“That’s for nothing,” she would say, thinking I had been laughing at her because I had been smiling.
And then she smiled.
My mother called Rachel “that dirty slut.” This was my first relationship with a girl, and it was killing her.
My mother loved her new pink telephone. It gave her a reason to get up in the morning.
One morning Rachel called me. My mother reluctantly handed me the phone and said “Make it snappy. I gotta get to work.”
She moved around the room impatiently.
“Come on Michael. Get off.”
“Presently,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” She stood over me. “Mr. Smart Ass?”
She tried to pull the phone away from me. I could not hear what Rachel was saying, my heart raced, but I smiled at my mother to rile her.
She smiled back and scratched my face. I dropped the phone, and pushed her away.
“Now it’s hitting its mother?” she screamed. That “it” cut me like a scythe, and she knew it. She came at me with her nails. I punched her for the first time. I think it felt good. I heard the thud as she fell back on the floor.
“My pink phone!” she cried. She lunged for it. I wouldn’t let her have it, she loved it so much. I held it in the air. She pulled it from me and I pulled back. I licked it to show her how delicious it tasted.
It fell to the floor. She held it. “My pink phone!” she cried.
I had to get away. But I heard her crying and went quietly back into the room. She sat on the floor, the phone in her arms.
I didn’t know whether to comfort her or kill her. I was afraid I would push her out the window. I ran out of the apartment.
I couldn’t let pity overcome me. She would let me drown if she had me in her power. The family idiots, the pale, drooling boy-men wearing caps with open ear flaps traveled all the way from Brooklyn to my mother’s house because she gave them old clothes, castoffs, leftover food in shopping bags. My mother’s tone softened with these boys, and I wondered why. But it didn’t hold anything good for me.
Rachel and I sat on the fire escape, sharing a cigarette. It was a windy June evening. Rachel was going away in a few days to work as a camp counselor for the summer. She hadn’t told me until now.
“Michael, you know I have to do it. My family needs the money. And I’ll be in the country. I’ll write you every day. Don’t you trust me?”
It was over, I knew it. Even if it weren’t, my sour puss, the way I was acting would kill it. I saw the camp through her eyes: swimming, dancing, lying under the stars, hay rides, first sex in the sweet green grass, boys with guitars and harmonicas like Brendan singing “We Shall Overcome”—unlike me, they really would—bodies touching and caressing. (I desperately sang that song in Lewisohn Stadium at a Pete Seeger concert, the hopelessness of my failure with girls clashing with my determination to change my fate).
She loved to dance, to do the hora, to give herself up to the music. She was such a nice, kind, bursting Jewish girl, and pretty soon I would be a candidate for Hubert’s Flea Circus in Times Square.
“Michael, I love you. I don’t feel I have to defend myself. I don’t know why you’re acting this way.”
I looked away because I felt the hot tears on my cheeks. I could not say what she had meant to me. I could not talk about what it all had meant.
I felt her small breasts against my back. Her hands encircling me around the waist. “Honey.”
She wept, and I felt her moving away from me. She would be the first of all the women who would react to my need with alarm. They did not want a woman, or an invalid, a crushed creature in their arms. Who would?
“The other night, Michael, I dreamt that we were married. I saw the good man you would become.”
We kissed each other’s warm, wet faces, and I knew she was gone.
That night we went up to the roof with blankets for the last time. Now she suddenly told me her father had gotten a good new job at Columbia. They would be able to move into a house of their own in the Bronx in the fall.
It was a swift new blow.
Rachel was wearing a bathrobe, a bra and panties. She opened her bathrobe and helped me unhook her bra. And Rachel offered herself to me. She was loving, and she was hot. And I withered in her embrace and turned away. I was so afraid of fucking. I didn’t know how. It never occurred to me that you could slide right in there. All I thought about was that I would fail.
I gave her up. I gave up what was most dear to me, and was introduced to the mossy cold darkness, the downward spiral of my life.
After Rachel went off to camp, I wandered over to her apartment on a rainy dark afternoon. Sometimes her busy, frantic, trusting parents went out and left the door open.
I guiltily tried the door. It moved, and I slipped inside. It was so quiet; no one was there, not even Sammy and Joseph. I went into Rachel’s bedroom. Everything was still; the piano was covered. I opened her closet and took out her old woolen bathrobe. I buried my face in the warm, sweet smell of her.
On the way out, I saw the piece of paper on the outer table. “Dear Mommy and Daddy,” it began. It had been written before Rachel left for camp. Rachel wrote her parents that they’d been right after all, that she hadn’t been ready for such a heavy relationship as the one she’d been having with me, that she needed time and space.
I wanted to sink down on the floor and lie there. I put the letter back and closed the door behind me. I staggered out the door, not seeing anything. I needed to lie down. I needed to die.
She had been my first girl, my candy store girl, my fire escape girl. I first tasted peppermint and licorice from her lips. I went from Jolson 78 rpms to her enveloping arms, from Lux Radio Theater to her plumlike breasts. She was the rooftops, the green trees, the stoops where I bounced balls. My first trip to Coney Island, to Luigi’s on 14th Street for spaghetti and Jimmy Roselli records, to Times Square and the premiere (me in a rented tuxedo) of A Star Is Born with Judy Garland, to Guss’ Pickles on Essex, to hot pastrami and Judaica, whatever that was. She had held my penis in her hands.
III
In the fall, I left my mother’s apartment for good. I was 15. My father would pay for a boarding house room for me on the upper West Side of Manhattan. I walked out into the street, past the goldfish pond, past the stoop of my late grandparents’ house, beneath the window, the fire escape of Rachel’s apartment, past the house with the well in the garden, the candy store, the barber shop, the ice-cream parlor. I peered into the window of my friend Eddie Colletti’s house, the warm Italian welcome his family, his father a cop, always gave me, feeding me spaghetti and meat balls. Just at that moment I saw the shining bald head, the protruding stomach of Mr. Colletti as he stood there in the kitchen, holding a pot of spaghetti. He spotted me, smiled, beckoned to me, holding up the pot.
Oh my Italian friends, so basic and natural, please adopt me and never let me get near a Daily Worker editorial again. I felt so alone in the world, but I never really was, there were always people like the Collettis reaching out to me. I waved to Eddie’s pop and walked to the corner, and up the stairs of the elevated for the short subway ride into Manhattan.
In my dreams the shouts and moans of my dead grandfather, the clown of the household, haunted me. My mother and grandmother would lock him out of the house, the house he paid for and maintained for all of them—my father never really worked, even when my grandfather bought two hamburger joints for him, which my father then forbade him from entering. The restaurants lasted 16 months. My mother and grandmother would laugh and giggle together at the scraping, gnawing sounds of my grandfather on the stoop trying to unscramble the lock, clawing at the chain, trying to get in, whimpering. There was no argument with him. They were just teaching him a lesson.
I moved into Manhattan, wore a beret, and hung around the Communists, looking for the dead Rosenbergs, for a family, a girlfriend. I always hoped I would find Rachel and her parents at a meeting, a rally.
The Communists were sublime malcontents like me; they could never navigate this world. Why should they? There was a far better world waiting in the USSR, perfect, golden and hot. They fascinated me; they came in all varieties: the burning zealots, the musty pipe-smoking tweed-jacketed, unsmiling cerebral library types. They had all the answers to every problem of mankind, and I wished I could be like them, if they weren’t so fucking boring. And then there were the out-and-out lunatics that no one seemed to notice, the grinning, string-bean couple who drove an armored truck. And the FBI agents, who stuck out like mirages of healthy masculinity, all young Irish men in their twenties and thirties, all wearing suits and ties and gleaming shoes, not a drooler among them. No one noticed them either, except to register delight at such lusty “representatives of the youth.” The halo of progressive humanity was draped around anyone who could stomach the rhetoric.
I stood in the hallway of my boarding house, listening to the sounds of girls’ voices from other rooms. But when a girl approached me, I froze. I was damaged goods.
I knew from early on my father’s fear of sex. I knew it by the wily, knowing tone he affected when people brought it up. My father’s sly little laugh: what a dog he was. I knew it camouflaged his ignorance and fear. After all, I had been around him day and night in my childhood and adolescence. I knew what his strategies were. And when I had brought up the subject, he blanched and stammered, smiling helplessly, begging me with his eyes to drop it.
I kept looking among the Communists. They were weird enough to accept me.
There was a curious building near my house. It was large and foreboding, with marble walls; its windows were blacked out. A little sign on the side of the building said simply: “Soviet Film Club.” But I somehow knew it was more than that.
Walking by the building at night, I would hear the sobs and screams of dozens of men and women standing outside the building, true believers as I longed to be, beating their heads against its marble walls and pleading to be sent to the first land of socialism, the Soviet Union. The crowd held pictures wreathed in black of the Rosenbergs and screamed, “Whatever they did, they didn’t do it!”; “We can’t live without them”; “Take us home!”; “Let us in, comrades!”; “We can’t stand it here another minute.” How they needed a quick fix, how well I understood them. I wanted so much to be like them; I needed to remake myself, to have a full suit of armor to hide my trembling skin. I needed a full revolutionary schedule to follow day and night; I needed to dip deep from the well of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, but that shit make me choke, and I knew it. Greater souls than I had been seduced by it: a huge banner had been unfurled across the building, looming in the night: a drawing of the Rosenbergs by Picasso.
Other nights I passed by, stood across the street and watched and listened when the front of the building was deserted. There were strange sounds from within; I heard glee clubs, swimming lessons, people being harshly questioned, food being consumed, the smacking of lips, I saw turkey legs, gizzards, garter belts, red bras and pasties being tossed out of the blackened windows.
I was both repelled by and attracted to the strangeness of it. I was drawn now to all that was strange.
IV
Some 25 years later, in 1985, I thought that I wanted to leave my wife. To prove myself as a man, to strike out on my own at last, to brave the world and overcome my fear of being alone and vulnerable. I wanted to stop being protected by her. I wanted to break with the fate imposed on me by my father. I wanted to stop taking his money. I wanted to walk away from his curse.
My wife would have thrown herself in the path of a gunman for me. Yet I jogged away from her when two muggers came after us in Central Park. “You jogged more quickly and left me,” she said.
When I left her, I panicked immediately, and thought she had left me. I forgot who I thought I was. I had developed only one limb: the writing limb. The abyss was the same as when Rachel had left me in 1958. I had to test myself and grow muscles that had been dormant for so long.
By the second day I was reassuring my wife on the phone that I loved her, which was true, and that I just needed a little time on my own. Soon that time became a couple of days and I could hardly wait to go back.
The veneers of my life had dissolved immediately when I left her, and the outer world literally broke down my door. They actually came through the window: thieves ransacked my apartment and took the radio, TV and turntable. I called my wife for help. She came over to install a new lock and cradle me in her arms. New neighbors moved in upstairs and partied all night. I could not sleep and I could not write. I called my wife again and she came over and begged the neighbors to quiet down. Old terrors instantly came back. I was afraid of the rejection of clerks, Waterboys, janitors and waiters.
The loneliness and isolation that I had feared all my life was lying in wait for me. It was the loneliness that drove my father crazy and made him so isolated from people, that made him misinterpret their motivations and mishear and distort their words. Or perhaps it was his craziness that caused his isolation.
I was hanging from the bridge by my fingers, and I knew that in order to climb up and make it across to the other side, I would have to utilize parts of my psyche, find strengths within myself, that had atrophied from lack of use over the years. I was still the invalid I had been at 15. My wife had protected and shielded me from myself.
It was scary out there! I couldn’t do it. It was too hard. I watched my father, grinning and yawning and stretching with comfort in his recliner before his two TV sets, set to different programs, and I wanted to go to sleep. He was waiting for me with open arms. “Now we can be together, Michael. Why don’t you sleep in the other bed in my apartment? You’ll go crazy alone.”
I had taken his money all those years. He had held out the two hundred and fifty smackeroos each month. All I had to do was sit there while he told me how soft I was to take it.
I didn’t walk out of his apartment. I took his humiliation, his confident forecasts of my failure, and I sat there, waiting for the money. If I took the money, I could keep writing, and I told myself that was all that mattered. I was the artist; I shouldn’t demean myself with ordinary struggles. But I also took the money because it was there, and it gleamed in my head: what I could do with it! But it wasn’t enough to have an independent life; it was just enough to keep me in his web. But I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.
And I took it because I was afraid of going out there alone, just as he knew I was.
In the end, I always took the money.
V
In the first days after the separation from my wife, I began to hang out on Times Square at the burlesque parlors with their smells of lysol and antiseptic, aisles of pockmarked, eager faces searching for a fix from the gloss of sex. The men eagerly held up their dollar bills to the strippers. I saw old men grabbing the chance to be spanked, dropping their pants and climbing onto the girls’ laps, grinning and winking at the audience of eight. They thought they were the lucky ones.
Porn: that outer zone of desperation—the flashing neon lights—and beyond it, the realm of the strange ones, the stalkers, those who broke into the homes of strange women and crept into their beds, actually thinking that somehow they would be welcomed.
It was a fetish world. Men worshipping parts of the female body, because they were afraid of entering it. I had been taught by my parents that the woman’s body was dirty. The substitutions were the clothes women were encased in, their garter belts, bras, shoes. They were more erotic to me partly clothed. And with that there was the feeling of humiliation, of defeat.
I sat behind my copies of Hamsun and Goncharov, peeking at the action. I sat for hours in the gloom making myself stare at the dancers’ pelvic areas to overcome my fear of it or talking to them about Dostoyevsky while they wiggled in my lap for a dollar a minute. ‘“Brothers K’ sounds good,” one of them said, “but does this guy ever write about sisters?”
My dentist had a new assistant, a pretty
young woman named Norma. Norma hovered around me, pressed against me, and I thought that perhaps she actually found me attractive. I called her for a date. We met at a candlelit restaurant on the upper East Side.
She confided in me that she had recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and would eventually be confined to a wheelchair.
I understood. I could wheel her around and be her nurse.
My father’s curse was still intact.
And then my lifeline came along.
Rachel called me two weeks after I left my wife. She was visiting Manhattan, and had looked me up in the phone book. I told her that I had separated from my wife.
I thought of her at the piano, on the fire escape, on the roof, the first time we kissed. She said, “I still have the stubs of our theater tickets.”
I could not wait to see her.
We met in the Village under the Washington Square arch. We embraced, and I held her. Her hair was an orange-colored frizzy Afro, and she smiled steadily. “Oh it’s good to see you!” she said. “I’m so glad I found you! So glad! I’ve been looking forward to it like a pilgrimage. You were very special to me. I have all of your books, Michael. I’m so proud of what you’ve done with your life.”
She hooked her arm into mine as we walked. “I have stolen lovely wonderful hours today, walking around the village. Where shall we eat? I feel like something Greeky.”
I wanted her to fill in all the spaces. At the restaurant, she said that she had met her future husband Ron, at a youth meeting of the Socialist Arbeiter Ring in the Bronx. She had been the guest performer that night, singing and playing her guitar. She was “crazy nuts” for him. She dropped out of City College.
“Where was all this?” I asked her. I needed to know.
“In the Bronx.”
I saw the trolley-like car to her stop. After she left, I had taken the trolley to see the house where she lived.
“All four of my children were born in the Bronx. You know, I was really a very good kid and I was very nice. And Ronnie was the first boy who ever went to bed with me. And then he left me.”
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