by Susan Isaacs
As I veered onto a bridle path, I must have shifted into runner’s high. For me, it was never exhilaration, but the ultimate dumb-down, a blank mind, free of productive musings such as Is John calling at this precise minute? He wouldn’t believe I’d get out of the house so fast. Now he’s thinking I’m deliberately not answering. Is he about to slam down the phone swearing never to call me again? If he remembers our relationship at all, will it be as two wretched years in an otherwise lovely life?
As I cooled down back in the apartment, I realized my torso hadn’t accordioned, which meant my ribs were still intact. I ate breakfast, one of those practices that will, one day, be the subject of a column in the Science section of the Times, where someone will report on a study that runners who eat while still breathing hard and sweating into their pineapple cottage cheese survive, on the average, ten fewer years than runners who have a modicum of self-control.
Minutes later, I was washing the conditioner out of my hair while musing that since John had been so clear about being just friends, he was probably on his way to a big-time commitment to La Belleza or someone else. With that, I thought I heard the phone ring. I willed myself to believe it was one of those phantom calls that occur when one is emotionally in extremis and also in the shower. Trying to distract myself, I thought about Steve Raskin. Sharp-witted, nice, plus that solid building-trades body that carried itself as if it knew its way around.
This did nothing to stir me up about Steve. It did get me to ruminating about John. Two years, and I’d never tired of him. Part of it was his look, the gold skin, the brown hair potentially perfect but usually mussed up from his running his fingers through it all day as he read or worked in the editing room. And his smile was lovely, though too broad for Manhattan: the well-adjusted smile of a happy suburban childhood. His body was fine, with thighs like rocks. But it was his chest and arms that got me, solid—Come on, I’d say to him, like a girl with her first boyfriend. Let me feel your muscle.
John was always warm. We could come back from an hour-long romp in new snow, undress each other, and he’d put his arms around me. The temperature of him, and his unflinching ability to wrap himself around me and heat me, no matter how cold I was, made me feel not just secure, but treasured.
Of course it was more than his temperature, his personal normal of 99.6. It was his ardor. John was one of the rare, highly sexed guys who didn’t bring his mother along into bed. No Do what? Are you kidding? Blech! No dash to the bathroom a second and a half after ejaculation. In other words, he had no no-no’s. Neither was there Look what I’m doing, Mommy! naughty-boy shit. No tedious attempts at Kama Sutra positions 147 to 152—It’s the left leg that goes around my neck. No request for a threesome with a Rottweiler.
Sometimes he’d say a few words. You’re beautiful. Or something raunchy that got me higher and hotter. But he was, blissfully, not a blabbermouth. I didn’t have to deal with lines that sounded as if they’d been culled from a multiple choice list: I want to kiss-suck-lick-bite your tits-clit-tongue-ear. True, no I love you. On the other hand, his cock was his cock and I didn’t have to call it Joey.
The second I got out of the shower I checked the phone and discovered the phantom phone call had been an actual one. I punched in my code, 1920, the year the constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage became law. Although the message was a letdown, i.e., not from John begging me to go back with him, it at least had some interesting potential. “Hi, Amy. This is Freddy Carrasco. If you get a chance, give me a call. I’m home. I’ll leave this message on your voice mail at work also.”
Quickly, I pulled on panties so I wouldn’t feel self-conscious and dialed Freddy’s number. “Hi. Amy Lincoln.”
“How mad at me are you?” He sounded bright and snappy, just like at the press conference.
“Give me a hint, Freddy. What am I supposed to be mad about?”
“You didn’t get the scoop.”
“I told you right from the beginning, In Depth wouldn’t run a story like this.”
“Well, just in case, I wanted to apologize about, you know, leaving you out of the loop. I know I owe you big-time. I mean, when the only reporter who’d speak to me was a guy from one of those Martians Eat Baby newspapers, you went out on a limb for me.”
“You don’t owe me, Freddy, but I’m glad things worked out for you.”
“You know Moira, my father’s press person? She said to tell you she was sorry about the mixup at the press conference—your having trouble getting in—and that if you’d like to do a story on me and my father and the rest of the family, she’ll do everything she can to make it happen.”
“Thanks for passing along the message,” I said, a little too cheerily, as if I, too, had caught the Bowles’s happy-talk virus.
“Sure thing!” He sounded abnormally ebullient for someone born and raised in New York. Even the worst news—Fifty people were accidently ground into cement this afternoon—had a positive spin when spoken from the West Coast. Not that Freddy shouldn’t feel happy, but considering the short time since Thom Bowles had acknowledged him as his son, it didn’t seem sufficient to account for a disposition transplant. “Things are going well with you and your father?”
“Great!”
“What do you call him?”
“We had a wonderful talk about that. He said that at this point he could understand that I’d feel more comfortable with Thom, but he hoped that someday I would feel close enough to him to call him Dad.”
Had someone been in the room with me, I would have rolled my eyes. Instead I just took a deep breath and said, “That’s great. Where is he now?”
“New Hampshire.” Ten months before the Democratic primary, nearly all the candidates were spending serious time in that state. “Everyone thinks either Kerry or Dean, the two New England guys, will take it, but Thom says because of the environmental stuff up there, he’s the natural candidate. I’m meeting him this weekend to campaign in South Carolina.”
South Carolina? That was such a lost cause to a left-of-center like Bowles that I couldn’t believe he was even wasting his time down there. To ask his newly acknowledged, out-of-wedlock son to campaign with him was probably a quick way of halving the single-digit number he might conceivably pull in a Bible Belt state. Why would Bowles do that?
Because it didn’t matter. Keep the kid happy. Keep him part of things. Keep him quiet. Although Freddy Carrasco might be a plus in a Latino neighborhood, Thom the Tree-hugger would only take Freddy down to South Carolina if he’d already decided the state was a lost cause, but for some reason couldn’t wiggle out of a commitment to appear there. “I hope you’ll have fun campaigning” was all I could think of to say.
“Just one question,” Freddy said. I was now holding the phone between my chin and shoulder and dressing, so I could get out and get to the office by nine, a dubious possibility. “Ms. Maller has been conferencing with my father’s lawyer. Thom wants to set me up to take care of graduate school. And then some. He’s being really, really generous. But I’m a little nervous because Ms. Maller—I know she’s a friend of yours and I don’t want to put you on the spot—turned down the other lawyer’s first offer. She said she could get more, but the last thing I want my father to think is that I’m being greedy.”
“I really don’t know what to tell you, Freddy. My guess is she wants to protect your interests in case your relationship with your father turns out to be ...” Forget diplomacy, but I did the best I could. “... less than what you hoped for.”
“You know, I have no worries in that area. We’re so comfortable with each other. And it’s amazing how much alike we are. Weird things, like we both get a real candy craving late in the afternoon.” What could I say to Freddy? So did 85 percent of the American public? “Neither of us could get over it,” he went on, “that we deal with it the exact same way, by having a cup of coffee instead! So as far as Thom Bowles and I not getting along ... it’s almost like saying I don’t get along with myself
.”
Sometime in the 1950s, our Revered Founder bought the ugliest building on Union Square, a four-story, Romanesque rodent’s nest. He named it the Optimus Publications Building. The plural, Publications, suggested the great man had once hoped to put out several boring periodicals rather than just one. Although he never was able to accomplish this—the newsstands then, as now, sagged under the weight of magazines no one wanted to read—he did deserve some credit: In Depth had been a going concern since 1951 and was even rumored to be slightly profitable.
But a few years more into the fifties, the square had grown too sleazy to be credited even with rough charm. One decade later it was still worse, unless you liked to watch street crime. The seventies brought salvation by, of all people, farmers. Four days a week, they set up a greenmarket in the square to sell what they grew and made. At first, having heard rumors of avant-garde lettuces, a few hip chefs and restaurateurs dropped by. They were followed by small bands of foodies seeking clever little upstate cheeses. By the late eighties, so many affluent New Yorkers were elbowing one another aside to get at the cranberry catsup that there wasn’t any room left for drug traffickers.
It wasn’t just the moveable feast. The shaky buildings surrounding the square were shored up, their facades dermabraded back to the gruff brick reds and pearly white stone of their youths.
Pretty soon, the area became the darling of architecture critics and the neofuturists. Perhaps unaware of this reverence by the intelligentsia, the public liked it too. So in addition to being a sometime farmers’ market, electronics store haven, and quirky boutique venue, the square reverted to what it had once been in the nineteenth century, a place to hang, to demonstrate. An Americanized Speakers’ Corner. In any case, our Revered Founder’s real estate investment, for which he’d probably paid in the low thousands, turned into what was now worth millions.
Usually, I got down there between noon and one for lunch. Although trendy and increasingly upscale, life in the square reminded me of life in the projects. Living in midtown as I now did was to live in a world of relentless movement, pedestrian and vehicular: people shopped or raced to and from offices or in and out of performances at Carnegie Hall. Tourists double-timed it to get on line early at theme restaurants that had zero to do with New York and ate fifteen-dollar bacon chili cheeseburgers served by waiters dressed as carhops.
In the square though, as on the Lower East Side, the pace was slower, the sidewalks grittier. People didn’t just rush from building to building. They had street lives. The blend of publishing and food people, gallery owners and demonstrators, farmers and housewives reminded me of the Lower East in that it was an amalgam. Not stereotypical New York City Melting Pot. More like a stew, in which the meat and carrots and potatoes mixed, but remained discrete ingredients. In the low-income projects, near-poor and working-class Latinos and Jews and Asians and blacks and Italians got along tolerably well, and sometimes formed fast friendships. But the individuals did not assimilate into beige Americans who could pass in Nebraska.
This day, however, there was no homey feeling for me. My article on the Democratic left hung over my head, my very own miasma. Like most professional ideologues, the people I’d just spent hours interviewing considered themselves important, their mission urgent. They lived to be heard. A reporter from In Depth, of course, was the perfect audience, though most would embrace an editorial assistant from In Style if that were the only journalist available. In any case, from nine-thirty until two-thirty, I’d traveled the left all the way to Z from A. I’d gotten an earful from everyone from ancient Marxists to younger-than-I antiglobalization warriors.
Out in the square, I tried to put aside all I’d heard. I took a deep breath and smelled everything from sweet potato fries to distant doughnuts. Being that it was a greenmarket day, I bought up a pygmy baguette at one stand and a small blob of goat cheese at another and smeared together a sandwich. But no, I couldn’t unwind. I strolled around, taking tiny bites, attempting to distract myself by eavesdropping, but the only two conversations I managed to overhear concerned new thoughts on roasting venison and Dick Cheney’s worldview, two subjects I preferred not to think about. I gazed at a vegetable display, a rainbow of beets, but my mind kept snapping back to my article.
The war in Iraq had focused the left in a way that their standard causes—racism, human rights violations, environmental degradation, anti-World Bank and IMF—had failed to do. What
I’d noted during the day of interviews was that after the requisite howls about Bush’s unilateralism and the administration’s often lame excuses for going to war, the lefty Democrats seemed to be moving toward the anti-Americanism of their Euro counterparts.
They were also embracing, with unseemly eagerness, the Europeans’ anti-Israel stand. As they saw it, the problem in the Middle East was Israel. If Israel could be obliterated, all would be peachy in the region. The Palestinians willing to commit mass murder by blowing themselves up (in spaces not unlike Union Square) were, to them, heroic. Given that intellectual construct, it turned out to be a mere hop, skip, and jump from blaming a sometimes odious, often obnoxious right-wing Israeli government to blaming Israel to blaming Jews. I threw away the rest of my lunch and went back to the office. I realized my smoldering Zionism was about to catch fire. While a journalist can have political convictions, political passions were to be avoided.
Except I couldn’t. “I want to change the focus of my Democratic left piece,” I told Happy Bob.
This time I got his indulgent smile, an upturned curve of the lips that blessedly did not expose his teeth. “Change it to what?” he asked. “Or should I say, to whom?”
“The left’s anti-Semitism.”
The smile’s curve straightened out a little. Now it said: You poor, benighted (Jewish) fool. What he actually said was: “There’s a difference between being anti-Sharon and being anti-Zionist. Both are a far cry from anti-Semitism.” For added emphasis, he expelled a short blast of gas.
That normally was a guaranteed conversation stopper, but I was determined to have my say. “Listen, Bob, I can’t tell you how many of the sources I spoke to—mostly in academia, I admit—are using Jews as the scapegoat. They’ve picked up the European attitude. More and more, what they’re saying on the campuses and in the lefty think tanks is that the Jews of the world, all twelve or thirteen million of them, are to blame for the Iraq war, and also that their so-called agenda is the cause for the misery of not only the Palestinians, but for the plight of over one billion Muslims.”
“This isn’t new,” Happy Bob said. “The French—”
“I’m not talking about the French and the Germans. You’re right. That’s old. This is new because it’s Americans who are talking the talk. I spoke with Henry Hobart, that political science guy at Ohio State. Mr. Big of the lefty-anarchist circuit. I’m telling you, he could have been quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
“Amy, I’m not in the mood for hyperbole. What I am in the mood for is objective analysis, as you well know. There is a legitimate case to be made that the Palestinians’ plight—”
“I know. But if the left is talking about plights, how about the plight of women in Iran and Saudi Arabia? Is that situation—which happens to be a scandalous human rights violation—the fault of the Jews too?”
Happy Bob scratched his crotch thoughtfully. “A couple of misguided academics do not a movement make.”
“It’s more than a couple of academics. Anti-Semitism has always been the ideology of choice for the third-rate. What’s bothering me is that countries that have descended from first-rate to second-rate, like Germany and France, are signing on. We are no longer preeminent: Blame the Jews. And now it’s come here. The lefties have been cut out of the Democratic Party since Clinton, and now they’re making a big noise to get attention: Blame the Jews. That’s my story. Out of all the causes to embrace, kids at Harvard and the other Ivies have been carrying signs with a swastika superimposed over a Star of D
avid: Blame the Jews.”
“Blame Israel.”
“No. Blame the Jews.”
“It can be a paragraph, Amy. Not the article.”
“Bob, listen—”
“I did. Or do you want it to go from a paragraph down to a sentence?”
Maybe I was feeling vulnerable, considering the morning had begun with John’s call and with me, basically, saying, Good-bye forever and this time I really mean it. So when I got home and saw the large padded envelope with Rose Moscowitz’s return address, I was determined to face whatever was inside. Except I couldn’t. Instead I set it on my one foot of kitchen counter, took out a beer from my minirefrigerator, and drank it slowly, my eyes never leaving the envelope. God knows what I anticipated: an explosion, a rubber-banded wad of bills with a note saying, Don’t bother me again, or a selection of weird materials that would prove my maternal grandmother was Boca’s most prominent victim of multiple personality disorder and the Nice Rose I’d met had been one of her lesser entities making a rare appearance.
It was either one more beer standing up or open the envelope. I finally chose the latter and peered inside. Lots of photographs and a folded piece of stationery, the paper palest lavender with deckled edges. Dear Amy, I went through several shoe boxes of pictures. (I still hold on to the belief that someday I’ll get organized.) I came up with these of Phyllis, both before and after the Véronique changeover. I had these copies made so you could keep them. Whenever I could, I put an approximate date on the back and noted who else was in the picture with her. Hope you are well. I look forward to seeing you again. Love, Rose.
I stuck my hand into the envelope and closed my eyes like a kid reaching for a present in a grab bag. I got Mama Véronique and her boys. One of those awful posed pictures arranged by someone with the emotional intelligence of a fruit fly. The three were on the couch, Mama in the middle looking straight into the camera. The boys—somewhere between seven and eleven, I guessed—were in three-quarter view, their lips planting a kiss on each of her cheeks. Herself staring into the camera with the blank expression of a patient waiting for the ophthalmologist to flash an eye chart onto a wall. Her sons didn’t seem to look like her. Both had round heads and flat features, so it looked as if she were being kissed by two Caucasian pumpkins.