The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar

  6

  January 19, 2001

  The 24th of Tevet, 5761

  Winter. The grand facades of Riverside Drive stand, austere and angular, against the frosty light. Their cornices, jagged turrets of a fortified ancient city, rise skyward with a sharp cry. The sun’s rays are hard and cold. The ice creaks underfoot. The air is as brittle as crystal. A young hawk screeches above the treetops, suspended in midflight like a snagged pendulum. Small, transparent beads of ice dot the naked boughs of the trees like buds. A thin, dry layer of snow accumulates on the shattered slabs of limestone lying like discarded altar tops in the rear of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Dumped there and forgotten, their inanimate memory preserves the stages of sedimentation and recalls the quarry they were hewn from long ago. So, too, the blind eyes of marble statues hoard what they have seen. Line upon line, dot upon dot, here a little, there a little. Nothing vanishes. All is stored in inanimate memory. Large, bluish-white ice floes, cleaved by winter’s mighty ax, drift on the current of the river. Swiftly they pursue their southward course to the great ocean, there to be swallowed, it would seem, forever. Mark this wonder, though: hours later they are shockingly moving northward, pushed back up the river by the tide toward their hidden source, in the dreamily mist-covered core of the continent. The sea has spat them out. Yet a recollection of its depths remains, for more hours pass and they drift by again, on their way to the ocean once more. How do the trees avoid dying in this cold? How do they manage every spring to come to life?

  7

  January 20, 2001

  The 25th of Tevet, 5761

  Ten forty a.m. If not for the quiet of these Saturday mornings, how would one ever stay sane? Ann Lee left early to go to the gym, after which she planned to meet friends. Her rhythms were a perfect match for his. Their need for solitude and space was so alike that it almost seemed like their own private pleasantry. The friction that should have been caused by the age gap between them never made itself felt, nor did this surprise either of them. They made an effort not to take each other for granted or to let their lives be routinized. Sometimes they left it up to the mysterious hand of fate to decide their next meeting, preserving something of the addictive, intoxicating danger of a love affair’s first days by keeping a whimsical distance from each other. It was a game that he, they, liked to play. It made him feel young and adventurous.

  What was in the New York Review of Books today? A new book on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. Another book on Freud? The old man refused to die. He was the incarnated God of the psychoanalysts, if not of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What better subject is there for a Freudian reading than Freud’s own obsession with Moses? All that hysterical rhapsodizing in front of Michelangelo’s sculpture that betrayed more than anything the drama of self-hatred raging in his assimilated Viennese Jewish soul and the need to kill his inner father, the greater Moses, so that he, the lesser Moses, might take his place. Angst-ridden, he can’t take his eyes off the disproportionately long beard twisting itself over the muscular stomach of the marble lawgiver like a giant sea monster caught in the depths of the oceanic feeling of Freudian theory—that magnificent beard whose tip disappears in the lower abdomen to merge with his pubic hair in an allusion to the inflated threat (a double entendre, that!) lurking beneath the toga so nonchalantly draped over the loins of the titan of monotheism. He should write about it sometime. No, better not. As if the world needed another scholarly article on Freud . . .

  Andrew put down the New York Review of Books and glanced at the wall clock in the kitchen. It was 11:10, time for a shave and shower. At noon he was meeting friends for lunch at Le Monde, the new French café on Broadway and 113th Street. From there he would go straight to the Guggenheim. Its new exhibit, The Man in the Mirror: Installations and Performance Art, was opening next week. He had been asked to review it for Harper’s and wanted to have a look at it before deciding whether to accept. Ann Lee wouldn’t be back before late afternoon or evening. They might eat out, or order in, open a good bottle of wine and watch a late-night film at his place. Although they sometimes went out together, they generally preferred staying in. Not that their relationship was a secret, not really. They just didn’t flaunt it. They both guarded their privacy. For obvious reasons, Andrew could hardly introduce Ann Lee to his circle of friends as his partner, and she, too, must have felt no need to present him to her acquaintances or to appear with him in public. Far from harming their relationship, its semi-clandestine nature only enhanced it by making it more exciting and less matter-of-course. Was there time for another cup of coffee? No, he had to run. He would have it at Le Monde. Hopefully, their coffee would be up to the French bistro ambience they were trying so hard to create.

  8

  February 12, 2001

  The 19th of Shevat, 5761

  Eleven a.m. There was a knock on the door of Andrew’s office. Its diffidence told him who it was even before Bert’s awkward figure appeared in the doorway holding a large stack of Xeroxed documents. Andrew’s teaching assistant (or “valet,” as he was unkindly referred to behind his back by both staff and students) was a pale, pudgy young man with granny glasses and the weak, wounded look of someone constantly about to burst into tears. Hesitant and stammering, he stored a thick layer of hurt under his skin, enflamed by the slightest friction; his restrained body language, which made him seem like he never dared flex a muscle or limb to the full, struck Andrew as typical of a “nice Jewish boy.” It made him think of the domesticated elephants of India that he had read about while working on an essay challenging the myth of human-animal bonding.* The elephants’ trainers, or so legend had it, would wait for the monsoons to come and then tie their little charges to a tree, fully exposed to the elements for days. Hungry and terrified by the fierce storms, they would repeatedly try to break loose until, helpless and exhausted, they collapsed on the soggy ground. No matter how large or powerful such an animal grew to be, it would never know its own strength or go beyond what its chains had permitted during those few terrible days.

  “Hi, Bert. How are you?” Andrew smiled cordially.

  “Hi, Andrew. I’m good, thank you.” Bert’s tongue tripped over itself each time he had to utter Andrew’s first name. He found the fashionable democratization of names and titles unnatural and would have much preferred the old “Hello, Professor Cohen,” had it only been acceptable. “I Xeroxed the reading list and left copies of the books on the reserves shelves in the library. I left two with Ms. Harty, too.”

  He spoke with the touching pride of a child eager to please and thirsting for approval. He liked running errands for Andrew and invested more time and energy in them than was justified by any rational calculation of their benefit to a research assistant like himself. Never did he broach the possibility of publishing a joint article with Andrew or angle for invitations to the conferences or meetings of academic organizations. Even Andrew’s proposal that he lead a class in “The Critique of Culture” course was accepted only after much soul-searching. Though a boost to Bert’s ego, his adulated teacher’s faith in him was also the cause of paralyzing self-doubt. Well-organized and not unlikable, he had no reason to fear facing a classroom. Yet the contrast with Andrew’s magical presence made him think twice about it, and there were even some jaundiced souls in the department who dared hint that he was picked for the job not in spite of his painful lack of charisma but rather on account of it, having absolutely no chance of ever outshining his master.

  “Professor Cohen.” The voice on the intercom was Ms. Harty’s. “Rachel called. She said she’s on her way but will be delayed by a few minutes.” Andrew glanced at his watch and leaned toward the speaker. “Thank you, Ms. Harty.” At the mention of Rachel, Bert, who was filing documents at a side desk, gaped behind his glasses, his hands moving more quickly but to less purpose. He was hopelessly in love with her. He had stubbornly been so for years, ever since they had shared notes and studied for exams together as college sophomores. His feelings for
her, though he had never dared express them, were an open secret. Loyal and obedient, he followed the twisting tracks of her stormy and anguished love life, meeting her latest boyfriends and the more casual acquaintances allowed by her for some reason to be her short-term lovers. Introduced, he shook their hands with a limp, sweaty palm and timidly declared he was glad to meet them while regarding with languishing looks their possessive arms around her shoulders and the self-assured sexual gleam in their eyes. Each time he felt that something had died in him anew and been buried deeper and more futilely than the last time.

  “Hi, Dad. Hi, Bert.” Rachel entered the office as light and bright as a butterfly, passing by Bert’s desk to reach her father and give him a long hug.

  “Hi, Rachel,” Bert muttered. He had to fight back an involuntary urge to look the other way when he saw them embracing. His hands still gripping their stack of documents, he hunched his shoulders and slumped in his chair, his head thrust forward until his neck was barely visible, once again the submissive freshman he had been when he first met her. Rachel glided across the room to him and grazed his cheek with a kiss. He blushed, eyes darting behind their glasses. “How’s your dissertation going?” she asked.

  “Oh, okay.” Bert seemed to flinch even more. His dissertation, a thorough and thoroughly trite work, was going slowly. He sometimes thought his only reason for sticking it out was not his studies or an academic career but the allure of Andrew and the craving to remain in his orbit. It was as if some part of Rachel had rubbed off on her father, making the crumbs of attention he scattered on Bert, however remotely, a substitute for her affection. “How are things at the Hillel House? How are all your lovely admirers?”

  Bert chuckled self-consciously. He was active in the Jewish students’ union, helped organize its lectures, conferences, and weekends, traveled to Israel nearly every year, and was a cautiously reliable supporter of the American Jewish mainstream causes. The female students who frequented Hillel—nice, friendly, unfortunate-looking girls—considered him a good catch, a future companionable husband and devoted father. Some were aware of Rachel’s shadow lurking in the background, her unruly coal-black curls so unlike their dull brown hair that was as tamed and stiff as their behavior, her tempestuous, almond-shaped eyes the reverse of their own lusterless, bovine ones.

  Bert felt a pressing need to change the subject. Although he hated what Rachel’s presence did to his voice, this was not something he acknowledged even to himself. “Hasn’t the semester at Princeton begun yet?” he asked.

  “It did, yesterday, but I decided to play hooky in the city and take Daddy dear out for lunch. You know Tom and I have split, don’t you?”

  It wasn’t clear at whom the surprising last sentence, which shot through the room like a meteor, was directed. Rachel felt no compulsion to expand on it. She offered a gentlemanly arm to Andrew, who smilingly accepted it with a ladylike grace. “Bye, Bert. Nice seeing you again. Good luck with the dissertation.”

  Bert, heart racing, went on clutching his stack of documents. Murmuring something indistinct, he watched Rachel and Andrew leave the office arm in arm. From the rear, they looked more like a pair of young lovers than a twenty-something-year-old woman and her fifty-something-year-old father. They were almost gone from sight when Andrew turned to look back with a quick, encouraging, almost paternal smile. Bert’s tense muscles relaxed, his nearsighted eyes blinked quickly. He responded with a big, childish smile of gratitude.

  9

  The apartment Rachel would be staying in belonged to a successful musician from a Long Island Jewish family who had gone to study in India, fallen for a guru like so many educated young Westerners, become an observant Hindu, and changed his name to Krishna Ram. Now, encouraged by his teacher to revert to an American lifestyle so as better to spread enlightenment, he performed in its name all over the United States. His place was on the third floor of a brick walk-up on 84th Street between Second and First, sandwiched between two East Side brownstones. Rachel, to whom it had been described as “a cute little place” with an exotic aura, traipsed up the stairs gaily, key in hand, curious to see it. Andrew followed her up the narrow staircase, dragging her heavy suitcase. By the time he reached the third floor and found her standing in front of the door with a sarcastic smile on her face, his white shirt, fresh that morning, was damp with sweat. “That must be the guru,” she said, pointing to a photograph taped to the peeling door of a fat, bald, mustached Indian man who was sprawled on a low wooden bench, completely naked except for a small loincloth. Far from radiating a refined spirituality, he had a self-satisfied, hedonistic expression that was accentuated by his corpulent belly, which hung over the bench and practically reached the ground. Andrew turned away from the repellent sight, half-aware of the urge to protect his daughter by covering it.

  The door opened after a brief struggle and Rachel, in that youthful, almost euphoric spirit of adventure that excuses all faults and even turns them into virtues, entered the apartment. Perspiring and out of breath, Andrew came after her. He hadn’t worked up a sweat in his ordinary clothes, as opposed to his gym and bike suits, in years and the incongruity of it caused him to feel a faint, semiconscious, physical distress. He stood in the middle of the main room, which was hardly bigger than his own bathroom, squinting uncomfortably at his surroundings while gripping the suitcase as though afraid to soil it by putting it down. The room was long, dark, and narrow. A thick layer of dust and neglect, palpable despite the shut blinds, lay over everything. It evoked in him none of the nostalgia that comfortably off adults sometimes feel when encountering the squalor often chosen by the young as a backdrop for the drama of youth. Andrew wasn’t one of those middle-aged men who mourn their lost youth. At the age of fifty-two he had the same youthful vigor he had had thirty years before, which caused others, even if younger than him, to feel an envy comparable to what they might have felt at the sight of the dark, dingy, devil-may-care space he was standing in. Something was bothering him, something indefinable. It wasn’t just the dust or the darkness or the smell of mildew exhaled by the walls. It was the vague sense of a hostile presence, as if somebody or something were lurking in the dim apartment and observing them malevolently.

  Rachel groped for the light switch. A dusty, low-wattage bulb clicked on. As soon as it did, something strange happened to the walls, which began to twitch as if thousands of roaches, lizards, or spiders were crawling over them. For a moment, Andrew felt he was in a Grade B horror movie. Heart pounding, he fought off his consternation and strained to see. The twitching grew less frantic. He took a deep breath and looked around. The walls, every one of them, were plastered with posters, photographs, and postcards of dozens, if not hundreds, of Hindu gods and holy men, so madly crowded together that hardly an inch of bare surface showed through. Exaggeratedly drawn in the lurid colors of Indian print art, demons and misshapen semi-human monsters regarded him from every direction, a glut of alien symbolism in their too sloe-eyed, too ferocious stares. Most unnerving of all was a face that appeared repeatedly in a bizarre variety of sizes and poses, a weird half-breed, whether an illustration or a photograph he couldn’t tell, with the flattened nose and broad mouth of a chimpanzee, rouged cheeks, and large, feminine human eyes painted with a whorish black mascara. Bedecked with gold jewelry, the repugnant creature wore an array of kerchiefs from which greasy black curls hung down to its shoulders. The bile surged in Andrew’s throat. The creature’s dark eyes seemed to come moistly to life and rest on him. He broke into another sweat, a clammy one that seeped into his shirt. He now found himself, the situation aggravated by its absurdity, in a schoolboy’s staring game with the uncouth, malignantly powerful creature on the wall, who was coming close to breaking his will and forcing him to lower his eyes. This demented clash lasted for only a few seconds before Andrew managed, with no small effort, to tear himself away. He felt that he was trapped in a nightmare, but that also, not quite rationally, he had been rescued at the last moment from a horrible, dem
onic fate.

  He struggled to get hold of himself, breathing deeply while waiting for his highly developed rational defense mechanisms to return him to reality. Meanwhile, he scrutinized the wall facing him, involuntarily averting his glance from his repellent nemesis until he recognized a familiar figure: the heavyset, semi-humorous elephant god Ganesha, whose picture was displayed on the packs of beedies, the smelly Indian cigarettes sold on Berkeley street corners to students flaunting their opposition to all things Western. Andrew smiled as if meeting an old friend. The elephant god Ganesha! He and the monkey god Hanuman, like an old comedy team, had recently starred in a fascinating novel by a promising Indian author named Vikram Chandra, which Andrew had praised in Harper’s for its sophisticated juxtaposition of Western and native Indian narrative techniques. Reading the book and writing the review had made him feel drolly intimate with these two Hindu gods, who were now inextricably linked in his mind with the author’s brilliant portrayal of them.

  Andrew threw back his shoulders with a sigh of relief, his sense of unreality dispelled. His reassurance, however, did not last long, for now the illustration of Ganesha, too, came alive and began to move. Its brutish eyes, set on either side of its thick trunk, flashed wickedly. The trunk began to gyrate, wrapping itself around the beast’s swollen abdomen like the tentacle of an octopus. Before his eyes, the friendly trickster god Ganesha was turning into a horrid, contorted ogre. A new wave of nausea swept over him. Afraid that the slightest contact with the pictures on the wall would release a flood of vomit, he shut his eyes, groped blindly for the door, and leaned against its cool, bare wood to let his tension drain. He realized now who the terrifying creature in the first illustration was. It was the monkey god Hanuman! Of course: Ganesha and Hanuman!