Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  29

  THREE P.M., WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. AT THIS hour, she’s at work. But Barry, her employer, told me that she took the day off to catch up in her studio.

  Found her at her workbench in the bomb shelter, fashioning a little wire man with pliers. When she saw me she laid the pliers down, still holding the wire man, and said: “What are you doing here? Debbie and Laura are both at your place, keeping Edna company while she waits for you to come home. She’s out of her mind with worry. We heard about some trouble down there. We were—are you all right?”

  I descended to the base of the stairs, paused to look around. It was all in shadow but for Anna, who sat on the high stool at the worktable, an architect’s lamp pooling light over her fidgeting hands.

  “It was crazy,” I said, leaning against the metal handrail.

  “Itamar’s in the north, getting shelled by the Syrians.”

  “At least he can still call himself a soldier. I’m just a morally debased policeman.”

  “Why don’t you request a transfer?”

  “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “No,” she said.

  Could slip through a dark dank maze of suspects’ rooms on a predawn search without so much as a flutter, but to tell this woman what I felt about her was…The room began to swim, frozen tears thawing at the corner of my eyes. “What if I told you that I love you?”

  Without hesitation, she replied: “And what if I told you that I love you?”

  Then we came to each other, breathless words tumbling out as we held each other close.

  She: “When did you know?”

  I: “The moment I saw you.”

  “The same for me. The night before your wedding I sewed mourning beads to my dress, the way Arab women do. That’s when Itamar first suspected that I love you. Oh, my darling, I love you!” she said, wiping away tears.

  We kissed every bare spot of warm skin. Crushed against each other, lips prayed to flesh with cardinal sincerity.

  En route to her place, we stopped off at the grocer to pick up Rishon LeZion brandy, a few cartons of Time cigarettes, all on her nickel. “To unwind,” I said. “I’m covered with bruises, inside and out.” It was understood: I was broke. Bye-bye Edna’s father’s money.

  “Darling.”

  At her place, we stripped, embraced. I wanted her. Was drowning. And no blindfolds, no spread-eagled binding to bedposts, but new saplings wanting only spring.

  “All that shit that went down in Gaza, it’s hard to make sense of. But it’s making me insane. I think a lot of soldiers, secretly, are going nuts down there. It’s like a spreading mental illness, you know? The other side wants to kill us, but the things we do to stop them are killing us inside. I feel like a dirtbag. You don’t remember the danger, just the looks in people’s faces. It makes you suicidally incautious. As if that will make up for the sight of an old woman curled up on her filthy pallet in a hovel we broke into, looking for guns. The way she tossed and cried in the beams of our searchlights. The sound of her voice. Or these kids I came across on a house-to-house, lying there on a row of cots, eyes locked on the ceiling, afraid to see me standing there. With my gun. Goddammit.”

  I couldn’t tell her about the blindfolded suspect who haunted my nights.

  “My beautiful man,” she said. “Do you know how happy I am right now, just to have you here with me? I want to know everything about you.”

  Reached over for a bottle of brandy, screwed off the cap, took a long pull. Then another. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Gasped. Couldn’t tell her about the blindfolds—I don’t know why that detail. Pulled some more on the booze and once again felt the warm spread and my insides calm. My medicine. I don’t know why blindfolds got to me. We passed a cigarette back and forth.

  Then we reached to make love.

  “We don’t have to now…if you don’t…want…to…now,” she said.

  I rolled off, curled up into a fetal position, my back to her. “I’m with the woman I’ve waited my whole life for and I can’t get it up.”

  Anna clasped the back of my neck with her hand, pulled my head forward, kissed me. “My poor darling. This is a lot, what we’re doing. It must be unreal for you. It is for me. But we have the rest of our lives to get used to it.”

  The worst thing, I thought, was not the shot soldier with a bullet in the chest and blood all over, or the guy we picked out of the razor wire who’d been diced to ribbons trying to get himself out. It was the guy I’d blindfolded and tied with hands behind his back. Standard military procedure.

  “I once blindfolded this guy. Tied his hands behind his back.”

  She looked at me, said nothing.

  “You understand?”

  “Well, who was he?”

  “A suspect, maybe a terrorist. We had a photograph. This was a bad guy. And I caught him. The damned police came on the raid. Me and a police colonel went through the roof door. But when I looked around, the cop was back inside. I was out there alone, ducked with my gun behind a vent, and when I saw the suspect, crazily, I stood up, pointed my gun straight at his head, shouting ‘DON’T MOVE! DON’T MOVE! I WILL KILL YOU IF YOU MOVE,’ aware that on some adjoining roof or even on this one another crony of his might be waiting in a cross-fire ambush, but I went right up on him. Recognized him from the picture passed around by officers of military intelligence. He could have killed me. I didn’t care. In fact, I think I hoped he’d open up on me. Just to kill him. But he was unarmed. I got him to come out. Threw him down, tied him up. And before I led him down, blindfolded him. Standard procedure. Then rode with him back to Gaza City, knee to knee, in back of a jeep, to the military barracks, and the whole time I watched his blindfolded face, thinking: What if that were me? And feeling sick.”

  “But darling, you were trying to prevent murders that he was sworn to commit.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I can’t make sense of it.”

  I drank more.

  And then I said: “Enough!” And plucking the cigarette from her lips, turned her around, wrapped her hair in my fist, and penetrated her from behind, clasping my free hand over her breasts, fingertips grazing gently down over her breasts and belly, her clitoris, softly kissing her neck and shoulders for a long time, and then, when she was soaking wet, took her, forcefully and directly, selfishly, from behind, without thought or hesitation, wanting her, knowing that she was the mate life had fated me to love, of that no question—and though somehow our paths had led us away from ourselves right to each other, somehow, improbably, through self-betrayal, we had found each other, and clinging to each other now, rocking conjoined in ecstatic love, it seemed possible to say that I had come to Israel and gone through heaven and hell only in order to find her.

  30

  FOR A WEEK, I STAYED IN THE HOME OF MY friend Itamar, banging his wife. Completely in love with Anna, I felt justified in each delicious thrust. Thought of nothing else but her. The moment I had her, feared losing her. Ran out of booze often. Anna replaced it. Cigarettes, food, movies, restaurants, cafés, a night’s drunk in Finks, Jerusalem’s swankiest bar—she paid for everything, of which I felt deeply ashamed. Wanted to be a man for her. Couldn’t. Hadn’t a dime to my name. It had all been Edna’s and now that she certainly knew about us, moneywise I was done for. We drank all the time. Word had come from Laura and Debbie that Edna was homicidal, suicidal, drunk, raging, smashing our home to pieces.

  That week, I did little but read, drink, and wait for Anna’s return from work. Checked out books from the British Library, where I had a membership, and from the American Cultural Center, the two best English-language libraries in town. Drank and read in order to sustain a mood, an artificial mental landscape in which committing calamitous adultery with your best friend’s wife makes a certain heroic sense. But mostly lay on Anna and Itamar’s marriage bed like an imbecilic child, feeling the slow bleeding away of my sanity and soul, mental images projecting through my mind at high speed, drab khaki-green visions
of military hell alternating with the life, the world, that Anna and I were about to destroy: all-night drinking sessions downstairs, the nonstop excursions to dance in night cafés, dawns waking hungover on the Dead Sea’s shores, the openings of new art shows, the happily chattering overflow parties, the adulatory museum crowds who came to their feet, show after show, in thunderous ovations. We were the cool set. People had wanted to be like us. Between shows we had engaged in constant banter, with a sense of doing something major. I thought of how all around me my vision of a collectivity rooted in intellectuality and art had wonderfully cohered—the equivalent of Twenties Paris, if on a smaller Israeli scale. But despite all that, always something had festered, threatening to explode and shatter everything: My loneliness. My drinking. My inability to form a bond with others. Had thought of it as the romantic Byronic solitude of the visionary whose paroxysms of imagination and fantastical initiatives sustain a network of artists—but in the end it was insupportable, a delusion. A lie. Along came a war like a great hand to sweep it all aside. And we were not writers and artists, directors and dancers, but angry or frightened or numbed engines of meat bombed on foreign roads or bursting into the dream sleep of old people and children and bearing off blindfolded men to ordeals. If we let down our guard, not only in the jeep, the armored car, the Noon Noon, the ambush wadi, the border tower, but now too, even here, on the love-stained sheets of adultery’s bed, they, the foe, would never stop attacking and killing us. This was the simple truth at the heart of everything, which no international legislative body of diplomatic reconciliation could ever bear to countenance, no political lobby ever face or state aloud, no journalistic investigative organ ever unearth, no ruling administration ever vocally concede, so that futile peace initiatives ceaselessly rolled out by the brightest minds inevitably failed, collapsed, exploded, shot in the head. We were all rushing headlong in a murderous mounting momentum of bloodshed that could last for a thousand years. They would not stop and we knew it. And it was killing us, which was their intention.

  I never tried so hard to be brave as in that first hectic week with Anna. At night her phone rang nonstop as Itamar tried to call home from his communications truck with the shells falling all around and we rolled clutching in the throes of ecstatic lovemaking, his frantic rings in our ears. In a way, he was blindfolded now, trapped in an armor-clad cell, unable to see or know who now occupied his home but no doubt could imagine as days passed without response from her. She didn’t want to pick up, receive anything from him. Had picked up phones to nothing for years. Was now receiving from me all that she should have from him, and more. I had already replaced him.

  Surely he must have sensed this, for it occurred on such a primal level that it could have traveled, I thought, kinetically telegrammed from our loins, our musk and heat, through the grasses and orchards, along the beach sands and into the rocks and forests and mountains—come to him on a breeze, or in the way the grass shifted in the lull between shellings, as if a great hand stroked what of the Lebanese earth was yet left unscorched by the perpetual fire and shrapnel of the Syrian bombardments. And told him, the stroked and moaning earth, that he had been replaced.

  “He already knows that I love you,” she said. “He’ll put two and two together.”

  If a shell had struck and killed him, he would have died with a head full of pornographic mental images of Anna copulating with me. And he would think of the sweet moments when we lay belly to belly, and understand the war raging about us, of which he was part and forgotten; also the social and artistic scene that we had created and on which he had placed so much hope, now waiting to disintegrate.

  “Who are you?” she asked ever so gently, tracing my face with fingertips. “I can’t believe that you exist. But you do. Tell me you do.”

  “I do,” I said, reaching for the bottle. Her hand touched my wrist, gently restraining. “Not yet. Wait.”

  I set the bottle down, but the ghost of my hand remained curled around it.

  “Tell me the truest thing about yourself. Something you’ve never told anyone.”

  Closed my eyes. Said: “If you could see inside of me, here? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited. For some great truth about myself that I had borne since birth to be revealed. But only one appeared. “All my life I have known that I am a writer.” In my ears, it sounded disappointing. I opened my eyes. She gazed at me with more love than I had ever seen in the eyes of anyone. It frightened me a little. Taking my face in her hands, she kissed my eyes, nose, and lips.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Aren’t you disappointed?”

  “No,” she said. “I know who you are inside and I know that anything else you could have said would have been a lie to please me.”

  “Don’t women like to have their men tell them pretty lies?”

  “Not this woman. Lies are ugly. Only tell me the truth.”

  We lay there in silence. And only then I thought of something else that might be true, perhaps the truest thing, not only about me—about us.

  “I feel as if you and I have entered a new world,” I said, “where we can leave all our corrupt former lives and selves behind, our memories, and set out for some new frontier, new selves—reinvent ourselves, make a new world, in our own image.”

  “Precious one.”

  Our bodies felt like newborns, side by side, safely cradled by love, rocked by bottomless desire. When we made love it was a preverbal transmission from one to another, syntax of sensation and delicious orgasms. I emptied myself into her again and again, yet always there was more. To be inside her was my new home—this is what she wanted me to know; that never would I need another. By day, I would write the great books that I had always meant to; by night, come home to her embrace. Our love became my religion, the new god to which I pledged body, soul and myself.

  But it was a jealous god, my love. Demanded perfection and complete fidelity. Chastity of purpose. Purity of heart. A god of quite clear absolutes that would broach no half-truths, no shades of gray. The color gray was banished from the realm of my love.

  When Itamar returned home, though, I drowned in gray. Despite our paradisiacal week together, Anna felt that a ten-year marriage required a subtle, careful untangling of the life they had fashioned together. She decided to remain at home rather than join me in exile at Barry’s, who offered us the use of his apartment.

  I could not bear her decision. Saw it as treachery.

  “But darling, I’m yours. The week we’ve just had together. Doesn’t that prove something to you? I want you. You’re my man now.”

  “You’re going to let him touch you, aren’t you?”

  Her eyes grew elusive. “No. I couldn’t. Not after this week. No. But I’m not going to treat him like some kind of fungus. We shared the same bed for ten years.”

  “What does that mean? You’ll sleep with him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. Or what’s going to happen. But I won’t give myself to him. That I swear. I’m yours.”

  “Whore!”

  She flinched, no less than if I’d slapped her. Took the wound deep into herself and grew pale, shaken. “I love you. Please don’t speak to me that way. I thought we’re better than that.”

  “Yeah, me too. That’s what I thought. And now you’re all vague and might share a bed with him. I can’t believe what an idiot I am! To have thought that we had something different, something special.”

  “We do, darling! We so much do! But be a little patient. There are practical details. We’re going to have to get a divorce. So will you.”

  “I’m used to it. It’s no big deal.”

  “Well, it is for me. I don’t want to make an enemy of Itamar any more than I may have already. I’ve publicly humiliated him. Everyone knows. I haven’t tried to hide. But we jointly own this house. Both our parents sank a lot of money into it. I can’t just run off. We need to disengage by stages.”

  “Sta
ges! I don’t have time for stages! There’s a war on out there. I’m getting sent into cesspools to look for I don’t know what anymore. What am I looking for? Do you know? Does anyone in Israel know what I’m looking for in those holes I get sent to? I want to know! Because now I’ve lost what I was looking for in there, or here with you. I thought I knew. Now I’m confused. I need a fuggin’ drink. I need a drink and a street to sleep in. That’s the fuggin’ truth! Women! You’re all fugging liars!”

  “No, darling. Don’t say that. You know it’s not true. Please, Alan. If you love me. There are other reasons. I’m in my first one-woman show at the Israel Museum, because of Itamar. It’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to me as an artist. When the war broke out, we were working on the installation together. I need his help to mount it. And to liaison with the museum.”

  “Yeah. Sure. And will he be mounting you while you and he are doing all this mounting?”

  “Darling, please. What are you talking about? I’m going to spend the rest of my life with you. I just need a little time to disengage. My love!”

  Her hand reached to stroke my cheek. I batted it away. But jealousy didn’t make me the monster I became at that moment. It was that I knew she was an adult and I just a child who couldn’t bear the pain of complex grown-up situations. She was a woman who needed a man, but I was emotionally stunted and anything hinting at shades of gray would unleash in me a howling sense of abandonment that only alcohol could numb. I saw the pain ahead and knew I couldn’t make it. Better to be alone. Better a blackout in the street than share a bed of nuanced love—for me a bed of nails. Looked at her as if to say, How could you do this to me? and stumbled out of there, angry, to get myself a bottle of brandy. Then went to the drugstore and bought a box of over-the-counter codeine tablets, no prescription needed. Careened through Jerusalem, swallowing handfuls of codeine washed down with brandy. The Old City, lit up like a Walt Disney castle, perched at a tilted ledge overhanging a black abyss, and then wobbled the other way back, and the whole sky seesawed as I staggered from neighborhood to neighborhood, moaning Anna’s name, wanting to be held by her, consoled, apologized to, reassured that in fact she had changed her mind, would stay, commence at once our Adam and Eve exodus to the beginning of time, where we would start over, undo all the mistakes made in the Garden, recalibrate the world.