Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  “But you said…you once talked about a little Alan and Anna mixed together…a baby with our features and personalities combined. To make a new thing, a third ‘us.’ ”

  “Yeah, I know. But in the meantime us isn’t doing so hot. And besides, you want to perpetuate me? Isn’t one Alan Kaufman bad enough? One of me is enough for this world.”

  “No, it’s not enough. You are a beautiful man. I think that you’re a genius. But you don’t know how to live. Let me teach you. You’re like a boy who’s been raised by wolves, thrown into situations you can’t handle. But you won’t have to. Let me deal with them. I know that you can do anything you set your mind to. I saw what you did at the museum. No one’s ever done that before. You brought a whole new art scene to life in Jerusalem, one of the oldest cities in the world. You were a soldier. And a journalist. And a poet. And you wrote and published short stories. Whatever’s happened to you can be cured with love and rest. Let me love you back to health. I want to. You’re my soul mate. The man I want to have children with.”

  “How many?”

  The question was like a slap, cold, logistical, a calculation, a position staked out in a desperate negotiation: not a response to her heartfelt call to love.

  “I don’t know. I thought, two…”

  “Two,” I said. And again: “Two.” Then: “It’s a good number. My brother and I were two. And Mommy and Daddy made four. And we all equaled one big fat nightmare.”

  “It can be different for us. We’re not them.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “I am them, in combination, the worst of both worlds. I’m their dream of what happens when you mix George with Marie. And look what we got. An adulterer. A drunk. A failure. A liar who reneges on his promises.”

  She cried.

  I sat up and felt around for an ashtray, found one, lit a cigarette. Had caused so many to cry that I’d gotten rather used to it. Go have a drink when they’re like this, I’d tell myself, and let them weep. It’s the only really decent thing that you can do.

  Her parents threw open her home to me, though Ben could barely conceal his hostility for what I’d done to destroy his beautiful and gifted little girl: wrecked her marriage and reduced her to a skeletal divorcée who’d stopped doing her art and was now working telephones to raise funds for other people’s creative endeavors while she herself was remarried to a drunken freeloader. Others should have been manning phones to raise funds for her, one of the most gifted and original artists of her generation.

  They gave me keys to their home when they were away on the little car excursions they liked to take. Anna joined them with my encouragement. I stayed behind. With them out of the way, I could raid Ben’s considerable liquor cabinet. Often, they returned to find me blotto.

  One day Ben sat me down to have a man-to-man. Bald, narrow-shouldered, with weak eyes and a trim mustache. I could have crushed him with one hand, which he sensed, and something inside me wanted to.

  “Alan,” he said, “I think that finding some sort of employment would help to raise your confidence.”

  “I’m not a citizen. I can’t work,” I said. “They have strict laws here.”

  “Anything. Do anything. There are jobs that don’t require permits.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But you should be willing to do anything for you and Anna to get on your feet.”

  I picked up a newspaper and flipped to the employment section. “Let’s have a look-see,” I said, smartly snapping open the pages. Brow furrowed theatrically, eyes narrowed in mock focus, I scanned the ads. “Well, here’s something. WANTED. EARTHWORM DIGGERS—Graveyard Shifts Only. We get you there and back. Decent wage!”

  His stiff smile faltered. He tried to appear upbeat. “Well, that would be a start. Honest employment is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  I answered an ad for a golf caddie, though I knew nothing about golf. Was the only adult there, the other caddies aged twelve or thirteen. I was attached to a cluster of four graying cardigan businessmen sans golf cart, and carried their bags on my shoulders. When their poor swings sent the ball vanishing into hedges, I scrambled downhill like a fox terrier to fetch. This exhausting work dehydrated my nauseated body. Badly needed a drink. Hadn’t thought to bring along a supply. At lunch break, followed on their heels like a good dog into the clubhouse dining room, looking forward to some good food, perhaps some beer and a little conversation with the congenial gents. But one of them turned, with a cold smile: “Uh, no. You take yourself around to the back, knock on the window. When it opens, ask for the Caddie Special. Put it on my tab.”

  Mortified, circled back, knocked on the wooden gate. It snapped up.

  “Caddie Special,” I said.

  It slammed shut. A moment later, it snapped up and out slid a tray with a single hot dog and a bottle of orange soda. The shutter dropped like a guillotine.

  At day’s end, my employer said: “We all want to give you this little something to express our gratitude for your great work.” He thrust into my palm a bill rolled as tightly as a piece of espionage, and hurried off. It was a single Canadian dollar—seventy-five US cents.

  36

  ON THE BUS RIDE HOME THROUGH THE FREEZING Toronto night—blacker and colder because that much closer than New York to the polar icecap—I realized that certain passengers were satanists who had singled out Anna and me for human sacrifice. They were following me home to her. Quickly, took evasive action like a good military man who knows that one key to not getting shot any sooner than your time is to change spots every three seconds, too fast for the ambusher to draw a bead.

  Cleverly, got off at the wrong stop, far from home, walked down wrong streets and, doubling back, took others equally wrong, circled around, got off at an alien stop, stood on an alien sidewalk, where a young punk in Mohawk and leather whom I knew, without doubt, to be a satanic operative passed me with head ducked, hands thrust into pockets, clutching a knife probably. He circled widely around me. I smirked in his wretched face as he passed. Didn’t he know who I was? A Bronx schoolyard battler. An Israeli combat soldier. “I KNOW!” I screeched at his back as he hurried past. “You HEAR ME, mother? I KNOW!!!”

  Sure that there were others close behind (they never operated alone but always in numberless legions performing intricate deceptive maneuvers), I too moved, quickly, in a new direction home, sure that I had a brief reprieve for now, knowing that I had just succeeded in ducking a very large bullet, but an hour from now or in days to come, who knows? With Anna so intent on feathering a nest, making a home, successful evasive maneuvers were once more impossible. The problem that had haunted me in New York had followed me to Toronto. Her vision of happiness made us sitting ducks.

  She could not grasp, nor could I explain, that in order to survive we must at all times stay mobile. Hadn’t she learned anything from our mothers’ wartime experiences—harrowing odysseys entailing a million intuitive twists and turns on improbable roads? Move! Staying in motion was the key to survival. Didn’t she know that from Sally’s experience, and after a decade in Israel? To enact normal rituals, pretenses of decency, in the face of Nazis, European Fascists, Arab terrorists, Islamic jihadists, White Supremacists, was an invitation to enter new, improved gas chambers. Constant vigilance and a willingness to instantly abandon all scruples in order to act with savage expediency in the face of overwhelming threat—this was key. But how to explain it to her? I knew: she was asleep, an ahistorical innocent. Could not see. Never would.

  Up this street, down that alley, hour after hour, wait, knife out, all clear, hurry across the road. But could one ever be sure that one had succeeded? Everywhere lurked threat. Stood riveted to my spot, surrounded by snipers, expelling plumes of condensed breath, gloved fist to my mouth, teeth grinding on a knuckle. The pain felt good. Harder I bit. The fear abated. Looked up, searching the Canadian sky, the Toronto roofline, face anguished, head exploding, body sickened, craving a drink, spied on, overwhelmed by t
he sheer scale of threat which unfolded not only in this moment but extended from the ancient past into the unforeseeable future, an axis of dire suffering and unrelieved onslaught imbedded in my very DNA, and I its horrified and hapless prophet. The infinite calculations needed to elude my multiplying enemies for an hour, let alone a lifetime, was exhausting: an unmapped ceaseless calculus of intuited probabilities squared with the worst imaginable outcomes. It was too much. I was imploding. The whole house of cards collapsing. “Little Einstein” could not forever stay one step ahead of Fate. Inevitably, it must catch up, and when it did, what would it bring? The Unspeakable.

  In an effort to show me how it felt to return from a day’s honest labor to a real home with a loving wife, Anna had gone to great lengths, despite her own full day of work, to prepare a home-cooked meal, replete with candle setting and herself dolled up in what she knew I liked best to see her in: a skimpy halter top, short skirt, with high heels and the kind of earrings that made the heart stop when she walked in a certain way and set them jiggling.

  But by the time I arrived, it was late, the food was cold, the candle low. Whatever weak glow she had fanned in herself was now squelched. “Sweet one,” she said, weakly hugging me. Looked into my eyes, saw what she thought she knew was there. “What’s wrong?” she asked timidly.

  Couldn’t bring myself to say. Still time to sit, pretend to enjoy the meal. But I couldn’t. Not for a minute. Not with the shadow army gathering around our door. The lesbians on the other side of the partition, lying in bed, talking, would meet death too. I was in a studio in the run-down bohemian quarter of Toronto, with three women completely unaware of the slaughter about to ensue. Fear of this froze in my throat. I paced. Lit a cigarette. Leaned my forehead against a wall, eyes closed.

  “Tell me, Alan. Sweet one. Tell me.”

  Nothing.

  “Is it fear?”

  Startled, I looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

  “The fear,” she said sheepishly.

  “I don’t have any fear.”

  Her eyes avoided mine, which blazed furiously.

  “You do, though. You’ve had it ever since you came home from the Reserves in Hebron. Something happened to you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t know either,” she said. “But it’s some kind of fear. Do you remember that trip we took down to the beach, to Ashdod, when you came back from Hebron?”

  “So? Nice trip.”

  “On the beach you said that a group of bathers near us were criminals who wanted to rob and kill us. And that the old man in the postal cap who rode up on that skeletal nag was the Grim Reaper, a messenger from Hades.”

  “I was feeling poetic,” I said, attempting a grin. “I’m a poet, no?”

  “I thought it was just being that, yes. But then there were other times. We couldn’t go to this grocer because of “things” you’d overheard. We couldn’t sit through Pasolini’s film Salò in the East Village because it was “satanic.” I couldn’t walk around dressed as I like because “it would attract dangerous killer types.” We couldn’t even list our telephone in the directory because the “wrong people” might see. Every day there was something else. Sweet one, you’re hard to read. You don’t say what’s really going on with you. How am I to know? I don’t care what it is, but you have to let me in, share it with me. That’s why I’m here. Hebron triggered something in you. You’ve never been the same.”

  My eyes sought for a purchase. I debated whether to tell her the truth. She stood there, emaciated, face lit by love and concern, wasting away, the brightest and most caring woman I’d ever known, but I felt certain that she’d be unable to grasp the full extent of threat arrayed against us. Certain kinds of evil are beyond the imagining of innocents like her. Sally somehow succeeded in insulating her daughter from the poison that flowed in the veins of life, the savagery that lay in the hearts of human beings. Anna had not played chess against the Unknown. She had no idea of its moves. How, just out of bed, the pawn feet of your chess-piece life hit the floor and there she was, the mother of your existence, with a rolling pin or belt, waiting to beat you to a pulp, then tell you about the gas chamber. You hit the schoolyard at dusk for a half-court game and next found yourself rolling on the ground with someone twice your size and age, in a fight to the death. You entered a village where fleeing women and children led you into a maze where behind every corner might lurk a bullet or ignited gasoline, a hand grenade or knife. There was the dark in which your chess piece moved from square to square, in a ceaseless match against kaleidoscopic variables whose endgame was your annihilation.

  “Look,” I said “Sit down. Okay? Here. At the table.”

  “Are you going to let me feed you?” she asked hopefully.

  “Sit first.”

  She did. And I, facing her.

  “You see,” I began, voice weak, hesitant, unsure what to say, how to begin.

  She retained a composed expression as I sought to explain, prefacing my assertions with “I know it sounds crazy, but…”

  When done, we sat quietly for a long time.

  “The food,” I said guiltily, knowing it was long past edible. She glanced over at it. “That’s all right. Forget it.”

  I nodded. “Since we’re being honest with each other, I need a drink.”

  “There’s nothing here. We have to go out to get you something.”

  “Okay.”

  But we didn’t move yet. Sat in more silence, Anna reflecting, I feeling a certain measure of relief but also a pinch of terror, for having brought her into this. Now they would know that she knew. Their surveillance was thorough. Now she was integral to their game. Her life was now in as much mortal danger as mine.

  “Sweet one,” she began, as she always did. “You’ve been under a lot of strain. I know you. You went to the army to be a hero, to do heroic things. But they threw you into a filthy job, and I think what you had to do…hurt your mind. But sweet one, you did it for us, even if I don’t agree with it. I know that you did what you thought had to be done. And now, you need rest.”

  “Rest? You tell me I need rest and then send me out to chase golf balls all day? Your cheapskate father! I was a director in the Israel Museum. Ben is a nothing, a nonentity! With his little mustache and bald head. Adopting superior airs! If you recall, I gave you and that poor excuse of a dickless and impotent husband of yours the first real break of your careers! That waste of life who married you and for ten years couldn’t find it in himself to make love to the most beautiful and interesting woman in all of creation!”

  “It’s not exactly like that. He had his little escapades.”

  This was the first I’d heard about philandering on the other side, and it came as quite the surprise. “He had someone for a few years. There at the art school where he teaches. I saw her once. A brunette. With a big bust. I guess he thought my tits were too small.” She looked down forlornly at a bust so dear, so lovely, I wanted only to lay my face upon it for the rest of my life.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s beside the point. For me, there’s no rest now. They’re closing in. You’re in danger too. And I can’t carry all this responsibility, for you and myself. It’s too much weight. I’m breaking apart and failing. I feel like such a loser.”

  She came over, wrapped her arms around me, but I pulled away, stood my ground.

  “I have no money. Do you have any? I need a drink.”

  “Yes,” she said with calm dignity, despite the agony in her eyes. Went to her shoulder bag, withdrew her purse, removed a few crisply folded singles; then, reluctantly, with slow, painful movements, removed a twenty-dollar bill and handed it over.

  “I’m going to get my medicine.”

  “Let me come,” she said.

  “No!”

  “Please!”

  I couldn’t stop her, but how to explain the white-hot anguish boiling in my chest and abdomen. Having to walk alongside her at an
average pedestrian pace, unpresuming, in a street filled with sinister faces, mocking eyes in shifting combinations of lethal looks, ominous shadows, passing cars, windows slammed shut, others opened, curtains parted, a passing cyclist glancing at me through the slit of his ski mask. And she, unconcerned, unsuspecting, cocooned in a gigantic circus tent of denial, unaware of her designation for murder, or the malicious knowing looks thrown our way by passersby anticipating, almost gleefully, the disembowelments to come.

  She took my hand, which perspired so heavily that I felt my fingers suffocate. Jerked away my hand. Hated her. Her simplistic nature. Her damned Bambi innocence! Goddamn you, Anna! Look at what’s all around you. Pierce the veil of this benign, banal Toronto night and see the horrible malevolence lurking underneath.

  Sensing my furious disgust, my dear love welled with tears. But deep shame only stiffened my resolve. In this war, you must be hard, I told myself: her survival is at stake. You—well, you’re as good as dead. But maybe you can yet save her. She will not understand. So it goes. Be a man! Take executive action. Go into EVASION MODE NOW!!!

  At this, a bus pulled up. Grabbing her hand, I pulled her aboard. Astonished, she stared the length of the bus at the half-awake passengers, undead under the overhead ghoulish fluorescence. “What are you doing?” she cried.

  “You don’t understand, do you? We’re being followed. And you don’t suspect anything. We’re being sought! And you mosey along nice as pie! I’m sick of your ignorance. Your refusal to face facts! Now, you listen and you listen good. You do what I say. Is that understood?”

  “Yes,” she said numbly.

  I led her to the back, where I’d have a good view of the passengers, but no sooner got us seated than realized my fatal mistake. Here was a man with a crew cut and blue, homicidal eyes. A scar over his upper lip. Looked ready to rock and roll with a bowie knife or handgun. A killer, for sure. I froze. Never had I felt more certain of the plot against us. Anna felt the change.