Great Kisser Page 9

  Karen now came toward me. She was holding a pizza box. “I brought you something,” she said. Her eyes were dancing. I opened the box to find Vinnie’s painting: the red awnings, the moon overhead, the little Vinnie’s within the big Vinnie’s, onions, peppers, anchovies, olives. And then I noticed that above the restaurant, Vinnie had painted the windows of the apartments where his family all lived: Vinnie and his wife and children and grandchildren.

  And I wanted to climb through those windows.

  We waited for midnight.

  Karen stared at me. “Your black bushy eyebrows say so much. They drop—boing—whenever you disapprove of something. Sitting across from you in your apartment in Vancouver, even before you’d ever touched me, I spotted that. They always give you away. And not only your eyebrows—then there’s your eyes and your nose and your mouth.”

  I held Karen in my arms and kissed her. My Karen, who was incapable of infidelity or even one stray hostile thought of me. Who saved me from the mean streets and from myself. Who wanted to be only with me, as much as I wanted desperately the wider camaraderie, the give and take of friends, of scores of writers and artists and historians and scholars. Who’d gone through life by my side avoiding history and politics and still couldn’t fathom the hotcoffeed, smoky, upper West Side intellectuals, the descendants of Partisan Review and Dwight MacDonald and Delmore Schwartz and Paul Goodman for whom ideas, learning were actually more important than hair styles, aging, weight or hair loss. Karen, who really just wanted a nice bar with a couple of drinks, not this seething potpourri of Irving Howes and Philip Roths and Stephen Dixons and Arthur Millers and Stanley Elkins.

  Karen, who became sober for me. Who would walk through fire for me. Karen, who was worth more than a hundred juicy, red-lipped, black-stockinged, curvaceous, black-haired, smoky dark Mediterranean women of child-bearing age in dungarees stretching over their beautiful round asses.

  Karen still waited to see my reaction before expressing an opinion, or even knowing what that opinion might be, about a book, a movie, a play, a concert, a song, a politician, an idea, a soup, a piece of toast. And if I told her she was doing that, she would promptly hasten to not do that if that was what I wanted, and insist passionately that she was not doing what I did not want her to do and was throwing herself totally into the kind of spontaneity that would please me. And that went for sex as well.

  If I told Karen she was too sad, too repressed, too controlled, she would storm heaven and earth to prove how happy, liberated and free she was. I would assure her she’d done everything right. “You’re sure?” she’d say. “I’m sure.” “Because—” “I’m sure. You were great.”

  I waited for midnight.

  On New Year’s morning I awoke to Karen’s crying softly.

  “I dreamt we were in the Caribbean, doing a native dance together,” she said. “You didn’t like the dance, and you walked off.

  “I was walking with another guy, but then I said to him, ‘Do you know where my Michael is?’

  “And I woke up so relieved to find you beside me.”

  Later, I heard her crying again behind the bathroom door. I knocked, and she opened it. “Even in that idyllic setting,” she said, “I knew no other man would be enough for me. I need you so much.”

  And she trembled in my arms as she had trembled when we met, thirty years before.

  The Man Who Gave Up Women

  I

  I stare at the lit memorial candle that commemorates my father’s just departed life. He has been gone a week.

  When they called me in Los Angeles from the nursing home in Roxbury to tell me he was dying, I thought he was tricking me again. I’d been back and forth a dozen times. He would never die. I couldn’t even afford the plane trip to New York. I waited a day, then I borrowed the cash. I arrived the next day. He died alone.

  I remember as a boy knowing that my father had a large penis, and also knowing that he didn’t know where to put it, how to insert it, where it went, how to stick it in.

  After the stroke, in the nursing home, when my father could mainly make guttural sounds (although he made himself understood when he said to me, “Give me five dollars”), could no longer see or hear, could not read The New York Times, he began to give up.

  But still, when a nurse was kind to him, he reached up to stroke her cheek and she kissed him.

  In the last year he would make lullaby motions with his hands, holding them, clasping palm to palm against the side of his head, indicating he wanted to sleep, to die, get it over with. Ninety-five years was enough. But the doctor got down on one knee to talk into my father’s ear and said, “Izzie, I know you want to go out into those hills out there like the Indians and fade away. But as your doctor I can’t let you do that. All I can do is try to make you as comfortable as it’s possible for you to be.”

  Money was the dance between my father and me for fifty years.

  When I was a boy, he held out a dollar toward me. I started to take it. He withdrew it, smiling, a big tease. “Not so fast,” he said.

  A lecture followed about my ingratitude. Then: the bill extended again. My hand out. The bill withdrawn. “Don’t be in such a hurry.”

  I wanted to kill him.

  II

  I really was a cute kid in those days, my prick sticking up in front of me, my high hats and canes, miming to Jolson records. Wherever I was, my father would find me. I’d pick up the phone in the boarding house hallway, or he’d find me in the schoolyard where my friends would watch him bobbing up and down like a puppet, or he’d treat me to lunch at the Automat, where he always drew a crowd. He would pummel away, the same monologue, not hearing the replies I barely uttered, knowing there was no use. Sometimes I mouthed the words along with him as he spoke.

  Are you alone? Tsk, tsk, tsk. It’s terrible to be alone. I’m alone like a dog. Don’t worry, kid. You’ve still got your father in back of you. If you fail, so what? I’m here to buck you up. Buck up! Be like me! I know. I should have let go of you. I ruined you. I’m only kidding. But it’s true. You’re weak. You have your father to lean on. I know you try to write. I don’t understand a word of it. I can’t help it, Michael. I’m not educated. Don’t blame me for the way I am. I didn’t have the help of all the therapists I’ve given you. I’m not bright like you are, but you ought to make up for me. I was always alone. Are you alone? It’s terrible to be alone. I was too sensitive. Are you sensitive? I was so awkward. Are you awkward? Be honest with me, Michael. You’re my son. I’d get so excited with the girl I couldn’t learn the dance steps. I’d forget to count. Do you dance? I’m your father, Michael, you shouldn’t hide anything. Are you a genius? How could the apple fall so far from the tree? What do you do in your room all day? At least I had wonderful friends. I know you say you have friends. But you can tell me the truth. When I die, Michael, the world will be your oyster. I could go anytime. I’m not well, and I’m not so young. I’m 38, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, getting old, Michael, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90—I have a crick in my neck. I have nothing to look forward to. I’m so bored. When I die you’ll have enough money to travel to Paris and write, beautiful women on your arm. The will is in the bank. The will is in the desk. The will is right over there. I’ll leave the room now. I hope you don’t read it. Don’t be in such a hurry. You shouldn’t want your father to die. Don’t get so excited about it, you can hardly wait. Be civilized. Your eyes are sparkling. There’s so much hate in you. You hate me, yet my entire life is you. I gave up women for you. I gave up delicatessen for you. You blame me for everything. I know: I really did ruin you. I’m sorry, Michael, forgive me. I didn’t have help for my emotional problems like you did. You understand, so you should forgive me. I mean well. A father means well! And what if I don’t? You’re a lucky boy! I look around at all the cripples and I feel great! Michael! Life is not easy for anyone. Friendship, honor—nothing matters but money. Mommy was a good kid, even though she tried to poison me. It was silly, I had no insurance to speak of. Michae
l, why was my father so mean? Please tell me. You’re the genius. Buck up, kid! I’m more important to you than all the girls and all your friends. You should break down the door to see me. Because when I die you’re going to have a ball. The will is in the First National Bank, Chase, Chemical, in Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, in vaults E, G, H, A, D, V. So don’t worry, kiddo. You see? You’ve got it made.

  III

  On Friday the nurse calls from Roxbury. My father is pulling out the intravenous cords. “I think he is fading.”

  I wait. She calls again on Saturday. My father has died.

  I borrow the money and on Sunday I fly to New York. At the funeral home, the director asks me if I want to see my father. I say no. Then I change my mind. The coffin with my father in it is moved back from the hearse to the chapel. I see my father’s waxed face, touch it and weep.

  No one else has come.

  The rabbi asks me, “Were you close?”

  “Not really.”

  “Would you like to say a few words at graveside?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The coffin before me at the cemetery, the rabbi and the grave diggers standing by, I say a few parting words to my father. “You always spoke of FDR’s words, ‘You have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ For most of your life you were governed by fear. In spite of it, you managed to do some really loving things.”

  IV

  I climb back into the limousine to return to Manhattan. The Italian driver, his fifty-five-year old face bright with cologne and talcum powder, is named Joe.

  In the car he speaks of his father. “Once I ran away from home with my father,” he says. “We went to Atlantic City. But we had to come back because we had no money. When my father got sick, I got in the bathtub with him, I changed his diapers. Things I wouldn’t do for my own kids because it nauseated me. I slept in the same bed with him. I was up most of the night for six months. The doctor warned me I would kill myself that way. Sure enough, I got pneumonia after his death and wound up in the hospital.

  “Growing up was a very simple life. We had our garden. He planted his tomatoes. Made his own wine. And I did it with him. At school you had to put a white handkerchief on the desk and lay your hands on it. The teacher would walk up and down the aisle. She checked hair for lice and nails to see if they were clean. In the wine season, my hands were all stained: you couldn’t get it off your skin, working with the barrels and the grapes. I used to scrub them with lemon. They sent me home, my hands were so dirty. I was crying.

  “My father went up to school and he was a madman. He said, ‘My son’s got cleaner hands than anybody in this building. His hands are pure.’”

  I listen to this enchanting story of a father.

  “You were lucky,” I say to Joe.

  V

  Returning to Manhattan, I recall a conversation I had in the morning with Benjamin, who is celebrating his fourth birthday tonight. He is the son of my friends Aviva and Norman, with whom I am staying in Manhattan. This morning Benjamin pointed to a toy drum in a children’s book and said it looked great.

  I tell the driver to let me out at 89th street. I go into the toy store.

  The store is crowded on this lovely afternoon with mothers and little children. One of the voids of a childhood spent listening to your father recount his own unhappy childhood are the gaps in basic knowledge that you seem to carry forever. I am not sure what a toy drum for a four-year-old boy should look like, and spend an inordinate amount of time checking each drum with bemused clerks. I am afraid I will not know what to say to Benjamin, how to play with him and keep his attention.

  I finally pick out the drum and wait a long time for the gift wrap. The sounds of the chirping children enfold me in their embrace. I feel that I am floating, that I could stand there forever.

  VI

  Benjamin’s party begins.

  Now that Benjamin has taught me how to play peek-a-boo with him, I do it constantly. Then I bring out his presents.

  First I have a train whistle for him. The size of a charm or a dreidel, it has a picture of a train in a meadow and when you squeeze it, the sound of the whistle and the chug-chug of the wheels is amazingly loud and clear.

  I have brought the whistle with me from Los Angeles, since Benjamin lost the first one I gave him. Until he lost it, every time he saw me, he would begin our conversations by asking, “Michael, remember your present?”

  I squeeze it and shout, “Holy smoke! What can that be? Watch out! Here it comes! Watch out! Here it comes! Here it comes!”

  Benjamin holds the whistle in his hands. “You remembered it.”

  He stares at the wrapping of the next present. “I love surprises,” he says.

  He opens it. “Look, it’s a drum!”

  He pulls open the rest of the wrapping. “But does it have drumsticks?”

  I hand him the tiny sticks.

  “But how do I hold it?”

  I’m stumped again. Then I see the attached string, and put it around his neck confidently as if I have often given little boy drums.

  “I have a drum and a drumstick!” Benjamin shouts.

  He pounds it, walking around the room.

  Later he approaches me, pauses, thinks.

  Benjamin sits on my lap for the first time. I hold him.

  Later he says, “Michael, do you remember this morning when I told you I wanted a drum like in that book?”

  “Yes, Benjamin, I do.”

  “Is that when you decided to get it for me?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I thought so,” Benjamin says.

  Aviva has been standing there, watching us. Her friend Marion asks her, “What is it about Michael?”

  “Michael has a special way with children,” Aviva explains.

  VII

  After Benjamin’s party, it is his bedtime and the adults have dinner.

  Aviva is a therapist, working with Holocaust survivors. Her parents were survivors, and she was born in a displaced persons camp. Norman is the editor of a Jewish magazine. At their house there’s the feeling of rounds of kids’ parties, baby sitters, laughter, music—children at the center. Renewal. Where is the darkness of life? I cannot find it.

  Glasses tinkle, through the window lights shine over the Hudson. Norman intones the Hebrew prayers. What do they mean? Search me. Probably God’s great, bow down to him, he’s terrific, whatever. You have to imbibe this stuff from childhood to feel it.

  There are miracles here. Not so long ago, before he met Aviva and into his mid-forties, Norman stuttered badly and on weekends sat writing poems in Washington Square Park, or waited for me at my street corner to show me them. Now his speech is clear and articulate, the part of him that was stifled has begun to fly out, he is presiding at the head of the table. Benjamin himself is a miracle. After years of struggling to conceive, subjecting herself to countless medical experiments and drugs, in her forty-seventh year the intrepid Aviva, the fighter for the survivors, conceived Benjamin in vitro.

  I sit watching in the corner of the room, where my father might have huddled had he been here. But like Norman, I am beginning to be less of a stutterer. My stutter was my contempt, which has only lately begun to leave me. Daniel, a film critic, is at the party with his new bride Marion and his elderly father Martin. Daniel has married for the first time at fifty-two. Father and son have an unusual relationship which for some reason I have always found amusing until tonight. Whatever Daniel goes, his father is always beside him or seated near him. Martin, an Auschwitz graduate, attends most of Daniel’s meetings, goes to screenings with him and parties like this one. Now that Daniel has married Marion, I’ve asked Aviva, will the father sleep in a bed beside them? Martin, who is seventy-eight and a retired pharmacist, has a new profession: he is teaching film history at City College.

  But today I see how tenderly Daniel attends to his father, and I understand this additional miracle before my eyes. Martin is following in his son’s footsteps.

 
; VIII

  Seated next to me on the plane back to L.A. is a girl named Gina. She has a classic Italian beauty. She describes a mother like my own was. She recalls having a cavity when she was six and being afraid to tell her mother because it would anger her. Gina’s brother, acting as a buffer, told her mother instead. She remembers her mother’s reaction to the news; the image of her mother’s hand reaching out through the opened door of the house and furiously grabbing her hair.

  She hesitates, then takes the locket from around her throat to show it to me. It has a photogravure of a young girl’s face, not her own, in the shape of a heart. On the other side is engraved her birthday. “My grandmother gave it to me. It makes me feel like I have a mother.”

  For a moment my failures stop cascading over me like black rainfall.

  And yet I know that I will never see her again.

  My father’s curse, I think, is still intact.

  IX

  He often said to me, “You’re lucky to have me to write about. I’m your best subject.”

  My father was handsome, a gentleman of the old school. Born in Austria in 1904, he came to America a year later and settled in Roxbury with his mother and tyrannical father, five brothers and two sisters. He was a creature of the Depression. He seemed like a homeless man in a world of homeless men. He lived in a greasy boarding house room after the divorce and ate in cafeterias where the lonely men gathered over coffee to pass the time. He sought out the darkened streets of the Bowery and the Third Avenue El and dimly lit cafeterias and lobbies. He came up for air during the day, smiling in his Cadillac, but at night went back to his single room. Even when he had the Cadillac and fancy shirts and suits from Hickey Freeman or Rogers Peet, he was never free of the apprehension of disaster.