NaNoWri - Day 1

Note: As a fictionalized biography of the woman who inspired Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and The Rosy Crucifixion, this work in progress contains sexually explicit material. If you're under 18 or you don't like sexually explicit material, don't read it.

Muse Alley

Chapter One

We were both liars. Stimulated by secrecy. Confabulators of parallel universes that lay side-by-side the worlds most people inhabit.

You can always tell more about a man from the way he lies than from the way he tells the truth.

I think that’s what sealed our connection.

My God! You breathe oxygen! You have opposable thumbs. You hate the same people I do. You read the same books. When you wake up in the morning, you’re never convinced you are where you’re supposed to be.

You lie.

It has to be love.

Doesn’t it?

###

I lived with Florrie after my mother banished me from the family home. In a flat on Montague Street in Brooklyn, a ground floor flat with French doors that opened on to a skinny little garden wedge filled with weeds and whatever seeds dropped from the feathers and shit of the birds who perched on the building’s eaves. Cathcart owned it. Extracted certain favors as a condition for my continuing residence. As Cathcart was in his late sixties and in poor health, these favors were not onerous.

I continued giving money to my mother. She disapproved of what she thought she knew about the things I did to earn it, but she went right on taking it though she refused to see me, refused to let me into her home. There was a mezuzah in a decorative case carefully fixed to a worn wooden door that opened on to the four-room apartment. The decorative case had come from Galicia, and before that, Romania. The clay from which the case had been made, my father was fond of telling me, my brothers, and my sisters, had once been pulverized coral and grit on the shores of the Red Sea; the mezuzah itself had been inscribed from pigments that contained the blood of my grandfather and great grandfather, and their grandfathers and great grandfathers.

My family is observant. When I was 15, my mother once slapped my face when she caught me reading Germinal on the fire escape on Shabbat. She pinched my arm so hard she left a fat yellow bruise on the flesh. “The Sabbath is for honoring the Lord,” she hissed. “Who gave you this book?”

“I found it,” I said.

“You found it where?”

I made my eyes go very round. I favored her with a smile that parlayed equal parts tenderness and innocence. “The Lord is good to me, Mama. He puts things out for me in easy reach. Blessed is the our God who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us.”

The Lord had put Germinal out on a scarred wooden desk in a room at Girls’ High School and positioned Mr. O’Flaherty, Girls’ High School’s janitor, behind it. Mr. O’Flaherty’s fly was unbuttoned, and he was breathing hard.

“Ya like the book, girlie?” Mr. O’Flaherty asked.

“I do,” I said. Zola is a great favorite of mine.

“The buttons on yer shirt,” he said. “Undo them.”

I smiled at Mr. O’Flaherty, and as carefree as you please, I undid the buttons of my long white middy blouse. Underneath, my shimmy was grey from too many washings. “My bubies are hot, Mr. O’Flaherty. Do you mind if I let them out for air?”

His hand fumbled at his fly. “Bend over,” he said. “Let me see your bubies knock against each other.”

When he finished fumbling, I slipped my shimmy back over my head, did up the buttons of my middy. One button had a fraying thread; I would have to sew it on more tightly that night.

“I like to read, Mr. O’Flaherty,” I said. “Balzac is a particular favorite of mine. And Thomas Hardy. But I don’t like Dickens.”

My mother, who saw no merit in reading on any day of the week but particularly not on Shabbos, tried to snatch the book from my hands. I hid it behind my back. I did not stop smiling.

“On Shabbos, we do not read,” my mother said. Her voice trembled. I imagine she wanted to hit me again. “We do not read, we do not speak frivolously. We do not handle money. We do not light fires. We think about the ways we can serve God.”

She spoke in Jiddisch, which was the language we spoke at home, the only language in which either of my parents could speak with any authority.

“I serve God by reading and understanding,” I told my mother. “By learning.”

“Learning,” she said. If it hadn’t been Shabbos, she would have spat.

Germinal and the encounter with Mr. O’Flaherty had served to convince me there were easier ways to get what I wanted than becoming a teacher, which was what Girls’ High School was preparing me to do; or becoming a presser like my father; or shoving needles through unyielding cloth, after a tedious day of cooking, cleaning, and washing, so that I might be able to sell it for a few pennies, like my mother. All such labor, as I saw it then, was merely a variant of pushing carts in the mines. In a place where human beings were brought together through stifled need, without the infrastructure of economic hierarchy, they were infinitely tractable, easily charmed.

But once I found that place, my parents chanted prayers for the dead.

I was a rebellious ghost. On Saturdays – not every Saturday, but many Saturdays – I took the subway to our old apartment. I climbed the five flights of stairs. I left the money in front of the mezuzah on the worn wooden door in a tin that had once contained Kyriazi Freres cigarettes from Egypt. Fifty dollars. Sometimes more. Cathcart liked Egyptian cigarettes.

I went back down the five flights of stairs and sat on the stoop, smoking. For half an hour. The streets were empty on Saturdays. The shops were closed. When I went back up the stairs to retrieve the tin, it was always empty.

I wondered what my mother told herself about the money. I was dead to her, so it couldn’t have come from me. Perhaps my mother envisioned herself as the heroine of a beautiful story in which a millionaire, driving by the Adath Jashurun synagogue on Rivington Street, had seen her leaving schul, her loveliness undiminished by poverty or years of grinding labor, or by the tichel riding low over her forehead, or by the birth and nurturance of five ungrateful children, or by the incompetence of a fumbling husband. Had seen her and immediately done the calculations: Price far above rubies, divided by fifty-two weeks of the year, multiplied by all the remaining years of a long and righteous life… Or perhaps it was G-d Himself who had chosen to reward her in this way as the first step in a long apotheosis that would culminate in of Shamayim, as Ruth, Esther, and Miriam scampered forth from the swirling ethers to claim her as their sister.

Sometimes my brother Sigmund joined me on the stoop. He, too, wanted a way out. He was thinking of the army when he came of age.

“I’ll change my name to Smith,” he said.

“I changed my name to Smith,” I said. “But I didn’t like it. So changed it again to Mansfield.”

“Mansfield!”

“Smerth is ‘death’ in Polish,” I said. “Smith only sounds like Smerth. But man’s field is the place where men are buried. Mansfield is death.”

“Yulia Mansfield,” Sigmund said. “That sounds funny.”

“I’m June Mansfield now,” I said.

When I got back to Montague Street, Cathcart was there. Florrie had slipped off her drawers and was reclining on the purple satin divan with her legs splayed so that Cathcart could get his eyeful. She winked at me when I walked through the door.

“Florrie was just confiding some details of your domestic ménage,” said Cathcart.

“Was she?” I said.

“What she does to soothe you when you cannot go to sleep.”

“Ah, yes, Florrie’s soothing ministrations,” I said. “I would like a cigarette.”

“My interest is avuncular,” Cathcart said. “I look upon you two delightful creatures as the nieces God deprived me of by making me an only child.”

“Avuncular,” said Florrie. “That sounds dirty.”

“Take off your blouse, Florrie,” I suggested. “It’s hot in here.”

Florrie’s tits were big with nipples that were only slightly darker than her white anemic skin. There was a vast chasm between them and between each breast and the sharp little bones of her tiny ribcage. When Florrie was drunk, which was often, she would demonstrate the types of things she could slip beneath her breasts. Here in the apartment we shared, just for fun, just to stay in practice, those things were pencils, typewriter ribbons,the occasional Krupniok sausage, but in Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale Brothers, Bonwit Teller, and the other emporiums on Ladies Mile she haunted before hiking the half mile to the Orpheum Dancehall where I'd first made her acquaintance, those things were pairs of silk stockings, kid gloves, pearl necklaces, flower clips for her hair.