If You Find This, Take It: It Was Meant for You-Chapter 4, (v)

Chapter Four

(v)

Next night, I watched the Chinese girl dance with a sailor. She swayed slowly to the music. Slid her hands down his pants. Into his pockets. The trick is to keep them coming back. Right?

When I left the Orpheum, the Chinese girl was hurrying down the stairs just in front of me.

“Wait!” I said.

She rolled her eyes, but she stopped.

“What do you mean you use coins?”

“She’s interested,” the girl announced to an imaginary audience.

“What’s your name?”

“Annie.”

“Annie can’t be your name!”

“Why not? You think my name should be Serene Lily Beneath the Mysterious Moon? In Cantonese, of course.” And she laughed.

Her laugh sounded foreign. Staccato like rapid gunfire and veering off into a high frequency that only dogs might hear.

“My name is June.”

“I know who you are.”

“Do you smoke?”

“I smoke.”

We stood under the awning of the shuttered and closed Child’s Restaurant and blew smoke rings. Across the street, I saw a man who looked like Henry Miller but as soon as the light turned green, he looked like someone else and walked away.

“You might want a second opinion,” Annie said. “Otherwise your little girlfriend is dead in six months. You saw it. I saw you see it.”

“You don’t sound Chinese.”

“What does Chinese sound like? You sound Yid. I bet my people have been in this country longer than your people.”

I let that slide. “So that second opinion.”

“Five dollars. I’m never wrong.”

I wasn’t sentimental. I wasn’t tenderhearted. The stuff I did with Florrie when I couldn’t sleep meant no more to me than Mr. O’Flaherty’s stealthy fumblings, Nestor’s journeyman thrusts, the things I let Marder’s friends do to me while he watched.

But I was interested in the future, I told myself.

“You’re on,” I said.

The only place open after 2am was the Third Avenue automat where I’d meet Sammy. We walked there. Once you leave the enclave of nervous hustlers that is Times Square, there’s a beautiful pragmatism to Manhattan’s grid: The east-west blocks are long; the north-south wests are short. You glide effortlessly through a late-night world of mathematical perfection. There aren’t any shadows because there aren’t any street lamps.

The automat was very bright. I walked up to one of the little cages that held the food. Slid two dimes into the slot. Released a serving of creamed spinach.

I took it to the table where the Chinese girl sat waiting for me.

She stared at it.

“You want something to eat?” I asked. “I’ll buy.”

She did something with her nose and her eyebrows. “Never worked food service, huh, sister? Don’t you know what they do to the food behind all those little little glass windows? They spit on it. They piss in it.”

She had a clutch made of scarlet silk embroidered with peonies. She removed six pennies.

“What are those for?” I asked.

“I told you. We use coins.”

“Don’t you have to use Chinese pennies?”

She made another one of her faces. Said something in Chinese. “Ask the question,” she demanded. “My feet hurt.”

“What?”

“It answers specific questions. It’s not some kind of illustrated book where you get to see pretty pictures of the future.”

“What will happen to us?” I asked.

“Us?” she asked.

“Florrie,” I corrected.

But she shook her head. “Too late. It has to be the very first question.”

One by one, she flipped the coins. Looked at them. Scribbled lines on a napkin. After she was done, she sat there staring at them for a very long time, her face expressionless.

“So?” I asked. “What do you see?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Her fingers drummed the table. I already knew she was a good liar, so apparently, she didn’t think I was important enough to lie to convincingly.

“I know you see something,” I said.

“I see nothing,” she said. Her voice had become stilted, formal and for the first time, I heard a chillingly foreign inflexion in it.

“I’m not going to pay you if you don’t tell me—“

“You can keep your money.”

Then she lunged for the red clutch and fled.

When I saw Annie the next night in the Orpheum, I approached her. She was in the company of the two other Chinese girls, standing by the bar where I’d first seen Henry Miller. One of the girls looked at me, touched her nose, and laughed.

“I want to know what you saw,” I said, putting menace into my voice.

Annie looked at me and said something to the other girls in rapid-fire Chinese. One of them laughed, but the other put her palm to her mouth and gasped. Annie made a palms-up shrugging motion.

“I want to know,” I said.

“No speak-ee Engrish,” said Annie. “Solly.”

The next night, the Chinese girls were gone.

“What happened to them?” I asked Dr. Dao.

Dr. Dao smiled his inscrutable smile. “Proportion,” he said. “It means golden mean, yes? Like Confucius. What rhymes with this word?”

“Extortion,” I said. “Contortion. Abortion.”

The disappearance of the Chinese girls didn’t matter, though: It was spring again, and business at the Orpheum Dance Palace had finally begun to pick back up.

If You Find This, Take It: It Was Meant for You-Chapter 4, (iv)

CHAPTER 4

(iv)

September turned into October. October turned into November.

Marder took off for Jamaica. The weeds in the garden of the Montague Street flat died; the birds flew some place else. A cold wind blew, and hard snowflakes fell on the city. They smelled like ashes.

Then it was December. Always my least favorite part of the year. December was a kind of dark time tunnel through which, if I closed my eyes and held my breath, I might be able to slide through fast without injuring myself.

Men had some idea that they ought to spend Christmas with their families. If they didn’t have families, they had some idea they ought to barricade themselves in a solitary room and drink.

After December, came January. Men made resolutions: I will live a better life. The ones that could stand to do it took a long hard look at themselves in the mirror, though often the only mirror that was close at hand was a shaving mirror, and the reflection they caught of themselves there—desperate eyes above a threadbare union suit—made their hands shake so hard that they cut themselves when they actually used it for shaving. In the week following New Years, New York City was a veritable sea of men with dazed eyes and slashed faces.

Of course, this life was the best one they were ever likely to get. But until they made peace with that fact, they were unlikely to show up at the Orpheum.

“Maybe now the place closes,” Nestor told me, shrugging.

That same night, Dr. Dao turned up with a couple of Chinese girls in tow.

From time to time it had occurred to me that Dr. Dao might be the true owner of the Orpheum, but whenever I tried to broach the subject with him, his English became worst than ever and he evinced a sudden interest in my thymus gland: “My English! Not good. You need Huáng Qí? I give you special price.”

They were quite plain with their flat, black, oily hair and broad faces, but Dr. Dao’s girls could trip the light fantastic like nobody’s business. You’d have thought Ginger Rogers took foxtrot lessons from them.

It didn’t matter what the Chinese girls looked like anyway. They had novelty on their side. The few male stragglers in whom the Orpheum habit was too embedded to die pounced on them. This embittered Florrie and Hannah.

“Their twats are horizontal, you know,” said Hannah.

“Jesus,” I said in disgust.

“It’s a scientific fact! And the reason they’re yellow is because they eat dogs.”

I had been trying to teach Florrie and Hannah how to play bridge with my old Tarok deck so we’d have something to do while we sat at the faded velvet banquette and listened to the steam piano play Yes! We Have No Bananas. But they were too stupid to understand the difference between a trump and a trick. So, instead I told their fortunes.

To Hannah, the Tarok assigned a placid if unremarkable future. Ten of Hearts, Five of Clubs: She would meet a man, and one day she and that man would have offspring. They’d be doorstops together in some upstate wasteland far away from the city! And that would pass for happiness.

What the cards foresaw for Florrie, though. That was disturbing.

There was the Fool card. What they call L’excuse in French and Sküs in German. I knew the French and German because Papa was very particular about the naming of cards.

And the Hanged Man. Le Pendu in French; Il Traditore in Italian. The legend was that the man dangling from the tree was Judas Iscariot, and that the little thing he clutched in his hand was the goatskin bag with its 30 pieces of silver.

As a Jew, of course, I’ve always been inclined to view Judas with a certain amount of sympathy, but mine is not the conventional view. Nor the view of the cards.

“What’s gonna happen to me? What’s gonna happen to me?” bubbled Florrie, giddy as a little girl.

Horrible things had already happened. And the card was reversed. Horrible things would happen again.

I didn’t know why I should care, but I did. So, I narrowed my eyes, pretended to peer. “You’ll marry your own true love. He’ll die and leave you a ton of money, and then you can live however you please,” I said.

Florrie squealed.

One of the Chinese girls, on her way from the bathroom, turned her head toward the cards spread across the cracked red leather and laughed.

“Do you mind?” I asked.

“She believes in that shit. The least you could do is be honest with her.” The girl’s voice was pure Coney Island.

“Dry up,” Florrie said. “You smell like fish. What the fuck do you know?”

“What business is it of yours?” I said.

“It’s not,” she said. She made her voice go singsong. “We use coins. Very accurate! We see far into future! We give you true love’s middle name!” Then she smiled infuriatingly at me. “The trick is to keep them coming back, right?”

If You Find This, Take It: It Was Meant for You-Chapter 4 (con'd)

CHAPTER 4

(iii)

Papa had been a brilliant scholar. He knew the Talmud backwards and forwards. He could write with both hands. He’d danced like a tsadik, like a whirling dervish. Gravity took a vacation when Papa danced. If only G-d had had a face, G-d would have smiled at the graceful arc of Papa’s arms, at the nimbleness and dexterity of Papa’s feet.

But Papa was not happy as a member of the Vizhnitz.

In secret, he read Hebrew newspapers from Russia. He joined the Hechalutz under an assumed name, became active in the leadership of the Zionist Society. He never liked my mother much but married her anyway: Her dowry would pay his expenses at the yeshiva in Budapest, the sparkling metropolis newly formed from the union of two ancient cities on opposite sides of the Danube, Buda and Pest. Budapest was a sufficient distance from Vizhnitsa so that it was possible—he hoped it was very possible—his two lives might never intersect.

My father was handsome in his wedding photo with a beautiful head of wavy hair, enormous dark eyes, chiseled cheek bones. Chopin miraculously cured of consumption! He towered over my mother in whose pathetically hopeful face one could sense the beginnings of the scowl that would become her one defining characteristic in adult life.

At the Yeshiva, the meanings of the texts the students studied were completely different from the meanings of the words that comprised them. The texts were injunctions; the words were spells: By transposing their initial letters into new words, by computing the numerological value of these new words, you could slowly begin to make your way in the darkness; you could see the darkness was really a canopy under which trillions and trillions of stars continuously coalesced into the face of G-d.

But this exercise in the duality of meaning became increasingly distasteful to my father who was becoming frustrated with the duality of his own life.

He began absenting himself from classes. He wrapped his payot around his ears. He bought a homburg, telling himself that should he happen to run into G-d in the dark little alley outside the Pest café where, more and more often, he spent the hours he should have spent in class, the Master of the World and All Things In It might easily mistake the hat for the Vishnitzer stovepipe my father had worn since the day of his bar mitzvah.

He took lodgings in a room above the café.

One day, he bought a razor and shaved off his beard and payot.

After that, he didn’t go back to the yeshiva.

Pest’s boulevards were named for Catholic saints, though its taverns, gambling dens, and whorehouses did their best to discourage saintly behavior. My father took up the less scandalous café life on Vörösmarty tér where he sipped Romanian tzuika, played chess, dabbled in writing poetry, and ignored the increasingly irate letters from the Vizhnitsa rebbe who wrote on his wife’s family’s behalf. I think my father had some vague notion that when my mother’s dowry ran out, he would support himself as a novelist. He admired Robert Louis Stevenson whom he’d read in French translation.

I’m not sure he ever wondered how my mother and the four children he’d dutifully sired upon her on his annual trips back home to Vizhnitsa would support themselves.

One afternoon, my father won 50 florins playing Tarok with an Austrian lieutenant. The lieutenant had no money on him; my father took his note.

That night, the daughter of the café owner pounded on my father’s bedroom door. She’d overheard the Austrian lieutenant talking: “Why, I’d set fire to that money before I’d give a thaler to that filthy zsidó swine.”

They’d be coming in the morning to conscript him.

My father fled back to Vizhnitsa. My mother’s family scraped together money to smuggle us all the way to Bremen and then to New York. I was only four years old, but I still remember the trip on that steamer, the endless glaze of the great grey sea.

In America, my father became a presser because it required no English. He spoke Jiddish, French, German, Hungarian, a smattering of Romanian, but these were not the languages they spoke in America, and English was a hard language to learn. He was a gentle man who bore no bitterness toward the destiny that had so cruelly disappointed him. He tried to keep out of my mother’s way as much as possible and when my brother Sammy turned 13, it was understood that Sammy was now the head of the family.

My father was the only person I told when I planned to move from my family’s apartment. Let my mother think she had kicked me out.

“What will you do?” my father asked.

“I’ll manage.”

“Manage, bubelah. What does that mean?”

“It means don’t ask me questions if you know you won’t like the answers,” I said.

“It will break your mother’s heart.”

“You think she has a heart? Oh, I know there’s a lump of meat contracting somewhere in her chest. You’d need a hatchet to put a dent in it.”

“Your mother has not had the easiest life,” my father said. “She looks at you, but maybe she doesn’t see you. Maybe she sees something else.”

“Fuck her,” I said in English.

My father frowned. “’Fuck’? That means what?”

“It means that something is of no importance.”

“Ah!” said my father. He took out the little notebook and pencil stub he always carried in his breast pocket to write down interesting English words. “And you spell it how?”

“That’s of no importance, either,” I said.

We were walking in the Botanical Gardens. The sun was out. The cherry trees were in bloom. Just beyond them, the classical façade of the Brooklyn Museum loomed. We could have been in Paris.

The branches of the cherry trees formed a pink canopy. People were everywhere. Sitting on the lawns, strolling along the dirt paths, sharing picnics on the benches. People. Everywhere. Their voices had an echoing quality; snippets of conversation that floated and disappeared like dandelion puffs on a child’s breath.

“I don’t want to be a Jew, Papa,” I said.

He threw back his head and laughed soundlessly. “Who wants to be a Jew? Better you should be the Tsar of Russia.”

This was my father’s way. He made gentle, foolish jokes that nobody laughed at. His eyes were sunken as an elephant’s; his ears were long and pendulous; he stooped now when he walked. What was left of Chopin’s curls sprouted round the shiny dome of his skull like a Christian monk’s tonsure.

He looked at me then with his sweet, slow smile. “You know what’s the miracle, Iulia? Each and every person in this garden has an inner life that’s every bit as compelling and every bit as involving as your own. Think about that for a moment.”

But I had more exciting things to think about.

And that was the last time I would ever see him.

Though I didn’t know it then.

If You See This, Take It: It Was Meant for You-Chapter 4 (con'd)

Chapter 4

(ii)

My brother Sammy got alarmed. My new antipathy toward Henry Miller threated to have a negative impact on his income. He actually agreed to eat something the next time we met at the automat on Third Avenue.

He stuck a spoon in a bowl of creamed spinach. Swallowed.

“Not bad,” he conceded. “But it looks like something dead puked it.”

“Creamed spinach was on the Titanic’s menu!” I told him.

“I’ll bet it was. So this… misunderstanding…”

I smiled politely.

“You know, he has really nice handwriting. Like he’s, uh, sensitive—“

“What’s going on at home, Sammy? How’s Papa?”

“Gussie’s getting married.”

Gussie! Married!

My sister Augusta had always been my mother’s favorite. Far more beautiful than me. Tall. Light-skinned, thin-lipped, thin-hipped. Her hazel eyes had a greyish tinge; in some lights, they even looked blue. A shiksa—that’s what she looked like—a shiksa who followed tzniut. In all the years we’d shared a bed, I’d hardly ever glimpsed her ankles and never once seen her naked, not even in the mikveh where we went monthly to cleanse ourselves when our wretched female bodies purged themselves of the clots and blood that was our legacy from the temptress Eve, or so our mother informed us.

I’d been my father’s favorite. When Sammy—Sigmund as he was then—baulked at learning to play the games my father used to play in his Pest cafés, my father taught them to me. Chess. Whist. Rummy. Tarok . You needed a special deck of cards to play Tarok, and you could use those cards to predict the future.

My father had grown up in Vizhnitsa, a town with names in many languages: Wiznitz, Wischnitza, Vijnița. I remembered Vizhnitsa as clearly as if I’d grown up there myself although, of course, I couldn’t possibly remember it; it was only that my father’s stories lodged in the same part of my brain that held my own memories. I remembered the formidable stone buildings in the town’s ringplatz where the Jews shopped for Shabbat; I remembered the shul with its oddly baroque circular windows and the strange stone ornaments creeping round its lone tower.

I remembered the stories my father told me when I was young and could not sleep, and he sat beside my cot, stroking my hair—

The forest near Międzybórz sprouted from the same oak that had once branched off to create the heavens, the seas, and all living things. Magic was slow to die there. And so it was that once upon a time, a simple fellow named Israel ben Eliezer met the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite while foraging for mushrooms.

Behold! the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite told Israel ben Eliezer. The children of Israel beyond the River shall never be free until they learn the occult sympathies that resonate through the Torah. And you shall be the One to guide them. And I shall give you my Mark.

The mark of Ahijah the Shilonite was the power to heal and the power to make worldly things vanish.

A dead child lay in the cottage of the candle maker Yitzhak ben Shelomah. Israel ben Eliezer put his hands on him, and the dead child lived.

The daughter of Moishe ben Raysel was covered with weeping pox. Israel ben Eliezer whispered in her ear, and the pox disappeared.

The Cossacks came to the village, and the villagers ignored them even as the Cossacks slit the villagers’ throats.

Israel ben Eliezer was the Baal Shem Tov, but that name was too holy to utter, so he became the BESHT.

And when he died, he went back into the forest to commune once again with Ahijah the Shilonite. When the living men sought the BESHT in these woods, the BESHT spoke to them of the d’vekut, which is the only true faith of those who are chosen.

And so, there grew a schism between those who knew for what they had been chosen and those who knew they had been chosen but did not know what for…

“Shoes,” Sammy was telling me. “The Rosens are in shoes. They’re very, very rich. Mendel is their only son. They don’t want him to marry her, but he saw her outside shul on the High Holidays, and he told them she was his bashaerte. If he couldn’t marry her, he wouldn’t marry anyone. No grandchildren! He’d study Torah and live alone. So—“ Sammy shrugged.

“She’s very beautiful,” I said. And wondered why I’d forced myself to say that.

Sammy snorted. He pushed the stack of translucent envelopes closer to me. “Anyway, here. I’m still snagging them before Ma sees them. That’s gotta be worth something.”

“Burn them,” I said.

“You burn them,” said Sammy. “And if you don’t want me to read them to Ma, my time is worth something.”

I argued with him for old time’s sake but my heart wasn’t in it. He must have seen that because he choked down the rest of the creamed spinach as a conciliatory gesture and patted my arm clumsily when he rose to go.

“Sammy,” I begged him. “How’s Papa? How’s Papa?”

“Papa?” said Sammy. And he spat on the floor of the automat.

If You Find This, Take It: It Was Meant for You

CHAPTER 4

(i)

Three weeks went by. And then another three.

Henry Miller wrote letters. Lots and lots of letters. And paid visits to the Orpheum Dance Palace almost nightly till Nestor stopped letting him in.

Getting Nestor to bar him took considerable persuasion on my part, Cigarettes. Cash. Sexual favors. Practically almost nobody else was coming to the Orpheum that long hot summer in 1923.

August and September were always the hottest months of the New York summer, but that year, the heat was in a category all by itself. The air was a strangler you tried to fight off; if you breathed in too deeply, you’d feel it clutching your throat. Tar oozed and bubbled on streets that stank like 14th century Venice at the height of a bubonic plague outbreak.

How could the Orpheum compete with Coney Island where cool ocean breezes blew and a sailor could lure a girl under the boardwalk for the price of an ice cream cone? Why would you want to shuffle sweatily round a buckling floor with a jaded pro when for the same price, you could ride the Magic Bullet or wheedle a hand job from a fresh-faced lass—the reek of Poughkeepsie still upon her—in the Wonder Wheel, a hundred and fifty feet above the dark, eternal ocean?

I opened Henry Miller’s letters in case they had money in them. Sometimes, they did. Mostly, they didn’t.

June, June, the girl in the tune, Henry Miller wrote:

Hey! It’s not my love letter. Even if it looks like my handwriting.

It’s a mash note Anthony is writing to Cleopatra.

It’s a billet doux Napoleon is dictating to Josephine. (Don’t wash.)

It’s a poem Keats is composing from his fever bed to La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Do you believe in the conservation of matter? Well, you should because it is this principle and this principle alone that turned metaphysics into physics, and physics is the set of spells that guides all matter through its adventures in time and space.

I personally take great comfort in the conservation of matter. In knowing nothing ever really disappears. That we’re never gone merely altered. Decay is evolution. When I die, when I turn to worm food, I will remember squiggling in the rich dark earth. When the worm I once was is eaten by the bird I once became, I will remember flight, what it feels like to spread weightless wings and battle with wind currents that want to blow me to Greenland.

I love you so helplessly, and you no longer want me as a lover. But I still know what it feels like to be so deep inside you that there was no way to separate what I was feeling from what you were feeling, no way that the mingled scents of our bodies could separate out into two distinct scents. They never will, June. I will always smell like you. You will always smell like me.

June, I’m sorry you were loved by a liar.

What the hell was he talking about?

Once Nestor banned Henry Miller from the Orpheum proper, he’d stand on the corner across the street. He’d stand there for hours, the other girls told me. Staring. Smoking and staring.

I practiced invisibility so that when I slipped in and out of the dance hall, he wouldn’t see me. It’s an odd thing to make yourself invisible. Once you have the habit, it’s hard to lose. When I made it so that Henry Miller stopped seeing me, nobody else saw me, either. I stopped seeing myself.

The Mirror and the Light

Hilary Mantel has finished the third book in her Cromwell trilogy!

Be still, my beating heart!

It’s called The Mirror and the Light. It’s due to hit shelves March 10.

There are already 10 holds on it at the local library, so I suppose I’m going to have to buy it. In hardcover. (Fastidious shudder.)

###

Else? It was a very sunny day, but a very cold day. Temps never rose above 25°.

I scribbled away on the Work in Progress. Chapter 6 is not easy. It’s 1925, and June is running a speakeasy out of the basement at 106 Perry Street in the West Village. Hi jinx ensue. I suppose it’s a little bit like me and Ben and the hot sauce store because Henry later takes credit for the speakeasy, as described in Plexus, the third volume of The Rosy Crucifixion.

The work was solid. I’ve sort of realized when I’m writing plot, I can’t pay much attention to style; I just have to dash off whatever is in my head. At the end of a block of plot, I go over what I’ve written like a street-sweeper, tidying up the commas and the dangling modifiers.

I also did some remunerative work.

Then I got a hankering for Indian food and decided to make chicken masala, which calls for using a garam masala rub and marinating the chicken in plain yogurt.

Guess what?

The local Shop and Drop does not carry plain yogurt.

I was appalled!

###

I haven’t posted anything from the Work in Progress in ages. Here’s Chapter 4.