End of the Jews Page 12

  Three flights up, the super unlocks the door. “There’s no kitchen, you know,” he says as he leads Tristan inside. “That’s why it’s advertised so cheap.”

  There is nothing in the place save a naked mattress lying on a boxspring, a telephone parked on a desk, and one chair. The emptiness cues in Tristan a great flush of happiness. Half the objects in the universe are crammed into his parents’ home: bolts of fabric and mounds of cutlery and stacks of magazines, all so permanent, his mother cleans by dusting them.

  He saunters around the two large, airy rooms. Light slopes in through a floor-to-ceiling window in the front, and the shadow of the fire escape pulses darker and fainter against the floor as clouds move across the sun.

  Two hours later, Tristan is in his suit and out the door, feeling as sharp of wits and dress as ever he has. The shul grants manhood at thirteen, the street upon the authentic or well-fabricated loss of virginity. Those milestones lie well behind him, thanks to a long-forgotten haftarah portion and the feminine wiles of Leah Krasner, but only now is Tristan certain that he is no longer a boy, and that he hasn’t been for years.

  He stands at the windswept corner of Seventy-first and Madison, reaches into his pocket and closes his fist around the gold pen he received at his bar mitzvah—a durable instrument, its elegance uncompromised by either the years of Hebrew school he had to suffer through to get it or the fact that everyone else got one, too. He’d bet the pen in a craps game with Sammy Fischer an hour after the ceremony, won, and made Fischer beg for a week before allowing him to buy his own pen back.

  “You look like the cat who swallowed the canary, kid.” Tristan turns, to find a grinning Loren Leonard, hand jutting at a right angle to his body. Tristan shakes it, smiling into the editor’s hypnotic, flecked-gray eyes. Their precise shade is echoed in his suit and hat, and it is one of many to be found in the spectrum of the editor’s thick mustache. Loren is a creature of deceptive age. Tristan guessed that he was fortyish and prematurely bald, but Pendergast corrected him by twenty years, adding that during the considerable span of their acquaintance, Loren had hardly aged a day.

  “I feel like him,” Tristan says as they walk east, toward the party.

  “Well, you sure as shit should.” The editor is a small man, spry and keen, possessed of a deeply embedded dignity. Tristan has not yet been able to determine whether his constant vulgarity has been calibrated to counterweight that dignity or emphasize its fixity. To be colorful is a common appetite among these Mayflower types. They are so accustomed to fitting in that now they seek to stand out, and thus they strive for a bit of coarseness, act the way they guess the lower classes might. The lower classes, meanwhile, are busy trying to behave as if they’d shared a stateroom with these schlemiels on the way over from merry old England.

  “Now listen,” Loren goes on, “I want you to think of tonight as part of your job. At this moment, you’re a writer, and a hell of a fucking talent. But we’ve got to make you into an author. Get you schmoozing, know what I mean?” Tristan nods, wondering whether Loren only trots out the Yiddish when he’s speaking to a Son of Zion.

  They cross onto Fifth Ave., walk south beneath awnings that cover the entire breadth of the sidewalk. Jacob once had a line on a doorman job down here. His accent ruined his prospects.

  “A lot of my authors, they’ve got their heads up their asses about this shit. They think the artiste is just supposed to sit in his study, sniffing the mildew wafting from his leather-bound editions of Milton and Shelley and dipping the pen in the fucking inkwell. If that was how it worked, I’d be a crap-happy bastard, Tristan. I’d be at home poring over Shelley right now myself. But publishing is a business like any other, and if you want to get a leg up, you have to learn to play the goddamn game.”

  “I’m all ears,” says Tristan, thinking that these writers unwilling to engage the literary world must be incredible pricks, or wealthy enough not to care, or else they’ve figured out a way to write that’s far healthier and less consuming than his. He imagines them puffing on their pipes as the words fill the pages, tousling the hair of the kids underfoot as they pour themselves a late-afternoon brandy, nestling against the bed-warm bodies of their wives and sighing in contentment as they drift easily to sleep.

  “Good man. Now, first things first: can you hold your liquor?”

  “I can hold it in my hand.”

  Loren nods. “Right. Do that, then. Midget sips. Build the tolerance. Nothing worse than a soused writer. Second: when you go to a party with me, assume that I am singing your praises to everyone who matters. You don’t strike me as a braggart, but I’ll tell you anyway: don’t walk in the fucking place and start yammering about yourself. Wait for me to work the room. Pretend not to notice if people glance over at you. When they sidle up and start asking questions, act surprised but be prepared to charm the piss out of them.

  “You have to understand, these people have the highest respect for literature, and high enough opinions of themselves that they expect to be presented with writers on a regular basis. Nothing makes a man who’s earned his fortune in, say, coal feel grander than chewing the fat with an honest-to-shit writer. These fellows think like investors—they want to get in on the ground floor. They love to feel that they’re playing some role in your success. And they are. They’ll buy your book the day it hits the shelves, then call me up begging to throw a publication party.”

  “They actually read, then?”

  “Some of them. The women more so than the men. They have more time for it.” Loren stops before a corner high rise, and Tristan throws his head back and stares up at it—rather pointlessly, he thinks, and stops. “The host and hostess are Maurice and Natalie Farber. He’s in textiles, import-export, real estate. That sort of thing. Also philanthropy. She’s very active in it, too. Exceedingly smart lady.”

  “They’re Jewish.”

  “Yes, of course. You’re not anti-Semitic, are you?”

  “I—”

  “Look. The publishers don’t realize it yet, but these high-society Jews are the new tastemakers. And they’re going to love you, Tristan, because you’re telling them what’s going on back in the old neighborhood. You know why Angel is beautiful? Because it’s dick-in-the-dirt honest. These people don’t know it yet, but they want that.”

  As the arrow above the elevator door sweeps from L to PH, Tristan wonders if they do—these people, or anybody else. The Angel of the Shtetl is populated with dressmakers, cockroaches, petty thugs, butchers, crapshooters. Talmudic scholars whose immigrant families are starving because learning is the greatest thing in life and they refuse to sideline the pursuit of knowledge and find work. Tristan has written of the shapeless dresses and mild charms of their homely, aspiring daughters and the pinched mouths of their bitter wives, about the way their timid sons push their spectacles up the bridges of their sweaty noses and doggedly pursue elusive New World manhood. Narrating the tale, and meddling ineffectively in the lives of its characters, is a haggard, pork chop–obsessed angel named Lew, the least-favored emissary of an overworked, bureaucratic God saddled with unmanageable debt and alternately furious and resigned about having chosen the Jews, of all the world’s people, to be His.

  What does writing such a book make Tristan? An author seems suddenly a naïve answer, an evasion, but he cannot allow the mantle of Jewish Writer to be draped over his shoulders. Whether it is brave or cowardly or impossible to refuse to let heritage and ideology define and obscure him like a Halloween mask while the Jews of Europe are being herded into ghettos, stripped of rights, Tristan does not know. But he can’t let his life be one long run through the gauntlet of the City College cafeteria, lined on all sides with competing factions slamming their fists against tabletops and shouting for allegiance. The world is the Bronx, and the Bronx is the world. They can’t banish him back to his parents’ apartment for insisting he speaks for no one, claiming the right to tell the stories that compel him and to be compelled by anything at all. Can they
?

  The lift’s doors do not open onto a hallway, unlike those of every other Tristan has ever ridden. Instead, they slide away to reveal the Farbers’ living room—an enormous hexagon, cathedral-ceilinged, full of rising smoke and voices. Everyone has turned, mid-conversation, to witness the latest arrivals, and Tristan is pleased to see more than a few faces register recognition at the sight of his editor. The young writer falls into step behind him, smiling in a general kind of way as he moves through the crowded room toward the statuesque dark-haired woman speaking Loren’s name.

  In one gloved hand, she holds a highball glass. In the other, a cigarette smolders at the end of a long holder. She bends toward Loren at the waist, presenting her cheek and, perhaps advertently, cleavage Tristan suspects he will reconsider later.

  “Inconceivably delighted to see you, Mr. Leonard.” She cuts her eyes, looks left and right, and drops her voice. “Wall-to-wall bores here tonight, Loren.” She leans past him, flashes her eyes at Tristan. “And good evening to you, Mr. Brodsky.” She consolidates her accessories in her left hand and extends her right. “Natalie Farber. Very charmed to meet you, and mazel tov.” Her handshake is firmer, more authoritative, than that of any woman he has ever met. “I look forward to reading your book—books, I suppose I should say.”

  Tristan affects a slight bow. “Thank you.” The noise of the room swells, and he raises his voice. “You have a lovely home.”

  Natalie glances toward the elevator, then back at Tristan. “Much lovelier without so many businessmen in it.”

  Tristan opens his mouth, decides discretion should be his watchword, and closes it. Then he changes his mind.

  “But isn’t this your party, Mrs. Farber? And isn’t your husband a businessman?” He feels Loren’s eyes boring into the side of his head, imagines the editor making a quick stop back at the office to set his book contract on fire.

  Natalie laughs; Tristan expels a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Yes on both counts. How do you think I know?” She draws on her cigarette. “One at a time is acceptable, but en masse they tend to drag a soiree down. Obligations, Mr. Brodsky, obligations. You’re not related to the attorney Brodsky, are you?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m afraid not.”

  “Good for you. Most tiresome man in New York State.” Her eyes flick over to the elevator once again. “I’ll spare you the tedium of explaining what your novels are about, as I must now welcome to my home the second most tiresome man in New York State. However.” And with that she sails away, a proud boat cutting through a jittery ocean. Tristan stares after her, wondering whether the various elements of Natalie’s hostessing repertoire—the mock boredom, the cutting wit, the nonstop motion, the odd farewell—are standard to these circles, or if she’s as strange and intriguing a creature as he’d like to think.

  Loren claps his hands. “Drinks. Scotch, I presume? All us literary cunts drink scotch, don’t we?” And he, too, walks off, making it a mere five feet before he stops to pump the hand of a portly fellow cupping a napkin full of hors d’oeuvres to his vest. The bar is on the far side of the room, a long, low table manned by two servers dressed in white. At his current rate of progress, it will take Loren twenty minutes to make it there and back.

  Tristan is relieved to be on his own for a spell, content to wander and overhear, pluck toothpicked delicacies from the silver trays of passing waiters and taxonomize this much-mythologized and seldom-seen species of Jew. This room is full of the men in whom the Bronx glories—and whom the Bronx monitors from afar, waiting to curse them with that awed and bitter-tongued refrain: he acts like he isn’t even Jewish.

  Of course, not everyone here is Jewish, and this free mingling, this blurring of distinctions, is worth considering. Do tonight’s Gentiles simply enjoy the succulence of Natalie Farber’s spread, or do they note that nothing being served contains a drop of dairy? If so, do they find the fact extraordinary, mundane, charming, or absurd? Tomorrow night, when half these people turn up at a party down the block thrown by some Episcopal business associate of Mr. Farber, will the goyim watch to see whether their Semitic friends consent to sample a shrimp cocktail, or an oyster wrapped in bacon? Will they widen their eyes as the trays of verboten appetizers are presented to the Chosen People, thinking take it, take it, act like you aren’t even Jewish?

  “I haven’t seen you before,” says a voice at Tristan’s side. He turns and looks into the placid face of an exceptionally pretty girl, about fifteen.

  She sips from a glass of wine. “Do you speak French?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he says, attempting a Lester-Young-by-way-of-Pendergast smile, detached and knowing and flirtatious all at once. “Is that requisite around here?”

  “I was going to tell you a joke, but it’s only funny if you speak French.”

  “I could laugh anyway.”

  “It’s very kind of you to offer.” Her eyebrows are arched and thin, and her eyes, a mottled hazel like his brother’s, radiate an intelligence all the more daunting for its lack of attitude. Her brains are not something that has caused this girl pain, not something she’s ever had to hide or defend. Or so it appears. “Do you play chess?”

  “Never learned that, either,” Tristan says, beginning to feel his dander rise. “Do you play craps?”

  Her smile is broad and closed. Something in her eyes says she knows he is fucking with her, and likes it. “Is it a card game?”

  “I’ll take that as a no. How about stickball?”

  “I’ve seen it played.”

  “Really. I didn’t know it had taken hold in this neighborhood.”

  “No, not here. I do leave the Upper East Side now and then.”

  “Whatever for?” asks Tristan, pocketing his hands.

  “Stimulation. And may I ask your name?”

  “I’m sorry. Tristan Brodsky.”

  She scrutinizes him. “The lawyer? I thought you’d be much older.”

  “No, that’s a different Brodsky. I’m a writer.”

  The girl’s face comes alive, and Tristan realizes how little attention she’s been paying to the conversation until now. “You don’t say. So am I. I knew you looked interesting. What sort of things do you write?”

  “Novels.” He gives his hand. “And may I ask yours?”

  “I’m sorry, I assumed you knew. Amalia Farber.”

  “You have your mother’s handshake, Miss Farber.” He seizes upon the momentary diversion of a passing waiter to look her up and down and thinks her tits, too.

  “How many books have you had, Mr. Brodsky?”

  “I’ve just sold my first two. What about yourself?”

  “I’m a poet. But I’ve just begun. No books yet.”

  Tristan smiles. Of course this girl assumes she’ll publish books. Her parents, or her nannies, have no doubt raised her to believe she will be anything she wants. Hell, she could be nothing, and what would it matter?

  “I’d love to hear something. Can you recite your work?”

  “I can, but I won’t. It’s not a parlor trick. If you’ll leave me your address, perhaps I’ll mail you one. I’d like to have a real professional’s opinion. The teachers at school are occupied with building our confidence; they claim that everything I write is marvelous.”

  “You don’t believe them?”

  Amalia eyes him over the top of her glass. “Of course not. How could I be any good after only a year?”

  “Some people are naturals.”

  “Did you write anything decent in your first year?”

  “Sometimes I think it’s all been downhill since. I’m not saying I’d want to see any of it published. But I was full of energy then, convinced that everything I wrote was utterly original. That fades as you go on, unfortunately, to be replaced by a more—” Tristan stops, shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I sound like a pompous ass, don’t I? I haven’t quite figured out yet how an author is supposed to talk.”

  “I thought you were doing fine. The phrase ‘pompous a
ss’ hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  “You’re very generous.”

  Amalia cocks her head to one side. She seems to be deciding what to make of him. Tristan wonders if she does this at every party: find the one person who doesn’t belong and monopolize him. He watches her watch him, trying to pinpoint what it is about this girl that makes her so attractive. It has less to do with looks or charm than with the absence of the striving desperation that sits like a weight in most people he knows, tethering them to the ground. It gives her a lightness, a purity, which he wants both to bask in and destroy.

  “You look like you work too hard,” she says at last. “Authors are supposed to have an air of leisure about them, don’t you think?”

  “Interesting that you should say so. Where I come from, writing is hardly considered work at all.”

  “Oh, I think it’s very hard work. Without question, the hardest I’ve ever done.”

  “But not as hard, say, as pushing a cart down the street for twelve hours a day. Or loading cargo onto ocean liners.”

  “Have you done such things?”

  “No,” Tristan admits. “I’ve only written. But if I fail, it’s what I’m bound for. How about you, Miss Farber? What are you bound for, if poetry doesn’t work out?”

  “I’ll have to give it some thought,” she says, and turns slightly away. They stare into the ever-growing crowd. Tristan curses himself and wills her to resuscitate the conversation, chagrined that he is looking to this girl to take the lead.

  “I’ll be happy if I’m a true poet by sixty” is what she comes up with. Her voice is petulant, as if Amalia expects to be mocked.

  “Sixty? You’d be content with mediocrity for the next forty-five years?”

  “The next forty-two and a half, thank you. By sixty, I’d like to think I’ll have something to say. I will have lived.” Her forehead crinkles. “Do I really look fifteen?”

  Tristan rubs a glint of perspiration from the side of his nose. “Let me ask you something. Do you consider yourself a Jewish poet, or just a poet?”