End of the Jews Page 20

  “I’m sorry,” she says the second they’re alone, tires crunching over the gravel of the Pendergasts’ circular drive and quieting as they hit fresh asphalt. “It was a dumb thing to say. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  He says nothing.

  “Talk to me, Tristan.”

  He folds his arms.

  “Come on. It’s that bad?”

  He grunts. Caveman for yes, Amalia supposes.

  “Why? At least tell me why.”

  He purses his lips, and at first she thinks he’s figuring out how to explain. But one minute becomes two, five, ten, and Amalia settles into Tristan’s refusal, her own guilt. I have driven him to silence, she thinks. An hour passes. Linda cries, and Amalia pulls off the road and nurses her in the parking lot of a diner.

  “I need a cup of coffee,” she tells Tristan. He follows her inside, slides into the booth across from her. She sits and sips, hands tight around the warm white cup, and watches her husband consume a wedge of cherry pie in four huge forkfuls.

  Amalia speeds for the last eighty miles, ratchets the engine into a frenzy it has never seen: worth the risk if it gets her out of this car ten minutes sooner. Even getting pulled over doesn’t sound so bad. At least the cop would talk to her, explain what she’d done wrong.

  They make it home by dark, and Tristan walks straight to his office. Amalia bathes the baby, puts her down for the night, and curls up in bed, exhausted. She goes to sleep alone, and stirs at three in the morning, when Tristan slips beneath the covers. He doesn’t press his body against hers, doesn’t touch her at all, but Amalia takes his presence as a sign that the argument is over. Argument. It’s the wrong word, but she can’t think of the right one. She falls back asleep, and when she wakes up to feed Linda, her husband is gone. She wanders the upstairs in her bathrobe, cradling her daughter to her tit, pushes open the door of the guest room with her bare foot and finds Tristan sprawled out on the unmade bed, swaddled in a quilt her mother gave them.

  He avoids her all the next day, and that night, and by Friday, Amalia is a wreck, dull pain behind her eyes, too drained to do what she wants to, which is scream at him, tell him to knock it off and act like an adult. He wouldn’t even hear her. Tristan’s anger is glacier-solid, and he’s trapped inside.

  No, that’s not right; she’s the one trapped. When the telephone rings, she hears him laugh and exclaim into it, talk loud and long. Tristan is typing away as usual up there. He’s not dwelling on what happened, incapacitated by the betrayal committed against him. He’s punishing her. On Saturday, she calls her baby-sitter, a college girl whose twice-weekly visits guarantee she gets some writing time, and gives her the week off. Amalia can’t even think straight, much less work.

  The next morning, a wave of revulsion hits her when she gives Linda her breast, and Amalia has to avert her eyes. It’s as if her daughter is sucking the life out of her, here in the featureless blank-walled nursery, the chill gray dawn, and all Amalia wants to do is run—hand her daughter to someone, anyone, drag herself to her feet and sprint out to her car and drive into some ancient, simmering forest where no one will ever find her. Carve her poems into tree trunks with a sharp rock. Buy a mammoth house on four acres of land and invite every female poet and painter and sculptor and dancer around to come and live and thrive.

  But she cannot run. Look at her body, at the grotesque proportions to which it has swollen in order to strip her of options. She cups one heavy, hard breast, weighs it in her hand. She is full of food, and who is feeding her?

  Amalia yanks the nipple from her daughter’s mouth and lays Linda, squirming, across her knees. She bends low over her own breast and forces the stiff, spit-slick nipple between her lips.

  Amalia’s cheeks go concave and she suckles, terrified that she will look up and see Tristan’s backlit silhouette at the threshold, though he has never awakened to keep her company before. The milk is thin, sweet, nauseating. Amalia shuts her eyes, and for a tiny moment, the space of one breath, self-disgust and guilt lift away and she feels a drowsy kind of comfort, as if she is both mother and child. Then Linda wails, and the nipple slips from Amalia’s mouth and her own wrongness stares her in the face.

  That afternoon, while the baby naps and Tristan is away somewhere, Amalia cloisters herself in her study and her pain finds form, becomes a poem. The sun has set by the time she rips the sheet from the typewriter. It is the best thing she’s written in months. She holds the poem in trembling hands, reads it again, and then Amalia opens the deepest drawer of her desk and drops the page inside. It settles at the bottom and she stares down at it, feeling as if she has just zipped a kitten in a duffel bag and thrown it in a lake.

  But no—she’s shot a lion, a man-eater. The poem maps a terrain too intimate, too ugly. Regardless of what he’s done to her, Amalia will not hurt and embarrass her husband by displaying her wounds to the world, even the minuscule, faithful world of her readers. A premonition hits her: this drawer filled with poems, a mass grave. She reaches down to rescue the paper—what good is a poet who is afraid to share her pain?—then stops herself, straightens, closes the drawer.

  Two days later, Tristan saunters into the kitchen as Amalia is heating a jar of strained peas for Linda’s lunch, the era of solids foods now under way.

  He sits down at the table, crosses his legs, and tickles the child beneath her chin until she giggles.

  “I’ve had a call from my brother.”

  Amalia turns, fearing the worst: Benjamin has cancer; his wife, Dora, has learned she can’t bear children; Jacob or Rachael is dead. “Yes?” she gets out, swallowing hard.

  “He told me a rather good joke.” Tristan launches into it.

  Amalia dries her hands on a towel, leans against the stove, and listens. When the punch line comes, she emits peals of laughter, absurd volumes of the stuff, then asks what else Ben said, how Dora’s doing. And just like that, they’re having a conversation, discussing a trip to Brooklyn to see Ben and Dora, and Amalia is so relieved that she accepts it, this casual resumption of normality. She does not ask Tristan what she’s done to deserve his forgiveness, or what he’s been thinking about up there in his annexed guest room every night, or point out that not only has he ignored her for a week but he has barely interacted with his daughter, either. She does not tell him that he’s dragged her through hell and it needs fixing, real fixing, not a joke about two Jewish beggars in Vatican City.

  Now it’s too late. Tristan is on his way back upstairs, cupping a handful of mixed nuts for the journey, and she’s agreed that they’ll hire a sitter, go out to dinner, eat somewhere nice. Perhaps that’s his apology? Is this the next step, to convince herself, stretch what she has until it looks like what she needs? Already, Amalia knows she won’t rend the peace at dinner, either—insist over her wineglass that they talk the whole thing through, or make him swear never to treat her this way again.

  That night in bed, Amalia will lie on her side, Tristan’s palm heavy on her thigh and his breath slow in her ear, and wonder, What have I let him get away with? She will squint in the darkness, trying to recognize herself, then give it up, close her eyes, and get her first decent night’s sleep in a week.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Check the appropriate box. How easy they make it sound. Nina has been staring at the page for twenty minutes now, hunched over a desk in a hotel in Saratoga, playing sick while the band performs and Marcus shoots alone. It is 1997; Nina is twenty-six and desperate, and college is the most plausible escape she can conceive. She’s learned something about herself in the last year: she’s not as strong as she once thought. Or, more accurately, she’s not as strong as Marcus. If she were, they wouldn’t still be sleeping together.

  Nina tries to end it as often as Marcus once tried to get it going, and just as weakly. The standard scenario, most recently played out a month ago in Portland, goes like this: the postshow hang in Pipe Man’s room breaks up around two in the morning, and Marcus tiptoes down th
e hall to hers like a smug bandit, probably humming the Pink Panther theme song to himself. He knocks, and Nina, already asleep, hauls herself out of bed, cracks the portal, squints at him.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she says, leaning into the door as if afraid he’ll try to push his way inside. She ought to have the sentence printed on a goddamn T-shirt.

  Marcus sighs, infinitely patient and impatient. “Nina…” is all he says. She relents and admits him, as if her name is a password, telling herself that it’s better to argue in private. They are still a secret, after all, if only a pretend one.

  She shuts the door, already feeling like a hypocrite because she’s mouthed her shallow protests so many times before. Occasionally, they’ve led to her sleeping alone, for a night or two. A whole tour, once.

  “I need to move on with my life,” she tells him.

  Marcus has mastered the craft of pretending to be as emotionally bound to Nina as she is to him, and so he says, “You’re all I know, baby.”

  Marcus is fifty-six and married, but what he means, and what she hears, is I’m all you know, baby. Which is correct.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he goes on, forcing Nina to consider just how terrifying the prospect of navigating the world alone has become. “We know each other so well….”

  If she hasn’t folded by now, Marcus’s sudden hug will do it. She’ll feel herself enveloped by a comforting frankincense-tinged masculinity, and her breathing will slow as if she has been drugged. The childlike intensity of Marcus’s embrace will be a final illustration of her feelings, a last reminder of her weakness.

  Marcus understands the kind of care she craves too well, and he metes it out cunningly. Nina’s on a subsistence diet, and even worse, she’s used to it. Trained. She knows to slip out of the room when Marcus’s wife calls, lest Nina hear something she can’t handle, like Marcus telling Carol that he loves her.

  Nina’s threats have become tactical. She throws tantrums to cue Marcus’s five-days-of-sweetness routine, and they pretend they’ve turned some corner and the sun is shining and everything is real and honest and out in the open. Gradually, it fades, and Nina resumes cataloging her discontents, building up strength, scorning her own pathetic, forlorn, damn-near-unrecognizable self. Her first relationship has not just shredded her identity, it has confirmed her worst fear. Make yourself vulnerable, and you are fucked.

  Thus, come September, Nina will retire from road life and reinvent herself as a college student. Applications to Columbia, NYU, Hunter, and the City College of New York are spread before her, and four copies of a recommendation from Devon are already en route to the admissions offices. After enormous wrangling, by Rayna and Devon’s homeboy at the State Department, the Czech government has supplied the documents she needs to apply for a student visa; with an admissions letter, she’ll finally be able to make herself legal. Her high school grades have been forwarded from Prague, and Nina has made up for the missing year of course work by acing the GED exam after a month of intense study, the octet quizzing her on chemistry formulas and historical dates as the bus carries them from coast to coast.

  The page in front of her, though, Nina has put off until now. She presses her fingertips tight to the pen and checks off the box next to the words African/African-American/Creole. Her hand darts down the sheet, and she makes another mark, this one indicating her desire to be considered for something Hunter College calls the Howard H. Dawes Scholarship for Black Achievement in Photography.

  There, done. And she feels mostly fine about it. After all, Nina has spent the last nine years living on a bus with a bunch of brothers who consider her a sister. Devon Marbury, who should know if anybody does, has peered deep into her genealogy and soul and declared her to be Creole three generations back. She has accepted that identity with pride, and lived up to it. What you are comes down to how you feel, and how others see you, and Nina is African/African-American/Creole on both those counts.

  He should have just been RISK. No author photo, no mention of his M.F.A. from NYU on the bio page, no mention of his grandfather in the promo packet. Then the fifty-bucks-a-book prick losers at the trade magazines wouldn’t have had shit to say. They’d have assumed that Tris was black and just read the goddamn novel and written about it, instead of spending two-thirds of their little pussy-ass one-paragraph appraisals making snide references to his skin color, his education, the old man’s comeback novel, and suggesting that those things made Tris some kind of clubfooted tourist, or starry-eyed anthropologist, or silver-spoon legacy case.

  How dare they? What the fuck do they know about hip-hop, or him? Tris grew up with this music, this culture, these ever-diffusing cosmic b-boy energy ripples—hip-hop raised him as much as anything or anybody, so of course he wrote about it. These anonymous bottom-rung critics are the same people who made fun of him for sitting at the black table in high school—soulless dorks who’d shit themselves if they had to outrun 5-0 in a subway layup. Who clowned Tris because it was easier than contemplating their own stare-back-from-the-mirror lameness. They’re the suck-ass hacks who graduated from M.F.A. programs five years ago with their own eager manuscripts clenched in their hands and got dissed by every publisher known to mankind, and now they drink their own stomach acid for dinner and rip books apart for spite. How the fuck can you review a novel about graffiti and not sign your goddamn name?

  More to the point, how can you review two novels featuring graffiti artists, and like the one written by a septuagenarian better than the one penned by a true-school motherfucker who happens to be his grandson?

  Tris’s debut, Contents Under Pressure, has been in bookstores for three months now, long enough to burn through its paid-for face time on the New Fiction display shelf and then be escorted out of there, like a broke drunk from a pub, and abandoned to the catacombs of the literature section, wedged where no one will ever find it unless they happen to be browsing the F section. His grandfather’s novel, meanwhile, Rage Against It All—a “sweeping, masterful panorama of late-century American malaise,” according to the New York Times Book Review blurb gracing the front of the later editions, and “long-awaited, electrifying…a triumphant return to top form” in the words of the Washington Post Book World quote splashed across the back—dropped five months before Contents, and it’s still sitting, thick and smug, right at the front of any bookstore Tris might fail to avert his eyes from as he walks by.

  The old man’s lead character is one Billy Vance, aka Rage, a time-bitten aerosolist estranged from his fertility-clinic-doctor ex-wife (as if any graff cat ever married so well) and precocious young son. Rage fritters away the days meandering through midwestern freight yards, painting whimsical, ironic “tributes” to such concepts as Christian fundamentalism and the Death of Jazz. He pines, lengthily, for the vanished New York subway era (for Oh, does it not represent the Lost Innocence of All?) and nurtures a wild dream of organizing the long-scattered graff community to descend on the transit yards en masse and bomb every car in the system, thus effecting a fleeting, glorious final victory.

  Parts of the book are undeniably great, and parts reveal—to Tris, at any rate, if not the book reviewers of America—a glancing familiarity with the subject matter that threatens to unravel the whole enterprise at a cellular level. Certainly, the book is sweeping, almost aggressively large, and graffiti is only a part of it—Rage Against It All could kill a man if dropped onto his head from a second-story window, whereas Tris’s novel would need six or seven stories to do any real damage—but whether it’s the great cultural synthesis the critics claim, Tris is not sure. What he does know is that writers of a certain stature tend to get this kind of “brilliant observer” accolade heaped on them when they are ambitious, whether the work merits it or not.

  That goes double if, as with Tristan, the tome in question ends a personal drought of more than twenty years. There is talk that the old man might finally win a Pulitzer, and whether Rage Against It All is genius or do
g shit, he fucking deserves it: the recognition, the sales, the renewed interest in his backlist, all of it. On Tris’s better days, he feels like part of his grandfather’s comeback: without RISK, there could be no Rage, no Brodsky renaissance. The book is dedicated to him; what more can Tris ask? The old man didn’t poach anything, not really, and it’s not his fault that nobody gives a shit about Contents Under Pressure—not even his fault that his book dropped first, which probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. He’s shouted his grandson out in interviews, including one on National Public Radio that probably sold more copies of Contents than anything else.

  There are better people to be angry at, like the folks at Frontier Press whose jobs are to make people give a shit about Tris’s book, yet do not give a shit themselves. He has been assigned a twenty-two-year-old in-house publicist, salaried at about two-thirds of a living wage; she won’t return his calls and cannot seem to operate a map or calendar without great difficulty. He’s got a flustered, perpetually swamped young associate editor who returns his calls a week late, full of apologies, and has to appeal to some kind of mysterious, unsympathetic board of superiors for permission to do anything, from promotional postcards on up.

  Tris’s agent, Marty Hammerman, the guy who should be putting foot to ass on his behalf, is such a complete douchebag that it’s actually comical. You’d think, to meet him, that Marty had hired a private acting coach to tutor him in the finer points of sounding, walking, even dressing like the kind of vulgar, all-about-the-money agent that some sour-smelling Marxist writer who disseminates his work by passing out poems on the subway and stapling short stories to telephone poles might conjure up to justify steering clear of The Industry. And as far as putting foot to ass, well, Marty does a lot of business with Frontier, and he’s not about to jeopardize his next million-dollar celebrity memoir deal by raising a ruckus on behalf of a client whose advance was only $35,000. “They’re doing a decent job for a thirty-five-grand book,” is the kind of thing Marty says.