End of the Jews Page 3

  Tristan mutters a stream of excuse mes as he walks, but after the first few fellows hear him, an awareness ripples through the crowd and folks clear a path, smiling and nodding and lifting their drinks as he passes, saying, “Right this way” and “All right, now.”

  Tristan smiles back. Beneath the fear and excitement of being here—alone, alive, half-drunk, useful, unique—there lies, in the pit of his stomach, an unprovable suspicion that these people are like him, or like he wants to be. He feels a wrenching lust for a life like theirs, a life lived in the present moment, an American life. The Bronx shadows Tristan, staggering like a golem, a motley amalgam of old customs, new realities, the bargains and concessions forged between the two. The people here stand with both feet in the here and now—for horrible reasons, to be sure, but it is brave and wonderful. Or perhaps, Tristan thinks, recoiling from his own certainty, that’s a load of bullshit and there is no freedom here in which to immerse himself, and this kind of broad fantasy is just what a writer must reject. Or both.

  Albert takes the drums from Tristan, sets them down, shows him how to undo the taut leather cords. Tristan fumbles at the task, his awkwardness becoming harder to bear.

  “Hey,” says the drummer, “meet Charles, our host. Charles, Tristan.” Albert winks. “My valet.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” The man who let them in pumps Tristan’s hand. “I’ll set ’em up if you please, Al. You know I know how. You fellows go grab yourselves a plate and a drink.”

  “Don’t forget a woman,” says Albert, and strolls off toward the brightly lit kitchen. Tristan stays where he is, hunched over the equipment, hoping he can continue to look useful for a moment longer.

  “You a musician, too?” Charles speaks over his shoulder, unfolding the tripod legs of Albert’s cymbal stand.

  “No,” Tristan says, apologetic. “I’m in school.” A pause, and then he summons the courage to add, “I’d like to be a writer.”

  Charles steals a backward glance at him. “Yeah? Good for you. You know who was up in here last month? Langston Hughes. I know you’ve read some Langston. No? Man, before you leave, remind me to show you one of his books.”

  The drums are ready to be played. Charles folds his arms, surveys the room. “Never know who’s gonna show up here,” he says. “Wouldn’t surprise me none if I looked up and saw Joe Stalin standing in my living room, holding a plate of pigs’ feet and doing the shake with Miz Clarke.” He points at the big woman with his chin, then shoots Tristan a look that seems intended to put him at ease, and thus doesn’t. “That’s why I didn’t bat an eye when I saw you comin’ up my stairs.” He chuckles. “Who knows, maybe you’ll write about me someday.”

  Tristan smiles for as long as Charles does, then says, “I think I’ll get something to eat.”

  “Sure. Go on in and fix yourself a plate. Don’t be shy. Have a drink, too. No Bob Crosbys here.”

  The pale green kitchen is full of people, mostly women. The window is open to the fire escape, where three men in suits are standing and passing something back and forth, and the room is cooler by far than the other. In the center squats a card table like the Brodskys’, every inch covered with serving trays and pots, ladles and tongs. Albert strolls over from across the room, where he’s been leaning up against the counter, ankles crossed, chatting up two pretty young things. He corrals Tristan and walks him through the menu as if his charge has never eaten before. Soon Tristan’s paper plate is buckling beneath the weight of all the chicken, macaroni and cheese, heavy-dressed salad, buttered corn, and string beans Albert has piled on “for starters.” The girls watch the whole thing, shaking their heads as the heap of food grows.

  “Now honey, you ain’t got to eat all that,” the taller of the two assures Tristan when Albert finally hands the plate over.

  “But if you don’t,” warns Albert, “no dessert.” The four of them laugh, and Tristan freezes the moment in his mind, breaks it apart. They are all laughing for different and numerous reasons, he thinks, thrilled that he notices. The girls’ laughter is hospitable, but also mocking; they are in on the joke of his oddness, getting a kick out of how a misfit makes them feel more vibrantly themselves. Albert—whose laugh is wild-eyed, raucous, leaves the rest of them behind—is showing off for the girls. Tristan is his pet and he knows he must strike the proper balance between care and disregard; too much of either will make him appear unmanly. Tristan, for his part, laughs to please and to connect, to communicate his willingness to play his role and because he is relaxed and tense and wildly delighted.

  Albert snaps his fingers and takes Tristan’s elbow. “I got somebody I want you to meet,” he says, lifting the plate from Tristan’s hands and setting it down atop the stove.

  “You better let that child eat,” the shorter girl protests.

  “Got to work up an appetite first,” Albert calls back, leading Tristan down the dark hall that connects the kitchen to the rest of the apartment. “Down here is the card game,” he explains as they near a doorway, but Tristan doesn’t need to be told. Gambling sounds the same in Harlem as it does in the Bronx.

  The air above the table is blue-gray with smoke. Three of the five players grip plump cigars with their teeth, the other two puff cigarettes. On couches in the dim recesses of the room lounge others, studying the game and waiting for a vacant chair. A serene girl who could be Tristan’s age sits on a stool in the far corner, next to a makeshift bar. No one looks up from the cards for longer than a second when Albert and Tristan enter.

  “Dolores.” The drummer beckons. “Come here a second, sugar.” She walks over to them, and Albert lays an arm across her thin shoulders. Dolores is every inch the schoolgirl: petite, with big brown cat eyes and obedient hair tied back into a ponytail that just brushes the collar of a blue cotton blouse. “Last call for food and drink, gents,” Albert announces. “Dolores’s going on a little break.”

  “Thank you for taking such good care of us, honey,” says one man. He stands, wobbily, and bends across the table to hand her a folded bill. Dolores takes it quickly, slides it into her skirt pocket. “You know Dee’s my lucky charm,” he tells the others. “I was smart, I’d cash out right now.”

  “But you ain’t smart, Earl,” somebody calls from a couch.

  “No, I’m not,” roars Earl, lifting his glass. “Sling the cards, Doc, sling the goddamn cards.”

  Albert shuts the door behind them. “Tristan, meet Dolores. Figured the two of you might like some company your own age.”

  Dolores flicks her eyes at Tristan and then crinkles her forehead at the drummer. “How old is he?”

  “Don’t ask me, girl, ask him.” Albert struts off toward the kitchen, leaving them alone.

  Dolores drops her hands to her hips and gives Tristan the same impatient yet resigned look his cousin Gerty used to wear when she came to baby-sit.

  “Well? How old are you?”

  It’s a fight-or-flight scenario. He’s a nuisance and a fool and it is time he got back home. But Tristan draws himself up and says, “Old enough.”

  Dolores giggles. “Old enough for what?”

  Tristan is stumped. A Yiddish phrase his mother uses when she scolds the young ones jumps into his mind and then right out of his mouth.

  “Old enough to know better.”

  “Better than me?” Dolores folds her arms over her chest in a posture of aggression, or mock aggression. Tristan is not sure which, and he doesn’t want to make any assumptions.

  He raises his palms chest-high. “Old enough to know when to give up.”

  “You give up pretty easy,” she replies with a wicked smile. “So what are you, anyway?”

  “Well, I want to be a writer.” Saying it is easier this time, but no less exhilarating.

  “No.” Dolores leans forward at the waist without uncrossing her arms, as if he is dumb or hard of hearing. “I mean what are you. Irish? Italian?”

  “Oh.” Isn’t it obvious? “I’m Jewish.”

  She rais
es her hand to Tristan’s face, so close that his cheek tingles in unfulfilled anticipation. “But you haven’t got those curly things.”

  “That’s only if you’re very religious,” he explains, charmed by her ignorance. This is the dream of every boxed-in kid in the neighborhood: to be around people who know nothing of him. “I’m hardly religious at all.”

  The hall is empty save the two of them, and Tristan feels the space acutely after all the bodies he’s brushed up against tonight. “I never go to synagogue,” he continues in the silence—in the noise, rather, which is loud and just around both corners, but in the silence of her voice. “I don’t think I even believe in God. Not the Jewish God, anyway, the one who cares whether you eat meat and milk from the same dish.” A nervous laugh snorts from him. “I mean, the milk touches the meat when they’re both part of the cow, right? And whose fault is that?”

  It’s an old joke, but not to Dolores. She laughs, and Tristan wonders what else he can reveal or retell to impress her. The joke about the alta kocker stuck on the desert island is a good one, but he doubts she’d understand the punch line about the guy building two shuls, one of which he prays in and the other of which he wouldn’t be caught dead in. He imagines her repeating it to her friends at school on Monday, thinks about how the joke would change shape in her possession, and puts it from his mind.

  “So this is your job?” he asks.

  “Only once a month. The rest of the time, I just live here.”

  “Oh. So Charles is your…” He waits for Dolores to fill in the blank with brother, uncle, cousin. Charles is too young, too agile and untrammeled, to fit with Tristan’s conception of father.

  Nonetheless: “My dad.” She narrows her eyes. “You know him?”

  “We just met.”

  “Oh. Can I ask you something? Is it true that Jewish people have to do it through a bedsheet with a hole cut out?”

  With the exception of Leah Krasner, who lets boys touch her for money, no girl Tristan knows would ever say anything so bawdy in mixed company, and hearing Dolores ask the question so casually, so easily, is enough to make his dick stiffen. Tristan clamps his notebook under his arm, slides both hands into his trouser pockets, and tamps himself down, firing off a quick volley of cover-up laughter.

  “Where in the world did you hear that?”

  “It’s not true, then?” He can’t tell whether Dolores is relieved or disappointed. What else does she think about him? Then again, until a minute ago, the only folk Dolores recognized as Jewish were the Hasidim. A little imagination a few moments back, and Tristan could be a goy right now, footloose and fancy-free.

  “Maybe if you’re extremely, extremely religious. And by extremely religious, I mean crazy.” Dolores gives him a strange, sad smile.

  “You’re very curious,” he tells her, wanting to wipe the pity from her face.

  “If I want to know something, I ask. What about you? Isn’t there anything you want to know about us?”

  The truth is, there is plenty, but nothing Tristan can put into words. Instead, he is surprised to hear himself say, “Can I see your room?”

  It is not what Dolores expects, either. She gives him another of her odd, bemused looks, then says, “Sure,” and leads him down the hall. They stop before a narrow, unlit staircase. “It’s up here.”

  “You have two floors?” Another idiotic question from the young ambassador, but such luxury is so foreign to Tristan that he cannot stop himself.

  The steps creak with each footfall, and Tristan is compelled to silence. There is a sweet sneakiness to this mission, this escape into private, and Tristan emboldens himself by remembering that he initiated it.

  The upstairs is smaller, all bedrooms, and smells faintly of dampness, mold. Dolores leads him through the hall until they reach the end, and the only closed door. The floor buzzes with the noise of the party downstairs, but the click of the doorknob turning in Dolores’s palm echoes through the corridor. Tristan stands behind her, trying to get a whiff of her hair, but it is saturated with the smoke of the gambling room, and he can only imagine the sweet haze he’s sure encircled her before the guests arrived.

  Tristan does not have to imagine for long, because as they enter the room, he is met with a blast of just the kind of womanly scent he’s been trying to conjure. A little tray table full of cosmetics sits in one corner of the room with a plastic-framed vanity mirror atop it, tilted against the wall. It is so low that Dolores must have to kneel to see herself. The rest of the room, too, is almost miniature. The mattress is narrower even than his bunk bed; it lies on the floor below a down-sloping plane of ceiling, against a window covered with pink paper blinds. The bureau is stuffed with clothes, the open drawers jutting out almost halfway to the opposite wall.

  It may be a glorified linen closet, but it is hers alone. He folds his hands behind his back and turns in a slow, appreciative circle, as if in a museum.

  “My sister Lillian got married last year. Before that, I shared a room with my little sister Ida, down the hall.”

  “How many kids in your family?” Tristan notices some pictures taped up by the bedside, clipped from newspapers and magazines. They are all of colored women. The only one he can identify is Josephine Baker, smiling coyly from beneath her feather plumes.

  “Six. Seven, but my brother Michael died when he was a baby. You can sit down if you want.” Dolores is perched on the edge of the bed, her legs jutting out in front of her and her hands in her lap. She pats the place beside her and Tristan tosses his notebook to the ground and folds himself into it.

  “Thanks.” He crosses his legs, rests his hands on his thighs. It is the only option the space offers.

  “You know,” Dolores says, “I’m older than I look. I’ll be eighteen November first. I’ll bet you thought I was younger.”

  Some neighborhood putz, quite possibly Sammy Fischer, once told Tristan that women always want to be mistaken for younger than they are. He wonders if that applies now; it seems doubtful. And anyway, you could fill Yankee Stadium with what Fischer doesn’t know.

  “I hadn’t really given it much thought.”

  She turns and grabs his hand. “My cousin Freda in Chicago is twenty-one. She has her own apartment and everything, and she said as soon as I finish school, I can come out and room with her. She’s got a job as a cigarette girl in a supper club, and she’s going to get me one, too, and introduce me to all the stars she knows.”

  “That’s great,” says Tristan with all the gusto he can put forth. The simple touch of her hand is wreaking havoc on his bodily self-control, and the last thing Tristan wants is for Dolores to notice what’s going on beneath his strategically placed forearm. “What stars does your cousin know?” he asks, determined to keep Dolores’s mind on the glitzy midwestern future until his dick realizes, as he does, that this girl is merely being friendly.

  “Well, Freda told me that every weekend—” she is saying when the doorknob turns. Her voice cuts out abruptly, like a radio when the power fails, and her hand snaps back into her lap. Both of them stare at the rotating lump of brass for a moment, and then, as the door swings open and slams against the wall, Tristan and Dolores leap to their feet and stand as far apart as possible.

  Standing at the threshold, with an unlit cigar wedged between two thick fingers and a woozy shimmer playing in his eyes, is one of the gamblers, a stout man with a pumpkin of a head. Perspiration beads where his hairline would begin, if he had one.

  “Earl!” Dolores crosses her thin arms. “What do you want?”

  It is no invitation, but Earl begins to shamble across the tiny distance between the door and the bed anyway.

  “Thas jus’ what I was gonna ask yo’ friend here,” he drawls, the words soaked in liquor and a sluggish southernness. Earl pokes the cigar at Tristan and then parks it in his mouth while he retrieves a handkerchief from his back pocket and sops the moisture from his brow. “Little late to be collectin’ the rent, ain’t it?”

 
Earl is smiling as he says it, so Tristan smiles back. “The rent?”

  “Thas what you’re here for, ain’t it? A nigger’s money?” He turns to Dolores. “They like to wipe they ass with it. Own every damn building in Harlem and don’t never repair shit. Just come around on payday. Tell her, Hymie.”

  Tristan’s hands clench and flex by his sides. Only the persistence of Earl’s smile keeps them there.

  “I think you’ve got the wrong man. My name’s not Hymie, and I don’t own a thing, pal.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Earl splays a hand over his belly, rubs a small circle. “My mistake. Must be yo’ daddy, owns this place. And I guess Charles fell behind on his payments, so your pa send you over to have a little fun with my niece here.”

  He grabs at her elbow, but Dolores pulls away. “You’re drunk, Earl. And I’m not your niece. Go downstairs. I’ll bring you a coffee.”

  Instead, Earl steps closer: right in front of Tristan, nose-to-nose—a distance that, in the Bronx anyway, in every schoolyard and on every street corner Tristan has ever known, implies the imminent failure of diplomacy. Tristan’s stomach tightens and a lone drop of sweat eases its way down the curve of his armpit. Earl’s face is still plastered with that fool’s grin, but his eyes have changed. Or perhaps Tristan has failed to notice, until now, that there is something sharp and probing underneath the glassiness.

  “You like colored poontang, huh?” He leans forward even farther, halving the space between them. The p pops, spraying Tristan with moisture. “You sheenies chase the dark meat every time.” Earl eye-checks Dolores, then rises to his tiptoes and hisses in Tristan’s ear. “Think on what your daddy’d do, he caught me with his daughter. Cuz thas exactly what’s gon’ happen to you.”