End of the Jews (31 page)

Talking Blues was a Jamaican-themed coffee shop built out of weather-beaten aluminum to evoke the charm of a Trenchtown hovel. A six-pack of obvious Americans, fresh off the train and more concerned with getting baked than finding lodging, was sunken into mismatched armchairs, mammoth backpacks by their feet. Aussies with blond ropes of dreadlocks winding down their backs bent forward over low tables, intent on rolling perfect cone spliffs. A trio of bored-looking Dutch waitresses, name tags still clipped to their blouses, sipped fruit smoothies and watched the tourists indulge.

Tris turned to the adjective-crammed menu posted on the wall, wondering what Mariko sought in a high. He couldn't picture her “giggly” or “mellow,” didn't think he'd care to see her get “cerebral,” was too cautious to bring a woman in her sixties any botanical described as “potent.”

He settled on a “mild, relaxing” Chinese hash and got in the wind, eager to run interference between Mariko and the public before anybody's night got ruined. Years of shielding Albert from the drug dealers and lowlifes he'd once counted as his buddies had taught her to distrust strangers, to clutch grudges long past relevance, occasionally to abuse her power as gatekeeper. Tris had seen her slam doors in the faces of people she'd known half her life, for no other reason than to demonstrate that she could. Yesterday's misdemeanor was tomorrow's felony, and whether transgressors were permitted to plead their cases was, likewise, a matter of whim. Mariko might listen to a musician's five-minute dramatization of how he'd done some dumb shit like oversleep and miss sound check, nod, and let him off with
Next time, ask front desk for wake-up call
. And then a week later, when a cat tried to explain how he'd been trapped in an abandoned mine shaft without food or water and had only escaped by weaving his body hair into a rope, she'd glare and wave her arm.
I don't wanna hear! Musicians gotta be professional! You gotta think of Albert's reputation!

Tris reached the club, still spangled with patrons, climbed the staircase to the dressing room, and knocked. The door swung open, revealing Mariko sitting just as he had left her: hands mufflered in her purse, cocktail gone watery on the table beside her.

“Ah.” Rolf smiled, clutching the doorknob. “You see? There he is.”

“Tris, where you been? I getting worried.” Gauging travel time was not Mariko's forte.

“Sorry.” Behind her, half-sitting on the waist-high lip of the counter, was a tall nineteenish blond girl with a lit cigarette cocked by her ear. There was a rangy, athletic restlessness to her, as if she were waiting to catch a fly ball or return a serve. A white hippie pullover billowed around her, sleeves pushed to the elbows to reveal thin, tanned forearms ringed with woven hemp bracelets. Automatically, Tris sized her up—she was a female in his field of vision—and his brain recorded the finding that she was fuckable, filed it away somewhere.

Rolf saw him looking. “My daughter, Saga.”

“Hi,” she said, then leaned toward her cigarette as though someone else were holding it, and took a drag without breaking eye contact. It was a profoundly goofy maneuver, but wholly original. Saga's whole full mouth relocated to the left side of her face and she blew the smoke behind her so as not to offend.

“Nice to meet you.”

Mariko piped up right on cue, cock block at the ready. Among the band's alumni, she was famous for this. “How your girlfriend, Tris?” She turned to Saga with a sage nod. “Very lovely young woman. Photographer.”

“She's fine.” He glanced at Saga to see if she'd followed the logic of Mariko's seeming non sequitur, and found the girl's eyes roving around the room.

Rolf pushed off with his hands and rose from the low leather couch into which he'd eased a moment before. “I've got to take care of some paperwork. See you tomorrow night, Mari.”

“Okay Rolf, thank you,” Mariko singsonged, waving as he sidled out the door.

Tris waited for the owner's daughter to follow, but instead she reached for the champagne bottle and poured herself a refill, so he extracted the bag of hash from his pocket and offered it to Mariko.

She looked at it, then at him, and then at Saga. “Give to her. She look like she know how to make spliff.”

Saga accepted the bag, expressionless, and went to work gutting a cigarette.

Mariko dropped her elbows onto the chair's armrests and crossed her legs. “So. When you gonna get married, Tris?”

He stooped to snatch a Heineken from the minifridge, tried and failed to twist the cap off, scanned the counter for a bottle opener. All of it was preferable to making eye contact with Mariko.

“I don't believe in marriage. We got a bottle opener?”

Saga, holding a low flame beneath the chunk of hash to soften it, looked up. “Give it to me.” Tris passed her the beer. She popped the top with her lighter, handed the bottle back, and returned to her project.

“You grown man,” Mariko continued, undeterred. “Your girlfriend gonna want commitment. I can tell.” She cackled, eyes shining with wisdom, mirth, perverse delight.

Tris swung the bottle to his lips with an exaggerated looseness, as if this were a shooting-the-shit-on-the-stoop beer. “I dunno, Mari. I look around and I don't see too many married couples who seem like they've both really flourished, you know what I mean? Even if they love each other.” He stopped short and eye-checked her. Mariko was impassive, but he decided to unimplicate her anyway, just in case. “I mean, look at my grandparents.” Looking at his grandparents was a major part of what Tris had done for the last three years. The results were currently en route from Frontier's publicity department to book reviewers nationwide.

“Your grandparents a special case. Not everybody cut out to marry genius.”

Tris shrugged. “The whole marriage-industrial complex just feels bourgeois and oppressive to me. People should be together because they wanna be, not because they're legally bound.” He poured some beer down his throat. “I guess I'm too much of a romantic to get married.”

“Too full of bullshit, you mean. You don't want to grow up, same as all men.” Mariko smirked. “That's okay. She gonna make you.”

“She feels the same way. Her parents' marriage was a train wreck.”

“I know female mind, young man. Security very important, even if they don't wanna admit. Not me—I never have no security with Albert—but I don't think like a woman.”

“Well then, I'm the wrong dude.” He lifted his arms like a tightrope walker. “Working without a net, man. Anything could happen.”

She grinned at him. “Asshole.”

“Hey, I mean, we do live together. I'll have a kid or whatever. I just don't want to sign a contract. If Nina hadn't gotten into grad school, that would have been something else, but now her student visa's cool for like the next three years.”

Mariko's smile faded, replaced by the deep furrows that surrounded her mouth at rest. “You ever been to INS, Tris?”

“Nah.”

“Worst place on earth. Cannot bring nothing into the building—no food, no drinks. Cannot even go to bathroom, 'cause you don't know when they gonna call your name. Government make it as hard as possible, so people give up. I almost give up myself, but I know I gotta make it for Albert's sake. You know how it feels to try to make a life someplace, and be afraid you gonna get kicked out?”

“Okay,” Saga proclaimed, and they both turned. A joint rested atop her palm.

She offered the masterpiece to Mariko, who crossed her arms. “You go ahead.”

Saga glanced at each of them, then raised the joint to her lips, flicked her lighter, and expelled a lazy, lingering cloud. Tris took his turn, felt his head lighten, and passed the spliff to Mariko. She glared suspiciously at it, then scissored the thing between her fingers like a cigarette and dragged. Everything was fine for one second, two. Then Mariko erupted in a fit of coughing, rocking forward and slapping her palm against her chest.

“You okay?” Tris ventured for the second time in an hour.

She nodded, still hacking, and wiped away a single tear. “Last time I smoke hashish thirty years ago,” she told Saga, looking up with wide eyes. “Albert have gig in D.C. Soon as we get to town, a blizzard hit us. Nobody come to the club except same six people, every night. So devoted! They feel power of the music, you know? By end of that week, we all best friends. For the last night, cooks and waitresses and band and customers have big party.” She shook her head. “I got so fucked-up that Albert have to carry me home. I say to myself, I cannot do that no more. If I get fucked-up, who gonna watch Albert?”

Mariko remembered the joint idling in her hand and thrust it toward Saga, lipstick stains and all. “I gotta find new bass player, Tris. You hear him tonight? He got no spirit.” She clenched her fist, held it before her face. “You want to play Albert's music, you gotta have
spirit.”

“Smoke some more, Mariko,” Tris urged. She shook her head, but that impish smile was in place. So seldom was Mariko teased that she truly seemed to enjoy it. “C'mon.” He crouched by her chair with the spliff held between five bunched fingers like a tiny torch. “You deserve it. Besides, we're only a block from the hotel.”

She uncrossed her legs and plucked the joint from its pedestal. “You funny, Tris. Okay. Sure. Why not.”

Watching Mariko happy and animated was sadder, somehow, than watching her sit shuddering at the piano bench. How long could she do this? Did she intend to die on the road, alone in some hotel room after a gig, like so many of her jazz brethren? Tris couldn't bear the thought of her chasing such a fate, aspiring to it because going until you gave out was the most recognizable of the alternatives arrayed before her.

“Hey, listen, Mariko, before I forget. My grandparents told me to invite you to Thanksgiving at their house.”

She narrow-eyed him. “I don't think so, young man. I think you deciding to invite me now.”

“Why would you think that? They told me to make sure you'd come.”

“Your grandfather said that?”

Tris was about to nod his head when something in her intonation stopped him. “No, actually, it was my grandmother. So you'll come?”

“What your grandmother say?”

“‘Tell Mariko we want her for Thanksgiving and don't take no for an answer. She should be with old friends now.'”

She pointed a finger at him. “Don't bullshit me, Tris.” He raised his palms to his shoulders and gave a sputter of indignation at the very thought.

Mariko's glance held firm for another moment, then softened. “All right. If they want me, I will come. Thank you. Now, Tris, you gotta take me back to the hotel. I gotta sleep.” She rose and patted Saga on the arm. “Good luck, young lady. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too.” Saga darted out of the way, gave Tris a half-smile good-bye, and picked the smoldering joint up from the ashtray. Tris took a last look at her, then chaperoned Mariko to the top of the staircase, spotting her from behind as she embarked on a methodical descent.

She took his arm when they reached the street. It was a good fifteen degrees cooler than in the club, and the air seemed to rejuvenate her.

“So, young man, what this new book about?” Mariko lurched slightly on her high heels, like a little girl playing dress-up.

Tris shrugged. “A man. A writer. His life. The title is
Pound Foolish.
”

“Your grandfather?”

A sour feeling wormed through him. “Yes and no. I mean, there are…Yes and no. Partly.”
Fuck.

Tris had tried to be a benevolent and gentle god, breathe a unique vitality into his man of clay. A writer could understand a character only through the matrix of his own brain anyway, he told himself, could only inhabit a life if he imbued it with his own. Writing this book had been an act of great truth-telling and great lying, an endless discourse between revelation and obfuscation, invention and guesswork and life. Deep down, Tris knew he had shaved dangerously close to Tristan's history, allowed his imagination to run along a track that paralleled and crisscrossed with reality. He had taken risks, ambitious ones. The ramifications of the enterprise were huge and frightening, and it took only a simple question like Mariko's to bring them lumbering out of the shadows.

As
Pound Foolish
revealed itself, Tris had worked feverishly to build a prison maze clever enough to contain the ramifications—piled brick atop brick even as the ramifications howled, slavered, rammed their shoulders against the walls. He'd sent champion after champion into the labyrinth to slay them. Truth, crusading, sword held high, was supposed to blind the ramifications with pure white light, render them speechless. But they only bellowed louder. Art strolled in unarmed, intent on convincing them of its rightful ascendance and forcing the ramifications to submit to a life of servitude. Instead, Art staggered back outside half-dead.

Finally, Tris had simply tuned out the clamor, as if it were nothing more than the sodomitic coupling of the downstairs pit bulls. His grandfather was supposed to be invulnerable, Tris reasoned—his life like history itself. Unassailable, and thus public domain. Canonical, and therefore subject to reinterpretation, satire, general fuckery. Something he loved, and therefore had the right, the duty, to find darkness in. The supposition had allowed Tris to write as he had, but now it seemed flimsy, crass.

Pound Foolish,
though, was neither. Irving Gold blazed from every one of its four hundred pages, thrashing and brooding and maintaining, throughout the seven decades of his existence, a fascination with the workings of his great gray brain that kept him floating just outside the world of human intercourse, like the man in the chair atop the hora dance—and like that man, Irving Gold was passed from one protector to another, barely noticing, until the arms and shoulders that supported him grew weary and he toppled down.