Great Kisser (16 page)

“Before he married, he went to massage parlors. He's very heterosexual in his way. I have a high regard for him. He faced the reality; he'll die young. His wife is so dumb—but she's a woman. She lived upstairs in his apartment house and he courted her on the fire escape. On Fridays, she lights the Sabbath candles in her office and walks across the Brooklyn Bridge toward home with them lit.”

After Leo left, Montague scooped up a pile of papers off his desk and shoved them in the bottom drawer. “As a child,” he said, “I would listen to the Hearn's Children's Hour on the radio. They had tap dancers. My mother would listen to the tap dancing and say, ‘That was so nice.' Then, in 1945, I listened to the Hit Parade every Saturday night at nine. Bea Wayne and Andre Baruch. He conducted the orchestra. I detested it.” Montague stuck out his tongue and said, “Aaaaaaagh.”

The phone rang. Montague's mood changed abruptly. The call was from a pretty housewife who called him frequently and seemed to somehow have a crush on him. “Oh my dear,” Montague cooed, “it's lovely to have your input.” He smashed the phone down. “I hate having to serve these suburban pigs. Jew-girl. She grew up in the co-ops, and now she's a member of Hadassah and belongs to a temple.” Montague made a face and made vomiting sounds again. I began to feel dizzy.

“She took me to lunch on Columbus Avenue. I can't stand walking there any more. Those yuppies, I want to machine gun all of them.”

I stood up, afraid I would faint, and started to open the door. Would it open? Would I ever get out of Montague's target range? This was my fate, to have Montague's bountiful hatred turned on me at last, to be killed by a crazy Jew. Jewish Punchers had the most elaborate security system to protect itself against anti-Semites, and I would die right here in the dust and files and paper clips. “Report me!” Montague shouted at me. “Report me to Leo, that Nazi bastard.”

Montague would become agreeable again after each explosion. “My Aunt Ida,” he said the next morning, “went to live with Indians in Arizona. She was addicted to coffee beans. She smelled of coffee.

“She decided she wanted to live on an Indian reservation. She was about sixty then and she had rheumatism. Then she moved to Glendale, California. There she found Catholicism. She became a Catholic of the Byzantine rite.

“My aunt was a very big woman: six feet tall. Big, red-headed, buxom. Big behind and big breasts. And she sewed for petite Cuban ladies. They would wear a lot of color, because they were dark and petite. She wore the same styles. Net stockings: this was in the 1930s. A flower on the side of her skirt. Spangles. A beauty mark on her face. Her lips like Betty Boop. She had four husbands. She ran off from one of them with her violin teacher. She refused to become an American citizen. She said, ‘I belong to the woild.'

“People like this don't exist anymore. Now you have things that are stamped, that come out of a machine. She had a lot of hostility. The family rejected her, to say the least, and she was not a happy person. My mother says I'm a carbon copy of her. She was very impractical. And she was a very kind-hearted person. She thought to look light was very nice. She was light to begin with; she had red freckles. So she put flour on her face. She'd eat butter and sour cream together, to lighten up.

“A priest wrote to an uncle of mine that she had died. Among her effects was a prayer book, a machzor, for Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur.”

“What was her name?” I asked Montague.

“Ida Levinsky. We called her by her family name. Hashke. Ida was her slave name. Most Jews have them: the names families give to children that appeal to the goyim.”

VII

As the seasons turned, Montague and I continued to talk each day as we sat at our desks in the windowless room. At night, his ravings continued in my head.

But Montague never did turn on me. Nor did he turn toward me. There was no real movement. It was static; like petrified rock. I sensed that sometimes Montague cared about me and liked me; sometimes there was even something remotely paternal in Montague. But in the same minute, or hour, or the next day, Montague was caught up in his own hatreds. There was an impersonality to that hatred; it did not really center on me. Sometimes I thought Montague was sparing me. Montague moved neither forward nor back; he was caught in the utter conviction of his own inconsequentiality. And he wanted to stamp himself out.

In the evenings now, we sat in the back row of Dapper Dan's: me, Leo, Montague, and Robb Bernstein, his white linen suit draped carefully on his lap. There was the smell of disinfectant and urine and Lysol everywhere. A man with a pail of soapy water loudly mopped up. Flies hovered over the free hoagies in the corner. On a Friday night, we sat on the broken seats, the flashing lights, the booming percussion of the tapes.

Kitty Hawk spotted us and said, “I wish I was a Jew!”

Leo, curious and grateful for the interaction, called out, “Why, Kitty Hawk?”

“Because then I'd be rich.”

This remark did not constitute anti-Semitism so vicious as to qualify for Leo's files. As Kitty began to remove her spangles, Montague turned to us and said, “Let's get the fuck out of here. It's Shabbos. Where can we get some candles?”

We stood by the bridge and struck matches. Montague led the way, the four of us holding our candles, as we walked slowly across the bridge, past the glittering city, looking down into the harbor and the National Cold Storage Company, and toward Brooklyn.

The Great Kisser

I

I was known as the Jewish writer who hated his mother more than any other Jewish writer. My best known story was “My Mother Is Not Living.”

At 21 I had returned from Israel, tanned and happy, with a girl on my arm. I had worked on the kibbutz for a summer picking cherries. My mother was waiting at the airport. “God, you're ugly,” she said to me, smiling. Her eyes were flashing. This was better than sex for her.

“Michael Goldberg, your mother is downstairs. Michael Goldberg, your mother is waiting,” Lily the telephone operator at Jewish Punchers announced over the loudspeaker. I heard it in my office.

My mother stood in front of the building, breathing heavily. I hadn't seen her more than three times in fifteen years. I'd fled to colleges in Vancouver and Boston, dodging the draft with deferments and dodging her. Now I was back in Manhattan. She handed me my presents, the first in fifteen years: a black raincoat that she knew I wanted, and a heavy wooden box with six bottles of Southern Comfort, which I'd never tasted. “For your new apartment,” she explained.

As women passed by, my mother scrutinized them as she always did, her eyes crinkling, watching the competition. But now she was old.

“How do I look?” she said, smiling. I saw the gold in her teeth. “Beautiful,” I said.

“I didn't say I wasn't beautiful.”

She looked at me. “Is your apartment nice?” She turned her face sharply to the right.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“You'll see it soon.”

“I will?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. But you don't have a cat anymore, right?”

“I have a great cat.”

“You know I hate cats!” she shouted. “Get rid of it. It's me or the cat.”

That was a major mistake on her part. There would be no visit.

II

Two years later, a distant relative called me and and told me that my mother was in the hospital. We argued over the phone. “It's heart surgery, a bypass. She may die, Michael.”

I banged my fist down on the desk angrily.

After work, I set out for the hospital. Instead of taking the subway, I began to walk the five miles, stretching out the time until I had to see my mother. I was furious. At least I would get some exercise.

I walked to Dapper Dan's in Times Square. The place was about to be torn down, and there was a wooden scaffolding around it. There was rubble everywhere, and the buildings around it were boarded up.

The Gaiety Male Burlesque and the Pussy Cat Cinema had closed. There was a gaping hole beside Dapper Dan's, with cranes digging into it. The sign in front of the theater said, YOUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME. As I entered, the turnstile hit me in the crotch.

The burlesque show began. Sharlene, Mikki, Aurora and Jaguar were on the bill.

Aurora was a little high. “You'll be searching through the rubble when they tear this dump down,” she said to the crowd of eight. She looked out at the audience.

“Why didn't you guys tip Jaguar?” she said of the girl who had stripped before her. “She had her ovaries out and everything.” She paused. “You're a dead crowd. How can the dead sit up like that?”

A midget with a pimpled face laughed and applauded. “Hey Eddie,” she said to me. “Come over here. Are you scared of a little pussy?”

“I already jerked off to Jaguar,” he said.

“You cheated on me. I'd like to piss on you.”

Dapper Dan himself, a man in his sixties whose face was riddled with boils and who resembled a decrepit Abraham Lincoln, bellowed into a phone near the stage, “If the baby's born with a big nose, it's your boy. If it's born with glasses on, it's mine.”

III

I bought flowers when I reached Mount Sinai Hospital. There was my mother on the bed, sore as hell at me. I gave her the flowers. She kept turning her face to the right. The phone rang constantly. “I got friends,” she said, “something else you didn't know about your mother.”

She paused. “I told my friends you been here every day. You brought me chicken in the pot yesterday.” She looked me over. “I'll never forget that wine-colored snow suit you had when you were a little boy.”

“I think I remember that.”

“A lot of things you forgot. Do you remember coming to see me in the hospital with your father? You were nine years old. You were staying at my parents' house.”

“No … No, I don't,” I said.

“I had a … kind of … breakdown, from him. They put me in. You and he were both waving through the glass door.”

I saw her waving hand through the glass. “Oh, yeah,” I said. Now I remembered.

“Your father brought flowers. That's the first time he ever brought flowers.”

“What happened?” I said.

“The stopping talking I couldn't take. That part was the worst. He stopped talking for months at a time. He walked in like a stranger and walked out like a stranger. I couldn't take the not talking. Like a boarder. Even a boarder pays more attention to you. I couldn't stand it anymore. That's when I left him.”

After a moment, my mother said, “I talked enough for now. You better go. Thanks for coming.”

I kissed her goodbye.

“When are you coming back?” she said.

“Soon.”

I returned the next day. She lay unconscious in a large hall, wired to scores of machines ticking away. Her bare feet stuck up at the foot of the bed.

“Mom,” I said to her. “Mom. It's Michael. Get better. I love you.”

IV

At the funeral, Gus Sharon, my mother's only friend, took charge.

In the car, Gus said, “That red coat—she looked like a teddy bear in that coat.”

“Yes, she did,” I said.

“There was nothing ever off-color in my relationship with your mama,” Gus said. “We were friends.” He paused. “People generally put the birthdate on the stone. But given your mother's vanity, I'll leave it off.”

“You understood her very well.”

“What the hell.” He paused. “She would carry around anything you published for months. She'd make me read it. ‘What do you think?' she'd say. She'd puff out her chin.”

“I never knew these things.”

“No, she hid everything. When she was hurt, she'd twist her face, turn it to the right, go home and cry. She did that with you.”

“Yes.”

V

After she died, I went back to the old apartment in Queens to sift through my mother's things, to dispose of the contents. She was in every crevice of the apartment.

Go little album far and near

To all my friends I love so dear

And tell them all to write a page

That I may read in my old age.

—My mother's elementary school autograph album, June 1982—in her handwriting.

The doorman said to me, “She was a little woman, wasn't she?”

Yes, just under five feet, with dainty little steps and a little girl voice and when young, resembling Elizabeth Taylor. I returned to the apartment because there was an answer hidden there to the broken shards of my life. Going through a lifetime of my mother's things, I discovered what she could never tell me, or show me.

I had thought that if I reconciled with her, she would devour me with her demands, but now I saw she was satisfied with an envelope that had my name on it, or a two-line note I'd scribbled to her enclosing a magazine article I'd written. Everything I'd ever published she'd kept—each in a separate envelope with “Michael” printed on it. Yet she had expressed such hatred and jealousy of my writing. She even wrote letters of protest to the editors of the magazine who published me. At the same time she had proudly saved every scrap, squirreling them away.

On one of my last visits, seated in the little bedroom of mine that my mother had converted into an oriental room, with fans, Chinese prints, and designs, I had asked her. “Who was your first boyfriend?” I was doing research, the way scientists tried to figure out Goering or Eichmann.

“My first boy friend?” She crinkled her nose. “Yeah I remember now. My first crush was on a candy store boy. He asked me to go to the movies. But you didn't go out at fifteen then. After my sweet sixteen party, I was allowed to. At my party, I looked like a queen. I had a tiara; they were wearing tiaras then. His name was Norman Charney. Tall, handsome-looking boy. His birthday was September first. Because he used to say, ‘On September morn, came little Norm.' I remember that.” My mother laughed softly. After a pause she said, “He was better looking than you.”