Great Kisser (20 page)

When I told her I played the piano, she perched atop it and sang, while I played, “Over the Rainbow,” with a wistful, little-girl look.

I mentioned my Jolson imitation, which was my specialty. Rachel jumped off the piano and placed the record on the turntable. I told her to get out of the way because I made a flying entrance. Mouthing the words to “Swanee,” I got down on one knee and belted it out. Waving my hat and grinning, I strutted out the door as the record ended.

Rachel applauded and then we had brownies and milk in the kitchen.

The phone rang. “Hank?” she said. That name stirred something in me, but I wasn't sure what it was.

I said goodbye and raced ecstatically over the roof. Then I stopped in my tracks, remembering the party line.

In those days, if you didn't have much money, your family chose the party line from the phone company. You didn't have your own private line; you shared it with your neighbors. If they were using it, you had the choice of hanging up and waiting for them to finish their conversations, or just quietly listening in on their calls.

Alone in the afternoons after school when I got back to my apartment, I would pick up the phone every day around four and listen to a conversation between a girl and boy. The girl's voice was high, tremulous and gentle; she was the needy one. The boy, whose name was Hank, was a tough guy who drove a truck.

When I entered my apartment, it was 4:15. I softly picked up the phone, and I heard Hank's voice. “Rachel?” he said. I lowered the phone.

And she became my girl, all because of that party line, that told me in advance what she was like, that she too was afraid, and longing, and waiting for her first real boy friend. I would never had had the courage without it.

I had rung that doorbell. I had advanced toward her with my petition like a blind man in the dark, not knowing what she looked like or who she was or what I was doing.

Now we were together constantly. In the evenings I sat with Rachel and her parents watching
Make Room for Daddy
with Danny Thomas on television. Her father was working for his doctorate in psychology. He had melancholy eyes, and spoke in a whiny, cracking, high-pitched voice. But he had a dry wit, and he was a loving father.

They were the noisiest family I had ever seen. My parents were screamers, but their screams were a way of relieving their terror and fear. They never forgave. I would walk by the Bernsteins' window at night, hoping to glimpse Rachel, and I'd hear shouting voices and laughter and music and dishes falling. They would have angry fights and a few moments later be laughing and joking together.

They'd marched for the Rosenbergs; the FBI hounded them; Mr. Bernstein had been fired from a job. His favorite music was Bach, Stravinsky and Paul Robeson singing “Ballad for Americans” and “Peat Bog Soldiers,” a dirge for the concentration camps. But they were more far more alive than their politics.

The Bernsteins ate frankfurters, chili, spaghetti and tamales to keep the budget. Everything about them was spicy to me. Mr. Bernstein sat in his undershirt at the table reading
Punch;
Rachel's brothers, Joey and Sammy, hummed through each meal. The children had their own bedrooms; their parents slept on the sofa bed in the living room.

At first Rachel and I were just friends. She and Hank still talked on the phone once in a while, but she never saw him again. I thought of her all day and all night. Once she shook her hair in my face and I gasped.

On New Year's Eve, on my 14th birthday, in Rachel's bedroom, at midnight, after three glances of punch, she fell into my arms. Tentatively, I kissed her on her warm, tender neck as if I was doing a scientific experiment; so that if she moved away I could pretend I was probing her for science. She did not move away. I kissed her on the lips: a taste of chili and tabasco sauce. She put her arms around my neck and kissed back.

At night I returned to my mother's apartment, where my mother screamed or cried alone in bed. On weekends I stayed at my father's boarding-house room across from the Greyhound bus station and ate with him among the sad old Irish men at Bickford's.

I spent most of the afternoons and evenings now at Rachel's house. I peeked into pots ahead of time to see what was for dinner. I sat beside Rachel in the spicy warmth of the kitchen and Joey and Sammy would begin their non-stop humming. Mrs. Bernstein washed the dishes and sang to herself, “He's just my Abe, an ordinary man … but I love him …”

I wanted to please Mr. Bernstein, so I acted “progressive.” I carried around a red-leather-bound volume of Stalin's writings entitled
Towards a Soviet America
which I had found in the garbage. But Stalin was dead and the sight of the book drove Mr. Bernstein crazy. The FBI was still hounding him. He pleaded with me to keep the book at home.

When the family wasn't around, I would sneak more food from the pot on the stove, hungry, insatiable for the warmth the Bernsteins shared with me so naturally. Yet once I heard Mr. Bernstein in his whining voice say softly, “Doesn't Michael have a family of his own?”

I was constantly afraid of losing her. I felt the darkness inside me; I didn't dance; I was afraid of everything. I wanted to tell her about my parents, but I thought I would drive her away. She wouldn't believe me. No one had parents like that; I'd never seen anything like them among my friends. They were freaks of nature. I was jealous of Brendan Neill, a classmate. A tall and gentle boy with a guitar, a singer of Irish folksongs. A much sunnier boy.

The dark was encroaching. My teachers befriended me. A curly-haired, gentle man named Morton Ballinzweig, my junior-high teacher, had been my friend. He had suddenly died when I was 13, and even though I wrote a poem about him in
The Nation
and said that Mister Ballinzweig had “made me love the days the way I had loved the nights,” it was the night that I was moving toward.

Rachel didn't understand how I felt about Brendan. “Michael,” she said. “I want to have friends. We're always alone. If we get married I want to have all sorts of friends coming to our house. More friends than babies even.”

When my mother wanted me to be nice to her, she wooed me. She cooed, she stroked my hair and we rubbed noses, like pussycats. When she felt lonely, she wanted me to come into bed with her. Lying in bed, I felt damp, I had hot and cold flashes.

She had a habit of turning; she could turn in the middle of a sentence, a thought. She would be giggling and praised me, and suddenly slap me across the face, her eyes blazing.

“That's for nothing,” she would say, thinking I had been laughing at her because I had been smiling.

And then she smiled.

My mother called Rachel “that dirty slut.” This was my first relationship with a girl, and it was killing her.

My mother loved her new pink telephone. It gave her a reason to get up in the morning.

One morning Rachel called me. My mother reluctantly handed me the phone and said “Make it snappy. I gotta get to work.”

She moved around the room impatiently.

“Come on Michael. Get off.”

“Presently,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” She stood over me. “Mr. Smart Ass?”

She tried to pull the phone away from me. I could not hear what Rachel was saying, my heart raced, but I smiled at my mother to rile her.

She smiled back and scratched my face. I dropped the phone, and pushed her away.

“Now it's hitting its mother?” she screamed. That “it” cut me like a scythe, and she knew it. She came at me with her nails. I punched her for the first time. I think it felt good. I heard the thud as she fell back on the floor.

“My pink phone!” she cried. She lunged for it. I wouldn't let her have it, she loved it so much. I held it in the air. She pulled it from me and I pulled back. I licked it to show her how delicious it tasted.

It fell to the floor. She held it. “My pink phone!” she cried.

I had to get away. But I heard her crying and went quietly back into the room. She sat on the floor, the phone in her arms.

I didn't know whether to comfort her or kill her. I was afraid I would push her out the window. I ran out of the apartment.

I couldn't let pity overcome me. She would let me drown if she had me in her power. The family idiots, the pale, drooling boy-men wearing caps with open ear flaps traveled all the way from Brooklyn to my mother's house because she gave them old clothes, castoffs, leftover food in shopping bags. My mother's tone softened with these boys, and I wondered why. But it didn't hold anything good for me.

Rachel and I sat on the fire escape, sharing a cigarette. It was a windy June evening. Rachel was going away in a few days to work as a camp counselor for the summer. She hadn't told me until now.

“Michael, you know I have to do it. My family needs the money. And I'll be in the country. I'll write you every day. Don't you trust me?”

It was over, I knew it. Even if it weren't, my sour puss, the way I was acting would kill it. I saw the camp through her eyes: swimming, dancing, lying under the stars, hay rides, first sex in the sweet green grass, boys with guitars and harmonicas like Brendan singing “We Shall Overcome”—unlike me, they really would—bodies touching and caressing. (I desperately sang that song in Lewisohn Stadium at a Pete Seeger concert, the hopelessness of my failure with girls clashing with my determination to change my fate).

She loved to dance, to do the hora, to give herself up to the music. She was such a nice, kind, bursting Jewish girl, and pretty soon I would be a candidate for Hubert's Flea Circus in Times Square.

“Michael, I love you. I don't feel I have to defend myself. I don't know why you're acting this way.”

I looked away because I felt the hot tears on my cheeks. I could not say what she had meant to me. I could not talk about what it all had meant.

I felt her small breasts against my back. Her hands encircling me around the waist. “Honey.”

She wept, and I felt her moving away from me. She would be the first of all the women who would react to my need with alarm. They did not want a woman, or an invalid, a crushed creature in their arms. Who would?

“The other night, Michael, I dreamt that we were married. I saw the good man you would become.”

We kissed each other's warm, wet faces, and I knew she was gone.

That night we went up to the roof with blankets for the last time. Now she suddenly told me her father had gotten a good new job at Columbia. They would be able to move into a house of their own in the Bronx in the fall.

It was a swift new blow.

Rachel was wearing a bathrobe, a bra and panties. She opened her bathrobe and helped me unhook her bra. And Rachel offered herself to me. She was loving, and she was hot. And I withered in her embrace and turned away. I was so afraid of fucking. I didn't know how. It never occurred to me that you could slide right in there. All I thought about was that I would fail.

I gave her up. I gave up what was most dear to me, and was introduced to the mossy cold darkness, the downward spiral of my life.

After Rachel went off to camp, I wandered over to her apartment on a rainy dark afternoon. Sometimes her busy, frantic, trusting parents went out and left the door open.

I guiltily tried the door. It moved, and I slipped inside. It was so quiet; no one was there, not even Sammy and Joseph. I went into Rachel's bedroom. Everything was still; the piano was covered. I opened her closet and took out her old woolen bathrobe. I buried my face in the warm, sweet smell of her.

On the way out, I saw the piece of paper on the outer table. “Dear Mommy and Daddy,” it began. It had been written before Rachel left for camp. Rachel wrote her parents that they'd been right after all, that she hadn't been ready for such a heavy relationship as the one she'd been having with me, that she needed time and space.

I wanted to sink down on the floor and lie there. I put the letter back and closed the door behind me. I staggered out the door, not seeing anything. I needed to lie down. I needed to die.

She had been my first girl, my candy store girl, my fire escape girl. I first tasted peppermint and licorice from her lips. I went from Jolson 78 rpms to her enveloping arms, from Lux Radio Theater to her plumlike breasts. She was the rooftops, the green trees, the stoops where I bounced balls. My first trip to Coney Island, to Luigi's on 14th Street for spaghetti and Jimmy Roselli records, to Times Square and the premiere (me in a rented tuxedo) of
A Star Is Born
with Judy Garland, to Guss' Pickles on Essex, to hot pastrami and Judaica, whatever that was. She had held my penis in her hands.

III

In the fall, I left my mother's apartment for good. I was 15. My father would pay for a boarding house room for me on the upper West Side of Manhattan. I walked out into the street, past the goldfish pond, past the stoop of my late grandparents' house, beneath the window, the fire escape of Rachel's apartment, past the house with the well in the garden, the candy store, the barber shop, the ice-cream parlor. I peered into the window of my friend Eddie Colletti's house, the warm Italian welcome his family, his father a cop, always gave me, feeding me spaghetti and meat balls. Just at that moment I saw the shining bald head, the protruding stomach of Mr. Colletti as he stood there in the kitchen, holding a pot of spaghetti. He spotted me, smiled, beckoned to me, holding up the pot.

Oh my Italian friends, so basic and natural, please adopt me and never let me get near a
Daily Worker
editorial again. I felt so alone in the world, but I never really was, there were always people like the Collettis reaching out to me. I waved to Eddie's pop and walked to the corner, and up the stairs of the elevated for the short subway ride into Manhattan.

In my dreams the shouts and moans of my dead grandfather, the clown of the household, haunted me. My mother and grandmother would lock him out of the house, the house he paid for and maintained for all of them—my father never really worked, even when my grandfather bought two hamburger joints for him, which my father then forbade him from entering. The restaurants lasted 16 months. My mother and grandmother would laugh and giggle together at the scraping, gnawing sounds of my grandfather on the stoop trying to unscramble the lock, clawing at the chain, trying to get in, whimpering. There was no argument with him. They were just teaching him a lesson.