Great Kisser (21 page)

I moved into Manhattan, wore a beret, and hung around the Communists, looking for the dead Rosenbergs, for a family, a girlfriend. I always hoped I would find Rachel and her parents at a meeting, a rally.

The Communists were sublime malcontents like me; they could never navigate this world. Why should they? There was a far better world waiting in the USSR, perfect, golden and hot. They fascinated me; they came in all varieties: the burning zealots, the musty pipe-smoking tweed-jacketed, unsmiling cerebral library types. They had all the answers to every problem of mankind, and I wished I could be like them, if they weren't so fucking boring. And then there were the out-and-out lunatics that no one seemed to notice, the grinning, string-bean couple who drove an armored truck. And the FBI agents, who stuck out like mirages of healthy masculinity, all young Irish men in their twenties and thirties, all wearing suits and ties and gleaming shoes, not a drooler among them. No one noticed them either, except to register delight at such lusty “representatives of the youth.” The halo of progressive humanity was draped around anyone who could stomach the rhetoric.

I stood in the hallway of my boarding house, listening to the sounds of girls' voices from other rooms. But when a girl approached me, I froze. I was damaged goods.

I knew from early on my father's fear of sex. I knew it by the wily, knowing tone he affected when people brought it up. My father's sly little laugh: what a dog he was. I knew it camouflaged his ignorance and fear. After all, I had been around him day and night in my childhood and adolescence. I knew what his strategies were. And when I had brought up the subject, he blanched and stammered, smiling helplessly, begging me with his eyes to drop it.

I kept looking among the Communists. They were weird enough to accept me.

There was a curious building near my house. It was large and foreboding, with marble walls; its windows were blacked out. A little sign on the side of the building said simply: “Soviet Film Club.” But I somehow knew it was more than that.

Walking by the building at night, I would hear the sobs and screams of dozens of men and women standing outside the building, true believers as I longed to be, beating their heads against its marble walls and pleading to be sent to the first land of socialism, the Soviet Union. The crowd held pictures wreathed in black of the Rosenbergs and screamed, “Whatever they did, they didn't do it!”; “We can't live without them”; “Take us home!”; “Let us in, comrades!”; “We can't stand it here another minute.” How they needed a quick fix, how well I understood them. I wanted so much to be like them; I needed to remake myself, to have a full suit of armor to hide my trembling skin. I needed a full revolutionary schedule to follow day and night; I needed to dip deep from the well of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, but that shit make me choke, and I knew it. Greater souls than I had been seduced by it: a huge banner had been unfurled across the building, looming in the night: a drawing of the Rosenbergs by Picasso.

Other nights I passed by, stood across the street and watched and listened when the front of the building was deserted. There were strange sounds from within; I heard glee clubs, swimming lessons, people being harshly questioned, food being consumed, the smacking of lips, I saw turkey legs, gizzards, garter belts, red bras and pasties being tossed out of the blackened windows.

I was both repelled by and attracted to the strangeness of it. I was drawn now to all that was strange.

IV

Some 25 years later, in 1985, I thought that I wanted to leave my wife. To prove myself as a man, to strike out on my own at last, to brave the world and overcome my fear of being alone and vulnerable. I wanted to stop being protected by her. I wanted to break with the fate imposed on me by my father. I wanted to stop taking his money. I wanted to walk away from his curse.

My wife would have thrown herself in the path of a gunman for me. Yet I jogged away from her when two muggers came after us in Central Park. “You jogged more quickly and left me,” she said.

When I left her, I panicked immediately, and thought she had left me. I forgot who I thought I was. I had developed only one limb: the writing limb. The abyss was the same as when Rachel had left me in 1958. I had to test myself and grow muscles that had been dormant for so long.

By the second day I was reassuring my wife on the phone that I loved her, which was true, and that I just needed a little time on my own. Soon that time became a couple of days and I could hardly wait to go back.

The veneers of my life had dissolved immediately when I left her, and the outer world literally broke down my door. They actually came through the window: thieves ransacked my apartment and took the radio, TV and turntable. I called my wife for help. She came over to install a new lock and cradle me in her arms. New neighbors moved in upstairs and partied all night. I could not sleep and I could not write. I called my wife again and she came over and begged the neighbors to quiet down. Old terrors instantly came back. I was afraid of the rejection of clerks, Waterboys, janitors and waiters.

The loneliness and isolation that I had feared all my life was lying in wait for me. It was the loneliness that drove my father crazy and made him so isolated from people, that made him misinterpret their motivations and mishear and distort their words. Or perhaps it was his craziness that caused his isolation.

I was hanging from the bridge by my fingers, and I knew that in order to climb up and make it across to the other side, I would have to utilize parts of my psyche, find strengths within myself, that had atrophied from lack of use over the years. I was still the invalid I had been at 15. My wife had protected and shielded me from myself.

It was scary out there! I couldn't do it. It was too hard. I watched my father, grinning and yawning and stretching with comfort in his recliner before his two TV sets, set to different programs, and I wanted to go to sleep. He was waiting for me with open arms. “Now we can be together, Michael. Why don't you sleep in the other bed in my apartment? You'll go crazy alone.”

I had taken his money all those years. He had held out the two hundred and fifty smackeroos each month. All I had to do was sit there while he told me how soft I was to take it.

I didn't walk out of his apartment. I took his humiliation, his confident forecasts of my failure, and I sat there, waiting for the money. If I took the money, I could keep writing, and I told myself that was all that mattered. I was the artist; I shouldn't demean myself with ordinary struggles. But I also took the money because it was there, and it gleamed in my head: what I could do with it! But it wasn't enough to have an independent life; it was just enough to keep me in his web. But I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.

And I took it because I was afraid of going out there alone, just as he knew I was.

In the end, I always took the money.

V

In the first days after the separation from my wife, I began to hang out on Times Square at the burlesque parlors with their smells of lysol and antiseptic, aisles of pockmarked, eager faces searching for a fix from the gloss of sex. The men eagerly held up their dollar bills to the strippers. I saw old men grabbing the chance to be spanked, dropping their pants and climbing onto the girls' laps, grinning and winking at the audience of eight. They thought they were the lucky ones.

Porn: that outer zone of desperation—the flashing neon lights—and beyond it, the realm of the strange ones, the stalkers, those who broke into the homes of strange women and crept into their beds, actually thinking that somehow they would be welcomed.

It was a fetish world. Men worshipping parts of the female body, because they were afraid of entering it. I had been taught by my parents that the woman's body was dirty. The substitutions were the clothes women were encased in, their garter belts, bras, shoes. They were more erotic to me partly clothed. And with that there was the feeling of humiliation, of defeat.

I sat behind my copies of Hamsun and Goncharov, peeking at the action. I sat for hours in the gloom making myself stare at the dancers' pelvic areas to overcome my fear of it or talking to them about Dostoyevsky while they wiggled in my lap for a dollar a minute. ‘“Brothers K' sounds good,” one of them said, “but does this guy ever write about sisters?”

My dentist had a new assistant, a pretty young woman named Norma. Norma hovered around me, pressed against me, and I thought that perhaps she actually found me attractive. I called her for a date. We met at a candlelit restaurant on the upper East Side.

She confided in me that she had recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and would eventually be confined to a wheelchair.

I understood. I could wheel her around and be her nurse.

My father's curse was still intact.

And then my lifeline came along.

Rachel called me two weeks after I left my wife. She was visiting Manhattan, and had looked me up in the phone book. I told her that I had separated from my wife.

I thought of her at the piano, on the fire escape, on the roof, the first time we kissed. She said, “I still have the stubs of our theater tickets.”

I could not wait to see her.

We met in the Village under the Washington Square arch. We embraced, and I held her. Her hair was an orange-colored frizzy Afro, and she smiled steadily. “Oh it's good to see you!” she said. “I'm so glad I found you! So glad! I've been looking forward to it like a pilgrimage. You were very special to me. I have all of your books, Michael. I'm so proud of what you've done with your life.”

She hooked her arm into mine as we walked. “I have stolen lovely wonderful hours today, walking around the village. Where shall we eat? I feel like something Greeky.”

I wanted her to fill in all the spaces. At the restaurant, she said that she had met her future husband Ron, at a youth meeting of the Socialist Arbeiter Ring in the Bronx. She had been the guest performer that night, singing and playing her guitar. She was “crazy nuts” for him. She dropped out of City College.

“Where was all this?” I asked her. I needed to know.

“In the Bronx.”

I saw the trolley-like car to her stop. After she left, I had taken the trolley to see the house where she lived.

“All four of my children were born in the Bronx. You know, I was really a very good kid and I was very nice. And Ronnie was the first boy who ever went to bed with me. And then he left me.”

“He left you?” I asked in astonishment.

“Then he came back into my life and said he wanted to marry me. There was really never any consideration of doing anything else. That's just what one did.”

“When did you get married?”

“February 5, 1962.” Horns blasted discordantly outside the restaurant window, marking Rachel's wedding day.

“You have four kids?” I said.

“No. Ron and I adopted four children. They all wanted to know who their real parents were. I always wanted a lot of children. Do you remember, Michael? I saw
The Egg and I
. I wanted six for a very long time. And then it was clear that I had problems.

“Two years ago I had a miscarriage. After a lifetime of trying to have children. I was 45 years old. I had surgery to try to make a baby. For many years I didn't have to worry about birth control, about periods. I never went through puberty. I couldn't menstruate. And then—I was so happy. But I could not.

“And you,” Rachel said. “You have children?”

“My wife has a child from a previous marriage.”

“So you're a father.”

“No, I'm not,” I snapped at her. “It's not the same.”

She stared at me.

She took out pictures of her children. “Lisa is 18. She is learning disabled.” She paused. “I was abusive. I'm very guilty. Very guilty.

“I've been therapized to the hilt,” she said. Only her parents seemed to have survived well, her father carving out a career for himself at Columbia, the two parents settling into a comfortable middle age, enjoying the early bird specials at their favorite restaurants where the portions were ample.

Rachel showed me pictures of her brothers, Joseph and Sammy. A shiver passed through me. When Sammy had had his Bar Mitzvah, I had mailed him my watch, which I knew he had always loved.

“I recognize them,” I said. “But Sammy was a little boy when I knew him.”

“Michael, neither of us was as old as any of my children are now.”

We walked out into Washington Square Park, where Rachel had sung and played her guitar on Sundays. The kids with their purple hair, blue lips and hatchet haircuts sat on the circular rim of the square. We passed by the Gaslight, the San Remo, the Bottom Line, the chess store and Arturo's on Thompson Street, emblems of the New York I loved.

“By 1970 Ron was fucking around royally,” Rachel said. “So I got involved in ecology. Let me do something! I gotta do something! I was hooked. I got into the frog boycott. Some of these people were saints and some the whores of the world. I'm flying back and forth to Washington. I'm speaking beautifully. I felt terrific. I would say, ‘I don't like that!'“ I became famous for that. I was on the Mike Douglas show twice. When I walked down the street people recognized me and called out, ‘I don't like that.'

“Now I'm moving into media relations,” Rachel said. “I'm a business consultant to a very interesting fellow importing swimming pool fittings from Russia. And I'm getting into a new kind of contact lenses.”

Rachel gazed at me. “You know, you haven't said a word all afternoon.”

I looked away. “The truth is, I loved you very dearly. I was very hurt.”

“Michael, you were 15 and a half. I was 17 and a half. It was as simple as that.”

She said, “I get the feeling you think you were an intruder in the household.”

“Yeah, I think I was.”

“My family is enormously fond of you. You were a very welcome presence.”