Great Kisser (8 page)

I had entered the Party's red brick building on 23rd Street and taken the elevator to the second floor. There was Ben Davis, behind the desk, reading. I stood there looking at him, and it was as if Ben were covered by radioactivity: I would be in the circle of these artifacts and pariahs I loved and feared who were in jail or going to jail and I didn't even believe a word of what they said. It was too late in the century. I just wanted their love, because the static inside me was bouncing around and I couldn't get away from it.

I turned and ran down the steps, heart jumping, hands shaking—ran down the street to the Automat and ate mashed potatoes and creamed spinach, my favorites, so comforting, and figured out what I would say to Strugin by way of explanation. (Maybe: “I'm not worthy enough yet to be a comrade.”)

I had saved myself, as I always did. After all, I knew these people were capable, later on, of reading my books and putting me in a concentration camp.

IV: Gratitude

I wonder now about all the terrors I went through, how obeisant and raging I was all at once. I can't connect to the boy who laughed at the news of JFK's murder in 1963. I want to erase that memory, I always want to obliterate it, but I can't. It happened. I try to reorder it, recast it, but it always comes out the same. I had been capable of the unthinkable.

Butinsky turned into a kind of Strugin in the end, and the rabbi was a kind of Butinsky, a pied piper to Jewish weaklings whom he needed to kill his wife, and then there was Osama Bin Laden, in September 2001: Osama was on an entirely different level, sprung to full life, and for a short time as omnipresent as Hitler was to the generation of my parents.

I was spared the fate I should have known, and it's gratitude I feel. In my motherless adolescence at Cherry Lawn (Were there cherries on the lawn? I don't remember. I did pick cherries on the kibbutz) I read Gorky's autobiography, the Russians. Lying in the field, I smelled the cut grass and saw the country sky for the first time. My friend Robert Abady lay beside me, chewing on a blade of grass. Robert, my dapper French friend with his beret, who said, “You must get laid! This is simply ridiculous!” And led me, at 15, to the Upper West Side and the Cuban whore, her unbathed animal smell, Robert cheering me on, not leaving the room until the deed was done.

You learned when you were loved. Dr. Stael took me in: “Oh Michael,” I hear her now in her garden, twenty years after her death, that lilting voice, the Swedish massages on the porch where she taught us history and pounded us on the back in the snowy cold days of winter, vapors rising from our breaths. And Basil Burwell, the writing teacher who let me write in his classroom instead of going to gym. Bazz, the Irish playwright who danced in the fields and gave me that part in Twilight Bar, the only part I could play: the shy, introverted, silent, frightened poet wandering across the stage. They plucked me out, pushed me, saved me. Loved me, as I will love them to my last breath. They were my introduction to Western Civilization.

And the first girl I ever kissed, my neighbor across the roof, I had thought of her constantly: the way she pouted, her plum-like breasts in a tight orange sweater, her languid movements when she combed her hair and gazed at me.

This, in my apartment house on Whitney Avenue in Queens.

On the Israeli kibbutz, at twenty, Gideon, the young soldier—despite the gibes of the macho soldiers who didn't like it—took me aside, to the barracks, to the fields, guided me, welcomed me, advised me about the girls, the nice ones, the cruel ones, and when I left the kibbutz at the end of the summer, gave me a picture of himself, “to remember me.”

And the shrinks who would not let me fail, would not let me go, poor financial investment that I was. And Boris and Natasha Shragin, who had fled the Soviet Union. Boris, sweet-voiced, strong, short, roly-poly, with little bits of hair atop his head, scholar with a picture of Dostoyevsky on his mantel, who had risked death as a dissident. In Vermont I watched them hunting for mushrooms, running through the grass. Karen observed them smoking and drinking coffee all through the afternoon and said to me, “I have never seen people drink so much coffee in my whole life.” I loved them all and they loved me and they made me grasp life, even if I could not hold on to it. But I could never hold on to despair because of them. All People of the Book who stepped out of history to hold me and embrace me and not let me fall. Why have I been so lucky in this life, this Jew who came after the Holocaust—the world had expended its Jew hatred for a while, having gotten it out of its system—and seen such bountiful goodness, so much beauty, totally unsuitable beauty to make literature out of because it is unbelievable—so incredible it would be pointless to try to write a story about it.

X: Karen

And first among them was Karen, who nurtured me, loved me unconditionally with a bright, red, steadfast flame. Karen fed me, clothed me, encouraged me, stood by me, was loyal and faithful. And I love her as deeply now as I should have then. She brought out my stories. When I tested an an idea, a story, a poem, on Karen, her reaction gave me the courage to create, to keep on. Her response was my inspiration. Yes, it was Butinsky who asked me if it was possible that she loved me more than life itself. When I published a story, or a book, or won a prize, it was Karen who cried. In the earlier crazy days, if I'd been starving, she would have gone out and begged for me, a little drunk at the time yes, but still.

I always think of an onion as symbolizing the dilemma of my marriage to Karen. When we first came to New York from Vancouver, quitting our teaching jobs, Karen worked at a men's shelter on the Bowery giving out clothes to the men. There was no place in the building to eat lunch, so, although she had so little money, Karen would go down to McSorley's Ale House. She'd only have a beer, a piece of cheese and a whole onion. “It was fun,” she told me later, “the sawdust on the floor, the old men coming in from the sun and drinking at the bar in the twilight.”

For Karen, I somehow exemplified what she called “the glorious life of the artist.” For years she struggled with her desire to create. She would observe me writing and say, “You start flying in that heavenly way.” Or she would say, “You're hot now.” And it was true: I ran from room to room in my excitement getting my notes, and sometimes she had to get out of the way because I almost knocked her down. And in Vermont in the log cabin where we spent our summers, she came face to face with her inability to sustain the discipline to become an artist herself. She always thought I saw her as the enemy of my writing because of all the booze: “You think it's me and beer and sex versus you and beautiful literature,” she said.

We both loved that cabin. Once she said, “Last year after we returned to New York, I called the cabin for several days. No one answered. I kept thinking of the trees—they would hear the phone ringing.”

Lying beside her, cuddling, I said, “You feel good.” She replied, “We feel good to each other if not to ourselves.”

When she had failed to provide me with the cereal I wanted, she walked ten blocks in the rain and returned with it. “Why did you go to all that trouble?” I asked her. “Because you were heaving sighs,” she said.

When she was very sick with a cold, I heard her get up in the middle of the night, honking in the middle of the next room, her bare feet on the floor. “What's wrong?” I called.

“I needed to do some nose-blowing and throat clearing,” she said, “and I didn't want to wake you up.” And when I laughed aloud in a dream, she told me afterwards, “I lay absolutely frozen, terrified I would wake you out of it.”

A writer at a writers' colony once told me he was won over by his wife-to-be when he came up the four flights to his apartment and found her there pursuing him. She had jumped across empty space from another fire escape to the one that adjoined his window, and had broken the window to come in. This was the kind of woman he was drawn to, although he now complained about her endlessly to me.

And I flash to a college memory of Boston when a female student was a kind of semi-hooker or tease. She had a waiting area in the hallway of her apartment for the boys. I saw one boy there, sitting patiently, smoking his pipe and reading
Dissent
. I just never forgot that; the incongruity of it. Even the boys with pipes who read
Dissent
needed to get laid, and even in ways that might not be all that worthy of what they were as people.

And so I sat 25 years later in Dapper Dan's Burlesque with the girl on my knee, her boobs in my face, and I was holding my copy of
Dissent
.

And still, Karen's face lighting up radiantly and trustingly at the sight of me.

She said one night, “I had the loveliest dream that we were kissing on a balcony over the ocean and I was thinking, ‘Oh, this is so lovely.'”

A letter from Karen when I was in Jerusalem in 1989 researching and writing my novel about Stalin's murder of the Yiddish poets:

My Darling Michael,

Tonight I've planned how to complete my old painting, thought about the Butinskys, thought about myself and about you (we both seem extraordinarily clear and vivid to me at the moment, even though we're half a world apart), read a great deal about the Expressionists, and prepared a canvas for the new painting I want to do of Beth Butinsky. I want to tell you about how I somehow see you even more fully than usual right now. I know you're getting up up about now, or soon—Dawn in Jerusalem, in an old orthodox hotel! I see your face as though it's lit by a pink sunrise (although I don't suppose you really get up at dawn). How strange, that it's already tomorrow for you, and I'm nowhere near ready to go to sleep today. As I move around our apartment, I see sudden flashes of you, angles of you in books and things I hadn't noticed before:
The Prophet Armed: Trotsky
, 1879-1921;
Sinatra: L.A. Is My Lady; Tillie Olsen: Tell Me a Riddle
. I found Ralph Ellison's new introduction to
Invisible Man
you had xeroxed—with your underlines—and I read it. It brought back not only the novel I loved, and the man's face as we saw it, but also you:

Ellison: Details of old photographs and rhymes and riddles and children's games, church services and college ceremonies, practical jokes and political activities observed during my prewar days in Harlem all fell into place … Everything and anything appeared as grist for my fictional mill. Some speaking up clearly, saying “Use me right here,” while others were disturbingly mysterious.

I see you in all your seriousness of purpose, your total dedication, your (to me) astonishing discipline, your day and night inspirations and connections, your constant process of writing. I feel you in Israel, your excitement as you finally connect with those you want to write about, who you searched out and pursued against all odds. I feel it all falling into place, all coming together. And I know you'll be able to accomplish everything you've set out to do, now and always.

I love you more than ever. Goodnight and good morning, my love—

Karen

Like the tapes, I had never fully read this letter before. I had opened Karen's letter, I had opened the tapes, but I never really read or listened to them until now. I couldn't bear the emotions they ignited in me, that burning passion so hard to control. I always knew they were there, waiting for me. I was waiting for me.

But still, this doesn't convey all that I want to say about Karen. Of her purity of heart. Of her tenacity. Of going back to school after the endless days of working at hateful jobs and long commutes during the day and studying at night and taking care of me and Kevin. It's difficult to write about.

Harder to recall than the Rabbi who murdered his wife and who, after being convicted and facing capital punishment, pled for his life to the jury. Summoning up all his oratorical and oracular gifts from thirty years on the pulpit, smiling and gesticulating, really in his element, the Rabbi in a slick suit gave a 22-minute sermon from Genesis and Deuteronomy and his favorite soap opera and talked about fulfilling “all the days of our lives.” He segued to “the days of my life,” in which he promised to tutor young men and thus redeem “the days of their lives.” After all this sappy crap about the days of our, his and their lives, he went on to say that he had loved his wife, that she was “a class act” and created a terrific bakery out of nothing. He spoke so well, he looked so pleased with himself, it was as if he thought the jury would be so moved and touched and persuaded of his superior qualities that they would change their minds, take off his handcuffs, and, after giving him a standing ovation, allow him to walk out of the courtroom a free man and resume his life with the stripper he was courting and to whom he had given his dead wife's car.

This is how we experience our lives now, but it is not boring. How entertaining to write about. We immediately recognize the Rabbi's evil as ours, our neighbors', the undertow of our world.

My wife Karen has the courage of a lion and goodness with no subtext. She has repaired herself and has become a psychologist whose presence is cherished by her colleagues and patients. What crippled and inhibited her is gone. She looks directly at me; she listens; she is not afraid. Her physical beauty is more intense than when she was young. I watch her read in her reflective beauty and she is the person now I wanted then.

And me? I rose out of the rubble too.

XI: Where You're Terrific Even If You're Good

In the bitter life I had carved out for myself in New York, sticking tenaciously to the writing I loved was the only thing that mattered. There was a purity to it, I thought simply, looking at myself in the mirror. I sacrificed everything else, everything, to get it done. I liked to quote Faulkner: “The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. If a writer has to sell his grandmother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.”