The Houseguest (4 page)

SPIRO ORDERED A
bottle of cognac that cost nearly as much as his rent and smoked a stranger's Turkish cigarettes. He listened to an Austrian cabaret singer in a white turban sing the blues, drank until the room went soft, and then whispered compliments into the ear of a woman (he was fairly certain she was a woman) who raved about his accent and insisted on calling him Nigel.

At one point in the evening, he found Metzger at a dark table in the back of the cafe. There was a girl to his right, a girl to his left, one across from him. They were chorus girls but they looked like lazy cats, smoking languorously and whispering into each other's ears. They made quite a picture, but it wasn't the girls that struck him. It was the fact that, tucked away in this dark corner with them, Metzger seemed to hardly notice they were there. He wasn't lighting their cigarettes or ordering their drinks or playing footsie with all three under the table. He was doodling Committee advertisement copy on a cocktail napkin, turning the napkin this way, then that way, then flipping it over, then scraping his pen against the table to draw the ink. It was both touching and pathetic, and Spiro understood completely. This was the essential problem of his existence over the past three years: the way the work invaded, the impossibility of tuning it out. When Metzger finally glanced up, Spiro raised his mostly empty glass of cognac to him, then swallowed it down.

A few hours after midnight, he left to go home. When he stepped into his apartment, there were only a few hours remaining before dawn. He collapsed on the bed in the small, cold room. For a long time, he lay on top of the rumpled sheets in his undershirt, watching the slow rotation of the ceiling fan. He thought about the girl and he thought about the fire and he thought about his wife and children, how a few weeks earlier, after two and a half years of living on separate continents, his wife had sent him not a letter but a three-sentence telegram: H
AVE MET SOMEONE ELSE
—STOP—M
OVING WITH CHILDREN TO
H
AIFA
—STOP—F
ORGIVE ME AS
I'
VE FORGIVEN YOU
—STOP—. He read it in the doorway to his apartment with his cup of coffee. He read it again and again, kept thinking something was missing, that there must be more. He could not really believe that he had lost them, that in the face of his postponements and evasions, she had made the decision for them both. Now, lying alone, he felt her presence. When he closed his eyes, he could see her in the small bedroom of their cottage halfway around the world, her body curled around their daughter as she nursed the child to sleep. He could hear the soft thud of the lemons that fell into their yard all year long, rotting sweetly, seeping into the earth. He saw his wife and children and he saw the American girls' delicate shoulders, the rounded bones pressing out against their skin as they sipped their martinis and puffed their cigarettes and smiled and danced. He saw smoke rising from the sanctuary's domed roof and the news from cables coming out of Europe: Jewish corpses discarded on the street. That was his night. Incessant scatterings, bloody pages tossed into the air, there for him to peruse in the slowly failing dark.

When he woke, he wasn't sure he'd slept. He reached for the place on the nightstand where he normally placed his glasses and found them under the covers by his hip instead. Light was flooding the windows and someone was knocking loudly on the door.

3.

E
ARLY JUNE, BIRDS
singing, the sky wide and blue, the air dense with the scent of new poplars and cologne and tobacco smoke and peanuts and somewhere on the periphery, far enough to be ignored while still being acknowledged, the tang of horseshit. A perfect summer day and everyone in Saratoga seemed glad to be where they were except the horses, and maybe Max Hoffman—a man just clear of forty who somehow felt, sitting in the grandstand, as though he'd lived several lives already. It was on days like these away from the temple it came to him—the peculiarity of the arc of his life. No one was going to call him unhappy, least of all Max himself. It was a restlessness bearing a pathology. Durkheim called it anomie, his sister called it
shpilkes,
and Max . . . Max wasn't blessed with a gift for nomenclature. Max called it living.

“Now this race is all about Peach Tree,” said the man sitting next to him. He had been giving a running commentary since the first race without realizing that Max, or anyone around him, was paying him any attention. But now, to ease the anomie or
shpilkes
or just to enhance the lovely day, Max decided to listen.

“Peach Tree's gonna take it.”

“What makes you say that?”

The man turned to Max, startled enough to make Max think the man actually was aware that he had been talking to himself.

“Did you see him run last week? Against Market Wise? If he hadn't been put up next to a worldbeater he'd of run away with the whole shebang.”

He wiped at his neck with a kerchief. He gave Max a mischievous look that under different circumstances might have been interpreted differently.

“Fella I know knows the vets, fella said keep an eye on Peach Tree,” he said conspiratorially. He pointed at his own eye, then Max's. There was a stubby pressure that made Max recoil. He squinted down at the lanes and tried to find the horse the man was touting. It was no use. From such a distance, the thoroughbreds seemed as small as dogs and the jockeys looked like ants. Max let his eyes wander from the track to the lake inside it, to the canoe anchored at the center, painted blue in honor of the year's winner at Travers Stakes. The lake appeared smooth, silver, and still in the morning light, the boat skimming a slow circle across its surface. A cool fog hung high above the track, but the sun seared off more haze with every passing minute. Sitting there, it seemed to Max as though he were watching summer unfold around him, and for the first time in almost three months, his spirits rose. He was glad he'd gotten out of Utica for the day.

It was unease that had kept him moving, that morning when he'd gotten in his car, but also all his life. Chicago. Heidelberg. Paris. Lyon. New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary, then disgrace, then Utica, his home now for four years. At first it felt like circumstance or the wiles of a society he was not comfortable in, but at a certain point, perhaps on a rainy afternoon in February at the place where the Rhône and the Saone diverge, he began to think that this was a natural condition, a fate, for lack of a better word. Do not weep; do not wax indignant, Spinoza had said, so he didn't: a rabbi in a town so flung away it hardly seemed to exist. Now he was in Saratoga for the day, enjoying the feel of the sun on his face and the open air, watching people as he always did, trying to understand them. There were at least a thousand
souls around this track, men and women of different ages, different inclinations and stations, and yet what they all cared about right now were horses sprinting laps, stakes and bets and odds, the lure of a little quick cash.

“If you stay here until the seventh,” said the man beside him, “make sure to keep an eye on Jumpy Puppy.”

“Very aggressive-sounding,” said Max.

He pointed to the paper on his lap. “Says here she's a maniac, bred on nothing but cabbages and beets.”

“A Jewish racehorse. How could you go wrong?”

The man laughed. “You drive in from Albany?”

“Utica.”

“That's a trek, isn't it?”

“Everywhere's a trek from Utica.”

The fellow laughed again. It came easy to him. He wasn't a watcher but a
tummler,
a man meant to make noise.

“Those who've seen her run, Jumpy Puppy I mean, they are inspired.”

Max grinned.

“You're fooling yourself. It's all dumb luck. One horse runs faster than the others and the rest lose—there's no reason to it.”

The man stared off at the track; he gave a bland smile but didn't respond. The way Max's unease could spill into the day, into the jolly lives of others, was uncanny. It was a talent, really. A bell rang out across the bleachers, calling the jockeys to the paddock. “Nice chatting with you,” he said to the stranger.

HE ARRIVED BACK
in Utica late that afternoon to discover that a thunderstorm had struck in his absence, landing an armchair-sized hunk of elm tree in the middle of his porch. And in case that wasn't enough, there was also a letter from Max's sister waiting for him beneath the mail slot: “Dear Max,” it read, “Yoo-hoo? Yoo-hoo? It's
been months. I call every day. If you don't start answering your phone, I'm contacting the police. Where are you, baby brother?” While trying to weigh the urgency of each problem against his need for a shower, the floorboards above his head began to shake.

Max lived on the middle floor of a three-flat on Oneida Street. Above him lived a young widow named Mrs. Epstein. Her husband had been killed in an automobile accident a few years back, and she lived on the insurance money and the paychecks she earned working at the public library.
A quiet woman,
he'd thought at first as he watched her coming and going on her way to or from the library. She was pleasant and petite with a quick, nervous walk. He'd watch her hurrying down the sidewalk, hear her showering above his head, smell the fried eggs she prepared for herself most nights for dinner, and he'd feel a mild relief wash over him that he shared a roof with this quiet, inward woman—a partner in solitude. She was a good neighbor, almost invisible right up until a month ago, when she began bringing a man—a Canadian naval officer she'd met while visiting her sister in Buffalo—up to her apartment. Max had heard from the synagogue gossip that he was shipping overseas at summer's end, that in a few months' time he'd be braving German U-boats. Maybe it was because of his impending departure that there had been no courtship. The man hadn't started coming around to the house with flowers in hand, holding the car door open for the widow Epstein, and driving her off for an evening of dinner and dancing. No, he'd come to the house and lead her upstairs to her bedroom, and there they would stay, sometimes for a couple hours and sometimes for a couple days; then he'd leave, an unshaven walking heap, only to return a few days later and do it again. They were up there now—moaning, grunting, straining the integrity of the mattress springs and floorboards. He imagined the soft friction of their naked bodies, the bare skin against cool sheets, the flushed flesh, the entangled limbs, the tense torsos moving together like a single entity, a single pulse. The box spring pounded the bed frame. The grunting grew louder.

Max moved out of the living room to get away from it, trying to put distance between himself and the noise, but his location in the apartment hardly mattered. It was a small apartment. One bedroom, one office, a kitchen that was really just a hallway and a stove. More than enough for a bachelor, though. He had his books spread throughout, organized by language. German in the living room. English in the bedroom. Yiddish and Hebrew in his office. Often, he stacked them vertically, un-alphabetically. He liked not knowing where a particular volume was right away, the process of looking, letting his mind wander while he looked. He'd had a thought to reach for Hegel. Hegel seemed right on a sunny day. But who could deal with
Phänomenologie des Geistes
when two people were fucking right over your head? He let the book drop.

Sometimes wandering, he'd come across some forgotten memento—a picture of himself and his sister in their swimming outfits at 31st Street Beach; a pipe from his time in Hyde Park when he'd wanted so much to look like one of his distinguished professors and had tried (without success) to develop an affinity for tobacco; or a handkerchief once bequeathed to him by a prostitute in Berlin. He'd met her at a subterranean cafe. She had bobbed hair the color of corn husk and bright red lips. She knew he wasn't going to take her home but sat with him anyway, telling him about the family she'd left in a small town in Bavaria. What was it about him that made people feel free to confide, confess, unburden? He'd had this quality much of his life and still didn't understand. It was not a bad quality, he thought, and yet often it left him feeling wistful and lonely, even in good company. He sat in his office, tried to focus on his calendar, his list of calls to make that week.

Just as it began to quiet down upstairs, the phone began ringing, and, thinking it might be his sister, he hurried into the kitchen to answer it.

“Max Hoffman,” said the voice on the other end. “You've fled to the deepest part of the interior. Tracking you down was probably slightly easier than finding Colonel Kurtz.”

Max tried to place the voice. “I'm sorry. Who is this?”

“This is Radio Free Promised Land, Mr. Hoffman. This is the voice of sacred earth.”

Silence on the line. Max still couldn't quite identify the speaker but felt the need to steel himself against something nonetheless.

“It's Shmuel Spiro, Max.”

“Shmuel? I'm sorry I didn't recognize you.”

“You are forgiven, Max. Memory does almost as much damage to voices as it does to faces, don't you think?”

“It's been since, what,” Max wondered aloud, “Heidelberg?”

“Probably,” said Shmuel. “Probably, old friend.”

It was odd how someone like Shmuel could evolve in memory, how someone who was a decent enough friend at the time now seemed like an intimate, a person of great importance, allowed to slip away. You couldn't trip on a cobblestone in Heidelberg without tumbling into the arms of a leftist or agitator or revolutionary of some stripe—stripes that often changed color by the season or by the week. They met at a cafe swollen with Trotskyites and the next time they saw each other it was in the same setting but the Trotskyites had reincorporated as Mensheviks; later they became adherents of a Dadaist offshoot and espoused public nudity. For Max, these constantly mutating organizations and their central role in one's identity were disorienting, but Shmuel seemed to have no trouble shapeshifting in stride. Max could recall seeing Shmuel charm packs of unrehabilitated Boers and devout anarchists on the same evening. It was like watching a lion tamer who could also train elephants.

Their time in Heidelberg had only overlapped for a brief period. Just on the edge of tipping into something greater, both were lured away from the university, Max by Paris, his determination to write a novel no matter how badly it might turn out, his unexpected friendship with a few artistic types he'd discovered during a week in Biarritz, some British communists and Rhodesians and a stray German named
Hans who'd invited him into their enclave. This luring, he now knew, was a symptom of his habitual tendency to flight, but at the time it felt very much like its own singular event with specific tensions and unearned seriousness. In Paris, he'd set his mind to write a novel and he'd done it. He'd written a very bad novel, shamefully bad. He did not even need the scorn of an editor to tell him how bad it was. He accepted that he was not a writer but a scholar. But by then it was too late to return to Heidelberg.

What snagged Shmuel away from those classrooms in Heidelberg, Max later found out, was Ze'ev Jabotinsky's radical revisionist Zionism. The journalist turned revolutionary had come to give a talk one evening to a group of Zionist youth. People who knew him told Max the transformation was nearly instantaneous, Shmuel moving from gadfly to a man inhabited by purpose. No one could recall what Jabotinsky talked about that night. If anyone remembered the evening, it was for what it did to Shmuel Spiro. A few weeks later he returned to Palestine. A few months after that he was a pleasant, inarticulate shape in Hoffman's memory. After that, a name only evoked by the title of a book or the name of a philosopher.

“Heidelberg,” Spiro said. “Surely that was a former life, no?”

“It feels that way. Where are you calling from?”

“New York, as a matter of fact.”

“City?”

Max cringed at the stupidity of the question immediately, but Shmuel somehow intimidated him, made him nervous. Shmuel let it go by without mention or even a change in tone.

“That's right. Been pulling together some good men here, trying to organize from solid ground. We're working to pressure the Americans about the crisis.”

He paused for a moment. Hoffman thought was going to say more about what it was exactly he was organizing for, but instead he said, “I can't tell you how relieved I am to have found you, Max. When I heard
you'd left the city, I thought, this man has set off for something grand. Perhaps you'd gone to the woods to become the Jewish Thoreau. Maybe the mighty and mysterious minds of the US government had found a purpose for you. Never did I think of Utica, New York. What is there, Max? I can only conceive of two reasons: one is a very fertile woman of extraordinary wealth, the other is that you've founded some sort of radical theological institute where no one can bother you.”

“I took a position at a synagogue in town. Nothing fancy.”

“A position? What sort of position?”

“Well, I'm a rabbi, Shmuel. I have a congregation.”

There was a long pause. “This is fascinating news.” The silence that followed humbled Max. It seemed to encapsulate everything he had not done since he had known Shmuel in Germany.