The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (8 page)

“I’m twenty-one,” I lied.

“But a mature gentleman like you, with nothing in the model department, he’s desperate for someone, some thing, to create his life around.” She hung onto my arm as if I were the strong one. “So what is it like, being alone?”

“It’s okay.”

“I wasn’t looking for a value judgment—okay, not so good, medium, terrific. I asked for a description.”

“You do this to all your patients?”

“They should be so fucking lucky,” she said. “Take all the time to answer until we get to Seventy-Third.”

I believed her about the patients. I would have believed her if she said she was Sandy Koufax and was just going off to pitch a perfect game. But we were walking at her pace: Seventy-Third was fast approaching—there was no time for evasion or, I realized, need. “It feels like shit,” I said. “It feels like I’m my own species, that whatever I do I’ll never find anyone who...”

“Go ahead. Say it.”

“Who cares about me and is worth caring for.”

We were at Seventieth, at the corner. Waiting for the light to change.

“Well, I can’t say you’re unable to articulate. That’s a big help.”

“It’d be a bigger help if I had someone to articulate to.” I paused in speech just as the light changed and we continued to walk. “I’ve been reading since I was a little kid.”

“Solace.”

“No. Yes. Maybe,” I said. “But it was more like a search. You open a book you open a life. You try to see if there’s a... a model there. Something that makes sense for you. For me. You want to see if there’s a way. But there isn’t any. You know,
The Great Gatsby
, that’s my favorite book, but it’s not a road map. It’s like La Rochefoucauld—a sketchbook. You think your brother knows French, or he just learned the one phrase phonetically?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Maybe it’s the same subject,” I said. “I got kind of kidnapped into this with your brother. Shanghaied. Suddenly I wake up and I’m on a ship and it’s heading for some strange port and I’m signed on. There’s my signature. Whether it is or it isn’t, there’s not much I can do about it now. So I’m suddenly in someone else’s life and, you know what, it’s a hell of a lot better than my own. I mean, where was I going? Two days ago I called this guy, a professor at college, who is supposed to supervise my honors program. You know, we meet every month or so and he buys me lunch and we have a beer and bullshit about literature. So I tell him, Professor del Vecchio, I’m so sorry. I won’t be able to make it tomorrow. There’s a death in the family. And he says, Someone close? You know what I told him?”

“Your mother,” Terri said.

I stopped dead in the street, right there in mid-block in front of an estate-jewelry store and a florist. “How did you know?”

“Maybe I’m not as stupid as I look.”

“You don’t look stupid.”

“No?”

“You look wonderful. You look smart, direct, no-bullshit honest. You look like heaven in bed.”

She smiled, the twin fish of her mouth moving in opposite directions so that the entire bottom of her face seemed to be opening, welcoming me in. “Right on all counts,” she said. “Tell me something, Russell. How do feel about vaginas?’

“Vaginas?” We were standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, the entire Upper East Side flowing around us. From somewhere far away I heard a car horn sound, then fade. “Vaginas?”

“You know,” she said, looking me in the eye. She wore heels, but still had to tilt her chin, almost as though offering her lips.

I was close enough to see a tiny chip of lipstick coating the top of one of her bottom teeth. “I like them.”

“Do you love them?”

I shrugged, my smile deepening. “Guilty as charged,” I said. “Okay, I love them. I love vaginas.”

“How do you love them?”

“There’s more than one way?”

“You love how they look, how they feel? How they smell? You like a nice hot smelly vagina, Russell?”

“You know what Napoleon wrote to Josephine from Egypt? ‘Coming home—don’t wash.’”

“You really feel that way?”

I felt like the luckiest man alive. “Yeah. I do. I love vaginas.”

Terri leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, holding her lips there for what seemed to be forever. Then she took a half-step back and looked me directly in the eye. “So do I,” she said. Taking my hand, she raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “You can’t grow a vagina, can you, Russell?”

“I can’t even try.”

“You know what I said? That there are two ways out for you. The first—”

“Spilling my gut for a year on a couch.”

“The couch is optional, and a little old-fashioned, but yes, a year at least. Maybe ten.”

“And the other way?”

“Do something.”

“I just tried, and got... rebuffed. Unmuffed, maybe. Turned down.”

“You tried to make me into another woman who is supposed to give you comfort, solace, direction even. When that doesn’t happen according to your needs, your bottomless needs, you go looking for the next. No, I mean
do
something. As a man.”

“And women doesn’t count?”

“Not for you,” she said, putting down my hand with such tenderness it was as if it would break if she let it go too abruptly. “As a man.”

“As a man?”

She stepped away, then as she turned said it so quietly I almost did not hear the words. “Among men,” she said, and continued down the street, leaving me looking after her, as much unsure of what she meant as sure that she was right.

Eugene del Vecchio, head of the Honors Program at Brooklyn College, was a translator of Macchiavelli and Bembo, and a poet whose work I had read in anthologies when I was still in high school. A tall man with tumbles of prematurely gray hair over a craggy face, half-frame tortoiseshell glasses always slipping down the slope of a seriously Roman nose, he spoke in the same lovely mutated English I had learned on the streets of Brooklyn—his acquired in Bensonhurst, a rather more pleasant area of trim attached single-family homes, each with its own concrete virgin in the postage-stamp front yard. Professor del Vecchio followed professional football, had boxed as a youth, and worshipped Hemingway (whose death by suicide two years earlier caused him much public grief, and provided fodder for a string of poems and a couple of essays). He was in short no one’s clichéd idea of an aesthete, a college professor or a homosexual. He was also no one’s idea, especially not mine, of someone who might be found sitting on a couch in Shushan Cats’ suite at the Westbury. He rose when Ira let me in. Myra was gone.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Professor del Vecchio said with that familiar mixture of the wise and the street-wise, each peculiar enunciation coming through clearly, a spoken palimpsest, one sound overlapping the next.
Palimpsest
was in fact one of Professor del Vecchio’s favorite terms, along with
villanelle
and
sestina
. He took my hand, pulled me close to him until I could smell the scent he used, some sort of bottled musk, part tobacco, part bay leaf. “Truly a tragedy.”

I looked to Shushan, seated on his crate as though it were a throne. Whoever had devised this Jewish tradition of ritualized discomfort during mourning never considered the possibilities hidden in the term
hard-ass.
Shushan was thriving. He’d probably gain weight on a diet of grubs and water. The man was even tougher, I thought, than his reputation, which was not saying a little. His dark eyes, aglow with beneficence, seemed to shower blessings. It was hard to believe this Shushan Cats would next week stand trial on a laundry list of felony indictments.

“Mr. Cats must have told you it’s
his
mother who passed away,” I said after del Vecchio released me. “Probably a mix-up on the phone.”

“Oh, there wasn’t any, Russell,” the professor said. “I wouldn’t take anyone into the Honors Program without knowing his family background, love of animals, if and how much he or she drinks, does dope. That kind of thing. Hell, I interviewed your high-school English teachers. A brilliant orphan, they said. I don’t get too many of either brilliant or orphans. So I remembered.”

I was growing tired of this orphan stuff. I had never traded on it, and didn’t want to start now. It was cheap. “How did you...”

“You phoned and left a number. So I rang you back.”

“So...”

“So I thought it a bit strange you were calling from a hotel, though perhaps not so strange because your mother had after all died many years ago. I rang back and asked the desk where the Westbury was. And here I am.”

Shushan was clearly delighted by this. “And here he is,” he said. “An unexpected visitor is always nice,” he explained, then revised. “Usually. And a professor. That’s more unexpected than normal. Russy, you keep surprising me to the good. Now I got a new friend in Del. And Del knows his stuff.”

“Del?” I said.

“My friends call me Del,” the professor said. “You’re welcome to as well.”

“Del,” I said. “I’ve known you three years and it’s been Professor del Vecchio, and you’re here what fifteen minutes—”

“Almost an hour,” Shushan said. “Came in just as you and Esther left. She okay?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, wondering idly what he knew of his sister’s sexual orientation. “Del. Okay,
Del
, how come you’re here—I mean, seeing as how you knew I was bullshitting you.”

Del shrugged good naturedly. He was drinking Scotch, neat. This was turning out to be a hell of a mourning period. Aside from Ira, who had all the
joie de vivre
of a tire iron, everyone was drinking, laughing, goofing around. I wondered if my own mother’s
shiva
had been like this. My father’s wasn’t. Del—how peculiar it was to call him that—put up his hand as if to stop me from going too far. “I knew it was
something
, so I came. I don’t have too many students like you, Russell. You probably don’t know that.”

“You came to catch me in a lie.”

“I figured
somebody
died,” he said. “And I now learn you delivered the eulogy—”

“Beautiful,” Shushan said. “Everyone was crying.”

“You wrote it.”

“Yeah, Russy, so I’m Shakespeare and you’re Richard Burton. What’s the diff? Next time I got a funeral I’ll get Del here to write the eulogy and you’ll read it and then I won’t even be involved. Del’s a hell of a poet, did you know that? I have his book.”

“Which one?” Del said.

“
Forms of Remorse
,” Shushan said. “I like the one that begins ‘The telephone is an engine of unpassion, reducing...’”

“Reducing apocalypse to noise,” Del finished. “That one I still like. Most of the others, eh.”

“Don’t say that,” Shushan said. “Which one you like, kid?”

Kid didn’t like any of them. And he did not like being grilled by a gangster on a poet’s work with the poet grinning on the opposite couch. “They’re all... great.”

“You ever read any?”

“Shushan, I never read none.”

Shushan laughed. “Kid’s got balls, I’ll tell you that. Thinks he can make fun of my English right in front of my face.”

“Better than behind your back,” Del said. “He’s not like that. Though I’m pretty sure he writes his term papers in the last week of the term.”

“What’s the difference when I write them? You like them.”

“I like them more than my other students’—but I think you could do better. You’re coasting.”

“So?”

“So coast,” Del said. “But don’t expect to get a great education out of it, only the minimum. You finish reading
Huckleberry Finn
?”

“I read it when I was twelve—”

“You’re not twelve now. You must have missed a lot.”

“And when I was fourteen. And when I was sixteen, during another
shiva
, as it happens. You’re right, professor. It’s not the same when you’re a kid.
Tom Sawyer
, that’s a kid’s book you read once. But
Huckleberry Finn
you could keep reading forever.”

“I’m gratified you feel that way.”

“But I do know the book. I mean I know it intimately. I could write a paper right now.”

“You could write a paper now?” Shushan said. “On
Huckleberry Finn
?”

“Sure.”

“Could you write it on the seventeen fucking accents and dialects in it, or the place of theater, or Nigger Jim’s options, or the resolution of sequence, like when...” Shushan stopped. “What’d I do? Russy, shut your mouth a fly will come in.”

Finally I had to speak. “What is it with you, Shushan? Are you a gangster or what? Every time I look up there’s another literary reference fired off, another allusion. Professor del Vecch—
Del
, an hour ago this guy was quoting La Rochefoucauld to a couple of gumshoes—”

“The elder or the son?”

“Père,” Shushan said. “To my mind, the son was nothing.”

“I concur,” Del said.

“Père? Would you two just cut it out!” I was livid. “What kind of bullshit gangster quotes a French aphorist of the seventeenth century—in French? The only good part of this is you both have it wrong. The one you call the son was born in the mid-
eighteenth
century, about seventy years after the original one died.”

“They were both
duc
though,” Shushan said. “Like Snyder.”

“Probably grandson,” Del added. “I always assumed...”

“You assumed fucking wrong,” I said. “How can you be the head of an honors program if you don’t know La Rochefoucauld? And how can
you
be a fucking gangster if you do?”

Maybe I would have gone off further on them—it was as if everything I’d known was upside down—but the door-buzzer sounded and we all turned to watch in a moment of blessed silence as Ira looked through the peephole and unlocked the door. Like a mastiff with a razor-line mustache, he seemed only to come alive when there was a question of defending his owner. Great, I thought, now we’re going to have four members of the Harlem head-bangers who will give us a fucking
a capella
rendition of Handel’s
The Trout
while simultaneously proving Fermat’s Last Theorem on the opened white handkerchiefs from their breast pockets. Wasn’t anything what it seemed, or what it should be?