The Other Side of the World (2 page)

The man warned my father not to be a professor smart-ass, made a fist, and said the only reason he'd been holding back till then was because he didn't like to hit little old men. At this point, my father, who was five-foot-six and weighed perhaps one-fifty, stepped forward and pointed to the ceiling. “Well, look at that,” he said, and as soon as the man looked up, my father stomped down hard on one of the man's feet, and let loose with a swift one-two combination to the guy's mid-section. When the man doubled over, my father gave him a terrific roundhouse chop to the side of the head that dropped him straight to the floor.

“In my youth, you see,” my father said, and without breathing hard, “I studied at the Flatbush Boys Club with the great champion Lew Tendler, who himself had learned the trade, in and out of the ring, from the immortal Benny Leonard.”

The man opened his eyes, but stayed where he was while my father advised him never to discount the benefits of a good education in teaching us that the use of verbal insults against those we deem inferior only served to reveal our own ignorant shortcomings.

After word of the incident got around, my father became a hero to my friends, who, when they hung out at our house, would ask him for boxing tips, and it turned out that my father knew more than a little bit about the sport. He had published a novel,
Prizefighter
, when he was in his twenties, and it was based in part on the life of Barney Ross, a Jewish boxing champion who'd also been a war hero, and had, from the morphine they gave him for pain when he was wounded, become a drug addict, and then a recovered drug addict. My father had been a pretty good bantamweight himself in Police Athletic League competitions, though he never did A.A.U. or Golden Gloves, and when my friends asked, he'd offer them basic stuff about feints and
jabs and being alert to an opponent's weaknesses, and, using Ross as an example, about the will to win, which derived, he asserted, from fighting for something larger than yourself.

My father told us Ross's story: how Ross's father was a Talmudic scholar who owned a grocery store in Chicago and was killed by gangsters in a hold-up, and how the family was made so poor by the father's death that two of Ross's brothers, along with his sister, were placed in an orphanage. The result was that whenever Ross was in the ring, he'd imagine he was fighting against his father's murderers, and when he won the first of his three world championships, he used the prize money to rescue his brothers and sister from the orphanage.

After he'd finish telling us about Ross—or about Tendler, or Leonard, or “Kid” Kaplan, or Abe Attell, or Daniel Mendoza, or other great Jewish fighters—and after he'd given us a few pointers, he'd stop, hold up an index finger to indicate that the most important advice was coming, and then touch his tongue with his finger and emphasize that because it could produce words that allowed you to avoid a fight, or if you had to fight, that allowed you to
distract
your opponent, the tongue remained far and away your most important weapon.

“And always, always,” he would add, “be kind—fight as hard as you can, but at the same time don't forget to nurture the kindness in your heart, the way Barney Ross did”—and one time when he gave out the saying, a friend asked if it was from Ross, and my father said no, that it was from Philo, and my friend asked who Philo was, and my father explained that Philo had been a philosopher from Alexandria who lived about fifty years before Christ, was known as Philo-the-Jew, and had been instrumental in the founding of Christianity by having combined elements of Greek mystery religions with Jewish theology.

My father usually had answers to most questions my friends asked, and if he didn't, he'd say, “Now that's an interesting question—may I get back to you on it?” In truth, I grew up in awe
not so much of things like his boxing expertise, but of his mind, of its sheer range and intelligence, though he would dismiss praise from me and others by acknowledging that yes, maybe he had a few smarts, but if he did they were merely a result of the lucky genetic hand he'd drawn at birth.

In this, he said, he liked to think he had something in common with James Michener, though my father's own writing—the one novel, along with a few short stories, and two books about other writers (Henry James and Willa Cather)—could not, of course, compare with Michener's work, either in output or style. Although Michener had a low reputation among academics, my father considered him ‘a great humanist,' and would outrage his colleagues—something he never minded doing—by teaching a course every few semesters on Michener's essays and novels.

He owned all of Michener's more than fifty books, many of them real door-stoppers, along with copies of some of his screenplays, and to encourage students, he would point out that Michener (whom he referred to as ‘the Rabbi Akiba of fiction') hadn't published his first book until he was past forty years old. He may not have been the greatest prose stylist, my father would say—something Michener himself readily conceded—but his books were richly informed, made readers of millions of people, and were—their great distinction—unlike those of any other writer, living or dead.

Like Michener, who never used researchers until he was hooked up to dialysis machines in his last years, my father was gifted with a photographic memory: if he read a page once, he had only to relax enough to locate the page somewhere in his mind and the sentences would be there for him. What helped make things easy between us was that it never seemed to bother him that I wasn't drawn to matters intellectual or literary, and clear, too, early on, that I lacked not only his intelligence, but his phenomenal memory. Nor was I a particularly good student—I worked hard to get a B average in high school, and at UMass,
where I was a business major, I worked even harder to get a three-point average. Still, as long as I applied myself, did the best I could, and, what my father considered most important of all—remained curious about the world—he seemed satisfied.

“The wonderful thing about you, Charlie,” he said to me on the afternoon of my college graduation—repeating what he'd said on previous such occasions: my Bar Mitzvah, my graduations from junior high and high school, and what he'd say each time I started a new job or brought home a new girlfriend—“the wonderful thing about you is that you've never disappointed me.”

Sometimes I wondered why. It wasn't that I'd screwed up so terribly, but more that I'd never succeeded especially well at any one thing: I hadn't married, or bought a house or an apartment, or made a ton of money, or—the nut of the thing—ever really had any clear idea of what I wanted
to
do with my life. More to the point, and what worried
me
from time to time: I'd never had much of a desire to do anything in particular with my life.

When I'd say this to him—that I sometimes wished I was more like this person or that person—friends who'd become doctors or lawyers or teachers or businessmen, who owned homes and had kids and the rest—he would seem puzzled. Why did I compare myself to others? Think of yourself as having taken the scenic route, he'd say. Or he'd tell me that in this I was really just a quintessential man of my times—a free agent, much like those professional athletes who moved to different teams and cities every few years. And weren't we, after all,
all
free agents these days?

He was forever alert to the ways others might compare me to him, so that the testimonials to my character I'd get from him through the years, which he must have thought would alleviate my insecurities (they never did) went essentially like this: That I was a fine young man leading a life unlike the lives of most of
my contemporaries—that I had not lost my capacity for joy, that my values were sound, and that I remained open to possibility.

Big deal, I'd think. Or, when I was in a better mood, “Words words words,” I'd say back to him, at which response he'd smile, and say something about the apple not falling far from the pear tree, but it was this kind of perpetual cheerfulness, along with his seeming blindness to the ways in which I was a fuck-up, that often irritated me. By the time I was in my mid to late twenties, his words of praise, along with the repeated injunction to be kind to everybody, especially when it came to the shits of the world, left me pretty cold. Why be kind to people who were mean and fucked over other people? Why forgive people for unforgivable acts? For all his sophistication and shrewdness—his incredible knack, especially when it came to women and books, to discerning crap from quality—he also had a surprising willingness to suffer fools gladly.

I must have seen myself as one of those fools, since I had a fairly well-developed talent for depriving myself of those things—like sticking with interesting women who actually
liked
me, or making sure to spend more time with Max—that might have offered more focus and direction—
and
more comfort and joy. Thus my tendency to change jobs (and girlfriends) regularly, to find jobs as far from home as I could, and to stay away from home for years at a time.

There was something about the tag sale, though, and, more, about Seana moving in—she wasn't much older than several women I'd gone with—that pushed me to say things to him I'd never been able to say before: that though I was glad things were going well, and I didn't want to piss on his new parade, there seemed something
unreal
about his endless good cheer. Especially, I wrote, given how much loss he'd experienced. For starters, there was the fact that his first wife (my mom) had ditched him (and me), and that two of his other four wives had died on him, so how come, I asked, there was no
acknowledgement—not even when he was raising me by himself, and there wasn't even a housekeeper around to help—of just how lousy and encumbered a lot of his life must have been?

“Well, Charlie,” he wrote back, “'twas not ever thus, let me assure you…” He understood why I might be puzzled by the ways he showed himself forth in the world, but what he'd come to believe had allowed him to be so cheerful, to use my word (
healthy-minded
was the term he preferred), as he thought he'd made clear on several occasions—but perhaps I hadn't been paying attention, he wrote, or had chosen not to pay attention—had to do with a period of considerable darkness in his life, a period that began a few months before my first birthday during which he'd come as close as one could to choosing to leave this world.

Because I'd been an infant at the time, I would of course possess no conscious memory of this moment—one he'd come to think of as his missing year (an admittedly foolish way of thinking of it, he noted, since it was anything but missing)—yet once he'd survived the year, an enormous clump of feelings and fears—of debilitating vexations—that had previously bothered him were, for the most part, deprived of their power.

That was the sum of what he wrote, without giving any details (in a postscript he noted that the period he referred to lasted fourteen months and three days, but that there was a certain pleasurable tidiness for him in thinking of it as a single year), and so I found myself wondering if he'd written about this period of his life, and if Seana had found any of it in the stuff she'd taken from him.

 

When I woke up on my first day home—the trip took a full twenty-four hours (to avoid Hong Kong, I flew via Tokyo and landed at JFK in New York, then took limo service to Northampton)—Seana was sitting next to me on the side of the bed, looking more beautiful than ever. She had been out of the
house when I'd arrived, doing research at the local library, so I had no idea how long she'd been there watching me sleep.

The last time I'd seen her had been nine or ten years before, in Chicago, where I'd been working for an insurance company as an auto accident appraiser. I'd shown up at a reading she was giving at a downtown bookstore for her second novel,
Plain Jane
, which was about an American woman in her mid-thirties who, after a divorce and an abortion, takes a job teaching art to teenagers at an international school in southern France, and becomes romantically involved with the headmaster. It was based, in part, on
Jane Eyre
—the headmaster is married, and his wife, a gifted painter who suffers from bouts of depression and mania, lives in seclusion in a cottage near the school—but, as Seana made clear in the question-and-answer period after the reading, when she reminded the audience that instead of
marrying
the headmaster, her heroine
murders
him and gets away with it—‘Reader, I buried him,' was the book's opening line—her novel was intended not as homage to Charlotte Brontë, but as Seana's way of using a situation she found intrinsically intriguing—another one of O'Sullivan's triangles, she allowed—to get at the dark side of matters that, in her opinion, Brontë had turned into sentimental nonsense. ‘Mawkish' was the word she used to describe Brontë's book, and afterwards—we had drinks together in her hotel's bar—she confided that although what gave her the most pleasure in life was the act of writing itself, she did love getting a rise out of audiences by being mildly
outré
.

“
Outré
?” I asked.

“Outrageous, eccentric,” she said. She was aware that people thought her books weird, which didn't hurt sales, and the good sales gave her the freedom to write what she wanted to write, and to live the way she wanted to live. The truth, though, was that she never thought of her books as being weird.

“I'm essentially a realist,” she said, after which, watching for my response—which was no response at all, since even if I'd
been sober at the time, I don't think I would have understood what she meant about
Triangle
or
Plain Jane
being
realistic
novels—she began giggling. Then she leaned toward me and kissed me on the mouth, very gently, and I was so stunned that all I could do was sit there and grin. “You can kiss me back if you'd like,” she said, and I did, and we kissed for a long time until, a finger to my forehead, she pushed me away from her. “That was very good, Charlie,” she said, and she wished me sweet dreams, and left.