Twice Told Tales

by Daniel Stern

  Katherine Eudemie’s therapist was a woman who smoked cigarette after cigarette, a bad sign Katherine thought. “Listen,” she said, “I’m not sure this is going to work out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Remember the time I told you about, when I left my child at the hat check room of the Russian Rendezvous?”

  “I remember that time, yes.”

  “Those times!”

  “Oh …”

  “Yes.”

  “You left her or ‘forgot’ her?”

  “The first time, definitely forgot. The second time, pretty surely. The last few it became a kind of collaboration. The women in the hat check room seem to like taking care of Tulip. But it scares me. That’s why I’m not sure this is going to work out.”

  “What is ‘this’?”

  “The treatment, the training. I’m a patient, not vice-versa.”

  “You know, you shouldn’t confuse what we’re doing here with a classical, full-fledged Training Analysis. There is a certain way of life in America’s Big Cities, New York, Chicago, L.A. (the therapist had a way of speaking in capital letters which unnerved Katherine), in which people like you and I—writers whose careers disappoint, actresses whose parts never quite get recognized, the wives of successful painters who feel overlooked, mothers who have survived mortal combat with their daughters who are now off in College—all of us having had lots of treatment of different kinds, decide to become therapists. It’s as much a statement about the impossibility of being a Middle-Class Woman in Modern America as it is a fresh career start.” Pause to light a new cigarette from the embers of the old. Katherine sits, stunned. “I’m telling you all this to lower your expectations. You’re not going to be a Healthy Individual Curing Patients.”

  “Then—what?”

  “You’re going to understand a little more about yourself and spend your time more fruitfully than hanging around waiting for your next novel to be rejected. You’ll help some patients and not others and you’ll earn money, maybe even a living. Best of all, you’ll be doing actively to others what you experienced passively for so many years.”

  “What’s that?”

  “TREATMENT!”

  “Even if I’m so crazy myself?”

  “You said the others at the restaurant were collaborating with you in this.”

  “Yes …”

  “So who’s crazy, you or them or everybody? We’re talking about the text you’re studying: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Everybody is disappointed in something from infancy on—everybody has a vested interest in forgetting, distorting, or ignoring reality so that it feels better for the moment. This gets worse as the years mount up.”

  “Is that what’s going on here?”

  “That’s what’s going on here.”

  “Ah …”

  She stubbed a cigarette out in a flash of red and said, in her Feminist Voice: “It’s a General Breakdown, but as always Women lead the way.”

  “Ah …” Katherine said again. She felt better.

  Myrna, too, felt better, central after years of feeling peripheral. She was the only one feeling better. As the summer burned toward mid-August, the desired pre-fall upturn in business did not happen. Krasner tallied lunch totals and Lew pondered a new advertising campaign, but he was too paralyzed by his troubles to take effective action. Paul’s lawyers made rumbling noises in the background.

  It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the story of Tulip, Katherine Eudemie, and the Russian Rendezvous began to make its way into the air. There’s always such a moment; it may be created by random gossip, by observation, or by someone purposely spreading the story for reasons of their own. It is already making the rounds when Jackson Eudemie enters his old hangout, the Russian Rendezvous, and the central action of the story, carrying a suitcase and looking for Lew Krale.

  “It’s been a long time, Jackson,” Lew said. “Put your suitcase in the check room.”

  “No thanks, I’ll hold onto it. How are you Lew?”

  “No way you’d know,” Lew said with typical tact. “What’ll you have?”

  “It’s a little early in the day,” Jackson Eudemie said. “I’ll have some tea.”

  “Misha,” Lew said. “One tea and one Scotch.”

  “Two teas coming up!”

  “Dammit, Morris! If that’s you—a tea and a Scotch or I’ll eat your bones for dinner.”

  Then, to Jackson, with ominous weight, “So, stranger …”

  “Listen, Lew,” Jackson Eudemie said, “My life’s different, now.”

  “You mean money?”

  “Right.”

  “Wrong. You know I never gave a damn about your bills. Think about all those nights we closed this place, together. You wrote a whole novel here on the arm.”

  “It’s different when you’re married.”

  “Hold it,” Lew said. “Harold was married, Zero was married …”

  “There’s married and there’s married,” Jackson Eudemie said. “They were married. I got married.”

  “I know,” Lew said, defeated. “But don’t use the money as an excuse for vanishing from the scene.”

  “It’s mainly that Katherine is in trouble—and there’s my kid …”

  “I know,” Lew said to his glass.

  “You’re a bachelor, Lew, you’ll understand. I never thought I’d get married. The thing was to be a great writer. But it all got reversed. I’m a married man who’s a small-fry litterateur.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “A literary man of small caliber. My father used to own guns. They scared the hell out of me. But so did my father. Well, if I were a pistol, I’d be a .22; not even a .38 and certainly not a .45; just a .22.”

  Lew was thoughtful. “I don’t think there’s any such weapon as a .22 pistol. I think that’s a kid’s air rifle—but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  “Aha!” Jackson said. “You see my point. Here I am—a nonexistent .22 caliber anthologist, trying to be a responsible family man with a wife who was—albeit briefly—a .45 pistol, dynamite on the scene … Then the dynamite turns wet … she has a baby … then after a time turns desperate … even a little strange … I’ll tell you, Lew, there’s more going on …”

  “Oh?”

  “She’s not up to the mark.”

  “I got the idea,” Lew said.

  “No … she’s not well. We don’t know everything yet—but something serious may be happening.”

  “Shit,” Lew said.

  “I’m worried.”

  Not knowing what else to say, Lew said, “How is it with you two?”

  “Off … way off … It has been for years. Long before this medical stuff started. I got married for the wrong reasons.”

  “That’s a membership in a very large club.”

  “She was so pretty and so ready to eat up New York. Then she got eaten up … Maybe I will have a drink …”

  “Have a Moscow Mule for old time’s sake. Morris,” Lew called out, then said, “Never marry a disappointed person.”

  “People aren’t born disappointed. Things don’t pan out. Then comes regret and it poisons everything.”

  Lew nodded and kept his peace.

  “I used to have low expectations of life,” Jackson said.

  “A wonderful way to be.”

  “I didn’t know what to expect of marriage. But it started to go bad long before this new stuff—leaving Tulip, trying to become a therapist.”

  “A what? I thought she was always on the couch herself?”

  “Don’t be so surprised. Patients and therapists are like the cops and the Mafia. Two sides of the same coin.”

  “Too glib, Jackson,” Lew said. “Norman Mailer baloney.”

  “Katherine has a thing for Mailer. She says he’s a part Jew, the same as her.”

  “As she,” Lew said.

  “Okay, Professor.”

  “And Mailer is all Jewish. All Brooklyn.”

  “I know what she means.
He’s Jewish but doesn’t really care to be.”

  “And your wife?”

  “You don’t know what it’s like to live with a mid-western Wasp woman who thinks the sun rises and sets on New York Jewish intellectuals and writers.”

  “A pretty good group, all in all,” Lew said.

  “FANTASTIC!” Jackson cried out. “Who’s going to argue with Delmore Schwartz or Bernard Malamud or Lionel Trilling … ? I can’t argue BUT I CAN’T BE ONE OF THEM, EITHER!”

  “Take it easy, Jackson …”

  “I do, I do, that’s the trouble. Real easy. My style is light and I am not filled with angst …”

  “What is angst?” Lew asked. “I see it printed all the time and I never think to look it up.”

  “Don’t worry—you’ve got plenty. It’s just the German word for anxiety with a capital A. Which doesn’t mean that only Jews have it.” No culture without anxiety. “We had culture,” Jackson said. “My father, Insurance Man, Canadian Goy, but we were poor. Jews don’t have a monopoly on poverty, you know.”

  “You were talking about culture.” Lew was wary now.

  “Before stereo, before hi-fi, we had a phonograph—a shabby street in Vancouver but we had chamber music records. My parents bought sets of Dickens and Mark Twain from the local newspaper with coupons, book by book. Sunday afternoons, Schubert’s C Major Quintet blooming in the air, me as confused as any Jewish adolescent intellectual … masturbating as much as Phillip Roth …”

  “This is some club you feel so left out of,” Lew said.

  “Only since Katherine. I came to New York. She came to New York. But it was different.”

  “All immigrants.”

  “But she came looking for her Jews.”

  “No shortage here. They thin us out a lot, most other places.”

  “It hurts, Lew, being married to a woman who has energy and talent and who thinks I’m some Canadian variety of white bread.”

  “Is it true? Are you?”

  “No! There’ve been times when I thought I was going insane …”

  “That’s good. Check one.”

  “Times when I thought I’d written something pretty damned fine.”

  “Check two,” Lew said. “But you may just have it all backwards. What you need to qualify are times when you thought you were the only sane person in the world.”

  Jackson shook his head, hopeless.

  Lew went on. “Times when you thought you’d written the worst piece of drek ever put on paper?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry, Jackson.” Lew says, solemn. “You’re just a little too comfortable in your skin.”

  “I’ve written twelve books. Okay, edited …”

  “Forget it!”

  “I had a poem in The Hudson Review when I was a senior at Yale.”

  “No dice.”

  “I don’t drink—hardly at all.”

  “Give it up!”

  “What’s the matter, Lew. You think I’m too dumb?”

  Lew clutches his forehead. “Are you kidding?” he says. “Do you know how many words there are in Yiddish for a dope?”

  “No idea.”

  “A million. Did you ever hear of a yutz?”

  “No.”

  “A yold?”

  More astonishment. “No!”

  “You see what a sheltered life you’ve had. A schmuck?”

  “That one I know.”

  “Not fair. That’s in the language by now. How about a naar?”

  “A what?”

  “Drop it, Jackson. If you knew them all, it wouldn’t make any difference. Frankly, even if you were Jewish, you wouldn’t be Jewish.”

  Jackson is dazed by how close to the bone this discussion of his fate has come. Katherine found, Katherine lost; the shadow-Jew he could not be … He murmurs, “You don’t know how it hurts …”

  “Pain I know,” Lew says. “Everybody has pain. But you have to face it, my friend. YOU ARE AT EASE IN ZION.”

  Jackson stood up. In spite of his sober claims, the floor was unsteady.

  “I’m sorry,” Lew said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  Jackson groped for the suitcase he’d brought with him. “Listen, Lew, I’m worrying about more than hurt feelings. This is life and death. I’m not fighting what’s been going on here. I can’t. So, I guess I’m joining it.” He threw an arm wave at the coat room.

  “Joining or resigning?” Lew says.

  “Listen, I’ve got a deadline for an anthology of Chassidic Love Poems for Dodd Mead.”

  At Lew’s quizzical look he offers, “It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. It means library research hours, xeroxing, editing … I can’t afford a housekeeper to take care of Tulip and I never even know where Katherine is any more.”

  He stands up and starts an odd retreat toward the revolving door. He pauses to finish his tea and puts it on an empty table. Myrna appears from behind her barrier and scoops it up—an excuse to be close to the action, nothing more.

  “We love Tulip and she’s been thriving here, so …”

  He thrusts the suitcase in the general direction of his audience, which now includes Myrna, Lew, Krasner behind the cashier’s cage, and Sasha, whose innocent outstretched arms finally receive the gift.

  Lew finds a few words. “But how long—?”

  “Well,” Jackson said, he was at the door now. “After this I have to do a collection of Vietnam War jokes for North Point Press …” The visit was over, leaving Myrna and Sasha to sort through the baby clothes and one pair of grown woman’s panties stuck in by mistake.

  Later that afternoon when Katherine Eudemie brought Tulip in, Myrna handed her the intimate item, tactfully placed in a Lord & Taylor shopping bag someone had left. Katherine Eudemie looked at it with a secret smile and said nothing.

  Myrna was exultant.

  The child!

  Her clothes!

  Permission from the father!

  Everything was coming up Tulips!

  One day in late September Myrna returned from the bathroom to find a small crowd clotting the area near the coat room.

  Arbut Blatas, one of the Old Guard Regulars and the man who had painted the murals on the RR walls, had taught Tulip to say goodbye in Russian (das vedanya) and was in the process of teaching her the prologue to Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmilla. Tulip spoke the sounds smashingly, “like a darlink Russian parrot,” Blatas said admiringly.

  A number of patrons lingered, unpaid checks in hand, to listen to the little girl repeat Russian poetry. Normally this would irritate Krasner; processing checks was his job. But this afternoon he was a Cheshire cat. His smile hovered blessing the little comedy in progress.

  Myrna got the message. Only a few minutes before, she and Krasner had been kicking around the work situation, present and future, gloom and doom. Then, in a few swift taciturn Krasner-like images he had sketched out Operation Tulip. The word would be spread about the kid in the hat check room. People would tell each other. It would give curious New Yorkers and naive out-of-towners a rooting interest in coming—like a mascot on a football team. He didn’t actually say all this because there was no appropriate quotation in blank verse for him to use, but Myrna got the idea.

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “Never mind,” Krasner said. “I know a hawk from a halvah when the wind is North.”

  “I thought you were so worried about Captain Kolevitch finding out.”

  “One step at a time.”

  “You’re crazy,” Myrna said. “You can’t use a kid to increase business.”

  Krasner didn’t think much of this. “All grown-ups use kids for something. See Shaw—preface to Misalliance.”

  Myrna had turned away in confusion. Now she told Tulip, “You shouldn’t say things you don’t understand.”

  Scornfully, Tulip said, “Das Vedanya means ‘good-bye.’ In Russian. Mr. Blatas says a child can learn to speak a lot of languages.”

  M
yrna shut up.

  Krasner counted the house.

  Then the real craziness began.

  Katherine Eudemie came to the restaurant, without Tulip, looking for Myrna, who was menstruating at the time and depressed. Always she had been sad at that time of the month. Later, when the two women were walking in Central Park, Myrna confided that she’d heard women were sad at that time of the month because they were mourning the loss of the birth possibility and Katherine said “Crap”—(like many of her women friends she liked to talk tough even though none of the men they liked talked that way.) “I never believed that stuff. That’s only literature.”

  “I would have thought biology,” Myrna said. “But I never took either.” That was when Katherine Eudemie made the offer of payment. “No, no, don’t look so horrified. It’s not for helping to take care of Tulip. That would be like paying you for babysitting. You really care about Tulip. No, this is a genuine bribe.”

  “For what?”

  “If Mr. Eudemie asks about Tulip spending a lot of time with you at the RR, just say—well, you can say the truth—that I’ve given you money for that. That it’s not accidental or strange or anything.”

  Myrna laughed. They crushed dry leaves underfoot as they turned south back toward the park exit. It was chilly. Myrna’s mind was a jumble. Depression was gone—so much for menstruation mythology. She decided not to tell Katherine Eudemie that her husband knew all about it, that he was now an accomplice, having added a suitcase full of Tulip’s clothes to the conspiracy.

  She said: “Here’s what I’ll do. If I take your money I won’t say anything. But if I don’t—and I won’t—I’ll be glad to tell your husband you are paying me to take care of Tulip. Okay?” Such are the deals made by everyday craziness. Katherine recognized the logic and instantly accepted it.

  The two women strolled through the September light, still a sort of straight sunshine, not yet the slanting light of winter.

  “What do you imagine is actually happening?” Katherine Eudemie asked.

  “Oh, I’m beyond imagining,” Myrna said. “I’m just grateful for Tulip.”

  “Do you see what I’m doing as something mad?”

  “I see it as a—gift.”

  “In other words you’re thinking about your own life; not mine, not Tulip’s mother …”