by Yoram Kaniuk
On the other side of the hall, through an open door, a beautiful girl sat typing. Bill, who saw me looking at her, introduced us. We talked. She finished work and I went out with her. I couldn’t think. Sex oozed from her. I could feel my body tensing. We went to Macy’s because she had to buy something, and no more than a few minutes passed before we were making out. She went into the store and I suggested that afterward we would go to my place—Lee was away on some tour or other—but she said not now, and asked me to come by her place at nine that evening. I wrote down the address. I went home and waited. On the radio they said that the temperature was dropping and that this was without doubt the coldest day in fifty years. I left the house at eight forty-five and, completely frozen, managed to hail a taxi. The driver was wearing gloves, the heater was on, the windows were covered in condensation, he managed to mumble that I was his last fare that night and then he was going home, he said, it was worse out than when he was in the army and was stuck in Alaska one shitty January.
On the radio we heard the announcer saying belligerently, A cold night. Cold. Cold. You could hear his teeth almost chattering in his heated booth. There was excitement on the radio. America loves it when it’s the coldest or hottest or longest or shortest day. A woman phoned in and said she’d been outside and found a bird that had frozen in flight. A man phoned from a call box on Ninety-second Street and he couldn’t move because his feet were stuck to the ice on the sidewalk. The driver said he hoped for my sake that I wouldn’t need a taxi later because they were all about to freeze up. I got out and looked around. It was on the corner of York and maybe Sixty-eighth Street. A big building, it looked like a warehouse. The walk from the taxi to the door was short. Excitement enabled me to reach—albeit frozen—the doorbell with her name underneath. She called me from inside to come in. I went inside. I went upstairs. A huge room, like a studio. Through the cloud of my breath I saw that the big hall was devoid of furniture. From a distance I saw a big bed lit by a ceiling light that came down to the bed and facing it a sealed window and door and she said from the bed, I’m sorry, there’s no heating, it’s a coldwater flat, and I remembered Pat’s apartment on Division Street. She told me to get into bed right away. I was confused and it was hard to think in that cold. I realized I had to use some kind of abstruse strategy to get even partially undressed and get into the bed that looked like an island in the middle of an ocean. I was shivering, she laughed and said, Get in, get in. Everything misted over, I managed to take off my coat and sweater and shoes and jumped in. I was shuddering. And how I was shuddering! My teeth chattered so much so that my mouth ached and she giggled and shoved a bottle of Cutty Sark into my mouth. I managed to ask her how she knew I was a Cutty Sark man, and she told me, but my ears were so frozen that they were about to snap off and fall down and I didn’t hear what she said.
I drank, I gargled, and after a while managed to stop shivering and my teeth stopped chattering. There was a radio next to her, a woman was saying that things were getting worse by the minute, New York was freezing to death, and I thought longingly about the drive in the Porsche in the heat when the blind people came to rescue us. And suddenly it hit me, maybe because most of my brain wasn’t functioning and some of the dormant cells had come to life in a brief flash of memory, that when we saw the blind people, a nun was marching ahead of them, and I realized, in that freezing hell, that Mira must have found her nun’s habit and gone to the shelter for the blind and had been there when we passed by. I thought, How come I didn’t realize this before? and I tried to think about the heat and gradually calmed down. I slipped one arm out from under the covers to tidy up my clothes that were scattered on the floor, but suddenly I had no arm with which to continue undressing, nor the strength to continue. My teeth were chattering again and with a cry of despair I got out of bed for a moment, undressed completely and hopped back in. I couldn’t see a thing on account of my breath clouding in front of me in the cold and my frozen arm hurting and I had to thump it to get rid of the tingling in my fingertips. My heart was pounding fast.
I looked at her. Her face was incredibly beautiful in the glow of the small bulb that shone above us. She had the face of a little girl; there was sorrow in it. She had brown eyes, lips that looked as though they’d been taken from a Holbein print, and a high forehead. Her cheeks were pinched—and then I embraced her. She pulled a cord and the light rose up, only a thin faint light remained, she wept in my ear, our bodies drew close, and then, beyond the intoxication of the moment, beyond the cold outside the blanket, I sensed that something was wrong. My brain hadn’t yet reactivated the synapses required to for me to draw conclusions from stimuli. Through the cold vapor hanging above, battling the warmth of the bed—from which I didn’t dare out stick my head—I slowly realized that the woman I was embracing had hair on her shoulders, back, breasts, legs…not like a hairy man but more like some sort of animal. I was lost and the tears that started trickling from my eyes froze and remained as icicles on my face. I could see the trees near York Avenue through the window. A cold moon hung in the sky. She smiled and said, Sorry, but I thought they liked it in Egypt. I whispered that I wasn’t from Egypt. She said she’d been told that I was. I asked who’d told her and she said, I don’t remember. But what is this? Hair, she said. I lay there and thought. Tried to think. It’s difficult in that kind of situation to know how to be polite. I was a prisoner in her bed because what had gotten me into it would hardly get me out of it again, and I asked, But why? Why don’t you shave? She said, I don’t want to because some people like it. She closed her eyes sadly and I was holding a woman covered in a thick, black down. She laughed nervously, but there was no sign of empathy with my predicament in her voice; there was a concrete and unyielding innocence in her, a demand perhaps, something exotic, some kind of obdurate feminine cunning; there was a harsh critique of the world in that voice, as if her fur was something she’d deliberately covered herself with for the sake of some secret portion of humanity. Perhaps she thought she it was her hair versus the world. I suddenly wished I were Egyptian. Never in my entire life had I wanted something as badly as I wanted to be Egyptian at that moment. I would have given years of my life to be Egyptian. She smiled shyly, her face mournfully yearning, despairing. I made no effort at pretense, although I muttered a few polite words, and tried to flee, Egyptian or not, it was impossible. The cold enclosed the bed like a glacial wall. Then, left with no alternative, with the knowledge that there was nothing to be done, I took the bottle, gulped down its contents, and sank into a stupor.
In the morning, when I awoke through the mist of a terrible hangover, I looked at her and seeing the laughter in her face, realized that I had done my duty after all. I was filled with revulsion but also compassion for her and myself. The cold had lessened slightly and with enormous effort I managed to drag my clothes over to me and get dressed under the covers. She got up with a sorrowful smile, put on a pink robe as if it wasn’t at all cold, and brought coffee to the bed. The coffee was delicious and aromatic. She didn’t want me to leave yet, said that I’d sung her songs in Egyptian during the night. She started begging me to stay, brought delicious cookies, it was difficult for me, embarrassing, and I said, Look, I have to go, and she said, I understand, her sadness now subsumed in a voice filled with a wistful sort of challenge, Go, go on, people are waiting for you, you didn’t complain last night! I don’t remember how I managed to get away. I hailed a taxi and made it home. I took a long shower in almost-boiling water, sat in my heated apartment, and waited. I didn’t know what I was waiting for and in my mind the beauty of her face blended with revulsion and loathing and anger at myself for being so cruel. I tried to separate the vast black fur from my body, and when the phone rang and it was Bill Dana, I realized what I had actually been waiting for. They knew, those sad comedian bastards. And how they knew. Each and every one of them had apparently been had once, but not on the coldest night in the past millennium. They at least had the option of running away, or perh
aps they were Egyptians in disguise, they wanted to teach me to laugh with my mouth closed too. I yelled at Bill, but he just laughed, and that was the first time I’d heard Bill laugh, Bill the great comedian who wrote thousands of gags in his lifetime, Bill Dana who was immersed in eternal sorrow, laughed at me. His lips smacked the receiver and I told him I hoped they’d break and that he would choke on the laughter that he didn’t even know he had in him, maybe he thought he was sick, and then I hung up on him. Ten minutes later, she called.
She sounded cheerful and asked if that sonofabitch Dana had already called. I told her he had. Those bastards, she said, but you’re sweet, at least you stayed till morning! You were decent to me. I told her that maybe I had no choice, the others hadn’t visited her on the coldest night in the last ten thousand years, but she said, You did have a choice, you’re decent, don’t be ashamed of being decent, it’s all right, bye. Then I painted Icarus with golden wings over and over using a paint mixture I’d invented. As I worked on the painting, which took quite a while, I couldn’t find an appropriate face for my poor angel, I wanted the face to be beautiful but a kind of Renaissance beauty that could be either a young woman or a young man. I went down to a nearby cafeteria and sketched faces of young women, but none of them was who I wanted, none of them had the profound feminine spirit I was after, reminiscent of those ancient Madonnas who seem promiscuous at the same time as holy and give you the agreeable impression of mocking everyone who dares look at them. I sat gloomily in my small studio and drank Cutty Sark when suddenly the image of the girl from Naples sprang to mind. A hundred years had passed since then. I painted the memory of her on Icarus but it was difficult to capture the basic structure of her face, the foundations on which expressions are built. I put the Icarus aside and started painting Israeli flags. They were laughed at. Years later, Jasper Johns made a career out of American flags. I painted a picture covered with paint-tube caps that I stuck to the canvas and then Lee came, we became a couple again for a time, moved to Fifty-second Street over a strip club and the building shook from the echoes of the drums below and people yelling: Take it off! Krissoula, our Greek friend, purchased my Icarus.
Forty years later I came back to New York and Krissoula was there, Krissoula who had managed to be the lover of four Greek tycoons one after the other, and who was always wise and practical, and who said that all she had left was nostalgia and Valium. In the old days, she would come back to New York just to spend time with us. We were close but didn’t know much about her. Krissoula said that one day the painting had disappeared, and she looked everywhere for it. She didn’t find it. Eventually it returned. But then the face disappeared. A big lump, a dark stain, had replaced the beautiful face. And then, quite recently now, the face had returned, but it was different from the original face, it looked like a whore’s face now, but an angel’s too. Sadness and a hint of disgrace. And forty years later, I was in New York looking for friends, and most of them had either died or disappeared. But I found Krissoula. A great lady.
But no one had seen Adele Schwartz for ages, Adele Schwartz who, with an unknown father, had had a baby boy with a body like Superman’s and the brain of some Jewish Amazon from an orphanage in Brooklyn—Adele Schwartz, who ran workshops for non-orgasmic women and once asked Gandy and me to take care of two workshop attendees who had never experienced an orgasm until then. And Gandy and I did our thing in two different apartments, and Gandy’s one looked happy afterward, and mine told Adele that I’d given her what she wanted but that she’d run off home straight after, and she said, I can’t be his mother for one fuck, and so Adele decided to explain to all her women about the custom practiced by certain men of taking off right after doing their thing, and asked me to introduce her to Marlon Brando. A picture I had painted from an old photo of my mother in high school hung on the wall above his bed. I went to his apartment on Fifty-seventh Street. He was playing with Russell, his raccoon. A journalist was sitting there and Brando had had enough of lying and set Russell onto her. I told him about Adele and we called her. She came over and I went back home. The journalist was still standing downstairs crying. Afterward, Adele said that he’d been great, but then wanted her to leave right away, and she did, and she said, Now I have something else to teach the women in my course tomorrow about men who don’t like to hang around afterward.
Forty years have passed. I want to find Adele. Someone said they thought that she worked in gardening. My friend Jerry Tallmer had seen her and heard that she’d changed her name, and not to Barak Ben-Avinoam. I investigated for several days and discovered that she’d once danced, possibly belly-danced, at a Turkish restaurant on Christie Street to the accompaniment of a bouzouki player who looked German. I found out that she’d changed her name to the name of an American flower she liked and did indeed work in gardening, and then someone said that the flower she’d named herself after was a rare mountain flower. I went to a botanist acquaintance who found the name of the rare mountain flower for me. After some more sleuthing, I arrived at the name Kalmia Deveraux. Kalmia is indeed a rare flower that grows in the mountains and Deveraux—she later explained—was a French film actor who absolutely no one remembers anymore: she was his last living fan but couldn’t remember what he looked like and had lost the only photo she’d had of him.
I went to see her in a rather shabby apartment somewhere around Seventieth Street and Amsterdam. Living alone. No sign of a child. She still had the tin bath. Adele was painting pictures of huge flies and living off a pension she had from her gardening work but with no money for medicine or food. I went downstairs and brought a big bag of food and we drank coffee. She was already over sixty-five and all wrinkled with sorrow. She pretended to be happy but it was obvious that she was going through hell and the rooms were crammed with memories of her son. She told me how he got sick and she called for her Reichian doctor who misdiagnosed him and the child died. She asked me if I’d seen Pat and I told her I hadn’t, and she said she’d heard that Pat was still looking for her daughter. The doctor killed my son. And what now? I see a different Reichian since I put the first one in Mount Sinai Hospital with broken bones and did two weeks in a women’s prison for it, but it wasn’t the same prison you remember from next door to Alex’s Borscht Bowl, the one on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street was demolished. I asked and she told she didn’t have a living soul in the world. Just like when her father ran off and left her with her mother and her mother died and they found Adele almost dead and put her into the orphanage. I’m an old orphan. The kid’s gone. But she keeps the tin bath for him. She sat facing me and I could see that the ancient, gypsy, frightening, brazen light that had kept her alive had disappeared from her eyes and how all the safety pins she used to fasten herself together had loosened. I asked if there was anyone she could telephone if God forbid something happened to her, and she said she sometimes talked to the storekeeper downstairs. He’s Mexican and gives me food on credit and sometimes I even pay him, he’s got a good heart. And no, she said, the truth is I don’t have anyone. Then she suddenly said, D’you know who I saw on television at George Bush’s inauguration? Mira. Standing there in a fur coat, her eyes closed, looking like she’d fallen asleep on her feet. I was surprised because I’d been looking for Mira for years. Adele said, I tried to get hold of her but it wasn’t possible.
I said good-bye and left her all the money I had and went back to Tel Aviv. Two months later, I felt kind of guilty and called Adele, or Kalmia to be precise, and the metallic voice of the impersonal world of telecommunication announced that the line had been disconnected. I went to the library at the American embassy and a pleasant and polite young lady gave me a videocassette of President Bush’s inauguration ceremony, and suddenly it wasn’t Mira I was seeing, but Adele standing close to the President. She was wearing a fur coat, locked into herself, as if she didn’t belong there. I flew to New York two months later for one reason or another, a stifling, unpleasant flight, and I looked for Adele. Someone said she knew the Pr
esident and had found an old friend of yours called Mira or something, and then this someone’s brother said she’d painted pictures of fifteen-foot-tall flies and Clement Greenberg had written wonderful things about her. I found her new number through a friend of Jerry Tallmer—who, as you’ll recall, was one of the founders of the Village Voice—so I called. She said she didn’t know who I was or who Mira was but didn’t manage not to cry. I asked, Why are you crying, and she said I’m rich and there’s no one for me to be rich for. I said, Barak Ben-Avinoam, and she shouted, Yoram Yoram, and hung up. When I tried again, her number had been changed to an unlisted one.
But back then, when I was still living in New York, after the business with Bill Dana and the monkey-woman, Lee, Gandy, and I went to drink wine with Bird. He was trying to kick again, but he just couldn’t help himself, he went crazy, he came over and took the ring off his wife’s finger, she cried, her finger reddened with blood, and he slipped away like a thief and then came crawling back on all fours like a dog because he’d bought some stuff, he looked relaxed now and sad and she forgave him and we all went to drink some wine and he played. He already looked half dead. I translated the lyrics to “Lullaby of Birdland” into Hebrew for him and he memorized them and repeated them all sorts of places he wandered into during those bitter nights. Sometimes it seemed as though all that was left to him was devastation and a childish arrogance. He played compassion and indignity, Sarah Vaughan once said, or something like that. He’s wise, Gandy said, Wise and as old as Methuselah, he plays tough, and I once told him that he and I are the day and night of the same twenty-four hours, not because of our colors but because I’m born out of his devastation…
