Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  Nathan knew she was right. Each generation had its obligation. Harry had offered Nathan more than Harry's childhood in Poland had offered, and because of that it was Nathan's responsibility to offer Sarah more than he had.

  Much of this would not have come up if the police hadn't insisted on cleaning up the neighborhood. They were slowly driving the squatters out of Tompkins Square Park, attacking in waves like a military assault and tearing down their tent city, only to have the squatters rebuild it in the night among the thick, leafy trees. The one small triumph of the police was in reclaiming a playground area where Sarah played. And that was where she had met her best friend. It was all connected.

  "Mira, Seltzer is going to his destino," Carmela said with a smile warm as a kiss from the fire escape above as Nathan walked out of his shop. Nathan continued to close up his shop. Why was she suddenly talking about destinos? Nathan asked himself.

  "No," he shouted up, loving his own ridiculousness, "I am going for cocktails." He gave the exact same special emphasis to the word "cocktails" that Carmela had given to "destino." Carmela laughed a crude, lovable cackle, and Nathan waved good-bye as he walked away.

  Walking up Avenue A, Nathan, Sonia, and Sarah passed several police officers who looked familiar enough to nod at. "Hello," Sarah insisted on saying, and most of them smiled and waved at her. But when they got closer to the park there were hundreds of them, and hard as Sarah tried, there was no smiling or waving.

  "You notice something?" Sonia said in a low voice.

  "Everyone's dressing like cops this year?" said Nathan.

  "Jerk," she said, slapping him playfully in the chest. "No badges."

  It was true. None of the police had badges on their shirts.

  Nathan had never noticed before, but some of the houses on the north side of Tompkins Square Park, unusual for the neighborhood, were more like houses of the wealthy than tenements. The outside walls had been cleaned on the house that Maya and her parents lived in, and the wooden door frame and windowsills had been refinished. The three stories had tall windows that let in light, mottled by the swaying leaves of the park. Dozens of police were on the sidewalk, preparing for the attack on the park squatters that was a part of summer evenings in the neighborhood. They clubbed everyone in sight, so it was not a good idea to watch. But Maya's family could see everything from their window, like a more refined class that stood above society's frays.

  Nathan, Sonia, and Sarah were ushered into the house by Maya's father, a young man with thick red hair and amber glasses frames carefully selected to match, and it was quickly apparent that everything in the house—the clean-lined, dark oak furniture, the brass and copper lamps, the deep colored rugs—was carefully selected to match.

  "Arts and Crafts," Maya's father explained.

  Sarah, the only Seltzer who looked happy to be there, noted the father's assertion in her notebook with a series of dashes. Sonia did not write in hers.

  "And Mission," explained Maya's mother, a tall woman in a flowing dress of tissuelike thinness, and Sonia wondered if this was a rebuke for her failure to take notes.

  "Ted got us unbelievable prices on these things."

  "I'm an architect," he explained shyly, "so I knew where to get the deals."

  Nathan nodded, while contemplating this new concept that architects necessarily know where to get deals. He had always been told that people in garments knew where to get deals, and he had never before thought about architects or what they knew. He kept trying to see what the cops were doing in the park without getting caught peeking out the window. Maya, a merry little spirit of the same size as Sarah, came running out, followed by a dark-skinned Puerto Rican woman in a bright purple dress. Nathan and Sonia both knew her, Rosita, the daughter of Consuela, who owned the cuchifrito. Nathan greeted her eagerly, relieved to see someone he knew from the neighborhood. But she was quickly sent away by Maya's mother, who wanted her to take Maya and Sarah off to some nether room of the house to play.

  "She was a find," asserted Maya's father. "She is so good with Maya."

  At first Nathan thought he was talking about Sarah.

  "She's like a member of the family," said Maya's mother. "We wanted her to come to Putnam County with us this summer, but she didn't want to."

  "She helps in her mother's restaurant," said Nathan.

  "Yes," said Maya's startled father, "that's what she said!" Sonia thought that they were only a few years older than their young babysitter. "Come on, we'll give you the tour," said Maya's father with a gracious, sweeping arm gesture. Nathan stole a last glimpse of the park, which hundreds of uniformed police, clubs in hand, had surrounded, looking like a swarm of blue insects crawling over one another.

  Maya's parents took Nathan and Sonia through every room in the house, and they could not find one trace of the normal disorder of life—except through the tall windows of the front rooms, where Nathan noticed the attack in progress. They had been in a back room when the assault began, and a great collective shriek could be heard. Nathan wanted to run to the front to see. He looked at Sonia. She had heard it, too, but had a look that said "Don't you dare move." Maya's parents did not seem to hear anything.

  Maya's father showed them their workout room full of bright white and shiny chrome machines. "How do you stay so nice and trim?" Maya's trim young father asked Sonia.

  "I don't like his mother's cooking," Sonia quipped, and Nathan laughed, while worrying that his own tellas were showing. Maya's parents looked at them quizzically.

  "Let's have some drinks," said Maya's father, steering them back to the oaken living room. "What would you like?"

  "A beer would be great," said Nathan. Sonia asked for white wine. People were running on the sidewalks with wet, fresh blood dripping from their heads, and police, clubs high, were chasing them. The sound was muffled under the rumble of air conditioners and behind the newly installed, tightly closed windows.

  "Let's have martinis," said Maya's father as though they had not answered.

  "Do you know Sagittarius, the new place on Third and First? Ted knows the owner. They make colored martinis. And they taught Ted."

  "What color do you want? What holiday is coming up? Fourth of July Red, white, and blue! You want a blue martini or a pink one?"

  "Pink," Nathan said ambiguously, all the while wondering if these people were Jewish. Their name was Kaplan. He had assumed they were, but there didn't seem to be anything Jewish about them. Sonia also reluctantly agreed to a pink martini.

  A woman on her knees on the sidewalk—had she fallen, or had she been clubbed into that position?—looked up at a police officer who was about to hit her again and let out a wail so loud that it could not be ignored even in the living room.

  "My God," said Sonia, "what are they doing?"

  "It's just the East Village," said Maya's father. "It's pretty noisy down here now. But that will change." He closed the oak shutters so that his guests would not be further disturbed and turned to his mixology with a glass shaker and a stirrer.

  "Linda can't have one," Ted asserted happily

  Is she too young? Nathan asked himself, but Sonia immediately knew the real reason. She was pregnant. Sonia politely congratulated her and noted that she was not showing. But she suspected that she was the type who didn't show until labor, which would be painless. She could have two children, even more, and still do the things she wanted in life because she had money. Money for preschool. Emma often said that women who wanted children but did not want to spend all their time in child rearing should send them off to schools to be cared for by women who wanted to do that. But Emma Goldman did not know what preschool would cost. Sonia was not going to give this woman the satisfaction of asking what month she was in. But of course, Nathan, genuinely excited by the news, did. "When are you due?"

  "November," she said. "Are you going to make a playmate for Sarah?"

  A playmate for Sarah was an uncomfortable subject.

  Ted produced three drinks, on
e blue and two pink, in long-stemmed glasses looking enough like designer crystal to make Nathan afraid to hold one.

  There was a house, now an apartment building, on Thirteenth Street, whose brick facade with brownstone trim was like that of many other buildings in the neighborhood. From 1864 to 1867, while her husband, Benito Juarez, was freeing Mexico from the French, the highborn Margarita Maza lived alone in this house. From 1903 to 1913, Emma Goldman, the Russian-born anarchist, lived there. Margarita had been devoted to her husband, and they wrote letters to each other about how deeply they missed each other. Emma had a long relationship with Alexander Berkman, with whom she had unsuccessfully plotted the murder of an industrialist before they renounced violence. But Emma did not believe in marriage, was politically opposed to it. Also, Emma was at home in New York and later driven into political exile in Russia, whereas Margarita was in exile in New York and later went home to Mexico. They never met each other. Emma was born two years after Margarita moved back to Mexico.

  It is probably for these reasons that the house had never attracted much attention, in spite of the fact that it is marked with plaques. Nathan had walked by the house his entire life without reflection until the day he saw a lean woman with curly, ginger hair standing in front of the fluted stone pillars that framed the steps and doorway, seemingly transfixed. What was she looking at? He read the plaques.

  "Remarkable, isn't it?" she said.

  Nathan turned and looked at her. She unfurled her left hand. "Emma," and then her right, "and Margarita. Emma Goldman and Margarita Maza de Juárez." When she said Emma Goldman she sounded American, but she said Juárez—Hwaah-rdace—like a Latina. He failed to see the significance of these two women. But what struck him most was the two unfurling hands. He thought that the most graceful gesture he had ever seen. What beautiful hands. He was in love with this woman's hands before he even knew her name.

  And she looked Jewish! Except for when she said Bay-needo Hwaah-rdace. "Two very different women with different ideas about the same problem."

  "What's the problem?"

  "Being a woman and a lover. Living a life and living with love. Doing both well." She knew that he did not understand her but that he would pretend he did because he was attracted to her. A good Emma observation. "The question is, who had the better life? Of course, it seems clear who had a better life in the house. Margarita was alone pining away for her husband and writing him letters, while Emma had one and sometimes several lovers. I think that somehow, in addition to the two women, I have to have Emma's lovers in the house. There was no demeaning cheating or sneaking around. It was all in the open."

  "Is that what you would like?"

  "No, I want to be alone writing letters," she said with a smile. "Actually, I want to be alone writing plays."

  He had little reaction to the fact that she was a playwright. He knew several playwrights, but he was thrilled to hear that she earned her living as a masseuse.

  "I knew it."

  "That I was a playwright."

  "That you are a masseuse. I could see it in your fingers."

  She studied the telltale digits that were wriggling in front of her like the tentacles of an octopus. "I suppose playwrights have fewer physical manifestations." She had never had a play produced. In fact, she had never completed a play. She had moved to this neighborhood to write her first play, Emma and Margarita.

  "But if they never met each other..."

  "It isn't a documentary. It's not realism. You have to imagine Margarita Juarez, the exiled wife of Mexico's democratic president, and Emma Goldman, an anarchist immigrant. Both radical women of their day. You put these two together and what have you got?"

  "A Mexican Jew?" he said, trying to be clever.

  But she smiled as though she had just won a prize and said, "That's me!" She, too, was quietly thinking, He must be Jewish.

  Nathan had thought it was a fine thing for her to be writing a play. Most people he knew had some project or other. Sooner or later they all had him photocopy their pages. Even Chow Mein Vega was working on his memoirs. He too would someday write something. But after Sarah was born, which Nathan remembered as "the plan" and Sonia remembered as "an accident," Sonia argued that she did not want another child until she had finished Emma and Margarita. Sonia was now thirty-eight years old and still working on the play, and the more she talked about her work, the more irritable Nathan became. She would talk about it just to annoy him, if she was angry with him. Few of the people whose pages he copied had ever finished their projects. He too had his life of Ludwig van Beethoven, known only to him and a handful of music history faculty at NYU. Nathan did not believe projects such as Emma and Margarita were destined to be completed. Nathan was a great believer in destiny

  Nathan could still hear some shouting beyond the shutters.

  "You know," said Ted, the expectant father of Maya's future sibling, accidentally stumbling over Nathan's secret thought, "got to look out for that biological clock."

  "But you don't have to worry about that!" said Sonia with a touch too much mirth. "Having just made it through puberty!" And she laughed.

  Nathan looked at her. In her discomposure she was drinking her pink martini in regular, quick gulps. A pink martini is a serious mistake in judgment. He, in fact, was drinking his at about the same rate.

  "We have a wonderful place up in Putnam County. You should take Sarah and come visit us this summer."

  "Yes, that would be lovely," said Sonia in a peculiar accent. "Just lovely," she repeated, showing her front teeth, Queen of England-like, on the word "Loveleh."

  Nathan, trying to carry the conversation, said, "I had to laugh. You know what Sarah said? She said you had a house in Punim County"

  Maya's parents looked at Nathan without finding a response. "Punim," said Nathan, and he laughed, but no one followed his lead. "You know, punim, like what a punim, a punim like that." And then, seeing that his point was not clear, he said a bit too loudly, "Punim!" And he reached over and grabbed a handful of Ted's left cheek with a pinch— his face, in truth, was a bit jowly. "As in 'Look at this punim.' " First the cheek and then the face turned pinker than what was left of their martinis. Nathan quickly withdrew, realizing he had transgressed.

  "What work do you do?" said the expecting Linda, trying to turn the conversation away from the embarrassing men. By now, Nathan was only praying that they got through the entire event without breaking any crystal.

  Sonia, pleased by the question, answered warmly, "I'm a playwright," as Nathan sank deeply into his chair and watched the light playing with the antique crystal stem of his oddly colored and almost finished drink. Beyond the shutters was silence, as though everyone had been beaten unconscious.

  "Have you done anything we might have seen?" asked the still red-faced Ted.

  "Not yet," Sonia said without the least embarrassment. "But I am working on a play about Emma Goldman and Benito Juarez's wife, Margarita, in New York."

  "Were they friends?" Linda asked.

  "No, actually Emma Goldman was not even born when Margarita was here."

  "Oh," said Ted, turning his recovering punim toward Sonia. "Emma Goldman was a Mexican painter?"

  "I don't understand," said Linda. "They never knew each other?"

  "They lived at different times."

  "Then how can they be together?"

  "You see, you ask that because you are obsessed with the dimension of time. They had all other dimensions aligned. Two radical women who could understand each other. How important is it that they were in different times? They were in the same place and the same plane. People can be in the same room at the exact same time, but they cannot talk because their worlds are so different, but no one questions the logic of them being together because it is assumed anyone can share time and space. But when they have everything putting them together except time, people say, Oh, that's impossible. In reality, this is what is impossible."

  "What is?" asked Linda, and there were worri
ed expressions on the faces of both of Maya's parents. But Nathan rescued the moment with a huge belly laugh.

  "These are impossible," he said. "You can't drink pink martinis. What makes them pink, anyway, nitroglycerin? I can't even talk."

  "I'm sorry, can I get you something else?"

  "Oh no, no, thank you. This was very nice. We just aren't used to it." He was thinking, They are Jewish, right? Kaplan? Why don't they know what a punim is? And suddenly he had a terrible thought: Maybe they are Republicans. Maybe these are the hidden Republicans in the back recesses of the neighborhood who cast their clandestine vote. "What do you think of the election?" he blurted out.

  "I think Dukakis is going to walk away with it," said Ted. "Thank God."

  "And that will be it for Bush and company," said Linda. "Thank God is right."

  "Linda was going to work for Dukakis until she found out her due date would be too close," said Ted.

  "I don't want my baby born under a Bush," said Linda, and she laughed. They all laughed, relieved to find something they could share besides time and space. And they all started feeling much better about one another. The Kaplans brought up the Seltzers' visit to Putnam County again and even tried to get them to commit to a date. But the Seltzers demurred.

  "And they teach swimming up there?" Nathan asked.

  "Yes, they have a whole summer camp. Sarah would love it."

  By the time they left, their pink martinis were beginning to wear off. Nathan had insisted on opening the shutters to make sure it was safe. The park was empty, and as far as he could tell, so were the streets. It was as though the stadium had been cleared and the game was over.

  "What nice people," said Nathan after walking down the front steps and seeing no one on the sidewalk in either direction. He noticed a dark blood spot on the sidewalk where the woman had screamed.

  "They are very nice," Sarah confirmed. "She is my best friend in the world."

  "That's nice, sweetie," Sonia said with encouragement in her voice.

  "Yes, and they have boxes in every room. You push it and you can hear everybody in the other room." Sarah started to laugh. "We heard you!"