End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  Her eyes dart up, a flash of green. “The whole world’s a pretty male-dominated world, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  He awards her the kind of deferential side nod you might give the person who outbids you at an auction. “Fair enough. I guess I’m just curious whether you ever run into any issues in documenting the culture, being who you are.”

  Nina stares at him over the lip of her teacup. “Being who I am.”

  The words, partially muffled by the porcelain, are both inflectionless and charged, and Tris feels compelled to elaborate, to implicate himself. “It’s something I deal with all the time, personally. I write about hip-hop, so my race is always an issue. As it should be.” Jesus, he thinks, there I go. It’s become a damn reflex.

  The cup clicks against the saucer, grinds as Nina gives it a quarter turn. “And who am I?” she asks, crossing her arms under her breasts and leaning forward until her elbows touch the table.

  “You look like a nice Jewish girl to me.” Tris smiles. “As they say.”

  She straightens so fast, it’s as though his words have blown her back against the chair. “Who says?”

  “I don’t know, Jewish grandmothers, I guess. Although not mine.”

  “How did you know I’m Jewish?”

  Tris thinks of CLOUD 9, and points a finger at a passing waitress. “How do you know she’s black?”

  “Nobody ever thinks I’m Jewish.”

  “Really? What do they think you are?”

  “Creole. West Indian. Black.”

  “Get the fuck outta here. What do they say when you tell them?”

  “I don’t. I wasn’t allowed to growing up, in Prague, and now, what’s the point? I’m more black than Jewish anyway.”

  “What, in your soul?”

  “Yeah,” she says, deadpan. Tris waits a second, expecting her to undercut her answer somehow, but she doesn’t.

  “And nobody has a problem with that?”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Any of these jazz dudes you work for.”

  “Why should they? It’s all about your conception, bruh. If you got a soulful type of vibe, you can understand the greatness and the sophistication of any tradition.”

  Tris wonders whether she realizes how dramatically she’s just switched up her own vibe in the course of this pocket manifesto. “Maybe so,” he says, “but that shit doesn’t really fly in hip-hop. If I started talking about ‘feeling black,’ I’d get slayed. I’m barely allowed to be what I am in the first place.”

  “Then maybe you need to leave hip-hop alone. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to diss it. But name me one hip-hop dude who’s dealin’ with it like Albert Van Horn is dealin’ with it. This is some profound historical shit, right here. This is it. And if motherfuckers can’t accept that you know your shit when you know your shit because they’re too caught up in trivial shit like how you look, then how could they be dealin’ with anything profound? Art is supposed to be universal, bruh. We gotta deal with that.”

  Tris can’t help but be impressed by the force of her conviction. And it’s been a long time since anybody folded him into a we, especially a we like that. “Maybe I do need to leave hip-hop alone,” he says. “Find something no one can deny.” Even as he utters the words, Tris wonders whether he means something no one can deny matters, or something no one can deny is mine.

  “Here you are.” She nudges his hands, knuckle-to-knuckle. “You doin’ it.”

  Tris looks up from the dregs of his coffee. Nina is waiting for him to meet her eyes, and when he does, their gazes lock. A staring contest. Tris hasn’t had one of these since junior high.

  “Here I am,” he says.

  At 7:14 and forty-five seconds, Tris excuses himself, lopes up the stairs, and double-taps the larger dressing room’s door, wondering how he can dispense with whatever duties impend and get back to Nina. He’s never had fantasies quite like the ones she inspires. Already, after an hour’s conversation, he’s imagining not a night in bed, but a life with her: the two of them locking together like Voltron robots to form an Artistic Power Couple. Tandem-grappling up the cliff face of success and walking solemnly, hand in hand, deeper and deeper down the mine shaft of creative commitment. Gliding through art openings, literary readings, jazz clubs. Living poetic, living fly. Living Brooklyn. Having each other’s backs, viciously and without question. Buying a brownstone, filling it with art, books, music. Strapping huge cartoon-dynamite packs to the notion of race and blowing it sky-high, once and for all—producing work so searingly dope, so unassailably dealing with it, that nobody ever asks either one of them another dumb-ass identity question again.

  “Open,” calls the voice from his answering machine. Tris wonders for a moment whether Mariko is using the word as an adjective or a verb, then turns the knob.

  A man who must be Albert is sitting in the only chair, one leg resting on the lap of the tiny woman on the couch across from him. The supple fabric of his suit pants is bunched above his knee. A long white scar runs down the visible length of his calf, stark and rough against the smooth brown of his skin.

  “Howdy,” he rumbles, punctuating the greeting by raising the drink in his hand. “Tristan number two. Last time I saw you, you were knee-high to a duck.” He sets the glass on the floor, lowers his leg, drops both hands to the armrests, and begins to lift himself out of the chair.

  “Hornsy, don’t. You gotta rest.” Mariko steps in front of him, and Albert aborts his effort, sinks back down. “Good to see you, Tristan. You lifesaver.” Mariko’s skin is stretched taut over her face and hangs loose at the neck, like a rubber Halloween mask that’s been yanked on and off too many times. Her lipstick matches her ankle-length burgundy dress, marks the near-odorless cigarette burning in her hand. “Albert recovering from arterial bypass,” she explains, waving an arm at the appendage.

  The saxophonist raises his eyebrows at Tris and grimaces. “Hard shit.”

  Mariko nods, resumes. “They open up whole leg. Doctor tell me, ‘Your husband gotta stay in bed for three weeks, Mariko.’ I tell him, ‘That’s okay, we booked at Blue Note in ten days.’ He say, ‘You crazy! No way he can recover that fast.’ I tell him, ‘You don’t know my husband. He gotta play!’”

  Tris grins, glances over at Albert to catch his reaction but finds none. His leg is crossed at the knee and he’s kneading the muscle with both hands.

  “So, this what I need, young man. You gotta get five waters and five towels and put onstage: one for everybody. And un–cover up the drums. When show start, you gotta stand by me—we cannot sit, Blue Note sold out, everybody wanna see Albert!—and go tell soundman if we need to make a change. I tell you the rest once show start. For now, you can visit with grandfather. I gotta go downstairs and talk to Mike about dinner for me and Albert. And Albert gotta go over set list with band—right, Hornsy?”

  “Right,” Albert grunts, dropping his leg. This time, Mariko lets him stand. He sets his weight down gingerly, limps to the door, and steps out.

  “My grandfather? He’s here?”

  No sooner does Tris ask than a great happy roar of recognition fills the hall. “Brodsky the bodyguard!” Van Horn bellows. Tris steps into the corridor and, to his delight, finds his grandfather dangling six inches above the ground, locked in the musician’s embrace, slapping Albert on the back. Tris looks at Mariko, waiting for the admonishment against overexertion he assumes will be forthcoming. Instead, he finds her gazing tenderly at them.

  “I knew you’d bounce right back,” says Tristan, regaining his feet. Mariko slips into the hall, and the old man gives her a double hand squeeze and a peck on each cheek, then turns to his grandson. “I’m telling you—this man is a miracle of nature. Nothing can stop him.”

  Albert stares at Tristan, eyes grown wide. “The old mutual-appreciation society,” he drawls, and then the two of them are laughing, harder and longer than Tris has ever seen his grandfather laugh before. And though the old man’s delight at seei
ng his friend is obvious, equally clear is how hard he’s straining to keep up his end of the moment. It’s the kind of thing Tris wishes he didn’t notice, and he turns away and lets himself remember Nina, sitting downstairs with her camera and her blazing eyes.

  Albert departs into the second dressing room, where his musicians are; he opens the door to brotherly salutations, the thrum of an upright bass. Tris watches the band fold him into itself and feels a yen for the kind of creative fellowship writers never experience, then peeks at his grandfather and wonders if the old man is suffering the same pang. Mariko skitters down the stairs, and then the two of them are alone. They commandeer the dressing room, and Tristan takes the chair.

  “Slip me a little of the grape, will you?” He indicates a bottle breaching the arctic surface of a bucket atop the minifridge.

  “It’s not open,” Tris reports, lifting it.

  “Change that.”

  “It’s champagne.” The reverence with which he says it sounds stupid even to him.

  “In that case, have it bronzed and mounted.”

  Tris twists the metal wire and passes the old man a flute. “Will they mind if I have some? While I’m working, I mean?”

  “I doubt it. Alcohol doesn’t rank as a drug with Mariko.” Tris pours himself a glass. They clink and drink.

  “Nice suit.”

  “The very best,” Tristan declares, pseudo-indignant. “Got it thanks to my old teacher, Peter Pendergast. I’m sure I’ve told you about him.”

  “A little.” Pendergast’s an enigmatic figure in the Brodsky oral canon; sometimes he’s spoken of with derisive affection, sometimes outright contempt. All Tris knows for certain is that the professor kept his grandfather out of the war and helped him get published, and that there was a falling-out: unspecified, conclusive.

  “Peter was one of these types with boundless energy. It was his undoing, in the end. Anyway, this exuberance was generally directed toward improving you. He liked to find some fault and then proceed to rectify it. Gave him satisfaction.

  “Sometime in the late forties, he took me aside and let me know that he disapproved of my clothes. He told me that they didn’t fit, that they lacked style, and that I simply didn’t spend enough on them. ‘Just once,’ he said, ‘you should go to a first-rate tailor and see what a real first-class suit is all about.’

  “I, of course, paid no attention. After a few months of this private nudging, Pendergast began to rib me in public—to my great annoyance. I told him to cut the crap and take me to his suit man, and the next day, at about six in the morning, Pendergast turns up in his fancy motorcar and transports me to an establishment known to him as the best in Manhattan. The proprietor and head tailor, I’ll never forget, was a man who was sort of an oily type but also managed to be very haughty. I disliked him immediately. Pendergast assured me that everyone disliked him immediately. So I leapt up on his box and let him take my measurements.

  “The idea, I hasten to explain, was not to cut me a suit from whole cloth. That would have produced a cost equivalent to the gross national product of one of these small countries, say Bolivia. The idea was to take a suit off the rack and alter it. Which was not cheap either. So away we went, and three days later I returned, and the oily fellow gave me my suit.”

  Tristan pauses.

  “And?”

  “It did not fit me. But really, I didn’t fit the suit. I’m of the lumpen proletariat. That’s it for me. Can’t blame the suit. I shoved it in the closet, and that was that. And then last fall I was poking around for something presentable to wear to your cousin Steven’s wedding, and there it was. And the goddamn thing fit fine. What do you make of that?”

  “Dunno. I’d have to see your tax return.” Tris balances the glass atop his palm. “It’s nice to see you and Albert together. You’ve known him forever, huh?”

  “He started as a drummer. I used to haul around his trap kit when I was younger than you are now. We’ve never seen very much of each other, but when we do, it means something.”

  “So what is it I’m supposed to learn from him, exactly?”

  “Whatever you can.”

  “What’s he, like, your muse?” Tris says it just sharply enough to register, but not so sharply that he couldn’t play innocent if he had to.

  “Don’t be a putz. You’ll never get anything done if you believe in muses.”

  Tris decides he’d rather confide in the old man than take him half-assedly to task, and he flops onto the couch. “I’m not getting anything done anyway.”

  “Welcome to the club. What’s your excuse?”

  “General indifference of the world. I haven’t written shit since Contents came out.”

  “That’s nothing—what, a few months? Look at me: more than twenty years since my last book. They had me dead and buried.” For an instant, the old man looks smug, or victorious, or something else Tris hasn’t seen in him before. The look passes, and Tristan adds, “I had me dead and buried.”

  “But you already had a career, Grandpa. You could afford to take your time. Nobody’s waiting for my next book, except maybe to slam me again.”

  Tristan waves off the complaint. “Fuck ’em. Everything moves in cycles. Do you know I just sold the movie rights to Manacles? Forty-six years later, people are finally ready for that book. Should have seen what I went through in ’51.”

  “I don’t have forty-six years, Grandpa. I gotta come up with something strong, or else apply to law school.”

  The old man levels a wine-hardened glare at him. “What do you want? A pep talk? How’s this: be a lawyer. If that strikes you as a possibility, then by all means quit fucking around with something you’re not serious about and do it.” Tristan breaks off, shakes his head, and guzzles his champagne.

  “Okay. Jesus. It was just a figure of speech. I mean, fuck law school.” Tris stares into his glass, watches the bubbles hit the surface and explode.

  The old man reaches over, and Tris feels his grandfather’s cool, dry hand encircle his wrist. “Listen. I like Contents. Your sentences are beautiful. But it’s too kind, Tris; there’s no fight in it. You’ve got to push yourself if you’re going to push anybody else. Whatever you love, you’ve got to stare it in the face until you find the dark part, the part you hate. And vice versa.” There is excitement in his voice, but Tristan’s face is grim. “It will take its toll,” he adds. “I don’t mean to make it sound romantic.”

  Tris lifts the glass to his mouth, feeling less like a writer than ever. There is something curdled in his grandfather—something stunted in the way writing and only writing can break him and heal him—that Tris is just beginning to understand. Or find the courage to see.

  “I’m not sure I want to do it that way,” he says, just louder than a whisper.

  “You’d better decide.”

  “I met somebody,” Nina says into the phone. She’s pacing before the Brooklyn studio’s one window, passing in and out of the harsh morning light.

  One second of silence. Two. “Hello? You there?”

  “Yeah,” Marcus grunts, and clears his throat. “Good for you, babe. You like him?”

  “Yeah,” says Nina, bristling. She planned to do this gently, but if Marcus is going to play it cold and casual, dip into some kind of pimp routine, then she can be a motherfucker, too. “We talked until three in the morning. I think I’m in love.”

  “I’m happy for you.” He sounds like he’s reading the cereal box in front of him. “You deserve it.”

  Marcus can’t be letting go so easily. This must be some cocksure can’t-nobody-take-you-from-me bullshit.

  “You meet him at school? He a college kid?”

  “The Blue Note. He’s a novelist. Why are you acting so weird?”

  “What? How am I supposed to act?”

  “Like you give a shit, maybe?”

  “Look. You turn down every gig I’m on. You make time to see me maybe once a month. What—”

  “And we have sex every time
.”

  “If you like this guy, you should see him. I might be selfish, but I’m not that selfish.”

  “You’re supposed to love me.”

  “I do love you. That’s not gonna change.”

  Nina sighs, and the phone dissects her breath into static. “I love you, too, Marcus.”

  “But you can’t do this anymore. Right?”

  Famous last words. Without even meaning to, he’s mocking her.

  “Right.” And as the first familiar pang of longing hits her, Nina knows that Marcus is going to get into his car and drive across the bridge and appear on her—his—doorstep, and they’re going to make love on the thin mattress lying on the floor of the glorified darkroom she’s been living in for almost nine years now.

  “Hey. It’s me.” Nina is back on the phone, watching Marcus sweep the bottom of his overcoat aside as he prepares to slip behind the wheel of his 1974 Jaguar. He lifts his head and waves. Nina waves back, with a weak smile he can’t see and she can’t feel.

  “Hey,” Tris says brightly, on the other end of the line. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Good. Me, too.”

  “Let’s meet. Did you have lunch yet?”

  “Listen, I don’t want to sound crazy. I know we just met. But you know how I was telling you my apartment situation is kind of fucked-up?”

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “Well, I need to clear out of here. Like as soon as possible. It’s a long story. My landlord’s an asshole, basically.”

  “Come stay with me,” he says immediately.

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. Want me to come and help you with your stuff?”

  Nina looks around. Everything she has, aside from an armload of framed photos taken by her and by Marcus, fits in the two well-traveled suitcases Devon gave her as a first-year Christmas gift.

  “That’s okay. I’ll call a car. Where are you, exactly?”

  “Two oh nine Washington Park, corner of Dekalb. I’m on the parlor floor; it’s buzzer number two.”

  “Okay. See you in a few. I can’t thank you enough.”