End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  “Well, I’ll guard you with my life, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your coming.”

  “Hell, I appreciate your paying me.”

  “You’d tell me if it wasn’t enough.”

  “You better believe it. But money goes a long way when you don’t shoot your paycheck in your arm.”

  Tristan smiles, marveling anew at the mystery of Albert’s life in the years between the lapse and the renewal of their acquaintance, the years after Albert discovered dope and bebop and before Mariko discovered him. Van Horn speaks of those times accidentally but openly. He does not tell drug stories per se, but if some memory happens to intersect with those dark decades, he will relate it without censorship or hesitation. And yet, for all the lurid details Tristan has accumulated, he still cannot grasp the ravaging day-to-day reality of that struggle. He has elaborated the particulars into a sketch of a life, as he is trained to, but if the Albert of yesteryear were a character he was trying to write, Tristan would be tromping around his study and kicking over stacks of books by now, in frustration at being so masterfully eluded.

  It is strange even to Tristan, but Albert’s addiction provokes in him a kind of jealousy. There is a purity to the wrongness of it, a beautiful simplicity to Albert’s battle to regain his life and to his victory. That affirmation of the strength of Albert’s higher will underwrites everything he does, says, plays now. He is on the other side of the river, and Tristan envies him the way he envies war veterans and gangsters and Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: men who have done something real, something clear in purpose and execution, whether right or wrong. Men whose wars are against tangible foes.

  Clarity, in any form, mystifies Tristan—and the closer he comes to the world’s easy navigators, the more incomprehensible the absence of ambiguity appears. Sometimes he suspects he simply missed the tutorial, that while he was slumped against a splintery wooden chair in an airless Hebrew school learning the story of Purim, they were gathered beneath the cool shade of a country-club oak, learning how to Do Things Right from teams of impeccably groomed, high-cheekboned tutors clad in tennis whites. It doesn’t matter that Tristan’s identity is predicated on his failure to catch up on those lost lessons. That wholeness of being, that unity of mind and heart and body he perceives in others, still fascinates and taunts him.

  I should have brought my daughter on this trip, Tristan thinks as the plane hits a turbulent patch of air and the more inexperienced passengers gasp, clutching at armrests or spouses until the ride smoothes out. Linda is finally worth conversing with, and it is now or never. Either Tristan will continue to hover nearby as Amalia raises her—loiter with pocketed hands and observant eyes and an air of discomfort, just as he has since Linda was an infant and he an inept infant father, gaping in wonder as the baby mewled and squirmed and his wife bustled around Doing Things Right—or else he’ll find it in himself to do more than offer Linda cashews and orange segments and offhand comments as she sits at the kitchen table after supper, bent over her homework, and he drifts into the room to find a snack. It is clear now that Linda will be Tristan’s only child; he can no longer offer himself the excuse that women know best how to raise daughters and he’ll do his share when the male heir arrives. Amalia is too well aware of her husband’s priorities to have another child with him, and getting too old anyway.

  Presiding over dinner had been involvement enough for Tristan’s father, but expectations were different then. Fathers were supposed to be remote figures, their authority undiluted by familiarity. Old Yahweh hadn’t gone around revealing His Divine Splendor to every schmuck and shepherd in Canaan, either; His voice hadn’t thundered forth from burning bushes every five minutes to comment on the weather. Not that Tristan is a deity, or even a disciplinarian. Amalia handles all of that. It is another way he’s failed her.

  No one ever looks back on his life and says “I wish I’d worked more,” Tristan’s father told him—not his dying words, which, according to Benjamin, were, Somebody please get me some lemon for this seltzer, but certainly the last memorable thing Jacob Brodsky uttered to his elder son before deciding not to bother recovering from the influenza he contracted in the frigid fall of 1955. He succumbed to pneumonia six months later, a year after his wife died, but the real cause of his death, his children agree, was guilt. Some part of Jacob couldn’t bear his own good fortune, could not reconcile his existence with his family’s annihilation. As more details of the camps emerged, and the specifics of the horror became easier and easier to imagine, such knowledge grew harder and harder to live with.

  Jacob didn’t talk about it. Not to Tristan, anyway. Instead, he lectured his son on common deathbed regrets. You know what people say, my boy? he asked during what turned out to be their last visit. They say “I wish I’d spent more time with my family.” Jacob spread his hands as if holding two grapefruit, and Tristan, face set to receive the peddler’s platitudes, fingered the key in his pocket, darted his eyes at his parents’ door. The landlord hadn’t changed the locks since Tristan was a kid. Half the Hebraic world could probably access the building by now.

  Your characters you write so beautifully. Such love you have for them. Such understanding. It wasn’t quite proof that his father read his work, but it was close. Why can’t you treat your wife as well?

  Tristan didn’t respond, though Jacob’s opinion of his marriage was based almost entirely on one icy dinner, years before. He and Rachael had come to Connecticut for the weekend, and it had been the wrong weekend. Tristan had been pissed off at his wife, and in no mood to hide it—the reason why escaped him now, always escaped him after the fact. Some assault on his integrity, no doubt, his sense of himself and what he would and would not do, unintentional but met like any attack just the same, with lightning bolts hurled from the bag he kept strapped to his hip, then scorched-earth stillness: knowing himself was not the same as controlling himself. For the first time in Tristan’s life, his mother had been quiet. A giant house filled with not-talking was so alien, she hadn’t been able to get her bearings, and she never visited again.

  Come, Jacob said, in the face of his son’s silence, grabbing Tristan’s hand across the kitchen table, nearly knocking over both their coffee mugs. Pray with your father. Ask the Lord for wisdom. He shut his eyes. Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.

  Tristan paused for a moment, stupefied, before he jerked away. Are you kidding? What’s gotten into you? Since when? His father opened his eyes, regarded his son with a kind of mournful hostility, then got up and disappeared into the bathroom. When he returned, it was as if it hadn’t happened; they discussed the Yankees’ chances against the Dodgers in the upcoming World Series. Not until his father’s death did Tristan stop worrying that Jacob would ask again. The possibility gripped him with a dread he couldn’t explain.

  He would have liked to tell Jacob that he found Amalia marvelous, still. So gifted and so calm, so capable, so present. That the knowledge that his wife sat each day in her office underneath his, writing her small, enormous, underappreciated poems, addressed a monumental need in him: to be part of something larger than himself. To understand that thing, and be understood by it, and still be bound together. She satisfied that need imperfectly, partially, but it was more than Tristan could imagine having with anyone else. He would have liked to tell his father that he kept a certain distance from his wife not because he didn’t understand her, but because he did—well enough to know he was deficient, to know it was not in him to provide the kind of attention Amalia needed, or that he could not find and marshal it, if it was. That failing from a distance was better than approaching and failing and becoming furious with himself and her and retreating and approaching and failing again. Instead, Tristan stared at the dusty top of his parents’ icebox and pictured himself in his final hour, regretting just what Jacob predicted he would.

  It is a sad fate, but Tristan has resigned himself to it. He can imagine being struck with the agonizing realization that he has
missed out on life, on marriage. The scene is so vivid in his mind that he can brace himself for it the way a devout sinner can brace himself for hell. Besides, everybody knows that you can’t have it all. Look at Pendergast. Three fine-looking teenage kids with whom he spends vast scads of time, a stable marriage to a good woman, a nice writerly office overlooking Harvard Yard, a fine full head of silver hair. Martha’s Vineyard every summer, seats on the boards of half a dozen well-meaning institutions thrilled to have an author in their midst. Two shipments of well-scrubbed freshmen each semester to romance into the life of the pen. Peter Pendergast is happy as a pig in shit and twice as venerated. And every three years, marking time as dependably as the floor clock passed down to him by old Grandpappy Graham H. Pendergast, the man turns out another worthless book, looses another buzzing swarm of inane words on the already-overpopulated world. Not for anything would Tristan trade places with him.

  The Man of the Year leans back in his seat, pulls up the window shade in defiance of his fear, and crosses his arms over his chest. Albert watches, and assumes a similarly ruminative pose. The plane cuts through the sky, and the two of them peer down awhile at the distant earth. The hum of the engine is loud and heavy, but every bit as lulling as silence.

  It is such a relief to wake up alone, in an empty bed, that Amalia is ashamed of herself—for feeling so liberated now, and for accepting something less than freedom the rest of the time. She lies on her back in the warm bed, extends her arms and legs like a snow angel, and moves them against the warm flannel sheets. She has the sense that she has slept remarkably well, better than in ages. Her right hand traces a leisurely path over her breasts and the concave of her belly, then comes to rest between her legs.

  Perhaps a short vacation from each other is just what she and Tristan need. When he comes back from Los Angeles, he will be relaxed and receptive, as he always is in the afterglow of so much adulation, and she will be strong and secure, the way she tends to be after so much time to work, so long a respite from conflict. They will find a way to approach each other. It is as good as done. Amalia feels more loving already.

  She throws off the covers with first-day-of-school vigor, wraps a robe around herself, and walks to the kitchen down the narrow, steep back steps. Coffee. A cigarette lit on the stove. The blinds open onto clear early winter; weak sunlight cannot penetrate the ice crust of the backyard snow.

  Amalia turns from the window to contemplate the clues spread over the breakfast table. They suggest what she would have surmised anyway. Linda has risen early, retrieved the newspaper from the driveway, and read the funny pages over a breakfast of toast, butter, and jam. Condiment effluvia now forms a ring revealing the former location of her plate. The dish itself rests in the sink, next to her half-full juice glass. Linda’s definition of cleaning up after oneself is something she has learned from Daddy.

  There are days when Amalia might be inclined to attribute Linda’s carelessness to disregard for the feelings of others, but today she is too light on her feet for sighs or scolding. The deep, warm smell of coffee fills the room and she pours a mugful, then selects an apple from the bowl and peels it in a thin, unbroken strip. Her own silence, and the way it blends into the silence all around, is hugely pleasing.

  She carries the meager breakfast through the dining room, the least-used chamber in the rambling house. It’s filled with furniture from Amalia’s childhood, opulent artifacts that harken back to a time when nothing was ambiguous and nobody felt guilty. When Jews like her father made and spent and gave away vast sums of money proudly, filled their homes with Turkish rugs and Russian tea sets, took their families on first-class cruises, feared nothing. When women like Natalie Farber, sharp, clever, fanciful beings in perpetual motion, rode chauffeured cars down to the Lower East Side to bargain with old-world vendors over chinchilla wraps, returned from trips to Palestine and contracted for Old Testament frescoes to be painted across the four walls of their sitting rooms. When the will of the matriarch and the dormant power of the patriarch constituted the balanced forces of the universe, and the dinner table now covered in dust and creaky with disuse was employed at full sixteen-seat capacity each Friday night.

  Amalia trails a finger across it, remembering the portable gold basin that stood next to her father’s place on Shabbos. It was Amalia’s job to dry his hands with a special white towel after he washed them and before he commenced with the brief prayers, belting them out with operatic gusto and vaudevillian flair. Maurice’s rendition evolved over the years, until any resemblance to the actual tune was mere coincidence. Natalie disapproved, but Maurice and Amalia considered the blessing an artistic vehicle, and his version a vast improvement. During the yearly seder, father and daughter played surreptitious chess games on a low stool situated between his head-of-the-table chair and her seat to his left; it was the only way either of them managed to behave through stern Uncle Yitzach’s three-hour ceremony. The stool sits in a corner of the dining room now, obscured by a potted ficus dying of thirst.

  Amalia eats at her desk while rereading the previous week’s work and savoring her coffee. She drinks the stuff sparingly, once or twice a week, not wanting her body to grow accustomed to the drug. Tristan needs three strong cups these days to get started, and by the time his thoughts are flowing, he has to dam them every fifteen minutes, cross the hall, and pee. Often, caught up in his words, her husband ignores his body’s needs until the last second, then dashes, near bursting, to the bathroom. From her study, the footfalls sound elephantine.

  A few years ago, Amalia gave him an old-fashioned bedpan as a gag gift. Tristan keeps it atop a bookcase in his office, points it out whenever he gives a guest a house tour. Amalia wishes her single scatological joke had not developed so interminable a shelf life, so wide an audience. She wonders if the delight Tristan takes in her nod to vulgarity implies a belief that Amalia is generally prudish. It’s possible; there is no accounting for some of the notions he takes up. But just as likely is that Tristan is happy to possess a totem attesting to the ferocity of his work ethic.

  What a man you are, Tristan. What a strong, virile, unstoppable man.

  And what are you, then? Amalia remonstrates herself. The patient coaxer of emotion? The weaker sex, too addled by sentiment to narrow your eyes and pound on toward greatness? Sometimes she feels as though the mutual knowledge that It Could Be Worse is what sustains their marriage. Worse for her, that is. In spite of all his shortcomings, they both know Tristan is a long evolutionary lope beyond most members of his gender. Many women just as capable as she are married to Company Men who scoff at any interests their wives have outside of cooking, cleaning, motherhood. And it isn’t until such a man has wooed you and won you and shuttled you off to some sterile subdivision convenient to his office, where no one can hear you scream, that the mask comes off and you discover that your husband, the father of your child, is himself a little boy who wants you to be his mother. Who will turn into your father at his cruelest if his wishes are denied. And fifteen years down the suburban road, when and if you finally work up the courage to leave him, there you’ll stand with no money, no skills, only the haziest idea who you are.

  Amalia teaches more and more women like this at Southern Connecticut State: as old as she and back in college, their faces masks of fear and determination. They attend the first class in pearls, heels, and makeup, retaining some deliberate, coquettish aspect of the schoolgirls they remember being—they carry their books pressed against their chests, or search out just the kind of pencil box they used twenty years ago during the three semesters of college they completed before earning their so-called MRS degrees. Amalia is as kind and helpful to these women as can be. Not just out of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I empathy, but because they have few allies on a campus geared toward students half their age. The faculty is full of male professors who see the collapse of their own marriages and perhaps that of Western civilization foretold in these women, and are thus as mean to them as they can get away
with being.

  Amalia watches with pride as the women abandon first the pearls and then the heels and later, sometimes, half the makeup. The boys write blustery Hemingway knockoffs and the girls treacly, wafer-thin romance, but these women produce work that is honest, brutal, and reflective. Occasionally, one will get together with a college boy, and Amalia will watch the couple stroll the campus, arms tight around each other’s waists, and not acknowledge that the feeling masquerading as well-good-for-her friendliness is mostly I-wish-somebody-would-touch-me-like-that jealousy.

  Noon passes before she hunkers down to write. For once, Amalia is secure enough in the promise of the day and the state of her own mind to allow herself such leisure. Sure enough, as soon as she puts aside the upcoming week’s student poems and the Rilke collection she keeps on her desk and opens at random anytime she needs a quick booster of inspiration, Amalia is able to reenter her poem. The decoding of a second-stanza implication—a previously hidden and now self-evident note to herself—spurs Amalia to insert a new third stanza, and soon the poem is finding its true shape, filling out, growing voluptuous. She works from 12:30 to 3:00, pausing only to approve Linda’s request to go and play at Marcy’s house around the block, and when she stops writing, Amalia is the proud mother of a beautiful baby poem, helpless but healthy.

  Only upon pausing does Amalia realize she is famished. She walks to the kitchen feeling like her husband. But while Tristan would merely shovel a few handfuls of something down his gullet and move on, Amalia believes in paying attention to what she is doing. She slices a tomato and some cheddar, melts a pat of butter in a pan, and grills herself a sandwich. It is cooling on the table and the pan is filling with tap water when the telephone rings.

  “Hello, Amalia?” It is Mariko Van Horn. She’s never called before, but that accent is unmistakable. There’s a slight flutter to her voice; Amalia identifies it as the wobbliness of the initial reach toward a potential friend. Exacerbated, naturally, by the fact that Mariko is reaching not just out but up. Amalia chastises herself for the thought, but facts are facts. She is ten years Mariko’s senior, and has her own career, and the few times they have met, brought together by their husbands, Mariko has watched Amalia with an admiration she probably thinks is subtle. Amalia has been flattered, and amused, and treated her with sisterliness. Older sisterliness. She likes Mariko, but Amalia has never extended any invitation to a greater closeness.