End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  Liking the little black-eyed beauty is easy enough. Deciding whether to respect her is harder. Mariko is brave and tough and cactus-sharp, and everybody knows that she saved Albert’s life. But when Amalia looks at her, she can’t help thinking of the sad, hollow divorcées she teaches. Composing an opinion is further complicated by the irksome fact that Mariko seems to consider the two of them, as the spouses of irascible geniuses, to be colleagues. Amalia would sooner commiserate with fellow poets, fellow artists, even fellow mothers, than with fellow mistreated wives.

  “Mariko,” Amalia replies, as if they chat daily, “so nice of you to call. How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you,” Mariko responds by rote. Then she sighs. “I not been away from Albert one day since we meet, Amalia. I wake up today, I don’t know what to do with myself. I already miss.”

  Amalia sits before her sandwich, but she doesn’t dare take a bite. “Do you miss him, Mariko? Or are you worried he won’t be all right without you?”

  There is a pause, and Amalia can feel her thinking it over. “You right. I more afraid than anything. I trust Albert now, much as I can. I know he gotta do. But I don’t trust the world.”

  “It’s out of your hands. Besides, I’m sure he’ll be fine. Tristan will look after him. Just try to enjoy yourself. Doesn’t it feel nice to be alone?”

  As she speaks, Amalia wonders: is Mariko calling because Tristan is on the road with Albert, or because she has no one else to talk to?

  “Nice, but strange. Before I think about it, I already make breakfast for Albert this morning. I think I probably gonna do the same tonight, so I wondered if maybe you want to come over for dinner.” Mariko stops short, as if she hadn’t expected to get it said so fast.

  The invitation catches Amalia off-guard, with no excuse at hand. “Well, thank you, Mari. It’s lovely of you to ask.” And it is, thoughtful and sad. Solitude, it seems, is so distasteful to Mariko that she cannot fathom Amalia’s not being lonely with her man gone. Here, too, is Amalia’s out if she wants it: the fact that she is not alone. She has a daughter to look after, and it’s not like popping into the city is easy—it’s a commitment, a two-hour trip. But there are three more whole days until Tristan returns, and perhaps an evening is worth forfeiting for Mariko, who dared make this phone call. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see who she is in Albert’s absence, although Amalia guesses that unless she herself directs it elsewhere, conversation will revolve around the men.

  Amalia smirks as she imagines radicalizing Mariko, arriving at this meeting of the abandoned women’s club with a big bottle of booze and working Mariko into an unrecognizable, man-hating frenzy, so that when Albert comes home, he’ll find his protectress transmogrified into a fearsome virgin war goddess. Linda can stay the night at Marcy’s.

  “What can I bring?”

  “Nothing,” Mariko says happily.

  New York City driving is not so bad when Tristan is beside her in the car, the two of them pointing out personal and joint landmarks and recounting their stories, but alone Amalia feels almost overmatched. Her skin prickles and her calves tense as she is funneled toward the massive arteries that are Manhattan’s borders, and pumped through: another drop of lifeblood free to plot its course through the city’s indifferent, blackened veins. Amalia flicks the radio off. The classical music she thought would soothe her infringes on her concentration, and she needs every bit for these next few minutes of navigation. Cars stream past her on the right and left. Amalia flinches with each honk.

  The city she grew up in seems foreign now, threatening. She feels guilty over what it has become, as if by forsaking New York, she has doomed it to monstrosity. From time to time, Tristan still talks about moving back here. Threatens, really, since he knows it is the last thing she would ever want. Nor would he, but Tristan maintains a blustery reverence for New York’s seething, compressed energy, its misery and hardness, its properties as a creative tonic. He speaks of it the way an ex-jock might speak of his high school football field, Amalia thinks, clicking her blinker and merging onto the West Side Highway.

  Apartment buildings loom to her left, the Hudson shimmers to her right, and beyond it New Jersey glitters feebly. And here she is, speeding past the exits for Seventy-second Street, Fifty-sixth, Forty-second, alongside scores of others, suffused with an out-of-control sense that she is living in the future—that this accelerated, frenetic, largely unpleasant here and now is the tomorrow of her childhood, the future of the world into which she was born. It is not the kind of thought you can try for very long to explain to others. If they understand, they’ll understand quickly, and if they don’t, you’ll only talk a rope of foolishness around yourself. Tristan would get it.

  Amalia exits on Tenth Street, dodging potholes until she winds her way down to Third and MacDougal. She parks, double-checks to make sure all the doors are locked, and braces herself as she passes a convocation of rangy young people in woolen ski caps, their breath indistinguishable from their cigarette smoke, passing a fifth of Southern Comfort in front of Cafe Wha?

  No one says a word to her. Why would they? Amalia reproaches herself as she continues up the block. Why would they take any note of me at all? Teaching seldom makes her feel old, but kids in their natural habitats have started to spook her. Before she knows it, she’s turned the drinkers into the Arbiters of Art, the Grand High Council of Hipness, standing guard as if protecting the purity of The Scene against the invasion of the old, the moneyed, the unhappening. Amalia pictures them gathered in judgment inside their famed Village coffee-house, pronouncing her poetry frail and aged, something their parents would probably read.

  She brushes the image away, tries to laugh. Allen Ginsberg wants to meet her, she reminds herself. Not six months ago, Albert introduced him to Tristan at some Village party Amalia had declined to attend, and Ginsberg talked on and on about her work, knew it backward and forward. Tristan glowed as he told her the story late that night, half-drunk adoration beaming from his eyes. It is when others praise her that he remembers who Amalia really is.

  She imagines telling the Arbiters about Ginsberg by way of validation—fisting her hands on her hips and invoking their gods as they sit slumped over their scarred wooden table and their dirty coffee cups, turning full young lips to one another and whispering, “Man, who is this old crone?” covering their mouths lest they laugh in her face.

  The door to the Van Horns’ building is ajar and so Amalia walks in, shuts it behind her, strides past a gust of pissy, heated air and a bank of mailboxes, and climbs the stairs to 2A. Mariko opens the door before Amalia can knock a second time.

  “Hello-hello,” she says, stepping back to let her guest enter. Amalia pays the toll before crossing the threshold: bends at the waist and presses her cheek against Mariko’s in an exchange of air kisses. Mari’s skin is softer than it looks, softer than Amalia’s skin by far, and she is perfumed with a familiar, floral scent Amalia can’t quite name. Her shoulder-length hair, though, smells like cigarettes—unavoidable if you smoke, and the reason Amalia keeps her own as short as fashion allows.

  She hands Mariko a bottle of red wine and steps inside. A strange blend of excitement and apprehension washes over her, stronger emotions than an apartment usually has the power to provoke. Why, she wonders, has Tristan never mentioned that the Van Horns live in a home without walls? But no—it is more like the walls are invisible. There is a kitchen, a music room, a den. Everything is delineated, but nothing is enclosed. Even the bed, jutting from a far corner of the loft where two brick walls meet, is right out in the open. One Japanese screen rests flat against a row of windows and another stands unfurled between the dinner table and the sleeping area, segmenting the space but hiding nothing; it reaches less than halfway to the ceiling. The apartment is close enough to the ground to benefit from the glow of the down-turned streetlights, high enough to be impervious to their glare.

  What an odd, honest way to live, Amalia thinks, eyes darting from the piano t
o the butcher-block peninsula, the paper blinds to the couch to the wardrobe by the bed. I would go crazy in a day.

  Mariko stands with her arms folded, watching Amalia acclimate. “The house I grew up in so big, you never know where anybody is. Here, I always know where to find Albert, no problem.”

  “Mmm.” Amalia drifts back toward the entryway. “But what if you want to lose him for a while? That must be quite difficult.”

  Mariko smiles. “You teasing me, Ama.”

  Amalia starts. No one has called her by that name in years. Her mother did not believe in nicknames for her daughter, and thus only Natalie’s own mother—having endured the same insult when the former Natasha reinvented herself—had dared. Ama had sounded wonderfully delicate, deliciously illegal, when Grandma Elena said it. But the name died with the woman, almost fifteen years ago.

  “Not at all, dear. I guess I just can’t imagine what it’s like never to want to be apart. You must be very much in love.”

  Mariko stares up at the track lighting. Her mane rustles against the back of her long-sleeved dress. She gathers it into a ponytail, then lets it fall.

  “It got nothing to do with love.” Mariko springs into motion, as if the conversation demands it: unsheathes the wine from its brown bag, sets it on the counter, plucks a corkscrew from a wall hook.

  “I not love the man,” she resumes matter-of-factly, leaning over the bottle and twisting the metal coil into the cork until her elbow stands perpendicular to the ceiling. Amalia watches Mari leverage, pull, pop, unscrew cork from coil, spin to snatch two glasses from a shelf she has to rock onto her toes to reach.

  “I love the music,” Mariko concludes as she tumbles wine into both glasses and sets down the bottle with a punctuation-marking clunk.

  Amalia sidles to the counter. The combined effect of Mari’s performance and her sentiment is manifesting as thirst. Without warning, the hostess launches into an athletic finale—lunges right, seizes a sponge, swipes it over a small red dribble, backhand-flicks it across her body and into the sink six feet away. Amalia suppresses applause.

  Mariko hands her a glass, and finally looks Amalia in the eye. “Nobody understands. Not even my family. I don’t expect. When I meet Albert, I never think, Do I love him? I just know he need me. What else can you do, Ama, when you find the person who need you most, and you know you can help him?”

  “But does it make you happy?” Amalia takes a deep sip of her wine. “Helping Albert?”

  “It makes me happy hearing him play.” Her eyes light up at the thought. “He so pure, Ama! Albert never think of anything but music. Just like little kid. Even when he practice at home, he got so much emotion. Make me wanna cry.” Mariko palms the wineglass, and the stem clicks against her wedding band. She gulps, sets down the drink, and dabs a finger to the corner of her lipstick.

  “But what about you?” Amalia places her glass next to Mari’s. “Who takes care of you?”

  “I do. Men cannot take care of nobody. Especially genius.” She picks up the bottle and another chute of wine splashes into Amalia’s glass. Mari pours like a saloon keeper. “Tristan take care of you?”

  She’s made her point; Amalia doesn’t even bother to respond. Instead, she thinks back to the fantasy of radicalizing Mariko that so amused her a few hours back, and wonders who is schooling whom.

  Mari lifts her glass. “You right, Ama. It’s good to lose them for a while.” Amalia consents to clang it in a toast, and they both sip: Amalia deliberately, and Mariko fast, so she can talk on. “Everything I remember before I meet Albert like memory from different lifetime,” she says, eyes trained on nothing. “Being single, going out with girlfriends, dancing on the beach all night. Things very different in Okinawa.” She giggles. It is a strange sound, coming from Mariko, but very nice. “My first boyfriends American GIs.”

  As she listens, Amalia strips the intervening years from Mari’s face as easily as peeling paper from a wall, and sees her teenaged and flirtatious, that tremendous energy not yet tethered to anything but the pursuit of fun. Mariko’s bare tan legs glint in the moonlight as she dances, moving faster and faster, throwing back her head to challenge the night sky with her black eyes. When the image dissolves, the room has lost a little of its luster, and so Amalia dives again into the past, her own this time.

  “Any boy who wanted to take me out had to have dinner at my parents’ house first,” she recounts, and a trill of laughter jumps from her mouth. She presses her fingertips to her lips, and the corners of her smile peek out from around them. “My father was so funny. Looking back, he was. At the time, I was mortified. My date would be sitting there, some poor sixteen-year-old in his best suit, as nervous as the dickens, and Daddy would be leaning into him and cracking jokes and elbowing him in the ribs, and then all of a sudden he’d sit up very straight and stern and start quizzing the boy on his plans for the future, as if it were a job interview.

  “‘Just how do you intend to make a living, son?’” she booms in Maurice’s baritone. “‘What kind of a noggin for business have you got?’” She presses her hand to her chest and giggles until tears rise to her eyes, looks over at Mariko and takes a deep breath and continues. “And then, if he thought he could get away with it, my father would switch over to math problems. He’d have the boy stammering about how he was hoping to study medicine, or law, and then Daddy would cut him right off and say, ‘Yes, yes, very good. Now see here, lad. Let’s say a train is traveling from Boston to Chicago, and at the first stop twenty men get on….’”

  Amalia breaks into hysterics and clutches Mariko’s slim forearm. The instant she feels skin against her palm, Amalia’s heart thrills as if it has been tickled with a feather. This happens now and again. Amalia will touch someone and only then realize how badly she has ached to. Sometimes she will also realize that she has employed some ruse or exaggeration in order to achieve her end: an imaginary fleck of lint, a not-really-so-tight squeeze through a party corridor, a laughing fit. These mini-crushes always vanish as soon as she becomes aware of them; Amalia tells herself she is a sensual person who needs more stimulation than she’s getting, and thinks no more about it. But this is different. Touching Mariko is something she should have done sincerely, not under the guise of this semiauthentic laugh attack, which is now ending and leaving her winded and annoyed with herself.

  “Oh.” She sighs, letting go. “I’m sorry. I haven’t thought of that in years. God, it must sound insane.” Mariko grins, hands her a paper napkin. Amalia takes it, and as she dabs the corners of her eyes, Mariko turns away and lifts the lid of a stout blue pot sitting on the stove.

  “It smells wonderful in here,” Amalia says, a little louder than is necessary. She stands on tiptoe, bracing herself against the counter, and tries to peer over her hostess’s shoulder from eight feet away. “Is there something I can do to help?”

  As she utters what is so often a rhetorical offer, routinely dismissed, Amalia is sure Mariko will say yes. They are two women cooking together, not The Server and The Served. No men are cloistered in the living room as if the sight of uncooked food has been proven to cause impotence in the male of the species.

  “You can make the salad.” Mari opens the refrigerator, covers the peninsula with an array of produce. Amalia helps herself to a knife and a cutting board and carves a radish into thin translucent wafers. Saffron and cilantro spice the air, and Amalia breathes the bouquet greedily as she works. The background burble of Mariko’s fish stew is the sound of excitement.

  Soon everything is ready. “Can I light these?” Amalia calls over her shoulder, setting the wooden salad bowl on the table and noticing two orange taper candles standing in low iron holders on a bookshelf, wicks pristine.

  Mariko is carrying the pot between two oven mitts, walking with the care of a pregnant woman. She gives her guest a quizzical smile.

  “Why not?”

  Amalia strikes a match. “I thought maybe you were saving them for something.”

  Mar
iko sits down, folds her hands in her lap, and nods. “For you.”

  Amalia can’t help blushing, but between the heat rising from the pot and the slight rosiness the wine has now imparted to them both, it hardly matters. She takes another sip as Mariko ladles the fragrant orange concoction onto a base of rice and lays a plate in front of her. There are chunks of haddock, shrimp, and scallops, small pieces of something that might be crabmeat or even lobster. Amalia thinks about her mother, the way Natalie always orders shellfish in restaurants because they are verboten in her kosher household. As if the Torah provides a loophole for Jews dining out.

  “You know, I haven’t been out dancing in years,” Amalia remarks as they pick up their forks. The image of Mariko spinning between the sand and stars has lingered in her mind. In fact, now a summer storm is coming down and Mariko and her girlfriends are getting drenched, opening their mouths to taste the rain as great fast sheets of water spatter their clothes and stick them to their bodies. Soon they will escape into the ocean, calling one another’s names.

  Mariko shoots a bemused look over the top of her wineglass and Amalia feels ashamed, guileless, like a child hinting at what she wants for her birthday when the gift’s been sitting in the closet, wrapped, for months.

  “Me neither. So we go, then? After dinner?”

  Amalia laughs, drops her eyes to the table, then raises them slowly. “We couldn’t.”