End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  “Nice to meet you.”

  Mariko piped up right on cue, cock block at the ready. Among the band’s alumni, she was famous for this. “How your girlfriend, Tris?” She turned to Saga with a sage nod. “Very lovely young woman. Photographer.”

  “She’s fine.” He glanced at Saga to see if she’d followed the logic of Mariko’s seeming non sequitur, and found the girl’s eyes roving around the room.

  Rolf pushed off with his hands and rose from the low leather couch into which he’d eased a moment before. “I’ve got to take care of some paperwork. See you tomorrow night, Mari.”

  “Okay Rolf, thank you,” Mariko singsonged, waving as he sidled out the door.

  Tris waited for the owner’s daughter to follow, but instead she reached for the champagne bottle and poured herself a refill, so he extracted the bag of hash from his pocket and offered it to Mariko.

  She looked at it, then at him, and then at Saga. “Give to her. She look like she know how to make spliff.”

  Saga accepted the bag, expressionless, and went to work gutting a cigarette.

  Mariko dropped her elbows onto the chair’s armrests and crossed her legs. “So. When you gonna get married, Tris?”

  He stooped to snatch a Heineken from the minifridge, tried and failed to twist the cap off, scanned the counter for a bottle opener. All of it was preferable to making eye contact with Mariko.

  “I don’t believe in marriage. We got a bottle opener?”

  Saga, holding a low flame beneath the chunk of hash to soften it, looked up. “Give it to me.” Tris passed her the beer. She popped the top with her lighter, handed the bottle back, and returned to her project.

  “You grown man,” Mariko continued, undeterred. “Your girlfriend gonna want commitment. I can tell.” She cackled, eyes shining with wisdom, mirth, perverse delight.

  Tris swung the bottle to his lips with an exaggerated looseness, as if this were a shooting-the-shit-on-the-stoop beer. “I dunno, Mari. I look around and I don’t see too many married couples who seem like they’ve both really flourished, you know what I mean? Even if they love each other.” He stopped short and eye-checked her. Mariko was impassive, but he decided to unimplicate her anyway, just in case. “I mean, look at my grandparents.” Looking at his grandparents was a major part of what Tris had done for the last three years. The results were currently en route from Frontier’s publicity department to book reviewers nationwide.

  “Your grandparents a special case. Not everybody cut out to marry genius.”

  Tris shrugged. “The whole marriage-industrial complex just feels bourgeois and oppressive to me. People should be together because they wanna be, not because they’re legally bound.” He poured some beer down his throat. “I guess I’m too much of a romantic to get married.”

  “Too full of bullshit, you mean. You don’t want to grow up, same as all men.” Mariko smirked. “That’s okay. She gonna make you.”

  “She feels the same way. Her parents’ marriage was a train wreck.”

  “I know female mind, young man. Security very important, even if they don’t wanna admit. Not me—I never have no security with Albert—but I don’t think like a woman.”

  “Well then, I’m the wrong dude.” He lifted his arms like a tightrope walker. “Working without a net, man. Anything could happen.”

  She grinned at him. “Asshole.”

  “Hey, I mean, we do live together. I’ll have a kid or whatever. I just don’t want to sign a contract. If Nina hadn’t gotten into grad school, that would have been something else, but now her student visa’s cool for like the next three years.”

  Mariko’s smile faded, replaced by the deep furrows that surrounded her mouth at rest. “You ever been to INS, Tris?”

  “Nah.”

  “Worst place on earth. Cannot bring nothing into the building—no food, no drinks. Cannot even go to bathroom, ’cause you don’t know when they gonna call your name. Government make it as hard as possible, so people give up. I almost give up myself, but I know I gotta make it for Albert’s sake. You know how it feels to try to make a life someplace, and be afraid you gonna get kicked out?”

  “Okay,” Saga proclaimed, and they both turned. A joint rested atop her palm.

  She offered the masterpiece to Mariko, who crossed her arms. “You go ahead.”

  Saga glanced at each of them, then raised the joint to her lips, flicked her lighter, and expelled a lazy, lingering cloud. Tris took his turn, felt his head lighten, and passed the spliff to Mariko. She glared suspiciously at it, then scissored the thing between her fingers like a cigarette and dragged. Everything was fine for one second, two. Then Mariko erupted in a fit of coughing, rocking forward and slapping her palm against her chest.

  “You okay?” Tris ventured for the second time in an hour.

  She nodded, still hacking, and wiped away a single tear. “Last time I smoke hashish thirty years ago,” she told Saga, looking up with wide eyes. “Albert have gig in D.C. Soon as we get to town, a blizzard hit us. Nobody come to the club except same six people, every night. So devoted! They feel power of the music, you know? By end of that week, we all best friends. For the last night, cooks and waitresses and band and customers have big party.” She shook her head. “I got so fucked-up that Albert have to carry me home. I say to myself, I cannot do that no more. If I get fucked-up, who gonna watch Albert?”

  Mariko remembered the joint idling in her hand and thrust it toward Saga, lipstick stains and all. “I gotta find new bass player, Tris. You hear him tonight? He got no spirit.” She clenched her fist, held it before her face. “You want to play Albert’s music, you gotta have spirit.”

  “Smoke some more, Mariko,” Tris urged. She shook her head, but that impish smile was in place. So seldom was Mariko teased that she truly seemed to enjoy it. “C’mon.” He crouched by her chair with the spliff held between five bunched fingers like a tiny torch. “You deserve it. Besides, we’re only a block from the hotel.”

  She uncrossed her legs and plucked the joint from its pedestal. “You funny, Tris. Okay. Sure. Why not.”

  Watching Mariko happy and animated was sadder, somehow, than watching her sit shuddering at the piano bench. How long could she do this? Did she intend to die on the road, alone in some hotel room after a gig, like so many of her jazz brethren? Tris couldn’t bear the thought of her chasing such a fate, aspiring to it because going until you gave out was the most recognizable of the alternatives arrayed before her.

  “Hey, listen, Mariko, before I forget. My grandparents told me to invite you to Thanksgiving at their house.”

  She narrow-eyed him. “I don’t think so, young man. I think you deciding to invite me now.”

  “Why would you think that? They told me to make sure you’d come.”

  “Your grandfather said that?”

  Tris was about to nod his head when something in her intonation stopped him. “No, actually, it was my grandmother. So you’ll come?”

  “What your grandmother say?”

  “‘Tell Mariko we want her for Thanksgiving and don’t take no for an answer. She should be with old friends now.’”

  She pointed a finger at him. “Don’t bullshit me, Tris.” He raised his palms to his shoulders and gave a sputter of indignation at the very thought.

  Mariko’s glance held firm for another moment, then softened. “All right. If they want me, I will come. Thank you. Now, Tris, you gotta take me back to the hotel. I gotta sleep.” She rose and patted Saga on the arm. “Good luck, young lady. Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too.” Saga darted out of the way, gave Tris a half-smile good-bye, and picked the smoldering joint up from the ashtray. Tris took a last look at her, then chaperoned Mariko to the top of the staircase, spotting her from behind as she embarked on a methodical descent.

  She took his arm when they reached the street. It was a good fifteen degrees cooler than in the club, and the air seemed to rejuvenate her.

  “So, y
oung man, what this new book about?” Mariko lurched slightly on her high heels, like a little girl playing dress-up.

  Tris shrugged. “A man. A writer. His life. The title is Pound Foolish.”

  “Your grandfather?”

  A sour feeling wormed through him. “Yes and no. I mean, there are…Yes and no. Partly.” Fuck.

  Tris had tried to be a benevolent and gentle god, breathe a unique vitality into his man of clay. A writer could understand a character only through the matrix of his own brain anyway, he told himself, could only inhabit a life if he imbued it with his own. Writing this book had been an act of great truth-telling and great lying, an endless discourse between revelation and obfuscation, invention and guesswork and life. Deep down, Tris knew he had shaved dangerously close to Tristan’s history, allowed his imagination to run along a track that paralleled and crisscrossed with reality. He had taken risks, ambitious ones. The ramifications of the enterprise were huge and frightening, and it took only a simple question like Mariko’s to bring them lumbering out of the shadows.

  As Pound Foolish revealed itself, Tris had worked feverishly to build a prison maze clever enough to contain the ramifications—piled brick atop brick even as the ramifications howled, slavered, rammed their shoulders against the walls. He’d sent champion after champion into the labyrinth to slay them. Truth, crusading, sword held high, was supposed to blind the ramifications with pure white light, render them speechless. But they only bellowed louder. Art strolled in unarmed, intent on convincing them of its rightful ascendance and forcing the ramifications to submit to a life of servitude. Instead, Art staggered back outside half-dead.

  Finally, Tris had simply tuned out the clamor, as if it were nothing more than the sodomitic coupling of the downstairs pit bulls. His grandfather was supposed to be invulnerable, Tris reasoned—his life like history itself. Unassailable, and thus public domain. Canonical, and therefore subject to reinterpretation, satire, general fuckery. Something he loved, and therefore had the right, the duty, to find darkness in. The supposition had allowed Tris to write as he had, but now it seemed flimsy, crass.

  Pound Foolish, though, was neither. Irving Gold blazed from every one of its four hundred pages, thrashing and brooding and maintaining, throughout the seven decades of his existence, a fascination with the workings of his great gray brain that kept him floating just outside the world of human intercourse, like the man in the chair atop the hora dance—and like that man, Irving Gold was passed from one protector to another, barely noticing, until the arms and shoulders that supported him grew weary and he toppled down.

  His life began and ended in the Bronx. There, Irving brawled in the streets until he learned to brawl with words, and there he returned when his wife finally tired of his self-obsession and his infidelities (always committed with his social betters, WASP women whom Irving fucked out of hostility toward his friends, their husbands) and the cannons blasting ceaselessly inside his mind. He exiled himself to the tenement house passed down to him when his father died, rather than extricating his finances from his wife’s. And there, a desert of a man, fifteen years estranging him from his last novel, Irving tried to kill himself but, having decided to stick his head in the oven, could not get the flame to light. He resolved to asphyxiate on carbon dioxide; his car refused to start. There was no rope in the house, and Irving did not trust himself to locate an artery with a knife. He wandered into the war-torn streets—intoxicated by the fact that his failure to create art and sustain love had now become a failure even to destroy himself—thinking that if he presented himself with sufficient insouciance, one of the blocks’ adolescent thugs would surely shoot him.

  Instead, this being 1982, Irving Gold stumbled across ex–Savage Skulls gang members turned graffiti masters, and soon he was sucking the marrow from their lives, smoking angel dust with kids sixty years his junior, and writing again. It was not the first time a ghetto darker than Irving Gold’s had vitalized him, though it would prove to be the last.

  “Writers gotta write what they know,” Mariko proclaimed, tapping Tris’s forearm with the hand laced through it. “Cannot bullshit.”

  “Right.” The hotel was just across the street. He could see the awning fluttering in the breeze.

  “Just like music. Musicians gotta be honest, above all.” She shook her head from side to side. “Albert so honest. Everything he do, Tris. He never bullshit. Albert care so much.”

  “He was a great man, Mariko.”

  “Problem with young people, you all bullshit. America the culture of the cheeseburger.”

  Tris walked her across the lobby, to the elevator. When Mariko got going on this one, the only thing to do was nod.

  “Everybody want fame, nobody want to study. Make me sick. Albert know whole history of music. Not just jazz; classical, African, everything! He never stop practicing. That what make the artist. Your grandfather, too. He know. He tell the truth.”

  The doors opened and she stepped inside. “I’m on the ground floor,” Tris said. “Can I take you upstairs, Mariko?”

  “I’m fine. You can go, Tris, thank you.” She regarded him across the elevator’s threshold.

  “Must sacrifice,” Mariko said, pointing her finger as the doors pinged and began to slide. When they were only inches apart, her eyes fluttered closed, and Tris saw her wobble at the knees. He tried to hold the doors, but it was too late. Tris strode over to the stairwell, hauled himself up three flights, and made it to Mariko’s floor in time to see her drifting toward her suite in stocking feet, one pump dangling loosely from each hand.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Tristan sat at his desk, furious, staring into space. There was no getting around it: he wrote like an old man now. The simple slowing of his recall, the fact that the right word no longer bobbed straight to the surface of his mind but swam languorously upward and broke through gasping for air, was the least of it. More crippling by far was that his understanding of people had eroded. The world had grayed as he had. It was not the gray of complexity, but the gray of remoteness, the gray that faded to black. He questioned his footing with every step. Was he interpreting things right? Did people think the way he believed they did? Act for the thin reasons he gave them?

  His characters noticed his unsteadiness and began to mistrust him. They looked at Tristan and saw an old man who would muddle or forget their secrets, and so they divulged nothing, humored him by making meaningless conversation. It was infuriating, trying to work with such people. Tristan had had reluctant characters in the past, but he’d overpowered them with persistence and wile, stalked them until he caught them in some moment of privacy or paradox and then blackmailed them for everything he needed. All he could do now was play the sympathetic geezer. Sit on a park bench, throwing crumbs to pigeons, and hope someone would shoulder in beside him and start telling his life story.

  But Tristan was too fearsome, even in decline, to pull off such a ruse. So for the past—what was it? Four years? Five? That seemed impossible, but they passed so quickly now, represented such a small percentage of his life. Let’s see: he’d published Rage Against It All when he was seventy-six and he was eighty now, and he’d finished that a year before it pubbed, so yes, five years. For five years, he’d written chapter after chapter about the same goddamned asshole prick of a 1930s Bronx bookmaker and his cunt bitch Sicilian wife and his faggot rabbi brother and their fucking parents and their shithead kids.

  The inspiration that had washed over him and midwifed Rage was gone. Tristan glimpsed it sometimes from a distance, the way a man hallucinates an oasis in the desert. Even the memory of Rage was disappearing, both the writing of the book and the vindicating swirl of celebration surrounding its publication, the feeling of being welcomed back from exile. The revelation that now that his absence had been bookended, it would be attributed to greatness, contribute to his mystique. As if it hadn’t been hair-tearing frustration and self-censorship, but some heroic, cloistered discipline that had preven
ted him from publishing anything but the occasional short story since ’73.

  Rage might as well have been a dream. Here he was at work again, struggling his ass off, and past success, recent or distant, had no bearing on the matter.

  Amalia would say that was precisely the problem—had said so, in fact, as recently as last week, when he’d moped downstairs for dinner, apologized in advance for his disinclination to make conversation, and then sat there immersed in his own blue thoughts, bringing fork to mouth.

  Can’t you derive any satisfaction from happy memories, Tristan? If nothing else, don’t they provide some indication that things might work out again in the future?

  No, he’d replied after chewing it over. I guess I can’t.

  Well then, how about pretending I’m someone worth faking a little sociability for? she’d said, laying her utensils against the edge of the plate and crossing her fingers beneath her chin.

  Tristan had looked up reluctantly, the way a brontosaurus might lift its head out of the vegetation upon hearing a noise. Amalia had batted her eyelashes at him. Trying to lend the remark some levity, no doubt.

  You’re worth not faking for, he’d said, hoping that meant something to her. It did to him. But she had only sighed and reached for her fork. He’d wished he had a scene to show her, something so rich and right that she would look at him over the top of the page with that small I-know-a-wonderful-secret smile she used to get, and say, Oh. Tristan. This is very good. He’d wished she had a poem to show him. But Amalia didn’t ask him to read her work anymore.

  Now Tristan dropped his elbows onto the desk and rubbed his eyes, trying to clear away a sudden fatigue. There were three things he could do with this alleged book, these insufferable mounds of paper. He could dump everything in his editor’s lap and tell him to make a novel of it; that was what would happen if Tristan were already dead. He could abandon the project to history’s dustbin, as he had three before. Or he could soldier on until he located and told the story, which at this rate might be never. The prick’s son was him, for Christ’s sake, was essentially Tristan at age twelve, and he couldn’t even write that. He’d had to call Benjamin last week and ask him what subway ran from Boston Road to the Lower East Side, something Tristan had known his entire life. Ben hadn’t been able to remember, either, and the two of them had sat there on the phone, racking their brains. Finally, Ben had asked his wife, Dora, a girl—girl! he sounded like his mother; Dora was seventy-three now, and half-blind—from the old neighborhood, and she had told them.