The One-Star Jew: Stories

by Evanier, David

  They had a maid, a college student. Linda paid her a dollar an hour, but also threw in lessons in Marxist theory.

  Michael and Linda’s bicycles leaned against the trees in their back yard. Avocados fell from the trees and dropped into the yard.

  Michael and Linda spent the evenings watching television. He hoped to direct TV films, and watched carefully. They told me that when visiting New York they had taken a taxi and when the driver turned to them, it was Rabbi Rick Levi.

  I told him I had thought of him when watching Joel Grey receive the Academy Award on television. Grey, with his elfin look and smile, reminded me of him. He had said, holding the Oscar, “Don’t let anybody tell you this isn’t a terrific feeling,” and I had pictured Michael.

  Michael laughed. “Oh, I never watch the Academy Awards. I made a vow never to watch that commercial bullshit.”

  Our room was next to theirs. Michael did Linda’s pregnancy exercises along with her every day. We heard them counting. We also heard a lot of laughter, and the sound of continual munching.

  The refrigerator was filled with milk, yogurt, coconut juice, health foods. Everything reeked of health. We hid our liquor.

  In the baby’s room we awoke to their laughter.

  One morning, I awoke, heard their laughter, and wept. My wife cradled me in her arms.

  “The L.A. Free Press is crap,” Michael said. Before I had a chance to agree, he went on. “But they’ve got one really good service. If you send your grass or any dope to them, they’ll analyze it for you and let you know what’s in it and if it’s safe.”

  “Have you used the service?” I asked, trying to get into the spirit.

  Michael nodded. “Yeah, sure. It was very helpful.”

  “This is the town for you, Bruce,” Michael said. “These laid-back, bland blondes don’t have the energy. It’s a terrific place for a New Yorker with talent and brains. You know, Bruce, I’m surprised you didn’t blow your brains out in Vancouver. We’ve got to get you out of there.”

  He earnestly, arduously set about finding me a job in the movie colony. He found an apartment for me and my wife to sublet behind theirs. He came by in the morning, leaving pastry at the door and copies of the Daily Variety, Billboard, Cashbox, the New York and L.A. Times. During the day he phoned me with interviews he had set up. In the evening he waited for the news.

  The first week I saw three people. The second week, four.

  Nothing worked. Michael looked away or directly downward as I talked to him, giving explanations, expressing my hopes.

  When he was especially hopeful, he would say: “You won’t get it.”

  I didn’t.

  It was while Michael and Linda were away for a week that I saw the ad for the job at Animals in Manhattan. I left a note for Michael and Linda and flew to New York for the interview.

  I am left with a recent dream, and with a memory of certain changes on that trip to Los Angeles.

  My wife and I are visiting Michael at his new home in Hollywood. There is no talking. Michael is just too busy. Linda doesn’t talk to us at all. Michael is on his way out to dinner. I stop him and ask him about the story I recently published and have mailed him two separate times. He claims he didn’t receive it the first time.

  “Did you get the copy of my story?”

  “Which story?”

  “My story.”

  “Uh. No,” Michael says.

  “But I sent it a second time.”

  “That’s very possible. The secretary probably got it and didn’t know.”

  “But then how can I get a copy to you?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But don’t you want to read it?”

  “Sure.”

  “But there’s no way to get a copy to you safely.”

  “Well, I can’t sleep with it, you know,” Michael says in a surly way.

  Then, trying to mollify me: “Look, we’ll think about it. We’ll work something out.”

  He’s on his way out to dinner. He brags: “Three-fifty for shrimp marinara, fifty cents tip.” He recites it proudly.

  On the way out, Michael and Linda show me and my wife where we will sleep: the garage. It is neat, spacious, and clean, with big bookshelves. I say: “This is nicer than our house!”

  Michael cackles, pleased. This breaks the ice. He repeats it to Linda. She likes it too. We all laugh now, more relaxed.

  And the memory:

  Over lunch in Los Angeles, before I was going for a job interview that Michael had arranged, he suddenly said to me: “Have you got a ten-dollar bill on you? I’ll pay you back later.”

  I hesitated, looking at the impatience in his eyes. I was sure he had taken to doing this often, and that he would never mention the ten dollars again.

  On the night before we left, Michael took us to see the newest Franklin National Bank of Santa Monica. He stopped the car and gazed at it in the moonlight. We sat politely.

  His last letters were not written in his personal, almost illegible schoolboy’s scrawl. They were typed on a letterhead, written in pristine language, and signed: Much love, DREAMLAND PRODUCTIONS. Beneath, the secretary had written in his name and their initials: MG/lbd.

  New York is rancid now. I can’t do the things I loved: walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset, sit in Washington Square Park. The Hell’s Angels have taken over the East Village, the terminal-sex crowd is in command of the far reaches of the West Village.

  The Fillmore East is a charcoaled ruin, the wreck of a marquee ghosting Second Avenue. The Automats are empty halls, shared by senior citizens and bums, and at night the lights are dimmed and belly dancers shake for a five-dollar admission.

  I scour the city, evoking the past. Animals isn’t that bad; I have good insurance and medical benefits, and I can write at night if I don’t have a drink first.

  Michael is in Los Angeles. He is sitting in on boardroom meetings where the smoke is thick, the air full of crazy energy. I see him. His laugh, his charm are well liked. The other executives also have beards, wear denim, and, like Michael, have firm social consciences.

  I even hear his laugh now, and it disarms me, as does his voice, and his face.

  But I keep seeing the look on his face when he waited for me to give him the ten-dollar bill. The repetition of the memory is as insistent as the look itself was.

  In the midst of chatter, memories, stories that day, what mattered was the passing of the bill from my hand to his—the tension before it happened, while he waited, and the resolution of it when he took the bill, pocketed it, and signaled to the waitress.

  I remember the scraping of our chairs as we stood up to go.

  7

  A SAFE ROUTE ON EIGHTY-THIRD STREET

  “Dora Lee … Dor-ra Lee … that’s what she would call to me … and how your wife reminds me of her.”

  Miss LeGrand, a former actress who was trying to sublet her Manhattan apartment to us, sat on the sofa beside my wife, stroking her shoulder, and taking sips from a full glass of what looked like water.

  “Is that your first name, Dora Lee?” I asked.

  “No, it isn’t,” she said, stroking my wife’s hair. “No, it isn’t,” she repeated, giggling.

  “You have such a beautiful face, and oh God, you do—you do— look so much like her.” She paused, raised her voice an octave and gave it a Southern lilt and cried again, “Dora Lee … oh Dor-ra Lee …” Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Miss LeGrand lived on Eighty-third Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. On her block drunkards and methadone patients huddled on the stoops, Puerto Ricans and blacks stared ahead in the heat, hustlers in platform shoes cruised up and down. The sound of sirens and shouts and screams came through the window as we sat talking to Miss LeGrand about the safety of the street.

  “This is the safest street. You see, they live here. They go to Seventy-sixth Street to rob and kill. They wouldn’t do it in their own neighborhood.

  “And I know ho
w to walk these streets. If I just did it in a straight line, of course I’d get killed. But you see, I have a route. I cross in the middle of streets, go up certain streets, and down others at certain angles. It is completely secure. I have mapped it out.

  “Of course, I drink—you see. I go out to bars—sometimes I have to at 3 A.M. They know that. So I have to be careful.”

  She looked thin and bare, her skin white. She looked like the apartment.

  “I’ve been ill. If you take this place for the summer, I’ll move in with a friend while you’re here. I need to get my head together. Cash—I haven’t any. I didn’t pay the phone bill. Now they want a $120 deposit, so I simply have to get out for a while.”

  “You must want to go back on the stage,” I said.

  “I can’t. I haven’t worked since a Lillian Hellman play years ago.”

  “Why not?”

  “The illness—it is in my throat. That’s why I talk so low. No one would be able to even hear me on the stage.”

  There were two chairs, a couch, a sink. On the wall there was taped an advertisement in Chinese.

  “Do you speak Chinese?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why—”

  “I think it’s fun-nee. Don’t you think so?”

  “Do you see many plays now?”

  “No. I don’t care for much of what they’re doing. I watch TV. The Avengers. Remember that? The gore and the blood—God! To tromp the men. I like that.” She turned to my wife. “Don’t you, gorgeous?”

  Miss LeGrand fell off the chair as she tried to embrace my wife.

  We told Miss LeGrand that we could not take the apartment.

  At the door she called, “Coming, Dolores.”

  We were not sure if she recognized us any more.

  She was holding the glass. It was almost empty.

  We went down the stairs and out into the night. The faces brooded and stared at us, two children jumped rope, a bottle smashed on the sidewalk and the sirens sang.

  8

  THE ONE-STAR JEW

  Part One I

  Stiff as a ramrod, a straight arrow, six foot three, his face a starched white, Isaac Zavelson stands in the elevator beside some of the other employees of Jews for Israel, waiting for it to move. Entering the building, he has saluted the American flag and the Israeli flag. In his hand he is holding an envelope addressed “Hon. Richard Nixon, San Clemente, Calif.” Inside the envelope is a birthday card. Zavelson heads the Ethnics Division of the organization. He is sixty-one. Under him are shorter men than he, more indecisive men, who shuffle when they walk, who do not speak English as well as Yiddish, who like to remain on the sidelines. Zavelson drives them hard—a ten-hour day, and weekends—except Ruthie. Zavelson takes long lunch hours with Ruthie at her apartment; they return to the office beaming, and, forgetting, immediately send down for lunch. Ruthie did not climb the ladder to get her position and salary, or wait ten years as the others did in the department. In order to move her up more quickly, Zavelson became impatient with one of his men, Mendel Berger. Zavelson took away his desk, his Israeli flag, and made Mendel sit on a chair by himself in the corner waiting for assignments. Mendel packed his things and left one day. Ruthie was given his job.

  A man enters the elevator and moves into the corner as much as possible: a thin man in his midfifties, with a beard and a moustache, his gray hair forming a ponytail in the back, held together by a rubber band. He wears a sports jacket from May’s, has a red handkerchief in his back pants pocket, and carries a dungaree bag over his shoulder, his initials sewn on the bag in suede: L. G. for Luther Glick. He has a paperback in his hand— Zavelson peers sharply at the title: The Way and the Light by Krishna Ramanujam. Luther is just returning from a month’s vacation.

  “How are you, Luther?” Zavelson says.

  “Tip top.”

  “Luther!” barks Zavelson. “So when will you read a Jewish book for a change, a novelty?”

  Luther Glick pauses. “I’m not a six-star Jew like you, Isaac.”

  Zavelson laughs his polite laugh. “I am a full-fledged, proud Jew, Luther. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “You know, Isaac,” Luther begins, “there are other things, other states of consciousness in this world besides—”

  But the elevator has opened again and Zavelson has marched out, leaving Luther with his unfinished sentence. Luther shakes his head and joins the line into the office.

  Luther is a member of the three-man publicity crew, or as he calls himself, a “minion” of Jews for Israel. He walks slowly this morning, his first day back at work, for Luther is tired. He is not a well man. He has had four heart attacks. And he spent six hours the previous night kneeling on the wooden floor of a church attic in Westchester with six others (all of whom happen to have been born Jewish) who are interested in a new Buddhist sect in the neighborhood. Luther is not a member, but, with the new “cosmic consciousness” he discovered five years ago, he is searching.

  II

  Jews for Israel (or JFI) is not a place for listeners. Almost everyone there has finished with listening. So Luther is not surprised by Zavelson’s behavior. I am not used to it, as I have only been with the publicity staff for six months and am, by twenty years, the youngest member of the organization. Our department occupies a corner of the office—a glass alcove for our head, Stephen Greenberg, and two desks on the outside for myself and Luther. Luther sits behind me. He greets me, our obese secretary, Bea, whom he calls “Queenie,” and our second secretary, Jill. Luther waters his plants, lights his pipe, thumbs through his copy of Ms., and unfolds today’s New York Times. He settles back.

  III

  Luther has spent his month’s vacation in the New England area. First he traveled to Vermont with his wife for the trial of one of my predecessors in this job, the man who sat at my desk ten years ago: Rom Schwartz. Rom, a poet, teacher, and the son of a world-famous Jewish scholar, was on trial for murdering his wife with a pickax. The two children testified against him. He was found guilty. Luther tells me that he went up to Rom while the trial was still going on, held out his hand and said, “‘Rom— Glick, Luther Glick, from JFI. You may not remember me. I was a colleague. Rom, if you want somebody to just lend an ear, someone to talk to, I’ll be glad to come back and see you tonight.’ He looked at me and he had a glazed air, as if he was far away, and suddenly he smiled—just for a moment—Rom’s old smile—a light of recognition—I think—of who I was, and then that look of despair came back, and he said, ‘I’m just so—’ and he couldn’t say any more—he choked—and walked away with his lawyers.” Luther did not stay for the remainder of the trial, but has brought back the newspaper clippings from the Vermont newspaper about the trial, which he shows to me, Stephen Greenberg, and our two secretaries.

  (Rom, who was sentenced to thirty years, has changed his mailing address in the Poets’ Yearbook from his Vermont home to the jail in which he is staying.)

  Stephen Greenberg, a short man also in his midfifties with a round cherubic face, is seated listening to Luther, his short hands folded in his lap, his feet not touching the floor, shaking his head. When he is not at JFI, Stephen is a scholar and historian, the author of more than twenty books. One book he has been working on for years is a biography of Rom’s father, who bequeathed him his private papers when he died.

  About the second half of the trip—which he had taken alone, without his wife—Luther is less communicative. Luther had been carrying on an intense correspondence with Molly Bethune, the Maine author of a best-seller about living a simple country life, in tune with the lakes, the forest, and the birds. Before the book became widely known, Luther had been delighted with it and had mailed Molly Bethune a cassette in which he talked about himself, his life, his new consciousness, and her book. She had been taken with it and in turn mailed Luther a cassette.

  Luther had been very excited by this contact with an author whose book began to move up the best-seller lists and whose pictu
re on the jacket was of an attractive woman in her thirties. He had told us that he had planned to travel in the vicinity of Maine—“Molly’s territory,” he had said with a possessive, intimate smile—but would not elaborate. He had let it hang. Now we both ask him about Maine.

  “I was there,” he says and doesn’t seem to want to go on. Then he says, “I didn’t see Molly.”

  “Not only didn’t he see her,” says Stephen to me in his glass cubicle as soon as Luther has gone out to lunch, “he told me he didn’t even call her. Luther probably didn’t tell you this, Bruce, but—” Stephen begins, crossing his legs. Stephen is a gossip, but the least malicious one I have ever met. He really cares about Luther.

  “—This is really quite moving. After Luther and Molly Bethune exchanged a few more cassettes, one day last fall she writes him that she is coming to New York. She gives him the name of the hotel, she gives him her room number, and she tells him the time she will be there. Luther was so excited. He talked about it for weeks. He had two of her books but he had a hell of a time tracking down the third—a poetry book. The crisis became finding that third early book— he had a search service looking for it. Finally he had all three books. Then the time came. He was in quite a state. He put on a modern suit and tie.

  “Well, he didn’t see Molly. He took her three books and rode the subway to her publishing house. He walked in the door and stood before the receptionist, who didn’t know him from Adam. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘my name is Glick. I have here all three of Molly Bethune’s books. She knows who I am. Would you ask her to autograph them for me?’ The receptionist shrugged and said she would try. Luther returned in a few days to pick up the books. They were autographed.”

  IV

  I remember one of the first things Luther said to me. It was on the third morning of my first week at the office. He was sniffling. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I’m crazy—foolish, just like my wife says. I sleep in the nude. There was a storm last night. I woke up, went down to the kitchen, and then I just walked out into my backyard. I just walked on the grass, the water pouring down on me, looking up at the sky.”