V
Since he returned from his vacation, Luther has spent several nights with another sect, a Nichiren Buddhist group. They hold their services in the home of a woman he knows. “Last night they set up the new altar,” he tells me. “The leader, a black man, kept making it parallel. He started the service and then stopped it again. ‘It’s too low,’ he said. He’s six foot four, by the way. So all of his little flunkies started lifting it.
“This leader,” Luther continues, “is thin as a pencil, all teeth. When he smiles, you see teeth. He stopped the services again in the middle, annoyed, and turned to this woman who donates her house for the evening: ‘When we chant,’ he says, ‘the leader should be predominantly heard. If others chant louder than the leader, the leader is not heard and cannot lead.’ She smiled and shook her head, thanking the leader for the whipping, and said she would be quieter. The Nichiren Buddhists stress positive benefits. This same woman testified to the positive effects of chanting: in order to get compensation from her medical insurance, she had to produce evidence of medical bills of several years ago. A letter had arrived that day from her doctor with a large contemporary bill, which he had dated, by mistake, several years back. So she submitted the doctor’s mistakenly dated bill. She didn’t question the honesty of what she was doing … “The chanting,” Luther concludes, “sounds like a railing buzz. It’s hard to take at first.”
VI
I am replacing Melvin Bronstein, who sat at this desk for ten years. Rom Schwartz was here earlier, and it is Mel who most people at JFI talk about. “A saint,” they all say, looking me over as if it would be impossible for me to be as good, as useful as Mel was to them. Mel died three months before I arrived.
There are pictures on the wall of the three of them: Stephen, Luther and Mel. Luther and Stephen’s memories are of their long association with Mel, sharing his tribulations. They talk about how Mel could never turn away from anyone, could never say no; of his alcoholism; of how his wife helped to destroy him, his wife with her three-inch high heels that drilled holes into the floor of his car, and who did not come to Mel’s funeral because she wanted to see California. They talk about how half his stomach was removed, his kidney, his weak heart. They talk about the huge hotel bills his wife racked up on credit cards while Mel was in the hospital, because she said she could not bear to be at home alone. The finance companies still call the office and are upset to hear they have lost Mel. “Kind, wonderful Mel,” the people in the office all say. They shake their heads. “He was too good for this world.”
Except Luther. “I never liked him,” says Luther. “He should have been a whore. He could never say no. He had no backbone.” Luther thinks about that for a moment and adds, “That’s true of Stephen as well.”
“Mel used to say to me, looking away, not facing me, never facing me, when he sat at your desk, ‘You know, Luther, I wasn’t always like this. There are certain things that do something to people.’ Well, he was trying to tell me—trying to hint that once there was a stronger, angrier Melvin: a dynamo. But I didn’t believe that for one minute.”
They both talk about the extra little jobs Mel took on at the office. He drew signs.
“Signs?” I say.
“Sure,” Luther explains. “Like ‘Quiet Please,’ ‘No Smoking,’ ‘Admission Two Dollars,’ ‘This Way Out,’ and so forth. Whenever the secretaries needed a sign for one of our dinners or rallies, they would come to Melvin. He printed very well. Watch out, Bruce. They’ll be asking you.”
“We’ll never forget his last party,” Stephen says. “We just arrived, me and Luther, and we were standing in his living room. We started sniffing. We smelled smoke. Sure enough, there was smoke coming from the next room. ‘Mel, there’s a fire!’ we said.
“Mel looked at us and beamed, his beatific smile, and said, ‘No, no, it’s nothing. Nothing is wrong. Everything’s fine. My daughter had a little problem earlier but it was resolved.’
“We had to take his word. But the smell got worse and worse, and the smoke was filling the living room. Finally we said, ‘Mel, you better do something.’ He insisted nothing was wrong, but Luther and I opened the door to the next room.
“What we saw was amazing. The entire room was burnt to a crisp. There was water and debris everywhere. Everything was black and charred. Water buckets stood in a row. The remaining pieces of wood were crackling. The walls were charred. The smoke was heavy. Mel’s daughter had set fire to her room an hour before the party.”
They both shake their heads. “Where is the daughter now?” I ask.
“In a mental institution.”
I look at Mel’s face in the pictures. He has a blank, brown corduroy look. He smiles. I look for traces of him in the desk. There are none.
I ponder the fate of my predecessors at this desk.
VII
I look behind me. Luther is doing twenty-five pushups on the floor. He touches his toes twenty-five times. He prepares his lunch. It is bright on his desk: carrots, celery, tomatoes, chicken, okra, an orange, and a quart of skim milk. He talks about his new consciousness.
“Nowhere is it written that I have to be numero uno. That’s the most important thing I’ve learned, Bruce. I know where it came from originally. I was a skinny malink of a kid … my brother, though, was a husky busker. And my grandfather was a butcher. That’s how it started.
“When I went back to Toronto after some years, there was no excitement on my grandfather’s part about my arrival … nothing. Then my brother came down the street. My grandfather dashed across the street to him. He brought him into the kitchen. He plunked black bread on the table, sour cream, sat my brother down and said ‘Eat!’ I noticed the difference.
“I used to be so influenced by what other people thought … and that was so wrong. Competition is nonsense. Nature did not decree that it be this way.
“I began reading books about different religions. I realized, and formulated for myself, that there are just two things, Bruce, that we need: peace and purpose. Peace and purpose. I found that I disagreed with not one thing about Islam, one thing about Buddhism (can’t remember which), and many things about Judaism.
“Have you heard of an author who signed his name, ‘The Gentleman with a Duster’?”
I said that I hadn’t.
“I’ve been looking for his novel for ten years. I read it as an impressionable youth, but it would have more meaning for me today: Julius Levine. It was about a young man who searches out an erudite uncle to teach him about Judaism. But the uncle teaches him about the East—he isn’t hung up on Judaism. He knows all the religions have wisdom.
“People around here aren’t tuned in to this wavelength. Being a truth seeker isn’t an easy thing.
“You know, Bruce, recently I had an experience. Alvin was someone I knew thirty-five years ago. I used to sneer at him. He was an astrology expert, a truth seeker even then. He had become a big business success. On an impulse, I took a journey to see him.
“I traveled far. When I arrived, I went up to his offices. When I saw him in the hall I said, ‘Hello Alvin,’ and Alvin throws his arms around me, flashing his smile. I was conscious of his admiration.
“I sez to him, I sez, ‘I recognize that lovely smile, Alvin—your father had it when he greeted strangers. But you don’t know me. Glick. Luther Glick.’
“He closed his eyes, opened them, recognized me, and threw his arms around me.
“He took me into his private office. He sat down behind his desk, and I sat facing him. ‘I have a series of questions for you, Alvin.’
“‘Shoot,’ he sez. ‘Anything you want to know.’
“‘Alvin, when did your daydreams stop …? ’
“He paused; then he said, ‘I don’t remember.’
“Then I asked, ‘What do you say when people scorn you for your séances, for your ideas, when they laugh at you? How can you stand it?’
“And Alvin smiled broadly, paused for a long time, and said, ‘Noth
ing. I know what I know.’”
Luther smiled at me, repeating the phrase, shaking his head in admiration.
VIII
Luther has many scrapbooks in the office. He saves clippings about events, books, but mainly about people he admires. He has two Norman Mailer scrapbooks: Mailer stabbing his wife, Mailer running for Mayor of New York and answering a reporter’s question about what he will do to clear up the snow if he is elected: “I will piss on it.”
Luther is reading the Rolling Stone interview with Mailer. “Jesus!” he keeps exclaiming. Then he says, “Listen to this. The man’s insight is amazing. Charles Manson chose horseshit— not dogshit or human shit—because his girls came from upper-class homes where they had been around horses all their lives. He had them roll in horseshit. It was much less objectionable and more familiar.” Luther looks up, giving me that same admiring smile, inviting me to share his admiration with him.
I look up. Stephen is running back and forth with assignments from the director. I have come to realize he does most of the work. As our secretary Bea says, “Luther panics if he has more than one piece of paper on his desk at one time. Also if he is called into the director’s office.”
Stephen’s face is chalk white from running. “Stephen really knocks himself out, doesn’t he?” I say to Luther.
Luther raises his head from the Rolling Stone. “Yes. That comes from a sense of responsibility.”
IX
Luther takes his job seriously—a possible source of contention between us. “Our standards are not one whit lower than the competition—unless there is a weakening at this desk.” He snaps at Jill: “I countermanded my comma after Fink.” Or at Bea, who is talking to her husband on the phone: “Hang up. We have priorities. When I open my lips, let no dog bark.” Stephen reminds me, “The job is his whole life.”
X
The most difficult person in the office, lately Luther has gotten worse. I feel him storming behind me at his desk, his back rigid, his breath war clouds, his fingers tapping. We are talking about China, a country he approves of, since he firmly believes in the theory of the survival of the fittest. I really don’t give a damn about the politics of China, but I do say, “Well, but of course, China is a totalitarian country.” On my way out the door at lunchtime, a voice reaches me across the entire length of the office. “BEFORE YOU GO OUT INTO THE WORLD TO TELL THEM, BRUCE, I AM NOT TOTALITARIAN!” Luther’s voice carries above the talk of fifty secretaries, the clatter of their typewriters, and the conversations of over a hundred JFI fund-raisers. My hand is on the doorknob. “BRUCE! DO YOU HEAR ME! “
I walk slowly back to our desks.
“Tell who, Luther?”
“TOTALITARIAN! TOTALITARIAN! YOU SAID I WAS TOTALITARIAN!”
“I didn’t mean you—”
“IN YOUR QUIET WAY, BRUCE, YOU REALLY TWIST THE KNIFE.”
I try to mollify Luther. I reassure him that I will not talk to anyone about our conversation.
XI
That afternoon, Luther says that he has had a long-standing argument with his wife. She has opened an antique store in Westchester and has wanted Luther to work there on weekends. Thinking of his heart condition, I say, “When would you rest?”
“During the week at the office, according to her.”
He says that immediately after his third heart attack, he continued to work in the garden he loved. He felt like collapsing. His wife and four daughters told him not to do the gardening, but they left it for him.
“They didn’t know how I felt … it was overwhelming … the pain … sometimes I thought I would collapse in the compost heap … that I would die there … but I never told my wife. I was afraid to lose her love … her support would continue, but it wouldn’t be the same … and I gradually got better. I suppose I remembered as a boy my father breaking his back in the machine shop with a heart condition. I know how I felt toward him … and toward my mother, who was sick too. I hated their illness. It was a drag, going on and on. And I thought my wife would feel that way towards me.”
XII
Luther stays late tonight. He talks about his correspondence with Buddies of the Earth, recommending Molly Bethune’s book to them; we talk about an article concerning an artist who shoots bullets as his art form (Luther asks my opinion of that), and then he suddenly says, straining forward, “You see, my wife left me last night.”
Part Two I
“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Rama Rama. Hare Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Krishna.”
Luther is chanting behind me. In the last weeks since his wife’s departure, he has moved more closely toward mysticism and Eastern religion. Luther chants the words from a file card he holds before him. The book on his empty desk is the I Ching.
Before going home this evening, Luther is in an animated mood. He gives me and Bea an example of ESP. He shows us his raincoat with a button missing.
“I was walking along at lunch thinking I needed a button … then suddenly … there on the ground …” Luther scoops out a blue button from his pocket and places it against the brown buttons on his raincoat, and says, “Exactly!”
We look at the button. “But it’s a different color,” we both say.
“It certainly isn’t,” Luther says, hurt. “It’s as close as you could come to finding an exact duplicate—”
“But—” Bea and I say.
“And it’s the same size!” Luther says angrily, “You hard-nosed rationalists!” Stalking out, he calls back to us: “You people don’t know how much a button costs nowadays …”
Luther has been dating the woman who has the Buddhism group at her house. She wants Luther to join her circle. She is looking for recruits.
She calls him at the office and asks him how his Buddhism is coming. “You’re the master,” he tells her over the phone. “There’s so much for me to learn—technique, background, rhythm.”
He tells me he has had a conversation with her the night before in which he said, “I want to see you and you to see me as more than a member of this group.” She replied to him, “I thought you thought that.”
She went on to tell Luther that her sex life during the last year with two black men “has been more completely satisfying than ever before.”
“She attributes this to the benefits of chanting,” Luther comments, “but I don’t know—I think she’s trying to tell me something.”
He says the song that keeps running through his mind is Ray Charles singing, “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
He reminisces with me about his boyhood, his father, his years in Hollywood, and his wife.
Luther takes out a roll of quarters. “Like my father,” he says. “I like to have a lot of change in my pocket, for the sound of having money.” He jingles the quarters and smiles.
“One time, just one time, my father told me about sex. He was standing by the window and he said ‘Come here. Look down there.’ I looked down. One flight. We lived one flight above the street. ‘You see him?’ my father asked me. I saw a kid from the neighborhood: sagging mouth, popping eyes, a lopsided walk. My father said, ‘That’s what comes from self-abuse. That’s all I want to say.’ And my father walked away.
“My father wasn’t a violent man. One time I played hookey from school. I remember coming home and an aunt was waiting for me on the corner. She was a mean one; she told me I was going to get it when my father got home. My mother said the same thing. So it built up, and when my father arrived he saw what was going on. He looked grim. For the first time I saw him reach to his belt, and slowly take it off, fingering it. Then he waved me into the next room. When we were alone, he said, ‘I have a story to tell you. There was a rowboat out on the sea in a storm. You don’t throw away the oars when you’re out there.’ Then my father hit the bed with his belt three times so they would hear.” Luther laughed gently.
“My father invented words without knowing it. Like in his candy store. He’d say, ‘I have to relemplish my stock.’ Or, if
I came home late, he’d ask, ‘Where have you been pulverooting all night?’”
II
“I was always a questioner. Even as a young man I made waves. I always had to know how things worked, and why. And I was always getting myself into trouble—I was full of piss and vinegar. I worked in Hollywood for a while, at Paramount. There were two categories: extras and wavers. All the wavers were allowed to do in a scene was wave. I was a waver. The extras belonged to the union, they got paid more and didn’t even fraternize with the wavers. They shunned us.
“As a truth seeker even then, I got into hot water. The director was giving instructions, see, and he’s telling us we should react to a home run in the baseball game with enthusiasm: the extras should cheer, the wavers should wave. It didn’t make sense to me as I understood the script up to that point. I didn’t understand what he was getting at. Then he said were there any questions. No one had ever asked questions—it was just a formality. I raised my hand and said, ‘Yes. I have a question. Isn’t it true that in this scene if we applaud this play—’
“I heard murmurs and then boos and hisses from the extras. There were catcalls. I heard them calling out, ‘What guff! And he’s only a waver!’”
III
On the lunch hour, Stephen says to me, “When his wife walked out on Luther, I wasn’t at all surprised. You may not know this, Bruce, but Luther hasn’t slept with his wife in five years. He moved out of their bedroom into his own room after his last heart attack. I asked him if he thought the lack of a sexual relationship had affected their marriage. Luther said he had thought of this and he had asked his wife. He said she said no. I also asked him if his daughters and friends were surprised at his wife’s leaving. He said no, no one was surprised except himself.”
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 10
