IV
Luther tells me that since his wife left him, he has a funny feeling of weakness in his chest. “I’ve tried to remember what it is,” he says, “and now I do. When I was a boy, looking for a job, out on my own, leaving my mother, I had this feeling.” I ask Luther if the separation isn’t a challenge to live a freer life. “No,” he replies. “I’m not a WASP … I don’t want to prove myself …”
V
Luther has begun to collect green bottles. He has a shelf of them in his bedroom window. In the morning when he wakes, the bare branches of the trees and the copper of the sun are reflected through them.
VI
Mornings are Luther’s best times. He comes in, announcing that his “evacuation and digestion” are both excellent. He shows me the copper bracelet he wears to cure his arthritis. “The body needs certain minerals,” he explains.
On his walk from the garage to the office he frequently sees people who interest him. “I don’t want to come in to work. I see people I just like, something about their look and their gait … I want to spend the day with them … a feeling of freedom. But you can’t hold on to it … by the afternoon you’re back in your suit …
“I saw a girl … very pretty … lollygagging down the street … I wanted to talk to her. But I had the wrong uniform on. She was wearing jeans. She would have been turned off the minute she saw me …
“I hear a guy behind me as I’m walking say, ‘I’m getting tired of looking like everybody else.’ I turn and I see a guy with a beard, unshaved hair all over his face, torn jeans and sneakers, and he’s seated in a hallway talking to three other guys who are dressed exactly the same way.” Luther laughs and shakes his head.
VII
He is waiting to see if his wife is serious about the separation. She is living in a single room in the home of friends near her store.
“I’ve been leaving hard-boiled eggs in the refrigerator. I had one left over, and so in order to know it was the oldest, I drew a cartoon on it. Then, knowing my wife comes by while I’m gone during the day, I drew a little balloon on it with the words, ‘Hello Nosey.’ A week went by. I checked the eggs every day and nothing happened. Then, last night, there it was. She had written— not on the same egg, but on another—’Very funny.’ Which is her way of saying something to me. She doesn’t take a joke well. But it was okay—it was her way of talking the same language.”
VIII
Being single again, he has to learn how to cook. He puts two saccharin tablets in his soup by mistake.
Jill explains to him: “If you have three apples and four men, you make apple sauce …”
“There’s a lot more freewheeling in this cooking business than I thought,” Luther comments. “I thought it was scientific.”
He gets information from all the secretaries about cooking, on the difference between a roaster, broiler, and pullet. He has a two-and-a-half-pound roast beef and wants to know at what heat he should cook it and for how long.
IX
Things are disappearing from Luther’s house. His wife is removing them. He finds the bone china cups and saucers that were wedding presents gone. He can’t bring himself to object to his wife.
One day the reading lamp over his bed is missing.
He gets up in the morning and goes into the hallway to knot his tie before the mirror. The mirror is gone.
X
His wife notices the effect of the sun on the stained glass lamp in the living room. She is visiting him one evening. She praises the effect. Luther is pleased, as he has placed it there. But then his wife says, “I think I’ll take that with me.”
Luther’s house is burgled. He returns home to find the TV set gone. The hi-fi is neatly stacked on the floor, unplugged, ready to go. He must have interrupted the burglars. Now he is afraid they will come back when he is gone, since there is no one at the house.
XI
Being alone, Luther now rises at 6 A.M. and listens to a radio program every morning in which blind people talk about their lives.
The word gets around that Luther is single again.
Ann Stark, a woman in the office, is about sixty. She has a beaked nose, a homely face, a dowdy figure, and she carries two shopping bags.
She approaches Luther, and stops several feet from his desk. From that distance, she says, “I love you,” and walks quickly away.
She does the same thing the next morning.
When she meets Luther at the door, or by the elevator, she whispers, “I love you.”
“My speed,” Luther comments.
He goes to a singles night at the insistence of a friend. “Not being a gay blade, I was reluctant. But I went. There was a big fat woman at the door and a sign that said ‘Admission $3.50.’ She asked my name and wrote it down, and, unsmiling, slapped a sticker on my shoulder with my name on it, and pointed the way. I walked into this cold, dank, stone church cellar. There I was. People were standing around. I did see one attractive woman and thought to myself, ‘This is wrong of me, chauvinistic. I’m thinking only of her physical appearance, not her mind.’ I stood around. No one approached me. They had coffee and doughnuts. I decided I would sit down in a corner and let them come to me. No one did. Although I noticed the attractive one’s eyes moved toward me a dozen times, or at least I thought so.
“I’ve often wondered why attractive people so studiously avoid other attractive people. On a train, if I see a pretty woman, and there’s an empty seat beside her, I’ll never sit there. And if a pretty woman walks into the train, and I’m sitting alone, she’ll never sit down beside me … Anyway, I’m sitting alone and a woman wearing a black beret comes through the door. She looks like Nancy Walker, worse, and, just as I thought, she made a beeline right for me. Why do these types always find me? She said she found these singles nights ‘valuable, very valuable experiences’ “—Luther laughed—” talked away like that with complete ease and assurance. Then they got us together in groups and the leader says, ‘I’m not your leader. Don’t look upon me as a leader. I’m just here to get things moving. This is not group therapy. This is not psychoanalysis. This is just a rap session …’ Then he said the topic was: Would I marry myself? And he went around the circle asking. They all said yes. I said no, I wouldn’t. After I said no, some of the others also said no. So there we were, paying $3.50 to talk to other people.
“I feel … it’s like being back where you started … when I was a young man. I know why I married my wife: she fed me, clothed me, took care of me … she was my blanket against the world.”
XII
Luther looks thinner and more haggard. One morning he tells me that his wife has returned from a trip to Michigan. When he saw her, he proposed that they get together again. “She said no, she couldn’t … that I was overpowering. She said that she was afraid of me.”
XIII
The town in which Luther lives has a large Chassidic Jewish community. “When I walk into town I see all these arcane Jewish types … with their black hats and suits and long black beards … there’s not much possibility of finding a friend.”
XIV
Luther fingers the things on his desk—a dried meat bone, a Buddha made from crushed concrete—and says, “There was an old man who used to visit our family when I was a kid. His name was Harry Bard. He was a distant relative. He came by for handouts: old clothes, food, whatever my mother gave him. He had an apologetic, smiling, impotent air. I felt sorry for him.” Luther pauses. “Now I feel like that old man—Harry Bard.”
XV
Peter Black sits talking to me at my desk. He is considered a JFI eccentric—a man in his late sixties with frightened eyes and a scatterbrained way of talking. Luther often gives him a long blank stare and begins reading the newspaper when Peter is talking to him. Peter laughs a lot, and boasts that he has never been sick a day in his life. He was a poet in Russia; he knew Mayakovski and Andreyev and Gorki; he takes out of his pockets crumbling yellowed pages of pamphlets published fifty ye
ars ago of Russian poetry and short stories, and literary journals from Chicago and Greenwich Village in the twenties when he came to America. One day he brings in a pamphlet from Meyer Levin’s marionette and puppet theater in Chicago in 1935. “As a boy in the Ukraine,” he says, “I would lie in the woods, reach up, and eat an apple … so many apples on the trees … I got diphtheria! The apples were red, with red cheeks! But some had fallen off before they were ready … like many writers … I’m still a little apple … I’m still on the tree.”
“The Jews are an enigma!” he says one day, his fingers pointing at me. Pleased with the phrase, he repeats it, “an enigma, yes, what they have accomplished”; his eyes light to the phrase, and he walks away, his shuffling walk, mumbling and smiling to himself. He likes the Publicity Department best of all; he lights on us and says, his eyes twinkling, “I sense a creative force here. Yes, a creative power. Am I right?”
One afternoon we are chatting and somehow I say, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“Yes,” Peter answers, “I had a brother—a doctor. He’s gone. He was in Buchenwald; they burned him at Auschwitz.” I see the tears falling from his eyes; he shakes them away. He chokes on the words. “Excuse me, I am not crying,” and he hurries away.
In a few minutes I look for him, but he is not at his desk. My phone rings. It is Peter. “Someone came over to me and asked me why I was crying. They saw me at your desk and they said I was crying. It’s ridiculous. I wasn’t crying—”
“But you shouldn’t be ashamed—”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk about these things. I don’t know what came over me. But I wasn’t crying. I explained that to this person, so it’s all right now.”
XVI
Now that Luther’s wife seems to have walked out permanently, there are no major changes in Luther’s daily routine.
He spends the evening watching TV, “talking back to the box” when he gets angry at what he is watching. His daughters do not call him. He says about children, “My experience has always been that kids are cannibals and killers.” When a child comes into the office, Stephen’s face brightens and he goes over to it. Luther calls out sarcastically across the office, “Pet her, Stephen. Go ahead and pet the little killer.” He recalls saying good-bye to his uncle on a train and getting caught when the train lurched away—”with three stinking kids waiting in my car for me knowing nothing.”
He grows reflective about his life, thinking back to when he was single and running a pottery shop in Santa Monica with his uncle. It was his wife who insisted that they move back East.
“I was a good Jewish husband. I only did things she liked. I never went hiking because my wife Lil didn’t like it. I was wrong … it demolishes you.
“Judy, my youngest daughter, leaves the curtains wide open at night. She likes to be shocked awake by the dawn. The way I was raised, you lower the curtains. When you piss, you piss on the rim. You don’t hit the water and make noise.
“We make the small decisions, Bruce. The big decisions are made for us. We drift in a half-lotus position, in complete unawareness. I used to have this little imp telling me how to think, how to dress, how to behave properly. He’s still talking to me all the time. Now I tell the little imp to just fuck off.”
XVII
“I know I’m not supposed to say this around here, but it’s the Jews who have destroyed this country.”
“The Jews?”
“Hear me out. I was … slightly gifted as a young man. I published some poems.” Luther swallows a handful of raisins and offers the box to me.
“The Jews, with their brazen arrogance, ran Hollywood. Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer. Every week I went to the movies and they filled us with all those romantic notions, those impossible illusions of heroism and success. They didn’t prepare us for life—they left us completely unprepared for life as it really is. I blame the Jews for destroying my creativity. And don’t think I’m the only one, Bruce. The Jews around here don’t admit these things.”
XVIII
Luther was agitated all day yesterday, bristling at all of us. Today I learn why. He asked his wife to get a kosher chicken for him. She did, and cooked it for him. He invited her over to eat it with him. They ate the chicken together. Afterwards, Luther turned on the television set and settled down to watch all of his favorite Channel 13 programs. About ten o’clock his wife said she thought she might as well leave.
Luther mulls this over today. “I realize now she must have expected that we would talk … about something important.”
XIX
Luther is haunted by his conviction that he should have been a writer.
“But you published poems when you were twenty. What happened then?”
Luther thinks a moment.
“My wife was … counterproductive. She loved everything I wrote. Then I saw that when she had the babies, she gave them just as effusive attention as she did my writing …” He shakes his head.
The last time he took a creative writing class, his teacher had encouraged him. This meant a great deal to him, and he had begun writing seriously. Then he had his fourth heart attack, and had stopped writing.
Now Luther is taking a new writing class at the local library. He is trying to regain what he feels he has lost.
“A woman read a sex poem about her husband’s cock, using the metaphor of a whale. Jesus Christ. Then a girl read some poems. A businessman, a member of the class, called out after she read: ‘Terrific! Terrific! I wish more people could hear that! Let’s hire a bigger hall!’”
XX
Luther is the chief fire warden of our floor. There is a fire drill on Thursday and Stephen, who is home ill, does not attend. “Don’t forget to mark Stephen absent,” he tells Bea.
“But he’s sick, Luther,” she says.
“You’re argumentative! Mark him down. Come on, Bea! I also have a memo for you on fire exits. The situation is egregious.”
XXI
After twenty-three years, Stephen and Luther have a complicated relationship. Stephen’s father was a renowned Hebrew scholar, whose only shortcoming was the inability to criticize people.
Stephen likes everything Jewish; also Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Leadbelly, Simenon, Robert Louis Stevenson on Edinburgh, Margaret Drabble, Flann O’Brien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Joyce Cary, R. Prawer Jhabvala, Augustus John, Ruggiero Ricci, Jim Reeves, Betty Carter, Tanya Tucker, Janet Baker, Iris Murdoch, Howard Cosell, Anita O’Day, Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten, Maria Callas, Sinatra, John Jacob Niles, Ruby Dee, Peter Sellers, Peter Allen, V. S. Pritchett, Laurie Lee, Frederick Manfred, James Hanley, Erika Jong, and Helen Humes. He is a compulsive talker and a careful listener. If he does not read an entire book every day, he feels he is losing ground. He is interested in butterflies, ants, and cats. He has raised 120 kittens. He loves London, Scotland, Jerusalem; food; boxing; photography; baseball; literature above all. The author of twenty books, he understands Luther well. He does not agree with his wife Susan, who says, “There’s a summer fool and a winter fool. The summer fool doesn’t dress up and hide what he is. With the winter fool it takes longer to get past the beard, the moustache … Luther is a winter fool.”
Stephen brings little treats for Luther every day: an article, a book of interest to Luther. Luther worries him, and it pains him to see Luther retreat more and more into his mysticism books. Luther is quick to say to me, “Stephen has a hell of a lot more blemishes and hang-ups than you know—take his absolute inability to say hello and good-bye … he disappears, like a thief in the night …” Stephen, on the other hand, is always looking for Luther’s good points. “Luther tells a story well, he’s intelligent …” He pauses and thinks.
At points of tension, Luther says to Stephen, “Hold me up. I’m crumbling.” Luther comes in to work an hour after Stephen and leaves work an hour before Stephen does. While he is in the office, he does a fraction of what Stephen does.
Stephen reads every newspaper, every magazine, every
literary journal—he bounces around Brentano’s every lunch hour. He is highly regarded for his scholarship, buoyancy, and good nature at JFI. But by carving out a creative life of his own, working nights and weekends, he has paid a terrible price. In his mid-fifties, he is deathly sick. Even walking in the New York air— he who loves life beyond anyone I have ever known—leaves him gasping for breath.
Stephen and Luther both read the Times—Luther during the day and Stephen at breakfast. Stephen calls out the key stories over the glass to Luther and asks his opinion. Luther welcomes the chance to air his views.
Stephen calls out the important names on the obituary page.
“Don’t be a killjoy, Stephen,” says Luther.
Luther and I both look up from what we are doing. Stephen is talking to a woman fund-raiser. He is jabbing at the Times with a finger, turning the pages rapidly and shouting, “He’s Jewish! He’s Jewish! He’s Jewish! She’s Jewish! She’s Jewish! He’s Jewish! He’s Jewish! She’s Jewish! He’s Jewish!”
The woman is nodding her head.
Luther can’t accept Stephen’s excellent relationship with his strong wife, Susan.
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 11
