Just before he leaves, he says to Jill and Bea, not to me:
“My father was in the oxygen tent in the hospital. One night I said, ‘So long, Pop—see you in the morning.’
“My father waved by moving the fingers of his hand.
“I just got in the car and drove home.
“When I got home, my mother said, ‘It’s over.’”
X
The next day Luther does not look at me. When I come near the office, he tries to go the other way.
By the end of the day, I take a chair and sit down next to his desk.
“Look, Luther, what I said—I meant it—for the moment. I felt you were being a pain in the ass. But I wouldn’t want you to think I meant that I felt that way about you—about our relationship, the things we’ve talked about. I wanted you to know I didn’t mean that.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t think you were that kind of guy.”
Our eyes met.
XI
Things have returned to normal.
Stephen is back at work. He now walks with a cane.
Luther is relieved. Before Stephen returned, he was thinking about what he would do if Stephen could not come back.
He told me of the mysterious way the bums in Bryant Park were attracted to him and of his fear that he would wind up like them. He frequently described his encounters with them.
On his lunch hour a big black man came up to him, bouncing a grapefruit in his hand. “Mister,” he said to Luther, “this is all I got in the world; could you help me out?” Luther reached into his own pocket, took out an orange, and bounced it in his hand. “This is all I’ve got in the world,” said Luther. “Could you help me out?” The black man laughed, patted Luther on the back, said “Touche,” and walked away.
Another day a black man on a bench with a liquor bottle in a paper bag called out to Luther. Luther went over to him. “May I make so bold … you have a face that tells me you’re someone with a deep understanding.” The man talked to Luther about the white man’s arrogance and the submergence of the black man. Luther agreed completely with him and gave him a lecture of his own, saying, “You’ve stopped a talker, you realize …” When Luther finished, the black man, pointing to his bottle, said, “I hope you’ll forgive this liquid refreshment …” Luther took a little paper bag out of his dungaree bag, took his liquor miniature out of it, tilted it back, and said: “I hope you’ll forgive mine …”
Luther commented about the black man’s choosing him to talk with: “I can understand it. I myself wouldn’t stop to talk with one of those dressed-up, flashy guys with their business talk, their clever phrases, their rush to nowhere.”
Luther continues to be puzzled by me and tries to figure me out. He tends to idolize all “creative people.”
“How do you feel about Jane Fonda?” he asks.
High on liquor and boredom with this job, I reply, “I’d like to slit her throat.”
He looks at me. “I thought artists were kind, gentle souls. I thought they had an ‘is-ness,’ a joie de vivre.”
“They’re not, Luther. I keep telling you.”
“Yes, I see that,” he says solemnly, shaking his head.
Now that Stephen is here, Luther settles back. “Really,” he says, “if you can maintain a kind of panoramic overview, it’s all so amusing.”
He talks often now about the women he knew before he got married and about his shyness. “I never went near another woman when I was married. Except once. In our car pool, I had seen the other guys, when they were sitting beside a young girl in the car. When she slept, they would put their arm around her. Well, one day, see, I was sitting next to this pretty girl. She fell asleep. After thinking about it for maybe ten minutes, I finally let my hand kind of drop on her shoulder—and then I even let my hand cuddle her breast. I don’t know what came over me. Finally she stretched, like she was waking up, and moved away. I worried myself sick about it, about her telling my daughters, or my wife, or both. Just one time.
“When I was twenty or twenty-one, I published maybe six poems in the newspaper. I got a letter in a perfumed envelope. From a writer. Her name was Magna Wand. Well, we exchanged a few letters and then we arranged to meet in a hotel lobby. She would wear a broad-brimmed hat and I would wear a white flower in my lapel. First I saw an eighty-five-year-old woman and I thought I better get out of there. Going through the revolving door to leave, I got stuck; there, on the other side, also stuck, she was. She was about thirty-five. We walked around the city. Finally we went up to her room. She had a big bottle of red wine. I got out of there as fast as I could. Maybe the wine didn’t mean anything, but I thought it did.
“And in a similar way I got together with Lil. You know I knew Lil from way back. She was always the prettiest girl in school and I had a crush on her since I was fifteen. Well, another girl wrote me about my poems in the newspaper. This one lived in New York, but wrote and said she was coming to Toronto. She asked me to rent a room for her.” He paused. “We rendezvoused. Well, she had hair on her chest. I have always been one quick to find an excuse not to fuck a woman. I got out of there and that’s how I called Lil for a date and began courting her. I remember telling her, ‘Do you know, Lil, I’ve been wasting my time with a girl with hair on her chest when I could have been with you?’”
XII
Luther came in on a Friday morning with a sunny face. “I planted a social seed today … with this woman, Yolanda, who teaches a yoga class. I mentioned bird-watching to her … and her eyes lit up!”
On Monday morning, he was still excited, but for a different reason. “I went to Yolanda’s house yesterday morning. I came into the kitchen. Yolanda wasn’t there and the door was open. There was a woman leaning against the edge of the table in pajamas and kimono … she had a luminescence of skin … aglow … and a tight little smile. It was Yolanda’s mother. We went outside and sat on a couch of leaves in a grove. Then some stinking little kids started throwing stones at us, and we had to get up. What knowledge this woman has … she lives on a hilltop … and I went there later in the day to spend more time with her. She has a bad back. She too believes in yoga, yet she said it was caused by the will of God!” Luther smiled and shook his head in admiration.
XIII
He seems to have adjusted to his new life. He does not really form any serious relationships with women. As he has often said about sex: “That’s out of my league.” He grows increasingly forgetful and absentminded. He continues to watch TV, and write letters of protest—to Barbara Walters: “She has a speech defect that I find offensive in a woman who’s a phony”; and to Time magazine for their bicentennial issue: “Dear Sirs: I just wasted a dollar. May I proffer the observation that nothing could be more offensive than turning the first page and finding an ad for Marlboro country—not even especially written for this occasion.” After dictating the letter to Bea, Luther offered to sell the magazine to her for fifty cents.
The starlings continue to seek protection under the eaves of Luther’s house.
Luther has new stories to tell as relatives and friends briefly cross his life. Aunt Ida and Uncle Igor invite him over for an occasional evening in Manhattan.
“My mother wasn’t on a straight line, I know, but Ida takes the cake,” he tells us. “Aunt Ida visited the bank last week. She sat down at the bank manager’s desk, leaned on her cane and said, ‘I have $25,000 to deposit in your bank. You may think this odd—but this neighborhood has changed so much in recent years, the kind of people who are handling money. You don’t know what the person who handled the money just before you was doing with himself. Sir, I want clean new bills.’” She writes letters of complaint to the presidents of companies and the responses, Luther says, come back “with crests on the letterheads.” She complains to the president of a tea company that the tea is dyed because it darkens immediately, and to a bank president about the procedure of giving away “cheap merchandise” to lure customers. “Of course,” Luther says laug
hing, “the bank president writes back that he understands Ida’s concern— ‘but we were the last to succumb—and you wouldn’t want us not to be able to compete freely?’”
XIV
Luther returns from lunch one day and says, “I saw a man with peace of mind today. I’m in the park. I see a man seated in the corner of a tree in dogshit. I say to myself: ‘There’s a man with peace of mind.’ He’s lying on a blanket in the heat. The blanket is held down by a rotten onion and a necklace. He’s wearing two hats. He’s the most disreputable-looking man I’ve ever seen.
“I go up to him and say, ‘I want to speak to you.’
“‘Can you talk?’ he says.
“This immediately got my dander up. I said, ‘I want to speak to you because you look to me like a man who has found peace of mind.’
“He was silent for a minute. Then he said, ‘And you look to me like a man who’s full of shit.’
“He paused again. ‘I’m sick. My family hates me, I owe hundreds of dollars, and I don’t know how to talk to people.
“ I have no peace of mind.’”
XV
Luther is still reading his texts on Eastern religion as well as The Outsider by Colin Wilson and Huston Smith’s The Religions of Man. Hegoestotheyogagatherings, although the younger members “look at me like Methuselah.”
He sees Lil occasionally. She asks him: “How can you be so insecure and have such an enormous ego at the same time?”
He recalls his wedding day. He went into the boss’s office on a Thursday and asked for the next day off. He said he was shaking. The boss said that in view of the wedding, Luther would be permitted to leave at 4 P.M. on Friday.
“Were you that afraid?” I ask him.
“I was full of fear.”
He continues to save his money. At a JFI affair at the Plaza, at the conclusion, on his way out, he reaches over to the hood of the piano, lifts it up, and takes his coat out.
He thinks and rethinks his life. “You know,” he says, “I don’t just wash my face; I attack it. My first heart attack occurred when I was washing; I scrunch up my face and smack it. One day my wife, Lil, looked at me and said: ‘Just what in the world are you doing to yourself?’ I’ve thought this over and analyzed it. It relates to my childhood—I’m acting out the role of myself as a child who hated to be washed by my parents, and the role of my parents who are vigorously washing me.”
But more than anything else, Luther thinks about Lil.
Stephen tells me that what hurts Luther most is that Lil doesn’t even have a boy friend. “At least that would be a plausible reason for leaving him,” Stephen explains. “But to leave him to live in a furnished room all by herself—that to her even such a life is better than living with Luther—that hurts him most of all.”
Luther tells me one day with a look that is full of pain that his wife, who knew he was dating Yolanda, told him that Yolanda was a “man-junkie.” He asked her if that was a phrase of the “sisterhood,” and his wife said it was. “The implication,” he says to me, “is that, one, Yolanda is just hung up on men, so that it could be any man she was dating, not just me, and two, that men are a nasty addiction.” I agree with his analysis.
XVI
In a few days, he says, “Something happened last night that tells me it’s fini with my wife … My youngest daughter had called and asked if anything was new. I said no, and hung up. I looked around, and there was … I collect bottles. Green ones, turquoise, I put them in little displays … and I have begun to collect blue ones. I had put a little collection of blue bottles in my bedroom, including a blue vase, a small one that my wife liked. It had been in her bedroom, and I took it and put it in mine with the others. It had an association, this vase, for us, a memory of an evening, nothing sentimental, but nevertheless it meant something. I know it did, because she never sold it, although she sold many things from the house in her shop. The house is piled with junk and she would just take something and sell it. But not this. But apparently yesterday, during the day when I wasn’t home, she came in and took it.
“It means either of two things, and they both mean the end. One, that she just wanted to take it to the shop and sell it for materialistic reasons, even though she saw that I had placed it in my collection. The fact that she didn’t feel anything about it, or consider my feelings in the matter. Or, two, that the vase does have meaning to her. She’s fond of it, and wants to have it beside her. In which case she’s really decided it’s over between us, and wants to have things near her that she likes. That she’s really moving out for good.”
XVII
Luther wants to find out above all why he did not become a writer.
He remembers the six poems he published when he was twenty, and the circle of young friends who regarded him as a “poet-philosopher” who would make his mark in the world.
He recalls the pottery shop he ran with his uncle in California, and that he was happy then.
He draws a blank about what happened then to make him stop writing.
At twenty-one Luther courted and married Lil. “I didn’t want to marry her,” Luther says, “but I loved her—I always loved her from the first day I laid eyes on her—and she wouldn’t agree to anything but marriage. And she had to have kids.
“And it was Lil who didn’t like California and the pottery shop. ‘It wasn’t a realistic way to make a living,’ she thought. Yes, she made me give that up and go back East with her to New York. She insisted I take the job with JFI. She said she was sure I could do it.
“She had that faith in me.”
9
THE LOST PIGEON OF EAST BROADWAY
I
My wife and I are standing over Mrs. Annie Blocker in her kitchen. We have placed a pot upside down on the table. On top of the pot we put a contraption that my wife has invented. We had bought Mrs. Blocker a magnifying glass for her eighty-fourth birthday so that she could keep reading The Daily Forward. She has been reading it since 1913. (“Reading the Forward is my pleasure,” she had told us. “First I open to the front page to look at the troubles, then I turn to the Bintel Brief.”) But she was unable to hold the magnifying glass upright with her arthritic fingers. My wife put together a stand to hold up the magnifying glass.
Mrs. Blocker sits at the table blinking. “I can’t see a thing, dolling,” she says. She holds the Forward in her hands.
“Your glasses!” we shout into her ear, relieved at finding another solution. “You forgot to put on your own glasses!”
I find her glasses in her bedroom, and Mrs. Blocker puts them on. Now we are ready. We show her how to place the newspaper next to the glass, and we wait. She tries at different angles.
“No goot,” she says finally. “Sorry, dollings.” She looks at us. “The cataracts. I feel like flies are flying out of my eyes.
“To read was my pleasure.
“I am a dead pigeon.”
II
On her birthday, she said to us: “I lay in bed and I figure—I’m eighty-four? Me?”
Her back is broken. She has a broken hip, cataracts, arthritis, hardening of the arteries, a weak heart.
She has a metal walker to lean on when she moves about the apartment, and five canes parked in corners around the apartment.
A bone in her right foot has become so swollen that it bulges out. The doctor made a hole in her shoe so that the bulge, which appears to be permanent, has room.
III
She lives in a project a block from the old Daily Forward building, now owned by a Chinese religious order. She is near the Garden Cafeteria, the Rabinowitz Book Store, and the abandoned yeshivas and synagogues. Her kosher butcher charges her five dollars for a tiny pullet, delivered to her by an old man “with a little beardele,” whom she cannot send away empty-handed. She gives him fifty cents. When she protests to the butcher about his prices over the phone, he replies like the phone company: “All right, Mrs. Blocker, go to the competition.”
Can a Jewish man be a cro
ok? Annie Blocker thinks about it, and the answer is yes. She remembers the king of the nursing homes, Rabbi Louis Ribman. She makes a slashing motion with her finger against her throat to express her opinion of what his fate should be.
IV
We first met her in the late autumn of 1974. We had signed up as volunteers with a Jewish agency to visit an elderly person once a week. I had asked what complaints she had expressed about her previous volunteer, and was told Mrs. Blocker had said she kept looking at the clock on the wall.
We arrived at one o’clock, and did not look at the clock once. She went through a litany of complaints, and waited for us to leave. She went through the litany again. We stayed. She laughed. “Crazy people,” she said. “Oh boy.”
She pointed across the way at the apartment building and the lighted windows. “A rabbi, a young man, lives in that apartment. I see him with his children and wife, lighting the Chanukah candles, and playing with the dreidels with the children. I see the dreidels spinning. He moves over to the blinds to shut them, and I think he sees me with my walker, though I try to hide. I see him stop, and instead of closing the blinds, he raises them higher so I can see and makes a movement with his arms to me. And I do this.”
Mrs. Blocker pressed her hand to her lips and blew a kiss.
V
There is an eeriness to these streets. The Jews abandoned these neighborhoods years ago, and still there are Jews here. When I was a boy, my father took me down to these neighborhoods to eat pickles and hot corned beef, and to visit an old woman (a relative) who sat in the doorway of a tenement wearing a babushka on her head. She had yellowed piles of Yiddish newspapers and a clock with one hand. I saw only old people down here then— who are these new old Jews? The Chinese and the blacks and Puerto Ricans have moved in, but the Jews have not moved out. Ten thousand are left.
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 13
