The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “Sure,” I said, standing. “If that’s what you—”

  “I want what you want, kid,” Shushan said from his crate on the floor. “Just make sure you come back. You know what else my mother said?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “On n’est jamais si malheureux qu’on croit, ni si heureux qu’on espère.”

  The accent was queer, but I got it. One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes. To the cops it was Greek, or maybe Yiddish.

  8.

  In the nineteen-sixties the Upper East Side of Manhattan was hardly a dangerous place. It was in fact the best neighborhood in the city, with leafy streets, museums, elegant shops, drugstores with real soda fountains—the amenities of a village with the resources of a major city. Your neighbor might be an Astor or Rockefeller—or a Feinberg, O’Rourke or D’Angelo. On Lexington Avenue you could eat sole meunière served by a waiter named Sol at a restaurant called El Sol and right next door get your shoes resoled. Bankers and brokers lived here, but also bartenders and shop-owners and floor-walkers in the midtown department stores. By all odds it was the safest neighborhood in the city, not least because it was the richest, with more cops per resident than anywhere in the five boroughs. It was also the least racially mixed. Germans lived in the eighties, Czechs in the nineties, but the number of resident non-whites was so low the student body of the Upper East Side’s public elementary schools—the neighborhood was sprinkled with private academies—had the racial profile of a segregated white grade school in Selma, Alabama. Suspicious doormen seemed to be everywhere, a kind of standing patrol against the disenfranchised. There was little street crime, though this was slowly changing because the nascent civil-rights movement kept pressure on New York’s mayor, whose official residence was in the neighborhood, to moderate the NYPD’s practice of stopping black male pedestrians and ordering them to pedest elsewhere. From the strictly parochial viewpoint of the police this made sense, because blacks—Negroes then—were unlikely to be residents, so aside from maids and colorfully-attired African diplomats—the United Nations complex anchored the south end of the neighborhood—anyone not white had to be up to mugging, rape, burglary, or just plain trouble. Over time, as restrictive rental laws fell away and wealthy blacks could find apartments in the area, the police gave up the practice entirely. This was a victory for civil rights, but also benefited the residents of Harlem, which began on the north side of Ninety-Sixth Street: instead of preying on their neighbors, Negro criminals drifted south to target the Upper East Side—why mug a black when a white might be carrying a lot more cash?

  “Three colored kids tried to snatch my purse last week,” Terri said as we walked. She set a pretty pace. At this rate we might be at her place in ten minutes.

  I had been hoping for a half hour, with maybe even a coffee-break on the way. Aside from Little Italy and the Village, this stretch of Lexington Avenue was then one of the few places in the city where you could get a cup of espresso. “They succeed?” I looked down at her purse, chocolate-brown alligator the size of several volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

  She stopped momentarily to look me in the eye. “You really think I’d let those cocksuckers rip off an Hermès purse that cost me a hundred-fifty bucks?”

  I whistled. In today’s prices that would be fifteen hundred, maybe more. “A high price for modesty,” I said. That was the way it was done. One of the gang would come up, pull a woman’s skirt up over her head, a second would knock her down while the third grabbed the purse. That year women were wearing long skirts, very full. It was like an invitation. In a short while New York women would all be in mini-skirts or pants—the incidence of this kind of purse-snatching dropped.

  “Clocked the first one before he even got started,” she said, “Second one I kicked in the nuts.”

  “And the third?”

  “What third?” she asked, showing a deadpan insouciance that could not be learned other than through growing up in the city. In Paris the women were elegant. Here they were matter-of-fact about a well-placed shoe to the genitals. “Son-of-a-bitch ran before the second piece of shit hit the ground. Do you know the crap I have to listen to all day to earn that purse? My mother didn’t love me. My mother loved me too much. I’m not comfortable with my body. Gimme a break.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted, when you got into being a shrink?”

  “I wanted to help people with real problems, not fashionably middle-class pseudo-neuroses. You know who has real problems? People who can’t afford psychotherapy, who in fact don’t even know they have problems.” She smiled wryly as she walked.

  I knew exactly how she smiled, because I had one eye on where I was going and the other on her tanned face—she must have been able regularly to get away to the sun, because even in a warmish November there were not enough rays in New York City for a tan like that. “People like who?”

  “Whom,” she said. “I thought you were some sort of literary whiz-kid.”

  “I try to disguise my brilliance when I’m talking to people from Brooklyn.”

  “I’m from Brooklyn, Russell. No longer of.”

  Just her saying my name sent a chill down my back, the hairs standing as though called to attention. “You don’t have to be ashamed of Brooklyn,” I said. “Walt Whitman was from Brooklyn.” I searched my mind. “Henry Miller. Norman Mailer.”

  While I searched for more, she spoke. “Delusional faggot, talentless nut-job, pathetic self-promoter. In that order. You know what those three have in common? Mistaking noise for achievement. You know how a Brooklyn intellectual commits suicide?”

  “Is this going to be personal?”

  “He jumps from his ego to his IQ. You, child, are exactly the kind of person who could use a solid dose of psychotherapy. In a year you’d probably discover things about yourself that would make your hair stand on end.”

  “It already is.” We had stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change. “You want to get a cup of joe? There’s an espresso place on the next—”

  She looked at me with something between disdain and amusement. “The short answer is no.”

  “What’s the unexpurgated?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Very nice,” I said. “Did anyone ever tell you it’s not polite to be curt with people?”

  “Many times,” she said, stepping into the street. Just at that moment a cab came hurtling around the corner from Lexington. I grabbed her arm. “I saw him,” she said coldly.

  “Good,” I said even more so. “Then I’m sure you can find your way home safely without me. Terri, Esther, whatever, it’s been fun.”

  Abruptly she took my arm and led me like a blind man across the street. “Don’t be such a pussy,” she said. “I only rag people I like.”

  “Oh, I’m so fucking relieved.”

  She continued holding onto my arm when we got to the other side. “Like who, like whom—it doesn’t really matter. I was trying to say, Like you. You’re fucked up.”

  “I’m glad somebody noticed,” I said, so pleased to have the arm of this ravishing woman she could spit at me and I’d be happy. “Why am I fucked up?”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Seventy-third.”

  “Then I guess we have four blocks. We could walk slower. Or stop for coffee.”

  “Nice try,” she said. “But I wasn’t kidding. I have a patient.”

  “I could wait. What is that, an hour?”

  “Fifty minutes. Then I have three more. Besides, there’s only two ways a kid like you, a nice kid, Russell, but a kid, is going to see the light. The first is really intensive psychotherapy—”

  “Because...”

  “Because you’re fucked up. You don’t like responsibility because it means commitment, and you won’t do that. You give off all the scents and sounds of the critically abandoned. An orphan. It’s you against the world, and you don�
��t like either one, you or the world. You want women in your life but not one woman, because if you have only one you’re afraid she’ll walk out on you. Did your mother walk out on you, emotionally?”

  “She died when I was a kid.”

  “Bingo. Your father?”

  “Passed when I was sixteen.”

  “Were you close?”

  I had never really considered the question. “We sort of lived in parallel worlds. We shared the space of a life, but there wasn’t a lot of contact.”

  “In Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Soviet Russia, any autocracy, a guy like you would be easy pickings. You need a hero. You can’t get close to a woman except to fuck her, so you do that as a sport. You might as well be riding a horse. With a guy like you there’s an empty space where most people have a model for how they should live. Usual stuff: warm family, Thanksgiving dinner, playing catch with the old man, mom forgives your faults, even loves them. Or it could be the opposite. A real mess. Bad family, bad model. Or more usually a mix. Nobody gets the brass ring every time. Some people come out better, some worse. But a kid like you—”

  “I’m twenty-one,” I lied.

  “But a mature gentleman like you, with nothing in the model department, he’s desperate for someone, some thing, to create his life around.” She hung onto my arm as if I were the strong one. “So what is it like, being alone?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I wasn’t looking for a value judgment—okay, not so good, medium, terrific. I asked for a description.”

  “You do this to all your patients?”

  “They should be so fucking lucky,” she said. “Take all the time to answer until we get to Seventy-Third.”

  I believed her about the patients. I would have believed her if she said she was Sandy Koufax and was just going off to pitch a perfect game. But we were walking at her pace: Seventy-Third was fast approaching—there was no time for evasion or, I realized, need. “It feels like shit,” I said. “It feels like I’m my own species, that whatever I do I’ll never find anyone who...”

  “Go ahead. Say it.”

  “Who cares about me and is worth caring for.”

  We were at Seventieth, at the corner. Waiting for the light to change.

  “Well, I can’t say you’re unable to articulate. That’s a big help.”

  “It’d be a bigger help if I had someone to articulate to.” I paused in speech just as the light changed and we continued to walk. “I’ve been reading since I was a little kid.”

  “Solace.”

  “No. Yes. Maybe,” I said. “But it was more like a search. You open a book you open a life. You try to see if there’s a... a model there. Something that makes sense for you. For me. You want to see if there’s a way. But there isn’t any. You know, The Great Gatsby, that’s my favorite book, but it’s not a road map. It’s like La Rochefoucauld—a sketchbook. You think your brother knows French, or he just learned the one phrase phonetically?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Maybe it’s the same subject,” I said. “I got kind of kidnapped into this with your brother. Shanghaied. Suddenly I wake up and I’m on a ship and it’s heading for some strange port and I’m signed on. There’s my signature. Whether it is or it isn’t, there’s not much I can do about it now. So I’m suddenly in someone else’s life and, you know what, it’s a hell of a lot better than my own. I mean, where was I going? Two days ago I called this guy, a professor at college, who is supposed to supervise my honors program. You know, we meet every month or so and he buys me lunch and we have a beer and bullshit about literature. So I tell him, Professor del Vecchio, I’m so sorry. I won’t be able to make it tomorrow. There’s a death in the family. And he says, Someone close? You know what I told him?”

  “Your mother,” Terri said.

  I stopped dead in the street, right there in mid-block in front of an estate-jewelry store and a florist. “How did you know?”

  “Maybe I’m not as stupid as I look.”

  “You don’t look stupid.”

  “No?”

  “You look wonderful. You look smart, direct, no-bullshit honest. You look like heaven in bed.”

  She smiled, the twin fish of her mouth moving in opposite directions so that the entire bottom of her face seemed to be opening, welcoming me in. “Right on all counts,” she said. “Tell me something, Russell. How do feel about vaginas?’

  “Vaginas?” We were standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, the entire Upper East Side flowing around us. From somewhere far away I heard a car horn sound, then fade. “Vaginas?”

  “You know,” she said, looking me in the eye. She wore heels, but still had to tilt her chin, almost as though offering her lips.

  I was close enough to see a tiny chip of lipstick coating the top of one of her bottom teeth. “I like them.”

  “Do you love them?”

  I shrugged, my smile deepening. “Guilty as charged,” I said. “Okay, I love them. I love vaginas.”

  “How do you love them?”

  “There’s more than one way?”

  “You love how they look, how they feel? How they smell? You like a nice hot smelly vagina, Russell?”

  “You know what Napoleon wrote to Josephine from Egypt? ‘Coming home—don’t wash.’”

  “You really feel that way?”

  I felt like the luckiest man alive. “Yeah. I do. I love vaginas.”

  Terri leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, holding her lips there for what seemed to be forever. Then she took a half-step back and looked me directly in the eye. “So do I,” she said. Taking my hand, she raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “You can’t grow a vagina, can you, Russell?”

  “I can’t even try.”

  “You know what I said? That there are two ways out for you. The first—”

  “Spilling my gut for a year on a couch.”

  “The couch is optional, and a little old-fashioned, but yes, a year at least. Maybe ten.”

  “And the other way?”

  “Do something.”

  “I just tried, and got... rebuffed. Unmuffed, maybe. Turned down.”

  “You tried to make me into another woman who is supposed to give you comfort, solace, direction even. When that doesn’t happen according to your needs, your bottomless needs, you go looking for the next. No, I mean do something. As a man.”

  “And women doesn’t count?”

  “Not for you,” she said, putting down my hand with such tenderness it was as if it would break if she let it go too abruptly. “As a man.”

  “As a man?”

  She stepped away, then as she turned said it so quietly I almost did not hear the words. “Among men,” she said, and continued down the street, leaving me looking after her, as much unsure of what she meant as sure that she was right.

  9.

  Eugene del Vecchio, head of the Honors Program at Brooklyn College, was a translator of Macchiavelli and Bembo, and a poet whose work I had read in anthologies when I was still in high school. A tall man with tumbles of prematurely gray hair over a craggy face, half-frame tortoiseshell glasses always slipping down the slope of a seriously Roman nose, he spoke in the same lovely mutated English I had learned on the streets of Brooklyn—his acquired in Bensonhurst, a rather more pleasant area of trim attached single-family homes, each with its own concrete virgin in the postage-stamp front yard. Professor del Vecchio followed professional football, had boxed as a youth, and worshipped Hemingway (whose death by suicide two years earlier caused him much public grief, and provided fodder for a string of poems and a couple of essays). He was in short no one’s clichéd idea of an aesthete, a college professor or a homosexual. He was also no one’s idea, especially not mine, of someone who might be found sitting on a couch in Shushan Cats’ suite at the Westbury. He rose when Ira let me in. Myra was gone.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Professor del Vecchio said with that familiar mixture of the wise and the street-wis
e, each peculiar enunciation coming through clearly, a spoken palimpsest, one sound overlapping the next. Palimpsest was in fact one of Professor del Vecchio’s favorite terms, along with villanelle and sestina. He took my hand, pulled me close to him until I could smell the scent he used, some sort of bottled musk, part tobacco, part bay leaf. “Truly a tragedy.”

  I looked to Shushan, seated on his crate as though it were a throne. Whoever had devised this Jewish tradition of ritualized discomfort during mourning never considered the possibilities hidden in the term hard-ass. Shushan was thriving. He’d probably gain weight on a diet of grubs and water. The man was even tougher, I thought, than his reputation, which was not saying a little. His dark eyes, aglow with beneficence, seemed to shower blessings. It was hard to believe this Shushan Cats would next week stand trial on a laundry list of felony indictments.

  “Mr. Cats must have told you it’s his mother who passed away,” I said after del Vecchio released me. “Probably a mix-up on the phone.”

  “Oh, there wasn’t any, Russell,” the professor said. “I wouldn’t take anyone into the Honors Program without knowing his family background, love of animals, if and how much he or she drinks, does dope. That kind of thing. Hell, I interviewed your high-school English teachers. A brilliant orphan, they said. I don’t get too many of either brilliant or orphans. So I remembered.”

  I was growing tired of this orphan stuff. I had never traded on it, and didn’t want to start now. It was cheap. “How did you...”

  “You phoned and left a number. So I rang you back.”

  “So...”

  “So I thought it a bit strange you were calling from a hotel, though perhaps not so strange because your mother had after all died many years ago. I rang back and asked the desk where the Westbury was. And here I am.”

  Shushan was clearly delighted by this. “And here he is,” he said. “An unexpected visitor is always nice,” he explained, then revised. “Usually. And a professor. That’s more unexpected than normal. Russy, you keep surprising me to the good. Now I got a new friend in Del. And Del knows his stuff.”