Accustomed to blows and screams, Joe instinctively jumped backward at the sound of a female voice.
“Don’t be afraid, Joe. I like you.”
She slipped her arm in his and tugged him forward. He smiled and began his introduction:
“My name is Joe Baker, my prick is a …”
“Now Joe, you’ve already told me that.”
She squeezed his biceps.
“Numbers,” he said.
“Two Tolstoys, One Dostoyevsky and seven Chekhovs.”
Joe jerked his head from side to side, as if slapped. He wailed. A cloud of stink covered her face. She quickly shouted:
“2,474, 5,356, 17.”
He gave the answer. They walked arm in arm. At the ramp leading to the Half-Moon, she sought to disengage. He crushed her arm to his side.
“Rosie’s,” he said.
“Rosie’s? I don’t understand.”
“Rosie’s, Rosie’s,” he shouted, sliding his free fist up and down the dangling end of the rope that held up his pants.
He dragged her beyond the hotel.
“Rosie’s!” Velia shrieked. My God, he wants to take me to Rosie’s whorehouse. He thinks I’m …
“2,000, 4,000, 6,000,” she yelled.
“12,000,” he answered, still dragging her.
She sank to her knees, trying to wriggle free. He crouched and pulled her like a sled. She grabbed at his ankle. He tripped and flew forward, landing on his forehead, then skidding about three feet.
She ran slipping and sliding toward the hotel. At the ramp she looked back. He hadn’t moved. Had she killed him? She didn’t care.
She sat on the radiator in the hotel bathroom for half an hour, moving to a stall when anyone entered. Finally warm, she tugged her hair into some kind of order.
At the newsstand in the lobby she bought a Daily Mirror and a Milky Way candy bar and fell into in a leather chair that allowed a view of the entrance. She chewed the chocolate and caramel into a stream of sweetness that soothed her throat and stomach.
It was six-fifty. The only other people in the lobby were a group of old men and women, sitting on the edge of their chairs like birds on a perch and swiveling their heads toward any movement. Their eyes, Velia thought, suck you up, like Luigi inhaling oysters. Suddenly they all rose and, each limping or listing at differing angle, shuffled to the elevator. It was time to switch on the radio and wait for Gabriel Heatter’s assurance: Ah, there’s good news tonight.
She read the front page headline: Pope Dies. Below was a photograph. Could that worn-out man be the same one who looked down at her from the walls of the convent? She read the report:
“Pope Pius XI, 261st head of the Catholic Church, died early this morning. His heart, weakened by two years of illness, stopped beating. The ‘Pope of Peace’ was 81 years old and had ruled for 17 years.”
He was not the one. They all looked the same.
She reread: “His heart, weakened by two years of illness, stopped beating.” She imagined that gentle death: a wistful sigh, the eyelids closing slowly. Not a Jewish death. Jews scream to the grave, as they scream in life. Their brains explode and leave a mess, like Papa.
Closing her eyes, she traveled to the convent which she had entered when she was eleven. She wore a white blouse and blue jumper skirt, surrounded by identically dressed girls. Nuns, reflecting the sun off their gleaming white hats, glided to their chores.
In the vestry, she lovingly beheld her white, alabaster angels, with whom she shared a blush of rose on the cheeks. She once again slid her fingers slowly, like a novice Braille reader, over the fluted wings that promised soaring flight—to anywhere.
The Warsaw convent was a place, the nun had told her, where a girl, even a Jewish girl sent there by her mother to plead for sanctuary because her family was starving, could meet God and the Son of God. She had been introduced to the Son of God, eaten his flesh, drunk his blood. She preferred the pure angels, in whose faces she saw her own.
Then, after more than a year of days that were neatly parceled out to be spent with the Father, the Son and the Virgin, the Mother Superior had told her that she was to return to the bearded men who stank, spat and prayed to an invisible God who, she was certain, also stank and spat.
She had pleaded that the convent was her home and all the girls more sister to her than her real one. She wanted to be like them: a Catholic. The nun had answered that these were not decisions for a child, but when grown-up, she could do as she wished—even become a nun.
The closest she ever came to that goal was Shrafft’s. There, scrubbed women wearing white gloves were led to tables covered with fresh white linen, to be served by blond waitresses, corseted in schoolmarm black-and-white uniforms. If the decor did not include angels, she could imagine them hovering over the white food.
At age fifteen she had applied for a job as a waitress, even though it was no secret that Jews were not hired. Leah became Velia and Poland moved to Russia and hints of the Romanovs. The interviewer, sure of his instinctive ability to spot Jews, demanded no credentials from this blond cherub.
She lasted two wonderful weeks, until her father, alerted that she had not been attending school, tracked her down, burst in during lunchtime and yelled at her in Yiddish. She fled in her uniform, never returning to pick up the pay due her. The uniform still hung in her closet, a testimonial to the limitless possibilities of lying.
A disturbance at the entrance ended her reverie. She watched in terror as Joe Baker, shouting, “Rosie’s!” was thrown out. Then he was back, allowed in under the protection of the creature in the wheelchair and the chauffeur. The three surrounded her.
“Rosie’s!” Joe shouted over and over, until it sounded like the a cheer.
The house detective waddled over.
“What’s up, Vic?,” he asked.
“Don’t know. Joe is saying he knows this one from Rosie’s.”
The house detective squinted professional eyes at her:
“Ain’t I seen you here before?”
“Probably. I often take dinner here with dear friends,” she answered in the sanitized accent taught at Schrafft’s.
“These whores are really something,” Menter said. “Hoity-toity, and all that.”
Velia lunged forward, missing a slap at his face.
“Hold that whore!” Menter shouted, brandishing a fist, “I’ll see to it she never works again.”
Joe put an armlock on her neck. His other hand pawed at her breasts. The house detective interposed himself between her and Menter.
“Vic,” he said, “we can’t have that here. Get her outside sometime.”
Menter nodded, now more interested in Joe’s vigorous squeezing of Velia’s breast.
“Nice feel, huh Joe?”
Baker’s cracked tongue slid rapidly between the corners of his mouth.
Menter laughed.
“Vince,” he said, “give Joe a couple of bucks for Rosie’s, and let’s get away from this cunt so she can go back to work.” His fist masturbated the air.
Joe skipped across the lobby, pulling at his rope, almost colliding with Luigi Barbetta, who ignored her as he walked to the elevator, where Menter and Vince waited.
“Hey, Luigi,” Menter said, “what the hell are you doing here this time of night?”
“A business conference. You know how it is, Vic, we work for our brothers and sisters twenty-four hours a day.”
Menter’s eyes swung from Luigi to Velia and back again.
“Sure, Luigi,” he said. “Sure … Luigi. Brothers and sisters.”
Velia bolted to the elevator. She knocked softly on the door of room 612. Inside, Barbetta was ill at ease. Her phone call had been an open admission of their affair to the eavesdropping staff. She was becoming dangerous.
He sensed a prelude to a campaign for a double divorce. He wanted rid of her, but her fantasy-driven reaction loomed too unpredictable.
He opened the door, flattening himself behind it.
She threw off her coat, directing his attention to her torn stocking and scraped knees. She sobbed out her experience.
“You know that crippled animal,” she concluded, “I want you to give him what he deserves.”
“Of course,” he answered. “My God, that is all you needed. Leave Menter to me.”
He poured two glasses of wine.
“My deepest sympathies on your great and tragic loss.”
It was the exact phrase she had heard countless times after handing him a note bearing the name of the deceased and the bereaved’s name and relationship. She merited only the mechanical, phony solemnity.
“I suppose,” she said, “he was not a bad man. Although he made my life miserable anytime he could.”
“Why speak ill of the dead? As your people say: Alov ha Shalom. May peace be with him.”
She looked at her savior from the black beards. He might as well be Jewish. But he wasn’t, and his skin was the color of her angels. She could close her eyes in the arms of an alabaster angel.
He unknotted his tie and began to unbutton his shirt.
“Draw the curtains and shut the light,” she said.
“Still, after all this time?”
“Still. I don’t want to see you naked or you to see me. It’s dirty.”
He sighed resigned exasperation.
As she lay down beside him, she spoke to her purpose, seizing the latitude conferred by her grief.
“A husband I never loved or wanted. A child I never wanted. I got pregnant to get out of the house,” she lied, having faith only in embellishment. “Pregnancy was a solution. I didn’t think beyond it.”
“Velia, there is no need to tell me all this. I do not believe you, in any case. You are distraught with your loss. In such a state you are liable to say anything.”
“Believe me, Luigi, believe me. I am telling you a truth I have never told anyone. Now you are closer to me than my husband. And that is how it should be.”
They made passionless love, Velia thinking, He is mine as never before, and Luigi panicking because he could not see clearly how, in an orderly fashion, to rid his professional and personal life of this threat.
As they dressed, she reminded him:
“Don’t forget that gangster Menter.”
“Of course.”
Menter, it suddenly came to him, was the solution. I looked the other way on some renegade, nonunion shops he operates in. Now he can repay me.
CHAPTER
14
AFTER ATTENDING THE CHAPEL CEREMONY, ABA TOOK THE SUBWAY to his favorite Harlem whorehouse.
Proximity to death was one of life’s many stimuli that agitated his desire to handle a woman, to wander his hands over all the grab bags of pleasure with which God had endowed his afterthought perhaps as recompense for chronological neglect.
When a psychiatrist friend had explained that the orgasm was the closest living approximation of death, therefore la petite mort, Aba, who believed that demons crafted all enigmas of life, had accused him of consorting with the French, convicted overintellectualizers.
In truth it was not the pursuit of orgasm that possessed him, but the yearning for tides of warmth his fingertips could capture and let flow through his body.
Once at a poetry reading he had watched a young Negro maid wearing a white serving outfit dole out food from a buffet table. Her icy, cocoa-colored skin, not completely covered by the uniform, promised a tactile romp of savagery and tenderness. He had held out his plate while his eyes swooned and his hands itched.
That evening he had made his first trip to a Harlem whorehouse, a path well traveled by Yiddish writers and actors seeking the thrills of unJewish, African abandon and elevation to the level of just another white man.
The Madam had asked him, “You want anything special?”
“They’re all special,” he had answered, watching the black flesh covered only by blacker bras and panties parade by.
In a tiny room, the whore, a chunky woman of indeterminate age, quickly threw off her underclothes and lay down on the lumpy bed. She twitched her wide nostrils as if preparing them for something, then shut her sad eyes and said, “Masie say you just want it straight”—a finger descended to her pubic hair—“but maybe it ain’t so. The mouth is extra.”
Without removing his clothes, he lay down beside her to examine his first Negro woman. At once he thought oneness, harmony. The brown nipples on the brown breasts, the dark pubic hair curling under the dark thighs, blended into an uninterrupted expanse of sexual nourishment. No wonder Solomon, that experienced archsensualist, had turned boy in the hands of Sheba.
He asked her to lie on her side. He lay one palm on her back and slid the other under her onto a breast. He slowly smoothed his way down. The distinct sensations lifted from each contour vied for attention, confusing his brain into a drunken dizziness. By the time his fingers found her clitoris and the other hand savagely spread her buttocks, a long orgasm had wet his underpants.
Now, following a more conventional act, he reboarded the subway: He looked at his watch: seven-fifteen, still time to make the shivah.
At the 96th Street subway stop another favorite of his erotic gallery boarded: a scrubbed-sterile, button-nosed, ghostly white blonde, directly off the American assembly line. The product that had scored a direct hit on Celine’s gonads.
She sat and read How to Win Friends and Influence People. Calling on Kafka to metamorphose him into a spider, he sat down beside her.
“You’ve won,” he said.
She looked up, averting his eyes, scanning the car for possible help.
“You have won a friend and I am ready to be influenced.”
She was relieved. It was only a pickup, not a madman. She blew air onto the book.
“Clever. Now leave me alone.”
A Bronx accent wafted on currents of drugstore perfume and powder. He wished for the sickly, sweet odor of Juicy Fruit gum to increase his pleasure.
“Wouldn’t you like to practice what is being preached?” he said. “Mr. Carnegie himself once said to me: All reading and no playing make Jack and Jill wallflowers.”
She finally looked at him but only to make plain that what followed were her final words:
“You sure like to talk. Why don’t you get off at Union Square and stand on a soapbox.”
He had misjudged. She was an informed person. Good conversation was the way to her heart.
“I don’t like to approach you in this vulgar way,” he pleaded, “but what does one do in America? In Europe, where I come from, as you can tell by my Charles Boyer accent, you see a beautiful woman and you write her a note. I tried that once in America …”
He told of being taken by Harry to Ebbets Field to see his first baseball game. It had been a bewildering experience, further muddied by Harry’s excited explanations of why men dressed in boy’s knickers tried to beat each other over the head with a wooden club and then ran in circles. More comprehensible had been the behavior of his fellow spectators, who, having paid money, regretted the expenditure and cursed everyone on the playing field in terms he had never before heard expressed so openly.
Bored, his eyes had roamed the crowd, landing on Carmen, seated in the next section of seats. She cheered her matador not with a rose between her teeth, but with delicate nibbles on a hot dog, which she chewed gently before circling her orange lips with a long, curled tongue. He had to meet her. But how? She told him by raising her hand and signaling to the circulating hot dog vendor, a pimply faced teenager wearing a surgeon’s white outfit. He wrote on the small notepad he always carried with him:
“Miss——. I do not know your name. But I do know you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Where can we meet?” He signed it: Your slave.
He called the hot dog seller, bought one, then gave him the note with instructions to wait for a reply. The boy resisted until a nickel was dropped in his palm. She read the note and looked up. The boy pointed at him. He stood, swept an imag
inary cape across his body, kicked the bull as it went by, and bowed. She passed the note to someone beside her and pointed. He congratulated himself on his conquest. Harry tugged at him to sit. He was obstructing the view of people who were now threatening him with the same mayhem they planned to visit on the players.
He watched an emissary from his beloved, a muscular teenager wearing an olive-colored T-shirt a shade deeper than his complexion, make his way toward him. The youth stopped at his row, reached past Harry, grabbed Aba’s shirt, and pulled him erect. The Roman face bared its teeth and growled:
“You dirty old bum!”
Harry grabbed the assassin’s arm with both hands.
“You leave him alone!” Harry shouted.
Around them, the spectators were calling for a good thrashing of “the shitty Giant fan.”
His attacker turned to Harry.
“Whoever dat is to you, tell him to lay off my sister or I’ll change his face.”
He slapped Stolz. The force unhinged his jaw. The spectators cheered the gladiator as he strode back to his seat. Stolz ground his jaw back into place, thinking, Olé!
During the recitation, in which Stolz had acted all the roles, even slapping himself somewhat painfully, the woman’s face had not strayed from her book. However, behind him there had been low laughter.
The woman said to the book:
“Serves you right. You know, I got a brother too.”
Close to his left ear he heard the crack of a baseball struck by a bat followed by a high-pitched voice which rode words up the musical scale:
“Steeerike threeee. Yer out!”
He turned, almost rubbing noses with a Negro woman of about twenty-five. He remained close, examining her chubby face: luminous, black eyes, a jutting, aggressive chin under the canopy of round, glossy purple lips. Nesting behind her left ear, a white camellia highlighted the sheen of her straight black hair, pulled into a tight bun. Gold hoops dangled from her ears. Inside each was a die—four black dots on one, three on the other, Underneath her tan, belted raincoat, he glimpsed taffy décolletage.
“You a funny dude,” she said.
“I’m glad someone thinks so.” He tilted his head toward the reader. “May I join you, or would you prefer that I send a note?”
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