Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  But she allowed Stannie to pay for the black shirt.

  “He’s my sugar daddy,” she told the clerk. “And my pimp—he finds me men to sleep with.”

  And a week later, she was back at the Farm. It mystified her why Stannie hadn’t quit. He could have worked for the best families in Manhattan, and he chose to remain with a derelict who had bombed out of AA. The staff fed her applesauce with a teaspoon. She dozed out on the veranda and dreamt of an albino deer leaping across the lawn. I’m that deer, she told herself. I’m a renegade with pink skin imprisoned inside a lawn without limits. And when she opened her eyes, Martha could see the sorcerer.

  “Darling, where’s your uniform? You won’t be able to free me from this pestilential place without your Serbian fire marshal’s tunic.”

  “Mimi, I told you a million times. I’m a Polish air attaché, but not this afternoon. I didn’t come here to free you, darling.”

  “Then to punish me for divorcing you and leaving you threadbare, without one black shirt.”

  “I’m not threadbare, darling. I receive royalties from eleven countries. I have won fellowships and prizes.”

  “Yes, yes, my little painted bird. Then why did you come here, Jurek?”

  “To sit quietly with you and hold your hand.”

  “And that will make my loins quiver, I suppose. Darling, if you don’t need my money or my love, then all I am is a useless hag from another life of yours. Couldn’t we start all over again, even with your royalties? You could pretend to be that graduate student in a squirrel-hair coat, and I could have you catalog my books.”

  “Shhh!” he said. “I command you.”

  “Yes, I love commands.”

  “Shhh!” he said, and the sorcerer clutched her hand.

  But she wasn’t silent for long. “Tell me a story, Jurek.”

  He looked at her with his Gypsy eyes. “I’m not a spigot, darling. I can’t turn the tap on and off, on and off. The stories have to end.”

  “About Gavrila,” she said, imitating the Continental r that he had given up. He didn’t need it now that he was a celebrated author.

  “Jurek, did you really get that cardboard satchel from Gavrila?”

  “No,” he said. She had gotten him to laugh.

  “I picked it up in Poland just before I came to America—it reminded me of him. I would have been lonely without it.”

  “And you didn’t sleep with your mother, did you, darling?”

  “Yes,” he said, with a silken purr. “I often slept in mama’s bed when I was a little boy.”

  “You know what I mean, darling—sleep with her the way you slept with me once upon a time.”

  But he wouldn’t commit himself.

  “Jurek, how do you ever fall asleep at night? You must stumble over your own stories.”

  “I was trained to be a liar,” he said. “Trained by my father.”

  “Did he have a double life, my darling, as a secret assassin?”

  “Papa didn’t do much killing away from the chessboard. But he saved my skin. I couldn’t have gotten through the war without a million lies. Papa burnt that into me. But we never got along. . . . Martha, it’s time to sleep.”

  “Lie down with me, Jurek. I promise not to seduce you. I don’t even remember how to seduce.”

  And he got into bed with all his clothes on; he felt like an animal with woolen skin. It calmed her. She shut her eyes. But Martha couldn’t even pretend to sleep. Her mind wasn’t a Moviola, a magic machine that could edit in and edit out the images of her life. It was more like a monster that loved to drift. She didn’t think of Cuthbert or his castles or his wealth. And she didn’t think of her sorcerer, with his military jackets and his cloak of lies. She thought of Gabriela. She’d been much happier when that urchin was around, sleeping with the sorcerer in Martha’s bed. She never touched the child, though she dreamt of incest the moment she put on her sleeping mask—it was the same as having a daughter in the house.

  She couldn’t be sure if Gabriela was twelve or twenty-two—a stranded doe that drew all the creatures out of the dark. Martha had to protect her from these night prowlers, and from the sorcerer himself. It was like having a menagerie in her own bed, full of jungle grass. The wildness comforted Martha, made her feel a little of the wildness within. And in her dreams, Martha was often a jungle cat, a predator feeding on human flesh, with blood and bones in her mouth. She ravaged without mercy, swallowed entire towns—women, children, warlocks and old witches, savoring their fat and gristle.

  Martha grew enormous. Children screamed; none could escape her claws. But she didn’t spoil her own den. While she prowled and took her plunder of blood, Gabriela snored on the far side of Martha’s bed. Gabriela and the sorcerer.

  LITTLE RED

  — 22 —

  STRANGERS AT MY SALON LOVED TO HEAR how I had been raped on the Orient Express.

  “How old were you, Anya?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Who was your father?”

  “A count from Budapest.”

  “And your mother?”

  “A whore with royal blood.”

  “How many hussars were on the train, Anechka?”

  “At least fifty,” I said.

  And with amazement still in their eyes, they would ask me about Jurek.

  “Did he write The Painted Bird in this apartment, Anya?”

  I stared them down like a Cossack.

  “Your Anya is not a stool pigeon. I cannot betray the trust of a friend.”

  But imagine what I could have told them.

  I was Jurek’s muse—more than his muse. I was his heartbeat as a writer. I live a block from the apartment-palace where he once lived with the petroleum jelly heiress, Martha Will. I knew him long before he met Martha. And I knew him after she died—was it ’68?—with a murderous marriage of alcohol and prescription drugs that Martha herself mixed. She’d suffered from blackouts and deranged fits, and was locked away in clinics time after time. Jurek hinted that she’d had a brain tumor. But there were no tumors. Her brain was pickled, poor thing. My Marilyn had also died of an overdose, even if a lot of troublemakers will tell you that it was the Kennedys who killed her.

  I first met Jurek in ’57, and he was fresh off the cattle plane. Another Polish dissident, with a million more like him waiting to be let out of some closet that the State Department kept with its own key. But Jurek was different. He didn’t stink of oily fish, didn’t blab about Stalin’s crimes. He had a boy’s undeveloped body, but with knees as sharp as knives. He had pointy shoulders and a breastbone that looked like a sunken arrow. I was fond of all his irregularities. He fit right into my plans with those pointy shoulders and his passion for Dostoyevsky.

  I had the beginnings of a literary salon since I’d published a pornographic novel, Nefertiti’s Nights, about a dominatrix in Manhattan, and it made something of a splash. Jurek was my protégé. He would appear at my dinner parties in his awful muskrat coat and sit with his hands folded while I told stories of my love affair with Marilyn. It was during her “sabbatical” in New York—1955—when she’d dropped DiMaggio and all the Hollywood moguls and was having a fling with Marlon Brando and a secret affair with her married admirer, Mr. Arthur Miller.

  “My dears, I’d met her at a party. Dietrich was there. She went up to Marilyn and wiped a trace of lipstick off her cheek. I wasn’t that bold. I was trembling. It was Marilyn who bumped past me and whispered in my ear. ‘I’d love to dance, but it would drive all the men crazy. And if I went into the toilet with you, and we did it in the tub, Lolly Parsons would bitch about how Marilyn went to Manhattan to become a dyke. I’m not dykey. I happen to like your mouth.’ I swear to God that’s what she said. We went to my place. She didn’t even give me a chance to lock the door. She bit every inch of my body. ‘Anya,’ she said, ‘you bring out the devil in me. I could never be that aggressive with a man. Arthur fucks like a little boy. He wants me
to meow every time we do it. But I wouldn’t have to meow with you.’”

  That’s when I’d usually start to sob. The memory hurt like hell. And it was Jurek who came to the rescue, like a relief pitcher with his own fireball. He told of the atrocities he’d suffered as a little boy wandering through Poland. There wasn’t a moment of self-pity. The stories spun out of him like a perfect piece of thread. But I had no perfect pieces. I would see Marilyn in my mind’s eye, feel her fragrance, the sweet smell of her skin, and I was paralyzed. That’s when Jurek would serve the chicken paprika, toss the salad, and entertain.

  SOON JUREK SEIZED HOLD OF MY DINNER PARTIES, and I was stuck with tales of Marilyn I couldn’t seem to tell. It was as if Jurek was thinking in chapters, in swaths of connected material.

  “You must put your adventures into a book. I insist. There’s nothing simpler. I’ll help you, Jurek. Didn’t I scratch out Nefertiti’s Nights in one or two sittings?”

  “But Anechka, I can’t write a word in English. It’s hopeless.”

  “Don’t write—talk! And I’ll take everything down.”

  “I’ll sound like a man on a tape recorder, confessing to the secret police.”

  But he already had a lesson plan—his “Novak,” nonsense about the Soviet Union that he’d scribbled in Polish, and had one of his mistresses, a fellow dissident, translate. Then a freelance editor helped him prune the prose. He named himself after Kim Novak, the Polish-American bombshell, who was nothing, a cow with bleached hair, next to my Marilyn.

  But Joseph Novak had the song of a wandering sociologist. Jurek had to find a voice that wasn’t cluttered with jargon. He had to descend deep enough to pluck this voice from his entrails.

  “I’m not Turgenev,” he groaned. “I am faceless, Anechka. I have no style.”

  “Then find one, and don’t whimper to me.”

  But he was occupied with a widow he met in 1960, Martha Will. He married her two years later on a whim. He got rid of his Polish friends, and Jurek became “Jerry,” a newly minted American cockatoo who performed for his wife’s rich friends. He traveled with the widow, went to Florence and the Far East. He told his orphan’s tale to an editor at a Boston publishing house, who happened to be one of Martha’s dinner guests. And suddenly he was back at work.

  He devoured books about other lost boys in Poland. He took endless notes. He would come crying to me.

  “Anya, I can’t write.”

  “You don’t have to be Turgenev. Be yourself, Jurek.”

  “But I told you. I am invisible on the page. I am like an amnesiac. I don’t even know who I am.”

  “That’s an advantage,” I said. “Write, or I’ll break your bones.”

  He finished a draft, wrote the book again. He hired a Polish slave to translate it for him. But the book was chaotic, without a fine thread. The charm of his narration wasn’t there. And the two of us fished around for “ghostwriters” who could locate the thread that Jurek had lost in the writing. We gambled on poets, professors, and philosophers short of cash. But we never stuck to one. We wanted our “ghost” to reimagine the voice of a boy who had become a sleepwalker and could recite the horrors around him with detachment and precision, the precision of shock.

  I didn’t have that kind of genius, and neither did Jerzy. His stories spun out of control on the page. It wasn’t a morbid fear of the written word. He was a man caught between languages, who had no real language of his own—all his texts were “translations” of the subtle, snakelike music inside his head. He told his stories to our friends as if he were on some deck, observing a boy who might have looked like Jurek but was all alone and had to fend for himself.

  The editors we hired brought us closer and closer to that boy, but they couldn’t recapture him. They couldn’t charm the snakes in his head. Jurek basked in his Polish gloom.

  “Anechka, I’ll shoot myself today or tomorrow. You’ll have to bury me.”

  “Why? You have a rich wife. Let her bury you.”

  He’d married Martha with the same detachment of someone who was narrating his own life at a distance. Did he love her? He wasn’t as interested in her money as his enemies like to think. He loved her as much as his own relentless scheming would allow. He cared for her when she was ill, but he never gave up a single one of his mistresses for Martha. And she couldn’t cure his own ills over a half-written book that seemed to wander like a chicken without a head. We were also headless chickens, Jurek and I.

  And then we found Gabriela.

  — 23 —

  SHE WASN’T EXACTLY A FUTURE FLOWER CHILD. She’d grown up in an orphanage, the ragged love doll of older orphans and sadistic, unwashed keepers, and still managed to finish high school and spend a year at Bard College on a full scholarship. But Gabriela couldn’t sit still. She ran away from college with a fifty-year-old farmer and was caught soliciting seniors (women and men) at a Golden Age center. And that’s when I got an SOS from my own lawyer about Gabriela—his second cousin, he insisted—who couldn’t be released from the Women’s House of Detention until someone “chaperoned” her out of that stinking jail.

  Jurek was kind enough to accompany me—he was also damn curious. We pretended to be a married couple for Gabriela’s sake. We planned to chat with her, buy her a meal, and put her on a Greyhound bus to Iowa, where she supposedly had a stepsister. But all our plans went into the toilet.

  I could blame it on that rotting hulk behind Jefferson Market. Inmates screamed from its grim walls. Their lament chilled my bones. It was worse than a lunatic asylum inside. Women with marijuana twisted into their hair hopped around in ankle bracelets. Nurses and guards had the torsos of football players. I had to show my birth certificate to Gabriela’s jailors, swear that I was her aunt. It took the guards half an hour to find her.

  We soon understood why. None of the guards or inmates could bear to part with Gabriela. She was a tiny waif with tits. Her eyes were hazel and seemed to glow in the jail’s sinister light. Her hands were as crisp and volatile as a child’s. She wore a simple smock, but it couldn’t hide the delicious curve of her belly. Her hair was a reddish brown, like Marilyn’s, before she went to Hollywood.

  Gabriela was as shy with us as we with her. We had pasta and wine in the Village. She stroked our hands while we ate and harrumphed like a frisky horse until Jurek wiped the red sauce from her chin. Then she lay with her head in my lap.

  “I’m sleepy, Auntie Anya.”

  We couldn’t abandon her to the bus terminal. We were both in love with that sultry little bitch. We brought her back to my place in Jurek’s Lincoln Continental. I tried to be a good Christian, but I trembled with un-Christian ideas as I imagined her a milkmaid trapped in a labyrinth of rosebushes with prickles that tore into her flesh. I lapped her blood like a lamb.

  We put her to bed in my spare room. Jurek and I sat at my desk and picked our brains, trying to solve the riddle of that abandoned boy in his book, to give him a voice that would keep his adventures from lapsing into random wisps of chaos. We worked for hours and accomplished very little.

  WHEN JUREK AND I AWOKE, the little bitch wasn’t there. I panicked, thought she’d run off with the five hundred dollars I kept in a shoe box. But she sat hunched over my desk, with one of the green pencils Jurek always used because his “spiritual father,” Josef Stalin, liked to edit with a dull green pencil whatever manuscripts that Soviet masters submitted to him. Jurek would boast that Russia had one style under Stalin’s reign—the broad, masculine strokes of Stalin’s green pencil.

  But Gabriela had her own miraculous style. Because she herself had been abandoned and abused, the abandoned boy of The Painted Bird must have seemed like her own lost twin. And with little strokes—a word and a line here and there—she restored pieces of the missing thread.

  Gabriela worked on instinct alone. She couldn’t shape Jurek’s book, only catch idle threads and pluck them out with her green pencil. She proceeded in fits and starts, whenever she wasn’t seducing us. S
he had no sense of time or belief in a career, not even a wish to travel. I couldn’t really tell what Gabriela wanted other than to bewilder her new uncle and aunt and scratch away at Jurek’s book. The sound of the pencil seemed important to her. She had to hear its rip across the page. And God forgive me, but I wondered after a while if her editing was a diabolic response to the violence that had been visited upon her, if it was a kind of rape.

  I repeat this because I was utterly confused. We were both sucked into the storm of this child. We couldn’t keep our hands off Gabriela.

  “Jurek,” I whispered while she was asleep. “We have to stop. It’s practically criminal. She’s been abused, soiled by ogres, and we’re keeping her as our concubine. We have to stop.”

  “I know.”

  He was miserable. I don’t think Jurek had ever been in love in his life until we met Gabriela. He’d always been the seducer, the ringmaster of all his little love plots. He hadn’t trapped Martha into marriage—it was her own idea to rebel against the Manhattan blue bloods who had scorned Jurek—but he’d captured her in his spiderweb, had wooed her like a tarantula. And now he barely slept in the same bed with her. He was bored with her apartment-palace. He couldn’t be away too long from Gabriela’s glorious stink.

  Even if we’d steeled ourselves and had made peace with God and the devil, we couldn’t have tied up Gabriela and put her on a Greyhound bus with some small inheritance. She would have landed in worse trouble. And how could we swear not to sleep with her?

  “Anechka, I’ll give her a salary—to help me write the book.”

  “But where will she live?”

  “With Martha and me. We’ll adopt her.”

  “Jurek, she’s twenty-one. And you can’t have part of the package. I go wherever Gabriela goes.”

  “You’re being childish,” he said. But it didn’t matter. We had little sway over her. Gabriela did whatever she pleased. She never spent the salary Jurek paid her. She never seemed indifferent to our touch. I thought of Marilyn, who had to meow for Arthur Miller. And I wondered if Gabriela’s meows were just as forced, just as brittle. But it would have taken a rocket scientist to read Gabriela’s heart. Perhaps the ogres had torn it out of her and left a ticking machine.