by Carson, Tom
“Oh, hell! I’ll never get it right,” I laughed, remembering Jake introducing himself as Jack Cornhole and also playing the shiksa for the first time in hours. “Didn’t all of you always tell me changing your name was giving in?”
“Well, colleague. A lot depends on what you change it to.”
“And where.” Gerson’s voice was muffled, but whether by his mouth or my ears is anyone’s guess.
Nachum went on out into his city; we went up to our room and made love. Whether I felt I had something to make up for or was just compensating for one act of infidelity or fidelity by performing another is anyone’s guess too. If I’d known it was our last time, I’d—oh, hell, bikini girl, I probably wouldn’t have done anything much different. We were us, knew each other too well for surprises to register as anything but impersonations. In bed, anyhow.
When I woke up, Gerson was out on our balcony. From my pillowed point of view, Jerusalem was just a blue sky and murmurs of traffic. I stood up and it metamorphosed into the vista my husband had been looking at for an hour.
I doubt he’d taken much of it in. Now that he knew there’d be world enough and time for that, looking at it while still trapped in the guise of a tourist must’ve been distracting and annoying. When he turned to me, he’d visibly spent most of that hour harrying his face and voice to brace for whatever followed what he’d audibly and visibly determined had to be the first words he spoke when he turned to me if they were going to get said at all.
“Pammie, I’m staying.”
Posted by: Pam Kukla as Sarah Bernhardt in the King David Hotel
Not only because a lot of it’s just too atrocious but I don’t have all day, there’s no way I’m going to attempt a full reconstruction of the two hours that followed. What I’ll be leaving out, like what I’ve got no choice but to put in, definitely wasn’t married life’s version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
It was just more, abominably more, of Gerson’s and my perversely bright-morninged, surreally—well, to one of us—Palestinial version of the witching-hour colloquy no marriage can survive more than one of. The other stranger’s facial expressions and vocal rhythms blind you with rage at their idiot resemblance to the spouse you loved. Noticing nose hairs feels like apt cause for butchery. Yet maybe the timing wasn’t altogether inappropriate, since as I think I’ve mentioned, some marriages are most themselves at midnight. Ours had always been most itself in the morning.
Here are a few—how to put this?—highlights. “Say it, say it! Just say it once, that’s all I ask. Did we disappoint you, Gerson? Huh?”
“No plurals,” he said reflexively.
“All right! Did I-aye-I-eye-I disappoint you?”
A fire engine could’ve gone by under our window just then and been drowned out. That “I” went on for a good eight or nine seconds, and Maria Callas, eat your lungs out. Of course, I didn’t have to worry about staying on pitch.
His lips crimped. “Yes, you did. But I’m sure I also disappointed you. Many, many times.”
With no anticipation from my eyes, I felt my cheeks go Niagara. “No, never, not once, never! Never once, Gerson. Never,” I blubbered, then corrected myself. “Well, now! I mean, obviously: now. Did I mention now? Yes, definitely now. It only takes one. Hell, just ask my muh-mother. Oh, laugh, please please laugh! Your Pammie muh-made a joke. LAaauUUuGH!”
“I’ll listen to anything you need to get said, but will you stop screeching? My God, Pam, you sound like—no, that’s too cruel.”
I didn’t stop screeching. It’s a wonder the King David didn’t throw us both out—or the city authorities, what with all those wonderful old buildings burnt to ashes. (Because the fire engines couldn’t get through, Panama. Because no one could hear the sirens, Panama. God! I get sick of holding your hand, bikini girl. I do.)
“…It’s because I’m American, you bitch!” he finally screamed back. I’d never heard him scream before. “My God, this is what I was promised. My God, don’t you understand that here, here, here is the country I always wanted, imagined, prayed for the United States to be? Because I knew it had been, once before I was born? It’s like a man whose mother is fat, dull, old, and stupid—she smells bad, Pammie! She doesn’t read anymore, can’t even write her own name. She sits in her own caca and rocks back and forth and laughs at Fran Kukla. She’s shoving, shoving more cookies in her mouth, more baloney, more hot dogs, more! I don’t know how she even finds room for it all when she’s got Gene Rickey’s cock in her mouth, but she does. Then one day he finds a photograph of her as a young girl.”
“And can’t wait to screw the bejesus out of her,” I said coolly. “My! This is getting interesting. I can’t wait to write to my mother-in-law in Passaic. But oh! That’s right. She can’t read anymore.”
Later. Was I packing, unpacking? Was I trying to smash the lid of Gerson’s suitcase down on that sweet man’s hands? He’d let slip that he’d already phoned Nachum ben Zion for help with a place to stay: my Nachum, my fellow swimmer in history’s ocean. Didn’t a fire engine loaded with ice cream outrank a new supplicant? Guess not. I know that at some point I wadded up his silly European-style striped pajamas and hurled them in his face.
“answer me! I need to know. If I were Stella! If I were Stella, Stella, that bitch Stella! Would you still? Well?”
He looked perplexed. Then, although it’s just as well I didn’t recognize it until shortly before its imprint on my memory began to fade some months later—if I had, I’d have gone for him with jaws for hands and teeth for nails; wouldn’t have rested or stopped until satisfied that not only I but nobody would ever see that look again, now that his face no longer had the tools required to produce it—he looked compassionate.
“You never knew her. She’d have just gone wherever I went.”
“Well, I’m Pam Buchanan! Pam Buchanan, not that stupid fucking, fucking cow, and you never even asked!! ME!!! Shithead!!!!” I screamed.
We looked at each other dumbfounded. Not only had it blatantly never crossed his mind to ask me to remain in the Promised Land with him; it hadn’t crossed mine until provoked that he hadn’t. We knew each other better than we wanted to right then, and we’d never wanted to less.
That well-meaning idiot honest-to-God scratched his head. “Oh, Pammie. Come on. I mean—I suppose I could have, yes. Maybe. But really. It would’ve really just put more of the burden on you. Wouldn’t it? Having to say no and feel rotten. That wouldn’t have been fair—and now, I think, it’s too late. Isn’t it?”
“Yeaaaahh, it’s too late. You know why? You want to know why? Now, Gerson, now it would only be painful! Oh, where have I ever heard that before? You want this up, up, up! you now, Gerson? Huh?”
And you might think that by the rules, namely none, of a marital witching-hour colloquy—even one held perversely, well!, let’s just say idiosyncratically, in the morning, with Jerusalem’s astonishing and yet never astonished skyline playing the backdrop to him, then me, then him, but never us—there can be no such thing as going too far. You’d be wrong, and now we both knew it.
It wasn’t a question of wrecking my marriage. That had gone out the window an hour ago and something in me was already wondering what it would be like to be free. It was a question of whether we’d be able to exchange a civil word if we ran into each other thirty years from now. He’d thought I knew and understood him better than that and now he’d never be sure.
He looked at me, made up his mind what he was going to say next. Didn’t look good—my bet and instant fear was Charybdis—but then he unmade it. Said instead, “Well, Pam, the game is done. You’ve won, you’ve won.”
Knowing I’d lost, I wept. Saved our future by insisting that random moment of cruelty didn’t define me. Brokenly agreeing that there was no Gerson, let alone plural, still up to me to define, leaving a Pam he might not despise a
s my only salvage job, I sat on the bed, half drowning my apologies in tears and half coaxing more tears with new apologies. He sat down there next to me soon enough.
What can I say? It worked. I’ve got forty fond letters postmarked Israel to prove it. Unless she threw them out after his death, his widow has at least that many, with a variety of postmarks, to him from me.
Saying “It worked” doesn’t mean one sob or apology was a whit less than genuine, Panama. It just means that salvaging a Pam he might not despise was the agenda. I couldn’t have cared less what sort of person I actually was, you know? I cared about what sort of person Noah was: someone I desperately wanted not to despise me. Believe me, if I’d had to fake being a Pam he might not despise, I would have. I just don’t think I did.
The third hour, for my single worthwhile accomplishment of the morning was that there was a third hour, was much calmer and quieter. One proof was that we heard a fire engine, though distant and plainly racing toward somewhere nowhere nearby.
In fact, the third hour was gratifyingly gentle. In a muted way, the third hour was one of the best we’d ever had. There’s nothing for marital harmony like the transition to speaking of your marriage and the selves that you were or affected to be in the past tense.
One fragment: “No, I’m not saying it was ever a temptation for you. That’s not who you were. But because of what you were—not Jewish—it couldn’t help being an option. That’s all: an option. It’s your option to move to Cincinnati. That doesn’t mean I think you’ll do it.”
“Not that miserable,” I mumbled.
“Good. And I asked myself, do I really want to go back to living surrounded by people for whom anti-Semitism is even an option? Even if I don’t believe the ones I know and trust will ever take advantage of it?”
I stirred, punched a friendly wet pillow. “Was that when we were at Yad Vashem?”
“Ah, Pam! You know me better than that. Masada.”
During the third hour’s last half, I was no longer sitting but lying on the bed. And yes, there was a moment or two when a friendly two-way suspicion dawned that the last time we’d ever made love might be demoted to the next-to-last time we’d make love. But we knew we couldn’t risk it; the second hour was too recent. The third hour, though a promising child, was still a long way from first grade.
“Noah, you’re brave,” I blurted up at him at the end of the hour.
“That may be the only thing I’ve ever wanted to hear someone say about me.” He bent to give my forehead a dry kiss. “And since you did—and since I’m glad, I’m honored!, it was you—let me have that as the thing I carry away from here. I’m going.”
I can’t say I’d have minded if, just for pleasantry’s sake, he’d seen fit to tell me Pam too was brave. But you can’t have everything, as I’d once been reminded by a whisper of skin on a beach deck in Malibu. That I’d won the third hour and the promise of knowing him for the rest of his life was plenty enough to keep.
He looked at his watch. “You’ve missed our flight, of course,” he said. “Bad timing.”
As I too got to my feet, since not seeing him to the door would only have told him I’d mistaken a hotel for a hospital, one final two-way recognition decided to stay mute. We’d both just realized I’d be boarding a plane soon, for Noah a special anxiety back when he’d been Gerson.
Even if my flight out of Israel did turn out to be Carole Lombard’s plane, though, he was safe now. However anguishing, the death of an ex-wife wouldn’t be history repeating itself, and I’d been one for at least an hour. The papers Pam’s lawyer mailed for his signature three months later were a civilized formality, at least so far as we two were concerned. Purely mental though it was in his case, poor old Oliver Watson was visibly strained by his first trip to Palestine. Noah sent them back with a joking note about the Galilee I’d left behind me.
“On my way out, I can ask at the desk and have them phone you,” he offered. “For your sake, I hope you won’t have to stay on an extra day on my account.”
It was silly, but maybe not getting my “You are, too” in the bravery sweepstakes had rankled a bit. It wouldn’t have had to mean any more than another driver’s thank-you wave after passing into the turn lane.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Now that I’m a free woman, maybe I’ll stay on a couple. I’d kind of like to go back to Tirat Karmel.”
“Tirat Karmel, really? What do you know? I wouldn’t call that one of the highlights. But, well, vive la dee-ferance. I did like that funny little restaurant.”
“Me too. Noah, will you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“When you get to Nachum’s, can you ask him how you say ‘The Great Unknown’ in Hebrew?”
Posted by: Pam
I didn’t go, no. (Duh! As you children say.) I shunned Tirat Karmel on later trips in the Sixties and Seventies, even though I alone in the bus or limo knew of a little restaurant that served the most divine, divine, divine!, hummus, falafel, and olives, brought to your outdoor table if you were in luck by a girl with eyes dark as tamarind and hips expert as miniature race cars. I’d inhaled her skin: “I am Israel. I’m sun, valor, hardship—and joy. I’m the most daring thing you’ll ever do if you’ve got the nerve. Are you Jewish, by chance?”
“Would it really matter?” my skin babbled back. But she was fetching the next table’s water by then.
I still hope Israel’s Great Unknown wasn’t killed in any of the wars. She’d have been getting on by my last trip: 1979. For her sake, not mine, by then I obviously had to hope she wasn’t still waitressing.
Instead, when obliged as expected to stay over an extra day, I ate a meek last supper alone in the King David’s restaurant. Was disgustingly, disgracefully relieved when ben Canaan’s surviving eye didn’t show up to rake me over the coals as a whore combined with a hypocrite and coward, two things your true whore—I’d seen Napoli, remember?—never is or could be. An American, in short.
Flew back the next morning to the land of Fran Kukla’s Hamlet. Yet of brave Martha Shelton and so much else. Still unsure whether one citizen’s idea of a promise betrayed is another’s idea of its fulfillment.
Perhaps the real prayer is that neither’s decision will ever be final. When I think of Israel, that’s certainly the hope of a philo-Semite like me.
Philo-Semite, you ask? What of your cleverness in spotting all those signs to the contrary? Oh, I swear. You’re children. As I should’ve started telling you much earlier on daisysdaughter.com, you’re all too fucking easy.
Yes, I belong to my generation. With the mother I had, not to mention the father, I could not help but be conscious of Jews as Jews. Smart ones can spot it eight decades later at Nan Finn’s Christmas parties, and unless they’ve got no humor—not bloody likely, not least given the goyish occasion—they dig it.
Me too, though I’ve got to be awfully bombed on Nan’s hopeless Chardonnay before I talk about Noah’s death. I yawp on instead about Pam’s first trip to Israel. If only thanks to the fact that I saw it before most of my auditors were alive, that keeps them interested until I’m outdone by the next round of canapés.
I swear, if Andy Pond were Jewish or could even fake it—had the odd bit of crackle, you know, along with his brain’s fine imitations of the weak lovely music Mozart would have composed if he’d lived into his eighties—I’d have probably married him ages ago. I’m still the shiksa and I know the drill. In the first decade or so of my final widowhood, it was my favorite way of being socially sexy.
I’ve been called a kike hag. Before you rise up in outrage, demanding the coiner’s name, I assure you he’s beyond your reach. His name was Nachum ben Zion—born Nachum Unger, the poet. Nachum only bothered to mince words when he was dealing with people who might misinterpret them.
He said it (“Oh, colleague!
You’re such a…”) at a round table on the patio of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem one night in the spring of 1965. I’d just learned of Eddie Whitling’s death in Saigon. Nachum’s wife—a sabra, by the way—was the only one who even rolled her eyes. Noah did blink before he chortled, but then Ruth rattled something off to him in rapid Hebrew and he started to laugh helplessly. Never did find out what she’d accused him of. Ehud Tabor, whom Hopsie and I knew from when he’d been Hopsie’s Israeli counterpart in Nagon, grinned at me and said, “They do come in handy. How’s Nan Finn these days?”
As for Cadwaller, he knew damned well he’d better be the quietest laugher. But he beamed over his pipe: “I’d never put it that way myself. But you’ll have to admit the shoe fits, dear.”
I’m sure Noah would’ve been disappointed but refused to judge had he known Nachum emigrated to the United States after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon: “Next year I’ll be seventy, colleague. At my age, you can’t help wanting to live in a country where ‘rockets’ red glare’ is a figure of speech.” Hired by some think tank, he used to show up on TV a lot when the Middle East was the topic. He died in 1995 in Passaic, oddly enough all of six blocks—not six million—from Noah Gerson’s childhood home.
Posted by: Pamorana
As for me, I might’ve stayed on in Los Angeles for decades, happily ogling girls in Newton-defying bathing suits and looking for the Great Unknown at parties, if Luz and Ava hadn’t decorated our home for the Gersons’ return. Coming into the den to see that forlornly tinseled, eternally Pam-sized Christmas tree next to Stella’s picture just about did me in. I moved on.
Though Noah didn’t even need to ask for me to send him his first wife’s photograph, I was touched when he wrote back requesting one of his second. He had a particular image in mind, a pensive shot of Mrs. Gerson in our old Beverly Hills garden. Being Noah, he hoped it wouldn’t be too much trouble for me to get him his own print of the picture of Glory Be’s author in Vogue.
