The Great Kisser
Stories
David Evanier
To Dini Evanier, Andrew Blauner, and Eric Wilson
Contents
The Tapes
The Man Who Gave Up Women
Sabbath Candles on Brooklyn Bridge
The Great Kisser
Danny and Me
Scraps
The Better Man
Rabbits in the Fields of Strangers
About the Author
The Tapes
“Wasn’t it your Uncle Sidney who said, ‘Acceptance, forgiveness and love?’”
—Broadway Danny Rose
I: My Life
I start with a suicide because I have avoided mentioning it to myself for so many years. A suicide of a man I never met.
In horror films, a drowned victim’s corpse rises to the top of the water, confounding the murderer.
Sometimes I see my wife Karen’s former husband, Victor, in my dreams. His body rises to the water’s surface.
On the tapes I hear myself as I was then—ten, twenty, twenty-five years ago—my old shrink Solomon Butinsky’s gift to me, the record of our therapy sessions. My life.
The tapes. I have just started to listen to them, in 2004. They unearth a hidden city. They tell me all the things I’ve blocked out, distorted or forgotten. What an amazing gift. Karen lying beside me, so changed now. Hearing her as she was then.
Butinsky, dead seven years, his scandal on the front pages in Boston long forgotten. And listening to the forgotten tapes, I measure what is real to me now against what was real to me then.
Now I love my wife Karen as she had wanted me to love her then. But on the 1978 tape, I hear myself say, “I don’t really know what the truth is.” And listening to the tapes, I realize that I don’t know anything.
“It,” says Butinsky, “sounds like MacBeth accusing his wife of plotting the murder.” He’s referring to my disclaiming any responsibility for the suicide of my wife’s husband, Victor.
He took his life because I was fucking his wife and she had left him. And I was fucking his wife because I was lost and lonely in Vancouver. And she was fucking me because the ’60s were over and she’d missed out; she wanted to be with a free spirit, a Jewish intellectual like myself who was actually not free at all, but terrified in exile and just wanting a date on Saturday night more than anything else. And, she fell in love with me.
When I went to Vancouver in 1972, I had left behind in Manhattan my girl Julie in the walkup red brick tenement on Stuyvesant Street in the East Village and the fleas I’d let in with the hooker I picked up on the Bowery. This had happened during my despair when Julie was away that summer in the pure winds of Vermont and I knew I had to give her up that following autumn. The hooker, red wig, red eyes, red platform shoes, left her Coca-Cola can on the stairway where I found it the next morning.
When I went to Vancouver, I had left behind Julie and the Cooper Union clock I could see from our window at night when I wrote and Julie slept, napkin under her head, I never knew why. And I left behind my fragile hold on the literary life and my Jewish radical friends and the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square—with all the holy meshugenas who lived there as I had once done with Julie when I first met her. Huddling together in the warmth of the community kitchen and writing all night at the Figaro. Wandering into Washington Square Park at dawn, the snow glinting on the trees, and thinking, I will remember how I felt this moment.
I had left behind the Italian Village Streets and all the apartments I had lived in with Julie: the tub in the kitchen at 145 Sullivan Street, and the last Italian enclave in East Harlem at 310 Pleasant Avenue—where a guy once kicked me in the balls because I interrupted his phone call in the booth on the street because Julie was sick and I needed to call a doctor—across from Rao’s and near Benjamin Franklin High School, and the apartment on Richmond Terrace in Staten Island that Julie and I took the ferry across to. When I left Julie, I felt no less loss than Hemingway when he left Hadley in Paris in “A Moveable Feast” or Peter Allen felt when he wrote and sang “Once Before I Go:” “It’s so hard to say goodbye when there’s so much that’s left unspoken in your eyes. But unless I spread my wings again, I’m afraid I’ll never soar …” I spread my wings and tumbled to the ground.
And I left Julie because I knew she didn’t want to have babies and I wound up with my wife Karen who had had her fill of babies, or so I thought then. Karen and I met in 1974 when we were both teachers for the first time at a community college in Vancouver. She had a Raphaelite face, and a pure heart. She trembled when I touched her. She actually resembled Jackie Kennedy in her dark beauty.
Karen had a young son and was married to a Dutchman, who had served as a doctor in both Nazi and Communist prison camps. He would smuggle food to the Jews through the barbed wire. This was her second marriage; her first had been to a florist in Oregon who turned out to be gay.
Karen had a free-floating innocence about her and supreme inhibition. When angry or upset, she would clear her throat once, even twice—but usually not speak. If she was furious, she might say “Oh crumb” or “Yuck.” She was entirely silent until she drank. As she sipped wine all day and night, she talked of her Oregon childhood. Her mother tried to make her curtsey to the teacher before her piano lessons.
“We would have these pajama parties through high school,” she told me. “Our favorite song was ‘Mister Sandman.’ Those lines: ‘My lonely nights are over,’ we found incredibly sexy. ‘Oooh!’ we said. ‘Oooh!’
“What meant a great deal to me as a child was a picture in my Girl Scout book of a foot in a field that stops just in time to avoid stepping on a caterpillar.”
Karen had a haunted, remote look that turned people off. She was deeply intelligent and empathic, but taut and painfully self-conscious. She did not look at people, hoping they wouldn’t look at her.
Long after I left Julie, ten years later and back in Manhattan and married to Karen—this was 1982 and I’d been living in Manhattan again for four years—I took the subway down to one of those fringe areas of Manhattan on the edge of Chinatown where I smelled the sea and looked at the lit lanterns and thought of the Rosenbergs because they had lived in Knickerbocker Village, a housing project nearby, before their arrest. I had tracked down Julie’s most recent known address. She had always liked these marginal, vivid areas near the waterfront—these noirish areas—where the wind seemed to be always blowing. When I first saw her, in 1966, hanging out outside the Judson church, she was wearing a tight leather skirt that blew me away and I walked into a pole. The stepdaughter of a Baptist minister, she lived with her cat and her masculine black musician lovers or willowy little pale white slaves on West Broadway near Broome on a warehouse street before the area had turned into Soho. And then we lived together in the Judson Church student house before we moved all over the city.
I found the address. An old white wooden house stood shuttered; yes, this was her kind of place. I walked up the creaky front steps and peered in through the blocked windows and tried to taste Julie. A middle-aged woman came by and peered at me. She asked me, “Looking for a long lost love?”
And yet, after I left Julie to go to Vancouver, I soon felt that she had left me, and in revenge, wrote of her “frozen face” in a story and mailed it to her preacher stepfather. That face that I loved dearly.
Karen and I were married in Vancouver in 1976 and we returned to live in New York in 1978. Those first years with Karen in New York were years when, after Karen had gone to sleep, I still combed the Manhattan phone book, sipping scotch, stopping at names of women or men I remembered from my past—a history teacher with two middle initials: “H” and “Q” (there he was, probably in his eighties) and I would sit sile
ntly with fleeting recollections that left me longing over lost chances for love, or sex, or friendship, or nothing at all except a touch. Sometimes the impulse was just testing memory. The memory sometimes lasted only as long as I fixed on the name, and then lost its place to another recollection as another name came into view. Frances Steloff’s name conjured up a scene I’d long shunted out of my mind: when I was 16, lost as I ever was, wandering into the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street, that literary sanctuary permeated with the strivings of Hemingway, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe and every hungry writer in New York. Frances Steloff, oh how she spotted me, and said, her eyes appraising, but casual, not wishing to frighten me, “Are you a writer?” Startled, I said, “I am.” She said, “Do you want to work here?” I was silent for a moment. “Yes,” I said. “You can start tomorrow morning.”
I could function in the world as a writer, working in this one shop where I would not have to hide myself, where I could survive without being scorned and ridiculed for not keeping pace with the drumbeat of commerce.
And, my heart beating, I never called her, didn’t allow myself to think about it, never went near the shop for years, never gazed in the window lest she see me, so afraid of failing those who loved me, of their turning on me when they realized what a fraud I was. And I ran.
I remember that day in the Gotham Book Mart now, the dark pall of it, the tomb I fell into, fearing so much that which I loved with all my heart.
And the names in the phonebook evoked the dividing signposts: the period of high school and college before I went to Vancouver; everything that followed upon my return to Manhattan. Or I would look for forgotten movie stars, or writers, or blacklisted actors, or old-time Communist celebrities. I frequently found them in the phone book and wondered what they did now. Losers and has-beens were so easy to approach. I was so much more comfortable with them.
But it was really the women who mesmerized me, who carried me away, who I was afraid to look at. For whom I burned. When they had caught me in their coils, especially if they were smart, and alive, they blocked out everything else, made me leave the ground and fly, forget where I was, out of control, desperate for life. Just beyond my grasp. They fell for the cool, the uninvolved, and how they turned away from awkward passion. An upright prick was a walking wound. What do you do with it? The guys who got laid didn’t seem to care about it. And it wasn’t that I was after, I was too afraid: but breasts, dimples, wide eyes, long black hair, a warm, live hand, a particular voice, a particular laugh—they were enough to make me cross to the other side of the street when someone I wanted was approaching, as my father had done before me. This was true in my adolescence, in my 20s, 30s, and 40s.
When Karen and I returned to Manhattan, we were eating at an Italian restaurant and I was staring at a beautiful dark Indian woman at the next table. I looked up to see my table on fire. My napkin had been ignited by the lit candle and the waiter rushed over to damp it down.
In 1965, when I was 21, I received my first fellowship to a writers’ colony in Maine. I had spoken two or three times to a painter, Linda Williams, who was perhaps 32 at the time, over dinner. One evening she said that she was engaged and wondered if she should go through with it. She suddenly paused and said, “Why don’t you marry me instead?” She’d been kind to me and I decided this was the one. At breakfast the next morning I stumbled into the dining room an hour late, pretending artistic exhaustion, telling her I’d been up all night writing. I hoped this would impress her and give her some idea of what a profound catch I was. Then, as we walked in the garden, I told her yes, I would marry her. She tried to explain that she hadn’t been serious. I had thought that if we married, I could jump over all the steps of courtship I could not navigate—the period of overwhelming need and dependency when I had a crush on a girl and wanted desperately to kiss her and regressed to the feelings of a child—feelings of helplessness and black depression, feelings that went back so far I knew I was in the grip of some distant but familiar part of myself that I could not remember but somehow recognized instantly. I became a trembling leaf, although my body was rigid. It was a damp and wet moistness—a neediness that drove women away always, neediness that was somehow deeply feminine and embarrassing both to them and to me. Wanting to hurdle those feelings that I could not control, which overwhelmed the woman and made her invariably touch my shoulder or my hand and say to me, almost the same fucking exact words every time: “I’m so sorry. I can’t handle this …” with a look of such pity and sorrow in her eyes that I wanted to cut my throat.
Seated quietly with the phone book and a scotch in 1980, I knew how it would hurt my wife if she knew I was doing this, and I never told her.
I did it until I had drunk enough, and fell asleep.
From the time I married her in 1976, Karen gave me a secure perch from which to yearn. I could do it knowing I was lucky, remembering my father’s images of poverty and failure and loneliness everywhere. Images he pointed out to me, and which stayed with me always. (“I look at those cripples, and I feel great,” he would say. “Look at that retard.”) I would have died without her. What if the bough broke? My sweet lovely Corie on the kibbutz in Israel when I was 20 (yeah, I didn’t fuck her either) sang to me as she poured cherries into my basket, “The last leaf clings to the bough.”
And when I left Julie in New York in 1972, I fell like that last leaf.
Peter Allen died of AIDS. He was like a shooting star those early days at the Bitter End when I came back to New York with Karen and her son Kevin (eight people in the audience and Peter Allen said, “You’re so small but so nice”) and at Reno Sweeney, singing songs he’d written of his grandfather, a saddler in Tenterfield, and of Central Park at 6:30 on a Sunday morning. Without mentioning her by name, he wrote—so simply—of his former wife, Liza Minelli: “I married a girl with an interesting face.” I remember his look of terror when he walked through the audience to the stage and his look of triumph when he introduced a new song and the audience rose to its feet; he hopped onto the piano stool, and when they kept applauding, he hopped up onto the piano. There was a sexual subtext, but I never gave a fuck about that. I never met him. I loved him, as I had loved the old vaudevillians at the Palace. Now Peter Allen is in the ground; that farewell song is on my CD player, and there is no way to forget what is lost.
II: Butinsky: Decline and Fall
1990: Dr. Butinsky, my shrink, sat beside me on the sofa and handed me nude photos of a female patient of his. I didn’t know what to say. He was a handsome man in his seventies—curly hair, a large, ingratiating, dark and perspiring face, a square, broad body-builder’s frame, his Delphic beard and mournful, piercing eyes. Mountainous shoulders like clubs. He had a huge and curiously graceful shape, which had always made me feel protected. And he was a kind and wise man.
But his wife had died six months before after a six-year battle with cancer. And he was cracking up.
The decline had started some time before, but he had been so immense—in his intelligence, his understanding—that it took time for me to recognize what was happening. When he began to fall asleep during a session, which he did increasingly, honest to God, I thought: he has such awesome power, he doesn’t even need to stay awake; he can analyze me while asleep. A remarkable gift. But then, of course, came along the sneaky second thought: or can he?
For twenty-five years he was the shrink one dreamt of having. I met him in Boston in 1965 when I was attending college and dodging the draft. I was living with the secret that I had laughed at JFK’S assassination, that was my state of mind, the hate within me. Butinsky didn’t even charge me for sessions, making it possible, after graduation, for me to travel to Boston to see him. He was always accessible, day or night.
I left him for two months for that summer in Israel. One day, as I was picking berries high in a tree in the Galilee, he walked towards me, beaming, with his family. He had come to visit me in Israel without telling me. It was like a benediction. I kep
t seeing him, traveling to Boston by train on weekends, until 1972, when I went to Vancouver to get my graduate degree.
I resumed seeing him in 1978, when I returned from Vancouver, and I kept seeing him, on and off, for another 12 years, with Karen the last 6 years.
To settle in Israel is to make “aliyah,” which means to ascend to something higher. For me, traveling to Boston to see Butinsky was my aliyah. Coming to Boston meant for me walking in the Boston Garden and by the Charles, climbing the winding streets of Beacon Hill and walking along Commonwealth Avenue listening to music wafting from windows, and reading and studying in the Copley Square Library and at Harvard. And then, on Sunday mornings, waiting to see him before my appointment, I would sit in the field (traces of remaining forest and old trolley lines between gnarled branches of trees) near Butinsky’s baronial house, smelling the burning leaves in late fall, or sit on benches in winter as the snow fell, or watch the children playing in spring and summer, music spilling from the open windows of the beautiful houses all around me. As the hour came closer, I had a brownie and coffee in the candy store nearby, the sweetness of the brownie a prelude, and then walking over to Powell Street to see the man I loved more than anyone on earth.
But this was 1990, and I was paying the price. He had saved me. But now I needed to save myself from him.
The reversal of roles had begun four years before, when he ushered me and Karen through his massive office door into the actual living room, the magic carpet of his home. He introduced me to his wife and daughter. Teacups, honey cake, the Talmud. What a feeling. A patient’s fantasy come to life. For years, I had listened to the happy sounds of his household while sitting in his office, his wife playing the piano or the Boston Symphony playing on his turntable, peals of laughter coming from his daughter. Butinsky would lift his head to the sounds. I had devoured every detail about him from afar, seeing him around Boston, playing basketball with his daughter, bicycling with his wife, cocking his arm for his wife to put her hand through as they entered a theater. That combination of gentleness and strength that would endure as a model for me of how one should live—even if I couldn’t do it myself.
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