Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  He and I were alone in the house. Stephen was still at the lab and Cyn, I guessed, was spending quality time with her father. I was supposed to be working on my paper at the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts Library—Stan had even given me special dispensation to check out the books there, if I wanted—but I didn’t like being even that close to the Props Studio where Mimi waited with veiled comments and studded leather belts. I’d taken the bus to the gates of the Glass neighborhood and walked up Frost Road, left at Hemingway Way and then down Byron Circle with my sweaty palms plunged into the pockets of my denim shorts where my key was hiding like a kidnapper in wait. It was a windy day. I was halfway up the brick steps when I spotted a stranger waiting patiently by the front door of what turned out to be, when I let us both in with my own key, an empty house. He said he was Rabbi Tsouris, although Tsouris is Yiddish for trouble so that couldn’t have been right. He said he had an appointment with Mimi, and that could have been right, so I led him into the living room, where I’d never been in the two months I’d been here. As the curtain rises to the Rabbi sitting down on the slipcover, I thought that maybe nobody ever sat in this living room, that even after all this time—just last night I’d offered Stephen a hated olive—there were rules in this family I hadn’t even heard of.

  “So how are you, Rabbi?” I asked.

  He crackled in his chair. “I’m fine,” he said, and the italics were lost on me—didn’t I look well?—just as their musical equivalent, a sinister murmur of woodwinds to signify approaching illness, will be lost on all but the most careful of listeners, or those who have read the verbose essays in the glossy playbills—“listen for the sinister murmur of woodwinds to signify approaching illness, a hallmark of the subtle decoration in Handler’s work.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said. “I’m sure if you have an appointment with Mimi she’ll be along any minute. They’re really working her to the bone over at Benedrum.”

  He frowned like I’d made a bad joke. “I’m sure—Mrs. Glass—will be along, as you say. She shouldn’t be working so hard, particularly now.”

  I tried to remember what Stan had said. “Well, people want—

  Mimi’s boss told me that he wanted to make this season mesmerizing.” I was enjoying watching the Rabbi’s face pucker every time I called a grown-up by its first name. Outside it was a windy day.

  “Mesmerizing I’m sure it will be,” Tsouris said. “Though I can’t say I’ll be seeing any of the productions.”

  “You don’t approve of the season?” I asked.

  Tsouris smiled at me. “You make it sound like I’m opposed to summer. But no, I don’t really approve of the anti-semitic operas. There was a real outcry from some of the more conservative rabbis in town, but I didn’t join that. I don’t want to see it banned. But I disapprove, yes.”

  “Why? Don’t you think it—I mean, don’t you see? It’s supposed to be ironic.”

  The Rabbi sighed. “You young people and irony. You think if you dress something up and wink at it, it’s all right. I suppose every generation tries to think it’s doing something for the first time, and your way is to, I don’t know, garnish it. Put it sarcastically.”

  “But don’t you think it makes a serious point, to do it that way? I mean, to present these operas in—”

  “To show it condones it,” he said gruffly, shifting on the sofa and showing me a pale, crackly stripe of skin between his pants leg and his sock. What was he condoning, with that lizard-belly skin? “There’s a Talmudic saying: ‘We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.’ The Benedrum Board is revealing itself to be—well, entrenched in anti-semitism. If they really wanted to do something ironic, why don’t they do—I don’t know—lousy operas?”

  “Because—”

  “Because people wouldn’t go, that’s why. They want to make something mesmerizing. And what’s mesmerizing to those schmucks?” The Yiddish rolled off his Pittsburgh tongue like a bandage off a scab. “Anti-semitism. It’s not ironic at all, not really.”

  “Then why didn’t you join the other rabbis and sign the petition, or whatever?”

  “Letter to the editor,” the Rabbi said, waving his hand like it didn’t matter, or he was blessing me. Outside it was a windy day. “Because I didn’t feel like it was my place to do that. If the Benedrum people want to do such a thing, who am I to stop them? It’s not like I’m some great moral authority.”

  “You’re a rabbi,” I said.

  There’s always parts in operas where some random, outdated ideology that nobody cares about blunders in, like a sudden gust of wind that blows open bedroom doors. “That’s no reason to judge. I mean, rabbis are beholden to a certain Gospel. But most Jews drift around different Gospels. They don’t just let Judaism run their lives. There’s lots of different Gospels out there. The Gospel of Work, and the Gospel of Relaxation. The Gospel of Power. The Gospel of Fun, of Enjoyment, of Relaxation. I said that one I think. There’s the Gospel of Self. More and more, people are finding themselves following a variety of Gospels. They’re Bi-Gospel. They’re Tri-Gospel. Pan-Gospel. It’s not my place to tell people what to do. That’s why I’m here today. Mrs. Glass has called upon me in her time of need, but to listen, not to judge. I may disapprove of her actions, as strongly as I disapprove of the operas, but I’m not going to judge. It’s my job to be now here, not nowhere.”

  “What?”

  “Now here, not nowhere. You’ve never heard of this?”

  I blinked. The audience fidgets, waiting for more sex, or a stabbing or something. Be patient, please. Stop crinkling the playbills; outside, I believe I have mentioned, it was a windy day. “Now here?”

  “Now here and nowhere are the same word. You know, they’re made of the same letters. It all depends on how you look at it. God is nowhere. God is now here. You understand? It’s in the Talmud.”

  “I thought the Talmud was in Hebrew.”

  “The idea is in the Talmud. It was modernized by somebody.

  It’s a modern idea—that’s why I’ll be using it today, to help Mimi. She thinks, in her state, that nothing’s left. She thinks she’s nowhere. But there’s no reason to give up hope. She can be now here. It’s all in how she looks at it. I’ll be trying to offer her my own Gospel. I’ll be trying to offer her God—but not a judgmental God. Not the kind of God who would track her down and punish her this way. I’m offering her God as therapist, a God that can help her. She needs to find courage. And the real irony is”—he looked at me significantly—“she should just look around her. The heroines of operas are always triumphing over adversity—real operas, anyway, not the schmutz they’re passing off this summer.” He paused. “Look at Medea. Now there’s a brave woman. She knew she was now here. At the end of that opera—have you seen it?”

  “No.”

  “At the end, they ask her, Medea, what is left? Everything is destroyed, everything is gone. And you know what Medea says? She says, ‘What is left? There is me.’ There’s a woman for you. ‘What do you mean what’s left? Everything is left. I am left.’ There’s an opera they should show the world.”

  “Doesn’t Medea kill her children?” I asked.

  “Yes,” croaked somebody behind us, and there was Mimi, slung in the doorway of the living room like something hanging to dry. She had a smudge of clay on her face from the Props Studio and she looked tired. How long had she been there, on stage? Her costume will have to match the drapes or something, so she can emerge gradually and no one will notice her until that one word, low in her range: Yes.

  Rabbi Tsouris stood up. “Mimi,” he said, and glided over to her. He took her arm like an old movie, and settled her down on a slipcovered chair. Mimi let these things happen to her like they were part of an examination. “Yes, Medea killed her children,” she said meanwhile, looking at me.

  “Will you excuse us?” the Rabbi asked me stiffly, and Mimi began to tremble. Her skin made little shivering crackles on the slipcover and I stepped backwa
rds out of the living room.

  It’s difficult to construct a soliloquy when I’m narrating this to begin with. A further soliloquy, a meta-soliloquy maybe. Rabbi Tsouris and Mimi begin mouthing things to one another, while the lighting focuses on Joseph, lurking by the curtains that match Mimi’s costume: Ah! Mimi looks terrible. And why is she home in the middle of the day? Why did she have an appointment with the rabbi? Does she suspect that Cyn and Ben are sleeping together during these afternoons of quality time? Ah, quality time—the very concept sounds suspect! Ah, Jewish house of intrigue and misery! Ah, my tainted Cyn! My lovely flower gone rancid in Mimi’s twisted and evil kitchen! My precious porcelain figurine shattered like ceramic bone in the operating room of her father! Reduced to a one-molecule width by the lecherous laser of her brother! Oh, my turbulent head, blowing like the wind outside, because outside it is a windy day, signified by the roll of the timpani!

  And roll it does, a tempest of T.U.D., as Joseph stumbles past the curtains like he’s drunk poison, careening in billiard angles from one wall of the hallway to the next. Mimi and Tsouris freeze in a tableau of conference so we know we’re supposed to keep looking at Joseph and because, obviously, I wasn’t there to listen in on them. I was there in the hallway, though, when the signal is given to the stagehand. He’s slightly overweight and has a pen in his mouth because he’s not allowed to smoke on the set. Since “it’s exhausting to think about, but if you drive around a neighborhood …” he’s been standing with his hand on the doorknob of Stephen’s bedroom, listening through headphones for the signal to pull it open as the wind rises and makes good on its foreshadowing. Outside, I hope you know by now, it was a windy day, and that window was open, the one above the little wrought-iron table with little claw feet. You will remember that wind, because of some air pressure or wind rushing thing, opens doors and exposes nudity.

  It will require, I suppose, a brave tenor, though with tricky enough lighting you could have a body double, with the real Stephen moaning the high A-flat behind a scrim, while Cyn’s hand reaches for the erection of some guy they get from wherever they get naked people for art classes. In some Salomes it’s downright embarrassing, when the typically-shaped operatic soprano removes the seventh veil and we wonder why Herod lusts after his niece-turned-stepdaughter when there are so many healthy, more slender objects available in his stable. But opera is sort of a myth, and a myth is sort of a truth, and truly, Stephen’s body was delectably formed. Even in horror you can find lust, and such was mine that I understood the mother (still tableaued across stage) who didn’t want to be friends. Damp, Stephen was framed in the doorway like a gift, his eyes glassy with eagerness, his arms hovering in mid-reach, aching with the paralysis of a readiness afraid to show itself too keenly and spoil everything. I’m sure even our pen-chomping stagehand, hiding behind the door with the doorknob poking him, leans to look at Stephen’s body, and pokes back.

  Having been cooked up by Mimi, it should be no surprise Stephen looked so delicious. His shoulders were delectable, the knobs of his shoulder blades rising like drumsticks of perfectly-roasted chicken. His legs were trembling like a watched pot, and the landing-strip triangle of downy hair cleaved the cutting board of his chest like those perfectly sheared scars down a loaf of fine bread. And no, we won’t call it a baguette, that’s too French and large. Stephen’s whole family is short; Cyn, in fifth grade, was nicknamed Shrimp. Stephen’s shrimp was curled, like a real one, and damp from the pupil of the shrimp’s one eager eye to the bouquet of coral around its base, damp with late-teen musk as familiar and crave-inducing as garlic butter.

  Dinner was ready. Cyn’s hand was half-clenched like she was picking up a fork, while Stephen was the most eager of waiters, not the ones who scowl “Who had the scampi?” but croon, whisper, whimper, “Please. Please.” And the rest moans. A-flat, over a chord of violins thin as a bedsheet. Behind Stephen, everything was familiar, although I’d only seen his bedroom during a brief tour the day of my arrival. I didn’t have to see any more of Cyn, just the forearm, just the foreplay. The blankets and sheets had been thrown to the bottom of the bed, hanging on to the mattress in a frozen grimace of rippled corners, leaving the playing field bare for unencumbered gymnastics. The pillows were scrunched at the other end, cowering against the wall; I remembered how many times my thrusts had scooted Cyn and me to the very top of the bed, her spidery hand grabbing a pillow and stuffing it behind her head to stop the knocking on her skull. I saw Stephen’s underwear and pants, fallen in concentric puddles near his arched bare feet. I didn’t have to see Cyn to know she had pulled them down. I didn’t have to see her face because I knew what she looked like when she was hungry; it was the same expression I could sense each night when her father scooted her to her wall, when she left me alone in the attic. I didn’t have to see any more than her spidery hand. I had seen enough.

  The last A-flat melts right into the most tempestous T.U.D. yet, topped only by the finale in Act IV, Scene Two. The timpani rolls again and our headphoned stagehand shuts the door as the body double is brought a robe to dull the chill, and shoes so he won’t step on some stray set-building nail as he walks to the dressing room.

  Mimi saw me re-enter the living room, and her whole body snapped like she’d been in tableau during my absence, or had been talking about something she didn’t want me to hear. She changed the subject as briskly as changing beddings, casting a new thin layer of whiteness over the stains of whatever had been going on.

  “But how do you make one, really?” she asked Rabbi Tsouris.

  Tsouris sighed with the trombones. “I didn’t come here to talk about golems,” he said. “You know I’m not taking sides on the summer season, Mrs.—”

  “Mimi,” she almost snarled, “Mimi. Please. Can’t you please tell me? It’s important.”

  “I really came here to talk about your illness. I want you to know, Mimi, that God—”

  “Is a therapist, I know,” she said. Her hand was as spidery as her daughter’s, now that I looked at it. “I know that. But if you really want to make me feel better—I want to know.”

  “O.K.,” he said carefully, shifting and squeaking on the slipcover. “Well, it’s a myth, of course, so the actual process is debated.” Mimi shrugged impatiently, almost a tic. “But it’s generally agreed that you need mud from a river, you know: river clay. And the creator is a rabbi.”

  “Does it have to be a rabbi?” Mimi asked sharply.

  “It’s a myth,” Rabbi Tsouris said.

  “Isn’t a myth a sort of truth?”

  “Mimi, I don’t think we should be talking about this. Obviously you’re upset. You’re ill, and—Joseph, would you excuse us?”

  “Don’t change the subject!” Mimi snarled. Her spidery hand flickered out to me again. I sat down instantly like she’d cast a spell. Stephen’s buttocks (I didn’t mention those, did I? Ripe, magnificent.) were probably squirming on the sheets now, bucking towards Cyn’s hungry mouth, but mine were stiff on an uncomfortable chair in the corner. “Tell me.”

  “I guess it doesn’t have to be a rabbi,” the rabbi said. “It could be anyone. It’s a myth, Mimi. We have to talk about what’s really happening right now.” The wind blew outside and I wondered what other doors had opened, had shut. What was really happening, here? “But if only to satisfy your curiosity, I’ll tell you, briefly. The rabbi would use river clay and lay it out in the shape of a man. He’d dress entirely in white—”

  “The golem?”

  “No, no, the rabbi. The golem, I guess, was naked. I mean, he was made of clay , so I guess we could call it naked.”

  “And?” The coffee table trembled, and so did I, and probably Stephen, and Cyn, and the cellos.

  “And, there’s not much else. He lights the candle, as I remember, and circles the body and does some sort of a chant. Mimi, I don’t know why you’re asking me about this, frankly—there’s a golem ceremony in one of the operas, isn’t there? Golem? Some sort of—”


  “Alphabetical chant?” Mimi asked. “Isn’t it alphabetical?”

  “You know,” the Rabbi said, and stood up. His legs shook slightly. Mimi looked at him like he was going to boil over. “You know,” he said again, “we shouldn’t be talking about this. You’re very upset, Mimi, and you need your rest at a time like this.”