Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  Up close, her looks showed signs of wear. Dark rings scored her eyes. She had a kind of stress-fractured smile. But I was so glad to see her. Held her in my arms, kissed her long and lovingly. Her body’s contours fit mine perfectly. God proportioned us for each other.

  In the East Village, we wasted no time—tore off our clothes and knocked each other into bed, where we made love for days and talked. I felt sanity’s return. And with it, hope. A homesick longing for Jerusalem took hold. Head on my shoulder, she told me what that had happened when I left for New York. Crushed by her application for divorce, Itamar, called up again, had gone north to perform more of the same duty. All his friends had turned against her except Debbie and her husband, Menache. She had heard that David Twersky was back in Lebanon. The whole local cultural scene had evaporated. People either left the country or moved north to Tel Aviv. Jerusalem was a ghost town. It would never again be as we had known it. There had been a news report about the ugly little war going on unreported in the south.

  “They said all the things that you had been telling us,” Anna said. “How the war would now come down from Lebanon and erupt out of the West Bank and Gaza. Alan, you had already seen the signs. That all we had succeeded at doing in Lebanon was move our foes closer to our urban centers.”

  Come to make a quick, fresh start, in no time Anna had a job telemarketing for a dance company and proved great at it. Made fast friends in the East Village performance art scene and was soon at the heart of a multiplying network of parties, performances, art shows, and readings. Energized by all the activity, she went out almost every night while I chose to stay behind, drinking in local watering holes.

  Abetted by the presence of Anna, her enthusiastic optimism, I felt the flood tides of insanity withdraw, and a renewed sense of confidence that I could, after all, with moderation, drink as I pleased. Soon slipped back into old patterns of chronic absenteeism at the museum, or else outright on-the-job drunkenness. En route home stopped at East Village bars and, bleary-eyed, speech slurred, knocked back rounds; stumbling out to a liquor store to get a bottle that I took over to Tompkins Square park, sat on a bench, peaceably drank. People walking by seemed so alive, animate, talkative—yet I felt like an unseen shade, a voyeur of emotions as they walked with arms around each other’s necks, laughed, backslapped, gestured, humans who had each other, cared, sparked a love interest in one another. Tilting back the bottle, I swigged a mouthful, tilted some more, down the hatch, burning away the landscape inside, and later climbed the stairs to our place, let myself in, flowers behind my back, a surprise. But she wasn’t there. Found a note. She had waited, waited, suffered and waited. No word or sign. Then had freaked out and gone to her friend Patty’s, not to be alone. Please, please, please call there as soon as I got home.

  I didn’t. Drunk, ripped up the note and flung it angrily around the room, shouting, “The hell with you” to no one in particular, and betrayal searing my chest.

  How dare she leave me here alone? I needed to find her waiting to console me. Ran down, lingered on the stoop, the sky a cartoon-purplish black; passersby leered, looming from dark streets as if each possessed knowledge of my imminent and horrible fate. Buried my face in my hands. Only the bound and blindfolded victim has no idea of what awaits, stretched upon the altar, beyond aid, unloved by those gathered to watch the bloody harvest, eviscerated intestines spilled from abdomens, breasts sliced off, torn-out tongues dangling from red-hot pincers, pliers gouging at a little wire man. O Lord God, save me, I prayed. Saw the sweat-soaked sinewy forearms of hooded men methodically exact suffering from innocents. Unable to stand more, bought a bottle of scotch, unscrewed the cap, and sluiced down several fierce swallows. Don’t recall the rest. Another night of violations. Woke beside her with a sensation of mad dogs tearing at my jugular, a kind of mild seizure. Had a dim memory of garments rent, doors slammed, shoving, pleas, screams.

  34

  SHE TOO BEGAN TO DRINK. AND INCREASINGLY lost weight. The strain of all that I put Anna through told in ways that frightened even me. She grew gaunt. I flew into constant jealous rages over Itamar, or any man. Wanted to strictly control her. At work, a departmental process had begun to oust me from my post—no easy task. I was unionized, a civil servant. Written complaints were lodged, all justified. A case against me built. I got warnings. Offers of counseling. Tête-à-têtes with sympathetic members of the admin. I was observed, I noted, with a certain look of dismay, as if they knew something. Did they? What? Felt sure they were on to my impending annihilation. At times, considered killing them all, to protect myself. But would collapse into a little crying child without an ounce of willpower. Baffled, Anna clung to me. I could no more kill anyone than pretend not to know who plotted my imminent downfall. But other times my disdain for my invisible assassins was boundless. The look in my eye mocked. You are nothing without me. So, kill me. But when I’m gone, what will you be? The nothings that you are.

  I just had no idea whom I was speaking to. Knew only that they were there.

  And it was only then, in the depths of my drunkenness, that I could admit to myself the truth: Anna, I love you, more than life itself. And it is because of love that I must remove you from harm’s way. For there is no possibility of revealing to you the terrors working against me, against us. If I do, your life is endangered too. The thought of you suffering the same fate that awaits me is the worst torture of all.

  The work of eluding monsters was hard enough. To be effective, needed to move quickly, act on reflex; take spontaneous evasive measures in sudden ways that she would never fathom. Reversing course in alleys, spinning around, heading in the opposite direction; rushing down into random subway stations, boarding any train that happened along; riding arbitrary buses to Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, as I often did, making circuitous returns by illogical routes—such tasks might eat up entire days and nights, deployed at the first sign of something amiss.

  To survive I needed unimpeded latitude. She, unaware of the threat, moved at the slow, purposeful gait of sanity, didn’t see what lurked at the corners of sight. With her in tow, I was sure to die, and in the bargain, she as well. And so one day I called her father, Ben, in Toronto and said: “You’d better come get your daughter. I’m going crazy and can’t take care of her anymore.”

  Three days later, Ben and Sally pulled up in an auto, come all the way from Toronto, and led her down, wrapped in a jacket, crying, as I followed behind with her bags. In the street, took her in my arms and said: “It’s only temporary. See you soon, when I’m on my feet,” which I knew would be never. As the car pulled out, I felt only relief.

  35

  I DROWNED THAT PART OF MYSELF THAT WOULD have hoped to ever hear from her again, vanished into someplace that I could never wish to find. All of me down that pit. A blue-black place of self-murdered heart. Like a fighter plane that bore all the armored decor and battle insignia of a savagely unstoppable war instrument but was in fact all balsa and house paint, planted on the runway, a decoy to fool the foe. My balsa life of blood, tears, silence, pilot in the cockpit dead and wings ablaze, a hollow burning facade tumbled from a sky where it never really flew in the first place, aflame, on the runway, never to take off.

  Now was free to enter into the bunker. Monitor the sinister knowing looks in strangers’ eyes, the expanding, unfolding mass plot, satanic clues overlying everything, from the sewers to the stars, in the hub of which I moved in a perpetual dodging dance that must not stop or else: death.

  Now and then, thought of my dirty little war on behalf of the Jews. A malevolent dangerous war in which soldiers like myself had worked to hold back a rising tide of lethal violence, placed our bodies between our people and the bombers, along with horrors of the Holocaust, the mass graves and gas chambers, corpse incinerators and torturers, neo-Nazis, Aryan Supremacists, the Inquisition, White Russians, Islamic Fundamentalists, the Klan. Sometimes awoke in the morning facing an almost empty bottle of vodka or beer in which a cockroach navigated s
oaked cigarette butts, and smacking my dry, spittle-caked lips, blinking like a child in a cradle, wished as if upon a star that one day I’d wake to find that none of it had ever occurred. That no one had ever hated us Jews, hated me, that I inhabited another sort of world, a different kind of place, could have back my Annie, live a sane life.

  But risen to my feet, the last of the cockroach-cigarette swill drunk, reentered the game to which there was no end, stalked by hostile, relentless, invisible killers, a dangerous match of camouflaged strategies, intuited moves, second-guessing faceless hunter-stalkers with the wiles of hyenas and jackals—my assaulted mental faculties collapsing under the sheer weight of constant hypervigi-lance, impossibly multiplying rules of the game—and in all of this, in the depths of my love, I had wished only to save Anna by putting her out of reach of the killing delusions bearing down so hard upon me without relent.

  I was inexplicable. No one knew anymore what to make of me. Natan, the artist, furious at my abandonment of Anna, refused even to speak to me. I sat in my kitchen with a wet blank stare, the air amassed around like wooly dust. Watched a cockroach crawl up the cracked wall, a journey of hours, even years. Waited for nothing, except my inevitable slaughter. Was to be killed, of course. Sacrificed. To the furnace mouth’s encyclopedic and incinerating prejudices. I was the contemptible Israeli, the despised Jew. Despite all PR to the contrary, I clearly saw: the world had changed little since it set the Gestapo on my mother. Now they followed me. If no other Jews yet saw what was coming, in my parallax view, I was living out the fate awaiting everyone, twenty, thirty years from now, say, in the future. Soon the human hunt for innocence would be global, with Jews first on the list of the wanted.

  Some days, thought it best to offer my neck to the blade, just let them have me. Certainly, deserved death, I felt. My writing career a sham. True love ruined. Day passed into night, remained there, hostage. The door creaked, a hall draft, footsteps passed in the stairwell outside. Around me the East Village exploded with new galleries, magazines, poets, movements, art, bands, but here, in my private rat hole—always, in the end, alone—I drank and waited for something that never seemed to materialize but the approach of which was always imminent, anytime I stepped into the street.

  So I rarely went out. After a week or month, I don’t know, received a call from the museum requesting my appearance at a departmental hearing. Received, too, a summons in the mail. So, this was it. The execution. Drunk, I went, and after the heads of the department had each taken a turn detailing my derelictions, was advised of my termination with the full consent of the union and asked if I had anything I wished to say in my defense.

  “Yes,” I said, “I wish I had told you all sooner to go to hell.”

  Now I’d collect my unemployment. Now no need to rise, bathe, eat, dress, and mobilize myself. Now could lie on the floor cradling a bottle and watch dust motes dance in a pale blue beam piercing the filthy alley window. Now Oblivion was a country all my own, a mystic magical place that lay only just one bar away, one more drink ahead. Every night visiting there, my unconscious stormed through lunatic adventures that I could not recall except in hints and flashes. My road led through a forest of bar-stool thrones, a succession of neon kingdoms that began in leather and ended in duct-taped patched vinyl, with barflies whose torn stockings were not intentional punk affectations but lizard scales over unwaxed and varicose skin.

  Into this void Anna called, her warm voice searching, wanting to draw me out from this evil mess. She searched blindly for me, but I was nowhere to be found. Left between us was only a superficial commonality of locations: Jerusalem, the East Village, and the Israel Museum.

  “But, sweet one. I’m yours now.” Her voice probing from a great distance, that other world she now inhabited.

  She said, “I miss you, want you here with me. My husband. Precious one.” Each word laden with a million-ton weight of shattered hope. Her voice lifted, but then stumbled and faded: “Come here, come home. To me. To Toronto.” An echo of a whisper in a strange tongue. I pulled on my vodka. Vodka was cheap, did the trick just as well as scotch, even better. Slashed through all pretenses. Stormed my nerves with bare knuckles, pounded my blood like a thug. I pulled again. Had heard somewhere that because vodka was clear, the hangovers were milder. This, I had learned, was a lie.

  Anna, hopefully: “Do you want to come?”

  I laughed, softly, hoarsely. Could only imagine how it sounded. A cackling emanation from a black pit. “What’ll I do there?” I slurred. “All I do is drink.”

  “My sweet, just come. I understand now like never before. Darling, you have PTSD, from what you went through in Gaza. What’s preventing you from facing your PTSD is loyalty, the fear that doing so will make it seem like you’re betraying your fellow soldiers. But darling, it’s not a matter of politics. It’s medical. I’ve got a job with the symphony. And I’ve found us a place on Queen Street. It’s like the East Village. I’ll work to support us until you feel well enough to get on your feet. In the meantime, just rest. Let me feed and love you, my darling. And we’ll have family here to help. We won’t be so alone.”

  I took a train north, a railroad to life, hoping to be cared for and cured, healed by the only woman I’d ever loved and believed had ever truly, selflessly, loved me. A woman of high intelligence, profound depth, artistic brilliance—even, despite adultery, a kind of moral character. A woman so beautiful that every man in our Jerusalem milieu, married or single, had hankered after her. When we men were alone, she was all that we spoke of.

  But what met me at the station had the pall of death. Anna had shrunk by some kind of eating disorder, anorexic, a near skeleton. Crazed as I was, her appearance shocked me. To make matters worse, Anna’s sister, at the station to ferry us to our new Queen Street digs, addressed Anna and me in that high-pitched, wheedling, histrionic voice that people adopt when pretending that something horrible has not happened: the reduction of a superb specimen of femininity to a human broomstick, a wasted shadow.

  “Alan! You look so great!” the sister exclaimed, lightly embracing me (we barely touched). Anna’s stick form, swimming in a cherry-red satin jacket embroidered with the logo of the symphony, lurked into view. “Doesn’t Anna look great?!” shrieked the sister.

  I ignored this. Said nothing. Anna looked near death. Embraced her, fingers pressing through the satin down to the skin, bones. She looked the way I felt, like an X-ray, black and white, with a big tumor where once the heart had been.

  Leaned close to her ear, felt her baby skin against my cheek. Her sweetness unchanged, just perishing. Felt a sharp stab of shame. I had done this. I; no one else. Reduced the most desired woman in Jerusalem to a specter, a menial worker, a ghost searching for the life that I had taken from her. I was poison. The fiercer her determination to keep me, the sicker she got. I had only deeper graves to offer, darker, danker dungeons.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “Let’s go home. Take me home.”

  “We can rest now, darling,” she said, laying her skeletal head weightlessly against my shoulder. Her voice too sounded spectral. Neither of us belonged any longer to this world. “We both need rest,” she whispered.

  The sister dropped her public relations effort, grew as grim as the situation. Drove us silently to Queen Street. Anna and I in the back of the car swayed against each other like shocked survivors of an airplane crash.

  The sister jumped out, helped Anna to her feet. Anna could barely stand. The sister handed me my bags, hugged Anna, and said, looking at me with dull pain in her eyes and little conviction, “You should consider yourself a part of our family now. We don’t care what’s happened before. It’s a brand-new start.” Then hugged Anna again, whispered something to her, kissed her, squeezed her lifeless hand, got back into the car, and sped off without looking back. We stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, unable to go backward or forward, two immobile monuments to insensible suffering and unquenchable love, looking down at our bags, then at each
other, struck dumb by our wounds and inconsolable memories.

  We shared a studio with a lesbian couple, the room partitioned by a curtain on the far side of which our alcove, barely large enough to fit a bed into, also contained two chairs and a hot plate. Anna had made it as homey as she could, given her limited funds and flagging energy. We were alone, the couple arranged to be out, and when we entered our space Anna drew the curtains, shrugged off her jacket, displayed herself on the bed as prettily as she could.

  She looked like a concentration camp inmate. Perhaps her mother, Sally, who spent time in a death camp, a Holocaust survivor like my mother, looked this way when Allied forces liberated her. Perhaps for her all this had been in some unbidden way her unconscious effort to claim her mother’s suffering for herself; the loss of everything, a terrible ordeal, and a long nightmarish journey home.

  But no matter how seductive she tried to look, it didn’t work. Thought of her not as a partner in pleasure but another medical case like me, in need of attention. Crawling onto the bed, stretching out on my back, I said: “Look, you know how much I love you. But I’m exhausted.” Surveyed our little space. “Thank you for this. But tell me. Anna, what we’ve lost. Think of it. Was it worth it? What did we gain?”

  “Each other.”

  “I gained you and you are wonderful, the woman of my dreams. But I don’t know what to do with it. Tell me the truth. Isn’t this about you wanting a kid?”

  She blinked hard.

  “I’m asking because I can’t do that. I can’t take care of you, let alone some kid. I can’t even take care of myself.”