Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  And that was that.

  In tears, she picked up her things, which I’d thoughtfully packed into two Zabar’s shopping bags, and left, cursing my name.

  To celebrate, I went out on a bender that lasted through Tuesday and from which I awoke in a doorway on Ninth Street, in the East Village—my Wuthering Heights place, where lately I always seemed to gravitate whenever blind drunk, perhaps to find Anna, vestiges of her, ghosts, an East Village Heathcliff roaming a pigeon-dotted moor strewn with shattered glass, kicking at rats, shrugging off addicts, bumping muggers, drunks, freaks with my powerful shoulders, howling for my Anna/Catherine, who was in Toronto, nursing her own shattered heart.

  I didn’t know what to do about Esther, felt so alone in that hotel room with her, had no connection to anyone I could ask for advice. What would I say? “Hey, guess what I did. Married a complete stranger in a blackout and now I can’t stand to be with her! What do you think I should do?” I didn’t know the woman even well enough to feel contrite for this awful thing I’d done, felt only fear and a kind of disgusted amazement and couldn’t quite connect the misdeed to myself, as if someone else had done it and I had been falsely implicated, an unwitting accomplice informed of the crime only after the fact. I couldn’t recall a single detail of the city hall ceremony or the days preceding it. It never even occurred to me to have the marriage annulled. Instead, I pretended to be aloof, tolerant, smiled when she spoke, thinking only of my next drink. I tried to put a brave face on the fact that I was now legally bound to one I’d injured and about whom I knew less than I might know about a random person standing next to me on a subway platform. I avoided home and my blackout bride as much as possible. But sometimes we had sex and were nice to each other for a little while, as if to prove that at least basic civility was possible. This would last only until I rose to dress and go to the bar, whereupon, outraged, she would shriek that I was an abandoning monster and a sadist. The fact that I readily agreed with her only seemed to make it worse.

  Now and then, to impress my employers, I pulled off some utterly pointless stunt. Once, I arranged to have the West Point Military Academy mascot mule brought under police motorcade escort all the way across the George Washington Bridge and led out into the rotunda of the Abraham Joshua Heshel School, where my office was located. Requested the city to close off the street while the kids in yarmulkes took rides on the mule’s back. Nonetheless, the board president, a vain oil tycoon who was on hand to shake hands before cameras with the Parks Commissioner, was pleased by my flimflamming puffery and praised me warmly. Mission accomplished. I could go back to drinking myself out of my mind.

  Things hummed along in a merry alcoholic haze, pierced occasionally by Esther’s voice or a hurled piece of dishware exploding by my head. My loneliness and mental anguish were like mourners on a raft, drifting without paddles, in a great gray sea. I drank scotch, mainly, the better grades, and added pot to the mix. Little by little, I learned about Esther: that she was the outcast daughter of New Jersey–based British Jewish plastic manufacturers with factories all over; that Esther was their emotionally volcanic black sheep child; the others obedient Stepford children cookie-cut in the image of Mom and Dad, who lorded over them with iron fists, augmented by broken promises of future wealth.

  All this filtered down to my indifference as a kind of remote static interference, an occasional white-noise alien transmission from an old crystal radio. Took it all in with little skull-crushing hangover headache nods and graveyard smiles to no one in particular, and tippled some more.

  43

  I STOPPED WRITING. MY BOOK WAS A FLOP. DISGUSTED, I dropped out of Columbia.

  My close friend and colleague from Israel days, David Twersky, asked me to take over from him as editor of Jewish Frontier, an old Labor Zionist journal that had once boasted contributions from David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Albert Einstein, and the poet Charles Resnikoff but that had fallen, over time, into irrelevance.

  Since it paid an extra annual ten G’s and came with an office and staff, I accepted. I now had two offices in Manhattan.

  The mag kept my writing hopes alive. I began to contribute essays, op-eds, met other writers. One day appeared a strange little bearded man in a vest and bowler hat, who introduced himself as Elazar Friefeld, an American-Israeli poet in town from Tel Aviv to offer me the post of American editorial coordinator for Tel Aviv Review, a prominent literary annual containing writing from the likes of Yehuda Amichai, Allen Ginsberg, Irving Howe, and Naguib Mahfouz. Of course I accepted, and was paid with the appearance in the next issue of six of my short stories. Felt back in the game. Took on a new book review editor, Ilan Stavans, who would someday become one of America’s most prominent literary scholars. Ran cover graphics by Art Spiegelman and articles by Cynthia Ozick and William Philips. I interviewed Diana Trilling in her home, sat at Lionel’s desk, held in my hands his copy of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, the one he famously wrote the introduction to, a volume I revered. Diana Trilling was as grand as I imagined she would be. Not self-important or grandiose but intellectually and socially rigorous: someone with high standards for herself, others, and who, most importantly, could live up to them. In her presence I felt at home, an equal, though I knew this to be an illusion: she was only being nice because of my interview.

  Still, leaving the Trilling home was like stepping back, culturally and socially, into a lightless sewer world. To return from this to Esther was simply horrible. She was frantic, manic, hysterical. A shrieker and laugher, a nonstop talker who snorted coke and became even crazier. I lived in the audio cesspool of her logorrhea monologues, delivered in a high stentorian faux-Victorian British stagecraft voice. She didn’t know what to make of me. But there was something she wanted. I didn’t know what. Whenever she tried to impress me or please me she sensed that she was only disgusting me more.

  Even to attempt a divorce at this time would sic her father’s lawyers on me, and slam me with an alimony rate that would crush me for the rest of my life. I would need to bide my time.

  The next move, though, proved to be hers. And it was by all standards a masterstroke.

  She announced that she was pregnant. We bought two different drugstore testing kits and each result confirmed that she now carried my child. She had no plan to abort. It was clear that this had been her intention all along, her reason for hooking up with a blackout drunk who gave no real thought to his life beyond doing whatever absurd tasks provided time to fiddle with writing, and enough cash for a steady supply of booze and cigarettes.

  In all this, there was no room for fatherhood. Had no wish to be a parent. The very idea—especially as I had witnessed it in my parents—filled me with horror.

  Parenthood was a guaranteed drain on one’s dreams, something one sacrificed one’s whole life to, with no payoff. Now that which I most feared had me by rights. There was no escape from DNA. This took some time to sink in. Life had caught me in its trap at last. I contemplated this with a grim smile. The consummate escape artist, who had succeeded at outwitting Bronx streets, poverty, crime, warfare, adultery, madness, was now ensnared by a baby. So be it, I told myself. I was a failed writer anyway. Failed husband. Failed Israeli. Failed student. Failed human. May as well add failed father to the list.

  Yet something inside wouldn’t let me. As though, from out of the flesh of this woman whom I absolutely loathed in every way, some magic force was compelling me to take actions and adopt attitudes that would formerly have been unthinkable.

  Cut back on my drinking from hard liquor to only beer and wine, and then just beer. Began to hustle hard for more bucks—arranged to teach creative writing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where one of my students was a young lady with haunting eyes named Alice Sebold, who would go on to write the international best seller The Lovely Bones. Already had the sinecure from Jewish Frontier and the editorial posting with Tel Aviv Review but abandoned the Israeli botanical garden to become New York director of development for a prominent Israeli
University at a significantly higher wage and with good medical benefits. I moved us into a cozy apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with hardwood floors and a garden out back.

  My determination to do right by the child surprised even me. Anxiously, I awaited the arrival of Isadora Kaufman. On a hot July night in New York City, she was born. A tough experience for Esther, who screamed, shat, spit, kicked, and cursed like a panicking banshee, the doctor and nurses rolling their eyes at each other at how poorly she behaved. They spoke to her with barely concealed contempt. I felt ashamed to be associated with her.

  But Isadora appeared on earth as pleasant and self-contained a little beauty as one could hope for.

  “Mr. Kaufman,” said the delivering doctor who had placed my swaddled daughter into my arms. He laughed. “Why are you crying?”

  “Am I?” I sobbed, confused. “I don’t know. I wasn’t prepared for this. I can’t believe how beautiful she is. I thought that newborns are supposed to be ugly.”

  “This is true. But sometimes,” the doctor said, “there are special exceptions. It looks like your Isadora is extraordinary.”

  I would take the night shift, rising whenever Isadora woke up. At first, I would put on a CD of classical music or rap and, cradling her, dance around the room. Sometimes we waltzed. Other times, we boogied. She’d fall right asleep.

  I was the only one able to quiet her. In Esther’s arms, she squalled. But no sooner was she back in mine than she slept, little breaths puffing from her lips, a look of angelic intelligent peace lighting her face.

  I adored her. Think that she adored me too. We shared an inexplicable link, an uncommon symbiosis. Had never felt such immediacy with anyone. The whole world snapped into view. Felt her in my heart, my bones, with joy that verged on tears. All through the day, even in her absence, dreamed of what she might grow into, become, whatever that may be, a mystery for me to bear privileged witness to.

  We had named her for grandfathers on both sides but also for the great founder of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, a powerful and brilliant woman who had defied all conventions to express her imaginative gifts. Until now, I had chiefly used women for my own purposes, with arrogant hostility. Now dreamed daily of my daughter’s empowerment. Fathering her made me see in the fullest light my wrongful actions. Were a man for any reason to strike her, I would kill him. Were one to exploit her money, make of her a mark, use her for sex, I would rope him to a fender and drive off with his skin.

  Determined to provide for Isadora as best I could, I worked hard and was rarely home. When I was, Esther attacked. It was clear: near me, Izzy felt calm. But Esther terrified her. All former signs of mental illness seemed to have vanished from me with Izzy in her Snuggly, snoozing calmly against my chest.

  Seeing this, Esther attacked. Returning from my two jobs, wanted to take Isadora out for a little evening stroll. Esther, shrieking wildly, hair every which way, forbade it. Would not even allow me, after a certain point, to hold her.

  Others, consulted, said: “She’s insane. Divorce her.”

  Once, when Esther screamed so loudly that neighbors called the police, one arriving patrolman looked at her, then me, and turning back to Esther, who screechingly accused me of violence, said: “Drop your voice. You’re disturbing the peace. And I don’t see what you’re claiming. I see a quiet, reasonable guy who has just volunteered to leave the premises. I see you shouting and angry. I see you blaming. I haven’t heard a single word of blame from your husband. He looks pretty sad, pretty broken-hearted, to me. Like he loves his kid. So…okay? Think about that.”

  She told him to get the friggin’ hell out.

  We left. The patrolman said: “You want a lift somewhere?”

  “Nearest subway stop is great.”

  “Get in.”

  As I rode in back, the other patrolman, who so far hadn’t said a word, studied me in the rearview mirror for a time and then said to me: “Hey, chief?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mind a word of advice from one who’s seen these things?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That wife of yours?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Drop her.”

  Inside me, slow-motion disintegration set in. Helpless, I noted its appearance with a sense of dread. I knew this mounting chaos would crush the type of lifestyle that supported Isadora’s well-being, her existence. Nevertheless, I simply could not fend off my resentment and despair, even though my baby’s welfare was at stake. We could count on nothing from Esther’s parents, and my own parents could barely support themselves. With me gone, Isadora’s world would collapse.

  During a routine pediatric examination, the doctor advised us that Isadora might have water on the brain, a potentially fatal condition.

  My insides shut down, frozen. Numb, I worked frantically, shuttling from work to doctor’s office, sent by my employers on fund-raising missions to Israel and then San Francisco, trying to raise large sums for the university, while also teaching, editing the magazine, going to the doctor, calling pediatricians, X-ray technicians, brain surgeons, pharmacologists, marathoning on the treadmill and all the while terrified of the peril facing Isadora. During this time, liquor rarely passed my lips.

  Once, in Tel Aviv on business for the university, I ran into my old friend the writer Robert Rosenberg seated with wife Sylvie on the veranda of the Café Picasso, along the boardwalk. Hadn’t seen him in years. He waved me over, said, “Sit.” Turning out a chair, “And have some of the most exquisite frozen Polish vodka. They keep it here for me.”

  “No. I’m not drinking these days. Here strictly on business. You know.”

  Rosenberg studied me with interest. Turned, signaled to the waitress to bring the bottle. She fetched it from a freezer, brought it over with a shot glass, which she set down in front of me. I looked down at it. “No,” I said, smiling weakly.

  “Pour him one,” Robert ordered.

  She did. “Now, drink that and don’t be a damned fool!”

  “No, no, I can’t,” I said.

  A minute later it went down my hatch and then a refill went down, and Robert let me finish off the bottle. I stumbled off alone and slept curled in a doorway somewhere, in a blackout.

  If Esther had been crazy before, her madness now reached new levels of operatic hysteria. Time and again, police came and I volunteered for the baby’s sake to leave the house, preserve the peace. Though earning more money than ever before, I found myself after long work days wandering homeless in my belted London Fog raincoat, nowhere to go. Sat like a hobo on the neighborhood stoops with a beer bottle jacketed in a brown paper bag. Only once did I really let myself go—an afternoon after writing class at the garden. Two of my lady students and I got righteously plastered on big jugs of cheap wine. We talked like crazy high school best friends and flirted and ranted: welcome release for me in a relentlessly dark time. At one point, we all wound up on the bed together, sloshed, but nothing sexual occurred—just a charged erotic juice sluicing through us of festering ambitions, frustrated dreams, wild hopes. We knew that whatever this life was, as we now lived it was not the answer. Something had to change for all of us.

  The news that Isadora didn’t have hydrocephalus released in me a strange new recklessness that caromed crazily through the soiled alleys of my life. She was healthy. What did money matter? Nothing I did was enough, anyhow. My wife was monstrous. Her parents hated me. My wagon was hitched to a dragon, the wheel spokes charred, the carriage bed heaped with ash. I couldn’t face one more night of Esther violently wresting Isadora from my hands and screeching that I didn’t understand parenthood or that I was trying to turn Isadora, now almost a toddler, against her.

  “Her mo-ther! Her own mo-ther!” screamed Esther.

  I smiled pensively. “And you really believe that Isadora, at less than a year old, understands all that, and is going along with my nefarious plot?”

  “You’ve hypnotized her with your phony charm! Oh, yes! I know all about that charm
of yours! You’re smooth! Very smooth! Snaking your way into a woman’s heart and then tearing it out, eating it!”

  In her best stentorian stage voice—a bad mix of hyperbolic Dylan Thomas inflection and vaudeville tragedian—she snarled: “Yes, I DO believe that you HAVE turned my DAUGH-TER against her own MO-THER!!!!”

  One could almost hear the sheet-metal lightning rumble offstage.

  During all this, the subject in question snoozed in her crib, in the dark, little breaths puffing her lips, a self-contained cherub wanting when awake only to laugh and get around as much and as far as possible, with a pair of doting parents close by. No one wants to crawl alone in the dark.

  44

  ONE NIGHT, RETURNING FROM WORK, AFTER almost two months off the hard stuff, as I passed a high-end local tavern, I thought: I have done so well. Have a beautiful daughter. I’ve published a book. Though I found myself married to a madwoman, I managed to provide my kid with a decent home. I’ve been off the hooch for some time. Surely, just one…

  Seated myself at the bar on a plush stool, took in the amber-colored luxuriance, and said to the clean-shaved well-mannered molelike bartender in a red waistcoat and black bow tie: “Give me a Chivas Regal,” and as he turned, in a flush of expansive mood: “Make that a double!”

  Held up the tumbler of caramel-colored whiskey against the warm, rosy light of an encased candle, inhaled its strong, virile aroma, knocked it back.

  Warm, dilating my knots, imbuing me with an untrammeled sense of fresh starts, possibility, and power, it shuddered through me.