RHODA LERMAN (1936–2015) is the author of numerous critically acclaimed novels, including Call Me Ishtar which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, God’s Ear, Eleanor, and The Book of the Night, forthcoming in new editions from The Overlook Press. As a speaker and writer, her work has been recognized and honored in India, Tibet, South America, and Europe. She taught and lectured at major universities, including Ghent, Harvard, Wisconsin, Colorado, Syracuse, Buffalo, and California Institute of the Arts as consultant. She served the State Department as an AMPART speaker.
GOD’S EAR
978-1-4683-1140-2 • $16.95 • PAPERBACK
“Lerman has a sharp, lyrical, and almost uncanny ear for the Jewish absurd.” —Susan Shapiro, Newsday
“Lerman effortlessly works an immense amount of Jewish learning and Hasidic lore into a novel that’s moving, wise, and very, very funny. Irresistible storytelling.” —Kirkus
“Like a Chagall painting translated to print . . . The very opposite of a minimalist, Lerman proves herself mistress not only of side-splitting one-liners but also of pregnant perception about faith and virtue.” —Publishers Weekly
THE RABBI’S ONLY SON, YUSSEL, SOLD INSURANCE, MOSTLY LIFE. He made a fortune because everyone in the Hasidishe world knew that his father, the Rabbi, and his grandfather of blessed memory, and his grandfather’s grandfather of blessed memory, all of them stretching back unbroken in a golden chain from Far Rockaway to Horodenka, to Braslow, Chernobyl, Lublin, Tiberias, Jerusalem, to David, to Adam, all of them in the Fetner family, made prophecy.
“So, why are you here, Yussel?”
“To sell you some life insurance.”
“Oy. What do you know?”
“Nothing.”
“Today, this particular day, why are you here?”
“You’re on my list. I come every six months. Your premium’s due.”
“The truth, Yussel.”
“You’re on my list.”
“How will I go?”
“Bernie, Bernie, I’m just selling life insurance.”
“Believe me, Yussel, if a Fetner comes to my door selling life insurance, I’m buying.”
Behind his back his clients called him the Angel of Death. The Rabbi’s son made a lot of money selling insurance. From Williamsburg, from Borough Park, from the Five Towns, they came to him to buy. As soon as he picked up the phone and said, “Guess who?” they bought. Life, accident, doubled their umbrellas, upped their homeowner’s and liability. Everything.
Yussel married a beautiful sweet girl from Toronto, a rabbi’s daughter. Although she spoke perfect Poylishe Yiddish she also had a slight British accent and looked a little like Patty Duke. He had a Mercedes, a house near the beach with moss-brick on three walls in the leisure room, two ovens, the Patty Duke wife, four Donna Reed daughters, one son who looked like him, which wasn’t so bad but very Jewish.
“You know something I should know, Yussel?”
“Nothing, it’s just time to look over your policy, Berel.”
“Your father tell you something? Your uncles? Did you hear something? Maybe about the Almighty’s intentions?”
“Berel, I don’t know from HaShem’s intentions. I know only from accidents, from the tables.”
Yussel rolled his shirtsleeves up over hairy muscular arms—he played baseball with the Kneth Israel Cemetery Association, handball on Sunday mornings against the wall of the Yeshiva behind his house— took his pen from his vest, removed his Hasidishe beaver hat, filled out the insurance papers. His friend Berel watched Yussel shove his skullcap forward and backward, forward and backward. Everyone thought this was a sign he was doing prophecy. Berel began to sweat. His wife brought a silver tray of schnapps and kickel.
“How long does my Berel have, Yussel?”
“Your husband’s terrific. Look at his medical report.”
“How long do I have, Yussel?”
Yussel shrugged and took his hand from his skullcap. “As long as you have, you have.”
Such wisdom from the Fetners. The insured discussed every word Yussel spoke, watched everything he did, read everything he gave them to read. They discussed mortality tables and immortality. They discussed HaShem’s intentions versus random accidents. They discussed handball, baseball, miracles, how much chicken fat a man could eat in a lifetime, cholesterol levels, the possible sainthood of the Fetners, the Rabbi, his wife, this remarkable only son. They discussed prophecy. Everyone was waiting for Yussel to become a rabbi even though Yussel swore never on his life. Yussel showed his clients the Metropolitan Life Expectancy Charts, wouldn’t discuss prophecy. He offered variable rates, good returns on single-life premiums, no predictions. He wore his beaver hat over his skullcap, tried to keep his hand from pushing it backward, forward on his head. The Fetners don’t see everything and they can’t control what they do see, but they can turn it off if it starts coming in on the screen. Which is what Yussel did when he went to sell insurance. Yussel didn’t want to know from prophecy, from God’s intentions, from reward and punishment. Yussel knew from insurance tables: chance, probability, accident. One in 1,500 skiers at Aspen breaks a leg; one in 10,000 drivers breaks an axle; one in 200,000 planes is bombed. He knew the tables by heart. The average nonsmoker female lives to 72; smokers to 73. His father, on the other hand, lived in a universe in which absolutely everything is God’s intention, where there’s no coincidence, where an angel stands behind every blade of grass, singing, “Grow, darling, grow.” Yussel didn’t want to live in such a universe because if there’s an angel behind every blade of grass you have to watch every step you take. Yussel only wanted to be a wealthy Jew, sell insurance, live in his house by the ocean in Far Rockaway, be comfortable.
“For me, Yussel?”
Yussel found the line in the tables, the age, the life expectancy, showed Berel.
“For me? Here?” “
That I can’t guarantee.”
Yussel wasn’t stupid. Yussel, like everyone else in the family—the uncles, the mother, the father, even the sister—was brilliant. He soared through theological seminary like an eagle, his teachers reported, and then cursed him when he left the Talmud for actuary tables. Yussel wanted no part of the soul, the law, the rabbinate, the lineage, the blood. He was thirty-six years old. What he had, he wanted; what he wanted, he had.
Yussel sometimes walked on the boardwalk, sometimes on the beach, sometimes climbed out on the jetties, and sometimes, when the tide was out and the moon was shining on the wet sand and he could walk on the moon, through the moon, those times he wondered for just a moment if maybe he should be a rabbi and continue the dynasty.
On Friday night, if a man goes to his wife with the correct sexual procedures in the creative act, if he pays attention to what it means, not how it feels, his child will come down from Heaven with a higher consciousness. His child will be delivered out of the waters of the evil inclination, out of Egypt, into Sinai. And when this child, with all these
CALL ME ISHTAR
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“Lerman equals Philip Roth at his own good game—the Jewish absurd. Her eye for the giveaway detail, her ear for the mad half-phrase, her ability to sustain the cadences of a comic scene, all have that peculiar mix of energy, lucidity and hysteria at which Roth excels . . . Call Me Ishtar announces a writer of genuine talent. Rhoda Lerman is a find . . . go out and find her.”
—Harriet Rosenstein, The New York Times Book Review
“A brilliant and original triumph of the imagination.”
—Marge Piercy
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
What am I doing here? It is very simple. Your world is a mess.
A mess.
Your laws are inhuman. Your religion is without love. Your love is without religion and both, undirected, are useless. Your pastrami is stringy, and I am bored by your degeneracy.
But what’s a mother to do? I’m here to bring it all back together again. I’ll come and straighten things out for you. I will choose an image here to do my work. To do your work. I shall spray your dusty corners with Lysol so you will find knowledge, stitch up those parts of your souls which have lost each other so that man knows what is womanly in him and woman knows what is manly in her. You hate, screw, war, starve and die without knowing me. The closets of your souls are empty of power and love. I do not like to come down here and work. There are no men here for me and I become, as a fish beyond the sea, hungry. And when I am overworked and hungry, I am mean. And when I am mean, I am destructive. So watch it. You are going to have to show me some respect this time, or you will all be impotent and once more the world will come grinding to an end and that end, as in your own grinding, which I have witnessed often, uncomfortably, will have no ecstasy.
Excuse me. I begin my threats again. I must remember, this time, that if I want you to become more divine, I must be more humane.
Somehow, I will distribute the wonders of my baking to you, to heal and balance and restore to you the powers that once were yours in the antique. I have always been the connection between heaven and earth, between man and woman, between thought and act, between everything. If your philosophers insist the world is a dichotomy, tell them that two plus two don’t make four unless something brings them together. The connection has been lost. But I’m back. Don’t worry. I am going to give you the secrets this time. You are not ready, but then you may never be and whatever will I do with them then? I must warn you I am jealous and selfish. However, I am really all that you have. I am one and my name is one and there shall be no one before me. I will forgive you anything, though, if you will love me. Cordially yours,
I remain, |
P.S. Call me Ishtar
WE DECIDED ONE NIGHT IN SOMEONE’S DEN, AT A PARTY RAGING BEYOND us, that we would be perfect friends as long as we could. We had just met. Standing over an Arabian dip, tearing crusts of bread, I felt his finger pressing instinctively into the fine scar line along my throat. “I have to talk to you. I mean really.”
“Talk,” I invited over the table.
“I really want to talk to you. Seriously.” And seriously he lifted an invisible flute from the same basket which held only bread crusts for me, ran his polished moon-pink nails along the silver sides of the flute, turned and walked away, looking once, over his shoulder, eyes dancing, at me. So I followed him, whoever he was, into a pink, carrot, plum den in the eclectic cliché which includes at any cost a mounted Nautilus, I. F. Stone, The Way of the Pilgrim, and something, at least one, of Alan D’Arcangelo. I followed him past a waist-high digital calendar clock flipping its large minute pages at us, whirring, whizzing, and wasting, the letters and number the size of hands, fluorescent and plugged in. Everything was plugged in, on time, set, ready. The couch he led me to faced a built-in plugged-in movie screen, backed up against a gleaming ebony desk with its own sets of plugs for projectors and anchored on either side with a telephone, a fresh, scented pile of notepaper, and a pewter mug of newly sharpened pencils. He laid his flute on the arm of the couch, addressed my attention to the screen, the telephones, the notepapers. Then, with courtliness, it could be described no other way, presented me with a fresh pencil and pad. We laughed. I gave him a fresh pencil and pad. We wrote, exchanged sheets, he sniffed my hair, murmured “delicious,” and read my name aloud.
“Stephanie.”
I had written my last name also. He didn’t read that.
Along with his first name was a phone number. “Richard,” I returned.
“My office.”
Something of the purity of the situation, the way what should be happening seemed to be happening, became entangled with his office number. I didn’t know why. His eyes were gray-flecked, his grin incorporated a convincing percentage of his orthodontic teeth, fleetingly crooked, a dimple in a strong chin, slightly uneven nostrils, a lovely soft dusting of downy hair spread between his nostrils and his cheeks, creature hair. Interesting. Not fascinating. But interesting. I put his note in my pocket.
He offered me the couch. I sat next to him as he took my hands, looked deep into my eyes, just like the movies, while I tried not to flutter or flush. “Stephanie, it would be so easy to make love to a girl like you.”
Yes? No? The perfect dilemma. Keep your mouth shut; let him think he’s in control of the situation. How to relate to a man. How to find a man to marry. This is it. Is this IT? Don’t say, “That’s a hell of a line.”
“Do you understand me?”
“I think so, Richard.” I tried to sound serious, just as he sounded, but actually I wanted to laugh.
“Good. Because what I need is a friend. A real friend, Stephanie.”
I nodded for space.
“And I want you to be my friend. Really.”
If I had thought or perhaps understood then, I would not have reached up to the pale sea-creature blond hairs, waving like cilia along his cheeks. I didn’t think. A page buzzed, preparing itself to flip over, clicked, flipped, and another page began to buzz. He reached up to feel the cheek I had touched.
“Anything wrong with my skin?”
“You left some hairs, that’s all.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t liked my touching him.
“Anything wrong with my touching your cheek?”
“Nope. As long as you understand, Stephanie.”
He spoke my name as my piano teacher had when I couldn’t lift the fourth finger of my left hand. “You’ll never play the piano with a lazy finger like that, Stephanie,” he would grumble behind me while I struggled with that utterly paralyzed extension of myself. Later my mother told me it was my ring finger which wouldn’t move.
“Stephanie, do you understand?” Richard’s face was close to mine.
“Maybe I don’t really know what you mean, Richard.”
He loosed my hands and I folded them in my lap. I thought he might kiss me. He leaned an elbow on the couch arm and chewed lightly on his manicured thumb, lips pressed together. The calendar clock never gave up. We would sit here forever, the month ending, the year ending, and I, stupidly, happy with anticipation and thoroughly discontent as if there were two of myself, waiting to be kissed and wanting to scream.
He spoke at last from his reverie. “I’ve never had a good friend since Steve. I’ll tell you about Steve sometime. I want you to be my friend. Will you?”
“I’d be glad to.”
“There are rules, of course.”
“Of course.”
He didn’t tell me the rules. He laid his hand on my wrist. “I won’t talk to you any more tonight. You have to think about being my friend. We’ll go out and enjoy the party and do whatever we expected to do if this hadn’t happened. I won’t take you home. But I do want you to go home and really think about being my friend. Seriously.”
The calendar clock seemed to speed up. He said nothing, rocking his head to the tick of the clock, tapping his feet into the depth of the Rya. I waited until the blood danced around his hand, up and down my arm. His rule was that we wouldn’t speak. I had no idea what he wanted. Once a man had turned to me in terror in the lobby of a hotel and said, in true pain, “Meet me in Room 414. I’ve had a terrible accident.” His face was ribbed in agony.
It could have been a brilliant pickup and I laughed until something motherly clicked and reminded me that he was an utter stranger who might truly need someone to help him. I followed him to his room and as I came in past the bellboy, he was screaming from the bathroom, “I haven’t been laid since my colostomy. Since June?” Only a woman like you so intelligent would understand.” I ducked out past the bellboy who held a vested suit reeking of fresh excrement, beyond the naked screaming man and flushing toilet and running bathwater and out, racing away. I could still hear the echo down the corridor, “Who needs you anyway? You look like an aging Pepsi ad.”
“Stephanie, when can I call you to know what you’ve decided?”
“Listen, are you crazy?”
“I’m not trying to make a pass at you, Stephanie. I love you. I just have to know if you’re going to be my friend. When can I call you?”
His hand tightened over my wrist.
“How about Sunday at two? Can I call you Sunday at two?”
“Sure.” He handed me my notepaper for my phone number.
“Let me walk out first. You count to one hundred. Sunday at two?” I was into the eighties when I asked myself what the hell I was doing. By one hundred, I was free to come out and I saw him sitting at an ebony piano on a deep white swath of Flokati. A young girl with rich thick henna hair and buckteeth that were almost predatory leaned against him. A very young girl, in something patchy and poor from India. He riffed on the piano badly and then slid into a familiar tune from Show Boat, anachronistic, not even camp, unlike the girl, the Flokati, the scene. I didn’t recognize the song until the girl began to sing it in a wonderful high voice. It wasn’t Show Boat, it was Annie Get Your Gun. It was “The Girl That I Marry.” I realized they knew each other well. He had just told me he loved me. I held a glass of soda water at eye level and peered over the icy lip for his eyes to catch mine in the significance I thought I had just become deserving of. He never looked at me. He kissed the girl often on the head. Too often. And then she burst into “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,” which he picked up on the keyboard as if they had rehearsed before the party. I had never wished to be younger or to sing badly in church-choir soprano or to be in love with a man who plays a bad piano and knows only show tunes. Nevertheless I considered shoving her off the piano bench. I felt a challenge and a surge of jealousy so rare in my life that I welcomed with surprise the richness of the emotion although I knew even then it was too soon to feel it.
Actually though, I thought in the cab home, I was much better looking than the girl at the piano. I did look like an aging Pepsi ad but that only indicated I was reaching the age when I could sell Lincoln Continentals and oven cleaners. Flash of white tooth, Sassoon-cut hair, a little flat-chested but leaner, longer, cleaner, athletic. I wouldn’t, for instance, look out of place with a pair of afghans. Wholesome. I liked being wholesome. I had integrity, inside and out. Men like Richard always like me, and I’m attracted to them because they play games. I also know if you get hooked on their game as real, or their secret as truth, or their dream as possible, or their potential as hero, then it’s suicide and you’re stuck with the prize. Sometimes my lesser self, although it might be my higher self, says yes to the Richards just to see how far along into the game I can go and still survive. And even if the Richards aren’t as interesting as I think they are, their interest in me always kindles my interest in them. This Richard was interested. With some kind of psychic economy, this Richard fit right into my movie.
He didn’t call on Sunday at two. The phone rang at ten-thirty that night, after I had cleaned the entire apartment, washed my hair, slipped into new Pucci bikinis, blue and seascape silk, which I had been saving for an occasion, and read Campbell’s Myths to Live By. It didn’t quite have the scenario for my movie. After an aesthetic supper of yogurt, maple sugar, and wheat germ, I had given up waiting, that catlike awareness, and I was outraged at myself for having waited. Which of course was when the phone rang and as I waited for it to ring itself out, I answered from the couch the last intelligent words of a good-looking gentile from the Midwest with a Ph D in art history and the beginning of a good collection of Sumerian fragments: “Can’t dance. Don’t ask me.” On the eleventh ring I lifted the receiver.
“Can’t talk,” my nemesis said. “Just wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten. I love you. Catch you later.”
I love you? Catch you later? I didn’t know what either meant. Calmly and rhythmically I tore a package of dinner napkins into feathery shreds. And then, because I couldn’t decide on an emotional response appropriate to an intelligent good-looking et cetera, I cleaned out my refrigerator. There were a good half dozen salad dressings, four kinds of relish, a terrible relic of mozzarella, my soybean collection for Lent, what had been a natural-food raisin kelp loaf, smoked brook trout from Zabar’s, instant tea, white-appliquéd brie, and gray Carnation milk. I threw everything out. Thinking back, it was an odd response. He had one hell of a nerve to keep me hanging. And I was pretty stupid to keep hanging. On Monday I would call him and tell him to throw out my phone number. That’s integrity.
My friends, who all live on commuter routes in Connecticut, have four-wheel drives and reversible fur-lined canvas coats, admire my integrity. My friends have all sold out. They come into the city dressed alike, their fur-lined storm coats canvas side out, their canvas-lined storm coats fur side out, jersey snoods, jewelry. They made those decisions: which side should I wear out. And they tell me, I who slip in and out of gray and black and beige things that I know are mine because the cleaner in my building has put my name inside them, that I always look so city.
They admire me because, they say, I could be what I wanted to be. I always wanted to be a dancer, I would say silently because they would be very disappointed in me to hear that. Am I still on vegetables? Who am I sleeping with? What happened to Harry Hardhat? Where do I get my energy? Are men really more interested in anal sex these days? Would I recommend the pecan pie from Amanda’s? Isn’t it overpriced? Do you know your vegetables are fresher in Gristedes than they are in New Canaan? Where am I getting my hair cut? Does he have a good brush? Should we get tickets for . . . is it any good? Should we make reservations at . . . is it any good? What’s your next trip, Stephanie? God, if I could only get away like you and live.
“She really lives,” they tell each other about me.
“You only live once,” they answer each other.
“What do you mean?” I would ask them.
“For one thing you get to sleep with lots of men.”
“And you’re free,” they add, knowing the first answer won’t suffice.
Nor will the second. “Terrific,” I answer. They need me to be what I am more than I need to be what I am. Whatever that is. I have no idea what I am. If tomorrow I were no longer an art historian at the Cloisters, I would have a serious problem. I would be free, but I would have a serious problem.
They at least have made a choice. They chose Pound Ridge, Ridgefield, New Canaan. They chose four-wheel drives, birch trees, reversible coats and stone fences. I have wandered along amiably making no choice at all except not to choose.
That’s fairly avant-garde as a statement but sometimes it can be worth a double session. “That’s very avant-garde,” my best friend Miriam would assure me. “And it’s definitely worth a double session. Bring yogurt and your wheat germ and meet me in the park.”
My family doesn’t believe in shrinks, the New Deal, or God. I didn’t have a shrink to help me figure out what Richard’s “catch you later” meant. It meant Wednesday. I never did figure out what his “I love you” meant.
EVEN THOUGH I COULD STILL FEEL THE POISON OF THAT LUNCH TRAPPED INSIDE me, I promised myself that Friday would be calm and wonderful. I would forget Jack and his clever, twisted envy. I wouldn’t eat. I wouldn’t scream. I wouldn’t respond to Sissy. My crosses were coming in at eleven. It was the second shipment and I had still not recovered from the thrill of watching the first shipment and touching their rough sides as they emerged from their crates. Our exhibit was only a few months away and so far Sissy had been thoroughly spontaneous and supportive with not a touch of jealousy. She took an uneven sort of pride in me. Knowing how hysterical her plans with Monica had made me, she had known enough to keep the ensuing details to herself. She hadn’t even watched me as I sat before the Unicorn all those lunch hours. I hoped somehow she and Monica had done the right thing . . . at least Sissy seemed more centered than she ever had before. And by nightfall, and by nightfall, I would be sleeping with Richard. Then the world might look sweeter to me. And perhaps not. It had been a long week and what I had learned by the end of it was the rules of the game. I didn’t know if I could play it, but at least I knew the rules. And so when I arrived at the office Friday morning I was not unhappy myself, knowing I would be driving off into the sunset with a very attractive man who wanted to spend the weekend with me, who wanted apparently to marry me and it wasn’t a bad way to begin the day except that Sissy was grinning like a Cheshire cat which meant I was once again the canary.
Not today, Sissy, please. Today is calm and wonderful and I’m not going to fight. She was delaying for some reason, opening and slamming drawers, rummaging for a pencil, sharpening one pencil, another pencil, another. Somehow she would ruin my day. My perfect, perfect weather, my crosses in the morning, Richard in the afternoon, and somehow Sissy would ruin it. I knew it. I could feel it. I waited for her at the arched window of our tower and looked down at the pigeons on the red-tile roof of the Froville Arcade below and the flower beds along the winding upper driveway. Blue hydrangeas were in bloom. Rich winey irises opened to the sky. I forced myself to my desk. If I began, perhaps Sissy would begin. I didn’t want to fight, with Sissy or anybody.
A key strung with mottled African trading beads and tied with a faded orange shoelace had been placed significantly dead center of my desk. “What’s this key, Sissy? Sissy, I must have the camera with film in it by eleven. I go to the docks at eleven.”
“It’s Richard’s key,” she called, still at her desk.
“Oh.” I slipped the key into my pocket and patted it for its promise. “Are we about ready to begin?”
Sissy finally came into my office. “Wouldn’t you like to know who brought it?”
“Not particularly. I would like to know how much film is in the camera and if there is not enough, order some fast. And I need the bill of lading and some authorization forms and . . . take some notes now and then do the camera.”
There was a message on her face I couldn’t decipher and since I had no time to play her games and had promised peace, I turned to my office. “Bring in your pad.”
Sissy continued to grin but didn’t move.
“Swallow something, Sissy?”
She shook her head.
“When you feel you’re ready to stop playing games, Sissy,” I told her calmly and a little officiously, “you’ll find me in my office lacerating my breasts with impatience.”
“Don’t ever say I’m not a good friend to you because no one would have done what I just did.”
I said nothing.
“His fiancée brought it.”
I covered my eyes with my hands. I would open them soon and everything around me, the sun on the Palisades, the pigeons cooing on the roof tiles, the happy spots on the Rhenish virgin’s cheeks, everything would be the same. My hands trembled against my eyelids. “I don’t think I can handle this, Sissy. I don’t think I want to hear about her.”
“I let her think I was you. Isn’t that good?” Sissy waited for me to commend her. I was unable to speak. The phone rang. “Was it bad? I was just trying. At least I tried.” My head throbbed in response to her whining. The phone continued to ring. “Do you want me to call Miriam? Do you want some tea? I really tried, Stephanie. I made believe I was you.”
“Whatever you did was wonderful,” I murmured and indicated the phone with my chin. “Please.”
“Miss Boxwell’s office.” Sissy touched my shoulder gently. “Do you want to talk to him?” she whispered. “You can just listen. You needn’t say anything.”
How does she know so much about me already? I took one hand from one eye and held the receiver at arm’s length before plunging once again into his sea. Someone is lying. Someone is clearly lying. Are they using me to work out their own problems? She didn’t leave him. She just went home to wait for him. His fiancée.
“Richard! Welcome home.” An exemplary Connecticut greeting.
“Hi, sweetheart. I thought you were a secretary. I didn’t know you have a secretary. Are you packed?”
“Yes.” I had indeed told him what I did, about the crosses, and he had indeed told me to decide where we would go. He’s really marvelous, like a battleship zigzagging across the Atlantic to dodge torpedoes.
“Great. Did you get the key?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” I said matter-of-factly. “Your fiancée brought it up this morning.”
“Great.” There wasn’t even a pause. His voice was impersonal and clipped. How could he have said nothing? “We’re going to see my Uncle Myron in New Jersey. I’ll pick you up at my place at four-thirty give or take.”
“Where? We’re going where?”
“Leisure Village West.” Richard dropped his voice. “It’s really important, honey. Everyone in the family listens to Uncle Mike. He’s the executor.”
“I don’t understand, Richard.”
“Just a minute, Nancy. Of my father’s estate, Steph.”
“Oh, Richard, I thought we’d be alone.”
“Jesus Christ, Stephanie, you always make me feel inadequate when you criticize me. We’ll be alone but right now it’s important that you meet my family.”
“When have I had the chance to make you feel inadequate by criticizing you?”
“Oh, Christ, it must have been someone else. I am sorry. Listen, I know I’ve been a real chauv not letting you make any of the decisions and not letting you know until the last moment. I’m really sorry. It’s just very important this time. I know you’ll understand.” He spoke to someone in his office.
Score one for Stephanie. I had made him feel inadequate. But it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to wear my jeans and the old shirt and bikini I’d stuffed into my duffle and lie in the sun and sleep naked and make love and make plans to spend the summer together. I didn’t want to meet his family. God, if I’m meeting your family, Richard, who the hell is your fiancée? How many rings do you carry in your nose? One for each of us? Over the phone I heard pages turning. “There better be a bong tree in Leisure Village West.” What I really wanted was a little assurance he could make me happy.
“Excuse me. The brief was a mess. We’ll find a bong tree. From there we go up to my sister’s in Westport. You’ll love her place. She’s so excited. She said to tell you she started the cooking yesterday. State occasion: Beef Wellington and she’s taking out her Bing and Grøndahl china.”
“Richard, I’m not going to wait for you in your apartment and you know very well why.”
“Stephanie. I have to be in court in fifteen minutes and I’ll be there all day. Look, I’ll pick you up at work. Let me put you on hold and you give Nancy your address. Shit, I’m going to be really late. I love you. Sit tight. Look nice. Here’s Nancy.”
“It’s the Cloisters,” I told Nancy acidly.
“Sweetie, you’re lucky he remembers your name. Don’t take a burn. He means well.”
He won. My hands shook on the teacup Sissy offered me. Richard is incredibly brilliant, accurately sadistic, thick, insensitive, all of the above, none of the above. Or simply on another wavelength, one I’ll never pick up on. What is he doing? “Sissy, don’t I look nice? I mean right now, do I look nice?”
“You always look nice.” Sissy poured sugar in my tea. She frowned. “Don’t go, Stephanie. He’s engaged to someone else, for God’s sake. How do you know he isn’t going to take you to Leisure Village West and hack you to pieces and bury you in the sand and steal the Cornish crosses? How do you know? I think you should call the FBI.”
There is a point at which Sissy becomes completely useless. We had reached it. She watches too much tv.
I dismissed Sissy from my space. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said over her shoulder. I stood and watched the sun slowly burning the fog from the river. Sissy walked between our offices, round and round, chanting.
“Don’t get upset. Don’t get upset.”
I caught her finally by an arm and stopped her. “Sissy, I would like you to tell me what that girl looked like.”
“You won’t get upset?”
“I may.”
“You’ve already torn up my shorthand pad.”
“Dammit, Sissy, mind your own business.”
She pulled away from me and I pulled her back. “I’m getting very upset,” she advised me, rather rigidly.
“Just talk. Objectively.” I held her arms tightly. As she studied my face, I managed a comforting smile.
“Well, I would say, she’s . . . well, she’s nice.” Sissy watched my face change and edged from me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .”
“No problem,” I assured her carefully through my teeth, nodding like a piano teacher at the Spring Recital. “Please begin again. What she said. What she looked like.”
“Well, she comes in, says hi, hands me the key. Sort of hip, a little far out on the clothes but attractive. Not beautiful. Uh, striking. Nice teeth.”
“I don’t care about the teeth. Was she sexy?”
“Ooozing.” She shot me a fleeting glance of triumph.
“Sissy, for Christ’s sake.”
“Just my opinion. Everything is relative.”
“So she wasn’t really what a man would see as sexy?”
“No. She said I looked familiar. I said she does too and then she asks if I . . . well, we probably belonged to the same group and it seemed like maybe there was a consciousness-raising group years ago before I came out that maybe we were in together. She says to leave the key in the kitchen. Then she asks if I have a minute and I said sure and she sits on the edge of my desk and lays on how Richard fucks like crazy.” Sissy giggled.
“She said that?” Braggart, it’s hardly a solitary act.
“Not exactly. Do you really want to hear what she said?”
“Don’t play with me, Sissy.”
“The semen is always flying—absolutely flying.”
“I can’t believe that.”
Sissy shrugged. “She says Richard is kind of lousy the way he runs women around, gets all of them crazy and then sort of steps back and says how come everybody’s crazy?” Sissy was pleased with herself. She had me going. The girl sounded so honest and friendly. Why? My intestines lurched with every new bit of information.
“He needs lots of rope, she said, and it’s tough for her to talk like this but she thinks women should stick together and if he ever starts playing one of us against the other, well, we should keep in touch.”
“God!” I sat at my desk, my fingers stuck through my hair. What does that girl want from me? She wants to keep tabs on me. But why would she tell me so much? Flying semen. Flying semen?
“Oh, she said to have a nice weekend and I said don’t you mind and she said she does but she’s got something going anyway. And then says put the key in the first drawer on the left of the sink.”
“She’s really smart. Bitch.”
Sissy crossed her arms before me and shook her head, smugly. “I’d say she’s really into sisterhood and that you are wrong this time.”
“When it comes to men, no one’s into sisterhood.” Her shadow was cast.
Sissy walked behind me as I trod the floor. She swept up scraps of her shorthand pad, sprinkling ostentatious handfuls into my wastebasket when she passed it. “I think she’s nice and I don’t think she’s up to anything at all except sisterhood even though that man Richard is her whole life. She said that.”
“Years ago, Sissy, you would have been a great fanatical Catholic. Now everything you know, sense, smell, taste, has to be interpreted as Movement. Did she really say he was her whole life?”
“Yes. And ‘when he swings, he sings and when he comes, he hums.’ ”
“Just make that up?”
“No, Stephanie, I had forgotten it.” Sissy really didn’t approve of me. She had approved of Richard’s girl. “You have to be at the docks at eleven, you know. It’s getting late.”
I sat rubbing my forehead. I wish I had seen the girl. “Her name? Did she tell you her name?”
“No.”
“Sissy, this is important. You know a lot of women. Did this one look crazy? Did she seem out of control? Desperate, dangerous, anything like that?”
“No. No. She was friendly and easygoing, sort of together, you know. A together girl.”
I would have preferred her to be mad so I could hope that my love, the love of a good woman, would put Richard together again. But she sounded like a good woman. She had made her peace with Richard. Somehow she had as much from him as she needed. He really was in love with her. I had been correct. I didn’t think I could love him as much as she did, certainly not more. Oh. Oh. Loving him less was the answer. And hurting him more. Wow. The unethical imperative. Men don’t get hostile from their mothers. They are naturally hostile and they spend their lives looking for a woman to blame it on: she hurt me. And usually it’s a woman who loves too much. Maintain your manhood through hostility; most of the other battlefields are closed. Richard wanted all the trappings of love, the dears and the darlings and the homemade pies, but not the love. Jack was absolutely correct about Richard controlling sexually and politically, but I still had an area of control: I could control his behavior. It was immoral. I was dealing with the devil for the illusion, buying into fantasy. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to hurt Richard or anyone. I could see the soft deer eyes of the Unicorn looking up at me: “Stephanie, did you have to hurt me? Why did you hurt me?”
If that lousy bastard Jack was right and Richard was the eunuch/unicorn waiting to be castrated, why would my Unicorn who had all the wisdom let me hurt him? “Because,” I told myself in Jack’s voice, “because he’s programmed for the wrong destiny. Wrong set of cultural values. He’s off the path, lady, and so are you. False principles. Wants to be Governor. And that’s the way he sees you—as the Governor’s Wife. It’s an ego trip for both of you and that’s not self-realization. But I don’t care about him,” Jack would say, “I care about you. Quit messing around with myths you don’t understand. They’re more dangerous than love.”