Book of Numbers: A Novel (3 page)

It was his honor, publishing me.

I dragged up to the front like a greenhorn with a trunk and Finnity went
to hug or kiss and I went to shake his hand.

I gave a speech—and the speech was my Acknowledgments (the book
itself didn’t have any). I had a lot of people to thank. My mother, for one, who
fled Poland, for giving me the money to travel to Poland, only so I could write a book
about her life. (I left the inheritance from my father out of it—spent.)

I thanked my Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe, whom I visited and interviewed
in Israel, and my cousin Tzila, who drove me directly from a Tel Aviv club to a shabby
Breslov minyan in Jerusalem so I could interrogate a former block commander who’d
been interrogated before by
better, the obscurer relations, honorary
inlaws, and strangers who’d responded to my letters from Kraków, Warsaw,
Vienna, Graz, Prague, Bratislava, the good people of Los Angeles, and of Texas, Florida,
and Maine (survivors), the faculties of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, and the stern lady
clerks of the Polish State Archives, who helped me sift cadastral registries,
deportation manifests, and Zyklon B inventories, who not only confirmed Moms’s
memories—the color of a hat ribbon or shoelace, the flavor of the cream between
favorite wafers—but who gave them flesh and future too—the location of
Gruntig’s butcher stand (by the mikvah, on what became the corner of Walecznych
and Proletariuszy Streets), the fate of schoolfriend Sara (Cuba,
aneurysm)—assisting with the granular details: how many grams of bread my uncles
were allotted in what camp on what dates, how many liters of soup were allotted per
prisoner per week/month in what camp vs. the amount on average delivered. How my
grandparents last embraced in Zgody Square, Kraków ghetto, 10/28/42, 10:00.

Appreciated—and when I was finished everyone stormed to
congratulate me, shake my hand, and Caleb nodded, from a huddle of girls, and Aaron
nodded too, gesturing for a smoke above a scrim of critics, reviewers. Someone
congratulated me by hugging and kissing and someone said, “Introduce me to your
mother.” But Moms wasn’t in attendance, she hadn’t been invited.
“She wouldn’t have enjoyed it—this isn’t exactly her
crowd.”

I leaned between brass poles, velvet suspended into satisfied smiles. Aar
sparked a joint and we smoked it and the air was gassy and my suit was wool and Cal
filed out with the girls.

We stumbled down 10th in celebration, or observance—in
memo-riam—afterparties bearing the same relationship to parties as the afterlife
to life. Straggling to get cash, to get cigs and a handle of vodka, to decipher the
Spanish on a wall shrine to a child shot or stabbed, to do chinups on new condo
construction scaffolding.

Gansevoort Street: everything smelled like meat and disinfectant. The
bouncer was a big black warty dyke bound in leather and chains, checking IDs, grabbing
wrists so as to break them, to stamp the back of the hand and someone said, “This
is like the Holocaust,” and someone said, “The Holocaust wasn’t
airconditioned neither.”

Behind the bar were crushed photographs of the
uniformed: cops, firefighters, Catholic schoolgirls. Businesscards between the slats, as
if phone fax email were all that held the walls together, all that fused the landfilled
island.

The bartender served Cal and me our sodas and we took them to a banquette
in the back to mix in the vodka while Aar ordered a whiskey or scotch and while it was
being fixed wound his watch and left a bill atop a napkin and left.

Someone had the hiccups, someone slipped on sawdust.

Kimi! publicized by the banquette:

“The deal is the publisher’s picking up the tab for beers
and wines,” and Cal said, “Why didn’t you say so?” and Kimi!
said, “How many do you need?” and Cal counted how many girls we were
sitting with and said, “We need six of both,” and Kimi! snorted and Cal
stood to go with her, but instead they went to the bathroom.

I had to go to the bathroom too. But all of college was crammed into the
stall, Columbia University class of 1992, with a guy whose philosophy essays I used to
write, now become an iBanker, let’s call him P. Sachs, or Philip S., sitting not
on the seat but up on the tank, with the copy of my book I’d autographed for him
on his lap—“To P.S., with affect(at)ion” rolling a $100
bill, tapping out the lines to dust the dustjacket, offering Cal and Kimi! bumps off the
blurbs, offering me.

“Cocaine’s gotten better since the Citigroup
merger.”

A knock, a peremptory bouncer’s fist, and the door’s opened
to another bar, yet another—but which bars we, despite half of us being
journalists, wouldn’t recollect: that dive across the street, diving into the
street and lying splayed between the lanes. Straight shots by twos, picklebacks. Well
bourbons chasing pabsts. Beating on the jukebox for swallowing our quarters.
“This jukebox swallows more than your mother.” “Swallows more than
The Factchecker.”

The Factchecker changed by the party, the season. Any fuckable female
publishing professional could be The Factchecker—if it could be proven that she
was between the ages of 18 and 26, and that she had fucked precisely zero people since
arriving in NY.

Last call was called, and Kimi! went up to tab bourbon doubles for us and
for herself a gin and tonic and Cal and I drank ours and even hers
and shared a cig between us and my mouth tasted like nickels, like dimes, and my
gums needed a haircut.

The lights went up, the jukebox down, I hurled a cueball at the
dartboard—Finnity had left with The Factchecker, Cal asked, “Anyone want
to come back to my place?”

We still had vodka in the bag, two girls in each cab, two cabs taxiing to
the Bowery, to the apartment Cal’s parents, half Jewish and full Connecticut
stockbrokers each, had bought for him. I was in the back and he was in the back and
Kimi! was between us (The Factchecker’s roommate was up front), and I asked if
anyone had talked to Aar but Kimi! was already calling him though she must’ve
been calling his office, because he didn’t have a phone on his person, this was
before everybody had phones on their persons.

Aar was waiting outside Cal’s building, wrapping his silk scarf
around a Russian or Ukrainian or close enough gift—a present to himself shivering
in only a frilly cocktail waitress shirt and a drink umbrella skirt and a nametag. Cal
poked with the keys, Aar poked his Slav from behind with a handle of rye, and we all
crowded into the elevator, stopped on every floor, Kimi! and Missy having plunged into
pressing all the buttons.

I’d lit a cig on the street and was still smoking in the elevator
and the cig I was smoking was menthol.

Missy, being The Factchecker’s roomie, whining to Kimi! and me
about her job as a temp receptionist, and “Why can’t I get a job at an
agency?” and “Can you I’m begging you introduce me to Aar?”
as Cal scoured around stuffing tightywhities into drawers, as Aar and his Masha?
Natasha? he’d picked up from hostessing the restaurant of the Jersey City Ramada,
the same place I’m sure he’d picked up the rye, set about mixing
Manhattans.

Cal tidying the shelves, rearranging and flipping what he must’ve
considered the respectable reads, the larger and wider reads, the complement of
Brontës, the Prousts, the Tolstoys, centrally and spine out, exchanging the
livingroom’s Flags of the Confederacy poster for the kitchen’s canvas of
abstract slashes by a dissentient Union Square Lithuanian, fussing with the stereo,
putting on some hiphop, some rap, clearing away the motivational improve your vocab
lectures he worked
out to. I left Kimi! and Missy to help him move
the treadmill to the bedroom, left him trying to fold the treadmill into the closet at
the buzzing, went to the door and buzzed them in: a dozen people, a 12-pack, dangling in
the hall, dangling like keys passed from the fire escape to the acquainted, from the
acquainted to the strangers they’d invited, assisterati and receptionistas
arriving, schedulers and reschedulers early and late, marketing and distribution
cultureworkers I didn’t know and who didn’t know me but we, this was our
business, pretended. More pot and coke, which, as P.S. said again, had gotten better
since the Citigroup merger. Tequila in the sink, martinis in the shower. Ash in both and
in energy drinkables. Masha or Nastya was asking if we had any games and after Cal
realized she didn’t mean Monopoly mentioned that his neighbor was a firstperson
fanatic—not the literary gambit, the gaming—and suddenly six fists were
knocking at Tim’s door demanding to borrow his system, and Tim, calculus teacher
at Stuyvesant, answered the door red and tousled senseless, and hauled into Cal’s
his system and even connected it to Cal’s TV with the bigger screen and bigger
speakers, the night blooding the morning as P.S. and some random
hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy tested each other in mortal combat avatared as
lasertusked elephants and wild ligers with rocketlaunching claws, as Aar left with his
Slav who had to get back to Staten Island by her cousins’ curfew, as Tim’s
girlfriend who had the flu trundled over in a balloonpocked blanket and scowled and
sneezed and coughed and left taking Tim but not his system with her, as some random
hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy left with his decentbodied girlfriend, as Cal grinded
Missy and took her into the bedroom, as I fumbled with Kimi! and got a burp, which sent
her to the bathroom to vomit, which sent Missy to the bathroom to help her, and P.S.
kept playing with himself, and in the hall Missy was into hooking up with Kimi! but not
Kimi! with Missy, P.S. suggested they call The Factchecker to confirm whether and which
sex acts she was perpetrating on Finnity, Missy and Kimi! left, P.S. left with them, and
after opening the fiercely bulbed fridge to find expired mustard and ketchup sweating,
just sweating, I suggested calling for delivery, but the good place was closed and we
were just a block outside the bad place’s delivery zone, and the freezer
wasn’t just out of ice but out of cold from
being left open,
and there was a cushion wet on the floor in the hall, and there was sleep without
dreaming.

I was woken—lumped in the contents of a dumped jar of
vitamins—by Kimi!’s phone, which she’d left behind. Cal picked it
up, and Kimi! yelled at him and he yelled at me to find the remote, but all I was
finding was a jar and vitamins.

Then Kimi!’s phone went dead and Cal was gone.

My mouth tasted like tobacco and mucus and lipgloss, absinthe (strangely),
marijuana, coke bronchitis.

I had an ache in the back of my head, and was deciding whether to vomit.
The screen was still showing the game, 1 Player, 2 Players, New, Resume, and on the way
to the window I stopped to resume the function for the time, but the screen just filled
with smoke, the sky with smoke, and in the weeks to come, the months to come, into 2002
when the paperback release was canceled and beyond, my book received all of two reviews,
both positive.

Or one positive with reservations.

\

Miriam Szlay. Still to this day, I’m not sure whether she made
it to the party. Either I didn’t notice her, or she was too reluctant to have
sought me out, because she was kind. Or else, she might have skipped
it—that’s how kind she was, or how much she hated my susceptibility to
praise, or how much she hated paying for a sitter.

I never asked.

Miriam. Her bookstore was a messy swamp on the groundfloor of a lowrise
down on Whitehall Street—literature cornered, condescended to, by the high
finance surrounding. Before, it’d been a booklet store, I guess, selling
staplebound investment prospectuses and ratings reports contrived by a Hungarian Jew
who’d dodged the war, and bought Judaica with every dollar he
earned—kabbalistic texts that if they didn’t predict commodity flux at
least intrigued in their streetside display. At his passing he left the property and all
its effects and debts to his children—Miriam, and her older and only
brother—who broadened the inventory
to include fiction and
nonfiction of general interest to the Financial District’s lunch rush, which as a
businessplan was still bleak.

Miriam—who kept her age vague, halfway between my own and my
mother’s—was the one who ran the shop and hired me: straight out of
Columbia, straight out of Jersey, a bridge & tunnel struggler with a humanities
diploma between my legs but not enough arm to reach the Zohar. She was inflexible with
what she paid me an hour ($8 or its equivalent in poetry), but was flexible with
hours. She respected my time to write, knew that I wasn’t going to be a clerk all
my life (just throughout my 20s), knew that a writer’s training only began,
didn’t end, with alphabetical order. Another lesson: “subject” and
“genre” are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily
ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving.

Miriam was my first reader—my second was her brother, who became my
agent. Aaron signed me on her word alone—a demand, not a
recommendation—and helped me clarify my projects. A memoir (I hadn’t lived
enough), a study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I had no credentials), a novel
about the Jersey Shore (no story), a collection of linked short stories about the Jersey
Shore (no linkages), a long poem conflating the Inquisitions and Crusades (not
commercial). Then one fall day in 1996 Aar came back brutalized from Budapest, cabbing
from JFK to Whitehall to drop a check with his sister (the shop would never be
profitable). His trip had been coital, not cliental, but out of solicitousness he talked
only profitability, Mauthausen, Dachau, family history. That was the moment to mention
my mother.

My mother was my book, he agreed, and he met me monthly after work, weekly
after I left work to finish a draft, to discuss it—how to recreate dialogue, how
to limit perspective—still always meeting at the register, where I’d give
my regards to Miriam, and him a check to Miriam, then rewarding ourselves at a
café up the block. Not a café but a caffè—as the former
could be French, and the latter could only be Italian. Aar taught, I learned: how to tie
a Windsor and arrange a handkerchief, how a tie and handkerchief must coordinate but
never match, which chef who cooked at Florent also subbed at which Greek diner owned by
his brother only on alternate Thursdays, who really did the cooking—Mexicans.
Actually Guatemalans, Salvadorans. A Manhattan
should be made with
rye, not bourbon. Doormen should be tipped. Aar—quaffing a caffè corretto
and marbling the table with stray embers from his cig, when smoking was still
permitted—knew everything: stocks and bonds and realestate, Freud and Reich, the
fate of the vowels in Yiddish orthography, and the Russian E and И conjugations.
When was the cheapest day to fly (Tuesdays), when was the cheapest day to get gas
(Tuesdays), where to get a tallis (Orchard Street), where to get tefillin repaired
(Grand Street), who to deal with at the NYPD, the FDNY, the Port Authority, the Office
of Emergency Management, how to have a funeral without a body, how to have a burial
without a plot.