Book of Numbers: A Novel (9 page)

Returning from that first chemo visit, Moms went and bought some clay, a
wheel, some tools. Impractical platters, flaccid flasks: she’d been inspired to
pot, moved to mold, vessels for her depression, while I had been, inadvertently,
sexualized.

Moms had intended to inculcate only a fetish for art, not for what art
must start as: body, the body defined by waist.

Dad, weakened, shriveled—a mummy’s mummy—had six
months left to live.

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That day, signing day, I took my tour, conducted my ordinary circuit by
gallery: first the women, then the men. Rounding the rotundities, before proceeding to
those other busts, those heads.

Staved heads—of the known and unknown, kings of anonymity with
beards of shredded feta, or ziti with gray sauce—separated for display by the
implements that might’ve decapitated them. If it’s venerable enough,
weaponry can look like art, just like commonplace inscriptions can sound like
poetry—Ozymandias, anyone? “this seal is the seal of King
Proteus”?

The armor of a certain case has always reminded me of cocoons,
chrysalides, shed snakeskin—all the breastplates and armguards and sheaths for
the leg just rougher shells from an earlier stage of human development. The armor
featured in an adjacent case, with its precisely positioned nipples and navels, sculpted
pecs and abs, would’ve been even stranger without them. The men without bodies
were still better off than the men just lacking penises, or testes. Regardless, statuary
completed only by its incompletion, or destruction, resounded
with me, while the swords hewed through my noons, severing neuroses.

But then I returned, I always returned, to my women, closing the show, a
slow, agonizingly slow circumflexion.

Fertility goddesses, that’s what the archaeologists who’d
dug them up had said, that’s what Moms had said, and I’d believed
her—these women were the idols of women and women were the idols of men and yet
we kept smashing them (I understood only later), smashing with rose bouquets, samplers
of marzipan and marrons glacés, getaway tickets, massage vouchers, necklaces,
bracelets, and words.

It strikes me that Moms herself might’ve believed that these odd
lithic figurines were for fecundity, because everything else had failed her—the
inability to conceive (and the inconceivability of) were fates she’d share with
Rach, or else the problem was mine.

And Moms might even have been so distraught by Dad’s decline as to
have placed genuine faith in the power of that petrified gallery—guiding me
through rooms now changed, antiquity redecorated since 1984—because suddenly I
wasn’t enough, she wanted another: a boy, though what she needed was a girl in
her image.

If so, then that studio she had erected at home—her installation of
a kiln in Dad’s neglected garage—must be regarded as a shrine, a temple to
opportunity lost.

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Now, when it comes to art, and I mean every
discipline: lit, sculpture, painting, music, and theater (but only Rach liked dance,
because she danced)—when it comes to any medium, I’m divided. Not between
styles, between perfections. Mark my museum map with only the oldest and newest. Roll me
in scrolls, volumina of vellum and parchment, papyri. But then also pile up all the new
books appearing, seasonally stack the codex barrage—how else to live, without
contemporaries to hate? Forget their books—I mean how to live without their bios,
their autobios to peruse and hold against my own?

Beginnings to romanticize and endings to dread—I’ll take
anything but the middles, all that received or established practice crap. Because the
middle was where I grew up—bounded by house and garage filled with clay—a
cramped colorless room filled with clayey boyhood, which my mother was bent on modeling
not for greatness, but for portability and durability and versatile use. Moms’s
hands that were her English, the puffy wrists behind the pads digging in, poking holes
in me so I might perceive life only as she perceived it—threatening, but
beautiful if I’d be careful. This was her way because from earliest age
she’d been foreign to even herself, as the youngest and the only girl after six
brothers, dumbsy, clumsy, inconcinnous, a dreamer, whose family fell in the snow around
her, around Kraków, and who’d lived like “an extinct girl
dinosaur”—meaning arousing of a hideous pity—until my father
married her home.

She’d had difficulties having sex, and so difficulties getting
pregnant. Her baby was late, was me. She’d told me about the drugs. Pergonal,
Clomid. The barren superstitions. Don’t sit on snow or ice or rock, do bathe in
water infused with moss from the walls of the shul on Szeroka Street. Dad had mentioned,
only once, as he was dying, that Moms’s war had been “tough,”
“hard knocks,” which was how he’d recount each tax quarter. A solo
CPA after being laidoff as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he’d never applied
his actuarial MS but kept it in a depositbox at the bank. Moms is a public school
speech-language pathologist/audiologist, retired. Anyway, Dad’s instructions:
“Help your mother out,” “Kaddish if she insists.”

Moms: what she lost in family, she gained in body.

She was dense with her dead—with Dad’s passing becoming ever
more solid, ever more embonboobed, rubicund. Zaftig, not obese.

Steatopygous—which doesn’t have to be
italicized, it’s already my language—all italics do is make what must be
native, not. Anyway, it’s not from the Latin, but Greek. Steatopygous meaning
possessed of fat buttocks, and implying fat all around, the thighs, hips, waist, a
gluteal gut, even adipose knees, unfortunate but vital. That’s what Moms’s
lady statuettes are technically called—steatopygi, or steatopygia. Thrombosed
bulges, throbbing clots—my mother’s hindquarter was always a veiny maze, a
varicose labyrinth, though not just hers: weighty were the bases of all the women in my
family, my mother’s family. My grandmother, my greatgrandmother, every aunt and
cousin—Holocaust fodder. Heavy Jewesses, thickly rooted Jewesses, each swinging a
single pendulous braid. From Poland, the Russian Pale, that settled and mortaring
mixture. Upper Paleolithic, Lower Neolithic, lower and swollen. Marbled in calcite,
schist, steatite, striated with stretchmarks of red rivers, the Vistula, the Bug. They
were made out of stone and many of them even had hearts of stone—not Moms,
though, despite how tough Rach found her. Yes, yes, Rach—she was the hard one,
the skinny, the taut, all rib and limb, a spindly wife more like a plinth, like a
pediment.

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Coming out of the Met with all those gods
on the brain—all those haloed faces seared into my own—it’s an
adjustment to sense normally. That’s why the museum abuts the park, so that its
patrons can walk in solitude—“walking in the garden in the cool of the
day”—to get their glaze back.

Or—in the collecting heat of that Friday, a freak faineant warmth
that unnerved me. I wasn’t myself because enriched, beyond the pecuniary.
Distracted by the thought of a second self. Distracted by the thought of a second
book.

I was so scattered, I’m still not sure what to write: About my back
aching from where I’d slept? my head still gauzed, Pharaohnically wrapped, from
when I’d been woken up? about the cut on my neck? the slit from chin’s
caruncle to neck like an against the grain shaving mishap, just healing? Rach had
responded to Moms’s thank you gratuitousness by throwing a bisque dish for our
keys, which struck a sill and splintered all over me.

The window had broken. Rach was expecting me to replace it. I was
expecting her to replace it. We both were aware of this, but only she might’ve
been consciously waiting.

I was—instead—counting my bounty.

Writing mental checks, but not for windows, before I’d written a
word.

I still haven’t written a word—just musings about museums,
snarks about parks, observations to obelize: two frisbeeists freed from their
cubicles—a professorial but perverted uncle emeritus—a Caribbean nanny
strollering her employer along the reservoir. I was imposing topiary on trees, and
rhymes between their branches and trunks.

I’d rather be procrastinating—I’d rather be doing
anything—rather jog, rather run—than record that moment.

When I approached the bench.

When I recognized him.

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Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the
characters involved, you don’t—you get all the benefits of having a
relationship, with none of the mess. The fictional, the factually nonexistent,
don’t leave msgs or txt. You’ll never have your own story about meeting
Raskolnikov shuffling the aisles of Zabar’s, or about bumping into Werther or,
more bizarrely, Bouvard and Pécuchet on line at Han’s Fruit &
Vegetable—anyway, if you did bump into them, having been exiled from home
yourself, like a fairytale knight errant sent out to seek not your fortune but tampons,
how would you know? From their “teeth gnashing”? their “furrowed
brows”? all those antique gestures? or just those antiquated translations? Forget
the fictional characters—how many authors are being stopped on the street?

Another feature, but of the Victorian serial novel: They always doubled
up, they repeated, reviewed, just in case the reader skipped an installment. Or was
diverted by a major business decision.

I’d just made a major business decision, having contracted for a
book for which I had absolutely no qualifications.

Or my only qualification was my name, the JC halfloops I stopped
strolling—I stopped.

I’d just quit the presence of immemorial Basileis and marmoreal
Caesares—the likenesses of infamous men who’d raped and plundered Europe
and Asia as if only for my entertainment. Yet this—he—was what jarred me.
This guy who’d always played the shrewn but happy hubby, the patient catchphrasey
Pop. A minor B-celeb, a situational tragicomedian.

He was sensitive, but gave the impression of impersonating himself. His
handsomeness was stilled, like the lines of his face were just distortion in his
reception. In terms of painting: chiaroscuro cheeks, a worried craquelure mouth. In
terms of sculpture: the nosetip curiously chipped, puttied cosmetically.

This cameo was atop a bench off the reservoir path,
crowded by pigeons pecking at the matzah slivers he tossed. A proper picnic was spread
in the grass.

I gathered myself and approached him, setting the flock to flying, a
claque clapping its wings and wallaing west—like in film when directors seeking
indistinct background chatter have their extras, forbidden by union rules from
pronouncing anything scripted, repeat the same word at the same time but at different
speeds and in different tones,
walla
supposedly being the most effective or
just traditional choice, which happens to be an Amerindian word for
“water,” as well as slang for “really?” in Hebrew and
Arabic—really?

Because sitting next to him was Rach.

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I started fabricating immediately—as if I were Rach—began
peddling their presence to myself: this was just a routine appointment enlivened with
nature. A meeting negotiated into a harmless park outing. Their commercial was about to
be shot, had been shot and was about to air. This was crunchtime, kinks had to be
smoothed, geriatric touches retouched.

I remember thinking that their conversation—this
situation—was itself a commercial, an infomercial, a public service announcement
warning: you’re not as witty as you think.

The actor noticed me before she did, and he recognized too—two
stars in rare midday conjunction. His face tanned a shade deeper, and went rumpled as if
by a gust, like the dewed pollenstrewn picnic blanket—a bedsheet, one of
ours.

Rach collapsed into her lap.

She’d been complaining about him since the fall. He’d been
forced on her by a director, by an agency exec. She’d never been more harried on
set, she’d never dealt with talent more demanding. So old, hard of hearing,
glaucomic, goutish—just getting his travel arranged was an account in itself, a
nightmare.