End of the Jews (14 page)

In one gloved hand, she holds a highball glass. In the other, a cigarette smolders at the end of a long holder. She bends toward Loren at the waist, presenting her cheek and, perhaps advertently, cleavage Tristan suspects he will reconsider later.

“Inconceivably delighted to see you, Mr. Leonard.” She cuts her eyes, looks left and right, and drops her voice. “Wall-to-wall bores here tonight, Loren.” She leans past him, flashes her eyes at Tristan. “And good evening to you, Mr. Brodsky.” She consolidates her accessories in her left hand and extends her right. “Natalie Farber. Very charmed to meet you, and mazel tov.” Her handshake is firmer, more authoritative, than that of any woman he has ever met. “I look forward to reading your book—books, I suppose I should say.”

Tristan affects a slight bow. “Thank you.” The noise of the room swells, and he raises his voice. “You have a lovely home.”

Natalie glances toward the elevator, then back at Tristan. “Much lovelier without so many businessmen in it.”

Tristan opens his mouth, decides discretion should be his watchword, and closes it. Then he changes his mind.

“But isn't this your party, Mrs. Farber? And isn't your husband a businessman?” He feels Loren's eyes boring into the side of his head, imagines the editor making a quick stop back at the office to set his book contract on fire.

Natalie laughs; Tristan expels a breath he didn't know he was holding. “Yes on both counts. How do you think I know?” She draws on her cigarette. “One at a time is acceptable, but en masse they tend to drag a soiree down. Obligations, Mr. Brodsky, obligations. You're not related to the attorney Brodsky, are you?”

“No, ma'am, I'm afraid not.”

“Good for you. Most tiresome man in New York State.” Her eyes flick over to the elevator once again. “I'll spare you the tedium of explaining what your novels are about, as I must now welcome to my home the second most tiresome man in New York State. However.” And with that she sails away, a proud boat cutting through a jittery ocean. Tristan stares after her, wondering whether the various elements of Natalie's hostessing repertoire—the mock boredom, the cutting wit, the nonstop motion, the odd farewell—are standard to these circles, or if she's as strange and intriguing a creature as he'd like to think.

Loren claps his hands. “Drinks. Scotch, I presume? All us literary cunts drink scotch, don't we?” And he, too, walks off, making it a mere five feet before he stops to pump the hand of a portly fellow cupping a napkin full of hors d'oeuvres to his vest. The bar is on the far side of the room, a long, low table manned by two servers dressed in white. At his current rate of progress, it will take Loren twenty minutes to make it there and back.

Tristan is relieved to be on his own for a spell, content to wander and overhear, pluck toothpicked delicacies from the silver trays of passing waiters and taxonomize this much-mythologized and seldom-seen species of Jew. This room is full of the men in whom the Bronx glories—and whom the Bronx monitors from afar, waiting to curse them with that awed and bitter-tongued refrain:
he acts like he isn't even Jewish.

Of course, not everyone here
is
Jewish, and this free mingling, this blurring of distinctions, is worth considering. Do tonight's Gentiles simply enjoy the succulence of Natalie Farber's spread, or do they note that nothing being served contains a drop of dairy? If so, do they find the fact extraordinary, mundane, charming, or absurd? Tomorrow night, when half these people turn up at a party down the block thrown by some Episcopal business associate of Mr. Farber, will the goyim watch to see whether their Semitic friends consent to sample a shrimp cocktail, or an oyster wrapped in bacon? Will they widen their eyes as the trays of verboten appetizers are presented to the Chosen People, thinking
take it, take it, act like you aren't even Jewish
?

“I haven't seen you before,” says a voice at Tristan's side. He turns and looks into the placid face of an exceptionally pretty girl, about fifteen.

She sips from a glass of wine. “Do you speak French?”

“I'm afraid not,” he says, attempting a Lester-Young-by-way-of-Pendergast smile, detached and knowing and flirtatious all at once. “Is that requisite around here?”

“I was going to tell you a joke, but it's only funny if you speak French.”

“I could laugh anyway.”

“It's very kind of you to offer.” Her eyebrows are arched and thin, and her eyes, a mottled hazel like his brother's, radiate an intelligence all the more daunting for its lack of attitude. Her brains are not something that has caused this girl pain, not something she's ever had to hide or defend. Or so it appears. “Do you play chess?”

“Never learned that, either,” Tristan says, beginning to feel his dander rise. “Do you play craps?”

Her smile is broad and closed. Something in her eyes says she knows he is fucking with her, and likes it. “Is it a card game?”

“I'll take that as a no. How about stickball?”

“I've seen it played.”

“Really. I didn't know it had taken hold in this neighborhood.”

“No, not here. I do leave the Upper East Side now and then.”

“Whatever for?” asks Tristan, pocketing his hands.

“Stimulation. And may I ask your name?”

“I'm sorry. Tristan Brodsky.”

She scrutinizes him. “The lawyer? I thought you'd be much older.”

“No, that's a different Brodsky. I'm a writer.”

The girl's face comes alive, and Tristan realizes how little attention she's been paying to the conversation until now. “You don't say. So am I. I knew you looked interesting. What sort of things do you write?”

“Novels.” He gives his hand. “And may I ask yours?”

“I'm sorry, I assumed you knew. Amalia Farber.”

“You have your mother's handshake, Miss Farber.” He seizes upon the momentary diversion of a passing waiter to look her up and down and thinks
her tits, too
.

“How many books have you had, Mr. Brodsky?”

“I've just sold my first two. What about yourself?”

“I'm a poet. But I've just begun. No books yet.”

Tristan smiles. Of course this girl assumes she'll publish books. Her parents, or her nannies, have no doubt raised her to believe she will be anything she wants. Hell, she could be nothing, and what would it matter?

“I'd love to hear something. Can you recite your work?”

“I can, but I won't. It's not a parlor trick. If you'll leave me your address, perhaps I'll mail you one. I'd like to have a real professional's opinion. The teachers at school are occupied with building our confidence; they claim that everything I write is marvelous.”

“You don't believe them?”

Amalia eyes him over the top of her glass. “Of course not. How could I be any good after only a year?”

“Some people are naturals.”

“Did you write anything decent in your first year?”

“Sometimes I think it's all been downhill since. I'm not saying I'd want to see any of it published. But I was full of energy then, convinced that everything I wrote was utterly original. That fades as you go on, unfortunately, to be replaced by a more—” Tristan stops, shakes his head. “I'm sorry. I sound like a pompous ass, don't I? I haven't quite figured out yet how an author is supposed to talk.”

“I thought you were doing fine. The phrase ‘pompous ass' hadn't crossed my mind.”

“You're very generous.”

Amalia cocks her head to one side. She seems to be deciding what to make of him. Tristan wonders if she does this at every party: find the one person who doesn't belong and monopolize him. He watches her watch him, trying to pinpoint what it is about this girl that makes her so attractive. It has less to do with looks or charm than with the absence of the striving desperation that sits like a weight in most people he knows, tethering them to the ground. It gives her a lightness, a purity, which he wants both to bask in and destroy.

“You look like you work too hard,” she says at last. “Authors are supposed to have an air of leisure about them, don't you think?”

“Interesting that you should say so. Where I come from, writing is hardly considered work at all.”

“Oh, I think it's very hard work. Without question, the hardest I've ever done.”

“But not as hard, say, as pushing a cart down the street for twelve hours a day. Or loading cargo onto ocean liners.”

“Have you done such things?”

“No,” Tristan admits. “I've only written. But if I fail, it's what I'm bound for. How about you, Miss Farber? What are you bound for, if poetry doesn't work out?”

“I'll have to give it some thought,” she says, and turns slightly away. They stare into the ever-growing crowd. Tristan curses himself and wills her to resuscitate the conversation, chagrined that he is looking to this girl to take the lead.

“I'll be happy if I'm a true poet by sixty” is what she comes up with. Her voice is petulant, as if Amalia expects to be mocked.

“Sixty? You'd be content with mediocrity for the next forty-five years?”

“The next forty-two and a half, thank you. By sixty, I'd like to think I'll have something to say. I will have lived.” Her forehead crinkles. “Do I really look fifteen?”

Tristan rubs a glint of perspiration from the side of his nose. “Let me ask you something. Do you consider yourself a Jewish poet, or just a poet?”

“I'd never think to identify myself that way. I can't see what bearing it has.”

“But it must have some, no? It's the single factor in millions of people's destinies.”

Amalia shrugs. “It does for you, I take it.”

“I don't know. Forces greater than myself want me to be Jewish. And I mean my publisher, not the man upstairs—He couldn't care less what I do. It's funny; I realized recently that virtually all the Hebrew I once knew is gone. It's as if for every word of English I've written, a word of Hebrew has disappeared.”

“Oh, I'm sure it's still in there. Come, let's have a quick Shema.”

“Even if I could recite it, I'd have no idea what it meant.”

“Does it matter? The sound is beautiful, whether you know or not.”

“From a cantor, maybe. From me, it would be an auditory pogrom.”

Loren reappears at Tristan's side, a glass of scotch and melting ice in either hand. “Hello, Amalia dear,” he says. “You're looking splendid tonight. If you'll permit me, I must borrow Mr. Brodsky for a moment. Some gentlemen across the room are just dying to meet him.”

Tristan takes his drink from Loren and lifts it to Amalia.

“The life of an author beckons,” she says, raising her wineglass an inch.

“Send me a poem.”

“I will,” she promises, and slips into the crowd.

         

Almost a year passes before Tristan extracts a slim envelope with no return address from his mailbox and stuffs it in his jacket's breast pocket, running late, as usual, to make it to the uptown train. The world is different now. He is a published author and the country is at war, and what it means to be a Jew has changed again.

They are a side issue in this conflict; what is real to them seems unreal to the rest of the world, and so there the Jews huddle, in colonies along the eastern seaboard of the United States, a paranoid race of the past, trading rumors about their own annihilation, a new one every week. At the second battle for Kharkov, the latest horror story goes, the Nazis sacrificed a tactical advantage—actually
decided to lose
—in order to round up Jews. No one took notice when the reports of absurd laws and cresting violence first began to trickle into the United States; no one listened when the deportations started. Now only a deafening silence booms from the European Jewry, Rachael's and Jacob's families included, and still “the Jewish problem” is of little concern to Roosevelt. In the global theater of war, it is a stray cough from the balcony.

Sometimes Tristan can hardly focus on the paper in the typewriter before him. Yesterday, after eating his usual blue-plate lunch at Pluto's Diner, he lingered for an extra half hour, eavesdropping on a hushed conversation between two old Jews, both grimly satisfied to have incontrovertible proof of what they'd always known: that the world's hatred of their race continues unabated. An hour later, standing in the subway's rush-hour crush, Tristan found himself six inches from a young uniformed draftee, watching the boy's eyes, imagining them glitter with mortal terror and blaze with the cold, naïve desire to kill. That night, stretched out in bed with the
New York Times,
Tristan came across the suicide note of a Polish Jew exiled in London, hidden away in the back pages:
It was not my fate to die with my comrades, but I belong to them, and in their mass graves. By my death, I hope to express my strongest protest against the inaction with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of my people.
He read it twice through, closed his eyes, and tried to understand why a man worried about the obliteration of his race would kill himself. He wondered whether living or dying required more of this man's courage, then turned the page and worked his eyes over the sports column, retaining nothing. He dropped the paper by the bedside, atop an issue of
The New Republic,
which seemed to suggest that the editors were equally horrified by Hitler and by the revelation of Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism.

The war rages in headlines and in minds, in the window-box victory gardens hanging from every apartment building and the hulking warships being hewn into existence down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It is in evidence all around Tristan, right down to the cuffs of his pants—the extra inch of fabric marks the trousers as prewar, manufactured before the military declared a textile shortage. And yet he still has books to write, an imagination through which to filter the world. Tristan doesn't know whether to feel guilty about his daily escapes from reality, or to pity those who have found no such respite. But he is resolute in the desire to hold on to the same sense of complexity that he had before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and thus he does not stand among the proud, the vocal, or the desperate.