End of the Jews (16 page)

A month passes, and the chapter comes back hemorrhaging red ink, slashed to ribbons. Tristan's brow wrinkles in consternation—indignation, even—but when he lies down on his bed and looks the pages over, he learns that Amalia brings the same rigor to reading as to writing. By the time he finishes absorbing her comments, Tristan is embarrassed for sending such embryonic material. He breaks another of his rules and doubles back to revise the chapter, instead of forging on toward the end of the draft.

Letters and poems, chapters and promises of drinks fly furiously between Poughkeepsie and the Upper West Side. Amalia sees sides of his characters that Tristan himself cannot. She treats them with a friend's sympathy, and when Amalia and Tristan discuss one of his people, they are like two friends conferring over the problems of a third, or a couple discussing their child. When his people disappoint her, Amalia forgives them and turns instead on Tristan.
This is baloney,
she is unafraid to scrawl in his margins, no less than
This is beautiful.
The passages Amalia brutalizes tend to be the ones in which Tristan himself has the least confidence, the ones he's bullshitted his way through and hoped were good enough to just squeak by.
This is not the way a woman thinks,
the red ink blares,
this is the way you male writers conspire to pretend women think. Can you see your mother thinking this? Can you see ME?

A few times, Tristan catches himself composing a sentence just for her, wanting Amalia to write
MUCH better!
in the margin on the next pass. He finds evidence of the same impulse in her. The poems she sends grow in their narrative awareness, their patience in allowing characters to be more than one thing, their willingness to let ideas roll over and bare their ugly underbellies. They branch away from what Tristan regards—disclaiming his authority to say so all the while, only to find that Amalia agrees with him—as the weaknesses of poetry. His aesthetic and hers are like two dancers in a ballet, flitting in and out of each other's orbits until the entire stage becomes a shared galaxy of space and they are dancing both alone and together.

The two-step of their own relationship, Tristan and Amalia don't discuss. He leaves the question of what they mean to each other unarticulated as the letters grow in depth and frequency, as reading and writing Amalia become the things Tristan relishes most. She does the same. Whether he is following her lead or she his, Tristan does not know, and fears to discover. Some things must not be said inside the house of words they are building around themselves. Words tell stories on pages, but a thousand other things tell stories in real life, and to overuse words, employ them to describe all that exists between people, that is weak and could be dangerous. Where this suspicion comes from, Tristan is not sure, but he feels it. If people explained themselves the way writers explain characters in books, the world would be far more insufferable than it is already.

It is frustrating, to know Amalia only through letters, and yet delicious. To savor and reexamine not his own words, for a change, because they've been surrendered into the hands of the U.S. postal service, but someone else's. To write not for the world, not for posterity, but for a single human being. To forgo the pretext of plot and character and describe for her the panic that sometimes overtakes him at cocktail parties, when Tristan finds himself telling an old anecdote to a new audience, chances to glance over at Pendergast, who's heard the tale at least seven times, and finds him preparing to feign a hearty chuckle. It keeps him sane, being able to confess that it's all he can do not to drop his highball glass and bolt for the door before he is smothered by the feeling that he and Peter and everyone else in the room are colleagues in a conspiracy of fakeness. Whether Amalia responds directly to the story doesn't even matter. Something in her next letter will rhyme with it, bounce against it, provide a perspective or an analog.

Soon, the second anniversary of their one meeting is only months away. Amalia mentions this fact in a letter—with a peevishness so subtle, it's like a whisper behind the words—and Tristan rubs his eyes and dredges his mind, straining to recall her face. An image starts to come together, and he wonders what has changed: whether Amalia has grown her dark hair down past her slim shoulders or cut it short, as fashion would dictate, and bared a graceful slope of neck. He tries to hold the image, freeze it. A wave of shame slams into him instead, at his failure to get on a goddamn train and go see her.

Something else is always demanding his attention, sure, but who is he kidding? Tristan hasn't visited because he's afraid of rending the elegant fabric of their communication with his careless body. It's all too easy to picture both his own expectations and Amalia's deflating over the course of an evening together, all too awful to imagine how everything could be lost when word gives way to flesh.

Tristan smells the letter in his hand, as he always does. Amalia has never perfumed an envelope, and he can't believe she would, but it's a habit anyway. In his mind, she smells like ink and stationery. People have gotten married in less time than this, and without knowing half as much about each other as he and Amalia do.

Or do they? Funny, that he's so quick to think so. Tristan has not written to her of his romantic entanglements—which are so brief as to be barely worth mentioning, he hastens to note to himself, and which could hardly say less about him. He begs his way out of fix-ups with the daughters of Jewish society types on a regular basis, citing nonexistent deadline pressure and a paucity of time. He's screwed only two girls in the past year. One was a mediocre-looking Upper East Sider who let him know before the appetizers reached the table that she was game; this did not turn out to mean that she was any fun, in bed or out. Things between them tapered off inside of three weeks. Neither one pretended to care.

The second liaison was with a fan, Italian—she came to a reading he gave at the New York Public Library, then took him back to her place, stripped both of them naked, and told him to do anything he wanted. Three exhausting nights later, when Tristan told her that he'd need to spend the following evening alone, tackle a bit of work, she heaved a metal candleholder at her own bedroom mirror, shattered it, ejected him from her apartment. His phone was ringing by the time he got home; she begged him to come back. He declined and she called again and again, at ten-minute intervals, alternately passionate, tearful, and toxic, until he pulled the phone out of the wall. By the end of the week, Tristan had a new phone number and an enhanced appreciation for the sanity of the general population.

If Amalia has suitors, and she must, she keeps it to herself. She's written that she longs for closer, more exciting friends, girls who'd drag her away from her studies and her typewriter and take her on adventures, but she's tight-lipped about her actual social life. The truth of the matter is that Tristan and his pen pal know a great deal about the way the other thinks, and creates, and perhaps feels, but little about how the other lives.

Vassar's spring break draws near, and Tristan suggests that if Amalia can forgive him for his failure to appear in her neck of the woods, perhaps they can meet in the city. But the Farbers are slated to spend the week in Bermuda, so no dice—although the full story might be that a stroll down the street does not constitute sufficient effort on his part: Poughkeepsie he promised and Poughkeepsie she wants it to be. Amalia sends a postcard instead, as well as a mildly bloodied chapter, which, when Tristan slides it from the mailer, sprinkles his bed with fine white sand.

He resolves to haul himself to Vassar before the conclusion of the school year, but the end-of-semester crunch is on before he knows it, and Tristan is stuck in the city. He writes Amalia his three longest letters yet; they go unanswered for three weeks. Such a lag is an eternity. Every day he finds his mailbox empty, it takes Tristan longer to keep his disappointment from metastasizing into anguish.

Not until the day Professor Brodsky returns from his last class, briefcase stuffed with enough exams and term papers to ensure that the coming days of his life will be a slow slog through a field of shit, does he find the letter he's been waiting for waiting for him. And it is locally postmarked. He imagines Amalia writing it on the train back from school, curled over a notebook, the contents of her dormitory room stowed in the bin above her head. Tristan picks up his phone and rings the operator. His hands shake as he waits to be connected.

CHAPTER
FIVE

H
er first month in America, Nina is not allowed to take a single picture. “Just watch,” says Marcus. “Get your bearings. You'll be working soon enough.” A thousand times, her hands dart to her rib cage, wanting to lift a camera that's not there. Nina doesn't complain, although it feels like an insult. Would a new trumpet player be forbidden to touch his horn? Marcus tells her she's being trained to pay attention, that she's got to understand what's going on before she can know how to shoot it. Photography is more than composition, it's communication. Why be so quick to talk before you listen?

Nina does her best to be chastened, and to trust him, but her camera is the only thing she has to justify her presence. Without it, she feels as if she's being winked about—as if the band suspects
apprentice
to be a code word for something else. Marcus doesn't seem overly concerned with correcting such impressions. If anything, he encourages them. He stands proprietarily close to Nina when others are around, speaks in confidential tones when none are necessary, touches her forearm or the small of her back. Never when they are alone. Then, Marcus is all business. Nina bides her time, waiting for things to work themselves out.

Everything's too new: the rules, the country, the people. The variety alone is dizzying—thirty TV channels in every hotel room, vegetables she's eaten only out of cans, tasteless and mushy, laid out in long, fragrant rows in every supermarket. The cats laugh at her when the bus pulls off the highway to stock up on snacks; they dump pretzels, chips, trail mixes on the conveyor belt—itself a marvel, like a miniature version of the moving walkways at the airports, America a land of automated movement for humans and food alike—and Nina brings up the rear, clutching heads of broccoli and bags of miniature carrots to her chest.

Day by day, she's decoding the illogic of English as a spoken language. After a week, she determines that the proper way to respond to “How's it going?” or “How you feeling?” or “What's up?” is not by accounting for your emotional or physical state, or your current activity, but by repeating the inquiry. Americans smile without provocation or sincerity; Nina trains herself not to be freaked out by all the flashing teeth, internalizes the fact that the default demeanor that passes for serious back home comes off as dour in this land of fluorescent produce.

The malaprops are unavoidable, though. A mound of jackets in the corner of an ill-equipped Pittsburgh dressing room prompts her to assert that what they need are some hookers; Nina has to stand and smile patiently for a full five minutes before the laughter dies down enough for Devon to explain the difference between the things you hang your coat on and the word she just said.

Thank God for Devon. Sometimes days pass without the two of them sharing more than a few moments, and Nina has to take her instruction amid the hustle-bustle, in the form of offhand comments, minuscule gestures, a whole lot of eavesdropping. But at least once a week, the two of them stay up late together on the bus, and Nina is privy to one of the trombonist's long, low ruminations on America, his voice as soothing as the hum of the big engine.

“Listen, Pigfoot,” he tells her, “the first thing you gotta understand is this: the legacy of black folks in America is so profound that it functions as a metaphor for all humanity.” Devon reclines in his plush captain's chair, stares out the window as the highway chugs by. Nina curls into the seat beside him, hugging her knees to her chest. “That's why all kinds of people love this music. It's like the great man said: every American is part black.”

Nina has no idea who the great man is, but she believes him great. Of course, all she knows of America are its clubs and restaurants and airports, and every nook and cranny of the custom-fitted thirty-five-foot vehicle in which the octet rides whenever the distance between gigs spans fewer than a thousand miles. “The men who built the music traveled this way,” Devon explains, “and the chemistry of those bands owed plenty to the tour bus. Besides which, I hate flying—and not just because Ellington did, the way Sparkplug likes to claim.”

When Nina professes to have developed only a vague impression of the country thus far, and blames her diet of hotels and concert halls, Devon wags a finger. “You gotta pay attention, 'Foot. You can find some of a place's character even in a hotel or a concert hall. A club in Portland and a club in New Orleans are like noon and midnight, know what I mean?”

Nina resolves to. Something else to mull over, another concept to try to understand. Occasionally, it all hits her at once: how much she has to learn and how much of it these men were practically born knowing, how hard it is and will remain. And even if she learns it all—if that is even possible—she'll still be an outsider. Not black and not a man and not a musician, her one ability the trick of showing them who they are, reflecting their images back at them. How lonely it is, here on this dark bus, when you are small and female and unable to sleep, surrounded by the sounds and tremors of big, slumbering, indifferent men.

Nina drifts off herself, and awakens when the bus jerks to a halt. She lifts her head, expecting to see a swarm of bellboys, but outside the window is only the grassy shoulder of the highway.

“We break down?” she asks groggily, thumbing the sleep out of her eyes.

“Naw,” says Torrence, one of the horn players, as he passes. “Recreational stop.” Nina follows him off the bus, into the sharp early-morning air, and finds the octet, plus Marcus and Greg, the bus driver, ambling over a small incline.

On the other side, just barely shielded from the highway, sits a lonely cement basketball court, complete with rusting poles and chain-link nets and faded yellow paint. What it's doing here, in the dead center of nowhere, is anybody's guess, but Devon keeps an eye peeled for such things.

He's on the court already, ball in hand, facing off against the drummer, Rasheed, the tallest and youngest member of the band.

“You know”—Devon feigns left, gets his man to lunge, then crossover-dribbles behind his back—“the only thing sadder than your inside game is your outside game, 'Sheed. You a goddamn waste of height, bruh. I was tall as you, I'd be in the NBA instead of out here bullshitting with you no-music-playin' motherfuckers.” He turns his head and sees her. “Uh-oh, look who made it off the bus. They got basketball behind the Iron Curtain, Pigfoot?”

He whips her a no-look pass. Nina catches it.

“Of course. I played in gym class.” She steps onto the court, takes a few dribbles, and tosses the ball at the basket—a push shot, from the chest; even Nina can tell her form is terrible. It clangs against the backboard hard enough to shake the pole, and falls into the hoop. The chain net caresses the ball, and it drops into Pipe Man's hand. He fires a two-handed pass back at her, and she shoots again. Another two points for the girl from Prague.

“You gonna break that backboard, Pigfoot. Damn. Shoot like—”

“A girl?” Nina shows her palms to Pipe Man, and he scoop-tosses her the ball.

Devon smirks. “I was gonna say ‘photographer.' All right, me and No Game here are captains. Call it in the air, 'Sheed.” The coin flashes in the sun, falls into Devon's palm.

“Tails.”

“Tails it is.”

Rasheed points. “Pipe Man.”

Devon appraises the field. “Torrence.” The reed-thin reed player jogs to his side.

“Greg.”

“Teo.”

“Antonio ‘Human Highlight Film' Graves.”

“Hackmaster General over here,” Devon says, pointing to Conrad, the bassist.

At last, only Nina and Marcus stand unchosen. It is Devon's pick.

“Youth or experience?” he muses. “A proven waste of court space, or the chuck-happy Creole rookie?” He deliberates a moment. “Come on, Pigfoot. You can sub in, Plug.”

Nina bends to tie her sneakers. When she looks up, Marcus is hunched over her. “They're going to think you're a dyke,” he whispers fiercely.

Nina stands and looks him in the eye. “Good.”

Marcus shakes his head and stalks back to the bus, not to be heard from again that morning. Six hours later, when the octet pulls into Detroit, he tells Nina she can use her camera.

         

Looking back, she cannot identify the moments when things changed. Strange, since that is what she does, what she believes: that no matter how fast or slowly life unfurls, the crucial instants can be pinpointed and captured. Perhaps it's a failure of memory, then, or perspective, or perhaps there are exceptions, processes that defy perception. Maybe the only way to document the eighteenth and nineteenth years of Nina's life would be with some kind of time-lapse photography. Set cameras to go off every five days, analyze the stills, and you might be able to see her and Marcus's shoots together evolve from clumsy tutorials—the teacher impatient, the student awkward and indignant, the space always a bit too small—into duets of shared sensibility, the two of them reading each other's minds and bodies and emerging with the images to prove it.

Perhaps with proper data, you could isolate the instant when their comfort with each other began, take a wax pencil and circle the day Nina and Marcus became capable of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder without speaking at all. Or the night they started arguing with the kind of fearless vehemence that only families and lovers usually dare employ—a ferocity born of the certainty that no matter how foul the invective, they will still be bound to each other come daylight.

Could it be that there's simply a quota? That intimacy comes automatically once you've logged five thousand hours with someone, or fifteen thousand miles? Once you've seen someone puke ten times—thus learning that Thai cuisine and Oklahoma City are a bad combination—or clicked off twenty-five thousand exposures? Once you've shared enough darkrooms, met enough deadlines, seen your names printed together in enough brochures and catalogs?

It doesn't matter. That closeness, that love, is natural, what the road, the gig, the life are all about. The real question is how it went from that to what it is now, in the fall of 1990, six weeks shy of her twentieth birthday. Nina has barely eaten in days. The stress is ravaging, finally too much, and so here she is walking to Devon's berth at the back of the bus two hours before dawn and leaning down to wake him with a whisper and a nudge.

“Bruh.”

One of Devon's many talents is the ability to be sound asleep one instant, totally alert the next: a by-product of his tendency to keep late nights and use the morning's first phone call as an alarm clock.

His eyes pop open. “Yo.”

“I gotta talk to you.”

He doesn't say another word, just wraps the blanket around his shoulders like a shawl and follows her up front. It delights Nina to know that she can yank the Prince of Jazz from his bed and he will ask no questions, simply accept that she needs him. Just as he has awakened her countless times, sent Nina on myriad late-night and early-morning errands without so much as a pleasantry by way of coaxing.

Devon seldom even bothers to tell Nina her schedule, just assumes she can walk out the door at any time on half an hour's notice to shoot one of his elementary school visits or accompany him to a TV taping so he has someone to talk to in the car. Taking photographs is only half of what Nina, as the juniormost member of Devon's entourage, is expected to do. She's been a messenger, a secretary, even a liaison between Devon and a few of the more demanding women in his vast collection.

He slides onto a built-in bench, pulls the blanket over his head, and hunches forward, elbows on the table.

“I can't take his shit anymore,” Nina whispers. “Look at this.” She points to her forehead. “I'm breaking out.”

“You call that breaking out? Shoulda seen me at your age.” He rubs his eyes with the heels of both hands. “Look, sis. I told you before, you gotta deal with it yourself. Tell him, ‘Negro, leave me the fuck alone.'”

“You think I haven't tried? He doesn't listen to me, Devon.” She looks over her shoulder at the shadowed bunk where Marcus is presumably sleeping. “He listens to you.”

“So make him listen. If you can't get people to listen to you in life, sis, that's a major problem. Cuz it won't be the last time a motherfucker wants some toonyan.”

“He doesn't just want some toonyan, bruh.” It is one of a hundred synonyms Nina has picked up, and learned to toss around as casually as any one of them. “Pipe Man just wants some toonyan. That I can deal with. Marcus wants to leave his wife for me.”

Devon cracks a smile. “I've known Cherokee Slim since I was born, Pigfoot. Trust me. That brother just wants some toonyan.”

Fuck you, thinks Nina, surprised at how much the assertion offends her. “Just talk to him.”

Devon shakes his head. “If he was popping shit in public, I could step in. But he's not.”

The bandleader is right about that much. As soon as Marcus got it in his head that the two of them should be together, the displays of intimacy stopped. Now he waits until they are alone, then tells Nina how beautiful she is, how deeply he admires her talent, how much he loves her, how badly he wants her. What an amazing team they make, and how they could travel the world together, lovers and partners, shooting project after project, book after book, from Mozambique to Japan.

He doesn't do it every day, or even every week. As unsettling as anything is the way Marcus's entreaties rise out of nowhere, return as fervent and flowery as ever just when Nina thinks she's made herself clear and the two of them have fallen back into a shit-talking, fraternal rhythm. She'll find him staring at her, feel her face grow hot, force herself to turn and ask, “What?” because Marcus will go on staring like that until she gives him an opening, and the sooner it begins, the sooner it'll be done.