End of the Jews (26 page)

Tris decides he'd rather confide in the old man than take him half-assedly to task, and he flops onto the couch. “I'm not getting anything done anyway.”

“Welcome to the club. What's your excuse?”

“General indifference of the world. I haven't written shit since
Contents
came out.”

“That's nothing—what, a few months? Look at me: more than twenty years since my last book. They had me dead and buried.” For an instant, the old man looks smug, or victorious, or something else Tris hasn't seen in him before. The look passes, and Tristan adds, “
I
had me dead and buried.”

“But you already had a career, Grandpa. You could afford to take your time. Nobody's waiting for my next book, except maybe to slam me again.”

Tristan waves off the complaint. “Fuck 'em. Everything moves in cycles. Do you know I just sold the movie rights to
Manacles
? Forty-six years later, people are finally ready for that book. Should have seen what I went through in '51.”

“I don't have forty-six years, Grandpa. I gotta come up with something strong, or else apply to law school.”

The old man levels a wine-hardened glare at him. “What do you want? A pep talk? How's this: be a lawyer. If that strikes you as a possibility, then by all means quit fucking around with something you're not serious about and do it.” Tristan breaks off, shakes his head, and guzzles his champagne.

“Okay. Jesus. It was just a figure of speech. I mean, fuck law school.” Tris stares into his glass, watches the bubbles hit the surface and explode.

The old man reaches over, and Tris feels his grandfather's cool, dry hand encircle his wrist. “Listen. I like
Contents.
Your sentences are beautiful. But it's too kind, Tris; there's no
fight
in it. You've got to push yourself if you're going to push anybody else. Whatever you love, you've got to stare it in the face until you find the dark part, the part you hate. And vice versa.” There is excitement in his voice, but Tristan's face is grim. “It will take its toll,” he adds. “I don't mean to make it sound romantic.”

Tris lifts the glass to his mouth, feeling less like a writer than ever. There is something curdled in his grandfather—something stunted in the way writing and only writing can break him and heal him—that Tris is just beginning to understand. Or find the courage to see.

“I'm not sure I want to do it that way,” he says, just louder than a whisper.

“You'd better decide.”

         

“I met somebody,” Nina says into the phone. She's pacing before the Brooklyn studio's one window, passing in and out of the harsh morning light.

One second of silence. Two. “Hello? You there?”

“Yeah,” Marcus grunts, and clears his throat. “Good for you, babe. You like him?”

“Yeah,” says Nina, bristling. She planned to do this gently, but if Marcus is going to play it cold and casual, dip into some kind of pimp routine, then she can be a motherfucker, too. “We talked until three in the morning. I think I'm in love.”

“I'm happy for you.” He sounds like he's reading the cereal box in front of him. “You deserve it.”

Marcus can't be letting go so easily. This must be some cocksure can't-nobody-take-you-from-me bullshit.

“You meet him at school? He a college kid?”

“The Blue Note. He's a novelist. Why are you acting so weird?”

“What? How am I supposed to act?”

“Like you give a shit, maybe?”

“Look. You turn down every gig I'm on. You make time to see me maybe once a month. What—”

“And we have sex every time.”

“If you like this guy, you should see him. I might be selfish, but I'm not that selfish.”

“You're supposed to love me.”

“I do love you. That's not gonna change.”

Nina sighs, and the phone dissects her breath into static. “I love you, too, Marcus.”

“But you can't do this anymore. Right?”

Famous last words. Without even meaning to, he's mocking her.

“Right.” And as the first familiar pang of longing hits her, Nina knows that Marcus is going to get into his car and drive across the bridge and appear on her—his—doorstep, and they're going to make love on the thin mattress lying on the floor of the glorified darkroom she's been living in for almost nine years now.

         

“Hey. It's me.” Nina is back on the phone, watching Marcus sweep the bottom of his overcoat aside as he prepares to slip behind the wheel of his 1974 Jaguar. He lifts his head and waves. Nina waves back, with a weak smile he can't see and she can't feel.

“Hey,” Tris says brightly, on the other end of the line. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Good. Me, too.”

“Let's meet. Did you have lunch yet?”

“Listen, I don't want to sound crazy. I know we just met. But you know how I was telling you my apartment situation is kind of fucked-up?”

“Yeah. What's up?”

“Well, I need to clear out of here. Like as soon as possible. It's a long story. My landlord's an asshole, basically.”

“Come stay with me,” he says immediately.

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. Want me to come and help you with your stuff?”

Nina looks around. Everything she has, aside from an armload of framed photos taken by her and by Marcus, fits in the two well-traveled suitcases Devon gave her as a first-year Christmas gift.

“That's okay. I'll call a car. Where are you, exactly?”

“Two oh nine Washington Park, corner of Dekalb. I'm on the parlor floor; it's buzzer number two.”

“Okay. See you in a few. I can't thank you enough.”

“Please. If I'd thought of it, I would have bribed homeboy to throw you out.”

She laughs. “I promise it'll just be for a little while.”

“Not if I can help it.”

Tris tosses the phone onto the bed, crosses his arms over his chest, and stands in the middle of the room, grinning like an idiot, for a good five minutes. This feels completely right—brazen, crazy, and natural.

He snaps out of his reverie and appraises the shithole he calls home. Some guys spend weeks prepping the crib for their girlfriend's move-in. It's a standard rite of passage for the young bachelor, the kind of moment a beer commercial might immortalize. And here he is, half-assing it in an hour. Then again, Nina's not really his girlfriend, is she? All they've done is kiss. Usually, post–industrial revolution, the normal thing would be to sleep together first, discuss cohabitation second. Oh well. This is…passionate. Or maybe, he thinks—and then shakes free of the thought—it's…convenient.

Tris sweeps on a regular basis, because it's easy, but his apartment hasn't seen a mop in months. He doesn't have enough belongings for true clutter, but due to his reliance on what his mother calls a “piling system,” the entire place looks as if it's in the early stages of being unpacked. At least there's no bad art of which to be embarrassed: no dorm-style posters of Tony Montana, no cheap Dalí prints. The walls are adorned only by a framed dust jacket of
Contents Under Pressure
—framed by Mom and Dad, naturally—and about thirty three-by-five notecards, indexing the various plot points of his now-abandoned second book. These are Scotch taped above his desk in long, uneven rows, and make his workspace look more writerly, to him and anybody who might chance to visit. Other than that, the cards are useless.

He snatches them down, shuffles them into a spiky stack, and shoves it in a drawer. His mop, nestled in the crevice between refrigerator and wall, is crusted with filth. He opens the front door and javelin-flings it straight into the trash can awaiting pickup at the curb, then soaks an old T-shirt in soapy water and slides it across the hardwood floor with his bare foot.

The buzzer sounds as Tris is staring into his lone closet, wondering how to clear some space and feeling increasingly as if he actually is a character in a beer commercial, the thought bubble above his head reading
Duh, girls got a lotta stuff.
He performs a last visual sweep as he jogs to the door: incense is burning, his one set of sheets is just back from the Laundromat, the stacks of books are clustered close enough to his desk to appear in use. Not bad. Besides, from what Nina told him last night, it's not as though she's been living in palatial splendor herself.

He swings open the door and they grin goofily and meet in a warm-chilly, indoors-meets-outdoors kiss right on the threshold. It's their most prolonged contact to date, so comfortable and hungry that Tris contemplates scrapping the no-pressure I'll-sleep-on-the-couch attitude he's decided would be prudent and just carrying Nina straight to bed, leaving her suitcases right there on the top step to be pillaged by the neighborhood's small nocturnal tribe of crack-rock enthusiasts.

That would be nice, in a way: to receive Nina baggage-free, with just the clothes on her back and the song in her heart, or whatever. Or maybe that's a fucked-up thing even to think, and why shouldn't her belongings mingle with his, her hair dryer befriend his bath towel, their CDs nuzzle together on cold Brooklyn nights?

“Come in, come in.” He bends at the knees to heft a suitcase in each hand. Nina follows him, carrying her purse and an armful of frames bound up with twine. Tris shoulders the door shut behind her, and Nina slides the bundle onto the countertop that separates the kitchen from the living room and has a look around. What's she thinking? Tris wonders, following her gaze, trying to see the room through her eyes. Ten-foot windows, dirty on the outside and thus uncleanable, ceiling draped with spiderweb chandeliers, a low black leather couch that Tris has always loved but that suddenly seems as if maybe three minor characters from
Shaft
should be sitting on it, dudes in denim suits with black-fist Afro picks wedged in their hair. The blank walls shame him, and so it is with an instantly regretted zeal that he bounds over to Nina's stack of photos—as if the only reason he invited her was to get his hands on some art for the crib.

“Wow, this is great. Can we put these up?” He's looking through the twine at a picture taken from the orchestra pit of Detroit's Symphony Hall: the bowed heads of eight musicians, shot in such a way that the drum set's cymbals appear to hover over them like looming spaceships. The image conveys an odd mixture of humility and majesty. The servants of the music, bowing to it as the fans applaud.

Nina turns, and almost winces. It's a great shot, one of her favorites. One of his. “Sure,” she hears herself say, and then wishes she hadn't. Why let Marcus follow her here? Why let Tris hang the work of her lover in his apartment? Already, in some vague way, she feels as if she's deceiving him, and it's the last thing Nina wants to do. But now he's rummaging for a hammer and a nail, and just like that, it's too late.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

A
malia stubs out a cigarette and cocks her head at the ceiling. When Tristan can't write, he paces—sweeps across his study like a shark circling a caged diver, searching for an opening, a way to lunge in for the kill. He hunts failure relentlessly, never takes his mind off a problem until it's torn to shreds.

Her husband's ruthlessness, Amalia is on intimate terms with. The determination to solve problems, though, stops at his study door. They have squabbled during breakfast, needlessly, and footfalls are the only sound she's likely to get out of him today.

It began when she asked Tristan, again, if he'd decided which week in July would be best for the short vacation she wants them to take—a little diversion, a week by a lake in New Hampshire with Ben's family so nine-year-old Linda can swim and spend time with her cousins. As compensation for the solitude of only-childhood, Amalia tries to ensure that her daughter sees plenty of them.

She wanted to call Dora, make arrangements, book the cabin. Tristan still hadn't looked at a calendar, and he acted as if the whole matter, which would take thirty seconds of his time, was a hassle of Olympian proportions. She pressed, told him that if he didn't voice a preference, she'd just pick a week herself and he'd have to live with it, and Tristan exploded. Now she's violated the sanctity of his morning, derailed him with bullshit when all he wants, all he asks, is to drink his coffee in peace and get to work—as if she wants anything different, for him or for herself. She dropped it,
Fine
,
Tristan
,
fine
, and he stormed off.

The pacing stops, and Amalia squints in concentration, tracking the staircase creaks of her husband's descent until she hears his foot strike the deeper note of the downstairs landing. His steps will fade now, along the foyer's pale green carpeting, lighten in timbre as he reaches the tiled kitchen and heads for the snack cupboard. Its contents have been the same since the Brodskys moved here: tins of mixed nuts to sate Tristan's hunger-break cravings for salt and protein, boxes of instant oatmeal and jars of applesauce he sometimes fixes late at night, and Ashkenazi comfort foods, store-bought and bottled and thus stripped largely of their comfort—matzoh balls bobbing in broth, gefilte fish suspended in heavy translucent slime. Tristan has never so much as learned to boil an egg, and Amalia will be damned if she's going to cook him more than one hot meal a day.

Tristan's footfalls are not dwindling toward the kitchen after all. Amalia hears her doorknob turn halfway, then stop—her husband remembering, belatedly, that she, too, has rules.

His knock is chest-high. “Amalia?”

“Yes? Come in.”

The door swings open. Tristan does not step inside.

“Have you got that letter from Herb Kaplan? I'd like to take another look at it.”

“I think it's here somewhere.” She stands and rifles through a pile of papers at the far corner of her desk. Why Tristan is willing to break his silence for the sake of a month-old piece of correspondence from a Chicago comedy writer they met on vacation in London last year, Amalia does not ask.

“Do you need it right now?” she says instead, the question an attempt to discern whether hostilities have truly ceased or just been momentarily suspended.

“No, no. Don't trouble yourself. It's nothing urgent.”

“I'm sure I've got it somewhere.” Seized by an eagerness to please, as if locating the letter will safeguard the peace, Amalia knocks over a bookend. Twenty volumes topple off the desk and onto the floor, taking a wooden music box with them. The introductory notes of its song wheeze forth: the first snatch of melody Amalia can remember hearing in her life, something her great-aunt played on Grandmother Elena's drawing room piano. Amalia hummed it for Tristan once, unable to name the tune, and months later he delivered it into her hands.

Her husband's coldness would not cut so deeply if he were not also capable of such fierce attention, of bestowing words and gifts that restore to Amalia things she doesn't even realize she's been missing. This room is full of books he's found her, by twelfth-century Sufi mystics and unknown wild-haired modern Greeks, poets whose troves were never excavated in the course of Amalia's classical education but whose words clang in her soul like church bells.

“Aha.” She slides a sheet of paper from a stack of miscellany and holds it aloft.

Her husband takes it, frowns as he scans a few lines, then looks up. “I may have to go to California,” he tells her. Before Amalia can respond, Tristan is on his way back up the stairs. He's neglected to close her door.

         

When he read the missive waiting for him in the mailbox, Tristan's first thought was that he was being bullshitted. The letterhead looks authentic, but only after he has held the typeface side by side with that produced by his various correspondents' machines and failed to find a match does Tristan allow his incredulity to fade, and accept that he is the Jewish Congress of America's 1961 Man of the Year.

It would be no more surprising to open his mail and find that he is
Car and Driver
magazine's top-rated luxury sedan. The Jewish Congress of America? He has never even heard of the bastards, as far as he can recall, but all these organizations are more or less the same, and none of them has reached out to him since
Manacles
except occasionally to request his money, or his time in some capacity that would allow them to alchemize it into cash.

And yet this letter, this invitation to speak at the awards banquet, this medium-size honorarium, has none of the feel of vindication. It is more like being asked to the birthday party of a kid who's bullied you on the playground every day since kindergarten, and so Tristan's thoughts turn to mischief, to revenge. What can he say up there behind that podium to shock them? To prove that he will no more give in to the Jewish community's veneration than its ire?

The notion that it is misdirected to thumb his nose at an organization that holds him in esteem flits through Tristan's mind, but he is able to talk himself past it. If they truly respect him—if this is about more than signing on to the success of his new novel—then they won't find the stunt he is already formulating outrageous in the least. In fact, they'll love it. As they should.

But if he is the Man of the Year only because Arthur Goldberg won in '6o, and nobody is a big enough baseballnik to vote for Sandy Koufax, and Samuel Goldwyn hasn't made any decent movies this year, and Tony Curtis hasn't been Bernie Schwartz or Jack Benny Benjamin Kubelsky for a long time, then the Jewish Congress of America will likely crap their britches when Man of the Year Tristan Brodsky shows up with the Albert Van Horn Quartet in tow and reads an excerpt from his prizewinning novel to a raucous jazz accompaniment, Albert full-gale wailing on his tenor saxophone and Murray Higgins behind the drum kit, smashing the fuck out of everything in sight.

The money will cover plane fare and payment for Albert and his band, and the banquet is far enough away that perhaps Albert's wife and manager, Mariko, can even book them an additional gig in Los Angeles that weekend. Tristan cackles and sits down to compose a genteel letter of acceptance, thanking the Congress for this great honor and mentioning only in passing that, if possible, it would be splendid if arrangements could be made for a piano.

Not until he and Albert are sitting together on the flight to California, sipping cocktails rendered tasteless by the clouds of cigarette smoke filling the cabin, does it occur to Tristan that there is a sense in which he is exploiting his friend. That even if Albert, Higgins, Trey, and Devon are in on the joke, it does little to change the fact that Tristan is wielding blackness as a scare tactic, a shock technique, a weapon.

It is not so different from the way some of the Jews in his book wield it.
Blockbusters
tells the story of a small fictional Midwestern city in the throes of a present-day battle over who will live where—a battle that twists and turns and explodes, ultimately, into violence. On both sides, there are Jews: young northern civil rights activists determined to desegregate the white suburbs, one black family at a time, and unscrupulous realtors using the threat of black encroachment and plummeting property values to drive whites from their homes—which they then resell at a profit. Motives and allegiances grow mutable; the radicals and the profiteers prove less ideologically entrenched than they first appear. Double crosses, moral awakenings, and secret deals abound. Black community leaders and local white politicians scramble to hold on to their power bases; outside agitators find themselves dangerously entrenched in a struggle they begin to fear they cannot understand. Then the Ku Klux Klan shows up.

It is a fat, frenzied, polemical novel, broad-ranging and morally messy, and the critics have lauded or lambasted it on just these grounds. It has sold shitloads of copies—largely to young people and blacks, judging from the fan mail—and for the first time ever, Tristan's literary agent is fielding calls from Hollywood types interested in the film rights. The Jewish media has refrained from hyperventilating in disgust this time around, but neither have they opened their arms to welcome back the prodigal son. They still don't much like Tristan's Jews; they still don't much like Tristan.

This weekend is not likely to change that, he reflects as the captain dims the cabin lights. At first, Tristan tried to tell himself that his performance was intended to expand the minds of the Jewish Congress of America, those bandwagon-hopping sycophants, but now he's made peace with the truth. It is about conveying the message
I am not like you
. I am not like you, and here are the sound track and the visuals to prove it. Here I stand with those whom, let's be honest, many of you are only marginally ahead of the national curve in learning not to fear and despise despite all that has been done to you, a couple of dead freedom-riding kikes notwithstanding. Those whose holocaust, if one wishes to compare such things, and I do not, outhorribles even our own. Those who are more Other than we will ever be again, O universally shunned and crushed and banished Chosen People, O Sons of Abraham, forever persecuted for your differences, your clannishness, who have survived, and made it here, and by sweat and wit risen to become America's brain trust, Hollywood's finest, who continued to claw your way forever upward even as your families overseas were herded and destroyed like cattle. And I declare that I, too, am different. A tribe unto myself. And if I am to someday die for my differences, I pray that they will be my own goddamn differences, and not those I have been born into and tried to explore the richness and complexity of, only to have my efforts castigated by other members of my race. So thank you for the honor and the moolah, Jewish Congress of America, and if you're not all utterly crammed full of hypocrisy and horseshit, then maybe you'll enjoy the show….

Albert leans over, into Tristan's thoughts. “I guess you're my new bodyguard,” he says in the low, conspiratorial tone that makes Tristan feel as if all the musician does all day is tell secrets. It is Albert's casualness, more than anything, that is so wonderful. It implicates and embraces, makes Tristan feel as wise and down-home as the man himself.

The novelist shifts in the narrow seat, trying to arrange himself into a cool and confidential posture. The plane has leveled off now, and with the window shade drawn and the mind occupied and the alcohol inside him, Tristan can almost forget that they are miles in the air, cutting through the cumulus in an enormous, absurdly heavy metal bird powered by technology he couldn't hope to understand. He doesn't get nervous about it anymore, but there is still a gravity to Tristan when he flies, a feeling that any thought might be his last.

“I can't believe your former bodyguard gave up the job.”

“Let's just say I put her on vacation.” Albert opens his eyes wide. “Against her will.” He stares at Tristan and laughs long and hard, and Tristan does the same because he wants to share anything with Albert that he can. But the laughter and the staring never end when they should; they go on and on, until they grow uncomfortable and almost scary. Eventually, Tristan always has to look away, or downshift into a grin, and Albert's laughter wanes reluctantly into a guttural sigh. If the silence goes on too long, or he has no glass in his hand from which to sip, he may start laughing and staring again, and Tristan will be right back where he started.

This time, the laughter dissipates more easily than usual, because Albert has more to say. He folds his lips into a kind of thoughtful frown and turns over the barely-breathable blue-gray air with an elegant gold-braceleted hand. “I told her the time had come for me to get out on my own. For her sake, much as mine. I told her there are ex-junkies and then there are nonpracticing junkies, and all I could ever be certain I was with her looking over my shoulder every second was nonpracticing.”

“And she accepted that?”

“Only because you were coming. If it was just me and the cats, forget it. She trusts you.”

“Why?” asks Tristan, flattered and insulted.

Albert unfolds a finger for each of his friend's virtues. “You're not a musician. Not a dopehead. Not black. If only you weren't American, you'd be perfect.”

“Well, I'll guard you with my life, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate your coming.”

“Hell, I appreciate your paying me.”

“You'd tell me if it wasn't enough.”

“You better believe it. But money goes a long way when you don't shoot your paycheck in your arm.”

Tristan smiles, marveling anew at the mystery of Albert's life in the years between the lapse and the renewal of their acquaintance, the years after Albert discovered dope and bebop and before Mariko discovered him. Van Horn speaks of those times accidentally but openly. He does not tell drug stories per se, but if some memory happens to intersect with those dark decades, he will relate it without censorship or hesitation. And yet, for all the lurid details Tristan has accumulated, he still cannot grasp the ravaging day-to-day reality of that struggle. He has elaborated the particulars into a sketch of a life, as he is trained to, but if the Albert of yesteryear were a character he was trying to write, Tristan would be tromping around his study and kicking over stacks of books by now, in frustration at being so masterfully eluded.