End of the Jews (28 page)

Amalia teaches more and more women like this at Southern Connecticut State: as old as she and back in college, their faces masks of fear and determination. They attend the first class in pearls, heels, and makeup, retaining some deliberate, coquettish aspect of the schoolgirls they remember being—they carry their books pressed against their chests, or search out just the kind of pencil box they used twenty years ago during the three semesters of college they completed before earning their so-called MRS degrees. Amalia is as kind and helpful to these women as can be. Not just out of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I empathy, but because they have few allies on a campus geared toward students half their age. The faculty is full of male professors who see the collapse of their own marriages and perhaps that of Western civilization foretold in these women, and are thus as mean to them as they can get away with being.

Amalia watches with pride as the women abandon first the pearls and then the heels and later, sometimes, half the makeup. The boys write blustery Hemingway knockoffs and the girls treacly, wafer-thin romance, but these women produce work that is honest, brutal, and reflective. Occasionally, one will get together with a college boy, and Amalia will watch the couple stroll the campus, arms tight around each other's waists, and not acknowledge that the feeling masquerading as well-good-for-her friendliness is mostly I-wish-somebody-would-touch-me-like-that jealousy.

Noon passes before she hunkers down to write. For once, Amalia is secure enough in the promise of the day and the state of her own mind to allow herself such leisure. Sure enough, as soon as she puts aside the upcoming week's student poems and the Rilke collection she keeps on her desk and opens at random anytime she needs a quick booster of inspiration, Amalia is able to reenter her poem. The decoding of a second-stanza implication—a previously hidden and now self-evident note to herself—spurs Amalia to insert a new third stanza, and soon the poem is finding its true shape, filling out, growing voluptuous. She works from 12:30 to 3:00, pausing only to approve Linda's request to go and play at Marcy's house around the block, and when she stops writing, Amalia is the proud mother of a beautiful baby poem, helpless but healthy.

Only upon pausing does Amalia realize she is famished. She walks to the kitchen feeling like her husband. But while Tristan would merely shovel a few handfuls of something down his gullet and move on, Amalia believes in paying attention to what she is doing. She slices a tomato and some cheddar, melts a pat of butter in a pan, and grills herself a sandwich. It is cooling on the table and the pan is filling with tap water when the telephone rings.

“Hello, Amalia?” It is Mariko Van Horn. She's never called before, but that accent is unmistakable. There's a slight flutter to her voice; Amalia identifies it as the wobbliness of the initial reach toward a potential friend. Exacerbated, naturally, by the fact that Mariko is reaching not just out but up. Amalia chastises herself for the thought, but facts are facts. She is ten years Mariko's senior, and has her own career, and the few times they have met, brought together by their husbands, Mariko has watched Amalia with an admiration she probably thinks is subtle. Amalia has been flattered, and amused, and treated her with sisterliness. Older sisterliness. She likes Mariko, but Amalia has never extended any invitation to a greater closeness.

Liking the little black-eyed beauty is easy enough. Deciding whether to respect her is harder. Mariko is brave and tough and cactus-sharp, and everybody knows that she saved Albert's life. But when Amalia looks at her, she can't help thinking of the sad, hollow divorcées she teaches. Composing an opinion is further complicated by the irksome fact that Mariko seems to consider the two of them, as the spouses of irascible geniuses, to be colleagues. Amalia would sooner commiserate with fellow poets, fellow artists, even fellow mothers, than with fellow mistreated wives.

“Mariko,” Amalia replies, as if they chat daily, “so nice of you to call. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you,” Mariko responds by rote. Then she sighs. “I not been away from Albert one day since we meet, Amalia. I wake up today, I don't know what to do with myself. I already miss.”

Amalia sits before her sandwich, but she doesn't dare take a bite. “Do you miss him, Mariko? Or are you worried he won't be all right without you?”

There is a pause, and Amalia can feel her thinking it over. “You right. I more afraid than anything. I trust Albert now, much as I can. I know he gotta do. But I don't trust the world.”

“It's out of your hands. Besides, I'm sure he'll be fine. Tristan will look after him. Just try to enjoy yourself. Doesn't it feel nice to be alone?”

As she speaks, Amalia wonders: is Mariko calling because Tristan is on the road with Albert, or because she has no one else to talk to?

“Nice, but strange. Before I think about it, I already make breakfast for Albert this morning. I think I probably gonna do the same tonight, so I wondered if maybe you want to come over for dinner.” Mariko stops short, as if she hadn't expected to get it said so fast.

The invitation catches Amalia off-guard, with no excuse at hand. “Well, thank you, Mari. It's lovely of you to ask.” And it is, thoughtful and sad. Solitude, it seems, is so distasteful to Mariko that she cannot fathom Amalia's not being lonely with her man gone. Here, too, is Amalia's out if she wants it: the fact that she is not alone. She has a daughter to look after, and it's not like popping into the city is easy—it's a commitment, a two-hour trip. But there are three more whole days until Tristan returns, and perhaps an evening is worth forfeiting for Mariko, who dared make this phone call. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see who she is in Albert's absence, although Amalia guesses that unless she herself directs it elsewhere, conversation will revolve around the men.

Amalia smirks as she imagines radicalizing Mariko, arriving at this meeting of the abandoned women's club with a big bottle of booze and working Mariko into an unrecognizable, man-hating frenzy, so that when Albert comes home, he'll find his protectress transmogrified into a fearsome virgin war goddess. Linda can stay the night at Marcy's.

“What can I bring?”

“Nothing,” Mariko says happily.

         

New York City driving is not so bad when Tristan is beside her in the car, the two of them pointing out personal and joint landmarks and recounting their stories, but alone Amalia feels almost overmatched. Her skin prickles and her calves tense as she is funneled toward the massive arteries that are Manhattan's borders, and pumped through: another drop of lifeblood free to plot its course through the city's indifferent, blackened veins. Amalia flicks the radio off. The classical music she thought would soothe her infringes on her concentration, and she needs every bit for these next few minutes of navigation. Cars stream past her on the right and left. Amalia flinches with each honk.

The city she grew up in seems foreign now, threatening. She feels guilty over what it has become, as if by forsaking New York, she has doomed it to monstrosity. From time to time, Tristan still talks about moving back here. Threatens, really, since he knows it is the last thing she would ever want. Nor would he, but Tristan maintains a blustery reverence for New York's seething, compressed energy, its misery and hardness, its properties as a creative tonic. He speaks of it the way an ex-jock might speak of his high school football field, Amalia thinks, clicking her blinker and merging onto the West Side Highway.

Apartment buildings loom to her left, the Hudson shimmers to her right, and beyond it New Jersey glitters feebly. And here she is, speeding past the exits for Seventy-second Street, Fifty-sixth, Forty-second, alongside scores of others, suffused with an out-of-control sense that she is living in the future—that this accelerated, frenetic, largely unpleasant here and now is the tomorrow of her childhood, the future of the world into which she was born. It is not the kind of thought you can try for very long to explain to others. If they understand, they'll understand quickly, and if they don't, you'll only talk a rope of foolishness around yourself. Tristan would get it.

Amalia exits on Tenth Street, dodging potholes until she winds her way down to Third and MacDougal. She parks, double-checks to make sure all the doors are locked, and braces herself as she passes a convocation of rangy young people in woolen ski caps, their breath indistinguishable from their cigarette smoke, passing a fifth of Southern Comfort in front of Cafe Wha?

No one says a word to her. Why would they? Amalia reproaches herself as she continues up the block. Why would they take any note of me at all? Teaching seldom makes her feel old, but kids in their natural habitats have started to spook her. Before she knows it, she's turned the drinkers into the Arbiters of Art, the Grand High Council of Hipness, standing guard as if protecting the purity of The Scene against the invasion of the old, the moneyed, the unhappening. Amalia pictures them gathered in judgment inside their famed Village coffee-house, pronouncing her poetry frail and aged, something their parents would probably read.

She brushes the image away, tries to laugh. Allen Ginsberg wants to meet
her,
she reminds herself. Not six months ago, Albert introduced him to Tristan at some Village party Amalia had declined to attend, and Ginsberg talked on and on about her work, knew it backward and forward. Tristan glowed as he told her the story late that night, half-drunk adoration beaming from his eyes. It is when others praise her that he remembers who Amalia really is.

She imagines telling the Arbiters about Ginsberg by way of validation—fisting her hands on her hips and invoking their gods as they sit slumped over their scarred wooden table and their dirty coffee cups, turning full young lips to one another and whispering, “Man, who is this old crone?” covering their mouths lest they laugh in her face.

The door to the Van Horns' building is ajar and so Amalia walks in, shuts it behind her, strides past a gust of pissy, heated air and a bank of mailboxes, and climbs the stairs to 2A. Mariko opens the door before Amalia can knock a second time.

“Hello-hello,” she says, stepping back to let her guest enter. Amalia pays the toll before crossing the threshold: bends at the waist and presses her cheek against Mariko's in an exchange of air kisses. Mari's skin is softer than it looks, softer than Amalia's skin by far, and she is perfumed with a familiar, floral scent Amalia can't quite name. Her shoulder-length hair, though, smells like cigarettes—unavoidable if you smoke, and the reason Amalia keeps her own as short as fashion allows.

She hands Mariko a bottle of red wine and steps inside. A strange blend of excitement and apprehension washes over her, stronger emotions than an apartment usually has the power to provoke. Why, she wonders, has Tristan never mentioned that the Van Horns live in a home without walls? But no—it is more like the walls are invisible. There is a kitchen, a music room, a den. Everything is delineated, but nothing is enclosed. Even the bed, jutting from a far corner of the loft where two brick walls meet, is right out in the open. One Japanese screen rests flat against a row of windows and another stands unfurled between the dinner table and the sleeping area, segmenting the space but hiding nothing; it reaches less than halfway to the ceiling. The apartment is close enough to the ground to benefit from the glow of the down-turned streetlights, high enough to be impervious to their glare.

What an odd, honest way to live, Amalia thinks, eyes darting from the piano to the butcher-block peninsula, the paper blinds to the couch to the wardrobe by the bed. I would go crazy in a day.

Mariko stands with her arms folded, watching Amalia acclimate. “The house I grew up in so big, you never know where anybody is. Here, I always know where to find Albert, no problem.”

“Mmm.” Amalia drifts back toward the entryway. “But what if you want to lose him for a while? That must be quite difficult.”

Mariko smiles. “You teasing me, Ama.”

Amalia starts. No one has called her by that name in years. Her mother did not believe in nicknames for her daughter, and thus only Natalie's own mother—having endured the same insult when the former Natasha reinvented herself—had dared. Ama had sounded wonderfully delicate, deliciously illegal, when Grandma Elena said it. But the name died with the woman, almost fifteen years ago.

“Not at all, dear. I guess I just can't imagine what it's like never to want to be apart. You must be very much in love.”

Mariko stares up at the track lighting. Her mane rustles against the back of her long-sleeved dress. She gathers it into a ponytail, then lets it fall.

“It got nothing to do with love.” Mariko springs into motion, as if the conversation demands it: unsheathes the wine from its brown bag, sets it on the counter, plucks a corkscrew from a wall hook.

“I not love the man,” she resumes matter-of-factly, leaning over the bottle and twisting the metal coil into the cork until her elbow stands perpendicular to the ceiling. Amalia watches Mari leverage, pull, pop, unscrew cork from coil, spin to snatch two glasses from a shelf she has to rock onto her toes to reach.

“I love the music,” Mariko concludes as she tumbles wine into both glasses and sets down the bottle with a punctuation-marking clunk.

Amalia sidles to the counter. The combined effect of Mari's performance and her sentiment is manifesting as thirst. Without warning, the hostess launches into an athletic finale—lunges right, seizes a sponge, swipes it over a small red dribble, backhand-flicks it across her body and into the sink six feet away. Amalia suppresses applause.

Mariko hands her a glass, and finally looks Amalia in the eye. “Nobody understands. Not even my family. I don't expect. When I meet Albert, I never think, Do I love him? I just know he need me. What else can you do, Ama, when you find the person who need you most, and you know you can help him?”