End of the Jews (32 page)

His life began and ended in the Bronx. There, Irving brawled in the streets until he learned to brawl with words, and there he returned when his wife finally tired of his self-obsession and his infidelities (always committed with his social betters, WASP women whom Irving fucked out of hostility toward his friends, their husbands) and the cannons blasting ceaselessly inside his mind. He exiled himself to the tenement house passed down to him when his father died, rather than extricating his finances from his wife's. And there, a desert of a man, fifteen years estranging him from his last novel, Irving tried to kill himself but, having decided to stick his head in the oven, could not get the flame to light. He resolved to asphyxiate on carbon dioxide; his car refused to start. There was no rope in the house, and Irving did not trust himself to locate an artery with a knife. He wandered into the war-torn streets—intoxicated by the fact that his failure to create art and sustain love had now become a failure even to destroy himself—thinking that if he presented himself with sufficient insouciance, one of the blocks' adolescent thugs would surely shoot him.

Instead, this being 1982, Irving Gold stumbled across ex–Savage Skulls gang members turned graffiti masters, and soon he was sucking the marrow from their lives, smoking angel dust with kids sixty years his junior, and writing again. It was not the first time a ghetto darker than Irving Gold's had vitalized him, though it would prove to be the last.

“Writers gotta write what they know,” Mariko proclaimed, tapping Tris's forearm with the hand laced through it. “Cannot bullshit.”

“Right.” The hotel was just across the street. He could see the awning fluttering in the breeze.

“Just like music. Musicians gotta be honest, above all.” She shook her head from side to side. “Albert so honest. Everything he do, Tris. He never bullshit. Albert care
so much.
”

“He was a great man, Mariko.”

“Problem with young people, you all bullshit. America the culture of the cheeseburger.”

Tris walked her across the lobby, to the elevator. When Mariko got going on this one, the only thing to do was nod.

“Everybody want fame, nobody want to study. Make me sick. Albert know whole
history
of music. Not just jazz; classical, African, everything! He never stop practicing. That what make the artist. Your grandfather, too. He know. He tell the
truth.”

The doors opened and she stepped inside. “I'm on the ground floor,” Tris said. “Can I take you upstairs, Mariko?”

“I'm fine. You can go, Tris, thank you.” She regarded him across the elevator's threshold.

“Must sacrifice,” Mariko said, pointing her finger as the doors pinged and began to slide. When they were only inches apart, her eyes fluttered closed, and Tris saw her wobble at the knees. He tried to hold the doors, but it was too late. Tris strode over to the stairwell, hauled himself up three flights, and made it to Mariko's floor in time to see her drifting toward her suite in stocking feet, one pump dangling loosely from each hand.

CHAPTER
TEN

T
ristan sat at his desk, furious, staring into space. There was no getting around it: he wrote like an old man now. The simple slowing of his recall, the fact that the right word no longer bobbed straight to the surface of his mind but swam languorously upward and broke through gasping for air, was the least of it. More crippling by far was that his understanding of people had eroded. The world had grayed as he had. It was not the gray of complexity, but the gray of remoteness, the gray that faded to black. He questioned his footing with every step. Was he interpreting things right? Did people think the way he believed they did? Act for the thin reasons he gave them?

His characters noticed his unsteadiness and began to mistrust him. They looked at Tristan and saw an old man who would muddle or forget their secrets, and so they divulged nothing, humored him by making meaningless conversation. It was infuriating, trying to work with such people. Tristan had had reluctant characters in the past, but he'd overpowered them with persistence and wile, stalked them until he caught them in some moment of privacy or paradox and then blackmailed them for everything he needed. All he could do now was play the sympathetic geezer. Sit on a park bench, throwing crumbs to pigeons, and hope someone would shoulder in beside him and start telling his life story.

But Tristan was too fearsome, even in decline, to pull off such a ruse. So for the past—what was it? Four years? Five? That seemed impossible, but they passed so quickly now, represented such a small percentage of his life. Let's see: he'd published
Rage Against It All
when he was seventy-six and he was eighty now, and he'd finished that a year before it pubbed, so yes, five years. For five years, he'd written chapter after chapter about the same goddamned asshole prick of a 1930s Bronx bookmaker and his cunt bitch Sicilian wife and his faggot rabbi brother and their fucking parents and their shithead kids.

The inspiration that had washed over him and midwifed
Rage
was gone. Tristan glimpsed it sometimes from a distance, the way a man hallucinates an oasis in the desert. Even the memory of
Rage
was disappearing, both the writing of the book and the vindicating swirl of celebration surrounding its publication, the feeling of being welcomed back from exile. The revelation that now that his absence had been bookended, it would be attributed to greatness, contribute to his mystique. As if it hadn't been hair-tearing frustration and self-censorship, but some heroic, cloistered discipline that had prevented him from publishing anything but the occasional short story since '73.

Rage
might as well have been a dream. Here he was at work again, struggling his ass off, and past success, recent or distant, had no bearing on the matter.

Amalia would say that was precisely the problem—had said so, in fact, as recently as last week, when he'd moped downstairs for dinner, apologized in advance for his disinclination to make conversation, and then sat there immersed in his own blue thoughts, bringing fork to mouth.

Can't you derive any satisfaction from happy memories, Tristan? If nothing else, don't they provide some indication that things might work out again in the future?

No,
he'd replied after chewing it over.
I guess I can't.

Well then, how about pretending I'm someone worth faking a little sociability for?
she'd said, laying her utensils against the edge of the plate and crossing her fingers beneath her chin.

Tristan had looked up reluctantly, the way a brontosaurus might lift its head out of the vegetation upon hearing a noise. Amalia had batted her eyelashes at him. Trying to lend the remark some levity, no doubt.

You're worth
not
faking for,
he'd said, hoping that meant something to her. It did to him. But she had only sighed and reached for her fork. He'd wished he had a scene to show her, something so rich and right that she would look at him over the top of the page with that small I-know-a-wonderful-secret smile she used to get, and say,
Oh. Tristan. This is very good.
He'd wished she had a poem to show him. But Amalia didn't ask him to read her work anymore.

Now Tristan dropped his elbows onto the desk and rubbed his eyes, trying to clear away a sudden fatigue. There were three things he could do with this alleged book, these insufferable mounds of paper. He could dump everything in his editor's lap and tell him to make a novel of it; that was what would happen if Tristan were already dead. He could abandon the project to history's dustbin, as he had three before. Or he could soldier on until he located and told the story, which at this rate might be never. The prick's son was him, for Christ's sake, was essentially Tristan at age twelve, and he couldn't even write that. He'd had to call Benjamin last week and ask him what subway ran from Boston Road to the Lower East Side, something Tristan had known his entire life. Ben hadn't been able to remember, either, and the two of them had sat there on the phone, racking their brains. Finally, Ben had asked his wife, Dora, a girl—girl! he sounded like his mother; Dora was seventy-three now, and half-blind—from the old neighborhood, and she had told them.

Tristan heaved himself up out of the cracked leather chair, slammed his office door behind him, and grabbed hold of the staircase bannister as if it were an old friend's wrist. He dipped his left foot over the edge of the first step, then brought his weight down. Tristan's hand slid farther along the railing, and the right foot joined the left. He thought of a passage from one of his books, in which a man was described by his usurper:
He went from taking the steps two at a time to taking each step twice
. The words were jubilant and scornful in the young man's mouth.

Tristan was in the pantry, filching a cookie, when the doorbell rang. The sound was an anomaly. The Brodskys' home was never locked, for reasons of both hospitality and convenience, and everyone knew it. Guests admitted themselves, hollered greetings, followed the sounds of the replies until they located a resident.

“Who could that be?” he said aloud, on the off chance that his wife might be within earshot. Or his daughter; he could hear Linda and Abe bustling around in the kitchen, which was why he had steered clear of it.

Amalia appeared behind him. “It's Mariko.”

He turned. “Van Horn? What is she doing here?”

“Your grandson invited her to Thanksgiving—you are aware that it's Thanksgiving, I hope. That was him on the phone.”

“Well, let her in, let her in!” Tristan shuffled past her and Amalia followed him into the foyer, astounded by the simplicity of her husband's response. Did he not remember that she had just last month declined to accompany him to Albert's funeral so as to avoid this woman—Albert, whom she'd loved, whose death had prompted her to set aside the manuscript she had due so that she might compose an elegy for him? Did Tristan not recall or simply not care that Amalia had refused to invite Mariko into this house for decades, that the two of them had fought about it and she had held firm for once, told him,
I don't like the way she treats people, Tristan. Especially Albert,
and he had leaned forward, all chin, and said,
Who are you to judge?

But what was there to say now, with Mari standing at the threshold? It was Amalia who'd squandered the hour since Tris's phone call, standing in the bathroom dolling herself up instead of walking down the hall and telling her husband who was coming to dinner. The only thing to do now was open the door and try to summon up some grace.

“Mari. Welcome.” The way Tristan's hug engulfed the tiny woman reminded Amalia of a hawk descending on a field mouse.

“So good to see you, Tristan,” Mari said when he released her. She reached back to grab the handle of her suitcase, still festooned with baggage-claim tickets. Tris had said she'd be coming straight from the airport. “I moving in,” she joked, wheeling the mammoth thing over the welcome mat.

Tristan boomed a laugh. His public laugh. Amalia took a step forward and smiled. “Hello, Mariko.”

“Ama!” Mariko shrugged free of her wrap and rushed over to embrace her. She still had her nimbleness, Amalia thought, her coiled, catlike energy. She was still the woman who'd heaved drum cases as big as she was into vans, the woman who'd carried Albert on her back. But my God, it was like hugging a dead sapling.

The two women pulled back, and Amalia wondered how she looked to Mari after all this time. Her eyes were not what they'd once been to look at; the pupils were cloudy, crossed with broken capillaries, and the flesh around them sagged away, so that, Amalia sometimes joked, she seemed to have regained her wide-eyed innocence.

Mariko's face, when Amalia got the chance to really look at it, was fascinating in its devastation. Her hair was still teased into the same black mane, but from the forehead down, Mari was bones and makeup. The black felt pantsuit hanging from her smelled of Albert: a rich, warm greasiness that conjured thoughts of a big southern meal. Amalia resolved to feed Mari, if Mari would let herself be fed. She had not expected to feel such sympathy, but how could you be angry at hardness when that hardness had so savaged its possessor?

“What are you drinking, Mariko?” asked Tristan from the fold-down wet bar built into the near wall of the living room.

“What you having, Amalia?” It was an odd gesture of deference, letting the hostess set the terms of consumption, but Amalia appreciated it.

“I'm going to have a very light gin and tonic,” she said, unable to remember the last time she'd taken a drink so early in the day.

“Same for me, please.”

Tristan passed the drinks over, hands slightly shaky, then raised his glass of Glenlivet, neat, chest-high.

“To old friends.” The liquor's warmth trickled through him and the sensation, combined with Mariko's adoring gaze, carried Tristan back in time, reminded him of himself forty years ago, when the words had simply flowed onto the page. Before he knew it, he'd poured the whole glass of scotch down his throat. Amalia gave him a sharp look,
What do you think you're doing?
, and for a moment Tristan was cowed because he didn't know. Then he realized that his wife thought he was showing off for Mariko, proving he was still the man of violent intake and vicious insight she'd always considered him. All geniuses were crazy to Mariko, beginning with her husband. Sure enough, her face was lifted to his, lit with affectionate shock.

Tristan turned back to the bar and refilled his glass, more out of custom than desire, then joined the women on the living room couch. He crossed his legs, placed his drink on his thigh, and leaned over to tap Mariko on the knee.

“How are you holding up, old girl?”

She closed her eyes and nodded several times before she answered. “Better. Every day, better. I want to thank you again, Tristan. Your speech so beautiful.” She smiled at Amalia. “When he finish, whole church crying. You gotta make a copy for me.”

“It sounds like it was a beautiful service,” said Amalia. “I'm so sorry I couldn't make it.”

Why couldn't she? wondered Tristan. Had Amalia been ill? And then, as he sat and watched his wife and Albert's widow chat about the florist and the caterer, a long-forgotten string of words hit Tristan in the chest:
I will not have that woman in my house.

“I don't know,” Mariko was saying when Tristan tuned back in, returning to a present seemingly unrelated to that past. Amalia's face was tilted toward her guest's, trying to coax Mari's eyes up from her lap. “I so used to the road, I probably go crazy at home. And somebody gotta keep Albert's music alive. But you can see, Ama”—Mariko deposited her gin and tonic on the coffee table, then laid her arms out straight, as if about to donate blood—“I not young woman no more.”

“Neither am I,” Amalia said, and wondered what she meant. I'm older and wiser than I was the night you broke my heart? Age and time mean nothing; we are who we've always been? She willed Mariko to get it, and a flush of heat spread over her as Amalia remembered this sensation. She had felt it lying in Mari's bed that morning: an urgent desire to be understood better than she understood herself. And for the kindness that, surely, came with it. She had not received it then—or anytime since—but as soon as she recognized the longing, Amalia realized she felt it still.

“I don't think you have to worry, Mariko,” said Tristan, and at the sound of his voice, Amalia started. During the few moments it had taken her to unravel her emotions, her husband had vanished from the world. “Albert's music will be here long after we're all dead and buried.”

Mariko nodded. “Like your novels,” she responded. “And your poems, Ama.” She didn't quite seem to connect his comment to the question of her future. But that was Mariko; she could embrace both the belief that Albert's music was eternal and the notion that it was her obligation to work herself to death ensuring it lived on.

“I think it's nice that Tris went with you,” Amalia offered, desperate to say something pedestrian. “I hope he was a comfort.”

“Tris grow up into a man! Albert and I so proud of him. Second book supposed to be the hardest, no?”

“They're all the hardest,” Tristan grunted. “It's a rotten business.”

“Well,” Amalia began, though it felt ridiculous somehow, grotesque, to have a prim domestic conversation, a little chat about family, in front of Mariko, “maybe we can do more to help him, this time.”

Mariko's lipstick had left a perfect impression on her glass, Amalia noticed. It was the same bright stuff she'd always worn. The shade and viscosity would have overwhelmed Amalia's face, reduced her to constant self-consciousness, but on Mari it was garishly beautiful.

Amalia felt the sudden need to escape, and stood. “I think I'll see if I can help the kids cook.” It occurred to her, too late, that Mari might offer to follow, that it would be the polite thing to do. But the moment passed and Mariko stayed where she was.