End of the Jews (37 page)

The quest was as exhausting as it was unaccustomed, and soon Tristan stepped back from it. To die stoic and alienated and brimming with anguish, yes, that had long been part of the plan. To die in the grip of some horribly earnest attempt to set things right—to expire in the midst of a paroxysm of rectification, with your pants around your ankles and your thumb jammed up your ass—that was another story. A man should die the way he'd lived, not recant in his final hours. Addiction, as a cause of death, was respectable. Withdrawal was not.

         

“Tristan ready to go,” Mariko reported, picking her way down the back stairs and joining Amalia at the sink. She took up a towel and rubbed it over one of the breakfast plates glistening on the drying rack. A perfectly functional dishwasher stood within arm's reach, and yet here Amalia was, despite everything else she had to attend to, doing the dishes manually.

There was something meditative about standing with your hands under the warm running water, something pure and useful to the act of cleaning. But Mariko was the real reason she labored so. The woman had never owned a dishwasher in her life, and she wasn't about to put her trust in one now, so after meals the two of them became a small assembly line, rinsing and drying. Tristan's dishes, Mariko did alone. The dishwasher was still full of the knives and spoons and bowls he'd used before he'd stopped coming downstairs. Mariko probably didn't realize they were in there, festering. Amalia was almost constantly aware of it, but she had no intention of running the machine herself.

She rinsed the last fork, turned it in her hands, and waited for Mariko's eyes to give up and flit elsewhere. The past few days had been like this: Mariko feinting and fluttering, looking for an opening, and Amalia refusing to give her one, shutting down the moment Mariko opened her mouth to plead Tristan's case.

Yesterday, things had come to a head. Mariko had been a hair more caustic, Amalia a hair more resistant, and that had been enough to make everything flare up, then curl and char and blacken.

Amalia,
Mariko had said, walking into the living room wide-eyed and coltish, hands clasped in front of her,
your husband gonna wither away up there. He barely eats. You gotta do something.

Amalia had squeezed her blanket and continued reading, forced herself not to reply. Only after Mariko had given up and returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, had it occurred to Amalia that she'd behaved just as Tristan would have. She finished her chapter, closed the book, and followed Mariko. Not to apologize, but to be fair.

Amalia found her sitting at the kitchen table, holding a mug of black tea, staring at her own reflection in the dusty television screen. Amalia stood to one side, out of Mariko's sight line, and rested part of her weight against the back of a chair. She was giving Mariko the opportunity to repay her rudeness by ignoring her back, but Mariko looked up immediately. She didn't know that game.

He'll come down when he's ready,
said Amalia, softer than she meant it.

Mariko sat for a moment with her lips pinched tight.
Tristan a good man.

The sentence hit Amalia like a bucket of ice water. It was a declaration of allegiance, a formal withdrawl of sympathy. How foolish she had been to ever believe this woman loyal. It didn't matter how many card games they played, how many dishes they cooked or cleaned together. Whatever existed between them was secondary. Mariko served genius. Male genius. She understood nothing. She was as cold as she'd ever been.

You marry him, then,
Amalia said, and turned to leave—cheated out of a quick, angry exit by her own frailty. Nature's way of telling the aged that they shouldn't be embroiled in such drama, she supposed.

Why you so mad?
Mariko said before Amalia had made it three feet. The younger woman's arm uncoiled, shot toward the ceiling like the body of an exclamation point.
What he ever do to you?
She let it fall back to her lap, clenched her hand into a fist like a period, and shook her head.
He don't deserve this.

He deserves every second. That man has given me hell.

Mariko pushed back her chair, stood up as if she'd been waiting all week for this chance.
What hell? You want hell, try being married to Albert. My husband get high and then walk straight into the ocean! Until waves hitting him in the forehead, knocking him down! I have to rescue, Ama! My husband spend all our money on dope, and I gotta convince landlord not to throw us out into the street! Middle December! You hear me complain? Never! I take responsibility!

She drew herself up, held out a palm as if checking the air for rain.
What you ever do for Tristan? What he ever do to hold you back? Nothing! So what, he got temper? He writer! You know that when you marry him.
She threw up her arms.
This bullshit! You wanted to be poet, you fucking poet!

Mariko's fists dropped to her hips and stayed there. The two of them stood for a moment gauging themselves and each other.

Oh, Mari,
Amalia said at last, shaking her head.
You don't know the first thing about marriage, do you?

I know the first thing. I know you don't abandon, Ama. That the first thing and the last.
Mariko's face went blank, and she carried her teacup to the sink to empty, rinse, wash, dry it. Amalia stood and watched. Mariko moistened a sponge and wiped crumbs off the table, into a cupped palm. She pushed in chairs, shuffled newspaper sections into a neat stack. When there was nothing more to do, she strode out of the room, eyes trained on her path, and turned onto the back stairs. Amalia listened for a door to slam, but she got no such satisfaction.

Things she could have said to crush Mariko careened through Amalia's mind. You weren't a wife to Albert, she might have whispered. You were a manager, a bodyguard, and a groupie rolled into one, and he exploited you for forty-five years. And now he's gone, and what are you without him? Nothing. But what would have been the point? Mariko had made her peace ages ago, and each lie she'd told herself since then had glazed her like pottery, layer upon layer, until she was impervious to the winds of the world and trapped inside. Each lie Amalia had told herself had been a tiny tap against the sculptor's chisel boring its way into the crown of her skull, threatening to split her in two.

She'd nestled back into the couch and tried to read, and a few hours later, Mariko had walked into the living room and handed her an egg salad sandwich and a glass of orange juice. Amalia took them wordlessly, bewildered, and Mariko turned and walked away. Was this an act of self-assertion or negation? Apology or spite? It was as if with every gesture, Mariko wanted to prove she was the stronger of the two. That even her anger was not the master of her will.

Now, Amalia laid the fork on the dish rack and turned off the faucet. “I'll wait in my study,” she said over her shoulder, as if speaking to a servant, and walked away from Mariko.

The new room was no less oppressive. Amalia slumped back in her work chair until her chest was level with the broad mahogany desk she'd inherited from her father, and found herself listening for Tristan's footsteps above her. Perhaps she would have done nothing without him, been nothing. Her best poems would not exist, that much was certain.

         

“So let me get this straight,” said Tris, limbo-bending to check the knot of his tie. The mirror hung too low for such appraisals, but it provided a clear view of the queen-size bed abutting the opposite wall. Nina lay there now, vertically half-covered by a tan down comforter, listless and naked. “You're saying that if we get married, we can remake the concept of marriage into anything we want, and it doesn't have to be the same basically oppressive, deluded, mundane thing it's always been throughout history.”

Nina cat-stretched, arms and legs going momentarily rigid, then crossed her hands behind her head and tried to summon patience. “Right.”

“But why bother? Why don't we reinvent, say, slavery? Check it out, we'll sign some paperwork and officially you'll be my slave, but we'll reinvent the whole institution and make it what we want, and it'll be really cool.” He frowned, undid the tie, and started over.

“Why do you have to be such a schmuck all the time?”

Nina had floated the idea of marriage yesterday, as planned. She'd traipsed into the bedroom and plopped herself down on his lap after her shower, dressed only in a towel, smiled and wrapped an arm around his neck and said,
I think you should wife me up
—light, playful, sexy.

Tris had stiffened instantly, smiled back but not really and said,
Oh yeah?
instead of what he was really thinking, what his body told her by clenching up—not the muscles, exactly, but something deeper in: the mind, soul, heart, whatever. One of those things, maybe all of them, had blared
Hell no!
, and Tris had tried to be polite, and blink at her as if she was sweet and he was happily surprised, but she could see his brain whirring. She imagined it as a computer screen, filled with number columns scrolling furiously down as he searched for some way to joke himself out of this, put her off gently, and then suspected that there was none and sighed inwardly, resigned to a failed gentleness and the likelihood of his day disappearing in an argument. And such an absurd, depressing thing to argue over.

Since when are you into marriage?
he'd asked, touching her cheek, and for a moment Nina thrilled, thinking perhaps she'd read him all wrong and Tris meant
Me, too! I want it, too, but I've been scared to say so because I know how you feel!
But it wasn't that. It was a halting
Um, sorry, not interested
half apology, the other half not an apology at all, but passive-aggression. He was annoyed with her for putting him in the position of having to reject her, and for changing the rules, having an unsanctioned desire, one he couldn't—no, wouldn't—satisfy. It made Tris feel inadequate and at the same time in control, thought Nina; his refusal tipped the balance of power toward him, so far that it ceased to be a balance at all. She wanted something he'd denied, something perpetual that would stay wedged between them, keeping her on the high end of the seesaw, legs dangling in midair, and him on the heavy side, watching her flail for as long as he wanted. It even occurred to her that Tris knew more than he was letting on—had figured out, somehow, that she was in jeopardy and was punishing her for not telling him the truth. Or for something. Fuck.

She was on the verge of laying out the facts now, the visa part anyway, had almost reached that point of desperation. But after all this, how could she? More shame for her, more power for him. Plus, everything she'd said—every declaration of love, every argument about how marriage represented just the kind of intentionality their life together lacked—would be sullied, struck through with black ink like the censored letters her father had held under her nose as a child.

“Schmuck, huh?” Tris replied now, everything a game. “How you gonna speak Yiddish and be anticircumcision?” His knees creaked as he stooped to pull the cardboard shape-holders from a pair of shiny black split-toes he'd bought in Sicily while on tour with Albert. The guys in the band had all bought shoes, so Tris had, too. They'd sat at the back of the closet, unworn, for years, and then Nina had found them, told him they were slick. Now, they were his favorites.

“You've still got time to change your mind and come,” he told her, crossing in front of the bed.

“Hell no. Fuck that barbaric shit. Poor little Thaddeus.”

“Five thousand years of history, baby,” Tris called from the bathroom. “Or six. Whatever. Abraham had to do his own with a sharp rock. You know what they say: ignorance is bris.”

“It should be illegal. It's mutilation. Infants are extremely sensitive. I bet it's psychologically scarring, too.”

He poked his head out. “Another theory to explain how fucked-up the Jews are?”

“You didn't have a bris.”

“Yeah, but I was circumcised. Only difference is that nobody served lox and bagels afterward.”

Nina hugged her knees to her chest as Tris rooted through the laundry strewn across the closet floor, looking for his belt. “If we had a son, would you want him circumcised?” she asked.

Tris shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. It's like the most nonnegotiable, bare-minimum Jewish thing you can do.”

Nina shook her head. “I'd never allow it.”

He bent over the bed and kissed her forehead. “Then you'd better hope we have girls.”

She propped herself up on her elbows, hands over her breasts. “I don't understand how you can talk about kids like it's nothing, and be so scared by marriage.”

He fussed again with his tie, tightening, smoothing. She thought she caught the flicker of a smirk. “Yeah, I dunno. Just how it is, I guess.” He buttoned the top of his shirt, then tried to ease the constriction by sliding two fingers inside the collar and tugging. “I didn't say I was scared. I ain't never scared.”

More cavalier bullshit, Nina thought. More jokes. She pouted for a moment, then tried to be funny. “I don't think I'm so bad. Those Puerto Rican guys in front of the bodega all want to marry me.”

He was back at the mirror now, preening. “Yeah?”

“Sure. I get proposals every week.”

“I bet you do. What time is it?”

She slid halfway off the bed to peer at the ancient clock radio they kept underneath the frame because it was too ugly to look at. “Ten-fifteen.”

“I gotta bounce.” He kissed her on the small of the back before she could turn, then lingered there a moment, brushing his lips up her spine. Nina shivered.

“I love you. Don't marry the Puerto Ricans while I'm gone, okay?”

She flipped over, smiled, and gave him the finger as he walked toward the door. He smiled back, and for a moment Nina forgot why they were having this argument, and everything seemed casual and loose and normal. Then she remembered, and panic snapped at her with the force of a real living thing—a big-ass crab, an alligator. “I'm not making any promises,” she called out as he slammed the door. She lay there awhile, staring at the ceiling, listening to Brooklyn breathe, then decided she needed to talk to someone, and picked up the phone.