End of the Jews (4 page)

“Dolores.” The drummer beckons. “Come here a second, sugar.” She walks over to them, and Albert lays an arm across her thin shoulders. Dolores is every inch the schoolgirl: petite, with big brown cat eyes and obedient hair tied back into a ponytail that just brushes the collar of a blue cotton blouse. “Last call for food and drink, gents,” Albert announces. “Dolores's going on a little break.”

“Thank you for taking such good care of us, honey,” says one man. He stands, wobbily, and bends across the table to hand her a folded bill. Dolores takes it quickly, slides it into her skirt pocket. “You know Dee's my lucky charm,” he tells the others. “I was smart, I'd cash out right now.”

“But you ain't smart, Earl,” somebody calls from a couch.

“No, I'm not,” roars Earl, lifting his glass. “Sling the cards, Doc, sling the goddamn cards.”

Albert shuts the door behind them. “Tristan, meet Dolores. Figured the two of you might like some company your own age.”

Dolores flicks her eyes at Tristan and then crinkles her forehead at the drummer. “How old is he?”

“Don't ask me, girl, ask him.” Albert struts off toward the kitchen, leaving them alone.

Dolores drops her hands to her hips and gives Tristan the same impatient yet resigned look his cousin Gerty used to wear when she came to baby-sit.

“Well? How old are you?”

It's a fight-or-flight scenario. He's a nuisance and a fool and it is time he got back home. But Tristan draws himself up and says, “Old enough.”

Dolores giggles. “Old enough for what?”

Tristan is stumped. A Yiddish phrase his mother uses when she scolds the young ones jumps into his mind and then right out of his mouth.

“Old enough to know better.”

“Better than me?” Dolores folds her arms over her chest in a posture of aggression, or mock aggression. Tristan is not sure which, and he doesn't want to make any assumptions.

He raises his palms chest-high. “Old enough to know when to give up.”

“You give up pretty easy,” she replies with a wicked smile. “So what are you, anyway?”

“Well, I want to be a writer.” Saying it is easier this time, but no less exhilarating.

“No.” Dolores leans forward at the waist without uncrossing her arms, as if he is dumb or hard of hearing. “I mean what
are
you. Irish? Italian?”

“Oh.” Isn't it obvious? “I'm Jewish.”

She raises her hand to Tristan's face, so close that his cheek tingles in unfulfilled anticipation. “But you haven't got those curly things.”

“That's only if you're very religious,” he explains, charmed by her ignorance. This is the dream of every boxed-in kid in the neighborhood: to be around people who know nothing of him. “I'm hardly religious at all.”

The hall is empty save the two of them, and Tristan feels the space acutely after all the bodies he's brushed up against tonight. “I never go to synagogue,” he continues in the silence—in the noise, rather, which is loud and just around both corners, but in the silence of her voice. “I don't think I even believe in God. Not the Jewish God, anyway, the one who cares whether you eat meat and milk from the same dish.” A nervous laugh snorts from him. “I mean, the milk touches the meat when they're both part of the cow, right? And whose fault is that?”

It's an old joke, but not to Dolores. She laughs, and Tristan wonders what else he can reveal or retell to impress her. The joke about the
alta kocker
stuck on the desert island is a good one, but he doubts she'd understand the punch line about the guy building two shuls, one of which he prays in and the other of which he wouldn't be caught dead in. He imagines her repeating it to her friends at school on Monday, thinks about how the joke would change shape in her possession, and puts it from his mind.

“So this is your job?” he asks.

“Only once a month. The rest of the time, I just live here.”

“Oh. So Charles is your…” He waits for Dolores to fill in the blank with
brother, uncle, cousin.
Charles is too young, too agile and untrammeled, to fit with Tristan's conception of
father
.

Nonetheless: “My dad.” She narrows her eyes. “You know him?”

“We just met.”

“Oh. Can I ask you something? Is it true that Jewish people have to do it through a bedsheet with a hole cut out?”

With the exception of Leah Krasner, who lets boys touch her for money, no girl Tristan knows would ever say anything so bawdy in mixed company, and hearing Dolores ask the question so casually, so easily, is enough to make his dick stiffen. Tristan clamps his notebook under his arm, slides both hands into his trouser pockets, and tamps himself down, firing off a quick volley of cover-up laughter.

“Where in the world did you hear that?”

“It's not true, then?” He can't tell whether Dolores is relieved or disappointed. What else does she think about him? Then again, until a minute ago, the only folk Dolores recognized as Jewish were the Hasidim. A little imagination a few moments back, and Tristan could be a goy right now, footloose and fancy-free.

“Maybe if you're extremely, extremely religious. And by extremely religious, I mean crazy.” Dolores gives him a strange, sad smile.

“You're very curious,” he tells her, wanting to wipe the pity from her face.

“If I want to know something, I ask. What about you? Isn't there anything you want to know about us?”

The truth is, there is plenty, but nothing Tristan can put into words. Instead, he is surprised to hear himself say, “Can I see your room?”

It is not what Dolores expects, either. She gives him another of her odd, bemused looks, then says, “Sure,” and leads him down the hall. They stop before a narrow, unlit staircase. “It's up here.”

“You have two floors?” Another idiotic question from the young ambassador, but such luxury is so foreign to Tristan that he cannot stop himself.

The steps creak with each footfall, and Tristan is compelled to silence. There is a sweet sneakiness to this mission, this escape into private, and Tristan emboldens himself by remembering that he initiated it.

The upstairs is smaller, all bedrooms, and smells faintly of dampness, mold. Dolores leads him through the hall until they reach the end, and the only closed door. The floor buzzes with the noise of the party downstairs, but the click of the doorknob turning in Dolores's palm echoes through the corridor. Tristan stands behind her, trying to get a whiff of her hair, but it is saturated with the smoke of the gambling room, and he can only imagine the sweet haze he's sure encircled her before the guests arrived.

Tristan does not have to imagine for long, because as they enter the room, he is met with a blast of just the kind of womanly scent he's been trying to conjure. A little tray table full of cosmetics sits in one corner of the room with a plastic-framed vanity mirror atop it, tilted against the wall. It is so low that Dolores must have to kneel to see herself. The rest of the room, too, is almost miniature. The mattress is narrower even than his bunk bed; it lies on the floor below a down-sloping plane of ceiling, against a window covered with pink paper blinds. The bureau is stuffed with clothes, the open drawers jutting out almost halfway to the opposite wall.

It may be a glorified linen closet, but it is hers alone. He folds his hands behind his back and turns in a slow, appreciative circle, as if in a museum.

“My sister Lillian got married last year. Before that, I shared a room with my little sister Ida, down the hall.”

“How many kids in your family?” Tristan notices some pictures taped up by the bedside, clipped from newspapers and magazines. They are all of colored women. The only one he can identify is Josephine Baker, smiling coyly from beneath her feather plumes.

“Six. Seven, but my brother Michael died when he was a baby. You can sit down if you want.” Dolores is perched on the edge of the bed, her legs jutting out in front of her and her hands in her lap. She pats the place beside her and Tristan tosses his notebook to the ground and folds himself into it.

“Thanks.” He crosses his legs, rests his hands on his thighs. It is the only option the space offers.

“You know,” Dolores says, “I'm older than I look. I'll be eighteen November first. I'll bet you thought I was younger.”

Some neighborhood putz, quite possibly Sammy Fischer, once told Tristan that women always want to be mistaken for younger than they are. He wonders if that applies now; it seems doubtful. And anyway, you could fill Yankee Stadium with what Fischer doesn't know.

“I hadn't really given it much thought.”

She turns and grabs his hand. “My cousin Freda in Chicago is twenty-one. She has her own apartment and everything, and she said as soon as I finish school, I can come out and room with her. She's got a job as a cigarette girl in a supper club, and she's going to get me one, too, and introduce me to all the stars she knows.”

“That's great,” says Tristan with all the gusto he can put forth. The simple touch of her hand is wreaking havoc on his bodily self-control, and the last thing Tristan wants is for Dolores to notice what's going on beneath his strategically placed forearm. “What stars does your cousin know?” he asks, determined to keep Dolores's mind on the glitzy midwestern future until his dick realizes, as he does, that this girl is merely being friendly.

“Well, Freda told me that every weekend—” she is saying when the doorknob turns. Her voice cuts out abruptly, like a radio when the power fails, and her hand snaps back into her lap. Both of them stare at the rotating lump of brass for a moment, and then, as the door swings open and slams against the wall, Tristan and Dolores leap to their feet and stand as far apart as possible.

Standing at the threshold, with an unlit cigar wedged between two thick fingers and a woozy shimmer playing in his eyes, is one of the gamblers, a stout man with a pumpkin of a head. Perspiration beads where his hairline would begin, if he had one.

“Earl!” Dolores crosses her thin arms. “What do
you
want?”

It is no invitation, but Earl begins to shamble across the tiny distance between the door and the bed anyway.

“Thas jus' what I was gonna ask yo' friend here,” he drawls, the words soaked in liquor and a sluggish southernness. Earl pokes the cigar at Tristan and then parks it in his mouth while he retrieves a handkerchief from his back pocket and sops the moisture from his brow. “Little late to be collectin' the rent, ain't it?”

Earl is smiling as he says it, so Tristan smiles back. “The rent?”

“Thas what you're here for, ain't it? A nigger's money?” He turns to Dolores. “They like to wipe they ass with it. Own every damn building in Harlem and don't never repair shit. Just come around on payday. Tell her, Hymie.”

Tristan's hands clench and flex by his sides. Only the persistence of Earl's smile keeps them there.

“I think you've got the wrong man. My name's not Hymie, and I don't own a thing, pal.”

“Yeah, sure.” Earl splays a hand over his belly, rubs a small circle. “My mistake. Must be yo' daddy, owns this place. And I guess Charles fell behind on his payments, so your pa send you over to have a little fun with my niece here.”

He grabs at her elbow, but Dolores pulls away. “You're drunk, Earl. And I'm not your niece. Go downstairs. I'll bring you a coffee.”

Instead, Earl steps closer: right in front of Tristan, nose-to-nose—a distance that, in the Bronx anyway, in every schoolyard and on every street corner Tristan has ever known, implies the imminent failure of diplomacy. Tristan's stomach tightens and a lone drop of sweat eases its way down the curve of his armpit. Earl's face is still plastered with that fool's grin, but his eyes have changed. Or perhaps Tristan has failed to notice, until now, that there is something sharp and probing underneath the glassiness.

“You like colored poontang, huh?” He leans forward even farther, halving the space between them. The
p
pops, spraying Tristan with moisture. “You sheenies chase the dark meat every time.” Earl eye-checks Dolores, then rises to his tiptoes and hisses in Tristan's ear. “Think on what your daddy'd do, he caught me with his daughter. Cuz thas exactly what's gon' happen to you.”

What? Tristan thinks deliriously. My father would shake your hand, then go into his room and slam the door and scream at his wife about
schwartzes
and how she raised the kids wrong, until he keeled over on his face with a heart seizure.

“My father,” he says in a low voice, filled with pride and shame, “wouldn't do a thing.”

Earl throws back his head and cackles. Two flecks of gin spittle jump out of the fat man's maw and land on Tristan's lip, and the pride of the Jews thinks, Enough. Taunting he can handle, but to be cat-and-moused, fucked with for sport, is something else again.

“Your father—” Earl starts up, and when his hot breath hits Tristan, Tristan hits back: lifts both palms to Earl's chest and shoves, hard. The fat man careens backward, unprepared, and stumbles against the vanity tray table, flipping it end over end. Lipsticks and compacts sail through the air.

“Motherfucker!” He throws his saliva-soaked cigar to the ground and charges forward, right hand already cocked by his ear—a ridiculous posture, and a clear indication that Earl has not fought in years. He might as well send over a telegram detailing his plan of attack.

The fat man's arm uncoils with surprising speed, obvious power, but getting clear of the blow's trajectory requires only the simplest of sidesteps, and before Earl can regain his balance, Tristan's own fist is in motion and then a painful sting is surging through his hand as his knuckles slam into the hard bone of his antagonist's blubbery cheek.

Earl staggers. Dolores lets loose with a piercing scream, and Tristan glances over at her—foolishly, since another quick blow might have dropped Earl and now, instead, he's ratcheted himself into a boxer's pose, bent at the knees, protecting his face with his forearms, remembering whatever he once knew about scrapping or maybe just doing his best Joe Louis impression as blood pools beneath his nose.