Inventing Memory (11 page)

Of course, Papa was the one who brought me your book—because he
knew it would hurt me. The harsh portrait of the mother who drives
everyone, including herself, but is a hypocrite for "giving up her dreams."
Do you think you are the first daughter in history to feel this way? Every
daughter is taught to blame the mama and exonerate the papa! That is
how the papas stay in power. If mamas and daughters ever formed a
union—that would change everything! But instead we fight each other,
and the papas go free like the capitalist bosses.

Perhaps you will understand when you have a daughter of your own.
Darling, what I understand now is that we are all part of a chain. We
are ripples in a river.

As on a rosebush, the single rose does not matter, but the stumpy
root with its stubborn life. Like a vine, not the grape itself, but the
gnarled, pruned stalk.

What we pass along is life. The leaves drop, the grapes rot, the rose
withers—but the sap has been transferred. It is life—by any name. Grasp
it. Seize it. Write what you like about me, about anyone. Find your own
truth—and follow it to the ends of the earth…. I love you, my heart, my
own, mayne libe….

Mama

[This letter, dated 13 April 1932, was also apparently never sent. Ed.]

EXCERPT FROM
A BAD GIRL IN PARIS

Vassily says that anonymity is the secret of art. Vassily sits at the mirror, squeezing his pimples. When one goes
ping
against the glass, he is jubilant and brings it to me to share the white worm in the bloody chancre. It is the only orgasm he can have. Vassily was wounded in the war. Which war? I ask, I always ask, as if that would answer anything.

—All wars, no wars, he says.

And then I am in the Hôtel des Etats-Unis with Val. He claims to have an unbreakable bone in his prick, but I will break it. I will swallow it whole again and again till it stays wilted.

But no! Up it pops again, harder than before. What am I—an houri, one of the Bacchae, that I can harden pricks so reliably? All over Paris—in the Dôme, the Select, the Dingo, the Ritz, the
Closerie des
Lilas—
pricks are hardening and preparing to spit their white worms like Vassily's pimples…. And I came here to write a book. Left America so I could chronicle America. But the last thing we need at the end of the world is another book! The last book for the end of the world! All over Paris, books are dying for lack of faith, lack of pus, lack of maggots.

Now we are on Val's bicycle, rolling along the Seine. The sun sparkles from the river to my nipples, Val's indefatigable prick is in my reamed out cunt, and all is right with the world. O delirium of foiling death! Prick of Ages! Thank you God for making me a woman.

I collaborate with the Cosmos! I fuck saints and savants, syphilitics and Seventh-Day Adventists, cannibals and choirboys.

My cunt encompasses the universe. It is vast as the upper and lower kingdoms and mythological as The Land of Fuck. Yes, I say to Val, as he watches me swallow all the pricks of history—yes, my cunt contains multitudes…. It ruminates on the ravages of history, meditates on Maya, contemplates Karma, antagonizes Isis and Osiris, hugs Horus, undoes Diana and her dogs (or are they stags?). It reaches from St. Sulpice to Broadway, from Sunset Boulevard to the primal volcano—yes, it is the cunt of creation….

NOTEBOOK—UNDATED, 1932

One of the best things about Paris is the constant stream of visitors to whom one can show off one's superior knowledge of the City of Light.

Uncle Lee and Aunt Sylvia are here, staying at the Ritz. They took me to Lapérouse, and I reciprocated by letting
Innuendo
make them a party—which everyone but Mrs. Wharton attended.

They were all there—from Kiki to Kuniyoshi, Miss Stein to Sam Beckett, Val Miller to James Joyce.

How the great ones
avoid
each other! Still, there was a moment when Beckett, Joyce, and Miller all pulled up chairs near each other, but they were accosted by their sycophants and admirers before they could speak a word.

To Miss Stein, however, the very fact of the chairs being pulled up connotes conspiracy.

"A chair is a chair is a chair is a chair is a chair is a chair," she says. "And where three chairs converge, it is a men's club, and
chair
means flesh in French."

"What do you think of his work?" I hear Jolas—or perhaps it was McAlmon—ask Joyce.

"Whose work?"

"Oh, him…," said McAlmon nonchalantly (or was it Jolas?).

Joyce looks dimly through unseeing eyes and does not recognize Miller. "Poached eyes on ghost," as Bloom says in
Ulysses.

"Trash," he says. "In Ireland we set the dogs on men like that."

Another writer is berating Sam Beckett for imitating Joyce: "His mannerisms are not what make him the genius he is. Rather his
brain
."

"The brain is an overrated organ," says Val.

My uncle Lee loves that—and how! He thinks Val is
corking
! (Ever since he made a pile in linen supply and changed his name from Leonid Solomon to Lee Swallow, he's gone soft on artistic types. His dream is to elevate himself from linen supply to show business. "Restaurants are entertainment, aren't they?" he says.) Just as Mama's ambition is to make painting
pay
, Lee's ambition is to turn business into art. This is the grand canyon that divides first-generation Jewish-American families: The artists want to be businessmen, and the businessmen want to be artists!

Val meanwhile is taking the measure of Aunt Sylvia's silk-stockingclad knee, admiring her white instep under a diamanté buckled strap.

"More bubbly for Mr. Valentine!" she orders.

"You look as young as your niece," says Val cannily.

This has the desired effect on Aunt Sylvia, who dimples like a bride. (She met my uncle in London, where her family tarried for several months on the way to America. From a well-to-do timbermerchant family in Odessa, she was staying with her married sister in the East End of London. Even though Leonid was a greenhorn, she saw in him the brute ambition that would make him rich, so she hitched her wagon to his rising—sanitary—star. Which indeed became the name of the business: Sanitary Star Linen Supply.)

Sylvia has come to Paris to shop, and her husband has come to Paris to get fucked. I figure it is my job to facilitate both simultaneously, if possible.

This is where Val comes in.

"Take my uncle to the Rue des Lombards or Rue Quimcampoix and get him fucked," I tell him, "and we'll meet you at Les Halles for breakfast." And while Val goes cunt crawling with Uncle Lee, Sylvia and I go back to the Ritz and flirt with gigolos in the bar. Then we order gin fizzes and plan our shopping trip for the next day.

Sylvia and I are only twelve years apart, and we had our hair bobbed on the same day back in New York. She is as dark as I am auburn, and has a heart-shaped face, Cupid's-bow lips, one adorable dimple, and a wardrobe full of Paris frocks. She believes in style above all things. I think my uncle married her because he
knew
he was a greenhorn who needed reforming. She never interferes with his pleasures but extracts ransom in the form of jewelry for each lapse. She is one of those women who know how to turn male guilt into diamonds. I have never possessed that skill.

Her fingers glitter with rocks of various sizes. Even her cigarette holder has real rubies in the band where you unscrew the two halves. She has a platinum swizzle stick and matching cigarette case, and she collects jewelry the way other women collect shoes.

"If God had meant us to sleep with men for nothing, He wouldn't have made diamonds," she says. She is a regular Russian-Jewish Lorelei Lee.

When we get to Les Halles at seven, the boys (as she calls them) are not there. In fact, they don't turn up for forty-eight hours. Sylvia is supremely unruffled.

She looks at her tiny platinum Cartier watch.

"The longer he plays, the more he pays," she says.

The shopping that goes on in the next two days is inspiring. An art form in itself. If Cocteau could make a film of it, we would really know the toy shop of a woman's heart.

"You and your mother," Sylvia says, being fitted for a whole evening and daytime wardrobe at Chanel, "
give
it away. That's the biggest mistake a girl can make."

"Do you think Mama ever had an affair?" I ask—like a little girl inquiring about Santa Claus.

Sylvia rolls her eyes. "Don't press me," she says.

"What do you mean?" Now I am alarmed.

"Your mama is a peach. Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."

I stare at Sylvia and see that she is torn between the urge to gossip and the urge not to.

"Your mama was a follower of Emma Goldman," she says.

"So…?"

"Someday ask her about your uncle Sim," she says, and then I cannot get another word out of her.

When Val and Uncle Lee come back, red-eyed, staggering, they both look very pleased with themselves. Until I say:

"And who is Uncle Sim?"

"
Oy vey
," says Uncle Lee. "Let's just call him your mama's
shabbas
goy
."

NOTEBOOK—UNDATED, 1932

Books that influenced me growing up:
This Side of Paradise, Winesburg,
Ohio, The Green Hat, Flaming Youth, The Sheik, Renascence and Other Poems.
Didn't know
Ulysses—
except by rumor—until I came
here
. But the feeling of the books, the jazz, the poems, the artists' costume balls, the Village speaks (like Three Steps Down, et cetera), led my generation to believe that sex was invented between 1920 and 1922. We were
certain
that our own parents had never known or sought such raptures.

[The durability of this delusion is amazing. Is it perhaps a necessary delusion,
enabling youth to break out of the Oedipal shadow long enough to mate and
pass along the flame? Ed.]

NOTEBOOK—UNDATED, 1932

Papa arrives in Paris soon after Sylvia and Lee go home (burdened by boxes and—it turns out—the clap).

Papa is no Ritznik. He stays on the Left Bank in a ratty hotel he remembers from his days as a poor artist who had walked from Russia.

He is
amazed
at the paintings I have hanging around my bohemian flat—by now I am living on the Rue des Saints Pères—and he begs me to bring home as many as I can.

"But, Papa, I am never coming home," I say.

"We all promise this," says Papa. "We all come home in the end."

He looks old. His shaggy beard is streaked with gray. His broadbrimmed black hat and flowing cape make him look like a ghost of the Belle Epoque. He still says "To mine opinion" when he wants to issue a philosophical dictum.

"Mama has never written me a letter," I say. "She's angry."

"Maybe you are
broykis
with her. By her, you never pick up a pen. You should see how she looks when she asks that
yenta
Sylvia for news of you. Her heart could break."

"So could mine."

"How could you—a baby—have a broken heart? Mama, she kills herself to earn a piece of bread."

"She lied to me."

"Never! Bite your tongue!"

"Remember Nana's favorite saying: 'A tongue is the most dangerous weapon'?"

"So
nu
?"

"So who is Sim Coppley, and why did Mama paint his portrait?"

There is a long pause.

"This is something your
mamele
should be the one to tell you."

"But Mama is not here and you are, and I need to know!"

"Let me tell you something else first, and then we'll see…."

I can see that Papa is settling in for some serious storytelling, so I put on the kettle for tea.

"Everybody talks about
pogroms
in Russia, but nobody born in America knows what means
pogrom
. Imagine nine little boys, too young to be
bar mitzvah
, laid out in the
shul
. Imagine their sweet faces—
cheder
boys dead for nothing. Maybe they were the
lucky
ones. Luckier than boys who went to the army for twenty-five years—or tried to shoot off a toe and shot off something else instead."

"Papa!"

"You don't know. We were so poor some people made a living picking rags or flicking chickens. That was already a
good
job…. My mother, of blessed memory, may she rest in peace,
oleha ha-sholom
, was a ragpicker, and when she died, Papa could not keep the family together. My sisters went to work as maids or factory girls. I began to walk to America. But I was caught. And sent back to the town where I was born, the town on my papers, where nobody I knew was left alive. I was only fifteen. I thought myself a man, but I was a boy. And the big fear was being caught by the
khapers—
the kidnappers for the Czar's army. You can't imagine…."

"I can't."

"You felt like a trapped rat. You cursed God, the Czar, the capitalists. You would do any crazy thing not to go to the army, to get away from Russia, and if you met with a group of good talkers who gave you bread, you would believe whatever they told you. In jail, I fell in with such people. They filled my head with anarchist
narishkeit
, the dignity of the common man, the uselessness of wealth, the writings of Bakunin, the Internationalist Socialist Congress held in Paris in 1889, at which May Day was proclaimed the holiday of the laboring classes….

"Angry and rebellious, I sought theories to clothe my rage, and theories were always more plentiful than food in Russian jails.

"A plot was hatched to escape when the next transport came. We were taken by filthy cattle car from town jail to town jail until, by slow degrees, we were brought home—or to our place of birth.