Watch Your Mouth (16 page)

I couldn’t look at Cyn as Zhivago pushed me into the hallway. I didn’t want to see where she had gone as the door slammed: into the room, or after me, or into the arms of somebody else. Mimi was right:
unbelievable,
all this sordid incest, the monster in the basement, all the lies and bedroom sneaking and signif- icant looks over meals, all this illness and looming death, all blossoming like horrid tulips from a filthy mind.
Mine
. I stum- bled out of the Osteopathy Ward and vomited into a little thicket of greying plants somebody had stuck in the middle of the parking lot, some vague and fruitless decoration. It didn’t belong there. I heaved again, and put my face into my hands like I was removing stage makeup. How can you see this? The curtain has fallen, that’s how, and the three men finish the scene at the edge of the stage.

I took my hands away and looked up at the hot, wet sky, beating down at me like I was hung out to dry. My chest was

beating with breath. I sounded like I was sobbing. But as I looked around the scraggly lot it wasn’t me; it was Stephen, not five feet from me, crouched against the smooth cement of the hospital wall and sobbing. He turned and faced me, but I wouldn’t speak to him. Now that they were out of sight, Mimi could get up out of bed and shake hands with Zhivago over a scene well played, but I needed to stay silent and out of sight. If I spoke, I thought I’d crumble, like a golem is supposed to if it ever opens it mouth, if you know what I mean. And you
do:
I know that deep down, you know what I’m talking about. Ste- phen walked closer and closer to me but I didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod. If I opened my mouth, I knew I’d crumble with the knowledge of what I saw there in Mimi’s hospital room, which as the audience fidgets is taken apart as Mimi and Zhi- vago walk out a back way, to await their curtain calls.

“What—what happened?” Stephen asked me. “Did any- thing—is she—what happened?” The words rattled in my mouth like a bite of something, but I didn’t answer. Stephen looked at me, and then past me and his face went dark. A shadow fell over us as Ben approached, but I barely noticed. As Ben and his son glared at one another, I sat right down in the parking lot and tried to sort it out:
unbelievable.
Mimi collapsing by the side of the river, having slipped from the house in the middle of the night, carrying—
unbelievable
—a clay man she had constructed in the basement. And then, sitting up in the complicated metallic bed, her pale hospital face framed with her unwashed hospital hair, that hospital grimace of pain and some- thing else, something which nobody would believe. What, this summer, had I made up, pieced together like something in Arts

& Crafts?

Ben sat down next to me, our legs sloping straight off the curb, downhill. We were all downhill from here. Stephen was stalking off, even further downstage. Ben sighed and turned to meet my eyes but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say it. I knew what I had seen, and I couldn’t say it. There, stored in my mouth, were all the words of what I had seen but I had to keep them there. The hospital room was all dismantled, the cemetery almost constructed for the final scene, and I couldn’t say any- thing. I knew what the words were—
Mimi, sitting up on the

complicated metallic bed, her pale hospital face framed with her unwashed hospital hair and plastered with that hospital grimace of pain, and her legs, bent at the knee, angled up towards her chin like she was stretching them.
I looked at Ben’s legs, and my own, and felt the words clearly behind my teeth:
Bent at the knee. Bent at the knee.
But I didn’t say anything. The opera was ending, and like all opera endings the bodies were going to pile up. If I didn’t speak, if I sat quietly like a child unable to inquire, mine wouldn’t be one of them. If I watched my mouth maybe I’d live. “Can I tell you something?” Ben asked me, quietly, finally,

but I put my hands over my face again, like a curtain.

ACT IV, SCENE TWO

Before the curtain rises, the chorus finally sings. Fans of the composer will call it an act of genius to save a chorus until the final scene, but the choristers will call it a gold mine; while the main characters have to show up early for makeup and cos- tumes, the chorus gets to wander in sometime around the sec- ond act and stand backstage in sweats for their big scene. None of those powdered wigs for the grand chorus-party in
La

Traviata,
or the black dust of stage-grimy Jews in
Die Juden.
It’s an easy gig, a Perfect Crime: You go in, you go out, nobody gets hurt.

The text is from the prayer book that Rabbi Tsouris read at the grave—so polite! So earnest! The muted green cover, and that respectful, respectful font:
In Contemplation of Death,
the heading reads, but the rest is set for unaccompanied, four-part offstage chorus.
The Name, Creator of the Universe and all that lives, I pray for healing and continued life yet I know that we are all mortal. If only my hands were clean and my heart pure! Alas, I have committed many wrongs and left so much undone! And yet I also know the good I did and the good I tried to do. May that goodness impart eternal meaning to my life. Blessed is The Name, Ruler of the Universe, the righteous Judge.

“The Name” is undoubtedly Tsouris’s favorite little quirk, rather than “Lord” or “King” or “He” which might alienate the congregation, drive them away. But as the audience peers through the fog—
now
the dry ice—to the cemetery, we see that nearly
everyone
has been driven away. The Memorial Service was fairly packed, but due as much to the rain-threatening clouds that gnarled overhead as tradition, Mimi’s coffin is low- ering, as the curtain rises, to a gravesite attended by precious few, although it reads like a crowd: her husband, her lover, her son and her daughter; her husband’s lover, her son’s lover, her daughter’s lover, her daughter’s other lover and the Rabbi, read- ing a prayer in gender-altered English translation.

It was clearly going to rain, as clear as a rolling cymbal and a shimmering viola vibrato. Beside us the Ohio River was swol- len with muddy water, an engorged vein of dirty, dirty fluid. I knew the feeling. For the past several days since we had arrived

at the hospital to find Zhivago waiting for us next to an empty, complicated metallic bed, my own bed in the attic had become complicated and metallic. It went without saying—as did nearly everything in the Glasses’ almost-mute house—that Cyn didn’t come up, so I sat up alone for most of the night, just listening. The orchestration was dense: the muted pizzicato padding of sneaky feet, the piercing glissandos of the wind, the snare-drum
slams
of bedroom doors. Beds creaked like xylophones while the rain hammered like brass. Over at Camp Shalom, the August rain was keeping all the kids indoors, making them sweaty and loud and horny. My head and body throbbed along with them all day, and at night, alone in the attic, I couldn’t tell if the pounding was internal or external, whether it was my own dirty mind, dreaming of unbelievable things, or the ripe house clos- ing around me like one of those humid flowers from Act I Scene One, that garden ballet back when everyone was alive and Cyn was moist only for me.

And it
was
unbelievable; Mimi is right.
Was
right: Nobody would believe me. In the attic I’d try to sort out all the scenes: the plate breaking in Act I Scene One; Cyn’s finger inside me in the following scene that night;
When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother
in the Props Studio at the start of Act II; Ste- phen’s sweaty advice-seeking lunch in the Physics Lab cafeteria at the close of it and then the spidery hand stroking the moans out of his eager throat; Mimi’s hot gasp against her husband’s loosening robe as it fell from my body, Mimi’s bent knees before her death. When had things
just happened,
as Cyn said, and when had I composed them, set them to the creaky music of this house? If “Dr. Zhivago” was unbelievable, what about the golem in the basement, or a whole season of anti-semitic operas,

or Ben sampling his delicious daughter after she’d sneak down from our wet bed? Eventually, all this mulling over would make the whole summer one sticky blur of sex, and I would no longer know who I was thinking of, me with Cyn, or me with Mimi, or Mimi with Stephen or anyone with anyone. I’d part my own knees and compose an ending, as wet and final as a cloudburst at a funeral.

Nobody, only the sky, broke down as the first few shovels of dirt fell on the coffin some poor propsmistress had to sweat over for days, just for a few seconds of stage time. The sky just
shattered,
the water breaking over us like something was about to be born from all this water and mud and grief. The orchestra—if there had been one at the funeral, which of course there hadn’t—roars, too, the timpanist going for broke in these final moments of Act IV. Because everything, here, is ending: The Glass family, having warped itself down to the fragile bones, would now claim one more life in its tragedy, and the sudden rain provides a perfect background, a nice and scary context for the monster’s arrival. Because all behavior, don’t you know, ex- ists within a social and cultural context, and the Glasses all began running around the cemetery within a social and cultural context of
rain
. It was
raining.

When the rain descended upon us, we were in a perfectly devised tableau (besides two supernumeraries, there to fill in the grave, who scurry off at the first sign of trouble): Rabbi Tsouris in the middle, the engorged river fluttering behind his dark black robe; Ben and Stephen stage left, staring at their feet, the better to see their skullcaps; and Cyn and I stage right, with her arm linked through mine formally and with such tender inappropriateness that I wanted to push her into one of the

cemetery’s patches of mud. But the rain did it for me. When the sky broke, Cyn’s nails scratched into my wrist like a suicide attempt and when I turned to look at her it was as if the ground had swallowed her up; her small body was wrapped in a black dress wrapped in mud. Rain ran off my face, through my eyes; I wiped them again and saw that Cyn had almost fallen. The thunder roared like trombones, if there had been trombones there at the Old Jewish Cemetery. The thunder almost drowned out a scream.

“What happened—what?” I said to Cyn, looking around, and then I had to say it louder.
“What?”

“What?” Cyn asked me. Her voice was raw like she hadn’t spoken since the hospital, which was practically true. She was trembling and holding a hand out. “It’s just
rain,
” she snarled. “
Nothing.
It’s
raining.
” She gave me a look of disgust and held her hand out farther. I reached for her but heard the scream again.

It was the Rabbi. Stephen and Ben both had their mouths open, holding their coats together in a tense wet hug and mak- ing their muddy way towards us in a monster-movie walk. But Tsouris was the one screaming. He had turned around, his black robe billowing behind him, but even over the trombones—
thunder
—I could tell that he was the one screaming, screaming and pointing to the wet mass of river raging in front of him. The muddy water was curling with the force of the cloudburst, emerging over the bank like the tip of a cape, or a dark and murky sunrise, or like the arm of something, hoisting itself out of the Ohio.

The Rabbi screamed again, but the sound was cut off by a splash—Tsouris had gone flying into the river like a rag doll.

There was a spray of mud and another roll of thunder and for a moment I couldn’t sort anything out. If Tsouris
hadn’t
fallen in, why was there such a scream, such a splash? But if he had, who was standing on the bank, covered in mud and shaking its fists?

Not who. Not a person.
What.
It was finished; sometime in the middle of prop-building and bone-aching, Mimi had fash- ioned a head out of that blank block of clay which had arrived at three in the morning like a nightmare. With Cyn yelling something at me, and the thunder rolling and Stephen coughing and Ben shouting something, the golem’s silence was even scar- ier than its bulging fists and the way its mute and quivering body seemed to rise up out of the river bank, like it’d been there all along just waiting for someone to make it up. Before I could fully register its presence it had already reached out and grabbed Ben by the flying wet hem of his jacket and yanked him to the ground. His face hit the mud and with a gurgle he slid right into Mimi’s grave.

Stephen had reached me; his face was pale and mud- splattered. “They said it would rain!” he shouted to me. “They
said!
” I looked at him, smearing the rain away from my eyes. He hadn’t seen it, maybe, or couldn’t talk about it, maybe, or maybe there was nothing to see. But I could see
everything:
the still-sputtering river, the puddles on the ground pouring into one another, and Ben’s hands on the rim of the grave as he tried to hoist himself out. Behind him was Tsouris, who had some- how found dry land; he was kneeling on the ground, shaking the mud off his arms. I ran to help Ben; I don’t know why. Maybe if I hadn’t helped him—but I didn’t help him, not really. When I reached the mouth of the grave I reached out a hand

for him to grab, but my palms were so muddy that he just slipped back down, landing on Mimi’s coffin with a
thump. If only my hands were clean and my heart pure! Alas, I have com- mitted many wrongs and left so much undone!

I turned around. Stephen was yelling. The golem had reached them and Cyn was now down on the ground, with the golem kneeling over her with its fists raised, like a timpanist over his dark, loud drum. I ran toward her, each foot slapping the wet ground like a spank. Stephen was looking at me and screaming, over and over, like I was a monster, like the monster was me. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Covered in rain and liver-colored grime, I must have looked like a monster, but it surprised me anyway, and I hesitated. I stopped for just a second, and looked behind me where the Rabbi was helping Ben out of the grave. I stopped just for a second, and in that moment everything was lost.