Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Page 14

  “I don’t like situations I can’t control.”

  “‘I who abandon what I can’t control, first the people I know, eventually my own soul,’” I quoted. I swirled my vodka and orange juice; I was finding it difficult to overlook the greasy residue on the rim.

  “Well, you have nothing to fear from us!” Rosie assured him.

  “Yes, we’re very ordinary,” I said. “How about some music?”

  “Sure.” Patrick sprang to his feet, glad to have a task. “Anything in particular?”

  “You choose.”

  He dropped a Santana album into place, and Rosie curled up in a fetal position and shut her eyes, lost in the music. Patrick was the first person I’d come across who was completely immune to Rosie; he was immune to everyone. She accepted his self-imposed quarantine, but I didn’t. I wanted to nudge a few nuggets of sociability out of him. There was something about Patrick that made it seem worth the trouble: a talent for humanity, for humour—all that trapped brilliance. You felt it would come bounding out if you could only tap into it somehow, if you could free him from whatever it was that was binding him to his Promethean rock.

  “I see you read a lot,” I said, scanning the crammed bookshelves.

  “Oh no, I hardly read anything.”

  “You’re just saying that. You’re just saying that so no one can accuse you of anything.”

  Patrick grinned. “No, no, I really don’t read much. I hardly read at all.”

  I picked up a paperback from the side table. “The Harrad Experiment. I’ve seen this somewhere. Is it good?”

  “I didn’t finish it.”

  “Why?”

  “I got bored.”

  “Then I won’t borrow it.”

  “No, no, take it—that’s just my opinion.”

  “If you hated it, why would I like it?”

  “Good point.”

  Close to my feet, on the braided rug, a newspaper was folded to the story of the Kent State shootings. Ordinary students gunned down, just like that. “Sick, sick, sick,” I fumed. “What is wrong with that country?”

  “As opposed to which country, exactly?” Patrick asked, hoping for a political debate.

  But I only shrugged. “If you think about everything, you might as well kill yourself … Hey, I almost forgot. I know your mother. You won’t believe this—I saw her once. As a patient, I mean—when I was twelve. My mother decided I needed a shrink. But we never went back, after that one visit. She’s Czech, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Czechoslovakia still around?” I wondered.

  “What?!”

  “Well, you know how countries keep changing.”

  Patrick was amused. “Yes, remarkable as it may seem, Czechoslovakia is still around.”

  “Well, you never know.”

  “That’s right,” he nodded. “You never do know. Here today, gone tomorrow.”

  Rosie, who had been half-listening to our conversation, roused herself from the Santana spell. “Was your mother also in the camps?” she asked.

  “I guess.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know. She never talks about it.”

  “Poor her! Was that where she met your father?”

  “My father isn’t even Jewish. He doesn’t live with us.”

  “Oh! That’s too bad … Where does he live?”

  “Who knows? Japan, India, Australia … he could be anywhere. He travels around.”

  “On business?” I asked.

  “On a spiritual quest,” Patrick said, carefully modulating his tone so it covered all bases—scorn, tolerance, indifference.

  “How come you live up here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I just do.”

  “When did you start?”

  “I guess I was eight or nine.”

  “Eight or nine—what were you, Quasimodo or something?”

  “I just wanted to live here. I asked Mr. Davies—he’s the cook—to help me carry the bed up. I was already spending a lot of time here, playing…”

  “Playing! Human after all—what did you play?”

  “Oh, the usual, you know. Let’s see, I had a train set.” He leaned his head back on the sofa; he was on his third shot of vodka. “And cars, and make-believe.”

  “Make-believe! That’s so adorable, Patrick.”

  “I used to pretend I was a teacher,” Rosie said. “My stuffed animals were the pupils. Then I was a nurse. Not too original!”

  “I imagined I was Harry Belafonte’s missing daughter,” I said. “You know, the one he deserted in Kingston Town. I thought she was his daughter, for some reason, and I imagined I was her, and he was going to come get me. Or else Tintin would, or else Nancy Drew. Your turn, Patrick.”

  “Me? Oh, I don’t know, it’s a blur.”

  “How can your childhood be a blur already? It was only last year practically. Have you been dropping acid every day or what?”

  “No, it’s just—I don’t think about it. I never think about it. But … I liked to pretend I was Robinson Crusoe or Long John Silver.”

  “Long John Silver! Wasn’t he the evil pirate? Weren’t you supposed to identify with the boy?”

  “The boy was a wimp.”

  Rosie and I laughed, and I remembered what she’d told me about Patrick’s school. “Do you go to a scary high school?” I asked.

  “Scary? I’m at St. George’s. We just sit around and moan about our existential crises. I’m not getting an education,” he added, switching to the comically aggrieved mode that served as a substitute for trust.

  “I thought you were in one of those fascist boys’ schools…”

  The hypodermic pulse of Santana’s guitar seemed to tilt the prints on the walls—Henri Rousseau’s lunar sleeping gypsy, the oddly suspended nude in Gauguin’s The Seed of the Areoi, a stupid Malevich (two squares on white from his why-bother period)—and I felt as if I really had been drinking. I examined Patrick. He hid behind his uncombed hair, his round glasses, his irritable resignation, but he had a faintly flushed complexion that made him look healthy despite his underground, or rather garret, style. He’d inherited his mother’s intelligent, deep-set eyes, her high forehead.

  “Did you say you had a cook?” I asked.

  “My mother has a cook.”

  “He lives here?”

  “Yeah, in the basement.”

  “How come? How come you have a cook? Does your mother have parties and things?”

  “No, he cooks for her. She’s into gourmet food.” He didn’t want to talk about Mr. Davies.

  “Cool.”

  “What was she like, my mother? When you saw her?” Patrick asked with sudden intensity, as if taking advantage of a rare opportunity, as if he’d been wondering for years.

  “She was okay—I liked her. I didn’t think she could help me, though, so I didn’t mind, really, when my mother said we weren’t going back. My mother’s a basket case.”

  “Why did she take you to a psychiatrist in the first place?” Rosie asked.

  “Oh, who knows? She’s completely crazy herself. ‘Mamaleh mamaleh my heart my soul my life—’” I mimicked, my voice tremulous with agitation and despair.

  Patrick made several attempts to restrain himself, but he lost the battle, and his body shook uncontrollably as he laughed his soundless, breathy laugh. I was all too familiar with the phenomenon of laughter that has a mind of its own. I’d experienced several attacks myself—most recently during an amateur production of Mother Courage. On one memorable occasion a fit came over me in Mr. Lurie’s class. The fearsome Mr. Lurie was, for the first time ever, at a loss. He stood uncertainly behind the front desk, his stern facade disintegrating into self-consciousness and sexual discomfort. “Perhaps you had better leave the room and take a drink of water, Miss Levitsky,” he said, but the words lacked his usual authority.

  Despite the one-time bonus of seeing Mr. Lurie transformed into Dr. Jekyll, I dreaded these outbursts,
and I hoped Patrick would be able to tell that Rosie and I didn’t mind.

  “Her mother’s a darling, really,” said Rosie.

  “Darling! I’ll do my mother and you judge whether she’s a darling.”

  I had no difficulty reproducing my mother’s unique blend of melodrama, railing, and general lunacy. I jumped up and began flying across the room, flailing my arms and commenting haphazardly on the plants, the view from the window, the house, the absent cook, Patrick’s mother: “‘ That Czech woman her her I know the type, with her money, from me everything they took, at the hotel, the hotel with the teapots—’” I was as unstoppable as she was.

  I was successful, at least, in driving away Patrick’s laughter; he was now staring at me in horror. “My God, how do you manage?”

  “Well, it would be worse for you,” I told him. “I say whatever I want.”

  “What’s the hotel thing about?” Rosie asked.

  “Who knows? I think she was working at some hotel, and then something went wrong. She had to pretend to be a puppet or something, or someone else did—oh, who cares! Now I’ll do Rosie’s father.” I glanced at Rosie to see whether she had any objections. She extended her hand in a be-my-guest gesture.

  She was right, of course, to trust me: I knew that Mr. Michaeli was not as hardy as my mother. Nor did I want to recreate his eclipsed view of the world, his shadow being. I meant to aim my parody—if you could call it that—only at his unnerving gifts.

  “Here,” I said. “Take this, here.” I placed a few books on Patrick’s lap. “And this, and this. Take this, here, and take also this.” Spurred by the urgings of Santana, I began to accelerate, hunting more and more frenetically for objects to pile onto Patrick’s lap, and when there was no longer room on his lap, then next to him on the sofa. I gathered ashtrays, pens, magazines, paper clips, the cumbersome German-English dictionary with Der Spiegel inserted inside, I emptied my pockets, poured out the contents of my fringed shoulder bag, and threw the shoulder bag itself at him, and Rosie smiled and Patrick said, “Okay, okay, I get the point,” but he was enjoying himself, and then there was nothing left to impose on him, so I pulled off my shoes and socks and added them to the heap and removed my wide leather belt and my jeans and blue plaid lumber jacket and finally my underwear until I was standing in the room as naked as a Woodstock bather and I stopped and giggled. Patrick gazed at me complacently, his clever, deep-set eyes absorbing with amusement five feet, eleven inches of white freckled skin.

  There was a knock on the door to the apartment, followed by Dr. Moore’s brave, hesitant voice. “Patrick?”

  Patrick sighed and made his way to the kitchen while I got back into my clothes. Through the closed door he said, “Yes?” The antagonism in his voice startled us.

  “Would you like some snacks? I brought up a small tray.”

  Patrick seemed to sag, somehow, as he opened the door. His mother remained on the stairs, and though I couldn’t see her from where I was standing, I could see Patrick. He stared at his mother with what looked like hatred. “We don’t need anything,” he said, and his hostility was all the more potent for being contained—like bad guys in old movies who spoke between their teeth. Seething anger: you don’t know its limits because the limits are kept hidden.

  Dr. Moore did her best to sidestep him. “Well, then, if you change your mind, I’ll leave the tray here.”

  “We really don’t want anything.”

  Dr. Moore laughed uneasily and we heard her footsteps fading away on the stairs.

  I don’t think Rosie had ever witnessed anything quite like this, and she was on the verge of tears. I said, “That was mean.”

  But now I’d gone too far. Patrick’s face darkened and he turned on me. “You don’t say,” he replied, straight out of the Ice Age, or maybe the Cold War.

  “Did something happen between you?” Rosie’s voice had turned mournful. She could have been wandering through the stormy heath, she could have been asking, Is man no more than this?

  “How do you mean?” It was Rosie’s turn to be shoved to the corner of the ring.

  She nodded sadly. Even she knew that at times there was nothing to be done.

  “‘Li-la-li,’” I sang. Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” had come out the previous year, and I couldn’t get enough of it. “‘ Li-la-li li li li li, li-la-li.’” Rosie joined in, and we sang the entire song together. If anyone had ever harboured the memory of each blow that had struck him, it was Patrick.

  “We can’t really stay to eat anyhow,” Rosie said. “I have to go home. But please come to my party.”

  “I don’t like parties.” The fight was over. Patrick had flopped back on the sofa as listlessly as a dying hero in the last act of a tragedy. He rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses.

  “You’d like my party. I have one every Saturday night, you can come any time.”

  “You wouldn’t have to talk to anyone,” I assured him. “I’d guard you.”

  “I’m really not into parties … Sorry you didn’t like the vodka.” He’d noticed my untouched drink. Rosie had politely finished her pear juice, but I’d set my own glass aside.

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m just being neurotic. I wasted your vodka—unless you drink it.”

  “I’ve had more than enough,” Patrick said, staggering a little as he rose. “I’d offer you a lift—”

  “We’ll be okay. Will you?”

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have had so much to drink. Social situations make me tense.”

  The tray of delicacies—brie, French bread, chocolate mousse in three fluted dessert glasses—was sitting on the floor at the top of the stairs. I knelt down and wrapped two slices of bread and a chunk of cheese in a napkin, slid them into my shoulder bag; this way I’d be able to thank Dr. Moore for the food if we saw her on the way out. I handed Rosie one of the dessert glasses, and the two of us wolfed down the mousse. It was my first chocolate mousse experience, and the start of a lifelong, exacting addiction.

  But we didn’t run into Dr. Moore on the way to the front door. As we pulled our coats out of the closet, Rosie asked Patrick, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “I have a brother,” he replied. “He doesn’t live here any more. He’s in California.”

  “How nice! What’s his name?”

  “Tony.”

  “You don’t have very Jewish names,” I said.

  “We’re only barely Jewish.”

  “I wish I had a brother!” Rosie cried out, and she threw her arms around Patrick and held him tightly, as if he were in danger of falling off a cliff and only she could save him.

  Patrick didn’t know what to do with himself. Then he smiled his sweet, childhood smile. But he didn’t come to Rosie’s party. He wasn’t ready to step out of his Robinson Crusoe seclusion, and two years passed before we saw him again.

  . . .

  Ah, it’s a stormy day today, a blizzard is raging, and Sailor, who has forgotten that he’s a St. Bernard, refuses to go out for his walk. He’s afraid of wind in general; wind combined with snow he considers simply an insult. I’ve trained him to use a grated litter box in the backroom instead.

  Trained is not the right word. I simply told him what to do. Sailor understands everything I tell him. I need only say, with explanatory gestures, “Sailor, you can lie on the wool blanket, but not on the linen,” and he’ll never go near linen again. I can even say, “This blanket is fine, but not that one.” He was mistreated by his first owners, and I think he developed this penchant for instant obedience in order to survive, poor thing. At least he’s happy now. I admit that I spoil him, and for every blanket I ask him not to lie on, he has several requests of his own. “Your wish is my command,” I rumble at him, and he wags his tail.

  Blizzard or no blizzard, Sororité won’t be deserted tonight. I was dragged to Sororité one time in the middle of a snowstorm, and I discovered that we’re a hardy species, we bar addicts. The person dragging me was Carmen, a woman from
Texas who was staying in the empty flat for a few weeks. She was a chef, and good company—lively, droll, her voice strong and fearless as she commented, amused and amusing, on everything around her. She had a rice pudding recipe that was immeasurably better than the one I’d been content with until then, and I went into a rice pudding craze when she was here. I still use her recipe, though it’s not quite the same as when she made it. It was Carmen who persuaded me to brave bad weather one stormy Friday night, and when against all odds and surmounting challenges worthy of Shackleton we made it to Sororité, we found the place packed.

  Occasionally I toy with the idea of severing the Sororité umbilical cord. Occasionally I ask myself why I go. For the past eight months—since Tyen left—I haven’t met anyone I particularly wanted to invite home. Though, let’s face it, it’s been years since I met anyone I particularly wanted to invite home. I invited them anyhow; I invited them, then hoped they’d leave. That semicolon after “anyhow” is probably the most conveniently nebulous bit of punctuation I’ve ever used—a semicolon that serves to sweep over the colossal wreck of my own monument to boundlessness.

  I blame my house. It has a life of its own and refuses to accommodate guests. Tyen was a rare exception.

  1971

  The army rolled into our city during the October Crisis of 1970; the media managed to frighten outsiders, but we were amused by the sight of goofy-looking soldiers in tanks as we made our way to school. Joshua and Peter, who were in the grade above us at Eden, were arrested at a French bookstore when an altercation broke out between police and two angry customers, and they spent the night in jail. They were released the next day, and an account of their adventure provided a full day’s entertainment. Reassured by her card-playing friends that she had nothing to fear—“What can you do, there are always a few troublemakers”—even Fanya refrained from issuing doomsday forecasts.

  Kidnapping was one thing, but when the troublemakers strangled their hostage, they lost whatever public sympathy they’d had. Three months later the sad, brief drama had been replaced by the drama of political debate and brutal weather. We were in the clutches of a deep freeze.