Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (15 page)

“Yes,” I said, “I wish I had told you all sooner to go to hell.”

 

Now I'd collect my unemployment. Now no need to rise, bathe, eat, dress, and mobilize myself. Now could lie on the floor cradling a bottle and watch dust motes dance in a pale blue beam piercing the filthy alley window. Now Oblivion was a country all my own, a mystic magical place that lay only just one bar away, one more drink ahead. Every night visiting there, my unconscious stormed through lunatic adventures that I could not recall except in hints
and flashes. My road led through a forest of bar-stool thrones, a succession of neon kingdoms that began in leather and ended in duct-taped patched vinyl, with barflies whose torn stockings were not intentional punk affectations but lizard scales over unwaxed and varicose skin.

Into this void Anna called, her warm voice searching, wanting to draw me out from this evil mess. She searched blindly for me, but I was nowhere to be found. Left between us was only a superficial commonality of locations: Jerusalem, the East Village, and the Israel Museum.

“But, sweet one. I'm yours now.” Her voice probing from a great distance, that other world she now inhabited.

She said, “I miss you, want you here with me. My husband. Precious one.” Each word laden with a million-ton weight of shattered hope. Her voice lifted, but then stumbled and faded: “Come here, come home. To me. To Toronto.” An echo of a whisper in a strange tongue. I pulled on my vodka. Vodka was cheap, did the trick just as well as scotch, even better. Slashed through all pretenses. Stormed my nerves with bare knuckles, pounded my blood like a thug. I pulled again. Had heard somewhere that because vodka was clear, the hangovers were milder. This, I had learned, was a lie.

Anna, hopefully: “Do you want to come?”

I laughed, softly, hoarsely. Could only imagine how it sounded. A cackling emanation from a black pit. “What'll I do there?” I slurred. “All I do is drink.”

“My sweet, just come. I understand now like never before. Darling, you have PTSD, from what you went through in Gaza. What's preventing you from facing your PTSD is loyalty, the fear that doing so will make it seem like you're betraying your fellow soldiers. But darling, it's not a matter of politics. It's medical. I've got a job with the symphony. And I've found us a place on Queen
Street. It's like the East Village. I'll work to support us until you feel well enough to get on your feet. In the meantime, just rest. Let me feed and love you, my darling. And we'll have family here to help. We won't be so alone.”

 

I took a train north, a railroad to life, hoping to be cared for and cured, healed by the only woman I'd ever loved and believed had ever truly, selflessly, loved me. A woman of high intelligence, profound depth, artistic brilliance—even, despite adultery, a kind of moral character. A woman so beautiful that every man in our Jerusalem milieu, married or single, had hankered after her. When we men were alone, she was all that we spoke of.

But what met me at the station had the pall of death. Anna had shrunk by some kind of eating disorder, anorexic, a near skeleton. Crazed as I was, her appearance shocked me. To make matters worse, Anna's sister, at the station to ferry us to our new Queen Street digs, addressed Anna and me in that high-pitched, wheedling, histrionic voice that people adopt when pretending that something horrible has not happened: the reduction of a superb specimen of femininity to a human broomstick, a wasted shadow.

“Alan! You look so great!” the sister exclaimed, lightly embracing me (we barely touched). Anna's stick form, swimming in a cherry-red satin jacket embroidered with the logo of the symphony, lurked into view. “Doesn't Anna look great?!” shrieked the sister.

I ignored this. Said nothing. Anna looked near death. Embraced her, fingers pressing through the satin down to the skin, bones. She looked the way I felt, like an X-ray, black and white, with a big tumor where once the heart had been.

Leaned close to her ear, felt her baby skin against my cheek. Her sweetness unchanged, just perishing. Felt a sharp stab of shame. I had done this. I; no one else. Reduced the most desired woman in
Jerusalem to a specter, a menial worker, a ghost searching for the life that I had taken from her. I was poison. The fiercer her determination to keep me, the sicker she got. I had only deeper graves to offer, darker, danker dungeons.

“I'm tired,” I said. “Let's go home. Take me home.”

“We can rest now, darling,” she said, laying her skeletal head weightlessly against my shoulder. Her voice too sounded spectral. Neither of us belonged any longer to this world. “We both need rest,” she whispered.

The sister dropped her public relations effort, grew as grim as the situation. Drove us silently to Queen Street. Anna and I in the back of the car swayed against each other like shocked survivors of an airplane crash.

The sister jumped out, helped Anna to her feet. Anna could barely stand. The sister handed me my bags, hugged Anna, and said, looking at me with dull pain in her eyes and little conviction, “You should consider yourself a part of our family now. We don't care what's happened before. It's a brand-new start.” Then hugged Anna again, whispered something to her, kissed her, squeezed her lifeless hand, got back into the car, and sped off without looking back. We stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, unable to go backward or forward, two immobile monuments to insensible suffering and unquenchable love, looking down at our bags, then at each other, struck dumb by our wounds and inconsolable memories.

 

We shared a studio with a lesbian couple, the room partitioned by a curtain on the far side of which our alcove, barely large enough to fit a bed into, also contained two chairs and a hot plate. Anna had made it as homey as she could, given her limited funds and flagging energy. We were alone, the couple arranged to be out, and when we entered our space Anna drew the curtains, shrugged off her
jacket, displayed herself on the bed as prettily as she could.

She looked like a concentration camp inmate. Perhaps her mother, Sally, who spent time in a death camp, a Holocaust survivor like my mother, looked this way when Allied forces liberated her. Perhaps for her all this had been in some unbidden way her unconscious effort to claim her mother's suffering for herself; the loss of everything, a terrible ordeal, and a long nightmarish journey home.

But no matter how seductive she tried to look, it didn't work. Thought of her not as a partner in pleasure but another medical case like me, in need of attention. Crawling onto the bed, stretching out on my back, I said: “Look, you know how much I love you. But I'm exhausted.” Surveyed our little space. “Thank you for this. But tell me. Anna, what we've lost. Think of it. Was it worth it? What did we gain?”

“Each other.”

“I gained you and you are wonderful, the woman of my dreams. But I don't know what to do with it. Tell me the truth. Isn't this about you wanting a kid?”

She blinked hard.

“I'm asking because I can't do that. I can't take care of you, let alone some kid. I can't even take care of myself.”

“But you said…you once talked about a little Alan and Anna mixed together…a baby with our features and personalities combined. To make a new thing, a third ‘us.' ”

“Yeah, I know. But in the meantime us isn't doing so hot. And besides, you want to perpetuate me? Isn't one Alan Kaufman bad enough? One of me is enough for this world.”

“No, it's not enough. You are a beautiful man. I think that you're a genius. But you don't know how to live. Let me teach you. You're like a boy who's been raised by wolves, thrown into situations you can't handle. But you won't have to. Let me deal with them. I know
that you can do anything you set your mind to. I saw what you did at the museum. No one's ever done that before. You brought a whole new art scene to life in Jerusalem, one of the oldest cities in the world. You were a soldier. And a journalist. And a poet. And you wrote and published short stories. Whatever's happened to you can be cured with love and rest. Let me love you back to health. I want to. You're my soul mate. The man I want to have children with.”

“How many?”

The question was like a slap, cold, logistical, a calculation, a position staked out in a desperate negotiation: not a response to her heartfelt call to love.

“I don't know. I thought, two…”

“Two,” I said. And again: “Two.” Then: “It's a good number. My brother and I were two. And Mommy and Daddy made four. And we all equaled one big fat nightmare.”

“It can be different for us. We're not them.”

“That's where you're wrong,” I said. “I am them, in combination, the worst of both worlds. I'm their dream of what happens when you mix George with Marie. And look what we got. An adulterer. A drunk. A failure. A liar who reneges on his promises.”

She cried.

I sat up and felt around for an ashtray, found one, lit a cigarette. Had caused so many to cry that I'd gotten rather used to it. Go have a drink when they're like this, I'd tell myself, and let them weep. It's the only really decent thing that you can do.

 

Her parents threw open her home to me, though Ben could barely conceal his hostility for what I'd done to destroy his beautiful and gifted little girl: wrecked her marriage and reduced her to a skeletal divorcée who'd stopped doing her art and was now working telephones to raise funds for other people's creative endeavors while she
herself was remarried to a drunken freeloader. Others should have been manning phones to raise funds for her, one of the most gifted and original artists of her generation.

They gave me keys to their home when they were away on the little car excursions they liked to take. Anna joined them with my encouragement. I stayed behind. With them out of the way, I could raid Ben's considerable liquor cabinet. Often, they returned to find me blotto.

One day Ben sat me down to have a man-to-man. Bald, narrow-shouldered, with weak eyes and a trim mustache. I could have crushed him with one hand, which he sensed, and something inside me wanted to.

“Alan,” he said, “I think that finding some sort of employment would help to raise your confidence.”

“I'm not a citizen. I can't work,” I said. “They have strict laws here.”

“Anything. Do anything. There are jobs that don't require permits.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. But you should be willing to do anything for you and Anna to get on your feet.”

I picked up a newspaper and flipped to the employment section. “Let's have a look-see,” I said, smartly snapping open the pages. Brow furrowed theatrically, eyes narrowed in mock focus, I scanned the ads. “Well, here's something. WANTED. EARTHWORM DIGGERS—Graveyard Shifts Only. We get you there and back. Decent wage!”

His stiff smile faltered. He tried to appear upbeat. “Well, that would be a start. Honest employment is nothing to be ashamed of.”

I answered an ad for a golf caddie, though I knew nothing about golf. Was the only adult there, the other caddies aged twelve or thirteen. I was attached to a cluster of four graying cardigan businessmen sans golf cart, and carried their bags on my shoulders. When their poor swings sent the ball vanishing into hedges, I scrambled downhill like a fox terrier to fetch. This exhausting work dehydrated my nauseated body. Badly needed a drink. Hadn't thought to bring along a supply. At lunch break, followed on their heels like a good dog into the clubhouse dining room, looking forward to some good food, perhaps some beer and a little conversation with the congenial gents. But one of them turned, with a cold smile: “Uh, no. You take yourself around to the back, knock on the window. When it opens, ask for the Caddie Special. Put it on my tab.”

Mortified, circled back, knocked on the wooden gate. It snapped up.

“Caddie Special,” I said.

It slammed shut. A moment later, it snapped up and out slid a tray with a single hot dog and a bottle of orange soda. The shutter dropped like a guillotine.

At day's end, my employer said: “We all want to give you this little something to express our gratitude for your great work.” He thrust into my palm a bill rolled as tightly as a piece of espionage, and hurried off. It was a single Canadian dollar—seventy-five US cents.

ON THE BUS RIDE HOME THROUGH THE FREEZING Toronto night—blacker and colder because that much closer than New York to the polar icecap—I realized that certain passengers were satanists who had singled out Anna and me for human sacrifice. They were following me home to her. Quickly, took evasive action like a good military man who knows that one key to not getting shot any sooner than your time is to change spots every three seconds, too fast for the ambusher to draw a bead.