Inventing Memory (8 page)

One day, I was due to meet Sim down on Orchard Street for one of our sketching and note-taking jaunts, and he did not arrive. I waited for him, got a penny coffee from a vendor, and looked anxiously along the street. But still Sim did not come.

"I know where he is," said a small voice.

I wheeled around. It was Tyke, the street Arab, who had trailed me, looking for a tip, some food, errands to run, a mother, a friend.

"Follow me," he said.

He led me along Orchard Street, which in those days was a riotous old-country market, almost impassable, with pushcarts, horse-drawn carts, boys carrying towers of tagged garments, dancing street
speilers
with flying pigtails, frenziedly following the hurdy-gurdy man, market women trundling baskets and barrels. Orchard intersected such streets as Hester and Delancey—all of them lined with tenements, whose roofs and fire escapes held as much teeming humanity in these hot summer days as their crowded railroad flats.

Tyke led me into a groaning tenement on Delancey. The stairs were dark and garbage-littered. Hungry cats roamed the halls, turning up their clean cat noses at the rotting refuse. The smell made you reel. On the top floor, several curtains had been improvised as doors.

We entered a darkened room furnished with pillows and opium pipes and crumpled bodies seeking such oblivion as could be found there. Deeper into the den we went, and when our eyes adjusted to the gloom, we saw a warren of little cubbyholes and in each one a waiting girl (or boy—who could tell?), painted like a woman and trussed in corsets, lace, and high button boots.

Sim was caressing one of these creatures.

I stood and watched, my eyes burning a hole in his back, as Sim parted the child's legs.

Suddenly he turned. His face went pale. He started to cough convulsively.

I pulled money out of my pocket and gave it to the little girl (I had decided it was a girl). Taking Sim's arm, I led him back to my studio.

Levitsky was not there. To Tyke (who had trailed us home) I gave some pennies and had him guard the front door. Then I locked the door to my studio and led Sim to the Turkish corner.

It was then that I entered Sim's fantasy and did all the things he dreamed of when he sat with Lucretia, sipping tea, at Fontana di Luna.

How I
knew
his fantasies I cannot say, but they rushed into my head as if I knew. I loosened my corset, played with my own breasts, tweaked my nipples, then presented them to his mouth like ripe berries. In a tangle of clothes, we fell back on the scratchy wool of my carpeted couch. His breeches open, my petticoat over my head, he slowly fed on me as if I were all the nourishment he needed. When the throbbing was so intense I thought I'd scream, he entered me and pressed his hardness into the Garden of Eden I had never known existed inside me. I was in blossom. I knew now why I had come to America.

From then on, Sim became our boarder. Strangely, Levitsky never questioned it. Outwardly, the two men became the greatest of friends. Whenever we could, Sim and I would stoke the fires of our obsessive passion—though never flaunting it before Levitsky. And yet he
knew
. I told myself it comforted him—as if he were my lover himself—but I was wrong. Surely sex is the province of imps and
dybbuks
, but the need for possession cannot be eradicated from the human heart.

Levitsky appeared to cede the field to Sim and seemed content to do so as long as people thought the three of us were lovers. I told myself it was as if Sim relieved him of a burden, as if this strange mé
nage à trois
fulfilled his own sexuality, as if Sim were somehow his lover too. The truth was, I needed to believe in the two men sharing me and becoming great friends. Since my idol was Emma Goldman—"If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution," was her credo—and she certainly had far more lovers than I, I felt I was merely following her example.

"A sin repeated seems to be permitted," Mama would have said. But I wrote none of this to Mama, though I sent her money every week.

"You can't ride two horses with one behind," she would also have cautioned, or perhaps, "You can't dance at two weddings with one behind." (Her proverbs were forever changing to suit whatever point she wanted to prove, or else memory—that great editor—has rewritten them.)

Levitsky, Sim, and I appeared to live like three comrades, sharing everything but bed. If ever conflict arose, we would discuss our revolutionary principles and recommit ourselves to the task of overcoming jealousy.

It was true that Levitsky seemed to be more and more often absent, but Sim and I were so drunk with our passion that we hardly noticed. From the moment we awoke, we were looking for a space of time to connect flesh to flesh—as if only this linkage proved we were alive. When we joined our bodies we were lost to the world and might as well have been in the land of faerie, tasting forbidden fruit. For that was part of the attraction. I can still close my eyes and see his parchment-pale skin with blue veins next to my honey-colored nakedness.

Sim wanted us to escape with our love, go to Europe. He knew his family would be fierce in reclaiming him once they knew of his defection. How could I travel to Europe and disappear into love when I had pledged to bring my family to the Golden Land (they were due to be arriving in the next few months)? Besides, how could I marry a
goy
—however much I loved him? I had
slaved
to bring my family over: how could I betray them and myself? This was the dilemma that entrapped us. We hesitated—and we were lost. To Sim, Europe was escape, but to me it was
pogroms
and heartbreak.

We drifted along in this state—neither ready to give each other up nor ready to part. The ecstasy of a forbidden love fills the whole mind, crowds out all practical considerations. Our love was a place where the barriers fell and everything was open, flowing with milk and honey. No wonder people are so afraid of love and ecstasy—you can lose the world for them. But love makes you feel so alive that you never stop to question your foolishness. You run over the tops of clouds. Your life seems to have meaning for the first time. Love may be commonplace, but the lover is no snob. However many times love has existed before, it is new to the lover.

But this was a troubled love, a love my mama never would approve. Not only was Sim a
goy
but he was promised to another. My mama took such things seriously. Breach of promise was still a crime in those days—both in Europe and in America. How low I had sunk since I came here! I worked on the Sabbath. I was sleeping with a
goy
. I was living with two men like a bigamist. My ancestors had said
kaddish
for me from their graves. Easy enough to rationalize all this in the name of Emma Goldman—but in the dark of night I was wretched. I believed I had condemned myself to hell.

And since it is we human beings who create hell for ourselves, hell arrived in the person of Lucretia.

Lucretia had begun to wonder at Sim's absence. She had a detective trace him—women like Lucretia
always
know where to find detectives. One day, wearing garish face paint and a cheap red dress, she burst into my studio, crying. I was priming a canvas for my next portrait. Fortunately Levitsky and Sim were both out.

"I
tried
to become what he wanted—but I can't even do that!" she bawled. "Nobody wanted me! Finally an old man took me home, gave me some money, and said, 'Give it up, girl—you're not cut out for the streets.' Even he didn't want me! And neither does Sim!"

I knew this was true, and I also realized she was insulting me by implying that Sim Coppley only sought sex from me, but I tried to comfort her.

"Lucretia," I said, "you will always be unhappy if you live for men. You need a cause, something to contribute to the world. Look at the poverty of New York! Look at the hungry children! You can do something worthwhile here without walking the streets!"

"Would it make Sim love me?"

"It would make you love
yourself
."

I gave her tea and cookies, told her she looked beautiful in her bedraggled red dress, and soon her sharp look returned. Lucretia had the soul of a headwaiter—at your feet or at your throat—and when she came back to herself, she came back to her meanness. I gave her some clothes of my own to wear, and she took off for the streets again, making me promise not to tell Sim she had come. Why I kept that promise I will never know.

"Only an honest man worries about keeping his bargain with a
gonif
," Mama used to say.

You probably wonder at my gullibility. I wonder about it myself. But even when people were cruel to me, I always tried to be kind to them in return, and I have never regretted my refusal not to be corrupted by my enemies.

I actually felt
sorry
for Lucretia, out there on the downtown streets. For a moment, I felt honor bound to protect her. In those days there was a song that went, "Heaven help the woikin' goil!" Remember that we are back in an era when cigar stores doubled as penny brothels, when downtown New York was famed for its parlor houses and its panel houses (where thieves lurked behind movable walls until gentlemen were engaged in taking their pleasure), when "magnetic water massage," freak shows, and vaudeville still entertained the populace, and when the vote for women was still a distant dream. In those days, part of a woman's power was knowing how to cosset men, and cosseting their kin was an essential part of that. It still is. Or has it all changed so drastically in less than a hundred years that you hardly know what I mean?

About a month later, Sim and I were strolling across Union Square when our way was blocked by a demonstration. Jewish and Italian garment workers were marching for a
unione
and an eight-hour day, and who should be marching with them, wearing a sandwich board in Yiddish and Italian, but Lucretia! She was dressed like a factory girl and chanting at the top of her lungs.

My first thought was to get Sim out of there as soon as possible. But I was not quick enough. He saw her and began to wheeze and sputter until he had a full-blown asthmatic attack. Lucretia pretended not to notice him. Nevertheless I saw that she saw him and was biding her time. I knew then that she would have him if she had to wait forever.

Levitsky had got me a prize commission. I was to paint one of the richest of the robber barons—a man named Theophilus Johnson—and his good lady wife Eliza. It was to be a double portrait, full length. Even their prize Thoroughbred horses and their colts were to be painted gamboling in the background. Of course, a man as important as Mr. Johnson did not have much time for such trivia as posing for portraits, so he sent his wife with swatches of his suiting material, his gold watch fob, a lock of his hair, and a full-length photograph of himself and his horses. He even sent studies of the horses' heads. When the portrait was almost done, he would deign to come for one hour so that I could put the finishing touches on his face.

The whole radical Lower East Side was abuzz about this commission. There were even those who whispered of kidnapping Mrs. Johnson so as to make Johnson—who was a mineral and mining magnate—yield to the strikers' current demands.

From what his wife said of him while posing, it wouldn't have been such a good idea. To hear her tell it, Johnson might not even have ransomed her. His horses were a different story.

Oh, she poured out her heart as she posed, and her heart was not a pretty place. It was rank with neglect. Whatever she had dreamed as a girl has been dashed in womanhood.

So I painted the highlights on her pearls and the shimmer of her gown and roughed in her consort from a photograph. I left his face ghostly if not entirely blank.

And then came the red-letter day when Johnson himself was to come to the studio. I was extremely agitated—as if somehow I knew my life was about to change.

Johnson arrived in state, with a liveried chauffeur driving a gorgeous automobile whose brass lamps alone could have lit a palace. His bodyguards were former cops—Irish, of course, as all cops were then. The street outside my brownstone vibrated with people—some gawking, others begging—but all were pushed aside roughly by Johnson's goons. I saw Levitsky and his cronies milling about just beyond the police barricades.

Sim Coppley stood at attention, making appropriate obeisance at the curbside. He even thanked Mr. Johnson for taking the time to pose.

Johnson was a vast man with a belly, waxed handlebar mustaches, and a red face. He was puffed up with his own importance.

When he posed, he did so in a fidgety way that seemed to imply he was far too busy for such female foolishness. He coughed, suppressed belches, and squeezed out deadly, smelly silent farts. He dictated to me as if I were his secretary. I hated the man thoroughly. Every five minutes, he broke his pose and got up to look at what I was painting.

"It's too soon to look," I told him. "Wait, and you will have a nice surprise."

But it was impossible for him to sit still. His knee jerked, his chin bristled, his jaws chewed imaginary delicacies. He wiped his bulbous nose with a handkerchief, picking out boogers and examining them before my eyes. The rich think they can do anything at all in front of their servants—and to a man like Johnson, an artist was merely hired help. He repeatedly consulted his pocket watch and spoke of an appointment far more important than this.

When, at last, he was ready to go, I couldn't wait to be rid of him.

One of his Irish bodyguards helped him with his beaver coat; another held his black derby and silk scarf. His wife nattered and apologized, though she had nothing to apologize for.

I accompanied him to the door of the studio, as far as the Turkish vestibule. Then time slowed to a crawl. He turned and tipped his hat to the crowd in slow motion, as if he were a king acknowledging his subjects. And then shots rang out, and the crowd began to roar. When I came to the edge of my stairs—oh, higher than an Aztec temple they seemed on that day—I saw a huge fat man crumpled facedown on my stoop and dark blood dribbling down the steps as if in geological slowness. Sim was feeling the dead man's pulse. The bodyguards had seized two Italian workers and were letting them know they were the wrong kind of Americans. Levitsky had absolutely vanished.