JD (8 page)

Then he was just … in his office. With the door closed, so I never knew if he was reading magazines or doing crosswords or just waiting for inspiration. At the time I thought Jonathan was pathetic, but maybe there was a sad heroism about it. He was like one of those Japanese soldiers you used to read about, found on some forgotten atoll decades after World War II ended, still faithfully guarding their outpost—with no idea that the war had been lost.

June 3O, 1964

Last night my disciples and I were supposed to go on to Gertrude Stein, but I could see how it would be, how they'd stare at her somber uncompromising wordplay and just titter. As if she were trying to put something over on them--her book like one of those action paintings that turns out to have been done by a chimp or a pig. I think we will never get to Gertrude Stein. And why should we, who reads Gertrude Stein anymore? Dead--how long? Not twenty years, but dead utterly. The writer's nightmare.

So instead I decided to stick with Kafka. I handed out his little meditation on Abraham and Isaac. Just three pages, thank God, because Rosalie is off and I had to go type up the master myself and run it through the cantankerous ditto machine.

Taking no chances, I read it aloud while they followed along. How Abraham couldn't believe he was the one God called upon. How he wanted to perform the sacrifice correctly but just couldn't believe he was the man God meant for the job, or that God could be satisfied with the slaughter of a grimy, scrawny kid like Isaac. I read that part again, because it is so perfect: you picture Isaac a wilting little golden lamb, but he is a dirty and sticky kid with scuffed knees, like my own son Mickey coming home sweaty after an afternoon shooting baskets with his buddies.

Abraham is afraid he hasn't been summoned at all. Then the passage that seems, weeks like these, to be hurled straight at me: about how they're giving out the prizes at the end of the school year, and the slowest kid in the class thinks he hears his name. He marches forward from his seat in the last row, perplexed but solemn, and then the whole class explodes in laughter. And maybe the teacher called out the dunce's name deliberately, just to make a fool of him. That's what Abraham is afraid of, that he is the butt of a celestial prank.

During my brief and costly fling with Dr. Bartholdy, he accused me of grandiosity. “You are not quite meckalomanick,”
he said. “But you do not, what? You do not see yourself as other men.” I'm afraid I may have laughed at him, grandiosely, perhaps that minute beginning our rapid slide to the day he'd announce I had no
Über
-
Ich,
no superego. Of course I didn't see myself as other men. Who could have the temerity to type the first word of a novel or an essay or a poem if he didn't harbor, deep in that recess where other men store their little superegos, the nagging certainty that he was entitled--not to speak, every schlemiel is entitled to speak, but entitled to be heard? I said, “It's grandiosity if you're wrong and grandeur if you're right.”

“Exactly,” he said, with a tiny smile. He only smiled when he knew he had me pinned. “Or not exactly, those are two quite similar species of delusion. Cousins. The difference? The grandiose have a small fear they may be mistaken. Because nobody else thinks they're so grand. And how could everyone else be mistaken?”

When I sold my first novel, ascended the front steps of the double brownstone off Madison that was the temple of the hallowed Aurora Press, sat waiting in the anteroom with the threadbare carpet and the discreetly ticking grandfather clock, was ushered in at last to see my first editor, the platonically tweedy Ernest Garvin: I was the chosen, the elect, of all the Jew boys in my year at City College the first to cross this threshold, or any editor's. I was the winner, out of that clamorous, hotly competitive rabble the one who had managed to shimmy a foot or two up the pole.

I sat across from Garvin in a fragile Chippendale chair, listened as he murmured about my talent and promise and, cough, a few little spots that could use some sprucing up. I leaned forward, ecstatic, I was going to be working with this famous editor, together we were going to polish
The Abandoned Steam Shovel
into a flawless masterpiece. Tense with joy, I clutched the armrests of the chair; at some point I glanced down a moment and saw that my fingernails were dirty.

Shovel
came out the next spring. It got three lines in the
Saturday Review
, “evocative account of Jewish life”--as if that's what I'd been writing about! Nothing in the
Times
or the
Trib
or even the
Forward
, so much for Jewish life. Even before the pub date you could find copies marked down at the Fourth Avenue Bookstore, Biblo and Tannen's, all the other mausoleums on that boulevard of oblivion.

Then
Orpheus in Crown Heights
, and
Straphangers
. The same each time: a little party, each more sparsely attended than the one before. A scattering of perplexed reviews--I did crack the
Times
, finally, the only result of which was that some parakeets might have seen my name at the bottom of their cage. A few months later the first royalty statement, ending with a negative number.

And still, from that day in Bartholdy's office to this stifling night, the conviction that I had been called, that I was the chosen one. Accompanied always, as Bartholdy had prophesied, with the dread: that I had misheard, the classroom was laughing.

My classroom wasn't laughing. What was I trying to tell them, that they were all grandiose dunces, sitting at their dirty desks? No, I was projecting, as Dr. Bartholdy would say. They weren't thinking about how Kafka's Delphic little parable applied to their own lives. More globally, they don't think any of the stuff we read has anything to do with them. It is culture they are acquiring here, something to mention at parties. Even Miss Rosoff--I checked, so I could call her by name, as she's practically the only student who ever raises a hand--even Miss Rosoff feels no kinship whatever with some crazy Jew whose only stroke of good fortune was that he contrived to die before he was shipped off, like his sisters, to the gas and the flames.

I tried to explain. “What he's saying is …” Oops. “What I think he might be saying is …” No use. Once I lose 'em, they stay lost. Why did they keep coming? Well, no refunds after the second week. But also still hopeful,
maybe, like that infernal moth, circling and circling the light. As if I had any light to offer them.

For what they spent on this course they could have had a weekend, hell, maybe a week on the Jersey shore, and here they had squandered it all on self-improvement. I wanted to tell them: no need to improve yourselves. You are young and comely and past improving. Go to the beach, lie guiltlessly in the sun, fuck around, for Christ's sake.

I found myself picturing them. Miss Rosoff throwing a beach ball, a little wildly. Mr. Glover running to intercept it. Both of them laughing at this little charade of feminine helplessness and male rescue. Miss Rosoff crossing her arms, as if she felt a little chill, when she really just meant to push up and highlight the ample breasts her little shmatte of a bikini top was too frail to support. Mr. Glover striding purposefully toward her, the black fur on his chest matted with sweat, the beach ball cradled coyly at the front of his wet madras trunks.

They could have the life the ads promise and yet they were there with me last night. So I guess I am wrong about them, they really are yearning for something, just as much as my tailors were thirty years ago. Not what I'm giving them. Twentieth Century Fiction, whether Kafka or Stein or even Ascher, isn't what they need. And the other kind of yearning, to remake the world: revolution, socialism, justice. All of that is quite out of style now. Why should the workers wish to control the means of production if all that is produced is mouthwash and suntan lotion?

What more do I want for them? The Great Society old Lyndon talked about a couple months ago? With spiffier public housing projects and better classrooms and cleaner restrooms in the national parks? Nicer, better, cleaner, all brought to you by those genial technocrats in Washington! And yes, my restive students do need all that. The last thing they need is an old crank telling them that none of this will make their lives matter.

It's the last thing they need, so it's what I need to give them.

I see that Jonathan wrote in by hand the umlaut over the
u
in Über-Ich. Perhaps this was mere fussiness, but I don't think so. He must already have decided that he meant this journal to be read—by me, by posterity, by somebody. And he couldn't bear the thought that some reader might suppose he didn't know when to use an umlaut.

July 7, 1964

After class last night, still reeling from Glover's lengthy, articulate, entirely incorrect exegesis of “The Bear,” I bumped into Willis. For just an instant I thought about playing around. Just an aftershock, probably, from the little temblor in my loins as I listened to Glover, so grave and gruff and stupid. Willis wasn't awful in the sack, the one time we tried. Amply hung, a tad prissy. And he vocalized throughout, almost narrated the encounter, as if dictating the first draft of the next morning's journal entry. How widespread is this vice?

“How's the adult enrichment racket?” I said.

Willis groaned. Poor guy: his classes must be even more harrowing than mine, as his particular brand of whoredom this term requires him to plunge into contemporary poetry before a room, he swears, packed with German exchange students. Who have not ceased to be by variable line lengths annoyed.

“Want to go get a beer somewhere?”

“Maybe just one,” Willis said. “I'm supposed to go to Edgar Villard's. Maybe.” The last an attempt at nonchalance, though of course any fey graduate student would be thrilled to be asked to Edgar Villard's.

“Edgar. How's he been?”

“Oh, you know how Edgar is.” Meaning that he had probably encountered Villard once at somebody else's party and would be amazed if Villard even recognized him tonight. Not
that I've encountered Villard very much myself--partly because he is more likely to hang out with art collectors and well-married former chorines than with fellow writers, partly because he's not very chummy with what I'm sure he calls, in private, the Chosen People. “Maybe you'd like to come along?”

“Who's going to be there?”

“I don't know who all. But there's this dancer I've kind of had my eye on.” This seemed pretty daring for Willis: we were just coming out the main door of SLS, making our way through the usual clot of students still hoping for an after-class pickup. But of course “dancer” is neuter; anyone who overheard him might have pictured the broad-hipped leotarded nymph in the Feiffer cartoons.

“Dancer,” I repeated, maybe failing to hide my disdain. “Like in ballet?”

“Modern.”

“Same difference,” I said, just to shock. I like Willis's little moue of consternation when he thinks I'm being philistine.

I like Willis, actually: the owlish horn-rims, the just-hatched astonishment when I crack a joke, the way-many seconds later--he claps his forehead to show he has got it. I know he is no less ambitious than the other crows who gather around pecking at me, but he is also honestly grateful to have found himself so close to a guy he thinks of, rather pathetically, as a famous man.

“Won't you come?” he said, as winningly as he could.

“I don't know.” My post-Glover appetites were more likely to be fed at the Everard Baths than at Edgar Villard's. And, given the way Willis fawns over me, I wasn't in any hurry to witness just how obsequious he could be with a more luminous star.

“Free booze,” Willis said. “And air conditioning!”

Villard is in a building on Fiftieth, just off Beekman, a corner apartment with huge windows looking out over the river. These splendid views he has framed with heavy velvet
curtains, complete with tassels. The rest of the décor is oriental carpets, cushions, little Moorish tables you might set a hookah on. The sort of room the richest fairy in Peoria would have called his
salon
, circa 188O. Villard may not be the richest fairy in Mannahatta, but he's probably right up there. All those potboilers about strapping Roman centurions or blond-maned Vikings--decorously pornographic and faintly rose in politics--must have made him plenty. Enough that perhaps he could hire someone to show him the way to the egress of a subordinate clause.

Last night the promised air conditioning was turned up full blast. Villard was wearing an open-necked shirt with great blousy sleeves; maybe he's at work on a pirate novel. “Jonathan Ascher!” I reached out to shake, but instead he gripped both my elbows in cupped hands, the way the pope holds people who have just risen from genuflecting. “How nice of you to come all this way.” All what way, I wondered; perhaps he imagined me schlepping up from my tenement on Orchard Street, or even just off the last boat from Odessa. “Robert, would you show Mr. Ascher the bar?” A dusky little presence emerged from a corner and led me to quite an impressive layout of liqueurs, jewel-like in their exotic bottles--a veritable kaleidoscope of fag beverages.

“Robert,” I said. “You got any beer?”

“Sure, in da icebox.” I felt a brief transport of--undeniably snobbish--merriment, that this accessory of Villard's, so nicely decked out in blazer and ascot, had evidently been procured in New Jersey. But my second thought, as I followed Robert to the kitchen, was that the fact of him complicated Villard somehow. He fetched us both beers, deftly uncapped them on the under-edge of the counter, a trick I've never mastered. We lingered for a minute, as I noticed how very amply he dressed to the left in his creased flannels, and he noticed my noticing. He grinned, took a long swig from his beer, and led the way out.