The Prince of West End Avenue (12 page)

"Cognac makes me burp. You wouldn't have a nice creme de menthe? Well, never mind." She bent over to unlace her shoes, then took them off. "Here," she said, wiggling a foot at me. "Does it look swollen?" It did not, and I told her so. "Well, it hurts just the same. Come along, Liebchen, you're forgetting your manners. Take off that silly coat and help me off with mine. Then you can have a cognac if you like."

I silently cursed the mischance of our meeting. Now I would never be rid of her and her damned ankle. Nevertheless, I sprang to accommodate her.

"I need a tiny rub to fix me up—a massage, you know." She swung her legs up onto the bed and, using her elbows and rump, hitched herself back to a position of comfort, her head sinking into the soft pillows, her hair, unpinned with her hat,

gloriously arrayed upon them. "Ah," she breathed, and turning to me, she spoke with unexpected formality. "Would you be so kind as to apply a tiny massage to the afflicted member?" She pointed to her ankle and patted the bed.

At long last I was beginning to get a glimmering of my situation. But nothing in my experience had prepared me for this moment. At the same time, I was beset by doubts. Plump Minnie was indeed an alluring, an arousing sight, stretched out at ease upon my bed. Her smile was welcoming, even eager. But what if my imaginings were false, were merely vile? She came from a class that lacked all subtlety, that would not recognize the indecorum of such a request from a relative stranger. And a worse thought yet: what if she supposed I expected payment for the treat at Gonfalons?

"Wouldn't you rather I tried to find a doctor?"

She patted the bed again. "I want Dr. Otto."

I went and sat on the bed beside her. She lifted a knee to make the "afflicted member" more easily available to me. What I saw then of white thigh gleaming in the darkness beneath her skirt I pretended not to see, and I set about the massaging of her ankle.

"Ah," she said, and "ooh," she said, and then she said, "That's oh-so-much better, but the pain's moved a little higher up.

And so I massaged a little higher and then a little higher still, and soon I found myself at that place of which I had only dreamed. And it was warm and moist and, oh, so wonderful! And Minnie shifted and squirmed in harmony with the massage, and she moaned and said "ooh" and "ah."

She put her hand on me, she grasped me. "Now!" she said. "Please, now!" And she tore at cloth and buttons, and so did I. And "now!" she said again, and took me swollen within her, and wrapped her limbs about me and beat a wild tattoo on my back.

Korner, Korner, what are you writing! Remember, you are not Blum. Know when to draw a decent veil over your youthful raptures.

Yes, I lost my innocence to Herr Ephraim's Minnie. How utterly delightful she was, how healthy her appetite, how natural and uncomplicated our liaison! In Minnie I was fortunate indeed. Simple and forthright, she taught a bumbling boy how to be a man. She had formulated no philosophy but was by nature a hedonist. The body was designed to give and to receive sexual pleasure; all that was required of a man and a woman was mutual desire. Anything else—love, for example—was potentially perverse to the extent that it might distract from pleasure. Oh, love was all right if that was what you craved, but then, from that viewpoint, so were whips and chains. Her doctrine she expressed in her every bedroom act. I was for a happy while her eager disciple.

Lenin was only partly right. I had needed a pretty girl, and certainly I had found one in Minnie. With her I passed hours of delight. But the experience failed to free my energies for the serious endeavors of the great world. My thoughts now were wholly of the flesh. I longed with pain for the elusive Magda.

with his right hand, discreetly masking it from the senora's demented gaze with his left.

"You've seen the notice?" I asked him.

"What did you expect, Lipschitz should sit around waiting for the bomb to blow up in his face? I won't say I told you so. I'll only say, didn't I tell you?"

"Hamburger's gone for the weekend. He says we'll talk after he gets back."

"Yes, talk. Go ahead, talk. Meanwhile, the Mad Monk over there, Rasputin—"

He put a warning finger to his lips. Eulalia was at his shoulder with his rice pudding. "Where's my raisins?"

"Dr. Comyns, he say you don't get no raisins."

The Red Dwarf sighed. "See what I mean?" he said.

Eulalia waddled around the table and gently removed the toast from the senora's mouth. "You want I pour tea now, Dona Isabella?"

Sefiora Krauskopf y Guzman looked up at her with impassioned eyes. "They called me the hollyhock girl." she said.

"They call you that again, you just tell me," said Eulalia. "Here your tea, Dona Isabella, honey."

The Red Dwarf waited until Eulalia disappeared behind the swinging doors into the kitchen. "The time for talk is over, finished. Now is the time for action."

"What sort of action?" I repeated.

The Lipschitz party got up from their lunch in a boisterous mood and left the dining room, the director in the van. Silently, we watched them go.

"What sort of action?" I repeated.

"Never mind what action. When I've acted, you'll know. Then will be the time for talk." He took a spoonful of rice pudding and held it in his mouth for a moment, savoring it. When he swallowed, his Adam's apple leapt two inches up his

withered neck and then plunged to its place again. "Needs raisins," he said.

The Emma Lazarus is filling up again; Sunday afternoon is on the wane. From my desk I can sense the renewal of stir and bustle: a hum of voices in the corridor, the whirr of the elevator going up and down, the strains of a Hoffmeister flute concerto from across the hall, the remote gurgle of a toilet flushing. From the kitchen the aroma that makes its way through the air ducts and into my room tells me that tonight we will have a beef-barley soup.

My room overlooks the street, not the avenue. At this time of year and at such an hour the location has a distinct advantage. While the sun, darkening the Palisades, prepares to set in New Jersey, the light that at the most acute of angles strikes my window has that wonderful pellucid yellow quality so beloved of the Dutch masters. One's fingers itch to hold a paintbrush. Meanwhile, from across the hall. Hoffmeister has given way, as well he might, to Mozart and Le Nozze di Figaro.

Ah, the vagaries of love! As I leaf through my manuscript, grown now to surprising length—my own modest effort a la recherche du temps perdu —I am struck by the number of pages that I, too, have devoted to this inexhaustible topic. " Voi che sapete" sings Cherubino across the hall, u che cosa e amor" Well, the vagaries of love are quite properly the stuff of comic opera. It is given to only a few, in art or in life, to pursue their amours on the grand scale. The rest of us must rely on these few to grant a kind of vicarious dignity to our petty liaisons. I say nothing of Blum, who is beneath our consideration and for whom love is little more than a viral infection, an itching beneath the skin that he seeks perpetually and vainly to scratch. But consider Hamburger, our own Jumbo, dashing off to the Hamptons,

unable to admit even to himself his high hope to render peccable the impeccable honor, to assail the unassailable virtue, of Hermione Perlmutter, transformed in his amorous imagination into a Juliet.

What fools these mortals be! Even poor Sinsheimer, now resting permanently in Mineola, was not immune. I well remember one evening when we sat together in the residents lounge, talking of Troilus and Cressida, a play in which Shakespeare at his most sardonic tells us the truth about this debilitating passion. Across the room sat three of our ladies (two of whom, incidentally, preceded Sinsheimer to Mineola), chattering and giggling together. His eyes misted over. "That's how it is," he said. And he began to sing, softly and achingly, "With what gladness have I the ladies kissed," as if recalling a time when he inhabited not the world of the Emma Lazarus but that of Lehar's Paganini.

And what of Otto Korner? Why should he be immune from this scrutiny? His love for Magda Damrosch may be excused on the grounds of his youth. However ridiculous, in youth love may be excused, even applauded, as a stage now reached in human development, a mark on the scale that denotes awareness of others outside of the self. It may even be beautiful: the toothless gums of the infant are far different from those of the dotard. Of Meta, his first wife, he still chooses not to speak. Of his second wife he has perhaps already said too much. But how does his Contessa, that good woman, may she rest in peace, measure up to the Contessa in the Marriage of Figaro ?

Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, arrived in Vienna in 1783. Let us rejoice that he did so and grant to that inscrutable Purpose the awe it deserves. For without his arrival at that place and at that time we would have no Figaro. Let us therefore not regret his apostasy, this Venetian Jew who became a Catholic, a priest, and a poet. For the goyim he remains a Jew, of course; and for the Jews, in view of his success, he is still a Jew anyway.

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The name da Ponte, I have always supposed, alludes to the bridge he so joyfully trod out of the Ghetto, but a bridge is not limited to one-way traffic. Certainly he was not a very good Catholic, let alone a good priest. He was kicked out of Venice, in part for political reasons but also for his embarrassing carnal indiscretions. Celibacy was not in his genes; he was something of a Blum, if not quite a Don Giovanni. His sexual scandals were such as to rock even that city of libertines and rakes. In Byron's day they were still talking of him. (They kicked him out of Europe too, eventually, all the way to the New World, where he became, of all things, a professor of Italian at Columbia College and initiated a certain faculty tradition in matters of the heart that, it is rumored, persists to this day.) At any rate, he arrived in Vienna as librettist with Salieri's Italian Opera Company, and Salieri found him a sinecure as court poet. But what matters to us are the librettos he wrote for Mozart, and in particular, in view of our present focus, the libretto for the Marriage of Figaro.

But Mozart himself was caught up at this time in love's vagaries, poor fellow, while scurrying about trying desperately to translate his genius into hard cash. Married to his inept Hausfrau, Constanze, he was nonetheless drawn to Anna Stor-ace, the English soprano, the Susanna of his opera's first and inglorius performance at the Burgtheater in 1786, the Nancy who urged him in vain to join her in London. He botched it, of course. In music, a genius; in life, one of the rest of us.

Since, in the fields of Venus and her soft delights, Mozart and da Ponte were no more ennobled or ennobling than Hamburger or Korner or, yes, even Blum, to what may we attribute the grandeur of the Marriage of Figarol To genius, of course, and to the happy conflux in time and place of two such sensibilities. But to say so much is to explain without explaining. What precisely did genius and conflux achieve? Into the familiar form of opera buffa and the earlier plot-stuff of com-

media delVarte, with its lords who made sexual advances toward girls of humbler station, these two amorous klutzes—Mozart and da Ponte—injected the serum of recognizable human experience and emotion. The comic material is subordinated to sharply realized characters, defined in part by da Ponte and in part by the individual tone and richness of Mozart's music.

Here is the unexpected irony, the unfathomable paradox: to achieve grandeur, art must descend to the level of palpitating humanity; obversely, to achieve grandeur, palpitating humanity must ascend to the level of art.

I WAS RIGHT about the beef-barley soup.

The Red Dwarf is making a rapid recovery. Already he has discarded his cane. He paused beside my table in the dining room long enough to whisper, "Better we're not seen together for a while, comrade. Mum's the word." He put his finger to his lips, winked, and tottered off to sit in a corner by himself, leaving me with Blum and Sefiora Krauskopf y Guzman. Our table conversation was not memorable.

Hamburger and La Perlmutter have yet to sign in. Perhaps they have eloped.

THE EVENTS OF THIS MORNING have been so astonishing, so shocking, that I have not yet fully absorbed them. The letter from Rilke is as good as in my hands! \ am dizzy with excitement. And of course my system is again in turmoil: a flutter about the heart, a feverish itch beneath the skin, loose bowels. Let me state at once that Hamburger has solved the riddle of the charades. He is a true friend. I am bitterly ashamed of my doubts about him, my ill thoughts. Granted his peculiar habit of mind, his—how might one put it?—his linguistic disposition, the solution was child's play for him. How can one

hesitate to ascribe his predilection for the coprological image, his Swiftian wit, to that greater Purpose whose lineaments I have from time to time descried? But Purpose aside, to Hamburger belongs all due credit: his, the love of truth; his, the searching intellect; his, the lifetime of preparation for this moment of triumph. But my mind is awhirl.

The better to sort things out, for my sake as well as for yours, I shall start at the beginning, and as a kind of self-imposed penance, I shall omit nothing of my unutterable rudeness to him.

I knocked on his door before breakfast. He was in the midst of shaving and clearly in excellent spirits.

"Come in, Otto, old friend, come in. You've heard the news?

"What news?"

He looked at me coyly, his eyes gleaming above the shaving lather. With his left hand held floppily aloft, he made a few fencing passes at me with the razor in his right. "En garde!"

I was in no mood for his japes. He tried again. "A little birdie didn't tell you something?"

"For God's sake, Hamburger, you're a grown man. Talk like one."

But he was not to be put down. "Never mind, in due course you'll know."

"You had a pleasant weekend among the Hamptons literati? The autumn foliage et cetera were to your liking?"

He was too far gone to notice my sarcasm.

"Pleasant?" he chortled. "Yes, you could say pleasant."