White Tiger on Snow Mountain (6 page)

1) I was thanked, along with a few other people, in the acknowledgments to
Walter Benjamin’s Grave,
a collection of essays by anthropologist Michael Taussig. As it happens, Mick was my landlord at the time. After a random chat in
the kitchen about Bataille, he handed me some pages and asked me to look at them. I offered a few comments, and to my amazement, he returned a couple of hours later having incorporated my thoughts, then kindly and needlessly thanked me in his book. Frankly, I can’t even recall what I said.

2) I was also thanked by another roommate: My old friend Paul Grant (known to some of us as Bud) translated a book by Serge Daney, the former editor of
Cahiers du cinéma,
dead now from AIDS. I read the manuscript at one point and caught a few grammar goofs, maybe.

3) Weirdest of all, and requiring the least actual effort, I was thanked on the back of a Bad Religion record. When I was living in LA, I gave my friend Brett Gurewitz, who is a big chess freak, a copy of Nabokov’s book of chess problems and the novel
The Defense,
which inspired Brett to write a song (not about me). Finding this reference, an academic coup, was apparently pure luck: Her brothers were old-school punk fans.

While it was hard for me to see anything much in this pattern except that I had odd friends, a lot of extra time, and no stable housing, to Leticia (that was her name, the Argentinean girl) this made me a significant “unimportant” figure. She’d written an article about me, she said, for a key journal, and I was already very popular in intellectual and artistic circles in Buenos Aires, as, she was sure, in New York.

“Not so much,” I said. “You’d be surprised.”

She frowned at this. “Perhaps they don’t understand what you’re trying to do.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed, hoping that when she arrived in New York she’d finally help me understand—perhaps while cradling my head in her lap, stroking my burning forehead with her long, cool, tapered fingers and whispering in her warm, soothing accent—just what, for all these years, I’ve actually been trying to do.

Leticia arrived a week later. I’d shaved by then and spent the rest of my time in my room, doing sit-ups and other painful exercises that the Internet said would trim my midriff and harden up my core. We met at a Chinese place downtown, where they sit you at gigantic round tables with strangers and plop your food on a lazy susan in the middle, like eating on a carousel. A round family of four bears—dad, mom, bro, and sis—chewed spareribs in silence and stared unabashedly at our meeting/ date.

In person Leticia was lighter: Her hair was still black, but her eyes were now a chestnut brown shot with gold. Her skin was very fair, paler than mine and freckled. I was surprised. The Latinas I knew had darker complexions.

“Yes, I am from the South America, but it is far south, even below your south. So far south that we are upside down from you, everything is opposite, and it is winter.”

She swabbed her pancake with plum sauce and deftly added several slices of pinkish duck before folding it all into a slim envelope with those long violinist fingers. They were so long they seemed to have an extra knuckle, and they wavered as she talked, writing in elegant script.

“Well, I hope that now that you’ve met me, you’re not still sorry I’m alive.”

“No, not at all!” She furrowed her long forehead. “It is still very good for my thesis; plus you are a very sympathetic man who I am pleasured to meet.”

“Thanks.” It was, I had already noticed, part of her charm that she had no sense of humor at all, at least not in English. She would have made a great straight-lady back in the golden age of cinema, with her unflappable seriousness and black-on-white beauty. Still, thinking that I was at least getting somewhere, I licked the duck sauce from my fingers, rotated the shrimp, which were floating dangerously close to the bear family, and drew, from a plastic Duane Reade bag, my piece of resistance.

“I brought you something. A surprise,” I said, laying the frayed and rubber-banded cardboard box between us. “This is my novel. No one else has read the whole thing.” Not for lack of trying, I could have added, but having finally found a real fan, I decided not to let the legions of rejecting agents, publishers, teachers, and girlfriends cloud her sunnier southern judgment. Who knows? Perhaps in the land of Cortázar, where poets filled
fútbol
stadiums and public insurance paid for psychoanalysis, readers would be brave enough to understand my tragically experimental novel,
Psoriasis.

She paused. While her narrowed fingertips tapped her beautifully greasy lower lip, she stared at the box without touching it. “Mmmm . . . no. I think I will not.” She picked her sticks back up and chose another shrimp. “It is outside of my scope of research for you. Plus”—and here she smiled a little—“what if I don’t like? It is a bit of when you imagine kissing someone and then it tastes bad, no?”

“No. I mean yes.” I chuckled lightly and slid the box back into the bag, just as the lazy susan slid beyond my reach. She snatched the last shrimp resting on the little island of spicy salt. I settled for the remains of broccoli and washed it down with a tiny cup of dark and bitter tea. With both my literary and romantic aspirations dashed, I found myself at a loss for conversation.

“You know,” I said, “my friend wrote a novel that takes place in Buenos Aires.”

“Yes? Who is this?”

“Her name’s Rivka Galchen.”

She reached out and gripped my wrist, as if I were steadying her on a boat, or she were heading down some stairs, in high heels, a little drunk, after midnight. “Rivka Galchen the Canadian writer?”

“Yes . . . I suppose so. She lives here, though, in New York.”

“But she is a very famous one! You really know her well?”

“Yes, yes, we are very close friends,” I elaborated, seizing on this new impressive connection and hoping she’d touch me again. “We talk all the time.” I felt like I was lying, although I was not, a common hazard when one is just generally full of shit. So I kept rambling on, tossing out random facts (Did you know she went to medical school? Her hair is dark and long like yours!), as if trying to convince her of something there was no reasonable reason to doubt, except for my own dubious motives. The check arrived, and Leticia didn’t budge. I would have guessed it was the interviewer’s pleasure, but perhaps not on her side of the world. I put down all the money I had. Smiling, she escorted me out.

“So tell me more about Galchen.”

“Well . . .” I searched my mind for more tidbits. “Actually this is funny. You know that ‘20 Under 40’ thing in
The New Yorker
?”

“But of course. Galchen is one of these to watch!”

“Well, I’m a character in her story. Isn’t that funny?”

“What?” She stopped me in the middle of the street. It was a narrow Chinatown lane, a crooked path through the tilting buildings in the ancient part of town. The crowd swept ceaselessly around us, like the current parting for a rock, softly shoving. The look on her face was very serious, as if I’d revealed a dire medical condition. “You are inside the story?”

“Yeah. I mean not really. It’s kind of her little joke. Her narrator has a friend named David who shows up to borrow money for his teeth. I’ve never borrowed money from her, at least not yet. Though I admit she’s offered. It’s also true I’ve had a lot of dental work, mostly because of my childhood illnesses, you know when you have high fevers you don’t get the normal enamel, but I mean they’re very healthy now and clean and look OK . . .”

“Please . . .”

I trailed off. She had leaned into my shirtfront, and her long hands were splayed against my chest, as if she were trying to peer into a window. “Please, I have never met a really fictional character before.” Her small face gazed up at mine, eyes glowing. “You are like a phantom,” she said as her nails pressed through to my skin. “Please,” she said, “kiss me,” and I did. I folded my arms around her, and our mouths met, and we hung like that for a long time, eyes shut and lost in the darkness. I felt the surging, endless crowd brushing past me and kept one
hand on my empty wallet. I tasted spicy salt on her lips. She whispered wetly in my ear: “
Imago, imago,
my phantom . . .”

As soon as Leticia left my bed the next morning for the library, I rushed to meet Rivka at the Hungarian Pastry Shop and tell her the whole story. “That sounds wonderful,” she said, nibbling a single macaroon. She has the smallest handwriting and the tiniest bites of anyone I know. I made a mental note to tell Leticia this over dinner that night. She sipped her tea and smiled. “Maybe you’ll end up in Buenos Aires, living in noble literary exile like Gombrowicz.”

“I hope not. Gombrowicz almost starved. Actually I remember a guy that Bud and Pascale introduced me to. He was doing research on how, while Gombrowicz was in exile in Argentina during the war, he was desperately poor but still too snobby to associate with the other Polish émigrés. But apparently there’s some suggestion he used to hang around the docks, consorting with lowlifes and hustling for his bread.”

“Aw, see, that is just like you,” Rivka said. I scowled. She still had like 97 percent of her cookie left. I had consumed my three in three stuffed mouthfuls. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m honored that my little story played a supporting role.”

“Your story is the hero of my story,” I told her. “That’s what did it. And let’s face it, this is the only way I’ll ever get in
The New Yorker.
Though I did have to deflect that business about the teeth. And she didn’t even want to read my book.”

“Which book?”

“The new one.
Psoriasis.
It’s depressing. I’m still a nobody, even to the girl I’m sleeping with.”

“Yes, but a beautiful nobody. She just wants you as she found
you. You don’t even have to impress her or be anybody. You’re just her dream. I think that’s wonderful.”

“I guess.”

Anyway, what did it matter? Leticia was a dream girl, and if her fetish was having sex with a fictional nobody, I wasn’t about to object. In fact, she was already looking into setting up some speaking engagements for me in BA, and said it was quite possible she could arrange a fellowship so that I could spend six months there. I could fly down in the fall, when it was turning cold up here. It would be their spring, and in that upside-down world I’d be a well-known and respectable phantom with a beautiful lover. Here I had been a nobody forever, and it didn’t seem to do me any good at all.

When I got home from the pastry shop, I could see that she’d been crying. Her battered suitcase was packed.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s wrong? Bad news from home?” I reached out to comfort her, and she recoiled.

“Don’t touch me,” she hissed. “Don’t you ever touch me again.”

“What? What is it? What’s wrong?”

She gave me a vile look, then turned her gaze to the window. “When Galchen said in her story that you were a writer of the magazine
Hustler,
I think this is a magazine of literary cowboys who sing poems, like we have in my country. But then I was carrying forward with my research into you and I found this.” She pointed at my computer.

Now it so happens that, back in my leaner and hungrier days, I wrote a good deal of porn, all of it long forgotten. Apparently, however, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, Leticia had located
some of the particularly nasty “true” stories I’d produced, mostly under the pen name MFA (Master of Fine Ass).

“But that’s just fiction,” I told her. I even laughed at the absurdity of it. “I made it up for money. It’s not real. Not like us.”

“Real? We are not real.” She had tears in her eyes. “This is the real you. A monster.”

“But this is crazy,” I said, pleading now. “What about us? What about our trip?”

She pointed a long claw at me. “If you ever come to Buenos Aires, one of my brother will cut your throat.”

She left. I hung by the open door, floating more or less in the same spot as when I’d first seen her letter. The only sign that the whole affair had ever really happened was the sad pair of damp brown socks I found later, dangling limply from my shower curtain rod. I called poor Rivka again, and she made soothing remarks but didn’t really seem all that surprised. I suppose it was never that realistic to begin with. Or perhaps she suspected it was all a delusion.

It was not until late that night that curiosity (and curiosity about ourselves is the worst kind) overcame depression and I found myself using the “history” function on my computer’s browser to re-search Leticia’s research into me. I came across some old stories, and I had to admit, Leticia had a point. They made disturbing reading. I almost said they were disturbing to reread, but in truth, I didn’t even recall writing them. It had, after all, been ages, another life, another city, a whole marriage ago.

As I read these absurd ramblings of a seemingly depraved and disordered mind, what I remembered was sitting at my
desk during my lunch break, often with my shirt and tie off so as not to drip mustard on my dry-cleanables, squinting at a set of slides I’d been handed moments before, trying to concoct some vaguely plausible narrative or motive for what the bodies in the pictures were getting up to and still get out for a quick smoke before 1 p.m. A tableau featuring two aproned girls, a dude in a chef’s hat, and a cornucopia of veggies became “Bottom Feeders,” and a story about two competing female pool sharks and an audience of, for some reason, nude men was called “Eight Balls in the Side Pocket.” None of this rang a bell, though I confess the fable “Good Pet, Bad Bitch” did remind me of the cages I saw when, as I child, I went to adopt a puppy and had nightmares for months after. Was that the key? Scrolling through the links, I found my own work reused over the years, without royalties, for murky foreign sites like
Asian Auction, Whores de France,
and, most grimly of all,
Ass Atlas of Romania.

My ex-wife had despised those writings, refusing to read them and wondering aloud about the spiritual damage they caused while also complaining about how little they paid. As for myself, well, they really had nothing to do with my “self.” My real, primal motive had not been lust but fear, fear of the mailman and the phone and whatever bad news they might bring. I also wrote ad copy for a yoga center, edited grant proposals for a choreographer, and proofread legal documents: That didn’t make me a dancing Buddhist lawyer.