The German Money, page 5
I nodded at the uniformed doorman, who I didn’t recognize. He had a comb-over so stiff he could have been wearing a piece of cardboard painted to look like hair; it gave him the air of a Senator. He smiled at Simon and Dina; it was another sign of my absence, but I was glad nobody bothered introducing me.
The lobby was as I remembered it, lavishly lined with white marble, cold as a tomb, the coffered ceiling fiendishly overcarved. And Tommy was the same elevator man as always: wizened, cheerful but remote, ageless, as short as a jockey.
“Sorry about your mother,” he said to me, nodding. I nodded back. Yes, I’d been sorry about my mother for a very long time.
Upstairs, in the rectangular hallway, I felt like I was entering the lobby of a theater where every detail was painfully, unpleasantly familiar: the floor made up of hexagonal grimy white tiles, the black apartment doors and the garbage disposal door at the hallways’ far end, the enormous opaque hallway windows that opened out onto an air shaft, the sagging wide staircase with its thick black railings. It was all so battered, so old, so oppressive.
But when Simon let us in, it flashed on me again that the apartment itself was one version of a New York dream: three large bedrooms, a big eat-in kitchen and servant’s room my parents had used for storage, deep closets, twelve-foot ceilings, parquet floors edged with a Greek Key design, elaborate moldings, a partial view of the Hudson. I couldn’t imagine living here; it struck me that day as phony, somehow, and remote.
We stood a bit awkwardly inside the front door and the scent of my mother’s perfume, Chanel No. 5, assaulted me. Simon and Dina breathed in deeply too, but said nothing as we lingered by the door. It was one of those real New York fire doors, heavy, steel-cased, painted black, and bristling with locks—not like those flimsy things you see on sitcoms supposedly set in New York. Though I’d given up this city long ago, watching shows like Friends or Will and Grace—if their dopey perkiness wasn’t turn-off enough—was impossible because their New York was unreal.
Dina took off down the dim hall to the guest bathroom; Simon sat at the foyer desk where the phone perched atop dusty address books.
The foyer was depressing: bare unpolished parquet, pale yellow-gray walls, small dented brass chandelier that looked like a carriage lamp and was over fifty years old.
I entered our old dining room, the heart of our apartment that was always brightly lit and full of food and guests.
Voluble Dad had loved company. He was constantly on the phone, clouding the air with plans, arrangements for shopping, lunch, dinner here, a party there, cards Saturday, the park Sunday, drives, walks, little visits. His hospitality had seemed rich and European to me. Friends could stay for hours, taking coffee “with something” and tea and snacks and eventually a meal to fuel the incessant conversation. It was Dad who set the tone. My mother always seemed aloof, uncomfortable, and if the conversation ever headed towards the War or anything connected to it, she would drift out of the room. It wasn’t an exit as much as a disappearance; her leaving wasn’t supposed to make any point.
I could tell that some of their friends thought she was haughty, acting like “a grandamma”—sarcastic Yiddish for “great lady.” Others nodded in sympathy with the wretched memories she obviously wanted to avoid, and talked of the survivors they knew for whom the War was not over. Like the couple who had bags packed under their beds, just in case they had to flee with no warning, or the woman who filled her basement with enough canned food for an army and would never allow her children to even touch a can on the tidy alphabetized shelves.
We hadn’t liked these people, these European Jews with embarrassing accents and prying eyes.
“It’s as if they can tell my weight to the ounce,” Dina had once complained. Dina was beautiful, which was appropriate for a girl, and so they evidently respected her, or at least her potential for marriage. And I was intelligent, though they thought I spent a little too much time with books.
George, a balding, shiny-cheeked custom tailor friend of Dad’s, well-off, always glowing with his own success, constantly asked me about my college major in English (before I switched paths to library science) with the smarminess of someone asking a little child: “Are you a boy or a girl?”
Dina did malicious imitations of them all in her room. They were loud, crude, we thought, too satisfied with themselves, with being alive. I think we really resented how they told stories of their childhood, mentioned relatives, holidays, vacations, the Jewish sections of their cities, with an edge to their voices that showed us all that the past was real for them, everything before the War. And all that came afterwards, which was of course our world, never quite measured up.
Simon clearly puzzled our parents’ friends; he was too interesting. They avoided staring at him so obviously it must have hurt, tried to act as if they weren’t fascinated by his dark troubled life. “So young,” I imagined them thinking. “So young and already no good.”
We never said it, but the real problem was that my parents’ friends were too Jewish and we were snobs—Dina and I, that is. We were afraid of them.
Not Simon, though. He couldn’t be drawn into mockery or disdain. His silence shielded him from all of us, made him a mystery, unreachable.
Simon was our mother’s favorite in a strange way; she looked at him like you’d look at a cripple, masking her pity. And Dina was closer simply for being a daughter, so why had our mother left me the German money instead of either one of them?
I sat at the dusty table, aware what an outrage this dust was in a house that had always been furiously clean thanks to my mother’s obsession with hygiene. No wonder we’d all lived untidy lives in some way—who wouldn’t want to break out?
With an index finger, I made random patterns in the dust layering the tabletop, puzzling over my mother’s Will, over our relationship. Then I stopped, since it seemed not just as obnoxious as someone writing “Wash Me” on the trunk of a dirty car, but a desecration.
I don’t think my mother ever figured out exactly how to feel about me. I knew from Dad that she’d had two miscarriages before me and maybe when I was born she found herself not as grateful to have a child as she should have been, or wanted to be. If Simon had felt not good enough for Dad, that’s how I felt about my mother. Maybe I had very early sensed that none of us were entirely substantial to her, that she couldn’t bring herself to care about us because she had lost everything: home, country, people, family. She never talked about the past; she had no pictures, no evidence of her life before the war—so in that way, the Nazis had succeeded in killing her by stealing her past.
Dina joined me suddenly, her eyes red, saying, “I’m okay.”
“Anyone hungry?” Simon asked from the large dim kitchen. It was also dusty, but seemed surprisingly full of food, and some things in the refrigerator had spoiled. Dina disposed of them. The cabinets were new, a softly-stained beige wood, and the recessed lighting was also new—when had our mother redecorated, and why? I couldn’t recall the kitchen needing any changes.
We ate scrambled eggs and toast made from slightly stale black bread, waiting for the coffee to brew. There was an oldfashioned Chemex coffee maker with a glass carafe that took longer than the sleeker contemporary models, but produced better coffee. Gazing at it, I pictured my mother with her strong hand around the wood collar on the carafe’s neck. It was stupid, but I thought I might want her coffee maker more than anything else in the apartment.
No, that wasn’t true. There was also a small Chagall lithograph Dad had given her years ago, supposedly an illustration from some French fairy tale. At its center was a haloed and horned figure, some kind of idol, and off to the right were a kneeling man and a small dog. It had always seemed a little weird to me, even more off kilter that Chagall’s fiddlers and flying cows. If it were valuable, I supposed I could always have it appraised and offer to buy it from Simon.
Simon talked about the funeral some, about the small turnout, the few people who had offered to help him, help us, how he hardly heard a word of it. Someone came from Dad’s accounting firm, but most of his co-workers had died of heart attacks or aneurisms so it was just a token appearance. And then my mother’s neighbor Mrs. Gordon—as he’d told me before— had been very kind to Simon. I couldn’t feel Simon present in the ragged story he told, and I bleakly imagined my own funeral again. Who would come to it? The question didn’t just leave me feeling empty, but childish. It was almost the pathetic reverse of that kid’s revenge fantasy of imagining everyone sorry when you’re dead.
Dina changed the subject. “Paul, you dating anyone?” She sounded like our mother, whose curiosity had always been mechanical; answers in general had seemed to interest her, but specific ones hadn’t appeared to mean very much. Though there was always the chance of saying something she disapproved of.
I had recently broken up with Camilla, a lab tech at the University of Michigan’s hospital who I’d dated for three months, until she told me she was seeing her ex-husband again. “No biggee,” I told her.
Ever since Valerie, I’d always let my relationships fizzle out, avoiding arguments and confrontations, the melodramas that people indulge in to prove the vitality of their existence. I didn’t need any of that. I knew I was buried alive.
What had first attracted me to Camilla when we met at Border’s in Ann Arbor was her self-contained simplicity and plainness. Despite sexy wide hips and large breasts, Camilla’s pale oval face and dull dark eyes—and her colorless clothes—completely extinguished any sense of her body as a passport to excitement, freedom, ease.
But Camilla had a different conception of herself. She liked setting the scene for sex like someone planning a rock garden. She lit an army of candles, chilled the wine in a gleaming cooler on the night table, set incense near the bed to helix the air with sweet pungent smoke—all in some complex geometry of the signs of passion. Then she would set the stereo to play a sound track for sex. Everything seemed so ritualized that she could have been warding off some kind of spell.
Camilla claimed to love sex, the atmosphere and aftermath of it, voicing delight in sweat and stained sheets, the stereo still humming at dawn, smug breakfasts at all-night cafes. I suspected the fuss was the camouflage of a woman who wanted to be enthusiastic. “I love sleeping in the wet spot!” she’d crow. “That’s because I’m a Taurus.” I never challenged her raving—I didn’t care enough.
Dina was waiting for an answer. I just shook my head.
“No? How come?”
“Too busy.”
Dina sneered, as if I were her hapless college roommate and she were showing off a mammoth diamond engagement ring, which, in fact, was what she wore. It was seven carats and in an unbelievably ugly heirloom setting. She chewed her toast with a superior tilt of her head. “Busy? At the library? Don’t you have all the file cards arranged by now?”
“What world are you living in? We’re computerized,” I said sharply, then drew back, annoyed at having been baited.
“Coffee’s ready,” Simon noted, rising and clattering cups.
Dina grinned triumphantly. “Then you should have plenty of time, right?”
“Coffee,” Simon insisted, thrusting a mug at Dina, who took it from him with a shit-eating grin.
“I bet you haven’t had a good relationship since Valerie, have you?” Dina asked cockily, her chin up as if daring me to answer. Simon startled both of us by snapping at her: “Enough.”
But it wasn’t enough for me. “Wait a minute! Since when did you become Dr. Joyce Brothers, huh? And why don’t you hassle Simon? He goes back and forth from guys to girls. What’s so great about that? You’re the last person to lecture anyone about good relationships. At least I was in love with Valerie. You’ve never been in love with anyone but yourself.”
I left my coffee in the kitchen and strode down the hall. I didn’t want an apology, nor was I going to apologize myself. I just didn’t want to think about Dina’s brutal question about Valerie. I spent a lot of time trying not to think about Valerie, usually right after splitting up with some far less satisfactory woman. “Val wouldn’t have said that,” I’d think, at least the Valerie I’d known in my twenties wouldn’t have. Who she had become all these years later was a mystery I didn’t want to explore, but wherever she was, I was sure her life had to be rich and satisfying—as unlike mine as possible.
Valerie and I had joked about her becoming a model or actress because of her height and long legs. People did often turn to watch her striding confidently along, her curly shoulderlength red hair bouncing, her oval freckled face slightly flushed from talking or laughing or just the breeze, her large gray-green eyes alive with observation. “Look at that!” she’d say as we walked Central Park West or through the Village, grabbing my arm, pointing at a cornice, a sign on a bus, a dog with a goofy raincoat, a pigeon pecking at a fallen hot dog, two women in leather pants suits and spiky green hair (“They must be dressed as each other,” she said).
Valerie wanted me to look at everything, and I wanted to look at her.
The room I’d shared with Simon was large, painted sky blue, with big windows facing south. The beds, bureau, desk and bookcases were all of the same blond wood and seemed welcoming, almost tender. Standing in the doorway I remembered playing “52 Pickup” with five-year-old Simon and how I’d tricked him into demanding to go first, so he knelt down to gather the scattered cards, looking so baffled and hurt that I stormed from the room, embarrassed. Playing tricks on him—like giving him an Indian burn on his arm—wasn’t fun because he didn’t howl or start a fight, he just suffered.
I stepped across the threshold, looking around. The books there were our very oldest: Robin Hood, Dumas, Jules Verne, Sherlock Holmes, Oz books, Lewis Carroll, Golden Tales from the Bible, all in shiny scratched bindings. I found the closet jammed with old shirts, worn chinos, warped boxes of writings from our first years of school, and miscellaneous mementoes that all looked like junk now. There were ancient-looking record albums, with the jackets that could have been chewed on: Peter Frampton, The Allman Brothers, David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Jeff Beck, Traffic, Edgar Winter. I hadn’t listened to them in over fifteen years and avoided all the rock stations back home even if they didn’t say they played nostalgia tunes because you never knew when one might slip in. I found Nightbirds—the Labelle album with “Lady Marmalade”—and remembered the silver lamé skirt Val said she had worn to their famous concert at the Metropolitan Opera. God, it made her look hot. I squashed that thought.
I didn’t touch anything or attempt to sort; there was no hurry because we’d decided to keep paying the maintenance fee until we were ready to move things out and put it up for sale. Simon strolled in and stretched out on his bed, hands twisting at the chenille coverlet. I knew that direct questions sometimes angered him, but I asked what was up.
“I wish I could afford to live here.”
I sat on my bed. Simon rarely shared his plans or his problems with me: I heard about them from Dina. If we’d had a large extended family, Dina would have been the one arranging reunions on cruise ships, researching the family tree, making endless chatty phone calls to ensure that no one’s birthday, anniversary or children’s graduation was forgotten.
“Why?”
Simon shook his head.
It didn’t surprise me, really. I could picture Simon living with shadows for the rest of his life, his strange disjointed past expanding, filling every room. Simon made sense here—more sense than in that tacky apartment in Forest Hills. I could never do it, since the city revolted me, and if Dina were to live here, she’d have to throw everything out in a rage of remodeling. She had houses in Montreal and Quebec City—a pied-à-terre in New York didn’t seem so unreasonable and I wondered if she was thinking about buying it from him. Or would she try to make him feel guilty and want to give it away?
We were so different, I thought, yet so similar. Each one of us was haunted and unhappy. What the hell was I doing here, and in New York?
True to form, when Simon and I walked into her room there was no animosity charging the air. If Dina felt anything about what I’d said about her not loving anyone, she wouldn’t be admitting it. Dina’s small room, all yellows and red, was bright and likewise full of her past: photos, framed certificates, dolls, clothes, and a jumble of shoes, bold posters and broken pens. She hunted through drawers, pulling out letters and knickknacks with a cry, shaking her head and tossing them back in. Watching her fun, I thought of having to clean up toys when we were kids. I’d be in charge; Dina would not want to stop and Simon would be lost in a private world with some unlikely-looking scrap of a toy. Mom, finding us unruly, disorganized, would say in leaden accusation, “You’re not doing what I asked. You’re not cooperating.”
“God, Mom hated this!” Dina laughed, dragging dress after dress from her closet. “And this one!”
I asked her, “What does it feel like?”
“To be back?” She shrugged. “It doesn’t. It’s not real. I keep thinking I’ll hear them talking in the kitchen or something.”
Because the bedrooms were all so close together at our end of the apartment, and the dining room was for guests, Mom and Dad had talked in the kitchen at nights where we could just hear a murmur of voices like the hum of traffic down below on West End Avenue.
But if Dina remembered their late-night conversations, I remembered their discord. If they tried cooking together in the kitchen, it was chaos because they couldn’t agree on anything, not even which pan to use. Simon would close the door when they argued like that, but Dina tried to intervene, fiercely reasonable in the kitchen.
That never worked because my mother ignored her and Dad would cut her down. I’d feel helpless listening to his sharp voice thick with self-importance, Mom’s heavier Polish accent making whatever she said sound harsh and unrelenting.
