On the Sunday after the funeral, James invited Noah to a party at the farm. Why should he go, he thought? To seethe with jealousy holding a glass of expensive wine and watch them ride and enjoy their fucking lives with that nonchalant pride of having everything?
He arrived by taxi, since he didn’t drive. One way, it cost him $135. As the taxi pulled up to the front door of the farmhouse it passed two horses in a fenced-off area attached to the barn. “Horses,” the Sikh driver said after not saying a word the entire trip up. By this, Noah figured the driver meant that his host had horses and therefore his host had money, therefore Noah had money, therefore the tip would be substantial. Noah got out, fumbled with a pocket full of fives, tens and twenties, handed over a messy ball of bills and quickly turned to the front door before the driver could count it and calculate the size of the tip. A sign on the door said “Come in.”
In the hall he noticed two well-worn but obviously expensive pairs of men’s knee-high riding boots. They had mud on the soles and sat flopped over at the ankle on top of each other like aristocratic lads pooped after a sweaty cluster-fuck. James was gay and lived with a partner he had left behind in London. Noah guessed that the second pair of boots belonged to one of James’s young “colonial” friends.
Noah stood with a drink, smiling at no one in particular, next to a fireplace made from plates of intersecting grey steel that took up much of the wall at one end of the cavernous addition built onto the farmhouse by the Japanese architect. He had just popped two of his dead aunt’s Percocets and was on his third vodka. The space, with its twenty-foot ceiling and massive Douglas fir beams, was built to house a collection of huge, abstract paintings, priced by James in the millions. This was the largest display of consistently hideous art Noah had ever seen in one place. The space and the money made him sick with envy at the same time that the overwhelming tastelessness of the art made him gloat with superiority. The two contradictory emotions mixed with pills and vodka put him in a mood that could best be described as a snarling giddiness. It was here and in this frame of mind that Noah was coincidentally introduced to Mary Hobson. There she was, the gorgeous and brilliant student from McEwen’s creative writing course, who, after McEwen’s description, had taken up residence in Noah’s sexual imagination as “The Hobson Girl.” If McEwen had been right about nothing else, this was a girl you could leave your wife for, if not shoot her for.
“We have a friend in common,” Noah said with a slightly ironic grin as if he held a piece of classified information.
“Oh,” she replied without a hint of curiosity or coyness. This wasn’t a “Lolita” response, Noah thought. This was a fawn still too innocent to recognize danger in man. He was too drunk to form anything but this one-dimensional and inaccurate impression. Her truth was, however, more complicated and perhaps beyond him. For starters, she was twenty and hadn’t yet developed that second self (which comes with maturity) with its jaundiced eye locked on the first. Noah, on the other hand, lived in the world of dualities. He knew no other.
“Patrick says you’re the smartest student he’s ever had in his creative writing course.”
“Not quite, omigod,” she smiled. “Professor McEwen’s pretty crazy. I mean in a good way. Do you know him?”
Know him? I hate his cock-sucking, ass-kissing, pretentious guts, Noah said, but somehow it came out, “We’re best friends. Patrick is great. Very smart. What do you think of the art?” He waved his drink hand in a circle, a slightly drunken move he hoped she didn’t notice.
She looked up and around the space, feet planted, her torso twisted. This move stretched her skimpy indie-band T-shirt across her small breasts. “Some of it’s okay I guess. I’m not an expert. I mean, there may be something here I can’t see.”
“… something here I can’t see.” What a smart response, Noah thought. Had she subtly pulled ahead of him? His paranoid competitiveness kicked in. He had to make a move. He noticed a single log of firewood standing on end alone in front of the fireplace and picked it up. “Do you think this is here because it’s been up Robert Mapplethorpe’s ass?”
She blurted out a short, sharp laugh. My fucking God, she got it, he thought.
“I have to catch up with my friends. I think we’re leaving.”
Fucking fuck, maybe she didn’t get it. She’s trying to get away. I blew it. If she didn’t know Mapplethorpe’s work, she probably thought it was just a horrible fag joke. He could feel his panic rising. That’s when the timing goes. He was familiar with the sensation.
“It was nice meeting you,” she said as she backed off.
“How about a coffee in town during the week?” Noah asked. Bad timing.
“I have a lot of work, like, three exams coming up.”
She was gone.
After a few more drinks, Noah grabbed a lift into town with a Jewish film director and his Norwegian girlfriend. Noah sat in the back seat alone, and after some small talk about Norway, melting ice sheets and climate change, he fell silent. The BMW 7 series sailed down the country roads absorbing bumps and dips as if it were in a TV commercial. Noah dropped his head back on the leather seat. What a fool I was to ask her for coffee after the Mapplethorpe joke, he thought. What an idiot. But fuck her. It was a great ad lib that summed up the art, the money and the gay world all with one blow. Still, she was walking away—you don’t ask someone for coffee once they’ve bailed out. What if she got the Mapplethorpe joke but thought it was homophobic? She’s fucking twenty years old; they’re all Stalinists when it comes to political correctness. His mind felt like a gaudy merry-go-round, with its horrible music and shrieking kids. He could hear the driver and his girlfriend talking, but their conversation seemed far away, as if it was in another language. This Jewish guy would have a BMW and a Norwegian girlfriend, Noah thought. No fucking cliché there.
The front-seat conversation continued. Noah turned his face to the late-afternoon sun and watched it strobe through the trees. His mind was momentarily at rest, as if the merry-go-round riders had dismounted and the ride kept going in sweet silence.
The BMW was now out of the country and on the freeway heading into the city. “Do you mind if we stop for deli?” the driver asked. Noah sat up. “Were you sleeping?”
“No, no.”
“Do you mind if we stop for deli to-go? It’s ten minutes out of our way. Bergit has never had good deli and there’s a fantastic place in the Jewish area up here.” The driver scanned the unbroken ocean of look-alike houses that rolled to the horizon on both sides of the highway. “I don’t know who the fuck can live up here.”
Noah stood with four or five others in front of the long glassed-in counter of food. Meats—pastrami, corned beef, smoked meat, pickled brisket; fish—white fish, salmon belly, lox, schmaltz herring, marinated herring, herring in sour cream, matjes herring; jars of soups; trays of salads—coleslaw, cucumber and onion, chopped eggplant; rows of knishes, kishka, farfel; pickles—cucumber, tomato, red pepper; chopped liver, chopped herring, chopped other stuff that was unrecognizable. Noah was mesmerized. He remembered the brothel scene in Fellini’s Roma, the half-clothed prostitutes strutting their wares and yelling and pouting and jiggling up and down in front of the customers and the young protagonist who didn’t know what to do but knew he wanted it all. Next to Noah was a tall guy, six foot two, maybe fifty-five, salt-and-pepper styled hair, gold-rimmed glasses, a blue Oxford-cloth button-down shirt, ironed jeans belted above his waist, a gold ID bracelet and a Rolex. He wasn’t slim. He scanned the food with a world-weary expression, even though his entire world most likely consisted of his office, his home and his club. He poked a toothpick into his mouth and emitted the slight heaving sigh of someone who had just eaten too much. He said to no one in particular, “It’s a good idea to eat before you order this stuff or you go nuts.” There were no numbers and no discernable line. Communication with the counter guys was not unlike that between brokers on the floor of a commodity exchange. The Toothpick now started to talk. “Give me a pound of medium and a pound of fat. Give me four potato knishes and two kasha. Give me a large coleslaw and a medium potato salad. Is the potato salad today’s?”
“Absolutely,” responded his counter guy, who was already preparing the order.
“Then make it a large potato salad. How long will it last in the fridge?”
“Two days.”
“Make it a medium potato salad. Give me a large rye with kimmel, sliced, and you better give me two jars of the barley soup.”
“You better give me two barley soup” was an interesting threat, Noah thought. What would happen if he didn’t get the soup? And Noah loved “Give me.” Where his mother used to take him shopping as a boy it was “May I have” or “I think I would like.”
The Toothpick had finished his order when something else caught his eye. “You better give me two sheets of lox and throw in a small cream cheese.” Another threat. “Is that all I need?” he asked of no one in particular. This was picked up by a small, round, middle-aged woman with a hairdo that looked like it had come out of a hat box.
“Their kishka’s very good,” she said, standing with the index finger of her left hand pressed against the glass, pointing at nothing in particular and showing a wedding/engagement-ring set with a diamond the size of one of the knishes.
“Give me about that much kishka.” The Toothpick held his hands about a foot apart.
Now it was The Diamond’s turn. “I don’t see pickled tongue. Have you got tongue today?”
“Is the pope Polish?” her counter guy responded.
“Give me three-quarters of a pound. It’s for my husband,” as if it was necessary for all present to know that she didn’t eat tongue.
Even though the current pope was not Polish but German, and the exchange was illogical, Noah loved its efficiency—they had tongue. Had logic applied, “Is the pope Polish?” would have meant, “We have no tongue,” which they had, and this would have made no sense.
Noah could only think, Why wasn’t I born a Jew? These are my people.
It was now his turn, and he could feel beads of sweat start to form under his arms and dribble down his sides. “The smoked meat, what’s the difference between the medium and the fat?”
“The medium’s medium and the fat’s fat,” answered the counter guy without any sarcasm or malice. The Toothpick had heard this and came to the rescue.
“The fat’s delicious but it’ll kill you.”
On Noah’s other side stood an extremely attractive blonde of about forty-two in tight designer jeans, a short leather jacket with a western fringe, and about $50,000 in jewellery. She smiled at him. “He’s right. It’s delicious but terrible for you.”
Noah smiled back and wondered how far he’d have to travel across the universe to end up in bed with her. She looked like the Jewish version of the horsewomen he had grown up with, but with a difference. The horse set would rather have a horse between their legs than a man. He imagined that this one fucked like a banshee but you’d need a good orthodontist practice to get in the door.
“What’s it gonna be?” asked his counter guy.
No one had actually answered the fat-medium question and Noah was on his own.
“Give me a pound of the fat.” He expected to hear cheers as if Evel Knievel had just landed a death-defying jump. But the fat was logical. It was delicious. No comment was necessary. “And I’d like a jar of soup.”
“Pea or barley?”
“Barley.”
“You want a bread?”
“Yes. The rye.”
“Is this just for you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll give you half a rye.”
“Done.”
Noah was getting the rhythm. “Give me one potato knish and one kasha and give me that jar of pickled tomatoes and a medium potato salad.” Noah was on a roll and could feel it. Measuring with his hands, “Give me that much kish …” Trouble. “Kish what, kish what?” he muttered to himself. The sweat was now rolling down his sides in small streams. He realized he had gotten too cute by half. But the counter guy was on to him from the start.
“A nice piece of kishka and I’ll throw in a little gravy with that. You heat it up and you stick it in.”
“Thank you.”
“You got it.”
“I got it,” Noah thought. “These are my people and I got it.”
But these weren’t his people and as they drove home and got farther away from the deli, his connection to them also stretched out. In the back seat he thought about why he had admired The Toothpick. It was because The Toothpick was head-to-toe, take him or leave him, The Toothpick. He could be nothing else but The Toothpick wherever he went or whomever he talked to. “It’s a good idea to eat before you order this stuff or you go nuts.” The Toothpick would have said this to the Queen of England as readily as he said it to the customers at the counter. And this is what Noah admired. He hated himself for being a different person to different people, constantly inventing and reinventing himself depending on the circumstances.
Once home and in the safety of the dead zone, Noah ate almost everything then listened to his messages. One was from a woman with a husky voice who worked at the same publishing house as McEwen. She had read Noah’s novel outline and “found parts of it very interesting.” She wondered if he had time “in his schedule” for a drink.
After two glasses of wine at a bar in a high-end hotel, it came out that she wasn’t at the editorial level but at the secretarial level. She was tall, about thirty-three with a strong jaw and large hands and feet and a pretty good body. He could tell she smoked. When she went to the ladies’ room between drinks, Noah watched her cross the floor with long, aggressive strides and thought she was to femininity what Albert Speer was to architecture, and this held interesting possibilities. However, there is always a distance to go before the final destination in bed, and she had strong opinions on issues on which Noah felt one should not expend too much energy.
“I hate the red carpet on Oscar night!” she said with genuine disdain. She didn’t hate the Oscars as a whole. This would have been fine with Noah, given its cultural implications. But she hated the red carpet only and with a vengeance. He didn’t challenge this because he knew that the road to bed can be not only long but rocky. She also “hated the North American way of tipping.” She preferred the French way of “service included.” She was militant on “service included” and pronounced it with a Parisian accent. She also “love, love, loved” France. Noah didn’t feel any need to hate or love it. He was okay with letting France be what it was without getting involved: good food, structuralism and Nazi collaborators. It wasn’t that he had no opinion on these subjects, he just didn’t have the energy to gang up on tipping. None of it was Hiroshima or poverty in America or AIDS in Africa or Proust or Mahler, on which he might have something to say. So he kept his distance and made no serious errors and she accepted his invitation to go back to his place for another drink.
Noah prepared two large vodka martinis in his tiny kitchen and returned to the living room but she wasn’t there. He saw her boots on the floor next to the bathroom. The door was open. He looked in—nothing. He moved carefully to the bedroom, balancing the drinks, and there she was sprawled on his bed stark naked. “Don’t touch me!” she screamed loud enough to bring the police. Noah realized it was now time to return to earth.
As he moved her out and down the stairs of his building, Don’t Touch Me told him that two editors at the publishing house had read his novel outline and there was a split decision on whether to go forward with a small advance. To break the tie, they had given it over to McEwen, since he had brought it in. He had passed and killed the project. She said McEwen told her the story in the copy room with his hand under her skirt and between her legs. This little kiss-and-tell seemed to give her a sadistic pick-me-up, and by the time they hit the street she was playfully grabbing at Noah’s crotch. But Noah had limits that sometimes surprised even him, and he stuffed her into a taxi as if he was putting out the week’s trash. He had no idea how far away she lived but gave her a twenty for the fare without a goodbye. As he closed the car door, she shrieked at him with her throaty smoker’s rattle, “I hated it too, fucker!” He stood on the curb and watched the cab drive into the night.