10
Reunion
NEW YORK, 2010
1.
I received Gila Konig’s first letter in the spring of 2010, about six months after my piece on David Bellen had first been published. Apart from the Bellen story, I hadn’t written any of the book you’re reading now—I didn’t know yet that the Bellen piece would become part of the larger story I would eventually, after some resistance, find myself telling. As I said before, when Gila told me about her past in Tel Aviv in 2010, I knew almost nothing about Meyer Lansky and wasn’t very interested in him.
I saw her only one time after I was twelve, at a restaurant on 79th Street, just a few blocks from where my father had run his antiques business back in 1982, the last time we’d seen each other. It was a bright sunny afternoon and Gila wore a cream-colored hat made of soft straw to protect her skin from the sun. That May, at the age of seventy-one, she had undergone what would turn out to be her final round of radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Her hair beneath the hat had started to grow back in, gray and straight and close to the scalp. I had forgotten the delicateness of her cheekbones, her lips. We sat upstairs on the restaurant’s covered porch, fans hung from the ceiling, waiters moving by in white jackets, as in some old film whose setting was Capri. I smiled at Gila the way I sometimes cry at a movie that isn’t really sad. She had written me a few times now. I imagined her motives for seeking me out were bound up in her illness. Because I write for a living, people I don’t know or hardly know have frequently approached me on the slimmest of pretexts to set down their life stories. It just happens, more than I would have ever expected. Particularly in the face of illness or old age, they come to me with secrets that no longer seem important enough to be ashamed of. I listen to the crux of their lives and I tell them no, I’m sorry, I’m busy with other projects. What I can’t explain is that it’s not that their life story isn’t interesting, it’s that everyone’s life story is interesting.
But Gila was of course someone I knew. A friend of hers, she’d told me, had seen my piece on Bellen and passed it on to her—the friend, Hugh, and his partner owned the apartment where Gila was staying that night as a guest. They had a summer house near where Gila lived now, in Sag Harbor, New York. It was a strange coincidence, I pointed out—my family, as she knew, had had a house in the next town over, Southampton. As she also knew, it was during a stay at that house that my father had first told me of their affair.
Her clothes looked expensive—pearl-gray slacks, a simple white blouse, crisply pressed. The clothes seemed to assert that she had taste and also more money than I probably expected.
“ ‘Strange,’ ” she said, echoing my word. “Everyone always says ‘strange.’ But life is strange. My life certainly has been strange.”
She took a slow drink of water. When she put the glass down, she lightly wiped her hands, one atop the other, watching them. The cancer had been “strange,” she told me. It had started in her big toe—all her toenails turned a cloudy white—and two different doctors had assured her at first that it was nothing, until by the time anyone gave it any real thought it had metastasized all over her body.
I said I was sorry. She looked at me then with something like forbearance, a kind of suppressed disappointment. In that look, I could see a regret for all the perfectly real things that separated us. But I could also see that, having read my piece, she thought we were somehow kindred spirits. She had expected something less trite from me than “strange” and “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t ask you here to talk about what happened with your father all that time ago,” she said then. “A lot of painful things. Obviously. And I didn’t ask you here to talk about my cancer. A lot of people get cancer. I wanted to show you something. That’s why I asked you here. This is something I thought you’d find interesting as a writer. Something that’s not just personal.”
With some difficulty, she took an old photo album out of her purse. It contained a fading collection of 5 x 7 prints that dated back to the 1970s, their colors degrading into an acidic murk behind their plastic compartments. She showed me one series in particular—I wish I had the photographs with me now—first through the plastic, then, so I could get a better look, removing the pictures from the album. They were stark interior views of an apartment, like realtor’s photos, except that these photos made no attempt to flatter the space they portrayed. The ceilings were low, the light depressingly dim. There was no furniture. The apartment was an empty shell with scuff marks on the walls where pictures might once have hung.
“It’s the one I told you about in my last letter,” she said. “It’s on a nice street, it must be worth some money these days. As I told you, I could have been living there right now, living there all this time. That was the idea.”
The apartment was a few miles from the hotel where she had worked for many years in Tel Aviv, the Dan. That was where she’d met Meyer Lansky, she said, bringing him coffee in the downstairs lobby.
She introduced me to a Hebrew word then, yored. Its root means “to descend.” It’s what Israelis are called when they leave and go to another country. They have “descended.” They have gone down to the corrupt world outside, so to speak, abandoned the holy land that is their rightful home.
“Strange,” she said again. “I don’t know how my friend Hugh found your story, but these things happen. He knew about my life in Tel Aviv, and so he passed it on. And then everyone says ‘strange.’ ‘How strange.’ ”
She showed me another photograph. This one was of her mother, a thin woman in a bright orange head scarf, her pale skin lusterless, like clear wax. Of course I already knew something about Gila’s mother, in particular about what Gila’s mother had done to keep them both alive during their time in Bergen-Belsen.
“She’s sixty-four in that picture,” Gila said. “She had cancer too. I took care of her for eight years—she fought for a long time. When she died, in 1979, I had just turned forty. I didn’t want her to die, but obviously her living meant I had to keep taking care of her. I was a cocktail waitress—the Dan Hotel is still there on the beach in Tel Aviv, you can go see it sometime. What I’m saying is that there was no way someone like me was going to make a fresh start after eight years of that. There was no way for someone like me to get ahead.”
She met my eye with a defiant candor. She was telling me this story not as a woman who’d known me as a twelve-year-old girl, but as a woman who knew me now. She was tough—I’d forgotten that. I found myself feeling a complicated warmth toward her. There was of course another part of me that felt otherwise, that deeply mistrusted her. Her affair with my father, in conjunction with my mother’s death, had caused all kinds of problems for me. Sometimes it seems that the confusion of that time has never really faded and that I go through life dazed—skeptical but also credulous, both doubter and believer at the same time—with the hazy result that I am almost never correct in my assessment of other people and their motives. The memory of my father telling me about their affair is a blur. The girl on the other side of the blur, the girl who was I, is not even someone I particularly like. Out of that blur comes whoever I am now. And so the blur is shaming, because it represents a force outside my control that is in a sense definitive.
The opposite of yored, she told me then, is oleh—the plural is olim. Olim are those who have “ascended”—those who have gone to Israel and settled there. “The American,” as she referred to Lansky now, had wanted to become oleh, she said, but he was refused. This was the story she was telling me. The apartment in Tel Aviv was his parting gift, an odd gift that had made her feel somehow diminished. It seemed to imply that she needed his help, that she was incapable of taking care of herself. She still didn’t know how the arrangement worked. The rent was always paid, the power stayed on, the water, the gas. No one would tell her who was keeping up these payments.
“The management company said it had been taken care of,” she told me. “What else did I want to know, it was mine. Well, they knew that I knew who was ultimately taking care of it. I did know. I’d had a relationship with him. In a sense, I still had a relationship with him. This is what I meant when I talked about yored before. The sense of going down, of descending, of being corrupt. Both of us were yordim, even though I still lived in Israel, even though I was a citizen there. We would both always be yordim, never olim. That was one of the things we had in common. This is what I thought you might find interesting.”
She was still striking, even in her illness. I was resisting the temptation to order a glass of wine and the effort was making my mouth a little dry. Gila seemed to sense this, watching me.
“I’m glad you came,” she said. “I was worried you wouldn’t, that you’d change your mind.”
“It’s been twenty-eight years,” I said. “A long time.”
“In a sense it’s been a long time. But in another sense, it’s like it just happened. All those things in the past. We haven’t seen each other in all these years. In that sense, it’s like it was yesterday.”
She’d wanted to be a designer, she went on. In the seventies, in Tel Aviv, she had shown some sketches she’d made of women’s clothes to a man who manufactured swimwear, but he’d been dismissive. Even after her mother’s death, she’d had no real hope of getting anywhere. And yet, she told me, there was that empty apartment sitting on a quiet street in Tel Aviv which she could either live in rent-free after her mother’s death or find some other way to exploit.
“I went to South Tel Aviv,” she told me. “Those places you wrote about where Bellen came from—Hatikva, Etzel Street. I knew enough to know that that’s where I should go. There was a cook I worked with at the hotel and he brought me—we took the bus that first time, it was a weekday, before our shift. Even back then, it was like you describe. Coffee for the men. For me, nothing. Coffee in those little gold-rimmed cups. I had to go back three or four times—it was just luck finally that got me anywhere. Luck. They wouldn’t have told me a word if I hadn’t recognized one of them. He’d been the driver of the man I told you about, the American. Because I knew his driver, I could speak to them. I could tell them that I didn’t want the apartment. What I wanted was the next year’s rent and then the apartment was theirs—whoever’s. I had no idea how much the rent was. I just thought one year sounded like a nice round figure.”
She assumed they would say no, or worse, that they’d ask for something back, involve her somehow, but then, after two weeks of silence, the driver appeared one evening at the Dan Hotel. He arranged to meet her the next day at the apartment she’d shared with her mother all those years.
“It was not a full year’s rent,” she told me. “It was more like a few months. But it was enough for an air ticket, with a little left over. It was enough to get me here.”
The waiter cleared our unfinished salads. I told Gila I had to go to the bathroom, but what I really needed was to go inside and sit at the bar and write it down without her watching me. If I don’t write it down, it begins to change. I knew it was changing a little even as I was writing it down. Etzel Street. Hatikva. The names of places she’d seen in my piece. I still didn’t know how much I believed her story. It occurred to me that the whole time I was in Israel, I had never once thought of my old babysitter, Gila Konig.
Gila Konig, born Tsilya Konig, somewhere in Hungary, 1939. Survivor of Bergen-Belsen, survivor of a DP camp outside Munich called Foehrenwald, refugee in the new state of Israel, 1950–1980. In 1980, Gila Konig had come to New York with a few hundred dollars and no connections, thinking she might find work as a designer, or if not as a designer, doing something in the fashion industry. Eventually, with my father’s help, she managed to enter into the dress business, selling wholesale to department stores—Macy’s, Dillard’s, Neiman Marcus—from her own small showroom on Seventh Avenue. And for a brief span early on in this trajectory—for a little more than a year—she had scraped by as a Hebrew school teacher at a temple on the Upper East Side, the congregation my family happened to belong to in the year my mother began dying of cancer.
I noticed that throughout our conversation she had almost never referred to Lansky by name. It was “the man I told you about,” or “the man I knew, the American.” It occurred to me that you could read this two ways. It was either an indication that she was lying and was nervous that her story sounded untrue, or that she was telling the truth and was nervous that her story sounded untrue.
When I returned to the table, she was talking on her cell phone. After she finished, there was a silence as we readjusted to the people we were now, as opposed to the people we’d been all those years ago. She looked away, at the long line of tables to our side, most of them empty. They each had a tiny white vase with a white orchid and a sprig of fern, which in the shade of the porch stood in subtle but dramatic contrast to the white tablecloths.
“I’m lucky I know Hugh,” she said. “I don’t have many people in my life. He’s waiting for me. He’s at the apartment. I’ll finish telling you the story and then we should go.”
She took another sip of water, as if in preparation, and then she told me what I would have guessed a long time ago if I had wanted to think about it. She told me that her affair with my father had started before my mother’s death, not after it. She admitted that from the moment she’d met my father she could see what he would ultimately want. She could see the opening, I suppose you could say, but of course she put it differently. He was “lost” in “grief,” she said. It wasn’t what my father “wanted,” it was what he “needed.” It was “naïve,” she went on, to wish for men to be “better” than they were. I feel somehow prim writing this all down now, inserting these quotation marks. I look at my past and what infuriates me is not my father but the rigid predictability of everything I did in the hopes of getting back at him—my marriage after a promiscuous past, the affair that then broke that marriage up. All of that by my midtwenties. All so that I could for a brief time pretend to be better than my father and then repeat the kind of behavior I held against him. When you’re young, your power is self-destruction. It occurred to me that my being there at that lunch was just a late echo of that self-destruction.
“You’re not angry at me,” Gila said.
“I told you already, it was a long time ago.”
“You haven’t told me what your intentions are. What your interest in all this is.”
“If you’re asking if I want to write about your past, then I don’t have any intentions. I have other things I’m working on right now.”
“I would think there would be money in a story like this, but maybe that’s a little vulgar for you, getting money for something you’re not that interested in, or that wasn’t your idea. I guess I think about money because I wasn’t born into a world like this one, the kind of world you were born into. The kind of world your father was able to give you access to.”
She sat up very straight, her hands placed before her on the table, and looked at me with something like reproach. Perhaps hearing someone’s confession is inherently draining. Its effect at that moment was to prevent me from pressing her to tell me anything more. I knew that’s what she wanted, and to ask would have made me feel I was indulging her, granting her story more interest than I wanted it to have. As I said, I was familiar with people overestimating the specialness of their stories. People imagine movies. They imagine a best seller, not a vanity press book. It’s the way the world is, everywhere, not only in America. You can go through Bergen-Belsen, Foehrenwald, and still be prey to this myth.
I knew I couldn’t write in good faith about Gila’s past with Lansky without writing about her past with my father—perhaps that explains my lack of interest at that lunch. I knew that to write about my father would only be to open up the old wounds, and I’d already done some of that years before in the memoir I’d written about my marriage and its collapse. I was tired of memoirs, I thought, tired of myself. But perhaps I was simply tired of struggling with my father and his opinion of my opinions. Which is to say that it was probably inevitable that I would eventually write about Gila and Lansky, Gila and my father, for I was still angry with my father, even if I didn’t want to be.
The waiter came with the bill. We weren’t friends, so although I offered to help Gila with the check, I didn’t press it when she refused.
“I’ll tell you more the next time,” she said. “When we see each other again. How about that?”
She smiled. She wanted more from me even now. She wanted the waiter to take our photograph. I forced myself to move my chair around the table, closer to Gila’s, my hand on her shoulder, so he could fit us both in the frame.
“Thank you for coming,” she said then, flatly.
Hearing that sudden hardness in her voice, I had a moment of regret. I began to feel that I had judged her too harshly. She took one last look at the photo on her digital camera, then drew back the lens and put it in her purse. We smiled at each other—my smile transparently false—and before saying goodbye I made an equally false promise that we’d see each other again soon.
2.
I went to visit my father a few days later. He lives now on 72nd Street, about eight blocks from where we’d lived when I was growing up. When the elevator door opens on the third floor, even when you know what to expect, the light-filled spaciousness can still come as a surprise. The living room, like a vast hall, has three different groupings of sofas and chairs—it even has one of those peculiar circular couches, usually seen in hotel lobbies, with a tall bouquet at the center like the pistil in a giant lotus. Floor lamps, framed etchings, a bronze boddhisattva standing lankily in a far corner. In the room he uses as his study, he switched off the TV and I told him about my lunch with Gila. He listened inattentively, eating cold beef consommé out of a bowl.
“She lives in Sag Harbor,” I said. “Like she’s been trying to get back there ever since that weekend.”
He wiped his hands on a large napkin, licking his teeth. “She came in to say hello about a year ago,” he said. “Right before I closed up the shop. She had cancer, she told me. They didn’t know yet how serious it was. Maybe she just didn’t want to tell me.”
“You never told me you saw her.”
“Once or twice over the years she came in to say hello.”
He was even less interested in my meeting with Gila than I’d expected him to be. I understood then that he seldom if ever thinks about her, just as, in the wake of all the trouble I brought him when I was younger, he seldom thinks of me. I made it hard for him—I frustrated and ultimately baffled him. He had only wished me well all those years. I was so accusative for so long that in his eyes that’s who I am now, no matter how often we see each other.
He had other problems to think about in any case. A few months before this, his name had appeared in a newspaper story along with the name of a longtime partner of his—an antiques dealer in London—who had been accused of fraud. The dealer in London had sold a consignment of English furniture to a dealer in Switzerland. My father had negotiated with this Swiss dealer to sell some of the English furniture to clients in New York. The consignment of furniture, falsely valued at over three million dollars, turned out to contain several forgeries. My father has claimed repeatedly that he had no idea about this. He “flatly denies” knowing anything about it, as the newspaper put it.
He showed me an elegant piece of furniture that afternoon—it was the massive desk in his study. It had belonged to his best friend, Harry Klein, he told me, the friend whose boat we used to go on when I was young. After Klein’s death, his wife, Deborah, had found herself in financial trouble, their assets worth far less than she’d believed. The desk, my father pointed out, had ebony marquetry and fleur-de-lis spandrels flanked by pilasters carved like acanthus leaves. It was called a partners desk, he told me. There were kneeholes on all four sides of its mahogany bulk so that four bankers could sit together in the sepia light and go over accounts. He didn’t know where the Kleins had found it. He asked me how much I thought it was worth, and I told him I had no idea. He said that Deborah Klein had lived with the desk for almost twenty years. It had made her feel a certain way about herself, about her life with Harry. They’d had a set of Hepplewhite chairs, a French commode from the eighteenth century, this partners desk from a famous workshop in England, Marsh & Tatham. After Harry’s death, the finances unraveled. Deborah had had to sell the house in Southampton, the house I’d visited as a girl. When she asked my father for his help with the antiques, he’d had to tell her, after she’d already lost so much, that the desk too wasn’t worth anything like what she’d thought. There were faded spots in the wood in places light would never have hit it. It was a fake—it had been cobbled together from scraps of other old pieces of furniture. My father gave her seventy-five thousand dollars for it, more than it was worth. She hadn’t spoken to him since. She’d thought the desk was worth four times that. In Deborah Klein’s mind, the desk was worth more than their friendship.
“You don’t talk about yourself very much,” I said.
“No. Not really.”
“You think it’s tasteless?”
“Something like that.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m curious. Because of the tastelessness.”
“I don’t think about the past very much. I try not to.”
“Why?”
“My parents never talked about the past. My grandparents didn’t. The past was what you were trying to get away from. You understand why.”
“No.”
“Because we came from nowhere. Because we were no one. That’s why. Part of becoming someone is not having to talk about your past. I couldn’t talk about it now if I wanted to. I don’t know anything about it.”
He had something else he wanted to share with me that afternoon, a kind of family heirloom, which he presented to me there in the study. His brother Jacob had recently passed on some recordings made by their father—my grandfather—who died before I really knew him. My grandfather had built up a chain of jewelry stores which were then fought over after his death by his two eldest sons, my uncles. They turned the chain of stores into rival boutiques that have since become famous. My father won’t set foot in either of them. He feels judged by his brothers, I think, because they have made even more money than he has. I say all this, and yet after a lifetime in his company, I don’t really know him. He is probably unknowable. When he says he has no information about the past, I believe him. It would have been not just personal shame his family felt, but also the greater shame of having left behind an impoverished world that eventually was exterminated. It wasn’t something people talked about. Very likely, it wasn’t even possible to talk about it.
He wanted to play me these recordings. He explained that his father would sometimes amuse his sons by hosting a mock radio show which he would capture on an old-fashioned gramophone that cut actual records, small shellac discs that could then be played back. My uncle had kept hundreds of these discs in storage and finally had them preserved on CDs. My father is in his midseventies now. He bent over the stereo with a scowl that looked angry but was really only reflexive, the face he wears when concentrating. He wore what he almost always wears in summer, a dress shirt with French cuffs, linen trousers, polished shoes. His hands shook a little. He stood there stooped over the CD player as the recordings began.
The first track was a kind of clownish singing, slightly embarrassing to hear. It was an old Broadway tune I didn’t know, the lyrics adjusted into puns about my grandfather’s jewelry store. My uncle—I assume it was my uncle singing—added a few bars of “The Tennessee Waltz” for some reason, letting his voice break like a yodeling cowpoke’s. Then my grandfather asked some questions of another little boy in the style of a journalist:
Who is the best singer in the world?
I don’t know.
Caruso?
I don’t know.
My father turned and looked at me, his hand pressed against his lower back. His new wife has a house in Connecticut, an old family house, and she spends most of the weekends there. I don’t think he would have been playing me these recordings if she was around. She’s been around less and less since the accusations appeared in the newspaper.
“It’s you,” I said, meaning the voice of the little boy.
“Nineteen forty. Nineteen forty-one. Sometime before the war, I’m pretty sure.”
“You sound happy.”
He shrugged. I think he sensed already that I was going to write him into this book. He knew it before I did, as if my disloyalty was never in doubt. His shrug was like his resigned way of urging me not to. He had come as far a distance as Gila Konig had, I think he was telling me with that shrug. Not as a victim but as a self-invention. Not as a yored, but as one of the olim—no one was more ascended than my father in his Upper East Side town house, a world away from the Brownsville slum of his own father’s youth. He had no interest in the yordim. I’m sure he wondered why I did.
3.
Gila sent me an e-mail after two weeks. I didn’t open it at first, and when I did open it I didn’t open the attachment, the photograph of us at lunch. I could see it in miniature beneath Gila’s brief note. The note thanked me for having lunch with her and then extended an invitation to visit her sometime in Sag Harbor. I saw myself in the tiny photo, ghostlike, trying to hide my discomfort—I thought I would have hidden it better. The fact that Gila could have looked at that picture and still sent it to me was a poignant indicator of her aloneness. I’m lucky I know Hugh. I don’t have many people in my life. She had waited two weeks to thank me for a lunch she had treated me to, a lunch I had never thanked her for.
The e-mail sat unanswered, shadowing me at odd times over the next few days. I don’t know why I didn’t want to face it. I wasn’t even particularly busy. When I look back over my inbox now, I see that it took me almost three weeks to respond. I have the response here in all its vapid, agreeable insincerity:
And now it was my turn to face the silence of an unanswered e-mail.
When she didn’t respond—one week becoming two—I began to feel somehow insecure. Despite my e-mail’s formal politeness, I knew it exuded an obvious lack of interest, if not outright rudeness. I hadn’t trusted her, but I didn’t know exactly why. Her pursuit of me had made her seem distorted, or inappropriate. But now that Gila hadn’t responded to me, I began to think differently. It’s the way these things go. I now thought that she had the dignity to know when she was being discounted. I considered writing her again, but I put it off. By then I was actually busy with other projects. Her silence, when I thought of it, took on a haughtiness, even a hostility. Eventually, I got a phone call not from Gila but from her friend Hugh. Gila, he told me, had passed away. It turned out she had not been avoiding my e-mail for the past three months but rather dying of cancer.
4.
She’d lived on a small side street in Sag Harbor, not far from Peconic Bay. I took the train to Bridgehampton, then a cab to the address that Hugh had given me. Gila’s house had been recently painted so that its white clapboard and black shutters gleamed as if still wet. Whatever I’d expected, I had not expected the pleasant quiet of the small front yard with its weeping cherry tree, the beds of dark ivy threading upward to cover the trunks of a row of pollarded sycamores. Hugh answered the door. He was in charge of Gila’s estate, including the sale of her house. He was a large man in his early fifties, his girth draped by a boxy dress shirt, pink with white stripes, the tails out over his jeans. Expensive eyewear, a very precise haircut. He invited me back into the house and in the living room he sat down in a leather armchair and lit a cigarette, asking only afterward if I minded. He spread out his hand to indicate the immaculate neatness of the place. There were no carpets on the floor, just the richly varnished wide plank boards. Plain sheer curtains hanging from black iron rods. I took a seat on a large white sofa before a coffee table made of black wood. On it rested one book, an oversized volume called David, The King, by Ivan Schwebel, the Israeli artist, placed there almost in vengeance, it seemed, against its qualities as an ornament. Everything was clean and so pared down that the air seemed more still than ordinary air.
“This was how she liked to live,” Hugh told me.
“Spare.”
“There were seven people at the funeral. She didn’t like people very much. She was past all that, not interested in playing ball anymore.”
He leaned back in his chair. He told me then that what he had liked about Gila was “all that turmoil in her head. All that self-generated struggle. You’d give her a compliment and she’d twist it around—you were not only insulting her but patronizing her. Thinking she was too stupid to see through your flattery. I’m a surgeon. I operate on people’s spines for a living. They’re spread-eagle on an inclining table for eight, ten hours. There’s no room for error, obviously. It’s not something I can talk about with everyone. Not even my partner. It’s not something that’s interesting to him. With Gila it wasn’t that she was especially interested, but there was something we understood about each other. Something about work, I guess. I don’t know what it was.”
I asked him what she had told him about her private life.
“Not much,” he said. He made a little breathing sound, somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. I looked at his cigarettes and then he nodded and I took one.
“Everything was always this vague mystery,” he said. “There was the designer. The swimwear designer. That was a good story—I never knew if I believed it or not, but I always liked it.”
The swimwear designer, he told me, had rented Gila an apartment in Tel Aviv. It was their love nest, he said. Even after she broke up with him, the swimwear designer had kept paying the rent and utilities for some reason. He said that eventually Gila had sold the furniture and left the place sitting there empty. It was with that money, he told me, that she’d come from Israel to America.
I told him the very different version of the story that Gila had told me. I told him about the photographs of the empty apartment and about Gila’s venture to Etzel Street, a street associated with organized crime. I told him about Meyer Lansky. I told all this to Hugh and then I asked him whether he believed any of it and he shrugged, looking not at me but at the wood floor.
“Lonely people can be difficult,” he said. “When they want you around, they can be desperate to keep you there. That’s why when she wanted to meet you, I encouraged her. I thought, fine, let her make the connection if she can. She needed it. She was, to put it bluntly, dying of cancer.”
The sun outside found an opening between the clouds and it came streaming in through the window, lighting up a diagonal plane of swirling dust. I finished my cigarette and Hugh lit up another and we sat in silence for a while. I wasn’t sure I shared his skepticism about the story Gila had told me. I wasn’t sure I even believed he was giving me an accurate account of what Gila had told him. People conflate things. The “notorious” figure blurs into the “swimwear designer” when we hear a few stories and aren’t paying close attention. I thought that even if that wasn’t the case, it was still possible that Gila had soft-pedaled the story for Hugh. If she’d wanted to intrigue me, perhaps she’d just wanted to titillate Hugh. The more I thought about it, the more sense this made. The alternative story of the “swimwear designer,” the “love nest,” selling the man’s furniture with an insouciant flourish, didn’t sound like the Gila I had met for lunch, nor the Gila I had known all those years ago. It sounded more like someone trying to be lighter and breezier than she really was. Perhaps it had always been easier for Gila, even with a friend like Hugh, to make her story lighter, breezier than it really was.
5.
Throughout this time, I’d been traveling a lot for work—teaching at a university in Montana, another in Chicago—and when I returned to New York in the summer of 2011, after more than a year away, I felt less at home than before, a condition that has not changed. I began to feel invisible. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’d begin to tell a story and lose interest halfway through. Whatever I was saying seemed unimportant or false. The people I spoke to began to seem more real than I was—by real, I mean that they seemed to occupy physical space while I hovered ghostlike, evaporating. Most of my friends had moved across the river to Brooklyn years ago. Their detailed interest in all things of the current moment induced in me a kind of hypnotic inertia. I didn’t care, but I knew I needed to care. It’s fine not to care until your not caring has left you so isolated that you have to either make an effort to care or you’ll disappear entirely.
It was around this time that things began to deteriorate with my father. I had told him about my meeting with Hugh—I had told him I was going to write Gila’s story after all. His name had appeared in the papers again. When I asked if he was worried, he told me no, he hadn’t done anything wrong. When I asked him how he felt about my writing Gila’s story, he was more enigmatic. He said, “You’re my daughter,” by which either he meant he supported me despite his qualms, or that my lack of discretion had left him speechless. Or perhaps my betrayal simply reminded him of his own.
I tell you everything, he had said that afternoon twenty-eight years ago when he’d told me about his affair with Gila. I tell you everything, that’s the rule. I think it’s an open question as to whether “telling everything” is the right thing to do. I know that ever since my father told me about Gila I have been insatiable in my need to tell everything, to expose myself and others, and I know by now that this has less to do with ethics than with the need itself.
I see now that this book is my idea of a Jewish story. It’s an unflattering story, negative in many ways. I suppose it begs the question, why tell such a story? Perhaps my father has simply gotten tired of my need to tell such stories.
I continued to think about Gila. Then, about a year after my visit with Hugh, I received an e-mail from David Bellen’s editor in Israel, Galit Levy.
This will interest you, she wrote. Hope you are well.