CHAPTER
EIGHT

Amalia stubs out a cigarette and cocks her head at the ceiling. When Tristan can’t write, he paces—sweeps across his study like a shark circling a caged diver, searching for an opening, a way to lunge in for the kill. He hunts failure relentlessly, never takes his mind off a problem until it’s torn to shreds.

Her husband’s ruthlessness, Amalia is on intimate terms with. The determination to solve problems, though, stops at his study door. They have squabbled during breakfast, needlessly, and footfalls are the only sound she’s likely to get out of him today.

It began when she asked Tristan, again, if he’d decided which week in July would be best for the short vacation she wants them to take—a little diversion, a week by a lake in New Hampshire with Ben’s family so nine-year-old Linda can swim and spend time with her cousins. As compensation for the solitude of only-childhood, Amalia tries to ensure that her daughter sees plenty of them.

She wanted to call Dora, make arrangements, book the cabin. Tristan still hadn’t looked at a calendar, and he acted as if the whole matter, which would take thirty seconds of his time, was a hassle of Olympian proportions. She pressed, told him that if he didn’t voice a preference, she’d just pick a week herself and he’d have to live with it, and Tristan exploded. Now she’s violated the sanctity of his morning, derailed him with bullshit when all he wants, all he asks, is to drink his coffee in peace and get to work—as if she wants anything different, for him or for herself. She dropped it, Fine, Tristan, fine, and he stormed off.

The pacing stops, and Amalia squints in concentration, tracking the staircase creaks of her husband’s descent until she hears his foot strike the deeper note of the downstairs landing. His steps will fade now, along the foyer’s pale green carpeting, lighten in timbre as he reaches the tiled kitchen and heads for the snack cupboard. Its contents have been the same since the Brodskys moved here: tins of mixed nuts to sate Tristan’s hunger-break cravings for salt and protein, boxes of instant oatmeal and jars of applesauce he sometimes fixes late at night, and Ashkenazi comfort foods, store-bought and bottled and thus stripped largely of their comfort—matzoh balls bobbing in broth, gefilte fish suspended in heavy translucent slime. Tristan has never so much as learned to boil an egg, and Amalia will be damned if she’s going to cook him more than one hot meal a day.

Tristan’s footfalls are not dwindling toward the kitchen after all. Amalia hears her doorknob turn halfway, then stop—her husband remembering, belatedly, that she, too, has rules.

His knock is chest-high. “Amalia?”

“Yes? Come in.”

The door swings open. Tristan does not step inside.

“Have you got that letter from Herb Kaplan? I’d like to take another look at it.”

“I think it’s here somewhere.” She stands and rifles through a pile of papers at the far corner of her desk. Why Tristan is willing to break his silence for the sake of a month-old piece of correspondence from a Chicago comedy writer they met on vacation in London last year, Amalia does not ask.

“Do you need it right now?” she says instead, the question an attempt to discern whether hostilities have truly ceased or just been momentarily suspended.

“No, no. Don’t trouble yourself. It’s nothing urgent.”

“I’m sure I’ve got it somewhere.” Seized by an eagerness to please, as if locating the letter will safeguard the peace, Amalia knocks over a bookend. Twenty volumes topple off the desk and onto the floor, taking a wooden music box with them. The introductory notes of its song wheeze forth: the first snatch of melody Amalia can remember hearing in her life, something her great-aunt played on Grandmother Elena’s drawing room piano. Amalia hummed it for Tristan once, unable to name the tune, and months later he delivered it into her hands.

Her husband’s coldness would not cut so deeply if he were not also capable of such fierce attention, of bestowing words and gifts that restore to Amalia things she doesn’t even realize she’s been missing. This room is full of books he’s found her, by twelfth-century Sufi mystics and unknown wild-haired modern Greeks, poets whose troves were never excavated in the course of Amalia’s classical education but whose words clang in her soul like church bells.

“Aha.” She slides a sheet of paper from a stack of miscellany and holds it aloft.

Her husband takes it, frowns as he scans a few lines, then looks up. “I may have to go to California,” he tells her. Before Amalia can respond, Tristan is on his way back up the stairs. He’s neglected to close her door.

         

When he read the missive waiting for him in the mailbox, Tristan’s first thought was that he was being bullshitted. The letterhead looks authentic, but only after he has held the typeface side by side with that produced by his various correspondents’ machines and failed to find a match does Tristan allow his incredulity to fade, and accept that he is the Jewish Congress of America’s 1961 Man of the Year.

It would be no more surprising to open his mail and find that he is Car and Driver magazine’s top-rated luxury sedan. The Jewish Congress of America? He has never even heard of the bastards, as far as he can recall, but all these organizations are more or less the same, and none of them has reached out to him since Manacles except occasionally to request his money, or his time in some capacity that would allow them to alchemize it into cash.

And yet this letter, this invitation to speak at the awards banquet, this medium-size honorarium, has none of the feel of vindication. It is more like being asked to the birthday party of a kid who’s bullied you on the playground every day since kindergarten, and so Tristan’s thoughts turn to mischief, to revenge. What can he say up there behind that podium to shock them? To prove that he will no more give in to the Jewish community’s veneration than its ire?

The notion that it is misdirected to thumb his nose at an organization that holds him in esteem flits through Tristan’s mind, but he is able to talk himself past it. If they truly respect him—if this is about more than signing on to the success of his new novel—then they won’t find the stunt he is already formulating outrageous in the least. In fact, they’ll love it. As they should.

But if he is the Man of the Year only because Arthur Goldberg won in ’6o, and nobody is a big enough baseballnik to vote for Sandy Koufax, and Samuel Goldwyn hasn’t made any decent movies this year, and Tony Curtis hasn’t been Bernie Schwartz or Jack Benny Benjamin Kubelsky for a long time, then the Jewish Congress of America will likely crap their britches when Man of the Year Tristan Brodsky shows up with the Albert Van Horn Quartet in tow and reads an excerpt from his prizewinning novel to a raucous jazz accompaniment, Albert full-gale wailing on his tenor saxophone and Murray Higgins behind the drum kit, smashing the fuck out of everything in sight.

The money will cover plane fare and payment for Albert and his band, and the banquet is far enough away that perhaps Albert’s wife and manager, Mariko, can even book them an additional gig in Los Angeles that weekend. Tristan cackles and sits down to compose a genteel letter of acceptance, thanking the Congress for this great honor and mentioning only in passing that, if possible, it would be splendid if arrangements could be made for a piano.

Not until he and Albert are sitting together on the flight to California, sipping cocktails rendered tasteless by the clouds of cigarette smoke filling the cabin, does it occur to Tristan that there is a sense in which he is exploiting his friend. That even if Albert, Higgins, Trey, and Devon are in on the joke, it does little to change the fact that Tristan is wielding blackness as a scare tactic, a shock technique, a weapon.

It is not so different from the way some of the Jews in his book wield it. Blockbusters tells the story of a small fictional Midwestern city in the throes of a present-day battle over who will live where—a battle that twists and turns and explodes, ultimately, into violence. On both sides, there are Jews: young northern civil rights activists determined to desegregate the white suburbs, one black family at a time, and unscrupulous realtors using the threat of black encroachment and plummeting property values to drive whites from their homes—which they then resell at a profit. Motives and allegiances grow mutable; the radicals and the profiteers prove less ideologically entrenched than they first appear. Double crosses, moral awakenings, and secret deals abound. Black community leaders and local white politicians scramble to hold on to their power bases; outside agitators find themselves dangerously entrenched in a struggle they begin to fear they cannot understand. Then the Ku Klux Klan shows up.

It is a fat, frenzied, polemical novel, broad-ranging and morally messy, and the critics have lauded or lambasted it on just these grounds. It has sold shitloads of copies—largely to young people and blacks, judging from the fan mail—and for the first time ever, Tristan’s literary agent is fielding calls from Hollywood types interested in the film rights. The Jewish media has refrained from hyperventilating in disgust this time around, but neither have they opened their arms to welcome back the prodigal son. They still don’t much like Tristan’s Jews; they still don’t much like Tristan.

This weekend is not likely to change that, he reflects as the captain dims the cabin lights. At first, Tristan tried to tell himself that his performance was intended to expand the minds of the Jewish Congress of America, those bandwagon-hopping sycophants, but now he’s made peace with the truth. It is about conveying the message I am not like you. I am not like you, and here are the sound track and the visuals to prove it. Here I stand with those whom, let’s be honest, many of you are only marginally ahead of the national curve in learning not to fear and despise despite all that has been done to you, a couple of dead freedom-riding kikes notwithstanding. Those whose holocaust, if one wishes to compare such things, and I do not, outhorribles even our own. Those who are more Other than we will ever be again, O universally shunned and crushed and banished Chosen People, O Sons of Abraham, forever persecuted for your differences, your clannishness, who have survived, and made it here, and by sweat and wit risen to become America’s brain trust, Hollywood’s finest, who continued to claw your way forever upward even as your families overseas were herded and destroyed like cattle. And I declare that I, too, am different. A tribe unto myself. And if I am to someday die for my differences, I pray that they will be my own goddamn differences, and not those I have been born into and tried to explore the richness and complexity of, only to have my efforts castigated by other members of my race. So thank you for the honor and the moolah, Jewish Congress of America, and if you’re not all utterly crammed full of hypocrisy and horseshit, then maybe you’ll enjoy the show….

Albert leans over, into Tristan’s thoughts. “I guess you’re my new bodyguard,” he says in the low, conspiratorial tone that makes Tristan feel as if all the musician does all day is tell secrets. It is Albert’s casualness, more than anything, that is so wonderful. It implicates and embraces, makes Tristan feel as wise and down-home as the man himself.

The novelist shifts in the narrow seat, trying to arrange himself into a cool and confidential posture. The plane has leveled off now, and with the window shade drawn and the mind occupied and the alcohol inside him, Tristan can almost forget that they are miles in the air, cutting through the cumulus in an enormous, absurdly heavy metal bird powered by technology he couldn’t hope to understand. He doesn’t get nervous about it anymore, but there is still a gravity to Tristan when he flies, a feeling that any thought might be his last.

“I can’t believe your former bodyguard gave up the job.”

“Let’s just say I put her on vacation.” Albert opens his eyes wide. “Against her will.” He stares at Tristan and laughs long and hard, and Tristan does the same because he wants to share anything with Albert that he can. But the laughter and the staring never end when they should; they go on and on, until they grow uncomfortable and almost scary. Eventually, Tristan always has to look away, or downshift into a grin, and Albert’s laughter wanes reluctantly into a guttural sigh. If the silence goes on too long, or he has no glass in his hand from which to sip, he may start laughing and staring again, and Tristan will be right back where he started.

This time, the laughter dissipates more easily than usual, because Albert has more to say. He folds his lips into a kind of thoughtful frown and turns over the barely-breathable blue-gray air with an elegant gold-braceleted hand. “I told her the time had come for me to get out on my own. For her sake, much as mine. I told her there are ex-junkies and then there are nonpracticing junkies, and all I could ever be certain I was with her looking over my shoulder every second was nonpracticing.”

“And she accepted that?”

“Only because you were coming. If it was just me and the cats, forget it. She trusts you.”

“Why?” asks Tristan, flattered and insulted.

Albert unfolds a finger for each of his friend’s virtues. “You’re not a musician. Not a dopehead. Not black. If only you weren’t American, you’d be perfect.”

“Well, I’ll guard you with my life, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your coming.”

“Hell, I appreciate your paying me.”

“You’d tell me if it wasn’t enough.”

“You better believe it. But money goes a long way when you don’t shoot your paycheck in your arm.”

Tristan smiles, marveling anew at the mystery of Albert’s life in the years between the lapse and the renewal of their acquaintance, the years after Albert discovered dope and bebop and before Mariko discovered him. Van Horn speaks of those times accidentally but openly. He does not tell drug stories per se, but if some memory happens to intersect with those dark decades, he will relate it without censorship or hesitation. And yet, for all the lurid details Tristan has accumulated, he still cannot grasp the ravaging day-to-day reality of that struggle. He has elaborated the particulars into a sketch of a life, as he is trained to, but if the Albert of yesteryear were a character he was trying to write, Tristan would be tromping around his study and kicking over stacks of books by now, in frustration at being so masterfully eluded.

It is strange even to Tristan, but Albert’s addiction provokes in him a kind of jealousy. There is a purity to the wrongness of it, a beautiful simplicity to Albert’s battle to regain his life and to his victory. That affirmation of the strength of Albert’s higher will underwrites everything he does, says, plays now. He is on the other side of the river, and Tristan envies him the way he envies war veterans and gangsters and Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: men who have done something real, something clear in purpose and execution, whether right or wrong. Men whose wars are against tangible foes.

Clarity, in any form, mystifies Tristan—and the closer he comes to the world’s easy navigators, the more incomprehensible the absence of ambiguity appears. Sometimes he suspects he simply missed the tutorial, that while he was slumped against a splintery wooden chair in an airless Hebrew school learning the story of Purim, they were gathered beneath the cool shade of a country-club oak, learning how to Do Things Right from teams of impeccably groomed, high-cheekboned tutors clad in tennis whites. It doesn’t matter that Tristan’s identity is predicated on his failure to catch up on those lost lessons. That wholeness of being, that unity of mind and heart and body he perceives in others, still fascinates and taunts him.

I should have brought my daughter on this trip, Tristan thinks as the plane hits a turbulent patch of air and the more inexperienced passengers gasp, clutching at armrests or spouses until the ride smoothes out. Linda is finally worth conversing with, and it is now or never. Either Tristan will continue to hover nearby as Amalia raises her—loiter with pocketed hands and observant eyes and an air of discomfort, just as he has since Linda was an infant and he an inept infant father, gaping in wonder as the baby mewled and squirmed and his wife bustled around Doing Things Right—or else he’ll find it in himself to do more than offer Linda cashews and orange segments and offhand comments as she sits at the kitchen table after supper, bent over her homework, and he drifts into the room to find a snack. It is clear now that Linda will be Tristan’s only child; he can no longer offer himself the excuse that women know best how to raise daughters and he’ll do his share when the male heir arrives. Amalia is too well aware of her husband’s priorities to have another child with him, and getting too old anyway.

Presiding over dinner had been involvement enough for Tristan’s father, but expectations were different then. Fathers were supposed to be remote figures, their authority undiluted by familiarity. Old Yahweh hadn’t gone around revealing His Divine Splendor to every schmuck and shepherd in Canaan, either; His voice hadn’t thundered forth from burning bushes every five minutes to comment on the weather. Not that Tristan is a deity, or even a disciplinarian. Amalia handles all of that. It is another way he’s failed her.

No one ever looks back on his life and says “I wish I’d worked more,” Tristan’s father told him—not his dying words, which, according to Benjamin, were, Somebody please get me some lemon for this seltzer, but certainly the last memorable thing Jacob Brodsky uttered to his elder son before deciding not to bother recovering from the influenza he contracted in the frigid fall of 1955. He succumbed to pneumonia six months later, a year after his wife died, but the real cause of his death, his children agree, was guilt. Some part of Jacob couldn’t bear his own good fortune, could not reconcile his existence with his family’s annihilation. As more details of the camps emerged, and the specifics of the horror became easier and easier to imagine, such knowledge grew harder and harder to live with.

Jacob didn’t talk about it. Not to Tristan, anyway. Instead, he lectured his son on common deathbed regrets. You know what people say, my boy? he asked during what turned out to be their last visit. They say “I wish I’d spent more time with my family.” Jacob spread his hands as if holding two grapefruit, and Tristan, face set to receive the peddler’s platitudes, fingered the key in his pocket, darted his eyes at his parents’ door. The landlord hadn’t changed the locks since Tristan was a kid. Half the Hebraic world could probably access the building by now.

Your characters you write so beautifully. Such love you have for them. Such understanding. It wasn’t quite proof that his father read his work, but it was close. Why can’t you treat your wife as well?

Tristan didn’t respond, though Jacob’s opinion of his marriage was based almost entirely on one icy dinner, years before. He and Rachael had come to Connecticut for the weekend, and it had been the wrong weekend. Tristan had been pissed off at his wife, and in no mood to hide it—the reason why escaped him now, always escaped him after the fact. Some assault on his integrity, no doubt, his sense of himself and what he would and would not do, unintentional but met like any attack just the same, with lightning bolts hurled from the bag he kept strapped to his hip, then scorched-earth stillness: knowing himself was not the same as controlling himself. For the first time in Tristan’s life, his mother had been quiet. A giant house filled with not-talking was so alien, she hadn’t been able to get her bearings, and she never visited again.

Come, Jacob said, in the face of his son’s silence, grabbing Tristan’s hand across the kitchen table, nearly knocking over both their coffee mugs. Pray with your father. Ask the Lord for wisdom. He shut his eyes. Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.

Tristan paused for a moment, stupefied, before he jerked away. Are you kidding? What’s gotten into you? Since when? His father opened his eyes, regarded his son with a kind of mournful hostility, then got up and disappeared into the bathroom. When he returned, it was as if it hadn’t happened; they discussed the Yankees’ chances against the Dodgers in the upcoming World Series. Not until his father’s death did Tristan stop worrying that Jacob would ask again. The possibility gripped him with a dread he couldn’t explain.

He would have liked to tell Jacob that he found Amalia marvelous, still. So gifted and so calm, so capable, so present. That the knowledge that his wife sat each day in her office underneath his, writing her small, enormous, underappreciated poems, addressed a monumental need in him: to be part of something larger than himself. To understand that thing, and be understood by it, and still be bound together. She satisfied that need imperfectly, partially, but it was more than Tristan could imagine having with anyone else. He would have liked to tell his father that he kept a certain distance from his wife not because he didn’t understand her, but because he did—well enough to know he was deficient, to know it was not in him to provide the kind of attention Amalia needed, or that he could not find and marshal it, if it was. That failing from a distance was better than approaching and failing and becoming furious with himself and her and retreating and approaching and failing again. Instead, Tristan stared at the dusty top of his parents’ icebox and pictured himself in his final hour, regretting just what Jacob predicted he would.

It is a sad fate, but Tristan has resigned himself to it. He can imagine being struck with the agonizing realization that he has missed out on life, on marriage. The scene is so vivid in his mind that he can brace himself for it the way a devout sinner can brace himself for hell. Besides, everybody knows that you can’t have it all. Look at Pendergast. Three fine-looking teenage kids with whom he spends vast scads of time, a stable marriage to a good woman, a nice writerly office overlooking Harvard Yard, a fine full head of silver hair. Martha’s Vineyard every summer, seats on the boards of half a dozen well-meaning institutions thrilled to have an author in their midst. Two shipments of well-scrubbed freshmen each semester to romance into the life of the pen. Peter Pendergast is happy as a pig in shit and twice as venerated. And every three years, marking time as dependably as the floor clock passed down to him by old Grandpappy Graham H. Pendergast, the man turns out another worthless book, looses another buzzing swarm of inane words on the already-overpopulated world. Not for anything would Tristan trade places with him.

The Man of the Year leans back in his seat, pulls up the window shade in defiance of his fear, and crosses his arms over his chest. Albert watches, and assumes a similarly ruminative pose. The plane cuts through the sky, and the two of them peer down awhile at the distant earth. The hum of the engine is loud and heavy, but every bit as lulling as silence.

         

It is such a relief to wake up alone, in an empty bed, that Amalia is ashamed of herself—for feeling so liberated now, and for accepting something less than freedom the rest of the time. She lies on her back in the warm bed, extends her arms and legs like a snow angel, and moves them against the warm flannel sheets. She has the sense that she has slept remarkably well, better than in ages. Her right hand traces a leisurely path over her breasts and the concave of her belly, then comes to rest between her legs.

Perhaps a short vacation from each other is just what she and Tristan need. When he comes back from Los Angeles, he will be relaxed and receptive, as he always is in the afterglow of so much adulation, and she will be strong and secure, the way she tends to be after so much time to work, so long a respite from conflict. They will find a way to approach each other. It is as good as done. Amalia feels more loving already.

She throws off the covers with first-day-of-school vigor, wraps a robe around herself, and walks to the kitchen down the narrow, steep back steps. Coffee. A cigarette lit on the stove. The blinds open onto clear early winter; weak sunlight cannot penetrate the ice crust of the backyard snow.

Amalia turns from the window to contemplate the clues spread over the breakfast table. They suggest what she would have surmised anyway. Linda has risen early, retrieved the newspaper from the driveway, and read the funny pages over a breakfast of toast, butter, and jam. Condiment effluvia now forms a ring revealing the former location of her plate. The dish itself rests in the sink, next to her half-full juice glass. Linda’s definition of cleaning up after oneself is something she has learned from Daddy.

There are days when Amalia might be inclined to attribute Linda’s carelessness to disregard for the feelings of others, but today she is too light on her feet for sighs or scolding. The deep, warm smell of coffee fills the room and she pours a mugful, then selects an apple from the bowl and peels it in a thin, unbroken strip. Her own silence, and the way it blends into the silence all around, is hugely pleasing.

She carries the meager breakfast through the dining room, the least-used chamber in the rambling house. It’s filled with furniture from Amalia’s childhood, opulent artifacts that harken back to a time when nothing was ambiguous and nobody felt guilty. When Jews like her father made and spent and gave away vast sums of money proudly, filled their homes with Turkish rugs and Russian tea sets, took their families on first-class cruises, feared nothing. When women like Natalie Farber, sharp, clever, fanciful beings in perpetual motion, rode chauffeured cars down to the Lower East Side to bargain with old-world vendors over chinchilla wraps, returned from trips to Palestine and contracted for Old Testament frescoes to be painted across the four walls of their sitting rooms. When the will of the matriarch and the dormant power of the patriarch constituted the balanced forces of the universe, and the dinner table now covered in dust and creaky with disuse was employed at full sixteen-seat capacity each Friday night.

Amalia trails a finger across it, remembering the portable gold basin that stood next to her father’s place on Shabbos. It was Amalia’s job to dry his hands with a special white towel after he washed them and before he commenced with the brief prayers, belting them out with operatic gusto and vaudevillian flair. Maurice’s rendition evolved over the years, until any resemblance to the actual tune was mere coincidence. Natalie disapproved, but Maurice and Amalia considered the blessing an artistic vehicle, and his version a vast improvement. During the yearly seder, father and daughter played surreptitious chess games on a low stool situated between his head-of-the-table chair and her seat to his left; it was the only way either of them managed to behave through stern Uncle Yitzach’s three-hour ceremony. The stool sits in a corner of the dining room now, obscured by a potted ficus dying of thirst.

Amalia eats at her desk while rereading the previous week’s work and savoring her coffee. She drinks the stuff sparingly, once or twice a week, not wanting her body to grow accustomed to the drug. Tristan needs three strong cups these days to get started, and by the time his thoughts are flowing, he has to dam them every fifteen minutes, cross the hall, and pee. Often, caught up in his words, her husband ignores his body’s needs until the last second, then dashes, near bursting, to the bathroom. From her study, the footfalls sound elephantine.

A few years ago, Amalia gave him an old-fashioned bedpan as a gag gift. Tristan keeps it atop a bookcase in his office, points it out whenever he gives a guest a house tour. Amalia wishes her single scatological joke had not developed so interminable a shelf life, so wide an audience. She wonders if the delight Tristan takes in her nod to vulgarity implies a belief that Amalia is generally prudish. It’s possible; there is no accounting for some of the notions he takes up. But just as likely is that Tristan is happy to possess a totem attesting to the ferocity of his work ethic.

What a man you are, Tristan. What a strong, virile, unstoppable man.

And what are you, then? Amalia remonstrates herself. The patient coaxer of emotion? The weaker sex, too addled by sentiment to narrow your eyes and pound on toward greatness? Sometimes she feels as though the mutual knowledge that It Could Be Worse is what sustains their marriage. Worse for her, that is. In spite of all his shortcomings, they both know Tristan is a long evolutionary lope beyond most members of his gender. Many women just as capable as she are married to Company Men who scoff at any interests their wives have outside of cooking, cleaning, motherhood. And it isn’t until such a man has wooed you and won you and shuttled you off to some sterile subdivision convenient to his office, where no one can hear you scream, that the mask comes off and you discover that your husband, the father of your child, is himself a little boy who wants you to be his mother. Who will turn into your father at his cruelest if his wishes are denied. And fifteen years down the suburban road, when and if you finally work up the courage to leave him, there you’ll stand with no money, no skills, only the haziest idea who you are.

Amalia teaches more and more women like this at Southern Connecticut State: as old as she and back in college, their faces masks of fear and determination. They attend the first class in pearls, heels, and makeup, retaining some deliberate, coquettish aspect of the schoolgirls they remember being—they carry their books pressed against their chests, or search out just the kind of pencil box they used twenty years ago during the three semesters of college they completed before earning their so-called MRS degrees. Amalia is as kind and helpful to these women as can be. Not just out of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I empathy, but because they have few allies on a campus geared toward students half their age. The faculty is full of male professors who see the collapse of their own marriages and perhaps that of Western civilization foretold in these women, and are thus as mean to them as they can get away with being.

Amalia watches with pride as the women abandon first the pearls and then the heels and later, sometimes, half the makeup. The boys write blustery Hemingway knockoffs and the girls treacly, wafer-thin romance, but these women produce work that is honest, brutal, and reflective. Occasionally, one will get together with a college boy, and Amalia will watch the couple stroll the campus, arms tight around each other’s waists, and not acknowledge that the feeling masquerading as well-good-for-her friendliness is mostly I-wish-somebody-would-touch-me-like-that jealousy.

Noon passes before she hunkers down to write. For once, Amalia is secure enough in the promise of the day and the state of her own mind to allow herself such leisure. Sure enough, as soon as she puts aside the upcoming week’s student poems and the Rilke collection she keeps on her desk and opens at random anytime she needs a quick booster of inspiration, Amalia is able to reenter her poem. The decoding of a second-stanza implication—a previously hidden and now self-evident note to herself—spurs Amalia to insert a new third stanza, and soon the poem is finding its true shape, filling out, growing voluptuous. She works from 12:30 to 3:00, pausing only to approve Linda’s request to go and play at Marcy’s house around the block, and when she stops writing, Amalia is the proud mother of a beautiful baby poem, helpless but healthy.

Only upon pausing does Amalia realize she is famished. She walks to the kitchen feeling like her husband. But while Tristan would merely shovel a few handfuls of something down his gullet and move on, Amalia believes in paying attention to what she is doing. She slices a tomato and some cheddar, melts a pat of butter in a pan, and grills herself a sandwich. It is cooling on the table and the pan is filling with tap water when the telephone rings.

“Hello, Amalia?” It is Mariko Van Horn. She’s never called before, but that accent is unmistakable. There’s a slight flutter to her voice; Amalia identifies it as the wobbliness of the initial reach toward a potential friend. Exacerbated, naturally, by the fact that Mariko is reaching not just out but up. Amalia chastises herself for the thought, but facts are facts. She is ten years Mariko’s senior, and has her own career, and the few times they have met, brought together by their husbands, Mariko has watched Amalia with an admiration she probably thinks is subtle. Amalia has been flattered, and amused, and treated her with sisterliness. Older sisterliness. She likes Mariko, but Amalia has never extended any invitation to a greater closeness.

Liking the little black-eyed beauty is easy enough. Deciding whether to respect her is harder. Mariko is brave and tough and cactus-sharp, and everybody knows that she saved Albert’s life. But when Amalia looks at her, she can’t help thinking of the sad, hollow divorcées she teaches. Composing an opinion is further complicated by the irksome fact that Mariko seems to consider the two of them, as the spouses of irascible geniuses, to be colleagues. Amalia would sooner commiserate with fellow poets, fellow artists, even fellow mothers, than with fellow mistreated wives.

“Mariko,” Amalia replies, as if they chat daily, “so nice of you to call. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you,” Mariko responds by rote. Then she sighs. “I not been away from Albert one day since we meet, Amalia. I wake up today, I don’t know what to do with myself. I already miss.”

Amalia sits before her sandwich, but she doesn’t dare take a bite. “Do you miss him, Mariko? Or are you worried he won’t be all right without you?”

There is a pause, and Amalia can feel her thinking it over. “You right. I more afraid than anything. I trust Albert now, much as I can. I know he gotta do. But I don’t trust the world.”

“It’s out of your hands. Besides, I’m sure he’ll be fine. Tristan will look after him. Just try to enjoy yourself. Doesn’t it feel nice to be alone?”

As she speaks, Amalia wonders: is Mariko calling because Tristan is on the road with Albert, or because she has no one else to talk to?

“Nice, but strange. Before I think about it, I already make breakfast for Albert this morning. I think I probably gonna do the same tonight, so I wondered if maybe you want to come over for dinner.” Mariko stops short, as if she hadn’t expected to get it said so fast.

The invitation catches Amalia off-guard, with no excuse at hand. “Well, thank you, Mari. It’s lovely of you to ask.” And it is, thoughtful and sad. Solitude, it seems, is so distasteful to Mariko that she cannot fathom Amalia’s not being lonely with her man gone. Here, too, is Amalia’s out if she wants it: the fact that she is not alone. She has a daughter to look after, and it’s not like popping into the city is easy—it’s a commitment, a two-hour trip. But there are three more whole days until Tristan returns, and perhaps an evening is worth forfeiting for Mariko, who dared make this phone call. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see who she is in Albert’s absence, although Amalia guesses that unless she herself directs it elsewhere, conversation will revolve around the men.

Amalia smirks as she imagines radicalizing Mariko, arriving at this meeting of the abandoned women’s club with a big bottle of booze and working Mariko into an unrecognizable, man-hating frenzy, so that when Albert comes home, he’ll find his protectress transmogrified into a fearsome virgin war goddess. Linda can stay the night at Marcy’s.

“What can I bring?”

“Nothing,” Mariko says happily.

         

New York City driving is not so bad when Tristan is beside her in the car, the two of them pointing out personal and joint landmarks and recounting their stories, but alone Amalia feels almost overmatched. Her skin prickles and her calves tense as she is funneled toward the massive arteries that are Manhattan’s borders, and pumped through: another drop of lifeblood free to plot its course through the city’s indifferent, blackened veins. Amalia flicks the radio off. The classical music she thought would soothe her infringes on her concentration, and she needs every bit for these next few minutes of navigation. Cars stream past her on the right and left. Amalia flinches with each honk.

The city she grew up in seems foreign now, threatening. She feels guilty over what it has become, as if by forsaking New York, she has doomed it to monstrosity. From time to time, Tristan still talks about moving back here. Threatens, really, since he knows it is the last thing she would ever want. Nor would he, but Tristan maintains a blustery reverence for New York’s seething, compressed energy, its misery and hardness, its properties as a creative tonic. He speaks of it the way an ex-jock might speak of his high school football field, Amalia thinks, clicking her blinker and merging onto the West Side Highway.

Apartment buildings loom to her left, the Hudson shimmers to her right, and beyond it New Jersey glitters feebly. And here she is, speeding past the exits for Seventy-second Street, Fifty-sixth, Forty-second, alongside scores of others, suffused with an out-of-control sense that she is living in the future—that this accelerated, frenetic, largely unpleasant here and now is the tomorrow of her childhood, the future of the world into which she was born. It is not the kind of thought you can try for very long to explain to others. If they understand, they’ll understand quickly, and if they don’t, you’ll only talk a rope of foolishness around yourself. Tristan would get it.

Amalia exits on Tenth Street, dodging potholes until she winds her way down to Third and MacDougal. She parks, double-checks to make sure all the doors are locked, and braces herself as she passes a convocation of rangy young people in woolen ski caps, their breath indistinguishable from their cigarette smoke, passing a fifth of Southern Comfort in front of Cafe Wha?

No one says a word to her. Why would they? Amalia reproaches herself as she continues up the block. Why would they take any note of me at all? Teaching seldom makes her feel old, but kids in their natural habitats have started to spook her. Before she knows it, she’s turned the drinkers into the Arbiters of Art, the Grand High Council of Hipness, standing guard as if protecting the purity of The Scene against the invasion of the old, the moneyed, the unhappening. Amalia pictures them gathered in judgment inside their famed Village coffee-house, pronouncing her poetry frail and aged, something their parents would probably read.

She brushes the image away, tries to laugh. Allen Ginsberg wants to meet her, she reminds herself. Not six months ago, Albert introduced him to Tristan at some Village party Amalia had declined to attend, and Ginsberg talked on and on about her work, knew it backward and forward. Tristan glowed as he told her the story late that night, half-drunk adoration beaming from his eyes. It is when others praise her that he remembers who Amalia really is.

She imagines telling the Arbiters about Ginsberg by way of validation—fisting her hands on her hips and invoking their gods as they sit slumped over their scarred wooden table and their dirty coffee cups, turning full young lips to one another and whispering, “Man, who is this old crone?” covering their mouths lest they laugh in her face.

The door to the Van Horns’ building is ajar and so Amalia walks in, shuts it behind her, strides past a gust of pissy, heated air and a bank of mailboxes, and climbs the stairs to 2A. Mariko opens the door before Amalia can knock a second time.

“Hello-hello,” she says, stepping back to let her guest enter. Amalia pays the toll before crossing the threshold: bends at the waist and presses her cheek against Mariko’s in an exchange of air kisses. Mari’s skin is softer than it looks, softer than Amalia’s skin by far, and she is perfumed with a familiar, floral scent Amalia can’t quite name. Her shoulder-length hair, though, smells like cigarettes—unavoidable if you smoke, and the reason Amalia keeps her own as short as fashion allows.

She hands Mariko a bottle of red wine and steps inside. A strange blend of excitement and apprehension washes over her, stronger emotions than an apartment usually has the power to provoke. Why, she wonders, has Tristan never mentioned that the Van Horns live in a home without walls? But no—it is more like the walls are invisible. There is a kitchen, a music room, a den. Everything is delineated, but nothing is enclosed. Even the bed, jutting from a far corner of the loft where two brick walls meet, is right out in the open. One Japanese screen rests flat against a row of windows and another stands unfurled between the dinner table and the sleeping area, segmenting the space but hiding nothing; it reaches less than halfway to the ceiling. The apartment is close enough to the ground to benefit from the glow of the down-turned streetlights, high enough to be impervious to their glare.

What an odd, honest way to live, Amalia thinks, eyes darting from the piano to the butcher-block peninsula, the paper blinds to the couch to the wardrobe by the bed. I would go crazy in a day.

Mariko stands with her arms folded, watching Amalia acclimate. “The house I grew up in so big, you never know where anybody is. Here, I always know where to find Albert, no problem.”

“Mmm.” Amalia drifts back toward the entryway. “But what if you want to lose him for a while? That must be quite difficult.”

Mariko smiles. “You teasing me, Ama.”

Amalia starts. No one has called her by that name in years. Her mother did not believe in nicknames for her daughter, and thus only Natalie’s own mother—having endured the same insult when the former Natasha reinvented herself—had dared. Ama had sounded wonderfully delicate, deliciously illegal, when Grandma Elena said it. But the name died with the woman, almost fifteen years ago.

“Not at all, dear. I guess I just can’t imagine what it’s like never to want to be apart. You must be very much in love.”

Mariko stares up at the track lighting. Her mane rustles against the back of her long-sleeved dress. She gathers it into a ponytail, then lets it fall.

“It got nothing to do with love.” Mariko springs into motion, as if the conversation demands it: unsheathes the wine from its brown bag, sets it on the counter, plucks a corkscrew from a wall hook.

“I not love the man,” she resumes matter-of-factly, leaning over the bottle and twisting the metal coil into the cork until her elbow stands perpendicular to the ceiling. Amalia watches Mari leverage, pull, pop, unscrew cork from coil, spin to snatch two glasses from a shelf she has to rock onto her toes to reach.

“I love the music,” Mariko concludes as she tumbles wine into both glasses and sets down the bottle with a punctuation-marking clunk.

Amalia sidles to the counter. The combined effect of Mari’s performance and her sentiment is manifesting as thirst. Without warning, the hostess launches into an athletic finale—lunges right, seizes a sponge, swipes it over a small red dribble, backhand-flicks it across her body and into the sink six feet away. Amalia suppresses applause.

Mariko hands her a glass, and finally looks Amalia in the eye. “Nobody understands. Not even my family. I don’t expect. When I meet Albert, I never think, Do I love him? I just know he need me. What else can you do, Ama, when you find the person who need you most, and you know you can help him?”

“But does it make you happy?” Amalia takes a deep sip of her wine. “Helping Albert?”

“It makes me happy hearing him play.” Her eyes light up at the thought. “He so pure, Ama! Albert never think of anything but music. Just like little kid. Even when he practice at home, he got so much emotion. Make me wanna cry.” Mariko palms the wineglass, and the stem clicks against her wedding band. She gulps, sets down the drink, and dabs a finger to the corner of her lipstick.

“But what about you?” Amalia places her glass next to Mari’s. “Who takes care of you?”

“I do. Men cannot take care of nobody. Especially genius.” She picks up the bottle and another chute of wine splashes into Amalia’s glass. Mari pours like a saloon keeper. “Tristan take care of you?”

She’s made her point; Amalia doesn’t even bother to respond. Instead, she thinks back to the fantasy of radicalizing Mariko that so amused her a few hours back, and wonders who is schooling whom.

Mari lifts her glass. “You right, Ama. It’s good to lose them for a while.” Amalia consents to clang it in a toast, and they both sip: Amalia deliberately, and Mariko fast, so she can talk on. “Everything I remember before I meet Albert like memory from different lifetime,” she says, eyes trained on nothing. “Being single, going out with girlfriends, dancing on the beach all night. Things very different in Okinawa.” She giggles. It is a strange sound, coming from Mariko, but very nice. “My first boyfriends American GIs.”

As she listens, Amalia strips the intervening years from Mari’s face as easily as peeling paper from a wall, and sees her teenaged and flirtatious, that tremendous energy not yet tethered to anything but the pursuit of fun. Mariko’s bare tan legs glint in the moonlight as she dances, moving faster and faster, throwing back her head to challenge the night sky with her black eyes. When the image dissolves, the room has lost a little of its luster, and so Amalia dives again into the past, her own this time.

“Any boy who wanted to take me out had to have dinner at my parents’ house first,” she recounts, and a trill of laughter jumps from her mouth. She presses her fingertips to her lips, and the corners of her smile peek out from around them. “My father was so funny. Looking back, he was. At the time, I was mortified. My date would be sitting there, some poor sixteen-year-old in his best suit, as nervous as the dickens, and Daddy would be leaning into him and cracking jokes and elbowing him in the ribs, and then all of a sudden he’d sit up very straight and stern and start quizzing the boy on his plans for the future, as if it were a job interview.

“‘Just how do you intend to make a living, son?’” she booms in Maurice’s baritone. “‘What kind of a noggin for business have you got?’” She presses her hand to her chest and giggles until tears rise to her eyes, looks over at Mariko and takes a deep breath and continues. “And then, if he thought he could get away with it, my father would switch over to math problems. He’d have the boy stammering about how he was hoping to study medicine, or law, and then Daddy would cut him right off and say, ‘Yes, yes, very good. Now see here, lad. Let’s say a train is traveling from Boston to Chicago, and at the first stop twenty men get on….’”

Amalia breaks into hysterics and clutches Mariko’s slim forearm. The instant she feels skin against her palm, Amalia’s heart thrills as if it has been tickled with a feather. This happens now and again. Amalia will touch someone and only then realize how badly she has ached to. Sometimes she will also realize that she has employed some ruse or exaggeration in order to achieve her end: an imaginary fleck of lint, a not-really-so-tight squeeze through a party corridor, a laughing fit. These mini-crushes always vanish as soon as she becomes aware of them; Amalia tells herself she is a sensual person who needs more stimulation than she’s getting, and thinks no more about it. But this is different. Touching Mariko is something she should have done sincerely, not under the guise of this semiauthentic laugh attack, which is now ending and leaving her winded and annoyed with herself.

“Oh.” She sighs, letting go. “I’m sorry. I haven’t thought of that in years. God, it must sound insane.” Mariko grins, hands her a paper napkin. Amalia takes it, and as she dabs the corners of her eyes, Mariko turns away and lifts the lid of a stout blue pot sitting on the stove.

“It smells wonderful in here,” Amalia says, a little louder than is necessary. She stands on tiptoe, bracing herself against the counter, and tries to peer over her hostess’s shoulder from eight feet away. “Is there something I can do to help?”

As she utters what is so often a rhetorical offer, routinely dismissed, Amalia is sure Mariko will say yes. They are two women cooking together, not The Server and The Served. No men are cloistered in the living room as if the sight of uncooked food has been proven to cause impotence in the male of the species.

“You can make the salad.” Mari opens the refrigerator, covers the peninsula with an array of produce. Amalia helps herself to a knife and a cutting board and carves a radish into thin translucent wafers. Saffron and cilantro spice the air, and Amalia breathes the bouquet greedily as she works. The background burble of Mariko’s fish stew is the sound of excitement.

Soon everything is ready. “Can I light these?” Amalia calls over her shoulder, setting the wooden salad bowl on the table and noticing two orange taper candles standing in low iron holders on a bookshelf, wicks pristine.

Mariko is carrying the pot between two oven mitts, walking with the care of a pregnant woman. She gives her guest a quizzical smile.

“Why not?”

Amalia strikes a match. “I thought maybe you were saving them for something.”

Mariko sits down, folds her hands in her lap, and nods. “For you.”

Amalia can’t help blushing, but between the heat rising from the pot and the slight rosiness the wine has now imparted to them both, it hardly matters. She takes another sip as Mariko ladles the fragrant orange concoction onto a base of rice and lays a plate in front of her. There are chunks of haddock, shrimp, and scallops, small pieces of something that might be crabmeat or even lobster. Amalia thinks about her mother, the way Natalie always orders shellfish in restaurants because they are verboten in her kosher household. As if the Torah provides a loophole for Jews dining out.

“You know, I haven’t been out dancing in years,” Amalia remarks as they pick up their forks. The image of Mariko spinning between the sand and stars has lingered in her mind. In fact, now a summer storm is coming down and Mariko and her girlfriends are getting drenched, opening their mouths to taste the rain as great fast sheets of water spatter their clothes and stick them to their bodies. Soon they will escape into the ocean, calling one another’s names.

Mariko shoots a bemused look over the top of her wineglass and Amalia feels ashamed, guileless, like a child hinting at what she wants for her birthday when the gift’s been sitting in the closet, wrapped, for months.

“Me neither. So we go, then? After dinner?”

Amalia laughs, drops her eyes to the table, then raises them slowly. “We couldn’t.”

Mari spears a shrimp, holds it before her mouth. “Why not?”

Why not indeed? Amalia doesn’t know whether she is rifling through her mind for an excuse or for the courage to say yes. Dancing has become a dare, and now Mari is watching her with those inscrutable dark eyes, waiting. It’s too strange to dwell on just now, but this woman is acting awfully like the girlfriend Amalia used to wish for in college: someone to throw pebbles at her window, rouse her from her bed, and drag her out of doors and into trouble.

She leans back in her chair. “Where? Where could we go?”

“We find somewhere.”

They go on eating. The stew tastes even better now. Richer, as if Amalia is ingesting every bit of energy that went into its preparation, from the walk to the market to the deveining of the shrimp to the chopping of the onions. For the next few minutes, her entire consciousness of food heightens and simplifies. These morsels she now places in her mouth are what will keep her alive until she eats again, what will sustain her through the night to come. It is how soldiers in the field must feel, tearing open their ration packets: newly cognizant of the obvious.

“I didn’t make any dessert.” Mariko is in the kitchen, opening a second bottle of wine. Amalia can’t believe they polished off the first, any more than she can understand why she agreed when Mariko suggested uncorking another. She doesn’t feel drunk. Perhaps her host drank more, but it doesn’t seem likely. If Mari consumed the lion’s share, she would be staggering by now, not dancing the bottle back into the dining room and humming. “I have some ice cream, if you want.”

“I’m fine,” Amalia says. “You have some.”

Mari, standing over the table and pouring, shakes her head. “Usually, I never eat this much. When Albert around, I cannot relax. Cannot digest.”

“You’re a better woman than I, Mari.” Amalia toasts, lifting her glass. “When I can’t relax, I eat everything in sight.”

Mari toasts back. “You very calm person, then. Else you not fit in that pretty dress. I wish I could wear.” She gestures at herself, with a looseness of limbs that is Amalia’s first indication that her host is tipsy. “I got no curves.”

“Nonsense.” Amalia can’t help looking away, embarrassed. “You have a lovely figure.”

“Please. I like stick figure.” Mariko stands over her, the wineglass in one hand, the other resting on her hip. “Wind start blowing, I gotta run inside.” Her cheeks are round with mirth, and when Amalia looks up, they both start to laugh. “Serious,” Mariko persists. “Every time I buy dress, they gotta take in. I tell them, I should get discount. I only buying half!”

Five minutes later, bundled up and trudging arm in arm into the wind, Amalia realizes that she, too, is a good distance from sober. Given that and the weather and the fact that they have no idea where they’re going, she finds herself willing Mari to call the whole thing off and invite her back to the apartment to warm up. She can already hear the lie they’ll tell each other: We’ll do it another night. Amalia squints and sets her jaw and shoves the thought aside. This is why you’ve never had a real partner in crime, she remonstrates herself. You have no stomach for adventure.

Even the Arbiters of Art have the sense to be inside now. Snowflakes are floating in the broad shafts of the streetlamps’ light, weightless as dust particles caught in a sunbeam. Amalia squeezes Mari’s arm to get her attention, then nods upward to show her. They stand and stare at it awhile, the night grown suddenly warmer, the block deserted, the wind gone. Within a minute, the snow organizes itself, stops swirling, and begins to advance in ranks, like marching infantry. Amalia turns and watches Mariko instead. Big flakes glisten in her hair; her face is wet where snow has melted, and Amalia feels the wetness on her own face, too.

Mari turns and smiles. “Why you look at me like that, Ama?”

She says it kindly, and this time Amalia is not abashed to be caught staring. “You know,” she ventures, unsure.

“I know nobody looked at me like that in long time.” Mariko glances up and away.

“Looked at you how?”

She laughs and steps forward. More snow is landing on their faces than is falling through the space between them. “Okay, Ama, you gonna make me say it? Okay. Like you want to kiss me. Right?”

Amalia swallows. “Yes.”

Mari’s eyes shine through the blizzard. “So what you waiting for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Women always wait too long.” Mariko looks left and right, then reaches up and places her palms on Amalia’s cheeks and guides Amalia’s mouth to hers.

The moment their lips meet, Amalia wants to cry. The softness of a woman is so familiar, and yet such a revelation. With a man, there is always something hard behind the gentleness: a force real or imagined, a drive he may slow or suppress but which is always beating in the depths. Mariko’s kiss is the first of Amalia’s life that feels like an act of lovemaking in itself, the first to take place wholly in the present. There is such freedom, such safety, in the absence of that unnegotiable male energy. Through their jackets, she can feel Mari’s breasts pressing against her own, imagine the beating of her heart. Amalia pulls Mari to her, unafraid of being grateful, needy, weak or strong.

         

Tristan shoulders the door closed behind him, takes two steps, and drops his luggage on the hotel bed. The mattress jiggles, settles. He flicks open the latches of his ancient suitcase and unfolds a brown Brooks Brothers suit, lays the pants over the back of a chair and hangs the jacket in the bathroom to unwrinkle when he showers. Albert and the band are bunked two to a room three floors below, but Tristan is up here by himself on the Jewish Congress of America’s dollar. The lousy bastards didn’t even spring for a suite.

He flops onto the bed and stares at the gift basket on the desk for ten minutes before he can muster up the interest to walk over and unwrap it. He pokes through the assortment of California fruit, notes the absence of macadamia nuts with disappointment, and scowls at the bottle of dessert wine, then takes the card back to bed together with a kiwi he intends to play with, not consume.

The message Tristan extracts from the envelope is all the more infuriating because it is written not in the familiar hand of the sender but the buoyant block letters of some dictation-taking hotel-store employee:

Old Man,

I trust your flight was comfortable and this note finds you well. First off, congratulations on the splendid honor. No one deserves it more. If you feel up to a drink before dinner, ring me in room 718. Otherwise, I shall see you at the ceremony.

Ciao,
P.P.

P.S. I’ve taken the liberty of reserving us a noon tee time tomorrow. You have no prior obligations, I hope?

Tristan reads it twice, then flicks his wrist and watches the card sail across the room and hit the wall. He should have known that Pendergast, the great friend of the Jews, was behind this Man of the Year business somehow. Good old Peter: too impressed with himself to stop and wonder whether a favor is worth doing, or to keep one a secret. God forbid Tristan should believe he’s won on merit. Better that Pendergast, the Puritan Pilgrim, make clear to his former pupil and greatest discovery that life’s prizes continue to rain down upon him only because Lady Pete is still fluttering around up there on winged golden sandals, seeding the clouds.

Tristan turns onto his side, stares at the drawn drapes, and wonders what he’ll say to the smug phony. How ridiculous that Pendergast is even here, that he holds any sway at all with this organization. Who votes on next year’s winner, the Daughters of the American Revolution? Tristan mashes his feet into his shoes. He’s not going to get any rest until he’s spoken to the man.

A DO NOT Disturb sign dangles from the doorknob of room 718, but Tristan knocks anyway, three short raps. The thought of breaking up Pendergast’s nap is rather appealing, but Peter comes to the door clad in a white shirt and a Windsor tie, hair slicked back, healthy and tanned—tanned! It is December and Pendergast lives in goddamned Massachusetts.

“The Man of the Year!” he crows, clapping Tristan on the back. “Wonderful to see you, dear boy, wonderful to see you.” Tristan is ushered into a room identical to his, except that manuscript pages are strewn over the desk instead of California oranges, and two pressed suits and a garment bag hang in the open closet. By the time Tristan completes his survey of the premises, Peter is in the bathroom, running the water. He returns with a freshly rinsed glass in each hand.

“How about a drink? I’ve got a bottle here somewhere. So, does noon tomorrow work? It was the latest decent time they had.” The scotch is located. Peter sets the glasses on the desk and pours them three fingers apiece, hefts his drink to eye level and winks. “Always a bad idea to book an early golf game for a man who’s being honored the night before.”

Tristan takes his glass from the table and holds it at his waist. “What did you do, Peter? Did you make them give me this award?”

Pendergast contorts his brow, laughs, takes a nip of scotch. He’s nervous, and hiding it. Tristan takes a step forward. Peter won’t register him coming closer, but it may increase his agitation. The professor has probably never been in a fight. A simple punch in the nose would catch him completely by surprise, lay him out flat, scare him half to death. Six feet of bloodied white Anglo-Saxon Protestant writhing on the hotel floor, wondering what the hell happened, and Tristan towering above, daring him to move a muscle.

“What do you mean, make them give you this award? Who do you think I am? I’m not even Jewish.”

No, Tristan thinks, and you never will be, no matter how many Heebs you manage to slip past the doors of your country club. Any more than you will ever know what it’s like to be black, no matter how many angry black writers you broker book deals. You will only be the man holding open the door.

“But you did something,” Tristan says, low.

Peter is already comfortable again. “I guested on the JCA’s board last year. They always ask one Gentile. It’s an honor.” Pendergast leans against a bureau, crosses his ankles, and draws a semicircle in the air with his drink. “One meeting, a few months ago, they asked for nominations for Man of the Year. Blockbusters is a damn fine book, an important book, so I put your name down. Did I do something wrong?”

Tristan stares at him. Where to begin?

“Don’t do me any more favors, Peter,” he rumbles, speaking into the glass as he lifts it to his mouth. The scotch is irritatingly excellent. Only Pendergast would order a fifteen-year-old bottle of Glenfiddich from room service.

Peter’s drink arm dangles to his side. “What ever do you mean?”

“It’s quite a game, isn’t it? First, you convince the goys some lucky Jew is all right, and then—and this is really where I have to hand it to you, Peter—then you have the audacity to go back and convince the Jews. Well, thanks. That’s what I’m supposed to say, isn’t it? That I can’t possibly thank you enough?”

Tristan cuts himself off as his voice begins to climb in pitch, volume. For a long moment, Pendergast is quiet. “Tristan, I…” he starts, then gives up with a sigh and a wave of his hand. The gesture is baffling. It could mean I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can say. Or: This is too absurd to merit a response.

“You know how the Jewish press has gone after me, Peter. What do you think it’s like to finally be offered an olive branch and then find out that it’s not real, just my guardian angel meddling again?” He sips his drink. “I knew it was something like this.”

Pendergast stands straighter. “There were twelve of us who voted, Tristan. All I did was give your name.”

“The WASP seal of approval. Best endorsement you can get.”

“Ah. You’re being ridiculous.”

“The hell I am. And as a matter of fact, Peter, I never asked for a guardian angel. Don’t you think it’s time you found a new way to feel good about yourself?”

Pendergast drops his head and gives a little snorting laugh. “You’re unbelievable, you know that? You could just take the goddamn olive branch. But no, you’d rather find a reason not to. You’d rather attack me for trying to get you the kind of credit you bloody well deserve. I think you’re scared, Brodsky. You know the minute you accept that olive branch you won’t have the foggiest idea who the hell you are.”

“Spare me. All right? Just spare me. You can put us on the golf course, Peter. You can get us jobs. But don’t you ever tell us who we are.”

“Oh, it’s ‘us’ now, is it? All of a sudden you speak for the Jews, Brodsky?”

Tristan throws back the rest of the scotch and sets the glass down. “Better me than you,” he says before he walks out of the room.

But by that evening, there is nothing Tristan wants to say. He calls off the performance, accepts the award wordlessly, and goes back to his room.

         

Sun pours through the windows, saturating everything. It’s almost noon when she wakes up, barely having slept, her breasts pressed against Mari’s back and her hand draped over Mari’s thigh, and every emotion Amalia possesses sits so close to the surface that she scarcely trusts herself to move. The slightest sweetness, the lightest touch, might summon tears. And Mariko has seen her cry enough already.

As she lies breathing shallow, stroking Mari’s hair, Amalia has the strange and horrible thought that perhaps she is too feminine even for a woman to love—too sensitive, too vulnerable. All night, she vacillated between intuition and experience, between making love the way she wanted to, the way that felt right, and letting doubts and errant fears corral her. If she can’t be herself, then what in God’s name is the point?

Mariko slips out from under her arm and disappears into the bathroom. Amalia opens her eyes in time to see Mari emerge, hair falling down over her tiny bee-sting breasts, a yellow sarong knotted around her waist. She heads straight for the French press.

Amalia props her head against a pillow. This cannot end now with a cup of coffee, or in an hour at some restaurant where they will masquerade as friends meeting for brunch.

“Mari,” she calls, “come home with me.” She yawns and stretches her arms over her head, then adds by way of enticement, “I’ll make you dinner.”

Mari puts down her can of Folgers, picks her way across the clothing-littered floor, and sits down on the edge of the bed. She crosses her thighs, then reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind Amalia’s ear.

“If I come, Ama, I just have to leave again.”

“I know.” Amalia takes her hand. “But come.”

“You got daughter at home. You gotta make dinner for her.”

“I’ll send her to a friend’s,” Amalia says, knowing it’s Sunday and no parent allows it.

“Ama, honey…” Mariko stands and looks down at her. “No. You know is a bad idea.”

“So when…” Amalia starts, but there’s no point in asking. Mariko offers her a tissue from the nightstand and Amalia scowls, offended by the assumption that she will cry. But a moment later, it proves correct.

“Well then, I guess it’s back to business.” She permits herself to blow her nose. Mariko hands over another few tissues, and Amalia takes them without looking up, smears them over her face, and lets her hand fall to her lap. “Back to your husband and back to mine.”

Mari moves to stroke her hair. Amalia flinches at the touch, then consents to it.

“What else, Ama?” Mari tilts her head, smiles. “Run away together?”

Amalia bursts into fresh tears. “You’re making fun of me.” With every sob, a bit more of her allure melts away forever, but the thought only makes her cry harder—and besides, she deserves to be disgraced. It’s as though Mariko has been regressing her. Last night, Amalia was carefree and twenty; a few minutes ago, clumsy and fifteen. Now she is forlorn as only a five-year-old can be, in front of a woman who has no sympathy for children. Mariko—wife of a man she does not love, defender of a music she plays no part in creating—is a realist even in her passions. She offers nothing more than a few strokes of the hair as her lover goes to pieces on her bed. A bed that still smells like sex, like women, like things Amalia had never done before and doubts she will ever do again. The instant she is gone, the mattress will be stripped, the sheets washed. When Albert comes home, he will lie down on fresh linens.

“Ama.” Amalia lets go of the pillow she’s been weeping into and looks up through wide red eyes. Mari stares at her a moment, then cups a hand to Amalia’s cheek and wipes a tear away with her thumb. “Have some coffee.”

Amalia nods, lugs herself to the table, and sits down, still naked. Mariko rummages through a drawer, puts on a top, and joins her. The seats of the chairs are made of woven rope; the cords cut into Amalia’s bare skin. They sit side by side and stare out at the street. Last night’s snow didn’t amount to much. Most of it melted when it hit the pavement, but there is still enough dusting cars and fire hydrants to bestow a little magic on the scene. Neither of them speaks. Eventually, Mariko gets up and begins washing last night’s dishes. Amalia gathers her outfit together, glancing periodically into the kitchen. Soon she is almost dressed, and Mariko still has not bothered to steal a final glance at her body.

“You know, we still haven’t danced,” Amalia says as she buttons her sweater, loud enough to be heard over the running tap water, not at all sure why she says it. Mari smiles without looking up. Amalia crouches to hunt for her stockings.

They kiss good-bye at the door: a real, long, tender kiss. Amalia feels the whole time as if it’s out of consolation, but when it ends and they stand staring at each other, it is Mariko who pulls Amalia back into another, harder than the first, this one both wonderful and cruel, a kiss Amalia knows must last her a long time.

She reaches the street dizzy. Bright light and cold air shock her awake. Cafe Wha? is packed; a blond folksinger sits on a stool with his back to the entrance, strumming a guitar, and Amalia, caught up in trying to listen through the door, slips on the ice-slick pavement and has to windmill her arms to keep from falling on her ass. She recovers, stalks across the street to her car and finds it gone—towed off for being parked in front of what was, unbeknownst to her, a church. Too much to deal with right now, just too much. She hails a cab and takes it all the way home to Connecticut, a hundred-dollar ride. The cabbie comes inside and she gives him a drink of water and pays him by check. As soon as he leaves, Amalia goes to bed, pretends to have the flu, and sleeps for the better part of a week.