WINSTEIN lay under the covers, staring at the ceiling in a depressed torpor. Outside, sheets of humid air rose from the pavement in stifling waves. The sound of traffic was deafening at this hour, and in addition to all this his bed was on fire. Look at me, he thought. Fifty years old. Half a century. Next year, I will be fifty-one. Then fifty-two. Using this same reasoning, he could figure out his age as much as five years in the future. So little time left, he thought, and so much to accomplish. For one thing, he wanted to learn to drive a car. Adelman, his friend who used to play dreidel with him on Rush Street, had studied driving at the Sorbonne. He could handle a car beautifully and had already driven many places by himself. Weinstein had made a few attempts to steer his father’s Chevy but kept winding up on the sidewalk.
He had been a precocious child. An intellectual. At twelve, he had translated the poems of T. S. Eliot into English, after some vandals had broken into the library and translated them into French. And as if his high I.Q did not isolate him enough, he suffered untold injustices and persecutions because of his religion, mostly from his parents. True, the old man was a member of the synagogue, and his mother, too, but they could never accept the fact that their son was Jewish. “How did it happen?” his father asked, bewildered. My face looks Semitic, Weinstein thought every morning as he shaved. He had been mistaken several times for Robert Redford, but on each occasion it was by a blind person. Then there was Feinglass, his other boyhood friend: A Phi Beta Kappa. A labor spy, ratting on the workers. Then a convert to Marxism. A Communist agitator. Betrayed by the Party, he went to Hollywood and became the offscreen voice of a famous cartoon mouse. Ironic.
Weinstein had toyed with the Communists, too. To impress a girl at Rutgers, he had moved to Moscow and joined the Red Army. When he called her for a second date, she was pinned to someone else. Still, his rank of sergeant in the Russian infantry would hurt him later when he needed a security clearance in order to get the free appetizer with his dinner at Longchamps. Also, while at school he had organized some laboratory mice and led them in a strike over work conditions. Actually, it was not so much the politics as the poetry of Marxist theory that got him. He was positive that collectivization could work if everyone would learn the lyrics to “Rag Mop.” “The withering away of the state” was a phrase that had stayed with him ever since his uncle’s nose had withered away in Saks Fifth Avenue one day. What, he wondered, can be learned about the true essence of social revolution? Only that it should never be attempted after eating Mexican food.
The Depression shattered Weinstein’s Uncle Meyer, who kept his fortune under the mattress. When the market crashed, the government called in all mattresses, and Meyer became a pauper overnight. All that was left for him was to jump out the window, but he lacked the nerve and sat on a windowsill of the Flatiron Building from 1930 to 1937.
“These kids with their pot and their sex,” Uncle Meyer was fond of saying. “Do they know what it is to sit on a windowsill for seven years? There you see life! Of course, everybody looks like ants. But each year Tessie—may she rest in peace—made the Seder right out there on the ledge. The family gathered round for Passover. Oy, nephew! What’s the world coming to when they have a bomb that can kill more people than one look at Max Rifkin’s daughter?”
Weinstein’s so-called friends had all knuckled under to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Blotnick was turned in by his own mother. Sharpstein was turned in by his answering service. Weinstein had been called by the committee and admitted he had given money to the Russian War Relief, and then added, “Oh, yes, I bought Stalin a dining-room set.” He refused to name names but said if the committee insisted he would give the heights of the people he had met at meetings. In the end he panicked and, instead of taking the Fifth Amendment, took the Third, which enabled him to buy beer in Philadelphia on Sunday.
WEINSTEIN finished shaving and got into the shower. He lathered himself, while steaming water splashed down his bulky back. He thought, Here I am at some fixed point in time and space, taking a shower. I, Isaac Weinstein. One of God’s creatures. And then, stepping on the soap, he slid across the floor and rammed his head into the towel rack. It had been a bad week. The previous day, he had got a bad haircut and he was still not over the anxiety it had caused him. At first the barber had snipped judiciously, but soon Weinstein realized he had gone too far. “Put some back!” he screamed unreasonably.
“I can’t,” the barber said. “It won’t stick.”
“Well, then give it to me, Dominic! I want to take it with me!”
“Once it’s on the floor of the shop it’s mine, Mr. Weinstein.”
“Like hell! I want my hair!”
He blustered and raged, and finally felt guilty and left. Goyim, he thought. One way or another, they get you.
Now he emerged from the hotel and walked up Eighth Avenue. Two men were mugging an elderly lady. My God, thought Weinstein, time was when one person could handle that job. Some city. Chaos everyplace. Kant was right: The mind imposes order. It also tells you how much to tip. What a wonderful thing, to be conscious! I wonder what the people in New Jersey do.
He was on his way to see Harriet about the alimony payments. He still loved Harriet, even though while they were married she had systematically attempted to commit adultery with all the “R”s in the Manhattan Telephone Directory. He forgave her. But he should have suspected something when his best friend and Harriet took a house in Maine together for three years without telling him where they were. He didn’t want to see it—that was it. His sex life with Harriet had stopped early. He slept with her once on the night they first met, once on the evening of the first moon landing, and once to test if his back was all right after a slipped disc. “It’s no damn good with you, Harriet,” he used to complain. “You’re too pure. Every time I have an urge for you I sublimate it by planting a tree in Israel. You remind me of my mother.” (Molly Weinstein, may she rest in peace, who slaved for him and made the best stuffed derma in Chicago—a secret recipe until everyone realized she was putting in hashish.)
For lovemaking, Weinstein needed someone quite opposite. Like LuAnne, who made sex an art. The only trouble was, she couldn’t count to twenty without taking her shoes off. He once tried giving her a book on existentialism, but she ate it. Sexually, Weinstein had always felt inadequate. For one thing, he felt short. He was five-four in his stocking feet, although in someone else’s stocking feet he could be as tall as five-six. Dr. Klein, his analyst, got him to see that jumping in front of a moving train was more hostile than self-destructive but in either case would ruin the crease in his pants. Klein was his third analyst. His first was a Jungian, who suggested they try a Ouija board. Before Klein, he attended “group,” but when it came time for him to speak he got dizzy and could only recite the names of all the planets. His problem was women, and he knew it. He was impotent with any woman who finished college with higher than a B-minus average. He felt most at home with graduates of typing school, although if the woman did over sixty words a minute he panicked and could not perform.
WEINSTEIN rang the bell to Harriet’s apartment, and suddenly she was standing before him. Swelling to maculate giraffe, as usual, thought Weinstein. It was a private joke that neither of them understood.
“Hello, Harriet,” he said.
“Oh, Ike,” she said. “You needn’t be so damn self-righteous.”
She was right. What a tactless thing to have said. He hated himself for it.
“How are the kids, Harriet?”
“We never had any kids, Ike.”
“That’s why I thought four hundred dollars a week was a lot for child support.”
She bit her lip, Weinstein bit his lip. Then he bit her lip. “Harriet,” he said, “I … I’m broke. Egg futures are down.”
“I see. And can’t you get help from your shiksa?”
“To you, any girl who’s not Jewish is a shiksa.”
“Can we forget it?” Her voice was choked with recrimination. Weinstein had a sudden urge to kiss her, or, if not her, somebody.
“Harriet, where did we go wrong?”
“We never faced reality.”
“It wasn’t my fault. You said it was north.”
“Reality is north, Ike.”
“No, Harriet. Empty dreams are north. Reality is west. False hopes are east, and I think Louisiana is south.”
She still had the power to arouse him. He reached out for her, but she moved away and his hand came to rest in some sour cream.
“Is that why you slept with your analyst?” he finally blurted out. His face was knotted with rage. He felt like fainting but couldn’t remember the proper way to fall.
“That was therapy,” she said coldly. “According to Freud, sex is the royal road to the unconscious.”
“Freud said dreams are the road to the unconscious.”
“Sex, dreams—you’re going to nitpick?”
“Goodbye, Harriet.”
It was no use. Rien à dire, rien à faire. Weinstein left and walked over to Union Square. Suddenly hot tears burst forth, as if from a broken dam. Hot, salty tears pent up for ages rushed out in an unabashed wave of emotion. The problem was, they were coming out of his ears. Look at this, he thought. I can’t even cry properly. He dabbed his ear with Kleenex and went home.
1975