That Broad’s
Like Vinegar

THE next morning in bed I read a few chapters of The Silent Passage: “The Cheating Heart,” “Embezzled Bone,” and “Dangerous Breasts.” It was written like gory pulp fiction, each page more eye-popping and horrific than the next. By the time I got to the part where it said Premarin was made from pregnant horse’s urine, I had to put it down not to puke.

I decided to go to D’Amico in case Powell might be there. I had debated calling him as soon as I woke up but it was gauche to call a guy before twelve hours had passed, and besides, the trickster was active in him, which meant I couldn’t act too romantic. For that I had to wait until the gentleman got active in him, although I wasn’t sure if that was a codified Jungian archetype.

A buff young Italian guy was behind the counter. He had thick eyebrows and a 1940s face. There were a couple dozen big barrels of coffee on the right and an old deli counter on the left, with Italian meats and cheeses in the glass case. In the back were a few round tables. A mom with a toddler in a stroller was sitting at one and Powell was sitting at another, his back to the door.

“Think of the devil and the devil appears,” I said. He turned around. But it wasn’t Powell. It was an old Italian woman reading the New York Post. She had the exact same black curly hair. This was one of the disadvantages to dating an older man: you might wind up mistaking him for a woman.

“Can I help you?” she huffed in a nicotined voice.

“I’m sorry,” I stuttered. “I thought you were someone else.” I did a one-eighty and walked out.

As I emerged back on the street I spotted Powell coming down the sidewalk. He was carrying his shoulder bag and there was a New York Times tucked under his arm. When he got close I pretended to be surprised to see him. “Hank?” I said.

He put his hand on the side of my face and said, “So how are ya?”

“Look at the shiner you gave me when you kissed me,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I tilted my face so he could see.

“Nice,” he said approvingly. “You wanna come in for a minute?”

We went up to the cappuccino bar in the back, which a skinny young guy with a hat turned backwards was wiping with a cloth. “What would you like?” Powell asked.

“A cappuccino,” I said coolly.

“Ah, a fellow appreciater,” he said.

We took the caps to a table in the corner, away from the hacking hag. “I got a question for you,” Powell said, leaning forward in his chair. “In the English language, is there such a word as ‘hoyle’?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Then I’m inventing it.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s whore and mohel put together.”

“You’re such a misogynist. What was your mother like?”

“Just like my ex-wife. A castrating bitch.”

“Am I a castrating bitch?”

“I told you, you’ve got too much animus to be a castrator.” I raised the cappuccino to my mouth and sipped through the hole. It burned my tongue. “Careful,” he said, and eased off the lid.

I blew into it and looked up at him with a grin. “Last night was such an unanticipated surprise,” he said. It was so strange to hear a guy put himself on the table like that. Maybe when they got older they got less tactical; there was less time and therefore less to lose.

“Didn’t you know when I wrote that I had a crush on you?” I said.

“No. I thought you wanted someone to tell you what to do with your life.”

“I do. I want that too.” I thought for a second. “I want you to be my buru.”

“What’s that?”

“ ‘Booty’ and ‘guru’ put together.”

“Very good,” he said, grabbing the back of my neck. “What are you doing Thursday night?”

“I have to go to my mother’s book group,” I said.

“What’s the book?”

“The Silent Passage.”

“What’s it about? Slavery?”

“Menopause.”

“Mmm,” he winced. “I don’t know which is worse.”

“Did you know that female babies are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have, about seven hundred thousand of them? That means a tiny little baby girl already has all her capacities for reproduction.”

“That explains why women are such materialists. They think they gotta hoard their wares. What time’s the group?”

“Seven.”

“Then I’d like you to come over in the late afternoon. Five o’-clock. And I’d like you to wear a dress or skirt, but no underwear. Will you do as I ask?” The question was like a hard cock fucking me. I felt my eyes glaze over like the dumbest blonde’s.

“You know I will,” I sighed.

“Something in you brings out the devil in me,” he said. “You’re so hard on the outside. I want to peel it away.”

“I’m not hard.”

“You are. The man in you is at war with the woman and it’s the woman part I’m interested in, the recessive woman.” He put his hand on the back of my head. I felt breathless and weightless like I’d just done a Whip-It. I wanted Powell to be my new career.

“If I bring out the devil in you,” I said, “there’s nothing I can do but egg you on.”

“You’re such a bad punner,” he said. “You should be punished.” He leaned forward, grabbed the side of my chair, and dragged it to his side so we were facing the same way.

“What are you doing?” I asked softly. I was wearing a black cotton tennis skirt and a T-shirt that said “West Side Pee-Wee League” in red letters. He put his hand under my skirt, nudged my panties to the side, and eased in a finger. “We’re in D’Amico,” I whispered.

As if on cue the counter boy came by with a box on his way to the supply room and said to the Italian woman, “Hey, Annie, how ’bout you and me get together tonight and I ram my big one up your ass?”

“You’re disgusting,” she said. “You got a filthy mout’.”

“You see why I come here?” Powell said. He moved his head closer and raised his finger up onto my clit. I felt as though I was a stick shift and he was in the driver’s seat wearing wraparound sunglasses. But instead of looking ahead he was staring right at me. His eyes were trained on my face like he had a medical interest in the moment-to-moment change in the tint of my skin and lips.

He held the hood up with his thumb and worked it. I opened my mouth and stared at him weakly. I saw a figure in the distance through the door and then it opened and Liz was striding toward us. “Hel-lo!” she cried.

“You’re the mayor of Cobble Hill,” he said, removing his hand. “Who is she?”

“Nobody,” I said. I slid my chair away. Liz was wearing a low-cut pink sweater with what appeared to be a bullet bra, because her breasts stuck out straighter than June Cleaver’s.

“Hello, Racheleh!” she said. She blinked at Powell placidly, waiting for me to make the intro.

“This is Hank,” I sighed.

“Delightful to meet you,” said Liz, extending her long bony fingers. Powell shook unceremoniously, with his nonpussy hand. “Elizabeth Kaminsky, Esquire.”

“A lawyer, huh? What kind are you?”

“Lay,” she said. “I’m Rachel’s very good friend. I live in her building. And you?”

“I live on Strong Place.”

“No, I mean, how do you two…intersect?” She was squinting as though irked she didn’t already know about this important person. She hated to be left in the dark about anything.

“Hank’s a friend of mine from the neighborhood,” I said quickly.

“How come I’ve never met you before?”

“He’s new here.”

“No kidding. How did you meet?”

“Rachel saw a play I wrote,” he said.

“Wow,” she said. “Have I heard of you?”

“Hank Powell,” I said quickly, certain she wouldn’t have. Powell had the kind of minor fame that meant the people who did know his name were cult fans and the rest were totally in the dark.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “You’re Hank Powell?” I wanted to throw myself across his body to prevent her from coming any nearer. “I loved Leon and Ruth!” she said, like she was telling him he had the largest, fattest dick she’d seen in her life. “I’m a huge fan of Don Cheadle’s. ‘When I kiss your mouth, Ruth, my heart explodes like Mount Vesuvius in my chest.’ ”

“Women love that line,” Powell said. She was kissing his ass but he didn’t exactly have to bend over.

“Who knew we had an auteur in our modest midst?” she cried. “A living landmark of the artistic craft?”

As Liz went on with her solo version of Password and Powell lapped it up, my heart got jumpy and irregular. I wanted to protect him from her wiles but it was hopeless. How could I measure up to a Vargas girl? I was going to get shafted for a skinnier witty Jew. He obviously had a fetish for banterers, and Liz was the bantering champ. I was menschier and way less fucked-up, but who wants Ralph Bellamy when you can have Cary Grant?

I shot her an imploring look. She cleared her throat and said, “I’d better get going. I have to go to the city to attend to some personal needs.”

“What kinda needs?” asked Powell. I wished he’d stop interrogating. As long as you engaged the motormouth, it kept running.

“I have three appointments—my colorist, my analyst, and my gynecologist. It’s a rainbow day. I’m attending to my gray, my blues, and then my pink. Ha ha ha ha ha!”

“You don’t have gray hair,” said Powell.

“Which is precisely why I continue to go to this fabulous colorist.” She squeezed his arm and said, “Don’t be naïve, Mr. Powell. It takes work to look the way I do.”

“My name’s Hank,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Powell. I’m a nice Jewish girl. I take the Fifth Commandment very seriously.”

“Which one’s that?”

“ ‘Honor thy father and mother,’ ” I sighed. She could outdo me in many ways but biblical literacy was not going to be one of them.

“But I’m not her father,” he said.

“That’s what they all say,” she said.

“How long have you been in analysis?”

“Eight years. But I think I’m going to leave her. I had an appointment on September eleventh and tried to call to cancel but I couldn’t reach her. I wound up going over anyway, right as it was happening—her office was in the Village. I sat down and said, ‘Dr. Fromberg, these planes just hit the World Trade Center.’ She said, ‘What? What?’ and I had to take her outside to show her. We wound up canceling the session but she charged me anyway.”

“She charged you?” Powell howled.

“That’s the way these people operate. Are you in therapy, Mr. Powell?”

“I was with a Jungian for four years,” he said. “I never liked him. He sat just three feet opposite from me with his legs open so that I was always aware of his penis. When I told him stories about my mother and my wife, seeking solace, he would always take their side. He’d say, ‘I can see why she might have felt that way,’ or, ‘Don’t you think you’re being a little unfair?’ I started to convince myself that he was right, that all my pain at the hands of women was brought on by myself. I grew weaker and more depressed. I had trouble sleeping at night and dreamed of murderous brides. One morning in the waiting room I saw a woman with black hair and pale pancake makeup emerge from his office. She weighed no more than ninety pounds and resembled an anorexic version of Chrissie Hynde. I realized this was a sign that the man was a murderer, and it was only a matter of time before he would kill me. I walked out of the office and never came back.”

He took a sip of his cappuccino. The young mom at the next table was gaping, and even her kid had gotten quiet. Powell could command any room, even the Romper Room.

“So you had no problem seeing a Jungian?” Liz said. “Even though Jung was a Nazi apologist?”

“He had a Jewish mistress!”

“Just because you fuck a Jew doesn’t mean you love them,” Liz said. Powell opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, then seemed to decide better of it and shut it again. Suddenly Powell’s interest in Jung didn’t seem so intriguing.

She stood up and arched her breasts forward. “Well, I’d better get going here or the day will escape me. I am so looking forward. First the chair, then the couch, then the stirrups.” She put her hand on Powell’s shoulder and lowered her mouth to his ear. “You know my favorite position, Mr. Powell?”

“What’s that?” Powell asked.

“Prone.”

With that the siren stood and headed out the door. “That girl needs analysis,” said Powell.

“Tell me about it!” I exclaimed delightedly.

“Soon as she walked in she was lying down. She wasn’t here five minutes and she was talking about the couch.”

“I know,” I said. “But admit it. Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

“She’s easy on the eyes, but all tied in knots. When you date a girl who’s that tightly wound you always have to watch your own neck.”

“I’ll say,” I said, eager to encourage any negative assessment. “She’s filled with bile. And she’s a nympho! She acts like she loves sex but she always uses words like ‘banged’ and ‘stuffed’ to describe it. And she loves anal sex. She particularly loves anal sex with black men.” The toddler at the next table looked up and his mom shot me a dirty look. I lowered my voice. “But she’s always saying she wants to meet a Jew.”

Powell thought for a second and then he said, “She’s all switched around, then.”

“What?”

“She’s having sex in the wrong hole with the wrong color. She’s got it ass-backwards.”

I giggled maliciously. “So you really don’t have a thing for her?”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “That broad’s like vinegar.”

“What do you mean?”

“A few drops on your salad tastes good, but you don’t wanna use the whole bottle.”

“I think I love you,” I said.

“Let’s not be hasty,” he said.

 

AFTER our coffee I decided to take a walk up Court Street to see what was playing at the cinema. As I headed up the street I passed a parade of kindergartners in bright yellow vests, tied together on a long leash like prisoners, yammering as their teachers barked at them to stay in line. I wondered how these children were going to mature when their most evocative childhood memory would be the preschool chain gang.

The Cobble Hill cinema was the kind of small neighborhood theater that had really bad murals of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean on the walls, such lousy likenesses it took you a second to figure out who was who. When you called to find out the movie times it was the owner’s voice on the answering machine and he said that in addition to cash they took “Visa rand Mastacard.” He was like that shlub on the Men’s Warehouse commercials—he had too much hubris to know when to delegate.

I bought a ticket for Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and then I went to the concession stand. The saleswoman had a very elaborate set of painted nails with rhinestones embedded in them. I ordered a medium popcorn and soda and she said, “For a dollar more you could get a Combo Package, which is a large popcorn and an unlimited soda.”

I took a deep breath. The Combo Package upgrade is the greatest evil in the known universe. The cheapnik in me wants to get the best deal but the rationalist knows there’s no way I’ll eat what they sell. “No,” I said defiantly, like she was trying to sell me crack. “Just a medium and medium.”

She nodded slowly, like she was personally disappointed in the choice, and turned for the bag. “Goddammit,” I said. “Gimme the combo.” When she rang it up it came to eight fifty-seven.

In the theater I found an aisle seat, jutted my feet out, and got to work on my popcorn. There were three other audience members that I could see—two old ladies, and a lone slender middle-aged man. The previews hadn’t started and it was quiet except for the Muzak version of “My Heart Will Go On.”

I heard the pffff of the heavy door opening and then a guy sat down across from me, a row ahead, and started munching on his popcorn. He was scarfing it down big time, scooping up big portions and chewing loudly. I got this weird feeling of déjà vu and slowly it dawned on me that there was only one person in the world who ate in such a vile, nasty way.

“Dad?”

He turned around, looking as though he had taken a shit in his pants. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Same thing you are.”

“It’s twelve o’clock. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

He hesitated a second and then lifted his popcorn and drink (he’d gone for the combo too), climbed over me, and sat down in the next seat.

“There were some layoffs.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “But you’d been there for, like, ten years.”

“Times are tough, and old people are expendable.”

“When did it happen?”

“Three months ago.”

“Three months? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know how long it would last. I was hoping I could tell you when I got a new job.” I knew the truth. He hadn’t wanted to tell me because he was ashamed, and the fact that he was too ashamed to admit it made me all the more worried.

As concerned as I was for my father, I couldn’t help thinking what it all meant for me. What if I was just like him? Maybe there was such a thing as Late-Onset Failure Syndrome. It was hereditary, just like high blood pressure or cancer, and mine was just kicking in. Sometimes when I watched the way he held his face in his hands or stroked his chin I realized I did the same thing and it always made me nervous, like he was in my blood. When he read the newspaper he sometimes said parts of sentences out loud—like “inverse relationship to fat consumption” or “war of words between the sides is abating”—as though he was trying to follow the train of thought. When I was a kid I used to make fun of him for it but in recent months I’d started doing the same thing. Whenever I caught myself I stopped immediately, terrified, like some evil alien baby was growing inside me.

Maybe he’d lost his job because he was so devastated by me dropping out. He was my biggest fan, in the worst way. When I was in Hebrew School, he sat in the front row every time I did anything special at services and came all the way to Wesleyan when I led my first Shabbat. And whenever anything bad happened, like the time I got rejected from a summer internship at the National Yiddish Book Center, he’d get this look on his face like he couldn’t take it, like it had happened to him. Maybe I was the reason he was on skid row. And if that was true I was in worse straits than I thought. Not only did I have to worry about getting back on my feet for my own sake, I had to do it for his.

“So have you been going on interviews?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I’m trying really hard to stay positive and Mom keeps telling me to keep an open mind. Yesterday I interviewed at a music company. A rap label.”

“For a computer job?”

“Actually, it was administrative assistant,” he said. “Have you heard of a band called Got 2 B Reel, spelled Got, two number sign, the letter B, and then R-e-e-l?”

“No.”

“That’s their main client. It may be their only client. I went to their Web site last night. The band members are posed with their fingers in this strange configuration.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “They’re Bloods. Those signs spell out a gang name. You cannot go working at a rap label. You could get shot!”

“I wish I’d known this before I lowered my salary range.”

The thought of him working as a secretary made me embarrassed, like he was the black sheep in the family instead of me. “Aren’t you interviewing for any computer jobs?”

“Sure I am but the market is terrible. And it doesn’t make it any easier that I’m twenty years older than most of the other applicants. Plus my skills are so outdated I don’t know who could use me. Do you think I should shave my beard?”

He had worn his beard since I was one and a half, which meant I had no conscious memories of him without it. I had seen photos of him clean-shaven, wheeling me in a stroller over the Brooklyn Bridge, looking young and studly in tight bell-bottoms, but he always seemed like a different person. It was the same with the photos of him smoking cigarettes (he’d quit a few months after meeting my mom). Shaved or smoking, he didn’t seem so much like my dad as his stand-in.

“Well, you’d definitely look younger,” I said, trying to gauge his neck fat through the hair.

“But what if my bald spot looks more obvious without the beard to offset it?”

I had lobbied successfully for his switch from a comb-over to a comb-back a few years back and the improvement had been astounding. Right away he started carrying himself with more confidence, looking slick and Cary Grantish instead of dissembling and Rudy Giulianine.

But I didn’t like the idea of him without his beard. I felt like I wouldn’t recognize him. “The bald spot pitfall is an important consideration,” I said. “You might wind up looking even more dorky and over-the-hill than you do already.”

His shook his head wearily like he probably should have guessed my response in advance. “Thank you so much, sweetheart,” he said.

“Why’d they lay you off?” I asked, eating some of his popcorn even though I had my own. “Was it personal?”

“It’s hard to tell. But I must say, it buoys me that you and I are in the same position.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “I have a job.”

“Not a real one.”

“It is real,” I said, feeling the kind of insane anger that can only be brought on by a mother or a father. “And I didn’t get fired. I left school because I wanted to. I don’t have any problem with where I am right now. Why would you compare your situation to mine when they’re not the same at all?”

“Misery loves company,” he said.

“But Dad,” I said. “I’m not miserable.” He shrugged and turned to the screen with great interest, even though the only thing on it was a word jumble for Matt Damon.

“You were going to be a rabbi,” he said, “the first in our family. And now you’re mopping tables. Not to mention the fact that Mom told me she saw you with a man twice your age. It’s like you’ve lost all common sense.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. I could never count on either of them to keep anything secret. If I kept quiet about anything they acted like I was being a horrible child but whenever I told them things they turned right around and told the other. In Jewish families information is love. The more you tell your parents, the more it means you love them. This is true even if they take whatever precious, personal stories you have and repeat them at parties to their friends with no thought or care to the shame they might bring upon you.

“What are you doing cavorting with a middle-aged screenwriter?” he said. “Older men are only interested in one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you? They’re addicted to power! Only a young woman can give it to them. And the relationship never ever lasts. Look how the girl from Modesto ended up. Look at Bill and Monica.”

“Are you calling your own daughter Monica Lewinsky? That is really low.”

“It’s not such a stretch! If you’re in awe of his status, I beg you please to be more of an adult! Someone like this is just going to think of you as a flash in the pan.”

“That’s really generous of you. You don’t think for a moment he might actually have some respect for my brain?”

“Of course not! You don’t have anything in common! How old is he?”

“Fifty-one.”

“What can you possibly have to talk about with a fifty-one-year-old?”

“Carl Jung.”

“Carl Jung was a Nazi apologist.”

“He had a Jewish mistress!”

“Listen to yourself,” he said, like it was all getting way too surreal. “I can’t believe you have no qualms about dating someone NJ, when just a few months ago you were on your way to the rabbinate.”

NJ was our family’s slang for Not Jewish, and the tone you used when saying it was similar to the one you might use for “convicted felon.”

“Look,” I said. “This isn’t any of your business. The only reason you even know is because Mom saw us. If I want to date someone NJ nothing you say is going to stop me.”

“You used to care about Jewish continuity! When you were fourteen you came back from that intermarriage shul-in and said you’d decided to marry a Jew.”

“I was fourteen! And they threw those events to brainwash us!”

“All I can think is that you don’t see yourself having anything long-lasting with this man, which I have trouble respecting, or that you’re in complete denial and have totally lost your head!”

The hot dog and cheeseburger concession stand ad was coming on, the one where the hot dog looks like a hard dick and if there are teenagers in the theater they giggle loudly.

“I don’t know what kind of hole you’re sticking your head into, Rachel,” he said, “but I wish you’d yank it out.”

“Give me a little more credit,” I said.

“Give yourself a little more credit. You used to be so ambitious and now it’s like you don’t even care!”

“I’m still ambitious. I’m just…repositioning. It’s important to take stock once in a while. Madonna takes years in between albums!”

“Exactly,” he said. “And when was the last time she had a hit?” He shoveled down some more popcorn, the corn spraying out from his hairy mouth.

BY the time the movie ended it was after two and the sky was bright and sunny. My dad was in high spirits, going on and on about the amazing action sequences and the chemistry between the actresses, like our whole argument never even happened.

When we got in front of my apartment building he looked down at the stack of supermarket giveaways that had accumulated on the stoop, scooped them up, and deposited them into the recycling bin. He did this every time he came over to visit. “Why do you do that?” I said.

“Don’t you know about the broken window rule?”

“I don’t think burglars are going to see my apartment building as a more appealing target just because they saw a stack of newspapers on the stoop.”

“You can never be too careful.” He put the lid on the bin and then his face brightened. “Hey, Rach. I have an idea. Why don’t we go for a bike ride? There’s a beautiful path by the Verrazano. We could pack a lunch and eat it under the bridge. I went there by myself the other day and watched the sun set.”

It was a little bizarre: your own father’s not supposed to sucker you into playing hooky. It was like his unemployment had opened him up to a whole new lazy worldview. “Dad,” I said. “I have to get ready for work.”

He sighed and gave me a grim look like he understood but wasn’t happy. “How ’bout tomorrow, then?” He looked so eager and lonely. Whenever I was around him he made me want to say things like “I need a little space” or “Why don’t we take things down a notch?” But you can’t exactly request a trial separation from your own father. I told him I’d think about it and kissed him on the cheek good-bye.