Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (7 page)

We drank a lot. Even she, a heavy boozer, remarked on my intake, though now I drank less than usual, substituting sex for drink. She was my new drug, my martini on legs. All day I worked in the fishponds and in the afternoons banged Helka. The more we balled, the more I wanted. Once was not enough. Twice, three times a day, until I was not only spent but drunk on our bodies' chemicals. My eyes wore a fixed, listless look. Helka began to bore me. Or rather, I became sick of the roles I played around her—my affected personae of jaw-clenched existential torment, all-knowing silences. Didn't want to analyze Camus, Beckett, Hamsun, Strindberg—authors she had not only read in depth but had dreamed of someday discussing with an erudite lover, and here I was. But after a few weeks of nonstop lust, all literary pretense fell away. My tongue did not want to discourse on
A Doll's House
; craved, instead, to tease her clit.

No fool, Helka took note. In her residential cottage, on her cot, we were half clothed, wound tight around each other, my aroused member prodding and probing. Her hand reached up and gently stroked my cheek as she pulled away.

“What's the matter?” I asked.

She gazed up into my face, studied my eyes, smiled warmly, and said with undisguised sadness: “You make it very hard to get to know you. What are you afraid of?”

Felt a mild sense of panic. For the first time imagining that in my eyes she could sight tight ovals of depthless fear. And again had the experience that I'd had with every woman I'd known. As if the whole were fast-forwarded through a life of scenes, I could see clear through, right to the end: the two of us aging, white-haired, kinder, the lines around our mouths softening into the inevitable physical surrender to death.

But I didn't want to grow kinder. Wanted to become more
savage, pitiless, steely. Could see it all, every Kodak color page of the photo album of our wedded lives—the friends and holidays, special family dos, retirement trips abroad, honorific ceremonies for work well done. All of it sickeningly predictable. My heart fiercely protested, didn't want to know the end; begged to be shown album pages of an indecipherable sort, a book not of standard watershed moments but of inscrutable mysteries.

I could not bring myself ever to say to any woman that this is what I saw—an inexhaustible round of dinners and nature walks, doctor's visits and grocery runs. The classic smiling snapshots of heads touching before the Eiffel Tower, waves from a gondola, creeping up with Nikons on silverback gorillas, the whole boring khaki shorts-clad suburban bullshit that passes for meaningful experience sickened me. Smiling heads posed in bouquets of joy were a happiness that vanished one moment after the shutter clicks, as they all returned to their socially programmed preset flight patterns to the family-package funeral plot.

What else a life could be I didn't know: another reason for my sunken-hearted certainty that no woman would be mad enough to risk the ride. And yet I'd hope, though I bitterly knew love that is an adventure was not possible at a certain point, once the routines set in. At best, all I could do was get aboard the Van Gogh boat, sail away alone. But the loneliness was killing. And my response was to drink heavily.

At the heart of me there lay the soul-crushing example of my parents. Recalled how as a boy of eleven I sat on the edge of my bed, fist clenched, cheeks and arms covered in welts, eyes burning with tears and swearing to God that so long as I lived I would never marry.

Soon after our little chat, I went to a Purim bash with Helka. On Purim, the Jewish answer to Halloween, one is mandated, by
holy writ, to get riotously drunk. I did. Don't recall much except that I found myself behind a shed, atop Helka, her naked ass in dung-smelling mud and me blindly grunting away. “Alan,” she kept saying. “Alan. Please. Alan.” If she wanted me to stop, I couldn't tell. But it felt like rape in the dark. I finished off a bottle of vodka and left her there, passed out, undressed, and stumbled off. Don't recall the rest of the night.

The next day, her eyes accused. I loathed to be near her and, equally, despised myself. I withdrew. Some kind of mechanism asserted itself: an old familiar one. The more you loved me, the less I cared. The closer you came, the farther I ran. And why was she calling my name that Purim night, again and again, in such a tone of quiet urgency?

Even the other kibbutzniks noticed her blues. Remarked the cruelty of my smile when responding to their queries. What's up with you and Helka? She looks so sad. Did you two fight?

I studiously avoided her. She sent notes; I tore them up. In the communal dining room, I sat apart, and after a meal, hurried out. If she knocked on my cottage door, I didn't answer. If I saw her approach, I turned down another path. I avoided the pool where she often hung out.

She sent two Swedish girls as emissaries to plead with me on her behalf. I told them that I no longer loved her and that they should tell her so.

“You should tell her yourself, coward!” one of them spit.

Knowing that she was right, I didn't reply. Instead, accepted a friend's invite to stay in Jerusalem. There was an Israeli girl he wanted me to meet. She was, he said, his wife's best friend, filthy rich, single, artistic and beautiful. If I had any sense, my friend advised, I would marry her. After all, he said, I was a pauper. A girl like that could really set me on my feet.

HOW UTTERLY SOULLESS I HAD BECOME. WITH shame I remember how arrogantly, heartlessly, I exited the kibbutz to bus down to Jerusalem, dressed in freshly laundered and pressed clothes, as Helka stood watching mournfully, her sleepless face haggard. Made my way out through the main gate, past the armed sentry, my heart stiffened against her. Weak, with no core values and with a foolproof escape hatch—alcohol—I was willing to betray the possibility of real love with her in exchange for a free ride on another woman's back.

On the bus to Jerusalem, I hummed tunes to myself as the landscape whizzed by. Smoked cigarettes and dozed or dug into my bag of kibbutz bakery cookies and chewed contentedly. Helka really loved me—in my book, a fatal error. My conscience, I told myself, could turn itself off at the first hint of real intimacy. She had come too close, wanted to ensnare me in her agenda. I wasn't having any of it, had other, bigger fish to fry. Heroics to perform. Books to write. Fame to gain. Also needed a place to crash where I wouldn't
have to break my back in return for board. A place to unwind, write, produce masterpieces. Drink and not work. Justify shiftlessness and manipulation of women in the name of art.

The Israeli woman, Tsofnat, lived part of the time with her mother, Elia, and four very feral mutt dogs, in an old, sprawling, elegantly decrepit flat in Jerusalem's Katamon quarter, which had been a front line in the horrific battles for the city during the '67 war.

Tsofnat, not nearly as beautiful as my friend had claimed, was pretty in a peculiar, jaundiced sort of way. Had haunted eyes underscored with dark bags that showed bad nerves, and her body was slender but flaccid, her breasts droopy. Not only did she have a faint smudge of hair above her upper lip—for me, a deal breaker—but her legs were defiantly unshaven.

And yet, there was something morbidly appealing about her. A kind of nervous, aristocratic twinkling. A fallen naïveté reminiscent of Hollywood Southern belles, late-stage Scarlett O'Hara or Blanche Dubois hiding from the lightbulb's glare.

In an instant her look would change from darkly introspective, morosely inscrutable, to a very pretty, even charming kind of histrionic liveliness, replete with cheek-fracturing dimples, and her eyes grew big and bright with awe-filled gaiety.

She was very flattering, made you feel like a knight in shining armor, and it occurred to me that since she was purportedly rich, here was someone that I could manipulate at will. The idea of such dominance aroused me.

For my visit she wore a white chiffon party dress with a ridiculous red corsage: an outfit that confirmed for me her full-blown outright eccentricity, an immaturity bordering on psychosis.

Strangely, this awareness of her probable madness gave me further hope. I realized that only someone crazy could endure
life with me. Also, she was rich. This would liberate me from the necessity to support myself, or her. My unwillingness to deal with money matters did not concern me overly. I was, I felt, engaged in a lifetime experiment to see the extent to which I could manage to evade money matters altogether.

All I required was cigarettes, whiskey, paper, pen, and boots. Foodwise, could live on whatever crap happened to be around, didn't really mind. Now and then, for lack of bucks, had even spooned dog food into my cakehole. As to clothes, skid-row thrift shops served me fine.

My reasoning went that given that she had dogs already, what mattered one more head to board, another mouth to feed? I thought myself no better than a feral hound, an opportunistic dog. To live comfortably I required little more than was needed to keep, say, a Great Dane. Surely one more mutt would not be too much.

Also, I liked her mother, Elia, who, it was evident, had once been, unlike her daughter, a very real beauty. She was fat but still hot: a former kibbutz potter of repute, with ceramic sculptures in such prestigious places as the Hebrew U and Hadassah Hospital.

Elia had jet-black hair, fierce, barbaric turquoise-blue eyes, perfect features, and a vivacious, keen intelligence that enfolded you in camaraderie and enthusiastic curiosity. She had big breasts that you wanted to rub your face in. Had she not allowed her once no doubt spectacular figure to go so completely and horribly to pot—with a huge belly and a behind that might need a wheelbarrow to transport around—I would have made my play for her instead, blown off the acrid daughter.

Elia and I were instant soul mates, two against the world. Tsofnat, who had that eerie, almost telepathic, insight typical of borderline schizos, grasped her exclusion. I had nothing to say to her. It was Elia I wanted to hang with.

When Tsofnat took me to see her penthouse in a building that she owned nearby, I couldn't wait to return to Elia's place, where the three of us sat all day in her lavish garden, eating grapes plucked from the overhead vines, as Elia regaled me with tales of her heroics as a fighter in the famed coed brigade known as “the Palmach.”

She had fired weapons in battle, seen comrades fall, thrown Molotovs and hand grenades, gone on hair-raising raids. Here was a woman I could relate to. She had known heroes, she said, such as I could not even imagine, fearless kibbutzniks, moshavniks, Jewish farmer-soldiers who went about in shorts and sandals with a revolver and a knife on their belts and performed secret military feats of derring-do, ones that you'd never find in any history book.

Israel, she said, voice dropping, kept secret its most important resource. Israel's most important weapon was not those hidden-away atomic bombs—there “just in case”—but the people. Israelis were Israel's truest secret weapon. And the men—she fluttered her heavily mascaraed eyes and nibbled hungrily on a cookie—such men were both fatally irresistible and hopelessly unreliable.

“You men are butterflies,” she said. “You live only for today. No yesterday. No tomorrow. A woman with her body, her need to breed and raise children, cannot afford to be so. But you men?” She shrugged and smiled. “You are a little like the men I knew. Though your life in America has made you soft, you have about you the splendid élan that they had in the early days, during the War of Independence. I'm sure that in the right circumstances you would make a brave soldier. I can already tell that you are a real heart-breaker with the ladies. Undependable. Irresistible. Come here.”

I moved my chair closer. Elia kissed me on the cheek. Then reached up with her long, warm fingers and wiped the lipstick off. Tsofnat absorbed all this in silence, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Now Elia took my hand, examined it. “You have calluses.
They make you work on your kibbutz, huh? Good for them! They are making you tough, hard, an Israeli! What do you do there?”

“I work in the fishponds.”

“The fishponds!” She and Tsofnat exchanged quick looks, clearly impressed.

“You know,” said Elia, “they only take the elite to work in the fishponds. The commando types. They must have a very high regard for you.”

Later, Tsofnat took me to the summit of Mount Zion. As the sun descended I saw the entire ancient city of white stone turn a fiery gold. There and then I resolved, at all costs, to live in the seat of the ancient Jewish kingdoms and of the Bible, where David, the poet-ruler and outlaw, had bedded Beersheva, wrote his melancholic psalms, and wise Solomon composed his immortal proverbs as he bed-hopped among his thousand wives.

IN THE MANNER OF SUCH THINGS IN ISRAEL, AFTER hosting me over several weekend visits, Elia and Tsofnat decided, without any open discussion but by a kind of perfume-scented osmotic interchange of nods, sighing winks, moistening thighs, and trembling breasts, that I would leave the kibbutz, apply to study at the Hebrew University, and move in with them.

There was little ceremony about it, and I had the least say of all, one way or another. Besides, it perfectly suited me. Owned nothing but the clothes on my back, some notebooks and books, and the typewriter, my trusted old Smith Corona. Hadn't a cent to my name.

The prospect of living rent free in Jerusalem, the city of God, thrilled me. Of course, it was understood, if unstated, that their sole reason for housing me was as a marital prospect for Tsofnat, who had no suitors for miles in any direction and was drifting into misanthropy of a very real and chilling sort. Her suffering was there in her eyes, unmistakable: a dark stare of nightmarish childhood mental
injury incurred by an upbringing on a borderland kibbutz where, every night, for fear of marauding robber bands and terrorists, the children were rousted from sleep and hurried, under fire, into dark, fetid bunkers to await the outcome of the night's battle, never knowing whether the figure appearing at the door to retrieve them would be a kibbutznik or a pistol-wielding killer poised for rape.