Joshua Then and Now (45 page)

“Yeah, sure,” he agreed, swallowing hard.

“Oh, to be at one with nature. Savage nature.”

Oh, why don’t you shettup, he thought in spite of himself.

Still breathing deep, Monique recited some lines about the sea, by Rimbaud, with enormous feeling, her bosom rising and falling. My, my. Scratching around for some saltwater poetry of his own, the best Joshua could come up with, under the circumstances, was, “Break, break, break/ At the foot of thy crags, O, sea/I would that my tongue could utter/ the thoughts that arise in me,” lines he had once had to copy out fifty times after he had been caught winging a blackboard brush at Seymour Kaplan.

“Breathe deeply,” Monique said, “and you will smell eternity. This is the air the Phoenicians smelled when they came here so long ago.”

“Um, is it true your mother is waiting for you?”

“She will wait. It makes her angry, but she knows I cannot live without the fucking.”

Could he have heard her right? Joshua fondled her, greedy but inept. She began to moan. He pulled back, burnt. “Anything wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, you have a way of doing that,” she replied hoarsely.

Hey, hey, she had been moaning with pleasure.

“… of touching me there …”

Kitty’s and Casa Rosita notwithstanding, Joshua was still a sexual innocent. Only two years earlier, visiting a summer camp in the Laurentians where Bobby Gross was working as arts and crafts director, his ignorance had been certified in the company of his peers. Bobby had boasted that Aviva, dramatics, had invited him to masturbate her the night before. Right out there on the baseball diamond. The outfield.

“Ah, who are you trying to kid,” Joshua had said, nobody’s fool even then, “how can a girl masturbate?”

Whoops of laughter greeted his remark and he had been sick with embarrassment for days. And now, looking down, he could see Monique’s eyes rolling. Soon only the whites were visible. Sweet Jesus, what next?

A twig cracked in the darkness beyond the trees. An animal, he thought.

“I cannot bear the idea of growing old,” Monique said. “I will kill myself before I am thirty.”

“You mustn’t even think that,” he implored her.

Monique was already undoing the rest of the buttons of her black blouse, tossing it on the sand and unhooking her bra. Looking back, Joshua still couldn’t say whether he was more alarmed than aroused, but, within an instant, they were locked together, Monique’s skillful tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. Strolling back to his place they stopped to embrace again and again, his hands kneading her breasts. Monique was inclined to moan, disconcertingly, and he, already spent, was suffering from a painful and persistent drip. Back at his place, he made a mess of it. He was no longer of much use and it was a subdued and forgiving Monique he led back to the Casa del Sol in the early hours of the morning. Her mother, she said, was bound to be waiting on the terrace. So they parted on the beach, having arranged to meet for a swim after breakfast. Starting home again, he was pursued by the clamor of their raised voices, the echo
of racing high-heeled footsteps against the marble tiles, a slamming door. Joshua cursed himself for his ineptitude and wondered if Monique would now be convinced that he was a homosexual after all and would consequently become agonizingly unobtainable again. Joking about him with Dr. Dr. Mueller. He’s not a man, Gunther, he’s a mouse.
Mueller
. Before going to sleep, Joshua locked his door and moved a chair against it, propped under the knob. He secured the windows and took a hammer to bed with him.
You are not only a plagiarist but you are also impotent. A coward. I hate you
.

After breakfast, even as her mother glared at them from the hotel terrace, they swam together in the bay. Monique thrusting her breasts against him under water, jiggling them against his chest. Monique fishing into his trunks, making him leap, astonished, but finding him happily erect. They swam to a lick of sand, obscured by palm trees, and there they indulged in some rather more gladdening a,b,c,d. Then they returned hand-in-hand to the hotel so that Monique could change her clothes. A waitress, mopping tables on the terrace, told him that he was wanted in the kitchen, and there he found a flushed Freiberg waiting for him with his wife and Max.

Mrs. Freiberg, her black eyes smoldering, hissed, “You mustn’t come to fuck with that girl on our beach. I would also prefer it if you ate your breakfast elsewhere from now on.”

“Don’t you serve Jews here?” Joshua asked.

Freiberg spat on the floor.

“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” Max asked. “Wait. I’ll guess. Your pet dog was run over by a car. No, you were naughty and your mummy made you go to bed without your supper. Have you ever eaten the flesh of sewer rats?”

“Where’d you get your scar?” Joshua demanded, his cheeks on fire.

“They beat the shit out of me, what do you think?”

“Why wouldn’t you say as much to him?”

“Do you speak Yiddish?” Max asked.

“Only a little. Why?”

“Because you are a
putz!”

“Maybe,” Joshua said, turning to leave, “but I wouldn’t serve that bastard Riesling at my hotel.”

Mariano was seated on the terrace, sipping coffee. “Come here,” he said to Joshua.

“What is it?”

Grinning, he slipped Joshua a coffin small enough to lie in the palm of his hand. “Open it,” he said.

As Joshua slid it open, an enormous erection popped up from between the legs of the carved corpse inside.

Monique emerged from the hotel, he took her back to his place, and this time he did not fail her. They made love through the afternoon, the night, and, with considerably diminished ardor on his part, through the early hours of the morning. Finally, he delivered her back to the hotel and tottered home to fall into a deep sleep. It was the same the next day, the day after, and the day after that. Between Monique’s visits, Joshua wandered from room to room in a stupor, aching everywhere, wondering when he would hear from Dr. Dr. Mueller.

Seemingly, Dr. Dr. Mueller had been rendered inert by his humiliation before the army officers. Joshua ran into him twice on the terrace of the Casa del Sol. Once, actually buying a camera with an elaborate lens from Freiberg’s brother-in-law, Max; another time, eating ice cream with Monique’s mother. Joshua was too discreet ever to take Monique to Don Pedro’s Bodega after that first night, but he still frequented the place himself. Dr. Dr. Mueller, if he was there, greeted him with a cordial smile, but they did not talk and there were no more games of lie dice. A gratifying change had come over the officers. Where once, with the exception of González, they had been no more than correct in his company, now they actually drank and joked with him. Jiménez, the jolliest of the captains, took to teasing him. “Man, she must keep you very busy. We no longer see you strolling on the hill overlooking the barracks.”

“He’s too tired to climb hills these days,” another officer pitched in.

“Oh, well,” Joshua said, savoring his role, “there may be some truth in that.”

“Say,” Jiménez asked, “what were you doing up there, anyway? Hunting butterflies?”

He didn’t dare acknowledge that he had been on his way to Dr. Dr. Mueller’s villa. “Oh, just walking. Looking around.”

“Juan says you were spying on us.”

“He’s absolutely right,” Joshua agreed, relieved.

Although he still drank with the fishermen and shared their scorn for the military, the truth was he was flattered by his hard-won approval from the officers. He savored their knowing smiles when he passed them on the road with Monique, the sex-crazed morsel he had plucked from Dr. Dr. Mueller’s grasp.

His triumph, it seemed to him, had connotations larger than mere sexual appetite fulfilled. He had demonstrated that, given the choice, a young lady of taste preferred the attentions of a skinny working-class Jew to that of an arguably aristocratic, yet moldering, German. He had taken on a Nazi
mano a mano
and demonstrated to Mr. Hemingway and himself that he did not lack for
cojones
. After months of despairing about his inadequacies, he had, to his delight, turned out to be one hell of a fellow, manly beyond his wildest dreams.

One night, feeding on such conceits, he asked Monique what had led her to choose him over Dr. Dr. Mueller. Then he lay back, waiting for the compliments to fall like rain.

“Oh, that was easy. Have you ever looked at him closely?”

That Jew-hating monster. Nazi scum. “Sure I have.”

“He has tiny ears. Very small fingers. His big toes hardly exist.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” he demanded.

Monique, redeeming herself somewhat, went on to say that she had noticed Joshua on the terrace on her first day at the Casa del Sol and had immediately resolved to make him her lover.

“Why?” he asked, shameless.

“You had such big ears. And your nose! My God! And your big toes, just look at them!”

“I don’t understand.”

“In my experience, men with such extremities usually have a very big one.”

“You mean, that’s all there was to it?”

“Oh, yes. Why?”

“No reason,” he said, crushed, “just wondering.”

With a familiar urgency Monique now announced, “I promised to be back at the hotel by two tonight.”

Which meant there was no more time for idle talk. He was being called on once more to compensate with energy for what he lacked in dimension. An exception to her rule, alas. Happily, he hopped to it. Such, indeed, was his twenty-one-year-old abandon that he still had no idea that he was being set up by Dr. Dr. Mueller.

“W
ELL. YEAH. RIGHT. WHAT’S TOMORROW?
”

“The Habs against the Leafs. If The Rocket puts it in the nets, that makes it ten games in a row.”

“Try again.”

“It’s Purim.”

“Hey,” his father said, astonished, “how did you know that?”

“Morty Zipper told me.”

“O.K. Not bad. Now tell me what it means,” and here he dragged out his Bible, searching for the right passage, “to have a Mordecai at your gates.”

Mordecai “Three-Fingers” Brown was the only one he knew of by that name, but he had been a pitcher long ago. “You’re going to tell me anyway. Why do we always have to turn these lessons into a kind of quiz?”

His father broke open a bottle of Labatt’s.

“I want you to stay away from Kitty’s. Every time she opens the door to bring in the milk, she says you’re standing there with your tongue hanging out.”

“You’re the one who told me to go early.”

“Yeah, but not every day. Shit.”

“My pimples are drying out. Look.”

“Yeah, and they’ve left your cheeks looking like a sieve.”

Joshua bristled.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Now about Purim. I’m no rabbi, you know, but I’m trying to teach you to the best of my ability so you should be aware of our tradition. I only hope I’m doing it proper.”

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Well I’ve read this Book of Esther three times now and, like, Mordecai is a guy we’re supposed to honor on Purim. But the way I see it, reading between the lines, he was a real conniver, a suck-hole, a very bloodthirsty fella.…”

“Oh yeah?”

“And – not that I want you repeating this to your Uncle Harvey – and certainly the first Jewish pimp.”

“Can I say something?”

“I don’t want to hear anything about what you’re doing at Kitty’s. I’m your father, for Christsake!”

“About the Bible, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, that’s why we’re sitting here.”

“You don’t seem to care for just about anybody in it, except for the hairy guy who was always cooking up stews for his father.”

“Esau.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t we just drop it?”

“Because you’ve quit school and it’s left to me, of all people, to knock an education into you. Now Mordecai was Kish’s kid, a Benjamite. That means from one of the two tribes that were left about the time the Jews had been muscled out of Palestine and were mostly hacking it in old Persia. There were twelve tribes who signed up with Jehovah, the covenant, but ten were lost since,” he said, his voice trailing.

“How lost?” Joshua pounced.

“Shit, Josh. Lost. Disappeared. Like the Montreal Maroons or the Ottawa Senators or the Brooklyn Americans; I mean, they just aren’t here any more.”

“They
disbanded
, they weren’t lost. How can ten whole fucking tribes just disappear?”

“The same way you build the world in six days, is how. This is the Bible we’re studying, it’s been translated into every language you ever heard of and has sold more copies than any book in the world. So pay attention. We are now talking about Persia during the days of King Ahasuerus, see. The king’s wife, a real bitch, was called Vashti, and one day the king calls for her, he was at this banquet with all his followers and maybe he feels like a piece of ass, and she wouldn’t come, which really burned him. He dumped her and got this idea to run a beauty contest, but only for broads who still had their cherry, and you could enter from any one of his hundred and twenty-seven provinces. Which brings me to old Mordecai. He was taking care of his dead uncle’s girl Esther, who was also known as Hadassah, like the group your Aunt Fanny belongs to, always trying to hit you with raffle tickets. Only she wasn’t a
yenta
like them, this Esther, but stacked, a looker, and Mordecai put her in the contest. Now we have lots of beauty contests, you know, like they had one to find a Scarlett O’Hara to play in
Gone with the Wind
. Or like Miss America. But if you won this one, you didn’t just get to travel with the Bob Hope Show, you got to be Queen of Persia and all its provinces.”

“Where does our family come from?”

“Oh, some shitty little village in Poland. Chickens used to run around right in the house. Do you remember your grandfather?”

“Not very well. Did you like him?”

“Well, he used to knock me around, you know, and he was bad news,” his father said, laughing fondly. “You know what he used to do? Greenhorns, you know, new arrivals from the old country, would get off the train with their bundles, scared shitless, and my father would come up to them with this pad in his hand and bark, ‘What’s your name, Jew?’ ‘Bishinsky,’ they’d say, teeth chattering, or ‘Pfeffershnit.’ And he’d holler, ‘You crazy Jews, this is the British fucking Empire and you can’t call yourself by such horseshit names
here. You there, you are now called “Bishop,” ’ and he’d hand him the name on a sheet of paper torn from his pad, ‘and you, your name is now “Pepper,” and that will be five dollars each.’ Trouble is, the old bastard couldn’t spell good and to this day there are families in Montreal called Bishop who spell their names B-e-a-s-c-h-i-p. Do you really not remember him that well?”