Rat Bohemia (22 page)

“No,” Rita said. “I mean the tongue in Mr. Braunstein's mouth.”

“Like
The Sign in Sidney Braunstein's Window
? It sounds like the title of an off-Broadway play.”

“Oh, how is the play going?”

“Oh God, you want the latest career news?”

“Of course, you know I want to know everything that happens in your life.”

“Well,” Claudia said. “One weekend only, in the basement of the Village Gate. A cute TV sketch about the US Open. First, let us settle the question of the tongue.”

“Okay,” Rita said. “I remember going into the butcher shop with my mother. You know it is one of the few memories I have of her.”

“I know,” Claudia said. “But I don't know the part about the tongue.”

“He had this incredible mouth,” Rita told her. “Sexy and huge. I
remember I used to watch it, dripping with saliva. Coated in slime. This is when I was still in the stroller, probably sitting there drooling myself. His tongue was enormous. Greasy. It was chewy. That's what David's tongue is like, since you asked.”

“What is the daily husband update?” Claudia asked.

“Oh, God, I feel so bad for him. David works harder than anyone I know, but he just can't get a break. You know how hard it is for white men to get jobs in academia these days. It just breaks my heart. It's weird, but now that we're married, I feel everything that happens to him as though it was happening to me. I wonder if that will happen to you when you get married.”

“I don't know,” Claudia said. “I just don't feel a need to get married yet. I just don't have a good reason. Hey, don't you have to go do work?”

“Oh God,” Rita said, realizing the time. “I'm glad you know my schedule. I gotta get out of here.”

“Where are you tonight? Becker or McAdams?”

“Becker gave me a week of nights.”

“That's good. Higher rate.”

“Yeah, and there's no night manager so the word processors can go home at midnight and bill for full-time. As long as they don't realize that we are smarter and therefore faster than they think we are, we'll never get caught.”

“Okay, go to work.”

“Okay, honey, talk to you tomorrow. David and I will come see your show on Saturday night.”

Rita knew that she was late again and raced out of the apartment, trying to run down the stairs and button her coat at the same time, which of course did not work. So she stopped on the next
landing to set the buttons right and could hear the intercom buzzing through the door in apartment ten.

“Lourdes?” the muffled voice called up. “It's Manuel. You want to go out for coffee?”

That's nice, Rita thought. A friend stopping by on the spur of the moment. A friend in the neighborhood who just happened to think of you. To think of your face on the other side of a nice warm cup.

Eddie Weems was a night owl. Even at the age of sixty-nine, he never went to be before five in the morning. All those years of walking out into the cool evening breeze to begin when everyone else was in retreat. Owning the night. Ending your day with whatever you want for breakfast and beginning it with an evening shower and an after-dinner shave.

Jimmy Hoffa had been his man. They'd fought so hard to join the Teamsters. Watched their guy stand up to those Kennedy snots. But now, at the moment of truth, all the Teamsters ever did for Eddie was a $288 monthly pension and a social security check. So, why adjust to living by day? Day is too expensive. Night is cheap. There's nothing going on but a drive or a walk or a long slow drink in a quiet bar. There a television show, an old leftover newspaper, let some other Joe pay the fifty cents. The waitresses are chattier at night. The cops are tireder. The cabbies are lonelier. The radio is weirder. There's less traffic everywhere you look.

Now, even his daughter was working at night. Working at night and living by day—letting go of the stresses of the nine-to-fivers. There's a lot less to compete with at 4:30 a.m.

“Rita, line four. Rita, line four.”

“Hello?”

“Hi kiddo, what's doing?”

“Entering the copy for an in-house marketing plan.”

“Oh yeah? What are they selling this time, those crooks?”

“Drugs.”

“You working for the Mob now, Rita?”

“No, Daddy, it's a pharmaceutical advertising firm.”

“I'm telling you they always think up some new kind of way to make money. Whatever happened to.…”

“What are you doing, Dad? Wait … I've just got to save this. Okay, what are you doing?”

“I'm just sitting here, naked, wondering what my daughter is doing.”

“Dad!”

“What do ya want? The heat is up too high.”

“So turn it down.”

“Listen, hows about taking your dad out for breakfast? When are you getting off? Take me to that all-night Chinese for some salt-and-pepper scallops.”

“I'm getting off at midnight.”

“I'll pick you up, sweetheart. Just tell the night guard that your boyfriend is coming to pick you up.”

“Dad.”

“I'm telling you,” he said at 12:32 over a dirty Formica table and two Budweisers at Wong Fat's Twenty-Four-Hour Chinese. “No
matter what kind of fancy labels we put on our beer—nothing will ever beat those beers we had in London during the war. They call them pints. Like half a quart but in a really big glass. And warm. The girls couldn't keep off of me. Those English girls, they knew how to have a good time. Especially with a GI. They love us over there. Those cozy nights with no electricity and everything still. You have some of those pints and hope you're in the right place at the right time when the lights go out. Lights Out! Man oh man, those were the two words I longed to hear. Hey Charlie, how about some service over here?”

A tired old Chinese man looked up from a tired old Chinese newspaper and snapped at his son behind the counter. New Jack Chinese happening dude with black fashions and white haircuts. Reading
VIBE
magazine, and some other publication for the all-American Asian homeboy.

“Gimme those salt-and-pepper scallops,” Eddie said. “This is my daughter here. She's taking her dad out for breakfast.”

“What do you mean, salt-and-pepper scallops?” the kid asked.

“You know,” Eddie said, frustrated already. “Salt and pepper. Salt and pepper. With that special sauce.”

“I don't know,” the kid said. “Is it on the menu?”

He wiped off the table and then wiped off the menu and Eddie started reaching around for his glasses.

“I can't see a thing,” he said, patting his empty breast pocket.

“Dad, you still didn't get new glasses?”

“I didn't have a chance,” he said. “Rita, take a look at the menu.”

“Garlic Scallops, Deep Fried Scallops, Scallops in Black Bean Sauce, Sautéed Scallops, Ginger Scallops.”

“That's it, sautéed. Salted. I'll have the salt-and-pepper scallops. So how's that husband of yours? Waiter, bring me a fork and a knife.”

Sitting across the table from her father filled Rita with a terrible sense of loss. Like something was forever moving out of her arms. Like her mother off to the hospital, leaving Rita alone forever. Like her mother on a train to Thereisenstadt, leaving Germany behind forever. Her youth, gone, forever.

Rita tried to make peace with these events in a self-aware contemporary way. She tried to confront them, amassing a sea of facts. Surprisingly, these facts helped everything make sense. But eliminating the mystery did not make peace. Understanding does not make peace. Facing facts does not bring peace.

Here were the facts, unearthed in secret over the years in many libraries, bookstores, and magazine racks.

The German Reisburo ran the passenger trains and they also ran the deportation trains. Both on the same system. Full-fare for adults, half-fare for children, free for children under four. Little children rode free.

But the problem with their ticketing system was that passengers bound for internment or extermination only required one-way tickets. And so the Nazis had to come up with a financing plan to substitute for the cost of the unfulfilled return trip. Correctly, they hit on the idea of seizing prisoners' belongings to pay for the train travel.

Now, this fact could not help Rita understand her own life, because it was a fact that her mother, Louisa, never even knew. So in many ways it was an irrelevant fact. When the historian knows more than the victim, there is an isolation from the original experience. An isolation reinforced constantly by too much information of the wrong kind.

At this point of revelation Rita abandoned a further search for facts, hoping instead to stumble on the core of meaning filled with explanation—not about the course of history, but instead on the course of her own emotional legacy. Her own future. The meaning was buried, somehow, in the process of a group of men in military uniforms or civilian dress, sitting down over coffee or at a conference table and trying to solve the problem of funding those return tickets. The logic of it. Proposing various other plans and then dismissing them before hitting upon the right one. The most practical one.

As she sat across the table from her father, Rita confirmed yet again her own quiet belief that her mother deliberately married a man who would never ask himself any of these questions. He would accept facts of history as facts, and have certain predictable beliefs about the grossest rights and wrongs. But when it came down to individual proposals for solutions to socially symptomatic questions, Rita's mother picked a man who was incapable of transcending. She wanted it that way. Because she didn't want to know. And he would never know. Rita, therefore, must know. But she must never, ever tell.

“Your brother Sam is really trying to make it out there in LA.”

“I know, I talked to him last week.”

“Going to the gym every day.”

“That's what you gotta do, Dad, if you want to make it in that world.”

“You gotta look the part,” he said. “I'll tell you.…”

While he was talking Eddie held up his knife, the one he'd been using to cut the scallops. And he waved it in the air to make a point about Sam, but suddenly it was like the whole dinner had ceased to exist and Rita was transformed back to Jackson Heights on a warm summer night in 1975 when her father came at her with a knife covered in mayonnaise. A knife glistening in grease from a tunafish sandwich.

“You whore,” he said. “You slut, fucking some Puerto Rican in your old man's bed. You dirty, dirty whore. I fucked girls like you when I was in the army. Girls like you are a dime a dozen.”

“You know, Dad,” she said, back in Wong Fat, keeping her eye on that greasy knife. “Guys who want to make it are a dime a dozen. Sam needs that extra edge.”

“Well, if he can get it in the gym, God bless him,” Eddie said, returning easily to his plate. Drawing blood from his plate.

He was yelling so loudly that Mrs. Haas came racing down the stairs to sweet-talk Eddie out of murdering his kid.

“Eddie,” she said seductively in her Berliner accent, whispering him into her kitchen. Serving him some coffee and homemade
apfel kuchen
. “Eddie, she never had a mother. She never had a mother.”

“I know,” he said. “But what can I do?”

“It's a new world, Eddie,” Mrs. Haas said, another well-bred German Jew whose destiny had eluded her, trapped now with these working-class slobs in this bland boring neighborhood. She patted him on the back and served another piece of cake. “You're the only family she's got.”

“But what do I know about girls?” he said.

Rita and Claudia stood in the hall outside the apartment, listening in through the open door. They stood together, silent and still, and Rita thought about her mother waiting to be arrested. Standing demurely in her grandfather's foyer, standing politely as she had been taught to do. Waiting. And Rita knew that her destiny lay in this moment—not because of her exposed sexuality, her naked body with that boy. Not because of the threat of violence. But because this was her chance to have someone love her. This was her chance for Mrs. Haas to invite her to come live upstairs and be part of them. Claudia's sister was getting married, there'd be room in Claudia's bedroom. There would be room for Rita to be part of their family. Please God, invite me. Please God, invite me. Please God, invite me.

“What do you think he's going to do?” Claudia whispered quietly, flat against the wall.

But Rita couldn't answer. Her desire was too palpable. Please God, invite me. Please God, invite me.

Finally her father came out into the hall, looked down at the floor, and walked past them silently. Rita waited for Mrs. Haas to come out into the hall. She didn't dare enter the tiny apartment because she wanted to so badly, she wanted to live there.

“This is silly,” Claudia said, finally relaxing. “It's over now. Anyway, you're going to be late for work.”

Claudia stepped into the apartment, leaving Rita in the hall. She waited another five minutes, staring at the closed apartment door. She was devastated. She couldn't believe it. Rita had been so sure they would invite her into the family. She had been so sure.

“Tell me, Rita,” Mrs. Haas said one afternoon as the two of them met at Mr. Braunstein's butcher shop. “What is it in your life that you most want to avoid?”

“I don't want to live in Jackson Heights,” Rita said. “I want to live in Manhattan.”

“Well then you'd better get a good job,” Mrs. Haas said. “A pound of liverwurst, please.”