Watch Your Mouth (11 page)

The Mather senior, like all Mather seniors, was given a special carrel in Wigglesworth Library—everyone called it The Wig— in which to analyze this sour little sip from the melting pot. Every night he’d go to the carrel and work on the thesis for a couple of hours, then let his printer spew the draft as he went out, leaned against the brass statue of Michael Wigglesworth and smoked cigarettes with other thesisers. When there were two more butts at the feet of the Puritan he’d go back and proof- read. Then he’d type his mistakes back into the little screens that made the corridor of carrels an eerie aquarium blue. And
then,
before he left, he’d rip the draft in half and stack the little half-sheets of paper next to the pay phones, so people could jot down numbers on the back of “Cornel East said in his
Matters of Race
[check this!] that the Klan’s interest in gaining credi- bility through the annals of high culture is an interesting con- trast to more earthy forms of self-recognition in urban black communities, such as [find out what that album is that Andrew listens to].”

If you were breathing heavily in the little telephone cubicle, if you were exhaling in strict time, if you were panting on the phone, these little draft fragments would curl up and skim around like leaves in a breeze. The blank side would flicker with the typed side. You wouldn’t think that you could read it, there as it flickered. You wouldn’t think enough of it could catch your

eye, and you wouldn’t think there was room for it in your head, because most of your brain would be consumed by the voice on the phone. Cyn was telling me everything she would do to me if I came to her room right then, instead of writing my paper. She thought I was in the main lobby of The Wig, where a row of pay phones was always busy; she thought she was exciting me somewhere where I had to play it cool. I let her think that, let her excite herself exciting me. But I didn’t have to play it cool. The aquarium was closed—the anthros must have been out smoking near the statue of Michael Wigglesworth in front of the library—so I could listen to her with my legs spread, touching myself through a pair of denim shorts I’d wear con- stantly when Cyn and I worked together at Camp Shalom in Pittsburgh a month later. I could listen to her as the half-sheets of someone’s thesis draft, thoughtfully stacked for jotting down phone numbers, curled and drifted with my own sharp breath. It was occuring to me, as my breath grew sharper, that I could go to my flaky professor Ted Steele and get an incomplete. I wouldn’t have to write the paper until later, so right now I could walk across the heaving late-May lawns of Mather and have Cyn make good on her promises. You wouldn’t think that you could think all this and still read a few stray paragraphs of an anthro- pology thesis with any comprehension, or that you’d forget all about it as you hung up the phone, already incomplete, and lurched across campus with your erection tugging at you im- patiently.

But you would be wrong, because I remembered it. By July the city was papered in advertisements showing a caricatured Jewish face—an old man with a large puffy nose and narrow slitted eyes—captioned KNOW YOUR ENEMY. When Stan told

me that Pittsburgh was the first American opera company to host such a season a bell inside my head went bing, bing, bing. I remembered something about Jackson, something about an interbreeding daughter. But I didn’t say anything, because it wouldn’t hold any water. Nobody remembers something they read on the back of a half-sheet of scrap paper while having phone sex in a library named after one of America’s earliest poets, Michael Wigglesworth. It sounds like you’re making it up. It sounds like you spent too much time at the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts and the season’s opera plots seeped into your dirty mind, particularly when the operas are things like
Die Juden,
where the Aryan daughter is seduced by Pinchas, a dashing Jewish boy, marries him despite her father’s pleas, suspects him of having another lover and in Act IV dis- covers him in the arms of his yenta-soprano mother and stabs him repeatedly, killing him as violently as possible. Everybody dies. Or like
Rachel and the Rabbi,
where the conniving Rabbi Ben convinces Rachel to refuse the handsome tenor suitor, not because he’s Christian but because Ben wants her for himself. You could make something up out of that. Your dirty mind could make something true. Or like
Alma,
where the daughter of the Grand Inquisitor is kidnapped by not one but
two
rabbis only to be rescued by the Spanish Army, angry, cross-wielding and singing in Italian. The opera company put them on, of course, for irony. Not like Jackson at all. They put them on so people would be aware that anti-semitic operas were in fact composed as late as 1965 (the experimental
Lox!,
performed on a smaller stage). They didn’t put them on because they were
true
. They didn’t put them on because these stories were
true
stories, not at all. If you thought they were true, then there was

probably something wrong with
you,
not with the lovely family who took you in all summer long, the generous doctor, the propsmistress who let you call her by her first name even though you were still in college and she didn’t even like her first name, the brother who didn’t want to discuss anything like
that,
but wanted to discuss something else, something perfectly innocent, or maybe never invited you to lunch at all. You could have made that up, too—as if the Physics Department would have its own special cafeteria, as if they’d make scientific gen- iuses eat in a windowless room at the height of summer. You couldn’t tell anybody these stories—they’d think you were mak- ing them up.
The Golem
was the flagship of the summer season, and everybody knows
that’s
not a true story—a good Christian woman who marries a Jew in an act of self-hatred, changing everything about herself, changing her
name
to suit him, while meanwhile he is secretly building a horrible monster. Spurned by Christian society—“We spurn you!” the choral number goes—she struggles to escape her husband’s clutches with the help of a sympathetic priest. Enraged, the husband arouses his long-awaited golem as the leitmotif noted in criticism as “The Unknown Dread,” abbreviated T.U.D., reaches a thunderous volume. A towering figure of clay destroys the soprano whom the Jew calls “The Loose Woman”—everybody knows that’s not a true story. Everybody knows a story couldn’t end that way no matter how dirty your mind is, and not to dismiss the subject as easily as all that but the audience must get back to its seats for the third act.

ACT III, SCENE ONE

It’s exhausting to think about, but if you drive around a neighborhood—try it yourself, but first put some decent clothes on so nobody will think you’re a child molester looking for the one child in America who hasn’t been told never to get into a stranger’s car, and best of luck to you—in every house there’s a family of people remembering clearly and obsessively what the other people have said and forgotten. You’ll show a finger- painting to your father, and he’ll say, “That’s nice. Go wash up for dinner,” and your hopes of becoming an artist will join your daily grime in the drain, despite the hundreds of other finger- paintings he’s celebrated in minute detail, magneted to the gal- ley of the refrigerator. Your mother will let something carelessly slide about your sister which will become a Doric column in your mind, the central piece in the Temple of Sibling Opinion. “I hate olives,” your brother will say once, and you’ll never give him any even though he loves them, he just hated
that
one. “My daughter is attractive,” somebody will say, and they won’t mean it one-tenth as much as you do. There in the dining room behind the fancy-paned glass and those stickers touting an advanced burglar alarm system, families are investigative re- porters. They write down their favorite things and quote them, out of context, all childhood long and through all the dinner parties of adulthood: at college gatherings with cheap red wine and stir-fries, over the exquisite grilled fish of early marriage, then with the carpools all I had time to do was throw together this casserole, hope you like it, and mixed into the pureed peas of the home where you sit on the porch and stare moodily at the shuffleboard courts. Drive around the neighborhood, you

dirty old man—Frost Road, Hemingway Way, Byron Circle— and see the houses quivering as the wrong words stick. The fire-tools shiver in their little jars. The lid of the wooden box from Indonesia rattles at the corners. The plastic slipcover on the flowered couch crackles as Rabbi Tsouris (
basso profundo)
settles on it. I’m sorry:
cue music,
it should have been going already.

He and I were alone in the house. Stephen was still at the lab and Cyn, I guessed, was spending quality time with her father. I was supposed to be working on my paper at the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts Library—Stan had even given me special dispensation to check out the books there, if I wanted—but I didn’t like being even that close to the Props Studio where Mimi waited with veiled comments and studded leather belts. I’d taken the bus to the gates of the Glass neigh- borhood and walked up Frost Road, left at Hemingway Way and then down Byron Circle with my sweaty palms plunged into the pockets of my denim shorts where my key was hiding like a kidnapper in wait. It was a windy day. I was halfway up the brick steps when I spotted a stranger waiting patiently by the front door of what turned out to be, when I let us both in with my own key, an empty house. He said he was Rabbi Tsouris, although Tsouris is Yiddish for
trouble
so that couldn’t have been right. He said he had an appointment with Mimi, and that could have been right, so I led him into the living room, where I’d never been in the two months I’d been here. As the curtain rises to the Rabbi sitting down on the slipcover, I thought that maybe nobody ever sat in this living room, that even after all this time—just last night I’d offered Stephen a hated olive—

there were rules in this family I hadn’t even heard of. “So how are you, Rabbi?” I asked.

He crackled in his chair. “
I’m
fine,” he said, and the italics were lost on me—didn’t
I
look well?—just as their musical equivalent, a sinister murmur of woodwinds to signify ap- proaching illness, will be lost on all but the most careful of listeners, or those who have read the verbose essays in the glossy playbills—“listen for the sinister murmur of woodwinds to sig- nify approaching illness, a hallmark of the subtle decoration in Handler’s work.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. “I’m sure if you have an appointment with Mimi she’ll be along any minute. They’re really working her to the bone over at Benedrum.”

He frowned like I’d made a bad joke. “I’m sure—
Mrs. Glass
— will be along, as you say. She shouldn’t be working so hard, particularly now.”

I tried to remember what Stan had said. “Well, people want— Mimi’s boss told me that he wanted to make this season
mes- merizing.
” I was enjoying watching the Rabbi’s face pucker every time I called a grown-up by its first name. Outside it was a windy day.

“Mesmerizing I’m sure it will be,” Tsouris said. “Though I can’t say I’ll be seeing any of the productions.”

“You don’t approve of the season?” I asked.

Tsouris smiled at me. “You make it sound like I’m opposed to summer. But
no,
I don’t really approve of the anti-semitic operas. There was a real outcry from some of the more conser- vative rabbis in town, but I didn’t join that. I don’t want to see it banned. But I disapprove, yes.”

“Why? Don’t you think it—I mean, don’t you see? It’s sup- posed to be
ironic.
”

The Rabbi sighed. “You young people and
irony
. You think if you dress something up and wink at it, it’s all right. I suppose every generation tries to think it’s doing something for the first time, and your way is to, I don’t know,
garnish
it. Put it sarcas- tically.”

“But don’t you think it makes a serious point, to do it that way? I mean, to present these operas in—”

“To show it condones it,” he said gruffly, shifting on the sofa and showing me a pale, crackly stripe of skin between his pants leg and his sock. What was he condoning, with that lizard-belly skin? “There’s a Talmudic saying: ‘We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.’ The Benedrum Board is re- vealing itself to be—well,
entrenched
in anti-semitism. If they really wanted to do something ironic, why don’t they do—I don’t know—
lousy
operas?”

“Because—”

“Because people wouldn’t
go,
that’s why. They want to make something
mesmerizing.
And what’s
mesmerizing
to those schmucks?” The Yiddish rolled off his Pittsburgh tongue like a bandage off a scab. “Anti-semitism. It’s not ironic at all, not really.”

“Then why didn’t you join the other rabbis and sign the pe- tition, or whatever?”

“Letter to the editor,” the Rabbi said, waving his hand like it didn’t matter, or he was blessing me. Outside it was a windy day. “Because I didn’t feel like it was my place to do that. If the Benedrum people want to do such a thing, who am I to stop them? It’s not like I’m some great moral authority.”

“You’re a
rabbi,
” I said.

There’s always parts in operas where some random, outdated ideology that nobody cares about blunders in, like a sudden gust of wind that blows open bedroom doors. “That’s no reason to judge. I mean, rabbis are beholden to a certain Gospel. But most Jews drift around different Gospels. They don’t just let Judaism run their lives. There’s lots of different Gospels out there. The Gospel of Work, and the Gospel of Relaxation. The Gospel of Power. The Gospel of Fun, of Enjoyment, of Relaxation. I said that one I think. There’s the Gospel of Self. More and more, people are finding themselves following a variety of Gospels. They’re Bi-Gospel. They’re Tri-Gospel. Pan-Gospel. It’s not my place to tell people what to do. That’s why I’m here today. Mrs. Glass has called upon me in her time of need, but to listen, not to judge. I may disapprove of her actions, as strongly as I dis- approve of the operas, but I’m not going to judge. It’s my job to be now here, not nowhere.”