Watch Your Mouth (14 page)

A
B R I E F
I N T E R M I S S I O N

[The audience strolls out of the auditorium and chats about subjects tangentially related to the action.]

Why didn’t he leave, why didn’t he just leave?
That’s the trouble

with modern operas, with modern settings: the audience asks modern questions. You wouldn’t think of telling Madame But- terly to wise up
vis-a-vis
Pinkerton’s return, or asking Otello to rethink his hankie-as-proof-of-adultery schemata, or telling all those women in winged helmets to sit down together and think up a way to break the
Ring Cycle
. Oedipus, how about you find out more about this girl before you make your move?

No. The bounty of Cyn’s body is becoming a stronger motif than the T.U.D., but let it; it
was.
In all likelihood the soprano they get for Cyn won’t have the same skin that enveloped me and kept me in unwavering place like a bone. Each night, the restless damp of her skin, sweat-tinged with summer, would turn my own restless damp into my own restless damp. Cyn would tuck me in as my penis still quivered, and would lean close to allow me to taste each nipple before she padded down- stairs to her father. I couldn’t leave that, that tucking in, those breasts dangling like bait: it was a booby trap. I couldn’t leave, not with her sex in front of my eyes, the flush of her climax against my throat, around my fingers, through the blankets of the bed she no longer lingered in. I couldn’t part with the part- ing of her legs, couldn’t pack my things as she unpacked me, one sticky night bending me over the desk and flicking her tongue between my buttocks until I spent a salty sob on the blotter where my paper was supposed to be written. The next

morning the stain was still there, left there each morning by the set decorator for continuity’s sake, along with the one in the hallway, following the close of Act III.

It stayed the summer. It stayed through each afternoon after the Goodbye session, when I would go to the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts Library, preferring to listen to the neigh- boring rumble of the orchestra rehearsals than whatever other rumbles I would hear if I went to Byron Circle. Cyn went home. Most days, Mimi wouldn’t be in the Props Studio, though oc- casionally I’d stop by and find her for a silent ride home in her Sahara-ready Jeep, the backseat crowded with shopping bags of supper. I stayed for each dinner, the juicy fishes and chicken with grill-lines marching down the breasts. Mimi would unpack the bags and marinate something, not for that evening’s dinner but for the next, or the next, and I stayed for all of them. She made roasted asparagus that stood straight up out of some sort of cornmeal mattress and I stayed to dip each tip in the hand- picked blackberry salsa before wrapping my tongue around it. I stayed to flick my fork between the two potatoes roasted to a stinging blush to find the sticky sob of river-fished caviar be- tween them. You can’t start something so difficult and exoskel- etal as lobster claws cooked inside a pomegranate and not finish it, or
I
can’t; once I open my mouth, there’s no stopping me.

Every year, whether the whole family is sleeping with one another or not, Jewish law requires a meal as loaded and struc- tured as those late-summer dinners: the Passover Seder. In the Seder rulebook there are four descriptions of children and how to tell them why they should stay and finish the meal.

The wise child says, “What are the testimonies, the statutes

and the laws which the Lord, our God, has commanded you?” The wicked one says, “What is this service to you?” “He says ‘to you,’ ” the Haggadah rages, “but not to him! By thus exclud- ing himself from the community he has denied that which is fundamental.” The simple child says simply, “What is this?” but I
knew.
I had the surety of wind blowing a door open, of sheets pulled back for a bare playing field, of a spidery hand on a sure and hungry course. These children weren’t me. I was much worse. I was the child who does not know how to inquire, the fourth act in the Passover Child opera. I was at the feast because I didn’t know how to inquire. What you’re supposed to say to that child is, “With a strong hand the Lord took us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage,” that’s really what it says, smirky prose even in a non-incestuous home. But that’s not what any- body said to me, and so there I was, undelivered. Like a box stopped en-route I was trapped in the house of bondage, a lost kid, a kid who doesn’t know how to inquire.

And you in the audience are the same, you of the
why doesn’t he leave?
clique. Otherwise why are you finishing your coffee, wide-eyed in your rush? You’ve been to the opera before, or you haven’t but strong hands have taught you how to behave. You stay for the whole thing. You keep quiet, and don’t move, and let the opera play itself out. Even if the plot is full of holes, the action full of unanswered questions, even if you’ve entered the action yourself by entering the mother herself, you gulp the rest of it down when you hear the oboe rehearsing one phrase over and over: T.U.D., T.U.D., T.U.D. Soon the conductor will stand in the narrow spotlight and give the downbeat, and you don’t want to be on a bus, on a plane, or just walking out of the color- coded city limits. You don’t want to be anywhere but here. You

want to sit quietly in your seat as the last act unfolds, as certain and random as the letters of the alphabet: Ah, By Clay Destroy Evil Forces, Golem, Help Israel: Justice. You don’t know how to inquire, but if you sit tight, if you stay perfectly still and leave the continuity unbreached, you might find out.

ACT IV, SCENE ONE

As if skipping ahead nearly a month and changing the scene to a hospital room isn’t disorienting enough, there’s a backstage technical difficulty and the dry ice machine kicks in as the cur- tain goes up. The fog is not supposed to appear until the fol- lowing, and final, scene in the cemetery, but there’s nothing those headphoned henchmen can do about it: it billows all over the complicated metallic bed, all the clear plastic vines of IV tubes, the get-well flowers, until the scene looks imaginary, or like something that doesn’t, that couldn’t exist: there is no in- tensive care ward in heaven.

The strings are hushed and polite: visiting-hour strings. Strings that won’t wake the patient, or the woman keeping watch. But the singer can’t take her cue—the downbeat is lost in churning fog. In a second, the conductor makes a decision and waves his baton dismissively like he’s killing a bug. The orchestra wavers off; the timpanist, posed for the sudden loom of T.U.D., lowers his sticks, shrugs and taps his drum boredly. The snare player whispers something to him and he smiles, as the fog surges over the rim of the stage and gives him a pow- dered wig. The conductor, still in the spotlight but with nothing to do, feels he must say something and turns to the audience. “I’m sorry,” he says, and everybody laughs, too loudly. He grins

sheepishly at the concertmistress, who hates him, incidentally, and says it again: “I’m sorry. We’ll begin again in a minute.” Act IV, Scene One, the machine fixed. If you please.

ACT IV, SCENE ONE

The music begins first, just the strings, hushed and polite: visiting-hour strings. The curtain rises to reveal a blindingly white, and perhaps still hazy, hospital room. Mimi is sleeping in the complicated metallic bed, surrounded by the clear plastic vines of IV tubes and get-well flowers flowering away in vases emblazoned with the snowflakes of faux-cut crystal. Beside her, Gramma sits dozing in a chair. Remember Gramma? The gypsy always returns at the end to reap the benefits of cursing. For more than two acts she’s had to wait backstage in full makeup, poor dear, just to flop herself in this chair and feign sleep. As the strings continue, their visit guided along by some polite timpani footfalls, you can see the contralto’s shoulders heaving with breath, either with post-allergic wheeze or from some sleepy overacting.

The footfalls are literal; an Orderly (
tenor
) enters, the only black man in the production. It’s wonderful how modern com- posers are incorporating the entire spectrum of The American Experience into their work, instead of just the elitist white cul- ture: there he is, the Orderly. He enters the room with a tray of inscrutable slabs of breakfast and places it on a small table. With a beatific smile so charming on Orderlies he gazes at the heaving Gramma and, like clearing steam from a window to see out, rustles at her arm to wake her. The timpani rustles along with him, but not Gramma. He rustles again but she doesn’t wake.

Still standing far from her body so the audience can see what he’s doing, the Orderly reaches out to her neck like he’s spotted something to wipe off. But, as the rustle becomes a roll, it doesn’t take a repeat of T.U.D. for us to realize that Gramma has already been wiped off. She’s been wiped out; Gramma— the T.U.D. arrives anyway—is dead. “She’s dead!” he sings any- way, and as some supernumeraries come and fetch her still- heaving body away the Orderly launches into an aria which will be immortalized forever as the aria black tenors use for audi- tions. Mimi sleeps on.

It, the aria, details the irony of Gramma dying while on death watch, and that, as an Orderly, he knows all about watching. As an Orderly, he spends his time ostensibly watching out for others, but really, like Gramma, he’s dying inside. As some canned jazz-riffs begin to shuffle behind him, the Orderly ex- pands his death watch metaphor to incorporate black people, who sit and watch on the fringes of society but who are dying inside. The audience, white as a hospital, is equally moved by the tenor sax solo—played by the only black man in the orchestra—and their own guilt. “But who will watch me?” he sings at the climactic close, and it’s a good question—many people will not be watching him. Their eyes will be on Gramma as she is carried off, looking to see if the contralto has indeed stopped breathing.

And it really happened that way, that day. Cyn and I drove to the hospital directly from Camp Shalom, having received special dispensation from the pimply actor to skip the Goodbye ceremony for the rest of the summer—or, as he said, “for the rest of the summer, or, until, until Mrs. Glass, I hope everything will be O.K.” We parked in the lot. We trudged beneath the

hot, wet sky to the Osteopathy Ward, the very site of Dr. Glass’s—Ben’s—broken-bone shame. It was a revenge better than anything Mimi could have cooked up in the basement: she had something wrong with her bones.

When the doctor spotted Mimi’s Jeep, parked off the road just next to the shore of the Ohio River, directly across from the Old Jewish Cemetery where she’ll be buried in the next scene, he must have thought she was the victim of some violent crime, but the unconscious woman lying face-down in the muck wasn’t dead. She’d been driving home, Mimi explained later, when the aching in her bones that she’d been feeling for months, and never told anybody about because she didn’t want to bother them and she’d thought it was probably just all the long hours at the Props Studio, suddenly overwhelmed her and she had to pull over. Good thing the doctor had come along when he had, otherwise who knows who would have preyed upon the help- less Mimi, there at five in the morning on the shores on the Ohio River.

Why she’d been driving at five in the morning, away from Squirrel Hill rather than towards it, was explained as vaguely as the specific nature of Mimi’s disease. In fact the whole scenario seemed vague, as if shrouded in thick dry ice. The doctor
(tenor)
who had come upon Mimi, for example, was rife with curiosi- ties. For one thing, his name was Dr. Zhivago. For another, he was a bone expert—he’d been one of the panel which had up- braided Ben during the Ceramic Bone Fiasco. So not only was he the one who rushed Mimi here to the hospital but was now exclusively supervising her care, even shipping in special nurses (and Orderlies! Notice the Orderlies! The entire American Ex- perience is here!) to work under him.

Dr. Zhivago was as gaunt and thin as a ghost story, with beady little flickering eyes that made him seem like he was al- ways taking notes. He was. He jotted them down on a clipboard as he hovered over Mimi and we hovered over him. He would not, just would not tell us exactly what was wrong with Mimi, who looked fine except for a constant wince of pain taped onto her face like a piece of paper you’d use to remind yourself of something: LOCK THE BACK DOOR. DENTIST TOMORROW.

MY BONES HURT. “It’s cancerous,” Dr. Zhivago said, “but not quite cancer.” We’d have these conversations in the hallways, with nurses and orderlies padding by, their footfalls like tym- pani. “It’s in the core of the bone. She cannot even bend her knees. Unfortunately, her leg bones have broken in several places, but we can’t go in and set them otherwise it might set off a chain reaction.”

Stephen, who did nothing all day but study chain reactions, would ask for details, but Dr. Zhivago didn’t give him any. “Could we have some more details?” Stephen would ask, and Dr. Zhivago would say, “No.” Gramma was usually sitting watch at her daughter-in-law’s bed, and Ben was always sitting on a bench a ways down the hallway, out of earshot and glaring at Zhivago. Aside from the tension which already existed between the two osteopaths, there was another wrench in the works: Mimi wasn’t speaking to her husband. She hadn’t spoken to him since That Night, and had scarcely spoken to Cyn. Zhivago passed on the message to Ben that not only did his wife not want him to treat her, but not to visit her. Cyn was clearly torn, but soon ended up spending these late afternoons and evenings on the bench next to him, so it was just Stephen and me stand- ing across from a renowned bone expert who had just happened

to be happening by the banks of the Ohio River at five in the morning.

“I just don’t understand it,” Stephen said, running a spidery hand through his summer-bleached hair, all shaggy from months at the lab. “What was my mother doing there? Where was she going? Where were
you
going? What is this? What’s happening?” Zhivago would write something down in his clip- board and frown. “You shouldn’t be talking so much to me,” he would say. “You should be talking to your mother. She’s in a lot of pain. She cannot even bend her knees.” Then Stephen would look at me, like I knew something more than I was tell- ing. And I did, too: I answered Zhivago’s phone call saying that Mimi had been found by the banks of the Ohio River—a phone call that, bing bing bing, jostled people out of all sorts of bed- rooms, all the wrong ones, their faces smeared with the puck- ered and smug look of the recently laid. Stephen and Cyn and Ben—in the dim hallway I couldn’t even tell who had come out of what room—hovered by the phone as I stood in Ben’s robe and relayed the news. There was a lot of slapstick room- switching again, as everybody rushed to get dressed for the hos- pital drive: nobody knew where to go. I did, though. I knew where to go. I went right down to the basement and flicked on the light while Cassius sniffed at the brushes, dripping and rinsed. The room was clean. The golem was gone. I couldn’t remember what Rabbi Tsouris had said about golem-raising— did you have to do it by a river, or did you just need river mud?—so I didn’t say anything to Stephen. He’d ask more ques- tions, and look at Dr. Zhivago, and then at Cyn and Ben on the bench, her hand on his knee in tender comfort, and then at me,