Private Novelist (9 page)

BEFORE DESCRIBING THE ENIGMATIC
submarine, I should remind the reader that my aim in
Sailing Toward the Sunset
is not to create irresistible literary characters, but in deference to my models,
Possession
and
Dictionary of the Khazars,
to dispense with such fripperies in pursuit of a higher goal: the suggestion, through breathless innuendo, of an exotic and unverifiable past.

I turn to Shats' eighth chapter. It begins on page 213. The novel ends on page 234. This chapter is surely an especially dense one, whose every word carries an ambivalent and multilayered significance, as these twenty-two pages must ultimately carry three-quarters of the hermeneutic weight of the entire book. It begins:

            
The angels [could be “queens”] of complaint came to Jamaica in the eighteenth century, and told the committee of virgins: the [?], symbol of reality and [?] of the bitterness of the power structure . . . the two deaths separated by eighty years. . . .

Hebrew words notoriously have multiple meanings, since each Hebrew word is based on a three-consonant root, and the twenty-three consonants (I don't think that's right, but it's something like twenty-three) yield only 12,167 possible combinations. As I recall, English has at least three times that many words, indicating that each Hebrew word must carry, at the absolute minimum, three English meanings. I.e., the sentence can also be translated:

            
Deeply eroded ravines [could be “gutters”] of resignation came to Sicily in despite of the 144 elisions, and told the objectors: the [?], essence of truth and [?] the bad flavor of the fruiting tops . . . the five circles split into eighty fragments. . . .

Or:

            
Cain entreated God for permission to lay down his weapon: but God said, one [?] has brought me here, I cannot be turned back . . . the wind [piped?] in Cain's ears, loess filled his lungs, he walked in the dust behind Abel, carrying a bag of newly grafted mango seedlings. . . .

The multivalence of the Hebrew vocabulary, I am told, makes it uniquely suited for poetry. (I have this on the authority of Amir Or, editor of
Helicon
.) Personal experience, on the other hand, gives me the sad impression that the Hebrew language is narrowly pedantic and precise. The title of Zohar's book, for example,
Shu Hai Practices Throwing the Spear
—“It's not a spear,” Zohar said to me with an air
of frustration. “‘Throwing the spear' is what we call that Olympic field event, the javelin. It's ‘Shu Hai Practices the Javelin.'”

Okay, I thought, whatever. Guess that's bound to happen if spears fall out of daily use.

Mary and I went down to the old port to look at Mr. Pickwick.

The old port of Tel Aviv, with its dusty cats, scabby dogs, flaking concrete, deep and opaque berths for ghost ships, etc., is surely worthy of treatment in prose-poetry, that bastard child of television. The style of montage, of snapshots succeeding each other, is similar to the way an inexpensive documentary, where the tripod is carried from place to place while the camera is turned off, might be perceived by someone who is not really paying attention. Certain parties I have attended present themselves to my memory with the benefit of similar editing techniques—I know I was there for ten hours, but all I remember is:

            
A small fire of twigs. Why were we building fires? Standing on the dock, I look back at the house and sway. Matthew on an attic cot, shivering and moaning. He does not look up. The hippie-earth-babe chick he's seeing—damn her. Splashing of the oars as I am helped into the boat. Two fingers of peppermint schnapps, he is not expecting this, neither am I, on Doug McLeod's head. Can't he see I'm already drunk enough?

Mr. Pickwick–related activity radiated from a yeshiva occupying one of the largest buildings in the port, next to the river. Dozens of buses were parked on the uneven gravel, and a crowd of men in black suits was milling around and sitting on beat-up garden chairs in the shade of the walls. We pressed
through to the front, by the sea. “You can't see anything from here,” Mary said, kicking off her shoes and beginning to unbutton her blouse.

I stopped her. No one should swim anywhere near the mouth of the Yarqon. We returned through the crowd to a sort of reception desk, where a few pictures of our King and Messiah were hanging decorated with Sukkoth streamers and tinsel. “You must be here for the disco,” the staffer said sympathetically. He pointed us one building over.

As we approached we could hear the fast, monotonous, irritating high drone of techno music over the idling of the buses. A pimply, hollow-chested young man stopped us at the door. “Do you have tickets?”

“We're looking for information about Mr. Pickwick. Have you seen anything?”

“We're waiting here for Mr. Pickwick,” he said, gesturing toward the interior. The pitch and volume rose in a whooping, tense curve, and I could hear yelling from the dance floor. “We think Mr. Pickwick will come soon. The tickets are seventy shekels, you can get them at the white shipping container on the other side.”

“Thanks,” we said, sidling away.

“I want to see Mr. Pickwick,” Mary said, leaning on the seawall. “Can you watch my stuff?” She climbed over, gave me her clothes, and dove out past the rocks into the surf, suddenly looking very tiny and white in her black silk underwear. She didn't come back up. I waited two hours, then wandered home, feeling sort of stupid for waiting. I put her clothes in a paper bag with her other possessions (another set of clothes, a toothbrush of Yigal's) and set them by the door. I mean, I dug around for a while, but that's all I could find. I thought, This can't be all she has, there must be more. I cried a few tears,
thinking of the lonely and vulnerable seal-girl adrift in a hot, dry world, then let her in the door around seven
P.M.
She was glowing with the exercise, fanning herself with a newspaper.

“I am so glad to see you!” I cried, hugging her closely, her damp bra leaving two spots on my shirt. “What was it like?”

“Well, it's true what they say, it's huge. It's completely black, metal. I went all around it, every side and the bottom, and there's not a mark on it, except, well, except something I'm not sure I should say—you know how dolphins are supposed to be really smart?”

“Sure.”

“Well, they aren't so smart—I mean, they have a language and everything, they read and write, but that isn't what makes a person smart. I know you're a Dolphin Star priestess and everything, so I feel really bad about telling you this . . .”

“What? Wouldn't you rather I know the truth?”

“Well, you know the way the whole human race thinks dolphins are totally wise and, like, cosmic? And the seals sort of like it that way, it keeps you guys off our backs. So I'm not sure—do you promise not to tell?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“I hate dolphins.” She sighed. “It was covered with personal ads. Really gross, explicit ones, the kind where they get really specific about who's going to put what where and how many—”

“Gross,” I said. “You mean they were printed ads, or just written on there, or what?”

“Graffiti,” she said. “Mostly. It's a new medium—ships with that antibiotic paint haven't been around that long. It's bringing the oceans closer together I guess, and everybody says it's a good thing, but nobody knows where it's going to lead. If this is any evidence—ick. It's so typical of those stupid dolphins to spoil everything. I need coffee.” She started for the kitchen.

“Mary,” I said. “So if dolphins are so bad, then what's really the wisest animal in the sea? Is it seals?”

“Starfish,” she said without hesitation.

“Seals eat starfish,” I objected.

“We do not! We venerate starfish!” She shook her head so that her wet hair slapped against the wall. “Starfish are wise. Starfish are gentle. We only eat fish and birds, though I personally never eat birds. No seal would ever, ever, ever eat a starfish.” She emphasized each of the last few words by stomping her foot.

“I guess I was thinking of sea otters.”

“Nobody eats starfish.”

“But, Mary, it's true. Now I remember, the sea otters fold them up so all the sticky suckers are on the inside, and then they eat it like a Popsicle.”

“That's it,” she said. “You are not a nice person.” She glanced into the bag with her clothes, grabbed it, and left. A minute later I heard the door of Yigal's apartment slam, and that's the last I saw of Mary until four days later.

This next scene actually took place in Yigal's bed, but I am informed by Shats that the vast majority of scenes in Israeli fiction take place in cemeteries, so we'll say instead that Yigal and Mary were holding hands as they walked on noisy gravel past the blazing white stones and skinny cypresses of the old cemetery on the south side of Tel Aviv. They rested for a moment in the shade under an aluminum canopy, and he fetched her a cup of water. Several aisles away a funeral was going on. The naked body of a middle-aged woman, wrapped in a sheet, was slowly vanishing under half a ton of sand. Yigal lay on his back, watching a reflection on the ceiling. Mary drank with her head on a pillow, dribbling water down her chin. He turned toward her and asked, “How did you get here, anyway? Swim?”

“No, I flew. On an airplane.”

“What sort of passport?”

“Canadian.”

“How'd you get that?”

“I bought it.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Nothing.”

“So where do you get all this money?”

“You promise you won't tell? Don't be mad.”

He kissed her fingertips and so on as though he had no intention of telling or being mad, but actually he was thinking about whores, gambling, and cocaine, and hoping her career involved gambling. Credit-card fraud was another acceptable alternative; arms dealing was something he was used to, spying a possibility, though he didn't think she was a spy any more than she was a silkie from the Shetland Islands . . .

“Well, it's like this, you know how silkies are sort of magical, and when you're sort of magical, there are things you can do?”

“Cut to the chase.”

“Well, if I think really hard about money, I find it in my pocket. Most silkies just live off guys, but I don't think that's fair. To the guys, I mean, but also I think it's degrading to be always asking guys for money.”

“So you find it in your pocket. Which pocket?”

“Usually my pants. The back pocket, here.” She patted her butt.

“I understand.” Yigal nodded. “I get money by mailing it to myself.”

“Cool!” She seemed impressed.

“No, seriously, you think about it and it's there?”

“Sure. Like, right now, I am thinking about a hundred shekels for groceries.”

“Why don't you think about fifty thousand shekels and buy a car?”

“Can you drive?”

“Sure.”

She got up and went over to her pants. “Here. Wait, I don't think this is fifty thousand. Maybe fifty thousand won't fit in my pocket.”

“You're right,” Yigal said, counting the money. “This is only ninety-four hundred.” He threw it to the floor and took her in his arms. “Skip the pants. Go for a million shekels in the laundry hamper.”

Yigal was not a
freier,
so that after he lost hope of getting a straight answer out of this mysterious woman whom he liked so very much regardless, he just changed the subject, and not being a
freier,
he didn't immediately go and look in the laundry hamper either. He waited until the next time she was in the bathroom. He stuffed it back in without counting it.

After a decent interval (I think it took him two days), Yigal said: “Please marry me. I really hate my job.” They had gotten out of bed and gone downstairs to Café Tolaat Sfarim.

“Of course,” Mary replied. “If I didn't want to marry you, I never would have told you about any of it. I know you really love me. Otherwise you would just ask me for like a billion dollars and hit the road.”

When I told Zohar about it, he said, “Tell that girl I need forty thousand dollars to buy a big white Lincoln Town Car.” His voice was thick and slurred. “I'm cold. Where did you say those camel people are?” He was still seventy miles shy of the Nepalese border. “You tell that girl, tell that girl I need forty thousand dollars, buy me a Hummer. Baby, do you have a sweater I can borrow?”

“Hold on, Zohar,” I said. “I'm coming to save you.”

“Don't do that. It's only seventy more miles. Get there by tomorrow. Wish me luck, baby, I'm gonna need it. Got a glacier in the way. Ouch.”

“What's wrong?”

“Hangnail . . .”

I waited a minute and finally said, “Don't keep me on the line while you play with it. Satellite phone time is expensive.” We exchanged vows of love and hung up, but I was starting to worry. It occurred to me that getting Zohar home from Bhutan in time to teach the fall semester might be more complicated than anyone had thought.

I WAS SLOW IN FALLING ASLEEP LAST
night and awoke at six, unable to shake the uneasy feeling that I had somehow involved myself in something unutterably sordid, and that I was surrounded by death. I'm pretty sure this happened because Zohar rented
Taxi Driver.
The same thing happened a month ago when I saw a VH1 documentary about Studio 54.

At 7:30 I crawled from the bed to the computer and found an especially dense and challenging message from Shats. The ostensible subject was the old port of Tel Aviv, more of a marina, really, it turns out:
The port could never handle ships, they would anchor at some distance, and boats would come and go, loading and unloading passengers and cargo.
He portrayed the people of Tel Aviv standing by the quay and singing as Zim Ship No. 1,
Kedmah,
lured their flimsy dinghies to certain death in the pounding surf, July 1947.

My mother had this to say:
Frank called last night. They dropped a seventy-million-dollar crane over the edge in some deep trench, so they are back in Mobile being repaired.

My brother Frank, a ship engineer, lives in Seattle and works on a very large boat out of New Orleans. The boat, a gigantic
coracle approximately four miles in circumference, carries immense towers of steel to the center of the Gulf of Mexico, where, wiggling and heaving, it drops them into trenches, then pops four hundred feet into the air, relieved to be rid of the extra weight. Workers such as my brother grip their coffee cups tightly in preparation for a bounding, vertiginous return to New Orleans by hydrofoil. Even the work schedule is larger than life: Rather than time their work by the sun as other workers do, they work by the moon, “twenty-eight days on and twenty-eight days off.” Already in the four hundredth hour of a shift, the workers are bleary-eyed, rigid automatons, hardly aware whether their coracle is moving as scheduled toward the meteor-craters of the Yucatán or merely spinning in circles. Has the seventy-million-dollar crane broken loose, or was it cut loose this morning, in response to orders no worker can be sure he did not hear in a dream?

Such a ship could not dock in Tel Aviv, any more than Mr. Pickwick could sail up the Yarqon. Only a few wooden rowboats come and go, rocking in the shadow of a single heroic statue—
The Hebrew Worker
. A magazine shop lends an air of commerce to the scene. Other ports, in Haifa and Ashdod to the north and south, are made to submit to the indignity of a more than symbolic function.

Yigal did not go down to the port. Instead, he went to his office. A brief euphoria after his engagement to Mary had surrendered to the realization that he could not quit his job. Most especially, he could not quit his job and then appear to be living very well without it. His assignment was frustrating, even impossible, but it was the only thing standing between him and certain death.

“Laos and Iceland?” Rafi said. “Take a look at this report about the carousel in Central Park.”

Yigal scanned it. “This one's two years old. I'm telling you, he's not in New York.”

“You're right, he's not—he's at Rye Playland, since April. I'd like you to talk to him. That's not much to ask, is it? Just talk to the guy. And be careful. How are you fixed for money?”

“Not too bad, but I could use a little extra this month—some nuclear missile landed in my office, so I'm thinking of upgrading my hard drive, plus I need to buy some paint. Also, my fiancée wants a car.”

Rafi handed him $5,000. “You're not cutting down on your travel, are you? Because if you are, you won't be working in this office. You'll be in purchasing in Holon. Medical supplies for the veterans' hospital. Have you considered changing apartments?”

“I like my apartment.” Yigal shrugged, his boss shrugged, and the meeting was over. As he walked home, he formulated a list of questions.

          
1.
  
What's in the submarine?

          
2.
  
What is Rye Playland?

          
3.
  
Will another missile fall into my apartment, or is my apartment the safest place in Israel?

When he arrived back at Basel Street, he came straight to my place, and I got out the tarot cards.

“This is a sort of cute tarot,” I said. “It's all these smiling, happy dolphins—look—”

“Even the hanged man?”

“That's actually a very positive card,” I said, handing him the deck to shuffle. “That's why he's leaping and splashing that way. It means change.”

“Dolphins don't have necks.” He gave me the first card.

“Eight of urchins—eight of urchins—let me get my book.” I struggled out of the lotus position and grabbed the Dolphin Star handbook. “Hmm. This is interesting. It's actually a little essay about the biology of dolphins. I hate it when they do this—it's how they cover their asses, like if they actually said what was going to happen in the future and got it wrong, I'd sue them or something.” I handed him the book.

“Unlike seals, who feel love every day of the year but conceive their pups only in the fall, dolphins have insatiable sexual appetites year-round.” Yigal took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Whatever,” he said, handing the book back. “Next card.” He pulled the lobster.

“The lobster means safety.”

He nodded and pulled the three of barnacles, symbolized by a pack of young male dolphins abducting a female from her pod.

“Travel. Give me three more cards and lay them out in a row.” He withdrew the seahorse, coral, and the ten of shrimp.

The book was explicit. “Ten of shrimp after the seahorse means a ride on the Derby Racers. ‘The Derby Racers,'” I read aloud, “‘is a monumental revolving, domed structure located on the grounds of Rye Playland in Rye, New York. Unlike a conventional carousel whose figures move up and down, the Derby Racers figures move forward and backward. The vast, deep rumbling sound created by the revolution, on wooden rails, of this large building more than one hundred years old is the most impressive achievement of Western civilization, the first and last wonder of the world.' Coral—that's just sex, pure and simple. I don't know how that fits in. This is interesting.” I tried to read further but Yigal took the book away.

“Nell, there's a card called ‘Leviathan' symbolized by a big black blob waving a trident.” He looked upset.

“I didn't write the book. Are you saying the Dolphin Star Temple had something to do with it? Because if you are, forget it. That thing went right through my coffee table.” I took the book and put it back on the shelf.

“One more card?” He held up the four of shrimp.

“Four of shrimp is ambiguous. It means either mechanical difficulties—could be the plumbing, could be bursitis—or an explosion and fire.” Yigal shook my hand and left.

I realize now that my free-floating anxiety might stem partly from having written so much dialogue yesterday and today. I'm not good at it, and I don't claim to have an ear for colloquial speech. Writing dialogue is an unnecessary risk and an inefficient way of telling a story. (All my best stories are in one paragraph, with no dialogue at all. The only exception is in the story about the anaconda, when he says in a plaintive manner while dying bankrupt in the prison hospital of self-imposed starvation: “I can't eat small things, and I can't eat dead things—without money there's just no place for me in this world.”)

But if efficiency were my goal, would I be devoting a month of my priceless youth, which can never be regained, to the re-creation of a novel already written? For four long years Shats labored to make straight in the desert a highway for this second version of
Sailing Toward the Sunset,
stealing time from work and family to create an entirely original literary masterpiece. In order to follow in his still-warm footsteps, I quit my last full-time job in 1995 and haven't worked a day in the last fourteen months. Were I efficient in any way, I would have re-created Shats' book of short stories, his reviews and feuilletons, his diary and letters, and his bank statements by now. Ashamed of my indolence, I will pass to another topic.

When I first began work almost two weeks ago, I made extensive notes regarding the topics to be covered. Now I find that two have been omitted completely. They are:

          
1.
  
The Hart Senate Office Building

          
2.
  
Poe's “Tamerlane”

Outside the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., is a long brick sidewalk, where I often walk on my way from Union Station to my friend David's office. Washington is a beautiful and peaceful city, most especially in springtime and in this particular section, Capitol Hill. The humid air telescopes the long view down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial and the row of reflecting pools into a single wide-angle panoramic painting. In May thousands of tulips in red and orange engulf the Capitol itself, but in April the predominating color is the pale green of new grass brushed with the delicate frosty pink of apple and cherry blossoms, those still on the trees, and those that drift from the trees into soft, feathery heaps, covering lawns and filling gutters with pale petals that keep for weeks in the cool shade of the oaks and tulip poplars. I wander through the drifts of flower snow, throwing soft handfuls upward and letting them fall until they cover me, and occasionally lying down in them, at which point I probably look like a complete idiot, and it's no wonder I'm unemployed.

Anyhow, outside the Hart Senate Office Building is a big parking lot, and between this parking lot and the building is a strip of plants a block long, so beautiful and diverse that I suppose it must have been designed to represent the fifty states and must be subsidized by all fifty. No one ever looks at
it but me. It sits in an ugly spot where no one ever goes who is not in a hurry. Besides, in Washington, D.C., such things are ordinary.

Inside the building is a strange sculpture. A black mountain range sits on the white granite floor, jagged peaks upward. The heavy black plates of steel are at least twenty feet tall. From the ceiling hang the clouds—the same heavy black plates of steel, but rounded. The clouds twirl slowly and threateningly. No one walks on the floor anywhere near the sculpture, which sits in the center of the lobby out of the way, but senators who go from one office to another must look out and see it. The building was the first ever to have an open but fireproof atrium. Were fire to break out, water would pour from the edge of each balcony in a solid sheet, creating a temporary wall. The sculpture would sit in a choppy sea of dirty water thick with shredded paper and blue-green carpet lint while the impotent flames raged on in the offices, trapped behind an artificial Niagara.

Poe's “Tamerlane” is a long poem, but I used to know it by heart. Tempted by Ambition, the shepherd Tamerlane hopes to make his girlfriend a great queen. His empire complete, he returns home to find her dead.

        
I have no words, alas! to tell

        
The loveliness of loving well!

        
Nor would I now attempt to trace

        
The more than beauty of a face

        
Whose lineaments, upon my mind,

        
Are—shadows on th' unstable wind:

        
Thus I remember having dwelt

        
Some page of early lore upon,

        
With loitering eye, till I have felt

        
The letters—with their meaning—melt

        
To fantasies—with none.

In despair, Tamerlane compares his wasted youth to the sun, and his maturity to the moon, less harsh, beautiful, but cold. He protests,

        
And boyhood is a summer sun

        
Whose waning is the dreariest one—

        
For all we live to know is known,

        
And all we seek to keep hath flown—

        
Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall

        
With the noon-day beauty—which is all.

I used to carry this very small book (Poe didn't write much poetry) everywhere with me when I worked in offices. Memorizing it was an accident. I discovered that I almost knew it already, so I just worked on the gaps. Then I stopped carrying the book. Reciting it to yourself from start to finish takes a good ten minutes. All I seek to keep hath flown, I thought every Friday as I deposited my large paycheck.

Later, when things got worse, I thought more of “The Raven”—“Is there—
is
there balm in Gilead?” Gilead probably isn't far from here, come to think of it—it's probably a stoplight with a falafel stand, like Armageddon.

Back downstairs, Yigal asked Mary if she'd like to help him set up the model railroad. She spliced all the track and he hooked up the signals and the whistle. They darkened the room and watched the engine, whose heavy flywheel made its starts and stops gradual, dramatic, and forceful like those of a real train, circle behind the mountains over and over,
first one way and then the other. The engine had a real Mars headlight, and there were lights in the passenger cars, where tiny hand-painted passengers sat diffidently looking out at the warm evening. Mary and Yigal lay on the floor and watched it from eye level. The next day, they left for New York.