The Professor of Desire (27 page)

Seeing Claire swallowed up by this stranger, Dazzle begins leaping crazily around in the dust at his mistress's sandals—and, though my father has never had all that much trust, or found much to admire, in members of the animal kingdom who breed out of wedlock and defecate on the ground, I am surprised to see that Dazzle's display of unabashed dogginess in no way seems to deflect his attention from the girl he is holding in his arms.

At first I do have to wonder if what we are witnessing is not designed in part at least to put Mr. Barbatnik at ease about visiting a human couple who are not legally wed—if perhaps my father intends, by the very intensity with which he squeezes her body to his, to put his own not entirely unexpected misgivings on that score to rest. I cannot remember seeing him so forceful and so animated since before my mother's illness. In fact, he strikes me as a little nuts today. But that is still better than what I expected. Usually when I call each week there is, in just about every upbeat thing he says, a melancholy strain so transparent that I wonder how he finds the wherewithal to keep going on, as he will, about how all is well, wonderful, couldn't be better. The somber “Yeah, hello?” with which he answers the phone is quite enough to inform me of what underlies his “active” days—the mornings helping my uncle in his office where my uncle needs no help; the afternoons at the Jewish Center arguing politics with the “fascists” in the steam room, men whom he refers to as Von Epstein, and Von Haberman, and Von Lipschitz—the local Goering, Goebbels, and Streicher, apparently, who give him palpitations of the heart; and then those interminable evenings soliciting at his neighbors' doors for his various philanthropies and causes, reading again column by column through
Newsday,
the
Post,
and the
Times,
watching the CBS News for the second time in four hours, and finally, in bed and unable to sleep, spreading the letters from his cardboard file box over the blanket and reviewing his correspondence with his vanished, cherished guests. In some cases more cherished, it seems to me, now that they have vanished, than when they were around and there was too little barley in the soup, too much chlorine in the pool, and never enough waiters in the dining room.

His letter writing. With each passing month it is getting harder for him to keep track of who among the hundreds and hundreds of old-timers is retired and in Florida, and thus capable still of writing him back, and who is dead. And it isn't a matter of losing his faculties, either—it's losing all those friends, “non-stop,” as he graphically describes the decimation that occurred in the ranks of his former clientele during just this last year. “I wrote five full pages of news to that dear and lovely prince of a man, Julius Lowenthal. I even put in a clipping that I've been saving up from the
Times
about how they ruined the river over in Paterson where he had his law practice. I figured it would be interesting to him down there—this pollution business was made to order for the kind of man he was. I tell you”—pointing a finger—“Julius Lowenthal was one of the most civic-minded people you could ever want to meet. The synagogue, orphans, sports, the handicapped, colored people—he gave of his time to everything. That man was the genuine article, the
best.
Well, you know what's coming. I stamp and seal the envelope and put it by my hat to take to mail in the morning, and not until I brush my teeth and get into bed and turn out the light does it dawn on me that my dear old friend is gone now since last fall. I have been thinking about him playing cards alongside a swimming pool in Miami—playing pinochle the way only he could play with that legal mind of his—and in actuality he is underground. What is even left of him by now?” That last thought is too much, even for him, especially for him, and he moves his hand angrily past his face, as though to shoo away, like a mosquito that is driving him crazy, this terrible, startling image of Julius Lowenthal decomposing. “And, unbelievable as it may sound to a young person,” he says, recovering most of his equilibrium, “this is actually becoming a weekly occurrence, right down to licking the envelope and pasting on the stamp.”

It will be hours before Claire and I are finally alone together, and she is able at last to unburden herself of the enigmatic decree issued by him into her ear while we four stood grouped in the fumy wake of the departed bus. The sun is softening us like so much macadam; poor confused Dazzle (barely grown accustomed to this rival) continues carrying on in the air around my father's feet; and Mr. Barbatnik—a short leprechaunish gentleman, with a large, long-eared Asian face, and astonishing scoop-like hands suspended from powerful forearms mapped with a body builder's veins—Mr. Barbatnik hangs back, as shy as a schoolgirl, his jacket folded neatly over his arm, waiting for this living, throbbing valentine, my father, to make the introductions. But my father has urgent business to settle first—like the messenger in a classical tragedy, immediately as he comes upon the stage he blurts out what he has traveled all this way to say. “Young woman,” he whispers to Claire, for so it would seem he has been envisioning her, allegorically, as all that and only that, “young woman,” commands my father out of the power vested in him by his daydreams—“don't let—don't let—please!”

These, she tells me at bedtime, were the only words that she could hear, pinned as she was against his massive chest; most likely, I say, because these are the only words he uttered. For him, at this point, they say it all.

And having thus ordained the future, if only for the moment, he is ready now to move on to the next event in the arrival ceremonies he must have been planning now for weeks. He reaches into the pocket of the nubby linen jacket slung across
his
arm—and apparently finds nothing. Suddenly he is slapping at the lining of the jacket as though performing resuscitation upon it. “Oh Christ,” he moans, “it's lost. My God, it's on the bus!” Whereupon Mr. Barbatnik edges forward and, as discreetly as a best man to a half-dazed bridegroom, says in a soft voice, “Your pants, Abe.” “Of course,” my father snaps back, and reaching (still with a little desperation in the eyes) into the pocket of his houndstooth trousers—he is dressed, as they say, to the nines—extracts a small packet that he places in Claire's palm. And now he is beaming.

“I didn't tell you on the phone,” he says to her, “so it would come as a total surprise. Every year you hold on to it I guarantee it will go up in value ten percent at least. Probably fifteen, and maybe more. It's better than money. And wait till you see the wonderful skill that goes into it. It's fantastic. Go ahead. Open it up.”

So, while we all continue to cook away in the parking lot, my affable mate, who knows how to please, and loves pleasing, deftly unties the ribbon and removes the shiny yellow wrapping paper, not failing to remark upon its prettiness. “I picked that out too,” my father tells her. “I thought that color would be up your alley—didn't I, Sol,” he says, turning to his companion, “didn't I say I'll bet she's a girl who likes yellow?”

Claire takes from its velvet-lined case a small sterling-silver paperweight engraved with a bouquet of roses.

“David told me how hard you work in the garden you made, and the way you love all the flowers. Take it, please. You can use it on your desk at school. Wait till your pupils see it.”

“It's beautiful,” she says, and calming Dazzle with just a glance, kisses my father on the cheek.

“Look at the handiwork,” he says. “You can even see the little thorns. Some person actually did that, by hand. An artist.”

“It's lovely, it's a lovely gift,” she says.

And only now does he turn and embrace me. “I got you something too,” he says. “It's in my bag.”

“You hope,” I say.

“Wise guy,” and
we
kiss.

At last he is ready to introduce his companion, dressed, I now realize, in the same spanking-new, color-coordinated outfit, except where my father is in shades of tan and brown, Mr. Barbatnik wears silver and blue.

“Thank God for this man,” my father says as we drive slowly out of town behind a farmer's pickup truck bearing a bumper sticker informing the other motorists that
ONLY LOVE BEATS MILK
. The bumper sticker on our car, affixed by Claire in sympathy with the local ecologists, reads
DIRT ROADS ARE DOWN TO EARTH
.

Excited and garrulous as a small boy—much as I used to be when
he
was doing the driving around these roads—my father cannot stop talking now about Mr. Barbatnik: one in a million, the finest person he has ever known … Mr. Barbatnik, meanwhile, sits quietly beside him, looking into his lap, as humbled, I think, by Claire's buoyant, summery fullness as by the fact that my father is selling him to us much the way, in the good old days, he used to sell the life-lengthening benefits of a summer in our hotel.

“Mr. Barbatnik is the guy who I tell you about from the Center. If it wasn't for him I would absolutely be a voice in the wilderness there about that son of a bitch George Wallace. Claire, pardon me, please, but I hate that lousy cockroach with a passion. You shouldn't have to ever hear the kinds of things so-called decent people think in their private thoughts. It's a disgrace. Only Mr. Barbatnik and me, we make a team, and we give it to them, but good.”

“Not,” says Mr. Barbatnik philosophically, in heavily accented English, “that it makes much difference.”

“And, tell me, what could make a difference with those ignorant bigots? At least let them hear what someone else thinks of them! Jewish people so full of hatred that they go out and vote for a George Wallace—it's beyond me.
Why?
People who have lived and seen a whole lifetime as a minority, and the suggestion that they make in all seriousness is that they ought to line up the colored in front of machine guns and let them have it. Take actual people and mow them down.”

“This of course isn't everybody that says that,” Mr. Barbatnik puts in. “This is just one particular person, of course.”

“I tell them, look at Mr. Barbatnik—ask him if that isn't the same thing that Hitler did with the Jews. And you know what their answer is, grown men who have raised families and run successful businesses and live in retirement now in condominiums like supposed civilized people? They say, ‘How can you compare niggers with Jews?'”

“What's eating this particular person, and the group that he is the leader of—”

“And who appointed him leader, by the way? Of anything? Himself! Go ahead, Sol, I'm sorry. I just wanted to make clear to them what kind of a little dictator we're dealing with.”

“What's eating them,” Mr. Barbatnik says. “is that they owned homes, some of them, and businesses, and then came the colored, and when they tried to get out what they put in, they took a licking.”

“Of course it's all economics when you get down to it. It always is. Wasn't it the same with the Germans? Wasn't it the same in Poland?” Here, abruptly, he breaks off his historical analysis to say to Claire and me, “Mr. Barbatnik only got here after the war.” Dramatically, and yes, with pride, he adds, “He is a victim of the Nazis.”

When we turn in the drive and I point out the house halfway up the hillside, Mr. Barbatnik says, “No wonder you look so happy, you two.”

“They rent it,” my father says. “I told him, he likes it so much, why don't he buy it? Make the guy an offer. Tell him you'll pay him cash. At least see if you get a nibble.”

“Well,” I say, “we're happy enough renting for now.”

“Renting is throwing money down the drain. Find out from him, will you? What can it hurt? Cash on the barrelhead, see if he bites. I can help you out, Uncle Larry can help you out, as far as that goes, if it's a straight money deal that he's after. But definitely you ought to own a little piece of property at your stage of the game. And up here, you can't miss, that's for sure. You never could. In my time, Claire, you could buy a little place like this for under five thousand. Today that little house and—and how far does the property go? To the tree line? All right, say four, say five acres—”

Up the dirt drive and in through the kitchen door—and right past the blooming garden he has heard so much about—he continues with his realtor's spiel, so delighted is the man to be back home in Sullivan County, and with his only living loved one, who by all outward appearances seems finally to have been plucked from his furnace and plunked down before the hearth.

Inside the house, before we can even offer a cold drink, or show them to their room or to the toilet, my father begins to unpack his bag on the kitchen table. “
Your
present,” he announces to me.

We wait. His shoes come out. His freshly laundered shirts. His shiny new shaving kit.

My present is an album bound in black leather containing thirty-two medallions the size of silver dollars, each in its own circular cavity and protected on both sides by a transparent acetate window. He calls them “Shakespeare Medals”—a scene from one of the plays is depicted on the face side, and on the other, in tiny script, a quotation from the play is inscribed. The medals are accompanied by instructions for placing them in the album. The first instruction begins, “Put on a pair of lint-free gloves…” My father hands me the gloves last of all. “Always wear the gloves when you handle the medals,” he tells me. “They come with the set. Otherwise, they say that there can be harmful chemical effects to the medals from being touched by human skin.”

“Oh, this is nice of you,” I say. “Though I don't quite know why now, such an elaborate gift—”

“Why? Because it's time,” he answers, with a laugh, and, too, with a wide gesture that encompasses all the kitchen appliances. “Look, Davey, what they engrave for you. Claire, look at the outside.”