Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (18 page)

Dr. Kucher's yellow pencil was now vertical as she feverishly wrote notes.

"And my mother is afraid of bridges. She thinks they may fall down. And maybe they will. The Williamsburg Bridge doesn't look too good to me, either." Nathan thought for a moment and then laughed lightly. "Once the bridge falls down, the problem is my father's."

"Why is that?"

"My father is afraid of water."

"All water?"

"I don't know. He's afraid of the East River. It's something that happened to him in Poland when he was a child. But I never found out what it was. I know I am making everybody sound crazy, but they are perfectly normal people. Why? Do you think any of this stuff is hereditary?"

Dr. Kucher did not answer. She was writing notes, bearing hard on the blunting pencil point, turning pages in fast jerks, filling the long pages of a yellow paper pad. "Just a minute." She straightened her pink glasses. Nathan, on the other side of the desk, could not see enough of her face. "What was that? Heredity. Yes, it's possible. Tendencies, anyway"

"So you think I can inherit what Hitler did to my uncle?"

"Not exactly. But Hitler didn't make your mother afraid of bridges."

"No."

"Anything else? Grandparents?"

"Didn't know them. I always hear that my mother's father killed himself. Jumped. I guess he wasn't afraid of heights, anyway." Nathan could see that everything he said impressed Dr. Kucher, though nothing made her smile.

"Is there anything new in your life?"

"New?"

"Upsetting changes?"

"No, not really." A staged sigh of boredom.

"Are you feeling guilty about anything?"

"What kind of anything?"

"Anything at all."

"No."

"Really? It's hard to imagine a guiltless person."

"I guess I could come up with something if I had to."

"Like what?"

"I haven't taught my daughter how to swim. The Talmud says you have to teach your son to swim, and I wonder if I am not teaching her because she is a girl."

Kucher's writing fingers were exhausted, but she pushed on as fast as she could. "Were you disappointed that she was a girl?"

"No," Nathan insisted in a defensive tone of voice.

"Do you think you are passive-aggressive?"

"How do you mean?"

"Some people cannot face their own anger and so they repress it but find other ways of getting back at the person toward whom they feel the anger." (Like that bitch on the co-op board, Kucher was thinking.) "Perhaps without even realizing that they are doing this."

"And you think I do that?"

"I don't know. I am just here to help you discover yourself," Dr. Kucher explained. "It is sometimes very difficult for someone to know themselves. Claustrophobia is a type of anxiety attack. You could get it in a number of situations or possibly only in subways. It could even be only in certain subway lines. We have to work on this step by step. It could be the result of something in your present life, but it could also be some suppressed childhood experience. Try to remember your dreams. Dreams can hold clues. A person with a phobia may experience the world as a dangerous and hostile place."

Nathan thought. "I can't think of any dreams right now, and I don't know that the world is a hostile place...."

"But..."

"But dangerous, yes. Do you have any children?"

She didn't answer, though she was thinking, You don't need kids to see how bad it is out there!

"Well, when you have children, you suddenly realize that there is danger everywhere."

She looked at her watch. The session was over. They would schedule another one. "In the meantime, try to remember your dreams."

"All right."

Dr. Kucher was not standing up. She never stood up in front of the patient, never revealed her height. "Are you a Mets fan?"

"Yes!" said Nathan, for the first time truly impressed.

"So what's wrong with Gooden?"

Nathan took the subway downtown, without incident. Even when it slowed down in the tunnel approaching Grand Central, he felt nothing. With great pride he imitated the boredom of the other passengers. The therapy, apparently, was working.

Nathan did not always remember his dreams. But in the early evening, while listening to
the
pleasant, splashing, squeaky sounds of Sarah taking a bath, no doubt dreaming of swimming lessons in a real pool, he suddenly recalled a dream. It might have been from the night before:

He is lying on Sonia's massage table and she is working him with her long fingers. But she is massaging too hard. He realizes that her fingers are penetrating his skin. She reaches into his body and pulls out— an iron cross, an SS insignia, a swastika. Nathan feels mortified, not only that he has these things inside his body, but also that she has found them.

Then he realizes that someone else is in the room. It is Uncle Nusan, and he has seen Sonia pull these things out of him. Maybe he hasn't seen. But he is right there. Then Nusan says to him, "Get your
tokhes
off the table." Suddenly Nathan understands what he means. He is starting to understand Yiddish. He feels very excited about finally mastering the language. He wakes up.

Should he tell Kucher about the dream? Then he would have to explain a lot of things. Cristofina asked fewer questions.

In the next room, Sonia was reading a large, colorful book to Sarah, Sarah looking so small against Sonia, her little hands and big eyes. The two of them looked safe and happy and absolutely perfect. He had never seen anything more perfect. And he was sick with fear.

(Emma walks into the room and finds a tall, thin woman with long fingers and curly hair.)

EMMA:
Who are you?

MARGARITA:
I am Margarita Maza Juarez.
(She waits for a moment but gets no response from Emma.)
Wife of Don Benito Juarez, the exiled president of Mexico.

EMMA:
Boyoboy.

MARGARITA:
This is absolutely true.

EMMA:
The exiled pres ... Exiled my
tokh ...
You know, you can get pretty far with a lie.
(She raises an index finger and swings her hips for emphasis.)
But there is no getting back.

MARGARITA:
But it is not a lie; I am Benito Juarez's wife.

EMMA:
. . .

EMMA:
. . .

"Oh, hell," said Sonia. She looked at her little girl, asleep and completely at peace. "What does Emma say to that?" If she could only figure that out, she was certain the entire play would fall into place. But she could never get past this moment.

I
T WAS ONLY MIDDAY
and a few bombs had already gone off. An occasional burst of small fire in the distance made the women wince as they arranged chairs and tables on the roof. The air was already sul-furous with the smoke of gunpowder. It was like this every year. Worse every year. It was the Fourth of July.

For people living uptown, July Fourth was a day to leave town. To people downtown, it was a day to attempt to have picnics among the bombs and explosions and then to top it off with the big bombs—the fireworks display over the East River.

The grassy patches in the East River park filled with picnickers from the projects—the tall, uniform rows of brick buildings on Avenue D. They would leave their picnics for the street fair and then return to their picnic spots to see the fireworks. Most of the locals still there in the neighborhood—drug dealers, family people, shopkeepers, observant Jews, secular Jews, all three Sals, and boogalooistas alike— imperceptibly tensed their muscles with each detonation, trying to assess if it was the blast of a firecracker to celebrate the nation's birth or the flatter, popping sound of a handgun blasting the face off someone else at an automatic teller. Chow Mein Vega sometimes looked at his watch to mentally record the time of a particularly suspect pop. The children didn't seem upset by the explosions. In fact, they were causing a lot of them, and every year a few people were hurt. Two years before, a man on Third Street was killed because he did not understand that a bunch of explosives sealed in a metal trash can constituted a large and lethal bomb. Successful guerrilla armies have been armed with less gunpowder. But these people were not trying to overthrow anything. They just wanted to make very loud noises.

Every year, the Seltzers hosted a Fourth of July party on the roof that culminated with a perfect view of the fireworks over the East River. Fortunately, they were close enough that Harry, unless he looked straight down, could avoid seeing the river so that only the Brooklyn skyline would be visible. If he stayed on the opposite side of the roof, there was no view of the river at all.

Ruth, Sonia, and Sarah were setting up chairs on the roof of their building. The armchair for Harry was set up in its place near the Avenue A side.

"Ruth," said Sonia, "why do men always have midlife crises and not women?"

"It's probably our fault. We keep telling them they are cute and then one day they start to suspect that they aren't that cute. They start suspecting that they are just foolish and they will die and it will have all been foolishness."

"So they act more foolishly than ever?"

"Sometimes. Harry is still in the phase where he thinks he is cute."

"Harry
is
cute."

"That's the problem. Harry is like Mordy Oboy, those two will never have a crisis. That's why they never earn any money. Harry thinks that if he actually collected rent, the tenants would realize he is the landlord and they wouldn't like him anymore. Why?" Ruth suddenly looked worried. "What's wrong with Nathan?"

"Nothing. He's just acting a little funny. Haven't you noticed?"

"You mean the bracelet?"

"What is that bracelet? Who gave it to him? That's a midlife crisis bracelet."

Sarah was staring with her large, perfectly round, molasses-colored eyes. Ruth smiled. "Believe me. Just don't ask. If you ask, you will hear something truly ridiculous. And you never will find out the real story"

"Come with us to Avenue D," said Sonia, taking hold of one of Sarah's small hands.

"My husband the impresario. I guess I should."

Ruth, as a lifetime habit, avoided Avenue D, not because it had become another neighborhood belonging to Puerto Ricans, but because of her memories of it when it was Jewish. When she was a child, the Lower East Side was her country and Manhattan her planet. Avenue D was the edge of the planet. If you swept Manhattan and pushed the waste to the edge, that was Avenue D. The closer to the river, the worse it got. Buildings turned into shacks, shacks into junk piles, junk piles into garbage. When she was small there were still stables there and sweaty, rank-smelling horses. Since then, the garbage heaps were cleared and the highway was built. The shacks were torn down for groupings of brick housing projects. The streets became lined with
cuchifritos,
grocery stores with boxes of roots and tropical fruit, and botanicas such as Cristofina's. But Ruth had not noticed the change. She continued to think of Avenue D as a place that you didn't go—the garbage heap at the edge of her world.

"It's always great," argued Sonia. "Chucho Vega is unbelievable. I think he really will bring boogaloo back."

"Boogaloo. I didn't listen to boogaloo when I was supposed to. Why should I listen to it now? Well, it makes Harry happy. See, everybody wants to make Harry happy because he makes such a good happy person."

"That's a talent, too."

"Sí, señora,"
said Ruth.

Nathan couldn't go to Avenue D because it was his assignment, every July Fourth, to check on Nusan, who would be hunkered down on Rivington Street, dug in as though trying to survive a bombing raid that was blowing apart the city, which may very well have been what was happening in Nusan's mind.

Nusan was always the same on the Fourth of July. He wrapped his maroon scarf tightly around his neck, clutching it with both hands, and stared at his door as though expecting someone. It wasn't Nathan he was waiting for, because he would always continue staring at the door after Nathan arrived. The gray, bushy eyebrows over his deep-set black eyes flinched with each explosion, but the rest of him did not move.

As Nathan climbed the stairs on Rivington Street, he could already hear muffled bursts in the neighborhood. As expected, Nusan was in his chair, motionless except for the barely perceptible shudder around the eyes, staring through Nathan at the door. He said nothing.

Together they listened to the explosions. There was no place for Nathan to sit, so he stood by the door, just out of line of Nusan's stare, trying not to notice the overbearing and undefinable sour smell of the apartment, while trying to guess what nightmare Nusan was reliving. Did he hear the Gestapo climbing the stairs, the Wehrmacht coming to get him, or the Red Army coming to free him? What Polish town was under siege in his mind? In which camp was he dying while waiting for the gates to be smashed? His eyes said nothing—not fear, not anger, only fatalism.

Nathan tried to engage him by talking about anything he could think of, about the Avenue D fair, Chow Mein Vega's concert, the boogaloo, the Mets and Dwight Gooden's six-inning no-hitter against the Astros the day before, comparing Gooden to Nolan Ryan, another shooting at the cash machine, the drug dealers, the police, people in the neighborhood getting angry. "They have been having meetings with the police at the Boys Club."

He still had made no eye contact with Nusan, who did not move his gaze from the door, on which dark coats and hats had been hung, obscuring the tiny, tarnished brass peephole. If the door were to move at all, the coats, clothing Nusan never wore, would move first. Nusan had only to wait for the telltale swing of a sleeve.

"They have meetings all the time now. I think some of these new Japanese are involved. Not that all the new people are Japanese. I think they are getting organized. Shop owners. Like the people at the Edelweiss."

Why did he say that? He did not want to bring up the Edelweiss. And this, of course, was what finally caught Nusan's attention. His eyes focused on Nathan, and in a quiet voice he said, "SS Standartenfuhrer Rheinhardt Müller."

A string of little Chinese crackers went off, sounding like a prolonged trigger squeeze on an automatic weapon. It was hotter than one hundred degrees in the apartment. The air was stale and rotten. Nathan wanted to open a window, but that would have brought the explosions and the gunpowder that much closer. "SS Standartenführer who?"

Nusan looked at his desk and held his spread fingers over the stacks and hills of papers the way a pianist paused over the keyboard before playing. "Müller. SS Standartenführer Müller. Owner of the Edelweiss Bäckerei." Something went off in a single burst with an echo like a rifle shot, but Nusan did not flinch.

For Nathan, the worst of it was that when he thought of the Edelweiss he was suddenly overcome with desire—desire to get out of this fetid cell, find Karoline, tear off her clothes ... "No. He's not SS, Uncle Nusan. It's just the German man who owns the Edelweiss. He's not a Nazi. He's just a pastry maker."

"Just a pastry maker, a businessman, a doctor. Just a German."

He was expected to spend the day here—with the windows shut. A day in which Nusan would not go outside. It was a perfect day to slip over to the little bakery above the Edelweiss. What was she baking today? "Being a German doesn't make him guilty of something."

"How old is he? If he was there and he was German, he is guilty of something. You can be sure of that. He is guilty of doing something or not doing anything—while Leah was hanged by her feet and beaten to death."

A loud bomb went off, and Nusan jerked his head and stared at the door.

Leah? Nathan thought. Who was Leah? He had never mentioned anything like this before. In a soft voice that he tried to make sound soothing, he asked, "Who was Leah, Nusan?"

Nusan turned to him and, with an equally soft voice designed to mimic him, said, "Who was Moellen, Nathan?"

Nathan had planted this idea years ago. He wished he could open a window and the thought, the idea, the air, the smell—it could all rush out. He was standing in the center of this stinking room. He could have cleared a place to sit. Maybe on the couch where Nusan slept. Had he ever washed that pillowcase? The real reason he was standing was that his body, independent of his mind, was expressing its desire to leave.

"Look, Uncle Nusan, it was a mistake. I made a mistake. I even talked to him. He was just in the army...."

"I vas just in the Wehrmacht, like everyone else." A wicked smile came over Nusan's face as he looked at Nathan. He could see in Nathan's eyes that he was right, the baker had actually uttered the cliche, "I was just in the Wehrmacht, like everyone else." That was what he had said. Actually, Nathan had never talked to him about it, but Karoline had said, "He was just in the Wehrmacht, like everyone else."

"They always say that, Nathan. They all say the same things. They were following orders, they had no choice. I never did anything against the Jews. I never knew about that until later. What a terrible thing. And I always liked the Jews." He studied Nathan's face and was disappointed. "No?"

"No. He never said that."

"Talk to him some more."

"I have to go now. Will you be all right?"

"Yes, yes. I will be fine."

It was easy. All Nathan had to do was ask if he would be all right and he would tell him how fine he would be and Nathan could ignore the disappointed look on his face and be away, free of the decaying remnants of the Holocaust, free to enjoy the eroticism of his own destruction. "Is there a Mets game this afternoon?"

Nusan nodded but did not move. Nathan put on the television and picked up an old, scratched record in a torn cover by the phonograph— Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Brahms Symphony No. I. He put the record on the turntable, placed the needle on the record.

He looked at the television and said to Nusan with false cheer, "Look, Cone is pitching. Against the Reds. Who knows, maybe Strawberry will save them." He exited to the dark and throbbing strings, a steadily encroaching force, that open the first movement.

Nathan did not feel good about leaving him, but he had to. What was worse? Where was he going? "To
schtup
the
Standartenführer's
daughter." Why did Nusan say that? He wasn't a
Standartenführer.
He was a pastry maker.

Harry Seltzer was wearing a freshly pressed white linen suit, his summer Latin impresario suit, walking up Avenue A singing:

Don't do that dance, I tell you, Sadie That's not a business for a lady. Most everybody kn
—

"Harry!"

It was Cristofina in a very tight red dress—silk that glistened like liquid running over her plump body. Harry had always thought of her as fat. But it was very nice fat. There was something appealing about a woman making the effort, just trying—that was all Harry wanted.

While he admired Cristofina, she handed him a piece of paper. "Oh, what's this?" he said, unfolding it as though unwrapping a surprise gift. It was a bill for $987.45—itemized. It was a very long list. "This is a thousand dollars! All this for Ruben?"

"Do you think it is easy to make a Dominican with nothing to work with but a Puerto Rican? Wait until you see him," said Cristofina, rolling her eyes dreamily. "El Dominicano." She walked on toward Avenue D while Harry examined the bill. He could not decipher any of the items. But he did not mention anything about this when he went over to the casita to check on the band. He was the producer. Chow Mein Vega was the star.

When Harry arrived at the casita, his suit already wilted and sagging, the band was struggling into turquoise-colored shirts with ruffled and ballooned sleeves. Felix was practicing on the congas, his eyes closed, his head back, bringing his hands up high over his head, beating them with such irresistible waves of rhythm that everyone swayed at least a little. Sonia was there with Sarah, swaying slightly. Sarah was hopping from foot to foot, wearing a toothy smile.

For Sonia, the casita was a chance to speak Spanish, but more important, for Sarah to speak Spanish—though she barely accepted that the Nuyorican spoken there was Spanish. But it was better than no Spanish at all. "I can always add the consonants later," she said teasingly. Sarah had taken to saying, "Whazup wi dat?" When Sonia asked her why she was talking like that, she would explain with tutorial condescension, "I am speaking Spanish."

Felix played with his eyes shut, hoping to be lost in rhythm and beyond thought, like having sex. But, also like having sex, thoughts sometimes intruded. At the moment, he could not help thinking of how ridiculous he was in his ruffled shirt—a Dominican, posing as a Puerto Rican, dressed like a Cuban.