David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“What’s your mom’s name?” That was the first question he asked when we walked out of the tutor’s apartment. I remember letting out an astonished giggle: the impertinence of this freckled little gnome to insinuate that I even had a mother!

“Mine’s named Sarah!” he proclaimed. He suddenly ran past me, then spun around and faced me: “What did you say your mom’s name was? Was she born in Israel? Where did your parents meet? Are they also from the Holocaust?”

The buses to Talpiot would come and go as we kept talking. This is how we looked: I sit on the wall, a long thin (yes, yes) kid with a narrow, tough face and pursed lips, who avoids smiling. All around me runs a little boy, at least a year younger than me, with black hair and very fair skin, who can pull me out of my shell with cunning persistence and slowly make me want to remember, to talk, to tell him about Gedera and Paris and New York, about the Carnival in Rio, about Día de los Muertos in Mexico, and the sun celebrations in Peru, and a hot-air-balloon ride above herds of gnu on the Serengeti.

His questions led me to comprehend that I had a rare treasure: life experience. That my life, which up to then I had endured as a burdensome whirlwind of travel and frequent changes of apartments and schools and languages and faces, was actually an enormous adventure. I quickly discovered that exaggerations were warmly welcomed: no pinpricks would deflate my hot-air balloons, and it turned out that I could and should tell each story over and over again with embellishments and plot twists, some that were real and others that could have been. I did not recognize myself when I was with him. I did not recognize the enthusiastic, animated boy who emerged from me. I did not recognize the hotness in my temples, which burned with thoughts and images. And mostly I did not recognize the pleasure I took in the reward for my new talent: the eyes that grew wide with amazement and happiness and laughter. The deep-blue splendor. Those were my royalties, I suppose.

We kept this up for a whole year, twice a week. I hated math, but because of him I tried not to miss a single lesson. The buses came and went and we stayed there absorbed in our world until we really had to part. I knew he had to pick his mother up from somewhere at exactly five-thirty. He told me she was a “senior official” in a government office, and I didn’t understand why he had to “pick her up.” I remember he had a grown-ups’ Doxa watch that covered his thin wrist, and as it got closer and closer to the time, he would glance at it with increasing agitation.

Each time we parted there were possibilities hovering in the air that neither of us dared to say out loud, as though we still did not trust reality to know how to treat this delicate, fragile story: Maybe we could just meet up sometime, not after class? Maybe go to a movie? Maybe I could come over to your place?

—

He waves both arms in the air: “Since we’re on the topic of the Big Buggerer, allow me, ladies and gentlemen, at this early point in the evening, and for the sake of historical justice, to give a heartfelt thanks, on behalf of you all, to Woman. To all the women in the world! Why not aim big, my friends? Why not admit for once where our pink bird of happiness really lies, what represents the purpose of our existence and drives our search engine? Why not bow down for once and give proper thanks to the hot and sweet spice of life we were given in the Garden of Eden?” And then he really does bow, bobbing his head and upper body repeatedly toward a series of women in the audience, and each one of them, it seems to me, even the ones sitting with their partners, responds almost involuntarily with a quick glint in her eyes. He waves his arms to encourage the men in the crowd to follow suit. Most sneer, a few sit frozen beside their equally frozen women, but four or five get up from their seats with embarrassed giggles and bow stiffly to their partners.

This cheap sentimental gesture strikes me as silly, and yet, to my surprise, I find myself giving a brief, almost imperceptible bow to the empty chair next to me, which only serves to prove once again how tenuous and insecure I am here tonight. To be fair, it was just a slight nod of the head, and a little wink escaped, too, the wink she and I always shared, even in the middle of a fight, two sparks flying from eye to eye: the me-spark in her, the she-spark in me.

I order a shot of tequila and take my sweater off. I didn’t realize how hot it would be in here. (I think the woman at the next table whispers: “Finally.”) I cross my arms over my chest and watch the man onstage, and in his faded eyes I see myself and him, and I remember that feeling of us. I recall the blaze of excitement, and also the constant embarrassment I felt when I was with him: boys didn’t talk like that back then. Not about those things and not in that language. In all my fleeting friendships with other boys there had been a sort of mutual anonymity that was comfortable and masculine, but with him…

I rummage through my pockets, my wallet. A few years ago I would never have left home without a notebook. Little orange notebooks slept in bed with us in case, while I was falling asleep or dreaming, I conjured up an argument I could work into a ruling, or a salient metaphor, or an idea for an eye-opening quote (I was somewhat notorious for those). I find three pens but not one scrap of paper. I motion at the waitress and she brings me a small stack of green napkins, flapping them in her hand from afar and smiling stupidly.

Actually, it was a pretty sweet smile.

“But most of all, my brothers and sisters,” he roars, almost tearing up with joy at the napkins and the pens, “after giving general thanks to all the women in the world, I would like to especially thank all the precious things who privatized my own global sex initiative, all those who from age sixteen have gone down on me and up on me, who jerked me, pumped me, sucked me, rode me…”

Most of the audience is pleased, but a few turn up their noses. Not far from me a woman slips her foot out of a narrow shoe and rubs it against the calf of her other leg, and my gut wrenches for the third or fourth time tonight—Tamara’s strong, solid legs—and I hear my own moan, the kind I’d long ago forgotten.

Onstage I see his old smile, charming and keen, and a little breathing room opens up: the distress that has weighed down the show from the start seems to dissipate a little, and I give in and smile at him. It’s a good moment, a private moment between the two of us, and I remember how he used to skip around me, cheering and shouting and laughing as though the air itself were tickling him. In his eyes now there is the same luminance, a little beam of light aimed at me, believing in me, and it’s like everything can still be repaired, even for us, for me and him.

But the smile vanishes in an instant, like it always does, snatched from under our feet, and from my own feet in particular. Again I sense a profound, dark deception, the kind that occurs in a place words cannot reach.

“I don’t believe it!” he suddenly roars. “You, the little one with the lipstick, yes, you, the one who put her makeup on in the dark! Or does your makeup artist have Parkinson’s? Tell me, dollface, do you think it’s reasonable that while I’m up here busting my ass to make you laugh, you’re texting ?”

He’s addressing the tiny lady sitting alone at a table not far from me. She has an odd, complicated tower of hair, a sort of braided cone with a red rose embedded in it.

“Is that any way to behave? I’m breaking a sweat over here, pouring my heart out, exposing my guts, disrobing—disrobing?! Stripping down from head to prostate! And you sit there sending text messages? Would you mind telling me what you were texting that is so, so urgent?”