Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

I’d have done a little better working with a waiter who didn’t have icy eyes and a face like a cliff above the North Sea, beaten by freezing winds. Larry spoke Yiddish and was fluent in the mambo, but he looked like an SS officer. Not a good way to look after World War II, especially in the Catskills, where the shadow of death, extending from millions of corpses in Europe, darkened the consciousness of surviving millions in New York.

Comedians, called tummlers, who played the Catskills were even stranger in their effects than Larry. Masters of Jewish self-mockery, they filled casino theaters with a noise never previously heard in the human universe — to my ears, anyway — the happy shrieks of unghosted yiddim. “What does not destroy me makes me stronger,” says Nietzsche. We laughed. We danced the mambo. Because we weren’t dead, we lived.

Entertainers came streaming up from the city — actors, magicians, hypnotists, jugglers, acrobats, impersonators, singers. But with or without entertainment, there was always dancing. After the dancing, we sometimes drove to a late-night Chinese restaurant called Corey’s, ate sweetand-sour spareribs, and listened to a small Latin band. Piano, bass, horn, congas, and a black-haired Latina in a tight red dress who played maracas and sang so beautifully you wanted to die at the table, lips shining with grease, cigarette forgotten, burning your fingers. She played maracas as she sang and danced, taking small steps, her shoulders level, hips subtly swaying to intimate the grandeurs and devastations of love. Pleasure was in the air, day and night.

The newly married couple, Sheila and Morris Kahn, took meals in their honeymoon suite for two days after their embarrassment. Larry said, ironically, “I don’t expect them to tip big.” I thought they had checked out of the resort and we’d never see them again, but the evening of the third day, they returned to the dining room.

Wearing a bright blue dress and high heels, Sheila looked neat, cool, and invulnerable. She took her seat, greeted everyone at the table, plucked her napkin out of the water glass, where I’d propped it up like a tall white iris, and placed it in her lap. But she didn’t make it past the soup. Larry set down her bowl. She stood up clutching the napkin and hurried away. Morris gaped after her, his ears like flames of shame, his cheeks pale. An urgent question struggled to shape his lips, then perished. The blue dress of happiness fled among the tables. Larry muttered, “I didn’t do anything,” and strode off to the kitchen to pick up the next course. I collected Sheila’s soup bowl, contents untasted, and put it out of sight.

Morris lingered through the meal. I heard him talking, in a loud, officious voice, about Hitler. “According to my sources,” said Morris, “Hitler isn’t dead.” Nobody disagreed with his sources. The flight of Sheila, the only subject, wasn’t mentioned.

Larry read one book all summer, which was about the mechanics and pathology of the human mouth. Otherwise, he was dedicated to Latin dancing and handball. He took on challengers at handball every week — lifeguards, tennis instructors, waiters, and bellhops — first — class players who often came from resorts miles away. Some referred to him as “the Nazi,” even to his face. Catskill resorts weren’t polite society, and conversation could be blunt and cruel. To call Larry a Nazi wasn’t fair, but he looked the way he looked. It had an alienating effect, despite his Yiddish, despite his being a Jew.

The hard black rubber ball, banging the backboard, sounded like gunfire as Larry annihilated challengers. I didn’t root for Larry, because he always won anyway, and I felt sorry for the others. They wanted badly to beat him, as if more than a game and a couple of dollars were at stake. He knew what they felt, men with strength and speedy reflexes who had come from miles away to beat the Nazi. He beat them week after week.

There was another great handball player, “Hairy Murray,” also known as “the maniac from Hackensack.” He worked the resort circuit as a tummler. He’d challenged Larry, and a date had been set for a game. The odds were usually around ten to one against the challenger, but against Hairy Murray there were no odds. People wanted to see these competitors in the flesh, the way people want to see horses before a race. I assumed Larry would win. He played like the God of Isaiah, an insatiable destroyer. Larry’s dancing wasn’t altogether different. He moved without a smile or the dopey rictus of ballroom professionals, his body seized by rhythms of the earth. I could live with his inhuman sublimity, and even his good looks, but I couldn’t think that I’d ever have Larry’s effect on a woman.

I felt envy, a primitive feeling. Also a sin. But go not feel it. According to Melanie Klein, envy is among the foundation stones of Brain House. Nobody is free of it. I believed envy is the chief principle of life: what one man has, another lacks. Sam is smart; hence, you are stupid. Joey is tall; hence, you are a midget. Kill Sam and Joey, you are smart and tall. Such sublogical thoughts applied also to eating. The first two bites satisfy a person’s hunger. After that comes eating, which satisfies more than hunger. Seeing hundreds of people eat three times a day in the dining room brought to mind the Yiddish expression “Eating is nothing to sneeze at,” which is no joke. Guests looked serious in the dining room, as if they had come to eat what life denied them — power, brains, beauty, love, wealth — in the form of borscht, boiled beef, chopped liver, sour cream, etc. In the bunkhouse at night, falling asleep, I saw hundreds of faces geshtupt , like chewing machines in a factory that ingests dreams.

I also saw Sheila’s light brown curly hair and her appealing face, with its pointy lips and small, sweet chin, and her nice figure, today called a “body.” Like a sculptor’s vision, it was nearly palpable, an image in my hands. I remembered her agony, too, how she stood up clutching her napkin, how she seemed transfigured, going from mere appealingness to divinity. She got to me, though she wasn’t my type, and I’d have felt nothing, maybe, if she hadn’t been deranged by Larry.

The morning after she fled the dining room, Morris Kahn arrived for breakfast alone. He carried the Times. It was to suggest that he was an intelligent man, with interests beyond personal life. He opened the Times and began to read. Larry approached like a robot waiter, wordless. Not looking up, Morris said, “Scrambled eggs.”

Larry spun away, returned with scrambled eggs.

Morris said, “These eggs are cold.”

Larry took away the eggs.

Morris said, “Fuck eggs. Bring pancakes.”

Larry quick-marched to the kitchen, reappeared with pancakes.

Morris let them get cold, then ordered more.

I stepped forward, took away cold pancakes.

Larry set down warm pancakes.

Morris read his newspaper, ate nothing. Larry’s white rayon shirt, gray with sweat, sucked his chest. Hair, pressing up against the rayon, was a dark scribble of lines.

Morris, about thirty years old, maybe ten or twelve years older than Sheila, was almost completely bald, and he had a pink, youthful, placid face that showed no anguish. He ordered pancakes five times. He wanted to make a bad scene, but, like a round-headed dog, he was hopelessly affectionate and at a loss for an appropriate violence. Larry and I sped back and forth, rolling our eyes at each other as we passed, in opposite directions, through the swinging doors of the kitchen. At last Morris was content. He rose and walked out, the Times folded under his arm, like one who has completed important business and is at leisure to amble in the sunlight.