Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Now, when it comes to art, and I mean every discipline: lit, sculpture, painting, music, and theater (but only Rach liked dance, because she danced) — when it comes to any medium, I’m divided. Not between styles, between perfections. Mark my museum map with only the oldest and newest. Roll me in scrolls, volumina of vellum and parchment, papyri. But then also pile up all the new books appearing, seasonally stack the codex barrage — how else to live, without contemporaries to hate? Forget their books — I mean how to live without their bios, their autobios to peruse and hold against my own?

Beginnings to romanticize and endings to dread — I’ll take anything but the middles, all that received or established practice crap. Because the middle was where I grew up — bounded by house and garage filled with clay — a cramped colorless room filled with clayey boyhood, which my mother was bent on modeling not for greatness, but for portability and durability and versatile use. Moms’s hands that were her English, the puffy wrists behind the pads digging in, poking holes in me so I might perceive life only as she perceived it — threatening, but beautiful if I’d be careful. This was her way because from earliest age she’d been foreign to even herself, as the youngest and the only girl after six brothers, dumbsy, clumsy, inconcinnous, a dreamer, whose family fell in the snow around her, around Kraków, and who’d lived like “an extinct girl dinosaur”—meaning arousing of a hideous pity — until my father married her home.

She’d had difficulties having sex, and so difficulties getting pregnant. Her baby was late, was me. She’d told me about the drugs. Pergonal, Clomid. The barren superstitions. Don’t sit on snow or ice or rock, do bathe in water infused with moss from the walls of the shul on Szeroka Street. Dad had mentioned, only once, as he was dying, that Moms’s war had been “tough,” “hard knocks,” which was how he’d recount each tax quarter. A solo CPA after being laidoff as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he’d never applied his actuarial MS but kept it in a depositbox at the bank. Moms is a public school speech-language pathologist/audiologist, retired. Anyway, Dad’s instructions: “Help your mother out,” “Kaddish if she insists.”

Moms: what she lost in family, she gained in body.

She was dense with her dead — with Dad’s passing becoming ever more solid, ever more embonboobed, rubicund. Zaftig, not obese.

Steatopygous — which doesn’t have to be italicized, it’s already my language — all italics do is make what must be native, not. Anyway, it’s not from the Latin, but Greek. Steatopygous meaning possessed of fat buttocks, and implying fat all around, the thighs, hips, waist, a gluteal gut, even adipose knees, unfortunate but vital. That’s what Moms’s lady statuettes are technically called — steatopygi, or steatopygia. Thrombosed bulges, throbbing clots — my mother’s hindquarter was always a veiny maze, a varicose labyrinth, though not just hers: weighty were the bases of all the women in my family, my mother’s family. My grandmother, my greatgrandmother, every aunt and cousin — Holocaust fodder. Heavy Jewesses, thickly rooted Jewesses, each swinging a single pendulous braid. From Poland, the Russian Pale, that settled and mortaring mixture. Upper Paleolithic, Lower Neolithic, lower and swollen. Marbled in calcite, schist, steatite, striated with stretchmarks of red rivers, the Vistula, the Bug. They were made out of stone and many of them even had hearts of stone — not Moms, though, despite how tough Rach found her. Yes, yes, Rach — she was the hard one, the skinny, the taut, all rib and limb, a spindly wife more like a plinth, like a pediment.

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Coming out of the Met with all those gods on the brain — all those haloed faces seared into my own — it’s an adjustment to sense normally. That’s why the museum abuts the park, so that its patrons can walk in solitude—“walking in the garden in the cool of the day”—to get their glaze back.

Or — in the collecting heat of that Friday, a freak faineant warmth that unnerved me. I wasn’t myself because enriched, beyond the pecuniary. Distracted by the thought of a second self. Distracted by the thought of a second book.

I was so scattered, I’m still not sure what to write: About my back aching from where I’d slept? my head still gauzed, Pharaohnically wrapped, from when I’d been woken up? about the cut on my neck? the slit from chin’s caruncle to neck like an against the grain shaving mishap, just healing? Rach had responded to Moms’s thank you gratuitousness by throwing a bisque dish for our keys, which struck a sill and splintered all over me.

The window had broken. Rach was expecting me to replace it. I was expecting her to replace it. We both were aware of this, but only she might’ve been consciously waiting.

I was — instead — counting my bounty.

Writing mental checks, but not for windows, before I’d written a word.

I still haven’t written a word — just musings about museums, snarks about parks, observations to obelize: two frisbeeists freed from their cubicles — a professorial but perverted uncle emeritus — a Caribbean nanny strollering her employer along the reservoir. I was imposing topiary on trees, and rhymes between their branches and trunks.

I’d rather be procrastinating — I’d rather be doing anything — rather jog, rather run — than record that moment.

When I approached the bench.

When I recognized him.

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Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the characters involved, you don’t — you get all the benefits of having a relationship, with none of the mess. The fictional, the factually nonexistent, don’t leave msgs or txt. You’ll never have your own story about meeting Raskolnikov shuffling the aisles of Zabar’s, or about bumping into Werther or, more bizarrely, Bouvard and Pécuchet on line at Han’s Fruit & Vegetable — anyway, if you did bump into them, having been exiled from home yourself, like a fairytale knight errant sent out to seek not your fortune but tampons, how would you know? From their “teeth gnashing”? their “furrowed brows”? all those antique gestures? or just those antiquated translations? Forget the fictional characters — how many authors are being stopped on the street?

Another feature, but of the Victorian serial novel: They always doubled up, they repeated, reviewed, just in case the reader skipped an installment. Or was diverted by a major business decision.

I’d just made a major business decision, having contracted for a book for which I had absolutely no qualifications.

Or my only qualification was my name, the JC halfloops I stopped strolling — I stopped.

I’d just quit the presence of immemorial Basileis and marmoreal Caesares — the likenesses of infamous men who’d raped and plundered Europe and Asia as if only for my entertainment. Yet this — he — was what jarred me. This guy who’d always played the shrewn but happy hubby, the patient catchphrasey Pop. A minor B-celeb, a situational tragicomedian.

He was sensitive, but gave the impression of impersonating himself. His handsomeness was stilled, like the lines of his face were just distortion in his reception. In terms of painting: chiaroscuro cheeks, a worried craquelure mouth. In terms of sculpture: the nosetip curiously chipped, puttied cosmetically.

This cameo was atop a bench off the reservoir path, crowded by pigeons pecking at the matzah slivers he tossed. A proper picnic was spread in the grass.

I gathered myself and approached him, setting the flock to flying, a claque clapping its wings and wallaing west — like in film when directors seeking indistinct background chatter have their extras, forbidden by union rules from pronouncing anything scripted, repeat the same word at the same time but at different speeds and in different tones, walla supposedly being the most effective or just traditional choice, which happens to be an Amerindian word for “water,” as well as slang for “really?” in Hebrew and Arabic — really?