Joshua Cohen - Witz

Not that anyone’ll notice…why, there’s just too much going on, are too many people, person pressing pushing up against personality, straining to keep their manners good, their faces fixed pleasant: dressed impressed and to, their dresses swishing up against the pleat and flat of their pants, folds to tails, striped, starred, ringed, then bound with necklaces chained of bracelets. Necks low, hems high. Anything but ashamed of their naked. Here, they’re poised to point, their lips pursed to whisper within the tomblike calm of the Museum’s dark cool, amid the wellventilated, recirculated air, this spring garden, a milder jungle — to live landscaped amid such drastic swoops almost demanding of awe, the ornamentation sinuous atop the hard lines, the austere, lean geometry, the public weight scaled of fruitbasket and bird…everyone focused, on point, kept on topic: on the preservation, on memory, anticipatory of what, a holy vessel to be expertly processed, labeled for ease of digestibility (though no one’ll eat it — how could they even begin to pronounce its manyclaused bracha?); but the manners, they can’t last forever, pleasantries live only halflives, remember, these are the Affiliated we’re talking about, you know the type and so soon, talk in its most or maybe least stupefying varieties breaks out, comes echoing loudly from whisper to shout; there’s fartalk, neartalk, eyetalk, nosetalk, sidetalk in all of its multiloquent geographic manifestations: Upper Eastsidetalk, Upper Westsidetalk, Westchestertalk, Joyseytalk, the murmurings bebabbled of Greenwich on down to Red Bank…smalltalk, largetalk, tabletalk, thattalk, thistalk, overtalk, under-talk, nthtalk, xtalk — a gossip apocalypse, a pack of lips…a salivary fleck-flock, a herding of mouths — this mass kibitzing, this metakvetch, orbits of noise gathering around the assemblage, to ring, planetary gas, puffing the drapery, wilting the appletrees despite the fayg’s fervid shpritzing; guests (they’ll never forget they once had been guests) discussing weighty matters, doing deals of Creationary proportions, spying steals of Biblical scope: Numbers, Numbers 2, Numbers 3, names dropped then picked up, dusted off, returned to Sender again whether Mr. or Mrs., this is our second & final attempt…linnerplans preempted by only a sneeze, a mere cough, matches handshaked on and off and then on again as offhandedly as possible as empires plot themselves then disintegrate to dust all around them; seismographs altared upon the floor register the insistent stomping of feet, the whole mess standing, shuffling, rising, sitting, squeezing hearts’ tight on loveseats, the spinechill wombcold of low tallowtoned marble benches, blue & white slipcovered sofas rented out for a mint down, hauled in for the occasion only to wear and then, stain, they’re pressed against walls, pushed up against doors…standing high up on chairs and on tables, how they’re speechifying, offering jeremiads, ezekielisms, and isaiahtirades, exhorting from chairs stacked one on the other or set atop tables or stacked and set thereupon both, how they’re leaning up against the balcony’s railing draped blue & white, too, in the standard of the U.S. of Affiliation, show your respect.

And above it all, the klezmiros, the music: there’s a piano quintet installed on the marble loggia presently givingout a specially orchestrated version of the Kol Nidre, Opus number does it really matter, from the Yom Kipper liturgy, this string quartet loaned out from the concertmastered ranks of the New York Philharmonic following their shockhaired pianist conducting con moto with thrusts directed seatward and brutal, the rise and fall of his tush: a lilt carried upon the cellist’s vibrato, the lefthand tremolos of the piano…the music comes tenuous, energetic but nervous, shaky, as if a touch off, a mite stressed, stuffily muffled, gagged to a sour still in the throat; then, in lowing fortes and high sforzando wails, how they’re shaking, they’re rattling the bartender’s bottles at the temporary bar, just for the night, draped in the same scheme of things…waitresses drop troughs left, right through the feverish shvitz, the competing blur of talk, ganze gossip, kopdreyenish, a lashon hara from mouths round in hora; lightly moustachioed waiters, their yarmulkes must be tapeddown, glued on, ladling out cupfuls runnething over, flutes and splits of champagne, and mensching, too, the vorspeizen trays, making sure, as ordained by Shade, to give everyone the option of saying the appropriate blessing before their indulgence (placards are made available printed with the prayers in the small scribblings of two different tongues): they nibble away at their benedictions, then partake of the healthily blessed…nu, the Tongue? a fat lady shrieks, what about the Tongue, the preview, the relic, that’s what we paid for; Tongue Schmongue, says her gin-rummy partner (or that’s just what she’s been drinking), you look like sooo gorgeous, will you just look at yourself, I just can’t believe it, hiccough…a woman whose dress she’s stepping on asking then if she’s heard the one about the, is drowned out when she’s elbowed into the fountain, the one to which the it’s labeled Tigris again flows, shouldered in headfirst and so the joke that’ll distance it All, just lost, stompedupon dress ripped off in her fall, shreds of exposed flesh, scandalous to love it, that and her humiliation, too, and they do; nudged to a laugh by a middleaged urologist-to-the-stars, or that’s just his type, you’d be lucky to get an appointment while still active…lost his wife to the turmoil, she’s here somewhere, he’s sure, though if not, there’s always another, he’s just tired of looking for Her (the vest of his threepiece being buttoned up by the fast fat fingers of a wife never his and hymn, there’ve been three of them now); the woman founders, her highheels fall from her to float, her fingers to linger at fountain’s bottom for shekels loosed, which she fists to the carpet that leads beyond, and then higher…fastened down by brass over the marble to make for footfalls so unconscionably soft, in their wary and panicky stalking of hard culture and symbol — all the way up the stairs to the loggia and its overture, now beginning again without warning: who’s that cellist, anyone know? a woman making breasty headway through the muck, jostling, stepping feet with stilettos without apologizing as if she’d ever, to this waiter she knocks who’s holding a tray of drinks up over his head, how he drops it, missing her must be blessed but splintering everywhere, glistening slivers of glass, chandeliershards catching the last of the light through the windows arched overhead, sloshing slivovitz whether plum, pear, or peach schnapps, frothing remains, bubbly champagne over the carpet, out into the wide grouts between the blocks matched for vein, the marble tombslabs, the gray gravevaults, the still living scattering themselves out of the way of the jeroboams unto nebuchadnezzers’worth, this foaming lacteal puddle forming around him a frown, a reprimand that’s maternal yet firm, the waiter just standing there silent, immobilized, awaiting his punishment, the retribution we’ve paid so dearly to exact: they surround him tighter and tighter, hurl imprecations, taunts and threats, but just as quickly as that begins, everyone’s distracted again, diverted, turns, is turned all around — toward this ruach, doorward, this strangling wind, divine breath on the fresh haircut backs of their necks…and now on their faces turned, too, madeup and puffy with blemish, tannedblack or clearing though surgically cut: with the silence of speed, a swift glide, without creak, crack, or groan, we’re talking greased, maintainence oiled; the doors sweep the halves of a clockface across the mingledulled floor; the cogs to an eternal timepiece, shadows, twohanded, now one, shadow the hour, across the newly finished mosaic that rings the lobby in widening suns (though a mosaic that no one knows, in full, what it is — no one can tell, they’re standing on it, they’re of it — perhaps it’s a rendering of our incomplete Creation). This is the shutting of the doors, the Closing of the Books, the locking of the gates in the offseason, the offhoured latenight to this winter of judgment: the hinges relent, a last shaft of light gives out from the unified draft, a spotlit escape of air and dust, the wind of the weather outside staining across them…swept narrow, thinned to a kiss; and then darkness, total and only: the doors settle, the strait gate presently shuts — and yet, with them left inside.