Zachary Lazar - I Pity the Poor Immigrant

3.

Gila sent me an e-mail after two weeks. I didn’t open it at first, and when I did open it I didn’t open the attachment, the photograph of us at lunch. I could see it in miniature beneath Gila’s brief note. The note thanked me for having lunch with her and then extended an invitation to visit her sometime in Sag Harbor. I saw myself in the tiny photo, ghostlike, trying to hide my discomfort — I thought I would have hidden it better. The fact that Gila could have looked at that picture and still sent it to me was a poignant indicator of her aloneness. I’m lucky I know Hugh. I don’t have many people in my life. She had waited two weeks to thank me for a lunch she had treated me to, a lunch I had never thanked her for.

The e-mail sat unanswered, shadowing me at odd times over the next few days. I don’t know why I didn’t want to face it. I wasn’t even particularly busy. When I look back over my inbox now, I see that it took me almost three weeks to respond. I have the response here in all its vapid, agreeable insincerity:

Dear Gila,

Yes, it would be great to see you again. I have given your story and its connection to my piece about David Bellen a lot of thought. I get to the Hamptons fairly often, so I’ll drop you a line the next time I’m out. Thank you for lunch, by the way.

All best,

Hannah

And now it was my turn to face the silence of an unanswered e-mail.

When she didn’t respond — one week becoming two — I began to feel somehow insecure. Despite my e-mail’s formal politeness, I knew it exuded an obvious lack of interest, if not outright rudeness. I hadn’t trusted her, but I didn’t know exactly why. Her pursuit of me had made her seem distorted, or inappropriate. But now that Gila hadn’t responded to me, I began to think differently. It’s the way these things go. I now thought that she had the dignity to know when she was being discounted. I considered writing her again, but I put it off. By then I was actually busy with other projects. Her silence, when I thought of it, took on a haughtiness, even a hostility. Eventually, I got a phone call not from Gila but from her friend Hugh. Gila, he told me, had passed away. It turned out she had not been avoiding my e-mail for the past three months but rather dying of cancer.

4.

She’d lived on a small side street in Sag Harbor, not far from Peconic Bay. I took the train to Bridgehampton, then a cab to the address that Hugh had given me. Gila’s house had been recently painted so that its white clapboard and black shutters gleamed as if still wet. Whatever I’d expected, I had not expected the pleasant quiet of the small front yard with its weeping cherry tree, the beds of dark ivy threading upward to cover the trunks of a row of pollarded sycamores. Hugh answered the door. He was in charge of Gila’s estate, including the sale of her house. He was a large man in his early fifties, his girth draped by a boxy dress shirt, pink with white stripes, the tails out over his jeans. Expensive eyewear, a very precise haircut. He invited me back into the house and in the living room he sat down in a leather armchair and lit a cigarette, asking only afterward if I minded. He spread out his hand to indicate the immaculate neatness of the place. There were no carpets on the floor, just the richly varnished wide plank boards. Plain sheer curtains hanging from black iron rods. I took a seat on a large white sofa before a coffee table made of black wood. On it rested one book, an oversized volume called David, The King, by Ivan Schwebel, the Israeli artist, placed there almost in vengeance, it seemed, against its qualities as an ornament. Everything was clean and so pared down that the air seemed more still than ordinary air.

“This was how she liked to live,” Hugh told me.

“Spare.”

“There were seven people at the funeral. She didn’t like people very much. She was past all that, not interested in playing ball anymore.”

He leaned back in his chair. He told me then that what he had liked about Gila was “all that turmoil in her head. All that self-generated struggle. You’d give her a compliment and she’d twist it around — you were not only insulting her but patronizing her. Thinking she was too stupid to see through your flattery. I’m a surgeon. I operate on people’s spines for a living. They’re spread-eagle on an inclining table for eight, ten hours. There’s no room for error, obviously. It’s not something I can talk about with everyone. Not even my partner. It’s not something that’s interesting to him. With Gila it wasn’t that she was especially interested, but there was something we understood about each other. Something about work, I guess. I don’t know what it was.”

I asked him what she had told him about her private life.

“Not much,” he said. He made a little breathing sound, somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. I looked at his cigarettes and then he nodded and I took one.

“Everything was always this vague mystery,” he said. “There was the designer. The swimwear designer. That was a good story — I never knew if I believed it or not, but I always liked it.”

The swimwear designer, he told me, had rented Gila an apartment in Tel Aviv. It was their love nest, he said. Even after she broke up with him, the swimwear designer had kept paying the rent and utilities for some reason. He said that eventually Gila had sold the furniture and left the place sitting there empty. It was with that money, he told me, that she’d come from Israel to America.

I told him the very different version of the story that Gila had told me. I told him about the photographs of the empty apartment and about Gila’s venture to Etzel Street, a street associated with organized crime. I told him about Meyer Lansky. I told all this to Hugh and then I asked him whether he believed any of it and he shrugged, looking not at me but at the wood floor.

“Lonely people can be difficult,” he said. “When they want you around, they can be desperate to keep you there. That’s why when she wanted to meet you, I encouraged her. I thought, fine, let her make the connection if she can. She needed it. She was, to put it bluntly, dying of cancer.”

The sun outside found an opening between the clouds and it came streaming in through the window, lighting up a diagonal plane of swirling dust. I finished my cigarette and Hugh lit up another and we sat in silence for a while. I wasn’t sure I shared his skepticism about the story Gila had told me. I wasn’t sure I even believed he was giving me an accurate account of what Gila had told him. People conflate things. The “notorious” figure blurs into the “swimwear designer” when we hear a few stories and aren’t paying close attention. I thought that even if that wasn’t the case, it was still possible that Gila had soft-pedaled the story for Hugh. If she’d wanted to intrigue me, perhaps she’d just wanted to titillate Hugh. The more I thought about it, the more sense this made. The alternative story of the “swimwear designer,” the “love nest,” selling the man’s furniture with an insouciant flourish, didn’t sound like the Gila I had met for lunch, nor the Gila I had known all those years ago. It sounded more like someone trying to be lighter and breezier than she really was. Perhaps it had always been easier for Gila, even with a friend like Hugh, to make her story lighter, breezier than it really was.

5.

Throughout this time, I’d been traveling a lot for work — teaching at a university in Montana, another in Chicago — and when I returned to New York in the summer of 2011, after more than a year away, I felt less at home than before, a condition that has not changed. I began to feel invisible. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’d begin to tell a story and lose interest halfway through. Whatever I was saying seemed unimportant or false. The people I spoke to began to seem more real than I was — by real, I mean that they seemed to occupy physical space while I hovered ghostlike, evaporating. Most of my friends had moved across the river to Brooklyn years ago. Their detailed interest in all things of the current moment induced in me a kind of hypnotic inertia. I didn’t care, but I knew I needed to care. It’s fine not to care until your not caring has left you so isolated that you have to either make an effort to care or you’ll disappear entirely.