To the Vexed, Voracious and Voluptuous

Guided Tours of Hell

2010-08-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Two weeks ago, I took part in a study tour of Auschwitz for young journalists. I am attached an album of the photos I took there (and on route in Krakow). The portfolio's title derives from a book by Francine Prose.

Open publication - Free publishing - More poland

Under the Lotus Tree

2010-07-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Thanks to my growing obsession with issuu, I present the following for your delectation and delight: an album of color photography from my 2006 trip to India with a class of masters students at the Columbia Journalism School.

Enjoy!

Open publication - Free publishing - More varanasi

Le Monde Renversé

2010-07-09T02:27:00.000-07:00

Having recently discovered the superb online publishing platform ISSUU, I submit for your delectation and delight a revised, formatted collection of the stories that have hitherto appeared on this blog. Enjoy!

Viagra Elegies

2009-01-12T08:39:00.000-08:00

This pair of poems was fashioned out of real, unedited penis enlargement emails that I discovered accumulating in the Spam folder of my Gmail account. In my humble opinion, they suggest an entirely novel and exciting direction for poetry in the 21st Century.

I.
Become perpetuum mobile of love

Turn your grass snake into a python
Make your hose’s radius great
So long and hard even when flaccid
Big and crazy huge!

This will bring fire to her crotch
Push your banger inside lady
Blow your load into her
Become her megadriller

Make her stay with your large bazooka
Postpone your love bomb’s explode

More inches in your pants – more reasons to be proud of yourself
Women will flock like bees to honey

Your new female guest
will love that you are blessed

Love her deep deep
Pump her from behind
Wham Bham Thank you Ma’am

Re: So huge I scared her

II.
Weapon used to make love

Cannot hold a candle to other men when it comes to intimate dimension?
More meat is never excessive.

The age of miracles is not past
Our new natural formula is aimed at the maximal growth of your package.

Make all your peers be jealous
About your new huge dimension!

Hottest girls will compete
To get impaled with your new huge rod!

Your newly increased pole will stimulate more receptors inside your lassie!

Give her endless nights
Of pure passion and delight

Don't you know that big size is alpha and omega of a happy romance?

Your salvation is almost there!
Flood of feelings is just a few clicks away!
Start increasing your small knob today!

Your PENIS will make more shadow
Than a tree

Lilith

2008-07-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

She was 5’6” standing in black stockings and leg warmers
All ruddy cheeks and cold feet
Breasts that heaved with confusion and longing
The velvet landscape of her belly resolving into a slender triangle

She was hungry kisses and soft piercing eyes
Long white legs oddly rooted to the red floor
Draped in my linen blazer, reluctant to leave
On her way to use the toilet

She was sensitive and flattering in my bed
Wincing at my scratches and biting oscillations
Swooning as I drew her up
In a rocking coital posture

She was mine for a thousand musical kisses
Aching suspensions and flying crescendos
The pitch-perfect violin to my scordatura viola
In Mozart’s sublime Sinfonia Concertante

She was beauty waking up at twilight
Made even lovelier by fatigue
Stubborn to bid goodbye to obfuscating night
Until our polyglot communion faded into silence

There is a burning in my ribs

The World Turned Upside Down: #114

2007-11-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

“The Axe Already Lies in the Roots”

Adam Joachim Goldmann

Bantcho Bantchevsky slept late on Saturdays. He would allow himself to rise at noon, having spent the nightlong dreaming of the opera he had seen the previous evening, and would awake, refreshed, to a morning ritual of coffee and the Arts & Leisure section of the Times.
The rarebit he usually made himself at midnight before retiring would aid the vividness of these reveries, which he considered as essential epilogues to the performances themselves. What’s more, these dreams had a corrective effect on the imperfections and kinks in the actual production, and would grant him an opportunity to experience as if anew the work in a flawless and perfectly realized incarnation. Every aspect was meticulously replicated: the most dazzling sets; the most powerful lyrical and dramatic singers.
As he rose to great the day, Batcho would relish the aesthetic experience possible only in the privacy of his unconscious. This gave him a certain degree of pride. He felt that few, if any, of the countless opera-lovers he knew were capable of such sheer, unadulterated artistic enjoyment. This is not to say that he often felt the performances he did attend almost ritualistically (had for the past 30 years been attending almost nightly) in any major way deficient. He knew well the opera houses of Europe from his travels before the war and had known all the great European singers of the day, many intimately. As much as he admired the artistry and integrity of the European tradition, he found himself at odds with the direction in which European opera had run in the wake of the Second World War. As much, his greatest admiration was reserved for the Met, and their unparalleled roster of talent, the sheer enormity of their stage and the delirious and unmatched spectacle they brought to him nightly.
Yet even these could not begin to compete with the nocturnal imaginings he experienced once he returned home, ate his rarebit and laid his head down on his feather pillow, his one material extravagance. He would then become the supreme artistic and musical director of the only opera house he praised and lauded without reservation, the one inside his own head. There the great singers of the past sang their roles with technical and expressive perfection. There one never had to worry about uneven tempi or overpowering brass: about awkward scenery or stiff acting. Every element was as it should be, the platonic ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
He knew that he would never die in his own bed, the theater of his grand operatic imagination. Though a widower and a private singing teacher, Bantcho was very much a public personality. And even if he hadn’t found the theatrical success that he’d expected to when he arrived in New York 35 years ago, he had still managed to hang out with the right crowd, the fashionable set of the New York classical music scene. Over the years he had secured invitations to parties, receptions and cocktail hours at some of the city’s most exclusive nightclubs, and had hobnobbed with Bernstein and Domingo (he kept a framed picture of himself and Domingo in his bathroom). He had lost precious little of his charm through the years. At 80, he was still as charismatic as when he’d arrived some 30 years ago, shortly after the war, those perhaps not so much as in his great performing days before the war.
Yes, he had hoped that New York would have been more willing to employ his talent. But he had arrived in the mid-1950s, a middle-aged man with a thick accent, no longer the youthful charlatan who had taken Sofia by storm a quarter century earlier. He knew well that he was charismatic, but he had not altogether succeeded in turning this talent into a sellable commodity. Still, he was loved and respected by his few pupils, friends at the opera who furnished him with free tickets and passes, and the four adorable grandchildren who wrote to him constantly from Bulgaria. All in all, he had few regrets and regarded his life as having been a triumph of some sort.
Up until a couple of years ago, Bantcho had been a perennial figure on the opera scene, which included performances and after parties. Wherever he went, he would regale those around him, becoming the focus of the party as he sang an aria or performed a Cossack dance. The unsupressable life of the party, he was forever devising new and ever-more-impressive party tricks. One day soon, he felt, he would unveil the party trick to end all party tricks.
But all that had changed abruptly two years ago, after Bantcho had suffered a minor stroke. The stroke caused little visible lasting damage. Out of embarrassment, he had kept the incident from his family and closest friends. Still, those closest to him noticed a dramatic change in his usually gay and exuberant demeanor. At 80, Bantcho was more seldom seen at the opera. His pupils felt that he was taking less interest in their affairs and treating the lessons in more business-like fashion. About half his students left him and Bantcho found himself with more and more free time on his hands. Then, two years later, around New Year’s 1988, he was gripped by a minor heart attack and spent about a week in hospital. After a long, healthy life, thought Bantcho, these ailments were more than fair.
Bantcho had been back from the hospital for about two weeks now. He hadn’t the energy or endurance return to the opera, where he was certain he was missed. His friend Luben had had helped Bantcho check out early of the Doctor’s Hospital, where Bantcho was dying of boredom. Since then, Luben rang several times a week. He had even offered Bantcho a ticket to the previous evening’s performance of Tristan, but Bantcho knew that his heart was not up to six hours of Wagnerian music drama (it could scarcely handle the three-minute walk to Lincoln Center).
Instead, he stayed at home and listened to the first two acts on a compact disc that he had recently received as a convalescence present. He slid the shiny discs into the new compact disc player that his daughter had mailed from Sofia for Christmas. Bantcho still preferred the wet sound of his old LPs and couldn’t quite get used to this new technology. Since his operation, however, he hadn’t the patience to fuss about with his poorly organized vinyl collection and his antique equipment. The compact disc player was so easy to use and its sound was a vast improvement over the audiotapes he sometimes listened to as he walked along the river during his very sporadic exercises.
He lay in bed that Friday night listening to Tristan and thought that hearing Jon Vickers and Brigit Nilsson not too poor a substitute for what he was missing at the Met. He dozed off somewhere into the second disc. When he awoke at 6am, the sun was not yet up and he had the unpleasant feeling that there was unfinished business to take care of. His dreams had been lacking. The closure that he was unable to find in real life had eluded him even in the dream state.
He awoke with the bitter recognition that he had failed himself, made melancholy by the unfulfilled dream of the night before. Though it was still early, he knew very well what he had to do. He went over to the bookshelf and removed the third compact disc from its case, slipped it into the player and turned the volume on full and crawled back into bed, hoping to recapture the sweet fulfillment that had been cruelly denied him by his physical ailments.
He knew that the music was blaring, but from his 26th floor apartment, it wouldn’t be bothering anybody except for his next-door neighbor Braulia, who, besides, was used to the noise from his pupils.
Isolde’s Liebestod concluded. He was in pain and cold not sleep. By now, the sun was on the rise, and Bantcho looked into the distance wistfully, full of admiration for the river view he so cherished. He rose to snatch the Times off his doormat, which read “Opera Fan.” The doctors had advised him to give up coffee entirely and he had laughed at such a preposterous suggestion.
He sat at the kitchen table and scanned page one. Then, as was his custom, he turned immediately to the obituary page, in part to make certain he didn’t see his name in print. More and more these days, he would open up the paper to be greeted with images of old friends and acquaintances from days gone by. Why, just a week ago he had read of the death of one of earliest friends, a minor British actress Lynn Callow, whose sexually-charged performances at the Old Vic had caused a minor-scandal in the 1920s. There was nothing that uncommon or remarkable about this natural death of a forgotten matinee idol, and the obit would have escaped Bantcho’s detection completely, had not Lynn played a sizable role in his aesthetic education.
Bantcho had gotten to know Lynn and her husband – an American industrialist whose name he couldn’t place – while they were honeymooning in Venice. The adolescent Bantcho was drifting about post-war Italy with his mother, searching for remains of her family and quite accidentally accumulating musical knowledge wherever he went.
His mother had deposited in Venice for a week on his own while she traveled on to Milan for some private and delicate business. At the age of 13, Bantcho was surprisingly independent and a shrewd judge of character. He used his charm to his advantage, making friends wherever he went and entertaining people with a song.
Lynn had seen him performing a Cossack dance along the Rialto one day and had taken a maternal interest in him. One evening, as she was exiting her hotel, Lynn found Bantcho seated by the edge of the water and invited him to join them at La Fenice that evening. Bantcho put on his finery and met Lynn and her husband in front of the opera house, where they were seeing Verdi’s Macbeth. Even at his early age, Bantcho could tell that such a worldly, young and beautiful wife did not belong with such an elderly, distinguished gentleman.
They sat in a box balcony center. Although this was his first experience with opera, Batcho knew that such luxury and extravagance must come with a hefty price tag. He remembered feeling very pampered and even uncomfortable about all the finery that surrounded him and with which these people aesthetcized and enriched their lives. Yet there was a seductive force to the whole affair that he had never before experienced, which both terrified and excited him. The drama, the tragedy, the music all came together in this atmosphere pregnant with elegance and ushered him into a world that he felt he simply had to gain access to or die, doomed to wander the earth deprived of its majesty.
At intermission, while Lynn husband stepped outside for a drink, Lynn and Bantcho remained inside the box talking. Bantcho was captivated by this enchanting creature. He must have amused her greatly, either by telling a joke or butchering the English language, for Lynn rather suddenly gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. He realized later that she must have meant in as a purely maternal gesture – he was in fact so young – but at the time, the contact of those soft, English lips against his untouched face was so overwhelming, so undeniably sensual, that he felt all the sudden dizzy and soon, his body was threatening to tip. Lynn had to grab him by his coattails to prevent him from hitting the banister or from a greater disaster.
That whole week long, Bantcho felt like the spoiled nephew or relations who rarely visited, but always did everything in style.
The Times ran a small obit a few days after Lynn died. Banthco recognized the old headshot that ran with the piece. He learnt that Lynn’s first husband had died quite suddenly in the early 1920s, just when his wife’s theatrical career was taking off. Though Lynn continued to haunt the London stage for the next thirty years, a conservative choice of reparatory and a hasty retirement ensured that her name was erased from public consciousness. Indeed, Bantcho was surprised both that she had lived so long and that the Times had thought her worthy of memorializing.
Bantcho made himself coffee and peeled apart the hefty paper section by section. There were maybe a dozen or so items of interest in the Arts and Leisure, but Bantcho had a difficult time focusing on even one for enough time to read more that the lead. This inability to concentrate was perhaps the single more detrimental aftereffect of his operation. In times past, he adored watching the PBS Great Performances broadcast from the Met. Now, however, he had enormous difficulty keeping his gaze focused on his 18-inch screen, even for a single aria. The only sections of the paper that he could digest were the color inserts. And so, Bantcho disinterestedly flipped through the advertisements for instant coffee, cereals and collector’s stamps.

At 10am, Bantcho began to get ready for the matinee performance of Verdi’s Macbeth. After a short bath, he shaved carefully for the first time that week. He removed a suit from his closet and unzipped the protective plastic around it. He draped it over his bed and inspected it looking for creases and other offenses. Finding none, he proceeded to dress. From his top drawer, he selected a gold silk bowtie. He wanted to look his finest for today: his first day back at the opera.
At 11:30, Braulia Serano received a knock on her door. She opened to find Bantcho, who looked primmer and more elegant than she could remember seeing him in some time. “Good morning, Madame,” he bowed courteously to the elderly lady. Braulia responded with a “Good Morning, maestro,” and held the door as he came inside. Bantcho asked the old women if she could possibly fix him some lunch. He had been in the hospital so recently and hadn’t gone grocery shopping in some time.
Braulia was excited by this unexpected visitation and hurried off to the kitchen to comply with her neighbor’s request. She returned shortly with some pasta and soup and joined him at the table. Batcho ate the food hurriedly but respectfully. He gave his belly a pat to show that he was satisfied. “You know, Madame,” he began, “I ought to marry you someday.” Braulia let out a high-pitched squeal. “Why, maestro, after 14 years of living next door to each other, what suddenly changed your mind?” Bantcho sat with the lazy expression of a man digesting his food and shrugged.
Bantcho had risen from his seat and was walking towards the door. He regretted that he did not have anything with which to repay his neighbor’’s kindness. Instead, he asked if he might sing her a song. Braulia had accepted this form of recompense on many past occasions and saw no reason to object now. She became an attentive audience as he sang “Nessum Dorma” in a voice that was hoarse, but undeniably full of feeling.
Braulia clapped enthusiastically and called after him to drop by that evening for dinner. “Thanks very much, Madame, for the invitation, but I am otherwise engaged. You see, Madame, I plan to die today.” Braulia had never shared a morbid sense of humor and hearing these words from one who had recently been so sick filled her with horror. She scolded him and told him not to talk of such things. “That’s a terrible thing for anyone to say, but especially you. You are so fond of life, Maestro. Go home, pull up your shades and think of happier times.”
Bantcho thanked his neighbor for the encouragement. She said goodbye to him and waited by the door as Bantcho walked down the hall toward the elevators. From her vantage point, she could see Bantcho clutch melodramatically at his heart (he had a great sense of theater) and mutter, “Oh! This is going to kill me.”

Bantcho didn’t usually sit in the upper balcony. He knew enough people at the opera who furnished him with seats in the orchestra. He reckoned, though, that he would feel bad accepting a complimentary ticket to this particular performance. It was the one and only time in his life that he felt the absolute necessity of paying his own way.
His one regret was that it should be such a lackluster performance. What a bad stroke of luck. During the past few weeks, many of the stars of the production had dropped out and all sorts of backstage drama and intrigue that usually remained hidden from the public had become widely, almost embarrassingly, publicized. In truth, Bantcho did not mind not seeing the originally-billed singers. But the entire first act was filled with a palpable atmosphere of failure. Everything from the chorus to the ballet to the sets seemed too thoughtlessly deployed to possibly enhance the performance in any way. Though none of his friends would have ever suspected it of him, Bantcho actually made loud noises of disapproval during the opening scenes. Those around him told him to keep quiet and let them enjoy the opera. Bantcho was offended that others could tolerate, much less enjoy, such a travesty. Bantcho knew this couldn’t be the same work that had made him fall in love with opera when he was 13.
At 3:25, the lights came up for the second intermission. Bantcho remained in the balcony while most of the audience around him filed out for drinks or the restroom. He looked about him and saw that he was pretty much alone up in the balcony. Now’s the time, he thought as he got up from his seat and walked to the balcony railing. The drop seemed far more dramatic that he had expected it to be looking up from the orchestra and Bantcho wondered if he shouldn’t have chosen a seat in the Grand Tier. He sat down on the railing and firmly gripped the brass bars to his sides. He felt himself gently begin to sway and closed his eyes. An usher called out from the back of the section for him to get off the railing. Bantcho opened his eyes slightly and squinted at the usher who approached with determined gait. For a moment, Bantcho froze and felt certain that the usher had torn him away from the rail. At 3:30, he let out a sigh of relief and dipped backwards, loosening his grip finger-by-finger from the bars.
The descent was quicker than he had anticipated and more painful. He hadn’t considered, for one, that the momentum from tipping backwards would cause him to flip over several times in the air. He had always been slightly anemic and all this somersaulting made him incredibly dizzy. He hadn’t expected, either, to hit his skull against the Grand Tier railing. When he finally reached the ground after covering a distance of 80 feet in an astonishing 2.2 seconds, part of a broken seat fell on top of him. He lay face-up in the left orchestra aisle, around row Y. The impact of the landing snapped his spine, while few of his ribs cracked under the weight of the broken seat. Bantcho had been knocked out almost immediately, when his head crashed into the brass railing.
Now, he lay sprawled out on the red velvet carpet, blood issuing from his head, mouth and nose. He was blind and deaf to the screams and chaos that his spectacular plunge had caused among those who had remained in the theater.

Luben was sitting in the living room after lunch with his wife listening to the radio broadcast of the matinee performance. They interrupted the intermission opera trivia to bring a report about a man who had just leapt from the upper balcony. There would be a slight delay until the third act. The opera trivia resumed, and the announcers kept stalling for time. Luben waited for more information about the man who had jumped, but was more impatient for them to get back to the opera. After an extra hour of opera trivia, the managing director came on the air to say that the rest of the afternoon’s performance had been cancelled, owning to an unfortunate incident. Disappointed and irritated, Luben switched off the radio and shuffled over to his record collection to decide what next to listen to.

The World Turned Upside Down Part 13: The Blockdragger

2007-04-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

Adam Joachim Goldmann

Proverb no. 13 - He who drags the block is an individual unhappy in love: who loves but is unloved in return.

We see a solitary figure in red stocking, a cap and black shoes dragging a wooden stool to the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.

A few hours and the horrid year would be over. Gustav, of course, knew that no magical transformation would accompany the ringing of bells from Martinskirche. Still, he fooled himself into thinking that this arbitrary marker of time not only symbolized, but could in fact, accelerate his long-hoped-for departure. He had, for some time, felt as if a movement in the symphony of his life were drawing slowly to a close. Now, he was sure that the mere act of scribbling “1896” at the top of his letter to Johanna the next morning would bring him appreciably closer to leaving Kassel. He still had no fixed destination; Leipzig and Prague attracted him greatly (although both his applications were pending.) He was certain of returning in time to Vienna: but that goal was a long way off. He could reach the imperial capital – the only place where he felt a sense of home – only after much wandering.
In the coach, he glanced over the letter that had been brought to him during the afternoon’s rehearsal. He knew immediately from the neat and ornamented chirography that it was in Frau Neumann’s hand. “Herr Mahler,” it began. Even on the page, that form of address coming from her rang false. It was a silly precaution that came from a woman who lived in fear of her husband’s jealousy. The contents of the letter were chaste and proper, without a hint of intrigue. “Enjoyed greatly your Freischütz of Thursday last...expecting great things from Robert le diable (although, don’t you feel that Meyerbeer gets dull after a while)…the critic from the Kasseler Zeitung (a friend of Herr Neumann’s) was over last night and said he hoped your contact would be renewed…Warm wishes for the new year.”
The coach stopped and Gustav folded the letter up. He was about to stuff it back when he noticed a hastily written Nachscrift on the reverse side. The light was bad and he had to squint through his glasses to make the message out. “Won’t you come over one of these days and tell me about Fraulein Richter, who I hear is your latest découvertement. Who knows, you may yet raise her talent up to the level of her beauty.”
Gustav became aware of a chill pervading the carriage and saw that the coachman held open his door. He heard the clamor of people on the sidewalk on the way to festivities. He waited in the coach until they passed, pressing his hands against his temples, which suddenly ached from the chatter of passers-by. Gustav was irked that his secret had come into Frau Neumann’s hands. Kassel ladies were not such great gossips as the Viennese, whose salons – the most fashionable ones especially – were rumor mills that saw the birth of a dozen new scandals nightly. In Kassel, people tended to mind their own business: a fact that made Frau Neumann’s discovery a greater source of confusion and concern. Gustav wondered how much she knew. He reckoned that she had started with little concrete knowledge and had guessed the rest. Perhaps he had even aided her in the discovery: inadvertently providing valuable clues by dint of telltale variations in his recent behavior. The affair with Johanna was still fresh enough to pique the world’s sensual consciousness. These past few weeks, it had been as if Gustav were wearing a new pair of spectacles and had, furthermore, been hearing the sounds of nature with heightened pitch and frequency. Perhaps Frau Neumann noticed this sudden youthful flush in him and knew instinctively that she could not be its cause. Slowly he began to feel the unforgiving winter seep into his heart. Springtime had taken up residence without attracting attention. But now the secret was out, and breach of confidence meant immediate expulsion. The thought sent a chill through him and filled him with incredible sorrow. Gustav was helpless to prevent the spring’s banishment: he knew that he would soon follow it into further exile. The current station of his endless wanderings became cold and black as the grave.
The driver had been holding the door open for some minutes now. Gustav felt embarrassed for keeping the man waiting in the cold that met him as he stepped out of the carriage. He tipped the driver handsomely and navigated the now-empty street to Johanna’s building, which stood on the other side of the street. The poisonous letter was still in his grip, clutched firmly between his thumb and forefinger. Standing under the awning, he tore at the note repeatedly, savoring the friction of severed fibers and the quick, whip-like music his violence produced. He released the shards of paper into his coat-pocket and walked up to the first landing.
The maid opened. “Welcome Herr Mahler. Fraulein Richter’s been expecting you.” She took his coat and he entered through the narrow foyer of the modest yet elegant apartment. Johanna stood by the piano and gripped his hands warmly as he entered. Gustav found her discretion ridiculously over-cautious and irritating. He knew that she wouldn’t so much as kiss him until the maid retired. But today, all these precautions assumed a new level of absurdity in light of Frau Neumann’s letter. Indeed, what did he and Johanna have left to hide?
They had some coffee and moved to the piano, where, at Johanna’s request, Gustav played for her the only original composition he’d found time to work on of late: incidental music to “Der Trompeter von Sackingen.” It was a commission from the Kassel Theater to accompany tableaux vivants based on Scheffel’s verses. Gustav had never understood Scheffel’s popularity: the poems could make him cringe visibly. A consequence of this being that Gustav could only devise mediocre music to match mediocre verses. Johanna was a patient and admiring audience, and when Gustav had reached the end of the piece, gave him an enthusiastic ovation. Gustav had secretly hoped to hear a mild rebuke or criticism, rather than this wholesale approval. He mistrusted her approbation; it struck him as more sycophantic than naïve or uninformed. Then again, had she said a few words against the composition, he knew full well he was liable to reproach her. Equally incapable of responding well to either compliment or criticism, Gustav regretted even playing it for her. It must have been a shocking lack of judgment that had made him perform the mediocre work as if it were a source of great pride and accomplishment to himself. Johanna couldn’t have known that projects like this constituted a large part of what Gustav considered wretched about his current state-of-affairs and, consequently, compelled him to flee Kassel at the first opportunity that presented itself.
Afterwards, Johanna joined Gustav by the piano as he accompanied her in Schumann’s Dichterliebe, which she’d been working on with her voice instructor. Gustav knew the works by heart and played by rote as he fixed his attention on her voice. It was not, as some had suggested, an ugly voice. If it couldn’t decide whether to be lyric or dramatic, then perhaps that ambiguity was what made the timbre unique. Her East Prussian accent, itself a thing melodic and mobile, surely enhanced the voice’s attraction. She might never be a great Prima Donna, thought Gustav, but her instrument was more than sufficient, and her looks would guarantee her steady employment.
Johanna sang with a great deal of emotion, often at the expense of accuracy. Often, he sensed that she was far away from him, summoning up a buried memory in which he shared not the slightest part or else making a great effort to resist such emotions. He sensed urgency and loss to her voice, but it was uneven, hesitant, unconvincing. She was still remarkably young, perhaps too inexperienced to grasp either Heine or Schumann’s Hertzschmerzen. At the end, Johanna seemed drained: but whether this came from physical exhaustion or emotional devastation, Gustav couldn’t determine. “That was well sung, but I missed the weeping in the soft, low notes. On the whole – and this can be applied generally to much of your repertoire – the athleticism of your performance style seems to come into conflict with, or at least obscures to an extent, some of the music’s more sensitive and lyric properties.”
Little did Gustav expect this speech to escape his lips. On the whole, he was somewhat surprised to find himself giving a singing lesson on New Year’s Eve. If these articulations were unpremeditated, the thoughts behind them were not altogether spontaneous. Johanna didn’t respond immediately and this worried Gustav a little. He didn’t mean to do the girl any offense. The lover in him wanted to protect her from all the world’s vicissitudes and cruel judgments, but he could not altogether suppress his professional opinion. It would be unfair of her to fault him for that.
At length, she lifted her eyes to his and thanked him coldly for his advice. Gustav could tell that she was irritated with him, although he felt confident that he could set things right without too much difficulty. It was nearly midnight and Gustav offered to retrieve the Sekt from the icebox. He popped it open. There was smell of champagne in the air, a scent which had in the past filled Johanna’s heart with delight. He turned her way and tried to discern how the bouquet affected Johanna’s demeanor. But she seemed to care little for the sweet fragrance or pleasant fizzing noise. Gustav handed her a glass and proposed a toast: “Here’s to your voice and my music. May they both improve with age like a good wine.” Johanna let out a soft giggle and Gustav surmised that he had won a small victory. He moved in to kiss her, but she withdrew strangely, if only for an instant. The next thing he knew, Johanna had run into his arms and was nuzzling her body against his. His fears had been unfounded. She loved him still – anyone could see that. They slithered down to the couch together, and she gently lay her head on his shoulder. At first the situation seemed magical. The air was completely still and the room radiated with the soft glow of kerosene lamps. They shared a silence that was more powerful than the most rapturous music. Gustav was aware of the scene and its intensity, as something worthy of Tristan und Isolde.
But Gustav soon felt the enchantment wear off and the profound ineffability mutating into a banal failure to communicate. Gustav and Johanna passed the first minutes of the New Year in a strange way. They sat side by side, almost in silence, awaiting the arrival the stroke of midnight. He tried to engage her in conversation, but her thoughts were far away. When the bells rang out from Martinskirche, tears came to her eyes. The bells, which carried for him the promise of future happiness, were for Johanna only the harbingers of parting and grief. Her tears moved him intensely and he wished that he could comfort her without making false promises. And so he chose to ignore her tears, sitting still on the sofa with the tragic understanding that he could not dry them.

He adjusted his pince-nez as Johanna went into the next room. Here she stood silently near the window for a moment to watch the descent of insubstantial snowflakes. When she returned, weeping in silence, an unspeakable sorrow stood between them like an eternal barrier. Slowly, haltingly, she began: “I had communication from a certain Frau Neumann today…” She broke off. Gustav had tried to avoid this. Now he thought perhaps it would make his departure easier for the both of them.
There was no point in being evasive. Although he had means at his disposal to quell Johanna’s fears and reassure her, he saw that, in the long run, these tactics had little value. He let it all come out. Let Johanna think of him what she would, he could mask the simple facts no longer. “Frau Neumann is a society woman, very wealthy and well-connected. When I arrived in Kassel, she made my move very pleasant, found me suitable lodgings. I was frequently a guest at her table and discussed all matters of politics and particularly the Judenfrage – with her husband, an attorney for the state. As I mentioned, she was exceedingly kind to me and moreover rather handsome. At her instigation, I agreed, without much romantic feeling on my behalf, to take her as a lover. It’s been going on for these part two years and I surmise that she only recently discovered that there was something between us. I further gather that the letter to which you just made reference contains a version of the tale I just told you. I take your silence as an affirmation. And so you see, I have absolutely nothing to hide from you. You are free to decide for yourself whether my behavior was decent or not. But for what it’s worth, I would have you know that I never cared for Frau Neumann. You have every right to disbelieve me, but I would be made a very unhappy man were you to take these unfortunate circumstances as evidence that I have been deceitful and unfair. With that, I bid you a good night.” Gustav was not used to making such confessions. He felt that words had cheated and betrayed him. Music was a safe and abstract mode of expression, much closer in fact to the way people thought and felt about things. Words were treacherous and concrete; they betrayed and distorted his sentiments by assigning rigid meaning to his confused, jumbled-up impressions. He descended and hastily entered his coach without a backwards glance.
When he reached his own doorway, the bells rang and a solemn chorale sounded from the top of the tower. The echoing tones united the pair in the windless night, if only for a few minutes. It was as if the Great Stage-Master of the Universe wanted everything arranged by the rule of art. For a brief moment, the world seemed beautiful and splendid again. A ditty whirled about in Gustav’s head, a tune almost comical in its folk-like simplicity. He longed to grasp it, but it kept evading him.
He sat down at his composing desk, pen poised to catch the melody should it come his way again. He had been for some time hoping to fit to music some poems he had written for Johanna. She did not know them and he hesitated to show her the verses. Issues of artistry aside (he fancied himself no great poet, but no impoverished one either), he knew that for all that they expressed, they could not capture a tiny part of his tumultuous emotions. Again he found that words betrayed him: the meaning of his verses would only be revealed once he had captured the music latent in his poetry. Tonight, however, he knew better than to hope to retrieve the music that evaded him on his journey home. He closed the music score and went to bed. He lay awake agitated and defiant, yet spent the whole night weeping in his dream. There he met a sphinx. It gazed at him silently with its gray eyes and threatened him by setting riddles that must be solved on pain of death.
The next morning Gustav resolved to give up his post and to leave Kassel. He had forgiven Johanna everything, sacrificing his pride and egoism. She was everything that is lovable in this world, and he was willing to give his last drop of blood for her, if only she could understand and forgive him. Day by day, the city felt more and more like a prison and Gustav readied himself everyday to throw off his chains. He lived like a Hottentot and would not exchange one sensible word with anyone. The Kasselers were such terrible blockheads, thought Gustav, that he would prefer to converse with a Viennese cabdriver. He was still given credit for his musical abilities. When it came to light, however, that Gustav was seeking employment elsewhere, his position vis-à-vis the chorus and orchestra was greatly crippled. In addition, there were accusations of his musical promiscuity. He was working on arranging a music festival and at the same time secretly running here and there to rehearse other choruses on the side, for he was often penny-less.
In the coming weeks, he drafted many letters to Johanna, which he had not the courage to post. Sometimes, he caught a glimpse of her as she glided through the theater on the way to rehearsals, but he never dared as much address her. Gustav felt certain that Johanna had resolved to give him up. He blamed the abandonment squarely on Frau Neumann, to whom he sent a vicious letter threatening to expose the whole intrigue between them if ever she was to try and contact him again. Oddly, though he felt cheated by both women, Gustav was glad to be left alone. It gave him more time to devote to his own work. At present, there were only the poems he had written Johanna: these about the wanderings of a man who has found only sadness in love. Her total absence from his life became an unlikely source of solace and creation. A casual mention of her name could make his cheeks glow red with anger, almost to the point of siding with the Kassel critics who opined that she was unfit to sing the state anthem, but those sentiments did not interfere as he sat at his piano, experimenting with different musical styles and motifs. When it as time, however, to push composition to the side and go on with his professional duties, the anger at his current predicament returned and he burned with desire to make a fresh start elsewhere.
Soon destiny smiled upon him, without making him the slightest bit happier. He was granted an appointment as head conductor in Leipzig. Though he had worked a great deal on his own compositions, they would need to remain in his drawers at present. In Leipzig he might find the possibility and the chance to perform these works. This new prospect drove him to finish his song cycle, but he struggled immensely with the final song. His sphinx had not stopped staring at him with menacing questions. Nocturnal voices whispered tempting and deceiving things. When he woke, the peal of her silvery laughter was still in his ears and he wished never to open his eyes again.
As the various threads of his life – his work at the Kassel Theater, his arguments with the management – became increasingly tangled, Gustav felt suffocated, when unexpectedly his Johanna returned to him. She had sent a long and impassioned letter, where she apologized (in her own artless writing style) for her own cruelty and forgave him. He assumed that their relations were entering on a new and final phase, but this turned out to be the trick of a skillful theater director announcing a Final Performance, who then – the next day – puts up the announcement of a Last Performance.
It was with some trepidation the Gustav gave her the music for the first three songs in his cycle, which were given their premiere in Johanna’s modest quarters, amid the din of midday traffic. At the conclusion of the performance, Gustav felt something that approximated closure. However, that Last Performance was in fact followed, several days later, by a Very Last One – again in Johanna’s abode. As only three weeks separated him even now from that eternal farewell, it was not probable that at popular request, that the Stage Master of the Universe would arrange an Ultimate and Last of All Performance.
With the coming of the spring, he was calm again. From his window he saw the town, the mountains, the woods, ad the friendly river Fulda, running peacefully through the landscape. When the sunlight played on all this, he became relaxed again. That is what he felt one day while sitting at his table near the window, as the swirling melodies danced in his imagination, struggling to wrap themselves around his verses. From time to time he glanced serenely at the tranquil abodes outside his window: somewhat longingly, but also with the conviction considering that he was above such conventional happiness. He sat late into the evening, composing and revising. No distinct sounds could reach him except now and then that of the bell that reminded him that people belong together.
He gave orders not to be disturbed and set to work on sketching the final song. A faint march echoed in his ears, a dirge-like melody and expansive silences. Moments of transformation provided temporary solace and he drifted out of consciousness.
Out of the darkness, Johanna’s two blue eyes appeared to bid him farewell. Gustav journeyed on through the still night: love and grief his only companions. He wandered and wandered, the eternal exile, and embraced sweet sleep beneath a linden tree. In his dream within a dream, he hit upon a note of serene resignation, something like peace.
But he soon awoke with a start to find himself back at the composing desk. He was completely shattered, his heart bleeding from many wounds. He felt that he had been close to sweetest fulfillment, only to lose everything at one stroke; no one was to blame. For a long time, he didn’t know what to do. He had only one gloomy desire: to sleep without dreaming.

The World Turned Upside Down Part 94: The Blue Coat

2007-03-20T02:16:00.000-07:00

The following story is part of a larger collection and should be regarded as a work in progress

Adam Joachim Goldmann

Proverb no. 94 – “Any women who gladly accepts offers here and there must hang the blue cloak on her husband.”

(We see a younger woman in a red gown drape a turquoise cape over an elderly man. Her eyes are downcast, her expression stern. He is hunched over, looking away, and clutches at a wooden cane. )

Everett McCay was known as the toughest Yankee businessman this side of the Atlantic. But, he had not entirely withstood the lure of culture and tradition during his long period of self-imposed exile, both in Britain and on the continent. Foremost among these effects was the deep love that he harbored for the European stage. He could be found most nights at one of the many playhouses that were scattered along the West End. He considered his tastes neither conservative nor modern: merely refined. As such he would not have them pigeonholed and resented the canonizing tendencies of certain theatrical societies. He was especially fond of Chekhov, Strindberg and Ibsen, but not – as was fashionable at the time among certain coxcombical critics - to the expense of Shaw and Wilde, and certainly not of the Bard himself. Still, he surprised not a few of his friends when, in his 60th year, the perennial bachelor determined to give his patronage in the form of nuptials. The lady in question was a gifted actress attached to an artistically progressive and modern troupe that McCay suspected of harboring socialist allegiances. She had recently started her career, but was such a presence, that even in the bit roles, which she was given, she managed to steal the performance away from her more established costars. She was still in the first flush of youth and her talent and beauty commingled to mesmerize and enchant audiences. Everett, who knew well the dangers of speculating, was certain that she was destined for great things. Otherwise, why would he have made it his business to support her fledgling career? He had, in the past placed his money on all sorts of ventures, gold digging in the Yukon and diamond harvesting in Africa. The days of great adventure and activity were behind him. Since the war broke out, he had confined himself to less daring enterprises, such as importing American cotton and wool to the allied countries. War was good for business, even if dealing in fabrics and dealing in jewelry were not equally profitable. And though he had, of late, parted with more capital that was his wont, he still had more than a little to gamble on an ingénue.
An old business associate who knew of McCay’s love for the theater had recommended the small theater and it’s troupe, which called itself the Laughing Cock. McCay had neglected to find the small stage near Charing Cross, where nightly a small band of actors, lead by their French director Pierre Jalousie night-after-night brought to life intriguing entertainments in innovative and inventive productions. McCay instead found himself at a fundraiser dinner for the Laughing Cock. McCay, though unused to the relative frugality and squalor of the theater, with its modest dimensions, seemed untroubled by the lack of ornament and formality. The table was set upon the stage and McCay found that he shared company with some wealthy eccentrics – attired as elegantly as he - who bankrolled the theatres and made its patronage their business, and the varied members of the troupe, who ranged in age from fourteen to fifty seven.
At dinner, he sat next to one of the troupe’s most recent additions and youngest members, Lynn Callow, a self-possessed Manchesterian. Quite without realizing it, the girl worked her charms on the aging businessman, who had recently been prone to meditating on mortality and had been more and more in want of steady companionship. As far as Lynn could tell, that first meeting was unmarked by anything out of the ordinary. And little would either party at the time have suspected what would come of that chance meeting three short months later.
Everett was initially taken with Lynn’s feminine Britishness: the deep flush on her pallid cheeks; her musky and commanding voice; her heightened politesse (almost to the point of affectation). For her part, Lynn was impressed by the dapper old man’s hawk-like eyes and his equally cunning knowledge of the theater. Lynn left by telling Everett to stop by the theater to catch her in the latest diversion of some foppish Frenchman which would to go up later that month. Indeed, our dear McCay made good on his promise and secured a place in the second row, where he could admire his ingénue, not once, but on four separate evenings. On each of these, he was arrayed in the antiquated manner of a generation ago, for Everett had no wish to ape youthful fashions. He also brought with him a bouquet for the ravishing comedienne, who, as he watched enraptured from the third row, brought to mind the Sarah Bernhard he knew from his career as a young man.
After the performance, Lynn would receive him cordially in her dressing room. She could tell that the squalor and disarray of the room, which so displeased her, worked a kind of magic on her aging admirer. He would lean against the heating pole and look around with childish wonder at the costumes hanging awkwardly from a half-broken rack, or at the basket of rhinestones and tangled junk jewelry in the corner. His eyes would drift to her dressing table, whereupon lay tubs of cheap theatrical makeup. McCay fixed his gaze on these accoutrements and beauty-enhancers: this stock-and-trade of all theatrical enterprises. She let him be present as she washed her false face away. Especially, after witnessing her onstage transformation, these ablutions took on an unreal quality. Even after several times witnessing them, McCay still had a tough time determining for himself, which one seemed more convincing.

When it became apparent that these visits were a ritual that McCay had no intention of doing without, Lynn permitted herself to take tea and cake with him. She even allowed him to take her arm in his as they walked to the lobby of the Metropole. Black tea had become scarce ever since the start of the war, and Lynn had trained herself to enjoy other, herbal variety. The Metropole, with its distinguished clientele was among the few establishments still to serve it, although at what a price! But what was dear for Lynn was the simplest expenditure for McCay. How good it was to be able to savor a late night cup of Earl Grey again! She found that the drink had a more calming and focusing effect of her than it had in the past. It made her both alert to her interlocutor’s hawkish remarks and comfortable in his severe presence.
It was late one evening, walking out of the café that McCay made a little speech. It had been with some reluctance that they traded the red velvet of the Metropole for the grey asphalt of the promenade along the Thames. This speech of McCay’s, it must be admitted, was not entirely unexpected by Lynn. Indeed so many of their conversations had started out similarly, with observations and declamations concerning the ills of bachelorhood. But it surprised her not a little when, after expounding rather at length his rich yet solitary existence, he brought up the subject of matrimony.
“I don’t expect your love, but I would hope for your fidelity and companionship,” he said with the direct and unfailing conviction of the businessman that he was. He spoke no further on the subject that evening and she, somewhat taken aback by his directness, chose to feign disinterest and allowed her eyes to focus on passing tug, before changing the subject rather flippantly: as is she hadn’t heard at all.
During their next few sessions, McCay never directly broached the topic, but like a skilled pilot, would often approach it, only to land his aircraft on a neighboring shore. Lynn felt it whenever he dropped little hints now and again: a backwards glance at an affectionate couple in the corner, enjoying a drink together, an off-putting praise of Lynn’s beauty. But the very point itself he managed to efficiently circumambulate.
Lynn was intrigued by the man’s methods and was certain that he would return eventually to the proposition. She felt that an air of expectation hung over all their conversations like a thick curtain and waited with almost uncontainable impatience to see what next he would do. Curiosity and anticipation, more than proper eagerness, accounted for these uncomfortable yet not wholly unpleasant sensations.
One evening as they walked, arm in arm, along the Strand, there came a prolonged lull in their conversation. The silence lasted a little eternity, producing a void that carriages or passersby chose to fill. Lynn could hear her neck turning as she tentatively eyed Everett. His gaze was directed past her, at the windows of closing shops: whatever awkwardness there was in the situation, seemed entirely on her side. Lying down at night, she kept adjusting her pillow and pulled the blankets up to her eyes. She was aware not only of her own uncertainty, but the feeling that she was being watched and evaluated by a discerning audience. She felt herself in the midst of a drama. The first act was about to draw to a close. It remained to be seen whether it was a comedy or a tragedy she was acting.

After all the kindness that McCay had hitherto shown her, Lynn made the somewhat radical decision to reciprocate. It was bold of her, for she knew that he would take the gesture – for better or worse – as a sign of encouragement. The Laughing Cock was putting on Ubu Roi. On the eve of the first performance, she invited McCay to join the cast for drinks at a pub in the Strand. She extended this invitation, two days before the premiere. This added to her natural anxiety about taking on a new role. She couldn’t foresee whether McCay’s presence that evening would be a burden or a relief. Of course, he would be the picture of discretion For even when he made love to her, her air was so unchanged, so unforced, natural and unassuming that it came on her unawares, dawned, that is, that his true intent lay forever imbedded only slightly beneath the surface, beneath the thinnest layer of subterfuge – no, not that – but a thin coating of paint, perhaps - she knew that nothing he did could ever make her uncomfortable. His manners were so refined and old-fashioned and foreign that she felt secure with him in a way she hadn’t known since childhood. So, why should she be so apprehensive about McCay’s joining them after the show?
Lynn was used to men throwing themselves at her, pleading for her good graces, weeping protestations of love and devotion. To a certain measure, these affections flattered her, but they certainly had a way of becoming very quickly nagging. McCay was as different from Lynn’s accustomed suitors as a stately Chopin polonaise from Stravinsky’s provocations. Lynn would gladly take the music of her youth over modern experiments any day. If these suitors all sang in the overblown style of Tristan and Lohengrin, then McCay was the soft countertenor voice of Bach’s “Erbarme dich.” A musical figuration should occur to Lynn precisely because of an episode from her adolescence involving a young German composer who’d despaired over her, threatening even to end his life. Though this encounter had been singular in both its ferocity and tenderness, it had become the one by which she’d judged all subsequent attachments.
Then, truth be told, she didn’t so much mind the hot-blooded ones as she did the obsequious ones, the haughty nouveau riche, preening themselves for the bourse or the commons. McCay was neither hot-blooded nor obsequious and perhaps this aspect – so typically American, she considered – was what endeared her to him. He spoke his mind, certainly; Americans were good at that. But moreover, he knew better than anyone she’d ever known, when to lay down his cards and when to make a subterfuge. This balance of honesty and discretion was the most unique quality that she found in McCay and she admired him greatly for it. He was shrewd, no doubt, and she set great faith in his store of knowledge and greatness of taste. Certainly, the specter of his income had some place in the overall assessment of his offer, but Lynn let herself be persuaded by such a host of other considerations, that the promise of security seemed merely a last, minor enticement. It was thus that Lynn was fully prepared to answer “Yes” when McCay formally made his offer at the end of the evening of pleasant and none-too-excessive drink.

Marriage meant a radical change in pace for McCay. He was accustomed to being the efficient and hardworking entrepreneur during the daylight hours and settling down in the theater district for an evening’s entertainment. However, he soon found that this design for living, which had hitherto carried him his entire adult life, was an awkward fit with another member of humanity to care for. McCay, who considered his long career full of material finery and adventure was wholly unprepared for how many new and wondrous things were in an instant, it seemed, opened to him. He could never have imagined the myriad pleasures of living with and for somebody other than himself. The long war had come to an end, fortuitously, shortly before their marriage, and the doors of Europe were swung open to Lynn for the first time. The couple spent their honeymoon in Rome and Venice, two cities that McCay knew well from his business before the war. The devastation that the war had wreaked on these capitals went unnoticed by McCay, who found their charm enhanced by the addition of new ruins and decay. He had toured the continent countless times, but the magnificence of old Europe had never struck him fully, he considered, as it did now. As he passed by the sites and monuments so familiar to him, he found it incomprehensible that he should have failed to notice the grandeur and majesty that they offered the eye and the soul. At his age, he could hardly have imagined how much surprise this old world still held for him.
When the couple returned from their peripatetic wanderings, McCay resolved to leave the world of commerce: a thing that none of his acquaintances would have though him capable of. Instead of overseeing mergers and signing contracts, he spent his days in Lynn’s delightful company. They made themselves regulars at the finest restaurants, jewelers and clothiers of London. In the evening, Lynn would don the finery that her husband lavished on her for the theater, the symphony and the opera. It wasn’t as if Lynn every asked or expected for these things, but McCay seemed positively incapable of doing without presenting her with constant gifts. Nor did she demand he spend his days at the market with her, but was grateful for his dotage, affection and generosity. She had no intentions of quitting her career as an actress and merely scaled back her involvement with the Laughing Cock. She had designs to make a full and triumphant return to the stage.
When summer arrived, McCay received a cable from Chicago. It was from his nephew Philip Anderson. The missive announced that the boy was headed for London, where he had been appointed to be visiting dramaturge at the Old Vic. Previously, Anderson had achieved considerable renown on the American stage by popularizing dramas of the Restoration period, which had been long out of fashion and was seeing a current revival of interest, no doubt influenced by the success of Shaw’s Pygmalion.
McCay was delighted to received word of his nephew’s arrival and suggested that they dine together the following week. Philip showed up with his friend Quentin Petronius, a wealthy Italian who had shared Phillip’s lodgings in New York and had followed him, for no apparent reason save ennui, to London. Uncle and nephew gave each other a warm greeting. It had been too long – this, both could agree on. McCay presented Lynn, who had worn the pearls that McCay had recently given her for their six-month anniversary, to the ever-so-refined and polite Philip, who placed a gentlemanly kiss on her gloved hand. Quentin shook hands with McCay insipidly and, in recognition of the actress, merely bowed at a slight angle. As goose was served, Everett explained to Lynn how Philip had waged war against his father, a doctor of local fame, who had considered his son’s interest in the theater amusing at best. At the end of his college years, Philip boldly announced that he intended to devote his life to the stage, rather than medicine. Anderson senior threatened to turn him out, but Philip would not give him this satisfaction and relocated to New York.
On the Lower East Side, he worked as a stagehand at the Volksbiene and performed in vaudeville and burlesque. Eventually, Philip got a shot at directing: a small neighborhood production of As You Like It that attracted the notice of the Herald’s drama critic. Philip was invited to work for the Bowery Theater where he quickly cemented his reputation with some more Shakespeare productions. From Chicago, McCay had received the news of his nephew’s great successes with much excitement and pride; indeed, he alone among Philip’s relatives had acknowledged the boy’s artistic proclivities as ought worthy of being attended to and supported. On the eve of his escape to New York, Philip had appeared at his uncle’s house asking for some money to sustain him through a week of finding employment. McCay had given freely, without the thought of making any profit. McCay was, therefore, all the more delighted and surprised to find the artistic dividends such a modest investment had yielded. To Lynn, it was an odd story of America: from riches to rags.
Ever since receiving news of his nephew’s arrival, McCay had gone on about the boy nonstop. He had only the finest things to say about this young man and Lynn formulated in her mind that his talents must be night limitless. It was not surprising, then, that she was eager to finally meet Mr. Anderson. Although, like McCay, she could’ve done without the company of queer Mr. Petronius, who, they learnt that night was cohabiting his friend’s flat on Russell Street, a stone’s throw from the Old Vic.
During the meal, Quentin was preternaturally quiet and inattentive. He barely lifted his eyes from his plate. In those rare instances in which he determined to look up, there was such an absent and fatigued look in his face that the McCays wondered if he was seriously ill. But it was easy to ignore this peculiar fellow, due in part to Philip’s exciting and engaging tone. He went on about his grand plans for the coming season with a shrewd and punchy sense that Lynn felt certain he had inherited from his uncle (or where all Americans like that?). McCay mentioned his wife’s acting career and Philip asked the lady about her work with the Laughing Cock, which she had, since her marriage, somewhat neglected. In her four months of wedded life, she had assumed only one role: a poorly received Juliet.
Philip seemed eager to learn of his aunt’s involvement with the theater, and was perhaps a little too forward in suggestion that she drop by the Old Vic, where they needed to cast a few more roles in Wycherly’s The Country Wife, which was to be the first production of the coming season. McCay took no offence at the suggestion and urged his wife to resume her acting career under the guidance of his nephew.
“Just think,” said McCay in the cab home, “The Old Vic. Now that’s a real theater. I don’t mean that the Cock isn’t…but this is something established we’re talking about. You can’t really compare them, can you?” Lynn was inclined to agree and showed up the following morning at the theater, where she landed a bit part as a maid.
She studied her role – a small but crucial one – religiously, with the intensity and conviction that this might actually lead her to the sort of success she‘d been imagining for herself since she arrived in London at the age of 19 and tentatively joined with the provocateurs at the Laughing Cock. It was the first time that McCay had been able to observe Lynn’s every step in the process of creating a role. Her recent turn Juliet hadn’t required much work as she had performed Juliet in the past. But it was another thing for Lynn to ease into a well-worn garment and quite another all together to fit into new ones. Everett determined to live it with her as closely as possible without invading on her creative territory. Towards this end, he studied the play closely and whatever information there was available regarding its production history and reception.
The Country Wife, a vital player in a theatrical tradition long out of fashion, constituted a gap in McCay’s aesthetic education. Though he had done his undergraduate work in English literature at Princeton, the whole gamut of Restoration dramatists had been passed over. America at the turn of the century was still prurient enough to consider playwrights such at Etherege, Congreve and Wycherly far too scandalous in their approach and attitudes towards marriage and infidelity. Such themes at the time were considered more than in bad taste, they were thought positively immoral and harmful to society. As Lynn would retire to her room to practice her limes, McCay sat in the library, immersing himself in the world of seventeenth century English drama.
The Country Wife appealed to McCay not least for its exaggerated characters: a serial philanderer who claimed to be a eunuch to put his rivals at ease about being alone with their wives; one husband who promotes his own cuckoldry by being so absurdly without suspicion; another whose overzealous attempts at safeguarding his wife make him the play’s first cuckold. Such characters could only exist in the world of a brand of vulgar comedy that had been out of fashion for nearly 200 years.
Though her character had no more that thirty lines in all, Lynn gave the greatest consideration to every word. Even with the simplest “yes” or “no,” she struggled and experimented to find the correct voice. The modulated her tone, tossed in a laugh here and there, or bit her hand before reciting a line. McCay was fascinated by these false gestures, which he had observed in his wife so often when they were meant in earnest and marveled that she could replicate the same motions and patterns of speech so convincingly.
As much as he learnt from this solo preparation, McCay felt he couldn’t take part fully in the incarnation without being present at rehearsals, which often kept Lynn away from his for the entire day. This, however, he didn’t dare to suggest. Not least, because he would have hated to cause Lynn any anxiety. No, the way to go about it would be to enter unannounced and sit where there was no chance that Lynn could possibly make him out.
About two weeks before the show was to go up, the production lost its two leads. First, the Country Wife herself failed to show at rehearsals for an entire week. Anderson and Petronius finally traced her to her mother’s estate in Rye, where she had disappeared to, in the hopes of hiding an embarrassing pregnancy. The note she had meant to leave Philip turned up in the script that her co-star, the play’s philandering eunuch was using. Outraged by the suggestion that this was in some way his fault, the actor threw his wig down on the floor and stormed out of the theater. Philip was in a tight corner. Lynn was the only other member of the cast who knew the country wife’s lines by heart and so was given the role. Philip himself would star opposite her as Harry Horner, the rakish protagonist. While irregular in the highest degree, none of this struck McCay as peculiar. Quite the contrary, he was delighted to learn that his wife would be the leading lady of the evening.
Lynn immersed herself for a second time in her far meatier role. She transferred out of the silly maid’s costume and into the shoes of a naïve and over-guarded young bride. The rehearsals grew longer; often, McCay would pick her up from the theater close to midnight. Addition rehearsals were scheduled for Sundays, an arrangement that McCay accepted begrudgingly, but ultimately endorsed, since it was all in service of his wife’s art.
At the same time, his curiosity at attending these rehearsals intensified with each passing day. He resolved not to await his wife’s call one evening and arrive at the theater deliberately early. As he entered the auditorium, his eyes met Petronius’. The Italian was hunched over a sewing machine and appeared to be making alterations to the costumes. “If you’re looking for your wife, she’s not here,” he said.
McCay was slightly unnerved less by what the man had said and more by how he had said it. He looked at the stage, where five actors were performing a scene. He noted Philip’s absence from the scene, was surprised at first, but corrected this impression when he heard a bit of the dialogue and recalled that his character did not appear in the scene they were practicing. “Is my wife backstage?” McCay opened his mouth to ask. Just then, however, a high-pitched cackled erupted offstage. The strange timbre threw McCay at first, but he soon recognized it as the voice of his wife. This impression was soon verified visually when Lynn emerged from stage right, swaggering drunkenly and dressed as a man. Philip followed soon after, speaking his lines and directing her to act more rugged and boyish. They both seemed amused at the scene and the attempts to make Lynn more masculine. Philip interrupted the performance to instruct Lynn more completely to stand properly. He planted her feet firmly apart on the stage and sent her chest out by gripping her violently by the back.
McCay was a little baffled by the physicality of his directing style and he hoped that Lynn’s delicate boy could withstand this rough treatment. He sat down in the back of the theater and watched the scene – which he couldn’t remember from the play - unfold. But soon, his eyes flashed with recognition and he felt he understood the effect that Philip was aiming for. Once it made sense and fit together in the context of the scene, McCay was entirely without worry at the manhandling of his wife. He was actually almost entirely lost in the scene when Petronius announced with a force that made them all flinch, “Stop the scene Philip. We have a visitor.”
McCay got up promptly and waited as Philip, who seemed surprised to see his uncle, hopped offstage and greeted him with warmth and politeness. McCay was astonished to see how greatly the young man perspired. “We were just about to wrap up for the day.” He was almost out of breath and made it sound like an apology. Before Philip turned away, McCay caught the scent of alcohol. He puzzled over this for a minute, while his wife, hastily changed into her ordinary clothes, came towards him. She kissed his cheek affectionately and they exited to the street.
“I thought I would surprise you today,” he offered as he held the door of the cab open for her.
“Yes,” was all she could respond.
“And are you surprised?” he further ventured.
“Quite,” came her dry reply, and mingled with the alcohol that he detected on her breath.
“Do you drink often at rehearsals?’ he asked with a little humor.
“Only where the script calls for it,” came her sensible reply.
McCay put his arm around her and she leaned towards him. She felt secure in his grasp.
“Were Philip and you rehearsing the scene backstage?” he asked.
“Did that concern you?”
“No.” The answer was definite. “But Petronius seemed pretty unhappy about it,” he ventured with laughter in his voice. She joined in with a noise not unlike the onstage cackle he’d heard before.
“Well, Quentin can go to Hell!” she exclaimed triumphantly and kissed her husband full on the mouth.

The day of the premiere was the McCay’s sixth-month wedding anniversary. They had gone out to dinner the night before and Everett had presented Lynn a pair of sapphire earrings which she promised to wear for at least part of the evening’s performance. Lynn had gone off to rehearsals by the time that McCay awoke. Draped across the sofa in the living room was a dark blue wool overcoat from Harrod’s and a fond note from his wife. He tried it on for size and was astonished to find that it fit him to a T. “How well, she knows me,” he thought happily.
Lynn had begged her husband not to surprise her at the theater before curtain, a wish that he respected. When he arrived at the Old Vic half an hour early, he was astonished to find that the theater had almost entirely filled up. He found his seat in the front row, assumed it, and tilted his head left and right, excited and proud that so many of London’s brightest had turned out to see his wife perform the role of Margaret Pinchwife. He had never desired for her to be an object of envy to other men. Still, he could not help feeling himself inflate as he took stock of his surroundings and anticipated the effect that Lynn was bound to have on her public.

The play provoked many gasps from the audience, not least for the built-in vulgarity of the situations and the profane language. But they balked and laughed in equal measure, often from having their expectations of decorum smashed to bits. Even McCay, who had read the play numerous times, was occasionally caught off-guard by the way that the play’s themes were realized onstage. For him, the greatest and most enticing attraction was Lynn. He could scarce believe that she stood so close by to him yet so transformed, utterly transformed into the sensuous naïf of the eponymous character. She brought effortless grace and coy appetite to her every onstage moment. McCay reflected that Philip could scarce have found a better replacement; they seemed so utterly convincing together.
As McCay witnessed Margaret Pinchwife’s incrementally lurid seduction, he became physically uncomfortable. He attributed these feelings to the effectiveness of his wife’s acting and felt that the audience was likewise affected. Starting with the scene in which she first appears disguised as a boy, only to be wooed away from her husband by the serial philanderer, McCay could not stop from wincing at every onstage kiss and caress. By the lurid denouement in act five, where the husband hands his wife over to his rival unawares, McCay felt renewed indignation and was certain that he sensed a similar sentiment in the rest of the crowd as well. Was this testament to his wife’s acting abilities, he wondered, or merely evidence that the play was inflammatory and perhaps unsuitable to be performed? He continued to ponder this well into the fifth act, almost losing the thread of the play altogether. His attention was again alerted, however, when Lynn appeared unexpectedly from under a veil and disappeared with Philip behind a large curtain. They dashed off with such urgency that McCay was certain that the lewd suggestion was lost on no one. Throughout the next scene, faint grunts and moans emanated from backstage: noises that might have sounded perfectly natural to anyone else. But McCay reasoned that he knew better. This awareness had the peculiar effect of paradoxically curing him of his unease, but making it impossible for him to believe in the play any longer. It was as if the actors had crossed over into the world of hyperbole and made the play’s vulgarity no longer authentic, no longer disturbing. McCay received a further shock when Lynn emerged from her tryst, attired in the same uniform, except that her the sparkle of the sapphires that she had finally chosen to don. McCay was glad to think that he himself had provided the performance’s finishing touch.

They were leaving the theater when McCay heaved a little and fell on his walking stick. He felt his legs begin to ache for the first time in a long while. He buckled slightly under the weight of brittle bones and arched his back pitifully. It took a few moments for Lynn to attend to him. She gripped his shoulders as they slipped away from her. She felt the soft wool between her palms and she drew the coat up and draped it over her husband. He stared at his head, how his hat rested awkwardly askew wondering what it was she saw. The foghorn of a passing ship resounded through the night.
“Philip,” he spoke as if the foghorn had called up the name. “I must say that I had my doubts about him that day I attended rehearsal: doubts with regard to his theatrical ideas, his practices. But I see his methods are solid. They work. And they worked best for you, my dear. He really managed to bring out something in you that I hadn’t seen before.” She listened absented, a little troubled by his tone, perhaps. He stayed with his back facing her, leaning on the walking stick. He needed a moment to catch his breath. Soon they were walking towards Charing Cross. It was odd that there was no cab in sight. So, on they walked. It was late and they had precious little company, mostly younger couples hurrying along the cobblestones, no doubt on their way to some gathering or other. “Philip,” he pronounced the name with such intensity, making the Ph sound as if it needed to be exorcised from his mouth. “He really brought out the best in you, I mean I could sense that he was committed: committed as deeply as you were.”
A cab stopped shortly in front of them and a giggling couple emerged. They dashed by and disappeared laughing into the obfuscating blanket of night. Lynn’ eyes followed them intently until they disappeared. She looked up at the buildings, imagining all the happy people, like the couple that had just seen, having drinks together. They would stay up for hours, possibly till dawn, carousing and merrymaking. They entered the cab and sat still until McCay picked up.
“You were stunning,” McCay went on praising her rather absently; the type of praise one speaks of one who isn’t present. “I’d say that it was a near-triumph.” At this Lynn’s ears pricked up and she took interest. “How near, dear?” she raised her pretty voice. “Quite. Quite.” Silence.
“Then again” - he continued - “I suppose I am biased unfairly. I suppose that my beef is not - cannot be - shared by the rest of your audience. It’s funny, actually, a funny bit of criticism.” Lynn was intrigued and leaned closer to her husband, the sounds of the carousers above them getting louder. “What’s the matter?” Her concern was genuine, so he could make out. “Well, it’s a minor point, a very minor matter and I beg you not to take it the wrong way, or anything like that. It’s just that you showed such a degree of naturalism, did your gloriously witty lines such justice: well, I was so involved, you see. And then, after all of this, that one scene.” He paused to catch his breath. “What scene?” “Oh, the one were your husband leads you to Philip – Horner I mean. Yes, and you’re offstage, while Horner has his way with you…” “To what did you object,” she asked innocently enough. “Nothing that major, I suppose. Which is why I call it a trifle. But the way you vocalized, the sounds coming from offstage. They just rang false. Certainly, though, I am your husband. I know very well what sounds are and are not in your natural repertoire.”
Lynn thought of something with which to respond, but the flush in her cheeks would not permit her to divulge. She was, therefore, amply surprised when she heard Everett voice her very own thoughts. “I know its silly to object when, after all, you’re only playing a part.”
As their cab sped on through the darkened streets, neither spoke further. McCay absently fumbled in his waistcoat for his pocket watch. He clutched gently at the chain and followed it to the silver watch. It sprung open and McCay studied the stylish face for some moments and slipped in back into the coat, not realizing that the timepiece had stopped.

New Photography Site

2007-02-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

Hello All,

I've set up a new site for my photography. It's called Theater of Desire and can be accessed at:
http://theaterofdesire.blogspot.com

COMIX

2007-02-09T08:32:00.000-08:00

Greetings to my throngs of fans! I'm taking this comic book class with Art Spiegelman, yes. The Art Spiegelman. Anyway, it's really given me a renewed appreciation for comixs, such as I never ever had growing up. My dad got a new macbook and I see that one of the applications loaded onto it is a primitive comicbook making software, so I used it in conjunction with photo booth (which my father can't get over) and had a little with it this morn'. Anyway, the rather hair-raising result of my kibitzing can be found by following the thumbnail below. Enjoy.

A Short Film About Killing

2006-12-10T12:54:00.000-08:00

USA / 2006 /6 mins/ DV / Color / dir. Adam Joachim Goldmann & Abraham Lev Weiss
Music: Radiohead, Pachabel, Manchini, Nina Simone

Dedicated to the memory of Kieslowski

The Jewish Wife

2006-10-17T16:14:00.000-07:00

Production History:
I recently came across this 16mm short that I made during one very dull day over winter break several years ago. I enlisted the aid of my faithful hound, Alfie the Pomeranian and my trusty Czech marionette Franz Kafka. Together, we read through a stack of scripts until deciding on a one act by Bert Brecht. While the stars rehearsed their lines, I loaded my Krasnagosk-3 with a reel of Kodak B&W reversable and got my studio ready, cleaning up, laying down the rug and deploying props with discernment. I borrowed an old phone from a neighbor and used a few spare lamps for the lighting. The result - as I hope you will be able to see - far exceeded my wildest expectations. In post-production, I got a call from my producer that Saul Bass, who was originally to do the titles, had died. Quickly, I scrambled to see what last minute provisions I could make. In the end, I convinced Peter Greenaway to design the intertitles. He faxed them over from his estate - Swineshire - in the marshes of Wales. I was splicing the film together when the most beautiful music drifted my way. It was the opera singer upstairs who was rehearsing for a concert that evening of Kindertotenlieder. I made a bootleg and used it as the soundtrack. The premiere took place later that evening in the Red Room Cinema. Both the stars were in attendence, while Brecht, Mahler and Saul Bass watched from above.

It was an historic event, a truly historic event.

Self-Portraits

2006-09-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a selection from a series of Self-Portraits I did last Spring and recently digitized. Sorry for the lousy resolution.

Symphony in H

2006-08-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

You await me in perfect stillness
Naked body glistening
Skin soft with dew
Hair the fragrance of orchids

My approach dissolves your statuesque poise
As you lengthen to admit me
Hands smoothing and caressing
To the tempo of our desire
Shaping and crafting
The symphony of our two bodies

With small gestures, we hush the strings or rouse the oboes
And grasp the air that carries the sweet music
As it transitions gracefully: Vivace-Allegro-Allegretto

From the infectious rondo to the melancholy adagietto
We entangle in aching suspensions
Yearning diminishments, blissful resolutions

Pulses quickening at the snare drums’ fearful entrance
Steadying at the agile bounce of the cellos’ glissando
Leaping at the violas’ playful pizzicato
Halting at the wail of a clarinet

At the cymbal crash of the crescendo
Every muscle thrills and tightens
Then melts and thaws
As the winds thin out

Berlin

2006-08-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

Soon, now, my darling, we shall meet
In the reunified city
Where East meets West
And Old meets New
A city that makes everything
A thing of beauty
So burdened with history and so free

We shall make this land
Our home for a day or two
Set out on a scavenger hunt
To find the remnants
Of all, that once was
And will never be again

But we will dance in the colonnades
And sing in the boulevards
And laugh in the bars
While the monuments
Testament to a chartered past
Bear witness to our love

The pigeons themselves
Squatters, unofficial residents
Of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate
Will testify to the miracle of our reunion

The gold stones themselves
Will rise up from the earth
To rejoice in our delight

The books of the Opernplatz
Their pages will flap felicitously
To see us so much alive

Victory herself will smile at us
And the needle at Alex will broadcast
Our joy into every living room

We will sail through the streets on a mighty ship
Eight sails and fifty canons strong
Toppling the remains of an imaginary wall
Liberating millions in our wake

Parading our love through the grass
Hanging ribbons and streamers from branches and lampposts
Swinging open the iron gates of sprawling cemeteries
To raise the dead from the sleep of centuries

Then at night in our bed
We will draft a new constitution
Our lips will seal the pact
Your arms will vouchsafe for security
And we will wake to reap the fruits
Of our revolution

Tea Ceremony

2006-07-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

Between a cedar and a willow
A low table of petrified wood
Its roots fastened to the thirsty earth
Its bejeweled surface warmed by the sun’s soft kisses

You fold back the linen cover
Careful not the upset the faint blue patterns
Of dragons playing amid the milky white

From the jewel-box of your bosom
You select a young tea, plucked in early April
Bearing the aroma of salt from the ocean winds

In my ears echo
The sound of waves breaking
And the rocking of the sea

And you, froth on the daydream
Bend over the stone well
Kindle the lime wood fire

Steamy waters, refreshing mist
Open my pores with soothing minerals
While you irrigate the forest floor

Awake, o, latent spice and flavor
Perform your liquid alchemy
And lull me into a hazy, somnambulistic state

Let flow the life-granting dew
In a fine, steady stream
Gentle bubbles to the surface float

Imagining the lips concealed from view
I kiss the tea as I would kiss you
And feel the balm of boiling liquid
Like the caress of your soft palms
On the back of my mouth

Tea sucks me up
Making every artery, every limb
Pulsate, tinge and tingle
Purging and anointing me

Now a darker, stronger brew thrills me
Silencing all the past sniffling of my heart
Creating a beautiful white
Where my mind once was

A soft blanket of quiet swaddles me
And on the forest, a vibrant hush
For we communicate without words

Next I feel a cooler, milder embrace
Slither through me with delicious ease
Its sweetness travels straight to my throbbing breast
Which urges softly for your trust

For I am by love fully infused
Deeply steeped in the waters I drain
As you read in the leaves my fate
And kneel beside me to refill my cup

Lips find their way unguided
Slurping greedily the sweetness of this final cup
In my mind and on my tongue
An exquisite arrangement

The harmony of flavors sings in my body
Kissing away all strife and bitterness
Plunging me into tranquil waves of tea

My cup drifts gently away and I swim to you
My darling, my Darjeeling
With effortless thrusts and strokes
To the rhythm of the singing source

Journey to the East

2006-06-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

Adam Joachim Goldmann

At night I take my Journey to the East
Lying beside you on a bed perfumed with exotic spices

Slowly, I draw back the finely woven silken sheet
Which floats away on the gentle waves
To rest, with my ship, on the ocean’s floor

And I gaze on the map of your body
As an explorer to a brave new continent come

For my Journey to the East is
A journey through your body
Ever fresh, ever new

I wander the slender peninsulas of your legs
Looking out over the waters that bore me to you
As the wind makes ripples in the sand
Of the smooth beaches of your hips

Then I travel the Silk Road of your wavy silhouette
And climb the wooden ladder of your rib cage
Which rocks gently to the beating of your heart, a ginger root

I run up the gentle mounds of your turmeric-scented breasts
Finding solace in the shade of your miso colored areolas

For my journey to the East is
A journey through your body
Full of spice and relief

And I read with delight the pillow book of your body
Which I write with a soft yet firm brush
Lengthwise along the fertile plain of your arched back
As you dictate, in foreign syllables and tones, my path

The land grows dark as I wander on
Through the valley into which you usher me
The air speaks my name
Echoing from peaceful mountaintops
And a narrow trail of sesame guides my way

For my journey to the East is
A journey through your body
An unfathomable mystery

“Go on,” you say, “into the forest of my Hermit Kingdom,
Where you will marvel at sights beautiful and strange.”

Down by a babbling brook where unborn children sing
I pluck a lotus that contains a single black pearl
That stares back at me from the mirror
Of the life-giving stream

For my journey to the East is
A journey through your body
Rich with wonder and shimmering possibility

And I kiss the wet lotus petals of your lips
As I stare into the watery pearls of your eyes
Smoothing back the soft seaweed of your hair
As I clutch the ripe, narrow bamboo of your spine
And grip the moist shells of your shoulder blades

For my journey to the East is
A journey through your perfect body
Small, dark and delicate

And I bring the lotus and the pearl
To the temple of our love
And offer it up on the altar of our bed
With jasmine and with juniper
While you sing with ecstasy the Song of the Earth

Sing those incomprehensible words
Whose music I so love to hear
As I draw gently on the opium pipes of your nipples
And drink, like tea, your tears of joy

For my journey to the East is a journey
Through the landscape of my dreams
Through the landscape of my dreams

BERLIN 2006

Love and Death at the Cine Ideal

2006-03-27T19:09:00.000-08:00

Adam Joachim Goldmann

“Look what Mr. Kubrick says here, he says ‘a film is or should be more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings.’” Alejandro folds back the pages of the issue of Cahiers du Cinema that his uncle has brought back for him from Paris. The other boys crowd around, looking at the pictures. He is the only one who speaks French and might, for all they know, be making it up. But they trust him, since he was the oldest. That and they don’t think he could come up with something that elegant on the spot.
It is noisy inside the club and Luis, who has arrived late and pulled up a chair behind the smallish table, has difficulty making out the conversation. He taps on Javier’s shoulder to ask what has been said, but Javier is busy discussing the point with Alejandro. Luis tries for several minutes to try and piece together the tête-à-tête, but several other boys quickly chime in, raising their voices and gesticulating. Luis gives up and leans back in the unadorned wooden chair. He takes another sip of port and, for lack of anything better to do, fumbles for a cigarillo. He lights up and makes a renewed attempt to join the conversation.
“There can be little doubt that Mr. Kubrick is both a philosopher and a poet.” Luis looks around at the older faces, some of them sprouting facial hair, to see if his comment has registered. Alas, it seems his words are lost somewhere in the ever-thickening cloud of smoke that hangs in the poorly lit room. He looks around at the others. There are five of them, all older boys. They meet every Monday in the smoke-and-booze laced atmosphere of La Fidula to discuss fine things like film and poetry, and listen to jazz. Luis, who is only 13, has impressed Raul with his knowledge of cinema and literature and has for the past few weeks been admitted as a guest to these weekly gatherings. Mostly, Luis is in awe of Alejandro. He is only three years Luis’ senior, but already possesses so great an amount of refinement, maturity and charisma. Poetry seems constantly to be rolling off his tongue with clarity and ease. His eloquence is matched by his physical grace; every gesture seems at once perfectly calculated yet utterly spontaneous. Luis’ observes Alejandro and essays to perfect the nonchalance with which he pulls gently on a cigarillo or downs a shot of whiskey; and no one is as well versed in all fields of literature, music, politics and film. Luis would be glad assume the mantle of disciple, if the older boy did not treated him with such indifference and outright dismissiveness. Luis fears that Alejandro secretly despises him - for what? his youth, his ignorance and his pretensions – and only allows him to be part of the weekly gatherings to humor Raul.
Again, Luis’ spine meets the unforgiving lounge chair and he takes a long drag on his cigarillo. Luis tries to enjoy the sweet smoke that swirled around in his mouth, and forget how out of place he always feels at these gatherings. Soon the musicians shuffle across the floor and over to the ancient upright piano at the front of the room. “Oh, that saxophonist’s quite superb,” Alejandro points out authoritatively. “He’s from Barcelona. It will be interesting to see what he does.”
The Catalan musician wets his lips and raises the instrument to his mouth. He lets out a wailing E and climbs up solemnly to an A. “Why if it isn’t Els Segadors!” Alejandro chuckles. There are scattered boos and hisses from dark corners of the club. A table in the very front clears out and leaves. But mostly, warm applause ripples throughout the audience. In the middle, Alejandro stands up and begins singing along. His voice, while not the best, is reverent and firm. The other boys stand up with him. Soon the whole club is a chorus of song. Men, young and old, pipe in or hum along.
Luis does not know the words, but hearing the well-known melody, so devout and somber, emitted from the barrel of a tenor saxophone seems at once a revelation and a shock. He can’t quite explain the effect that hearing that jazzman pipe out Els Segadors has on him. If affects him the same way that reading a verse by Aleixandre or seeing a film by Bresson does. It speaks directly to his emotions; it can’t be put into words. The musician sounds his final resounding note and the crowd erupts with peals of applause and cheers. Alejandro turns towards the gang and sneers. “Isn’t it incredible? The Generalissimo isn’t dead 72 hours and already look how much more exciting music in Madrid has become.”
Luis looks at his watch. It’s 10:30. He’d better be getting home soon or else his mother will begin to worry. He reaches in his pocket for some change and drops a few coins down on the table, which is teaming with wine glasses. He waves goodbye to everyone, but Raul is the only one who seems to acknowledge his farewell. Luis’ parting is lost on the others, who sit absorbed in the Catalan’s second song. The heavy wooden door swings open and Luis walks out onto calle las Huertas. The November air is unforgiving, and it stings at his cheeks as he walks alone back to La Latina.

When he enters his apartment at 16 calle Humilladero, it is close to 11:00. Everyone is asleep except for Luis’ mother, who is seated at the kitchen table, reading by candlelight. The mother rises from her chair and Luis eagerly runs to her. He throws himself on her apron and tries to wrap his arms around her, but she pushes him away and slaps him forcefully with the back of her left hand. Luis clings all the more strongly to his mother. “I got a call from Doctor Bernal’s office this afternoon. You never showed to pick up my prescription,” she hisses through her teeth. “You know that I need those pills for my insomnia. You know I can’t get to sleep without them.” She is on the verge of shouting and Luis readies himself for a second slap on his cheek; but the slap doesn’t comes. Instead she softens her tone. “Do you have any idea what it’s like,” she cries into his ear, “not to be able to fall asleep when your tired; not to even close your eyes when your body is completely exhausted?” She pauses to wipe her forehead and in a piteous voice accuses him. “Do you do this to be cruel to me?” Luis is silent, and his silence is an admission of guilt.
“And tell me what you did the 300 pesetas I gave you this morning?” Luis digs his hands into his coat pocket and deposits a cluster of coinage into his mother’s palm. She quickly counts it and beams up at him. “There are only 200 pesetas here.” Luis tells her that he’s gone to a movie. “Don’t you tell me lies!” she raises her voice for the first time. You stink of cigarettes and cheap booze. My god, you’re becoming worse than your father.” Luis knows he was in the wrong, and he takes the abuse without protest. His cheek still burns from his mother’s fierce slap, but he is more hurt by the insults she now heaps on him. “You go out to some scandalous club with your friends and get drunk while I wait up till all hours of the night waiting to see if you’ll ever come home.” Luis feels tears forming in his eyes. “It’s like an addiction with you. You and your friends. You sit around and get drunk and talk about movies and poetry with no regard for me or your father or your siblings.” Then she softens her tone somewhat. “It isn’t about the money, Luis. It isn’t. Thank God your father makes enough for us to live like decent, respectable people. It’s just that if you think you can live like a bum, neglecting both your family and your studies… What’s gotten into you that makes you think you’re any better than your father or me? When did you become such a hot-shot all of a sudden?”
Luis tears himself away from his mother and runs down the narrow hall into the room he shares with his younger brother. He gets into bed and turns on a little night-light. He pulls the covers over him and opens the volume of Aleixandre that he always keeps in his jacket pocket. He turns the pages and reads

There are moments of loneliness
when the heart knows dumbly that it doesn’t love.
We have just sat up in bed, tired; the dark day.
Someone is still sleeping innocent on that bed.
But perhaps we are asleep…

And he falls asleep.
---

Every day after school, Luis goes to the Cine Ideal. He is bright, but not a terribly good student. School, especially math and science, distracts him from what he’s really interested in: film, poetry and philosophy. Luis has no real friends his own age. The only students who seem to share Luis’ interests are Alejandro and his crowd; and hanging around them, Luis always feels like a pariah. He wishes he had someone with whom to discuss all the books he’s read and the films he’s seen, but everyone else is too interested in football or British rock and roll. That’s why he spends so much time at the Ideal.
The Cine Ideal is a retrospective movie house. It is also the only place in Madrid where you can see films in their original language with subtitles. They have different films showing everyday. There is always something new for Luis to see: old or contemporary; Spanish or foreign; black and white or color. Luis doesn’t discriminate. He takes them all.
Alone in the dark, watching the images flickering before his eyes, Luis ceases to be a friendless adolescent with unpopular tastes. He ceases to be the son of an abusive mother and an apathetic father. No, he doesn’t become John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart. He doesn’t enter into a fantasy world of glamorous women and exotic locales. Cinema isn’t a form of escape for Luis, but the complete opposite.
Along with reading Alaixandre or Plato and listening to jazz, it is only while watching movies that Luis feels most strongly that he is Luis. When the lights go down in the Ideal, his heart beats loudly and chills slowly creep along his spine. He awaits the picture with baited breath and rarely, if ever, takes his eyes off the screen. He has never fallen asleep during a film, or even dozed off for a minute: not even in Laurence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago (both of which he admitted had their dull spots). He sits rapt in quiet contemplation of all he sees, taking in the manifold beauty he finds, even if he can’t always understand the emotions the actors are expressing.

---

He sees her for the first time after a screening of “My Man Godfrey.” He has exited the building and is lighting up a cigarillo when he notices a slender girl with curly red hair walk out the door past him with a determined gait. He follows her with his eyes until she reaches the plaza. A black Mercedes-Benz is stationed by the statue of Charles III. Its driver waits calmly outside with a cigarette. As the girl approaches the vehicle, the driver throws away the cigarette, gives a slight bow and holds the door open for her. The driver quickly closes the door behind her and they drive away. Luis follows the car as it speeds along the plaza and down calle Mayor. He then walks home in the direction of Peurta del Toledo thinking about the faceless girl with red hair and her chauffeur.
The next week at the Ideal there is a Godard festival. Before each screening, Luis furtively scans the crowd in the hopes of spotting the redhead once more. Afterwards, he lingers by the art deco façade hoping the catch a glimpse of her as she walks by. But he waits in vain; that whole week, she fails to materialize. Sometimes he thinks he sees the black Mercedes waiting by the equestrian statue, but as he nears the vehicle, he realizes it’s only a navy Peugeot or a beige BMW. Then, at the end of a week he spots her again at “Modern Times.”
As the lights dim, he notices the unmistakable tuft of curly red locks a few rows in front of him. His heart, already excited by the starting film, begins to ache with anxious alacrity. She sits alone, and still as a mannequin. Throughout the picture, he cannot tear his eyes from her. He imagines to himself how her face must look, and half-wishes she’d tilt her head to the side and offer him a look. But this is an outcome he would really only partially desire; mostly, he enjoys looking at her head and its fiery silhouette against the movie-screen, conjecturing what might lie on the other side of that two-dimensional cutout.
After the film, he makes every attempt to glimpse her face, yet she succeeds in evading him. He is caught up in the mob of people exiting the theater. When he makes it to the street, the Mercedes is already halfway across the plaza. When he spots her next, it is at a screening of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” Again, she manages to slither away without allowing him the briefest peek at her face. After a few weeks of observing her, Luis begins to detect a pattern; she only comes to the Ideal to see American films.
One evening, before a screening of “The Third Man” he decides to stand guard in front of the cinema. Spring is coming and breathing in the evening air refreshes Luis like a cool glass of lemonade. When at last he sees her slender figure approaching, a peculiar sensation seizes hold of him. It is something entirely new to him, far more intense than anything he’s experienced while watching a film. The girl glides past him with her usual, graceful bearing and Luis nervously raises his eyes to meet her face. Her face is lovelier than anything he could have imagined. He has only a moment to glimpse it before she disappears through the swinging doors, but that fleeting image remains imprinted on his memory throughout the film.
She is young and fair, no older than Luis himself. Neither her physiognomy nor demeanor seems especially Spanish. Most likely, she’s a foreigner. Based on her film preferences, Luis fancies her an American. Her face itself is small and dappled with freckles set against pale skin. Her green eyes seem almost too big for her head, yet they communicate more a sense of exotic wonder than of disproportion. Her nose is a short, sharp slope of 15 degrees and the nostrils flare unobtrusively to the side. Below, her lips are full and round yet in keeping with the diminutive proportions of the rest of her features. The cleft in her chin does not immediately bring to mind Burt Lancaster, but rather suggested to him some noble Gaelic ancestry.
It hardly comes as a surprise, when the American girl makes a stealthy exit after the film. Luis runs outside to catch her lithe and carefree figure skipping fancifully to the car that awaits. At night, Luis lies down with her image. In the darkness he caresses her: the form of a tall adolescent in a black dress with striking features and a foreign charm.
When the Ideal holds a Billy Wilder retrospective, he sees the American girl every day. He waits for her to enter the theater and take her seat before strategically finding a place where he can observe her unnoticed. Throughout the films, he watches her as the illuminated shadows dance across her freckled face. Her wide eyes take in everything onscreen yet remain impervious to Luis’ piercing gaze.
Luis would like to make the girl’s acquaintance, but he has trouble seizing upon a pretext. But his ardor eventually overcomes his timidity. Carefully, he practices a little speech he’s prepared to for her. He goes over it again and again in the mirror, until he has every syllable down pat. He plans to recite it the girl after a screening of “The Apartment.” He finds the girl’s row and sits at the end of it. After the film, she eases past him on her way to the exit. He screws up his courage and addresses her in Spanish: “Hello Senorita. I’ve noticed you come here rather often, especially this past month, particularly to the American films. Are you, by any chance…”
He breaks off as she lets out a wholly unexpected and obscene giggle. She notices his face go beet red and suddenly grows serious. “I’m very sorry, but my Spanish is fairly dreadful,” she speaks in a broken Spanish. Nonetheless, he finds these first few mangled words, uttered by a mouth he has so cherished of late, endearing. At this point she decides to switch to English, fearing perhaps that she has confused the shy young man. “I’m American, you see.”

---

Her name is Kate. She is the daughter of an American diplomat, some type of ambassador, who’s recently been posted to Madrid with his family on state business. Kate doesn’t know how long the appointment will last. There is no way one can know such things.
Kate goes to the American School. Her classmates are the sons and daughters of Franco’s former ministers. Despite living in Madrid for the past six months, her spoken Spanish is dreary. Luis communicates with her in English, most of which he’s picked up from the movies.
After their initial exchange, Luis always finds occasion to speak with Kate at the Ideal. These exchanges are only several minutes in duration, before and after the evening film; but these few moments are the highlights of Luis’ days. He no longer picks the films he most wants to see, but rather calculates the ones she’s likely to attend. Every evening, he waits in front of the cinema for her to arrive. He paces about and wrings his hands anxiously whenever she’s running late. When she approaches the Ideal, he pretends that he’s only just gotten there and escorts her inside. Inside the theater, they sit together in reverent silence, spellbound by the play of light and shadow onscreen. Afterwards, he walks her to the black Mercedes. She waves goodbye from the rear seat and disappears into the night.
Luis loves to show off his knowledge of film to Kate. She is impressed by the breadth, if not by the depth, of this knowledge. He wishes he could read to her from the volume of Aleixandre he carries around at all times; but the five minutes intervals of their conversations are too short for him to attempt a rough translation. Luis wishes that just once the Black Mercedes wouldn’t be waiting for her, so she wouldn’t have to leave him so soon. But the ambassador’s chauffer is ever dependable, a surer symbol of power and force than the saddled monarch brandishing his sword.

---

And then a miracle happens. The projector at the Ideal breaks down in the middle of “Casablanca.” The film is rescheduled for later that week and the management refunds the admission price. Kate and Luis exit and walk past the bronze monarch and into the open plaza. It is a pleasant March evening and they sit around the fountain talking about the film. Both have seen “Casablanca” and neither is especially heartbroken about the broken projector.
The two lonely adolescents feel comfortable and secure in each other’s company. Luis tells Kate how much he looks forward to seeing her every evening. She is flattered by his courtesy. Luis is embarrassed at having expressed his feelings so candidly, like he’s given away a key position. Casting about for something new to say, Luis turns towards the statue of Mariblanca as if imploring her for guidance. Impulsively his hand slides into his jacket pocket and he draws out the well-worn volume of Aleixandre. Does Kate mind if he reads her something? No, she doesn’t. He opens the book with trembling hands and reads aloud to her

Throw away this book which tries to hold a sunflash
in its pages,
and look face to face at light, your head against
a rock,
while your remote feet feel the last kiss of twilight
and your raised hands fondle the moon,
and your tossing hair is a path among the stars.

She asks for no translation and he stares at her bent head that she rests against the palm of her right hand. The poem seems to swirl around them in the dark springtime wind. They sit in silence. Presently, Luis has an inspiration. “Do you like jazz?” he asks her with renewed confidence. She bows her head in assent and quits the fountain with Luis. On their short walk to calle las Huertas, Kate gives Luis her hand. He cradles it gently in his palm as if it were a canary, its small heart beating as quickly as his own.
Luis holds the heavy wooden door of La Fidula open for Kate. Inside, he spots Alejandro’s crowd at a table off to the side. Raul seems them and whispers something into Alejandro’s ear. Luis knows from the way Alejandro looks up at him that Raul has made some comment about Kate. He smiles to himself and is glad that Alejandro thinks he has a girlfriend. He and Kate sit down at the table, and in his zeal he forgets to make introductions.
Luis offers to buy Kate a drink, but she politely refuses. Her father would be furious, she says. The room goes hush as the musicians strike up the next song, “As Years Go By.” Luis lets his gaze rest on Kate’s soft features as she sways her head to and fro in time with the music whispering the lyrics to herself. When Luis asks her where she knows the lyrics from, she tosses her curly hair back and laughs, “She is my namesake, after all.”
The song ends, and all eyes turn to Kate. Luis sees there dark wide pupils glaring straight at her through the cloud of smoke. “So, aren’t you going to introduce us to your girlfriend?” Alejandro asks Luis brashly. Luis is really too delighted to correct his misconception: “This is Kate. She’s American and her doesn’t really know Spanish.” Alejandro gets up and bows low. “It’s a pleasure to meet you Kate. My name is Alejandro.” He addresses her in flawless English and turns back to Luis. “Well tell us Luis,” he begins in Spanish. “Is it true what they say? Are American whores the wettest between the legs?”
Alejandro’s cohorts burst out laughing and Luis turns sharply away. He gets up from his chair and holds out his arm for her. “Come, let’s leave, Kate.” Alejandro grabs his wrist gently but firmly. “But you only got here a minute ago. Stay and have another drink.” The blood was rising to Luis’ face and he muttered through his teeth, “I’m afraid we really must be going. I had no idea that farm animals were welcome at this jazz club.” He yanks out of Luis’ grip and marches to the door with Kate in tow.
Outside, his head seems less impacted. He breathes deeply and murmurs to himself: “The pigs. Underneath all their culture and refinement, they’re all just filthy pigs.” He is glad that Kate hasn’t understood Alejandro’s deprecating comments. It is nearly 10:00, and as Luis escorts her back to Peurta del Sol, she hangs on his right arm and leans her head against his shoulder. Luis feels her small frame nuzzling up beside him, and wants nothing more than to protect her.
At the entrance of the plaza they stop. Luis looks her full in the face and plants a soft kiss on her diminutive lips. It lasts only for a moment and has no sequel; but for Luis it is enough. He feels that one kiss could conquer eternity. Her great green eyes beam up at him and she wishes him goodnight. Goodnight, he answers and watches her turn and walk to the statue where her chariot awaits.

---

Over the next few weeks Luis and Kate routinely forgo the Ideal in favor of a poorly lit café where they can go to sit and talk. They cozy up with café con leche and cigarettes and discuss Aleixandre, Plato and Hitchcock between kisses. Luis holds her tightly as if to make sure she doesn’t run away. He brings her Spanish poetry in translation and dusty volumes of ancient philosophy that he buys at a used bookstore nearby his house. She is flattered by these gifts and thanks him with enthusiastic kisses and embraces. They are always mindful of the time and Luis ensures that she’s always on time to meet her chauffer.
Luis is content at first, but soon physical desire encroaches on his spiritual attachment. He is frustrated with Kate, who doesn’t reciprocate his yearning beyond a mere kiss or caress. What’s more, he’s pained that such lustful feelings have broken upon his calm and peaceful breast. At first, the highest joy he’d imagined for himself was simply to be with Kate and to be able to hold her. But she is no longer the source of such innocent solace. Now, when he looks at her, she appears not as a delicate young creature who loves him with a deep and tender love too pure to be sullied by intimacy; now, he sees her as a sensual creature in the process of becoming a ravishing woman.
He stares at her and imagines the developing body that lies concealed under the thin folds of her linen dress. He imagines stroking her slender stomach with the back of his hand: imagines the warmth and softness of her pubescent skin; the long, subtle curve of her arched spine and the weightlessness of her fragile ribcage. He dreams of watching as her breasts blossom out of their infancy before his eyes.
To Luis’ dismay, Kate does not share this longing for sexual intimacy. For her, love is something infinitely pure and rare. Something untouchable. Her conception of love springs from 1950s American melodramas. She expects a fade-out after every kiss: as if that were all there was to it.
Luis begins to despite her naïveté. His frustration mounts and he wonders how he can possibly get her to overcome her sense of shame and confront her natural sensuality. He takes her to “Belle de Jour” in the hope that it will open her eyes. She sits through the film without protest and even allows him to place his hand on her knee. Afterwards, however, she tells him bluntly, “I don’t know those types of films.” “Why?” he asked. “Because they’re foreign?” “No,” she countered, “because they’re filthy.”
So he was filthy then: really not a bit better that Alejandro and his gang. If anything, he was worse that Alejandro, who stopped at distasteful insinuations. He, Luis, went further by actively attempting to corrupt. Luis resents the suggestion of Kate’s words and the accusatory tone in which they were spoken. After all, what was he doing except casting about desperately for ways by which to express his love.
The next week, when they go to see “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Luis is even bolder. His hand creeps in the dark and finds its way to Kate’s knee. Slowly, Luis moves up past the hem of her dress along her hip. Like a snail, his fingers curl around her thigh and gently inch along towards her groin. When the trembling hand closes in on its goal, Kate starts in her seat as if suddenly woken out of the trance into which the film had caused her to fall. She brings her legs together tightly, squeezing the offending limb between her fleshy hips. Out goes the prying hand and Luis slinks back in his red velvet seat. The film ends and Kate makes her way to the Black Mercedes without uttering a single word to Luis.

---

For several days after that incident, Luis doesn’t see Kate at the Ideal. He looks around urgently for her at every film and is terrified that she might never show up again. The hours he spends in the Ideal without her are meaningless and solitary. No longer does he enjoy a film if she is not by her side. As the days pass by, he despises himself for his brutish behavior and curses his unquenchable desire. Exactly a week later he receives a letter from her. It reads:

Dear Luis,

I don’t think I need to tell you how offensive I found your behavior last week to be. And I want you to know that I am unable to satisfy your lower urges. This doesn’t at all than I love you any less today than I did three months ago. I hope you can understand the way I feel and don’t feel insulted by my behavior. I also have some sad news to communicate. My father has been posted back to America. My entire family is moving to Chicago when school ends. I’ve known about this for sometime now, and that why I didn’t want to get more intimate with you, knowing that it would all soon be over. My parents have lately become suspicious with me spending so much time at the Ideal, that’s why I haven’t been there lately. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to come for still another week because I have my final exams. Please don’t be angry with me. I hope to see you as soon as possible.
Love,
Kate

Luis reads the handwritten note and presses it to his forehead. The tears erupt like cannonballs and stream down his face in an endless torrent. His mother hears his bawling and bangs roughly on the locked bathroom door. What do you have to cry about, she hisses between clenched teeth and tell him to come to the table for dinner.
Luis looks at himself in the mirror. His dark ovular face is stained with tears and he though he washes them away he cannot stop the quivering of his slender lower lip. He presses the towel to his temple and pats along his high and well-defined cheekbones. He dries his olive-toned skin and wipes away the excess water from his bushy eyebrows and the mustache that is only beginning to sprout above his upper lip. He stares into his soft dark-brown eyes and feels his delicate lashes as he closes them. He takes a breathe and joins his family for dinner.
That night finds Luis without much of an appetite. For the balance of the week he scarcely touches any food. He glides from class to class like a ghost and after school stumbles frailly along to the Ideal in a vain attempt to momentarily forget how much he misses her. He wishes he had some means of getting in touch with her, but he never thought to ask her for her phone number and the letter she wrote him has no return address.
That Saturday is a triple-bill of Marilyn Monroe. He sits through “Some Like in Hot,” “The Seven Year Itch” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and imagines that Kate is sitting besides him laughing her loud and girlish chuckle. But not even this thought can quell his misery. He sobs quietly to himself, as all round him, the audience erupts in peal of laughter. When he gets home, he finds a note for him lying on the table. The handwriting is the same as before, Kate’s handwriting. He tears it open frantically and scans its contents. It tells him to meet her on Sunday for the 18:00 screening of “It Happened One Night.” It will be the last time they meet, as she returns to Chicago the following afternoon.
Luis sinks into his bed like a stone in the middle of the ocean. He feels the world closing up around him like a coffin but he is too weakened from malnutrition to scream. Instead he lets the darkness overtake him.
---

From the moment Luis wakes up late Sunday morning he finds himself possessed of an inexplicable source of energy. He leaves his bed close to noon feeling incredibly well-rested and resolute. In a bit under ten hours he will bid goodbye the dearest thing he’s ever had in his short life. Luis awaits the fateful hour without trepidation. He spends the afternoon calmly skimming through Plato’s Republic and the Apology. Before he leaves his room, he reflects carefully on a poem by Aleixandre that he opens to by accident. He reads the ending of the poem aloud to himself

More lights or flashing shadow.
The scattered sound and silence of the world.
Desolation
of the rimless void

And abruptly the last word;
Water caressing a thirsty mouth,
Or the tender drop on blind eyes
Burned by life and its fires.

Ah, what peace; sleep.

He closes the book and kisses it, then places it carefully back into his jacket. Before leaving the empty house, he walks to the bathroom, opens the medicine cabinet and finds his mother’s vial of Nembutal. He takes seven yellow pills out of the plastic container, wraps them carefully in a handkerchief and places it in his breast pocket.
He walks slowly along calle Humilladero breathing in the sweet air of the sunny June day. As he makes his way to Puerta del Sol, he observed, with renewed appreciation, the old buildings that line the streets. They are edifices that he has known all his life, that have remained the same as he’s grown up around them. How many times has he walked this familiar route to Puerto del Sol? Yet for some reason, the old familiar buildings take on an aspect of novelty, appearing to Luis unexpected and new.
As Luis nears the plaza he hears chanting from a small protest that has gathered in front of the post office. He doesn’t quite gather what the demonstration is about, but hopes that the cause – whatever it may be - meets with success. Kate is waiting for him by the statue of Charles III and embraces him with a passionate and loving kiss. They disengage and he sees that she’s more distraught than he. Her tears are blown to the side of her face by the playful wind, where they mingle with separatist strands of her thick, curly, red hair. He tells her not to worry, that everything will be all right.
They walk arm in arm through the heavy wooden doors of the cinema and he separates from her to go to the bathroom. He walks over to the sink and carefully unrolls the handkerchief from his breast pocket. He lets cold water run out of the faucet, and places the yellow pills on his tongue between massive gulps.
When he emerges, Kate is waiting for him by the popcorn stand. He nears her slowly, and they enter the auditorium. The lights swirl gently around him as they take their seats together in a central aisle. He plops into his chair like lead and draws the wimpering Kate close to him. He apologizes for his behavior during their last rendezvous and she chokes out that its okay, that she forgives him everything, that she is afraid to leave because she loves him so much. Luis looks into her freckled face, all ruddy and wet from crying, and is glad that he’ll remember her like this, her girlish beauty still intact. He whispers goodbye in a faintly audible tone and then her face goes out of focus. The theater darkens and the film comes on. The music is muddled and incomprehensible. Amorphous shapes made of shadow and light dance across the screen. And then something unprecedented happens; for the first time while watching a film, Luis falls soundly asleep.

Photo Gallery #1

2006-02-28T00:52:00.000-08:00

I'm currently taking a photo course and will be posting some of my recent work shortly. For the time being, here's a selection of photographs that I snapped over the past 6 months or so. Enjoy!

3 Stories

2006-02-27T19:20:00.000-08:00

This posting contains three short stories that were written over the past five months. The first appears in its second draft; the second in its third; and the first in its first. Enjoy!

I. A Nice Pair of Legs

Adam Joachim Goldmann

“The attraction of the connoisseur to any work of art is in part beyond description, and it is generally agreed that the desire to possess constitutes but a fraction of the attraction. While the eye may be the organ initially stimulated, the affair is soon transmuted to something beyond mere infatuation: namely understanding. It is thus that, at the risk of sounding obvious, we say that in order to truly see art, it is incumbent on the viewer to have some requisite knowledge in how to look at it.”
The pencil was poised threateningly at the paragraph it had just written. Its owner’s eyes quickly scanned it three times over. It was no good. Murray had asked for something simple and to the point: half-a-dozen lines that would inspire confidence and good cheer as a word of greeting for the company’s homepage. The man rubbed the eraser vigorously on his moleskin. Pinkish residue spilled onto the description of Lot 576, a Klee watercolor. He dusted it off the catalogue and onto the pants-legs of his silver Brooks Brothers suit. At a slight tug on the fabric that clung snugly to his left knee, the pinkish particles dispersed. He continued with his revision, indifferent to the auctioneeress’ fierce determination. The lot in question was a minor work, barely identifiable as a Klee, and it could hardly be expected to fetch more than a fraction of the opening bid.
The well-dressed gentleman retracted the tip of his pencil and stuck it behind his ear, feeling as he did so, the exquisite softness of his prematurely graying hair. He turned again to the catalogue and flipped to a dog-eared page. Again, he reviewed the description and provenance of the work he knew well. It gave him a special thrill to think that he had charted Lot 616’s trajectory with such doggedness. For nearly half-a-year now, he had barely pursued anything aside from this monumental work. Surely, such an acquisition would represent the greatest triumph of his short and unusually blessed career. The artist of Lot 616 was barely known outside his native Holland, and even there he was considered by the critics and public alike as an essentially provincial, even marginal figure whose importance for art – if indeed his work had any – could scarcely have a wide-reaching influence. But the graying man in the silver suit saw through what his detractors had termed “cold, inhuman tones” and “derivative prosaic form” and found in the aging Dutchman’s work a surprising deal of human sympathy and genuine originality. For some months now, the artist in question had been gravely ill. Some of Holland’s more youthful voices had been clamoring for recognition of his singular genius and stature. So far, their pleas and proclamations had fallen on mostly deaf ears. The man in the silver suit hoped that their impassioned voiced would continue to go unheeded: at least, that is, until he succeeded in acquiring a sizable collection of the work of an artist whose death – like his neglect – was an event that was to be both tragic and propitious.
The man in the silver suit sat impatiently in the fourth row, shifting his weight this way and that, crossing, uncrossing and re-crossing his legs with as much frequency as his pencil, which kept dashing out the more cumbersome words and clauses, while adding new ones of grace and simplicity. The man persisted in his task until he had achieved something resembling that form of artistic expression so noted for its concision, precision and clarity: poetry. He admired his handiwork with not a small degree of pride and was only brought back to earth by the announcement of lot 616.
So there it was. After months of tracking the coveted canvas, the man in the silver suit laid eyes on the object of his quest for the first time. Like an explorer perceiving in the distance a fabled land, the man’s heart beat ferociously; he was nearly choked by his tears. He had followed the painting from Brussels to Amsterdam, Madrid, Florence and finally New York, but had never until now as much as caught a glimpse of it. Like a young man overwhelmed by the freshness of his lover’s body, the graying man felt equally faint and exhilarated. There could be no mistake; van Floos’s “Begierde” would bring him and his firm to a whole new level. The early masterwork of this unappreciated dying artist would prove the man a force to be reckoned with. Of course, his triumph would not be immediate; but within a year of van Floos’s death, the painting’s value would skyrocket forty, even fifty times its current value.
The man held these happy contemplations in check as he raised his paddle. The work’s other admirers cut out early in the bidding, and the man in the silver suit walked away with “Begierde” for an almost criminally low price. The auction ended, and the man brought his paddle downstairs with the instructions that the painting be delivered straightaway to Ashton & Fairfax c/o Vincent Fatizzio.

It had been a long day already and the irregular length of the auction had put Vince in the mood for a nap. Before he journeyed home, however, he thought to pop in at the office, both to furnish Murray with the teaser for the website and to pick up the reports from the morning’s meeting. He called ahead to let Murray know that the purchase had been successfully concluded, and his superior gave him hearty congratulations. As Vince exited Rockefeller Center, he was positively beaming. He had masterminded the sale entirely from start to finish, and he had little doubt that he had done what was in his company’s best interest. He did, of course, have Murray to thank for putting so much faith in his obsessive quest. Vince had made an extremely impassioned case for van Floos, and he was prepared to forfeit the coveted position he held at Ashton & Fairfax, should his calculations prove horribly wrong. But Vince’s combination of charisma and determination soon had everyone won over.
Indeed, despite whatever shortcomings he may have had in both personal and social sphere, Vince Fatizzio could never be accused of having bad taste. That, at least, was something on which all his friends and enemies could agree. One could tell at an instant from his custom-tailored suits and finely coiffed hair that he was the type of man who only dined at the finest restaurants, drank the most superior wines, enjoyed only the most sophisticated entertainments and could tolerate only the most genuinely rarified works of art. Thus whenever anyone called upon Vince for a bit of advice, it was forthright obeyed as if a papal edict. Anyone who knew the privilege of being invited to Vince’s apartment knew his meticulous attention to detail and preternatural sense for creating ambiances seductive enough in which to drown. Since adolescence, Vince had been an ardent collector of African ivory carvings, Seventeenth-century Delft vases and fine sets of Chippendale’s furniture. But the most exquisite item in Vince’s collection was his wife of five years, the model Cindy Marigold.
To this enchanting and marvelous creature, Vince was forever glad to return at the end of a taxing day of work. He held her image in her mind as he rode the elevator to Art Advisory Services on the 11th floor of the Ashton & Fairfax building. When the door swung open, Vince found the cleaning lady – a Hispanic woman with a chronically nasty countenance – waiting for the elevator. Vince was not yet over the threshold, when the woman, who had with her the maintenance cart, edged her way into the car rather brusquely. She apparently had no regard for Vince’s suede shoes, which the cart rolled over, nor for the much commented-on pants-legs of his Brooks Brothers suit, onto which she let spill some murky blue water. Vince’s anger had no time to even register before the elevator, along with the cleaning lady, was gone.
Vince was not alone in his hatred on the cleaning lady. The middle aged Argentine woman went by the name of Conchita and had been on the cleaning staff of Ashton & Fairfax for three years. In all that time, however, she had never been known to mutter a kind word of greeting to anyone or even to wipe that angry scowl of her face, if only for a minute.
Vince marched into Murray’s office brandishing his soiled pants-leg and flattened shoe. His superior listened sympathetically, but said: “I’m afraid there isn’t much we can do. Don’t think that you’re alone in your dislike of her, but that’s hardly grounds for having her fired, especially considering what a damn good job she does. Besides, she’s illegal. I think we’d all feel pretty guilty if she were to get her deported.” Vince did not share in his superior’s sympathetic concerns, although he admitted, somewhat grudgingly, that Conchita was an exceptional mistress of her craft. Seeing that this answer hardly improved Vince’s mood, Murphy added, “Cheer up, Vince. With the investment you made today you can buy yourself 1000 new suits and pairs of shoes.”
Well that was true, even if it wasn’t quite the point. But as Vince packed up his office for the day he reflected – not without a bit of relish - on the untold hardship that was certainly Conchita’s lot.

They had oysters for dinner. Cindy had prepared them with garlic and mustard, approximating a recipe she’d tasted once at Bernardin. The dish had turned out infinitely better at the restaurant, although Vince applauded his wife’s efforts nevertheless, for courtesy’s sake. The conversation revolved around the afternoon’s auction and Vince fetched the catalogue to show his wife his latest purchase. Cindy looked at the grey and black image blankly and Vince, not knowing if she was puzzled or bored tore the catalogue from her hands rather brusquely. Cindy, of course, had not the ability to comprehend what was of significance in van Floos’s art, and her husband had neither the patience nor the inclination to educate her on the matter. He was tired from work, and the added fatigue of digesting his supper made him wish to do nothing more than to admire his wife’s beauty.
And so, after dinner, he sat on the leopard-skin sofa in silent contemplation of his wife, who flipped disinterestedly through the pages of the current issue of Vogue. Vince asked is she’d had a good day. She nodded vaguely and continued to look at the glossy pictures. What had she done while he was away at work, he wondered. Nothing much. A bit of shopping, perhaps. Vince noticed that Cindy had on an unfamiliar silver bracelet. Even at a distance, he could tell that it was of inferior quality, what is commonly called “costume jewelry.” Vince didn’t like the idea of his wife wearing anything less than pure and told her so.
“Take that silly thing off, Cindy,” he said rather gruffly, “it will give you a rash”
“Oh, I see,” she replied and casually threw it on the coffee table. Vince regretted speaking harshly to his wife, but had felt that it was something akin to a moral obligation, to demand his wife cast off her shoddy goods. Sometimes he felt seriously depressed that her own standards of beauty and perfection were so hopelessly low. He remembered how absolutely crazy she’d been for an ugly little puppy they’d seen at a farm upstate. Cindy cried like a child all the way back to the city, and persisted even after Vince had swore to her that he’d find her a cuter puppy in the city, one that was a purebred from a respectable breeder. For the most part, however, Cindy had been willing to leave all the decision-making to Vince and was always inclined to agree with him at the end of the day (even about the puppy). To say she was a woman of weak resolve would be misleading, for it would imply that she was a woman with even the ficklest of opinions, which was rarely the case. But it hardly mattered to Vince, who had enough opinions and prejudices for them both. He knew well enough what a dope she was, and that was precisely what he loved her for. She was a creature who existed for no reason other than to be beautiful. She didn’t stand for anything or conceal anything. She just was. And she was beautiful.
Vince considered Cindy his greatest discovery. They had met ten years ago, when Vince was getting his master’s degree at Princeton. She was a senior in high school and worked in a Dairy Queen nights and weekends. How exactly they met was a source of endless debate among their various friends, for – as can be surmised – they moved in very different circles. Intellectually, Cindy was about as exciting as a toothpick and, there being no question of her going to college, Vince whisked her away to the city, promising her parents to make a great model of her. That is precisely what he had done. She was introduced to all the best people in the New York Fashion circuit. Soon the name of Cindy Marigold became synonymous with the most exciting fashions of the time. The walls of Vince’s apartments were adorned with glamorous shots of his wife: not magazine covers –which Vince considered kitschy to display- but artist’s proofs by Sherman, Avedon and Freedlander.
Now, at 23 years old, Cindy’s modeling career had hit a temporary lull. Frankly, she welcomed the opportunity for much-needed rest. In her five years of marriage, she had lost none of her youthful beauty. Vince was not in the least disturbed by the sudden cessation of offers. As shrewd a businessman as he was a connoisseur Vince could appraise his wife as well as any painting.
Where was the man who could dare to pronounce Cindy Marigold anything less than the embodiment of feminine perfection? She was tall, but not too tall. Her ovular face would have suggested Modigliani where it not for delicate freckles set against the pallor of her skin. Her eyes were changeable, but usually shone light blue. Her diminutive nose was perfectly straight and her nostrils resolved in a compelling arc. Her hair was a ruddy brown, and she wore it down so it flowed past her proud neck down to her breasts, which were generous without being vulgar. Her waist was impossibly small and Vince often considered putting her in a corset to see just how narrow her narrow frame would bend. Vince counted among his greatest pleasures to cradle her lean yet substantial derriere while he buried his head inside her sex, which was both wonderfully taunt and surprisingly clean.
The only place where nature could have been shown to settle for something less than perfection was her legs. They were by no means repugnant or unsightly, but the kneecaps were a trifle crooked and bulky. Additionally, recent years had brought about an increase in spider veins extending from her ankles halfway up her calves. Vince had offered repeatedly to have the blemishes surgically removed, but Cindy, in an uncharacteristic demonstration of will, said she feared of the procedure and had refused. Vince was loathe to admit these imperfections, and tried as best he could to ignore them; a formidable task in which he succeeded most of the time.

Still smacking with the success of the previous day, Vince decided to sleep late and only arrived at work in the early afternoon. He entered his office and immediately recalled all the work that lay before him, researching various investment opportunities and writing up proposals for clients. He took a letter to Christie’s, asking when the van Floos would be ready for delivery. Then he contacted a small gallery in the Hague to see about acquiring a series of sketches that dated from van Floos’ mauve period. He finished his report on the “Begierde” purchase, and handed it directly to Murray, who didn’t as much as mention Vince’s tardiness.
The sun was setting, and Vince found the pile of documents on his desk was still considerable. At 6:30, he looked out the glass door into the office, and saw that it was entirely deserted. He rose to pack his briefcase and walked stridently to the bathroom. In a moment of what could only be forgetfulness, Vince’s hand seized the knob to the janitor’s closet. He swung it open to reveal Conchita who was changing out of her outfit to go home. She held the hem of her skirt raised to her waist, and unwittingly offered Vince a view of her right leg in full profile. Vince stood for an awkward moment that might well have been an eternity while the cleaning lady beamed at him like a fury. Then, fully gathering his senses, he muttered a confused word of apology and slammed the door rather forcefully. He went straightaway into the bathroom, where he stooped over the sink like a man defeated. His shock had stemmed for the inevitable embarrassment that such a farcical occurrence would engender. But it had another, more persuasive source. Vince gripped the sides of the basin firmly and peered resolutely down the drain, feeling that a horrifying abyss had just opened, and threatened to swallow him whole. By the time he opened the door to the men’s room, Conchita was long gone. Vince was relieved.
That night, Vince was unable to sleep. He lay in bed inertly sad as he stared wide-eyed at the wooden ceiling. Next to him lay the Cindy, her beauty not in the least diminished by slumber’s warm embrace. How could she, who had no thoughts of any consequence, possibly understand the suffering he felt? He continued to stare at the ceiling, replaying in his head the chance encounter in the janitor’s closet. He saw first that indignant look, the look of a hunted animal: those eyes peering out at him like a lion in the bushes. And then his gaze settled again on that single leg, curving suggestively from the toe to the hip, long, dark and delicate. He shuddered to recall such beauty and doubted even if he’d even glimpsed the perfection that haunted his nights. Those slender, incalculably smooth, remarkable legs dangled before his eyes all night long. He reached out to touch them, yet his fingers grasped nothing but air. In the morning he awoke on the wrong end of the bed, both arms wrapped around his wife’s knees.
It was still early, but Vince showered quickly and downed his coffee with the urgency of man exiting a burning building. His plan was to arrive at work early, and watch across the street for Conchita to emerge from the subway in her street clothes, which offered the eye a knee-length view. Vince’s pulse was racing and he felt absurd loitering by the Radio City awning with a half-burnt cigarette. Then he saw her walk across Sixth Avenue towards the Ashton& Fairfax building in a perfectly pedestrian cream-colored dress with brown stockings. To the casual viewer, there would have been nothing in the least remarkable about so ordinary a woman wearing so bland an outfit. But when she appeared, Vince felt anything but disappointment. There they were again, those twin limbs of perfect poise and balance. Yesterday he had viewed them at rest. Now he got to see them in action: the swinging hips striding confidently; the supple knees bending with spring-like exactness; the muscular calves jutting out as their owner advanced determinately towards the office building. Vince chased after her discreetly as he could. His eyes followed her from across the street and when he reached the building, he was but five seconds behind her. He prayed that she hadn’t gone up yet, and was relieved to find her still waiting for the elevator. He smiled awkwardly as he entered her field of vision, and she returned his greeting with one of her signature scowls. In the elevator, he stood in the corner in back of her, a position that afforded him the advantage of staring at her legs with impunity. She didn’t once turn around. For the duration of their brief journey, his eyes caressed her legs to his heart’s content. When the elevator reached their floor, he wondered if he ought to apologize for barging in on her the previous evening. But the possibility of a verbal confrontation was something that terrified him. He remained silent.
The first thing he saw on entering his office was a fax. He picked it up and read it, trying hard to be interested. Van Floos had undergone a successful heart surgery, it read, and the Dutch medical establishment had pronounced him beyond a doubt out of risk. This was indeed very unfortunate news for the purchaser of “Begierde.” He held the fax in his hand and remained stationary for quite some time. He knew it mattered a great deal if van Floos died tomorrow or lived another twenty years, yet he couldn’t bring himself to care one ounce. His reason was excited and Vince himself was starting to feel feverish.
When Murray and the others arrived from work, Vince withheld the information about van Floos from them and pretended as best he could to conduct his business as usual. But his colleagues picked up on certain telltale signs that betrayed that Vince was not entirely all right: the back of his suit was wrinkled, and parts of the sleeves were even stained with food; Vince’s hair was unkempt and his brow was soaked in sweat; whiskers lengthened along his upper lip and chin. Aware of his unseemly appearance, Vince confined himself to his office and, in vain, forced himself to take an interest in his work. He flipped through the catalogue from Christie’s, reading the most irrelevant details with mock intensity. He went through the catalogue with a pair of scissors cutting out the pictures, including the advertisements for the upcoming auction of film posters.
In the early afternoon, the door to his office creaked open. Conchita walked in unassumingly to clear away his garbage. Vince scrambled to sweep his clippings into the garbage, and “Begierdge” fell into the metal receptacle followed by “Claire’s Knee” and “Death in Venice.” Vince watched Conchita as she crossed the room in her cleaning outfit. Like a robe belonging to a nun, it covered her completely down to her ankles. As she walked towards the garbage, she seemed almost to glide across the floor. Vince was tantalized. As Conchita bent to retrieve the garbage, Vince raised himself to spy – if only for a split-second – an exposed ankle. The torment was too great, and Vince fell back into his chair with a resounding thud. In a moment, Conchita was gone.
All that evening Vince was plagued by his unholy desires. During dinner, he could barely stand to open his mouth in response to his wife’s chatter. In bed at night, he stared once more at the ceiling while watching Conchita’s legs dance before his mind’s eye. He was so ensnared by this game that he didn’t hear his wife whimpering gently from her side of the bed, until she placed a hand on his chest. She had been frightened earlier by his erratic behavior and felt certain that he no longer loved her. Vince did his best to assure her that nothing of the sort was true, that he merely had been feeling a bit sick at the office. But Cindy sensed the far-off longing in her husband’s eyes. It terrified her. Desperately, she threw herself at him, smoothing his brow with kisses and caresses. Minutes later they were making love. Cindy sat straight-backed on top of him, while Vince’s finger dug into her slender waist. His fingers moved down to her thighs as her movements became more violent. Vince clutched at his wife’s legs – good legs, ample legs, beautiful legs – yet realized now how inadequate they were.
For the rest of the week, Vince’s work was no less agonizing than it had been that first day. He woke up early every morning and stationed himself below the Radio City marquee in the hopes of catching a glimpse of his beloved legs. At his office, Vince continued to sequester himself to the obvious concern of the entire office. Vince came to expect Conchita’s daily visit with great impatience and excitement. Several times he was on the brink of opening his mouth, but he always found himself hopelessly tongue-tied. The legs never ceased to dance, dangle, run, jump, split and curtsy before Vince’s eyes. Gradually, Vince came to the realization that he must have them or die. There was no doubt about it. He simply needed them – to feel them, to touch them – to live. A desperate slave to his obsession, Vince hatched an insidious plan.
On Friday evening, Vince waited outside the Ashton & Fairfax building. It was nippy outside and Conchita was later in coming out than Vince had expected. When he saw her emerge from the great glass lobby, Vince mustered up whatever courage remained in his weak and worn-out body and approached her, confidently yet unthreateningly. Conchita spoke no English, and Vince had not a bit of difficulty communicating his intentions to her. He handed her a business card with his home address scrawled on the back and a key-chain, repeated “Sunday” a few times and then flashed his ten fingers before her face. Conchita looked bewildered at first, but then gave him a definite nod of understanding. The dark legs swung their way across Sixth Avenue and marched down into the subway.

Vince spent every hour leading up to Sunday in abject misery. It pained Cindy than her traditional remedy, a prix fixe consisting of Advil, Campbell’s soup, and oral sex – failed to have a restorative effect on her husband. All day Saturday, Vince was painfully taciturn, and Cindy left to go shopping while her husband pretended to read. When Sunday crawled around, Vince awoke before dawn and stayed in bed the whole morning. At 9:00, Vince heard Cindy slam the door behind her. She was off to see her parents for the day in New Jersey and wouldn’t be back until late. At 10:15, Vince heard a key turning tentatively in the latch. He remained in bed and only gradually dared to venture out into the kitchen to fix himself a cup of coffee. Noiselessly, he assumed a stool at the counter and clicked on the espresso machine. Directly ahead of him, the legs scurried across the living room floor, making order of the partially dissected Sunday Times. Vince was absorbed in his voyeuristic enterprise, and paid little attention to the piping hot espresso that awaited him. Whenever Conchita bent down to retrieve an errant pen or earring, her cream-colored skirt rose slightly of its own accord, offering Vince an unobstructed view of the back of her thighs. They were exactly as he had imagined them: dark, lean and muscular, like the thighs of feisty Brazilian stallion. Vince kept vigil from behind the counter unobserved. His gaze was so unshakably transfixed on those delirious legs that he really wouldn’t have been able to tell if she had noticed his presence.
At length the living room was tidied up and the legs marched playfully in the direction of the bathroom. Only once Vince was certain that she could no longer see him did he dare to follow on tiptoe, leaving behind the espresso which had deteriorated into a cold, bitter soup. The bathroom was situated at the end of the hallway, and as Vince approached ever so slowly, Conchita got down on her knees to scrub the tiled floor. Her servile posture afforded Vince the fullest display of both legs yet and even revealed a portion of her cheap, gray panties. Vince stood in the hallway breathing hard. The torment was too great and he was on the verge doing something violent when with a superhuman effort he tore himself from the scene and darted back to his room.
He crawled back into bed and drew the down comforter over his sweat-soaked body. He faintly made out the sound of the radio on his night table. Instantly, he identified the piece as the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth and weakly turned the volume up. He lay there trembling while the madness ebbed and flowed inside him, driving him to the edge of sanity. He closed his eyes and conjured up the vulgar position he had, moments earlier, spied. He imagined himself grabbing the slender ankles, smoothing the calves with his dexterous hands, biting the knees and showering those thighs in kisses. He was still in the delirium of his fantasy when he heard a gentle tapping on the door, and Conchita entered straightaway: impervious, of course, to his presence. She set about wiping the large glass doors that opened on a spacious balcony. The sun poured through, bathing Vince’s sickly countenance in a horrid yellow light. Vince propped up on his pillow and peered down at the extended feet of the cleaning lady, who was straining to reach the top of the window, with the consequence that, silhouetted against the glaring late-morning sun, her calves and thighs became suggestively defined. Vince gazed longingly at the object of his obsession and he strained his crusty eyes to admire the upturned ankle, which seemed to gesture at something that lay just beyond the horizon.
There he sat, the master, the eminently dignified critic, appraiser and collector, the purchaser of “Begierde,” who had all his life rejected anything the least bit impure, never settling for anything but the finest, won over in the end by slender limbs of a poor Hispanic cleaning lady. Vince felt faint and bend his neck as far as he could towards the outstretched legs before collapsing on the bed in sheer exhaustion.
Conchita must have heard the noise, for she turned around rather stunned. Seeing her employer so pale and sickly frightened her, and she disappeared from the room only to reappear a moment later with a glass of water. Vince accepted gladly and set the glass down on the night-table. He then gripped Conchita’s arm and forced her to sit beside him. He was hardly even looking at her when he placed his hand gently on her knee, caressing it like a kitten. Conchita showed some initial resistance to her employer’s advances, but let him proceed unhindered at so early a stage in the game. She was no stranger to the caresses of strange men, and had known the soothing hands of her uncles since her girlhood in Rio. There had always been a class of men whom she allowed to treat her body liberally, those who had shown her some kindness and whose motives had seemed unthreatening. She could easily tolerate the soft hands of her employer stroking her knees, then her calves and ankles.
It is hard to say what, then, caused the poor girl to bolt for the door a moment later when the pious hands crept up along her thighs. Perhaps she had gazed into her employer’s crazed eyes and had considered him a desperate man capable of anything. Whatever their reason, those pretty legs flew out of the room like a bat out of hell and a piteous look lodged in Vince’s disappointed eyes. The melancholic ears listened for the pitter-patter of steps through the tortuous hallway, and finally the resolute slamming of the door. Vince began to sob real tears as if he had just lost what was both most precious to him and most essential to his existence. He cried and in his heart cursed those perfect legs. In his mind’s eye he saw them gnarled, twisted, crushed and severed.
He was still in the midst of these violent reveries when what sounded like 1000 soda cans being crushed in unison, echoed in his room. The sound of twisted metal was followed instantly by a second, shriller sound, that of human anguish. Vince ran to the balcony and flung open the glass doors. He looked down into the street three stories below, and saw the image of a dark girl in a cream-colored dress pinned between two parked cars. Her pathetic cries wafted gently through the February breeze and then were heard no more.
The car in back, which was clearly the culprit, backed up slowly a few feet. As it did, a new sound was heard amidst the broken metal: the crushing of bones. The car in back came to a stop and the victim, unable to support herself, collapsed by the curb. Even from his elevated vantage point, Vince could see the bones jutting through the bloodied and crumpled legs. Vince stared intently at those limp bruised and formless limbs. He remembered back to his childhood, something and soothing: the sight of a crushed origami bird. Vince saw a sizable crowd form rapidly around the woman and saw the culpable driver emerge from her badly dented vehicle. The hapless victim soon lapsed into unconsciousness, the result both of shock and pain. Vince’s cell began vibrating frantically. He ignored it. He was too absorbed in the scene to care about anything outside of it. He sat on the balcony, watching as the sun climbed in the sky. It’s lunchtime, he thought, and calmly re-entered the apartment, amid the wailing of sirens. He continued to ignore the cell, as he sat down at the kitchen counter and carefully prepared himself a choice few turkey drumsticks. He seasoned them lightly and arranged them artfully in a cast-iron pan. His fingers groped at the squishy, clammy flesh as he handled the short, stubby limbs. He pressed the back of his hand to a drumstick, as if taking someone’s temperature, and them slapped the meat with the back of his hand. The symmetry of the arrangement was disturbed and Vince felt something that approximated relief. When he bent up after putting the dish in the oven, he door quickly swung open. Cindy stood flanked by two police officers. The unhappy wife flew into Vince’s arms and he was genuinely glad to see her home so early.

All that week the Art Advisory division of Ashton & Fairfax had to go without a cleaning lady. This hardly made a difference, as all the department’s employees were persons of immaculate personal hygiene. What’s more, everyone at AA found it a great relief to be rid of the unpleasant Conchita, although they all agreed that it was terribly unfortunate that she should have met so horrific an accident. Best of all, the old industrious, confident and shrewd Vince Fatizzio was back in business, and Murray and all the others were glad to see his mysterious malady suddenly vanish. Things went back to normal for Vince, and he continued to negotiate the sale of the van Floos sketches. Shortly after this last triumphant purchase, the neglected artist had the good sense to die. When Vince read the paragraph-long obituary in the Times he emitted a sigh of deep relief and contentment. It was as if he had concluded planting his garden, and now returned indoors to wait for his flower-patch to grow.
Eventually, the division was assigned a new cleaning lady. Her distinctive physiognomy made it immediately obvious to everyone that she was none other than Conchita’s younger sister, Anita. But unlike her sister, Anita’s youthful face radiated that wholesome goodness that is often mistook for true beauty. She was perpetually pleasant and blessedly easy to get along with. Most importantly for Vince, however, she possessed none but the most undistinguished legs: legs, which for all their length and firmness, were but a pale shadow of her sister’s dearly departed limbs.
After work one day as Vince was leaving the office, he noticed Anita loitering in front of the building’s fountain. The city was cloaked in a rainy gray. As he turned quickly to descend into the subway, she approached briskly and impeded his progress. To dispel the awkward flavor of this tense encounter, Vince asked after the health of Anita’s sister.
“She will live,” Anita responded meekly, adding that Conchita would never walk again. Vince expressed his sympathies and was on the verge of tearing himself away from the girl when she said, “She was with you, earlier that day of the accident.”
So she knew that much, Vince considered. He stammered and said, “Oh, how awful of me. I forgot to give her her wages.”
Vince reached into his breast pocket, withdrew his wallet, and discreetly withdrew a wad of bills, far too great a price for a couple of hours of housecleaning. He was on the verge of handing her the money when Anita spoke again, almost as if she hadn’t seen the bills flash before her eyes.
“If you need a new housekeeper…” her voice trailed off and Vince reflected that her sister had done well to keep his conduct a secret from Anita.
“I’m quite alright for the moment, but thanks anyway.” Vince returned her supplicant expression with an avuncular smile. He held the wad of bills up to her, and Anita, wide-eyed with wonder, extended her hand timidly to receive the gift. As her fingers scooped up the unexpectedly generous donation, Vince noticed a singularly striking thing; her slender wrists were really quite perfect.

Copyright 2006

II. 37 Via Dolorosa

Adam Joachim Goldmann

“My eyes are spent with weeping; my soul is in tumult; me heart is poured out in grief because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city.”
- 2:11 Lamentations

“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.”
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

It had to stop. There was no way it could last. To pretend would be futile, distressing for him and me. Berlin was my life. Its museums and parks were like vital organs to me: its wide boulevards and bridges over the river Spree, veins and arteries. I had to leave Berlin, beautiful city of art and life. I had to escape, to run away. I fled to what was perhaps the least likely place for a German girl to flee: Jerusalem. I learnt to love that ancient city, but my heart still yearns for Berlin, for the bustle and excitement of Kastanienallee and the elegance of Unter den Linden.
Of course Berlin wasn’t my only home. I was born in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria and spent my first twenty years of life in that loathsome city. It was more a prison than a home. My house was my individual cell. No, Kaufbeuren was never my home. I may have enjoyed it in my youth, but that was because it was all I had ever known of the world. We were a God-fearing Catholic family, indistinguishable from all the smug, middle-class families in our town. My parents raised me, their only daughter, to be a mild-mannered, pious wife, a strong asset to our close-knit congregation. They never harbored any great expectations for me and I don’t think they ever thought I might desire more from life than to love God. My parents loved me well and protected me, as others might tend a lone orchid in one’s garden. By all accounts, mine was a blissfully oblivious childhood: untouched by drama or incident or anything that might even for a moment quicken my pulse. I was earnest in my simple faith, accepted communion reverently and regularly confessed those peccadilloes I felt certain I must have committed.
Most forms of contact with the world outside our cloistered town were strictly verboten, as it was supposed that sin seeped into the community when it opened itself to others. Even a trip to nearby Munich was a rare event. The biggest family excursion I can remember was to the Passion play at Oberammergau. The year was 1990, and though I was 10 at the time, I don’t recall much of the seven-hour-long production. My parents still speak of it as a profoundly spiritual experience. The chief thing I still fixate on, however, was the spectacle of violence, and the pity that arose in my pre-adolescent breast for the suffering Christ.
Remember that while I was growing up, Germany was still divided. We lived, as did all our relatives, in the West. I had an uncle in West Berlin. According to my parents, we went to visit him once when I was nine, although I don’t recall ever making such a trip. After reunification, my family never traveled to Berlin. The first time I visited was with my high school class, I was 16 and couldn’t believe the city’s enormity and squalor. This was 1996 and the reminders of the city’s communist past were everywhere. At that age, I naturally preferred the far cleaner and more commercialized West. Back then I still held my provincial hometown in great esteem. The trip itself was unimpressive – I wasn’t particularly taken with that big, noisy city, the way it made you feel anonymous at night – but it awakened in me a sense of wonderment and opportunity that I could never imagined possible. On our tour, we passed by the main building of the Humboldt Universität, on the elegant Unter den Linden, across from the Staatsoper. It was lunchtime and students flowed from the building in an endless procession. How different was their garrulous, jovial demeanor from our reserved and reverent silence. I saw them exit the palace-like edifice, stylish in their casual, cool way and felt an overpowering urge to be one of them, to live as they lived, to dress as they dressed, to learn as they learned. When I came back from Berlin, I pled with my parents to let me attend university in a neighboring village. They put up much resistance, and told me that university would make me lose my soul. But I was determined, and swore to remain absolutely faithful to the church. In the end, I won out and attended the University of Regensberg, to which I commuted from my home each day (not an uncommon arrangement for Germans).
One of the first classes I took at Regensberg, I took a seminar in European post-War literature taught by a soft-spoken and casual professor named Markus Fink. The books we read included works by Paul Celan, Imré Kertesz and Primo Levi. Prof. Fink was a slightly stuffy middle-aged pedagogue, whose thick Hungarian accent made every syllable sound like poetry. Initially, I had my doubts about taking a course with such a heavy and grim reading list. I believe all the students in the class felt an initial revulsion and discomfort with the course. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to be confronted with our country’s bloody past. Much to the contrary, we felt it was an issue that we knew inside and out, better perhaps than anyone who had survived the camps. And while we understood that we were in no way to blame for what happen a half-century earlier, the Holocaust remained something for which we all felt guilty. The post-War guilt of our parents’ generation was one of our inheritances. Since elementary school we had all learnt to feel immensely, personally responsible. After all, it had happened on our own soil. How many times had I watched “Night and Fog” and “Schindler’s List” in class during Holocaust Remembrance Day? Thus, any reservations I might have had prior to taking Prof. Fink’s class stemmed as much from arrogance as it did from shame.
I was fairly certain that I wasn’t going to take the class, but when I saw Dr. Fink, and peered into those brown eyes that beamed out from a face ennobled by suffering, I could scare tear myself away. It was a small class that met on Monday evenings in a teacher’s lounge that was, by that late hour, deserted. The intimacy of the setting, coupled with the gentle teacher who seemed to embody the sorrow-filled beauty of every book and the poem we read, held me in a trance. We read authors German and foreign, Jewish and non-Jewish, and the more we read, the more incredible and horrifying the events themselves became. I spent long hours with Prof. Fink discussing the literature that we were always either reading or reading around. My fascination in the Holocaust and the various artistic representations of the Jewish Passion, eventually became the subject of my thesis. Prof. Fink was incredibly supportive of my research and advised my with ardent devotion. Naturally, I turned to him for advice when it came time for me to graduate. Fink adamantly opposed the proliferation of Holocaust museums and monuments (he felt they were trivial and wreaked of sanctimoniousness). Great art, so he held, was the only morally and politically acceptable way to memorialize the Holocaust. Thus, discouraged me from interning at any one of the seemingly endless Holocaust museums and foundations. He admired my academic writing, and suggested that I put my talents to use as a journalist. He gave me the name of a Jewish publication in Berlin, “Die Ürständ,” and told me internships were fairly easy to come by.
The idea of being a journalist in Berlin worked itself on my imagination, and I scarcely thought of doing anything else as I waited to graduate. Convincing my parents to allow me to move to Berlin, even temporarily, was far harder than I anticipated. They had always been troubled by my academic proclivities and felt that my moving to Berlin would signify a complete break with my family, religion and community. You see, while I was in Regensburg, they still had me pretty much under lock and key. I still accompanied them to church every Sunday and participated in the various youth groups my duty as a member of the community dictated. Of course, I could lapse on these responsibilities whenever I was consumed by my studies. This had frightened and irked my parents, and they threatened to cut me off without a dime if I chose Berlin –a city less than 5 % Catholic – over them. I understood that in their minds Regensburg had been intended as a consolation prize for the devout and provincial life they still excepted me to lead. They threatened me with but none of their threats could dissuade me from my appointed path. The guilt I had expected so to torture my conscience never came. Regensburg and Fink had purged me of all guilt, cured me of all attachments - spiritual and psychological – to my childhood.
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I arrived in Berlin one cold autumn day and directly took the U-Bahn to Schönhauser Allee, where the two-bedroom apartment that belonged to my friend Uwe awaited. Uwe had graduated from Regensburg one year before me. The room had been her sister’s before she’d moved to America. It was spacious and modestly furnished, dimly lit (the windows faced north) and smelling potently of cigarettes.
Uwe was a former dancer. Earlier she had dreamed of being a professional ballerina. She still had a dancer’s body, slender, graceful, petite, but one ravished from within by arthritis and the drugs she took to dull the pain of her unsuccessful love-affairs. She was so stunning that I didn’t think any man could be indifferent to her charms. But she was a mess psychologically and drove her frequent boyfriends to exhaustion with her moodiness. She could go from being frigid to clingy at a moment’s notice and could never quite interpret her own emotions. She saw a therapist once a week. But I doubt she told him about all the cocaine she did off her mirror in the middle of the day. The one thing that might have saved her was a job, but she lacked any motivation for finding one. Her childhood had been spent in opulence. She never wanted for anything. Her parents were Iranian royalty who fled to Munich after the revolution. They had been troubled when she and her sister had decided to move to one of Berlin’s most depressed boroughs, Prenzlauer Berg. She cried a lot: at mealtimes; during sex with her boyfriend; alone in the middle of the night. When I left Berlin, I fell out of touch with her.
Sometime during my first week in Berlin, I showed up for my internship at Die Urständ. I entered the newly-built offices in the West and introduced myself to the editors, two middle-aged single German women from whose lips hung half-smoked cigarettes. The editors seemed pleased to meet me, although they regretted they didn’t have much for me to do at present. I asked where they reporters sat and learnt that there were no staff writers, just a trusty group of freelancers who fleshed out each issue of the bi-monthly publication. Most interestingly, I learnt that the paper wasn’t even really a German publication. Die Urständ had been founded in 1930’s New York by refugees from Hitler’s Germany. In its heyday writers and thinkers like Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig contributed to it. But when I arrived the paper was a pale shadow of its former self.
The paper’s readership was rapidly dying out, and the quality of the writing I found in the back issues lying around the office was amateurish. All the freelancers and the editors understood that - despite the offices, a gift from some overly optimistic foundation – the paper was in its death throes. I soon discovered that of the 5,000 Jews who lived in Berlin, only a small fraction bothered to pick up a copy. Dismayed by my first impression, I stayed away from the office for about a week. When I returned, it was for a writer’s meeting to determine the contents of the coming issue. I met the other freelancers, as well as another intern, a Jew from San Francisco named Sam. Late into the night we mused about possible article ideas. I remember the contenders as being the controversial Holocaust monument in Berlin, an interviewer with the oldest survivor in some small German town, and a new film about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
There were few Jews in where I grew up in Kaufbeuren. I saw them at school – a boy named Klein, a girl named Falk – but I really didn’t know anything about Jews before I came to Berlin. I learnt a lot from Sam. He was studying at Humboldt University on a Fulbright, working on his dissertation about memory and guilt in post-War Germany. I envied him his lifestyle and that was primarily what attracted me to him. He was not a handsome man, but the fact that he had a Fulbright and was able to travel on someone else’s tab, made his big, ugly body, his bushy eyebrows and balding head terribly attractive. Aside from Prof. Falk, who had been a paternal, even avuncular figure, Sam was really the first Jew I ever got to know intimately. I was fascinated that, despite what issue after issue of Die Urständ would have me believe, there was more to Jewish culture than the Holocaust. We often discussed politics and culture and Sam would tell me that Israel, political problems notwithstanding, was poised to become the future culture capital of the Middle East.
I stayed at Die Urständ for two whole years, despite how depressing I found the whole outfit. They never once rejected a story of mine, but the pay was so pitiful, I had no choice but to find other ways to pay the rent. My experiences with the Urständ had made me fairly certain that journalism was my calling, or at least, the best use of my talent. I took internship at several other papers, all of which were unpaid except for when I managed to get a story in print. The two publications I had the most luck with were Der Tagesspiegel and Berliner-Post. But although I hadn’t found the professional success I’d envisioned for myself, I loved my new home dearly. Berlin, the backdrop of all my half-successes, was the single greatest thing I’d ever known, and the sole reason why I never once considered running back to Bavaria, even at times when I was flat broke.
It’s hard to describe what it was about Berlin that seduced me to completely. Was it the endless sprawl of the city and the diversity of its boroughs, where a seemingly endless assortment of punks, beggars and the riff-raff of society seemed to get by on the little they had? The classical architecture coexisting with sleek, modern buildings, with expansive public parks sprinkled throughout the city? Was it the history I sensed so potently walking and biking along its grand boulevards and back alleys; seated in its copious biergartens and cafés. Was it the abject squalor of Kotbusser Tör, teaming with beggars and orphans like Istanbul the way I imagine it, juxtaposed with the wealth and boastfulness of Charlottenberg? Was it the overwhelming sense of the past that lent itself so effortlessly to the energy and dynamic sights and sounds of the youth? Or was it, perhaps, all the museums, concert-halls and opera houses that signified the city’s ascendancy to the cultural center of the new Europe? My love for Berlin was all of these things and none of them. I loved the city with a fervor that more closely resembled romantic love than a love of place. I hoped never to have to leave Berlin, but that hope was quickly dashed.
I had been in Berlin an entire year when I began interning for another daily, “Berliner-Post.” The editor of the Feulliton, Bernd Höniger, encouraged me to pitch regularly. I can’t remember when exactly I noticed that his interest in me was more than that of a mentor. Perhaps I had understood it all along.
A fellow intern told me one day that the way you get to the top in this profession is not by fucking your editors, but making them think they could fuck you. Since girlhood I have been a flirt. It was no different when pursuing professional success. Sure enough, it worked. I got many articles into the paper.
He kissed me for the first time on a brisk, autumn day. We were coming back to the office from lunch when he took me by the shoulders and drew me into an alley. At the time I struggled and even scolded him afterwards. Later that night, he called to apologize. I accepted immediately and told him not to worry. I didn’t think that it was a cause for alarm. But over the next few days, weeks, I realized that I was falling for him. I had been in love before, but still, when the realization hit me, it made my heart beat so violently that I constantly feared having to confront him. I took a break from the Berliner-Post but realized I couldn’t stay away for long.
We began our affair in December, right before Christmas. I had seduced a respectable family man. Both his children were grown and Bernd himself was pushing 50. It’s so easy for me to analyze why I fell so desperately for him. Even then, I had the clarity of thought to realize that I loved him more for what he did than for who he was. It was his age, his experience, his prestige that drew me to him. But even now as I tell myself all this, as I try to convince myself that I was more in love with an idea than I was with the man himself, I don’t want to believe it.
After we made love for the first time, he talked about his family: about the wife whom he loved and had remained faithful to for 26 years. As the weeks wore by, he told me how dreadful he felt betraying her. Yes, he still loved her. The thing was he loved me – or so he claimed – equally. Separate but equal, that’s what I was. We would meet in my room on Kopenhagenerstraße after work. He opened up in my arms. I seemed to cast off the weight of his 49 years and he’d become easy and casual, not ashamed of anything personal in my presence. I felt wanted and was thrilled to mean so much to someone so important. We’d go to concerts, films and operas (he reviewed them frequently and his wife wouldn’t usually join him). I can’t remember ever having been so happy as I was during those few weeks. The city that I loved became more vibrant and exciting. I took Bernd to my favorite haunts; a “secret” bar in the Hackesche Höfe that only played ‘60s music, a cozy bar in Helmholmplatz call Der Wohnzimmer, and the sprawling Mauerpark, which had rock-climbing and concerts, and was just one block from me. Sometimes, Bernd would cut out of work midday and take me to a museum, the Gemäldegalerie or the Alte. But his wife remained the one unresolved variable that obstructed our happiness.
One day he came into work visibly shaken. We went out for lunch and told me that he couldn’t stand to deceive his wife any longer. He was going to tell her and face the consequences. I urged him not to, but I secretly hoped that such a confession would lead to divorce. When I didn’t see him at the office for a couple of days, I feared the worst. He finally returned on a Friday and told me he’d confessed all to his wife. Although she had screamed and cried, she had resolved not to leave him. He assured me that he still loved her very much. Then, he told me that she was interested in meeting me. I thought about it a few days and reluctantly obliged. That meeting was pure hell. Bernd’s wife didn’t shout or cry, but the pain was so clearly etched on her face in the wrinkles around her lips and eyes. I hated the thought that I was the source of so much anguish and wished that she would accuse me, so that I could beg forgiveness. But she remained calm and even polite. I sensed that she might even admire me. It was frightening.

After my meeting with Berndt’s wife, things never went back to normal. I don’t know if it was me or him, but we just couldn’t seem to meet as innocently as before. I couldn’t give myself to another so fully, with the knowledge that I was causing someone else so much pain. The guilt ate away at me and I avoided the offices for weeks on end and ignored Bernd’s phone calls. But I couldn’t stay away for long, and soon our affair fell into a semi-regular pattern.
One day Berndt told me that his wife requested I join them for dinner. I resisted but gave in after much argument. At the restaurant, Berndt hardly opened his mouth except to order. His wife, on the other hand, was a perfect chatterbox and drilled me on everything from what my parents did to how old I was when I started wearing glasses. She asked so many questions, so many things that Berndt himself had never thought to ask. It was as if she wanted to show him how little he knew of me, to prove the pettiness of his infatuation. It was cruel of her and hard to watch Berndt put up with it. After the meal, she asked me to come over for some drinks. When I politely declined, she became insistent and grabbed my wrist. I refused and broke away from her menacing grip, running like a fugitive to the station. I cried on the U-Bahn all the way back to Schönhauser Allee.
From then on, Berlin seemed stifling. I stayed away from Bernd, but I feared meeting him on the street as much as I hoped for such a chance encounter. I loved Bernd unwaveringly, but understood the painful necessity of giving him up. My love for him ran as deep as my love for Berlin. I knew that to forget him I would have to run away and never return. The only place to run was back to my parents in Kaufbeuren. But I knew that once I had crawled back and done my penance, I would never be able to escape again. My funds were meager, far too little to afford anything resembling an extended vacation. I felt utterly helpless, pushed into a corner. All the things I had previously loved about the city began to suffocate me; everything reminded me of Bernd and of my guilty love.
Sam, the intern with the Fulbright, had an unexpected solution. He encouraged me to apply for a Master’s program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, saying that the German government, ever ready to through money around for reparations and building German-Jewish relations, was certain to grant me a scholarship. In the months that followed, waiting to hear from Hebrew University, I had no contact with Bernd. I stopped writing for the Berliner-Post and threw myself with renewed fervor into the pathetic tidbits I devised for the Urständ. Early that winter, I heard back from Hebrew University. I had been accepted into the Master’s program and needed to work out the financial arrangements with the German government. It wasn’t hard to have my grant request approved; of course they were thrilled that a bright, young German girl was interested in pursuing studies in Israel. I was very good PR for them, you see.
Within a week I packed up the life I had made for myself in Berlin, folded it neatly into the boxes I sent home to Kaufbeuren. It was hard to leave Uwe. I knew how desperately she needed me and feared for her when I was gone. I continued to stay away from the Berliner-Post. I couldn’t bring myself to confront Bernd before I left and braced myself for the impossible task of falling out of love with him.
Sam insisted on taking me out as a goodbye present. We went to the Philharmoniker, where Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was being performed. At intermission, we ran into Bernd. He looked flustered and confused. It had been some time since we’d last seen each other. Running in to him unexpectedly after such a long absence was an enormous shock. After the opera, Sam took me to a bar in Potsdamer Platz, I cried to him about it all, how I felt I couldn’t bring myself to fall out of love, how I feared that Israel would do nothing to weaken his hold on me. I didn’t want Sam to leave me that night. I tell you, I felt nothing for him, nothing whatsoever, but I needed him then and there, needed to feel him next to me, to feel him, to fuck him, someone to make me feel beautiful and wanted. Drunk, I dragged Sam back to Kopenhagenerstraße with me. He saw me upstairs and despite my entreaties left. I saw I had a message from Berndt, the first in months on end. I called him back and was glad to know he was as miserable as I was. We made up to meet by Richard-Wagner-Platz for what was to be our last session.

It was raining. Bernd wore his woolen trench coat and a fedora, both of which seemed to blend into the gray sky. I nestled close to him to feel his tired heart beating. We went to a nearby hotel and talked and made love all afternoon. In the gloom of oncoming twilight I awoke and got dressed. I couldn’t bear to say goodbye and left him sleeping in his tiny rented cell. My flight was the following afternoon. Who knew when we’d meet again? Wordlessly, I said goodbye to both lover and home.
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I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport on a mockingly sunny January morning. I took a cab to Jerusalem, Rehov Tschernichowsky, where I was sharing an apartment with some other doctoral students at the university. Of my three roommates, I became closest with Yedid, who was slightly older than the rest. They had already done their compulsory military service, but none of them had nearly the experience as Yedid, who was a general. He’d told me countless stories of his unit’s operations, often condemning Israeli policy. For the most part, these Israelis were as critical of their own government as I was. They just hated when the criticism came from outside.
I came to Israel during a lull in the Intifada. A ceasefire had been announced very shortly before my arrival. No one, of course, expected it to last. For the moment, though, there was little violence. My first experience with the Matzav, or “the situation” as it was euphemistically called, came about two months into my stay. The semester was getting off to a promising start. I was still struggling with mastering the Hebrew alphabet, but very relieved to find that virtually everyone spoke English. I had made several friends, mostly Americans, at the university, but none in whom I felt I could confide. So far away from Berndt, I understood how deeply I loved him. I decided to write him a brief email. He wrote back immediately and told me it was the same for him. When I read “Karen, ich liebe dich noch und kann dich nicht vergessen,” I cried overjoyed to learn that my affection was reciprocated, yet distressed that we would go so long without seeing each other. It was the middle of February and I had no plans to go home for another year at least. (It really depended on how much success I had pitching articles to German and English-language papers).
That afternoon I walked along Rehov Derech Beit Lehem, a busy street downtown, feeling my heart torn apart by longing and elation, when an ear-shattering blast shook the air. The force of the explosion knocked me to the ground or maybe I fell out of fear. In the immediate aftermath, a deafening silence clouded the smoke-filled air. Then I heard the screams. Shrill, choked, horrific. I followed the cries around the corner onto Rehov Yaffo until I could see the carnage. A branch of the ubiquitous coffee shop, Café Hillel, had been blown up. The store windows were shattered and a tangle of limbs hung out of the rubble, the figures impaled on the remaining shards of glass. On the street were those who had either pulled themselves from the scene of devastation or were on the sidewalk when the bomb went off. On the ground, a collection of severed limbs and mangled automobile parts lay smoking. The ambulances and fire trucks arrived within minutes and I stayed and watched as they took the injured to the hospital and cleared the area of debris.
From that day on, the bombings were frequent, sometimes even daily. The Israelis had a thick skin. They’d lived with this constant violence for years and had learnt to accept it as a fact of life. Within a week, the Café Hillel on Rehov Yaffo was rebuilt (not that I could ever bring myself to go inside). The Israelis I knew never thought twice about taking a bus or visiting a crowded shopping area. This was a people whose only response to tragedy seemed to be to continue with their everyday lives and not to succumb to fear. This was a people who had learnt to laugh about the biggest tragedy in their history.
A week into my visit, Yedid told me the following joke. “When did Hitler kill himself?” He didn’t wait for me to react. “When he got the gas bill.” He must’ve seen the shock that stood in my face, but it didn’t in the least seem to occur to him that he was addressing a German citizen. Perhaps the ability to joke about such a terrible atrocity was a way to cope with all the violence and bloodshed that these people encountered daily. I admired their stubbornness and wished I could take a similar approach to the little tragedies in my own life. But there were deeply painful parts about my past that I could not make light of. Nor could I function regularly when explosions shook the city daily. I avoided the popular bus lines and the noisy outdoor shopping centers in downtown Jerusalem. Even at the university, I was prone to anxiety (its café had been blown up once before the start of the Intifada). Thankfully, the part of town where I lived, Hamoshavah Germanit, the German Colony, an affluent and heavily American neighborhood, had never suffered a serious attack. The main boulevard Emek Refaim, with its teaming shops and coffee houses, and the peaceful gardens of Gan Hashoshanim and Yemin Moshe were the only places I felt truly safe.
I spent more and more time indoors, my movements severely paralyzed by fear. Alone with my thoughts, I yearned for Berndt constantly, realizing how much I missed and loved him. The loneliness and the grief of not being with him crippled me more than the constant fear of attacks. Eventually, I realized that I needed to regain a semblance of a normal social life if I wanted to go on functioning.
It was spring but the landscape of the city riddled with terror seemed hardly more appealing. I took up with another student at the university, a Brit named Edward for whom I felt next-to-nothing. What did it matter when I was sure of Berndt’s love? With him I started venturing out again. We went often to a café in the Midrehov called Tmol Shilshom, sometimes alone, at other times with friends. We debated politics and other things our minds couldn’t quite grasp. These debates often became heated, which was both entertaining and infuriating. After a while, I tired of them and my British friend. I devoted myself to my schoolwork and turned in a dissertation proposal on the fate of Jewish publications in post-War Germany. But I wasn’t so much interested in my studies as I was looking for something to distract me from thinking about Berndt. I hadn’t received word from him since the Café Hillel bombing.
By July the wave of violence that had shook Jerusalem the entire spring was calming down. Israel was once more pursuing diplomatic strategies with the Palestinian leadership and both sides had declared a cease-fire. The only certainty in this region was that the peace wouldn’t last. It had been seven months since I left Berlin. When I finally thought that I had learned to stop loving Berndt, he contacted me.
The email was short and to the point. His marriage had gone back to normal, but he had been struggling and tried every way he knew to forget me. He knew that nothing could ever come of our love and felt he had to put a stop to our relationship once and for all. He had decided that he could not break up with me at such a distance. After talking things over with his wife, she had consented to let him finalize matters with me. He’d already booked a flight for the following weekend.
The morning his flight came into Ben Gurion I rented a car and drove it to the airport. I waited a while for him to get security clearance. When I saw him my heart leapt out of my chest. Although I knew all too well the purpose of his visit, I choked on my tears and embraced him long and tenderly, feeling his beard brush gently against my neck.
He was leaving in two days, during which time he hoped to resolve everything between us. It seemed impossible that we should accomplish so much in a mere 48 hours. I had spent so many sleepless nights crying for him, holding imaginary conversations with him. I felt what I had to tell him would take years to communicate. Why then was the car ride back to Jerusalem so deafeningly silent? Was it that we both feared the purpose of his visit and sat silently conspiring how to postpone the inevitable?
His accommodations were in the Old City at the Austrian Hospice of the Holy Family, 37 Via Dolorosa. I had been only once before to the guesthouse, which was located in the Arab Quarter, close to the exit of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Via Dolorosa is the avenue Christ was paraded down before his crucifixion. All along it are markers for the Stations of the Cross. I didn’t often find myself in the Arab Quarter, or the Old City for that matter. Not for any particular reason. On my few visits there with my Israeli friends, we restricted our movement to the Jewish Quarter with its preternaturally tidy streets and squares constantly teeming with American tour groups and Jewish students. Yedid often referred to the area of the Rovah as a Jewish Disneyland, with its pristine, sanitized presentation of ancient sites. “All they need is people dressed up as Moses and Abraham walking around with big stupid grins and taking pictures with eager tourists,” he’d joke.
How different things were in the Arab Quarter. Here, one seemed to enter a completely foreign world: the hustle and bustle of activity; the sounds and smells of people teaming in the streets; children hanging out of the windows of their squalid apartments; beggars and peddlers accosting you in the Shuk; starving mothers and their children sitting on the cobblestone streets.
The guesthouse was staffed entirely by German and Austrian volunteers. I hadn’t communicated with anyone in that language for months and it felt good to hear German spoken so openly and freely. It almost transported me. But then I looked around at the old grayish walls and remembered where I was. The spell had been broken.
We made love three times that afternoon. Noiselessly. Wordlessly. I understood, as did he that this would be out last session, that the affair was quickly nearing its inevitable conclusion. There was no need to discuss anything any further. I didn’t want these last moments with him to be wasted wallowing in sadness. No, I wanted to have only good memories. We had two days together, a little surprise, one last chance to be happy with man I loved before the pain set in. Everything seemed to take on a heightened sense of reality. I didn’t care about the future or that we were in a house intended for pilgrims. I just wanted to be happy, as intensely happy with him as possible, before he left me forever.
Afterwards, we went downstairs to the garden café. We drank coffee and smoked while the setting sun made the rooftops gleam with blue and gold. The call to prayer echoed through the air. We spoke freely then, easily to each other, both of us trying hard to pretend that it wouldn’t be goodbye forever. He went to bed and I walked languidly along the quiet Via Dolorosa and back to the New City.
The following day, I skipped classes to spend time with him. It was a calm day and neither the climate not the Matzav oppressed the city. I took him around, showing him my favorite sites, stopping in at cafés and bookshops along the way. We ate dinner on Emek Refaim and went to the Cinematheque afterwards. The Jerusalem Film Festival had just begun and we saw a restored print of Carl th. Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” After the film, we stopped in at a café, where I drank something that upset my stomach. I accompanied him back to the guesthouse. We didn’t make love that night.
He woke early to pack. His flight was at 2:00pm. I offered to drive him to the airport. He told me that he’d take a cab and I obeyed. I didn’t want any unpleasantness between us in those final hours. When we walked out of the Damascus Gate, the car he’d ordered from the hotel concierge was waiting to take him away. I trembled with sadness, but held back my tears. So much pain stood in his face that I couldn’t bear to look at him. We embraced, but not as lovers embrace. I stood in the empty lot as he entered his taxi, my throbbing mind awash with something other that thought or emotion. When the cab was out of sight, I still stood there peering into the distance. The first emotion to assail me was not grief, but an overwhelming desire to confess.
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After Berndt left, the bombs continued to go off almost daily, but I was no longer afraid. Had anything really changed? I asked myself. The country seemed so far from peace, so devoid of hope. And yet, people were going out to clubs and restaurants, enjoying themselves like they would any other place on earth. I asked myself if I had changed and I realized that I hadn’t. I had switched countries and given up man I loved, yet I myself remained the same. It was now the height of summer and some student I knew, including the Brit I had briefly dated, were considering going down south to Elat, a seaside town with luxury hotels, beaches and scuba diving. I would’ve loved to join them but couldn’t afford such a lavish package.
A few days into their stay, there was an attack at their resort. Of the thirteen casualties, two were from Hebrew U. I was sitting in the Café Aroma on Emek Refaim waiting for Edward, when I learn of the bombing. The television carried a familiar story and as I watched the carnage revealed on screen I felt more bored than horrified. Edward arrived. He already knew about the attack from a friend who had phoned from the resort. When I heard that two students were among the dead, I nearly dropped my coffee. I knew neither of the victims; or rather I knew them too vaguely to ever miss them. Yet the news shook me. My eyes fixed again on the television screen, and the flat, unconvincing images of mangled flesh became somehow more real. I thought how moments ago those chunks of bloodied meat had been something alive and beautiful.
I lay awake in bed that night thinking about those images; in my dreams, I played the scene of the bombing out over and over again. Every time it was slightly different. Even in my unconscious state, I was unable to decide which version of the truth to embrace. I see them looking thin and tan in their bathing suits, towels fastened around their waists. They are returning from the beach, and are carelessly treading sand into the hotel restaurant. I see them choose a table by the window and inspect the menus carefully. It is noontime, and the tables around them are quickly occupied. I see them order their meals, giving the Arab waiter a hard time for not remembering everything perfectly. I see also the unassuming woman with dark sunglasses and a large handbag who saunters in without having her bag checked. No one notices when she sat down, crossed her legs and began to read the newspaper. I see the alluring woman get up and go to the bathroom. She might even ask the girls at the neighboring table to keep an eye on her bag. When after a few minutes she hadn’t yet returned, one of the girls grows uncomfortable. I see her eyes widen as the realization gradually dawns on him and then -. I can hear the blast, louder by far than anything my parents have ever shouted at me. I can see the smoke, thicker than when I enter the stream room of the pool on Emek Refaim. I can smell the dust and the blood and the flesh commingling in my nostrils perversely, a combination that shouldn’t be possible. I hear their screams, faint at first, rising like the chorus of the damned from beyond the grave. The smoke clears and I see the victims: faces burnt, limbs missing, covered in blood and ashes. And by the shattered window I see what remains of the two girls, paltry evidence of their short lives.
And that was all. I couldn’t mourn them. If anything, I admired them. I knew that the pain their friends and families suffered would ultimately embolden them, the way it had all of Israel. I wished that the inner turmoil I had endured could somehow make me stronger and embolden me. But all that I had suffered only rendered me helpless and inactive.
If I couldn’t mourn those two girls, nor did I feel any anger towards the bomber. I looked on him as another one of the war’s anonymous victims, another innocent trapped in a desperate situation. There were only good people trying to make the right choices. The consequences could be horrific, but at least some people took action and tried to change something. Everyone has his reasons.
This war will go on long after I’m gone. It will never stop. It’s the things that should never stop that do, things like love and happiness. Everything else will go on long after we’re all gone.

I received an email from Sam the other day. It was about Uwe. She had killed herself, cut her wrists wide open and hung her arms over the balcony, so her neighbors could see the free-flowing blood cascade down from her fourth-story apartment. When I remember how miserable she was, I think it’s a good thing that she took action to stop her suffering. Very few of us can be that strong.

Copyright 2005 - 2006

III. Brief Encounter in a Parisian Cafe

Adam Joachim Goldmann

Gottschalk took a gulp of his lukewarm espresso and sank into the leather comfort of his first-class seat. Across the way sat his assistant Bernstein, looking thoughtful and stroking his chin. His gaze was averted to the window as the plane started its descent into Charles de Gaulle airport.
As Gottschalk stepped off the plane, photographers encircled him like vultures, snapping their cameras in quick succession. The flight had tired him and he felt in no mood to field questions from the sea of journalists that awaited him at the foot of the stairs. It was early October and the Paris sky, though sunny and clear, sent bouts of stinging wind this way and that. Gottschalk gripped the collar of his parka with both hands and began his descent, while Bernstein, somewhat intimidated by the celebrity-hungry horde, lagged behind. The journalist who led the pack popped out of his Hermes trench coat and nestled his way next to the director.
“Welcome to Paris, Monsieur Gottschalk. Maurice Signac, Le Monde,” the journalist introduced himself in surprisingly unaccented English.
“I trust that you had a pleasant journey.” Gottschalk gave a tired nod.
“If you please sir, a Gottschalk film is a major event in world cinema. In this country, we are anxiously awaiting your new project. We are more than familiar with your secrecy, but is there anything you can say about your new film that would whet our reader’s appetites? And could you, Monsieur, say something about working with Angelique Delacroix, whom you chose for the principle role?
Angelique Delacroix was an 18-year-old French beauty whose coquettish performance as Joan of Arc in Patrice Chateau’s richly detailed historical film “Les Moyens-Ages” had caused a scandale in the spring. Within a week, she had captured the hearts and minds of a generation. There was not a soul in all of Paris that did not worship her pale, creamy skin or fall slave to those soft azure eyes. In this, Gottschalk was no exception.
Gottschalk responded in French, a practice he’d long ago adopted to avoid being mistranslated in the tabloids: “Angelique, c’est une actrice formidable, très doué et belle. Elle, comme on dit en anglais – Fit the bill – pour le film.”
Since Gottschalk’s producer, Balducci, had not yet announced the project formally, the director refused to comment on the film. At the journalist’s insistence, he added:
“C’est un film d’amour. Une tragedie.”

In the lobby of the Quatre Saisons, Gottschalk’s producer, Balducci, awaited the director’s arrival. He’d arrived half-an-hour earlier with Mademoiselle Delacroix, and had coaxed her to sit on his lap as he took his coffee. Delacroix was modestly dressed and wore only a trace amount of blush and natural-colored lipstick. Owing to the disparity in age between the two, the scene appeared perfectly chaste; there was something even grandfatherly in Balducci’s demeanor. Nevertheless, the director was a little stunned to find his star sharing his producer’s lap. (It was bad enough that Gottschalk himself had to eat out of Balducci’s hand). They had met only once before while Delacroix was promoting “Les Moyens Ages” in New York. Gottschalk remembered their interview perfectly. He had come at the insistence of Bernstein on the press day in early August. He met with her and Chateau in a suite at the Regency. They chatted about the film and he handed her a script of Brief Encounter for her to look over. As she perused the script, Gottschalk could not tear his eyes from her. He stared at her, not indecently, but rather as one examines a skillfully executed work of art. He hated to admit it, but he’d fallen a little in love with her that day, a fact that certainly lay behind his quick decision to cast her.
Although the Academy had yet to bestow its honor upon Duncan Gottschalk, his reputation was in no way hampered by this apparent oversight. In his twenty years of making movies, he’d won virtually every other award offered a director. He was loved and admired by a large and nonpartisan body of critics, none of whom ever lodged complaints against him for pandering to his audiences. Indeed, the seemingly universal appeal of his films in no way came into conflict with his very clear and distinctive artistic vision. This is not to say that he was a director of “feel good movies,” for indeed many of his films turned out rather tragically. What set him apart from other directors were two rather distinctive predilections. Firstly, he felt that writing was the sole way a director could maintain total control over his film and so, his fifteen films all bore his name for the screenwriting credit. The second, and more distinctive, of his trademarks was that he limited his artistic output to remaking classic films. At first, many were skeptical and thought it wrong that so talented a director should waste his time rehashing old material, but very soon critics and audiences warmed to his technique and roundly praised him. Many of Gottschalk’s remakes had actually been recognized as superior to the originals, including Casablanca (1995), Rebecca (1997), From Here to Eternity (1999) and Jezebel (2003). Gottschalk himself thought all comparisons – even the most favorable ones – insidious, and begged the public to judge his work – which merely reexamined old stories and themes through a new lens - for its own merits. When it came to art, his philosophy was simple. Everything that art had to say and do, it had already said and done. Hence the only thing left for the artist was to reinterpret. And surely there was little good to be got from trying to mask this attempt as anything other than a remake.
He had clung strongly to this conviction ever since he’d dropped out of college to go work in Hollywood. And it was this philosophy that sustained him as he arrived in Paris to begin work on his sixteenth feature. Initially, he’d been apprehensive about filming in a language of which he had only an imperfect knowledge. But the film hinged on Delacroix, who under no conditions would consent to acting in English (her spoken abilities were truly horrific). From the moment he’d met her, Gottschalk knew she was his Laura. He enlisted the help of a French graduate student at Columbia University and set about rendering the script into French. It was a relatively easy project. Balducci was very pleased with the result, and his quick and decisive seal of approval struck Gottschalk as out of character. Brief Encounter was to be their sixth film together, and although it would be unfair to say they often locked horns on the set, Gottschalk knew Balducci to be a man of much argument and little patience. Upon entering the lobby, however, Gottschalk began to suspect why Balducci had so willingly gone along with the slightly irregular arrangements.
Delacroix rose immediately when she saw Gottschalk. Balducci sighed and tossed his head in Gottschalk’s direction.
“Gottschalk,” Balducci never addressed him by his first name, “we’ve been waiting an eternity. Won’t you join us for coffee.”
“No thank you,” replied Gottschalk, “I’m going to bed right after this.”
He embraced Angelique, who called him by his first name and whispered a word of greeting. In the cab he’d felt intolerably exhausted, but seeing Angelique once more revived him. He engaged her in a strenuous conversation about her character, and doing so in French, where he had to struggle to get his meaning across, made him increasingly animated. Tomorrow was the first day of shooting, and Gottschalk had chosen to film one of the picture’s key scenes, after Alec takes Laura to the cinema for the first time. There was a moment that Gottschalk considered key. Alec is talking about being a doctor, when Laura interrupts and tells him he suddenly looks much younger, like a boy. Gottschalk spoke loudly and gestured widely attempting to communicate the exact poise, demeanor and attitude required for that moment, the first intimation that she might be falling in love.
When the dessert cart arrived, Gottschalk instinctively grabbed for the coffee pot. Neglecting the cakes that lay elegantly arranged on the tray, he downed one demitasse, and then another. Sweat formed on his brow, and Gottschalk suddenly realized what a fool he was being, so garrulous and unnatural with this girl. Angelique, for her part, listened attentively and gave thoughtful answers. She enjoyed his conversation and struggle with the French language immensely – or perhaps she only seemed to. After the fifth demitasse, Gottschalk’s hands started to quiver. Balducci, who had hitherto been silent, only bothering to interpolate an anecdote or two, drew out his watch. Evening was coming on, and they all had to be on the set by 6 in the morning.
Angelique gave Gottschalk a soft kiss goodbye. He hesitated a moment before returning the kiss, overcome by emotion. Then, before he let her go, his eyes met the full mirror opposite them. In it he saw himself, still darkly handsome and vigorous at 56. Of Angelique, he made out only the outline of her slender shoulders and the brown hair curling up at the back of her neck.

In his hotel room, Gottschalk could not sleep. His heart was racing, and he hated himself for those five demitasses. But he knew his heart was racing for quite a different reason and had no wish to exorcise Angelique from his thoughts. He had never been intimate with any of his actresses, much less fallen in love with one. As it was, his ability to form attachments with women was limited. His sole marriage had been to a journalist a decade his junior and had dissolved three years earlier. He didn’t particularly lament the marriage, and had spent the years that followed engaged in passionless encounters with second unit directors, script-girls and the occasional gaffer.
Gottschalk could not prepare for the shoot; he let his thoughts be guided solely by Angelique. The three decades that divided them in age loomed like some mythic, avenging bird in the director’s mind. He felt foolish and miserable. But at the same time, the stirrings in his breast gave him a joy and hope that had evaded him for most of his adult life. As he reflected on the above, sleep seized the unsuspecting Gottschalk.

Bernstein had hammered his fist long and hard against the door to Gottschalk’s suite. The numerous wake-up calls had failed to rouse the director, and finally the concierge had been called upon open the door to the suite. By the time the director reached the set, the actors had been waiting in costume and make-up for over an hour. Not quite fully awake, Gottschalk apologized to everyone and ordered Bernstein to find him an espresso. The actors assumed their places, and awaited Gottschalk’s instructions. He approached Angelique and her costar, Daniel Aulait, and explained the scene to them. “Tous compris?” he asked. The two stars gave their assent.
He returned to his chair, and Bernstein handed him a steaming cup smelling wonderfully of coffee. Gottschalk sipped at it religiously and gave his attention to the actors as they ran through the scene. He gave the signal to dim the lights and cue the music. He was wide-awake now, as he heard the Rachmaninoff coming through softly on his headphones. He watched the scene play out and was very pleased with what he saw. As he had suspected, Angelique inhabited the role perfectly. As a comfortable yet restless middle-class housewife, Angelique was the embodiment of English modesty, yet the way she kept shifting her legs under the table, coupled with the heaving of her breast, made that reticence wickedly ironic. As he’d suspected, Gottschalk sensed a strong chemistry between Angelique and Daniel, and felt pangs of jealousy. Everything was going well until the crucial line, “Tu as l’air plus jeune,” fell flat. Angelique delivered the line dully, unconvincingly. Then, as if to compensate for lack of expression, she spoke the next line, “Comme un petit garcon” with exaggerated tenderness.
“CUT!” yelled Gottschalk, and took another sip of his espresso, before he hopped up next to Angelique. He tried to explain precisely what he wanted from her: a look so caring, so attentive, almost dreamy, yet by no stretch overwrought. He wanted naturalism. Subdued passion and budding ardor behind British formality and restraint. He explained as far as his French allowed, loudly and dramatically, then sat back down and had them take the scene from the middle.
The second time was worse than the first.
They spent the entire morning on that one scene. Gottschalk was very exacting and the actors and crew, while showing outward patience, were obviously being driven to exhaustion. Gottschalk saw this especially in Anglique, who began eyeing him with malice after the 16th take. Gottschalk felt that anything in the world was preferable to incurring her contempt. With this in mind, he decided to use material from first take, and re-shoot those 10 seconds or so at a later date. As they were packing the set up, Gottschalk whispered to Bernstein, “I absolutely need to have a tête-à-tête with Angelique this evening. I made a reservation at Georges Blanc, tonight at eight. Balducci is under the impression that he’s joining us. I’m sure you can find a way to distract him for the evening.”
Bernstein was no stranger to this sort of request, and he cast Gottschalk a sidelong glance that assured his loyalty in the matter. Gottschalk told Angelique that he’s send a cab around her place at seven pm. With that, Gottschalk made a noiseless exit.

He was happy to have the afternoon to himself. It had been a while since he was last in Paris (he didn’t count tours to promote his films, during which time he was completely wrapped up in press conferences and attending premieres). He walked from the Quatre Saisons past the Hotel de Ville and along the north bank of the Seine, stopping occasionally at the book vendors, handling a volume and turning it over in his hands before deciding against the purchase.
He crossed the river along Pont Neuf, and looked down at the water, lapping violently this way and that. The sun barely poked through the graying skies and the autumn wind played on Gottschalk’s face, stinging his cheeks in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. Having achieved the Rive Gauche, he made his way towards the Luxembourg Gardens. He was strolling through, stopping now and then to light a cigarette or admire a mother pushing a carriage, when it began to drizzle. The rain was more refreshing than irksome, and Gottschalk continued to meander through the gardens, down into Montparnasse.
He was crossing Boulevard Edgar Quinet, when the skies momentarily grew sunny, then unleashed a torrent of heavy raindrops on the director’s head. He clutched at his parka and raised it over his head to shield himself. He ran along the darkening boulevard looking for shelter and found it in a small café on rue d’Odessa.

Gottschalk pushed the heavy wooden door and set some bells pleasantly jingling. He hung his soaked parka on the coat hanger and took a seat at the bar. He ordered an espresso and glanced over his shoulder to see the rain coming down in sheets over the entire block, washing the café windows and obscuring all that lay beyond from sight. It was very still in the café; the silence was only broken occasionally by the tapping of a teacup against a saucer, and an elderly woman who mumbled incoherently to her companion, a man her equal in years.
The espresso arrived and Gottschalk lit up a cigarette. As he did, the fire seemed to illuminate the entire café. Seated at a shadowy table in the corner was a woman, unextravagant yet elegant in dress. Gottschalk nearly gasped out loud when he saw her face. The high cheekbones and wide, imploring eyes of that noble visage were unmistakable. There was no doubt about it, that finely outlined pair of lips were the very same ones he had so tenderly kissed 35 years ago. The hair that poked out from under that satin toque hat was still full and espresso-colored, just like when it used to fall over her alabaster face while they made love. Did she recognize him too, he wondered.
Gottschalk went back to his coffee and bowed his head. He had often wondered about such a chance encounter, never actually expecting it to ever in a million years take place. But now, on a rainy day in an anonymous café in Paris, it had. Already, Gottchalk felt his chest heaving, the cruel stinging sensation returning to his breast. Such was the force that Virginie Murano continued to exert on Duncan Gottschalk.

In the spring of 1967, the year he had entered Harvard, Gottschalk fell wildly in love with Virginie. After several excursions to the Symphony and Fine Arts Museum, he made his feelings known to her, and she rejected him coldly. The blow to Gottschalk was such that he felt he’d never recover. Unable to keep away from her, he continued to court her indirectly, keeping his true feelings and motives pent up. During the months that ensued, Gottschalk sank further and further into depression. Never for a moment did he think of giving up the fight, though he knew it was hopeless. Then, soon before the start of the summer holiday, she accepted him unexpectedly and unconditionally. Those weeks spent with her before the onset of summer were the brightest of Gottschalk’s life. That all ended when she returned to Lyons to visit her family.
Gottschalk would have given anything to chase after her, but his parents, already swimming in debt from putting him through college, refused to fund his amorous expedition. Gottschalk exploited every resource he had, and by August, had produced the sum required. He booked a flight impulsively and flew into Lyons, expecting to surprise Virginie. When he arrived, he found her changed. Whatever they did, wherever they went, she seemed distracted and aloof. Gottschalk was not insensitive to her queer moods. When he pressed her for an explanation, she shrugged and avoided his questions. Gottschalk grew terrified of losing her, and the fear ate away at him for the remainder of his stay in Lyons. On his second and last weekend in France, he pressed her to come with him to Paris, where they could be alone. This was the most significant demand he’d made on her yet and she, who hadn’t granted him access to her bed even when her parents were out of the house, refused flatly. He could not reach her, and he cried night after night to think that he was losing her. Then, the night before his flight back to New York, she visited his room after dinner. She explained as gently she could that in the two months they’d been apart, she’d been missed him terribly. To assuage this loneliness, she’d accepted invitations from her boss (her job that summer was at a law firm in Strasbourg) to dinner and movies. What began innocently had become progressively involved. She was ashamed, but little-by-little she fallen in love with him. The realization came afterwards, when she’d returned home to Lyons in early August. On that account, she could be considered innocent of any actual infidelity. She told him she’d pretended that all was well until now because she understood the sacrifice traveling to Lyons had entailed for him and didn’t wish to spoil his vacation. But now that his trip was nearing its close, she had to let him know all this. With those words, she broke from him and fractured his heart a second time.
Gottschalk wept all the way on the flight back to New York. When he landed at JFK, it was pouring heavily, and he took a bus through the deluge, back to Manhattan. When he got home, he informed his parents. Despite their impassioned protestations, Gottschalk dropped out of Harvard and went to work for his uncle, who was a scriptwriter in Hollywood. For a long while, the memory of Virginie, the brief happiness he’d shared with her, the ensuing separation and deception, plagued him. In those initial years in Hollywood, he never ventured back home – let alone visited his college friends – for fear of being confronted with her. He learnt to hate her, and vowed to kill her if ever he saw her again. After he found a steady, well-paying job, he started putting money aside, to pay for her killing sometime in the future. But no matter how much he despised her: regardless of the endless ways he found to blacken her character, he never fully exorcised her from his heart.
All that had been over more than three decades ago, but the passage of time had done nothing to ease his pain. Looking at her as she read her book, taking an occasional sip of her tea, he renewed all the vows of love he’d made her so long ago. He realized that he’d only ever loved Virginie and would give the world for one more moment in her arms. All the other women in his life had meant so little to him, and he was sickened to think how petty his infatuation with Angelique was.
Gottchalk sat at the bar for a long while, contemplating whether to approach her. He let the half-burnt cigarette die in his hand, and ordered a couple more espressos while he tried to quell the violence in his breast. His breathing was erratic and perspiration ensured that his rain soaked shirt wouldn’t dry anytime soon. His head was spinning. Without thinking, he got down off the stool, and slowly approached her table. From the bar, the distance between them had seemed enormous. But he conquered the divide in under four steps. She felt him approaching, and raised her head. At first, it seemed she didn’t know him. But quickly, her eyes flashed with comprehension and the shock made her jaw quiver.
If he had a knife at hand, he wouldn’t have hesitated to plunge it into her breast. As it was, he was entirely unarmed, and didn’t feel he could stir up the courage to strangle her. Instead, he lowered himself, shaking, onto the seat next to hers. His hands reached across the table until they found hers. Virginie flinched slightly as he laid his moist palms on the backs of her hands and gripped them as both a plea and reproach. She looked up from the table, into Gottschalk’s watering eyes. His entire face was contorted as if by pain, and his lower lip twitched piteously. Finally, the confrontation he’d imagined for 35 years was at hand. But what could he possibly say to her? What difference would it make now? How could he possibly communicate how much and how long he’d yearned for her, secretly looking for her in other women? Gottschalk understood that the situation was hopeless – worse, absurd. Had he all the time in the world, he could never explain how dearly he had loved her all those long years, and continued to love her. Now he glared into her eyes, with a half-crazed, blank stare. At length, his quivering lips parted and, in a voice barely audible, he told her that he’d carried his love buried deep in his heart all these years, that he’d spent his life hoping to see her once more. She drew back from him and narrowed her eyes, as if to say, Did I really mean that much too you?
It was too much for Gottschalk and he raced to the door, ignoring the unpaid check and the hanging parka. He felt as if he was going to faint, and stood under the awning for several minutes. His heart wasn’t breaking; it was tearing itself apart savagely.

Gottschalk recalled Laura’s monologue and as it passed through his mind, he felt he understood it more acutely than he had ever before.
This can't last. This misery can't last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There'll come a time in the future when I shan't mind about this anymore. But I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was. No, no I don't want that time to come hither. I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days.
He heard at once when the café door opened behind him and turned cautiously to see. But whoever had opened the door was no longer there.

Georges Blanc served the finest food in all of Paris. Yet Gottschalk had to force himself to eat even a small fraction of what was on his plate. Their waiter showed concern: but Gottschalk assured him that everything was superb, and ordered another bottle of 1961 Chateau Latour. Gottschalk drank it like water, and refilled Angelique’s glass repeatedly. She looked ravishing in a very revealing black evening gown.
Gottschalk had originally planned for a tasteful and suave seduction, but after the events of that afternoon, he was in no mood to be mannered and subtly calculating. Instead, he hoped to get the girl drunk enough that she’d go along with anything he did. Gottschalk wanted to numb himself entirely with drink and then annihilate himself between Angelique’s slender legs. Throughout their repast, he stroked her thighs constantly, several times slipping his fingers in between. The first few times she put up some resistance. After a while, she too had fallen under the drink’s spell, and abandoned her body to Gottschalk’s caprices. After dessert, the maitre d’ hailed a cab to return them to the hotel, where Angelique accompanied Gottschalk to his suite without protest.

She stumbled inside the darkened room and collapsed, from exhaustion, on the bed. Gottschalk switched on the desk light and set about undressing. After he undid his jacket and removed his shoes and trousers, he approached the unconscious Angelique. He moved in close to her and undid the straps of her evening gown, dragging it down off her petit and delicate body. Her small breasts offered themselves reluctantly to his eyes. But the effects of the alcohol were beginning to wear off. He reached for her underwear, slipping his fingers in under the pelvic bone and divesting her of that final garment.
Angelique lay naked before Gottschalk, her perfect body ready to fulfill his every desire. He placed a hand over her left breast and felt for the beating of her heart. It took a few moments for him to detect it, and the regular rhythm of the beat, coupled with his growing sobriety made him hesitate before he proceeded further. He drew close to her and planted a long kiss on her preternaturally red lips. But she was unresponsive, and he drew back almost in fear. Looming over her magisterially, his eyes took in her entire body, from her dancerly feet to her thick bouquet of golden-brown hair. By now he was entirely sober, and he gasped in panic. How exactly she resembled Virginie in the bloom of youth, down to her toes and ankles. Gottschalk shrank away in shame and he despised himself for carrying out such a despicable plan in order to sleep with a shadow of his first, great love. Had he actually expected to find that same existential peace and solace in the arms of an actress whom he knew so little, while she lay drunk and passed out before him?
Gottschalk got up off the bed, and drew the blanket over Angelique, still as a statue. He would give her his room for the night, and have the concierge find him another. It was past two a.m., and they both needed to be up in four hours for the shoot.

Copyright 2005

Quintet

2006-02-27T10:07:00.000-08:00

Evening

When the evening was spent
And you were tired
We covered ourselves with baby blankets
And laid down to rest
We spoke of many things
Of parents, careers and Love
I listened as best I could but could not refrain
From weeping my pathetic song
Sweetly you asked how you could help
And touched my hand (or offered your own)
I clung to your fingers despairingly
Fearing they might forever slip from my grasp
Sitting in fearful contemplation
I admired your sleeping self
'Doubting, dreaming dreams –'
And then followed suite
In the morning you awoke
Your eyes fluttering, your lips trembling
And said that you'd been dreaming Of me.

I Am Starved For You

I am starved for you, my love
Have I really gone so long without a kiss or a caress
Lying here in bed, fasting, I am powerless
To put you from my mind
And the emptiness that comes from lack of food
Is nothing next to the void I've felt since you left me
Yes, we have but a little more time to wait
And then, you'll return to me, changed perhaps, but not too much
And I'll kiss your kiss-deprived lips
And stroke your stroke-deprived body
The grumblings of my stomach contracting
Are nothing compared to the howling of my lovesick and lonely spirit
And it seems as though going without food and drink
Has made me focus more acutely on how much
I miss you and how much it pains me
That I can't be there with you
We read last night in the book of Lamentations
Of the sack of Jerusalem – Jerusalem the whore
Sitting on the floor with the lights dimmed
Yet my grief had no object but you
I am starved for you, my love
I lie here thinking what I would do
If you were at my side:
I'd feast myself on your love
And hold you so you'd never run away
I crave you like a junkie craves coke
And the smell of you is enough
To pique my monstrous appetite
Be glad that you're far away
For I would devour you entirely with my love
Swallow you up completely and leave no trace of you

Winter

Though nineteen winters I have seen;
Nineteen seasons of snow and frost
Of snuggling up by the fireplace
And sipping hot cocoa while watching
Old films on TV
Though I am no stranger to the bitter cold
The stinging wind and the biting frost
I cannot help but await the twentieth
With immense impatience
For I shall have you by my side
To warm me and to snuggle with me
To take care of me should I fall ill
And come down with a cold
Or else to lay me out on a blanket of snow
And curl up alongside me like a snow angel
Giving me Eskimo kisses and pressing your purple lips to mine
Seeking my warmth in the snow palace of Central Park
And I shall spread you over me like a woolen blanket
And cuddle you close to me
Sipping your kisses like hot chocolate
To warm me up on a icy winter's day

Saturday

Last Saturday I kept you waiting
Out in the cold, alone with Goethe
As we ascended in the elevator
Emitting strange music, you
Observed, "The queue was short"
(I concurred)
As we waltzed, half tagging along
With the guided-tour through
Canvases, installations, projections and Sandcastles
I inhaled your presence and fed on your soul
Even if I kept my distance
On the descent we held hands,
Slowly nearing the end of the rainbow arm-in-arm
On the street, in our endless search for a reading room
You showered me with spontaneous affection…
Please forgive me, who have so much to forgive you for

Materia

In a labyrinth of desire and loss
My spirit felt at one with its surroundings
Unburdened by the weight of antiquity
Titian's saturated palette gave way
To a sky the colour of your eyes
And the air, unpolluted by the dust of ruins
Carried the sweet fragrance of your hair
The decaying city, sinking into its fetid canals
Seduced me with its sinister splendour
Which I savoured in a state of rhapsody
Tinged with peripatetic melancholy
Wafting through piazzas, over bridges and
Down alley-ways
Until I came to the entrance
Of a palace on the sea
Through the gate I stumbled, almost gliding
Past the Surrealists, Cubists and Dadaists
Until arrested by a work I knew well
One which you had spent an eternity scrutinizing
While I, unnoticed, fixed a gaze of like intensity on you
And the stern, commanding mother
Rendered in stark geometry
Towered over us, squinting her eyes at the son
As he accomplished in brushstrokes
The fullest realization of his manifesto

June – July 2004
Paris - Berlin

The Vineyard

2006-02-19T18:12:00.000-08:00

I.

Youthful innocence
Fore’er lock’d
Bows to the touch
And ne’er to be pluck’d

Seducing, seduc’d; both found success
The vintner presses not, content to kiss
Herein a delicate tradedy
Of rak’d vantage; attained luxury

Was vantage that permit’d passion’s slave:
Findingart to avarice in the asking?
For though attain’d by that divine enclave
Purely filter’d, tast’d and enjoy’d in basking

Thus assured, surrender, submit
Amusing, amus’d both in wit

II.

Yard to yard the vintner goes
Marking the yield, sampling few
‘Til chancing ought freshly sown;
Velveteen skin; delicate hue

Gleaming from out the prease
A fragile ruby seeming
The divine complexion leased
Upon this praise ahearing

And rapt, her stem does unfix itself
To be plucked, yet my fingers round her
Crop sensibly that ambrosial pelf
That in descent should suffer

By and by such caress finds no gripe
Ever more the sweet, no more the ripe

III.

Forsak’d amidst the sand
Heaven’s dew attending
Parch’d and arid stands
Unappeas’d, her trunk unbending

In this thirst a wil’d refuse
To petals made poist: precious abuse
As patient, she would, delicate mirage
To have lips enshrined in her visage

Parting her petals most gracious
The self-produc’d dew alfowing
To quench both thirsts rapacious
And aid each other’s growing

More poems and explanation

2006-02-19T12:30:00.000-08:00

Hello there,
As I set this blog up, I'm going through my various papers and document in hopes of locating hitherto lost poems. Here are two more I recently came upon:

The Third Dialogue

I.
You invited me and I accepted
Most willingly I stayed with you
Until words became irrelevant

You turned to me and asked
If we could just let it slide
My lips sealed the pact

I encountered no resistance
No protest or respose
I sought so badly to elicit

The most you did was squeeze my arm
And even that seemed disingenuous
A poor excuse for affection

Neither water nor soap
Succeed in tearing you
From my grip

II.

He's come here doubtless expectant; and I am not able to deny him; though I love him not; though I cannot love
Where the irritant and where the balm; he searches and finds not; he disappoints and is disappointed
The sun also rises; he goes off in its pursuit; I am thus released; go I then to my ablutions

III.

No art could lend its meaning to the experience
Nor find its likeliness in our embrace
Were that beautiful lies could perfume
The repulsive stench of that evening

IV.
12:ooam
Got tipsy on fruit and vinegar; the holy tongue profaned; lending a certain magnetic gravity

1:00am
Stumbled back together; ins Bett legen and sprechen; dann kussen und liebkosen.

2:00am
Peaceful and calm; slipping from his grasp; deforested, dehydrated, and deluded

V.
3:00am
A corpse in sheets; scattered limbs fragmented and numb; idealist's tragedy

4:ooam
Drawing to a close; corrupt barter; sullied by utter lack of artifice; depravity, malaise; stepped into sunlight and greeted the day.

The Youthful Garden

As when the darkened sky
Cues the world to rest
And begs each watchful eye
Host a phantom guest

Steal I thus in shifty fashion
Into her youthful garden
In a fit of boisterous passion
To beg my lady's pardon

My presence sensed she shows concern
For what I will to beg of her
No words from me alas do earn
What tender tact alone can cure

I hold her close and then release
And find to my surprise
My former paramour has ceased
Has changed before my eyes

Lifting the veil, to day I wake
Craving night to cloak heartbreak

Two Nocturnal Poems

2006-02-19T11:07:00.000-08:00

A Valediction: Forbidding Slumber

As we talk and breathe
Inside this glass
The desert does invert itself
With scope and pace so fearsome
None can be but buried
Towards this end we rehearse each night:
To hasten our entombment
In those sands left as souvenirs
On our lashes and eyelids
And so seldom do we dream
What we ought to or desire
And rarer still are these imaginings
Our remembrance granted.
And still, of our age one third is dreamt
Had languor an antidote
I would be first to imbibe
Spending day and night wide awake
To make heard my voice from out the desert

Nightly Deception

When pupils’ reflection
Our senses preclude
This foolish quartet waxes upset

With nightly deception
The eyes are imbued
Tainted a dual flibbertigibbet

By this delusion, do they
Being sound, smell, touch and taste
Purport an unconscious foray
Furtive cravings exhumed and graced

Yet relations rest not their place
Or fate in dreamy guile
In daytime, lovers be got with grace
Though their duties be nocturnal

Inaguration

2006-02-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

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