11   14 Jan 90   I jokingly said to Daniel “Send me a postcard from Cyprus” and he did just that. In the postcard he actually explained in a few words how he got in touch with Nili. “Nili’s daughter Ora, coincidentally, was my biology TA at Columbia.” I wouldn’t call that an explanation. How does one find out from a TA who her mother is, and connect her to his father? He obviously has the makings of an investigative journalist, not an opinion journalist like Miki. The picture on the postcard is of a statue of Aphrodite, in a pose similar to the Venus de Milo, also without arms, but naked except for some sort of scarf on the back of her neck (or is it a snake?). I think Sam Zucker would approve of her pubis. And her breasts… I suddenly remembered what Miki said the first time that he saw mine: that they reminded him of a Greek statue that he had seen in Cyprus. Perhaps it’s the same one! For they do remind me of mine. Well, perhaps not my present 40-year-old breasts (that Mike liked), but the ones that nourished Daniel as a baby (when they were quite a bit larger than their natural size). Does he have a subconscious memory of them? It must be subconscious, because I weaned him before he was one, when I began what would have been my final year at McGill if his arrival hadn’t delayed my studies by a semester. The card that he sent to Betty depicts a mosaic of gods, fully dressed goddesses and animals. A very chaste image. Betty said that she liked my card better. “Does he think I am still a little girl?” she asked me. I looked through my drawer of memories to find the card that Miki sent me from Cyprus. It is a scenic photograph of a place called Kyrenia, with the sea in the foreground and a medieval castle in the middle. On the back there is a quotation from Apollinaire: Quand atteindrai-je mon île de Chypre aussi où m’attend ma Vénus adorable? But Miki crossed out Chypre and Vénus, and wrote Montréal and Mireille above them, in red ink. Miki… ------------------ Réveille-toi, Mireille. Wake up. Back to the present. George called last night. He said that he is sorry and wants to get together again. I tried to say no and it somehow came out as maybe. But I did not agree to a specific date. I told him that I would call him when I am ready. And I don’t know if I will ever be ready again for him. Or did I perhaps misjudge him? Was he really as callous as he seemed to be? As we women well know, sexual need can do strange things to men. (Tina and I have had many a good laugh about it.) Of course it does strange things to women too, but in a different fashion. For example it makes us more, rather than less, attentive to the feelings of the men that we desire. Or it makes us more withdrawn rather than more aggressive. As feminist as I am, I must be aware of the essential differences (even taking account of all individual variations) between the male and the female of the species. Especially because I am the mother of one of each, and even more so because they are (almost) no longer children. Betty makes it easy for me. She reminds me of myself. She is 15½, perhaps a little slower than me with regard to boys, but I can sense that she will be there soon. Daniel, though, is different. He is a man, all right, no doubt about that, but in his essence he does not remind me of any other man I have known. As much as he has made his father into his role model, deep down I do not find similarities. Well, my journal, he is who he is. He is my son and I love him. Met   He managed a few airborne catnaps, both on the short Larnaca-Athens flight and the long one from Athens to New York. He arrived in the afternoon, took another nap in his room and woke up hungry, in time for dinner. He woke up Tuesday morning at the normal time, with no need for the alarm that he had set. The blood pull at the Health Service was handled matter-of-factly, and he was told that he would have the results early the next week. The weather was clear and, for the time of year in New York, quite mild. He was ready for classes. Thursday morning he walked over to the Fairchild Building, to Ora Rozen’s office, and found that her office hours would be later that afternoon. When he went back to see her she was busy with students until she finally had some time for him. “Hello, Daniel,” she said. “How was your trip?” “It was great. I want to give you regards from your mother, and I would like to show you some pictures of her and Stavros.” “Stavros? Is that her latest Greek friend?” Ora laughed. He felt embarrassed over having assumed that Ora would know who Stavros was. But she quickly seemed to realize that her office was not a good place for personal talk. “Anyway, I would love to see your pictures.” “I should have them Monday,” he said. “Good. Bring them. But not here in the office. Come to my apartment. Monday evening. Are you free?” “Yes,” he said, whereupon she gave him her address and phone number, in case he had to cancel.   Monday morning the call from Health Services came. All the tests were negative. The result made his upcoming visit to Ora all the more exciting. “My beautiful mother is getting fat,” was Ora’s first comment as she began to look at the photographs that he handed to her, one by one, after they sat down side by side on her sofa. “Can you believe it, she used to be slimmer than me?” “Yes, of course I can believe it.” “But since I left home she has gradually been getting more fat. You know, it is not so obvious when you are with someone, but when you don’t see them for a while and then you see pictures, it’s clear.” “That’s true.” “When I told her about it a few years ago, she said that Greek men – she means older Greek men – like flesh on women. She always liked Greek men. I did too, until I married one.” Ora laughed. “That was enough.” “But wasn’t he Israeli Greek?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter. A Greek is a Greek, from Greece, from Cyprus, from Israel.” She stopped looking at the photographs, though there were a few left to see, and looked at Daniel. “When I was a teenager and my mother took me to Cyprus I enjoyed meeting Greek boys. I had my first sex with one of them – well, not exactly a boy – he was twenty-three.” “How old were you?” “Sixteen. One of the boys that I met, who was my age, introduced me to his big brother, who was already married and had a child. I decided that he should be my first one, since he knew what to do.” She laughed again. He found Ora’s frank talk about sex surprising but encouraging. “And did he?” he asked. “Yes,” she said, blushing for the first time, and did not elaborate. She went back to looking at the pictures, but he decided to stay on the topic of sex. “My first woman was ten years older than me. More than that, she was a teacher of sex education, in school! I learned a lot in a short time.” “Lucky for you!” “Yes, that’s exactly what she said.” Ora smiled, and Daniel went on. “But she also said, ‘Lucky for me.’” “Meaning herself?” “Yes.” “What did she mean?” She looked at him again. “I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me.” “Me? What are you talking about?” “This,” he said as he edged closer to her, put his arms around her and kissed her. She began to push him away from her, but her resistance quickly subsided and she gave in to the kiss, which they held for a long time before she pulled away. “I understand what she meant,” she said with a smile as she stood up and went into her bedroom. He waited for a while before joining her and found her on the bed, already undressed, with a condom in plain view beside her. Matt Billings had been right about their TA’s T’n’A. “You have beautiful breasts,” he said as he began to undress. “Not too big, not too small.” “Thank you,” she said. “They are the ones that I got.” “Your mother’s are much bigger.” She laughed. “Yes, since about eight years ago.” When he lay down on the bed beside her – the apartment was very warm and there was no need to go under the covers – he asked her if the condom was meant as a contraceptive or a prophylactic. She laughed at his choice of words. “I suppose mainly as a prophylactic,” she said. “I… have… other… contraception.” “In that case, I just got a clean bill of health from the Health Service. I can show you the paper.” “I believe you,” she said. “That was very nice,” she said afterwards, as they were lying side by side, “but, you know, I have a boyfriend.” Of course Daniel didn’t know this, since she hadn’t told him. “Probably we shouldn’t do this again.” But doing it again was precisely what her words made him feel like. “Probably?” he asked as he began to mount her. “Definitely,” she said as she helped him get on top of her and pulled him inside her.   Walking back to his dorm he reflected on the fact that Ora’s misgivings about cheating on her boyfriend did not seem very deep, but his were growing deeper. Daniel did not relish the idea of being an accomplice to such cheating. What about Megan? he asked himself. That didn’t count, he answered himself, because she was an old girlfriend with whom he had never actually broken up, and, more importantly, Megan herself had no such misgivings whatsoever. Either monogamy was not a part of her relationship with Keith, or she was true to him “in her fashion,” to paraphrase Brigitte’s favorite song from Kiss Me Kate. Or perhaps infidelity was a Kenner family trait. And what about all the men – probably scores of them – with whom Brigitte Wilner had cheated on his father? Of course, they were actors – like her – and as such skilled at dissociating experience from feelings. As he was crossing 112th Street he began to review his sexual history. Some quick finger calculus told him that in a little less than a year and a half he had had nine partners, of varying ages, personalities and backgrounds – and by this point he counted his time with the English hookers as an interesting experience – but with one thing in common: they were all white. (Vivian Alvarez might, by the strange American convention, count as “nonwhite” because of her Spanish surname, but her paternal grandfather was from Spain and she was otherwise Anglo-Canadian.) Amid the melting pot of Manhattan, he thought, surely he ought to be able to find, for his tenth, someone who in politically correct parlance would be called a woman of color. Une femme de couleur.   The consummation of his desire for Ora Rozen took place at the beginning of the spring semester, but in his personal history it was a delayed culmination of something that had been growing inside him, unawares, all through the fall. In his second semester it was the German class that became his passion predominante. (Here I go, he said to himself, quoting Leporello again.) At first it was because of the instructor of his section, another beautiful woman teacher, Dr. Ulrike Klostermann, whom they were asked to call Fräulein Doktor but whom he thought of as Die schöne Lehrerin. She was at Columbia as a short-term scholar, only for that semester, on leave from a position in Hanover, where she taught at a drama school. She had short light-brown hair and blue eyes, dressed casually, and was thirty-three years old. They learned her age in the first class, when she taught the ending -jährig: Der Dreißigjährige Krieg meant the Thirty Years’ War, while eine dreiunddreißigjährige Frau meant a thirty-three-year-old woman, as she might, for example, be described in a news item, in einer Notiz, a word whose plural – Mehrzahl – is Notizien. Dr. Klostermann had spent a year at Oxford, where she came to appreciate the tutorial system, and she used it as part of her teaching. Every other week one of the students would go to her office for a half-hour tutorial. During the first two weeks this would be a get-acquainted session. Daniel’s came on Tuesday of the second week of classes, the day after his evening with Ora Rozen. When she checked his name on the class roster, she remarked that his family name had an unusual spelling, eine ungewöhnliche Schreibweise, the usual spelling being Willner. He told her that his father had been born in Poland. She then said that in Germany there was eine berühmte Schauspielerin, a famous actress, named Brigitte Wilner, who took her name from her late husband – von ihrem verstorbenen Ehemann – who had also been born in Poland and was ein berühmter Journalist. “Michael Wilner,” he said, pronouncing his father’s name in the German way. “Ja, richtig,” she said. “Sie kennen ihn?” “Das war mein Vater,” he said. It was the first sentence that he spontaneously spoke in German without translating from English. It felt almost as if his father were speaking through him. He went on to tell her, feeling fully at ease in German, about the circumstances of his birth and his meeting with Brigitte. After telling him that Brigitte Wilner had studied in Hanover at the same school where Ulrike Klostermann taught, she gave him an assignment for his next tutorial: an autobiographical essay. His sudden fluency in German gave Daniel a sense of exhilaration comparable to what he had experienced a year and a half before, when he was introduced to sex, or two years before that, when he enrolled at North Am, or two years before that, when his voice changed and at the same time he found himself able to execute competent guitar licks. He now wanted to see and hear everything German – movies, operas, whatever. He could not wait to travel to Germany – now on the verge of reunification – that summer. A look through The New Yorker’s listings showed that the offerings would be meager. A weeklong showing of recent German films had just concluded at the Museum of Modern Art, though there would be a showing of The Tin Drum at the Thalia SoHo the following Sunday. Other than that, nothing. French films were screening in abundance – new releases like Trop belle pour toi (which he had already seen), Camille Claudel, Une flamme dans mon cœur and Une affaire de femmes (cluelessly translated as “Story of Women”) as well as endless revivals – and there seemed to be a lot of Italian, Russian, Spanish and Japanese cinema to be seen, but there was nothing in German. With opera, things were not much better. Other than Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which the Met would put on in March, there was only Wagner, and Dr. Klostermann had told them not to bother with Wagner unless they liked the music, since Wagner’s language was not real German (kein echtes Deutsch) but a kind of artificial old German (eine Art künstliches Altdeutsch) that no one had ever spoken. He also decided that he would try to find a girlfriend from among the dozen or so girls in his German class. Three of them were, at least technically, nonwhite: Cynthia Carmona, who was Puerto Rican but as white as Vivian; Carol Choi, Korean; and Bobbi Stearns, nominally African-American but with a good three-quarters, if not more, of her genetic material from Europe. They also happened to be the three prettiest girls in the class. But his primary criterion was now a shared interest in German culture and proficiency in the language, and so he decided to postpone the broadening of his racial horizons and turned his attention to Karen Witte.   What threw Karen and Daniel together was the fact that not only did her surname follow his in alphabetical order, but they both began with W and were (or seemed to be) of German origin so that they were expected to be pronounced, in class, with a V sound. In private Karen pronounced her name like “witty” and freely recounted that in middle school other kids would say things like “Karen Witte isn’t pretty.” This was still true to some extent. A stocky, short-haired blonde from Iowa who wore glasses and loose sweatshirts, Karen was well below the class median in looks. But she spoke the best German – not only was she of German origin but she had spent a high-school year in Germany – and even knew how to tell German puns that made Dr. Klostermann laugh. She was twenty-one (einundzwanzigjährig), a junior majoring in psychology, and living off-campus, sharing an apartment with two other women students. For Daniel, sex with Karen did not get beyond so-so. It happened very quickly and naturally. After they saw The Tin Drum together and discovered that there were no more German movies to be seen, she told him that there was a VCR in her apartment, and nearby there was a video-rental store with a good selection of foreign films. The first movie they so watched was Bittere Ernte (“Angry Harvest”), and its sexual charge propelled them into bed. Karen was not inexperienced. In high school she had been, as she put it, “an easy lay.” (“For a girl like me,” she said, “it was the only way to get it,” without specifying what she meant by it.) But in her senior year she managed to hang on to one of the guys, Jason, and he became her boyfriend. He was now at Iowa State and she still saw him whenever she went home, which was at every vacation, even Thanksgiving. In her two and a half years in New York she had not dated at all. And, despite his best efforts, she had – like Vivian, almost her polar opposite in looks – no genuine enjoyment of sex. It was a quality that he was not used to and had not expected. But she wanted to do it, and for him it was satisfying enough, along with the shared enjoyment of things German, to keep him from being interested in anyone else for the rest of the semester. In essence, then, she was not his girlfriend (she still thought of Jason as her boyfriend) but a female buddy with whom, a couple of times a week, he would have minimally satisfying sex. Or so it was until the end of April. Audrey was now in a different section of Contemporary Civilization from his. Occasionally he would see her on or off campus. She looked good in her tight-fitting winter clothes, and he missed her slim, firm body. But their encounters never went beyond perfunctory greetings. Spring break came early that year, in the middle of March. In New York the weather was unusually warm and dry, and so it was in Iowa, where Karen went. But Montreal was as wintry as ever, and he had no desire to go back. In fact, when at the beginning of the month he made the decision to stay in New York during the break, he realized that he no longer thought of Montreal as home. When he told Karen she was surprised, but his mother seemed to understand him perfectly. It had been the same for her: as soon as she got to Montreal, Rimouski was no longer home. “Besides,” she said with a laugh, “I never could live with a man, so now that you’re a man you’d better live on your own.” It was about that time that the decision crystallized that when the obligatory freshman year on campus was over and he could live off campus, he would look for a place of his own – which he could well afford – and not for a shared apartment. New York was henceforth to be his home.   He decided that he would go to the Met to see Die Entführung. Of late he had been occasionally emulating his mother in listening to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts, most recently to Samson et Dalila with the wonderful voice of Plácido Domingo. He had been a fan of his since the age of ten when he heard him sing the theme song of the 1982 World Cup, about the time when he began both playing and following soccer. The competition took place in Spain, and Daniel had the opportunity to follow much of the action in real time on hotel televisions when he, his mother and his sister were vacationing in Europe, traveling with the Bermans through Holland, Belgium and France, with Daniel, Harvey and Paul sharing triple rooms. Later, back in Montreal, whenever he happened to be at home on a Saturday afternoon, he never missed a Met broadcast with Domingo in the cast, whether as Calàf or Cavaradossi, as Don Carlo or Don José. But for Die Entführung he wanted to be there, to see the actor-singers articulate the German text. Since Karen was not an opera lover, he got a ticket for a performance during the break. His seat was in a section that, strangely to him, was populated entirely by men. Inexperienced as he was, it took him a while to realize that the section was a kind of high-culture equivalent of a gay pickup bar and that, as a young man requesting a single ticket, he was perhaps given a seat there by default. The attention he was receiving – his first such experience – made him self-conscious and uncomfortable. During intermission he sped off into the lobby and came back to his seat just as the lights were dimming, and after the performance he left before the applause was over. But the performance itself was wonderful. The cast’s German diction was excellent, though only the bass who sang Osmin was German. Daniel was able to follow the action completely. Of course it helped that he had, as was his habit, read the libretto beforehand. Most memorable was the coloratura soprano who sang Blonde. She was a funny, sexy young blonde (a real one, he thought), whom he had not heard of and who was to fill his fantasies for several nights, until Karen came back from Iowa.