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. Nilis daughter Ora, coincidentally, was my biology TA at Columbia. I
wouldnt 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 its 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 hadnt 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
mattend 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 dont 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 Rozens 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 Oras 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 dont see them for a while
and then you see pictures, its clear.
Thats
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
wasnt he Israeli Greek? he asked.
It
doesnt 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 Oras 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,
thats 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
dont 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 TAs TnA. 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
mothers 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 didnt know this, since she hadnt
told him. Probably we shouldnt 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
Oras 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 didnt 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 Brigittes 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. Daniels 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 fathers 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 Yorkers 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 Wagners 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 isnt 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 youre a man youd 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 casts 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.
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