End of the Jews (2 page)

Perhaps the postcard was meant to say 152nd Street, for here Tristan stands before 201 West 52nd, and it is nothing but a bar, Oswald's, with front windows tinted so dark that Tristan can see himself in them: a lanky, perspiring kid sporting a cheap Bronx haircut, faint concentration furrows already lining his forehead. He looks as though he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, this future doctor/lawyer, the pride of the Jews.

Tristan approaches the black glass door and pulls it open. On the other side is an unexpected density of conversation, vibrations he feels all the way down at the bottom of his balls. Clinking silver and glassware punctuate an unseen symphony of trills and murmurs around the corner; whiffs of liquor and calligraphs of smoke roll toward him. Tristan has never been anywhere like this before, and in his mind he edits the sentiment for clarity: he has never been
anywhere
before.

Perhaps he never will. Sitting on a stool in front of him, at the edge of a luxurious burgundy carpet, is a thick, bald troll who appears to be contemplating whether to break Tristan's jaw with a swipe of his hairy meat hook. A cigar lolls from side to side in his mouth, like a log in the ocean.

“You gotta be eighteen, kid. You eighteen?”

“Is this two oh one West Fifty-second?” asks Tristan, a staggeringly obtuse query, since the numbers are stenciled on the door's outside glass, right above the handle.

“Don' answer a question with a question,” the troll growls, sliding forward on his stool so that one black-shod foot touches the floor.

“I'm looking for Professor Pendergast.”

The troll chuckles through broken teeth and eases back on his haunches. “Oh. Yur wunna his. I shudda guessed. Alla way back, in frunnada stage. Two drink mimum.”

He jerks a thumb, and the cigar follows it. Tristan nods, ducks, passes. He half floats, half stumbles to the back of the room, gaze bouncing off the dark plush walls, the high ceiling, the carved mahogany bar stocked with mysterious bottles. Even as his legs carry him forward, Tristan twists back to look longer at the crisp white-shirted bartenders and scan the smooth sepia faces mingling with the pink ones. For a moment, he is mesmerized by the sequined red dress of a woman leaning in to laugh at her man friend's joke, a long unlit cigarette cocked in her hand. A gleaming lighter emerges from behind the bar, cleaving the air with perfect timing, so that she notices it just as she reaches the summit of her lean-in and begins to rock back on her splendid ass.

Tristan's footfalls grow heavy. His tongue and fingers engorge to the size of uncooked sausages. The shirt he's wearing changes from light blue to mottled shit brown; his hair grows a foot and mats over his ears. A gnawed woolly-mammoth drumstick appears in his left hand, a Torah in his right. Tristan is a swarthy Jewish caveman, eyes twitching in the sifted light. The thought that he's smarter than any son of a bitch in here is little consolation, and while the floating part of Tristan's brain continues registering delight, the stumbling part sizzles with resentment of his parents, the entire Bronx.

By the time Tristan reaches the long table laid out in front of the stage, he's had time to compose a future fantasy, a return-in-triumph reverie in which his entrance turns heads and freezes words in mouths and his topcoat alone is stylish beyond the aggregate of every stitch of clothing in the place. The daydream is pathetic and he casts it off, but not before noting that a doctor/lawyer could never galvanize such a response.

The table is full of other cavemen, dressed as carelessly as he. A dozen of them sit straight against the backs of their chairs, rigid in this house of curves, heads cocked, listening. Some have notebooks like his. They look to be Tristan's age, which means that really they are eighteen, nineteen. There is one empty chair, at the foot of the table, and at the head, speaking, is a man who can only be Professor Pendergast. Tristan sees the glossy black back of his hair first.

The teacher pauses, turns, and smiles. “Brodsky, is it?” he intones with a hint of melody, clearly the master of his own voice. Tristan nods. Pendergast is dressed for a night on the town. Even his thin mustache looks exquisitely groomed, as if a tiny luxurious animal, perhaps an infant mink, has crawled onto his face and stretched out for a nap. A cigarette smolders in the ashtray at his fingertips, and the pack of smokes lying by his other hand, next to a burnished gold lighter, is a brand Tristan has never seen. He is beautiful, in a way no man Tristan knows would ever allow himself to be.

“Welcome to Contemporary Literature.” Pendergast gestures to the empty chair and checks his watch as Tristan takes a seat. “Let's begin, shall we? No—wait—a thousand pardons. Not until we procure Brodsky a drink.” He spins a finger in the air before Tristan can consider protesting, and a moment later a glass of amber liquid is deposited by Tristan's elbow. The other cavemen have been similarly feted.

Tristan lifts the heavy glass, takes a cautious nip, pulls back his lips and twitch-winces casually as he has seen men do in movies. Now Tristan understands why. The scotch burns, and he holds it in his mouth a moment, waiting for it to mellow before swallowing. His form, he feels, is excellent. A small warmth ripples through him.

“As some of you gentlemen have no doubt taken note,” says Pendergast, “this is not a conventional classroom.” A pause as the class chuckles and the professor smiles indulgently. He is younger than his bearing would suggest. Thirty, Tristan would guess.

“Nor, I regret to inform, will we be meeting here at the redoubtable Oswald's again. Tonight is a reward which I hope, over the course of the semester, you will earn.” He halts once more, this time lowering his face to browbeat them. “I am a new breed of teacher,” Pendergast declares, raising his eyebrows, “and this, with your cooperation, will be a new kind of class.” He straightens, magisterial again. “You will read no contemporary literature this semester. Rather, gentlemen, you will write it.”

Pendergast taps the ash from his cigarette and waits, as if expecting the students to turn to one another and begin stage-whispering in excitement. Instead, they sit with the air of undecided jurors, and Tristan almost laughs. Cavemen they may seem, here at Oswald's, but City College kids are far from dumb. These are the choicest members of New York City's bumper crop of underprivileged Hebrews, and their reputation is for aggressive intellectualism, for educating themselves and one another when the school's instructors prove unequal to the task.

You can find any debate you like being waged in the dining alcoves of the school cafeteria, passionately and at maximum volume. The Stalinists of Alcove One and the Trotskyites of Alcove Two go home hoarse every day, whether they've been arguing among themselves or against one another. Politics is the new religion. Tristan listens to the sermons as he wolfs down his homemade sandwiches, but he remains an atheist, believing only in himself.

For a moment, faced with the table's silence, it seems that Pendergast has prepared nothing further. Then: “Here is life,” he proclaims, raising his arms like a king at a feast. “Here are men and women, drink and song. I wrote the first words of my novel in this very room, sitting in that corner, listening to the sounds you hear right now and some you will hear soon. I want all of you to find that spark, to feel the urge to press pencil to paper and invent.”

So this place is Pendergast's muse. It is a cheap trick, trying to inspire them by showing them his lair, cheap and self-serving. And yet Tristan has to force himself not to fall for it; the ease and glimmer of the life Pendergast is putting on display are that seductive. Only the professor's satisfaction with himself prevents the siren song from taking hold. The scotch glass is in Tristan's hand again, and when he takes it from his lips, he finds it empty. He wants more.

“Montaigne said, ‘I write to compose myself,'” Pendergast announces. “Writing creates us, gentlemen, even as we create it. Certainly it can calm, as Montaigne suggests, but believe me when I tell you, lads: it can also inflame.”

Tristan flags the waiter himself, using only his eyes. A slurred energy is beginning to fill him, and it's not the booze. If anything, the fresh drink in Tristan's hand will mitigate against the expanding desire to squeeze Pendergast's words into paper balls, set them on fire, and watch them shrivel. From some unspelunked chamber inside Tristan a righteous fury is beginning to well, in defense of things he didn't know he held so holy. Pendergast cannot be a real writer. He's too comfortable, too handsome, too much on the inside of things, and what's more, he's a fool for laying all this Let's Be Writers drivel out before a tableful of kids who signed up for a regular three-papers-and-a-final-exam English class.

Only a phony would bandy such ideas so carelessly, attempt to baptize everyone immediately in what should be sacred, hidden waters. Who the hell is Pendergast to throw open the temple doors? Tristan thinks of his mother's grandfather and her stories of the old craftsmen's guilds, the years of toil and apprenticeship a man endured before he attained even Journeyman status. Pendergast, you wileless schmuck, has your race no such standards?

He sips his new drink, blinks back his thoughts, and finds the professor has stopped talking. Pendergast is sitting with his legs crossed at the knee and his chin lifted to the stage. The other cavemen, too, have turned toward the narrow bandstand. Two colored men in suits are up there; one sits down at the piano bench and plays a nimble snatch of melody, then turns and looks into the room, making an arcane gesture at an unseen accomplice. The other clasps the neck of an upright bass with one hand and runs two long fingers against the strings with the other, loosing a low, pleasing thrum.

Tristan watches the class watch them, and sees in the students' eyes a childish vacancy. They cannot define this in the language they know. It is not prelaw or premed or pre-anything; it is fully formed and alien, and they are unequipped. The sight should not surprise him, but it does, and Tristan clasps his hands in his lap and tightens them until the bones of his fingers ache, as if to compress the ambition surging through him into as small a space as possible.

He surveys the room and attempts to think in words, not sensory impressions, mind sprinting to translate what he sees, hears, feels. He can't do it, not at all. The failure fills him with resolve. He thinks of the lunchroom politicians, shouting at one another, trying to bore their way into hearts and minds, and of the lawyers-and doctors-in-training laboring to master their small portions of the world. They have their limits, all of them. But a writer can strive to know anything—can tell his own story as if it is another man's, another man's as if it is his own.

Tristan's thirst returns, but there is not a waiter in sight. He notices the drink at the adjacent caveman's elbow; the glass is still full, and the fellow's head is turned. Tristan swaps their glasses, takes another sip, and reflects. A writer can wrestle with the snarled, mystifying whole, with the fact that nothing is simple, that no answer is right, that life is twinned and layered and everything contradicts everything else. A writer, if he is good, might do justice to the complexity of the truth—reconcile, for instance, the simultaneity of Tristan's desires to punch Pendergast in the face and to be him.

The problem with this firecracker string of epiphanies is not the rending of expectations or the sloughing off of everything Tristan has been told about himself. The problem is that they have come in Pendergast's presence, and could even be said, by one with a muddled sense of cause and effect, to have been inspired by him. Tristan resolves to borrow the professor's novel from the library tomorrow, read it, and despise it.

Pendergast is banging his hands together for the saxophonist, who has now mounted the stage and stands with his back turned, conversing with the bassist. “This cat is going to be famous soon,” he tells the class over his shoulder. Immediately, Tristan doubts it. Cat?

The man hears, and turns. “Lady Pete,” he says, bending at the waist to shake Pendergast's hand.

“Lady Les.” The professor clasps the musician's palm in both of his.

“This your class?” Lady Les surveys the table with a dimpled smile, and Tristan grins back like everyone else. Pendergast could not be more pleased at his friend's attention; he's still holding on to Lady Les's hand, as if he wants to make certain everyone sees the embrace before consenting to end it.

“Thanks for making the scene tonight, y'all,” Lady Les says, reclaiming his hand and tucking his thin, casually knotted tie more tightly into the vest of his rumpled charcoal suit. “I'm glad to have you here. You prick up your rabbits at what Lady Pete lays on you, now. This is my main man right here.” He tugs the brim of his porkpie hat in punctuation, or perhaps irony—and here it is, camaraderie and disdain together, the one beside the other, stratum upon stratum, the full weave of life revealing itself for an instant—then straightens and nods to the band. Behind him, the drummer counts off the song, and then a lushness spreads over the room, washing over conversation and eroding it to whispers: soft cymbals and piano, soft chocolaty bass, and then the most intimate, softest sound of all coming from the man's horn, a tone so sweet and warm and light and airy that it feels as if he's breathing right in Tristan's ear.

It is astounding that such a contraption as Lady Les's saxophone can produce these tender notes—softness from hardness, the full weave visible for an instant more. The song makes Tristan want to move very slowly with a girl he loves hard, pressed as close to her as possible. Lady Les stands with his eyes shut and his eyebrows prancing, immobile from the neck down except for his strolling fingers on the metal pedals. His arms are rigid, holding the horn away from his body like a first-time dance partner, and the instrument curves up and connects with the corner of his mouth like a forgotten toothpick.