End of the Jews (29 page)

“But does it make you happy?” Amalia takes a deep sip of her wine. “Helping Albert?”

“It makes me happy hearing him play.” Her eyes light up at the thought. “He so pure, Ama! Albert never think of anything but music. Just like little kid. Even when he practice at home, he got so much emotion. Make me wanna cry.” Mariko palms the wineglass, and the stem clicks against her wedding band. She gulps, sets down the drink, and dabs a finger to the corner of her lipstick.

“But what about you?” Amalia places her glass next to Mari's. “Who takes care of you?”

“I do. Men cannot take care of nobody. Especially genius.” She picks up the bottle and another chute of wine splashes into Amalia's glass. Mari pours like a saloon keeper. “Tristan take care of you?”

She's made her point; Amalia doesn't even bother to respond. Instead, she thinks back to the fantasy of radicalizing Mariko that so amused her a few hours back, and wonders who is schooling whom.

Mari lifts her glass. “You right, Ama. It's good to lose them for a while.” Amalia consents to clang it in a toast, and they both sip: Amalia deliberately, and Mariko fast, so she can talk on. “Everything I remember before I meet Albert like memory from different lifetime,” she says, eyes trained on nothing. “Being single, going out with girlfriends, dancing on the beach all night. Things very different in Okinawa.” She giggles. It is a strange sound, coming from Mariko, but very nice. “My first boyfriends American GIs.”

As she listens, Amalia strips the intervening years from Mari's face as easily as peeling paper from a wall, and sees her teenaged and flirtatious, that tremendous energy not yet tethered to anything but the pursuit of fun. Mariko's bare tan legs glint in the moonlight as she dances, moving faster and faster, throwing back her head to challenge the night sky with her black eyes. When the image dissolves, the room has lost a little of its luster, and so Amalia dives again into the past, her own this time.

“Any boy who wanted to take me out had to have dinner at my parents' house first,” she recounts, and a trill of laughter jumps from her mouth. She presses her fingertips to her lips, and the corners of her smile peek out from around them. “My father was so funny. Looking back, he was. At the time, I was mortified. My date would be sitting there, some poor sixteen-year-old in his best suit, as nervous as the dickens, and Daddy would be leaning into him and cracking jokes and elbowing him in the ribs, and then all of a sudden he'd sit up very straight and stern and start quizzing the boy on his plans for the future, as if it were a job interview.

“‘Just how do you intend to make a living, son?'” she booms in Maurice's baritone. “‘What kind of a noggin for business have you got?'” She presses her hand to her chest and giggles until tears rise to her eyes, looks over at Mariko and takes a deep breath and continues. “And then, if he thought he could get away with it, my father would switch over to math problems. He'd have the boy stammering about how he was hoping to study medicine, or law, and then Daddy would cut him right off and say, ‘Yes, yes, very good. Now see here, lad. Let's say a train is traveling from Boston to Chicago, and at the first stop twenty men get on….'”

Amalia breaks into hysterics and clutches Mariko's slim forearm. The instant she feels skin against her palm, Amalia's heart thrills as if it has been tickled with a feather. This happens now and again. Amalia will touch someone and only then realize how badly she has ached to. Sometimes she will also realize that she has employed some ruse or exaggeration in order to achieve her end: an imaginary fleck of lint, a not-really-so-tight squeeze through a party corridor, a laughing fit. These mini-crushes always vanish as soon as she becomes aware of them; Amalia tells herself she is a sensual person who needs more stimulation than she's getting, and thinks no more about it. But this is different. Touching Mariko is something she should have done sincerely, not under the guise of this semiauthentic laugh attack, which is now ending and leaving her winded and annoyed with herself.

“Oh.” She sighs, letting go. “I'm sorry. I haven't thought of that in years. God, it must sound insane.” Mariko grins, hands her a paper napkin. Amalia takes it, and as she dabs the corners of her eyes, Mariko turns away and lifts the lid of a stout blue pot sitting on the stove.

“It smells wonderful in here,” Amalia says, a little louder than is necessary. She stands on tiptoe, bracing herself against the counter, and tries to peer over her hostess's shoulder from eight feet away. “Is there something I can do to help?”

As she utters what is so often a rhetorical offer, routinely dismissed, Amalia is sure Mariko will say yes. They are two women cooking together, not The Server and The Served. No men are cloistered in the living room as if the sight of uncooked food has been proven to cause impotence in the male of the species.

“You can make the salad.” Mari opens the refrigerator, covers the peninsula with an array of produce. Amalia helps herself to a knife and a cutting board and carves a radish into thin translucent wafers. Saffron and cilantro spice the air, and Amalia breathes the bouquet greedily as she works. The background burble of Mariko's fish stew is the sound of excitement.

Soon everything is ready. “Can I light these?” Amalia calls over her shoulder, setting the wooden salad bowl on the table and noticing two orange taper candles standing in low iron holders on a bookshelf, wicks pristine.

Mariko is carrying the pot between two oven mitts, walking with the care of a pregnant woman. She gives her guest a quizzical smile.

“Why not?”

Amalia strikes a match. “I thought maybe you were saving them for something.”

Mariko sits down, folds her hands in her lap, and nods. “For you.”

Amalia can't help blushing, but between the heat rising from the pot and the slight rosiness the wine has now imparted to them both, it hardly matters. She takes another sip as Mariko ladles the fragrant orange concoction onto a base of rice and lays a plate in front of her. There are chunks of haddock, shrimp, and scallops, small pieces of something that might be crabmeat or even lobster. Amalia thinks about her mother, the way Natalie always orders shellfish in restaurants because they are verboten in her kosher household. As if the Torah provides a loophole for Jews dining out.

“You know, I haven't been out dancing in years,” Amalia remarks as they pick up their forks. The image of Mariko spinning between the sand and stars has lingered in her mind. In fact, now a summer storm is coming down and Mariko and her girlfriends are getting drenched, opening their mouths to taste the rain as great fast sheets of water spatter their clothes and stick them to their bodies. Soon they will escape into the ocean, calling one another's names.

Mariko shoots a bemused look over the top of her wineglass and Amalia feels ashamed, guileless, like a child hinting at what she wants for her birthday when the gift's been sitting in the closet, wrapped, for months.

“Me neither. So we go, then? After dinner?”

Amalia laughs, drops her eyes to the table, then raises them slowly. “We couldn't.”

Mari spears a shrimp, holds it before her mouth. “Why not?”

Why not indeed? Amalia doesn't know whether she is rifling through her mind for an excuse or for the courage to say yes. Dancing has become a dare, and now Mari is watching her with those inscrutable dark eyes, waiting. It's too strange to dwell on just now, but this woman is acting awfully like the girlfriend Amalia used to wish for in college: someone to throw pebbles at her window, rouse her from her bed, and drag her out of doors and into trouble.

She leans back in her chair. “Where? Where could we go?”

“We find somewhere.”

They go on eating. The stew tastes even better now. Richer, as if Amalia is ingesting every bit of energy that went into its preparation, from the walk to the market to the deveining of the shrimp to the chopping of the onions. For the next few minutes, her entire consciousness of food heightens and simplifies. These morsels she now places in her mouth are what will keep her alive until she eats again, what will sustain her through the night to come. It is how soldiers in the field must feel, tearing open their ration packets: newly cognizant of the obvious.

“I didn't make any dessert.” Mariko is in the kitchen, opening a second bottle of wine. Amalia can't believe they polished off the first, any more than she can understand why she agreed when Mariko suggested uncorking another. She doesn't feel drunk. Perhaps her host drank more, but it doesn't seem likely. If Mari consumed the lion's share, she would be staggering by now, not dancing the bottle back into the dining room and humming. “I have some ice cream, if you want.”

“I'm fine,” Amalia says. “You have some.”

Mari, standing over the table and pouring, shakes her head. “Usually, I never eat this much. When Albert around, I cannot relax. Cannot digest.”

“You're a better woman than I, Mari.” Amalia toasts, lifting her glass. “When I can't relax, I eat everything in sight.”

Mari toasts back. “You very calm person, then. Else you not fit in that pretty dress. I wish I could wear.” She gestures at herself, with a looseness of limbs that is Amalia's first indication that her host is tipsy. “I got no curves.”

“Nonsense.” Amalia can't help looking away, embarrassed. “You have a lovely figure.”

“Please. I like stick figure.” Mariko stands over her, the wineglass in one hand, the other resting on her hip. “Wind start blowing, I gotta run inside.” Her cheeks are round with mirth, and when Amalia looks up, they both start to laugh. “Serious,” Mariko persists. “Every time I buy dress, they gotta take in. I tell them, I should get discount. I only buying half!”

Five minutes later, bundled up and trudging arm in arm into the wind, Amalia realizes that she, too, is a good distance from sober. Given that and the weather and the fact that they have no idea where they're going, she finds herself willing Mari to call the whole thing off and invite her back to the apartment to warm up. She can already hear the lie they'll tell each other: We'll do it another night. Amalia squints and sets her jaw and shoves the thought aside. This is why you've never had a real partner in crime, she remonstrates herself. You have no stomach for adventure.

Even the Arbiters of Art have the sense to be inside now. Snowflakes are floating in the broad shafts of the streetlamps' light, weightless as dust particles caught in a sunbeam. Amalia squeezes Mari's arm to get her attention, then nods upward to show her. They stand and stare at it awhile, the night grown suddenly warmer, the block deserted, the wind gone. Within a minute, the snow organizes itself, stops swirling, and begins to advance in ranks, like marching infantry. Amalia turns and watches Mariko instead. Big flakes glisten in her hair; her face is wet where snow has melted, and Amalia feels the wetness on her own face, too.

Mari turns and smiles. “Why you look at me like that, Ama?”

She says it kindly, and this time Amalia is not abashed to be caught staring. “You know,” she ventures, unsure.

“I know nobody looked at me like that in long time.” Mariko glances up and away.

“Looked at you how?”

She laughs and steps forward. More snow is landing on their faces than is falling through the space between them. “Okay, Ama, you gonna make me say it? Okay. Like you want to kiss me. Right?”

Amalia swallows. “Yes.”

Mari's eyes shine through the blizzard. “So what you waiting for?”

“I don't know.”

“Women always wait too long.” Mariko looks left and right, then reaches up and places her palms on Amalia's cheeks and guides Amalia's mouth to hers.

The moment their lips meet, Amalia wants to cry. The softness of a woman is so familiar, and yet such a revelation. With a man, there is always something hard behind the gentleness: a force real or imagined, a drive he may slow or suppress but which is always beating in the depths. Mariko's kiss is the first of Amalia's life that feels like an act of lovemaking in itself, the first to take place wholly in the present. There is such freedom, such safety, in the absence of that unnegotiable male energy. Through their jackets, she can feel Mari's breasts pressing against her own, imagine the beating of her heart. Amalia pulls Mari to her, unafraid of being grateful, needy, weak or strong.

         

Tristan shoulders the door closed behind him, takes two steps, and drops his luggage on the hotel bed. The mattress jiggles, settles. He flicks open the latches of his ancient suitcase and unfolds a brown Brooks Brothers suit, lays the pants over the back of a chair and hangs the jacket in the bathroom to unwrinkle when he showers. Albert and the band are bunked two to a room three floors below, but Tristan is up here by himself on the Jewish Congress of America's dollar. The lousy bastards didn't even spring for a suite.

He flops onto the bed and stares at the gift basket on the desk for ten minutes before he can muster up the interest to walk over and unwrap it. He pokes through the assortment of California fruit, notes the absence of macadamia nuts with disappointment, and scowls at the bottle of dessert wine, then takes the card back to bed together with a kiwi he intends to play with, not consume.

The message Tristan extracts from the envelope is all the more infuriating because it is written not in the familiar hand of the sender but the buoyant block letters of some dictation-taking hotel-store employee:

Old Man,

I trust your flight was comfortable and this note finds you well. First off, congratulations on the splendid honor. No one deserves it more. If you feel up to a drink before dinner, ring me in room 718. Otherwise, I shall see you at the ceremony.

Ciao,
P.P.

P.S. I've taken the liberty of reserving us a noon tee time tomorrow. You have no prior obligations, I hope?