The Correspondence Artist (2 page)

I wrote Tzipi back telling her how honored I was to receive her message, and I hastened to assure her that I'd been a devoted fan for many years. I explained that “hippie” indicated, for me, certain social values which I found myself missing more and more, particularly given the current political climate. I knew she'd agree with me about this. I said that the next time she came to New York, I'd love to cook her dinner. We exchanged one more round of brief messages in which she returned the invitation, should I find myself for any reason in Tel Aviv.

Perhaps you can imagine what happened a few months later. Sometimes one's life feels like a book that's being written by somebody else. I got a freelance gig writing a short piece for a travel magazine: nightlife in the age of anxiety in the Israeli metropole. I'd be spending two nights in Jerusalem, and two in Tel Aviv. I sent Tzipi an e-mail and she wrote me back right away asking what hotel I'd be staying at. She suggested she pick me up on the evening of my first night there, and she'd take me to the famous restaurant Mul-Yam. The chef was a friend of hers. She said if I were going to be out prowling the clubs till dawn, I'd better get myself some sustenance in advance. I said I'd love that.

After I checked into the hotel, I took a shower and set my clothes out on the bed. Everybody said Tel Aviv was very laid back, but this was supposed to be a really nice restaurant. I decided to wear jeans, but with a low-cut blouse and some very high-heeled '40s-style platform shoes. I posed for myself in
front of the full-length mirror. I changed my shirt a couple of times but ended up going back to my original choice. Tzipi had said she'd pick me up at 8, but at 7:45 she called to say she was going to be a little late. She was apologetic. It was something about her younger son – he wasn't feeling well, and Tzipi had to wait for her ex to get there. She sounded a little flustered.

When she got to the hotel around 9, they called me from the front desk and said I had a visitor. I walked down the steps and saw her standing expectantly in the lobby. Everybody in the place was looking at her. It's not just that she's so beautiful. She's also extremely famous. People here know Tzipi's face, but in Israel, it's ubiquitous – plastered in the window of every bookstore, smiling enigmatically from street placards, flitting with eerie regularity across the television screen. She was exactly as I'd seen her in those photographs – just, perhaps, a little greyer. That famous white streak through her gorgeous, wild hair had spread out further, almost encompassing her face now in a snowy blur, but her eyes were still shiny and black, rimmed, as ever, with kohl. She held her arms out, and we embraced. It felt strangely natural. She had a very slight scent of vetiver. She said, “You look as I knew you'd look. This is exactly as I pictured you.”

Everyone in the lobby smiled at us.

In the car on the way to the restaurant, Tzipi apologized for being late. She explained that she was in the process of a somewhat complicated separation. It had been her decision, and her ex was having a difficult time. Tzipi didn't want to make it any more difficult than it had to be for their son. I wasn't sure how to respond to such immediate intimacy, but I told her I understood. She asked me if I had any children, and I told her yes, one.

She changed the topic to my writing. She told me what she'd liked, particularly, about that review. I said that after I'd read
Embracing Anomalies
I'd felt compelled to write a series of prose
poems. She laughed and said she always found this an interesting contradiction in terms, although people often used the expression to describe her more fragmented narratives. She asked me if I knew any of my poems by heart, and if I could recite one to her.

With my heart in my mouth, I did – an unrhymed sonnet about failed love. It was called “Obscene.” She looked over at me, smiling just a little. I felt extremely naked.

Everyone knew Tzipi at the restaurant. The famous chef, Yoram Nitzan, came out to speak with us. She told him to bring us whatever he thought was best. Nitzan grabbed her strong brown hand and kissed it. He turned to me and smiled. He said, “You know, we have the best wine list in Tel Aviv – we have our own label, excellent, but Tzipi is horrible, she insists on ruining my beautiful food by washing it down with Coca-Cola!”

It's true. Despite the fact that she is unarguably the most elegant woman in the world, Tzipi Honigman never touches wine. She drinks Coke, assiduously. She said, “There's nothing like a Coca-Cola with a tender piece of foie gras! You don't believe me, but you haven't tried it. I can't tolerate alcohol – it makes me feel desiccated. But I don't prohibit others. Feel free to order wine if you like! Or whiskey!”

I was nervous enough. I didn't think I needed to be the only one impaired. I just asked for mineral water.

The food was exquisite, but I had a hard time eating. At one point I looked up at Tzipi and said – and this was entirely unpremeditated – “I'm nervous.” I told her, truthfully, how much I admired her, what she'd meant to me, as a writer, as a reader, and for how long. She took this in gracefully, accepting it at face value. Surely she'd heard this many times before.

What happened next was something of a blur. There was a commotion toward the front of the restaurant, and suddenly I was looking up at a tall, beautiful, distracted young woman in a black leather jacket. Her long brown hair was disheveled, her
eyes streaked with ruined make-up. She was staring at me in disbelief. Tzipi looked up and said gently, “Hannah…”

“You told me she was some middle-aged journalist! You said this was ‘professional'!”

“I am…” I uttered meekly. “It is…” Tzipi said.

“Tell me you don't think she's beautiful!” Hannah screamed. Tzipi stared back dumbly. “Tell me!”

Tzipi said, “Hannah, what you're saying is extremely flattering to her.” She didn't seem to notice that this was pretty insulting, but I was a little too disoriented to take offense. Hannah looked at the table between us, littered with plates smeared with remnants of fatty liver and traces of sauce. She decisively grabbed Tzipi's wine glass of Coke and dumped it on my head.

Everyone, everything, froze. I felt a lump in my throat and worried for a second that I was going to cry. I'm not sure why – if it was just a childish reaction to the spoiling of my perfect dinner with Tzipi Honigman, or if I was in that instant intuiting just how inevitably sad overwhelming love always is. Then as quickly as she'd appeared, Hannah went striding out of the restaurant.

The other diners tried very hard not to pay attention. The waiter quietly swept in with some extra napkins, cleared the plates before me and swabbed away the puddle of brown liquid. I dabbed at the top of my head with my napkin. Tzipi looked up at me and said, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

I excused myself quickly and rinsed off a little in the ladies' room. I surveyed the damage: surprisingly minor. But my heart was racing. When I got back to the table, the next course had arrived, but I was sure I couldn't eat it. Tzipi explained a little, but I'd already figured it out, as I'm sure you have, too. Tzipi's life with Hannah was something not much talked about in literary circles, though people knew. They'd always been discreet, even after Hannah conceived a child and Tzipi took to calling him, as well, her son.

Tzipi had been married briefly in the '70s and she had an adult son, Asher, with whom she was very close. In fact, they were famously close – and I'd always identified with her because of that, because of my relationship with Sandro. Maybe it's something of a cliché. Like Susan Sontag and her son. I simultaneously romanticize this model, and worry about its pathological implications. Anyway, the parallels were obvious.

Hannah had been introduced to Tzipi as a young student. She was writing poetry and Tzipi took her under her wing. Hannah stopped writing almost immediately, and pretty soon she'd dedicated herself entirely to being with Tzipi. She moved in. A few years later she had Pitzi. I've seen a photograph of her pregnancy. She was so stunningly beautiful. Annie Leibovitz took a portrait of her, smiling beatifically over her perfect, soft breasts, the tendrils of her brown hair falling over her shoulders, her lovely, round belly circled by Tzipi's unmistakably muscular and yet graceful, tanned arm. Tzipi was mostly out of the shot, obscured by Hannah's naked glory, but you could see her pressing her face into the back of her lover's neck.

That was ten years ago. Hannah was 19. Tzipi was 58.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After Hannah stormed out of the restaurant we tried to recover, but Tzipi's cell phone kept going off. The first two times she spoke in a hushed voice, but when it went off a third time she said, “Maybe I'd better just take you back to your hotel. She's having a hard night.” Of course I agreed. God knows, I wouldn't have been able to eat, anyway.

In the car driving back, we tried to talk a little about music. Tzipi often writes about jazz, and piano improvisation is a kind of leitmotif in more than one of her novels. I told her about a fabulous CD a friend had given to Sandro of Monk learning a tune. She was intrigued. As I described it to her, I found myself reaching over and touching her arm. I knew what I was doing.

Then we stopped at a light, and Tzipi looked up into the rearview mirror. “Oh, look at that,” she said calmly. “She's following us.” I wrenched around and saw Hannah gripping the steering wheel of the car directly behind us. My pulse picked up again. We pulled up in front of the hotel and I thought to myself, “Maintain composure.” Tzipi and I leaned in and kissed each other on the cheek. The porter of the hotel was opening the car
door. I swung my leg out, began to step out, and suddenly felt a thud on the right side of my head. Hannah was tackling me. I stumbled but managed to stay upright as she yanked at my hair and swung another punch, this time pummeling my left ear. I turned and ran toward the lobby. I heard a scream and looked back. Hannah had pushed up the sleeves of her jacket and was mercilessly clawing at her own arms and howling in my direction, “If you call her again, if you send her another e-mail, I swear to God, I'll kill you! I saw you kiss in the car! I have a photograph! Bitch! Get the hell out of Israel!” Tzipi had rushed out of the car and was trying to hold a thrashing Hannah in her arms. I ran up to my room without looking back.

Tzipi later told me that the hotel security had misunderstood her attempt to calm Hannah down, and thought she was attacking her. They ended up pulling the two of them apart. Fortunately nobody called the cops, but it took some talking before everyone calmed down.

Needless to say, I didn't do any research that night for my article. The next night I poked around a few clubs in the downtown area and got enough to fill my word count. The section on Jerusalem was a little more thorough, but as you'll surely understand, I kind of wrote this piece on automatic pilot.

Tzipi answered my e-mail very graciously. She said it had been a difficult few days after that scene, but that there had also been moments when Tzipi thought she saw a light at the end of the tunnel. She said she liked Hannah very much, and wanted for her to be happy. She said it was funny that I'd expressed shyness, when she so obviously had so much more to feel awkward about.

I was glad to get back to New York. Sandro found this story pretty amusing. “Wow,” he said. “Cat fight.” I periodically checked my e-mail over the next few days, half-hoping Tzipi would pop back up, but I was mostly getting messages from the Socialist Party USA [spusa] list serve about labor abuses in
Colombia, and a variety of other spam. One evening I found myself writing a poem. I couldn't resist sending it to Tzipi. It was a sestina, called “Coca-Cola and Violence.” It was about those e-mails I was receiving from spusa-listserv and Hannah's blow-out in the restaurant. It basically implied we're all implicated in violence, little and big, political and personal, even if we think we're trying to be good.

Tzipi wrote back saying she liked the poem. She'd been confused by the last line, which was a fragment of a torn-up love letter, but she solved the riddle for herself.