therefore just great, right in the American grain.
“Is Jerry gay?” I suddenly asked.
“My brother?” The Swede laughed. “You’re kidding.”
* * *
Maybe I was and had asked the question out of mischief, to alleviate the
boredom. Yet I did happen to be remembering that line the Swede had written me
about how much his father “suffered because of the shocks that befell his loved
ones,” which led me to wondering again what he’d been alluding to, which
spontaneously reminded me of the humiliation Jerry had brought upon himself in
our junior year of high school when he attempted to win the heart of a
strikingly unexceptional girl in our class who you wouldn’t have thought
required a production to get her to kiss you.
As a Valentine present, Jerry made a coat for her out of hamster skins, a
hundred and seventy-five hamster skins that he cured in the sun and then sewed
together with a curved sewing needle pilfered from his father’s factory, where
the idea dawned on him. The high school biology department had been given a gift
of some three hundred hamsters for the purpose of dissection, and Jerry
diligently finagled to collect the skins from the biology students; his oddness
and his genius made credible the story he told about “a
scientific experiment” he was conducting at home. He finagled next to find out
the girl’s height, he designed a pattern, and then, after he got most of the
stink out of the hides—or thought he had—by drying them in the sun on the roof
of his garage, he meticulously sewed the skins together, finishing the coat off
with a silk lining made out of a section of a white parachute, an imperfect
parachute his brother had sent home to him as a memento from the marine air base
in Cherry Point, North Carolina, where the Parris Island team won the last game
of the season for the Marine Corps baseball championship. The only person Jerry
told about the coat was me, the Ping-Pong stooge. He was going to send it to the
girl in a Bamberger’s coat box of his mother’s, wrapped in lavender tissue paper
and tied with velvet ribbon. But when the coat was finished, it was so stiff—
because of the idiotic way he’d dried the skins, his father would later explain—
that he couldn’t get it to fold up in the box.
Across from the Swede in Vincent’s restaurant, I suddenly recalled seeing it in
the basement: this big thing sitting on the floor with sleeves. Today, I was
thinking, it would win all kinds of prizes at the Whitney Museum, but back in
Newark in 1949 nobody knew dick about what great art was and Jerry and I racked
our brains trying to figure out what he could do to get the coat into the box.
He was set on that box because she would think, when she began to open it, that
it contained an expensive coat from Barn’s. I was thinking of what she would
think when she saw that wasn’t what it contained; I was thinking that surely it
didn’t take such hard work to gain the attention of a chubby girl with bad skin
and no boyfriend. But I cooperated with Jerry because he had a cyclonic
personality you either fled or yielded to and because he was Swede Levov’s
brother and I was in Swede Levov’s house and everywhere you looked were Swede
Levov’s trophies. Eventually Jerry tore the entire coat apart and resewed it so
that the stitching lay straight across the chest, creating a hinge of sorts
where the coat could be bent and placed in the box. I helped him—it was like
sewing a suit of armor. Atop the coat he placed a heart that he cut out of card-
board and painted his name on in Gothic letters, and the package was sent parcel
post. It had taken him three months to transform an improbable idea into nutty
reality. Brief by human standards.
She screamed when she opened the box. “She had a fit,” her girlfriends said.
Jerry’s father also had a fit. “This is what you do with the parachute your
brother sent you? You cut it up? You cut up a parachute?” Jerry was too
humiliated to tell him that it was to get the girl to fall into his arms and
kiss him the way Lana Turner kissed Clark Gable. I happened to be there when his
father went after him for curing the skins in the midday sun. “A skin must be
* * *
preserved properly. Properly! And properly is not in the sun—you must dry a skin
in the shade. You don’t want them sunburned, damn it! Can I teach you once and
for all, Jerome, how to preserve a skin?” And that he proceeded to do, in a boil
at first, barely able to contain his frustration with his own son’s ineptitude
as a leather worker, explaining to both of us what they had taught the traders
to do to the sheepskins in Ethiopia before they shipped them to Newark Maid to
be contracted out to the tanner. “You can salt it, but salt’s expensive.
Especially in Africa, very, very expensive. And they steal the salt there. These
people don’t have salt. You have to put poison into the salt over there so they
won’t steal it. Other way is to pack the skin up, various ways, either on a
board or on a frame, you tie it, and make little cuts, tie it up and dry it in
the shade. In the shade, boys. That’s what we call flint-dried skin. Sprinkle a
little flint on it, keeps it from deteriorating, prevents the bugs from
entering—” Much to my own relief, the outrage had given way surprisingly fast to
a patient, if tedious, pedagogical assault, which seemed to gall Jerry even more
than being blown down by his father’s huffing and puffing. It could well have
been that very day when Jerry swore to himself never to go near his father’s
business.
To deal with malodorous skins, Jerry had doused the coat with his mother’s
perfume, but by the time the coat was delivered by the postman it had begun to
stink as it had intermittently all along, and the girl was so revolted when she
opened the box, so insulted and
33
horrified, that she never spoke to Jerry again. According to the other girls,
she thought he had gone out and hunted and killed all those tiny beasts and then
sent them to her because of her blemished skin. Jerry was in a rage when he got
the news and, in the midst of our next Ping-Pong game, cursed her and called all
girls fucking idiots. If he hadn’t before had the courage to ask anyone out on a
date, he never tried after that and was one of only three boys who didn’t show
up at the senior prom. The other two were what we identified as “sissies.” And
that was why I now asked the Swede a question about Jerry that I would never
have dreamed of asking in 1949, when I had no clear idea what a homosexual was
and couldn’t imagine that anybody I knew could be one. At the time I thought
Jerry was Jerry, a genius, with obsessive naivete and colossal innocence about
girls. In those days, that explained it all. Maybe it still does. But I was
really looking to see what, if anything, could roil the innocence of this regal
Swede—and to prevent myself from being so rude as to fall asleep on him—so I
asked him, “Is Jerry gay?”
“As a kid there was always something secretive about Jerry,” I said. “There were
never any girls, never close friend
s, always something about him, even besides
his brains, that set him apart….”
The Swede nodded, looking at me as though he understood my deeper meaning as no
human being ever had before, and because of this probing stare that I would
swear saw nothing, all this giving that gave nothing and gave away nothing, I
had no idea where his thoughts might be or if he even had “thoughts.” When,
momentarily, I stopped speaking, I sensed that my words, rather than falling
into the net of the other person’s awareness, got linked up with nothing in his
brain, went in there and vanished. Something about the harmless eyes—the promise
they made that he could never do anything other than what was right—was becoming
annoying to me, which has to be why I next brought up his letter instead of
keeping my mouth shut until the bill came and I could get away from him for
another fifty years so that when 2045 rolled around I might actually look
forward to seeing him again.
34
* * *
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people
without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance,
as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half
a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of
tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open
mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get
them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong
before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong
while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the
meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them
with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception,
an astonishing farce of mispercep-tion. And yet what are we to do about this
terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the
significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is
ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior
workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit
secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out
of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing
than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact
remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s
getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and
then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know
we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or
wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well,
lucky you.
“When you wrote me about your father, and the shocks he’d suffered, it occurred
to me that maybe Jerry had been the shock. Your old man wouldn’t have been any
better than mine at coming to grips with a queer son.”
35
The Swede smiled the smile that refused to be superior, that was meant to
reassure me that nothing in him ever could or would want to resist me, that
signaled to me that, adored as he was, he was no better than me, even perhaps a
bit of a nobody beside me. “Well, fortunately for my father, he didn’t have to.
Jerry was the-son-the-doctor. He couldn’t have been prouder of anyone than he
was of Jerry.”
“Jerry’s a physician?”
“In Miami. Cardiac surgeon. Million bucks a year.”
“Married? Jerry married?”
The smile again. The vulnerability in that smile was the surprising element—the
vulnerability of our record-breaking muscleman faced with all the crudeness it
takes to stay alive. The smile’s refusal to recognize, let alone to sanction in
himself, the savage obstinacy that seven decades of surviving requires of a man.
As though anyone over ten believes you can subjugate with a smile, even one that
kind and warm, all the things that are out to get you, with a smile hold it all
together when the strong arm of the unforeseen comes crashing down on your head.
Once again I began to think that he might be mentally unsound, that this smile
could perhaps be an indication of derangement. There was no sham in it—and that
was the worst of it. The smile wasn’t insincere. He wasn’t imitating anything.
This caricature was it, arrived at spontaneously after a lifetime of working
himself deeper and deeper into … what? The idea of himself neighborhood
stardom had wreathed him in— had that mummified the Swede as a boy forever? It
was as though he had abolished from his world everything that didn’t suit him—
* * *
not only deceit, violence, mockery, and ruthlessness but anything |
remotely coarse-grained, any threat of contingency, that dreadful
i harbinger of helplessness. Not for a second did he stop trying to
to himself.
Unless, unless, he was just a mature man, as devious as the next mature man.
Unless what was awakened by the cancer surgery—
and what had momentarily managed to penetrate a lifelong comfy take on things—
the hundred percent recovery had all but extinguished. Unless he was not a
character with no character to reveal but a character with none that he wished
to reveal—just a sensible man who understands that if you regard highly your
privacy and the well-being of your loved ones, the last person to take into your
confidence is a working novelist. Give the novelist, instead of your life story,
the brazen refusal of the gorgeous smile, blast him with the stun gun of your
prince-of-blandness smile, then polish off the zabaglione and get the hell back
to Old Rimrock, New Jersey, where your life is your business and not his.
“Jerry’s been married four times,” said the Swede, smiling. “Family record.”
“And you?” I had already figured, from the ages of his three boys, that the
fortyish blonde with the golf clubs was more than likely a second wife and
perhaps a third. Yet divorce didn’t fit my picture of someone who so refused to
register life’s irrational element. If there had been a divorce, it had to have
been initiated by Miss New Jersey. Or she had died. Or being married to someone
who had to keep the achievement looking perfect, someone devoted heart and soul
to the illusion of stability, had led her to suicide. Maybe that was the shock
that had befallen … Perversely, my attempts to come up with the missing
piece that would make the Swede whole and coherent kept identifying him with
disorders of which there was no trace on his beautifully aging paragon’s face. I
could not decide if that blankness of his was like snow covering something or
snow covering nothing.
“Me? Two wives, that’s my limit. I’m a piker next to my brother. His new one’s
in her thirties. Half his age. Jerry’s the doctor who marries the nurse. All
four, nurses. They revere the ground Dr. Levov walks on. Four wi
ves, six kids.
That drove my dad a little nuts. But Jerry’s a big guy, a gruff guy, the high-
and-mighty prima donna surgeon—got a whole hospital by the short hairs—and so
even my dad fell in line. Had to. Would have lost him otherwise.
37
My kid brother doesn’t screw around. Dad kicked and screamed through each
divorce, wanted to shoot Jerry a hundred times over, but as soon as Jerry
remarried, the new wife, in my father’s eyes, was more of a princess than the
wife before. ‘She’s a doll, she’s a sweetheart, she’s my girl… .’ Anybody
said anything about any of Jerry’s wives, my father would have murdered him.
Jerry’s kids he outright adored. Five girls, one boy. My dad loved the boy, but
the girls, they were the apple of his eye. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for
those kids. For any of our kids. When he had everybody around him, all of us,
all the kids, my old man was in heaven. Ninety-six and never sick a day in his
life. After the stroke, for the six months before he died, that was the worst.
But he had a good run. Had a good life. A real fighter. A force of nature.
Unstoppable guy.” A light, floating tone to the words when he goes off on the
subject of his father, the voice resonant with amorous reverence, disclosing
* * *
unashamedly that nothing had permeated more of his life than his father’s
expectations.
“The suffering?”
“Could have been a lot worse,” the Swede said. “Just the six months, and even
then he didn’t know half the time what was going on. He just slipped away one
night… and we lost him.”
By “suffering” I had meant that suffering he had referred to in his letter,