Three stories from the memoir, Intimate Souvenirs:
by
Rob Couteau
I. Teaching Little Dybbuks in the Lion’s Den
Late one night, after exiting a bar in Tribeca and ambling along the woebegone waterfront, I heard a scream:
“Please! Just don’t cut me!”
Halting in my tracks, I peered ahead into the darkness. About a hundred yards away a yellow cab was parked in the center of the road. Tiptoeing a bit closer, I noticed a faint billow of exhaust fumes. The headlights were off, but suddenly the brake lights flared with a fitful pulse.
Gradually I made out a pair of silhouettes. A man in the back seat was holding an enormous cutlass against the driver’s Adam’s apple. When he tilted the blade, it caught the moonlight. The cab hadn’t yet been fitted with one of the new plastic partitions that separate the front from the back, so the passenger had simply leaned forward and held this monstrous knife against this poor man’s throat. The driver was scared out of his wits, and his voice was trilling: “Take the money! But please! Don’t cut me!”
I retreated to a pay phone and dialed 911. Moments later, three cop cars bolted in from the north, south, and east, pinning the cab against the waterfront.
Emerging from the shadows, I briefly spoke with the cabbie and asked if he was all right. A balding, stocky, middle-aged man, from head to foot he was trembling uncontrollably. He just barely managed to remain standing on his wobbly legs. His throat was nicked with a fine, hairline cut, but the knife had severed only the outermost layer of skin – just a tad deeper than a paper cut. But clearly, it wasn’t the wound that had unnerved him but rather the certainty that he was about to be sliced in two.
God only knows what that screwball – who was now handcuffed and tossed into a squad car – had threatened him with or what was spewing from his lips, but this driver was in luck. Now he could continue to bust his hump and earn his daily bread.
Once I saw that he was all right, I slipped back into the shadows. Bless those courageous cabbies, I thought, for without them Mannahatta wouldn’t be the same. And hadn’t Walt Whitman himself loved to ride beside the stagecoach drivers of yesteryear?
But as I headed back to Brooklyn, I realized that such flâneur-inspired peregrinations wouldn’t pay the rent or set me along my path – wherever the hell I was traveling. So now I decided to bite the bullet and apply for a job as a substitute teacher. Although I wanted to be locked inside those dreary classrooms even less than the children did, at least I wouldn’t have to deal with a knife pressed firmly against my throat.
* * *
How I dreaded those mornings when the phone would ring at eight a.m. and I’d be ripped from the bliss of a rapturous dream. In one moment I’d be scaling the walls of the Himalayas, visiting Buddhist lamas in Tibet; in the next, my mother would be screaming at the foot of the stairs: Robbie! Wake up! P.S. 95’s on the phone!
Groggy, disoriented, wiping the sandman’s crumbs from my eyes, I’d next be subjected to the monotonous drone of a secretary with an overblown Canarsie accent who was informing me that Mrs. Aiello was sick with the flu, and could I teach her third-grade class for the next three weeks?
After downing half a pot of coffee, I’d stumble into a cacophonous school yard, searching for my class amidst the roaring thunder of that lion’s den where the kids were encouraged to run themselves ragged – screeching and hollering during that first forty-five minutes of utter delirium.
Those were the days when certain classrooms were packed with over thirty-five students, stuffed like sardines into a greasy can. And now that their regular teacher was out of commission, perhaps suffering from laryngitis after so many weeks of yelling and screaming, they were in no mood to be absorbing such tedious information. For, as everyone knows – and no one knows better than a horde of savages from Gravesend – a substitute teacher is not to be taken seriously.
* * *
One morning as I was surveying my latest bunch of insurrectionists in the yard, I devised a plan:
When it was our turn to enter the building, I led the class into a ground-floor stairwell, but I waited there until the students in front of us had completely cleared the staircase. From the yard, it appeared as if a momentary jam had occurred, and no one was the wiser. But as soon as the stairs were empty again, I ran at top speed up four steep flights.
The kiddies exploded with merriment, perhaps thinking that their teacher had gone mad, and they raced after me – their centipede legs whirling along as they hollered with delight. By the time they straggled up to the fourth floor, however, they were exhausted, with their pasty tongues hanging from their dried little mouths. Stumbling along, they were nearly out of breath as they waggled, wavered, and wobbled along the hallway.
Now I buttonholed one the brownnosers and plied her with questions about how far they’d progressed in their various textbooks. I knew that if I asked any of the incorrigibles what page they were up to in math, English, or geography, they’d point to a lesson that had already been completed weeks ago, ingenious little demons that they were. During this brief intermezzo, if I could collect the pertinent information, then I’d maintain control for the rest of the day. But if you failed to grip the reins during this crucial moment, you were doomed. Moments later, as if awakening from a revivifying slumber, they’d crackle, hiss, and steam like locomotives; and then I’d say, “All right, boys and girls. Here is the deal:
“If you follow my instructions and complete your various and sundry assignments – and if I do not have to yell, scream, and carry on like a banshee from hell – then you will be granted an entire afternoon off! Yes, and we’ll do something fun and frolicsome and easy, such as drawing pictures or playing guessing games. But if you don’t follow my instructions – then, oh, boy – you will be saddled with mathematics all afternoon. And such a drudging, tiresome application of subtraction, multiplication, and division! And maybe even I shall be a good little dybbuk written one thousand times … or some other pointless exercise designed not only to make you crazy but to make you feel as if you’ve been abducted by a time machine and are now serving on a Roman galley, rowing endlessly across a bright blue Mediterranean with your aching wrists feeling as if they’ll drop off at any moment. Yes, ‘I shall be a faithful, quiet, well-behaved little golem for the rest of my days – one thousand times!”
Within seconds the class would be split between those who just couldn’t help being obnoxious little pricks, despite such lures and incentives, and those who were terrified by the prospect of descending into a disciplinary hell, surrounded by a crazy dance of meaningless integers, and deprived of a rainbow of Crayola crayon ecstasy and the joy of doing nothing taxing for the remainder of the day. And so, the kids who dreamed of reaping a reward would attempt to gang up on the malefactors who just couldn’t help but rock the boat. Divide and conquer! Thanks to this devious strategy, we’d usually manage to quash a rebellion, maintain our course, and cruise into the final hours of a carefree afternoon.
Back then I was still absorbing the Beat classics published by City Lights and Grove Press, so if I was in a particularly good mood I’d share a few excerpts from this subversive literature … perhaps reading a passage from Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” that tender homage to a dried-out stalk that rises from a junk heap on Fisherman’s Wharf as Kerouac – ever identifying with the tragic horror of the torn and tattered World Soul – proclaims: “Look! A sunflower!” Thus, I’d attempt to nurture these cultural orphans who were themselves so beat and beaten, not to mention beatific, and encourage them to consider for a moment the dusty gray bloom and its lonesome plight. On another day, to a group of fourth graders, I recited a few lines from Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist ravings: “Art is an amoeba! Art is a spook! Art is a tomato!”
They couldn’t understand a word of it, but it sent lightning bolts up their wriggling spines as they howled with laughter … for their spirit caught the gist of it.
* * *
I soon discovered that the administrators of P.S. 95 would contact me only when the other substitute teachers lacked the temerity to enter one of these especially difficult classrooms. They’d never hire me for the more easygoing kids, for the well-behaved pushovers. Instead, I’d only be summoned when no one else dared to tread beyond Dante’s fifty-ninth circle of prepubescent hell. And upon learning this, I was convinced that it was my big bushy beard that had marked me as a pariah: one unsuited for a more civilized classroom.
I’d stumbled onto this information accidentally, while speaking to a secretary in the office. One day, she’d let it slip: Oh, you’re the one who never says no when we call! Thus, she’d unwittingly revealed this villainous plot: to place me in charge of those distressing varmints in need of constant supervision. They’d even separated the worst laggards and troublemakers of each grade, herding them into these clusters of thirty-five or forty kids. And with my dreadful Whitmanesque whiskers – which I wore in a secret homage to the poet – they regarded me as an antisocial boogieman who might at least serve to scare the bejesus out of such louts, scamps, guttersnipes, and misfits. All this occurred in the years before the beard had returned as an acceptable accoutrement for socially adapted men, so they continued to treat me as an uncouth interloper. But at least the stockbrokers and executives of the 1980s who would soon don such bristle would keep it well trimmed. Mine was a bit too unkempt and freewheeling for such stiffs.
One morning the beard had even made a young girl weep the moment she’d laid eyes upon me in the yard. She was a new student, and when her Russian mother brought her hand in hand to the line, this adorable little goldilocks shyly gazed up at me and shrieked – with a flood of tears cascading along her rosy cheeks.
Her mother tried to reassure her that I wasn’t a Billy Goat Gruff, but it was only by the most delicate of maneuvers that we managed to comfort her. I even insisted that the mother briefly join us in the classroom, to help calm her daughter while my outlaws hung up their coats and I culled the latest lesson-plan information, hoping to remain at least one step ahead of this dunderheaded bunch of scalawags.
* * *
I finally decided to I shave off the beard as an experiment, just to see what would happen. Sure enough, suddenly the administrators hardly seemed to recognize me. Instead of treating me as an outcast, at once the calls increased. Soon I was graced with polite invitations to teach the most well-behaved bevies of mollycoddled darlings. Not to mention the cutest bunnies, the first graders, who were usually too timid to talk back, as well as the more brainiacal second- and third grade classes: sweet little automatons who wouldn’t dream of misbehaving. Not only was I inundated with calls; I was even offered a full-time position by the principals of two different schools: offers that I promptly rejected. For the notion of settling into such a “normal” routine horrified me.
Instead, I grew back my stubble and then, of course, the calls dropped away. Once again, I was happily condemned to the dungeon of those endearing demons who proudly proclaimed their latest acts of mutiny and insurrection as I tugged at the reins and forced order down their throats. But oddly enough, they seemed to like me. And the bizarre mixture of extreme discipline followed by extreme disorder fascinated them more than a ride on the bumper cars at Coney Island.
Though I maintained an iron fist, they knew that, beard or no beard, somehow I was different. As soon as I’d arrive – zigzagging through the yard and searching for my class – the kids would shout, Look! It’s Mr. C! They’d jump up and down, screaming and hollering: Mr. C, Mr. C, which class do you have? hoping it would be theirs. But then they’d moan, “Oh, no!” when I sailed past and, instead, stopped before some other slowly forming double line.
And now, those kids would yell: It’s Mr. C! We have Mr. C! They’d grow crazier by the second, but I never bothered to contain them, even when some other teacher would stalk over and try to stifle their outbursts. Instead, I’d smile – ever so slightly – as if signaling my subtle approval.
* * *
The salary for such a thankless task was a mere thirty-five dollars a day. And I waited for my first paycheck for so many weeks – and then months – that, one morning, utterly infuriated, I phoned the Board of Ed to complain. Such a plodding, anachronistic, woolly mammoth of an institution! Such a fossil-encrusted labyrinth! Even the byzantine corridors of Southern Italian bureaucracy would put you to shame!
But no matter how much I ranted and raved, at first I wasn’t getting anywhere with the various drowsy, indifferent, benumbed functionaries … until I claimed that I was a freelance writer who occasionally authored diatribes for the Village Voice (a complete falsehood); and if I didn’t get that goddamned check within the next ten days I’d publish a full-length polemic denouncing their archaic, obsolete administration. What an abysmal lack of regard for such exploited laborers, such assembly-line pieceworkers known as substitute teachers! Imagine, I said, paying us such a pittance for the torture we endure! I went on and on, but now, suddenly, they appeared to be listening, and I was quickly transferred from one Beelzebub to the next. But instead of being shunted sideways, now I was ascending a ladder of authority. And with each respective functionary my story grew even more elaborate, as if were erecting my own byzantine monument.
And then, miracle of miracles, the following week I had my first paycheck in hand. Eventually they raised our salary to fifty bucks per diem, although this still wasn’t enough to properly compensate the hired hands who actually wanted to labor for such a crusty, mind-molding institution. For what else is a teacher, especially an elementary school teacher, but a mind crusher, a maker of zombies, and an assassin of the soul?
As I shuttled in and out of such forlorn, desperate hollows in the remote hinterlands of Gravesend, I tried to imagine what would happen if those pedagogical victims known as students could somehow read my mind as I lingered beside the windowsill and gazed down at the handball and basketball courts, past the wavering treetops – and all the way to the horizon. How I yearned for those exotic lands of adventure that must lie out there somewhere.
Hovering beside those dusty windowpanes, I’d wonder what it was like to live in Lisbon, Rome, or Paris. I mean, to really live, and to wander for hours through dimly lit streets minus any rhyme or reason, accompanied only by the song of the open road.
~~~
Late one night, after exiting a bar in Tribeca and ambling along the woebegone waterfront, I heard a scream:
“Please! Just don’t cut me!”
Halting in my tracks, I peered ahead into the darkness. About a hundred yards away a yellow cab was parked in the center of the road. Tiptoeing a bit closer, I noticed a faint billow of exhaust fumes. The headlights were off, but suddenly the brake lights flared with a fitful pulse.
Gradually I made out a pair of silhouettes. A man in the back seat was holding an enormous cutlass against the driver’s Adam’s apple. When he tilted the blade, it caught the moonlight. The cab hadn’t yet been fitted with one of the new plastic partitions that separate the front from the back, so the passenger had simply leaned forward and held this monstrous knife against this poor man’s throat. The driver was scared out of his wits, and his voice was trilling: “Take the money! But please! Don’t cut me!”
I retreated to a pay phone and dialed 911. Moments later, three cop cars bolted in from the north, south, and east, pinning the cab against the waterfront.
Emerging from the shadows, I briefly spoke with the cabbie and asked if he was all right. A balding, stocky, middle-aged man, from head to foot he was trembling uncontrollably. He just barely managed to remain standing on his wobbly legs. His throat was nicked with a fine, hairline cut, but the knife had severed only the outermost layer of skin – just a tad deeper than a paper cut. But clearly, it wasn’t the wound that had unnerved him but rather the certainty that he was about to be sliced in two.
God only knows what that screwball – who was now handcuffed and tossed into a squad car – had threatened him with or what was spewing from his lips, but this driver was in luck. Now he could continue to bust his hump and earn his daily bread.
Once I saw that he was all right, I slipped back into the shadows. Bless those courageous cabbies, I thought, for without them Mannahatta wouldn’t be the same. And hadn’t Walt Whitman himself loved to ride beside the stagecoach drivers of yesteryear?
But as I headed back to Brooklyn, I realized that such flâneur-inspired peregrinations wouldn’t pay the rent or set me along my path – wherever the hell I was traveling. So now I decided to bite the bullet and apply for a job as a substitute teacher. Although I wanted to be locked inside those dreary classrooms even less than the children did, at least I wouldn’t have to deal with a knife pressed firmly against my throat.
* * *
How I dreaded those mornings when the phone would ring at eight a.m. and I’d be ripped from the bliss of a rapturous dream. In one moment I’d be scaling the walls of the Himalayas, visiting Buddhist lamas in Tibet; in the next, my mother would be screaming at the foot of the stairs: Robbie! Wake up! P.S. 95’s on the phone!
Groggy, disoriented, wiping the sandman’s crumbs from my eyes, I’d next be subjected to the monotonous drone of a secretary with an overblown Canarsie accent who was informing me that Mrs. Aiello was sick with the flu, and could I teach her third-grade class for the next three weeks?
After downing half a pot of coffee, I’d stumble into a cacophonous school yard, searching for my class amidst the roaring thunder of that lion’s den where the kids were encouraged to run themselves ragged – screeching and hollering during that first forty-five minutes of utter delirium.
Those were the days when certain classrooms were packed with over thirty-five students, stuffed like sardines into a greasy can. And now that their regular teacher was out of commission, perhaps suffering from laryngitis after so many weeks of yelling and screaming, they were in no mood to be absorbing such tedious information. For, as everyone knows – and no one knows better than a horde of savages from Gravesend – a substitute teacher is not to be taken seriously.
* * *
One morning as I was surveying my latest bunch of insurrectionists in the yard, I devised a plan:
When it was our turn to enter the building, I led the class into a ground-floor stairwell, but I waited there until the students in front of us had completely cleared the staircase. From the yard, it appeared as if a momentary jam had occurred, and no one was the wiser. But as soon as the stairs were empty again, I ran at top speed up four steep flights.
The kiddies exploded with merriment, perhaps thinking that their teacher had gone mad, and they raced after me – their centipede legs whirling along as they hollered with delight. By the time they straggled up to the fourth floor, however, they were exhausted, with their pasty tongues hanging from their dried little mouths. Stumbling along, they were nearly out of breath as they waggled, wavered, and wobbled along the hallway.
Now I buttonholed one the brownnosers and plied her with questions about how far they’d progressed in their various textbooks. I knew that if I asked any of the incorrigibles what page they were up to in math, English, or geography, they’d point to a lesson that had already been completed weeks ago, ingenious little demons that they were. During this brief intermezzo, if I could collect the pertinent information, then I’d maintain control for the rest of the day. But if you failed to grip the reins during this crucial moment, you were doomed. Moments later, as if awakening from a revivifying slumber, they’d crackle, hiss, and steam like locomotives; and then I’d say, “All right, boys and girls. Here is the deal:
“If you follow my instructions and complete your various and sundry assignments – and if I do not have to yell, scream, and carry on like a banshee from hell – then you will be granted an entire afternoon off! Yes, and we’ll do something fun and frolicsome and easy, such as drawing pictures or playing guessing games. But if you don’t follow my instructions – then, oh, boy – you will be saddled with mathematics all afternoon. And such a drudging, tiresome application of subtraction, multiplication, and division! And maybe even I shall be a good little dybbuk written one thousand times … or some other pointless exercise designed not only to make you crazy but to make you feel as if you’ve been abducted by a time machine and are now serving on a Roman galley, rowing endlessly across a bright blue Mediterranean with your aching wrists feeling as if they’ll drop off at any moment. Yes, ‘I shall be a faithful, quiet, well-behaved little golem for the rest of my days – one thousand times!”
Within seconds the class would be split between those who just couldn’t help being obnoxious little pricks, despite such lures and incentives, and those who were terrified by the prospect of descending into a disciplinary hell, surrounded by a crazy dance of meaningless integers, and deprived of a rainbow of Crayola crayon ecstasy and the joy of doing nothing taxing for the remainder of the day. And so, the kids who dreamed of reaping a reward would attempt to gang up on the malefactors who just couldn’t help but rock the boat. Divide and conquer! Thanks to this devious strategy, we’d usually manage to quash a rebellion, maintain our course, and cruise into the final hours of a carefree afternoon.
Back then I was still absorbing the Beat classics published by City Lights and Grove Press, so if I was in a particularly good mood I’d share a few excerpts from this subversive literature … perhaps reading a passage from Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” that tender homage to a dried-out stalk that rises from a junk heap on Fisherman’s Wharf as Kerouac – ever identifying with the tragic horror of the torn and tattered World Soul – proclaims: “Look! A sunflower!” Thus, I’d attempt to nurture these cultural orphans who were themselves so beat and beaten, not to mention beatific, and encourage them to consider for a moment the dusty gray bloom and its lonesome plight. On another day, to a group of fourth graders, I recited a few lines from Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist ravings: “Art is an amoeba! Art is a spook! Art is a tomato!”
They couldn’t understand a word of it, but it sent lightning bolts up their wriggling spines as they howled with laughter … for their spirit caught the gist of it.
* * *
I soon discovered that the administrators of P.S. 95 would contact me only when the other substitute teachers lacked the temerity to enter one of these especially difficult classrooms. They’d never hire me for the more easygoing kids, for the well-behaved pushovers. Instead, I’d only be summoned when no one else dared to tread beyond Dante’s fifty-ninth circle of prepubescent hell. And upon learning this, I was convinced that it was my big bushy beard that had marked me as a pariah: one unsuited for a more civilized classroom.
I’d stumbled onto this information accidentally, while speaking to a secretary in the office. One day, she’d let it slip: Oh, you’re the one who never says no when we call! Thus, she’d unwittingly revealed this villainous plot: to place me in charge of those distressing varmints in need of constant supervision. They’d even separated the worst laggards and troublemakers of each grade, herding them into these clusters of thirty-five or forty kids. And with my dreadful Whitmanesque whiskers – which I wore in a secret homage to the poet – they regarded me as an antisocial boogieman who might at least serve to scare the bejesus out of such louts, scamps, guttersnipes, and misfits. All this occurred in the years before the beard had returned as an acceptable accoutrement for socially adapted men, so they continued to treat me as an uncouth interloper. But at least the stockbrokers and executives of the 1980s who would soon don such bristle would keep it well trimmed. Mine was a bit too unkempt and freewheeling for such stiffs.
One morning the beard had even made a young girl weep the moment she’d laid eyes upon me in the yard. She was a new student, and when her Russian mother brought her hand in hand to the line, this adorable little goldilocks shyly gazed up at me and shrieked – with a flood of tears cascading along her rosy cheeks.
Her mother tried to reassure her that I wasn’t a Billy Goat Gruff, but it was only by the most delicate of maneuvers that we managed to comfort her. I even insisted that the mother briefly join us in the classroom, to help calm her daughter while my outlaws hung up their coats and I culled the latest lesson-plan information, hoping to remain at least one step ahead of this dunderheaded bunch of scalawags.
* * *
I finally decided to I shave off the beard as an experiment, just to see what would happen. Sure enough, suddenly the administrators hardly seemed to recognize me. Instead of treating me as an outcast, at once the calls increased. Soon I was graced with polite invitations to teach the most well-behaved bevies of mollycoddled darlings. Not to mention the cutest bunnies, the first graders, who were usually too timid to talk back, as well as the more brainiacal second- and third grade classes: sweet little automatons who wouldn’t dream of misbehaving. Not only was I inundated with calls; I was even offered a full-time position by the principals of two different schools: offers that I promptly rejected. For the notion of settling into such a “normal” routine horrified me.
Instead, I grew back my stubble and then, of course, the calls dropped away. Once again, I was happily condemned to the dungeon of those endearing demons who proudly proclaimed their latest acts of mutiny and insurrection as I tugged at the reins and forced order down their throats. But oddly enough, they seemed to like me. And the bizarre mixture of extreme discipline followed by extreme disorder fascinated them more than a ride on the bumper cars at Coney Island.
Though I maintained an iron fist, they knew that, beard or no beard, somehow I was different. As soon as I’d arrive – zigzagging through the yard and searching for my class – the kids would shout, Look! It’s Mr. C! They’d jump up and down, screaming and hollering: Mr. C, Mr. C, which class do you have? hoping it would be theirs. But then they’d moan, “Oh, no!” when I sailed past and, instead, stopped before some other slowly forming double line.
And now, those kids would yell: It’s Mr. C! We have Mr. C! They’d grow crazier by the second, but I never bothered to contain them, even when some other teacher would stalk over and try to stifle their outbursts. Instead, I’d smile – ever so slightly – as if signaling my subtle approval.
* * *
The salary for such a thankless task was a mere thirty-five dollars a day. And I waited for my first paycheck for so many weeks – and then months – that, one morning, utterly infuriated, I phoned the Board of Ed to complain. Such a plodding, anachronistic, woolly mammoth of an institution! Such a fossil-encrusted labyrinth! Even the byzantine corridors of Southern Italian bureaucracy would put you to shame!
But no matter how much I ranted and raved, at first I wasn’t getting anywhere with the various drowsy, indifferent, benumbed functionaries … until I claimed that I was a freelance writer who occasionally authored diatribes for the Village Voice (a complete falsehood); and if I didn’t get that goddamned check within the next ten days I’d publish a full-length polemic denouncing their archaic, obsolete administration. What an abysmal lack of regard for such exploited laborers, such assembly-line pieceworkers known as substitute teachers! Imagine, I said, paying us such a pittance for the torture we endure! I went on and on, but now, suddenly, they appeared to be listening, and I was quickly transferred from one Beelzebub to the next. But instead of being shunted sideways, now I was ascending a ladder of authority. And with each respective functionary my story grew even more elaborate, as if were erecting my own byzantine monument.
And then, miracle of miracles, the following week I had my first paycheck in hand. Eventually they raised our salary to fifty bucks per diem, although this still wasn’t enough to properly compensate the hired hands who actually wanted to labor for such a crusty, mind-molding institution. For what else is a teacher, especially an elementary school teacher, but a mind crusher, a maker of zombies, and an assassin of the soul?
As I shuttled in and out of such forlorn, desperate hollows in the remote hinterlands of Gravesend, I tried to imagine what would happen if those pedagogical victims known as students could somehow read my mind as I lingered beside the windowsill and gazed down at the handball and basketball courts, past the wavering treetops – and all the way to the horizon. How I yearned for those exotic lands of adventure that must lie out there somewhere.
Hovering beside those dusty windowpanes, I’d wonder what it was like to live in Lisbon, Rome, or Paris. I mean, to really live, and to wander for hours through dimly lit streets minus any rhyme or reason, accompanied only by the song of the open road.
~~~
II. Rosebud
To escape the tedium of Gravesend, I’d often take the train into Manhattan after work. Usually I’d roam around the Village, but one night I found myself padding under the flashing billboards of Times Square. It was well after midnight, when Broadway assumes its most dazzling aspect: windswept, drained of burgeoning crowds, festooned with a necklace of traffic lights flashing mint green or blood red all the way to the horizon, and with the skyscrapers ever looming … and mocking anything as insignificant as a human being.
After wandering for a few hours, I entered a subway just as an express train roared to a halt at the platform. Selecting a seat in the middle of the car, I retrieved my copy of Jung’s Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche and buried my head in the thick tome. I was concentrating on a passage about narcoleptic utterances, periodic amnesia, and pathological dreaming when I suddenly noticed, seated directly across from me, an attractive woman with shiny black hair and large ebony eyes. She was scanning a ream of paperwork and occasionally thumbing through a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine. Impeccably dressed, I wondered if she was a corporate executive, perhaps heading home after a long day at work.
At the next stop, a teenage girl wearing garish red lipstick and bearing an insolent smirk boarded the train and pranced into the aisle between us. Her head was completely shaved. On the crown of her scalp was perched an albino rat with a leather collar, attached to a chain that was linked to the girl’s necklace.
The woman looked up from her magazine and, noticing the girl, appeared to be startled. As our eyes met I raised an eyebrow and made a comic expression, and she broke out laughing. Then she shuffled her papers and returned to her magazine.
I continued to sneak peeks at her as the train rumbled along. Occasionally she’d dart a glance my way, but only when the train was approaching a station, as if she was wondering if I might vanish.
We continued in this manner until 59th Street in Brooklyn, when she gathered everything into her bag. I assumed she was about to leave, perhaps to catch a local train, so I stood up and waited by the door, pretending it was my stop as well.
She exited behind me, along with most of the other passengers, to board an awaiting train. Once again, we assumed the same positions: seated directly across from one another as we continued to glance back and forth.
Suddenly I sprang up and sat beside her. She smiled demurely as I said hello, and as we began to speak I realized that her grasp of the language was rudimentary. A native of Spain, she said that she was studying English and working for the airlines, adding that she lived on Shore Road, in Bay Ridge.
When the train approached Bay Ridge Avenue, she frowned and announced that it was her station.
“Perhaps,” I said, “we can exchange phone numbers on the platform.”
“Yes, good idea!”
When we disembarked she continued walking along, chatting about her job as we approached a staircase. Once we were outside, she halted at a taxi stand and removed a notepad from her bag.
“Now, I take a cab home. This is my residence number,” she said, writing on the pad, “and this is my work number.” As she wrote her name – Monica – I could see that her delicate handwriting was beautifully formed, as if penned in another century.
We stood under a flickering streetlamp as her eyes beamed with a warm intensity. I leaned forward to kiss her goodbye, but at the last moment she turned, ever so slightly, so that my lips brushed against her soft cheek instead of her full, pulpy lips.
* * *
We’d originally planned on a dinner date that Friday night, but when I phoned she said that her doctor had advised her to remain indoors, as she’d contracted some sort of mysterious skin disorder. “But don’t worry,” she added, “it’s not contagious!”
I arrived with a flower in hand – a single rosebud – and rang the bell. A Black woman answered the door, dressed in a nurse's uniform.
“You must be here to see Monica,” she smiled, leading me inside. “Have a seat. She’ll join you in a moment.” I tossed the rose onto a table, sat in an armchair, and waited.
Moments later Monica appeared, looking a bit pale. She turned her cheek toward me, and I gently kissed it.
“This is my friend Marie,” she said, gesturing toward the nurse. “She works at a hospital and lives upstairs.” With a look of amusement, Marie’s gaze shifted back and forth between us. Then she smiled at Monica and nodded – as if she approved of our rendezvous – and wished us good-night.
“Aren't you going to take your flower?” I asked, pointing at the living room table.
“Oh, how nice!”
She retrieves a vase and plops it inside, then sits across from me on a small velvet couch. “I'm sorry I have no whiskey for you. Last night, two of my friends come over and drink it all up. Next time you come, I have plenty of whiskey. Yes?”
“Sure, Monica.”
“Leeson. You married?”
“No, are you?”
“I have boyfriend for two years, we engaged to marry. But then, two months before we marry, he die.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Make me very sad. You want some tea? I get you some.”
She returns with a teapot and pours me a steaming cup as I slip into the couch and sit beside her.
“Tell me about your family,” she says. “They’re in Brooklyn?” I nod and explain that I still live at home.
“Oh, you lucky! I have five sisters and three brothers, all in Spain.” It’s another thing that makes her sad, she says, for she misses them and often gets lonely.
“I soofer. Terribly. Make me very, very sad. When I twenty-three, I come to America and learn to take care of myself. How old are you? I twenty-five.”
“I’m twenty-two.” As she absorbs my words, she appears to be crestfallen. “Does it bother you that I’m younger than you are?”
She nods, then presses her hand against her bosom and adds: “But I very young in heart, yes?”
Her response startled me. How many Americans would have responded like that, I wondered. Suddenly I remembered the girl with the shaved head and the albino beast slouching toward 59th Street: the augur of a new generation about to emerge from its nightmare cradle. But Monica epitomized the Old World woman that I'd encountered only in classical works of literature: an amanuensis who takes special care to reassure her companion of her devotion.
“It is very ... Wait.” She retrieves a Spanish-American dictionary, thumbs through it, and points to the word rare. “How you pronounce it? It is rare,” she continues, “for man to bring flower to woman these days. I am very impressed. I will keep it forever. I will press it into my diary to remember you. Forever.”
Pointing to the word “flirt,” she adds: “I like the way you do this on the train. Most men, they use too many words. I no like. But you, you use your eyes.” Pointing to her own pupils, for a moment she assumes a serious expression, until we both burst out laughing.
Glancing over her shoulder, I notice a stack of records piled in a corner on the floor.
“Monica, should we listen to some music?”
“Yes!” Tossing a couple of pillows on the floor, she gestures for me to sit there beside her as she sorts through the collection.
Selecting a few albums, she carefully places them on a turntable. Traditional Spanish ballads, they’re profoundly sentimental, melancholy, and romantic.
Singing along with the crooners, Monica occasionally pauses to translate the lyrics. Whenever the songs shift into a refrain, I ask if I can kiss her. After each kiss, we unlock our lips as if nothing unusual has happened. Then she selects another record.
* * *
“Leeson,” she says, holding my hand, “when I see you again?”
“When would you like to see me?”
“Tomorrow!” she grins.
“I’ll give you a call this week.”
Standing beside the front door, we kiss one last time: a long, passionate, tender embrace.
“Oh, that was a good kiss! Bye-bye!”
“Goodbye, Monica …”
As the Great Bard once said, youth is wasted on the young. For, instead of calling her back, I allowed Monica to vanish into the ether.
Perhaps I was fearful of giving her any false expectations about marriage. But despite that, when she said that she would press the rose into her diary and keep it forever, I felt assured that at least a part of me would remain in place, under the empathic gaze of those warm ebony eyes.
Sitting beside her on the floor, listening to those charming love songs, and kissing during each refrain was one of the sweetest, finest things that I’d ever experienced. It was all so simple, pure, and human. I even imagined that the rose, dried and mounted, would somehow preserve such ephemeral joy.
But as any Old World woman would tell you, such relics mean nothing. For the only thing of lasting merit is what persists and grows from one living, breathing moment to the next. And instead, thanks to youthful folly, I’d nipped all that in the bud.
But when I look back on it now, I’m sure that meeting Monica was one more sign that Europe was indeed calling.
~~~
III. La Belle Noiseuse
By the late 1990s a fear and loathing of l’étranger – a word that means both “foreigner” and “stranger” – continued to roil throughout France. Hosting the seventh-largest number of immigrants in the world, many of les français remained proud of their tradition of welcoming newcomers, although an increasing number were fed up with the escalating tensions that resulted from this inevitable clash of culture and mindset.
In my daily life as a language tutor, in conversations with citoyens from every political persuasion and walk of life, I listened to story after story chronicling such affairs. But perhaps the most peculiar tale to unfold at my table was that of Domenico Mazzucco, an immigrant from Northern Italy, and his cousin Alfredo, a Milanese who had settled in Provence with a native Parisienne. Although they would never think of renouncing their Italian heritage, Domenico and Alfredo considered themselves to be fully integrated citizens of France.
When Domenico phoned one day to inquire about my cours d’anglais, he said that he needed to improve his English due to an increasing demand to interact with international business clients, who were adopting English as the new lingua franca. But his responsibilities left him with little time, so he wasn’t sure if he could commit himself to a weekly schedule.
As I learned during our first encounter, Domenico also lacked the time to pursue any romantic interests. Thus, at the age of thirty-five, he was still a célibataire. And although he was a chief executive, he considered himself to be a mere “pauper” as far as relations with the “fair sex” were concerned.
I found this to be understandable but also puzzling. Besides being a cultured, skillful conversationalist who exuded an abundance of intelligence, discretion, and charm, Domenico also possessed a buccaneer’s swashbuckling good looks. He was graced with a thick crop of jet-black hair, an olive complexion, and a pair of dark riveting eyes set in a beautifully formed physiognomy. Why should it be so difficult for such a fellow to find a suitable mate? There seemed to be a missing piece to this puzzle, and I wondered if lack of time was the only obstacle he faced.
As was often the case with my European students who were successful lawyers, bureaucrats, or entrepreneurs, despite being deeply committed to his work Domenico rarely mentioned his daily labor. Instead, he preferred to speak about artistic or cultural events. I never failed to be impressed by how these Continental “company men” took an enormous pride in recounting their recent trips to art exhibits, or discussing the novels they were reading, or remarking upon how lovely the Luxembourg Garden appears at sunset. And have you visited Parc Montsouris, with its 345 varieties of roses? So unlike their American counterparts, who could babble endlessly about stock portfolios and retirement pensions and who concerned themselves almost exclusively with finance, profit, and the so-called bottom line.
But Domenico differed from the typical French Cartesian in one significant aspect. Instead of continually attempting to exhibit an intellectual prowess, he didn’t hesitate to communicate his deeper feelings, which often appeared to shine through his lively eyes: honing in to the person seated before him with the tentacular reach of his native empathy. Indeed, he was a man of the heart and proud of it. And he wasn’t at all embarrassed to “tear up” one day as he related a sad, uncanny, and surrealistic event that had shaken him to the core:
Speaking with a voice that seemed to tremble with affection, Domenico said that he had a cousin named Alfredo, whom he always regarded as a beloved brother. And now Domenico’s gaze assumed a troubling cast of melancholy as he added that Alfredo had married an “attractive Parisian director of communication” who was known for her elegant taste and chic, stylish manner. By all accounts, they’d led a most blissful life in the south, living for the last ten years in Provence. Everything seemed to be hunky-dory, and life was gliding along splendidly; but then, one day, a stranger – an étrangère – knocked unexpectedly on Alfredo’s door.
Standing at the threshold was a smartly dressed businesswoman who smiled invitingly as she explained that her car had broken down, right outside Alfredo’s house on the road to Montpellier. And so, she wondered if she might use his telephone.
Without hesitation Alfredo offered to assist her and invited her inside. Although she bore uncanny resemblance to his wife, Alfredo doubted that this woman was French, for her accent was difficult to place. She spoke fluently, and with a grasp of the language that was as impeccable as any native, but her intonation resonated with the hint of a foreign tongue.
Speaking with a slightly wavering tone, Domenico said that shortly after this businesswoman had completed her call, another stranger appeared with a tow truck. And this repairman, with the woman standing beside him, fiddled around beneath the hood of her car. But when the engine still wouldn’t turn over, they decided to tow it.
Just before she left, she approached Alfredo and stared at him intently. Then she grinned in an odd manner. When Domenico asked Alfredo what he meant by all this, Alfredo said that her lips had curled into a smirk that was at once menacing and cruel: “A sort of superior, mocking, patronizing smile,” Alfredo replied with a grim expression, “and one meant to communicate something threatening and dangerous.”
Alfredo added that, upon vanishing with the truck, this strange lady had also disappeared with something rather precious. For the real purpose of her visit was to take possession of Alfredo’s heart, mind, and soul. Not in any romantic way but in a devious, evil fashion. Indeed, muttered Domenico, his eyes now widening into a look of utter despair, his poor dear Alfredo was never the same again.
Alfredo believed that l'étrange dame was from another planet and that she’d hypnotized him to gain control over his entire being. While they were awaiting the tow truck, he said, she had penetrated into his psyche and fiddled around, just as the mechanic had fiddled with the engine. Alfredo had also deduced that this so-called repairman was a key principal in the plot. For, clearly, he too had come from somewhere very far away. Perhaps he was an étranger from Mars or from whatever planet the woman had originally hailed from.
To thank Alfredo for his assistance, the following day the strange lady sent a deluxe box of chocolates to his house via special delivery. But Alfredo refused to eat them; and he warned his wife, who was now growing desperate over this entire turn of events, not to touch them but, instead, to dispose of the box.
“Not long afterward,” Domenico sighed, “this glamorous wife, the so-called director of communication who had seemed so lovely when they first married, lost her patience and decided to divorce.” Then she, too, vanished, never to return.
As a result, Alfredo barricaded himself into his house and refused to let anyone in except for Domenico, who pleaded with him to seek professional help. But Alfredo wouldn’t hear of it. As far as Alfredo was concerned, this was obviously a problem that transcended any medical or psychiatric situation.
When Domenico reached this poignant part of the tale, he nearly broke down. His tears welled up, but he struggled to control himself: gripping his fists together till the knuckles were glowing. Not one drop spilled over the rim of his reddened eyelids, and his cheeks remained dry and unstained. But I felt as if his upset was just as profound as it would have been if he’d sobbed uncontrollably.
Clenching his jaw, Domenico glanced over my head, and his attention now shifted to a painting hanging on a wall behind me. During each of his previous visits, I’d noticed that Domenico’s gaze would eventually drift to this far corner and remain there, like a butterfly pinned to a lepidopterist’s specimen card. For a moment I imagined that instead of a portrait of a nude seated upon a divan, there was an actual woman hovering there, beckoning Domenico to surrender his professional responsibilities and to submit himself to her every whim.
He continued to glance back and forth between me and the portrait, then he added that perhaps this trouble of finding a suitable mate was genetically rooted to his family tree. For just like Alfredo, he too was alone, without any imminent prospects of finding a romantic companion; while his cousin was not only isolated but now rendered incapable of pursuing any meaningful sort of human interaction.
* * *
When we met the following week, Domenico gestured to the painting and, speaking with a subdued, almost entranced tone, remarked that he greatly admired it. Composed on a sheet of masonite, it portrayed a Parisienne named Sabrina: a model who, like Alfredo, had also experienced a loss of soul. For Sabrina was a victim of pathological narcissism: something that had slipped beneath my radar at first. When she’d answered my ad to pose for a painting she had just turned nineteen, so I’d assumed that her self-centeredness was merely a reflection of her youth, which she’d eventually outgrow. A normal narcissism, so to speak; which, as it turned out, was a serious error in judgment. For I soon discovered that Sabrina was a precocious sadist who reveled in tales of cruelty that were delivered with a sort of professional coquetry that was entirely unsettling. A sort of composite, one might say, of Lolita and the Marquis de Sade. And the more I absorbed all this, the less I was able to concentrate on my work.
Once I realized how dangerously ill she was, I refused to hire her again or to return her calls. So now, all that was left was this image of a young woman staring at the viewer with a secret in her eyes – since I’d completed the painting before learning of her darker side. Hence, I’d christened it La Belle Noiseuse – “The Beautiful Troublemaker.”
As Domenico studied Sabrina’s likeness, he appeared to grow increasingly enraptured. Her icy-blue orbs seemed to bore into his soul, leaving him frozen on the spot. While his eyes widened, I began to wonder if he was right – perhaps there was an abnormal genetic marker lurking in his ancestral makeup: something that attracted the male descendants in his line to such ominous predicaments.
Now, instead of tearing up, his eyes were glazing over. Perhaps, I thought, he was suffering from what the French call amour fou or aimer la folie: “crazy love” or “love madness.” And since the portrait featured such a realistic likeness, I imagined that if Domenico were to encounter Sabrina in the flesh the gravitational pull would be that much stronger – and more fatal.
As our conversation drew to a close, he turned to me with a smile and asked if it would be possible for him to purchase the painting. Since it was over four-feet long and two-feet wide, I knew that it would be problematic to depart with it on a plane if I ever decided to leave France, so I decided to offer it to him as a gift.
Domenico appeared to be surprised as well as delighted, and he again volunteered to recompense me. But despite the fact that I was merely subsisting in France, I refused to take anything. In fact, I was glad to be rid of it.
After paying for his lesson, Domenico assumed a grave expression: as if a weighty responsibility had been thrust upon him. Gripping the masonite beneath his suit-jacketed arm, he somberly marched to the front door where he turned, paused, and nodded.
Although the look in his eyes was a peculiar one, at first I didn’t attempt to fathom its significance. But in retrospect, he appeared to be sizing me up one last time: snapping a photographic souvenir, which he might later study if he ever wished to contemplate the creator of his beloved painting.
And once he closed the door, he never again returned.
At a loss over how to explain his disappearance, I wondered if Domenico had suffered a similar sort of abduction as that of his cousin – but via the painting itself. Perhaps he’d arranged a semiwithdrawal from society, content to merely gaze at Sabrina’s enigmatic facade. By now, I mused, it was probably mounted in an expensive gilded frame and prominently displayed, so he could more easily commune with her image as he padded back and forth in his capacious apartment.
But I finally conjectured that the simplest explanation might perhaps be the most fitting one. From the very beginning, Domenico had underscored his inability to commit to a weekly language lesson, yet he’d never once missed an appointment. Furthermore, during each of our encounters, his eyes never failed to rest upon that same spot on the wall where his “mistress” was poised like a damsel patiently biding her time as he plotted her rescue.
So I concluded that, once Domenico had gained possession of his treasure and achieved his goal, it was pointless to return.
Just as Alfredo had fallen headfirst into the mystery of the “stranger” and had been swallowed whole, so too had Domenico. But one man had been destroyed, while the other was seemingly revived.