Carnovsky's Retreat Read online

  One more interesting point concerning Linda. In a houseful of good Jews, I will always feel I am not one of them; in a restaurant with this one shiksa, I feel I am. Linda is the All-American Goy and her brother I’m sure is the All-American Boy. What else? Blonde hair, a nice pale skin—greeneyed Protestants from across the Hudson. We were thrown together and do we fit? Well yes we do. Not to marry of course, but to talk, to share a few things, why not?

  She prefers not to talk too personally, however. Likes to ask the questions, but not to answer them. It’s a schoolteacher’s trick I guess, knowing how to duck a question and send it back. For example—

  “Tell me, Linda, what decided you on the trip to Canada?” And she replies with,

  “Fate. It was fated I go, to meet you there. What about you, Oscar?”

  I can see the technique very clearly as I sit here and scribble it down. At the time, however, she gets the best of me. Has me going on with all my own muddled reasons for choosing to travel out, and I never did hear a single word about hers. Linda is very slick, very good at dodge-ball. But I am on the case.

  With the slooshy weather it isn’t so easy navigating the streets, plus which you better bundle up good or spend a fortune in the cafeterias thawing out. Hard for me to imagine Lewis and Clark, or someone like that in the old days—no cup of coffee on the road up ahead for those guys, and no road either! Just the wet woods.

  But I go out on my excursions nevertheless, it’s what I want to be doing, and it’s enjoyable to me. I have invested a whole philosophy of life in this wet cold walking I do every day, up the Hudson side to the garment district, up the East River all the way to Kip’s Bay.

  1. You see the world up close. The faces of people.

  2. Nothing stops you—no dead battery. You get where you are going every time.

  3. It’s exercise, keeps you trim and healthy in the winter.

  4. It’s free, costs you not one penny.

  5. Uses the time just right.

  6. Gives you a good appetite. This is true. It enhances the flavor of food.

  7. It relaxes you, where red lights and traffic, park and unpark will drive you crazy.

  So it clears the mind for thinking. You must enjoy your own company when you walk and I’m sure this is the reason I never did much before. My longest stroll was around the corner from home, to the car. Then I would drive the car everywhere, even if I was only going a few blocks. It’s a wonder my heart muscle still functions. Not to mention the brain.

  You cannot do any thinking under the wheel of an automobile. If you do, for half a second, you’ll be dead. So you watch like a hawk and hope they don’t kill you anyway. But walk and they cannot get at you so easily. At a nice safe distance from the traffic, see what you see and think what you think.

  Of course there is such a thing as too far, and here you might take a train. I will be riding the railroad myself in April, to Jamaica. Still, you can walk to the train, walk from the train: let the train be a bridge between walks.

  Every week Linda sets up the exact same plan. It’s the easiest, she says, since she has the car and likes coming in to the city.

  “This is the city? We could go someplace.”

  “You mean some fancy club?”

  “Doesn’t have to be fancy. Radio City, whatever. You name it. We could take in the Rangers and Andy Bathgate if you want, for old lang syne.”

  “All right, let’s. But sometime when we’re bored. Not yet.”

  Nice to hear my girlfriend isn’t bored yet. Sometimes I get the feeling she will suddenly wake from her dream and say, What am I doing in this dump, but so far she doesn’t notice. Maybe because she doesn’t meet the neighbors, or see the neighborhood when it’s light outside.

  Each week we watch a movie and afterwards discuss the movie while we munch our dinner in a restaurant. We offer our ideas and beliefs, our sympathies, in this unusual way—as they apply to a moving picture, rather than to ourselves. But this is what she likes, along with the fact that she also likes sex, so why should I complain? Isn’t that what I wanted?

  I felt something along these lines could occur with Giselle, who is always kidding me, “Oscar come on, take me to the sun, I’ve earned a vacation.” What she would say God knows if I should just once have replied, Okay pack a bag, let’s go Mexico. Call her bluff.

  We both have a little twinge of attraction now and then, as in the springtime when she blows in with a cotton jersey, and no stockings on her legs. We chat over Ryker’s foul brew on a few subjects beside the bookkeeping, and maybe we flirt. I see the legs, I note the form—but no action from Oscar. Temptation you must expect, it’s natural, yet action you are responsible for and can control.

  Happy Chanukah, Merry Xmas. I got Jimmy a trinket, nothing big—crystal radio kit. Who knows if he’ll enjoy such a thing? You take a stab in the dark at this time of year and figure they know it’s the thought that counts. But I took on a little guilt, shopping, wrapping, giving. Guilt that I had nothing to give dear Walter and not to mention my dear wife. The only thing in this world more useless than guilt is yesterday’s garbage, and still we all collect it.

  I bought Linda Stanley a fancy bottle of perfume, the aroma of which I am sure will soon be visited on my unwilling nostrils. What the hell, I never had a good imagination for such gifts and how long can you wander around a department store without losing your marbles?

  Bulkitis, my other recipient, I had just right—a box of Coronas set his Giant heart at peace for the holiday season.

  “Will you be with your people?” says Linda to me. That one came home, I’ll admit. How little she knows me, how little I know her. And how few are my people. Stand up and let me count you!

  They have no school for the week, so I get a good dose of Jimmy each day. I make a point therefore to do my walking early and then settle in, listen to the radio and look at the papers and live the life of Riley till he arrives. Always soaked with snow, to the skin, so I dress him down and pour in the hot cocoa to restore his color. A bottomless well this one, he is hollow—one, two, three big mugs of the stuff will disappear.

  Yesterday I had to rescue him from Jesus H. Johnson in the foyer. I caught the Holy Man with a handful of my friend’s neck, and shaking him like a broken bird, wagging fingers in his face. The little guy didn’t shut the front door quick enough and as a result a cold breeze came in under the Holy Door.

  I let him have it nice and gentle, tapping on his silly plaque with the Christianity scribble. “And do you think, my friend Johnson, that your Jesus Christ would shake a child by the neck? Not to mention that it’s a crime.”

  None of them care for me now. I try to be nice, as always, yet how nice can you be. Such awful people. I’m sure that the bearded fiend upstairs is aiming his garbage—he always fires away when someone is at the barrels. And then someone else stuffed a cat into one of those cans, and slammed the lid on tight, so when I pried it off I nearly lost my face. Out springs kitty—but a jack-in-the-box with claws. Someone’s idea of humor.

  “He shouldn’t grab you like that,” I tell Jimmy.

  “He does.”

  “No. Tell your folks. He should never touch you. Does he grab your sister?”

  “Sure. He gave her a shove once, for spilling on the steps.”

  “You’re kidding me. A hard shove?”

  “Ask her.”

  She never visits me, and is very shy out on the street as well. I don’t know her. Six years old, so naturally she stays closer to mama, but I wonder. She could think I am someone to be avoided, someone who might shake her, like the Holy Man. A meanie, not to be trusted. I tell Jimmy to bring her up but he doesn’t. I am a resource to him, a little gold-mine of cocoa and lifesavers and sports talk plus now storybooks, and he wants it all to himself.

  An error, with Jimmy. It came from wanting to please him but can only wound in the end, and I can’t think how to get the bullet back now that it’s out of the gun.

  He is a Dodger man, lik
e me, a Snider man in particular, yet has never once seen the ballpark. I was surprised, since the father is also a fan (they see the games on television) and in any event this frail midget seems to get where he wants to go, all on his own. Turns out, however, that to him Ebbets Field is not a short jaunt across the Bridge, it’s a distant shrine, like the Wailing Wall.

  And I put my foot in it. In the summertime, says good old Oscar, we will have an outing—two seats behind Snider in the centerfield bleachers and all the frankfurters you can eat. This is Oscar the great resource talking. Of course I now realize it cannot be done. I can’t go on Flatbush Avenue where two thousand people know me. And who is to say I won’t meet the two Walters inside the ballpark? They go now and then, my brother-in-law and my nephew—Hey look, there’s Oscar sunning himself in the bleachers!

  Linda still holds back on me, answers questions with questions, not answers. She too had no school all week and it seemed a time to vary our pattern, if only on principle. Get together sometime during the week. But I do not have her home address or telephone and can’t get it. Even sneaking up on her, I come up empty. Does she live alone or with a friend, I say, nonchalant.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Are you crazy? We’re in bed together and I shouldn’t want to know you?”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “Oh yes I like it, that’s why I want to know. It seems to me quite natural that I should want to know, but you keep it a dark secret. Your address.”

  “Not at all.”

  “What’s your address?” (Must be very direct.)

  “Look it up in the phone-book if you really want to know.” She giggles and distracts me with hanky-panky. And she has another trick of acting hurt when you do not respond in kind to the hanky-pank, so there you are.

  However I did look it up in the book and it ain’t there. In Fort Lee or anyplace nearby there is no one under Linda, Lynn, L., nothing. Except under Liar. This is my girlfriend and I can’t ring her up, can’t drop her a line. We set up a date for the next Saturdays always, a week away, and what if I should happen to choke on a chickenbone Thursday? Suppose I die and have to cancel?

  My new theory is no boyfriend, or maybe not. Forget the jealousy angle, this girl is a Walkaway. She left in the dust three small babies, triplets, and a loving husband, and she left them no forwarding address. She’s not Stanley any more than I am Fish. I’m company for her, but she holds a hatful of secrets notwithstanding.

  Not that I have a right to complain about secrets. I don’t refer to Tanya either. Of course I am not married anymore. I could go off in the morning and marry with someone new, and so could Tanya, so long as we don’t invite one another to the wedding breakfast. I will tell Linda NotStanley who I am and I will not hesitate to mention my wife with pride. And I will do these things as soon as she releases to me her address.

  Just about now I can see the top of the bottom of the money-barrel. I am already cutting back, as on Saturday night I was oh so casual to Linda, “How’s about a pizza for a change?”

  And it will get worse. Not yet dire, just say I will be wanting an income in a month or two.

  Carnovsky’s thought for the day. We are like two boats in the basin, Linda and myself, floating, jostled by the waters around us, and not connected to anything including each other. Boats have an anchor, but only to haul out and drift where the current is flowing.

  A very small sampling of the level of profundity I can produce when my feet are wet and the walking bumps my brain. Fed up with delicatessen lunches, so I made myself a soup last night, enough to heat and eat until the Ides of March, if you can stand the taste.

  Mrs. K. at the library: “Mr. Fish! We haven’t seen you in some time. As a matter of fact I’ve been holding something for you.”

  A dear lady. Again she has been doing my work for me, and waited weeks to let me know the search goes on. This one concerns a priest who vanished one evening from a pilgrim retreat—he retreated further. This was a man who was “always cheerful” and was just as cheerful when last seen wishing the others in his party a good night’s slumber and heading off to his cabin in the woods.

  At sun-up, however, his bungalow was empty, and lacking any other explanation of this fact, they concluded he was eaten up by an animal in the neighborhood. Possible, of course, but without leaving a trace? Imagine it. Doesn’t even cross their mind that he could use his feet and walk away, yet they will believe he was digested whole by a grizzly bear. And that was the official version. They ransacked the woods and fields—police and family and the newspapers—and in the end concluded the animal had taken this priest along to his cave to eat him, thus leaving behind no evidence of what was obvious.

  But years afterward, one hundred miles away in western Massachusetts, the fellow turned up again, in one piece and still wearing the hair-suit! He was making jelly with a crowd of monks in some other neck of the woods. So he was told, We thought the bears ate you, and he told them, No I am safe.

  That’s it? No bears, no scarlet woman, not even a spiritual crisis to relate? No, said the priest who had been making jelly, I am safe.

  Of course who is to say what really happened on the night he retreated. Not him. He isn’t even in this tale, which is in a collection of letters between another priest and a childhood buddy of his who went into politics. These two exchanged mail back and forth all their lives—the officeholder to show his friend how not all politics is crooked and the priest to prove that his chosen life can be a little interesting, or funny.

  My personal guess would be that he came a little unwound that night, the jelly priest. Heading off into the woods to pray makes him suspect to begin with and then it sounds like he was behaving strangely when they caught up to him over in Massachusetts. People will excuse a crazy guy if he loves God—they give him the benefit of the doubt—but when you think about it such a fellow never had reality under his feet to begin with.

  In any event I know what I know, about my own case now. Widmer had his reason for going (the usual reason, I’m sure) and Flitcraft with his beam thought he had come up with a good one too. Maybe he did, that’s not the point. The point is that I did it for no reason at all. This is what I know. If I was going for a reason I would have said so. Any reason—even crashing girders or grape jelly. But what I could not say was this: “There is no reason.” If I said that, then Tanya would never let me leave.

  No mystery. For me, in my case, to walk away was the only way to go at all.

  “Tanya I am not happy with the food here.”

  “Tanya I am in love with Mrs. Getz.”

  “Tanya I am off to make jelly now, in a hair-suit.”

  No. Anything I could give her to go on, I would gladly have given. But “Tanya I have no good reason to go yet I am going anyway and never coming back”—that she wouldn’t buy. Not a chance. She would say, “Tough luck, Oscar, you aren’t going anywhere and don’t be so silly.”

  She would talk me out of it and with ease. Everything she had to say on the subject would be correct and nothing I had to say would make one grain of common sense, I know that. So I had no choice but to go that way, without seeking permission, and now of course here I am.

  *Knowing what I know, let me interject that to my uncle a “winning year” was one in which he lost less than $500. There is something to this, inasmuch as he would wager thousands and to drop a mere $500 meant he was protecting his income while footing the bill for his own entertainment. And while he was occasionally a few hundred in the red, he could be (and often was) thousands in the black.

  —Walter Ford, Jr.

  *Oscar wrote in those small notebooks that say Composition Book on the front, pale green pages between cardboard covers with a black marbled design. In all he filled four of them.

  —Walter Ford, Jr.

  II

  The Oriental Advantage

  Winter 1955–56—

  A sexual disaster last night. My luck in this field of endeavor ran
out and it happened just as I dreaded it might when Linda made the change to Sunday for this week. I did everything in my power to alter the timing, but Linda is the social director here, she sets the schedule of events, and she is also the interior decorator of our love life—in charge of sound effects and lighting. She likes the music on and the lights off, and the “starlight” must be coming through the window to bless our efforts.

  So of course it was the absolute worst time for Linda, doing her rag doll routine on me and getting ready for the fireworks when I suddenly became unable. No help for it, the air just went out of me and when I struggled to come back it only got worse. Even with my eyes shut I knew that my bare girl was over there plumping up her pillows, advertising her assets in the window-frame. At first Linda in her transports did not notice. Then she could not help but notice, first me and then the spectacle next door.

  Thus Carnovsky, who managed forty-eight years on the planet earth with a single naked lady in his life, has now got himself two at once without even trying. They are coming out of the woodwork. Surrounded by them, literally, my life is suddenly filling up with naked ladies and I can’t cope. It should not be so shocking. After all nakedness is everywhere all of the time—it’s behind every door, inside each outfit you see on the street, every suit and smock. So how can it be shocking?

  Linda Stanley is shocked, that one is for sure. Even in our homegrown starlight-dreamlight I could see her go pale on me, like a wet white flower. To her I am guilty of an infidelity. And the funny part is that at the same time I was feeling some of the guilt of infidelity to my bare girl in the window, who had me to herself until tonight. Even stranger, another page in my education on these matters, I had for the first time a guilt toward Tanya that I never bothered with before. It took two of them, an orgy, to wake me up to the fact I might be living badly, like a Roman Emperor, corrupt.