Twice Told Tales Page 11

  One of Lew’s afflictions was having inherited twin headwaiters—identical twins, Misha and Morris. Bright, young refugees, no one knew exactly from where, Morris was a kind of self-appointed policeman of Lew’s soul and was taking some course of study, as was his brother. No one knew what course, only that they spelled each other on nights—or days—when the other one was at school. Misha had no interest in Lew’s drinking habits or his soul. That was Morris’s territory. And Lew’s torture was that he never knew which one he was yelling at.

  “That happens to be true,” Morris said. “But it doesn’t change the facts: you’ve had enough.”

  “A Scotch, I said, Morris the miser, it’s my Scotch and my life,” Lew thundered. Morris brought the smallest Scotch he could pour.

  Which Lew sipped while watching an hysterical Katherine return to clutch her daughter to her breast, her cheek, her lips.

  “Tulip … Tulip …” she murmured, weeping in a combination of relief and embarrassment, “My God, my God, I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “What does it all mean?” Lew muttered.

  The next time the child was forgotten she was left for most of the afternoon. By the time Katherine Eudemie came back and got her, Tulip was helping Myrna with the early evening cocktail arrivals; no coats, the weather was warm, but there was a man’s hat, there was a woman’s attaché case. Sasha had begun to tell Tulip about the Chauve Souris, about what it was like to flee the Russian revolution, to join a song and dance troupe in Paris and end up in America in 1924. “You know what was the Chauve Souris?” Sasha asked. Tulip did not know. “My, my, my,” Sasha said. Every little girl in White Russian circles in Paris had known of the Chauve Souris. When Katherine Eudemie arrived, the little girl was reluctant to leave. She asked her mother if she had ever heard of the Chauve Souris.

  Katherine gave both women a sharp look but this time was not hysterical. For a brief moment it was not certain how the incident was to be treated.

  “Please,” Katherine said to Sasha, “don’t fill her head with fairy tales”; a Russian noblewoman speaking to one of the women-in-waiting at her country estate. Then she and Tulip were gone and the evening business occupied everyone’s attention.

  It was Lew’s lightness with Katherine’s unpaid bills which fueled the first stages of the madness. She would never have thought to make a special trip to drop the child off at the coat room for the afternoon. But, lunching there almost every day as she did on her unpaid charge account, it grew easier and easier to just move on to her appointments and come back later and later. Precisely the kind of lunching Buchalter decided had to stop if they were to get the restaurant safely in the black.

  This was New York of long ago, a city waking up from the dream of war. But the boom was losing some of its thunder. By the time of Katherine Eudemie’s first parapraxis words like recession were in the air. Everyone knew somebody who knew somebody who had folded a business: a publishing house, a small record company, something! One heard distant rumors about established restaurants growing shaky, God forbid!

  “Why does she do it?” Sasha asked Myrna.

  “It doesn’t matter. I wish she’d do it again.”

  “Don’t wish such a thing.”

  “I can take care of her better.”

  “This is not right,” Sasha said and turned to her Russian language newspaper.

  “Everything isn’t right,” Myrna said. “For me to be alone in the world isn’t right either. But I am. For Lew to be without a wife and to maybe lose his restaurant isn’t right either, but it might happen.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Sasha said.

  Myrna smiled and waited for the next parapraxis.

  How many times had Krasner heard Lew Krale muttering his favorite litany: What does it all mean? Once he pointed out to Lew that he had never once heard any of the questing artists who were drinking their drinks or stuffing their faces at the RR cry out What does it all mean? Only Lew, the owner, the businessman.

  “Does that make you an artist manqué, Lew?” he asked.

  “If I’m anything, I’m a businessman manqué.” Lew laughed and said, “Get out of here and stop trying to make a manqué out of me.”

  Lew was devoted to failure. At first he did not know this, but later he got the idea quite clearly, and it became a kind of cause celebre for him. In spite of the superstars surrounding him, Lew would have liked to be the Saint of Failure. But that was to be denied him, like so many other things he wanted.

  Lew: “What I love about these maniacal writers, these dancers especially, these musicians, is that they fail! It’s practically guaranteed. But they don’t stop! They’re crazy. They just don’t give up. Krasner—(he was talking to the cashier at the end of the day)—some of them know they’re doing their absolute best and they still fail! WHAT FUCKING HEROES!”

  Krasner: “So?”

  Lew: “If they lose and keep on going, why shouldn’t I? Okay, a restaurant is not a play or a painting or a book. But it’s a THING! IT’S A WAY OF BEING IN THE WORLD! And I want to go on like them, win or lose.”

  Krasner: “No dice, Lew. It doesn’t work. Meat spoils. Sour cream goes bad. Lunches are down from last year and the cost of veal is up. It’s not the same.”

  Lew (Mutters): “What does it all mean? Where are we all going?”

  It’s not clear what Katherine Eudemie’s continuing parapraxes had to do with it, but came the first of July, when Myrna and Sasha would normally have been shifted from the coat check room and put to work elsewhere in the restaurant, they were told to stay put. You don’t need coat check service, you need air conditioning. But Tulip’s mother was maybe on the fourth or fifth parapraxis by then. No one in the restaurant was surprised at Lew’s decision to keep Myrna and Sasha on duty in the front. It was a statement about the child’s continuing presence and the new comedy of mistakes and affections.

  Myrna was not insensitive to the subtle gift from Lew. It came with responsibilities.

  “What’s this prayer book doing here?”

  “To teach the child about God.”

  “Sasha, she’s only four years old.”

  “For four years old is no God?”

  “No,” Myrna said firmly. “God starts at seven. Tops. Maybe eight. And He will be brought in by her parents, if and when.”

  “Seven!” Sasha looked doubtful.

  “It’s not a question of does He exist or not. You were an actress, Sasha. Just make believe he’s waiting in the wings.”

  “How long He waits?”

  “Our father,” Tulip chimed in.

  Myrna grabbed her in a hug.

  “Okay, wise guy, if you’re so smart, who’s Our Father?”

  Tulip thought. “My father is Jackson Eudemie,” she said. “So I guess Our Father is somebody else. But why is He waiting with wings?”

  “You see?” Myrna said helplessly.

  Sasha folded her Russian newspaper and added it to a floppy pile of papers on the shelf where, as the year progressed, hats would ultimately be kept. She took the prayer book and placed it on top of the day’s paper. Then she went back to the kitchen to get three glasses of tea. She paraded in quiet, round triumph. Leaving Myrna with a new sense of the problems which might be coming at her from every unexpected direction. Her heart was beating hard as if she’d had a narrow escape.

  TAKING TULIP TO THE BATHROOM. This proved to be not as traumatic as everyone had feared. Misha, who was on, stood guard while Myrna taught Tulip the basic ropes of restaurant ablutions. The child needed some help, but only the bare mechanics. Of course these were ordinary healthy times. Diarrhea waited, like God, in the wings.

  Then there were Krasner’s unspoken but intense concerns about the police. Captain Kolevitch dropped in often, a slender, nervous man with an enormous Saroyan-mustache, abandoned playwriting ambitions behind him, and a wife in and out of institutions. Lew knew him well. You couldn’t run a restaurant without knowing the police.

  “It’s like r
unning a whorehouse,” Lew said. “It goes with the territory.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Myrna said.

  Lew looked at her with fresh interest.

  “The kid is not here,” he said. “Her mother took her back two hours ago. You’re really getting into this, aren’t you?”

  “Listen,” Myrna said. “She’ll be back. I don’t want you to get into bad habits. We’re running a different kind of show now.”

  “Aha,” Lew said.

  “The problem is not Lew’s mouth,” Krasner said. “It’s Captain Kolevitch.”

  “I can’t take a man seriously whose name sounds like a dish on my menu,” Lew said.

  “Mistake,” Krasner said. “What’s in a name?”

  “We are not discussing roses, we’re talking Tulip.”

  “Just everybody keep their mouth shut that we have a kid in the coat room okay?” This sentence, at least nine words longer than Krasner’s usual, made everybody take the Tulip/security question seriously. Captain Kolevitch was greeted with an odd ceremoniousness on his next visit. It made him suspicious and he resolved to check out what was happening at the Russian Rendezvous more closely.

  Lew Krale felt more at home in his restaurant than in his home. With a customer he liked—a rare bird, but occasionally to be found—after the coffee, dessert, and check he would stand up and see him to the door as if he were in his own home. But on the odd chance you were invited to his apartment down on West Tenth Street in the Village, he might fall asleep if the drinking and the laughing had been heavy, and leave you to find your way out unescorted. Home is where the heart beats and the RR raced Lew’s pulse.

  A Tulip-Moment: Agnes de Mille heading for the exit, enraged at having been seated in the back near the men’s room, looking for sympathy, looking for Lew or Misha, comes upon Tulip at exactly the same moment Georges Balanchine enters the RR.

  “Hello, young woman,” Balanchine said, bending over the ledge of the coat room to observe Tulip more closely, (it came out vooman), “Do you dance?”

  Agnes de Mille, still flushed and angry snapped at him, “Georges, she’s too young for the bar.”

  “Merde,” Balanchine said, staring past her at old dance world resentments, Bolshoi versus Broadway to get it down to simplicities. “I started Natasha Makharova at three.”

  “And where is she now?”

  “She stopped dancing.”

  “Aha!”

  “Aha, nothing. She got married.”

  “Why not,” Agnes de Mille said. “You do it all the time.”

  “I do it to dancers.”

  “Exactly so,” Agnes de Mille said and turning to Myrna she said, “Your little girl must start dancing now. Four years old is already late.”

  Tulip, in high spirits at all this attention, turned and turned in a graceful pastiche of ballet. The Eudemies had a television set; Tulip had observed.

  “No,” Agnes de Mille said, “Not now, just soon. I’ll teach you first position next time I come.”

  Balanchine was gone. His swift disappearance was disapproval. Agnes de Mille went on to seek Misha, in Lew’s absence, to complain of once again being seated near the Men’s Room, but, today, Misha turned out to be Morris. Baffled, she swept out. Perhaps only a dancer can sweep out through a revolving door.

  Myrna, proud of Tulip in advance, experienced a tremble, a little frisson of what mothers must feel. (“Your little girl must start dancing now …”) It made her breath rush in a thrill through her breast.

  Not long after her excitement at being mistaken for Tulip’s mother she was called upon to explain the grown-up world, a little, to the kid. Which is, of course, one of the main things mothers do, either by example or using words.

  It was harder than Myrna had imagined. A tart little dose of reality.

  One early evening a woman was turned away from the bar because she was unescorted. The woman did not look especially disreputable. Somebody from a very small midwestern town might have felt the lipstick did not outline the lips closely enough, that the hair was too frizzy, and the perfume too heavy. But basically she was middle-class: a secretary, a saleswoman, a housewife out for an evening: ambiguous. Still, off the premises she must go and without any real explanation. But not without a fuss.

  When it was over Tulip wanted an explanation.

  Myrna fumbled, stammered, and said, “Sometimes bad women come to sit alone and talk to men they don’t know, instead of coming here with men they know or they’re married to … And then a restaurant gets to be a bad hangout and the regular customers stop coming …”

  Tulip’s steady gaze, her waiting for Myrna to make some sense out of nonsense, froze Myrna’s tongue. Suddenly she realized how dumb all this was and how easy it is to lie to children.

  “Listen,” she said. “It’s because men aren’t fair to women.”

  “I’m a woman,” Tulip said.

  “Well—yes,” Myrna said.

  “Will I be able to sit a bar without a man when I grow up?”

  “Unless they keep having one law for the lion and one for the lamb.”

  “Am I a lion?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “Am I a lamb?”

  “Just hang up this coat and shut your lamb chop.”

  Myrna was embarrassed. In that internal theater in which we all perform our play with ourselves as audience, she’d caught herself dumbly accepting something she’d always known was bullshit. You could usually tell a professional and it was no trick to keep the place from becoming a hooker hangout.

  It was just men fucking women over as usual.

  Playing “mother” was instructive.

  “Don’t be afraid, kid. I’m drunk but I’m a different kind of drunk.”

  “Lew …” Myrna said.

  “I’m Jewish. A special breed. Alcoholicus Judaicus. Gentle, self-punishing only, guilty but not angry. And, most important of all, sooner or later I get hungry.”

  Tulip was curious. “All people get hungry.”

  “Not drunks. But I always stop drinking and start eating.”

  “Are you hungry now?”

  “It’s not going to be that easy, tonight,” Lew said. “Not tonight.”

  Myrna observed and drew conclusions. From being apprehensive and even angry about Tulip’s presence in the restaurant, Lew had grown to like having her around. An odd painting was being sketched in Myrna’s soul: an ersatz Renaissance picture, The Negative Holy Family. A man who wasn’t her husband, a child who wasn’t her child, and Myrna/Madonna.

  The summer sun was warming up the New York streets. Fantasies of strolls in the park chased around in Myrna’s thoughts. She thought of mentioning some of this to Krasner but was embarrassed at the thought of exposing herself. Suppose people thought she was using Tulip to get closer to Lew? A sense of shame expressed itself swiftly in a decision to make phone calls to agents. The summer stock season was all booked, but the fall productions would be getting under way soon. Her ex-lover, Sheffield, was as much a fantasy as all of this. She had to get on with Real Life.

  Besides, the RR lunch business was off so badly, who knew if she would still have a job in the fall? The telephone was in the rear of the restaurant. But en route she fell into a conversation with Gregor, a roly-poly veteran waiter. They discussed rumors: Paul was about to make an offer to buy Lew’s share, take over again, get rid of the nonpaying regulars and change everything. By the time she remembered the original purpose of her errand she saw a familiar shaggy gray head—premature but startlingly gray—up front. It was Sheffield, her ex-lover who refused to accept his termination; and who stopped by to deliver lectures to Myrna, borrow money from her, or both. Myrna not only had no money to lend him, she realized she’d forgotten to bring change for the phone.

  So, for the moment, that was that on the Real Life front.

  We have to imagine Katherine Eudemie waking in the middle of the night in a sweat of terror. We have to imagine her lying for a moment next to Jackson
Eudemie sleeping his usual tranquil sleep, hers so palpable, a kind of semi-suffocation of snores, dreams that force gasps and waking instead of protecting sleep, and imagine her grabbed by panic before she realizes what the panic is about.

  Then she gropes for her long white robe, almost tripping on the belt, and runs into Tulip’s bedroom. The little girl sleeps the innocent sleep of one who can tell Misha from Morris, infallibly. It astonishes everyone, this gift of hers; no one can explain it. The mysteries of identical twinness do not exist for Tulip. Some of the more imaginative members of the RR inner circle think of this as a kind of grace. Lew thinks it is only a series of lucky guesses. But he is impressed.

  Of course Katherine does not know any of this. She only knows that her life is racing out of control; that she runs her daily rat race, writing her new novel, chasing assignments at The New York Times Book Review so that she won’t be forgotten between books, terrified that she has already been forgotten after the fuss that greeted her first book four years ago, showing up for her analytic training classes—she has not missed one, though she now doubts the auspices and wonders if it is all legitimate, perhaps only another mad dance to distract herself from her own frantic dance, never missing her exercise class, because the body might be all that is left if the mind and the talent go; scared, too, that forgetting her child at the restaurant is no longer a mistake—something much worse. She has begun to masturbate in the bathrooms of midtown restaurants and art galleries.

  We must imagine that she picks the sleeping Tulip up and holds her, crooning, wetting the shut eyes with tears, unable to imagine a time when Tulip had not been with her as pride and comfort.

  The next afternoon she forgets her at the RR for the longest stretch ever: five hours.

  Studying the text she’d once forgotten at the restaurant, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud, reading about the forgetting of proper names—and how complicated the causes of such simple lapses could be—Katherine Eudemie marvels and despairs at the language of gestures and at what the language of the repeated forgetting of a child might mean. Reading the book and thinking about her own lapses she feels a shiver of terror.