Book of Numbers: A Novel Read online

  September’s also the time of new books coming out, of publication parties held at new lounges, new venues. Which was why on that freefloating Monday after Labor Day, with the city returned to itself rested and tanned, my publisher gathered my friends, frenemies, writers, in the type of emerging neighborhood that magazines and newspapers were always underpaying them to christen.

  Understand, on my first visits to NY the Village had just been split between East and West. SoHo went, so there had to be NoHo. When I first moved to the city the realestate pricks were scamming the editors into helping reconfigure the outerboroughs too, turning Brooklyn, flipping Queens, for zilch in return, only the displacement of minorities despite their majority. At the time of my party, Silicon Alley had just been projected along Broadway, in glassed steel atop the Flatiron—each new shadow of each new tower being foreshadowed initially in language (sarcastic language).

  Call this, then, as I called it, TriPackFast: the four block triangle north of the Meatpacking District but south of the barred lots for Edison ParkFast. Or Teneldea: the grim gray area beginning where 10th Avenue switches from southbound to northbound traffic and ending where the elevated rail viaduct crosses that avenue just past the NY offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  A pier, jutting midway between where the Lusitania departed and the Titanic never arrived, where steamers and schooners had anchored to unload the old riches of the Old World like gold and silver and copper slaves, before wealth turned from tangible goods and favorable tradewinds to a matter of clicking buttons—where the newest warehouses were filled with “cultural capital”—where “money,” which was still silver in French (argent) and gold in German (Geld), had become a gentrified abstraction.

  A purposefully unreconstructed but rebranded wreckage harbored on the Hudson—the interior resembled a ruin, a rusted halfgutted rectilinear spanse. Hangaresque, manufacturingesque. Previously a drydock, formerly a ropery. Had it just been built, it would’ve been a marvel—the type of modern design that architects and engineers torment themselves over, the natural course of things achieved by falling apart: foundation issues, an irresolvable roof, problems with the electric and plumbing.

  A table was set, laid with midpriced wine to be poured not into plastic cups but glass glasses, that’s how intensely my publisher was investing in me, offering red and white and, blushing, trays of stinky chèvres and goudas, muensters, gruyères, a dozen varieties of crackers, veggie stix ’n’ dip, sexual clusters of muscats, sultanas, ruby grapes without seed, selections of meze with pita.

  A trio performed klezmer, or rehearsed it, a screechy avantklez that didn’t distinguish between rehearsal and performance: a trumpeter, bass, drums, soloing always in that order.

  Copies of the book were piled into pyramids? ziggurats? but ziggs are goyish, the pyramids are for the Jews.

  The press began arriving, all my future peers, my colleagues. The newspaper people, the dailies, a half hour fashionable. The magazine people, the weeklies, the monthlies, an hour. Aaron’s joke: the longer the leadtime, the later they showed. A cymbal tsked. The bass followed a note and stayed with it, not a note so much as a low throb, as if it were the guest of honor everybody felt they had to notice but nobody much liked to be stuck with, just the excuse for all the busyness swirling—that guest was me, terrified.

  I was uncomfortably complimented in my suit, the suit that’d needed shoes, the shoes that’d needed socks, belt, shirt, tie—the only thing I’d already owned was the underwear.

  The mic was taken from the trumpeter, tapped. Wine courtesy of Pequot Vintners, beer from Masholu, please join me in thanking our generous sponsors—that was Kimi!

  Everyone applauded, drowning her introduction of Finnity.

  My book was called “a migrant story,” “a quintessential American tale”—inheritance of loss, bequest of suffering transmitted genetically, the people of the book, after millennia of literacy, interpretation, commentary, the book of the people of the book, at the end of the shelf of the century.

  Finnity, all prepped, Harvard vowels and Yale degree, tweedly, leatherpatched not just at elbow but also at shoulder—he would’ve worn patches on his knees, on his khakis. He mispronounced tzedakah, “said ache a,” misused tshuvah, “a concern for Israel in the guise of a tissueba,” mentioned the Intifadas, all zealotry being inherently suicidal, democratic pluralisms, Zionisms plural, concluded by saying in conclusion twice, “It’s the testimony of two generations,” everyone nodded, “a witness to one America under or over God, with or without God,” and everyone nodded again and clapped.

  It was his honor, publishing me.

  I dragged up to the front like a greenhorn with a trunk and Finnity went to hug or kiss and I went to shake his hand.

  I gave a speech—and the speech was my Acknowledgments (the book itself didn’t have any). I had a lot of people to thank. My mother, for one, who fled Poland, for giving me the money to travel to Poland, only so I could write a book about her life. (I left the inheritance from my father out of it—spent.)

  I thanked my Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe, whom I visited and interviewed in Israel, and my cousin Tzila, who drove me directly from a Tel Aviv club to a shabby Breslov minyan in Jerusalem so I could interrogate a former block commander who’d been interrogated before by better, the obscurer relations, honorary inlaws, and strangers who’d responded to my letters from Kraków, Warsaw, Vienna, Graz, Prague, Bratislava, the good people of Los Angeles, and of Texas, Florida, and Maine (survivors), the faculties of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, and the stern lady clerks of the Polish State Archives, who helped me sift cadastral registries, deportation manifests, and Zyklon B inventories, who not only confirmed Moms’s memories—the color of a hat ribbon or shoelace, the flavor of the cream between favorite wafers—but who gave them flesh and future too—the location of Gruntig’s butcher stand (by the mikvah, on what became the corner of Walecznych and Proletariuszy Streets), the fate of schoolfriend Sara (Cuba, aneurysm)—assisting with the granular details: how many grams of bread my uncles were allotted in what camp on what dates, how many liters of soup were allotted per prisoner per week/month in what camp vs. the amount on average delivered. How my grandparents last embraced in Zgody Square, Kraków ghetto, 10/28/42, 10:00.

  Appreciated—and when I was finished everyone stormed to congratulate me, shake my hand, and Caleb nodded, from a huddle of girls, and Aaron nodded too, gesturing for a smoke above a scrim of critics, reviewers. Someone congratulated me by hugging and kissing and someone said, “Introduce me to your mother.” But Moms wasn’t in attendance, she hadn’t been invited. “She wouldn’t have enjoyed it—this isn’t exactly her crowd.”

  I leaned between brass poles, velvet suspended into satisfied smiles. Aar sparked a joint and we smoked it and the air was gassy and my suit was wool and Cal filed out with the girls.

  We stumbled down 10th in celebration, or observance—in memo-riam—afterparties bearing the same relationship to parties as the afterlife to life. Straggling to get cash, to get cigs and a handle of vodka, to decipher the Spanish on a wall shrine to a child shot or stabbed, to do chinups on new condo construction scaffolding.

  Gansevoort Street: everything smelled like meat and disinfectant. The bouncer was a big black warty dyke bound in leather and chains, checking IDs, grabbing wrists so as to break them, to stamp the back of the hand and someone said, “This is like the Holocaust,” and someone said, “The Holocaust wasn’t airconditioned neither.”

  Behind the bar were crushed photographs of the uniformed: cops, firefighters, Catholic schoolgirls. Businesscards between the slats, as if phone fax email were all that held the walls together, all that fused the landfilled island.

  The bartender served Cal and me our sodas and we took them to a banquette in the back to mix in the vodka while Aar ordered a whiskey or scotch and while it was being fixed wound his watch and left a bill atop a napkin and left.

  Someone had the hiccups, someone slipped on sa
wdust.

  Kimi! publicized by the banquette:

  “The deal is the publisher’s picking up the tab for beers and wines,” and Cal said, “Why didn’t you say so?” and Kimi! said, “How many do you need?” and Cal counted how many girls we were sitting with and said, “We need six of both,” and Kimi! snorted and Cal stood to go with her, but instead they went to the bathroom.

  I had to go to the bathroom too. But all of college was crammed into the stall, Columbia University class of 1992, with a guy whose philosophy essays I used to write, now become an iBanker, let’s call him P. Sachs, or Philip S., sitting not on the seat but up on the tank, with the copy of my book I’d autographed for him on his lap—“To P.S., with affect(at)ion” rolling a $100 bill, tapping out the lines to dust the dustjacket, offering Cal and Kimi! bumps off the blurbs, offering me.

  “Cocaine’s gotten better since the Citigroup merger.”

  A knock, a peremptory bouncer’s fist, and the door’s opened to another bar, yet another—but which bars we, despite half of us being journalists, wouldn’t recollect: that dive across the street, diving into the street and lying splayed between the lanes. Straight shots by twos, picklebacks. Well bourbons chasing pabsts. Beating on the jukebox for swallowing our quarters. “This jukebox swallows more than your mother.” “Swallows more than The Factchecker.”

  The Factchecker changed by the party, the season. Any fuckable female publishing professional could be The Factchecker—if it could be proven that she was between the ages of 18 and 26, and that she had fucked precisely zero people since arriving in NY.

  Last call was called, and Kimi! went up to tab bourbon doubles for us and for herself a gin and tonic and Cal and I drank ours and even hers and shared a cig between us and my mouth tasted like nickels, like dimes, and my gums needed a haircut.

  The lights went up, the jukebox down, I hurled a cueball at the dartboard—Finnity had left with The Factchecker, Cal asked, “Anyone want to come back to my place?”

  We still had vodka in the bag, two girls in each cab, two cabs taxiing to the Bowery, to the apartment Cal’s parents, half Jewish and full Connecticut stockbrokers each, had bought for him. I was in the back and he was in the back and Kimi! was between us (The Factchecker’s roommate was up front), and I asked if anyone had talked to Aar but Kimi! was already calling him though she must’ve been calling his office, because he didn’t have a phone on his person, this was before everybody had phones on their persons.

  Aar was waiting outside Cal’s building, wrapping his silk scarf around a Russian or Ukrainian or close enough gift—a present to himself shivering in only a frilly cocktail waitress shirt and a drink umbrella skirt and a nametag. Cal poked with the keys, Aar poked his Slav from behind with a handle of rye, and we all crowded into the elevator, stopped on every floor, Kimi! and Missy having plunged into pressing all the buttons.

  I’d lit a cig on the street and was still smoking in the elevator and the cig I was smoking was menthol.

  Missy, being The Factchecker’s roomie, whining to Kimi! and me about her job as a temp receptionist, and “Why can’t I get a job at an agency?” and “Can you I’m begging you introduce me to Aar?” as Cal scoured around stuffing tightywhities into drawers, as Aar and his Masha? Natasha? he’d picked up from hostessing the restaurant of the Jersey City Ramada, the same place I’m sure he’d picked up the rye, set about mixing Manhattans.

  Cal tidying the shelves, rearranging and flipping what he must’ve considered the respectable reads, the larger and wider reads, the complement of Brontës, the Prousts, the Tolstoys, centrally and spine out, exchanging the livingroom’s Flags of the Confederacy poster for the kitchen’s canvas of abstract slashes by a dissentient Union Square Lithuanian, fussing with the stereo, putting on some hiphop, some rap, clearing away the motivational improve your vocab lectures he worked out to. I left Kimi! and Missy to help him move the treadmill to the bedroom, left him trying to fold the treadmill into the closet at the buzzing, went to the door and buzzed them in: a dozen people, a 12-pack, dangling in the hall, dangling like keys passed from the fire escape to the acquainted, from the acquainted to the strangers they’d invited, assisterati and receptionistas arriving, schedulers and reschedulers early and late, marketing and distribution cultureworkers I didn’t know and who didn’t know me but we, this was our business, pretended. More pot and coke, which, as P.S. said again, had gotten better since the Citigroup merger. Tequila in the sink, martinis in the shower. Ash in both and in energy drinkables. Masha or Nastya was asking if we had any games and after Cal realized she didn’t mean Monopoly mentioned that his neighbor was a firstperson fanatic—not the literary gambit, the gaming—and suddenly six fists were knocking at Tim’s door demanding to borrow his system, and Tim, calculus teacher at Stuyvesant, answered the door red and tousled senseless, and hauled into Cal’s his system and even connected it to Cal’s TV with the bigger screen and bigger speakers, the night blooding the morning as P.S. and some random hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy tested each other in mortal combat avatared as lasertusked elephants and wild ligers with rocketlaunching claws, as Aar left with his Slav who had to get back to Staten Island by her cousins’ curfew, as Tim’s girlfriend who had the flu trundled over in a balloonpocked blanket and scowled and sneezed and coughed and left taking Tim but not his system with her, as some random hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy left with his decentbodied girlfriend, as Cal grinded Missy and took her into the bedroom, as I fumbled with Kimi! and got a burp, which sent her to the bathroom to vomit, which sent Missy to the bathroom to help her, and P.S. kept playing with himself, and in the hall Missy was into hooking up with Kimi! but not Kimi! with Missy, P.S. suggested they call The Factchecker to confirm whether and which sex acts she was perpetrating on Finnity, Missy and Kimi! left, P.S. left with them, and after opening the fiercely bulbed fridge to find expired mustard and ketchup sweating, just sweating, I suggested calling for delivery, but the good place was closed and we were just a block outside the bad place’s delivery zone, and the freezer wasn’t just out of ice but out of cold from being left open, and there was a cushion wet on the floor in the hall, and there was sleep without dreaming.

  I was woken—lumped in the contents of a dumped jar of vitamins—by Kimi!’s phone, which she’d left behind. Cal picked it up, and Kimi! yelled at him and he yelled at me to find the remote, but all I was finding was a jar and vitamins.

  Then Kimi!’s phone went dead and Cal was gone.

  My mouth tasted like tobacco and mucus and lipgloss, absinthe (strangely), marijuana, coke bronchitis.

  I had an ache in the back of my head, and was deciding whether to vomit. The screen was still showing the game, 1 Player, 2 Players, New, Resume, and on the way to the window I stopped to resume the function for the time, but the screen just filled with smoke, the sky with smoke, and in the weeks to come, the months to come, into 2002 when the paperback release was canceled and beyond, my book received all of two reviews, both positive.

  Or one positive with reservations.

 

  Miriam Szlay. Still to this day, I’m not sure whether she made it to the party. Either I didn’t notice her, or she was too reluctant to have sought me out, because she was kind. Or else, she might have skipped it—that’s how kind she was, or how much she hated my susceptibility to praise, or how much she hated paying for a sitter.

  I never asked.

  Miriam. Her bookstore was a messy swamp on the groundfloor of a lowrise down on Whitehall Street—literature cornered, condescended to, by the high finance surrounding. Before, it’d been a booklet store, I guess, selling staplebound investment prospectuses and ratings reports contrived by a Hungarian Jew who’d dodged the war, and bought Judaica with every dollar he earned—kabbalistic texts that if they didn’t predict commodity flux at least intrigued in their streetside display. At his passing he left the property and all its effects and debts to his children—Miriam, and her older and only brother—who broadened the inventory
to include fiction and nonfiction of general interest to the Financial District’s lunch rush, which as a businessplan was still bleak.

  Miriam—who kept her age vague, halfway between my own and my mother’s—was the one who ran the shop and hired me: straight out of Columbia, straight out of Jersey, a bridge & tunnel struggler with a humanities diploma between my legs but not enough arm to reach the Zohar. She was inflexible with what she paid me an hour ($8 or its equivalent in poetry), but was flexible with hours. She respected my time to write, knew that I wasn’t going to be a clerk all my life (just throughout my 20s), knew that a writer’s training only began, didn’t end, with alphabetical order. Another lesson: “subject” and “genre” are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving.

  Miriam was my first reader—my second was her brother, who became my agent. Aaron signed me on her word alone—a demand, not a recommendation—and helped me clarify my projects. A memoir (I hadn’t lived enough), a study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I had no credentials), a novel about the Jersey Shore (no story), a collection of linked short stories about the Jersey Shore (no linkages), a long poem conflating the Inquisitions and Crusades (not commercial). Then one fall day in 1996 Aar came back brutalized from Budapest, cabbing from JFK to Whitehall to drop a check with his sister (the shop would never be profitable). His trip had been coital, not cliental, but out of solicitousness he talked only profitability, Mauthausen, Dachau, family history. That was the moment to mention my mother.

  My mother was my book, he agreed, and he met me monthly after work, weekly after I left work to finish a draft, to discuss it—how to recreate dialogue, how to limit perspective—still always meeting at the register, where I’d give my regards to Miriam, and him a check to Miriam, then rewarding ourselves at a café up the block. Not a café but a caffè—as the former could be French, and the latter could only be Italian. Aar taught, I learned: how to tie a Windsor and arrange a handkerchief, how a tie and handkerchief must coordinate but never match, which chef who cooked at Florent also subbed at which Greek diner owned by his brother only on alternate Thursdays, who really did the cooking—Mexicans. Actually Guatemalans, Salvadorans. A Manhattan should be made with rye, not bourbon. Doormen should be tipped. Aar—quaffing a caffè corretto and marbling the table with stray embers from his cig, when smoking was still permitted—knew everything: stocks and bonds and realestate, Freud and Reich, the fate of the vowels in Yiddish orthography, and the Russian E and И conjugations. When was the cheapest day to fly (Tuesdays), when was the cheapest day to get gas (Tuesdays), where to get a tallis (Orchard Street), where to get tefillin repaired (Grand Street), who to deal with at the NYPD, the FDNY, the Port Authority, the Office of Emergency Management, how to have a funeral without a body, how to have a burial without a plot.