A Brilliant Novel in the Works Read Free Page B

martinis at the Righteous Room are good, though
it took a little constructive guidance to get them to make it
just right: be careful with the vermouth, dry off the olives first,
don’t let the gin sit too long in the shaker. My dad used to say
that it’s not hard to make a damn good martini, but it’s damn
easy to screw one up.
#
    drink 1
    Shmendrik explains to us about the dance he and Ally’s
daughter have learned. Shmen and Ally have been dating for
less than two years, but her daughter fell in love with Shmen
instantly.
    “The trick,” he says, “is to wave your clothes around in the
air before you throw them at Mommy.” He rubs Ally’s back
and Ally rolls her eyes while she drinks her martini. This is
the life of Ally and Shmen. On paper, it sounds like Shmen is
doing all the wrong things. But there’s something about their
family that’s not on paper.
    Julia says, “This sounds an awful lot like stripping.”
“Oh,” Shmen says. “It is.” He puts his hand on his sister’s
hand. “But you have to understand, we don’t take off our
underwear.”
    Ally puts down her martini. “Yes you did,” she says and
gives him a punch in the shoulder.
    “Oh yeah,” he says. “I did.”
#
    drink 2
    Ally tells me that a horse’s instinct—even after an injury—is
to keep running.
    I say, “Really?” and I can see that she is trying to gauge
whether I’m pulling her leg, this goofy Jew who is rarely serious,
but her stories always do this to me. If I were dropped from an
airplane right in the middle of Kansas, I’d barely be able to tell the
difference between a horse and a cow and a pig, but sitting here
in this bar listening to Ally talk, I can’t get enough horse sense.
    “Even when they break a bone in their leg,” Ally tells me,
“they’ll run on it if you don’t stop them.”
    And while I sit there learning about injured horses, I
hear Shmen and Julia talk about Shmen’s latest plan to get a
psychology degree. Julia is always supportive even while she
knows that he is unlikely to finish any degree. As long as I’ve
known him, Shmen has always been halfway through a degree
in something. Even though he has troubles following through
with a degree, he reads like a monster and is able to say things
like, “You can’t read Ulysses for the third time until you’ve
read it twice,” and he can even make it sound funnier than it
is arrogant. I’m supposedly the writer, but he’s the one who is
obsessed with language. He will call me at four in the morning
to tell me that you can’t spell “husband” without “anus.”
#
    It’s one of those hipster bars we’re in, with exposed pipes and
exposed air vents, and I pretend that I’m up in the pipes rather
than down here where all the regular people are. And from up in
that maze of pipes, I can see Shmen, with his love of language,
his love of obscure words and phrases, but without a clear
plan to make use of this love, other than calling friends in the
middle of the night. But then again, he might be the happiest
man I know. And Julia. This is a woman who comes home after
having a cigarette with an alcoholic who just died in her lap
while apologizing to her because he thought she was his dead
wife whom he had deceived for twenty-seven years. “Forgive me,
Cassandra,” this man kept saying to Julia, and Julia kept forgiving
until the man finally died, and then, after this kind of day, Julia is
still able to help me get my pants on and go out for drinks. This
is also a woman who loves these fabulous masculine singers like
Frank and Johnny and Elvis and then marries a scrawny little
Jew who writes scrawny little stories. And there’s Ally, who talks
about such real-world things like listening to the heartbeat of a
horse who has just broken his spine but still tries to get up. And
while she speaks with such sympathy for this creature, I wonder
if it’s wrong of me to think: metaphor.
    After savoring the metaphor for a while longer, I come down