Twice Told Tales Read Free

Bloomsbury on Morningside Heights.
    There was no way for her to know I would tease a stony-faced Huntress of Ideas:
    “Where did you go to school?”
    “I’m an autodidact.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. I taught myself to drive.”
    Beware! Those who tease the gods will be punished. In the first case by talk of fish instead of Forster. But after fish (and much wine) came dessert. Katherine Eudemie. We’d been engaged in the usual sexual sparring (it’s no accident that in sparring the fighters are called partners. A fight is only a fight. Sparring is a relationship). And our relationship, about forty hours old, was bouncing along its competitive, sexy way; myself, Jewish, New Yorkish, bookish, twenty-fiveish. Katherine Eudemie, gentile, Judaphile, turning twenty-five in a short while.
    She was my first encounter with the stream of wheat-colored young women traveling West to East in search of their promised Jews; the Rose Rabbis of their flowering literary, political, and sexual ambitions. The dark strangers between whose temples, arms, and legs wisdom was to be found, and whose wisdom was aphrodisiac.
    I had no wisdom to offer. I had then what I have now: a rag-bag of quotations: the currency of the uneducated. It sufficed. A line from a Pound canto for an open-mouthed kiss. A Goethe aphorism for one bra-strap down. A murmured memento from the Talmud to spread knees ever so slightly. Pretty good for forty hours of acquaintance this many years ago. I’m not being cruel. Cruelty requires a victim and an executioner. We were both victims. It was as thrilling to me as it was to Katherine. She came to me from Illinois that spring, singing songs of famous Chicago Jewish writers who refused to come East. Her affair with the most famous of them left a spoor on her skin. We both sniffed it to track each other around the bed.
    Hence: sparring. Ducking, weaving, touching, panting, we were teaching each other the game in a match no one could win. Though, it turned out, someone could lose. My situation at the precise party-moment was the obverse of Katherine’s. She had left her family to come East, raging to be known. My family had left me two months before I met Katherine Eudemie; left me for California. My quotations from de Tocqueville about restless, rootless Americans had been useless.
    “There was no California, then,” my father said, with his optimism typically masquerading as logic. It was no help for me to point out that there was no California now either. Like Katherine he was enormously ambitious but it was not a vague, boundless ambition. It was precise and could be satisfied—by a great deal of money.
    Every enterprise failed him or vice-versa—it was never clear which was the case. He landed the first Volkswagen dealership in America. The guy with the second one made money. He bought land in Florida years after the whole country knew there was no land in Florida to buy. My mother’s bitter joke in Yiddish: “Your father, the alchemist in reverse. Fun gelt er macht dreck. ” Somewhere in the sunshine of California shimmered more gold. Like all good alchemists he believed in the magic of wealth and that getting it was a reasonable even scientific matter. He had ideas, he had plans, he had methods, he had obsessions. What he never had was the gelt.
    I lingered on, pleasantly post-adolescent, amid the dreck of his dreams, carefully avoiding dreams of my own. All ambition was tainted. I assumed this was a temporary reaction. I had a tender tolerance for my own failure to get started.
    It was a lively time. A college degree, my conspicuous lack, had not yet achieved the status of a high school diploma. That is, you could still get a job without one. Before leaving for the Golden West my father had arranged for my Uncle Harry—the flip side of my father, a true Midas—to pull strings at Duell Sloane & Pearce, a small but classy publisher, and J. Walter Thompson, an epic advertising agency. At the same time, an editor