Twice Told Tales Read Free Page A

at N.Y.U. Press had offered me a manuscript to copyedit, a book on the language of sexual relations. I toyed with them all; a kind of languorous, lingering, professional foreplay.
    “Getting involved with you is activity enough,” I told Katherine.
    “You’re crazy,” she said.
    “No, you are; the mad alien invader. You’re going to eat New York.”
    “I’m not that hungry.”
    “That’s because you haven’t had your first real taste.”
    “Oh? The review in the Times … ?”
    “True. A taste.”
    She regretted having confessed that her Chicago hotshot had helped her place her novel. We’d argued, sparred, clothing and ideas all in disarray: her half-slip, Dostoyevsky’s abominable politics, my shirt and half-opened fly, and the life and death of The Novel. Next to the bed on which we’d done everything except it, her ancient Royal Portable trembled on a tiny wooden table. She pointed to it.
    “That’s what placed my book.”
    “Easy does it,” I said. “It’s only been published and reviewed. It takes years to place a book.”
    “Is that a quotation?” she asked. Suspicion clouded the blue fields of her eyes.
    “No. Just a cheap irony of my own. But true, anyway.”
    “Is it so awful to want a place, my place?”
    I was merciless the way one is when being kept above bed instead of in bed.
    “Are you sure it’s your place—or a place; any place?”
    She pressed red lips to my neck and mumbled, “Don’t sell me so short. I’m not here just to make out. I want to find out, too.” She stood up, a tall blonde apparition of confusion, wisps of hair everywhere. She blew some from the corners of her wide mouth. “To find out,” she repeated.
    I decided to be stupid.
    “Find out what?”
    “Everything.”
    “Everything Jewish, you mean.”
    Without smiling she said, “That’s everything.”
    I grabbed her back to the bed, rolling on top of me; a roiling of unharvested wheat.
    “God, I give up! The only parts of you not full of goyish nonsense are these. ”
    I attacked these with mouth and hands.
    All full of life, given the confusion, given the lust and the teasing, given the youth and the resentments. And all long before I had carved out my unique position as the bottom rung—America’s only life-long, freelance copyeditor; even longer before my surprise fame as a funeral eulogist—the Georgie Jessel of the small-fry literati—had reached and convinced Jackson Eudemie that no one but I would do for the obsequies of poor, premature Katherine. Talk about finding your place. We found our places. Or they found us.
    “You’re so beautiful,” I said in a rare abdication of irony. “No cosmetics. How do you do it?”
    “With mirrors,” she said. And, indeed, there were mirrors everywhere in that tiny Village apartment whose address I never knew.
    Typical of the time and the immigrant-bohemian-style, she was staying in an apartment which had been loaned to a professor friend and who, in turn, loaned it to her; if you can loan what does not belong to you. I would guess you would simply have to give it if it’s not yours. In any case, she had it—with no phone. One of the loaners or the other had carefully turned it off. It seemed to be significant that she could never get the address straight. It was one of those weird tripartite meetings of Christopher Street and two others. She always—the three times I went there with her—told the cab driver to turn here, turn there, stop here, and, presto, we were there. Where, we had no idea. (Once I went down to get cigarettes, just around the corner, and almost could not find my way back.) But when we were inside the apartment there were mirrors; tall, wooden, burnished, dark antique, a bureau mirror, tortoise-shell hand mirrors on every surface.
    Yet she didn’t seem to care for mirrors; not for makeup, not for fussing hair, not for anything. Except for the moment before we entered Trillings’ apartment. But that’s because on the way up