Opera
Esther Cohen
We don’t know too much about love: when it can happen. How it starts and how it ends.
Daniel and I met for lunch once a month, the last Thursday. We met in one of the last remaining Cuban-Chinese places around, Victoria China, on 93rd and Broadway. We both liked it there, the straightforwardness of the room, the large, out of focus black and white photographs that could have been China or Cuba or Hong Kong or anywhere else. The waiters were all older men with hair dyed unimaginable black, dense and shiny as polished shoes. They were all desultory in their treatment of those of us who ate there. We were all regulars. It wasn’t the sort of place a stranger would easily enter.
They laid our platanos, our bright orange sweet and sour pork, our lo mein and saffron rice down with a clank on the edge of the table. No fanfare, no flourishes, no doleful smiles. Then they left us alone with our heaps of cheap bright food, alone to do what each of us liked best. Tell each other stories. We listened carefully to one another, and rarely interrupted. No detail was too meaningless for either of us.
The last story I told Daniel, I’d heard from a student in the Community Center where I teach, a neighborhood place where people just walk in and write. I help them a little with notebooks and pencils and felt-tipped pens. Sometimes, that’s enough. More than write, though, they talk. Mostly about what they’d write down if they could. Marc Victor was no exception.
Marc was not an appealing man. His stomach fell over the top of his belt, and his fingernails, brittle yellow, gave his hands the look of deadness. But he could talk. His was the language of raconteur and crossword puzzle master, full of stories of relatives and Sri Lankan cities. And his voice, deep and low, was the voice of someone else, a more magnificent, almost triumphant voice, the voice of a man who won at chess and conquered white water rapids, the voice of a man with a life.
But he had none. No relatives, except for a cousin in Salt Lake City, Utah, who didn’t keep in touch. No friends. His was a life of day old rolls and talk shows, of visits to the community center for fifteen-cent breakfasts and free classes there, in yoga, woodworking, water colors. He told strangers his stories, when he found himself near others, at the center, on the subway on one of his very occasional forays somewhere else, in the corner store. But in spite of his voice and his vocabulary, people moved away from him very quickly, because of his nails and his dirty blue shirts, because of the lost way he had of standing still. I stayed and listened.
“Once,” he began, “Once, I had a friend.”
Marc moved from Philadelphia to New York in l939. He had wanted to sing. His mother Rose, then alive and strong, suggested he become an accountant. He’d said No. He moved into a ground floor room on West 8lst Street in New York, where he lived for 60 years, working odd jobs one after another, and always auditioning.
Each audition, each date and time and place, he recorded in a notebook, with brief remarks. They liked me somewhat. Too many others. I wasn’t right.
He carried the notebook like a talisman, and although he never got any parts, he persisted the way people do who are on an absolute quest. Once, in a large very prosperous German Jewish synagogue, where he was trying out for second cantor for the High Holy Days, he sat next to another auditioner who began to talk. He too had a beautiful voice, and where Marc was reticent, even whispery, and parsimonious with his impressive words, Jonathan was expansive. He boomed, and his booming took everyone in. His life was so big that everyone around him came alive. Even Marc.
“Who are you?” Jonathan asked Marc. He peered very closely into his eyes, really truly looking at his face. “What a question,” Marc answered.
Jonathan got the part. He usually did. To celebrate, he invited Marc to dinner. Marc never went out, and he was thrilled. They went to a crowded cheerful Chinese place, cheap and festive, where Jonathan, who genuinely seemed to like Marc, to like something charming or clever that had been there forever, lying in wait, Jonathan spent the evening telling Marc about his life, and wanting to know about Marc’s.
Jonathan’s life spilled over. Messy divorces, three of them, a long stay with the Jesuits, AA, therapy, groups of many kinds. And singing, always singing. He loved music, and breathed it in, going to hear performers, buying CD’s, taking classes all his life. A large, rich, full, contradictory person, his life was an ongoing present tense narrative, always happening.
“I’ve been in and out of every group you can name,” he told Marc, who’d never joined even one club. Even Boy Scouts, or his block association. “Not me,” Marc replied. “Not me.” Marc talked too. He told Jonathan about the time he’d worked for a crossword puzzle company, composing a puzzle not even the on-staff masters could unravel, about his favorite cousin Esther who’d fallen in love with a photograph of Herbert Hoover, about Ida Steinman, the one woman he’d dreamt about on and off for years.
Their dinner was one of those wonderful meals that happens very rarely: two people out of nowhere find themselves together in song. It had never before happened to Marc, and he walked home that night with the unfamiliar sense of hope pushing out his usual darkness. But he didn’t expect all that much more, didn’t believe Jonathan meant it when he said he would call the next day.
But he did. The two became inseparable. For the first time in his life, Marc’s phone rang every day. And nearly every day, they would meet, if only for coffee. Marc would talk, and listen. He’d never been so happy. Jonathan told him everything: what he thought, what he saw. And Marc felt, through Jonathan, that he too was now living his life.
Jonathan, unlike Marc, was very very neat. He dusted. He put things away: clothes, dishes, papers, books. His closets looked like closets in magazines. He did not like dust. One day, Marc accompanied Jonathan to buy a new dust buster. Jonathan had read about a machine that had nearly supernatural capabilities. Far better than other dust busters, it had been tested by scores of experts, and although it was expensive, it came with a lifetime guarantee. Jonathan asked Marc to come home with him for
the dust test.
Jonathan’s apartment was immaculate, shining, more or less dustless. He chose to experiment under the couch where dust, he said, was merciless. Marc stood at attention alongside the couch, as Jonathan began his test. Holding the new gray dust buster, he hummed the score from My Fair Lady, moving gracefully across his floor as though he and the machine were doing an unusual tango. Marc watched carefully. His apartment was impossible to enter, so full of debris from each day of his sixty years of living there: untold newspapers, rubber bands stored one by one by one, plastic bags from every vegetable, every roll. Magazines scavenged from the garbage formed precarious towers against his spotty walls, Popular Mechanics and old TV Guides, Family Circle, Life. Bottles and bottles and bottles he’d intended to bring back to the store formed small hills all over the room.
Jonathan had never been inside Marc’s place. Marc had explained, and Jonathan accepted, that the unholy chaos would upset him. Marc watched Jonathan remove his dust with the fascination of a Persian at miniature golf. He could not take his eyes off the dance between Jonathan and his dust buster, a smooth, seamless glide. So when Jonathan suddenly stood up and yelled, “It’s Not Right,” in his loud and very dramatic voice, Marc jumped. “What?” Marc asked. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“The way it picks up dust. It’s just not right,” Jonathan pouted. He brought out a towel from his linen closet, and carefully began to take apart the dust buster, humming gently. “I found it,” he said. “It’s a flaw in the design. All this money and they didn’t do it right.” He found the box, and called the manufacturer in Milwaukee. Marc sat in a chair and listened. “I want to talk to the product development chief,” he said, and before long, he was engaged in serious conversation. Marc stood up and waved good-bye.
“We talked for three hours,” Jonathan said the next day, when they met at Five Brothers for coffee. She and I have so much in common.
“Who?” Marc asked. Jonathan began to talk about Annie, the product development VP for All Air Products. “It’s been years since I spoke with someone so easily,” he said. “She’s in AA. She’s been married 3 times too. She used to be a very devout Catholic.”
“What about the dust buster?” Marc felt usurped, instantly replaced by this stranger, this Milwaukee woman.
“She’s sending me another overnight. She claims it had to be that model. She’s certain it was a fluke.
Every day that week, when Marc and Jonathan met, Jonathan went on and on about the dust buster VP, whose full name was Annie O’Neill. She was funny and insightful. She hated dust, and loved James Joyce. She had four grown children. She wrote a play once, about Persephone and Odysseus, set in modern day Milwaukee. She played bridge. She’d been to Katmandu with one of her children. She was a hatha yoga teacher, as well as a civil engineer.
Marc hated her, hated everything about her, hated Jonathan’s slow descent into love. Still he was completely unprepared for Jonathan’s declaration, on Friday’s walk through the park, that he’d asked Annie O’Neill to be his wife, and she’d said yes.
“You can’t possibly,” Marc yelled, without thinking about it twice. “Who is she, after all? You can’t make decisions without thinking them through.”
Daniel grabbed my hand. He had been very very quiet, listening more carefully than I ever remember him listening, but he stopped me and asked, “What do you think he should have done?”
I didn’t have to think about the answer. “Marry her,” I said. “What about you?”
“No,” he replied. “I don’t know why, but there’s something about this whole story that makes me very nervous. I can’t tell you what.
Daniel himself had been married four times. Remarkably, three of the women were named Justine. And unlike anyone else I’ve ever known, he remained friendly with all of them. Saw them all on their birthdays. For lunch, if they had husbands.
“Why shouldn’t they get married? This seems so unlike you.”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said, “It’s just a feeling.”
Daniel then apologized for interrupting and told me to get back to Marc’s story. I did.
Marc and Jonathan went out for their final dinner together that weekend, at their favorite Chinese restaurant. Jonathan ordered everything, even fried ice cream. Marc did his best. Jonathan was jubilant. Any other word, Marc said, would be too thin for what he felt. And the next day, Friday morning, he left. They said good-bye on the phone. Marc did not want to see Jonathan off. Jonathan promised to call Marc the week after the wedding. “You will come to visit us,” was how he said goodbye.
Friday night was the wedding dinner in Indianapolis. The wedding was scheduled for Saturday morning at l0. At ll, Annie O’Neill called Marc. She found his number held with a clip onto of Jonathan’s date book. “I know you loved him,” she said. “You’re the first person I am calling. Jonathan died of a massive heart attack half an hour ago.” She began to cry, and hung up.
Daniel was stunned by Marc’s story, although he’d heard far stranger, much more horrifying tales. Something about Marc and Jonathan touched him, and he couldn’t eat. Just drank his ginger ale.
I suggested he take the food home, but he said no. He was spending the weekend with Maxine, his current lover. They’d debated getting married on and off. Maxine had been married once. Daniel was willing to do it again, though something intangible held him back.
“We’re going to a wedding party tomorrow night. Maxine’s nephew,” Daniel said. I was going out myself, so I left the food right there.
He never liked to say good-bye. Let’s have dinner in a week or two, he said. And we kissed good-bye.
Saturday morning at l0:30 exactly Maxine called me. “Daniel died,” she said. “Half an hour ago. A massive heart attack.” She was crying quietly, when she hung up the phone. Just like that.