The Prince of West End Avenue Read online

  "Wouldn't you rather I tried to find a doctor?"

  She patted the bed again. "I want Dr. Otto."

  I went and sat on the bed beside her. She lifted a knee to make the "afflicted member" more easily available to me. What I saw then of white thigh gleaming in the darkness beneath her skirt I pretended not to see, and I set about the massaging of her ankle.

  "Ah," she said, and "ooh," she said, and then she said, "That's oh-so-much better, but the pain's moved a little higher up.

  And so I massaged a little higher and then a little higher still, and soon I found myself at that place of which I had only dreamed. And it was warm and moist and, oh, so wonderful! And Minnie shifted and squirmed in harmony with the massage, and she moaned and said "ooh" and "ah."

  She put her hand on me, she grasped me. "Now!" she said. "Please, now!" And she tore at cloth and buttons, and so did I. And "now!" she said again, and took me swollen within her, and wrapped her limbs about me and beat a wild tattoo on my back.

  Korner, Korner, what are you writing! Remember, you are not Blum. Know when to draw a decent veil over your youthful raptures.

  Yes, I lost my innocence to Herr Ephraim's Minnie. How utterly delightful she was, how healthy her appetite, how natural and uncomplicated our liaison! In Minnie I was fortunate indeed. Simple and forthright, she taught a bumbling boy how to be a man. She had formulated no philosophy but was by nature a hedonist. The body was designed to give and to receive sexual pleasure; all that was required of a man and a woman was mutual desire. Anything else—love, for example—was potentially perverse to the extent that it might distract from pleasure. Oh, love was all right if that was what you craved, but then, from that viewpoint, so were whips and chains. Her doctrine she expressed in her every bedroom act. I was for a happy while her eager disciple.

  Lenin was only partly right. I had needed a pretty girl, and certainly I had found one in Minnie. With her I passed hours of delight. But the experience failed to free my energies for the serious endeavors of the great world. My thoughts now were wholly of the flesh. I longed with pain for the elusive Magda.

  with his right hand, discreetly masking it from the senora's demented gaze with his left.

  "You've seen the notice?" I asked him.

  "What did you expect, Lipschitz should sit around waiting for the bomb to blow up in his face? I won't say I told you so. I'll only say, didn't I tell you?"

  "Hamburger's gone for the weekend. He says we'll talk after he gets back."

  "Yes, talk. Go ahead, talk. Meanwhile, the Mad Monk over there, Rasputin—"

  He put a warning finger to his lips. Eulalia was at his shoulder with his rice pudding. "Where's my raisins?"

  "Dr. Comyns, he say you don't get no raisins."

  The Red Dwarf sighed. "See what I mean?" he said.

  Eulalia waddled around the table and gently removed the toast from the senora's mouth. "You want I pour tea now, Dona Isabella?"

  Sefiora Krauskopf y Guzman looked up at her with impassioned eyes. "They called me the hollyhock girl." she said.

  "They call you that again, you just tell me," said Eulalia. "Here your tea, Dona Isabella, honey."

  The Red Dwarf waited until Eulalia disappeared behind the swinging doors into the kitchen. "The time for talk is over, finished. Now is the time for action."

  "What sort of action?" I repeated.

  The Lipschitz party got up from their lunch in a boisterous mood and left the dining room, the director in the van. Silently, we watched them go.

  "What sort of action?" I repeated.

  "Never mind what action. When I've acted, you'll know. Then will be the time for talk." He took a spoonful of rice pudding and held it in his mouth for a moment, savoring it. When he swallowed, his Adam's apple leapt two inches up his

  withered neck and then plunged to its place again. "Needs raisins," he said.

  The Emma Lazarus is filling up again; Sunday afternoon is on the wane. From my desk I can sense the renewal of stir and bustle: a hum of voices in the corridor, the whirr of the elevator going up and down, the strains of a Hoffmeister flute concerto from across the hall, the remote gurgle of a toilet flushing. From the kitchen the aroma that makes its way through the air ducts and into my room tells me that tonight we will have a beef-barley soup.

  My room overlooks the street, not the avenue. At this time of year and at such an hour the location has a distinct advantage. While the sun, darkening the Palisades, prepares to set in New Jersey, the light that at the most acute of angles strikes my window has that wonderful pellucid yellow quality so beloved of the Dutch masters. One's fingers itch to hold a paintbrush. Meanwhile, from across the hall. Hoffmeister has given way, as well he might, to Mozart and Le Nozze di Figaro.

  Ah, the vagaries of love! As I leaf through my manuscript, grown now to surprising length—my own modest effort a la recherche du temps perdu —I am struck by the number of pages that I, too, have devoted to this inexhaustible topic. " Voi che sapete" sings Cherubino across the hall, u che cosa e amor" Well, the vagaries of love are quite properly the stuff of comic opera. It is given to only a few, in art or in life, to pursue their amours on the grand scale. The rest of us must rely on these few to grant a kind of vicarious dignity to our petty liaisons. I say nothing of Blum, who is beneath our consideration and for whom love is little more than a viral infection, an itching beneath the skin that he seeks perpetually and vainly to scratch. But consider Hamburger, our own Jumbo, dashing off to the Hamptons,

  unable to admit even to himself his high hope to render peccable the impeccable honor, to assail the unassailable virtue, of Hermione Perlmutter, transformed in his amorous imagination into a Juliet.

  What fools these mortals be! Even poor Sinsheimer, now resting permanently in Mineola, was not immune. I well remember one evening when we sat together in the residents lounge, talking of Troilus and Cressida, a play in which Shakespeare at his most sardonic tells us the truth about this debilitating passion. Across the room sat three of our ladies (two of whom, incidentally, preceded Sinsheimer to Mineola), chattering and giggling together. His eyes misted over. "That's how it is," he said. And he began to sing, softly and achingly, "With what gladness have I the ladies kissed," as if recalling a time when he inhabited not the world of the Emma Lazarus but that of Lehar's Paganini.

  And what of Otto Korner? Why should he be immune from this scrutiny? His love for Magda Damrosch may be excused on the grounds of his youth. However ridiculous, in youth love may be excused, even applauded, as a stage now reached in human development, a mark on the scale that denotes awareness of others outside of the self. It may even be beautiful: the toothless gums of the infant are far different from those of the dotard. Of Meta, his first wife, he still chooses not to speak. Of his second wife he has perhaps already said too much. But how does his Contessa, that good woman, may she rest in peace, measure up to the Contessa in the Marriage of Figaro ?

  Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, arrived in Vienna in 1783. Let us rejoice that he did so and grant to that inscrutable Purpose the awe it deserves. For without his arrival at that place and at that time we would have no Figaro. Let us therefore not regret his apostasy, this Venetian Jew who became a Catholic, a priest, and a poet. For the goyim he remains a Jew, of course; and for the Jews, in view of his success, he is still a Jew anyway.

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  The name da Ponte, I have always supposed, alludes to the bridge he so joyfully trod out of the Ghetto, but a bridge is not limited to one-way traffic. Certainly he was not a very good Catholic, let alone a good priest. He was kicked out of Venice, in part for political reasons but also for his embarrassing carnal indiscretions. Celibacy was not in his genes; he was something of a Blum, if not quite a Don Giovanni. His sexual scandals were such as to rock even that city of libertines and rakes. In Byron's day they were still talking of him. (They kicked him out of Europe too, eventually, all the way to the New World, where he became, of all things, a professor of Italian at Columb
ia College and initiated a certain faculty tradition in matters of the heart that, it is rumored, persists to this day.) At any rate, he arrived in Vienna as librettist with Salieri's Italian Opera Company, and Salieri found him a sinecure as court poet. But what matters to us are the librettos he wrote for Mozart, and in particular, in view of our present focus, the libretto for the Marriage of Figaro.

  But Mozart himself was caught up at this time in love's vagaries, poor fellow, while scurrying about trying desperately to translate his genius into hard cash. Married to his inept Hausfrau, Constanze, he was nonetheless drawn to Anna Stor-ace, the English soprano, the Susanna of his opera's first and inglorius performance at the Burgtheater in 1786, the Nancy who urged him in vain to join her in London. He botched it, of course. In music, a genius; in life, one of the rest of us.

  Since, in the fields of Venus and her soft delights, Mozart and da Ponte were no more ennobled or ennobling than Hamburger or Korner or, yes, even Blum, to what may we attribute the grandeur of the Marriage of Figarol To genius, of course, and to the happy conflux in time and place of two such sensibilities. But to say so much is to explain without explaining. What precisely did genius and conflux achieve? Into the familiar form of opera buffa and the earlier plot-stuff of com-

  media delVarte, with its lords who made sexual advances toward girls of humbler station, these two amorous klutzes—Mozart and da Ponte—injected the serum of recognizable human experience and emotion. The comic material is subordinated to sharply realized characters, defined in part by da Ponte and in part by the individual tone and richness of Mozart's music.

  Here is the unexpected irony, the unfathomable paradox: to achieve grandeur, art must descend to the level of palpitating humanity; obversely, to achieve grandeur, palpitating humanity must ascend to the level of art.

  I WAS RIGHT about the beef-barley soup.

  The Red Dwarf is making a rapid recovery. Already he has discarded his cane. He paused beside my table in the dining room long enough to whisper, "Better we're not seen together for a while, comrade. Mum's the word." He put his finger to his lips, winked, and tottered off to sit in a corner by himself, leaving me with Blum and Sefiora Krauskopf y Guzman. Our table conversation was not memorable.

  Hamburger and La Perlmutter have yet to sign in. Perhaps they have eloped.

  THE EVENTS OF THIS MORNING have been so astonishing, so shocking, that I have not yet fully absorbed them. The letter from Rilke is as good as in my hands! am dizzy with excitement. And of course my system is again in turmoil: a flutter about the heart, a feverish itch beneath the skin, loose bowels. Let me state at once that Hamburger has solved the riddle of the charades. He is a true friend. I am bitterly ashamed of my doubts about him, my ill thoughts. Granted his peculiar habit of mind, his—how might one put it?—his linguistic disposition, the solution was child's play for him. How can one

  hesitate to ascribe his predilection for the coprological image, his Swiftian wit, to that greater Purpose whose lineaments I have from time to time descried? But Purpose aside, to Hamburger belongs all due credit: his, the love of truth; his, the searching intellect; his, the lifetime of preparation for this moment of triumph. But my mind is awhirl.

  The better to sort things out, for my sake as well as for yours, I shall start at the beginning, and as a kind of self-imposed penance, I shall omit nothing of my unutterable rudeness to him.

  I knocked on his door before breakfast. He was in the midst of shaving and clearly in excellent spirits.

  "Come in, Otto, old friend, come in. You've heard the news?

  "What news?"

  He looked at me coyly, his eyes gleaming above the shaving lather. With his left hand held floppily aloft, he made a few fencing passes at me with the razor in his right. "En garde!"

  I was in no mood for his japes. He tried again. "A little birdie didn't tell you something?"

  "For God's sake, Hamburger, you're a grown man. Talk like one."

  But he was not to be put down. "Never mind, in due course you'll know."

  "You had a pleasant weekend among the Hamptons literati? The autumn foliage et cetera were to your liking?"

  He was too far gone to notice my sarcasm.

  "Pleasant?" he chortled. "Yes, you could say pleasant."

  There he stood, wrapped in his elegant dressing gown of wine colored silk, his great girth shuddering with secret glee, the roguish expression on his thin face made all the more ridiculous by the globs of lather that still adhered to his cheeks.

  "Finish shaving," I said. "We've much to talk about."

  He waddled off to the bathroom, leaving its door open.

  "We'll talk over breakfast," he called. "I'm starving. Country air, I suppose."

  So that was it! No doubt after penetrating Hermione Perlmutter's final defenses, the old fool had proposed marriage. Ah, Hamburger, ah, Jumbo, Jumbo, so it was not the shifting of molars after all!

  "Shave," I could not control my impatience. He turned on the hot water, and while he shaved, he sang the "Ah, how funny!" aria from Die Fledermaus. Then he gargled, long and loud, with a sound that rose and fell, recognizable after a while as the same aria transposed to a new medium.

  He emerged from the bathroom clad only in his long Johns. "Ecce homo!" he said.

  Now it was my privilege to watch a Beau Brummel de nos jours prepare for the day. He stood at the open closet door, pondering. This? That? Perhaps this other?

  "What do you think of this tie, Otto?"

  I closed my eyes.

  "A moment, my dear sir, patience, the blink of an eye." And he began bum-bum-bumming his bathroom aria.

  At last he was ready, resplendent, refulgent. "What d'you say this morning we go out for breakfast, my treat? Not Goldstein's, of course. Wherever else you say. Who knows, perhaps over a second cup of coffee I might have something of interest to tell you."

  This was too much. " You might have something of interest? Ha! About your indecent weekend I can already guess, spare me the details. What is it with you, Hamburger? For days now I keep telling you I've something of considerable personal concern to discuss with you, something that touches me dearly, something—I don't exaggerate—that has driven me to distraction, and all you offer me is evasions: 'Sorry, I'm off to the

  movies,' 'Too bad, I'm going to the Hampton's.' What is this? Perhaps it's time for Korner and his problems to go elsewhere." I had of course brought the charades with me, and now I shook them in his face. "Perhaps you haven't time to look at these. Of course not. Well, why should I be surprised? After all, you owe me nothing. Forget it, never mind, it doesn't matter. By the way, congratulations on your engagement."

  Yes, to my eternal shame I went on at him like that. Poor Benno! I had pricked the bubble of his good cheer. Utterly bewildered by this unexpected and unfair assault, he dropped onto his bed—poof!—deflated, miserable.

  "Forgive me, Otto, forgive me, old friend."

  And so, having reduced him to sober and guilty attention, I told him about the stolen letter—at which news he took in sharply his breath—and handed him the charades.

  As he read them, the color left: his cheeks. His jaw dropped, and a haunted look came into his eyes. "Oh, my God!"

  "Who is it?"

  Hamburger passed his hand over his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, uttered a shuddering sigh.

  "Benno, who is it?"

  "Give me your hand." His own was trembling. "I want your word of honor you will leave this for me to take care of."

  "First tell me who stole the letter."

  "No, first your promise. If I tell you, you will do nothing, you will say nothing, you will leave it up to me. In twenty-four hours, thirty-six at the most, you will have your letter. But your word of honor, Otto."

  What could I do? "You have it."

  We shook hands solemnly.

  Once he told me the name, of course, the charades proved embarrassingly simple:

  Whoever tries to mouth the culprit's name Must end in
ordure to assign the blame.

  Answer: mouth-ordure-lip-shits.

  To give my first is sure to give offense, But may create a smile (in other sense). (1) Who does my second doubtless finds his ease, But even if a czar must bend his knees. (2)

  Answers: (1) lip; (2) shits. The third was the easiest of the three:

  The gap that stands in view twixt hip and tits Can soon be closed in rhyme by clever wits.

  Answer: hip-tits-lip-shits. And of course the couplet of the sonnet tells the same story:

  Look for the thief in Denmark's Elsinore; He's in the play, and dallying with his whore.

  Answer: Lipschitz! Lipschitz!! Lipschitz!!!

  Now, when more than ever I wanted to talk to him, Hamburger was anxious to be rid of me. Gone was the promise of a breakfast treat and a chat over a second cup of coffee.

  "As you can imagine, Korner, I have much to do. And before I act, I must think." He hurried me out of his room. At the door he took my hand again, his expression woebegone. "Remember, I have your word of honor. And remember this, too: an accusation is no proof of guilt."

  The door closed in my face before I could speak.

  And so I sit here in tumult, waiting. And I am besieged by questions. Why should Lipschitz have stolen my letter? Of what value can it be to him? Can one suppose he has even heard of Rilke? Can Tosca Dawidowicz have prompted him, that harridan who rules him by a twitching of her skirts? Or was he

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  motivated quite simply by his own malice? And the old question: who pointed the finger at him, however enigmatically? What was his motive? Also malice? Toward Lipschitz? Yes, it seemed so. Toward me? Who can doubt it? And what of Benno Hamburger, my true friend, my pillar of integrity? How mysteriously he is behaving! What does he know about all this? How does he propose to go about recovering the letter? And so on and on and round and round, until my head spins and I cannot find my breath.