Shlomo in Love

Ah, you've probably heard of my friend, Shlomo Einstein (long i, long e) the writer, the one who wrote the book about his hometown of Delphi, and used the real family names of some prominent nudniks, who later threatened to sue and the book was not allowed in the town libraries for months while private matters of litigation were discussed. Old Mrs. Glockomorra never forgave Shlomo for taking her family name in vain and for splitting the infinitive of pride with the arrow of insolence. Shlomo also later wrote the story "The Annuals of the Tabletops," which became the centerpiece of his famous collection, the book for which his name shall be mentioned with the great novellaists of his time, A PLAQUE OF DENTURES.

But here I don't want to talk about literary history, about the awards, and there were plenty in those days, or the struggle to make sure his books were carried nationwide, spread all over the hairy midsection of this great country, so that every rube down in Rubeville had access to PLAQUE or HENRY CABBAGE'S STRANGE MOLE or the children's stories, especially the wonderful ALLENODALE AND THE HEIMLICH MANEUVER. No, that's for the biographers, the literary critics, the highbrow sycophants of that rarefied world Shlomo inhabited, his New York friends, and I'm not jealous, may they live now with what they've done. I want to tell the story of one part of Shlomo Einstein's miserable life, one brief shining moment, when he was the best that he could be, and a little sunlight was let into the musty, strawcovered corner of his garret. I want to tell the story of Shlomo in love.

Shlomo, so the myth goes and so the life went, as if he were under some kind of ancient curse, cared about nothing but his typewriter, and even when his typewriter became a word processor and increased his WPM, he still had no time for anything that was real. He lived in a fairy world; he cavorted with the spectres of his own imagination the way most children entertain their peers. He was pixilated and he knew it. Though he could grasp a steaming hamburger in his clawlike hand and draw its essence into himself through his fine, pronounced nasal passages, and he could know that hamburger with all the heartiness of a gourmand, the food which fed him more nourishingly, the sustenance of his soul, was fairy food. The meal he could dream was as real to him, ok, more real to him, than that dripping meat and bun in his hand. So, he lived here with the rest of us and then again he didn't. I'm only telling it the way it was.

In his daily routine Shlomo accepted no phone calls except during the times he prescribed. Normally his lightweight plastic receiver resided in a dusty piece of pottery given him by his hometown artist and one time girlfriend Candy Knowledge. Ceremonially each afternoon about four he would fish out the tangled communication device and replace it in its cradle and proceed to make phone calls to the few people still left who were dear to him. (Sotto voce: Shlomo often remarked how close our exchange in Delphi is to 911.) These were the times of day when myself and other Delphians heard from our longlost friend, from our friend who had made good on his promise to take the seeds of this smalltown backwash and plant them in the jaded soil of New York and make it big. And if he never achieved the status of a Mailer or a Vidal or a Michener this was to his credit. Shlomo never compromised.

It was during one such afternoon phone call that I first had an inkling that something was different about Shlomo. There was a slight lilt to his normally Eeyoreish voice; there was a hint of hope in his damned-if-I-do-or-don't hangdogma. There was, as Shlomo would have put it, magic in the air.

Well, it all started earlier, I guess, at my own nuptials, when I wed the light of my life, whom you all know by now, but I don't want to steal her thunder any more than I want a free ride on Shlomo's airy coattails. For the wedding Shlomo had to make the trip south, a trip which always caused him inordinate consternation, and moreso this time because he was trying so hard to avoid seeing Candy, who had been spreading ugly stories about Shlomo's sexual performance or preference, even going so far as to link my name with some vague hints of depravity. The vindictive female was not a foreign creature to our writer-hero and one of many more complicated reasons he kept so dearly to his protective privacy.

What is the sound of a heart engaging? Is it the rumbleroar of an overheated chevy? A natural sighing like wind through the hibiscus bushes? Or is it a zen non-sound like one hand clapping or the eternal tree in the manless wilderness? Is it a long consonant with a catch on the end--a sort of Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn-g-gg--gggg? Who knows?

There was about Eve at this time of her life an aura of confidence blended haphazardly with her usual girlish vulnerability and her usual sexual heat. Even Shlomo was not immune though I had seen him stand up to stiffer tests, always brandishing his portable like a shield, using literature as an emotional prophylactic. So what was the difference on this cool spring evening in Delphi, the bookstore which served as my reception hall crowded with a This-Is-Your-Life throng, drinks in hand, an air of expectancy present which I perhaps mistook for the joy of seeing Bobo the Unmateable Gorilla (myself) on the brink of happiness? Maybe this was not my crowd, I thought. Maybe like it had been forever, like it forever more shall be, maybe it was Shlomo's crowd, Shlomo who worked an audience like a Catskills comedian, like a shill. Anyway, there stood Eve, like, well, the first woman, shyly edging over to Shlomo, who was entertaining a klatch of peers with a softshoe shuffle of self deprecation. She hit him blindside. She went into him like an injection. Shlomo, my Shlomo, loopy with love, his head, capped with corkscrew curls, spinning.

In Shlomo's short story, "The Leap" an elderly man discovers he can fly and is at first exhilarated with the power and mystery of his new gift, but then, in a typical Einsteinian twist, one of those bitter herbs his readers found so tasty, the old guy dies of a heart broken by the idea that maybe he had always had this ability and his life had been wasted. Now this is Shlomo the writer talking and it's dangerous confusing real life with literature (well, that's the message here isn't it) but there are indicators in the writings, signposts. Shlomo on the page implied Shlomo incarnate. Or, at least, this is what I believe.

The critics, those backbiting curs whose power is the power of the politician and hence corrupt, were for the most part kind to good Shlomo, though, I think you'd have to say, they misunderstood and therefore underestimated him. Some of the blurbs from his motley dustjackets stuck to him like tattoos; some he took to heart and these were mostly the misguided few. He couldn't live up to his press was the way he looked at it and in his relationships with women, mostly inchoate, mostly abortive never-got-off-the-grounds, he believed this was true also. He couldn't live up to his advance notice. At any rate, those blurbs: "Like a cross between Sholom Aleichem and Pigmeat Markham," "It's as if the Bowery Boys were doing King Lear," "If Franz Kafka had married Carol Baker Shlomo Einstein might be their offspring," and my favorite, "How about Woody Allen and Gertrude Stein?" These are some of the words with which the world embraced my friend. Shlomo: "I've gotten what I always wanted, to embarrass myself on a national level."

Eve had read the blurbs. Eve had read the books. She had a predisposition to fall in love with Shlomo and pledged a crush before she was physically introduced to him. Shlomo, unarmed, walked into this predisposition like a lamb, like a charming, even cocky, doomed lamb. Eve had a curve like a natural law, a deadman's curve. Shlomo only had Malamud, Bellow and Ozick. Shlomo only had a sheaf of publishing credits and a head full of unwritten stories.

Shlomo went back to Gotham after the wedding, with an unsatisfied longing beginning somewhere behind his hornrimmed glasses. It was coitus interruptus before the coitus. It was that horrible life-threatening feeling that an opportunity had passed, that a chance had been missed. Shlomo struck out and had never batted, etc. Anyway a series of phone calls ensued. Ma Bell was once again forced at gunpoint into the uncomfortable, unfair and ultimately unrewarding role of Cupid. Large bills were amassed. Promises were made through the thick and crusty fog of a thousand American miles. Heat out on the wire.

And that same wire brought that mysterious new quaver into my workspace one afternoon, that Shlomo-Lite. I almost didn't recognize the amplified voice, a heartiness which I would have presumed indecorous from that grey graveyard of a city in the north, a voice Shlomoic and not.

"If I were someone else I would say I am happy," the voice began.

"Shlomo?" I said.

"Yes and no."

"You've talked to Eve. I gather..."

"You know me too well. You've been through this before with me."

"Not to say," I said.

"Yeah, not to say we prefigure doom."

"Yeah."

Shlomo went on to wax romantic, a particularly charming side of Shlomo Einstein, let me be quick to say, against the proverbial grain though it may go. But we all always wished Shlomo the best and we all knew that Shlomo himself did not expect the best or even accept its anticipation. The love story, "The Anomaly that is Adam," from his first book, COURTESANS AND CRIBBAGE (Lost in America Press, 1983, OP) is a good example of the way in which our hero has been misunderstood, not only by the intelligentsia, from whom we don't expect much anyway, but by his hometown and those who were once closest to him. The story, about a street urchin who is transformed into an angel who falls in love with a butcher's daughter and must be transformed back into an urchin to keep his heart, is indicative of the tenderer side of my friend, a side forgotten in the press release that his reputation has become. The accepted truth about the man is the schnook story, the sadsack, the undeserving protozoa story, a little of which goes a long way. Shlomo also was one of the warmest fellow creatures many of us had ever known. I'll tell you this about that: it took this epiphanic romance to make Shlomo's sheepish heart bleat publicly, Mr. Hideaway becoming a delightful Dr. Heckle-and-Jeckle.

And so the fairy tale unfolded and the princess called me daily to update me and generally just to have a sounding board for her continual pronouncements of the charmed word: Shlomo. I grunted assent where necessary, snorted mild humor when appropriate. I loved to talk about my famous friend, I told her, as evidenced since by the 20/20 interview, the Tikkun memorial, the postmortem telephone calls which, if I do say so myself, I handled with grace and aplomb. Eve prattled on as if she had just bitten the apple. She gushed. And I was happy for my two friends, happy to be in their service, happy to be party to their being happy. Shlomo certainly deserved a little felicity, a salve for the flesh-loneliness that was his curse and the price he thought his due for the ability to work, to produce those tortured, celebratory stories. Months of scrotal agony for one "Abe and the Sea Wolf;" months of tearing at oneself for "Bertrand's Metempsychosis." It was a just transaction. But an occasional brief reprieve was allowable.

And every reprieve was brief for Shlomo; there was a warning going in, a sign at the door of his heart: abandon all hope, etc. Shlomo was a work, yes he was, as complex as an ecosystem and with the same mixture of serenity and fury. Despite the disclaimers Eve jumped with both feet and several other delicate body parts. Both participants seemed happy and smitten, weaving their own cosmos, at times oblivious to their surrounding world, at times eager to get at it, to go out and mix it up with anything life could lay out before them. Love is that enigmatic mixture of self-protective envelopment and bighearted expansiveness and Shlomo and Eve played both sides with all the abandon of the reborn. (This is of course tempered by the obstacles of distance and opportunity; much of this energy was disbursed over the telephone and, what visits there were, were forced and frenetic, as they attempted to pack a lifetime's worth of emotional expenditure into a few days or a week.) It was dizzying and it was exhilarating.

Shlomo was happy. He was happy, and even with reservations, he was, like the rest of us, made more human by love. He was madcap; he was merry.

The secret (not nearly so private as an outsider may suppose--anyone familiar with the territory Shlomo created would guess the inner agonies of our man) reality was Shlomo was living in terror. In his head, where he was trapped, there were demons: Doubt, Panic, Selfishness, and the overlord imp, Guilt. Shlomo was a man torn in two by his own dichotomy. The Body-Mind debate was played out in him with nuclear intensity; it was a battle to the death.

There is a calibrated deliberateness to disintegration, a natural will at work that wears things down. Love, like the sentience that created it, is entropic. So, one could say, to court this windup would seem meet and right, to recognize the end from the beginning, so to speak, would be the sane reaction to what is apparent to every man. Conversely, there is the school of thought that says, gather ye rosebuds while ye may. There is credibility in both sides, I'd be the first to say.

So Shlomo's warnings were fruitless. The affair blossomed despite them, April led to May, May to June, and June went ahead and slid into July. And the heat without and the heat within, spurious and oppressive, set hearts aflame, boiled the lifestuff, humors fumed, and abscesses only made the heat grow fonder.

It was after one trip northward that Eve showed up on my doorstep, canarylike, full of herself, glowing the way women do when they are being irresistibly happy. A smile that starts deep within them blossoms on their faces like a roseate flush. And this is what I had to deal with.

"Eve," I said, genuinely pleased to see her, even if so contented.

"Hello," she said. "Well," she sighed.

"It was a good trip, I'm guessing."

"Oh, I'm hopeless. I'm smitten all over again. He's so damned charming, isn't he? Talk about him to me."

"Yes. Yes, he is. You know he's one of my favorite human beings. You want a softdrink?"

"Something light. And the sex."

"Yes," I called back over my shoulder. I had no reason to take this as a barb, as barbaric as this kind of conversation seemed to me. I was at a point in my life where I was fairly satisfied, in the physical sense of the word. I had married a young woman who had the proclivities of the badlands primates, and it generally kept me sated and uncovetous.

"Oh, you know him. He's frustrating and childish and obsessed and possessed and just plain goofy but under it all he's so sweet. He gave me the dead-end speech again."

"Hmph. That's Shlomo. My dear, you've just nutshelled him."

"Am I a fool? Am I just being self-destructive again?"

Eve's past was as checkered as a bad zoot suit, a subject we were comfortable discussing, one which, you might say, made up our friendship.

"Oh, Eve. Don't ask me to pronounce against my friend--"

"No. No, I wouldn't. It's just--"

The silence which followed was bristly, a prickly heat of incomprehensibility. Something was in the room with us and it was something that we were powerless in the face of. There was a demonic stillness. Eve's ebullience had eddied down into a rapidly spiraling pool of dread. The glow was dying and it was my fault. I can't explain what happened.

She was in my arms and then she was in my bed. God knows neither of us expected it. And afterwards the awkwardness that replaced the intimacy was appropriate and we both knew this was something that would never be mentioned again. We both thought we knew this. It wasn't that important.

A month or so of silence ensued. I heard from neither my famous friend to the north or his partner in folly, who lived a mere mile from my abode. I was busy myself with my wife, you know of her achievements--she let me sit in on her conferences and accompany her on her field research--and also with my own meager job which is unassuming and does not fit into the scheme of this narrative, being an exegesis of love, for the most part, and a biographical piece only secondarily. I had almost forgotten to think about the high wire act two of my dearest pals were during this time performing. The abyss which yawned beneath them momentarily seemed benign, if indeed an abyss can seem so.

The phone call which shattered the peace came at midnight, that most obscure hour, that hour of witchery and bad faith, the bleeding of one day into another, time's portent, time's mark. The ringing of the phone sounded like flesh tearing, something prehistoric, except that it was so present. My wife, who sleeps like a chimney, rolled away from me as I picked up the receiver.

There is an unpublished Shlomo Einstein short story (well, actually it did appear in 1978 in an obscure Southern rag called Neptune's Sputum, but I'd assume Shlomo would rather forget this early publishing credit) entitled "Nobody Move," in which the telephone is referred to as "the devil's instrument," and indeed figures in the doom visited upon the main character, Salvador Limpleaf, a bungling alchemist. I'd go further to say that the telephone could be traced in Einstein's work as a leitmotif, like, say, bird imagery in Yeats. Some ambitious young grad student, looking to make a name for him or herself, in that cesspool called Literary Scholarship, could do worse than considering the Einstein/telecommunications theme. I'm just saying.

So, the telephone rang. My wife turned. I picked it up.

"Bastard," a raspy voice said.

"Sh-shlomo?" I whispered in return.

"I'd a never expected it. Not in a million years."

The conversation ran for a few more exchanges before Shlomo rang off in anger. The only reason I point this out is that there are some who might make a case out of this, might exaggerate the importance of this nocturnal tête-à-tête. So I conceal nothing; it is not my intention to obfuscate. My life, as Shlomo used to say, is an open book.

It was during this same time that the release and resultant neglect of Shlomo Einstein's "negro novel," as it has come to be called, occurred. This book, JUJU BE, so many years in preparation, which addressed the racial situation in the South, in a manner both comic and compassionate, was never attacked openly for condescension, but the intimation of the few reviews there were, was that Shlomo had overstepped the invisible line. Write what you know, apparently, is not just advice but a warning. No trespassing.

It took Shlomo seven years to write that book, the same time Joyce spent on ULYSSES, and you can imagine what would have happened to that fragile Irishman if his magnum opus had not been so much reviled as ignored.

The review that ran in the Delphi Oracle was not bad, it just wasn't a rave, and, let's be frank, a rave is what Shlomo expected was his due. Not just for the labor which produced this particular novel, not just for the place on the literary map where he placed Delphi, but for a lifetime growing up in that godforsaken podunk where culture is the primetime TV schedule. For making Delphi his Yoknapatawpha, for caring enough to leave and recreate his hometown after his own image, Shlomo Einstein felt, and rightfully so, underappreciated. So, when the local town crier had a few minor gripes about JUJU, there were eggshells to walk on.

I called Shlomo to read him the review over the phone. I wanted him to hear it from me. He grunted a greeting but I knew his moods and breezing past rather than taking anything personally I began the reading of the Oracle's critique. Halfway through, after a particularly sharp section decrying some half-baked sociological gutter talk, Shlomo abruptly hung up. I tried numerous times to call back but the phone must have somehow gotten shorted out. It was my last contact with my best friend, Shlomo Einstein.

Oddly enough it was Candy Knowledge who told me the sad tale of Shlomo's last days, the story now so familiar it has entered national lore in the same way Hemingway's shotgun has, or Berryman's wave: the leap from the book depository (the second most famous book depository in the twentieth century), the crumpled love poem in the pocket of his derelict's dusty jacket (Shlomo's only attempt at verse to my knowledge), the body not found for days because it landed in an abandoned ice cream truck. Candy's first words when I picked up the phone were, "Well, your lover has left you for good."

Eve was nowhere to be found. Rumor had it that she had headed north when she first heard about Shlomo's dark leanings, his low food intake, his sleeplessness, his cursing his muse (this last the most serious indication of dementia), and she just disappeared. I believe (though I am alone in this particular theory, the prevalent tone seeming to be more pessimistic) she went on into Canada, to revisit some of her and Shlomo's romantic getaway spots (The Humbert and Dolores Roadway Inn in Ottawa, for example) and I can picture her there, sitting in some cheap Toronto restaurant, (cf. the uncollected Einstein short story, "Oh No, No Not the Vista," which details this trip in a comic picaresque style that is unlike most of Shlomo's published works) scribbling in her battered notebook (suddenly she fancied herself a writer) and occasionally sighing as her gaze took in the frosty interior of the middle distance, and discerning there my friend’s goggled visage, winking from Valhalla, a message in his manner now, a message heretofore in life untransmitted, or at best garbled, his pop-eyes saying, "I love you. I love you all."

Well, anyway that's the way I see it. (And much of what I say will be corroborated when W.W. Norton releases SHLOMO EINSTEIN: THE COLLECTED TELEPHONE MESSAGES [24.95, Date not set]). Shlomo's gone and I can't bring him back, nor do justice to his memory. But the point is, and this is the point, I blame New York for Shlomo Einstein's demise. I blame those ostentatious eggheads for filling our poor homeboy with dreams, for not being there when their promises came to naught, when the caviar they stuffed him with turned rank and sour. Shlomo should have stayed home where his grapes were ripe, where expectations are as small as the screens in our largest movieplex. Shlomo is gone and I blame them.

Shlomo is gone and I blame them. From here in my one room efficiency, where I moved after the divorce, here where the ghosts are thick, and where, late at night, in the light from the refrigerator door, I can see a faint outline which may be an angel, a seraph Shlomo-sent, an angel from the imagination which drove my angelic friend.

In the Shlomo Einstein story, "Net," a man steps off the ledge of a thirteen story building and, rather than plummeting to the pavement in a sensational mash of bones and flesh, floats gently earthward, slowly spiraling downward, buffeted by dark winds, held aloft in a dreamy semi-wakeful state, while streams-of-consciousness revolve around his fanciful head, telling a story about his life and what it has meant, seeing it, perhaps for the first time, as a whole thing, as a maybe not perfectly rounded but nevertheless complete composition, everything fitting, even the awkward parts, even the pain. It ends as his feet touch gently to the sidewalk and he walks away.