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Chosen People
by Lisa Zeidner
Published in Tin House, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2000
B.J. liked to pick up women at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. He liked
to choose one, track her reactions to the cattle cars and heaped cadavers,
and approach after the tour of the carnage, when she emerged, dazed and
blinking, into the tastefully solemn Hall of Remembrance.
Imperfectly shaven in a leather jacket the supple brown of a chocolate
Lab, B.J. could have been a resistance fighter. A five o'clock shadow of
danger combined with courtliness: he could have been a count moonlighting
as a pilot, because trying times demand trying measures. Shy behind wire
rims, his eyes suggested that love was a brilliant weed that could sprout
from the cement of the world's brutality.
This was not untrue. Even in the camps, people must have found crevices
of time and space in which to have sex. To stay alive, you must hang on
to desire.
B.J. liked Jewish women. Not that he had any burning desire to marry
one again. Pale but not, generally, pasty, their long faces, framed by dark
hair, were appealingly out-of-time, someone else's ancestral daguerreotypes.
Some were jumpy as whippets, but he could enjoy that in controlled doses;
could bolt one down like absinthe or Turkish coffee.
B.J. himself was a Southern boy a Bobby Joe, in point of fact,
though he'd never own up to that here, or to the equally trite initials.
For Holocaust museum purposes, he was Rob. The accent was not a problem.
An advantage, even. For the women he followed the trim asses of were not
the ones who came to this shrine with a holy sense of belonging. On the
contrary, he wanted the ones who could not accept a man like their fathers,
but whose rage and ambivalence were so deep, so unruly, that they would
never be so obvious as to date, say, a black bongo player with,dreadlocks
who plays for change in the subway. Rob is an architect, they could huff.
He was not even circumcised. Of course that would not generally be evident
until later. Likewise, the women could not know, when informed of his profession,
that he was a failed architect (was there, really, any other kind?) A low-level
CADD operator, detailer of hideous, derivative, squat strip malls and office
parks, whose work day offered little more outlet for creativity than your
average dataentry clerk for a credit-reporting bureau. Despite the reality,
"architect" as a profession still managed to sound dashing. Further
it gave him and the women something to discuss, since everyone knew that
the architecture of the Holocaust museum was supposed to be interesting.
B.J. did not tell the women how much he disliked the architecture, and
not merely out of professional jealousy, this being the kind of project
he himself would never enjoy, despite having dutifully learned to hash-sling
phrases like "conceptual parti" in grad school. He loved bridges
and arches, steel and brick, thought them luscious and noble; he resented
the materials themselves being symbolically linked with the Third Reich.
He even had a mental bumper sticker to sum up his objection to the unfair
bad-reputation-by-association: Stainless steel didn't kill Jews. Nazis did.
His ex-wife's brother whom he still saw, since Mike was still
his physician, and his friend was the only person he had told about
his use of the venue. Mike got "a kick" out of B.J. and considered
it brilliantly subversive to hit on women in front of a portentously enlarged
photo of Kristalinacht rather than, say, a curvy Matisse nude. B.J. did
not find this praise condescending, since Mike was far more complicated
than he seemed. He too had married outside his class and faith, suffering
the scorn of his family. The men shared a conviction that miscegenation
not only produced better and better-looking human beings, but was the very
cornerstone of progress and civilization. Look at the English their
fine, refined race begot by wave after wave of invasion.
"You guys can't possibly believe that," B.J.'s ex-wife, Elaine,
had scoffed, at the Thanksgiving dinner close to a decade ago when the topic
had come up. "It's such kindergarten bullshit. You're actually proposing
history as a nice-nice Rainbow Coalition, perfectly balanced and harmonious,
like some Pepsi ad?"
"Not harmonious," Mike had shot back, "but definitely
vive la difference. And there's scientific evidence for it, too. All those
studies where they ask women to sniff the armpits of worn men's shirts,
see who they want to screw. They like the B.O. most different from their
own. The nose knows the gene pool wants to vary up its act. Unless
you're Amish."
"God, you're a dolt," Elaine had huffed. Mike was the little
brother. He had not yet finished medical school. His brand-new girifriend
and wife-to-be, a placid, fine-boned WASP, had looked alarmed during this
exchange; as soon as was polite, she'd left to busy herself in the kitchen.
B.J. himself had played the impressionable newcomer at one point, the trembling
hick right out of Rocky Horror Picture Show, witnessing the brutality of
the family's wit. Elaine had eventually remarried a nice, ambitious Jewish
stock-market guy who served on the board of directors of many significant
Manhattan cultural institutions, condescending to people like B.J. on a
daily basis. When her first child was born, she'd begun to keep kosher,
which had shocked B.J. deeply. The only explanation he could devise was
that she needed an excuse to design a kitchen with many, many different
cabinets and preparation areas, but Mike said that it was very common for
people to discover their devout inner children when they became parents.
B.J. stood by what they'd said. One thing you must hand to sex: it is
democratic. Aside from whips and chains, studs and black leather, or movies
where Nazi soldiers snatch their snatch from the line of the doomed, sex,
like death, is a great equalizer. An ass, grabbed, knows no race or place.
Paradoxically, however, sex renders you more vulnerable to falling in love,
and love returns you to the dangerous myth of individuality. The conviction
that a lifesay, your owncan matter in the great meat grinder of history.
This is what B.J. contemplated as he watched footage of emaciated bodies
being cleared away by bulldozer. Someone once wanted to kiss, solely, each
one of those mouths. Each tongue, each tooth connected. To commit a sexual
act in the face of death was therefore not sacrilege, but sanctimony.
"What we have tried to do," the architect was quoted as saying
in Progressive Architecture, "is to construct symbolic forms
that in some cases were very banal, ought to be banal, and in other cases
are more abstract and open ended." No shit, Sherlock. Banal summed
up neatly, for B.J., the museum's elevator. Once you surrender your timed
pass to a uniformed guard, you take an identification card that "tells
the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust" and board
a somber elevator-steel, of courseto deliver you to the exhibitions. People
face forward and fold their hands before them, reverent as churchgoers,
but their eyes are avid, awaiting the horrors above. When you are an American,
confident that the worst thing likely to ever happen to you is to be trapped
in an elevator for several hours with sweaty strangers, you take amusement-park
rides, bungeejump, watch disaster movies about airplanes or high-rises.
A pickpocket could work very efficiently in the Holocaust museum elevator.
That would be amusingly craven. The elevator often made B.J. think of one
of his nephew's Nintendo 64 games. 'Yah-poo!" Super Mario exclaims
as he jumps from platform to platform above quicksand, abysses.
Sometimes B.J. found her right there in the elevator. It wasn't appearance
that drew him so much as movement. Something swift would twitch in her:
a pang of pre-lunch hunger or need to look down at her new shoes. Exactly
twice, women had already been taking his measure. (He had not lied to Mike
about his small success rate at this enterprise, nor was it his fault that
to Mike, still married, any ratio of call to response was impressive.) Those
women were, not surprisingly, among the willing. Mandy, recovering from
a breakup, sweetly timid, then immediately, skipping afterglow, accusatory.
Like reliving his entire marriage in time-lapse. Ildiko, tourist from Budapest,
zesty as Popeye. Generally B.J. did not gravitate toward tourists. Ideal
as they'd be logistically (with, even, their own hotel rooms), B.J. could
not be accused of wanting to carve the names of his conquests on a commemorative
wall. He fully expected to marry again, and this certainly was more likely
with someone he could meet for dinner by Metro than with Anna from Amsterdam.
Still, .a he was ready to go where love led him.
Wasn't one of the Holocaust's lessons that you must be willing to leave
your Picassos on the wall and bail? People deluded themselves that in the
Jews' place they would have bravely boarded the ship at the first sign of
trouble, but that is merely the safety of hindsight. There was no Vietnam
Museum on the Washington Malltoo much ambiguity. Better to bemoan cartoon
Nazis in their armbands.
Once you got off the elevator, the hallways were designed to chunnel
you through the exhi bitions, but here, as on the highway, people rudely
passed. Most of the women who appealed to B.J. dawdled behind their companions
if they had them, spending longer than usual on something less obvious than
the Auschwitz room, where people can elbow each other t rubberneck at the
crematoriums. They were in front of the huge photo of the fifteen thousand
pounds of human hair (think of all the wigs, B.J. once heard someone note,
that hair could have made for the women of Brooklyn's Orthodox community),
or even poring over the guest register near the gift shop ("This really
sucks, man," one teenager had written. "Love, Beavis and Butthead").
The very young women, with their vacant expressions and }lowriding jeans
over cloddish shoes, did not much appeal to him. You couldn't blame them
for not knowing the history of their grandparents' war, but B.J. felt himself
way too jaded for the kind of dewy eyed exploration a woman that young would
demand. He was no Casanova; he brought to bed all of his dashed hopes; sex,
he knew even as he felt himself flush from pleasure at a trim hip, pursed
lip, or balletic walk, would disappoint him as had everything else, and
this disappointment was not something Prozac could cure, though Mike had
suggested it once, casually.
Only an idiot, B.J. believed, would not be depressed. Arms and clitorises
were being chopped off all over the globe, in what was generously called
the Third World but was really the Ninth or Tenth, by preteens with Uzis
who made the Gestapo look like Cub Scouts what exactly was that lesson
the Holocaust was supposed to have taught us? while in the home of
the brave and the free, Commerce had triumphed so totally that even museums
were voyeuristic entertainment centers. In all fairness, the architecture
of the Third Reich was perfectly tasteful an updating of the
very neoclassicism that had inspired the Washington Mall. Whereas the "tasteful"
Holocaust museum gave away, as party favors, passports of genuine Jews!
Please turn page at end of 4th poor, the instructions offered, to help people
get into the spirit! The whole country one gigantic shopping mall, B.J.
himself a humble manservant.
That Saturday he had failed to engage a sultry, knock-kneed woman in
the Hall of Remembrance. Her blue-black, frankly artificial hair was cropped
close, like a camp inmate's or Mia Farrow's in Rosemarys Baby. She'd spent
a long time in the Resistance section, one of B.J.'s favorite haunts, squinting
at the pullquote about Irene Gut Opdyke, who saved eighteen people by playing
mistress to a major in Tarnopol. At the end of the exhibitions B.J. zeroed
in. But she would not even look at him, even though she was lost and impatient,
in search of something. Her boyfriend, it turned out. B.J. venomously witnessed
their reunion kiss.
The museum had installed a container for recycling the identification
cards, since it had become embarrassing to have the sad histories of dead
Jews littering the grass outside as people left. B.J. watched now, mesmerized,
as a black child of about ten removed the bubble gum from his mouth, smashed
it between the pages of his passport, and gleefully dropped the passport
in the recycling container. You were not even allowed to note, anymore,
that a person was black.
"Charming," someone said, at his side, in an accent so close
to his own that it had to be Georgia? Tennessee? But tempered by college
and Manhattan? She was all in black. A trim, blondish, heavily freckled
woman. "Just the spot where I'd take a kid. But hey, as we all know,
slavery was much, much worse. 'Course l'm not allowed to say that, being
a plantation owner and all. Guess what? Slavery isn't new. Ask the Greeks.
The potato famine wasn't all that much fun either, and let me ask you: Do
you know your ancestors' names? Can you trace your lineage right back to
the king? Who has their own names, in this country? Smith? Taylor? I'm surprised,
by the way, that you like her," and here she jerked her head toward
the jet-black-haired woman. "Seems a little . . ." She stared
at B.J., challenging.
"Come here often?" she asked.
He wondered how long she had been watching him. Had he actually been
stalked? He had not noticed her at all, anywhere, which, given his vigilance,
seemed impossible. The way she had just laid her political cards on the
table to a stranger it seemed bold enough to qualify as deranged,
although her posture (arms folded, head tucked chinward) seemed guarded
enough. What made her suspect he was a reasonable recipient for un-politically
correct invective? Did he look, despite the Oliver Peoples specs and cool
shoes, like a good ole boy?
"So what do you think?" he asked, making a sweep with his hands
to indicate the room.
Her eyes registered surprise, which she choked off. She had not recognized
him as a co-Confederate until he spoke. On what basis, then, had he been
selected? Bachelorhood alone?
"Thought I just said," she answered. "I just want to make
it known, however: Mass murder is a bad thing. I'm totally against it. Slavery,
too. Extremely poor idea."
"Of the architecture, I mean."
She sighed. She drew his attention downward to the point of one of her
ankle boots, which she now aligned, in a mildly parodic ballet position,
with the grout joint on one of the triangular granite floor tiles. "Triangles,"
she said. "Mind you, I don't have anything against triangles. A nifty
change from right angles. But is it supposed to mean something? Okay, a
Jewish star I understand it's pointy but to have the edges look
threatening, like ice picks: I don't get it. I mean . . . why?"
That was the moment when B.J. knew he could fall in love.
"Have you seen the famous sharp-edged building corner of Pei's addition
to the National Gallery?" he asked.
She nodded. The nod might have meant she had, or had not. He went on.
"A thirty-degree angle in Tennessee marble. Technical feat, no doubt
about it. Everybody needs to come up and say, Bet that was hard to do, then
stroke it, so the entire expensively produced and elegant joint is all worn
down, turned black."
"Care to show me?" she asked.
B.J. realized that he was breathing hard, from the effort of having to
evaluate her all at once rather than surreptitiously, in stages. She made
a sweep like the one he'd done, about the room, to show her willingness
to be inspected by Quality Control. But the erstwhile object of B.J.'s affection,
with her tiny silver backpack and her galoot boyfriend, was ready to leave,
taking a path that demanded their inserting themselves right between B.J.
and this new woman. B.J. recognized, now, the error of his ways. Blue-hair
suddenly seemed ridiculous, Olive Oyl-ish, clearly inferior to this woman
with her pageboy, in her priestly black, who was "neat as a pin,"
as his mother would say, except for the random splatter art of the freckles.
B.J. was not particularly attracted to her. But that wasn't the point.
Or rather, that was exactly the point. What do you know about people by
how they look' We're all supposed to be enlightened enough to declare, Nothing.
Phrenology not science at all. Red hair no more makes someone "fiery"
than freckles make them "spunky." And yet. And yet. We all make
our instantaneous judgments. He had been selected, here, on the basis of
something. He wanted to trust her enough to see where things led.
He knew that his next gesture was important, and he didn't have long
to invent it. He was thrilled to have to act with no facts. He looked at
her gravely. He shifted position so that he could offer his arm. "I'll
show you," he said. Wordlessly, with a wince of shyness, she took the
arm with both of hers in a quaint way that seemed to require long white
gloves.
B.J. had a flash of this encounter's ultimate position in the line of
encounters he had enjoyed here. For this to be the Final Solution to his
thus-far failed personal life, a life as blind and botched as history itself,
shouldn't he and this woman find a handicapped bathroom somewhere, go at
it? Any old dark semi-private alcove. A tour of the
Holocaust museum made small spaces seem claustrophobic: the bunk beds
at Auschwitz like the head-to-foot sardine layout of the galleys of slave
ships; Anne Frank's minuscule apartment, shared with strangers, so she couldn't
even find a private place to write small in her diary. But in love, small
spaces are bowers. Secret gardens. Her hands around his arm were so thrilling
that the fantasy he'd been mentally playing out, mentally bragging about
later to Mike which involved, for some reason, her having her period,
them not caring dissolved into a powerful feeling of safety.
They would come back here together always, he knew. A private ritual.
Mike would be best man. He would take some flak in his family. For all B.J.
knew, she would not like it much either. "Hey," he could imagine
himself saying, "I like Mike."
Her name, he was about to learn, was Rebecca, and she was one of a handful
of Jews to grow up in North Carolina, where her father was: an architect.
An architect who had been actively involved with the civil-rights movement
in the fifties and was now fixated on his hatred of the Nation of Islam,
which had actually accused his ancestors of perpetrating the slave trade.
The sundry straggling colonial Jews with capital to invest, rather than
the Portuguese! When it came time for B.J. to tell Rebecca that he was an
architect, her response would be, "I'm so sorry for you." When
he tried out the line, Funny, you don't look Jewish, she'd laugh. Her mother
was a Georgia belle, awakened by love into political conscience. Her maternal
grandfather and B.J.'s grandfather (either of his would have done, but only
one was alive) could sit together at the wedding, emboldened by champagne
to admit to each other that they're not entirely sure the Holocaust ever
happened. This museum was unlikely to change their minds: they were not
so old and naive as to not know that photographs could be rigged. Even old
black-and-white footage.
'Wait," Rebecca said. They had not moved, B.J. realized, from the
recycling container. It had taken only a second for him to spin out this
whole premonition of their joint destiny their lives flashing before
his eyes.
"Shall we?" Rebecca asked.
They found their identification cards, in unison checked the last pages.
Both his and her tour guides to the museum had survived their separate death
camps, emigrated to the United States in 1947. B.J. pointed out that their
twosome might have met on the ship. She retilted her chin in a way that
seemed to suggest a lot, most of it contradictory: that this meeting was
indeed fated, as meant-to-be as if it had happened on Ellis Island; that
she might not stick around for more than lunch. They dropped the identification
cards in the container for reincarnation and once more Rebecca took his
arm.
B.J. had this thought as her hand landed. She's the kind of woman who
will cry when she comes. Never at the standard sentimental things, though.
Never at dead heroes in movies. For that second he enjoyed the absolute
conviction of the premonition, as strong as his belief that they would marry:
that her strong shudders would so deeply move her, she would weep. He was
wrong, actually, but by the time he discovered he was wrong, it would no
longer matter.
On the way out, Rebecca did something that made B.J. so fond of her it
caused him a sharp pain in his gut. As they walked past a brushed stainless
steel railing, she had to release one of her arms to touch it. As a boy
B.J. had stroked everything he passed on the walk home from school, drawn
to each new texture, so that his hands and nails were always filthy, cut,
and splintered. Maybe all boys did this. The ones who didn't stop became
architects. His ex-wife had berated him about just this habit: Stop touching
things! But the architect's daughter put down just the pads of her fingers
on the steel, as if blessing it, or savoring the material's coolness.
"Pretty," she said.
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