The author posing for his first novel. What he will gain in readership, he will soon lose in hair.
A BOOK FULL OF DYSFUNCTION and hammer-armed assassins needs an adult in the room. Someone has to enter from stage left, way left, and tell our deluded hero, You can’t live like this anymore. Someone with two ounces of wisdom and at least as many of kindness needs to change our hero’s life. How romantic it would be if said person was a willowy American blonde or a sharp-tongued Brooklyn girl. Nothing doing here. We all know who it’s going to be.
But, oh, thank God there is someone. No, let me be emphatic: Thank God there is him.
When I graduate from Oberlin, John is at the center of my life and the center of my abuse. I hate him so much for being from a prosperous American family, for being older than me, for being generous to Maya, whom he’s installed in the first decent apartment of her life and who, thanks to his kind offices, no longer has to whip businessmen inside a Manhattan dungeon. And I hate the little muscle under his left eye, the one that twitches when we watch something sad at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the one that allows the sheen of liquid to coat the bottom lid, the one that shows that he is human and aware of the pain of others. That, more than anything else, is unforgivable to me and to my origins. So I respond by sabotaging his documentary, by offering him nothing but clownish songs and stupid accents whenever he flips on the camera. I want to punish John for trying to see beyond my goatee and spiteful tongue. I want to make him pay for his curiosity and his love.
But despite this hatred, I want his life, too. I pass by the Frank Stella shop on Columbus where John gets some of the shirts he wears effortlessly to places like Le Bernadin or a production of Mamet’s Oleana. To me, Frank Stella, this old-fashioned middle-class shop, looks like nothing less than a well-lit jewel box. Just the simplicity of it, the lack of pretension, the lack of Stuyvesant striving to be the best. If only my eye could twitch and cry. If only the silent coldness inside me could dissipate. If only my apartment had green silk curtains, a 1920s burgundy mohair couch, and a letter from Bette Davis thanking me for sending flowers when we stayed at the same hotel in Biarritz. If only I could drink a few glasses less each day.
When I come home after a day of paralegaling to discover the world’s biggest water bug flapping around my studio, I call John and beg him to come over and kill it. He won’t, but it’s a relief to be able to call him and tell him something no one else must know. That I’m scared.
John is generous enough to go over dozens of drafts of my first novel, for which I reward him with five years of derision. “The Challah character [read: Dominatrix Maya] needs more development,” he tells me.
“Well, what do you know?” I say, seething like a small samovar on his plush mohair couch. “You’re just a television writer. You’ve never written a novel.” And what I’m really telling him is: Why do I have to work so hard, why do I have to rewrite this fucking novel over and over again just to get a little bit of your praise? Why don’t you just adore me like my grandmother did?
When I’m with my real parents, I regale them with funny tales of Rich American John—“A woman comes every week to clean his apartment and he pays her handsomely!”—a profligate, silly individual whom we may all safely look down upon. And yet, despite his Americanness, or perhaps because of it, we also respect him. At Thanksgiving family dinners he tries to steer them from their dreams of law or accountancy for me, telling them stories of his own years as a television writer. “And how much money did you make from this writing business?” my father wants to know.
He tells them. “Ooooooh.” It is a fine figure. “Gary’s very talented,” John says to my parents. “He can make it as a writer.” And I blush and wave it away. But I am thankful. A soft-spoken American whose apartment my parents and I have estimated to be worth close to a million 1998 dollars is my advocate.
Later, I realize that just as I tried to puff up my family’s barely existing wealth when I was in high school, I am attempting to make John richer and more generous in the eyes of my parents, my friends, myself. I am trying to make John the parent who would take me right out of Solomon Schechter. The parent who would say, “We can do better than this.” The truth is, John’s father did not own half of Salem, Oregon, the glittering state capital from which John hails, as I always claim to others. He owned a hardware store. The Upper West Side apartment, bought in the mid-1990s, cost John two hundred thousand dollars, not one million. The single Armani blazer he owned and bequeathed to me was hardly the Gatsbyesque wardrobe I made it out to be. And even those trips to Le Bernadin or La Côte Basque were rare. More often than not there was sugar-cane shrimp at the Vietnamese joint around the corner from his house. But, honestly, who cares? I was just happy to be with him.
No, I want the safety of John’s imaginary riches to rescue me from my mother’s $1.40 Kiev-style chicken cutlet. “When you have to pay for everything, you will know that life is hard,” my mother says the night she sells me the stack of butter-stuffed poultry and a roll of Saran Wrap for twenty dollars even.
And I realize then the dissonance between my parents and John. We’re in America, and, frankly, life is just not that hard. She needs to make it harder. For her. For me. Because we never really left Russia. The orange Romanian furniture, the wood carving of Leningrad’s Peter and Paul Fortress, the explosive Kiev-style cutlets. All of it means one thing: The softness of this country has not softened my parents.
At the dinner table in Little Neck on the Night of the Cutlets, John and my parents are discussing what to inscribe on my grandmother’s gravestone. A year has passed since she died.
My father wants to write the English translation of a Russian inscription, which translates roughly as “Always mourning son.”
“But you won’t always be mourning,” says John. “You’ll always miss her, but you won’t be mourning.”
My father looks mildly horrified by John’s pronouncement. He’ll always miss her? What kind of American bullshit is this? His mother has died, so he has to literally be the always mourning son.
My mother has another suggestion for the gravestone. “Always struggling son.” She explains for the benefit of our American guest: “Gary’s father thinks he has to struggle. He has to feel this pain forever. Some people”—meaning our kind—“always want to feel guilty.” She comes up with a few more gravestone inscriptions. “Always painful mourning.” “Constantly painful mourning.”
My father will take John up to his monkish attic space to show my friend the lay of his land. “And here I have my Sony radio. And here is some Chekhov and Tolstoy. And here are Pushkin’s letters.” How happy I am to see the two most important men in my life talking to each other, being chums across the distance of time and culture. That one term, Sony radio, is enough to make me cry cutlet-dense filial tears. John is doing it again; he’s softening my family for me.
Finally, outdoors in his overgrown beefsteak tomato and cucumber garden, the sun setting behind him, my father speaks into John’s camera: “When Gary was six years old he was running on the street, kissing me, hugging me. Now he doesn’t want to hug me, he thinks it’s not necessary. But I need this. I feel lost now. Not only because I don’t have my mother anymore, but because nobody needs me so much like she needed me.”
John and I talk about our parents all the time, me only half listening, or quarter listening, to his stories, him immersed in mine. He points out what I sometimes can’t see through both my rage and my love (at a certain point, the two have become indistinguishable): They paid for my college; they bought me my new teeth so that I could smile. If his father, a successful businessman in Salem, Oregon, could worry about payment at a one-dollar parking lot, what can be said of my mother, a woman born in the year after the Siege of Leningrad was broken?
Empathy is the first part of this parental program.
And then, a managed distance.
The years roll by. 1999. I am dating Pamela Sanders, weeping at the presence of Kevin and his powerful woodworking tools. My novel keeps going through draft after draft. Somebody has to be blamed for all this and since I can’t rise up against either my parents or Pamela, it will have to be John.
For years I’ve been trying to squeeze him dry. To my friends, who never meet him, he is the Benefactor, aka Benny. The thousands of dollars he’s been lending me have been flowing into my caviar party fund. Several times a year, my two-hundred-foot studio is crammed with about as many celebrants, who gorge on the finest champagne and silver-gray beluga that I’ve sourced from a questionable Brighton Beach store. The reason for these parties is always vague. My hairdresser is moving to Japan. My hairdresser is moving back from Japan. “Caviar courtesy of my benefactor!” I shout over the MC Solaar and the happy giggling of my Osaka hairdresser. “Somebody out there really loves me!”
And then it ends. And then John has had enough.
Before the advent of the electronic in-box, I manage to save nearly all the letters and postcards that come my way. A sensible gift of habit, I believe, from my mother, who throws nothing out. Or, perhaps, the inheritance of a totalitarian culture where everything will be used as evidence. In any case, John’s letters to me are at the top of the pile. By the time he’s had enough of me, they are as long as twenty-four pages and they render the truth of my life in those days better than I can.
You are not a child and I am not your parent.
There is practically nothing writerly about your process. Your acute and omnipresent anxiety causes you to function much more as an accountant or a producer, with his eyes on the bottom line and no understanding of how artists function, rather than as a young writer, trying to develop a first novel, a new career. In short, you are as mean and ungenerous to yourself as your parents are; they taught you well.
You are no longer twenty as you were when we met. You are pushing thirty. The wounded child in a defensive rage has become an adult man hurting himself and inflicting pain on others.
You are still close enough to the beginning of adulthood that you can change.
Do you want to spend your life as a frightened angry person taking your deepest fears and problems out on innocent bystanders, as well as on yourself? In five or ten years, you could be a father bestowing upon his children the same kind of misery that you now enjoy. That’s how it works.
Your inability to empathize makes it difficult for you to put yourself in the skin of the characters you write.
You have to decide to take yourself seriously, not in a phony self-pitying way, but in a serious, dignified way.
It’s impossible to discuss these issues for long without thinking of the role your drinking plays. Last spring’s birthday dinner comes to mind, when you drank a bottle of wine at Danube and a large pitcher of sangria at Rio Mar. About half way through the evening you were incoherent, uncomprehending and slurring your words. A highlight was a disjointed monologue about how you have no drinking problem.
When do you reach the point that you are no longer so fragile that you can’t see beyond your own pain?
When do you stop being pitiable Gary hiding in the Stuyvesant bathroom and emerge to become a man who stands up to the inner demons that are driving him?
When I first read these dispatches, a Pamela Sanders — grade anger boils within me. Fucking John. What does he know about writing? Or hiding out in bathrooms? He’s just a television writer. And, anyway, I’m too old to have a father figure. I’m “pushing thirty,” as he, the man obsessed with his own mortality, has just reminded me. But the thought of going it alone, with nothing but the pricey Kiev-style cutlet awaiting me in Little Neck, turns my anger to despair. I must find a new way to manipulate John, to keep my caviar fund intact, to keep the Duet with Gary humming along. As a gesture of kindness, I take John out to Barney Greengrass for sturgeon and eggs. At first I’m excited by the idea that I’m repaying a vast debt to John by buying him some animal protein on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but perhaps it is the Russian nature of the sturgeon that turns my mood from magnanimous guest of the Upper West Side to pure Leningrad citizen, circa 1979. When the $47.08 check is slapped on the table, the color of my face turns from lox to whitefish, and I have a minor panic attack on the spot. No! No! No! My American papa has to pay for this, not me. If he doesn’t pay, then I have nothing but my real parents! I run out of the restaurant, the edges of my eyes blurring with crazy tears, leaving John to settle the bill once more.
And then, finally, after all the bilked meals and goods and services and cash, and in response to yet another one of my requests for cash, there is this:
We the undersigned agree to all the terms specified herein.
Gary will borrow the sum of $2200 from John.
The term of the loan is two years.
On the 27th of each month, Gary will pay to John $50.00 of the principal.
In addition, on a quarterly basis, i.e. every three months, on the 27th of the month, Gary will pay to John one quarter of the year’s worth of interest on the remaining principal. The rate of interest will equal the interest which is being paid at that time on a two-year United States Treasury Bill.
Gary further acknowledges that part of his stated purpose in borrowing the money is to embark in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis with a trained certified professional, preferably a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst M.D. He hereby gives his word that this was not merely a ploy to receive the loan but that he does indeed intend to proceed with this plan.
It gets easier.
It gets easier fast.
It is fashionable now to discredit psychoanalysis. The couch. The four or five days a week of narcissistic brooding. The reaching over to pluck Kleenex from the quilted tissue box beneath the African pietà thing. The penis-y Freudianism underlying it all. I have made fun of it myself in a novel called Absurdistan, my hero, the overweight and self-indulgent Misha Vainberg, son of a Russian oligarch, constantly calling his Park Avenue shrink while the real post-Soviet world disintegrates around him and people die.
The truth of it is that it is not for everyone. It is not for most people. It is difficult, painful, and tedious work. It feels, at first, like a diminution of power rendered upon a person who already feels powerless. It is a drain on the bank account and it takes away at least four hours a week that could be profitably spent looking oneself up on the World Wide Web. And, quite often, there is a seeming pointlessness to individual sessions that makes my days studying Talmud in Hebrew school brim with relative insight. But.
It saves my life. What more can I add to that?
I hit the couch four times a week. I mean that literally. I jump on that couch; I hear the thwack of my body against it, as if I’m saying to my analyst, who is partly a stand-in for John: Fuck you. I don’t need this. I’m more real than this talking. I’m more real than your silence. I hate my shrink so much. The smug, silent authority who charges me fifteen dollars a session. The money, the money, the money. I am always the keeper of accounts. And always will be.
“I think you’re charging me too much,” I say into his silence.
He’s ripping me off, there’s no doubt about it. The gray-haired, gray-bearded, native-born presence is taking money from me, fifteen dollars at a time. My mother was right about everything. This country was built on the coins of fools like me. “Hide your quarters,” she would warn me before my college friends came over to visit my apartment.
Thwack, the angry retort of my body against his couch.
Well, I’m not going to be different. I’m not going to be one of those people. The animal petters. The smilers. The helpers. The Benefactors. The sandwiches-for-the-homeless makers. Stop pushing me. Stop pushing me with your silence.
“What else comes to mind about that?” my analyst says after I quiet down.
What else comes to mind about that? I want to get up and beat you like you once beat me. I want to have that power over you. I want to be so big that all you can do is hide your head beneath my assault, offer me up your pretty little ears.
You with your innocent silence. You think I don’t see your rage? Every man has it. Every man, every boy, has the power to humiliate another with his strength.
“I think you’re charging me too much,” I say.
Four times a week, I have a lunch date with reality. I talk, he listens. Later I find out that he is half Anglo and half Armenian, just like J.Z., and I wonder if being in the company of a person who shares in at least some of her nucleic acids soothes me. In the intervening years, she, too, has become a doctor.
Reality. I’m learning to separate the real from the not. As soon as I say something out loud, as soon as I publicize it into the afghan-carpeted Park Avenue air, I realize it is not true. Or: It doesn’t have to be true.
I think you’re charging me too much.
I am a bad writer.
I should be with a woman like Pamela Sanders.
I do not have a problem with alcohol or narcotics.
I am a bad son.
I am a bad son.
I am a bad son.
There is usually a lag between understanding and action. But I move quickly.
I break up with Pamela Sanders, taking myself out of the path of her wrath and her hammer. At first, I offer her the choice of ending her relationship with Kevin. She tells me that she feels like Kevin and I are both pointing guns at her head.* Yes, I want to tell her, but only my gun is cocked and loaded.
New Year’s Eve 2000 is coming up and she has not been invited to any parties. “What are you doing around New Year’s? Parties?” she asks me with a new shyness. I email her, telling her I have plans, typing the words reluctantly, because I know what it’s like to be lonely on an important date and because I still love her. She buys me a much belated birthday gift, a book.
Its title is St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars.
Several months after I begin analysis, I do something I’ve been scared to do since I canceled my junior year abroad in Moscow. Despite my mother’s insistence that I will be killed and eaten right in front of the Hermitage, I buy a ticket back to St. Petersburg, Russia. And so, beneath my sweaty polyester ski hat, I am standing in front of the Chesme Church, its “sugarcoated spires and crenellations,” trying not to pass out. I still don’t understand the why of it, but at least I am here. At least I am trying.
Half a year into analysis, I apply to creative writing programs. Not to Iowa, because the pain of that rejection still blinds me, but to five others. I am accepted by all of them. The most promising one appears to be Cornell, which in addition to covering tuition and fees also gives a healthy stipend of twelve thousand dollars per year.
I happily call my parents to tell them that I’ve been accepted to an Ivy League school not focused on hotel administration. But, as a lark, I have also applied to Hunter College’s new writing program, directed by one of my favorite contemporary writers, Chang-rae Lee. Reading his novel Native Speaker has severely shaken my perception of what fiction about immigrants can get away with. There are scenes in Native Speaker that are not teased out with bullshit laughter and hairy ethnic weeping but shouted, with anger and resignation, at the sky, scenes that make me question the relative insignificance of what I am trying to do with a “comic” novel still called The Pyramids of Prague.
I get an acceptance call from Chang-rae, and he invites me over to his office in one of the two skyscrapers that form most of Hunter’s unapologetically urban campus. The elevator smells like the French fries being French-fried in the second-floor cafeteria, and the whole building seems powered by their delicious grease. The fear of meeting one of my favorite writers is only partly offset by the Cornell acceptance letter, which I’ve folded talismanically into my front shirt pocket. In the years before analysis, I would have had a spontaneous eruption of stomach flu or jaundice and found a way to avoid seeing my literary hero. Or, had I made it into the Hunter building, I might have passed out in the fry-smelling elevator.
The fearsome literary presence I’ve expected is actually a skinny Korean American man, maybe four inches my better in terms of height and seven years in terms of age, wearing jeans and an unassuming checkered shirt. Perhaps that bastard Hemingway is to be blamed for the image of the male writer as a grenade that’s just been uncapped and rolled across the floor — writers of my generation, for the most part, look very much like the rest of humanity. But all I can do is sweat humbly before my idol.
We sit down and shoot the shit. He tells me he just started this program at Hunter, and he needs good students like me. He’s read the first thirty pages of my novel, and he’s impressed. I tell him about Cornell and all the gorgeous funding that awaits me in Ithaca. He agrees that it’s a deal too good to refuse. I take out a copy of his latest novel, A Gesture Life, which he signs to me “With warmth and admiration,” a series of four words which floor me with their unexpected solicitude. He admires me? As I prepare to leave, he asks if he can do one more thing that maybe, just maybe, could entice me to go to Hunter instead of Cornell.
Two weeks later, at a SoHo restaurant called, appropriately enough, the Cub Room, I meet Cindy Spiegel, Chang-rae’s editor at Penguin Putnam and one of the rising stars of publishing. I have a speech prepared. I know the novel isn’t good enough yet. But I can work hard. I’ve already worked on it for close to six years, first at Oberlin and then with my friend John. I can work more. It’s really no trouble. I have a job, but I can work after work. I can work during work. I can skip breakfast and work. I can skip sleeping and work.
Before I can unbosom myself of the well-rehearsed and patented “Stuyvesant Immigrant Work Song,” before the appetizers even arrive, Cindy offers me a book deal.
I want to pause here for a second. I would love to re-create what Cindy said about my novel and how I felt in the first few moments when I realized my life’s dream would somehow collide with my reality. But I remember nothing of that afternoon, except walking out of the Cub Room and into one of those ridiculous spring days, one of those days that somehow push aside New York’s heat and cold and make life seem much too easy. And I remember breathing in the scent of a blossoming tree and not knowing the name of it, just walking beneath a cloud of its honey and perfume. What had just happened to me? Something happened that was the opposite of failure. Something so big my English cannot even say what it is.
As a teacher of creative writing, a lifestyle choice nearly as maligned as psychoanalysis, I often look out at the table and see myself at age twenty-eight or thereabouts. Another desperate young man at the end of his options, insecure, anxious to be praised, betting his literary future, his romantic future, on his work.
In the year 2000 it is still possible to woo a girl with a book deal. And woo I do. But what’s so amazing is how quickly I am wooed back. How soon a number of warm and attractive women are keen to walk down the street with me, hand in hand, to see Cabaret Balkan or whatever foreign nonsense is playing at the Film Forum, without a second wood-carving boyfriend waiting for them on their Brooklyn couches. I quickly settle down with an interesting one, an Oberlin graduate with some jet-setting predilections — one of our first dates takes place in Portugal. Lisbon’s airport handily features a shop selling engagement rings, and my new sposami subita, with the thick pretty eyelashes and the sexy way of wearing a simple hoodie, encourages me to buy her an engagement ring right there (she is of a certain Asian culture that stresses matrimony). I almost do so, but a slight panic attack keeps me from shaving the remaining points off my credit score.
But it’s my happiest panic attack to date. I’m not stupid when it comes to these matters. I know how little attraction I pose for most women à la carte. And what I realize is that with Chang-rae’s single gesture, I will never have to go home to an empty bed again. From this point forward, I will know love whenever I need to know it.
The early joys of my impending publication, and then the joys of actual publication, are without equal in my life. There’s something outrageously simple about extending yourself toward a goal the way a plant seeks the sun’s rays or a gopher the crunch of easy soil beneath his paws, and then getting exactly what you want, sunshine or some prized tuber.
My would-be bride and I are now living in a small but affordable duplex in the far West Village — her real estate acumen is without equal. My psychoanalysis is going well, even though a part of me misses the pain of being with a Pamela Sanders. Each day, out of habit, I bring up my cheek for my new girlfriend to slap, and each day she doesn’t slap it. “I just can’t seem to spoil you enough,” she tells me, as we lie in bed surrounded by an impromptu meal of Popeyes fried chicken, Doritos Cool Ranch — flavored tortilla chips, and non-diet Coke. It’s not true, what she said. I learn how to be a spoiled little bastard pretty quickly, but each time she tells me I can’t be spoiled, I block out some space in the bathroom to cry happily to myself.
And each day I make the trip to one of those Hudson Street media bodegas that feature a complete selection of the latest Albanian and Eritrean news sources. There, I scoop up the dozens of publications that are running advance and nearly all favorable(!) reviews of my first book. Places I’ve understood to exist only vaguely, Boulder, CO, and Milwaukee, WI, and Fort Worth, TX, harbor people who have not only read all 450 pages of my meandering manuscript but also approve of what I’m trying to say.
Which is what exactly? The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, about to sail into Barnes & Noble and destined to enjoy a slight commercial success, is if anything an unfaithful record of twenty-seven years of my life. It is filled with Nat Sherman cigarettes, guayabera shirts and janitor pants, words like “venal” and “aquiline,” cats named Kropotkin, dying beloved grandmothers, Eastern European castles brooding over urban hilltops, midwestern collegiate panic attacks, sedulous Jewish roommates from Pittsburgh, large female American backsides, cheerless Soviet cartoon crocodiles, eyebrow waxing, aged balsamic vinegar, and the age-old questions of whether it is better to be an alpha or a beta immigrant, and whether it’s okay to bring others into the world when you are not happy with who you are. It is a catalog of the styles and mores of a particular era as recorded by an outsider fast becoming an insider. It is a very long document in which a troubled young man talks to himself. It is a collection of increasingly desperate jokes. To this day, some people tell me it’s my best work, implying that it’s all been kind of a downhill slog from there. After finishing the book you hold in your hands, I went back and reread the three novels I’ve written, an exercise that left me shocked by the overlaps between fiction and reality I found on those pages, by how blithely I’ve used the facts of my own life, as if I’ve been having a fire sale all along — everything about me must go!
On so many occasions in my novels I have approached a certain truth only to turn away from it, only to point my finger and laugh at it and then scurry back to safety. In this book, I promised myself I would not point the finger. My laughter would be intermittent. There would be no safety.
With my first novel about to be born in the late spring of 2002, I feel my life shifting irrevocably; all those tectonic plates that once shuddered against each other are finally aligning to make a permanent surface upon which I can grow plants and herd cattle. It gets easier. But there’s something my analyst knows that I don’t: This burst of sheer joy will not last long. Already, the mechanisms at my disposal are working to revert myself back to the mean, to the unhappiness, to the drinking. A particularly cruel and personal review finally comes by way of the West Coast and that is the one I savor, the one I draw comfort from, the one I memorize. But this will not be my worst review by far.
The phone rings in my West Village duplex, with its childish triptych of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin stretching along an entire wall, with its sense of a happy new couple trying out life together. Another terrific early review has just landed on my laptop, and tonight we are going to my favorite sushi restaurant, on Hudson Street, to celebrate. The day before, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker and my father’s future nemesis, had called me personally to ask if I could write an article on Russia for the venerable magazine.
I pick up the phone eager for whatever else the world can provide me.
It is my father’s voice. “Mudak,” he says. My mother’s howling takes up the rest of the conversation.
The Russian word mudak stems from the ancient term for “testicles,” and in a rural sense connotes a castrated piglet. In a modern sense it is perhaps closest to the American “dickhead.” In my father’s arsenal of words I know that it is the nuclear option, and that’s what it feels like when he says it: like being deposited in the middle of Threads or The Day After. Dead trees are whistling around me; a bottle of milk is melting on my doorstep. “Attack warning red!” “Is it for real?” “Attack warning is for bloody real!”
Mudak. Added to Snotty and Weakling and Little Failure, this may be the final word to grace the tombstone of our relationship. Because while the hurt is still thrumming in my ear—why can’t you be proud of me in my finest moment to date? — I am back on my psychoanalyst’s couch trying on the new words I’ve just taught myself.
I am not a bad son.
Through the howling coming at me from across the East River, I discern the source of my parents’ anger, the mudak-inciting pain. A Jewish newspaper has sent a reporter to meet my parents in their natural habitat and in her subsequent article has suggested that my parents somewhat resemble the hero’s parents in my novel.
“We don’t ever want to speak to you again,” my mother is shouting at me.
If you won’t speak to me, it is better not to live!
Those are the traditional expected words on my end. But what I say instead is: “Nu, khorosho. Kak vam luchshe.” Well, that’s fine. Do as you please.
And that stops the howling. And that makes them backtrack, if not apologize. But it is too late. The razvod has been signed and notarized, not between my mother and my father but between them and me. I will continue to see them and love them and call them each Sunday night, as mandated by Russian law, but their opinions of me, the fanged hurt of their own childhoods, will not rend my world asunder, will not send me to the nearest bar, will not be unleashed upon the woman I share my bed with.
But then there’s also this. My mother, a financial administrator at a New York nonprofit, the hardest-working person I have ever known, dutifully going over a letter with me over the phone while I’m at Oberlin, making sure those nefarious articles are in place. “Igor, is it ‘We have submitted budget for third quarter, fiscal 1993,’ or ‘We have submitted the budget for third quarter, fiscal 1993’?”
“Submitted the budget,” I say, literally rolling my eyes, holding the phone away from me as if I am speaking to a younger version of myself. “I have to go, Mama. Irv is here. We’re going to [light up a spliff and] see a movie.” But how can I, the Red Gerbil of Solomon Schechter School, not recognize what it’s like to be ashamed of what comes out of my mouth, or, in my mother’s case, what is painstakingly typed beneath the letterhead of her agency? “Mama, your English is so much better than the Americans who work with you,” I say to her. “You really don’t need my help.”
But she does. And now I’ve published a book that mocks, gently, but sometimes not so gently, a set of parents that are not entirely dissimilar from my own. What does that feel like for them? What does it feel like to pick up a book, or an article in a Jewish newspaper, and not fully understand the subtlety, the irony, the satire of the world depicted therein? What does it feel like to be unable to respond in the language with which that mockery is issued?
And as I’m suing for my razvod, how can I also not celebrate my parents, my exes? After all, they could not have known that all these years I had been sitting there with the only thing truly at my disposal, the only thing truly mine. My notebook. Taking notes. “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished”†—Czesław Milosz.
My father’s favorite saying to me: “Maybe after I die, you will come pee on my grave.” It is supposed to be sarcastic, but what he’s really saying is “Don’t let go.”
“Don’t let go of me.” Because sometimes it may seem like I have. Because instead of my fighting back, instead of my indignation, what he hears is silence.
When he tells me that one of my postcollege girlfriends is too fat, that he’s personally affronted by her weight, although he does “respect her right to exist,” there is silence.
When my mother tells me, before I am to go off on a trip to India, that I shouldn’t get any vaccines “because they will give you autism,” that canard of the extreme right wing, there is silence.
Silence instead of the yelled rebuttals, the peeing on the grave, which they’re used to, which feels familiar and pee warm. “It would have been better if you had told me you were a homosexual,” my father said when I told him I had started psychoanalysis. Beyond the post-Soviet distrust of the practice — mental hospitals were used by the Soviet state against its dissidents — there is another fear. You can fight with your gay son, tell him he is a disgrace in your eyes. And he will fight back, will beg for your love. But what do you tell someone who is silent?
And within that silence, time itself has stopped. Within that silence, the words hang in the air, fluttering in Cyrillic, not entirely painless but without the power to bring back the small, unquestioning child at their mercy.
Don’t get any vaccines. They’ll give you autism. Don’t write like a self-hating Jew. Don’t be a mudak. Soon you will be forgotten. How can I not hear the pain in that? His pain? Her pain? How can I not publicize that pain?
And how can I not travel, across eight time zones, to its source?
* The image of Pamela Sanders plus a weapon pointed at a head is what in creative writing classes is called “foreshadowing.”
† And, I might add, if the family isn’t finished, then the writer is.