Lounge Lobster

“Hey Sam, did you know there’s a really nice upright piano locked up behind the spare wash basins?”

Samantha Frankel placed the opal-polished index finger of her right hand on the next evening’s reservation book, checked that her new Macintosh reservation system and the hostess’s notes agreed, and then raised a laconic eye to Dimitri. “So?”

“Why in hell is it here if nobody plays it?”

“Don’t ask me; I just work here.”

“But you’re boss. You know everything, don’t you?”

“Don’t you forget it. I can set up a party for New Year’s 2012, but I don’t know about pianos.”

Dimitri froze. The world’s ending in 2012, don’t’cha know? Just ask the Mayans.

“Don’t you have tables active, Dim?”

“Yeah, I wonder if they’d like to hear Chopin or show tunes.”

This time, Sam froze. Something had always added up wrong about this guy. Twenty-three, vaguish accent, claimed a degree from Western Galilee College in Israel. She knew she should have taken Hebrew seriously at Temple Beth Sholom. How the hell did she know that she’d never leave South Jersey, and still have to verify a diploma from some place that could be hit by a Katyusha rocket?

“Go ask ‘em.”

Dimitri disappeared. Samantha punched a few keys on her Mac, set the beach ball screensaver rolling, patted the hostess on the butt in a way that would have drawn a scowl or a come-on from a man, and headed in the direction of the kitchen.

Dimitri had two tables still eating dinner at 9:40. Dimitri’s section reflected his seniority; he had the tables nearest the windows on the side parking lot.  For the waitresses, the section nearer to the bar was a better bet; proximity breeds orders, and orders breed tips. The side road, Buttonwood Street, looked out on a new theme restaurant and bar that seemed destined to run the Red Lobster out of Maple Shade. Bartenders wore football referee’s uniforms complete with whistles. The draw was the wait staff. All female. All young. All in orange go-go pants. Most with bare midriffs. All paid to smile nonstop and to put some extra bounce in more than their steps. More than a few evenings when the weather was warm, the server in that section would “work” through a break.

This evening, Dimitri had other thoughts in mind, especially since with snow on the ground, even the most exhibitionist Hooters waitress arrived in sweat pants and an overcoat.

“OK, folks, our manager Samantha wants to know, would you rather hear Chopin or show tunes?”

It took most of the diners at the two adjoining tables several seconds to hear “Chopin” instead of “show-pan.”

“No, for real. We have a shiny black upright in the back. What would you rather hear, Chopin or show-tunes?”

“Right now?” One patron spoke up after the general twittering subsided.

“No, I have to tune the piano, but you come back on the same night, at the same time, and I’ll buy the pitchers.” Did Dimitri really say this? He began calculating, “twelve people, half a pitcher each, a few glasses left over, say, nine pitchers. I can get Sheila to give me half-off, that’s $4.50 a pitcher…”

Five votes for Chopin, three for show tunes. One person came up with a suggestion of a nocturne or intermezzo, and then two suggestions from the house.

“OK, this time next month good for you guys?”

Dimitri ignored the inconvenient fact that the two groups of diners never saw each other before in their lives.

“Done.”

And so “Second Tuesday By Request” was born. And now, Dimitri had a piano to practice on that didn’t require a bus ride to the JCC, or to the synagogue he’d never set foot in.

___

Setting up “Second Tuesday” was no problem. Samantha saw a wasted evening converted to a profit maker. She even let people enter their mailing addresses into her Mac Office mailing list if they wanted a reminder postcard. Response had been surprisingly strong. Samantha took stock near closing time on Saturday night, just over two weeks to go before Showtime in Maple Shade.

Database of 60. Ten tables already booked. That could be half the dinner crowd for a Tuesday in February. Now we’ve got an event. I’m SO toast if the kid can’t play.

“Dim,” Samantha tossed her golden curls with just a touch of flirtation. Up and over her right shoulder crept a designer lock. She flicked it away without setting down the pen she held in her right hand.

“Yes, Sam.” Throwing his left hip forward, and placing his hands on his hips, the would-be lounge lizard upped the ante.

“When do I get my private concert, huh?”

 Dimitri knew what was up, but his thoughts flashed back to a girl he’d accompanied four years ago, on the Kibbutz. Same height, same hair past the shoulders. Smoker. He couldn’t tell exactly with clothes on, but same slim waistline. Yasmeena. OK, I can do this. Just pretend, but keep in check. You don’t make garab where you eat.

“I’m coming in to tune the piano on Monday morning. You’re here to open, yes?”

“I get here at 10.”

“Well, because you gave me the key, and trusted me not to take all the seafood, I come at 8.” But only because those lazy bums who clean up won’t let me get to the piano until 2:30.

“See you Monday.”

“Formal wear. Backless.”

“In your dreams.” Samantha flipped the curls, tilted her head, and swished over to the bar.

 Samantha had more than a little trouble getting to sleep that Saturday night WMMR. Nope, Aerosmith at 3am?! WLIT. ABBA? Gag me with a spoon. OK, WRTI. Jazz all night. At least…Ornette Coleman. Shit. Who goes to sleep with Ornette Coleman on? Samantha had a screaming flash. It’s Sunday in Israel. They don’t have to go to church in Israel. Now did he say Western Jezreel University? No, it’s not a university, it’s a college. Shit. All I know is the Technion. Oh, yeah, and Bir-Zeit, but isn’t that Palestinian? No, Galilee. That’s it, Western Galilee College. If he’s lying, it might as well be Western Gethsemane College, and his name is Judas. OK. How do you say, “What’s the number?” in Hebrew? I can’t even remember how to say, “Bat Mitzvah.”

Samantha got the international exchange code. She called the operator for the number.

“KJFGHJGHFF azor l’cha” Samantha could barely think, let alone remember a phrase she probably hadn’t learned in Hebrew school.

“Eastern…Galilee College…”

“Tov, tov, connect you now.” The operator bypassed procedures and connected the call. So do they charge me for an international collect call, operator assist?

“Oniversitat Galil Mizrachi, OUYFYUYUF azor l’cha?” crackled the voice across the Atlantic.

“Diber Anglit?” Samantha asked hopefully. She didn’t know that she had just said, “He spoke English.”

“Yes, sure.” The receptionist lost her Hebrew accent. “I was born in Columbus. How can I help you?”

Several points fell off Samantha’s systolic blood pressure, and the rushing of blood in her ear stopped competing with the receptionist’s voice.

“Shalom, thanks, I’m from Cherry Hill. Can you verify a student’s enrollment? I’m a hiring manager.”

“Does the student go to school here now?”

“No, he says he was there from 1985-1987. He lived on Kibbutz Halivat… Halivat…”

“Hadarat Haderech. Most of their olim go here. But I don’t have the records for former students.”

“Oh, shit – sorry, I didn’t mean that. Just transfer me to someone who speaks English?”

“I’ll get Shachar Dvoretzky in Student Records. She’s from New York.” Please, please don’t be a Giants fan.

Samantha was relieved to hear that there was music on the line while she held on. At least the connection was still live. For what I’m paying, this better be the best music in the Middle East. It was Gevatron, the most famous Israeli live music group. R’kudei am, Israeli dance music. Barefoot in the fields. “Hava netzei b’machol…” Sam was, despite her insomnia and anxiety, tapping her toes against her nightstand. When Sam was in Hebrew school, people knew Israel for the dances. And Jaffa oranges. And June 5, 1967, her birthday. No, not Israel, Samantha. The Six-Day War started on Samantha’s birthday. Had she been a boy, it would have been over before her circumcision. The music switched to a driving hora. Up went Samantha, wide awake, pretending she was at the dance hall at Kibbutz Hadarat Haderech. The full-length mirror on her closet danced in time, glancing back at the dancer in a T-shirt and all legs. I’d’a killed ‘em.

Shachar Dvoretsky, whose first name means “dawn,” answered in a voice that sounded like it was born on a mucosal, gravelly February morning. The receptionist from Columbus introduced the manager from Maple Shade to the registrar from Queens, and they tracked down the records of the renegade from Rhawnhurst there in the Jezreel Valley. Sure enough, Dimitri Katz had earned an associate’s degree with a performance diploma in piano.

“Todah rabbah.” Samantha thanked the women, who answered, “B’vakashah” two octaves apart. Within five minutes, still before the dawn in Maple Shade, the dancer fell asleep.

Less than thirty hours earlier, Samantha couldn’t sleep worrying if her multinational waiter was a fraud; now she had arrived at work more than two hours early on a Monday morning to listen to Dimitri play a few numbers. She pulled her shiny black 1988  BMW 325i into the handicapped spot nearest the door. She wrinkled her upper lip at the 1978 Datsun 280ZX with the low-hanging muffler sitting in the other handicapped spot.

At least he has some conscience. She experienced no cognitive dissonance with this thought.

She unsnapped her Lobster key ring from inside her fake Fendi bag, inserted it into the lock on the glass doors of the restaurant, and almost tripped on the doorjamb when the door opened itself.

“Dimitri, if you don’t want to serve breakfast, you’d better lock the door, yo!”

Duingduingduingduing. The response was that of a piano string being lowered, and then raised in pitch until the Russian-Northeast Philly-Israeli-Jerseyite was satisfied with its temperament.

“Samantha, since when does anyone eat seafood for breakfast, yo?” Two can play that game.

“Since when they invented shrimp cocktail, yo!”

Check and mate.

“So do I get my concert now?”

“I still have some work to do on the piano.”

“How much work?”

“I think a half an hour, no more.”

 Samantha was none too interested in hearing the squawks and peeps of a half-hour piano tuning session, and Cherry Hill Mall was right down the road.

“Dim, I’ll be back. Want anything?”

“Yes. Lox and a bagel from Bain’s. Lobster pays.”

“You’re pushin’ it, Dimbo.”

“Yep, I love you too.”

Salman

“The chicks dig my accent.”

”Even the rich ones?”

“Especially the rich ones.”

Nachum Salman was a sabra, like Rafi, but unlike Rafi, “Salman,” as most people called him, made y’ridah  for good. This was a chance trip back to visit old friends, get laid by a few new ones, and qualify at the 1988 Tel Aviv Interzonal. Salman owned a home on Berkeley Street in Cleveland Heights.

“Rafi, you run to work every day for eight months, you run two blocks from my house, you never stop in?  I have to go to Tel Aviv, then I still find you out here in Suryah!” To expats like Salman, all the kibbutzim in the northern Galilee were “Suryah” since Israel took the Golan Heights in the 1967 War.

“I had to come back. I left my guns here from the War. ” When Rafi was in gan y’ladim, kindergarten, the children danced to lyrics that Salman wrote. One in particular went like this:

            Dance, dance on the water, water (mayim)

            Sing about uniting Yerushalayim

            Sail in peace upon the sea (yam)

            Sing Hatikva b’kol ram.

The class play featured a crude movement “dance” staged to these lyrics. Rafi had dressed up in a uniform that looked like a sailor suit had a nasty encounter with a bottle of Clorox bleach, but to victory-crazed Israelis, suggested the national flag. He had charged up a set of choral risers with cardboard cutouts in the shape of mountains. “Golan” was stenciled in Hebrew underneath largely fictitious snowcaps. The children behind him were the Israeli Defense Forces waving cardboard Uzis, and the school staff, dressed as Syrian soldiers and all wearing Hafez al-Assad masks, tumbled down a ramp built for the purpose out of wood borrowed from the loading dock at the wrong end of the cafeteria. Ouch. It’s just that none of the kids wanted to be Suryans. So the people who couldn’t fight had to tumble down a board, brick, and burlap slope while wearing masks. Ouch, hoi!

Salman threw his olive skinned head back with such a laugh that all Rafi could see were his too-big lips and his too-hairy nostrils. He had fought in ’67. After the outcome was no longer in doubt, he wangled a trip to a recording studio at Sharm-el-Sheikh, a Sinai resort town taken from Egypt on Day 3. There, he recorded the kids’ song, which the star Boaz Arnon covered, and a novelty song called M’shaneh Makom, M’shaneh Mazal, which means “Change the place, change the luck,“ in his own gnarled nasal voice. This song went right to the top of the chart before Day 6. In these days, Sadat was bound by a peace agreement, but blood, both Palestinian and Israeli, was flowing freely. The triumphal spirit of the new Colossus had dissipated into memory.

Rafi agreed to go to Tel Aviv and compete in the Open tournament, held in the King David Hotel ballroom, while the Interzonal would take place in the much more cozy press room. Salman had no business being there. He was as Israeli as Katarina Witt was East German. But his friend Edgardo Rosario, a former professional baseball player who had a cup of coffee (or a line of coke; this was the ‘80s) with the parent club, went home with his wife to the Dominican Republic to have their children so the kids could compete in the athletic Olympics (the oldest, a boy named Fredy, was an 8-year-old who designed video games in his bedroom and could run the 40 in a week), so why not Salman in chess? The previous August , Salman placed second in the Haifa Zonal to Yehuda Gruenfeld, but first in the InterZayin with all the tourists. Here’s a Zayin. ז What do you think he was doing in a resort town full of tourists in string bikinis?

So Nachum Salman sat down with the likes of Viktor Korchnoi and the Syrian-American wunderkind Yasser Seirawan. A real Suryan. The genuine article. Rafi, who was later to crush Salman with an outrageous Queen sacrifice in front of a full rank of pawns sheltering a castled King, just muttered. This guy is no more going to beat the second best player in the world than I’m going to beat him on the beach.

Rafi had a sideline as a chess hustler in Cleveland. Nobody at the Agnon school had a clue that the teacher with the nice voice could play. Since he earned extra money as the cantor for the school’s Saturday services, he couldn’t play tournaments during the school year. OK. No problem. Keep my head down and my ego small, and I can go to the clubs and take everybody’s money. I wait for the summer for tournaments anyway.  In the US, all I have to do is keep my rating low and I can win class prizes. They don’t have class prizes in Israel. You could pay for a year in the States by winning the Class C section at the World Open. CLASS C!! Those people have the vision of a fruit bat. All I have to do is lose the rapid transit tournament at the same time and act stupid. These Yankees will never know.  In all, Rafi had played in about thirty chess tournaments and had won $30,000.  In Israel? With a master’s rating, he didn’t make a penny, but he did beat that same Yehudah Gruenfeld as Black by double-daring the guy – he played the Gruenfeld Defense and rolled up Gruenfeld’s Queenside like he was, well, Gruenfeld. That time, the tournament was at Kibbutz Hadarat Haderech. Rafi earned nothing, but for a few weeks he was a minor celebrity.

This time, Rafi was playing for nothing particular. There was a chance, with Rafi’s strong openings, sound game and eagerness to sacrifice his pieces, that he could beat anyone in the Open field, but to win a ten-round, five-day event, he’d have to beat at least three people Salman’s strength, at least one of them with the black pieces. Salman liked the more relaxed, one-game-a-day schedule of the championship tournament. Games starting at 6 will be done by 11. The discos just get going by then. Rafi imagined spending the days with Salman, hiking in the Golan, swimming in Yam Kinneret, maybe doing a tourist before the game, and even hanging out at the tournament with both Salman’s and his own girl.

Salman had other ideas. Back in the States, he was an independent contractor, who also flipped houses for profit. He had responsibilities most days. Here his day started at 6pm. The mylar ball danced in Salman’s eyes. I have halivat boker for part of the second week. Who gonna be his wingman? Viktor Korchnoi?  Rafi made a copy of the key for the visitor’s dorm, and bought the guy a map. Aizeh gever. What a man.

It was Day One, Round One of the Interzonal. Salman found himself immediately thrown to the Suryan lion, Yasser Seirawan, who shared Rafi’s age and quick mind, but while Rafi was trying to find out who he was as a high schooler in an unmotivated Kibbutz classroom, Yasser was ripping his way through his agemates across the world to become World Junior Champion. This guy was a weapon. His warm, fuzzy gaze matched his high black Afro, turning him into an adorable catch for any girl on the beach, but he would not be there. He was a Vulcan over the chessboard. Daggers came out of the eyes, all the soft cuteness consumed as fuel for that agile mind. With the second highest ranking in the tournament, Seirawan would sit on a podium reserved for the top three players. Viktor Korchnoi and Yehuda Gruenfeld took up residence at the other two tables.

Seirawan entered the hall wearing tight jeans (“I hate adjusting loose pants during a game”) and a Hawaiian silk shirt, half open in any temperature. Rafi and Salman came fresh from the beach. The Interzonal would go for a week before Rafi’s section, so he could do halivat boker and meet Salman for breakfast. They had brought a change of clothes, “just in case,” said Salman. The girls were out with a group, so the closest Rafi and Salman could get was to play in the volleyball game. Beach volleyball. Eight girls, two guys. The girls- maximum twenty-one years old.  Salman got the number of the hot one in the fishnet string, who kept readjusting the few lonely pieces of yarn on her private parts after diving in the sand – almost every point. Rafi got three other numbers. Salman had violated his usual pick-up principle. Salman would always talk to the prettiest girl, and then switch to one who was hanging on to the clique by her fingernails.  This would usually make the girl happy, and more receptive to an offer of breakfast (around 2 am), and an early morning romp. He must be taking his tournament seriously.

So the mermaid in the fishnet wasn’t there at opening night. Probably just as well. Seirawan is going to roll over him like a tank.

Salman had Black. Seirawan played the King’s Pawn, eschewing the slower, more positional Queen’s Pawn openings. Salman must have had that in mind, when he played his queen pawn one square forward. He remembered a game from Chess Informant in which Seirawan played the Scotch Opening against some pathetic local master and checkmated in seventeen moves. “Let him try to mate my Pirc defense that fast,” thought Salman.  The game developed along theoretical lines that favored Black. After Salman didn’t lose before the first ten moves were completed, Rafi headed off to the skittles room.

This procedure became Rafi’s mode de vivre during that first week. During the day, he’d do his Kibbutz chores, call one of the girls, head into the beach or the town, and hang out. Then he’d head back to the Kibbutz for dinner and the tournament. Salman had focused his attention on splitting off the mermaid in the fishnet bikini from the rest of the group. By the fourth round, Salman had only one half-point draw, having frustrated Nigel Short into a childish mistake in the late middle game, when Short found he couldn’t roll over this obscure player. However, Salman chalked it up to Short’s early teenage hormones. Mermaid had shown up to the game barefoot, with white shorts and a ripped rugby shirt that displayed the bikini masquerading as underwear.

Rafi started hanging out with Mermaid in the bar at the event site. It was clear that she was supposed to be part of the clique, but Rafi knew before Mermaid said it that she was just getting to sleep when the girls got to the beach. She was only 19, and Salman was 44.

“He’s magic!” she volunteered.

“What are you going to do tonight?”

“The disco, maybe another one, Chummi promised there was on that plays Yemeni beat, then we’ll go to breakfast, and take the first bus back to the Kibbutz. Everyone else will be going to work.”

“What about your girlfriends?”

“They know, they aren’t that dumb. So you still playing with them volleyball?”

“Yes, yes, I can’t jump, but I’m OK. Your friends are pretty. Are they sabras?*

“No, I was born in Italy, and most of us are on an exchange program.”

Why do you guys speak such good Hebrew? I am dreaming, yes?

“What do they say about me?”

“When Chummi gets done with me, I’ll let you know.” Mermaid giggled. When she flipped her hair like that, especially when she touched him with her toes for punctuation,  she looked just like Roza.

“I like Francesca. What do you know about her?”

“She comes from Nice. Her father is a professor there, and her mom tutors the piano. She wants to be animal doctor. “

“I know, I talked to her, I’m not that dumb either.” As he said this, Rafi quickly slipped off his sandal and planted his right toes back on Mermaid’s calves. Mermaid giggled again.

“Well, she’s not good at men, I don’t think.”

“You mean a lesbian? She plays for your team?”

“Ha, no! She’s just a little nerdy, that’s all. She reads too much.” Reads too much?! You have got to be kidding. No wonder Salman is in your fishnet.

“What does this mean, too much?”

“She’s got Les Mis in her beach bag.” Andrew Lloyd Webber fan? Grrrr.

“So what do you read?”

“Schoolbooks, Cliff’s Notes, my dictionaries…”

“You mean you can speak English, Hebrew, and Italian and you don’t read any of the great books in any of them?”

“Don’t forget Russian.”

“Russian?!”Grrrrrrrr.

“I will be a translator for NATO. Maybe US. Not Israel. I don’t want to spend my life in a US jail.”

Rafi was aware of Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy who was spending a life sentence for infiltrating the US nuclear establishment. But the flirtatious way she delivered the last sentence put the lie to the serious nature of this point. He was on the verge of suggesting a quick walk when Salman walked in.

“Hoi, Sofia, hey, Rafi!

“Ma yesh?”

“Another draw. The guy didn’t want to play, he offer me draw after eight moves. I had White, so I say no, but I couldn’t get the advantage.” It’s the fucking Interzonal, and you let this guy go just because you don’t have an easy win? You could have stayed in Cleveland for that!”

The mermaid finished her Mai-Tai, flipped Rafi a dorsal fin, and put her hand on Nachum’s ass.

In the Key of V

Omigod. Omigod. Omigod.

One after another, each telephone pole on Mayfield Road passed Rafi in the breeze.  Running east through Cleveland Heights brought about its own breeze in the still May air. Rafi had run this route a hundred times in the past year or so. Never after coming out of the funny farm. Oh, right. I’ve never been in a funny farm before. Omigod. Omigod. Omigod.
The mantra faded as he passed Jaguar Cleveland. It was replaced with the image of Vered, naked except for a white fox stole, on the front seat of an XJ6. Omigod. Omigod.  Then came the image of that night.

Rafi was in Pittsburgh Saturday afternoon. One of the other Yordim, émigrés,  from the kibbutz, had celebrated his sixtieth birthday that morning in synagogue. Rafi had led the service, while his friend, Netanya, had read the Torah and given the “sermon.”  Like Rafi, Netanya was a sabra, native-born in Israel. Unlike Rafi, Netanya had been twenty-two years old when Israel declared her independence from the British Commonwealth.  Netanya had never known peace during his sixty years on the planet, beginning in his early years in the yishuv, which was what the Jews of pre-1948 Israel called themselves (“Palestine” was a dirty word in the yishuv, of course).  During the War of Independence, Netanya had earned the status of a minor war hero by taking fire to rescue a fallen comrade. When he told the story to the y’lidei kibbutz, the children born on the kibbutz, they would all ask him, wide-eyed, how he accomplished such a miracle, when he himself took a deep shrapnel wound during the retreat.

“No big deal,” he would shrug while making his voice even more gravelly that the driveway that was his normal voicebox. “Everybody do it.” Yeah, Right. I was barely alive in ’67, and just a kid in ’73. Parents suddenly decide Israel’s not safe, and make y’ridah (emigration from Israel). But they send me back for college in ’78, I come back, come here, come there… Never shot a gun in my life. Omigod. Omigod.

Asshole.  Rafi left Netanya’s phone number with Vered.  He knew she’d call. He wanted her to call. When she did, he took the phone from Netanya.

“Please come,” said Vered.
“When?”
“Now. How fast can you be here?”
“About two hours.”
“Not to stop!”

Please come. Not to stop. Damn her, what can I do? I tell Netanya I’m leaving his party to drive two hours for a girl, and he…

“Nu, so what are you going to do?” rattled the war hero.
“What would you do?” Rafi asked.
“Get laid first, ask questions later,” growled Netanya.

Rafi had not told Netanya anything about Vered. Not the first date. Not sleeping naked with the girl the first night and no sex. Not the tennis and the shower afterward. Not the early exit from his day job in order to bring her chicken soup from Katz’s Deli on Chagrin Blvd.  But it was written on his face with a pen of iron, like Jeremiah said.  So rather than mumbling some pathetic excuse, Rafi just hugged Netanya.

“Call me. And if you’re successful, you know what to name the kid, OK?”

Omigod. Omigod. Omigod.

The drive was an incomprehensible babble of Hebrew singing, poor English rhyming paraphrase, and FUCK! CUS-A-MAK! And similar drivel. After however many hundred phrases, Rafi settled on:

               Ramblin’ cross Ohio with my windows down,
               Lookin’ for the words along the way,
               Thoughts of love and passion swirlin’ in the sound
               The air you breathe me knows just what to say.

               Magnetic soul , let it be drawn to you.
               Magnetic fingers, polarized your touch.
               Magnetic heart, your pulsing guides me true.
               Magnetic dreams, promise me so much.

Pedestrian? Well, OK, but this pedestrian is flying over Rt. 70 at 85 mph, and I haven’t seen a state trooper yet.

Rafi bounced out of the Ford Tempo almost before it stopped rolling into the parking space in front of Vered’s building. He grabbed the creamy orange roses he had bought along the way with his right hand while he threw open the driver’s door with his left.  About halfway across the parking lot, he thought he’d better grab his shoes, just in case. Don’t take anything for granted. He thought, “Shoes on, shoes off?” as he rung her bell. At least he could make the decision; her screen was mostly shut and he didn’t notice her peeping out observing him. He finally decided to hold the shoes and offer the roses. Vered’s breasts rubbed his through her see-through cami, and of course, Rafi was wrong on the shoes. Vered stood with her toes on Rafi’s. Savlanut, chamor, savlanut. No tongue yet. OK, only a little. Fingers. Hairline. Ears. Thighs. Breathe. Breathe.

“Are you hungry?”

Vered suggested takeout. Rafi hoped he had made a big statement.

Lewchenko’s Deli was less than five minutes away. Vered was not one to pay any attention to the ubiquitous “No shoes, no shirt, no service” signs anyway, but Rafi slipped his boat shoes on before entering. Vered’s every curve competed for attention under the barely-there pink cami and opalescent one-layer shorts. No time to get self-conscious now. This is my prize. Let them try not to serve us. Rafi opened the door for Vered, and ushered her into the restaurant as if she were wearing diamond slippers. He looked the waitress in the eye, and said, “Takeout, please,” as if she should be honored by his address. They ordered cabbage borshch, potato dumplings, and cabbage stuffed with veal. Even though the sun was still shining and the fragrance of cherry blossoms perfused the late afternoon breezes, neither of them suggested that they ate on the grass. Instead, Vered cast a tablecloth over her mattress, produced two fluted champagne glasses for the Stolichnaya, and gave Rafi a quick peck on his collarbone.

As they ate their Ukrainian picnic, they purred at each other. The subject matter was Netanya’s event, but it could have been the periodic table of the elements. Vered poured a second round of vodka. Rafi took the plates to the sink. While Rafi was in the kitchen, Vered folded the tablecloth, lit a candle, and turned out the light.

Omigod. Omigod. Omigod. Rafi could not jerk his mind out of the heat of that Saturday night. Here he was trying to shake off the effects of being thrown into a mental hospital because a casual acquaintance heard him talking about suicide, bought him some drinks, and called the cops. I --- don’t --- have --- a ---choice --- I --- have --- to --- live --- his mantra changed as he thought back to his betrayal by the acquaintance. Several minutes of panted obscenities later, Rafi settled into a steady 8:20 pace and recalled THAT NIGHT.

He had returned from the kitchen to the flickering of the candle. Vered was partially seated on the mattress, her rich black hair flowing over her shoulders like a tapestry. The pink cami seemed like naked skin in the subdued light. It was like she was sitting naked under a gently out of focus lens. She had disposed of the ivory shorts, so that only the thong of the cami covered her nakedness. Rafi stood, flatfooted, at the head of the mattress.

“Come here,” she smiled. “What waiting for?”

Rafi slowly stepped onto the mattress. He knelt down and kissed her on her forehead. He patted her eyebrows, her cheeks, her nose and her chin softly with gently parted lips. She unfastened each button on his shirt with far more skin contact than was needed to do the job. She ran her index finger up and down the hair from his belt buckle to his breastbone. Rafi returned the touch to the tops of Vered’s ears. Soon his fingers danced down her collarbone to her chest to her nipples. He reached his thigh, still clad in jeans, over her bare thighs. She pressed against him, and whispered, “Lose the jeans.”

“I don’t wear underwear.”

“I know.”

He was naked with Vered, in the same bed, again. This time, She still wore the cami that had disappeared between her thighs only to reemerge behind, where underwear were supposed to go. She was kissing. Each. Toe. It took her an eternity to stroke every cell, first of one foot, then the other. As she caressed her way up his left calf, up to his knee, his thigh, she slipped her leg over his right foot and eased herself onto those toes. She could squeeze this foot. He could press just a little higher, just a little more deeply. Finally that beautiful black web of silk that was Vered’s hair came close enough that he could caress it and give her pleasure – and have something to do with his hands.

There could not have been a more beautifully orchestrated procedure. Vered operated like a Steinberg, a Bernstein, a Slatkin, and every nerve ending in both their bodies were the orchestra members. Just the right amount of crescendo led into a sudden change of position – a shift in orchestration that led to an even deeper level of intoxication. When finally, the climax of the music overtook the performers, it came in waves of synesthesia – vivid blues, golden lighting bolts, earthquakes, gasping, exhaustion.

Omigod. Omigod. She said later that day that it was sex. Really great, headbanging sex, and how great Rafi was to let her take the lead and do what she does best. And does he always allow a girl to lead? It was so sweet. But.

But. But. But. But.

It was great, it really was, but it didn’t mean to me what it mean to you, Rafi! I love to have sex. It’s like my drugs. But it’s too much for you. It’s your life.  I don’t want your life. Rafi. I like your sex. I love your sex, you are so sweet.

She. Has. No. I. de. a. How. This. Kills. A. Man.


Kibbutz

Dimitri drove the combine with all the discipline his twenty-one-year-old self could master, none. From behind the wheel six feet above the arugula field in Kibbutz Hadarat Haderech, the Kats residence in  Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., North America might have been on Mare Nostrum, the Moon. His brother the surgical resident was a mythical undead. His Law Review brother could have been on the moon Deimos, not at Duke. His younger sister, who only dated rich men at least ten years older than herself, could have been an exhibit at the wax museum in Hollywood. 

And och, Bozhe moi, those parents! What was Khrushchev thinking when he gave these people their exit visas, anyway? The Katses were nobodies, not like the usual refuseniks with Ph. D.’s who got stuck cleaning toilets, or worse, while waiting for their exit visas. Obviously, intelligence skipped generations. Dimitri had grabbed the first lifeline: a program offered by Habimah, the national theater company of Israel. Life on the kibbutz.  A steady diet of rehearsals. Driving heavy equipment during harvest seasons. Casta divas for the taking. Even a Jordanian on a good night. No Palestinians, though. The intifadeh was on. A death wish? No, thanks. Later that summer, the company was off to Moscow. Dimitri hadn’t signed up to go find any long-lost relatives at the Bolshoi; his role was far more humble. He’d just run the rehearsals and accompany the theater school while the company performed in the country of its birth.

“Hoi, Raf, hitarrarta ktzat? Have you woken up a little yet?” Dimitri shouted out the tractor . He made a habit of teasing the poor loser who draws Halivat-Haboker, morning milking, for his or her chore. Dimiti had it inserted into his contract that under no circumstance did he need to participate in any Kibbutz activities that commenced before 6 a.m. Halivat-Boker began at 4:30. It was 10:30, midmorning. Rafi had eaten breakfast and taken a nap already. A yeled hakibbutz, a son of the farm collective, Rafi had made y’ridah and  aliyah  five times in four years, this time because of a Russian flutist whose name sounded a little too much like “sex.”

“Yes, who did you have last night?” Rafi was a young 24, but at least he had a degree. A couple of them. At 21, Dimya had no degree, no focus, but most important for Dimitri, no parents carping on him for the first two “no’s.”

“Nothing much, habibi, it was men’ sectional last night.”

“What, no cute tenors?” You weren’t an Israeli man if you didn’t bust on your chevre for being “homo.”

“Fuck, I just played music and went to bed. Rafi, wanna come tonight? It’s the women’s sectional, and beside, we’re auditioning a new flutist.”

“Cus-a-mak!” Rafi leapt up on the grille and started flagellating Dimitri with his shirt, fresh from the laundry.  Rafi was chunkier than Dimitri, although Rafi was the distance athlete and Dimitri was the smoker. Dimitri’s thin, pale frame disappeared under Rafi’s broad torso, richly tanned from miles of distance running. 

“Homo,” Dimitri took his turn. “Get your ape-ass off me and smoke this joint.”

Rehearsal started at 8pm, right after aruchat-arev in the common dining hall. Dimitri was covering as the rehearsal pianist for Joel Engel’s 1917 score to The Dybbuk, the centerpiece behind the upcoming exchange program with Moscow. At a kibbutz rehearsal, the feel was more like an annual “Messiah-sing” at Christmas than an earnest preparation for an international cultural event of historic significance. The ranks of the chorus swelled from fifteen singing actors and twenty-five extras to almost a hundred voices. Hed-Arzi sold almost a thousand dollars of complete scores. Nobody performed from complete scores. These tomes would receive the autographs of Mira Rafalowicz, who published the 1977 edition, and Joseph Chaikin, who was producing the Moscow event. The task of repetiteur, the banging of notes on the piano for the sake of the musically illiterate, fell to Dimitri. 

“You can conduct this blind,” said Dimitri, handing Rafi a score. “Go.”

“Rachem alai, ani iver,” Rafi spoofed a line from Ivrit Chayah, one of the popular Ulpan (Hebrew intensive) programs. “Have pity on a blind man.” Drafted. Was this Habimah, or was this amateur hour? After a bit of dithering, the pros took over once the amateurs sounded like they had heard of the piece before tonight.  The leading lady, Leah’le – or at least her understudy – didn’t show up until 9:30. 

No matter, thought Dimitri, jutting his jaw out just a bit more than usual. 

The woman, a 28-year-old Yemeni bombshell whose frumpy headdress and casual clothing could not conceal the sparks jumping off her evergreen tan, started a long pas-de-deux with the rehearsal pianist, while the conductor gesticulated at, rather than shaping the curves of the score. Three hours later, Rafi left Yasmeena sharing a smoke with her pianist and went for a run. A long. Long. Run.

Magda

Fulgencia, Anna’s mom, had returned to Puebla several times during the first year after her fancy clothes and her Bible had tiptoed out when Anna was 8. Each time, the mother became more sarcastic toward the daughter, gradually moving to open rage. It was as if the mother returned only to throw aside her previous life by destroying the links that bound her to those who loved her. Anna, try as she might, could not move past the place that children go when a parent leaves, by abandonment, divorce, or death.  One morning, she would look up at the crucifix she took off the wall – that wall in that room with that empty bed for one alone – and hurl invective at a God she had started doubting long ago. The very next morning she would kneel in front of the crucifix, with its cast-iron martyr peering out from under his crown of thorns, and beg Him to care for her mother and to remember her among the myriad billions of believers on this world or any other.

When she was eleven years old, she had discovered her classmate Magdalena sitting cross-legged in front of the giant sycamore tree in the school’s courtyard. This deciduous gift came from the Archdiocese of Seville as part of the earthquake reconstruction effort sixteen years earlier. The tree towered above the stumpy palmeras of the native climate, its bark looking like an endless row of greenish chameleons by comparison to the scaly brown exoskeleton of the much smaller palms. Magdalena’s light skin and blond hair marked her as an outsider. Anna felt like an outsider on the inside. Since Magda’s Danish mother had divorced her father and returned to Copenhagen, Magda and Anna shared parallel lives, but until this Tuesday in October, a bright sunny interpause in a month of solid rain, they had never spoken.

Wordlessly, Anna sat down on an exposed root of the great tree. Unlike the sticklike Magdalena, Anna had hips to tuck under herself even as a sixth grader. Noticing the slighter girl’s shoes neatly placed next to her schoolbooks, Anna placed hers the same way. The girls sat in lotus position like two yogis.

“What are you reading?” Anna asked.

“La Indagacion de la Poesia.”

“Mande?”, which is the Mexican idiom for, “I did not get that. Again, please!”

“It’s one of my brother Marco’s textbooks. When I was born, I was careful to choose a family that would have a brother ten years older, so I could read his books.”

“With my luck,” replied Anna, “he would have been a naco futbolista.”

“That was part of the bargain. If he wasn’t a reader, I don’t get born.”

“Si, claro. Por supuesto.”  Anna had never heard the white stick-girl talk before. She liked it. “What would he do if he knew you had his book? I’m telling, jajaja!”

“You don’t know where I live. In fact, you don’t even know my name, do you, burra?”

Magdalena’s tone, the little toss she gave of her rich Mexican brown hair, and the furtive wink of her Danish blue eyes put the lie to the harsh words she had just uttered.

“Magdalena da Silva Jort. Burrona.”

“Mande? How did you know my matronymic?” Magda’s eyes widened, and her thin lips remained parted slightly at the end of her question. She blushed, more from embarrassment than from anger. The idea of a nearly-complete stranger knowing such a personal detail, especially as she perceived her mother as having abandoned her, felt like a violation.

“I do my research.” When the girls were in fourth grade, Anna had noticed a tall, blonde woman in the school. Perhaps it would be better to say that the tall, blonde woman penetrated Anna’s consciousness, striking a silent blow to Anna’s self-image and placing a permanent chip on her shoulder. Anna walked in the tall woman’s shadow to the office, and hid in the stairwell until she saw which girl left, hand-in-hand, with her goddess mom. Anna had the classroom responsibility of running messages to and from her classroom, so she spent the last three periods praying that the Sra. Morales would ask her to take something to the office. The moment finally arrived in art class. A new poster and English phonics game had arrived earlier in the day, but Sra. Morales had left it in the copy room by accident. Her lesson for last period depended on having this material, so she sent Anna to retrieve it. Anna feigned casual disinterest when she glanced at the early dismissal sheet, and there it was:

Heike Hjort         Magdalena da Silva

Now Magdalena da Silva Hjort was reaching for her shoes.

“No, don’t,” Anna pleaded. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

“It’s just… just… nobody talks – uses matronymics. I was just surprised, that’s all.”

“So tell me about, who is that, Villanueva?”

“Yes. He says that the central moment in the creation of a poem is like the moment of consciousness. Like the way the first man realized that he was a man and not an ape.”

“Yes! I think that this is the big idea in being human. Every moment is a new awareness…”

“A new possibility! And a whole universe is contained in it!” Magdalena gushed.

“Magda, would you read that passage to me?”

Magdalena read from the book. The entire passage occupied a page and a half, but it took up most of recess to read. That is, to read a single paragraph of it. The language was dense for an adult, and these were eleven-year-old girls. But they savored the language, the thoughts, the seriousness, the ADULTness of it, and they interrupted themselves interrupting the reading. Occasionally, Magda would look up whenever an older boy took up position nearby. She would shoot the boy a cross look and try to pick up where she and Anna had left off.

“I wish they wouldn’t do that,” Magda sniffed.

“Do what? Who?” Anna replied.

“The boys. They haven’t stopped coming since you sat down. Do they do that to you all the time?”

“No, but maybe,” speculated Anna, “I just don’t notice. That’s bruto. Barbaro.”

The bell rang, indicating that the children had five minutes left to go back to class. Both girls gathered their shoes, replaced their lunches, barely touched, in their book bags and caught each other’s gaze. Anna spoke first.

“Do you want to come over after school?”

“I’d love to! But I have to take my younger brother home. Then I have to…” The words froze between Magda’s larynx and tongue.

“My mom left too.” With that, Anna placed her free hand on Magda’s shoulder. The girls hugged. “I’ll come to your house, then. My father knows I usually stay in the library, so he won’t expect me.”

Even to the European thinness of their lips, the girls saw themselves reflected in the other.

Song of Himself

 “With a boulder off my shoulder, and feelin’ kinda older…”

The Manfred Mann song had blast out of Hollywood in 1975, when Dimitri was only eight. A decade later, he was shape-shifting the lyrics to suit his situation. Maybe I’ll be the teen-age diplomat. Maybe I’ll have diplomatic immunity. Wonder what the legal age is there, for some Silicone Sister action.

“Torresdale Station,” called the conductor.

Markus is probably still waiting for my call this week. I wonder if he got anything good in? I hear they have really good hash in Israel. 

The Walkman in his brain started the quote from “Chopsticks.”

“Do you mind?” A fiftyish black guy from the bench across the bus from Dimitri scowled.

Bozhe fucking moy! I guess it’s true what they say about geniuses thinking out loud.

“Sorry.”

Dimitri was fingering with both hands now, verse in one hand, chorus in the other.  The black guy unzipped a slightly weather-weary canvas bag. He peered into it, riffled through some paper, and extracted what he was looking for. He presented for Dimitri’s inspection a manila folder, clean but for a fresh crease that resembled  the oversized strap of a handwoven diaper bag from Ecuador. Where the free shoulder would have been, the file label bore, in crisp jazz script, the title.

The One True Love, huh? OK. It’s gotta be better than Chopsticks.

Dimitri started fingering the left hand while humming the melody. Now neither the young pianist nor the older musician noticed or cared about the presence of other midday travelers on the R-7 to Trenton.

“Bb?”

“Yeah. Clarinet.”

“You didn’t think about tenor sax?”

“No, man, alto maybe. Tenor’s too brassy. You can’t make sweet honey with a tenor. Think (    ). “

“On tenor?”

“Naw, (   ) played clarinet. You didn’t know that, didja? S’prised you recognized it wasn’t a hobo.”

“Oboe?”

“C’mon.”

“The melody only makes sense with this chart if it’s in Bb. Nice tune, though. Maybe you should have written it for a hobo with an oboe.”

“Naw, man, then it would have been the blues.”

“Y’right.”

“How’d you know, kid? You probably don’t know who Bill Monroe is.”

Dimitri tried to ignore the older man’s change in address from “man” to “kid.” Instead, he tried to think back to jazz club at Interlochen the past summer, but all he could think of was Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill Cody. His eyes drifted from the upper-right focus of database searching to the centered point of memory.
Rob Morris, Trombone Instructor. Tyrone Maguire, the kid on drums who really played vibes. A vocalist who could do anything in any octave at the same time, Bobby McFerrin. A saxmaster, Howie Smith, in his late twenties already. Another sax guy, Quintin Moore, who made a living as a programmer on a DEC PDP-8. Interlochen – between the lakes. Upstate Michigan. Magic. Meredith McIntyre. Damn her, I came so close. The girl from the #9 green. What was her name? I can trace her navel but I can’t remember her name. A wash of major 7ths, half diminished 13ths, chords built on altered notes. Meredith changing backstage after playing tennis. A golden ray hits her rich hay-blonde hair, disappearing under her t-shirt. Was it olive? Her skin was a matching tan. She had no tan lines. I was about to check the piano. Tux already on. Shit.

“Sorry.”

“Bill Monroe (    ). Never mind, kid. Can you hear it?”

He must mean the music. I hope so. I learned about misdirected pronouns in 9th grade. 

“Yeah. Pretty nice. You playing it?”

“I wrote it.”

“I’m mostly a classical player. But I can tell a well-crafted progression. And I like the melody.”

“You can hear it, if you’ve ever loved a woman.”

“You don’t think I’m a virgin, do you, old man?” There was a note of tension in Dimitri’s voice.

“I don’t think nothing about nobody. Not ‘til I played with them, at least.”

Ray Leopold. “Is this a stage name?”

“Yeah. I’m Raymont Leathers. I don’t figure any of your Curtis Prep teachers have a name like that. It’s strictly Clef Club, Raymont. Ray Leopold. You can’t even tell that this composer ain’t white. How ‘bout you, kid?”

“Dimitri.”

“Dimitri who? Dimitri Rasputin? You do sound a little bit Sovi-Et to me. Born here, or there?”

“Here. Kats, actually. My parents came in 1964.”

“Oooooh. Bay of Pigs. How did they get out of there?”

“Khrushchev must of made a mistake.”

“Morning in America. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall ‘n stuff. Still, you read OK. Where you headed, Dimitri?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

Dimitri reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his fellowship letter from Habimah Theater.

“Holmesburg Station.”

“Well, well, well, a veritable Irving Berlinski. Whatever else do you expect? I thought the way it works was the Russkies came through Israel to come here. Live ‘n learn. Lessee. Y’got round-trip tickets, travelers’ checks, some letters saying you’re goin’ to a kibbutz and a technical school all while you rehearse these kids for a musical, and Lord knows whatever else when the parent company gets back from Mother Russia, OK, OK! Not bad. In my day, the only way we got to see the world was by goin’ to Korea. Later, Vietnam.”

Dmmm, dm, dm, duduummm, dit, dit, dudummmmmmm, dummmmm, diduddleduddlediddydayyyy. 

Take the A train. That’s the only lick I can remember from the whole damn summer, other than the one I didn’t get of Meredith. What do I say to this guy? This is like me talking to Pushkin because I wrote a short story once. 

“I played in Israel once, at Habimah no less. I played the clarinet in a jazz beat, psychedelic-pop thing. Lots of players, not much structure. Free formin’. Their food sucks, man. Shawarma. Baba, hummus. Salads that come in tiny little cubes, thinner than the skin of the vegetable itself. Their liquor. I took one swig of that ouzo shit, kid, and my eyeballs damn near popped out of their sockets. Like anise and gasoline. Stick to beer.”

“How were the girls?”

“Young. Very young. They’re all married by age twenty.”

“How old were you when you went?”

“Thirty-six. I was twice the age of any of the kids that hung out with the bands.”

Beat.

“Yep, I got some. We all did. A little ouzo, a little hash, these kids didn’t need an alibi the morning after. They wanted a Harlem experience, they got a Harlem experience.”

Dimitri’s eyes widened. He longed for a life outside the sticky, amoeba-like Russian-Jewish neighborhood of the Northeast. Everything he knew about Harlem came from the ‘60’s riots and Jelly Roll Morton as portrayed by a touring show called “Jelly’s Last Jam” that he had wangled an audition for, when the piano man got violently and passionately ill after the last show in Cleveland. The music was too easy, and the lyrics seemed like something a foreigner would write in elementary school. So he failed to focus on the improv and “mailed it in.” He was better than that. He didn’t get a call-back.

“We grew up with our instruments we got from the schools. All the schools had orchestra and band, and PS (151) had two bands. After school was swing band. We played Dizzy, we played the Duke, we even tried  to work through Miles back before he was Miles. Our band leader made the arrangements. It was just the basics – the chart, the changes – but then we could just play. Everybody got a break. Sometimes one tune would last and last and last – and then it would be 5 pm and time to go home for dinner. Then the lucky ones, me and the other dudes who had parents working the night shift, we’d go to the Apollo and warm up with the band. I got to sit in a lot. Most of the guys were in the horn section. I didn’t go that way. I played clarinet.

“Go your own way, kid. By playing clarinet, not sax, I got special props. Be your own dude. I ain’t heard ya play, but doin’ what you doin’ now, I know you got chops."

I’ve got to ask.

“Why are you here? Why aren’t you in a limo somewhere? No offense, but this country runs on the roadway.”

“Not too far off. I’d take the train in any case, but if I could afford it I’d take Amtrak. You too I bet. But some people can’t handle the life. Think of Cannonball, Bird. People go down on smack, booze, you name it, we did it. We busted on dudes with problems, lightweights and shit. Can’t handle your liquor. But it’s brought better players than me to sad ends, kid.

“Tullytown station.”

“You live here now?”

“Yeah, I take care a’ my mom, but she has the house, so I guess she takes care a’ me. I got sober about three years back, and the word got out. I got a call to audition for a show by a kid named Prince. Ever heard a’ him, kid?

“Who hasn’t?” He just cut an album called ‘Purple Rain.’ It’s going to change the world, I think.”

“I have some of the charts. I been practicing harmonies, but also making my own breaks. Trenton’s coming up in a minute. You wanna stop for a bit? I think I’ll play some tunes with my own solos.”

“OK, but just maybe for a half hour or so. You have to get in line for international flights early.”

“Flying El-Al?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you gotta make it more ‘n two hours early. Terrorists, you know. Hey, you don’t have anything nasty in that duffel, do ya?”

Dimitri thought about that. No, he had sold the pot he had bought for graduation. He could get better stuff in Israel anyway, as soon as he knew the scene. And learned the lingo in Hebrew.

“No, I’m good. No bombs, either.”

“Cool. You got a little accent, though. Be careful. Don’t act funny. Anyway, your flight’s not ‘til 8, right?”

“How long is the train ride to Kennedy?”

“They didn’t tell you? You’d be lost, kid. Fuckin’ lost! “

“Huh?!” Dimitri had never considered the possibility that he might not get off at the airport. After all, in Philly you took the R-1 and you were there.

“You get off at New York Penn Station, and then follow the signs to the Long Island Railroad. LIRR, the locals call it; I f’get what the signs say. Kennedy is on the Queens line. I think there’s an express train there now. Otherwise, the line that go to Huntington stops at JFK. Plan an extra forty-five minutes, half an hour if you’re lucky. You bein’ a kid and all, you can bet on at least an hour. Don’t talk to any funky people with too much jewelry up there. They’re pimps, and they troll the places where kids get stuck looking for fresh meat.”

“I think I should skip the busking at Trenton.”

“Naw, kid, I’ll walk y’ over to the Long Island Line. I need the run-through.”

“Only if you start with The One True Love.”

“Deal.”

“Trenton Station. Last stop. Make sure to check for all your belongings. Transfer to the New Jersey Transit train to New York – Penn Station on Platform 2. Purchase tickets in the station upstairs, or you may pay a three dollar surcharge on the train. Have a good day and thank you for riding SEPTA.”

Graduation

“OK, fuck you, cretin!”

With that, Dimitri slammed the door to the row house that huddled behind a façade of Wissahickon schist on Harbison Street. The green duffel bag with the black trim and more than one fibrous scrape or snag had come from a classmate at Central High. Rather, it came from the older brother of said classmate, swiped while the sibling was off at tennis camp. For the day. At whitebread Philadelphia Cricket Club, on grass courts so thick that, from a distance, you could be forgiven if you thought that the cross-hatched pattern on the forest-green carpet had been painted, not mowed. Dimitri’s friend was right. His brother wouldn’t even notice that it was gone until fall, when it was time to head back to college. Dimitri wasn’t going to college, really, although he had matriculated, by scholarship, at the Jezreel Valley College in the Galilee, Israel. He was going away. If he had won a competition to accompany the Sidney Opera Company in Australia, he would have gone there.
“Chortyonok!” You will never listen. Disrespectful sukin ..”

Dimitri’s mother, Fanya, shot an icy blast over her husband’s furious tongue, freezing it to the roof of its cage in an incipient sibilant. This was not the first time that Maksim had used this epithet, impugning the species of the mother of his children, but the last time she didn’t talk to him for three days. There was no time for silence this time. Fanya threw the door back open – BANG! with a report as staccato as in its closing.

“Dimya, you cannot leave with your father beset with grief. Give me minute…”

Dimitri broke his stride angrily, like a tight end breaking off a pass route in front of a defensive back.
Dimitri’s father, Maksim, never had any use for his son’s passion for music. Dimitri’s mother, Fanya, pushed all the children to learn the piano. Dimitri paid for his studio time with a G. P. A. that never fell below 3.5, even though he had to do some first-class sucking up to his physics teacher to get that B he didn’t earn. He harvested nine college credits by taking the Advanced Placement tests, but he told Maksim that the subjects were biology, chemistry, and math, but he had taken English, history, and Russian. Russian! They believed him! They paid for his testing fees, and they snapped it up like matza balls eat salt.

“Trust me, my little durak, you could go be lawyer, doctor, President, but piano? We coming to America to make you MUSIKANT? Nyet! For last time, you come back here and you go to Temple and you become surgeon like your brother!”

Now, Maksim had just banned his youngest son from returning to the house, even though Dimitri’s older brother and sister were free to come and go as they pleased. She was beautiful, and he was in medical school.

Dimitri half-strode, half-stumbled to the bus stop at Frankford and Hawthorn, unzipped the duffel just a bit, and took out a thick paperback book with the tattletale yellow and black cover. War and Peace. The Cliff’s notes version – in English. Dimitri flipped through the pages like a fresh deck of cards. He had written quotes from class in Russian so that he could read the quotes before the test. Now he hit a page describing a society party in which the patroness discoursed in nothing but French. “SKUCHNAYA!!” Dimitri had buried the text under four colors of highlighter. “Boring!”  The 66 bus appeared a few blocks away. Dimitri tore the book in half at the spine, and tossed it in the trash can, one half at a time, first like a basketball, then like a Frisbee.

Getting on the bus, Dimitri could have glanced back at the block he wouldn’t see for twenty-five more years. He would have seen a row of freshly planted ginkgo trees, mercifully all male, standing between six and eight feet high – a class of leaf-bound preschool children in a line going to the bathroom, or the playground, or the lunchroom, with the row houses standing like teachers and administrators, fully grown and dour. The sidewalks would have been impossibly smooth, freshly laid to accommodate the expected foot traffic to the new shopping areas on Frankford Avenue. After all, there was a new concept in town, Chickie’s and Pete’s, the sports bar. Dimitri’s neighbors, the Cohens, wouldn’t have been caught dead there – it wasn’t kosher – but their freier family members often showed up after having more than one or two before Jewish holidays. As it was June, the men would have been out mowing, or the women out sweeping. Except the Cohens. It was Shabbes, and you didn’t work on Shabbes.  Dimitri might have noticed that the front door that he had abjured just moments ago, slamming it with a force that echoed through each of his eighteen years, had revealed his mother, sobbing openly as if she were still in Czarist Russia and Dimitri had just left for America. Dimitri thought, just for a moment, that he heard an automatic garage door opener creak open, banging every eighteen inches as the aluminum failed to fold over itself as neatly as had been advertised by the Sears salesman. Or was that the manual lawn mower banging in Maksim’s angry hands?

Dimitri didn’t look back. Instead, he slung the heavy duffel bag onto the baggage shelf of the number 66 bus. Then he unzipped the end pocket – damn, other end pocket -  and extracted the score to Joel Engel’s opera The Dybbuk. In it, he had placed his round-trip plane ticket to Israel, departing New York’s LaGuardia International Airport in six and a half hours. Passport? He thought he had stuffed it in the envelope with the ticket. Not there? A note in the score Dimitri had opened might have sung, “Panic!” but only if it were an eighth note. Before a beat had passed, Dimitri slapped himself in the butt with his left hand, and feeling the solid rectangle he had stuck back there, though he might as well have put a “Kick me” sticker on himself, as he enjoyed doing to the nerds, misfits, and Orthodox Jewish boys at school. Satisfied that he had no need to look back to that block that taunted him with the life he loathed, he sat on the stippled vinyl bus bench, working out passages with his left hand while holding the score in his right. Later, on the train from Frankfort Terminal to Trenton, he held the score with his left hand while making sure of the melodies in the right.  In each phrase of the music, Dimitri found the shape of his life to come. Israeli? Well, maybe, let’s see how the girls are. If I can handle the opera company, and I can get laid, maybe I’ll say I’m a sabra.