The One That Isn’t Moving

Kettleman was at his best in a crisis. No level of human travail was too profound for his timely interventions. If a friend had the flu, Kettleman was there with chicken soup. If the troubled roommate of a former girlfriend was addicted to pills, Kettleman took her in, fed her, and kept her drug-dealing boyfriend at bay while he gave her the strength to resist her fierce cravings. And if she repaid his kindness by ransacking his apartment and selling his expensive speakers for dope, Kettleman forgave her and got her into rehab. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a foul-weather friend. So, when Connor’s wife, Marla, called, as chirpy as if they had spoken six minutes ago rather than six months ago, and said let’s meet at Vesuvio’s for lunch, Kettleman A: knew that she meant Café Roma because she always confused the two, and B: said sure, without getting into anything too heavy with her over the phone.

In the division of assets that follows divorce, Kettleman’s ex-wife, Lenore, had glommed onto Connor and Marla, though her annexation seemed more like a campaign for electoral votes than friendship. Thus, Kettleman knew only the bits of information he’d gleaned from Connor regarding Marla’s slippage back into the troubles that had plagued her when the four of them had been inseparable. At first, random food items began appearing in their refrigerator, for which Marla’s explanations had been vague and cheerfully implausible. Then came her day-long disappearances, and lately the random strangers showing up at their home, people who knew things about Marla’s life that were new to Connor, like her talent to play the guitar and that God had once lifted her in His arms.

Connor was a young twenty-nine, six years Marla’s junior, British, and over his emotional head in waters that were ankle deep to most people. He tended to minimize frightening events into a size he could manage. Kettleman was glad that Marla had called him. He’d be able to appraise her condition firsthand and reoccupy his role as the stabilizing influence.

He hit the shower and soaped down his artillery shell of a body. Marla’s voice on the telephone still resonated in his ears. She possessed the three characteristics he found attractive in a woman: a prominent overbite, sumptuous breasts, and a troubled past. He recalled his first impression of her was that she smiled a lot, and that her mind was half-gone. In this he was partly right. Her mind had come halfway back. (As the Chinese say, you have to watch the moon for two nights to know if it’s on the wax or the wane.) Having a sharp mind himself, he maintained that as a qualification for potential friendships, a barrier that became more porous when he learned that Marla had only recently emerged from a stint at a psychiatric hospital, where at regular intervals she had been zapped with enough voltage to light a small village. It seemed to have worked though, for when she emerged she was calm and rational, grateful to be relieved of the monumental stresses that had sent her there.

 Lenore had made the first contact. She had bought an end table from their antique store, The Forest Of Arden. Really Connor’s enterprise, underwritten by Marla’s elementary school teaching income. Kettleman had been home when Connor delivered the table. He’d hit it off with the Brit right away. This was not typical of Kettleman, who was generally standoffish with people whose quirks might be more interesting than his. But he liked Connor’s working-class accent and his spiky hair and was fascinated with his nearly albino skin that was all pink and cream of mushroomy.

The two couples began hanging out nearly every weekend. Kettleman was not afraid to listen, and Marla’s sensing that Kettleman’s hearth-like body was a true synecdoche of his inner self, confided to him all the horrendous details of her descent into hell that precipitated her being committed: The hordes of Nazi storm troopers that crawled out of the fissures in her brain, first in nightmares, then in daymares, chasing her down streets, lurking in her kitchen, in the shower. She described the incidents that had resulted in her summons before the district school board—the Christmas play she had staged that ended with her own crucifixion, the field trip to the Malibu tide pools where she had waded out into the ocean in all her clothes—the humiliating hearing that had culminated in her dismissal with a mere two-week grace period, one day for each of the fourteen years she had taught there.

It was not unusual at the end of their evenings together to find Marla and Kettleman immersed inside a glowing membrane of conversation. On one such occasion, Marla conducted Kettleman into their backyard where there was something she needed to show him. It was a moonlit April night. The blossoms of the mock orange tree were falling through light as though invisible flower girls were sprinkling a path. Their heady carpet of fragrance made Kettleman feel he could fly. Marla stood close to him, almost touching.

“Ket,” she had said, and opened her blouse to him. In Kettleman’s world a man would cut off his dick before pointing it at the wife of a friend. He put up his hands in the universal sign of surrender and backed into the house.

“They’re here for you whenever you want them,” she had smiled.

Out of the shower, Kettleman toweled down and swiped a swath of steam off the medicine chest mirror. He avoided making eye contact with his reflection. It wasn’t the big solid Cossack face and dark set black eyes that he minded seeing, or his ice chest torso and meaty arms. It was his hair. It had reached a critical length where it had to be cut right now or move into a whole new unmanageable stage. Kettleman’s barber, Rex Feingold, had suddenly died a month prior, at the age of ninety-two. A catastrophe. He had just found Rex, had only received two haircuts, but they were perfect. The void he had filled in Kettleman’s life was a large and jagged crater. In the wake of his divorce from Lenore, Kettleman had left her the house with its abundance of amenities and embedded himself in the basement apartment of a duplex bereft of most creature comforts. There was no wife, no girlfriend, no children, no neighbors with keys, no pets, no plants, no perishable foods. There was a hanging scale-model of the Solar System. There were papers and magazines with clipped and circled articles reflecting his succession of contradictory beliefs, both social and dietary, that he adhered to with religious ferocity for two, sometimes even three consecutive days. But save for the deliveries of three a.m. internet purchases that he had only the dimmest recollection of making (a six-thousand-dollar mattress, a two-year supply of insect repellent), so that unwrapping them was like finding gifts from the most thoughtful and intimate lover, nothing was ever different when he came back to his abode than it had been when he left. Nothing was done that he did not initiate and cause to be done.

Apart from having his hair cut.

He couldn’t remember how he had met her. Somebody who knew someone who knew someone had recommended her. But at regular intervals, for more than a year, without his ever having to think about it, Beverly would appear. She was blonde and nearly attractive but not quite, friendly the way a lover might be who knew you too well for any pretense. She would lead him to the kitchen sink, and with her shoulders up against his back, and hot streams of water running over his head, her strong fingers massaged lather into the folds of his beefy scalp. And then, as Kettleman liked to tell it in the gruff voice he reserved for humor, “the bitch had the nerve to fall in love, move to Connecticut with some guy, and have a baby.”

It took Kettleman weeks after her departure to find Rex. He groused that there was no such thing as a normal barbershop anymore. Everything was a fancy salon with colorists and scalp follicologists. He just wanted his hair to be shorter when he came out than when he went in. He rebelled at the caffelattification of the world. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford a six-dollar latte. Or (Good God in heaven!) sushi at the ballpark. Money was not the object. Years back, when the Internet was still a novelty, Kettleman had invented a piece of coding that turned out to be essential for all Internet transmissions. With his royalties of one-millionth of a cent per hit, even with half of it going to Lenore, his bank accounts were as overstuffed as silos in August. He hated what had become normal behind his back. Which was why finding Rex the Barber had been such a Godsend and losing him such a blow. He would never say this to a cancer patient—he knew it would sound like when the Beatles said they were more popular than Jesus and the Christian world freaked out—but finding and then losing Rex felt to Kettleman exactly like descriptions he had heard of the euphoria that comes from remission after a sequence of chemo, and then a month later to be told that the cancer had returned.

As was his habit, Kettleman left home early enough to arrive at Café Roma well before the arranged meeting time with Marla. He considered it an expression of respect to arrive early. Lenore had seen it as moral superiority, but that was Lenore. Cruising west on Wilshire Boulevard in his ‘88 Lincoln Continental, Kettleman was startled to see Rabbi Eliezer standing at the bus stop waggling his thumb at passing cars. His hitch-hiking technique was atrocious. His elbow was crooked up, his hand elevated to nose level, jerking back and forth like a bobble head. What were the odds, even once in your life, of encountering a nattily dressed, octogenarian rabbi hitchhiking on Wilshire Boulevard? What about twice in the same week? Kettleman had picked him up just a few days earlier, miles away in the San Fernando Valley, and taken him to a synagogue in West Hollywood to complete a minyan for a bereaved husband’s observance of shiva for his deceased wife. He was dressed in the same pressed tan suit, dress shirt, and tie with a brimmed summer weight hat he had worn the previous day.

 “Rabbi!” Kettleman yelled out his open window. “Over here.” He pulled off to the right and opened his passenger side door.

The old man pointed at himself questioningly. He reminded Kettleman of an ancient Airedale, spindly legs wavering in the breeze.

“Yes. Get in.”

 “This is a nice car,” the rabbi observed once he had settled into the sumptuous upholstery of the front seat. He handed Kettleman a piece of coarse brown paper from a lavatory dispenser that contained an address written in smudgy pencil and asked if Kettleman knew where it was. Kettleman noticed that the sleeves of the rabbi’s jacket were frayed, and a small safety pin stood in for a missing button on his shirt.

“Are you Jewish?” the rabbi asked in an undertone in case the Czar was listening in.

“No, Irish Catholic,” Kettleman joshed, expecting a wry chuckle of recognition, which did not come. “Yeah, I’m Jewish,” Kettleman said. “You asked me the other day.”

Once they hit a certain speed in traffic, it was as if a tour bus had passed under the electronic sensor and its mechanized voice kicked in. Rabbi Eliezer told Kettleman how he’d been a congregational rabbi in Romania until the Nazis came, how he’d survived the camps, (here he made an unconscious gesture toward what you’d see on his arm if he rolled up his sleeve) and returned to his village after the war to find twenty-three Jews left alive out of three thousand who’d lived there before the war. He resumed being a rabbi to his small congregation until the communists took over. They were as bad as the Nazis. They didn’t kill him but forced him to preach propaganda from the pulpit, which was nearly as bad. He uttered a phrase in Yiddish and asked Kettleman if he knew what it meant, which he didn’t.

“Getting the hot branding iron on both sides of the tuchus,” the rabbi translated. “You know what’s a tuchus?”

“A tuchus I know,” Kettleman said.

Kettleman knew the end of the story without hearing it again. After Romania, Eliezer had fled to Israel and eventually immigrated to America. He was told here that he was too old to be a rabbi. Jewish Family Services found him a room with a bed and a hot plate and gave him fifty dollars a week for food. The rabbi had told the story identically, with the same pauses and intonations, the other day.

Kettleman found the address, which turned out to be a Jewish home for the aged. “You live here?” Kettleman asked as he pulled over and stopped.

 “What me? No. I read here to an elderly man.”

“To an elderly man?” Kettleman thought he was making a joke. “How old do you have to be to be elderly?”

“Lonely makes you old enough.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a question before you go inside? After all you’ve been through, how do you still believe in a just and gentle God?”

“Some days it rains,” the rabbi said. “Do you stop believing in the sun?” And then to Kettleman’s astonishment, the rabbi reached out and held Kettleman’s head powerfully under his hands and recited the most passionate prayer in the liturgy, words that Kettleman had not heard spoken since his father’s funeral when he was a boy. “May the Lord bless thee and keep thee. May the Lord sanctify thee with his commandments and be gracious unto thee. Let his countenance shine upon thee and grant you his most precious gift, peace.”

Kettleman found himself trembling when the rabbi finished his benediction. The old man’s hat bumped the roof as he got out of the car. The hinges of his body were stiff and barnacled. His hair was like wild milkweed growing in unwatered soil. Kettleman pressed a twenty-dollar bill into the rabbi’s hand. “Please,” Kettleman said. “Don’t say no.”

The rabbi regarded the bounty with wonderment. “They don’t have money, the man I read to. His sister’s husband cuts my hair.” The rabbi nodded toward a tiny shop across the street with an old-fashioned barber pole. Kettleman blinked. It was exactly what he had been looking for.

He found himself disoriented and made uncharacteristic wrong turns after leaving the rabbi. Even with the detours, he was the first to arrive at Café Roma. Marla had a liquid relationship with time. Her inner clock was always set to Right Now. Half an hour after Kettleman had eaten the bottom half of a roll, piled so high with butter it looked like a body on a funeral bier, he saw the green Toyota van with the “Forest of Arden” logo pull into the parking lot. Marla spotted him at the window from outside and waved ebulliently.

It was good that she had to walk out of his sightline to enter the front door of the restaurant. It gave Kettleman a moment to recover his composure. He had girded himself to deal with her mind being a little flaky, but he was not prepared for her physical change. She had become gaunt. Her face looked like it was stretched across her bone structure like a kite pulled too tightly across its frame.

“Ket,” she said, putting a lifetime into one syllable as she plopped herself down on the opposite banquette. She had not bought new clothes to accommodate her diminishing topography. Her once luxuriant breasts moved loosely under her cotton blouse, sucked dry of their allure. Her skin had an unhealthy pallor and was thin as a layer of human filo. By a strange mathematic, the multiplication of negatives produced a powerful effect, amplifying the home fire that still burned in her eyes. She held his hands across the table.

Her touch recalled a second encounter with her that had occurred months after the night under the mock orange tree when Kettleman had declined Marla’s offer. The two couples had spent the weekend in Santa Barbara. After an intoxicating day on the beach under perfect skies, and after a few margaritas before and after dinner, Connor had produced a small trove of Quaaludes.

Entering Marla that night had not felt the way he had anticipated it might. She was tighter than Lenore, dryer and deeper, interesting and unfamiliar, like piloting a ship through the Straits of Magellan when you’d been accustomed to Cape Horn. While he was inside her, he had reached across the space between the two queen beds and found Lenore’s hand. Even as Connor thrashed about between Lenore’s legs with surprisingly un-British exuberance, Kettleman’s and Lenore’s fingers had grasped in a firm steady hold, that had been the closest he’d ever felt to her.

Marla clumped her elbows down onto the Formica table. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

“Which part of that is my fault?” Kettleman had meant his voice to carry more humor, less belligerence than he heard.

“You’re right,” she admitted.

“No, I didn’t mean it that way.”

She brushed away crust and debris from Kettleman’s chin. “You’re a sloppy eater.”

The waitress came to their booth with her order pad open. “I’ll have my usual,” Marla said.

The waitress regarded her with confusion.

“Salad with endive, cucumber, tomatoes, and goat cheese.”

“How would I know that?” the waitress asked.

“It’s what I get wherever I go.”

Kettleman ordered chocolate pudding.

“Which one of us is crazy?” Marla laughed.

Kettleman registered the remark as a good sign that Marla knew why she was here.

“Fat is actually good for you,” Kettleman informed her. “I’m seeing a Polish nutritionist who’s done studies. What—?”

She was grinning at him across the table. “You’re so Kettleman.”

“Who else would I be?”

 “Do you know that feeling that you can see through a person right to their baby pictures? It makes you want to hug them and tell them it’s all right. That’s how I feel all the time now.”

Kettleman had no reverse gear, just variable speeds of forward. “I’m a little worried about you,” he said.

“Do you know what I find completely amazing? In all the time I’ve known you, I’ve never heard you sing.”

“That’s the most amazing thing you notice?”

 “I’m really fine,” she assured him.

 “I’ve seen you finer,” he said. “Do you think you might need a little booster shot?”

“Do you mean go back in there?” Her body vibrated though she did not lose her smile.

“As a possibility.”

 “I want everybody to bring a musical instrument to my party. I want us to sing a duet together.”

“What party?”

Their food orders came. Kettleman watched Marla apply a poultice of goat cheese to a leaf of romaine, roll it all into a cylinder and bite off a section. “This was good,” she said, and asked the waitress to pack the rest in a to-go box.

 “Are you leaving?”

“I have many callings,” she declared.

The restaurant wasn’t far from a freeway entrance, but Kettleman didn’t like to follow preordained routes. He took Pico east to La Cienega and detoured around another sinkhole that had appeared where they were trying to build a subway. Only in Los Angeles would they think it a good idea to propel electric cars through earthquake faults marbled with deposits of flammable methane. Thousands of years from now, he thought, tourists will gawk at the site where the city had been and ask, “Why did they stay? Didn’t they have enough warning? Were they just stupid?”

He felt secure that fears of Marla’s insanity had been exaggerated. She was quirky, but who in their right mind wasn’t?

An official looking tag was taped to Kettleman’s door. Rarely was this a harbinger of good news. It announced that an attempt had been made to pick up a parcel at his address at three p.m. and that he’d have to call the eight hundred number to arrange another pickup. Smack in the center of Kettleman’s kitchen was a fully assembled Swedish sauna, a birthday gift to himself that had taken weeks to assemble and which he had used for a grand total of six minutes before he became claustrophobic, his heart began to race, he couldn’t breathe the oven-baked air and thought he was having a heart attack. He had to dismantle this thing and return it before the thirty-day money back guarantee expired. It took him the entire remainder of that day and all the next to dismember the structure plank by plank, repack it in its original shipping crate, and obtain unequivocal assurance from the Vice President of Direct Marketing in Lake Inari, Finland that if it were shipped by the end of business day tomorrow he would still be entitled to the full refund. With all the distraction, he had neglected to buy an instrument for Marla’s party.

Connor and Marla’s home was a tiny dollhouse less than a thousand square feet on a cul-de-sac in a modest neighborhood. They had very few friends that Kettleman knew of, and he expected a sedate gathering. Two blocks away he knew something was different. There was no place to park, and a live hum permeated the atmosphere, the sense of a downed power line that grew progressively stronger as Kettleman approached their block.

As he turned the corner, he felt like he was entering the set of a Fellini movie. There were strolling minstrels, jugglers, a seven-foot man riding a unicycle. There was a girl carrying a rabbit in a top hat, a man with a mustache and thick glasses wearing athletic shorts. Marla wore a silky white iridescent peignoir with a crown and a wand, and two sets of wings fastened to her back. “You’re here,” she exulted.

“Do you know any of these people?” Kettleman asked.

“Does anyone ever know anybody?” When she hugged him, he felt amperage through her fingers.

“I didn’t bring an instrument,” Kettleman said.

“You are an instrument.”

She nodded for him to follow her and led him away from the critical mass of the party, past the neighbor’s yard to the side of the house, and through a hole in a wire fence. By this circuitous route they returned through a rotting wooden barrier into Connor and Marla’s own back yard. It was November. The branches of the mock orange tree were bare above them. The night air was clear. In the southwest sky facing the airport, patterns of red and amber blinking lights flashed code at them.

“There’s Mars,” Kettleman said. “It’s closer to earth than it’s been in five thousand years.”

“Which light is Mars?”

“It’s the one that isn’t moving.”

 “What would it take to suspend the laws of physics?” she whispered.

He smiled obliquely at her.

“You know,” she said, and laid her soul out as if it were a naked snow angel. Her arm was raised alongside his. He could smell her skin as she turned toward him. Her eyes blazed like a filament in a bulb that flares impossibly bright the moment before it pops. Molecules of crackling air were all that separated their skins. It would take no more than the movement of electrons for the world to become a different place.

“You know,” she said. “I know you understand.”

He smiled reassuringly, understanding nothing.

The call came early the following morning that Marla had hung herself. The woman on the phone said she was calling everyone in Marla’s address book, assuming that whoever was in her book was a friend. Kettleman did not recognize her voice and had to ask twice who she was. He felt angry and displaced and that he should be the one making these calls.

The husband of the sister of the elderly man whom Rabbi Eliezer read to was an immigrant Polish barber named Ignatz. He stood barely five feet tall and had the most incongruous high-pitched twittery giggle that Kettleman had ever heard coming from the throat of a seventy-year-old man. Even with the barber chair dropped to its lowest level, Ignatz had to stand on tiptoe to reach the top of Kettleman’s head. He was telling Kettleman how he came to be a barber, how when he got out of Treblinka he had learned that the Nazis had wiped out his village. (Nazis again! Kettleman was getting sick of hearing about Nazis.) His mother, his father, his grandparents, three brothers, two sisters, their children, all had been eradicated. He was ready to kill himself. Then he saw a woman even more miserable-looking than he was. Her hair was like an animal’s.               

He had learned to cut hair in the camps. The one treasure he had managed to save was the carbon steel scissors he had stolen from the desk of the Bavarian lieutenant. He had to cut ten heads to earn enough cigarettes to barter for a pair of shoes, which he gave to the feral woman. A week later he ran into her again at the wall where people wrote the names of relatives who’d been found. She was cleaned up. He barely recognized her. She asked if he had found any family. He said no. She said that neither had she and did he want to walk with her. “Next week is our sixtieth wedding anniversary,” Ignatz giggled. “Five children and eleven grandchildren are making a party for us. You see? We’re repopulating the world!”

In Kettleman’s mind he was with Marla under the bough of the mock orange. As Ignatz shook out the apron and Kettleman’s trimmed hair fell around him like a shower of comet dust, he wondered what universe of possibilities would have been opened if he had moved his arm through that one millimeter of space and touched her. And as he watched what he might have done, the great hearth of his belly opened wide, and he swallowed Marla into himself, like a film of childbirth played in reverse.