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  For K and P

  In Chicago I had unfinished emotional business.

  —Saul Bellow, The Actual

  VISIT TO THE JUDGE

  Chicago, 1984

  This is how it was for certain boys in Chicago, the sons of lawyers. In some families, Alexander Popper’s included, forget the bar mitzvah. To leave boyhood behind, you went to see Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz for a chat.

  He was a great man, a learned man, bosom buddy of the mayor himself, the machine’s favorite judge. In the words of one West Side precinct captain, “The yid really classed up the joint.”

  A federal judge! Think, son, of the heights to which you yourself might one day rise!

  A bachelor, father to no one and so father to everybody. Popper’s brother, Leo, once presented the judge with a drawing of him and his namesake. In the picture, Marovitz and Lincoln are sitting on a bench talking politics. The caption beneath their feet reads: Just a Couple of Abes. Marovitz got a big kick out of that. “Just!” he roared. “Just!”

  In the index of Mike Royko’s Boss, the judge is listed like this: Marovitz, Abraham Lincoln, 41–46; and Mafia, 42; amateur boxing career, 41; association with underworld figures, 42–43; influenced by “friendships,” 43–44; friendship with Richard Daley, 44–45; preoccupation with Abe Lincoln, 41–42.

  Now to this day, Popper has no truck with Royko’s insinuations. He remains a loyal, if wayward, stalwart. And hey, if Judge Marovitz was crooked, he wasn’t that crooked, which in Chicago, as everywhere, if everywhere was as honest about being dishonest, means something.

  It wasn’t a chat. Popper remembers how he sat there, swallowed up in that tremendous leather chair, afraid to even move because of how loud the crinkle would sound in his ears, and how he listened. But take a step back—before he listened, Popper waited, and in that waiting was a silence so absolute it was like drowning in the lake, out past that point where the sandbar gives way to blue emptiness. Him in there alone, his father in the judge’s anteroom, pacing. And the judge staring at him. His face and ears and bald pate were ruddy, as befitted a man who kept his chambers heartily cold. His single thick eyebrow was like a centipede crawling across the top of his face. And his eyes beneath that thicket of brow were full of motion, and to meet them straight on (as Popper had been told by his father to do) caused a churn in Popper’s stomach. Above him, as if to enforce the power of the judge’s gaze a hundredfold, an armada of images of Lincoln. Paintings, photographs, etchings, silhouettes, drawings by other boys like Leo who’d been encouraged by their father to give the judge a present. (Popper himself presented him with a piece of cardboard, the judge’s great name spelled out in pennies.) And on the tables, busts of Lincoln, statuettes of Lincoln. And they were all watching him, too—this was a test—and the silence was broken only by the judge’s sporadic wheezing. The fourteenth floor of the Federal Building. Afterhours, February.

  The judge slowly raised one hand and waved it around a little, as if to summon the force of all the Presidents who were all the same President. Then, with the index finger of his other hand, he pointed to a framed picture on his desk, a man and a woman dressed in black. Lined faces, hollow-eyed peasants from Lithuania. His parents. The judge played traffic cop, exhorting him to look around the room and at the same time at the little picture. But he got it. Popper had been prepared by his father to get it. Moreover, he was given to understand the miracle that was this country itself, this city. From a Kentucky log cabin to the White House. From the shtetl to the U.S. Courthouse. Look at him. Look at them. Now look at me. My father was a peddler. My mother sewed buttons for the landowner’s wife. My mother first got wind of the Great Emancipator at a meeting of socialists in Podberzeya. She heard that after he freed the slaves, Lincoln got shot in the temple. In the head, Mother, it means in the head! Nothing could convince my mother that Lincoln wasn’t a Jew!

  And the two of them, Popper and the judge, laughed, but the judge stopped laughing earlier, so Popper’s laugh hung there alone, between them, like an insult. And the judge’s ruddy face drooped then, became sad. Sad because there were some boys, there were always some boys, who failed to embrace the opportunity that was being handed to them on the silverest of all platters. Maybe you yourself are one of those boys who will squander God’s gift of Chicago. One of those boys who will take this vast gift for granted.

  The judge talking less to him now than to an audience of ghosts who seemed to have gathered at the darkening windows, just behind the half-closed blinds.

  Not that any gift worth salt comes without a price. You think a gift is free? Remember this for all time. But, by God, here we are free to live. No Ivan the Terribles, no Cossacks, no Stalins. In this city they wouldn’t know a pogrom from the St. Patrick’s Day parade. And here we answer only to the United States Constitution and Robert’s Rules of Order. With, note, one unwritten stipulation. Some call it patronage, I call it friendship. Everybody needs somebody else. Just as in the old country, everybody serves Caesar. The difference is, here you get a shot at playing Caesar in the movie. And so does your neighbor. And your neighbor’s cousin Bobchinsky. We scratch each other’s back in this city. I scratch you. You scratch me. Nice to have your back scratched. Especially those places you can’t reach. This is how we build our buildings tallest of the tall. Our highways, fourteen lanes across. Sears, Roebuck, Marshall Field’s, Wiebolt’s, Goldblatt’s, Montgomery Ward, Carson Pirie Scott, Hart Schaffner Marx, Polk Brothers. Back scratchers all. Do you think we could have reversed the flow of the Chicago River, this kind of engineering marvel, if not for the scratch, scratch, scratching of one another’s back?

  The judge sneezed then, an internal, handless sneeze, the sneeze of a man for whom sneezes were not an obstacle to straight dope. His little body jolted.

  And it wasn’t absurd. If it sounds absurd, it is memory’s fault and not the judge’s. The truth is that it was a show—a show Popper studied for, a show he rehearsed for, but there was something fundamental about it that wasn’t a show at all. Himself in the big leather chair with his cold feet; it was less the judge’s words or all those sorrowful Lincolns than the incoming dusk of the city, the gray doomful light settling over that room through those half-closed blinds. He was being told in no uncertain terms: Don’t be cute. Your flesh will wither, too. Don’t be cowed into the old hoodwink that you are actually young, that you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Even cows aren’t so stupid. And then the old judge gulped a breath and laughed, really laughed this time. A terrible, high-pitched whinny of a laugh. His eyes disappeared beneath his brow. The skin around his skull seemed to tighten, and all at once his ruddy face went pale—dead.

  That day Popper, too, felt dead in that winter office light.

  Relieved, though, as well. Because he’d been prepared for this also. Make it past the laugh, his father had said. All you have to do is make it past the laugh and you’re home free. The judge reached to his shelf and pulled down the Pentateuch. He began leafing, seemingly at random, until he came to his favorite book, Numbers. Then he intoned: “And all the congregation lifted up their voice and cried; and the people wep
t that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron; and the whole congregation said unto them: ‘Would that we had died in the land of Egypt.’ ”

  The judge slapped the book shut, leaned toward him over the great desk, and began the test: “How did Moses respond to this cowardice and ingratitude?”

  “First he put his head in the sand, Your Honor.”

  “And then?”

  “He pleaded with the people, Your Honor.”

  “And then?”

  “The people still wouldn’t listen.”

  “Yes! And then what happened?”

  “Well, the Jews prepared to stone Moses and Aaron, Your Honor.”

  “Conclusion?”

  “Accept to be stoned.”

  “Accept to be stoned for what?”

  “The greater glory, Your Honor.”

  “Right. True. Well done. And then?”

  “God had enough of the Jews. They were too rebellious, too defiant. He wanted to smite them out of existence but Moses convinced him to give them another chance. God agreed, reluctantly. After a couple of minor plagues for punishment—fire and snakes and also a few men over twenty sucked into a crack in the earth—they moved on again. Moses wanted to get to the Promised Land already. Forty years of wandering in the wilderness gets tiring.”

  “Sustained. And did Moses reach the Promised Land, Mr. Popper?”

  Popper hesitated, purposefully. Weighed his answer with the heavy burden of study, of knowledge, of the sad irony of it.

  “No, Your Honor, he never did. In the end, Moses too failed God and—”

  “Yes? And?”

  “God brought him to Mount Nebo and let him have a look at the land of milk and honey but Moses never set foot in it.”

  “In summation?”

  “Moses died alone. No family, no friends. Nobody even knows where he’s buried. An angry God isn’t much of a friend, Your Honor.”

  The skull nodded and the judge began to clap. The doll-like hands in slow syncopation, clap, clap, clap. The room all shadows now. Forget Moses. Goodbye, Abe. Your days are done. You were good stories, good men. But this, my son, is Chicago. We don’t go it alone. For a while longer they sat together in the new darkness, until it was time for the judge to ring the little bell. Tinkle, tinkle. Then, at last, his secretary came in—the light draining into the room as if from another world—and she took Popper by the wrist (he still thinks of her moist grip) and towed him out to where his proud father waited with his hat in his hands.

  PART

  ONE

  1096 Olivia

  1

  PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A CREATIVE WRITING MAJOR IN THE AUTUMN OF MIKE DUKAKIS,

  OR

  FIRST LOVE

  Often he thought: My life did not begin until I knew her.

  —Evan S. Connell, Mr. Bridge

  BUNNIES

  In the early seventies there was an epidemic of Playboy Bunnies hurling themselves out windows of the John Hancock Building. Leo informed him that these bunnies weren’t rabbits. They were women, women with long pointy ears and puffballs over their breasts. Popper was five. He would imagine them falling, all that air speeding past those ears. But these bunnies never landed. Theirs was a free fall that went on and on—and on. And even then he thought he understood why they did it. That if you spent so long so high, so so high, it was only inevitable that you’d need to feel that drop, Hugh Hefner and Chicago itself be damned. If it’s time to fall, let’s fall.

  LETHE

  Ann Arbor, 1988

  The scene: the basement of the Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan, the most hideous concrete mistake of a building ever architected by man, i.e., the UGLi.

  It’s 2 a.m., Tuesday.

  The UGLi is a raucous place, loud conversation, coffee, beer, music, a little dope in the bathrooms, some isolated studying here and there. Popper’s not studying. He’s in his cubby, half-sleeping, half-reading William Blake. Not for class. Popper likes to carry certain books around and announce before anybody even asks: This book? No, actually this isn’t for class. And it’s not pleasure reading either. There’s no such thing as pleasure reading. It’s all pain, pain—and more pain.

  If you trap the moment before it’s ripe,

  The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe;

  But if you let the ripe moment go

  You can never wipe off the tears of woe.

  She’s a mere four cubbies away. At first he spies only the back of her head, her blond-brown ponytail rising above the plywood like a beacon. He ducks beneath his desk and eyeballs down the row of legs. Her running shoes are off her feet, one socked foot scratches a naked shin.

  Blake admonishes, nay, threatens—

  Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

  Popper stands up and laps the cluster of cubbies six, seven times, as if pursuing great thoughts. All the while, surreptitiously, observing her in this basement light, in this noisy purgatorial fluorescence. Each time he passes, he peers a little closer over the rim of her cubby. Never has a square of plywood held so much promise. Details? At present she is eating a Butterfinger. Very unique candy bar. Famous yellow wrapper. Concentrate. Don’t babble. Tell your head to stop babbling. She places her index finger and her middle finger over her mouth when she chews. She is reading intensely. He can almost see her eyes move across the words. God, if I could only read like that. I read two sentences and my brain wanders to Tegucigalpa. Her face, describe her face. Why is it so hard to describe a face? May as well describe a soul!

  (Question for Creative Writing Professor (adjunct), Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel, author of a good, sad novel called Floaters, which refers to those small black wings that rain down our eyes:

  POPPER: Professor O’Dowd Ezekiel, why is it so hard? Why are things like trees or cars easier, when we spend much of each day staring into faces?

  PROFESSOR O’DOWD EZEKIEL: Ah, but do we, Mr. Popper? Do we really ever truly look at each other, see each other? It would seem to me that we spend our days not looking into each other’s faces.)

  Body easier. Legs easier. Breasts easier. Always. Because men are inherently infantile? Something to do with our relationship to the memory of our mothers? Hers? Only rising hints of sweatshirt. Small undiscovered planets? You know they’re there, but they’re so distant they may as well be conjectures.

  Retreats to his own chair. Spies low again. She crosses her legs, one way, then another, then uncrosses them. For no recordable reason, Popper thinks of the word lethe. He gets up again and approaches the dictionary, the great dictionary that stands alone in the middle of the room, beneath all that buzzing light, like a weird pulpit nobody ever sermons from. Popper flaps the pages of truth and/or metaphor. The stream of oblivion in the lower world, hence, forgetfulness.

  Maybe I’m spelling it wrong?

  Ah, Lithe. Supple, bendable, that’s better. Supple, an exciting sort of word. Back again to his cubby headquarters. Use it in a sentence. I hope you don’t mind my saying hello. I find you beautiful but also lithe, not to be confused with lethe, which means something else entirely, having to do with memory, or rather loss of it, yet as it is, I can’t forget you. Are you by any chance a dancer?

  She gets up to talk to a friend sitting in another cubby. The friend’s face hidden, nothing but a mass of curly hair.

  “How’s it going?”

  “I’m so bored of psychology I could go on a shooting spree,” Mass of Curly Hair says.

  Gripping Blake for courage, Popper makes his move and drops the note on her desk. He notes the title and the author of the facedown book. The Need for Roots. Simone Weil. Never heard, must look him up.

  And flees to the bathroom. Popper, hiding in a stall, waits. In the bowl, a forlorn unflushed turd the color of knockwurst. But even in there, he hears her laugh. A blasting, honkish, gooselike sound. The UGLi goes quiet. He’ll learn this. How this girl could laugh entire rooms—banquet
halls—into silence.

  Lindy, seriously, look at this, some doof’s writing notes.

  AT YU LIN’S

  Wait, you’re a what?”

  “It’s a new undergraduate major.”

  “Weird.”

  “You?”

  “Philosophy.”

  “Philosophy. Interesting. Really. And difficult. Wow, philosophy, wow. I’ve read Kierkegaard. God ordered Abraham to murder his kid and Abraham said, Okay okay, whatever you say, not a problem. He didn’t even try to get out of it. He didn’t run away to Nineveh, which sounds to me like a pretty fun place. That’s faith? I mean, at least Jonah gave defying a totally unreasonable God a shot. And Kierkegaard says Abraham’s a great man? To me, he just sounds like a bad dad. Did I miss something?”

  She just let his gibberish float there between them without answering. Lunch at a Chinese restaurant on South University. The place was dark, the blinds drawn against the afternoon sun. Above each table a small round bulb; Popper thought, Each table its own sad moon. This isn’t going very well at all. She is from Wisconsin and her name is Katherine but her father had called her Kat since she was six minutes old. Kat Rubin. I’ll never see her again.

  “Who do you read, then?”

  “Oh, you know, lately a lotta Ray Carver.”

  “Who?”

  “People call him a minimalist, but that’s really a misnomer. Carver just doesn’t use a barrel of words to say something he could say in half a phrase. He’s the poet of modern despair. Drunken, laconic husbands. Lonely, cheating wives. You know, the gritty truths—”

  “Fuck that. Are you related to Karl Popper?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “How many Poppers could there be?”