Conversation Over Moo Goo Gai Pan

I've noticed that as you get older most of your friends fall out like hair, or decay like teeth. Usually, though, there's one that you keep. You need him as a witness to what you once were — a nice-looking kid with fast hands — and eventually as a pallbearer. I had thought I'd keep Milton, but as he himself said, I always did think too much.

I was in the Philippines when I got his letter, and I read it sitting on some 40-millimeter crates in an ammunition dump. At first I refused to believe what I read — it was as though I'd seen his name on a casualty list.

Not that I had anything against marriage — this one just didn't make sense. It had to be bad news. Sylvie wasn't knocked up — Milton would've told me. And I knew he wasn't in love, so why in hell had he done it? She was a good kid, she had a shape, but you don't love a girl for that. And you don't marry her. Not Milton, anyway — or so I thought.

His letter told me nothing, so I took the cue and postponed my questions for two years. Then when I got out in 1947, I went to see him. He was living in Kew Gardens, in the top half of a two-family house. His brother-in-law, who was a dentist, had the ground floor.

(continued on page 144)Moo Goo Gai Pan(continued from page 131)

The minute he opened the door, I could see he had put on weight. It was also plain that motherhood hadn't been kind to Sylvie, either. I was immediately uncomfortable, and to stall for time, I picked up their son, who was about a year-and-a-half and had apparently been conceived well within wedlock. The minute I laid hands on him, he went off like a burglar alarm. We all started cootchy-cooing and trying to coax him to smile, or at least shut up, for his uncle Paul, but it was no use. Finally Sylvie took him and pressed his face between her breasts to muffle him up, and Milton opened the window to let out the compressed air. He invited me to stick my head out too and look down at his lawn, which he had bought and laid in divots like linoleum squares.

Sylvie held her son in her lap, ready to smother him again if necessary, and we sat around talking nervously like three strangers in the dentist's waiting room downstairs. I was trying to be charitable, to give Milton the benefit of the doubt, but it wasn't easy. The kid, for example, was unattractive, and it didn't look like the kind of unattractiveness that he'd outgrow. Sylvie, on the other hand, seemed to be rapidly outgrowing whatever attractiveness she had had. The way she bit off her d's and t's, it was like circumcising every word. Milton's accent wasn't so bad — it had the nuances and inflections of a well-told Jewish joke — but with Sylvie it was no joke.

She began all her sentences with so. So what are you going to do now? So you were in Japan? So you're a lieutenant? and so on. When Milton and I spoke, her head turned from one of us to the other as if she were at a tennis match.

Am I jealous? I asked myself as we sat there fanning the conversational fire with clichés. Milton and I had planned to take a place in the Village when we got out of the Army, so I guess I was jealous. But not only for me — for him. He had been my best friend, my buddy, the closest thing I had to a brother, and I was jealous of all the things he might have been and I might have shared with him.

Of course I saw that he probably would have turned out to be just what he was now, but at least we'd have had the fun of trying. Ashamed of what I was thinking, I tried to look at it his way: What would we have done in the Village, after all? Strike too many poses, chase too many girls, waste too many evenings sitting in the San Remo, always hoping for and expecting too much.... Most likely it would all have been pointless, but as some poet said, you never know how much is enough until you know how much is too much. Milton would never know, and this realization opened such a distance between us that I felt I was still looking at him and talking to him from the other side of the world.

After dinner, while Sylvie did the dishes, Milton and I watched television. It was still a new thing in 1947, and although his set was about seven feet tall and three deep — with a radio, phonograph and bar built in — the screen was about the size of an enlarged snapshot. A stand-up, borscht-belt comic was on, and he was making faces at the audience. Then I saw that both he and Milton were laughing at the same time, and I felt a swift flash of anti-Semitism. He wasn't my buddy, my brother, anymore — he was just a Milton, and to him I was just a goyish kopf.

When it was time to go, I had the feeling I would never see him again, and I would have said something. I don't know what — everything, maybe — but Sylvie walked with us to the subway, so that was that.

After that we let it drop by mutual consent, but about a year later, when I was living in the Village, I ran into him. I was coming out of a secondhand book shop on Fourth Avenue and he was going somewhere to see somebody about some secondhand machines. At first I didn't recognize him because he was wearing a hat — then, in the confusion, we arranged to have dinner.

I was to meet him on the corner of Fifth and Eighth at 6:30. In this, at least, he hadn't changed — it was a throwback to the old Brownsville days. When I used to go there to pick him up, he never waited for me in the house. Even if it was snowing, he'd meet me on the corner of Pitkin. In 10 years I'd been inside his family's apartment just once. I forget why we went in, but I still have an impression of a long railroad flat with windows at only one end.

"You're not wearing your slippers?" This was his opening line when he arrived. I'd had on sneakers when I saw him earlier.

"I thought we might go to the Copa afterward," I said. "Where do you want to eat?"

"I don't eat pizza."

"I'll try to control my craving," I said. "Where do you want to eat?"

He pursed his lips, then smacked them. "I feel like Chinese. Let's go for Chinese."

I never knew him to eat Chinese food before, but I should have guessed. At a certain age — a sort of culinary bar mizvah — every classical Jewish type begins to hunger for it. It must be some Oriental root in their racial unconscious.

We settled for a Chinese joint in the block. There were two and he chose the fancier one. He hung up his hat and we slid into a booth. The waiter shuffled over with menus and he scanned his thoughtfully. I ordered sweet-and-sour pork and a bottle of beer. He chose Moo Goo Gai Pan, pronouncing it with Kew Gardens expertise, and added "Make that two Heineken's."

He put the menu down and smiled. "So what are you doing, Paulie?"

I wasn't going to be the first to open up, so I said, "Living. What are you doing?"

"Come on," he said. "Don't be afraid to talk to Papa."

"I'm talking. What do you want me to say?"

"I ask you what you're doing and you give me a fast answer."

"All right, I'll give you a slow one. I'm going to school."

"You're going to school?"

"That's what I said."

"You're twenty-seven years old."

"Uh-huh."

"You're two months older than me."

"Yeah."

"And you're going to school?"

"I may go till I die."

He shook his head. "Nah, you're not going to school."

"What am I doing?"

"You're stalling."

"A school by any other name——"

"You're stalling! You never went to a class when we were in Brooklyn College — so don't tell me you're going to school."

"My Uncle Sam offered to send me to school, and I didn't feel like going to work, so I'm a schoolboy."

His high-pitched laugh always sounded strange coming out of his hard face. "So you don't feel like going to work?"

"You like to work?"

"Lunatics like to work, but that's beside the point. What else have you got to do?"

"I can think of a lot of things. I read books, I take walks, I sleep, I think——"

"You think! You think whether you'll read a book, take a walk, or maybe you'll go to sleep?"

"When is the last time you read a book?"

"I've got no time for books. I get home, pat the kid on the head, eat dinner — it's nine o'clock. I get up at six-thirty. Where am I going to read a book? Besides, I'm reading invoices all day."

"You look at television, don't you?"

"Yeah...."

"Books won't blind you any faster than television."

"I can see a whole television show in half-an-hour. I read a book for half-an-hour, it's just time for a character to take a crap."

"All right, you pat the kid on the head and you watch television — is that it?"

"I live, you schmuck, like you said — only with me it's true. I read, I walk, I (continued on page 234)Moo Goo Gai Pan(continued from page 144) sleep, I think — that's not living. It's playing. How long can you keep that up? You're probably going crazy already."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to work. I'm going home. I'm going where I'm supposed to go — where I've got to go."

I gave him a skeptical look. I was afraid to say too much. It was one thing to mock my life, because it was so random, and it was only mine. It was like saying "Where'd you get that tie?" I could always change it — but with him it was flesh and blood. I could hardly ask "What's that big hump on your back?"

The waiter brought our order and laid it out on the table. Milton picked up his glass to pour the beer. It was scratched from scouring and he held it up to the light and looked at it sardonically. "Listen, Pancho," he said, "this is how it goes: Your life is there and you live it. You don't read it in a book or take a walk through it or dream it, and you don't think it up either — it's there. Look at me — I got married. When I went overseas in 1945 I left a lively nineteen-year-old girl, two-months pregnant. Twenty-six months later I come back — twenty-six months I've been waiting to live like a human being. I don't tell her I'm coming — I want to surprise her, I'm going to drop in like a bomb. So what happens? I ring the bell, I hear a lot of hollering inside. My mother-in-law opens the door — she's crying. She looks at me and she starts up even louder. 'It's not him! It's not him!' I'm standing there, my hat on my head, my duffel bag on the doorstep. 'Who's not him?' I say, and I take off the hat. My wife comes up. 'Where is he? Where is he?' She's crying too. 'What am I — invisible?' I say. 'What's going on here?' So between boo-hoos and yoo-hoos they tell me the dog is lost, they're crying for the dog. They thought I was bringing back the dog. Sylvie goes back in and drags something out. I thought it was the dog, but it's the kid. 'Here's your father!' she's hollering. I'm still standing on the doorstep. I look at the kid. He's screaming — I'm the bogeyman. His face is all screwed up. I see that he's skinny and his eyes are close together. He's screaming like an air-raid siren. I look at Sylvie — her eyes are red, she has wrinkles in her neck, and I see that the little bastard has dragged her tits down. She's staring at me as if to say 'Nu, you're home?' It's not that she isn't glad to see me, you understand, it's just that the dog is lost — her mother is crazy about the dog, and the kid too — and she's a bit slow, she didn't know I was coming. She'll catch up in a minute — wait awhile. But I don't feel like waiting. I see my father-in-law bringing up the rear. He's got the dog on his brain too — he even offered a reward. Nobody offered a reward for me. I haven't put my foot in the door yet. I'm thinking I could turn around and walk away. I'm going to find the dog, I could say, and before they woke up I'd be gone. I'd grow a beard, take a French name — they'd never find me! But what did I do? I went across that doorstep, I picked up the kid, screaming and all, put my hand around Sylvie, coughed up a smile for her old lady, clapped her old man on the back — I had three hands — and said 'Here I am!'

"A few days later I report to the old man's hat factory and start to work like a slave six days a week. Sundays when I'm trying to read the sports page he's always after me — 'Why don't you take a hammer in your hand?' — so I move to Kew Gardens. Another expense! Furniture, debts, divots — they got me a whole life wholesale!

"But you see what I mean, Pablo — all this has nothing to do with it. The point is: This is a life, for better or worse. People know what I mean when I talk to them about it."

This was such a staggering non sequitur that I put down my knife and fork and stared at him. "So you're happy — you're satisfied?"

"Satisfied! It's a life, I'm telling you. I'm not a philosopher to go to the library or take a course to find out if I'm satisfied."

Even though I still loved him, I couldn't let all that pass. "You like living in Kew Gardens on top of your brother-in-law?"

"He's a dentist. Suppose I wake up in the middle of the night with a toothache — I got a bargain. Besides, where do you want me to live — on top of a mountain?"

"What about the hat factory? You enjoy making hats?"

"I don't make hats — I make money. You think making hats is more monotonous than making girls? You don't go through the same motions, say the same things every time? Hello — goodbye!"

I looked down at my plate and tried to remember him as he was five or six years before: the fine tough tight grin he had, the quickness you could see in his downing. He was wiry then, with a restless ferocity in his face that sucked in his lean cheeks. We used to wear each other's clothes, but now he outweighed me by 20 pounds, he didn't have that hungry-for-life look anymore. Now he would call that look "from hunger."

"You never feel trapped?" I said, coming back to Kew Gardens.

"Sure I feel trapped! But I'd rather be trapped by something than by nothing."

"Monotonous or not, you don't wish you could grab a stray piece now and then?"

"Sure I wish! But suppose I did grab one — I'd still wish, because you can't grab them all. Right now in the shop there's a Puerto Rican kid with a belly full of mambo who's hot for me. I once made a deal with her and borrowed some guy's place. She meets me around the corner after work and I'm whistling for a cab when all of a sudden I say to myself Ah, what for? and I put her in the cab and send her away. Then I go home and tell Sylvie to wear a pair of black stockings and high heels to bed."

"Black stockings and high heels! Are you serious?"

"Sure I'm serious — where's your imagination?"

I looked at him. I thought he was putting me on. "I know," he said, "you recite them poetry. OK, each man to his taste. It all depends on what you want. Now you take your kind of girl — your skinny shiksas — they've got no tits. Fine! you say — there's nothing to go wrong. They can't fall, you can frame her and hang her on the wall, or from the chandelier. Sylvie, now, she's no work of art — her tits hang down to her belly button already. But they're tits! When she lays down you can't tell the difference. She puts on a bra and they bounce. You and your chums over here, you've got to grab your girls by the ass. They've got nothing but asses — your whole world is ass-backward!"

Before I could stop laughing he was off on a different tack. "Listen, Polo, you want a job? You need something to exercise your talents on. I'll give you a place on the truck — plenty of fresh air, contacts, you'll see the world. I'll even fix it so you don't have to count the boxes."

"Then I can move to Kew Gardens."

"Naturally! I'll buy you some divots, you'll have a lawn. You'll get an apartment with a toilet and I'll teach you to bet baseball."

His baseball bets — hockey, basketball, football and fights as well — always baffled me with their point spread, who's hot, who's pitching, what the smart money says, and so on, and I had the fleeting thought, as if this was a prerequisite to living his life, that I could never get the hang of it all. It suddenly struck me too that I was much more of a babe in the woods in his world than he was in mine, and strange as it seems, there were more imaginations running amuck in his. He had told me, for example, about a friend of his named Herbie who was a state highway patrolman. One day Herbie had stopped a guy for speeding. It turned out that the guy was an appliance dealer, and he talked his way out of the ticket by offering Herbie a 40-percent discount on anything he wanted. A fair exchange was no robbery, Herbie said, then he squeezed the guy for the same discount for all his friends and relatives, so that in his and Milton's house now nothing is done by hand if it could possibly be managed electrically. It was the same with the friends and relatives. Then one day the dealer, who by now is like an in-law, confesses: He purposely did it, in Herbie's words — he deliberately got himself stopped for speeding so he could make a pitch and start the wholesale ball rolling. And if this isn't plot enough to dum-found Dostoievsky, here's the pay-off: They weren't even surprised, Herbie and Milton. Yes, he was a hustler, they conceded, but they saw nothing unusual in him.

I must have had a faraway look in my eye, because Milton tapped his knife against his glass. "Stop thinking, Pasquale! You think too much. Look what happened to Hamlet. You're surprised I know what happened to Hamlet? I saw it on television. I'll explain to you what Shakespeare was saying: He was saying that happy is busy, you've got to be busy, then you've got no time to think you're unhappy. Here, I'll tell you a story — you only understand stories, even though you're always thinking. A few weeks ago I'm riding in the subway and I meet a guy I knew in basic training, Zeller. 'Hello, Miltele,' he says and starts pumping my hand. 'How are you, what are you doing, how's the family?' and so on. 'Fine, fine,' I say, and I remember that he's crazy about his wife, he was always raving about her and writing letters, so I ask him 'How's your wife, Zeller?' He puts on a long face. 'Ah, not so good,' he says, 'not so good.' 'Why, what's the matter?' I say. 'Nothing serious?' 'You'd never guess in a million years,' he tells me, and he pulls out a pencil and a piece of paper. 'You see,' he says, 'most people's intestines, they go like this' — he draws a couple of loops — 'but my wife, her intestines, they go like this,' and he draws the same thing but with a knot in it. I look at the paper. The man next to him looks at it, too. People are listening. 'Nothing can get past here,' he says, pointing to the knot. 'Naturally she's very uncomfortable.' I don't know what to say. People are watching us. He looks at me very seriously. 'It's costing me a fortune,' he says. I'm trying to think of something to answer — 'So the doctor's giving her treatments?' 'Naturally,' he says. 'He's against an operation, so he's giving her solvents and she's on a fluid diet.' Well, I wished him luck with his solvents, and when I got off the train I thought about him and his wife with the knot in her intestines and I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe he was a little cracked — but then I realized that he was happy. He could take out his life or his wife and draw you a diagram. He had a first-rate problem, like one of those doctor series on television. Plenty of human interest — and suspense, what suspense!"

The waiter was clearing the table and I knew Milton would soon be leaving. I felt very sad, as if those scraps on my plate were the sweet-and-sour remains of our friendship. A faint hope — maybe he was only downing? — rose and fell. But no, if it was a joke, it was on him. The dead pan was no longer a mask.

My feelings slipped out in a needle: "By the way, did you get your new two-tone load yet?" He had told me the last time I saw him that he was going to trade in his car.

"Not yet," he said. "I had to get Sylvie a cocktail diamond."

"A cocktail diamond?"

"That's right — a cocktail diamond."

"What the hell is a cocktail diamond?"

"It's like an engagement ring, only she wears it on the other hand."

"Doesn't she have an engagement ring?"

"Sure she has an engagement ring."

"She can't put it on the other hand?"

"She wants one on both hands. She wants to feel well-balanced."

"Listen, Milton, let me ask you: Can you tell a diamond from a piece of glass? Can Sylvie?"

"What are you bugging me for? She wanted it — her friends have them."

"Her friends have them — so she has to have one, too, and you have to pay through the nose for it?"

"I don't pay through the nose — I pay by check. Anyway, what do you want from me? You want me to change the world?"

If I had stopped to think, I wouldn't have done it, but he was my best friend, my brother, so I said "Yes. Yes, I want you to change the world. I want to change it myself."

He gave me a long searching look until the waiter came and laid the bill between us. I reached for it, but he pushed my hand away. "All I want to change," he said, "is a twenty."