Are you damaged? Am I not what you like?
Really, lady!
Suddenly, all these aimless, jittery foreign souls threading their way about me seemed to strap on billboards like sandwich men, displaying large playing-card portraits on their fronts and backs, some parading as kings, others as queens, and still others as jacks. The handsome jack of hearts and the queen of spades. The Gorgon and the Joker. You Gorgon, me Joker. There are places on this planet where they stone women like you. Then the man slits his own throat or hurls himself off a bluff.
I had never hated myself so much as I did now. I’d brought this on myself, hadn’t I? Me with my quixotic too soon, too sudden, too fast shit, and she with her cheap, petty, sordid flips. My shit and her flip. Flip for shit. Tit for tat. Flit for ship. Ship that slipped, that got away. A whole life summed up by bip, bip, bip, and crick, crick, crack.
I was losing my mind, and the more I grew aware of it, the worse it became. I tried letting my thoughts drift to other subjects and settle on anything that might strike a cheerful note — one good thought, my kingdom for one good thought — but everything my mind landed on seemed to start out quietly enough, only to rouse satanic images, three good thoughts morphed into three blind mice. Three queens of diamonds walked by me, twittering away in a strange tongue, followed by a king of spades and two jacks with tiny electric gadgets sulking each to each. King stopped me and, pointing to timid number 2 wife, asked for directions to the bathroom. I must have turned away in shell shock. You’re a Shukoff, I said. You rude, mister. Me very sorry, most very, very sorry indeed, I said. How I missed her, how I loved her, how I wanted to laugh with her — all I want is to laugh with you, Clara, hold you, make love to you, laugh with you, and if we do nothing else in life but spend each day sans friends, sans children, sans work, and speak of Vaughan and Handel and strudel gâteau and a lifetime of nonsense words studding our love like medals on the tattered uniforms of White Russian generals turned panhandlers after they’ve had everything taken away from them by the revolution, it would still be the right life for me. I wonder what she’d say when I told her. I’d have to tell her, had to tell her, for this fat doting husband/father, who’d asked directions to the vaterklosèt, was more important to me now than anything in this entire museum, for all I wanted was to take out my cell phone and tell her of my brush with the king of spades and his number 2 wife keeling with pipi trouble.
Suddenly I felt the need to stop and hold on to something and make sure the world around me wasn’t reeling. Must leave the museum. I rushed out into the cold and saw the steps of the Met before me spill like the Spanish Steps all the way down onto Fifth Avenue, turning white-gray before me like the cold waters of Venice flooding the embankments and reaching down to the pretzel vendors, whose diminutive trucks seemed bolted to an ever-receding sidewalk. I directed my path down to one of the vendors. Heading toward him gave me a direction. When I finally reached his stand, I saw him spread mustard on one of those large salted pretzels. The sight turned my stomach, and I felt something surge in me, something like nausea, but not nausea, more like seasickness after a forgotten nightmare. The sweat was collecting on my face, despite the cold. I grabbed a pole around which a rider had chained his bicycle. I could hear my heart racing. And what didn’t help was the antiphonal whine of a bus bickering with its inability to kneel for an old lady with a cane, as if heart and bus were busy arguing like the piano and violin in the Kreutzer Sonata, talking back each to each, tit for tat, pip for pip, shit for flip, all loose ends tied together into a crusty warm pretzel with bilious mustard dolloped on top, the whole pretzel resting on my nose like a pair of binoculars, my eyes are your eyes to my eyes, your tongue and my tongue is one tongue, and your teeth on my lips, your teeth, your teeth, what beautiful God-given teeth you have, you have, you have.
I was — there was no question — losing it, yet obviously faking composure quite well. No one was staring at me, no one even noticed me, so I wasn’t about to embarrass myself. I finally understood why people who have heart attacks in public suffer on many counts: for the pain, for the shame, for the pure fear of falling to pieces in full view of every tourist and every messenger and hot-dog vendor. Just don’t let me soil myself. If I have to die of a broken heart, let me go gently and vanish at dusk through narrow streets and put an end to this bungled life that started on the wrong foot. Was I dying?
No sooner had the question crossed my mind than I decided to rush myself to Mount Sinai. I hopped into a cab and told the driver to take me to the emergency room. I knew the drill well from taking my father there several times. Simply tell the guard that you’re having chest pains and they roll out the red carpet and let you bypass all the stops. Indeed, they immediately put me on a bed. Next to me with his mother was a ten-year-old boy who was bleeding from the leg while a nurse was patiently removing shards of glass with a pair of surgical tweezers, speaking softly, telling him that there were a couple more, and a couple more pieces after that, but that he was such a brave boy, not one tear, not one, she kept saying with her comforting Jamaican lilt as she dabbed the wound ever so softly with a piece of gauze held delicately in between her thumb and her index finger.
The resident intern was wearing Crocs.
I explained that my heart was racing.
I had nausea too.
A strange film was clouding over my eyes. As if fog were closing in. Was closing in. Were, was, I couldn’t decide which.
“Any disorientation?” he asked.
Big-time, I answered, thinking back to the stairway spilling down from the Met over into the lagoon on the way to the Lido. Ever been to the Lido, Doc?
He ordered a regular cardiogram.
I had expected an echocardiogram, maybe an angiogram. I was dying, wasn’t I?
Ten minutes later: “Everything checks out fine. You’re a very healthy man.”
“I thought I was having a heart attack.”
“You were having a panic attack.”
I looked at him.
“Maybe you’ve got too much on your mind?”
“Not especially.”
“Family issues?”
I was single.
Love troubles — heartbreak?
I suppose.
“Tell me about it.”
I was about to tell him when I realized that Tell me about it meant Say no more, we’ve all been there.
If all this was as common as he let on, why hadn’t I experienced this before?
Because you’ve never loved anyone, Printz.
What had I been doing these past eight-and-twenty years, then?
Barely been alive, Printz, barely been to the rose garden. Waiting for me, that’s what. You came to life when we stepped onto the balcony on that first night and stood watching the beam together, you and I, Printz, and you watched my suede shoe kick the cigarette butt down to floors measureless to man, you and I leaning together on the parapet like two notes on the same staff, both of one mind, as you stared at my breast in my very crimson blouse.