“He’s not talking to anyone,” Ellen reminded me. “It’s not just you.”
“He’s talking to my stepmother.”
“They live together. She’s his wife.”
“She’s the one who picks up the phone when I call. She tells me I shouldn’t take it personally. Just like you. That I should be patient. That it’s not a statement about me. But it certainly is a statement about me.”
I realized that the more I talked, the less attached I felt to the words. All I felt was a vague airlessness, which itself was like a product of the room, its smell of carpet cleaner and the gray light leaking in through the blinds. I thought of Ellen’s patients, the stories she’d told me about them. They were all from my kind of background, I realized, girls from affluent families who’d experienced some emotional trauma or who’d simply experienced their affluent backgrounds as a kind of emotional trauma. They played out this trauma through the most direct means available to them, anorexia and bulimia, narrowing their days to a simple monotonous punishment of hunger and denial. Food, shit, vomit, blood — all of life’s other complexities fell away. Since Ellen herself has struggled with some of these same problems, her work has sometimes seemed to me to have a self-lacerating aspect to it, a dangerous aspect. She lives inside her emotions more than I do. I wouldn’t want to have Ellen’s emotional life, but I sometimes fear that I’ve gone too far in the other direction. I do my work because I find it interesting. I cook because I like to eat well. I clean my apartment, I exercise, I see friends, I have occasional men in my life. I have worked all this out to minimize turbulence, but I realize this is ultimately a defensive posture. A part of me thinks that life is meant to be sloppier.
“You haven’t told me all that much,” Ellen said.
“I don’t have anything else to say.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It feels true.”
“Then you might want to think about why that is. Just saying.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“There are art supplies in the closet over there. For the people who don’t like to talk or don’t know how to talk. The ones who can only draw pictures. Paint. Make things out of clay. I bet you couldn’t draw a picture in front of me if I held a gun to your head.”
“What is this?”
“I’m just saying it would make sense if you needed some help right now.”
“I don’t think I need ‘help.’ ”
“Of course not. Everyone thinks that. My clients, for example. Of course eventually there’s not really any ‘them’ to talk to anymore. They’re just bodies. Emaciated bodies. That’s how committed they are to not talking.”
What if everything you have to say is a cliché? Does it change the cliché to express it in other, more evocative language? Or does it make more sense to seek out experiences that don’t lead one to feel like a cliché?
“I don’t think I’m like your patients,” I said to Ellen.
“You mean you’re not a lot like them.”
“I mean I’m more like the opposite of them.”
“Maybe. Maybe so.”
But she was right about one thing. It was true that I could hardly imagine anything that would have made me more uncomfortable than opening a pad of fancy drawing paper and trying to sketch out something about my feelings for my father in that office. I wouldn’t have known where to begin. If that doesn’t make me ridiculous, then I don’t know what does.
I was planning to go back to Israel that fall. I wanted to try to find the apartment Gila had shown me in her photographs at lunch. I wanted to talk to David Bellen’s ex-wife, the one mentioned in his essay, a woman now named Rachel Kessler. I wanted to talk to Eliav, if he would still talk to me after what I’d written about him in my piece on his father’s murder. I wanted to see if I could make sense of all these disparate lives — certainly I wanted to stop thinking about my own. But it was hard to see it as a story. The story was too tangled, even as I felt myself getting more and more invested in it. If I went to Israel, I thought, it would be to simply satisfy a few of my own curiosities — there was no subject I could claim to be “investigating” for any possible piece. But then in November I got an e-mail from Oded Voss, whom I had not heard from in more than two years. He wrote to tell me that a week before, Eliav had been found dead of a heroin overdose in Tel Aviv. He was thirty-eight years old.
From an e-mail dated 12/22/2008, forwarded to me from David Bellen’s “Drafts” folder by his ex-wife, Rachel Kessler, on 12/2/2011, about three weeks before I was to interview her in Jerusalem. The e-mail was originally addressed to Bellen’s friend Adam Harris, an editor at an American magazine who had rejected Bellen’s essay “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”:
Dear Adam,
I understand your reluctance — the piece is far too long — but I wanted to thank you for your kind words anyway. What I did not include in the piece was yet a further confession. In the fall of 1972, I saw Lansky once in person. I had been sent to cover his trial, not even for a newspaper but for a small journal of literature and politics that ceased to exist before it could even run my story. My then-wife Rachel and I were living in a small one-bedroom flat in Tel Aviv, expecting our son Eliav, and we were gravely in need of money. I took the bus to Jerusalem with no set idea of what I wanted to ask Lansky if I even had the chance.
It turned out of course that he was thronged. It was the day the supreme court handed down its decision denying him citizenship, and afterward I could only see him from a distance, speaking to some newsmen, looking down briefly at the lapel of his suit jacket. I remember that his clothes could not have been more impeccably clean. They shone against his matte skin, making him seem somehow less visible by comparison. I remember his words that day were oddly poetic. He compared his loss to the recent shock of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Germany. “Look what happened last week in Munich,” he said. “Young branches cut down. I’m an old man.”
When I returned to our apartment in Tel Aviv that night, it was later than I’d planned and Rachel, pregnant and uncomfortable, was standing in her nightgown at the stove. I had spent the last few hours in the bar at the Dan Hotel, the hotel where Lansky had lived throughout much of his stay in Tel Aviv. It was a place I’d never liked, a place not for Israelis so much as foreigners, yet in my role as “journalist” I somehow felt the need to assert my right to sit there. I hadn’t counted on the impact of Lansky’s fame, its strange mutedness — I remembered looking at him and marveling and also wondering why I was marveling. I noticed that the sound of his voice, his physical proximity, had caused something profoundly untrustworthy to stir inside me. It was his very mildness that caused this.
At the hotel, a waitress about my own age brought me coffee. When I remained there after the other customers had left, she came for the empty carafe and we ended up talking. She told me she was hoping some day to move to New York. I remember that — at the time, the very words “New York” suggested a place scarcely less romantic and unreal than the one conjured by the matchbooks from Billy Wilkerson’s Flamingo Club. I didn’t believe she’d ever see New York. I didn’t even believe I would. I didn’t have any money to take her somewhere when her shift ended — I thought the whole thing was over when I paid my bill. Young, stupid, “poetic”—I can look for words to explain what happened next, but explanations are beside the point. “Impatient” might be the right word. Preyed on by an impatience that made every appetite a panic, something crucial I feared missing out on.