And above it all, the klezmiros, the music: there’s a piano quintet installed on the marble loggia presently givingout a specially orchestrated version of the Kol Nidre, Opus number does it really matter, from the Yom Kipper liturgy, this string quartet loaned out from the concertmastered ranks of the New York Philharmonic following their shockhaired pianist conducting con moto with thrusts directed seatward and brutal, the rise and fall of his tush: a lilt carried upon the cellist’s vibrato, the lefthand tremolos of the piano…the music comes tenuous, energetic but nervous, shaky, as if a touch off, a mite stressed, stuffily muffled, gagged to a sour still in the throat; then, in lowing fortes and high sforzando wails, how they’re shaking, they’re rattling the bartender’s bottles at the temporary bar, just for the night, draped in the same scheme of things…waitresses drop troughs left, right through the feverish shvitz, the competing blur of talk, ganze gossip, kopdreyenish, a lashon hara from mouths round in hora; lightly moustachioed waiters, their yarmulkes must be tapeddown, glued on, ladling out cupfuls runnething over, flutes and splits of champagne, and mensching, too, the vorspeizen trays, making sure, as ordained by Shade, to give everyone the option of saying the appropriate blessing before their indulgence (placards are made available printed with the prayers in the small scribblings of two different tongues): they nibble away at their benedictions, then partake of the healthily blessed…nu, the Tongue? a fat lady shrieks, what about the Tongue, the preview, the relic, that’s what we paid for; Tongue Schmongue, says her gin-rummy partner (or that’s just what she’s been drinking), you look like sooo gorgeous, will you just look at yourself, I just can’t believe it, hiccough…a woman whose dress she’s stepping on asking then if she’s heard the one about the, is drowned out when she’s elbowed into the fountain, the one to which the it’s labeled Tigris again flows, shouldered in headfirst and so the joke that’ll distance it All, just lost, stompedupon dress ripped off in her fall, shreds of exposed flesh, scandalous to love it, that and her humiliation, too, and they do; nudged to a laugh by a middleaged urologist-to-the-stars, or that’s just his type, you’d be lucky to get an appointment while still active…lost his wife to the turmoil, she’s here somewhere, he’s sure, though if not, there’s always another, he’s just tired of looking for Her (the vest of his threepiece being buttoned up by the fast fat fingers of a wife never his and hymn, there’ve been three of them now); the woman founders, her highheels fall from her to float, her fingers to linger at fountain’s bottom for shekels loosed, which she fists to the carpet that leads beyond, and then higher…fastened down by brass over the marble to make for footfalls so unconscionably soft, in their wary and panicky stalking of hard culture and symbol — all the way up the stairs to the loggia and its overture, now beginning again without warning: who’s that cellist, anyone know? a woman making breasty headway through the muck, jostling, stepping feet with stilettos without apologizing as if she’d ever, to this waiter she knocks who’s holding a tray of drinks up over his head, how he drops it, missing her must be blessed but splintering everywhere, glistening slivers of glass, chandeliershards catching the last of the light through the windows arched overhead, sloshing slivovitz whether plum, pear, or peach schnapps, frothing remains, bubbly champagne over the carpet, out into the wide grouts between the blocks matched for vein, the marble tombslabs, the gray gravevaults, the still living scattering themselves out of the way of the jeroboams unto nebuchadnezzers’worth, this foaming lacteal puddle forming around him a frown, a reprimand that’s maternal yet firm, the waiter just standing there silent, immobilized, awaiting his punishment, the retribution we’ve paid so dearly to exact: they surround him tighter and tighter, hurl imprecations, taunts and threats, but just as quickly as that begins, everyone’s distracted again, diverted, turns, is turned all around — toward this ruach, doorward, this strangling wind, divine breath on the fresh haircut backs of their necks…and now on their faces turned, too, madeup and puffy with blemish, tannedblack or clearing though surgically cut: with the silence of speed, a swift glide, without creak, crack, or groan, we’re talking greased, maintainence oiled; the doors sweep the halves of a clockface across the mingledulled floor; the cogs to an eternal timepiece, shadows, twohanded, now one, shadow the hour, across the newly finished mosaic that rings the lobby in widening suns (though a mosaic that no one knows, in full, what it is — no one can tell, they’re standing on it, they’re of it — perhaps it’s a rendering of our incomplete Creation). This is the shutting of the doors, the Closing of the Books, the locking of the gates in the offseason, the offhoured latenight to this winter of judgment: the hinges relent, a last shaft of light gives out from the unified draft, a spotlit escape of air and dust, the wind of the weather outside staining across them…swept narrow, thinned to a kiss; and then darkness, total and only: the doors settle, the strait gate presently shuts — and yet, with them left inside.
Where they become the exhibits…and how no one knows, no one understands: they just proceed with their mingling, they talk themselves on, jaw and thrust tongues, as bottles pour out into glasses that clink; ladies in the powder room, which is a lavishly appointed facility, staffed with dour, whispery immigrant attendants hired away from area hotels especially for this evening and now everafter, they offer hot and moist towelettes, perfumes and mints…they the women all pause their ministrations a moment at the sudden silence — then resume, din, mingling mingle, while their husbands they wait outside, glance at their watches, wait, talk talk, get dragged away, by associates, by acquaintances, business partners, brothers-inlaw, and by strangers, there’s a mensch I’d like you to meet…into discussions, discursions, digressions importuned upon deviant involutions of tangents. Eden’s gates have shut, have locked, keeping them here, fallen within, frozen in time, frozen as time. To live here, to become exhibits themselves, as they’re already exhibits of themselves, and then for themselves, too, exhibited exhibitionists, say: mulling the mulledover forever, ruminating until the food and drink run dry, they’re examining, framing, and posing, appraising the pagelike walls with thumb and with tongue…scratching with questionmarked fingers their heads, then at others’ detailoriented they’re scrutinizing to ever, patronizing patrons, both viewers, the viewed, the subject and its object all talked, compared, contrasted, parsed a rolled tongue into one, and then swallowed: eventually finding their ways out into the far halls, Tonguesearching at first, Tongueforgetting too soon, deep into the shadowy spaces, the attic’s dim ducts and then the underground stairwells of emergency access…the furthest recesses of memory’s muse; the evening running forever late, the world, too, damned, without exit.
And as everything is nested in everything, and That, too, in everything, unto when or wherever you just get tired, decide to call it a day and it was and it was good…or, maybe Gnosticwise, that heresy older than heresy, older even than the One True God against which or Whom one would rail — holding that the ruler of this world is only the ruled of a greater world, then that the ruler of that world is in turn only the ruled of an even greater world, and then yaddaing blah imploding on down through the core of the cosmos, if you’re interested, threehundred and sixtyfive times, which, FYI, was how many days they’d had in their old years, way back when: O to have lived before the Sixthousands…a dayschool group yawning, fidgeting amid a handful of misanthropic sketchers in ash, in ashes and uniformed sackcloth themselves (as thinly sketched as they are here, it’s nothing compared to how blank their own pages), annoyed and trying to appear as such, mourning recess, feeling sorry — then, there’s also a Museum of Museums, the mensch says, gasping for air, and here there’s all of one exhibit, one piece…this spindly docent he folds himself up in his map of the premises, distractedly forces it around himself, over his eyes, around his ears, nose, and mouth until the urge obligingly rips a hole for his voice, high and yet groucho, at the southernmost tongue of the southernmost state, which is this one.