“If I’m going to be dealing with Odell when he’s in this kind of mood,” he said by way of accepting my offer of a drink.
Zippi signaled to me. She told me that that was enough. Big Dash could barely stand as it was. I mustn’t treat him anymore. They were taking care of him, keeping him up to a certain amount of alcohol per day, but no more.
“Oh no, she’s not talking about my business tonight,” Big Dash pleaded with the ceiling just as we both turned to look at him.
I thought that Zippi was also looking out for me, letting me know that I didn’t have to keep up the grandiose level of generosity. It was okay for The Party to be over. I was permanent, a regular, not leaving on a jet plane. But more than anything, she wanted Big Dash to be able to walk, because she spoke to Odell through him for much of the night. To bring lemons, to get the glasses their one busboy forgot. A mediator was supposed to prevent either one of them from misreading the tone of the other, a thing they never did by themselves, whether in English or German, as far as I could tell.
“You’ve burned your hand.”
“Well, you know my hand. It’s like a wall.”
And yet at some point in the evening, because of the game of Chinese whispers they played through Big Dash, one or the other would explode.
Zippi avoided my questions about how they met, saying only that they had both been with other people and it was complicated. They’d been together eleven years. I couldn’t tell how old she was. I suspected she was probably older than Odell, who had not been sent back to Nam because of his skill with engines, someone whispered. He remained on the base in Germany. They said Zippi had broken with her mother over her black lover. The one time I pretended to be so drunk I could ask about the gossip, she hunched her shoulders and swiped at her adorable black bangs, as if to say, “You know how it is.”
She paid me the compliment of speaking to me in cryptic expressions, half phrases, sighs, as if I, too, understood the helplessness of her kind of love for Odell, that hip-film total surrender to his animal presence that her bearing told me she experienced daily, a submission, a sexual drowning that was the secret of existence. I was going to be excluded from the mystery for the rest of my life, AIDS promised.
“That son of a bitch owes me one hundred and twenty marks. He promised,” Big Dash complained suddenly into his fists on the bar.
“The amount of farting that must go on in your brain,” someone, a “brother,” yelled at him after a while.
Everyone was performing, because of the new element I’d introduced, so I thought. Manfred wanted to sit at the bar and the whole joint scoped him, so I imagined, talking to Bags about something called foti seng that elephants ate.
Bags said that for years he didn’t know fresh asparagus and didn’t know that eating asparagus made your urine smell. He thought the urinal where he was standing needed cleaning or that his towels were going moldy. He didn’t know until his woman at the time told him. He said he thought she would save him, but she was too busy removing the asbestos in buildings that went up in the city during the construction boom to have any love left over for him.
“Six hundred and thirteen ways to go nuts,” Big Dash said, arms raised in exhortation of the bottles behind the bar. “Vectors of existence,” he pronounced, hissing like a black preacher.
Bags went over to investigate a possible customer, and Big Dash rolled along the bar in our direction, stopping far from Odell, who usually stayed where he could also keep an eye on the kitchen door. The ChiChi’s snack menu was erratic, even with a microwave back there.
“Why don’t you walk on my back for a good half an hour.” Big Dash’s breath could have stopped a dog race.
“Okay, pal.” Burt Lancaster stuck his nose into his tall glass.
“No, tread on me. For real.”
I’d wanted to show Zippi what complicated was; I’d wanted to show off Manfred, and Cello’s end-of-the-week business trip to Zurich removed her as a threat to my playacting. Dram was more than happy for Manfred to be mine. They got on well because of their leftist pasts and their consequent mistrust of the left. The nanny from Kent made bangers and mash of the most elegant sort. Dram didn’t go back to the office, but then Cello had called to say good night to the children later than expected.
One of Dram’s husky sisters had set up a Ping-Pong table in the smaller salon. After the nanny and then Dram had left us, Manfred and I played. The to-and-fro with him eased me into a light-footed condition he moved to end quickly, gently. He simply laid his paddle aside and suggested we head toward his pub in Schöneberg. I proposed the ChiChi instead, one of those crazy places that gave rise to the very Berlin expression Big Fun.
He turned down his sleeves before we headed inside. Once acclimated to the smoky dark, he’d been powerfully relieved — it was clear — to find himself in a sort of black vets’ bar and not the auntie bar he’d braced himself for. His formal manner toward Zippi was his way of saying that he could make himself at home among my black brethren.
Odell’s jazz tape got him going in a near monologue about Dexter Gordon in Denmark. Sometimes there was more English speaking going on in the ChiChi than German. We didn’t often get to hear how really fluent Odell was. He rewound the tape so that they could go over this or that fine point. Manfred said he’d have to go because he had to get his car home. But one of Bags’s customers sent him a U.S. Army — style boilermaker.
Manfred rolled a cigarette, dropped the shot glass in the beer, and took his boilermaker around Big Dash’s ass. He was down at Odell’s end of the bar, with Dexter Gordon, and in a flash of her scarf Bags’s German customer joined them. Zippi made me another coffee. Their coffeemaker was like a miniature vending machine. A button caused the milk to pour into the cup with the coffee. I lit a cigarette and gave Zippi a look that said things were complicated. But her look as she placed the saucer on the bar and rested her hands on either side of it said that actually things weren’t that complicated.
Sure enough, Manfred bowed to Zippi and gave my neck a massage with one paw. All of Bags’s cheaply dressed but attractive customer swayed as Manfred held the door for her and her scarf and saluted Odell once more.
Zippi marched down to Odell’s end of the bar and had words with him. He took his time changing the music and taking over down by her end. As he came toward the cash register, I moved to the other side of the bar in the opposite direction and followed Zippi through the door to the kitchen, where she was walking toward the spliff Bags and the busboy were sharing. She held it out to me and I drew in the smoke.
* * *
Manfred pressed my left hand flat between his hands and said that I had a Balzac thing going with coffee. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t know Balzac had died of caffeine poisoning. I didn’t know that Balzac believed in ghosts. I was never going to know how fat it was, but to sit with him, to receive Manfred’s thoughts, to be impressed by his expressiveness made me happy. I didn’t know that Balzac was masturbating under the cloak in Rodin’s statue.
He told me of the best date he’d ever had. A girl who’d torn off his clothes made him drive from Greenwich Village to L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. They stopped in New Hampshire to buy booze. She just stuck her hands down his pants and they were off. They did it five times their first time. He loved her, but she was bulimic, and he could not get along with her mother. Manfred was both touched and embarrassed that I cried.
Yet I no longer accepted rides in his Deux Chevaux from the Lessingsdorf site, his yellow hard hat flung onto the back seat with the mess of his life. All roads he took led to his pub in Schöneberg. Instead, I had those soulful walks at last, in the brisk late autumn air, the waning light turning even nearby figures into silhouettes. I went into the Tiergarten, in a way that I would not have dared to enter Chicago’s Midway at the same hour. I emerged at the Great Star, Der Grosser Stern, a large traffic circle around a several-story monument finished with cannons captured from the French after the fall of Sedan in 1872. I took the long way around and dived back into the landscape of wet branches in the evening streetlights.