The second of her multiple personalities was Joanna Jewish (originally Joanna Jewess until she informed him, at once and somewhat heatedly, that the word “Jewess” was derogatory), a combination of Henny Youngman and Barbra Streisand being Brooklyn when she wasn’t singing. Joanna told him that there was only one similarity between Streisand and herself, and then turned her face in profile, and said in her Joanna Jewish voice, “The beak, dollink, vot den?” She used this voice and this personality to snap off one-liners and to tell long stories about what had happened to her at rehearsal or while wandering the city (she was a dedicated walker, and spent hours roaming the streets, looking and listening), delivering her shtik with all the elan of a stand-up comic, frequently interrupting herself with bursts of self-appreciative laughter. She suddenly became Joanna Jewish after they had made love the first time — “Well, well, vot haff we here, dollink? Where’d this come from again, all of a sudden, hah?” — but he suspected, and said aloud, that this aspect of her personality was normally reserved for whenever she needed reinforcement from whatever ethnic roots lay deeply buried and half-forgotten in her psyche. “You tink you’re Dr. Mandelbaum maybe?” she said.
Joanna Jewish had never eaten pork in her life; the very thought of it turned her stomach. Joanna Jewish still put newspapers on the wet kitchen floor every Friday night, a Shabbes habit picked up from her mother. She celebrated Chanukah, and not Christmas. She peppered her speech with Yiddish expressions like vontz, which meant bedbug, and which she used to describe the orchestra’s first bassoonist, or aleha ha-shalom, which Jamie gathered meant “rest in peace” and which she used whenever she mentioned her mother, who had died in 1962, shortly after Joanna’s Cleopatra summer. She defined for him the difference between shmuck and putz — “A shmuck is a dope, a putz is what’s sticking up there between your legs again” — and she told him what kvelling meant (“That’s what I did when I told Mandelbaum about you”). But contradictorily, Joanna Jewish considered the state of Israel a foreign country, and whereas she had contributed money to plant trees there, she railed unexpectedly against American Jews who seemed to put the well-being of “the homeland” (“That’s their homeland? Then what the fuck is this?”) above that of America. “If there were German-Americans who felt about Germany the way some Jews feel about Israel,” she said, “we’d call them subversives and throw them in jail.” Jamie disagreed, but he knew better than to argue with her on her own turf.
Professor J. D. Berkowitz was the last of the triumvirate, a learned scholar whom one would not dare call by her first name, no less her hated middle name, Doris. Professor Berkowitz was a pontificator who pronounced her theories and dictums in a voice reminiscent of his own Connie’s V.S. and D.M. voice, although the professor was quick to point out that she’d never been to a “genuine” college, in that the Juilliard School paid scant attention to anything but music and, as a result, sometimes turned out people who were virtual illiterates in any other field. She had felt this most keenly in her freshman year there, after the more catholic education at Fieldston-Riverdale. The voice she assumed for Professor J. D., in fact, was the result of that private school education, or so Jamie surmised, a bit nasal, a bit New Canaan corporation wife-ish, culturally affected, totally phony, her teeth clenched, her Gothic nose tilted as though she smelled something recently dead in the room.
She used this voice when she quoted, with presumed accuracy, any psychological premise picked up from the redoubtable Dr. Mandelbaum, the Tweedledee to Frank Lipscombe’s Tweedledum. She used it when she told him what her politics were: she voted Democrat and considered herself a liberal, but many of the views she held (about welfare giveaways, for example, or bilingual public notices in New York) seemed conservative if not downright reactionary. She used it when she told him about her father’s work or her Uncle Izzy’s, but never when she discussed her own; the instrument she played was the secure domain of Joanna La Flute, its borders sealed to either Joanna Jewish or the professor.
At 4:00 P.M., reluctantly, he went into the bathroom to shower. Joanna was leaning nude against the sink, smoking marijuana, watching him as he lathered himself, the outline of his naked body blurred behind the mottled glass door of the shower stall.
“What time is your train?” she asked.
“I can catch an express at five-oh-five.”
“To where?”
“Stamford. My car’s at Stamford.”
“What kind of car do you drive?”
“A Corvette,” he said. “Why?”
“Just want to know.”
He came out of the shower stall, took a towel from the rack, and began drying himself.
“Look at it,” she said. “All sweet and clean and soft. Let me dry your back.” She took a last drag, threw the roach into the toilet bowl, and then flushed it down. Taking the towel from him, she said, “Turn,” and began briskly drying his back. “Will I see you next week?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What time?”
“Same as today? Eleven-thirty, twelve?”
“I’ll have to look at my book,” she said. “I know we’ve got Figaro next Wednesday night, but I’m not sure whether there’s a rehearsal of anything.”
“Well, I’ll call you.”
“No, I’ll check it before you leave.”
Her hand reached around him.
“Hey,” he said. “Train to catch.”
“When’s the next one?” she asked.
“I really have to get home,” he said.
“When’s the next train?” she said, and her hand tightened on him.
He turned to her. He took her in his arms. He looked into her face. “Next time,” he said. “Okay?”
“No, this time,” she said, “okay?” and fell to her knees before him, and wrapped her arms around his legs, and took him savagely in her mouth. He placed his hands on top of her head. He closed his eyes. Her mouth was relentless. And suddenly, she pulled away from his erection, her lips sliding free, her hand cradling him rigid and pulsing against her cheek. Looking up at him, she whispered, “When’s the next train, Jamie?”
“Six-oh-five,” he said.
“An express?”
“Yes.”
“You have time,” she said, and took his hand and led him back into the bedroom.
He was in New York again that Saturday, scouting the landmark buildings with the Times people, and was through with his work by eleven o’clock. On the offchance that Joanna might be home, he called, surprised when she answered the phone. She told him they were performing Turn of the Screw that afternoon at two-fifteen, which meant she had to be in her chair at about two or a little after, which further meant she’d have to leave the apartment no later than twenty to. She apologized profusely, explaining that the Britten opera was scored for a sort of miniature orchestra, but that as first flutist she had to be there to play alto and piccolo. Could he... would he be willing... did he think he might be able to come over for just a little while? He caught a taxi from the Flatiron Building and was uptown in her apartment twenty minutes later.