Morris lingered through the meal. I heard him talking, in a loud, officious voice, about Hitler. “According to my sources,” said Morris, “Hitler isn’t dead.” Nobody disagreed with his sources. The flight of Sheila, the only subject, wasn’t mentioned.
Larry read one book all summer, which was about the mechanics and pathology of the human mouth. Otherwise, he was dedicated to Latin dancing and handball. He took on challengers at handball every week — lifeguards, tennis instructors, waiters, and bellhops — first — class players who often came from resorts miles away. Some referred to him as “the Nazi,” even to his face. Catskill resorts weren’t polite society, and conversation could be blunt and cruel. To call Larry a Nazi wasn’t fair, but he looked the way he looked. It had an alienating effect, despite his Yiddish, despite his being a Jew.
The hard black rubber ball, banging the backboard, sounded like gunfire as Larry annihilated challengers. I didn’t root for Larry, because he always won anyway, and I felt sorry for the others. They wanted badly to beat him, as if more than a game and a couple of dollars were at stake. He knew what they felt, men with strength and speedy reflexes who had come from miles away to beat the Nazi. He beat them week after week.
There was another great handball player, “Hairy Murray,” also known as “the maniac from Hackensack.” He worked the resort circuit as a tummler. He’d challenged Larry, and a date had been set for a game. The odds were usually around ten to one against the challenger, but against Hairy Murray there were no odds. People wanted to see these competitors in the flesh, the way people want to see horses before a race. I assumed Larry would win. He played like the God of Isaiah, an insatiable destroyer. Larry’s dancing wasn’t altogether different. He moved without a smile or the dopey rictus of ballroom professionals, his body seized by rhythms of the earth. I could live with his inhuman sublimity, and even his good looks, but I couldn’t think that I’d ever have Larry’s effect on a woman.
I felt envy, a primitive feeling. Also a sin. But go not feel it. According to Melanie Klein, envy is among the foundation stones of Brain House. Nobody is free of it. I believed envy is the chief principle of life: what one man has, another lacks. Sam is smart; hence, you are stupid. Joey is tall; hence, you are a midget. Kill Sam and Joey, you are smart and tall. Such sublogical thoughts applied also to eating. The first two bites satisfy a person’s hunger. After that comes eating, which satisfies more than hunger. Seeing hundreds of people eat three times a day in the dining room brought to mind the Yiddish expression “Eating is nothing to sneeze at,” which is no joke. Guests looked serious in the dining room, as if they had come to eat what life denied them — power, brains, beauty, love, wealth — in the form of borscht, boiled beef, chopped liver, sour cream, etc. In the bunkhouse at night, falling asleep, I saw hundreds of faces geshtupt, like chewing machines in a factory that ingests dreams.
I also saw Sheila’s light brown curly hair and her appealing face, with its pointy lips and small, sweet chin, and her nice figure, today called a “body.” Like a sculptor’s vision, it was nearly palpable, an image in my hands. I remembered her agony, too, how she stood up clutching her napkin, how she seemed transfigured, going from mere appealingness to divinity. She got to me, though she wasn’t my type, and I’d have felt nothing, maybe, if she hadn’t been deranged by Larry.
The morning after she fled the dining room, Morris Kahn arrived for breakfast alone. He carried the Times. It was to suggest that he was an intelligent man, with interests beyond personal life. He opened the Times and began to read. Larry approached like a robot waiter, wordless. Not looking up, Morris said, “Scrambled eggs.”
Larry spun away, returned with scrambled eggs.
Morris said, “These eggs are cold.”
Larry took away the eggs.
Morris said, “Fuck eggs. Bring pancakes.”
Larry quick-marched to the kitchen, reappeared with pancakes.
Morris let them get cold, then ordered more.
I stepped forward, took away cold pancakes.
Larry set down warm pancakes.
Morris read his newspaper, ate nothing. Larry’s white rayon shirt, gray with sweat, sucked his chest. Hair, pressing up against the rayon, was a dark scribble of lines.
Morris, about thirty years old, maybe ten or twelve years older than Sheila, was almost completely bald, and he had a pink, youthful, placid face that showed no anguish. He ordered pancakes five times. He wanted to make a bad scene, but, like a round-headed dog, he was hopelessly affectionate and at a loss for an appropriate violence. Larry and I sped back and forth, rolling our eyes at each other as we passed, in opposite directions, through the swinging doors of the kitchen. At last Morris was content. He rose and walked out, the Times folded under his arm, like one who has completed important business and is at leisure to amble in the sunlight.
That morning, he checked out of the resort with Sheila. At the desk, he left an envelope with Larry’s name scrawled across the front. It contained a thirty-five-dollar tip, much more than he’d have left if he’d stayed a week and never missed a meal. The tip was an apology. Had Morris been a Catskill gangster, Larry Starker would have disappeared, dumped in a mountain lake.
In the following weeks, Larry received phone calls from the city, sometimes in the middle of the night. It was no secret who was calling. He stayed long on the phone and never discussed the calls. Sheila had spent only a few days at the resort, and if she and Larry had found moments to talk, nobody noticed. Lovers are sly, making do in circumstances less convenient than the buildings and grounds of a resort in the Catskills.
One afternoon, in the break after lunch, I was lying in my bunk, groggy with fatigue and heat, unable to sleep or to sit up and finish reading The Stranger, in which Camus’s hero mysteriously murders an Arab, on a blindingly sunny beach in Algiers, and feels no remorse, feels hardly anything else, and has no convictions. A modern believer, I supposed, different from the traditional kind, like Saint Teresa, who draws conviction from feeling. I thought the book couldn’t have been written before the Holocaust.
Larry was lying in the bed next to mine. I heard his voice: “What do you say?”
“All right,” I answered, hearing my own voice, as I sprawled in stuporous languor after lunch, a dairy meal, which was always the hardest of the day. Guests had to sample everything. Busboy trays became mountains of dirty dishes. The dining room was too warm. The kitchen was hot, and the wooden floors were soft and slick, dangerous when rushing with a heavy tray on your shoulder. The chefs, boiling behind the steam counter, screamed at you for no reason. In the middle of the meal, the dishwasher cut himself on broken glass. He couldn’t stop working. More and more dishes were arriving, and there was blood everywhere.
“Then get up.”
“Doing it,” I said.
I’d agreed to play handball, surprised and flattered by Larry’s invitation, never before offered, but my body got up reluctantly, lifting from the clutch of mud. I followed him out of the bunkhouse. He’d brought a ball and two gloves. “You lefty or righty?” he asked. I mumbled, “Righty,” as if not sure. He said, “Here. Take both gloves.” He didn’t really need them, since he could hit killers with his iron-hard, naked hands. In the glare and stillness, the ball boomed off the backboard. As we warmed up, my body returned to itself. I hit a few good shots, then said, “I’m ready.” We played one game. Larry beat me by eighteen points. It felt like an insult. He’d slammed the ball unnecessarily on every play. My palms were burning and swollen. Walking back to the bunkhouse, he said, “Sheila Kahn has a sister. Adele. Would you like a date with her? They live in Riverdale.”