Moe Treitler had been Oscar’s friend from childhood. They’d grown up together, had their bar mitzvahs the same year, chased girls together. Back before Oscar and Abigail were married, when they’d gone to jazz clubs in the Village, they had double-dated with Moe and a succession of his girls, most of whom Abigail had found intimidating, humorless, sophisticated, and slovenly. Then Oscar had married Abigail, and Moe had disappeared into Alphabet City to live in a tenement flat near Tompkins Square Park, where he’d cultivated through the years first a hipster heroin habit, then a full-blown addiction, and finally a rehabilitated, clean-living persona of righteous zeal. He painted street murals and enormous abstractions on stitched-together bedsheets and cheap fabric, played free jazz on his saxophone, mostly alone in the street for loose change but also gigs with other musicians when he could get them.
In the early years in the Riverside apartment, Moe had occasionally turned up for dinner with Oscar, both of them punchy and sweaty and hungry, often having walked the whole way uptown, shouting and arguing and gassing each other about what geniuses they both were. Moe always had some crazy outfit on, tie-dyed jeans and animal-fur vests in the sixties, top hats and glitzy ties and platform shoes in the seventies, velour jumpsuits and long silk scarves in the eighties, and then he’d disappeared from Oscar’s life after a blowup over something — Oscar wouldn’t say what.
Abigail hadn’t liked Moe Treitler much when he was sixteen and hadn’t cared much for him when he was twenty and thirty and forty, but she felt almost glad to see him now.
“You want a cup of coffee or something?”
“Coffee, great. Can I smoke in here?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Abigail, pouring some coffee for him, “but all right.”
Moe settled in, stretched his legs out under the table, lit a cigarette, and fondled his coffee cup. He had always been excessively tactile, needing to claim whatever came into his orbit by touching it, whether it was a woman, an object, or food and drink. Abigail dredged up the ashtray Maxine always used when she visited, a souvenir from Maui that had come from she knew not where, and set it on the table in front of him.
“I can’t believe Ockie’s gone,” he said to Abigail, his eyes welling up. She remembered then his habit of tearing up easily, then pinching his nose as if staunching a potential cascade of tears. “Somehow sitting here makes it real in a way it wasn’t before. Makes me feel so fuckin’ old.”
“We are so fuckin’ old,” said Abigail. “I’m eighty; how old are you?”
“Yeah,” said Morris. “I’m the same as Ockie, so he would have been eighty-three now if he was still around. Time flies, life.”
“Time flies, life,” Abigail repeated. “It sure does.”
“Last time I saw Ockie, we almost killed each other. That was over twenty years ago, 1984. I remember that day like it was yesterday. Broke my heart, but I wanted to kill that guy. I wanted his neck between my two hands. We walked away like, pffft, it’s over, a lifelong friendship. And it really was. I kept thinking, you know, we’d…”
“I know,” said Abigail. “He told me you two fell out, but he wouldn’t say what it was about. He also always sort of thought…you know, you’d patch it up.”
“Well, we never did. Maxie I see from time to time. You know I live near her now. I see her out walking her dog, late at night. Both of us are night owls. I call her ‘Crankypants’ she calls me ‘the old nutjob.’ ‘Well, if it isn’t Crankypants!’ ‘Oh no, not the old nutjob.’ She sure has a stick up her ass. She sure can pass judgment. We start arguing drop of a hat. I say, ‘Maxie, calm down. It’s all one big pot of gold we’re dipping our brushes in, whatever we do with the paint.’ I was spray-painting awhile back, heavily influenced by my very good friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. I told Maxie all about it and she said, ‘Oh, that’s just a bunch of bull.’ On the whole, she doesn’t care for anything too street, you know, too unconventional, too black. Personally, I think black art and culture is all this country has going for it. It’s the only original shit we’ve got.” Morris clapped his hands together once and shook his head. “That’s the shit, man. That’s where it’s at. Black kids.”
“I’m sure Maxie would have a lot to say about that,” said Abigail. “I myself have no opinion.”
“Ockie was just as nuts as his sister,” Morris said. He looked over at Ethan with a paranoid grin, as if he might be a gossip columnist in disguise. “Ockie was a bad boy, worse than anyone but me you ever saw. We were the red devils on each other’s shoulders, me and him, till we weren’t anymore. There’s a lot of stuff you would wet yourself if you knew, and most of that goes to the grave with me, or the stoppered jar, wherever I end up. I’ll tell you one thing, though. He and I came up together, sort of like brothers. Brothers who fell out with each other, who ended up in hatred, but for a while there we were very close.”
Abigail watched him with an expression of careful, mild interest on her face, afraid if she revealed how rabidly she wanted to hear this, he would clam up and scuttle away.
“Listen to me,” Morris went on, leaning in. “No one knows this. I forgave Ockie a long time ago, or maybe I never will, but this is my hour of sweet revenge.”
“No one,” repeated Abigail with frank disbelief.
“That’s right,” said Morris. “And I know he never told anyone. It’s not the kind of thing he would brag about, as you’ll see.”
“Not even Maxine?”
“Naw,” said Morris. “Well, all right, Maxie probably knows most of this story. So, my best friend.” Morris’s thin shoulders hunched in a shrug. “As you well know, Ockie didn’t get along with a lot of guys. He was competitive, liked women better, whatever. I put up with a lot of bullshit from him. One thing with Ockie, he had to be the alpha male. He had to be top guy, big man on campus. Otherwise, he was out of his depth. He had to leave if another guy topped him. He didn’t fight; he scrammed. With me, I let him be the famous guy who married a rich girl and lived in a nice house and had a tamale of a girlfriend on the side and all that.”
Abgiail flinched.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Morris, leaning in closer, as if he were sucking in her pain, altruistically siphoning it off like snake venom, but drinking it vampirelike at the same time. “Anyway. Meanwhile, I was the crazy poor one in the weird situations, doing drugs and living in cockroach shit. On top, that was him; on the edge, that was me. I never fought Ockie on this. I let it ride. I wasn’t competitive like that; I’m a live-and-let-win kind of guy. Whatever, if that was his thing, let him have it — that’s how I saw it. And that kept the friendship together through a lot of shit. A lot of shit. So then I got married.”
“Oh,” said Abigail.
“You ever meet Carole?”
“I never met her,” said Abigail. “I don’t think Oscar ever even mentioned her.”
“No surprise,” said Moe. “This girl wasn’t like the other girls I always had. This one was my own true love. Carole, her name was, and she was so good to me. I would always go for these smarty-pants Ivy League girls, younger classy babes slumming it with an old schmo like me from the Lower East Side who didn’t know his ass from Thoreau. Then I meet Carole. She was younger, too, but from the same neighborhood, not Jewish, but might as well’ve been. She spoke the same language as me; she knew who I was. And what was new for me was, I was a step up for her; I looked pretty good after a bunch of low-life scumbags. I looked like a prince compared to those jerks, a real knight in white armor. But the thing is, she was beautiful, Carole. I mean really a knockout. Long black hair, good-tempered, easy to be around. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I couldn’t believe she loved me, too. Both of us had suffered from past heartbreaks; we’d been treated pretty rough, so we knew each other’s weak spots, and we always took care to avoid causing more pain. We just plain loved each other, no drama, no bullshit.”