Especially when you were impersonating Mrs. Zolteck from Talmud Torah
when we were at camp.
Josh, we have become the best of friends and I’m so happy now I’m your sister,
But when we go out together let’s try not to get blisters…”
Nathan’s mind wandered as Mindy meandered.
The effort he’d squandered, if this was the standard,
Seemed hours badly wasted, until he recalled
That, time notwithstanding, he’d nothing at all.
He’d pored over Bartlett’s for couplets to filch
He’d stayed up ’til three and still came up with zilch
Except for instructions he’d underscored twice
Just two words in length, and those words were, “Be Nice!”
Too often, he’d noticed, emotions betray us
And reason departs once we’re up on the dais.
He’d witnessed uncomfortable moments where others
Had lost their way quickly, where sisters and brothers
Had gotten too prickly and peppered their babbling
With stories of benders or lesbian dabbling,
Or spot-on impressions of mothers-in-law,
Which, true, Nathan thought, always garnered guffaws
But the price seemed too high with the laughs seldom cloaking
Hostility masquerading as joking.
No, he’d swallow his rage and bank all his fire
He knew that in his case the bar was set higher.
He’d have to be careful and hide what his heart meant
(Disingenuous malice was Susan’s department).
They’d be hungry for blood even though they had supped,
Folks were just waiting for him to erupt
In tears or some other unsightly reaction,
And Nathan would not give them that satisfaction.
Though Susan’s a slattern, and Josh was a lout
At least Nathan knew what he’d not talk about:
I won’t wish them divorce, that they wither and sicken,
Or tonight that they choke on their salmon (or chicken).
I’ll stay mum on that time when the cottage lost power
In that storm on the Cape, and they left for an hour
And they thought it was just the cleverest ruse
To pretend it took that long to switch out the fuse.
Or that time you advised me, with so much insistence,
That I should be granting poor Susan more distance.
That the worst I could do was to hamper and crowd her,
That if she felt stifled she’d just take a powder.
That a plant needs its space just as much as its water
And above all, not give her the ring that I’d bought her.
Which in retrospect only elicits a “Gosh!
I hardly deserved a friend like you, Josh.”
No, I won’t air that laundry, or make myself foolish
To satisfy appetites venal and ghoulish.
I will not be the blot on this hellish affair.
And with that Nathan pushed out, and rose from his chair.
And just by the tapping of knife against crystal,
All eyes turned his way, like he’d fired off a pistol.
“Joshua, Susan, dear family and friends,
A few words, if you will, before everything ends
And you skip out of here to begin your new life
As happily married husband and wife.
You’ve promised to honor, to love and obey,
We’ve sipped our champagne and been cleansed with sorbet
All in endorsement of your Hers and His-dom.
So, let me add my two cents’ worth of wisdom.
Herewith, as a coda to this evening historical
I just thought I’d tell you this tale allegorical.
I was wracking my brains sitting here at this table
Until I remembered this suitable fable.
Each reptilian hero, each animal squeal
Serves a purpose, you see, because they reveal
A truth about life, even as they distort us
So here is ‘The Tale of the Scorpion and Tortoise.’
The scorpion was hamstrung, his tail all aquiver.
Just how would he manage to get ’cross the river?
‘The water’s so deep,’ he observed with a sigh,
Which pricked at the ears of the tortoise nearby.
‘Well, why don’t you swim?’ asked the slow-moving fellow.
‘Unless you’re afraid. Is that it, you are yellow?’
So much as unable. It’s not how I’m made.’
‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to be glib when
I said that, I figured you were an amphibian.
The error was one of misclassification
I mistakenly figured you for a crustacean.’
‘No offense taken,’ the scorpion replied.
‘But how ’bout you help me to reach the far side?
You swim like a dream, and you have what I lack.
What say you take me across on your back?’
‘I’m really not sure that’s the best thing to do,’
Said the tortoise, ‘Now that I see that it’s you.
You’re the scorpion and—how can I say this?—just … well…
I don’t know I feel safe with you riding my shell.
You’ve a less-than-ideal reputation preceding.
There’s talk of your victims, all poisoned and bleeding,
That fact by itself should be reason sufficient.
I mean, what do you take me for, mentally deficient?’
‘I hear what you’re saying, but what would that prove?
We’d both drown so tell me, how would that behoove
Me, to basically die at my very own hand
When all I desire is to be on dry land?’
The tortoise considered the scorpion’s defense.
When he gave it some thought, it made perfect sense.
The niggling voice in his mind he ignored
And he swam to the bank and called out ‘Climb aboard.’
The tortoise was wrong to ignore all his doubts
Because in the end, friends, our true selves will out.
For, just a few moments from when they set sail
The scorpion lashed out with his venomous tail.
The tortoise, too late, understood that he’d blundered
When he felt his flesh stabbed and his carapace sundered.
As he fought for his life, he said, ‘Please tell me why
You have done this, for now we will surely both die!’
‘I don’t know,’ cried the scorpion. ‘You never should trust
A creature like me, because poison I must.
I’d claim some remorse or at least some compunction
But I just can’t help it. My form is my function.
You thought I’d behave like my cousin the crab
But unlike him, it is but my nature to stab.’
The tortoise expired with one final quiver
And then both of them sank, swallowed up by the river.”
Nathan paused, cleared his throat, took a sip of his drink.
He needed these extra few seconds to think.
The room had grown frosty, the tension was growing,
Folks wondered precisely where Nathan was going.
The prospects of skirting fiasco seemed dim
But what he said next surprised even him.
“So what can we learn from their watery ends?
Is there some lesson on how to be friends?
I think what it means is that central to living
A life that is good is a life that’s forgiving.
We’re creatures of contact, regardless of whether
to kiss or to wound, we still must come together.
Like in Annie
Hall, we endure twists and torsions
For food we don’t like, and in such tiny portions!
But, like hating a food but still asking for more
It beats staying dry but so lonely on shore.
So we make ourselves open, while knowing full well
It’s essentially saying, ‘Please, come pierce my shell.’
So … please, let’s all raise up our glasses of wine
And I’ll finish this toast with these words that aren’t mine:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!”
Where first it seemed that Nathan had his old resentments cleanly hurdled,
The air now held the mildest scent of something sweet gone meanly curdled.
The thorough ambiguity held guests in states of mild confusion
No one raised their eyes, lest a met glance be taken for collusion.
Silence doesn’t paint the depth of quiet in that room
There was no clinking stemware toasting to the bride or groom.
You could have heard a petal as it landed on the floor.
And in that quiet Nathan turned and walked right out the door.
The urinal’s wall was The King and His Court,
A work done in porcelain, precisely the sort
Of tableau of gentility at Le Petit Trianon,
A cast of nobility, designed for the peeing on.
Nate turned his gaze as he hosed down the scene,
It seemed an especially brutish and mean
Treatment of all the baroque figures in it
(Such unlucky placement, poor girl at her spinet).
He needed this pit stop before he took off
To go catch his train, when he heard a slight cough.
There, twisting a swan’s head in gold for hot water
Was Lou, who had bankrolled this day for his daughter.
Lou had scared Nathan for all of the years
He was with Susan, and now the sum of his fears
Was here, now the chickens had come home to land.
“The man of the hour, with his schvantz in his hand.”
Nathan started to say that he knew how he blew it
And how he was sorry, but Lou beat him to it;
Lou, who was blunt—some said boorish—and rich.
But a mensch deep at heart, said, “My Suzy’s a bitch.
You’d think that today I’d be proud, that I’d kvell,
But I followed you out here just so I could tell
You: she told her friends she would be able to get
You to come give a toast. It’s a monstrous bet,
Made all the more awful that her Day of Joy
Was still incomplete, and abusing a boy
In a trick was the thing that she wanted above
All else. It’s the mark of a girl who can’t love.
Ach, Nathan, this day is a stroke of bad luck.
You, cast in this play, and then played for a schmuck.
But think of it this way, she’ll wake up tomorrow
And still be unhappy. And that is my sorrow.”
Lou turned off the swan’s head, once more checked his tie,
Held his arm out and said, “This is good-bye.”
He shook Nathan’s hand and then made for the door
Where he paused and he turned to say just one thing more.
“That toast, if you give it again (but you won’t),
Remember, Nate: turtles swim, tortoises don’t.”
A permeable world where each friend is a trick,
Can feel like it’s crumbling when just one gets sick.
Add one more for two, and that queasy sensation
Can feel like a threat to one’s very foundation.
Three seems like carelessness, a surfeit of strife
Exposing one to comment on the Platform of Life
(Yes, dear Lady Bracknell, invoked with remorse
But humor was Cliff’s one remaining recourse);
For if “sick” becomes “die” and then “three,” “every friend,”
It’s the hurricane’s eye of a world at an end,
A Vale of Tears reached ’cross a sad Bridge of Sighs,
Cliff and his cohort were dropping like flies:
Victor, a handsome star of the ballet
Whose turnout, they said, could turn anyone gay
Coughed once, and then he expired like Camille—
Not quite, but the true facts seemed just as surreal—
And what could one say about poor lovely Marty?
Whose fever spiked high at his own dinner party
Between the clear soup and the rabbit terrine
By eleven that night, he was in quarantine.
Marco was the anchor of Bay Area News Day.
Fevered on Friday and dead the next Tuesday.
Gorgeous and baritone, gifted with words
And felled by an illness that struck only birds.
Before all they’d had to look out for was crabs
But now nothing helped, there were no pills, no labs
Nothing to slow down, never mind getting rid
Of this crazy-fast killer they’d weakly named GRID.
A grid: Cliff could see it stretched out, made of wire,
And spanning a canyon of brimstone and fire.
Suddenly, all of them caught unawares
Were one by one falling away through its squares
Rampant infections called opportunistic
Worked at a pace both absurd and sadistic.
The plum-colored smudge, a sloe slowly blooming,
Seemed barely worth noticing; small, unassuming,
As if trying to belie all the terrible harm it
Could do, it stayed hidden, just under his armpit.
But soon it branched out, making siblings and cousins
His lesions were legion, from just one to dozens.
Despite all his nursing, the tears and the dramas
Of friends, when he woke up to find his pajamas
As wet through with sweat as if dunked in the sea
He still briefly asked, What is happening to me?
He’d loved Touch of Evil, when la Dietrich tells
The fortune of corpulent, vile Orson Welles:
“Your future’s all used up.” So funny and grim.
But now that the same could be spoken of him
It was sadness that gripped him, far more than the fear
That, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year.
When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last”
Become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.
A new, fierce attachment to all of this world
Now pierced him, it stabbed like a deity-hurled
Lightning bolt lancing him, sent from above,
Left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love.
He’d thought of himself as uniquely proficient
At seeing, but now that sense felt insufficient.
He wanted to grab, to possess, to devour
To eat with his eyes, how he needed that power.
Not much of a joiner, he’d always been leery
Of groups, although now, he was simply too weary
From all of the death, plus his symptoms now besting
Him. He so admired those heroes protesting
The drugmakers, government—all who’d forsaken
The thousands—the murderous silence of Reagan,
Or William F. Buckley, that fucker at whose
Suggestion that people with AIDS get tattoos;
(The New Haven lockjaw, the glib erudition,
When truly, the man’s craven moral perdition
Made Clifford so angry he thought he might vomit
Or fly east, find B
uckley’s address, and then bomb it).
But, just like a child whose big gun is a stick,
Cliff was now harmless, he’d gotten too sick
To take any action beyond rudimentary
Routines that had shrunk to the most elementary:
Which pill to take now, and where is your sweater?
Did the Imodium make you feel better?
Study your shit to make sure you’d not bled,
Make sure the Kleenex is next to the bed.
“Make sure,” “be prepared,” plan out every endeavor
Like a scout on the stupidest camping trip ever.
The facts were now harder, reality colder
His parasol no match for that falling boulder.
And so the concern with the trivial issues:
Slippers nearby and the proximate tissues
He thought of those two things in life that don’t vary
(Well, thought only glancingly; more was too scary)
Inevitable, why even bother to test it,
He’d paid all his taxes, so that left … you guessed it.
Suppose one were trying to gently assert
One’s position; an East Eighty-third Street address doesn’t hurt.
Nor does a cottage on Georgica Pond,
Or three (Jewish … shah!) kids who are natural blonds.
Susan had banished all unsightly elements
Her latest career would brook no such impediment
To being the personal, shining reflection
Of breeding and privilege, class and connection.
Finally, to match Mayflower Realty, Inc.’s tone
Her business cards now showed her first name as Sloan.
Josh was a force of the courts—law and squash—
The family was blessed and seemed wholly awash
In the kind of good fortune one doesn’t dare dream,
Near-parodically copious, bursting the seams
Of the sky; heaven-sent, like the biblical gift of the manna,