The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History. Michael Blumenthal
diabolically cunning and wise.
There was much a woman could learn from older men, she had always been told, and he, no doubt, had already taught his share of younger women a great deal. Suddenly, she could feel her feet moving against his beneath the table. She could feel the pillows moving beneath her head once more. He was gazing, paternally yet seductively, into her eyes from across the table. Slowly but surely, he could feel her body, almost of its own accord, begin to rise, slowly heading toward yet another bed.
She is quintessentially French. I am, in the loosest sense of the word, American. She always feels cold. I am always hot. In the winter, even if it isn’t chilly, she does nothing but complain about how cold it is. Even in late spring, there are large, fertile fields of goose bumps on her thin, beautiful arms, and I have known her, even in the Middle East in late June, to wear a woolen sweater around the house, to sleep in a lamb’s wool camisole in August.
She speaks, since she doesn’t speak much, only one language well, though she seems to understand so much more than I do, even in the languages she doesn’t really speak. I, on the other hand, can make myself understood in several languages, yet have trouble focusing on the conversations of others.
She enjoys reading maps and navigating around in new places. I hate it, and quickly grow impatient and ornery. After a single afternoon in a foreign city, she will have mastered the public transportation system, be able to find her way to the centrum from the most desolate-seeming corners. I will get lost five meters from my own hotel, or—worse yet—a new apartment. She hates asking for directions, preferring to gaze patiently at a to-me-indecipherable map for many moments. When we get lost, I am quick to blame her. She blames no one, but busies herself looking for second-hand shops and fruit and vegetable markets in whatever neighborhood we are lost in.
She loves old architecture, curved surfaces, rummaging among the trinkets and memorabilia of other people’s lives at flea markets, the scent of flowers and herbs. I am always impatient to get where I’m going, missing virtually everything along the way. The only two things I’ve ever been able to love completely and unconditionally are my own disfigured face in the mirror and sitting at my desk making a kind of music exclusively with words . . . though I love my son, and sometimes her, in a different way, as well.
She loves travel, unfamiliar places, a sense of the unexpected. I dream of living always in one place, burning my passport, etching an address in stone upon my door post, running for mayor in some town I will never again move from.
I love to eat in restaurants—bad restaurants, good restaurants, even mediocre ones. She always wants to eat at home: fresh vegetables and better food, she claims, at a third the price. She hates the way I do the dishes and leave a mess after cooking. I like, on occasion, to do the dishes and cook, though I’m quite awful at the former, which I always do in too great a hurry, leaving all sorts of prints, smudges, and grease stains along the way.
She loves to watch a late movie—preferably a slow-moving, melancholic one of the French or Italian sort—and to have a glass of wine or two with dinner. I prefer rather superficial, fast-moving American films, fall asleep almost the second I enter the theatre for anything later than the 7:30 showing, and can drink, at most, a glass of white zinfandel in late afternoon.
She has little patience for, or interest in, pleasantries among strangers, preferring to restrict her circle of acquaintances to those she is truly intimate with. I enjoy talking to the garbage collector, the mailman, making small talk with the meter-reader and taxi driver. The greetings “How are you?” and “Have a nice day” do not cause me to rail against the superficiality of America and Americans.
She is shy; I am not. Occasionally, however, her shyness rubs off on me, or, alternatively—as in the case of landlords who are trying to take advantage of us or rabbis who are too adamantly in favor of circumcision—she loses her shyness and grows quite eloquent, even in English, her vocabulary suddenly expanding to include words like barbaric and philistine.
She has no respect for established authority, and thinks nothing of running out on student loans, disconnecting the electric meter, or not paying taxes. I, on the other hand, though I have the face of an anarchist, am afraid of established authority and tend, against my own better instincts, to respect it. As soon as I spot a police car in the rearview mirror, I assume I have done something terribly wrong and begin to contemplate spending the rest of my life in jail. She, on the other hand, smiles shyly at the police officer, who quickly folds up his notebook and goes back to his car.
She likes goat’s cheese, garlic, a good slice of pâté with a glass of red wine, tomatoes with fresh rosemary. I like sausages, raw meat, pizza, and gefilte fish with very sharp horseradish.
She claims that I am a Neanderthal when it comes to food, a barbaric American animal who will die young of high cholesterol, rancid oils, and pesticides. She is refined, has a sensitive palate and a nose so accurate it can tell the difference between day-old and two-day-old butter. When we lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she spent many days in search of the perfect, vine-ripened tomato and just the right kind of basil for making pesto. She can’t stand, for example, pine nuts that are rancid. “Rancid,” in fact, is one of the English words she uses most frequently.
At the cinema she hates to sit too close to the screen, and—if we’re at home—refuses to watch movies on TV that are interrupted by commercials, claiming that it interferes with her “dream world.” I like to sit near the front of the theatre and tell jokes during the movie. I like almost any movie, as long as it is superficial enough not to disturb my worldview. She prefers dark, slow-moving, romantic tragedies, set to the music of Jacques Brel, which linger in her imagination for many days after, causing her to question, or reexamine, almost everything in her world. She remembers the names of films and actors, and prefers actresses who embody a kind of low-key sensuality and dark reserve. I adore those who are brazenly sexual and whore-like in their demeanor. If, for example, as in Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon, there are two women, one of whom is subtly beautiful, sensual, and slightly tragic, the other who is vulgar, brazen, hedonistic, and rather shallow, it is always certain that she will prefer the first. I always prefer the second.
On those rare occasions when we’ve seen a film we both liked, she will, the next day—even the next month—remember every small detail of it: the weather in a particular scene, the shape of an awning, the way a blouse or a cloth napkin lay against the protagonist’s arm or lap. I, on the other hand, will remember nothing, not even the plot, as if some premature and obliterating dementia had overtaken me during the night. Somewhat sheep-faced, I will ask her to remind me what the movie was about, who was in it . . . on occasion, even, what it’s name was, all of which she will generously do, never even pausing to comment upon my infirmity.
Though I am rather smart about books and literature, it is the rare film in which I am even able to follow the plot line, much less unravel the mystery, so that, after we leave the theatre (assuming I haven’t fallen asleep), I will usually need her to explain to me exactly what happened, who was related to whom, and why, at the end, a photograph of one character’s daughter mysteriously showed up on the wall of a seemingly unrelated character’s living room. When she does, I am inevitably embarrassed about my simple-mindedness and lack of insight, a shortcoming she seems either oblivious to or willing to overlook.
I either love or hate people, and find myself utterly incapable of having any interest in those I am indifferent to. She, though often equally indifferent to the same people, always seeks to find something interesting and unique about them, a pursuit I have neither the time nor patience for. Something in even the most uninspiring person arouses, if not her conversation, then at least her curiosity, and—once she has been engaged with someone in any way—she retains a certain ongoing loyalty to them I can neither relate to or comprehend. Though far less extroverted than I am, she will carry on a correspondence with any number of people, in all sorts of countries, and keeps a list in her address book of all the birthdays of everyone she has ever known and liked.
I consider every crisis a catastrophe, and will begin to fidget nervously and