The Wife

Gertie Ellenbogen was seventy-eight years old, ten years younger than her husband. They called her a termagant, a wild woman, a crazy person, a vilde chaye, a nut, a monster, a devourer, when she was, in truth, a protector, a defender, a barrier, a fortress, a guardian of his name and his convictions, custodian of those heaps of letters, papers, clippings, notebooks, all secured in cardboard boxes under the marital bed, in the back of closets, in orange crates in the hallway, in plastic bags below the kitchen sink. Her husband was dead. Someone must watch over his past, his future, his interests, his needs; who better than a wife, the wife who warded off the parasites, the predators, the pirates? They meant to get hold of it all, but she would never allow it. Never. Never. Her voice was loud, strong. When they came to the door, she shrieked through the peephole, she drove them off, how they feared her! She could hear their heels pounding down the half-dozen flights of cracked marble. Sometimes one of them slipped and missed a step: may he split open his goddamn skull! Those frauds, those thieving biographers, bibliographers, translators, librarians, journalists, scavengers, how he was neglected, ignored, buried alive, no one knew his name, now they come running, when he is fifteen years gone, after shunning him, dismissing him, mocking him, they discover his fire, his creation, his grandeur! I, Gertie Ellenbogen, his wife, his defender, his champion, his lover, his savior, I will wait one thousand years for the right one to be worthy of Asher Ellenbogen!

The marriage itself was a puzzle. He had brought home a pretty creature, more child than woman: round, shining, staring black eyes under a narrow forehead bursting with curls blacker than shoe polish, curls at the ears, masses of curls tumbling over her shoulders, the pretty nose, the pretty puffed-up pink lips, all of it noisy with childish whims and tantrums. And she was, from the beginning, loyal; she trusted him, she believed in his genius, he was her magus, her prophet, her sanctified liege. Never mind that by now she was old, the valentine mouth no more than an unforgiving line, the curls gone limp and thin and yellowish; an elderly widow, but robust, living, undaunted, a force!

The argument (it had come to this) was whether Asher Ellenbogen had seized on a hushed underground movement to claim it as his own devising—or had the movement already been hovering overhead for an eternity, like a rainbow in the sky, no one below thinking to look upward? It was as if to ask whether Darwinism was true before Darwin, whether shamanism healed before Freud, whether time mattered before Einstein, whether all the continents were once connected. And the thing itself (not a thing, but a wave, a thought, a stab of knowing) had many names: Orphism, Simultaneity, Parallelism. In Scandinavia they called it Unanism, in Greece Polypneumia, in Spain Cosmorphia, all forgotten, exhausted, finished, lost, until their reincarnation in the Ellenbogen Theorem, materializing as a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, and now swelled to cover peninsulas and isthmuses, drawing them into a single land mass sequestered and presided over by Gertie Ellenbogen in Apartment 6C on the sixth floor of Marlborough Manse, 5347 Tremont Avenue, the Bronx, New York, whose allegiance was absolute: I will wait one thousand years!

Lionel Einhorn, age twenty-four, was a disciple of the Ellenbogen Theorem. Why shouldn’t everything be linked to everything else? Cold implies warmth; you can’t conceive of one without the other. Hope is born in despair, and vice versa. Whatever the mind can picture has its counterpart, no god without a devil, no freedom without tyranny, no music without a vibration; the nine Muses are one Muse, just as the waves of the sea, each with its thrust and lip of foam, are one sea, all breeds are ancestrally one breed, all arts are the same art, the dancers are paintings, the portraits odes; histories are one with folktales and make-believe. Unicorns, with their single tusks, are merely mythic; yet myths themselves all hymn in chorus. A solitary glint of mica invokes lightnings.

At NYU, Lionel had majored in business administration in the hope of future employment, urged on by the childless aunt who had taken him in as a small boy when his parents divorced. They agreed on nothing, they had no common sense. His mother had joined an erotic puppet theater, where the puppets were underdressed and made to speak smut. His father had fled to Tibet to seek wisdom. Lionel’s aunt read to him out of her book of pious stories and maxims—how Abraham denied his father’s idols, how Lot’s wife disobeyed and looked back to what was past—and advised him to be practical, commonplace, conforming, never to stand out, always to be conscious of the difference (this was her favorite saying) between Mordecai and Haman.

Five times a week he sat in a cubicle in the office of Manhattan Café & Creamery Inc., and three nights in a corner of his bedroom in a secondhand office chair on wheels at a desk a yard-and-a-half from the foot of his unmade bed. His aunt was now in a nursing home, where she had forgotten the difference between Mordecai and Haman, and also between dawn and dusk. He, meanwhile, had no desire other than to be uncommon, to be marked out, to be swept by intimations of the unreachable. These rumors of secret holdings at 5347 Tremont Avenue—you could read of them in the columns, you could hear of them in late-night radio talk shows, stand-up comics in night clubs mocked them. But no one took in the Theorem as Lionel did, viscerally, with his stomach muscles, both the external and the internal obliques, and in the tremor of his nostril wings.

In the National Geographic, in an old article speculating on how during the last ice age the land bridge to Alaska had broken off from Asia—referencing, of course, the Ellenbogen Theorem—he happened on a photo of Asher Ellenbogen and Gertie as newlyweds on the shore of the Dead Sea, she with her wild hair tangled all around her girlish face, where he noticed for the first time a small shallow dimple in one curved cheek. A hidden hollow: it stirred him. He tore the page out of the magazine and every night studied with a magnifier under his desk lamp those invading eyes, those lips, those curls, that nearly invisible dimple. Who had taken this photo? A random passerby? And how had it migrated into this creased and smudged public fate, how had it escaped her boxes and baskets, who had smuggled it out and sold it as contraband? The photo gazed back at him, he caught a flash of her teeth, her tongue, it was as if her mouth beckoned, her breath, her kiss. Her kiss! He hardly dared imagine it. Or he did imagine it, as something virginal, tender, immaculate, true in the manner of the Ellenbogen Theorem itself. He understood that she was now an old woman, some fifty or more years his senior; but in the photo, and in the gauzy recesses of his desire, her silken beauty was unfailing. But look, she was widowed, she lived alone; he, too, lived alone in a so-called studio apartment in a renovated tenement on Avenue A, and why, after all, could he not entice her? Marriage!—the living marrow of the Ellenbogen Theorem, how every moment, every thought, every image and sound and flicker of light, is matched, avowed, bound to its unlike. If all lands are anciently one land, if all arts are indivisible, if all longing is one longing, then it follows that all chronologies are equal, and youth and age are snares and delusions, who can deny it?

Two buses, and a third at West Farms, took him to Tremont Avenue. It was night, and even under the streetlights it was difficult to read the rusted house numbers. He had found her address in a row of houses whiskered by fire escapes, all with stoops, eight steps up, the lobby with its unwashed tiles, the mixture of smells, onions, pea soup, eggs frying, the row of vertical mailboxes, and aha! there it was: Ellenbogen, 6C.

A buzzer at the left of the door. He pressed it and heard nothing—disconnected. How cannily she punished intrusion: He was compelled to knock, and to knock twice again. A twist of pain in his knuckles.

The eye in the peephole spoke: “Go away.”

Lionel breathed out a brave breath. “I’ve brought something you may be missing.”

“Beat it, scram, you’ve got nothing I want—”

“I have what you need,” he said.

“Crazy lowlife, you think you know what I need, I can sniff out all the tricks, they say they’ve found a scrap of my husband’s I don’t have, but I’ve got it all, they want to look around and steal. You’re all a gang of thieves, you’ll get nothing from me.”

“I’m asking for nothing. I already own the Ellenbogen Theorem, I’ve got the proof, it’s mine just as much as it’s yours.”

“Scum! Liar! Miscreant!”

The peephole was all at once shuttered; he saw in its small scratched mirror his own brown eye.

He gave the next week to pondering. His clumsy misspeaking, why had he answered with “proof”? It had sprung from his lung like a demon. His proof was only raw craving. What could be more alien to what all the world took to be a cranky old hoarder, a fanatic holding hostage the hallowed archive of the framer of the most comprehensive modern expression of the Theorem? Only Lionel knew better: Gertie Ellenbogen had been a good wife. And would be again.

Behind the shut door Gertie Ellenbogen too was uncertain. One hearing aid was broken; she kept it in an empty cottage cheese container, together with her wedding ring. Her fingers had thickened. She reflected—had the voice, pitched on the scale of a young male, called out use or truce or truth? Or was it proof? Proof of what? That he was entitled to snoop and poke and pilfer? But still there was something unwonted in it, more a pledge than a demand. It came to her that it wasn’t oily with greed, like the voices of all those looters and ransackers. It teased at the thinnest membrane of sensation—the tone, the timbre, the plea. It skirted her will, it made her look back; it made her think back. She had heard it salted by the winds that coiled around the big gray-white mounds at the brim of the Sea of Sodom, when Asher Ellenbogen had confessed his calling. It was, he said, to become one with the primordial sweep of the universe.

She opened the peephole. No one was there. She knew now what the new voice had promised. It was no more than a trifling mumble, half diffident, half daring. Yet this was the note, the syllable, the sacred word, on the other side of the door: neither truth nor proof, but youth, youth!

It was in the early dark of the next Sunday afternoon that Lionel tried again. A cold November rain, tilted by wind, spilled down from the beak of his cap. Passing an empty lot, he stopped to dig his fingers in the mud and pulled up a stone as oval as an egg. He cleaned it with his handkerchief and put it in the pocket of his coat, where his magnifier in its faux-leather pouch slept in the dark. On the stairs at number 5347 he left behind him a trail of wayward droplets. He knocked, lightly now to spare his knuckles, and heard rather than saw the hinges squeal open, no more than an inch or two.

“It’s you again,” Gertie said. “I told you last time, you’ll get nothing from me.”

“I’m here to give you what you haven’t got.”

“There’s nothing I haven’t got.”

For Lionel it had the unsure waver of an invitation.

“You don’t have a husband,” he said.

“So what’s that to you?”

“Let me in.”

“Why?”

And then, precisely as he had calculated beforehand, Lionel gave it out directly, bluntly, unreservedly: “I want to implement the Theorem. To renew the germ of it. To make it live.”

The hinge squeaked. The door opened.

“You’re a kid!”

Lionel stepped in. A sour stench of elderly breathing, of airless confinement, of trapped kitchen odors and sweated sheets.

He said, “And isn’t that the point? I can do it, I can restore what your husband was for you, as at the beginning, when he gave birth to the Theorem. I’ve studied the Theorem, I’ve mastered it, I believe in it—”

“You don’t look like him.”

“I carry Asher Ellenbogen in my bones.” He felt in his pocket. “Here, this is for you. Take it. A stone from the Dead Sea.”

“That’s a lie,” she said. But she held out her hand.

Lionel recited, “The human head is an ellipsoid. Those salt mounds on the shore are ellipsoids. This stone is an ellipsoid. Each embodies the other. Difference is mere appearance.”

“Don’t tell me what I know, I know just how he figured it all out, so take off your coat,” she commanded. “You’re soaked. I’ll give you a cup of tea.”

The teacup itself had a bad smell, the tea leaves were long overused. What might have been an errant leaf was, when he poked at it with a sticky spoon, a half-decayed fly. Or was it a mouse dropping?

Cautiously, quietly, Lionel said, “And it’s all here? All his papers? Everything?”

“I’ve kept track of it for years, I’ve watched it grow. Everybody knows that, but it’s all they know. They don’t understand any of it, they can’t live up to Asher Ellenbogen—”

“You do.” A cajoling half-whisper. “You contain him.”

Her stare held him. He recognized it, it was familiar, he was accustomed to it: Hadn’t he fallen into those black orbs night after night, riding his magnifier? But what he saw now was a pair of dying planets dimmed by a milky film, the lids swollen and ruddy, the lashes white, the sparse eyebrows also white, and under the lower lids two bruised bulging pockets.

“I like that,” she said. “Yes, I contain him. Every word, every syllable.”

So he had won her—instantly, deliriously—and why, and how? Because of the lure of the Theorem: The Muses are one, the continents are one, Mordecai and Haman are one, dawn and dusk are one, all disparities are kin. And because he carried Asher Ellenbogen in his bones: it was Asher Ellenbogen himself who had betrothed them.

“I am your new husband,” he told her.

“Silly boy,” she said, with her horrible smile, the browned and crusted teeth and the whitened darting tongue. Yet still: she was his own, she had consented, the marriage was consummated, and like any man of the house, he was free to come and go and come again.

He came and he went and he came again and again. She brought him whatever he asked for, the billowing bags below the kitchen sink, the cartons out of the closets, the crumpled sheets bent at the corners, the spattered longhand. Under his fingertips he could feel the beating of the blood and the blink and the pulse of Asher Ellenbogen, his will, his purpose, his knowings, every instinct and nerve of the Theorem, the sway to the left of its alphabet, the elongated threads of the y’s and the j’s, the lofty stretch of the f’s and l’s, this and that mishap of a telltale misspelling or blot, all of it swooping him into a hysteria of possession, burrowing, inhabiting, stealing away with Asher Ellenbogen in the very hour of his seizure. His was the Theorem. It was his captive. It had entered his gonads, his semen.

And meantime, in a small corner of his awareness, Lionel plotted a masterwork of his own: He meant to turn and turn and overturn Asher Ellenbogen, to be his viceroy, his chief interpreter, his advocate, publicist, explainer, his avatar, his ventriloquist, his fulfillment, while at the far horizon of his dreaming, his inner eye beheld Gertie, arid eyebrows and pinprick lashes and flattened mouth, teasing and tempting and dancing around him, avaricious, amorous, triumphant!

But he saw how she hobbled, she dragged a foot, a worn shoe trailing a loosened lace.

“I knew it the moment I saw you”—this from a broken windpipe—“I knew what you are because I’m the one who’s kept him breathing, I’m the one, none of it would exist without me, you see it for yourself, I was his angel, his right hand, his left hand, I was his tongue, I kept on, I never begged off, I was never too tired to go on, I was his wife, it was heaven to have such a husband, I was on my knees, why was I worthy, you don’t look like him but you have that young voice—”

Voice? Voice?

In a rush of cold, like a man interrupted in a density of drowning, Lionel said, “You were a good wife.”

And why now this shudder of cold?

He looked all around, and again took in the bad air. And how can those feebled shins, as dry and wooden as stalks in a drought, gone jigging in a dance?

Voice. It flooded him, this surge of seeing . . . scribe, clerk, scrivener, amanuensis, the good wife humbly and faithfully transcribing dictation, was it all a ruse, was he besieged not by the inkings of the true, the pure, the indubitable Ellenbogen electric but by the dutiful pen of conjugal devotion?

“Is there nothing here,” Lionel said, the worm of icicle creeping into his veins”—with his magnifier he sliced through the frozen air—“from his own hand?”

Now she gave him her wrinkled stare. “All of it’s from his own head. I’ve kept him safe, I’ve preserved him.” She rounded it out pridefully:
“For you.”

He wanted to say more, to name her a betrayer, a violator, a blighted and hollow deceiver, a scrap, a scratch, an itch. And he was her dupe. The ecstatic paroxysms of a copyist are not the same as the frenzies of a seer. Lionel is not Gertie’s husband, and Gertie cannot be his wife. He is too young. She is too old. A stone picked up from the mud on a rainy night in the Bronx isn’t the same as a salt mound at the brink of the Dead Sea. The arctic glaciers drift. The continents, having parted, will never again adhere.

Yet it was hazardous to think so coldly.

Lionel Einhorn has done well on the pragmatic side of life. Diligent and determined, consciously inspired by his aunt’s unforgotten proverbs and admonitions, he is now first vice president of Manhattan Café and Creamery, and has expanded the company into the ice cream business. The coloring is artificial, composed of various chemicals, but his inventions for the most commonplace flavors are regarded as ingenious. Lionel is prosperous but melancholy. Married and divorced, he admits (though only to himself) to being an inattentive husband. Yet how could he not be, when he had never known a good wife?

As happens with many influential movements, the tides of Orphism, Polypneumia, Cosmorphia, Simultaneity, and all the rest, have receded, their crises and climaxes muted, but for a single scandal: Gertie Ellenbogen found dead, of an aneurysm, alone in her locked apartment. The masses of her husband’s treasured papers, the once-coveted yet suspect originals, were confirmed to be fabricated.

Today Lionel is revisiting a scene lodged in a memory not his own. The desert sun is mercilessly scorching even as it ignites resplendent bursts of flashes from the flanks of the ice boulders in all their variegated forms and postures. The bent necks, the outstretched arms, the glacial knees, all numbed by salt. Here, surrounding this lake moored at the bottommost fathoms of geological time, in whose weighty waters no fish can live, he can see not one Lot’s wife entombed in a pillar of salt, but dozens, scores, hundreds. Bodies bob and loll on the surface of the landlocked sea, but Lionel is content to cling to the muddy shore, where more bodies are basting in the tarry paste.

He has come here not to relive the Ellenbogen honeymoon (after all, he’d had his own, at Niagara Falls), but to learn whether he has, in fact, fully repudiated the early allure of the pernicious belief that once so wildly besotted a foolish boy. Now he has looked on the Sea of Sodom, and there is nothing else like it on the face of the earth. The Dead Sea alone, under whatever name it carries, refutes the Theorem.

The heat is unendurable. He returns to the air-conditioned hotel where the bus back to Jerusalem waits. An hour remains before departure. In a little shop in the lobby he picks up the Philadelphia Inquirer from a rack of American newspapers four or five days old, sits down at one of the small round tables to sip iced coffee, and on page 59, under the headline “Museum News,” he reads that the technical laboratory, including its forensic chirography department, of the Pennsylvania Library of Transformative Philosophies, which retrieved the scattered archive from a Bronx landfill, has definitively determined that Asher Ellenbogen’s papers are authentically his own.

But there is no way for Lionel to feel the cold washing over him, not here at the burning lip of the Dead Sea.