November 4, 2006--Saturday Story: Ludavicio et al.

Of course you will understand that Lydia took a lover. In truth, many. As did I. Though I only managed three. I can tell you about two of hers—the ones I met. And of course everything about all of mine. Well, perhaps I’ll limit myself to just two. To keep things discreet and balanced. No need to take unfair advantage of the numerical situation. Things were bad enough.

And I can tell you, if you would like, about how it ended. That is, between Lydia and me. But before I begin--Fair warning: this is not going to be pleasant.

Speaking of the unpleasant, you may be wondering about the wedding. I left you with Lydia raging in my room about not having being selected to dance with Martha Graham in her last masterpiece, Clytemnestra. This, after the hundreds of hours she slavishly spent studying Graham’s body-distorting technique, a technique that called upon acolytes to compress their bodies into a perpetual mash of inner organs; and after so much devotion and study, including in her Greek Literature class at Barnard, such ideal preparation, Lydia ranted, for choreography based upon Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy of lust and betrayal.

As an aside, that latter emotion, betrayal, I had felt filtering into our own relationship and the former, the lust, was something I had agreed to work on, you know, in the literal hands of her own Bioenergetic therapist, Dr. Luven, in order to enhance my ability to express and deliver to Lydia that lust, more ecstatically in the future than as in the more tragic, perhaps even satiric present.

So, I left you with how in the midst of paroxysms of bed-beating rage, Lydia had agreed to proceed with the wedding and gave the go-ahead to send out “the fucking invitations.”

Thus, after my graduation from Columbia in early June, later that same month, representatives from both families, and the few friends we had in common, schlepped out to sultry New Jersey to the Binai-Binai Temple in South Orange where the ultra-reformed Rabbi David Phillips, without even the cover of a yarmulke, performed the ceremony, totally in English, complete with a brief, quite secular sermon directed pointedly at Lydia and me, in which he told us, actually me, to worry less about being fruitful and multiplying and more to devoting ourselves, myself, to all forms of love’s expressions.

He gave special emphasis to the all; and just in case anyone missed his inflection, he added a wink so theatrical that it was visible all the way to the back benches where my nearly-deaf Aunt Madeline, who had at the last moment decided, after all, to attend, in her widely-imitated voice, just like a seagull’s, cawed, “What? What did he say? What is he saying? I think he’s talking about sex.” And when all heads were craned in her direction, added, “Doesn’t he know this is a wedding not an orgy?”

In the face of that barked chastisement, as if his admonition needed further amplification, with Lydia squirming at my side, Rabbi Phillips made quite a display of draining the cup of the remaining sacramental wine. It was French of course, actually, the deep ruby Medoc he had required us to provide as part of the deal to perform the ceremony. Considering her carnal interests, though she had shown little interest in any other aspects of the wedding plans, Lydia had clearly made an inspired choice of clergymen to, so to speak, unite us.

By the end of the ceremony, which was also suffused with pulpy erotica selected from Kahlil Gibran The Prophet, about “filling each other’s cup” and “love caressing our tenderest quivering branches,” I too was set asquirm by the challenges Rabbi Phillips and Gibran and Lydia had set for me to take on. This even before the ink was dry on the marriage certificate.

And of course Madeline punctuated it all by having the last word, “What are those ‘quivering cups’ he keeps talking about? What is he talking about? To tell you the truth, I don’t think he’s a real rabbi. Where’s his yarmalkie?” For the first time in Zazlo family history everyone appeared to agree with her. Or was I just projecting?

* * *

Following the ceremony, between the six dinner courses, after completing the required dances, after the obligatory toasts to our health, happiness, and progeny—never mind what the rabbi had said--Lydia and I finally wove our way to the table where the Zazlo aunts and uncles were clustered. Actually squashed together since the Lichters needed my parents to find a place to seat Madeline and her husband Harry who had accepted their invitation just three days earlier. “If she insists on coming,” Mr. Lichter had said to my father, “You’ll have to find room for her at one of your tables. I’m not paying the caterer one more dime to add an extra one. I’m already being robbed blind by them because your side insisted on shrimp cocktail.”

Since this was true and the Lichters had been so accommodating to that request, for once my father managed to restrain himself, and as soon as his about-to-be fellow father-in-law hung up he began, on a yellow pad full of circles that he drew with great precision, to come up with all the possible combinations of Zazlos that a ten-person table could yield for the now twelve siblings and their spouses. This took him until 3:00 AM in the morning, not because any of his brothers or sisters would have been insulted if Madeline were not seated with them, but rather the opposite. If Madeline, for example, was assigned a seat next to her brother Danny or her sister Rosalie that would assure that they would have such a miserable time that they would likely leave as if insulted, well before the bride cut the cake. Madeline was that kind of sister.

And if that were to happened, my father speculated, who knew if they would leave their gift checks as they raced back to Brooklyn. “After what I had to go through to get them their shrimp,” he muttered, “they had better pay up.”

So he had prevailed upon my mother to allow Madeline to sit between them; and when Lydia and I finally made it to their table, there she was proudly sandwiched between them in her trademark sweat suit. It appeared to be embellished for the occasion with a smattering of sequins that she had stitched to her top in a way that emphasized the shape of her breasts. Also for the occasion, she had had her hair buzz-cut at the barber school on Kings Highway. Thus she was glamorized for the wedding and at the same all set for a long hot summer on the Brighton Beach boardwalk. She was well-known for being economical. Some said “cheap.”

“Hello, my favorite nephew, you!” she trilled, ignoring Lydia. They had not before this moment point met. Lydia had refused to make the traditional pre-wedding round of the Zazlo relatives. Anticipating what might be coming, my mother began to slide down in her chair so that only her face and bouffant showed above the table top.

“Hi, Aunt Madeline, I’m glad you were able to come to the wedding so you could meet Lydia. We were all along hoping that . . . .” I managed to say that much before she returned to the subject of Rabbi Phillips.

“Where did you find that so-called rabbi? With a name like, wha, ‘Phyllis’?”

“Actually, ‘Phillips.’ Lydia wanted someone who . . . .”

“And where did you find her?” She pointed toward Lydia without even glancing in her direction. “To me she also looks like a goy.” I cringed but out of the corner of my eye it appeared that Lydia was smiling. Thus, I resumed my breathing.

“No Aunt Madeline, she comes from a Jewish family. The Lichters.” I pronounced their name with as much phlegm in my voice as possible to emphasize their Semitic roots.

“I never heard of them. I’m sure they’re not from Brooklyn so what kind of Jews can they be?”

She continued not to acknowledge Lydia who, considering her usual combativeness, surprisingly said, “Not very good ones I admit. My parents wanted to change their names to ‘Lewis,’ isn’t that ridiculous; and I had a nose job when I was sixteen.” She turned her head and tipped it upward into the light so that Madeline could get a clear view of the surgeon’s work.

Taking that as an invitation, Madeline hoisted herself with oey’s and vay’s from her chair and shuffled in her new Ked sneakers toward Lydia, adjusting her reading glasses as she drew near on the broken slope of her own nose. When she got to within a foot of Lydia, she reached out and ran her dry fingers up and down over it, pronouncing it a success to all the gaping Zazlos, “Now that’s what I call a nose job!" Everyone at the adjacent tables, including the Lichter aunts and uncles, twisted in the chairs to get a closer look at what was happening. When all eyes were upon Madeline she turned to her hated sister-in-law Lydia and pronounced, with the same conviction, “Not like the one that butcher did to your Lois.”

With that she broke out into raucous gull-throated laughter, hurled herself into Lydia’s arms, and entwined that way began to dance in place as the band again struck up their version of Hava Nagila. Martha Graham this wasn’t.

While thus cojoined, we all heard Madeline offer her own guidance to Lydia, “Keep an eye on him. He’s a Zazlo. I know them all. The men are the worst. He can’t keep his pecker in his pants,” she gestured contemptuously toward her brother Sunny, Lydia’s husband, “Not that anyone should be interested in it. It’s nothing special. Trust me. I know what I’m talking about. I work in his office. And your father-in-law, one day I’ll tell you a thing or three about him too. When was the last time you think they did it? And my brother Danny. A useless capon if you know what I mean.” At this revelation, she offered a wink that rivaled Rabbi Phillips’; and my very proper mother, to get away from this ribaldry, finished sliding under the table. “So I’m not sure what you can expect of him,” she continued, now meaning me. I was glad my mother was no longer there to hear this part.

“So If you ask me, and I know you didn’t, if you want to do some of that quivering that Rabbi What’s-His-Name went on and on about, you had better find yourself a man. Because from the looks of him,” meaning me again, “I think you found yourself a boy. Lots of training he’ll need.”

Still embracing, she and Lydia collapsed in a roar of laughter. “That’s what I needed to do! I got myself a man!” She pointed derisively toward her third husband Harry, who had himself collapsed, but not from laughter. He had after all by himself emptying a full bottle of Haig & Haig Pinch.

Madeline’s had proven to be our true benediction. It guided so much of Lydia’s behavior toward me. That behavior was, in fact, already moving along a certain trajectory even before Madeline’s imperatives, especially Lydia’s efforts to turn this boy into some sort of man. But Lydia took Madeline’s guidance as if it were a sanction bequeathed to her by many generations of failed Zazlo men; and thus while waiting for that halting metamorphosis of boy-to-man to occur, impatient with my lack of progress, Lydia, following in her new aunt’s footsteps, also began the process of getting herself a man. Actually, men.

* * *

And so it should not be a surprise to even a casual reader that when I returned a day early from my first coast-to-coast business trip, from UCLA where I had been invited to present a paper on the “Prophetic Works of William Blake,” the subject of my master’s thesis, I was so excited to see my bride and share my triumph (the departmental chair had said it was “revelatory”) that I burst through the door at 11:00 PM wanting so much to take her in my arms and carry her up to our nuptial bed. But there, on our Spanish-style sofa, which represented a splurge from Bloomingdales, as if he lived with us, draped there like a male odalisque, wearing just his low-cut black briefs, was a bruiser of no more than nineteen, who I immediately realized was not a delivery boy.

To be continued next Saturday. . . .