Bleeding Edge

It probably helped that they both had East European roots, for even in those days you could still find on the Upper West Side certain long-lived intra-Jewish distinctions being drawn, least enjoyable maybe the one between Hochdeutsch and Ashkenazi. Mothers were known to shanghai their recently eloped children down to Mexico for quickie divorces from young men with promising careers in brokerage or medicine, or from ravishing tomatoes with more brains than the guy they thought they were marrying, whose fatal handicap was a name from the wrong corner of the Diaspora. Something like this happened in fact to Heidi, whose surname, Czornak, set off all kinds of alarms, though the matter didn’t get quite as far as the airplane. On that caper it was the Practical Elf who acted as agent and presently bagperson, holding up the Strubels for a sum nicely in excess of what they had initially offered to buy Heidi, the little Polish snip, off. “Galician, actually,” Heidi remarked. It was not for her the issue of conscience Maxine had been afraid of, for Evan Strubel turned out to be a feckless putz who lived in reflexive fear of his mother, Helvetia, whose timely entrance that day in a St. John suit and a snappish mood prevented Evan from putting further moves on Maxine herself, is how serious he was about Heidi to begin with. Not that Maxine shared details of young Strubel’s perfidy with the Princess, settling for “I think he sees you mostly as a way to get out of the house.” Heidi was far, further than Maxine expected, from desolated. They sat at her vast kitchen table counting the Strubels’ money, eating ice-cream sandwiches and cackling. Now and then down the line, under the influence of assorted substances, Heidi would relapse into blubbering, “He was the love of my life, that evil bigoted woman destroyed us,” for which the Wacky Sidekick would always be there with a witty remark like “Face it, babe, her tits are bigger.”

Certain lobes of Heidi’s spirit may have been compromised—because Mrs. Strubel had perhaps only casually threatened Mexican divorce, for example, Heidi presently found herself in a struggle with the Spanish tongue rivaling that of Bob Barker at a Miss Universe pageant. The language question in turn spilled over into other areas. Heidi’s idea of the echt Latina seemed to be Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961). It did no good to point out, as Maxine has done again and again with dwindling patience, that Natalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, came from a somewhat Russian background and her accent in the picture is possibly closer to Russian than to boricua.

Putzboy went on into a Wall Street apprenticeship, and has probably been through several more wives by now. Heidi, relieved to be single, pursued a career in academia, having recently been given tenure at City College in the pop-culture department.

“You totally pulled my meatloaf out of the microwave on that one,” Heidi airily, “don’t think I’m not eternally grateful.”

“What choice did I have, you always thought you were Grace Kelly.”

“Well, I was. Am.”

“Not career Grace Kelly,” Maxine points out. “Only, specifically, Rear Window Grace Kelly. Back when we used to surveil the windows across the street.”

“You sure about that? You know what that makes you.”

“Thelma Ritter, yeah, but maybe not. I thought I was Wendell Corey.”

Teen mischief. If there can be haunted houses, there can also be karmically challenged apartment buildings, and the one they liked to spy on, The Deseret, has always made The Dakota look like a Holiday I

At some point back in high school, Maxine and Heidi bought cheap binoculars down on Canal and took to lurking in Maxine’s bedroom, sometimes into the early A.M., staring over at the lighted windows across the way, waiting for something to happen. Any appearance of a human figure was a major event. At first Maxine found it romantic, all the mutually disco

The girls kept hatching schemes to sneak in, swa

This went on until the fitness craze of the eighties, when it dawned on The Deseret management that the pool on the top floor could serve as the focus of a health club, open to visitors, and be good for some nice extra revenue, which is how Maxine was finally allowed upstairs—though, as an outsider or “club member,” she still has to go around to the back entrance and take the freight elevator. Heidi has declined to have anything more to do with the place.

“It’s cursed. You notice how early the pool closes, nobody wants to be there at night.”

“Maybe the management don’t want to pay overtime.”

“I heard it’s run by the mob.”

“Which mob exactly, Heidi? And what difference does it make?”

Plenty, as it would turn out.

4

Later that afternoon Maxine has an appointment with her emotherapist, who happens to share with Horst an appreciation of silence as one of the world’s unpriceable commodities, though maybe not in the same way. Shawn works out of a walk-up near the Holland Tu

For a couple of weeks now, Maxine has been showing up for sessions to find her youthful guru increasingly bent out of shape by the news from Afghanistan. Despite impassioned appeals from around the world, two colossal statues of the Buddha, the tallest standing statues of him in the world, carved in the fifth century from a sandstone cliffside near Bamiyan, have been for a month now dynamited and repeatedly shelled by the Taliban government, till finally being reduced to rubble.