Zev and Bell

Laurie
Zev and Bell
September 27, 2007

“Zev fucked everybody,” Ellen says. She has spent the day with Toby who was remembering her sister, Bell. Aunt Bell was tan and wiry, thinner than Toby. In the Long Beach years, Toby put on padding, but never Bell. She was a stringy, tendony thing you would have to pull out of your teeth if you were a monster and ate her. “Zev would fuck anyone,” Ellen says, and I remember this uncle—a younger brother of my father—with a gleaming smile and wavy black hair. When I was a plump little temptress, he said to me, “You will drive boys crazy.” He was the Bill Clinton of furriers, an equal opportunity dog, and Bell’s mouth watered when Zev flashed one of his roguish, Clark Gable smiles.

Zev was married to Kate, a beautiful red head in the style of Rita Hayworth with skin as soft as a moth’s wing. Her people were civilized, and maybe Zev was trying file his claws and mute his howl in the way Jack Kennedy mated with Jackie. Bell’s husband, Eli, didn’t speak. Their daughter, Brenda, zoomed around, envious and restless, and a boy, Sam, left no image behind. My grandmother pulled Brenda to her bosom and stroked her hair, maybe because no one else was going to find this girl easy to love.

According to Ellen, Zev and Bell meet at a wedding both sides of the family attend. How else can Toby’s sister cross paths with Murray’s brother? What happens next? They arrange to see each other on the sly. Zev is rich. He wears handmade suits. He, Kate, and their two daughters live in a twelve-room apartment on Park Avenue. Kate works at the fur showroom, but Zev says he is meeting a buyer for lunch. Bell drives down from Westchester, and in the hotel she sits on his lap as he runs his hands along her tight little muscles, working to ease her impenetrable knots. He makes it better and worse for Bell, who wants more than the hour he can steal away to be with her; still, she treasures the dirty feelings of these afternoons. He says goodbye while she’s showering, tells her to spend as much time as she likes in the room. People pay so much for his furs he could live forever on the money, except he’s a gambler and dies young of a heart attack. "What heart attack?" my father says. He goes to his grave believing his brother was the victim of a mob hit for unpaid loans.

I see Zev on one of his rare visits to Long Beach, striding along the boardwalk like a movie star in his thousand dollar camel’s hair coat. Near him, we all walk with a bounce in our steps. The salt air smells like the Mediterranean, not iodine. This is the Zev I preserve even though he and Kate were at Andre’s house in Cold Spring the weekend Andre laid me on his bed, felt me up, and tried to have sex with me. Andre was their psychoanalyst and mine. I was fourteen, and they uttered not a murmur of protest when he announced that they would sleep in the guest room and I would share his bed.

My sister is nineteen in her memory of Zev. She is also Andre’s patient, and he has paid for her abortion. My parents don’t know, and Ellen doesn’t tell them until many years have passed and she is married with three kids. After the procedure, Andre arranges for her to stay with Zev and Kate, and while she is sleeping, she feels a body in the bed next to hers. Zev has slid under the covers and is pushing his cock against her behind. She’s bloody and exhausted, but she tells him to go away. I have said the same thing to Andre and he has left me in his bed, feeling guilty. When Ellen tells the story of Zev, she is laughing. She is sixty-six, and Zev and Andre are long dead.