Broken Heart Chapter Two

Frumpkin's Moleskin Notebooks Excerpts

Chapter 2 a : Affairs of the Heart; in media res

How, where to begin, thought Frumpkin on affairs of the heart. He recalls his high school English teacher, Mr. Charleston—Haverford College educated, suede elbow-patched Harris Tweeds, penny loafers, often prancing on his metatarsals, bowtied— stating, “Start at the beginning and end at the end.” Or , when asked about the length of an essay, responding orotundly : “It should be like a woman’s skirt; long enough to be interesting but short enough to be revealing.” (Never today could he teach thus.)

But, then there’s Homer who starts in media res for the Iliad: after some nine or ten years of battle against Troy, he starts with Achilles, the finest of Greek warriors, petulant that his woman “got took” by Menalaus (whose brother’s woman got took by Paris, starting this whole shindig.

Which of too many woman to begin with?

And behind each, was the shadow of his disastrous marriage and D.’s divorcing him. Yes, “divorced” is not quite accurate: for there is a divorced and a divorcéd (if there is such a word). Frumpkin was the divorcéd and also the cuckoldéd. Perhaps behind each if not many of the too many affairs of the heart was the gloomy umbra of mistrust. Mistrust of his own judgment about women.

D. had insisted that Frumpkin take the Sabbatical at Oxford. She would join him soon after she finished teaching her dance classes at Mount Holyoke in the Western Massachusetts’ ancient worn-down mountains. Before D.’s time, Holyoke dance graduated Alison Chase who founded Pilobolus and Rebecca Rice of José Limón. She would remind him of this, as if to engrave her job’s importance to the arts. D. was a so-so modern dancer, the legs too stumpy; but, as they say, if you can’t do…teach.

“Go ahead early, take the sabbatical in England. You know how important my teaching is to me and my students. I’ll join you once semester is done and I rent the house.” she offered generously.

The house in Western Massachusetts was a rattle-trap shingled monstrosity. Heating was costly. You could see the wavy lines of heat escaping from the windows, sills into the icy winter air. So in winter, they shut all the extra rooms—attic, second floor, and slept in the dining room adjacent to the too-large kitchen. In the basement was still the big bellied, squat, cast-iron body with a big Beckett burner unit on the front; it was formerly coal-fired, converted to diesel fuel. Every few months, the fuel truck chugged the foul-smelling diesel into a massive container near the heater in the basement. They tried converting to used cooking oil, which had its own rancid stink. A chimney opened opposite the heater which needed to be swept yearly. Dead sparrows were the first evacuated, then ashes. The rotund furnace was placed abutting the deep double galvanized steel sinks, perhaps to be close to a water source, should the burner go awry, flare up. Nestled between was an old-fashioned clothes washer, round, standing tall, a wringer attached to its edge. The agitator both rotated and pumped up and down, ejaculating wet rags.

Too many memories of D. and the death of their marriage. Perhaps the diesel fuel or dying sparrows inhabited a space in his brains, next to memories of the dead twins. Bad fumes, bad thinking, feelings, fouled the hippocampus.

Sweep them out, like the chimney. He remembers Dick Van Dyke’s charming chimney sweeps who found dancing joy in their tasks. He needed a Dick Van Dyke to dance away the ashes of his marriage, the fallen sparrows.

For five years he was celibate. Sat in desolate libraries; his company was Eric Auerbach, Harold Bloom, and those two Litvaks, Bernard Berenson, who was Harvard educated and lived at Villa I Tatti and Isaiah Berlin, All Souls College educated at Oxford. Frumpkin felt more kinship with the two Litwaks and the Nazi refugee Auerbach and the Yiddishe Eli-educated Bloom, than all the goyishe-kop lit crits inhabiting the Ivies. Auerbach alone did them all in.

Frumpkin was given a carrel where he kept his borrowed books in the stacks. He read and wrote. Spent his time staring at art and trying to convert it to words. Recalled Joyce’s lament that unlike the other arts—painting, sculpting, music, dance—with English, everyone speaks it, so they think they can write it.

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The fragrance of dusty books to Frumpkin was like Chanel No. 5 to many men:, faintly alluring, stirring. He always kept a kerchief in his left breast pocket should the dust get too irritating.

A vehicle was little needed, as he had a studio in the College. An ancient deux cheveux was available. Its driver’s door often fell off its hinges, easily replaced. The windows did not wind down, but flopped down half-way, often of their own will. In the winter, if the Deux Chaveux was recalcitrant, a passing student or colleague would give a short push (in Frumpkin’s kid-Yiddish, a “shtup” which he later learned had other adultiform meaning) while Frumpkin popped the clutch.

He was invited to dinners. At times also were invited divorced or widowed women. But his hosts’ intentions, he knew, to have Frumpkin entertain. A raconteur, if he chose so. Frumpkin sang for his supper. Otherwise, he was polite, uninterested in “fem-tanglements.” Of younger women, students, he met with the door ajar, claiming it was too stuffy with more than one human breathing; no rumors should float about.

The studio was more a cubby hole. Frumpkin was offered a larger place on campus. He would joke that his cubby was an empirical test by the University to see how little oxygen a professor needed to survive. The windows were wavy from age (glass is a liquid and over the years, it settles downwards). A hotplate, his stove. The sill outside his window, his fridge in colder days. Canned sardines found refuge in the right drawer of his desk; pipe tobacco in the left and a pipe rack above. He had only a tapered stem meerschaum and a half bent-stem Savinelli briar (born of the Mediterranean heath tree (Erica arborea). He ate mostly in the faculty dining room. Puffing still allowed there. After dinner, he often sat reading and listening to the clack of billiards (and a single pool table). No Minnesota Fats playing at the University, but the physics department, especially atomic scientists played best: got the right angles of collision. Pool (or billiards) is a military sport; practicing angles for artillery. A soldier in his graduate class was studying architecture because, in part, he’d been in artillery and was good at finding angles. He dove into Vitruvius the 15 BC architect. This ex-soldier could quote Vitruvius by heart: “For without symmetry and proportion no temple can have a regular plan; that is, it must have an exact proportion worked out after the fashion of the members of a finely-shaped human body.” (Book III, Chapter 1),

Well, perhaps so too a well-lived life: symmetry and proportion. These can lead to a regular plan of life One of Frumpkin’s professors said, the patient’s body is a temple: respect it. Symmetry and proportion. Got Frumpkin to thinking about his temple, his life plan.

He got the chance to shift from dusty stacks, the deux Chiveux, the partly opened cans of beans cooling on his window sill and row of unopened sardine cans in this desk. Offered a visiting professorship at the Hebrew University. Well why not. He’d been studying Moshe Barasch’s “Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art”, his book on art criticism, Imago Hominis, and even Giotto and the Language of Gesture, an offshoot of the despair book. From where did Barasch get this focus on despair? Frumpkin wondered if he’d been in the Holocaust. On the other hand, just surviving in Israel with its punctuated history of surrounding murderous Moslems would generate enough interest in despair. Even though dead since 2004, Frumpkin wrote him letters. Went to Giotto’s chapel in Perugia worshipfully studying the woman of irae (anger) who showed more despair and bared her breast with grasping hands, than showed anger. Frumpkin wanted to ask Barasch about this. He “sent” these letters into the ether and sometimes answers would ricochet back. Ether was Frumpkin’s primitive internet or ethernet: which needed no WiFi or such to bear his messages. Yes, take the Sabbatical from his Sabbatical, alight to the City of Light (per Augustine’s shining, visible “city on a hill,” Jerusalem.

A close colleague and dear friend who lived in Tel Aviv wrote to him cautioning. She explained that the Tel Avivniks and Jerusalemites differed: Jeruselamites lived in caves carved into its hilly substance; they transformed to cave dwellers, dim-eyed, hunched over, blinking in the light. Tel Avivniks, particularly Tzfon Bonies (northern Tel Avivniks) lived by the sea, the sun set like gems in their Mediterranean, Middle Earth. They were like the sun and the sea, wave dancers. Almost naked men and women, bronzed played matkot, that game of pseudo ping pong without a net, whose aim was to keep the ball aloft longer (unlike ping pong in which you must defeat the other). Well, Frumpkin had the offer from the cave dwellers and had been living cave-ishly, He could adapt. If necessary, he would ride Route One, the slalom descent from the City on the Hill, the highway yearning for the Sea. (Once, on their annual pilgrimage from the mountains of Western Massachusetts to watery Maine, they stopped in Rye New Hampshire. Frumpkin, anxious to see the sea, asked a crusty guy on Wallis Road how to get to the beach. He answered, “Wellll, ya keepa goin’ ’til ya’ hat floats.) He’ll float his homburg in the Mediterranean.

Later that year, in his class on Augustine’s city on a hill, —actually the phrase written by John Winthrop in 1630— one of his students, upon hearing that Frumpkin lived in the student dorms on French Hill (abutting Shuafat, the “refugee camp” ,more honestly called a slum), the student remarked sotto vocé, “The best thing about Jerusalem? Route One out of the city.”

The students, marvelous, remarkable. Also older than his Oxford fuzzy faced flock. These men and women had finished 2-4 years of army. Then, college was snipped to three years. And those wanting to be lawyers or doctors entered directly for six years schooling, no college required. The University wanted him to teach only graduate students, but as was his wont, Frumpkin opened his class to all, but limited sizes to twenty-five, after the first semester. Too many clamored to join and he both didn’t want a larger size than two dozen nor want to grade the essays in Hebrew of more than that. He learned from the Roman army: that to be effective, a squad led by a captain should be limited to a dozen or dozen and half: larger and it was hard to communicate in the field; smaller and it was hard to execute actions. Ah, those Romans: they created two institutions that have endured the longest in Western Civilization—the army and the Church. When they really wanted to conquer, they’d spread salt on the earth so that nothing would grow. There is a flower in the Negev—Frumpkin thinks its the Athel tamarisk— that ‘weeps’ salty fluid from its leaves, surrounding itself with a , barren “halo” zone. Is that what Frumpkin has done after the divorce to keep others from taking root nearby?.

Meantime, he was learning from his students and enjoying the faculty. One faculty member, Shmuel, was a Hindu scholar, an acquaintance of Wendy Dolinger of the massive tome, The Hindus. Shmuel was fluent in some dozen dialects of Hindu and western tongues. And of course biblical Hebrew. Also Assyrian, that script made of triangles pricked into wet clay. In class, he would teach a new Sanskrit song, then perform it on the sitar, that long-necked fretted lute with 18–21 strings, the 6–7 melodic strings on top, and 11–13 sympathetic (taraf) strings below. He would be accompanied by one of his graduate students, patting a Mridangam drum. Now, Shmuel was dedicating himself to protesting with Arabs in Samaria to protect their land. He was a great believer in co-existence even after October 7. One of dwindling few. The Atlantic seeks him out periodically to find an Israeli Jew with whom Americans can identify—nice guy, everyone is good if you’re good to them.

Frumpkin’s memory at times was like those satellites destined for far planets in the solar system and which uses the gravitational fling of closer planets to accelerate their passage. For instance, now Frumpkin’s memory is flung by Shmuel’s sitar back four decades to D. and their first NYC trip. To an evening with sitar music at Nirvana Restaurant. Frumpkin and D. had never been to NYC together. D’s brother, Insel, lived in Brooklyn, then an up and coming cheap site for students. He listed various activiites including dinner at Nirvana, overlooking the southern edge of Central Park. One had to call well in advance to score a table near the window; Frumpkin didn’t call early enough, but the view from a few tables over was enough. This menu’s prices would set him back a week’s salary. The entrance to the building faced Central Park South. The elevator could accommodate two, possibly four. But he and D. were the only occupants at early dinner. He noticed that the floors weren’t numbered. Rather, a single MD name on each floor. At the top was Nirvana. The maitré de explained that each floor below was occupied by a psychoanalyst, just one on each floor. Frumpkin commented to D. that one could work oneself up via psychoanalysis from the first floor onward until…one achieved Nirvana.

Decor as they peeked from the foyer was simple: the ceiling was hung like a large tent with the multi-colored suspended cloth encrusted with shiny dots. They were asked to sit in the foyer until their table was ready. The sitar player Frumpkin saw and had a slight stirring of memory. Memory? He went to the restroom, needed after the long flight. The toilet was decorated throughout with painted pairs coupling in marvelous positions as well as castrated penises floating amongst them. He had difficulty releasing the flow in the face of the free radical genitals.

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Back to the bar/foyer, D. had started without him. Yes, Pellegrino.

“And for the gentleman?”

Sticking with Pelligrino’s “p”, Frumpkin asked for a pinot, a pinot noir. And then looked again at the sitar player sitting on the floor who looked, well…familiar. Like the sitar, some strings below were thrumming in Frumpkin’s body. Asked him, “Are you a neurosurgeon?” D., shocked, grasped his wrist, asked, “You’ve only sipped your wine. Are you already drunk?”

The sitar player, still strumming all six or eight strings (Frumpkin couldn’t be sure.) Said, “Yes.”

“Are you Dr. Shyam Yodh, trained at Yale.”

“Yes.”

And now D’s eyes were like saucers. Speechless.

“I saw you in one of the medical rags, a photo of you both at Yale with your wife and children and with your sitar.”

“Yes.”

As he strummed, he now spoke. Softly, like the harmonic strings on the sitar.

“I have always loved the sitar from when I was six. Studied with Ravi Shankar in India. But my father insisted I become a physician, study in the US, return to Bombay to open the first neurosurgery clinic in Bombay, which I did with my three children born in New Haven, my wife, the nurse. Then he died, my beloved father. And I forsook medicine to return to sitar.”

“But why,” Frumpkin, continued, “Why can’t you do both? I have a friend who loves skiing. He practices in Vail. Skis during the week and sets fractures among visiting “shush-boomers” those guys who scream their way down as they carve out the whole path spoiling it for others, then white out. Other skiers at times applauded as the emergency snowmobile was on its way.”

Dr. Yodh, continued strumming. Waited. Turned to Frumpkin.

“Medicine, like sitar, is a passion. One cannot be wedded to two passions simultaneously. I left one passion to engage in another.”

And to Frumpkin, this made both good sense and widened his admiration for Yodh.

This also explains why he left his nurse wife and three children to wed his sitar.

They were escorted to the table, D. now seeming to admire Frumpkin’s memory and forthrightness. The meal he doesn’t recall so well; the usual Indian marvels. Beautiful and delicious. And leaving him with heartburn. Years later, a dear friend married to a stunning Indian woman (former Miss Bombay, she still had her painted portrait in their living room) invited Frumpkin and D. to his favorite Manhattan Indian restaurant. They feasted and were served by elegant women in saris. Frumpkin asked him his secret for being able to tolerate the hot spices.

“Before I left for Manhattan, I ate a banana and drank a cup of milk. Coats the stomach. You’re a former physician, Frumpkin, you should know that.”

His memory did him in again, thought Frumpkin. Here he was in Jerusalem, thinking of Shmuel’s sitar and his memory hijacks Frumpkin to D. and time with her.

Shortly after being divorcéd, Frumpkin was teaching in Finland. He asked to come in the winter during the eternal nights, two hours from the Arctic Circle. The darkness was more of a muted deep blue and the snow appeared to neon glow as if lit from below. But, when he went into town, looking for gifts to bear to his hosts, he was hijacked by the Marimekko store. Marimmeko, D’s favorite fabric, clothes. And Frumpkin announced to himself, “When I am no longer hijacked by Marimekko, I will be able to divorce myself from her.” He keeps trying even as he would never want to be married to a woman who cuckkolded as she did.

But, heart affairs, Frumpkin tells himself. Let’s get back to the City on the Hill. For there he discovered one of his heart affairs. Not the first nor second. But more in media res, more Homer than Old Testament.

Just as Mircea Eliade—that erudite anti-Semite—spoke of sacred and profane, there were holy spots at the Hebrew University for Frumpkin. (Frumpkin thought that Eliade stole those ideas from the Jew, cantor’s son, Durkheim.) One go–to Frumpkin holy spot was the buzzy circular espresso outside his office. His favorite barista was built like a praying mantis, all knobby and lank. He would flip the empty milk frothing can behind his back, snag it above his shoulder, twirl the closed milk container about before slurping it from a meter high into the milk frother; he entertained as if he were a talented bar tender at some chic Caribbean bar. And he had mastered the design to top off the cappuccino: a heart for women, an eye blink for men. For visiting US students at the Rothstein Center, he did a Magen David. As he did all these gymnastics, he kept up his banter. All female students were hamudati or metuki —my sweetie. The guys were akhî!, my brother. Frumpkin was always Professor. The only time Frumpkin saw knobbly-elbowed barista turn somber was at the onset of the Second Lebanese War, day two. He kept checking his pager on his belt, waiting for his call-up. Tense, he told Frumpkin, that he hadn’t been called yet; how would his unit manage without him.

The other holy spot of Frumpkin’s worship was the Barbra Streisand café in honor of her father, or mother or both, as he recalls.. This was indoors, with the jutting staircase crowding the micro-tables, the stairs’ directions following an Escher pattern. Frumpkin imagined that a climb to the top would wind up at the bottom. There he would occasionally meet a former Oxfordian, trained as a visual artist, now directing plays for the University. But, this ex-Oxfo- had turned dati, become a Chabadnik, grew a bushy, unruly, albeit sparse chin bush. Frumpkin in his head, called him bushman.

They would meet to discuss bushman’s attempts to direct students in plays. He was trying to have plays for men only audiences, woman only audiences consistent with his religious beliefs that the two genders shouldn’t mix; avoid sexual arousal.. How, this bushy faced scholar would ask of Frumpkin, how could he do a play of Waiting for Godot with women only actresses? Maybe Lucky, the enslaved mostly silent slave, chain about his neck, who bursts into a mad monologue. But Vladamir, Estragon? “What would you call them?” Frumpkin asked. “Virginia-mir and Estrogen?”

He would like to try Lysistrata with men only for a male audience. But then men-only actors. Would it be plausible that men would withhold sex from women? He pleaded. Would Aristophanes approve of this version of the sex-withholding ladies, pleading for peace? Generally, Frumpkin listened, shrugged, nodded. If they had coffee mid afternoon, bush face, screwing his kippa tighter to his deranged hair, a kippa tentatively perched on his equally wooly head, would excuse himself to go to the University shul to pray minha, afternoon prayer. Asked Frumpkin to wait twenty minutes. Then he’d return until the sky turned dark (in winter about 445), to excuse himself to daven maariv, evening prayer.

Frumpkin asked why they simply did’t pray minha then maariv sequentially, why the interruption. Patiently, as would a good educator, the director turned bush-faced, his lips buried in hair, cappuccino frothing at his beard, explained to Frumpkin that one needed to keep times separate. One can’t pray evening prayer until the darkness of the sky can’t be distinguished from a raven’s dark wing. (Frumpkin wondered if they checked for flying ravens or crows to check the level of nightness.)

But it was at his third place of espresso worship that Frumpkin met Khen, né Camille, who was to become even for a brief moment in a life of barreness, the love of his life… of the time.

CONTINUED