We Never Talk About My Brother Read online

  But sitting down is not a natural act for an angel: they stand or they fly; check any Renaissance painting. The great wings inevitably get crumpled, the halo always winds up distinctly askew; and there is simply no way, even for Uncle Chaim, to ask an angel to cross her legs or to hook one over the arm of the chair. In the end they compromised, and the blue angel rose up to pose in the window, holding herself there effortlessly, with her wings not stirring at all. Uncle Chaim, settling in to work—brushes cleaned and Scotch replenished—could not refrain from remarking, “I always imagined you guys sort of hovered. Like hummingbirds.”

  “We fly only by the Will of God,” the angel replied. “If Yahweh, praised be His name,”—I could actually hear the capital letters—“withdrew that mighty Will from us, we would fall from the sky on the instant, every single one.”

  “Doesn’t bear thinking about,” Uncle Chaim muttered. “Raining angels all over everywhere—falling on people’s heads, tying up traffic—” The angel looked, first startled, and then notably shocked. “I was speaking of our sky,” she explained haughtily, “the sky of Paradise, which compares to yours as gold to lead, tapestry to tissue, heavenly choirs to the bellowing of feeding hogs—”

  “All right already, I get the picture.” Uncle Chaim cocked an eye at her, poised up there in the window with no visible means of support, and then back at his canvas. “I was going to ask you about being an angel, what it’s like, but if you’re going to talk about us like that—badmouthing the sky, for God’s sake, the whole planet.”

  The angel did not answer him immediately, and when she did, she appeared considerably abashed and spoke very quietly, almost like a scolded schoolgirl. “You are right. It is His sky, His world, and I shame my Lord, my fellows and my breeding by speaking slightingly of any part of it.” In a lower voice, she added, as though speaking only to herself, “Perhaps that is why I am here.”

  Uncle Chaim was covering the canvas with a thin layer of very light blue, to give the painting an undertone. Without looking up, he said, “What, you got sent down here like a punishment? You talked back, you didn’t take out the garbage? I could believe it. Your boy Yahweh, he always did have a short fuse.”

  “I was told only that I was to come to you and be your model and your muse,” the angel answered. She pushed her hood back from her face, revealing hair that was not bright gold, as so often painted, but of a color resembling the night sky when it pales into dawn. “Angels do not ask questions.”

  “Mmm.” Uncle Chaim sipped thoughtfully at his Scotch. “Well, one did, anyway, you believe the story.”

  The angel did not reply, but she looked at him as though he had uttered some unimaginable obscenity. Uncle Chaim shrugged and continued preparing the ground for the portrait. Neither one said anything for some time, and it was the angel who spoke first. She said, a trifle hesitantly, “I have never been a muse before.”

  “Never had one,” Uncle Chaim replied sourly. “Did just fine.”

  “I do not know what the duties of a muse would be,” the angel confessed. “You will need to advise me.”

  “What?” Uncle Chaim put down his brush. “Okay now, wait a minute. I got to tell you how to get into my hair, order me around, probably tell me how I’m not painting you right? Forget it, lady—you figure it out for yourself, I’m working here.”

  But the blue angel looked confused and unhappy, which is no more natural for an angel than sitting down. Uncle Chaim scratched his head and said, more gently, “What do I know? I guess you’re supposed to stimulate my creativity, something like that. Give me ideas, visions, make me see things, think about things I’ve never thought about.” After a pause, he added, “Frankly, Goya pretty much has that effect on me already. Goya and Matisse. So that’s covered, the stimulation—maybe you could just tell them, him, about that....”

  Seeing the expression on the angel’s marble-smooth face, he let the sentence trail away. Rabbi Shulevitz, who cut his blond hair close and wore shorts when he watered his lawn, once told me that angels are supposed to express God’s emotions and desires, without being troubled by any of their own. “Like a number of other heavenly dictates,” he murmured when my mother was out of the room, “that one has never quite functioned as I’m sure it was intended.”

  They were still working in the studio when my mother called and ordered me home. The angel had required no rest or food at all, while Uncle Chaim had actually been drinking his Scotch instead of sipping it (I never once saw him drunk, but I’m not sure that I ever saw him entirely sober), and needed more bathroom breaks than usual. Daylight gone, and his precarious array of 60-watt bulbs proving increasingly unsatisfactory, he looked briefly at the portrait, covered it, and said to the angel, “Well, that stinks, but we’ll do better tomorrow. What time you want to start?”

  The angel floated down from the window to stand before him. Uncle Chaim was a small man, dark and balding, but he already knew that the angel altered her height when they faced each other, so as not to overwhelm him completely. She said, “I will be here when you are.”

  Uncle Chaim misunderstood. He assured her that if she had no other place to sleep but the studio, it wouldn’t be the first time a model or a friend had spent the night on that trundle bed in the far corner. “Only no peeking at the picture, okay? On your honor as a muse.”

  The blue angel looked for a moment as though she were going to smile, but she didn’t. “I will not sleep here, or anywhere on this earth,” she said. “But you will find me waiting when you come.”

  “Oh,” Uncle Chaim said. “Right. Of course. Fine. But don’t change your clothes, okay? Absolutely no changing.” The angel nodded.

  When Uncle Chaim got home that night, my Aunt Rifke told my mother on the phone at some length, he was in a state that simply did not register on her long-practiced seismograph of her husband’s moods. “He comes in, he’s telling jokes, he eats up everything on the table, we snuggle up, watch a little TV, I can figure the work went well today. He doesn’t talk, he’s not hungry, he goes to bed early, tosses and tumbles around all night... okay, not so good. Thirty-seven years with a person, wait, you’ll find out.” Aunt Rifke had been Uncle Chaim’s model until they married, and his agent, accountant and road manager ever since.

  But the night he returned from beginning his portrait of the angel brought Aunt Rifke a husband she barely recognized. “Not up, not down, not happy, not not happy, just... dazed, I guess that’s the best word. He’d start to eat something, then he’d forget about it, wander around the apartment—couldn’t sit still, couldn’t keep his mind on anything, had trouble even finishing a sentence. One sentence. I tell you, it scared me. I couldn’t keep from wondering, is this how it begins? A man starts acting strange, one day to the next, you think about things like that, you know?”

  Talking about it, even long past the moment’s terror, tears still started in her eyes.

  Uncle Chaim did tell her that he had been visited by an angel who demanded that he paint her portrait. That Aunt Rifke had no trouble believing, thirty-seven years of marriage to an artist having inured her to certain revelations. Her main concern was how painting an angel might affect Uncle Chaim’s working hours, and his daily conduct. “Like actors, you know, Duvidl? They become the people they’re doing, I’ve seen it over and over.” Also, blasphemous as it might sound, she wondered how much the angel would be paying, and in what currency. “And saying we’ll get a big credit in the next world is not funny, Chaim. Not funny.”

  Uncle Chaim urged Rifke to come to the studio the very next day to meet his new model for herself. Strangely, that lady, whom I’d known all my life as a legendary repository of other people’s lives, stories and secrets, flatly refused to take him up on the offer. “I got nothing to wear, not for meeting an angel in. Besides, what would we talk about? No, you just give her my best, I’ll make some rugelach.” And she never wavered from that position, except once.

  The blue angel was indeed waiting when Uncle Cha
im arrived in the studio early the next morning. She had even made coffee in his ancient glass percolator, and was offended when he informed her that it was as thin as rain and tasted like used dishwater. “Where I come from, no one ever makes coffee,” she returned fire. “We command it.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with this crap,” Uncle Chaim answered her. “Coffee’s like art, you don’t order coffee around.” He waved the angel aside, and set about a second pot, which came out strong enough to widen the angel’s eyes when she sipped it. Uncle Chaim teased her—“Don’t get stuff like that in the Green Pastures, huh?”—and confided that he made much better coffee than Aunt Rifke. “Not her fault. Woman was raised on decaf, what can you expect? Cooks like an angel, though.”

  The angel either missed the joke or ignored it. She began to resume her pose in the window, but Uncle Chaim stopped her. “Later, later, the sun’s not right. Just stand where you are, I want to do some work on the head.” As I remember, he never used the personal possessive in referring to his models’ bodies: it was invariably “turn the face a little,” “relax the shoulder,” “move the foot to the left.” Amateurs often resented it; professionals tended to find it liberating. Uncle Chaim didn’t much care either way.

  For himself, he was grateful that the angel proved capable of holding a pose indefinitely, without complaining, asking for a break, or needing the toilet. What he found distracting was her steadily emerging interest in talking and asking questions. As requested, her expression never changed and her lips hardly moved; indeed, there were times when he would have sworn he was hearing her only in his mind. Enough of her queries had to do with his work, with how he did what he was doing, that he finally demanded point-blank, “All those angels, seraphs, cherubim, centuries of them—all those Virgins and Assumptions and whatnot—and you’ve never once been painted? Not one time?”

  “I have never set foot on earth before,” the angel confessed. “Not until I was sent to you.”

  “Sent to me. Directly. Special Delivery, Chaim Shlomovitch Malakoff—one angel, totally inexperienced at modeling. Or anything else, got anything to do with human life.” The angel nodded, somewhat shyly. Uncle Chaim spoke only one word. “Why?”

  “I am only eleven thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two years old,” the angel said, with the a slight but distinct suggestion of resentment in her voice. “No one tells me a thing.”

  Uncle Chaim was silent for some time, squinting at her face from different angles and distances, even closing one eye from time to time. Finally he grumbled, more than half to himself, “I got a very bad feeling that we’re both supposed to learn something from this. Bad, bad feeling.” He filled the little glass for the first time that day, and went back to work.

  But if there was to be any learning involved in their near-daily meetings in the studio, it appeared to be entirely on her part. She was ravenously curious about human life on the blue-green ball of damp dirt that she had observed so distantly for so long, and her constant questioning reminded a weary Uncle Chaim—as he informed me more than once—of me at the age of four. Except that an angel cannot be bought off, even temporarily, with strawberry ice cream, or threatened with loss of a bedtime story if she can’t learn to take “I don’t know!” for an answer. At times he pretended not to hear her; on other occasions, he would make up some patently ridiculous explanation that a grandchild would have laughed to scorn, but that the angel took so seriously that he was guiltily certain he was bound to be struck by lightning. Only the lightning never came, and the tactic usually did buy him a few moments peace—until the next question.

  Once he said to her, in some desperation, “You’re an angel, you’re supposed to know everything about human beings. Listen, I’ll take you out to Bleecker, MacDougal, Washington Square, you can look at the books, magazines, TV, the classes, the beads and crystals... it’s all about how to get in touch with angels. Real ones, real angels, never mind that stuff about the angel inside you. Everybody wants some of that angel wisdom, and they want it bad, and they want it right now. We’ll take an afternoon off, I’ll show you.”

  The blue angel said simply, “The streets and the shops have nothing to show me, nothing to teach. You do.”

  “No,” Uncle Chaim said. “No, no, no, no no. I’m a painter—that’s all, that’s it, that’s what I know. Painting. But you, you sit at the right hand of God—”

  “He doesn’t have hands,” the angel interrupted. “And nobody exactly sits—”

  “The point I’m making, you’re the one who ought to be answering questions. About the universe, and about Darwin, and how everything really happened, and what is it with God and shellfish, and the whole business with the milk and the meat—those kinds of questions. I mean, I should be asking them, I know that, only I’m working right now.”

  It was almost impossible to judge the angel’s emotions from the expressions of her chillingly beautiful porcelain face; but as far as Uncle Chaim could tell, she looked sad. She said, “I also am what I am. We angels—as you call us—we are messengers, minions, lackeys, knowing only what we are told, what we are ordered to do. A few of the Oldest, the ones who were there at the Beginning—Michael, Gabriel, Raphael—they have names, thoughts, histories, choices, powers. The rest of us, we tremble, we hide when we see them passing by. We think, if those are angels, we must be something else altogether, but we can never find a better word for ourselves.”

  She looked straight at Uncle Chaim—he noticed in some surprise that in a certain light her eyes were not nearly as blue as he had been painting them, but closer to a dark sea-green—and he looked away from an anguish that he had never seen before, and did not know how to paint.

  He said, “So okay, you’re a low-class angel, a heavenly grunt, like they say now. So how come they picked you to be my muse? Got to mean something, no? Right?”

  The angel did not answer his question, nor did she speak much for the rest of the day. Uncle Chaim posed her in several positions, but the unwonted sadness in her eyes depressed him past even Laphroaig’s ability to ameliorate. He quit work early, allowing the angel—as he would never have permitted Aunt Rifke or me—to potter around the studio, putting it to rights according to her inexpert notions, organizing brushes, oils, watercolors, pastels and pencils, fixatives, rolls of canvas, bottles of tempera and turpentine, even dusty chunks of rabbit skin glue, according to size. As he told his friend Jules Sidelsky, meeting for their traditional weekly lunch at a Ukrainian restaurant on Second Avenue, where the two of them spoke only Russian, “maybe God could figure where things are anymore. Me, I just shut my eyes and pray.”

  Jules was large and fat, like Diego Rivera, and I thought of him as a sort of uncle too, because he and Ruthie always remembered my birthday, just like Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke. Jules did not believe in angels, but he knew that Uncle Chaim didn’t necessarily believe in them either, just because he had one in his studio every day. He asked seriously, “That helps? The praying?” Uncle Chaim gave him a look, and Jules dropped the subject. “So what’s she like? I mean, as a model? You like painting her?”

  Uncle Chaim held his hand out, palm down, and wobbled it gently from side to side. “What’s not to like? She’ll hold any pose absolutely forever—you could leave her all night, morning I guarantee she wouldn’t have moved a muscle. No whining, no bellyaching—listen, she’d make Cinderella look like the witch in that movie, the green one. In my life I never worked with anybody gave me less tsuris.”

  “So what’s with—?” and Jules mimicked his fluttering hand. “I’m waiting for the but, Chaim.”

  Uncle Chaim was still for a while, neither answering nor appearing to notice the steaming varyniki that the waitress had just set down before him. Finally he grumbled, “She’s an angel, what can I tell you? Go reason with an angel.” He found himself vaguely angry with Jules, for no reason that made any sense. He went on, “She’s got it in her head she’s supposed to be my muse. It’s not the most comfortable thing somet
imes, all right?”

  Perhaps due to their shared childhood on Tenth Avenue, Jules did not laugh, but it was plainly a near thing. He said, mildly enough, “Matisse had muses. Rodin, up to here with muses. Picasso about had to give them serial numbers—I think he married them just to keep them straight in his head. You, me... I don’t see it, Chaim. We’re not muse types, you know? Never were, not in all our lives. Also, Rifke would kill you dead. Deader.”

  “What, I don’t know that? Anyway, it’s not what you’re thinking.” He grinned suddenly, in spite of himself. “She’s not that kind of girl, you ought to be ashamed. It’s just she wants to help, to inspire, that’s what muses do. I don’t mind her messing around with my mess in the studio—I mean, yeah, I mind it, but I can live with it. But the other day,”—he paused briefly, taking a long breath—“the other day she wanted to give me a haircut. A haircut. It’s all right, go ahead.”

  For Jules was definitely laughing this time, spluttering tea through his nose, so that he turned a bright cerise as other diners stared at them. “A haircut,” he managed to get out, when he could speak at all clearly. “An angel gave you a haircut.”

  “No, she didn’t give me a haircut,” Uncle Chaim snapped back crossly. “She wanted to, she offered—and then, when I said no, thanks, after a while she said she could play music for me while I worked. I usually have the news on, and she doesn’t like it, I can tell. Well, it wouldn’t make much sense to her, would it? Hardly does to me anymore.”

  “So she’s going to be posing and playing music? What, on her harp? That’s true, the harp business?”

  “No, she just said she could command the music. The way they do with coffee.” Jules stared at him. “Well, I don’t know—I guess it’s like some heavenly Muzak or something. Anyway, I told her no, and I’m sorry I told you anything. Eat, forget it, okay?”

  But Jules was not to be put off so easily. He dug down into his galushki poltavski for a little time, and then looked up and said with his mouth full, “Tell me one thing, then I’ll drop it. Would you say she was beautiful?”