Time Travail Read Online Free

,”
soundlessly click my sneakered heels and pretend to find it
funny.
    It wasn’t my fault if I took after my mother.
She’d come over from Poland in the early twenties and still spoke
English with a faint but unmistakable Yiddish intonation which made
up for her blonde hair and blue eyes. Also she was a passionate
Zionist. I felt vague shame at the ethnic betrayal of my pale eyes
and hair. It was worsened by a profile people called Greek. I had
nothing to offset them like accent or faith.
    When people – new teachers, for instance –
learned my last name they often looked surprised as if there were a
mistake somewhere. Some would even say, “Your name’s Weizman ?” or
worse: “ You’re Weizman?”
I used Yiddish expressions all the time to compensate. Harvey
compensated in the other direction by using vulgar goy
expressions.
    The contrast between us wasn’t just physical.
There was the intellectual imbalance. This was vast. I was the
first to acknowledge it. A very late bloomer that way, I knew I was
no genius. Everybody knew he was one. He didn’t try to conceal the
fact. His intellectual swagger may have been compensation for his
physical inferiorities. They aggravated at the critical age. By
thirteen my mind was up to the hilt into girls, my body burning to
follow and not much later it did. He was a late-bloomer that way.
He was able to develop a little anti-climactic face and body hair
only at fifteen. It was publicized by spectacular and persistent
acne. He went to the hospital regularly for mysterious treatments.
My mother spoke vaguely of “glandular troubles”. She always
referred to him as “Poor Harvey” and gazed at me with loving
admiration.
    Maybe his brain monopolized all of his
body’s resources. I sometimes wondered if the people who laughed at
the sight of us together didn’t see us as I once did in the
jubilant trick mirror of the 42nd Street Laugh Movie : me pin-headed and macro-phallic with those elephantine
haunches, Harvey like H. G. Wells’ Martian invaders, macrocephalic
above a thread of a body.
    That didn’t prevent him from using foul
pseudo-knowledgeable language and prying for intimate details about
the new girlfriends whose photos I carried about in my wallet. He’d
stare down at them and with his new unsure tweeting woofing voice
use vulgar terms to describe them. He offered me money for accounts
of times with those girls.
    Gentlemen don’t tell, I’d say and then pocket
the money and tell, inventively and in elegant language but a
little ill at ease. Verbally I was something of a puritan. I soon
lost the money back to him at five hundred rummy. It wasn’t just
for the money that I did it. It was my one area of acknowledged
superiority.
    Sometimes I’d try to inject a little
tenderness into the accounts. He wasn’t paying for tenderness.
    “Cut the crap. Did you get into her?”
    I didn’t like that kind of language. I was
longing for a great romantic love experience. I had other photos in
a secret compartment of my wallet just beneath the semi-public
ones. Even then, I had this weakness for impossible love-objects.
There was Judy Garland in the Land of Oz with twin cascades of hair
tumbling down past her wonder-lit face. One day I learned she was
born Francis Gumm in Grand Rapids. She disappeared beneath a
succession of women I judged more exotic. I took Katherine Hepburn
for a foreigner with those cheekbones and that passionate sinuous
mouth. Also Claudette Colbert and Olivia de Havilland because of
their names. Finally Wendy Hiller crowned the other photos. I
saw Major
Barbara twenty-one
times, four times in a single day till I was turned out of the
movie-house. Wendy bore an astonishing resemblance to June Keller,
my first ex-wife.
    One day, coming back from the toilet in the
middle of a disastrous card-session, I found Harvey ferreting in my
wallet. He’d discovered my impossible stratified loves. It was as
though he were ferreting in my brain.
    “Titless