The Invention of Solitude

daughter Queenie with a straight face? But at her birth he had de clared, “ she ’ ll be a queen, ” and could not resist the temptation. He thrived on bluff, the symbolic gesture, on being the life of the party. Lots of jokes, lots of cronies, an impeccable sense of timing. He gambled on the sly, cheated on his wife (the older he got, the younger the girls), and never lost his taste for any of it. His locu tions were particularly splendid. A towel was never just a towel, but a “ Turkish towel. ” A taker of drugs was a “ dope fiend. ” Nor would he ever say “ I saw…, ” but rather, “ I ’ ve had an opportunity to observe. … ” In so doing, he managed to inflate the world, to turn it into a more compelling and exotic place for himself. He played the bigshot and revelled in the side-effects of the pose: the headwaiters calling him Mr. B., the delivery boys smiling at his ex cessive tips, the whole world tipping its hat to him. He had come down to New York from Canada just after the First World War, a poor Jewish boy on the make, and in the end he had done all right for himself. New York was his passion, and in his last years he refused to move away, resisting his daughter ’ s offer of a life in sunny California with these words, which became a popular refrain: “ I can ’ t leave New York. This is where the action is. ”
    A. remembers a day when he was four or five. His grandparents came for a visit, and his grandfather did a magic trick for him, some little thing he had found in a novelty shop. On the next visit, when he failed to show up with a new trick, A. raised a fuss of dis appointment. From then on there was always a new piece of magic: disappearing coins, silk scarves produced from thin air, a machine that turned strips of blank paper into money, a big rubber ball that became five little rubber balls when you squeezed it in your hand, a cigarette extinguished in a handkerchief that made no burn, a pitcher of milk poured into a cone of newspaper that made no spill. What had started out as a curiosity to amuse his grandson became a genuine calling for him. He turned himself into an accomplished amateur magician, a deft sleight-of-hand artist, and he took special pride in his membership card from the Magician ’ s Guild. He ap peared at each of A. ’ s childhood birthday parties with his magic and went on performing until the last year of his life, touring the senior citizen clubs of New York with one of his lady friends (a blowsy woman with a pile of fake red hair) who would sing a song, accompanying herself on the accordion, that introduced him as the Great Zavello. It was only natural. His life was so steeped in the hocus-pocus of illusion, he had pulled off so many business deals by making people believe in him (convincing them that something not there
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was actually there, and vice versa) that it was a small mat ter for him to step up on stage and fool them in a more formal way. He had the ability to make people pay attention to him, and it was clear to everyone who saw him how delighted he was to be the cen ter of their attention. No one is less cynical than a magician. He knows, and everyone else knows, that everything he does is a sham. The trick is not really to deceive them, but to delight them into wanting to be deceived: so that for the space of a few minutes the grip of cause-and-effect is loosened, the laws of nature counter manded. As Pascal put it in the Pensees: “ It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles. ”
    A. ’ s grandfather, however, did not content himself merely with magic. He was equally fond of jokes, which he called “ stories ’’ —all of them written down in a little notebook that he carried around in his coat pocket. At some point during every family gathering, he would take out the notebook, skim through it quickly in some corner of the room, put it back in his pocket, sit down in a chair, and then launch into an hour ’ s worth of verbal nonsense. Here, too, the memory is of laughter. Not, as with S., a laughter bursting from the belly, but a laughter that meandered outward from the lungs, a long sing-song loop of sound that began as a wheeze and dispersed, gradually, into a fainter and fainter chro matic whistle. That, too, is how A. would like to remember him: sitting in that chair and making everyone laugh.
    His grandfather ’ s greatest stunt, though, was neither a magic trick nor a joke, but a kind