Gordon Haber

Since Dr. Spruell first tested his theories on the Schwabisch milliners in 1683, scholars have questioned whether comparative analytics is a liberal art or a science. Although eighteenth-century visionaries like Mishkin successfully applied scientific techniques to what had previously been considered a mere mode of expression, postmodern performance artists have appropriated many of the basic tenets of comparative analytics for their own work, causing much consternation in more traditional practitioners. (Who can ever forget the brouhaha caused by Henry Spark's shocking recitation of the Five Rules in Person with Fish?) I have devoted considerable space to settling this divisive question of classification.

I have also attempted to fill certain lacunae in our understanding of the development of comparative analytics by writing the first historiography to include the findings of the Birmingham Conference of 1916, which reopened many old wounds by requiring members of the Royal Society to cover their own bar tab. It is my sincere hope that this book will once and for all mend this bitter rift in our midst.

However high my aspirations for A Treatise on Comparative Analytics, and however modest its actual achievements, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the efforts of the following persons and organizations.

Firstly, I would like to thank my cousin Jacques for allowing me to make use of his prodigious graphic talents in the design of this book, and especially for providing me with unlimited access to his car. Merci, mon frere. I must also thank the rest of my family for finally heeding my repeated requests to never, ever call me.

I extend my gratitude as well to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Charles A. Dana Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Arthur Vining David Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Monongahela Rotary Club. Their consistent rejection of my grant applications only served as fuel for the fire of my determination. Fortunately, I can thank the Spruell Center for Comparative Analytics and Hat Museum for archival access and generous provision of a cot during my all too infrequent research trips to Schwabisch Hall.

The President and Trustees of Monongahela State College of Pennsylvania graciously provided me with office space and unlimited legal pads.

Finally, my sincere affection and gratitude to Hathilde, my assistant, muse, amanuensis, and friend. My dear, I can only assure you, once again, that the check is in the mail.

Rudolphe Keene
Monongahela, Pennsylvania
May 27, 1963

Gordon Haber

It's a sticky suburban evening. Recumbent on a chaise longue, I scan the patio of my parents' house, watching Mom and Dad's party guests and sipping a mighty powerful Long Island iced tea that my little sister prepared for me. The combination of the drink and the moist green Thai weed that we smoked earlier has created a dreamy, floating sensation.

I push my sunglasses up my nose with my thumb and adjust my skirt. The bug zappers punctuate the drone of conversation and throw otherworldly blue highlights on the faces of the party guests at uneven intervals. I imagine myself rising above the patio, drifting on the chaise longue like it's a flying carpet, looking down on the bald spots and spreading behinds of the guests, watching the streets and subdivisions form abstract patterns as I make lazy circles in the air.

How many times have I been stoned at this house? Hundreds, maybe a thousand. Pot has been my little helper for years; my fragrant, dependable friend since seventh grade. And besides, it's the only way to get through one of these parties and stay on an even keel.

Mom and Dad's friends are all of a type. Let's take Big Frankie, for example. As a rule, Frankie's shirt is unbuttoned to the crease formed by the meeting of his chest and his potbelly. A golden Star of David on a thick chain lies suspended in the dense gray hair of his chest. His glistening, carefully combed hair is the inky black of a man who uses Grecian Formula.

"He's a sweet, sweet man, Frankie is," my Dad is fond of saying. "Made a small fortune selling doorknobs to the Japanese. Doorknobs." Dad's friends are small businessmen, accountants. Men who sweat and bullied their way into the middle class. Some of their childhood cronies, the wilder ones, grew up to be hoods. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between them. Big Frankie sees me alone, lumbers up. He squeezes his great bulk into an empty chair next to me, mops his sweaty brow with a handkerchief.

"What, you a big movie star now, Stacy?"

I look up at him, utterly confused and too stoned to ask him what he's talking about.

"It's almost nighttime and you still got your shades on."

I take my sunglasses off, feeling myself smile idiotically. Big Frankie leans forward so close, his Star of David almost lands in my drink. He looks straight into my dilated pupils and chuckles.

"Put your sunglasses back on, kiddo," he says. He starts to tell me about his son, Mark, a software designer in Silicon Valley.

"Can you believe that? Twenty-nine years old, and the little SOB is worth more than me." Frankie pauses and fixes his eyes on a distant point.

"You want I should give him your phone number?"

( ( (

"Describe yourself in fifty words or less," Dr. Finster says, handing me an index card and a pen. My name is Stacy Mintz. I am twenty six years old. I am five foot nine, brown hair, brown eyes.

I think for a second, tapping the pen on my knee. Dr. Finster is pushing papers around on his desk with a studied nonchalance. I add:

I like to read and work out. But not simultaneously. I mean I do read at the gym, on the Stairmaster anyway, but then it's usually magazines.

Why am I writing like this is a dating service? I'd like to start over, but Dr. Finster will be able to see what I've scratched out anyway, and he'll read something into that. They always read into things, these shrinks. His office is in a brownstone in the East Thirties. The shades are drawn, the air conditioning hums soothingly. The books that line an entire wall were clearly all purchased before 1980. I think it's supposed to be cloistered in here but it feels a little claustrophobic to me.

He's about seventy, my shrink. Can I call him "my" shrink even though this is only my first session? But I like him, despite the stuffy office. I like his gleaming, bald head; his ready, youthful smile. A wonderful surrogate father for only seventy-five bucks an hour.

Smiling, he takes the card from me, doesn't even look at it, sticks it in a file somewhere. He puts his fingertips together, padded elbows of his corduroy jacket on his desk.

"So," he says, putting a serious expression on his face, "why are you here?"

Why am I here? I'm here because my mother suggested it. Because she says I'm "detached," and that at my age I should be able to form a lasting relationship with a man. Of course this worries her, but it can't worry her half as much as it worries me. Because I only feel relaxed when I'm stoned, and I'm starting to wonder if this is a healthy psychic survival tactic. I tell Dr. Finster all these things in the course of my allotted hour, haltingly, inarticulately. I temporarily place my faith in this kind, grandfatherly total stranger.

"Look," he says eventually, "I think what you're suffering from is nothing more than a mild depression, a neurasthenia."

Well, that makes sense. No wonder I feel like shit all the time.

"I think you should come here once a week for a little while. Do you have insurance?"

Oh yes, Dr. Finster, I most certainly do. One half of your hourly ministrations will be paid by the Oxford HMO (at least the first fifteen of them) and the other half will come courtesy of those bountiful philanthropists, Mom and Dad. Why do I feel so good? Dr. Finster, you've cured me in just one session. I'm going to tell all my depressed friends about you. I whistle in the taxi all forty blocks north to my apartment, then rush inside to look up "neurasthenia" in my American Heritage Dictionary: a neurotic disorder characterized by chronic fatigue and weakness, loss of memory, and generalized aches and pains. What a lovely word! I imagine some Victorian quack scratching his long beard: "Young lady, I am afraid you are a neurasthenic. Nurse, get the leeches and a phial of laudanum! We must remove her uterus, immediately!"

Then, my mood shifts with the suddenness of a car screeching to a halt: I remember that I've got a date tonight. I frantically throw my work clothes onto the growing pile of dirty laundry and ransack my overflowing closet (how I loathe it! I've got nothing to wear, nothing!) until I extricate a beige tank top, antique blue shorts, and black sandals. Is that too casual for a first date? But I don't want him to think that this is some kind of big occasion for me. White v-neck t-shirt, faded Levi's, white Keds? Heather gray knit crew-neck, blue print skirt, Dr. Scholl's? Oy.

I check the weather report: mid-nineties and humid. Looks like the tank top, shorts and sandals. On my way out, I manage to find some willpower and forego the bong, perched invitingly on the coffee table.

In the cab on the way to the restaurant I find myself thinking about my sister. When she goes on a date, it's like a military operation: prepare, and be ready to adapt. Prepare by researching the guy. What does he do? What does he really want to do? Be ready to adapt by acquiescing to every suggestion he makes, with the exception of sex until the fourth date.

Some people suffer from free-floating anxiety. My sister has free-floating love. It attaches itself to whomever drifts into her life, like a barnacle to the side of a boat. Her tenacity is awesome. She has loved philanderers, embezzlers, bigamists and the merely indolent with the same ferocity. Who receives her love is immaterial. She just has a talent for giving it.

My love is more selective. So selective, in fact, that I can't say that it's ever attached itself to anyone, at least romantically. It's too "detached."

My date is meeting me at one of those noisy family-style restaurants with old-timey decor. As I pay the cabby and step inside I wonder why these places are so popular for dates. So many angry fathers, harried mothers and crying children. But mixed among them are the hopeful couples, the first-daters, their optimism undaunted by the tableau. I'm looking at the girls in particular. Their energy, their skin. The way they smile coquettishly, so interested in the lame jokes of their dates. Their breasts are suspended in defiance of gravity. Reality or Wonderbra? The boys don't care. Nice teeth and a Master's in Comp Lit are not enough to get a nice Jewish boy with this kind of competition. And there is Joshua, my date, in jeans and a white button-down shirt. Now I remember why I said "yes" to him, why I let him pick me up in the park. It's that chin. Who could say no to a chin like that?

I present my cheek for a chaste kiss. A lock of my hair gets caught in his tortoise-shell glasses. We laugh uncomfortably as he extricates himself. He steers me by the elbow to a table in the back that he has already commandeered, holds the chair out for me while I sit down.

From behind me, a stentorian voice: "You can not have two orders of chocolate mousse!" We turn to see a father's beet red countenance, six inches from the face of his plump son.

"Looks like they could use a little family therapy," I say.

Joshua wrinkles his nose, signals to a waiter.

"I think therapy is a luxury," he says. "The only possible response to a world where leisure time is considered an entitlement. How about Cotes de Rhone with our steaks?"

We're having steaks? I mean I love steak, but what if I didn't? What kind of a guy doesn't ask? And what has he got against therapy? The waiter approaches, and in one smooth motion, Joshua has opened the wine list and indicated his choice with his index finger. He continues, barely pausing to take a breath.

"Before the Industrial Revolution, who had time to sit around kvetching? There was too much work to do." Ah, I think. Uses Yiddish to indicate that he's Jewish, orders the wine, and gives his pithy punditry all in one sentence. Maybe I should have smoked that pot. Well, nothing to do but soldier on.

"What line of work are you in, Joshua?" I ask.

"Advertising. Pharmaceutical advertising. I'm working on the campaign right now for that new male impotence drug." "What was wrong with the old one?" I ask (they like it when you ask them about their jobs).

Joshua smiles, encouraged. "The previous male impotence treatment involved a doctor-administered injection," dramatic pause, "directly into the male organ."

"Yikes," I say, perking up. Now this is interesting.

"This injection created tumescence which lasted for four hours. An uncontrollable, four-hour erection."

"Sounds like every boy in junior high school," I say. Joshua is not amused. His attractive jaw clenches slightly. "Male impotence is a serious problem," he says. "Not that I suffer from it, mind you, but lots of men do." He takes a sip of water. "Lots."

We stare at each other for a moment, and the wine comes. Joshua sniffs the cork, swirls the wine around in his glass for a moment, examining its color, I suppose. He sticks his nose in the glass, takes a big sniff. The waiter looks at me and rolls his eyes.

Finally Joshua takes a dainty sip and pronounces the wine satisfactory. The waiter pours out a glass for each of us and beats a hasty retreat.

"What line of work are you in, Stacy?" he asks.

"Publishing. I'm an assistant editor."

"I think advertising is the literature of today," Joshua says.

"I thought literature was the literature of today," I reply.

"That's where you're mistaken. Nobody reads literature anymore. As a form of mass media it just doesn't generate the kind of income that it could a hundred years ago."

"What was your major in college," I ask.

"Media Studies," he says smugly, signaling for the waiter, who is wisely pretending not to see Joshua's outstretched, beckoning index finger.

( ( (

Grandpa's apartment is hot and smells of old books. It's always warm in there, but it's particularly hot today because he's cooking dinner for me. He's my height and whisper-thin, but his bright blue eyes still see everything, and his silver hair is thick on his head.

"Shayna punim," he says, holding me under the chin. "A face like this, you should be married already." I allow him this. Though vital at eighty, he's of a different world, one long faded into sepia like the ancestral photographs on his walls.

We sit in the living room because it's cooler. "Where's your sister?" he asks, setting a glass of soda water down in front of me. He vigorously stirs a spoonful of raspberry syrup in the glass, exposing the numbers on his arm.

My sister, who finds it too much to spend one summer evening a week here and does not respond well to guilt.

"She's a busy girl, grandpa," I say. He nods and shrugs, goes into the kitchen for challah and chopped liver. He sets it down in front of me and starts to talk as I eat. And eat I do. I experimented with eating disorders in college, but I like food too much.

"You see that picture," he says, pointing toward a photograph of a bearded man in a cracked oval frame. I nod, chewing. I know what story is coming, but that's okay.

"That is your great-great-grandfather Chaim, my grandfather. A writer, a translator, and a journalist of the highest caliber-he worked with Herzl in Vienna. But a godawful translator. Did you know that he translated Shakespeare into his native Romanian dialect? He did such a lousy job, to this day, people in Transylvania think Shylock was a goy." How can my sister not want to visit with this man? We eat comfortably in silence.

"Grandpa," I say, after a few minutes, "what do you think of therapy?"

"What, you mean with a headshrinker?" He cocks his head at this, thinks for a second. "I never had much use for it, but your grandmother might have done well with some. Are you having it?"

I nod. He strokes my hair once, smiling.

"Such a serious girl. Well, whatever you think you need, you need."

After dinner, he insists on paying for a car service to take me back to Manhattan. A Buick comes for me, huge and smelling of piney chemicals, driven by a genial middle-aged Latino. Grandpa waves goodbye from the curb.

"You mind if I put on the radio?" the driver asks.

"Not at all." The joyous sounds of salsa fill the car as he turns onto the Major Deegan.

Grandpa has gone from Romania to Poland to Israel to the Bronx. In a destructive and violent world, he has seen more destruction and violence than most. But I can't remember a time when he ever second-guessed himself, when he ever expressed regret or remorse. It's the people like me and my sister, the soft and privileged, the semi-damaged. We're the ones who have to pay strangers to listen to us spill our guts.

Okay, I think, there's a little something wrong with me, with the way I live. Best not to think about it tonight. I watch the other cars on the highway, whizzing by, filled with people on some errand of importance known only to themselves. When I get home I'm going to turn on the TV and fire up the bong. Tomorrow there will be plenty of time to worry.

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