Helen Keller Really Lived: A Novel

"Where do I start, détka?"

Helen Keller Really Lived 319 Where do I start, détka? How do I begin to pick apart the garbage that you write? And to what purpose? To uncover some measly morsel of love beneath the mountain of crapola? Some scrap of affection that we both know is only fiscal regret? Why should I waste my time sifting through the trash of your prose? Then again, who am I kidding with the phrase “waste my time”? You can’t squander eternity. The dismal, endlessly droning like a dial tone that never becomes a ring, truth of the matter is that I’ll take any diversion. I’ll take any diversion and you, you will simply take anything, with the emphasis on “take” (from the OE tacan, to take, which in turn derives from the 320 Elisabeth Sheffield PGmc. taekanan, of uncertain origin. The OED calls it “one of the elemental words of the language.” That is, taking has never been about anything other than taking, and neither have you, you greedy, grasping bitch.). Thus you persist with this pretense that you can’t read my messages. To vex me, to provoke me, to spur me on! The bucks and Bosky House are gone, but who knows, the saga of Timor Zinkovsky (hooker to healer to hoodwinked hubby) might be worth something. Perhaps as a companion volume to your own Not Okay. You could title it Not OK. Or even Knot OK—a bit cryptic for the mass market you hope to hook, but at the same time provocatively expressive of the emotional bondage you practiced on me. Continue to practice. And when you’ve fleeced me of every last word (because unlike time, language is not inexhaustible), you’ll finally let me go. No, I would not put it past you, Selina Van Staal—grifting a ghost. So it’s Not OK, or Knot OK—a companion and corrective (or korrective, as in Oll Korrect) to Not Okay. That doesn’t mean that everything you’ve written is inkorrect. Admittedly, I was less than “forthcoming about [my] foreign background.” But think about it. This was not exactly a heritage for a young gynecologist with a budding practice geared toward the wives of affluent capitalists to broadcast, i.e., a former life as a Soviet refugee and prostitute, the whoreson whore of a Siberian logging camp slut and blackmarketeer of western lingerie. The associations with venereal disease and cold war privations would not have helped my professional image, with my patients, my colleagues or the insurers who determined my malpractice coverage rates—already somewhat higher than American born MDs, despite my solid gold standard (Nixon shock or no) US of A medical education and training. Helen Keller Really Lived 321 Yet if I was vague or even reticent about my “foreign background ,” certainly I was not ashamed of it as implied in your account of your Ramada Plaza Inn fling with that fedora hatted , philosophizing pimple face (if only you had seen me in my youthful prime: then you would know the difference between caviar and spam!). The kid from Odessa stood (and still stands) in good company, Isaak Babel, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov , Sergei Prokoviev, Petro Illych Tchaikovsky—all hailed from the Ukraine. Not to mention the lovely Grace Paley (née Goodside, an anglicization of Gutseit, like the Bliss that was once Blizinsky), who though born in the Bronx hailed from freshly transplanted Ukranian stock. And oh, Lee Strasberg, him too, Lee Strasberg (née Israel Strassberg), the father of method acting in America. An art I sometimes wonder if you studied. “The human being who acts is the human being who lives…” Strasberg said. “He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage.” Or to quote the oft quoted Dean Van Staal, “the good salesman believes in what he sells. Even if he doesn’t.” So it’s not that I think you were lying when you told Silly Dilly about “the mushroom pale soft yet tough look of the stranger, of his high quartz-white forehead with the pillowy tuft of black hair above and the impenetrable glasses below that had hit hard, fast and unfair, taking advantage of some blind spot you did not even know you had” (by the way, I can see that my style has...