Down Under Read online

  Praise for

  Down Under

  “A sly, subversive take on the familiar boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-becomes-a-world-famous-movie-star-and-tries-to-win-girl-back story, Down Under is a sheer delight. Sonia Taitz has written a fast-paced, quick-witted novel filled with trenchant observations about celebrity, aging, culture wars, and the search for true love. I raced through this witty and insightful book, anxious to reach the end. It came not with a whimper but a bang.”

  — JILLIAN MEDOFF, bestselling author of I Couldn’t Love You More and Hunger Point

  “Down Under is a beautifully constructed farce that reaches out in many directions—some amusing, some disturbing. The novel portrays a young boy’s thrillingly brave and heroic struggle with his domineering father. We are hooked on the character of Collum Whitsun, and on his girlfriend Jude’s obsession with this young, courageous boy. The writing is at all times so subtle and so right. When the middle-aged Collum sees himself become his father, the author brings a tragic dimension to her tale, even as the hero begins to go kablooey. It is all very enticing to follow her intelligent lead.

  While very much of the moment, and no less than a witty take on the zeitgeist, this novel is at the same time imbued with deep, dark truths and a sense of warped wisdom. Sonia Taitz is able to segue from an arch scene or grotesque moment to a heartfelt observation or smart insight with ease, finesse, and an unerring sense of literary mischief. A bravado performance, full of truth.”

  — WESLEY STRICK, screenwriter of True Believer, Cape Fear, and Final Analysis

  “Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again. Sound familiar? Not in the deft hands of Sonia Taitz, whose funny, tender, big-hearted novel about love, loss, and the one that got away is a pure delight from start to finish.”

  —YONA ZELDIS McDONOUGH, author of You Were Meant for Me and Two of a Kind

  “Down Under is a sharp, sad, and funny trip to the emotional antipodes. Weaving a story that’s based, in part, on the broken soul of one of the world’s erstwhile heroes, the author takes us from the northern exurbs of New York to Australia and back. Love, madness, and the meaning of loyalty form the backbone of this fabulous (in every sense) yarn. Sonia Taitz combines depth, pathos, and hilarity, creating a love story that is part legend, part cautionary tale, and entirely delicious.”

  —SUZANNE FINNAMORE, bestselling author of Otherwise Engaged and Split

  Praise for

  The Watchmaker’s Daughter

  NAMED A BEST MEMOIR OF THE YEAR BY FOREWORD MAGAZINE

  NOMINATED FOR THE SOPHIE BRODY MEDAL BY THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

  “Not your typical coming-of-age story . . . American Sonia Taitz, born to survivors of the Holocaust, lives under its long shadow in The Watchmaker’s Daughter.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “Funny and heartwrenching.”

  —People

  “One of the year’s best reads. This poignant memoir is a beautiful and heartfelt tribute to the author’s parents. Funny, yet moving, The Watchmaker’s Daughter illuminates Sonia’s Taitz’s life growing up in New York City, the daughter of Holocaust survivors . . . It is the story of an ambitious and gifted daughter whose aspirations and goals collide with those of her parents.”

  —The Jewish Journal

  “Taitz writes beautifully about religious roots, generational culture clashes, and a family’s abiding love.”

  —DAWN RAFFEL, Reader’s Digest

  “An invigorating memoir . . . especially noteworthy for its essential optimism and accomplished turns of phrase.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sonia Taitz, born to survivors of the Holocaust, lives under its long shadow in The Watchmaker’s Daughter.”

  —ELISSA SCHAPPELL, Vanity Fair

  “Even now, as the last Holocaust survivors pass away, wrenching reverberations run through Taitz’s poignant, poetic memoir.”

  —Booklist

  “A heartbreaking memoir of healing power and redeeming devotion, Sonia Taitz’s The Watchmaker’s Daughter has the dovish beauty and levitating spirit of a psalm . . . A past is here reborn and tenderly restored with the love and absorption of a daughter with a final duty to perform a last act of fidelity.”

  —JAMES WOLCOTT, Vanity Fair columnist and author of Lucking Out

  “Sonia Taitz’s memoir of growing up the daughter of a master watch repairman who survived the Holocaust is also a haunting meditation on time itself. Taitz writes with a painter’s eye and a poet’s voice.”

  —MARK WHITAKER, author of My Long Trip Home

  Praise for

  In the King’s Arms

  “Beguiling . . . Taitz zigzags among her culturally disparate characters, zooming in on their foibles with elegance and astringency.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A witty, literate, and heartfelt story, filled with engaging characters and relationships.”

  —Jewish Book World

  “Evelyn Waugh, move over.”

  —JESSE KORNBLUTH, Vanity Fair essayist and curator of HeadButler.com

  “In her gloriously rendered novel, In the King’s Arms, Sonia Taitz writes passionately and wisely about outsiders, and what happens when worlds apart slam into each other.”

  —BETSY CARTER, author of The Puzzle King and Nothing to Fall Back On

  Also by Sonia Taitz

  Fiction

  In the King’s Arms

  Nonfiction

  Mothering Heights

  The Watchmaker’s Daughter

  Plays

  Whispered Results

  Couch Tandem

  The Limbo Limbo

  Darkroom

  Domestics

  Cut Paste Delete Restore

  The Day Starts in the Night

  Copyright © 2014 by Sonia Taitz

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2014

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, address McWitty Press, 110 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10024.

  www.mcwittypress.com

  Cover design by Jennifer Carrow

  Interior design by Abby Kagan

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Taitz, Sonia

  Down Under: a novel / Sonia Taitz.—1st ed.

  p.cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-9852227-5-8

  This is a work of fiction and the usual creative rules apply. None of the characters are real. None of the events ever happened.

  In memory of Neil F.K.B.K. Boyle,

  1953–1990

  The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

  —Oscar Wilde

  For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast,

  And the heart must pause to breathe,

  And love itself have rest.

  —Lord Byron

  Contents

  Prologue: The Middle, or the Muddle

  You Can’t Touch This

  Tied Up and Run Down

  Slam

  Breaking Horses

  The Faithful Wife

  Jude Had a Friend

  Collum the Cowboy

  A Missing Ingredient

  Jude Spills Some Beans

  More Beans Spilled

  Disorders

  At the Angel-Fire House Farm

  Treats

  Judy and Collum, Age Fourteen

  The House of Whitsun

  Mr. Whitsun Also Composed

  Conspiracy Theory

  Spilling Heidi’s Beans

  More Learning Experiences


  Escape

  A Heart Attack on a Plate

  Beyond Bitter Herbs

  A Visit from a Holy Man

  Lost Languages

  Delaney’s Season

  Patriarchs

  Matriarchs 1

  Matriarchs 2

  Collum’s Vigil

  Dodging

  Correspondence, or Social Intercourse

  The Seduction of Slam

  The Holy Ghost

  More Discoveries

  Plaisir d ’Amour

  Escape from Paradise

  You Can Touch This

  Valrhona, Valhalla

  Love Is Not a Pogrom

  Step by Step and Shlep by Shlep

  Just One More Step

  Acknowledgments

  Afterword

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The Middle, or the Muddle

  In the middle of the journey of her life, Jude Ewington realizes that she is starting to see real lapses in the looks department. For a once-handsome woman, these downturns hurt, the losses as portentous as a rich man’s failing fortune. Some small restitution might be made—the equivalent of cents on the dollar—and rather than bemoaning this fractional comfort, Jude tries to embrace it. Products are available and she buys them; they promise to restore the appearance of a viable sexual allure. And buying them is action. It is dynamic, almost lusty, to care this much. At this particular moment (the eve of another birthday whose number insults her), Jude stands gamely in front of her mirror, wrangling the hooks and eyes of a waist-cincher. Her face reddens in a tug of war against time, that flesh-destroyer. She could rage against the dying of allure—or buy the right foundation garment.

  A feminist, a reader, intelligent and educated, Jude has to laugh at the irony. Having started her life on a par with any male, she now willingly tortures herself in ways they rarely would. It is the early twenty-first century, and yet the boned garment with which she wrestles resembles one forced upon the females of a more benighted time. Worse still are her anatomically incorrect shoes—too tight, too high, too pointy. Modern women bought such daggered monstrosities in order to follow the fiat: Seduce. This kind of self-inflicted pain—so female—was now oddly deemed macho, not masochistic. But no settled soul would stand it.

  Jude had come of age in the heyday of sexual and gender revolutions. She knows that men no longer bestow identity, status, or joy. She accepts that women can and should attain bliss on their own shoe leather (however pointy). She has her accomplishments; she has had great moments independent of male company or opinion. Most, however, occurred before desire had swept her away, weightless, into its arms. She’d been an eager, curious girl until boys entered the picture. Then her life had tilted as she leaned, eagerly, curiously, toward love. After that came marriage, home, and children. Yes, she worked (sporadically), but passion remained her narrative focus. Somehow, she’d been cast out as the lead. She’d had twin boys, which meant that three males circled her hearth, running toward or away from it just as they pleased. So much of Jude’s life was conditional, vicarious.

  She knows it all. But knowledge is not wisdom, and neither will temper a true desire. Nothing had ever felt as good as that first sweep of erotica, the brief touch of immortality that romance had once brought her. Jude is no pioneer anymore; she wants to be a paramour. Like a courtesan, she needs to adore and be adored. After all these years, her dearest wish is still to buckle up and rocket to the stars. Wasn’t love still the deepest source of truth? She wants to shudder with love and relief as the truth reveals itself, crashing. What, she thinks, did these clomping years have to do with passion? They’d buried it. But wasn’t truth supposed to be timeless?

  Jude still feels that love is the deepest source of truth. She will excavate and find it once again. Even as her husband’s hair has grayed and his stomach softened, Sam has remained the focus of her days. Which is unfortunate, because over the same decades, Jude seems to have become less and less the center of Sam’s own, increasingly busy, calendar. And passion unreciprocated is—no, she couldn’t think of it. She could not grow bitter, a wire-haired harridan, or resign herself to the portly eunuch’s corner, consoled by a torsade of shiny pearls. There are ways of getting to men, and Jude is doing what she can to learn, buy, and apply those ways.

  On this night, she colors her lips with a deep pinot stain and glistens them with a sweep of an oily foam wand. She lights scented candles—how like love they seem, hot and flickering, then sputtering in a death-crackle, followed by a pool of velvet darkness. She lies down on the bed and arranges her garters. Her black-stockinged toes point prettily, she thinks. Ten ninety-nine a pair, and they’ll probably rip five minutes after he gets here. She yawns loud and long, her jaw cracking. It is 11:20 now. What an embarrassment, she thinks, if she were to fall asleep before her husband comes home, an effigy of waiting and wanting.

  Jude falls deeply asleep, which actually gives her more pleasure than the best coitus she (or anyone) has ever had. She is tired; her life as a disengaged wife makes her very, very tired.

  The telephone jars her. Jude leaps, wipes her mouth, rummages for the phone, swipes it toward herself.

  “Heh—?” Not even a word. She’s made a sound, a cut-off syllable. For an oddly pleasant moment, Jude doesn’t know who she is or where she is. There are possibilities in this waking haze. She’d been dreaming, and she can remember some retrieved sense of her actual self. Her “look” has blurred now: the gloss is smeared, an indignity she herself can’t see, just as she can’t see that her two coats of extra-rich mascara have turned into smuts of sorrow under her eyes. In her dream, there had been no sorrow, no husband, and no smuts.

  “It’s me.” Sam Ewington’s voice is hard and harsh for this hour of night. It is the voice of a man in a good suit and tie, rushing relentlessly in the world. Male energy is like that—brisk and cold. You had to warm it up with your stockinged feet. Jude feels a tug of habitual longing. Always so far away these days, which makes her wish him closer.

  “Can you believe it?” he continues rapidly. “The plane was late. I only just got into the airport. Don’t wait up. It’s gonna be baggage claim and customs and the whole damn rigmarole.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after midnight. Happy birthday—got you some great stuff! When you wake up, you’ll see. Get some sleep, sweetie.”

  Sweetie. That word, which lately replaced her name, had never sounded sincere. Jude sinks back down into unconsciousness. She dreams a new dream.

  In her dream, she encounters a boy whose passion never wavers, no matter how many years go by, how old they become, or how far he has flown from her side. He shows this constancy in the way he holds her, looking into her eyes, his own eyes shining with deep recognition. In her dreams, Jude stirs him in a way that cannot die. She doesn’t need to stuff herself into outfits; she doesn’t need to set the mood. It’s there. It’s set. She can enter it herself.

  You Can’t Touch This

  Collum Whitsun’s life is all about distances. Once he was poor, and now he is rich. Once he was shunned and hurt, but for years after that he was worshipped—he’s been famous. As a boy, he had to move from New York State to New South Wales—a jarring change of continents and climates. That was his father’s doing. Then, his meteoric rise as an actor took him all over the world, from dripping Aztec jungles to the golden hills of Jerusalem. But none of that travel was real, he thinks; he’s been sent like a package, tied, stamped, and flung.

  Or like a yo-yo, maybe. Out into the transcendent, and back to his small, real self. It’s all been rather polar.

  He is traveling on his own now, a hero’s sort of quest. This is not a boy uprooted by his father’s crazy mandates, or a star driven by the exotic demands of blockbuster filmmaking. This journey is as real as life can get. That makes it harder. That makes it frightening. No father, mother, brothers, wifey, passel of kids; no crew, no doubles, scri
pt girls, fluffers. Collum will have to be brave now, alone—but not so brave that he breaks. In the last few years, he’s noticed a wear and tear on his sanity, the presence of black rages and blazing pangs of sorrow that increasingly unnerve him.

  Sometimes that has meant drinking. An old fallback, yes, like stepping into another language, costume, wig. There’s no shame in a bit of self-preservation. Buffers stave off madness. A man might need such props from time to time. Collum’s nervous system jangles and twangs more than most. It’s the core of his appeal and his undoing. But finally, at least, he is going where he wants, and going for what he wants.

  What does he want? What everyone seems to want: love. The man is alone wherever he goes. He’d love to be embraced and understood.

  Collum, like Jude, is getting older. It’s inevitable, insulting; it’s unbearable. All of his life’s efforts have begun to taunt him. Nothing lasts, not even world fame. His star is falling, and people have stopped paying to see him on the big screen, where he thought he’d be immortal.

  So what, he thinks, because (as he now grasps) their “love” has never been real. Fortune is fickle, isn’t that what they say? Real love, he now knows—that’s permanent. As a boy, Collum had tasted it briefly—a pure and giving grace. The girl who had offered that brief shelter would remember him. He’s never forgotten her. Well, maybe for a while, when he’d been distracted by hellish illusions. There had been an increasingly disgruntled wife, and many insufficient lovers full of lies. Users, tossers. None of them had been true. Not one. The proof was in his solitude.

  Collum’s traveled a long way to get back to his girl. He’s getting there now, and he’s nervous. What if she doesn’t want him anymore? What if she really hurts him? Time, then, for a drink.

  Collum’s head lies heavy on a pub counter. The establishment is located about an hour or so north of New York City. The actor’s cheek sags on a carpety beer-cloth, stiff with hoppy, old spills. Alone as he feels, he’s in public, and the folks around him begin to notice his hair, too yellow to be real. Baby-chick yellow. Technicolor blond. They take in the broad shoulders under his distressed leather jacket. Ordinary men don’t often have shoulders like that. Collum works out, though to less and less effect. They gossip and wonder who he is. Their curiosity is almost aggressive. Famous people are not like the rest of us. They seem dangerous, like game. You want to tame them.