"It wasn't ice before, Bruce. It was water."
"Oh, you're so full of baloney. Why doesn't the human stomach digest itself?"
"It does," said Sid without missing a beat.
"It does?"
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"But once it starts it isn't a whole stomach any more and has to stop until it rebuilds in order to start again."
"Why don't you go fuck yourself?" asked Gold. And then instantly invited Sid to lunch on Monday. "I owe you one."
"Make it Wednesday, pal." Sid had Gold by the arm and was leading him from the others to the bar with a grasp not to be resisted. "I've got a meeting with Joannie Monday."
"That's the last time you'll humiliate me in front of your family," Belle finally broke her silence on the drive back to Manhattan.
"Every time I humiliate you," Gold said with detachment, "you tell me it's the last time. How did I humiliate you?"
"With your filthy language. You know I hate it. And why must you fight with Sid all the time?"
"The cocksucker always starts it, Belle, you know that. You're just sore because I might be moving to Washington, aren't you?"
"You can do what you want about Washington. I couldn't quit my job in the middle of the school year anyway."
Gold was still banking on.that. "I can fly back every weekend. Lots of Senators and Representatives do that. Okay?"
"If it's okay with you it's okay with me," said Belle. "Like everything else."
"Not like everything else," Gold objected. "You like to think I have everything my way, don't you?"
"Not like everything else," Belle yielded with a shrug. "Have it your way."
"You won't even notice when I'm gone."
"And I won't even notice when you're here."
"If that's the mood you're in," said Gold, "I think I better sleep at my studio. Make up a good story for Dina."
"Why must I do that?"
"So she won't think we're fighting and be insecure."
"Dina says you left me weeks ago but are too lazy to
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move out and too sneaky to say so, and that you're probably already thinking of seeing a lawyer secretly about a divorce."
Gold slept home and weighed the merits of consulting Sid about his trip to Acapulco with Andrea.
But first there was the troubling conversation over drinks with Joannie, who admitted she'd been inhospitable to Rose and Max's daughter in Los Angeles. "She's snorting cocaine and dropping pills and is a living sponge when it comes to other people's money. Norma's over thirty now, for Christ's sake, and thinks she has the rights of a teen-ager. I hate addicts—of any kind. They're always wanting something." And then disclosed, after a distrait and worrisome silence, that she and Jerry were on the verge of separating. kkAll these years I thought I was doing him a favor—he's such a boring windbag—and now he wants me to go. He won't give me enough money to live well and I can't live any other way."
Gold knew he was not much good at comforting people. It dismayed him that Joannie was no longer beautiful. Although she still had the carriage of a tall and graceful woman, her suntanned skin, suddenly, was sandpaper-dry, her lips were thin, her eyes were restless as his own, and the lines in her face were dark and taut. Gold had another Scotch and Joannie switched to coffee. The friend she would fly to in Palm Beach the following day was an elderly, bedridden man she was fond of who'd been close and very decent to her when she was younger, after she'd run away from home to become a famous beauty queen or movie star. In Key Biscayne was the shoemaker's daughter from Coney Island she'd left with, associated in some way now with a wealthy man with a houseboat on which sybaritic parties of peculiar sorts took place, and Gold began to acknowledge that Joannie might not always have been telling him the whole truth about herself.
"What'd Sid say?"
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"Sid promised as much as I need for the best lawyers out there, but I can't really ask him for more than that, can I? What about you?"
"What do you mean?" Gold was taking no risks and looked tremblingly into her face to see what her question might portend.
"How's the book and the job in Washington?" Wryly, she added, "If you get a good one. Jerry might let me stay."
"Both at a standstill," he conceded darkly. Her glamor was perishing before his eyes and he was impregnated with something like disillusionment by the unattractive signs of deterioration in her face and her spirit. "If I get the job, I won't want to write the book. If I don't get the job, I guess I'll have to."
"Do you want to?"
Gold answered with an awkward shake of his shoulders. "I should want to. I could use some stimulating information from someone. God knows I can't come up with any of my own. Did Mom—Momma ever talk to you about sex?" This succeeded in making her laugh. "I mean it. What does a woman from Russia who never even learned English tell her daughters who are growing up here about lust, petting, screwing, morals? What did she say to you?"
"EJruce, I'm younger than you. I hardly remember her. Ask the others."
Now it was Gold who gave a terse laugh. "How could I talk to Rose or Esther about something like that? Or Ida. Muriel's running around a lot as though she's just invented adultery and doesn't seem to care if Victor finds out. I think there'll be trouble."
"Belle sounds depressed," Joannie said neutrally.
"She's worried about her mother," Gold replied without a blush, and skillfully worked his way around that sunken danger. "I can't get over those people, Joannie, Mom and Pop—"
"Toni."
"Cant we stop that shit now?"
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She resisted but one more moment and capitulated sadly with a reluctant nod. "Joannie."
"Imagine those old people—"
"They weren't so old."
"—leaving with children from a small town in Russia more than sixty years ago and coming all the way here. How did they do it? They knew they would never go back. I can't go anywhere without hotel reservations and I can't go out of town two days without losing some laundry or luggage or having a plane connection canceled. You travel, don't you? Imagine them."
"Always with credit cards," said Joannie. "And I use Jerry's travel agent."
"I wouldn't move without one," said Gold, somewhat surprised by the ardor of his interest. "But they didn't have any. Who told them? How did they know where to go? Where did they sleep? The trip must have taken longer than Columbus. What did they think and talk about, what did they eat? They were just kids. They had Sid, remember, and Rose was just a baby."
"Ask Pop," urged Joannie.
"Pop," Gold repeated despairingly. "He wouldn't answer me. He couldn't remember if he wanted to and I wouldn't believe him if he did. A native-born American, he was calling himself last week, without even knowing what it means. Soon he'll be claiming he isn't Jewish."
"Not Pop," Joannie stated. "Maybe you and me. But not him."
"I wonder why I never spoke to her more." Curiosity was making him thoughtful and he leaned forward studiously with his head resting in his hand. "I still don't know what she died of, Joannie, and I'm afraid to find out." He felt mawkish but nevertheless went on. "I understand what that means now. I didn't even realize I didn't know until I applied for my first life-insurance policy and they asked. I answered cancer of the thyroid because of that bandage of some kind around her neck,
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but I've really no idea. The only time I think about it is when I talk to you, and you don't want to find out either."
"Ask Sid," said Joannie. "I bet he remembers a lot."
"Sid," Gold repeated with the grimace of a minute before and stared past her. "Sid won't open up about anything. All he does is make fun of me at dinners. I wish he'd stop. I could kill him."
"He thinks it's funny," said Joannie. "He thinks you enjoy it too."
"Tell him it's not funny and we're both too old for it now."
"Sid's really proud of you, Bruce," Joannie said. "He still kind of takes care of us,
doesn't he, even though it kills Harriet now to see him spend anything? He feels very close to us. They all do."
"We don't feel close to them."
"That's the funny part of it," said Joannie with a look of inscrutable melancholy. "They think we're a very close family. They'd be so hurt if they heard us talking this way. Not even you and I feel close to each other any more, do we? Oh, shit, Burce, what am I going to do? I just know I'm never going to find another husband, and I don't ever want to have to live without one. It's better to have Jerry to fight with than no one, isn't it? I don't want to be another one of those clumsy middle-aged people taking up tennis because I've got nothing else to do." Her eyes narrowed guardedly and she fell silent, swallowing. Gold made no effort to console her. "God," she exclaimed with a cynical amusement when she was able to continue, "I can just see myself. You can add that to my Jewish experience. I just know I'll wind up living with some kid with a motorcycle who plays the banjo and wants to be an actor. Oh, Christ, I'll be smoking dope with nitwits again, won't I?"
Gold, meanwhile, had stealthily withdrawn into the citadel of noninterference he automatically chose whenever threatened by the encroaching personal
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problems of others. Let Sid handle it, he decided as he parted from his favorite sister with a cursory kiss. A formidable constraint lay between them. Sid could handle them all—Joannie, Muriel and Victor, his father's dying and funeral arrangements. But wouldn't it be awful if Sid died first and all of it landed on him? The ramifications latent in that unthought-of state of affairs were too many to be contemplated by Gold now with anything like equanimity. A thumping vertigo possessed him instead. He leaned a moment against a mailbox to clear his head completely of all traces of that horrendous possibility before continuing along the sidewalk to his studio to check his recording machine for telephone calls.
He felt anything but good about himself and knew it would be in vain to hope for a better nature to assert itself. When Esther was left a widow by Mendy's death two years before, Gold's apathy toward her as an older sister was transmogrified at once into a bristling mood of vigilant suspicion and dislike. He sensed a danger that in one way or another he was going to be stuck. That didn't happen. Remorse took him in its grip shortly afterward when he beheld in Harriet a similar change from the sisterly feeling of more than thirty years to a temperament of miserly reserve that expanded to pervade her relationship with all the members of Sid's family. She too was afraid she was going to be stuck and was taking measures to cut her losses.
Mendy's burial services were the last Gold had attended. Only a small portion of the people filling the Jewish chapel in Brooklyn made the trip out to Long Island for the interment. Gold knew as he stood in the field of carved headstones and allowed his thoughts to roam that even fewer people would come to the cemetery for his funeral. Then he remembered that he had left instructions in his will for cremation without any ceremony or memorial service. Next he remembered that he had also left instructions for the donation of all his organs and tissues for medical use and
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research. He made a mental note at Mendy's funeral to correct his will. Now he remembered he had forgotten. And he also remembered it would make no difference. Part of the Jewish experience would be to get him into the ground so fucking fast there would be no time to find and read his will.
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SlD was already at the bar and hailed Gold's arrival with the rosy generosity of mild intoxication. "This is quite a restaurant, kid. I think I've already seen a couple of television actors and a newsman. And what girls."
All Gold saw was Pomoroy and Lieberman leaving. Pomoroy passed in tactful acquiescence when Gold turned away to talk to Sid. But Lieberman veered like a bulvon and with his elbows clubbed his way between them to the bar, knocking an ashtray to the floor and blindly plopping a stubby paw smack into the center of a bowl of dried nuts with the atavistic luck of something Neanderthal and hungry.
"I've been getting flak." Lieberman sprayed chewed nuts from his mouth when he spoke and stuffed whole ones in when he stopped. "About that article of yours. I thought it was conventional, safe, intelligent, orthodox neoconservatism. But some people tell me it's nihilistic and negative."
Gold put an open hand on Lieberman's face and
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firmly pushed him back from the bar. "My brother Sid. This is Maxwell Lieberman. You may remember each other from Coney Island."
"Call me Skip. Are you really saying that nothing anybody does, even us, succeeds as planned?"
"Sure," Sid said good-naturedly while Gold was forming an educated reply.
"Well, I can't see why anyone is making such a fuss about it," said Lieberman. "Is it liberal or conservative?"
"Both," said Sid.
"Sid," said Gold, "why don't you let me talk?"
"Because you never could make up your mind, kid," Sid answered playfully. "Even when he was a child I used to make every decision for him."
"Are you saying," Lieberman demanded of them both in a manner of niggardly disgruntlement, "that every attempt at political and social improvement has been a failure?"
"Nope," said Sid.
"Sid!"
"He didn't say that," continued Sid in satirical high spirits. "He said they didn't succeed."
"Industrialization? The labor movement? Integration? The Constitution? Democracy, communism, fascism? Public education? Free enterprise?" Lieberman was arguing now only with Sid. "Are you saying none of that succeeded?"
"As planned," specified Sid.
"In any way?"
"Ask him." Sid jerked a thumb toward Gold. "He wrote it."
"You read it, didn't you?"
"No," said Sid. "Leave me out of it."
"Well, what about it?" Lieberman demanded in a way that challenged opposition. "Do you really maintain that every action anyone takes to improve anything is doomed to fail?"
"I didn't quite say that."
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"He said it wouldn't succeed."
"Sid!"
"What's the difference?"
"A world," said Sid.
"A world?"
"Of difference."
Gold remembered then that he disliked Lieberman and was suddenly delighted by the ease with which his big brother was handling him. In Pomoroy's eyes was that familiar look of careworn pessimism and Gold asked with sympathy, "How you doing?"
"I'm prospering," Pomoroy confessed funereally, as though revealing he was the victim of a malignant tumor of the heart.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Gold commiserated.
"It could be worse, I suppose."
"It could be fatal," said Gold. "You might be president of the company some day and have to stay there the rest of your life."
"Bite your tongue."
"Where else would you rather be?"
"Bite it all the way off."
"I can tell you one thing," Sid announced with authority, paying the bar bill before Gold could get back. "Every action toward social improvement in one direction produces a reaction of equal force in the opposite direction. Right, kid?" Lieberman was frozen in place by this proclamation and appeared, incredibly, at a loss for words. "Let's go eat. So you're going to Acapulco, huh?" were the words with which Sid began at the table after Gold ordered another round of drinks.
"I don't want to talk about that," Gold answered brusquely to close off that line of discussion. "What are we going to do about the old man?"
"I find I get a kind of kick out of him now," Sid said softly.
"I can see that. Harriet doesn't want him around either."
"I don't pay too much attention to what Harriet
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wants any more," Sid confided gently. "I kind of like him, Bruce, and we're not going to have him much longer."
"How can you like him?" Gold asked. "He's such a pain in the ass. He was mean to you. The two of you were always fighting."
"He was never mean to me," Sid
disagreed almost in a whisper. "We didn't fight."
"Sid, the two of you used to fight all the time. Once he drove you away for a whole summer. You ran away from home and went all the way to California."
"That's not why."
"It is, Sid," Gold persisted. "Rose and Esther say so, and so does Ida. Even he likes to brag to people how he drove you away."
"That wasn't really the way it was," said Sid. He avoided looking at Gold. "It was a chance to see the country. He was never mean to me."
"Sid, you ran away," Gold reminded him gently. He wanted to touch his hand. "How old were you?"
"About fourteen or fifteen, maybe sixteen. I know I was still in high school."
"Why don't you ever talk about it?" Gold asked with wonder. "That must have been pretty exciting."
"Yeah, it was, I guess."
"And dangerous."
Sid thought a moment. "No, I don't think it was dangerous."
"You had no money, did you?"
"I had a few dollars. A lot of people were on the road then. I hung around with hoboes for a while and they helped. I worked. A rancher in Arizona offered me a regular job if I wanted to stay. A farmer in California offered me another. I saw Hollywood. But I was glad to be able to make it back when the summer was over. I didn't want to miss school." Sid's eyes were moist and he did not seem to know how close he was to crying. At the same time, his fleshy face was wearing a weird and dull and distant smile, as though his mind were lost in thought.
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"You had a fight, Sid," Gold prodded. "That's why you went. And Mom was worried."
Good as Gold Page 27
