Three Balconies

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  And he would make up for the rinse and the weight and the age – don’t forget that – by the sheer force of his joy at being with this new group of tanned and attractive young Miami Beach professionals on a Saturday night, the importance of which he had forgotten but which they took seriously.

  So Harry ordered a double scotch and waded into the crowd.

  He met women quickly and easily and what amazed him was how relaxed his swing was – he didn’t even have to shoehorn his credits into the conversation. And that was just as well because his Two Big Pictures had been made twenty years before and he was starting to get vague looks when he mentioned them. But all he had to do on this particular Saturday night in Miami Beach was to say Hi, how are you doing? And isn’t it great to be here? And if someone suggested it was a little crowded, Harry would say he didn’t mind, since he lived reclusively most of the year. He found himself saying that a lot – that he lived reclusively – so he must have liked the sound of it.

  No sooner did Harry get started speaking to one woman than he went spinning – or got spun off – to another, which was fine with him. Not surprisingly, he met a few litigators. But he also spoke to a woman who designed halo braces for people who broke their necks in highway accidents. Her father, who had wanted her to take over his luggage business, had broken his neck in a highway accident and she had gotten to design a halo brace for him – which Harry and the woman agreed was quite a story. So Harry had spent a bit more time with her than what he had in mind. And then a tiny woman in black leather asked if Harry could help her get a drink. And Harry, only too happy to oblige, had lifted her off the floor so the bartender could see her. She turned out to be the manager of a Chicago rock group, and after she had gotten her drink, she said she’d like to get to know Harry, though she was tied up with the band on that particular night. That was fine with Harry. He turned his attention to a pretty young student who was getting a degree in business, though, frankly, all she wanted to do was lie on the beach and do nothing – which Harry found charming. He found everything charming and continued to do so for two days running, returning to the same spot on Sunday night and finding it only a little more subdued. Throughout this mild escapade, he kept noticing a couple – in the same two seats at the bar – who had been taking in the scene and at the same time having a whispered conversation. The woman, who appeared to be in her mid-twenties, had tanned shoulders and streaky blonde hair that was cut short in a style Harry recognized from one of Julie’s fashion magazines. She wore a white lingerie-type halter that did not cover her breasts so much as present them. As to the breasts themselves, they may not have been perfect – what are perfect breasts? – but they were close enough to the mark for Harry. He assumed she was a fashion model – what else could she be? – and that her companion, a thin fellow with a thin face, was somehow tied to the fashion industry.

  She was the most exquisite creature he had ever seen and Harry knew immediately that she was out of his league. Strictly speaking, she should have been out of the thin fellow’s league, too, but she wasn’t – that’s the way life is.

  Then, amazingly, because that’s the kind of three days it had been, Harry was talking to her. For all he knew – in the crush of activity – she may have turned and begun speaking to him. Harry loved surprises and got a big one when it turned out she wasn’t a model at all – she was Miriam Rosen, a Jewish, or half-Jewish, housewife with two children, from Guatemala of all places. No disrespect to Guatemala – which to its credit had just ended a thirty-year war with its guerrillas – but Harry had no idea they had Miriam Rosens running around down there. Ones who were this gorgeous. So obviously, Harry would have to rethink his feelings about Guatemala. The thin fellow with the thin face did not seem to mind Harry talking to Miriam Rosen – he even encouraged it with a careless wave of his hand, as if to say, Please continue, this means nothing to me. So Harry continued talking to Miriam Rosen and – like a beginning swimmer – found it easier as he went along. The couple were mysterious about what they were to each other, and Miriam encouraged Harry to take a guess: Were they friends? Husband and wife? Lovers? Like a contestant in a game show, Harry chose lovers. Then, after pointing out that he was a storyteller (who lived reclusively most of the year) he fashioned a scenario in which Miriam Rosen was a married woman who had gone off to meet the thin man, her lover, for a weekend idyll; on Monday, after several days of exquisite lovemaking, she would fly back to her family in Guatemala, refreshed, happy, better able to be a housewife and mother. (He did not speculate on the future of her lover.)

  As Harry told the story, he was aware that it wasn’t much. Even if he were back on the radar screen, he would never have pitched it to a studio.

  The banality of the story notwithstanding, Miriam Rosen was delighted with it, wriggling around in her seat and clapping her hands and indicating that Harry had absolutely nailed the situation.

  “You are very wise,” said the thin man with the thin face, stroking his chin as if he were a little wise himself and what you had here was an exchange between two wise individuals.

  Harry was impressed by how nicely they were all getting along; the thought crossed his mind that the three of them might even end up in the couple’s hotel suite, with the thin-faced man graciously allowing Harry to make love to Miriam Rosen while he went off to an adjoining room to stare at the ocean and smoke a Gauloise.

  After all, if the couple liked Harry’s first story, why wouldn’t they like this one, which, in Harry’s view, had a lot more dimension?

  Then Miriam Rosen said, “I’ve been watching you for two nights now and I think you’re very courageous.”

  “Because I’m old?” said Harry.

  “No, no, no,” said Miriam Rosen, but the two extra no’s were confirmation that he had read her correctly – and that tore it for Harry.

  He hung around for a while and then said he had to get going, but that if he ever found himself in Guatemala, he would be sure to look up Miriam Rosen. Then he made as graceful an exit as was possible under the circumstances, paying his check and giving a little farewell salute to the bartender. Amazingly, he found the Galant in the public parking lot with little difficulty; then he took a long drive with no particular destination in mind and found himself way out on the Tamiami Trail at four in the morning. He stopped at a topless nightclub, which was empty except for three men in shirt sleeves who were arguing at the bar and ignoring the one dancer who was still working. She had long black hair and good legs, but her jawline was a little off and she did some sudden and erratic moves around a tent pole that Harry found unsettling. When she finished her routine, she approached Harry – who was tapering off with a Molson – and said the place was about to close, but if he was interested, she might be able to squeeze in one last private lap dance. Harry was probably the only one in America who didn’t know the specifics of lap dances, but he felt he needed to get something out of the three nights, so he said fine and followed her to a darkened booth at the rear of the club. She told him to keep one eye out for her boss, which he did, though it wasn’t very relaxing. Then she did the lap dance for Harry, who was surprised at how intimate that type of dance could be. Or maybe they were that way only at closing time in this particular club. Maybe they even called it a “closer.” Before he knew what had happened to him, he was unbuckled and she had swooped down on him with a couple of her sudden, erratic tent pole moves. And then he was back in the Galant, asking himself what kind of serious man allows himself to get lap danced on the Tamiani Trail by a dancer whose jawline is a little off. When he could have been back at the hotel reading Herodotus.

  He was still asking himself that question the next day as he sat on the balcony of his hotel suite thinking that maybe he ought to hop over the railing and bring down the curtain once and for all. There was a fellow who had done just that from a similar balcony two floors above. He had run up debts all over the beach, and the police had come for him and put him in handcuffs; but they had forgotten a
bout his feet, and he was able to break away and make it over the railing. When Harry told Julie about it, she asked: “What happened to him?” That was one of the thousand things he loved about her. She could hear a story like that and think something good had come of it.

  Harry would never go over the railing because of debt. He didn’t love debt, but there was no point to ending your life because of it. Declare bankruptcy in Florida and you’re a hero. They practically run a benefit for you.

  But Harry would do it because of being sixty and walking around with half a rinse and chasing women and not catching them and pissing away three whole days in which he hadn’t even taken his Siege of Malta play out of the Sports Sac, much less begun to thread a Diane Sawyer type through it. (Which, incidentally, was the dumbest idea he had ever heard, even if it meant the play would get done in L.A. and give him a shot at getting back on the radar screen.)

  So Harry clutched the sides of the beach chair, thinking it would anchor him down, which was ridiculous, since it was made of lightweight plastic. And he did not particularly relish the idea of being the first fellow to fly off a balcony holding on to a plastic chair.

  But he could not drive the possibility out of his mind. He even did a dry run in which he imagined himself going over. He actually tried out a little whinnying sound he would make in the process, or maybe whimpering was closer to it – a salute to T.S. Eliot, demonstrating that in his final moment, Harry had not lost touch entirely with his literary concerns.

  Sitting out on the balcony, gripping the arms of the plastic beach chair, Harry tried to push his thoughts in another direction. He had brought a couple of Willa Cather paperbacks out on the ledge with him (suddenly it was a ledge, not a balcony). He tried a few pages of one, but the descriptions of the bleak Nebraska plains – and the unforgiving land – were so desolate they made him feel even worse. So he set the book aside, thinking he had chosen the wrong Cather. Or maybe it was the right Cather, but he had tried it at an inappropriate time. Still, the very thought that there might be a more appropriate time was useful.

  So Willa Cather had helped him out after all, even though, strictly speaking, he had not really plunged into her work.

  The trick, Harry realized, was to get off the balcony and back into the hotel suite. Instead of sitting out there and arm-wrestling with himself. Or arm-wrestling with the fates – that was better. Obviously, he did not do well on balconies. So why sit out on them and try to become brilliant at it.

  The trick was to get back into the hotel suite and get the place neatened up for Julie and Megan. And then take a walk, a simple solution that had always helped. And when he felt better, after the walk, at least take the Siege of Malta play out of the Sports Sac. Or maybe even leave it in the Sports Sac and start something entirely new. Trust his unconscious for a change, the way he did when he was writing his Two Big Pictures. See if it would lead him in a fresh direction – toward something like The War of Jenkins’ Ear, which the L.A. producer might like even more than the Siege of Malta. The title alone would probably attract DeNiro.

  And then try to stay in for at least one night. Watch a biography on Jefferson, someone like that. One that finally brought the man into focus, so you didn’t have to keep hearing about his complexities. And if he had to go out, try to find a place that was a little more seasoned, maybe a steakhouse where there were other sixty-year-old guys with rinses. Miami must be loaded with places like that. And if he absolutely had to go to the other kind of place – the kind that he loved, with the Miriam Rosens and the gorgeous young litigators – see if there was anything legitimately worth exploring. If he came up with something, fine, but don’t force it. And don’t get humiliated so fast over every little setback.

  But first Harry had to get off the balcony – a simple matter for most people, but not for Harry. He got to his feet carefully, keeping his legs bent at the knees, and tried not to stare down at the pavement. He had made that mistake earlier in the day and had seen some tropical trees below and had immediately started wondering if they could break his fall. Even if they could, he’d probably have to get into one of those halo braces designed by the woman he had spent all that time with.

  Harry inched along until he got to the balcony door, which opened toward him, forcing him to step around it in a wide arc and to brush against the railing in order to get into the suite.

  So Harry did all that, and even though he had lost some points – letting the balcony defeat him – he realized that he had probably (always probably, like the O.J. jurors) done the right thing. He poured himself a cup of coffee that he had made from the fresh Colombian beans he had ground himself – to show that, if necessary, he could be self-sufficient. Then he got the peach out of the refrigerator. He had bought it in a kosher store, and he wanted to see what was so special about it. So he bit into the kosher peach, and unless it was his imagination, it was the best peach he had ever tasted. So Harry drank the great coffee and ate the great peach and started to feel better, thinking the last three days were behind him.

  “That’s past,” he said to himself, quoting a friend who appeared to have triumphed over a long illness. When the friend made that statement, he had accompanied it with a shoving motion, as if he were pushing aside a giant carton.

  And it was past until it occurred to Harry that the condo he and Julie had bought on the beach had three balconies – one for every room, which was part of the sales pitch. And Harry had made the down payment before he realized how much trouble he had with balconies. So now he had three of them to worry about – unless he wanted to stay huddled in the middle of the apartment, which obviously defeated the purpose of having a condo in Miami, no matter what they said about getting too much sun.

  Then Harry took hold of himself and decided it was too early to worry about the three balconies. The building was still under construction. All they had built was the lobby and the health club. It would take a year to get to his floor. (To “pour” his floor is the way they put it.) So there was plenty of time. And when he absolutely had to, he would deal with the balconies one at a time. Wasn’t that what life was all about – taking it one balcony at a time?

  If that wasn’t a philosophy, he didn’t know what was.

  Harry would have to remember it, the next time someone suggested that he wasn’t a serious man.

  Mr. Wimbledon

  ONCE MORE, into the country came Siegel, this time to a far-flung village in the Pacific Northwest, one he had flirted with as a vacationing youngster, wondering what it would be like to live there on a year-round basis. He was older, of course, but perhaps more formidable, accompanied as he was by Victoria St. John, who adored him when she could find the time. They rented a cheerful little cottage that may have been a shade too close to the lone Chinese restaurant in the area. Comforting to Siegel, the smell of hot prawns and garlic sauce was less of a treat for Victoria who enjoyed only one or two items on the menu, primarily the Dim Sum Parade. Each day, Siegel sent her out to inspect homes he had no thought of buying; it was his intention to spend a year in the area – playing a little tennis, also wading through dusty volumes in an effort to shore up his knowledge of history, finally bringing such figures as Talleyrand and Clemenceau into focus. He planned to plug up holes in his understanding of young America as well; he had no idea, to his shame, of why Shays – of Shays’ Rebellion – had rebelled or, for that matter, why poor Bleeding Kansas bled.

  But instead of practicing his ground strokes and sailing through Cotton Mather biographies, he found himself distracted by yet another favorite activity – looking for evidence of hostility to the Jews. Thus far, he hadn’t come up with much, a pinched look here, a sidelong glance there. Nonetheless, he pressed on, convinced it was worth the effort.

  After a week, the dry cleaner invited him to a pig roast at the dock. Siegel was about to take offense, then decided it was a friendly gesture, perhaps a tribute to the tremendous bill he and Victoria had racked up in such a short time, truly impressive
for only two people. The grateful dry cleaner had asked Siegel to sit around and partake of a little pig with him. What was wrong with that? And what was Siegel all of a sudden, kosher, with all the spare ribs he had packed away in his time? So he let it pass. Shortly thereafter, a toothless fisherman at the supermarket announced to the checkout line that Walter Winchell had changed his name from Louis Lipschitz.

  “I don’t blame him, do you?” he asked, then narrowed his eyes and scanned the line, as if waiting for a show of hands.

  Siegel prepared to lash out at the man, but held back. Though it had come out of the blue, the question may well have been a legitimate one. Who knows, perhaps it had nagged at the old-timer on the rough seas, while he waited for marlin.

  Should the great columnist, given the time and his choice of profession, have stuck with Lipschitz?

  Siegel, of course, had remained Siegel. He had achievements in bulletproof sportswear. Why credit them to Atkinson or Seville, two of the names he had flirted with? Nonetheless, he felt that Winchell’s choice was defensible. Had there been a vote among the customers, he would have said so boldly. As it was, there was only a generalized chuckling. Siegel fell in with it, an act of mild cowardice, since he didn’t feel that jocular. Then he paid for his chicken breasts and left. Once again, he had found nothing he could hang his hat on.

  Still, he pressed on in his search for behavior that was offensive to the Jews. If he couldn’t find a little, what was the point of being a Jew. Somewhere out there, they didn’t like his people. All he had to do was keep looking and he would be able to prove it.

  In the city, Siegel never thought much about being a Jew. If there was trouble, he could call other Jews. He certainly didn’t make this an issue when it came to dating. A woman could wave a mezuzah in his face and he wouldn’t notice it. It was a woman. That was enough. Beyond the safety of the city’s borders, it was different. Years before, on Maine’s craggy coast, Siegel had lived in another community, shorn of his people. He recalled that in his isolation he felt like a Jew the second he got up in the morning. This was true in bars and restaurants and when he took a leak. In his car he was a Jew. On occasion, he’d affected a folksy exterior; in actuality, he tiptoed along, ready at all times to be unmasked – forced to trade punches in the dirt with the person who had just caught him. He approached strangers with a bluff caution. Nor did he relax when he made friends. Israel might come up, provoking mixed emotions. God forbid, he’d have to take a stand. On several occasions, he’d made a study of the country’s origins and legal right to exist. But the codicils and the Balfour Declaration kept fading on him. He’d read somewhere that London was a swamp when the Jews were in Palestine.