A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  “Well, how many times have you gone?”

  “Just once. I don’t know if I’ll go back.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. The one thing he was very big on was what do I want. I mean, not what’s good for Georgie or the kids, but me.”

  “Yeah, and what did you say?”

  “I said I didn’t know,” I answer, and then I realize I’ve got my fingers working at my hair, just what she’s always bitched about. I stop. “I told him I’m a little confused right now. That’s true too. I’m kind of on overload—all the shit that went on at The Cross, the Justie thing, now this with Georgie. Sometimes I think I want to just chuck it all. Just say fuck it, and so long, everybody. But the thing is, I like what I do. Or what I did. Maybe I shut my eyes to a lot of stuff, okay. You do what you have to do. And it wasn’t the money either. So you buy a better car once or twice, but how often can you do that? As far as that goes, I made it; she spent it. But I liked it. Liked the action. And all the people she’s always dumped on—I don’t mean Gamble, people like that, but my customers—I liked them. I don’t mean I loved them necessarily, as individuals, but I liked them. And taking care of them, schmoozing them? Making them a buck, and The Cross, me too? And the trainees I was bringing along, all the kids in the Aquarium?”

  “You’re good at it too,” Joe says.

  “I don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no. I—”

  “Come on, Bear, don’t say that. You’re goddamn good at it. You’re the goddamn best!”

  “Well, okay. At least I was.”

  “Why was? Are you telling me you’re all washed up?”

  “Well, I’m almost thirty-six. And right now, I’m pretty tarnished goods. Who’s going to hire me?”

  “And I say that’s so much bullshit. The business is going to turn around, you know that as well as I do, and the minute it does, a guy like you’ll be in a position to name your fucking ticket. And meanwhile, the deal you made, who’s going to starve? Answer me that, Bear. Whatever happens between you and Georgie, who’s going to starve?”

  He’s staring at me, eyebrows furrowed in a kind of straight line across his brow. Georgie, before she declared him Public Enemy Number One, or Two, always talked about how intense he was. I guess that’s the word for it.

  “Thank you, Runt,” I say, meaning it. “When the day comes, maybe I’d better take you on as my agent.”

  “You got it, babe,” says Penzil. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  I walk him back to his building. We were about the last ones out of the restaurant, and down in the street, it’s all cold wind and shadows, but still we keep on talking on the sidewalk. He tells me the gossip about The Cross. Apparently the deal is going through—that much has been in the papers—and Gamble, though it hasn’t been announced yet, is staying on as CEO under the new ownership. According to Penzil, the Brits made him some humongous offer.

  Well, good for the Great White. I wonder if he’s told them yet about my gray accounts.

  Look, I may be obtuse some of the time, but I’m not a total asshole. In a sense, Georgie’s not wrong. They did, as the Runt said, “exploit” my situation, and he helped them, and maybe, although he denies it, he let drop stuff he shouldn’t have about what I was up to. The shrink seemed surprised—though you never know with those guys—that I don’t feel any great resentment toward him. Maybe a twinge, sure, but you’ve got to keep moving forward. What was it Satchel Paige said? Don’t look back, they may be gaining on you?

  The trouble with shrinks, and I said this to the guy, is that they get you chewing over the past so much that you practically have to stop living.

  Anyway, I feel pretty much the same way about Penzil’s news. He waits till we’re down in the street to tell me. He’s making partner at Lambert Laughin Spain, almost a year ahead of schedule.

  “Jesus, Runt,” I tell him, “that’s great. It’s fucking fabulous.”

  “Well, at least it means I’ll get my name on the stationery.”

  “That and a piece of the pie,” I say.

  “Some pie,” he grumbles. “The only lawyers making a buck this year are the bankruptcy guys.”

  “Come on, Runt,” I needle him. “The Penzil family’s not about to starve either.”

  “True,” he says. Then, looking up at me, “I’ve got you to thank for it too, Bear.”

  “Me? How do you mean?”

  He’s got this sly crinkle around his eyes.

  “I sure as shit shouldn’t tell you this, old buddy, but that whole business with Leon and Frank? The Sunday I got called up to see Leon? The truth is that I didn’t want to touch it, not with a ten-foot pole. I told him, ‘Look, Larry Coffey’s my friend, I’m not doing anything that’s going to hurt him.’ It took some tall convincing for me to believe that your best interests were at stake. Along the way, though, I managed to score some points for myself.”

  “You mean you cut a deal of your own?”

  “More or less.”

  “On the spot? With Mark?”

  “That’s right. No hard feelings, I hope?”

  Maybe a twinge, nothing more. Okay, maybe I’m a little pissed, but he’s still my friend.

  “No hard feelings, Runt,” I answer. “You do what you have to do,” and if Georgie can’t accept that, well, I guess that’s baseball.

  I call Georgie.

  It’s the same night, and I’ve just done something a little crazy—thanks, in part, to the Runt. The shrink too, maybe. I mean, while the Runt and I stood on the sidewalk this afternoon, shooting the shit, I said that, even with his partnership and me with my eight-year cushion, we were still a pair of bongo players compared to Gamble, Holbrook, and Spain. And he said sure we were, by comparison, but they were all guys in their fifties. Mark Spain was even talking about retirement. Just give us another ten years, he said, and we’d be the high rollers while they were off in the Caribbean playing shuffleboard.

  I guess I believed him. Wanted to, anyway. Enough to do something a little crazy.

  Not that I tell Georgie.

  I say, “Look, I’d like to see you tomorrow.”

  She answers, “Well, you’re going to, aren’t you? Aren’t you coming for Justin?”

  In fact, I’ve half-forgotten. When you’re living the way I do, the days kind of meld together.

  “Sure,” I say, recovering, “but I mean without the kids. I’d like us to spend a little bit of time together. Either before or after Justie.”

  She’s evasive.

  “That’s hard for me. I do have the children. Isn’t it something we can talk about on the phone?”

  “I’d rather not,” I say. “Can’t you get somebody to deal with them for a little while? It won’t take long.”

  She’s noncommittal, says she’ll try but she can’t promise. In any case, it’d be after, not before.

  “Either way,” I say, “but it’s kind of important to me.”

  “I’ll try,” she repeats.

  9 February

  It’s funny. Even before I actually left, Saturdays somehow became mine with Justie. I don’t remember our talking about it, Georgie and me, it just sort of happened—a kind of grim preview, I guess, of the divorced daddies we used to joke about, weekends, when we still lived in the city. As far as I’m concerned right now, it could be any day of the week, or more than one, but Saturdays it is. I try to do special things with him—not so easy with a three-and-a-half-year-old kid who doesn’t seem to much care where he is and whose mother is scared to death I’m somehow going to lose him. We’ve been to the flicks. Once I got a pair of tickets to a day game at the Garden (she bitched about that), but it didn’t interest him and we left early. Last week I drove him in to the new Central Park Zoo and we froze our nuts off. This week, though, I’ve got nothing planned.

  Saturday morning. I take the PATH to Hoboken, which (part of the New Economics) is where I now park the car. I head west. I’m all revved up, and I keep running it throug
h my head, all the things I’m going to say to her, but when I get to St. George, even though I know exactly where I’m going, it all seems foreign to me, and so, weirdly, does the house.

  I don’t get it. After how many years, and I’ve been gone less than two weeks?

  And then I do get it, at the last second, rolling up under the porte-cochère. It’s that I feel like a fumbling high school kid. Because of Georgie. Because of what I’ve got in my pocket.

  And there she is at the door. With Justie, all ready in what looks like a new snow jacket and a wool cap that half hides his face.

  “Lynne’s coming out later,” Georgie says, holding onto Justie’s shoulders. A bad omen, I think—Lynne Snyder’s an old feminist buddy of Georgie’s, and no great fan of mine—but what the hell. “She’s taking the three o’clock bus, and she’ll take care of the children. So, say anytime after four?”

  She hands me the keys to the Volvo, which has Justie’s seat in back, and I’m about to drive off when she calls after us from the front porch: “You forgot to tell me where you’re going!”

  Another Saturday ritual.

  I roll down the window.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “We’re going out to lunch, and then we’ll play it by ear.”

  She frowns.

  “Please be careful,” she says.

  Much as I hate to say it, it’s torture. We go to one of those big highway diners which, outside the Spaniards and the Portuguese in Newark, are about the only honest restaurants in north Jersey. I order Justie what he says he wants: a cheese omelet and french fries, but he only pokes at the food. Ditto ice cream for dessert. We’re finished at twelve forty-five, even though I try to stretch it out. I buy a couple of bucks in quarters—there are arcade machines in the entranceway—and I pick him up to play, but he’s gunned down in a hurry the first couple of times, Game Over, and he loses interest. Too young, I guess.

  I’ve bought a Star-Ledger and combed the movie entries, but I can’t find anything that’s likely to appeal to a three-and-a-half-year-old. Or, for that matter, a thirty-five-and-a-half-year-old either.

  “Well, we’re sort of stuck, Justie, old man,” I tell him, but he doesn’t seem to care, one way or the other. It’s not that he’s sullen exactly, but there’s little eye contact, and he makes it pretty clear that, as far as he’s concerned, we’re only marking time.

  We’re back in the Volvo, Justie behind, me in front. Fuck it, I say to myself, what do weekend fathers do in New Jersey? With kids who’d rather be someplace else? I think of a mall. Then I think if Georgie ever found out I took him to a mall, any mall, she’d shoot me in cold blood.

  In the end, we drive around, more or less. There’s a great tropical fish store on Route 46 in Clifton that’s almost like an aquarium, and I take him there to look at the fish. It’s jammed on Saturday and steamy, but I pick him up in my arms and walk him around, eyeball to eyeball with some pretty weird species in Day-Glo colors, some of which cost in the hundreds of dollars. We manage to kill the better part of an hour that way. Then I find a couple of free-standing toy stores where we work the aisles. The only thing that catches his attention, in one of them, is a low-slung remote-controlled car that looks like something out of Buck Rogers. I show him how it works, in the aisle, but he has trouble manipulating the controls. Still, he says he wants it. I buy it for him. Batteries not included. I remember Georgie saying something about battery-operated toys, at his age. I think she’s against them. Too bad. I buy the batteries too.

  I offer to stop in St. George for ice cream, even though it’s February. He doesn’t want any. Neither do I. Popcorn? No. A bag of mixed nuts? No. A soda? No. Doesn’t he have to go to the bathroom? Nyet.

  We’re home at four on the dot, actually three fifty-five on the dashboard clock.

  I suggest to Georgie that we go out. We could just go into town, have a drink at one of the saloons.

  “Neutral turf,” I say jokingly.

  But she doesn’t want to. She says it’s because she doesn’t want to leave Lynne alone with the children. She says if I want a drink, I should just help myself.

  It’s all wrong, I can feel it in my gut. The whole damn place feels alien to me, even though I paid for it. Lynne has gone upstairs with Zoe and Justie—that’s a plus, but it also leaves us standing together like two strangers.

  We end up in the kitchen. She’s got something in the oven—smells like chicken roasting, or turkey.

  “Please,” I say, “let’s at least sit down a minute.”

  We sit on stools. I reach into my jacket pocket, just to make sure it’s still there. It is.

  “Look, honey,” I start, then try to censor the “honey.” “Georgie,” I begin again, “I’ve thought a lot about everything you said, believe me. For the first time in years, I’ve had a little time to think, take stock. A kind of personal inventory. Who was it who did that? Buckminster Fuller, wasn’t it?”

  When I was at Dartmouth, Buckminster Fuller was still a kind of legend. The wise guys called him Bucky.

  “Maybe in that sense,” I say, “what happened to us isn’t all bad.”

  My voice sounds hollow though, a little preachy, and she’s not much help. She’s listening all right, but the expression on her face is like she’s expecting me to trip over my own feet any second. Then, excusing herself, she has to baste at the oven, with one of those plastic tubes with the rubber bulb.

  I watch her bending over, ass up. Still looks pretty damned good, for the mother of two.

  She sits down again.

  “Look, honey,” I start again, “I may not be the most introspective guy in the world, but a lot of what you had to say sounds right to me. I mean, your criticisms of me. On the one hand, I am what I am. On the other, that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of changing. Maybe it took—”

  “For God’s sake, Larry,” she breaks in, “you don’t have to apologize for yourself. Not to me.”

  “Well, maybe I do. The thing is, I heard you, Georgie, I really did. You blew the whistle. For a long time, I’d just been going along, doing stuff like I always had. I mean, without stepping back and taking a hard look. But then the Justie thing happened, and it hit me just as hard as it did you. I found myself in a kind of trap, but I kept thinking: The only thing that matters is getting him back. So maybe I did some stuff I shouldn’t have, wouldn’t have otherwise, but at least I did it with good intentions.”

  I’ve wandered off from my prepared script. I was leading up to going to the shrink, but now I don’t even remember what I’m supposed to say next. The worst part is that she’s just sitting there, looking up at me, and I’m not getting any signals one way or the other. I feel like saying, Oh, fuck it, honey, I still love you, something like that, taking her into my arms, but something’s telling me that would really blow it.

  Now I realize I’m futzing at my hair, and that she notices it.

  I stop.

  I go on. I remind her of that TV flick we saw once—The Day After the War, something like that. What it would be like after the bombs have fallen. I thought it was pretty powerful, Georgie didn’t. Anyway, I tell her, we’ve had our bombs fall, but when it’s all over, we’re still intact, our little family. Maybe she’s worried about Justie right now, but he’ll straighten out. And Zoe’s cute as a button. And she and I are still young, we’ve got our resources. Yeah, it’s true, I’m out of a job right now, a real one anyway, but things are going to turn around for me, and, for once, I’m going to take the time to figure out what it really is I want to do.

  I think: plus we’ve got eight years’ worth of cushion, that’s not nothing, but I stop myself short of saying it.

  She interrupts me anyway. All of a sudden she’s on her feet, hand raised like a stop sign, and listening at the back stairs that go up to the second floor.

  Listening to what?

  “I’m sorry,” she says with a sigh, coming back to the counter. “I thought I heard Zoe crying. Please go on.”

  G
o on? But I feel like I’m almost done!

  Damn! Her saying nothing has thrown me totally. I feel like I’m slogging along in mud up to my knees, and thinking that thought, damn if I don’t catch my hand on its way up to my scalp again.

  Okay, Georgie, I’ll slog along.

  “All I want to say is that I want us to start over again. The war is over, it’s the day after. It’s like it’s a whole new … well, a whole new season. It’s like—I know this is going to sound funny to you, Georgie, but I feel like I want to ask you to marry me.”

  When I rehearsed it, I thought she’d laugh at this, but all I get is a faint smile. Kind of a sad smile. But nothing more, no signals, and suddenly I think: What are you doing, you dumb bastard, can’t you see it written on her face? But I can’t stop now, even with my stomach starting to twist up.

  “I guess that’s what I’m doing, Georgie,” I say, standing. “I’m asking you to marry me. All over again.” At the same time I’m fumbling in my blazer pocket. “At the same time,” I say, “I did something a little crazy.” I fish out the oblong box, gift-wrapped by the store in silver paper with a silver rose attached to it. “I bought you something. I picked it out by myself, and if you don’t like it, you can always exchange it. I thought it would go with a lot of your clothes.”

  I hand her the package. She holds it in silence, head bent over it so all I can see is her curly hair.

  “Go on, Georgie,” I say, “open it. It’s for you.”

  It’s the first time I ever bought her jewelry by myself. A few times I’ve been with her, but she’s always done the choosing. And this is big time, Fifth Avenue, ten grand plus tax on the Gold Card.

  So much for the New Economics.

  She opens it. There’s one of those black velvet cases inside the silver paper. She opens the case. Somehow it seems smaller to me now. It’s a diamond choker, set in gold. The saleswoman who helped me looked a little like Georgie, and when she tried it on in the store, I thought it looked great.

  Now I think it’s all wrong. She doesn’t even have to say it. Shit, I wish to hell I’d never taken the box out, wish to hell I’d never bought it. I wish to hell …