Carnovsky's Retreat

by Larry Duberstein

  “Last day tomorrow!” (Was my opening line.)

  “I hope not. You make it sound like the end of the world. It’s the first day of the school year, that’s all, on Monday. I’ll be back home to visit in less than a month, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I’m not traveling to the Aleutian Islands or anything. I’ll get back to New York for a weekend in October, and for Thanksgiving. And Christmas.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “What? Did you think we would never see each other again, or something like that?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “What a strange attitude. We’re friends.”

  “May it be so.”

  “So?”

  “So, dear Caddy, you are going and you will be gone. Summer camp is over and next comes the rest of your life.”

  I lost my momentum here, however. It was true I counted down, ten nine eight seven six, and expected the world to end at zero. I forgot it wasn’t a game we were playing, but life. Which goes on and on. So I wavered. But prevailed over my weak character with the argument that a decision was taken and it was a brilliant one (in my opinion at the time) and so I went ahead with my plan.

  “What does it mean to you, Caddy, to be friends with a man.”

  “Depends on the man. You mean yourself?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fun, good company, sharing time and experiences. With you it’s more fun for me, because you have had more time and experiences to share.”

  “In that case the best man to marry would be a Methuselah. A relic, who saw the Flood.”

  “I never said anything about marrying. Except that I once told you I wouldn’t. We were talking about friendship. What does it mean to you, Oscar? That’s what I’d like to know. You’re so obsessed with our age difference. That’s why I know you must think in terms of a sexual relationship.”

  Such a bluntness—and entirely correct of course. If you don’t think sexual, you don’t think mismatch. Just play with a free hand and enjoy it.

  “Good, I confess. I would like to have a relationship of that kind, with you—but only once.”

  “One time? You mean like one hour, total?”

  “One hour, half-an-hour, I don’t know. Whatever it takes. We get rid of it, get it out of our systems, and then resume a friendship. Can you see the reasons behind it?”

  “But why once? I guess I can’t see them, no. If you want a sexual relationship, purely for sex, why would you expect the first time to be any good? What if it was just scary, nervous, or ridiculous in some way. What if the earth didn’t move?”

  “You speak from experience.”

  “Not very much. I speak mostly from intuition and common sense, plus a little experience. You have to be comfortable.”

  “So then. You are not interested in my proposal?”

  “In the one-shot plan? Not for my sake, no. It sounds like the old conquest ritual. A score, you know.”

  “Oh but not at all. My respect for you is enormous—”

  “I know that, Oscar.”

  “I am clumsy, I realize, and this is foolish the way I present it. I am only trying to be honest with you, in your own style of directness. I have considered the matter a great deal and I reached the conclusion. To be with you once, in reality, will free me from the dream of being with you. You see, I cannot explain it. Not right now, maybe in a minute.”

  “No, I get it. It isn’t such a crazy idea, either. And even if I’m not interested in it for my own sake, I would do it if you think it is absolutely important to you. Why not?”

  “What? You would do this?”

  “I don’t mind. I am fond of you.”

  “But it isn’t horrible? Grotesque?”

  “Not that at all. It’s just sex. Something a person will do, with other people, a certain amount. Which is not to say I would do it with anyone. Far from it.”

  “You would do it for me, however. Not for your sake or for our sake.”

  “For you. That’s right.”

  “As a favor.”

  “I am fond, very much so, but not exactly in that way. So yes—for you, as a favor. As in the old expression, granting sexual favors, I suppose.”

  “Caddy, this is not the way I expected our Big Talk to go.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “That you would laugh at me and say no. And then I would lie and pretend I wasn’t being serious. And you would know I was lying.”

  “Is that what you wanted me to say?”

  “No. I wanted to be with you, one time. That’s what I wanted. But you make it sound silly.”

  “It is silly.”

  “Yet you would do it—for me.”

  “I said so.”

  Started a temperature on Friday night and by next morning I felt like a rotting cheese. At first I thought it was emotional, and would subside if I slept. So I did and woke up 102. Left alone with my thoughts, by Caddy, and I was too sick to think them.

  You can ignore a broken bone, or a cold in your nose, but fever is tough. Fever ignores all protest. And I am a man who has had few illnesses yet has always known how to take his illness seriously. Lying in a room with fever, I am easily convinced I’m in my death throes. Even as a boy this was true of me. It was never I will regain my strength tomorrow and run out to play with the Sondsheim Twins. Always—It’s over, I am sinking fast, better bring me in the ginger-ale quick.

  Heaven can wait, however. Ginger-ale did the trick again, along with thirty hours sleep. So tonight I’m good and will work tomorrow, and as for my thoughts I feel no urge to hurry. Such an issue could not be decided on the spot, at least not decided in the positive, and yet I can feel that something’s gained. It’s a giant step forward to have spoken my piece and not only that, to have Caddy reply, Fine by me. It’s like a winning ticket in your vest pocket—you know you can cash it anytime.

  Kiss goodbye to Caddy on Friday, kiss goodbye to my friend the fever today and enter this resolve tonight—I will let it sit one week. Let it percolate. And then I will call a meeting to discuss the particulars, me myself and I.

  Back to the club after my weekend of unmitigated misery and the boys thought I was out living the high life. When I called in sick both days they were sure they had me dead to rights on the Mann Act, fleeing across state lines. One thing—my reputation as a ladies’ man is safe with these two.

  “Surprised you came back,” says Wiley.

  “Yes,” says the Duke of Kent, “We thought you found a new niche in life.”

  Naturally I issued a denial across the board, but a denial in the face of these guys is like a losing parimutuel slip on a windy day. The unvarnished fact is I took sick. I never ran off and would not do so if invited—I have a job here. I also had 102.5 Fahrenheit on Saturday and no papers to prove it.

  “So what if she could be your grand-daughter,” consoles Wiley, “as long as she isn’t.”

  No alternative but to take it on the chin, keep a dignified face on, jump into my livery and get to work. They’ll get over it on their own.

  The place Caddy has gone, called Swarthmore, I never even heard of. Why not Harvard Yale, I asked her, and she replies this place is even better! I will check it out when I get up to the library—wherever she goes it ought to be the best.

  In the meantime it is as she predicted, life goes ahead and as a matter of fact goes very nicely. There is a little trick in the air that makes me feel younger (or maybe it was losing five pounds in bed with fever)—something special. It’s a Munich Oktoberfest air, the top of the line. Not that I’m crazy to be young again. I would just as soon stick.

  According to The Post it’s about time to be putting shoe polish on my hair, to battle the “autumnal gray.” No thanks. My grandfather’s hair was snow-white and soft, like goose-down, at the age of twenty-eight and he never put shoe polish. His went white all at once, overnight, when he lost a baby. (Born dead.) A sensitive man, I’m sure, and such things can
occur. Glimpse a ghost and your hair stands up straight as a picket fence.

  Regardless, I didn’t wake up with white hair when Caddy Moore vanished from my sight. I just got sick, from something I ate at the Horn and Hardart. I can’t say I’m happy that she is in the state of Pennsylvania—just happy to be alive, to be myself exactly and no one else. Say it’s the “autumnal air” but I also know my mental health is unshakable. I have proof.

  Because it was trash day here and I came back from breakfast to put out my bags. Just as I am squashing my contribution down into the barrel, my instinct alerts me—air raid! Sure enough, there is my friend the halfwit up in his windowframe with a nice ripe bag on the launching pad.

  “Hold your fire! Listen, can’t you walk? You have no legs up there?”

  I hope he has legs. The minute I spouted it out, occurred to me for the first time that maybe he has not. Would they put a disabled war veteran on the fourth floor? The day we had a small fire at the house, this piece of work never appeared on the street.

  Legs or no legs, he thinks I am a real comic. Up there laughing at me, so I take another crack at it. “You aren’t as accurate as you think, with your potshots. And what about the rest of us.” Laughs again and sends the slop. His bag tears apart and out rolls the ripe salami, egg-shells, tin cans of tuna—all the usual fare. The man is a nut, a loobie. He is a character not subject to Robert’s Rules of Order.

  And what do I do? Do I rant and rave and call the cops? Not me, I pick up after him. Figuring it’s like the people on relief. Some cannot feed themselves, so we do it. Others feed themselves all right, but can’t manage to clean up afterwards. So we do it.

  Such is the state of my mental health, that nothing can shake me. I am on the upswing, a philosopher of the city streets. Throw your garbage at me, what the hell, I’ll tidy it up. Leave me ten cents tip on a $25 tab, it’s no big deal, life goes ahead.

  Could be an error, no doubt, the tip. One of those slobs who leaves a puddle of cash on the table. Wiley calls these your trick-or-treat tippers because you never know, it could be good. Sorted out by Sid at the bar, however, the overage on this one was one thin dime. I thought Sidney would weep.

  I had no choice but to console him. It’s really no problem, I said, my pockets are overflowing with money, I hit the Double pretty big today.

  A white lie, and he probably knows I never bet the Double. I could say to him “I don’t need it,” but Sid understands “I got it” much better. I don’t need it, means nothing to him.

  Yet another perfect morning. Shirts to Wing Wang, fish breakfast too good to be true, and no one I know in the obituaries. Air so sweet you could breakfast on that, if you were some kind of poet.

  Feeling sensational and at the same time still sticking to my deal—don’t even examine emotions until Caddy is absent one full week. Not that I need an analysis to know what I feel. I’m as happy as a colt in an April meadow in old Kentucky. The question is why.

  A piece of mail from Linda this morning and a nice surprise too. When I saw it I concluded at once a wedding invitation and I was right with Eversharp. She invites her old friend Oscar, her favorite schnorer, to come snore at her wedding to the butcher’s boy. Mentions her lovely summer, two weeks at the Delaware shore with her girlfriend, and now the new school year etcetera. And that’s all she wrote—just a friendly note of hello, keeping in touch.

  I like this note a lot. Makes me feel much better about our whole business. We cleared a way for friendship. Doing it more than once, yes, but only the first time counted, in my book.

  A week expired and I went to examine my emotions. The first thing, of the first importance to me, is to know was she being truthful, was she truly willing. A girl is no guinea-pig, and least of all this girl—but was she truthful? She knows me, after all, and could know that a Yes would make the matter more clear to me than a No. No only makes you wish for Yes, whereas Yes can make you think again.

  I believe in her sincerity. No one told her she was required to care about me, or what my private preferences might be. So what if I hoped for a Yes? A girl like that, there will be a line around the block, stretching twenty thirty years at least, of those who would love to hear Yes. Doesn’t mean she has an obligation to worry about it and smooth all the feathers. She must care, personally.

  And I know she doesn’t fib. What do I know about her any better than that? It’s not her way. She likes to be direct and what could be more so than to acknowledge she does not want to do it, yet will for my sake? It is silly, she says, but still it is all up to you. How could that be a lie?

  The decision is clear. It’s not a lie or a trick, yet by making it possible to be in bed with her, she made it impossible. She showed how wrong it was. Not wrong because of anyone’s birthday or his social background, wrong because it’s contrived. It didn’t happen. If it should have happened, it would have. It still could, in theory, only it won’t since there is nobody now who wants it to happen.

  So what becomes of my crush? Caddy is more lovely in my eyes than ever. Such a caring heart, and I have nothing but praise and adoration for her and now she is again among the missing just as she was in August when my heart swung like a boulder inside my chest, and bruised and ached, and so I ask why does it not ache now? Why do I feel lighthearted and happy, if I agree to leave her be? And I do not know the answer, it’s that simple. I haven’t got a clue.

  Changed my mind tonight. It’s a good thing I didn’t fire off a telegram to Pennsylvania cancelling my order. As far as she knows I took it under advisement and I’m still advising. True enough—tonight’s advice is forget last night’s advice, it was bad.

  What’s the argument for suffering a loss like that, when you could instead just go have it. And what nice it would be. Sure she voted 51% and not 99.9, but 51% is all it takes in a democracy. Say Ehrlich calls in an order for fifty cases of Lowenbrau—do you send him away if he lets slip that he almost didn’t call this week? Certainly not. You ship him the beer fast, before he changes his mind.

  What leads me astray on the subject of sex is logic. You try to be logical and to understand. What’s the big deal, you say, everyone is naked inside their clothes—as though that makes it null and void. Or when I dreamed my bare girl on the windowsill and awoke thinking okay that’s good enough, because you know what it looks like even without seeing.

  It’s not the same. You cannot be logical on the subject of sex—that’s the whole point. It is not a logical subject and if it was no one would bother with it. If you saw yourself in the mirror, doing it, would you expect it to make any sense or to look good? It isn’t even emotional, it’s physical, like hunger. You might not enjoy watching yourself eat in the mirror either, but do you weigh the pros and cons of your daily bread?

  With sex you try to figure the angles, make decisions, and they don’t work. You try to get on top of it and can’t—it gets on top of you. Does what it does and that’s that. So you can forget logic. Flesh has a different reality when it is in the flesh, even if it shouldn’t.

  Witnessed the return of Billy the Roof today, his first visit to the racetrack in a year. He was out of town, starting a new life, as in the gospel according to Caddy Moore. They trained him to run a machine that prints a circuit, something new he says and I didn’t catch the details. Free training in exchange for a minimum of two years on the job. Unfortunately Billy does not like the work now, finds himself sitting in a basement room in Yonkers all day.

  “At least it’s not the Roof.”

  “Hell no,” he says, “it’s the fucking basement.”

  “Only at first, maybe. You work your way upstairs.”

  “I can’t see taking two years of it, Oscar. No way.”

  I looked at him and I saw a criminal. Cannot explain this, but I saw a man who was once a criminal, forgot about it, and must very soon begin to consider that option in life again. And really it is to his credit he didn’t think of it first, instead of this job in the basement.

&nbs
p; “View it as security. People are losing their jobs every day, there’s a recession they say. And you can’t.”

  “Too bad! But tell me about yourself, Oscar. You were getting out of the beer business as I recall.”

  I told him my life as a waiter, so that he could join in the chorus and tell me I am too good for such undignified labor. He just nodded his head, however, and smiled his old blond-haired smile—the one that kept me from ever suspecting he hated the Roof. Maybe anything sounded good to him at this point.

  “Well anyway it’s great to be back here on a day like this. Like old times. I feel the best I’ve felt in years, right this very minute, I mean.”

  “Me too, Billy. It’s the air.”

  “I told them I had The Flu. To get out of working today. You get it?”

  I got it after he told me. Asian Flu is going to the post today in the third and Billy will take a ticket on him for the sake of honor, so he can truthfully say “I had The Flu” this after. So you can tell a white truth as well as a white lie in this life.

  Billy of course may just be a sourball, who doesn’t like it whatever he does. Could be he was spoiled by the life of crime, big money for short hours. In fact yes—that’s what he looks for at the racetrack too. In any case I wished him well and gave him Big Sir in the fifth on condition he keep it under his hat. It’s easy to start a run out here, as always everyone has an eye and an ear on everyone else.

  I am getting to be a regular on the Staten Island Ferry, I just don’t keep regular hours. I commute without working, so for this one passenger it’s a cruise—neverending luxury cruise. I step off the boat briefly, in accordance with the rules, then hop right back on return trip. Costs me nothing really, to ride the waves all I like, whereas to put a boat on the water myself would cost a small fortune and provide headaches galore.

  My boat is on the water already, fully insured. When I want to go out in it, I go, and someone else gasses it up. My private captain keeps an eye out for small craft and there is a bar if I wish to have a drink on deck. You can’t beat this arrangement. Some men like to fish from a boat and you cannot cast a line from the Staten Island Ferry, but I am not one of those men—a Fulton Street fisherman strictly.