The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Sure,” he said, and then, after a pause, “Got something I can write it on?”

  “Aren’t celebrities supposed to supply their own pencil and paper? I got nothing to write on in here.”

  “Here,” Alex said, a little crossly, opening the glove compartment and fishing out the ballpoint pen and pad of note paper that he always carried there. “Use this,” she said, passing the writing utensils to him.

  He scribbled his signature on the pad, and handed the sheet of paper to the woman.

  “My sister-in-law Lucille still won’t believe it. Put the date on it to prove it.”

  “Let’s see. Today’s date is—”

  “June twenty-third,” Alex said, still crossly.

  “And up there, on the top of the page, write ‘To Marsha Bernice Apfelbaum, toll attendant, booth four, Queens-Midtown Tunnel, New York Bridge and Tunnel Authority.’ No, no—it’s M-A-R-S-H-A,” she said, seeing that he had spelled it “Marcia.” “No, you better start the whole thing over. Lucille will never believe you’re who you are with my name spelled wrong.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Alex said.

  The woman in the harlequin glasses scrutinized the redone autograph. “No, it’s Apfelbaum, not Applebaum,” she said. “There’s an ‘f’ goes there, not a ‘p.’ Can you draw that second ‘p’ better, so it looks like an ‘f’? Put a little tail on it.”

  “Oh, eff you,” Alex whispered.

  “There, that’s more like it,” said the woman, examining the final work. “Now you’ve finally got it right. Now tell me something, now I’ve got you here. You know Johnny Carson? What’s he really like? Is he as funny off the television as he is on?”

  “Wrong coast, wrong network,” he said with a smile.

  “Why’s he keep having all those wives, I wonder?”

  Still smiling, he said, “Have to ask him.”

  “Just thought I’d ask. Well, you have a nice day, Mel, you hear me? And I’ll tell Lucille you said hi.”

  “You do that,” he said.

  “Say—is that a dog you got back there?” she said, peering into the car for a closer look.

  “No, it’s a fur lap robe,” Alex said.

  “What’s its name?”

  “Pudd’n Tane,” said Alex.

  “Is she a boy or a girl?”

  Alex leaned across Mel’s knees. “May we please have our change?” she said.

  “Yipes! I almost forgot,” she said. “What’d I do with it? Didn’t I give it to you?”

  “I saw you put it back in your drawer when you were getting his autograph,” Alex said.

  “Did I? You gave me a ten—right? Here you go—seven fifty.”

  “We gave you a twenty,” Alex said.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “You gave me a ten,” she said.

  “Look,” Mel said pleasantly, “I gave you a twenty, but it doesn’t matter. If your drawer is ten dollars over at the end of your shift, you’ll know who it belongs to. You can send it to me at the station.”

  “You gave me a ten,” she said. “You rich celebrities are all alike. You’re always trying to jew people out of money. If my drawer’s short, it comes out of my pay. Ten dollars is nothing to you. To me, it’s dinner.”

  “Mel, let’s get out of here,” Alex said.

  “Who’s she?” the woman said, glaring at Alex. “I never seen her on TV. It’s you I’m talking to, not her. Don’t look at me, bitch!”

  “If you’ll please raise your gate, we’ll be on our way,” he said.

  “Rich celebrities! All alike! Don’t give a rat’s rear end about the little guy who has to work for a living!”

  But the barrier gate went up, and Mel gunned the engine, and they were through.

  “Good heavens!” Alex said, sinking back into the bucket seat.

  He was humming a little tuneless tune, toot-toot-te-toot-te-toot, as they moved out onto the elevated section of the expressway. The experience with the toll collector seemed to have left him unperturbed, but for Alex, at least, the episode had taken some of the buoyancy out of her mood, and some of the splendor out of the day. Why did she resent intrusions like these? They happened often when she was out in public with him. Certainly it was not jealousy. The editor of a fashion magazine—even a fashion magazine that has just achieved a circulation of five million—did not expect her face to be recognized instantly, except in certain professional circles, and certainly not by a woman collecting tolls at the Midtown Tunnel. He, on the other hand, was a news anchorman whose face came into the homes of millions, night after night. He was a genuine media star. She should not resent that, and yet she did, in a funny way, and she resented her own resentment. Her resentment was ill-placed, illogical, and unbecoming.

  “Well,” she said at last, “I’m sure her sister-in-law Lucille still isn’t going to believe her.” But the remark wasn’t funny, and she added, “Thank God that’s the last tollbooth.” And then, “Jackie always uses the exact-change lanes.”

  “Jackie?”

  “Onassis. When she takes her car to New Jersey, she always uses an exact-change lane. She has one of those little change-gun gizmos that you load with quarters. You shoot the quarters—ping, ping, ping—into the hopper. If she didn’t have that, toll collectors would be asking for her autograph all the time. I’ll get you one for your birthday.”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t mind,” he said. “It probably made old Marsha’s day. Besides, she didn’t have anything else to do. As you can see, there’s no traffic to speak of. She just wanted somebody to shoot the breeze with. Boring job.”

  “Perfect job for a sociopath,” she said.

  And that was another thing she tended to forget. He enjoyed his celebrity. He loved being famous, loved being recognized by all sorts of unlikely people. That was why, even when the fans turned ugly, as they occasionally did, he didn’t really mind. The certain perils of celebrity didn’t worry him. He never worried that what had happened to Jack and Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon could happen to him.

  So—why shouldn’t he enjoy his fame? He had worked hard enough to gain it, that recognition. He had told her all about the early days. His was an almost classic, almost Horatio Alger, American success story—the poor Jewish boy, a tailor’s son, who from the time he reached high school was determined to rid himself of his Brooklyn accent. He practiced speaking with marbles in his mouth, practiced with a pencil clenched between his teeth, practiced with a tape-recorder, playing his voice back to monitor his progress, practiced speaking into a mirror to be sure the face muscles worked right, practiced by watching old movies and imitating the way the actors spoke. Practice, practice, practice, until he was perfect. What he wanted was an accent that was a kind of cross between Cary Grant’s and Jimmy Stewart’s—Ivy League, but with a down-homey flavor. The best American accents for the airwaves, he had told her, came either—with much fixing—out of the Deep South, or from Nebraska. Nebraska? How had he learned this? Johnny Carson was from Nebraska. So was Dick Cavett. So were Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando, and many other distinguished voices of the stage and screen. The Nebraska accent, he explained, came closest to what linguists called Standard American Diction. And, in the end, Mel had mastered the kind of speech he wanted for himself: Cary Grant cum Jimmy Stewart. And with it had come his spectacular glass house in Sagaponack, where they were headed now, and the equally spectacular town house on Beekman Place, and the red BMW named Scarlett O’Hara, and a contract that paid two million a year, and much, much more. He had done it all by working hard and being a pro.

  He was still whistling the little tuneless tune—toot-toot-te-toot-te-toot. “Can you believe this?” he said as they drove along. “No traffic at all!” She loved him, in such a comfortable, easy way. He was like a favorite old bathrobe. It was not a dangerous love, like that first one that had left her with a sliver of ice in her heart, or like Steven, which had been more of a practical thing. This was an entirely different sort of love. An old bathrobe, and a p
air of comfy, flip-flop slippers. She tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow.

  But she knew exactly why she resented intrusions such as the one from Miss Marsha Bernice Apfelbaum of the Bridge and Tunnel Authority. It was because when they happened—and they happened in restaurants, on street corners, in the waiting rooms of airports, strangers who came right up to him and started conversations as though they had known Mel all their lives—she herself was made to feel invisible. He was a star, but she became a cipher, anonymous, a nonperson. Marsha Bernice Apfelbaum, at first, had not even seen her sitting beside him in the front seat of the car. She had noticed the dog before she noticed her. Never mind that it was she, Alexandra Rothman, who provided the pen and paper for the celebrity’s autograph. Never mind that it was she, Alex Rothman, who had fielded some of the woman’s more impertinent questions. She had simply been ignored, made to feel even less than a nobody. She had been dropped off the face of the earth, into oblivion. That was the way his fans made her feel, nonexistent. Of course she didn’t expect him to introduce her to the intruders. That would be neither necessary nor appropriate. He simply tried to handle these situations as politely as possible. How else would she have him handle them? But if there were only some way that this star’s fans could be made to treat her, Alex, as though she were something more than a zero—but there wasn’t. “Is this your attractive wife?” they might say, but they wouldn’t because they all knew that Mel Jorgenson had no wife at the moment. They had read all about his divorce in their supermarket tabloids. And so it was a problem without a solution. But that was what lay at the core of it. That was the hard kernel at the heart of her resentment. When she was with him in public, she became zilch, zip, nothing, nada, as Aunt Lily would say.

  Did these sound like the thoughts of a jealous woman? They came dangerously close to it, she thought. And she couldn’t even console herself with the notion that she was jealous of people who meant nothing to him. They meant a lot to him, the Marsha Bernice Apfelbaums of the world.

  There was nothing that Alex held in lower esteem than jealous women. There was nothing more unattractive, more pathetic even, than a jealous woman unless, perhaps, it was a drunken woman, and the jealous woman and the drunken woman had a lot in common. Both did stupid, irrational, ugly, and self-destructive things. The jealous woman will pester her man at his place of business. She will eavesdrop on his telephone calls, go through his wallet and credit-card receipts, steam open his mail. She will detect another woman’s perfume on him, even if it is his own after-shave. She will spot the long blonde hair on the lapel of his jacket, and refuse to believe that he could have acquired it in a crowded elevator. She will call him at home, and hang up if he answers. Or, if he doesn’t answer, she will stake out his house and, when he appears, demand to know where he has been, and with whom, even if he has just been around the corner to the hardware store. Alex knew one jealous woman who became convinced that her lover was secretly married. Using a bent wire coat hanger to unlock the door—like a common thief—she had broken into his car to look for evidence. What had she found in the creases of the back seat? Crayons. Crayons! What did crayons mean? They meant that he not only had a wife, but children as well! When she tearfully accused him of lying to her, she refused to believe his innocent explanation—that he had recently driven two small nephews to the Bronx Zoo. “Nephews!” she screamed at him. “You never told me you had nephews! Why have you been hiding these nephews from me? How can we have a relationship when you hide these secret nephews from me?”

  Alex’s own magazine even ran a story on the disastrous side effects that the slimy green-eyed monster could have on a woman, emotionally and physically. Liquor might create bags under a woman’s eyes, cause her chin to sag and her hips to thicken, but jealousy could do all those things as well, besides creating angry little pinched lines around the mouth and between the eyebrows. The anger-lines of jealousy were permanent, like scars. But besides being ugly and intolerable, the jealous woman was, worst of all, a bore.

  Alex would not let herself be jealous of Mel’s—of Mel’s what? His fame? Just because he loved his fame?

  She realized that she had experienced irrational rushes of jealousy twice today—first with Joel, now with Mel. The two men she loved the most. Stop it, she warned herself, and stop it now, bitch. That woman had called her a bitch.

  “Toot-toot-te-toot-te-toot. Oh, Keeee-rist!” She had been woolgathering again, paying no attention to the road or to the passing scenery, which for some time had seemed to consist of an endless series of drearily pompous cemeteries. Now she felt him apply the brake pedal and, looking up, she saw that suddenly all three lanes of traffic ahead of them had become a bobbing sea of red taillights stretching to infinity. The red BMW slowed to a complete stop. “Do you believe this?” he wailed. “What happened?”

  “I guess we spoke too soon. Must be an accident ahead.”

  The mass of traffic that they were now a part of moved forward an inch or two, then stopped again.

  “Damn,” he said. “Damn.”

  Once more the traffic inched forward, then stopped.

  Now, for the next twenty minutes, it was like this—an inch or two forward, then a five- or six-minute stop.

  “Wanta hop out and see if you can tell how far ahead the trouble is?” he suggested.

  She did this, and it was a signal for other passengers in their vicinity also to alight from their vehicles and stand, craning their necks and shielding their eyes from the sun, looking out across the glittering sea of automobile rooftops on the expressway that had now become a parking lot. She slumped back inside the car, and other passengers did the same. “It seems to go on for miles,” she said.

  In twenty-five minutes, they had traveled perhaps a hundred feet. “We could walk to the Hamptons faster,” he said.

  “Well, we’re in no great hurry,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. But it was no use.

  A little later, he said, “Car could overheat like this.” He was now talking largely to himself. And, sure enough, several motorists had already pulled off on the shoulder, raised their hoods, and were standing helplessly, arms akimbo, glaring hatefully at their vehicles’ unlovely steaming insides. “Turn off the air conditioning,” he said to himself, obeying his own instructions and flipping off the air-conditioner switch. “Top down? Okay?”

  “Sure,” she said, and he lowered the convertible top. The day was growing quite warm, and now, instead of air conditioning, they had automobile fumes and a relentless view of ugly, identical two-family Queens houses that lined the expressway. Everything about the day now seemed ugly.

  Alex retied the red scarf in her hair to accommodate the breeze, but there was no breeze. You’ll find yourself back in Paradise, Missouri, without a pot to piss in! Herb had said to her. But she had promised herself not to think about any of that. She would think about her picnic issue instead. Fashions in picnics.…

  After a while, she said, “How about a little music? Or will playing the radio cause the car to overheat?”

  “Of course the radio won’t cause the car to overheat!” he snapped.

  “What I know about cars …” She flipped on the radio, and managed to find the classical music station. The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra was playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number Five in D Major. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast,” she said.

  “Breast,” he said. “It’s savage breast.”

  “Don’t talk dirty,” she said. But it wasn’t very funny.

  Once more, the little car inched forward, then stopped again. More motorists were pulling off the roadway now, with radiators aboil, as the sun beat down through a leaden sky.

  He was stroking the steering column of the car now, and saying, “Good little Scarlett. You’re not going to heat up on Daddy, are you? You wouldn’t do that to Daddy, would you?”

  The Mozart concerto ended to thundering applause, and the radio commentator had begun his scholarly dissertation on the composi
tion’s history and importance to the world of music. Alex played with the dial, trying to find something as pretty as the Mozart, but all she located were hard rock stations, and a woman interviewing an author who had written a book about French cathedral cities.

  “And how would you describe a groin vault, Winston?” the woman interviewer asked.

  “More dirty talk,” Alex said, twisting the dial.

  “See if you can find a traffic report,” he said. “See if you can find out how much more of this we’ve got to face.”

  She tried, but failed, and flipped the radio off.

  After a while, she said, “Look, what if we get off at the next exit, and try to make our way down to the Southern State? A lot of people swear by the Southern State.”

  “The Southern State is always worse,” he said angrily. “Besides, have you noticed any exit signs lately? I sure as hell haven’t.”

  She said nothing. When he was in a mood like this, she knew that the best policy was silence.

  The car jerked sharply forward for a few feet, then stopped abruptly, and there was a sloshing sound from behind their seats. Mel turned in his seat to look and cried out, “Oh, Christ! Cronkite’s tipped over his water dish! He can’t sit out in this heat without any water! Cronkite will die!”

  She did not point out that it was the driver’s lurching acceleration of the car that caused the water dish to overturn, not anything that Cronkite did. Instead, she suggested, “Would it be cooler for him if we put the top back up?”

  “No! It’s always hotter with the top up!”

  Once again she said nothing.

  “We’ve got to be coming up to the scene of the accident soon,” he said, though there was no evidence along the clogged expressway to support this assertion, and the mood between them now was thoroughly sour.

  “Goddammit, find me a traffic report on the radio,” he said.

  “Find it yourself,” she said. “It’s your fucking radio. It’s your fucking house in the Hamptons we’re going to.”