The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  He had accused her of being mean-spirited.

  Against one expanse of white wall—the only interior wall in the house, really—leaned a large abstract oil painting, unframed. The painting had been sitting there, unhung, for the past two weeks.

  They had named that stretch of wall the Wailing Wall, because they had been unable to agree on how to treat it. Alex felt strongly that this wall demanded, cried out for, an important piece of contemporary art. Mel disagreed. He said he liked that wall left dramatically bare. But he was wrong. She had spotted this particular painting—by a young Cambodian who now lived in France, and who signed himself simply Sam—in a Madison Avenue gallery, and had it shipped out to Sagaponack for Mel’s approval. Everything about the painting was perfect—the size, the colors, everything—for that wall. But Mel’s approval had not been forthcoming.

  “Fifteen thousand seems like a lot to spend for some streaks of oil on a canvas,” he said.

  “But you’re rich, darling,” she said soothingly, though she knew that, in his heart of hearts, he would probably always think of himself as poor. “Think of it as an investment,” she said. “This Mr. Sam is very young. He’s just beginning to be discovered by important collectors. His work isn’t going to do anything but increase in value. If you buy him now, you’ll be in the vanguard.”

  “I don’t want to be in the vanguard.”

  “But look how those golden browns would pick up the colors of the dunes. And there’s the blue of the sky and ocean. And look—those slashes of bright green with the palette knife echo the color of the beach grass. It’s a landscape, really, and it’s perfect for this room.”

  “Hmm,” he said, frowning. “I don’t see any landscape in it.”

  “You have to sit and look at it for a while. You have to get your eye in, as we say in the fashion business. You have to let a painting like this grow on you. Let’s put a nail in the wall, and hang it up. You’ll see how it’ll bring this whole room to life.”

  “What?” he cried. “Drive a nail into my beautiful white plaster? Are you nuts? If I end up not buying the thing, I’ll end up with a nail hole in my wall, for God’s sake.”

  “A tiny little nail hole could be easily spackled over.”

  “I don’t want my wall spackled!”

  Or repainted, she had thought. Wasn’t it amazing, she sometimes thought, how this man, who would spend God-knew-what amounts of money to have his fish-tank house shoveled periodically out of the shifting sand, and to have his walls constantly washed—from the salt-spray outside, and from Cronkite’s nose-marks inside—would nonetheless dig in his heels at the thought of patching a tiny, almost invisible, nail hole in one wall?

  “I’m not sure I want anything on that wall,” he said at last.

  And so there they were, stalemated again on the subject of the Wailing Wall.

  She curled herself in one of his deep white chairs, and gazed upward at the pale ceiling of the dimly moonlit room. The ceiling was full of shifting shadows reflected from the glass walls. His model for the house, he often explained, was what the Japanese called a compound house, where many different areas for different uses combined and flowed together. The Sam still leaned against the long white wall, unhung, its colors bleached by the light of the moon. Mel’s house had a kind of buoyant beauty on a night like this—a great glass ship floating in a moonlit sea.

  But the room demanded this painting! Even in the colorless moonlight, its colors haunted the room. With this, and only this, painting on that, and only that, wall, the room would be complete, perfect. He had to be made to see how the colors of the Sam echoed and reflected the shifting tints and shadows of the natural world outside. The shadows were never the same, always changing. She tucked her legs beneath her tailor-fashion and stared fixedly at the Sam, thinking.

  I am a clever woman, she thought. I have even been called a genius. It took brains, and it took taste, to last as long as I have lasted as the editor-in-chief of Mode. It took brains and guts and determination to bring the book’s paid circulation up to the magical five-million mark without special-discount offers, without coupons, contests, or other expensive gimmicks—circulation, after all, could be bought. It took foxiness, inventiveness, and spirit to do what I have done. Then certainly I am clever enough to persuade Mel Jorgenson that he must buy this painting, to convince him that I am right—I, an acknowledged expert on color and design—and that he is wrong. Why is he wrong? The room is just too damned white! It cries for a splash of color. It is screaming for the Sam! Why, to do what this painting will do for this room, for the entire house, fifteen thousand dollars was cheap!

  “I’ll win this one,” she said aloud.

  When he came back from his swim, he would shower off the sand and saltiness in the outdoor shower, but his mouth would still taste salty when they made love. And after that …

  He had called her mean-spirited.

  And why must he buy this painting, this and no other? Because, as even he would be the first to admit, an appreciation of important art was not his strong suit, and why should it be? A Brooklyn tailor’s son. She wanted her man to own this painting because she wanted his house to be perfect, she wanted everything about him to be perfect, as perfect as his Australian crawl, as perfect as his tennis serve, as perfect as his Italian seat on horseback, and she wanted all his friends to admire him for his perfect taste. She wanted him to be praised, for heaven’s sake! Was that selfish? Was that mean-spirited? Surely, she thought, there was a clever way to win this particular battle. Surely, if she was clever enough, she would find a way. After they made love, and he was in that lovely, acquiescent mood …

  But why do I want to win? she asked herself. Because everything I have ever got in life I have fought for, and I have always fought to win. It was as simple as that.

  But why do I want to change him? Why do I want to change his life, his house, and the way his friends think of him? Simple enough. Because I love him, and the change will be for the better.

  Or, she asked herself again, is it something else? Is it because I am an editor, and feel I can edit this man’s life? An editor always changes. That is what an editor is for: changes. Change the layout, change the lead, change the headline, change the copy block, do something different with the cover for a change. Vivify it, give it an extra twist, crank the story up a notch or two. Change the girl’s earrings, change her hair, give her a little more fox and flair. That rhymes, she thought; I have written a couplet. But a person was not a product, like a magazine. Probably a person could never be changed, never be vivified, twisted up a couple of notches, redone like a layout. And Mel was a person, a man who had told her he loved her, and whom she had told she loved.

  The sound of the distant surf was a signal, and it seemed to match the sudden beating of her heart, and all at once there was the answer. Love had nothing to do with winning, did it? Love was the opposite. Love was loss. Love was surrender, love was sacrifice. Love was losing yourself in one other person. “You need to be needed,” that first, painful love of hers had told her all those years ago, that lover who, when she thought of him, had left a thin splinter of ice in her heart. “No one needs you,” he had said. But had he really needed her? In retrospect, not at all, and from that lack of need had grown the cold splinter of ice. Had Steven needed her? She had thought so at the time but, if he had, would he have done what he did? Then how did you get someone to need you? That answer was simple, too. To be needed, you needed to offer up, unbidden, some precious extra of yourself. Love was loss. Why had it taken her half a lifetime to discover this one small, pure fact?

  In the excitement of this sudden discovery, this small epiphany, Alex sprang to her feet and began pacing the big glass room. Love is loss! If I am really going to win this one, I am going to have to lose myself, let go of myself, untwist myself, in love. She took a last, hard look at the painting leaning against the wall, and instantly decided: First thing Monday morning, I will telephone the David Findlay Galle
ry on Madison Avenue and tell them to take that painting back. How could I have been so stupid—stupid and selfish? I will give him back his wall, give him back his house.

  But she knew that offering was not anywhere near enough. There must be more, much more. This was only a beginning. And—amazing how her mind worked this late at night—the pieces of their respective lives seemed to fall magically, symmetrically, into place.

  Consider Mel. Mel was all about generosity, all about giving away pieces of himself. He gave of himself daily in all directions. He was generous to her, always giving her little gifts, like the Hermès silk scarf that she had bitchily tossed out the window of his car. He was generous to his parents, the retired tailor and his wife, and had bought them a lovely house in Westchester. He was generous to his two daughters, even though he rarely got to see them. He was wonderful to his dog. He was generous to his public, to his fans, all those people he would never know, answering every letter personally, even the crazy ones and the ones that wrote him asking for money. His generosity and his spirit shone from the television screen, which surely was why he was so popular. He had been generous to the two women stranded on the expressway with their flat tire. He had wanted Alex to have generous thoughts—was that so much to ask?—about Fiona. Even that dreadful woman in the tollbooth—what was her name?—he had treated generously, even leaving her ten dollars richer for her dreadfulness, enough for her dinner, as she had put it.

  And Alex herself? She had spent the last few days full of anger, full of jealousy and resentment, thinking only of herself and her career. She had been angry at Herb, and had been busily plotting ways to bring him to his knees—ways to win! She had been jealous of Joel for growing up without asking her express permission. She had been rude to Marsha—that was it—Apfelbaum, rude and angry and imperious and, yes, bitchy. She had had jealous thoughts about Mel, jealous, unworthy, mean-spirited thoughts. She had bitchily suggested that Mel’s interest in Fiona Fenton was more than friendly. She had found herself resenting Mel’s fame, simply because his celebrity was more visible than hers, and because it inconvenienced her now and then, because his fans intruded on her space and made her feel invisible, because they were not her fans as well. She had even resented poor old Ho Rothman for becoming senile, too old for her to manipulate any longer. Worst of all, she saw herself turning into one of those hard-boiled, despotic boss-lady executive types whom Joan Crawford used to play in movies, who threw tantrums when they didn’t get their way, and hurled erasers at their secretaries when their morning coffee wasn’t hot enough. She was becoming a cliché, the selfish, manipulative bitch-goddess.

  Anger, resentment, jealousy—toward anyone who appeared to stand in her way, who threatened to usurp any of her hard-won power, who threatened her with any sort of loss. Where was love in any of this? Love was loss!

  She thought: I really am a genius! A genius, to have made this great discovery which seemed, at the moment, greater than anything discovered by Copernicus, Galileo, Columbus, Newton, Einstein. There was a small, brown mole just below Mel’s navel, and suddenly she loved this mole with more enormity and passion than anything she had ever loved in her life, and the flush she felt in her face was sexual, and it flooded through her body like that very first orgasm, the one one never completely forgets.

  Suddenly, outside the window, she heard a branch snap. She knew, from having grown up in the country, that no animal in nature, except a human, will step on a branch that will not hold its own weight. And it couldn’t be Mel returning from the beach because the sound had come from the side of the house that faced the highway. She turned, and saw—or, for a fleeting second was certain she had just seen—a white face pressed against the glass window-wall. Then it was gone. Someone had been watching her!

  They had grown used to intruders pressing their noses against the walls of the glass house in daytime, hoping for a glimpse of the famous anchorman, but, at one o’clock in the morning, this was something else again. For a moment, she stood frozen with fear.

  Then she leaped across the thick-piled carpet to the small kneehole desk where she knew Mel kept his pistol. He had rarely needed to produce it, but there had been times when the sight of it had helped send unwanted visitors on their way. She pulled the gun from its drawer, ran to the sliding glass door, and flung it open defiantly. “Who’s there?” she demanded. But the dune seemed empty now in the moonlight, though she was certain she could hear the sound of running footsteps retreating in the sand. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” she cried.

  Briefly, she thought she saw an object move, low in the beach grass, and she aimed the gun low at that, her finger on the trigger. But then she saw that it was only the broken branch of a sea grape tree, dangling in the breeze. There had not been sufficient wind to break that branch. Whoever had broken it had fled off into the night. She stepped back into the house again, slid the door closed, and snapped the dead-bolt lock.

  “What the hell are you doing, Alex?” He stood there, still naked, but with a beach towel draped about his head and shoulders.

  “We had a prowler. I heard someone, and I saw someone.”

  “Gone now?”

  She nodded.

  “Another member of my fan club, I suppose. Now put that thing away, Alex. It makes me nervous.”

  “I know how to handle a gun.”

  “I know. That’s why it makes me nervous.”

  She returned the pistol to its drawer in the desk.

  “Now, come here,” he said, and opened his arms wide.

  She flew—flew to him, as though wings had been provided—and buried herself in his embrace with a little happy sob.

  When it was over—and it had been immensely, complexly satisfying for her tonight—she curled, like a nesting spoon, against the warm curve of his back, and thought about it. There was something different about making love with Mel, very different from making love with any other man she had ever known. She tried to define the difference, but it wasn’t easy. What was it? It was more mature, perhaps, more grown-up, but that didn’t quite explain it, for “mature” implied that they didn’t do silly, sexy adolescent things with one another. They did. Tonight, for instance, she had been so excited that she whipped off her clothes in front of him, and let him lift her by her shoulders and let him enter her as he stood there, and she locked her arms and legs tightly around his back. He carried her, danced with her really, like that, around the room before carrying her, locked to him, to the bed, where they fell, laughing at how they must look if someone were still looking at them through the glass, across the cool white sheets. Their lovemaking was adult in the sense of adults playing a childhood game, and she thought of the young men in their banana hammocks playing volleyball on the beach. Yes, their lovemaking was like a game in which no one really cared who won—the volleyball flew back and forth—it was all for the fun of it, the good times of being together, of being friends, and in love. In their lovemaking, there was no victor and no vanquished. Everybody won, when it was over …

  It was so different from the way it had been with Steven, or that first one. When Mel made love to her, they laughed. They had little jokes. He had given her breasts names. Her left breast was Sarah, the right was Beatrice. He claimed to much prefer Beatrice to Sarah, but he tried to be fair. “Sarah is getting jealous,” he said, after nibbling on Beatrice for a while, and he would let his tongue glide gently around Sarah’s nipple.

  “Sarah wants more than that,” she would say, and they would both laugh, before getting serious again for a while.

  And so she was revising her thoughts again. Love didn’t have to be only loss, only sacrifice. It could be something even more complicated than that. It could be sharing—the first, and most difficult, thing that preschool children were taught to try to do, and how slow most children were to learn to share! Some of them never learned to do it. Probably most of them never learned to do it. And perhaps that was the special thing about Mel’s and her lovemaking, perhaps that was why it s
eemed so mature, adult, grown-up. They were two children who had finally grown up and learned to share.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she whispered. “You are absolutely right about that painting. It doesn’t belong there. That wall should be left absolutely bare.”

  “Mmm,” he mumbled drowsily.

  “I’m calling Findlay the first thing Monday morning to tell them to take it back.”

  He muttered something unintelligible. Then she heard him say, “It must have been one of the waiters,” and she knew he was asleep.

  But she wasn’t thinking about Maggie Van Zuylen’s waiters, or the women’s purses. She was thinking now about poor old Ho Rothman, who had been her friend, but who had never learned to share. For most of his adult life, Ho Rothman had waged a pitched battle with his oldest son, knowing, intuitively perhaps, that one day Herbert would try to take over the company and that, when that happened, everything that Ho had created would be destroyed. Now that day appeared to have come, and Ho was too old and ill to know it was happening, the fall of the House of Rothman.…

  The pale face she had fleetingly glimpsed at the window tonight seemed familiar. Where had she seen it before? As she drifted off to sleep, it became the face she had seen in her dream, her own face from the Bouché portrait, looking up from the spinning boat and calling for help.