The Best Revenge

by Sol Stein

Riller reminds me of Boxhead Armitage, dean of admissions, the supersnob who needed to replace eight grand he’d slipped out of the college treasury, one bill at a time, for a necessity. Necessity my ass, Boxhead spent all the dough on his new wife, a people-in-the-street-stopper. He brought her around to prove it to me. She looked like Princess Grace, and I treated her, putting a chair under her ass when she sat down, lighting her cigarette, all that. Boxhead was fucking stupid about the way he fixed the books. An audit team was on the way in. His collateral wasn’t worth filing a UCC form for. I tried sending him away, but he pulled me aside and said as part of the deal would I like to spend a weekend with his Princess Grace? You’d never catch an Italian doing what these boxheads do. If these guys need dough bad enough, they let a stranger play with their best toy. If my father’d owed five million to Mussolini he wouldn’t have let him play with home goods for one second even if one feel wiped out the debt. The only guy I ever personally took care of was the one who picked Mary for a pigeon and made the mistake of boasting about it.

  When Armitage repeated the offer, I looked over at Miss Clean pretending she’s paying attention to New York magazine. A weekend’s too long for any broad, I told Boxhead, one evening’s okay, and since he needed the cash immediately, how about today as watching her goods got my motor running.

  Afterward, while I was driving her home, I knew why she’d agreed. It takes savvy to get one of those iceboxes warmed up. On her back that lady was no Princess Grace, she was a hollerer. I let her take the envelope with the cash to him. I made sure she knew it wasn’t pay. It was a loan at ten percent a week. Maybe her Dean boy could get a loan from his rich mother he’d avoided seeing since he married Princess Grace. Mama Armitage, the way he described her, was supposed to be class. Maybe she saw through Princess Grace. As this princess was getting out of my car I thought of something. “Honey,” I said, “any week you bring the interest, you don’t have to make a payment on principal. If your husband makes the drop, I want ten percent of the principal, suit yourself.”

  You see how easy it is to keep a beautiful relationship going? I saw them together only once more, when Boxhead came to tell me that though he’d put the money back they’d traced what they called the defalcation and asked him to resign. He had to get a job in some other city, and there was still fifteen hundred on my books. At the outset I had told him one condition was no skipping town, not even the appearance of skipping town, or the whole loan comes due and payable immediately, and I had a surefire method of finding anybody anywhere. Boxhead didn’t know what to do, right?

  So I told him it’s simple. He and his Princess Grace go off in his Honda and leave her Porsche with me. When the fifteen hundred was ready, with the interest of course, she could fly east and pick up her Porsche from me person-to-person so to speak.

  What could he say, no? She’d hound him till he’d come up with the scratch to get the Porsche back.

  Anyway, Riller, who even looks like this Armitage, he’s trying to be nice, so I told him, “Please have a seat. No reason for anyone to get excited. I was just trying to explain my principles since we’re talking about being partners.” To Hochman I said, “Did you know Mr. Riller’s father and my father knew each other real well a long time ago?”

  Hochman said, “I was aware of it.” Why can’t these guys say something straight out in English. I was aware of it. Shit.

  It was Riller who piped up, “My father was very fond of your father.”

  Fond? My old man fell for that Yid’s personality like it was some medicine he needed. He let Louie Riller become a suckerfish on him. “Louie nice man,” he used to say. “Brains working allatime.” My mother’d say, “If he’s so smart, how come he always needs money?” She was pecking at my old man, you got to be careful who you lend money to, friends don’t like to pay interest. The truth is she had a thing for Louie, finding an excuse to be around whenever he showed. Even a kid could see it. The guy was no George Raft, but when he came she fluttered her black dresses like a pigeon.

  “I suppose you know,” I said, “that my father made his first big money from renting women?”

  Riller didn’t say a thing. His cupid-lips lawyer didn’t say a thing. I loved it.

  My father never wanted straight people like Louie Riller knowing where he got all that money to lend out, but I was going to make sure these guys knew that Aldo Manucci’s halo was made of a lot of noserings.

  “That’s okay,” I told them, making my face serious. “The only bad part was that it made my mother ashamed. She wanted me to be Mr. American. She was worry-sick I’d wind up doing the same thing as my old man. Well, my mother died a happy woman because the sex revolution gave away free what my old man’d been selling. He always said the best money was in specialty service, high-priced fancies. When people started advertising their kinks in The Village Voice, my father decided that’s enough. My money,” I said to Riller, “is as clean as a virgin.”

  Riller coughed.

  I like to negotiate with someone who is nervous.

  He coughed again. Beautiful.

  Finally he said, “I was merely”—get that, merely—“concerned that any investment in my play not be connected to Atlantic City casino money, anything like that.”

  I told him, “You’re out of date, Mr. Riller. I was out of gaming before Atlantic City was back in. If a gambler can’t make it, he blows his brains out in the men’s room. If I wanted to spend my life doing business with sick people, I’d open a hospital. In fact I got two legit nursing homes in New Jersey. I make my money available to people who deserve it and can’t get it someplace else. That’s my principle. How many guys in show business live on principle?”

  5

  Mary Manucci

  When I was a teenager I used to have a kind of private joke. I’d tell myself that my parents, Salvatore and Mary Carducci, didn’t settle in one of the Little Italys on the East Coast but went on to Minnesota because everyone there was so blond. The truth is they came from a small town in the north of Italy, and everybody from there either went to Argentina or the United States, and those who came to America passed right through New York and went on to Duluth because all the others from their village had gone there.

  My father, a refined-looking man, always wore his fedora at a slight tilt. Mr. Proud used to laugh when he referred to people who came from Naples as “four-legs” and from Sicily as “sheep lovers.” He called me his Principessa, and implanted the idea that what I needed was an Italian boy who didn’t look Italian.

  My father, who, according to my mother, always had the smarts for business, didn’t want to do what the other Italians were doing, fruit and vegetables or a barber shop. He had what he called “a real American idea,” a store that carried imported children’s clothes for people who didn’t want to dress their kids in Sears Roebuck. Baby clothes with a European label caught the wind of snob appeal among the better-off locals. Pretty soon if you attended any baby shower in the so-called good neighborhoods, you’d see the piled-up boxes wrapped in candy-striped foil paper that proclaimed where the contents had been bought. My father’s employees spent eight minutes wrapping a gift, with a ribbon in the form of a flower. People used to joke about buying empty boxes from the Carducci store because they made beautiful presents. Kids, as you know, grow out of clothes fast. If your precious started out in a Carducci outfit, you kept the image up by going back to Carducci’s every time Precious grew a couple of inches. Distances in Minnesota mean nothing. People came from other counties before an important birthday. In the six weeks before Christmas we could have sold tickets to get into the shop. I grew up smelling success, but once I heard a dressed-up farmer and his wife leaving with an armful of pretty boxes say, “These wops sure know how to stock a store.” At my junior prom, Olaf Swenson’s son Pete, the handsomest boy in our class, asked me to dance twice in a row, and when we went out back with our Cokes, his blue eyes burning, he said, “Mary, you are absolutely number one. My mother says you’re C
atholic, is that true?”

  That shook me. We got another jolt when my father refused a certain Mr. Sondergaard further credit because of his long-unpaid bills. Mr. Sondergaard left the store spluttering loud enough for others to hear, “Never shopping in this dago store again.”

  When it was decided that I go to college in the East, my father’s excuse was that I should get away from home for a while, but I knew the real reason. I was eligible. And I had better be in places where I’d be more likely to meet good young men of Italian extraction so that my ears, which my father said could have been sculpted by Michelangelo, would never hear dago.

  My father, who put a dollar in the collection plate when everyone else put a quarter, asked the priest about colleges where good Catholics go, and where there weren’t too many Italians from places “down below,” meaning south of Rome, which was for him a more important dividing line than the Iron Curtain. The priest said Manhattanville, Mary will meet wonderful girls there.

  I was accepted by Manhattanville. In my sophomore year, on a trip to Bloomingdale’s with a girlfriend, I met Nick Manucci, who looked like he might have come from Minnesota, tall, handsome, hair the color of white sand, and a name that rhymed with mine.

  He danced like a professional. When he kissed me, it wasn’t lips on lips like other boys, but lips on my neck, and just above my breasts, and behind my ear, and suddenly my mouth, never the same route twice, and always a way that made me aware of my body preparing itself for love. I wouldn’t let him. We had to get to know each other first.

  I took him to Searleham’s, a men’s clothing store that catered to well-to-do Protestants. I could see he instantly felt uncomfortable because he was wearing a fluorescent sports shirt. Over at the display case, I pointed to a button-down with a muted stripe. He nodded. At the tie rack, I fingered a paisley. He said okay. I could tell he wanted to get the hell out of the store fast so he could take off his shiny shirt and throw it in a Salvation Army dumpster.

  He had a dark coat he wore when we went out. So after a couple of days I took him back to Searlham’s and had him try gray gloves with his dark coat.

  “Classy,” was all I said.

  “Thirty dollars for a pair of gloves?”

  Of course he bought them. Once I said I wanted to give him a manicure. He resisted, as if it was something sissy. But I made a ritual of it, and he said it turned into one of the most erotic experiences of his life, and wanted a manicure soon again. His hands began to look well groomed, like my father’s.

  His voice had a slight coarseness to it, like Bogart’s. I tried to help him smooth out the roller-coaster inflections of New York, but I didn’t want him to lose the huskiness because when he had his arms around me and talked into my ear, that voice did things to me.

  Once I remembered how I’d clothed my favorite doll and thought, “Am I doing it all over again with a man?” Why couldn’t there be enough smart men in the world so there’d be one for each smart woman?

  I made up excuses not to see Nick for a week. He kept phoning me. Finally he said, “What’s the matter, ain’t I smart enough for you?”

  “I’m sure you’ll be very successful,” I said.

  “Hey teach,” he said, imitating Dead End Kids from the movies, “ain’t I learning to be classy fast enough?”

  “You make me sound like a snob.”

  “Sure you’re a snob. I love it. You want me to wear spats when I make love to you, I’ll wear spats. I’ll wear a jockstrap on my head, okay?”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. There were no ideal men. “Tomorrow?”

  “Sure tomorrow. But today’s today. How about today and tomorrow and the day after, too?”

  “You’re greedy.”

  “You bet your sweet ass I’m greedy. What are you, a nun? The last time—”

  “Come on over.” I remembered the expression Bette Davis had in some movie when she was saying yes like she was surrendering a country.

  I never had a hangup about pleasure. My excuse to myself was that Nick gave me pleasure. I didn’t have the experience to know that some men, when the contract is signed, stop selling.

  Nick eased through NYU by charming the teachers the way he charmed me. He learned facts to pass exams. But it was all a means to an end, graduation, and the diploma was all the satisfaction he got out of it. In high school, my favorite teacher, Miss Gladys as we called her because her last name made us laugh, told me there was a new field, working with retarded children in private schools, that could give me more joy than teaching ordinary children because each step was such a triumph. I’d found what I was meant to do, and it was an easy field to get a job in because people, despite their pretensions, are contemptuous of the retarded, as if their condition were voluntary. As Nick said, “You want to teach stupid kids instead of smart kids, that’s your lookout. Just so’s I can tell people you’re a teacher period, it’s okay.”

  For a while Nick talked about this parcel and that parcel, so I thought he’d fixed his business attention on real estate.

  “Look, Mary, get off it. I like doing deals. I don’t care if it’s land or—”

  “Larceny?”

  He came up real close and pinched my lips together with his fingers. “Sometimes,” he said, “you talk out of turn.”

  On Sundays he could shine as a cook as some Italian men do.

  I asked him, “How would you like to own a really elegant restaurant some day that people from far away would come to because the food was so good?”

  Nick laughed. “The hours are murder. Besides, who wants to cook what you can’t eat?” He put his arms around me. “I’d love to cook you.”

  I think Nick skipped in and out of what he called “projects” so nobody would think he was finally into a field he’d stay with. Then one day I was short twenty dollars for something I longed to buy and Nick said, “I’ll lend it to you.”

  The look in his eyes chilled me.

  “It’s okay,” I said, “I’ll manage.”

  “Take it,” Nick said. “I won’t charge interest.”

  I’d never heard of friends or family even thinking of charging interest, and I couldn’t understand why Nick had said that until I met Aldo Manucci, the Bronx Medici. I learned that moneylending was the family business, and Nick had just been pretending to be interested in various other things so that when the inevitable happened it would seem that he had made a choice.

  His father sold some debts to him to get him started. I didn’t know you could sell a debt. And since Nick couldn’t pay in cash, his father sold him the debts on credit and charged him interest, but not as much as Nick collected from the customers. My friends had become teachers, and engineers and doctors, their work had content, but moneylending?

  “Tell your friends I’m a banker,” Nick said. “That way you wouldn’t be ashamed.”

  “Oh, Nick,” I said, “you’re misunderstanding me.”

  “I got you perfect. You go for the show. I mean like the marble pillars in banks, you know what they’re made of? Cement. Covered by a fake layer of marble so people like you will be comfortable about doing business with those solid people behind all that marble. I’ll tell you something maybe you don’t want to hear, but this country was built by people who took smart risks. Bankers ought to be run out of the country because the only risks they take are stupid risks.”

  Nick’s fervor was erotic. I didn’t have to hear what he was saying.

  “Mary, banks fight with each other to lend money to businesses that could get along without it, and they turn their backs on the starter-uppers, the people who made business possible. I’ve seen smart businessmen whose asses have been kissed for years by bankers suddenly hit a snag, a bad deal, something, and the same gray-suit guys are touching the edge of their eyeglasses as if they can’t really see you. The guys they turn away are the ones who show up at my father’s, hate steaming out of their ears about how banks treated them. So they use my father’s money to get back on their feet, terrific
, and then what do they do? They go back to their fair-weather friends with the fake marble pillars. Guys like my father ought to get medals for what they do to save businessmen.”

  “Doesn’t your father charge more interest than the banks?”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “Doesn’t a lawyer who takes a case on contingency charge more because if he doesn’t win he doesn’t get paid? My father takes risks banks won’t take.”

  Shylock was the word I needed to shake out of my head. “Don’t people like your father use, well, men who put pressure on borrowers if they don’t repay on time?”

  “What do you expect him to do, report the delinquents to Dun and Bradstreet? If he didn’t get his money back from the people who owed him, there’d be no more to lend the next guy the banks turn their back on.”

  Thugs was what I thought. “Why are you glaring at me, Nick?”

  “I’m not glaring. I’m looking. Are you ashamed of me?”

  “I’m not ashamed of anything you do,” I said.

  I’d lied before. Everyone does. But that was my first important lie. Was being a shylock a vocation? My father, who had that wonderful store, once said to me, “Marry a shoemaker, somebody who makes something. Marry a farmer who makes food. Marry a carpenter who makes houses. Don’t marry a man who makes nothing, a businessman.” Was he disparaging himself, a storekeeper and a businessman? You can’t skip centuries and go back to everybody making something. Even then there were men who put deals together, got the ships going to the Indies. Besides, my father was a reacher, he didn’t really want me to marry a workingman. Didn’t the “businessmen” he scorned by the way he pronounced the word, didn’t they make things? My father was as unrealistic as the dropouts who want to live on barter. Wasn’t the important thing that a man enjoyed what he did for a living? Wasn’t Nick proud of something that rubbed me the wrong way for the wrong reasons?

  Maybe this is all hindsight. At that age what I knew was that I was happy when he telephoned, happy when he took me out, and happiest when eventually he made love to me and it blinded me the way that first blast at Los Alamos blinded the onlookers.