The Best Revenge

by Sol Stein

  Comment by Zipporah

  Of course I knew that Louie had a crush on her, what wife doesn’t know such things? But I loved her more. She was reserved the way I thought only older people were. Outside, her poise made her seem like a live statue, inside, a soft heart beat. If I loved her, why shouldn’t Louie, who was flesh and blood? I sometimes imagined them making love together. I don’t know when they would have had the opportunity. But in front of me, and Charles the husband sitting there, too, they sometimes talked to each other as if a secret perfume enclosed them both. Sure, the contact of flesh to unmarried flesh is forbidden, but the Devil knows that people do things in public that are more personal than sex in bed.

  Comment by Anna Addison

  My family has been Protestant since Luther. Why do I envy the Catholic widows? Because if their voices are still strong and their manners cleverly deceitful, they can flirt with the priest through the wire mesh, pretending he doesn’t know they are in their eighties as I am. They can look forward to ring-around-the-rosie with Mary and Jesus and the Holy Ghost when it’s over. What does a Lutheran lady of the same age have if she never had children and her husband is dead? None of the male parishioners of a suitable age are willing to risk more than the frailest friendship out of fear that anything else might require something they couldn’t do, when I’d settle for an affectionate kiss.

  You realize after a time why the widows with pensions move to Arizona or California or Florida. In Chicago, without a body to get close to during the night, the winters get longer as the antifreeze drains out of your bones. When did I see Bennie Riller last? At Zipporah’s funeral, twenty-five years ago! Oh how I miss that woman. I remember her sitting right here beside me. And the truth is I miss her husband more. Louie and I were virgins with each other, yet when did a week pass when I did not imagine his lips on my neck?

  In the shower I caught myself singing a song of fifty years ago. Hoping my voice would not betray my age, I called the beauty parlor and asked could they give me a special appointment for a permanent this morning. I meant right away. They said, Sure, come on down, sweetie. Going outside for my appointment, Chicago suddenly looked like the most beautiful city in the universe. Ben is coming, sang the song in my head. Ben is coming.

  14

  Ben

  Samuel Glenn, Inc., occupied the entire fourteenth floor of the Michigan Tower Building in the Loop. The reception-room chairs were occupied by men and women who tried to avoid looking at each other. Every few minutes a different young woman came in, called out a name, and then escorted whoever responded through a door into a huge room filled with desks and ringing phones like a broker’s office.

  I picked up Business Week. Every story seemed to be about Sam Glenn. I put the magazine down and stared at my fingernails like everybody else.

  In high school Mr. Edwards kept Sam on the football team because Mr. Edwards understood that crowds find violence entertaining. Sam was expert at flinging his body against a running linebacker as if he was hoping to break bones in the process of bringing the man down.

  While Sam played up his repulsiveness, I detected signs of loneliness. Something simple, like Sam saying, “I’d like to go out with you guys,” stuck in my head the way a piece of chewing gum can stick to the sole of your shoe. The more you try to get rid of it, the worse it seems to get. When Sam tried to be friendly, it came across like a threat, and the guys would head in the other direction. I went to the movies with him once and we had to stand until two seats opened up in the last row. Sam said if he sat anywhere else, he’d be blocking someone’s view and it would end up in a shouting match. I suspect he was the only male virgin in our class.

  I lost contact with Sam until maybe a dozen years later he phoned from Chicago and said he had what he called “a little loose change” and could he invest in one of my plays.

  I said, “Sure.” To be polite, I asked what he was up to.

  “A little of this, a little of that,” Sam said.

  “I heard you went to law school.”

  “You heard right, Ben.”

  “You practice law?”

  “Not really. I also got an accounting degree. I don’t do that either.”

  “How much do you want to invest?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “It comes in units of thirty thousand. Want half?”

  “I’ll take thirty. Send me the stuff. Nice talking to you, Ben.”

  He hung up, leaving me feeling like a clerk in a store.

  That play made money, but I didn’t invite Sam in again. It was easy enough to finance my productions with money from people who didn’t go at everything as if it were a contact sport. Then one day I got a phone call from Sam, pushing money at me.

  “I’m full up with old investors,” I told Sam. “Sorry.”

  “I lent you two bucks in high school. That makes me your oldest investor.”

  I gave him his laugh, but not a participation. When too many of my regulars stayed away from The Best Revenge, Charlotte dug out my backup list and there was Sam’s name. I did my short-form pitch, and Sam said, “Don’t do me favors, Ben. If you need my money, say so.”

  “So,” I said, which drew from him something like a snicker.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take two units. That’s about what I made the first time. See to it I don’t lose it.”

  *

  I soaked in thought for nearly half an hour in Sam’s waiting room before a bird-beaked woman called out my name. I stood.

  “Follow me,” she said and led the way through a huge room filled with desks occupied by fast-talking people with phones on shoulder rests. Along two walls were glass-walled cubicles in which I could see people from the waiting room getting grilled. I followed the woman to the far corner, where she stepped aside to let me into a cavernous office with half a dozen huge potted plants—trees, I thought—sized to Sam, who came from around his large desk with palm extended. I braced myself for a brutal handshake.

  “You don’t look a day older, Ben. Life must be good to you. I hope you got some sleep after my call.”

  I noted the photographs of several children on the credenza along one wall.

  “Nephews and nieces,” Sam said quickly. “My sisters are baby factories. I’m not married.”

  After the how-was-your-flight prattle, I said, “Sam, I still don’t know what you do.”

  “A little of this, a little of that.”

  We both laughed.

  “I collect money,” he said, doodling on the pad in front of him.

  “What do you sell, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Nothing. No investment in inventory. I’m the collection agency.”

  I wished I hadn’t asked.

  “Sam,” I said, “I’d like to make a deal with you, to have you aboard for all my plays.”

  “That’s real nice, Ben, but we’re talking about the play you got both feet in right now. I want out.”

  “Sam, if you pulled out now, I couldn’t invite you into my future shows.”

  “Bennie, this isn’t high school. I invited myself in the first time. You didn’t invite me back. You don’t like me.”

  “I have every confidence…”

  He waited. I didn’t finish.

  He said, “Did you bring a check like I said?”

  “Sam, Mitch Mitchell has given me three hits and no flops. The casting is perfect. The Best Revenge is a terrific play. I wish you would have faith and stay. Please.”

  Sam stopped doodling and put the pencil down. “In this place, Ben, we hear a lot of pleases on the phones. If I listened to words like that we wouldn’t be in business. All please means is you don’t have a bargaining position.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Your personal check. I’m sure you’ve got a blank in your wallet.”

  “If you leave your units in, Sam, I’m prepared to give you a side deal of a kind I’ve never done with anybody. In addition to your share I’ll throw in five percent
of the producer’s share. And I’ll give you an airtight right of first refusal on my next five productions.”

  “If you don’t have a blank check, Ben, I can give you one. What’s the name of your bank? I can phone and get the account number.”

  “I came to Chicago because I thought we could talk things over.”

  “We just did, Ben. I have a young friend in Manhattan, a kid lawyer who’s been very helpful privately with some big New York accounts. I can call him right now, while you’re here.” He buzzed his secretary.

  “Sadie,” he said, “get me Forty-four in New York.”

  “Cancel the call,” I said, taking out my checkbook.

  When I handed him the check, he studied it a moment and said, “You flying back?”

  “Not till five. I’ve got another appointment.”

  “Mind if I write down the number of where you’re going to be?”

  15

  Anna Addison

  Ben was broad-shouldered like his father but nearly a head higher. Without touching his bushy hair you could tell it was soft like Louie’s, but the rest of him was more like Zipporah, the tall way he walked into my apartment, kissing me on both cheeks as in a French movie, and putting into my hands a small blue package tied with an elegant silver elastic. On the box was one word: Peacock’s.

  “Go ahead, open it,” Ben said.

  I lifted the cover. Against the white cotton lay a silver teardrop on a delicate chain, a girl’s engagement present.

  “Do you like it?”

  “I love it,” I said, rubbing my eye with the back of my hand. I didn’t want him to look at my hands. He took them in his as if to say the bumps didn’t matter because the hands were mine.

  I had to break loose and go to the bedroom for a handkerchief. I pulled out the drawer and there beside the neat pile of cotton handkerchiefs was the lace one I used to stuff in my sleeve when Charles and I went gallivanting. I took that one, of course, and hurried back to find Ben staring out of the window.

  “You remember Chicago?” I said.

  “Only the inside of hotel rooms, rehearsal halls, restaurants. You know how it is on business trips.”

  He never got in touch with me.

  “Is something wrong?” Ben asked.

  “No, no, no,” I said. It takes reaching a certain age to want to connect back with the past before you die. “You remember nothing from when you lived here?” I asked.

  He turned from the window, such a good-looking man, such sad eyes.

  “I’ll help you remember,” I said, “as soon as I put up some tea.” Settled over sandwiches and tea, I said, “Would you like to have your tea leaves read?”

  “I’ve never gone to places like that.”

  “No, no. I meant here. By me. I haven’t done it in years.”

  Ben looked into his cup. “It might show what I don’t want to see.”

  “Ben, I don’t need leaves. A man with your gifts has his future in his pocket. All he needs is to remind himself once in a while.”

  “Thank you, Anna.”

  “Thank Louie. Thank Zipporah, not me,” I said. “You know your parents, we were very close.”

  “I know.”

  How could I say to him that they were the first good friends I had who were Jewish, whose feelings glided off the tips of their tongues. They’d say anything in front of me. At first it made me nervous to be around such people. I had to get it through my skull that it was an honor to share instead of to hide. Those two people took the walls off my soul.

  “Anna?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you know about the money?”

  “What money?”

  “My father was making out very well and suddenly it all vanished.”

  “There was a depression.”

  “You came through it okay.”

  “Charles was a teacher.”

  “Other people came through it.”

  “The past is the past. Why think about it now?”

  What did I say wrong?

  “I think about the past, too,” I said. “It wasn’t just money. Your brother Harold’s nephritis, you must know about that?”

  Ben nodded.

  “He was what, three years old? In those days there weren’t antibiotics. The doctor, I’m trying to remember his name, he used to push hope at your mother. Louie didn’t buy it. Once I asked Louie how he could be so sure that Harold would die. He said, ‘A Jew is born thinking that every door he opens will reveal some form of the angel of death.’ After listening to Louie, I would lie in bed at night praying for Harold.”

  Ben leaned over. “If it hurts to talk about it, don’t,” he said.

  “More tea?” I asked.

  Ben shook his head of hair just like Louie. I wasn’t going to tell him that when Charles reached over to console me at night, I pushed his hands away because I was thinking of Louie’s hands!

  I said, “Your mother and father were like a tribe of two people beaten in war.”

  “They never got over it.”

  “They loved you, too,” I said.

  “You can’t compete with the dead,” Ben said. “They grow more perfect year by year.”

  *

  “Do you remember the baby grand piano?” I asked Ben.

  “No. Who played the piano?”

  “Nobody, Louie said if you want your son to be a mountain climber, you put him in front of a mountain. In those days Louie could afford anything so he bought the piano thinking it would be an inspiration.”

  “For Harold.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. For both of you. Do you remember the parquet floors around the Oriental rug? The library—ten thousand books, floor to ceiling everywhere. Some Russian, some in Yiddish, a complete set of Zola signed by Zola if you’d believe, and in English, all of Mark Twain, all of O. Henry. You used to play in that room all the time, opening books as if you could read them.”

  “I don’t remember,” Ben said.

  “How could you forget a room filled with more books than Einstein could read in a lifetime?”

  “You make it sound as if my father were very successful.”

  “Oh, he was. If you asked your mother, she’d say it was Louie’s funny stories that attracted customers. But she knew the truth. Most of the people who bought from Louie hated the fancy atmosphere of the jewelry stores in the Loop, with salesmen who condescended to help you pick something in good taste because obviously you couldn’t. In Louie’s place it was just a little office half the size of this room, a table, three chairs, and a big safe. People got bargains from Louie. He had so many customers he could pay for the carpets, the piano, for clothes that made your mother look like a queen and you like a prince. Zipporah was always going on about how she could have married some professor, but what professor could have given her all those belongings. And more.”

  “More?” Ben asked.

  There are some things you don’t say to a son about his parents, even if the son is over fifty. So I said, “Louis was an interesting person” instead of a good lover, because how would I have known if Zipporah hadn’t told me how addicted she was to the touch of his fingers.

  Why was Ben staring at the phone? “Are you expecting a call?”

  He shook his head. Louie was a liar about such things, too.

  Suddenly Ben said to me, “Anna, you could have been an actress.”

  “Me?” I said. “I can’t remember my grocery list, how would I remember a whole play?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Ben said. “You have such poise. Your back is such a straight line.”

  “Charles always said I had good posture.”

  “It’s the authority,” Ben said. “You could have played a queen.”

  “You’re confusing me with your mother.” I felt very uncomfortable with the way Ben was looking at me. I don’t mean uncomfortable. I mean too comfortable. What a foolish thought. Quickly I decided I better bring my Charles into the room as a chaperon!

/>   “Charles,” I said to Ben, “loved books differently than your father. He would examine the type sizes, measure the margins on the page, figure out the number of words compared to the outside dimensions. He was looking for efficiency. We all get something different out of books, why should I interfere with his pleasure just because he didn’t like to read.”

  I got up and went over to the window, happy to hear Ben chuckling softly behind me. I used to love it when men reacted to my way of putting things.

  I pulled the curtains a bit farther apart. Was it to let in more streetlight, or to dispel an atmosphere that I suddenly thought ridiculous? I am thirty years older than him, he must have a beautiful wife, he is not Louie. I felt a pain, thank God, in my left arm and shoulder, a sign. To change the subject I said the first thing that came to mind: “How did you come to pick the theater, Ben?”

  “It picked me.”

  His face completely changed. He was staring at the telephone again. Why did Bennie, the most successful person I had ever met, suddenly look like his father’s ghost? I was about to put my arms around him, when the phone pierced the room with its aggressive, demanding, insistent sound.

  Comment by Ben

  My instinct was to grab the phone. I thought, It’s her phone.

  “Hello, hello,” Anna was saying. “Yes. A minute please.”