The Sunset Gang

by Warren Adler

  "She should," Jake Stein said. "She should put her hand in the till like the rest of the freeloaders. I would."

  "Don't be so sure," his wife said. "I'd be so humiliated. You wouldn't catch me dead giving food stamps in payment for food."

  "If you were starving, you would."

  "Never."

  "Neither would Harriet," Marcia said.

  "She would rather steal?" Seymour asked. "Is that a better alternative?"

  "I can't look into her head, but I can understand," Bernice said.

  "So one alternative," Marcia continued, "might be to confront her quietly. Just one of us suggesting that she seek help, like food stamps or welfare."

  "Welfare?" Bernice asked. "My God, we'll destroy her."

  "It would be better than stealing," Seymour said. "You owe it to each other to confront her. It has got to stop. It has got to be resolved. It's costing us all money. It's another mouth to feed." His voice rose: "You can't allow this."

  "Why not?" Bernice asked. She watched her husband, ashamed at his lack of compassion, disgusted with the absence of empathy.

  "This is life. Not your books," Bernice said quietly.

  "What has that got to do with it?" he responded, annoyed at her criticism.

  "Books end. Life doesn't."

  He was confused now, a lone voice of reason, he decided. They had no real understanding, he assured himself, sitting down.

  "If we don't tell her," Marcia said, ignoring the exchange between the Shapiros, "then we simply go on as if nothing is happening. That's what I've done." She paused and looked at her husband. "I buy a little extra," she said. "I expect to find things gone." She paused again and dropped her eyes. "And you know, I feel good about it. I think of the humiliation that poor Harriet has to live with and I feel good about it."

  For a moment the group was silent, like a tableau in some French painting, their eyes briefly washing over each other. Only Seymour kept his eyes hidden, looking downward, feeling the weakness of their reasoning. He longed to leave this place, to go back to reading his mystery books, where things were more logical, where all clues led to resolution.

  The women exchanged kisses and the two couples left the Finkelsteins' condominium to go home after first confirming the coming evening's game and where it would take place. Back in his own apartment again, Seymour dressed and while Bernice puttered in the kitchen making them breakfast, he carefully searched his book collection for the one he would spend the day with.

  Now I could swear I had more eggs, Bernice thought, on the verge of shouting the discovery to Seymour. Then she checked herself and smiled. I'll have to go shopping later, she decided, feeling happy as she opened the blinds wider to bring the morning sun into the room.

  God Made Me That Way

  For forty years Max Bernstein had spent every winter from November first through March first in Florida. He would return, always deeply tanned, full of energy and optimism, as if the sun had rejuvenated his spirit. Not that he had ever been depressed or gloomy. He was a born kibitzer, always joking with the women at his brother's delicatessen, where he worked behind the counter during those months when he was back in Brooklyn.

  His first and only wife, Milly, divorced him in 1937, after five years of marriage.

  "How can I live with him?" she told her lawyer. "He's a playboy, a born playboy."

  "You have to be a little more specific," the lawyer had told her as he sat, pencil poised over lined yellow paper.

  "Women," she said uncomfortably. "That's his whole life. That's all he has on his mind. Mrs. Goldberg's daughter was the last straw."

  "Who?"

  "My neighbor, Mrs. Goldberg. She has this college girl daughter, Eileen. It wasn't me that found them. Mr. Goldberg came home early from work and there they were in bed, the Goldbergs' bed. It was a horrible scene. Very embarrassing."

  "And what did Mr. Bernstein say?"

  "What he always says."

  "What's that?"

  She flushed a deep red. "He said she seduced him." She paused. "After all, women find him very attractive."

  "And you, Mrs. Bernstein. Have you been cohabiting?" the lawyer asked.

  "Cohabiting?" She blushed again thinking that she had surmised his meaning. "Of course," she said indignantly. "One thing has nothing to do with another. It's just that I can't stand the humiliation any more."

  "Can I help it?" Max Bernstein had protested to his wife. But the divorce proceeded and after a few weeks of being terribly upset he went off to Florida and drowned his sorrows in a Miami Beach hotel.

  Max's brother, for whom he worked, had long ago thrown up his hands about Max, but his job behind the counter was always waiting for him when he got back. Secretly, he had always yearned to be like Max, who was always so self-assured and, it seemed, could hypnotize any woman to crawl into his bed. It was a gift, a talent, he was convinced, wondering how his parents had spawned brothers who were so different.

  It wasn't that Max Bernstein was handsome. He had a big nose, and curly hair that began a little too low along his forehead. His eyes were big brown cow's eyes, heavy-lidded, but when he smiled they lit up like neon signs. He had, some said, good bone structure and when he dressed up in his snappy sharp clothes, he had the carriage of a big-time gangster. But, whatever it was he had, it was extraordinarily tangible, and when he walked into a room, women's eyes automatically turned toward him. It was a fact that he accepted, nor had the attention left him jaded or bored. He liked it, he reveled in it, and used it to his full advantage.

  He had also discovered that if he used this talent wisely he could enjoy a wonderful Florida winter vacation. He would drive down in one swoop, stopping only when absolutely necessary until he reached Miami Beach, where he would check into the least expensive motel he could find. Then he'd have himself a good sleep, put on his bathing suit and his slacks over that and proceed to the pool of the swankiest hotel, which he could approach from the beach side.

  At first he would stand surveying the crowd that lay supine on the hundreds of beach chairs, their oiled bodies turned toward the sun. He had, he knew, an infallible eye for picking out a woman in just the right circumstances, preferably a divorcée or a widow. Naturally he preferred them to be attractive, but availability was always his consideration.

  He admitted to himself, during those first moments, that he was a bit overanxious. The prospect of spending many more nights at a cheap motel was enough to trigger anyone's anxieties. Calm down, Max, he told himself during those moments, feeling his self-confidence return.

  When he was certain that he had a likely prospect, and he knew this instinctively, he would simply activate himself, switch himself on, and proceed directly to his prey.

  "You should put it on your back as well," he would say to the woman he had chosen, having picked the perfect moment to begin a conversation. Squinting into the sun, the woman would turn, and he would smile and blink his big brown cow's eyes.

  "Would you do the honors?" the woman would say, handing him the sun oil.

  "I can't think of anything else I'd rather do," he would respond, sitting down at the end of her chair, pouring the sun oil into his palms. Then he would gently begin to rub the grease onto her back and over the backs of her thighs and her knees and calves.

  "I hope I'm not making your man jealous," he would say, bending over so that his breath might create a brief breeze near her hair.

  "What man?"

  "I can't believe it," he would say.

  "And you?" The question was always put casually, almost as an afterthought, its motive carefully disguised, the voice tremulous. The answer was always an improvisation, although the theme was the same, tragedy, loneliness, near-despair. For openers, he had learned, he could be most effective when speed was essential. And speed, at these moments, was always essential.

  "I feel I've just come out of a long tunnel," he would say. "My wife was sick for a year before she died. It drained me. I thought I was at the end of the rope
. I'm trying to reconstruct my life."

  "Really?"

  He would look deeply into her eyes and hold her hand, stroking her fingers.

  "I'm beginning to feel human again."

  But after sketching in his little fictitious biography, he refused to dwell on it, no matter how much she probed. Having established his availability, he proceeded to become lighthearted and loquacious, tossing jokes around so that others in the vicinity could hear him and laugh and he could strike up conversations with them. The objective now was to make the woman insecure, jealous, and he would turn his attention on other women in the area, always controlling the degree of her anxiety. The purpose of his little game, he knew, was to let himself become the object of competition.

  Invariably he would wind up at the poolside bar, sitting between two of them, his original choice smoldering on one side, while he directed his attention to the other one, but he was always alert to the degree of the chosen woman's tension beside him. It was not that he was calculating. Nor could he articulate his method if asked to do so. It was an instinct, a sure talent, and he believed implicitly in his irresistibility.

  He knew in advance when the woman was hooked. The strategy at that point was to make it easy for her to find a way to get him into bed, which, he knew, would seal the bargain. He was always amazed about how resourceful they could be.

  "Dammit, I've torn my slacks," he might say, testing her.

  "I'll sew them."

  "You carry around a sewing machine?"

  "No. I've got needle and thread in my room."

  Usually he would move in within a day or two, but not until the woman had been totally taken with him and knew that he was broke. Hadn't he gone through a fortune caring for a sick wife? He considered himself a fair trade for a few months' companionship. After all he had picked her. And it wasn't long before she was totally convinced of that. Not that he would confine his sexual attentions solely to her. The beauty parlor claimed a great deal of her time, leaving him free to dally a bit, which he always did in other hotels. Never shit where you eat, he told himself. That was a firm policy.

  "How do you do it, Max?" his brother would ask when he returned to the store after his winter's vacation, tanned and glowing with health and energy.

  "I can't explain it." He shrugged.

  "You just snap your fingers and they come."

  "I can't explain it."

  Nor could he explain the lack of remorse after he had said good-by, promising to call. He always told them he lived in New Jersey.

  He would, of course, vary the hotels from year to year, working out a rotation that enabled him, miraculously, to avoid the inevitable confrontations. Although they did occur occasionally.

  "I was frantic," a woman from a previous year might say. He tried to avoid her eyes, knowing that it might start things over again. "You didn't call. I searched all over New Jersey. You weren't in the telephone book. I thought I would commit suicide."

  At those moments, he would pat her arm, rubbing his hand lightly over the flesh.

  "I had my pride," he would say. "How could I live off you forever? What kind of a man would that make me? I did it for you."

  Sometimes the woman would overcome her past humiliation, restrain it, and rub her hand on his thigh, an unmistakable signal that required a chivalrous and dutiful gesture, and he would provide the woman with a farewell episode that she would treasure forever.

  "It will catch up with you some day, Max," his brother would say. "Some lady will put a knife in your heart. Find yourself a good woman and settle down."

  Max would look at him, his big cow eyes registering confusion and hurt.

  "Me?" he would protest.

  Such a possibility was far beyond his comprehension. I give them joy, he told himself. I give them pleasure.

  "Someday you'll get too old," his brother would say.

  "I'll have to adjust," Max would answer.

  What Max knew instinctively was that although chronology might age the body, it also invested the mind with additional wisdom, a miraculous compensating factor. Thus, as the years passed, and Max passed through his fifties and sixties, he kept pace with his modus operandi by recalibrating the inner clock. He understood his limits, both economically and chronologically. The big expensive hotels--the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Diplomat, all of which had once accepted him as a nonpaying guest in the company of some pleasant lady--became too formidable, a fact which he knew well in advance and which spared him any of the sourness of defeat. Times change, he told himself, knowing that there were still plenty of places available where Max Bernstein could walk into a room and cause the female eyelids to flutter.

  He would acknowledge to himself that there were a few more difficulties to overcome. The new condominiums that dotted the beaches now, with their sophisticated security systems and permanent residents, made it more complicated to present himself--although the permanence of the residents made the preliminary research easier. He would know the widows without having to trust his intuition. And it was widows that were his principal concentration in his later years.

  But always he would return to Brooklyn and to his brother's delicatessen.

  "I'm going to sell the store," his brother told Max one day after he had returned from his annual vacation.

  "Sell the store?"

  "The neighborhood is changing fast, Max. And we're too old, too old to run things any more."

  "Who's old?"

  "You, Max," his brother said. "You were born in 1902."

  "So?"

  To Max, age was an odd frame of reference. He didn't feel old and sometimes, not always, he would look into the mirror and wonder whose tanned and wrinkled face was staring back at him. Encased inside was a nineteen-year-old, he was convinced, and occasionally the way his organs reacted to the blandishments of a woman convinced him that this was true.

  You amaze me, he would sometimes say to himself, looking down at his organ in the shower, appraising it, then patting it proudly. You're a good old putz, baby, he would say, giggling with the exuberance of the imprisoned nineteen-year-old embedded in his gnarled body.

  Finally the store was sold. Abandoned would be the appropriate word, since the neighborhood was hardly viable any more for the likes of a kosher delicatessen. Max's brother was a widower by then and would be moving out of the neighborhood to live with his daughter in Hempstead.

  "And you, Max?"

  "I'm going to Florida."

  "And money?"

  "I have my social security."

  "Max," his brother said. There were tears in his faded myopic eyes. "Find a good woman to take care of you."

  "One woman?" he said. "I'm not ready for the grave yet."

  There was, Max admitted to himself, a slight anxiety about the future, but when he arrived that first night in the clubhouse of Sunset Village, where he had gone directly from his motel, he knew he had found the cornucopia for his survival. The place was crawling with widows, thousands of them, of all shapes and sizes. They were like an occupying army, stationed everywhere.

  He sat on one of the high-backed winged chairs of the clubhouse lobby, cautioning himself not to be too hasty as he was having trouble distinguishing between them. Older ladies, like Chinese waiters, were difficult to individualize. As he watched them, he began to dwell on what his brother had suggested: "Find a good woman."

  A good woman. He chuckled. They were all good women. His wife, Milly, had been a good woman. The hundreds of women he had bedded, lived with, lied to, caressed, were all good women. Not a single one could he remember who treated him badly. Even Milly had been generous, appearing from time to time over the years to share his bed and cook for him. Can I help it if they find me irresistible, he told himself, not with any sense of bragging. It was an unalterable fact.

  He sat in the high-backed winged chair, contemplating the faces of the women, when his attention fell on a plump woman walking up and back in front of him, stealing an occasional glance
when she could. He was used to this, although he sensed that the woman was vaguely familiar. This was, he agreed, a common occurrence. So many of them were characteristically familiar, the color of hair, or eyes, the way of a walk, fingers, legs, haunches. Familiarity was everywhere, even in bits and pieces.

  "You're not Max Bernstein?" the woman asked finally. Her hair was dyed red but he could tell by her lightly freckled bone-white skin that she was an authentic redhead. He detected a flicker of memory in her greenish eyes.

  "Why do you ask?" he said. He could not resist the propensity to be flirtatious.

  "You look like Max Bernstein."

  "Max Bernstein yesterday? Or Max Bernstein today?"

  "Like forty years ago."

  "You mean when I was twelve?"

  The woman laughed, throwing back her head. There was a puddle of fat around her chin that shook like jelly. It was the gesture that recalled her vaguely.

  "You remind me of Max Bernstein."

  "Sometimes I remind myself of Max Bernstein."

  "You are, aren't you?"

  "I was when I shaved this morning."

  She reached out and touched his shoulder.

  "I'm Eileen Goldberg."

  "Eileen Goldberg?" He repeated the name, his mind rifling through a list of women's names like a computer.

  "Brooklyn. I was in college. We lived next door."

  "Of course, Eileen Goldberg." He recalled now. The father had walked in on them. Milly had gotten all upset. Was this the one she divorced me over? He remembered. She was a college girl then, slender, affectionate, very affectionate, and an absolutely natural redhead. She was blushing, perhaps reading his thoughts.

  "I'm a widow," she said suddenly, as if it were the accepted introduction to identify immediately one's availability.

  Why not? he thought and stood up. Her blush receded, although her cheeks were still rouged with two circles of red. He withheld his own availability label. He wanted to be certain of his choice.

  "So what have you been doing for the last forty years?" she asked, as they began to walk outside.

  "The same thing I was doing when I last saw you."