The Sunset Gang

by Warren Adler

  "Yes, I quite agree," Frieda said, turning to Ida. "You'll love it here. You'll see how the place grows on you."

  "It all depends on the friends you make. That's exactly what my son told me."

  Frieda made sure she left before Heshy came down to the pool. She stoop up and announced that she wouldn't be playing that night.

  Minnie smirked. "Can you make it, Ida?"

  "I'd love it."

  "Your husband wouldn't mind?" Minnie asked.

  "If he minds, he minds," Ida said, flaunting what seemed like independence in this circle of widows. She paused a moment.

  "Perhaps he can find someone to play shuffleboard with."

  Frieda was too excited to eat, and she carefully pored over her make-up bottles and vials and tubes to make what she imagined was the best face possible. Why lie to yourself, she asked, putting on one of her new outfits, a bright-yellow dress that the clerk had said made her look youthful. That was the way they sold goods in Florida.

  She deliberately set off early for the shuffleboard courts to avoid the eyes of Minnie and the yentas who did not burrow out of their condominiums until later and, most important, to be able to flag down Heshy Feinstein before he found a partner to play that detestable game with. Sometimes a little sacrifice doesn't hurt, she told herself, climbing into the gaily colored open-air trailer bus and looking toward the bright sunset that turned the whole western sky molten red and gold.

  Picking a vantage point near the shuffleboard courts, she watched the emerging groups of people seeking the evening's play. The lights seemed to brighten as the sun went down and soon she felt her own impatience and uncertainty. Suppose he had chosen not to come? Suppose Ida had not won her battle for independence? It was past the hour when they would have assembled in the cardroom and she was growing impatient when she finally saw him walk through the clubhouse exit toward the courts. Standing up, she moved toward the fence. She had taken the precaution of putting her name on the list and now noted that her court would be coming up shortly--providing that the honor system of vacating the court after an hour was adhered to, which did not always happen without the use of intimidation.

  She felt him standing behind her watching the games in progress. She wondered if being close to her, smelling her, had not jogged his memory. I am Frieda Goldberg, she screamed within herself, hoping he would hear. She dared not confront him openly with such a confession, fearing rejection. Another couple was standing next to her.

  "I'm looking for a partner," she said so that he might hear.

  "We're already a twosome," the man said.

  "A gruesome twosome," the woman said, obviously wanting to ease what she considered the pain of the other's rejection.

  "I'm in the market," Heshy Feinstein said. His voice was clear, strong, and came to her over the distance of half a century. She turned and looked at him, looked deep into his eyes, which she had recognized instantly. He, however, quickly glanced at his feet.

  "Perfect," she said. "My court comes up in a few minutes."

  "Say," he said, "aren't you the woman who was here last night?"

  "Yes."

  "My wife said she met you at the pool."

  "Oh?" She feigned a slow recollection.

  "Ida Feinstein."

  "Ida," she said, noting that he was searching her face, "a lovely woman." She paused. "You've just only arrived?

  "Two weeks," he said. She detected a note of sadness.

  "You miss your work," she said softly, a trifle breathless she imagined, wanting to offer him greater understanding than he had had in fifty years.

  "It's not easy. I've been active as a teacher for all those years. It'll take some getting used to."

  When their court was ready, they proceeded down the line and took their sticks from the rack.

  "I'm really not good at this," she said. "You're much better."

  "I've only played twice in my life."

  "You're probably a natural athlete."

  "Yes, people have said that."

  She held the stick and moved forward with her disk overshooting the board and crashing into the wall beyond.

  "Too hard," he said.

  The next barely made it to the point of the triangle.

  "I think I need a little instruction," she said.

  He was a teacher and immediately began a pedantic lesson in the relationship of the disk to the stick to the muscles of the arm. He gently took her bare arm and moved it in a pushing motion. She felt the goose pimples erupt, her arm grow limp.

  "Stiffer," he said.

  I can't stand this, she told herself. She managed to move the disk to the easiest score.

  "Now watch me." Gracefully, in a slow motion, he moved the disk across the court, knocking her disk aside.

  "You're fantastic," she said, noting his concentration.

  After they had played for three-quarters of an hour and she was growing bored with the game and frustrated at his lack of recognition, she turned to him. "Maybe I should rest for a moment," she said. "I am absolutely the lousiest player here."

  He sat down beside her on the bench and pulled out a package of chewing gum.

  "No thanks," she said, thinking of her bridge.

  "I've done this for years. I've still got all my teeth."

  "Did you enjoy being a teacher?"

  "Yes, I did."

  "You didn't want to be anything else but a teacher?" she asked.

  "Not really." He paused. "My father wanted me to be a doctor."

  She felt her heart beat swiftly again, the memory and the pain washing back.

  "You didn't want to be a doctor?"

  "Not really."

  The anger of fifty years came rushing back.

  "It didn't cause you any trouble?"

  "Trouble?" He turned and looked at her, as if for the first time, almost as if the inquiry had offended him. She imagined she could hear old doors squeak open and smell the musty odor of her father's cellar.

  "I have a son that's a dentist," he said, still watching her, although his frame of reference seemed deflected.

  "Did you put pressure on him to be a dentist?"

  "Never," he said. He continued to look at her. She hoped that the floodlights weren't too revealing and that her make-up was clever. She felt her attraction to him, untrammeled by time, the old feelings of wonder and pleasure that she had had when he was in her presence, close to her.

  "Do we know each other?" He seemed confused.

  "I don't know," she answered, feeling at last the tug on her line.

  "You lived in Flatbush, my wife said?"

  "Yes."

  "You were never a teacher?"

  "No. My husband was a cutter in the garment center."

  "I went to City College. Did you go to college?"

  "No."

  "We didn't meet at Rockaway, someplace at the beach. Maybe at the PTA. I used to teach in Brooklyn."

  "I never went."

  "Where did you grow up?"

  "Brooklyn."

  "Where?"

  "Crown Heights." She paused, watching his eyes for any sign. Then she said slowly, "And before that Brownsville."

  "Brownsville. That's where I grew up. Imagine that. What a mess that place is today. I went back once and cried like a baby."

  She felt him drifting again.

  "I lived on Douglass Street."

  "Douglas Street? I lived on Saratoga Avenue."

  "The next block."

  She could sense his agitation now. Thank God, she told herself.

  "What did you say your name was?"

  "Smith," she teased, knew she was teasing, enjoying it, felt the pleasure in her body, in her soul, felt her womanliness, the wonder of this flirtation.

  "No. Your maiden name."

  "Goldberg."

  "My God! Frieda Goldberg!"

  "Bingo."

  She saw his lips tremble and his eyes mist slightly and the remembered little tic at the base of his jawbone palpitate.r />
  "Frieda." He had trouble swallowing.

  She moved away from him on the bench, as if to study him.

  "You're not the Heshy Feinstein?" She brought her palms together and pushed them under her chin. "Heshy Feinstein. I can't believe it. I just can't believe it."

  "You can't?" He paused again, then grasped her hands in his. "How do you think I feel?

  "Frieda Goldberg." He repeated her name over and over again.

  "It's Smith now," she said.

  "It's been lots of years." He moved his head up and down, surveying her, watching her, his face flushed quite visibly beneath the redness of his recent sunburn. She sat still, watching him, looking into his eyes, letting him drink her in, wondering what he was seeing.

  "It's a coincidence," Frieda said. A new group of players came to take their court and they got up from the bench and moved toward the exit.

  "Let's take a walk," he said.

  She seemed to be leading him. They walked along the path that skirted the clubhouse and snaked into the pool area. There were chairs there on which they could sit in the quiet darkness and watch the clubhouse lights play against the surface of the pool.

  "I've been counting the years in my head," he had said after they had walked for a few moments in silence. "I'll be seventy in December," he said. "I was seventeen."

  "Fifty-two years," she said, moving close to him in the quiet night, hoping he would take her arm.

  When they reached the chairs he had wiped off the moisture with his handkerchief. Other couples sat in the distance. She could hear their voices.

  "I've thought about us many many times," Heshy said, his voice suddenly hoarse. He cleared his throat.

  "We were something," she said, patting his hand, and then moving her fingers up his bare arm.

  "It took a long time for that to go away," he said.

  She wanted to say it never went away. She remembered Herman again, feeling sorry. Poor Herman!

  "You've had a good life?

  "Fair," he said after long pause. "And you?"

  "The same."

  "Tell me."

  She shrugged. "As I said, I married a man named Herman Smith. He was a cutter in the garment center, made a decent living. We lived in two apartments. One in Crown Heights. One in Flatbush. Then he died of a heart attack. Quick. No pain. I have a daughter named Helen, who got married and moved to Chicago. Now I'm a widow and live in Sunset Village with the rest of the widows." She had said it all quickly, marveling as to how swiftly it all could be said, her life. Some life. Surely there was more to it, she told herself. Was she deliberately trying to draw out his sympathy? Of course she was.

  "And you?" she asked. He had placed his own hand on hers, which still rested on his bare arm.

  "My father drove me crazy about that doctor business. But he died a year or two after you moved away and I had to help my mother in the grocery store. Then I went to City College and took my teaching tests. I taught for more than forty years. My two children are doing fine. Ida you met. We've been married forty-two years. Now I'm retired."

  They sat silently again, his hand kneading hers now, the pool water shimmering and the din from the clubhouse washing over the air like distant thunder.

  "We were something," he said. He is recalling me, she thought, wondering if he was frightened. "We never could get enough of each other."

  She wanted to tell him then and there what it had meant to her, how much of it she had protected and treasured, but she held off.

  "We were very close," she said. Did it seem to him that they were talking about different people? she wondered.

  "Unbelievable," he said. "It was never the same again."

  She felt her joy now, the validation, the thing that was alive inside of him after all those years. He bent over to catch a ray of light on the face of his watch.

  "I better pick up Ida now," he said, standing up, but not letting go of her hand.

  They walked toward the clubhouse through a clump of young trees. He directed her off the path and looked around him quickly. Then he enveloped her in his arms, kissing her on the lips, his tongue darting in. She felt her body turn to jelly, lurch, and she caressed his back, running her hands down to his buttocks. He pressed close to her with his pelvis, then disengaged his mouth and whispered in her ear, "It's a dream."

  She felt a tingle begin in her, somewhere deep, a tremor of pleasure, something she had not felt for more than fifty years. She wondered if he was still alive there, still needed her, and she brought her hand down to his crotch, stroking gently. She felt the beginning of hardness and knew she was giving him pleasure, but he moved away swiftly. They had heard footsteps coming on the cement path.

  "Are you going to mention this to Ida?" she asked as they reached another dark spot on the path. This time they paused but did not touch.

  "No," he said.

  "Good."

  They started to move toward the clubhouse, but she hesitated.

  "I'm going home from here."

  "Will I see you again?"

  "Of course."

  She was so agitated she could not sleep, tossing and turning in her bed. The restraints of more than five decades had simply crumbled against the force of this mysterious attraction. She did allow herself the use of the word mystery, since it was something that defied all logic--at least from her experience.

  In the morning, she was tempted to call her daughter, because she dared not confide in any of her friends, especially Minnie, who would have the information all over Sunset Village as if on a streamer carried by an airplane. She was uneasy, too, about their having been seen in public together. Did someone see them last night? It was not exactly the norm to see two people embracing in the shadow of the Sunset Village Clubhouse. What she had felt unmistakably was something that Herman Smith, for all his kindness and faithfulness and decency, could not produce in her and for this inability had suffered a lifetime of deprivation and frustration.

  When she had gotten out of bed that morning, she had taken off her nightgown and viewed herself again in the full-length mirror, inspecting every fold of her aging body, wondering whether, when compared to that image in his mind of a sixteen-year-old, it would disgust him, turn him away from her. If I close my eyes, she reasoned, I feel sixteen. Perhaps he will close his. And I will close mine, she agreed, although she had noticed that men's bodies did not seem to shatter so terribly with age.

  When the telephone rang, she knew it was him and answered quickly.

  "Frieda?"

  "Yes."

  "Heshy."

  "I know."

  "You knew I would call?"

  "I felt it."

  "I didn't sleep all night. Ida got up twice to get me an Alka Seltzer. Frieda, I can't believe it. What I feel. What I felt last night."

  "Yes," she said. She knew, of course, why he had called and pondered the question. They must be very careful. Surely, this one time, she told herself.

  "You can come over. Walk in the back." She gave him her address.

  "I can stay till two-thirty. Ida is at the pool."

  "Yes," she said.

  When he had hung up, she called Minnie.

  "I don't know what's wrong. I feel terrible. I'm going to nap."

  "Should I come over later?"

  "No. I'll be fine. Just let me sleep."

  "Your friend Ida Feinstein is terrific," Minnie said. "She fits in most beautifully with our group. Her husband sounds like a big schlepp."

  "At least he's alive." It was an expected reference, a wisecrack.

  "That's something."

  She put on a brassiere to take away the sag of her breasts and she searched her drawer for a fresh pair of pink panties, the older kind without elastic around the legs. She found a pair lying on the bottom of her lingerie drawer and drew it on. She then slipped into a flowered dressing gown. She went into the kitchen, made a tuna-fish salad, enough for two, and set it out on the cocktail table in front of the couch. For a moment
she wondered if she should put out her half bottle of Manischewitz Concord, but remembering its cloying sweetness she rejected the idea.

  The rattling on the screen door came sooner than she expected, and she was annoyed with herself for not having lifted the latch because someone might see him knocking on the door. Walking swiftly to the door, she let him in. He was wearing a flowered short-sleeved shirt, white cotton slacks, and white loafers. She led him through the apartment to the living room and they sat on the couch together.

  "I can't think of anything else since I met you last night, Frieda. I've been going over in my head all the things we did together. What we meant to each other. I never thought I would see you again, never."

  "Vice versa," she responded. She moved closer to him and he put a hand on her knee.

  "You think we're a joke?" he asked suddenly. It has been troubling him, she saw, but the feeling between them was beyond his stopping it. It had always been beyond that.

  "I was going to call my daughter this morning and tell her."

  "She knows about us?"

  "Not really. Once I mentioned it when Herman died. But if I called her up and said, 'Helen, I met an old boy friend and I'm going to have an affair,' she would plotz right then and there."

  "How could I even tell my children? Certainly not Ida. I've never been unfaithful to Ida. Not once. What about you?"

  "Not only was I not unfaithful. I wasn't even faithful."

  He threw his head back and laughed, rubbing his hand up and down her inner thigh.

  "I made some tuna-fish salad," she said stupidly, feeling the blood surge in her veins, the joy tickling her groin.

  "There is only one salad I want," he said.

  She felt her breath coming in hot gasps as she moved her head back on his shoulder, knowing her mouth was open as she made gurgling sounds. She recovered herself somewhat to begin unzipping his pants.

  "You haven't got a bad heart, have you, Heshy?"

  He looked down at her confused, then smiled as he helped her remove his white slacks and undershorts.

  "You want to go into the bedroom?" she asked, hoping he would say no, since they had never ever been together in a bedroom.

  He shook his head.

  "I'm older now," he said, surveying his still not-up-to-par member, "I need more help than I used to." He seemed to be pleading. She stood up and unfastened her brassiere. She let his hands play with her nipples while she stroked his manhood, feeling the response come, the hardness begin.