Augusta Played (4 page)

Now, so far as being a pilot went, Norman rode the subway; he could hardly drive, much less fly. He had never been through anything spectacular. He had never been a soldier or a prisoner, or anything but a student, analysand, and, for a few weeks one summer, a seller of baby pictures door-to-door on Long Island. He had also briefly worked for a firm of financial consultants, dialing people in the Manhattan telephone directory and trying to talk them into setting up a free appointment, at which they would find out from someone else how little it could cost them to save money. For this reason, the exploits of other men nudged Norman discomfitingly, pushed him into the past, where he stopped on the street, stood listening for danger, heard Snowball, the albino with a hard-on, slip and curse behind the fence, and then ran like hell for home. About once a month Snowball and his cohorts caught him, plastered his face in mud, yanked his pants down, foulmouthed his father. While his father was the D.A., they had it in for “Norm the Gorm.” But his father the D.A. never even noticed them; boys like that were mindless microscopic existents, his father said, interesting to a sociologist but of no ethical consequence. “I got bigger fish to fry,” his father said. His father said this until full-scale gang warfare erupted in vicious earnestness in the late fifties, but by that time Sid Gold was busy being a judge. By that time Norman had come into his own, the Julien Sorel of Ocean Parkway with large, suffering, intense, heart-hurting eyes and a young man's utter lack of scrupulousness about using them.

Meanwhile, he had learned to walk with his head down, since to shoot glances at Snowball ranked, apparently, as an insult of injurious proportions. He steered clear of dead ends.

All this caution had delimited Norman's sense of himself; he felt that he knew himself inside out, and he was ashamed not to be aware of vast unexplored emotional territories. Even if he could discover them, he doubted that he would be brave enough to penetrate very deeply, though perhaps he did himself a disservice here, for he
was
intellectually aggressive, a prober of tunnels, a ravisher of motive, and if mystery was a woman, shy and sultry as sunlight on a hot, cloudy day, when the wind hung over the sky like seven veils, then he was her best lover, the one who knew how to strip to essence.

Gus, knowing the pressure of Norman's arm on her lap, smiled. The Berliner said she was beautiful when she smiled. Norman said she was beautiful even when she didn't, but that she was more likable when she did. These comments contained messages, but for whom were they meant? If for her, why did both men speak about her and not to her? Warned, she took her hand from Norman's elbow, as if suddenly she doubted he would be as careful of her person as she would. Suppose she
were
a book, or a score. Men were lackadaisical about library due dates, the energy that went into any work a woman did, and most of all, sexual loyalties. “Did the war touch your wife too?” she asked, addressing the Berliner. She hadn't intended for her question to sound so obscene. She felt as though she'd bent over to pick up some idea that they'd left lying around on the wooden floor, like a peanut shell, only to learn that the back of her skirt had pulled up humiliatingly, exposing her most vulnerable parts.

The man said, “You want me to give you a yes. This would be the easy answer. But my wife is a free spirit; nothing touches her but art.”

Norman laughed. “You read too much Nietzsche at the Gymnasium.”

Gus was thinking about the wife that only art touched. Art seemed to her to have become a person. A man. A Mann man. Redheaded. She said, “Art's touch is cold.” She didn't know why she said that. It wasn't what she believed.

Nobody answered her.

It became important to her to get a response, so she said, “It's like a crematorium that hasn't been used in twenty years, if you want to know the truth. Art's touch.”

Still nobody said anything, but she wouldn't let it drop. “What I mean is,” she said, “art is a kind of stony vault in which the ashes of our ancestors are housed. Even physicists' ashes. Even the ashes of dead dictators.”

The Berliner capitulated. “Even that is to make of art a utility,” he said, “like the water service or electric power. My wife says, there is an artist named Paul Jenkins, who has publicly consumed a canvas of pears, to illustrate that pears are for eating, not painting.”

And at that, Gus and Norman glanced shyly at each other and fell in love all over again. They
were
on the same side after all! Augusta asked the Berliner, “What did they taste like?”—meaning the pears. And Norman said, “If you ask me, that's an extremely untrustworthy teleology.”

The man seemed offended. “What do you mean?” he asked. “What teleology?”

“Look,” Gus said, leaning over the table animatedly; her hair, grazing the table top, was so blond it hurt Norman's eyes. “Suppose a pear's most salient characteristic, the one that juts out from the others, is its shape. After all, I defy you to describe how a pear tastes; isn't it a bland taste, like gritty pudding? And consider the shape of the pear, how it
glows
, a mock light bulb. Maybe pears were meant for mock lamps. You'll say, What do I want with a mock lamp? But that's a whole different problem, to wit, our supply of mock lamps exceeds the demand for them!” Her eyes glittered, reflecting the incredible dark yellow of her hair, and on her finger the lustrous pearl gleamed, like a third, anomalous eye. Now when she turned toward Norman, he felt charged by her energy, and they left hand in hand, in good spirits, victorious.

7

N
ORMAN
HAD
TO
BREAK
the news to his father. He did not look forward to doing this. Well, part of him looked forward to it.

He took the subway to Brooklyn and went straight to the old man's office. The way he had it figured, it was wiser to tell his father personally in private; his mother would go along with anything. His mother's philosophy was, Never complain because it's all free anyway. “It” was life. His father's was, Nothing is free—they take it out of your hide every day and the best you can hope for is a decent return on your investment. This argument had been going on for the whole of Norman's time on earth, which now totaled twenty-eight years.

Waiting in the anteroom, Norman smoked a cigarette, taking exaggerated drags to keep his throat from locking. He cracked his knuckles. There was no window in the waiting room but otherwise it was posh: paisley pillows and rubber plants, plenty of walnut paneling. Jocelyn's IBM typewriter looked like the computer bank on
Star Trek
.

The luxury didn't hide the odor of hard work. The toil was there, even if it was neatly filed away in steel cabinets. In a way, Norman thought it was obscene of his father to go on working at his age; a man that old was a fool to lust after the law. By the time Jocelyn let him in, Norman was furious, but he could follow the line of his fury back to the Talmud, and he knew better than to blame his father for the sins of
his
fathers. For all those generations, law had been the truly beloved, embraced warmly like the Simchath Torah. Understanding inhibited him. Tolerantly, he said to his father, “You're looking fit.” It was like starting an avalanche by dislodging a single pebble. His father roared—or tried to.

“Why shouldn't I?” he demanded. “You think I'm not? I could take on a dozen wiseguys like you.” He put an arm around Norman's shoulders, breaking away to feint and jab. “Sit. Did you eat already?”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Jocelyn”—he was leaning into the intercom—“get lunch. How do I know what? Food. Get food.” He turned to Norman. “Now tell me, what kind of a name is Jocelyn?”

For all the power behind his father's voice, it came out high—not feminine, but not so masculine, either. It was as if the old man's gender was fading away with age, like the color in his face. He could end up a pale, brown-specked, cigar-puffing, money-making bookworm. Not that he ever read anything but law. He had strong eyes and even now didn't need glasses. He peered into Norman's face, cheeping in that high, loud voice which always came as such an unpleasant surprise and made a listener feel rather as though he were pitching to a bunt. Norman backed away, using as an excuse the cigarette in his hand; his father shoved an ashtray across the desk at him and he put it out. Then he took a seat in a straight-backed chair and tried to get his bearings. His father sat down behind the desk, facing him. His father's head was bald and lumpy, with a neat white fringe encircling the bottom edge of the skull, like a slipped halo. With his squat, substantial pudge-body widening at the base, he looked like a cross between a cherub (belonging to the knowledgeable order of celestial beings) and a toad. On the right side of his head, alopecia had exposed a thick mole that ought to have been removed, if only as a precaution. But the old man's gaze was as sharp as Chopin's Thirteenth Prelude. Norman lit another cigarette, and his father said, “You smoke too much.”

“I know, Pop.”

“For a son, I have a chimney.”

“I know, Pop.”

“Hey, was the train on time? Did you stall? Did anyone get electrocuted on the third rail? Was there a mugging in Union Square?”

“I got here, didn't I?”

“Good,” he said, “that's great. What an age. The wonders. Airplanes, rocket ships, miracle drugs, television by satellite—”

“Spare me.”

“You don't eat right, Norman. You got no pep.”

“No get-up-and-go.”

They glanced at each other slyly, like vaudeville comedians checking out a rival act, and then they smiled, a kind of shorthand applause for each other. The old man laughed until he had to blow his nose to clear his sinuses. He had often explained to Norman that laughing was lousy for the sinuses.

“Pop—” Norman began.

“Come on, come on, I don't have all day. I'm an old man! I could die tomorrow!”

His father always overacted. Never knew when to quit. It was the thing about him that his mother had always been a little disgusted by, though she would never complain. “Look, Pop, this is serious,” Norman said.

The old man folded his handkerchief back into his pocket and nodded.

“I'm getting married.”

The old man was now acting serious. “It's time,” he said, seriously. “You were the child of my old age.” He looked grim, preparing to meet his maker. Inside, Norman knew, he was as excited as if the Messiah had just walked through the door. More. The Messiah wouldn't give him a grandson.

“Her name is Gus.”

“Gus?” He looked bewildered.

“For Augusta.”

“She's not a Jew?”

“No.”

Norman watched his father's bewilderment deepen. It seemed to sink in through the nonplussed eyes and settle somewhere lower down, around the heart. “I see,” his father said. But Norman knew that he didn't. He couldn't conceivably see because his eyes had gone dark. All the play had been banished from his father's features, exiled to some Siberia of the emotions for responses that had served their purpose and were no longer useful. What Norman saw across the desk now was his father's legal face, about as expressive as a municipal bond.

“You'll like her,” Norman said, breathlessly. If only he could bring back the joker in his father—“She's a musician,” he said. “That's almost like being Jewish.”

“I'm sure she's likable.”

“Well, naturally, I think so. I could be prejudiced.” He knew he was grinning like a simpleton.

“How much does she want?”

“What?”

“You heard. How much?”

“How much what?”

“She's pregnant, isn't she? Or else just smart. They're all like that. It's not a big deal. But you wouldn't compound a mistake by marrying it.”

“Gus is not a mistake.”

“All right, an unfortunate choice. Of words. But you get what I'm saying, my drift?”

“And if I don't?” The ash on Norman's cigarette was as long as a caterpillar. It fell off before he reached the ashtray with it. His father looked at the floor mournfully. Norman stood up.

“You're the child of my old age, Norman.”

“What the hell's that got to do with anything?”

“You should know.”

“I should know! I should know better than to expect you might have learned something in your old age. Like, the whole world is not contaminated! Not everybody is a Nazi! Hitler is not some big honcho in Argentina and he is not going to deceive you in the guise of a Gentile daughter-in-law.”

“Shame! Shame!”

“I'm leaving.”

“Leave. What do I care? I could be dead the next time we see each other. Did I tell you about my blood pressure, the strain I'm under? What do you care about that?”

“Very funny, but this is my life you're making the butt of a joke. I don't appreciate that one bit.”

The old man's face darkened as blood rushed to his cheeks. “Who's a ham?” he asked. “Not me.”

As if summoned by the mention of food, at that moment Jocelyn appeared in the doorway, holding a brown paper lunch bag. She was wearing pink.

Norman said to his father, “I'll write a letter. Maybe if you won't
listen
to reason, you'll
read
it.”

“You'll only upset your mother.”

“Mother has nothing to do with this, don't use her as an excuse. You're behaving like an ass on your own initiative.”

“Listen, Jocelyn, how a son talks to his father.” He shook his head sadly.

“Corned beef on rye,” Jocelyn said, holding out the paper bag.

Norman, possessed, snatched it out of her hands and threw it across the room. It landed against the wall behind his father with a soft plop.

“Now see what you've done,” his father said. “And all because you let your head be turned.”