Augusta Played (5 page)

“So,” Norman said, “fast. Skip lunch. It won't kill you. And incidentally don't expect to see me again anytime soon, because you won't.” But he was lighting another cigarette as he said this; it was his third in half an hour.

“A bad penny always turns up.”

Jocelyn was picking lunch up off the floor. “Speaking of turning up,” she said, hinting at significance.

“Oh no,” the old man said.

Norman heard the hint in Jocelyn's voice and the gasp in his father's. He was silent for a minute, trying to think what it might mean. His father did not often gasp.

“She's waiting in the anteroom,” Jocelyn said.

The old man thundered at Norman, but the words came out almost caressingly. Did his father know how he sounded, what a crazy effect he produced? It was a voice like a late summer sky, full of the threat of rain and streaked with sheet lightning—but the rain never broke, and the sweeping winds only roiled the dry air. It was a voice for a Jewish Lear, hurled into the sluggish, hoax-heavy, pollution-dark clouds that sat on the roofs of skyscrapers and tenements, blowing raspberries. The old man had got up and was standing under Norman—Norman was short but his father was shorter—shaking his fist and glowering. “You're excused,” he said.

“Excused?”

“Yes, dammit, excused! Don't you know when to leave the table?”

“After the corned beef,” he said. “Not before.”

“Don't be smart. Smart I've got enough of to last me a lifetime. I don't need more from you. If you marry this person, you are herewith disinherited. I will make it official. I would make it religious, but that would ruin your mother. She would die of tears. I don't want your mother should drown. I got enough troubles, like I got enough of smart. You think I'm being funny, don't. I may express myself in your eyes peculiarly, but what it amounts to is about half a million smackeroos you won't see. Have I made myself clear?”

“Why do you care so much? It's not as if you've spent your life in a synagogue chanting prayers, for chrissake.”

“I have a constituency. Also, I have values.”

“Some values.”

“You can think what you think, Norman, but a father's will is his labor of love. I earned every cent and how I leave it is my way of saying what I was working for. Remember this. After all, I could die today. This afternoon.”

“Oh, Sidney,” a woman's voice wailed. “Not this afternoon! Just when I came all the way to Brooklyn to surprise you!” It originated from behind Norman. He wheeled around, the fateful cigarette in his raised hand. The hand struck a breast of mind-boggling proportions, and then Norman heard a faint sizzling sound, and there was a pause for collective astonishment, as they all gazed, united in fascination, at the fox fur catching flame on Birdie's bust.

8

O
N
TIMES
SQUARE
, Birdie Mickle was billed as Miss Chicken Delight. The neon said:
SHE'S
FINGERLICKIN'
GOOD
. It had taken her a long time to work her way up to neon, and every year on the way up was one year subtracted from how long she could hope to stay there, stripping with class being something you could do only so long as the body held up. Not that hers was in any immediate danger of collapse. She was, as the boys used to say, round and firm and fully packed, and that's not all: her chest was like a scaffold; a man could practically stand on it to get a better view of the scenery.

If Birdie's body was still good, she was convinced that this was at least partly because she kept her mind in shape. Birdie was no dope. She was a well-read woman, and why not? Should she let her life lead her, instead of her leading it? She read between numbers, and it wasn't to educate herself either, as she quickly informed any man who took a patronizing interest in the books in her apartment on Madison Avenue. She read because she liked to.

But Birdie's deep-down special interest, the ambition that lived in her heart like a secret lover, was interpretative dancing. At work, she was renowned for her rendition of “Baby, Pull My Wishbone, Please”—and what nobody even knew was that she had written it herself, words and all. She had talent, she didn't doubt that for an instant. The sad thing was, the business was tight. Sex in the sixties was free, so who needed the illusion of sex? You could walk down the street and see young girls half Birdie's age nearly as naked as she was by the end of her act, and in broad daylight no less. And as if that weren't enough, now the men were taking over. Male strippers were muscling in on the business. Birdie made her living by being just a little bit sinful, but if there wasn't anything sinful anymore, she would be flat broke, wouldn't she? Interpretative dancing had to wait while she made her way in the world. It had waited all these years, she guessed she could live without expressing her true self for a little while longer. But still, it is a terrible thing not to have an outlet for the terpsichorean passion that fires your limbs, for example.

As for the years she had waited—Birdie was forty, and the funny thing was—she knew it was funny because everyone else in the business lied—she didn't mind saying so. You had to lie to managers, certainly. Managers she told she was thirty-eight; but on the whole, forty was a fine age to admit to. It's not as if you get to be forty without earning it. Every bump and grind had cost her, but she wasn't sorry. Look what she had got for it: Sid Gold.

Birdie loved Sidney. She had met him when she was doing a cake job at a stag party on Atlantic Avenue. Some smartass had pricked the balloon on her behind with his swizzlestick, and everyone had laughed except Sid. And her. It stung like hell, that stupid rubber snapping against her bottom. It was like being goosed with a slingshot. She didn't mind pranks. She didn't mind kinks, most of them. But one thing she hated, and that was pain. From the big stuff to the kid stuff, S and M was for the birds and not for Birdie.

Sidney was very kind. He had a mushy heart and a cute fringe and a deep mind. Birdie gave him his own key to her place and he could drop in whenever he felt like it, though, being a gentleman, he usually telephoned first. This was as close to being married as Birdie cared to come, and she made sure that Sidney appreciated the honor she was bestowing on him. Of course, it wasn't all give and no take. There was no one Birdie liked having around more than Sidney. He was undoubtedly the most significant human being she had ever known, and the sweetest besides. Why, she supposed she would do just about anything for Sidney.

When he came to see her in the apartment on Madison, they turned the air conditioner on full and sat on the Empire sofa while she massaged his forehead. He said he couldn't get a real massage anymore. You went into one of these parlors and you were lucky to get out with your clothes on. You had to drink champagne in a sunken Roman bath or lie down in an all-red room that made your eyeballs ache, and what good was it to satisfy one pair when the other pair was popping out? Furthermore, he preferred Concord Grape. It showed you what the world was coming to, he said. Birdie blew on his fringe and told him the story of her life.

The apartment was in a high-rise with a doorman. It wasn't a penthouse but, as she pointed out to Sidney, she was on the way up. She had a dressing room adjoining her bedroom, so she could put on her face in private like a lady; the dressing table had a skirt and a three-way mirror. Basically, making up involved moisturizing the skin, pancake foundation, highlighter, translucent powder, blusher, eye makeup base, eye shadow (blue or purple, or both, and silver frost), two strips of false lashes on each eye, eyeliner, pencil, mascara, lipstick, lip outliner, and a stick-on beauty spot in the shape of a baby chick. (But on the Fourth of July and Washington's Birthday, as a patriotic person, she wore a beauty spot in the shape of a tiny flag.) Making up required about two hours each time she did it. In cocktail lounges, from a distance of ten feet, Birdie looked twenty. She liked being forty but she didn't like looking forty. Her hair color changed with her wigs. Lately, she was into platinum.

The rest of Birdie's apartment looked like a set from a Hollywood musical. This was because Birdie found the movies very helpful when it came to ideas for decorating. From movies she had learned the importance of plushness. She had plush carpeting, plush drapes, plush cushions, and in negligees she favored floor-length silk over the baby doll look, although she was barely five feet tall. She compensated with spike-heeled mules and hairdos-with-height. Sidney had showered her with gown-and-peignoir sets, and she was grateful. Sidney was a generous man. However, the fact that she accepted his presents did not necessarily mean anything. Not necessarily.

Because Birdie was not, repeat definitely not, and if you forgot it you could get your block knocked off by her purse, a whore. She had turned a trick now and then but she was not about to let anybody jump to conclusions. That was what a whore was, somebody who let other people jump to conclusions, and you didn't have to be a woman to be a whore, either. The world was full of respectable male whores, many of them politicians. Sid was an exception, and so, for that matter, was she. It was one of the things that they had in common. And like Sidney, Birdie always stated her arguments very clearly so there could be no misunderstanding. She liked having things out in the open. But if it made a man feel good to buy her a fox fur, she wasn't going to stand in his way. You start demurring and saying you can't and he shouldn't, and all you do is saddle the poor fellow with a lot of guilt which is not what anybody wants. Guilt a man can always get at home. A woman too, for that matter. Her father had laid just a whole lot of it, if you want to know the truth, on her, and look where it got her: forty years old and in love with Sidney Gold. She giggled. On the other hand, could guilt be all bad, if it led to this?

Sid, being deep, understood all this. If things broke for him, he might be sitting on the Supreme Court, but that didn't alter his inward self, and his inward self was a lot like hers. The hard shell and the slick surface were accreted, like hers. It was a kind of chitin, but they were piteous within, which was a quote from
Time
magazine. So Sid didn't laugh at her, and she didn't laugh at him, but they laughed with each other more than either of them had ever done with anybody else.

9

N
ORMAN
WHIPPED
the fox fur from Birdie's bosom and threw it to the floor. The Honorable Sidney Wallechinsky Gold watched his son stamping out the sparks. How much had he paid for that fur? It didn't matter—what did he care about money? Norman could think he was closefisted, let him. It wasn't that he loved money but that money was love. If Norman did not think that money was love, let him try living without it. The lack of it stunted your growth. Little children grew up warped in mind and body for the lack of it. As for himself, from being poor he had got rich, and to what end if not to shower his wealth on certain persons whom he loved dearly and wished to see thrive, like American Beauty rose bushes? And why should he pay to see weeds grow, would somebody please tell him that? God did not make the rain to fall everywhere in the world at the same time, indiscriminately.

Sidney Gold was liberal with the B'nai B'rith and the United Jewish Appeal, and he had staked Israel from the beginning.
Eretz Yisrael
. He had done his part to make
aliyah
, the return to the homeland, possible. He was goddamned if he'd support a
shiksa
in his old age. You could lose votes with a mixed marriage in your immediate family. True, he was not running for anything, but it was the same principle. People didn't like this sort of thing. It went deep. Hell, it went back to all those pogroms and camps and exiles and diasporas. Where was the point in surviving all those things
as Jews
if you were going to let yourself be assimilated into nonexistence? To the dead, it was disrespectful. Did they die relinquishing their unique souls so their grandsons could ridicule their beliefs? True, he was not himself a believer, but he could understand their feelings. And Esther's. What about Esther? She would be heartbroken already, her only son. And there was Rita, their daughter. Her husband would give her holy hell for this. Rita was married to an Orthodox Jew and lived in Far Rockaway, he was a good man, decent enough and God knows solid, like a Swiss bank he was solid, but hell, every time she took a piss she had to have a ritual bath. So it seemed.

10

L
OOK,
I'm really sorry,” Norman was saying. “I didn't realize you were so—”

Birdie smiled magnanimously. “It's all right,” she said, graciously. “It was just fox.” Then she saw Sidney's brow beetling. “I mean,” she said, “why it was special was only because Sidney gave—” But Sidney's brow, instead of smoothing, was creasing still further. It was capable of great creasing because with his scalp muscles he could pull the flesh forward from his bald pate. “Sidney,” Birdie said, trailing off helplessly.

“This is my son the schmuck. Norman. He was just leaving.”

“It's okay, I'm in no hurry. I should make amends.”

Jocelyn was trying to squeeze past the trio. “Oh, I'm sorry,” Birdie said, turning around and giving her a smile like the one she had flashed for Norman. It was her stage smile. She used it when she didn't know what the hell was expected of her, and at this particular juncture in history, so to speak, that was precisely the case. She could tell something had been going on here because she knew Sidney's aura very well. It was usually a comfortable nondescript brown, dried tobacco-leaf brown, but right now she could see clear as daylight, assuming it was a clear day, about a thousand pulsating yellow dots coursing around the contours of his spirit, and that spelled trouble to anybody who knew, as she certainly did, how to read it.

Norman was trying to brush the fox fur into shape, but singed hairs kept flaking off and drifting to the floor. “There must be something—” he said, holding the fur by its snout.