Playland (22 page)

Arthur French remembered:

Or tried to remember, given the slippages of age, or was evasive, and perhaps even lied a little.

I embroidered:

She was almost eighteen, or perhaps nineteen, considering the uncertainty about her date of birth. She was wearing a black evening dress and a full-length red fox coat, and she was accompanied by two bodyguards, three Cosmopolitan Studio publicists, and Arthur French. She smiled and waved at the photographers, their cameras loving her and she loving their cameras in turn, the cameras wiping the teenage sulkiness from her face, Blue always in motion, posing, vamping, cooing, “I’d
walk a mile for a man who walked a mile for a Camel.” Joe Romagnola, the maître d’, produced a cigarette, offering a light from his silver Tiffany lighter, a gift from Frank, who when he played the Paramount gave Tiffany lighters to all the maître d’s at all the gin mills where he drank, and Arthur French just as quickly removed the cigarette from her mouth. “J.F. says you’re too young to smoke in public,” he said, and Blue said, “I’m too young to do a lot of the things I do with you, Arthur, in public and especially in private, it’s called statutory something, isn’t it?”

More flashbulbs as she threw her arms around Arthur French, kicking one leg behind her, Arthur, who she had fucked a few hours earlier in the top-floor corner suite at the Plaza (Arthur said that it was Blue who only liked to make love in the afternoon, not he, in his late seventies still unable to say the word
fuck
, irritable that I would even ask such a thing). Blue mimed a kiss at Walter Winchell, “Walter, love you, how’s June?” not stopping to hug him, and moving behind a phalanx of bodyguards and captains and publicity men she let her red fox coat slip off her shoulders onto the floor, where it was immediately picked up by a bodyguard and handed to the coat check girl. The band eased into a rhumba and before she reached their table she drew Arthur French onto the dance floor, Arthur a game escort but no Chocolate Walker Franklin as a dancer, and as he whirled and dipped, Blue doing the leading and not he, tico tico teek, tico tico tock, Arthur spotted Morris Lefkowitz looking at them and he favored Morris with an almost imperceptible nod. Blue followed his gaze and first she saw the old man with the liver marks at the ringside table and next to him the small man with the wary eyes and the broken nose and next to him the woman with the hard angular face tearing into her steak and then she saw the man who seemed to be with the woman demolishing the steak, the not-quite-tall man with the lacquered black hair and the prominent chin and the look of someone to whom no sexual experience was foreign. He was staring at her, she who men had stared at since she was four
years old, men who would look at her on the screen and put their hands in their pockets to fondle their cocks and send her fan mail crusted with their semen, but he was different, he was a man who made her feel embarrassed.

“Who’s the guy?” Jacob King asked Morris Lefkowitz, his eyes not leaving Blue Tyler.

“What guy?”

“With the actress.”

“Moe French’s boy,” Morris Lefkowitz said.

“Arthur French,” Jimmy Riordan said. “His father, Moe, runs Cosmopolitan Pictures.”

“They call Moe J. F. French out there in California,” Morris Lefkowitz said. “When I first know him on the Lower East Side he was Moses Frankel. He was in haberdashery, and then he bought a nickelodeon. Fur is forever, and suits. But film …” He pronounced it “fillum,” as if it had two syllables, and even saying the word made him look as if he had bitten into something that tasted bad. “So, Jacob, you understand what you’re going to do in California?”

“Let me get the feel of it first, Morris,” Jacob King said, rising from the table, leaving Lillian with her steak and Morris Lefkowitz without an answer and Jimmy Riordan uneasy. He walked across the dance floor and tapped Arthur French on the shoulder. A studio bodyguard moved to cut him off, but Arthur shook his head, and Jacob took Blue in his arms, more fluid on the dance floor than Arthur French, as the other dancers moved away, giving them room.

“My name is Jacob King. I’m on my way to Los Angeles”—he pronounced it with a hard
g
—“and I want to get to know you better. I want to get to know you very well.”

“You’re a very good dancer, Mr. King. You know all the moves.”

“I know all the moves,” Jacob King said. “That’s very funny.”

“The studio lets me date, if that’s what you mean,” Blue said. “Arthur …”

Arthur French had retrieved Blue’s fox coat from the hat check girl and was moving toward them. “Mr. King is coming to Los Angeles, he says it like it’s ‘angle us’ so I guess he’s never been there, but he says he wants to get to know me better, and he has such good moves,” Blue said. “I am very flattered, Mr. King. Ta ta. I’m not in the book.”

She danced away from Jacob King and into the fur coat Arthur was holding out for her, did it in one take as if she was on a soundstage and knew where the marks were that she had to hit. It was a star turn, and as she danced toward the exit the house band struck up “California, Here I Come,” and she waved and was gone.

“Did she mention him?” I asked Arthur French.

“She’d never heard of him. But then again she’d hardly heard of Winston Churchill either.” I had the sense nearly fifty years after the fact that Arthur French might conceivably be implying that Blue Tyler had occasionally been rather tedious in her selfcenteredness.

“And you told her?”

“I told her he was somebody she should stay away from. That he killed somebody. Wrapped him up in duct tape.”

“That wasn’t Philly Wexler.”

“So it was somebody else. There were so many, does it make any difference? Anyway. She was never going to see him again.”

“Your mistake.”

“My mistake.”

“But was she interested?”

“The way it turned out I’d have to say she was.”

T
he night before he left for Los Angeles, Jacob King fucked Lillian, and then in the morning he fucked her again, positioning her as he performed his conjugal duty so that her legs were over his shoulders and he could stare out the window in his upstairs Bay Ridge bedroom at the fog-shrouded Statue of Liberty. As always, Lillian King copulated and fellated with zest, if no particular skill or peculiarity. That she was angry with him, and she always seemed to be angry both with Jacob and the world at this juncture of her life, was never a deterrent to her pleasuring. But she seemed to understand that in some deep pocket of his mind, Jacob was already entertaining the notion that this view of Miss Liberty was one he was not likely to see again, during coitus or otherwise. When he left the house in Bay Ridge, he gravely shook hands with Matthew King, kissed Abigail and Lillian King, and then was gone. Gone from their lives; of that Lillian Aronow King was sure, and it was not for her a cause for mourning.

In his office in the fur district—
LEFKOWITZ FOR FUR
was the name painted on the front door,
M. M. LEFKOWITZ, PROP
.—Morris Lefkowitz bade Jacob King good-bye and made him a present
of a custom-tailored vicuña overcoat, double-breasted, with a belt that tied instead of buckling.

“Morris, no,” Jacob King said. “I’m going to California where the sun shines, you follow?”

“Take it, I want you to have it,” Morris Lefkowitz said, admiring the stitching and the hang, running his hand over the soft weave. “It’s South American, from the Andes, that’s the mountains they got down there. The same family as the guanaco, but smaller, and the wool is more delicate. The other one, the guanaco, is for the savages that raise the goats those people eat.” He smoothed a bubble at the shoulder blades. “You’re going out there to represent Morris Lefkowitz, and I don’t want Lilo Kusack and Benny Draper thinking Morris Lefkowitz got poor.”

“We have to go, Morris,” Jimmy Riordan said. “The Limited leaves on the dot—”

“So let this Limited wait,” Morris Lefkowitz said without concern. He was a man used to having his wishes honored, and it did not cross his mind that the conductor of the Twentieth Century Limited would dare thwart those wishes. The conductor was after all a man who wore a uniform, and to Morris Lefkowitz it was a given that any man who wore a uniform was a man who could be bribed, especially when it was for so trivial a task as delaying the departure of a train carrying his personal emissary to the West Coast. He took a belt and fed it through the vicuña overcoat’s generous loops. “Tie it, Jacob, once. Don’t knot it. It wrinkles it’s so soft. I hope you realize the opportunity this is.”

“I had a dollar for every time you told me that, Morris, I’d be a rich man.”

“You have the friendship of Morris Lefkowitz. That makes you a rich man. Jimmy …” Morris Lefkowitz turned to Jimmy Riordan. “You have the figures for the train?”

Jimmy Riordan patted his briefcase. He checked his watch once more, then walked from Morris’s office, through the cutting rooms and the showroom to the reception area. On the
front door,
LEFKOWITZ FOR FUR, M. M. LEFKOWITZ, PROP
. was in black lettering because M. M. Lefkowitz, Prop., thought gold was too ostentatious for a simple furrier.

“I don’t hug you, it will ruin the drape,” Morris Lefkowitz said to Jacob King.

Jacob nodded. “Morris,” he said, a kind of obeisance, and then he too headed out past the cutting tables to the reception area. Jimmy Riordan was waiting by the front door. “Morris,” Jacob King said as he opened the door, pointing to the words
M. M. LEFKOWITZ, PROP
. “All the years I know you, I never asked what the second
M
stood for.”

“Menachem,” Morris Lefkowitz said, and then, “
Mazel
, Jacob.”

“I’ll just ride to a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street,” Jimmy Riordan said when Jacob was settled into his Pullman compartment on the Limited. He looked out the window at the red carpet laid down for the Limited’s passengers. On the burled-wood foldout desk his briefcase was open, and in the briefcase were stacks of crisp new bills, neatly packaged, ten thousand dollars to a package, twenty-five packages in all. “You know, New York before the goddamn war, before Franklin Delano Pain-in-the-Ass Roosevelt even, you had a town then. Thirty thousand joints. You walk in a club, you’re anybody, it wasn’t unusual you sat next to the guys. Sometimes the guys shot each other. Like it was part of the floor show, or something. You’d eat in a place, go to a club, grab a show, and end up in Harlem at five
A.M
., eating ribs and chicken wings and listening to Cab Calloway or Bill Basie. But now …” Jimmy Riordan made a rude noise. “New York is dead, you ask me.”