You're Married to Her? (3 page)

Although the Sunday of the awards ceremony was a blazing 94 degrees, it came after a week of sporadic rain and unyielding humidity that spun my hair into a ball of grade 4 steel wool. At sunrise I spread an old blanket on the hot tar roof of my apartment building in an attempt to coax a fast suntan. In order to make up for lost time, my mother's brother Rudy, or The Idiot, as my father called him, also in on the project, provided me with a secret formula that he told me life guards used, a squeezer bottle with equal parts baby oil and iodine. Like a rotisserie chicken, I turned and basted myself
every half hour. I did not eat breakfast or go downstairs for lunch as I was fasting to take off extra pounds and I did not realize the effects of the secret formula until I saw my dad's expression when he came up to the roof to get me.

“The Idiot told you to do that?” he said. My skin was scorched and raw to the touch, the approximate color of a red bliss potato. My mom led me directly to the bathroom where I sat on the toilet seat while she massaged hair-straightening mixture into my scalp. Then she wrapped my head in aluminum foil and moved me to the living room to watch the ball game while my hair relaxed. Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee sportscaster, was swabbing his face with a handkerchief. The infield in the Bronx, he announced, had reached 97 degrees. Allison and her mom were to pick me up in a limousine at five. It was now four-fifteen. My dad plucked lint off the tuxedo he had rented at 50 percent off, a winter model made of mohair. My skin was beginning to blister. My mom unwrapped my head. “Oh, my,” she said with the expression of someone unpinning a diaper. “It must be the heat.” My hair had completely lost its texture and dribbled down my scalp like gravy.

Half the building watched from the lobby when the limousine arrived. None of the children had ever seen a real chauffeur. An overly solicitous body builder in an ill-fitting double-breasted suit, he held open the door and softly said many things about my comfort. It did not register at first that he was mumbling apologies because
the air conditioning in the limo did not work. Allison was wearing a real ruby tiara and a shoulder-less pink satin gown that made crunching sounds as she slid over. Her mother was rattling the bottles of the limo bar and cursing the driver until he raised the divider to shut her out. I found that if I did not move, if I remained motionless and simply visualized, in this case a water moccasin sliding across my foot, I could ignore the fact that my body was covered with second-degree burns. Relief arrived with a sea breeze as we swung through empty streets and even Allison's mother had gently succumbed to sleep. But soon we hit the Long Island Expressway, packed bumper to bumper with Sunday evening beach traffic.

Enveloped in the exhaust of many thousands of cars headed back to Manhattan, the long black limousine did not move. Allison's mother snored. My slacks, ordered a size too small at the waist to account for the weight I was supposed to lose, girded the soft flesh of my belly like piano wire. To our right a car full of teenage thugs in bathing suits, their bare feet sticking out the back window, drank beer and smoked pot and, laughing at the stiffs in formal dress, took turns spitting phlegm loogies at us. Closing our windows in this heat was not an option. I tried blocking them out with Sylva Mind Control. Think positively: Soon the traffic would budge. A loogie hit me in the neck. Utilize the right brain hemisphere: Before long, I will eat. I had not eaten in twenty-four hours and my stomach made those
noises you hear in trucks that need a new transmission. Lurching forward a car length at a time, swinging into lanes in which the traffic abruptly stopped the moment we got there, we made slow progress.

The hand on my fly came as a surprise but Allison's expression was familiar, the one that always said, “Now. Now that Marina is washing the windows and my father won't be home until eleven, I want you now. Now that the chauffeur is blasting his horn and my mother is fast asleep and stretched out on the jump seats in front of us, let's do it now,” and Allison silently parted the teeth of my zipper as we entered the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

The hotel was a Camelot-era palace of gold brick and white marble on Seventh Avenue. Allison's father, waiting nervously at the curb for the limousine, pulled open the doors and hurried us inside. This was my moment to shine. Born to a family of crass working people always in the midst of crisis, I was entering a world of women in rhinestone ball gowns and witty men in dinner jackets. The air conditioning churned, cold as a Moscow Palace, and Dr. Zhivago was surrounded by admirers. It
was
Zhivago, Omar Shariff himself, with a bushy mustache and eyes like liqueur-filled chocolates. Allison's father knew all the stars. Peter Graves. Carol Burnett. Mary Tyler Moore.

“Meet my daughter's beau.” He presented me to Peter Ustinov and murmured sotto voce, “Both his parents were killed.”

The great actor patted my shoulder gravely.

“He's our little foundling,” Allison's mother said.

I grabbed a cocktail from a waiter's tray. Allison whispered, “Are you all right?” I seemed to have stumbled. Peter caught me under the arm.

What a question. Other than getting ready to meet the love of my girlfriend's life, the boy I had to assume she really loved, I had never felt better. The waiter offered more cocktails all around. There were chefs in tall white hats carving
chateau briand
and serving mounds of iced jumbo shrimp with silver tongs.

“You're covered with sweat,” Allison said.

Indeed, I started shaking the moment I saw him, the slender young man with flame-colored hair doing an improvised tap routine on the dance floor. My skin was liquid slick. I was wet all over, but warm inside, the way you feel when you piss yourself in a wet suit. There was a gelatinous ooze on my upper lip which returned however many times I blotted it with a cocktail napkin.

“Over here!” her mother called.

“Oh, it's Ricky!” Her father led us to a cocktail table near the bar where Ricky Fox in a tailored white dinner jacket was clinking glasses with Allison's mother. His pompadour was like a wave in frozen motion. His skin was incandescent. The leprechaun smile, the arms outstretched like Jolson singing Mammy, announced not that he was happy to meet you but that he was happy for you to have the opportunity to meet him. This was what it meant to be a star, to radiate one's own light, to be the absolute object of adoration.

“Pinky!” He reached for Allison.

“Hello, Ricky.” She offered her cheek.

“She used to call him Mr. Tricky,” her mother said proudly. “Tricky Ricky. We all did.”

“We're older now, Mother.”

“Oh. Older. Excuse me. All of seventeen.”

Allison was rigid. Uncomfortable. Standoffish. But not unlike the way you might treat someone you once loved, or still loved, who had never loved you back. “This is Ira,” she said, and Ricky turned to me, but only briefly, as if one glance was enough. Enough, at least, to convince me there was still heat between them, that in fact she had loved him. Must still love him. Must have had sex with him. Must still want to have sex with him. Because he was Ricky Fox and I was, well, me.

Her father began pulling chairs from the table and I did need to sit down. The floor seemed to tilt as I walked and the band sounded far away. Voices melded and slowed as if stretching like taffy and the million glass beads of the ballroom chandelier spun above me like a dazzling roulette wheel. I remember prisms of lamplight, silver, white, then a thousand shards of color, a kaleidoscope of famous faces, as I fell to one knee and pitched forward. Allison screamed. Ricky Fox stepped away, shaking vomit from his shoe. I retched again and fell on my face.

I awoke, not in a seat at the round table for twelve in front of the orchestra, but on a king mattress with a striped duvet whose pattern matched the curtains, in
a suite on the eighteenth floor. It was in fact Ricky's suite. “Make sure the ass hole is out of there before I get upstairs,” I heard him say as two waiters carried me to the elevator. Hugh Downs was tonight's emcee. He told jokes with a puckish smile. I watched it all on TV as Allison sat hunched forward at the foot of the bed. There was a bottle of Pepto Bismol on the night table and an ice bucket with a wash towel on the rim. My shoes were off as was the itchy wool jacket.

On TV the camera panned the ballroom. The orchestra played the theme from
Hogan's Heroes
. Allison was sitting cross-legged, her chin in her palms, the blue glare shimmering on her bare shoulders.

Bob Crane reached for a glass from a passing waiter's tray. Fifty tables roared approval. I inched up to the front of the bed. I waited till the commercial break to explain. The sunburn. The drinking. The starvation diet. “I ruined everything. I lost it. I saw you and Ricky together and—”

“
Together
?” Allison sounded repulsed. “Me and
Ricky
? Ricky is my father's partner's son. I've known him since I was 5 years old.”

“Do you still love him?”

“Love him? He's sick. He's a sadist. He always has been. He used to torment me until I cried. He played tricks on me. In summer camp he stole my underpants. . . .” she wasn't laughing at the memory, she was taking breaths in bursts, opening and closing her fist. “He put them on a baby pig, Miss Pinky, the camp mascot. We
all came to camp with name tags on our clothing and when the counselors took the underpants off the pig they told all the kids they were mine.”

Allison stood up abruptly, grabbed the telephone receiver from the nightstand and thrust it out to me. “Here. Your parents are worried about you.”

“There's nothing to worry about.”

“Why don't you tell them yourself? They're waiting for your call.”

“How do you know?”

“Because my mother spoke to them.”

“What did she say?”

Allison straightened her gown. She took a step toward the door and sighed, “My mother said, ‘Hello. Are you Ira Wood's
step
-parents?'” and I saw myself as I appeared in her eyes, in Marina's eyes, the turd on a white lace table cloth.

It was over, of course. Everything. Allison. Her parents. Their parties. Their friends. I was no more than a family trivia question now, the subject of poolside laughter as the steaks sizzled and the drinkies were poured. What was his name? Allison's first boyfriend? The
putz
who said he was an orphan and passed out on the dance floor?

When I turned to look at Allison she did not look away. She gazed deeply into my eyes in fact and slowly shook her head and smiled, that curious and forbearing smile due high school boys and insects, then took a deep breath, stepped squarely in front of me and caught
my face with the hard knuckles of her closed right hand.

 

The limousine company had sent a new car. The air conditioning worked perfectly. I sat alone in the plush back seat. The bar was stocked. Scotch. Vodka. Beer and ice cubes in a miniature refrigerator. Cashews. Peanuts. When we pulled up to my building it was past one in the morning. The click of my footsteps echoed in the deserted lobby.

I pressed my ear to the door of my apartment. Not a sound. I removed my shoes and turned the key, gently, gently, guiding the door to avoid the squeak. But the lights in the foyer were on, every one and every lamp in the living room as well. My parents sat upright, legs crossed, arms folded on opposite ends of the couch, waiting up for my arrival so they could ignore me. “Why does he hate us so much?” my mother began.

“He doesn't hate you, he hates me,” my father said.

“But he told them we were
both
dead.”

“
I'm
the one who lost his business,” my father insisted. “I'm the one who made us sell the house.”

My mother was indignant. “And I never account for anything?”

In a four-and-a half-room apartment it is rarely possible to be alone. Not when the living room opens to the kitchen, your parents are sitting on the convertible couch that serves as your bed, one brother is asleep in the boys' room, the other in your parents' bed. The bathroom, however, at one-thirty in the morning, was
mercifully unoccupied and sitting on the toilet seat with my father's newspaper, turning up the volume on his transistor radio and lighting a cigarette from the open pack next to the sink, I was enabled one deliciously private moment to ponder the roots of my problem while holding a cold wet wash cloth to my sore and swelling eye.

M
y father had two major passions. The first was eating. The second was Lipsky.

On any honest list of the obsessions that occupied his waking mind, food would incontestably precede money, work, wife, or children. He could never remember the date of his wedding anniversary or any of our birthdays but he could tell you the restaurant in which each was celebrated and what every person at the table ordered for an appetizer. Despite his doctor's warnings and my mother's reproach, he blew up to two hundred twenty pounds on a five-foot-six-inch frame. After his third heart attack, he was wheeled into the hospital hallucinating. “The hamburgers! They're dancing.” In the intensive care unit my mother told him the doctors had given him a death sentence. My father gasped, “Then bring me a pint of Haagen Daaz. Rum raisin.”

Sanford Lipsky was our across-the-street neighbor
and my father's closest friend, his rival, his antagonist, his measure of himself. Lipsky was in medical equipment sales and although it would be decades before the Diffusion of Innovations became a popular sociological theory, he was the consummate early adopter. He bought every appliance known to post-war America the day it hit the showroom. A Tappan electric range. A Lady Kenmore washer-dryer. A Coldpoint refrigerator freezer. A Philco transistor radio. An Emerson Quiet Cool air conditioner. He had the first color television in our entire town. Lipsky was a swaggering Dean Martin in a middle-income suburb, Kennedy-era man-crush material. Broad-shouldered and suntanned with loose black curls and Ray-ban sunglasses, he wore sharkskin suits over thin V-neck sweaters and a diamond studded Star of David on a gold chain. He spent summer Saturdays at Yankee games and Saturday nights at the Copacabana, drove a Thunderbird convertible to my father's Ford sedan. At the time we lived in a modest cookie-cutter ranch. The Lipskys had a split level with a basement play room, a pool table and two-and-a-half baths. In my father's life Lipsky was the
ne plus ultra
, that which is ever to be strived for and never attained.