Augusta Played (24 page)

“Because how?”

“Never mind. I know. Besides, how could she be privy to what Norman thought if she didn't know him? It tallies, Richard.”

“With what?”

“Everything.”

He was flabbergasted. “Do you mean to tell me that your husband is humping—excuse me, sleeping with—Birdie Mickle?”

They looked at each other, stricken. “Why, Richard? Why, why?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked glumly down at her nose, shiny from weeping. “Search me,” he said. “I would never have suspected it.”

46

R
ICHARD
DID
what seemed to him the only gentlemanly thing to do, under the circumstances—he called Birdie and asked her why she had not told him she was doing a father-and-son number. “You didn't tell me you were climbing into bed with Norman Gold,” he said, aggrieved. In fact, formulating his feelings out loud seemed to aggravate them, and he began to feel sexually gypped, intentionally made a fool of as well as deceived. He couldn't believe she had been lying the first time he met her; but it was almost worse to think this had begun after their meeting. “I'm not a prude, Birdie, really I'm not, but I don't like the idea of sleeping with someone who's sleeping with someone who is married and sleeping with the girl I used to sleep with. You can see my point.”

“But I'm not, Richard! Norman is just a friend.”

“That's what people always say.
We're just friends
. God, Birdie, I wouldn't mind if it was anybody else, but I'm beginning to feel like the person I'm really in bed with is this Norman Gold.”

“Oh, Richard!” Birdie said. “Oh, oh!”

“No,” he said, “that's how it stacks up. You can save your
oh's
for Hollywood, along with the
We're just friends
stuff. I am going to call it quits. Gussie is a good girl, and I can't continue with our arrangement knowing what I now do about her husband's involvement. I'll miss you, Birdie. You have the most beautiful boobs of anyone I've ever known. You have a luxurious body, Birdie. I really appreciate having known you. I will always remember you with profound affection and lust.”

“But Richard—” she said.

Richard hung up. He felt he had acquitted himself rather well, but this didn't begin to compensate for the sudden sense of loss that smacked him right in the back of his knees. He really felt quite weak, and had to sit down.

47

B
IRDIE
CALLED
Sidney.

“The son of a bitch!” Sidney said. “Where did he come up with this cockeyed notion?”

“It's not true, Sidney.” Birdie was crying.

“Okay, okay. The fool has his wires crossed. Somehow somebody thinks I'm my son instead of myself. I have been taken for worse, I guess, though on second thought maybe not. Birdie, don't cry, please. For me, your Sidney.” When she cried, he felt like the father of all the world.

“All right, Sidney,” she said. “I'll try not to.”

“Now listen, Birdie. I want you to think carefully. Have you got any idea how Hacking could have come up with this idea that is fit only for burlesque, and not even that now that the great names are gone?”

“None,” Birdie said, beginning to sulk. She had not expected him to interrogate her.

“You know what I think, Birdie, I think Hacking's mind is a mystery. Not even he knows what's going on in it. Sherlock Holmes couldn't solve the secret of this man's reasoning process. It's
too
elementary.”

“Well,” Birdie said, “actually—” But what could she tell him? If she explained that she had met Norman, she would have to say why. But that wouldn't be fair to Norman. It would be like squealing on him, to tell his father that Norman was distraught because he thought his wife was having an affair, especially after his father had warned him not to marry the girl. That would put Norman in an A-1 untenable position, and furthermore, you did not get to be a star stripper without learning that you did not talk about one man behind his back to another. Sidney might feel he would have to stop allowing his son to blackmail him, and their relationship would be on the rocks for good. Birdie couldn't do it. Anyway, she had only seen Norman once, and how could Richard construe this out of that, about which he did not even know, presumably? Birdie, sucking at the end of her golden magnetic ballpoint as if it were a lollipop, decided that what Sidney didn't know wouldn't hurt him, and it certainly was true that she had never slept with his son.

Sidney caught the delay in her voice, the train of her thought switching tracks. What did this mean? “What is it, Birdie?”

“It's just that I'm very upset, Sidney. Richard says he won't see me anymore and I naturally have inferred that he does not intend to fix me up like he said. Oh, Sidney, I had my heart set on it! You know how much class means to me!”

“I know, Birdie. Class means a lot to you.”

“It truly does, Sidney. And the thing about Richard is, he's very classical. I didn't expect this concert to change my life, but I certainly have been hoping that I would at least have an opportunity to strut my stuff in style, for once. A girl goes through her whole life asking only for one little break, an opportunity to show what she can do before she's too old to do it, and then something like this happens. Sidney, from my point of view, this is a tragic misunderstanding. You can see that, can't you?”

“Here's what I want you to do, Birdie. You dry your tears first of all. Then I want you to fix yourself a tall glass of Hawaiian Punch and you take a long hot bubble bath and drink the punch while you're relaxing in the bath and letting this whole
schmeer
float away. There is nothing like being cold inside and hot outside at the same time for refreshment. This I learned from Esther. Meanwhile, I will myself straighten out this schmuck. You'll get your chance to dance.”

“You are so good to me, Sidney. I was ready to kill myself.”

“Now you listen to me, Birdie,” Sidney said, sternly. “Suicide is not a live option.”

“I know it isn't, Sidney. Deep inside, I know it. And besides, death is a waste of time, isn't it? So I rejected this alternative in the dark night of my soul, which you are the everlasting twin of, you know that, don't you, Sidney? I know how hard it would be on you in addition to being not so delightful for me, if I did myself in.”

“Thank God,” Sidney said. “I don't know what I would do without you.”

“All the same, Sidney, I remember my father, and sometimes I feel like I'm filling up with tears. You've heard of the water table? I have a tear table, and I think it's flooding. I feel, Sidney, like a bottle of sadness. Sometimes I think you could take the cap off this bottle and pour out all the misery in the world. Not that I'm not basically the fun-loving type, as you well know, Sidney, but when I remember my father, this is how I feel. Poor Mama never had a chance.”

“Was he mean to you, Birdie?”

“Only when he'd been drinking. The rest of the time he was just dried up. He was like a desert, Sidney. He had a heart that if you planted a flower in it, it would die in a day from lack of emotional irrigation.”

“You shouldn't think this kind of thing, Birdie. You want to think positive, that is the way to get ahead in this world.”

“I know, Sidney. It was just being thought to be a bad girl that put me down in the dumps. My father always thought I was a bad girl. Now here I am forty years old, nudging forty-two, in fact, and I am still being thought of as a bad girl. When I'm eighty, I'll still be considered a bad girl.”

“Not by me, Birdie. When you're eighty, I'll look at you and say to myself, There is one of the finest old ladies that ever crossed my path!”

“Oh, Sidney,” Birdie said, crying again. “When I'm eighty, you'll be dead!”

48

I
T
WAS
a thought that was often in Sidney's mind these days, a presence as unignorable as a fly in a closed room. Sidney chased it around once or twice, but then he decided to live with it. What choice did he have? The worst thing was, he couldn't forget how he felt. And how did he feel, you should perhaps want to know? Rotten, that was how he felt. His whole life, all the backbreaking work he put into it, had come down to this one thing, an overwhelming desire to take a leak. As soon as he did, this desire visited him yet again, more demanding than any woman. A woman he could tell to get lost. His body he could not say this to. “Age is a terrible thing,” he told Jocelyn, in the middle of dictation. “No,” he said, “that's not part of the letter. It's a philosophical observation I just thought I would throw out.”

“It's very profound,” she said. Alas, she didn't say it with Birdie's adorable straightforwardness. There was something accommodating in her tone.

Sidney sighed, his down-through-the-ages-since-the-Temple-was-sacked sigh. He couldn't blame Jocelyn for what life had done to her. In all probability, deviousness was the essence of being a good secretary. Still, he would have welcomed some response from her. It was not every day that a boss said to his secretary that age was a terrible thing, he was sure of that.

“That's enough for today, Jocelyn. I have a dinner engagement. I'll lock up.”

It was his night to see Norman. For months they had been meeting at the same place. “They make chicken livers here like nobody's business,” Sidney had told his son, with finesse, but being secretly much relieved when Norman agreed.

Jocelyn waved and left, a pink-covered tail disappearing out the door, iridescent like the moon of a baboon in heat, which is something he knew about from his days as an adolescent reading the
National Geographic
. He did not know why Jocelyn chose to wear pink all the time. There was bound to be a better color for her somewhere in the spectrum.

He locked his files and closed the door. How many hours he had lived in this office, and before that, other, mingier offices! You work, he thought; you love, you hope, you sweat, and it comes to this—the need to pee. It was not fitting, it was inelegant. Man was made of earth and water, mud. His dreams were air. But law, ah, law—and here Sidney's chest swelled—law was fire. It warmed the hearts of men and gave them a light to see by. Before the heavens and the earth existed, there was the Torah, and it was black fire scripted on white fire. So maybe he, Sidney Wallechinsky Gold, was a man that looked like a toad, and maybe his prostate was a pain in the ass and maybe in a figurative sense the earth was already up to his ankles, that they would bury him in, but his mind was like a coal glowing in the grate, and nobody but nobody could put one over on him. This went even for his beloved Birdie.

The summer air was muzzy; no doubt it was thermally inverted. It reminded him of so many days in his life that he couldn't bear to think of them all—the years, the string of events that tied him to his first days on earth. He couldn't be mad at Birdie for being nostalgic. It was the climate of the times. The population of the nation was jumping off into the future like lemmings into the sea (also from
National Geographic
), but here and there, there were people like him and Birdie and who knows, in his own way Norman, who felt a deeper impulse, something tugging, a compulsion to turn around and go back against the blind-to-thought onrush. He felt a kind of gentle yearning for the sepia-toned past in which much was still possible that now was out of reach forever, fallen down behind the cold cliffs, a future like death.

Yearning. In his squat body with its wide waist and baggy trousers, Sidney felt a sadness settling on him, an unseen layer like pollen on a rose. It was not happiness he ached for so much as a lack of harassment, a peaceful afternoon with no school and no errands to run, when he could curl up on the parlor floor and read the comics. Where were the Katz-enjammer kids now? Where was the waggletailed, white-haired, black-nosed puppy in Mr. Zweifel's shop on Delancey Street, that for two weeks he begged his mother for until one day he went to see it and it was gone, poof, like magic, and nothing ever made up for it? Was there a kennel in Gehenna where the angels watched over the souls of animals who have died to this present earth, this infinitesimal speck of greenness budding with hope, watered with sorrow, with Birdie's tears? There should be a heavenly home for puppies with black noses and for old dogs with sharp but increasingly rheumy eyes, a place where everyone could meet again, the people and their pets, spending the long nights of eternity in utter languishment naming for one another the events that had most mattered in the days when they were full of division and torment, and why, and saying how those events appeared in the cool light of eternity's radiant visage.

49

N
ORMAN
WAS
in the restaurant already. Sidney saw him drawing invisible pictures on the tablecloth with a spoon.

It cheered Sidney hugely, to see his son at the table. And yet he was not sure it should. He had not forgotten Birdie's evasiveness. He didn't object if she had secrets from him—a woman without secrets was like a woman without her own checking account, defenseless in a voracious world (Sidney believed that all women should be independent, except his wife, whom it was his appointed duty to protect)—but for a father and a son to share the same bed would be incestuous, and in addition, he could not very well threaten to shoot off Hacking's nuts with an M4, which was very nearly employed in the
aliyah
, the return to the promised land which is where the sun is like honey and the air is as sweet as bread, and every place that the sole of the foot treads upon has been given by God, without he should know if Birdie was telling the truth or not.

“So,” Sidney said, waving the
maitre d'
away and easing himself into the chair without, as he termed all such offers of help, outside interference, “you're here.”