Augusta Played (28 page)

“Then I'll wait. It's him I want to talk to.”

“You'd better tell me what this is about,” she said, regretting her lie. “Sometimes it takes longer than you expect to buy a pack of cigarettes.”

“Are you expecting it to take a long time?”

She chewed on her fingernail. If he jumped her, she could scream for Tom and Cyril, but they wouldn't be much good in a situation like this. “What do you want to see my husband about?”

“You shouldn't do that,” he said, “it's a bad habit.”

“Nobody asked for your advice.”

“Shit,” he said, “you haven't even asked for my name.”

“I know who you are.”

“My name is Mario.”

“Why do you want to see my husband, Mario?”

“It's between him and me. I got something for him.”

“He'll kill you if he finds you here.”

“No, he won't. We got that all worked out a long time ago.”

“What did you get worked out? I don't understand. When did you see my husband?”

Mario looked around the room—the canary, the desk, the television, the bed. Gus became alarmed as his glance hovered over the bed. He was young, but he wasn't too young.

Mario saw the fear on her face and it embarrassed him. In spite of his manner of practiced cool, he had not often been alone in a room with a double bed with a beautiful blonde whom he had seen in the altogether on her wedding night, and he felt that the whole thing was rather a lot to ask him to process right off the bat. She was really a looker. The way Mario had it sized up, there were two kinds of girls in the world, and the kind that this one was, was the kind that when she looked at you, you ought to be ashamed of what you were thinking, even if you had not been thinking it. Mario found that he felt deeply protective of her.

“Your husband lent me some money,” he explained. “Well, actually, he didn't think it was a loan. He was under the impression that he was being blackmailed. Isn't that far out? My mother gave him that impression. She says she finds it an effective way of doing business.”

“He lent you money?”

“That's what I said, isn't it?” The fact that he had been struck by a desire to do anything for Mrs. Gold that she might ask meant to Mario that he had better come on superlatively nonchalant. It was always fatal to let a broad know she was calling the shots.

“I think you're talking crazy,” Gus said, narrowing her long eyes. “You're on speed, or something.”

“I never touch the stuff,” Mario said, offended. “It wrecks your looks, and I'm going to be an actor.”

Gus thought he was certainly beautiful enough to be an actor. If he were ten years older, she'd be swooning over him. But he was just a tough-talking kid. “Why did my husband get the impression that you were blackmailing him?” she asked. She tried to make her voice sound older, upper-hand-ish, but it gave way on the word “blackmailing.”

“Uh, well, you see,” Mario said, pulling out a knife to clean his nails, “we told him that his old man might not like it if the papers knew his son was going around kicking the daylights out of minors.
Italian
minors. That kind of thing is very bad for race relations. As my mother said, it would be even worse for a Jewish father who needs Italian help if he wants to sit on the Supreme Court. My mother has a lot of inside information. Besides, it hurt like hell,” Mario added, whining slightly in spite of himself. “Man, it felt like ten tons of pillowcases fell on my head. My mother thought that was hilarious, but let me tell you, ten tons of anything is still ten tons.”

“My husband beat you up for a very understandable reason. I wish you'd put that thing away.”

“Don't sweat it,” Mario said, meaning to put her at ease. In fact, the way these words rolled off his tongue, as if he frequently said them while dangling motorcycle chains in front of terrified teeny-boppers, upset her more. “I'm not dangerous,” he said. “Why do you keep saying
my husband?
I know he's your husband. Are you afraid I might try something?” Why did girls always think a guy had evil motives? Fuck and goddamn.

“He'll be back any minute,” Gus said, desperately.

“Yeah,” Mario said, “I'll wait.”

“You could go, if you want to. I'll give him a message.”

“Not a message. Two thousand dollars.”

Gus abruptly forgot she was supposed to be afraid. She couldn't believe what she'd heard. “What?” she asked.

“Yeah. It's the amount my mother took him for.”

“Norman doesn't have two thousand dollars!”

“He does now,” Mario said. “Here it is.” He pulled two thousand dollars out of his hip pocket and put it on the desk.

Gus sucked air, sharply. “Where could he get that kind of money?”

“From his old man.
I
told you.”

“Norman doesn't have anything to do with his father. His father disowned him for marrying me.”

Mario shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “he got it.” Birdie!

Gus fingered the money. She had never seen so much at once. “Tell me, Mario,” she said, beginning to feel less tense, “why are you bringing it back?”

“It's not exactly the same bread,” Mario said. “It's a repayment.”

“But why? You could have just disappeared.”

He looked at her closely, his eyes suddenly flashing, the lashes fluttering like a young girl's. “We don't need to steal from anybody. I keep telling my mother, but she won't listen. My father wouldn't do such a thing, if he were alive! I keep telling my mother, it is not a thing a man would do! But she's just a woman, what does she know?”

“But where did you get the money to pay it back? You can't earn very much bellhopping.”

“Panhandling.”

“Begging?”

“Panhandling. Like you stand on a street at a subway entrance, St. Mark's for instance, that's a hot spot, and people give you bread. It's as simple as that.”

“But that's taking money from people. It's just like taking it from Norman.”

“Don't be stupid,” he said, “it's not the same thing at all. The first way is stealing, the second way, you're just letting people do what they want to do. Norman didn't want to fork over two grand, but those squares who come in for hip weekends, they're dying to buy back their consciences. They think I'm a runaway. So it makes them feel better to think they are not letting down the youth of the nation. I'm performing a public service. I'm like a safety valve which lets the country blow off steam and keeps it from blowing up. Somebody that don't think about this kind of thing in depth, he might think I was ripping people off, but as I see it, I am practically sacrificing myself so they don't have to torment themselves with questions like, Where did we let our kids down? What did we do wrong? Why was I thinking only about money instead of my darling baby? My mother is not the only person who reads the books in our apartment, but the way I look at it, she comes to some pretty flaky conclusions. What I'm giving you here is only the larger view, naturally.”

“What's the smaller view?”

“The smaller view is that these idiot couples from Long Island come in to the East Village for weekends to look us over like we were monkeys in a zoo or something, and the girls want to impress the guys with how frigging compassionate they are, so they say, Oh look, Lance, or Bruce, or whatever the schmuck's name is, give him some money, I'll bet he's starving. And the guys, they want to impress the girls, so they throw their small change at us. Can I help it if people are stupid?”

“Would you like a Coke?”

“Sure,” he said, sitting on the desk. He put the knife away. “You are a real knockout. Even with your clothes on.”

“Thanks,” she said. She handed him a can of Coke from the icebox. “Does your mother know you're here?”

“I told her I was flicking out. You know, at the movies. How is the marriage going?”

“The marriage?”

“With Norman. I'm interested. After all, I was in on it from the beginning. Does he make you happy?”

“Sure,” Gus said, looking at the floor.

“I don't believe it,” Mario said. “He's a real creep.”

“He is not!”

“Well, he has a kind of brooding intensity, I'll give him that. Like Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
. I figure my style is more of a romantic thing. Did you ever think of going into the movies? With your face, you could be a Tuesday Weld type. Easy. Or Candice Bergen, only smaller-looking.”

“Thanks,” she said, “but no thanks. I'm a flutist.”

“No kidding! Like Herbie Mann?”

“Same instrument,” she said. “I'm making my debut in a couple of weeks. You can come, if you want.”

“Why not?” he said. “It could be a gas.” Actually, he was pleased and flattered, but it would not be cool to go overboard with gratitude.

Gus gave him a ticket—she had dozens, along with the throwaways which her manager had printed and which for days she'd been littering the city with. “Here,” she said. Then, while she half wished she could keep on talking with Mario—it was like having a younger brother, something she'd always missed—she said, “You better go now, though. I lied about Norman. He won't be back for ages.”

“He shouldn't leave you alone so much,” Mario said. “In the city, you can never tell who's going to show up when you're alone in your apartment.” He crushed the empty Coke can with one hand and went to the door, but at the last minute he turned around and said to her, convinced that he was speaking the innermost feelings of his heart for the first time in his life, “You are a really out-of-sight chick, Mrs. Gold. I mean that. Really fine!”

“Thanks,” she said, again, startled.
“Ciao!”

58

C
REEP
, Gus was thinking, as she looked at the money on the desk. Two thousand dollars. Next to it was a book…a book on Beethoven. The Thayer. Gus turned it over in her hands, wondering how it had got there. Wasn't this the book she had lent to Richard? Norman did not know Richard. Then she remembered: Richard knew Birdie Mickle. Again! The weight of all this evidence heaped on Gus was finally too much, and she felt that she had to tell someone everything. She had to get it off her chest before she tried to play the flute in public. But to whom could she talk? She didn't want to tell her mother; her mother wouldn't say it, but she would remember that she had warned Gus not to get married in the first place. Gus didn't have any friends separate from Norman anymore. She couldn't talk to Richard, who knew Birdie. Philip Fleischman was Norman's friend, and Dinky was Phil's. She couldn't talk to Tom and Cyril about Norman behind his back—they were Norman's neighbors and had been even before she moved in, even though they hadn't known each other then. So far as Gus could see, there was only one person left.

59

E
STHER
GOLD
, wife of Sidney and mother of Norman (also the ritually clean Rita), had all her married life worked hard not to be like the Jewish wives and mothers in all the books. Where they mixed in, she kept herself apart. Why should her life be the butt of a running joke? She was not without a quality of self-reflectiveness and inner grace, not abundant but utterly trustworthy, all the stronger for having been wrested from circumstance rather than freely bestowed. The circumstance was Sid, or, more specifically, Sid's money.

Often she said to herself, If only Sid had been content to become a CPA! A Grade Twelve with the
IRS!
A little auditor with a big company! Instead he had to make a fortune and become a big shot, leaving her alone in the rambling Victorian house with gingerbread trimming and solid oak banisters on Ocean Parkway, unfit for mahjong and miserable at fund-raising dinners. She fulfilled her role to the best of her ability, wore mink in July and turned her children over to Mitzi, but her heart was as fragile as a flower vase in which the immortal Rose of Longing stands, and she had to carry it carefully to keep it from tipping over and breaking into a thousand uncollectable pieces. Her hair was blued and she wore upswept plastic eyeglass frames with rhinestone clusters, in this way accenting her soft green irises and giving the illusion of what is known in the women's magazines as youthful maturity, but her heart was like a candy store where no children ever came to buy.

Once, when Sid was still D.A., burglars had broken into the house, stealing all her diamonds, and who did Brooklyn's Finest suspect but herself, Esther Gold! It was Sid who hadcalled in the police. He noticed that she wasn't wearing them to a party when in his opinion she ought to have been wearing them, and she had to confess they were missing. First, to Sid's surprise, the police pointed their collective finger at her. “This is ridiculous,” she told them, “why would I steal from myself?” “Insurance,” they said. “They weren't insured,” she said. “What, not insured?” “You heard,” she said. “So,” they said, “this is very deep. A D.A. who doesn't insure his wife's jewelry must have an ulterior motive.” “No motive,” she said, as they began to frisk her son. (Norman was nine that year.) “He forgot. It's my fault. I never put it on his list.” “His list?” “I have to make a list for him of things to do each day.” They demanded to see a sample list. They had it in for Sid because he was D.A. and out to make a name exposing corruption in the police force, graft and bribes. However, her lists were no clue, and in the end they had to give up. They never recovered the diamonds.

This was because Esther had donated the diamonds anonymously to a certain organization in Israel devoted to desert reclamation. It required some doing, but she had learned a lot from Sid about how to smuggle in the days when he was running arms. She would have liked to send her mink as well, but it was too bulky to ship easily and in any case Sidney expected her to wear it constantly to political functions, and she didn't want to endanger his career. She was much happier without the diamonds, although now she sometimes wished she had them back, for Norman's and his wife's sake. Rita, her daughter, she didn't need to worry about. Rita's husband could buy Levittown and have money left over, but how could Norman and his young wife live, with Sid cutting off” his own son, like cutting off his schnozz to spite his face, and Norman being, she had to admit it to herself even if she was his mother, about as worldly as her own father, who, he should rest in peace, thought a man's birthright and duty was to sit in the attic reading the Talmud all day while his wife worked her tail off to keep him from starving in his piety.