Augusta Played (6 page)

“Forget it,” Sid said to Norman. “You have to keep that appointment.”

“What appointment?”

“That
appointment. You know. You said you had an appointment to keep.
Didn't you?”
Norman looked blankly at his father's winkings and eyebrow-liftings. “Good-bye,” Sid said.

“Oh,” Norman said,
“that
appointment. It doesn't matter. I can always make another appointment.”

“That could create an adverse impression.”

“On whom?”

“On the party with whom you have the appointment!”

“Oh,” Norman said. “The party. I expect the party will understand. These things happen.”

“Not very often, they don't,” Jocelyn muttered, darting the rest of the way out of the room.

“Sidney—” Birdie began again.

“In a minute.”

“I think the lady has a question,” Norman said, grinning.

“No—” Birdie began yet again.

“The lady does not have a question,” Sid said.

“I have an
observation
to make,” Birdie said.

“Oh God,” Sid groaned.

“I don't believe I've gotten your name,” Norman said.

“Would you like my personal name or my professional name?”

“Her name is Birdie Mickle!” Sid said.

“My name is Birdie Mickle,” Birdie said.

“Is that your personal name or your professional name?”

“Personal, definitely. My professional name is—”

But just then the telephone rang. Sid opened the door—they were still standing by the door, which Jocelyn had closed after her—and shouted: “No calls!”

“It's your wife,” she said.

“I'll take it,” he said, slamming the door again and sighing deeply, as if each breath were dredged up from the bottom of his soul, with an effort so enormous no one should know but if you happened to be a perceptive person you might just realize that lugging the world around on your shoulders was no fun. Weightily, he walked to his desk. “Hello, Esther,” he said. “Yes, Esther. Yes. No, no. Yes, Esther. Fine, Esther.” Then suddenly his tone changed. “She did? What about? What was her bearing? She was pleasant? That's good, that's very good. So? It would be better if she were unpleasant? Now listen. We could just pull it off. If her husband comes out for Amato, it could be just the support we need to put him in. Amato's word we already got. If Amato goes in, Lei-bowitz goes in, and if Leibowitz goes in, so do I. This is excellent news, Esther, excellent.” His pale beige skin was suffused with a rising red glow. Birdie's face fell. She sat down in a chair, ignoring Norman. Norman asked her what was wrong but Birdie only shook her head. She could not possibly tell Norman that she had that minute realized for the first time that she was jealous of his father's wife.

For a second after he hung up, Sid Gold's mind was elsewhere.

Norman, mentally playing back his father's half of the conversation and realizing what was missing, said, bitterly, “You could have told her.”

“Told her what?” Sid was genuinely confused.

“My news.”

“Oh. Your news. I sincerely hope you will come to your senses and that she never has to be told.”

“Told what?” Birdie asked.

“I'm getting married. As you might have gathered from my father's reception of this news, my fiancée is not a Jewess.”

“What is she?” Birdie asked, wide-eyed.

Norman laughed. “That's good,” he said to his father. “She's right, you know. I could be engaged to a black girl. Or an Arab.”

“Over my dead body.”

“Is she an Arab?” Birdie asked.

“No,” Norman said. “She's not pregnant either. Apparently, my father never heard of the Pill. Also love he never heard of.”

“That's not true!” Birdie exclaimed. “Your father knows a lot about—”

“That's enough, Birdie,” Sid said. “And as for you, who taught you to use such language in front of a lady?”

“What language? What on earth are you talking about? Love?”

Sidney looked—and felt—acutely uncomfortable.

“Holy Toledo,” Norman said. “You don't want me to talk about the Pill. Is that it?”

Sid turned to Birdie, who was still seated. “You said you had an observation to make,” he said, thinking it might be less exhausting to go back rather than forward so far as this particular discussion went.

“Oh yes,” Birdie said, in a voice as clear and fresh as a mountain stream, which could be unnerving in Brooklyn. “It was just this. Not to worry about the fox fur, Norman, because Sidney can always buy me another.” And she looked at them both ingenuously, not to say ingeniously, as if she had found the perfect solution to the most urgent problem of the entire afternoon. She batted her false lashes. She was aware of how she looked at them and of the effect it produced, but this did not mean that her expression was not an honest reflection of her real self. She
was
, she happily admitted, a dizzy dame. It's just that she was not a
dumb
dizzy dame. It was a subtle distinction, and not all men had minds that could grasp it.

Sid could see that his son was twitching with pleasure, galvanized. “Okay. You've had your laugh. Now go.”

“I'm leaving,” Norman said. He reached down and plucked Birdie's hand from her lap to shake it. “Nice meeting you, Miss Mickle,” he said.

“Me too, I'm sure,” she said.

“Half a million bucks,” Sid said, just as Norman put his hand on the doorknob and turned it. Norman opened the door. “I won't lose any sleep over it.” “You probably won't,” Sid said, sadly. “But I will.”

11

G
US
WAS
in her apartment, waiting for Norman, when the telephone rang. It was Richard. “I have something I've been meaning to tell you,” she said, twisting her long, wavy hair with her free hand, worried. “I'm getting married.”

“Oh?” he asked, as if she'd said she was taking a trip, or changing schools. “Since when?”

She was confused. “Since when am I getting married, or when am I getting married?”

“Both.”

She told him.

“Why didn't you tell me before?” Richard said. “Jesus Christ, I feel like a goddamn idiot, Gussie.”

“I didn't know how.”

“You apparently know how now!”

She was sitting cross-legged on the couch-bed, the white receiver at her ear, gazing dejectedly at Tweetie-Pie cleaning his feathers. (Tweetie was a bit of a dandy.)

She hadn't
wanted
to tell him before; she didn't want to give him up—and more than that, she didn't want to have to tell him, as she was in effect doing, that she hadn't been faithful to him. “I thought, since you're married—”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“I'm not sure—”

“What's he do?”

“Who?”

“Oh, fuck. Your
fiancé.”

“You aren't being very nice about this.”

“Oh, come on, Gussie, you sound like you just ate a persimmon. I feel like a fool, that's all. I'm going to miss you. I hope you'll be happy. Of
course
I hope you'll be happy.”

“He's writing his dissertation in Cultural Musicology.”

Richard broke out into laughter. “Whoop-de-do!” he cried. “What's that?”

“He's a kind of philosophical psychologist, not with rats, but he's not a shrink, either—” She knew she was being unfair to Norman, but she owed something to Richard too.

“I miss you,” he said.

She wanted to say that she missed him—the words were already in her mouth, waiting for her to say them—but it wouldn't have been true. Occasionally, she missed his attentions, and remembered how dynamic he looked crossing campus with his tie loose, the desperation in his eyes that dissolved into light when he saw her coming toward him. “But you're married,” she said again, still not knowing exactly what she meant to convey by that. It wasn't a point that had ever troubled her before.

“You don't have to tell
me
I'm married.”

“Why don't you get a divorce?” The subject was safe, now; it had been taboo only so long as she had had an investment in it.

“Because Elaine loves me.”

Gus chewed the ends of her hair.

“And you don't,” he added, a little petulantly.

“Would you get a divorce if I said I did?”

“It's a hypothetical question now, isn't it?”

“I guess—”

“If I said I would, would you say you did?”

“I guess it wouldn't make any difference if I did, would it?”

“Not if you're going to get married anyway. To this whatever-he-is, some kind of culture vulture.”

“Of course,” she said, enjoying this new turn to the conversation immensely, “a person can be married and still have affairs. Take you, for instance.”

“But you aren't me. There's no similarity.” He was crooning in her ear, low and sweet, a slight abrasive edge to his voice stroking her eardrum like a wire brush sweeping softly over the snaredrum in an orchestra. “I know your type.”

“What's my type?”

“You'll think you have to worship him, just because he's your husband. You'll think he's a reflection on your character, so he'll have to be perfect.”

Gus laughed. She was meant to be a star, no question about it—hearing herself talked about by other people always intoxicated her. Her face shone and her eyes kindled. The phenomenon was delicate but definite. “You're being nasty again,” she said, pleased.

“I'm owed, Gussie, owed, owed, owed.”

“I don't see why—”

“Because I love you.”

“That's not—”

“You owe me like I owe Elaine.”

Secretly, Gus thought that Elaine did look like the type who was always collecting on old debts. Elaine had a complexion that must have glowed with a freshly scrubbed look, once, and now looked raw, and the doe's feet of her eyeliner ran into the crow's feet at the corners of her eyes. Altogether, she wore the righteous look of someone who's been prevailed upon to lend her heart against her better judgment. Gus used to see her in the grocery store on Tate Street in Greensboro, or at parties. Elaine stayed away from the school itself. “How is she?” Gus asked.

“Elaine is fine. I'm miserable.”

“Why are you miserable?”

“Why shouldn't I be miserable? I spend half my waking hours trying to make everyone else happy.”

It was true; an odd occupation for a man. “How is the new record coming along?” she asked. He was doing the Beethoven Eighth. You couldn't be too miserable, Gus thought, while you were recording the Beethoven Eighth. She said as much.

“You aren't giving up the flute, are you?” he asked, as if the possibility had just struck him. “Christ, that's unthinkable!”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said. But it was something that had been bothering her.

“I've been meaning to tell you,” he said. “I'll get my manager to take you on whenever you're ready. You don't have to worry about that.”

“That's nice of you, Richard.”

“You didn't think I wouldn't come through, did you? I know what's expected of me—”

“Richard!”

“Don't sound so shocked, Gussie. Things always work this way. Almost always, anyhow. It's not so terrible. Life isn't so terrible. Even marriage isn't so terrible.”

“I'm glad to hear Elaine is fine,” she said, primly.

“Elaine is fine,” he said. “Beethoven is fine. I'm fine. But I'll tell you what gets me down. The kids complain all the time. It's a case of nonstop wheedling. They fight a lot. Are you pregnant?”

“Of course not. Should I be?”

“If I were you,” he said, “I would want to be.”

“That's
your
problem. If you weren't so good-looking, I'd think you were queer.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” he said.

“Oh, gee, Richard, I really do like you—”

“I know,” he said. He sounded very blue. “Everybody does.”

Just then Gus heard Norman downstairs; he had his own keys now. The door downstairs banged, he took the steps two at a time. But now was not the moment to hang up on Richard. She
did
owe him something.

“That's not what I mean,” she said, earnestly. “I care about you
more
than everybody else.” The second door had not made a sound, and now Norman was staring at her from across the room.

“That's probably true,” Richard said, heavy-hearted. “Nobody else cares even that much.”

“Now you're being stupid. I'm not going to listen to this.” It would have to be Elaine who did. She had Norman to think of.

“You're right,” he said. “I'll call you later. Sometime. Someday. In ten years. Come disguised as a housewife and I'll meet you under the clock in the Biltmore Hotel.”

She giggled in spite of herself, and put the receiver down in an expansive mood, but when she turned around again, Norman's face was white. Not his usual dark cloud-filled countenance-of-anger that she had seen before, but white. As white as the bedspread, the telephone, the curtains, the walls—all of which, she now noticed, had been dying into darkness for the past half-hour. In the dark room, Norman's face was spookily white.

12

T
HE
ROOM
had gotten dark while Gus was talking on the phone.

She switched on the closest lamp. It had a perfectly round white porcelain base with raised impressions of leaves. The shade was shaped like a Chinese coolie's hat. It was a lamp she remembered from childhood, the lamp she had colored by in the living room in Chapel Hill on rainy afternoons. Her parents had bought it shortly after they were married. Now Norman was standing next to it, his face above the central funnel of the volcano-shaped shade, and the bulb threw his features into eerie relief.