Joshua Then and Now (43 page)

“Me,” Joshua said.

“You’re wearing a nice jacket. British. Cashmere. The best. I have four.”

“If you’re so disgustingly rich, Izzy, why don’t you retire?”

“Because money’s like a soufflé, you’ve got it, you’ve got to keep a constant eye on the oven, either it keeps rising or it flattens. Inflation. I hear you don’t fuck around, you’re faithful to your wife. That’s a plus. Me too, I’m faithful. I mean, you’re going to be screwing other women all the time like that crazy Seymour, you can bring home the syph. How many times a week do you still fuck? Average?”

“Fifteen.”

“Ha ha. We fuck on the average three times. More on vacation. Becky bought a copy of
The Joy of Sex
, we’re still making sensual discoveries. Joshua, come back to my office with me, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Izzy’s office occupied a floor in one of the city’s new office towers.

“I believe in coming right to the point,” he said. “No shmoozing. I’d like to get into the Senate. If you whispered that in your father-in-law’s ear, I wouldn’t complain. I’m a big contributor to the Liberals. He must know that. So?”

“Ask him yourself,” Joshua said angrily and, eager to change the subject, he muttered that he was leaving in the morning for the Grey Cup weekend in Ottawa, to be followed by the Annual Day of the Mackenzie King Memorial Society.

“Gee, I never see any of the old bunch,” Izzy said wistfully.

“Would you like to come?” Joshua asked, trapped.

“O.K. Done. How many tickets do you need for the game? I’ll pay.”

“Izzy, we’ve already got our tickets.”

“Yeah, but where? With my muscle, it would be the owner’s box.”

In Ottawa, Joshua felt he could not really avoid lunch with his father-in-law at his home in Rockcliffe. Their relationship was still rather stiff in those days, so he was startled to hear the senator say, after the briefest exchange of pleasantries, “It’s time I told you how very pleased I am that you married Pauline. I want to apologize for my churlish behavior on your first visit here. It was inexcusable.”

“I could have been more polite myself.”

They both laughed, recalling the things they had said to each other, and Joshua felt himself suffused with the beginning of a warm regard for his father-in-law. What promised to be a kinship, two men bound together by their love for Pauline.

“There’s something I want you to know. I’m transferring the family cottage on Lake Memphremagog to your name and Pauline’s. Why should you be troubled by death duties when the time comes?”

“I’d rather,” Joshua said, intent on earning points, “that you just put it in Pauline’s name.”

“As you like,” the senator said, obviously relieved.

In his mind’s eye, Joshua saw the cot in the maid’s room. With the rubber sheet.

“I’d be most grateful,” the senator said, “if you could all manage to come out and visit me next summer. I’d like to see my grandchildren out there.”

They talked about Jane Austen, Dr. Johnson, and Mrs. Thrale, and then the senator revealed a taste, surprising to Joshua, for the novels of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. They discovered they shared an enthusiasm for Bath. The senator told him that he had once met Isadora at a party in Haut-de-Cagnes, but she had cut him. “I suppose,” he said, “she realized what a boring old stick I was.”

Emboldened, Joshua asked him about his meeting with Izzy Singer.

“Yes, I remember,” he said, amused, “he phoned me out of the blue to say he was an old friend of yours.”

Joshua blanched.

“Don’t worry, I’ve had a long experience of the type. I got the idea quickly enough. But I was curious, and I asked him to join me for drinks at the Rideau, knowing how much that would please him. He’s an amazing fellow. Commendably forthright. He wants to be appointed to the Senate.”

“Did he offer you money?” Joshua asked, ashamed.

“Some directorships,” he said, averting his eyes. “You know, I can’t
imagine why a man of his flair and accomplishment would want to get into the Senate.”

“There’s some chance, then?”

“None whatsoever. He wants it too badly. That will never do in Ottawa.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“I think he should be allowed to try. He shouldn’t be denied that.”

“Noblesse oblige.”

“Oh, come now, that’s a bit rich. I’m merely tolerated these days. An aging ornament. You’d be surprised how little influence I have.”

Joshua got out of his taxi outside the National Press Club, badly in need of a drink, troubled by his meeting with the senator. The streets of Ottawa were icy, bitterly cold, but, for all that, a parade was in progress. Desperately high-spirited westerners come to town to see their American imports,
NFL
rejects to the man, do battle with the East’s imports for Canada’s national football trophy, the Grey Cup. The Saskatchewan Rough Riders vs. the Hamilton Ti-Cats. Paunchy men on horseback, their faces seared red by the wind, yodeled at passing secretaries huddled into their fur collars. Yahoo.

Back at the Chateau Laurier, the grizzled, middle-aged bellhops had broken out in rakish Grey Cup boaters. More westerners in high heels and Stetsons milled about, many of them reeling. All the unanchored lobby furniture had been removed. Joshua showed his room key to the man guarding the elevator, entitling him to ascend, and he was soon joined by his colleagues in the Mackenzie King Memorial Society. Seymour, Max Birenbaum, Bobby Gross, Leo Friedman, Jack Katz, Eli Seligson, and Morty Zipper of the Montreal contingent. Joshua told them, somewhat defiantly, that they were to be joined by Izzy Singer, but not until early Saturday morning.

“Shit,” Seymour said, “now you’ve gone and done it. While George Reed is making his run, he’ll be counting the gate and figuring out how many hot dogs are being sold.”

“Cool it,” Joshua pleaded.

“You don’t know the half of it. I ran into him in Florida once. Izzy Singer relaxing. Poolside. You know what he was doing? He was sitting there, with a notebook in his hand, marking his three kids for diving, on a scale of one to ten, with a prize for the winner.”

The out-of-towners began to trickle in. Mickey Stein, now a professor of social studies at Harvard; Benjy Zucker, a dean at
UCLA
; and Larry Cohen, a deputy minister at Consumer Affairs. Lennie Fisher and AI Roth had flown in from Toronto.

Izzy arrived in time for breakfast the following morning, catching up with the boys at their table in the Chateau dining room. His cheek dancing, he threw a clutch of game tickets on the tablecloth. “You know what scalpers are asking for those seats?”

Nobody knew where to look. They buttered toast or stared glumly at their newspapers. Except for Lennie Fisher, who leaped up to find a chair for Izzy.

“Oh, will you sit down and shettup,” Joshua said to Izzy. “We’ve all had a late night.”

“I’ve had champagne sent to your room for tomorrow night. A case. Dom Perignon. I also brought a side of smoked salmon with me.”

“Sit down,” Joshua said.

“I thought we were going to have us a ball here. What’s the matter with everybody?”

Izzy’s deerstalker hat matched his brown cashmere coat. His binoculars had been made in Germany, the best. A Nikon in a soft leather case was suspended from his shoulder. He also carried a Hudson’s Bay blanket and a pillow in a celluloid case.

“I’m going to get you laid,” Seymour said, his smile menacing. “After dinner tomorrow night.”

“I thought,” Izzy said, his voice wobbly, “there were no girls at these dinners.”

“There are no girls,” Joshua assured him.

“I swear,” Seymour said, “that when she’s finished with you, your
tongue will be hanging out. Your cock will be raw and bruised. We’ll have to carry you all the way back to Montreal.”

Izzy’s seats were better than theirs, but the boys accepted them grudgingly, only Lennie Fisher acknowledging his largesse. “I was at Becky’s last show,” he said. “I think her work is marvelous.”

Izzy’s wife, Becky, sculpted. She made pieces out of fish bones. In an interview with the
Gazette
, arranged by Izzy (a major advertiser), she had said, “My children, bless their hearts, couldn’t be more understanding. If my atelier door is closed, they walk about on tiptoe. I don’t think Leonard Woolf himself could have been more patient than my husband.”

A bitterly cold wind cut across the frozen playing field, the Ti-Cats jumping up and down on the sidelines. One-two-three-four. Between exercises they blew on their reddening fingers and stamped their feet together.

Then the Rough Riders trotted onto the field, their partisans in the stadium roaring. Izzy tugged at Joshua’s sleeve. “I’ve got to pee.”

“Turn right at the top of the stairs.”

“But it won’t come if there are other people there.”

“Then wait.”

“I can’t.”

“Izzy, I’m running out of ideas.”

“Come on,” Lennie Fisher said. “I’ll take you back to the hotel. We’ll keep the taxi waiting and we’ll be back before they even kick off.”

On the field, they watched a milling group of scrawny girls in green-and-white tights, their teeth chattering, their noses running. The Riderettes. Pimply sex kittens of the prairie. Fortunately, a thoughtful bandmaster had provided them with woolies, sadly loose-fitting, to wear over their stockings. The girls bobbed up and down, running in place, to keep warm. Suddenly, a
TV
camera came into play, the drums went boom, and the intrepid girls, after one last wipe of the nose with chapped hands, flashed radiant smiles and began to strut across the frozen field.

“Get ’em, get ’em,” the Riderettes chanted. But the Riders were down 17–0 at half-time.

“I’m freezing,” Joshua said to Seymour. “Let’s watch the rest of the game on
TV
back in my room.”

As they moved past Izzy, only his owlish shell-framed glasses showing over his Hudson’s Bay blanket, he asked, “Do you have to pee?”

“No,” Seymour barked. “We’re going to get you that girl now. A real wild one. Wow.”

Rather than risk the hallelujah streets of Ottawa again that night, the boys decided to order food from Nate’s Delicatessen and to play poker in Seymour’s room, turning in early with tomorrow’s Memorial Day festivities in mind. Izzy pulled Joshua aside to say he couldn’t play. Relieved, Joshua still felt obliged to ask him why.

“If I win, everybody will be angry with me, and if I lose, they’ll say so what, he can afford it.”

“Don’t believe him,” Seymour said, overhearing. “He’s going back to his suite because he knows I’m sending the girl in there. She’s going to screw his head off.”

Their Annual Day couldn’t begin with a champagne breakfast on the site of the “Abbey ruins.” Snowy Kingsmere was shut down for the winter. So they drank their champagne at the gates, Mickey Stein leading them in his Yiddish rendition of “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.”

“What if somebody comes?” Izzy asked, embarrassed.

Plump, good-natured Mickey Stein, to whom they had used to hurry with their jokes even back in
FFHS
days, just for the joy of seeing him heave with laughter, was a milkman’s son. He had been able to afford McGill only because he had won a scholarship. And now, a full professor at Harvard, he pronounced to the sons of the American rich on the nuclear family, male bonding, and cultural patterns among the Assyro-Babylonians in Persia during the Sassanian Dynasty. “Joshua,” he said, “you don’t understand what publication means. I don’t write for the masses. I compose a three-thousand-word
argument for publication in a journal with a circulation of, say, fifteen hundred. The editorial committee broods for six months before they accept my piece, and then we write to and fro for another six months, quarreling over commas. A year later my reflections on the eschatology of the heretical dharmas is published, I Xerox two thousand copies for other professors, the Ford Foundation gives me a grant, and I’m able to take Sylvia to conferences in Tokyo, Stockholm, and Grenoble. Where we meet with other bores. And you want to know what? I’m beginning to suspect the delivery of milk is a more socially beneficial activity. Here’s to us,
chaverim.”

Their other academic, sweet Benny Zucker, a dean at
UCLA
, was not to be outdone. “Scratch Stein here and what will you find? A thwarted Socialist. A loser. Who has he backed in recent elections? Gene McCarthy. He’ll never learn to be a proper goniff. He’s mired in the wrong discipline. But me, I now own a wall of honorary degrees. My legendary services as an industrial consultant are fought over. I have an agent. And once a year he sends me down from the mountain with my tablets. To conventions for overachievers in Hawaii. Or orientation courses for top-level executives on an Arizona ranch. I am even known among the oilmen of Dallas. And wherever I go, standing at the podium, removing my reading glasses to emphasize a point, I tell the movers and shakers that our researches at
UCLA
, computer-programmed, tested in the field, indicate that there is more stress among executives than bartenders and, furthermore, that there is a definite correlation between energy loss and age. And they shake their heads, flabbergasted, delighted with me, thinking, boy those Jews are clever. You’ve really got to hand it to them.”

“How much,” Izzy demanded, “do you get paid for such a lecture?”

“Well,” Zucker said, elated, “not to brag, two grand, minimum.”

“We had Elie Wiesel speak at our Bond Drive Dinner last summer, we paid him five thousand dollars.”

“Oh, well,” Zucker allowed, retreating, “it was just a story to amuse the boys. I never suggested others weren’t being paid more.”

Seymour looked ready to erupt. “Izzy,” he said, “I’ve decided you’re not getting fucked after all. Instead, I’m going to kill you.”

“I don’t like you either,” Izzy protested, his cheek doing a jig, “but at least I know how to behave.”

At Laurier House they marveled once more at the crystal ball on the piano and the painting of Wee Willie’s mum. “He wasn’t prime minister for nothing,” Izzy said, pointing out that Joshua’s father-in-law had been a member of King’s wartime cabinet. “I’ve had drinks with the senator. At the Rideau,” he said. “What a gentleman!”