Solomon Gursky Was Here (42 page)

“Yes. Are you pleased?”

The raven-haired figure, possibly Beatrice, subsided softly into a chair, silk rustling.

“Don't let me fall asleep again.”

“I won't.”

“Say your name.”

“Beatrice.”

“Imagine. Beatrice.”

He squinted, concentrating, grudgingly reducing the multiple
breasts, each one exquisite, to two; the comically trebled mouth to a more satisfying sensual one.

Unable to cope with his idiotic gaze, she asked, “How do I look?”

“Harder.”

“Count on Moses.”

“You asked.”

“Yes.”

“I don't think I can make it back to the bar again,” he said, pointing at his empty glass with a certain cunning. “You go, please.”

Enabling him to watch Beatrice, his heart's desire, stride to the bar, obviously nourished by the stir her presence was creating among the men in shiny suits gathered there. She took too long. Head slumping, he drifted off to sleep again.

“Moses.”

“Go away.” Then he recognized Beatrice, the proffered drink, and he smiled again. “I want to ask you a question of the most intimate nature.”

“Please don't start on me, Moses.”

“Do you wear pantyhose now?”

She shook her head, no, flushed but amused.

“Garters still. I knew it. Ah, Beatrice.” Satiated, he slid into sleep again, his smile serene.

“Moses?”

“What?”

“You said you didn't want to snooze.”

Slowly, deliberately, he relit his dead cigar, enormously pleased with his accomplishment.

“Strawberry says you're heading North of Sixty.”

“Tomorrow afternoon. Could I see a garter?”

“Oh, Moses, please.”

“Just one little peekee.”

“Where are you staying in town?”

“Why, Mrs. Clarkson, whatever are you thinking?”

“Stop playing the fool.”

“I rent an apartment here now.”

“I'll drive you there and we can talk. It's too depressing here.”

“It's my club.”

“You belonged to better clubs once.”

“And a better woman.”

“Let's go.”

“Only if I can have a peekee first.”

“Not here. There. Let's go.”

He gave her his address before staggering out with her, toppling into her Porsche, and falling asleep again. But they had only gone a few blocks when he started to tremble. “Stop the car!”

Alarmed, she braked. Moses, fumbling with the door handle, tumbled out, lurching blindly into the middle of Sherbrooke Street.

“Moses!”

Circling, he scrambled to the curb, sinking to his knees beside a fire hydrant, his stomach heaving. Beatrice pulled up alongside and waited in the car for him to finish. She was wearing a new dress. A Givenchy. “Do you feel better now?”

“Worser.”

While Moses showered, she made coffee and then wandered restlessly about the apartment. Bay windows. Old-fashioned bulky radiators. The Persian carpet, worn threadbare in the middle, reminded her so vividly of home that she found herself searching for the walnut RCA radio cabinet and the sticky Peer's Cream Soda bottle supporting the window with the broken sash. Then, clearing the dining-room table of old newspapers, she caught her first glimpse of the crocheted tablecloth. She slipped on her hornrimmed glasses to have a better look just as Moses emerged from the bathroom in a towel dressing gown.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, stroking the tablecloth.

“My mother made it years ago.”

“How come you never brought it out when we were together?”

“I was saving it for your vintage years,” he said, accepting a black coffee and adding a couple of fingers of cognac to it. Then he bit off the tip of a Monte Cristo and lit it. “To think that I had once been so foolish to believe that you would be the one, as the old human question mark put it, who could ‘help me through this long disease, my life.'”

It was, she knew, his way of putting her down. She was supposed to recognize the quote. “You think I'm stupid,” she said.

“Of course you're stupid, but it hardly matters in the circles you frequent now that you are so insufferably rich.”

“I didn't marry him only for that.”

“I want my peekee now.”

“Go to hell.”

“Just the quickest of peeks, a mere flash, what would it cost you?”

“Why are you determined to make me feel cheap?”

“Aren't you?”

“I loved you, Moses, but I couldn't stand it any more. You have no idea of how insufferable you are when you're drunk. I want my peekee. Just one little peekee. Fuck you.”

“At least I haven't changed.”

“I'll give you that much.”

“Actually, I would have left me a lot earlier than you did. I
am
impossible.”

“Are you going north to visit Henry?”

“I have a hunch the ravens are gathering. Damn it, Beatrice, why did you flush me out? What do you want with me now?”

“I needed somebody to talk to. Somebody I could trust.”

“Well that somebody isn't me. Not any more.”

“Tom goes both ways. He has a boy. I'm not supposed to know but they're in Antibes together now.”

“Then you'll get an even richer divorce settlement than you were counting on when you decide it's time to trade up again.”

“Take me north with you.

“Certainly not.”

“Can I stay the night?”

“Yes. No. Let me think.”

“Bastard.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because fool that I am,” he said, sinking into an armchair, “I sometimes rush to the door of my cabin, thinking I've heard a car and that it will be you.” He knocked over his coffee cup, half full of
cognac. “Get out, Beatrice. Leave me alone,” he pleaded, before his head slumped forward and he began to snore.

Beatrice went into the kitchen and washed the dishes and then it came to her. She dug a pen and paper out of her purse and wrote, “The human question mark was Alexander Pope. You are as smug and pompous and hateful as ever.” She left the note on the dining-room table. Then she stood before him, hiked her dress, revealing her garters, and fled the apartment, weeping. Outside, she stopped, cursed, and retraced her steps, determined to retrieve the note. But his apartment door was locked.

Nine

Isaac, who had once tagged everywhere after his father, clutching the hem of his parka, now avoided him. Shirking his Talmud studies, pleading a headache. Declining to join him in saying grace after meals. Giving up on his Hebrew lessons. “Who speaks it here? Only you.”

Nialie anticipated that he could hurt Henry badly, but Henry claimed not to be distressed. “It's a stage they all go through,” he said. “You are not to worry.”

Only twelve years old, Isaac's face was already encrusted with angry red pimples. He bit his nails. His voice was cracking. Once inseparable from his schoolmates, always up to mischief, he now eschewed their company as well.

“What happened to all your friends?” Nialie asked him.

A shrug.

“I asked you a question.”

“So?”

“Answer me.”

“They're always asking me for money.”

“Why?”

“That's what you've got, they say, isn't it?”

Cleaning his room, Nialie didn't quite know what to make of the changes. The pinups of hockey players pasted to the wall (Guy Lafleur, Yvan Cournoyer, Ken Dryden) had been displaced by a row of McTavish labels peeled carefully off bottles that had been soaked in the sink, and a photograph of the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue, scissored out of the last quarterly report.

“What does an ‘adjusted dividend' mean?” he asked at the sabbath table.

“Search me,” Henry replied.

“‘Amortization of goodwill and other intangible assets'?”

“I'm afraid your father is a prize
klotz
in these matters.”

“‘A covenant'?”

“Ah. Now we're talking turkey. We are
Am Berit,
‘The People of the Covenant.' A covenant is what
Riboyne Shel O'lem
made with us at Mount Sinai, choosing Jews over all the other peoples in the world, liberating us from slavery in Egypt. Now how would you say Egypt in Hebrew?”

“I don't remember.”

“Come on.”

“Eretz Mitzraim.”

“Yes. Excellent. Now in every generation, each person should feel as though he himself had gone forth from
Eretz Mitzraim,
as it is written: ‘And you shall explain to your child on that day, it is because of what the Lord did for me when I,
myself,
went forth from Egypt.'”

Hypocrite, Isaac thought, his only response a smirk. Hypocrite, hypocrite.

“Don't make such a face to your father.”

“I can't help how I look.”

“Leave the table.”

Henry waited an hour, tugging absently at his sidecurls, before he went to Isaac's room. “Is there anything wrong,
yingele?
”

“No.”

“If there's a problem, I'm here to help.”

“There's nothing wrong, I said.”

But when Henry leaned over to kiss him good-night, Isaac slid away from him.

“Do you think I should buy us a TV set?” Henry asked.

“Only if we can afford it.”

Nialie found Henry in the living room. She brought him a cup of lemon tea. “Was he bad to you again?”

“No.”

“You look terrible.”

“I'm fine. H-h-h-honestly.”

A few days later Nialie startled Isaac going through the papers on Henry's rolltop desk. “What are you looking for?” she demanded.

“A pencil,” he replied, leaping back.

“There's plenty in your room.”

“Do you know how much he gives to the
yeshivas
in Jerusalem, never mind the Rebbe?”

“It's his money.”

“Millions and millions.”

“Shame on you.”

“Yeah, sure. Go to your room. Don't worry. I'm going.”

Then, his ear to the door, Isaac heard her say, “You ought to lock your desk every night.”

“What have I got to hide?” he asked.

Plenty, Isaac thought. If only she knew. But he wouldn't tell her. He didn't dare. Henry, whom everybody took for a holy man, a saint even, hid filthy photographs in his desk. Photographs more revealing than anything Isaac had ever seen in
Playboy
. They had come in a plain brown envelope from somebody in England and showed a naked woman, a really skinny one, doing amazing things with one man and sometimes two of them.

Nialie confronted Isaac at breakfast the next morning. “How can you be so rude to your father?” she asked.

Because he's a hypocrite, he thought. But he didn't say it. Instead he glared at her.

Ten

Condemned to a night in Edmonton before he could catch his morning flight to Yellowknife, Moses checked into the Westin, and then settled into a stool at the bar. Sean Riley was on TV. He was in Vancouver, peddling
Bush Pilot,
the book about his thrilling adventures in the Land of the Midnight Sun. The pleasantries didn't last long and then the interviewer, a former Miss B.C. Lion, took a deep breath, swelling her bosom, and asked about Riley's celebrated crash in the winter of '64. His passenger, a mining engineer, had died on impact. A month later Riley, who had been given up for dead, limped out of the barrens right into the Mackenzie Lounge in Inuvik.

“As you know, it was rumoured in Yellowknife at the time that you survived your terrible ordeal by resorting to, um, cannibalism. If that's the case,” the interviewer suggested, flushing, “and, darn it, who's to say any one of us would have done different—if that's the case—I'm looking at a guy who has had a
very
unusual experience, eh?” Then, glancing hastily at one of her index cards, she added. “Now what grabs me is how such an unusual experience has affected you personally and psychologically?”

“Say, I don't get to appear on TV that often. Do you mind if I say hello to Molly Squeeze Play in Yellowknife?”

“What?”

“Hiya there, Molly. See you in The Gold Range tomorrow. Meanwhile keep your legs crossed, ha ha ha.”

“Does it haunt your dreams?” Shirley Anne asked.

“Molly?”

“Cannibalism.”

“Well, I'll tell ya, it kind of puts you off your prime rib. Like, you know, it's so good and sweet. Hardly any gristle.”

The bar was rocking with chattering men and women wearing name tags, educators gathered from all ends of the continent to ponder WHITHER THE GLOBAL VILLAGE? But, as Moses started into his fourth double Scotch, most of them had dispersed, only a handful of dedicated drinkers surviving. Then a lady came flying into the room, out of breath, obviously too late for the party. She snuggled into the stool immediately beside Moses and ordered a vodka on the rocks. “Prosit,” she said.

MY NAME IS CINDY DUTKOWSKI wore a snug woollen dress and carried an enormous shoulder bag. Fierce she was, black hair unruly, petite, forty maybe. She taught Communications 101 at Maryland U. “Say, do my eyes deceive me, or didn't I see you in Washington last week, rapping with Sam Burns at the Sans Souci?”

“You're mistaken.”

“I'll bet you're also a media personality and I should know your name.”

“Sorry about that.”

“If you tell me your name, I won't bite.”

“Moses Berger,” he said, signing his bar bill and starting to slide off his stool. She shoved him back.

“Hey, you're really shy. It's a form of arrogance, you know. It also protects you against rejections in highly charged social encounters. I was a psych major.” Hers, she said, was an open marriage, which allowed both partners a life-style enabling them to explore their full sexual potential.