The Last of the Wise Lovers (24 page)

  
*

   I found a relatively clean flophouse
on 11th Avenue.  I paid the $23 up front (I didn't have any bags, which
didn't seem to make the desk clerk too happy) and walked up the narrow
staircase to the second floor.  The room contained a large bed, a sink,
and a chair.  I locked the door, got undressed, lay the pistol under the
pillow and slid under the covers.

   I immediately realized that I would
not be able to sleep.  You know the feeling.  Soda, not blood, was
coursing through my veins.  The room's odor was driving me crazy.  It
smelled of sex, and of
her
; her smell clung to the shirt and jacket.
 I looked down at the street.  There was nothing unusual outside;
just rain.  Once I read that there was a way to hint to the desk clerk
that you wanted a woman sent to your room, but I didn't know what that way was,
whether my $50-some-odd would be enough, whether the desk clerk would even take
such a hint seriously from a kid my age, or whether I'd know what to say or do
once the whore showed up.  I paced up and down the room.  Then I lay
down on the bed and carefully took the gun out from under the pillow.  It was
cocked and loaded.  A small latch locked the slide.  I realized from
all the movies I'd seen that this was the safety.  I was dying to try it,
to shoot just one shot; but I controlled myself and slipped the gun back under
the pillow.  I lay down on my back, rolled onto my stomach, then turned
back over onto my back.  Finally I jerked off with the soap that was by
the sink and fell asleep, ashamed.

   When I woke, it was pitch dark.
 I found myself sprawled across the width of the bed; the clock read 6:10.
 I thrust my head into the pillow and took slow, measured breaths in an
effort to fall asleep again.  But in vain.  I would have given
anything for it to be morning already.  I thought of Mom coming home just
then to a cold, empty house.  I also thought about what was going to
happen today to the man she loved.  I didn't believe you'd be able to
prevent it; something in our last telephone conversation made me think you
wouldn't be able to stop
any
thing.  Suddenly I realized the
groundlessness of my belief that today, the 7th of September, all my troubles
would be over.  Even if the man who controlled Mom's life were to
disappear at The Society for Proper Nutrition ("disappear" was the
word that made me the least uncomfortable) at 12 noon, my problems would not.
 Dad would not stop looking all over the country for secrets until he got
caught; Mom wouldn't be any happier with him, and might even be more miserable;
and I would still have one year left before I'd have to go back to a country I
hardly knew and serve in an army that all the newspapers denounced.

   My memories of the previous night
were hazy, as if the magic spell had evaporated.  My other worries came
back with renewed force.  I had an overwhelming desire to talk to Mom.
 I got dressed, put on the steel-tipped boots, and went downstairs.
 The telephone in the lobby was broken.  I zipped up the jacket and
went out into the street.  I bought some cookies at an Italian bakery and
asked to use the phone.

   It was a little after seven.
 Mom answered after eight or nine rings and sounded confused.  That
didn't keep her from asking if I was behaving myself wherever I was a guest.

   I reminded her to pick up Aunt Ida at
the hospital.  I wanted to make sure she wouldn't make the mistake of
going to the offices of The Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of the Body,
but that proved unnecessary.  

She remembered, and even added, "I don't know
how I'll manage everything.  At 12:00 I've got to get Ida, and the service
at Uncle Harry's Temple starts at 4:00... when will I have time to get
dressed?" Getting dressed is a long, drawn-out affair with Mom, so a
statement like that indicated she'd probably be running quite late.  This
time, it reassured me.  It meant she was going to spend at least half an
hour trying on clothes and rejecting them, rather than just putting on the pink
shirt with the black stripe - which would have been a bad sign.

   Nevertheless, I felt edgy.  I
looked at my watch again.  There were less than six hours to
the
event.  What would happen afterward?

"I want to come with you," I said.

   "Where?"

   "To Temple."

   She was bewildered.  That was
understandable, given the fact that the Temple was one of those places she
usually had to beg me to go.

 "What happened?" she asked.

   "Nothing.  Rosh Hashanah."

   She didn't buy it.

"There are only two tickets: one for me, and
one for Aunt Ida."

   "Aunt Ida won't be able to go.
 She's sick."

  
"She's
healthy as a horse.  She just called an hour ago and asked why I'd lied to
her doctors about being in Syracuse instead of coming to get her."

  
"What did you tell her?" I asked with some trepidation.

  
"You know it's beneath my dignity to argue
with someone feeble and senile."

   I went back to the matter of the
Temple. "You can leave a message at the entrance telling them to let me
in."

   "No. No," she said
decisively.  "They're very careful, you know; security and all.
 The vice presidential candidate and the mayor and all those other bigwigs
will be there."

   I didn't say anything.  I felt
both insulted and embarrassed.

   "Ronny?"  There was a
strangeness about her voice, something I couldn't identify.

   "Yeah."

   "Don't be insulted.  You
know how much I like it when you come with me.  Who else do I have to be
proud of, if not my beautiful boy?  You won't be missing anything - just a
boring ceremony.  I'm only going in order to make Aunt Ida happy."

   I realized that the strangeness in
her voice was the tail end of tears. I wondered whether she'd fought with the
man with whom she'd spent the night, or whether you'd finally managed to get
her on the phone and reprimand her because of what I'd told you.  Either
way, she sounded so battered that she aroused my pity.

"Ok," I gave in, "just take care of
yourself."

   "Yes," she said, "of
course... and you know that if we only had another ticket...”

   "I know," I assented, at
that very moment realizing that we
did
have another ticket, the one I'd
written your numbers on.  I put down the receiver and went back to my
flophouse.  I took the gun out from under the pillow and put it in the
jacket pocket, then zipped up the jacket.

   I lay down on the bed, fully dressed.
 Out of all that had happened, only one thing puzzled me: how had he found
me at the club, that guy from the Lincoln Tunnel?  I couldn't stop
thinking about it.  The sleep I had longed for so desperately during the
night suddenly overcame me.  My eyes closed.  I only intended to doze
off for a minute, but I slept until 10:00, when the desk clerk knocked on the
door and said it was check-out time.

  
*

   I wandered around the streets until I
noticed a poster advertising an old film I'd wanted to see.  I bought a
ticket and went inside.  At noon, the alarm on my wristwatch went off.
 Everyone else in the audience was laughing over some hilarious
misunderstanding that was taking place on the screen.  I sat there,
sweating.  I kept thinking about what was happening at that very moment at
The Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of the Body.  At 12:15 I
wondered whether the guy was already dead and how it had happened.  I
could picture the street opposite the old dock in Nyack overrun with police
cars and hear the APB to find the murderer and all other suspects.  Oddly,
I felt prepared to face whatever came; I just hoped that Dad was in a safe
place, and that everything would be all right from now on.

   I stayed for two showings, but I
didn't manage to follow the plot. When I left, it was 3:00 p.m.  There was
still some time until the service began at 4:00.  I started toward the
Temple.  After walking a few blocks I took the jacket off and slung it
over my shoulder.  Then I remembered the gun; I was afraid it would slip
out of the pocket.  I ducked behind a billboard and took the gun out of
the pocket.  I considered what to do with it.  I tried putting it in
my pants pocket.  My pants were too tight.  There were no pockets in
my new shirt.  The only other option was the boots.  The slack sides
of each boot were held to my calves by the big buckle.  I undid the buckle
on the left boot and slipped the gun inside.  Within a few minutes it had
absorbed the warmth of my leg, and I forgot it existed.

   I walked briskly the rest of the way,
but I was late anyway.  When I reached the entrance to the Temple it was
already 4:20.  It didn't look like much from the outside: just a big old
building that could have been a movie theater, or even a bank.  Maybe that
was because it didn't feel like a holiday.  For all I could tell, the men
in tuxedos and women in furs who were visible on the other side of the big,
plate glass window-walls could have been attending a conference of insurance
salesmen.  I walked along the glass and tried several doors.  All of
them were locked.  I found an entrance around the corner.  It was
blocked by a folding table.  A guy wearing a gold Magen David on a chain
sat behind the table.

"There are no classes today," he said
politely.  "This is a closed event."

   "I'm invited," I said, and
showed him the ticket.

   It was worn and crumpled from all I'd
been through in the last few days.  He placed the ticket in front of him
and threw a questioning glance behind him.  That's when I saw that he
wasn't alone.  Six or seven guys in grey suits hovered behind him in the
shadows of the lobby.  They looked identical to one another, as if they'd
come off an assembly line where they'd been supplied - as a parting gift - with
a tiny earphone that was plugged into one ear.  They all wore the same
detached expression.  It was clear that they wouldn't intervene until the
little earphone told them to.

   The guy gave up on getting help from
them and looked back at me suspiciously.  I smiled pleasantly.  He
shot back a forced smile, turned the ticket over, and saw the telephone
numbers.

   "They're my uncle's, Mr.
Steinman," I explained.  "He's the president of the Board of
Trustees of this Temple."

   He asked for my name.  I told
him.

He asked, "Do you have any
identification?"

   I showed him my driver's license.
 One of the guys in the grey suits now approached us.  He looked at
my license for a long time, then tugged the end of a wire in the inside pocket
of his jacket and whispered something.  The earphone answered something
straight into his brain.  He nodded to the guard to let me in, then moved
aside.

   I got the license and the ticket
back.  I walked around the table and was given into the hands of two other
suits from the same assembly line.  One of them frisked me while the other
passed a metal detector over my body.  The left boot caused a prolonged
shriek to emanate from the metal detector.  My immediate reaction was:
Run!

 But the security guard just said to his
partner, "Look at all the noise these accessories make."  He
tapped the steel tip of the boot and stood up.

   Inside, the view was truly impressive.
 I know you're proud of your Temple, and with good reason.  It's very
cleverly built.  Take the plate glass walls, for instance.  From the
outside they look like a giant trap for dirt and fingerprints.  But from
the inside you can see they were built to show off the green treetops of the
park.  The pews sit on a series of graduated platforms, like in an
old-time movie theater - so everyone can see and be seen.  The organ, the
cantor, and the low lights all add to the air of majesty.

   There weren't any vacant seats, so I
walked around the room and stood off to the side, near the altar, among the
others who either didn't have assigned seats or who had arrived late.  I
searched for familiar faces in the crowd.  I picked you out right away.  You
were sitting in the first row and - as usual - you looked great.  On
either side of you sat the mayor and some other man, perhaps the guy who was
running for vice president.  A minute later I spotted Mom's head.
 The main aisle was to her left.  To her right sat a completely
healthy-looking Aunt Ida who was busy tugging on her silk handkerchief.  I
also found Aunt Lilian and Uncle Freddy from Rego Park, and Rabbi Goldwasser,
who comes to see you every holiday to offer his blessings and get a hand-out.

   The cantor finished singing and asked
you up to the altar.  You thanked him with a nod and invited the mayor and
the vice presidential candidate to join you.  They got up from their
places in the first row and walked toward you all full of smiles and handshakes.
 This was my chance to go up the side aisle and get closer to Mom.  I
moved forward with soft, silent steps, but the stairs creaked anyway.
 Heads turned with each row I passed, and several people whispered a
reproving "Sssshhhhh".  I lingered opposite Mom's row.
 Aunt Ida saw me and waved hello.  Mom was obscured behind her and
was looking straight ahead at the altar as if nothing else existed.  I
signaled Aunt Ida to get Mom's attention, and Aunt Ida signaled back.
 Something about Mom disturbed me, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
 I signaled again, but Aunt Ida was already absorbed in the game and she
waved back to me with the hand that gripped the handkerchief.  As Aunt Ida
leaned forward I could see more of Mom, and I realized what it was that had
bothered me: she was wearing the pink shirt with the black stripe.

   At first I thought: it can't be!
 
That
had all happened hours ago at The Society for Proper
Nutrition...  I regretted having stayed at the movies instead of finding
some electronics store or restaurant with a TV
where I could've watched the news to see whether it had really happened.
 I still thought there had been some mistake, but I couldn't help looking
at the faces of the men who sat nearby, trying to guess which of them was the
man who for the last two weeks had aroused in me feelings of hatred, anxiety,
guilt, and - more than anything else - curiosity: the man Mom loved.