"Pa, I want you to buy that condominium."
For one moment more the old man glanced wildly about in hectic disorientation. Blood rushed alarmingly to his whole face, and he choked with such anger and violent confusion that he seemed to be fighting for each mouthful of air. Words would not come. In torrents of fury and frustration, he began poking with a bent finger toward the table in imperious spasms, his walleyed gaze rolling from the people seated on one side of him to those on the other. At the first motion of his arm, the ancient reflex abiding in the others leaped into life, and everyone present lunged with terror for the closest dishes of food to pass to him. Gold pushed plates of duck, spareribs, and rice toward him with both hands. Esther, who was sitting nearest, gave him the enormous bowl of wonton soup. Gold spied the hairline crack in the porcelain an instant too late to scream and foresaw with an intuition that defied any possible doubt just what would follow. The crash when the bowl shattered on the floor was even more hideous in reality than in his despondent imagination. The manager returned in a moment with a visage of awesome force and authority, joined this time by three unsmiling warriors with onyx eyes and closely shaven heads and a jittery Oriental woman with bright lipstick who carried a very long, thin pencil.
"Is anything wrong?"
193
"Chipped china?" inquired Esther.
"Vehr Gehargit!" the old man roared in reply to the baleful Chinese manager when he at last found his voice, stabbing his forefinger into the tall man's stomach and driving him back. The man blanched as Julius Gold, still thrusting toward him, shouted, "I don't want no condominium! I live here, not there! It's for a vacation I go!"
Sid was already on his feet, gushing twenty-dollar tips and magniloquent apologies like a fountain. Fuck him, steamed Gold, dispensing ones and fives with the readiest of hollow laughs to dumbfounded children and parents at tables nearby. He should be locked up! In a prison, not a hospital! In handcuffs! To the walls of a dungeon he should be chained, that crazy fuck of a bastard, fifteen feet off the ground!
In time the floor was mopped and they progressed through the meal to the pineapple, ice cream, and fortune cookies in near total silence under the harrowing pretense that nothing untoward had intruded. The haggling that did ensue was concise. The old man was not returning to Florida until he was good and ready. Sid guaranteed a visit from at least one branch of the family every month for no less than five days. Nothing doing. Every three weeks for seven days? We'll see about that.
"Fuck him!" Gold ranted to Belle in the car going home. "Let the son of a bitch get bronchitis again and start coughing his lungs out. Let him start complaining he's lonely because we don't come visit."
"You'll be in Washington," Belle said laconically.
And fuck you too, Gold fulminated in silence with an evil squint at his wife. You're goddamned right I'll be in Washington. At midnight he was on the telephone to California pleading with Joannie to come to New York to try to take charge. She was having trouble with Jerry, and a lawyer had warned her not to desert the domicile.
"He broke the soup!" Gold insisted tragically in recapitulation. "He broke the goddamned soup! I think
194
this must be the worst day in my life. Then, in the restaurant after he broke the soup I got the weirdest fortune cookie anyone ever heard of. When I finally got back home someone had turned all the one-way signs around as a joke and I couldn't get close to the house to drop Belle off or back to the garage to bring my rented car in. Gussie said she made me a sock—"
"One sock?"
"She only has two hands. And it turned out to be that same strip of wool she's been knitting since we know her and everybody laughed at me. Nobody who knows me treats me with respect."
"We're your family, Bruce. Do you want us to call you doctor too?"
"Not just them. Everyone around here treats me like a schmuck. Even Chinese fortune cookies. Yesterday at the gym I ran into Spotty Weinrock, this guy we grew up with in Coney Island, and he said Belle was a dumpy broad and talked to me like I was still a jerky little kid in school. Belle's not dumpy, is she?"
"Yes," Joannie said after a small hesitation. "She is."
"Well, what's so bad about dumpy?"
"I didn't say it was bad. Some women are slim and tall, like I am, and some are short and . . . well."
"It ain't her fault she's dumpy, is it?" Gold was peevish. "We're born that way. It's not my fault I'm short, is it?"
"You aren't short," Joannie defended him. "You're average."
"Average ain't good enough."
"What did your fortune cookie say?"
Gold's whimper was a malediction against fate. "Everybody else got normal ones. I never even touch the damn things. They made me." He re-created for Joannie now how, only after concerted importuning by the others, he had broken open the fortune cookie he had picked and extracted from inside the stoic message You will hurt your foot. "And they ail thought it was so funny."
195
"What did it say?"
" 'You will hurt your foot.' And then they all made me pass it around and started laughing at me again. Joannie, what's wrong? What's that noise? Holy shit— what the hell are you doing?"
"Laughing," she said. "I can't help it. I think it's funny too."
196
Between the locker room in the Businessmen's Club of the YMCA and the staircase to the indoor track two floors above were a television lounge, a sleep room, showers, some massage tables, a steam room and sauna, and a small exercise room that normally was unoccupied when Gold stopped by in the mid-afternoon for his warm-ups and clandestine weight lifting. The familiar form of Karp the chiropodist, a member, was planted on a wooden stool in the aisle of the locker room with his bald head drooping almost into his lap, much like a man praying to God against impossible odds. He mumbled something somber in greeting that Gold obdurately refused to hear as he turned around him toward his locker deep inside the row. Gold's demeanor at the Y was habitually unsociable, his countenance that of someone introverted and choleric. When Gold walked back in his gym clothes, Karp reiterated his sacerdotal incantation in exactly the same dirgelike cadence. Gold growled "Hi" and con-
197
tinued past. As Gold proceeded through the carpted hallway toward the staircase to the track, a tall shambling figure wearing just a bedsheet over one flabby shoulder emerged from the sleep room with a semiconscious smile and began laughing at him.
Gold halted with a scowl. "What are you doing here?"
"I belong," said Spotty Weinrock, chuckling steadily and staring down at Gold with an expression of drowsy merriment that instantly put Gold at a disadvantage. "What about you?"
"I've been a member for years." Gold was arrogant in establishing seniority. "What do you do here?"
"I sleep," said Spotty. "Mursh said I ought to start going to a gym for my health. So I come here a few afternoons a week for a nap. I read Variety and the fashion papers in the sauna and sometimes I lay myself down for a massage. Mursh was right. I feel much better since I've been coming here. What do you do?"
Gold had been listening as though in a dream. "I
jog."
"You? That's something. How've you been?" "Fine," said Gold. "What's it your business?" "I know why you're snubbing me," Weinrock said with good humor. "I owe you thirteen hundred dollars."
"I'm not snubbing you. I don't think of you at all." Weinrock responded to the slight by beaming even more offensively in enjoyment of Gold's sally. "I can pay you back now. Call me at my office and I'll take you to lunch. How's your old man?" "What's it your business?"
"He still alive? My mother was asking about him only last week."
"He's fine," retorted Gold. "How's your old man?" "Mine's gone, Bruce. I thought you knew that." "You only owe me eleven hundred," Gold said in apology. "I couldn't spare it the last time you asked." "I forgot." Weinrock rubbed his half-closed eyes with both fists. "Those old folks are really something,
&nb
sp; 198
ain't they? I still get a kick out of my fucking mother. She couldn't speak a word of English but she learned how to call me Spot when I was eleven years old because I worked for your father. She's okay now." Unjust, Gold lamented for more than the first time, how everybody's parents but his own turned easier and more manageable in advanced age. "How's your brother Sid?"
"Fine," said Gold.
"Your sisters Rose and Esther?"
"They're fine. What do you care?"
"I'm interested. And Ida and Muriel and Kitty and Betsy?"
"I've got no Kitty and Betsy."
"I forgot."
"What are you laughing about?" Gold wanted to know. "What's so fucking funny?"
"Fishy Siegel tells me you're going to work in Washington for the President. It's in the papers."
"Fishy Siegel don't read the papers."
"His brother Sheiky does. You still married to that dumpy broad what's her name?"
"Yeah," Gold answered aggressively. "You still married to that skinny giraffe with the big teeth?"
"Oh, no," said Spotty Weinrock. "I got rid of her."
Gold was balked again and said, "Gimme the money you owe me, you cocksucker."
"Is that how a college professor talks?"
"You filthy prick," raged Gold. "You come to a gymnasium to sleep and read and lay on a massage table? And you don't like the way I talk? Where's my money?"
"Call me at my office." Weinrock was chuckling once more. "So you're going into politics in Washington and cash in big, huh? And all of us guys in Coney Island thought you'd never amount to anything."
"I look at it," said Gold, "as performing a useful service to society."
"That's what I'm laughing about," said Spotty Weinrock.
199
Weinrock was gone when Gold came down from the track half an hour later after running three miles and looked for him. All the bones at the bottoms of both Gold's feet felt broken. Karp the chiropodist repeated:
"The Angel of Death is in the gym today."
Gold's guard was down and this time the words penetrated. "What?"
"The Angel of Death is in the gym today."
"What are you talking about?"
"Another man dropped dead here this morning."
"On the track?"
"On the squash court."
Then what the fuck do I care? was the thought reverberating in Gold's mind as he strode to his locker to strip for his shower.
"I've been reading what you've been writing in the Times and that other magazine," said Karp when Gold returned wearing shower sandals and carrying a plastic bottle of herbal shampoo and his green soap dish, "and I would like to differ with you on one or two points if you will first take the trouble to define your terms for me.
Almost two minutes went by before hot water came up from the boiler in the basement. Twice the soap slipped from Gold's hands as he showered and he dropped his bottle of shampoo once. In adjacent stalls in the shower room two old men, deaf to melody, insensible to tempo, and oblivious to each other, were singing different songs industriously. Gold's head began to ache. He was a pound and a half heavier on the scale than he wanted to be. He would have welcomed a prodigious bowel movement.
"How do you feel about municipal tax-exempt bonds," asked Karp the chiropodist, "as an investment, as an economic phenomenon, and as a social inequity? Do you have an opinion?"
Gold's pulse rate was down. Dressing at his locker, he assessed the damage to his flesh, bones, and systems from the track. Again the toll was heaviest on his right
200
side. A rigid ache toward the rear of his neck there descended into his torso like a railroad spike. His shoulder, elbow, and breast were throbbing, and his liver felt swollen and seemed heavy as a cast-iron mass. There was a fiery, very fine twinge in his left kidney and a snag in his right hip that he hoped might grind away. His appendix was sore, as were his groin and right testicle, and there was stiffening compression in the leg muscles below from his buttock to his calf. It would not surprise him to be told he had cancer of the thighbone. A toe had bled beneath the nail. Physically, he was in peak condition.
"Personally, I'm opposed in principle to tax advantages of that kind," said Karp the chiropodist as Gold took his coat from the rack. "But I hold the view that attempts at correction will produce dislocations in other areas of the economy that will prove more harmful than the injustices we remove. Who do you think will play in the Super Bowl the next three years and how do you feel about the effects of television on revolution and the quality of conversation in the nuclear family? Don't you have an opinion?"
An old handball player several rows down complained in a high-pitched voice, "This is supposed to be the Young Men's Christian Association, isn't it? But you don't find so many Christians around here any more, do you?"
"It's hard to be a Jew," said Karp to Gold. "Do you agree?"
Gold shut the door of the telephone booth. Wein-rock Fashions had changed to Spot Modes.
"Mr. Weinrock is out in the market," the frail voice of an immature girl said when Gold had given his name. "May anyone else be of assistance to you?"
"What market?" asked Gold.
The girl hung up in panic. Karp the chiropodist was standing in wait near the exit and jeered, "Aaaah, you don't know what you're talking about."
Gold made for the elevators in a weary hobble. Both
201
kneecaps were tender. There was pain in one ankle and he walked with a limp, in premature fulfillment of the mystic prophecy in the Chinese restaurant that came to him the following day.
202
VI
You Will Hurt Your Foot
JULAVE you left Belle yet?" said Ralph. "In that case, please give her my love. Do it soon, though, if you hope to propose to Andrea and marry her before your appointment is announced. Now these Commission meetings tomorrow morning can be of great importance to you, Bruce, because they're of no importance to anyone else. Do whatever you want as long as you do whatever we want. We have no ideas, and they're pretty firm. Seize control. This Administration will back you all the way until it has to."
Gold arrived for his first Presidential Commission meeting punctually at eight-thirty the following morning as though borne to his destiny on a tide of optimism and felt his poise crumble when he found nobody there. At ten, an enticing, buxom woman with black hair in a ponytail entered with several young assistants to supervise the physical arrangements and was staggered to discover someone else already present for an official meeting slated to convene but an hour and a half
205
earlier. Her name was Miss Plum. She had much makeup on her comely face, and a necklace of green Mexican beads lay languorously between her breasts. Gold cursed his poor judgment in arriving on time. He prowled nervously to and fro in the marble hallways and neighboring side rooms like a creature in fear of ambush, praying feverishly for his allies on the Commission to join him. In a while a coffee wagon rolled into the anteroom, closely stalked by a celebrated, superannuated career diplomat in striped pants and morning coat, who, stretching upward on his toes for improved range, was plucking avidly at the raisins and glazed almonds on the pastries he still had spryness enough to reach.
The hour was past eleven when his remaining twenty-three colleagues arrived in chattering clusters so concentrated that all could have alighted from the same chariot. The walls resounded with hearty salutations from which Gold was excluded. People tended to look and move right through him as though he were made of something nebulous. All were addressed by title. Eventually, Gold was introduced to a defeated mayor, a deposed old judge who could hardly see, a retired naval commander, an apostate clergyman in splendid vestments, and the ex-athletic director of a large university who wore a sweatshirt, whistle, and billed cap and was called Coach. Even Gold had a title: his title was Doctor, and as far as he could tell, he was the only member of that superior group with a job—as a doctor,
although it was only as doctor of philosophy, and in English literature at that.
He was distressed from the outset by how little attention his presence excited, and his powers of speech were vitiated by his dread of being considered inferior. He began to wonder if he were the only Jew. Introductions were performed by Miss Plum with effulgent cheerfulness and inviting sexual warmth and there was much lewd laying on of hands by the more elderly men who had worked and resided in Washington longest and were most in keeping with the customs. Miss Plum
206
had been divorced four times, and Gold could tell she was not a virgin. Overshadowing all was a handsome, silver-haired former governor of Texas with a chiseled cleft in his chin and a reputation for emanating authority,
"I'm glad to meet you, Dr. Gold," the Governor said crisply when Miss Plum finally brought them together. The flat blue eyes resting on Gold were friendly as ice. "People tell me you're a genius."
"Who?" Gold blurted out, repenting the blunder even as he was committing it.
"You can't be much of a genius if you don't even know that," said the Governor, turning away. "Good morning, Mayor, you're looking marvelous. So is the Deputy and the Chief. Have you seen the Admiral?"
"He's with the Consul and the Chancellor, Governor. Enjoying a word with the Widow."
"Who is the Spade?"
"He's our new Token Black. A brilliant scholarship student at Oxford."
Good as Gold Page 17