The fear over, the tears came. Torrents and gushes, cascades and rushes. She should have known. And she clutched at him as though he had just saved her from some dragon. She clutched at him hard, pulling him down upon her. And she thought, how lovely. All the toys on his shelf could watch them make love. How very special. How very much like Christmas Eve in Santa’s Workshop. Hey, toys, watch this. Watch and learn. For if you can someday do what we are now doing, it will mark the beginning of a wondrous new era in the development of educational toys and in the progression of creative playthings. Watch me, little dolls. Watch, you soldiers and cowboys and teddy bears. See the loving. See Luther make love to Tiger. Quick, Luther, quick. Come, Tiger, come.
She knew that he watched over her at night. Even in her sleep she could feel him there, lying on his side, studying her. Once, when she woke up somewhere before dawn, it was because he was running his big palm gently through her hair. He told her that it was okay, to go back to sleep, he was guarding her. She asked him, “Against what?” And he said, “Against the dybbuks inside you—the ones trying to take over.” To which she said, “I have no dybbuks, you dope.” And he went on to say, “Everyone has dybbuks. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need much sleep. Besides, it’s nice to lie beside the girl you love and listen to her breathe and know, that if anything comes, you’ll protect her from it. When a woman sleeps, that’s when she’s a child and needs caring. Also, nutsy, if you want to get mathematical about it, if we spend one-third of our lives asleep, that makes you, when you’re asleep, a little more than six years old, and six-year-olds need caring. Not until you’re ninety should you sleep without someone watching. It’s too risky.” The following morning, of course, he denied ever having made such a speech to her. He made a similar speech a week later, and a similar denial. So she never mentioned it again or asked why he watched over her, mostly because she liked it.
4
They certainly enjoyed their bacon and eggs the next morning. They certainly did. After a full night of love-making, Luther could usually consume half his weight in calories, and that morning was no exception. As for Tiger, she, too, laid into the breakfast goodies if for no other reason than to replace the weight that Luther had “loved” off her during the night. She had an uncanny sense of just how much weight she lost in any given love session. And because of the high passions involved, last night, by her calculations, had been a rousing three-pounder. So she waded into breakfast as would a host of locusts, lest her weight fall below her usual nifty 107 pounds.
“Mmmmm,” said Luther. “Good bacon.”
“Ummmmm, yes,” said Tiger. “Delicious. And no mess.”
The demonstrator was very pleased and continued his spiel. “Yes, and it all works on high frequency sound waves. No grease, no waiting. Just forty-eight seconds for the bacon and ten seconds for the eggs.”
The other people standing around in Bloomingdale’s epicurean department seemed impressed with the demonstration. But Luther and Tiger, by dint of having placed themselves strategically in the crowd’s forefront, were the only ones imbibing of the breakfast fare. They stood there, balancing their little plates, and smacking their little lips, and generally enjoying their little repast while the demonstrator continued to extoll the efficacies of the jim-dandy little sonic oven. “Yes, indeed…no modern kitchen can really consider itself complete without this high-speed futuristic cooker.” The demonstrator, obviously an out-of-work actor, was reveling in his moment in the sun. So he turned to Luther and Tiger and went into his Great Dunninger routine. “Now then, for the record, you two have never seen me before.” He smiled and winked at the good-natured crowd, who, no doubt, were appreciating his fine performance.
“True,” said Luther, and Tiger nodded her agreement.
“Neither of you is in the employ of Bloomingdale’s,” said the demonstrator, building his foolproof case.
“No, sir. We are not.”
“There is no collusion. You are not shills?”
“No, sir.”
“You just wandered into Bloomingdale’s this morning and kindly consented to be guinea pigs, is that correct?” The demonstrator had switched from Dunninger to Clarence Darrow.
“Correct.”
“And what, then, is your conclusion?”
Luther was everything that Bloomingdale’s had ever dreamed of. “My conclusion is—that I have never tasted bacon this crisp without its being dry and lifeless. There’s no curled-up edges, no loss of flavor…”
He looked at Tiger, and she took that as her smiling cue. “And the eggs are perfect,” she said. “Delicate and tasty and barnyard fresh.”
The demonstrator, out of his mind with the performances of his cast, closed in for his dramatic climax. “And would you like to know exactly how much this incredible little oven costs? Would you care to hazard a guess?”
Luther did not flinch at the hazard. “Eight thousand dollars and twenty-three cents.”
Tiger added, “Plus tax.”
The demonstrator, a man who had not studied with Lee Strasberg without results, gave the world the correct figure. “Only four hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-five cents!”
Luther expressed facial amazement and exhaled a gasp of shock. Then he pulled himself together, and clapping his hands as though sealing a bargain, he announced, “Jesus Christ, I have to have one.”
Tiger was surprised. It served her right for ever assuming that Luther knew when it was time to quit. All she could do now was watch and see how the situation would develop.
The demonstrator was tickled out of his skull. He whipped out his order pad, probably from up his sleeve, and drew out a pencil as if it were the fastest Eberhard Faber in the West. “And the name, please?”
Tiger waited to hear what the name would be. Luther did not back off as he stated it for all mankind to hear. “Mr. Jack Bergman.”
Bong. Tiger knew that they had passed the point of no return. All that could follow would be disaster. She gently tugged at Luther’s sleeve, like a child indicating to Daddy that it was time to cut out. Luther gave ground grudgingly, still addressing the demonstrator as he was being pulled away by Tiger. “Put a card in, please. To Uncle Jack, with lavish and idiotic affection, from Seymour and Shelda and all the gang at Mossberg Hats.”
The demonstrator had run out of script. He was watching his life, luck, and commission, all leaving together, backward. “But—”
Tiger tugged Luther farther and farther away from the confused demonstrator and the equally baffled crowd. She led him straight and cool, neither fast nor slow, but most assuredly away. They moved through another little area in the epicurean department. The bakery section, where little fresh-baked cookies lay cooling on a counter, delectably, as in a Tom Sawyer movie, as though just placed there by Aunt Polly. Luther inhaled and stopped short. And Tiger’s legs kept going a few steps farther, climbing only on air.
Luther smiled at the chubby lady baker who looked like one of the Campbell Kids grown up. “Hi,” he said as he reached over with one of his paws and picked up three cookies in one move. “Mmmmm,” he said. “Good. And real butter, too.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “And only a dollar ninety-five a pound.” Everybody was selling in Bloomingdale’s. Hardly the Christmas spirit. But then it was hardly Christmas. It was October.
Luther filled his pockets with cookies as the chubby lady watched with disbelief. “Don’t you want me to…put them in a box?”
“Oh, no,” said Luther. “Don’t bother. I’m not paying.” And he felt Tiger’s tug on his sleeve, and he moved along after her, stopping only to shout back to the stove demonstrator. “And put in three dozen of these fine and tasty cookies! Jack Bergman! It’s in the garment center somewhere! They’ll know!”
Tiger tugged again, and they moved along. They turned a corner and bumped into a woman shopper who was intensely examining an electric coffeepot. Luther folded his hands behind his back and immediately became a floorwalker. “Yes? May I help you?”
Tiger leaned against a counter and sighed skyward as Luther professionally examined the coffeepot. “Hmmmm,” he said. “Ah, yes. It’s eleven ninety-five. But for you, because it’s Arbor Day—six fifty.” He placed the pot back into her surprised hands. “You see,” he said, smiling, “it’s really a piece of crap.” He felt Tiger’s tug and was soon moving down the aisle. A few yards, and he turned back to the lady shopper and called out, “At a hundred and fifty-five degrees it self-destructs!” The lady dropped the coffee pot and went immediately to the complaint department.
Luther and Tiger finally left the department store. But not until Luther had autographed Irwin Shaw’s name on three separate copies of Norman Mailer’s latest novel much to the giggly satisfaction of a trio of New Rochelle matrons to whom he had identified himself as Truman Capote. Also, at the perfume counter, he asked to have three gallons of Réplique shipped quickly to the New York Knickerbocker locker room, and before the next game, please. In the infants’ section he hastily instructed the saleslady immediately to ship eight cribs to the Olesky octuplets in Manitoba, charging the whole thing to Cosmopolitan magazine, which, he said, had just acquired the rights to at least five of the kids, though, as far as he knew, Life magazine owned the other three, but they’d all work it out somehow.
Bloomingdale’s was not to be the same for some time. It was the third time that year that the Phantom Imbecile had struck, and they were hard at work checking his fingerprints with the FBI from the last time when he hit them again. That afternoon Bloomingdale’s checked with Macy’s and Gimbels but received no cooperation, though they thought they heard laughter on the other end of the line.
Luther and Tiger romped happily down Lexington Avenue, leaving Bloomingdale’s to heaven. It was a glittering day, and they both felt good, finishing up their hearty breakfast with cookies that came endlessly from Luther’s large pockets.
They walked through the world like that almost every day, with other people and other sounds floating all about them like blurred pastiches—but they were never touched by anything outside their own tiny perimeter. Luther and Tiger belonged only to each other, and nothing else was allowed in. Nor did anything else try. People who bumped people never bumped Luther and Tiger. Vehicles that intimidated all life never threatened them. Things that fell from windows, cranes that toppled, gas mains that burst, arms that broke, hearts that attacked—none of these presented the slightest danger to Luther and Tiger. For they had their invisible shield, and beneath it, they wore their enchanted garments, and within those folds they bore their exalted love. And in all such moments Tiger could feel the power of him, tall and tousled and slightly daft. King of the hill. Lord of the manor. Cock of the walk. Christ at large on Halloween Night, tweaking noses, pulling legs, tricking and treating, but hurting no one.
The drugstore loomed up as an oasis, like the only place in town, like the last train out of Istanbul. Tiger felt Luther stiffen, and when she looked up into his face, she could actually see the brazen idea festering.
Luther removed his jacket and handed it to Tiger as though she were his valet. Then he rolled up his sleeves, and Tiger looked round, wondering who it was he was going to fight. There was no one, of course. Only Luther, looking through the glass door of the drugstore at the action beyond. And when Tiger looked, too, she found herself kissed gently upon the head. And when she turned her face up, the better to receive his kisses, he was already moving through the doorway. She was always one step behind him. It was her lot. She was forever doomed to be a split-second post-Luther. Nor was there any way in which to anticipate his actions.
So she remained outside the drugstore, hugging his jacket. From her vantage point, allowing for reflections, Tiger could still see fairly well through the glass door. At the eating counter sat New Yorkers of the morning, gobbling coffee and Danish just prior to turning themselves in at their offices. And behind the long counter a half dozen white-shirted countermen went frenetically about their business. They were harassed, confused, and vitally busy, involved with orders and questions from customers whose faces were long and whose tempers were short. So immersed in their activity were the countermen that they didn’t notice their number swell by one—the tall man in the white shirt with the rolled-up sleeves, direct to Whalen’s, courtesy of Central Casting. Needless to say, Tiger did not care for the situation that Luther had so nonchalantly stepped himself into. The getting there was half the fun. The getting back would be another kind of journey.
Luther swung into action, and Tiger gulped at his gall. He grabbed a rag and polished the counter and generally moved about in the same frenzied patterns as did the other countermen. He even deigned to shout out a few orders to the unseen chef in the back. In the clatter and the clamor none of his orders was heard. But that didn’t dissuade him. “Burn one! BT. down, kill the gravy, it’s to go!”…“One double garlic malt, easy on the chutney!”…“Still waiting for my liverburger, Marlene!”
His directives mingled with other hoarse orders, and no one questioned the sanity of any of them. But it made him feel a part of the team, and Luther liked that. He believed in camaraderie on the job. And since the six others were yelling at the kitchen, then by gum, he’d do it, too. The important part of the entire maneuver he carried off with Lutherian style. For as he polished the countertop, he also pocketed the tips, slyly sliding the coins across the counter toward his belly, allowing them to plop into his unobserved palm, which then introduced them to his pocket. And all the while he slowly worked his way from the far end of the counter back toward the doorway, beyond which he could see Tiger’s openmouthed face pressed against the window.
“Pastrami lean, on white bread, with mayo!” He grimaced as he ordered that one because it was such a godawful combination, and he looked around at the customers as if to say, “Which one of you dum-dums ordered that?”
One of the countermen, a scarred ex-sailor with hairy tattoos and heavy muscles, was looking at Luther and checking him out because he wasn’t sure that he’d seen him there before. He was posted between Luther and the door, and he stopped what he was doing and watched and waited as Luther came polishing toward him. He was a menacing man with a frazzled cigarette dangling from his swarthy face, the smoke spiraling up into his squinty eyes already swollen from the boozy night before.
Tiger noticed the man immediately. She watched him plant his feet and place his big hands on his hips, and she feared that the jig was up and that Luther would shortly be confronted with his dishonesty and leniently punished with mere death. She hated whenever Luther put himself into such jeopardy. It wasn’t any fun when he did that. It frightened her. And she could feel her heart pumping, and she had trouble gathering oxygen. She raised one finger in an effort to gain Luther’s attention. More she could not do.
Luther could not have really seen the powerful torso in his path. And yet he somehow knew that the man was there. And without a moment’s hesitation and without even looking to see if the man was large or small or dead or alive or a duck, Luther squeezed by and addressed the man very sotto voce. “Dowse the butt. Health inspector.”
The big counterman, suddenly guilty and equally fearful, whipped the cigarette from his ugly mouth, pulling part of his lip with it. Then, doubling up out of sight, he shoved the butt hissingly into someone’s upcoming orange juice. And, in that split second of measured time, Luther the Wisp was past him. And in the next split second Luther was out the door.
Tiger had his jacket ready; there was not a moment to lose. She held it toward him, and he thrust both arms into it, and they were on their way, turning a corner, vanishing.
Tiger, breathless and angry, chastised him for his stupid gambit. But he only laughed as, with great pride, he showed her his pocketful of coins. She looked into his oversized pocket (Luther had oversized pockets for professional reasons) and witnessed the collection. Had they been doubloons, t
hey’d both have been wealthy. But Tiger only grew more and more upset, whereas Luther, not choosing to argue the point, merely steered her farther up the street, and even as she was scolding him, he whisked her into a mod jewelry shop.
When they emerged, Tiger had a cheap ring for each finger. Her hands were so heavy that she could barely raise the rings to the sun to see just how cheap the glass was. Nor could she touch her fingers together. They remained spread, like a cat’s, and her hands dangled helplessly at her side as though they had originally belonged to a much larger person. For all his work, Luther had only his smile. He had squandered his hard-earned booty on the pretty wench, but it had seemingly produced results. For if she had not truly forgiven him his crime, she had, at least for the moment, forgotten it in a blaze of gaudy jewelry. He was sure it was not too different in Tortuga and Port Royal, years ago when Captain Morgan and his men tossed trinkets to strumpets and then sailed away for more. He put his big arm about her and gathered her to his side. Once again he had risked all for a pretty girl, but such a pretty girl.
5
The sun was high and warm over Central Park. It was the noon to two break in the day, and many office workers took to the park benches just to sit and contemplate trees. Luther and Tiger strolled along, quite the laconic couple, appreciating nature and generally approving of October, which still had a dash of summer in its veins. Luther was whistling his favorite song, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and it never ceased to amaze Tiger that the national anthem was the only song he concerned himself with in his more meditative moments. He was either a patriot or a put-down artist. Whichever, he was a good whistler.
They walked the twisting paths, and Tiger was troubled. It had been occurring to her more and more frequently that by staying with Luther, she was going nowhere. Not that she minded living only for the present. She didn’t. It was crazily unique, especially when superimposed on her Protestant background, which, very early on, had pointed her always to the future, so much so that she never really remembered enjoying anything along the way. Always the future, the future. Hurry up and get there. And when you’ve gotten there, take a nice look around and feel very satisfied that you’ve lived by the Protestant ethic, and once you’ve done that…die.
A Glimpse of Tiger Page 3