by Ira Wood
Her mother called me “the Foundling.” A sun-wizened ex-Broadway chorus girl with a cigarette-raspy voice, she spent most of her days at the club playing golf and evenings, whenever she felt she could get away, in the city, meeting her husband for dinner at Joe Allen or Sardi’s, and leaving Allison to the care of Marina, their live-in housekeeper and cook.
When her father was detained at work I was invited to stay to dinner. Her mother sat with her elbows on the dining room table, tanned brittle forearms with sun spots, the wings of a crisply roast duck. She barely picked at Marina’s pork dumplings and poppy seed cake, but made comments to Allison as she ate. “Perhaps we want half as much, Dear?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“I wonder if Ricky would think so?” Ricky Fox was a favorite on a weekly TV show for kids. Allison told me they had gone to summer camp together.
“I don’t really care.”
“Obviously not.” Her mother enjoyed watching me eat, however, and chose to see my gluttony as deprivation. “Have more veal. Pass him the mushroom sauce. I think those step-parents of yours are trying to starve you.” She was full of stories from her days on the stage, tales in which she danced in rhinestone g-strings and was chased by a certain married producer who offered her bracelets and hats for, and here she would wink, “You know what.”
“Mother, I think that’s enough.”
“The Foundling doesn’t think so, do you?”
“Don’t embarrass him.”
“At least I don’t bore him.”
“I’m going to leave the room.”
“When did you become so grumpy?”
In spite of their skirmishes I loved Allison’s mother’s stories of theatrical New York in the fifties, one big opening night party, one friendly neighborhood overflowing with the most eccentric and generous people in the world. Allison’s mother was happiest when she had an audience. “Put another shot of rye in this drinkie, would you, Dear?” Early on she had taught me to make Old Fashioneds. “And a double dash of bitters? Good boy.”
But when she was bored she could be malicious. One long rain-swept afternoon when a game of hearts turned to bickering Allison ran from the table and slammed her bedroom door so hard an entire shelf of antique ceramic dolls crashed to the floor. She wept as we knelt to sweep up the mess. “I can never live up to that bitch’s expectations.”
“Of course not,” I said. “You’re only one person. Your mother needs a roomful.”
That was the first time she said, “I love you.”
If Allison felt tormented by her mother there was always the presence of Marina to make a home. A large silent Lithuanian woman who lived in the maid’s suite off the kitchen, Marina was suspicious of all male mammals that had not been gelded. She wore a headscarf tightly knotted under her chin and a crucifix the size of a Bowie knife. Marina doted on Allison, whom she had effectively raised, and looked at me like I was a mouse turd on a white lace tablecloth. Softly spoken, demurely dressed, Allison was in all ways modest in front of Marina, doubly so before her father. Having fantasized more about sex than ever having had any, I was happy enough with our long wet good night kisses and the occasional backseat feel at the drive-in. I loved Allison and felt grateful simply to be accepted by a family like hers.
Every year on the weekend after Memorial Day Allison’s parents prepared a barbecue for their closest friends, retired B movie actors and former TV variety show dancers who took the Long Island Railroad from the city, no one I had remotely heard of, but who were openly gay and played suggestive games of charades and broke into Cole Porter songs at the piano. This was the life I might have been born to had I been lucky, the life I caught glimpses of in The Thin Man movies; the café society, the flip repartee, the urbane drinking, the cigarettes that seemed to punctuate conversation like a conductor’s baton. I adored being included and would never have done anything to jeopardize my place in the family; then one day an odd thing happened.
Allison and I were in the pool. Her father was grilling porterhouse steaks at the far end by the diving board, her mother swilling drinks on the chaise lounge not ten feet away, telling a story about the first time she met Sinatra—when I felt a hand in my bathing suit. It was Allison’s hand and it was no shy brush with temptation, but a determined attempt to milk the cow. Through the haze of Beefeater martinis and the rising smoke from the steaks, no one noticed. Later that afternoon in the pool house I tried to run my hand under her bathing suit and got a firm No! in response. But the following Wednesday on Marina’s day off, while her mother was in the kitchen heating meat loaf, I felt Allison’s fingers tugging urgently on my zipper. As her mother finished the better half of a bottle of Beaujolais and sang along to the original cast album of South Pacific , Allison stuffed her hand inside my fly. I told her about the empty cabanas at the beach club where my friends took their dates to make out. She had no interest. I begged her to meet me under the boardwalk. She said it sounded sordid. She suggested we do things that I had never imagined, she knew exactly what turned her on, but it was only when her mother might catch us. I got my first blowjob while her mother was upstairs watching The Brady Bunch. It may be that for the rest of my life I will associate cunnilingus with the sani-rinse cycle of the dishwasher because I spent many evenings on my knees between Allison’s legs as she braced herself against the kitchen sink while her mother was walking the dog.
I was terrified of being caught, of being thrown out of the perfect family, but on the last weekend in June her father asked if I’d like to be his daughter’s date to an awards dinner for TV stars in New York City, to sit at the table with the family and all his most important clients. Her mother winked. “We’ll see Ricky.”
Just some boy I used to know. A big jerk, was the way Allison referred to Ricky Fox. A freckle-faced redhead with a glossy pompadour and a lean, rubbery dancer’s body, he was a fixture on National Educational Television, a kind of public broadcasting Mouseketeer. Nothing went on. Our parents were friends, was all Allison would say when I pressed her about sex. I had never “done it” with Allison, but I imagined Ricky Fox had. And the less she wanted to talk about him, the more I imagined.
Back at home my own mother and father were engaged in one of their prolonged periods of silence. They would occupy the same bedroom, stare at the same black and white television set while sitting at opposite ends of the same couch; eat at the same table, take slices of pizza from the same box, and pretend the other did not exist. Important information was conveyed loudly enough to be heard but addressed solely to the children, so that if I, or my middle brother, were not at home my father might ignore my mother and tell the 3-year-old, “I’m getting a colon biopsy tomorrow. If they find cancer in the polyps, my will is in my top drawer under the socks.” But somehow the idea of their oldest son on live television awakened a shared sense of possibility, united them in a quest, and I became the family project.
My father volunteered to rent me a tuxedo while my mom prepared to remake me in the image of her favorite celebrity, an actor named George Hamilton, who had hair like Zorro and skin with the buffed polish of a goat-hide briefcase. As I more closely resembled Izak Perlman, it was to be a complicated makeover. A three-fold plan was devised. First, I needed a rich suntan. I also had to drop ten pounds, and lastly, my mom was going to straighten my hair.
Although the Sunday of the awards ceremony was a blazing 94 degrees, it came after a week of sporadic rain and unyielding humidity that spun my hair into a ball of grade 4 steel wool. At sunrise I spread an old blanket on the hot tar roof of my apartment building in an attempt to coax a fast suntan. In order to make up for lost time, my mother’s brother Rudy, or The Idiot, as my father called him, also in on the project, provided me with a secret formula that he told me life guards used, a squeezer bottle with equal parts baby oil and iodine. Like a rotisserie chicken, I turned and basted myself every half hour. I did not eat breakfast or go downstairs for lunch as I was fasting to take off extra pounds a
nd I did not realize the effects of the secret formula until I saw my dad’s expression when he came up to the roof to get me.
“The Idiot told you to do that?” he said. My skin was scorched and raw to the touch, the approximate color of a red bliss potato. My mom led me directly to the bathroom where I sat on the toilet seat while she massaged hair-straightening mixture into my scalp. Then she wrapped my head in aluminum foil and moved me to the living room to watch the ball game while my hair relaxed. Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee sportscaster, was swabbing his face with a handkerchief. The infield in the Bronx, he announced, had reached 97 degrees. Allison and her mom were to pick me up in a limousine at five. It was now four-fifteen. My dad plucked lint off the tuxedo he had rented at 50 percent off, a winter model made of mohair. My skin was beginning to blister. My mom unwrapped my head. “Oh, my,” she said with the expression of someone unpinning a diaper. “It must be the heat.” My hair had completely lost its texture and dribbled down my scalp like gravy.
Half the building watched from the lobby when the limousine arrived. None of the children had ever seen a real chauffeur. An overly solicitous body builder in an ill-fitting double-breasted suit, he held open the door and softly said many things about my comfort. It did not register at first that he was mumbling apologies because the air conditioning in the limo did not work. Allison was wearing a real ruby tiara and a shoulder-less pink satin gown that made crunching sounds as she slid over. Her mother was rattling the bottles of the limo bar and cursing the driver until he raised the divider to shut her out. I found that if I did not move, if I remained motionless and simply visualized, in this case a water moccasin sliding across my foot, I could ignore the fact that my body was covered with second-degree burns. Relief arrived with a sea breeze as we swung through empty streets and even Allison’s mother had gently succumbed to sleep. But soon we hit the Long Island Expressway, packed bumper to bumper with Sunday evening beach traffic.
Enveloped in the exhaust of many thousands of cars headed back to Manhattan, the long black limousine did not move. Allison’s mother snored. My slacks, ordered a size too small at the waist to account for the weight I was supposed to lose, girded the soft flesh of my belly like piano wire. To our right a car full of teenage thugs in bathing suits, their bare feet sticking out the back window, drank beer and smoked pot and, laughing at the stiffs in formal dress, took turns spitting phlegm loogies at us. Closing our windows in this heat was not an option. I tried blocking them out with Sylva Mind Control. Think positively: Soon the traffic would budge. A loogie hit me in the neck. Utilize the right brain hemisphere: Before long, I will eat. I had not eaten in twenty-four hours and my stomach made those noises you hear in trucks that need a new transmission. Lurching forward a car length at a time, swinging into lanes in which the traffic abruptly stopped the moment we got there, we made slow progress.
The hand on my fly came as a surprise but Allison’s expression was familiar, the one that always said, “Now. Now that Marina is washing the windows and my father won’t be home until eleven, I want you now. Now that the chauffeur is blasting his horn and my mother is fast asleep and stretched out on the jump seats in front of us, let’s do it now,” and Allison silently parted the teeth of my zipper as we entered the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
The hotel was a Camelot-era palace of gold brick and white marble on Seventh Avenue. Allison’s father, waiting nervously at the curb for the limousine, pulled open the doors and hurried us inside. This was my moment to shine. Born to a family of crass working people always in the midst of crisis, I was entering a world of women in rhinestone ball gowns and witty men in dinner jackets. The air conditioning churned, cold as a Moscow Palace, and Dr. Zhivago was surrounded by admirers. It was Zhivago, Omar Shariff himself, with a bushy mustache and eyes like liqueur-filled chocolates. Allison’s father knew all the stars. Peter Graves. Carol Burnett. Mary Tyler Moore.
“Meet my daughter’s beau.” He presented me to Peter Ustinov and murmured sotto voce, “Both his parents were killed.”
The great actor patted my shoulder gravely.
“He’s our little foundling,” Allison’s mother said.
I grabbed a cocktail from a waiter’s tray. Allison whispered, “Are you all right?” I seemed to have stumbled. Peter caught me under the arm.
What a question. Other than getting ready to meet the love of my girlfriend’s life, the boy I had to assume she really loved, I had never felt better. The waiter offered more cocktails all around. There were chefs in tall white hats carving chateau briand and serving mounds of iced jumbo shrimp with silver tongs.
“You’re covered with sweat,” Allison said.
Indeed, I started shaking the moment I saw him, the slender young man with flame-colored hair doing an improvised tap routine on the dance floor. My skin was liquid slick. I was wet all over, but warm inside, the way you feel when you piss yourself in a wet suit. There was a gelatinous ooze on my upper lip which returned however many times I blotted it with a cocktail napkin.
“Over here!” her mother called.
“Oh, it’s Ricky!” Her father led us to a cocktail table near the bar where Ricky Fox in a tailored white dinner jacket was clinking glasses with Allison’s mother. His pompadour was like a wave in frozen motion. His skin was incandescent. The leprechaun smile, the arms outstretched like Jolson singing Mammy, announced not that he was happy to meet you but that he was happy for you to have the opportunity to meet him. This was what it meant to be a star, to radiate one’s own light, to be the absolute object of adoration.
“Pinky!” He reached for Allison.
“Hello, Ricky.” She offered her cheek.
“She used to call him Mr. Tricky,” her mother said proudly. “Tricky Ricky. We all did.”
“We’re older now, Mother.”
“Oh. Older. Excuse me. All of seventeen.”
Allison was rigid. Uncomfortable. Standoffish. But not unlike the way you might treat someone you once loved, or still loved, who had never loved you back. “This is Ira,” she said, and Ricky turned to me, but only briefly, as if one glance was enough. Enough, at least, to convince me there was still heat between them, that in fact she had loved him. Must still love him. Must have had sex with him. Must still want to have sex with him. Because he was Ricky Fox and I was, well, me.
Her father began pulling chairs from the table and I did need to sit down. The floor seemed to tilt as I walked and the band sounded far away. Voices melded and slowed as if stretching like taffy and the million glass beads of the ballroom chandelier spun above me like a dazzling roulette wheel. I remember prisms of lamplight, silver, white, then a thousand shards of color, a kaleidoscope of famous faces, as I fell to one knee and pitched forward. Allison screamed. Ricky Fox stepped away, shaking vomit from his shoe. I retched again and fell on my face.
I awoke, not in a seat at the round table for twelve in front of the orchestra, but on a king mattress with a striped duvet whose pattern matched the curtains, in a suite on the eighteenth floor. It was in fact Ricky’s suite. “Make sure the ass hole is out of there before I get upstairs,” I heard him say as two waiters carried me to the elevator. Hugh Downs was tonight’s emcee. He told jokes with a puckish smile. I watched it all on TV as Allison sat hunched forward at the foot of the bed. There was a bottle of Pepto Bismol on the night table and an ice bucket with a wash towel on the rim. My shoes were off as was the itchy wool jacket.
On TV the camera panned the ballroom. The orchestra played the theme from Hogan’s Heroes. Allison was sitting cross-legged, her chin in her palms, the blue glare shimmering on her bare shoulders.
Bob Crane reached for a glass from a passing waiter’s tray. Fifty tables roared approval. I inched up to the front of the bed. I waited till the commercial break to explain. The sunburn. The drinking. The starvation diet. “I ruined everything. I lost it. I saw you and Ricky together and—”
“Together?” Allison sounded repulsed. “Me and Ricky? Ricky is my father’s partner�
�s son. I’ve known him since I was 5 years old.”
“Do you still love him?”
“Love him? He’s sick. He’s a sadist. He always has been. He used to torment me until I cried. He played tricks on me. In summer camp he stole my underpants. . . .” she wasn’t laughing at the memory, she was taking breaths in bursts, opening and closing her fist. “He put them on a baby pig, Miss Pinky, the camp mascot. We all came to camp with name tags on our clothing and when the counselors took the underpants off the pig they told all the kids they were mine.”
Allison stood up abruptly, grabbed the telephone receiver from the nightstand and thrust it out to me. “Here. Your parents are worried about you.”
“There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Why don’t you tell them yourself? They’re waiting for your call.”
“How do you know?”
“Because my mother spoke to them.”
“What did she say?”
Allison straightened her gown. She took a step toward the door and sighed, “My mother said, ‘Hello. Are you Ira Wood’s step-parents?’” and I saw myself as I appeared in her eyes, in Marina’s eyes, the turd on a white lace table cloth.
It was over, of course. Everything. Allison. Her parents. Their parties. Their friends. I was no more than a family trivia question now, the subject of poolside laughter as the steaks sizzled and the drinkies were poured. What was his name? Allison’s first boyfriend? The putz who said he was an orphan and passed out on the dance floor?
When I turned to look at Allison she did not look away. She gazed deeply into my eyes in fact and slowly shook her head and smiled, that curious and forbearing smile due high school boys and insects, then took a deep breath, stepped squarely in front of me and caught my face with the hard knuckles of her closed right hand.