She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me

by Herbert Gold

  “Begone,” he commanded me; he should have commanded Priscilla, since she was the one who had picked him out of the crowd, but because he wasn’t talking to womenfolks this week, I would have to do. I introduced myself cautiously—his middle name might also be Attila or Jack the Ripper—but he turned out to be a part-time sweetie.

  His name used to be Jerry. Depositions were not his bag anymore. Besides, the tithe from the ad agency had all been spent in his unique combo of good and evil works. His mission on earth and in San Francisco required new sources of income. Expenses—grade A tunafish for the puppy and kittens was only the beginning—seemed to be the result of having an optional added spare middle name: St. Francis. This guy in the red dress kept a lot of arrows in his quiver.

  I gave him my business card. He put on his glasses to examine it. Office Depot, nothing fancy. “Come to my pagoda,” said Mr. Satan. “I think you’ll find it dissolute but attractive. Lava lamps, I’ve got your basic Esalen pillow situation, I’ve got ample closets…”

  “Jerry, you’re wanted.”

  “And I want you, Mr. Kasdan. This card represents you correctly? Have you investigated the Path?”

  “Jerry, if you want to settle this matter amicably, it can be handled. Otherwise, you know Sergeant Alfonso, he can cut a warrant and he’s no farther than a phone call away.”

  “I know Alfonso, love that schwartzer, for even the Nubian shall find the Path. Doesn’t a warrant need a judge?”

  “Jerry, come off it. I’ll give you a day to find a good home for the lava lamps and the pillows, but you may have to send the pets to the pound.”

  “Eeek, sir,” he said. From a distance he had dramatic eyes, those of a silent film siren, darkened and intensified with soot; up close, as the mascara peeled off in the heat, they were bright little mouse eyes, darting here and there under the cosmetic burden he put on them. They wished Priscilla had never brought endarkenment unto this day. “I may have to pronounce a Malediction and summon the powers of Night. You wouldn’t like that.”

  “I may have to summon the powers of the police. If I ask Alfonso to pick you up—”

  “Eeek! Interstate warrant on what they’re trying to nail me won’t hold up, Mr. Kasdan. It was petty cash. It was discretionary funds at the art director’s disposal.”

  “Hey Jerry, I’m not your lawyer. That’s why I say go back and settle.”

  “Eeek! Sanctuary!” He held his fingers up to my face in the shape of a secular, authority-defying cross. The cape flopped. The puppy started yipping. The cat withdrew, yellow eyes incommunicado. “I’ll ask for sanctuary down at Anton LeVey’s Temple of Holy Satan Mark II. They got goats, they got chickens, they got a direct line to the ACLU, buster.”

  “Ah, Jerry, no need to get abusive. Call off your terrier, okay? Let’s discuss this like gentlemen.”

  But Jesus Christ Satan doesn’t have to be a gentleman. We stood there arguing and eeking about legal matters on a windswept corner of Polk Street, surrounded by gray wolves, runaway boys from San Antonio, chicken queens, and, carrying the new plastic shopping bags, your normal middle-class shoppers from Russian Hill, for whom the sixties were just another time when the kids had to be fed, clothed, and sent off to school. I asked Mr. Satan what I could do to persuade him to go back and deal with his problems. He asked me what could persuade me to stay here and let him help me deal with mine. Standoff time at the Polk Corral.

  Ultimately I failed with this one, made the call to Alfonso, and another Savior of the World ended up in Vacaville. The ad agency in New York got zilch. Mr. J. C. Satan’s ultimate line of defense at his hearing was that maybe he belonged in Napa, a resort for the normal insane, but certainly not in Vacaville, which was reserved for the criminally insane. He was productively, creatively mad, an art director and bringer of miracles down from Twin Peaks.

  The judge begged to disagree. Alfonso and I felt a sense of both relief and failure. Priscilla said she learned her lesson and it was the last time she would be party to a crucifixion.

  “Just doin’ my job, ma’am,” I said.

  “Come here then”—crooking her finger—“I’ve got another job for you.”

  Happiness was my lot. Happiness was our lot. Alfonso said, “You guys. Let me take you down to Third Street for some barbecue, that sound okay?” We were so easy with things we could even digest Sam Jordan’s fried fish and ribs with sauce at the Primitive Bar-B-Que, 4004 Third.

  And then there was the Pomona College boy I had to find. He thought he was Antonin Artaud, the French poet and actor who was also Joan of Arc. When he raised his cane, every woman in Paris peed her pants. So I was looking for a fresh-faced kid, blond, about five eight, freckles, carrying some kind of cane or staff and suddenly lifting it cloudways and darting glances at the passing girls, giggling, giggling.

  It seemed that life in San Francisco just then was a carnival, and a festival for Priscilla and Dan. But not everybody was licensed to be happy on this planet earth, even during the Age of Aquarius.

  * * *

  An older man with hair beginning to gray—“gradual blonding,” I called it, “from all the chlorine in the YMCA pool downtown”—I lay alongside my wife and love and wondered if we should just go ahead and have another child. Then, as she moved her butt in a particular way, and grinned and squinted sideways at me, and that flush came over her face, I forgot that lovemaking had anything to do with child-making. Her butt made enough sense all by its lonesome, flying and twitching and rosy pink; she wasn’t afraid of Chocolate George’s slobber or of mine.

  A newscaster on the “all the news, all the goddamn twenty-four-hours” station—much of the news being urgent bulletins about discount appliance sales—gave us unending joy. “Turn on KCBS, spouse, I need some giggle time,” and here was a flash flash flash about a cable car tragedy: “Several people are injured not up to the point of being considered dead.”

  “Now I can rest in what some might call peace,” said Priscilla.

  We wondered if it was correct to laugh about the report of a serious accident. We decided it was funny, we could share the guilt, silliness was an American birthright. “Not up to the point!” cried Priscilla, choking. “Not up to the point of being considered dead!… It’s brutal,” she said, frowning at a thought that troubled her for a millisecond. “People laugh. They can be so awful.”

  “That’s how people are.”

  “It just amounts to awful, doesn’t it?”

  She switched off the radio. We listened to the ticking and creaking of household events. There was marital risk among our family accumulations of objects and histories. We aimed for the love of slow. San Francisco in those years also sent us other offers, but we steered our three-wheeled vehicle, Jeff, Dan, and Priscilla, down the highway into a shady tunnel of domesticity. Remembered the shade of the giant, ancient Muir Woods when there were only the two of us, Priscilla and Dan.

  As a rest from Bob Dylan records, and because we were serious people, now and then we put a classical tape on—maybe it was the Coasters or Chuck Berry. Later Bob Dylan would be a golden oldie, but some of us kept busy remembering those years when we witnessed lots of famous rock bands—It’s a Beautiful Day, Jefferson Airplane, even the Grateful Dead before Pigpen died of drink and the usual high-liver liver breakdown—all in San Francisco at the Fillmore Auditorium, or in Golden Gate Park, or at Chet Helms’s Avalon Ballroom. The late sixties and early seventies were made for ending the war in Vietnam to the rhythms of love, drugs, rock and roll; by that time we were taking Jeff along in a basket as fellow witness. We were happy. Danger, danger.

  Priscilla bought a flashlight to keep under the bed in case an earthquake caused a power outage. We’ve got a child, she said. You can’t tell what might happen, she said. Who can predict the future, she explained.

  Just once in a while she took on extravagant tastes; not too often. She couldn’t decide which granny dress she wanted, so she bought three although she would only wear one. I yelled
a little, she cried, I apologized. Next day she gave the two dresses she didn’t like to the Salvation Army, but I knew enough now not to complain that she could have tried returning them to the shop. Like every marriage, ours moved down the road to normal, rich in daily drivel. I looked at her in her Amish housewife drag and said I felt sad because we didn’t have a horse and wagon. Although it was over, I felt sad because we had had a quarrel. There were times when she felt sad and I didn’t know why. “A little postpartum privacy, please,” she said.

  With our house key I scratched our two sets of initials inside a little heart in the wet cement of a new sidewalk out front. It was a childish thing to do. I wanted our names to be marked together for all time, entwined in cement, and I wanted to come by now and then and peer at them and peek at her and say, “Remember?” and then ask again, imperatively, “Remember?”

  But of course the utilities people are always digging, so one day the old cement was gone and new cement was wet in its place with the whiff of a secret cave. You can’t do a childish thing like that again and again. It’s gone, the single heart with our initials, but it’s not gone.

  In the meantime we were having conversations like (me), “I think I’ll grow a beard,” and (she) “That would be not shaving”; and then (me), “What a keen logical mind, but unless it’s a rough kind of hippie prophet deal, I’ll still have to trim.” So then stuff about electric razors and energy and whether it’s masculine to do so and she’s behind me all the way as I find my path in life … The daily fare of married folks joshing and negotiating at the same time, fending off the married-folks boredom.

  Personally, I didn’t need to fend it off. The flat times were almost relaxing because I knew I was just waiting for the happiness to rise up again so I could legitimately grab her. Marriage means another person’s fart sneaks out from under the covers sometimes in the morning. Marriage means your own fart gets commingled with hers and the blame is shared. I didn’t mind. Our morning farts could fill the sheets like sails, and off they might lift into skies blue above bright-sparkled seas. Carrying us with them like windsurfers, lovesurfers, in the free sulfurs of the empyrean.

  Can’t speak for Priscilla, of course. That’s the inevitable dilemma of two hearts, two farts entwined.

  Sometimes Priscilla had nightmares, which astonished a husband who had watched her ride through the years triumphant in her strength and gaiety. One night I was awakened by moans. She said she had dreamed of a long-legged running bird with a beak like a pelican’s. How big? I asked. Not a giant, as tall as you are, but that beak … Another night I shook her and she went on with those shuddering sobs and didn’t seem to awaken, didn’t want to, even when I murmured in my own sleepiness, said her name. I held her swelling and subsiding in breaths that came like sobs. I kissed her back and shoulder blades, swaddling her from behind. What a lonely tenderness to comfort a sleeping wife, comfort her like a hurt child, comfort my own griefs by sharing hers. I may have been ignorant of her sorrows. I didn’t fully know my own, either. I was happy to lie that way against her back. I brushed my lips across her shoulders, saying, Shh, sleep, sleep. She woke, muttering, “Oh, bad dream,” and I said, “I know, I tried to make you feel safer,” and then she suddenly sat up, demanding: “You proud of that? Is that your job? You’d rather just turn over and snore?”

  “Only snore sometimes if I sleep on my back.”

  But her head was in the pillow, her arms flung around it, sleeping or pretending to sleep.

  Look down from heaven, look here, God of Christians and Jews, observe and judge how hard we try in the department of loving each other forever. Loving forever is a difficult procedure. We only do it the best we can.

  Chapter 9

  For a while I avoided the outdoor terrace of Enrico’s because Karim was always there at lunchtime, wiggling his eyebrows at me so that the antlike dots from recent plucking between the clumps bounced above his nose. By rights, ants shouldn’t be scurrying and bouncing between a man’s clumps and tufts of eyebrows unless he’s in the business of forehead sugar storage.

  “Mr. Kasdan! Mr. Kasdan!” he would call across the tables between us.

  I waved my hand. “Busy,” I said.

  “You’re only reading the paper, Mr. Kasdan.”

  “Got to have it all read by two o’clock, Mr. Abdullah.”

  “Karim, call me Karim.” He got half out of his chair. “We’re old friends by this time, Dan.”

  A friendship built on refusing to hear his offer. He seemed to treat it like a challenge. It was a courtship; he intended to win me over.

  “Karim, why me? You can find people who want to do what you want.”

  He appreciated the question; he just didn’t like having to answer it. “Those people you speak of, my friend, they are rotten already. You are not. Dan Kasdan, a man to trust, that is my motto. All I need is for you to feel what I feel for you.”

  “Should you trust me?”

  Karim sighed. I could see the little nose hairs blowing. “There is one thing I don’t like about you,” he said. “You do ask questions. You don’t believe I have sincere feelings, many desires, I am a person like you, stubborn.” And because words failed him, he touched his chest, the traditional casing for all that trouble of sincerity, feeling, unspoken desires.

  When I told Priscilla about these meetings, she said, “He made an impression. The champagne, that was cute. Brought it himself, not a waiter. What a comedian.”

  “He’s a dealer.”

  “I thought you said he ran a porn theater.”

  I explained about having several enterprises, a conglomerate, girls, porn, maybe fencing, certainly drugs. She listened alertly; she took an interest. I explained about things she already understood; but she didn’t mind. She said, “Not that I want you to do anything really illegal, but isn’t there a legal side to it these days when people start to get rich? Since he’s not stupid?”

  “He’s not stupid. Owns a few cops, Alfonso said is a probable. Provides for that nun, I think she’s his daughter. Definitely thinks ahead.”

  Her eyes glittered. “I wouldn’t mind a Genie for the garage … You could play that Handel piece you like, ‘La Folia,’ and your Dylan records on better speakers…”

  “Corelli, not Handel. Are you putting me on? I don’t get his appeal.”

  “It’s not because I like pretty things, lover.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She looked dreamy, cut the dreaminess with a grin, the way she often did. “But a little extra cash—”

  “Tax free.”

  “—to pick up some, I don’t know, maybe we’d just have caviar in front of the fireplace.”

  “See? Can’t even think of a thing you really want. Money’s not your thing.”

  She stopped teasing and stared straight into me. “We’ve got a kid. School’s coming up. Nest might be my thing, Dan.”

  For a moment I heard her saying “next” and felt terror and then, as an after-echo, I heard her real voice, nest, nest. Pray God “next” was not her thing.

  She was amused watching the tracks of listening, not hearing, the twitches of distress as they crossed my face. She didn’t need to know what I was thinking. She took a stab at understanding, even consoling me, in her teasing, stubborn way. “Not that he isn’t pretty, got his own style—all that linen, jewelry, the notion store he carries around his neck … Brings some fun with him, doesn’t he, lover? If a person is susceptible?” She stopped, she meditated on it, she reached to pat my hand. “Not that I’m susceptible that way, dear. To Karim Abdullah.”

  But she did take him seriously. Even as a nonfanatic shopper, Priscilla, like most people, liked a man who could give her something she wanted or thought she wanted. Like everyone else, she was a person in want—and so was I. In this case I wanted no part of Karim and she was open to thinking about what part of Karim might be helpful to her.

  “This is America, you’re a new daddy, may I make a suggestion? Think ah
ead. That’s the schedule. And I have to say he’s kind of cute, blowing and dodging and that champagne idea he got from the movies, and his eyebrows going at us a mile a minute—”

  “We don’t need money that bad.”

  “Of course. Since we’re rich. Since our son is rich. Since this new daddy is still willing to live day to day.”

  “I’ve liked the days so far.”

  “What would it hurt to hear his story?”

  There were things I didn’t want to know. I didn’t think Karim was wired, I didn’t know what his most bad connections were, but I believed it was better not to know and to stick to my low-tech investigations and retrievals; lost kids, deadbeat daddies, missing data. I liked what worked for me.

  Priscilla was asking: “… and why not? It’s a sign of respect, it’s the game patriots play in America.” She was talking about money. “We could use some more, husband.”

  * * *

  The waiter at Enrico’s, Chad, made a special lunch for Karim when he went on one of his diets. He chopped fresh cherries over bananas. He dug out the pits and chopped the little cherry bits over bananas with cream. The cream, Karim explained, holding my jacket, was because when a man makes sacrifices like this at lunch, he deserves a little pleasure as consolation.

  “Tell me what’s so bad about a regular check, my friend. For a little collection now and then, just picking up the funds.”

  “Thank you.” I said it to mean I didn’t need collections, transfers, transport over state or federal borders—no.

  “You have a problem with me? If I was Kevin, not Karim? Or Sammy?”