by Sidney Hart
2.
While Elvis Presley’s popularity continued to grow that summer with each new song he recorded, Sarah and I remained true to the more conventional romantic music of the time like film scores, and songs with Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis Junior. Radio stations were playing Tennessee Ernie Ford, Johnny Cash, The Platters and, of course Elvis, as much if not more than they played “Moonglow,” “Around the World in Eighty Days,” “The Poor People of Paris,” “Lisbon Antigua” and “Que Sera Sera.” We listened to them all unaware of the change that was about to erupt through the calm surface of the mid-1950’s.
The political conventions of August 1956 would be a reprise of 1952 with Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower once again facing off, the only change being that the Democratic vice-presidential nominee would be Estes Kefauver in place of John Sparkman. The controversial Republican veep would survive efforts to dump him, go on in later years to lose one and then win two presidential elections, and ultimately be the first sitting president to resign his office in the midst of scandal; Richard Milhaus Nixon of course. But a more immediate scandal was brewing at Braverman’s that summer.
“Can you keep a secret?” Sarah asked as we walked down to the old shed at the lake. We had been seeing each other on a regular basis for several weeks. We had developed a pattern of going down to the storage shed, spreading a blanket and making out after our first week together. The one thing I knew with certainty was that I was in love.
“Of course,” I answered, not remarking upon the several other secrets I had yet to confide to her.
“I really shouldn’t be telling you this but, well … I know that you’re not a thief. Heidi told me that someone is robbing people at the hotel, has been all summer long.”
“Yeah, I know, Sammy told us weeks ago. You know I was in the main lobby once and a woman was really giving it to Belle about a missing bracelet, but I never heard anything more about it. Mrs. Braverman took her into the office and that seemed to be the end of it.”
“Not at all. Heidi says the Bravermans ended up giving her a free vacation just to keep her from making another scene, but the bracelet was never found. And they don’t think it was a chambermaid who took it.”
“Who do they think did?”
“This is very secret, you have to promise me …”
“I promised already, didn’t I?” I was hurt that she challenged my sincerity: it was my long suit.
“Well, they believe that it might be Harlan.”
“Jesus Christ! Not them too. Is this about somebody stealing jewelry or about him stealing their precious jewel Heidi?” I reached for her hand but she pulled it away.
“This is why I was reluctant to tell you. Harlan is perfect in your eyes. Don’t you ever get the sense that he’s just too perfect, too charming, too … too nice?”
“Oh, those are really deadly characteristics aren’t they? Of course, who would trust a person who is charming and too nice, what a fool I’ve been.”
“I’m not saying it right,” she said, shaking her head, “it’s not that he’s too nice, it’s that there’s something just a little unbelievable in the niceness—I mean have you ever seen him get angry or upset?”
“Yes!” We had reached the waterfront but our quarrel had made me feel remote from her and our mood was less than amorous.
“I’m sorry I shouldn’t have said anything, Mel. Wait, there’s another example of what’s wrong with him, didn’t he tell you to call yourself Jack? Didn’t that strike you as strange?” I’d felt odd when Harlan renamed me but I’d grown used to the change with time and I really had liked being called Jack.
“I hate the name Melvin, I wanted to change it. He didn’t change my name I did.”
“Yes, but you could have done that anytime and you didn’t, you didn’t until Harlan told you to do it.”
“He didn’t tell me. I asked him. He was just supporting what I intended to do anyway. And if you hadn’t made such a fuss about it I’d still be calling myself Jack.” Hearing the petulance in my voice I curled my lower lip, snuffled, and added, “so there” in the hope that lightening the mood might rescue the evening and allow for more tenderness and sensuality.
“I’m not kidding around Mel, this isn’t a joke. I don’t know, it’s hard to find the words, there’s something that’s just not right, about him. I don’t trust him.”
“Does Heidi trust him? Who knows him better than she does?”
“Oh Mel, she’s in love with him, how else could she feel?”
“So love really is blind?” I said in an acerbic tone.
“I’m afraid so,” she said walking away, “and right now it looks to me like there’s an epidemic of blindness.”
“Come back here,” I said walking briskly after her, “don’t run away from me.” But she continued to walk back towards the hotel. “Sarah please, please stop and talk to me.”
“Talking means listening to the other person too. You get so defensive about Harlan that you start defending him before you’ve even heard the whole story. Doesn’t that tell you something?” There was no question but that she was right. I was wrong.
“I’m sorry. I want you to like him as much as I do, I want the two of you to be friends too. It upsets me when you have negative things to say about him that’s all. It’s like when you’ve read a book or seen a movie that you really like a lot and want a friend to like it just as much as you do. You take that friend to the movie and sit watching him instead of the movie and if he doesn’t laugh at the things you thought were funny, or get excited about the part that excited you, well, you feel like you’ve lost the thing that you had been so excited about and also that you’ve lost a bit of that friendship.” Sarah came up to me and took my hand.
“Let’s take a walk.” She led me back to the lakefront and sat down on the bank. “I know that you want me to like him as much as you do but I can’t. I’ve never told Heidi this,” she said, pursing her lips and looking over the lake, “but I don’t think he’s loyal to her; no, I know he’s not loyal to her.” She closed her eyes and when she opened them again she was looking at me. “One of my kids hurt himself in camp one day and I had to take him back to his mother. I went to the pool because she was the kind of woman who was always sunbathing, but she wasn’t there and no one had seen her that day. I asked the boy where he was staying and he pointed to the main building. At the front desk Belle called up to his room and Mrs. Cohen took a long time to answer. She said she wasn’t feeling well and could I please just send him upstairs. He was still upset and I couldn’t make him go alone so I walked him to his room. When we got there I knocked on the door and Mrs. Cohen opened it only a crack. She was wearing a thin robe, her hair was mussed and her face was all flushed and perspired. ‘You must have the flu’ I said sympathetically, but she just nodded at me. She reached out to David who started to cry and when she spread her arms to embrace him her robe fell open and I saw that she was completely naked. The door had come ajar behind her and I peeked over her shoulder and looked inside. There was a man’s shirt draped over the back of a chair and it was a shirt I had seen Harlan wear, a brown cotton plaid that I’d seen before but only on him.” Sarah looked back at me and then out over the dark waters of the lake. “I knew that Harlan was in that room, I just knew it. When David came hack to camp the next day I asked him how he was feeling. He said that he was fine and that his mommy had made his boo-boo all better with a special medicine that a man had given to her just for him, but that was all he’d say. I didn’t press him. Mel I know it was Harlan in her room, I just know it. I can’t say anything to Heidi but I don’t know what I’d do if we were to be together all four of us.”
“I can see why you’d think it was Harlan but there never was a one of a kind shirt in the history of shirt manufacturing. I mean somebody else could have worn a shirt like that. Ron could have worn Harlan’s shirt. I could have worn Harlan’s shirt.” I was becoming extravagant in my defense of Harlan.
“You mean it was you in Mrs. Cohen ‘s room?”
“I mean that Harlan gets accused of all kinds of things but I trust him anyway. Women flirt, with him and he flirts with them but nothing ever comes of it.”
Sarah frowned and cocking her eyebrow said, “You just can’t believe he’s not the person you wish he’d be.”
“All right. I’ll tell you a secret. I’ll keep your secret if you’ll keep mine.” She nodded. “One night when I was down at the lake I heard a woman call out Harlan’s name.” I told her about rowing the skiff across the lake and seeing Harlan and the woman at the cottage. “That woman turned out to he his mother, not some cheating married woman.”
“You took his word for that I suppose.”
“No, I took her word for that. Harlan’s mother and father rent one of the cabins across the lake. Harlan’s father is sick and he wanted to be near Harlan so they rented one of the cabins. He took me to meet them.” I had to restrain myself from telling her about his father, about judge Crater.
“Well, I don’t know. He’s just so, so slick.” She said the word as though it were some kind of filth. “Another thing I don’t understand. You already have two older brothers why do you need another one?”
“Harlan’s a friend, not a big brother,” I said, feeling stung but not showing it. “Harlan is someone I like and respect someone I might get some sense of direction from.” I weighed explaining to her the real extent of my admiration, the wish to get more than just direction from the person I admired and looked up to; the wish to experience the world as that person, to become that person, not permanently but for a discrete period of time. I had imagined that by concentrating my thoughts and attention upon that person I might consolidate all the forces that comprised my self into a small but dense body of energy and then, like a spark jumping a gap, transubstantiate my self into his self. How better to learn to be like someone you admire than to be that someone you admire, to dwell inside his mind and hear the thoughts as they form; to live inside his skin and experience feelings as they course through his blood and inform his every cell of the will behind his acts. Don’t be alarmed, this was a telekinetic fantasy not a reality. Only a madman would believe that he has temporarily taken up residence inside of someone else’s consciousness. But there were some times I felt so close to making that leap it was almost as though I was about to leave my body. Of course it never occurred; reality is ineluctable. And even then, as I listened to myself considering it, the whole notion sounded so insane to me I dared not tell Sarah. “He doesn’t condescend to me, he doesn’t bait me, he talks to me like he respects my intelligence and like my feelings and opinions matter for something. That’s why when people criticize him I always defend him. He’s been loyal to me and that’s the least that I can do for him.” I finished my explanation just as we reached the vicinity of the dock and shed. Sarah was still rubbing her arms to warm them.
“I’m sorry but I just think that Harlan is not who you think he is. We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one Mel. Boy it’s cold.” She shivered. We moved closer to each other and I put my arms around her to warm her. But with that nearness the beckoning perfumes of her soap and powder released yearnings and desires in me that shrank the visible world to just her face and erased all sound save the windy rush of her breath; her touch as light as the stroke of a feather, her kiss the purest bliss, all of me, every molecule of every cell, in a state of perfect harmony with her every atom. I could have stood there with her for eternity.
“Let’s go inside,” she said, nodding her head towards the shed.
“You sure that you want to?” She smiled a mischievous smile and started walking backwards towards the shed, beckoning me with her curling index finger she curled towards herself again and again. At that moment I was more in love with her than ever and the feeling she loved me was strong and thrilling. It was my first experience with the intense eroticism that flows when lovers reconcile after a quarrel.
After securing the door we embraced and slowly lowered ourselves to the blanket covered chaise longue we kept under the window. Over the weeks our petting had gone from holding and touching to passionate kisses after I gave up cigarettes. There was a night or two of dry humping, as we called it, which involved my rubbing myself against her until I climaxed, but there had been no touching under the clothing, until that night. They say that the smoothest and softest skin is that of a woman’s inner thigh. Sarah’s skin felt like that everywhere on her body; smooth skin, smoother than silk, softer than satin and warm, alive, pliable flesh with its vital and unique texture. The chill that had driven us indoors was gone replaced now by flushed and heated flesh that wept a fine mist of perspiration. I removed my shirt, she her sweater, and our bodies touched very lightly, teasingly, before pressing together tightly. Her soft breasts spread out under the pressure of my embrace and then sprang back into their tear-shaped contours when we parted. My heart was pounding so hard I was breathless from its concussion and my excitement made muscles all over my body jerk out of my control, as though I was receiving tiny electric shocks, but stopping was unthinkable. We rolled apart only long enough to shed the rest of our clothing and then fell back into one another’s arms. When we looked into each other’s faces we’d smile but we never spoke. Rolling onto my back I pulled her on top of me and slipped my erection against the moisture between her legs. I wanted to look at her almost as much as I craved holding onto her, pressing her against me, running my hands over her body, over the slightly moist and warm flesh that rose and swelled into buttocks and thighs and neck and brow. She pressed her thighs together enclosing me and began to rock slowly at first, then more intensely and more eagerly, all the while staring into my eyes until our excitement drove me to release, ejaculating wildly, an ammonia like smell rising from the creamy ejaculum running down our legs. Life is never more complete than at that stunned, satiated moment after climax, one that for all its vigorous force is as insubstantial as a dream; intense, alive with power, and then gone even as you try to sustain its presence and arrest its departure.
“We should quarrel about Harlan more often,” I said, “that was fantastic.”
“Well, it was okay but fantastic? For you more than me.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I was surprised by her reaction, surprised and hurt. She just shrugged.
3.
After that night I began to look at Harlan through different eyes. Sarah had been so certain that it was Harlan with her camper’s mother that I no longer could lull myself with easy assurances that he was simply the honey that drew flies. Would honey want flies in its syrup or did Harlan want his syrup in these honeys was the question. After all, the woman on the tennis court, the woman on the softball field, the women who flirted with him, these all could not have been members of an aggressive tribe of Amazons. And then I remembered the woman at the pool who wanted Harlan to teach her son to dive. Her little boy’s name was David. Half the children in the camp were probably named David, a favorite name for Jewish boys, but Harlan had agreed to teach that one only after a careful appraisal of the mother’s physical assets. The more I thought about it the clearer it became that he must have encouraged these women, given some indication he was interested or available or both. But why should that have mattered so much to me? Wasn’t it the ambition of every healthy young man to bed as many women, scores and scores if possible, before he found that one true love he would take away with him and then live happily ever after? I was certain that it was not envy or jealousy that was propelling my feelings about Harlan’s seductions and liaisons. Only a fool would begrudge a Cary Grant or a Robert Redford his amorous successes and to me Harlan was in possession of that kind of star-like charisma. It was his disloyalty, his betrayal of Heidi that had gotten to me. Sarah was right to mistrust him. That woman on the softball field was not Doris Braverman and there never was a birthday party for Heidi that week.
While this realization discomfited me it did not put me off enough to distance
myself from Harlan and his plot to retrieve his father’s ring. The reservations I’d had on the first hearing had been discarded, my credulity triumphing on Harlan’s behalf. And why not? This whole story, his father the notorious missing judge Crater, a precious, ancient heirloom lost on the grounds of the hotel I had known for years and was now working for, Harlan’s quest to retrieve the ring for his dying father, it was irresistible. It was as though I was living as a character in a great and grand novel, an observer somewhat peripheral to the main plot but always available to witness its unfolding. Who would not be enchanted by such a tale? And who would turn his back and walk away from the chance to participate in and maybe even affect the outcome of the story? It was impossible for me to even consider such a course.
And for all the suspicion about Harlan that Sarah had stirred in me, my nagging doubts about him and his seeming disloyalty, there was still a desire to win his admiration and affection with a grand and unexpected act of discovery. I wanted to find that ring. I could not yet redefine him as a bad person, a calculating and self-serving opportunist, a grifter. That sounded like Ron’s and Abe’s position, a sour grapes position. No, I wouldn’t boast to Sarah about my loyalty but I wouldn’t relinquish it either. At least not then.
4.
Harlan woke me with a gentle tug on my shoulder. Expecting his summons I was prepared to be very quiet and simply nodded to him. My clothes were balled up at the foot of the bed and I took them into the hall with me and dressed in the shower room. The snores of one sleeper, more like the ratcheting of a metal gear than the sawing of a log, disturbed the early morning stillness of the quarters.