A Week as Andrea Benstock

by Lawrence Block

  “Are you considering it?”

  “Not for a minute. And I’m sure they knew I wouldn’t.”

  “Then—”

  “God, I wouldn’t want to move to New York! Kramer lives in a house like ours except that he paid about twice as much for it and it takes him over an hour to get to the office in the morning. And Joel pays a good deal more each month to rent a four-room apartment than I pay to own a four-bedroom house. Not to mention that he’s living in a jungle and he has to send his kid to a private school. Would you want to bring up Robin in New York City?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Neither would I, and even without kids I wouldn’t want to live here. It’s just like everyone says, a great place to visit, and that’s as far as it goes.”

  “That’s how I feel.”

  “But the thing is—” he was signaling the waiter again—” the thing is that I never seriously considered the job and I don’t think they expected me to. But what they’re really saying, without saying it, is that they like me and they like the way I operate.”

  “Well, I don’t blame them.”

  “No, there’s a point to this, honey. They like me as a person and as a lawyer and they’ll be anxious to steer their upstate business my way. And they’re well connected, you know. They’re a couple of guys not much older than me who went out on their own and are doing damned well for themselves. Their upstate business comes to a few dollars, and if you get their business you’ll get bits and pieces from other people too.”

  “I don’t understand. Don’t you already get their business?”

  “Ah,” he said. He winked elaborately. “Does Gordon, Weissbart & Gordon get their business? Yes. But do I, Mark Alan Benstock, get their business? No.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh is right.”

  “You mean if you decide to go off on your own—”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Have you been thinking about that again?”

  “Uh-huh.” Her hand lay on the table, and he extended his index finger and traced designs on the back of her hand. “Thinking a lot about it.”

  “For a while, it sounds like.”

  “For a few months.”

  “You’re doing well where you are. And they like you.”

  “Oh, they love me. And I’m doing quite well. And there are too goddamned many little Gordons and Weissbarts in the wings.”

  “You’d go on your own?”

  “I’d go in with a partner.”

  “Jeff Kaiser?”

  “Why Jeff? No, nobody from the office. That wouldn’t make much sense. I’d want someone who would bring in business I wouldn’t get otherwise, somebody who would give the partnership an extra dimension. Not from my office, and not even Jewish, as far as that goes.”

  “You have someone in mind.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do I know him?”

  “You’ve met him a couple of times.” He sipped his drink. “As a matter of fact, he was the one who broached the idea. He wants to be on his own because he’s not getting anywhere in his present connection, and he came up with the suggestion. And it’s funny, because I was not only thinking in the same terms but I was thinking he was the man I’d ask first.”

  “You’re not saying who he is.”

  “Oh, I’ll say sooner or later.”

  “Cass Drozdowski.”

  “You must be psychic. How in the hell—”

  “It just came to me. You think it would work? You know, it just might. The two of you would complement each other in a lot of ways.”

  “With his roots in the Polish community—”

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean in terms of personality. You’re the brilliant Jew and he’s the solid Pole. And at the same time you’re very thorough and painstaking and he’s, what’s the word I want? Mercurial.”

  “You can see it, can’t you?”

  “Yes, I think I can. If you decide you really want to have your own office.”

  “And I think I’m very close to that decision. Closer now than I was ten minutes ago.”

  “I think you probably are. Would I have to become bosom buddies with Ellie Drozdowski? Not that I could possibly compete with her in the bosom department. I don’t mind Cass but she’s a little hard to take.”

  “You two wouldn’t have to see all that much of each other.”

  “I remember that New Year’s party at their place “

  “I was just thinking that.” He lifted his glass to his lips but it was empty. “I think I’ll have one more. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Why should I mind?”

  “And will you have one with me? To drink to the future?”

  “I can hardly refuse that.”

  They had another round of drinks. He paid the check and left a large tip, and when they were outside he turned east instead of west. “No, our hotel’s the other way, darling,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “But—”

  He took her arm and led her down the block to where the carriages were parked. “Always wanted to do this,” he said. “Once around the block, James. Pip pip, old top. Pop, pop, old tip. I’m not a nasty drunk, anyway. You’ll have to grant me that.”

  “You’re a sweet man, drunk or sober or in between.

  I’ve always wanted to do this. How could you possibly have known? And it’s every bit as much fun as I hoped it would be.”

  “It’s been a good day, baby.”

  “It’s been a very special day,” she said.

  Wednesday

  October 16, 1968

  SHE was in the back yard with Robin when the phone rang again. It had been ringing all morning. She said, “Shit,” and went inside to answer it. The conversation which she had was a brief one, and certainly undemanding; she had been having essentially the same conversation over and over. Throughout the city her mother’s friends and Mark’s mother’s friends were checking their calendars, discovering the notation, “Andrea Benstock 30th B’day,” and reaching for the telephone. It was certainly very nice of them but it was beginning to be boring.

  When the conversation ended she broke the connection, then placed the receiver on the table next to the phone. She was halfway to the door before she decided it just wasn’t cricket to leave it off the hook. If people were taking the trouble to call her to wish her well, she could at least take the trouble to answer their calls. And they’d get through sooner or later anyway. They wouldn’t let a busy signal stop them.

  She replaced the receiver and stood there for a moment, glaring at the phone, daring it to ring. It remained silent. She went outside again. Robin looked up from her sandbox and sang out, “Happy Birthday!”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Happy Birthday!”

  “Oh, Happy Birthday yourself, elf.”

  “I’m not a elf.”

  “An elf. Sure you are.”

  “An’ it’s not my birthday. On my birthday I’ll be four.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Four years old.”

  “That’s terrific.”

  “It’s better than thirty.”

  “Go play in your sandbox, kid.”

  “Go play in traffic. That’s what you always say.”

  Well, she’d always wondered what happened when you were thirty years old. And now she knew. You got to play straight man to a three-year-old.

  She drew a breath, put her hands on her hips, let out a sigh. She wanted a cigarette but they were in the house and it seemed inefficient to make a special trip. She could pick them up the next time the phone rang. She crossed the lawn to examine the tree they had planted their first spring in the house. It was a white oak, a sturdy and well-formed young tree, and it had reached the stage where one was able to take it seriously.

  It hadn’t been that long since they’d planted it. A little over three years, and she’d always thought of the growth of trees as being a terribly slow matter
. Three years ago the tree had been small enough to fit in the back of their station wagon. Mark had picked it out at the nursery and brought it home, and she remembered how he had dug a huge hole to accommodate the sizable root ball, cursing when the spade glanced off stones in the soil, panting with exertion when the hole was finally dug. Then the job of wrestling the tree over to the hole and propping it in place, and filling in the hole, and soaking the earth, and then they’d stood together with his arm around her waist and admired his handiwork.

  “Some day,” he’d said, “we’ll sit in the shade. Try to make yourself believe it.”

  “It does take some imagination.”

  “Hell of a thing, isn’t it? I came within a few inches of a hernia lifting the son of a bitch, and now that it’s in the ground it looks like a splinter. Maybe I should have sprung for a few more bucks and bought an older tree. And let them plant it.”

  “It’s more exciting this way.”

  “Exciting?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Fulfilling, gratifying, you know what I mean.”

  “Uh-huh. You know, there really is something about planting a tree. There was a song that was popular when I was in high school, something to the effect that a man has to accomplish three things in the course of his life.”

  “Plant a tree and what else?”

  “Take a wife and father a child.”

  “Well, you’re three for three, tiger.”

  “It’s a funny feeling,” he said, “when you think of it that way.”

  And it was a funny feeling now, looking at the tree and wondering how it had grown so without her really having noticed the growth. She looked from the tree to her daughter and that, too, gave her a funny feeling.

  The tree had been in bud when they’d planted it. Tight buds that showed green only on close examination. “It’s quite an act of faith planting it,” she’d said at the time. “For all we know we’re digging a hole and planting a dead stick in it.”

  But the buds had opened into yellow-green leaves within weeks of planting. And now the leaves were beginning to turn, going shades of rust and bronze.

  And today she was thirty years old.

  Perhaps a week ago she had found herself standing mesmerized at the bathroom sink, drowning in her reflection in the mirror. She came abruptly out of the state as if from a dream, unable to say how long she had been standing there or what if anything had been going through her mind. And then she’d blinked rapidly at herself, and then leaned forward to stare searchingly into her own eyes.

  Looking for what?

  On the night when she lost her virginity she had returned to her dormitory to gaze into the mirror. To see if she looked any different. To see if the brief intrusion of a boy’s flesh into her own flesh had left her marked like Cain. It wasn’t until months later that she happened to learn that such post-defloration scrutiny was a positive cliché.

  “Christ,” she’d said. “I did that.”

  “Well, of course. Everybody does.”

  “But I thought I invented it, for God’s sake. And it turns out to be a cliché.”

  “That’s how things get to be clichés, Andrea Beth. By everybody doing them.”

  “Still.”

  And what had she been looking for now?

  Signs of age? She supposed they were beginning to appear. Life gradually got around to drawing lines on your face and there wasn’t a hell of a lot you could do about it. Some people seemed to accelerate the process. Eileen Fradin, living on diet pills since the birth of her second child, had managed to lose her baby face along with her baby fat, and without makeup the dark hemispheres beneath her eyes were ghastly. Andrea had never seen any similarly dramatic evidence of aging in her own face.

  Oh, there were lines. The horizontal folds in her forehead that came when she raised her eyebrows no longer vanished when she lowered them. Evidently she had raised her brows once too often. “Your face should freeze like that,” her mother had used to say when Andrea would make a funny face of some sort. And in a sense people’s faces did freeze as, over the years, lines appeared to mark off one’s characteristic expressions.

  A man is ultimately responsible for his own face.

  She had heard that recently, but where? She leaned against the sink and remembered. Of course, sitting in front of a television set in Cheektowaga, she and Mark and Ellie and Cass Drozdowski, watching the Democrats in Chicago. There was a shot of Humphrey in his hotel room and Cass roared and slammed his drink down on the table beside him.

  “Look at that face! Four years playing pratboy to the big Texas sheriff and it all shows. I swear to God it’s the truth. After the age of forty a man’s face is his own responsibility.”

  She had not understood the remark when he’d made it, but now, studying her own face, she began to understand why it was true. The face you began life with was largely a matter of genetics. You could be fortunate or unfortunate by being given a face that would stop either traffic or a clock, but it was almost entirely a matter of fortune. Your face, when you were young, might be a good reflection of the person you happened to be. Or it might be quite the reverse.

  But with the passage of time the expressions you fastened upon your face and the emotions you locked behind it became fixed in place. People who always drew their faces together wound up with pinched little faces. People never disturbed by thought wound up with faces like blank sheets of paper. It took a while, but ultimately you wound up looking like the person you had learned to be.

  She couldn’t read much in her own reflection. The evident changes—the lines on her forehead, the touch of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes—said little to her beyond reporting her age. And she didn’t mind looking her age, not really, any more than she minded being her age. At least she didn’t think she did.

  And yet her mirror image seemed to be trying to tell her something, and sometimes it seemed as though it should be important to know what it was. Like right now.

  When the telephone rang again she went into the kitchen and answered it. She chatted briefly and automatically with an aunt of Mark’s. Then she got her cigarettes, lit one, and called Mark at his office.

  “Nothing special,” she told him. “Just that my phone’s been ringing all day so I decided to turn the tables.”

  “Have a lot of people called?”

  “Oh, all the usuals. Liz and Dick Burton, Grace and the Prince, Jackie and the Greek. All our crowd.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Fat chance a girl’d have to lie about her age in this town. These clowns mark their calendars years in advance. Somewhere here in Buffalo there’s a woman who wrote down ’January 6, 1995—Robin Benstock’s 30th Birthday.’ I mean they really plan ahead around here.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Well, that’s nothing new.”

  “It certainly isn’t. Listen, being thirty’s not so bad. There are worse things.”

  “Sure. Like being thirty-one, and thirty-two, and—”

  “Idiot. I spoke to your dad. We’re meeting them at the Club for dinner.”

  “Yes, I spoke to my mother.”

  “I moved it from seven-thirty to eight so that we could stop and see my folks first. They wanted us to come by for a drink, and of course they’ve got something for you.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “What’s that? You were mumbling.”

  “Nothing, just thinking out loud.”

  They went on talking, sketching in the details of the evening, establishing that the baby-sitter had been booked. Then he said, “Just a minute, somebody wants to talk to you,” and he put Casimir Drozdowski on the line.

  He said, “Well, hello there. Rumor has it that it’s your birthday.”

  “How did you ever hear that?”

  “Listen, I read the papers. I listen to Rona Barrett. I keep on top of things.”

  “I’ll just bet you do.”

  “Have a sensational birthday, huh, Andrea? And don’t get to
o drunk tonight.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Drunk, but not too drunk.”

  “Okay. Cass?”

  “Hmmmm?”

  “Something you said a few weeks ago. A few months, actually. About a man being ultimately responsible for his own face?”

  He laughed. “That’s after forty, honey.”

  “I know,—”

  “You got ten years before you have to worry.”

  “No, what I wondered is was that your line or did you get it from somewhere?”

  “It was my line.”

  “Oh.”

  “Except Shaw wrote it down before I had the chance, the son of a bitch.”

  “George Bernard Shaw?”

  “Uh-huh, but don’t ask me where he wrote it or the exact wording because I couldn’t tell you. But have a wonderful birthday, and here’s another UN member who wants to talk to you, the honorable ambassador from Sicily.”

  “Andrea? Happy birthday, kid.”

  “Thanks, Eddie.”

  “The whole family wishes you a happy birthday,” Eddie Santora said. “The Godfather, the consigliere, everybody. They said to tell you that if-a you don’t-a have a Happy Birthday, they’s-a gonna slappa you face.”

  “What I want to know is how you three lunatics ever get any work done.”

  “We can’t miss. The UN always beats everybody.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “A Jew to be sneaky, a wop to be crooked, and a polack for brute force. Who’s gonna stand in our way?” His voice dropped. “Listen, Andrea, I figure you’re thirty now, that means you’re old enough to play with the big kids, right?”

  “If you say so, Eddie.”

  “So what I mean is you’re old enough to mess around a little, right? You and me, kid, we’re a natural combination.”

  “Well, I know that, Eddie, but would Terri see it that way?”

  “Listen, kid, I won’t tell if you don’t. Hang on, your old man wants to talk to you.”

  Mark came back on the line. “All three of you are crazy,” she told him. “It’s good you found each other. I’ll see you around six, six-thirty?”

  “Around six. I’m glad you called, honey.”