Three Balconies

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  “Maybe so,” said Baum, “but where’s the soup?”

  Mercifully, Wiener hadn’t been heard from for some time. It was as if he was unwilling to take advantage of the plodding and unproductive Baum. Then, treacherously, Wiener exploded on the literary world with a l000-page Holocaust novel. It was told from the point of view of a wily Jewish tailor who had survived for five years in the center of wartime Berlin, all the while making slacks for the Nazis. Before this publication, Wiener and Baum, as if by tacit agreement, had avoided the Ultimate Subject. Both Jews, though not practicing, they had fallen in with Eli Weisel’s view that the magnitude of the Holocaust demanded literary silence. Baum felt, and assumed Wiener agreed, that the genocide existed in another dimension. The very mention of it, like God’s name, was a crime. To approach it with cheap art – or even decent art – was to spit on it. In violation of this silent compact, Wiener had plunged ahead all the same and produced his thunderbolt. The effect was to electrify the literary world . . . Suddenly, there wasn’t a newspaper or magazine, popular or otherwise, that didn’t feature a Weiner interview, a lengthy critique not only of his current work but of his entire oeuvre. The man was in Baum’s face from dawn to dusk. His books sold by the truckload. Television might as well have been called All Wiener All the Time. No sooner had the Wiener craze died down than a revisionist attack took hold. Its substance was that Wiener had been overrated. Heavy-handedly, a tabloid cried out: Wiener’s Back, But Where’s the Schnitzel? The attacks gave solace to Baum, but only temporarily. They kept the flame alive. New and passionate defenders of Wiener found their voices. Baum had acknowledged for some time that Wiener had outdistanced him by a considerable margin. But at least Baum could make out his silhouette on the horizon. Now, he no longer saw his nemesis, only a disappearing puff of greatness.

  The effect of the Wiener phenomenon on Baum was literary paralysis. Obviously, Wiener’s triumph was not directed at Baum specifically, but it might as well have been. Now and then, a critic would mention Baum’s name in connection with the Sixties. Inevitably – and sickeningly – the writer would point out that at one time, Baum had been mentioned “in the same breath” as Albert Wiener.

  Baum tried to go back to his early fables, but there was no passion in his efforts. I.B. Singer, the Nobelist, had written: “Just because a man has written ten good novels, it doesn’t mean the next one won’t be trash.”

  Baum found strength in this observation. But where were his ten good ones?

  In an hour-length television interview, Wiener was seen in a spare and gloomy apartment with a rowing machine. For the most part, he lived alone and continued to date fading actresses. What kind of life was that? Baum told himself that at least he experienced the joys of family. But in truth, Magda Baum had become fat and indolent. One daughter was a survivalist in the state of Washington. Another drew listless watercolors in Trondheim. The twins lived at home in a state of romantic confusion, dating half the young men of Cologne.

  Was it possible that Wiener was better off with his fading actresses and his rowing machine?

  Despairingly, Baum abandoned his literary efforts and found a job at a community college as a teacher of creative writing.

  “If I can reach only one or two young minds,” he heard himself say, self-importantly, in the faculty lunch room.... “If I can only pass on what I know. . . .”

  But what did he know? Envy of another writer? One that he had underestimated? Is this what he wanted to pass on to young minds?

  One morning, Baum opened a newspaper and read that Wiener had suffered (“been felled by”) a stroke. To his everlasting shame and humiliation, Baum took heart in the news. Still, he felt it only right to extend his sympathies. After all, this was a fellow craftsman. He called an agent in Vienna who had once represented Wiener – and Baum as well.

  “I heard about Wiener,” he said. “Tragic.”

  “It’s not so tragic,” the agent said. “If you or I had a stroke, God forbid, it would be one thing. But he has entire medical teams, the finest in Europe, attending to him. Round-the-clock nurses are at his disposal. He’ll survive beautifully.... And by the way, what have you been doing?.”

  “I keep busy,” said Baum, vaguely.

  “You were as good as Wiener. Yet look what he’s achieved. And you. . . .”

  Here he sighed hopelessly.

  Baum longed to fire back. Where are the Wiener movies? The short fiction? And where is his family? Where is his life?

  But the questions lacked force. He choked back his words.

  After three months of recuperative silence, Wiener returned to the literary wars, as if the stroke had given him added strength.... In the months and years that followed he was more productive than ever. First came a slyly crafted novella about adultery. (When did he have time to write it? Had he tossed it off in intensive care?) This was followed by an announcement that a new play by Wiener on Life, Death and the Universe (Baum’s themes?) was to be produced as part of the Theatretreffen Berlin Festival. The play was thrown immediately into production. Baum waited tensely for the reviews, which were tepid. “The Great Man Stumbles . . .” said one. No sooner had Baum taken a grateful breath then it was announced that Albert Wiener’s play would be mounted in a grand production in Petersburg.

  “Here we will do it properly,” said the Russian impresario.

  En route to attend rehearsals, Wiener announced to the press that he had signed a contract with the Pflaume/Kunstler Presse to do the first revisionist biography of Benjamin Disraeli. This was yet another venture that Baum had thought wistfully of tackling. Wiener had already completed four hundred pages. The rest was in meticulously organized notes.

  Each mention of Wiener’s name or one of his projects was like a spear lodged in Baum’s side. Only on those rare days when his rival was absent from the news was Baum able to draw a clean breath. In mid-semester, he gave up his teaching job. “I’m not worthy of it,” he told the headmaster, and tossed his classroom keys on the man’s desk.

  The following day Baum experienced a coup d’age. Virtually overnight, he became short of breath and developed roving stomach pains. His knees swelled to twice their size. A doctor reported that he had lost an inch and a half in height. He walked with two canes and was easily jostled in crowds.

  Baum attributed this sudden decline to a single item of gossip in Bunte Illustrierte. Wiener was reported to be dating Lotte Frietag, a blonde and exquisite nineteen-year-old who was a rising star of the German cinema. There was a grainy photograph of the couple in matching bikinis, “frolicking” on the beach in St. Tropez. Though Wiener had a modest paunch, he looked surprisingly well-toned. He had, of course, enjoyed a glittering career. For him to possess the ravishing Frietag as well was unconscionable. Baum imagined himself saying to his rival: “Wiener, you go too far.”

  Baum followed his wife’s advice; the couple moved to a small village outside of Schwernitz, where he would no longer be caught up in the turmoil of city life. The twins rented an apartment in Berlin, sponsored by the dwindling residuals of Baum’s Italian film career.

  “You lived a wild life,” said one. “Why shouldn’t we?”

  In the years that followed, Wiener continued to produce books at an infuriating pace. Even a wild novelistic foray into science fiction was bought by the films.

  “What I have in mind,” said the director who had been assigned to Wiener’s project, “is a grand trilogy that will be faithful to the master.”

  A single heartening note – from Baum’s point of view – was that Wiener and the exquisite Lotte Frietag had agreed to separate and to remain good friends. But this, too, was taken away.

  “I finally realized” she told a tabloid interviewer “that it was only the sex that kept us bound together. The man was voracious. I could no longer keep pace.”

  For his part, the white-haired Baum followed the same routine each day: he rose early, spent as much time as possible with his breakfast and the newspapers, th
en took a nap. When he awakened, he walked – or rather trudged – up a little hill to a shed he referred to as his “office.” There, he reviewed notes for works that he had set aside. Why push on with them when he could never catch sight of Wiener, much less draw abreast of him. It crossed his mind that a single small classic might do the trick – but Candide had already been written. After making a feeble and fruitless pass at a new venture, he reread the fables he had written as a young man. Then he called it a day.

  And then one morning, as he prepared a tasteless but healthful breakfast of oatmeal and berries, he glanced at the newspaper. A banner headline announced the death of the great novelist Albert P. Weiner. The man who, perhaps unknowingly, had caused Baum such enormous grief, had succumbed to pancreatic failure at the University Hospital of Innsbruck. The obituary was lengthy. It seemed to Baum that it went on forever. At one point, the author threw in a bitter personal note.

  “One of the great literary crimes of the century is that Albert P. Wiener – obviously for political reasons – was denied the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

  Baum wondered about his own obituary. How much space would be allotted to him? Was there any assurance that he would receive more than a brief mention? And would those damnable words – he’d once been “mentioned in the same breath as Wiener” – be repeated?

  A small funeral was scheduled for friends and family, to be followed, weeks later, by a large memorial service for the general public. It seemed unlikely that Baum would be asked to attend the funeral. He made a vague plan to show up at the memorial service and scribbled down some notes, in case he was asked to speak.

  “An unlikely giant has left us,” he would begin.

  But why ‘unlikely?’

  Baum’s eighty-ninth birthday was a week away. After reading the Wiener obituary, he finished his breakfast and took what had now become a long and arduous trek to the shed. Once there, he started an excellent woodfire. In past years, with nothing better to do, he had become an expert on kindling. With some effort, he took his old Remington portable typewriter down from the top shelf of a closet. His daughters had ridiculed him for not switching to a computer, but for many years, he’d felt he had no use for either machine. Sitting at his desk, he blew on his twisted fingers to try to get some blood flowing. His back ached and he could feel his breakfast, undigested, in what felt like a package beneath his ribs. Simple breathing was a hardship. Only one eye functioned properly. But Wiener was gone. Now he could focus. Now he could begin.

  A Pebble In His Shoe

  THE HOTEL, in the south of France, was Egyptian in motif and baffling in its design, as if the architect had proceeded with his first draft and been wildly off target. Corridors that seemed intriguing suddenly turned dark and came to an abrupt ending. The bar was out on a weird limb. Only with luck could Jack find his room without assistance. At first, he took on some of the responsibility for his confusion, assuming that the hotel was probably brilliant in its conception and it was his fault for not getting the hang of it. He then learned that a group of Lebanese had lost millions on its wild and purposeless construction and had finally thrown up their hands and sold it back to the French at enormous loss. The new owners, offering immaculate service, caviar and fresh croissants, were inching their way toward a profit.

  He had come to France for some talks with a film actor he admired named Marty Hatcher. Brilliant in his career in England, Hatcher had performed adequately in American films and had gotten rich. He continued to be brilliant in flashes, and it was the flashes that Jack remembered – a lopsided smile, a ridiculous walk, the perfect mispronunciation of a familiar word. Which was not why Jack made the trip. A French producer had paid for it; considerable sums would come Jack’s way if the proposed film got off the ground.

  A nice bonus was that he liked Hatcher, although their first meeting had begun ominously. Much like the design of Jack’s hotel, the notion he proposed to Hatcher had been wildly off target. Jack saw himself as having made a wasted trip and fell into general despair. In this situation, another star might have been cruel and let him flounder. But Hatcher had gently eased him onto safe and comfortable ground. In essence, what they would do was keep the outlines of Jack’s idea and drop the politics (an irritant to the non-political Hatcher). And they would, of course, hold on to the fun. They had been dining at a four-star restaurant with Hatcher’s fourth wife, a lovely woman named Hillary who had to be some three decades or more younger than the sixtyish film star. It was only when Hatcher had pushed aside the crisis that Jack felt able to take his first deep, satisfied breath. The days that followed were cozy and peaceful – cool, off-season nights, light work, ripe local wines, the three of them taking trips to inspect the seaside house that Hatcher was having built in a nearby village. Portuguese construction men with fat hands lovingly shaped the new beams.

  All of this pleasure in spite of the fact that their group was off-balance. Jack was alone. They had each other. Hatcher’s wife had a perfect face and wide, astonished eyes. It was as if amazing stories were continually being whispered in her ear. Hillary drove them about in a Ferrari at hair-raising speeds. Jack assumed she was a good driver, although her success depended upon everyone else, pedestrians and other drivers, playing their parts to perfection. She had done a few small roles in films, her specialty being young girls bewildered by first love. But she did not have the usual starlet background. Her father had been a naturalist of some prominence and her mother, a novelist, had once been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

  There was an instant connection between Hillary and Jack, but he chose, if not to ignore it, to finesse it. At the end of the evening, when they were lightly and happily drunk on wine, the three of them would stand and hug one another, a three-way embrace. Then Jack would return to his hotel to think about Hatcher and wonder about Hillary, though not to covet her. He was alone, but he did not feel in the least bit lonely. As long as the visit did not go on and on.

  While their new house was being built, Hatcher and his wife had rented a villa some five hundred yards from Jack’s puzzle of a hotel. The actor, who had suffered a stroke, liked to sleep late and to begin work at noon. Since Jack rose early, at least in foreign countries, that left him with the morning to kill. He took fresh walks through a nearby forest area, trying to ignore the giant patrolling dogs of a breed he had never encountered, then fingered merchandise in the port area; after breakfast, he sat out on the wharf, putting his face up to the sun. Out of the corner of his eyes, he watched fishermen making operatically hostile gestures at one another – any one of which would have caused instant death in the city in which Jack had lived. But these raucous combatants were friends and generally walked off arm in arm. Promptly at noon, Jack would appear at Hatcher’s villa, generally to find that the actor had not arisen. Hillary would flash by in a robe, legs exposed, apologetically running her hands through ringlets of golden hair. Hatcher would appear soon after, also in a robe, dazed, flushed, also apologetic, and begin to imitate Frenchmen for Jack, as an offering for his being late. That was the extent of their work, Hatcher doing imitations of eccentrics he wanted to work into the movie – spinsters, mad Englishmen, adenoidal Frenchmen, doddering old white colonials. He would do them into a German-made tape recorder, one of several dozen he had placed around the house, the idea being that Jack would take the cassettes back to the States, to be referred to, while he did the work. Hatcher would simply break into these imitations, taking no time at all to prepare or to get into character. This was a phenomenon to Jack, more so than the brilliance of the imitations. Often, he wondered if Hatcher had any real character of his own, other than to be sweet and befuddled.

  One day, at noon, Jack let himself into the villa and sensed an unusual stillness in the air. Since the work was casual, you could not say that he and Hatcher were at any critical juncture in the project. They had a strong middle section, so it did not seem terribly important that they did not have a precise beginning and lacked a payoff. The
y would get it. After half an hour or so during which neither Hatcher nor Hillary tumbled out in a robe, Jack, somewhat shy about doing so, shouted out: “Anyone home?”

  Hillary came out to greet him, shaken, as if someone had told her a fairy tale with a horrible ending.

  “Is anything wrong?” Jack asked, idiotically, since it was plain that something was.

  “Marty’s had a terrible row with Ian St. Clair,” said Hillary, barely able to get out the word. Jack recognized the name Ian St. Clair as that of a young financial wizard who had saved troubled rock groups from insolvency and now served as Hatcher’s representative.

  Hatcher soon appeared, the color gone from his face, his dressing gown dipping low and revealing what might have been the start of a woman’s breasts. In the ensuing hour, calls and cables went back and forth to London. In bits and pieces, Jack learned that Hatcher had balked at proceeding with several of St. Clair’s recommended projects. Somewhere along the line, the financial adviser had suggested that Hillary had been interfering in Hatcher’s life. St. Clair had actually gotten her on the phone and berated her.

  “I believe he called you a cunt, didn’t he, darling?” said Hatcher mildly, after the last of the calls.

  “How can he say that?” Hillary had responded, her lips trembling.

  She turned to Jack, distraught, and said, “I’ve been modest in my suggestions – and everything I’ve done has been to shore up my husband.”

  “There, there,” said Hatcher, covering his wife’s hands with his own. “We’ll get it straightened out, don’t you worry. Ian doesn’t know diddly about creative affairs.”

  Jack listened to all of this and found it incomprehensible that a financial adviser would berate a client’s wife.