Three Balconies

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  But now and then he asked himself: What am I doing? Why am I letting her watch two men try to pound each other into oblivion? He tried to justify this by telling himself – and her – that it was a sport. The best fighters were great athletes, their movements balletic. They rarely got hurt. But he could not think of too many examples to prove his point. Ali himself had had at least five fights too many. No one could claim that he had walked away from the sport uninjured. So there was a part of Collins that felt awful about exposing his daughter to such carnage, especially since many of the televised fights were one-sided. Managers served up bloated, over-the-hill “tomato cans” to fatten up the records of rising stars. At a cocktail party, Collins had once met a psychiatrist, a father and presumably a learned man, who was also a boxing fan and, as a hobby, had actually managed several fighters.

  “How do we justify our interest in this bloody sport?” he’d asked the man. “Two men trying to destroy each other?”

  The man, who seemed not to have a worry in the world, had shrugged and said” “We don’t.”

  His response was of interest to Collins, but it was not terribly helpful.

  Collins had constructed a scenario in which his daughter would always be with him. She would travel with him to China, a dream of his – and she would look after him when he was unable to take care of himself. (He had never considered the unfairness of such an arrangement.) As it happened, Colleen enrolled in a junior college nearby where she met and fell in love with the first boy she had dated seriously. They married, and before they’d graduated, moved to La Jolla so that they could be near the young man’s family. Rather than remain alone in an isolated area, Collins, in his sixties, sold the house and moved back to New York City where he had been born. Though Manhattan offered a feast of activity, Collins took advantage of very little of it. He’d once enjoyed the theatre but the ticket prices seemed annoyingly high, and it became increasingly difficult for him to hear the stage dialogue. So he stopped going to see plays. His few friends died. He kept in touch with his daughter, but neither had much of a phone style. They ended each conversation by saying “I love you.” But the exchanges were brief and strained. Perhaps he felt she had deserted him.

  Though Collins’ life had begun to narrow down, his interest in the fights never wavered. He saw one boxing program at an arena on Staten Island and had been surprised – and frightened – by the unruliness of the crowd. His age no doubt contributed to a feeling of vulnerability. But he recalled the fight nights of his youth as being convivial affairs. Men dressed for such occasions. They greeted each other warmly and exchanged cigars. There were catcalls but they were in a different spirit, jocular, never obscene. To throw refuse into the ring because of a disputed decision was unthinkable. It was a gentleman’s sport. Or such was his recollection.

  Collins was content now to kick back in his recliner and watch the fights at home on a television screen. More programs than ever were available on the cable channels. Once in a while he caught a gem, such as the unheralded bout between the powerful Irishman and the rangy and skillful Jamaican. Halfway along in the brutal ten-round fight match, there was an expectation that the fight would taper off. It was impossible for the fighters to continue at that level. But if anything, the action intensified. As if by silent agreement, the fighters took turns battering each other. The Irish fighter threw body punches with such force it seemed the Jamaican would be cut in two. And then, seemingly at the point of collapse, the slender Jamaican would find enough energy and willpower to fire back with a blizzard of slicing punches to the head that were thrown with speed that was impossible to follow. This was the pattern for ten furious rounds, Collins winced when the Irish fighter threw body blows, and covered up as if to block the scissor-like combinations of the Jamaican. Though the fighters were relatively unknown, the announcers, who were hoarse with excitement, made comparisons to the legendary fights of the past . . . Sadler/Pep . . . Leonard/Hearns . . . the Ali/Frazier fights . . . Zale/Graziano . . . When the bell sounded at the end of the tenth and final round, the referee raised the hands of both exhausted fighters. The fight was declared a draw. The crowd roared its approval.

  There were two other tenants on the second floor of Collins’ brownstone. One was a stout and cheerful nurse in her fifties, the other a retired 70-year-old City Hall worker, who favored checkered suits and wore a fedora at a rakish angle. Three days after the fight, Miss Simms, the nurse, passed Collins’ door and heard the sound of a daytime soap opera on the television. She had not seen him at the corner coffee shop for several days, which was unusual. It was possible he’d gone somewhere and forgotten to turn off the set, but she had never known him to do any traveling. He liked his privacy – she was aware of that – but something prompted her to ring his doorbell to say hello and see how he was getting along. When there was no response, she became uneasy. At the newsstand, she ran into Mr. Adler, the jaunty City hall retiree. After exchanging pleasantries, she expressed her concern to him.

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “I haven’t seen him around either.”

  The two decided to notify Antoine, the bartender at the Greek restaurant, who had a passkey to each of the brownstone apartments. All three mounted the stairs to the second floor. Antoine rang the bell several times, then rapped at the door. When no one came to answer, he used the passkey. The door swung open and there was Collins in his recliner, hunched over in a fighter’s crouch. His nose was flattened, his lips puffed up, his ears battered and misshapen. There were mounds of swollen flesh around his eyes, which had become little slits, giving him a simian look.

  “Oh, my God,” said a horrified Miss Sims.

  “We’d better call 9-1-1,” said Antoine.

  Mr. Adler removed his hat.

  “Poor bastard,” he said. “I hope he gave as good as he got.”

  Three Balconies

  AS IS THE CASE with most men, Harry wanted to be taken seriously and resented the suggestion that he was not a serious man. Yet there may have been some truth to the charge. Because if he were to take a hard look at his life – which is not something he did every twenty minutes – he would have to admit that he had spent most of it chasing women. Or maybe not exactly chasing them, but pursuing them. Something along those lines. Which is not to suggest that he had a sterling record of catching them – or even knew what to do with them when he did – but he certainly did pursue them. Harry was still at it, but what bothered him was that he had done so much of it when he should have been reading Herodotus. He was reading Herodotus now, but if he had been reading Herodotus when he was chasing – or pursuing – women, he could have been finished with Herodotus and moved on to someone like Tacitus. Or Willa Cather. He could have been finished with Willa Cather, too, instead of just starting to read her.

  Harry had once sat on the deck of a film producer’s house in Malibu, exchanging stories about the carefree ’60s and ’70s. With a casual wave, the producer said that he had slept with hundreds of women.

  “And I took no prisoners,” he said, with grim satisfaction. Harry was not in that league. He had taken plenty of prisoners. And he did not want to get into a numbers game with the producer. He knew for a fact that the man had slept with entire platoons of film stars. Or at least he didn’t doubt it. (The producer had a kind of sleazy charm. Harry could see him sleazing film stars into bed.) And Harry was painfully aware that in all his years of traveling to the Coast he had slept with only one film star, who, strictly speaking, wasn’t really a film star at all but a catalog model who had left the business after playing a role in one movie. When Harry last heard from her, she was selling real estate in Sydney, or someplace like that.

  But one thing Harry knew for sure was that he had at least chased – or pursued – women with the best of them.

  Did that make Harry a womanizer? Did they still have womanizers in the ’90s? And wasn’t that someone who preyed on women and got them to sign over real estate holdings?

  If so, that d
idn’t sound much like Harry.

  There were probably one or two women out there who would say that he had ended an affair too abruptly – or had pretended to be interested in them when all he wanted to do was roll around a little – but that would be the extent of his womanizing.

  So if someone insisted that Harry was a womanizer, he would say fine, you got it, but would you please put an asterisk in there somewhere?

  Harry was madly in love with his wife (he never failed to insert “madly” when he told someone how much he loved Julie), but he kept chasing women anyway. Yet never in the fifteen years they had been married had Harry had a full-out affair. (Or “conducted” one. He was fascinated by the image of someone “conducting” an affair.) Harry was scared out of his wits at the very thought of having an affair. The last thing he needed was to lose Julie. He had come close to having an affair on two – maybe two and a half – occasions (over-flirted is the way he saw it) and all of a sudden it was hey-wait-a-minute-this-is-the-big-leagueswhat-do-I-do-now? What he had done was to take himself – physically – out of the country. He had gone off to play blackjack in the Caribbean – Harry’s equivalent of a cold shower. It was fair to say that he had gambled his way out of the two and a half affairs.

  You just didn’t have affairs when you were married to someone like Julie. To actually enter another woman – and then go back and sleep with Julie. A little unthinkable is what it was.

  But that did not stop Harry from charging out of the gate every chance he got to see how he would do out there. On an impulse, Harry had fired a famous agent, in a sense shooting himself in the foot, since the assignments had dried up overnight. (And he could feel the agent’s fine hand in drying them up.) When he tried to hire another (less-famous) agent, the fellow had said: “Harry, I am afraid your name no longer comes up on the radar screen.”

  That fact notwithstanding, he and Julie got by. He did a little of this and a little of that and actually made some money in real estate, which embarrassed him slightly – as if it made him a less serious man. One of the small jobs Harry got offered was to write about hobbies for what he thought of as an “old guy” quarterly. Harry struggled with the assignment for a few weeks until he realized that his only hobby was chasing women. And obviously what the fellows at the “old guy” quarterly had in mind was lacquering or sanding stuff in the garage. Collecting sheriffs’ badges – something like that. So that was the end of the assignment.

  When Harry was younger, he chased women – or went after them, or whatever he did – because they looked and smelled and felt nice and he wanted to go to bed with them. (Not “bed” them. There was a certain type of individual who “bedded” women and Harry was not one of them.) But now Harry enjoyed listening to women and finding out what they did and what was on their minds instead of just waiting for them to finish talking so he could shift into his seduction mode.

  Was it possible he just liked to be with women? One of his favorite things was when he met someone he had at one time thought of as a “pretty young thing,” somebody’s assistant, and have her turn out to be a leading neurophysiologist. Or a feared litigator. It seemed that half the women he ran into were feared litigators. He was now surprised when one of them turned out not to be a feared litigator. And Harry was delighted by this change in the culture. How could he not be? In his lifetime – as a phenomenon – he ranked it up there with the overnight collapse of communism.

  That thought – and the others – occurred to Harry as he sat on the eighteenth-story balcony of a hotel suite in Miami Beach and considered ending his life with a little hop over the four-foot brass railing. Several years before, he had crushed three toes in an ancient garage door – they looked like cartoon toes, he had told friends – and he could not imagine it would be more painful to hit the pavement. Additionally, and in support of his impulse, he had heard that you would lose consciousness while in flight. Of course, no one knew if you woke up for a split second before you landed – and what that would be like. In any case, Julie would be all right. She would have the embarrassing money from Harry’s real estate deals and the royalties that still dribbled in from his Two Big Pictures. And she would have little difficulty finding a new friend. All she had to do was decide she wanted one. Julie kept her weapons concealed, but when she decided to zero in – and Harry had seen her in action – you (i.e. the target) were a dead duck. Megan would get along fine as well. She was an independent thing at thirteen, and she had shocked Harry by announcing that she wanted to go to a boarding school. So how much did she need Harry around?

  If Harry took that little hop over the brass railing – and he was amazed at how easy it would be – he would not have to go around feeling so awful.

  It was the day following Harry’s third night of chasing women and drinking more than he wanted to, and he could not recall a time when he had been shakier. And this was without drugs and cigars. If you had thrown that pair into the mix, he would have been over the railing hours before.

  As was his custom, Harry had flown to Miami a week in advance of his wife and daughter – this time to check on the condo they had bought, which was under construction, and, as always, to see if he could get some work done in a fresh setting. The director of a small theatre in Los Angeles had expressed interest in Harry’s new Siege of Malta play but felt it lacked a romantic component. His suggestion was that Harry thread a Diane Sawyer type through the play – someone covering the siege for some medieval publication, or maybe a broadside – and have her fall in love with one of the Knights Templar; he didn’t care which one. Ostensibly, that is why Harry had flown to Miami a week in advance of his family. If he could pull it off – successfully thread a Diane Sawyer type through the play – he would have a production on Melrose Avenue, right under the noses of the studio executives and agents who said he was off the radar screen. A hit, of course, would put Harry right back on the screen.

  But so far, Harry had not even taken the play out of the Sports Sac, much less begun to thread through a Diane Sawyer type – which is one of the reasons he felt so awful. He had warmed up for the Miami trip at home on Long Island – taken a kind of trial run – at a local bar, and he recalled closing out the evening by telling a mortgage broker that there was “something about her,” a kind of “sly beauty” that other people might not notice but that Harry noticed and found irresistible. Yes, he was a little married – he never lied about such things – but he had to have her. If he was not mistaken – and he hoped he was – he had also told her that as an artist, he did not “play by other people’s rules.” (Obviously, that was the kind of dialogue that had gotten him removed from the radar screen.) So he probably had said that, and all the other things as well, and he had meant them at the time. It was a good thing he hadn’t invited her to fly down to Miami with him, which he was capable of doing at the time. Because that’s all he would have needed – to wind up not playing by other people’s rules with a mortgage broker in Miami Beach. And with his family on their way down.

  But somehow Harry had gotten up the next morning and made it to the airport – and once he had landed and rented the Mitsubishi Galant, he started to revive; when he saw the sign on I-95 that said WELCOME TO MIAMI BEACH and the comforting one nearby – MT. SINAI MEDICAL CENTER – he revived with a vengeance.

  By the time Harry pulled up to the hotel, he was so excited about the weather and how balmy it was and how good he felt that he didn’t even bother to unpack. He took a shower, dressed, slapped on some of the new uni-sex cologne, put a salsa recording on full blast in the Galant (one that had been highly recommended by a hot little trotter behind the Alamo counter) and tore into the beach like a madman.

  Harry’s plan was to work his way up and down the beach, making a few of the night people he knew from the previous year aware that he was back. But as it turned out, he never made it past his first stop. It was a small hotel, a few blocks from the ocean, one that Harry remembered as having a cheerful feeling to it and a little bar h
e thought of as an excellent place to get started. But something had changed since his last visit. It still had the cheerful feeling, but it had caught fire and turned into a madhouse; it was jammed with tanned and pretty and handsomely turned-out women who Harry correctly identified as young Miami Beach professionals. Each wore an outfit that you didn’t just throw on. The outfits took a lot of planning and it was clear that these women took Saturday night seriously. Harry, on the other hand, had forgotten how important it was. In Manhattan, Saturday night was referred to by knowledgeable bar people as “amateur time.”

  The mood was tastefully raucous, and the activity spilled out from the bar into the lobby and out to a packed terrace ringed with lanterns, giving it some kind of enchanted look. Or at least Harry thought so.

  There was no question that Harry was the oldest one in the place, and he was sorry he hadn’t lost a few pounds and picked up a quick suntan before the flight. But what really bothered him was that his hair wasn’t right. In preparation for the trip, he had had it colored or rinsed – rinsed was the term he preferred. But the colorist, or rinser (who had once done Julie’s hair) had made a remark about Julie’s hairstyle that was just a fraction off and Harry, still wearing his apron, had marched out of the salon in the middle of the rinse. (Criticize Harry to your heart’s content, but be careful what you say about Julie.) Whatever the case, there was some question as to whether Harry’s rinse had taken. It may have been a little patchy, and someone with a discerning eye – some young Miami Beach professional who had started out as a beautician – would probably notice that he’d had an incomplete rinse. But Harry’s position was that the subdued lights, especially the enchanted ones on the terrace, would disguise the possible unevenness of his rinse. And if he managed to fake out only half the women in the crowd, that was fine with him.