Rich Boy

by Sharon Pomerantz

  PERHAPS SHE ENJOYED THE bookstore because of the company, even if that company included Bruno. She seemed so thoroughly on her own. No parents called —no letters, not even checks in the mail. He had no idea where her money came from, and after a month he began to worry about it. If his mother had known that he was not living in his room at Tufts—a room that was paid for at the beginning of each year—she’d have been very angry, but there was little chance of her finding out. She’d never call the dorm.

  His board about to end, he needed to begin paying his way at Gwendolyn’s place, yet he had no idea what that entailed—how much, how little, what he might already owe her. He had wanted to discuss money with her before he moved in, but there was that first rush of enthusiasm to be together, and the narcotic effect of sex. They had known without words that they could not be parted, and he hadn’t wanted any impediments; everything was about speed and urgency. But how had she not brought it up? Perhaps she was waiting for him because he was the man. Could that be true? He had no idea. If there was one thing everyone talked about in his family, it was how much something cost and what was a person’s share. Such conversations were never sentimental; no one hesitated or faltered. The shame was in not talking about it. Yet since leaving home most of the people around him talked of money in whispers, or not at all—and he had adopted this feeling, as he’d adopted so many others—so that he could not blurt anything out, kept the adding and subtracting of dollars and cents to himself, as if his head were a giant cash register camouflaged by a human face.

  There were thirty dollars left in his bank account, until he was paid for his campus job, when the thirty dollars would likely be gone, and he’d get another seventy-five dollars. His mother wanted him to go to New York again to drive the cab. But how could he leave Gwendolyn? How could he stay? Insisting that it was for a friend, he had inquired about a newly empty one-bedroom apartment on a lower floor. The doorman had said it was already rented, for five hundred dollars a month. Their place was on a higher floor and was bigger, over 1,000 square feet. Surely it would be closer to six hundred? Even with a decent job, he’d come away with little if he had to pay that much for his half of the rent. How could he offer what he did not have? He would have to, somehow, to preserve his self-respect.

  April came to an end, and the question of funds was on his mind every minute. Outside, it was raining for the fourth day in a row, and Gwendolyn had a cold. He got up early and made both of them strong tea with lemon; her mug rested on the bedside table, his on the windowsill. She’d come home from the bookstore the night before with a big bag of candy—a customer had given it to her—which now rested next to her on the bed. In between sips of tea, she fed him bits of a Mounds bar, her fingers slick with melting chocolate.

  “Not our most nutritious breakfast,” he said, as she put a piece in her own mouth.

  “Didn’t your mum ever tell you?” she replied. “Chocolate is excellent for a cold.”

  He took the candy bag and placed it on the floor. “We need to talk about something.”

  “Something that won’t be improved with candy?! Robbie, give it back!”

  “I’m serious. We need to talk about money.”

  “Oh, let’s not.”

  There was the tone again. Tracey’s tone when anyone argued over the check. “We never talked about it before I moved in, and now we’re coming up on the first of another month and I feel weird,” he replied. “I have to figure out what I’m doing for the summer. You see —”

  “You’re not sure you can stay here and pay,” she said. “But why worry about it, when I have so much to spare? If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be thinking of this, would you?”

  “No, but that’s not the point,” he said, trying to follow her logic. “You exist, and so I do think about it. I don’t want to freeload. And I don’t want to leave you.”

  “It’s not my money, anyway,” she said. “To be honest, Robbie, I’m not even sure how it gets into my account. I wish I didn’t have to take it from them —”

  “You don’t get along with your folks?” he asked. “You never mention them.”

  “They’re all right,” she said, taking another sip of tea. “But we’re better off, the three of us, on different continents. Certainly they would say so. Oh, let’s not spoil everything by talking this way. If my parents knew you were here, they’d probably pay you just to babysit me.”

  “Stop making jokes,” he replied. “I need an answer.”

  “Enough!” she replied, raising her voice to him for the first time. She pushed some hair out of his eyes and kissed him on the forehead. “Shall we go out for some breakfast? I’m getting my appetite back and I want masses of eggs and toast.”

  He read want ads and campus postings, asked everyone he knew about summer work. Returning to his old dorm room, hoping to find Tracey, he saw his old mattress now piled with Tracey’s T-shirts, saw Tracey’s books on his side of the room, as if he had never lived there. Certainly Tracey had to be happy to have the place to himself? He sat down and wrote his old roommate a note asking him if he knew of any work in Boston. “You’ve always been so generous to me, and I’d be grateful,” Robert added, and signed his name. Then he wrote Gwendolyn’s address. He knew that he was displaying bad manners; you didn’t ask favors of someone you hadn’t seen in weeks, and certainly not in a note. But all of that, the code he’d worked so hard to learn, was certainly over. The times were different now. He would try what he’d been taught at home—to ask and not care how people saw it, no, how Tracey saw it.

  Three weeks later, a typed note arrived at Robert’s new address. It said that Tracey would be moving to an apartment for senior year; he wished Robert luck and signed his name. No mention of Robert’s request. All very polite and formal. Robert couldn’t blame him, really, and he threw the note in the trash, wondering if he’d ever see Tracey again.

  He already had his aid package for the following year, which included room and board. He wanted the option to continue working in the kitchen and have the free dinners available before work, or the occasional breakfast when in a hurry, which meant that it was easier for him to go on pretending to live in the dorms. He asked Zinnelli to be his roommate; Zinnelli was happy to cover for his absence and get a single for the price of a double.

  In May he got himself a waiter job at a fancy seafood restaurant in Newton Center in which one of his professors was a silent partner. He and Gwendolyn did not talk again about the rent and when, on June 1, Robert put his half of the rent, a little over three hundred dollars, on a table in the living room, it sat there for so long that eventually he was forced to take it back and give up, living rent free in this paradise on Commonwealth Avenue. Even with the guilt he felt about the money, even with a fear of the draft hanging over him, he knew that he had finally grabbed hold of something—something as elusive as air itself—that he wouldn’t let go of, not even for a summer. He told Stacia that he was house-sitting all summer in exchange for rent. He could do as he pleased, she wrote back, so long as he didn’t ask her for money during his senior year. She could not complain about his grades, which had gotten very good that semester—he had given up, finally, on applying to medical school, and was taking courses almost exclusively in his decided-upon major, history. Other departments, in reaction to the times, were more modern in their approach, with rap sessions and professors called by their first names. But the history department still clung to some old fragments of order—and so did Robert. He was determined to end college with a decent GPA, even if the future was unclear.

  And so, as summer began, he could think only of the misery of his past two summers, of his time in New York, in the heat and dirt, and before that of the tiny house on Disston Street. Even his room in the dorm now seemed ridiculously uncomfortable. How had this happened? Gwendolyn beside him each night in a queen-size bed, an apartment so well air-conditioned that they slept under a comforter in July, and a job that paid well and even fed him dinner. He
knew that this was the happiest he had ever been. No, he understood that he was happy for the first time ever, and he went off to his job every afternoon waiting, like his mother’s son, for the bad news to arrive.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Senior year

  By the fall of 1968, Robert’s senior year, half a million soldiers were in Vietnam, and injuries and deaths were reported in the thousands. His fall semester disappeared through his hands like so many grains of sand, and his head filled with plans for escape. Stacia’s letters were full of news: a boy he went to Hebrew school with had chopped off his own thumb to get out; a distant Vishniak cousin faked insanity and, to everyone’s surprise, was proclaimed of sound mind. Stacia had the whole family working on it; every Vishniak and Kupferberg was asking coworkers and neighbors, butchers and bookies, if they knew anyone who could help keep Robert out of the war.

  He was so absorbed in the problem that at first he hardly noticed the changes in Gwendolyn. Her routine had, if possible, sped up—through the bookstore, she and Bruno organized various local protests against the draft, and a march to the statehouse. One day Robert came home to Gwendolyn shearing off Bruno’s mop of hair in their living room, the thick black curls falling onto the wooden floor. The two would be campaigning door-to-door for Eugene McCarthy, Gwendolyn explained. It bothered Robert that they were together more. And she couldn’t seem to sleep without the help of pills—pills for sleeping, and for getting up, too. He worried that she wasn’t eating. Their apartment was now filled with protest posters; mornings, Robert stumbled into a sunlight-filled living room that seemed to be shouting at him—Down with the Pigs! Stop American Imperialism! Remember Chicago!

  Gwendolyn’s morning reading took hours—when on earth did she go to class?—and she often cut out articles, underlining sections with a ballpoint pen. The periodicals no longer quietly disappeared—they were everywhere, accumulating so fast under tables, overflowing from bookcases, finding their way into the kitchen cabinets and, once, the freezer. The maid couldn’t keep up. She was miserable, too. Students in Prague had occupied the university to protest the Soviet tanks rolling into the city; a nephew was missing. Then Nixon won the presidency, and at about three in the morning on November 9, Gwendolyn woke him up out of a sound sleep.

  “Robbie, I have an idea.”

  “Can’t it wait until morning?”

  She turned on the light and he braced himself for news of yet another event or project. He had lost count and wondered when, if ever, he would have her full attention again.

  “I want us to go to Philadelphia,” she said. “For Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh, please,” he groaned, putting the pillow over his head. Not that. “You’re going to meet them anyway in six months. They’ll be up for graduation.” That would be hard enough, but at least fast; he’d intended to stay in Boston over Thanksgiving. “Can’t I go back to sleep now?”

  “I want to go now,” she said. “I want to meet them at home.”

  “Well I don’t want you to,” Robert said. “I have enough on my mind now; don’t ask that of me.” He kissed her and begged her to come to bed, but she only went back to the living room.

  Robert had come to hate Bruno now—yes, the emotion was hate—for giving Gwendolyn all the pills, making her beholden to him and, most of all, giving her such crazy ideas. He felt sure that Bruno was the one who suggested she meet Robert’s family. He knew this was irrational, but his jealousy knew no bounds. The next day, when he was sure Gwendolyn wasn’t working, he went to the bookstore to tell Bruno to butt out of his life, but he found the place closed for the afternoon, the door locked. He went around to the side of the building—there was a window in the storeroom, and if he stood on tiptoe he could see inside.

  There was Bruno, pacing the room and talking, only Robert couldn’t see anyone else in there. Was he ranting to himself? Or were there others whom Robert couldn’t see from his angle, with the boxes obscuring his view? He banged loudly on the frosty window, but Bruno seemed not to hear. He tried again and again with no result. He’d forgotten his gloves, and finally he put his hands in his pockets, went back around to the front, and knocked again on the door, staring into the display window. There were copies of a book lined up, framed by black velvet cloth. Gwendolyn did the windows, and they were always artistic. Too good for the shop, he thought. The book title was familiar: Madness and Civilization, by Michel Foucault. It was the English translation of one of the books Tracey had been reading, or trying to read, their freshman year. All around the display were questions, painted in orange on white cardboard: “Is it sane to be crazy in crazy times?” and “Who are the real crazy people? The suit on the subway? The boy with a machine gun and a weekend pass? Look around, brother—maybe it’s you.”

  He walked quickly up the street, telling himself he’d go back, figure this all out. There was some puzzle here, with Gwendolyn and Bruno, with this place, just as there had been with Tracey. Again he couldn’t understand the signs, didn’t know the answer. His head hurt as he stumbled back to the T—he wanted some dinner, then off to the library; the apartment had become too crowded. Easiest to put one foot in front of the other, do what needed to be done.

  Past midnight, he came home to find the apartment still empty. He ate a piece of cold pizza and crawled into bed. Gwendolyn had left the bedroom window open. A cold wind blew the lace curtains into the air like apparitions, but Robert liked a chilly room for sleeping. He got under the comforter, so light yet remarkably warm. He drifted easily off to sleep only to be awakened by a fire truck speeding down Commonwealth Avenue, sirens blaring. He sat up, looking around the dark room. Something was wrong. A lump on the floor caught his eye. For a moment he thought that an animal had gotten into the apartment, but when he got up and went closer he realized that it was Gwendolyn on the floor by the foot of the bed, no pillow or blanket, legs folded under her like a child.

  “Baby, what are you doing down there?” he asked. He took the comforter off the bed and sat down next to her on the floor. She was shaking, and he put it around her, then curled himself up against her and held her, trying to keep her warm. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t deserve to sleep in the bed, Robbie. I don’t deserve it. Not any of it. I’m guilty, you see, I’m terribly guilty.”

  “Sweetheart, you’ve been watching too much news on television.”

  “All the children on fire, and the women screaming, and when they part, the machine guns are behind them. They weren’t distributing flowers, they were working for the Vietcong.”

  “Who was?”

  “I could have stopped them, you know, I might have.”

  “Stopped what?”

  “All those souls. The souls are evaporating. Where do they go—?”

  She babbled on like that, and he couldn’t comfort her. She seemed to think that she’d done something wrong, something more wrong than everyone else. “If there’s anyone who deserves to live like this, Gwendolyn, it’s you. You deserve everything lovely in the world,” he insisted, but she would not come to bed. He couldn’t leave her down there, so he slept beside her on the floor, his body wrapped around hers. In the morning, the only thing that calmed her, the only way he could get her to take any breakfast, was if he promised her, yes, he would ask if he could bring her home. He knew Stacia would say it was a waste of money; that he would see them at Christmas and she didn’t like strangers sleeping in her house. He’d have the satisfaction of having asked, and the relief of not having to go.

  But his mother was in a good mood when he called, and when he asked about coming home, she told him to do it. “We’re having fifteen, at least.” She paused. “How are you getting here?” Her voice was suspicious, as it got whenever she suspected she’d have to part with money. But he told her he was coming with a girl, and they’d rent a car.

  “Expensive, ain’t it?” she asked. “To rent?”

  “It’s her money.” Robert said, “Tell my brother he better be on good beha
vior.” How could he explain Gwendolyn and what she was used to? It was all cursed from the moment he began. The weekend would be a disaster.

  “We know how to behave here, mister,” Stacia said, and hung up the phone.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Holiday

  They found a spot on the street, near the house, and Gwendolyn pronounced it a good sign. She kept asking him which house, exactly, was his.

  “What difference does it make when they all look the same?” he snapped.

  “Because it’s yours, my love.” She squeezed his hand. “You grew up there.”

  They arrived at night, just after eight. The tiny yellow patio lights were on, shedding their fuzzy glare up and down the block. They’d stopped on the road for dinner—Robert had insisted to his mother that this was the earliest they could get here when in truth he’d had no exams that day, classes were empty, but he didn’t want to lengthen this ordeal any more than necessary.

  Barry stood watch at the bay window. He wore a maroon sweatshirt and ate a kasha knish, and as Robert made his way up the walk holding Gwendolyn’s hand, he could see that his brother’s shirt was covered in stray pieces of grain. Then Vishniak joined Barry at the window and they waved—his father was wearing his undershirt and, Robert hoped upon hope, pants—and then the door opened and there was Stacia, her arms folded in front of her, face twitching.

  “Oh, Christ,” he whispered to Gwendolyn, who’d walked ahead of him and took the screen as it was held open to her. She walked inside and stood near the entrance, as Vishniak, wearing his slippers and pajama bottoms, ready for bed, fell on Robert and hugged and kissed him. Barry, usually the first to come forward, stood back, licking his fingers. Stacia assessed Robert, pronouncing him too thin, asking if he was hungry, and frowning at his answer.

  “You’ll have to take that car around and park in back,” she said. “I don’t know why you didn’t do that to begin with.”