Close Relations

by Susan Isaacs

  “What about Lyle LoBello?”

  “Lyle LoBello. Well, Bill told me not to worry, that he couldn’t rely on Lyle because he’s still in mourning for his dear buddy, Jim Gresham. Crazed with grief, old Lyle is. And according to Bill, anyone that emotional isn’t much good to us. Of course, there’s no reason why we can’t avail ourselves of Lyle’s upstate expertise those times that he can manage to stop crying. But—”

  “You want curry?” the waiter demanded.

  Jerry began to wave him away, but I asked, “What kind do you have?”

  “Good curry.”

  “What sort? Chicken?” The waiter shook his head. I requested shrimp or lamb, but the waiter said no and intoned: veg-e-table. “I don’t care for vegetable,” I said.

  “Jesus, Marcia, would you take the goddamn vegetable thing and be done with it? It all tastes the same.” The waiter nodded, apparently agreeing with Jerry, and trotted into the kitchen. “Where was I?” Jerry demanded.

  “You were saying how Bill might use Lyle on an occasional basis.”

  “Well, read between the lines.”

  “I’m not quite sure what you mean.”

  “Really? You, the great intellectual, don’t know what a simple guy like me means? I should be flattered. I’m so subtle that the resident thinker can’t follow my line of reasoning. Jesus, this is an important moment in our lives.”

  “It may be,” I said softly.

  “Don’t threaten me, Marcia.”

  There followed about ten minutes of silence. The waiter deposited two bowls on the table. I put a small mound of curry on the side of my plate, then dumped a glob of gelatinous rice into the middle. Jerry waved aside my offer of help and ordered another drink.

  The food was vile, sharp, just on the edge of rancidity. I considered getting up and leaving but realized I had no place to go. The waiter sneezed, covering his mouth with his hand. I watched him for a while, but he did not go to the bathroom to wash it off. I decided not to order dessert. I turned back to the table and looked at Jerry’s hand on his glass, his index finger rising and falling, teasing the little beads of moisture. If I left, he might decide all of a sudden that he needed solace, and then where would he find it? All over. Anywhere.

  “Jerry, please talk to me. I’m sorry if I pushed too hard. But you need someone to talk to, someone you can trust.”

  “Can I trust you? Completely?”

  “How can you even ask that?”

  “If I asked you to do something, would you go along with whatever I asked, on faith?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “See? You start drawing up amendments before I even start. If you were on my side completely—”

  “Jerry, what do you want from me?” He didn’t answer. “Jerry, please. Don’t you think I’d do anything …?”

  “Sure. Sure I do. Anyway, I’ll tell you what’s happening. I’m campaign manager.” I nodded. “Bill says he’s behind me one hundred percent. But that’s crap.” He held up a hand as I was about to protest. “I know that’s crap because he’s sending me out of town.”

  “What?”

  “Sending me up to Sullivan County. I’ll explain some other time. You know at the beginning of a campaign—Christ, in any part of a campaign—you need a warm body here, running things. But he’s telling me he needs me more in the boonies. That’s the essence of crap. He claims it’ll just be for a few days, that Eileen Gerrity can run things till I get back, but you know and I know that’s bullshit. He’d never trust a woman in that role.” I hadn’t known that. It was interesting. “You know what he’s going to do? He’s going to bring in LoBello. He’ll talk him into accepting some temporary half-assed title until he can figure out how to handle me, but he’ll give LoBello the reins. He’s screwing me, Marcia. He’s giving me the biggest screwing of my life, and I can’t do anything about it. ‘Morrissey,’ he says, ‘you’re my man. You’re campaign manager.’ And he’s right. I’m his man. I’m forty-fucking-seven years old and he’s sending me out of town like a kid to camp. What the hell am I going to do?”

  I didn’t know. His hands were trembling slightly, as though the ground was vibrating under his feet. “Jerry, are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I do anything?”

  “No. Just let me be.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go. Go up to Sullivan County.”

  I paid the bill and we left the restaurant.

  Sullivan County is in the Catskill Mountains. It is sometimes referred to as the borscht belt. Sometimes as Solomon County. Its big industry is tourism, and many of its residents work at the hotels. Others raise chickens. It is, on balance, a nice place to visit.

  And that, as he later explained, was why Jerry was going there. Not for a vacation, of course. But the rumors were traveling fast down the Quickway to the city: Sidney Appel, the nouveau premier hotelier of Sullivan County, was making gubernatorial noises.

  The next day I heard the details from Joe Cole, Paterno’s coordinator of minority affairs. Joe had gone to Paterno and Jerry with a riddle: What does it mean when a rich white businessman shows up at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street on a Sunday morning?

  It meant, Jerry had told him, that the aforementioned businessman is running for something. But governor? Sidney Appel?

  He knew about Appel, of course. Everyone in New York politics did. He was a tiny man, Bronx-born, who looked like a bulbous-nosed elf. He had parlayed a chunk of his wife’s hefty inheritance from her father’s cat-food business into even bigger money by opening a health-oriented hotel built mainly from pine logs and spit. He called it the “Family Farm,” using a smiling chicken as his logo and advertising “Clean Air Like Grandma Used to Make.” For some reason, people found that appealing, and Family Farms were banged together in the Adirondacks, the Poconos, and the not-too-depressed areas of the Appalachians.

  He made millions charging deluxe prices for vegetable cutlets, bunk beds, and several miles of overworked hiking trails. He pitched to parents: “When was the last time you saw your child climb a tree?” His ad pictured a small, brown-haired, genderless child embracing a huge but safe-looking oak. “We’re people people!” another ad announced, and its picture was a campfire surrounded by weenie roasters of every race and creed, all smiling beatifically, looking like shills from the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

  But despite the red bandanna he always wore around his neck, Sidney Appel retained the heart of a city boy. He loved the Democratic party more than the 4-H Club. Instead of collecting rifles, he bought politicians. Not an unheard-of hobby, certainly not an impractical one. But why would the hunter choose to become the animal he preyed upon?

  “He thinks he can be governor?” I had asked Joe Cole.

  “Sure. He has the money.” For a black man, Joe Cole had an unusually Semitic face: an opulent hooked nose and a big chin that called out to be rubbed in deep thought. Maybe we were distant cousins. “Listen, Marcia, he’ll go out and do some token fund-raising to conform to the law, but he could take five million out of his pockets—or his wife’s pocketbook—and not feel the difference.”

  “But, Joe: governor? What experience does he have?”

  Cole cleared his throat and orated in a forced basso: “What New York needs, ladies and gentlemen, is a businessman! We need a governor who knows what it means to meet a payroll, who has never had an unbalanced budget, who—”

  “Come on. What kind of organization does he have? What kind of support?”

  “Money, honey. He can buy all the support he needs. Ask your boyfriend.”

  But my boyfriend was not in shape to give an advanced civics lesson. That night, riding downtown after work, I asked him if he thought Joe Cole was right about Appel. “Well,” he began, “I’ve known Joe for years and his instincts—” Jerry’s voice broke then, as if cut by the recollection of Paterno’s perfidy. His normal, consuming interest in anything political had
been replaced by something else. Maybe fury. Maybe horror at finding himself in the midst of a maneuver he had not manufactured. We sat and swayed silently on the subway.

  When we reached our stop, Jerry exited first, not even checking to see if I was behind him. I was, though, scurrying to keep after him as he strode to the first flight of stairs as if he had an urgent appointment. But on the staircase he slowed, climbing them wearily, pausing before putting a foot down on each new step, leaning heavily on the railing.

  “Jerry.” I just called his name. I had no idea about what to say to him. How was your day? would have been pointless; it had obviously been as awful as the previous one.

  “Yes?” We stood before the second flight of steps that led up to the street. He was eyeing it as if it were too much for him to manage, although it was plain he was not out of breath.

  I asked him the same question I had been asking him. “Jerry, can I do anything?”

  “You’re trying to push me, Marcia. You’re trying to get me to lean on you so I’ll be a cripple without you. I told you once, you’ve got to give me room.”

  “I’m not trying to crowd you, Jerry. I swear. I just want—”

  “Why don’t you find yourself some new doctor or something and quit bugging my ass?”

  I rushed away from him. Where else would I go? To bask in the warmth of my friends? I had two: Eileen, who spoke of privacy with religious reverence; Barbara, with a husband, two sons, five servants, three cars, and four charities.

  Back to my mother? To one of the men who wouldn’t even remember whether he had just propositioned me or actually slept with me?

  Or maybe out on my own? I could find a cheap walkup on the West Side and spend my nights sniffling into damp tissues and listening to cockroaches walk across the floor. I sensed that Jerry was giving me all I could ever get. I had been alone for a long time after Barry. I was not a woman who valued her independence.

  Jerry caught up with me. His arm slid around my shoulder. “Okay, you can come upstate.”

  “What?” My throat dried, then tightened up.

  “You can take Friday afternoon off and be back late Sunday.”

  “Oh. Of course. Sure.”

  “Listen, who knows, I may be in a decent mood by then. We could even have some fun.”

  He met me Friday evening at the bus depot in a town called Liberty. He waited in front, leaning against a car and waving, looking like one of the local boys in a dark green army parka. I saw him mouth “hi.” He had acclimated himself to the town in the thirty-six hours he’d been there; if he hadn’t been meeting me, he probably would have played a few hands of poker at the firehouse or met a couple of new pals for a few beers.

  “Hi,” I said, climbing off the bus. April in Liberty could never inspire a song; it was bitterly cold, and I pushed my hands into my pockets. It kept them warm and kept my approach casual. “Where did you get that parka? You look like a USO ad for our boys in Korea.”

  “How are you?” he asked, and bent over to kiss my lips.

  “Wanna dance, sarge?”

  “No. Listen, I’m sorry if I was a shit this week.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “You’re not mad at me?” I shook my head. “Look at me and tell me you’re not mad at me.”

  I looked. His cheeks were burnished by the icy air. The cold had brought tears to his eyes, and a few of the tears rested on his lashes, which glistened a deep, solid black. The white light from the street-lamp illuminated only the upper part of his face, so the bottom was in shadows, emphasizing the pouty fullness of his lower lip, deepening the cleft in his chin. “Of course I’m not mad at you.”

  Jerry led me across the street to the rented Chevrolet he was driving and held the door open for me. “See how mannerly I am?” he demanded.

  “Wonderful. Do you chew with your mouth closed too?”

  “Most of the time. Listen, call your mother and tell her I’m very well bred, very refined.”

  “Of course. She’ll be so pleased. Listen, maybe we could invite her to spend the weekend with us. Giver her her own room, her own six-pack.”

  “I’d like that, Marcia.”

  He drove carefully along a well-paved but very narrow mountain road. The car smelled of years of stale cigarettes; its heater didn’t work. “Do you think the car can make it up the mountain?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  But we arrived alive at the Pineview Inn. It was an ordinary cheap motel, with nailed-to-the-wall pictures of kittens and a mouse-trap baited with a petrified piece of yellow cheese shoved between the toilet and the sink. The Pineview Inn was notable only because it offered just a bed and bath in an area of resorts where, minimally, guests were given the choice between indoor or alfresco swimming, matjes or Bismarck herring as a breakfast appetizer. The Pineview aspired to nothing.

  “I’m just curious,” I said, still in my coat. “How come you picked this place?” The room was a mite warmer than the car but did not offer sufficient comfort for me to even take my hands from my pockets.

  “Because it has a kind of raunchy, illicit atmosphere. I thought that would appeal to you.” Having hung his jacket over a metal pipe, Jerry flashed me a practiced smile and began unbuttoning my coat.

  “Really?” I asked. “Does it have any of those X-rated movies?”

  “No, but for an extra five bucks the owner will throw in his nubile twin daughters. Actually, I picked this place because it was sort of anonymous. I mean, I know maybe ten, fifteen people up here, and the way my luck is going, I’d run into the one or two who shouldn’t know I’m up here poking around.”

  “What have you found out?” Jerry threw my coat beside his jacket. Then he sat on the yellowed white bedspread and motioned me over.

  “Appel’s running. He’ll probably announce the end of the week after next.”

  “What else?” He unzipped my jeans slowly, so I would have time enough to contemplate what was going to happen. He inched them off, together with my underpants, easing them over my hips, kissing me along the way.

  “Want to hear about Appel’s media director?” he whispered.

  “No.” I left my pants in a mound on the floor and lay on the bedspread, feeling its stiff cotton bumps press into the small of my back. Jerry spread my legs apart and sat between them. Then he leaned over, using his tongue first, then his mouth. Only there did my body heat match his. He kept it up for more than an hour, lifting me up on pillows, taking the pillows away, sometimes blowing cool air on me softly, sometimes pressing roughly with his fingers. I was so satisfied I could have spent the rest of my life on the bedspread, lying on my back, lowing stupidly, like a cow. “Oh, Jerry.”

  “Happy, sweetheart?”

  We got out of bed the next day only because the owner’s wife knocked on the door, whimpering that her husband would kill her if she didn’t make up the room. “We’ll go for a hike in the woods,” Jerry announced, as I pulled on a heavy sweater.

  “In the woods? Are you kidding? Didn’t you ever read ‘Hansel and Gretel’?”

  The day was cold but full of beaming sunshine. We walked, pausing to examine the branches of trees: their tight little buds, a few weeks away from splitting open and putting out, seemed ungenerous. I gave Jerry a big, wet, open-mouthed kiss.

  But I felt a little uncomfortable. My kind of nature was controlled. Like Central Park, it had perimeters. I demanded to know what would happen if a hunter thought I was a deer. I confessed to being afraid of getting lost and suggested we mark our path with my dental floss. Jerry shook his head, promising no harm could come if we stuck to the trail. And no harm came. After a half hour, we found a clearing, a nearly perfect circle of pale new grass surrounded by a ring of dark evergreens.

  Jerry lay down, letting his body ease out onto the cold earth, as comfortable in the Catskill forest as on the East Side of Manhattan.

  “It smells nice here. Like room deodorant,” I said.

  We spent the afternoon there, spl
itting a jar of peanut butter we had bought in a general store across from the motel; the proprietor was neither friendly nor homespun but sat hunched on a stool behind the counter, his legs crossed, reading a magazine that displayed a lot of unnaturally pink female genitalia. But Jerry and I were quite friendly and, if not homespun, at least warm and cuddly. We rubbed noses. We played Name That Tune. As usual, I stumped Jerry. “It’s ‘Long Before I Knew You’ from Bells Are Ringing. You really didn’t know that?”

  “No. Never heard it.”

  I bellowed the entire song. “Now do you recognize it?”

  “No, but maybe somebody three mountains away will. You are loud.”

  “I am not. I’m subdued and elegant.”

  “Come here. I’ll show you what I do to elegant ladies.”

  We had pizza and chianti. We saw a monster movie. We made love. We read the Sunday paper together in bed. We could have been featured in a Newsweek cover story on The Great Middle-Class Weekend.

  “Have a good trip home.” We stood before the window of Katz’s bakery, watching cheese danish, waiting for the bus to pull into Liberty. “I’ll call you during the week.”

  “Jerry?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know when you’ll come back to the city?”

  “Soon. I’ll spend another couple of days pretending to be busy and then I’ll be home.” His voice seemed to get clearer and louder. Saint Agnes had sent him for elocution lessons, then acting lessons. Jerry was her baby Barrymore. He gave me his self-assured public smile. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “You are. But it will be all right, I promise you, Marcia. I’m in control of this thing.” Again the smile. “What can happen?”

  Nine

  My new office at campaign headquarters did not make me happy. The William Paterno for Governor Committee had rented the fourth floor of a medium-sized midtown hotel that had stumbled over the brink from shabby gentility into seediness. Mildew perfumed the corridors. The elevator creaked as it rose, and when the wind blew across the air shaft it made long low noises, like the moans of the ghosts of dead guests.