Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  “That’s the point of it,” Bingo said enthusiastically. “Some of them are so ill-coordinated you have to sustain them at their activities. But once they grasp the concept…”

  “About the ozone layer…”

  “All the best child psychiatrists warn us against becoming anal retentive. But what of ‘anal expulsive’? Such behavior, and Ames is more knowledgeable on this than I…”

  “Ames?”

  “Mrs. Marsh,” I put in, impatient for Bingo to get on with the narrative, wondering where it was leading.

  “Yes,” Bingo said, “especially between the ages of two and four, the problem ought to be somehow worked out. If not, well, I guess we all appreciate the problem…”

  “No,” a man next to me said, “I can’t say I…”

  Bingo fixed him with a patronizing smile. “Then later in life you have all sorts of people who’ve experienced arrested development in terms of wanting, fruitlessly, I might add, to assert their autonomy. And, when they fail to do so…”

  I must admit, I was myself leaning forward. Up on the dais a rabbi of extraordinary piety was describing a grove of spruce on the Golan Heights. Bingo waited that brief moment during which tension tested restraints and then said, in a rather loud voice:

  “… people then find themselves defecating in the most unusual places, in formal flower gardens, in the drawing rooms of great homes, even in the backseats of hired cars. You see, it’s a sort of protest which…”

  There was a sort of mass paralysis at our table, and, I suspected, at neighboring tables, people hearing what they heard and trying to believe they were, somehow, mistaken.

  Bingo, in full flight, went on:

  “… Hitler, for example…”

  “Hitler?” a gruff voice demanded, Hitler not being a name often invoked at UJA-Federation dinners.

  “Yes,” Bingo said primly, “it’s not generally known, but he was a victim of a mild form of anal expulsion. Teutonic people tend to hold back, which probably explains his particular form of malaise.”

  “Madness?” one of the women asked.

  Bingo shook his head. “You can be perfectly sane and have these little difficulties. With Hitler it was called ‘dynamitism.’ ”

  “Dynamitism?” several of us asked, I among them.

  “Yes,” Marsh said, lips momentarily pursed.

  “Uncontrollable farting.”

  Several heads at our table swiveled abruptly, to see if we were overheard, and one of the two women got up and excused herself.

  I’d myself always been sensitive to Bingo’s needs, rarely, for example, making reference to the last flight of Amelia Earhart lest it remind him of his mother’s unfortunate death. But he never failed to dismay me when he got on to the subject, in whatever form, of bowel movements. Behind me, on the dais, someone was calling for monetary pledges. The someone was, I believe, Joey Adams. But I hesitated to turn ‘round, lest I be right.

  “Bingo, the new fashion collections,” I said desperately, “they sound fascinating.”

  He bathed me in smiles.

  “Why, John, they are, you know. Olivier of Hollywood was telling me just last week…”

  I was terrified one of our guests might ask just who Olivier was, and we would be favored with one of Bingo’s little essays on bike riding and masturbation, or perhaps a few other selected quotes.

  Fortunately, we were spared, and Bingo limited himself to a dazzling report on the season’s new clothes, a subject which the women found mesmerizing.

  As we made our way out, the evening over, Bingo pulled me aside.

  “You know, I was pleasantly surprised. I thought an entire evening among Jews would be banal. But there was really some rather good table talk, wasn’t there?”

  Uncomfortable lecturing him about how patronizing he sounded, I tried sarcasm.

  “It’s like blacks having innate rhythm. Jews are famous for their verbal skills.”

  “Oh? That must be why things went so well,” he said, very satisfied.

  Then, as he spied his limo and waved it toward us, a man immune to sarcasm as to so much else, Bingo suffered one final moment of insecurity.

  “John, what I said tonight about disposable diapers and the ozone layer…?”

  “Yes?”

  “I sometimes become confused, John. Are we in favor of the ozone layer or opposed?”

  51 Go to work for Hitler or play piano in a cabaret.

  FOUR or five years passed this way, a dizzying kaleidoscope, brilliantly colored but unfocused, shapeless and chaotic.

  Then, on a spring evening, while drunk, I met Babe.

  By now I was one of the highest-priced journalists in the country. A few editors made more; more publishers surely did; but among pure writers maybe only Buchwald and Russell Baker and broadly syndicated feature writers like Erma Bombeck were better paid. At one point King Features offered to make me “the new Jim Bishop,” and dangled riches.

  I didn’t agonize over the money, suffered few guilts. I recognized I was Bingo’s creature, that I went along with most of his pettiness, joined in his feuds, promoted his agenda, deviled his enemies, and smarmed over his friends. There were empty nights and hangover mornings when I disliked myself for not declaring independence and going somewhere east of Eden to write more serious stuff, something better than journalistic bitchery.

  And then on a television talk show or in a magazine someone would refer to me as “the most powerful” magazine writer or some such rubbish and I would cheer up and admit, well, it’s not all that bad a job, is it?

  Head swollen? Of course. I was still honest enough to admit that (at least to myself).

  But there was something beyond money and celebrity. By now I was so inextricably entangled with Marsh there had developed between us such a genuine, if antithetic, affection, that we seemed often to be halves of the same curious brain, one starting the sentence, the other ending it. Marsh wasn’t anything like my father. Nothing like! And yet…

  Bingo even tolerated anger, which he rarely did from others, hating to be opposed. I think he put it down to petulance. Or my liver.

  At Le Cirque one day Karl Lagerfeld sat across from us at lunch, his hair in a pigtail, his red-lacquered fan languidly moving the elegant air.

  “He’s such a phony,” Bingo hissed contemptuously, “a baron or something in Germany where they haven’t had royalty since the Kaiser was shot…”

  “Didn’t he abdicate?”

  “… and he’s forever telling people to look him up in the Almanach de Gotha. It’s just like Egon von Furstenberg. Or Egon von und zu Furstenberg, more properly. Can you imagine being ‘John von und zu Sharkey’? Besides, the Agnelli side of the family have all the money, and they’re wops. Poor Egon. He and his wife split, and she was the smart one. Now he’s working for a shirt manufacturer, selling menswear. It’s like Putzi Hanfstaengl in 1930, a Harvard man at that, either go to work for Hitler or play piano in a cabaret.”

  Marsh could manage such mental gymnastics, from Lagerfeld’s “phony” title to going to work for Hitler. The appalling thing was, by now I could follow his tortured thought processes.

  Then Lagerfeld saw Bingo and waved. Voice shrill with delight, Marsh called back, “We must have lunch!”

  We argued again about cover girls. I was doing a column, and Bingo thought it was beneath the magazine even to acknowledge their existence. As I did increasingly, I told him he was wrong.

  “Little girls in America used to want to grow up to be nurses or stews or Rockettes. Now they want to be President or Christie Brinkley.”

  A streak of puritanism ran pure in Marsh and he regarded me narrowly.

  “You just want to have S-E-X with them.” He spelled it out, really he did. There may have been an element of truth in that, but I did the column. Bingo wasn’t happy until he saw the newsstand sale.

  I’d come back from Paris the end of ’80, a foreign correspondent for the Times, a Pulitzer laureate, a man who’d
been to war, a bestselling author who knew… and legend had it had loved… Coco Chanel. And ever since I’d lived for Bingo’s job and Bingo’s magazine. Marsh paid me with more than money, with that weekly fix of a column with my name at the bottom and a thumbnail photo at top, just to the right of that ridiculous exclamation point at the end of “Shark!” Every fortnight or so “Good Morning America” had me on as a sort of “guest columnist,” chatting with David Hartman about the rich and celebrated I’d just pinioned. And the ABC checks came without carping notes from Nunc about “that lad Sharkey” and how much I cost. With such clamor and popularity, I should have been content.

  Instead, I felt the weight of vacant years, a single man halfway through his thirties, making a lot of money and owning nothing. My apartment was rented, my car was leased, there were a dozen girls and not a single important woman, pleasure but no true joy. And if love came my way, would I even recognize it?

  Bingo made sport of me when I complained.

  “You’re having a midlife crisis. Or a change of life. Or what is it women have these days, PS something?”

  “PMS.”

  “I knew there was a P in it somewhere,” he said, rather pleased.

  For all my vaunted knowledge of European women (courtesy of Bingo Marsh), it was in the pickup bars of Manhattan’s East Side that I would discover the great erotic secret: there is nothing more exciting than a young American career woman who’s just shampooed her hair.

  It was Babe from whom I learned.

  52 Go to Woody Allen and turn right.

  A soft evening rather late in a bar on Second Avenue. There was this Babe Flanagan standing there talking to people I knew. I hardly noticed her, concentrating instead on an American Indian lady with whom I was necking as we sat on adjacent bar stools, I attempting to put my tongue into her mouth but ending up inaccurately somewhere around her right eye, startling her so that she toppled from her stool, dragging me with her.

  The American Indian lady, embarrassed, fled into the night. And as I attempted to regain my feet, tangled in one of the bar stools, Babe Flanagan looked down at me.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  So began a candid relationship.

  The man with Babe introduced us, and as I rearranged my ensemble, she said, more matter-of-fact than solicitous, “Can you get home by yourself?”

  “I live right over there,” I said, weaving slightly but seeking precision as if it were vital she know the latitude and longitude, “right across the street. A small but tasteful apartment.”

  She looked past me through the window. “Over the deli?” she said. “You can’t live over a deli. Think of the roaches.”

  “Where in Manhattan are there no roaches?” I demanded in some perturbation.

  “I find Roach Motel pretty effective,” she said, serious about it.

  “Forget roaches. Pigeon lice are the true peril.”

  “Pigeon lice?”

  “A man named Marsh warned me when I first came to New York: ‘Examine the windowsills carefully,’ he said. ‘If there are pigeons roosting you get pigeon lice. And if you ever do, you’ll have to move. There’s no way to rid yourself of them. There’s no escape.’ ”

  “Who’s peddling this?” she said, brow furrowed.

  “Bingo. His vision is apocalyptic, seeing plague and disaster looming everywhere.”

  “He’s nuts,” she said pleasantly, “and so are…”

  “Yes,” I said firmly, “he’s nuts. But in the morning I’ll be sober.”

  “Hey, that’s pretty good, falling down drunk and paraphrasing Churchill.”

  Sodden as I was, I knew we’d begun well. She’d read Churchill; more significant, her candor. Two people meet by chance who actually tell the truth, each of them, with just about the very first words they speak; her allegation of drunkenness; my shamed agreement that, yes, I was indeed drunk. I had theater tickets for the next night and I told her where and when and I went home to sleep it off. I wasn’t at all confident she’d show up. It was George C. Scott in Volpone. Babe Flanagan surprised me by getting there. George C. Scott didn’t.

  “An indisposition,” we were informed nervously from the footlights.

  “Stewed,” Babe announced.

  Bingo would like her, I thought, like him, ascribing motivation and thinking the worst of people.

  The understudy played the role, and we left halfway through and went uptown to Elaine’s. I was something of a regular by now, but she’d never been there.

  When they took our order, Babe said, “I like the waiter. Knowing but obsequious.”

  “Sure. Considers himself better than we are, but he wants the tip, too.”

  Her first name was Barbara, but she had always been called “Babe.”

  “I’m youngest of five, the baby of the family. But I was never really the ‘baby’ type. Too rambunctious and noisy. So it was ‘Babe.’ ”

  Her father was a city cop, now in retirement. Her mother always worked, teaching school mostly. They lived way out on Long Island, someplace I never heard of, and all five kids had gotten through college. Babe was in law school now, at Fordham, over in Lincoln Center near the opera house.

  “I targeted Harvard,” she said, “or at least Columbia. But I screwed up the math on my LSATs and missed out by a couple of points. Math and I co-exist uneasily.”

  Until now, a familiar story: lower-middle-class overachiever getting her law degree and then going down to Wall Street to join one of the big law firms and become a Yuppie, get rich. But there were things that made Babe… different.

  She was not the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. After all, I inhabited the realm of models. She had freckles and over her right eyebrow a small but discernible scar. And she was solid. You had the feeling that if she ever stopped exercising, with her appetite, she might weigh one fifty, one sixty. But she was startling to look at, with extraordinary eyes that bored right into you. And she was honest to the point of blunt, maybe of all the people I ever knew, men and women, the most direct.

  “I don’t do bullshit,” she told me once, and it was true.

  And she was smart. And a bit wacky. I liked that, too. But there was one other thing that set her apart, and it was that first night over dinner at Elaine’s that she told me about it, the other thing that made her different.

  “I didn’t tell you where I went to college, did I?”

  “No.” I hadn’t asked. People in New York were always sizing you up by your college, which I found phony.

  “Well, it was West Point. I’m in the army. I’m a first lieutenant.”

  They brought the drinks just then, and a good thing.

  “Well,” I said, “I never dated a first lieutenant.”

  She grinned. “Is it that bad?”

  “No,” I said, “different but decidedly not bad.”

  She’d graduated a couple of years earlier and spent a year down South, at Fort Benning, where she qualified for parachute duty. Her grades at West Point had been excellent and the army needed lawyers, and now she was in New York at Fordham Law. She and another woman officer, who worked in recruiting, shared an apartment in Forest Hills, where they used to play tennis.

  “It isn’t Manhattan,” she said, “but neither is the rent. Lieutenants don’t get paid all that much, and even with per diem and a housing allowance, it’s a stretch.”

  She ate everything on her plate, the way children were once taught to do, giving the impression buying food might be a stretch as well. I said so.

  “Nah,” Babe said. “I’m just a girl with a healthy appetite.”

  She was about five seven and, as I say, solid, with straight blonde hair chopped short just above her shoulders. Very square shoulders; I don’t know if that was genes or West Point. None of the rest of her seemed at all square or cut off, and even seated, she moved as well as my tennis player or the ballet dancer, the Russian, swiveling and with everything working together. It doe
s me no credit, but it was on the tip of my tongue to ask if she enjoyed being tied up or some other indecent proposal. I chose discretion, noting a very firm chin that a millimeter more might have turned stern and a gloriously straight nose the Irish don’t usually have and blue eyes they sometimes do, the fortunate ones, eyes like fresh mornings in the country.

  “I went to the library today to look you up,” she said. “The main library on Fifth Avenue, the one with the lions.”

  “And?” I was inordinately pleased, so much so I stopped having lascivious thoughts about her breasts. Women weren’t this candid; they fenced and played games. Babe was admitting interest.

  “Hey,” she said, “the Pulitzer Prize.” And she pronounced it right.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And you wrote a couple of books. A biography of Chanel and a novel.”

  “The novel was lousy. The bio was okay.”

  “I’ll read it. I just haven’t had time yet.”

  She’d also punched up my file of stories radioed out from Da Xiang, the stories that got me the Pulitzer.

  “When I met you last night I recognized the name.” I didn’t say anything, and then she said, less ebullient, “It’s really gross I missed the ’Nam.”

  “Babe, you didn’t miss a thing.”

  “Easy for you to say, you were there.”

  “What were you when Vietnam ended, ten, eleven?”

  “About.”

  “You were too young to go. You had to be eighteen. At least.”

  “We studied it a lot at the Point,” she said. “I actually read about Da Xiang. It was one of the firefights we studied in small unit tactics. It all came back to me when I read your stories in the library. I doubt they had all of them, just the ones that ran in the Times. But, I mean, there’s Charley coming over the wire at you. I could see it just as clearly from what you wrote.”

  I cleared my throat, remembering fear.

  “You overwrote a bit,” she said, “all those adjectives.”

  “The hell I overwrote.” I’d been twenty-one years old and an English major and of course I overwrote; I just wasn’t going to get pushed around. She smiled. That smile took away critical sting.