Mirabelle’s boyfriend had paid for the entire week up front, so the front desk didn’t know—or frankly care—where they were so long as the room was empty at checkout.
Lorenzo was on the ground, Abe was in the air, and Mirabelle upriver.
“What do you think?” Sheldon asked the idiot in the mirror. “Shoot Lorenzo and join Abe in Canada? I could leave a note for Lenny saying I had to run.”
“You’ll never feel Miriam’s breasts in your palms if you do” came the reply.
Strictly speaking, this should not have been a consideration. He shouldn’t be weighing vengeance for his father’s death against the chance to feel up Miriam in a broom closet.
Still: Once you get an idea like that in your head it’s hard to shake.
He toweled off his face and stared deeply into his own blue eyes. He tried to imagine himself a Canadian. An airman. Looking down through a sight and dropping bombs over the deep blue sea to bust open some tin cans under the surface where German U-boats were hiding and hunting down cargo and passenger ships and the British navy.
The idea of it was fine, but it didn’t feel right. Not at all. It felt like someone else’s daydream.
His father hadn’t fought for Canada. He’d fought for America, for an America where Sheldon could grow up and know for an absolute fact that he belonged—belonged as much as anyone whose first breath of life drew in American air.
Also, the air force felt wrong—Canadian or otherwise. If the spirit world was made of earth, wind, fire, and water, Sheldon’s was a life of earth. A life in the army felt more appropriate. Or the marines, in a pinch; at least they fought on land too.
“I put on my bellhop uniform,” he said to his reflection. “I open his door and walk in. I say, ‘Excuse me, sir, I didn’t realize you were here,’ and then I kill him. Bang, bang, bang. There’s no defense against that.”
The Sheldon in the mirror didn’t reply. He did, however, look skeptical, which surprised the Sheldon not in the mirror.
“What?”
His face knew if his mind didn’t. So close to it; to the actual thing. And it felt wrong.
Sheldon straightened up and looked at himself for a hint about what he should do.
He tried to imagine himself older and looking back on his life. It was hard to do. Lenny thought that Sheldon had been living a magical and wild life, but Sheldon didn’t see it that way. He felt like he was stumbling from one problem to another and using his wits to muddle through. What all of this was leading to, or might look like on reflection, was anyone’s guess. It wasn’t even really his question. What he wanted to know was how his father would feel about all this, and the answer was so obvious that he was ashamed for even asking it.
Take care of yourself would have been his father’s answer. Take care of yourself because your mother and I love you.
This had very little to do with shooting a man in cold blood.
“Well . . . shit,” he said aloud.
“Even if I don’t shoot him,” Sheldon said to the mirror—he was back in charge now, and he had a lecture to give—“there’s no way this guy walks out of Grossinger’s a free man. I’m going to pull a Krupinski maneuver on him and we’re going to ruin that bastard. If I can take the Krupinski brothers out and this Sir-Lies-a-Lot guy, I don’t see why I can’t do it again when the stakes are up.”
“How?” said the magic mirror.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you should figure it out,” said the mirror.
“How about a little help?”
* * *
LENNY WAS ONSTAGE again that night, and while he had taken Mr. Whitaker’s advice and stayed clear of Nazis—for now—Lenny wasn’t going to back off on the baby poo jokes without a fight. Every man has his limits, and there was still a bit there. And a real comedian doesn’t back away from such rich veins of material.
That’s the coward’s way.
Sheldon hadn’t understood why this was a battle worth fighting in a world—as he called it—“of barbed wire and mass murder” but the boys didn’t pry too deeply into each other’s business.
If there was one thing the Catskills didn’t lack, it was a stage to perform on. The same guys were working the same circuit, and they ran from place to place making the same jokes. Some, Lenny would learn, told the same twenty minutes of jokes their entire lives. It was a scary idea but informative. If you haven’t got the brains, you’d better have the legs. One way or another, you have to keep it all moving along.
Tonight, a slot had opened for him at the Hotel Cloister three miles up the road from Liberty in Parksville. Sheldon had invited Miriam on the logic that he needed a fresh perspective on his problems, and Lenny had told him that he needed all the support he could get. Lenny and Sheldon had both wondered how Mirabelle at nineteen was seeing a man in his thirties whereas Miriam was only a little younger and was happy to accompany Sheldon who wasn’t even fifteen yet, but both concluded that the answer was in the box marked WOMEN ARE COMPLICATED; the same box that was slapped with a warning label reading, DANGER: CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE.
Lenny sat at the bar, too young to drink, and watched one of the comedians tell a story about visiting a farm for the first time. He wasn’t going to be a hard act to follow, but it was the sort of droning, middle-of-the-road storytelling that had these guys working day after day, a harmless background to the dinner people were eating. A chance to smile weakly and giggle from time to time all while appreciating that this was a vacation. Did you get to the top of this game by being special or by fitting in? How did it all work?
When was Sheldon going to get here?
* * *
Sheldon and Miriam met in reception. On his way, he had assumed it would be a night like any other, with the occasional family or couple passing the front desk or arriving late; the front doors opening only on occasion as the hotel’s guests were already involved in one event or another. Unexpectedly, though, the lobby was full of extremely well-dressed people milling around as though they were waiting to enter a Broadway show.
The women were wearing long evening gowns and the men were in tuxedos. Others were wearing black or gray suits with thin ties; their hair was slicked down and their patent leather shoes reflected the chandelier lights with the same intensity as the jewels adorning the women’s necks and wrists and ears did.
There must have been fifty people or more greeting one another and slowly working their way toward the Grand Hall.
Off to the side of all this, like a schoolgirl spectator, stood Miriam. She was in a long floral skirt and a blue cotton blouse that made her hair appear even redder under the blaze of the lobby’s lights. Her shoes were sensibly low heeled for the bike ride they were about to take, and Sheldon wore a collared short-sleeved shirt and brown trousers. He was clean and fresh, and didn’t look like a boy who was splitting his time between trying to figure out how to cage a dragon and considering how he could steal a kiss. As a couple, they could have been classmates or family. Only they knew—if Sheldon understood the evening correctly—that it was a date.
It was a date with a girl who wasn’t Mirabelle.
It was the best way to deal with the situation.
He was sure of it.
He was not sure of it. The mirror might have been sure of it when it suggested this, but the mirror wasn’t here right now, and it was known to like a practical joke on occasion.
Miriam smiled at him when he arrived. Her hands were behind her back, and a small purse crossed her chest so it wouldn’t slip off on their ride.
“Ready?” she asked.
“What’s going on?”
“Some big political fundraiser. A senator or something. I don’t know the details.”
“They’re all very . . . sparkly,” Sheldon observed.
“Power likes shiny,” said Miriam. Sheldon nodded. There was something to that. The Egyptians, the Aztecs, and the conquistadores all liked shiny things.
A woman with a necklace
of sapphires and diamonds passed Sheldon. She looked like a queen and walked like one too. Miriam saw him stare.
“Mrs. Ullman. A very rich widow. She comes to these things every year. Pulls out all the stops.”
Shiny things and sparkly people and jewels reminded Sheldon that there was something he was supposed to be thinking about. The Krupinski maneuver he needed to play on Lorenzo had something to do with all this. He couldn’t think of what it was, though. The jewels were gone. Very, very gone.
“What are you thinking about?” Miriam asked him.
“About how smart you are.”
“You’re a little weird,” she said to him, rising slightly on the balls of her feet, making herself even taller than she was already.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Sheldon said.
* * *
The night was balmy. The inland hills grew cool; the temperature began to drop to sweater weather. But the land was holding on tightly to the last heat of the day. The fireflies were coming out in the field and twinkling a call to the stars. The wind was warm against their arms, and the trees rustled with the feeling of life. It was the perfect night for a ride.
Sheldon and Miriam collected their bicycles from a rack between two evergreens that almost reached the fourth-floor windows of the hotel. Miriam’s was a girl’s bike without a crossbar so she could step into it rather than throw a leg over it. Back in Massachusetts, none of the girls had such bikes because they always shared whatever they had with their brothers or accepted hand-me-downs, but the Catskills were a classy place.
Miriam knew the way. Grossinger’s was on a slight hill so they caught their first breeze as they coasted down to the intersection and made the hard left that took them eastward away from Liberty.
They rode side by side on the quiet road lit by a bright moon that almost masked a universe of stars. Traffic was very light, and the loudest sounds around them were their own tires and the bullfrogs that croaked from the ponds behind the trees.
At first, they rode without talking. Miriam sat bolt upright in her seat, and her strong swimmer’s lungs kept her from becoming breathless. Sheldon tried to hide his admiration for her when they turned into the parking lot of the Hotel Cloister twenty minutes later, and he worried that Lenny’s voice was soon going to ruin this romantic mood.
Sheldon winced when his brakes squeaked as they pulled to a stop by a tree close to the entrance.
“We don’t actually have to do this, you know,” he said.
“It’ll be fun.”
“What if it’s awful? It could be awful.”
“I heard his Nazi skit was hilarious.”
“I’m not comfortable with that sentence.”
“Come on. It’ll probably be OK.”
Her arm through his, Miriam and Sheldon walked into the brightly lit hotel lobby toward Lenny’s world.
Sheldon kept one eye on the exit.
* * *
Lenny was shadowboxing offstage. He wasn’t just charged up and pumped. He was also angry. Out there, right now, under a hot spotlight, was a third-rate punk comedian getting laughs from one-liners he’d cobbled together by attending everyone else’s routines at every other hotel. As best Lenny could tell, lice didn’t travel in a schoolyard as fast as these jokes were stolen and circulated. Who even made these jokes? Where do most jokes come from? They have to start somewhere. His did. He’d written them. Hadn’t he? He’d heard so many now that he wasn’t even sure.
It was dark offstage, and there was a stool he’d been told to sit on, but he couldn’t sit on the stool because it prevented him from pacing back and forth, and his legs needed to be working. They needed to be moving; he needed to go and go and go because his mouth was going to have to fly; it was going to have to articulate and enunciate and all those other fancy words Miss Simmons used about public speaking that seemed to mean the same thing—speak up!
“One minute,” said some nameless lump next to him.
One minute? One minute was a lifetime. It was ten percent of the act. It was enough time to get or lose an audience. Race car drivers had more time to maneuver than a comedian did.
“Thirty seconds, kid. Look sharp.”
“I’m thinking.”
“You think too much.”
“That’s the least Jewish phrase on earth.”
“Ladies and gentlemen!” said the theater manager. “Next up we got . . . a kid. That’s all I know. He’s a kid. I’m told he’s funny, but only you will know. Let’s welcome Lenny Bernstein from Massachusetts, of all places. Lenny, come on out.”
* * *
Sheldon and Miriam sat together. She held his hand and he couldn’t remember ever feeling this happy. He had been this happy before. He knew that. But his brain couldn’t think of anything but Miriam’s soft hand in his at the moment.
Lenny appeared onstage. Sheldon wondered what an appropriate prayer might be.
* * *
“Hello and good evening, ladies and gentlemen . . . of the jury. I’m here to tell you that a crime’s been committed. It’s true. Right here in front of our noses. They do that, you know. They steal material. I heard one comedian the other day tell the exact same joke as the comedian he heard the night before. He said, ‘This hotel is so swank that a guy dropped a quarter, and when I gave it back to him, he tipped me a dollar.’ I’m not stealing that joke, I’m just telling you a story about a guy who stole that joke. You see the difference.
“Here’s another joke I heard a guy steal, but it’s longer. A Mexican comes across the border on a bicycle with a giant rucksack. The guard says, ‘What’s in the bag?’ The Mexican says, ‘Sand.’ The border guys look. It’s sand. This happens every other day for six months. Rides up with a bag of sand. Nothing there. They let him in. A year later, the border guard meets the Mexican at a café. Says, ‘Look, you were driving us crazy. We know you were smuggling something, but we couldn’t figure out what it was. I won’t arrest you. You got to tell me. What were you smuggling?’ The Mexican says . . . ‘Bicycles.’
“My point here,” Lenny said, as the audience laughed, “is that the longer the story, the harder it is to steal. I did the math. Stories are too long to steal, and I don’t want people using my stuff ! So that’s what I want to do tonight. I want to tell you a story so long that no one can steal it. I encourage you to get comfortable because it starts like this. Once upon a time . . . I was a child.”
The audience giggled and Lenny pointed to a man in the front row.
“You too? You were a child?”
The man nodded. Lenny started to pick out other people in the audience.
“Child? You too. You were a child? Child. Child. Also a child?”
He used his hand like a visor to see deeper into the darkness of the theater. He found a guy way in the back. Lenny squinted. “You were . . . you were two children? [Beat] You were not two children. [Beat] You have two children. Where . . . in the trunk of your car? [Beat] No. Not in the trunk of your car. They’re your children. I see. You have receipts. You got a good price? OK. That’s nice.”
Sheldon and Miriam were sitting at a tiny round table in the upper half of the audience area. People were smoking and drinking and laughing, and Sheldon had to hand it to Lenny. Whatever he was doing up there wasn’t what Henny Youngman or Milton Berle did. He was doing his own thing and people liked it. How it was working, why it was working, Sheldon didn’t understand. That, however, was not the thing on Sheldon’s mind. All this talk of spotlights gave him an idea.
“Those fancy people we saw back at the hotel . . . ,” Sheldon said, trying to get Miriam’s attention. She was smiling up at Lenny in a way Sheldon didn’t like. As though he made her happy. As though he might make her happy forever.
“Miriam!”
“What? He’s funny!”
“Yeah, OK. Listen, those people back at Grossinger’s for the event. Are they staying over? Did they book rooms and stuff?”
“Most of them, yeah. They get l
oaded and stick around. They don’t want to drive all the way back to the city, and the train stops running after midnight. Why?”
There was something about this fact that needled Sheldon. There was a plan in there someplace. “You ever feel like the pieces are all lying around you, but you just can’t figure out how they fit together?”
“No,” she said.
Why would she? Miriam didn’t have problems like Sheldon did.
“Well, anyway, it’s coming together but it’s not there yet.”
“What’s not?”
“The solution.”
“To what?”
“The problem.”
“That’s a bit general, Sheldon.”
“What’s Lenny going on about now?” asked Sheldon, not wanting to share anything specific. It was, after all, a first date.
“Parents. He said he used to have parents too, which was funny, then he did this . . . listen, we’re missing it.”
Lenny was pointing to a beautiful girl in the third row. “Can we have the light on her? Thank you,” he said, as the spotlight shined down. “You, on the other hand, did not have parents. You emerged from a shell out of the Mediterranean Sea fully grown with that long black hair flowing down your torso, your right hand covering your left—ba-boo-bage.
“Listen,” Lenny said, sitting down on the edge of the stage, his feet dangling like a schoolboy’s from a bridge. “I have to ask you,” he said, addressing the young woman and getting personal with the microphone close to his mouth. “Have you considered, for even a moment, the possibility of leaving that guy and spending the rest of your life with me?”
The girl laughed and shook her head furiously.
“You haven’t?” Lenny said, as though absolutely shocked but also delighted. “Oh boy! Do I envy you the daydreams you’re about to have!” Lenny spoke with his entire body. “The two of us walking in Central Park during springtime draped in the latest fashions, the hem of your long summer dress tickling the instep above your sandals as you sip champagne and watch the sun track across the sky—the warm glow of Hollywood glamor accompanying your every glance and gesture. That’s how it would be every waking second. Does that guy make you feel that way? He doesn’t, does he? I know he doesn’t. You know how I know? Because he takes you to places like this. I wouldn’t come here in my free time. I certainly wouldn’t brag about it to a date.”
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 22