Women--women like Joan--did not understand the urge. Why just beyond this beach was the real action, the casino. Blackjack tables, row after row, waiting.
What a waste, what a crime, what a sin to detain these green-felted high places of destiny. Money was waiting to be won. Suppose--and here the urge reached fever dimensions--suppose you were fated for an incredible run but weren’t there! You were on the beach.
So I went and I played for about fifteen minutes. That was all I needed to get up sixty-five dollars.
But then I played for five more minutes.
Chapter 5
JOAN WAS WHERE I left her.
“Back so soon?”
“I didn’t want to win too much. I’m setting them up.”
“Huh!” she laughed.
“Remember that time I won three hundred dollars? What happened to those days?”
“Maybe it’s time for a new hobby,” she said.
“Like stamp collecting,” I agreed.
“Has it occurred to you that you may never get rich at the casinos?”
“No, it hasn’t.”
“They’re not here to make you rich, Josh. They’re in business to make themselves rich.”
“So how are we supposed to make it, Joan, if not by my gambling? Certainly not by my working.”
“You’ll make it, Josh. I know you will. You’ll make it on your talent.”
“My talent is gambling.”
“Oh.”
Now I sat down beside her and we were silent for a while. Then I said, “Haven’t you had enough sun?”
“I feel so good,” she said. “I wish we could stay here all summer.”
We were lucky to have a week--and in less than three days even that would be over and back in Philadelphia we’d resume real life. The Galaxy’s public relations man, Sy Rodrigo, was a friend from my newspapering days and he had gotten us the room here for half price.
“You’re tanned enough.”
“Soon.”
“I don’t like my women well done.”
“Like them rare, huh?”
“Tender.”
She was listening to the waves or whatever it is women listen to when they crawl into themselves.
“I never want to die,” she said.
“I’ve thought about that,” I said.
Her eyes were suddenly red and puffy.
“Hard to imagine,” she said. “I mean all these people on the beach, one day they’ll all be dead. Even the kids.”
“Wow. Are you that unhappy?”
“No, I’m happy. That’s why I’m so sad.”
“You’re happy.”
“Very happy. Really, I am.”
Why I wondered, is she happy?
I said, “He’s a handsome guy, this guy.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“To tell the truth, I could be jealous.”
“I’m always jealous.”
“About me?”
“I see how they look at you.”
“I don’t.”
“I do.”
“You should see how they look at him. That lady next to me, before I went over, she kept saying how handsome and glorious he was. She was having multiple orgasms out there on the casino floor.”
“Ha!” she laughed, her voice rising and hitting that note of delight that was patently hers.
“I’m not kidding.”
She was face up, eyelids set tight against the sun.
“I think jealousy is good,” she said.
“You think everything is good.”
“You’re only happy when you’re sad.”
“Then I know where things are coming from.”
She turned over. “Rub my back.”
I did and my bathing trunks started getting too tight.
“Stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?”
“You know what. You’re bad. You’re such a bad boy. What was it like?”
“Where?”
“When you were in the desert. Is this what you dreamed about? Is this what men dream about?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill anybody? You’ll never tell me, will you?”
“Certain things a man never tells a woman.”
“Certain things a woman never tells a man.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Uh-uh. You first.”
“If I tell, you’ll tell?”
“Maybe. Is it true men get erections when they’re in combat?”
“What kind of Main Line crap is that?”
“It’s what they say.”
“Bullshit.”
“All right. Well I’m not telling.”
“Telling what?”
“My secrets. Guess I’ll take my secrets to the grave.”
“Main Line women don’t go to a grave. They go to a party.”
“You don’t know a thing about Main Line women.”
“Never will, either.”
“Shut up and keep rubbing.”
“Your turn.”
“Later.”
“Aha.”
“Filthy mind.”
“Why is it good?”
“What?”
“Jealousy.”
“Because.”
“A woman of mystery,” I said. “That’s you.”
“I’m glad you’re a war hero.”
“I thought you hated war.”
“I do. But I like heroes. I feel you can protect me from anything.”
“I don’t know about anything, Joan.”
“I’ll deny I ever said it, but a woman likes to feel protected by a man.”
“This could cost you your membership.”
“Tell me what a man wants.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know. It’s not simple.”
“Well for example, what do you want from me?”
“Everything, I guess.”
“Everything? That’s what men want from women?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re a big help.”
“I never do well in surveys.”
“Let’s never be jealous.”
“I’m game.”
She turned up.
“Let’s always be happy,” she declared.
“It’s up for grabs?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“You just decide, that’s all.”
“Really.”
“People make that choice,” she said, “right at the beginning of their lives. They make the choice.”
“Sometimes the choice makes them. Things happen.”
“Not if you don’t want them to.”
“Joan.”
“It’s a choice.”
“All right.”
“When you get up in the morning you decide to be happy or sad. Everybody does that, consciously or not.”
“Suppose you decide to be happy but they’re waiting for you?” I said.
“Who?”
“I guess you wouldn’t know.”
“You would.”
“Not even talking about myself.”
“Sounds ominous. They’re waiting for you!”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Well I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do.”
“All right, let’s just say I don’t want to know. Not today. I’ve decided to be happy.”
She rolled over and showed that lovely Main Line posterior. In their bikinis women are so simplified, one of this, one of that, two of those, and sometimes you wonder what all the commotion is about. I gave her tush a light spank.
“We never tried that,” she said. “I mean S and M.”
“How do you know about S and M?”
“Oh, I read.”
“Where did you read about S and M?”
“The Bible. Why are religious people not better than others?”
&nb
sp; “They’re usually worse.”
“I know,” she said. “Strange. They should be better.”
“People are people.”
“You’d think they’d be better, knowing all those commandments. Remember that rabbi?”
“Remember that priest?”
“He wasn’t a priest,” she said.
“All right.”
“He wasn’t Catholic.”
“Fine.”
“It’s not all the same. You think it’s all the same. Talk about naïve.”
“He was a man of the cloth, man of the Bible.”
“I don’t think we need the Bible,” she said.
“There’d be chaos.”
“People would know the rules.”
“Even with the rules people don’t know the rules. Look what’s going on.”
“What’s going on?” she said.
“Joan.”
“All right, I know what’s going on. I don’t want to know what’s going on.”
“Good for you.”
“We’ve been through this before,” she said. “This isn’t beach talk. Good night.”
I stretched out on the towel and shut my eyes and tried to do what people did.
“I can never sleep on the beach,” I said.
“Relax.”
“That’s the point. I can’t relax.”
“Hmmm,” she cooed. “This is heaven.”
“Ninety degrees is closer to that other place. How can you sleep under this sun?”
“I can’t. Not with you yapping.”
“Time to go in,” I said.
“No. I know what you’re thinking.”
Wasn’t that exactly how it had all begun?
* * *
When we first met she was the lone female among twenty of us gathered on the fifty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building for a meeting on business ethics sponsored by my company.
She was very beautiful and very professional. She wore a blue business suit that concealed everything but her tapered American legs, and when I thought of her legs, as we sat around a big table talking ethics, she pushed the hem of her skirt over her knees. I knew we were communicating, not necessarily about ethics.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said during coffee break.
Alarmed, I said, “What?”
“It’s all a joke to you.”
“And you? Are we really talking ethics or how to put it over?”
“I think these people are sincere, yes,” she said.
“I’m not sure they’re even people. They’re corpies.”
“Corpies,” she said. “Your word?”
“Yes.”
“And corporate people aren’t people.”
“They’re corporate people. Corpies.”
“And what are you?” she asked.
“I’m a corpie, too.”
“Am I a corpie?”
“Look at you,” I said. “Business suit. Even a tie. Briefcase instead of a purse. That tight smile.”
But it really wasn’t tight at all, that smile. Instead it was like something blossoming.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me more.”
Wait a minute, I thought. This is flirting.
“You’re a corpie,” I said. “At least on the outside.”
“Oh,” she whispered, “you know what’s inside?”
“I see right through you, too.”
“Huh!” She brushed by, shoulders rising and expanding. I liked those wide shoulders, so typical of the rich and the spoiled. I measured the lady as strong-willed, quick-minded, sort of happily married. Missing something, though. There was something missing in her life. The laugh was the giveaway. There was a cry in it.
When the meeting was over everybody shook hands and said, “Good meeting.” I met her at the elevator--we just happened to be there together after everybody else had gone--and she said, “Good meeting.” I said, “Never say good meeting.”
“Why not?”
“It’s so eighties.”
“So corpie, would you say?”
“Men and women used to ask each other different questions.”
“Oh. Like what?”
“Did you come?”
“You mean sexually.”
“Now they say, did you have a good meeting?”
“Not sexually, I see. Well that’s your problem.”
“Problem?”
“Women mean sex to you. Yes, that’s a problem. Where have you been?”
“In all the wrong places, that’s for sure.”
“You’re a very old-fashioned person,” she said. “I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m not saying it’s good, either. But it is you.”
“And you see right through me,” I said.
“I’m beginning to.”
“Good or bad?”
“I just told you. I don’t know. But interesting.”
“Did you have a good meeting?”
“Yes,” she laughed. “Did you?”
“Would you care to take a ride to the top? I understand on a clear day you can see Camden, New Jersey.”
We saw New York too and it was windy up there atop the Empire State Building. She used four fingers to brush the hair off my forehead and finally asked me about the cane I’d been carrying.
“Left knee,” I said. “The war, you know.”
“Can’t they operate?”
“Don’t want them to. Only acts up once a year for a couple of weeks.”
“I’d get it fixed.”
I had to explain that there always had to be something wrong with you and if you fixed what was wrong something else was sure to go wrong that was even worse.
“Superstitious!” she said. “Good God!”
“I am not superstitious. It’s bad luck.”
She said, “I admit there’s something about it, that cane. Romantic? It did help me to notice you.”
“I needed no such help.”
We took a cab to Greenwich Village and I showed her Bleecker Street and recreated it for her as it had been in the sixties. I showed her the Bitter End where I had been a doorman and where at night a generation came to life. I mentioned the names Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary.
We walked up to the front of the place and she said, “It’s a bar now.”
“Yes,” I said.
She said, “Let’s go back uptown. Let’s go to the Algonquin Hotel for something to eat. I’ve always wanted to pretend I’m Dorothy Parker. People were so smart and witty then.”
We agreed that some people, maybe most, whether through reincarnation or not, yearned to be cast in another generation. “You definitely are not eighties,” she said. “Let’s see. I say you belong...”
“I go back to the time of King David.”
“I thought so. He’s your hero.”
“Lover, poet, warrior, sinner, king, yes, he’s my man.”
“Which of those are you?” she asked.
“One--but I don’t know which one.”
She laughed. “I’ll take the poet.”
I said, “What makes him my hero, above everything else, is that tremendous faith he had. I have moments but can’t seem to master that, this powerful faith. That, plus--he was so vulnerable. His great frustration was that God wouldn’t talk to him, as He had talked to the prophets beginning with Abraham. So, instead, he talked to God. That’s how we got the Psalms.”
“You actually read the Psalms?” she said.
“What else is there to read?”
“The Catcher in the Rye.”
“Your book?”
“Yes,” she said. “I wrote that book.”
“Does J. D. Salinger know this?”
“That’s the secret. Everybody who reads it thinks she wrote the book.”
“I guess I get that feeling sometimes when I hear Beethoven. You become Beethoven. She, did you say?”
“Don’t be like that,” she said.
“But Holden Caulfie
ld is a boy.”
“He’s whatever you want him to be. To me he’s a girl.”
We discussed other great books and the duds they may have been had the titles been rearranged. I offered Peace and War but she triumphed with The Karamasov Brothers.
“Maybe you’re not such a corpie after all,” I said.
She squeezed my hand and said, “Joshua, I’m a happily married woman. I’ve only had one affair and that was ages ago. I was getting even with my husband for a night he admitted he had been with a whore out of town. We weren’t getting along. We’re getting along fine now and I don’t need anything else. I mean things are fine the way they are. I’m a very busy person and don’t have time for getting involved. I like you. You’re nice. You’re different. You’re provocative. You’re interesting. But...”
I said nothing, watching Manhattan instead.
“Yes,” she said, “I’m attracted to you. I think you know that. We both know something happened. We’re not children. But it’s all chemistry, nothing but chemistry, and I’ll be over it an hour after we go our separate ways. I’ve been tempted before and I’ll be tempted again. That’s life. But nothing will happen. I’ve made the decision.”
I wasn’t sure, but she seemed to be sobbing. Her eyes got swelled up.
“I cry easily,” she said. Then she said, “That’s not true. I haven’t cried in years.”
“Sorry if I make you unhappy.”
She smacked my face gently. “Don’t be so arrogant.”
“Arrogant?”
“Yes, arrogant. You know it’s the opposite. There is a feeling...and I do love the feeling.”
“But it’s all chemistry,” I said.
“Molecules and stuff.”
“Nothing will happen.”
“Nothing,” she said. “That’s a guarantee.”
“Money back.”
“Money back.”
“What about my feelings?”
“You have no feelings. You’re a man.”
“Good point.”
“All right. Are you saying you’re attracted to me? I mean in a very special way?”
“Well I’ve got this feeling that says I need you.”
“Oh never, never need me. Bad word.”
I said, “Don’t you ever need anyone?”
“Never.”
She leaned over and kissed my cheek.
“Is that a Main Line kiss?” I said.
“How did you know I was from the Main Line?”
“I just told you. That kiss.”
“It says Main Line?”
“Oh sure. So gentile.”
Indecent Proposal Page 5