“How do they kiss where you come from?”
“I come from France,” I said, and I showed her.
Then she said, “How did I do?”
“Still Main Line. Needs work,” I sighed. “But of course you’ve already decided.”
“That’s right, I’ve made the decision.” Why did I think otherwise? “Don’t look at me like that.”
Actually, I had been staring at her teeth. She could do commercials for toothpaste. Her hair, she could do commercials for shampoos. Her skin, Noxzema should pay her a fortune for a testimonial. Her upper lip, however, on the left side, was slightly but noticeably puffy. That gave her that occasional lisp.
“Benign tumor,” she said.
“Where?”
“The lip. They found a tumor but it was benign. I had it fixed and nothing else went wrong.”
“And I thought you were the perfect...”
“Shiksa?”
“Now why would you say a thing like that?”
“Because it’s one reason we’re so attracted to each other. We’re so different and it’s exciting, the unknown. You’re King David and I’m Dorothy Parker.”
“Maybe Bathsheba,” I said.
“Is shiksa a bad word?”
“Depends how it’s used.”
“If we had met first, I probably would have become your shiksa.”
“You like that word.”
“Shiksa? Yes. I like Jewish words. Like shmatteh and schmuck. You’re a shmatteh.”
“That means rag.”
“It does? What does schmuck mean?”
“Am I a schmuck?”
“Yes, you’re a schmuck. I’m a shiksa and you’re a schmuck.”
“Am I a big schmuck?”
“Yes, you’re a big schmuck.”
“Schmuck means prick.”
“It does not.”
“Does so.”
“You’re awful. The way you lured me in! That’s terrible. I have one word for you.”
“What?”
“Schmuck.”
The dining room of the Algonquin was empty, this late in the afternoon, but all the tables were ready, decked out in white linen. We were seated by a hauteur waiter and ordered a round of apple pie and coffee.
“Where is everybody?” she said
“No Dorothy Parker. No George S. Kaufman. What a disappointment.”
She complained that the pie was cold. She seemed to have run out of good humor. “I think we should take the next train back to Philadelphia,” she said. “I’m ready to go home.”
“Getting ready for that hour?”
“What hour?”
“You said an hour after we go our separate ways you’d forget about me.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember saying that. All right, maybe it will take two hours.”
Then the bill came. An enormous amount.
“We should have gotten an estimate first,” I said.
“Just for pie and coffee?” she said. “I can’t believe the bill.”
I said, “For this kind of money they should throw in a room.”
She said, “All right. Let’s.”
We astonished each other many different ways in that room in the Algonquin, but the highlights--perhaps the greatest moment in the history of mankind--was the beginning, when she stood there, boldly upright, so firm and so soft, so blonde and so white, and staring me in the face, she stepped out of her panties.
* * *
“I thought you couldn’t sleep here,” she now said on the beach in Atlantic City.
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
Chapter 6
JOAN WAS GETTING spiffed up in a shapely all-white evening dress. Dinner was at six and it was late. She seldom spent much time fussing about herself, it was all there to begin with, but today was special. She had discovered a wrinkle under her right eye, nothing there really but she kept staring at it until I told her the flaw was in the mirror not her face.
She chuckled and said, “You don’t know how right you are. Some mirrors are so unflattering.” She was putting on lipstick and said, “Some mirrors make you look so good. Like our mirror at home. This one’s exacting and cruel. I’m getting old, Josh.”
“Fortunately you’re not the only one.”
For some reason she stepped up and kissed me. She smelled nice and fresh and young. She was in high spirits.
Just as I was tying my tie she said, “You’re wearing that?”
“Why do women always wait until you’re dressed before telling you what you shouldn’t wear?”
“Because we’re bad. We’re all bad. We do everything we can to make life miserable for you guys. Don’t you know that?”
“Of course I know that.”
“Now take off that tie and take off that shirt. Here.”
So I changed because in this department she was the boss and she said, “That’s more like it. Now you’re handsome. Guess I never told you I married you strictly for your looks. I took one look at you and I said, that’s him.”
“Aha.”
“I did. Isn’t it funny? I mean attraction. We don’t really know what it is. It’s such a mystery what makes two people fall in love--nothing to do with logic or reason.”
“You once said it’s all chemistry.”
“Well it is,” she said as she hooked on the necklace with the diamond drop and measured the distance between that and her cleavage, if it could be called that. She wasn’t large there, only perfect, her breasts the perfect size for loving, and there were no nipples livelier than hers, so firm, long and erect when aroused. “But it’s more than chemistry,” she said. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Right before that time in New York, about two weeks earlier, I had a dream. I don’t remember what it was all about except that I saw you in that dream. Your face--it came in so clear. I saw your face, Josh, and I hadn’t even met you. Spooky?”
“What about what’s-his-name?”
“He was a tryout. You’re the real thing. You’re Broadway.”
I said, “Will we always be this mushy?”
“Oh yes. I will. I’ll always be mushy about you. Sometimes I just want to swallow you up. I’m not talking sexually, although maybe that’s the expression of it, you know, when I do that to you. But it’s something else. Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”
I was reclining on the bed ready to go as she was finishing up in front of the mirror here in our cozy room in the Galaxy. I was feeling apprehensive and sluggish, and I wished, as I sometimes did, that everyone but Joan would go away. Sometimes she said the same thing--“If only there’d be just the two of us. No other women, especially. I resent other women.”
Who needs all the rest of the people in the world? The two of us would be enough.
“Getting late,” I said.
“I’m ready,” she said--which meant at least ten more minutes.
“How come a ponytail?”
“Because my hair’s too long. What’s wrong?”
“No, you look great. It’s fine.”
“I must get my hair cut when we get back to Philadelphia.”
“You had to mention that word?”
“You’re sure it’s all right?”
“Women always worry about their hair. As if there were nothing else in the world.”
“Here we go.”
“It’s true. On the subway that’s all women talk about, their hair. Never politics or even sports. In the office, too, they all go around saying, ‘Love your hair, Sue.’ Why are all the girls in the office called Sue?”
“You’re such a sexist.”
“I know. Isn’t it wonderful?”
She threw something at me.
“Missed by a mile. Just like a woman.”
* * *
Ibrahim was waiting for us in the lobby and he was also wearing white, just like Joan. Few men could get aw
ay with that, wearing an all-white suit, but he did and he looked stunning in it. His grin was so wide during the introductions that it seemed he had a thousand teeth.
“This is Joan,” I said. “My wife.”
He took her hand and bowed and she curtsied and people began to watch.
“This is Riva,” he said.
I said, “Hello, Riva,” and she said nothing and I thought maybe I had insulted her.
“We have reservations at Il Verdi’s in the Tropicana,” Ibrahim said. “I hope that’s agreeable.”
“Oh that sounds wonderful,” said Joan.
We had dined there once before, when I had won that three hundred dollars.
“So what are we waiting for?” I said.
“Yes, let’s go,” said Ibrahim. The restaurant was only a few blocks up the Boardwalk. We walked hurriedly as if the Trop were a train and we were rushing to catch it before it left. Il Verdi’s was dark and candlelit. The women at the tables seemed glamorous, but none were like Joan; and none of the men were like Ibrahim.
We got seated in the best booth and Ibrahim ordered the wine.
He asked if I had a cellar.
I said yes I did.
He talked about the winery he owned in France and I could not follow this too closely, all this talk of wine. He kept tossing out names and vintages. He knew all the good years and all the bad years and I did too, though I did not measure them by wine. He was not shy about his wealth, he was quite boastful in fact, but it suited that expansive personality.
He said, “Wine is one of the few things that improves with age. Wine and beautiful women.”
I thought he’d raise his glass to Joan, but he didn’t.
Anyway, we had all heard that line before and it was somewhat uncomfortable here in the beginning. All of it superficially upbeat. There were lapses in conversation. There was the feeling, at least my feeling, that Ibrahim was working, like an insurance salesman with a pitch to make. Everything he said, even the small talk, and everything he didn’t say seemed to be leading to something. He was trying to make an impression and I had thought that burden would be on me.
When he was silent he seemed content to just sit and dominate, his tremendous physique and powerful head towering over the rest of us. His dark eyes, so theatrical, did his talking for him. Now and then they landed on Joan. When they did she turned away. But sometimes she stared back.
When he spoke he confirmed my worst fears about this meeting. Never mind wineries, he owned buildings and ranches and stables of Arabian horses and cars and airplanes. He talked about all these, even about an island he half-owned. I wondered if I should mention my thirteen-year-old Malibu, which I owned outright.
“Life is good,” he said. “We must remember that when we’re sad.”
Joan wasn’t sad. She was as luminous as ever and kept shooting me happy glances. We both understood that this was another experience for our collective memory vault. These experiences we did own as nobody else, and for that we were wealthy beyond wineries and airplanes.
Now she said, “Is it true you’re a prince?”
Her attempt to be casual failed because there was no way to ask this question and not come across as schoolgirl innocent at least, and at most downright star-struck.
But he saved her, saying, “We’re all princes where I come from. Aren’t they all princesses where you come from?”
She blushed and said, “Where is this place you come from, where you’re all princes?”
“Somewhere in the Middle East.”
“Oh. Am I being too forward? I happen to be a very curious person. I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t be.” He turned to me. “But does it really matter where a person is from?”
“It does tell you half his story,” I said.
“Yes, and I understand you also have a story, Joshua Kane. You were in Sinai, weren’t you?”
“Yes--and I’m getting the feeling you know more about me than...”
“Don’t trouble yourself about what I know, Joshua Kane, but tell me this--is it true about Dayan? They tell me he picked a spot where the Egyptian bombing was heaviest--stretched out and went to sleep. Bombs crashing all around and he slept. Can this be true?”
“Yes.”
Ibrahim shook his head. “What a man he was. What a people you are. But I also come from a people. We trace back to the Amalekites, an ancient race and fearless.”
“Also brutal. Good people for keeping a grudge.”
The Amalekites were not my kind of folks. An ancient people, all right. They had menaced the Hebrews at every turn. They were the sons of Esau-the-Redneck then, and they were the sons of Esau even today. Saul lost his kingship when he discarded the order to kill their king on account of that Hebrew failing, compassion.
At my rebuke Joan winced.
She knew I was long on patience, but not too long. She feared my dark side, as when a carload of white trash hassled us on the road and I let them race me over to the side and then proceeded to do what I had to do. She was impressed but unhappy. She said, “That look on your face! I never thought you could have that kind of look, and do such things.” I said I had no choice. It was them or us. She understood, but she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand this either.
I used to tell her the whole world wasn’t Bryn Mawr. She said neither was it Auschwitz.
Ibrahim now gave Joan a soft and tender gaze, and for me he had these slow, well-chosen words: “I keep no grudges, Mr. Kane. Only promises.”
I felt myself gulp.
“Oh, and are you making a promise?”
“Perhaps.”
“And what is this promise?”
He said, “Let that wait, Mr. Kane. That can wait.”
Just in time to save a bad and worsening situation came Sy Rodrigo, PR man for the Galaxy and my buddy, going back to the days when I was writing a newspaper column and he was a press agent for a Philadelphia nightclub.
“Hey!” he said, giving it that showbiz flair and making a production of being astonished at seeing us here.
“Hey!” I said, and introduced him to Ibrahim and Riva, who really wasn’t here or anywhere.
Sy was with a lady. He was in his mid-fifties, a man with a terrible complexion, the remnant of adolescent acne. Yet women were never a problem for Sy. He had already gone through two wives and had lived a life, mostly as publicist for entertainers, boxers, wrestlers, strippers and even big-time hoods, who paid him to keep their names out of the papers.
“What are you guys doing here?” he said. “I thought you belonged in my place.”
“I could ask the same question, Sy.”
“Me? Just checking out the competition. It’s my job.”
“Tough job.”
“Yeah, but it’s a living. How are you doing, Josh?”
“All right. You?”
“Super.”
“We’re here as guests of Mr. Hassan.”
“So I notice.”
Sy noticed everything, and I never knew how to feel about the man. Sy was not a good person and Sy was not a bad person. Sy was Sy, promoter and opportunist with a sincere streak, but you could never be quite sure when it was sincere.
Everybody knew him and he knew everybody. PR was his business, people his product. He knew Philadelphia inside-out, Atlantic City upside-down. Even in New York he was no stranger.
He liked to brag that he could pick up a phone and get anybody, even the president.
He had no friends. He had pals.
In his business, favors--not money--were the medium of exchange. You do me, I’ll do you. Give me a mention in your column and I’ll get you an interview with Frank.
He said, “We could use your patronage at the Galaxy, Mr. Hassan. We’re doing wonderful things.”
“Ah yes,” said Ibrahim.
“Give us a try.”
Of course he meant the gaming tables.
I came to Ibrahim’s rescue.
“Always workin
g. Isn’t that right, Sy.”
“That’s what it’s all about.”
His favorite line--that’s what it’s all about.
He said, “Got to run. Our table’s ready. Stop up and say hello, Josh.”
“Will do.”
“Super.”
I had the feeling, and this came to me after Sy left, that Ibrahim and Sy did not have to be introduced. They knew one another. Nothing specific that I could point to. Just a feeling, and it did not have to mean anything, of course. Knowing the high-rollers, as Sy would say--that’s what it’s all about.
Now we were having our coffee and it was that part of the meal with strangers when you wonder if you’ll ever be seeing them again--exactly how much of a fool have you made of yourself?
Ibrahim, since that timely intrusion from Sy, was back to being pleasant and talkative, and Joan was high, too.
“Do you gamble?” he asked her.
“No.” Hair had fallen over her right eye and she gazed at him from profile and smiled.
“But of course you do,” he said. “When you drive you gamble that every other motorist is sober. When you walk you gamble that you won’t be mugged or attacked by a rabid dog. When you eat you gamble that your food is not poisoned. When you breathe you gamble that the air is not full of toxin. When you send your husband off to work you gamble that he won’t be with another woman. A thousand times a day you gamble. Everything you do is a gamble. So what is it to put money on a horse or on cards? It’s like anything else.”
Joan was charmed. She said, “You’re a persuasive man.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve just turned me into a compulsive gambler. Just like that!”
Ibrahim tossed his head back in laughter. Not that Joan had said anything so funny. No, he was merely expressing the delight of a man utterly satisfied with himself. There was a tone of contemptuousness in the laughter as well, the punishing sound of a winner, a winner in a world of losers.
In fact, watching him now abandon himself so freely to mirth, so mighty his laughter...I could not help but think, as if for the first time, that this was a world of losers, all of us losers, and here was a winner. Here was a winner.
“I may be compulsive myself,” he said. “I gamble for everything. Even for love.”
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