Indecent Proposal

by Jack Engelhard

  “Huh!” said Joan, shifting in her seat and trying to thwart his steady gaze.

  He said, “With money, you know, everything is possible.”

  “No, that’s not true,” she said.

  “Everything.”

  “Not true.”

  “Everything can be bought. Everything and everybody.”

  “Oh,” said Joan, overly casual and nonchalant. “I suppose people can be bought?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you bought people?”

  “For business, yes.”

  “For love?” she asked.

  He gave this some thought. “Not yet.”

  “So there,” said Joan. “You can’t buy love.”

  “Oh, for the right price...”

  “There is no price...love is...”

  He held up his royal hand. “Please! I know what love is. I also know what money is.”

  He was being so candid that he even said something dangerously profound, that he had heard all the songs about love but if people were really honest they’d write more songs about money.

  Said Joan, “What a pity.”

  “Pity?” he said.

  “That you have to buy your way through life.”

  He laughed that big laugh.

  “Touché. But you’re wrong. It’s called testing the limits. Women have a tough time understanding this.”

  Good and provoked, she snapped, “You’d be surprised what women understand.”

  “I certainly would be. Women lack...daring.”

  “Oh God!”

  “Yes, yes. Women lack daring. They’re...predictable.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I think...I think predictable can be bad, yes. But it can also be good. It depends. It depends on circumstances. It depends on the moment. Some moments, what’s usually wrong might be right. Depends on what your feelings say.”

  He slapped the table and roared, “Then perhaps you are a daring woman!”

  “Perhaps I am,” she said coyly. “Perhaps I’m not.”

  I thought it so strange, how throughout all this Ibrahim kept ignoring his wife. This Riva, was she really alive? She refused to talk. So be it. Then again, Joan had done a fine job of excluding me, too.

  Now Joan sensed this and said something about her husband the speechwriter. This prompted Ibrahim to say, “Just as you can’t go to the bathroom for another man, so you can’t write his speeches. But I am writing a book, Joshua Kane. Maybe you can help me.”

  I said everybody is writing a book.

  “No,” he said. “I’m serious.”

  I repeated that I only wrote speeches.

  He said, “But when you started out, surely you intended to be a real writer.”

  This was unnecessary, especially in the presence of Joan.

  She made a tactical blunder. She rushed to my defense. “Joshua,” she said, “is the best at what he does.”

  Next time people defend me like this, I thought, I must remember to duck.

  “I’m sure he is,” Ibrahim said slowly.

  “What’s the book?” I said.

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “I thought so, too,” I said.

  He already had the title. The Perfect Revenge. “Everybody has a story about getting even. We all want to get even with somebody--and some of us do. It can be quite fascinating. I want to put the best of these stories in a book. What do you think?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I mean these would have to be real stories about real people. You could do the research and even the writing, under my name, or we could use both our names. We should talk about this.”

  “But not now.”

  “I’m sure the book would get published,” he said. “I own a publishing house.”

  We all laughed.

  “In fact,” he said, “that might be the first story. The man who owned the publishing company turned down another book I submitted. So I bought the company and fired the man. That’s what I mean by revenge, Joshua Kane. His name was Cohen. That’s what I mean by the perfect revenge.”

  I refused to return the look Joan gave me.

  Ibrahim now said he had Jewish friends. Had even studied judo and karate under the famous Marcus Rosen. He modestly admitted to being a black belt, but only first Dan. Joan piped in that I had a brown belt, in Krav Maga.

  “You studied with Avri Ben Ish?” Ibrahim asked.

  “For a time,” I said. “In Pardes Chana.”

  “I’ve been there,” he said. “I even met Imi in Natanya. You know him?”

  “Yes, the father of Krav Maga. So you know Krav Maga, Mr. Hassan?”

  “No,” he said, “but they tell me it’s the best system for hand-to-hand. After all, if the Israelis use it, it must be good. I’m always ready to learn. Maybe you can give me lessons.”

  “Or do you want to give me lessons, Mr. Hassan?”

  “There’s a boxing ring here we can use--if you like.”

  “You’re challenging me?”

  “I see you’re not interested. Maybe some other time.”

  It occurred to me that I was already in a fight and that I was losing, but that was my style, in the beginning. I liked to be underestimated, the underdog, even the scapegoat.

  Frankly, unlike the Boy Scouts, I was never prepared. When I came under attack my first reaction was that the other person was only kidding. I always thought people were kidding. When I found out they weren’t my question was… What have I done?

  Usually, so far as I could tell, nothing.

  But hang around long enough and you’re bound to have done something to somebody.

  This Ibrahim, I thought, is he kidding?

  He said, “I did learn one classic Krav Maga hold. I wonder if I might show it to you.”

  He asked me if I knew the Cavalier, and of course I knew the Cavalier: grab hand and apply pressure to wrist to manipulate joint beyond normal range and motion.

  In other words, terrific pain.

  I had studied it in Pardes Chana and practiced it in Philadelphia under the second Dan black belt Alan Feldman, who had received it from Imi. Never failed to bring a man down, this hold. A grasp really, both hands of the attacker clasped together by the fingers, the defender’s hand helplessly in between and one quick snap and it was over, broken wrist.

  Or, it could be done slowly if your intention was merely to inflict pain and watch a man sink to his knees and beg.

  I saw Ibrahim reach for my left hand. I could have blocked him before he so much as touched me. Even once he held me I could have slipped out, in the early stages of the hold, by one of six releases.

  But no, I let him. This was all in fun, after all.

  Though I was surprised...here, all this in public, out in the open.

  So I let him grab me and as he did something changed in his eyes and his mouth went wide, showing at once the teeth of a smile and grimace. A voice told me that I had made a mistake. We all make a mistake a day.

  “I wish this weren’t necessary,” said Joan sternly and reprovingly. Her voice held a measure of fright and a hint of disgust and a dash of despair for all humanity. “This is stupid,” she said, meaning the two of us, even though I had consented to play victim.

  As to why I had--good question. Strange generation, this generation that I belonged to, that in a single lifetime had seen both the dream of Hitler and the dream of Herzl come true, and only about half a decade apart.

  Bound to create hybrids of men, men still unsure of whom to follow, Akiba or Bar Kochba.

  But there was a choice, finally, and for now I had chosen this.

  So he locked my hand between his “69” shaped palms in perfect Cavalier form, and went to work. Slowly at first, but my ears were already beginning to ring. Then he began twisting, clockwise from one o’clock to two to three to four to five to six to seven, my wrist going one way, my palm the other, violating the delicate balan
ce of the human anatomy.

  Forget pain. I was already up to grief.

  “Stop it!” Joan said, unaware that we were gone, departed from her world. Into our own place of sands and tents and camels and wadis and nomads and weeping women.

  Riva sat there impassively.

  Ibrahim picked up more power from the leverage of his body, inclining me ever more downward.

  His fingers now were flaming tongs and all right, I thought, he knows the hold, and it’s time to say so, except this: they are watching from the hills of Hermon to the springs of En-Gedi.

  So I let him take me to eight o’clock and even nine and then, then I tapped my leg, the signal among gentlemen and martial artists that the limit of pain had been achieved--I tapped my leg and instead he took me to ten.

  “Hey!” I said, my face down down and sweat pouring from my entire body. The heat!

  Again I tapped my leg and he was laughing and took me to eleven.

  “Stop it!” said Joan.

  He notched me up to twelve and now...now it was unbearable.

  I tapped my leg, again and again, and soon there’d be no strength even for that anymore.

  “Enough!” said Joan. “Enough!”

  Riva--I thought this might be the time for her to wake up and say something. I looked at her and she even looked back, but with absolutely no expression. I wasn’t here for her. I now realized this: No man or woman existed for her except Ibrahim. He was more than perfection in her eyes. He was creation.

  “Am I doing it right?” he said.

  “Enough!” said Joan.

  “Am I doing it right?”

  “Enough!”

  “Just tell me if I’m doing it right.”

  But I couldn’t mouth the words.

  “For God’s sake, you’re doing it right,” said Joan.

  Now he offered the release and just like that we all began to laugh. I was all right. Excellent.

  “Good?” said Ibrahim.

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “Your Imi would be proud?”

  Not of me, I thought. Not of me.

  Then again, maybe yes. I remembered Imi that day in Natanya by the sea, sharing cheesecake with him at the Ugati around a Parisian-style outdoor table. He was lecturing us on the essence of serenity. He straightened himself erect in his chair, cast his eyes far off into the depths of the Mediterranean, held his fists tucked to his waist, and said, “While everyone around you is jumping and hopping and doing this and doing that...you...you sit. You sit. You make your place not here, but there, away. You sit. Like this. Like this. You see? Like this.”

  So now I sat there like this but said to myself, Remember Amalek. Do not forget.

  Chapter 7

  WE LEFT IBRAHIM and Riva behind for a husband-and-wife stroll on the Boardwalk. Ibrahim had invited us to join him in the casino but I was not in the mood and neither was Joan. Joan had turned peevish. Something had happened. As for me, too much sun in the morning and Ibrahim at night.

  The heavens were lit and to our right, as we walked, the ocean was splendid in its everlasting murmur. To our left we passed Fun Spot Arcade, Ice Cream Parlor, Jackpot Souvenir Shop, Pier 21 T-Shirt Factory, Reader and Advisor and A. L. Roth’s candy and nut shop, all anachronisms against the gambling strongholds of Bally’s Grand, the Versailles, Tropicana, the Galaxy, Atlantis, Trump Plaza, Caesar’s, Bally’s Park Place, the Claridge, the Sands, all the way to Resorts and Showboat.

  In the old days the six-mile Boardwalk had been an esplanade second only to the ocean as a resort feature. The rich and the weekend rich used to parade in their finery. Now the casinos were everything, and the people who played in them stayed in them, and the Boardwalk was left largely to the dregs who washed up from the interior and from the bus depot on Arctic Avenue.

  Right here in what Boardwalk veterans remembered as Chelsea, here along the railing, the leisure class sat in their parked rolling chairs, the men fat and bald and smoking cigars, and the women clothed in mink stoles, munching polly seeds and spitting the shells all over the wooden planks.

  People danced in those days and wore evening gowns and ate at Sid Hartfield’s or Kent’s, and they stayed at the Ambassador, the Marlboro-Blenheim, the Brighton, the Breakers.

  Even the language was different. The word wasn’t glitzy. It was ritzy.

  The place we were passing, Ocean One, a spreading shopping mall built over the waters, had once been Million Dollar Pier, where people danced to the music of Eddie Morgan.

  But I still loved it here, everything about the place.

  “Did you have a nice time?” I asked Joan after some silence.

  She did not answer--so meditative.

  “I purposely made it simple. Yes you did, no you didn’t. Yes or no.”

  Still nothing.

  “All right. Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

  “He propositioned me,” she said.

  I stopped dead. She kept walking. I rushed up.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How?”

  “He asked me to go to bed with him. That’s how.”

  “When?”

  “While you were talking to Sy.”

  “But that was only a second.”

  “That’s all it takes.”

  “What did you say?”

  Now she stopped.

  “What do you think I said?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I would hope...”

  Her right hand came flashing and caught me on the left side of my face. Then she ran off and I followed slowly behind. I lost sight of her when she turned to the doors of the Galaxy. I got there a few minutes later, took the elevator up, and she was in the shower when I walked in. Yes, she needed a shower.

  I sat down on the bed. I felt nothing, a calm to cover fright.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when she come out.

  “So am I.”

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “Not as much as I hurt you. Forgive me.”

  “Let’s just choose our friends more carefully from now on.”

  “He’s no friend of mine,” I said.

  “He actually expects me to be at his suite tomorrow at six.”

  “I’ll be there instead.”

  “No you won’t. It’s over.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Josh, a man propositioned me. I feel cheap and filthy--but nothing happened. Don’t complicate things.”

  “Something smells,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve got to find out.”

  “We have to remember that this is a very wealthy man. His values are not our values.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “Josh...”

  “I have to know.”

  “He said, ‘Let’s make love. My place tomorrow at six.’ Okay?”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You mean you were thinking?”

  “No, I was trying to make a joke of it, think of something funny to say.”

  “So what did you say?”

  “I said no. Of course I said no. Josh, if I didn’t love you so much I’d hate you right now.”

  “I hate myself. I got you into this.”

  “Okay, so now I’m out.”

  I got up and held her close and firm. So often that embrace resolved our conflicts. This time we both stepped back empty. She was not even crying; she was too disgusted or too something to cry.

  Now wait a minute, I thought. No one’s been raped or anything. A man made a play for my wife. Right under my nose. Disgusting, yes, but not tragic, and certainly not irreversible. Nothing happened, as Joan said.

  But maybe something did happen.

  “Were you tempted?” I asked.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Are you tempted now?”

  “Josh--why are you doi
ng this?”

  “I feel jealous as hell.”

  “About what?”

  “That he’s got you wondering.”

  “I am not wondering. Leave it alone, Josh. It’s getting dangerous.”

  How deftly he had moved. I had not even noticed him talking to Joan while I had been talking to Sy. How long had this been in the works anyway? From the time he first saw her in the lobby this evening, or gradually over dinner?

  Then again, was this the first time he had seen her? Maybe he’d seen her before. Strange, I thought, how Sy just happened to pop in. No, Sy had nothing to do with this. That was going too far.

  Right, a man had made a play for my wife. I should not be so astonished. She is, I thought, an extraordinarily beautiful woman. After all, I too had made a play for her when she had belonged to another, and won her. Yes, that would always be with me. If I could steal her, so could someone else.

  His values, as she said, are not our values. But what are our values? We had once cheated. Those were not our values. So we had made a deal. We had agreed that we were not really cheating because we were so much in love.

  So much in love that it had to be right. Once we were married we’d return to our values and settle into old-fashioned middle-class fidelity. That was the deal and the deal was valid.

  This--this was different. This was not love. This was an attempted seduction.

  Joan was still mine.

  But there was doubt. There had to be doubt.

  She hadn’t said no right away. She had paused. Doubt, in her mind, in his mind, in my mind.

  Finally, she let it go. Tears flowed down her cheeks.

  “Don’t you know,” she said, “that I love you more than anything? Even if I was tempted--and I wasn’t--I’d never do anything to ruin what we have. I’m yours, Joshua, fully and always. Nothing can come between us. Nothing. Do you understand?”

  Chapter 8

  THE NEXT MORNING we had breakfast again in the Galaxy Coffee Shoppe, facing the Boardwalk and the ocean. It was pleasant, the atmosphere of the place. We talked about the weather, how fortunate we were to have it so hot and sunny.

  But Joan was not going to the beach today. Maybe, she said, she’d sit by the pool, indoors.

  “You can join me,” she said, “or play blackjack all day.”