It’s still a million dollars.
So it was done, the whittling of a man’s absolutes.
Ibrahim was obviously a master at this. He had played the game before. Not necessarily for another man’s wife, but for other prizes. Perhaps the game itself was the real delight. The prize could not equal the pleasures of negotiating, of finagling. The catch could not equal the exhilaration of the hunt. His joy was in watching the power of his money strip men and women of their vanities. In that sense he wanted me, my capitulation, as much as he wanted Joan.
When a man had so much money that no thing was beyond his reach, he had nothing left but to play for people. What begins as a solution to boredom leads to contempt, and Ibrahim’s contempt for his fellow man was as wide as he was handsome.
Now, from an end table, Ibrahim drew a Cuban Montecristo cigar from a cedar-lined humidor and began a loving process. He sniffed the length of the cigar to inhale its fragrance, licked it to tighten the leaf and dipped it in cognac. He let it dry and then drew a V-cutter from his vest pocket and made a perfect V-incision. He struck a wooden stick match along the matchbox and waited ten seconds for the top layer of sulfur to burn off. He lit up by rotating the cigar in his mouth, distributing the flame evenly along the length, never letting the flame actually touch the leaf. He took a short draw and was in business.
“I’m sorry,” he said extending the humidor. “Care for one? Cuban.”
“Thank you, but I would not do it justice.”
“Maybe so,” he said.
If this man had one shortcoming, I thought, it was underestimating his opponent. That could be used against him. I did not know how. But somehow. Let him be almighty, I thought, and let me be meek. Then I’d surprise him. Somehow surprise him.
“For past favors,” he said, “I owe you more than a cigar. The other day you really were good luck to me, as you could see for yourself. I did promise to make it worth your while.” He drew a bulky white envelope from inside his jacket and placed it atop the humidor. “That’s yours,” he said.
It was, it was mine! Those were wages, the ten thousand dollars I figured were in there, in that envelope, an arm’s length away. That money was mine as surely as my paycheck. An oral agreement had been made. I had fulfilled my end. Now it was his turn.
Yet how could I take the money?
And damn it, I needed the money. How I needed that money!
Just lean over and take it, I thought. It is yours. This is not part of that other deal. This is separate. This is clean. This is kosher. This is blessed. This is not tainted. This is earned money. This is good money. This is honest money.
But it was also a test, a trap, a snare, a trick to gather me in. Take this money, I thought, and you’ve submitted. Had he seen this from the start and saved it to now?
If so, he had this calculated even more than I had imagined. Now I understood why he had withheld payment at the blackjack table. For this moment. Then it would have been wasted--valueless as negotiating power. Now it was useful. He had set me up by degrees. He had everything figured. Down to knowing that I would show up here instead of Joan. He had her figured, too. He knew she’d tell me. Was there anything he didn’t know?
“Take it,” he said. “It’s yours.”
“No,” I said, “it’s yours. What’s yours is yours. What’s mine is mine.”
He got the point, but I had won nothing. As perfectly as he had this planned, surely he had foreseen this rejection. I was up against cunning, and defeatism set in. The thing about a loser is this: he expects to lose. Oh, but I was a winner.
“Don’t you feel well?” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“You look pale. I have a physician in the other room. You look very pale.”
I knew the game. It was a typical gambler’s ploy to diminish and intimidate, and yet it was true that I felt clammy and strange in my clothes and irritated about the air conditioning. There was none of it here in Ibrahim’s rooms, perhaps because of some religious prohibition against manufactured air. But I was beginning to suffocate.
Of course, being a son of desert nomads he was accustomed to heat.
Now I felt myself grow weak and unable to breathe, and this sensation, when I suspected each breath to be my last, was accompanied by chills and blurred vision and the shakes.
Our family doctor had found nothing physical but had diagnosed my occasional condition as a relatively mild case of Fear of People Syndrome, the sort that afflicted Howard Hughes, Greta Garbo and J. D. Salinger, meaning that I was in good company.
But it came upon me rarely, this dread of people, and this was one of those rare times--Ibrahim now looming as the giants of Canaan and me, yes, the grasshopper.
I was trembling and tried to keep it hidden from him, but he was smiling and I thought, I must get out.
I thought back to the time of the World’s Fair in New York, I worked the night shift, so in the mornings I made my way up the ramp alone and down they came from the elevated subways, the tourists by the thousands, blind to my efforts to find a path against this surge of humanity. I felt utterly small and inconsequential and even separate and apart from the human race.
Exactly as now.
Don’t die, I thought. Not now. Save it for later.
I called on my reserves and somehow managed to rise. I staggered to the door, which kept changing places. But I found it and left Ibrahim sitting there, following me with those eyes of Esau-the-Hunter.
Chapter 11
THE ELEVATOR dropped me to the slot machine graveyard. There was no exit from there, except to the casino, so I walked in. I was in the mood anyhow.
Lights flashed in my face, blinking neons above the progressive slot machines circling jackpot figures of $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, $250,000--and even one million dollars!
Otherwise it was dark. It was always nighttime in the casino, to make people forget the outdoors. There were no clocks, to make people forget time. They even hid the water fountains, the bathrooms and the exits. This, ladies and gentlemen--they tried to tell you--this is the entire world! Thou shalt have no other worlds before you.
Right now that was fine with me. I needed to forget time and place and myself.
I made the rounds. End to end, the tables were brimming with people. Blackjack, baccarat, craps, roulette, Big Wheel, the people sat before these altars as intense as in prayer. Here, answer to prayer came swiftly, though not always affirmatively, with each turn of a card and each roll of the dice. Here it was decided who shall become rich and who shall remain poor. Mercy and punishment were meted out. This was heaven and this was hell.
I caught the flow of the place and felt its magic, its intoxicating pull. I drifted from aisle to aisle. There was nothing else like this--money! The religion of money. Chance--the worship of chance.
I saw a man place hundred-dollar chips on each of the thirty-eight numbers of the roulette table--each number but one. That was the number that came up. He wanted to protest. You could see the cry in his face. But there was no one to argue with. The ball and the wheel were the final authority, the last word.
I saw a man at the craps table whispering to the dice cupped in his hand and then yelling after them when he tossed them out. This should be strange, I thought, whispering to dice, yelling at the dice. But it wasn’t. Not at this temple, where nothing was strange, nothing was wrong. Even greed was right.
But greed was the wrong word. No, the frenzy spoke of something deeper, a final grasp at life before the coming of death. Make it happen for me, was the entreaty--before I die.
Those middle-aged women by the slots--where did they get such mean faces? How did they get to look so much alike? These were the disdained bus people, the day-trippers. They came from all over, but they were row-house people, nothing about them to suggest open spaces or freedom of any sort. They had the downcast expressions of people who had aged harshly, trapped by trivial certainties. These were the wives of salaried men, their lives fixed to i
ncomes rather than to dreams.
They were Americans you never saw and never would have seen but for the casinos. The casinos lured them from their hiding places. By the multitudes they came, purposeful and fierce, to claim their share of the American jackpot. With each pull of the handle they declared, “Gimme, gimme. It’s mine.”
I was no different. Along with them I said, “Gimme. I want a better life. I’m owed something better.”
That big bald fat man by the craps table, black hundred-dollar chips rolling in his hands, fat black cigar rolling in his mouth--why should he have it so good?
No, envy wasn’t the problem. Neither was greed. Justice was what I sought. That’s what we were all after. Life was unfair, damn it, except for the rich. So the purpose was to make life fair. That’s what this was all about.
* * *
Joan was not in the room when I got back. I dialed the front desk to find out the time--I seldom carried a watch--and was told it was 7:30. I had told Joan I’d be back from Ibrahim’s no later than 6:30. So, I thought, she must be having dinner by herself. Or maybe not.
I worked myself up into a panic. She could be anywhere, I thought, including Ibrahim’s. No, impossible. Yes, he had threatened to make her the offer if I didn’t, but this was too soon--and would she have gone running anyway? Let’s not get ridiculous.
Rather than go hunting her down I decided to stay put. I clicked on the TV for company and it did not help. I missed her. She so filled the empty dimensions of my life that without her I was nothing.
Out in public places, when she was not with me, my head always turned at the sight of a golden crown of hair. When I was alone I still talked to her. I had allowed her to become everything, and no man should ever let any woman do that to him.
Maybe, I thought, she somehow knew about my conversation with Ibrahim! If so, she’d rightfully be furious. So maybe she had packed up and left. I checked the closet. Everything was there--Gucci luggage, Aigner sandals, Charles Jourdan pumps, Nipon wrap dress and all manner of other linen skirts and dresses, pants, jump suits and whatever else she had salvaged from her first marriage.
The book she’d been reading, Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph, was on the bed. She was near the end. I’d read it first and we had already been discussing it, especially the idea that women ruled the world of love. Love was a woman’s domain, according to Remarque. Man? He was a stranger in a strange land.
Joan thought the notion stupid. Another thing to blame on women.
In the Remarque book, the heroine loved the hero but saw nothing wrong in having other men. Personally, said Joan, that sort of arrangement was not for her--but she could understand it. Yes, she could see how a woman could love one man and still have others. Don’t men do the same?
With men it’s different, I said.
Oh! The old double standard! Men can but women can’t.
Sometimes I provoked her just to watch her arch up into a full princess.
So where was she?
I should have socked him, I now thought. But that would have gained nothing. He probably had a plan against that, too. The offer would still have been good; and with that offer, take it or leave it, sock him or don’t sock him, he had me. How perfectly he had me.
Joan arrived close to eight o’clock.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Where were you all this time? Did you slay the dragon?”
“Where were you?”
“I had dinner. By myself, since you weren’t around. I played some slots, finally.”
“You?”
“Just to kill time.”
“Did you win?”
“Yes--but not the million-dollar jackpot.”
“Maybe you did.”
“What?”
I told her everything.
She fell back on the bed in a fit of exultation. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God! Did you say no at least?”
I paused.
“Of course.”
“You don’t seem sure.”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“So why did you hesitate? If you hesitated now you must have hesitated then.”
“I did not hesitate.”
Now we were silent, waiting for the other to say something--something smart, funny, wise, profound or whatever the occasion demanded. But what was the occasion? Who was the injured party? Was there an injured party?
Joan did not seem to think so. She was now in one of those Main Line moods that I never could figure out, half serious, half mocking, all female. It was impossible to take her at her word when she was like this, and impossible not to.
The playful look was now all over her happy face.
“The offer does sound good,” she said.
“Stop it, Joan.”
“Hmm. A million dollars for my body. Did you check the Book of World Records?”
“No, but I’m sure this is the top price ever.”
“Are you impressed?”
“Oh, I’m very impressed, Joan.”
“Well, now we both know, what I’m worth. Not bad, don’t you think?”
“What are you getting at, Joan?”
“Me? I’m getting at nothing, sweetheart. What are you getting at?
Sweetheart was a word she used only when she meant to be tactless.
“Let’s not go round on this,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
“I’m game, Josh. Exactly that.”
“This is nothing to tease about, Joan.”
“I’m not teasing.”
“You better believe you are.”
“Oh, but I’m not. I’d be doing it for you, Josh. I’m happy with my life. You’re miserable. Just think. No more work. No more buses, subways. We’d be able to leave Philadelphia, which you hate. Buy a home, buy a car. Two cars. Three cars. Pay for your kids’ college. Travel. Stay in Israel, which you love, for a year, two, three or however long you like. Of course, you being so religious and all, you’d give ten percent to charity. Who knows? Your money could find a cure for cancer. All that for one night with me. Doesn’t sound like much of a sacrifice.”
“In case I didn’t make it clear, we’re talking about your body.”
“You made it very clear. My body. Not my heart. Not my mind. Not my soul. Those you’ll always have. My body you’ll lose for a night. Big whoop. What’s a body?”
“Very big whoop.”
“A million dollars, Josh. The jackpot, Josh.”
“Can you believe we’re having this conversation?”
“I can,” she said. “Somehow I expected something like this to happen. You’ve always wanted to be rich. You’ve prayed for it and now your prayers have been answered, in a cruel sort of way, of course. But then, you expect your God to be cruel, so He is. Yes, there’s a price. There’s always a price. But you’re not giving up that much. What’s sex? Another bodily function.”
“That’s almost word for word what he said. You two do have much in common.”
“Oh, don’t make this a romance, Josh. This isn’t love. This is money.”
“And as you say, first the money, then be proud.”
“No,” said Joan. “First you have to earn the money.”
That was a jab to the heart, and she knew it, as surely as she knew what earn meant in this discussion.
“How practical you are,” I said.
“That’s what I am, practical.”
Only the other night she loved me more than anything. Nothing could come between us. She’d still say the same thing now. But now--now practical was the word.
“Yes,” I said, “practical you are.”
“Yes, and practical you are not.”
“So he wins. The Arab wins.”
“No, we win.”
“He’ll touch you.”
“I’ll survive.”
“He’ll penetrate you.”
“You said he might be impotent.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
“So he’ll penetrate me. I’ll shut my eyes and think of the million dollars.”
“Joan, this makes you a whore!”
“So?”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“No. Anyway, isn’t that the gospel according to Sy? We’re all whores.”
“You mean he’s right?”
“Of course he’s right.”
“I don’t understand women.”
“I don’t understand men. You want me to go ahead with this. I know you do.”
“I do not.”
“Yes you do. It shows.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
“Something I said?”
“No, it’s what you’re not saying.”
“What am I not saying?”
“Never mind.”
“Is there a magic word?”
“For what?”
“To persuade you that I want no part of this thing. Is there a magic word to kill this ugliness between us now?”
“No, it’s too late for magic words, I have no choice. We have no choice. We have to go ahead with this. You do see that, of course. Our lives are already changed. Every time a bill comes along that we can’t pay, or your boss gives you a hard time, or the car breaks down, or the dishwasher goes on the blink--we’ll think of that million dollars. That’s how big this thing is. No, we can’t go back. It’s too late. Rejecting this offer would tear us apart more than accepting it. The freedom, Josh! You’re being released from bondage. You don’t have to write phony speeches for phony big shots anymore. You sell out everyday. Now it’s my turn and I’m willing. Freedom, Josh. Freedom to say yes and when you mean yes, freedom to say no when you mean no. It’s yours now.”
I remembered what Ibrahim had said about turning down eternity, renouncing paradise. A million dollars could buy more than just material things. In fact, that was the lesser benefit. The big gain was the freedom, all right, the freedom a man lost when he became a husband, a father, a worker. From the time he woke up in the morning to the time he went to bed at night, he had to answer to somebody. I’d always said that everybody owns a piece of a man. Well, that was only true of the poor man and the middle-class man. A rich man owned himself. What was that like, I often wondered--to own the rights to your beliefs and inclinations? To say what you want to say, do what you want to do? Joan was so right. Say yes when you mean yes, no when you mean no--how many men could do that? Very few.
Indecent Proposal Page 10