The Best Revenge

by Sol Stein

  I nodded.

  “I’ll provide you with a loan apron,” Zalatnick said. “When you’re making money, you buy your own.”

  I nodded again.

  “Okay?” Zalatnick concluded, standing. “Come in Monday.”

  “I’d like to borrow a saw and two blades,” I said, “for practice over the weekend.”

  Zalatnick must have thought, Boy this is an ambitious pisher. “If you break a blade, you pay for it.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “One more thing,” Zalatnick said, nodding toward the homely young woman. “She’s mine.”

  I practiced all day Saturday and Sunday. When I finished with the drilled pennies, I cut into undrilled ones and tried all kinds of experiments for the fun of it, making Lincoln look bald or putting a bump on Lincoln’s nose. By Monday morning at seven forty, I handled the delicate saw as if it were an extension of my own hand.

  “Some apprentice!” Zalatnick told Max the following week. “He’s as good as Moshe, who’s been with me for three years!”

  “Then start paying him,” Max said.

  And so within a year, I was making out of metal a leaf so real-looking an onlooker could fool himself for half a second into believing it was from a tree. And within two years, as anyone who knew me could have predicted, I had parted company with Zalatnick and set up a shop in Chicago. Within months I had seven apprentices of my own. My apprentices worked as hard as I did. We all wanted to be perfect. Soon my shop of master workmen had a Saturday morning lineup of customers who, in those wild days of the twenties, had money to spend as if there was no tomorrow. Tomorrow, meaning 1929, was still a few years off.

  But whatever my hands did for metal, they did more for the ladies that I met, and to be quick about it, though I might have taken up with any of three dozen beauties in Chicago, I eventually settled in to live in sin with a tall, and it was said royal-looking, beauty from Kiev, a properly educated woman who carried herself like a queen, and who joined with a carpenter’s apprentice from Zhitomir to effect God’s will.

  God’s will, it turned out, was that I and the queen from Kiev, Zipporah, should share an apartment on Kedzie Avenue for a wonderful year, and then, satisfied that our backgrounds mattered less than the common ground of a mattress holding two contented lovers tangled in a good night’s aftersleep, we agreed, amidst much kissing and relief of our friends, to get married.

  Comment by Zipporah

  Marriage? Forever? How could an educated woman marry a man who left school at the age of eight? Do I look like a housekeeper who’d tie herself to the tail of her husband’s kite? I could fly by myself. I was tall and fair-skinned. Louie was almost as dark as an Egyptian, half a foot shorter than I was, a man who couldn’t tell blue from green unless I went with him to pick his clothes. Did I want children from him? True, he did have a magnificent head of curled soft hair, and strong hands that touched like velvet when he wanted to. My skin sabotaged me. It cried out for his touch. All right, so I lived openly with him for a year, but marry?

  My father, who I brought over from the old country on my earnings as a teacher, was a six-foot, straight-backed giant with a full red-blond beard, who, if he hadn’t dressed in traditional black, you’d never have thought was a Jew. A month after he came he was already playing touch football in the park on Sundays with the goyim, who couldn’t understand how a man of that age could learn to throw and catch the strange-shaped ball as if he’d been doing it all his life, or why he didn’t trip over the tails of his long black coat.

  One Sunday, after watching my father play, I sat with him on the park bench and he asked the question I knew sooner or later would come.

  “Zipporah, when are you and Louie getting married?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It seems to me,” he said, “you are already married.”

  I recited my reservations. I told him the professor—he knew all about that, too—would be a better match. My father, who came from the same village on the outskirts of Kiev as I did, where matchmakers arranged everything, shook his head. “Love is better.” Just like that.

  So I married Louie, my father beaming as if I were marrying Gilbert Roland instead of Charlie Chaplin, that other little fellow who made us all laugh. And I had from him Harold and a year later Ben, and like everybody else we all became part of Louis Riller’s audience.

  BOOK III

  9

  Ben

  As the cab pulled up in front of my office building, Ezra said, “Why don’t I come up with you? Maybe we can figure a way to deal with Manucci.”

  I shook my head.

  “Two heads are better than one,” Ezra said.

  “If you had two heads, Ezra, you could double your hourly charge.”

  “I’m glad to see you can still joke.”

  I got out of the cab and did a little quick-step on the sidewalk.

  Ezra rolled down the window of the taxi. “Put your hat on the sidewalk, maybe someone will throw something in.”

  “You know I never wear a hat.”

  “Maybe that’s our problem.”

  I watched the cab pull away. Ezra was looking out the back window, but the voice I heard wasn’t Ezra’s.

  Ben, negotiating is not surrendering.

  Manucci didn’t give an inch, Pop.

  Manucci’s offered over four hundred thousand dollars to save the show, that isn’t an inch?

  He wants everything I’ve got as collateral.

  What are you going to do, Ben?

  Find Manucci’s short hairs and pull.

  I never fought with his father.

  Maybe you should have.

  Hey, I was just beginning to enjoy the argument, where did he go? The only person in sight was a young black messenger riding his bike up onto the sidewalk with a bump. “Hey, whacko,” he shouted, “out of the way.” All I was doing was watching him chain the bicycle to a lamppost, when he said, “Touch this bike, mister, and I’ll cut your balls off.”

  I let the messenger go into the revolving door first. He pushed it so hard the wing behind me hit my back. He waltzed straight into the elevator, saw me, and darted his arm out to hold the door open. “I’ll wait for the next one,” I said.

  “Whacko,” said the messenger.

  There was only the one elevator.

  I watched the overhead indicator light two, three, four, and stop. My floor. This kid, I said to myself, is a messenger, not a mugger. Manucci’s the mugger.

  When the elevator returned, I took it to the fourth floor. I stepped out, looked left, looked right, nobody.

  Straight ahead were the black-outlined gold letters on my office door. What I read wasn’t written there: NICK MANUCCI PRESENTS BEN RILLER’S PRODUCTIONS.

  Inside, Beloved Charlotte took her eyes off the package the messenger was handing to her. “Jane called,” she said. “Alex wants to see you. You look terrible, Ben.”

  “Thanks,” I said, staring at the messenger staring at me. “What’s he want?”

  “Somebody’s got to sign for the package,” said the messenger.

  Charlotte said, “It’s a script from Bertha. She said she was messengering it over. Shall I buzz Alex to come in or do you want to wait till you’re in a better mood?”

  I closed the door of my office. The hat tree behind the door was useless, not just for me. I can’t remember when somebody hung a hat there. My finger hit the intercom. “Charlotte, have someone get rid of my hat tree.”

  Not a word.

  I opened the door. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I heard you. I think you better see Alex.”

  “If you know what he’s going to talk to me about, why don’t you tell me and save him the trip.”

  “I’m here,” said Alex, a skeleton rattling coins as he came down the hall from his office into the reception area.

  Theatrical producers don’t have chief financial officers with MBA’s. If a bookkeeper is with you long enough, you call him your acc
ountant. Mine, Alex the Pencil, is an owl of a man, who keeps one eyelid half shut not because of an affliction but because there is much in this world he is not prepared to see. Alex lives alone with his high blood pressure. His life takes place within the four walls of his office, where I usually go to see him so that he can then say to Charlotte, “You see, Charlotte, he comes to me.”

  “Ben,” Alex said in his sandpaper voice, “I sent you a note.”

  “Come on in. Sit,” I said, pointing to the high-backed leather chair behind my desk.

  Alex flashed me one of his you’re crazy again looks and did as he was told.

  “Ben, we need to talk.”

  “I gather.”

  “Ben, I don’t feel comfortable sitting here.”

  Next to the hat rack was an ancient bentwood chair. I picked it up and placed it in front of the desk with its back to Alex so that I could sit astride it and rest my folded arms. “I read your note, Alex.”

  “Ben, your liquidity stinks. You get hit by a truck this week, you’re going to leave Jane and the kids with a lot of headaches.”

  “You driving a truck this week, Alex?”

  Alex let out an experienced sigh. “Ben, I wish I earned what a truck driver earns.”

  “This isn’t the time to pitch for a raise, Alex.”

  “I know that better than you do. The only thing I’m pitching is damage control. What I was trying to say before you cut me off is that I can turn most of my assets into cash and you can’t. You want to sell your house? You want to sell your Matisse? You want to sell the gold cuff links Helen Hayes gave you? If Jane had to sell your assets as part of an estate, you know how people take advantage.”

  “Jane is smart.”

  “Then how come she married a play producer? It has got to be the lousiest business on earth. People in other businesses don’t have to go begging for new investors every single season. In other businesses you test market. Here, your whole investment is at risk before your first out-of-town audience puts their asses into their seats. Even if they all applaud like crazy, if they cheer like they’re having a community orgasm, they don’t have one bit of influence on a bunch of critics in New York who are going to decide whether the production lives or dies. The more successful you are, the more they hate you. You call that a business?”

  I was about to answer him when Alex said, “Let me finish. This business got a handicap invented by the Devil. You know what it is?”

  I said nothing.

  “It’s love, that’s what it is. I ask you about a new play, you say you love it. You know what happens to people in love, they go nuts. They float like crazies up in the air without an engine and without a parachute. All right, people fall in love once, twice in a lifetime, you fall in love every goddamn season. In other businesses people like their products, but love? In other businesses you manage a group of people for years, things work smoother when you get to know each other. In this mishegoss every production means a new mob of faces, new actors, a new director, a new stage manager, and they all want you to love them like you love the play. Then comes out-of-town, and everybody’s sure you picked the wrong play, the wrong actor, the wrong something, and you can’t go near your hotel-room window because someone will push you out. That’s love? That’s business? That’s an asylum, and everybody expects you to be the doctor who comes around with a fix of hope that you need more than they do.”

  “Finished?”

  “Finished.” Alex handed me a folded sheet of paper across the desk.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  Alex cantilevered himself up. “I’m a human being with one fifty-five over a hundred. I don’t need any more threats from bookkeepers who want their money yesterday.” He pointed at the folded sheet of paper in my hand. “You don’t have to open that. I’m not one of your writers. It’s just two words, I resign, and my name.”

  Ben, if Alex leaves, Charlotte will leave, then Jane will leave.

  “Shut up!” I said.

  Alex took a step back. “That’s no way to talk to me, Ben, not after all these years.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  The top half of the Pencil’s body leaned back as if he didn’t want to breathe the same air I was breathing. “Then who are you talking to? You got a woman hiding in the closet, Ben? I’m the only one in this room.”

  Ben, stop him from leaving.

  “Are you okay, Ben? Where are you looking? Look at me. Maybe you better sit down. I didn’t mean to shock you. I assumed you could guess I had enough.”

  I let myself down into my high-backed chair. Alex put the bentwood back in its place and sat down in the Naugahyde chair alongside my desk.

  I said, “How come I never fired you, Alex?”

  Alex picked up the daggerlike letter opener from my desk. For a moment I thought he was going to stab me with it but he was only pointing it at me for emphasis. “Because you’re surrounded by ass-kissers and I tell you the truth.”

  “Then how come even before the play goes out of town you’re ready to bury me?”

  “Because you’re better off dead. Insurance is cash, and cash is what you don’t have. Don’t reach into your pocket, your forty dollars mad money will get you a taxi from here to Hoboken. Have you forgotten we owe Grayson the final payment on the set of a play you closed four months ago? His bitchy bookkeeper calls me at home.”

  “Why doesn’t she call you here?”

  “Because I duck calls, just like you do.”

  “Tell what’s-her-name to call me. Charlotte is very good with people who misbehave about money.”

  “So am I. Grayson’s not misbehaving. You’re eleven months overdue on that payment.” Alex expelled another of his calamitous sighs.

  “What is it?” I said.

  He shook his skinny head barely an inch side to side. “Do I have to say it out loud?”

  “You’re not supposed to keep things from me, Alex.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Ben.”

  Whatever he was holding back colored his face.

  “Out with it,” I said.

  “I can’t make payroll.”

  I stood up. “Son of a bitch, we had a deal. We always reserve payroll no matter what!”

  “Don’t jump on me, Ben. We got served with papers on the costumes. If they didn’t withdraw the filing, you’d be all over the newspapers. The only way I could shut Bixler up was to settle with him.”

  “By giving him some of the payroll? Are you crazy?”

  “I had to, Ben. I know what the papers do to you and Jane when they find something. I was relying on the money from Martinson.”

  “It was due this week.”

  “Yeah. I called. We’re not getting it this week or next week or the week after. Martinson’s filed for chapter eleven.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s exactly what I said.”

  “Hold my paycheck.”

  “I already figured that. Holding back mine, too. It’s the cast I’m frantic about.”

  “Alex, how can you be concerned about the cast and in the same breath say you’re quitting? Take a Kleenex, blow your nose, get on the phone. We can’t miss payroll. You’re a genius at collecting.”

  “I’ve been at it all week, Ben, ever since I learned about Martinson. I guess I’m not a genius anymore. All the money out there seems to be dead or dying.”

  Money was my father’s song. I put it in the ground and nothing grew from it. In 1929 I took it to a bank, and the bank went to heaven, taking my money with it. Forget money, Ben, do what you like to do. There’ll always be a few dollars somewhere.

  Where, Louie? I was listening, and hearing nothing. Everybody hears somebody’s voice, though some of us don’t have the guts to admit it. I have heard Louie’s voice in New York and Hollywood, in the shower and while driving on the open road, and once when I was about to make love to a woman I wasn’t in love with. It was for Louie’s approval that I set out to conquer the world, not l
ike Alexander the Great, who hated his father, and Genghis Khan, who hated everybody. Alex is right, Broadway is an unmarked minefield in which everybody says they’re in love with everyone else.

  “Alex, please don’t sniffle.”

  “I’m sorry, Ben.”

  “What are you sorry about?”

  “I should have told you earlier. I was so sure I could come up with something. We always used to.” He picked something invisible off his upper lip. “You’ve got four business days, Ben. Equity is not going to extend.”

  “Alex, when you first came here—”

  “Eighteen years is a long time.”

  “You’re my colleague, not a bookkeeper. You’re in charge of my money matters. You’re my friend. I trust you.”

  Alex blew his nose. “I’m used to you spending it first and making it afterward, but I have to tell you, Ben, this flop could kill you now.”

  “Don’t talk flop. We’re not even out of town yet. We’ve got months to the opening.”

  “Didn’t you hear me, Ben, we can’t make payroll. The play isn’t going to get out of town.” Alex slumped into the depths of the Naugahyde chair like a long, skinny balloon deflating.

  “I don’t want your blood pressure going up over this, Alex. I’ll get to work on the payroll right away, first things first.”

  I despised the deprecating hand I laid on Alex’s shoulder. I loathed hearing my voice turn into its Vigor One Mode. “Alex, just for you, I’ll produce a hit.” Why was I bullshitting this man?

  He said, “Take your hand off my shoulder, Ben. I’m older than you are. Even if the play was a hit, you’re in so deep, it might only pay for your past sins. To get ahead, you need two hits in a row. Neil Simon plus Neil Simon.”

  “Alex, because you’re a longtime friend, I want you to sleep well. I’ll let you in on something.”

  Alex looked at me with his owl eye.

  “Ezra and I have had a talk with somebody important.”

  “To hell with important, has he got money?”

  “Tons.”

  “How many units is he talking?”