by Rona Jaffe
There were two things that Daddy definitely did not want to think about at this moment: one was Elaine, who had a mean temper, and the other was his birthday next week, when he would be forty years old. He had told Marcie he was thirty-five. He told everybody that. It was an awful thing to get old, especially when you felt just as young as when you were a teen-ager. The things that made him laugh were the things that made the kids laugh, and his grown-up friends bored him. Libra, for example. Libra bored Daddy to death. Libra was always talking about girls in a dirty way, saying that if he was Daddy he’d certainly take advantage of all the little teeny-boppers who were in love with him. Libra had no soul, and no sentimentality at all.
“I think my skin’s shriveling up,” Marcie said. “Isn’t your skin shriveling up?”
“What a terrible thing to say!” Daddy exclaimed, and jumped up and out of the tub. He looked at his body. “I’m not shriveled up. Are you shriveled up, Marcie?”
Marcie looked down at her splendid body. She had jumped out of the tub too, and was shaking bubble bath suds on the bathmat like a frisky puppy. “No,” she said, giggling. “Everything’s here.” She scooped the Dennison of the Deep toy out of the bath. “We mustn’t let him shrivel up.”
“You can have him if you’d like,” Mad Daddy said.
“Oh, can I? Oh, he’s groovy!” Marcie hugged the rubber fish. “I’d really rather have you, Daddy. I think you’re even groovier.”
“You can’t have me,” he reproved mildly. “Hey, can you do this?” He had a toy that shot a pingpong ball into the air and caught it in a net. The gadget was hard to work. He played it for a while, deftly, showing off for her. Then he gave it to her to try.
“Oh, I can’t do that at all!” she cried, giggling.
He led her to the full-length mirror in the bedroom and made her try it, and then he showed her again, but Marcie had no sense of timing and even less manual dexterity and she missed the ball every time. Finally she got annoyed and tossed the pingpong ball at him, hitting him on the ear. He whooped happily and tossed it back at her, but she ducked. Then they ran around the room throwing everything at each other—pillows, magazines, toys, a slipper, her bra.
“Where did you get that beautiful suntan, Marcie?”
“I went to Florida between semesters. There are lots of boys in Fort Lauderdale. We had lots of fun.” She became serious for a moment. “Daddy, tell me something. Nobody knows if you’re married or not. Are you married?”
“Well, of course I’m married,” Daddy said. “I’m a grown-up. Grown-ups are always married.”
“How boring.”
“Yes, it’s very boring.”
“Do you like her? Your wife?”
“Oh, she’s a nice girl.”
“How old is she?”
“Eighty-seven,” Mad Daddy said, shoving Marcie on the bed.
She giggled and hit him with the pillow. “Is she as old as you are?”
“Do I look eighty-seven?”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-six.”
Marcie shrugged. The subject bored her. “I’m starving,” she said.
“Me, too. I’ll send down for some breakfast.”
He called Room Service and ordered two hamburgers with chili and two Cokes. As an afterthought he told them to add some French fries and some ice cream with chocolate sauce. “That’s my very favorite breakfast,” Marcie said.
“Mine, too.”
“How come you have all these toys?” she asked.
“The people from the Toy Show sent me a lot of samples.”
“Are we going to the Toy Show?”
“Do you want to?”
“Not particularly,” she said. She wrinkled her nose. “I’d rather watch television. Your show should be on soon.”
Mad Daddy looked at his watch on the dresser. They had played the whole morning away, and some of the afternoon. His show would be on in ten minutes. He turned off the radio and went across the room and turned on the television set.
“I love your show,” Marcie said. “I watch it every day when I come home from school. I didn’t go to school today. I wonder if they’ll tell my parents.” She had called her parents the night before and told them she was sleeping over with a girl friend.
“Will you get in trouble?”
“Nah.”
She wouldn’t get in trouble, but he would, he was thinking. Elaine was going to kill him. To tell the truth, he was rather afraid of Elaine. She was so big, and when she was drunk, which was every night now, she became paranoid. She cried, and a few times she had even slapped him. But the thing that scared him the most was when she yelled. Elaine was a champion yeller. She had invented tantrums. Every time someone cursed she got a royalty. It was hard to believe Elaine had once been so sweet.
People kept changing. It wasn’t like children growing up and changing, like his children had, which was wonderful to watch. It was scary the way adults changed. They got neurotic and mean. He’d seen it with his older sister, Ruth, who had brought him up after their parents died when they were kids on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Ruth was beautiful and loving, but then when she and he were both grown-ups she became a nagging yenta housewife like all the other women in the neighborhood. Her husband, Bernie, was in the tie-pin business, and when Ruth and Bernie moved to Scarsdale there was no stopping her. She did her whole house in white wall-to-wall carpet and put plastic on top of it, and you had to take your shoes off anyway when you walked into the room. She kept introducing Mad Daddy to terrible replicas of herself, only unmarried or divorced or widowed, who she wanted him to take out. She had hated all his wives. And she and Bernie always called him Moishe. “I only had one Daddy,” Ruth would say, “and it wasn’t you.”
Oh, Ruth would have a fit when she found out his marriage with Elaine was in trouble. She would say “I told you so” until it came out of his ears. She only seemed to like his wives when he was well rid of them and they had married other people. Then she would look back on them with nostalgia, comparing them to the new one. He hated having dinner at Ruth’s. Her nagging gave him indigestion, and her cooking was enough to give him indigestion all by itself, even if she had kept still.
“There he is!” Marcie squealed. She pulled the sheet around herself like an Indian and sat on the floor cross-legged in front of the set. “Oh, I just love him! Isn’t he a gas?”
“That’s me,” Mad Daddy corrected her.
There he was, on the screen, taped from the day before yesterday. He looked very good; no one would know he was going to be forty years old next week.
“Ssh,” Marcie said reprovingly.
“That’s me,” Mad Daddy said again, beginning to feel left out, beaten by his own television image.
Marcie gave him a blank look. “Will you keep quiet? I’ll miss all the jokes.”
He went to the closet and took out his bathrobe and put it on. He didn’t want to see the show; he knew what he’d said. A show was a show, it was a job, and it was finished until the next one. He had never basked in his own glory. Sometimes he watched the show for a minute or two on the occasions when it was taped, but once he had reassured himself that he looked well his interest was finished.
Room Service arrived with their breakfast and Mad Daddy signed for it, keeping the door discreetly ajar and his body between the boy and the sight of Marcie rapt on the floor.
“Can I have your autograph?” the boy asked.
“You have it on the bill.”
“I mean for me.”
“Why don’t you keep the bill?” Daddy asked slyly, and he and the boy both laughed. He signed the piece of paper the boy held out to him.
“Hey, that’s you on TV now,” the boy said, craning his neck to see into the room. Daddy blocked his view with his body. “Hey, how does it feel, seeing yourself on television?”
“It feels like a piece of glass,” Daddy said. The boy laughed.
As soon as the boy turned away, Daddy
shut and locked the door. “The food’s here,” he called to Marcie.
“Ssh.”
He looked at the hamburgers, feeling lonely. He opened a Coke with the opener on the bathroom wall and sipped it, looking at himself on the seventeen-inch screen and wishing the show was over. He nibbled at a French fry. He hated eating alone and he hated cold food. If she wouldn’t eat with him, he’d either have to eat alone or eat cold food, and that really depressed him. He unwrapped one of the hamburgers and put it into Marcie’s hand. She accepted it without looking at it or at him and transferred it to her mouth like a sleepwalker, her eyes never leaving the screen. She didn’t say thank you.
“Wow, I’m hungry,” he said, trying to sound cheery. She didn’t seem to hear him. “Hey! There’s a fishbone in my hamburger!” No response. He put his uneaten hamburger on top of the television set so it would keep warm and retired morosely to a corner of the messed-up bed, nursing on his bottle of Coke, and wondered if he should try to get to the Toy Show before it closed. There would be salesmen there who would sell twice as hard if they met him in person. He was getting a healthy royalty from the dolls: Dennison of the Deep, Little Angela, and Stud Mouse, and from the Mad Daddy Bubble Bath in the lifelike Mad Daddy plastic container. Libra was a good man to have on your team if you wanted to get rich. He thought about the midnight show and wondered if it would be a success. He was planning to use the same kind of material he used in the daytime. Indeed, he didn’t know how to write any other kind of a show. He hoped Libra was right and that the midnight hour would draw twice as many people as the daytime slot had. He’d be taping all the shows, with a live audience. He’d probably continue to tape in the afternoon because he was used to it. It was funny to think that he, the clown from the Lower East Side who always did impromptu skits to amuse the neighbors, was going to have all those big sponsors and become a millionaire. Libra said he would be a millionaire. Then he could retire to a desert island and run around without clothes all day long, drinking from coconuts, eating bananas, and swimming in the ocean whenever he felt like it. He would have a tree house, the kind he’d always wanted when he was a kid. He’d meet a beautiful girl and give her a shell he’d found, without a word, and she would accept it without a word, just a smile, and lead him by the hand into the lush jungle where they would lie down together. She would have long black hair and she wouldn’t be wearing anything either. She wouldn’t look anything like Elaine.
He thought about Elaine. Elaine had grown after he married her. Not more mature, just taller. And she had turned into a bossy woman. Who had known she was going to grow and fill out? Nobody told him sixteen-year-old girls grew any more. She was two inches taller than he was. And she thought just because she was married to a TV personality she had to acquire culture. She had started studying French. That wasn’t so bad, except she talked French all the time when they were out and she was trying to impress people. The last straw, the day he knew their marriage was finished, was the day Elaine insisted on talking to the goddam Puerto Rican waiter in French.
After that everything she did drove him crazy. She bought all those five- and six-hundred-dollar dresses when she knew he couldn’t afford them. She put the kid into a French kindergarten. Then she started hanging around with Lizzie Libra, who was old enough to be Elaine’s mother, and who was a big whore besides. He ought to know: he’d gone to bed with Lizzie Libra once when he’d had a fight with Elaine at a big, rotten, drunken party. Lizzie wasn’t his type, but she was so little and dressed like a kid, and for a moment, feeling unloved and mad as hell, he’d imagined she was a little girl. Lizzie had always been after him. She’d batted those horrible false eyelashes at him and made double entendres—even he knew that word. He hated false eyelashes on older women. It made them look even older. But Lizzie had taken him by the hand and led him into one of the bedrooms at the party, after Elaine had stormed out drunk, and Lizzie had locked the door. “You’ve always been my idol,” she had said to him. She didn’t say it sexily, as if she was coming on or anything, but wistfully. He had felt sorry for her. She had this kind of hunger about her, like a woman who never gets any love. He’d felt sorry for her. Poor little Lizzie. She had seemed very sexy at the time. Her blond hair was hanging down loose and she was wearing a little pink dress. She had taken off her glasses and looked at him with those big, hungry, myopic eyes. “You’re the greatest thing since sliced bread,” she said. So he’d done it with her, there on somebody’s bed, and afterwards he had felt so guilty and scared to come back to the big, rotten, drunken party where her husband and all his and Elaine’s friends were that he couldn’t even look at Lizzie, much less talk to her.
She’d been happy as a lark. She was absolutely bubbling, like seltzer. He’d never seen a woman so happy just because of a little fling. Maybe it was him? He didn’t think he was so much, just an ordinary guy. She hadn’t even come. How strange she was! He was scared to death afterwards that she would say something to Elaine, because of how close they were, but evidently Lizzie never had, because Elaine was the most jealous woman in the world and she had never said a word to him about Lizzie, even as a prospect.
The doorbell rang again. He glanced at Marcie, still enthralled in front of the set, and realized with relief that the show was almost over. He went to the door.
It was the bellboy. “Telegram, sir.”
Mad Daddy signed for the telegram and got some money off the dresser for a tip, first shutting the door in the bellboy’s face. The bellboy was delighted to get a dollar tip and did not seem to know who he was, which was a relief.
Safe in the room again he grinned when he saw Marcie turn off the television set. She ran over to him and sat on his lap, putting her cheek against his. “Oh, you are the grooviest!” she breathed.
“Let’s see what this telegram says,” Mad Daddy said, pretending to be unimpressed with her now that she had ignored him for so long. He opened it.
“Your Kew Gardens Fan Club wishes you the greatest success ever at your benefit in Atlantic City” the telegram read. “We love you. Michelle, Donna, and Barrie.”
“They know everything,” he said.
“I’m so glad I live right here,” said Marcie. “Or else I never would have met you.”
“Do you want your hamburger now?”
“Oh, yes!” she said, all excited.
“Well, it’s hanging out of your hand.”
She looked at it. “It’s all cold and greasy.”
“Your own fault. Here, you can have half of mine.”
He shared the warm one with her that had been waiting for them on top of the warm television set. They munched and gobbled and stuffed themselves, smearing the chili inside the hamburger roll and washing the whole mess down with Cokes. The ice cream, which he’d stupidly put on top of the TV set in the same bag, was all melted, so they mixed it up with Coke in the water glasses from the bathroom and made sodas.
“I love to cook,” Mad Daddy said.
“Yeah? Can you cook?”
“Just stuff like this. Ice-cream sodas.”
She giggled. “Oh, you are silly! I really love you.”
“Well, I love you, too,” Mad Daddy said solemnly.
“Do you really?” She looked ashamed. “You know, I didn’t tell you, but I have a boyfriend, Howie, who I go steady with.”
“That’s okay—I have a wife who I go steady with.”
“Howie wouldn’t mind,” Marcie said. “You’re not like cheating. You’re not a person … you’re a … a phenomenon!”
“Well, you’d better not tell him anyway,” Mad Daddy said.
“I won’t tell him if you won’t tell her.”
“Oh, no, I most solemnly promise I won’t tell her.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
“Let’s not talk about that,” he said. “We have a whole evening ahead of us.”
“When do you have to go back?”
“I should go back tonight.”
“Can’t y
ou stay longer?”
“I have to do my show.”
“If I save up my money and come to New York to see your show during spring vacation, will you speak to me?”
“Of course,” Mad Daddy said, kissing her on top of her cornsilk head, “I’ll always speak to you. But you’ll have to cool it. You know, pretend you’re just a fan.”
“Oh sure, I know,” she said calmly.
Panic gripped him. He hoped she would act as cool as she was acting now. He hoped even more that she would forget all about him by the time spring vacation came. He didn’t need any more trouble with Elaine than he already had, not to mention with the police for molesting a fourteen-year-old girl who was really older than he was, but how could you convince them of that?
“Are you sure you’re only fourteen?” he asked.
“Wanna see my identification card?”
“No, I believe you.”
“Did you ever go out with a fourteen-year-old girl before?”
“No,” he lied solemnly. “Never.”
“How come you like me then?”
“Because you’re so beautiful.”
“You think I’m beautiful?”
“I think you’re the most beautiful girl I ever saw.”
“Wow,” Marcie breathed. “Wow …”
He put the music on again and took off his bathrobe. Marcie unwound herself from her sheet. “Wow,” Mad Daddy breathed, closing his eyes to kiss her, then opening them again because she really was so beautiful he wanted to see her. “Wow …”
CHAPTER FIVE
As it turned out, two interesting things happened to Gerry that Thursday: she had lunch with Dick Devere and she received an engraved invitation to the party the B.P.’s were giving for Franco two weeks hence.
The day of her lunch was one of those false spring days New York sometimes has in March, just to keep the inhabitants going until real spring rescues them from their eternal bouts with flu and slush. She recklessly left her coat at the office so the whole world could see her new green suit, and Dick Devere was charming. He reeled off the names of what she already knew from reading about them were three of the seven best restaurants in New York, and she let him make the choice because she’d never been to any of them. At the one he took her to they saw two Kennedy ladies and a movie star, several socialites, and of course Penny Potter, Mrs. B.P., who was lunching with her mother. Although Gerry had never met the client, she nodded at Penny Potter, who gave her a totally nonplused look back and a fake smile just in case she was somebody after all. The girl was smaller than she looked in her photographs, and terribly young.