by Rona Jaffe
CHAPTER TWENTY
On a Fine, late September morning, Barrie Grover was dozing through her boring history class when her friend Michelle passed her a note. It was a newspaper clipping, actually, a gossip column about celebrities, and it said that TV star Mad Daddy and his wife Elaine were acting silly and going splitsville. It was the first the girls had heard that he even had a wife. Michelle had circled the item in red pencil and written in the margin: “Maybe you’re next?????”
Barrie Grover nearly went into shock. It was all she could do to contain herself until the class was over. Then she pushed her way through the kids into the hall and grabbed Michelle.
“My God! He’s getting divorced!”
“I wonder what she’s like,” Michelle said.
“I wonder if he’s got somebody else,” Barrie said.
“You’d better hurry up and meet him now,” Michelle said.
“What about you?”
“I don’t want to marry him, for heaven’s sake. He’s old enough to be my father.”
“You never used to mind that.”
“Oh, I was just a kid then.”
“Imagine being Mrs. Mad Daddy,” Barrie mused, transported.
“Will you invite us over to your house?”
“Sure I will. You and that kid you’re going to be married to.” They both giggled at the fantasy of Barrie married to Mad Daddy and playing hostess to the former Mad Daddy Fan Club of Kew Gardens. The bell rang for their next class and Barrie decided to cut it. She put her books into her locker and sneaked out of the building. It was a clear, beautiful day, the air crystal clear, the sun shining, but not too hot. The leaves on the trees were just beginning to fade at the edges. She walked a block to the Pancake House, where the kids usually hung out, and went in. It was almost empty, being the middle of a class, and too early for lunch. She sat in a booth at the back, put a quarter into the miniature jukebox beside the table, and selected two happy songs. The waitress was setting tables and ignored her, as usual. She didn’t mind because she was too excited to eat anything anyway, and she wanted to think about this new extraordinary development.
Mad Daddy had a wife, and he was getting a divorce! It made him seem more like a real person now. She was just dying to know what his wife looked like, how old she was, was she funny too. Or maybe she was a good laugher. Barrie drifted into a fantasy of actually meeting him, of telling him who she was, and of him saying of course he knew, because he had read and appreciated all her notes and letters. Then he would really look at her, as if noticing her for the first time, and he would ask her if she would like to go for a cup of coffee. They would sit there and talk and talk. They would gaze into each other’s eyes. They would realize that they really understood each other like no one had understood either of them before. He would fall in love with her because she was loyal, sensitive and true. They would get married. They would never be separated again. She would sit there at each and every one of his shows, right in the front row. Everyone would know that he was dedicating the show to her.
She had to stop living in fantasies and figure how to make them come true. The first thing would be to get a ticket to be in the audience at his show, and get a seat in the first row, and try to make him notice her. No, that wouldn’t work. The kids always mobbed him, and they had all those nasty guards that kept you away from him. The only way to meet him would be to find him after a show, when the guards weren’t around and get to speak to him. She knew that if she could only speak to him and tell him who she was that they could be friends.
During her next class she would write him a letter. She started composing it in her head. She would tell him more of her secret thoughts, how she had been maturing and changing, what she had discovered about life, and he would think she was astonishingly bright and perceptive for a kid who had just turned fifteen. Maybe she would send him her picture. Then when he saw her he would recognize her without her having to tell him.
She looked at the clock above the counter and realized she was too late for the next class, too. Where did the time go? The Pancake House started filling up with kids, the ones who had spending money and couldn’t stand to eat the school lunches.
“Is anybody sitting here?”
They were all strangers, and they wanted her booth. She nodded shyly and slipped out of the booth, letting the noisy couples crowd in. All those older kids going steady, holding hands over their hamburgers, saying dumb things, proud of themselves because they had someone to be in love with and that gave them status. She hated them. She was above it all. She was going to meet Mad Daddy, a man who was old enough to get married, not just fool around being engaged to be engaged, and she would never have to be a lonely, ignored outcast again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mad Daddy, registered under his real name of Moishe Fellin, had moved into the Plaza Hotel, in a suite down the hall from the office-residence of Sam Leo Libra. He loved the Plaza; it was big and elegant and old-fashioned, and there were no kids running around the lobby to jump out from behind the potted palms at him. He had thought his apartment was elegant, but this was really it. What a long way from the Lower East Side! Sometimes he could hardly believe it. And the best thing of all, the thing he could believe least of all, was that he was in love with the most wonderful girl in the world, and Elaine the ogre was finally going out of his life forever.
He supposed it was a rotten thing to do to their kid, but he had always felt himself totally inadequate as a father, and Elaine would probably marry someone much better at it than he had been. He just couldn’t think of himself as a father, an authority figure. When he was with his daughter he felt like another kid. He made her giggle, and they played together, but he couldn’t stand to discipline her, and he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to teach her anything. He wondered if Gerry would want to have kids. He didn’t want to have any more. He had kids he hadn’t seen in years, and he was sure their mothers had told them he was the dirtiest of rats. No, he and Gerry wouldn’t have any kids. They would just be together and love each other for the rest of their lives. The world was a bad and dangerous place, and kids grew up to be killed in wars. He had no special desire to perpetuate his name and his image. His show was his name and his image. It was all the creativity he needed.
The lawyer said he and Gerry couldn’t live together until all the financial terms of the divorce had been arranged, but they were together nearly all the time anyway. They simply kept separate residences. He saw her a dozen times a day when she ran down the hall to visit him on the sly, and after the show was taped he would go to the office to pick her up. He pretended he had come in to talk to Libra, because he was just down the hall, and he didn’t want Lizzie to catch on and tell Elaine. Lizzie was hardly ever there anyway. So then he’d give Gerry the high sign and she’d grin at him and then if Libra was there and Lizzie was not, Libra would give them a drink and have one with them and look very pleased about the whole thing, as if he was their matchmaker. And then Libra would send them on their way with his blessing and they’d have the whole wonderful evening together.
Sometimes they would go to Gerry’s apartment and cook dinner together and make love and watch television, and sometimes they would go to a late movie (Mad Daddy with big sunglasses on and a beret pulled down over his face like a foreign movie director), and a couple of times he rented a car and they drove out to Coney Island and bought hot dogs at Nathan’s and had a private picnic on the beach because the season was over and there was nobody there but them until the cops came and chased them away. And once they went to Chinatown and wandered around and ate Chinese food and bought each other presents and went into a funny apothecary shop where they bought dried-up things wrapped in paper that were supposed to be brewed into medicines. And then they went home to Gerry’s and brewed up all the funny dried-up things and smelled them and tasted them and threw them away. And once they went to the Planetarium because neither of them had ever been there, sneaking in after the show had st
arted and leaving early so no one would recognize him. And a couple of times they took a cab to the Cloisters, where Gerry had never been, and wandered around pretending they were living in medieval times, telling each other stories. He always went home to the hotel, alone, because the lawyer said he had to, and many times it was so late it really seemed ridiculous, but rules were rules and Elaine was asking for almost more money than he could pay. He didn’t care, really; he’d pay her anything she wanted, but the lawyer and Libra kept telling him he was crazy not to try to lower the alimony. What difference did it make? It was his money, not theirs, and Elaine was his soon-to-be ex-wife, not theirs, and his kid was going to go to private school and camp when she was old enough and have all the pretty dresses and bicycles she wanted.
Life was like a happy dream. The best thing was that he no longer had that rather embarrassing urge for fourteen-year-old girls. Mad Daddy had always felt it was kind of unseemly to want to be with all those little Lolitas because, after all, what could you really talk to them about? People would think he was mentally retarded if they knew. The thing that had always made him feel guilty about it was not that he wanted to go to bed with them, because they always made the first pass somehow, but that he enjoyed their actual company so much. He could communicate with them. People were always talking about the generation gap, but his gap was with his own generation. Gerry was all the best things of a grown-up and a little girl. She was intelligent, understanding, beautiful, funny, sexy, and she never put him down. He felt as if they’d known each other all their lives, and at the same time every day brought new surprises. He wrote little private jokes into the show for her. When he did, they watched it together at midnight, something he’d never been interested in doing before. But now he wanted to see if she liked it, and he was much more interested in the show because she was. Gerry was never unaware that it was he, Mad Daddy the man, who was with her, who was the one she loved. She didn’t squeal and sigh over his television image. She knew that was just him doing his work. It made him feel as if he had gone sane for the first time in years.
He measured her ring finger and went to an expensive Fifth Avenue jeweler Elaine had often patronized. The owner started bringing out big rocks, thinking it was for Elaine, and Mad Daddy suddenly realized that he thought big rocks were vulgar and ugly. He said no, no he wanted something dainty and romantic. Big rocks didn’t suit Gerry, because she was little and romantic too. So finally Mad Daddy designed something himself: a circle of forget-me-nots in blue enamel on gold, with a tiny little diamond in the center of each one. It looked like a wedding ring but she could wear it for her engagement ring and then he’d get her a real old-fashioned gold band for a wedding ring, the kind real live wives were supposed to wear. In the Jewish religion it said that a wedding ring was supposed to be an endless circle of gold to symbolize an endless marriage, but none of Mad Daddy’s wives had ever wanted an old-fashioned wedding ring, and he wondered if that was why none of his marriages had ever lasted. They had been jinxed from the start because he got the wrong ring. That was what he deserved for flouting the rule. Gerry wasn’t Jewish, but it didn’t matter because none of his other wives had been either. He was totally unreligious himself. It was just that he was superstitious about some things.
They decided to have an engagement party in his suite, and they invited Libra, Silky Morgan, and Bonnie the Boy. A divorce took so long, but at least they could be officially engaged, even if secretly. Mad Daddy realized that, except for Libra, he really didn’t have any friends. Even if he was divorced and could have the biggest, loudest engagement party in the world, there was no one he liked enough to invite. He didn’t much want his sister and brother-in-law. Ruth would just criticize everything as usual, starting with Gerry. So they just asked Gerry’s friends, and she didn’t seem to have any friends either. Mad Daddy was rather pleased that she didn’t have a lot of friends. It meant they both needed each other more. He wanted her to need him a lot. He would take care of her.
Libra sent over the biggest bottle of champagne in the world, on a little contraption with wheels and a handle to push it with, and Gerry ordered a cake. Mad Daddy got millions of blue and white flowers and put them in vases all around the living room, and he hung balloons from the chandelier. He arranged it so Gerry came over first, so he could give her the ring, and when he gave it to her she cried, and then he knew he was right to have designed that ring because it was perfect.
Then Libra came, with a carnation in his buttonhole, and they had champagne and cake and played all the new hit records on Mad Daddy’s new hi-fi, and then Bonnie the Boy came in for just one second because he was really very shy, and when Bonnie the Boy saw Gerry’s ring he cried because he knew he would never get married, and Mad Daddy began to feel awfully sorry for him and wondered why he used to feel like laughing whenever he saw him because the poor kid really wasn’t funny at all. Then Silky Morgan came in for a minute, between her matinee and evening performances of Mavis!, bringing a beautiful china breakfast set for two from Tiffany’s, with little blue forget-me-nots painted on it because Libra must have told her about the ring.
And then Lizzie Libra came poking her nose around the door, saying: “Okay, I can smell a party a mile off, and why wasn’t I invited?”
“Because you’d open your big mouth, is why,” Libra told her.
“Don’t be silly,” Lizzie said. “You really don’t even know me, Sam, after all these years, not that I’d expect you to, since you never see me.” Lizzie had brought some embroidered hand towels that she said were guest towels and not to be used, and which Mad Daddy recognized as the same guest towels Elaine had given her for Christmas the year before because someone had sent them to them and Elaine didn’t like them. Gerry pretended to like them very much, and Lizzie kept looking anxious and asking her if she was sure she really liked them; and Mad Daddy couldn’t understand why Lizzie was so worried since they were obviously hideous and Lizzie was so cheap.
Then they all had more champagne and Bonnie the Boy said to Gerry that he was really embarrassed because he didn’t know you were supposed to bring presents. Gerry told him you weren’t. And Silky Morgan left, and Libra said he wished he could take the four of them to dinner but he was sure Mad Daddy and Gerry would rather be alone anyway, which was true. So Libra said he would take Lizzie to dinner at 21, and Lizzie said: “What do you know—sentimentality finally got to the old bastard.”
After everybody was gone except Mad Daddy and Gerry, he sent down for pizza and they had it for dinner with the champagne, and then they made love and Gerry said it felt funny doing it with an engagement ring on and Mad Daddy said wait till you do it with a wedding ring on—it’s actually kind of dirty.
They figured out that if all went well with the lawyers they could get married on Valentine’s Day, and if they couldn’t then they would get married on the first day of spring. Gerry asked him if he wanted to wear a wedding ring and he said no, because he’d have to take it off for his television show and he thought it was bad luck ever to take a wedding ring off so he’d rather not have one. And she said she didn’t like them on men anyway.
They decided they would live in a penthouse because they’d both always wanted to live in a penthouse if they had to live in New York at all, and Mad Daddy wondered how he was going to be able to afford one, but he didn’t say anything because he knew everything would work out. Everything had always worked out.
They’d missed his show on TV, which didn’t seem to bother either of them, so they watched the late movie in bed and then they had to get up and get dressed so he could take her home because of the lawyers. He really hated that. It was so ridiculous. He wished they could elope that minute, to Salt Lake City, where they had Mormons with plural wives. Gerry didn’t want him to take her home and said she could get a taxi, but he said he certainly wasn’t going to let her go home alone on her engagement night. When the cab got to her front door, he didn’t even get out to take her upstairs because he knew i
f he did he could never stand to leave.
He felt terribly depressed when he went back to the hotel alone. Libra had left a big pile of fan mail on the living-room table, which they’d started sending over from the studio so Mad Daddy could spend more time in his suite. He looked through a few letters but they always scared him, as if those people were right there in the room, in his life, where they had no business to be. One kid had sent a picture of herself—he guessed it was a she—with the long hair the kids had sometimes you couldn’t tell, and his or her name was Barrie. He tossed the photograph into the out box with the rest of the fan mail so that his secretary at the studio could answer it. The secretary would send everyone who included a home address an autographed photo of Mad Daddy, wallet size, with the autograph signed by her. Libra didn’t approve of autographs signed by duplicating machine. Libra also didn’t approve of stars signing their own autographs because he said you never knew when some nut was going to forge your signature on a check.
Mad Daddy got back into bed and telephoned Gerry, waking her up, to say good night. They talked for forty-five minutes. They both agreed how lucky they were that they were never bored with each other, and he blew a lot of kisses into the phone, and after they hung up he felt sadder and lonelier than ever. He’d picked up the morning papers before he went upstairs and before he went to sleep alone he read the columns and saw that he had been enjoying himself very much at a party he’d never attended at a restaurant he never frequented, given by some people he didn’t know.