“Who the hell cares what the press says? Who the hell cares what the trade says? If we’d cared about things like that, we’d have gone belly-up years ago! We’ve always done exactly what we damn well wanted, and to hell with what people say!”
“Well, I care about what people say,” he said.
“We wouldn’t have to announce my resignation, your appointment, and Bathy’s appointment all in the same breath, Noah. We could wait a few months—six months, perhaps, and then—”
“No. Because Bathy isn’t going to be appointed—now or ever. Not while I’m around, at least.”
“It’s because she’s a woman, isn’t it.”
“Yes,” he said, “Perhaps it is. Perhaps that has a lot to do with it. Perhaps I’ve become a little gun-shy about working with women after all these years.”
“That’s supposed to be a slap at me, isn’t it. But I’ve never ordered you around, have I, Noah? I’ve always let you do pretty much everything you wanted, haven’t I? This new label you’re launching, for instance. That’s been your baby right from the beginning. I was against it, as you know. I was against taking that kind of a financial risk. But when I saw how much you wanted to do it, I gave you my go-ahead. Didn’t I do that?”
“Yes, but it was an uphill battle to get that go-ahead,” he said.
“I could have vetoed it outright! I had that power. But I didn’t do that, did I?”
“No, Mom, you’re a dream to work with. A real dream.”
“Don’t be sarcastic!” Now her eyes began to wander around the room, and he watched her as they settled on a single shelf of books. “Those books,” she said, pointing. “All those books about education. Motivation. Human development. Boundaries of learning. All those books by authors with Jewish-sounding names—Seligman, Maser, Garber, Rosenhan—all with Ph.D.’s after them. Do you actually read those books?”
“They happen to be books on topics that interest me.”
“It’s not for that silly Aesop business, is it? Is it?”
“I said those’re books that interest me.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about that Aesop nonsense, do you hear? You’re in the liquor business, Noah. If you work for me, you’re in booze, not crazy pipe dreams.”
“You’re changing the subject, Mom. We were talking about Bathy—remember? Not my reading habits.”
Now she shifted slightly in her chair, and Noah knew his mother’s body language well enough to know that this meant she was about to try a different tactic. “Suppose I told you,” she began. “Suppose I told you that this was what your father wanted. Suppose I told you that your father wanted Bathy reinstated in the company. Suppose I told you that this was his deathbed wish. Suppose I told you that this was what he made me promise him with his dying breath.”
“If you told me that, I’d know you were lying,” he said. “If Pop had wanted that, he’d have said so in his will. His will was very specific about what he wanted for this company. No mention of dear old Bathy.”
“Look at it this way, dear,” she said—still another tactic, he knew, was coming when she began to call him “dear.” “Think of it this way. It’s all so unfair. We all have so much—you, I, Ruthie, and Cyril. We all have so much. But poor Bathy, who worked so hard for this company for so many years—she’s wound up with nothing at all!”
“Then why don’t you help her out, Mom? After all, she’s your sister. It seems to me that you’ve got plenty to spread around.”
“I’ve tried. I’ve tried again and again. I’ve begged her to let me help her out. But she’s too proud. She’d never accept anything from me. But you, on the other hand—that would be a different story, dear. If you offered her a job, she’d be so thrilled!”
“Look,” he said, “when Pop first asked me to come into the business with him, right after college, I said to him, ‘Okay, but on one condition. Bathsheba Sachs has got to go.’ He said okay, and that was that. He let her go. He knew how I felt about your sister.”
“But why, dear—why? Why do you feel this way about her?”
He stared at the square of carpet between his feet. “Personal reasons,” he said. “Private reasons.”
“But don’t I have a right to know what those reasons are?”
“Why don’t you ask her? She knows how I feel about her—and why.”
“I swear to you she doesn’t, Noah! She’s at a loss! She has no idea why you seem to hate her so, and it hurts her terribly! She only knows that something she may have done—she has no idea what it might have been—turned you against her years ago. She loves you, Noah. Can’t you imagine what it’s like for her, knowing that you hate her but not knowing why? She loves you almost as if—”
“If she knows how I feel about her, why would she want to come back into the company?”
“Oh, Noah, don’t you understand? Don’t you understand anything? It’s not that she wants to come back into the company. She’s never asked for that. She’s never asked for anything, in fact. But whatever it was, whatever it was that happened between the two of you, it was all so long ago. Now you have the power, with one forgiving gesture, offering her a job, to erase all that, all the hate, all the old bitterness over—whatever it was. Don’t you see? Don’t you see that I want to see all the old wounds that have divided this family healed before I die?”
He looked at her, and she briefly averted her eyes; and for a moment he wondered whether his mother did, in fact, know exactly why he felt the way he did about her baby sister. Was it possible she had always known? In some ways, he’d never known her.
She dabbed her eyes now. “I don’t want to die with my boots on,” she said. “I want to die knowing that you’re running the company, and that Bathy has been taken care of. I want to get out of my girdle and relax, and travel, and go to my quiet grave from some glamorous place—climbing the Spanish Steps in Rome, or in the lighthouse overlooking the harbor at St. Jean de Luz … St. Mark’s in Venice … on the Charles Bridge in Prague. I’d like to die in the Juderia in Seville, or in the mosque at Cordoba, or at the Ritz in Paris, where I spent my honeymoon with your father. I want to die knowing that everything is in place, Noah. Is this too much for a mother to ask?”
“Now, don’t start pulling your sympathy act, Mom. I know that act only too well. You’re not dying. You’re as healthy as a horse.”
She lowered her eyes. “There are some things I haven’t told you about, Noah,” she said. “The doctor says I have an irregular heartbeat. He talks about fibrillations—”
“Come off it, Mom! Don’t pull that crap on me!”
“It’s not crap! But do you know what I think? I think you really don’t want the top job. I think you’re scared of it. I think you’re like the Duke of Windsor. Wallis told me that once at Grandmont. She said, ‘David wasn’t in love with me. He just didn’t want to be king. He used me as an excuse to get out of doing a job he didn’t want.’ I think that’s the way you’re using my poor sister.”
“That’s more crap! Would I have been standing around on tiptoes all these years if I wasn’t waiting to be kissed? It’s just that I don’t like the quid pro quo. You’ve always operated that way, haven’t you—I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.”
Her voice rose. “It’s just a favor I’m asking of you,” she said. “That’s what business is all about, isn’t it? Favors? Doing favors in return for other favors? That’s how business deals are made, young man! By calling in your markers. I owe you one, but first you owe me one! Your father made a fortune simply by collecting from all the people who owed him one!”
“And meanwhile, in the business community, I’ve become a joke,” he said angrily. “A fucking joke, Mom, thanks to you. The mama’s boy who can’t get himself untied from Mama’s apron strings. Because every time the little boy asks for a cookie, Mama says, ‘No cookies until the little boy does what Mama tells him to.’ Thanks to you, people laugh at me behind my back. Worse than that, people feel sorry
for me—they pity me! ‘Poor Noah, who’s his mama’s little puppet.’ Even my wife pities me. How do you think that makes me feel? The only source of pride I’ve got left is that I haven’t let you shove your sister down my throat.”
“She’s family, Noah. She belongs here. That’s why I’m asking you this—tiny, tiny favor.”
“Your sister is a lying, conniving, troublemaking, double-crossing little bitch! So, you know what you can do with your tiny, tiny favors, Mom? You can take them and shove them up that big fat ass of yours—one by one!”
Her eyes grew hard then. Just imagine her eyes, and the quick downward curl of her lip, something very close to a sneer. Now he was seeing the executive Hannah, the boardroom Hannah, the Hannah Liebling who sent $250,000-a-year executives trembling back to their drawing boards and, from there, still trembling, into the Biltmore Bar for many stiff drinks. She reached into her reticule for her spectacles, and placed them over the bridge of her nose, the way she often did at meetings when she had a final point to make.
Through her glasses she glared at her son. “You’ll be getting a ten percent annual salary increase,” she said. “I’ve already put that through. And there are some people who would consider that a not inconsiderable—even a very generous—raise. There are even some people who manage to make do on that amount of money a year. And I don’t need to tell you that if you were CEO, your present salary could more than triple. You could pay yourself whatever you wanted, for that matter. And there would be other perks. The company plane. A fat wad of Ingraham stock. Bonuses and other benefits too numerous to mention, but of which I’m sure you are well aware. Your problem, Noah, is that you are stubborn. You were always a stubborn child, and stubbornness is a childish trait. A good executive is not a stubborn executive. A good executive must be flexible, be willing to go to the bargaining table, be willing to hammer out a deal. In addition to being stubborn, you have a terrible temper and a foul mouth. These are not attractive executive qualities. Your father could get away with that sort of thing because he was a roughneck to begin with. The role of roughneck doesn’t suit you, Noah. You still look too preppy for the part. As a roughneck you just look silly. So perhaps you’re not quite ready to be CEO, after all. But I want you to think about all this, Noah. Perhaps you should talk it over with Carol. See what she thinks. Let me know your decision within a week.”
“I’m not going to talk it over with Carol, or with anyone else. I’ve made my decision. You talk about going to your grave from some glamorous place. I’ve got a better plan. I’m going to my grave with a headstone that says, ‘He died without caving in to his mother. He died without kissing his mother’s ass.’”
“Suit yourself,” she said with a wave of her hand, her usual gesture of dismissal. “Someone’s got to be boss. It’ll still be me.”
He got up and walked out of the room, leaving her there. But he still did not feel ready to join the others in the living room.
And that was when he heard the sounds of a young girl’s sobs from behind the guest room door.
In her town house on Sutton Square, Ruth Liebling di Pascanelli is sitting on a long white sofa with Ector, watching the flickering image of the black-and-white film on the huge television screen that occupies one wall. “Here’s where I make my first entrance,” she whispers.
“Hey, that’s not you!” he says.
“Of course it is!”
“I can’t believe that’s you!”
“Ssh! Listen to the dialogue.”
From the screen, the actress named Ruth Radcliffe says:
Did you really mean you’d kill for her, Paul?
I swear it, Roseline!
Then the person you must kill is—
Don’t say it, Roseline. I know.
“C’mon! That ain’t you! That don’t look a bit like you.”
“Ssh!”
We’ll be conspirators, Paul. You and I.
You and I. Together.
“They used the wrong take on that line,” she says. “That was supposed to be my reaction shot. That was supposed to be my closeup. Instead, they gave it to him, and all you see is the back of my head.”
On the screen, the scene has changed to calendar pages fluttering in the wind. One by one the calendar pages blow off the frame … December … January … February …
“If that was really you, you really used to be pretty,” he says. “How old was you then? When was this movie made, anyway?”
“Don’t you know it’s rude to ask a woman her age?”
Now, on the screen, is a busy Arab street scene, mosques in the distance. The street bustles with women in face veils and men in burnooses, and the legend appears: “Marrakesh—1936.”
“So that’s when it was made. Nineteen thirty-six. Shit, man, I wasn’t even born then.” He yawns.
“That’s when the story takes place,” she says. “Look, do you want to watch this film or not?”
“Well, it’s getting kinda late.”
She presses the Off button on the remote, and the screen goes blank.
“So you’re a movie star and a countess. And Jewish, even. Say, you’re hell on wheels, aintcha?” He reaches out and squeezes her arm.
“Please don’t,” she says, moving away from him on the white sofa.
He looks at his watch. “Look, we got a little business to discuss,” he says. “You know the rates. Hundred an hour, or a thousand for all night. I been with you—let’s see, five hours. You want another hour or all night? I gotta phone the agency and let ’em know. What’ll it be?”
“All night,” she whispers.
“Okay. Where’s the phone?”
She points.
He rises and goes to the telephone. Ruth’s living room is all white, including the telephone. He talks quietly on the phone for a minute or two. “Say, this is quite a penthouse you got here,” he says, returning to the sofa.
“It’s not a penthouse. It’s called a town house. What’s it like being a male escort?”
“Not bad. I’m lucky. Got a good agency.”
“A different woman every night.”
“Oh, not every night. And I do johns, too. You know, businessmen. Conventions, that sort of thing. Makes for variety.”
She shudders.
“Reason I’m successful is I always try to show a little affection. That’s the secret.”
She says nothing.
“Well, how about it?” he says. “Ready for a little roll in the hay? Satisfaction guaranteed.”
She shakes her head.
“Not worried about AIDS, are you? Don’t worry. I brought along plenty of protection. Choice of colors and flavors, ma’am.”
She shakes her head again.
“You’re funny,” he says. “Most women I take out, older women like you, all they want is a little roll in the hay.”
“No,” she says. “No, thank you.”
“You’re not a dike, are you?”
“No.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I got nothing against dikes. I know a lot of nice dikes, some of ’em you’d never guess was dikes, no kidding. But if you’d wanted a girl for tonight, the agency would’ve sent one. Same charge.”
“No.”
“Speaking of which, if you want me for all night, the agency says payment in advance.”
“In your ad … in the Yellow Pages … it said you accept the Visa card.”
“Sure do! Got my little machine right in my ditty bag,” and he pats the black zippered toilet kit on the sofa beside him, “But if you want me for all night, and you don’t want a roll in the hay, what do you want?”
She turns her face away from him, facing the white-white wall. “Just someone to talk to,” she says. And though he cannot see her face, a single tear slides slowly downward across her cheek. “Just someone common and ignorant to talk to. Common and ignorant like me.”
6
Tables for Two
Jacques, the captain, has given Georgette Van Degan th
e best table at Le Cirque, as he always tries to do. This is the corner banquette on the right-hand side of the room, facing the door, where Georgette can see everyone who enters the restaurant and where, so much more important, everyone who enters the restaurant can see Georgette. To those faces she recognizes, she blows air kisses. Upon those she doesn’t, she affixes a brief, icy stare.
Today she has been a few minutes late for her luncheon date, deliberately, but her guest, it seems, is going to be even later, and this has already put Georgette in a thoroughly sour mood. There is absolutely nothing in the world more infuriating to a woman than to be sitting alone at a table in a fashionable restaurant waiting for her luncheon partner, and to have people she knows walk in and see her sitting there, looking as though she has been stood up, and seeing on her friends’ faces that look of gloating sympathy. Georgette has ordered a Lillet, and when not sizing up the room, she pretends to be studying the menu through a small gold lorgnette she wears around her neck, like a lavallière. Actually, it is not a lorgnette at all. It is a mirror, which Georgette uses to check her makeup as well as to see what is going on behind her back without turning around. Now she sees Carol Liebling, escorted by Jacques, moving toward her table, looking like something the cat dragged in. But no, that’s not fair. Carol has made what Georgette would call a nice try, though she must have had a bad hair day. She is also lugging a briefcase.
Carol is wearing a new navy faille silk suit by Versace that she bought just for this occasion. The navy silk has tiny flecks of gold thread woven into it, and the suit was expensive. “Sorry to be late,” Carol murmurs as she slides into the banquette beside Georgette. “My hairdresser kept me waiting.” The two women do not kiss, as women often do at luncheon tables. They are not such good friends as that, though Georgette and Jacques always kiss when she comes into his restaurant, and they are not friends at all. Georgette does not even know Jacques’s last name. Nobody does.
“Well, it was certainly worth the wait,” Georgette says. “Your hair looks lovely, darling. You’re doing something different with it, aren’t you?”
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