“Little boy.”
“Congratulations, buddy.”
“Great presentation, Noah. Really great …”
“I got a great name for it, Noah—Highland Fling!”
“Not bad. Write ’em all down, send ’em all in. Ten thousand to the winner …”
“What about Heather Hill?”
“Too close to Heaven Hill? But send ’em all in. Ten thousand—”
“We’re gonna knock the competition on its ass, Noah.”
“That’s my intention, buddy.”
Someone named Peter corners him. “Listen, I’ve got a terrific marketing idea for this, Noah,” he says. “We should market the booze and the bottled water under the same name! We can’t advertise the booze on network TV, but we can advertise the water. So the water promotes the booze—get it? Hell, we can even advertise the water in the Girl Scouts’ magazine!”
“Believe it or not, that’s exactly my thinking, Pete. It’s like what they say, great minds—”
Peter looks crestfallen. “Anyway, it’s a million-dollar idea,” he says.
Noah finds Frank Stokes standing alone at the bar, nursing a drink. “C’mon, Frank,” he says. “It’s not like it’s the end of the world. Nothing’s like it’s the end of the world.”
“That’s what it’s like for me,” Frank says. “Like it’s the end of the world.”
With tongues loosened by liquor, the noise level in the room rises, and in certain sections the party becomes almost raucous, as waiters circulate with trays of drinks and others with trays of hors d’oeuvres.
“Anybody want to get laid tonight? There’s this girl called Estelle …”
“Didja hear the one about the rabbi who got stranded on a desert island?”
“I won eight hundred bucks at roulette last night. Whaddaya think of that?”
“And it was quite a few years before he was rescued, you see, and by the time they rescued him he’d—”
“Roulette? Shit, that’s a sissy game. I’m hitting the craps table one more time before I head home.”
“… built a hospital, a yeshiva school, a community center, and two synagogues.”
“This Estelle gives great head, man.”
“So they said to him, we can understand you building the hospital, the yeshiva school, and the community center. But why two synagogues?”
“Hell, you can’t get AIDS from a girl giving you head!”
“And the rabbi said, ‘The other one I wouldn’t set foot in!’”
“You can?”
Noah moves, smiling, shaking hands, through all of this. Before he is finished, before he can leave the party and go home, it is essential that he greet every single person in this crowded, noisy room. “Hey, Dex … Yo, Wally … Hi, there, Eddie …”
“Telephone call for you, Mr. Liebling,” a waiter says. “You can take it in that little room over there. Quieter …”
It is Edith Ackerman. “Mr. Noah,” she says, “I just wanted to make sure you got my message—that Miss Hannah wants to see you at her house before you go home tonight. As soon as you get to New York, no matter how late it is. She says it’s very important.”
“Yes, Edith, I did get that message. Thanks.”
“Oh, Mr. Noah!” There is a sob in her voice.
“What’s the matter, Edith?”
“Oh, Mr. Noah—the most awful thing has happened.’
“What is it, Edith?”
“The Little Girl is dead!”
“Dead?” He carries the phone with him to a chair and sits down. “Now tell me,” he says. “Tell me exactly what happened, Edith.”
“This morning she had some sort of seizure. Her blood sugar was up. I gave her an injection, and she seemed better, but I didn’t think she should go to her school today, and so I had my neighbor come in, and—”
“Oh, you’re talking about your niece,” he says. “Oh, thank God …”
“What?”
He bridges his left hand over his eyes, as though to shield them from the light, though the light is behind him. “I just meant … it must seem like such a release for you, Edith. She’s been such a burden to you, Edith, such a care … all these years, and …”
“But still, Mr. Noah,” she sobs. “But still. She was all I had.…”
You did this, Carol is thinking. You did this, yes, you did. And I hurt. I hurt here, and here. And also here. Oh, you bastard. You hurt me so much I no longer know where I’m going, or even where I’ve been, you bastard whom I hate. And also love. Because hating someone you love is the worst kind of hate there is. She adjusts the sun visor on her little green car.
Did you think I never had opportunities to do to you what you’ve done to me? Did you think Johnny Pearlstein never tried to put his hand inside my dress that night after we all went to see Born Free, and you were taking the sitter home, and I just pushed his hand away? Or were you doing the same thing to the sitter? How many chances to hurt you this way have I turned down? Dozens, you bastard, and even more than that, if I were to count all the times on my fingers. And just the other night, when Beryl and Bill Luckman and Georgette came up for drinks, did Bill Luckman—or did he not—whisper to me, “I find you very attractive”? And did I not just smile and go on passing the cheese and crackers? I could have hurt you like this dozens and dozens and dozens of times. But did I?
And speaking of Beryl, she’s obviously been getting her jollies while Frank is out of town. In fact, she’s probably been getting them from Bill Luckman. She was all over him like a tent that night. Yearbooks. I heard her tell him she had some old school yearbooks. “Come up and see my yearbooks.” Sure, that’s what she did. Took him up to her place after she left my place and screwed him. I could have done the same, you bastard. At least he’s an adult. In fact, he’s probably the one she wrote that letter to, though how it got faxed to Mama at Greenspring Hills I’ll never know. Did you think I could be someone like Beryl, as dumb as she is?
How long has this been going on, you bastard? How long has Melody been spending her vacations with us? Three years? Four? As long as that? And right under my nose, under my own roof. That’s the worst part. That’s what hurts the most, because it makes me feel so stupid, stupider than Beryl Stokes, and that’s pretty stupid. You think I’m stupid. No one ever called me stupid before. Four years of college in three, and a Phi Beta Kappa key even so. “No wives at sales conference, that’s the rule,” you told me. But what about teenage girlfriends? That was the question I was too stupid to ask, you bastard, my love I love to hate, my hate I hate to love. The line between the two is so thin that it’s nothing but a tiny, blurry squiggle now. Oh, I could kill you for what you’ve done to me, Noah, kill you for what you’ve killed in me, I really could.
Where am I?
It is the sun, the sun in her eyes that is blinding her, altering familiar landmarks on the highway ahead of her, making everything she sees float strangely out of focus. In the sun’s glare the landscape along the parkway, instead of gathering alongside her as she drives, seems to slide away from her on all sides and disappear. She has forgotten how far south the sun moves in mid-winter, and now, driving back to New York, as the sun sinks toward the horizon against a clear sky, it is directly in her eyes. She tries adjusting the visor again, which does not help, and she has left her sunglasses at home. She has always kept her little green car spotlessly clean and polished, but perhaps she has picked up some road dust on the trip, and this is helping the direct sunlight to shatter her vision so. Or perhaps her windshield is simply too clean, and its very cleanness is refracting the sun’s light in her eyes too brilliantly.
Still, she drives the way she has always liked to drive, a little over the speed limit. Perhaps, she thinks, she has always gone at everything a little too fast. Perhaps that is the trouble. Perhaps she had wanted to leave the little town of Rumney Depot, New Hampshire, too fast, to leave the world of her Christ-obsessed mother and the ever present Father Timmons, who, her mother us
ed to remind her, was the closest thing to a real father she would ever have. Perhaps she had wanted to leave that world so fast that she had left it before she ever understood it. Then she had put herself through college too fast, accelerating, squeezing four years’ worth of study into three. Then she had gotten her master’s degree in psychology too fast, in one year instead of two. Then she had speeded into marriage with Noah, whom she had met—fast—on a blind date, and fallen in love with too fast. Noah had told her he liked speed, too, speed and danger. They had run off and been married at City Hall without telling anyone, courting danger, courting disaster, and it was this marriage, Father Timmons had insisted to this day, that drove her mother over the edge, though there had been plenty of alarming signals before that. “When she heard you’d done that, she simply snapped,” he said to her. “Snapped like a bough in the wind. It was a terrible thing you did, Carol. Now your mother is a broken reed.” Then, with her accelerator pedal pressed to the floor, she sped into motherhood. What was I trying to prove? And to whom was I trying to prove whatever it was?
But I was in love.
One falls in love because one falls in love. That’s all there is to it. It’s as simple as that. There’s no other explanation. And probably one really falls in love no more than once, and that is probably a lucky thing. Once is enough, and more than once would probably be unbearable. The rest of the time one is just waiting to be in love, or wanting to be in love, or trying to be in love, or thinking about being in love, or pretending to be in love, which is always fruitless and pointless in the end. Oh, yes. Sometimes at night, pretending to be asleep, I will hear sounds—soft, secretive sounds—from the bed next to mine, and I know that he is making love to himself. When it first happened, long ago, I was bewildered. Then I was hurt, then I was angry. Where were his thoughts when he did this? Were they with some other lover, someone he found more fulfilling than me? Why was I not invited, not even permitted, to share these secret moments with him? I would lie very still in the other bed, keeping my own breathing soft and slow and regular, pretending to sleep, until he finished. Then I would hear him sleeping.
But then, long ago, I decided that these private, secret moments of his were all a part of sharing my life with him, a part of being in love with him and, of course, this discovery only made me love him more. Loving is more than fucking. Fucking is more like dancing, a pleasant way to pass some leisure time. Loving is not a pleasant pastime, no holiday in Capri. Love is rugged and thick with tangled underbrush and sudden, unexpected pitfalls and barriers between lovers, barricades that announce NO TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS POINT, and this was the worst part, the loneliest part of being in love, the whole trouble with loving at all, why love is not for the foolhardy, or even for the wise and brave. Love is for those willing to be left out. They might tell you that love is sharing, but sharing means sacrifice, as every child learns when he is being taught to share. The bigger the sacrifice, the more it hurts. And so when those times come when sharing is no longer endurable, men and women in love fight back with secrets. That was the crux of it, that was the real trouble with it. When one is in love, one is always in love alone.
And so—what to do now? Can I forgive him? That would be the Christian way. The Christian prayer tells us to forgive those who trespass against us. I wonder what Hannah would say. “Forget it,” I can hear Hannah’s Old New York vowels saying. “Don’t be absuhuhd. Get on with your life, woman. Shuh-uh-ly this isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to any woman in the wuh-uhld. This isn’t the fuhst time this has ever happened to a woman, and it cuh-tainly won’t be the last.” But what kind of a life do I have to get on with, Hannah? Tell me that. And yet … and yet. After all, all he did was fuck her. You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a fuck is just a fuck. Fucking isn’t loving. But I’ve already said that. And yet he wouldn’t have fucked her if he really loved me, and so here I am again, right back where I started, talking in circles, getting nowhere.
And so now Carol is speeding blindly down the Henry Hudson Parkway with the sun in her eyes, courting an accident, but suddenly the thought of an accident is not without a certain appeal, a certain almost piquancy. Aren’t there moments in every human life when the idea of self-destruction floats into the racing mind, beckoning with sirenish allure, holding out its gentle hand and offering a solution to everything? A temptingly fast solution? That was the best thing about it: it would be so fast.
Now her thoughts are measured and spaced out, and seem to be coming to her in slow motion. She is passing through the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and ahead of her is the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge to Manhattan. On her left is Baker Field, where she used to go to watch college football games. Below her, on her left, winds the Harlem River. On her right is the Hudson, looking deceptively wide and calm, and that narrow gap of water where the angry tides from the Harlem River boil into the larger river through a steep and narrow rock-strewn gap, some two hundred feet below. The railings of the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge do not look particularly substantial. One quick turn of her wheel, and her car would go flying through those railings, and it would be over, fast. She tries it, turns the wheel, and watches her car head for the railing. But when she feels her right foot fly to the pedal of the power brakes she knows she does not really want to die.
She sees the crash, everything, although she really cannot see it from her driver’s seat. She sees her right front fender crumple against the railing, sees the right headlight shatter in a shower of glass. But now the car is at a standstill, its right wheel up on the concrete curb of the railing, the motor idling.
She puts the gearshift into park, and gets out to inspect the damage. The fender is caved in, but well away from the wheel, so the car will steer. The front bumper is twisted, but secure. The right headlight is gone, but at least a half an hour of daylight remains before she will need it. No fluids are dripping from under the hood, so the radiator is not cracked. The car will get her home. Perhaps there is something to be said, after all, for driving an expensive car. This being New York, of course, no one stops to help her, though motorists in both directions slow down for a better look at the accident.
The impact threw her chest against the steering wheel, and she struggles to get her breath back, feeling a little nauseated. But she gets back into the car and backs it off the curb, into the roadway, where it lands with a small bump and another scrape of the fender. Only then does she see, in her rearview mirror, the spinning orange light of a police car pulled up behind her, and a lanky young officer walking toward her. She rolls down her window.
“You all right, little lady?” he asks her.
“Yes, Officer. I’m fine, thanks.”
“What happened?”
“The sun was in my eyes.”
He looks up at the upper roadway of the bridge above them, which throws where they are now into deep shadow. “No sun under here,” he says.
“I’m afraid I just wasn’t concentrating on the road,” she says.
“That’s not a good thing to be doing when you’re driving a car, little lady—not concentrating on the road.”
“I guess my thoughts were—elsewhere, Officer.”
“It’s also not good to have your thoughts elsewhere when you’re behind the wheel of a vehicle, little lady.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Think you might have fallen asleep at the wheel, little lady?”
“No, and—look, that’s the third time you’ve called me that, Officer. I do have a name. Do you want to see my license and registration?”
“That won’t be necessary, ma’am.”
“That’s better,” she says. She looks up at his face. He is surely no more than twenty-four or twenty-five. She wonders: Is he going to ask me to get out of my car and into his while he writes out a ticket? She has heard lurid stories about policemen who stop single women, rape them at gunpoint, and then stuff them into the trunks of their cars.
“Where’re you coming from?” h
e asks her. “Maybe from a cocktail party? Maybe had a couple of drinks?”
“No, but I wish I had.”
He squints at her. “What do you mean by that?”
“Because that would have given me a good excuse for what I did. Want me to get out of the car and try to walk a straight line?”
“No, that won’t be necessary, ma’am.”
“It’s funny. My husband’s in the liquor business, and when you’re in the liquor business you hardly ever think about drinking. Half the time I forget to stock the bar in my own house. My maid has to remind me.”
“Oh, you’ve got a maid?” He smiles. “It figures, with a car like this.”
“I used to have a maid. She quit this morning.” She studies his uniform, which strikes her as an unusual combination of styles and periods. His gray Stetson calls to mind the hats J.R. Ewing wore in Dallas. His blue double-breasted jacket and wide belt could have belonged to a Union cavalry officer in the Civil War, while his gray jodhpurs and black boots seem to have been borrowed from a polo player, though she doubts those long legs have ever been astride a horse. His skin is smooth and clean-shaven, though his beard is dark. He has a strong jawline and kind, dark eyes with heavy lashes. If he turns out to be a rapist, she thinks, I could do a lot worse. In fact, his face reminds her of someone she knows. She knows who it is: Noah, when he was younger.
“I’ve been following you for about the last five miles,” he says. “You were going a little fast—five, six miles over the speed limit. But I don’t like to ticket anybody for as small a violation as that. You were driving just fine, but then suddenly you swerved and hit the railing here.”
“I know. My mind was on something else.”
“Where did you say you’re coming from?”
“I don’t think I did say, Officer. It’s a place in Connecticut called Greenspring Hills. I don’t know why they call it that. It’s not green, there isn’t any spring, and there aren’t any hills to speak of.”
“Oh, sure. I know that place. The funny farm. You an inmate there?”
The Wrong Kind of Money Page 44