Augusta Played (10 page)

Mario's startling blue eyes were sullen and rebellious; he sat silently, every once in a while throwing his head back to shake the straight, dramatically dark hair out of his eyes. The rest of the time he cleaned his nails with a penknife, like a model hood, but the fingers were long and delicate, and his bone structure was refined, princely, almost spiritual, as if God, breathing life into his creatures, had happened to linger over this one with a long, loving, life-despairing sigh. His mother told him to sit up.

“This is all there is,” Norman said to her, shoving the money at her in an unmarked envelope across the formica table top.

“I am not an avaricious person,” she said. “I want only what's right for my son.” She spoke in tones so low Norman had to lean across the table to catch them. Her face, under the soft-brimmed hat, was stunning, a large, handsome face with sad, let-down eyes, a mouth with a single fine crease on either side suggestive of a highly sensual cross between emotional deprivation and physical amplitude. Her figure, under the black cloth, was statuesque. She was wearing widow's weeds. Norman was not entirely sure what to say to a noble-looking, elegant widow in a hat in a pizza parlor who was blackmailing him. As he bent toward her dropped voice, Norman felt dizzy. Her musky odor mingled with the smell of pepperoni and Parmesan. “I won't lead you on,” she said, and for a moment, Norman felt disappointed. “I am not a blackmailer.”

“That's good. There's no more where that came from.” He said this loudly, all the more loudly because she spoke so softly, but still she didn't raise her voice.

She made a tsk-ing sound deep in her throat, a milky, female sound. “There
is
more,” she said, with delicate emphasis. “There is always more. If there were not more, blackmailers—of whom I am not one—would go out of business. It is a law, an economic law.” She looked at him, and Norman thought her glance managed to be simultaneously shrewd and sad, as if she were waiting for him to betray her. But as there was no earthly way he could do that, nor would he if he could, there was, to Norman's mind, something melodramatic in her manner, something of a pose struck purely for effect. He imagined this was attributable to his lack of information: if he knew the etiology of that tenderly accusing look, he might understand its appropriateness. In the condition of increased alertness that had settled on him since his marriage, Norman avidly desired to absorb the fullest amount of meaning from every experience circumstance vouchsafed to him. He listened intently. “An economic law,” she repeated. “The basis of capitalism.”

He couldn't help raising an eyebrow.

“You think a poor woman can't know about capitalism,” she said, her eyes downcast, the hat tipped, her face in shadow. “Who has a better right to know? A poor woman, always at the mercy of men like Marx, Adam Smith, Keynes, Veblen, and John Kenneth Galbraith. I am a woman, a poor woman”—she had picked up the envelope containing two thousand dollars in notes of one hundred and was holding it in front of her chin like a Japanese fan—“I, a woman, will tell you something. After all, you have helped me; perhaps I should return the favor.
There is always more money where it comes from!”

“Don't talk so loud, Mama,” Mario said, embarrassed.

Her voice had risen alarmingly, and Norman hastily scanned the pizza parlor, but no one was looking at them. Mario's mother regained her da Vinci, grief-engraved pose. “My son is a man,” she said, without any indication that she was aware of reaching a logical impasse. “So he does not understand economics. Where money exists in the first place, there is always more of it.” It was a sort of steady-state theory of economics. “The ramifications of this law,” she said, her fingers stroking the hollow of her snowy throat with a certain absent-minded seductiveness, “are astounding.”

“Probably,” said Norman, entranced, “but your theory has one flaw in it.”

“Sit up, Mario. What do you mean, flaw?”

“I mean, even if there
were
more money where this comes from, I can't get my hands on it. So you might just as well lay off me.”

“Is that a way to talk to a lady?” she asked, softly, the hint of aggrievedness strengthened. “I told you, I am not going to blackmail you. But I am giving you some motherly advice”—she threw him a nonmotherly look—“as if you were my own son Mario here, sit up, Mario. I am telling you, if you want more, you can get more. Now, you look to me as if possibly you're going to want more. How do I know? You're a young man, you have a young wife. You have a sensitive face, deep eyes. You are a thinker, a philosopher, an
artiste
. The machinations of big business are not for you. Neither are the working classes for you. Would you work from nine to five every day for somebody else, when your mind is on higher things? No. Your face tells me. So I say to you, as a mother would, Do unto yourself as you have just done unto me.” She kissed the envelope. “Mario,” she said, “don't pick your nails with the penknife.”

“They're dirty, Mama.”

“What I don't understand,” Norman said, “is why
you're
doing this. Shouldn't you be at home?” He had a vision of her, wrapped in a black shawl and cleaning fish. “In the movies, it's the men who do this kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing? I told you, I'm not blackmailing you, I'm earning the money for my son's education, that's all. Also I'm giving you a brief lesson in economics. Think of it as a trade. Besides, my late husband was a man of refinement and education. What makes you think all people of Italian heritage are members of the mob? You confuse us with Sicilians. My late husband, he couldn't stand cruelty. His heart was so tender that if he stepped on an ant by accident he hated himself for the rest of the day. A heart with Accent on it, a heart pounded with a mallet to make it tender. The mallet was Life, what else? He was like you, I would wager, smart but not too bright. And he worked too hard. He was a stockbroker. I met him at Harvard Business School; we were studying for our masters in business administration. He was a good man but, like my son Mario here, sit up, Mario, he was a man. Basically, he thought women should wear black shawls and clean fish, like his mother. The shawl could come from Lord and Taylor and the fish from Gristede's, it was the same thing. So I sat at home and read the theory behind the practice. Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Max Weber. True economics is home economics. And I learned that my husband was a stockbroker with a Harvard degree but like all these men, he didn't really understand the first thing about money. He had a weakness for the horses.”

“Mama!”

“Sit up, Mario. My son worshiped his father. This was reasonable, his father was a fine man, but what does it mean for the son in the end? Sadness, nothing but sadness. The heart took such a beating it gave out.”

“Mrs. Solaroli—”

She patted Norman's hand, fleetingly, a pat so restrained it was as erotic as a caress. “Now my son shall go to a good school, with this”—snapping a crimson fingernail against the envelope—“and he will learn from professors to be a jerk about money like you. Or maybe he will become a Marxist. Would you like that, Mario?”

“No, Mama,” Mario said, angrily.

“You see, he wants to be an actor. All the time, he's dreaming of Hollywood. Maybe this helps.”

“Mrs. Solaroli,” Norman said in a last-ditch, effortful push for
terra firma
, “I wasn't kidding. That's
it
for money from me.”

Mrs. Solaroli stood up, her regally sad and hat-shadowed form towering over Norman. “Good-bye, Norman,” she said, in that gently expiring voice, conveying dignity in the face of insurmountable tragedy, as if these were her last words on earth, “we will never meet again. I promise.” She held out her hand and he took it; it rested in his for a single moment. “But maybe you will think about what I said, okay? Come, Mario.
Arrivederci.”

As they left, Mario leaned down and whispered into Norman's ear. “Punk,” he said, hissing, and looking at him violently with his beautiful blue eyes.

18

E
ACH
DAY
, Norman expected to hear from Mario's mother, but she seemed to be well and truly gone. There were several snowfalls that winter. The snow lay in long-running ridges like ploughed rows with a black crust of soot on top. There was ice on the sidewalks in the morning and slush in the streets by noon. The chains of the garbage cans clanged against the railings, the tops of the garbage cans slipped and banged against the bottoms, and the tops of cardboard boxes flapped beside the stoops.

Gus felt lonely. This neighborhood wasn't at all like hers, only a few blocks farther north. The buildings here were secretive, blank-faced, closed in. There were no Puerto Ricans hanging around on the stoops to wave to you when you walked to the bus stop. There were two dwarves, in the apartment across the hall, but they kept to themselves.

In their own apartment, Gus and Norman had a double bed with a dark red and blue comforter, the infinite desk, a chest of drawers, bookshelves, a portable television on a stand, two phonographs (his and hers), Tweetie's cage, the favorite lamp, a windowseat under the center window in the tall set of three at the room's street end, a Persian rug Norman's mother had given him years ago when he first moved out of the house in Brooklyn, and a parquet floor. There was a bathroom the size of a closet, and a kitchen smaller than that; both apparently had once been closets. The tiles had peeled from the bathroom walls and schist crumbled into the tub and sink. The kitchen was swarming with cockroaches. Gus could keep them out of the stove—good thing, too, unless you liked fried cockroach—but they crawled over the boxes in the cabinet on the wall above the stove. After a while, she gave up learning to cook and the newlyweds lived off nonalcoholic eggnog, creamed herring, and hotdogs. So far as Gus could tell, Norman didn't seem to notice. Possibly it was what he was used to. Could he be used to fried cockroach as well?

During the day, when most of the tenants were at work, the landlord turned the heat off. Gus told Norman that she could barely manage to practice, her fingers were frozen. Norman told the landlord and the heat began to come up, a small blast at wide intervals. She played the flute in the big, attractive room, with the cockroaches in the kitchen at her back and her fingers tingling with the cold, and when she was through practicing there was nothing to do but wait for Norman to come home from Columbia. Some days she went to Juilliard and used a practice room there, but she couldn't live in a practice room—she had to let other students use it some of the time—and Eighty-eighth Street was too far to make the trip more than once in a day. Besides, she wasn't taking regular classes, and couldn't offer that as an excuse for being at the school all the time; and now that she was married, it seemed to her that the other students had no reason at all to be interested in her anymore. She very much liked to laugh and flirt, but now there was no one around to laugh or flirt with. She would put her flute away when she was through, switch on the television or play a record, and sit in the cold room looking at the cold sky or the cold white walls. The walls were not cheerful like the ones in her old apartment; they were starker, serious walls supporting a high ceiling, meaning business. Gus did not hang her leaves on them. The green seemed frivolous, carefree, out of place in this dark red and blue dissertation-writer's room. But Tweetie-Pie preened, swung, sang, and splashed as unstoppably here as in Gus's old place; and Gus herself, with her happy hair and willful lip, glowed like a candle in the jewel-toned room. Except when she was actively miserable, she smiled, whether she was aware of it or not; smiling was a long-time habit with her, and it persisted even in the change of circumstance.

But she was bored. Even playing the flute did not entirely take the edge off that—it was not as if she could look forward to playing it for real. Waiting for Norman to come home, she began to see how extensible time could be. Each day it stretched a little farther. The afternoons became longer and longer. Time was like a waistband that had lost its elasticity, and it sagged. If Norman came home at lunch, that made it worse: he sometimes came home at noon, horny as a toad, because, he said, he'd been thinking about her all morning when he was supposed to be thinking about the function of the oboe as a displaced phallus in the symphony. Suddenly it would occur to him that
his
oboe was displaced, and he'd rush home, swept by a large yearning for sexual shelter, to stick it where it belonged, but then he'd rush back to Columbia, and Gus was left in the empty apartment to make up the bed for the second time of the day. She decided she needed a job. He turned as black as his briefcase with anger when she told him.

“We could use the money,” she said. All they had was his fellowship and some money she had saved from her allowance, which she no longer received.

“We have plenty of money.” In fact, the fellowship barely covered his tuition and the rent, and now there were her lessons with Julie Baker, and food—although he wondered how food could cost so much, when it seemed to him that he never got any to eat—and bills for this and that, of which there seemed to be double now that he was married. He owed the telephone company three hundred dollars but they would never get him for that since he had installed a phone in Gus's name. So far as the telephone company was concerned, Norman Gold had vanished. They were getting by; how could Gus call him a failure like this? “You don't need to work,” he said.

“But I'm lonely!”

“That is a hell of a thing to say to me,” he said.

“I don't see why I can't say it. I'll get a job, and that will solve everything. It will kill two birds with one stone.” She looked at Tweetie guiltily.

“I don't want you to work. You're supposed to play the flute.”