Augusta Played (12 page)

“He doesn't remember,” Sid said, addressing the hotdog in its paper boat in front of him. “Tell me, your precious Dr. Morris the same which to whom I paid a fucking fortune, he lets you repress the agony you caused your poor mother? Not to mention me, God forbid anyone should mention me.”

“What's the matter, you can't take what you dish out?” They were sitting side by side, on stools, and Norman's face, thrust out over the half-eaten hotdog, was going black with blood. His bushy, brown-black curls gleamed under the fluorescent ceiling fixtures. The intense, ironic eyes were filled with heat; they looked as if they would be hot to the touch, like live coals. “Do you know what it really is I'm offering you, Pop? Redemption. The father redeems the son from service in the synagogue. Isn't that the way it goes?”

“How much is it going to cost me to keep you from sacrificing yourself to a nine-to-five job?”

“Fifty bucks a week. Salvation never came cheaper.”

“So this is what happens when your son that you devoted your life to marries a
shiksa.”

“Devoted your life to! Christ. I mean, Christ, Pop. Christ Almighty, Pop. You hardly knew I was around! Your memory is playing tricks on you in your old age.”

“My memory! What about yours? You're the one who doesn't even remember the diamonds!”

“I certainly never stole anything in my life, if that's what you mean, except for library books.”

“What do you call this?”

“I already explained. Your difficulty with the situation is purely semantic. The underlying structure of it can work only to your own benefit. I'm talking about your spiritual benefit, though I grant you, that's never been one of your overriding concerns. What it is, is an interesting dialectic. Instead of being a materialist dialectic, it is far more comprehensive, operating in terms of the interaction between matter and spirit. Your spirit and my matter.”

“You know a lot about my spirit.”

“Not a lot. Enough. Enough to know that you'll pay to keep it untainted by adverse publicity. You already demonstrated that once.”

“Would you really do it, Norman? Would you really try to bring your own father down publicly?”

“Who knows?” Norman said. “I might. You really disowned your own son.”

“That's different.”

“That depends,” Norman said. “I don't think it's so different.”

“Have it your way. So, once a week I mail you fifty dollars.”

“Not mail. I don't want Gus—that's my wife, in case you've forgotten the name—I don't want her to know anything about this.”

“Then how?”

“Just like this. A friendly father-and-son lunch. Or better yet, dinner. I could stand to eat a real meal. Gus hasn't learned to cook yet.”

“All right, Norman. As I said, I didn't get where I am by being such a fool I don't know when somebody has me by the short hairs. There's just one thing I don't agree with you.”

“What's that?”

“Miss Mickle is not laughable. I can see why you would say that. I can even see how other people, knowing only the outside of the situation, might think that. But Miss Mickle is the twin of my soul, and if she is ludicrous, so am I.” He got down from his perch with dignity. “And the public, if I may remind you already, does not snicker at me the way my own son does.” He paid the check, and then pulled two twenties and a ten from his wallet and laid them on the counter at Norman's place. Norman rammed the money into the back pocket of his green jeans without looking at it. For a moment he wavered, then he recovered his nonchalance.

“If she means so much to you,” Norman said, “what does that make Mother? A casual lay?”

The Honorable Sid Gold picked up the leftover end of Norman's hotdog and shoved it into Norman's mouth, which Norman had carelessly left hanging open. Then he walked out of the diner, past rows of turned heads, feeling younger than he had in ages.

21

T
HE
MARCH
WIND
flapped noisily at Sid's trouser cuffs and spat grit into his eyes. His head was splitting from his sinus trouble, and now his prostate, which for a while seemed to have decided to leave him alone, was acting up again. But his feelings were not all unpleasant—they were confused and erratic, but some of them were quite likable. He was particularly pleased to have an excuse to see his son, and glad the boy had not turned out to be some namby-pamby like so many of his friends' sons. The third generation had a tendency to be a little sissy. Art and analysis—the kids hardly stood a chance. At least Norman knew enough about the world to figure out how to put the screws on somebody, even if it had to be his father. He damn well didn't learn that at Columbia. No, Sid thought, proudly; he learned it from
me
.

With this mixture of feelings pressed against his chest like a poultice, Sid decided to skip work. Instead of returning to the office, he hailed a cab into the city and went to see Birdie. He felt like a truant, daring and excited, but it wouldn't do to show it: a judge who felt like a schoolboy, circa 1906! That was why he was crazy about Birdie—she felt the way he did inside and also, miracle of miracles, showed it on the outside. She was elated.

“Sid!” she said, kissing him full on the mouth, “I wasn't expecting this. I'll tell you frankly, Sidney, this is an honor. An honor from the Honorable Mr. Gold. Can I fix you a drink? Here, would you like Scotch?” Birdie was drinking Hawaiian Punch.

“I know I shouldn't drop in on you so sudden. How's by you, Birdie?” He sank onto the Empire sofa and took off his shoes. He liked the feel of the plush carpet on his stockinged feet. “It was an impulse, that's what caused me to come like this.”

“Gee, Sidney, I think it's peachy. I mean, I really do. You think I'm being a cut-up, but I really do feel this is an honor, you just dropping in on me like this when I know you have all kinds of work at the office. That's why I gave you your own key. It's sort of like having a key to the city, isn't it? If you think of it that way, I'm your city. Now isn't that a lovely thought, Sidney?”

“I've had a rotten day, Birdie.”

“No!”

“Like you wouldn't believe, Birdie. A man works all his life, he wants to be able to say he accomplished something. All I got to show for years of sweat and toil is grief. People think men my age, they get heart attacks but not broken hearts. They should only know. My heart is breaking, Birdie, breaking.”

“Oh, Sidney, I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear this!” She leaned over him from behind the sofa, handing him his drink and blowing softly on the white fringe of hair. The radio was playing semi-classical music. As Birdie frequently said, she heard all the rock she needed to hear at work; at home, she liked to listen to a more refined type of music, such as a person might do interpretative dancing to.

“You have a deeply sympathetic nature,” Sid told her, kissing her hand as he took the drink from it.

“I was just working on my pasties before you showed up. I was making a new pair of feathers.” She showed him her pullet nipples. “Do you like them?”

“They're some swell,” he said. “I'll say. But listen, Birdie, will you excuse me a moment already? It's this damn prostate again.”

She nodded, and he plodded silently in his stockinged feet into her bathroom with the cylinder shower and purple towels and
loi Jokes for the John
. Birdie sipped thoughtfully at her Hawaiian Punch. It must be murder being male, getting intimations of mortality every time your thing twinged. Sidney had had this trouble for quite a while now, but he refused to see a doctor. “For my sinuses,” he had said, “I saw a doctor, and what good did it do?” Birdie had said it was not the same thing. “The difference,” Sid had said, “is that the examination is not so nice, that's all. You know how they examine?” Birdie had nodded then too, not knowing. “Then,” Sid had said, “they inform you that it's enlarged, which any dope knows without he sees a doctor. And what do they do for it? It still hurts when you pee. Only the doctor, he feels terrific, because he knows what you're going to owe him on the first of the month.”

“I don't know, Sidney,” Birdie said now, calling after him. “Maybe a doctor could help.”

“This is nothing, you think my prostate is in pain, you should experience the deep distress of my heart. Talk about torment.”

He left the door open, and she turned the radio off, waiting for the sound she loved to hear, his urine splashing into the blue water, but there was nothing. God, it was sad. She plopped another ice cube into his drink, and then, sitting on the sofa in the quiet room, she found herself reaching for his jacket hanging over the Louis Quatorze chair (a genuine copy). His address book was in the inside breast pocket. Hurriedly now, afraid that Sidney might give up and come back into the room without having taken his leak, she flipped through the pages. There it was—Norman, under G for Gold, the address on Eighty-eighth Street and the telephone number.

Why was she doing this? A woman's intuition, she said to herself, by way of an answer. Sidney did not call her the twin of his soul for nothing. It had to be Norman that was wringing Sidney's heart like a washrag; Birdie's own experience told her that no man breaks his heart over a daughter. Besides, she had met Norman in his father's office: she had known from right then that there was trouble between them.

She stored the information in her head—she was always a quick study—and slipped the little book back in the pocket just as Sidney shouted from the bathroom. “Aargh!” he shouted, “goddamn!”

“What is it? Oh, Sidney, what has happened?” She raced to the bathroom. He was standing in front of the john; the seat was up, and she heard the dainty trickle of a few drops, but that was all.

“Nothing happened. That's the trouble. It just burns like hell, Birdie.”

She went around to his front, tucked him in and zipped him up. “I'm sorry, honeybunch, I really am. I know it's painful. I wish you would see a doctor.” She led him back into the living room. He pulled her into his arms as he sat on the sofa again, and for an easy ten minutes they thought their own thoughts, curled together. Finally Birdie said, “I have to get dressed now, Sidney.”

“I know. Sometimes I ask myself, Why do I want to sit on the Supreme Court? At my age, I should retire.”

“It's all right with me if you want to retire, Sidney.”

“I know. But I don't want to retire. I want to sit on the Supreme Court. I don't know why.”

“It's natural to be ambitious, Sidney. I have always admired your ambition, as a matter of fact.”

“You have?”

“Yes, I have. But if you want to retire, why, I can sympathize with that too. After all, you said it yourself—I have a sympathetic nature. Many is the night I have myself wished to retire, but in the morning I was always raring to go again. Ambition is a part of my nature too.”

“I know. That's one of the things I admire in
you,”
Sidney said, leaning over to put on his shoes. Birdie dropped to the floor and put them on him for him. Sidney pulled her up by the elbows. “In fact,” he said, “there are quite a few things that I find admirable in you, Birdie. Listen.” He was glaring at her; anyone could have seen where Norman got his intensity. “I want you to do me a favor, Birdie.”

“Of course, Sidney.”

“I don't want you to ever let anybody razz you, you understand?”

“About what, Sidney?”

“About anything. You just don't let anyone take you less than seriously, ever! You are not one hundred and one jokes, Birdie.”

“But Sidney,” she said, bewildered, “I never thought I was!”

22

I
N
MARCH
, ten thousand kids staged a love-in in Central Park. That night, Gus and Norman had their own love-in, a flight into the relaxed world of harmonic voluptuousness. Then Norman introduced a new theme. They were lying in bed under the dark red and blue quilted comforter, an old movie showing on the television on the stand at the foot of it, and Gus was feeling quite gratified, when Norman went down on her. She had no idea what he was doing. His head, previously resting beside hers on the pillow, vanished, dropping out of sight as he slid down the bed in the direction of the TV set, those exuberant brown-black curls disappearing over her boobies and tickling her stomach. He dragged the comforter down with him as he went, leaving her top exposed to the cold air of the room. What was she supposed to do now? She didn't dare mention the comforter, because whatever he was doing obviously was so engrossing that he hadn't even noticed he'd pulled it off. But she felt like an idiot, wholly extraneous, lying there with goosebumps and not doing anything. In sex, as in the rest of life, she was used to contributing. Richard had told her she was exceptionally active in bed. She was not sure how many women there had been in Richard's sample, or how random a sample it was. And Richard might well say something that wasn't true simply to make her feel good. But in any case, there was passive and there was passive—what was going on now seemed to exclude her entirely, and this made her feel peculiarly self-conscious. Norman was too far down for her to reach him without sitting up, and she had the distinct impression that she was expected to stay in a supine position. There was nothing anywhere within kissing distance except air, cold air. She could hear the late movie but she couldn't see the screen, and trying to make the dialogue go with the cracks in the ceiling was a lost cause. It was
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, and it seemed to have excited Norman terribly. “Norman—” she said. For an answer, he flicked his tongue where it said everything she needed to know.

That gave her a completely new outlook. She still felt embarrassingly useless, but all urge to complain about it left her. For years, she had been double-tonguing and triple-tonguing, but plainly Norman was the real performer in the family. She would tell him so!—later. She watched Norman's curls bobbing up and down between her legs, like a big bush gobbling a little bush, and was about to laugh when a low cry escaped from her throat instead, like a bird from a cage. Norman kissed her navel and sat up, obviously pleased with himself. She lay as still as a corpse, listening to that strange dove, her own sexual cooing, flap its wings in a far corner…until she realized that was no love dove, that was Tweetie, annoyed at being so rudely wakened.