Augusta Played (21 page)

“You're probably worn out yourself. Why don't you lean back and I'll massage your temples?” She adjusted the pillow behind his head. “Sidney loves it when I do it for him. He says you can't get a real massage anymore.”

“He's right,” Richard said, leaning back and closing his eyes. Birdie stood behind him, rubbing his temples. After a while she leaned over and kissed him. It gave her a most peculiar but interesting sensation, an upside-down sensation such as she used to get when she was a child hanging from a Jungle gym. Richard had his nose in her cleavage. Neither of them heard the key turning in the lock.

40

O
H,
SIDNEY
, I'm sorry! I didn't mean for you to find out like this.”

“Relax, Birdie,” he said. “I may be old but I'm not an old fool.”

“Nobody knows that better than I do, Sidney,” Birdie said. “I would have told you myself.” She waved a hand at Richard. “At the right time.”

“It's okay, Birdie.” He turned to Richard. “Sidney Gold,” he said.

“Richard Hacking.” They shook hands.

“That's nice,” Birdie said. “I love to see men being manly together. It's so…manly. You want a drink, Sidney?”

“I'll take some of your Hawaiian Punch,” he said. “Lately I just don't seem to have the heart for booze. The stomach, but not the heart. Ah, Birdie, Birdie. What age does to a man.”

“I'll leave if you like,” Richard said. “I should be going anyway.” He had risen from the sofa and was straightening his tie.

“Why?” Sidney asked, taking his place on the sofa. “You're in too big a rush to say hello to a friend of Miss Birdie Mickle's?”

“But I thought—” And furthermore, he had said hello.

“I know what you thought. I haven't lived all these years for nothing. I don't know what you do for a living, but you are the criminal type, that's for sure. I can tell it from looking at you. It's okay by me. I don't care what you do so long as you treat Birdie nice and don't get sent to me for sentencing.”

Richard was rather pleased by this and sat down in the Louis Quatorze chair. “Do you really think I have the physiognomy of a criminal?” he said.

“It always shows.” It was plain to Sidney that the man was a harmless dunce, but it never hurt to flatter people. If they were experts in graft you flattered them by talking about their church contributions. If they were naive, you flattered them by suggesting they were experts in graft. Nobody got to be a judge of any kind without being a judge of character. Or without being a flatterer.

Birdie was taking off Sidney's shoes and massaging his feet. He looked down and saw the pert purple bow on top of her head.

“That can wait, Birdie,” he said. “You must be tired from giving Mr. Hacking his massage. Rest.”

“I knew you two would like each other. It was inevitable, because I like you both. I
love
you both.” Birdie was beaming.

“We love you,” Richard said, feeling safe so long as he could speak in the plural.

“Richard's going to help me with my career, Sidney. He's going to get me a dance engagement. It'll be very classical.”

“I'm not really a criminal,” Richard said, seriously. “I'm a conductor.”

“Same difference,” Sidney snorted. “How much do they give you for telling the players to do what they had to know how to do anyway or they wouldn't be in the orchestra in the first place?”

“I see what you mean,” Richard said, ever agreeable. “There is something extortionar about it.”

“Sidney is a great teaser,” Birdie said. “Aren't you, Sidney?”

“Who's teasing? Mr. Hacking, I'll tell you how come I'm such an expert on orchestras. You should meet my
son
the musicologist.”

Birdie gasped and tried to shake her head at Richard but he didn't see her.

“I don't think so,” Richard said. “I know his wife.”

“You know his wife and not him? What does this mean, Mr. Hacking, you shtupped his wife? Why else would you not know her husband my son?”

“You're jumping to conclusions, Sidney,” Birdie said, desperately.

“So? It's not so big a jump.”

“I'm professionally acquainted with her. Sir,” Richard added, trying to give his statement weight.

“Oh well, what's it to me? Nothing. Because I disinherited my son when he married your professional acquaintance. I suppose you think I was wrong, Mr. Hacking.”

“I never really thought about it, sir,” Richard said.

Sidney was squatting on the Empire sofa, legs spread, arms crossed, like a toad on a toadstool. His white fringe was thinning.

“A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do,” Birdie said, rhapsodic. She would have hitched her thumbs under her belt but it was impossible to mime John Wayne in a leotard. For one thing, she had no belt. She ducked out of the room for a minute and returned wearing a crotch-length wraparound purple skirt which didn't quite cover what she thought of as her derrière. The effect was to make her look like a feather duster.

“Birdie tells me,” Sid said, looking at her legs and free associating, “that you are giving her a leg up.”

“Yes sir, so to speak, sir,” Richard said.

“Stop calling me sir.”

“Yes sir. I mean, Your Honor, sir. Yes, Your Honor.”

“Young people,” Sid said.

It was the first time Richard had been called a young person in approximately ten years, and this, coupled with Sidney's earlier observation, gave him a peculiarly exciting feeling, a kind of existential titillation, as if he was on the edge of developing new and perverse inclinations—heights of degradation. The podium was merely a beginning; next, the world, in all its convoluted richness.

However, Sidney didn't stop here; he had merely paused, as if to state the subject of his speech: “You're all authority-ridden,” he said, and at once, Richard felt himself wilting. “Either you're rebelling against authority or you're sucking up to it. When I was your age I was running arms to Palestine. Why don't you do something with your life?”

“Build a country, you mean?”

“So what's better to do?”

“I don't feel as young as you think I am.”

“It's immaterial,” Sid said. “Take it from me, you're young. Birdie's young. Birdie's practically a baby, but she has a good mind. Don't let appearances fool you. A man who lets appearances fool him is a fool, and also generally a young fool in my experience. Appearances can be deceiving.”

“That's very true,” Richard said.

“I can see you're nobody's fool, Mr. Hacking. So you'll understand what I'm saying when I say you take good care of Birdie and see that she gets the break her career needs, and then when you need a little help behind the scenes, why, you come to me and we'll see what we can do.”

“Birdie said you were going to be on the Supreme Court.”

“It's not so definite as that, but could be, could be. If Amato goes in, Leibowitz goes in, and if Leibowitz goes in, yours truly will not exactly be standing out in the cold because I once did Leibowitz a favor or two, such as I am now suggesting you'll do for me if you know what's smart.”

“Actually, sir, I don't see how you could ever do anything for me. I'm not planning to test the Constitution.”

“Richard is very mild and dreamy,” Birdie said. “If you don't mind my saying so, Richard.”

“Birdie's right,” Richard said. “Frankly, aggression scares the hell out of me. My wife is all the aggressiveness I can handle.”

“Let me say it another way then. If you don't come through for Birdie, I personally will arrange that your wife finds an outlet for her aggression, and I don't mean tennis. I may have neglected to mention that I have one or two small arms left over from when Israel won its statehood.”

“I get your meaning, sir, yes sir, I would say your point is very well put. I'll do my best by Birdie.”

“Swell,” Sidney said, glaring at him.

41

As
AGREED
, Birdie called Elaine and told her that Richard was not sleeping with Gus. She made the call from her apartment on Madison Avenue. She had a French telephone and next to it a small neat pad of white paper with a golden magnetic ballpoint pen, with which she and Richard left messages for each other, as it wasn't always easy to coordinate their public and private performances. She dressed in negligee and peignoir for the call, feeling that it was an occasion of sorts. On the other hand, Birdie found almost everything an occasion of sorts. “So you see,” she said to Richard's wife, “you just must tell Norman.”

“Who are you?” Elaine said. “How do you know all this?”

“My name is—” Birdie said, catching herself. “It doesn't matter. I'm a friend. I'm a real disinterested party. I just think it's only fair to Norman that someone should let him know that his wife is not cheating on him. A very well informed source told me that she's very sweet.”

“Sweet, my eye. Who are you?”

“I told you, a friend. Don't you believe me?”

“Not much. I think if you're telling the truth, it must mean that Richard is sleeping with you.”

“But somebody has to tell Norman! Will you do it?”

“Why don't you do it, if you're so eager for him to know it?”

“I don't want him to know who I am!”

“Who are you?”

“If I tell you, will you promise not to tell Norman?”

“Look, do you want me to tell Norman or not tell Norman?”

“I just want you to tell him his wife's not sleeping with Richard—”

“Richard! So you are sleeping with Richard!”

“—and don't tell him you heard it from me.”

“I'll do this,” Elaine said, “but only on one condition. You tell me your name.”

“I knew you would do it,” Birdie said, burbling. “I knew you had a big heart. My name is Birdie.” She giggled. “You didn't say I had to tell you both my names.”

42

B
UT
Elaine changed her mind, although it was several weeks before anything so definite as that took place. At first, she simply put off telephoning Norman while she fixed herself a vodka gimlet. Then she decided to drink her vodka gimlet while sitting in the polished living room with the framed mirror and bouquets, now tulips. Then she fixed herself another one. All this time she pondered Birdie's mes sage. The children were asleep. Richard was at a rehearsal. Purportedly. Presumably, he would not have been with this woman, Birdie, when she made the call. Richard did have rehearsals to attend. Indeed, it seemed to Elaine that ever since she could remember, Richard had been at a rehearsal and the children had been at home, awake or asleep. What was left, besides vodka gimlets? Sometimes, when Elaine asked herself this question, it was a rhetorical question; but sometimes she put it to herself with a painful sense of existential emergency. Whether the former or the latter depended largely on how many vodka gimlets she had put away.

She could recite to herself how it had been before the children came, but she could not really remember it. The events in those early days—she tended to think of them as having occurred somewhere around the start of the century—no longer carried with them the stamp of personal validation that emotion lends to life, like a visa in a passport. She could look at herself in the photographs on the wall over the bar, fresh-faced, manicured and level-gazed, with a beguiling inkstain on her cheek, and she felt only a formal recognition, no inner link to that girl who went to Wellesley and spent all her spare time making prints in the lithograph workshop.

If she drank enough vodka gimlets, she grew sorry for the girl in the photographs. Enormous waves of pity would roll in on her unforeseen like an offshore squall, washing over and choking her, but it was not
self
-pity because she could no longer feel that she and the girl in the photographs were one and the same. Elaine Hacking was not Lainy O'Hara, voted Perkiest and Most Forward-Looking in her dorm. It was Elaine Hacking, not Lainy O'Hara, who had a husband who slept with other women and left her to take care of his children and his laundry.

If the world only knew what it was like, being the wife of a conductor. From the outside, it looked like a profile in
The New Yorker
, or a layout in
Town and Country
, but what the captions didn't tell you was that you had to devote all your time to protecting your husband from other women. And of course Richard required that protection, demanded it, even if he would say he didn't. Richard would fall to pieces if she ever said the hell with it and turned him loose in that mob… It must be the baton. It had to be the baton. They took one look at him up there on the podium, wielding that little stick, and they went berserk. Somebody should have warned her, when she was still Lainy O'Hara and lived on coffee and doughnuts, art and ambition, generating ideas for masterpieces even in her dreams at night, just what being a conductor's wife entailed. She had seen herself as Alma Mahler. It had all looked so beautiful, from the outside, an age ago. She had not been oblivious to that dumb baton herself.

Now Richard was sleeping with a woman named Birdie. Really, that was going too far. Did Gustav sleep with a woman named Birdie? Why should she, Lainy O'Hara herself, do anything this woman asked, much less what she was asking? Did Elaine Hacking née Lainy O'Hara owe anything at all to a woman who was very likely trying to steal her husband from her? And how had this woman heard what Elaine had thought, anyway? Had Norman Gold told his wife, and his wife told Richard? But if the woman was telling the truth and Richard was not having an affair with Augusta, then when would Augusta have told him that Norman thought, because Elaine had. told him so, that she and Richard were having an affair? The more Elaine drank, the more complicated the situation appeared.