Cheat and Charmer (67 page)

Dorshka sighed. “I must tell you something, Dinah. It is too much, this love you have for your husband. No one should love anyone that much, my dear.”

But she did not press Dinah. Their conversation moved on to other things—Veevi’s daughters, Dinah’s kids, what would happen if Jake got the backing he wanted from Marathon for the show. Dinah, Dorshka knew, would never have an affair, but it was also true that she would never figure out, on her own, about Jake and Veevi. Really, she thought in exasperation, there was nothing one could do with these abominably chaste, virtuous wives.

That night, unaware that she and Dorshka had met, Jake made love to Dinah, as he sometimes did on nights when he didn’t visit Veevi. When it was over, he kissed his wife on the cheek. “Do you still love me?” he asked her.

“Of course I love you,” she said. “I adore you. You know that, don’t you?” She tightened her arms around him. “Are we still one person? Are you still only half alive if we’re not together?” she asked.

“Of course, darling,” he said. “You don’t ever have to ask.”

As usual, Jake believed every word he said, at least at the moment he said it.

O
n Sunday afternoon, as on all Sunday afternoons over the summer, after golf or after writing, when Jake woke up from a nap, he went out on the balcony outside the bedroom, held the camera up, and, in a shot that included the whole backyard, captured his entire family: Dinah, Peter, and Lorna; his mother, Rose; Veevi, Claire, Coco, and Dorshka; his sister, Elsinore, her husband, Dave, and their daughter and son, Phyllis and Jerry. Later, there would be friends with their kids, more swimming, a barbecue by the pool, with hot dogs and hamburgers. After it got dark, he would pull down the screen in the living room and run a picture he had brought home from the studio.

The moment he went downstairs and out to the pool, however, he saw Elsinore emerging from the wood-slatted dressing room, her large bulk so much like his in shape but made ungainly by feminine swellings and bulges exposed by her bathing suit. She was followed by Phyllis, who had also gone in to change for a swim. At thirteen, Phyllis was tall like her mother, but though no beauty, she had so far been spared Elsinore’s inheritance of fat and awkwardness. Dave was lying on a pool chaise, his eyes closed, soaking up the sun. He had large patches of scarred skin on his thighs and forearms, grafts from burns he’d gotten in the Pacific; he held a big unlit cigar in his hand while he dozed in the sunshine. Jake was glad to see him relaxed and tranquil. The man spent his entire life—Monday through Saturday—on his feet, selling shoes. At that, he barely made a living.

“Jacob,” Elsinore said. “May I have a word with you?” He nodded and got up, and they went over to a couple of chairs under a bay tree, where
there was shade and some privacy. “I need to ask you for a favor, Jacob,” Elsinore said.

“You’re on my deaf ear.”

She got up and dragged her pool chair over to Jake’s right side. When she sat down again, he made a point of not looking at her Jell-O thighs. He remembered the time he and Bobby Nathan had spied on her taking a pee in the bathroom on Calumet.

“Can you hear me okay?”

“Yeah. Shoot.” Whatever she was going to ask him for was going to cost money.

His sister took a deep breath and tears filled her eyes. She smiled, and Jake became uncomfortably aware of her extensive bridgework. His sister was, to him, a patchwork of physical imperfections and charmless mannerisms. He saw her nearly every Sunday, when she and Dave brought the kids over to swim. They stayed for dinner, and he was generally affable and kind, but he avoided long conversations with her.

“You know, Phyllis could be a very pretty girl,” she began. “Not like me.” She gave a brief, bitter laugh. “Now that a lot of her friends are becoming teenagers, they’re getting nose jobs.”

“Say no more. She’s got it.”

She reached out to touch his hand. “Please,” he said, wincing. “Don’t do that.”

“You’ll really do it?”

“You’ve got it, Elsie. I just said so.”

“Don’t you want to know how much?”

He withdrew his hand to the safety of his lap. “Okay. How much? Never mind. Don’t tell me. Just set it up and tell them to send me the bill.”

“A good one is about three thousand dollars.”

“
Oy vey
. Consider it done.”

“Jake, they’re all getting them, the girls in the ninth grade. You should see them. They come over with their eyes all bloodshot and their faces black and blue, like they’ve been in a prizefight. It looks terrible. Then, a month later, you can’t believe your eyes. Gorgeous. They’re absolutely gorgeous. I want her to have this chance, Jacob.”

“Elsie, stop already. I told you: she’s got it.”

How we Jews hate ourselves, Jake thought, though he admitted to himself how glad he was that both of his kids had inherited the straight, well-proportioned, and very gentile Milligan nose.

“It’s just, you know, that you do so much for Dinah’s family.”

She never knew when to stop. She did it every time, whether it was the loan for the down payment on their house or extra money so they could take Grandma Rose on vacation with them to Murietta Hot Springs.

“What do you mean, Elsie?”

“Well, you know—putting Claire through private school, supporting Veevi and Dorshka. You treat them better than you treat us.”

“Elsie, don’t blow it. We don’t support Dorshka. Mike takes care of her.”

He knew that she knew he’d send her the money anyway, no matter how she needled him.

“Thank you, Jacob,” she said. “You know, my kids go to public school.”

“Guess what, Elsie? So do mine.”

“Yes, but for how long?”

He got up. “Elsinore, go take Mother into the goddamn pool and make her exercise her knee. Would you do that for me?”

“I did it already, Jacob,” she said triumphantly. That was their unspoken deal: she took their mother to the doctor and the chiropodist; he paid the bills. And when the time came she would be the one to take her mother in, or change her diapers, and Jake would be the one to pay for it.

“Well, go for a swim,” he said. “Phyllis’ll have her nose done.”

If Phyllis had a nose job, she’d have a crack at marrying a guy who could make a buck. That’s what this was all about, and both of them knew it. He’d had a nap only a little while ago, but conversations with his sister always exhausted him. Yawning, he caught Veevi looking at him with a secret smile that said, “We’re going to leave this one day. Just say the word.”

With sudden irritation, he went up to Dinah and leaned over her. Startled, she put down her knitting and looked up at him. “Will you please pay some attention to my sister and my mother? It’s not too much to ask, is it, considering all I do for Veevi.”

She looked at him, her mouth open, flabbergasted. “You’re out of your fucking m-m-m-mind,” she said. “Who do you think looks after them while you’re upstairs working or playing golf? Or napping all afternoon?” She was stunned by his outburst.

Suddenly he knew he couldn’t keep his eyes open. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” he said. “I gotta go lie down again. Be nice to them, okay?”

She looked at him and scratched her head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, b-b-b-bud. That sure as hell came out of nowhere.”

But he was already on his way into the house. Passing through the kitchen, he told Gussie to wake him up in an hour, when it was time to light the coals for the barbecue.

“Mr. Lasker, you’re too tired,” she said. “It’s all that night driving. You got to relax, but that ain’t the way. What if you get so relaxed you was to fall asleep at the wheel?”

“Oh, Gus. I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he said. “You have no idea how much.”

He went to the ice box and opened the door.

“Mr. Lasker,” Gussie said, glaring at him. “Are you fixing to eat something?”

He had told her not to let him raid the ice box. “I’m so tired I’m not even hungry,” he said, peering inside, then closing the door.

About an hour later, he woke up to find Dinah sitting beside him, holding his forearm. “Jake? Are you all right? Gussie says it’s time to come down.”

He looked up into her brown eyes and smelled the suntan lotion on her skin. What a nice smell that was—hot skin smooth with suntan lotion. “I must have fallen asleep,” he said.

She leaned over and kissed him. “You’re so tired all the time, honey. I’ve never seen you so tired. Look, darling, if this show is doing this to you, it just isn’t worth it.”

“Actually,” he said, abruptly sitting up, “I feel marvelous now.”

He had been thinking of Veevi lying in bed with her nipples hard, but now, looking at Dinah, smiling at him so lovingly, he thought, I’ve got to get out of this. He pulled on his pants, and together they went out to the balcony. With his arm around her shoulder, he cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted, “Everyone out of the pool! Everyone out of the pool!” The sun was going down, and Gussie was lighting coals in the barbecue. It was time for him to go down and flip hamburgers.

Not every night was what he called a Veevi night. But even when he stayed home, desperate to catch up on sleep, he still woke up at two, as he had tonight, and went downstairs to the kitchen. He had dunked five Oreos, one after the other, in a glass of milk, swallowed each soggy one practically whole, and then moved into the den.

He was there now, pulling a book down from the shelf. It was one of Mike’s novels, and he read the final paragraph:

Jake felt both moved and embarrassed, but he only said to himself, What crap. That was Mike and Veevi’s way of living: you fell in love and seized the moment and you did it in wartime or in impossible situations and you took what you could in the face of fate. It certainly wasn’t life on Delfern Drive, where you just lived with your wife and your kids, you got up and worked all day, and you functioned almost automatically but you never questioned that you were together and would stay together forever. But which guy was he? A good Jewish husband and provider who raided the ice-box at night and worried desperately about bringing his pictures in under budget and the grosses in Cincinnati, or a Mike Albrecht, one of those seize-the-moment guys for whom life without passionate sexual love wasn’t worth living?