The Dream Merchant (16 page)

Their lovemaking was soft and dreamy and usually unfulfilled because Lenny couldn't quite do it anymore. Even that was sweet and informed by hurting and she'd hold him for a while and say, It's okay, Lenny; it doesn't matter. On Jim's fancy victrola, a present from Marvin Gesler, Lenny played her Joe Williams, Goin' to Chicago, sorry but I can't take you there; she felt it deeply and it made him so happy; in an hour he'd be trying to make it again, full of ardor and curiosity. He tried to please her, best as he could, but mainly he wanted to possess every inch of Ava, every capricious little smile, kissed the creases beneath her heavy breasts, rolled her over and opened her legs, searched; You know me better than my husband, she joked; he nodded seriously and loved her little fatnesses and cracks and smells, put his ravaged face on each mole, looking for clues, maybe about what was missing in himself, tried to fill it in with her taste, her sweat, and even her menstrual bleeding. She let him. She let him eat her alive until he was sated, his face dripping with himself and her—she quickly wiped it with her hand—before he began to kiss her deeply, long stretches of ardent schoolboy kissing.

She'd entirely opened herself to this man from the moon. He hardly ate food. He fed on her flesh and shadows. She allowed him. Then he'd pace around, talking about the Constitution and First Amendment law, and Ava tried to follow his ideas until her brain ached. He was so intricate and moody and his jokes weren't exactly funny. They were mazes of commentary and sarcasm. With Jim she was the arty mystery girl, but she wasn't in Lenny's class. She was just holding on. Then she would become frightened. How could she stay with this guy? He was in a different league. When Ava thought of Jim she felt appalled and lost, a fallen angel. She and Jim were going to make a baby. Jim brought the freshness of the woods and physical strength that lifted her spirits. He pushed aside her demons. Lenny called her to march alongside him in darkness. He surrounded her with his scrawny junkie arms and ideas that made her feel stupid. What was she doing? I'm not on your level, Lenny. It won't work. Whenever she took a little step back Lenny geared up and won her back with big promises, Fame, Mystery, and decadence that frightened her but drew Ava ahead as if this shady path were fated. He'd tapped into the primal Ava. Nothing was obscene, he told her. He wanted to know every secret urge. He wanted to watch her make love to another man or maybe they'd make it together with another woman; she tittered. He wanted to unleash the impulses she held back. Ava didn't understand Lenny, but he moved her.

Lenny appealed to Ava's ego with his tape recorder. Since the first obscenity trial he had taken to taping many things in his life: conversations with friends, testimonials on his work, the trials themselves. He turned on the machine and asked Ava thorny questions about her family life, her first sexual experiences; the worst she could say didn't make Lenny flinch and he'd make a little motion with his fingers, Give me something more. His questions had a thematic direction and she got caught up in his pace. Ava stopped being self-conscious and she could feel her life stitching together like a tapestry. He wanted it all on tape for something special he was working on in California. He was going to make her a star. Then he'd turn off the machine and he needed her kisses like a kid, an empty kid. He'd earned them with all his questions and the small machine that was taking in her life.

Even if Lenny was quiet a moment Ava felt his mind working and she tried to watch his eyes and feel his direction. Anything could trip him into laughing or falling into one of his routines, looking at her face for approval. Maybe I'll try it on
The Tonight Show,
he'd say, and she'd nod yes or no, so seriously, as though she were making America's cultural choices. Then he'd tell her how great she was or that she had soul or she understood things deeply. Her problem was confidence. She didn't understand how fine she was. He was always pumping her up. Believe me you'll do important things, you're still young, and Ava was half-believing she could be great at that nameless something, maybe a model or a performer; he could get her club dates, everyone needs a leg up; she actually bought into it. If she doubted for a moment, he turned on the tape, the tape of her life. And he took notes in the little black notebook as though she were a star. She was a star. She was Lenny Bruce's girl.

 

16.

When I got to Florida I went straight to Jim's. After dinner we had a few minutes by ourselves on the tiny patio. That's when he told me that Mara's ex-husband had arrived from Israel. Shimon had rented a small apartment a couple of miles away. He missed his kids and wanted to visit, she explained to Jim. But this was a strange situation. Shimon was thirty-two years old, handsome, and with a bodybuilder's physique. He was coming by twice, three times a week to pick up the children. He and Mara spoke Hebrew in the tiny kitchen. What did they say? How would Jim know? It hung between us, the chance there was something more going on, a secret arrangement or rekindling of their feelings. Jim had so little to offer Mara. Their great plans were stalled by no money and Jim's reluctance to leave her side. He didn't say this, but I could read him. His need for her had absorbed everything else in his life. It was a scalding need. She listened to his dreams and made him lusty. For years he had forgotten how that felt, what a beautiful supple body felt like against his chest and heart that pattered unevenly or sometimes raced ahead. But what was the risk weighed against a young woman's breasts and arms, how they felt? Just to kiss her neck. Made him forget how old he was and how the luck had turned against him. That was enough for him; just to kiss her neck or fine arms was enough. He could not give that back. Even if she made love with her husband, it wouldn't be so terrible, if there was enough left for him, something for him. As long as Mara stayed with him, listened to his stories and promises. But he had to marry her, immediately, before she disappeared into a new life. Jim had stalled Mara about the marriage. Maybe he'd played it too cute. She might turn him down now and laugh in his face. He was sopping with fear. It didn't matter if Mara and her husband were setting him up. More time with her was everything to Jim. He needed to buy time. Something could still break his way. It was a good deal, good enough, because he would never find her again. For his remaining ancient days he would search for her.

I couldn't decide if Mara graced or degraded the remains of my friend. This physically slight, uneducated woman had eclipsed his great factories and showrooms, his glory days in the jungle. She had become Brazil, but Brazil had devolved into the most rudimentary needs and deceits. And still, Mara would occasionally look at me in a lingering way as though she was making a calculation: Would he be better for me? She was so audacious, preposterous, presumptuous, and yet I wondered, Could I resist her? I don't know. Mara was a calling, something way beyond herself.

I asked Jim about Phyllis and he hesitated before answering. His silence told a lot. Whenever Jim stalled like this, I knew he had done something wrong or, more to the point, he believed you'd think he'd done something wrong and he was figuring how to cover up. He's always had a very pragmatic relationship to guilt. After he coughed a couple of times, he said to me, Remember the paintings? Well, she changed her mind and decided to give them to me. She wanted me to have them. And I'll tell you something. She did the right thing. I picked out those paintings twenty-five years ago. She told me, You should have them, Jim. He seemed emotional about Phyllis's change of heart—that's how he tried to sell it. But I knew he was thinking about selling them, giving Mara something, and having a couple of thousand left to take her to Orlando for a few days after they were married. It was a chance to make her believe in their lives together.

Even when Phyllis could no longer pay the rent on the one-bedroom apartment, she had remained stubbornly in place. Jim had coached her, You can stay for a long time after they post the notice, months and months, sometimes years. No problem, she said to me in that chipper way that his salespeople had reassured one another while they were going broke. No problem. No problem. She stayed on until the day the sheriff came. It was August and very hot in her twilight rooms because the owner of the condominium had turned off the AC three weeks earlier in a guerilla tactic to force her out. While the tall man waited with crossed arms in the kitchen leaning against the wall, sweating through his khaki shirt, she tried to reach Jim on the phone. He's not home, Mara said curtly, and hung up. Phyllis stuffed things into four matching pieces of luggage and carefully took down the ornately framed Monet prints from the wall and admired them for a moment.

Phyllis hadn't envisioned actually leaving her apartment. She was an optimistic girl, and she didn't like being rushed about making her choices. She had stayed on in the swelter of summer expecting things to turn her way when the cool weather came. Network marketing always picked up in the fall when men and women turned down their air-conditioning and once again began to feel like going door-to-door. As she hauled the suitcases to her little black Nissan, she felt tipsy, as though her head weren't sitting exactly on her body.

Phyllis hadn't called Vivian in advance. Anyhow, what could Phyllis have said on the phone with this sheriff standing in her kitchen, wanting to get on with his police work.

She tried to remain peaceful, as if this were just another happening in her week. The steering wheel of the Nissan had its familiar spongy feel. But she was misty-eyed and thought, if only she could have reached Jim, the whole matter could have been resolved differently. What a shame.

She rang the bell of her friend's house and looked through the glass door into the high vaulted living room; beyond that she could see through the open sliding glass doors to the small canal where Vivian's young boyfriend's ski boat was tied to the little dock. Vivian had come out of her marriage wealthy but also deeply wounded, and Chris filled a void. The girls had decided that this young man was good for her.

It was Jim's kind of house. They had come here for parties and Jim would sit on the tan leather sofa smoking a cigar and holding court with his favorite stories. It was an odd coincidence, one night Jim had discovered that more than twenty years earlier Vivian's boyfriend, Chris, had known Jim's son in Toronto. This news quieted Jim while Chris looked on with an over-the-top caring expression.

It was early in the afternoon, but Vivian smelled of alcohol. The friends embraced and Phyllis tried to keep it cheerful but had to dab her eyes with a tissue. She told her friend that she was feeling a little out of balance and needed a place to rest. For a short while. Do you know what I mean, Viv? I don't like to feel this way. She circled her finger next to her tilted head, to say “cuckoo,” and managed a smile.

Phyllis liked things to be comfortable and attractive. It was too crude to say she'd been thrown out of her place and needed a bed to sleep. She didn't have forty dollars to her name besides the valuable prints in the back of the car. She'd left the family photographs behind in her apartment along with the sectional from the Canada house and some of her best clothes. She'd been rushed and hadn't made the wisest choices. She couldn't say to Vivian, Everything is gone. Desperation was outside the orbit of their friendship and so Phyllis used psychobabble language to make her situation acceptable. She had to regain her equilibrium. She needed a place to rest, she said to her friend. Then she'd be fine. Except Phyllis was gulping for air like a fish on the deck. Vivian nodded, but she seemed unsettled or cross. Maybe it was from having to right herself from a stupor.

Vivian was one of the girls Phyllis went out to lunch with on the waterway. If Vivian thought about it at all, she would have believed Phyllis had money, at least enough to float from good restaurants to parties, cooling down at night with a drink beside the pool. All these women were trying to paint themselves back together. They had money from their settlements but were bracing against demise with a bottle or a younger man. They drove fast cars and looked in on one another with tenderness and shared regret. In the first weeks without Jim these friends had been Phyllis's lifeline. One of them had a grand yacht and had offered to take Phyllis and the others up to Cape Cod for a week. The nights on the water were gay with karaoke singing and sipping wine beneath the stars, meals you couldn't imagine. But this afternoon at Vivian's, Phyllis knew she had passed out of their circle. She was falling very quickly.

Vivian offered her the little garret above the garage, which was separate from the main house. Phyllis smiled as if things were already much better. The room was put together with two-by-fours and plywood, a rough storage space that was much smaller than the maid's quarters in Phyllis's Canada house. She pushed Vivian's luggage, bikes, and knickknacks aside to fit a cot. Phyllis smiled and said it was perfect, just right to catch her breath for a few days. She also shoved aside Chris's distaste for her visit. She wasn't staying here forever. Phyllis had resources, plans for her life, an artist's eye, people said that about her; she had taste and convictions, and that didn't go away because Jim had found a new romance. He'd had other women before. He liked women. But he cared for her and always would. They were a special couple; a thousand times she had heard this from his customers: Jim and Phyllis. She became teary and shook her head at Vivian's question. Nothing, just feeling a little sentimental, she managed.

Whenever they spoke on the phone, Jim told her he loved her. Now she was crying and tried to wave it off. Jim would take care of her when his new deal came through. It was an arrangement they had. He'd promised her a house by the water and a car when he made his deal. Jim couldn't explain this to his Israeli girlfriend with her middle-class aspirations and plans for every nickel. It was Phyllis's secret with Jim, and she relished this intimacy. It became her castle. She couldn't tell her plans to Vivian, who would have snickered. But Phyllis knew Jim would take care of her.