After Claude (6 page)

I wandered up and down the aisles, pushing this cart that was designed to go backward into my ankles, and found inspiration in the form of two bright-orange barbecued chickens, a container of cole slaw, plus a quart of chocolate-chip ice cream, and then, remembering the French addiction to a procession of courses, a large jar of pickles, and dinner was served, Madame. The bill came to twelve dollars, which is my flat rate, whether I buy a pack of cigarettes or load the cart with hearts of palm and Nova Scotia. I paid the tariff and went sloshing in and out of the dog puddles, back up Morton Street. I wish to say one word about dogs in New York and then forever hold my peace, which is that they should turn on their fag boy friends and bite off the proudest part of their fag anatomies.

I had hardly ripped off my dainties when the doorbell rang. Could it be that my swarthy admirer had followed me home? I looked through the peephole and beheld the jangling presence of my best friend, Maxine.

“Wait,” I yelled, because I’m very modest in front of the hostile scrutiny of women. I slipped into my silk kimono and opened the door.

“Harriet.” Her burglar alarm went off. “I’m so glad you’re home. I’m expiring from the heat. You look, fantastic!”

I must admit that she did, too. I checked the hall to see if a drooling convoy of tourists were snapping at her heels. There was a sufficiency of rhinestones in her thong platforms to refinance the purchase of Manhattan.

“Come in quick,” I said. “How do you have the guts to walk around in public like that?” Maxine, Jewish mother and wife, was fighting off an airtight pair of white shantung hip huggers. Above that carnage, through the transparency of a fishnet polo shirt, you could see a kosher delicatessen.

“Oh, really.” She switched to a throaty laugh. Maxine had more accents than Peter Ustinov, but unless you punched her in the stomach, you never heard the real one. “I just came from my hatha-yoga class. It was madness in this heat. But you know, for an Indian it’s chilly out there. My teacher was so pleased with me today. He said I had the spine of a five-year-old, but I’m completely worn out.”

She dropped her retarded spine into the wicker armchair, her stubby legs clearing the floor.

“My lips shrivel up in the heat.” I watched as she applied yet another layer of lip gloss to lips greased thick enough to cause a major oil slick along the Atlantic coastline.

“You’re lucky to have such a wonderful skin,” she crooned, but since she didn’t look up from her gold compact, I couldn’t tell which of us was supposed to be so lucky. She glanced up. “Not a wrinkle or a blemish. What do you use?”

“Sperm,” I said, damned if I’d let her drag me into one of her beauty commercials that begin with compliments and finish with her imploring me to consider plastic surgery.

“You’re terrible.” She giggled and fell back into her valise. She emerged holding up a small pink package. “I bought you the most fabulous moisturizer, guaranteed to banish those black pouches under your eyes in less than three weeks.”

“How long are you planning to visit me?” I asked. “I have a lot of things to do.”

“Just till I cool off,” she said and put a pack of kingsize Kools on the coffee table. She lit a cigarette with an efficient click of her gold Dupont lighter, her tiny, pointy fingers rigid with wedding bands. She was the most adorably married woman in the Western Hemisphere.

Maxine was under the impression that since we had jumped rope together in Brooklyn, our insults were predicated on love. The real reasons that Maxine insisted on continuing to know me were one: to feel fortunate that instead of being me, she was her wonderful, eleven-room, married self, and two: in order to hear sex stories about Claude, since the mere mention of his uncircumcized name made her hysterical. To guarantee herself these pleasures, she harped on our historical and emotional bonds.

“How are your parents?” Maxine never failed to ask.

“Alive,” I said, in an attempt to cut that boring ritual to the bone.

Anyway, it was all the information I had. Gorgeous George and his trainer had retired from the ring and weren’t giving out any interviews from their camp in Los Angeles. Whenever I called them, be it six in the morning or ten at night, or four in the afternoon, my call interrupted their napping tournament.

“Hello Ma,” I’d say, after letting the phone ring a few dozen times, “this is your daughter Harriet.” Why turn a long-distance call into a quiz show?

“Harriet?” I could feel her struggling to surface.

“How are you, Ma?”

“Fine, fine, the weather is beautiful here. I was just taking a little nap.”

“How is Dad?”

“Should I wake him?” she’d worry me. “He didn’t sleep a wink all night. I know, because he kept me up.”

“Just say hello for me.”

“Oh,” she’d groan, sinking back into dreamland, “he’ll be heartbroken that he missed your call.”

“Do they like California?” Marine politely pursued the inquisition, her rosy face contorted with sincerity.

“What do you want from me? What do they know, like, don’t like? When they’re not sleeping, they’re sitting in a kitchen a real-estate agent told them is located in California. If they went in for liking, they’d sign a suicide pact.”

“You talk that way,” said the uncanny Jewish mind reader, “but I know you miss them.”

“I miss them,” I informed her, “like I miss having the clap.”

Maxine registered shock. From the day she had climbed the top of the mountain and married a Professional Man, our mutual parents had magically transformed into sacred beings. Forget the twenty-year poker hustle conducted around her mother’s formica dinette table. Forget everything that didn’t jive with being a periodontist’s wife. One of the major deletions I was asked to make in my memory bank was the entertaining fact that Maxine had been the neighborhood nymphomaniac. From the age of four on, she would put out for a half-eaten Tootsie Roll. As she matured into adult promiscuity, she waltzed a troop of sexual freaks through my parents’ parlor, since the gambling casino she called home wasn’t exactly suited for secret love trysts. Only marriage had liberated her from sex. Her debt to society was paid. Now, her past must be forgotten, her file pulled, her record wiped clean. I saw her the day she returned from her honeymoon, bursting with charge accounts.

“It’s silly.” She giggled girlishly. “My Jerry is so jealous, he gets crazy if I look at a man.” That no doubt meant she could detect breathing.

“Well, you can hardly blame him,” I said judiciously. “It’s probably a guy you blew in your youth.”

“Me, are you suggesting that I fooled around with boys?”

My candor caused Maxine to drop me for three refreshing years. It was only when I’d returned from Europe and Maxine had packed eight years under her chastity belt that she felt a charitable impulse to resume our friendship. This impulse did not include the friendship of Dr. Jerry. I had to be satisfied with photographs of him modeling the latest sporting equipment. From the pictorial evidence, she had turned him into a chicken-fat hemophiliac. My impression was, if he nicked himself shaving, out the stuff would gush, till you were left with a non-recyclable plastic container. He was not, to put it mildly, the star you would cast in your TV series about this swinging dentist who caps Loretta Young’s teeth.

“How is Jerry?” I asked and immediately suspected that Maxine had hypnotized me into mouthing these inane words.

Was she ready to tell me!

“He’s wonderful, he’s so wonderful. I just don’t deserve such a wonderful husband. It should only happen to you, Harriet, it’s all I wish. Guess what he gave me for my Norton’s birthday?” My Norton was their six-year-old deviated septum.

I was mad for her guessing game.

“A hysterectomy?” I guessed. But for a change she wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes had wandered off to her walk-in closets.

“Guess again.”

“A vaginal orgasm?” I tried gamely.

“Really.” She heard me that time and smartly flicked an ash with her ringed finger.

“A dark-brown, twelve-inch vibrator?” I was beginning to enjoy the challenge.

“Is sex all you ever think about? He built me a sauna in the dressing room,” she said flatly, sensing that I wasn’t going to fall on the floor in paroxysms of joy.

She waited for a response, but when it became apparent that I’d sunk into a wide-eyed coma, she upped the ante.

“And he’s engaged Felicia Bernstein’s masseuse to do me every morning at nine.”

“Hmmm,” I said, “if anyone came here at nine in the morning, they’d arrest Claude for practicing unnatural acts.”

She sucked in her breath. My friend had what she coyly referred to as a crush on Claude. Since he wasn’t a Jewish husband, she knew it was only my cunning and vigilance that kept him from jumping on top of her and violating her ears off. She eyed the closed bedroom door as if she expected to see a thick ooze seep out from under it.

Maxine had this heartbreaking problem, which she had confided to me during one of our intimate girlish chats. Her problem was that producing Norton had almost destroyed her, and there wasn’t one contraceptive method on the market that suited her unique system. The Pill? Was I perchance suggesting suicide? It gave her migraine headaches that transfixed the medical profession. Diaphragms shot out of her every time she hit the jackpot, which was always, and her profuse body fluids did likewise to any precautions Jerry employed. The mention of coils caused her to hemorrhage like a tsar, but as she discreetly put it, Jerry was an angel of understanding. Apparently the final solution for this tragically fertile woman was to have her sex life in her head, and Jerry, I presume, conducted his in his patients’ bleeding gums.

She interrupted my ruminations by asking if she might impose on me for a glass of water. While I was in the kitchen, she added ice to her modest order. She came to watch me fight the ice-cube tray, which was welded into the freezer like King Arthur’s sword.

“Jerry bought me the most marvelous new refrigerator,” she remarked absently. “It manufactures darling little ice cubes and drops them into a plastic bucket.”

“Bring it around with you the next time you barge in.” I handed her a dripping glass. She held it as though the wetness was pure slime. In between delicate sips she told me her latest troubles.

“It’s such a bore. I’m on this diet and I have to drink eight to ten glasses of water a day. I feel like I’m going to explode, but I must lose ten pounds by next Friday, and it’s supposed to work like magic. You should try it, Harriet. Ten pounds less would be very becoming on you. Of course, you don’t have my pressures and social obligations to be attractive. If Claude likes you the way you are, I guess you’re set for a while. But me, it’s one invitation after another. Next week it’s Lenny. You know, if not for Jerry, Lenny wouldn’t have a tooth in his head. So he’s been begging us to save him one weekend on his yacht. And you know Lenny, he’s constantly surrounded by the beautiful people, black and white, I’m delighted to say, just so long as they’re famous. God knows the competition I’ll run into on Lenny’s yacht, and I have absolutely nothing to wear, nothing that fits, except what you see on my back. How are things with Claude?” she finished, so I shouldn’t get the impression that she was self-absorbed.

“Terrific,” I said, “if your ambition in life is to be a one-woman bordello.”

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Her eyes flickered around the messy room. “It’s all they think about. My Jerry is driving me up the wall.”

Her Jerry, the Phantom Stud of Central Pack West.

“Of course, it’s really all you have to do. But me, there are servants to manage, dinner parties to arrange, Norton, my
au-pair
girl, my analyst, my yoga, group therapy, and now a masseuse.”

I welcomed her commiserations. “You’re right. My life with Claude is one uninterrupted bout of carnality.”

Maxine understood. She set her water glass on the coffee table and circled her loving-cup hips with her hands.

“He has so little time left to be with you, it probably weighs on his mind. How much longer does he have in America?” The head of immigration couldn’t have been more concerned.

“Hopefully, Maxine, you’ll be out of here before he has to leave. Isn’t it time for you to get back and clean Jerry’s tools?”

She looked at her gold watch, which was set in a gold band surrounded by gold bracelets,

“Just a few more minutes. I want to stop off and see Regina when she gets home. Did you two make up yet?”

“Who’s that?” I demanded, because of all her hypocritical roles, the one I despised most was Maxine as peacemaker. She rushed back and forth between me and Rhoda-Regina, reporting to each of us how sick the other one was. When she came to visit our tenement from her estate on Central Park West, she did a full Queen Elizabeth touring a Ugandan hospital.

“Now don’t be that way.” She smiled her Mrs. Periodontist smile.

“If you are referring to my ex-friend Rhoda, no, we haven’t made up. And I wish to remind you that after twenty-five years of calling somebody Rhoda, I find it extremely difficult to switch to Regina.”

“If it makes her happy, what does it cost you?” Maxine recited in a chillingly accurate imitation of my mother.

“And when she decides she’s Van Johnson? Will you be ready for that one?”

Maxine glowed, already having a splendid time at the expense of my nervous system.

“She’s greatly improved. She’s sculpting again. She got her job back at Greenwich House, and she and Sidney seem very adjusted.” I was astounded to find myself listening to a diagnosis of R.-R.’s condition.

“Wonderful,” I said. “Is she still tipping the scales at a neat two hundred?”

“She’s not, fat, Harriet. She’s just very large-boned,” the contented midget decreed. “Anyway, I really think that if you apologized to her, explained what you thought you were doing, she’d be only too glad to forgive you. After all, you don’t just throw a lifetime friendship out the window.”

“She did,” I said grimly, “and I don’t wish to discuss it. If she’s too sick to realize that I had her best interests at heart, I don’t want her friendship.”