Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (22 page)

Nachum grinned. “Oh, well. By the time I’d learned it well enough to think of trying, I must say writing poetry in Hebrew struck me as redundant. Colleague, what about you? Tell me about the book you wrote.”

Did that ever turn out to be an awkward bit of post-coital pillow talk! Of course I thought he meant
Glory Be
,
but Nachum didn’t know it existed. He looked unabashedly baffled when I started going on about the Pilgrims’ landfall and the French and Indian War. Meaning to pay me a professional compliment by treating it as a given, my colleague meant that I must’ve written a book about
our
war—our own bit of history’s ocean, swirling until it knocked us together on April 29, 1945.

And I had. I just didn’t especially enjoy explaining that mine was an uproarious American romp through Europe that featured the Holocaust as a clumsily appended afterthought, scrapped outright in the later printings. Can’t say for sure if squeaking
Nothing
’s title when Nachum wouldn’t take “Oh” for an answer counted as a third awkward moment or just the second one’s continuation by other means.

“And your role?” he asked Gerson pleasantly. I don’t know if he meant the war, my book
,
or our shared century, but my husband was too honest to choose any but the least boastful option. God knows it pained him, though.

“Me? Oh, I turned it into a movie.”

Slipping the Karloffian camel back into his breast pocket, Nachum beamed at us both with real fondness. “
Damned
good ice cream,” he said.

Posted by: Pam

Nonetheless, that let Gerson back in as more than a landlocked peeping Tom. He was allowed to have hands now. Once he saw he’d been granted permission to perch on the messy bed we’d made of our bit of history’s ocean, he was even allowed, a bit gingerly, to broach topics. Since Nachum had already told us about the 1948 war, my husband wanted to hear all about the one that had ended a month ago with ben Canaan’s tanks on the Suez Canal.

But Nachum was a real Israeli, impatient above all with simplicity. He knew what Gerson wanted to hear: the IDF on the offensive, armored spearheads in the Sinai. Ben Canaan and Landau conferring over a map, goggles around their necks in the lead chariot’s blue-starred, Hebrew-lettered shadow as sun-baked dust swirled and they seized the initiative. Paying my husband a backhanded compliment (they were to stay great friends for years), Nachum refused to give Gerson that movie.

“Remember: we colluded,” he told us. “I’ve got no love lost for Nasser, I’d shoot him without batting an eye if that raving pan-nationalist bastard showed up at my door. But we
schemed
.
Not exactly a first for us, since we made deals with anyone and everyone to get as many Jews out of Europe as we could.”

Note the “we,” Panama. As I’ve said, “This is who I am now.” Also note its upcoming contradiction, though.

“Well, it was justified,” said Gerson primly.

“Of course. You’ll get no argument from me. I just wish they’d made a few more! But this was different. Suez wasn’t survival, it was power politics: our little Israel on Broadway at last. Suez was us in league with the British and French, our former imperial masters—no great love lost there either, but we’ve obviously learned you don’t always marry for love—plotting in secret to smash Nasser and Egypt, who deserved it, to hell and gone. It must just
confound
our so recent allies that in London and Paris, Suez is the foreign-policy disaster of all time. But in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and this very room, Suez is a triumph and the latest glory of our already much laureled IDF. Same plan, same war! Different publics.”

“Have you
written
this?” My husband looked incredulous.

“Oh, Noah!” Nachum laughed flat-out tenderly. “I’ve not only written it, I’ve said it on radio. To a mixed reaction, yes. Did you think we’d stop arguing just because we’re a country? It would be like the British learning to cook. Or Americans forgetting how to make movies.”

It wasn’t until we were exchanging addresses that Nachum confirmed Pam’s stymied ghost-seeking stare by admitting he wasn’t Nachum Unger at all. No, not an impostor, Panama: a successor, one Nachum ben Zion. “Not the most inspired choice, colleague, I agree. But as I think I told you both, trying to write poetry in Hebrew struck me as redundant.”

“Oh, hell! I’ll never
get it right,” I laughed, remembering Jake introducing himself as Jack Cornhole and also playing the shiksa for the first time in hours. “Didn’t all of you always tell me changing your name was giving in?”

“Well, colleague. A lot depends on what you change it to.”

“And where.” Gerson’s voice was muffled, but whether by his mouth or my ears is anyone’s guess.

Nachum went on out into his city; we went up to our room and made love. Whether I felt I had something to make up for or was just compensating for one act of infidelity or fidelity by performing another is anyone’s guess too. If I’d known it was our last time, I’d—oh, hell, bikini girl, I probably wouldn’t have done anything much different. We were us, knew each other too well for surprises to register as anything but impersonations. In bed, anyhow.

When I woke up, Gerson was out on our balcony. From my pillowed point of view, Jerusalem was just a blue sky and murmurs of traffic. I stood up and it metamorphosed into the vista my husband had been looking at for an hour.

I doubt he’d taken much of it in. Now that he knew there’d be world enough and time for that, looking at it while still trapped in the guise of a tourist must’ve been distracting and annoying. When he turned to me, he’d visibly spent most of that hour harrying his face and voice to brace for whatever followed what he’d audibly and visibly determined had to be the first words he spoke when he turned to me if they were going to get said at all.

“Pammie, I’m staying.”

Posted by: Pam Kukla as Sarah Bernhardt in the King David Hotel

Not only because a lot of it’s just too atrocious but I don’t have all day, there’s no way I’m going to attempt a full reconstruction of the two hours that followed. What I’ll be leaving out, like what I’ve got no choice but to put in, definitely wasn’t married life’s version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

It was just more, abominably more, of Gerson’s and my perversely bright-morninged, surreally—well, to one of us—Palestinial version of the witching-hour colloquy no marriage can survive more than one of. The other stranger’s facial expressions and vocal rhythms blind you with rage at their idiot resemblance to the spouse you loved. Noticing nose hairs feels like apt cause for butchery. Yet maybe the timing wasn’t altogether inappropriate, since as I think I’ve mentioned, some marriages are most themselves at midnight. Ours had always been most itself in the morning.

Here are a few—how to put this?—highlights. “Say it, say it! Just say it once, that’s all I ask. Did we
disappoint
you, Gerson?
Huh?
”

“No plurals,” he said reflexively.

“All right! Did
I-aye-I-eye-I
disappoint you?”

A fire engine could’ve gone by under our window just then and been drowned out. That “I” went on for a good eight or nine seconds, and Maria Callas, eat your lungs out. Of course, I didn’t have to worry about staying on pitch.

His lips crimped. “Yes, you did. But I’m sure I also disappointed you. Many, many times.”

With no anticipation from my eyes, I felt my cheeks go Niagara. “No, never, not once, never! Never once, Gerson. Never,” I blubbered, then corrected myself. “Well,
now!
I mean, obviously: now. Did I mention now? Yes, definitely now. It only takes one. Hell, just ask my muh-mother. Oh, laugh, please please laugh! Your Pammie muh-made a joke.
LAaauUUuGH!
”

“I’ll listen to anything you need to get said, but will you stop screeching? My God, Pam, you sound like—no, that’s too cruel.”

I didn’t stop screeching. It’s a wonder the King David didn’t throw us both out—or the city authorities, what with all those wonderful old buildings burnt to ashes. (Because the fire engines couldn’t get through, Panama. Because no one could hear the
sirens
,
Panama. God! I get sick of holding your hand, bikini girl. I do.)

“…It’s
because
I’m American, you bitch!” he finally screamed back. I’d never heard him scream before. “My God, this is what I was
promised
.
My God, don’t you understand that here, here,
here
is the country I always wanted, imagined,
prayed for
the United States to be? Because I knew it
had been
,
once before I was born?
It’s like a man whose mother is fat, dull, old, and stupid—she smells bad, Pammie! She doesn’t read anymore, can’t even write her own name. She sits in her own caca and rocks back and forth and laughs at Fran Kukla. She’s shoving, shoving more cookies in her mouth, more baloney, more hot dogs, more! I don’t know how she even finds room for it all when she’s got Gene Rickey’s cock in her mouth, but she does. Then one day he finds a photograph of her as a young girl.”

“And can’t wait to screw the bejesus out of her,” I said coolly. “My! This is getting interesting. I can’t wait to write to my mother-in-law in Passaic. But oh! That’s right. She can’t read anymore.”

Later. Was I packing, unpacking? Was I trying to smash the lid of Gerson’s suitcase down on that sweet man’s hands? He’d let slip that he’d already phoned Nachum ben Zion for help with a place to stay:
my
Nachum,
my
fellow swimmer in history’s ocean. Didn’t a fire engine loaded with ice cream outrank a new supplicant? Guess not. I know that at some point I wadded up his silly European-style striped pajamas and hurled them in his face.

“
answer me!
I need to know. If I were Stella! If I were Stella, Stella, that bitch Stella! Would you still? Well?”

He looked perplexed. Then, although it’s just as well I didn’t recognize it until shortly before its imprint on my memory began to fade some months later—if I had, I’d have gone for him with jaws for hands and teeth for nails; wouldn’t have rested or stopped until satisfied that not only I but nobody would ever see that look again, now that his face no longer had the tools required to produce it—he looked compassionate.

“You never knew her. She’d have just gone wherever I went.”

“Well, I’m Pam Buchanan! Pam Buchanan, not that stupid fucking, fucking cow, and you never even
asked!! ME!!! Shithead!!!!
” I screamed.

We looked at each other dumbfounded. Not only had it blatantly never crossed his mind to ask me to remain in the Promised Land with him; it hadn’t crossed mine until provoked that he hadn’t. We knew each other better than we wanted to right then, and we’d never wanted to less.

That well-meaning idiot honest-to-God scratched his head. “Oh, Pammie. Come on. I mean—I suppose I could have, yes. Maybe. But really. It would’ve really just put more of the burden on you. Wouldn’t it? Having to say no and feel rotten. That wouldn’t have been fair—and now, I think, it’s too late. Isn’t it?”

“
Yeaaaahh
,
it’s too late. You know why? You want to know why?
Now
,
Gerson,
now
it would only be
painful!
Oh, where have I ever heard
that
before? You want this up, up, up! you
now
,
Gerson?
Huh?
”

And you might think that by the rules, namely none, of a marital witching-hour colloquy—even one held perversely, well!, let’s just say idiosyncratically, in the morning, with Jerusalem’s astonishing and yet never astonished skyline playing the backdrop to him, then me, then him, but never us—there can be no such thing as going too far. You’d be wrong, and now we both knew it.

It wasn’t a question of wrecking my marriage. That had gone out the window an hour ago and something in me was already wondering what it would be like to be free. It was a question of whether we’d be able to exchange a civil word if we ran into each other thirty years from now. He’d thought I knew and understood him better than that and now he’d never be sure.

He looked at me, made up his mind what he was going to say next. Didn’t look good—my bet and instant fear was Charybdis—but then he unmade it. Said instead, “Well, Pam, the game is done. You’ve won, you’ve won.”

Knowing I’d lost, I wept. Saved our future by insisting that random moment of cruelty didn’t define me. Brokenly agreeing that there was no Gerson, let alone plural, still up to me to define, leaving a Pam he might not despise as my only salvage job, I sat on the bed, half drowning my apologies in tears and half coaxing more tears with new apologies. He sat down there next to me soon enough.

What can I say? It worked. I’ve got forty fond letters postmarked Israel to prove it. Unless she threw them out after his death, his widow has at least that many, with a variety of postmarks, to him from me.

Saying “It worked” doesn’t mean one sob or apology was a whit less than genuine, Panama. It just means that salvaging a Pam he might not despise was the agenda. I couldn’t have cared less what sort of person I actually
was
,
you know? I cared about what sort of person Noah was: someone I desperately wanted not to despise me. Believe me, if I’d had to fake being a Pam he might not despise, I would have. I just don’t think I did.

The third hour, for my single worthwhile accomplishment of the morning was that there was a third hour, was much calmer and quieter. One proof was that we heard a fire engine, though distant and plainly racing toward somewhere nowhere nearby.

In fact, the third hour was gratifyingly gentle. In a muted way, the third hour was one of the best we’d ever had. There’s nothing for marital harmony like the transition to speaking of your marriage and the selves that you were or affected to be in the past tense.

One fragment: “No, I’m not saying it was ever a temptation for you. That’s not who you were. But because of what
you were—not Jewish—it couldn’t help being an option. That’s all: an option. It’s your option
to move to Cincinnati. That doesn’t mean I think you’ll do it.”

“Not
that
miserable,” I mumbled.

“Good. And I asked myself, do I really want to go back to living surrounded by people for whom anti-Semitism is even an option? Even if I don’t believe the ones I know and trust will ever take advantage of it?”

I stirred, punched a friendly wet pillow. “Was that when we were at Yad Vashem?”

“Ah, Pam! You know me better than that. Masada.”

During the third hour’s last half, I was no longer sitting but lying on the bed. And yes, there was a moment or two when a friendly two-way suspicion dawned that the last time we’d ever made love might be demoted to the next-to-last time we’d make love. But we knew we couldn’t risk it; the second hour was too recent. The third hour, though a promising child, was still a long way from first grade.

“Noah, you’re brave,” I blurted up at him at the end of the hour.

“That may be the only thing I’ve ever wanted to hear someone say about me.” He bent to give my forehead a dry kiss. “And since you did—and since I’m glad, I’m honored!, it was you—let me have that as the thing I carry away from here. I’m going.”

I can’t say I’d have
minded
if, just for pleasantry’s sake, he’d seen fit to tell me Pam too was brave. But you can’t have everything, as I’d once been reminded by a whisper of skin on a beach deck in Malibu. That I’d won the third hour and the promise of knowing him for the rest of his life was plenty enough to keep.

He looked at his watch. “You’ve missed our flight, of course,” he said. “Bad timing.”

As I too got to my feet, since not seeing him to the door would only have told him I’d mistaken a hotel for a hospital, one final two-way recognition decided to stay mute. We’d both just realized I’d be boarding a plane soon, for Noah a special anxiety back when he’d been Gerson.

Even if my flight out of Israel did turn out to be Carole Lombard’s plane, though, he was safe now. However anguishing, the death of an ex-wife wouldn’t be history repeating itself, and I’d been one for at least an hour. The papers Pam’s lawyer mailed for his signature three months later were a civilized formality, at least so far as we two were concerned. Purely mental though it was in his case, poor old Oliver Watson was visibly strained by
his
first trip to Palestine. Noah sent them back with a joking note about the Galilee I’d left behind me.