Jane Austen in Boca (22 page)

“And when are
you
going back?” she asked innocently, turning to Norman.

Although he had planned to stay up north for a while, he suddenly felt inclined to shorten his trip. “Soon,” said Norman, “sometime next week, if not earlier. I haven’t firmed up my plans yet.” He looked at May. “But I’ll call you. We can have
brunch as soon as I get back, and maybe, if I’m good”—he winked—”you’ll make me that kugel you promised.”

May left the mall holding Adam’s hand, but hardly aware of it. She was floating on air.

F
LO HAD BEEN RIGHT ON THE SUBJECT OF
R
UDY
S
ALZBURG.
H
E
was perfectly agreeable to the filming, seeing in it the possibility of a starring role for himself However, he explained, his support was not enough. They still required the approval of the club board.

This was unforeseen. “Going before the board,” as the phrase went, was a daunting prospect. The board, Flo knew, was a notoriously contentious body. Its meetings had entered the popular folklore of Boca Festa as occasions for ferocious power struggles and vituperative backbiting. Only last month, there had been an enormous fracas over the issue of relocating the trash bins in the parking lot. A fight had ensued between Pinkus Lotman and Manny Schaeffer, requiring three other board members (one with a heart condition) to separate them. A careful review of the minutes had shown that Pinkus had raised the concern about the bins because his Lincoln had been scratched when someone had pressed up against it in the process of getting from the path to the nearby bin. Though Manny’s name was not directly mentioned, Pinkus had already put it out that he suspected him, since he was known to transport large bags of trash from his second-floor apartment and to carry his keys on a chain attached to a belt loop on his Bermuda shorts. Manny flatly denied the charge and resented what he took to be a public accusation. Subsequent meetings had done nothing to clarify whether the bins should indeed be relocated or whether the subject was a personal one, to be resolved between Pinkus and Manny alone.

Such things were standard fare at board meetings and resulted in very few concrete decisions. In the past, Rudy had found it expedient to bypass board approval on minor issues, simply proceeding as he saw fit. He would have most willingly done so in this case, he explained to Flo, only recent events had made this impossible. It all stemmed from a decision he had made two weeks ago abolishing the breadsticks on the table at lunch. It was a cost-saving measure that he had deemed to be uncontroversial. The sticks tended to get stale quickly and were rarely sampled, since guests liked to leave room for more substantial fare. Yet the decision to abolish them had resulted in a storm of protest.

Roz Fliegler had been the first to mention the absence of the breadsticks in a pod meeting. “Where are the breadsticks?” she had asked in a peremptory tone, after which others were quick to second the question, though they hadn’t noted their absence until Roz had pointed it out.

Finally, Rudy had been called in to explain. He noted that the breadsticks were rarely eaten and that the chef found himself with more croutons than he knew what to do with.

“That’s not the point,” noted Roz huffily. “They were decorative. Now the tables look naked.”

Others chimed in, with some maintaining that they actually ate the breadsticks.

Ultimately, the point was raised that this was, after all, a board issue. Why had Rudy not gotten the approval of the board before removing the breadsticks?

“It’s a matter of democratic process,” noted Isadore Waxman, whose interest in history and political theory was well known. “We pay our dues and we expect proper representation. This kind of high-handed decision making”—he waved his hand toward Rudy, who straightened defensively—”does not reflect the principles upon which our club has been duly constituted.” The statement drew enthusiastic applause.

The Issue had become a firebrand, taken up across the complex, with a special committee assigned to look into recent decisions that Rudy had made without board consultation. It had been, he confessed to Flo, a humiliating ordeal. Eager as he was to facilitate her niece’s project, he was obliged to conform to the letter of the law, though he admitted that taking anything before the board, especially now in the wake of the LotmanSchaeffer dispute, was a gamble.

It was decided that Amy would accompany Flo to the meeting and, with her aunt’s help, present her request in person. Flo had convinced her niece to use a cream rinse on her hair, remove her nose stud, and wear a skirt. “There’s no point giving them fodder,” explained Flo. “We’ll have enough on our hands as it is.”

The board listened to the case politely.

“What,” someone asked, “is the story the film is going to tell?”

Amy responded that this was a difficult question to answer. “We’ll try to capture the daily life of the club: how you spend your day, what you like to do and talk about, that sort of thing.” A number of members nodded their heads as if rehearsing their day as she spoke. Amy continued, “In time, what happens is that a story emerges; it kind of finds its way into the film—like a lost child.” There were further nods and murmurs as they tried to take this image in. “But you have to understand,” she concluded, smiling her most ingratiating smile, “with a documentary we can’t entirely predict what the story will be in advance. It has to take shape on its own. It’s fishing for diamonds, so to speak.” There was another murmur and rustle among the audience as they considered this metaphor.

“Personally”—it was Pinkus Lotman, rising slowly with the mannered deliberation of Spencer Tracy in
Inherit the Wind,
a film that had much impressed him—”I’m against it. It’s a powder keg. She says she’s fishing, and fishing is not what we want here.
She’ll start filming and find things that make us look bad. It happens on
60 Minutes
all the time. Bad is always more dramatic, so they make it a smear job.”

“It’s only bad if you have something to hide,” piped up Manny Schaeffer, jumping to his feet. He was a small man with a high, reedy voice that nonetheless carried a great deal of authority (some people said he bore a striking resemblance to that fearsome Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn). “I think it’s an excellent idea. It will make us stand out from the other clubs and show us to advantage.”

In no time at all the group had polarized along two lines, strangely reminiscent of the breakdown in the trash-bin controversy. There was the Lotman side, which feared an embarrassing expose, and the Schaeffer side, which saw the opportunity for free publicity. It was clear that a stalemate had been reached and that a creative maneuver was called for to break the impasse. Not by accident had Rudy Salzburg made a fortune in the ice cream business.

“You know,” he said, tapping a manicured finger on the table where the refreshments committee had laid out a nice spread, “correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there an Academy Award given for documentary film?”

There was silence. The board looked expectantly at Amy.

“Well, this happens to be true,” she said, nodding to Rudy and smiling at the group before her, “and I might add that NYU has done very well at all the awards. I mean, it’s common knowledge that most of the winners in the major festivals nowadays have attended either NYU Film School or USC, and I’d say that recently, NYU has the lead. That’s one of the reasons I chose to go. And besides, everyone knows New Yorkers are smarter.”

This drew a laugh and a murmur of agreement.

“I have a really talented crew,” continued Amy, “and as my aunt mentioned, I’m on a merit-based partial scholarship, and last year my student film won an Olive Branch at the Village
Film Festival, where there were over five hundred entries. I don’t want to get your hopes up, of course, but with a subject with this potential interest and visual richness, an Academy Award nomination is not out of the question. And in the event that we were nominated, it stands to reason that we’d want the subjects in the film at the awards ceremony. It’s great human interest and publicity value for the film.”

Flo was impressed to see that Amy was as good as Rudy at working her audience. Everyone had a question, including what to wear to the Awards. And when it came time for a vote, it was discovered that opposition to the project had evaporated. Permission for filming was unanimously approved.

T
O HER SURPRISE,
F
LO FOUND THAT
A
MY AND HER FRIENDS AS
similated with relative ease into the life of Boca Festa. The cameras, initially feared by many of the women concerned about cellulite on their thighs and hair in need of a touch-up, were soon forgotten.

Amy used the analogy of science fiction genre films to explain this to a puzzled Flo. “Once the society accepts the alien visitors,” she said, “nobody ever notices them much. They lose their shock value and everybody just goes back to business as usual.”

The analogy, Flo thought, was apt in other ways as well. Amy and her friends were so different in appearance from the general run of club members that their cameras seemed like just another piece of physical exotica, like Amy’s nose stud or George’s corn-rows—or, to use Amy’s analogy, like the third eye on an alien visitor.

There was also the kibbitzing factor that soon wore away any sense that the filmmakers were aliens. The population of Boca Festa was by temperament curious and inclined to engage. They liked to question, probe, and commiserate, and they held to the steadfast assumption that everyone, however superficially different from themselves, was at heart really exactly like them. Amy and her friends were therefore continually peered at in a penetrating though not entirely unpleasant way, as though those scrutinizing them had seen them somewhere before—perhaps at their daughter’s wedding—and were trying to place them.

It helped as well that the filmmakers were an easygoing and
appreciative lot. Amy knew Boca from her numerous visits during childhood, when her parents, during rough spots in their marriage, had taken short jaunts there to unwind. Later she had been shipped down to Eddie and Flo (an exposure that her parents now thought far less benign than they had imagined at the time). But even George and Jordan, for whom Boca was an entirely new experience, quickly developed a taste for the pastimes and personalities of the place. George took to playing cards with some of the men in the evening and was judged an above-average pinochle player, while Jordan was known to spend time at the pool putting suntan lotion on the women’s backs and admiring their jewelry. The manicured grounds, the leisure activities, and the pleasant weather were all seductive, the group agreed. They were particularly taken by the quality and quantity of the food, not only at Boca Festa but everywhere in West Boca.

“Everything tastes good,” remarked George, taking a large forkful of smoked sturgeon and eating it with his bagel with schmear. “It’s like they’ve discovered some miracle seasoning that gives everything maximum flavor.”

“Maybe we’re in heaven,” noted Jordan.

“Or in that place in the Albert Brooks film, where everybody goes after they die and waits to be assigned their ultimate fate,” added George.

“Defending Your Life.”

“That’s it. Remember how the food was really good there, too? Is Albert Brooks Jewish?” He turned to Amy. “Maybe his parents live in Boca.”

It wasn’t long before the group had become extremely sought after by a certain segment of the Boca Festa population who enjoyed debating topics like affirmative action, rap music, and body piercing. These debates sometimes grew loud and intense, and the group soon learned to take comments made in the heat of argument in stride. Arguing, for Boca Festa residents, was not necessarily a sign of dislike—on the contrary, fifty-year marriages
had been sustained on this foundation alone. Vigorous debate was even said to have health benefits, getting the blood circulating better than a good game of tennis.

The group had spent the first days of their stay collecting general background footage that could be used to add atmosphere and provide filler once the structure of the film was in place. There were panning shots
of
elderly men moving in procession in their golf carts like generals surveying a battlefield, and of jaunty septuagenarian tennis players in pleated skirts who appeared not to generate anything in the way of sweat despite hours of play. Amy told Flo that she had never seen tennis played so slowly, the ball moving back and forth as though underwater, or out of a scene from
Elvira Madigan.

Some of the best footage involved the kind of spontaneous interchange that was likely to arise when one resident began expounding on a subject to the camera in a public place. The possibility for accumulating commentary was amazing, as talk grew with the rapid, combustible energy of brushfire. It was simply impossible for someone to say something without arousing the need for someone nearby to say something else. Nor was any question in itself a guarantee of the direction the conversation would take. The material emerging from any single question held to a very high level of improbability, as though the principle of chaos theory (that one interference would, over time, cause an outcome very far afield from the original direction of events) was that much greater than normal when the variables involved were elderly Jews with the leisure to indulge in a free play of mind.

At lunch on the Friday of the first week of filming, the group had positioned itself in what seemed to be relative seclusion at the end of the buffet table. George was holding the camera and Jordan the boom mike, and Amy had gotten hold of a man in pink Bermuda shorts and asked him to speak a little about his interests.

“Interests? What interests?” exclaimed the man irritably, as
though he had been asked to discuss his bank account or his sex life. The group had learned not to take explosive reactions to seemingly innocuous questions too seriously. In the minds of the respondents the questions might harbor unforeseen depths and implications, or might simply serve as a convenient pretext to vent on a favorite subject.