Old Neighborhood (11 page)

She looked at me carefully and then she said:

“Steve, I’d like to spend the summer away from you.”

“Bev—”

“I need some time to be by myself.”

“Are we that far gone?”

“I just need a separate vacation, that’s all. People take separate vacations.”

“Not for a summer.”

“I’d like to take a place in Montauk. The camp can run without me. And that’s what I want.”

“What you’re asking for is a trial separation.”

“Don’t make it worse than it is. Twenty years, Steve. If nothing else, we’re due for a little time apart.”

“A summer?”

“We’ve done a lot of things in our life because of what you needed. This is what I need.”

“Your needs have not been ignored around here.”

“Look, we’re not in a good place right now. I want to sort out who I am and who we are. It might turn out that this is good for us.”

“Or it might not.”

“Well, I’m going to do it.”

I knew the tone and Beverly’s resolve. There was nothing to negotiate.

“Will I get to see you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t figured out the details.”

I must have looked as hurt as I felt.

“It’s not the end of the world,” she said.

“Montauk? It’s pretty far out.”

We both managed to smile.

“Well, you’re going to do it anyway,” I said. “So take the time you want, goddammit. We got through consciousness-raising. I guess we can get through the summer.”

“Thank you, darling.”

“It’s not like you announced you were having an affair.”

I did not say that out of cunning, it had not occurred to me. I asked offhandedly:

“I mean, you’re not having an affair, are you?”

Her face turned crimson.

“Bevvy! You are!”

“No.”

“Bev—”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“Something happened. But it was nothing.”

“Christ! Bev?”

“It wasn’t an affair, Steve. Not an affair.”

The two of us were trembling.

“It was just—an episode.”

“An episode?”

“An incident. It was nothing.”

“Bev, I could have had women. They’re all around. But I never did.”

“Steve, why did you have to ask?”

“Is this why you want to get away? For episodes?”

“No.”

“Oh, Bevvy—”

“Steve, remember when I first had the idea for the business? You didn’t put it down, or put me down. You said, ‘It’s great.’ You said, ‘Do it.’” She took my hands in hers. “I owe you so much.”

“I owe
you
so much.”

“We married very young, didn’t we?”

I pulled away.

“A summer apart,” I said. “We’re so chic.”

We no longer had sex. I was too angry to touch her. It was necessary for me to go on an overnight trip to Boston for a trade show. I almost decided not to tell anyone I would be gone, feeling that I would not even be missed. I chose to let Sarah know so that someone would have a record of my whereabouts. I also told her that Beverly and I would be spending the summer apart.

“I figured something like that.”

“We don’t know what it all means yet,” I said, stealing a line from the marriage counselor.

“I’m never going to get married,” she said flatly. I was stunned by the coldness of her remark. I felt I had failed her.

“There are good parts. And there’s you. Having you was a good part.”

“You don’t have to get married to have children.”

“You did in my day.”

“Well, maybe I’ll get married. But when I’m older. Not before I’m thirty.”

She was not so definite. We had not set such a terrible example, after all.

“It’s just that marriage is so—inconvenient,” she said.

I took the shuttle from LaGuardia Airport and the moment the plane was airborne I felt sexually liberated. Beverly had broken a code of honor with me, I was free to have sex with the person of my choice. The stewardess, a slim brunette, collected my ticket, and I thought about my chances of making it with her standing up in the washroom, protected from the passengers by the “Occupied” sign. My fantasies became rampant, a wild bird had been released. I walked to the back of the cabin and noticed three attractive women passengers on board, two businesswomen and a college student, any of whom I would have substituted for the stewardess. I never liked her anyway. I was blocked by other passengers. None of the women were sitting near me and I could not execute a proper pass leaning over people.

I had come to Boston for a hi-fi trade show, our account was previewing its new line of speakers, and I had arranged to stay at a hotel near the site of the show. I ordered dinner from room service and fell asleep after watching a movie on television. In the morning, I had breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, my waitress was an overweight girl in her early twenties with a pretty face, who bungled my order, brought me coffee instead of tea, and left the dish on the pickup counter so long the pancakes arrived cold. I left an excessive tip. This was to compensate for the fantasy that had engaged me during breakfast—bringing her up to my room, ordering room service to show her what hot pancakes were really like, and then screwing her until she moaned, “You are the best lover at the hi-fi trade show,” or words along that line.

The show was set up for hi-fi fans and for trade people who were there to do business with one another. At nine in the morning, on the floor of the convention with the hot lights and the displays proclaiming “Buy me!” “Place an order!” “Better than ever …” the event seemed hysterical to me.

“I’m not in the mood for this,” I said to a model at a booth. She smiled a smile she must have practiced in a mirror and handed me a brochure on a new hi-fi turntable.

“Just what I needed,” I said.

I went to my client’s booth, which featured a series of magazine ads I had written. The ads tried to explain some of the technical features of the hi-fi speakers. They were enlarged to four feet by six feet and looked obscene to me in that size.

“Steve, you came! Don’t they look great?”

The president of the company was Mal Peterson, an engineer in his fifties. He shook my hand frantically and started to talk to me about responses to the ads. My mind drifted. I was thinking about Beverly, I saw her in bed with someone else, he was in her, and she was responding, rocking back and forth, her hands all over him, her hands on his ass—on his ass for Christ’s sake—rocking, drawing him out, and out—Peterson’s remarks about favorable dealer response were somewhat out of context. The hi-fi speakers were on display with “Thus Spake Zarathustra” playing, which seemed to be plugged right into the inside of my head. I excused myself, saying I was going to look at the competitors’ booths, but I wandered, watching the female models, imagining how much better they would look if only they would wash off their stage makeup, which led me to imagine myself showering with them.

Somehow I got through a business lunch with Peterson and three members of his staff, they did most of the talking, then we went back to the trade show, where the line of speakers was being presented at a press conference. This was the responsibility of an outside public relations firm we had hired.

“It went well, didn’t it?” the publicist said to me afterward. He was in his thirties, aggressive, he wanted my business.

“Yes, it all seems like a great success,” I said.

The time was after five, Peterson was going to a business dinner with his sales people and a few dealers, I had discharged my responsibilities. I sank into a chair in the refreshment area and I saw him coming toward me. He was shouting my name, “Steve! Steve Robbins!” It was Liebowitz from the days in California.

“Steve, buddy! It must be fifteen years.”

“How are you, Liebow?” I said, shaking his hand. “It’s more like twenty.”

“I saw your name so many times. I always meant to call you, but I just couldn’t. You know, with you being such a big shot.”

“Is that what I am?”

“You must be one of the top five creative minds in the advertising business today. I mean, the top five!”

Liebowitz and his hyperbole—

“What are you up to, Liebow?”

“I’m doing great. I own a mail-order business in Chicago. Anything you can think of, we ship. Giant balloons, stereos, electric toothbrushes. We’re the biggest mail-order house west of the Alleghenies. The biggest.”

“That’s great.”

“So tell me, you still married?”

“Yes.” Technically correct, I thought. “I’m still married.”

“I got married, I got divorced. I got married, I got divorced again. You with your wife?”

“No.”

“So let me buy you dinner. And after, if you want, I’ll get you laid, tiger, like always.”

“Liebowitz, you never got me laid. And I don’t think
you
were getting laid.”

“You got to be kidding. I invented the matinee in the state of California.”

“Liebowitz.”

“Come on, Steve.”

“Sure. Let’s have dinner.”

We went to a seafood restaurant near the convention hall, Liebowitz maintained a high level of sexual tension throughout, he flirted with waitresses, stared at women seated at other tables.

“They got to know you really want it. They love it when they know you’re hungry for it.”

I was at a point where I did not know whether to humor him or take it as good advice. He asked me to guess how many women he had had in his life. “Over two hundred,” he said. I believed him. This seemed important enough to Liebowitz for him to have kept count and I wondered what it would have been like to have experienced over two hundred women. He regaled me with The Great Lays of History. “She was the best ever in Green Bay, Wisconsin.” I might have begun to dismiss all this as bravado but he was making eye contact with a woman having dinner with a man a few tables away.

He excused himself, went to the men’s room, she went to the ladies’ room and he returned with her phone number, which she had given him on a piece of paper when they were out of view.

“I’m amazed, Liebow. I have the feeling something’s been going on all the time that I just learned about.”

“Communication. I’m in the communication business.”

The woman left with a last glance in Liebowitz’s direction and he leaned back in his chair, satisfied with himself.

After a while he went to a pay phone to call the date he had for this night and returned to tell me that he was sorry, but his friend did not have a friend for me. Just before we parted company, we exchanged business cards.

“Fantastic,” he said, looking at mine. “I always knew you’d go places, Steve. You’re some smart guy.”

“I don’t know anything, Liebow.”

I returned to the hotel and tried to decide whether to take a plane back to New York or stay the night in Boston, deciding to stay, since I did not have a compelling reason to return home. I ordered a cognac from room service and turned on the television set. I was not ready to sleep and too keyed up to remain in the room. I took the elevator down to the hotel cocktail lounge. The place was noisy, the serious drinkers had settled in, another convention was in town, people with nameplates were gathered in various-sized groups. A piano player was producing show tunes in a monotonous medley, making everything sound like “The Impossible Dream.” I sat at the bar, ordered a stinger and watched the end of a Red Sox game on television. To my right was the only other drinker sitting at the bar, a man in his fifties, consuming scotch sours at a rapid pace. At eleven sharp, the man rose, said goodnight to the bartender, turned, and in an effortless motion, fell to the floor like a wooden plank.

“My sentiments entirely,” I said, as I tried to help him to his feet. The bartender and a waiter removed the man before he could offend any of the steadier drinkers in the room. A few minutes later a petite redhead in her thirties with an attractive but tired face and a sexy body sat in a stool to my left, accompanied by a stocky man in a leisure suit. I watched the news on television and looked at them in the bar mirror. I guessed that he was a hi-fi salesman about to cheat on his wife with the redhead. They had a disagreement and he walked out, leaving the redhead and me to stare at each other in the mirror. What would Liebowitz do at a time like this? I wondered. I produced a solitary drinker’s chuckle at the notion that Liebowitz had become my role model.

“Is something funny?” she said.

“This and that.” A truly dumb retort.

“Are you here for a convention?” she asked across the empty stool.

“Hi-fi.”

“You’re in hi-fi?”

“Advertising.”

“Really?”

She moved her drink and her body toward me.

“What do you do in advertising?”

“I’m beginning to wonder myself.”

“My name is Jean.”

“Steve.”

“Are you from around here?”

“New York.”

“That’s nice.”

She was not doing much better than I.

“I’d like to know about you, Steve. Will you buy me a drink?”

“All right.”

“In your room? I have an hour, sugar. Anything you can think of for an hour, I’d like to do with you. Anything.”

She had made it convenient for me. All I had to do was decide if I wanted her and at what price. I could see something appropriate here—Boujez, Tolchin, Beverly, my marriage—I should have been picking up a prostitute at a bar and making it with her in a hotel.

“It’s where I’m at,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m game, Jean.”

“I should tell you, everyone I like I ask to contribute to a favorite charity of my choosing.”

“What do you consider a suitable contribution?”

“A hundred dollars.”

“That’s impossible.”

“We could make it seventy-five dollars, but I would only be able to stay half the time.”

“Seventy-five dollars would be a lot for irony.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I really don’t think so.”

“Then I’ll put it to you this way, lover. Fifty dollars. One time.”

“Well, when you consider that I’m not just buying a hot time, but I’m making a protest—”

“Huh?”

“Okay.” I said.

We went into the elevator and I caught a glimpse of the two of us in the distorted image of the elevator’s mirror, a used-up woman and a used-up man. We did not pass anyone on the way to the room, the corridor was quiet, a corridor indistinct from the ones above and the ones below, my room the same as those above and those below. I entered the room with a prostitute and became one of the countless other men in hotel rooms having seedy liaisons with women they did not know. Nobody had seen me, nobody would see me, I was anonymous. This, more than anything, appealed to me now. I had become exhausted with myself, and here in this place, I was no one—“Steve”—not even a last name.