St. Urbain's Horseman (37 page)

Lou Caplan, Al Levine, Talman, and the rest of the film crowd Jake played baseball and poker with were mostly ten years older than he was; he agreed with Nancy that they were corrupt, their wives hard, and understood when she preferred to read in bed rather than endure another of their parties. But Jake forgave them everything for their wit, their appetite, and their ability to rub hope together with
chutzpah
to evoke a film. And from time to time he was touched, as when he discovered the usually ebullient Fiedler drinking alone at Tiberio's at one in the morning, disconsolate, gray in the face and chewing pills. “I can't take these parties any more. They're killing me.”

“Why did you go, then?”

“But I left early,” he protested. “Here I am. What am I doing here? Dropped in for a nightcap. I should be home in bed.”

“Go, then.”

“If I hadn't gone to the party, I'd feel I was missing something. Or there are bastards who'd say I haven't been invited. Like I didn't count any more. I have to put in an appearance, you know.” He shrugged. “Wherever I go, Jake, I feel I'm missing something. Other guys are having a better time somewhere else and, shit, if I go there, it still seems like the wrong place. It's only the next morning I discover the action was somewhere else altogether. I'm under pressure. My pulse rate makes the doctor turn pale. How about that?”

“Go home, Harry. Get some sleep.”

“Yeah. You're right,” and he gulped down his drink. “Hey, wait. Come with me to Annabel's. There are going to be a couple of girls there.”

As usual, Jake declined. Which is not to say he wasn't tempted from time to time, that after a bad day he couldn't have coped very nicely with a little something on the side. A dalliance, a diversion. Like Cy Levi, who approached all women with ardor, dizzy with desire at parties and in restaurants.

“You see that one over there? No, at the next table. She's got just the kind of ears you like to pull when she's going down on you, don't you think?”

Cy had grieved, he had pulled his hair, he had wept and switched to a Reichian lay analyst before he had been able to divorce his wife. All because of their eleven-year-old boy, whom he adored.

“You tell him, she kept saying. It's your decision. You tell him. So finally, you know, I took him into the living room and shut the door. Biting back the tears, I said, Mark, there are some things you are too young to understand. Brace yourself, boy. And taking his hand in mine, stroking it, I said, I'm leaving your mother, but this does not mean I don't love you. I adore you. I will see you every weekend. Saturday and Sunday, yours. I make no other plans. I am at your service. Now, your mother is a splendid woman. But adults, well, they're difficult, and to be honest we don't get along any more. It's not her fault, it's not mine. We decided it would be best for you if we
parted and you were not raised in a bad atmosphere, like I was, for my parents, God bless them, abominated each other and made my childhood miserable. They weren't honest, as I'm trying to be with you. So I'm leaving, son. I will take care of your mother and you. I don't expect you to understand now, but I beg of you not to judge. Love me, Mark, as I love you. Later, understanding will come … And blowing my nose, searching his baby-blues for reaction – emotion – anything – I said, that's it, kid. Now what do you say? You know what he said? He said is it all right if I stay up to watch Bonanza tonight?”

Jake was sufficiently tolerant of himself to understand it wouldn't mean anything if he strayed, but given the opportunity he simply liked Nancy too much to humiliate her. He could not abide the idea of her being introduced to another woman at a party, his afternoon's vagary, the other woman throbbing with secret knowledge. He lacked the reckless style of Manny Gordon, for instance, who exulted in watching his wife and mistress of the moment trade niceties at a dinner table, only to nab Jake afterwards, “Oh, am I ever a bastard! But, you know, I live with it now.
That's
where analysis pays off.”

Jake also lacked the subtlety, not to say the rich background, of Moey Hanover.

Years and years ago, reading the
Gemara
with his
zeyda
, sharing a glass bowl of pistachios, pinging shells together into a saucer, Moey had learned that if a man holds a sword out of a third-floor window and flying past comes another man, and he stabs him, is the man guilty of murder? Not so simple, says Reb Gamaliel. Was the flying man, for example, going to his death anyhow? Did he jump, asked Rabbi Eleazar, son of Azariah, or was he pushed? Were they related, inquired the sagacious Raschi?

Seemingly, this was a futile exercise in arcane law, with no possible future applications, but it had in fact enabled Moey to grasp at an early age that truth was a many-splendored thing; it had its nuances. So when his wife charged that he had been seen leaving the Paramount Hotel at four in the afternoon, arm in arm with an
obvious tart, he had been able to swear to Lilian, hand over his boy's head, that, appearances notwithstanding, he had not been unfaithful to her.

For, he argued with himself, to be unfaithful is to commit adultery, it is to have carnal knowledge of another woman, but to lie on a bed in the afternoon in the Paramount Hotel and have your toes sucked one by one is no such thing, even if he did moan with pleasure, for, as Reb Gamaliel would be the first to ask, could his big toe ejaculate? No. Could his little toe, even nibbled to distraction, impregnate another woman? No. Could it bring home the clap, as Rabbi Azariah might ask? No. These were not even his private parts.

Verily, he argued, even to allow his cock to be licked clean as a lollipop stick was not to be unfaithful, for this, as Raschi would perceive, was oral and not vaginal knowledge of another man's woman and, oh bliss, required no exertion on his part, and therefore, he made a mental footnote, did not even violate the sabbath.

There was also a sneaky side to Jake's constancy. He felt that as long as he was true to Nancy, she could not be unfaithful to him. But – but – if only she could be made to appreciate how onerous it sometimes was, what a burden of responsibility it could be, to enjoy, as they did, a singularly happy marriage. The serious books they read, the films and plays they sat through, all celebrated delicious
angst
. Empty sex in the afternoon with strangers. Existential couplings in parked cars. ‘Now' people lonely even at the most crowded orgies. Only the bores and the baddies, the dopes, the characters given all the bad lines, continued to stay together.

Furthermore, to love your wife was to be denied a reprobate's license. Nancy, everybody agreed, was no
yenta
but a rare pearl. For Jake, fortunate Jake, to have strayed would have been to raise disapproving eyebrows. Meanwhile, his film friends, happily unhappy, were permitted everything.

One by one their abandoned wives trooped into Jake's living room to bewail their condition. The children, the children. Betty Levi
wept at the dining room table. “Suddenly he's a bed-wetter. He has nightmares. He's doing nothing at school.”

Crap, Cy assured them. “The kid's thriving. If only she would stop poisoning his mind against us. Would you believe she put him up to asking me, how come they have to do with a black-and-white and we get color on our set?”

Television rang changes unsuspected by McLuhan on at least two lapsed marriages. Every Thursday evening, Leah Demaine had friends in to watch the girl Frankie was living with sing on her own show. “Have you ever seen such a fat cow?” But Bobby Fiedler had to miss six weeks of
Dr. Who
because Daddy's whore was playing in it.

Frankie Demaine, whose children were grown up, felt that to his own self he could now be true. “Oh, sure, to
outsiders
it appeared we were happy. Eighteen years I suffered. Why? Because I hate scenes. There were the kids to consider. But what was she to me all that time.
My mother
. Why, they even have the same name. Rebecca. Oh, I know what people are saying. Don't worry. When he was sick she took excellent care of him. Never a complaint. But the truth is she
enjoyed
my being ill, it made her feel
indispensable
. Since I began a new life with Sandra I haven't had a day's trouble with my back. It was psychosomatic all these years.”

One evening Jake came home to find Ida Roberts weeping in the living room.

“I don't mind his leaving me. It's his life, after all. But it's the indignity of it that makes me hate him. To think that all the time he was pretending to be such an attentive father, driving off to Brighton at the drop of a hat, my own daughter was letting him use her flat.”

Alfie Roberts had been bewitched by a student at the University of Sussex, his daughter's roomie.

“Did I tell you he smokes pot now? You should see him, the fool, he even wants me to take it up. He says it's easier on the liver than gin. Oh, no. This time, I'm not taking him back. You know he always
leaves his hi-fi equipment behind, and when the girl he runs off with discovers that what she took for a young ram is really an old billy goat, he's suddenly coming around to borrow records or to take some cigars from his humidor. Well this time I threw him out with the hi-fi equipment and the cigars after him, and I warned him, hey, swinger, travelin' man, don't forget your hormone injections.
Or it will be very embarrassing for you, won't it?”

C. Bernard Farber, his foulard, his suede vest and trousers from Mr. Fish, the pendant bouncing on his belly made for him by one of his girl friends, and his Aston-Martin suddenly blooming with flower decals, insisted Jake make the scene at his newly acquired pad, a mews flat in Belgravia, the Rolling Stones blaring from speakers everywhere. “You don't know what a blessing it is just not to have her sitting behind me in the projection room any more. Print that one, I'd say, and she sighs.
Oy
. What's wrong, I'd say, you prefer a different take? It's your picture, she says. I'm a new man. I wake up in the morning, I bounce out of bed singing. Letting the sunshine in. I simply can't believe my luck she's no longer lying beside me. Moaning, bellyaching. Any morning you ask it's either after her period. Or before her period. Or it is her period. I think she's better off too, you know. We never related. We made bad vibrations. The kids have the right idea, Jake, you've got to go with the flow.”

Yes, yes, possibly, but Cy Levi soon began to find dieting a severe punishment. Lou Caplan was suddenly embarrassed that he snored and slept with his mouth open. Farber was ashamed of being seen in his truss yet frightened of going without it. Undressing, Bob Cohen hastily stuffed his underwear into his trouser pocket, just in case there was a brown stain, which would offend a young girl. Al Levine, ever mindful to take a digitalis pill before, pretended he was popping something groovy. Myer Gross confessed, “It's embarrassing at my age to get up in the morning and lock the bathroom door before I rinse my dental plate. But I don't dare let her see me without my teeth.”

All agreed they envied Jake.

“What have you done to deserve Nancy? What a girl!”

But, gradually, their fulsomely declared envy was overtaken by disapprobation, even sneers. “You know, Jake's a bore,” Talman said. Lou Caplan pronounced him square. And C. Bernard Farber, putting him beyond the pale, declared to the poker table that he gave off bad vibes.

And what, Jake thought, if they have a point?

Jake feared that a felicitous marriage not only reflected poorly on Nancy and him, stamping them superficial, tin-like, but it was also bad for the kids. Everybody he admired, his most imaginative and resourceful friends, had emerged from afflicted homes. Dad a zero, mum a carnivore. Parents so embittered that they wrote off their own lives and toiled only for the children's sake. Divorced parents, vying shamelessly for the kids' affections. Quarreling, lying, but, inadvertently, shaping rebels. Hammering out artists. Whereas in their home there was only symmetry, affection, parents who took pleasure in each other's company.

What are we spawning here, Jake wondered? Surely from such a well-adjusted and cozy childhood only ciphers could spring. Cocooned and soft-minded dolts, who would grow up totally unprepared for life. Sammy would never shoplift. Molly wouldn't have hysterics. In a drug culture, they were already tranquillized.

England, England.

London was almost Jake's home now, but he had mixed feelings about the place. For if the city he had come to know was no longer Big Ben, Bulldog Drummond, and the anti-Zionist fox hunters of his childhood dreams, neither could it be counted the cultural fountainhead he had sought so earnestly as a young man. Slowly, inexorably, he was being forced to pay the price of the colonial come to the capital. In the provinces, he had been able to revere London and its offerings with impunity. Fulminating in Montreal, he could agree with Auden that the dominions were
tiefste Provinz
. Scornful of all things home-baked, he was at one with Dr. Johnson, finding his country a cold and uninviting region. As his father had blamed the
goyim
for his own inadequacies, mentally billing them for the sum of his misfortunes, so Jake had foolishly held Canada culpable for all his discontents. Coming to London, finding it considerably less than excellent, he was at once deprived of this security blanket. The more he achieved, feeding the tapeworm of his outer ambitions, the larger his inner hunger. He would have preferred, for instance, that the highly regarded Timothy Nash had been worthy of his reputation and that it was utterly impossible for Jacob Hersh to be as good. He would have been happiest had the capital's standards not been so readily attainable and that it were still possible for him to have icons.