Streets of Gold (49 page)

But who can argue with success?

As Biff had prophesied, we had somehow made the right music in the right time and the right place. By the beginning of 1956, there was not a jazz buff in the United States of America who did not know of the Dwight Jamison Quintet. Rudy Hirsch was jubilant. His boss, Harry Arnberg, offered us a long-term recording contract. In gratitude for the splendid job Harry had done with our first record, Mark Aronowitz promptly signed the quintet with RCA Victor.

That’s show biz.

He had turned her pictures to the wall, he had told everyone his eldest daughter was dead. She had married a blind
shaygets
, a wop entertainer, she was dead. But he comes around in 1956, after eight years of silence. Coincidentally, this is after I’ve opened at Birdland to resounding critical cheers, and am no longer a blind
shaygets
to Honest Abe; I have become his “son-in-law the jazz artist.” He has three grandchildren to discover. They distinguish him from “Papa Jimmy,” their other grandfather, by calling him “Papa Abe.” There is a lot of catching up to do. To facilitate the osmosis of Papa Abe into the family bloodstream, Rebecca puts the “big one” on the turntable. We are living at the time on Park and Eighty-first, in an apartment we’ve sublet from a saxophone player who is in Paris. The windows are open, a balmy New York spring flirts with the stench of cigar smoke (my father’s and Abe’s) in the living room twelve stories above the street.

“This is the one that did it,” Rebecca says.

“Daddy got a hit with it,” Andrew says proudly.

“Well, well,” Abe says. “Well, well. What record
was
that?”

“ ‘The Man I Love,’ ” Andrew says. “
Everybody
knows that.”

I listen to the record. I have not yet grown weary of listening to it. At Sophie’s insistence, Rebecca is breaking out the photo album again. “Show him the pictures of when you were in Florida,” Sophie says. “Show him the pictures, darling.”

“That’s a very nice record,” Abe says. “I think I heard it on the radio. Very nice.”

Success at last. Approval from the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer.

For our perseverance and our courage, and to prove that only good things come to those of us who have the integrity to stand up for our convictions (ours being that only in America can a Jew and a Gentile, working side by side in the same double bed, construct Rockefeller Center), Rebecca and I have been rewarded with S*U*C*C*E*S*S! We have obediently learned the American myth, and faithfully adhered to its precepts, and we can now live in the luxury of its full realization, while simultaneously serving as prime examples of its validity. “Look at your father,” Stella tells my children. “He was raised in Harlem; see what can happen in America?” Stella believes it. Rebecca believes it. I believe it.

“How come you never blow me?” I ask her.

“How would
you
like a prick shoved into
your
mouth?” she answers. She never calls it a “cock,” though I have asked her to repeatedly. To her, it is a prick. To a man, a prick is a son-of-a-bitch bastard. When I explain this to her, she says, “Who told you that? Susan Koenig?”

But her tone is bantering now, and not at all malicious. In and out of bed, her mood is playful and assured. She often goes around the apartment humming in her slightly off-key voice, and once — to my great surprise — she sings “On the Good Ship Lollipop” at the top of her lungs, waking David, who is in for his afternoon nap. It is as though the hit record, not the record itself, but what the record
means
— the mink coat in the closet, the leopard beside it for sportier occasions, the forty acres of land we have purchased in Connecticut, the jazz-buff architect who is thrilled that he is designing a residence for
the
Dwight Jamisons, the paintings Rebecca buys at Hammer Galleries in anticipation of the move to the country — all of these have caused her to look at herself in a new and exciting way. So when I remind her again that it is a cock, and not a prick, she seizes it just below the head and says, “A cock, is it? Oh, is
that
what you are? Hello, cock, let me kiss you, cock,” and kisses it noisily, and then says, “Oh, that’s a nice tasty cock, how would you like me to suck you out of your mind, cock?” and goes down on me with a fervor that knocks all memories of Susan Koenig clear across the room, and out the window, and down to Park Avenue, and perhaps clear across the East River. “Now
that
was a premature ejaculation,” she says, and giggles against my wet belly, and then murmurs, “Hurry up and get big again, Ike. I want you to fuck me.”

I lie with one hand covering my eyes, grinning foolishly at the ceiling. The construction company of Jamison & Jamison, Inc., has finally come through, we have finally made it; all it took was a little sprinkling of success.

“I’m probably putting you to sleep, Daddy,” Rebecca says.

“No, no, the snapshots are really very interesting,” Abe says. “Quite interesting, Ike,” he says, using my name for the first time that day.

When he leaves the apartment later, he gives each of the boys a five-dollar bill. Penance, Papa Abe? For all those wasted years?

You prick.

Actually, I liked him.

He had style, the prick.

The shark, for example. In the spring of 1957, while the house in Talmadge was being built, the saxophone player came back from Paris, and we took a place on Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, rather than go through the hassle of looking for another apartment, which we knew we’d be vacating in the fall. I spent a lot of time on that ferry from Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven because the quintet was playing in Boston, and I was virtually commuting back and forth from the island. But the gig ended the last week in August, and Rebecca invited the entire Baumgarten clan to spend that week with us — which I needed like a
loch in kop
; I was exhausted, and scheduled to leave again for San Francisco just after Labor Day.

Our rented house in Menemsha was set high on a bluff overlooking Vineyard Sound and (I am told) the most beautiful sunset anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. But the Menemsha beach was quite rocky that summer, and Davina’s husband, an accountant named Seth Lewis (né Levine), constantly complained about having to drive to a beach on the ocean side.

“Don’t be a pain in the ass, Seth,” Davina told him.

“I thought there were supposed to be private little beaches here,” Seth said in his whining adolescent voice. “I thought people swam in the nude here and everything.”

“People
do
swim in the nude here,” I said.

“If you haven’t seen a bunch of aging publishers and their wives swimming around in the nude,” Rebecca said, “you haven’t lived, Seth.”

“Would you like everybody to see me swimming around in the nude?” Davina asked.

“What’s so special about you in the nude?” Seth answered.

According to Rebecca, Seth was either as blind as I, or else totally jaded after four years of marriage. Rebecca told me Davina was quite beautiful, and this was a gracious admission indeed, since there was little love lost between the two sisters. Davina was described to me as a tall blonde, her long hair worn loose and sleek, her green eyes dominating the pale oval of her face. She had a generous bosom for someone so slender, and was blessed with spectacular legs besides, which she showed to best advantage in shorts rolled high on her thighs, or long party skirts slit up each side. She was undeniably the center of attraction at most of the insufferably “in” cocktail parties we attended. There was, in fact, almost as much ooh-ing and aah-ing over Davina as there was over the sunsets, or the sneak previews of scores from Broadway shows in preparation, or the new painting by any one of the island’s artists in summer residence, or the current performance by this or that visiting actor; everybody was “somebody” on Martha’s Vineyard, and Davina Lewis was “somebody,” too, if only because she was so extraordinarily lovely. I am speaking now of her physical appearance. Since I had never seen the lady, I could only judge how lovely she was by what she said and what she did. I did not find her particularly attractive. It seemed to me that she made impossible demands on both Seth
and
her father, requesting, for example, that one or another of them drive her all the way to Oak Bluffs so she could ride the carousel (I mean, for Christ’s sake, she was twenty-five years old!), or one day forcing Abe to take her all over the island in search of a lobster roll because the shack up on the hill near the beach was temporarily out of them. She was not pregnant, there was no excuse for satisfying this bizarre and childish urge. (She had, in fact,
never
been pregnant, and professed she would jump off the cliffs at Gay Head if ever she missed her period. She said this in the presence of my three sons.)

At cocktail parties, Davina was quick to announce that she was Dwight Jamison’s sister-in-law, and seemed to enjoy whatever cachet this guaranteed. I have never (much) begrudged anyone taking a free ride on my coattails. My father has taken advantage of my fame often enough, as has Honest Abe. Even Rebecca, whenever she signed for anything in a department store, was inordinately delighted if a shopgirl asked, “Are you
the
Mrs. Dwight Jamison?” Come to think of it, the only ones who’ve
never
used my position to further their own are my sons. I have overheard conversations between them and new acquaintances. When the talk got to music and eventually to jazz, my sons never once revealed that their father was
the
Dwight Jamison. I respect them for that. (Or should I? Is there something darker in their act of omission? Come on, you fucking wop! You’re as paranoid as the entire city of Naples!) It rankled (a little) when Abe boasted about me to potential car buyers — did you sell more Oldsmobiles because I was your son-in-law, you prick? — and it annoyed me, too, when Davina, sleekly blond and tanned (“She looks terrific, the bitch!” Rebecca said), whispered to a photographer, or a sculptor, or a writer, musician, or swordsman of renown, “Who, me? I’m nobody but Dwight Jamison’s sister-in-law,” knowing full well she was dazzling the poor bastard, anyway, with her beauty and her phony Hunter College speech major voice.

It did not hurt to put down poor Seth, either. A woman who puts down her husband sounds available, even if she isn’t. In those days, I was never quite sure whether Davina was looking around or just taking jabs at Seth to keep him on his toes. Not that I liked
him
very much, either. He had a high nasal voice, and he was invariably complaining about one thing or another. If it wasn’t the drive to the beach, then it was the service in a restaurant. And if it wasn’t that, it was the sand in the bedroom. Or up his ass, for all I know. He was a mean little man who kept telling me I should get a new tax lawyer, when the lawyer I already had was well on the way to making me a millionaire. He kept yelling at my kids. Once, when he told Michael to stop making so much noise, I told him, “Michael lives here.”

“I am your guest,” Seth said.

“You can fucking well take the next ferry back,” I said.

“Oh, is
that
it?” Seth said. “Well, I didn’t know
that
was it.” But he didn’t take the next ferry back. Nor the one after that, either. He stayed the whole damn week, while Sophie, who never went to the beach, sat on the porch and knitted. She was probably knitting a shawl identical to the one she wore around her shoulders on the hottest days. Sophie was always chilly. “It’s in my blood,” she said. She wore that gray woolen shawl to all the cocktail parties, too, where she chatted nervously with strangers — “How do you do, I’m Rebecca’s mother” — and seemed clearly out of her element. Not so with Abe, the prick. Abe would meet a movie star and immediately and familiarly say, “Oh, sure, John [or Frank or Joe or Sam], I saw that picture you made, you were actually very good in it.” Or, if introduced to the man who’d written the lyrics for one of Broadway’s long-run musicals, Abe would burst into a song from the show, invariably out of tune, and then would slap the man on the back and say, “You wrote that, huh? What do you know? I sell Oldsmobiles.”

He had style, the prick.

Of a sort.

On the day Abe took my eldest son fishing, Rebecca and I had a terrible fight. The fight was over a woman. Specifically, it was over a woman who had asked me to play “The Man I Love” at a cocktail party the night before. Rebecca knew I hated requests for “The Man I Love,” and she wanted to know why I had so readily succumbed to this particular request from someone she termed “a horsy Wasp cooze from Bedford Village.”

“I just felt like playing,” I said.

“With whom?” she said. “The cooze?”

“I felt like playing
piano
,” I said.

“I thought you were tired,” she said. “You told me you were ‘utterly exhausted,’ weren’t those your words, Ike? Didn’t you say you couldn’t understand why I’d invited the whole
mishpocheh
up here on the one week you’d hoped to get some rest?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Well, for somebody who’s so
tired
, Ike, so
utt
erly ex
haus
ted, you certainly leaped to that piano in a flash when Miss Bedford Village put her hand on your arm.”

“She did not put her hand on my arm. Or anyplace else.”

“She put her hand on your arm, and she put her face so close to yours I thought she was giving you artificial respiration.”

“She merely made a request, Rebecca.”

“What did she request? ‘Roll Me Over in the Clover’?”

“She requested ‘The Man I Love.’ You
know
what she requested.”

“So you played it.”

“I played it. You heard me play it.”

“And she draped herself on the piano and sang along. I thought you hated people singing along when you play.”

“I do.”

“But you didn’t mind
her
singing along.”