Streets of Gold (50 page)

“I didn’t even
hear
her singing along.”

“You didn’t? Well, well, I knew you were blind, but I didn’t realize you were deaf, too. She sang along in a very horsy Wasp cooze voice, with her mouth an inch from your left ear; are you
sure
you didn’t hear her? Maybe we ought to take you to Manhattan Eye, Ear, Nose and...”

“Rebecca, what is the point of this?”

“The point, Ike, is that I find the sight of a man tripping over his own cane in a mad rush . ..”

“I did not trip over any goddamn cane...”

“... in a mad rush to get to the piano because some twirpy blonde stinking of horse sweat puts her hand on his arm and requests a goddamn song you hate to play... well, Ike, that is just plain dis
gust
ing,” she said, spitting out the word so that it really did sound disgusting. “When a man your age...”

“What do you mean, a man my age?”

“You are thirty-one years old,” she said.

“So what’s that? What the hell is
that
supposed to be? Decrepit?”

“Everyone thought you made a fool of yourself.”

“I did not make a fool of myself.”

“Everyone thought so. Including me.”

“The cooze from Bedford Village did not think I made a fool of myself.”

“Go to hell,” Rebecca said, and stormed out of the house, the screen door clattering shut behind her. I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me, and lay on the bed. I thought of what my brother Tony had promised me on those long rides to the Bronx, when I was taking lessons from Federico Passaro, who was going to make me a concert star.
You’ll have beautiful girls hanging all over you, rich girls in long satin dresses, wearing pearls at their throats, draped on the piano, and never mind that you’re blind, that won’t matter to them, Iggie.
Well, in 1957, though many beautiful girls in long satin dresses, wearing pearls at their throats, had draped themselves on the piano in more cities than I could count, I was still (Surprise, Rebecca! Stick around, I’m full of surprises) as virginal, so to speak, as my grandfather had been in 1901 when Luisa Agnelli, feigning sleep, had flashed her luxuriant crotch at him.

Mark Aronowitz had told me that in the entire United States he knew only one man who was not cheating on his wife. That man was Mark himself. Mark did not consider his frequent extramarital excursions “cheating.” Mark was simply “advancing careers.” And besides, his wife knew all about his penchant for young singers, which automatically implied tacit approval on her part, and therefore rendered meaningless the word “cheating”; you cannot cheat someone who
knows
she is being short-changed. I did not tell Mark that he could add a second name to his list — that of Dwight Jamison. Instead, I went along with the American fantasy (I thought it was a fantasy at the time; it is not) that anyone achieving celebrity status could call his own tune with members of the opposite sex (or the same sex, for that matter). Whenever Mark and I had breakfast together after an opening night someplace, and he asked over scrambled eggs and coffee, “Did you boff that gorgeous blonde last night?” I automatically answered, “Why, Mark, you know I don’t fuck around,” which he automatically took to be a sly and gentlemanly denial of the all-night orgy he knew had taken place. My masculinity had been preserved, Mark’s suspicions had been verified, and in addition, he had been able to assuage any guilt he might have felt for his own unfaithfulness to Josie — who, by all accounts, was a devastatingly beautiful girl who had given up a promising singing career only because she’d fallen so madly in love with Mark.

In 1957, I still thought the bedrock of a successful marriage was fidelity, and whereas I was subtly flattered by Rebecca’s jealousy, I also had to admit that my response to the Bedford Village blonde (I had not known she was a blonde till Rebecca told me) had been something more than innocent. To begin with, she had definitely
not
smelled of horse sweat, no matter
what
Rebecca later claimed. Instead, she had smelled of something reminiscent of Susan Koenig’s perfume, which of course recalled countless hours of ecstasy spent in Susan’s embrace. Moreover, when she rested her hand briefly on my bare arm (I was wearing an imported short-sleeved sports shirt, and hand-tailored slacks), I felt a response that seemed wildly out of proportion to her delicate touch, as though she had applied pressure to a particularly sensitive spot that immediately flashed a signal to my groin. She put her face very close to mine, I sniffed in Susan’s perfume or something very close to it, and detected the admixtured scent of minty toothpaste and — what else? Was it the lingering aroma of suntan oil? Had she not showered after her day on the beach? This thought, too, was somehow stimulating. She told me that she just
adored
the way I played piano, and would I
please
, as a personal favor to her, though she was sure everyone asked me to do this, I was probably bored to
tears
with the same request over and over again, but would I
please
just do a
few
choruses of “The Man I Love,” for which she would be eternally grateful,
please
? I rushed to the piano, more in self-defense (the slacks were very tightly fitted) than in eagerness to please. She followed me there, and sang into my ear as I played, almost throwing me off meter. She told me afterward that her name was Hope Coslett and that she was in the Westchester directory. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” she whispered. Lying on the bed in the room I shared with Rebecca, I wondered what she’d meant. If I ever called her, would she do a dance with ostrich fans? She had excited me, no question about it. Rebecca had been right on target.

I heard voices in the kitchen. My son Andrew was exuberantly relating to Rebecca all the details of the fishing expedition with Papa Abe. They had caught a small sand shark, which was now proudly displayed on the kitchen table. Abe told his daughter he had never eaten shark meat in his life, and he wanted to try it now; he was willing to bet it was a rare delicacy. Rebecca sounded unconvinced, but we had a housekeeper with us that summer, and I guess she figured if Abe made a mess of the kitchen, the housekeeper would clean up after him. Besides, eight-year-old Andrew was begging her to
please
let them cook the shark (his whine was almost identical to Sett’s except that he produced it in a high, piping voice, and usually accompanied it with a little nervous tap dance), and it would have taken someone stronger than Rebecca to have resisted both Abe
and
Andrew in the same kitchen on the same hot August afternoon.

They must have cut the shark open, preparatory to broiling it or frying it or whatever Abe had in mind for it, because the next sounds I heard were compounded of surprise, awe, and (from Andrew) delight. Apparently, there were three perfectly formed tiny sharks inside the one they had just cut open. Honest Abe ventured the opinion that the eviscerated shark had been feeding on smaller sharks just before they hooked it. But Rebecca, whose knowledge was encyclopedic, told her father flatly and authoritatively that some species of sharks were viviparous, and that what they’d caught and sliced open on her kitchen table was nothing more nor less than a pregnant shark. Her father wanted to know what viviparous meant (I was glad he’d asked the question because I was dying to know myself), and Rebecca told him viviparous meant bearing live young, and repeated that what he’d cut open on her kitchen table was a pregnant shark. Andrew asked what pregnant meant, and Abe said What the hell, it’s only a fish, and they went about preparing to cook and eat the shark, as had already been planned, though I think Rebecca vetoed the idea of cooking the pups. The house rapidly filled with the stench of frying shark meat. Abe took one taste (he had style, the prick), told Rebecca it was the vilest thing he’d ever eaten in his life, promptly threw the whole stinking mess into the garbage can, and then went out onto the back porch, leaving Rebecca in a kitchen reeking of fried shark meat, and filled to bursting with a tap-dancing eight-year-old boy who wanted to know all about how the shark had got those babies in her belly. Quite calmly, Rebecca told him — even though I’m sure she hadn’t the faintest idea of how sharks mated — that the mama shark and the papa shark had got together because they loved each other very much, and the papa shark had put his sperm into the mama shark, and the sperm had got together with the mama shark’s eggs, and the baby sharks had been formed inside the mama shark’s belly. She made the mistake of adding, “Sharks make babies the same way people do.”

“What do you mean?” Andrew asked immediately.

“People,” she said.

“Is that how
I
 got made?” Andrew asked.

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t you go out on the porch with your grandfather?”

“You mean a sperm got inside your belly?”

“Yes.”

“And got together with an egg?”

“Yes.”

“An egg like in the refrigerator?”

“No,” Rebecca said. “Well, yes. But not a chicken egg,” she said. “A human egg.”

“Yeah?” Andrew said.

“Mm,” Rebecca said. “Now go outside and play.”

“How did the sperm get inside your belly?” Andrew asked.

There was silence in the kitchen. It lasted at least a minute.

“The same way it got in the shark’s belly,” Rebecca said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“The papa shark puts the sperm inside the mama shark.”

“Did Daddy put the sperm inside you?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Andrew, why don’t you go outside and find your brothers? I think they’re...”

“How did Daddy get it inside you?” Andrew asked.

When I heard this, I almost burst out laughing. I was delighted by my son’s persistent questioning (so like his dear grandmother Stella’s), and I was also tickled to death by Rebecca’s discomfort. Good, I thought. See what happens when you falsely accuse Dwight Jamison of having responded to some dumb cooze from Bedford Village? Go ahead, smart-ass. Explain the mysteries of life to your eight-year-old son. You’ve probably memorized a lecture from some goddamn textbook, anyway. Answer the kid!

“Well,” Rebecca said, and then took a deep breath, and apparently decided to go whole hog. “The daddy,” she said, impersonalizing it so that it referred to daddies in general and not to Andrew’s daddy in particular, “puts his penis into the mommy’s vagina.” She took another breath, and in a rush said, “And the sperm comes out, and that’s how it gets in there.”

“Yeah?” Andrew said.

“Mm,” Rebecca said.

Andrew was thoughtfully silent for quite a few moments. I held my breath.

“That’s how people do it, huh?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rebecca said, and the confident tone in her voice indicated she thought the conversation had ended.

“Let’s
do
it!” Andrew said.

His offer was so unexpected, his tone so exuberantly innocent, that I almost choked to death. I quickly covered my mouth with my hand. If Rebecca heard a sound from the bedroom, I knew she’d come in there with a meat cleaver. It was one thing to play “The Man I Love” for a dizzy blonde from Bedford Village; it was quite another to allow your own wife to flounder helplessly before the sexual inquisition of a bright eight-year-old.

“We... uh... can’t,” she said.

“Why not?” Andrew said. He sounded extremely puzzled.

“Well... uh... the mommy can only do it with the daddy,” she said.

“Oh,” Andrew said, and again fell silent. And then, with the spontaneous brilliance of pure inspiration, he piped excitedly, “Let’s get Daddy!” and was running toward the bedroom when Rebecca’s voice stopped him.

“Daddy’s sleeping!” she shouted in panic.

“Let’s wake him up,” Andrew said.

“No,” Rebecca said. “
No!
Now that’s it, Andrew, I want you to go outside this minute.”

I heard the screen door opening. But Andrew must have hesitated on his way to the back porch, because I heard him ask, somewhat suspiciously, “Is it really true?”

“Is what really true?”

“All that stuff you told me.”

“Yes, it’s true,” Rebecca said.

“That’s the way sharks make babies, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“And people, too, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You mean everybody? Or just you and Daddy?”

“Everybody,” Rebecca said.

“Then how come I never saw it on television?” he snapped, and I swear to God his voice had all the triumphant timbre of someone shouting, “Ah-ha,
got
you, didn’t I?” I burst out laughing. Rebecca came rushing into the bedroom, and I covered my face defensively, expecting that single cleaver stroke that would smite my skull in two. But instead, she threw herself on top of me, and began kissing my closed eyes, and my nose, and my mouth, and my cheeks, laughing between kisses, and saying again and again, “Oh, you son of a bitch, you no-good son of a bitch.”

Standing in the doorway, Andrew logically asked, “Are you doing it now?”

I took Rebecca to dinner alone that night. Davina and Seth had been invited to the home of a couple they’d met at one of the cocktail parties. (“Who, me? I’m nobody but Dwight Jamison’s sister-in-law”), and I prevailed upon Honest Abe and Sophie to sit with the kids. Abe protested at first. “We should
all
get out of here,” he said. “The place stinks to high heaven.” But he and Sophie stayed, and Rebecca and I enjoyed a quiet, candlelit shore dinner together. I apologized to her for the way I’d foolishly allowed myself to be flattered by the blonde (“It’s beneath you, Ike, really,” she said), and I promised it would never happen again, and we drank muscadet with our lobsters, and laughed over what had happened with Andrew in the kitchen, each of us telling the story from our separate viewpoints, Rebecca in the kitchen in a head-on confrontation, I in the bedroom as an eavesdropper. We laughed a lot that night, we reaffirmed our vows.