Streets of Gold (58 page)

As for the greater American family, the family at large... well, the country was in ragged shape, but it had been there before, and in 1970 we still clung to the hope (speak for yourself, John) — all right,
I
still clung to the hope that we’d somehow get out of the mess we were in. Somehow we’d manage to preserve what was good, true, and noble, we’d find new well-springs of courage, and drink from them deeply, and replenish our spirit, and go marching arm in arm together into a bright and shining space-age future, brothers one and all,
including
the fucking black man who was dominating whatever was left of jazz in New York. In the meantime, I had grown accustomed to the fact that I was no longer Number One (or any number at all) on the charts, and no longer mentioned in any of the polls, and no longer a Big American Hit. I was a man secure in the knowledge that he was loved by family and friends, and I gave to them my own boundless love in return. I was a man at peace with himself.

Why then, you may ask, did I go to bed with Davina Baumgarten Lewis on the afternoon of July 17, 1970?

The seventeenth was a Friday. My schedule for that day (I still have the memo I punched out on my slate; I am a very organized fellow, except where it concerns my life) was as follows:

           11:00 am    Leave Talmadge

           12:30 pm    Chipp’s — final fitting

            1:30 pm    Lunch — Mark Aronowitz

                            Four Seasons

            3:30 pm    Jeffrey Epstein

                            MGM — 29th floor

                            1350 Avenue of the Americas

            5:30 pm    Drinks — Davina and Seth

            7:00 pm    Dinner — Sardi’s

            8:30 pm    “Fiddler on the Roof”

                            Majestic Theater

I took the car and driver into the city that day. Rebecca planned to drive her own car (a $22,000 Maserati) to New Canaan later, catch a train to Grand Central, and then taxi over to the apartment on Central Park West. Our plan was to spend the cocktail hour with the Lewises, after which we would go our separate ways, Rebecca and I to dinner and the theater, Davina and Seth to a party in the Village. My afternoon meeting with the MGM executive was to be an important one; we were supposed to discuss the possibility of my scoring another film. I suppose that’s why Mark had asked me to lunch. He was anticipating a fat fee on the horizon, and it does not hurt to be kind to the people who are putting ten percent of
their
daily bread on
your
table. In retrospect, I’m amazed he showed up at all, or — considering what he had to tell me — stayed to pay for a lunch that did not promise future revenue. The first thing he said was, “We’ve been screwed, Ike. Here’s the story....”

The story was glum. I listened to it as I downed first one Beefeater martini, and then another. It seemed that MGM had changed its collective mind. They were having internal troubles, Mark said. They weren’t even sure they were going ahead with the picture, but even if they
did
go ahead with it, they wanted to use the guy who had scored
The Wild Bunch
, had I seen
The Wild Bunch?

No, I told him, I had not seen
The Wild Bunch
.

“So that’s it,” Mark said. “Epstein was supposed to fly in last night, but he canceled. They called me just a little while ago. I tried reaching you in Talmadge, but Rebecca told me you’d left early.”

We finished lunch at a quarter to three. I walked’ Mark up to his office on Forty-seventh and Broadway, shook hands with him, and began walking crosstown and then downtown. I had no specific destination in mind. It was a reasonably cool day for July in New York, and I wandered aimlessly, wondering if I should fill the time between now and five-thirty by taking in a movie. There was a crowd on the corner of Forty-fourth and Sixth. In 1970, there used to be a very good hot dog stand on that corner; it has since been torn down. A lot of sidewalk hookers used to line up there for a late-afternoon lunch before starting their daily grind. I figured now, as I heard the buzz of the crowd all around me, that one of them was being hassled by a cop.

“What is it?” I asked someone who was standing beside me clucking his or her tongue, the repeated
tsk-tsks
falling like brushes on a snare drum.

“Oh, it’s a bum,” the person answered. She was a woman who sounded very much like my mother. I immediately identified her as Italian, though she spoke without a trace of accent.

“Is something wrong with him?” I asked.

“He’s picking bugs,” she said.

“He’s what?”

“He’s sitting on the curb with his shirt off, and he’s picking bugs out of the shirt and stamping them dead under his shoe.”

“Bugs?”

“Lice,” she said. “You know. Bugs.” She began clucking again, and then she said, “His back is all covered with sores. The bugs must’ve bit him, don’t you think?”

At that point, the vagrant said, “What are you all looking at? Leave me alone,” and his voice startled me for a moment because (I’m sure I was mistaken) it sounded exactly like my Uncle Luke, or at least my Uncle Luke as I’d last heard him in 1950, when I’d telephoned to ask him something — what was it I’d called to ask him? “Go on,” he said, “get lost,” and I was convinced now that the man sitting on the curb picking lice out of his shirt and stamping them dead under his shoe was my Uncle Luke (I’m positive I was mistaken), who had disappeared from sight eight years ago.

“What does he look like?” I asked the woman, but she was gone, and a man answered for her.

“Who?” he said. “The bum?”

“Yes.”

“He’s an old fart,” the man said.

“How old?”

“Sixty, seventy? Who can tell with these bums?”

“Is he wearing glasses?” I said.

“Yeah,” the man answered, surprised. “How could you tell that?”

I turned away swiftly. If it was Luke (It
can’t
be, I told myself, though Luke if he was still alive would be in his late sixties, but no, it can’t be him!), I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t want to hear him say again, “Hey, Iggie, how’s the kid?” I tapped my way through the crowd, “Excuse me, excuse me, please,” and found my way to the curb, and asked someone to help me across Sixth Avenue. I walked east, still without a destination in mind (or so I believed), thinking about that man sitting on the curb killing lice, and telling myself over and over again that Luke was dead, he
had
to be dead, he’d been gone a long, long time now, no one had heard from him in years, of course he was dead. I turned left on Fifth Avenue and began walking uptown. It was not until I reached Fifty-seventh Street, and was standing outside the Double-day’s there, that I realized I was sweating and trembling. I walked to the curb and raised my cane, holding it aloft, hoping some passing vehicle would be a taxicab, hoping the driver would realize I was hailing him. As I waited, still trembling, I imagined a woman standing at the corner bus stop not fifty feet away, staring at me. I wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible, before she could say, “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

A taxicab pulled to the curb. “Where you going, Mac?” the driver asked.

“Central Park West,” I said, and I gave him Davina’s address, and climbed into the back seat, and closed the door.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said.

I heard him throwing his flag, and then he gunned the taxi away from the curb.

“You look familiar,” he said. “Are you somebody?”

“No,” I answered.

The doorman at Davina’s building recognized me, but he called upstairs nonetheless to announce me. The elevator operator took me up to the sixteenth floor, and I tapped my way down the hall, and found the doorbell in the jamb, and pressed it, and heard the familiar chimes inside the apartment, and then heard the peephole flap being drawn back, and then the door being unlocked.

“You’re early,” Davina said. I went into the apartment. She locked the door behind me. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “You look...” She let the sentence trail.

“I think I need a drink,” I said.

“Sure.”

“My meeting was canceled,” I said.

“You’re lucky you caught me home.”

“Were you going out?”

“Just to pick up a few things. Sit down, Ike.”

I had followed her into the living room. I knew where the furniture was (unless she had rearranged it), and I found one of the couches, and sat, and heard Davina padding barefooted to the bar in one corner of the room, on the side with the window overlooking the park.

“What would you like?” she asked.

There was the scent of lilac in the room. I suddenly thought of my Aunt Bianca.

“Ike?”

“Anything.”

“Well, what?”

“A little Scotch,” I said.

“Ice?”

“Please.”

As she poured, she said, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

She came back to the couch, put the glass in my hand, and then sat beside me. “What time is it, anyway?” she asked, and must have looked immediately at a clock someplace in the room, because then she said, “You really
are
early. Becky won’t be here for at least two hours.”

“Yes, well, I told you. The meeting was canceled.”

“No problem,” she said.

“If you have to go out...”

“I have to run up to Columbus Avenue for a minute. We’re out of club soda, and I thought I’d pick up some hors d’oeuvres while I’m at it. Those little things you warm up. You can come with me if you like.”

“No, I’d rather wait here.”

“Well, excuse me then, huh? I want to get out of these dungarees. Would you like another drink?”

“Please,” I said, and extended my empty glass.

She rose, took the glass, and went to the bar again. I heard the sound of whiskey being poured. She came back to me and put the glass into my hand. As she started out of the room, she said, “Shall I put on some records?”

“No,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, and went down the corridor to her bedroom.

I sat on the couch sipping my Scotch. For no apparent reason (I already knew what time it was, Davina had already told me Rebecca would not be here for at least two hours, which meant it was now three-thirty or a little bit later), I opened the cover on my wrist watch and felt for the raised dots. The first ten letters of the Braille alphabet also double for the numbers one to ten. The big hand was now on the G, the little hand was almost on the D; it was now precisely twenty-five minutes to four. At the Blind School, I had never had any difficulty translating letters to numerals; it was the imaginative jump
following
this simple task that threw me. I asked Miss Goodbody why the three was a three when the
small
hand was pointing to it, but a fifteen when the big hand was pointing to it. And why was the seven a seven, but also a thirty-five (Like when we say it’s seven thirty-five, Miss Goodbody), and also a
twenty
-five (Like when we say it’s twenty-five to four). That’s a very good question, Iggie, Miss Goodbody answered. It was now twenty-five to four, and Davina was in her bedroom, which was at the far end of the apartment; I had placed my coat on the bed in that bedroom many times over the past several years. I decided to go into the bedroom to chat with her. I told myself I was a little drunk. Two strong martinis at lunch, a pair of Scotches now, I was just a little drunk. I got up off the couch, and banged my shin against the coffee table, and found my way down the corridor, past the bathroom I knew was on the right, and the small room on the left Seth used as a study, and then knocked on the door to the master bedroom, and called, “Yoo-hoo, are you decent?”

“Ike?” she said.

“That’s who,” I said. “Are you decent?”

“Well... no,” she said. “Not exactly.”

I opened the door. “Who did you think it was?” I said.

“Hey!” she said. “I’m not dressed.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Who’d you think it was?”

“Come on, get out of here,” she said. “I’ll be with you in a minute. Go make yourself another drink.”

“I feel like talking.”

“Ike, get
out
of my bedroom,” she said, and laughed, and came across the floor (she was still barefooted) to where I was standing just inside the door, and gently turned me around, and gently nudged me out of the room, and then closed and locked the door behind me. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said.

I went back into the living room. I found the bar and poured myself another drink, sniffing the lip of the bottle first to make sure it was the Scotch. Again, for no apparent reason, I checked the time. It was twenty minutes to four. I snapped the lid shut on my watch, went to the sofa (this time managing to avoid the coffee table), and sat. When Davina finally came into the living room, I said, “That was
some
minute. That was an
Italian
minute.”

“You’re not getting drunk, are you?” she said. “Becky’ll kill me.”

“Why don’t you have a drink yourself?” I said,

“What time is it?” she asked.

“About a quarter to four.”

“I’ll have one when I get back,” she said. “Ike, if the phone rings, don’t bother answering it. It’s out in the kitchen, I don’t want you breaking your neck.”

“Poor little blind bastard,” I said. “What are you wearing now?”

“Just a little white cotton shift,” she said. “And sandals.”

“Aren’t you allowed to wear dungarees on Central Park West?”

“Well, that’s not it. I like to...”

“Are you wearing stockings?”

“With sandals?”

“What
are
you wearing?”

“I just told you.”