The Rothman Scandal (19 page)

“Oh-oh-oh-oh,” she said.

“You are so lovely,” he said.

“Your mother hates me too.”

“She won't when she sees how sweet you are.…”

From Joel Rothman's journal:

6/22/90

4:16
A.M.

Tra-la … tra-la. Life is full of unexpected wonderments, isn't it? No one would ever guess what I've been doing half the night. F---ing my brains out is what! Whoopee and hallelujah, free at last! There was a nurse I used to have who wanted me to call her “Mamzell,” even though she wasn't French, but Irish—thought “Mamzell” sounded a little “tonier,” she said—who told me that if I touched myself it would drain the fluids out of my brain cavity. Well, shit—surprise, surprise—tonight I spent half the night just f---ing my brains out, and look, my brain's still here, fluids and all! The Boy in the Bubble is out of the Bubble at last—ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay! And this was so different from the other time, the time I've already written about, when old Otto took me to see that whore in Concord—a “hoor,” he called her—the one with the dirty underwear who only pretended (I'm sure of it) to come. An experience like that one could turn a guy off sex for the rest of his life, I guess, but thank God it didn't. But this was entirely different. This was the real thing. This was the real turtle soup, not merely the mock. This was Granada I've seen, not just Asbury Park! And I think I'm in love. Her name is Fiona—isn't that a lovely name? And she is so sweet—so sweet, and so clever. It was so clever the way she got rid of old Otto, I'm still laughing about that—pretending she'd seen a man on the roof (my would-be killer!) with a gun, so she and I could make our escape together. Old Otto's probably still tearing around the city looking for me! He wasn't in the lobby when I got home a few minutes ago, and I'm sure he wouldn't dare tell Mom he lost me! Well, old Otto's days are numbered anyway, thank God. Christ, a guy couldn't have any
social
life, much less a
sex
life, with old Otto tagging along. I couldn't even jack off in bed at night, with old Otto sleeping in the same room! Know where I had to go to jack off? In the shit-house stall in the dorm, and even that wasn't all that private because someone could always come in and take the stall next to mine. But anyway, those days are gone forever, and back to Fiona. Took her home in a taxi—she lives at the Westbury—and she asked me up to her apartment for a nightcap, in return for the favor, and when I started to go she asked to kiss me goodnight, and when I kissed her she stuck her tongue between my teeth, and the next thing I knew we were f—ing! We were f---ing our brains out, right in her living room on her big white sofa. But that was just for starters. After it was over, the first time, we got to talking a bit, and she told me a little about herself. She has no real friends in New York, she told me, having come here from London not long ago. She told me she felt like an alien in a strange land. She finds New York to be kind of an unfriendly city. I told her I wanted to be her friend, and she told me quite a lot about herself then. She comes from a really good family in England, where she even has a title—“Her Ladyship,” but she hates the whole idea of titles. And, title and all, she has really had a pretty unhappy life. Good family or not, her father abused her. She didn't say how exactly, and I could tell she didn't want to talk about that, so I guess she was abused in some really awful way. Then, when she was six, her mother ran off with another man, and she's never seen or heard from her mother since. She was left to be raised by the abusive father—like me, she was raised by a single parent—but she really hates her father, and she's actually afraid her father might do something to try to bring her back, even though she's a grown woman. Incidentally, I didn't ask her how old she is. I guess she's a few years older than I am, but whatthehell. Mom's dating a guy who's a few years younger than she is, and she's probably going to marry Mel one of these days. Besides, I've always kind of been attracted to older women, haven't I? I'm thinking in particular of K.G., and all that stuff at St. Bernard's. Anyway, she said, “Bertie rescued me.” Bertie is what she calls Gramps. I never heard the Great Herbert J. Rothman called Bertie, but I guess that's the English of it. Seems she met Gramps in London a couple of months ago, and when she told him how bad the situation was with her father, Gramps offered to bring her to this country and give her a job with the magazine. I guess Gramps must have his sentimental side. (Funny, I've never seen it!) Anyway, Fiona said she doesn't think Mom's too happy about the job he's given her. She said she really wants to be Mom's friend, but doesn't think Mom will let her be. I promised to help her any way I could—with Mom. And then, as we were talking like that, she did the cutest thing. We were lying there, bare-assed on her sofa, and she suddenly took this crazy big pair of sunglasses she wears and wrapped them around my limp cock, and made my pubic hair stand out around the frames like a pair of bushy eyebrows, and she said, “Oh, look at the little old man!” And then she said, “Oh, look, his nose is getting bigger. Are you Pinocchio? Have you been telling lies to me?” And before I knew it, we were starting to f--- again. But she said, “No, this time we're going to do it right,” and she got up and led me by the hand, just like a little girl, into her bedroom, with her crazy sunglasses still hanging from my stiff cock, and she turned down the covers of her big Hollywood king-size bed, and there were these beautiful pale blue satin sheets, and I was so excited I almost came again before I could get inside her! Oh, she is a wild thing, wild and beautiful, and I think she loves me, too. I would like to ask Mom what it's like for a woman to be in love, how it feels, but I don't know if she could even tell me, because I think it's so different for a woman, being in love, from what it is for a man. But if what I feel now is love, then it's a wild and wonderful feeling that has nothing to do with f—ing, a feeling that seems to creep up on you after the f—ing's over, a feeling of wanting to protect, and comfort. Because after it was over, this time, she said she felt it was wrong, that we shouldn't have f—ed, and she shouldn't have let me because of her new relationship with Mom. I told her it didn't matter because I would never tell Mom about it, or anybody else in the world about it, for that matter
.
And then she even got a little tearful, and said that she thinks Mom hates her. And I tried to comfort her and reassure her that Mom would never hate her, and that I would take care of that because I loved her, and before we knew it—well, we were f—ing again! So—what other words can I use to describe this lovely girl I've met? Pert is one. She is pert, lively, spirited, bubbly (like champagne), energetic, peppy, snappy, frisky, bouncy, sparkly, as hard to pin down as quicksilver, but also brave and strong and sad, and I want to make her happy. But look, it is almost 5:30 in the morning, and the sun is coming up, and I am f—ing tired! And I haven't even bothered to make paragraphs for tonight's entry, and this is probably the sloppiest piece of writing I have ever done, but whatthehell—I'm in love. Tra-la! Just one more item for my collection of misused words in the public press. Headline in yesterday morning's
Times:
“DATA SHOWS CHINESE POPULATION GROWTH IS STABILIZING.” Of course “data” is a plural word, and so it should be “DATA SHOW.” Who edits the
Times,
anyway? I could do a better job. And one new vocabulary word: FIONA. Those three lovely vowels, and just two consonants. All the loveliest, most delicate words in the language have more vowels than consonants
.

Enough for tonight:

It was one of those dreams which she knew was a dream and, knowing that she was dreaming, she knew she could rouse herself from it if she wanted to and yet, for some queer reason, she chose not to, and made the dreaming, conscious choice to let the dream spin itself out. In the dream, she was leaning over the parapet of her terrace, staring down at the dark river below, and at the little boat, spinning crazily, being sucked into the tidal bore. There were cries from the boat, and the woman's voice was familiar. Murderer! she was crying. This is my life you are taking, and this is my blood in the water. And down there in the darkness, she was able to make out the woman's upturned face as one she knew. The eyes blazed up at her with terrible accusation, and it was her own frightened face from the Bouché portrait. The woman held up the little white dog, as if offering it for sacrifice, as if to say, If you won't spare me, at least spare this helpless animal, but her open mouth kept screaming the word
Murderer! Murderer!

She forced herself awake, and out of the dream, and, groping for a cool corner of her pillow, tried to sleep again.

Two

THE HO FACTOR

10

ROTHMAN DYNASTY COULD OWE
$900,000,000 IN UNPAID TAXES,
IRS CLAIMS

With Penalties, Interest,
Figure Could Top $1 Billion

—The
New York Times
, May 1, 1990

To alex rothman, there was something almost surrealistic about figures like these. It was impossible to take them seriously. At that level, it all became Monopoly money. She had been in Ho Rothman's office, in fact, the day his lawyers had telephoned him with the bad news that a major Treasury Department audit was under way. He had uttered just one word:
“Momzers!”
Then he seized the telephone cord, ripped it from the wall, and flung the instrument against his map of the United States, where it dislodged several gold stars from the tip of the state of Florida before crashing to the floor in several pieces. So much, he seemed to imply, for that.

Later, she was reassured that there was nothing to worry about. The Rothman lawyers had the situation well in hand. The IRS, she was told, often zeroed in on prominent taxpayers just to reassure the general public that the agency was doing its job, going after the fat cats. In due course, the case would be settled for a tiny fraction of the amount claimed. It was nothing but bluster, nothing but stagecraft, on the part of the feds. It was all part of George Bush's promise not to raise taxes. His administration would show that it had other ways of balancing the budget. And, a week later, when a telegram arrived from the White House on Ho's ninety-fourth birthday, reading
BIRTHDAY FELICITATIONS FROM GEORGE AND BARBARA
, Ho waved the telegram triumphantly in front of his staff. “See?” he cried. “He is wishing me Happy Birthday, while his pipple are saying they're going to kill me!”

At the same time, it amused Alex whenever the newspapers referred to the Rothman clan as a “dynasty,” as though they were of the same ilk as the Rothschilds, or the Hapsburgs, or the great Imperial families of China, when in fact it had all started as recently as 1910, in Newark, New Jersey, when Ho Rothman was an ill-educated immigrant lad of fourteen who could not even remember his original name.

The man who became Herbert Oscar Rothman had only the vaguest memories of his parents, who died when he was five years old. There was a woman who used to sing to him. Could that have been his mother? Perhaps. His most vivid childhood memory was of being carried away from a burning house, of flames filling all the windows and doorways and bursting through the rooftop with the sound of thunder and towering into the sky. Of course the flames could not have been that towering, for it could not have been that much of a house, but to a child's eye the flames seemed to vault for miles up into the night sky. He was told that this had happened on a Christmas Eve, when the Russian soldiers were given extra rations of vodka, and were encouraged to run loose in the Jewish quarter of wherever it was. He assumed that his parents perished together in that fire. Were there other children, brothers and sisters? He never knew. Was the house torched as part of a pogrom, or was it an isolated incident? He never knew that, either.

For the next year or so he was cared for by a couple who must have been relatives, for he was told that he could call them “Mother” and “Father.” They lived in a village called Volnitskya, or at least that was the way it was pronounced—he never saw it spelled out—which no longer appears on any map of Poland, for apparently it disappeared during the Revolution. He could remember a muddy river, and a muddy road that ran down to it, where women did their washing and where he and other children launched sailboats made of leaves and twigs and swam naked in the summer. It was here that he first noticed that little girls had no little
putz
, but when he asked his new mother why, she slapped his face and sent him to bed without his supper. He remembered their little house, with walls of brick that seemed to have been fashioned from the same river mud, and that, in winter, he could reach out and touch the wall beside his bed, and that the wall was covered with a thin layer of ice. He remembered drawing frost-pictures on the icy walls.

He remembered the woman he was told to call Mother, though she was not his mother, sitting at a spinning wheel by candlelight. He remembered her telling stories of her ancestors, who were huge, fierce men who lived in the mountains and wrestled lions singlehanded, and of whom even the Cossack soldiers were terrified. “They bit the heads off live chickens, my people,” she told him proudly. He remembered the dirt floor of the little house, and a rug in a pattern of bright flowers laid down carefully in the center of the floor. The woman he was told to call Mother was inordinately proud of this little rug. It had great value, he was given to understand. It was a rug worthy of the czars themselves, and the children—how many were there?—were not permitted to walk on it, but had to step carefully around it. His new mother always rolled this rug up and hid it under a mattress whenever a stranger knocked at the door. Other treasures were hidden under this lumpy mattress: a menorah, a silver teapot, six silver spoons, and a
chuppa
that was being saved for a daughter's wedding, but the rug was the most precious possession of them all. Ho Rothman used to dream of one day going back to Poland to search for the lost village of Volnitskya, where he would try to retrieve this special rug. Of course, he never did.