Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“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.”