Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“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.”

“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.