Inside, Outside, page 62
“You don’t have to swear and raise your voice,” she said. “I must bring you and Eddie together to argue it out. I bet he’ll convince you. I know he’s right. Now come here and kiss me.”
But a combative squirt of adrenaline was waking me up. I asked her whether she had been kidding me about The Prophet. She appeared puzzled. Why, of course it was a great book, she said, but Eddie had predicted that I wouldn’t understand the philosophy, because I was too young. Next I inquired about the play Eddie was writing. She hemmed and hawed, and said Eddie had made her promise not to tell me the idea, because I might steal it, since all gagmen were notorious thieves. “But I guess you can’t steal it, at that. It’s beyond you,” said Bobbie, “it’s a very serious play.” She revealed that it was about reincarnation. Three great men were all actually the same person, and the three acts would show how the three lives were really one. The three men were Napoleon, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bix Beiderbecke. Eddie hoped to star in the play himself, as these were his three heroes.
Well, somehow that did it. It was a moment of veil-ripping truth. This Eddie might be a good voice coach, I knew nothing about those things, but he was a preposterous ass, that was certain, and my Bobbie lapped up his mindless drivel. She lay there naked in body, mind, and soul, the glorious Avatar of the Outside, my poor dear first love, as fair as the daffodils of April, a hopeless, gullible ninny.
“Let’s go, Bobbie. Peter will be getting back,” I said.
“Oh, dear, yes.” Bobbie happily yawned, stretching. “And I did tell Mother I’d be home early. We must do this more often, Izzy.”
And as she tucked her exquisite breasts into a lacy brassiere, it came to me with pain like acute angina that whatever she was, I loved this girl, loved her as I could never love Rosalind Hoppenstein; that I was bound to this one girl, of all living girls, with unseen steel cords; and that I had had to find out just what a lightweight fool she could be, to strike down to the bedrock fact that I loved her.
***
“For Christ’s sake!” groaned Peter the next night, looking at his glowing watch dial. “The phone, three in the morning?”
“Probably a wrong number.” I leaped out of bed. I had not closed my eyes all night, lying there tossing in bedclothes redolent of Bobbie’s perfume. I shut the bedroom door and answered the phone.
“Hello, Izzy dear.” Gay tipsy note. In the background, laughter, loud talk, music, clinking of glasses. “Is this awful of me, to wake you up?”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Oh, working late again? How are you, honey? Look, this whole place is in an uproar over the deerfly. I did my best to explain your fifteen miles, but everybody thinks Eddie is right about the Einstein theory. Why don’t you talk to Eddie? Here he is—come on, Eddie, he wasn’t asleep.”
Rich rumbly baritone: “Hello, there, Izzy. This is Violet’s idea, calling you up. But anyway, Izzy, you’re wrong about the deerfly. What’s all this about fifteen miles?”
I was too numbed, I guess, to do anything but run through the answer again.
“Well, Izzy, your methodology is fundamentally mistaken. You see, you’ve got a series of smaller and smaller relative motions there. So you just can’t work the problem without the Einstein theory of relativity. Albert Einstein’s down there in Princeton, you know. I’ve met the man, we’ve talked for hours.”
Poor, poor bubble-headed Bobbie! “I didn’t realize you knew Einstein,” I said. “Of course that settles it.”
“Okay, Izzy. I hope Violet didn’t wake you, just for this…. Violet, want to talk to the guy again? I’ve got to go to the can.”
“He calls me Violet,” she giggled. “He says Bobbie is a childish name. So, it’s all straightened out about the deerfly? Good. That was fun last night, Izzy. Call me.”
Click.
I sat there in my pajamas, looking out of my April House aerie at the downtown skyscrapers, dark against the stars except for a few yellow patches of windows, and at the Paramount clock that had once kept the time of our shining palace. No use going back to bed. I felt that I might never sleep again, or eat, for that matter. The arrow in my liver this time was poisoned.
***
A snowy night in February.
I have been walking for hours. Starting from April House, I have wandered in the white silent park, and then gravitated downtown to Broadway. Circling aimlessly, I have stopped twice at the theatre where Bobbie’s show is playing, and have stared and stared at the cast pictures, picking her out of the chorus scenes, twisting the dagger in my gut.
Just to do something with myself, I drift on to the Radio City Music Hall, where the box office is about to close for the night. I am in time to see the last stage show. When the forty Rockettes line up and do their kicks, I see forty Bobbie Webbs kicking perfect, unmatchable, maddeningly exciting Bobbie Webb legs. The sight is unendurable. I walk out to the foyer.
I am in an exceedingly bad way. Peter Quat has put up with my collapse and is doing the work of both of us, even agreeing to my taking a ten-day cruise to Cuba, which has helped not at all. My trouble is an all too simple and common one. The reader who has not been through such an ordeal has enjoyed a sheltered youth. After enduring tortured weeks of Bobbie’s moody, peevish, whimsical veering between me and the man who knows Einstein—her evasions, her broken dates, her brazen lies, her blowing cold and hot—I have become a disintegrated wreck; and to end the humiliating torment, I have written her an ultimatum. Her reply has been silence. It has now lasted more than three weeks.
In the grotesquely grand and ornate lobby of the Music Hall, I am almost alone. The voice in my brain speaks. I know where she is. I am going there. It will be the worst experience of my life, but I must go. Nobody can ever tell me that there is no such thing as a presentiment; and incidentally, I have never again been inside the Radio City Music Hall.
Bobbie stares at me, shocked, round-eyed and open-mouthed, as though she is seeing a ghost. Probably I look like one, hat and coat caked with snow, my face maybe whiter than the snow, bursting into the bar out of the night. She is sitting on a bar stool beside the man who knows Einstein, in the small sleazy bar of the Broadway hotel where he lives.
“Good lord,” she says to him. “It’s Izzy.”
The man who knows Einstein turns and grins at me. Close up, he appears to be forty, with a lined jowly face. “Hi, there, Izzy. What a surprise. Come and have a drink.”
I go and sit beside her. There is nobody else in the bar. “Bobbie, I want to talk to you.”
“Well, go ahead and talk.”
“Will you come with me somewhere?”
Bobbie hesitates. Her abundant black hair is carelessly pinned up. I have seen it that way often, late at night, when she has just gotten out of bed. She is sitting between me and the man who knows Einstein. She deliberately puts her hand high inside his thigh and rubs affectionately near his crotch. “Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of Eddie.”
“All right. I love you. I want you to marry me.”
Whatever Bobbie is expecting, she does not expect that. She looks as though I have knocked out her wind with a punch. She peers at me and glances at the man who knows Einstein. He is smirking over his beer as he sips it.
“Well!” she says, speaking very slowly and primly, with a slight stammer, “I see. Of course I’m proud and happy that you feel that way, but… excuse me.”
Off she goes into a powder room visible in the lobby, leaving me with the man who knows Einstein. He gabbles about the hard lot of gagwriters, who have to be thieves for a living. I pay no attention. I am in deeper shock than Bobbie. That unmistakable, unspeakable gesture of her hand!
She returns. “Oh, you’re still here? I thought you’d gone by now. Well, have a drink, then. Or are you leaving?”
“Bobbie, I want an answer,” says the damned young idiot who was then called David Goodkind.
Bobbie’s face takes on an expression I have never seen before and have never since forgotten—half-closed glassy glittery eyes, contracted black brows, and a cold smile showing all her teeth. She glances at the man who knows Einstein, lays her hand again high inside his thigh, and looks straight at me. “Don’t you know when you’re done, Izzy? That’s not characteristic of your race.”
So at that I collect myself, and what is left of my self-respect, and walk out of there. Right? Wrong. That is not how things go in real life. What she has said, I scarcely grasp; not just then, not yet, as they say one does not at once feel the penetrating knife or bullet. I cannot remember what I reply, but there are more words. Bobbie jumps up, very agitated, puts on the beaver coat I bought her, and angrily ties a red shawl over her hair and under her chin. “I’m leaving, if you’re not. Come on, Eddie,” and she plunges out into the night. He follows her. I dumbly start to follow, too.
“Look,” the man who knows Einstein says to me at the door, with more condescension than malice or menace, “she really doesn’t want to talk to you, don’t you know that?”
But I come out anyhow, and I watch them fade off side by side in the whirling neon-lit snow of Broadway.
79
Bobbie’s Second Thoughts
“Izzy, are you all right?”
That voice, that unforgettable voice—that voice I can hear in my mind now, thirty-six years later, as plainly as I’ve just heard a patrolling jet fighter break the sound barrier out over the Mediterranean—that voice was on the telephone again after a long terrible month and more, sounding rushed and shaken. I had jumped from my typewriter to the phone, not expecting to hear from her, yet still in that state of excruciating tension when every telephone ring was like a gunshot.
“Hello, there, Bobbie. I’m fine, why?”
“I had the most horrible dream about you last night. I couldn’t stand it, I had to find out how you were. You really are all right?”
“Perfectly okay. How are you?”
“Oh, not bad.”
Long pause. Then Bobbie, in a different sheepish tone, “It sounds sort of obvious, dear, my calling like this, but I did have this truly awful dream about you.”
Overwhelmingly sweet as it was to hear that light crystalline voice again, the pain at least equalled the sweetness, and through my tumbling emotional murk a single idea shone through, an Eleventh Commandment booming at me out of fire and cloud, HAVE NOTHING MORE TO DO WITH HER.
“Well, it’s nice of you, Bobbie, but I am quite okay.”
“I’m so glad. How is Mr. Goldhandler?”
“Pretty well recovered. I see your show’s still running.”
“Oh, sure.” Another awkward pause. Then, gaily and a bit shyly: “Are you doing any horseback riding?”
And there it was. The dream ploy was feeble enough, but this was as close as a girl like Bobbie Webb could ever come to backtracking.
In our magic springtime, one of the many things we had done was ride together in Central Park. I had bought her a fetching riding habit, and we had trotted, or rather plodded, around the reservoir now and then on placid old hired nags. Now here was the olive branch. I had only to say the word. It was late March, the park was greening, and the riders were out.
“Well, I’ve been sort of busy, Bobbie. A lot of work.”
“I see. I hope I haven’t interrupted you.”
“Not at all. It’s nice to hear from you.”
“Nice to talk to you.” Slight pause, and she added cheerily: “Well, goodbye, then.”
“Bye, Bobbie.”
Between that famous encounter in the bar, with the man who knew Einstein as witness, and this call, exactly four ghastly weeks and five ghastly days and nights had elapsed. It was by chance that I was in April House when Bobbie called. I had been living at home in Lee’s old room, and coming to the suite for a few hours to work with Peter. I couldn’t sleep a wink in April House, couldn’t endure looking out at Peeping Tom, seeing the Paramount clock at night and that whole downtown panorama. Peter Quat surmised my trouble, more or less, when I temporarily moved out. “I’m not paying the whole rent,” was all he said, and when I assured him I would go on paying my share, that was that.
But Mama asked so many questions when I came home with a suitcase that I was inclined to give up the idea, until Pop snapped at her in Yiddish, “What’s the matter with you? The boy comes home, and you ask questions? Don’t ask. The boy came home, and finished.” That silenced Mama.
I had read somewhere that one slept best in a cold room, and it was a bitter winter, so I took to turning off the radiators in Lee’s room, opening the windows wide, piling on the blankets, and downing stiff slugs of neat whiskey. I still didn’t sleep much, but there was something primally comforting about air icy in the lungs, booze warm in the stomach, and a heavy swaddling of blankets. Mama did some muttering when she came in some mornings and found snowdrifts on the floor, but she made no trouble about it. She did bother me a lot, however, about a large sign I pasted in my bathroom, the day after my date with Vyvyan Finkel’s secretary.
Seeking relief from my agonies over Bobbie, you see, I went up to Columbia to talk to Vyvyan in his office. Vyvyan was delighted. He put his arms around me, gave me several damp friendly kisses, and offered me sherry from a bottle lying on a shelf behind the collected works of George Santayana. I kept pouring out my heart as he poured the sherry. He was most sympathetic about Bobbie, assuring me that all this would be grist for the mill, once I entered on my true calling as a pewet.
“I seem to be the fool of the world,” I said. “Maybe I should start my education over again.”
“You have.” He recommended several books, including—I remember—The Education of Henry Adams and The Memoirs of Casanova. “Just to get the range,” he smiled, and he invited me to come to a concert with him, as in the old days.
Well, on my way out, there sat at a desk in an outer room this big blonde girl in tweed, busy with papers and books. Any port in a storm! I introduced myself, and was surprised by a friendly smile, a warm large-boned handshake, and the disclosure that she had seen my Varsity Shows, and read my Vicomte de Brag columns while at Barnard. I took her to the theatre. The date cheered me up more than my talk with Vyvyan had. Here was a girl with a brain, a Columbia education, and a Phi Bete key; catch her falling for a chorus boy who knew Einstein! I was enchanted, and tried necking with her in the taxicab afterward. That was not so hot. She had a way of staring wide-eyed at me as I kissed her, and she smelled soapy.
Still, when I got home from that date I was a new man, or thought I was. I printed in crimson crayon on a piece of cardboard, IT WAS THE LUCKIEST THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED—referring, of course, to my rejection in the bar—and propped it in my bathroom, so that when I got up and went to bed, this consoling thought would confront me. I forgot that Mom would see the sign. She pestered me about it. “What was the luckiest thing that could have happened? Tell me. Tell me what was so lucky! Why can’t you tell your own mother?” Et cetera. Papa had to intervene again and order her to leave the boy alone, if something lucky had happened to the boy she should thank God, and finished.
That sign was all very well, but one more date with Vyvyan’s secretary, and I gave up. No soap. Or rather, soap, yes, brains, yes; but ah for black hair, huge eyes, and dopey gullibility about Kahlil Gibran! The ordeal of icy sleepless nights went on. I was keeping my sanity by concert-going with Vyvyan Finkel, burying myself in work for Goldhandler, and seeing more and more of Zaideh—as Vyvyan put it, to get the range. Bobbie’s ineradicable words, “That’s not characteristic of your race,” had thrown me back a long way. During those insomniac whiskeyed-up nights they reechoed and reverberated in my mind. Naturally I told Zaideh nothing of all this. Nor did he ask questions, except, as I would be leaving, “When will I see you again?” We studied Talmud, and he told me about old times in Russia, and he also talked a lot about Uncle Velvel’s latest quagmire, a matter of peanuts.
***
Last and maddest of the Velvel stories, true as sunrise. Briefly, a cousin of Velvel’s worked on a kibbutz that grew peanuts and shipped the raw product abroad. Velvel had some money, though the shittim-wood scheme was finished, because his wife had finally divorced him, and his father-in-law had given Uncle Velvel a nice lump sum to get lost, permanently. Uncle Velvel invested in machines that salted and packaged peanuts, and built a small processing plant near that kibbutz. The markup from peanuts off the vine to the packaged article was of course enormous, and Uncle Velvel saw his ship coming in, after a lifetime of thwarted visions.
The ship might well have made port, what’s more, except for the unforeseen problem of vibration. The floor of the processing plant had been poorly set down, so it vibrated. The whole plant vibrated. In fact the entire kibbutz vibrated, or so the kibbutzniks claimed. In a nearby kibbutz machine shop, the ceiling fell down, knocking cold some idealistic Americans working there. The kibbutz council blamed Velvet’s peanut plant, and there was hell to pay.
That was bad enough, but the main problem was with the product. The vibration threw the salting process out of whack. A large shipment of heavily oversalted peanuts went to France—though it was news to me that Frenchmen ate anything as normal as salted peanuts—and set fire to a lot of Gallic insides and caused no end of trouble. Most of the shipment came back. The French importer was suing Uncle Velvel. Velvel was suing the contractor who had built the processing plant. The council that ran the kibbutz, fearful of getting involved, had given up on Velvel and resumed shipping peanuts abroad.
So Uncle Velvel was left high and dry with a peanut-processing plant that vibrated, and no peanuts. Far from taking this lying down, he was importing peanuts from Liberia, and suing the kibbutz council for not supplying him with peanuts. He had nothing on paper, so he was suing in a rabbinic court, where an oath of a pious man, and Uncle Velvel was visibly pious, would have weight. It was a Marxist kibbutz, not pious at all, so the council was countersuing Uncle Velvel in a secular court for trespassing, since the vibrating plant was on their land and they wanted it off. The council claimed that Uncle Velvel had built the plant too close to their dairy barns, and the vibration was making the cows nervous, drying them up and causing them to fight like bulls. I am summarizing a mess that went on for years. Zaideh would read me Uncle Velvel’s letters, naively rejoicing over his son’s reports of triumphant turns in the lawsuits, which always concluded with pleas for more money to pay his lawyers.
