Inside, Outside, page 57
There was Bobbie Webb for you in one blinding “epiphanic moment,” as the creative-writing professors put it these days; apologizing to me for my own ineptness as a fiend, and using a bit of showbiz or garment-center Yiddish to make me feel more at home. Langeh loksh is slang for somebody tall; literally, “long noodle.”
Seductions have a way of working out, and this one of course did. How many times? Think back to your own first night, reader, or at least your honeymoon night; if you’re a man never mind exaggerating, if you’re a woman don’t be too wistful about what you read in books. We are nearly all pretty close to average. Who wants to be a freak of sexual prowess, anyway, the ace barnyard cock, racking up the orgasms like billiard scores? Peter Quat is Priapus’s fool. Love is the thing, and love was a white radiant blaze that enveloped Bobbie and me that night until the window showed not moonlight but lilac dawn.
“Oh, my God. Mother will be having kittens. Take me home, darling.” Bobbie leaped naked from the bed.
The magic trailed us down the elevator, through that deserted red-and-gold lobby, into the taxicab, and all the way to Ninety-fifth Street, like a shower of stars all around us. We kept looking deep in each other’s heavy-lidded eyes, spent, content, drained, still rapturous in the afterglow, in the new intimacy, in the one-time and all-time wonder of first love.
But I had played it straight. Through the torrent of endearments, all that night long, I had never once told Bobbie Webb that I loved her. That, I had managed to avoid. For that would have been misleading the girl. I was not that much of a fiend.
72
The Hemingway Pillow
Cousin Harold’s mother, Aunt Sophie, was the Walter Cronkite of the Mishpokha Broadcasting System, so taking Harold to the Winter Garden lobby to show him Bobbie Webb’s picture was an insanity. What a red-hot news break for Aunt Sophie! Why, this was Yisroelke, Zaideh’s pet, the big yoxenta’s jewel, the Minsker Godol, going out with a shiksa in a Broadway show! I tell you, it was a family Sputnik shock. Yet that possibility never crossed my mind when I dragged Cousin Harold to the Winter Garden. I was in an amorous daze, a blissful sleepwalk.
Cousin Harold stood gaping at that picture like a believer at a wonder-working saint’s statue on the saint’s day, expecting it to start bleeding. “Wow,” he breathed.
It was an old-time shadowy glamour pose, tilted head and naked shoulders, with a slight smile barely parting her lips, so that you did not see her teeth. Among the showgirl pictures Bobbie’s was not the most striking, but it sure struck Harold. “Are you—” Cousin Harold hesitated, then dropped his voice, as befitted conversation about a holy object, in a holy place, “—are you, ah, having an affair with her?”
Note Cousin Harold’s delicacy; not “fucking her,” or more circumspectly, “screwing her,” which would have been his secular style.
I laughed. “Ye gods, no. Nothing like that. We’re just having great fun.”
Not taking his eyes off her, Cousin Harold heaved a deep, deep sigh; and that sigh balanced out, for me, ten years of listening to the tales of this copulating Sinbad. He was back from his Swiss medical school between terms. At lunch he had been recounting his conquests in boardinghouses, train compartments, and one in a funicular car; and I had sat quietly, a disguised billionaire letting a beggar ramble on, waiting to show him Bobbie’s picture. He also told me about the whiffs of anti-Semitism drifting across the Alps from Germany, the scrawls of Juif on store windows, the spreading rash of Hitler pictures and swastikas, but none of that dented my somnambulist serenity.
“Think you’ll end up marrying her?”
“No, it’s not like that, but she couldn’t be lovelier.”
“I’ll bet.” Harold looked respectfully at me, as he had used to before we reached puberty. Then he had sprouted that extraordinary member, framed in a bush like a gorilla’s topknot, and set off on his precocious career, while I had languished behind, an inept virgin with morbid concerns about being an invert. Bobbie’s picture ended all that, without Harold even knowing what the true situation was. So perhaps you can understand why I did such a damn fool thing. Believe me, it was a satisfying moment, though I paid for it.
***
Peter Quat returned from the hospital, talking once more about quitting Goldhandler. But it was no time for Peter to desert. We were carrying a heavy work load. Goldhandler was riding high again, grinding out two new comedy shows as well as the Leslie Howard program, and also drafting a libretto for a Gershwin musical. The quadruplex penthouse was becoming crammed with Mrs. Fesser’s antiques, Karl and Sigmund were getting straight A’s at college, and the Klebanoff mine in Alaska was actually starting to produce some gold. I was dickering with our landlady for a full year’s lease, and it appeared feasible; not, however, if Peter left. And that brings me to the unfortunate matter of the Hemingway pillow.
Admirers of Ernest Hemingway will surely recall that when a Hemingway hero is doing it to one or another woman, he is likely to put a pillow under her loins. Hemingway makes a big deal of women’s loins. As between loins and lions, it is a close-run thing in Hemingway, and with the loins there generally goes a pillow, underneath. Now as I’ve said, in my mind this relationship with Bobbie Webb was a mishmash of Hemingway, Coward, and other literary influences, maybe above all Edna St. Vincent Millay, as in her definitive quatrain:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
There you had it. Passion was an evanescent delight, to be enjoyed and then given up with a little agony, a little sadness, but on the whole mutual good feeling and thanks for the memory. Certainly that was my idea of what was happening between me and Bobbie Webb. All this took place long ago, before the sexual revolution made such bohemian posturing very old hat. You have to project yourself back into a former quaint set of values, almost as when you read Anna Karenina, to understand that for our Yisroelke, in the 1930’s, these were exceedingly liberated notions.
It followed that the closer I could approximate my literary models, the better. Edna Millay offered no suggestions as to how to go about doing it, just lots of lyrics declaring how sweet, short-lived, painful, and precious the whole business was. Ernest Hemingway, however, had this highly specific suggestion of a pillow under the loins, which would greatly heighten mutual rapture.
“A pillow?” said Bobbie. “Why a pillow? Everything’s fine this way.”
I insisted we ought to try it, and Bobbie was nothing if not compliant, at this stage. Taking Peter’s pillow to put under Bobbie’s marvellously shapely loins did not seem quite the thing, somehow. So I went into the living room and fetched a cushion from the couch. Well, Bobbie was right, it made no perceptible difference. Bobbie, though, was so anxious to please me that she said afterward, why yes, it was just marvellous, we would have to use a cushion more often. And I was so happy in bed with her that I only wanted her to be half as happy; so I was delighted with her reaction, and greatly obliged to Ernest Hemingway, and we did use that sofa cushion now and again when I thought of it. It didn’t harm anything, there was just the nuisance of going to get it. Finally Bobbie held me back one night and said irritably, “Darling, look, do me a favor and get on with it, forget that goddamn cushion, will you?” Exit Ernest Hemingway from our romance.
As it happened, that couch was Peter’s favorite reading spot, as the peach mink chair was mine. It was upholstered in shaggy brown material like a grizzly bear’s hide, and the cushions were a smooth bright yellow; altogether a gaudy item, much in keeping with our Hollywood decor. Peter loved to lie propped on the cushions with one of his far-out books: Carl Van Vechten, Laura Riding, Ezra Pound, or what have you. One evening he was settling down to read when he froze. He held a cushion up to the reading lamp and picked something off it.
“There’s hair on this cushion,” he accused me. I was in the peach armchair.
“So? You’re the one who uses the couch,” I said. “It’s your hair.” I had not told him about Bobbie and me, and wasn’t about to.
“My hair?” He brought it over to me: a very short black curly wiry hair. “What kind of hair do you call that?”
I might better have kept my big mouth shut, but I was feeling pretty foxy, and I said, “Could be an eyebrow.”
“An eyebrow?” Peter snarled, with the ghastliest face he had ever made, and a roll of his eyes like a mad dog. “Some fucking eyebrow!”
Next day he told me his mind was made up. He was going to get his M.A. in English literature at Harvard, starting in the fall, then go into university teaching; and as soon as he had enough stuff published, he would apply for a Guggenheim fellowship and write novels. It wasn’t until the early fifties that he got the Guggenheim on which he wrote Deflowering Sarah, but otherwise he lived by that plan. And so far as that goes, my hat is off to him. Anyway, after the pillow episode I was on notice that come the summer layoff, Peter Quat was out. As for the contract with Goldhandler, Peter just ignored it, as he ignores all contracts until the law closes in.
Peter was never surly to Bobbie, I’ll say that. When she would call up after the show and we sweet-talked, he would sit listening with a sardonic smile. “You, my friend, will marry that girl,” he would say. But I knew better, of course. Bobbie and I had agreed that our thing was a shining palace built upon the sand, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings, etc. Peter and I even double-dated sometimes with Bobbie Webb and Marilyn Levy, and it was a caution to see how swimmingly those two got along: the high-powered, heavily moneyed, big-bosomed nineteen-year-old Jewish Bennington sophomore, and the tall thin professional Irish beauty in her twenties, sparsely educated, poor as a rat. They would go off to the powder room together, chatting and chortling like lifelong friends. All they had in common was that they were both in love with eccentric Jewish gagmen. I guess this peculiar fate made them sisters under the skin, pro tem.
***
When I came home for Friday night dinner, a few days after my lunch with Cousin Harold, my sister Lee collared me and pulled me into her frilly pink bedroom. “Tell me about the showgirl!”
“What showgirl?”
“Oh, please. Mom and Pop are up in arms. Pop hasn’t slept for three nights.”
I woke out of my somnabulism as though I had walked under a waterfall. “Cousin Harold,” I said. “Damn.”
Lee’s eyes snapped with excitement. Here was high Yiddish-theatre drama, in the poky Goodkind flat! She was safely engaged to her Jewish pediatrician, Bernie Cooperman, and their marriage was only a month off; and “my David” was in the hottest of hot water.
“She isn’t Jewish, is she? Not a showgirl.”
“She’s not Jewish. She’s a darling, and we’re having a marvellous time.”
Lee gave me a penetrating sisterly look. “I’d love to meet her.”
“Why not? I’ll take you to the show.”
It was an unusually quiet and glum Sabbath meal. The candles seemed to be burning blue.
“Who’s been manicuring your nails?” Mom said abruptly. “They look so nice and clean.”
“I just cut them,” I said. “Nobody’s manicuring them.”
“Your nails never looked as clean and shiny as that. Somebody’s been manicuring them.”
“Leave him alone,” Pop said. “If he says nobody manicured them, nobody manicured them.”
That was as close as we came to discussing Bobbie Webb; except that when I left to go back to April House—where in fact I was meeting Bobbie—Pop said with weighty meaning, “Take care of our son.”
“Don’t worry, Pop,” I said, and off went the jewel for his rendezvous with the Outside.
You may ask, since Quat was over his pneumonia, and since Bobbie lived at home with her mother, how were we managing? Well, in seduction the first slice off the loaf, the first olive out of the bottle, is the whole thing, you know. After that you are lovers with one desire, which much simplifies things. There were times when I knew Peter wouldn’t be in. He was an obsessive bridge player, and every Monday night he invariably played until two in the morning. So Monday night was regular management night, so to speak. I would sit in the peach mink armchair on Monday night, trying to write funny jokes on a pad, but forever glancing downtown with an eye for only one of those light-spangled skyscrapers, the Paramount tower with its illuminated clock.
The show let out at eleven, but she had to take off her makeup and change. When it reached ten minutes to twelve on other nights, the telephone would ring, and it would be Bobbie wanting to chat. But on Monday nights it would crawl past that mark, past twelve, and about five or six minutes after midnight—seldom later; Bobbie was if anything more passionately into this thing than I was—the doorbell would ring, I would fly to the door, and there she would stand glowing, my Grade A showgirl, with a love gleam in her eyes and an inviting, intoxicating smile. I would pull her inside and there at the door we would commence crazy kissing; and she would do her best to hold me off, to laugh at me, to ask for a drink, to insist she was hungry. But on Monday night that was just talk.
Ah me, those Monday nights in April House! “Youth is a crown of roses,” says the Talmud, “old age a bed of thorns.” Poor grizzled tax lawyer! Dear God in Heaven, Bobbie Webb, how the roses became you!
73
Lee’s Wedding
My sister Lee, Dr. Bernie Cooperman, and I watched the show from house seats. Over the footlights Bobbie threw us bewitching smiles, and when at one point the singing girls raised those long World War I skirts to show their legs, Bernie Cooperman’s eyes popped at Bobbie and he hissed “Kee-rist!” My sister Lee, with a tart little grin, laid a possessive hand on his arm. Afterward we ate in a seafood restaurant. Like Lee, Bernie loved abominations. We all ordered Uncle Yehuda’s South African lobster tails—I doubt that I can cram in here the loony but true story of Uncle Yehuda’s striking it rich in lobster tails—and Bernie Cooperman peppered Bobbie with leaden doctor badinage, which she fielded with frolicsome ease. You’d think my sister Lee would have been disapproving, but not a bit of it.
“Why don’t you marry her?” said Lee next day. She was shopping for her trousseau, and she dropped in to our suite.
“Hell, Lee, you know the answer to that.”
“Oh, look, she can convert, can’t she? You won’t do much better. I’ve never seen you look at a girl like that, and she’s obviously crazy about you.”
Coming from Lee, that threw me. I carefully explained to her that Bobbie and I were enjoying the lovely light of a candle burning at both ends, but she couldn’t grasp this difficult concept. She seemed all set to teach Bobbie how to make gefilte fish; except that she couldn’t make it herself. Lee has never liked gefilte fish, so she never learned how. Anyway, my sister Lee clearly perceived Bobbie as a wife, not as a pair of transient Hemingway loins.
Goldhandler weighed in as matchmaker. I had been bringing Bobbie to occasional rehearsals and programs. “Taking kid, that black-haired girl,” he remarked when we were working together late at night in the penthouse. “Rabbi’s daughter, I presume?”
I laughed uneasily.
“You ought to marry her, Finkelstein. She’s nice.”
“Why, I barely know the girl.”
He gave me a shrewd squint through cigar smoke, and dropped it.
One Friday night after dinner, Pop came to me with a Bible open to a chapter in Proverbs about “the strange woman,” the wanton who lures a young fool into her bedchamber and seduces him with her wiles, assuring him that her husband is off on a trip. The simpleton ends up with an arrow through his liver. One gathers the husband got back too soon. I could see in this no relevance to my own liver. After all, I was seducing Bobbie, not the other way around, and anyway she was single. I brought the Bible back to Pop.
“Okay, Papa. Forget it.”
“It’s not serious?”
“No.”
“Mama and I wouldn’t interfere with your life, you know. We could move to Palestine, or maybe Hawaii.”
“Papa, for crying out loud, that’s absurd.”
“Lee is having a very big wedding.” His weary wise eyes searched mine. “Maybe too big, but that’s what Mama and the Coopermans want. Zaideh will marry them. You’re the best man. Nothing should interfere.”
“Nothing will interfere.”
He held out his hand. I shook it.
Bobbie was sweetly tactful about not being invited. “Of course I understand, dear,” she said. “It wouldn’t do, would it? With your grandfather, and whatnot.” Bobbie liked my sister Lee, and she knew that Lee liked her, for one night in Bernie’s flat Lee had put on for the four of us a jolly meal of turtle bisque, oysters Rockefeller, shrimps Creole, sea urchins in wine sauce, and Uncle Yehuda’s lobster tails. Lee had committed herself to keeping a kosher kitchen, you see, out of consideration for Mom and Pop, who were giving the happy pair the dowry for Lee, saved up probably since the day she came out a girl baby: a honeymoon in Europe, and ten thousand dollars to set up a pediatric office on Central Park West. So she and Bernie were cramming in home-cooked abominations while the cramming was good.
Bobbie wanted to know, when I told her about the wedding, where it would be held (“Wow, the Algonquin!”) and how many guests there would be—she had one very mobile eyebrow, and it went up high when I said over three hundred—whether Lee’s dress had a train, what I would wear as best man (top hat, white tie, and tails), and such girlish inquiries. And who was coming, that she knew? Peter Quat? Yes. Marilyn Levy? Um, yes. The Goldhandlers? Yes. Boyd? Yes.
“Even Boyd? I didn’t think he was Jewish. I guess everyone’s coming but me.”
The arrow sailed through my amorous fog and got me in the liver. Bobbie and I were together in the peach armchair. She put both arms around my neck. “Oh, honey, don’t look like that. It’s all right, truly it is.”
