Good as Gold

  "I would let him get one from you silly," she sighed.

  "He might be annoyed," Gold reflected disconso­lately.

  "Or I can listen in for you."

  "You can listen in?"

  "Of course, silly," Andrea laughed, beaming at his disbelief. "On everybody." This was the third time, Gold noted, that she had carelessly addressed him as silly. Here was another trait of personality he would soon rigidly have to modify and he found himself looking ahead, with some feelings of vengefulness, to assuming more broadly the role of mentor and discipli­narian.

  "You know, Dr. Gold—"

  "Bruce," he corrected.

  "Bruce—" Andrea glowed each time at such testi­monies of minute observance—" maybe my father can help. But he'd want to make sure we're close. A lot of times he helps men and they never want to see me again."

  "How much closer can we be?" Gold cried, and stumbled on the lagging fringe of her bathrobe as he hurled himself across her living room to embrace her.

  Gold was enamored. Andrea was capitivating in all moods and states of dress and at all times of day. While Gold made improvements in his essay, Andrea, en­chanting in eyeglasses, read and graded his student blue books, penciling comments faintly that he could later copy in ink. He pictured an endless and untroubled

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  idyl. Andrea was fascinated by his Irish oatmeal and had responded with gratifying exclamations of rapture to his freshly ground blend of mocha, Java, and French roast coffee beans. An entirety of bliss lay in store. She would grade all his papers, balance his checkbook, and write out his alimony payments. In spring he would make her matzoh brei.

  With magnificent self-restraint he kept the article down to four thousand words and mailed this abbreviated, droll presentation of his ideas to an editor of the Times Magazine who had been soliciting a piece from him for almost a year and who rejected it overnight with the gratuitous recommendation he reduce it to eight hun­dred words, improve the title, and submit it to a different section of the newspaper, the Op Ed page. Gold knew then he would hate that man till his last breath. He reduced the piece to twelve hundred words and, as directed, submitted this shortened version to the Op Ed page, where it was received with a cry of delight by an irrepressible young editor who pro­nounced himself blessed to receive so pregnant a work from so revered a source and then requested Gold to cut four hundred words and change the title.

  "An affirmative statement would be superior to all that enigmatic coyness, which is not worthy of you, Professor Gold, not worthy of you at all. Use your last sentence as the title instead."

  Gold condensed the piece further by four hundred words but stuck to his title and received a check from The New York Times for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. Less than a week after his few paragraphs appeared, two letters stimulated by his piece were published. The first was a note of genial accolade from a nonagenerian in Massachusetts who said he had not read a book or a poem, looked at a painting, or given a thought to anything but his income and his health since graduating from Williams seventy-eight years earlier and had not in that time suffered a second's regret or sense of loss. The second was a vituperative attack from

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  Lieberman, who declared Gold "morally nihilistic and incoiioclastically desecrating," denounced him for "in­sultingly promulgating challengingly contrary predica­tions that all we loyal, good Americans must unprece-dentedly disapprove of," and scornfully defied him to rebut these charges "if he dared!" Gold loved seeing his name in the papers this' second time and was rejoicing as well in the two phone calls he'd already received. The first was from a leader in the State Senate, who requested Gold's support of an education bill denying financial aid to any community in New York containing poor people.

  "The beauty of the bill—and I'm sure you'll agree, Dr. Gold—is that it will help force most families on welfare out of New York State."

  Gold held back. "I know a better way," he said wryly. "Why not change the welfare laws to give money to all poor people who live out of the state instead of those who live in?"

  "By God, Gold!" Gold, in his time, had produced many a favorable response. He had never been witness to a better. "I think that's the best political idea I ever heard. Will you come to Albany and help push it through?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  "Then I'll take all the credit myself!"

  The second call was from Ralph. "I thought of phoning you immediately, but the idea never entered my mind. We're going to send you up to Congress to argue our position for us. You've given us just the ammunition we need to end all federal aid to public education."

  Gold felt terrible. "Ralph, that wasn't exactly my plan," he interposed timidly. "I was trying to improve education, not destroy it."

  "Well, Bruce, nothing succeeds as planned," Ralph informed him instructively. "If we can keep our educational systems just as bad while lowering the cost, we would be improving our educational systems a good deal, wouldn't we? Bruce, you won't have to say

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  anything you don't believe when you talk to Congress. Just tell the truth."

  "The truth?"

  "Even if you have to lie."

  "I suppose," Gold reflected, "I could do that."

  "The President will be tickled. He was particularly impressed with your statement—oh, what genius you have—that an ignorant citizen is the best citizen."

  Gold gave a start. "That was meant to be ironic, Ralph."

  "I'm afraid we all missed that, Bruce."

  "Lately," Gold complained, "all my sarcasms are being received as truths."

  "That may be," consoled Ralph respectfully, "be­cause like all brilliant artists, you are in closer touch with reality than you know. Your appointment to the new Presidential Commission on Education and Politi­cal Welfare is now assured. We'll issue the announce­ment next week, right after we have your piece read into the Congressional Record with a few changes we have in mind. Only if you approve, of course. I'd like to cut about two hundred words and take your closing sentence and use that as the title. Then I'd like to have the authorship read Dr. Bruce Gold."

  Gold objected with sadness. "I'm not a doctor, Ralph," he pointed out.

  "You're a Ph.D."

  "So are you Ralph. How would you like it if people started calling you doctor?"

  "I'd hate it, Bruce. But I'm not German."

  "Neither am I, Ralph," said Gold. "My parents were Russian."

  "What's the difference?"

  "Between Russian and German, Ralph?" asked Grold.

  "Oh, you know what I mean, Bruce, don't you?"

  "I'm not sure that I do, Ralph. In what way are Russian and German the same?"

  "They're both European, Bruce. I thought you knew hat."

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  "I did," said Gold, still depressed. "Not even Anton Chekhov is called doctor."

  "It's only for the Congressional Record, Bruce," Ralph cajoled. "Nobody reads that but the typesetter, and he's usually blind."

  "Ralph, I would look ridiculous and pompous. Kissinger was called doctor, and you know what people thought of him. No, Ralph, I can't allow it."

  "I'm afraid I have to insist."

  "It's my nature to resist insistence."

  "Then let me persuade."

  "In that case I consent."

  "Bruce, I can't tell you how inspired we are that you're coming to join us. You're already setting a standard of accomplishment that all of us are trying to equal. We call it the Gold standard.

  No laughter followed from Ralph.

  And none, therefore, came from Gold. "Ralph, how much will it pay?" Gold finally found bravery to ask. "I may have to take a leave from college."

  "Nothing, I'm afraid."

  "Nothing?"

  "Just expenses. Up to a thousand dollars a day."

  Gold came closer then than ever in his life to yodeling. "That seems like a lot," he remarked with staid objectivity.

  "It doesn't go as far as it used
to." Ralph sounded sympathetic and ashamed. He muffled his voice a bit when he continued, "Of course, you can submit a false diary of expenses and perhaps keep a little. If anybody is listening in, I am making that suggestion only as a joke. But don't tell Andrea. She's scrupulous as a hawk when it comes to government money. Right, Andrea'? Some of these Presidential Commissions go on forev­er."

  A thousand a day forever appeared to Gold a retun that was more than paltry.

  His piece was read into the Congressional Record b; a Representative from Louisiana Gold had never heap of. The morning following, Gold was astounded upo opening his Times to find his article published ther

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  again under a different title, accompanied by an explanation below:

  CORRECTION

  Last week the Times published an essay mistakenly called "Education and Truth or Truth in Education" and erroneously naming the author as Bruce Gold. The author should have been identified as Dr. Bruce Gold, who has recently been appointed to the new Presiden­tial Commission on Education and Political Welfare. Because of the widespread interest in Dr. Gold and his views, the Times is pleased to make this clarification and republish his essay under its correct title, "Say Yea to Life!"

  Another check arrived from The New York Times for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. Gold loved getting money in the mail more than anything else in the world, he guessed, and seldom was unhappy on days some came. He wondered with cheerful whimsy whether there might be another letter in the paper from Lieberman.

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  JL/IEBERMAN had put on weight and gravy stains since Gold had lunched with him last. He had lost more strands of his carrot-colored hair. "Did you read my piece in the Times?'' he asked.

  "What piece?" asked Gold.

  "My letter demolishing your article," Lieberman replied. The tables in the delicatessen were small and close. "I notice you didn't try to rebut me. I had a devastating reply all ready for you and the whole cowardly Eastern liberal establishment."

  "Publish it in your magazine," said Pomoroy.

  "Nobody reads my magazine," said Lieberman with abruptly deflating morale.

  "Put it in your next autobiography," said Gold. "I'll probably be a famous government figure by then."

  There was something akin to hatred in Lieberman's glare. "How many people are there on this Commis­sion?"

  "Eight," said Gold. In truth there were twenty-five.

  "I want you to know," said Lieberman with the

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  starchy courtesy of protocol, chewing his cheeseburger messily, "that I'm going to have to oppose you. I'll write devastating articles and editorials in my maga­zine."

  "Nobody reads your magazine," reminded Gold.

  "I have friends in Washington."

  "No, you haven't," said Pomoroy.

  "There are people there who know who I am."

  "It's why you have no friends," said Gold, savoring as always Lieberman's tormented display of jealousy and resentment.

  Now it was Lieberman's round to lie. "Frankly, I wouldn't even take a job like that," he said with a gloating snort, and spit chewed bits of ground meat and melted Cheddar cheese onto the sleeves and lapels of his woolen jacket. He rubbed them into the fabric with his thumb. Then he licked his thumb. "Not unless I could be chairman of the Commission, write the report, and have direct access to the President whenever I felt the situation warranted it. You have my permission to tell that to Ralph."

  "Ralph will be inconsolable," said Gold.

  "But I'm willing to listen to reason."

  "There will be dancing in the streets."

  Pomoroy, saturnine and somber as ever, sipped unflavored yogurt from his spoon aseptically as though from a medicine dropper, glowering at Lieberman like a man nurturing a concealed grudge.

  "Where's my book?" Pomoroy demanded of Gold, touching at last on the purpose of their meeting.

  "Yve started a new one," intruded Lieberman.

  "It's almost done." Gold paid no attention to Lieberman either.

  "By which you mean, I take it," said Pomoroy, "that you haven't started."

  "There's not much point in beginning until I've finished, is there? That will only create a need for revisions later. I like to know what conclusions we've got before I set out proving them."

  "Do you know?"

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  "Just about," said Gold. "I know there've been a number of good books on this same subject of the Jewish experience I can steal from in total confidence."

  '7 was going to tell you that."

  "I may need more money. I've put aside my novel, you know."

  "You'll have to show me some work."

  "I'll show you copies of the books I'm going to steal from."

  "Don't you believe in original research any more?" Pomoroy's tone was only faintly caustic.

  "Unmistakably," Gold answered. "That's why I'm always so willing to use other people's."

  "I wonder often," Pomoroy deplored with a sigh, "if editors and writers and thinkers of the past ever engaged in sordid conversations like this one. Then I remember what I know about them and realize they did. Seriously, have you any idea when you might have it done? I don't take things like this lightly any more."

  "No," Gold replied frankly. "Give me another month or so to sort things out. I'd like to introduce some unique and significant personal elements, if I can figure out what they should be."

  Gold ate his fruit cup and cottage cheese without appetite. Lieberman had ordered a jumbo cheeseburg­er, a combination lean pastrami-corned beef-tongue-turkey-chopped liver-and-Swiss cheese-tomato-and-Bermuda onion sandwich, a plate of French-fried potatoes, and a chocolate malted milk. "I wish I had you guys' metabolism," he had muttered earlier. "Then I could be skinny too." Lieberman still ate with both hands, ingesting and ejaculating food simultaneously while talking without interrupting himself to swallow or breathe. He had eaten his soup with his spoon in both hands. He held his jumbo cheeseburger in both hands.

  "I can finish my book in a month and it will be better than his," Lieberman said.

  "How can you have such a high opinion of yourself," Pomoroy asked Lieberman, "when all the people who know you have such a low one?"

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  Lieberman, chewing pensively, turned the question over in his head as though the interrogation were a petition for counsel instead of a slur.

  "I'm the editor of one of the biggest little magazines in the country."

  "With a circulation of sixteen," said Gold.

  "Who belittle you," said Pomoroy.

  "I know more," said Lieberman, "and have a better education than over ninety-nine percent of the Ameri­can people, which means, probably, more than a hundred percent of all the people in the world."

  "So do we," said Pomoroy.

  "It ain't enough," said Gold.

  "It ain't?"

  "Not for you," said Pomoroy. "Do you realize, Lieberman—"

  "Please call me Skip."

  "Do you realize, Lieberman, that you are probably the only person Fve met of whom I've never heard anyone speak well?"

  Lieberman weighed that information gravely. "Never?"

  "Bruce, you grew up with him."

  "Not really," said Gold. "Our families lived for a while on the same block. It was a long block."

  "You went to elementary school with him, didn't you?"

  "Only for a few grades. His family moved to Brighton Beach."

  "But you went through high school together."

  "He was one year ahead."

  "But you know him a long time. Have you ever heard anyone speak well of him?"

  "No," Gold answered truthfully. "Skip was always lacking in charm, talent, wit, intelligence, and social ability."

  "You're both mistaken," interposed Lieberman. "I was always the best student in my class."

  "The second best, you liar," said Gold. "I was the best."

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  "I went to Columbia College on a scholarship."


  "No, you didn't," Gold corrected him again. "And neither did I, although we both say we did. And you were never a member of any Communist organization, so stop taking credit for having resigned from one."

  Lieberman, who had never been a Communist, was always tremendously complimented now when singled out as a former one, although he was not quite so complacent when detected at anniversary and testimo­nial dinners for reactionary groups calling themselves conservative at which celebrated anti-Semites and neo-Fascists were speakers or among the other guests more honored than himself. Lieberman, puff-bellied, jowly, large, and double-chinned, was all for sending in the bombers and for standing up to everyone all over the globe. He was not afraid of war with Russia or China. He was afraid of Pomoroy and Gold.

  "Fm a vastly improved writer now," Lieberman pleaded for approbation with an onset of hope. "Fm taking a much braver stand with vocabularly now in foreign policy and using lots of epigrams and paradox­es." Producing from somewhere inside his soiled and rumpled clothing a copy of the next issue of his magazine, he swept open the pages until he at last found the one he wanted, his regular feature boldly headlined "An Outspoken Editor Speaks His Mind, by M. G. Lieberman, Editor." "Listen to what I've got coming up," he cried with excitement and prepared to read. "No more rhetorical questions," he exclaimed and began, "'What, then, shall we say to those who argue this may lead us into war? / say, unflinchingly, then let us have war.' How's that? I express nothing but opprobrium and scorn for the failure of nerve of all the members of the cowardly Eastern liberal establish­ment. That's a phrase," he could not hold himself back from footnoting, "I got from Henry Kissinger."