Good as Gold

  "I've always wanted to be married to someone with a high position in government," said Andrea. "To some­one I admired who would want to see me again."

  "I was given a big promotion today."

  "From what?"

  "I can't say," he told her mysteriously.

  "What will you do?"

  "I'm afraid I'm not able to tell you that either."

  "I bet I can guess," Andrea teased and began tickling him. "A spokesman?"

  "Oh, no," Gold replied immodestly, chortling with her. Both were frolicking. "I've already been promoted well beyond that."

  "A source?" She played the game zestfully. "Higher than a senior official?" she continued as Gold kept shaking his head. "Then I bet I do know," she said, growing serious. "Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Secretary of State? Attorney General? Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?"

  Gold put a finger to her lips. "That's close enough, my darling," he told her firmly. "It has to be secret. But I think we can begin making plans for marriage. I

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  feel we've always sort of wanted to. I know I've always had a crush on you."

  "You're so much fun."

  "Bliss!" he cried in ecstasy when he saw his proposal of marriage accepted. "I have never known such!"

  So was it done. Both took it for granted, Gold surmised afterward, that in one way or another he would separate himself from Belle, for neither made mention of it then.

  In bed later she said, "You don't have to do that. I almost never come."

  By every imaginable standard, she was ideal.

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  VTOLD broached the subject at home discreetly. There was a cowardly procedure for leaving a wife, and he had the substantial advantage of a studio apartment into which he could move with a minimum of disloca­tion.

  "I've been seeing a doctor, a psychiatrist again," he began evasively. "For overwork."

  "Yes?" said Belle.

  "I've been under a strain, with my teaching and my writing and all my work in Washington."

  "So you told me, just a few days ago."

  "See how things slip my mind? He thinks it's important that I get away somewhere by myself for a while and pull myself together."

  "Sure," said Belle.

  "Weil, I can't really take a vacation now. So he suggested I might start sleeping at my studio when I'm in New York, one night a week, maybe two, sort of live there three or four nights a week when I'm in town, until I sort of pull myself together."

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  "Okay," said Belle.

  "Belle, you understand? You understand what I'm telling you?"

  "Sure," said Belle.

  "And there's all those times I like to get up in the middle of the night and start typing, and I don't always feel right about doing that here."

  "Okay."

  Against such limp opposition his courage flagged. He felt a melancholy letdown at the thought she might not care.

  "So you see," he explained, with a warble of woe gargling in his throat, "we'll really be living apart some of the time. Separate. Separated, sort of." She said nothing. "You understand?"

  "I understand."

  "At least until I can pull myself together."

  "How long," asked Belle, "will it take to pull yourself together?"

  "Nobody knows."

  "Do you think," asked Belle, "you'll be able to pull yourself together in time for your father's anniversary party next Friday?"

  "Oh, sure," Gold acceded with a hardy spirit of cooperation far from consistent with the neurasthenic condition he had described. "I'll still be coming here often for dinner and mail and to have my suits cleaned and pick up my laundry. I'll need my old dark suits for Washington and some of those old white shirts."

  "Otherwise, he might want to stay in New York longer to help you pull yourself together."

  "I'll be in Washington a lot."

  "I'll bet he would even go to Washington to help you pull yourself together."

  "I'll be at the party," said Gold, "and anywhere else I'm needed until they go back. Belle, you're sure you don't mind?"

  "Why should I mind?"

  "That I'll be out at my studio almost every evening

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  and sleeping out of town so much? Sometimes whole weekends?"

  "To tell you the truth," said Belle, "if you didn't tell me, I wouldn't know."

  "You wouldn't know?"

  "It's how you've been living for years."

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  VXOLD'S daughter, though only twelve, was less easily deceived that nothing ulterior was afoot.

  "You're moving out, ain't you?" she charged, with acumen rare in one so fresh in years.

  "No, I'm not." He made a face at the scornful laugh she discharged. "I'm merely packing things I'll need at my studio for my work and have to take with me to Washington."

  "Don't shit me," said Dina. "You're getting a divorce."

  "That's no way for a little girl to talk."

  "Don't you care what happens to me?"

  "No."

  "Why'd you have me if you didn't want me?"

  "Who knew it would be you?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Ask somebody else."

  "You really are the pits."

  "Do some homework now, or go outside and play.'

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  "There's another woman, isn't there? I can tell. You probably think you want to marry her, don't you?"

  "Not one word of that is true," said Gold.

  "Bullshit. I know you've been screwing other women all my life. You think I don't know what goes on in the world? You might as well tell me. I've got a right to know, I'll find out anyway."

  "Mind your own business."

  "And what am I supposed to do? Come visit you on weekends?"

  "Don't even call."

  "You fuck. I ought to go into therapy just to spite you. I'll get thrown out of school. I'll bleed you dry."

  "You'll go to a public clinic," Gold warned with a sudden chill, for Dina generally made good her threats. "One session a week. In a group."

  "I hope she gives you the clap and the syph."

  "Go shit in your hat."

  Having separated from Belle and talked the matter out fully with his daughter, Gold decided to stay for dinner and spend the night. He was more comfortable home than at his studio, where the strident music from the Haitian whores next door came through the walls nightly as though the partitions were made of tissue.

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  SCRUPULOUSLY consulting his wristwatch, Gold, inflated with a growing sense of himself as a dignitary whose fortunes were on the rise, stepped gingerly past the unadorned reception room at the magazine and threaded a fastidious path through a creaking corridor congested perilously with leaning heaps of unsold back issues, attaining at the farthest end the office that still was the shabbiest and scruffiest and mustiest of any in which he had ever set foot. He could not think of a runner-up. An old feather duster as dirty as anything existing outside a garbage dump or an abandoned tenement ruin lay atop a shambles of yellowing old New York Times Magazine sections from which Lieberman perpetually plagiarized most of his new editorial ideas. Gold glanced balefully at the repellent object.

  "I use it to clean/* Lieberman apologized.

  "Clean?" Gold repeated in a tone of aloofness intended to bulwark a distance between them of at least an arm's length. "What can you find to clean that's filthier than that?" He could not remember milking sc

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  much satisfaction from the relative standings in their relationship since that fruitful spring far back when Lieberman was rejected for a Rhodes Scholarship, a Fuibright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Grant, and a library card on successive days of one week. "Get it the fuck out of here if you want me to sit down there and sign anything."

  Lieberman had responded jealously to Gold's ascen­dant fame by producing another of his manifestos. Gold read:

  MY CALL FOR AN END TO
COMMUNIST RULE IN ALBANIA

  "As you can see," said Lieberman, "I'm allowing a number of my colleagues in the intelligentsia to cosponsor this manifesto with me. We want fifty dollars from each signer to run advertisements in the most influential publications in the world, including mine. We're shooting for a thousand important people and I've decided to let you be among them. I personally have guaranteed to produce five hundred."

  "How many have you now?"

  "None." His manifesto continued:

  WE DEMAND

  1. POLITICAL DEMOCRACY IN ALBANIA.

  2. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN ALBANIA.

  3. RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE FOR THE ALBANIAN PEOPLE.

  WE WILL NOT BE DENIED!!!!!!

  C

  Gold read no further. "I won't sign it."

  "Will you give fifty dollars?"

  "I won't give fifty cents. Since I became a neoconser-vative, pragmatic progressive, concerned Democrat for a Coalition for a Democratic Majority, liberal reaction­ary, arid enlightened Republican I am no longer accustomed to paying my own money to advertise my political principles. And neither are you."

  "Why won't you sign it?"

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  "I'm not sure it's wise," said Gold with that incan­descent contentment that often glowed in his heart when he contemplated the failures and frustrations of his contemporaries. "I'm about to be appointed to an important permanent position in Washington."

  "You're what?" Lieberman drew back the corners of his mouth and seemed for the moment on the brink of attacking Gold's head with even his hind teeth. "You must be joking."

  "I have not been more in earnest."

  "Washington? Where do you shine in? Why should you be in government and not me? I had dinner at the White House once."

  "With four hundred other people."

  "With my wife. You never did. You want the Albanian people to be without political democracy just because you're getting a job in government? Don't you care what happens to them?"

  "No," said Gold.

  "I'll ruin you for that," Lieberman threatened. "I'll issue another manifesto."

  "Easy, Lieberman," Gold cautioned gaily. "Let cooler heads prevail. If you're going to use manifestos, why aim them at little Albania? Launch them at Russia and China. Why waste manifestos? Once you bring Russia and China to their knees, I'm sure the little fish like Albania will fall into line."

  "You're funny," Lieberman muttered bleakly. "But someone has to start somewhere. What kind of a job will you get in Washington?"

  "I couldn't tell you if I wanted to," said Gold. "But I've already received a promotion."

  "It's that big, huh?" Lieberman was impressed.

  "And confidential."

  "You can't trust even me?"

  "My lips are sealed."

  "When will we know?"

  "I can say no more."

  "You must have powerful friends in Washington now, huh?"

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  "Many. I was at the White House to meet the President."

  "For dinner?" challenged Liberman.

  "At brunch," said Gold. "There were just Ralph and me. It was brief. We all have so much to do. I was chosen to write the Commission report, you know."

  "What will you say about me in it?"

  "Nothing," said Gold, "at which you will take umbrage."

  "I'll give you all the help you need," offered Lieberman, and asked for some himself. "I bet you can do a lot for me now, can't you?"

  "I believed you would get around to that," said Gold. "But is it, I must always ask myself, in the best interest of the country?"

  "I think it is," said Lieberman. "That's the main reason I've been shifting all my editorial policies around in support of the Administration."

  "I'm not that sure the Administration is aware of all your editorial shifting around," said Gold.

  "You could tell them." Lieberman seized his arm. "Bruce, what's it like in Washington?" Gold wrested his arm free and began rubbing at the grease stains and clumps of dust left on his sleeve by Lieberman's fingers. "What do you do there?"

  Gold gave it to him with both barrels. "I fuck girls, Lieberman," he began explosively with a sadistic delight he could not bring himself to forgo. "Blond girls, Lieberman, blond, the blondest girls you ever saw. All of them beautiful. The daughters of million­aire oil barons and newspaper publishers. Lumber barons, potentates, steel tycoons. Magnates. You should see them, Lieberman, oh, you should see them. All are nineteen or twenty-three and will never grow older. They love Jews. Do you hear me, Lieberman? They love Jews. And they don't have enough of us there to go around. We're at a premium. They're crazy about us, Lieberman. Are you listening? Do you hear? Wealthy widows. They think we're brilliant and dy-lamic and creative, instead of just jumpy, nervous and

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  neurotic. They don't know, Lieberman, they just don't know. You should get them, Lieberman, by the armful, you should get them while you can."

  'Take me with you!" Lieberman blurted out tearful­ly, and raised his eyes to Gold's face with an imploring look. "Get me a job!"

  "I'm not convinced," Gold informed him coolly, "that what the government needs at this juncture is another Russian Jew from Brooklyn."

  "Moravian," Liberman corrected promptly.

  "You've got no experience," said Gold. "I'm afraid I must go."

  "Then get me a CIA grant." Lieberman chased after him through the winding path in the corridor with the agonized puffing of someone in a seizure.

  Gold pinned him with an icy stare. "Won't you feel your intellectual integrity is compromised if you take money from the government secretly?"

  The effect of this question was to reunite Lieberman with his vaunted moral authority. "Absolutely not," he replied with great asperity and hauteur. "There is nothing wrong with accepting money for supporting positions I would advocate anyway."

  "And what are the positions you will advocate?"

  "Whichever ones they want me to."

  "Good day, my man."

  "Bruce," Lieberman wheedled, attempting to ob­struct Gold's exit, "why don't you and Belle come over the house for dinner with me and Sophie some night?"

  "Because I don't want to," said Gold, and began working adeptly with scissors, pencil, and Scotch tape—his tools of preference for scholarship and research—as soon as he'd taken a seat by himself in the rear of the plane transporting him back to Washington and Andrea. He had clippings to mount on pages to classify in folders. Within minutes after takeoff he was surveying with complacency an ingenious sequence of three front-page headlines constructed from different issues of the New York Post:

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  Judge to Utah:

  SHOOT HIM JAN. 17!

  The Gilmore Ruling: kill him!

  GILMORE DEAD! A climax was missing. He made one up. Court Orders:

  KILL HIM AGAIN!

  To these he inventively appended on a separate page two old headlines from the New York Daily News having nothing whatsoever to do with each other:

  Ford to New York: drop dead!

  And:

  Mayor to Sanitation Men:

  PICK UP THAT GARBAGE!

  These he deftly rounded off with two strips of Scotch tape on a scrap from The New York Times he had been carrying in his wallet for ages and feared misplacing:

  QUOTATION OF THE DAY

  "I told them I didn't like what was going on. I told them to shape up or ship out." Mayor Beame, expressing displeasure with Sanitation Department officials over the condition of city streets.

  Although he wasn't sure how, Gold knew already he would fit these somewhere into his book on Kissinger,

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  David Eisenhower, or the Jewish experience in Ameri­ca. He found himself next with two more jokes by Henry Kissinger for the collection of public witticisms by the former official which Gold, uncharitably, had been amassing for years. He reread the first:

  Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger made a little joke yesterday while passing ou
t local Monday morning quarterback awards. The outgoing Secretary quipped that he had turned down a tryout offer from the New York Jets to become a possible successor to the Jets quarterback, Joe Namath. "I didn't think New Yor(k could handle two sex symbols in a row."

  The next was hewn from similar wood:

  This week's going-away present for the go-go Secre­tary: honorary membership in the Harlem Globetrot­ters, plus a Trotters' basketball uniform. Kissinger approvingly noted that his new uniform bore the number 1. Said Henry: "The numeral accords with my estimate of myself. My only worry is how I will look in short pants."

  Gold fiendishly planned using both in a morbid and depressing chapter on Kissinger's humor. Neither reflected the ironic, fatalistic mockery of either the Talmud or the shtetl, and Gold greatly preferred as humor a joke about Kissinger circulated by the Danish news agency Ritzaus:

  Kissinger, it seems, obtained a length of top-quality tweed cloth that he wished made into a suit. Tailors in Washington and New York, after measuring him, said there was insufficient material for trousers and a jacket that would fit. In London, France, and Germany, where he went on diplomatic missions, the same warning was repeated by the best tailors in these countries. Then he came to Jerusalem and was told by a Jewish tailor to leave the material and return in ten days. When Kissinger came back after meetings in Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Iran, he was astonished to

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