Good as Gold

  find not only a suit that fit him perfectly but a vest, an additional jacket, and two extra pairs of trousers all made from that same length of material. "How is it possible," asked Henry Kissinger, "that in New York, Washington, London, Paris, and Germany I was told there was not enough material for even a suit, and here in Israel you were able to make so much?"

  "Because here in Israel," said the Jewish tailor, "you are not such a big man."

  Gold now was down to his two last pieces of Kissinger data. The first brought a wry laugh, for the story, though small, had appeared on the front page of the Times and seemed to have been written with a certain subtle facetiousness:

  KISSINGER IS HONORED BY U.S. JEWISH GROUP

  Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger paid an emotion­al farewell to leaders of the American Jewish communi­ty yesterday at a luncheon given by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

  "I have never forgotten that 13 members of my family died in the concentration camps," Mr. Kissinger told the hushed audience.

  From luncheon at the Pierre, he went to a dinner at the Waldorf, to receive the Great Decisions Award from the Foreign Policy Association.

  Among the greatest of those Great Decisions, Gold surmised perniciously, was the decision to leave those Jews at the Pierre for dinner at the Waldorf. Now he was left with just one clipping that still remained a vexing enigma after many months, and he pored over it three, four, five more times with drawn brows:

  3 ON HELSINKI PANEL CURBED BY KISSINGER

  Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger withdrew per­mission today from three Administration officials to

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  accompany a Congressional fact-finding commission to check on how the controversial Helsinki agreement is being carried out.

  Instead, Mr. Kissinger instructed them to travel with five members of Congress only as far as Brussels for a briefing by officials of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Common Market.

  Gold read it a sixth time to no avail. He could not remember why he had saved it. Desolation reigned in his emotions for another minute or two before he pensively turned over the clipping and saw:

  DIRECT FROM MANUFACTURER TO YOU!

  TOP QUALITY SHEEPSKIN COATS!

  UP TO 40% OFF!

  VISIT OUR SHOWROOM NOW!

  WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD!

  Gold smoothed the clipping carefully and preserved it in his wallet. His work for the day concluded, he opened his Times and found:

  POLICE BLOTTER

  The Citibank branch at 1 Park Avenue South, at 32nd Street, was robbed of $1,200 by a man who passed an obscene note to a teller.

  In the business section he came upon a second obscene note of financial news that seemed to him not entirely unrelated to the first:

  SIMON REPORTED PLANNING RETURN TO SALOMON BROS.

  William E. Simon, the Secretary of the Treasury, is planning to return to Salomon Brothers, the New York investment banking firm he left on January 1, 1973 to join the Nixon government.

  William R. Salomon, managing partner of Salomon

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  Brothers, said he hoped Mr. Simon would rejoin the firm. "Because he has been Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Simon obviously would be more important to us than he was before."

  At the time he was tapped by former President Nixon, Mr. Simon was, according to published reports, earning $2 to $3 million a year. Mr. Simon has been the Ford Administration's best articulator of the Presi­dent's economic philosophy.

  REMEMBER THE NEEDIEST!

  Gold's ambivalent feelings were easily sedated when his disgust with the voracious materialism of his society was quickly overcome by the consideration that, when his government service was concluded, he too might be more important to Salomon Brothers. As the wheels of the plane touched ground his attention was riveted to a caption of more fortuitous worth than any he might dare improvise in even his most extravagant fantasies. He read:

  MORAVIAN PUTZ

  Gold turned aside for an instant and sucked in his cheeks. His eyes had not, as he first had feared, deluded him. He read more:

  MORAVIAN PUTZ

  Correction Several inaccuracies appeared in the article "Christ­mas—the Other Bethlehem" (Travel News, Nov. 7). The correct information follows: The Christmas-scenes display known as the Moravian Putz will be put on view Dec. 5 in the Christmas Education Building behind the old Moravian Chapel on Church Street in Bethlehem, Pa.

  In the air terminal, he bought a stamp and begged an 245

  envelope and dispatched the clipping headlined "Mora­vian Putz" to Liebertnan with the unsigned scrawl: "Does this mean you?" He hastened to a taxi with a lively spirit he felt nothing in the world could dispel, and then he arrived at Andrea's and saw he was mistaken.

  246

  iJHE was leaving for a weekend away with a man she had been seeing till the time of their secret engage­ment. Words failed him when she resumed packing after kissing and pinching him perhaps a dozen times and vowing she would love him always for returning to her so quickly. Gold reached deep inside himself for understanding and patience. When away from her field of home economics, he knew, she was often ingenuous in a way strangers might call obtuse.

  "Darling, we're going to be married," he explained.

  She remembered. "It's the reason I felt I should see him. I want to say goodbye."

  "You want to say goodbye?" Gold affected a phleg­matic calm. "What's the matter with the telephone?"

  "We were already on the telephone, silly," Andrea replied with a somewhat sprightly titter and gave no evidence she saw Gold wince. "We made the date on the telephone."

  "Why couldn't you say goodbye on the telephone?"

  "It seemed so cold."

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  "It has to be warm?"

  "It's just for the weekend," she reasoned.

  "You told me you'd love it if I came back for the weekend."

  "I do!" she exclaimed. "It makes me so happy to know you're here. You mustn't be so small-minded, Brucie."

  "Please don't call me Brucie," he reproved her and wondered if she realized she was bruising his most vulnerable feelings. It was not in such fashion that Gold was accustomed to hearing himself addressed by his wife or girl friends, and he accordingly held himself apart from any display of friendly emotion. "Where will you stay?"

  "At his house. Or maybe a motel. He used to like motels."

  "Is this one of those men who didn't want to see you again?" He watched her nod. "What made him change his mind?"

  "He's a great admirer of your work."

  Gold's pose of reserve broke. "Oh, shit, Andrea," he moaned, shaking his head in grief and bewilder­ment. "Are you telling him about our sex life too? We've got to keep this relationship secret."

  In the dreary silence that ensued Gold remembered the food he had brought with him from New York and went morosely into the kitchen to unpack the two heavy shopping bags. Andrea followed in silence.

  "It's only my body I'm giving him, darling," she attempted to placate him after a minute. "After all, what is that?"

  Gold felt his eyes glaze. "Only?"

  "That's all." Her manner now was hectoring and amused. "What difference should it make to us what he wants with my body? You'll have my mind."

  "I've got my own mind." Not for the first time did Gold feel himself estranged from the mores of a generation other than his own.

  "You've got a body too." She was relying on gentle good sense to cajole him.

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  "Not like yours."

  "Let him have it if he wants it," she urged. "It's only bones, and flesh, and organs, and places."

  "Your body," said Gold, "is one of the things Hook forward to having."

  "But you will, darling, whenever you want. You can have it too, even right now if you make it fast." She glanced at her watch.

  "Unshared," Gold emphasized loudly, with a look of uncompromising disapproval. "I want it to belong t
o just me."

  "Oh, Brucie—"

  "Don't call me that."

  Andrea clung to the arm of her chair and laughed. "I really think you're attaching too much importance to the whole thing. It seems to me you've got the sexual attitudes of a middle-aged man."

  There was something in her tone less than the adulation and total acquiescence he had come to expect from her as his due. "I am a middle-aged man," he said coldly. "What kind of sexual attitudes would you expect me to have?"

  "But it isn't necessary to be so fussy and old-fashioned about it, is it? Why can't he have my body if he wants it? A lot of men want my body."

  Gold was bowing in flinching rhythm to each repeti­tion of "body," as though the subject were too painful to discuss. Not for this, he told himself, was he leaving his wife, provoking the enmity of his children, offend­ing his family, and forsaking for the time all other erotic relationships, but for money, beauty, social position, political preference, and a stupendous magnification of sexual prestige, and when he remembered, his dam­aged feelings were assuaged and his damaged pride repaired, and his paramount objective was one of reasserting his supremacy over her or see it forfeit forever. He began his rebuttal with formality.

  "When we first met at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation," he reminded her, "I was Dr. Gold. When we had coffee or lunch together, or occasionally

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  cocktails and dinner, I was always Dr. Gold. When we made love together the first time not long ago, I was still Dr. Gold. Even when I telephoned you the next day to tell you how happy I was and how much I wanted to see you again, I was Dr. Gold. Now that we're secretly engaged to be married, I'm fussy and silly and ridiculous and old-fashioned. When did I stop being Dr. Gold and become small-minded and narrow-minded? Why didn't you notice it before?"

  "It didn't matter before."

  "What did matter?"

  "That you were Dr. Gold," she said. "And you were always so quick and sinister and articulate. I was so impressed with you. All of us women were. I'm still so impressed that you're Dr. Gold to everyone here. And you aren't even a doctor?"

  Gold spoke with mistrust. "What do you mean by that?"

  "A real doctor."

  "I have my Ph.D."

  "Oh, Bruce." she laughed again. 'Everyone we know has a Ph.D. I have a Ph.D. But you're the only one we know that's called Doctor. It's so thrilling to be in love with a doctor who isn't a medical man. I can't tell you how happy I'll be when we're married." « Gold took a calculated risk. "I'm not so sure that we're going to be married," he said, and watched the smile fade from her face.

  "You're angry, aren't you?" she replied with uncer­tainty, and her eyes filled with tears. "I didn't think you'd care. Oh, darling, I don't want to fight with you over this big stupid body of mine. I wish I didn't have it. It's always been so much trouble. If you're going to be so jealous about it, maybe I won't give it away any more after we're married."

  "Had you intended to?" asked Gold with curiosity and surprise.

  "I took it for granted we would both want to be free." She was ready to capitulate. "If it means so much to you, I'll break the date. Should I?"

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  Gold drew upon a lifetime of experience to find the words with most telling effect. "I don't want you ever to see him again."

  He could not have done better. She smiled in sweetest subservient contentment and pressed his hand to her cheek with a lambent look of love. It was obvious she had never been favored with such chivalry before.

  "I'll tell him I'm not going."

  Gold, in this first test of power, had reestablished his primacy and was prepared to be lenient. "I was looking forward to spending the whole weekend with you," he admitted tenderly, kissing her hand.

  Andrea started violently. "The whole weekend? What will we do for a whole weekend?"

  Gold kept his temper under excellent control. "When we're married, Andrea," he told her in the bedside tones a mother might use to a backward daughter, "we'll be together for more than just whole weekends, you know."

  "But then we'll have so many things to keep us busy. Houses to rent and furnish, parties and dinners to go to, trips to make. What can we do for a weekend now?"

  Again Gold's answer was inspired. "Couldn't we drive out to your father's estate tomorrow? You can go riding while he and I get acquainted."

  "I'll tell him we're coming."

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  It JLY daughter tells me," said Pugh Biddle Cono-ver, "that you have the sexual attitudes of a middle-aged man." He spoke from his motorized wheelchair in the spacious wood-paneled library overlooking many of his gardens and many of his gardeners.

  This was a comment for which Gold, though drasti­cally self-vigilant, had not made provision. His first trauma of the afternoon had occurred two hours earlier after driving with Andrea through the Virginia hunt country to the splendid, immaculate manor house possessing the breadth, though perhaps not the equiva­lence in height or depth, of the celebrated palace at Versailles, and deducing from an unavoidable aggrega­tion of visual clues that none in the multitude of elegant and wealthy weekend guests normally in attendance at ConovSr's had yet arrived. In place of the festive bustle of activity he had anticipated there prevailed a ghostly and quiescent inertia. Scores of uniformed retainers of countless occupational gradations were everywhere in view, but the long driveways and innumerable garages

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  were empty, and Gold could spy no evidence that other people were expected. It was the largest abode in which he ever had stood. Close to seven full acres, Andrea had revealed, as they approached in her yellow Porsche, were under roof in the main house alone.

  "I'm sorry she spoke to you about that," Gold was able to mutter at last.

  "Lord knows I didn't ask her to," Conover replied with a rich, soft laugh, and Gold gazed with fondness at his spare and dapper host. "Although that's much to your credit, I'm sure." Conover was a blooming, compelling figure of indeterminate age, a man of slight, wiry build in worn corduroy and cavalry twill, with white wavy hair and a small pointed military mustache. A paisley kerchief of deep red was knotted rakishly about his neck, and he projected the opulent assurance and panache of a ruler secure in his reign and his revenues. It occurred to Gold that Pugh Biddle Cono­ver was the healthiest and handsomest moribund valetudinarian upon whom he had ever laid eyes. The bracing, astringent odor of horse liniment clung to him like a virile ambience, and he had the pink, unlined face of someone who has never known vicissitude or expects to. Gold was hungry with admiration. "I ..confess," said Conover, chuckling, "that I haven't any idea what she meant by that. Do you?"

  "I haven't, either," said Gold, "and I'm greatly embarrassed that the subject even has come up. Andrea didn't used to be so outspoken." Gold was gratified by the easy terms on which they were already conversing. "When I first met your daughter several years ago at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation, she was interested in me even then but she said she was much too shy to show it."

  "She was lying," said Conover with robust good humor. "Andrea has never been too shy to ask for anything, even millions. I'm afraid she doesn't always demonstrate good judgment in every area of intelli­gence and is far too tall, but I don't suppose we can do much about those failings now. I had a deathly fear you

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  might want to talk to me about sex too. Or about marijuana or other drugs you both use."

  "There was never much likelihood of that," Gold boasted. "And I don't use drugs."

  "My mind is more at rest. It's another trait for which you are to be applauded, Mr. Goldberg. So far it seems you are utterly without fault, doesn't it?"

  "Gold, sir."

  "Sir?"

  "My name is Gold. You called me Goldberg."

  "Indeed," said Conover, cogitating. "Learn this, my boy, before you grow old, that learning is better than silver and gold. Silver and gold may fritter away, but a good education will never decay."

  In other company Gold might
have delivered a more disputatious reply than the one he permitted himself. "I will always keep that in mind, sir. As you may know, I've invested a great deal of myself in my own education, and I've written a number of articles and books on the general subject." Conover was silent and Gold looked at his watch.

  "You're ill at ease," said Conover after sipping from the glass of bourbon Gold had poured him from one of the cut-glass decanters that stood close by. "I can tell from your face."

  "Andrea said I must always be frank with you," replied Gold, and was emboldened to continue by Conover's signal of concurrence. "And that you would think less of me if I pretended to take no notice of your illness or infirmity. May I ask what's wrong?"

  "What illness or infirmity?" Conover inquired with surprise.

  "Your disability."

  "I have no disability," Conover retorted with testi-ness. "What the devil are you talking about?"

  "You use a wheelchair," Gold found himself protest­ing defensively.

  "It's easier than walking," Conover said. "You rolled here by automobile, didn't you?"

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  "You see a physician."

  "Only when ill, Mr. Goldfarb. I see a mechanic for this infernal wheelchair much more often. Would you care to whiz around a bit while we wait for Andrea to return? You have misgivings. Your expression betrays you."

  "My name is Gold, sir, not Goldfarb."

  "There are gold ships and silver ships but the best ship is friendship."

  "Pardon?" Gold squealed, leaping upward a few inches as though snatched from preoccupation. "No, no, no, no, sir." He recovered quickly as Conover obligingly made ready to repeat. "I was merely ex­pressing astonishment at the wisdom of your words."