Good as Gold

  "I'd rather use Murshie Weinrock."

  "The FBI will be in touch. And from now on, let us see anything new you write before you publish it."

  "For clearance?"

  "For ideas. With so many people doing so much pontificating these days, it's become just about impossi­ble for anyone to say anything new that doesn't immediately sound trite and dishonest. That's where your real contribution to the country can be, Bruce. We'll need something good soon on blight."

  "Blight?"

  "Urban, not elm."

  "Are we for it or against it?"

  "Neither," said Ralph. "But we have to make some kind of pretense, and the President will want something fresh."

  Gold rose spontaneously to the occasion with that aptitude for the expedient that occasionally was mistak­en by others for brilliance. "I may have just the thing," he volunteered. "There's this section of my book I'm

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  preparing for Pomoroy and Lieberman on the decline of Coney Island that uses roller coasters, carousels, and fun houses as metaphors for social cycles. I can easily expand it to embrace all the violence and decay of our inner cities. I can make it funny,"

  "That sounds like just the thing," Ralph rejoiced. "Send us a copy. And next, maybe you can give me a hand with the Washington Monument."

  Gold found himself peering sideways at Ralph again. "In what way, Ralph?"

  "It's been bothering me, Bruce, ever since I got here." Ralph scratched his head mournfully. "It re­minds me of something, and I can't for the life of me remember what—not a phallic symbol, but something else."

  "An Egyptian obelisk?"

  "Oh, Bruce, what a mind you have, what a mind-boggling mind!" cried Ralph, looking absolutely aston­ished. "You know all you need to know, don't you? It just boggles my mind how you keep boggling my mind. Incidentally, Bruce, what does boggle mean? I've been looking it up everywhere but can't seem to find it in any dictionary in the world, and no one I ask is sure."

  Gold said, "There's no such word."

  "Really?" Ralph found this curious. "How are we able to use it if it doesn't exist as a word?"

  "Because that," said Gold, "is how people are."

  The interview took place an hour later in Gold's hotel room. The Jewish FBI man had hair like wrought iron and a neck and face that seemed to have been grown in a foundry.

  "Greenspan's the name, Dr. Gold," he began with­out loss of time, "Lionel Greenspan. May I be frank?"

  "Sure, Frank."

  "You're a shonda to your race."

  "Pardon?" Not in Gold's memory had so ingratiating a pleasantry of his fallen so flat.

  "You're a shonda to your race," Greenspan repeat­ed. "I say it more in sorrow than in anger."

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  "What are you talking about?"

  "I have to be frank," said Greenspan grimly. "Dr. Gold, is your wife, Belle, a Communist?"

  "No, why?"

  "Then how come you're fucking all these other women?"

  Gold sat down slowly. He was familiar with practical jokes. This was not one. "I like it." For the next few moments only the sound of their tense breathing could be heard. "And there aren't so many."

  Greenspan had recourse to a leather-bound memo pad. "There's this gentile girl you're secretly engaged to, there's this married woman in Westchester who sneaks into the city once a month on a shopping trip, there's this Belgian exchange student in Romance languages at Sarah Lawrence who—"

  "That was last year!"

  "And then we have Felicity Plum."

  "Miss Plum?" Greenspan nodded with a critical look which Gold indignantly returned. "I never fucked Miss Plum."

  "She says you did. She tells everyone you're great."

  "I'm not. Greenspan, it's a lie. I never even touched her."

  "You held her against your member twice."

  "Once."

  "I have it twice."

  "You have it wrong. Greenspan, can't you make her stop? A story like that can ruin me."

  "We can only try," said Greenspan solicitously. "We have the duty of guarding your reputation as well as your person. But I want to be frank. Professor Gold, there'll be nothing we can do if she decides to write a book and gets a lucrative contract."

  "I'll sue the shit out of her," vowed Professor Gold, "that's what I can do."

  "You're reaping the whirlwind," Greenspan philoso­phized, and then charged at Gold alarmingly with his hands lifted. "Mend your ways, I beg you, before it's too late," he broke out in a quavering voice. "Do it for

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  my sake, if not for your own. Oh, Dr. Gold, if I could only tell you how many times my heart was broken, over and over again, by that momzer Henry Kissinger. Please don't put me through that again. How sick I was when he raised his voice to Golda Meir. How I wept, wept, Dr. Gold, when I found out he went down on the floor—without even a hat on, I betcha—to pray with that shaygetz Nixon." Now Greenspan was brandishing a fist in anguish. "With his own people he don't go to temple, but on his knees he goes down on a carpet to pray with that vontz. Dr. Gold, I suffered. I'm not making a joke. I must be frank."

  "Am I cleared or ain't I?" Gold interrupted wearily. "Greenspan, stick to the goddamned point."

  "I'm not sure. It's why I say you're a shonda"

  "You're going to disqualify me for fucking girls? I'm not the first, am I?"

  "Not just for fucking girls, Dr. Gold," Greenspan justified himself decorously. "You're vulnerable to blackmail in the interests of a foreign power by anyone who knows all the facts."

  "Who knows all the facts?"

  "The FBI knows all the facts."

  "Is the FBI likely to blackmail me in the interests of a foreign power?"

  "You pass," Greenspan said with reluctance and snapped his pad closed. "Since you're almost a govern­ment official, it's almost our duty to protect your life. Call on me for help if you find yourself in danger."

  "How can I reach you?"

  "Talk to the wall." Greenspan went for his gun at Gold's blistering look of reproach.

  "Say that again?" dared Gold.

  "You can talk to the wall. Here, I'll show you." Greenspan came zigzagging back with his large, hard head hanging forward and called, "Testing, one, two, three, four. Do you read me?"

  "I read you clearly, Bulldog," came a voice from his stomach.

  "I've got a bug in my belly button," explained

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  Greenspan. "It looks just like skin. I'll see you very shortly," he concluded in a way Gold found sinister. "Have a good time at Muriel's and I hope when we meet again it will be on a happier occasion."

  "Muriel's? What's at Muriel's?"

  "Your father's tenth anniversary party. Leah thinks it's nice that you're having a tenth anniversary party for your father and stepmother, when they've only been married six years, five months, and nineteen days. Leah is my wife now for twenty years, four months, and eleven days, and in all that time—in all that time, I'm not boasting, Dr. Gold, but simply stating a true fact—in all that time I never once lusted for another woman. I remember my own dear departed father." That memory detonated in Greenspan a final shot at bathos, and he came blubbering back toward Gold with a face drenched in revolting piety and goodwill. "If you won't do it for me, at least do it for your sweet old father. Give up sex," he entreated with outstretched, shaking arms, "and go back to your wife. Adultery might be all right for them, but not for us."

  "Brush up on your Bible, Greenspan," Gold told him. "We found it first. We were even fucking sheep when we couldn't get Canaanites and Philistines."

  Greenspan answered coldly, "You're a shonda to your race."

  "You're a credit to yours."

  "Our race, Dr. Gold, is the same."

  "Beat it, Bulldog," ordered Gold and began talking to the wall the second he was alone. "Get me New-some," he burst out angrily. "Tell him it's an emergen­cy." Ralph was on the phone in a minute. "Ralph, that fucking cocksucker Greenspan has been following me ev
erywhere. He knows everthing about me."

  "Did you pass? What did he say?"

  "He wants to be frank. For Christ sakes, you should have given me warning. If I'm going to be subjected to the degradations of public office, I at least want the office. Or you and the President will get shit from me on blight, Ralph, I'm warning you now."

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  "Please don't quit us," Ralph begged. "Not while the President is having all these terrible problems with inflation, unemployment, disarmament, and Russia."

  "I haven't even been hired."

  "You've already been promoted."

  "To what? Give me a sign, Ralph. Say something public or I might have to start meeting those fucking classes of mine again. I hate teaching. No one knows I'm playing this important role in the Administration. I don't even think Andrea really believes it and she sure as hell won't marry me until she does."

  "Would you love a balloon?" asked Ralph.

  "I'd adore a lollipop."

  "A trial balloon," Ralph explained. "We'll launch one this afternoon and see if it lands in the public eye."

  Belle found his name in the newspaper first the following morning and called it to Gold's attention while serving him breakfast. Gold saw no pragmatic need for reaffirming to Belle he'd moved out until he had actually done so; Andrea could not sew or iron and Gold did not have the time. Under "Notes on People," the gossip portion of the Times certain to be seen by more of his cultivated associates than any other section of the news, Gold read of unconfirmed rumors from an unnamed source about his imminent appointment to a high Administration post that a government spokesman refused to comment upon and about which a senior White House official professed to have no knowledge he could reveal. "I just don't know," said the senior White House official, when pressed by journalists for details.

  Overnight, Gold had increased in status prodigiously. Royally he extended his hand for the New York Daily News and found:

  Everyone is dressing—or trying to. Maggie and Clyde Newhouse have asked the ladies invited to their black-tie party for Nedda and Josh Logan to wear flowers in their hair, preferably fresh ones. And the

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  Cooper-Hewitt Museum is encouraging the male guests at the Regency Ball to wear whiskers and waistcoats.

  Imperiously, Gold drew a line. The Newhouses could go fuck themselves, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum could kiss his ass. Gold wasn't wearing whiskers, and no woman with a flower in her hair was getting anywhere with him.

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  TT HEN you die," asked Gold's stepmother of Gold's father in a lull toward the end of the dinner party commemorating their sixth-and-a-half wedding anniversary, "where would you like me to put you?"

  The aforementioned lull was as nothing compared to the silence that gripped the others now. Even Muriel's vacuous teen-age daughter finally terminated her con­ceited prattling to wait with dread. At last Julius Gold found the capability to reply.

  "What?" he growled incredulously with his eyes straining in their sockets. Every vein in his face seemed swollen to bursting, and Gold was sure it would happen then, apoplexy, right there in Muriel's dining room, instead of a painless demise in Florida, where Sid could close out that whole generation on a single trip with no inconvenience to the others.

  "When you die," Gussie Gold repeated to Julius Gold, without lifting her gaze from her knitting, "what do you want me to do with you? Where would you like me to put you?"

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  It required but an instant longer of calculation for the old man to persuade himself that he could indeed believe his ears. "In the kitchen under the table!" he thundered in reply and, with beetling brow and gigan­tic, writhing tremor, twisted away from her in his chair as though from the most frightful misfortune ever conjured up to human sight by some foul destiny.

  "Julius, I am being serious," said Gold's stepmother. "How would you like me to dispose of your remains?"

  "Never mind my remains, you cockeyed lunatic," the old man roared his reply at her with bared teeth. "And just what makes you so sure," he gloated, a note of triumph stealing into his voice, "you're going to live longer than me?"

  "I'm younger," she answered securely. "And when I die, I won't have a problem. I have my own burial plot in Richmond, Virginia, and I can always find room, if need be, in the ancestral grounds in the Jewish cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina, although they frequently have moisture there, I'm told—the land is so damp and low, you know—even though air of my relations on the Charleston side of the family have refused to have intercourse with me"—Gold was consoled by some sixth sense that his was not the only countenance that was falling—"since I married your father."

  There was an audible halt in all respiration for a moment and then a common resumption of life when she concluded her account with no debauchery more scandalous than the slighting allusion to the low estate in which the old man was held by the Charleston side of her family.

  "I got a cemetery plot of my own," Gold's father was already retorting. "I don't need yours."

  "I was merely trying to find out, Julius, whether you would rather be laid to rest in your plot or in mine."

  "In mine. It's better."

  "Have you got room?"

  "Sure I got room. I bought for everybody."

  Sid bent forward worriedly. "When was that?"

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  "When I came here and found good work. I bought for the whole family. I bought for Momma and me"—his voice grew faint as his confidence subsided visibly—"and Rosie . . . and you. That was the fami­ly"

  "That's only four," Ida counted with her flair for the literal. "Mother has one. One from four leaves three."

  "It's not enough—we'll have to get more," cried a voice Gold could not place as he sat groaning inwardly with a mental agony no words could describe.

  "Don't argue," ordered his father. "I know what I did and I know what I said. I bought for everyone and that's where you're all going whether there's room or not and that's it. Finished. Fartig."

  "I've got a family plot of my own now," apologized Sid.

  "Mine wasn't good enough?"

  "I've got my own family now, Pa."

  "And we want our children to be buried with us," Harriet added with spiteful determination. "And our grandchildren too. Sid, are you sure we have enough? We didn't count on having four children. And we might have to make room for my mother and my sister."

  "You can use some of ours. Max has plenty."

  "I don't have one. Mendy went with his family."

  "Maybe they're holding a place for you," said Milt. "If not, I'd love to have you come with me."

  "She's coming into mine," snarled old Karamazov. "All my children are going with me, and all my grandchildren. That's where I want them."

  "Well, we want ours with us," said Lady Chatterley. "And our grandchildren too."

  "We might not have room, Harriet," said poor Twemlow in an effort to placate both. "And the kids might have plans of their own."

  "They're not adding up," said the venerable Chan­cellor of the Exchequer with the ostentatious vanity of a swain showing off to Esther his perspicacious powers of leadership. "How many have you?"

  Cinderella shrugged.

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  "We have some to spare," said Irv, smiling amenably until tiny Clytemnestra shot him a nasty look with a legible message: She did not want nonprofessional people like Victor or Max lying in peace with her. "But we don't. I forgot my brother. Now that he's divorced we might have to let him in."

  "His wife got custody?"

  "He can come into mine."

  "No, he can't, Mr. Dummy," said Muriel, and her daughter sniggered behind her hand at this rude disparagement of her father. ,

  "Your own children come before strangers. And it isn't even ours. The family plot is in your brother's name. Everything's in his name, isn't it, even most of the business?" A dark flood of embarrassment swept over Victor's ruddy face, turning him maroon.

  "How many have you g
ot?" Quilp demanded of Gold a second time, and turned into Max.

  Gold had none.

  "I may need one soon for my mother," politely entreated Sophronia, who'd said scarcely anything else all evening and began to bear an uncanny resemblance to Belle. "I'm sure there's room left with my father, but I've forgotten where we put him."

  "We've got to get more!" cried someone shrill.

  "It's crazy to buy now."

  "Real estate can only go up."

  "Now ain't the time."

  "We can run it like the opposite of a beef and veal inventory," Victor said, recuperating, and tittered ridiculously. "First one out, first one in."

  "It makes more sense to buy," persisted Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and somewhere about here it dawned forcibly upon Gold that there was a nice distinction between "incredible" and "unbelievable" which he'd overlooked all his life. That was "incredible" which merely was unexpected or not most obviously foreseen. "Unbelievable" was something that absolutely, even by the most elastic stretch of faith or the imagination, could not be believed. This was unbelievable!

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  In other families relatives quarreled over cash and bibelots; here they bickered over burial plots. Every instinct instructed him he could never introduce a single one, not even Joannie, to Andrea or the glittering new social circles awaiting him in Georgetown, Bethesda, Alexandria, Chevy Chase, McLean, and the Pugh Biddle Conover hunt country of Virginia. They were not coming to his inauguration—that much was sure. He would lie and say he had no tickets. He would noise it about through Ralph that he was a foundling. The children would understand and explain everything. The children would understand and explain nothing, the carping fucks. All they wanted . . . Gold was shaken from his melancholy ruminations when he perceived his father haranguing the room in a violent outburst, strangling with rage and bellowing in indignation simultaneously with each wheezing gasp for air.