Good as Gold

  "Greenspan, stop, for Christ sakes."

  "Why should she be the one to say something and make it easier for you?" asked Greenspan. "If you won't complain, why should she do it for you? Sure, she'll give you a divorce, but first ask. Why should she

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  be the one to say you want a divorce, if you won't do it? Oh, Gold, Gold—I must know something, for my own information. It's off the record, I swear. This school­teacher, this Linda Book."

  "What about her?"

  "You sure come a lot with her, don't you?"

  "What's it your business?" Gold answered icily.

  "You hardly ever come at all with the one you're going to marry."

  "So?"

  With a saddened, meaningful look, Greenspan re­placed his hat. "You're a shonda to your race."

  "And you, Greenspan, are a credit to yours. Will you be in Acapulco? What should I do if I get in trouble?"

  "You can talk to the wall."

  Gold fell into a mood of melancholy introspection the moment he was alone. For a prudent man he was reckless. For a sane one he was mad. Gold needed no inner voice to tell him he was courting trouble. All his life he had hated trouble. All his life he had been afraid of failing. Now, it seemed, he was distressed he might succeed.

  -

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  W HAT could go wrong? asked Sid. Gold could easily foretell as he left the elevator at the gym and turned toward the locker room. To begin with, there was that electrifying flash of lecherous attraction be­tween him and the Mexican television actress that erupted on first sight on the tarmac of the airfield in Mexico City when they were waiting with Andrea for the connecting flight bearing Linda from Houston, and which burned in plain view like phosphorous with a fragrant, steaming brilliant heat that everybody nearby could scent and feel. The raw, magnetic force of their reciprocated animal desire could not be withstood and barely brooked delay. With a native quickness for which he could never be sufficiently grateful, she agreed in a throaty murmur to steal away to Acapulco the following day for a clandestine tryst with him in the empty chamber between the others, while the swarthy pilot who was her lover surveyed him evilly with baleful yellow eyes and muttered something sinister that Gold

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  heard as though in a coma and politely requested he repeat.

  "The Angel of Death is in the gym today," said Karp the chiropodist a second time from his oracle's perch on his low wooden stool in the aisle of lockers into which Gold had turned.

  Gold came to a stop, blinking. "What are you talking about?"

  "There's a man having a heart attack in the main gym upstairs. They're waiting for the ambulance now."

  Grimly Gold continued to his locker, determining, as usual, to breast the cryptic tides of destiny and confront the morbid omens. Statistically, he solaced himself, the odds against two men dropping dead of heart attacks in the same gym on the same day were weighted heavily in his favor. Empirically, the harsh truth dawned, the chances were no different than ever if one of the men already had, and the transportation arrangements were filled with complications that neither Sid nor he could have foreseen. Because Linda did have to bring the two younger children, she traveled directly to Acapulco from New York and arrived at the hotel four hours before Gold and Andrea, who departed from Washing­ton with stops at Houston and Mexico City. Or, because she did not have to bring the children, she insisted capriciously that she go on the same plane, and Gold found himself in transit with her too. That neither was impelled to recognize the other did little to ease the strain. Or, having cemented arrangements for traveling by herself on that same flight, she then arrived, as a consequence of a late-hour stance of perverse noncoop-eration by her bellicose husband, accompanied by the two children, who fell into a disagreeable funk immedi­ately their eyes, with shattering disappointment, alight­ed on Gold. In seconds he was unmanned by the degrading need for treating the encounter as circum­stantial, their previous acquaintanceship as slight and entirely professional, and the independent selection by both vacationing parties of the same plane for the same distant hotel as indeed a most extraordinary occur-

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  rence. With failing courage he watched Andrea's incisive doubt grow more manifest with every word exchanged. Another grueling test awaited him at the registration desk in Mexico, where all rooms, through some staff oversight, he shakily surmised, were re­served in his name, and just as this delicate contre­temps was almost successfully untangled, Spotty Wein-rock, of all people in the world, was standing there before him in a luminous golden cotton sweatsuit, irreversibly intent on going jogging with him on the small oval track two floors above.

  "We can have a nice long talk while I'm learning how."

  "I come at this hour to be alone." Gold should have remembered he had no chance ever of staring this otiose, imperturbable childhood friend out of counte­nance. "You shouldn't jog, not without a doctor's examination and a stress test. It's dangerous. Okay then, but don't try to keep up with me or run as long. You're overweight and out of condition and I'm not. I mean it—you wouldn't be the first one to drop dead."

  "There's a guy with a heart attack upstairs in the gym now."

  "I don't care about him!"

  "Is this what you call fun?" asked Spotty Weinrock with a hateful smile, pulling alongside Gold and running with him easily midway through the second lap.

  "Slow down, you fuck, or you'll soon have to stop," Gold warned. "I don't want to talk. You're not allowed to run side by side. Just fall back behind me and take your time."

  "Is this how slow you always go?" asked Spotty from in back.

  The effect upon Gold was excruciating. "I don't want to talk!" he yelped in a squeezed-out scream through a neck in which every vein and muscle was stretched in fury. His heart was beating with a louder noise than his pounding feet were making against the track. The grotesque ordeal was afflicting him rapidly with an

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  enervating anemia of the will, and he sat down to rest in a cushioning armchair as soon as he was alone in the center suite after each of the women had been installed in rooms on either side without further conflict. Both thought he was transacting confidential official business with Washington. Linda's children were no longer there. His composure restored, he was able to have a banana daiquiri from room service with Linda, a banana daiquiri alone, and a banana daiquiri with Andrea when he'd completed another lap and again was with her. He fucked Andrea first to get that out of the way and was unable to perform with Linda when she rang him for that purpose on the telephone in the middle room.

  "Fag!" cried Spotty Weinrock cheerily and went flitting ahead of Gold like a sunbeam in his golden track suit, as though Gold were standing still.

  Gold was flabbergasted by this blinding display of speed but held morosely to his own dogged pace with something scarcely human in his contorted visage. The pain that always rose in his chest at the beginning was intensifying, rather than subsiding, and he lost count of the number of laps he had run and was forced to start all over just when, with a violent start of tremendous surprise, he heard the phone in his room again.

  "It's the White House," he lied with a leap out of bed.

  It was Andrea, with whom he then had a light lunch in the patio dining room. Then he had a heavy second lunch with Linda in the bedroom, which he consumed without appetite. The waistband of his walking shorts was turning sharp as an iron file. In less than two hours he had nurtured a cumbersome paunch that bounced when he moved and made jogging this afternoon an arduous chore instead of the strenuous and salutary regimen he normally found it. His breathing was more labored than usual and his pulse rate felt swifter than he knew was good for him.

  "Fag!" sang out Spotty Weinrock playfully and sailed by him again.

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  J

  Gold kept his eyes down and pretended not to notice that Linda was restless and growing insurgently frac­tious at being kept under wraps. Andrea too was tired of being kept u
nder wraps and already was phoning about the area to people she knew with vacation homes. Linda wanted to carouse at the pool and Andrea wanted a drive into town. In a backward glance as the car pulled away, Gold took a mental snapshot of Linda at poolside in close conversation with a slender, tall, lithe, insultingly good-looking Mexican youth with gleaming teeth, and he experienced, to his chagrin, that jealous debilitating pang that is recognized universally as heartache.

  "Fag!" denounced Weinrock and passed him again, as airily and blithely as a spirit with feet skimming on air.

  Gold's own legs felt leaden, and he forced his gaze further downward into a dejected mode of inflexible concentration as Spotty ran from view while he had dinner with Linda and dropped her at a discotheque and had a second dinner with Andrea before driving with her to a party at a home near Kissinger's owned by friends of her father. Both women were complaining at the amount of time he was spending on the telephone with Washington.

  "Fag!" called Weinrock and flew by him again.

  "You'll drop!" Gold yelled reluctantly, but was too late to be heeded, so he stole unhappily from the party to look in on Linda at the discotheque. Linda was encircled now by four handsome dancing young men, all courting her rhythmically with the seductive, pos­sessive allure that is the exclusive property of the self-assured scions of very rich Latin American million­aires. It was not necessary, all let him know, to trouble himself with the problem of getting her back to the hotel.

  "Fag!"

  And when Gold drove at breakneck speed to return to the party, he was dismayed to find Andrea surround­ed by several loud and drunken burly men from the

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  Southwest who were trying to solicit her participation in a group-sex supper dance together with a number of stunning models with whom they'd arrived while Gold was absent.

  "I'm here with my fianc£," Andrea was trying civilly to refuse as Gold came up vengefully behind her, "and I'm not sure he'd approve."

  "Oh, don't worry about him," said the largest and most muscular, sliding his arm around Andrea's shoul­ders with the lewd self-assurance of the impervious extrovert. "We'll take care of him."

  "How?" said Gold curtly with his hands bunching into fists. "How will you take care of me?"

  "Any way we want to, little man," said another of the group in a husky outburst of laughter.

  "You think you can stop us?"

  "That's an awful lot of woman there for a little fella like you."

  A brawl would be futile and he took Andrea's arm and backed away.

  "Fag!" cried Spotty, and it was just about midnight when Linda Book returned to her room and sent Manolito away without even a peck on the cheek when she saw Gold stewing there in a raw humor. They made love then with results that were mutually sublime. Spotty slid through the bedrooms sideways with anoth­er provoking reiteration of that homosexual epithet as Gold trudged back to bed with Andrea. As he dreaded most, Andrea now was baking at a sensual tempera­ture. A soft groan broke from his lips at her advances. He was not lying when he spoke briefly of a splitting headache and nausea and of an overall fatigue. At three in the morning he was awakened in agony from a troubled sleep by the telephone ringing again in the middle room.

  "It's the goddamned White House again."

  Still grumbling, he limped through the rooms to explain to Linda in a haggard voice that he had to spend every night with Andrea because they were engaged to be married.

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  "Fag!" called out Spotty Weinrock and this time skipped by in the springy, floating gait of the male ballet dancer in black leotards who was also on the track. A mustached fuck was running backwards, infuriating Gold; every eccentric distraction on the track always infuriated him. The basketball players on the courts below were screaming at each other in brutal argument again.

  Gold held adamantly to a determination to ignore them all the next morning when he sank down to rest in darkest spirits in his own room after breakfasting twice. His ankles were hurting terribly and he was sweating profusely. His future had never looked worse. Then the passionate Mexican television actress arrived, as did shortly afterward her hot-blooded Mexican airline pilot, who prowled the grounds for Gold to avenge his honor in the most primitive and unspeakable ways imaginable. Just as the Mexican television actress was ready to go off like a string of firecrackers, the jealous lover learned Gold's room number and came charging up the stairs. When Gold rushed to the window to escape, he was horrified by the curious sight of a taxi arriving with Belle, who'd journeyed all the way after him with the thought they might still patch things up if they were off together. The crazed lover was banging both fists on the door. Notoriety would be disastrous to him. He berated himself mercilessly for his indefensible folly. What was he going to do?

  "What am I going to do?" he helplessly wailed to the four walls.

  "Go to the temple and say prayers," directed Greenspan coolly, materializing from one of the side rooms attired in Acapulco sports clothes.

  "I'll do no such thing."

  "Then go past the temple to the airfield," continued Greenspan, "and take the first plane out for anywhere. Get back to Washington however you can. I will tell them about your urgent business one at a time and send them out without meeting each other. Oh, Gold, Gold, you're such a shonda."

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  "And you, Greenspan, are such a credit." Gold clasped him gratefully to his breast in the Russian manner and hugged him about the shoulders with strong feeling.

  "Fag!" chirped Spotty and breezed by him once more.

  That fuck! cried Gold inwardly with the fiercest scowl as commonsense reality exposed itself to him suddenly with the force and flashing illumination almost of a bolt of lightning. Spotty had been doing two laps to his one, sometimes three, sometimes four. Oh, that base cocksucker—no human on earth could run that fast!

  Gritting his teeth and breathing wrathfully through his nose as he maintained his even pace, he watched stealthily with murder growing in his heart. There were four landings in each corner of the room where the track curved, and on each landing was exercise equip­ment or a stairwell. Spotty ran off the track to a landing and hid until Gold went by, then came down in back to pass him again. The maleficent motherfucker had been hiding, resting, and waiting on the landings all along in the cruelest, most insensitive prank Gold could con­ceive of.

  "Fag!"

  Gold mistimed the lunge he made for Spotty Wein-rock's throat with his left hand, broke stride, and stumbled. Anguish exploded in his chest then with an immense, cramping, darkening pain. The room began spinning, the lights dimmed. The ground rose to meet him with sways and undulations as he felt his legs wobble and give way, and, like a wounded warrior plucky to the last, he ran almost fifteen more yards on his knees before toppling to the track and lying still as a stone with his eyes staring, as though he had been brought to his doom by a mortal fright.

  "Are you all right?" someone said.

  His hearing was unimpaired.

  "Give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," suggest­ed the ballet dancer.

  "I will not. That's disgusting."

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  "Boy, are you lucky," Spotty said in his golden uniform. "The ambulance just came for that other

  guy."

  His vision remained also.

  "Doctor, can he be moved now?" a strange voice complained. "The rest of us want to jog."

  "Put him in a private room," said Spotty Weinrock. "He's a very important person."

  Gold felt his heartbeat falter critically again. "I'm not! Spotty, tell not a soul."

  He could speak too, and he screamed blue murder the next morning in Roosevelt Hospital when he saw he was still not in an oxygen tent.

  "Doctors say you don't need one," explained the phlegmatic black male orderly who brought him his breakfast.

  Gold was appalled by what he saw on the tray: scrambled eggs that glistened, bacon that dripped, four pats of butter—enough cholesterol to lay waste a generation of mar
ines. "It's a mistake, I tell you. I'm not going to eat it."

  The orderly smacked his lips when he'd finished it all. When a woman came for information Gold would not give even his name. He was wary with the doctors and requested permission to call his own physician. The pay phone was in the hall.

  "Can I get out of bed by myself and walk there?"

  "It's up to you."

  He needed a dime. They gave him a dollar. Mursh Weinrock was there at noon and conferred with the medical men in undertones while preparations were made for Gold's transfer to a private room.

  "What do you want an oxygen tent for?" said Weinrock when they were alone. "It's cheaper this way. Did you trip and fall or did you collapse? What'd you feel?"

  "I felt like murdering him, Mursh, with my bare hands. I kept getting madder until I couldn't stand it and then this thing went off in my head and my chest. I was scared. Then I got weak suddenly and everything

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  went black. I didn't trip. It was your fucking brother Spotty. I'm going to kill that bastard someday."

  Weinrock was nodding. "He breaks my mother's heart a thousand times a week. There's no sign of cardiac damage. It sounds more like anxiety, but we can't be sure. I've had many a patient drop dead right after showing a perfect electrocardiogram. It's a reason I don't like to take on sick people." He recommended a ten-day stay for observation. Few visitors, few phone calls. "No one will know you're here unless you tell them."