Good as Gold

  "I can't believe Sid hated him."

  "I'll have to ask Rose. Now Sid coddles him like they've always been pals. You interrupt me a lot, don't you?" Gold accused, slouching in a corner of the taxi with his face drooping on his hand.

  "I don't interrupt you at all." There was a stubborn­ness in Belle's manner, never defiance, but a stolid,

  34

  homespun refusal to give more ground, regardless of cost. "You told me you don't like to be interrupted, so I never interrupt you."

  "Then you disagree with me."

  "How can I disagree with you," Belle wondered evenly, "if I'm the one who says it first?"

  "You answer questions for me."

  "What's the difference who gives the answer?"

  "Sometimes your answers contradict mine."

  "Can't I contradict you?" Belle asked.

  "No."

  "Never?"

  "No." Gold spoke austerely, leaving no room for misunderstanding.

  Belle responded with a shrug.

  "And I'm not going to see them all at dinner again, maybe forever."

  "For three weeks," said Belle. "They're coming to our house. I invited them. You said you'd be home."

  "Call it off," he directed.

  "Don't come," she answered. "It's Rose's birthday. And I'm making her a surprise party."

  "At sixty?" His stress of surprise was edged with ridicule.

  If Belle answered he didn't hear. There was distance between them now that neither made attempt to deny. He was thankful she did not force him to talk about it. Belle was a pudgy woman nearly his own age, and she seemed smaller and rounder as she sat hugging on her lap the paper shopping bag with the empty Pyrex kugel pan inside, her head up straight in a matter-of-fact way that seemed to be saying, "I know also that I'm getting old and never was a beauty, and that I don't know how to make you happy any more. I don't like it either. Do what you want."

  Gold stared across the river at the house lights in New Jersey and was glad he had never had to live there. Soon, he reflected peacefully, he might be free of Belle, for he had learned something more from Ralph that

  35

  could improve his own situation: it was not mandatory {hat a husband wait until the youngest child moved off to college before he left his wife.

  Buoyed by the encouraging prospect of an early separation from Belle, he allowed his imagination to float in joyous expectance to the secret project he had no intention of mentioning this early to Pomoroy or Lieberman. Another book. Now that he had finally abandoned his novel, he would be that much quicker to start.

  Kissinger,

  How he loved and resented that hissing name.

  Even apart from his jealousy, which was formidable, Gold had hated Henry Kissinger from the moment of his emergence as a public figure and hated him still, a mental and emotional judgment not so original as to guarantee in itself a Nobel Prize for peace or a Pulitzer Prize for investigative disclosure. However, Gold had an angle for a book on Kissinger he believed might do both. Gold had file drawers filled with all Kissinger's writings and public statements and with newspaper and magazine clippings of everything said about him. He collected clippings also of the writings and public statements of David Eisenhower.

  Sometimes he thought of mixing the two collections up. Sometimes he found it difficult to keep them apart.

  36

  AT was a cause of prolonged vexation to Gold that almost no one he knew read any of the publications in which his work was likely to appear. Let Gold's name surface for a single mention in Playboy or Ladies' Home Journal, however, and the whole world took cognizance at the same moment. Even Lieberman. Even Pomoroy. Even his father and stepmother, who read only the Times and Daily News in New York and nothing at all in Florida. They preferred watching news broadcasts and old movies on television, taking bizarre delight in identifying dead actors and actresses and recounting the circumstances of their demise.

  "Hey, bigshot," his father would bellow on the telephone, and Gold would wilt at once. "I see you got your name in Playboy again. That guy didn't think so much of you, did he?"

  "Why?" Gold was rankled. "He paid me a very nice compliment."

  "Sure, that's what he wrote," said his father. "But I could read between the lines."

  37

  Encouraged and accompanied by Gussie, Gold's father would move after dinner to the television set in whatever home he had decided to be driven to that evening and begin watching old movies with the energetic vigilance of a custodian of dead souls. The movies themselves made no difference. The responsi­bility for keeping score was only his.

  "That one's gone," he would shout elatedly like the grim reaper himself, as though collaring another trophy for his collection. "A hundred years ago. Old age did him in. Remember that lawyer for the defense? Geshtorben. Heart attack. Gone in an instant. Look at that big guy there pushing everyone around. You know where he is today?"

  "Dead?" inquired Gold's stepmother delicately, glancing up from her wool. In such moments, she recalled to Gold's mind the image of Madame Defarge knitting at the foot of the guillotine.

  "You bet, baby," answered Gold's father. "In d'rerd. Now he ain't pushing around people. He's pushing up daisies. A suicide. They tried to hush it up, but they couldn't fool me."

  "I do believe," said Gold's stepmother, "that old governess has passed away too."

  "Sure, she did," Gold's father agreed. "Cancer. It ate her up. See that taxi driver, the funny one? Toyt. Like a doornail. A stroke. Maybe twenty years ago. Lingered a few weeks, then good-bye Charlie. That crooked cop? Bagruben. In d'rerd also. In a fire, I think. Whiskey had something to do with it too. That one was a faygeleh!"

  It was their favorite recreation, even in Gold's apartment. Gold would sit with gritted teeth for as long as he could and then excuse himself with the explana­tion he had work to prepare. Belle, to her credit, remained, with the same hospitable consideration she showed to her own widowed mother.

  "He ain't no Jew!" Gold's father had decided in Gold's living room one evening as he watched another

  38

  newscast of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger smiling still one more time into the press cameras as he descended from still one more airplane. Gold's father turned to Gold as though daring opposition. "No, siree. He said he was a cowboy, didn't he? A lonesome cowboy riding into town to get the bad guys, didn't he? All by himself. Well, no cowboy was ever a Jew."

  "Not," said Gold's stepmother, "on your life."

  "Show me one," challenged Gold's father. "Shep­herds, maybe. No cowboys."

  And Gold wondered if the Creator, in the giving of His laws to Moses on that cloud-covered mountain, had not also in His wisdom and mercy imparted a time limit on at least one of His Commandments that had somehow been lost in translation after the tired old Patriarch made his way back down on a day that had been for him more than usually distracting. How was it possible to honor a father who was so abrasive and married now to such a fucking wack?

  Yet it was shortly after this visit from his father that Gold opened his dossier on Henry Kissinger and began outlining his strategy in closest secrecy. His file thick­ened rapidly. He began collecting clippings on David Eisenhower because he could not resist. From David Eisenhower he read:

  One improvement in the Nixon administration, due to Watergate, is that Mr. Nixon is no longer considered an unqualified goody-goody. I never liked that idea. The image of the Nixon administration is part of my heritage as well, and I don't think I'm a goody-goody either. I am a contentious person in a lot of ways. I'm glad that to a certain extent this ministerial cloak can be lifted from my shoulders. I'm not just a goody-goody.

  For the first time in his life, possibly, Gold's mind boggled. David Eisenhower, after all, was probably the outstanding Amherst alumnus of his generation. God was thankful he'd clipped that interview. Someday, in

  39

  respite from work that he knew was largely undistin­guished and, in ev
ery nuance of the adverb, abomina­bly intellectual, he might want to write comedy.

  Often since, Gold was amazed by things he found in newspapers and magazines.

  Many such groups of heckling, young hoodlums roamed at will among the crowd of 125,000 gathered at the Washington Monument for Human Kindness Day, robbing or beating 600 people.

  He clipped them all. They boggled his mind.

  Gold was the author of six nonfiction books, one of which, his first, was genuine, and that one an expansion of his doctoral dissertation. Four collections of his shorter work had been published. Two of these collec­tions each contained four or five fairly perceptive pieces in which he had been able to say something original effectively; and a third included a long essay on the symbiotic relationship between cultural advance and social decay that had been reprinted widely and was still made reference to by commentators on both sides of the matter—those in favor of social decay and those opposed. The remaining collection, his latest, was worthless. Gold thought much less of his work than even his fussiest detractors, for he knew far better than they the diverse sources of most of his information and even of much of his language. Gold's current scheme for a new collection was a volume of pieces from his previous collections.

  His short stories were mannered and trite, and he was content that they were published in far-flung quarterly magazines of very small circulation. His poems, he sensed, were atrocious, and these he submit­ted to obscure literary magazines in Pretoria and the Isle of Wight and to English-language university publi­cations in Beirut, Spain, and Teheran. He felt safer talking about his poetry with people who had never read any. A problem with his stories and poems, Gold

  40

  knew, was that they tended to be derivative, and mainly derivative, unfortunately, of works of his own. His novel, a work he had wrestled with, on and off, for almost three years, he had finally abandoned after one page. The novel was derivative of a poem Gold had written seven years before that was itself derived from a brilliant exegesis by a young Englishman of the works of Samuel Beckett that Gold wished he'd written himself.

  Although it was taken for granted by now that no one in Gold's family was obliged to read anything he wrote, he nevertheless was held in some kind of baffled awe by everyone but his stepmother, who was fond of remark­ing that she thought he had a screw loose.

  Collections of his books and the periodicals in which reviews and articles by him had appeared were main­tained in each of the households. Esther and Rose kept scrapbooks. Ida, the practical schoolteacher, combined literature with painting by hanging copies of his book jackets in art frames in her foyer and living room. Belle's mother pasted his titles on each piece of her luggage. Even Harriet and Sid showed his work off prominently in their large home in Great Neck on a polished sideboard facing the entrance to the house almost dead-on. But that was it. Beyond the title and opening sentences, he could have written fuck-all anywhere and the words would not have come to their attention. None of them, not even Belle or his two older sons or his unambitious twelve-year-old daugh­ter, were caught up irresistibly by his speculations on the fallacies of truth, his concepts for an ideal universi­ty, or his theories of cultural phylogeny and ultimate universal doom. It was usually after the publication of something new by Gold that his stepmother was prone to mention that his brains, in her opinion, were twisted, or that he had a screw loose.

  Gold, for his part, believed that she, in pace with his father, was losing her marbles, and that neither had many left.

  41

  Only Joannie in California and her husband, Jerry, seemed to understand who he really was and appreciate the high regard in which he was generally held by people who had never met him. Jerry gave parties whenever Gold came to California and relayed invita­tions for Gold to speak at temples and churches and before various adult civic and professional groups in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, invitations Gold always declined. Jerry, the boorish overachiever, was too wealthy the community figure to suggest that Gold be paid a fee, and Gold was too successful the scholar to convey that he never spoke without one.

  If anything, his relatives had long ceased struggling to figure out what he was writing about or why. Their beliefs were simple. They liked education, the larger the amount, the better the effects. Gold could have demolished this simple faith in a pulverizing thunder­clap had he wished. They voted piously in every election, even Julius, his father, as though their doing so made a difference, but had no interest in govern­ment. Gold had no interest in government either, but pretended he did, for politics and governmental opera­tions were among his most rewarding areas of discus­sion. Gold no longer even voted; he could not, in fact, find any beneficial role for popular elections in the democratic process, but that was something else he could not disclose publicly without bringing blemish to the image he had constructed for himself as a radical moderate.

  Gold was a moderate now in just about everything, advocating, in Pomoroy's description, fiery caution and crusading inertia. Inwardly he simmered often with envy, frustration, indignation, and confusion. Gold was opposed to segregation and equally opposed to integra­tion. Certainly he did not believe that women, or homosexuals, should suffer persecution or discrimina­tion. On the other hand, he was privately opposed to all equal rights amendments, for he certainly did not want members of either group associating with him on levels of equality or familiarity. And for the soundest reasons:

  42

  his reasons were emotional, and emotions, he was concluding, particularly his own, could constitute the highest form of rationality. Problems were increasing in all areas to which he could no longer find uncomplicat­ed solutions, but he kept these embarrassing dilemmas to himself and continued to manifest in public an aspect of cordial poise and balanced judgment that made him acceptable to almost everyone.

  Gold could speak with aplomb now on politics, diplomacy, economics, education, war, sociology, ecol­ogy, social psychology, pop culture, fiction, and drama—and on any combinations of these in infinite permutations, for he had an inventive ability to relate anything to anything else.

  Gold was flexible and unopinionated now and able—with just a few minor adjustments in empha­sis—to deliver essentially the same speech to an elderly reactionary religious group that he had given the day before with equal success to a congress of teen-aged Maoists. Gold could produce newspaper evi­dence that a former governor of Texas had not been brought to trial on all the counts for which he had been indicted, and he had used this information one evening to confirm the suspicions of an audience of millionaires that the federal government had it in for all rich Texans and to insinuate convincingly the next afternoon to an assembly of college students just thirty miles away that justice, in the presence of rich politicians, was not blind but merely looking the other way. The college students paid him seven hundred dollars for this talk. The millionaires gave him shit.

  He preferred the millionaires.

  In the last Presidential election, Gold had allowed his name to be listed among the sponsors of separate full-page newspaper advertisements supporting the candidates of both political parties. For the advertise­ment supporting the candidates of the Democratic Party, Gold was asked to pay twenty-five dollars. Fot the other, the Republican Party met the whole cost in secrecy. From this Gold concluded that the Republican

  43

  Party was the more humane and philanthropic, and he eased himself one stage farther toward the political right, and called it the center. Although he did not go so far as Lieberman, who was all for a totalitarian plutocracy, backed by repressive police actions when necessary—as long as the men on top were good to Jews like himself and let him have a little—and called it neoconservatism. Lieberman, whose name had ap­peared fraudulently as a contributing sponsor only in the ad deceitfully paid for by the Republican Party, was incensed that Gold, for only twenty-five dollars more, had his name in the newspaper twice.

  Gold, like Lieberman, loved getti
ng his name in the papers, and his strongest surviving political sentiment lay in his wish for the good government position Ralph hinted might be found for him. Gold had neither illusions nor misgivings about the burdens of public office: the only great weight of public office he could see was staying in, and he was in a quandary only a moment when the opportunity came to review the President's book.

  There had been no advance word that such a manuscript even was in preparation. He was surprised, of course, by the oddity of a President who had chosen to write about his experiences in office after being there so short a time. But Gold had managed to cast even this unusual circumstance in a favorable light in the thoughtful appraisal he wrote of My Year in the White House, paying respectful tribute to a chief executive willing to open communications from the start with what Gold luckily described as his "contemporary universal constituency." The term proved more felici­tous than Gold could have imagined. The President himself repeated it twice daily on a whirlwind goodwill tour he made to parts of the world in which he was despised. Journalists felt conscience bound to credit Gold with the phrase whenever they reported it. Gold had no idea what it meant.

  Even more surprising had been the telephone call

  44

  from Ralph Newsome to thank him on behalf of the White House.

  "Where do you shine in?" Gold inquired. Ralph still sounded truthful. They had lost touch with each other since their fellowships at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation seven years back.