No visitors, no telephone calls, no letters, no flowers, no greeting cards, no bananas in baskets of fruit—the ten days that followed were the most forlorn of Gold's life. How many people wondered where he was? He pondered also, with bewildering compunction, the moral mystery originating in his final words to Spotty Weinrock at the gym: "Tell not a soul." A heartbeat away from death and his dominant concern was not life, but that corrupting illusion of triumph, public success.
And so it was still.
Gold contacted nobody until about to be discharged in health that was certifiably excellent. He called Belle first.
"What hospital?"
"I've been sick, Belle. I'm getting out tomorrow."
"With what?"
"Nothing. Where did you think I was? I've been away for almost two weeks."
"You told me you had to go off somewhere to straighten yourself out," said Belle. "So I thought you were probably straightening yourself out."
"I'm okay," he quickly assured Andrea. "The doctors are positive it was nothing."
"What doctors? Where are you?"
"In the hospital, darling. In New York. Didn't you even miss me?"
"With what?"
"With nothing, darling. I just told you. It was just a checkup."
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"Why didn't you tell me, darling?"
"I wasn't allowed any calls or visitors."
"With nothing?"
"Where did you think I was, Andrea? It's been ten days. Didn't you notice I was gone?"
"I knew you had to go back to your wife one more time to work out the divorce," said Andrea. "I thought you were working out the divorce."
His call to Ralph was crucial. "Something personal came up and I had to go away for a while. I'm sorry I haven't been able to be in touch with you."
"About what?" asked Ralph.
"About everything. You told me things were starting to happen."
"And they are, Bruce," said Ralph. "Conover is pushing strongly in your behalf. The President asked to meet you."
"I can come tomorrow."
"I think he's busy tomorrow. The Embassy Ball would be a good place to meet."
"The Embassy Ball?"
"I hope you'll come if you're invited. I told the President that you were writing some important position papers. So try to draw up a few."
"On what?"
"On any positions you choose. I don't think anyone's going to want to read them. Where are you now?"
"At my studio," lied Gold. "Ralph, didn't you miss me? Didn't you notice we were out of touch?"
"I missed your hotel room," said Ralph. "I can tell you that. Sleeping with just my wife and Misty, Candy, Christie, and Tandy for almost two weeks hasn't been easy. You ought to try it some time and see. You and I have to get together very soon to talk about the Embassy Ball and what you should say to him there if you're invited."
"Tomorrow?" asked Gold.
"I'm busy too," said Ralph.
"How can I get invited to that Embassy Ball?"
"It's practically impossible."
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"Fuck him," said Gold for the first time as he crossly dialed another number. Neglect, moped Gold, abounding everywhere, closing me in like a poisonous tide, drowning me, closing over my head, filling my nose with fetid—
"Spot Modes," greeted the girl on the telephone brightly. "May I help you?"
"Mr. Weinrock, please. Bruce Gold calling."
"Mr. Weinrock is in the market."
"What the fuck does that mean?"
The girl hung up. Gold reached him at the gym.
"Spotty, you bastard, nobody knows I'm even in the hospital. I told you not to tell anyone, so you didn't, huh? Not my wife, not a single soul, did you?"
"I can keep a secret," said Spotty Weinrock.
"Not a person in this whole world knows what I went through. Was there anything in the newspapers?"
"I don't read the newspapers."
"It shows how people care. I could drop dead tomorrow and no one would even notice."
"I can follow instructions when I have to."
"Did you have to, you prick? And you didn't even come to visit, did you? Suppose I died, you son of a bitch? Would you have told anyone then? My wallet was still at the gym with all my clothes and they wouldn't even know who I was. You can keep a secret, all right. How in heaven's name can you keep such a secret?"
"To tell you the truth," said Spotty Weinrock, "I forgot."
"You forgot?" The painful words were still sinking in.
"I got kind of busy, Bruce, and I forgot you even had a heart attack."
"It was not a heart attack!"
"I was pretty scared, anyway," said Spotty Weinrock. "I couldn't stop worrying about you."
"Till when?" scoffed Gold with a bitter laugh.
"Till I forgot."
Gold thrust his face toward the telephone as though
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it were the enraging incarnation of the person he was addressing. "You forgot?" he repeated through tightened jaws in a voice quivering with a black storming anger that sifted through his entire system and caused every muscle to tremble. "Money, Weinrock, money, you cocksucker. How much do you owe me now?"
"About two thousand."
"Pay up, you lousy bastard."
"Okay."
"This minute, you fuck. Or I'll put you in prison. I'll get liens. I'll serve papers. Spotty, Spotty," said Gold with a catch in his throat as his voice cracked and he tried without succeeding to fight back the tears rolling from his eyes, "how could you be so insensitive? Why didn't you at least come to visit, just to see for yourself I was alive?"
"I tried, Bruce. Three times I was going to visit and made up my mind that nothing was going to keep me away."
"And what happened?"
"I forgot."
"Do you know what it feels like?" said Gold with a sob. "Do you know what it feels like to have to lie in a hospital day after day without visitors or phone calls, with what might have been a fatal heart attack, and have nobody care? It feels like shit. Suppose I died?"
"I cared," said Spotty.
"You forgot."
"Somebody would have reminded me."
"Nobody else knew," Gold reproached him further. "I would have been buried in a pauper's grave. Even I would have been more thoughtful than that."
"I have to go jogging now. I belong to this group."
Gold washed and dried his face before telephoning next the one person he thought of who might have missed him most.
"I called you at your studio only yesterday," she said. "I left a message on your machine."
"Only yesterday? Where'd you think I was until then? It's been ten days."
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"I thought you were busy with your wife and with your financ6e."
"Is Dina back in school?"
"And doing beautifully," said Linda Book. "I've been doing her homework for her. Tell me what hospital you're in. I have this dental bill I want to mail you."
"I'll be getting out tomorrow," said Gold. "I want to see you first."
In a fevered ecstasy of abandonment and slavish indiscretion, he could now easily picture all his carefully laid plans flying asunder into a bohemian muddle of debauchery and irresponsible disgrace, and he did not care. He wanted her in his arms, wanted her body beneath him, covered by his own. What would Conover say when he found out? How many people who ever read about him would truly believe that a thinking adult like him would endanger his marriage—nay, two marriages—and a brilliant budding political career for a lascivious fling with a married woman with four children with whom, as was also true of Andrea, he could never become in any other way intimate? That didn't seem to matter.
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A love you very, very deeply, darling, and I wish so much that I didn't." Gold could safely afford the luxury of such lavish words and sentiments because he knew that the emotion in which they had their birth was not going to last. He did not drea
m, however, that the demise of this tender feeling lay as near as the dental bill she handed him. He calmly mixed a gin and tonic for each. By then his agitation had lessened. "How come your husband isn't paying for any of these? I thought he was such a good provider."
"He isn't going to pay for anything any more since he found out we're together."
Several questions rose simultaneously in Gold's mind and broke into pieces against each other in the burbling struggle to get out. "Together? Found out? How? How together? Are? What do you mean found out? What do you mean together? How are we together?"
"Like this. He knows all about us."
"Knows all about us? How did he find out?"
"From the children."
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"From the children? How do the children know?"
"I told them."
Gold looked at her steadily with a troubled eye. "You told them? You told your children? What did you tell your children?"
"That we're lovers."
"Lovers?"
"You keep repeating everything I say."
Gold was lacking the necessary equilibrium for timely repartee. "Is that what we are, lovers?" he asked credulously.
"Of course, darling," answered Linda with a smile. "I'm your lover and you're mine. What did you think we were?"
Gold did not hesitate long to give the answer that first sprang to mind. "Fuckers."
"Lover is so much sweeter," said Linda Book with the ethereal sensitivity of a poetess, "so much richer in meaning and value, don't you think?"
"Don't you have to be very seriously in love to be a lover?" asked Gold.
"Oh, no," she corrected him. "All you have to be is a fucker."
Gold had never looked at himself as a lover before and was not altogether convinced he liked the idea now. "So that's what I am, huh? A lover."
"Of course you are, you fucker," said Linda Book. "And a darling too. I rate you an A minus." Gold was stung only superficially by this backhanded tribute, for there was the impact of catastrophe in the words that followed. "And I'm so proud that someone as intelligent as you finds me sexy and attractive. Even my husband is impressed."
"Good God!" Gold hurtled to his feet. "He knows my name?"
"Gold is a very nice name," she said. "And I wouldn't be ashamed to have it as my own."
"Jesus Christ, Linda, that's not the point." Gold lifted a pillow from the bed for the sole purpose of having something in both hands he could slam down.
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"Where the hell are your brains? I'm a very distinguished man. Next week I may even be invited to the Embassy Ball. Why the fuck did you have to tell anybody about me at all?"
"Because I believe in the truth."
"Why?" he insisted on knowing.
"Why?"
"Why in this case couldn't you believe in a lie? Why in the world did you have to tell your children anything?"
"Because in our family," retorted Linda Book without any trace of concession, "we don't believe in keeping things from each other."
"Do they understand what being lovers means?" Gold demanded scornfully. "I didn't."
"Oh, yes. The older two did."
"What did they say?"
"My son said he would kill you," she said. "My daughter wanted to know if you were any good. I told her you were an A minus who would probably graduate to an A if you could last. The younger two were more accepting."
"Oh, were they?" said Gold with a rather wild shake of his head. "I'd like to know how you explained to them what lovers are."
Linda Book met the challenge with unconcern. "Oh, we have this illustrated German sex book for children. It shows a little boy with his penis erect and a little girl with her vagina exposed and it explains in simple language any child can understand that he shoves it in."
"Shoves it in?" Gold's voice nearly failed him.
"Yes. And I explained to them that you and I do the same thing with our penee and that's why we're lovers."
"They understood?"
"Immediately. They said we were fucking."
Gold stared at her with bulging eyes for a moment and then went plunging about the room in shocked silence for several seconds. "Linda, you're a schoolteacher?" he addressed her with his jaws knotted and
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with his mouth drawn back as far as a human mouth could go, and all at once he looked as though he were congenitally snaggletoothed. "You went to college, got your degrees? You completed education courses? You got your license, a nice shiny diploma?"
"Oh, yes," said Linda with the same collected smile. "I communicate very well with children. Your daughter will vouch for that."
"My daughter!" Gold's voice was a hysterical cry. "Holy shit! She's friends with your kids. She sleeps at your house. Dina. Do you think they told her too?"
"I should hope they did," said Linda. "Our children are all very open with each other about sex."
Gold moaned and shivered in terror. "I didn't want her to know!"
"It will bring you closer together."
"It will put us at sword's point at each other's throat. Goddammit, she'll tell my wife."
"It will bring you and her closer together too."
"I'm leaving my wife to marry Andrea. Is there no way you can get word to her as well? Listen, Linda, marriage for us is out of the question, definitely out."
"Oh, we agreed on that," said Linda without taking offense. "I could never afford to give up my support or my alimony."
"Which you are now not getting," said Gold with an uncordial gleam of triumph, pacing. "Because you believe so much in the truth. What is this horrifying obsession with the truth that all you women seem to be in the grip of these days? Where does it come from? Goddammit—I may be Secretary of State soon. Do you think it's helpful for a thirteen-year-old child to know that the Secretary of State is fucking her schoolteacher? Can't you imagine what will happen to my home life and divorce if my wife does find out?"
"It will clear the air," said Linda. "When my husband found out it certainly cleared a lot of air."
"And he stopped giving you money. How do you think my wife is going to feel about all these dentist's bills when she finds out they're for you and your kids?"
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At last the seriousness of the matter impressed itself upon her. "Do you think we shouldn't have told him?"
"What did your husband say when you told him?" asked Gold.
"He said he was going to kill you."
"You shouldn't have told him. Greenspan, you fuck," he shouted in violent anxiety as soon as he found himself alone with a wall he could talk to. "Where the hell are you?"
"I know, I know," said Greenspan when Gold began relating his troubles. "It's why I say you're a shonda."
"Her husband wants to kill me."
"It's a federal offense to kill a public official, but you're not a public official yet."
"Tell him I'm about to become one," Gold begged. "Go see him for me. Bring a gun."
"He says you're fucking his wife," Greenspan reported back.
"Tell him I'll stop if he promises not to assassinate me.
"He wants you to marry her and take full financial responsibility for her and all four children," Greenspan reported back.
"He's out of his fucking head," said Gold. "I thought he was madly in love with her and would never let her
go."
"He'll let her go, he'll let her go," said Greenspan.
"It's out of the question," said Gold. "I'm already married to one woman and about to marry another, and we Jews don't take our marriages lightly."
"I told him that."
"Tell him I'll go for the dental work for all of them until it's completed, but that's all."
"He says it's a deal," Greenspan reported back. "I had to threaten to shoot him." He declined without words the drink Gold offered in celebration. "Now, Dr. Gold, what about you? Do you really think you have the right character to be Secretary of State or any other high government
official?"
Gold considered the matter. "What do you think?"
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"Are you really going to stop fucking his wife?*'
"No."
Greenspan surveyed him with a look holding generations of disappointment. "You're no worse than the rest," he decided, "but certainly no better. He doesn't think you will, either."
"Greenspan, we can drive a better bargain. Tell him I'll really stop if he picks up all the dental bills."
"Now, it's a deal," Greenspan reported back. "Just a little wine, please. L'chaim."
"L'chaim," Gold toasted him in return.
"But what I said still goes," Greenspan stressed at the door.
"What's that?"
"I forget. Let me think. Oh, yes. You're a shonda."
"You're a credit."
The way was clear now, Gold saw, for his triumphant return to Washington.
"XJU
tt ITH Conover promising to champion you after you marry Andrea," said Ralph, dressed in another monogrammed shirt that caught Gold's discriminating eye, "there is nothing in the world that can block your appointment, unless something gets in the way. I say that with as much assurance as I've ever been able to give you in the past."
"And Andrea won't marry me until I already have the appointment," grumbled Gold. "The two of them are playing games with each other. Can't I meet the President now? I'm sure I can convince him if I had just one meeting with him."
Ralph had been shaking his head even before the request was concluded. "At the Embassy Ball, if you can get invited. I think he's still busy with Russia. The President worries a lot about Russia. He wants to meet you at the Embassy Ball, in front of photographers. Try to come if you're invited."