"He's a salesman, for God sakes, and a show-off," she would exclaim in condemnation, when she heard me speculating enviously. "If he pitches a hundred women, he's bound to find a few who would find him better than nothing, or than the dopes they're already tied up with. He can talk, we know that."
We knew he had a certain persevering charm, though none for us. At times when she was moping, I would clarify things for her, in the argument we'd first used with each other over the morning newspaper about whichever man was then in the White House: he was base, self-centered, conceited, bogus, and untruthful, so why expect him to behave any other way? I still can't tell whether the little prick we have there now is a bigger little prick than the two little pricks before him, but he certainly seems big enough, what with Noodles Cook as a confidant and that gluttonous, silver-haired parasite C. Porter Lovejoy, just out of prison on another one of those presidential pardons, his moral supervisor.
I always managed the mediation with Richard craftily. With me too he was driven to come across as likable and worldly, and I never let him feel positive he was succeeding.
"Set up a lunch," I volunteered, not long after Glenda and I started telling each other things and singling each other out to talk to at parties. "Let me speak to him for you."
"To who?" she asked.
"To whom," came out of me spontaneously.
"Oh, Lord!" she cried, her dark mood lifting. "You're a pedant, you know. Singer, you're a nice bright man, but what a pedant you are!"
It was the first time I'd heard that word pedant spoken. It was then, I believe, maybe at just that moment, that I consciously began to put to sleep my resistance against ever allowing myself to feel much lasting connection to any woman, even to those with whom I'd been feverishly enthralled for a while. My fear was not of commitment but of entrapment. But any woman who could use that word pedant, I reasoned, call her ex-husband "duplicitous" and a "narcissist," and describe an assistant manager we both worked for as a "troglodyte" was a woman I felt I could spend time talking to and perhaps even want to live with, despite the three kids, a first husband, and her extra year in age. And a Christian too. Guys from Coney Island thought I was going crazy when they heard who Sammy Singer was finally marrying, a girl with three children, a Gentile, one year older than he was. And not even rich!
Glenda had another trait I never mentioned to anyone until after she was gone, and then I told only Lew, one time when both of us were drinking, me with my Scotch on ice, he still with his Carstairs and Coke: she was amorous and daring when drinking and out for a good time, full of mischievous fun, and all the more so after we were married, and there was no end to her spontaneity and my exhilarating surprises right up until the time she fell sick and slowed down. More than once in the back of a car coining home from a party with people we hardly knew, she would begin to neck and grope and rub, and she would go farther and farther, and it was up to me to strain to continue a level conversation with the couple in front, making inordinately loud jokes to supply an explanation for my laughing and talking loudly and brokenly, for she would bob up with remarks and answer questions also before ducking down again to work on me some more, and it was something to keep more than the catch out of my voice when she finally made sure I came. I had stupefying orgasms, she knew, and I still do. They are slower in starting but last much longer. Lew told Claire I had tears in my eyes when I reminisced about that part, she let me know the last time we saw each other, at lunch in a restaurant, not long after Lew died, when she was flying off to Israel the first time on the chance she might buy a seashore house there for vacations for herself and any of her children who might want to come.
Glenda and I never courted each other, and that's one of the reasons our marriage happened the way it did. She took me ice-skating downstairs one afternoon in the rink in Rockefeller Center. I'd been a whiz on metal roller skates as a kid, playing our kind of hockey in the street, and I mastered the ice skates so adeptly she was tempted to believe I'd been hoaxing. I rented a car one Sunday in spring and took her and the children to Coney Island, where they'd never been. I guided them through Steeplechase. They all of them rolled around in the Barrel of Fun and hooted at their deformed reflections in the magic mirrors, and afterward I led them across the avenue to show them the two-story Tilyou house of the founder. I showed them the chiseled name on the stone face of the bottom step that was continuing to bury itself in the sidewalk and was already all but submerged. They were skeptical of my impression that the house was sinking too and had earlier been a level higher. A week later I rented a larger car and took her mother along too when we went back and then had early Sunday dinner at a big seafood restaurant in Sheepshead Bay called Lundy's. When Glenda and I kissed goodbye that time, there was a second kiss in which we pressed into each other, and we knew it had started. I felt a powerful sentimental affection toward her mother. I missed my own. I lived downtown and Glenda lived uptown, and one late evening when she did not feel like journeying home, following birthday cocktails after work for a different girl that stretched into a long dinner with about twelve of us and after that into a club with jazz and a dance floor in Greenwich Village, I said she could sleep at my place. She said sure. I had a platform bed and a long sofa too.
"We don't have to do anything," I promised reassuringly, when we were there. "I really mean it."
"Yes, we do," she decided, with laughing determination. "And don't try that bashful-little-boy act on me. I've seen you work." And after that we seldom went out without fitting into our schedule the chance to be alone unobserved. We went to movies, we went to plays, we went off for weekends. One time she wanted to take the girls to see The King and I.
I said, "You mean the king and me, don't you?"
After a second of surprise, she saw I was joking and let out a hoot. "Oh, God!" she cried, with disbelieving praise. "You still really are a pedant, aren't you! Even just to think of a crack like that one. But I'd rather be married to a pedant than a prick, especially to a pedant who can make me laugh. Sam, it's time. Move in with me. You're practically living there now, and I've got room. You don't mind my kids, you spend more time with them than Richard ever did. You take them to Coney Island, and to see the king and me, and you get along better with Michael than the rest of us. Naomi and Ruth look up to you, even though Naomi is already taller. And you get along better with my mother than I can when I'm having my periods. Don't argue. Just move in and give it a try. You don't have to marry me."
"You know that's not true. You know it's a lie."
"Not right away."
I was not sure I wanted to see her every day.
"You see me at work every day now. We're together every weekend."
"You know that's different."
"And when I quit and you're supporting me, you'll have more time away from me, in the office, than you have now."
She was not as good a housekeeper as my mother had been and only ordinary as a cook. Even her own mother made better food, and she was not good either. I told her staunchly I would not consider it.