“Who?”
“You wouldn’t know even if I told you.”
Sam asked Moses to return to the house with him as they had hardly begun to talk. He would play his Yiddish music hall records for him: Molly Picon, Aaron Lebedeff, Menasha Skulnik, Mickey Katz. But Moses, complaining of fatigue, asked to be dropped off at his hotel.
Once back at his place, Sam poured himself a Remy Martin.
“God knows you’re not a braggart,” Molly said, “but there was no stopping you tonight. Why do you feel you have to justify yourself to him?”
“You know when Moses was only twenty-one, he found an error in the OED. A first usage. We wrote them and they sent back a letter thanking him and promising to correct it in the next edition.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I have, only you don’t know it. Okay, okay. The emes. I envy him.”
“You envy him? He’s an alcoholic, poor man, and who knows how many tranquilizers he takes he slurs his words now. Let’s face it, Sam, he didn’t amount to much.”
“And me? Hoo haw. Sam Burns né Birenbaum can call Cosell Howard to his face. Mike Wallace sees me he waves.”
“The truth is he’s a failure.”
“Oh, yeah, a failure absolutely. But he’s an enormous failure, a tragic waste, and I’m a little trendy horseshit TV mavin, the trustworthy face that comes between the Preparation-H and Light Days commercials.”
Sam wandered into the bathroom, knocking into things, opening the medicine cabinet, pulling out her jar of Vaseline and holding it up to the light, squinting.
“What are you doing?”
“I marked the level it was at with a pencil before we went to dinner.”
“Sam, you’re disgusting.”
“I’m disgusting? When they leave burn the sheets.” He shook his fist at the ceiling. “It’s an averah what they’re doing up there. Makkes they should have! A choleria on them! Faygelehs! Mamzarim!”
“Please Sam. Philip is not responsible for tonight. Lower your voice.”
“He plucks his eyebrows. I caught him at it. Maybe you should never have taken baths with him.”
“He was three years old at the time.”
“Okay, okay.”
“What did you and Moses talk about when I went to the ladies’?”
“This and that.”
“He’s your oldest friend. You’ve known each other since you were nine years old. What in the hell did you talk about?”
“The Mets. Moses thinks they can take Cincinnati in the playoffs. Pete Rose. Johnny Bench. Tony Perez. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Raw tapes. What’s he after?”
“All I know is that he has that crazy look and I’ve seen it before.” And then Sam, breaking an old vow, told her the story, making her swear never to say anything to Moses. “In the spring of ’62 I think it was, I was drinking in the Algonquin with Mike, shortly after he started with The New Yorker, and we were soon joined by a couple of other editors.
They were sharing a private joke about something they called the Berger Syndrome. What’s that, I asked? Well, it seems that in the early fifties some kid called Berger, a Canadian, sent them a short story that everybody liked and wanted to publish. They wrote him, asking for a few minor revisions, and he wrote back a nutty letter saying The New Yorker regularly prints crap, so long as it is written by their friends, they couldn’t tell Pushkin from Ogden Nash, and he was withdrawing his story. When I met Moses the next afternoon for drinks at Costello’s, I got up sufficient nerve to ask him about it and he said, no, it was certainly not him. But he was lying. I could tell just looking at him. I thought he was going to pass out on the spot.”
“Why would Moses do such a thing?”
“Because he’s crazy.” Settling on the edge of the bed, depleted, Sam asked, “Was I really bragging tonight?”
“A little,” she said, bending to help him out of his trousers.
The bodice of her dress came away from her. Sam peeked. It was still nice, very nice. “Was Moses ever your lover?” he demanded, jerking upright.
“Philip’s his son. Now you know. The cat’s out of the bag.”
Sam forlorn, his eyes wet, said, “I want the truth.”
“Remember when you were working for the Gazette and there wasn’t enough money and I said I could give French lessons?”
“Yes.”
“Some French lessons. Moses and I were making pornographic movies together. Now can we get some sleep?”
But he couldn’t sleep. He was thirsty. He was dizzy. His heart was hammering. His stomach was rumbling. “They can take everything. The works. I would have settled for writing ‘The Dead’. Never mind War and Peace or Karamazov. Am I greedy? Certainly not. Just ‘The Dead’ by Samuel Burns né Birenbaum.”
“‘The best of a bad job is all any of us can make of it,’” she recited, hoping she had got the lines right. “‘Except of course, the saints …’”
“I wasn’t kidding about the sheets, you know. I want them burnt. I want the room fumigated.”
“Sam, he’s our son. We’ve got to play with the cards that we were dealt.”
“Molly, Molly,” he asked, lying on her breasts, weeping, “where has all the fun gone?”
Uninvited, her manner truculent, Molly turned up early at the Madison. She steered Moses into the dining room, slamming her PBS tote bag on the table. “Ever since he got your call saying you were coming he’s been on a high. Boy, were the two of you ever going to light up the town. He went through all of our books to make sure there were no compromising best-sellers on the shelves. The signed pictures of him with Kennedy were hidden in a drawer. His framed honorary degrees went into a cupboard. He must have made up and crossed out eight dinner-party lists, saying no, Moses wouldn’t approve of them. He laid in a case of Macallan. Our fridge is stocked with smoked salmon. Then you show up and stick him with the fact that he has a swimming pool. Count on Moses. You don’t tell him once—it would really cost you—how damn good and honest he is on TV. Or that he should write that Watergate book, he’s dying to, but it scares the bejesus out of him. Philip with that boy in his room is breaking his heart. I find him sobbing in the toilet, but you have nothing reassuring to say to him. I could wring your miserable bloody neck, you self-centred son of a bitch. Then last night he gets drunk, also to please Moses, and he actually asks me if we ever had an affair. He’s so pure of heart he doesn’t even know that he’s a much better man than you are. What are those cuts in the palms of your hands?”
“Some people grind their teeth in their sleep. I clench my fists. It’s a bad habit.”
“Read your paper and don’t look at me. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
Moses ordered more coffee for both of them, stirring five spoonfuls of sugar into his own cup.
“What are you doing to yourself?”
“I crave sweets now. I can never get enough. Please don’t start crying.”
“I won’t. I won’t.”
“The last time I was in the clinic there was a beautiful girl there I still can’t get out of my mind. I mean genuinely beautiful. A fawn. Maybe only nineteen years old. She would drift into my room, shrug out of that awful starchy gown, and do an arabesque, a pirouette, a tour en l’air. She never leaped, she soared. Then she would smile like a naughty girl, squat, and shit on my floor. It’s all right, I’d say. I don’t mind. She danced and shat on my floor every day for a week and then she was gone. We weren’t allowed cutlery, but somehow or other she got her hands on a fork and it was enough to do the job. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. If I had a reason I forgot.”