New York Echoes (11 page)

I
watched them until they faded from sight, trying to hold down a feeling of
nausea. I really wanted to vomit. I gagged but held it down. I had no idea what
to do, where to go, how to cope with this monumental disaster in my young life.

I
could never remember how I got home. I felt dazed, punchy, like a person who
had been emptied of all life and hope. I know I didn't sleep. In the mirror the
next morning, I saw a pale, bearded face with circles under my eyes. I felt
feverish, sick at heart. My Helen. I still longed for her, wanted to hold her
in my arms. I must have run through a gamut of emotions, all new.

And
yet, when Helen called me next day, the sound of her voice momentarily chased
the pain. I told her I was sick.

"I'll
come over if you want," she said. Not a hint. Not an iota of guilt did I
detect. I couldn't understand it.

"No.
I'll be fine," I said.

"Do
you love me?" she asked.

"Of
course, I do."

I
knew I was saying it by rote, although I also knew I loved her still. But a
totally new feeling had crept over me, a kind of aura of self-protection. It
even over-rode the sensation of jealousy that was now growing inside my gut.
What could be bigger than jealousy? Betrayal. I was sure of that. I could not
stand the idea of being betrayed, and I was determined to exorcise it from my
system. I have since learned that nothing, but nothing, beats being betrayed as
an act of inhumanity.

I
didn't let on to Helen what I had seen. Deep down I tried to tell myself that
it was all a mistake. Perhaps the guy she was kissing was an old childhood
friend, maybe a cousin? It was all harmless kidding around, I speculated,
searching for the bright side, if there was one. After all, I still loved her
deeply. But I sure had doubts about its reciprocity.

It
must be understood that, in those days, a great premium was put on
faithfulness. Divorce was more a rarity than the norm. People made pacts with
other people and kept them. Or so it seemed. Certainly, it was supposed to be
that way with Helen and me. We had made a pact, an irrevocable one. We had
vowed to love each other forever and ever. I had not the slightest doubt that,
from my end, my commitment was iron bound.

But
I was not a fool. Before I was going to do something I might regret for the
rest of my life, I had to be sure. To be absolutely sure I had to commit myself
to be a shadow. Put her under surveillance. That meant neglecting everything
and dedicating my energies to the service of that one purpose. That wasn't, of
course, very practical. In those days we had to be practical. There wasn't much
room to maneuver. We hadn't any money and to get ahead you had to keep up. And
applying yourself to college was one of the ways you got ahead. So I wasn't
going to jeopardize that under any circumstances.

Sick
at heart, doing my best to mask my feelings, I did not waver from my pattern of
calling Helen every day. We talked and I tried to keep my voice from cracking
and my conversation light enough.

"Are
you okay?" she asked.

"Still
a little down," I told her.

"Friday
I'll make you a very happy young man," she told me. "I love you so
much." At those words, I thought my heart would break.

On
Friday I appeared as usual at her apartment.

"Good
news," she said grabbing me around the neck and giving me a deep kiss.
"Mom and Dad won't be back until very late. They've gone to a party on Long Island."

That
meant that we could spend the whole evening together in her bedroom. Ordinarily
that would have been a wonderful event. Not tonight. That night I was planning
to be clever, manipulative. I was going to force the truth, one way or another.
However the chips fell.

We
hopped into bed and got naked and made love. It is possible to separate your
mind from your body. I hoped she was not noticing any difference in the way I
performed. I even whispered to her, as I always did, telling her how much I
loved her, how much she meant to me, how I would love her forever and ever and
ever. I'm sure she said the same things to me as we lay there locked in each
other's arms. All the time, on another level, I was thinking about what I was
going to say and when I was going to start. I waited until I cooled down.

I
held her in the crook of my arm and we both lay there looking at the ceiling.

"Helen,
sweetheart, I often wonder what you do when I'm not around?" It was, I
thought, blandly put as a matter of idle conversation, typical afterplay talk,
I supposed.

"I
go to school, do my homework, talk to my girl friends, listen to records. The
usual."

"And
you miss me?"

"That
especially," she said.

"You
don't hang out with a crowd."

She
stiffened slightly, although that could have been my imagination.

"Not
really," she said.

"Does
that mean yes or no?"

I
was deliberately not threatening, just coming on the subject easy, not wanting
to scare her.

"Sometimes
I go down to Murray's with my girl friends and kid around."

"The
candy store."

"Down
the street," she mumbled.

"Every
night?"

"Not
every night."

"Every
other night?"

"Maybe."

Still,
I didn't look at her. But I was sure she knew something was up.

"Lots
of boys there?"

"A
whole crowd."

I
could tell that she was getting just a wee bit defensive. I was afraid of that.
I was still hoping to get her off guard.

"I
can't blame you, I suppose," I said, changing my tactic slightly. I wanted
to keep lulling her, afraid of going too far to soon. "I'm all the way
down there in Brooklyn. You've got to have some fun when I'm not around."

"It's
just hanging around with people I've know for years," she said. I could
tell she was slightly relieved.

"I
don't mind," I said.

"I
don't see why you should," she said, with just a bit too much innocence
showing. I held my breath. It was, I was sure, time to strike.

"I
don't even mind your going out with that guy," I said blandly.

She
stiffened now, lifted her head and looked me in the face. I made sure I was
smiling.

"What
guy?" she asked, but a frown had already wrinkled her forehead.

"You
know how it is," I said as if it didn't really matter, as if I wasn't
bleeding inside. "You hear things. People talk."

She
wasn't sure what to make of it, but I could see that she was getting really
scared now.

"They're
all busybodies. Bernie doesn't mean a thing to me."

It
was a dagger in my heart. Bernie? God, I hated Bernie.

"That's
not what I hear, Helen," I said.

"They're
all liars," she said with some vehemence, sitting up in the bed. It was
getting tougher and tougher for me to keep up the game. I could feel rage and
jealousy mounting inside of me.   

"They
say he's more than just a friend," I pressed.

"People
are such bastards," she said, her own anger mounting.

"They
say you go out with him," I said, my voice no longer gentle.

"You
can't believe them."

"I
know you went out with him," I said, taking the shot in the dark. I really
felt like a prosecutor and it pained me, especially the answers I was getting.

"Just
once or twice," she admitted cautiously. I could tell by then that she was
lying through her teeth.

"Or
more?"

"Maybe
more," she said. I was not giving her enough time to think, to be evasive.

"A
lot more," I said.

"No.
That's not true."

"He
did it with you, too. That I know for sure."

"I
didn't," she snapped, on the verge of hysteria.

"Listen.
I know the truth. Why are you lying to me? Everybody knows."

Tears
rolled over her eyes down, her cheeks.

"I
didn't," she repeated through her sobs.

"Bernie
told everybody, Helen. Everybody knows."

Her
sobs became louder. Her shoulders shook.

"I
only did it once. I swear it. He made me,” she cried. "Only once."

"Lots
more than once Helen," I said as if I knew.

She
really started to ball then, crying like a baby. Clutching me around the waist.
I felt her warm tears on my naked chest.

"I
didn't mean it, Kenny. I swear I didn't mean it. He made me. He pushed me. It's
you I love Kenny. Please, please Kenny, forgive me. I'll never do it again. I
swear it. I swear on my mother. I swear."

It
became a litany, all this swearing never to over and over again. I felt sick to
my stomach and soon the dykes broke and the tears ran down my cheeks and onto
her hair. I was still holding her, you see, still hugging her, still loving
her. But I was also grieving, grieving for this lost pure love. I had, I truly
believed, given her my essence, my soul, and she had betrayed me. It had dealt
me an awesome, monumental, painful blow.

I
don't know how long we lay there, but I do know that for me it was the end of
the world, the absolute end of the world. I've been through lots of defeats
since, lots of betrayals of one sort or another, but nothing ever had the force
and power of this betrayal.

I
knew it was over then, although we did go through the motions of making love.
I'll never understand that. I knew it was over, that I would never, could never
see her again, and yet I made love to her. I even whispered in her ear how much
I loved her and heard her whisper that to me.

I
think that kind of farewell eased the parting for both of us. I never saw her
again after that night, and I don't think I ever loved anyone as much.

Every time Max Ruben
passed Bloomingdale's, he thought of Sporty Morty Millstein. Even now in his
late seventies, Max found that Sporty Morty was the dominant character of his
long-term memory.

From their earliest days together
hanging out in front of the candy store on Saratoga Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Sporty Morty was the acknowledged leader of their pack. With his nifty
double-breasted, blue serge suits, jaunty gray fedora, ties that screamed out
their authority with large Windsor knots on gleaming white-on-white spread
collar shirt, pointy-toed, mirror-shined shoes, Sporty spun stories of female
conquests that boggled the mind of his deprived sycophants who were relegated
to the dubious delights of Madame Palm and her Five Sisters.

No one really knew how Sporty could
afford his lifestyle, although he broadly hinted that he was involved in
various enterprises that smelled like number running or bookmaking, far more
romantic undertakings than his supposed front carried out behind the counter of
his father's delicatessen on Pitkin Avenue.   

The candy store was
renowned for once being the headquarters of Murder Inc., the Jewish mob that
was hired out to dispatch enemies of the mob bosses in the twenties and
thirties, a number of whom wound up in the electric chair. When Max, Sporty,
and the other boys got there, that era had ended, although the romance of the
mob's exploits remained to fire their imaginations.

Most of the gang, like Max, were good
boys who got decent marks in high school and dreamed of the prosperous life in
the professions. Becoming a doctor, of course, was still the highest rung of
the success ladder in that first-generation Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood and
many became such, while others became lawyers and accountants, and the more
idealistic of the crew became academics, writers, and artists.

Sporty Morty would
have none of that. He was a high school dropout and his life seemed obsessively
devoted to his Casanova exploits. At times, he showed off his conquests to the
candy store crowd, good-looking girls who wore their big boobs like flashing
headlights and strutted and posed and swarmed over Sporty like ants over honey.

There was nothing mean-minded about
Sporty Morty. He was generous, gregarious, and loved the spotlight, performing
mostly for the benefit of his envious crew. They coveted his lifestyle,
especially his remarkable success with girls, a fact that he publicized at
great length and with vivid images.

“Keep this up and it will fall off,” was
the mantra of his jealous buddies who yearned to drink the magic elixir of his
success. As Max remembered, this was long before the sexual revolution, and
getting girls to go all the way, for most of the crew, was a task akin to
climbing Mount Everest barefoot. Not so for Sporty Morty.

“I make them feel like Queen of the
May,” he instructed us. “The name of the game is focus.”

“But how?” his buddies asked.

“I guess I was born with the knack.”

At times, he would regale the crew with
the results of a triple header, meaning having serial sessions with three
different ladies in a single day, moving from bed to bed with the zeal of a
grasshopper. The crew supposed, from the samples Sporty Morty brought around to
exhibit, that they were all gorgeous with tits that would grow an erection on a
dead Indian.

Sometimes, goaded by our envy, he would
illustrate the point of his prowess by visiting Bloomingdale's and picking up
the salesgirls. Apparently, this was his prime hunting ground. Max and his
friends would watch out of the corner of their eyes as he pretended to buy
something, and before they knew it he had stashed the girls' telephone numbers
in his little black book. He did have a little black book and sometimes showed
us its jottings with numbers denoting not just a box score, but the quality of
the girl's sexual performance.

The Bloomingdale's spiel went something
like this:

“Hey doll, I couldn't help noticing your
striking resemblance to that movie star.”

“Which one?” the girl countered, wary
but strangely engaged.

“The name escapes me, maybe Myrna Loy or
Veronica Lake. Someone like that. I see the same aura.”

“You're kidding me,” the girl replied,
skeptical for form's sake, but visibly moved.

“No really. There's something about
you.” He peered soulfully into the girl's eyes. “I can't put my finger on it.”
He smiled and showed his dimple. “These things happen. Suddenly you're there. I
can't explain it.”

“Come on,” the girl said, blushing, but
obviously enjoying the repartee.

“Honest to God, I wish I could buy
something, just to keep your attention. But by not making a purchase it will
give me an excuse to see you again. That is, if you'd like me to?”

“I can't say I would mind,” the girl
said.      

“Nor would I. In fact, if you could
grant me your telephone number, I will show you my sincerity.”

Invariably that first step was granted
and thus the prelude was achieved. What was most remarkable was the yearning
look the girls offered as Sporty Morty moved away. To the onlooking crew, her
response was both baffling and miraculous.

When Max or one or another of his
friends tried to ape Sporty Morty's technique they were rejected so
resoundingly that it left them socially stunted for weeks on end. Sporty
Morty's talent was a given, like that of an artist. Was it in the smile, the
look, the dimple, the walk, the clothes, the gleam? The words were, after all,
so simple, silly transparent meaningless clichés full of false flattery that
anyone with half a brain could decipher.

Long debates would ensue on the
mysterious subject of Sport Morty's magnetism. All of the boys were certainly
presentable, and a number of them were movie-star handsome, far more handsome
than Sporty Morty, although one had to admit that Sporty had great teeth, a
cleft chin, and dimples. His complexion, though, was often ashen, which the
boys attributed to his overworked libido and a massive loss of semen.

Looking back, Max calculated that Sporty
Morty worship probably lasted no more than three or four years. Most of the
boys went off to college and became the professionals their parents wished for
them to be. Max Ruben became a certified public accountant, raised a family in Huntington, Long Island, had two sons, both of whom migrated to the west coast. When his
wife died, Max moved to Manhattan to a one- bedroom apartment on the east side,
ironically a couple of blocks from Bloomingdale's.

The old candy store gang drifted apart,
and when Max would meet one or another of them casually invariably the
conversation would get around to Sporty Morty.

“What ever happened to Sporty Morty?”
became the refrain of all these chance meetings. One or another heard he had
moved to Manhattan where he became a full time bookmaker, a salesman for Vegas
casinos or a pornographic film producer. No one knew for sure. Somehow Sporty
had to be connected, at least in the mind of his old friends, as someone
involved in illicit trade like gambling, jewel thievery or some other
romantically roguish activity.

Sporty Morty was always the central
point of these chance meetings. For long periods of time, as life became
crowded with other experiences, Max did not think about Sporty Morty. It was
only when he became older, widowed, and lonely that memories of Sporty Morty
surfaced like a long-latent storm that had been gathering for years.

How did he do it? What was his secret?
It became somewhat of an obsession for Max, especially now that he was alone.
He wanted, needed, longed for the fleshly pleasures of ladies, preferably young
ladies. His fantasies became lewd and, experimenting with the benefits of the
new erection drugs, he discovered that he could maintain a respectable
performance instrument despite his age.

In his married life, sexual events had
become gradually tepid and in the end ceased altogether. Desire had disappeared
and although he had a wonderfully affectionate and loving relationship with his
wife of more than fifty years, that part of the equation had lost its luster.
Alone now, retired, with more time for reflection, he rediscovered erotic
longing and began having exciting fantasies, stimulated by the numerous
websites he had found on the Internet that could feed his newfound lust and
bring him to a solitary climax. Naturally, he would much rather have reached
consummation with a live partner.

For some reason, he was not attracted to
women of his own age. Their sagging flesh and aged bodies could not move him
sexually. There were some forays in that direction, but in the end, they became
brief and unsatisfying. What he found was that he longed for young flesh,
pretty girls, the kind of girls that Sporty Morty brought around to the candy
store in those halcyon days of his youth.

As an accountant, he had a trained
analytic mind, and a daily assessment in the mirror told him that he was hardly
a magnet for any woman, no less a woman under thirty. Or even forty. In fact,
with his graying, sparse hair, his yellowing teeth, baggy eyes, and growing
jowls, he was hardly a sight to stir any woman, except those desperate enough
to have somebody, anybody, a live male body, to shepherd them around.

Somehow he managed to buy into the idea
that age was merely a matter of attitude and that today's eighty, a milestone
he was fast approaching, was yesterday's forty. He became determined to remake
himself into the youthful image of himself that had grown in his mind. He
prevailed, over the objections of a reputable plastic surgeon, to tighten his
face, remove his jowls, lift his chin, and eliminate the bags under his eyes.
With liposuction he removed the fat on his belly and the love handles that had
grown above his hips. He had his rotted yellow teeth replaced with white
porcelain.

He hired a trainer to help tone up what
was left of his muscles, dyed his hair, tweezed his eyebrows, and, satisfied
that he had done what he could for his body, bought a new wardrobe at
Bergdorf's favoring Italian designers. His sons, who passed through New York on their various business meetings, thought he had lost his mind or regressed into
a severe form of senility. One of them suggested he see a psychiatrist.
Privately, they both thought his makeover hideous.

In his own mind, he felt that he had
armored himself for the battle of the sexes, determined to pick up ladies by
following the path of Sporty Morty Millstein. With the new erection pills, the
cunning wisdom that came with age, and a pocketbook bulging with excess bucks,
he felt he was ready to embark on a twilight career of seduction. 

Carrying the mind baggage of total
recall of Sporty Morty's chatting technique, he charged the Bloomingdale's
floor looking for a likely target. It wasn't easy. The sales staff at
Bloomingdale's had changed radically since the days when Sporty Morty prowled
its precincts. He remembered that Sporty Morty found his best prospects in the
jewelry department and after careful study, he found a likely mark, a
well-stacked blonde with a boyish haircut and a big-toothed, welcoming smile.

“Hey doll,” he said, offering a flash of
his implanted teeth and winking his bagless eyes. “I couldn't help noticing
your resemblance to that movie star.”

“Really?” the girl said. “Like who?”

“Marilyn Monroe comes to mind.”

“My God, she's been dead forever.”

“I mean in her heyday,” he corrected,
changing course. “I'm not kidding,” he said, forgetting his lines.

“Can I show you some jewelry?” the girl
said. “We work on straight commission.”

“Honest to God,” he said, flashing his
implants again, “but if I bought something now I wouldn't have an excuse to see
you again.”

“Yes, you would. I would sell you
something else.”

“We should really discuss these things
over dinner.”

“You're kidding.”

“Dead serious,” he winked.

“What, are you nuts, old man? I'm
selling jewelry here. Why don't you take your great grandchild to the carousel
in Central Park and get out of my face.”

Max felt words congeal in his throat.
“Old man? Hell, this new me cost nearly fifty thousand dollars,” he wanted to
say, but he held back. Sporty Morty would have known how to handle this
situation. He felt himself flush and hurriedly left the store.

Of course, he was mightily discouraged,
although he did try the technique at Lord & Taylor and one time at
Bergdorf's, experiences that left him depressed and feeling ancient despite the
cosmetic rearrangement of his face and the attempt to sculpt his body. He toyed
with the advice one of his sons had given him about seeing a psychiatrist, but
finally rejected it. He would not be able to bear the shame of revealing his
inner life to a stranger.

The repetitive rejections seemed to
accelerate the aging process. He lost interest in living alone in his
one-bedroom apartment. He stopped cooking for himself and took fewer and fewer
pains with his grooming. Life slipped by without incident. He no longer
experimented with erection drugs, no longer frequented the porn sites on the
Internet, slept most of time, lost all interest in watching television, and
generally drifted in a haze of nothingness.

Finally his sons, seeing the condition
of his apartment and his declining physical state, put him into a nursing home
on East 71st Street. It was a compromise since at that point he refused to
leave Manhattan. There, he languished, reluctantly joining the various programs
devised to keep the inmates, as he called them, from dying of boredom.

One day, sitting in
the main room, dozing, his attention was arrested by a well-dressed elderly
gentlemen sitting on a couch surrounded by three or four ladies of uncertain
age, one of whom was in a wheelchair.