Streets of Gold (46 page)

Rebecca does not much care for my family. I do not understand this, but I do not have much time to care about her not caring. I am pursuing the hairy beast of success. She tolerates my grandfather because she knows how deeply I love him, but she describes my grandmother Tess as “a crabby, constipated woman,” my Uncle Luke as “Mr. Rumples,” my Uncle Matt as “the Mafioso,” and my mother as “the paranoid nut.” Once, when my Aunt Cristina takes the IRT up to 174th Street and walks to the housing project and knocks on the door, Rebecca seems not to know her at first, and then says, in surprise, “Oh, Cristie. Hi.” Cristie has come uptown because she wants to see the new baby. Rebecca has her coat on, and is preparing to do the weekly marketing. Andrew is bundled in his snowsuit. The thirteen-year-old girl from next door is in the living room doing her homework. Rebecca takes Cristie into the room where Michael sleeps “He’s beautiful, God bless him,” Cristie says.

“Thank you,” Rebecca says. “Cristie, I hope you don’t mind, but I was just on the way out.”

“That’s all right,” Cristie says, but later she tells my mother, “She didn’t even offer me a cup of coffee.” When I confront Rebecca with this, she says, “Well, I was all ready to go out; Andrew was in his snow-suit.”

“Honey, that was my
aunt
! She made me lemonade every day of my life!”

“She should have called first,” Rebecca says.

We visit Harlem rarely. My grandfather still has the tailor shop on First Avenue, but the neighborhood is rapidly turning Puerto Rican, and Rebecca is fearful of making the trip downtown. Where Sophie had once protected her “treasures” from the goyim who drunkenly invaded the ghetto, Rebecca now refuses to bring
her
treasures — Andrew and little Michael — into another ghetto, where they may be harmed. I tell her the neighborhood is actually safer than the one in which we live, and she says, “You’re thinking of when you were a kid. It’s changed.”

I sometimes wish I could go home.

I sometimes know exactly how my grandfather felt during that decade when he was twenty-four and longing to return to Fiormonte.

“Oh, and
these
,” Rebecca says to her aunt. “Oh, these are my favorite pictures.”

The job is really in Treasure Island. The man who hires me for it, on recommendation from the leader of the house band where I am playing between sets, is fifty-four years old. His name is Archie Coombes, and he tells me at our first meeting that he is probably the world’s lousiest drummer, but his brother-in-law owns this small place on the Gulf, and this is how he gets a winter vacation each year; his brother hires him to come down with a pickup trio. The job doesn’t pay much, he says, but what the hell, it’s been a miserable winter, and maybe I can use some sunshine for myself and the family, he understands I have two kids. He tells me he is also looking for a good bass player, and when I recommend Stu Holman, he asks immediately if Stu is colored. He does not hire Stu. The bassist we end up with is a sixty-two-year-old white man, who reportedly once played with another Whiteman named Paul. I accept the job, but I have the feeling I will be making music with one of the Jimmy Palmer orchestras.

Rebecca is overjoyed. This is January of 1953, and she is six months pregnant with our third child (“I am going to
burn
that fucking diaphragm!”), and we have just come through a siege of chicken pox with Andrew and Michael. The children, in fact, still have drying scabs on their faces when we move into the rented house on Pass-A-Grille. The house is small — it once was the caretaker’s cottage for the sumptuous twelve-room mansion that sits on two acres of ocean-front property. We walk through the house with the real estate agent who found the rental for us. I can sense Rebecca’s disappointment. Kitchen, living room, bedroom, one bath. We are paying $750 for the month — which is exactly $250 less than I will be earning with the Archie Coombes trio. We are in the living room, the real estate agent is helpfully explaining that the two little boys can sleep together on the sofa bed. She is rattling a doorknob now, trying to open the glass-louvered doors leading to the rear of the house. She flings the doors wide with a sudden grunt, and I feel a rush of sunshine on my face and smell the heavy moisture-laden aroma of tropical plants. Beside me, Rebecca gasps and takes my hand, and leads me into the garden. I can barely keep up with her. She is ballooning with pregnancy, but she moves about the garden like a ballet dancer in flight, stopping at each bloom to identify it for me. “This is hibiscus, and this is bougainvillaea, and look, Ike, oh my God, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever, oh God. it’s an oleander!” In the distance I can hear the sound of the surf, and suddenly I smile.

“Peter Pan,” 
I say.

In the apartment we move to on Ninety-seventh and West End, Andrew has his own bedroom, and Michael shares a room with his new brother. I have started another band. We rehearse in the huge, sparsely furnished living room because we cannot afford studio space. Rebecca constantly tells me that if I’m trying to break the lease, I’m well on the way to success. She no longer believes the
other
success is possible. She has been married to me for almost six years, this is the fall of 1954, and we are virtually standing still except for our boundless capacity to produce big, beautiful children. She is beginning to have doubts, and so am I. What if I
don’t
make it? What if I am one of those who never make it? (“He’s got to
make
it first, you understand. Lots of guys
never
make it.”) This is America, and I am talented and industrious and ambitious, but even in America two bills a week don’t go very far when you’re trying to raise a family. That is what I am earning with the quintet. Two hundred dollars a week. More or less. Some weeks. Rebecca counts out the money as grudgingly as a miser, putting aside so much for rent, so much for gas and electricity, so much for food and clothing, so much for entertainment. There is not much for entertainment, but then again there is rarely
time
for entertainment, either. I work six nights a week (when I’m working), and because baby-sitters cost more than we can afford, and because Rebecca has learned to hate sitting around smoky toilets while I play piano, and because some of the jobs are out on the Island or over in New Jersey or, once in a blue moon, up in Schenectady or Newburgh, I rarely see Rebecca on any night of the week but Monday. During the day, I either sleep or rehearse. I am pursuing success, certain I can track and trap that hairy beast. I am American.

My family is a new family. It consists of Rebecca and the children, my parents, and Sophie and Davina. (I do not consider Davina’s recently acquired husband a part of the family; I never ask him to pour the wine.) I see my grandfather only on holidays, though I try to call him at least once a week. I beg him to move out of Harlem; he has been having trouble lately with Puerto Rican street gangs who come into the shop demanding protection money. He is seventy-four years old, and though I can remember in exact detail the courageous stand he took in 1937, I am now truly fearful for his life. He belittles my concern “
È niente,”
he tells me.
“Non ti preoccupare, Ignazio”
The Italian words almost move me to tears. I do not know why. I have begun to learn a great many Yiddish expressions. Rebecca’s friends tell me I’m more Jewish than she is. “You’re a bigger Jew than any of us,” they say, and I take pride in this, certain it means they approve of me. They are calling me a white nigger, but I do not realize it.

In bed, in our spacious bedroom overlooking Ninety-seventh Street, in an apartment we are beginning to think we cannot afford, I sometimes wonder who is under the covers with Rebecca and me. It is surely not the two of us alone, grappling with this sweaty antagonist who yields so grudgingly. Is Tina in the closet wriggling her ass on these rumpled sheets, is Basilio in the locker room squirming against a Palumbo cock now become my own? It cannot be the two of us alone, laboring in tangled enterprise gone stale. I never know when she desires me now; she gives me not the faintest clue. I sometimes lie engorged beside her, certain she can sense my heat, yet reluctant to make an overture that will be either rebuffed or ridiculed. Where once
I
 was the Blind Shaygets, all of me, all five feet eleven inches of me (a title I wore proudly because it defined her father’s own blind prejudice), the appellation has now been applied by Rebecca to three or four or five or seven inches of me instead — my one-eyed cock rising in blind expectation against her flesh. “Ooops, here comes the Blind Shaygets,” she says, and sometimes seizes me in both hands, and shakes me, and says in mock (I think) anger, “Don’t you ever sleep,
shaygets
? What do you want to do, knock me up again?” She is terrified of having another baby. She sometimes stands before the mirror examining the stretch marks on her belly, and says (although she knows I cannot see), “Look what you did to me.” So I lie beside her waiting for a move that never comes, waiting for her to reach for me and murmur, “Do you want to make love?” Sometimes, she encircles the Blind Shaygets with her hand, and gently teases it till I am quaking with desire, and then her hand stops, and I wait. And wait. And wait. And then realize she has drifted off to sleep with a hard-on in her fist.

When we do make love, she tells me I must learn to control what is surely premature ejaculation. If I complain that Susan Koenig never seemed to find my orgasms too swift for her pleasure, she tells me Susan Koenig was a fucking sex fiend, and besides, she doesn’t want to hear about Susan Koenig or Michelle whatever-her-name-was with the big tits. So I learn to control my premature ejaculations. While pumping diligently away, Rebecca supervising the work on our construction site (“That’s it, a little faster,
no
, goddamnit, don’t stop what you’re doing”), I allow my mind to consider the conformation of bicycle wheels or roller skates, lemon peels or stale pizza crusts, anything to keep from spurting too soon into that lubricated vault stuffed with diaphragm and diagrams. And when at last she grudgingly releases what she has been hoarding, expiring on a single exhalation of breath, tumbling from the spire of the Chrysler Building or the top of the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever architectural wonder we have wrought together, only then do I allow myself to consider Michelle’s swollen breasts or Susan’s grinding hips or thirsting mouth, and come inside Rebecca.

Would you like to know how I became a big success?

By accident.

And overnight, of course. This is America, and all successes here happen overnight. Ten years of studying classical music, and eleven years of learning to play jazz — the nights are longer here, especially now that we’re on daylight-saving time all year round.

My mother still can’t believe a grown man can earn a living playing piano. If I were not blind, I’m sure she’d insist I find a good civil service job. Even being blind, I should be able to do something else, no? (Like what, Mom? Watch repairing?) Did I mention that my father collects all sorts of things? Anal, I’m sure. Coins, stamps, first-day covers, matchbooks, cigar bands, and of course clippings about his famous son, Dwight Jamison. Didn’t I mention it? Time is running out, this is the last thirty-two bars, and I have the feeling there are many things I haven’t mentioned yet. He’s a collector, Pop is. He is especially proud of his coin collection; he has left it to my youngest son David in his will. I know because my lawyer prepared the will. First let me tell you about that coin collection, and then I’ll tell you about my mother’s attitude toward piano players in general and me in particular. If I forget anything, just nudge me.

My manager, Mark Aronowitz, also collects coins. With him, it’s an investment. (Everything with Mark is an investment, which is why he doesn’t call me much anymore.) Well, in 1961, 1962, I’m not sure which, the baker decided to sell the house on 217th Street because “the neighborhood was changing.” This meant the neighborhood was becoming black. My parents found a new apartment on the Grand Concourse. Ironically, they chose this location because it was close to where Sophie and Abe were living. By that time, they had become fast friends with the Baumgartens, played poker with them every Sunday night, became members of their Family Circle, went to Broadway musicals and kosher restaurants with them, the whole megillah. Anyway, my mother insisted that my father clear out all that junk on the sun porch before they moved. She was referring to his collection of coins, stamps, matchbooks, and so on. I suggested to my father that if he was thinking of selling the coins, my manager might be happy to take them off his hands. “Well, I don’t know if he can afford them,” my father said. “They’re worth a fortune.” (Are you ahead of me? You can never anticipate me at the piano because while
you’re
listening to Bar 10,
I’m
already working on Bar 11 in my head — but this ain’t a piano, ma’am.) My father lugged his precious coins down to Broadway and Forty-seventh, and Mark looked them over and called me that very afternoon. “Ike,” he said, “what am I supposed to
tell
your father? The stuff is worth face value; there isn’t a rare or even slightly hard-to-find coin in the lot.” I handled it by telling my father a lie. I told him he was right, Mark simply couldn’t afford the collection, he’d probably do better taking it to a dealer. My father never took it to a dealer. “The hell with it,” he said, “I’ll leave it to the kids.” So when he dies, David will inherit from him something worth maybe five hundred dollars, if that much. It’s the thought that counts.