The Best Revenge (18 page)

“You don't look a day older, Ben. Life must be good to you. I hope you got some sleep after my call.”

I noted the photographs of several children on the credenza along one wall.

“Nephews and nieces,” Sam said quickly. “My sisters are baby factories. I'm not married.”

After the how-was-your-flight prattle, I said, “Sam, I still don't know what you do.”

“A little of this, a little of that.”

We both laughed.

“I collect money,” he said, doodling on the pad in front of him.

“What do you sell, for Christ's sake?”

“Nothing. No investment in inventory. I'm the collection agency.”

I wished I hadn't asked.

“Sam,” I said, “I'd like to make a deal with you, to have you aboard for all my plays.”

“That's real nice, Ben, but we're talking about the play you got both feet in right now. I want out.”

“Sam, if you pulled out now, I couldn't invite you into my future shows.”

“Bennie, this isn't high school. I invited myself in the first time. You didn't invite me back. You don't like me.”

“I have every confidence…”

He waited. I didn't finish.

He said, “Did you bring a check like I said?”

“Sam, Mitch Mitchell has given me three hits and no flops. The casting is perfect.
The Best Revenge
is a terrific play. I wish you would have faith and stay. Please.”

Sam stopped doodling and put the pencil down. “In this place, Ben, we hear a lot of pleases on the phones. If I listened to words like that we wouldn't be in business. All
please
means is you don't have a bargaining position.”

“What do you want?”

“Your personal check. I'm sure you've got a blank in your wallet.”

“If you leave your units in, Sam, I'm prepared to give you a side deal of a kind I've never done with anybody. In addition to your share I'll throw in five percent of the producer's share. And I'll give you an airtight right of first refusal on my next five productions.”

“If you don't have a blank check, Ben, I can give you one. What's the name of your bank? I can phone and get the account number.”

“I came to Chicago because I thought we could talk things over.”

“We just did, Ben. I have a young friend in Manhattan, a kid lawyer who's been very helpful privately with some big New York accounts. I can call him right now, while you're here.” He buzzed his secretary.

“Sadie,” he said, “get me Forty-four in New York.”

“Cancel the call,” I said, taking out my checkbook.

When I handed him the check, he studied it a moment and said, “You flying back?”

“Not till five. I've got another appointment.”

“Mind if I write down the number of where you're going to be?”

15

Anna Addison

Ben was broad-shouldered like his father but nearly a head higher. Without touching his bushy hair you could tell it was soft like Louie's, but the rest of him was more like Zipporah, the tall way he walked into my apartment, kissing me on both cheeks as in a French movie, and putting into my hands a small blue package tied with an elegant silver elastic. On the box was one word:
Peacock's.

“Go ahead, open it,” Ben said.

I lifted the cover. Against the white cotton lay a silver teardrop on a delicate chain, a girl's engagement present.

“Do you like it?”

“I love it,” I said, rubbing my eye with the back of my hand. I didn't want him to look at my hands. He took them in his as if to say the bumps didn't matter because the hands were mine.

I had to break loose and go to the bedroom for a handkerchief. I pulled out the drawer and there beside the neat pile of cotton handkerchiefs was the lace one I used to stuff in my sleeve when Charles and I went gallivanting. I took that one, of course, and hurried back to find Ben staring out of the window.

“You remember Chicago?” I said.

“Only the inside of hotel rooms, rehearsal halls, restaurants. You know how it is on business trips.”

He never got in touch with me.

“Is something wrong?” Ben asked.

“No, no, no,” I said. It takes reaching a certain age to want to connect back with the past before you die. “You remember nothing from when you lived here?” I asked.

He turned from the window, such a good-looking man, such sad eyes.

“I'll help you remember,” I said, “as soon as I put up some tea.” Settled over sandwiches and tea, I said, “Would you like to have your tea leaves read?”

“I've never gone to places like that.”

“No, no. I meant here. By me. I haven't done it in years.”

Ben looked into his cup. “It might show what I don't want to see.”

“Ben, I don't need leaves. A man with your gifts has his future in his pocket. All he needs is to remind himself once in a while.”

“Thank you, Anna.”

“Thank Louie. Thank Zipporah, not me,” I said. “You know your parents, we were very close.”

“I know.”

How could I say to him that they were the first good friends I had who were Jewish, whose feelings glided off the tips of their tongues. They'd say anything in front of me. At first it made me nervous to be around such people. I had to get it through my skull that it was an honor to share instead of to hide. Those two people took the walls off my soul.

“Anna?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about the money?”

“What money?”

“My father was making out very well and suddenly it all vanished.”

“There was a depression.”

“You came through it okay.”

“Charles was a teacher.”

“Other people came through it.”

“The past is the past. Why think about it now?”

What did I say wrong?

“I think about the past, too,” I said. “It wasn't just money. Your brother Harold's nephritis, you must know about that?”

Ben nodded.

“He was what, three years old? In those days there weren't antibiotics. The doctor, I'm trying to remember his name, he used to push hope at your mother. Louie didn't buy it. Once I asked Louie how he could be so sure that Harold would die. He said, ‘A Jew is born thinking that every door he opens will reveal some form of the angel of death.' After listening to Louie, I would lie in bed at night praying for Harold.”

Ben leaned over. “If it hurts to talk about it, don't,” he said.

“More tea?” I asked.

Ben shook his head of hair just like Louie. I wasn't going to tell him that when Charles reached over to console me at night, I pushed his hands away because I was thinking of Louie's hands!

I said, “Your mother and father were like a tribe of two people beaten in war.”

“They never got over it.”

“They loved you, too,” I said.

“You can't compete with the dead,” Ben said. “They grow more perfect year by year.”

*

“Do you remember the baby grand piano?” I asked Ben.

“No. Who played the piano?”

“Nobody, Louie said if you want your son to be a mountain climber, you put him in front of a mountain. In those days Louie could afford anything so he bought the piano thinking it would be an inspiration.”

“For Harold.”

“Don't be ridiculous. For both of you. Do you remember the parquet floors around the Oriental rug? The library—ten thousand books, floor to ceiling everywhere. Some Russian, some in Yiddish, a complete set of Zola signed by Zola if you'd believe, and in English, all of Mark Twain, all of O. Henry. You used to play in that room all the time, opening books as if you could read them.”

“I don't remember,” Ben said.

“How could you forget a room filled with more books than Ein
stein could read in a lifetime?”

“You make it sound as if my father were very successful.”

“Oh, he was. If you asked your mother, she'd say it was Louie's funny stories that attracted customers. But she knew the truth. Most of the people who bought from Louie hated the fancy atmosphere of the jewelry stores in the Loop, with salesmen who condescended to help you pick something in good taste because obviously you couldn't. In Louie's place it was just a little office half the size of this room, a table, three chairs, and a big safe. People got bargains from Louie. He had so many customers he could pay for the carpets, the piano, for clothes that made your mother look like a queen and you like a prince. Zipporah was always going on about how she could have married some professor, but what professor could have given her all those belongings. And more.”

“More?” Ben asked.

There are some things you don't say to a son about his parents, even if the son is over fifty. So I said, “Louis was an interesting person” instead of a good lover, because how would I have known if Zipporah hadn't told me how addicted she was to the touch of his fingers.

Why was Ben staring at the phone? “Are you expecting a call?”

He shook his head. Louie was a liar about such things, too.

Suddenly Ben said to me, “Anna, you could have been an actress.”

“Me?” I said. “I can't remember my grocery list, how would I remember a whole play?”

“That's not what I meant,” Ben said. “You have such poise. Your back is such a straight line.”

“Charles always said I had good posture.”

“It's the authority,” Ben said. “You could have played a queen.”

“You're confusing me with your mother.” I felt very uncomfortable with the way Ben was looking at me. I don't mean uncomfortable. I mean too comfortable. What a foolish thought. Quickly I decided I better bring my Charles into the room as a chaperon!

“Charles,” I said to Ben, “loved books differently than your father. He would examine the type sizes, measure the margins on the page, figure out the number of words compared to the outside dimensions. He was looking for efficiency. We all get something different out of books, why should I interfere with his pleasure just because he didn't like to read.”

I got up and went over to the window, happy to hear Ben chuckling softly behind me. I used to love it when men reacted to my way of putting things.

I pulled the curtains a bit farther apart. Was it to let in more streetlight, or to dispel an atmosphere that I suddenly thought ridiculous? I am thirty years older than him, he must have a beautiful wife, he is not Louie. I felt a pain, thank God, in my left arm and shoulder, a sign. To change the subject I said the first thing that came to mind: “How did you come to pick the theater, Ben?”

“It picked me.”

His face completely changed. He was staring at the telephone again. Why did Bennie, the most successful person I had ever met, suddenly look like his father's ghost? I was about to put my arms around him, when the phone pierced the room with its aggressive, demanding, insistent sound.

Comment by Ben

My instinct was to grab the phone. I thought, It's her phone.

“Hello, hello,” Anna was saying. “Yes. A minute please.”

She held the receiver out for me. “It's for you. A man.”

“Yes?” I said into the phone.

“Ben, it's Sam Glenn here. I got some bad news for you. I never deposit a check that might bounce without checking the bank first. Ben, using escrow funds is a crime. Knowingly issuing a bad check is a second crime. You better come back to my office right now.”

“Relax, Sam,” I said, “I've just closed the partnership with a single investor who's picking up the balance.”

“You are a fucking liar, Ben.”

“I can't say what I'd like to say, Sam, there's a lady in the room.”

“She your investor?”

“No, someone in New York I talked to half an hour ago.”

I saw Anna trying to understand my lie.

Sam said, “You better give me his name.”

What name?

“I'm waiting.”

Go ahead,
Louie said,
use it.

“Manucci,” I said.

“Spell it.”

I spelled it.

“First name?”

“Arthur.” Whole cloth.

“Phone number?”

“Listen, Sam, I just made the deal. Give me three or four days to get the papers signed.”

“Is he listed?”

“Must be.”

“Manhattan?”

I couldn't hesitate. He'd know I was inventing. “Bronx.”

“Hey, Ben, what the fuck is someone with that kind of money doing in the Bronx? You come down to my office.”

“I've got to catch the five o'clock out of O'Hare.”

“Ben, I'm going to call this Arthur Manucci, just in case he's real. I'll tell him I'm just a friendly fellow investor checking to see who else is in the deal. You'd better not be fucking me over, Bennie. I'm getting my dough back or you're going to jail.”

He slammed the phone down so hard I was sure Anna heard it.

“What's the matter, Ben?”

“It's nothing.”

“Nothing is nothing. Tell me.”

“I'm having a little trouble raising the money to put a play on.”

“If you don't raise the money,” Anna said, “don't put it on.”

There it was, straight and simple, from a woman who knew nothing of business. How could I explain to her that all my life I did things first, then figured out how to pay for whatever I was doing?

I excused myself to go to the bathroom not just because much tea will eventually require it, but because I wanted a moment's thought without Anna's face in front of me.