VI

You Will Hurt Your Foot

"Have you you left Belle yet?" said Ralph. "In that case, please give her my love. Do it soon, though, if you hope to propose to Andrea and marry her before your appointment is announced. Now these Commission meetings tomorrow morning can be of great importance to you, Bruce, because they're of no importance to anyone else. Do whatever you want as long as you do whatever we want. We have no ideas, and they're pretty firm. Seize control. This Administration will back you all the way until it has to."

Gold arrived for his first Presidential Commission meeting punctually at eight-thirty the following morning as though borne to his destiny on a tide of optimism and felt his poise crumble when he found nobody there. At ten, an enticing, buxom woman with black hair in a ponytail entered with several young assistants to supervise the physical arrangements and was staggered to discover someone else already present for an official meeting slated to convene but an hour and a half earlier. Her name was Miss Plum. She had much makeup on her comely face, and a necklace of green Mexican beads lay languorously between her breasts. Gold cursed his poor judgment in arriving on time. He prowled nervously to and fro in the marble hallways and neighboring side rooms like a creature in fear of ambush, praying feverishly for his allies on the Commission to join him. In a while a coffee wagon rolled into the anteroom, closely stalked by a celebrated, superannuated career diplomat in striped pants and morning coat, who, stretching upward on his toes for improved range, was plucking avidly at the raisins and glazed almonds on the pastries he still had spryness enough to reach.

The hour was past eleven when his remaining twenty-three colleagues arrived in chattering clusters so concentrated that all could have alighted from the same chariot. The walls resounded with hearty salutations from which Gold was excluded. People tended to look and move right through him as though he were made of something nebulous. All were addressed by title. Eventually, Gold was introduced to a defeated mayor, a deposed old judge who could hardly see, a retired naval commander, an apostate clergyman in splendid vestments, and the ex-athletic director of a large university who wore a sweatshirt, whistle, and billed cap and was called Coach. Even Gold had a title: his title was Doctor, and as far as he could tell, he was the only member of that superior group with a job—as a doctor, although it was only as doctor of philosophy, and in English literature at that.

He was distressed from the outset by how little attention his presence excited, and his powers of speech were vitiated by his dread of being considered inferior. He began to wonder if he were the only Jew. Introductions were performed by Miss Plum with effulgent cheerfulness and inviting sexual warmth and there was much lewd laying on of hands by the more elderly men who had worked and resided in Washington longest and were most in keeping with the customs. Miss Plum had been divorced four times, and Gold could tell she was not a virgin. Overshadowing all was a handsome, silver-haired former governor of Texas with a chiseled cleft in his chin and a reputation for emanating authority,

"I'm glad to meet you, Dr. Gold," the Governor said crisply when Miss Plum finally brought them together. The flat blue eyes resting on Gold were friendly as ice. "People tell me you're a genius."

"Who?" Gold blurted out, repenting the blunder even as he was committing it.

"You can't be much of a genius if you don't even know that," said the Governor, turning away. "Good morning, Mayor, you're looking marvelous. So is the Deputy and the Chief. Have you seen the Admiral?"

"He's with the Consul and the Chancellor, Governor. Enjoying a word with the Widow."

"Who is the Spade?"

"He's our new Token Black. A brilliant scholarship student at Oxford."

"He knows his place?"

"At the foot of the table. They tell me, Governor, you might be back as a Secretary soon."

"Ho, ho, ho, Solicitor-General." The Governor advocated caution with a reproving shake of his finger. "You must have been eavesdropping on the Major or the Coach. I do know I'm up for an Under."

"The Ambassador certainly looks healthy again since he lost Vietnam, Chile, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Pakistan, China, Africa, Thailand, and the Middle East, doesn't he?"

"He bounces back every time. The tougher the losses, the tougher he gets. Look at that vitality."

All turned with love to glance past Gold at the active old Ambassador, who, in a world of his own at the coffee wagon, was busily stuffing cakes into the pockets of his morning coat, striped trousers, and pearl-gray weskit.

Gold was stung again by their indifference. He would either have to forgo the society of such people or get used to stinging, and he knew already it was going to be the latter.

He was eager for the chance to excel and take charge when he heard Miss Plum suggest softly that all move inside the conference room and begin. In his briefcase were notes for an opening statement that would start with remarks from Montaigne and Erasmus and end with a likable summation from John Henry Cardinal Newman that would win him the enduring loyalty of the Roman Catholic episcopacy in America, provided he were never examined closely on abortion, transubstantiation, the Resurrection, or papal infallibility. Coach was named Permanent Temporary Chairman and the Governor said:

"Let's adjourn."

"Till when?" screamed Gold as the room cleared.

"You'll be informed, hon," Miss Plum crooned, placing a gentle hand on his neck. There was perfume in her breath and the scent of freshly soaped flesh floated from the low neckline of her dress. "It isn't necessary to work eight hours to get your thousand a day."

Gold could have fucked her right there. Sympathetically she guided him out through a darkened alcove lined with telephone booths, where she took his hand and curled her fingers ever so lightly toward the tips of his own. Gold drew Miss Plum inside a telephone booth and pressed her against his member.

"Not here," she said. "It's against the law."

"Then where?"

"Anywhere. Andrea's apartment."

"Oh, shit." Dejection superseded lust. "You know Andrea?"

"She tells me you're great."

"I'm not. Andrea doesn't know."

"She tells me you're powerful and domineering and rates you an A plus. Power turns me on."

"It's a known aphrodisiac. But power corrupts."

"Don't I know it."

"I love you, Miss Plum."

"Felicity."

"But breathe that to a soul and I'll break your head."

Felicity Plum scheduled another session for the following day just to see him again that much sooner.

By then, Gold had learned in Washington that the CIA was recruiting mercenaries to fight in Africa. He learned this at breakfast from his morning newspaper when he read:

CIA DENIES RECRUITING MERCENARIES TO FIGHT IN AFRICA

In Congress all the preceding day, members of a coalition of right-wing Republicans and Democrats had been taking the floor to extol the CIA for recruiting mercenaries to fight in Africa.

Gold was stern in his determination not to be outdone again as he arrived with the others for the second meeting of the Commission with an expression of almost belligerent impudence. Even Miss Plum had a title now, he noticed; her title was Dear. Gold casually lifted a licentious hand to her shoulder and found hairy, cold, wrinkled flesh and fossilized bone. The old blind Judge had got there first.

They convened earlier than the preceding day. Coach gaveled the session to order and the Governor said:

"Let's quit. We've already spent more time on these problems than I think they deserve."

There tore from Gold a feline wail of protest. "No! Please! We haven't spent any!"

"And it's more than enough," said a quondam Attaché. "We've done as much as we're going to. Let's get out."

"We haven't done anything!"

"And in record time, too," clucked the Ambassador. "I was once on a Presidential Commission that took almost three years to do nothing, and here we've accomplished the same thing in only two meetings."

"We have computers now," said the Widow.

"I agree with the Governor," said the retired Naval Commander. "And I command we conclude the work of this Commission by unanimous consent."

"I agree with the Commander," said the Governor.

"All in favor say aye."

"I object," said Gold.

"One objection, the rest ayes," said Coach. "The motion is carried by unanimous consent. Can I drop you at the reception, Governor?"

"I'm going to the brunch."

"Then I'll see you at the lunch."

"I'm so glad it's over," chortled the Ambassador, "even though I'm sorry. I love the expense money so—" he made fists of his hands and tapped them together—"and all these free cakes."

"But we can do so much more," Gold pleaded. "We haven't even called any authorities."

"Gold." The Governor pronounced the name quietly and the others fell silent. "Everyone here is an authority." Even seated the Governor projected that extra impression of size that placed him head and shoulders above all the rest. "In about three minutes, we are going to leave this room. Any reporters outside will come to me first because I'm the most important one here and can emanate emanations of authority that have been commented upon the world over. I'm famous for them, dammit! I'm going to notify them that the business of this Commission is concluded and that we've done all we could under most difficult circumstances—that the people will understand when they read our report. Now if you want to tell them something else, you do that. But you will be giving insult to me and the rest of these fine people who have worked together with you cheek to jowl and hip to thigh, and you better believe right now that sooner or later I'll have your pecker in my pocket, along with all the other peckers I've collected in a successful political career that has been a surprise and a joy to my teachers, my family, and my friends. Now do you want to tell me I'm wrong?"

Gold did not.

"I'm obliged to you for that," said the Governor. "Gold, you a Jew, ain't you?"

No hell could be worse, or with more finality seem eternal, than the instants Gold needed to reply to that deafening question. The cutting word was pronounced as though the letter y had sneaked in before the vowel, and Gold also took note of the Governor's declension into a cruder syntax. He prayed with passion for the voice of some Arthurian champion to supervene; his prayer was answered with the silence of a tomb.

"I'm Jewish, sir," he replied with a flippant dignity invented for the purpose, "if that's what you mean."

"What in hell else do you think I mean?"

"I was not," said Gold, "totally sure."

"It don't make a sparrow shit's worth of difference whether you are totally sure or are not totally sure, and the sooner you learn that fact the safer your pecker will be. Hey, boy!" The Governor abruptly moved his gaze to the black student at the foot of the conference table. "You a nigger, ain't you? You understand what I mean when I say you a nigger, don't you?"

The student squared his shoulders. "The ones I don't like are those Northern liberals who say one thing and mean another. I know where I stand with you and you know where you stand with me."

"Where do I stand with you?"

"Wherever you want to, Master."

The Governor redirected his attention to Gold with a patronizing sigh of impatience. "Now, Gold. Everybody here is a somebody, and I don't know why you're being so captious about who it is you are. He is the Spade, she is the Widow, I am the Governor, and you're the—"

"Doctor!" yelled Gold in time to ward off a crushing repetition of that denunciatory term. "The Doctor!"

The Governor's manner was transformed into one of self-interest. "You an osteopath or something, Gold? A faith healer? A chiropractor?" He flexed his arm and massaged his shoulder. "I may have a pinch of bursitis that could use relief."

"I'd like him to examine my foot," said the Coach, unlacing his shoe, while the Judge waved wildly for Gold's attention and tapped his breastbone as though suffocating while fumbling with the buttons of his shirt as the Consul stuck his tongue out toward Gold with a cough and the Ambassador rose, bent his asshole to Gold, and began dropping his striped pants.

Gold's cries now were of terror mingled with desperation. "Of philosophy!" he yelped, slapping his brow. "I'm a Doctor of Philosophy! A professor. I'm a writer!"

"Then fuck my bursitis," said the Governor with an emanation of authority of the kind for which he was justly renowned and an air of expeditiousness for which he was also applauded universally. "You write the report. Can I drop you at the reception, Widow?"

"Thank you, Governor, but I'm praying with the Bishop."

"Then the Envoy and I will see you at the ball park."

"What should I write?" Gold broke in helplessly.

"Anything you want," said the Governor, and the Ambassador cheered "Hear! Hear!" "As long as it doesn't contain a single thing anyone here might take exception to." A look of mercy crept into his eyes and he spoke with benevolence. "Gold, a Jew always needs friends in Washington, because he doesn't really belong here. Don't argue—listen. You oblige me in this and I may help you get some."

Relief was Gold's first emotion and his fires of initiative were damped. "How would you like me to write the report, sir?" he asked.

"Make it short," the Governor advised, "and make it long. Make it clear and make it fuzzy. Make it short by coming right to each point. Then make it long by qualifying those points so that nobody can tell the qualifications from the points or ever figure out what we're talking about."

"I think I know," said Gold, "what you mean."

The Governor was mollified. "Let me give you five good rules of behavior I got from my momma the first time I left our dirt farm for the great big city of Austin. My momma, bless her heart, instructed me, 'Don't make personal remarks, never tell a hostess you enjoyed yourself, don't force anything mechanical, never kick anything inanimate, and don't fart around with the inevitable.' Now, Gold, it appeared that in disputing with me you were drawing very close to farting around with the inevitable. I hope I am mistaken.

"It was certainly not my intention, sir," said Gold, "to fart around with the inevitable. Or to force anything mechanical. I will never kick anything inanimate."

The Governor placed his huge hand upon Gold's shoulder in a gesture of fraternal pardon. "Understand that nobody in this room ever wants to read our report. That's another reason you must make it too long to be published in total in that damned New York Times. Otherwise, some of these nosy journalists might be pestering us for years with questions we don't know the answers to about matters we have no interest in. Will I see you at cocktails, Mr. Special Prosecutor?"

"No, Governor. We're going straight to the banquet with the Comptroller and the Queer. Will you be at the ball?"

"The Mrs. and I will be detained at the orgy. But perhaps at the supper."

"If I'm able to get there. I'll be shooting the shit with the Adjutant and the Bailiff. Let's say hello to the Crook and goodbye to the Champ."

"I am not a crook," said the Crook.

Gold was sorry it was over and missed them dearly. Working in concert, they had accomplished in just two meetings what had taken others as long as three years: nothing. He had served on his first Presidential Commission, and oh, the joy—the intoxicating ecstasy of being insulted and condescended to by people of established social position who ignored, abused, or despised him, the gratification in being admitted into such company as an insignificant status-seeker to be overlooked and snubbed, interrupted when he did try to speak and banished with such grace from each conversation he attempted to penetrate. They were occupied with brunches, lunches, and orgies at which his presence was not yet desired. They went to the ball park with Widows and Prelates and had good seats. How he envied their sense of belonging and their impervious stupidity.

"Invite a Jew to the White House (and You Make Him Your Slave)" was a snide attack on Lieberman he had planned writing after the latter's invitation to the White House for supporting a war. How close, as Ralph had discerned, Gold often came by whim, jealousy, and blind intuition to the fundamental truths of his world.

And how pleasing the custom of allowing people to wear like plumes the titles of the highest position they had held. If I were President, thought Gold—when I am President, he amended in fanciful contemplation— everyone will be appointed to some good government position one day and asked to resign the next, so that all in the land—regardless of race, occupation, family, creed, or financial station—can go through life called Ambassador, Judge, Major, or Secretary, instead of Esther, Rose, Irv, Victor, Julius or Sid.

Gold was jarred from his reverie by news from Miss Plum that four reporters had lingered outside in hopes of obtaining some truth from him.

They could hardly have been younger, and they came flocking about him for light like moths around a dark bulb. One was a tall pretty girl with a small face and straight blond hair who asked in a tone of nagging disrespect as querulous as any of which Gold had ever been the target just what he and the others were trying to pretend they'd accomplished. Gold decided to seduce her.

"Frankly, my dear, I don't know," he began in a practiced mode of disarming modesty, but could get no further. They had flown.

"That was terrible!" Miss Plum rebuked him severely in a panic that brought a strained ellipse of unsightly tension around her voluptuous mouth and beads of sweat to her cheeks and forehead. "You're never supposed to say that!"

"That was great!" cheered Ralph on the telephone before Gold could slink from the building in solitary disgrace. "Cables of your declaration are already out to our embassies in computerized code."

"What declaration?"

"Your motto is now a mainstay of official policy."

"What motto?"

"Your instinct is infallible, your words poetic, your modesty endearing. Bruce, you boggle my mind. Rush right over now to our next press briefing. An executive order has been issued to sneak you in."

"You are wonderful," cried Miss Plum, pressing close, but Gold no longer loved her and knew he would never wish to hold her against his member again.

He arrived for the White House press briefing not a moment too soon and found a place against the wall with an uninterrupted view of the lectern just as the Press Secretary said: "I have an announcement to make. As you know, this President conducts an open Administration and is committed to total truth. In keeping with that policy,

I have to announce that I have no announcement to make. Nothing's happened since yesterday."

There was a dumbfounded pause in the room before a veteran newsman up front asked, "Nothing?"

"That is correct. There is no news today."

"No news?"

"No news."

"Not a thing?"

"Not a thing worth talking about."

"Is that just for Washington, Ron?" asked a voice at the side. "Or is that true of the rest of the country as well?"

"Just for Washington. We don't care about the rest of the country."

"You don't care about the rest of the country?"

"That is correct."

"Does that mean there'll be nothing in the newspapers about the President?"

"That's right. Unless you want to make a story out of that. Can we move along?"

"Your announcement leaves me somewhat at a loss, Ron, so let me go back several years. Some time ago, Ron, the former head of the CIA, Richard Helms, appeared to have lied under oath to at least one Congressional committee. Yet he was allowed to remain as Ambassador to Iran instead of being indicted for this crime and brought to trial. Can you comment on that?"

"No. This Administration does not feel it appropriate to comment on matters that are under investigation."

"Are you saying," asked a woman quickly, "that the matter is under investigation?"

"I didn't say that."

"But isn't that the implication of what you did say?"

"I don't know."

At this reply a collective gasp of amazement filled the room and was followed by a tempest of excitement in which one voice at last rose above the rest.

"What was that?"

"I don't know."

"Could you say that again?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I really don't know."

"Holy cow! Ron, Ron, would you mind repeating that one for the mike. I want to be absolutely sure I have it on tape."

"Certainly. I don't know."

"Thank you, Ron. That was swell."

"Is that reply for attribution? Are you willing to let yourself be quoted on that?"

"I don't know."

"You mean you don't know whether you're willing to let yourself be quoted saying you don't know?"

"That is correct."

"Can we quote you on that one?"

"I don't know."

"Ron, is there anyone else in a position of authority in government, or anywhere else, who ever said, T don't know'?"

"I don't know. Those are the words of Dr. Bruce Gold, who teaches college in Brooklyn, New York, and may soon be coming to work for the Administration."

"In what capacity, Ron, would Dr. Gold be coming to work for the Administration?"

"I don't know. May we move on?"

"You remember Henry Kissinger, don't you? What was your opinion of him?"

"Second-rate."

"That was his opinion of Richard Nixon, wasn't it?"

"Make that third-rate."

"That's something that's always puzzled me, Ron. If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?"

"Henry Kissinger."

"You rate Henry Kissinger below Richard Nixon?"

"Only in intelligence and wit. In character and credibility they're about the same."

"On this subject of credibility, Ron. You remember that Richard Kleindienst was caught lying under oath in connection with his appointment to Attorney General. Now, this is perjury. Yet he was allowed to plead guilty to just a misdemeanor and to continue practicing law. Can you tell us now why Richard Kleindienst, like Richard Helms, was afforded this lenient treatment normally denied to other criminals?"

"I don't know."

"It's a little fishy, isn't it?"

"It's fishy as hell."

"Is that for attribution?"

"Of course not. Who's next?"

"Now that so much time has passed, can you tell us the real reason—it's a lot of Richards, I know, that we're dealing with now in the criminal element but I hope you will bear with me, Ron—Gerald Ford found it necessary to pardon Richard Nixon for all the sex crimes he committed while in office?"

"Did Nixon commit sex crimes?"

"I don't know. But wasn't that the effect of pardoning Nixon for all crimes committed while he was President?"

"I don't know."

"This Administration has decided to fight inflation by raising prices to lower demand to reduce prices to increase demand and bring back the inflationary high prices we want to lower by reducing demand to increase demand and raise prices. Isn't that pretty much all your present economic policy amounts to?"

"I don't know."

"Ron, are you sure you don't know or are you merely guessing?"

"I'm absolutely sure I don't know."

"What are you willing to predict will happen tc unemployment and the economy in the short-tern: period ahead?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know what you would predict?"

"That is correct."

"Is there anyone in government who does know?"

"What I would predict?"

"I withdraw the question."

"How about our overseas alliances? If just about a are based on bribery, coercion, and subversion an other corruption of one kind or another, what stability will they have in a genuine crisis or when a government changes?"

"Lord, I don't know that."

"Well, is there anyone in the Administration who does know?"

"What?"

"Anything."

"Would you repeat that question?"

"Anything."

"Is that a question?"

"Is that an answer?"

"I don't know."

"I forgot my question."

"I'll withdraw my answer."

"Well, how about the President? Doesn't he have any intelligent opinions about what's going to happen at home or abroad?"

"I don't know."

"Ron, please. Pretty please. Can I have that one again for the television camera? I'd like to zoom in on you just before you answer. Hold your answer until you see us zooming in."

"Sure. I don't know."

"That was peachy."

"Ron, I have to ask you this about the President. Is it that you really don't know or that you don't want to say?"

"I don't know."

"You mean you don't know if you don't know or not?"

"That is correct."

"Thank you, Ron," said the senior correspondent in the first row. "You're to be congratulated. This has been the frankest and most informative press briefing I've ever attended."

"Oh, I don't know."

Ralph phoned the next morning while Gold was making breakfast to tell him the President wanted to see him to congratulate him personally. "He tried phoning you at your hotel, but the switchboard told him you weren't taking any calls."

"I'm staying with Andrea," said Gold. "Registering at the hotel is a way of protecting myself."

From Ralph came a low whistle of homage. "You're deep, Bruce. That's exactly the safeguard we all should use to protect our most vital secrets. Be at the White House at eleven. Use the servants' entrance."

Gold followed directions and was ushered upstairs through a pantry into a private waiting room just as Ralph emerged on tiptoe from a private inner office and led him back out. The appointment was canceled. The President was asleep.

"He's taking a nap," whispered Ralph.

"At eleven in the morning?" cried Gold.

"The President," Ralph explained, "is a very early riser. He is up at five every morning, takes two sleeping pills and a tranquilizer, and goes right back to bed for as long as he can sleep."

"When does he work?" asked Gold.

"What do you mean?" said Ralph.

"When does he work?" Ralph's chief emotion was perplexity. "I still don't get it."

"When does he do what he's supposed to be doing? As President?"

"Twenty-four hours a day," said Ralph. "The poor man is probably working right now, even while he's napping. You've been promoted, you know. He meant to tell you that."

"To what?" Gold exclaimed in surprise.

"We haven't decided, but it's a big step up."

"From what?"

"We never found out, did we? You can just about have your pick now, unless you can't. That much is official, although it has to be approved, and it must remain secret until we announce it, in case we decide we won't. You're way past a spokesman and a source now."

"Will I make more money?" Gold wanted to know.

"As much," said Ralph, "as you can get away with, although the competition is always strong. You know, Lyndon Johnson and Jack Javits were not the only ones to get rich while serving in government. I bumped into Harris Rosenblatt and found out what the Secretary of the Treasury does," said Ralph as they settled down comfortably in his office. "People of your religious beliefs inevitably do well there."

Gold cleared his throat. "I have no religious beliefs, Ralph."

"You know what I mean, Bruce," said Ralph. "I was trying to phrase it with tact."

"I'm very grateful for your tact."

"There's something mysterious happening with Harris Rosenblatt, Bruce," Ralph said with a furrowed brow. "Each time I see him he looks more and more like someone like me and less like someone like you."

Once more Gold found difficulty speaking. "In what way, Ralph, does Harris Rosenblatt look more and more like you and less like me?"

"He gets taller and leaner, Bruce," Ralph answered simply and honestly and seemed unmindful of the frostiness with which Gold had spoken. "And he stands up straight. You remember how short and flabby he used to be. And he seems to be getting paler too. I saw Andrea at a party the other night and I'm worried about her also. Didn't she used to be taller?"

"Taller?" Gold searched Ralph's eyes for some beam of shared intelligence. "Taller than what?"

"Than she is. I'd check if I were you. You wouldn't want her to get too short, would you?"

"Too short for what, Ralph?"

"For you, Bruce. I don't think it would add much to your stature if your second wife turned out to be as short as Belle, would it?"

"I'll ask, Ralph, when I have the chance. What does the Secretary of the Treasury do?"

"He reassures the business community."

"I could do that," said Gold.

"Sure you could," Ralph agreed. "And promises to hold down deficits. He doesn't actually hold them down, you understand, but merely promises to. He also looks after the financial interests of himself and his friends so they can continue to live on the level they're used to."

Gold was losing interest. "I'm not so crazy about my friends," he confessed, "and I'm trying to improve the level I'm used to."

"Your heart wouldn't be in it."

"I've been giving second thoughts to Chief of NATO, Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA or FBI, and even to Secretary of the Army, Navy, or Air Force, if it isn't too late."

"No, of course it isn't," said Ralph, "unless, of course, it's already too late. Did we come to a decision on Health, Education, and Welfare?"

"I'm only interested in my own."

"What about Housing and Urban Development? It helps to know what it's like to be poor—"

"I've been poor."

"—and identify with the underprivileged."

"Count me out."

"How about Attorney General, Bruce? That one really packs a wallop."

"I have an open mind," said Gold. "I think I could really get behind such issues as busing and integration now that my own children won't be affected by them. But don't I have to be a lawyer to be Attorney General?"

"I don't think so. Not as a matter of law."

"Could you find out?"

"I'll ask the Attorney General."

"Let's pass it up."

"How do you feel about the State Department?"

"It's where I think I'd fit in best."

"The President may think so too." Ralph, rising, stretched contentedly. "I know I can just about guarantee that you'll get the appointment you choose as soon as you want, although I can't promise anything. So please don't hold me to that."

Although there was nothing but pure friendship in Ralph's voice, Gold determined he might bear closer inspection. "Ralph, I find myself listening to things here that I can't believe I am hearing."

"I know just how you feel." Ralph ran his hand through his auburn cowlick. "Now that I've been in Washington awhile, I'm willing to believe almost anything."

Gold wondered if he was being too abstruse. "Ralph, I'm hearing them from you."

"From me?" Ralph spoke with frank surprise. "Bruce, you can believe what I tell you, because I will never lie to you. Everything I've promised has come to pass, hasn't it? Tell me how you're handling your job at the college."

"I've promoted all my students into the Honors Program," said Gold, "and assigned them term projects. I may never see any of them again."

Ralph gasped approvingly and tapped the side of his nose with his finger. "You're deep, Bruce, deep indeed. I doubt there's a problem in government you won't be able to solve with ease. All that remains is for you to leave Belle and marry Andrea. It would be so much better, Bruce, if you did that before your confirmation hearings begin. It's always bad for the country when someone waits until after he's made it big in government before dumping his old wife for a better one. That may be acceptable ethics for a Senator or Congressman, but you're much bigger than that now."

"I am?"

"I thought you knew that," said Ralph, "although there's no way you could have found it out. Leave Belle, Bruce. Do the right thing."

Gold was slightly cowed. "Leaving a wife is not so easy, Ralph."

"You say that to me?"

"And how do I know Andrea will marry me?"

"How can she refuse when you tell her about your promotion?"

"How can I tell her when it has to be a secret?"

"Oh, you can give her a hint," said Ralph. "She's probably been listening in anyway. Have you met Pugh Biddle yet? He's special, you know, and so is his estate in the hunt country. What are you working on these days?"

"I still have to do that book on . . ."

"Jewish people?" Ralph showed off.

"Jews," Gold said bravely. "Although it's more in the nature of a personal history now. And I'm organizing material for a humorous book on David Eisenhower and a serious one on Henry Kissinger, although it may turn out the other way around."

"How will you treat Henry Kissinger?"

"Fair."

"I never liked him either. Oh, yes, the President asked me to find out from you if Russia will go to war if we reduce our military strength."

Gold looked at Ralph through the corner of his eye. "How should I know?"

"Could you find out?"

"From who? Ralph, doesn't anyone here have an idea?"

"Oh, we have lots of experts. But the President feels your guess might be as good as anyone else's."

"I'll ask around."

"You're aces, Bruce," said Ralph. "The President will be grateful."

"Ralph," said Gold, with skepticism predominating again over a multitude of other concerns, "do you ever really see the President?"

"Oh, yes, Bruce," Ralph answered. "Everybody sees the President."

"I mean personally. Does he see you?"

"The President sees a great deal, Bruce."

"Do you ever see him to talk to him?"

"About what?" asked Ralph.

"About anything."

"Oh, Bruce, you can't just talk to the President about anything," Ralph chided. "The President is often very busy. He may be writing another book."

Gold persisted rationally in the face of a gathering fog of futility. "Well, Ralph, if you did have something of importance to discuss with the President, could you get in to talk to him?"

"About what?" Ralph asked again.

"About whatever you had that was important—no, don't stop me—like war, for example."

"That's not my department," Ralph said. "That's out of my area."

"What is your area?"

"Just about everything I cover, Bruce."

"What do you cover?"

"Everything in my area, Bruce. That's my job."

Gold was struggling to keep his voice down. "I've been trying to find out, Ralph, just what your job is."

"Well, I'm glad I've been able to help," said Ralph, pumping his hand. "Please give my love to Belle and my best to Andrea, or my love to Andrea and my best tp Belle, whichever seems more appropriate."

Gold stood wearily. "And you give mine," he said, "to Alma."

Ralph looked blank. "Which Alma?"

"Isn't Alma the name of your wife?" Gold demanded.

"It's also the name of the girl I'm engaged to," said Ralph. "She's almost a full year younger. Bruce, take my advice. If a man is going to leave one wife to marry another, it's better if he divorces the first before he marries the second. I've tried both ways. And leave them quickly, before they start getting those tumors and hysterectomies. Yes, it's always practical to leave your wives while they're healthy and young enough to attract another husband to pay the medical bills and make those dreary hospital visits. Oh, yes, I'm supposed to find out if there is anything disgraceful in your life that would be embarrassing to us if it were made public?"

"Like what?" Gold watched him shakily.

"I haven't any idea."

"Then I have to say no."

"Have you ever done anything worse than the rest of us?"

"Absolutely not."

"Then you're in the clear." One would have guessed from his serenity of expression and the deep breath Ralph took as he stared out the doorway at the banks of desks on the office floor that he was contemplating a fertile meadow and inhaling breezes enriched by privet and honeysuckle and astir with the seasonal hummings of countless bucolic copulations. "Isn't this breathtaking," he exclaimed. "It's been said, Bruce, by two out of three of our most dependable think tanks, that if someone stood in this doorway of mine long enough. sooner or later he might see the President walk by. Would you care to wait?"

Gold looked at "him askance, doubtful once more that he had heard his Protestant friend aright. "I have to propose to Andrea."

"The President will be pleased."

Gold was nervous and faintly giddy all through dinner. Preserving his outward calm, he artfully inculcated Andrea again with the need to forbear discussing their relationship and sexual intimacies with people like Miss Plum or anyone else. Andrea attended him with a credulous sort of rapture that had him feeling superbly gifted and slightly alarmed. He was not used to wielding such hypnotic influence over anyone he revered.

The Scotch kippers and Lithuanian rye bread he had brought from New York had gone down well, and Andrea would find out from contacts in the Commerce and Agriculture Departments if Arabian mocha coffee beans could be obtained anywhere in the world or if they were extinct. He preferred the Arabian mocha to the French. Gold put the last of the saucers in the dish drain and moved into the living room, where Andrea awaited him on the sofa in a recumbent attitude that summoned to mind the painting and the marble statue of Madame Recamier, her head resting lightly on her hand and her fine, lithe legs extended atop the cushions of the couch. His breath was swept away again by the lavender expanding radially from the clear, sea-blue circles surrounding her pupils. Her face was the loveliest into which he had ever peered, and he questioned anew why he occasionally was so bored. Her fingers played affectionately with the dark hairs at the back of his neck.

"Ralph thinks," he said, kissing her, "that we ought to get married."

An influx of color made her cheeks shine. "I think so too."

"He feels it would be good for the country," said Gold, suffused with an embarrassed shyness that he did not believe descended on people past the age of fourteen and which he made Spartan effort to suppress. "I'm going to work for the government, you see. It's absolutely definite now, although I can't be sure."

"I've always wanted to be married to someone with a high position in government," said Andrea. "To someone I admired who would want to see me again."

"I was given a big promotion today."

"From what?"

"I can't say," he told her mysteriously.

"What will you do?"

"I'm afraid I'm not able to tell you that either."

"I bet I can guess," Andrea teased and began tickling him. "A spokesman?"

"Oh, no," Gold replied immodestly, chortling with her. Both were frolicking. "I've already been promoted well beyond that."

"A source?" She played the game zestfully. "Higher than a senior official?" she continued as Gold kept shaking his head. "Then I bet I do know," she said, growing serious. "Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Secretary of State? Attorney General? Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?"

Gold put a finger to her lips. "That's close enough, my darling," he told her firmly. "It has to be secret. But I think we can begin making plans for marriage. I feel we've always sort of wanted to. I know I've always had a crush on you."

"You're so much fun."

"Bliss!" he cried in ecstasy when he saw his proposal of marriage accepted. "I have never known such!"

So was it done. Both took it for granted, Gold surmised afterward, that in one way or another he would separate himself from Belle, for neither made mention of it then.

In bed later she said, "You don't have to do that. I almost never come."

By every imaginable standard, she was ideal.

Gold broached the subject at home discreetly. There was a cowardly procedure for leaving a wife, and he had the substantial advantage of a studio apartment into which he could move with a minimum of dislocation.

"I've been seeing a doctor, a psychiatrist again," he began evasively. "For overwork."

"Yes?" said Belle.

"I've been under a strain, with my teaching and my writing and all my work in Washington."

"So you told me, just a few days ago."

"See how things slip my mind? He thinks it's important that I get away somewhere by myself for a while and pull myself together."

"Sure," said Belle.

"Well, I can't really take a vacation now. So he suggested I might start sleeping at my studio when I'm in New York, one night a week, maybe two, sort of live there three or four nights a week when I'm in town, until I sort of pull myself together."

"Okay," said Belle.

"Belle, you understand? You understand what I'm telling you?"

"Sure," said Belle.

"And there's all those times I like to get up in the middle of the night and start typing, and I don't always feel right about doing that here."

"Okay."

Against such limp opposition his courage flagged. He felt a melancholy letdown at the thought she might not care.

"So you see," he explained, with a warble of woe gargling in his throat, "we'll really be living apart some of the time. Separate. Separated, sort of." She said nothing. "You understand?"

"I understand."

"At least until I can pull myself together."

"How long," asked Belle, "will it take to pull yourself together?"

"Nobody knows."

"Do you think," asked Belle, "you'll be able to pull yourself together in time for your father's anniversary party next Friday?"

"Oh, sure," Gold acceded with a hardy spirit of cooperation far from consistent with the neurasthenic condition he had described. "I'll still be coming here often for dinner and mail and to have my suits cleaned and pick up my laundry. I'll need my old dark suits for Washington and some of those old white shirts."

"Otherwise, he might want to stay in New York longer to help you pull yourself together."

"I'll be in Washington a lot."

"I bet he would even go to Washington to help you pull yourself together."

"I'll be at the party," said Gold, "and anywhere else I'm needed until they go back. Belle, you're sure you don't mind?"

"Why should I mind?"

"That I'll be out at my studio almost every evening and sleeping out of town so much? Sometimes whole weekends?"

"To tell you the truth," said Belle, "if you didn't tell me, I wouldn't know."

"You wouldn't know?"

"It's how you've been living for years."

Gold's daughter, though only twelve, was less easily deceived that nothing ulterior was afoot.

"You're moving out, ain't you?" she charged, with acumen rare in one so fresh in years.

"No, I'm not." He made a face at the scornful laugh she discharged. "I'm merely packing things I'll need at my studio for my work and have to take with me to Washington."

"Don't shit me," said Dina. "You're getting a divorce."

"That's no way for a little girl to talk."

"Don't you care what happens to me?"

"No."

"Why'd you have me if you didn't want me?"

"Who knew it would be you?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Ask somebody else."

"You really are the pits."

"Do some homework now, or go outside and play.'

"There's another woman, isn't there? I can tell. You probably think you want to marry her, don't you?"

"Not one word of that is true," said Gold.

"Bullshit. I know you've been screwing other women all my life. You think I don't know what goes on in the world? You might as well tell me. I've got a right to know, I'll find out anyway."

"Mind your own business."

"And what am I supposed to do? Come visit you on weekends?"

"Don't even call."

"You fuck. I ought to go into therapy just to spite you. I'll get thrown out of school. I'll bleed you dry."

"You'll go to a public clinic," Gold warned with a sudden chill, for Dina generally made good her threats. "One session a week. In a group."

"I hope she gives you the clap and the syph."

"Go shit in your hat."

Having separated from Belle and talked the matter out fully with his daughter, Gold decided to stay for dinner and spend the night. He was more comfortable home than at his studio, where the strident music from the Haitian whores next door came through the walls nightly as though the partitions were made of tissue.

Scrupulously consulting his wristwatch, Gold, inflated with a growing sense of himself as a dignitary whose fortunes were on the rise, stepped gingerly past the unadorned reception room at the magazine and threaded a fastidious path through a creaking corridor congested perilously with leaning heaps of unsold back issues, attaining at the farthest end the office that still was the shabbiest and scruffiest and mustiest of any in which he had ever set foot. He could not think of a runner-up. An old feather duster as dirty as anything existing outside a garbage dump or an abandoned tenement ruin lay atop a shambles of yellowing old New York Times Magazine sections from which Lieberman perpetually plagiarized most of his new editorial ideas. Gold glanced balefully at the repellent object.

"I use it to clean," Lieberman apologized.

"Clean?" Gold repeated in a tone of aloofness intended to bulwark a distance between them of at least an arm's length. "What can you find to clean that's filthier than that?" He could not remember milking so much satisfaction from the relative standings in their relationship since that fruitful spring far back when Lieberman was rejected for a Rhodes Scholarship, a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Grant, and a library card on successive days of one week. "Get it the fuck out of here if you want me to sit down there and sign anything."

Lieberman had responded jealously to Gold's ascendant fame by producing another of his manifestos. Gold read:

"As you can see," said Lieberman, "I'm allowing a number of my colleagues in the intelligentsia to cosponsor this manifesto with me. We want fifty dollars from each signer to run advertisements in the most influential publications in the world, including mine. We're shooting for a thousand important people and I've decided to let you be among them. I personally have guaranteed to produce five hundred."

"How many have you now?"

"None." His manifesto continued:

1. POLITICAL DEMOCRACY IN ALBANIA.
2. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN ALBANIA.
3. RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE FOR THE ALBANIAN PEOPLE. WE WILL NOT BE DENIED!!!!!!

Gold read no further. "I won't sign it."

"Will you give fifty dollars?"

"I won't give fifty cents. Since I became a neoconservative, pragmatic progressive, concerned Democrat for a Coalition for a Democratic Majority, liberal reactionary, arid enlightened Republican I am no longer accustomed to paying my own money to advertise my political principles. And neither are you."

"Why won't you sign it?"

"I'm not sure it's wise," said Gold with that incandescent contentment that often glowed in his heart when he contemplated the failures and frustrations of his contemporaries. "I'm about to be appointed to an important permanent position in Washington."

"You're what?" Lieberman drew back the corners of his mouth and seemed for the moment on the brink of attacking Gold's head with even his hind teeth. "You must be joking."

"I have not been more in earnest."

"Washington? Where do you shine in? Why should you be in government and not me? I had dinner at the White House once."

"With four hundred other people."

"With my wife. You never did. You want the Albanian people to be without political democracy just because you're getting a job in government? Don't you care what happens to them?"

"No," said Gold. "I'll ruin you for that," Lieberman threatened.

"I'll issue another manifesto."

"Easy, Lieberman," Gold cautioned gaily. "Let cooler heads prevail. If you're going to use manifestos, why aim them at little Albania? Launch them at Russia and China. Why waste manifestos? Once you bring Russia and China to their knees, I'm sure the little fish like Albania will fall into line."

"You're funny," Lieberman muttered bleakly. "But someone has to start somewhere. What kind of a job will you get in Washington?"

"I couldn't tell you if I wanted to," said Gold. "But I've already received a promotion."

"It's that big, huh?" Lieberman was impressed.

"And confidential."

"You can't trust even me?"

"My lips are sealed."

"When will we know?"

"I can say no more."

"You must have powerful friends in Washington now, huh?"

"Many. I was at the White House to meet the President."

"For dinner?" challenged Lieberman.

"At brunch," said Gold. "There were just Ralph and me. It was brief. We all have so much to do. I was chosen to write the Commission report, you know."

"What will you say about me in it?"

"Nothing," said Gold, "at which you will take umbrage."

"I'll give you all the help you need," offered Lieberman, and asked for some himself. "I bet you can do a lot for me now, can't you?"

"I believed you would get around to that," said Gold. "But is it, I must always ask myself, in the best interest of the country?"

"I think it is," said Lieberman. "That's the main reason I've been shifting all my editorial policies around in support of the Administration."

"I'm not that sure the Administration is aware of all your editorial shifting around," said Gold.

"You could tell them." Lieberman seized his arm. "Bruce, what's it like in Washington?" Gold wrested his arm free and began rubbing at the grease stains and clumps of dust left on his sleeve by Lieberman's fingers. "What do you do there?"

Gold gave it to him with both barrels. "I fuck girls, Lieberman," he began explosively with a sadistic delight he could not bring himself to forgo. "Blond girls, Lieberman, blond, the blondest girls you ever saw. All of them beautiful. The daughters of millionaire oil barons and newspaper publishers. Lumber barons, potentates, steel tycoons. Magnates. You should see them, Lieberman, oh, you should see them. All are nineteen or twenty-three and will never grow older. They love Jews. Do you hear me, Lieberman? They love Jews. And they don't have enough of us there to go around. We're at a premium. They're crazy about us, Lieberman. Are you listening? Do you hear? Wealthy widows. They think we're brilliant and dynamic and creative, instead of just jumpy, nervous and neurotic. They don't know, Lieberman, they just don't know. You should get them, Lieberman, by the armful, you should get them while you can."

'Take me with you!" Lieberman blurted out tearfully, and raised his eyes to Gold's face with an imploring look. "Get me a job!"

"I'm not convinced," Gold informed him coolly, "that what the government needs at this juncture is another Russian Jew from Brooklyn."

"Moravian," Lieberman corrected promptly.

"You've got no experience," said Gold. "I'm afraid I must go."

"Then get me a CIA grant." Lieberman chased after him through the winding path in the corridor with the agonized puffing of someone in a seizure.

Gold pinned him with an icy stare. "Won't you feel your intellectual integrity is compromised if you take money from the government secretly?"

The effect of this question was to reunite Lieberman with his vaunted moral authority. "Absolutely not," he replied with great asperity and hauteur. "There is nothing wrong with accepting money for supporting positions I would advocate anyway."

"And what are the positions you will advocate?"

"Whichever ones they want me to."

"Good day, my man."

"Bruce," Lieberman wheedled, attempting to obstruct Gold's exit, "why don't you and Belle come over the house for dinner with me and Sophie some night?"

"Because I don't want to," said Gold, and began working adeptly with scissors, pencil, and Scotch tape—his tools of preference for scholarship and research—as soon as he'd taken a seat by himself in the rear of the plane transporting him back to Washington and Andrea. He had clippings to mount on pages to classify in folders. Within minutes after takeoff he was surveying with complacency an ingenious sequence of three front-page headlines constructed from different issues of the New York Post:

Judge to Utah:

SHOOT HIM JAN. 17!

The Gilmore Ruling:

A climax was missing. He made one up.

To these he inventively appended on a separate page two old headlines from the New York Daily News having nothing whatsoever to do with each other:

And:

These he deftly rounded off with two strips of Scotch tape on a scrap from The New York Times he had been carrying in his wallet for ages and feared misplacing:

"I told them I didn't like what was going on. I told them to shape up or ship out." Mayor Beame, expressing displeasure with Sanitation Department officials over the condition of city streets.

Although he wasn't sure how, Gold knew already he would fit these somewhere into his book on Kissinger, David Eisenhower, or the Jewish experience in America. He found himself next with two more jokes by Henry Kissinger for the collection of public witticisms by the former official which Gold, uncharitably, had been amassing for years. He reread the first:

Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger made a little joke yesterday while passing out local Monday morning quarterback awards. The outgoing Secretary quipped that he had turned down a tryout offer from the New York Jets to become a possible successor to the Jets quarterback, Joe Namath. "I didn't think New York could handle two sex symbols in a row."

The next was hewn from similar wood:

This week's going-away present for the go-go Secretary: honorary membership in the Harlem Globetrotters, plus a Trotters' basketball uniform. Kissinger approvingly noted that his new uniform bore the number 1. Said Henry: "The numeral accords with my estimate of myself. My only worry is how I will look in short pants."

Gold fiendishly planned using both in a morbid and depressing chapter on Kissinger's humor. Neither reflected the ironic, fatalistic mockery of either the Talmud or the shtetl, and Gold greatly preferred as humor a joke about Kissinger circulated by the Danish news agency Ritzaus:

Kissinger, it seems, obtained a length of top-quality tweed cloth that he wished made into a suit. Tailors in Washington and New York, after measuring him, said there was insufficient material for trousers and a jacket that would fit. In London, France, and Germany, where he went on diplomatic missions, the same warning was repeated by the best tailors in these countries. Then he came to Jerusalem and was told by a Jewish tailor to leave the material and return in ten days. When Kissinger came back after meetings in Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Iran, he was astonished to find not only a suit that fit him perfectly but a vest, an additional jacket, and two extra pairs of trousers all made from that same length of material. "How is it possible," asked Henry Kissinger, "that in New York, Washington, London, Paris, and Germany I was told there was not enough material for even a suit, and here in Israel you were able to make so much?"

"Because here in Israel," said the Jewish tailor, "you are not such a big man."

Gold now was down to his two last pieces of Kissinger data. The first brought a wry laugh, for the story, though small, had appeared on the front page of the Times and seemed to have been written with a certain subtle facetiousness:

Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger paid an emotional farewell to leaders of the American Jewish community yesterday at a luncheon given by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "I have never forgotten that 13 members of my family died in the concentration camps," Mr. Kissinger told the hushed audience. From luncheon at the Pierre, he went to a dinner at the Waldorf, to receive the Great Decisions Award from the Foreign Policy Association.

Among the greatest of those Great Decisions, Gold surmised perniciously, was the decision to leave those Jews at the Pierre for dinner at the Waldorf. Now he was left with just one clipping that still remained a vexing enigma after many months, and he pored over it three, four, five more times with drawn brows:

Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger withdrew permission today from three Administration officials to accompany a Congressional fact-finding commission to check on how the controversial Helsinki agreement is being carried out.
Instead, Mr. Kissinger instructed them to travel with five members of Congress only as far as Brussels for a briefing by officials of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Common Market.

Gold read it a sixth time to no avail. He could not remember why he had saved it. Desolation reigned in his emotions for another minute or two before he pensively turned over the clipping and saw:

DIRECT FROM MANUFACTURER TO YOU!

TOP QUALITY SHEEPSKIN COATS!

UP TO 40% OFF!

VISIT OUR SHOWROOM NOW!

WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD!

Gold smoothed the clipping carefully and preserved it in his wallet. His work for the day concluded, he opened his Times and found:

POLICE BLOTTER

The Citibank branch at 1 Park Avenue South, at 32nd Street, was robbed of $1,200 by a man who passed an obscene note to a teller.

In the business section he came upon a second obscene note of financial news that seemed to him not entirely unrelated to the first:

William E. Simon, the Secretary of the Treasury, is planning to return to Salomon Brothers, the New York investment banking firm he left on January 1, 1973 to join the Nixon government.

William R. Salomon, managing partner of Salomon Brothers, said he hoped Mr. Simon would rejoin the firm. "Because he has been Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Simon obviously would be more important to us than he was before."

At the time he was tapped by former President Nixon, Mr. Simon was, according to published reports, earning $2 to $3 million a year. Mr. Simon has been the Ford Administration's best articulator of the President's economic philosophy.

REMEMBER THE NEEDIEST!

Gold's ambivalent feelings were easily sedated when his disgust with the voracious materialism of his society was quickly overcome by the consideration that, when his government service was concluded, he too might be more important to Salomon Brothers. As the wheels of the plane touched ground his attention was riveted to a caption of more fortuitous worth than any he might dare improvise in even his most extravagant fantasies. He read:

MORAVIAN PUTZ

Gold turned aside for an instant and sucked in his cheeks. His eyes had not, as he first had feared, deluded him. He read more:

MORAVIAN PUTZ
Correction

Several inaccuracies appeared in the article "Christmas—the Other Bethlehem" (Travel News, Nov. 7). The correct information follows: The Christmas-scenes display known as the Moravian Putz will be put on view Dec. 5 in the Christmas Education Building behind the old Moravian Chapel on Church Street in Bethlehem, Pa.

In the air terminal, he bought a stamp and begged an envelope and dispatched the clipping headlined "Moravian Putz" to Liebertnan with the unsigned scrawl: "Does this mean you?" He hastened to a taxi with a lively spirit he felt nothing in the world could dispel, and then he arrived at Andrea's and saw he was mistaken.

She was leaving for a weekend away with a man she had been seeing till the time of their secret engagement. Words failed him when she resumed packing after kissing and pinching him perhaps a dozen times and vowing she would love him always for returning to her so quickly. Gold reached deep inside himself for understanding and patience. When away from her field of home economics, he knew, she was often ingenuous in a way strangers might call obtuse.

"Darling, we're going to be married," he explained.

She remembered. "It's the reason I felt I should see him. I want to say goodbye."

"You want to say goodbye?" Gold affected a phlegmatic calm. "What's the matter with the telephone?"

"We were already on the telephone, silly," Andrea replied with a somewhat sprightly titter and gave no evidence she saw Gold wince. "We made the date on the telephone."

"Why couldn't you say goodbye on the telephone?"

"It seemed so cold."

"It has to be warm?"

"It's just for the weekend," she reasoned.

"You told me you'd love it if I came back for the weekend."

"I do!" she exclaimed. "It makes me so happy to know you're here. You mustn't be so small-minded, Brucie."

"Please don't call me Brucie," he reproved her and wondered if she realized she was bruising his most vulnerable feelings. It was not in such fashion that Gold was accustomed to hearing himself addressed by his wife or girl friends, and he accordingly held himself apart from any display of friendly emotion. "Where will you stay?"

"At his house. Or maybe a motel. He used to like motels."

"Is this one of those men who didn't want to see you again?" He watched her nod. "What made him change his mind?"

"He's a great admirer of your work."

Gold's pose of reserve broke. "Oh, shit, Andrea," he moaned, shaking his head in grief and bewilderment. "Are you telling him about our sex life too? We've got to keep this relationship secret."

In the dreary silence that ensued Gold remembered the food he had brought with him from New York and went morosely into the kitchen to unpack the two heavy shopping bags. Andrea followed in silence.

"It's only my body I'm giving him, darling," she attempted to placate him after a minute. "After all, what is that?"

Gold felt his eyes glaze. "Only?"

"That's all." Her manner now was hectoring and amused. "What difference should it make to us what he wants with my body? You'll have my mind."

"I've got my own mind." Not for the first time did Gold feel himself estranged from the mores of a generation other than his own.

"You've got a body too." She was relying on gentle good sense to cajole him.

"Not like yours."

"Let him have it if he wants it," she urged. "It's only bones, and flesh, and organs, and places."

"Your body," said Gold, "is one of the things Hook forward to having."

"But you will, darling, whenever you want. You can have it too, even right now if you make it fast." She glanced at her watch. "Unshared," Gold emphasized loudly, with a look of uncompromising disapproval. "I want it to belong to just me."

"Oh, Brucie—"

"Don't call me that." Andrea clung to the arm of her chair and laughed. "I really think you're attaching too much importance to the whole thing. It seems to me you've got the sexual attitudes of a middle-aged man." There was something in her tone less than the adulation and total acquiescence he had come to expect from her as his due. "I am a middle-aged man," he said coldly. "What kind of sexual attitudes would you expect me to have?"

"But it isn't necessary to be so fussy and old-fashioned about it, is it? Why can't he have my body if he wants it? A lot of men want my body."

Gold was bowing in flinching rhythm to each repetition of "body," as though the subject were too painful to discuss. Not for this, he told himself, was he leaving his wife, provoking the enmity of his children, offending his family, and forsaking for the time all other erotic relationships, but for money, beauty, social position, political preference, and a stupendous magnification of sexual prestige, and when he remembered, his damaged feelings were assuaged and his damaged pride repaired, and his paramount objective was one of reasserting his supremacy over her or see it forfeit forever. He began his rebuttal with formality.

"When we first met at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation," he reminded her, "I was Dr. Gold. When we had coffee or lunch together, or occasionally cocktails and dinner, I was always Dr. Gold. When we made love together the first time not long ago, I was still Dr. Gold. Even when I telephoned you the next day to tell you how happy I was and how much I wanted to see you again, I was Dr. Gold. Now that we're secretly engaged to be married, I'm fussy and silly and ridiculous and old-fashioned. When did I stop being Dr. Gold and become small-minded and narrow-minded? Why didn't you notice it before?"

"It didn't matter before."

"What did matter?"

"That you were Dr. Gold," she said. "And you were always so quick and sinister and articulate. I was so impressed with you. All of us women were. I'm still so impressed that you're Dr. Gold to everyone here. And you aren't even a doctor?"

Gold spoke with mistrust. "What do you mean by that?"

"A real doctor."

"I have my Ph.D."

"Oh, Bruce." she laughed again. 'Everyone we know has a Ph.D. I have a Ph.D. But you're the only one we know that's called Doctor. It's so thrilling to be in love with a doctor who isn't a medical man. I can't tell you how happy I'll be when we're married."

Gold took a calculated risk. "I'm not so sure that we're going to be married," he said, and watched the smile fade from her face.

"You're angry, aren't you?" she replied with uncertainty, and her eyes filled with tears. "I didn't think you'd care. Oh, darling, I don't want to fight with you over this big stupid body of mine. I wish I didn't have it. It's always been so much trouble. If you're going to be so jealous about it, maybe I won't give it away any more after we're married."

"Had you intended to?" asked Gold with curiosity and surprise.

"I took it for granted we would both want to be free." She was ready to capitulate. "If it means so much to you, I'll break the date. Should I?"

Gold drew upon a lifetime of experience to find the words with most telling effect. "I don't want you ever to see him again."

He could not have done better. She smiled in sweetest subservient contentment and pressed his hand to her cheek with a lambent look of love. It was obvious she had never been favored with such chivalry before.

"I'll tell him I'm not going."

Gold, in this first test of power, had reestablished his primacy and was prepared to be lenient. "I was looking forward to spending the whole weekend with you," he admitted tenderly, kissing her hand.

Andrea started violently. "The whole weekend? What will we do for a whole weekend?"

Gold kept his temper under excellent control. "When we're married, Andrea," he told her in the bedside tones a mother might use to a backward daughter, "we'll be together for more than just whole weekends, you know."

"But then we'll have so many things to keep us busy. Houses to rent and furnish, parties and dinners to go to, trips to make. What can we do for a weekend now?"

Again Gold's answer was inspired. "Couldn't we drive out to your father's estate tomorrow? You can go riding while he and I get acquainted."

"I'll tell him we're coming."

My daughter tells me," said Pugh Biddle Conover, "that you have the sexual attitudes of a middle-aged man." He spoke from his motorized wheelchair in the spacious wood-paneled library overlooking many of his gardens and many of his gardeners.

This was a comment for which Gold, though drastically self-vigilant, had not made provision. His first trauma of the afternoon had occurred two hours earlier after driving with Andrea through the Virginia hunt country to the splendid, immaculate manor house possessing the breadth, though perhaps not the equivalence in height or depth, of the celebrated palace at Versailles, and deducing from an unavoidable aggregation of visual clues that none in the multitude of elegant and wealthy weekend guests normally in attendance at Conover's had yet arrived. In place of the festive bustle of activity he had anticipated there prevailed a ghostly and quiescent inertia. Scores of uniformed retainers of countless occupational gradations were everywhere in view, but the long driveways and innumerable garages were empty, and Gold could spy no evidence that other people were expected. It was the largest abode in which he ever had stood. Close to seven full acres, Andrea had revealed, as they approached in her yellow Porsche, were under roof in the main house alone.

"I'm sorry she spoke to you about that," Gold was able to mutter at last.

"Lord knows I didn't ask her to," Conover replied with a rich, soft laugh, and Gold gazed with fondness at his spare and dapper host. "Although that's much to your credit, I'm sure." Conover was a blooming, compelling figure of indeterminate age, a man of slight, wiry build in worn corduroy and cavalry twill, with white wavy hair and a small pointed military mustache. A paisley kerchief of deep red was knotted rakishly about his neck, and he projected the opulent assurance and panache of a ruler secure in his reign and his revenues. It occurred to Gold that Pugh Biddle Conover was the healthiest and handsomest moribund valetudinarian upon whom he had ever laid eyes. The bracing, astringent odor of horse liniment clung to him like a virile ambience, and he had the pink, unlined face of someone who has never known vicissitude or expects to. Gold was hungry with admiration. "I ..confess," said Conover, chuckling, "that I haven't any idea what she meant by that. Do you?"

"I haven't, either," said Gold, "and I'm greatly embarrassed that the subject even has come up. Andrea didn't used to be so outspoken." Gold was gratified by the easy terms on which they were already conversing. "When I first met your daughter several years ago at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation, she was interested in me even then but she said she was much too shy to show it."

"She was lying," said Conover with robust good humor. "Andrea has never been too shy to ask for anything, even millions. I'm afraid she doesn't always demonstrate good judgment in every area of intelligence and is far too tall, but I don't suppose we can do much about those failings now. I had a deathly fear you might want to talk to me about sex too. Or about marijuana or other drugs you both use."

"There was never much likelihood of that," Gold boasted. "And I don't use drugs."

"My mind is more at rest. It's another trait for which you are to be applauded, Mr. Goldberg. So far it seems you are utterly without fault, doesn't it?"

"Gold, sir."

"Sir?"

"My name is Gold. You called me Goldberg."

"Indeed," said Conover, cogitating. "Learn this, my boy, before you grow old, that learning is better than silver and gold. Silver and gold may fritter away, but a good education will never decay."

In other company Gold might have delivered a more disputatious reply than the one he permitted himself. "I will always keep that in mind, sir. As you may know, I've invested a great deal of myself in my own education, and I've written a number of articles and books on the general subject." Conover was silent and Gold looked at his watch.

"You're ill at ease," said Conover after sipping from the glass of bourbon Gold had poured him from one of the cut-glass decanters that stood close by. "I can tell from your face."

"Andrea said I must always be frank with you," replied Gold, and was emboldened to continue by Conover's signal of concurrence. "And that you would think less of me if I pretended to take no notice of your illness or infirmity. May I ask what's wrong?"

"What illness or infirmity?" Conover inquired with surprise.

"Your disability."

"I have no disability," Conover retorted with testiness. "What the devil are you talking about?"

"You use a wheelchair," Gold found himself protesting defensively.

"It's easier than walking," Conover said. "You rolled here by automobile, didn't you?"

"You see a physician."

"Only when ill, Mr. Goldfarb. I see a mechanic for this infernal wheelchair much more often. Would you care to whiz around a bit while we wait for Andrea to return? You have misgivings. Your expression betrays you."

"My name is Gold, sir, not Goldfarb."

"There are gold ships and silver ships but the best ship is friendship."

"Pardon?" Gold squealed, leaping upward a few inches as though snatched from preoccupation. "No, no, no, no, sir." He recovered quickly as Conover obligingly made ready to repeat. "I was merely expressing astonishment at the wisdom of your words."

"Old truths are the best truths, Mr. Finegold. I think you'll always find that so."

"My name, sir, is Gold," Gold corrected a little less tolerantly.

"Fine." Conover nodded weightily and looked up at him with a smile. He resumed after a moment in his quiet mellow voice in which the rounded vowels of the South were euphoniously interblended with the distinct consonants of the best English tutors and preparatory schools. "I hope you will not allow an occasional extra syllable from an aging mind to be the cause of any serious misunderstanding between us."

"Certainly not, sir!" Gold assured him with candid fervor and stepped back a pace to feast his eyes again upon his host. More than ever, Pugh Biddle Conover appeared the quintessential gentleman-statesman of his maudlin ideal. Pomposity was absent. A keen and cultivated intelligence presided. He was good as gold.

Conover asked: "Would you like to geld some horses?"

It was a decision Gold had not in his lifetime been forced to make. "Why," he gulped, "would I wish to do that?"

"For the pure thrill," Conover answered exuberantly. "It's sexual, you know. I can place some lively colts at your service if you like. I'll have my niggers whet a sterile blade."

"I think not," said Gold, with faltering confidence, "if I can demur without offending you."

"The choice is yours," said Conover with disappointment "although I think you're missing a rare chance. Some of them have such big balls. You seem surprised. I can tell by your gasp."

"I think I will have that drink, sir."

"I'll have another spot too, if you'll be so good. Oh, a much larger spot than that, Mr. Goldstaub. You pour so sparingly, Mr. Goldsmith, one might think it were your own. You people don't drink much, do you?"

Gold raised his eyebrows. "We people?" A monstrous notion that had been with Gold nearly every day of his adult life was now bulking in his thoughts. "What do you mean, sir, by we people?"

Conover answered amiably with no loss of equanimity, as though blankly unmindful of any uncomplimentary nuance. "I mean you people who don't drink much. There are people who do, Goldstein, and people who don't—"

"Gold, sir."

"—and those who don't, don't, do they? I swear on my life I intended nothing less innocent than that. Your health, you dog," toasted Conover with a sudden surge of vitality. "You have questions in mind. I can tell by your twitching."

A knowing light in Conover's small, sharp eyes was adding to Gold's uneasiness, and he felt the ground shifting beneath him in a way one sometimes experiences in dreams. He longed again for Andrea's return. "I was under the impression," he said nervously with a careless veneer he hoped might be misconstrued for insouciance, "that you always had a great many friends here on weekends."

"They're not my friends," said Conover with charm, "but they're the best I can do. They come when I want them to and they stay away when I want to be alone."

"If I'd known you wanted to be alone this weekend," Gold offered debonairly, "we would not have come."

"If you hadn't come," said Conover, looking squarely at him, "I would not have wanted to be alone. I'm a great admirer of your work, Mr. Gold," Conover continued unpredictably in a way that was keeping Gold off balance, "although I've been much too feeble to read any. I hear only praise."

"Thank you, sir," said Gold with heartiness and elation, freed from much of the strain cast upon him intermittently by what he now perceived to be an endearing instability in the mental state of his prospective father-in-law. "And I, sir," he ventured, "have always admired you."

"I said I admired your work," the spruce little man stressed waspishly, "not you. The truth is I don't like you at all. If you wish to know, I find you pushy."

"Pushy?" Gold's voice was cracking.

"Yes." There was little room left for circumlocution. "Are you saying that," he asked with a sickly feeling, "because I'm Jewish?"

"I'm saying it," said Conover, "because you seem pushy. But since you raise the point, I don't like Jews and I never have. I hope I am not offending you."

"No, no, not at all," said Gold, feeling miserable. "These things are better brought into the open."

"Especially," said Conover, "when they cannot be concealed. You'll be marrying far above you, you know." Here was a topic for which Gold had prepared. "Lots of people marry above them," he began articulately, "although that may not be the reason they marry. They often marry for ..."

"Yes?"

"Love." The word caught like a barb in his palate and emerged through his nostrils with the timbre of a high note from a clarinet.

"Is love your reason?" asked Conover acidly. "Or are you choosing a wife appropriate for the new career in Washington toward which you presently think you are directed?"

"I couldn't love a woman who wasn't appropriate."

"Then love is not exactly blind, is it?"

"It shouldn't be at my age. Should it?"

"I don't really care," Conover conceded with a sigh. "Andrea can take care of herself and always has. Ten or fifteen years ago I would have been too busy with my own pleasures to notice. Thirty years ago I would not have allowed it. Forty or fifty years ago when I had no daughter and still possessed some democratic ideals, I would have championed her marriage to an inferior. Now I'm beyond all prejudice and it's merely a nuisance. A middle-age Jew is better than a nigger, I guess, and not much worse than a wop or a mick. Or somebody bald! Oh, I think that's what I dreaded all my life more than anything else," Conover went on shrilly with a manic volubility that began to take Gold's breath away. "I don't think I'd be able to stand it if Andrea came to me with a husband who was bald. I feel ill. Ill, do you hear? Ill, you idiot!" As Gold, struck dumb with amazement, stared helplessly, Conover allowed himself to be racked with a perfunctory cough and then studied Gold as though expecting to learn something from him. "Oh, God!" he cried in a tone of repugnance and began to beat the side of one fist lightly against his chest. "My medicine. Oh, oh! I must have my medicine. Quick, you gaping fool. You Jew nincompoop—can't you get me my medicine?" Gold cast his eyes about the room frantically in a manner famished for illumination. "Never mind!" Conover screamed at him. "Bring me a whiskey, whiskey, in the tumbler—the large one, you miser. Fill it up, up, goddammit—it's my whiskey, not yours. To the top, the top. Ah, that's better. Hey-hey. Ikey-kikey, where's your bikey? I'll survive, I think. You've saved my life, my bravo," he exclaimed with regenerated conviviality, "and I'll drink to your health. Sit on the tack of ambition and you will surely rise. You have something in mind. I can tell by your pallor."

"You aren't being very courteous to me," said Gold with an affected air of urbanity, "as you people are supposed to be. After all, I am a guest."

"But not of mine, Goldfine," Conover responded merrily. "And I'm not a host. You're part of a formality here today, and so am I. Andrea will do what she wants no matter what I say. She has money of her own and much more coming and she has no need to fear my displeasure."

"I have money of my own," Gold said.

"I do doubt it compares to ours," said Conover with sarcastic politeness.

"I really don't care much about Andrea's money," argued Gold, "although I'm sure you won't believe that."

"/ don't care about it at all," said Conover, with a laugh, "since none of it is mine. All of it descends to her from grandparents and great-grandparents, too many to count. There was a time, I'll admit, when I entertained great expectations of inheriting all of hers in the event she predeceased me, but now that I've aged, she might as well live. My sentiments shock you. I can tell by your nausea. But I do love money, Mr. Finestein, more than anything else in the world. I doubt there's a creature walking the earth who loves money more than I do. I don't crave it greedily, because I've always had plenty, but I value money much more than health. I am ailing and I'm old, no matter what lies I tell. Let the Fates propose, Take perfect health for many more years, but we'll give you nothing,' I would turn it down in the blinking of an eye. If an angel appeared on my deathbed to beg, 'Forsake your wealth while you still have time and you can live for decades as a pauper and in eternal Paradise afterward,' I would answer, 'Be off, you feathery fool. Spend at least a million on my tomb and each of my cenotaphs.' I'd much rather die in splendor. After all, Mr. Goldfedder, health won't buy money, will it? Philosophizing drains me of energy," Conover said and replenished his strength by emptying his glass. "But I do treasure the company of someone like you with whom I can engage in intellectual discourse as an equal."

Nothing but the malice in Conover's eye suggested he was intending anything different from a compliment.

"My name, sir, is Gold," Gold reminded him once more with an exasperated sigh. "And I do wish you would remember it."

"I remember it," Conover countered with a smile, smoothing with a pinky his trim mustache, the flush shining higher in his neatly formed cheeks like a thermometer of malevolent satisfaction. "My mind is as clear as any in the world when I'm not having one of my fits. I won't object to the marriage since it would do no good, and I won't stand in the way of your career, although I can't for the life of me see what business a Jew has in government except to gain social recognition. There've been no good ones, have there? It's hard enough for a Protestant, isn't it, and we have the knack."

Gold would not be deflected into a dispute on comparative religion. "It is my belief, sir, that I might make the same kind of contribution in public service that people of my—ah—ethnic denomination have made in other areas."

"I have four acres of stables, Mr. Goldfinger, with less horseshit than that," Conover replied pleasantly. "You have black and thinning hair too, I see, among your manifold other shortcomings, but I believe it will last as long as you do, if I am any connoisseur of scalp. If Andrea had to marry a foreigner I would have preferred someone like Albert Einstein or Artur Rubinstein or even Arturo Toscanini. God, what glorious heads of hair they had. But not Joe Louis or Ignace Paderewski. You're better, I guess. I don't think I could stand a Pole as a son-in-law. Son-in-law? Oh, what a sickening term, sickening. Don't you understand yet? Sickening!" Gold poured him more whiskey. The adventure was over, the romance was gone. The bracing odor of liniment rising from Conover was metabolized liquor, the gleam of acuity in his penetrating eyes a flame of gifted lunacy. Gold was confronting another old kook. "Your health, you weasel," Conover shouted with vigor, and swallowed deeply. "May all your troubles be little ones. I always knew Dean Rusk would never amount to anything, or Benito Mussolini. Too bald. Ah, Andrea, my child. You've come just in time. I have trouble making conversation with all of your boyfriends, but this one is practically a stone."

Andrea was radiant and refreshed after her ride and her bath and looked almost blindingly beautiful. She kissed each of them lightly, saying, "I think you're being rude, Daddy."

"I'm feeling poorly, Daughter dear," Conover said in a whine. "I wanted my medicine and he wouldn't give me any, not a single drop. May I have some now? No, let him get it. Faster, faster, you kike filly-fucker. To the top, the top, dammit, I'm paying for it, not you. Ah, that's better, my health is restored. Bless you, my lad. Never circumcise a bus. They're not Jewish. Arabs wash feet. McGeorge Bundy is the warmest human being I ever met."

"Daddy dear, I think you're babbling."

"I may be failing fast. Your health, sir, and to our everlasting friendship. I never met a man I didn't like till you. May your life be as bright as Edison's electric light."

"Finish your whiskey." Andrea held the glass steady for him. "Your mind is wandering."

"Hip, hip, hooray. Let's call it a day. Daisies are yellow and so is cheese. What is a kiss without a squeeze? You're touched, Mr. Gold. I can tell by your blush."

"I'm mulling it over."

"How wise you are, how wise you be. I see you are too wise for me. For God's sakes, it's been awful for all of us. My niggers will feed you. Have Simon whip them if they disobey." Conover juiced up his wheelchair, whipped himself about in a half circle, and rolled from the room without further ceremony.

Gold and Andrea ate silently in an immense dining room illuminated by candelabra, engulfed by impassive ebony servants with large eyes who made no noises. Their separate bedrooms were on different elevations half a mile apart, and Andrea led Gold to his. A mezuzah was on the doorpost.

"Please don't fuck me here," she pleaded.

Gold was incensed. "If you ever use words like that with me again," he answered, "I may never want to fuck you anywhere."

It was his only victory of the day. His room was large, the bed was good. He had the consolation of knowing he had suffered the worst. Things might improve on the morrow.

He awoke at daybreak and waited for sounds indicating others were astir. Past nine, he could bear his solitude no longer and crept forth into the morning in a spirit of cautious dejection. He descended the magnificent curving oak staircase with the mournful cast of a sacrificial victim whose moment for the spotlight had come. The house was inundated by a stillness that seemed eternal. Conover had horses that did not whinny. His dogs did not bark. If there were roosters or cows on the baronial grounds, they did not crow or moo. Doors did not close, toilets did not flush, wood did not creak, leaves did not rustle, and footsteps did not fall. At the base of the staircase a portly old Negro with woolly hair stood in the silver-and-black Conover livery and indicated with a slight bow the direction Gold was to follow.

Maids and dusters and porters with chamois cloths were silently cleaning and polishing wood, brass, pewter, glass, and porcelain. Passing in awe and disbelief down the center hallway of the main floor, Gold came at length to an enormous breakfast room containing a buffet of a size he did not know could exist outside the whimsical visions of novelists with extraordinary powers of description. Legions of servants, all of them black, in color of skin as well as by race, were on duty at fixed posts under the canny supervision of a virginal white spinster who was herself subordinate to a nasty-looking white overseer glowering cruelly, even at Gold. The plantation hierarchy was intact.

The serving table was more than sixty-five feet long. Only the staff was present when Gold entered. His line of march was clear and he moved along the counter in a trance. There were turkey, partridge, quail, squab, and goose to start with. There were heavy hams. Too much, too much, was the cry of his soul. His fingers trembled and he could hardly look. Mute figures with high cheekbones waited expectantly to serve him. There were pans of biscuits and baskets of eggs, rashers of bacon and kettles of fish, creamers and crocks and gallipots brimming, compotes and hoppers and casseroles steaming, dry cereals in bushels and hot ones in cauldrons, platters of sausage and trays of beef, kegs of butter and bins of cheese, urns of fresh milk and jugs of hot coffee, and condiments in cruets, flagons, and flasks. On a crested salver of silver embossed with the head of a pig was the eyeless head of a cooked pig. There were basins of fruit and bushels of washed fresh vegetables, and smoking tureens of stews of hare and venison. Glowing like a Christmas fire near the end of the table was a firkin or two, perhaps a whole kilderkin, of fresh wild raspberries, each perfect as a ruby. Gold took only coffee, a cannikin of orange juice from a beaker, and a sample of honey dew melon from a trencher with a trowel. Tables had been set with silver and linen for five hundred persons. He was the only guest.

He sat facing the door and prayed for a sight of Andrea. How long could she sleep? Never had he longed for the arrival of a human being so much as he now missed her. The loudest noises in all Christendom seemed to roar in his mouth or flow from his person. His prissy sips of juice and coffee were as hurricanes and wild cataracts in their sound, and his mincing swallows were the thundering explosions of erupting primeval volcanoes. He feared he would make himself deaf. Each contact of cup with saucer was a vibrating crash of cymbals of which he was positive all thirty-eight staring people there to serve him were critical, although they said nothing to him or to each other. The awkwardness he had felt at first was nothing compared to the sensation of their unanimous and unmitigated disapproval which oppressed him now. Whenever he lifted his eyes to glance at anything a somber form materialized at his shoulder as though by witchcraft and poured another refill of coffee. Finally Gold addressed the servant nearest him in the lowest voice he could find above an immoral whisper.

"Miss Conover? Do you know what time she comes down for breakfast?"

"Miss Conover was here at five, sir. I believe she's gone riding."

"Mr. Conover?"

"Mr. Conover never comes down for breakfast when he has overnight guests. He can't stand them the next day. More coffee, sir?"

Gold had already finished seventeen cups. He left through the French doors opening onto the gardens and aimlessly strolled along the wall of the building. In a minute he came upon Pugh Biddle Conover on a patio, ensconced in his wheelchair like a monarch on a throne. He was dashingly clad in a glove-leather shooting jacket of plover gray and this time the bandana about his neck was of frisky blue. In his hands was a full decanter of whiskey he was examining lovingly in the morning sunlight. His face lit up when his eyes fell on Gold.

"Ah, good morning, dear fellow," he greeted him warmly. "Did you sleep well?"

"Indeed I did," Gold responded with eagerness to the unexpected clubby sociability of his host. "The room was a castle and the bed was superb."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Conover cheerfully. "Enjoy your breakfast?"

"Immensely."

"Too bad," said Conover, and Gold welled with sorrow again. "You miss my daughter, don't you? I can tell by your tears. She's probably out riding. You don't ride, do you? Your kind usually doesn't."

"My kind?" Gold sucked air deep into his diaphragm and followed Conover inside a small study. "Whom again, sir, do you mean by my kind?"

"Oh, you know, Goidenrod," said Conover with the same chipper good humor that was not in character with the phobic dislike with which he was now regarding Gold and made no serious effort to suppress. "There's a kind of person who rides and a kind of person that doesn't, and those who don't, don't, do they?"

"Jews? Is that who you mean?"

"Jews?" Conover repeated, happily cocking his head. "Italians too and Irish Catholics. You keep speaking of Jews as though that's all we have to think about. Is that the only thing you have on your mind?"

"You give the impression it's very much on yours."

"Perhaps it is, this weekend," Conover retaliated with the aim of a marksman and the sleek proficiency of a well-bred asp. Dropping all restraints, he now leaned forward with a gloating leer. "Your grandchildren might ride, if you make or marry enough money. But your children don't, because you haven't. Look at how much the Annenbergs and Guggenheims and Rothschilds have been able to do for their children and how little you can do for yours. How does it feel, Dr. Gold, to know you've already failed your children and probably your grandchildren as well—to realize you've already deprived these innocent descendants of yours of the chance ever to enter good society?"

Gold echoed him with disdain. "Good society?"

"Yes, Shapiro, you know what I mean. I'm in it and you're not. My family is and yours isn't. You have aspirations and regrets and feelings of inferiority and I don't. What are you doing in here with me?" he demanded suddenly with eyes screwed* up into an expression of ferocious surprise and annoyance. "We don't have to talk to each other this much, do we? What the devil do you want from me, anyway?"

"I want to marry your daughter," said Gold. "I'm here to ask for her hand in marriage."

"Take it and get out," said Conover. "Go read the Sunday papers or something until Andrea gets back. Do the crossword puzzle."

"I have your blessing?"

"If you leave early."

From the doorway Gold hit back. "I am hopeful, sir, that in the fullness of time, you will come to love me."

"Daddy likes you," Andrea said, in her tiny golden sports car, slicing back through the hills to Washington with the speed of sheet lightning, and Gold was bound to the conviction that she was out of her fucking mind. "I can tell. You can't imagine how cold and sarcastic he can be to people he doesn't like."

"I can imagine," said Gold wanly.

"And then they never want to see me again. Please don't be angry." She was visibly upset by his sullen demeanor. "I'll do anything you say."

"Do ninety-five." She braked considerably and the needle of the speedometer came down below a hundred. "He was rude and nasty to me, Andrea. Why wasn't he polite? Why wasn't he deferential? Doesn't he know I'm up for a job in government?"

"He's dying, darling. Isn't that better?"

"No!" Gold exclaimed guiltily, recalling with aversion how inconceivably callous and accepting some of these Christians always had been about their dead. The old Greeks set pyres flaming as soon as they could chop the wood and clean and oil the bodies. The Jews had them in the ground in forty-eight hours. Some of these gentiles remained on such good terms with their deceased that they kept them on display at home for a week, often in back parlors adjacent to kitchens and dining rooms. "For God sakes, Andrea," he added in a more reasoning tone, "what has that got to do with the way he treats me now?"

"It's true, though, isn't it?" Andrea was eager to explain. "Won't it be much easier for us after he's dead?"

"But you're not supposed to say it." Andrea was abject and Gold began to enjoy the generous wrath roiling within him. "Goddammit, why wasn't he quailing? I'm going to be on the President's staff, and he ought to know what that means."

"More work?"

"Less work. Power. Raw power. Brute, illegal power. I'll misuse it to ruin him and make his life miserable. I'll tap his telephones. I'll have the FBI ask insinuating questions about him. I may be a balding little foreigner from New York to him but—"

"He likes your hair."

"Not as much as Arturo Toscanini's, does he? Horsepower. I'll plant microphones and secret agents in his stables and catch him gelding. The IRS will question him over every deduction. I'll unplug his wheelchair and leave him out in the sun to poach. I'll be an unnamed source spilling leaks to the press that your old man's syphilitic. Ha! The eminent Dr. Bruce Gold's new father-in-law is not dying of whatever he's supposed to be dying of. He's got syphilis and syphilis has got him. How will that sit with all his horsey friends back there once they learn he's got the syph? Your fucking father was insulting to me from beginning to end," he went on, smiling faintly in anticipation of the irony to follow, "and I'm going to have my revenge, if he helps me get my job. He didn't treat me with respect, Andrea. He has no respect for me."

"Neither does your own father."

"My father knows me. Yours doesn't. He isn't coming to our wedding."

"He said that too."

"Neither will mine, or my sisters." Gold rested his chin on his fist with a dull laugh. "I think we're going to have a very small wedding, whether we want one or not. If we get married at all."

Andrea's lovely face trembled. "Don't say that, Bruce," she pleaded, improving his spirits vastly. "I'd be so miserable if you didn't want to marry me just because of my father. I never scrape calluses from my feet any more unless I'm alone."

"Watch the road!" Gold shrieked as she put both arms on him in a supplicating hold. "You're doing a hundred and eighty again!" Andrea slowed the car to a hundred and thirty-five, and his heartbeat decelerated in ratio. "Andrea, I have to ask you this and I don't think I know how. But didn't you used to be taller?"

"Taller than what?"

"Than you are now, I guess. Ralph saw you at a party and he seems to feel you're getting shorter."

"Than what?"

"Than you used to be, I imagine."

"I haven't noticed if I am. Maybe I only looked shorter because you're getting larger."

"I wasn't there."

"Would it make much difference if I were?"

"Not to me." Gold's answer flew from him too readily to leave him altogether secure in its accuracy. "Although Ralph seems to be concerned. But if you are getting shorter, don't you think we ought to know about it before the marriage and try to do something? After all," said Gold, feeling rather expansive, "you wouldn't want to get too short, would you?"

"On, no. Not too short. I'll look into it if you want me to. I'll measure myself or see a specialist. I'll do anything you want."

"I'm glad we agree on that," said Gold. "You told your father I have the sexual attitudes of a middle-aged man, didn't you? Why do you have to talk to people about our sleeping together?"

"I only say very good things about you."

"That isn't the point, really." He snickered morosely. "You told Miss Plum I was great and your father I have the sexual attitudes of a middle-aged man. I guess that makes me a great man with middle-aged sexual attitudes, doesn't it?"

"I can't help boasting about you," Andrea answered. "Please don't be angry with me. I'll do anything I can to make you happy. I'll be your slave. You can make believe you're my master and tie me up in chairs and beds with ropes and belts and chains."

"Andrea, what are you talking about?" cried Gold with instinctive horror, hoisting himself from the low-slung seat as though his ass were on fire and pivoting on his hip to gape at someone so unlike the girl he supposed her to be that it took a larger stretch of imagination than he could command to recognize her.

Andrea misread the message in his response and continued spiritedly, "Or I can pretend I'm a young Victorian maid from the provinces who's poor and you're my wicked employer in London who can make me do everything perverted you like, with whips and costumes and riding crops. You can bind my buttocks or hands."

Gold gazed at her in utter stupefaction. "Why would I want to do that?"

"To have your will with me. I can eat your foot."

"Don't do me no favors!" Gold objected with frightened vehemence, and repented at once that he had spoken so resolutely. In afterthought, her ideas did not seem altogether that degenerate, and he began to pay attention to the visions conjured up by her words. Andrea as a slave or bound-up Victorian maid was not half bad.

"I was only trying to make you happy," she defended herself. "When I was going with this economist at Georgetown University—"

"I don't want to hear it," Gold interrupted with a bedraggled wave of his hands. "Andrea, why must you tell me things like that?"

"I've always believed in the truth."

"Well, stop, for God sakes," he ordered. "What's so special about truth?"

"Do you love me?" she asked.

"With all my heart," he lied. "Then let me do something to please you.

There must be something you'd like."

Gold concentrated with a pout. "I'd like to eat out for a change," he decided. "I'm getting tired of cooking every night."

Andrea left the car with the doorman of the restaurant.

"Good evening, Miss Conover." The towering captain of waiters spoke directly to Andrea over Gold's head. "Would you like to be seen? Or would you prefer someplace secluded where you can do whatever you want to with each other?"

"Both," said Gold.

They were seated in a booth against the rear wall with phallic sconces illuminating only their brows and eyes. Gold was seized with a clammy terror when Harris Rosenblatt joined them almost immediately and looked from one to the other with piercing inference.

"This is Andrea Conover," said Gold. "She and I were at the Senator Russell B. Long Foundation together and we happened to run into each other here in Washington."

"I believe I know your father well," said Harris Rosenblatt even before Gold had finished. "How is Pugh?"

"Just about the same," answered Andrea.

"I'm sorry to hear that." Harris Rosenblatt's voice came down in register a bit with condolence, but he continued in the same workaday manner, as though all three were about to run out of time, "Were there many people out this weekend?"

"Almost none."

"Promise him I'll try to drive out to see him the next time I'm in Washington. What is it that's wrong with him, anyway?"

"No one can find out."

Gold's confusion and chagrin on discovering Harris Rosenblatt on such, knowledgeable terms with Pugh Biddle Conover were beyond description. He had experienced the contradictory sensations of recognizing Harris on sight and requiring several instants to place him. Despite Ralph's disconcerted observations, Gold was unprepared for the physical changes in his former schoolmate that he would have thought biologically incredible. Harris Rosenblatt had grown lean with rectitude and tall and ramrod-straight with probity and that manifest puritanical social self-righteousness that is by no means rare in the financial world. He had grown a high forehead somehow. He had a Norwegian nose. Dark, vertical clefts scored his face from eyebrows to chin and the gaunt muscles of his cheeks held any inclination to smile or laugh imprisoned in a vise of solemnity. His words were to the point and his eyes had the look of a person with a propensity for uncovering people who did not measure up to standards. Before retreating from graduate school under the pressure of impending failure, Harris Rosenblatt had been a rather obese and epicene figure of smaller than average stature with a rotund and fleshy face and a shapeless pelvis and a puffed-out chest. Finance changes a man that way. Humor would be wasted upon him and Gold guessed he'd be even drearier and thicker than before.

"How's Belle?" Rosenblatt boomed at once, affirming the veracity of this analysis.

"Okay," said Gold and dropped the subject like a live coal. "You're looking wonderful, Harris. You've grown so thin and tall. You must be on a fine diet. You've lost much weight, haven't you?"

"Oh, no, I haven't lost weight."

"You haven't been on a diet?"

"No. Not on a diet."

Gold's wonder was increasing. "Have you grown taller?"

"Oh, yes, much taller." Here Rosenblatt somehow let it be known he was pleased. "I've grown a lot since the last time we met. I'm a much bigger person now than I have ever been. I've learned a great deal and I'm much better in many ways."

"What have you learned?" Gold was curious.

"I'm not sure," Harris Rosenblatt replied. "But I used to be a very proud person. I'm not any more. I've learned what it is to be humble, and I'm very proud of that." In the silence that came in the wake of this, he again shifted his glance restively between Andrea and Gold. "Someone told me you and Belle aren't together any more."

"There's not a word of truth in that," said Gold.

"I was very disappointed when I heard that. I believe I got that information about you and Belle from a reliable unnamed source."

"I've been doing a lot of work here as an unnamed source," Gold answered with nervousness and haste, "so it may have come from me. No truth to it at all."

"I'm pleased to hear that about you and Belle. There's much too much of that sort of thing going on now to suit me. It isn't good for the family, it isn't good for the children, and it isn't good for the country. It may be good for the economy but it just doesn't suit me for the short term or the long term and it certainly is not good for the budget. I'm happy to hear that you and Belle will be staying together, and Selma will be happy too."

"What's new in money, Harris?" Gold inquired as soon as he found himself with the chance. "Are we going to revaluate or devaluate and what will that mean to income and purchasing power?"

"I have no idea. We have other people in our firm who deal with matters like that. I specialize in municipal bonds and government budgeting."

"Well, what's going to happen there?"

"I don't know," said Harris Rosenblatt smartly as though delivering an apt recitation, and bestowed upon Gold a look of approval that clearly was to be appreciated as a rarity. "That's a remarkable phrase you coined there, Bruce, remarkable, and I'm sure that everyone in business and government is grateful to you. It boggles the mind how minds like mine used to boggle at mind-boggling questions like that before you gave us those three marvelous little words, / don't know. I can see why the President wants you. I hear good things about your report."

Gold veiled his surprise. "It's still in a preliminary stage."

"Good news leaks out. When will it be ready? I look forward to reading it."

Gold decided to have a crack at it. "I don't know."

"Good," came the plaudit from Harris Rosenblatt. "I must go now. I have early appointments tomorrow with the Treasury Department, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Federal Reserve Board. I can tell you what I'll tell them tomorrow and what I told them at the White House yesterday and today. It's the soundest advice I can prescribe for the country and the soundest advice I can give to any individual." Harris Rosenblatt made his pronouncement while rising, and stood as upright and rigid as the column of a temple. "Balance your budget or you will rue the day. If you want to dance you have to pay the piper, and the man who pays the fiddler is the one that calls the tune."

"Harris," said Gold, holding on to the edge of the table as though for dear life, "you really say that to people?"

"In just those words." Pride rang triumphantly in Harris Rosenblatt's voice, and his enunciation too, Gold noted now from the hardened r, had taken on the meticulous polish of a tenth-generation Midwesterner. "And they listen wisely. I can confide this much to you. I think every effort will be made to balance the federal budget and I think there's a very good chance we'll succeed."

"What will that mean?"

"What do you mean?" Gold's question evoked in Harris Rosenblatt an expression of stark incomprehension.

"What will it mean to things like prices, taxes, income, and unemployment?

What effect will a balanced budget have on the economy and social welfare?"

"I don't know." Harris Rosenblatt was pleased with his response and paused with pride a moment to allow it to sink in. "We have other departments in our firm with knowledge like that. I just specialize in budget balancing. Good evening, Miss Conover. Give my best to Pugh Biddle and tell him I'm looking forward to coming out again soon and hunting the fox, eh? Remind him I'll want that dog he promised me. He said he would give me a good one to shoot. Bruce, now that you're becoming well known, why don't Selma and I get together again for dinner with you and Belle? We used to have such good times together with you and Belle. Be sure to give my love to Belle," he clanged as loudly as the old Coney Island trolley car and trundled away in an aftermath of echoes.

"Who's Belle?"

Gold was already at the starting block. "My ex-wife," he said and sprinted ahead nimbly. "We still have some details to talk over before the divorce becomes final. What did Rosenblatt mean when he said your father would give him a good dog to shoot?"

"Probably one of Daddy's jokes. You know how funny he can be. How long will it take to get your divorce?"

"Ralph says it can be done in an hour in Haiti once we reach an agreement."

"I wish we were already married and you didn't have to go back."

"I wish I had that government job already and I wouldn't have to go back," Gold declared in a voice charged with bitterness. "I was hoping your father would offer to do more." Andrea looked hurt and Gold was stricken with self-reproach. "I wish the two of us could sneak away from everyone now on a secret honeymoon. I'd like a vacation with you more than anything but I don't think I can afford it."

"We can use my money," Andrea promptly offered.

"I won't allow that," Gold heard himself state even quicker. His spontaneous avowal of principle sounded much more final than he expected it would, and disgruntlement followed hard on its footsteps. "Dammit, why doesn't somebody rich invite us to Acapulco? I'll bet Kissinger didn't pay."

"You have to be important before you get those," Andrea explained with a laugh. "I'm happy you even thought of it. Much of the time I'm afraid you won't want to see me again, even after we're married."

"Why would I marry you," asked Gold, "if I didn't want to see you again?"

"To help you get the government appointment," she answered. "That's why I want to wait until after you have it before we decide. I don't think we could be happy if you were only the Secretary of Agriculture or a speechwriter, could we? But I love the thought, if only you could afford it." She squeezed his hand in both her own. His hand was in his lap.

"I can raise the money," he decided recklessly with a surge of joy, recalling the money owed him by Spotty Weinrock and all the rest he could borrow from Sid. "We'll sneak off to Acapulco together and tell nobody. It will be dangerous, but what the hell—that will make it more exciting."

"You're so much fun."

"I'll start making plans. We'll leave as soon as I get my father back to Florida."

Gold had trouble sleeping. Andrea would not lose a wink in a cataclysm. With envious petulance he listened to her breathe, deploring the defect in his character that left him destitute of that flatness of viewpoint and narrowness of mind without which it is impossible for any strong ideological belief to flourish. That a dunce like Harris Rosenblatt should find adherents in Washington raised questions about the sanctity and durability of government and American society that no amount of patriotic reasoning could subdue. Andrea sighed in her slumber with a stirring that did not cease until she had backed into contact with him again. They both slept nude. Her tawny flesh, fuzzed with silken, yellow hairs, was gorgeous in the rippling overlaps of muted light and shadows. It dawned upon him then that she could not really know in her deep and tranquil repose it was he who was there beside her. Sadness overcame him and he lost contact with the present. Sid had spurned him. Stinting in conversation with everyone at home, what fraternal comments he had for Gold as a child seemed mainly criticism and belittlement. So much older in years, Sid was like a second father, and both these elders were disgraced by his early need for eyeglasses. No matter how brightly he excelled in elementary school, Ida was always exhorting him to do better, dumbfounding their immigrant mother, who could not believe he was as habitually delinquent as the reprimands signified. Even when his grades were perfect her praise was a rebuke. No, he's very good, Gold could still hear Ida trying to impose her dictum on the hapless, uncomprehending woman, but there's no reason he shouldn't be perfect, instead of like Muriel.

"Hey, kid, you ought to put on some weight or you'll never make a team," Sid would say to him often. For one year Sid had been on the high-school football team as a substitute. Then he gave it up to work in the laundry. "Go out for fencing when you get to high school. You're so skinny they'll never be able to hit you. I bet you could stand under a shower without getting wet."

In music class he was converted into a listener and not permitted to sing. The teacher staggered back with a look of nausea the first time she massed the children for song at the front of the classroom and some sound of unbelievable ugliness landed without pity on her sensitive and unsuspecting ears. She flew into a frenzy of action as though confronted with a dire emergency. By a rapid process of plucking and grouping, she narrowed the source of the offending voice down to eight students, then four, then three. The accusing finger fell at last upon him. "And you, Bruce/' she announced with what little breath remained to her, "can be a listener. We need listeners too, don't we, class?" Her bosom heaved with enormous relief.

Thereafter, he would sit and listen two or three hours a week while the others stood and rehearsed for the performance they would give one Friday at the weekly assembly. Once, Miss Lamb, the teacher, after commending the singers at the conclusion of a session, thoughtfully had all of them turn and clap their hands at him for being so faithful and true a listener, and this became a ritual at each of the music classes. Gold was dumb as a log at every music session, and his head felt as heavy. Even fucking Lieberman was a bass.

And then his fucking crackpot of a father, Gold recalled with a surge of nostalgic grief that oozed from his heart to form a lump in his throat, at last was proud of him and bragged outrageously to customers in his tailor shop and to neighbors up and down the street. "In that whole class, there is just one listener," he would announce to Gold's speechless mortification, exhibiting one finger high in the air, "and that listener is my son." With no warning his father would then soar melodically into the five most celebrated notes from / Pagliacci and terminate abruptly. "See how good he listens?"

"Me and Fishy Siegel are altos in our class," Spotty Weinrock stopped him once to say, approaching in a limping walk with one foot on the sidewalk curb and the other in the gutter. "What are you?"

A clock tolled three. A child was crying. Scores of memories of that melancholy nature flowed through Gold's mind as he lay in bed with Andrea and forgot she was there, and Bruce Gold, Doctor of Philosophy and Professor of English and related disciplines, Presidential appointee-designate, near the half century of his life, sought refuge at night in the fantasy of his childhood that he was not really Bruce Gold and that his family was not really his family, his background was not his background, and his station in life was not his station, that he was of better heritage than anyone but himself had yet supposed, and had been unfortunately misplaced all his life as the result of some incomprehensible series of errors and misunderstandings that were on the brink of correction. A computer was already deciphering them. Justice would be done. Everything was destined for improvement. Men and women of beautiful and most noble lineaments would appear in sandals and silken robes to claim and redeem him. The land would rejoice. A child had been found. He might even be a prince. The people who attended him with such devotion and bliss were all multimillionaires.

"You are not Bruce Gold," they assured him soothingly. "These people are not your people and these relatives and friends are not your true relatives and friends. You are Van Cleef and Arpels," they said. "You are a stunning, sparkling jewelry store on Fifth Avenue, and it's all yours. The wealthiest people come from everywhere to shop in you." Gold held fast to his dream, and his trust in the inevitability of this outcome for him had lessened only slightly over the decades of maturity. "Please come in, Mr. Van Cleef and Arpels," they cooed, "and be at home, for it all belongs to you. You are a group of dazzling and distinguished jewelry stores with branches in Beverly Hills, Palm Beach, Paris, and other lovely cities and have secret contacts in Antwerp. People of what little royal blood survives come in homage on soft footsteps and pay you money. The finest, most beautiful persons in all the world are your subjects and your suitors. You are not a listener any more," they whispered. "You are not," they lullabied, "even a Jew."

Gold moved his lips to reply but no words came. He was asleep.