Authors: Philip Roth
“What was the first?”
“What first?”
“You said
two
things,” I said.
“I don’t remember. I say two because my wife tells me I’m sarcastic and a cynic. That way maybe she won’t think I’m such a wise guy.”
I saw Brenda and Ferrari separate, and so excused myself and started for Brenda, but just then Mr. Patimkin separated from Julie and it looked as though the two men were going to switch partners. Instead the four of them stood on the dance floor and when I reached them they were laughing and Julie was saying, “What’s so funny!” Ferrari said “Hi” to me and whisked Julie away, which sent her into peals of laughter.
Mr. Patimkin had one hand on Brenda’s back and suddenly the other one was on mine. “You kids having a good time?” he said.
We were sort of swaying, the three of us, to “Get Me to the Church on Time.”
Brenda kissed her father. “Yes,” she said. “I’m so drunk my head doesn’t even need my neck.”
“It’s a fine wedding, Mr. Patimkin.”
“You want anything just ask me…” he said, a little drunken himself. “You’re two good kids … How do you like that brother of yours getting married?…Huh?…Is that a girl or is that a girl?”
Brenda smiled, and though she apparently thought her father had spoken of her, I was sure he’d been referring to Harriet.
“You like weddings, Daddy?” Brenda said.
“I like my kids’ weddings…” He slapped me on the back. “You two kids, you want anything? Go have a good time. Remember,” he said to Brenda, “you’re my honey…” Then he looked at me. “Whatever my Buck wants is good enough for me. There’s no business too big it can’t use another head.”
I smiled, though not directly at him, and beyond I could see Leo sopping up champagne and watching the three of us; when he caught my eye he made a sign with his hand, a circle with his thumb and forefinger, indicating, “That a boy, that a boy!”
After Mr. Patimkin departed, Brenda and I danced closely, and we only sat down when the waiters began to circulate with the main course. The head table was noisy, particularly at our end where the men were almost all teammates of Ron’s, in one sport or another; they ate a fantastic number of rolls. Tank Feldman, Ron’s roommate who had flown in from Toledo, kept sending the waiter back for rolls, for celery, for olives, and always to the squealing delight of Gloria Feldman, his wife, a nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes. Gloria and Tank, in fact, seemed to be self-appointed precinct captains at our end. They proposed toasts, burst into wild song, and continually referred to Brenda and me as “love birds.” Brenda smiled at this with her eyeteeth and I brought up a cheery look from some fraudulent auricle of my heart.
And the night continued: we ate, we drank, we danced—Rose and Pearl did the Charleston with one another (while their husbands examined woodwork and chandeliers), and then I did the Charleston with none other than Gloria Feldman, who made coy, hideous faces at me all the time we danced. Near the end of the evening, Brenda, who’d been drinking champagne like her Uncle Leo, did a Rita Hayworth tango with herself, and Julie fell asleep on some ferns she’d whisked off the head table and made into a mattress at the far end of the hall. I felt a numbness creep into my hard palate, and by three o’clock people were dancing in their coats, shoeless ladies were wrapping hunks of wedding cake in napkins for their children’s lunch, and finally Gloria Feldman made her way over to our end of the table and said freshly “Well our little Radcliffe smarty, what have
you
been doing all summer?”
“Growing a penis.”
Gloria smiled and left as quickly as she’d come, and Brenda without another word headed shakily away for the ladies’ room and the rewards of overindulgence. No sooner had she left than Leo was beside me, a glass in one hand, a new bottle of champagne in the other.
“No sign of the bride and groom?” he said, leering. He’d lost most of his consonants by this time and was doing the best he could with long, wet vowels. “Well, you’re next, kid, I see it in the cards … You’re nobody’s sucker…” And he stabbed me in the side with the top of the bottle, spilling champagne onto the side of my rented tux. He straightened up, poured more onto his hand and glass, but then suddenly he stopped. He was looking into the lights which were hidden beneath a long bank of flowers that adorned the front of the table. He shook the bottle in his hand as though to make it fizz. “The son of a bitch who invented the fluorescent bulb should drop dead!” He set the bottle down and drank.
Up on the stage Harry Winters brought his musicians to a halt. The drummer stood up, stretched, and they all began to open up cases and put their instruments away. On the floor, relatives, friends, associates, were holding each other around the waists and the shoulders, and small children huddled around their parents’ legs. A couple of kids ran in and out of the crowd, screaming at tag, until one was grabbed by an adult and slapped soundly on the behind. He began to cry, and couple by couple the floor emptied. Our table was a tangle of squashed everything: napkins, fruits, flowers; there were empty whiskey bottles, droopy ferns, and dishes puddled with unfinished cherry jubilee, gone sticky with the hours. At the end of the table Mr. Patimkin was sitting next to his wife, holding her hand. Opposite them, on two bridge chairs that had been nulled up sat Mr and Mrs Ehrlich They spoke quietly and evenly as though they had known each other for years and years Everything had slowed down now and from time to time people would come up to the Patimkins and Ehrlichs wish them
mazel tov
and then drag themselves and their families out into the September night, which was cool and windy, someone said, and reminded me that soon would come winter and snow.
“They never wear out, those things, you know that.” Leo was pointing to the fluorescent lights that shone through the flowers. “They last for years. They could make a car like that if they wanted, that could never wear out. It would ran on water in the summer and snow in the winter. But they wouldn’t do it, the big boys … Look at me,” Leo said, splashing his suit front with champagne, “I sell a good bulb. You can’t get the kind of bulb I sell in the drugstores. It’s a quality bulb. But I’m the little guy. I don’t even own a car. His brother, and I don’t even own an automobile. I take a train wherever I go. I’m the only guy I know who wears out three pairs of rubbers every winter. Most guys get new ones when they lose the old ones. I wear them out, like shoes. Look,” he said, leaning into me “I could sell a crappy bulb it wouldn’t break my heart. But it’s not good business.” ‘
The Ehrlichs and Patimkins scraped back their chairs and headed away, all except Mr. Patimkin who came down the table towards Leo and me.
He slapped Leo on the back. “Well, how you doing,
shtarke?
”
“All right, Ben. All right…”
“You have a good time?”
“You had a nice affair, Ben, it must’ve cost a pretty penny, believe me…”
Mr. Patimkin laughed. “When I make out my income tax I go to see Leo. He knows just how much money I spent … You need a ride home?” he asked me.
“No, thanks. I’m waiting for Brenda. We have my cat.”
“Good night,” Mr. Patimkin said.
I watched him step down off the platform that held the head table, and then start towards the exit. Now the only people in the hall—the shambles of a hall—were myself, Leo, and his wife and child who slept, both of them, with their heads pillowed on a crumpled tablecloth at a table down on the floor before us. Brenda still wasn’t around.
“When you got it,” Leo said, rubbing his fingers together, “you can afford to talk like a big shot. Who needs a guy like me any more. Salesmen, you spit on them. You can go to the supermarket and buy anything. Where my wife shops you can buy sheets and pillowcases. Imagine, a grocery store! Me, I sell to gas stations, factories, small businesses, all up and down the east coast. Sure, you can sell a guy in a gas station a crappy bulb that’ll bum out in a week. For inside the pumps I’m talking, it takes a certain kind of bulb. A utility bulb. All right, so you sell him a crappy bulb, and then a week later he puts in a new one, and while he’s screwing it in he still remembers your name. Not me. I sell a quality bulb. It lasts a month, five weeks, before it even flickers, then it gives you another couple days, dim maybe, but so you shouldn’t go blind. It hangs on, it’s a quality bulb. Before it even bums out you notice it’s getting darker, so you put a new one in. What people don’t like is when one minute it’s sunlight and the next dark. Let it glimmer a few days and they don’t feel so bad. Nobody ever throws out my bulb—they figure they’ll save them, can always use them in a pinch. Sometimes I say to a guy, you ever throw out a bulb you bought from Leo Patimkin? You gotta use psychology. That’s why I’m sending my kid to college. You don’t know a little psychology these days, you’re licked…”
He lifted an arm and pointed out to his wife; then he slumped down in his seat. “Aaach!” he said, and drank off half a glass of champagne. “I’ll tell you, I go as far as New London, Connecticut. That’s as far as I’ll go, and when I come home at night I stop first for a couple drinks. Martinis. Two I have, sometimes three. That seems fair, don’t it? But to her a little sip or a bathtubful, it smells the same. She says it’s bad for the kid if I come home smelling. The kid’s a baby for God’s sake, she thinks that’s the way I’m
supposed
to smell. A forty-eight-year-old man with a three-year-old kid! She’ll give me a thrombosis that kid. My wife, she wants me to come home early and play with the kid before she goes to bed. Come home, she says, and
I’ll
make you a drink. Hah! I spend all day sniffing gas, leaning under hoods with grimy
poilishehs
in New London, trying to force a lousy bulb into a socket—I’ll screw it in myself, I tell them—and she thinks I want to come home and drink a martini from a jelly glass! How long are von going to stay in bars she says Till a Jewish girl is Miss Rheingold!
“Look,” he went on after another drink, “I love my kid like Ben loves his Brenda. It’s not that I don’t want to play with her. But if I play with the kid and then at night get into bed with my wife, then she can’t expect fancy things from me. It’s one or the other. I’m no movie star.”
Leo looked at his empty glass and put it on the table; he tilted the bottle up and drank the champagne like soda water. “How much do you think I make a week?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess.”
“A hundred dollars.”
“Sure, and tomorrow they’re gonna let the lions out of the cage in Central Park. What do you think I make?”
“I can’t tell.”
“A cabdriver makes more than me. That’s a fact. My wife’s brother is a cabdriver,
he
lives in Kew Gardens. And he don’t take no crap, no sir, not those cabbies. Last week it was raining one night and I said the hell with it, I’m taking a cab. I’d been all day in Newton, Mass. I don’t usually go so far, but on the train in the morning I said to myself, stay on, go further, it’ll be a change. And I know all the time I’m kidding myself. I wouldn’t even make up the extra fare it cost me. But I stay on. And at night I still had a couple boxes with me, so when the guy pulls up at Grand Central there’s like a genie inside me says get in. I even threw the bulbs in, not even caring if they broke. And this cabbie says, Whatya want to do, buddy, rip the leather? Those are brand new seats I got. No, I said. Jesus Christ, he says, some goddam people. I get in and give him a Queens address which ought to shut him up, but no, all the way up the Drive he was Jesus Christing me. It’s hot in the cab, so I open a window and
then
he turns around and says, Whatya want to do, give me a cold in the neck? I just got over a goddam cold…” Leo looked at me, bleary-eyed. “This city is crazy! If I had a little money I’d get out of here in a minute. I’d go to California. They don’t need bulbs out there it’s so light. I went to New Guinea during the war from San Francisco.
There
” he burst, “there is the other good thing that happened to me, that night in San Francisco with this Hannah Schreiber. That’s the both of them, you asked me I’m telling you—the apartment my mother-in-law got us, and this Hannah Schreiber. One night was all. I went to a B’nai Brith dance for servicemen in the basement of some big temple, and I met her. I wasn’t married then, so don’t make faces.”
“I’m not.”
“She had a nice little room by herself. She was going to school to be a teacher. Already I knew something was up because she let me feel inside her slip in the cab. Listen to me, I sound like I’m always in cabs. Maybe two other times in my life. To tell the truth I don’t even enjoy it. All the time I’m riding I’m watching the meter. Even the pleasures I can’t enjoy!”
“What about Hannah Schreiber?”
He smiled, flashing some gold in his mouth. “How do you like that name? She was only a girl, but she had an old lady’s name. In the room she says to me she believes in oral love. I can still hear her: Leo Patimkin, I believe in oral love. I don’t know what the hell she means. I figure she was one of those Christian Scientists or some cult or something. So I said, But what about for soldiers, guys going overseas who may get killed, God forbid.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The smartest guy in the world I wasn’t. But that’s twenty years almost, I was still wet behind the ears. I’ll tell you, every once in a while my wife—you know, she does for me what Hannah Schreiber did. I don’t like to force her, she works hard. That to her is like a cab to me. I wouldn’t force her. I can remember every time, I’ll bet. Once after a Seder, my mother was still living, she should rest in peace. My wife was up to here with Mogen David. In fact,
twice
after Seders. Aachhh! Everything good in my life I can count on my fingers! God forbid some one should leave me a million dollars, I wouldn’t even have to take off my shoes. I got a whole other hand yet.”