Kissing in Manhattan (3 page)

Out on the street it was cold. Leaves and trash blew around. Checkers and Donna walked together, not speaking.

“You don’t have to walk with me,” said Donna.

Checkers looked at the sky. He was thinking about what happened when he was alone in his apartment at night, sleeping. He knew he curled around himself at some point, because that’s how he woke every morning: curled up tight, hibernating.

“There’s a subway stop.” Donna pointed.

“My car’s near the next one,” said Checkers. “Broadway-Lafayette. Come on. Just five more blocks of your life. Then I’m vamoose.”

They kept walking. A ragged white cat watched them from an eave. Something smelled like rubber. Slouched in a doorway was a lanky, black-eyed street vagrant tuning a guitar.

“The holidays are coming,” said Checkers.

“I guess so.”

Donna watched her pumps clopping the sidewalk. The subway station loomed.

“Well,” said Donna. “Thanks for dinner.”

Checkers nodded east. “I’m parked around the corner.”

They could see their breath.

Donna stuck out her hand. “Nice meeting you.”

“Sixty seconds,” said Checkers. “Just stand where you’re standing for sixty seconds.”

Donna detested how she felt.

“Checkers,” she said. “The night is over.”

Checkers was already trotting away.

“Sixty seconds,” he shouted back. He disappeared around the corner.

Forget it, thought Donna.

She moved toward the subway. Then she stopped.

There’s nothing to try, she told herself. She didn’t move, though. She stayed standing still and looked up at the stars, which were dull blobs of gas.

Jezebel’s up there, thought Donna. Jezebel, with her perfect calves, is floating around like an imbecile.

I’m an imbecile, too, thought Donna, shivering. An imbecile with no coat.

“Screw it,” said Donna.

She walked to the top of the subway stairs. A car braked. A horn honked.

“Whoa, baby,” shouted a voice.

Donna turned. A midnight-blue Plymouth Duster was pulled up to the curb twenty feet from her. The passenger window was rolled down, and through it Donna could see Checkers behind the steering wheel, staring out at her.

“Hey, sexy mama,” shouted Checkers.

“I’m not coming with you,” said Donna.

Checkers rolled down the driver-side window. He leaned out, waved at some pedestrians.

“Hey.” Checkers jabbed a thumb toward Donna. “Anyone else see this package over here? She spoken for, or what?”

“Cut it out, Checkers.” Donna’s arms were folded on her chest. “I know it’s you. I get it.”

“Is she the bomb?” hollered Checkers. “Is she the word? Is she the motion?”

Two cars were stuck behind the Duster, unable to pass. One was a cab, the other a Honda.

“Move that thing,” yelled the cabbie.

“Checkers,” said Donna.

Checkers turned his attention back to Donna. He widened his eyes at her, raised his eyebrows, honked his horn. He revved his engine, whooped like a schoolboy. He slid himself over to the passenger window.

“Say there, fine thing.” Checkers hung his tongue like a dog. “You got the eyes and you got the thighs. Know what I’m sayin’, love chicken?”

Donna scowled. She gave Checkers the finger.

“Move that fucking thing,” yelled the cabbie. He laid on his horn.

Checkers licked his pinky, made a summoning motion.

“Come over here, woman,” he growled. “Come over here and get nasty with old Checkers.”

Donna rolled her eyes. She tossed her hair. There were goose bumps on her neck.

“Come on now,” said Checkers.

“You’ve got cars behind you,” warned Donna.

There was a rush and rumbling in the earth. A train was pulling in.

Checkers thumped his chest. “Come get in the love machine,” he told Donna. “Papa Checkers’ll make you a woman.”

“You’re sick in the head,” said Donna.

The driver of the Honda was out of his car. He was an angry man in a bow tie.

“What’s the story?” he demanded.

“Papa Checkers will screw you cross-eyed,” yelled Checkers.

Donna gasped. She was thirty-two, in a tight dress, with goose bumps and good lipstick. She sold real estate, loved children, voted.

“Come on, now,” said Checkers quietly, holding his hand out to Donna. “You’re all about obeying Papa, aren’t you? Get on over here right now, little girl.”

The man in the bow tie stuck his face in the Duster’s driver-side window.

“What’s the story?” he bellowed at Checkers.

Checkers didn’t flinch. His hand was still out, reaching toward the woman.

“Now,” he whispered, and Donna smiled.

The legend of Jacob’s bath began on May 1, 1948, the day Jacob Wolf married Rachel Cohen.

The wedding took place in the West Eighty-ninth Street synagogue and the reception was at the Plaza Hotel. Jacob and Rachel’s mothers—both named Amy—coordinated these events. Both families had histories of propriety in Manhattan. Centuries back the Wolfs had been Romanian tailors. They now owned Wolf’s Big and Tall on West Seventy-second, where they trimmed the prominent and took in the monstrous. It was rumored that Sherman Wolf, Jacob’s father, had been personal tailor to both the mayor and the Scapalletti crime bosses. The exact clientele of Wolf’s Big and Tall was never known publicly. What was known publicly was that the Wolfs were in league with giant men, men whose paws you were afraid to shake. That’s what made it such a disgrace when, in the summer of 1943, twenty-four-year-old Jacob Wolf, Sherman’s only son, took work as a jingle writer.

“A what?” Sherman Wolf stared at his boy. “What’re you handing me, here?”

“I’ll write jingles,” said Jacob. “Songs for products.”

“Songs for products?” Sherman Wolf was six foot seven. His son was five eleven.

“What songs?” demanded Sherman. “What products? What’re you handing me?”

“It’s for the radio, Dad.” Jacob sighed. “It’s for a conglomerate.”

“What now? What’re you handing me? A condiment?”

Jacob sighed again. The conglomerate was a team of businesses whose common association mystified Jacob. All he knew was that a man had offered him a paying job writing jingles. If the man called and said, we need a poodle-collar song, that’s what Jacob wrote. If a thirty-second-long ode to mouthwash was required, Jacob would create a thirty-second-long ode to mouthwash.

“A conglomerate is a team of businesses, Dad.”

Sherman looked down on his son. They stood facing each other in the drawing room of Sherman and Amy’s penthouse on West Seventy-fourth Street. The penthouse contained two original paintings by August Macke. It also contained a black grand piano that Sherman had bought when Jacob was aboy. At an early age Jacob had shown musical talent and achronic deficiency in athletics, and Sherman hoped to promotethe former. True, his son was short and a disgrace at stickball. But, with arduous training, perhaps Jacob could become a musical genius of stormy temperament, a kind of Jewish Mozart who would bang out his tragedies at Carnegie Hall or the Met. Sherman wasn’t averse to culture. But he presupposed that his only male offspring would crave power, notoriety of some respectable cast. A war was on, and anything that smacked of the trivial was disgraceful to Sherman Wolf.

“Amy,” barked Sherman, “get in here. The boy wants to join a condiment.”

So Sherman and Jacob never agreed about Jacob’s profession. In 1944, when Jacob netted a fat paycheck for his Grearson’s Soap Flakes jingle, Sherman held his tongue. He did the same during his son’s 1946 Bear Belly Cupcakes phase. But, in the fall of 1947, Sherman’s patience died when he heard the following ditty on the radio:

It’s time to be kind
to your child’s behind.
Switch to Kyper’s . . .
the dapper diapers!

“Diapers can’t be dapper,” fumed Sherman. “Men’s clothes are dapper. Suits and vests, dammit.”

“It sounded good,” said Jacob.

“Besides,” said Sherman, “I know Mitch Kyper. He dresses like shit.”

“Dapper diapers,” explained Jacob. “Alliteration, Dad.”

Sherman threw up his hands. His exasperation and embarrassment over Jacob seemed like divine decrees, permanent curses on his life. All he wanted was for his son to be a man. A man worked hard, played cards, drank whiskey, thought about women’s tits. A man paid for things, and then, if he wasn’t sick or dead, he laughed. But a man did not write songs about toothpaste and hair cream.

“He just needs a wife,” Amy Wolf told her husband.

In January 1948 Jacob Wolf found his wife. To Sherman and Amy’s undying relief the girl was Rachel Cohen, daughter of Alex and Amy Cohen of West Seventy-ninth Street. Alex Cohen was the sports editor of
The New York Times
. His family hadn’t been in news for as many generations as Wolfs had been cutting cloth, but Alex’s published opinions about the Yankees and the Giants were sober and correct. Alex Cohen, Sherman Wolf felt, was not a man of levity. Alex understood the honor a man bore when he crushed an opponent, whether that opponent was Adolf Hitler or the Boston Red Sox. Sherman hoped that some of Alex’s nobility had come down to his daughter Rachel—as much nobility, anyway, as a woman could carry—and he hoped in turn that Rachel’s nobility might rub off on Jacob.

As for Rachel, she loved Jacob. She was twenty-two when they met, and she worked as a fact checker in the
Times
’s features department. Rachel was responsible for discovering and accurately reporting to her superiors the exact height of Benito Mussolini, or the wing speed of the hummingbird, or the precise ingredients in the vichyssoise at Duranigan’s of Madison Avenue. In fact, Rachel was at Duranigan’s, arguing with the chef—who had agreed over the phone to publish some recipes, but was now being tight-lipped and haughty—when she noticed Jacob Wolf eating lunch alone at a corner table. She’d seen Jacob while growing up, at temple on Eighty-ninth, but she’d never
noticed
him. She’d never noticed the particularly strong cut of his jaw, or the frailty of his fingers. She’d never been privy to the sadness, the unselfconscious melancholy with which Jacob ate a Reuben sandwich when he figured no one was looking.

“My God,” whispered Rachel. “Jacob Wolf?”

“I say nothing.” The chef shook his head in triumph. “The vichyssoise, it is private.”

Rachel floated out of the kitchen, toward her lone and future lover, who glanced up to meet her gaze.

“Private,” the chef hollered after Rachel. “You hear?”

Four months later Jacob and Rachel married. It was a regal wedding. Cousins poured in from Long Island and Washington, D.C. Pure-white long-stem roses were strewn on the synagogue floor. Susan March, Rachel’s close friend and fellow fact checker, was the maid of honor. Susan wore a dress that revealed her excellent calves, and many guests felt privately that Susan was more beautiful than Rachel.

At the Plaza reception, under Amy and Amy’s discerning command, steak tartare was served, and champagne, and then lemon sorbet and then dinner. All the best people in Manhattan attended, including June Madagascar, the Broadway soprano, and Jacqueline Hive, who ran an orphanage, and ominously tall men in waistcoats. During a lull in the gaiety Robby Jax, the famous comedian, grinned and called for a toast.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Robby, his glass of Scotch raised, “for the love of summer, for the love of husbands and wives, for the love of Cutty Sark and dancing, for the love of Jacqueline Hive’s stupendous bosom, for the love of your mothers and fathers, for the love of Jews and starlight and well-crafted wool suits, but mostly, God bless them, for the love of Jacob and Rachel Wolf . . . cheers.”

A hurrah went up. Glasses clinked. Dancing was permitted, children smiled, and a cavalcade of gifts was bestowed on the bride and groom. All of the gifts were impeccable. There were silver knives and gold jewelries. There were bottles of wine and examples of art. There was nothing lewd, grotesque, comical, or personal: no lingerie, no cash, no recordings of jazz, no books. Every gift pointed toward a useful, lavish life.

Presiding over the night was six-foot-seven Sherman Wolf. True, Alex Cohen had footed the bill, but that was nothing magnanimous. It was Sherman who imbued the night with class: he sank his teeth into steak tartare, he danced with wives, he shook hands with his cousin Ida to end a long-standing feud. Above all, Sherman was happy. No goofy jingle writers had appeared—Sherman had feared there might be a union of them—to sing stupid songs or snort laughter. For the evening’s end a limousine had been hired to pull up to the front doors of the Plaza and spirit Jacob and his bride off to an Adirondack mountain resort. Finally, in the reception’s pi`ece de résistance, the governor himself appeared for fifteen minutes. He kissed the bride, pounded the groom’s shoulder, then took Sherman aside for some intimate words.

Amid all this wonder was Jacob Wolf, twenty-eight, newly married and utterly dismayed. Jacob sat at the head table beside Rachel and watched the night go unhappily by. The Plaza was glorious, of course. The food was glorious, and the lighting, and the violin music, and even Jacob’s snot-nosed cousin Lucy from New Haven had somehow lost her baby fat and vulgar tongue and become glorious too. But Jacob was not built for glory. He’d known this all his life. He smiled at his and Rachel’s guests because they wished him well, but in his heart he was terrified of these people. Contrary to myth there was nothing pretentious or phony about them. They were everything they believed themselves to be. They were rich, shiny, intelligent, and, Jacob guessed, they were moral champions of every perseverance. It was exactly their goodness that chilled Jacob’s heart. For he knew himself to be a flawed, simple man. He wrote breezy, foolish song lyrics for a living and was content to do so. He took long walks in Central Park, not so as to appreciate nature or become fit, but rather for no reason whatever. He’d chosen Rachel as a wife because she’d been an easy catch. She’d walked up to him at Duranigan’s, and, through body language and the English language, madeit known to Jacob that she was available. They dated for a month, and Rachel said things that made Jacob laugh. She had a capable body, as did Jacob—though they didn’t sleep together before their honeymoon—and Rachel neither loved nor disdained the jingles Jacob wrote. Out of what might have been joy but was certainly relief, Jacob asked Rachel to be his wife. She immediately said yes, and that was that.