WHEN I GOT BACK to our room at the Galaxy Hotel and Casino--about five minutes down the Boardwalk from the Versailles, where I’d been with Ibrahim--it was past midnight and the TV set was on, talking to Joan as she slept. Even in slumber she was golden. She was my Main Line blonde, my high-born darling from Bryn Mawr.
All right, I thought, so you’re not lucky in money. But look at this. Look at this...
If she wasn’t the most beautiful woman on the planet, then who was?
More than that, she had brains and that special American kick--insolence.
What made it really good was this: She was mine!
I sometimes wondered how it had happened between us. My best guess was that we fell in love because we didn’t understand one another, and stayed in love for the same reason--that thrill of renewal, that magic of everlasting discovery. In her poetic moments she said we “replenished” our lives by our conflicts. We had plenty of those.
The first came on our honeymoon when she got her period. She thought it hysterical that I refused to make love to her.
She said, “What am I--unclean? Josh, I keep telling you that’s so old.”
Maybe that was it, she was the future, I was the past. She was America, I was Europe. Forget Europe--I was Abraham setting out from Ur of the Chaldees. Yet it was that very “Hebrew-ness,” she said, that spirit of going forth that drew her to me.
She said, “I think of you like that, coming out of the wilderness, in search of something. I think of you as the singular man, rooted to his principles, the world on one side, you on the other.”
She thought I was romantic. French charm and all that and how, unlike other men, I looked into a woman’s eyes. I was nearsighted.
She thought I had lived a life of adventure--and I had. That trek over the Pyrenees to escape Hitler. But I had been an infant through all that. I didn’t know I was having an adventure.
But then I had gone off to fight for Israel in 1967 and that had been a choice. And there had been others. Like quitting that hot magazine job when they tried to put my byline over another man’s story. She thought that showed strength and character. They hadn’t thought so at the unemployment office.
In every way I numbered myself a failure, she scored me a success.
She said I was “perfect.” Why argue?
She said I reminded her of that long-ago movie star John Garfield. She loved my “rugged hurt” features.
“I was sort of hoping for Cary Grant,” I had told her.
“No, no, no. You’re the outsider. The underdog. The fighter. The loner. The wanderer. You’re everything I’ve been looking for.” She said other men were shallow. “A man like you comes around only once. Can’t let you get away. You’re Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And David, of course. Must never forget David.”
If I was Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, she was Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall. Joan was more than the American dream. To an immigrant kid like me, she was America.
So I relinquished a wife and two kids for her. She gave up a husband for me, a man of wealth and social standing. Now that I had her, the job was to keep her.
In any case, you would call us a loving couple, but by no means a secure couple. No, we were afraid of each other. In return for what we had given up we demanded loyalty forever, and that was easy to promise but impossible to guarantee. Especially since our marriage was rooted in sin. She had forsaken what had been hers and I had forsaken what had been mine, and who was to say what spitefulness fate had in store?
We had even discussed it, the chance that we might each turn to another, again--and she made it a joke.
“You believe revenge bugs are flying out there?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Ridiculous.”
Joan believed in a God of mercy. Her God knew no vengeance. If God was good--and she believed He was--then she was good. She was made in His image, after all. While we had been married to other spouses we had been adulterous, but not in her eyes. Love could not be sinful.
To Joan, the world was as pure and as bright as a kindergarten. Everything was wholesome. Everything was right. Nothing could go wrong.
Now I sat on the edge of the bed and stared abstractedly at the TV, pondering the adventure I had just had with the Arab, an episode intangible as a dream. I had nothing to show for it, no signs, no evidence to prove it and Joan would be right to doubt that it had happened--as would I. Had it happened? Yes. What did it mean? That I did not know.
Possibly it meant that I had been put to a test and had passed. But my integrity had been stretched thin and it had troubled me that I could be so easily seduced. Not that I was, but it had been close. I was vulnerable.
No doubt about it, money had become a weakness more so with the advent of Joan. A woman like that needed things, required pampering. She deserved better and would demand more than life on a meager income.
Besides, with or without Joan, I was tired of being poor. The big score--suddenly, that’s what I was after. That’s what lured me to the racetrack, to the casinos. The big score.
I had become a gambler. I lost more than I won. But I preferred losing over stagnating, the chance of a jackpot against the certainty of need. Of course we were not certifiably poor. But we were not rich, and that’s poor. To me that’s poor.
So I was sick of it, weary of being condemned to ordinary wages as my father and mother had been sentenced to poverty for life...beginning with their adventures in the New World.
For in the Old World, in France, they had been rich. And then came Hitler. They had to sell everything to pay and bribe the smugglers who would lead them up and down the Pyrenees. By the time they reached Montreal they were penniless, especially since Father had financed the escape of twenty-two other families.
So they were destitute in Montreal and stayed destitute later in Philadelphia. “Your father, God love him, has a knack for failure,” my mother once said, and since he could not succeed in business they went out borrowing.
They borrowed from friends, acquaintances, strangers and even from those families they had saved from the Roundup of Paris. Soon even those doors were shut to them. These were not happy times when they brought me along and I heard them begging for a loan--“to get us back on our feet.”
The humiliation did strange things to my mother and one day she stopped talking and laughing and so she remained, hollow and impassive, until she died. That’s when I promised myself, none of this for me. Not this kind of life. No, no, no. Never. Yet here it was, not quite but almost the same, and the fear of turning Joan into my mother obsessed me and made each moment urgent.
So I schlepped her to the casinos, and though she was a willing accomplice she rarely played and seldom joined me in the gaming rooms. And on the occasions when she did--she was so out of place!
Her beauty was of the stately kind. She was a striking paradox against the hordes of tiny women lusting after the slot machines in their orange hairdos.
This was not Joan.
She could be quite haughty and reach back into her Main Line genes for a quick score, as when she got a ticket for speeding in Collingswood, New Jersey, and tilting her head for a regal pose, she said to the officer, “You know my father can buy this town.”
He could, too.
Oh definitely, now and then that pride kicked up. Mostly, though, she carried herself calm and self-effacing and moderate and modest. She had once been an heiress by golly and a debutante, of course, and she had degrees in English and psychology, wrote poetry, read a book a week, loved art, and cried when she listened to Concierto de Aranjuez. The question was this: What was a girl like this doing in a place like this? She was here because her husband was here, and he was here because he had an errand--to get rich!
During those periods when I pursued the perfect blackjack table, as others pursued the perfect wave or the perfect sunset, she went “looking for clothes”--and given our finances that was about the extent of it; she could look but could not buy.
“But I don’t mind,” she always said, “so long as we’re happy and we’re together.” This was true as far as being together and only half true about being happy. I was not happy about being so utterly broke that Joan had to resort to the ultimate cliché: “Money isn’t everything.”
But it was, and this had become clear only a few days earlier, back in Philadelphia, just as we were getting into the car for this vacation, when against my advice Joan decided to check the mail.
Sure enough, there was a bill from the IRS for $1,989, remarkable for this reason: it was almost to the penny our entire savings! But--we still had money in our checking account, so the vacation was still on. Never mind that we were behind a month’s rent and the landlord refused to have our front door painted--the surface peeling off as if stricken by leprosy. Such an ugly sight that, even though we resided in a relatively nice neighborhood, Joan never invited her Main Line friends to the house.
She was ashamed. She’d never admit it but she was, she was ashamed. Said she was too busy to have friends over anyway, for she did have a job, helping others find work, the poor, the handicapped, for which she received no salary. But she had to do it, she said, because these people needed her.
She was a big fan of the oppressed and the disadvantaged and agonized over the Cubans detained in American jails, the starving children in Ethiopia, the deaf, the blind, the infirm, the aged and even Bob Brennan. Yes, Bob Brennan, the New Jersey millionaire who had been skewered on “60 Minutes” for a questionable securities business.
When they roasted him again a few months later as a summer repeat, Joan was outraged. “So unjust!” she declared, and she sent a letter off to CBS saying, “Muck-raking is defendable, but not as entertainment.”
As for our own condition, she did not see us as oppressed. Disadvantaged, maybe--but this was no big whoop. She was managing, and anyway she had faith. “Josh,” she said, “I know you’ll make it someday. Someday others will see in you what I see in you and on that day we’ll celebrate.”
Now I sat on the edge of the bed between Joan and David Letterman. He was a rerun and she was asleep and I had big news and there was nobody to hearken. I was still high over those millions--I had played for millions.
This had to be proclaimed. Joshua Kane has arrived.
I used to tell Joan the odds were turning in my favor. I was due. Now that it had happened the world was asleep and so I nudged her until she wakened partly and said, “Why are you waking me? Is there a fire?”
Joan was as intense about her sleep as about her wakefulness.
“No,” I said.
“So let me sleep. Good night.”
“I have something to tell you,” I said. “Something extraordinary happened.”
But she was back to snoozing, her face dug into the pillow, her arms around the pillowcase as a drowning woman clinging to a raft, and I thought--why the rush?
I’d played for millions, yes. But not mine!
This came as a shock.
But I had been so close--so close that my life, our lives, had already taken a turn. The drought was coming to an end. I sensed big things. Big things were about to happen!
I got undressed, slipped under the covers and stroked her golden hair. It took me hours to fall asleep, thinking. Nothing bad must ever happen to this woman. She is mine to safeguard, and I will. I will. I will show her. I will show them all. Only the best for her. Only the best.