JOAN WAS GETTING spiffed up in a shapely all-white evening dress. Dinner was at six and it was late. She seldom spent much time fussing about herself, it was all there to begin with, but today was special. She had discovered a wrinkle under her right eye, nothing there really but she kept staring at it until I told her the flaw was in the mirror not her face.
She chuckled and said, “You don’t know how right you are. Some mirrors are so unflattering.” She was putting on lipstick and said, “Some mirrors make you look so good. Like our mirror at home. This one’s exacting and cruel. I’m getting old, Josh.”
“Fortunately you’re not the only one.”
For some reason she stepped up and kissed me. She smelled nice and fresh and young. She was in high spirits.
Just as I was tying my tie she said, “You’re wearing that?”
“Why do women always wait until you’re dressed before telling you what you shouldn’t wear?”
“Because we’re bad. We’re all bad. We do everything we can to make life miserable for you guys. Don’t you know that?”
“Of course I know that.”
“Now take off that tie and take off that shirt. Here.”
So I changed because in this department she was the boss and she said, “That’s more like it. Now you’re handsome. Guess I never told you I married you strictly for your looks. I took one look at you and I said, that’s him.”
“Aha.”
“I did. Isn’t it funny? I mean attraction. We don’t really know what it is. It’s such a mystery what makes two people fall in love--nothing to do with logic or reason.”
“You once said it’s all chemistry.”
“Well it is,” she said as she hooked on the necklace with the diamond drop and measured the distance between that and her cleavage, if it could be called that. She wasn’t large there, only perfect, her breasts the perfect size for loving, and there were no nipples livelier than hers, so firm, long and erect when aroused. “But it’s more than chemistry,” she said. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Right before that time in New York, about two weeks earlier, I had a dream. I don’t remember what it was all about except that I saw you in that dream. Your face--it came in so clear. I saw your face, Josh, and I hadn’t even met you. Spooky?”
“What about what’s-his-name?”
“He was a tryout. You’re the real thing. You’re Broadway.”
I said, “Will we always be this mushy?”
“Oh yes. I will. I’ll always be mushy about you. Sometimes I just want to swallow you up. I’m not talking sexually, although maybe that’s the expression of it, you know, when I do that to you. But it’s something else. Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”
I was reclining on the bed ready to go as she was finishing up in front of the mirror here in our cozy room in the Galaxy. I was feeling apprehensive and sluggish, and I wished, as I sometimes did, that everyone but Joan would go away. Sometimes she said the same thing--“If only there’d be just the two of us. No other women, especially. I resent other women.”
Who needs all the rest of the people in the world? The two of us would be enough.
“Getting late,” I said.
“I’m ready,” she said--which meant at least ten more minutes.
“How come a ponytail?”
“Because my hair’s too long. What’s wrong?”
“No, you look great. It’s fine.”
“I must get my hair cut when we get back to Philadelphia.”
“You had to mention that word?”
“You’re sure it’s all right?”
“Women always worry about their hair. As if there were nothing else in the world.”
“Here we go.”
“It’s true. On the subway that’s all women talk about, their hair. Never politics or even sports. In the office, too, they all go around saying, ‘Love your hair, Sue.’ Why are all the girls in the office called Sue?”
“You’re such a sexist.”
“I know. Isn’t it wonderful?”
She threw something at me.
“Missed by a mile. Just like a woman.”
* * *
Ibrahim was waiting for us in the lobby and he was also wearing white, just like Joan. Few men could get away with that, wearing an all-white suit, but he did and he looked stunning in it. His grin was so wide during the introductions that it seemed he had a thousand teeth.
“This is Joan,” I said. “My wife.”
He took her hand and bowed and she curtsied and people began to watch.
“This is Riva,” he said.
I said, “Hello, Riva,” and she said nothing and I thought maybe I had insulted her.
“We have reservations at Il Verdi’s in the Tropicana,” Ibrahim said. “I hope that’s agreeable.”
“Oh that sounds wonderful,” said Joan.
We had dined there once before, when I had won that three hundred dollars.
“So what are we waiting for?” I said.
“Yes, let’s go,” said Ibrahim. The restaurant was only a few blocks up the Boardwalk. We walked hurriedly as if the Trop were a train and we were rushing to catch it before it left. Il Verdi’s was dark and candlelit. The women at the tables seemed glamorous, but none were like Joan; and none of the men were like Ibrahim.
We got seated in the best booth and Ibrahim ordered the wine.
He asked if I had a cellar.
I said yes I did.
He talked about the winery he owned in France and I could not follow this too closely, all this talk of wine. He kept tossing out names and vintages. He knew all the good years and all the bad years and I did too, though I did not measure them by wine. He was not shy about his wealth, he was quite boastful in fact, but it suited that expansive personality.
He said, “Wine is one of the few things that improves with age. Wine and beautiful women.”
I thought he’d raise his glass to Joan, but he didn’t.
Anyway, we had all heard that line before and it was somewhat uncomfortable here in the beginning. All of it superficially upbeat. There were lapses in conversation. There was the feeling, at least my feeling, that Ibrahim was working, like an insurance salesman with a pitch to make. Everything he said, even the small talk, and everything he didn’t say seemed to be leading to something. He was trying to make an impression and I had thought that burden would be on me.
When he was silent he seemed content to just sit and dominate, his tremendous physique and powerful head towering over the rest of us. His dark eyes, so theatrical, did his talking for him. Now and then they landed on Joan. When they did she turned away. But sometimes she stared back.
When he spoke he confirmed my worst fears about this meeting. Never mind wineries, he owned buildings and ranches and stables of Arabian horses and cars and airplanes. He talked about all these, even about an island he half-owned. I wondered if I should mention my thirteen-year-old Malibu, which I owned outright.
“Life is good,” he said. “We must remember that when we’re sad.”
Joan wasn’t sad. She was as luminous as ever and kept shooting me happy glances. We both understood that this was another experience for our collective memory vault. These experiences we did own as nobody else, and for that we were wealthy beyond wineries and airplanes.
Now she said, “Is it true you’re a prince?”
Her attempt to be casual failed because there was no way to ask this question and not come across as schoolgirl innocent at least, and at most downright star-struck.
But he saved her, saying, “We’re all princes where I come from. Aren’t they all princesses where you come from?”
She blushed and said, “Where is this place you come from, where you’re all princes?”
“Somewhere in the Middle East.”
“Oh. Am I being too forward? I happen to be a very curious person. I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t be.” He turned to me. “But does it really matter where a person is from?”
“It does tell you half his story,” I said.
“Yes, and I understand you also have a story, Joshua Kane. You were in Sinai, weren’t you?”
“Yes--and I’m getting the feeling you know more about me than...”
“Don’t trouble yourself about what I know, Joshua Kane, but tell me this--is it true about Dayan? They tell me he picked a spot where the Egyptian bombing was heaviest--stretched out and went to sleep. Bombs crashing all around and he slept. Can this be true?”
“Yes.”
Ibrahim shook his head. “What a man he was. What a people you are. But I also come from a people. We trace back to the Amalekites, an ancient race and fearless.”
“Also brutal. Good people for keeping a grudge.”
The Amalekites were not my kind of folks. An ancient people, all right. They had menaced the Hebrews at every turn. They were the sons of Esau-the-Redneck then, and they were the sons of Esau even today. Saul lost his kingship when he discarded the order to kill their king on account of that Hebrew failing, compassion.
At my rebuke Joan winced.
She knew I was long on patience, but not too long. She feared my dark side, as when a carload of white trash hassled us on the road and I let them race me over to the side and then proceeded to do what I had to do. She was impressed but unhappy. She said, “That look on your face! I never thought you could have that kind of look, and do such things.” I said I had no choice. It was them or us. She understood, but she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand this either.
I used to tell her the whole world wasn’t Bryn Mawr. She said neither was it Auschwitz.
Ibrahim now gave Joan a soft and tender gaze, and for me he had these slow, well-chosen words: “I keep no grudges, Mr. Kane. Only promises.”
I felt myself gulp.
“Oh, and are you making a promise?”
“Perhaps.”
“And what is this promise?”
He said, “Let that wait, Mr. Kane. That can wait.”
Just in time to save a bad and worsening situation came Sy Rodrigo, PR man for the Galaxy and my buddy, going back to the days when I was writing a newspaper column and he was a press agent for a Philadelphia nightclub.
“Hey!” he said, giving it that showbiz flair and making a production of being astonished at seeing us here.
“Hey!” I said, and introduced him to Ibrahim and Riva, who really wasn’t here or anywhere.
Sy was with a lady. He was in his mid-fifties, a man with a terrible complexion, the remnant of adolescent acne. Yet women were never a problem for Sy. He had already gone through two wives and had lived a life, mostly as publicist for entertainers, boxers, wrestlers, strippers and even big-time hoods, who paid him to keep their names out of the papers.
“What are you guys doing here?” he said. “I thought you belonged in my place.”
“I could ask the same question, Sy.”
“Me? Just checking out the competition. It’s my job.”
“Tough job.”
“Yeah, but it’s a living. How are you doing, Josh?”
“All right. You?”
“Super.”
“We’re here as guests of Mr. Hassan.”
“So I notice.”
Sy noticed everything, and I never knew how to feel about the man. Sy was not a good person and Sy was not a bad person. Sy was Sy, promoter and opportunist with a sincere streak, but you could never be quite sure when it was sincere.
Everybody knew him and he knew everybody. PR was his business, people his product. He knew Philadelphia inside-out, Atlantic City upside-down. Even in New York he was no stranger.
He liked to brag that he could pick up a phone and get anybody, even the president.
He had no friends. He had pals.
In his business, favors--not money--were the medium of exchange. You do me, I’ll do you. Give me a mention in your column and I’ll get you an interview with Frank.
He said, “We could use your patronage at the Galaxy, Mr. Hassan. We’re doing wonderful things.”
“Ah yes,” said Ibrahim.
“Give us a try.”
Of course he meant the gaming tables.
I came to Ibrahim’s rescue.
“Always working. Isn’t that right, Sy.”
“That’s what it’s all about.”
His favorite line--that’s what it’s all about.
He said, “Got to run. Our table’s ready. Stop up and say hello, Josh.”
“Will do.”
“Super.”
I had the feeling, and this came to me after Sy left, that Ibrahim and Sy did not have to be introduced. They knew one another. Nothing specific that I could point to. Just a feeling, and it did not have to mean anything, of course. Knowing the high-rollers, as Sy would say--that’s what it’s all about.
Now we were having our coffee and it was that part of the meal with strangers when you wonder if you’ll ever be seeing them again--exactly how much of a fool have you made of yourself?
Ibrahim, since that timely intrusion from Sy, was back to being pleasant and talkative, and Joan was high, too.
“Do you gamble?” he asked her.
“No.” Hair had fallen over her right eye and she gazed at him from profile and smiled.
“But of course you do,” he said. “When you drive you gamble that every other motorist is sober. When you walk you gamble that you won’t be mugged or attacked by a rabid dog. When you eat you gamble that your food is not poisoned. When you breathe you gamble that the air is not full of toxin. When you send your husband off to work you gamble that he won’t be with another woman. A thousand times a day you gamble. Everything you do is a gamble. So what is it to put money on a horse or on cards? It’s like anything else.”
Joan was charmed. She said, “You’re a persuasive man.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve just turned me into a compulsive gambler. Just like that!”
Ibrahim tossed his head back in laughter. Not that Joan had said anything so funny. No, he was merely expressing the delight of a man utterly satisfied with himself. There was a tone of contemptuousness in the laughter as well, the punishing sound of a winner, a winner in a world of losers.
In fact, watching him now abandon himself so freely to mirth, so mighty his laughter...I could not help but think, as if for the first time, that this was a world of losers, all of us losers, and here was a winner. Here was a winner.
“I may be compulsive myself,” he said. “I gamble for everything. Even for love.”
“Huh!” said Joan, shifting in her seat and trying to thwart his steady gaze.
He said, “With money, you know, everything is possible.”
“No, that’s not true,” she said.
“Everything.”
“Not true.”
“Everything can be bought. Everything and everybody.”
“Oh,” said Joan, overly casual and nonchalant. “I suppose people can be bought?”
“Of course.”
“Have you bought people?”
“For business, yes.”
“For love?” she asked.
He gave this some thought. “Not yet.”
“So there,” said Joan. “You can’t buy love.”
“Oh, for the right price...”
“There is no price...love is...”
He held up his royal hand. “Please! I know what love is. I also know what money is.”
He was being so candid that he even said something dangerously profound, that he had heard all the songs about love but if people were really honest they’d write more songs about money.
Said Joan, “What a pity.”
“Pity?” he said.
“That you have to buy your way through life.”
He laughed that big laugh.
“Touché. But you’re wrong. It’s called testing the limits. Women have a tough time understanding this.”
Good and provoked, she snapped, “You’d be surprised what women understand.”
“I certainly would be. Women lack...daring.”
“Oh God!”
“Yes, yes. Women lack daring. They’re...predictable.”
“Is that bad?”
“You tell me.”
“I think...I think predictable can be bad, yes. But it can also be good. It depends. It depends on circumstances. It depends on the moment. Some moments, what’s usually wrong might be right. Depends on what your feelings say.”
He slapped the table and roared, “Then perhaps you are a daring woman!”
“Perhaps I am,” she said coyly. “Perhaps I’m not.”
I thought it so strange, how throughout all this Ibrahim kept ignoring his wife. This Riva, was she really alive? She refused to talk. So be it. Then again, Joan had done a fine job of excluding me, too.
Now Joan sensed this and said something about her husband the speechwriter. This prompted Ibrahim to say, “Just as you can’t go to the bathroom for another man, so you can’t write his speeches. But I am writing a book, Joshua Kane. Maybe you can help me.”
I said everybody is writing a book.
“No,” he said. “I’m serious.”
I repeated that I only wrote speeches.
He said, “But when you started out, surely you intended to be a real writer.”
This was unnecessary, especially in the presence of Joan.
She made a tactical blunder. She rushed to my defense. “Joshua,” she said, “is the best at what he does.”
Next time people defend me like this, I thought, I must remember to duck.
“I’m sure he is,” Ibrahim said slowly.
“What’s the book?” I said.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
“I thought so, too,” I said.
He already had the title. The Perfect Revenge. “Everybody has a story about getting even. We all want to get even with somebody--and some of us do. It can be quite fascinating. I want to put the best of these stories in a book. What do you think?”
“Sounds good.”
“I mean these would have to be real stories about real people. You could do the research and even the writing, under my name, or we could use both our names. We should talk about this.”
“But not now.”
“I’m sure the book would get published,” he said. “I own a publishing house.”
We all laughed.
“In fact,” he said, “that might be the first story. The man who owned the publishing company turned down another book I submitted. So I bought the company and fired the man. That’s what I mean by revenge, Joshua Kane. His name was Cohen. That’s what I mean by the perfect revenge.”
I refused to return the look Joan gave me.
Ibrahim now said he had Jewish friends. Had even studied judo and karate under the famous Marcus Rosen. He modestly admitted to being a black belt, but only first Dan. Joan piped in that I had a brown belt, in Krav Maga.
“You studied with Avri Ben Ish?” Ibrahim asked.
“For a time,” I said. “In Pardes Chana.”
“I’ve been there,” he said. “I even met Imi in Natanya. You know him?”
“Yes, the father of Krav Maga. So you know Krav Maga, Mr. Hassan?”
“No,” he said, “but they tell me it’s the best system for hand-to-hand. After all, if the Israelis use it, it must be good. I’m always ready to learn. Maybe you can give me lessons.”
“Or do you want to give me lessons, Mr. Hassan?”
“There’s a boxing ring here we can use--if you like.”
“You’re challenging me?”
“I see you’re not interested. Maybe some other time.”
It occurred to me that I was already in a fight and that I was losing, but that was my style, in the beginning. I liked to be underestimated, the underdog, even the scapegoat.
Frankly, unlike the Boy Scouts, I was never prepared. When I came under attack my first reaction was that the other person was only kidding. I always thought people were kidding. When I found out they weren’t my question was… What have I done?
Usually, so far as I could tell, nothing.
But hang around long enough and you’re bound to have done something to somebody.
This Ibrahim, I thought, is he kidding?
He said, “I did learn one classic Krav Maga hold. I wonder if I might show it to you.”
He asked me if I knew the Cavalier, and of course I knew the Cavalier: grab hand and apply pressure to wrist to manipulate joint beyond normal range and motion.
In other words, terrific pain.
I had studied it in Pardes Chana and practiced it in Philadelphia under the second Dan black belt Alan Feldman, who had received it from Imi. Never failed to bring a man down, this hold. A grasp really, both hands of the attacker clasped together by the fingers, the defender’s hand helplessly in between and one quick snap and it was over, broken wrist.
Or, it could be done slowly if your intention was merely to inflict pain and watch a man sink to his knees and beg.
I saw Ibrahim reach for my left hand. I could have blocked him before he so much as touched me. Even once he held me I could have slipped out, in the early stages of the hold, by one of six releases.
But no, I let him. This was all in fun, after all.
Though I was surprised...here, all this in public, out in the open.
So I let him grab me and as he did something changed in his eyes and his mouth went wide, showing at once the teeth of a smile and grimace. A voice told me that I had made a mistake. We all make a mistake a day.
“I wish this weren’t necessary,” said Joan sternly and reprovingly. Her voice held a measure of fright and a hint of disgust and a dash of despair for all humanity. “This is stupid,” she said, meaning the two of us, even though I had consented to play victim.
As to why I had--good question. Strange generation, this generation that I belonged to, that in a single lifetime had seen both the dream of Hitler and the dream of Herzl come true, and only about half a decade apart.
Bound to create hybrids of men, men still unsure of whom to follow, Akiba or Bar Kochba.
But there was a choice, finally, and for now I had chosen this.
So he locked my hand between his “69” shaped palms in perfect Cavalier form, and went to work. Slowly at first, but my ears were already beginning to ring. Then he began twisting, clockwise from one o’clock to two to three to four to five to six to seven, my wrist going one way, my palm the other, violating the delicate balance of the human anatomy.
Forget pain. I was already up to grief.
“Stop it!” Joan said, unaware that we were gone, departed from her world. Into our own place of sands and tents and camels and wadis and nomads and weeping women.
Riva sat there impassively.
Ibrahim picked up more power from the leverage of his body, inclining me ever more downward.
His fingers now were flaming tongs and all right, I thought, he knows the hold, and it’s time to say so, except this: they are watching from the hills of Hermon to the springs of En-Gedi.
So I let him take me to eight o’clock and even nine and then, then I tapped my leg, the signal among gentlemen and martial artists that the limit of pain had been achieved--I tapped my leg and instead he took me to ten.
“Hey!” I said, my face down down and sweat pouring from my entire body. The heat!
Again I tapped my leg and he was laughing and took me to eleven.
“Stop it!” said Joan.
He notched me up to twelve and now...now it was unbearable.
I tapped my leg, again and again, and soon there’d be no strength even for that anymore.
“Enough!” said Joan. “Enough!”
Riva--I thought this might be the time for her to wake up and say something. I looked at her and she even looked back, but with absolutely no expression. I wasn’t here for her. I now realized this: No man or woman existed for her except Ibrahim. He was more than perfection in her eyes. He was creation.
“Am I doing it right?” he said.
“Enough!” said Joan.
“Am I doing it right?”
“Enough!”
“Just tell me if I’m doing it right.”
But I couldn’t mouth the words.
“For God’s sake, you’re doing it right,” said Joan.
Now he offered the release and just like that we all began to laugh. I was all right. Excellent.
“Good?” said Ibrahim.
“Oh yes,” I said.
“Your Imi would be proud?”
Not of me, I thought. Not of me.
Then again, maybe yes. I remembered Imi that day in Natanya by the sea, sharing cheesecake with him at the Ugati around a Parisian-style outdoor table. He was lecturing us on the essence of serenity. He straightened himself erect in his chair, cast his eyes far off into the depths of the Mediterranean, held his fists tucked to his waist, and said, “While everyone around you is jumping and hopping and doing this and doing that...you...you sit. You sit. You make your place not here, but there, away. You sit. Like this. Like this. You see? Like this.”
So now I sat there like this but said to myself, Remember Amalek. Do not forget.