WE TOOK that question for a walk. Joan now suggested we stroll the Boardwalk to lift this weight from us, and on first stepping out we felt restored by the crowds moving from one casino to another, the sounds of laughter and couples walking arm in arm. For a moment we stopped by the pavilion in front of the Tropicana and listened to the oompah band and watched a man doing flips and turns on roller skates atop a picnic table... reminding me of such spectacles on Mount Royal in Montreal, a man exactly like this being introduced as “direct from the United Cigar Company...”
We stopped in Atlantic Books. The latest Philip Roth was out in paperback. As she picked her copy I heard two women, both minimum-wage employees, talking of a nearby novelty shop. One said to the other:
“Just do it. It’ll make the day go by faster.”
What a way to live!
Make the day go by faster.
So it was like this for just about everybody. There were levels and degrees, but no person was able to deny another’s sense of affliction. This was suffering.
Outside, I asked Joan, “Who said we all lead lives of quiet desperation?”
She said, “Thoreau.”
“Walden?”
“Yup. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.’”
Of course she knew the quote, Joan being Joan.
She said, “Yes, Josh. The secret’s out. Thoreau knew it ahead of you.”
“Do you agree with him?”
“Oh I don’t know. I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. I’ve seen too many happy people.”
“So have I. For an hour. A day. Maybe even a week. But day after day?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Day after day. My sister Sunny...”
“All right, she’s sunny.”
“Yes she is, and there are more where she came from.”
“But suppose he’s right...”
“Of course there are plenty of miserable people...”
“And suppose Ibrahim’s offer went to one of them?”
She thought this over. “They’d take it,” she said. “First, if you put it on a hypothetical level, sure they’d say no. That’s a reflex. Who me? Never. But put the power of real money behind the question and the answer is yes. Yes.”
“So that’s us,” I said.
“That’s us.”
“Even though we’re not miserable.”
“That’s a state of mind. Your state.”
“My state.”
“Yes. You’re obsessed with money.”
“But I’m not miserable.”
“A person who doesn’t have what he wants, what’s that?”
“So I am miserable.”
“No. Unhappy. You’re unhappy and frustrated and that’s why this makes sense.”
“That’s the only reason.”
“That’s the only reason,” she said.
“You don’t mind...being broke...driving around in that car...”
“I do mind. But so what? We’re not alone.”
“You can take it, right?”
“I can. But you can’t. That’s why I’m game.”
I resisted saying maybe too game.
“You never wondered if I’d ever get us...comfortable?”
“No,” she said. “I have confidence in you. You have talent. People are bound to realize your worth.”
So much like my mother. The same cheerfulness and always so sure about the future. Just like my mother, and just like my mother Joan would wake up one day and see it all before her. Futility.
Was this the Joan I was making? The same woman my father had made of his wife?
In that case, Joan was right. It made sense. There was nothing to do but accept.
No way.
I did agree on this: I had talent. People were bound to recognize my worth. Oh sure.
But suppose this happened only after you were good and dead? After all, most people lived and died just like this.
I said, “The way we’re talking, it’s like a farewell.”
As unexpected as an ambush, she stopped, turned and pulled me into a powerful embrace, planting wet kisses all over my face. “Never. Never, never, never. Nothing changes. Nothing. You’re my husband and lover forever.”
This made it all the more like a farewell.
We passed Convention Hall, which soon would be jumping for the Miss America Pageant, and then we caught a tram by leaping up while it was still moving. Joan was absolutely delighted by this cheap thrill.
We sat closely together.
“We don’t do this often enough,” she said, waving back to the people on foot.
Down on the beach a muscle-man in swim trunks was standing on one hand, and the lady next to Joan said, “There he is. He does it every night. That’s all he does. I wonder if he’s crazy.”
Even now in the dark, the locals were walking their dogs, the dogs skipping along the water’s edge and on the sand, couples, silhouetted and isolated against the expanse of the sea, were doing what was private.
In the pavilions and on the benches along the Boardwalk railing the elderly were gathered and seated, and some were not so old. There was talking and gesturing and whispering and laughter, clusters of people from all over, all over the world, accents and dialects and languages of all sorts, even English.
After a drought of some thirty years, Atlantic City was again the place to be. The Boardwalk, slowly coming back, was the place to be seen.
I watched her from the corner of my eye. She was positively happy now...forgetting that offer from Ibrahim that had us in turmoil. She was exultant, smiling and laughing and making small talk with the other passengers on the tram. As much as she tried to be plain and ordinary and simple there was something about it, like a queen come down to mix with her subjects. She was wearing a white shawl and around her shoulders it was draped as a royal vestment. This lady had been to the Riviera! How could she get a kick out of this?
She had been in private planes, sports cars, speedboats, yet there was something so solid about her. She had once said, “I’m really a Jewish mother at heart. Oy vey.”
To test this I took her to the Orthodox synagogue on Castor for the high holy days, and she was appalled.
“Oh it was beautiful,” she had said. “The cantor and all the men in white. Such beautiful melodies and the Torah scrolls with their glittering crowns. Too bad I couldn’t see or hear most of it because they keep their women in the back. Now why is that, Josh?”
“Because...Joan, it’s too involved.”
“In the back?”
“Talk to Gloria Steinem.”
“In the back?”
“Trust me, Jewish women are more equal than men.”
“I’ll go wherever you want, Josh, really I will, but not second-class.”
“Women don’t have to go to synagogue anyway.”
“But I want to go. Next time we’ll go Reform again. It’s so much like church. Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why don’t women have to go to synagogue?”
“Because their prayers are already answered, just by being women.”
“That is beautiful. No, I mean it. That’s beautiful. But one day I’ll talk to God about this business of keeping women hidden in the back. She should know about this.”
Now the tram passed Bally’s Park Place and the Claridge and the Sands and we rode all the way to Showboat, where we got off. “Shall we go in?” said Joan.
“No,” I said.
“You don’t want to play?”
“No.”
“You’ve never tried it here.”
“They’re all the same.”
“This doesn’t sound like my Josh.”
Snap out of it, I thought. This is a great night. There really isn’t much more.
She pulled me indoors and said, “All right, I’m going to play.”
Which did not sound like Joan.
“What?” I asked.
“Something.”
“Look out, Showboat!”
She followed the crowds and found that the big action was by the video poker machines, the hottest games in town. Here, unlike most other slots--here you had choices and could make decisions.
“Do you even know how to play poker?” I said.
“Josh, see, you don’t know me. Of course I know the rules of poker, silly boy. Played it in college.”
“Strip poker?”
“Maybe once,” she said. Our Lady of Once.
Mostly women, but a good number of men, were working the machines, tapping the buttons.
“Hold this machine,” she said--the only one available amid the crush of players.
She got change at a Change Booth and came back with a roll of forty quarters. She was excited.
She put in a quarter at a time.
“Hon,” said a lady, “a quarter at a time gets you nothing. You got to put in all five quarters.”
“Thanks,” said Joan, but continued slipping in a quarter per play.
“I know this machine,” said the lady. “It can get hot.”
Sure enough it did. Four of the cards were diamonds, and in this order: ten, jack, queen, king. She needed an ace of diamonds for the jackpot. “Josh,” she said, “do you see this?”
“Yes,” I said, but she only had a quarter going, and she’d only get back some more quarters, instead of a thousand dollars had she put in all five, as the lady had said.
Joan held the four good cards, pressed Draw, and up came the ace of diamonds. Royal flush.
She yelped, “Josh!”
The machine rang up a few credits.
“You just lost a thousand dollars,” said the lady.
Joan didn’t mind. She’d gotten herself a royal flush!
I didn’t mind, either. So what? A thousand dollars.
I mean so what? A thousand dollars.
Who needs a thousand dollars?
I was sweating. What happened to the air conditioning? Don’t they air condition these places anymore? I thought of that movie, Hole in the Head or something, with Frank Sinatra playing the poor shiftless guy against the big shot Keenan Wynn. They’re pals from way back. Sinatra trying to pass himself off as a successful guy himself. They’re at the racetrack, both with big bets on the same horse, Sinatra having sunk all his money on this horse. The horses are off and running. Here’s Sinatra up on his toes, sweating and hollering, and there’s Wynn, seated and calm because it’s just another bet for him, watching Sinatra, seeing the desperation, the loser in him.
In an instant, the loser had given himself away.
So don’t go giving yourself away, I thought, and when we left the casino I tried to be cheerful.
“I got a royal flush,” she said.
“You sure did.”
“Hope I don’t get hooked. That was fun.”
“Sure was.”
No mention of the thousand dollars. She did not see things that way.
We walked back, and near Bally’s Park Place police had a black man down on the ground. Bystanders said he had snatched a purse. The black man, held tight to the boards by five officers, was saying, “It wasn’t me. Let me go.”
They had him pinned in police hold number two.
I turned to Joan. “Do something?” I said.
“There’s nothing to do,” she admitted, but we sped up and hastened back to the Galaxy.
But before heading back to our room, a thought suddenly depressing, we strolled over to the Boardwalk railing and gazed out at the ocean. We stood there for some time and said nothing, and I knew her mind was working--she kept shooting me side glances, occasionally sighing and smiling and now and then touching my face.
One of the rolling-chair boys shouted out, “Give the lady a ride!”
I waved back.
Before he took off again, he said, “Beautiful lady like that!”
Then it became quiet again, as if everybody had left. She resumed her study of the ocean, following the waves lapping in gently, and she turned to me in great determination to say something monumental--staring firmly into my eyes and pressing her hand against my chest. But no words came. She had said something monumental, but she kept it to herself. Then she turned from me to face the ocean again.
I felt that something great and deep and wonderful and awful had just passed between us, only I didn’t know what it was, exactly, except for this powerful impact of the unsaid.
Now she said, “My father...for a time I thought all men were like my father. He was, and he is, a brutal man. Not physically. Never touched me or my mother or my sister, but that made him no less brutal.
“He had wanted boys, and we were girls, and he never took us anyplace and he seldom talked to us. He had no patience at all for girls, and I’m sure he’d have been different with boys.
“He actually blamed Mother for giving birth to girls, as though it was all her fault. She asked him, she said, ‘Would you have been happier with no children at all?’ He said yes. Yes! He even said that to my face, and Sunny bawled for a week.
“But it’s a strange thing between daughters and their fathers. I remember when we went to see him off at the airport that one time, and when they started boarding I waited for him to turn and wave to me and--he didn’t. I felt so devastated.
“I must have been about twelve and it made a terrific impression.
“I thought all men were like this...like my father. Oh I had a wonderful childhood in many ways. Of course we were wealthy, but when you grow up wealthy you don’t know you’re wealthy. I mean we passed all those slums when we had to go into Philadelphia--but that was just scenery.
“Father even said, ‘These aren’t real people. Think of them as extras.’
“I’m not kidding.
“Charles was the same way, and I’m sorry to bring his name up but he was my first husband. I mean he was and that’s a fact and I thought I loved him. Because I was supposed to love him.
“He was a good man and he loved me but he was so...I mean he never exceeded himself. He never surprised me. I once bought him a book for his birthday--he only read those legal things, so I thought I’d buy him something literary. Updike I think it was--and he said, ‘What would I want with this?’
“So I could see it happening. This was my father all over again.
“You’ve met my father. You were there when he said, ‘Nothing is offensive.’
“Well Charles was more sensitive, but not much.
“Then you came along...Josh, it was so different...so exciting.
“If you only knew how much I loved you, from the very beginning.
“You were so perfect. In you own quiet way, so dashing. You were shy and brash and confident and insecure and so masculine and so vulnerable and you had been around and seen things and done things and yet you were not spoiled or ruined by it all, and not even cynical, though you like to think of yourself as cynical. But you’re not. No, Josh. You’re open and available.
“I’ve been around, too, though not in the ways you have, all these things in Europe and then Israel and the women you’ve tried not to tell me about--but I’ve heard. Some rake you were. I’ve told you I’ve only been with two men, Charles and you, and it’s true. But my life really started when I met you. That’s when the adventure began. You are my adventure.
“You’re not a woman so you’ll never understand, but take it from me, however liberated a woman is, she lives to please her man. It’s as old as the caves and there are a million exceptions, but it is a rule.
“I’m a woman, Josh, and you know I fight for my rights--make all the fun you want about us whining about our disadvantages while sipping iced tea on the veranda of the country club.
“All right, I’m not wholly with them and I’m not wholly against them. I’m me, an individual, an irreplaceable soul as you say, and the point is this--I may fight it when I find myself too confined, too much into you, too much a part of you, but I am yours. I want to please you.
“I’m that old-fashioned.
“I mean even the sex we do... you must admit some of it is kinky. But it pleases you so it pleases me--and I love it! I never thought I would do all those things, but I do love it, Josh.
“But it’s not only the sex. The sex is even the least of it. It’s everything else. The books you read, the thoughts you think, the feelings you feel--I want all of that for me.
“I wish I had been there with you in France, and on those sidewalks in Montreal, and I even wish I could have been there with you in battle. No, I’ll never understand you and you’ll never understand me--but that’s the fun.
“I even have dreams of being a nurse and saving your life and falling in love. It’s rare, isn’t it to have fantasies about the man you already have!
“You have to know all this, Josh, no matter what happens. And we know things are happening and we’re scared and we have every right to be because to use that word--it’s awesome, this thing. It’s awesome.
“But you have to know that even when I get modern on you, and liberated, and rebellious, and remain a shiksa, deep inside I’m your Sarah, your Rebecca, your Rachel, your Leah. Now let’s go inside.”
Now in our room, reality was back. Ibrahim and his offer were alive and well and living in Atlantic City.
Time to go.
She took her shower and got into her night things, and I said, “I’m ready.”
“You are?”
“To go home.”
“Our vacation isn’t over,” she said.
“For me it is.”
“Isn’t this running away?”
“Yes it is.”
“You can’t run from this, Josh.”
“Watch me.”
“You’re a fighter, Josh.”
“So I’m fighting.”
“By running away?”
“Strategic retreat.”
“You’re a war hero. You have all those medals from Israel.”
“I can face an Arab with a rifle. How do I stand up to an Arab with a million dollars?”
We sat down on the bed. Now we were weary. Exhaustion overtook us both at the same time. As if by signal we knew we had come to the end, for now. Joan’s face, usually shaded by high crimson, was now chalk white.
“So what do we do?” she asked.
“Forget,” I said. “We forget the whole thing.”
“Whatever you say.”
“I still think we should go home.”
“Whatever you say. I love you, Josh.”
“I love you, Joan.”
I decided against joining her in bed. Instead I went down to the casino to play my game. Blackjack.
I won $180. Once upon a time that would have been a fortune. I’d have sped up to Joan to report the wonderful news. But now... what was $180? Compared to, say, a thousand.
Compared to, say, a million?
We left Atlantic City the next morning.