JOAN WAS being entirely too cheerful. Sometimes I wondered if there was depth to her. She seemed suffer-proof. Out there on Main Line they pasted a smile on your face and sent you out to meet the world camera-ready.
She was the product of manners over feelings. She wept, she bled, but she mended so speedily that I doubted her capacity to know true emotion. Or maybe I envied her show of steadfastness against life’s trials.
Where I came from people anguished. Ships and planes moved the remnants of a generation from continent to continent. Trains gathered up loved ones. The parent became childless. The child became an orphan. The wife became a widow. The husband became a widower. The patriot became homeless. Separations, farewells, reunions quickened the days. People knew great upheavals, great sorrows and even great jubilations.
But Joan--Joan was a child of peace. Sometimes I needed conflict. I sought the drama of my youth. Not Joan. Joan sought harmony, which, idiot that I was, I often mistook for complacency--because Joan was deeper than I would ever be. She knew--and this was the only difference--she knew how to manage pain. She made herself cheerful. The worse things got, the more cheerful she became. This evening, before I even had a chance to bring her up-to-date on Adolph, she was more cheerful than I had ever seen her.
She had heard from Ibrahim.
“Oh?” I said. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Why, I wondered, was she being so triumphant? That should be bad news, not good news.
“You seem pleased,” I said.
“Oh, I’m very pleased. Shouldn’t I be? Not every woman can say she’s worth a million dollars.”
“Surely he didn’t mention money to you.”
“Oh yes he did. It’s quite clear that I’m the merchandise in this transaction.”
Her smile widened to include a million dollar’s worth of resentment.
“There is no transaction,” I said.
“He’s madly in love with me, you know.”
“How flattered you must be.”
“Oh, you can’t imagine. One night with me would keep him for a lifetime. That’s what he said.”
“Are you about to start crying?”
“Me? I’ve never been so happy.”
“I don’t think you’re happy.”
“Of course I am. My husband has made a million-dollar business deal. Of course I’m happy. I’m thrilled.”
“We never made a deal.”
“He said you did. Very much so.”
“That’s a lie.”
Ibrahim was a genius. He had planned that, too. To tell Joan that I had agreed. That could only divide us and surely send her to him, if not for the money, then for the defiance. From one faraway glance and a single follow-up dinner, how perfectly he knew her.
He saw the rebel in her that I never knew. Appearances did not fool him. She was not a contented woman...what woman was? What woman lived without forbidden yearnings and fantasies? Ibrahim knew Joan from knowing women. But Joan he mastered in particular. He saw right through her, beyond the layer of sunniness and directly into her naked heart.
* * *
When I told Joan about my lunch with Adolph--well, that was the clincher. There was no doubt now that I had insulted him with malice, on purpose, the purpose being to lose my job and force a desperate situation that could only be resolved in Atlantic City, in bed with Ibrahim.
“You, you’re the manipulator,” she said, “not him.”
Anyway, I had not lost my job. True, Adolph had been startled by my accusation that all Germans were Nazis, and Jules had hid back a fit, but it all ended without bloodshed--or worse, losing the account. Adolph’s response was mild. He said he could appreciate how I felt. He said, further, that hatred against any people was unjust, but that he was willing to forgive me.
“You are willing to forgive me?” I was about to say, but Jules had had enough.
He gulped down some water and began to choke. He had performed this trick once before when another conversation with another client turned grim. This time I thought he was really going to die, so vehemently was he coughing, gagging and gasping, both hands at his throat. His eyeballs were about to pop out.
Everything in the restaurant came to a stop. The waitress rushed over with the manager, while I slapped Jules on the back, administering first aid to the best of my knowledge. I had once taken a company course in CPR. But now, when it came time, I forgot everything. Worse, I got mixed up between what you were absolutely supposed to do and what you were absolutely not to do.
Everybody shouted out advice. Stand him up. Sit him down. Bend him frontwards. Bend him backwards. Loosen his tie. Punch him in the spine. Punch him in the belly.
“Give him water,” said the manager.
“That’s what did this,” I said.
“Water?”
Later, when just the two of us were back at the office, Jules denied that it had been an act.
“You’re trying to kill me,” he whispered.
When word got around that I had saved his life--for that was how I had spread the word--I was reprimanded by the entire staff, except Myer. No, Myer was jealous. Jules, according to Myer, would now be indebted to me forever, heaping on me raises, bonuses and promotions.
“You’re his hero now,” said Myer.
In a sense I was. Adolph, before goose-stepping off to his room at the Holiday Inn, had told Jules in private that he admired me. I was such an honest person. Business needs more men like me, he said.
“Now you and I both know that business needs fewer men like you,” Jules said. “But you won the guy over. You never know with clients. But someday you’ll kill me, Josh. I know you will. I’m on your list.”
Actually the entire public relations profession was on my list. I got into the business while I was with the newspaper and was making a reliable dollar. I needed something unsteady. I’m that sort. A fast-talking but well-meaning politician persuaded me to write his campaign speeches. The catch was that I’d have to quit my newspaper job.
To offset that was the possibility that someday this politician might become president of the United States. He promised to bring me up with him and make me secretary of state. How could I turn down secretary of state?
So I accepted. First, of course, he’d have to win the congressional seat he was after. He lost, and not only was I minus secretary of state, I was minus a job.
So I decided to start my own business. The speechwriting business. I placed an ad in the classified section of the newspaper, advertising myself as a speechwriter for all occasions.
The people who needed speeches written, it turned out, were white supremacy advocates, loonies who wanted to declare Pennsylvania a separate nation and a sex therapist who had everything but a diploma. The ad--it brought them out like a full moon.
My life as an independent speechwriter lasted exactly two weeks, and before I knew it I was working for Jules Corson in public relations, where nothing was sacred and everybody was scared. I’d never seen so many frightened people in all my life.
So many times I had thought of quitting. In fact, I once did. I saw Jules and I said:
“Jules, I resign.”
He laughed in my face.
“Presidents,” he said, “resign. You don’t resign. You quit.”
“Right. I quit.”
“You can’t quit. Get out of here.”
So I’d have to get fired. I devised scheme after scheme. Anything to rouse me from this complacency and impel me to go out there and do something. So I arrived late for work, left early, took two-hour lunches, ignored memos, failed to show up for new business meetings, refused to join the Birthday Club, defamed my colleagues by declaring them useless to their faces, publicly ridiculed computers, made sexist remarks in the presence of feminists and even fell asleep in the conference room while Jules went on and on about expense accounts.
My conduct with Adolph was my most brazen attempt, but it was nothing special.
So Joan was wrong about my motivations, although who was to say what lurked in the subconscious?
This much was true: I could not imagine myself touring the country with Adolph, a Nazi who was prepared to forgive me. Nor could I imagine enduring the routine of another day in Philadelphia, Slob City USA. For this I was born?
Surely the creator had something loftier in mind. What I had in mind was to excavate in Jerusalem, take part in the dig for the City of David. Find the radiance of my past. Maybe even find David or something about him that would lead me to his faith. I wanted to emerge from a cave utterly changed, divested of my earthly soul, aglow from spiritual transformation. That was my dream. Not this.
The twentieth century was not my idea anyway. There was no place for me here, where men deceived themselves into importance by devising Towers of Babel in the form of mighty computers and buildings that reached for the heavens.
And the view from heaven? What was the view of earth from up above? With all his doings, his comings and goings, could man be distinguished from the mole? For all his motion, where was he going?
If anything motivated me this was it--the need to escape futility. But how?