“Could it be,” he said, revealing a jack-o’-lantern smile, his near-toothlessness giving him a Karloff lisp, “that angelic choristers of heaven have invaded this bistro, wings tipped with music vibrating like a flock of wild swans skimming the surface of some enchanted sea?”
“Shut up, Max,” the brunette said; she had a husky voice that under the right circumstances might have been sexy.
“Who is that?” Marilyn whispered.
“The guest of honor,” I said.
And this was indeed Maxwell Bodenheim, an astonishing husk of the tall, slim, golden-haired ladies’ man I remembered from my father’s bookshop; back then, only his eyebrows had been a devilish red-brown.
He leaned against the shoulder of the violinist. “And are these the heartwarming, bell-like tones of a Heifetz? Or does the angel Gabriel lurk in your barrel-like form?”
“Max!” she said. “Can’t a girl dance?”
He raised the whiskey glass sloshingly, a parody of a toast, underlined by the threat of flinging it in the nearest face (not much of one, because Bodenheim was unlikely to waste such precious fluid in so foolhardy a manner).
“Or,” he proclaimed, “are you heathens tempting an innocent child into the ways of the nymph, stirring the wildness in her nature and fomenting the bestial longings in her blood?”
The brunette threw her hands up. “Jesus Christ, Max!”
The musicians were looking at each other like the Three Stooges wondering how to explain their latest botched wallpapering job to their boss. Wide eyes peered out of the drifting cigarette smoke around us as the Renaissance reunion got a good look at the man of the hour, who was dramatically draining the whiskey glass, handing the empty vessel to the nearest bewildered musician.
Then, moving with unexpected quickness, and force, Bodenheim grabbed the woman by the arm and she squealed with pain as he intoned, “Or is this ‘innocent’ the heathen? If we are to believe Schopenhauer, women are incapable of romantic love, yet infinitely capable of unfathomable treachery...”
“Excuse me,” I told the horrified but spellbound Marilyn, and got up and put my hand on Bodenheim’s shoulder.
“It is rather unfortunate,” he was saying, still clutching his wife’s arm, his face inches from hers with its wide eyes and lips drawn back in snarl, “that the legs of a girl cannot be nailed to the floor... It’s hard to keep them in one place, except when they are locked up in closets.”
I said, “Been a long time, Max.”
The rheumy blue eyes tried to focus, and he suddenly noticed the hand on his shoulder, looking down at it as if it were an oversize, unpleasant moth that had landed there. “I don’t know you, young man. Kindly remove your meat hook from my shoulder.”
I did, then extended my hand. “Nate Heller. Mahlon’s son.”
A wrinkled smile formed under the lumpy nose and the eyes tightened in remembrance. “Heller’s Books. Ah yes. The West Side. Wonderful days. Days of youth and passion.” Ric, just behind us, was rounding up his musicians and herding them out of the bar and back up into the dining room.
In the meantime, Bodenheim had unhanded the brunette and was gesturing to her rather grandly with his corncob pipe in hand. “Heller’s Books, allow me to introduce Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim.”
The pretty, lanky lush smiled at me, looked me up and down with open appreciation, and said, “I’ll have to get Max to bring me to Chicago more often.”
“You’ll have to forgive Ruth,” Bodenheim said, his smile tightening. “She has the morals of an alley cat, but she can’t help it. She, too, comes from a newspaper background...”
“You mean like me, Max?” Ben asked, stepping into our rarefied social circle. He had a cigar in the fingers of the hand that held his glass of Scotch. He had the uneasy smile of a host who suddenly realized he had invited a disaster area for a guest.
Bodenheim beamed at the sight of his old friend and adversary; his smile had more holes than teeth. “I was referring...” He gestured and sneered and stage-whispered: “...to these lesser lights. Literary section editors. Book reviewers. Columnists...”
Ben smirked. “Try not to alienate them too bad, Bodie, till I pass the hat for ya.”
Ruth floated off and I returned to the small table where a stilted Marilyn was talking to Herb Lyon of the Trib. He was trying to wrangle an impromptu follow-up interview for his Tower Ticker column; I gently let Herb know this was a social occasion and he drifted off. Soon Marilyn was sipping a glass of champagne; I had a Coke — I was working, after all — while Bodenheim (who had somehow acquired another drink) had Hecht up against a wall, the former getting worked up and Hecht’s patient smile wearing thinner and thinner.
I only got bits and pieces of it, mostly Bodenheim, saying, “I have always liked your work, my cynical friend, I can honestly say I’ve never slammed it... Count Bruga, of course, excepted... Ben, you had great ability in fields of prose, where money alone lies. I am an indifferent prose writer and a very good poet. That explains the difference in our purses!”
“Such a sad, brilliant man,” Marilyn said, working on her second glass of champagne.
“Sad, anyway.”
“You don’t think he’s brilliant?”
“He’s got an impressive line of bullshit,” I said, “for a deadbeat.”
“How can you say that? His language is beautiful!”
“But what he says is ugly.”
“I don’t care. I want to meet him.”
I didn’t argue with her. Mine was not to reason why. Mine was but to do and sigh.
As I approached Bodenheim, he continued filibustering his old friendly foe: “If we don’t raise at least twenty dollars tonight, Ben, I shan’t be able to get my typewriter out of hock when I return to that shallow, mean, and uncouth frenzy known as New York.”
“Then as you wend your way around this room, Bodie,” Ben said, smiling the world’s tightest smile, “I suggest you find some topic of discussion beside the ‘stench of Capitalism.’ Your old friends, the ones still alive anyway, aren’t radicals anymore. They’re democrats.”
“I do need my typewriter,” Bodenheim said, as if Ben had said nothing, “even though I have not sold one of my short stories or poems yet this year.” He took a healthy swig from his latest glass of whiskey. “But hope is a warmly smiling, stubbornly tottering child — and without a typing machine I would feel like a writer with spinal meningitis.”
I whispered to Ben: “Marilyn wants to meet the Great Man.”
Ben rolled his eyes, and said, “All right, but let’s both chaperone him, then.”
Bodenheim was saying, “You might consider it a persecution complex, but I’m convinced these rejections stem from the days when I threw many a caustic jab at the intellectual dwarfs who pass as literary editors and critics...”
Taking his toothpick arm, I said, “Max, that lovely blonde would like to meet you. She’s quite famous. That’s Marilyn Monroe.”
“Heller Books, it would be my immense pleasure!” he said, something flickering in the cloudy eyes, the ghost of a once-great womanizer, perhaps.
I ushered him over to the table, where Marilyn rose, smiling, almost blushing, saying, “Mr. Bodenheim, I’ve worn my copy of your Selected Poems simply to tatters.”
He took her hand and, much as Ric had, kissed it; I hope she washed it, later. With antiseptic soap.