“No,” Preminger said, “not Friday.”
“Then we’re in like Flynn. Friday it is. I called you first because it’s in your honor,” Jacobson said. “Leave everything to me. I got some people I especially want you to meet.”
Friday he closed the pool early and went upstairs to prepare for the dinner party. He showered carefully. Two weeks in the outdoors had given him an excellent tan. The swimming had done him good. A lot of his pot had disappeared and he could see his major ribs. Dressing scrupulously in a blue summer suit he’d had cleaned for the occasion, he carefully removed the lollipop headed pins from a crisp new shirt and placed them in a glass ashtray. He was amused by the cunning ways new shirts were folded, he was very cheerful.
But the party was a letdown. Sylvia, a pretty woman about his own age whom Preminger assumed to be divorced, had a date that evening and had to be downtown by eight-thirty. Preminger resented that no one had thought to fix him up. He’d assumed that people like these, family people, were always on the lookout for eligibility like his own. Yet no one had approached him with the names of likely girls or pressed for his attendance at their tables. Willing to serve as the bait in their legendary machinations, this was the first time he had been to any of their homes. The other guests were all from the condominium, and he couldn’t imagine who it was Jacobson had wanted him to meet.
“How about you, Preminger?” Jacobson asked, “you good for another bourbon and ginger ale?”
“Is there club soda?”
“Club soda. Ho ho. We got a real shikker in this one. He drinks like a goy. Lena, we got any seltzer for Buster Crabbe?” Buster Crabbe was only one of the names of swimmers he was to go by that evening. Johnny Weissmuller was another. And once Esther Williams.
“Ask him if he’ll take Seven-Up.”
“Water, I think.”
“Water he thinks,” Jacobson said.
“A busman’s holiday,” Lena said.
Jacobson brought his drink. “Want a piece of candy? Make it less sour?”
The decor in the Jacobson’s apartment was nothing like that in his father’s. They had moved from a large apartment on the South Side and brought all their things with them. Seven rooms of furniture crammed into five. Preminger was certain the heavy pieces were absorbing all the air conditioning in the hot apartment. In a while Jacobson, sweating, told Lena to open a window.
“Won’t that work against the air conditioning?”
“It ain’t on,” Lena said. “Air conditioning gives Jack a cold.”
Preminger hated people who got colds from air conditioning.
“Only place I don’t catch cold from air conditioning is in Chinese restaurants in California,” Jacobson said.
“I see.”
“Don’t ask me why.”
The conversation was pretty much what he heard at the pool, from the women names he was not familiar with, and from the men dark, illiberal talk of stores broken into and advancing hordes of blacks. He was astonished to learn that many of the men carried guns. Jacobson showed him one he wore inside his jacket. Someone else moved his hair with his fingers and showed him a scar. He kept silent, but even without his saying anything they seemed to know his position and sought constantly to provoke him.
“You’re a college man,” one said. “I suppose the talk up in the ivory tower is that the shvartzers are abused, that we been robbing them blind for years, that we’re slumlords and get them to sign paper they don’t understand. Am I right?”
“They try to see both sides,” Preminger said mildly.
“Both sides. Hah. You hear that? Both sides. I work with these people. I worked with them all my life. Yeah, yeah, and in the old days I lived next-door to them. They’re shiftless. On one side they’re shiftless and on the other side they’re worthless. There’s your both sides.”
“What’s the matter,” someone else said angrily, “the Jews weren’t oppressed for years? They were oppressed plenty, believe me. But they didn’t go crying to the NAACP.”
“They went crying to the B’nai B’rith,” Preminger said.
“You compare the B’nai B’rith to the NAACP? The Jews are the best friends the Negro ever had.”
“We vote Democratic. We got a name for ourselves all over the world as nigger-lovers.”
“Just more anti-Semitism,” someone said sadly.
“I’m not going to change your minds,” Preminger said. “Why don’t we just stop talking about it?”
“That’s the ticket,” Lena Jacobson said. “He’s young, he’s an idealist. Leave him to heaven.”
During dinner they wanted his opinions on Vietnam, on welfare and minimum hourly wage laws. What concerned them most, however, was the campus situation — SDS, the Weathermen. Why were they so angry? They saw him, he realized at last, as a representative of the younger generation. He was there to be baited.
“For God’s sake,” he cried, “look at my hair. Is it longer than yours? Am I wearing bellbottoms? Is anything tie-dyed? I swear to you, I washed my hands before I came to the table.”
“Drugs. What about drugs?”
“I take ten milligrams of Coumadin.”
“You hear? He admits it.”
“It’s a blood-thinner. I had a heart attack.”
“Do you smoke Mary Jane? Have you ever smoked horse?”
“You don’t smoke horse. You inject it.”
“You know an awful lot about it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“Do you drop acid?”
“I’m thirty-seven years old.”
“This boy saved my life,” Lena pleaded.
“It’s true,” Jack said. “No more.”
They ate the rest of the meal in silence.
Afterwards they went back into the living room. Marshall poured himself a very large bourbon. Two of the women went into the kitchen to help Lena with the dishes. A third walked around the apartment and studied the photographs — there might have been a hundred of them — on the Jacobsons’ walls. “Lena, this one of Laurie, it’s very nice. I never saw it.”
“The one with Milton’s grandson?” Lena called.
“The blond?”
“Sherman. Milton’s grandson.”
“Who’s Milton?” a man asked.
“Wait, I can’t hear you, the disposal’s on.”
“I said, who’s Milton?”
“Milton,” Lena called from the kitchen, “Sherman’s grampa. Paul’s partner’s father-in-law.” She came into the living room, drying her hands on a dish towel. “A brilliant man. And what a gentleman! You remember, Jack, when we were to California and he had us to supper in his home? Brilliant. A brilliant man.”
“What’s so brilliant about him?” Preminger asked.
“He’s eighty-four years old if he’s a day.”
“But what’s so brilliant about him?”
“He’s brilliant. A genius.”
“How?” asked Preminger.
“How? How what?”
“How is he brilliant? How’s he a genius?”
“That’s right. He’s very brilliant.”
“How?”
“He’s eighty-four years old if he’s a day.”
“That doesn’t make him brilliant,” Preminger said.
“I didn’t say that made him brilliant.”