I told myself, too, that those euphemistic record-hunting expeditions, or shopping trips, or dental appointments, or fittings at the tailor’s, or simply long walks alone in the Talmadge Reservation were helpful to the sex life Rebecca and I shared together. I had long ago decided that I simply needed more sex than she did (does that sound familiar, Mr. and Mrs. Phil Anderer?) and that she was getting no more and no less (well, perhaps a teeny bit less) than she desired. I remained convinced, too, that Rebecca was faithful to me, that whereas she immediately triggered desire in any man who mistakenly read her smoldering look, she would just as quickly turn on her green death ray and zotz! — a smoking pile of ashes from which could be heard the echoing traces of an advertising man’s voice oozing, “Do you ever get into the city?” I told myself that what I was doing was not only American, it was probably international or maybe universal as well. If I’d been a successful (albeit fading) jazz musician in Italy, I’d have had a steady mistress with whom I would spend weekdays in Porto Santo Stefano, shtupping her before her own hubby came down from Milano for the weekend. (During the week, he was up at Lake Como, putting it to a Genoese lady whose husband was in Portofino sticking a lady from Naples.) There were a lot of Little Orphan Annies in Talmadge, and I found at least a few of them, and we used each other to satisfy our separate needs, whatever we told ourselves they were. Actually, I had no needs. Everything was hunky-dory.
My immediate family was as hunky-dory as any of the families surrounding us, or any of the families we knew in New York City, fifty miles to the south, or New Haven, approximately the same distance away to the north and the east. My youngest son, David, was attending a private school in New Canaan, intent on getting into Princeton — sixty percent of the kids who were graduated from his school found themselves in Princeton afterward. He was a bright kid who maintained a straight-B average, and who (like every other kid in the world) was a member of a rock group; his instrument was bass guitar. He played it as well as did any of the bass guitarists in any of the successful rock groups; he was lousy. I once told him all I had to do was pull out the plug and rock music would go away. He told me I was old-fashioned. Actually, he called me an alteh kahker; not for nothing was he half Jewish. My middle son, Michael, had been accepted at Columbia University, and was living in a rat-infested apartment on 119th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. He shared the apartment with a girl two years older than he was. She had not told her parents she was living with a boy. She referred to Michael only as “my roommate” whenever she spoke to Brighton, Massachusetts, on the telephone her parents were paying for. If Michael ever chanced to answer the phone when they called, he used one of a dozen different names and told them he was the superintendent come to fix the pipes (I suppose he was, in a way), or the faygeleh poet who lived down the hall, or the boyfriend of a girl who was visiting the girl he lived with — his inventions were varied and imaginatively deceitful; not for nothing was he half Italian. My farblondjeteh son, Andrew, was at the moment in India, having dropped out of three colleges in succession, and having discovered that his father was nothing but a nine-to-fiver in disguise, a money-grubbing, materialistic fink — “Who needs money?” he asked. “I can get along on pennies a day. Pennies!” (Yes, son, but they’re my pennies; I busted my ass to earn them.) He had not written for three months, but many of our friends had wandering children, too, and we were all convinced this would pass, eventually they would settle down. In the meantime, Andrew was safe from the draft (he’d had cartilage removed from his knee after a skiing accident), and we figured if he had already survived the war in Vietnam, he might one day survive the war raging within himself. My immediate family, then, was what any of us successful Americans might have expected of our immediate families in the year 1970, by which time one president, one assassin, one separatist, one neo-Fascist, one civil rights leader, and one presidential hopeful had been murdered.
My Immigrant family was in pretty good shape as well — with the possible exception of my Uncle Luke, who had disappeared from the face of the earth right after my grandfather confronted him on the Bowery. Honest Abe had remarried — not his little shvartzeh, but a nize Jush lady from Miami. He was living down there with her and helping to run the gift shop she owned on Collins Avenue. My parents, though they seemed to be going to doctors and to funerals more and more often, were nonetheless happy in their apartment house on the Grand Concourse. Each time my father came for one of the family get-togethers, he brought one of his poems. Seth and Davina were still happily married, still childless, still living in the same building on Central Park West, though they had moved to an apartment four stories higher, overlooking a magnificent view of the park. My grandmother had died of a stroke the year before, and at the age of eighty-nine, my grandfather had finally been convinced to leave Harlem and to move in with my Aunt Cristie out in Massapequa. I saw him perhaps once a month, usually at my mother’s house.
And my Wasp family was in fine shape, too, consisting as it did of successful American like myself, wealthy self-made men who were ready to swap ethnic jokes, and tell this or that intimate anecdote about one or another Broadway production or Hollywood film or celebrity more or less famous than ourselves, and exchange Christmas gifts, and do favors for each other, and embrace each other (an old-world affectation) whenever we came into or left each other’s company. One or two of us were also fucking each other’s wives (though not my Rebecca! never my Rebecca!) and looking the other way while we swigged the booze and danced the wild Tarantella and greeted the sun or bayed at the moon. We were one great big Wasp American family, and we realized that nowhere but in the United States could we have scaled such dizzying and spectacular heights while managing simultaneously to cling to our spectacles, testicles, wallets, and watches.
As for the greater American family, the family at large... well, the country was in ragged shape, but it had been there before, and in 1970 we still clung to the hope (speak for yourself, John) — all right, I still clung to the hope that we’d somehow get out of the mess we were in. Somehow we’d manage to preserve what was good, true, and noble, we’d find new well-springs of courage, and drink from them deeply, and replenish our spirit, and go marching arm in arm together into a bright and shining space-age future, brothers one and all, including the fucking black man who was dominating whatever was left of jazz in New York. In the meantime, I had grown accustomed to the fact that I was no longer Number One (or any number at all) on the charts, and no longer mentioned in any of the polls, and no longer a Big American Hit. I was a man secure in the knowledge that he was loved by family and friends, and I gave to them my own boundless love in return. I was a man at peace with himself.
Why then, you may ask, did I go to bed with Davina Baumgarten Lewis on the afternoon of July 17, 1970?
The seventeenth was a Friday. My schedule for that day (I still have the memo I punched out on my slate; I am a very organized fellow, except where it concerns my life) was as follows: