11:00 am Leave Talmadge
12:30 pm Chipp’s — final fitting
1:30 pm Lunch — Mark Aronowitz
Four Seasons
3:30 pm Jeffrey Epstein
MGM — 29th floor
1350 Avenue of the Americas
5:30 pm Drinks — Davina and Seth
7:00 pm Dinner — Sardi’s
8:30 pm “Fiddler on the Roof”
Majestic Theater
I took the car and driver into the city that day. Rebecca planned to drive her own car (a $22,000 Maserati) to New Canaan later, catch a train to Grand Central, and then taxi over to the apartment on Central Park West. Our plan was to spend the cocktail hour with the Lewises, after which we would go our separate ways, Rebecca and I to dinner and the theater, Davina and Seth to a party in the Village. My afternoon meeting with the MGM executive was to be an important one; we were supposed to discuss the possibility of my scoring another film. I suppose that’s why Mark had asked me to lunch. He was anticipating a fat fee on the horizon, and it does not hurt to be kind to the people who are putting ten percent of their daily bread on your table. In retrospect, I’m amazed he showed up at all, or — considering what he had to tell me — stayed to pay for a lunch that did not promise future revenue. The first thing he said was, “We’ve been screwed, Ike. Here’s the story....”
The story was glum. I listened to it as I downed first one Beefeater martini, and then another. It seemed that MGM had changed its collective mind. They were having internal troubles, Mark said. They weren’t even sure they were going ahead with the picture, but even if they did go ahead with it, they wanted to use the guy who had scored The Wild Bunch, had I seen The Wild Bunch?
No, I told him, I had not seen The Wild Bunch.
“So that’s it,” Mark said. “Epstein was supposed to fly in last night, but he canceled. They called me just a little while ago. I tried reaching you in Talmadge, but Rebecca told me you’d left early.”
We finished lunch at a quarter to three. I walked’ Mark up to his office on Forty-seventh and Broadway, shook hands with him, and began walking crosstown and then downtown. I had no specific destination in mind. It was a reasonably cool day for July in New York, and I wandered aimlessly, wondering if I should fill the time between now and five-thirty by taking in a movie. There was a crowd on the corner of Forty-fourth and Sixth. In 1970, there used to be a very good hot dog stand on that corner; it has since been torn down. A lot of sidewalk hookers used to line up there for a late-afternoon lunch before starting their daily grind. I figured now, as I heard the buzz of the crowd all around me, that one of them was being hassled by a cop.
“What is it?” I asked someone who was standing beside me clucking his or her tongue, the repeated tsk-tsks falling like brushes on a snare drum.
“Oh, it’s a bum,” the person answered. She was a woman who sounded very much like my mother. I immediately identified her as Italian, though she spoke without a trace of accent.
“Is something wrong with him?” I asked.
“He’s picking bugs,” she said.
“He’s what?”
“He’s sitting on the curb with his shirt off, and he’s picking bugs out of the shirt and stamping them dead under his shoe.”
“Bugs?”
“Lice,” she said. “You know. Bugs.” She began clucking again, and then she said, “His back is all covered with sores. The bugs must’ve bit him, don’t you think?”
At that point, the vagrant said, “What are you all looking at? Leave me alone,” and his voice startled me for a moment because (I’m sure I was mistaken) it sounded exactly like my Uncle Luke, or at least my Uncle Luke as I’d last heard him in 1950, when I’d telephoned to ask him something — what was it I’d called to ask him? “Go on,” he said, “get lost,” and I was convinced now that the man sitting on the curb picking lice out of his shirt and stamping them dead under his shoe was my Uncle Luke (I’m positive I was mistaken), who had disappeared from sight eight years ago.
“What does he look like?” I asked the woman, but she was gone, and a man answered for her.
“Who?” he said. “The bum?”
“Yes.”
“He’s an old fart,” the man said.
“How old?”
“Sixty, seventy? Who can tell with these bums?”
“Is he wearing glasses?” I said.
“Yeah,” the man answered, surprised. “How could you tell that?”
I turned away swiftly. If it was Luke (It can’t be, I told myself, though Luke if he was still alive would be in his late sixties, but no, it can’t be him!), I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t want to hear him say again, “Hey, Iggie, how’s the kid?” I tapped my way through the crowd, “Excuse me, excuse me, please,” and found my way to the curb, and asked someone to help me across Sixth Avenue. I walked east, still without a destination in mind (or so I believed), thinking about that man sitting on the curb killing lice, and telling myself over and over again that Luke was dead, he had to be dead, he’d been gone a long, long time now, no one had heard from him in years, of course he was dead. I turned left on Fifth Avenue and began walking uptown. It was not until I reached Fifty-seventh Street, and was standing outside the Double-day’s there, that I realized I was sweating and trembling. I walked to the curb and raised my cane, holding it aloft, hoping some passing vehicle would be a taxicab, hoping the driver would realize I was hailing him. As I waited, still trembling, I imagined a woman standing at the corner bus stop not fifty feet away, staring at me. I wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible, before she could say, “Who do you think you’re kidding?”
A taxicab pulled to the curb. “Where you going, Mac?” the driver asked.
“Central Park West,” I said, and I gave him Davina’s address, and climbed into the back seat, and closed the door.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said.
I heard him throwing his flag, and then he gunned the taxi away from the curb.
“You look familiar,” he said. “Are you somebody?”
“No,” I answered.
The doorman at Davina’s building recognized me, but he called upstairs nonetheless to announce me. The elevator operator took me up to the sixteenth floor, and I tapped my way down the hall, and found the doorbell in the jamb, and pressed it, and heard the familiar chimes inside the apartment, and then heard the peephole flap being drawn back, and then the door being unlocked.
“You’re early,” Davina said. I went into the apartment. She locked the door behind me. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “You look...” She let the sentence trail.
“I think I need a drink,” I said.
“Sure.”
“My meeting was canceled,” I said.
“You’re lucky you caught me home.”
“Were you going out?”