He spent what he earned. He could have been some dedicated, even obsessed, hobbyist or collector deliberately setting, despite its cost, a final treasure triumphantly into place in the collection. Yet he had no hobbies, no collection. His pleasure was pleasure, his pastime was fun.
He’d once purchased a big-ticket, luxury item from a mail-order catalogue and now he received catalogues from every mail-order house in the country. These retailers, whatever they sold, must have pictured him as some world-class yuppie and, indeed, the stuff he sent away for was exactly the sort of merchandise you might expect to see on the wish list of any upwardly mobile, spoiled-rotten kid in the land. He owned almost everything L.L. Bean and Sharper Image had to offer. Banana Republic sent him pith helmets and commando gear — sweaters, boots, compasses and flight jackets — from a dozen armies. He owned a Swedish submariner’s first-aid case, fuses and assorted makings that might have been used by the PLO. He owned an official knife from the Portuguese Fishing Fleet that he used to loosen knots though it was designed to fillet fish. He sent away for the best telescopes. He had an expensive home gym. He owned a robot. He purchased state-of-the-art Camcorders, audio equipment, edge-of-the-field cameras, rifles, Betamax machines, and alarm systems to protect all this shit. He gave elaborate luaus and liked to charter planes on New Year’s Eve and fly his friends to mystery destinations. He hired symphony musicians to entertain at his parties. They strolled among the guests and took requests like gypsies in a restaurant. He flew to Europe only if he could get reservations on the Concorde and, though he did none himself, at parties he would lay, with this tiny, special limited-edition sterling silver spoon beside it he’d purchased from the Franklin Mint, cocaine out on the coffee table as if it were fruit. His measurements were on file with half a dozen Jermyn Street shirtmakers and Savile Row tailors. A Brazilian bootmaker had lasts for his feet. He had season tickets to everything.
But oh, oh, infinite is the cash cost and list price of pleasure. There seemed no bottom to the bottom line. He was always strapped, as desperate as Tober to think up new ways to make the funeral home pay off, to parlay the other guy’s cancer and bad germs into cash flow, additional ready for the general fund, store and reserve, that hoarded hope-chest, war-chest treasury and nest-egg kitty, that protective cushion, call it what you will, that Tober wanted for the rainy day when he would be dead and Shull to tide him over until the weekend.
Because he was a ladies’ man, of course, a good-time Charlie, an actual out-and-out Lothario.
I never met a more romantic-looking sixty-one-year-old. In his camel’s-hair coat, brushed Borsalino, suckling lionskin gloves and soft Gucci shoes, he was the sharpest grandpa I’d ever seen. I wasn’t surprised to learn he’d once been Rose Pickler’s and Naomi Shore’s lover.
“You see too much death in our business, Rabbi,” he’d told me. “Well, you know, not too much, I don’t mean too much, but all there is. I mean, what the hell, we don’t rent the land out for picnics, do we? We don’t use the organ for dances or pin corsages on the basic black. Jerry, Jerry,” he’d moaned, “we’re under the gun, we’re working at knifepoint here. I memento mori morning, noon and nighttime too. It’s all I ever think about. It makes me crazy and costs me money. Sure. Death makes me a big spender. It puts the glow in my cheeks and the stiff in my cock. Sure. Because I put a big day in at the office, all I’m good for is playing with my electric trains, trying on my new suits, easing the Jag out of my garage and putting the top down and taking her for a spin. I watch my weight, brush after every meal, and regard my pressure like I loved it. I’m aware of every organ, Rebbe. Not just my heart, lungs, guts and glands, but what covers them too, the hankie sticking up out of my breast pocket, the press in my pants. I’ll tell you something. It’s death made me cheat on my wife when she was alive. Because basically I’m a family man basically, or wanted to be, would have been. But you tell me, Goldkorn, you tell me — how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm? How, hey?”
“It ain’t easy for me to get girls,” he’d confessed another time. “Hell,” he said, “it ain’t easy for me to get full grown-up women. Pie bakers, widows, ladies with varicose in their veins, blue rinse in their hair, yellow in their underpants. It ain’t even the immorality of it, that they know I’m this only recently widowered old man. You know what it is? They know I’m a mortician. How? It ain’t the first thing I tell them. I think maybe they sniff it on my fingers. Me, who hasn’t personally handled a stiff since to tell you the truth I don’t even remember. Handled? Looked at in the casket even. Who can say? Maybe they smell the flowers on me, all that death grass. You think that don’t make a difference? You think so? I’m telling you, Rabbi Jerry, I drive these ladies to their own bank accounts! An evening with yours truly and they’re looking for the Neiman Marcus catalogue, the Henri Bendel. A night on the town with me and they’re circling the item, checking off the size, choosing out the color, turning down the page.”
“Hey, listen,” he said yet another time, “it isn’t as if I’m bringing you the news. You’re the rabbi here. You’re familiar with what goes on. Death’s your speciality, so I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know or haven’t thought about plenty. Only, the way I see it, with you it’s not so geferlech. There’s even something spiritual about it, some natural order business, God’s plan, that people like me don’t even think about. Sunrise, sunset. Whatever. But personally, and speaking strictly for myself, and given the nature of the business even, I’ve got to be thinking ‘Here today and gone somewhere else tomorrow.’ Hell, that is the way I think. It’s the way Tober thinks too, even if he comes at it from a different priority. So I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”
“I know what’s on your mind,” I said.