Just how Gus managed that seduction, I eventually witnessed for myself and at Golda’s request. Poor Golda. Ordinarily buoyant, chatterboxy, rather plain and unmade-up and simple as water, a happy, open woman with a good heart and a fair amount of worldly wisdom, she suddenly became estranged and melancholic, more beautiful in a soft and vulnerable way, but more ludicrous too, puppy-eyed and dolled up like a schoolgirclass="underline" a poor hapless maiden, we all supposed, suffering from unrequited love. Except when he was copulating with her, which was about once a week, off and on — or I should say, on and off — Gus didn’t know she existed. The old story, you might say — but no, he really didn’t know she existed. She had to throw herself in his path. If on these rare occasions he had rejected her, even insulted or abused her, she might in time have got over him — she’s no child, after all, and ordinarily has a good sense of humor. But each time it was apparently exactly the same thing all over again — a textbook seduction, stunning orgasm, then briskly out and gone without so much as a wink or a fare-thee-well, leaving Golda spread out, flushed, gasping, and ever deeper and deeper in love. I’d see her often, lurking about my studio, a forlorn and dark-eyed creature utterly unlike the Golda I once knew, hoping only to catch a glimpse of her lover, but disappearing the moment Harry or one of the others turned up. She did catch him there a time or two, and discreetly I left them to it.
But one day she came up to me and, tears running down her soft cheeks, she said: “Meyer, you got to help me! Am I crazy or what?”
“Sure, Golda, you’re crazy,” I said. I was up on a ladder, working on Gorky’s forehead. It occurred to me that Gorky had not said much that was useful on the subject of sexual love, but in this I felt yet another bond with him. I did not know or care much about it either, especially that of other people. “All people in love are crazy.”
She didn’t seem to hear me. She was staring at, or rather through, a little row of flowers made out of brass hinges, screws, and the like, one of a group of things I’d been working on since Maxie’s party. My Jarama flowers, I called them. “Meyer, listen, it’s always the same, exactly the same…”
I thought at first she meant that all her affairs had come to nothing in the end, which was mostly true, and I started to make something up about the flowers she was staring past (maybe, also, I wanted her to notice them), but then it came to me that she might be trying to say something else. “What’s exactly the same, Golda?”
“What he says. What he does. The whole shmeer. Every word, every look, every touch, just the same. It’s like going to a movie you seen before. Except you end up getting… having…” She sighed, looked up at me. Yes, she’s in trouble, I thought, I could see it. “Is that you up there, Meyer? Maybe this is all just a bad dream, hunh?”
“No, it’s me, Golda,” I said, crawling down off the ladder, pulling off my welding goggles: “See?” I shut down the acetylene and oxygen, released the screw on the pressure regulators, drained the lines. In my mind’s eye I still saw that deep furrow over Gorky’s eye I was working on. The truth is beyond all commiseration… “C’mon, let’s have some coffee, you can tell me about it.”
She seemed to calm down and become the old Golda once more, but when we reached the back and she saw my cot, she got all shaky and tearful again. I kept quiet, letting her find her own time and way to get it off her chest. I didn’t exactly want to know about it, but I knew she’d tell me regardless. Gorky has a line in his Childhood: “I might liken myself as a child to a beehive to which various common ordinary people brought the honey of their knowledge and views of life.… Often the honey was dirty and bitter, but being knowledge, it was honey, nonetheless.” People have always come to me like that, too. I rarely ask any questions, but they tell me things anyway. “It starts,” she said, “with the way he looks up at me, how he suddenly recognizes me, the way the lid on one eye droops a bit and his lips come apart, how he tilts his head like he’s thinking about something very serious, and then how he smiles, so warm, so good, a little movement he makes with his hand, like a touch across the space between us, and I feel a tingle. ‘Golda!’ he says. Such a nice deep voice he has, Meyer, throaty and solemn like a rabbi. ‘Golda, I been looking for you!’ And then he takes my hand…”
She described it all, phrase by phrase, gesture by gesture, touch by touch — I found myself getting excited in spite of myself — and exactly what happened to her each step of the way. “There’s no grabbing, no fumbling, his hands slide from my face to inside my underwear like magic, Meyer, like water running over pebbles in a brook, you know? Gemitlech-like, going from some place to another place, sure, but remembered like being everywhere at once, and he is whispering in my ear and kissing the insides of my legs and smiling down at me from above, and I don’t know where I am anymore! ‘Surrender to the ancient force inside you, Golda,’ he says, ‘struggle against death!’ Is he kidding? The surrender is over, he’s—zetz! — inside me already, he’s—ah! — my clothes are gone but—oi! — filling me…!” The last part got rather blurred, but by then the words weren’t very important anyway.
She lay on my cot after, her clothes sweaty and rumpled, her hand between her thighs, her face suddenly aged and filled with so much sorrow I lost all my own excitement and wished only to hold her like a child and give her comfort. “Meyer,” she whispered, “would you do me a favor?”
“Sure, Golda…”
“Watch him, Meyer. Watch what he does to me.”
“You mean while he—? Well, I don’t know, Golda, I don’t much like—”
“Please, Meyer. For me. He’ll come here tomorrow. Keep the others away and watch. Tell me what happens, the whole megillah, tell me if I’m crazy or what.”
As usual, spineless as ever, I could not say no. The next day was Friday and Gus turned up as expected. I’d chased the others off, telling them my aunt was coming to visit. (And what would have happened, I was to wonder later on, when it was all clear to me, if Gus had taken my crazy aunt on?) I didn’t even have time to hide, but Gus didn’t seem to register my presence, and Golda after the first minute or two was conscious of nothing except Gus. And it was all true, the whole transaction, word for word, move by move. Gus entered the studio, walked to the back to get fed, noticing nothing en route, and there she was. She looked frightened and painfully self-conscious, yet approachable as a park bench; he seemed as insentient as ever, staring at her like she was the horizon. But then suddenly there was that flicker of recognition, the little gestures, and Golda, like Pavlov’s dog, began to respond. “Golda!” he said gently. “Golda, I’ve been looking for you!” He took her hand.
It was very smooth, very professional, yet sincere and intense at the same time. He went through the entire routine, just as Golda had recounted it, but though I’d heard it all before and stood objectively apart, trying vainly to apply Freud to what I saw, it was such an absorbing spectacle it all seemed like new. I tried to watch his hands, but I, too, got caught up in the timelessness of his performance and could not remember afterwards exactly how he undressed her. “Oh, Dick!” she groaned (she was the only one of us who ever used his real name). “Take me! Love me! Save me!” I left before the climax (he was technologically up-to-date, I’d noticed, using one of those slide fasteners on his fly instead of buttons), having seen that part before, went outside and planted some flowers in the vacant lot next to my studio, thinking: It is true that love is a momentary denial of reality and death — but then, is that its true and secret function: to serve as a defense mechanism against other forms of madness? I realized I was very agitated and falling back on defense mechanisms of my own.