The Best Revenge by Sol Stein Page B

was tall and fair-skinned. Louie was almost as dark as an Egyptian, half a foot shorter than I was, a man who couldn’t tell blue from green unless I went with him to pick his clothes. Did I want children from him? True, he did have a magnificent head of curled soft hair, and strong hands that touched like velvet when he wanted to. My skin sabotaged me. It cried out for his touch. All right, so I lived openly with him for a year, but marry?
    My father, who I brought over from the old country on my earnings as a teacher, was a six-foot, straight-backed giant with a full red-blond beard, who, if he hadn’t dressed in traditional black, you’d never have thought was a Jew. A month after he came he was already playing touch football in the park on Sundays with the goyim, who couldn’t understand how a man of that age could learn to throw and catch the strange-shaped ball as if he’d been doing it all his life, or why he didn’t trip over the tails of his long black coat.
    One Sunday, after watching my father play, I sat with him on the park bench and he asked the question I knew sooner or later would come.
    “Zipporah, when are you and Louie getting married?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “It seems to me,” he said, “you are already married.”
    I recited my reservations. I told him the professor—he knew all about that, too—would be a better match. My father, who came from the same village on the outskirts of Kiev as I did, where matchmakers arranged everything, shook his head. “Love is better.” Just like that.
    So I married Louie, my father beaming as if I were marrying Gilbert Roland instead of Charlie Chaplin, that other little fellow who made us all laugh. And I had from him Harold and a year later Ben, and like everybody else we all became part of Louis Riller’s audience.

BOOK III

9
    Ben
    As the cab pulled up in front of my office building, Ezra said, “Why don’t I come up with you? Maybe we can figure a way to deal with Manucci.”
    I shook my head.
    “Two heads are better than one,” Ezra said.
    “If you had two heads, Ezra, you could double your hourly charge.”
    “I’m glad to see you can still joke.”
    I got out of the cab and did a little quick-step on the sidewalk.
    Ezra rolled down the window of the taxi. “Put your hat on the sidewalk, maybe someone will throw something in.”
    “You know I never wear a hat.”
    “Maybe that’s our problem.”
    I watched the cab pull away. Ezra was looking out the back window, but the voice I heard wasn’t Ezra’s.
    Ben, negotiating is not surrendering.
    Manucci didn’t give an inch, Pop.
    Manucci’s offered over four hundred thousand dollars to save the show, that isn’t an inch?
    He wants everything I’ve got as collateral.
    What are you going to do, Ben?
    Find Manucci’s short hairs and pull.
    I never fought with his father.
    Maybe you should have.
    Hey, I was just beginning to enjoy the argument, where did he go? The only person in sight was a young black messenger riding his bike up onto the sidewalk with a bump. “Hey, whacko,” he shouted, “out of the way.” All I was doing was watching him chain the bicycle to a lamppost, when he said, “Touch this bike, mister, and I’ll cut your balls off.”
    I let the messenger go into the revolving door first. He pushed it so hard the wing behind me hit my back. He waltzed straight into the elevator, saw me, and darted his arm out to hold the door open. “I’ll wait for the next one,” I said.
    “Whacko,” said the messenger.
    There was only the one elevator.
    I watched the overhead indicator light two, three, four, and stop. My floor. This kid, I said to myself, is a messenger, not a mugger. Manucci’s the mugger.
    When the elevator returned, I took it to the fourth floor. I stepped out, looked left, looked right, nobody.
    Straight ahead were the black-outlined gold letters on my office door. What I read wasn’t written there: NICK MANUCCI PRESENTS BEN RILLER’S