Good as Gold

First Look

at a new novel

In one love and out the other

Bruce Gold was in a rage when he stormed into the office of the principal with newspaper clippings attesting to his probable emergence as a person of vast political influence. He pulled no punches because the reigning official was both a woman and a black.

"Your words," he began with a sputter and picked up velocity as he went along. "You'll have to change them. Don't you read the newspapers? I can't have a daughter of mine in trouble in school at this time. Either take her out of trouble or redefine your words so she's not in trouble, and that's it. Fartig! I'll ruin you. I'll cut off financial aid. I'll let the whole world know you're running a segregated, selective private school while pretending to be integrated and impartial."

The poor woman was shaken by his vehemence. "But, Dr. Gold, that isn't true. We're known as segregated and selective, although we secretly are integrated."

"Then I'll let the parents know you're integrated and drive all the whites away. You're after headlines, aren't you? That's the reason you're doing this, isn't it?"

"She's refusing to do homework. We can't very well lower our standards, can we?"

"That's progressive education," countered Gold. "And you can so lower your standards without harming or helping a single student. Read my piece called Education and Truth, or, Truth in Education."

"Dr. Gold," the woman tried futilely to explain, "if we keep her in and fail her, she'll be held back and you'll waste a full year's tuition. If she leaves, there'll be nothing derogatory on her record and you'll receive a refund."

"How large a refund?"

"A fraction of the total."

"Keep her in."

"Dr. Gold, I'm sure you wouldn't want us to overlook our rules just to make an exception of your child."

"Why not?"

The woman could hardly have looked more surprised. "You would?"

"Yes. She is exceptional, isn't she?"

"In a recalcitrant, unproductive way."

"Good," said Gold. "Make an exception of her for that and treat it as experimental education. I'll do the homework for her if you attach that much importance to it."

They came to terms on that. In the anteroom outside the open door, there awaited him with parted lips a pretty woman with ash-blonde fluffed-up hair who hurried after him breathlessly and caught at his arm when he had gained the corridor.

"Dr. Gold, please," she said after bringing him to a stop. "I think it's so unfair. Your daughter is not an exception. And I think it's unjust for you and the administration to label her an exception."

"Who the fuck are you?" asked Gold.

"Linda Book," said the woman. "I'm one of Dina's teachers."

"You the one who's complaining?"

"Oh, no, Dr. Gold. I'm her favorite. We're very close friends and it hurts me to see her stigmatized as an exception. She's really so exceptional."

Gold looked into her sensitive gray eyes with the knowing interest of someone watching a new fish swim into his ken. He gave the softest gasp of appreciation when he realized that hers was probably the most beautiful face of a woman of his own approximate generation that he had ever seen. Her blouse and skirt were a bit on the shiny-bright side, which was all to his taste, and she had good-sized breasts in a soft brassiere. A second later, he knew he was on the very verge of falling in love with her, and he glanced at his watch to see if he had time.

"Ride downtown to my studio with me," he requested. "I want to talk longer with you."

"I have a class in five minutes."

"Cut it."

She appeared a bit flustered by his air of command. "At least," she said, "let me freshen up."

He waited downstairs in a cab for her and they fell immediately into an orgy of lubricious kissing that soared in ardor and noise until they arrived at his building. He was almost certain afterward that for a period of about a minute during the ride, she had one foot on his shoulder. They were as formal and correct as rigid, weaving drunks in the lobby and elevator. As soon as his key turned in the lock, she came at him again with the same famished voracity, and they resumed as passionately and calisthenically as before, with a lustful grinding of bellies and pelvic bones and a bruising banging of thighs and knees. He held her ass. She pulled his hair. He remembered to shut the door.

"I can't ball you today," she told him the moment they were inside, "but I give good head."

Actually, her head was only soso, but Gold did not criticize and Gold did not care. Before the sun set that same day, he learned that Linda Book was the easiest person to give his heart to that he'd ever met. Gold had this penchant for falling in love. Whenever he was at leisure, he fell in love. Sometimes he fell in love for as long as four months; most often, though, for six or eight weeks. Once or twice he had fallen in love for a minute. Confident that this new attachment had no better chance of surviving than the others, he yielded himself to it completely. In the throes of romantic discovery, he told her all about Andrea and much about Belle. In the freshness and exhilarating sweep of adventurous new feeling, he asked her to come with him secretly to Acapulco on his trip with Andrea, scheduled during her Christmas vacation, and she quickly agreed.

"I may have to bring two children."

"That's out of the question."

"I'll leave them with my husband."

"We may be followed," he thought it prudent to advise her, thinking of Greenspan.

"My husband wouldn't go that far," said Linda Book, "although he's desperate for a reconciliation. He hates being separated from me."

"Smart fellow," said Gold. "He'd be a fool to give you up."

Linda blossomed like a rose. "You know how to make a woman happy. But I must warn you now. I'll never want to marry you."

Gold could not find the right words for a moment. "The mold!" he cried at last. "They broke it! They broke the mold when they created you!"

•

In the cold light of morning, he lingered over breakfast with his head in both hands, wondering what the fuck he had done.

•

Sid gave Gold a check for $3500. Gold put the check in his pocket.

"I'll also need some advice, Sid, about Acapulco. I'm not really going for the Government, and there'll be two of us."

Sid pursed his lips in consternation. "I'm not sure the places I mentioned are right for Belle."

"Not Belle, Sid. Belle and I are finished. We're not really together anymore."

If Sid was distraught, he hid it well. "How come I haven't heard?" he asked with only mild surprise. "The girls still talk to her, don't they?"

"I'm not sure she knows." This was growing to be an awkward confession to have to keep making. "I'm sort of hoping she'll catch on. There's this girl in Washington I'm engaged to secretly and want to marry."

"You're really in love, huh, kid?"

"Yeah, Sid, I am. But that's with a different one."

"You mean there are three?" Now Sid sat straight up and a look of keenest joy brightened his face.

Gold nodded sheepishly. "And there's also a Jewish FBI man named Greenspan who might still be checking me out for good character."

"Tell me something," Sid said after asking the waiter for another round of drinks. "Why aren't you marrying the one you're in love with?"

"Her husband wouldn't let me," said Gold. "He doesn't even like the idea of being separated. He's a big violent man with a savage temper and I mustn't let him find out."

"That's funny."

"She's got four kids."

"That's funnier." Sid was chuckling heartily. "Is she having her teeth capped?"

Gold answered with amazement, "How did you know?"

Sid merely smiled in a paternal way. Then he explained, "Every time I fell for a girl, she decided she had to have her teeth capped."

"Linda's having just a couple. I offered to pay."

"Don't commit yourself for more."

Gold was again embarrassed. "Two of her kids need orthodontia," he confessed, "and I told Linda I'd help there, too."

"Why are you marrying the one in Washington?"

"She's a lovely girl, Sid," Gold answered with persuasive feeling, "really nice, and her father can help me with his influence. There's money there and that might make it easier for me to help Linda with those dental bills."

"How's her teeth?"

"Good, Sid, good."

"Is she tall?"

"Very. With long legs and very strong bones. Healthy, and really quite a beauty."

"Then take her to Acapulco," Sid urged genially. "It sounds like you might have some fun."

"I'm going to, Sid," said Gold, "but there's the problem. I don't like to be away from Linda and I want to sneak her along, too."

"What's the problem?" Sid asked.

"Is it possible?" asked Gold. "Can I really do something like that without getting caught?"

"Sure, it's possible," Sid assured him with zest and called for two more drinks. "I've got this friend in Houston I do business with who goes with this Mexican TV actress who goes with this airline pilot who's married to this woman with the Mexican Tourist Bureau who can help with travel and hotel reservations."

"She may have to bring two of her kids."

"The more the merrier," Sid chortled, "if you can afford it. And a maid or baby sitter to take care of them so she's free nights."

"I hadn't thought of that. Sid, how can I hide so many people? Two hotels? (continued on page 152)Good as Gold(continued from page 148) Three?"

"One," answered Sid concisely.

"One?"

"Sure, one. It accounts for your being wherever you're seen and you don't waste time shooting back and forth. Please don't take offense, Bruce, but I think that maybe for the first time in my life "I'm finally proud of my kid brother."

"And all this while," reminded Gold, thrilling a moment with the compliment, "there's this FBI man who might find out and ruin everything. By the way, what's she like?"

"Who?"

"That Mexican television actress," said Gold.

"Not bad, I hear, if you like them short, dark, shapely and passionate. She goes off like a string of firecrackers, I'm told. And I always thought you were kind of stuffy. I never thought you had nerve for something like this."

"Sid, I don't," Gold decided, wilting. "I'm going to call it off."

"Over my dead body," Sid told him in an affronted voice that commanded the attention of others in the small restaurant. "I haven't had this much fun in fifteen years. What could go wrong? Boy, oh, boy--I wish I could go along, but I don't think my heart or Harriet would stand it. Listen--we'll book you into the Villa Vera in two private cottages back to back. You'll have your own kitchen and private swimming pool with each and can avoid the public areas. I'll work out the right room numbers. The way I see it, you won't even have to worry about this Greenspan or the FBI."

"Forgive me for intruding," said Greenspan of the FBI, "but I'd like to make a suggestion. He'll need a third room for himself to make and receive private phone calls from each of the ladies. He can use secret business with Washington as a justification. I recommend three connecting suites, with his own in the middle."

"You seem to know an awful lot about this," Sid said appreciatively after Gold introduced them.

"I've worked for Presidents," was Greenspan's understated reply. "Your place--it's a pigsty," he said of Gold's studio when they entered. "I say that more in sorrow than in anger. I've been meaning to tell you for weeks."

"Greenspan, don't butt in," said Gold with a look plainly indicating he was both worried and irked. "I don't want Belle to know anything about this."

"She knows, she knows," said Greenspan in a soughing litany. "Everything but the names. Since when has Belle ever been guilty of stupidity?"

"Then why hasn't she said anything?"

"What can she say?" answered Greenspan with an expression of absolute grief stealing over him. "If you only knew how my heart bleeds for her every time I hear her talking to her mother or trying to pretend that nothing's wrong when she speaks to your sisters. What a woman she is, what a wonderful wife and mother she----"

"Greenspan, stop, for Christ sakes."

"Why should she be the one to say something and make it easier for you?" asked Greenspan. "If you won't complain, why should she do it for you? Sure, she'll give you a divorce, but first ask. Why should she be the one to say you want a divorce, if you won't do it? Oh, Gold, Gold--I must know something, for my own information. It's off the record, I swear. This schoolteacher, this Linda Book."

"What about her?"

"You sure come a lot with her, don't you?"

"What's it your business?" Gold answered icily.

"You hardly ever come at all with the one you're going to marry."

"So?"

With a saddened, meaningful look, Greenspan replaced his hat. "You're a shonda to your race."

"And you, Greenspan, are a credit to yours. Will you be in Acapulco? What should I do if I get in trouble?"

"You can talk to the wall."

Gold fell into a mood of melancholy introspection the moment he was alone. For a prudent man, he was reckless. For a sane one, he was mad. Gold needed no inner voice to tell him he was courting trouble. All his life he had hated trouble. All his life he had been afraid of failing. Now, it seemed, he was distressed he might succeed.

•

What could go wrong? asked Sid. Gold could easily foretell as he left the elevator at the gym and turned toward the locker room. To begin with, there was that electrifying flash of lecherous attraction between him and the Mexican television actress that erupted on first sight on the tarmac of the airfield in Mexico City when they were waiting with Andrea for the connecting flight bearing Linda from Houston, and which burned in plain view like phosphorous with a fragrant, steaming brilliant heat that everybody nearby could scent and feel. The raw, magnetic force of their reciprocated animal desire could not be withstood and barely brooked delay. With a native quickness for which he could never be sufficiently grateful, she agreed in a throaty murmur to steal away to Acapulco the following day for a clandestine tryst with him in the empty chamber between the others, while the swarthy pilot who was her lover surveyed him evilly with baleful yellow eyes and muttered something sinister that Gold heard as though in a coma and politely requested he repeat.

"The Angel of Death is in the gym today," said Karp the chiropodist a second time from his oracle's perch on his low wooden stool in the aisle of lockers into which Gold had turned.

Gold came to a stop, blinking. "What are you talking about?"

"There's a man having a heart attack in the main gym upstairs. They're waiting for the ambulance now."

Grimly, Gold continued to his locker, determining, as usual, to breast the cryptic tides of destiny and confront the morbid omens. Statistically, he solaced himself, the odds against two men dropping dead of heart attacks in the same gym on the same day were weighted heavily in his favor. Empirically, the harsh truth dawned, the chances were no different than ever if one of the men already had, and the transportation arrangements were filled with complications that neither Sid nor he could have foreseen. Because Linda did have to bring the two younger children, she traveled directly to Acapulco from New York and arrived at the hotel four hours before Gold and Andrea, who departed from Washington with stops at Houston and Mexico City. Or, because she did not have to bring the children, she insisted capriciously that she go on the same plane, and Gold found himself in transit with her, too. That neither was impelled to recognize the other did little to ease the strain. Or, having cemented arrangements for traveling by herself on that same flight, she then arrived, as a consequence of a late-hour stance of perverse noncooperation by her bellicose husband, accompanied by the two children, who fell into a disagreeable funk immediately their eyes, with shattering disappointment, alighted on Gold. In seconds, he was unmanned by the degrading need for treating the encounter as circumstantial, their previous acquaintanceship as slight and entirely professional, and the independent selection by both vacationing parties of the same plane for the same distant hotel as, indeed, a most extraordinary occurrence. (continued on page 242)Good as Gold(continued from page 152) With failing courage, he watched Andrea's incisive doubt grow more manifest with every word exchanged. Another grueling test awaited him at the registration desk in Mexico, where all rooms, through some staff oversight, he shakily surmised, were reserved in his name, and just as this delicate contretemps was almost successfully untangled, Spotty Weinrock, of all people in the world, was standing there before him in a luminous golden cotton sweat suit, irreversibly intent on going jogging with him on the small oval track two floors above.

"We can have a nice long talk while I'm learning how."

"I come at this hour to be alone." Gold should have remembered he had no chance ever of staring this otiose, imperturbable childhood friend out of countenance. "You shouldn't jog, not without a doctor's examination and a stress test. It's dangerous. OK, then, but don't try to keep up with me or run as long. You're overweight and out of condition and I'm not. I mean it--you wouldn't be the first one to drop dead."

"There's a guy with a heart attack upstairs in the gym now."

"I don't care about him!"

"Is this what you call fun?" asked Spotty Weinrock with a hateful smile, pulling alongside Gold and running with him easily through the second lap.

"Slow down, you fuck, or you'll soon have to stop," Gold warned. "I don't want to talk. You're not allowed to run side by side. Just fall back behind me and take your time."

"Is this how slow you always go?" asked Spotty from in back.

The effect upon Gold was excruciating. "I don't want to talk!" he yelped in a squeezed-out scream through a neck in which every vein and muscle was stretched in fury. His heart was beating with a louder noise than his pounding feet were making against the track. The grotesque ordeal was afflicting him rapidly with an enervating anemia of the will, and he sat down to rest in a cushioning armchair as soon as he was alone in the center suite after each of the women had been installed in a room on either side without further conflict. Both thought he was transacting confidential official business with Washington. Linda's children were no longer there. His composure restored, he was able to have a banana daiquiri from room service with Linda, a banana daiquiri alone and a banana daiquiri with Andrea when he'd completed another lap and again was with her. He fucked Andrea first to get that out of the way and was unable to perform with Linda when she rang him for that purpose on the telephone in the middle room.

"Fag!" cried Spotty Weinrock cheerily and went flitting ahead of Gold like a sunbeam in his golden track suit, as though Gold were standing still.

Gold was flabbergasted by this blinding display of speed but held morosely to his own dogged pace with something scarcely human in his contorted visage. The pain that always rose in his chest at the beginning was intensifying, rather than subsiding, and he lost count of the number of laps he had run and was forced to start all over just when, with a violent start of tremendous surprise, he heard the phone in his room again.

"It's the White House," he lied with a leap out of bed.

It was Andrea, with whom he then had a light lunch in the patio dining room. Then he had a heavy second lunch with Linda in the bedroom that he consumed without appetite. The waistband of his walking shorts was turning sharp as an iron file. In less than two hours, he had nurtured a cumbersome paunch that bounced when he moved and made jogging this afternoon an arduous chore instead of the strenuous and salutary regimen he normally found it. His breathing was more labored than usual and his pulse rate felt swifter than he knew was good for him.

"Fag!" sang out Spotty Weinrock playfully and sailed by him again.

Gold kept his eyes down and pretended not to notice that Linda was restless and growing insurgently fractious at being kept under wraps. Andrea, too, was tired of being kept under wraps and already was phoning about the area to people she knew with vacation homes. Linda wanted to carouse at the pool and Andrea wanted a drive into town. In a backward glance as the car pulled away, Gold took a mental snapshot of Linda at poolside in close conversation with a slender, tall, lithe, insultingly good-looking Mexican youth with gleaming teeth, and he experienced, to his chagrin, that jealous debilitating pang that is recognized universally as heartache.

"Fag!" denounced Weinrock and passed him again as airily and blithely as a spirit with feet skimming on air.

Gold's own legs felt leaden, and he forced his gaze further downward into a dejected mode of inflexible concentration as Spotty ran from view while he had dinner with Linda and dropped her at a discothèque and had a second dinner with Andrea before driving with her to a party. Both women were complaining at the amount of time he was spending on the telephone with Washington.

"Fag!" called Weinrock and flew by him again.

"You'll drop!" Gold yelled reluctantly, but was too late to be heeded, so he stole unhappily from the party to look in on Linda at the discothèque. Linda was encircled now by four handsome dancing young men, all courting her rhythmically with the seductive, possessive allure that is the exclusive property of the self-assured scions of very rich Latin American millionaires. It was not necessary, all let him know, to trouble himself with getting her back to the hotel.

"Fag!"

And when Gold drove at breakneck speed to return to the party, he was dismayed to find Andrea surrounded by several loud and drunken burly men from the Southwest who were trying to solicit her participation in a group-sex supper dance together with a number of stunning models with whom they'd arrived while Gold was absent.

"I'm here with my fiancé," Andrea was trying civilly to refuse as Gold came up vengefully behind her, "and I'm not sure he'd approve."

"Oh, don't worry about him," said the largest and most muscular, sliding his arm around Andrea's shoulders with the lewd self-assurance of the impervious extrovert. "We'll take care of him."

"How?" said Gold curtly, with his hands bunching into fists. "How will you take care of me?"

"Any way we want to, little man," said another of the group in a husky outburst of laughter.

"You think you can stop us?"

"That's an awful lot of woman there for a little fella like you."

A brawl would be futile and he took Andrea's arm and backed away.

"Fag!" cried Spotty, and it was just about midnight when Linda Book returned to her room and sent Manolito away without even a peck on the cheek when she saw Gold stewing there in a raw humor. They made love then with results that were mutually sublime. Spotty slid through the bedrooms sideways with another provoking reiteration of that homosexual epithet as Gold trudged back to bed with Andrea. As he dreaded most, Andrea now was baking at a sensuous temperature. A soft groan broke from his lips at her advances. He was not lying when he spoke briefly of a splitting headache and nausea and of an over-all fatigue. At three in the morning, he was awakened in agony from a troubled sleep by the telephone ringing again in the middle room.

"It's the goddamned White House again."

Still grumbling, he limped through the rooms to explain to Linda in a haggard voice that he had to spend every night with Andrea because they were engaged to be married.

"Fag!" called out Spotty Weinrock and this time skipped by in the springy, floating gait of the male ballet dancer in black leotard who was also on the track. A mustached fuck was running backward, infuriating Gold; every eccentric distraction on the track always infuriated him. The basketball players on the courts below were screaming at one another in brutal argument again.

Gold held adamantly to a determination to ignore them all the next morning when he sank down to rest in darkest spirits in his own room after breakfasting twice. His ankles were hurting terribly and he was sweating profusely. His future had never looked worse. Then the passionate Mexican television actress arrived, as did shortly afterward her hot-blooded Mexican airline pilot, who prowled the grounds for Gold to avenge his honor in the most primitive and unspeakable ways imaginable. Just as the Mexican television actress was ready to go off like a string of firecrackers, the jealous lover learned Gold's room number and came charging up the stairs. When Gold rushed to the window to jump to escape, he was horrified by the curious sight of a taxi arriving with Belle, who'd journeyed all the way after him with the thought they might still patch things up if they were off together. The crazed lover was banging both fists on the door. Notoriety would be disastrous to him. He berated himself mercilessly for his indefensible folly. What was he going to do?

"What am I going to do?" he helplessly wailed to the four walls.

"Go to the temple and say prayers," directed Greenspan coolly, materializing from one of the side rooms attired in Acapulco sports clothes.

"I'll do no such thing."

"Then go past the temple to the airfield," continued Greenspan, "and take the first plane out for anywhere. Get back to Washington however you can. I will tell them about your urgent business one at a time and send them out without meeting one another. Oh, Gold, Gold, you're such a shonda."

"And you, Greenspan, are such a credit." Gold clasped him gratefully to his breast in the Russian manner and hugged him about the shoulders with strong feeling.

"Fag!" chirped Spotty and breezed by him once more.

That fuck! cried Gold inwardly with the fiercest scowl, as common-sense reality exposed itself to him suddenly with the force and flashing illumination almost of a bolt of lightning. Spotty had been doing two laps to his one, sometimes three, sometimes four. Oh, that base cocksucker--no human on earth could run that fast!

Gritting his teeth and breathing wrath-fully through his nose as he maintained his even pace, he watched stealthily with murder growing in his heart. There were four landings in each corner of the room where the track curved, and on each landing was exercise equipment or a stair well. Spotty ran off the track to a landing and hid until Gold went by, then came down in back to pass him again. The maleficent motherfucker had been hiding, resting, and waiting on the landings all along in the cruelest, most insensitive prank Gold could conceive of.

"Fag!"

Gold mistimed the lunge he made for Spotty Weinrock's throat with his left hand, broke stride, and stumbled. Anguish exploded in his chest then with an immense, cramping, darkening pain. The room began spinning, the lights dimmed. The ground rose to meet him with sways and undulations as he felt his legs wobble and give way, and, like a wounded warrior plucky to the last, he ran almost 15 more yards on his knees before toppling to the track and lying still as a stone with his eyes staring, as though he had been brought to his doom by a mortal fright.

"Are you all right?" someone said.

His hearing was unimpaired.

"Give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," suggested the ballet dancer.

"I will not. That's disgusting."

"Boy, are you lucky," Spotty said in his golden uniform. "The ambulance just came for that other guy."

His vision remained also.

"Doctor, can he be moved now?" a strange voice complained. "The rest of us want to jog."

"Put him in a private room," said Spotty Weinrock. "He's a very important person."

Gold felt his heartbeat falter critically again. "I'm not! Spotty, tell not a soul."

He could speak, too, and he screamed blue murder the next morning in Roosevelt Hospital when he saw he was still not in an oxygen tent.

"Doctors say you don't need one," explained the phlegmatic black male orderly who brought him his breakfast.

Gold was appalled by what he saw on the tray: scrambled eggs that glistened, bacon that dripped, four pats of butter--enough cholesterol to lay waste a generation of Marines. "It's a mistake, I tell you. I'm not going to eat it."

The orderly smacked his lips when he'd finished it all. When a woman came for information, Gold would not give even his name. He was wary with the doctors and requested permission to call his own physician. The pay phone was in the hall.

"Can I get out of bed by myself and walk there?"

"It's up to you."

He needed a dime. They gave him a dollar. Mursh Weinrock was there at noon and conferred with the medical men in undertones while preparations were made for Gold's transfer to a private room.

"What do you want an oxygen tent for?" said Weinrock when they were alone. "It's cheaper this way. Did you trip and fall or did you collapse? What'd you feel?"

"I felt like murdering him, Mursh, with my bare hands. I kept getting madder until I couldn't stand it, and then this thing went off in my head and my chest. I was scared. Then I got weak suddenly and everything went black. I didn't trip. It was your fucking brother Spotty. I'm going to kill that bastard someday."

Weinrock was nodding. "He breaks my mother's heart a thousand times a week. There's no sign of cardiac damage. It sounds more like anxiety, but we can't be sure. I've had many a patient drop dead right after showing a perfect electrocardiogram. It's a reason I don't like to take on sick people." He recommended a ten-day stay for observation. Few visitors, few phone calls. "No one will know you're here unless you tell."

No visitors, no telephone calls, no letters, no flowers, no greeting cards, no bananas in baskets of fruit--the ten days that followed were the most forlorn of Gold's life. How many people wondered where he was? He pondered also, with bewildering compunction, the moral mystery originating in his final words to Spotty Weinrock at the gym: "Tell not a soul." A heartbeat away from death and his dominant concern was not life but that corrupting illusion of triumph, public success.

And so it was still.

Gold contacted nobody until about to be discharged in health that was certifiably excellent. He called Belle first.

"What hospital?"

"I've been sick, Belle. I'm getting out tomorrow."

"With what?"

"Nothing. Where did you think I was? I've been away for almost two weeks."

"You told me you had to go off somewhere to straighten yourself out," said Belle. "So I thought you were probably straightening yourself out."

"I'm OK," he quickly-assured Andrea. "The doctors are positive it was nothing."

"What doctors? Where are you?"

"In the hospital, darling. In New York. Didn't you even miss me?"

"With what?"

"With nothing, darling. I just told you. It was just a checkup."

"Why didn't you tell me, darling?"

"I wasn't allowed any calls or visitors."

"With nothing?"

"Where did you think I was, Andrea? It's been ten days. Didn't you notice I was gone?"

"I knew you had to go back to your wife one more time to work out the divorce," said Andrea. "I thought you were working out the divorce."

His call to Ralph was crucial. "Something personal came up and I had to go away for a while. I'm sorry I haven't been able to be in touch with you."

"About what?" asked Ralph.

"About everything. You told me things were starting to happen."

"And they are, Bruce," said Ralph. "Conover is pushing strongly in your behalf. The President asked to meet you."

"I can come tomorrow."

"I think he's busy tomorrow. The Embassy Ball would be a good place to meet."

"The Embassy Ball?"

"I hope you'll come if you're invited. I told the President that you were writing some important position papers. So try to draw up a few."

"On what?"

"On any positions you choose. I don't think anyone's going to want to read them. Where are you now?"

"At my studio," lied Gold. "Ralph, didn't you miss me? Didn't you notice we were out of touch?"

"I missed your hotel room," said Ralph. "I can tell you that. Sleeping with just my wife and Misty, Candy, Christie and Tandy for almost two weeks hasn't been easy. You ought to try it some time and see. You and I have to get together very soon to talk about the Embassy Ball and what you should say to him there if you're invited."

"Tomorrow?" asked Gold.

"I'm busy, too," said Ralph.

"How can I get invited to that Embassy Ball?"

"It's practically impossible."

"Fuck him," said Gold for the first time as he crossly dialed another number. Neglect, moped Gold, abounding everywhere, closing me in like a poisonous tide, drowning me, closing over my head, filling my nose with fetid----

"Spot Modes," greeted the girl on the telephone brightly. "May I help you?"

"Mr. Weinrock, please. Bruce Gold calling."

"Mr. Weinrock is in the market."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

The girl hung up. Gold reached him at the gym.

"Spotty, you bastard, nobody knows I'm even in the hospital. I told you not to tell anyone, so you didn't, huh? Not my wife, not a single soul, did you?"

"I can keep a secret," said Spotty Weinrock.

"Not a person in this whole world knows what I went through. Was there anything in the newspapers?"

"I don't read the newspapers."

"It shows how people care. I could drop dead tomorrow and no one would even notice."

"I can follow instructions when I have to."

"Did you have to, you prick? And you didn't even come to visit, did you? Suppose I died, you son of a bitch? Would you have told anyone then? My wallet was still at the gym with all my clothes and they wouldn't even know who I was. You can keep a secret, all right. How in heaven's name can you keep such a secret?"

"To tell you the truth," said Spotty Weinrock, "I forgot."

"You forgot?" The painful words were still sinking in.

"I got kind of busy, Bruce, and I forgot you even had a heart attack."

"It was not a heart attack!"

"I was pretty scared, anyway," said Spotty Weinrock. "I couldn't stop worrying about you."

"Till when?" scoffed Gold with a bitter laugh.

"Till I forgot."

Gold thrust his face toward the telephone as though it were the enraging incarnation of the person he was addressing. "You forgot?" he repeated through tightened jaws in a voice quivering with a black storming anger that sifted through his entire system and caused every muscle to tremble. "Money, Weinrock, money, you cocksucker. How much do you owe me now?"

"About two thousand."

"Pay up, you lousy bastard."

"OK."

"This minute, you fuck. Or I'll put you in prison. I'll get liens. I'll serve papers. Spotty, Spotty," said Gold with a catch in his throat as his voice cracked and he tried without succeeding to fight back the tears rolling from his eyes, "how could you be so insensitive? Why didn't you at least come to visit, just to see for yourself I was alive?"

"I tried, Bruce. Three times I was going to visit and made up my mind that nothing was going to keep me away."

"And what happened?"

"I forgot."

"Do you know what it feels like?" said Gold with a sob. "Do you know what it feels like to have to lie in a hospital day after day without visitors or phone calls, with what might have been a fatal heart attack, and have nobody care? It feels like shit. Suppose I died?"

"I cared," said Spotty.

"You forgot."

"Somebody would have reminded me."

"Nobody else knew," Gold reproached him further. "I would have been buried in a pauper's grave. Even I would have been more thoughtful than that."

"I have to go jogging now. I belong to this group."

Gold washed his face before telephoning next the one person he thought of who might have missed him most.

"I called you at your studio only yesterday," she said. "I left a message on your machine."

"Only yesterday? Where'd you think I was until then? It's been ten days."

"I thought you were busy with your wife and with your fiancée."

"Is Dina back in school?"

"And doing beautifully," said Linda Book. "I've been doing her homework. Tell me what hospital you're in. I have this dental bill I want to mail you."

"I'll be getting out tomorrow," said Gold. "I want to see you first."

In a fevered ecstasy of abandonment and slavish indiscretion, he could now easily picture all his carefully laid plans flying asunder into a bohemian muddle of debauchery and irresponsible disgrace, and he did not care. He wanted her in his arms, wanted her body beneath him, covered by his own. What would Conover say when he found out? How many people who ever read about him would truly believe that a thinking adult like him would endanger his marriage--nay, two marriages--and a brilliant budding political career for a lascivious fling with a married woman with four children with whom, as was also true of Andrea, he could never become in any other way intimate? That didn't seem to matter.

•

"I love you very, very deeply, darling, and I wish so much that I didn't." Gold could safely afford the luxury of such lavish words and sentiments, because he knew that the emotion in which they had their birth was not going to last. He did not dream, however, that the demise of this tender feeling lay as near as the dental bill she handed him. He calmly mixed a gin and tonic for each. By then, his agitation had lessened. "How come your husband isn't paying for any of these? I thought he was such a good provider."

"He isn't going to pay for anything anymore, since he found out we're together."

Several questions rose simultaneously in Gold's mind and broke into pieces against one another in the burbling struggle to get out. "Together? Found out? How? How together? Are? What do you mean found out? What do you mean together? How are we together?"

"Like this. He knows all about us."

"Knows all about us? How did he find out?"

"From the children."

"From the children? How do the children know?"

"I told them."

Gold looked at her steadily with a troubled eye. "You told them? You told your children? What did you tell your children?"

"That we're lovers."

"Lovers?"

"You keep repeating everything I say."

Gold was lacking the necessary equilibrium for timely repartee. "Is that what we are, lovers?" he asked credulously.

"Of course, darling," answered Linda with a smile. "I'm your lover and you're mine. What did you think we were?"

Gold did not hesitate to give the answer that first sprang to mind. "Fuckers."

"Lover is so much sweeter," said Linda Book with the ethereal sensitivity of a poetess, "so much richer in meaning and value, don't you think?"

"Don't you have to be very seriously in love to be a lover?" asked Gold.

"Oh, no," she corrected him. "All you have to be is a fucker."

Gold had never looked at himself as a lover before and was not altogether convinced he liked the idea now. "So that's what I am, huh? A lover."

"Of course you are, you fucker," said Linda Book. "And a darling, too. I rate you an A minus." Gold was stung only superficially by this backhanded tribute, for there was the impact of catastrophe in the words that followed. "And I'm so proud that someone as intelligent as you finds me sexy and attractive. Even my husband is impressed."

"Good God!" Gold hurtled to his feet. "He knows my name?"

"Gold is a very nice name," she said. "And I wouldn't be ashamed to have it as my own."

"Jesus Christ, Linda, that's not the point." Gold lifted a pillow from the bed for the sole purpose of having something in both hands he could slam down. "Where the hell are your brains? I'm a very distinguished man. Next week, I may even be invited to the Embassy Ball. Why the fuck did you have to tell anybody about me at all?"

"Because I believe in the truth."

"Why?" he insisted on knowing.

"Why?"

"Why in this case couldn't you believe in a lie? Why in the world did you have to tell your children anything?"

"Because in our family," retorted Linda Book without any trace of concession, "we don't believe in keeping things from one another."

"Do they understand what being lovers means?" Gold demanded scornfully. "I didn't."

"Oh, yes. The older two did."

"What did they say?"

"My son said he would kill you," she said. "My daughter wanted to know if you were any good. I told her you were an A minus who would probably graduate to an A if you could last. The younger two were more accepting."

"Oh, were they?" said Gold with a rather wild shake of his head. "I'd like to know how you explained to them what lovers are."

Linda Book met the challenge with unconcern. "Oh, we have this illustrated German sex book for children. It shows a little boy with his penis erect and a little girl with her vagina exposed and it explains in simple language any child can understand that he shoves it in."

"Shoves it in?" Gold's voice nearly failed him.

"Yes. And I explained to them that you and I do the same thing with our penee and that's who we're lovers."

"They understood?"

"Immediately. They said we were fucking."

Gold stared at her with bulging eyes for a moment and then went plunging about the room in shocked silence for several seconds. "Linda, you're a schoolteacher?" he addressed her with his jaws knotted and with his mouth drawn back as far as a human mouth could go, and all at once he looked as though he were congenitally snaggle-toothed. "You went to college, got your degrees? You completed education courses? You got your license, a nice shiny diploma?"

"Oh, yes," said Linda with the same collected smile. "I communicate very well with children. Your daughter will vouch for that."

"My daughter!" Gold's voice was a hysterical cry. "Holy shit! She's friends with your kids. She sleeps at your house. Dina. Do you think they told her, too?"

"I should hope they did," said Linda. "Our children are all very open with one another about sex."

Gold moaned and shivered in terror. "I didn't want her to know!"

"It will bring you closer together."

"It will put us at sword's point at each other's throat. Goddamn it, she'll tell my wife."

"It will bring you and her closer together, too."

"I'm leaving my wife to marry Andrea. Is there no way you can get word to her as well? Listen, Linda, marriage for us is out of the question, definitely out."

"Oh, we agreed on that," said Linda. "I could never afford to give up my support or my alimony."

"Which you are now not getting," said Gold with an uncordial gleam of triumph, pacing. "Because you believe so much in the truth. What is this horrifying obsession with the truth that all you women seem to be in the grip of these days? Where does it come from? Goddamn it--I may be Secretary of State soon. Do you think it's helpful for a thirteen-year-old child to know that the Secretary of State is fucking her school-teacher? Can't you imagine what will happen to my home life and divorce if my wife does find out?"

"It will clear the air," said Linda. "When my husband found out, it certainly cleared a lot of air."

"And he stopped giving you money. How do you think my wife will feel about all these dentist's bills when she finds out they're for you and your kids?"

At last the seriousness of the matter impressed itself upon her. "Do you think we shouldn't have told him?"

"What did your husband say when you told him?" asked Gold.

"He said he was going to kill you."

"You shouldn't have told him. Greenspan, you fuck!" he shouted in violent anxiety as soon as he found himself alone with a wall he could talk to. "Where the hell are you?"

"I know, I know," said Greenspan when Gold began relating his troubles. "It's why I say you're a shonda."

"Her husband wants to kill me."

"It's a Federal offense to kill a public official, but you're not a public official yet."

"Tell him I'm about to become one," Gold begged. "Go see him for me. Take a gun."

"He says you're fucking his wife," Greenspan reported back.

"Tell him I'll stop if he promises not to assassinate me."

"He wants you to marry her and take full financial responsibility for her and all four children," Greenspan reported back.

"He's out of his fucking head," said Gold. "I thought he was madly in love with her and would never let her go."

"He'll let her go, he'll let her go," said Greenspan.

"It's out of the question," said Gold. "I'm already married to one woman and about to marry another, and we Jews don't take our marriages lightly."

"I told him that."

"Tell him I'll go for the dental work for all of them until it's completed, but that's all."

"He says it's a deal," Greenspan reported back. "I had to threaten to shoot him." He declined without words the drink Gold offered in celebration. "Now, Dr. Gold, what about you? Do you really think you have the right character to be Secretary of State or any other high Government official?"

Gold considered the matter. "What do you think?"

"Are you really going to stop fucking his wife?"

"No."

Greenspan surveyed him with a look holding generations of disappointment. "You're no worse than the rest," he decided, "but certainly no better. He doesn't think you will, either."

"Greenspan, we can drive a better bargain. Tell him I'll really stop if he picks up all the dental bills."

"Now it's a deal," Greenspan reported back. "Just a little wine, please. L'chaim."

"L'chaim," Gold toasted him in return.

"But what I said still goes," Greenspan stressed at the door.

"What's that?"

"I forget. Let me think. Oh, yes. You're a shonda."

"You're a credit."

The way was clear now, Gold saw, for his triumphant return to Washington.

"The raw, magnetic force of their animal desire could not be withstood and barely brooked delay."

"Andrea now was baking at a sensuous temperature. A soft groan broke from his lips at her advances."

This is the second of two excerpts from Joseph Heller's forthcoming novel, "Good as Gold."