Three Balconies

As is the case with most men, Harry wanted to be taken seriously and resented the suggestion that he was not a serious man. Yet there may have been some truth to the charge. Because if he were to take a hard look at his life--which was not something he did every 20 minutes--he would have to admit that he had spent most of it chasing women. Or maybe not exactly chasing them, but pursuing them. Something along those lines. Which is not to suggest that he had a sterling record of catching them--or even knew what to do with them when he did--but he certainly did pursue them. Harry was still at it, but what bothered him is that he had done so much of it when he should have been reading Herodotus. He was reading Herodotus now, but if he had been reading Herodotus when he was chasing--or pursuing--women, he could have been finished with Herodotus and moved on to someone like Tacitus. Or Willa Cather. He could have been finished with Willa Cather, too, instead of just starting to read her.

Harry had once sat on the deck of a film producer's house in Malibu, exchanging stories about the carefree Sixties and Seventies. With a casual wave, the producer said that he had slept with hundreds of women.

"And I took no prisoners," he said, with grim satisfaction. Harry was not in that league. He had taken plenty of prisoners. And he did not want to get into a numbers game with the producer. He knew for a fact that the man had slept with entire platoons of film stars. Or at least he didn't doubt it. (The producer had a kind of sleazy charm; Harry could see him sleazing film stars into bed.) And Harry was painfully aware that in all his years of traveling to the Coast, he had slept with only one film star, who, strictly speaking, wasn't really a film star at all but a catalog model who had left the business after playing a role in one movie. When Harry last heard from her, she was selling real estate in Sydney, or someplace like that.

But one thing Harry knew for sure is that he had at least chased--or pursued--women with the best of them.

Did that make Harry a womanizer? Did they still have womanizers in the Nineties? And wasn't that someone who preyed on women and got them to sign over real estate holdings?

If so, that didn't sound much like Harry.

There were probably one or two women out there who would say that he had ended an affair too abruptly--or had pretended to be interested in them when all he wanted to do was roll around a little--but that would be the extent of his womanizing.

So if someone insisted that Harry was a womanizer, he would say fine, you got it, but would you please put an asterisk in there somewhere?

Harry was madly in love with his wife (continued on page 146) Three Balconies(continued from page 130) (he never failed to insert "madly" when he told someone how much he loved Julie), but he kept chasing women anyway. Yet never in the 15 years they had been married had Harry had a full-out affair. (Or "conducted" one. He was fascinated by the image of someone "conducting" an affair.) Harry was scared out of his wits at the very thought of having an affair. That's all he would need is to lose Julie. He had come close to having an affair on two--maybe two and a half--occasions (over-flirted is the way he saw it) and all of a sudden it was hey-wait-a-minute-this-is-the-big-leagues-what-do-I-do-now? What he had done was to take himself--physically--out of the country. He had gone off to play blackjack in the Caribbean--Harry's equivalent of a cold shower. It was fair to say that he had gambled his way out of the two and a half affairs.

You just didn't have affairs when you were married to someone like Julie. To actually enter another woman--and then go back and sleep with Julie. A little unthinkable is what it was.

But that did not stop Harry from charging out of the gate every chance he got to see how he would do out there. On an impulse, Harry had fired a famous agent, in a sense shooting himself in the foot, since the assignments had dried up overnight. (And he could feel the agent's fine hand in drying them up.) When he tried to hire another (less-famous) agent, the fellow had said: "Harry, I am afraid your name no longer comes up on the radar screen."

That fact notwithstanding, he and Julie got by. He did a little of this and a little of that and actually made some money in real estate, which embarrassed him slightly--as if it made him a less serious man. One of the small jobs Harry got offered was to write about hobbies for what he thought of as an "old guy" quarterly. Harry struggled with the assignment for a few weeks until he realized that his only hobby was chasing women. And obviously, what the fellows at the "old guy" quarterly had in mind was lacquering or sanding stuff in the garage. Collecting sheriffs' badges--something like that. So that was the end of the assignment.

When Harry was younger, he chased women--or went after them, or whatever he did--because they looked and smelled and felt nice and he wanted to go to bed with them. (Not "bed" them. There was a certain type of individual who "bedded" women and Harry wasn't one of them.) But now Harry enjoyed listening to women and finding out what they did and what was on their minds instead of just waiting for them to finish talking so he could shift into his seduction mode.

Was it possible he just liked to be with women? One of his favorite things to happen was when he would meet someone he had at one time thought of as a "pretty young thing," somebody's assistant, and have her turn out to be a leading neurophysiologist. Or a feared litigator. It seemed that half the women he ran into were feared litigators. He was now surprised when one of them turned out not to be a feared litigator. And Harry was delighted by this change in the culture. How could he not be? In his lifetime--as a phenomenon--he ranked it up there with the overnight collapse of communism.

Or, who knows, maybe he was just a horny 60-year-old guy who was trying to get laid.

That thought--and the others--occurred to Harry as he sat on the 18th-story balcony of a hotel suite in Miami Beach and considered ending his life with a little hop over the four-foot brass railing. Several years before, he had crushed three toes in an ancient garage door--they looked like cartoon toes, he had told friends--and he could not imagine it would be more painful to hit the pavement. Additionally, and in support of his impulse, he had heard that you would lose consciousness while in flight. Of course, no one knew if you woke up for a split second before you landed--and what that would be like. In any case, Julie would be all right. She would have the embarrassing money from Harry's real estate deals and the royalties that still dribbled in from his two big pictures. And she would have little difficulty finding a new friend. All she had to do was decide she wanted one. Julie kept her weapons concealed, but when she decided to zero in--and Harry had seen her in action--you (i.e., the target) were a dead duck. Megan would get along fine as well. She was an independent thing at 13, and she had shocked Harry by announcing that she wanted to go to a boarding school. So how much did she need Harry around?

If Harry took that little hop over the brass railing--and he was amazed at how easy it would be--he would not have to go around feeling so awful.

It was the day following Harry's third night of chasing women and drinking more than he wanted to, and he could not recall a time when he had been shakier. And this was without drugs and cigars. If you had thrown that pair into the mix, he would have been over the railing hours before.

As was his custom, Harry had flown to Miami a week in advance of his wife and daughter--this time to check on the condo they had bought, which was under construction, and, as always, to see if he could get some work done in a fresh setting. The director of a small theater in Los Angeles had expressed interest in Harry's new Siege of Malta play but felt it lacked a romantic component. His suggestion was that Harry thread a Diane Sawyer type through the play--someone covering the siege for some medieval publication--and have her fall in love with one of the Knights Templar, he didn't care which one. Ostensibly, that is why Harry had flown to Miami a week in advance of his family. If he could pull it off--successfully thread a Diane Sawyer type through the play--he would have a production on Melrose Avenue, right under the noses of the studio executives and agents who said he was off the radar screen. A hit, of course, would put Harry right back on the screen.

But so far, Harry had not even taken the play out of the Sports Sac, much less begun to thread through a Diane Sawyer type--which is one of the reasons he felt so awful. He had warmed up for the Miami trip at home on Long Island--taken a kind of trial run--at a local bar, and he recalled closing out the evening by telling a mortgage broker that there was "something about her," a kind of "sly beauty" that other people might not notice but that Harry noticed and found irresistible. Yes, he was a little married--he never lied about such things--but he had to have her. If he was not mistaken--and he hoped he was--he had also told her that as an artist, he did not "play by other people's rules." (Obviously, that was the kind of dialogue that had gotten him removed from the radar screen.) So he probably had said that, and all the other things as well, and he had meant them at the time. It was a good thing he hadn't invited her to fly down to Miami with him, which he was capable of doing at the time. Because that's all he would have needed--to wind up not playing by other people's (continued on page 148) Three Balconies (continued from page 146) rules with a mortgage broker in Miami Beach. And with his family on their way down.

But somehow Harry had gotten up the next morning and made it to the airport--and once he had landed and rented the Mitsubishi Galant, he started to revive; when he saw the sign on 1-95 that said Welcome to Miami Beach and the comforting one nearby--MT. Sinai Medical Center--he revived with a vengeance.

By the time Harry pulled up to the hotel, he was so excited about the weather and how balmy it was and how good he felt that he didn't even bother to unpack. He took a shower, dressed, slapped on some of the new unisex cologne, put a salsa recording on full blast in the Galant (one that had been highly recommended by a hot little trotter behind the Alamo counter) and tore into the beach like a madman.

Harry's plan was to work his way up and down the beach, making a few of the night people he knew from the previous year aware that he was back. But as it turned out, he never made it past his first stop. It was a small hotel, a few blocks from the ocean, one that Harry remembered as having a cheerful feeling to it and a little bar he thought of as an excellent place to get started. But something had changed since his last visit. It still had the cheerful feeling, but it had caught fire and turned into a madhouse; it was jammed with tanned and pretty and handsomely turned-out women who Harry correctly identified as young Miami Beach professionals. Each wore an outfit that you didn't just throw on. The outfits took a lot of planning and it was clear that these women took Saturday night seriously. Harry, on the other hand, had forgotten how important it was. In Manhattan, Saturday was referred to by knowledgeable bar people as "amateur night."

The mood was tastefully raucous, and the activity spilled out from the bar into the lobby and out onto a packed terrace ringed with lanterns, giving it some kind of enchanted look. Or at least Harry thought so.

There was no question that Harry was the oldest one in the place, and he was sorry he hadn't lost a few pounds and picked up a quick suntan before the flight. But what really bothered him was that his hair wasn't right. In preparation for the trip, he had had it colored, or rinsed--rinsed was the term he preferred. But the colorist, or rinser (who had once done Julie's hair), had made a remark about Julie's new hairstyle that was just a fraction off and Harry, still wearing his apron, had marched out of the salon in the middle of the rinse. (Criticize Harry to your heart's content, but be careful what you say about Julie.) Whatever the case, there was some question as to whether Harry's rinse had taken. It may have been a little patchy, and someone with a discerning eye--some young Miami Beach professional who had started out as a beautician--would probably notice that he'd had an incomplete rinse. But Harry's position was that the subdued lights, especially the enchanted ones on the terrace, would disguise the possible unevenness of his rinse. And if he managed to fake out only half the women in the crowd, that was fine with him.

And he would make up for the rinse and the weight and the age--don't forget that--by the sheer force of his joy at being with this new group of tanned and attractive young Miami Beach professionals on a Saturday night, the importance of which he had forgotten but which they took seriously.

So Harry ordered a double scotch and sailed into the crowd. He met women quickly and easily and what amazed him was how relaxed his swing was--he didn't even have to shoehorn his credits into the conversation. And that was just as well because his two big pictures had been made 20 years before and he was starting to get vague looks when he mentioned them. But all he had to do on this particular Saturday night in Miami Beach was say, Hi, how are you doing? and Isn't it great to be here? And if someone suggested it was a little crowded, Harry would say he didn't mind, since he lived reclusively most of the year. He found himself saying it a lot--that he lived reclusively--so he must have liked the sound of it.

No sooner did Harry get started speaking to one woman than he went spinning--or got spun off--to another, which was fine with him. Not surprisingly, he met a few litigators. But he also spoke to a woman who designed halo braces for people who broke their necks in highway accidents. Her father, who had wanted her to take over his luggage business, had broken his neck in a highway accident and she had gotten to design a halo brace for him--which Harry and the woman agreed was quite a story. So Harry had spent quite a bit of time with her. And then a tiny woman in black leather asked if Harry could help her get a drink, and Harry, only too happy to oblige, had lifted her off the floor so the bartender could see her. She turned out to be the manager of a Chicago rock group, and after she had gotten her drink, she said she'd like to get to know Harry, though she was tied up with the band on that particular night. That was fine with Harry, who turned his attention to a pretty young student who was getting a degree in business, though, frankly, all she wanted to do was lie on the beach and do nothing--which Harry found charming. He found everything charming and continued to do so for two days running, returning to the same spot on Sunday night and finding it only a little more subdued. And throughout this mild escapade, he kept noticing a couple--in the same two seats at the bar--who had been taking in the scene and at the same time having a whispered conversation. The woman, who appeared to be in her mid-20s, had tanned shoulders and streaky blonde hair that was cut short in a style Harry recognized from one of Julie's fashion magazines. She wore a white lingerie-type halter that did not cover her breasts so much as present them. As to the breasts themselves, they may not have been perfect--what are perfect breasts?--but they were close enough to the mark for Harry. He assumed she was a fashion model--what else could she be?--and that her companion, a thin fellow with a thin face, was somehow tied into the fashion industry.

She was the most exquisite creature he had ever seen and Harry knew immediately that she was out of his league. Strictly speaking, she should have been out of the thin fellow's league, too, but she wasn't--that's the way life is.

Then, amazingly, because that's the kind of three days it had been, Harry was talking to her. For all he knew--in the crush of activity--she may have turned and begun speaking to him. Harry loved surprises and got a big one when it turned out she wasn't a model at all--she was Miriam Rosen, a Jewish, or half-Jewish, housewife with two children, from Guatemala of all places. No disrespect to Guatemala--which to its credit had just ended a 30-year war with its guerrillas--but Harry had no idea they had Miriam Rosens running around down there. Ones who were this gorgeous. So obviously, (continued on page 191) Three Balconies(continued from page 148) Harry would have to rethink his feelings about Guatemala. The thin fellow with the thin face did not seem to mind Harry talking to Miriam Rosen--he even encouraged it with a careless wave of his hand, as if to say, Please continue, this means nothing to me. So Harry continued talking to Miriam Rosen and--like a beginning swimmer--found it easier as he went along. The couple were mysterious as to what they were to each other, and Miriam Rosen encouraged Harry to take a guess: Were they friends? Husband and wife? Lovers? Like a contestant in a game show, Harry chose lovers. Then, after pointing out that he was a storyteller (who lived reclusively most of the year), he fashioned a scenario in which Miriam Rosen was a married woman who had gone off to meet the thin man, her lover, for a weekend idyll; on Monday, after several days of exquisite lovemaking, she would fly back to her family in Guatemala, refreshed, happy, better able to be a housewife and mother. (He did not speculate on the future of her lover.)

As Harry told the story, he was aware that it wasn't much. Even if he were back on the radar screen, he would never have pitched it to a studio.

The banality of the story notwithstanding, Miriam Rosen was delighted with it, wriggling around in her seat and clapping her hands and indicating that Harry had absolutely nailed the situation.

"You are very wise," said the thin man with the thin face, stroking his chin as if he were a little wise himself and what you had here was an exchange between two wise men.

Harry was impressed by how nicely they were all getting along; the thought crossed his mind that the three of them might even end up in the couple's hotel suite, with the thin-faced man graciously allowing Harry to make love to Miriam Rosen while he went off to an adjoining room to stare at the ocean and smoke a Gauloise.

After all, if the couple liked Harry's first story, why wouldn't they like this one, which, in Harry's view, had a lot more dimension?

Then Miriam Rosen said: "I've been watching you for two nights now and I think you're very courageous."

"Because I'm old?" said Harry.

"No, no, no," said Miriam Rosen, but the two extra noes were confirmation that he had read her correctly--and that tore it for Harry.

He hung around for a while and then said he had to get going, but that if he ever found himself in Guatemala, he would be sure to look up Miriam Rosen. Then he made as graceful an exit as was possible under the circumstances, paying his check and giving a little farewell salute to the bartender. Amazingly, he found the Galant in the public parking lot with little difficulty; then he took a long drive with no particular destination in mind and found himself way out on the Tamiami Trail at four in the morning. He stopped at a topless nightclub, which was empty except for three men in shirtsleeves who were arguing at the bar and ignoring the one dancer who was still working. She had long black hair and good legs, but her jawline was a little off and she did some sudden and erratic moves around a tent pole that Harry found unsettling. When she finished her routine, she approached Harry--who was tapering off with a Molson--and said the place was about to close, but if he were interested, she might be able to squeeze in one last private lap dance. Harry was probably the only one in America who didn't know the specifics of lap dances, but he felt he needed to get something out of the three nights, so he said fine and followed her to a darkened booth at the rear of the club. She told him to keep one eye out for her boss, which he did, though it wasn't very relaxing. Then she did the lap dance for Harry, who was surprised at how intimate that type of dance could be. Or maybe they were that way only at closing time in this particular club. Maybe they even called it a closer. Before he knew what had happened to him, he was unbuckled and she had swooped down on him with a couple of her sudden, erratic tent-pole moves. And then he was back in the Galant, asking himself what kind of serious man allows himself to get lap-danced on the Tamiami Trail by a dancer whose jawline is a little off. When he could have been back at the hotel reading Herodotus.

He was still asking himself that question the next day as he sat on the balcony of his hotel suite thinking that maybe he ought to hop over the railing and bring down the curtain once and for all. There was a fellow who had done just that from a similar balcony two floors above. He had run up debts all over the beach, and the police had come for him and put him in handcuffs; but they had forgotten about his feet, and he was able to break away and make it over the railing. When Harry told Julie about it, she asked: "What happened to him?" That was one of the thousand things he loved about her. She could hear a story like that and think something good had come of it.

Harry would never go over the railing because of debt. He didn't love debt, but there was no point to ending your life because of it--not with the lenient bankruptcy laws. Declare bankruptcy in Florida and you're a hero. They practically run a benefit for you.

But Harry would do it because of being 60 and walking around with half a rinse and chasing women and not catching them and pissing away three whole days in which he hadn't even taken his Siege of Malta play out of the Sports Sac, much less begun to thread a Diane Sawyer type through it. (Which, incidentally, was the dumbest idea he had ever heard, even if it meant the play would get done in L.A. and give him a shot at getting back on the radar screen.)

So Harry clutched the sides of the beach chair, thinking it would anchor him down, which was ridiculous, since it was made of lightweight plastic. And he did not particularly relish the idea of being the first fellow to fly off a balcony holding on to a plastic chair.

But he could not drive the possibility out of his mind. He even did a dry run in which he imagined himself going over. He actually tried out a little whinnying sound he could make in the process, or maybe whimpering was closer to it--a salute to T.S. Eliot, demonstrating that in his final moment, Harry had not lost touch entirely with literary concerns.

Sitting out on the balcony, gripping the arms of the plastic beach chair, Harry tried to push his thoughts in another direction. He had brought a couple of Willa Cather paperbacks out on the ledge with him (suddenly it was a ledge, not a balcony) and he tried a few pages of one, but the descriptions of the bleak Nebraska plains--and the unforgiving land--were so desolate they made him feel even worse. So he set the book aside, thinking he had chosen the wrong Cather. Or maybe it was the right Cather, but he had tried it at an inappropriate time. Still, the very thought that there might be a more appropriate time was useful.

So Willa Cather had helped him out after all, even though, strictly speaking, he had not really plunged into her work.

The trick, Harry realized, was to get off the balcony and back into the hotel suite. Instead of sitting out there and arm-wrestling with himself. Or arm-wrestling with the fates--that was better. Obviously, he did not do well on balconies. So why sit out on them and try to become brilliant at it?

The trick was to get back into the hotel suite and get the place neatened up for Julie and Megan. And then take a walk, a simple solution that had always helped. And when he felt better, after the walk, at least take the Siege of Malta play out of the Sports Sac. Or maybe even leave it in the Sports Sac and start something entirely new. Trust his unconscious for a change, the way he did when he was writing his two big pictures. See if it would lead him in a fresh direction--toward something like Shay's Rebellion, which the L.A. producer might like even more than the Siege of Malta. At least it was American.

And then try to stay in for at least one night. Watch a biography on Jefferson, someone like that. One that finally brought the man into focus, so you didn't have to keep hearing about his complexities. And if he had to go out, try to find a place that was a little more seasoned, maybe a steakhouse where there were other 60-year-old guys with rinses. Miami must be loaded with places like that. And if he absolutely had to go to the other kind of place--the kind that he loved, with the Miriam Rosens and the gorgeous young litigators--not stay there all night. Just check it out--take the pulse of the place--see if there was anything legitimately worth exploring. If he came up with something, fine, but don't force it. And don't get humiliated so fast over every little setback.

But first Harry had to get off the balcony--a simple matter for most people, but not for Harry. He got to his feet carefully, keeping his legs bent at the knees, and tried not to stare down at the pavement. He had made that mistake earlier in the day and seen some tropical trees below and immediately started wondering if they could break his fall. Even if they could, he'd still probably have to get into one of those halo braces designed by the woman he had spent all that time with.

Harry inched along until he got to the balcony door, which opened toward him, forcing him to step around it in a wide arc and to brush against the railing in order to get into the suite.

So Harry did all that, and even though he had lost some points--letting the balcony defeat him--he realized that he had probably (always probably, like the O.J. jurors) done the right thing. He poured himself a cup of the coffee that he had made from the fresh Colombian beans he had ground himself--to show that, if necessary, he could be self-sufficient. Then he got the peach out of the refrigerator. He had bought it in a kosher store, and he wanted to see what was so special about it. So he bit into the kosher peach, and, unless it was his imagination, it was the best peach he had ever tasted. So Harry drank the great coffee and ate the great peach and started to feel better, thinking the last three days were behind him.

"That's past," he said to himself, quoting a friend who appeared to have triumphed over a long illness. When the friend made that statement, he had accompanied it with a shoving motion, as if he were pushing aside a giant carton.

And it was past until it occurred to Harry that the condo he and Julie had bought on the beach had three balconies--one for every room, which was part of the sales pitch. And Harry had made the down payment before he realized how much trouble he had with balconies. So now he had three of them to worry about--unless he wanted to stay huddled in the middle of the apartment, which obviously defeated the purpose of having a condo in Miami, no matter what they said about getting too much sun.

Then Harry took hold of himself and decided it was too early to worry about the three balconies. The building was still under construction. All they had built was the lobby and the health club. It would take a year to get to his floor. (To "pour" his floor is the way they put it.) So there was plenty of time. And when he absolutely had to, he would deal with the balconies one at a time. Wasn't that what life was all about--taking it one balcony at a time?

If that wasn't a philosophy, he didn't know what was.

Harry would have to remember it, the next time someone suggested that he wasn't a serious man.

Who knows, maybe he was just a horny 60-year-old guy who was trying to get laid.

She wore a white lingerie-type halter that did not cover her breasts so much as present them.