George: A Dream (Embellished)
I met George in a candy store on 82nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan. He opened his attaché case and out poured the story of his life while we sat at the counter sipping vanilla egg creams. He wore a gray suit and looked every inch a George⎯with his sandy hair and stocky build, he even resembled the actor George Segal.
George lived in rural Ohio but he'd come to the city to assist his poor old mother. She was struggling alone in New York, trying to care for a retarded son. There was another child too, a daughter, living on her own but making a mess of her life with bulimia. George was here to help.
We went upstairs and he showed me the little apartment he'd rented over the candy store. He left me unattended for a moment in one of the empty white rooms, and I fell into a reverie. I dreamed I was standing alone in that empty white room in George's apartment and looked down and found a penny on the bare wooden floor.
George returned, I awoke, and we took our conversation across the street to Riles, a combination jazz café and kosher deli in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We sat in a tucked-away corner booth and leaned toward each other, whispering intimately. It was dark and romantic. "Why is it a white horse that symbolizes the Avatar of the Age?" George said with mesmerizing intensity. "I mean, why a white horse rather and not, say, a fiddler crab?"
After that I took him home to meet Mother. "Come again when you can stay longer," she said a little too brightly while his eyes darted rapidly around the kitchen as if counting the exits.
That was on Saturday. On Sunday we had brunch together and talked some more. By Tuesday night I was in bed with him and stayed over in his little white apartment.
The only problem was, I already had a boyfriend, also named George. He was back home in my childhood bedroom, and of course I was sleeping with him too. But I was too deeply involved to worry about that now.
After I'd stayed over with George a few more times, Mother arranged a musical evening to be held at our place. We sat waiting for it to begin in the room we called the Playroom with its pukey-colored linoleum and blue-striped wallpaper. Time was passing and the waiting was getting tense. I snuck into the kitchen for a few sips of vodka from one of the bottles of Stolichnaya that Mother had hidden on the high shelves of the cabinet, in among the jars of Welch's grape jelly, bottles of Worcestershire sauce, and weevil-ridden dog biscuits. The Stoli bottles had no tops, and God only knows how long the vodka'd been sitting there, turning cloudy and disgusting. I took a quiet sip but quickly spat it out when I heard footsteps approaching the pantry.
It was the two Georges, moving stealthily toward the back door, bearing on their shoulders two ancient green trunks from the bottom of the sea, one on top of the other. Each was tied with a frayed yellow rope, oozing green slime and foamy seawater⎯and bulging with treasure, a fortune in gold doubloons.
So that was it all along. Can you believe I fell for that line about the poor old lady with her retarded son?
The cops would be here any moment. I had to tell Mother. I rushed into the Playroom, where the guests were still waiting for the musical event. "How long have you been playing the clarinet, George?" my sister was asking one of the musicians politely. "His name isn't George," I hissed.
"What's your name?" I asked him.
"George, ma'am."
Mother had gone to bed drunk and pulled the covers over her head. All you could see of her sticking out of the bedclothes was a tuft of stiff brown Orthodox Jewish wig. "Mother, I've got to tell you something." I quickly told her the whole story. "I fell for George's line, can you believe it?" When I got to the part about "Of course, I'm sleeping with the other George too," she smirked.
"Get up, Mother, the cops will be at the door any minute. We'll have to tell them everything⎯
"Oh my God!" I slapped my forehead. "So that's what the dream meant⎯I found a copper, get it?"
The doorbell rang.