Close Relations by Susan Isaacs Page A

black lashes and give a long, easy grin to a short, tense, rich widow. Inevitably, she’d cough up a few hundred more for Paterno. Talking to a woman reporter or a gay banquet manager, he’d lean back in his chair with his legs spread slightly, so the healthy swelling between his thighs was just barely evident.
    The taxi stopped for a light. Jerry turned from Sixth Avenue to me. “You okay, sweetheart?”
    I nodded.
    “It’s not so bad. Just think of it as three hours of continual smiling. You can handle it.”
    “Don’t you hate it, glad-handing and buttering up all sorts of awful people?”
    “No. It’s fun.”
    Jerry would never concede that he despised political dinners. How could any decent person possibly enjoy a roomful of pols and building contractors and hungry lawyers all drinking whiskey of unknown origin and nervously gobbling egg salad canapés? I would demand.
    “So I don’t discuss the meaning of life,” he would say. “So what? I walk around, say hello to a few of the boys I haven’t seen for a while, pick up some interesting gossip. I enjoy it.”
    I would explain, patiently, that the room was very hot and it was hard to talk standing up. And some criminal court judge from Queens who looked like an Easter Island statue would sidle up and mumble a few damp sentences that I could not understand because of the noise but sensed were disgusting. And Jerry would say, “Marcia, you have two feet. Put one in front of the other and take a walk.” And then I would remind him that even after cocktail hour, when we were seated at Table 137, with a brash band playing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” he would carry on a yelling conversation with some clubhouse Neanderthal at Table 135 rather than talk to me. “Marcia, we don’t go to these things to be together. We’re supposed to be out there smiling, making friends for Bill, patting asses. But the minute we get there, you grab my arm and start to discuss your childhood or tell me your College Board scores.”
    Then I’d sniff and tell him that if this kind of party was the sort of thing that he, Gerald Morrissey, a graduate of Fordham University who had been on full scholarship, found appealing, well, he had my pity. He would sigh and I would pout and together we’d enter Spanelli for Congress or the Cardiac Infarction Fund Honors Esther and Selwyn Litwak dinner and part. I would seek a potential wallflower, an electorally doomed assemblyman or another speech writer, and ask how they were and then listen.
    Jerry would work the room, laughing, drinking, standing with his arm around a crucial state senator and whispering bright ideas, breaking into smiles of gladness as the women came up: wives and secretaries and officeholders who would pass him and then say “Jerry!” as though they had only accidentally noticed him. And he would beam at them, a special smile as though—just between him and her—she had made his evening by noticing him.
    With his intelligence and courtesy added to his fine looks, he was nearly irresistible in a world of the glib and the cruel. There seemed no reason why he couldn’t have any woman at all. There was simply no reason to deny him.
    Women bolted from their escorts to greet him. They phoned him at the office and at home. He’d empty his jacket pockets at night and discover odd pieces of paper with phone numbers written on them that women had slipped in, women he could barely remember meeting. Twice he found a key.
    Except among women who had specific requirements of men—wealth, knowledge of nineteenth-century American literature—Jerry’s appeal was nearly universal. I think he realized it and was secretly a little sad about it. Since he could charm just about any woman he met, since he knew the inevitability of his attractiveness, he lost some of his interest in women. Their value decreased because the supply so grossly exceeded the demand.
    The taxi pulled up to the Hilton and I paid the driver. “Now, Marcia,” he