All the same, Sam was getting ready for If and When. He pushed weights and ran track and was the first to split the leather on the gym’s new punching bag. He’d learned hand-to-hand in military training camp and underwent a skim of personal combat in police academy, yet every Sunday he paid an instructor in Chinatown for a private three-hour class in pa-kua, the Chinese battle art featuring eight animal movements. His favorites were the lion and the snake. His reflexes and timing were impeccable, and he advanced through the belt rankings quickly.
One Saturday morning, Sally got him to go to a new temple on Fourteenth that Izzy had joined. Sam pretended to like the droning lay cantor, the very young rabbi, the short ladies telling him how handsome he was. But it was hard for him to hear anything while in the pews because of Izzy, five rows up, reciting loudly, davening like a man with fumes on the brain during prayer. He didn’t know if Izzy saw him there.
Sally was taking classes at City College and had to study, so she and Sam necked in the car she’d just purchased and regretted already, and then he drove her home.
Sunday he took a bus to where Izzy worked at a tire store. Sam knew the street the shop was on. Parking was tight even up to the apron of the shop, and he had to approach between cars. Izzy was outside, signing a paper for a deliveryman who brought a tire that now leaned against Izzy’s shin. When the guy left, Izzy looked after the truck a moment, and then he took the tire to a car on the far side of the shop door. He unlocked the trunk with a key, lifted the trunk gate, and put in the tire; he shut it and looked around again. Sam was already stooped between cars. It was too noisy on the street to talk to him there. He would wait until Izzy was back inside.
A mechanic came in from the garage at the same time Sam pulled open the shop door and asked Izzy if that was the tire delivery. Izzy said no. The mechanic left grumbling.
When Izzy faced the front and saw Sam, he said, “You would come here?”
Sam waited a beat and then said, “Why’d you do a thing like that, Iz?”
Izzy tipped his head down, looked this way and that at the floor, then met Sam’s gaze and said, “Shut your face, oh-holier-than-thou.”
“Iz, Iz. You need extra dough? I can—”
“Not from you.”
“You can’t do that, Iz, come on.”
“Maybe it’s not what you think.”
“Maybe it is,” Sam said.
Did he have the thing right, though? What if Izzy intended to deliver the tire to someone else, and it was a different tire the mechanic was expecting?
A customer came in. Sam hung around reading wall charts and tire labels. The man paid a balance from work previously completed, telling Izzy to be sure to thank his boss again for letting him run a tab. When the customer was out the door, Izzy stayed behind the counter. He said, “I got one question.”
“Fire it up,” Sam said.
“Are you or are you not a stinkin’ rat-fink Communist?”
“Look, Izzy, that’s not it, and you know it. Some things, they just come to you. You don’t mean for it to happen. Sally and I love each other, we really do. It’s been a year. No. Seven months, two weeks, and three days I’ve known it was her. I’d like you to be my best man, Iz. Will you do that for us? Day before Valentine’s Day, Sally says, so I won’t forget the anniversary. Do that for us, Iz?”
The color dropped from Izzy’s face. He reached under the counter and brought up an oil-smeared tire iron, laid it on the counter slowly, and said, “How you like them apples, Sergeant?” Sergeant—with a level of contempt in his voice you’d expect from a bad stage actor. And sure, Sam would know about bad theater, because Sally had him take her to plays uptown, so they could claim some culture, too.
Like tonight. Tonight he and Sally would hop the subway, grab a dog off a cart, and go see Annie Get Your Gun. Afterward, they would steer around the corner to a hot spot for a drink. Sam’s mother had been helping Sally with a sewing project. She wouldn’t say what; he only knew it was a dress. On the subway, Sally held a giant shawl tight around her so Sam couldn’t see, but when they got off and she spread open the soft-cream shawl, the sight near knocked the wind out of him. The design bared the shoulders, pinched the waist, flowed down to a boat-collar moat at the top of the hips, and then drove a waterfall of ruby red to just below the knees. On her feet were black heels with red silk roses on the tops.
After the play and a short stop for cheesecake at the end of the block, they walked toward the subway. The air was perfect. You could see the stars even through the sign glare. Sam wished he could conjure the night to go on longer than the ten hours it was meant to be. But when he spotted a police call box two feet down an alley on the way to the subway, he apologized but said he wanted to phone in because Hirsch liked that.
When she saw him come back from the call box, Sally said, “You have to go now, don’t you? Go, baby. I can get myself home just fine.”