"Honey, let's go back tomorrow," I said to Claire, when I felt that old, sick taste of green apples bubble up, and later gave her some baloney after we were back in our room and had balled each other again. "I thought of something I might do in Newburgh that might turn out pretty good for us."

I was feeling fine after the sex together and even after we were home. But just to make sure I dropped in at the doctor's. Emil looked and found nothing. I still don't know if he should have looked harder, or if it would have made any difference. Emil could easily believe that what I had on the island was not what I have now. j I'm not afraid of people but I'm getting more afraid of green apples. The first time in my life I remember getting sick, my mother told me I was sick because I had eaten some green apples she was keeping in a bowl to bake or cook something with. I don't know if I'd even really eaten them. But every time I got sick that way again and felt nauseous and threw up, from mumps, from chicken pox, from a strep throat one time, she put the blame on those same green apples, and after a while I began to believe her, even though I'd eaten no green apples, because that taste of throwing up was always the same. And I believe it still. Because each time I get sick to my stomach, before the radiation or chemotherapy and during the radiation or chemotherapy and after the radiation or chemotherapy, I taste green apples. I tasted my green apples with the surgery for the double hernia. And when I got really sick that first time driving back from a weekend at Sammy's house on Fire Island with a couple of some of Sammy's lively friends from Time and felt my neck swell so that I couldn't turn my head to keep driving and then went faint over the steering wheel and threw up just outside the car and began to babble to myself a little deliriously, it was about green apples I was babbling, Claire told me. And the kids in the back of the station wagon, we had just three then, said so too. We told people who wondered why we weren't home till late that it was only an upset stomach, because that's what we thought it was. Later we said it was angina. Then mononucleosis. Then tuberculosis of the glands. When I had my first real collapse seven years later and was in a hospital in the city and Claire told Glenda what it really was, it turned out she and Sammy both already knew or guessed. Glenda had some experience with an ex-husband with a different kind of cancer, and Sammy, as we knew, was smart, from reading Time magazine every week.

Claire had never met a family like ours, with Brooklyn accents and Jewish accents from my mom and pop, or gone out with a guy like me, who had picked her away from someone else on a double blind date and was able to do whatever he wanted to do, and whose future was in junk. I didn't like that last idea, but never showed it until we were already married.

"There's no future in junk, because there's too much of it," Winkler would say to us before his first business failure. "Louie, a surplus is always bad. The economy needs shortages. That's what's so good about monopolies-they keep down the supply of what people want. I buy Eastman Kodak surplus army aviation film for practically nothing that nobody wants because there's too much, and I turn it into regular color camera film that nobody has. Everybody's getting married and having babies, even me, and everybody wants pictures in color and can't get enough film. Eastman Kodak is helpless. It's their film, so they can't knock the quality. I use the Kodak name, and they can't come near me for price. The first order I got when I mailed out my postcards was from Eastman Kodak for four rolls of film, so they could find out what I was doing."

He and Eastman Kodak soon found out that army aviation film, which was good at ten thousand feet, left grainy splotches on babies and brides, and then he was back driving a truck for us on days we needed him before he began making honey-glaze and chocolate-covered doughnuts for the first of the bakeries he went into next before he moved to California and bought the first of his chocolate-candy factories that didn't work out either. For twenty years I slipped him money now and then and never told Claire. For twenty years, Claire sent them money when they needed it and never told me.

Before I got out of the army, Claire, still just a kid, talked seriously to me about reenlisting because she liked the opportunties to travel.

"You must be joshing," I told her, back from Dresden and flat on my back in the hospital after my operations. "My name is Louie, not screwy. Travel where? Georgia? Kansas? Fort Sill, Oklahoma? You've got no chance." Claire helped at the junkshop with the telephone and business records when my big sister Ida had to be home with my mother. And she helped with my mother when Ida was in the shop. She could make her smile more than we could. The old lady was getting stranger and stranger with what the doctor told us was hardening of the arteries of the head, which was natural with age, he said, and which we now think was probably Alzheimer's disease, which maybe we now think of as natural too, like Dennis Teemer does with cancer.

Claire is still not much good at math, and that worries me now. She can add and subtract all right, especially after you give her la hand calculator, and even divide and multiply a little bit, bat she is lost with fractions, decimals, and percentages and doesn't understand the arithmetic of markups, markdowns, and interest rates. She was good enough for the bookkeeping then, though, and that's about all the old man wanted her to do after the time she began throwing pieces of brass and copper into the last paper bale of the day to help us finish up sooner. The old man couldn't believe it, and his groan shook the walls and probably drove all our rats and mice and cockroaches jumping out in a panic onto McDonald Avenue.

"I'm trying to help," she gave as an excuse. "I thought you wanted the bales to be heavier."

I laughed out loud. "Not with brass."

"With copper?" asked my brother, and laughed also.

"Tchotchkeleh, where did you go to get educated?" the old man asked her, scraping his dental plates, with the different noise they made when he was feeling jolly. "Copper, brass too, sells for fourteen cents a pound. Newspapers sell for bubkes, for nothing by the pound. Which is worth more? You don't have to go to Harvard to figure that out. Here, tchotchkeleh, sit here, little darling, and write numbers and say who must pay us money and who we got to pay. Don't worry, you'll go dancing yet. Louie, come here. Where did you find such a little toy?" He took my arm into that grip of his and pulled me into a corner to talk to me alone, his face red, his freckles big. "Louie, listen good. If you were not my own son, and if instead she was my daughter, I would not let her go out with a tummler like you. You must not hurt her, not even a little."

She wasn't as easy to fool as he thought, although I probably could have done everything I wanted with her. She'd heard from a cousin nearby about the Coney Island boys and their social clubs, that they would dance you into the back room with the door and the couches and get some clothes off you fast so you couldn't go back out without feeling ashamed, until you gave them at least some of what they wanted. When she said she wouldn't go back there with me the first time, I just picked her up off her feet while we still were dancing and danced her around down the hall into our back room just to show her it wasn't always true, not with me, not then. What I didn't let her know was that I had already been there with a different girl about an hour before.

She was weak at arithmetic for sure, but I soon found out I was better off leaving business things in her hands than leaving them with any of my brothers or my partners, and I always trusted my brothers and partners. None of them ever cheated me that I know of, and I don't think that any of them would have wanted to, because I always picked men who were generous and liked to laugh and drink as much as I did.