Our continued reminiscences of Isaac Asimov, and we must be getting somewhere near the end by now, mustn’t we?
Still, Gertrude wasn’t entirely happy. She knew that her husband was getting quite well known, you could almost even use the word “famous,” with all those books and all those people who kept wanting him to come and speak to their groups. But she was a normal Brooklyn girl who read the gossip columns, and the kind of fame that she really wanted for her husband came with a special flavor that could come only from Broadway.
Isaac spent some effort on trying to make her happy. He wasn’t a particularly addicted theater fan, but that’s where you found the air Gertrude liked to breathe, so he took her to each season’s most important plays — and often to dinner before the curtain and to a snack when the show was over, always in the places where the famous people flocked together. But eating in the same room as the stars of the gossip columns wasn’t the same as eating with them, and on one occasion Gertrude decided to act.
She and Isaac were sharing a table for two at Sardi’s, the very definition of the famous people’s Broadway hangout. And a few yards away, as Isaac told it to me:
“There was this table for eight or ten, all directors and actors and all that, and they were laughing and hollering and having a great time. And Gertrude was after me to go over there and talk to them.“‘You’re famous, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘So let’s just drop by, and you can say, “I’m Isaac Asimov, and my wife and I noticed you were having such a good time we thought we’d stop by and say hello.”‘
“And I didn’t want to do that, but she kept on. So finally I gave in. We walked over there, with me rehearsing what I was going to say in my mind, and I asked for some autographs, and then one man on the far side of the table looked up. Then he jumped up and came running over in our direction — but not exactly to both of us, and definitely not to me. It was Gertrude he was aiming for, and he was yelling, ‘Gittel! Is it really you? My God, I haven’t seen you since you moved out of the old neighborhood!’”
By the way, I’m pretty sure that Gertrude’s dream of Heaven was that her husband, and perhaps even herself as well, might possibly become subjects of a couple of the 1,300 cartoons of celebrities that festooned the walls of Sardi’s and were the restaurant’s trademark. I don’t think that ever happened, but I don’t know for sure. Does anyone?
(The reason I never looked for myself is that about the only times I ate at Sardi’s was when I was grabbing a quick lunch before an Author’s Guild Council meeting, the Guild offices being on an upper floor of the same building. When the Guild moved out, I stopped going. There was nothing wrong with the food or even with the prices, which are what you’d expect from a fashionable restaurant in the theater district, but it was always too crowded for my enjoyment.)
The Asimovs stayed married through the decade of the 1960s, but that was the end. Isaac was by quite a large margin more interested in sex than Gertrude was. He was in fact a healthy human male, not much over forty and unwilling to endure a life of deprivation. Accordingly, he began supplying his lacks through a series of affairs.
I don’t know the identities of most of his partners in the affairs, but as it happens I do know where he had them. That’s because on one later occasion he and I agreed to meet for some purpose in the lobby of a big old Boston hotel just off the Common. When Isaac got there he looked around, grinning, and volunteered that this was the place where he used to take his girlfriends. But he didn’t say who those girlfriends were, and I didn’t ask.
