When she got into bed, he moved closer to her and touched her face.
“I’m practically dead,” he said.
“It’s okay, honey, I know.”
“Do you want to . . . ?”
She was silent.
“You must want to, and if we don’t you’ll hold it against me always.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re just saying that,” He supported himself on his elbow.
“The mystery’s gone, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think it is.”
“Well, it’s not like the first time.”
“Would you want it to be the first time?”
“I would and I wouldn’t. There’s a feeling of doing something dangerous when it’s the first time, and here you are as undangerous as can be.”
“Well, that’s the way it is when a woman’s pregnant on her honeymoon.”
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s both our faults and not our fault.”
“I’m glad you didn’t go through with it in Scranton.”
“You wouldn’t have married me, then, would you?”
“I think I had to marry you, Rhoda, no matter what.”
“Not because you love me, that’s for sure.”
“I have a feeling for you. It’s just not the same as you have for me. You want to eat me up.”
“Is that why you’re fighting to get away from me?”
“Something like that. I don’t like the idea of someone owning me, having a claim, being responsible for them. But I don’t have much choice.”
“I want to help you. You’ve got good things in you fighting to get out.”
“Let’s wait till the morning? Okay? I’ll feel better then,” He rolled over on his side.
She listened for a while to the noises coming from the river, the urgency of tug hoots, the drone of cars on the bridge. The night passage of machines and people caught in them, and the pervasive smell of the river in her nostrils, the dampness of the apartment, and the camphor of the bed ticking, and Jay’s rye breath, his snoring, and the sudden inexplicable kick in her womb, irregular; she was overpowered, forced to sleep, despite the fact that she had planned to go over all the events of the most important day of her life.
In the middle of the night, she felt him move out to her, and his hands, warm, crept over her body. She resisted, and he increased his pressure on her thighs. Will it always be this way, she wondered, and then she gave in as she knew she would. Her reliance on him, his needs and urges, was total. “I’m committed . . “ she said in a whisper.
“Whaaaat?”
“Nothing. Just take it easy.”
The jeweler - a man in flight is concerned only with his freedom - had left the store in chaos: a counter was turned over on its side, the showcase was smashed and huge jagged pieces of glass littered the floor; wherever the eye roamed, mounds of dirt had accumulated like small coal piles in a yard.
“Must’ve been a fire,” a man called Shimmel said. He was the painter Fredericks had assigned the job of renovating the store. “Best idea is to make a fire and rebuild the whole place.”
“I may do that next year,” Jay said. “God, did you ever see such a craphouse?”
“Your funeral, my boy.”
“Thanks for the encouragement. Can you do anything beside painting, or are you just a schmeerer?”
“Chippendale’s cabinets I’ll give you if you want to pay.”
“Can you wallpaper the place? It won’t show the dirt so much.”
“You got paper?”
“No, but I’ll get some. . . . Rhoda, we’ll have to go to Macy’s to get some paper, and I’ll stop off at Thirty-Ninth Street while you’re picking it out.”
“I’ve got to go to see Mr. F. to give notice.”
“Give him nothing.”
“Jay! He won’t know what to do or what hit him.”
“Sorry, he hasn’t got my sympathy. He was born a schmuck, and that’s how he’ll die. It’s time, Rhoda, time that he stood on his own two feet.”
“Your father-in-law?” Shimmel asked, full of sympathy.
“Ex-boss. A putz of the first order.”
“I thought it was your father-in-law. Mine lives off me like I was grass and him a cow. Listen, it’ll take a day at least to get all the dreck outa here before I can start schmeering or papering. You want I should get a schvartzer to gimme a hand? It’ll cost maybe fifty cents.”
“I’m going, Jay.”
“Hire him. Rhoda, I need you.”
“I’ll see you in Macy’s at one o’clock.” She was out the door before he could stop her.
“An honest wife I’ve got,” Jay said.
“She’s a shiksa?”
“No, I wish she was.”
“That’s a woman for you, a shiksa. They kill for their men. Someday, you’ll get lucky. We’ll both get lucky.”
Rhoda arrived at Modes a bit after ten. Finkelstein had by this time succeeded in jamming the register, starting a small fire in the lavatory, which Betty was attempting to put out by sprinkling sugar on it, and giving two women the wrong dresses. They were now angrily haranguing him. Another woman who claimed that Mr. F. gave her a goose during a fitting, one of Jay’s regulars, had brought her husband to plead for justice - a little worm of a man who was spitting tobacco juice on the floor and dancing round Finkelstein in imitation of a boxer. With all this activity surrounding him, Finkelstein, by some mystical trick of personality, had remained glacially unperturbed and was threatening to go into a trance or a swoon. He rolled his eyes maniacally when he caught sight of Rhoda standing in the doorway. In five minutes, she had cleared up the mess and Finkelstein embraced her.
“No honeymoon?” he asked.
“No, we’ve had to change our plans. That’s why I’ve come to see you.”
“Honeymoon?” he asked again.
“Not exactly. I’m afraid Jay and I are leaving.”
He sank onto his stool; the gelatinous soft green leather had long ago hardened and cracked under his weight. He shook his head and triggered his ear as if to rid himself of a fly that had entered the orifice. He rose from his seat and went outside, rolled down the awning to shade the store from the clouds, bought himself some pistachio nuts from a nearby machine, returned to the store and took up his newspaper.
“I said we were leaving, so don’t make believe you don’t understand,” she said, with some vexation.
“Understand, what’s understand?” he groaned.
“We’ve decided to start our own business.”
“This . . . yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yours . . . everything, who I got?”
“You can’t do a thing like that.”
“Can’t leave me.”
“I’ve got to. Jay says we have to. He can’t work for anyone.”
“The store . . . his.” Finkelstein opened his arms expansively like an eagle about to take flight. “Can’t leave me.”
“We’ve taken a store.”
Finkelstein swallowed a nut whole and began to choke. Betty ran to the back of the shop and brought a glass of water most of which Rhoda poured down Finkelstein’s shirtfront.
Finkelstein gave an enormous belch, and the nut came out with the speed of a pellet. He searched his pockets for a handkerchief and at last brought out a dusting rag that had lived in the garment for a decade. He sniffed into the cloth, expelled some mucus from the back of his throat, jumped to his feet and commenced a rhythmical stamping exhibition that in its perfect cadences would have done a West Point cadet proud. After some moments of this tribal gavotte, he ceased as suddenly as he had begun and stared helplessly at Rhoda.
“I’ve got to do what he tells me. He’s my husband.”
Finkelstein moaned and stretched out his arms to embrace some divine and invisible God, but Rhoda, her mouth firmly set, her eyes aimed unswervingly at the sign behind the register – NO EXCHANGES OR REFUNDS OR RETUR
NS - was adamant.
“Like that . . . finish?” Finkelstin declared, biting a hangnail.
“My final word.”
“Partnership!” he said.
“Oh, what’s the use?” she answered, losing patience with him and herself and discovering that the longer she stayed, the more indefensible her position became. She rushed into the street and crossed to the other side. She could hardly believe that she had spent seven years of her life in the store and that now she had walked out and closed a chapter in her life. In a way, she felt grateful to Jay, for she could not have left without him. He had made her act: he had set her free.
She got on a train and went uptown to Macy’s to meet Jay. She found him in the wallpaper department making life miserable for a salesman. He showed Rhoda twenty different types of paper, and she decided on one that would wear like iron and was washable. They had lunch at a Nedick’s hot dog stand and walked up to Thirty-Ninth Street, where Jay planned to launch himself on anyone who would give him credit.
It soon became apparent to everyone who knew Jay, did business with him, or was related to him, that he was destined for success. The store’s new windows gave it a display area and people who passed by could see that some kind of business activity was going on inside the brightly lit cavity. The wear-like-iron wallpaper had a greasy luminous quality and was the color of rancid butter. Two false walls had been liquidated by the industrious Shimmel and according to Jay’s count, forty people could be crammed into the space. Like most semiliterate people, Jay was sign crazy, and Shimmel’s assistant, a young Negro art student, with a predilection for unspeakably tasteless calligraphy, had plastered the walls with such inventive admonitions as: “Buy here now. Tomorrow may be too late.” “All dresses one price: cut price.” “Two Dollars Only.” “Original models as worn by the French.” The winter months marked the watershed for J-R Dresses and during the post-Christmas sales his business increased. On a slow week, he was able to move at least a thousand dresses, and by February the number of sales shot up to fifteen hundred. He bought with the astuteness of a gypsy, and he always seemed to know which jobber or manufacturer was in trouble and would, therefore, be vulnerable to price shaving, an art he had perfected. Everyone wanted his business because he paid promptly, often in cash, which enabled whoever got his order to cheat the internal revenue of a substantial sum. His first coup was pulled during the month of December, when with information provided by Marty Cass, who got twenty percent, he finagled his way into New York Fashions, owned by Marty’s father-in-law, who desperately needed to move his winter stock and was ripe for a cash sale. With $4,000 in his pocket, Jay succeeded in buying two thousand six-dollar dresses at his cash price. He was making tremendous dents in the business of his competitors. Manufacturers who dealt with him were blacklisted by the big chains, the Better Business Bureau investigated him after numerous complaints that he lured women into the store by window displays that suggested that twenty-dollar dresses were being sold for two. Nothing from the window was for sale, of course. Jay never had the right size of the come-on dress, as it was called, but shrewdly switched a customer to something he had in stock.
Rhoda still took an active part in the business even though she was now in the middle of the ninth month. She had always had a tendency to put on weight easily, and a combination of indifference, frustration with Jay as a husband, and simply the peculiar urges of pregnancy, forced her weight up, so that she had become massive. She worked in the store twelve hours a day and took no lunch or dinner hour, living on enormous meatball sandwiches and black coffee. To Jay she had become an object not merely of derision, but of disgust. Her obesity revolted him, although to others she still seemed attractive in spite of being overweight. As her time drew nearer, his attitude towards her altered slightly, for he realized that she would be in the hospital for at least ten days and he would be free to conduct his little campaigns with customers, shopgirls, staff, showroom secretaries, with less than his usual discretion. He had begun to live a dual existence from the first week of his marriage, using the excuse of a visit to his mother when he met women whom he had picked up during business hours. His affairs were indiscriminate and meaningless until for the second time Eva Meyers came into his life.
They met accidentally at a party given by Marty Cass. Jay had explained hastily to Rhoda that he would have to leave the store early because he had to meet some people who wanted his business.
“Here” - he gave her a five-dollar bill – “don’t take the subway, grab a cab.”
“Can’t you drop me first? You’ve got the car a week, and I’ve been in it exactly twice. Where’re you running all the time, Jay?”
“I can’t stand here talking all night. As it is, I’m late already.”
“What’s so important?”
“The business of course! I mean, look at you. Do you expect me to take you with me? Honestly, Rhoda, buy yourself a mirror - you’re a sight.”
Conspiratorially she whispered: “Don’t make nothing out of me in front of the girls. I’m supposed to be the boss also, and if you treat me like dirt, they’ll take advantage.”
“Then stop nagging me, will you, please? Do you do anything but piss and moan?”
“You’re my husband. I know it’s a fact you’d like to forget.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“What happens if I have pains while you’re out?”
“Pick up the telephone and call the hospital. What do you think I had a phone installed for? For its own beauty?”
“Please don’t be late,” conciliatory. “I worry . . .”
“See you.”
He lit a cigarette when he got inside his car, a brand-new maroon Chevrolet that he loved possibly more than anything he had ever possessed. He breathed easily, delighted that he had got away so easily. Housebroken was the word he used to describe Rhoda to Marty. The smell of the new leather seats excited him, and he rubbed his fingers lovingly on the glinting steering wheel. He pulled out from the curb, taking pleasure in simply changing gears and revving up the engine when he stopped for a red light. It was his car, and he was moving in the right direction: up. Luxury resembled a bottomless well: the more you got, the deeper the well appeared to be. Most of the people he had grown up with were still on Relief, and none of them had a hope of achieving so quickly - in the space of barely a year - all that he had. The thought comforted him.
He had passed Marty’s apartment house a number of times, but this was the first time he had been invited in. A doorman who looked like General Pershing opened the door for him.
“Can I leave the car here?”
“Yes sir, I’ll look after it.”
Jay handed him a dime, and the man doffed his cap, revealing a pink-ridged scalp. Not Pershing after all. The lobby had an odor of floor wax and carpet shampoo and Jay was greeted by another flunky who asked if he could help him.
“Mr. Cass,” Jay said, “Which apartment?”
The man picked up a phone and pressed a button on a lighted switchboard that had all the tenants’ names. He waited and then said: “Your name?”
“Blackman.”
“There’s a Mr. Blackman in the lobby. Right sir.” He put down the phone and gave Jay a smile of approval. Jay followed him to the elevator and held the door for him, but the man said: “After you, please, sir.” The elevator shot up to the eighteenth floor in a matter of seconds and Jay was led to the apartment. He hesitated about tipping the man and finally took out a dime, but the man smiled at him and said it was just service and something about being paid to do a job, which Jay didn’t catch. He pressed the buzzer and a colored maid, dressed in a black satin uniform that must have cost at least ten dollars, opened the door for him.
“Yes?” followed by a display of teeth.
Must look like a heist guy, Jay reflected.
“I’m Mr. Blackman.”
“Please come in,” all polite and with an ass wiggle that gave him ideas as he followed he
r through a long foyer with about ten wall lights on either side. The walls were painted mauve, and Jay’s lips puckered in an incipient whistle but he caught himself at the last moment. He adjusted his tie in the mirror, and the maid asked him if he’d like to wash his hands. Jay turned them over for her inspection.
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