“I’ve got a business to look after, and don’t forget Neal’s at camp. I can’t just up and go.”
“Why not? I’ll lend you the money.”
“Very funny.”
“Well, the business won’t fall apart without you. Your partner can look after it.”
“Harry’s retired. Marty’s just the salesman.”
“So for a couple of weeks American women will walk around in the nude. It’ll save thousands of marriages.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I am. I agree. Now if you have to get your little Viennese operetta over with, get started. Tears, strife, a scene of monstrous proportions, completely devoid of emotional content. Your wife will curse me, both of us, and I’ll get us fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in the meanwhile and buy a knockout of a white bathing suit - something that covers the least amount of me.” She hopped off the bed and lifted up her nightgown. “Would you Like a little encouragement to bolster your courage? A short turn on a wide bed . . . forget me not, tra-la-la-la-la-la, tiddly-dee-dee.”
“It’s sex, like your husband said.”
“Of course it is, you silly fool. Sex and a million and one other things. Any complaints” - she picked up a butter knife and flourished it – “because if there are, you will most certainly be a man around town but in chunks.” He sat her on his lap and kissed her, and she laughed when she drew away. “Ah, is it madness, yes midsummer madness?”
“Last night, did you . . . ?”
“Did I what?”
“Well, I wasn’t very careful.”
“I thought you were not only careful, but magnificent into the bargain.”
“Precautions.”
“I threw them to the wind when I left my husband, or did you forget?”
“Seriously?”
“Most seriously.”
“What if . . . ?”
She laughed so violently that her whole body shook with the pure joy of it.
“This is my own unique form of planned parenthood. Both the man and the woman avoid the use of anything but skin, and if they’re lucky, first shot, they are delivered of a little bundle nine months hence.”
“You must be kidding.”
“Darling, it’ll be our child. A bastard or bastardess because we shan’t have had the benefit of matrimony. So, there. Alas and alack, and all that crap. Now off you go, and tell your wife the good news and then meet me at Saks.”
Eva concealed her surprise when he appeared unannounced at the house. She was sitting on the sun terrace alone, reading a magazine, but her face tightened when he sat down on the white bench opposite her, and her uneven breathing sent out a nervous, apprehensive emotional code that he detected at once.
“You’ve just missed Lorna and my mother.”
“That’s a shame,” he replied without conviction.
“Why didn’t you give me a ring? Everything okay at business?”
“Of course,” he said with curious violence.
“You don’t have to jump down my throat. I only asked a civil question.”
He reached out and picked up a glass of fresh orange juice that was on the wooden table and drank it.
“I haven’t even asked you if you’ve had breakfast.”
“Yes, I have. Thanks just the same. I’m only thirsty.”
She lit a cigarette, and her hand trembled as she held the match to it. She saw that he was watching her, and she tried to control her nervousness.
“Did you bring your clothes?”
“No. I don’t plan to stay.”
“Oh, I wish you’d change your mind. It’s been pleasant with Lorna and my mother but you being here would give us all a lift. Couldn’t I persuade you? Please.” He put down the empty glass, “I’ll squeeze some more, would you like that?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“You were just passing by and you decided to stop by to say hello?”
“Not exactly.”
“We ought to talk about having a vacation. Anywhere particular you want to go, or should we stay down here for the summer? I’ve met a few people who’ve asked me to get you down here. Everyone’s so anxious to meet you . . . a lot of Wall Street people who know all about you and they say that the stock is going to be a blue chip when it’s on the market.”
Jay turned his head slightly and closed his eyes. The sun was hotter than he expected for eleven o’clock in the morning. A few beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and he wiped them off with his handkerchief.
“I saw one of your suits in the bureau so you can change and have a swim.”
He opened his eyes and turned his head slowly so that his eyes were in a line with hers, but then quickly she averted her face. He could see how frightened and nervous she was, and he had a sinking, doomed, feeling inside.
“I’m going to go,” he said.
She was working desperately to control herself, but her mouth twitched and she started to blink, so she put on the sunglasses that were hooked over the edge of the chaise longue.
“I have to, Eva.”
“I knew it was coming. Oh God, Jay, I feel too awful to say anything. For days, I’ve been walking around with this terrible tense feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nerves, I told myself. On edge. But all the time I was sinking and I couldn’t hold onto anything. It’s coming. My body knew. I’m almost relieved that I’ve heard. I used to get the same nervous tension when I was a kid, and I waited for my school report card. I used to dream of failing all my subjects.”
“I’ll get my stuff out today.”
“Whenever you like. Will you go to a hotel or what?”
“I think so. It’s your house. In your name.”
“Oh, boy. Compensation.”
“No, not compensation. Money isn’t involved. I’m sure you’re not thinking of money.”
“You’re right. I always wondered how I’d react when this finally came. And the day we got married I was sure that you’d leave me and not the other way around. A big emotional scene. Screaming. Abuse. I can’t, though - I’m not built that way.” She took out a cigarette and this time he lit it for her. “Your hands are shaking too. Which must mean that you feel something, and it’s not just cold-blooded murder.”
“Sure I feel something.”
“We tried to build a marriage on the bones of a dead man and what’s dead doesn’t live again. But you did care for me, didn’t you? Once?”
“Very much.”
“But not enough. Is it the girl you never mentioned?”
“Yes, it is.”
“The college girl who threw you over.”
“I threw her over.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t suppose it does.”
“The one who came over to you at the country club bar?”
He nodded. The futility implicit in her quest for information disturbed him. It was like watching someone with a rash scratch uncontrollably until the skin was a mass of bleeding sores.
“I knew it was her. Don’t ask me how I knew. But in my bones, I sensed that we were dead together.”
“I’d better go,” he said, unwilling to prolong her agony, but as he got up to leave he turned and in a voice that came as close to entreaty as he was capable of, he said: “Would you consider a divorce?”
She pursed her lips tightly, and the long cigarette ash fell on her bare stomach, but she did not appear to notice it.
“I’ve acted like a lady, and you like a gentleman, very unusual for us.” She paused as though remembering his question. “I can’t divorce you, Jay. I just couldn’t do it.”
“I didn’t think . . .”
“Remember me to Neal, will you? He’s really a nice kid. I’m sorry he didn’t like me, but I guess he had his reasons.”
Jay drove from the house in a daze. He was out of Southampton on the road back to New York when he realized where he was. He pulled into a driveway and turned his car around. In Southampton, he parked his car i
n front of Saks and walked in. The lights made him feel a bit giddy. He circled most of the counters in the front of the store, then somebody took his arm.
“Jay, Jay, darling,” Terry said, “you’re crying.”
“Am I?”
She wiped his face with her handkerchief.
“Was it so terrible?”
“No, that’s the point, it was almost painless.”
“You feel something for her and you’re sad. But it’s sentiment.”
“You’re probably right.”
“You’ve found me, Jay. You’re my man. The best man in the world.”
“Let’s have a drink somewhere.”
“Yes, let’s have a drink. Only one.”
“Why only one?”
“Well, there’s nothing to forget now, is there?”
The severity of the winter seemed almost supernatural to Sports. He regarded the snow as a nemesis that fate had designed to torment and test him. He had been on a losing streak for two months; it had begun on Christmas Eve with a fixed basketball game in Madison Square Garden, a game he was so confident of winning that he broke his long-standing habit, and started to count his money before it ended. The team he bet on lost by two points in the last eleven seconds, and he recalled the sinking, recoiling sensation that turned his stomach upside down as he stood in the exit with Rhoda by his side as the ball sailed through the hoop. Two quick losses on football games followed and he knew with that instinctive helpless sixth sense that gamblers possess that he was on a losing streak. The difficulty, as he explained to Rhoda, who had begun to deplete her savings in an effort to save him, centered on making the right move: “Do I just sit on the sidelines with no action, hoping that my luck changes, or do I stick my head into a meat grinder?”
Perplexed and with growing desperation, she had replied:
“I dunno what to advise you . . . I trust you.”
“I’m in a hole, and I gotta fight back,” he protested.
“Then fight! I’ll stick with you no matter what.”
And she was as good as her word. She would study the television screen with as much concentration as she could muster, while he twisted his hands, bit his fingernails, picked sores on his face, his complexion a composite of sallow green, his eyes red from loss of sleep as he listened, listened, interminably to sports commentaries which, by the end of January, sounded as though they were the product of the same voice describing the same game she had heard hundreds of times.
“I need money. I gotta pay off, or they come for me,” he threatened. “And when they come, they break everything. They wreck the house completely and put me in the hospital.”
She gave him the store’s receipts that she was to deposit in the bank on Monday.
“Business is bad, Sports. It’s the slow season. All the sales are on, and I’m stuck with loads of dresses I can’t move, and bills I can’t pay.”
“I need money,” was the plaintive cry, and she gave it to him. “Go to the bank. They’ll give you a loan.”
“You don’t see a customer all day. Nobody walks out of the house in this weather. Eighteen inches of snow last night. The Saturday is a write-off.”
“Go to the bank, Rhoda!” he said in a menacing voice, slamming his fist down on the cash register and breaking the glass.
“Sports, I’m in hock up to my neck. I’m afraid to go to the bank because I haven’t made last month’s repayment on the car.”
“Who the hell needs a canary yellow convertible in the Arctic? What do we need it for? Let’s get rid of it.”
“But how can we? It’s not ours to sell. The bank manager won’t give me the right time. If I ask him for another loan, he’ll get worried, and he’ll send somebody down to the store and they’ll see that we’re losing money.”
“Get a personal loan.”
“What do you think I got?” she shrieked, helplessly.
“Well, Latkin’s coming this afternoon and he’ll want his money. Ten thousand dollars.”
“I’ll go home with you. We’ll plead for more time.”
“He knows from pleadings? Are you crazy or something? Who do you think goes to him? Pleaders, people who can’t get nowhere else? Do you understand, Rhoda?”
She looked at the empty store, and the dust on the floor that had not been cleaned for weeks: the dirty marks made by galoshes and boots.
“It’s a pigsty, this store. That’s what Jay would say. It was a business principle with him to have a clean store. He said people leave dirty filthy homes, but they want to shop in a clean store. We’ve got rats in the basement, and I’m afraid to go down to put the rat poison on the bread.” She flourished the stale bread in his face. “Would you do it for me?”
“Please, don’t bother me. I’m not a businessman. This ain’t my business.”
“No? Well, you spend the money that comes out of it pretty good.”
“I don’t ask you to decide on teams and you don’t ask me to sell dresses.”
“I wasn’t asking you to sell dresses, but to act like a man, a husband.”
He scratched his ear violently, picked some wax out of it, and flicked it on the floor.
“A husband!” he jeered. “Listen, Rhoda, I been a pretty goddamned good husband, by anybody’s standards.”
“You’ve never worked since I met you.”
“I perform my other duties all right by you. Frankly, sleeping with you ain’t no picnic. With the kind of appetite you got. I done my share.”
“I was starved for a long time. Didn’t have any real affection.”
“So that makes you a glutton? You got no complaints.”
“No, I got what I deserved.”
“I’ve got to have the money.”
“What should I do, manufacture it out of thin air? Tell me what I should do, and I will.”
“You got any jewelry you haven’t told me about?”
“It’s all been hocked. Sell the car, and we’ll both wind up in jail.”
“Can you get anything for the furniture?”
“Maybe three or four hundred dollars. It’s eight years old. And Jay bought it!”
“So Jay bought it, but it’s yours.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, selling another man’s furniture?”
“Oh, you’re getting self-righteous with me? C’mon, let’s go home and wait for Latkin. He said he’d be there at twelve o’clock.”
“What happens if you’re not there?”
“Simple. You become a widow.”
The synagogue was a large, square building on Eastern Parkway that had been built in the early twenties. It stood on a dark corner, and its gray façade had been recently cleaned. Young Rabbi Davidson, who was in charge of it, took a special pleasure in welcoming those who came to Saturday morning services. He was a pink-cheeked man, with a strong sense of decorum and he enjoyed the feeling of older, wealthier men seeking his counsel; sometimes they came away after a discussion with him convinced that he was a sage. Latkin was his favorite, for Latkin consulted him frequently on fine points of theology, and made himself readily available when the synagogue was one short of a minyan. They had a mutual interest in trivial pedantries - the rabbi scholastic, and Latkin purely pragmatic, for he was determined at all costs to get into heaven, which he regarded as an exclusively Jewish club - its physical characteristics he imagined were similar to a good frim Catskill mountain hotel where the men sat on the lawn at card tables playing pinochle and the women sweated in the kitchens cooking food, and elderly infidels (all those whom were not members of the tribe) ran back and forth bringing cigarettes and ice water to the players. He never got around to revealing this celestial vision to Rabbi Davidson because he was sure that the rabbi had his own “particala idear of da place: sometink more heim, as befitted a man still lean in years.”
“It’s a sad anniversary,” Davidson said, as he stood on the steps, the wind blowing his long black coat.
“Fifteen years,” Latkin admitted, “an’ I s
till feel like it was yesteryear.” Western films had given his broken English a contemporary flavor.
Davidson blew hot breath on his white frostbitten hands.
“She was a good woman,” he said.
“A good woman?” Incredulously, Latkin clapped his hands together, for he was not sympathetic to understatement. “Da best. A heart made from gold, she had.”
“How old was she when you had your loss?”
Latkin did some hasty logarithms on his tobacco-stained fingers.
“Seventy-four. A young woman. Kerried herself like sixty.”
“You were a good son.”
“I nevah merried,” he said, rolling his r’s with the same enthusiasm he reserved for sweet Passover wine. “My life - I geve it up for her, but who’s complainink. Did you hear me complainink? I should live so long if I ever . . .”
The rabbi began rubbing his arms, engaging in something close to a self-embrace as he attempted to restore the circulation in his flaccid muscles. Latkin could keep him standing there for an hour and a half, and he knew he couldn’t move because Latkin had just given him a check for a thousand dollars - his annual contribution. Latkin sucked in his cheeks, made a popping sound, and sighed in Davidson’s face. Davidson waited for him to continue. He himself had no intention of providing the conversation with any additional fuel. Latkin nodded to him, and Davidson nodded back. The week before they had nodded to each other for a good fifteen minutes, and Davidson’s neck had hurt all week. Latkin walked down a single step and repositioned himself, and Davidson, assuming that the interview was concluded, hastened to walk up two steps, but Latkin seized his sleeve and pulled him close, so that the younger man had to stoop awkwardly. He whispered through his frosty breath:
“You a wise man. Full of wisdom. When you get a little older, you will be wiser still.”
Davidson thanked him wordlessly. Where the devil was the sexton, he wondered, for he had arranged for the man to call him to the phone when Latkin and he got outside.
“I’ll see you next Friday evening.”
“See me? Of course, you’ll see me. Is there ever bin a Friday night when you didn’t see me?” Davidson’s wisdom-wall had been breached.
“I didn’t mean to imply that I wouldn’t see you.”
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