The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  There is one person who loves her, and it is Celia.

  WHEN JO ARRIVES back at work, the office appears unchanged; she approaches her desk the way she has for years—before Lucia Mazzano—barely glancing to the desk along the far wall, acknowledging nothing but the need for more light, the necessary adjustments to the blinds.

  “How are you, Jo?” Lucia says. She’s on her feet, listing in the direction of Jo’s desk: Jo glances up long enough to register a blurred slim figure, green topped with black. She can’t focus any longer than that, even if she wills herself to, not in that direction. She nods and bows her head over her desk of files. “Better, then,” Lucia says, her voice filtered through air as dense as glass.

  Jo remains silent. Isn’t that all she has—insulating silence, the silence of retreat? She rolls paper into the typewriter and imagines the monotone percussives filling out into a chant. For an hour, two hours, she types beautifully, unthinkingly. Nods hello to Moshe Schumacher. Nods to Attorneys Feigenbaum and Levy. Takes her lunch in silence, the noise of downtown passing around her, the afternoon light glossy and peculiar. She waits until the end of the day, unaware that she is waiting. The office emptied, she returns to Lucia’s files, which she has not touched since the first day of Anthony. This time, Jo rearranges the papers in the Markson file, ruining the chronology. Closes the cabinet. Closes the office. Cooks fish and noodles for dinner, pours her father’s tea, sleeps the night without interruption.

  By the end of the week, Jo’s wearing the cream-and-plum dress to work, bringing Lucia breakfast rolls and coffee, regularly riffling Lucia’s files. Lucia smiles her carmine-and-white smile. There’s talk of Anthony, Lucia’s family warming to him, the invitations to dinner, of the lingering good-byes and ecstatic hellos, kisses in the theater. Outside the office, a light rain has begun to fall, occasional plinks against the glass. Kisses in the theater, imagine, and his hands, where were his hands? “Delicious coffee,” Lucia says, and the theater evaporates. “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” Jo says. Nods. Sets her fingers on the keyboard.

  She sticks to the easy misfiles, chooses the busiest and most distracted days. The attorneys appear at Lucia’s desk, at first inquiring mildly, then demanding: The cover letter for the Kahn agreement? Have you seen it? Brodsky case, Motion to Amend—don’t you have it? Find it. Now.

  “It’s in the file,” Lucia repeats, checking her desk, the basket of documents to be filed, the floor, the wastebasket, the desktop again. “I’ll have it for you in a few minutes” she says, and the attorneys wait, impatient. She’s flushed, miserable-looking. “I’m sure I filed them,” Lucia tells Jo. “I know I did.”

  The deadline on Brodsky arrives. Jo nods in the direction of the attorneys’ offices. “One of them probably has it. I’ll help you look.” Together they search the files, trying different dates, searching out other Brodsky matters, checking under the client’s first name, Jacob. Try the files on either side: Blumenthal, Broadman, Bryson.

  It’s in Broadman. The attorneys nod and retreat.

  “Such stupid mistakes,” Lucia says.

  “Don’t give it a second thought,” Jo says. “These things happen.”

  Twice, Jo stays late retyping Lucia’s work, this time with errors.

  TWO WEEKS OF misfiles and Lucia does not smile at the attorneys, does not speak of Anthony, does not mention the saints. There is no talk of lipstick: there is almost no talk. As if she’s absorbed Jo’s silence. She stops objecting when the attorneys point out errors, turns beseechingly to Jo. Let me help, Jo says. I can proof-read. I’ll take the Lipsky pleadings. Why don’t I file that last group of letters? Once, Jo asks Moshe Schumacher to wait while she helps Lucia correct an error.

  He stares at Lucia, his mouth a flat pout. “Miss Mazzano will have to do that herself,” he says.

  “I understand,” Jo says, and then, more quietly, “Give her time.”

  To which he makes no answer.

  JO CAN’T REMEMBER her dreams, but that is familiar, the old way. She does not consider the grass, observing instead the space between trees, the neighboring yards. Continues to smoke tobacco in the evenings behind the house, while Celia watches without comment, the orange cat rumbling, its eyes pressed shut. There is no pleasure in smoking, no pleasure in anything. But also no tremors, no bitter cramps or ragged breathing.

  It’s a Monday morning in early August when Lucia is called to Moshe Schumacher’s office. She leaves her desk for no more than five minutes, returning tight-lipped. Pale blue dress, hair pulled back tightly, head bent, her gestures jagged and fast. From her desk drawer she grabs up a compact, a handkerchief, a palm-sized print of the Virgin.

  “What happened?” Jo says.

  Lucia’s lashes are wet spikes against her face. She chews on a fingernail, clearly forgetting herself.

  “What is it?” And Jo crosses to Lucia’s desk, shocked: in that instant she does not remember the sabotage. She touches Lucia’s shoulder. “What can I do?” Jo is sincere, she could even save Lucia, earn her gratitude. It’s a chance, isn’t it? To prove, finally, that though Lucia has been foolish she can still be forgiven, that with Jo she can be redeemed.

  “He’s got another girl lined up,” Lucia says. She steps away and organizes her desktop into rectangles and squares—files, stationery, message slips—and beyond it the parquet floor extends to the sharp lines of the windows. Lucia herself is blue curves. She hands Jo a lipstick. “It’s a new one,” she says. “Why don’t you keep it?” she says. And then she’s at the door.

  Jo mumbles Oh, and Thank you and Oh, but already Lucia is fleeing, an echo of footsteps in the hall.

  At her desk, Jo completes a letter in the matter of Brodsky v. Ludwig.

  CELIA WEEDS and waters and the zinnias bloom. Delphinium, snapdragons, honeysuckle, common daisies, roses in yellow and red and white. Some of these Celia cuts and brings into the house; others she won’t dare touch. Peas blossom and mature, green tomatoes fatten. It’s best to think only of the colors, to be empty except for yellow against green against red. The back porch is the only place Jo can breathe, at least for a while; she can’t cook dinner unless the porch door is open, and she won’t sit at the dining room table, despite her father’s complaints.

  At summer’s end, Moshe Schumacher’s cousin Gert, a terse, stout woman in her forties, takes up Lucia Mazzano’s desk. Daily, Jo falls into the percussive hum of the typewriter, works precisely and without thought. She walks instead of taking the streetcar, and her body seems as light as a lifted fever. Still, the cooling nights are marred by poor sleep, which seems connected to no one but Celia: Jo imagines Celia humming through wounds in her throat; imagines the roses in the yard blooming over Celia’s body until she falls beneath their weight, until she is buried in roses. Their malignant proliferation speeds on, obliterating the house. Even when Jo is awake, the humming persists, mixed with patternless ticking and faint sporadic bells.

  CHAPTER 14

  Lillian

  1934

  Moshe’s voice on the telephone is unhappi-ness itself, potent enough to change the air and seep through Lillian’s skin. He’s been calling to remind her to visit their mother, and for months she has ignored his reminders. Now he says, “Lilly, we need to talk, you and I. When will you come talk to me? Tomorrow? Come to the house to dinner. You will be here, Lilly?”

  She pours rose oil into her bath and drinks a gin over ice. The unhappiness of men so easily chafes. You have to be watchful, let the weight slide off your shoulders and neck, keep your hands hidden or they will at once be burdened. Lillian has her daily rituals of lotions: face cream in the morning and at night, hand cream three times a day, once a day lotion for her legs and arms and neck. The rose oil she drops in her bath twice a week, as if this will keep unhappiness from sticking to her skin.

  Of course you need more than bath oil: be careful, decide when to listen and when to feign listening, daydream when you can. Lillian pretends she does not see the
deepening worry in her boss Harry Kaplan, an old friend of her father’s, who now slumps in the stationer’s back office recalculating numbers, closes the store on Tuesdays and sends her home early on Fridays; Harry who is so mired in his worries he doesn’t notice Lillian speaking to him. “Have a good evening,” she says, day after day. She locks the store entrance, returns through the already dark afternoon to her flat, and smoothes on hand cream.

  Abe’s unhappiness seems constant, though now more than usual his unhappiness is tied to his store. Jewelry sales have stayed flat; some of his competitors have gone under. Worry makes Abe efficient and unsentimental. He stocks simpler pieces—more garnets, more diamond chips—offers payment plans, expects less from walk-in business, and more, it seems, from Lillian. More patience with his moods, more cooking at her flat instead of dining out, more fast unromantic sex, while he offers fewer endearments, fewer gifts, less affection. One day he is obsessed by the loss of a fedora, convinced it is at her flat, and the next visit he mentions nothing about it, brings a bottle of wine and gives her a perfunctory kiss. She has seen these phases arrive and depart, fluctuations within a larger too-familiar stasis, but she has learned to keep to her own rituals and turn him down when he is most harsh. She has her gin, her baths, her own quiet pleasures.

  But Moshe’s unhappiness she cannot shrug off: his voice swims in her blood. She should not ignore her mother—there is always a price to ignoring her mother—and perhaps the scales have tipped, the price of ignoring higher than the price of visiting. Now his unhappiness is a man’s reinforced by a mother’s, by their mother’s— sharp-toothed, daubed with lavender. Even though you know better, the lavender will fool you, so fragrant, so promising, you lose yourself in burgeoning hope and find yourself bleeding from the ankles and wrists. The longer you visit Isabel, the greater the chance you will be afflicted, all the while you are stunned by lavender. You leave her house gasping. She’s an old woman: how does this happen? Even now, Lillian isn’t sure. She pictures her mother as a middle-aged woman, a woman the age Lillian herself is now, a morose beauty confounding her husband. From Isabel’s pink mouth there’s a steady murmur of dissatisfaction, dour music, which hangs in the air when she is silent. So clumsy you are, so childish, no good, she says, and how do you forget your shame, your father’s shame in the face of such unhappiness? No one could stop the murmur, not even Moshe, the one she loved. But Isabel is not middle-aged, and Lillian is not a child, and Sol has been dead for decades. In recent years Isabel has weakened, but she’s also soured down to essence, a bitter extract lavender does not mask. Does anything? Sleep? Perhaps in sleep she is satisfied; perhaps in sleep she forgets them all.

  Still, even now small specks of hope survive, like spores adrift for years, announcing themselves in liminal moments. You steel yourself but then you’re lulled by a small unexpected kindness— a birthday note—and you’re stupidly, irresistibly drawn to her. For a moment Isabel seems open, she kisses you, and then she’s murmuring her discontent, and before you’ve steeled yourself again, there’s the insult, the snuffing out, and in the place of hope a flush of shame. Go home. As quickly as you can, go home to your bath, to your gin on ice, remembering your own small life, beyond your mother’s reach.

  And without those specks of hope? Hard to say, just as it is hard to decipher which fragments of memory will serve you and which will do you in. Once Isabel called Lillian nafka, under her breath but loud enough to be heard, with the knowledge of Lillian’s perfect comprehension: whore. Years have passed. If you choose to forget, the word might rise up at you again, or another word, another kind of insult, fat perhaps, she likes to call Lillian fat, and wrap the insult in an ordinary sentence Lillian cannot refute (Still fat Lilly, but healthy, you can thank God for your health). Scowls at Lillian’s clothes, though Lillian is wearing a dress she bought at Joseph’s, where the mayor’s wife shops. If you choose to remember every insult, you cannot bear to be in Isabel’s company.

  The only alternative is to dodge the question, which Lillian has been doing. Dodging her mother. After each conversation with Moshe, there is a shallowness to her breathing, a tightening in her belly, a blue-black dread. She has on this earth one mother, a mother she wishes to forget, whose love is the color of bruises and who will, if you ignore her, haunt you into the next world.

  Lillian breathes and sucks at the gin and feels a slow remove from her own body. Fat but not a whore. Fat but no fatter than Bertha, who is accused of nothing but goodness. Or Moshe, dear God, she loves him, but the man is a house. She rubs lotion on her hands, her elbows. Fat in whose eyes? Who cares about fat? Her father never insulted her, or anyone for that matter, not even in reply to Isabel’s taunts. He deserved better, deserved to outlive Isabel, to retire in the house he bought, where Lillian would have visited him daily. Instead her mother claimed it all, her mother, who deserves what? Lillian thinks, and there’s another sharp pull of breath, the gradual blurring of the living room into watery shapes, cream, violet, the fine penumbra of oblivion. No. Lillian’s an imperfect woman but she is not a monster: she’s neglected commandments, but she has paid the price of transgression. Hasn’t she? She does not honor her mother, but that other wish—dead, she’s said it—does not belong. The gin is very cold. Not honoring is the best she can do, with this mother, in this life.

  MOSHE’S HOUSE is a large red-brick on Nottingham, a street of gracious houses, wide lawns, spreading trees, and from his living room window there’s a view of Delaware Park, snow-covered, the snow blue under streetlamps and the early rising moon. At the door, Moshe kisses Lillian and sets a hand behind her elbow and guides her into the house, all one smooth movement, as if she might slip away. “I’m glad you’re here, Lilly,” he says, and hangs up her coat and offers her a gin with lime.

  In the living room’s blue damask reading chair sits Isabel, though not the Isabel of Lillian’s imagination or even of her visit four months ago: this Isabel’s a wren, tiny in the Moshe-size chair, blinking at Lillian. Her chestnut wool dress bunches around her hips, fine bony hands drop from her sleeves. It’s hard not to stare. Lillian at least has the presence of mind to set down her gin and take her mother’s hand and kiss her on the cheek.

  “Hello Mama, how are you?”

  Isabel frowns at Lillian’s dress. “The same,” she says, though she clearly isn’t the same, or, rather, the same has become different. “I don’t know about your brother,” Isabel tells Lillian. “You look well.”

  “What about me?” Moshe says. “Never been better, Ma. Did Bertha get your tea?”

  “She’s an angel, your Bertha,” Isabel says.

  “Lilly, see if there’s some tea for her, would you?” Moshe waves toward the long hallway, the casual wave that always accompanies his orders.

  “Of course,” Lillian says, and in fact it’s a relief to have a moment in the reliable company of the parquet floor and hallway chandelier. She glances into the dining room—table set with wedding china, a couple of bottles of French wine on the sideboard— and makes her way to the kitchen.

  The air smells of good meat and rosemary and cooked fruit, and heat fills the kitchen: Bertha is roasting lamb. She’s pumpkin round in her blue apron, hair swept back in a bun, wisps clinging to her temples, face pink from exertion. Bertha squints at roast potatoes.

  It’s easier here. Lillian would not mind squinting in the kitchen with Bertha. True, Bertha can be an angel of sorts—and angels are tiresome—but you’d have to be one to live with Moshe, to ignore his dalliances and raise his children and be kind to his prune-hearted mother. A dopey angel, Lillian thinks, one who closes her eyes when she needs to. And maybe it’s a fair bargain: she’s a rich woman, a woman whose husband loves her even if his way of loving is wildly flawed, a woman whose loyalty is returned with affection and security and fur coats. She has made her compromises, and she has been good to Lillian (who is not fat and not a whore). She deserves, if not Lillian’s love, then her kindness and respect.

  “
It smells wonderful in here,” Lillian says.

  “Oh, Lilly.” Bertha leans over to kiss her on the cheek. “I’m glad you could make it. Moshe’s been wanting to see you.”

  “He asked about tea for Mama.”

  “I took her a cup and she sent it away. But there’s the tray: you might try again.”

  The tray appears untouched. Perhaps she did bring Isabel tea, or perhaps this is a way to make Lillian serve Isabel, who likes to be served and softens toward those who serve her. “I see,” Lillian says.

  Bertha forks the potatoes onto the serving dish, blows at the tendril of hair falling over her right eye. Lillian stanches the impulse to tuck the loose hair behind Bertha’s ear. “Do you need any help?”

  “No. Just take the tea to Mama, thanks, Lilly.”

  “She’s changed,” Lillian says.

  Bertha hesitates over the roast carrots, sighs. “Poor thing. Did Moshe get you a drink?”

  “In the living room.” Lillian picks up the tea tray, leaves the fragrant kitchen and recrosses the long hall out to the living room and Moshe and her mother, the wren.

  “Here you are, Mama,” Lillian says. “Here’s your tea.”

  “Thank you, Lilly.” Pleasant. And holding her teacup, Isabel has the mild expression of sleep. It’s true she doesn’t look good, but her expression belongs to someone else’s mother. Lillian sits on the sofa beside Isabel’s chair, picks up the gin, and over the top of her glass watches Moshe, who seems both anxious and deliberate. He’s expert at hiding his moods, but not expert enough for Lilly: he’s rattled, and he wants something.

  Headlights slide over the snow of Delaware Park, a few flakes beginning to drift down again, the trees’ dark silhouettes layered with blue. “I love that view,” Lillian says, and Moshe says, “Nice, isn’t it?” and Isabel sips at her tea. Her silence seems a kind of vacuum, anomalous to Lillian. No one yet leads the conversation: always it has been Isabel, with Lillian defending herself and Moshe clowning to distract them.