The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  And still she cannot sleep. The image of Eli’s hand is again alternately tender and grubby; she recoils, but not every moment, as if the tenderness distracts her from recoiling, or perhaps she is lured in just enough to make recoiling possible. He is luring her with his hands. She does not want to be lured. After the hands other things follow. After the hands, he would expect to press himself against her, into her, maybe taking her apart—which is what men do, even Eli would. It’s three o’clock in the morning. Why he’d expect such things from Jo she cannot fathom.

  CELIA IS neatly dressed for the third day in a row, unusually concerned with the morning headlines. Their father eats a slice of toast and pores over the Jewish papers. It’s as if they’re both searching through the black-and-white pages for something essential. Her father is mild today, careful in the way he asks Celia for the jam. “Here, Papa.” Celia smiles at him, then goes back to her paper, pointedly ignoring Jo. It’s not a stance Celia can maintain without great effort, can she? All this cleanliness and calm and getting along.

  Nobody says anything about the date with Eli, but Eli Abramowitz, tender or not, grubby or not, may be Jo’s last chance for a life beyond Lancaster. A chance she did not expect. Marriage, the kind of chance she’d never seek, but with Eli would it be so bad? Here is her father in his freshly pressed suit, clean shaven, his breathing labored as he scours the Forward, and Celia pretending to be fine. And what is happening at Eli’s house? Is his mother also scouring the Forward? And Eli? Drinking coffee, drawing sparrows? Jo, teacup in hand, imagines herself in some liminal space between houses, parachuting down through the snow, glimpsing her father and Celia through one window, Eli and Mrs. Abramowitz through another, the white ground dotted with canned vegetables and sacks of sugar and pearls on satin hearts.

  IT’S AFTERNOON when Eli drops by the store. “I would like to take you to dinner,” he says. “Saturday. How about Saturday?”

  She’s watching his hands. “Lookit,” she says, “I’m no prize.”

  “What are you doing Saturday, Jo?”

  “I’m not the type for this, you know?”

  He is silent for a moment. “Would you like to have dinner Saturday?”

  “I don’t know,” Jo says.

  And Eli nods, his face reddening. “Okay. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He quickly leaves, the bells on the outer door jingling as he closes it.

  And then she feels herself at the edge of things, a sickly haze in the room. If the snow would stop she’d leave now, she ought to leave now anyway, drive to the snow-filled farms and orchards and find a diner. Lockport maybe. Where she could drink coffee and eat a slice of cake and speak to no one, and not think, just breathe in the anonymity, the small pretend life of a woman at a diner. Which is how far from any other life? A life in California, say, or the life of a man at a diner, or the life of a pilot. A thick dizziness passes over her, a wavering, as if she’s had liquor and is now buried in lostness, the edges of the world collapsing, right here behind the cuff links; the steel cash register could slide away and the room fragment as the city’s swept bit by bit over the lake ice to open water, then into the mouth of the Niagara and down the icy rapids and over the Falls, to flow north unseen beneath the ice bridge into Ontario and toward the sea. A vast watery maw even larger than the lake, in which people drown and are lost, bones never retrieved. From the back room her father’s radio reports new rationing, and bombs falling on London. If Goldie hadn’t disappeared, Jo would know what to seek, wouldn’t she? She would know.

  She calls Sadie, even with her father at the store Jo calls Sadie, who answers exasperated. But Jo’s voice is pinched, Jo herself pinched inside the layers of stuffing, and she asks if Sadie is thinking of coming by the store.

  “What’s wrong?” Sadie says.

  “Nothing. Come take a look at the rubies.”

  “What’s going on, Jo? I’ve got to get the girls. What’s this about rubies?”

  Jo doesn’t know: it must be like this for Celia sometimes.

  “Make sense, Jo. What is it?”

  And Jo gathers herself. “Just thought your husband might buy you some,” she says.

  “Really Jo.” And there’s Sadie’s habitual sigh. “I’m sure they’re beautiful. Papa always picks good ones.” There’s a pause on the line, faint voices of strangers popping up and dispersing. “Did you sleep?” Sadie says.

  “A little.”

  “I know you’re upset about Goldie. But you can’t go without sleep.” Sadie’s talking the way she would talk to her daughters, the way she would talk to Celia, Jo can hear the sureness and slight condescension. A tone that usually makes Jo balk, but not today, when the room is so fragile.

  “Maybe I’ll go home early,” Jo says. “Maybe I’ll sleep then.”

  She’ll wait until four, she tells herself, she’ll keep to the usual time, because further breaking the routine could break other things. She fidgets. She paces. Her father takes more pearls from the safe and restocks the display case, carefully arranging the strands. The postal delivery arrives, and he glances through the mail—there he is again, glancing through the mail. For how many years has he done this?

  The words spill out of her as if someone else is speaking them. “Know anyone in California, Papa?”

  He pauses and studies her for what seems a long time. Tilts his head. There’s a slight trembling in his hands, from the question or the radio news or his age. “No,” he says firmly. “You dreaming about pictures, Josephina? Hollywood?”

  Jo feels the clamminess again, the room fragile as blown glass, and she imagines the movie yachts in Florida set loose from their docks, drifting in the sea toward Mexico. Nothing today is anchored.

  “Maybe I’ll take Celia to a show,” she says.

  For a moment he seems a frozen image of himself, his lips pressed together, the slightest sag in his shoulders. Anchor, Jo thinks, be an anchor. Say Josephina again. But he’s motionless: it’s terrible, the way he leaves like this.

  She should not have mentioned California. How stupid—but now she’s done it and he is traveling away. And she must find the right thing to make him return, to make the day stop tilting so wildly.

  “Maybe Saturday,” she tells him. There is no thought of Eli. “We can go Saturday night.”

  Finally her father summons himself, straightens his jacket, and offers the briefest of smiles. “Yes,” he says. “Find a picture you like.” If his face reveals regret (could that be it? Regret? The expression passes too quickly to be sure), she does not know the source.

  “Have a good time,” he says. He draws his wallet from his jacket pocket and offers her a dollar for the show.

  CHAPTER 20

  Irving

  1943–45

  He tried to follow Leo’s advice, which arrived in frequent letters, and he did not know whether his assignment in Somerset was Schumacher luck or his own. After his unit shipped out he was transferred—it seemed at first the worst of luck, to be separated from the unit on arriving in Europe, everyone said so—but Rogers drove him to Yeovil and he got his assignment stocking a PX and driving in supplies. There were orchards in Somerset, and moors and hill country, and when he was driving the war itself would recede. He had a steady flow of cigarettes and beer and after a time he met a brunette named Meg. Maybe, he thought, Schumacher influence reached into the war itself.

  During air raids he would fall into a panic that seemed a cold lagoon, and he would sweat through his shirts and carry a sourness with him until he could change: he had managed to requisition extra underclothes because of the sweating, but even so he could not always keep up. Driving past a bomb crater near Bristol he stopped and surveyed the damage and tried from then on to take other routes. This was easiest when he was alone and didn’t have to explain circuitous detours, but when he couldn’t detour he would sweat (humiliating that a hole in the ground made him sweat) and pretend the crater was from a different era, a loose, anomalous event that had jimmied itself free and
smacked awkwardly into the English countryside.

  At boot camp there had been the hard shock of being always Irving, and an Irving whittled down to bone, suspended in barren space: Private Cohen. Keep your head down, Leo told him. Head down. There were the deadly boring drills and exhaustion, the moments when adrenaline flared and the moments when he felt too tired to be afraid. Pay attention, Leo told him. Listen. In the barracks with the other men—kids, really, some barely eighteen—Irving said he was from Buffalo, he’d had a few girlfriends, and his family owned a jewelry business. Then he said he was the buyer for the store and took occasional trips to New York City. This did not seem so much of a stretch: in time he would be a buyer. But Leo’s instructions echoed—Don’t talk big—as if Leo were in the room; Irving would make himself stop and shrug. He didn’t know the city very well, only a few hotels, a few ordinary restaurants. Really it was all business. The recruits who did know New York would jump in then and take the spotlight, and describe the city in technicolor details which he memorized.

  In the early mornings when his bunk was still warm he felt a hazy sense of his bed at Lancaster—the air outside cool, the light beginning, the sensation of burrowing deeper—and he could imagine a different day ahead. First would be the necessity of washing and finding his suit, but the disruption of rising would be ameliorated by his walk in the city: here was the vast pendulous sky, buildings rising high above the broadest street, shops readying to open, legions of cars, the traces of the night still fading. A coffee shop for breakfast, which made him feel again like a city man, a traveler. Alone, he could relax with his coffee, his paper, and a fleeting royal feeling would come over him the moment the waitress set down his plate of eggs and smiled. By the time he finished his breakfast and paid, he felt prepared to open the store. He walked to lower Main Street, the weather easy—it would be May—and opened the metal gates over the windows, and the front door, and entered the silent shop, its thick rug and gleaming cases of necklaces, cuff links, rings, all intimating grand hotels and romance. For part of each morning, Irving could be the distinguished proprietor. This role sustained him for an hour (though its appeal ebbed and he grew bored); then there would be the relief of his father’s arrival, the relinquishing of responsibility.

  Mornings in his bunk he could conjure the waitress (more beautiful now, the smile more inviting), the plates of toast and eggs, the moment of unlocking the shop, but at night there was only blankness. On the dullest days his life felt tinny and airless, and he found relief in physical exhaustion. There were no women, no one touched him, and this seemed almost impossible to withstand. He found himself missing even the women who arrived at the store perfumed and smiled at him indulgently and left. In the mail he received occasional letters from Lillian Schumacher, which made him happy and unaccountably wistful; and frequent letters from Sadie, elegantly written and chatty. He paid little attention to the content of Sadie’s correspondence but felt soothed by it nonetheless, the way he did when he sat in her living room and listened not to her actual words but to the music of her voice. And then she made the fuss about Goldie, and for a few days he wished she would stop writing and leave him be. All that polite fury, which came as a surprise, a shock, really—his feet were blistered from marching and he’d bruised his elbow, and the brief pleasure of holding the envelope was canceled by Sadie’s slap. The fact of Goldie’s life seemed to him indisputable: Sadie could hardly have thought Goldie was dead. She’d known better from the start, hadn’t she? True, his awareness of her ignorance had slipped into a kind of nether space: years ago he’d stopped thinking about it. He had wrestled for a brief time with the matter, but then there were reasons, weren’t there? Goldie’s privacy to protect. Goldie could have written to Sadie anytime she wanted. This was not his fault.

  Still, when there was a brief interruption in mail delivery, he missed Sadie’s letters and was glad when they resumed, at first with a cool tone and later warmer though always without money. Goldie sent him a postcard with a picture of a carousel near the ocean, and Celia wrote two letters in careful script, one describing the latest pictures she’d seen, the other about her walks and her cat. And his father wrote to him, elliptical letters that seemed to be about Russian and Polish villages in a time before Irving existed.

  Always there were the letters from Leo, with regular advice, some of it repeated for emphasis. Do not establish a reputation, Leo said. Watch the cards. And Irving was managing to keep his head above water in the barracks’ poker games. He joined games but did not sponsor them and never stayed in until the very end, though he wanted to. Stick to low stakes and get out early, Leo had said. You can’t afford more trouble.

  The moment he was reassigned felt like tumbling down an endless flight of stairs. Bad luck, sorry, Cohen, the others said, real worry in their faces. Sweat leaked through his shirt. Luck of the draw, the sergeant said, but Irving did not know if this was true. He was older than the other men, and nowhere near the most agile. He was Jewish. Had he ticked off a superior? He had kept his head down, held to Leo’s advice. For a few hours the falling continued— it seemed even his borrowed luck had run out, and then he was driven to a storybook town in the country, and introduced to his commander, a straight arrow named Leyton, and to a beautiful, roughly built PX.

  At first he did not comprehend the locals, though their accents appealed to him, and he worked to understand and privately to imitate the sounds. He was grateful for pubs. He was grateful for the predictable routines of stocking shelves, of selling tobacco and beer and soap and tallying accounts. Often Somerset was startlingly quiet, and he braced himself for disruption: he knew he could be reassigned again at any time.

  Most of the units coming through were new troops on their way to combat, and often they seemed like neighborhood kids; for a time Irving would strike up conversations and join their card games, but as soon as the unit was ordered to mobilize, he’d make himself scarce. There were other men convalescing before returning to action, and these men he tended to avoid, as they seemed haunted or naïvely patriotic. Occasionally they would talk to him anyway. The most likable of them, a Midwesterner named Graham, was worried about his buddies and spoke urgently of getting back to them. It was idiocy to return only to be wounded again or killed, and Irving said nothing. You could give only so much for men you’d just met, none of whom were Leo: Graham was a well-intentioned fool. Irving offered him a cigarette, and Graham accepted with a serious nod, and as Irving held out the lit match, he was nonetheless jolted by a quick, stinging wish for Graham’s loyalty.

  He followed Leo’s advice to avoid the prostitutes—Half the army has the clap, Irving, you have to watch it—but the isolation in his own body seemed a kind of punishment, a flintiness just beneath his skin. After two months he met Meg: she was in her early twenties and soft-hearted, a little shy, with a small round face that reminded him of opals and budding leaves. He took her to a dance and brought her cigarettes and sweets from the PX. And then he began to break curfew to be with her in the evening, which was not what Leo would have recommended—but Leo shared a bed every night with his wife, and had been born lucky. Irving went to Meg’s tiny flat and she undressed and touched him—it almost made him cry, Meg touching him—and she seemed to him remarkable, her body, her pale skin astonishing. And when he was inside her the flintiness dissolved, he felt immersed in syrupy hot light, and nothing was painful, and the world seemed defined by this liquid sensation he now called Meg.

  FOR MONTHS Leyton gave no sign of a transfer order, and Irving began to relax. It seemed strange that Irving’s luck would arrive with the war but he did not question it: his life had shifted, and he had become a lucky man. The men at the front were not so lucky, and when their stories drifted his way he paid no attention. Men were wounded; men were killed, including some of the men in the unit he trained with, but their stories were not his story. It was a matter of what you accepted and what you refused, he thought, a matter of what you allowed yourself to believe. Y
ou had to resist the unlucky stories. The rumors of atrocity—often involving Jews—he tried to shrink to small dark points held at a great distance, like the inverse of stars, but he would feel the sweat begin. A drink would smooth out the moment, a trip to Meg’s would put the rumors out of mind. Here was her body, her bed, his streak of luck, safe and irrefutable. Careful, Leo wrote. Don’t get too involved. But when there was a spell with clean shirts and no bombings and plenty of nights with Meg, Irving tended to believe himself.

  His father’s letters continued to arrive and Irving would open them with anticipation, only to find more details of Russia and the Ukraine: descriptions of a samovar, a meadow, a street in Kiev, all in beautiful archaic script. They were in English but seemed more like a secret code he grew frustrated trying to decipher, and he tucked them into his duffle and did not look at them again. Buffalo seemed increasingly miniature and fragmentary: he thought of Leo, and his numbers man, Murray, and the theaters on Main Street; of reading the racing forms and picking horses with smart, sprightly names. He did not have to think of Sadie, who seemed present enough in her letters, Bill shadowing her, the apparatus of her life spinning like a distant filigree ball. The Somerset orchards reminded him of western New York, and now and then he would walk in them alone, as he had been instructed not to do; but they seemed to him oddly serene, even when stripped of leaves in the winter damp. He thought then not of Buffalo but of the countryside he would drive through on the way to other towns, to the Falls, road trips on which he was not forced to be anyone in particular and could choose. There were days when he wanted to get lost in the orchards, or to drive his truck not to port towns but farther away, perhaps to Scotland. On the map there seemed to be plenty of places where one could get lost, though he knew better.