Brooklyn Love (Crimson Romance)

by Yael Levy

  Rachel tried to laugh, but only a tiny sound emerged from her throat. “It’s too late, Chris.”

  Christine grabbed her shoulders. “Do you want me to call him for you? I’ll tell him to leave you alone.”

  Rachel shook her head. “Thanks, Christine. But I’ve got to marry him, and I will. I’ll be fine, really. All my friends get anxious before their weddings. It’s just part of the whole experience.”

  Christine looked dubious. “And after the wedding? What happens then?”

  “After?” Rachel hadn’t thought about that. “I’ll deal with it then.”

  “Seems like your mind is made up.” Christine shrugged, opening the bathroom door to return to class. “I’m here if you need me, Rachel.”

  Rachel nodded. She washed her face and then called Daniel.

  His secretary put him through.

  “Hi, Daniel.” Rachel bit her lip. “How are you?”

  “I’m actually very busy right now. What do you need?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just feeling a little nervous.”

  “Rachel … this isn’t a good time. I have a big meeting coming up in five minutes. What’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing. Well, everything, really.”

  “What are you saying? Are you backing out?”

  “No. I gave you my word. I’m just feeling scared about it all.”

  “Well, what do you want from me?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to share how I was feeling — ”

  “Don’t. If you have nothing concrete to tell me, please save it for later. I have a huge meeting coming up, and I can’t be late.”

  “Right.”

  “I should be finished tonight around eight. Come to my office, and we can talk then.”

  Rachel sighed. “I’ll be there.”

  She hung up and ran back to the bathroom to throw up again. Eventually her stomach felt empty. She splashed water on her face and then called her mother.

  “Rachel! I just got back from the florist with Suri. She picked out the nicest peach-colored roses. Who knows when Leah will get married, so for you she — ”

  “Ma.”

  “You are going to love them. They look so delicate, just like you.”

  “Ma? Could you just listen to me for once?”

  “What? What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “So what? Is it about the wedding? It is, isn’t it?”

  “No, Ma. I mean yes. I mean, Daniel is great. Really. I’m just feeling nervous.”

  “What exactly are you feeling nervous about?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just such a big step. I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

  The phone went silent.

  “Ma?”

  “You got engaged to him and now you don’t know if you feel ready? I just got back from the florist. You’d better get ready!”

  “Ma.”

  “Next thing you’ll say you should live together and try it out like your artsy FIT friends.”

  “I’m not saying that,” Rachel cried.

  “Maybe he should marry one of your friends instead, who wouldn’t drei around!”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Who’s not being fair? Are you even thinking about Daniel’s needs?”

  “Ma, I’m just feeling nervous.”

  “Look how nervous Malky was, crying like that before the chuppa. I heard her all the way down the block! And now look at her — ”

  “I’m not Malky.”

  Ma snorted. “That’s the truth. She’s a smart girl. An obedient girl. Not like you, with your cockamamie ideas. Get a hold of yourself, or Daniel will leave you. And none of us would want that to happen.”

  Rachel quieted, realizing the truth of her mother’s implications.

  “A broken engagement would be very embarrassing,” Ma continued, “for you, for us. It would take so long to recover from it that you would have slim chances of ever getting married. You’d sit, Rachel. You’d sit and no one would ever marry you. None of us would want to see this not work out. None of us.”

  “Right, Ma. You’re right.” She hung up and went to the vending machine to buy a cold ice cream bar. She wondered how long it would stay in her stomach.

  • • •

  Rachel waited for Daniel to finish working. It was almost 10:00 P.M., and she’d been waiting at a desk in his nearly deserted office to talk with him since eight. She did her nails, reviewed homework; later, she made Daniel coffee.

  “Five more minutes, Rachel.” He barely looked up from his computer as she brought him another cup. She hadn’t eaten supper and felt dizzy.

  The clock moved to 10:43. “I’m done,” Daniel finally announced. “Let’s go.”

  Rachel got her things together and followed him.

  Outside, it was snowing. Rachel tightly buttoned up her red shearling coat — Daniel’s favorite — over her thick sweater. Daniel hailed a cab, and they rode eight blocks to a kosher Chinese restaurant.

  They entered a room painted red, with golden dragons stenciled onto each panel. The eatery seemed nearly empty, and when nobody came to seat them, Daniel reached over the host’s counter and rang a bell.

  The waiter came to take their order.

  Rachel stared at the waiter. “Jacob?”

  “How are you?”

  “You know my fiancée?” Daniel challenged.

  “Sure. I model for her all the time.” Jacob laughed.

  Rachel smiled. “Don’t worry, Daniel. He poses and learns Talmud while I paint.”

  “I see.”

  “Although she sure eats my parents out of all their French fries.”

  “Oh, please.” Rachel grinned. “Ilana eats way more than I do.”

  Daniel stared at Jacob. “So are you going to seat us, or what?”

  Jacob coughed. “It’s closing time, sir,” he said, and then looked at Rachel. “I suppose we could make an exception, though.”

  Daniel ran his fingers through his slicked back hair. “Good.” He sat down at the nearest booth. “Bring me a menu.”

  Jacob’s eyes widened and he stared at Rachel, who shrugged apologetically.

  “The restaurant is almost closed, sir. I can tell you today’s specials that are still available.”

  Rachel smiled. “Tell me it’s French fries!”

  Daniel pounded his spoon on the table. “How about you take our order, waiter?” Rachel cringed at his rudeness.

  “Sure.” Jacob said.

  Daniel ordered for both of them, and Jacob disappeared into the kitchen. Daniel waited for his food to arrive before speaking to Rachel.

  “So what’s bothering you?”

  Once Jacob was out of earshot, Rachel leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “Daniel, I don’t even know. The closer we are getting to the wedding, the more uncertain I’m feeling.”

  Daniel carefully stirred the spoon in his boiling-hot tea. “What exactly are you unsure about?”

  “Everything.” Rachel felt her anxiety sink heavily in her stomach like a huge Chinese dumpling.

  Daniel stopped stirring. “So you’re saying you are unsure about marrying me?”

  Rachel began to cry.

  “You choose to bring up this issue after we’ve already started planning for our wedding?”

  Rachel flushed red with shame.

  “Rachel, I don’t know what’s going on with you. Talk to your friends, a rabbi — a therapist if you must. But if you want to be my wife, you’ll have to get real sure, real fast.”

  Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, then nodded. “Maybe you should take me home now.”

  Daniel asked Jacob for the chec
k and more tea, and then told him to put the leftovers into containers to go as he cleared away their dishes.

  Jacob returned with the bill and tea but not with the leftovers.

  “Sorry,” Jacob said. “It’s late, and the rabbi already left. We can’t work in the kitchen after he leaves.”

  “That’s not my problem,” Daniel said quietly as he looked at Rachel and then back at Jacob. “Pack it up for me.”

  Jacob shook his head. “I’m sorry, but the kitchen is officially closed now. I only kept the restaurant open for you to finish your dinner.”

  Daniel brandished the bill. “I paid for the meal. I want the rest to go.”

  “I can’t, sir.”

  Daniel sat squarely in his chair. “If you can’t use the kitchen, you can buy packing materials elsewhere.”

  Jacob turned a bright crimson and stared out the window at the December snow.

  “Why don’t you come back another time?” he offered politely. “I’ll see that you get a meal on the house.”

  “No, I want my leftovers.”

  Rachel leaned over. “Please, I don’t need the leftovers. Let’s just go.”

  Daniel glared at Rachel and pounded his fist on the table. “But it’s mine!”

  Jacob took a step back and held up his palms. “Okay. The food belongs to you.” He turned and gazed at Rachel. “It all belongs to you.”

  At close to midnight, Jacob asked the men cleaning in the back to keep an eye on the restaurant, as he donned his jacket and went out into the cold to see if he could get packing containers from a coffee shop down the street.

  Daniel watched him go and laughed as Rachel gazed after Jacob in horror.

  “Really, I won’t eat it,” he confided as he stirred his tea. “But he should know who is in charge.”

  Rachel felt sickened to the core of her soul. “Don’t you think you’re being a little tough? He’s only doing his job.”

  “How dare you question me?” Daniel exploded, and slapped Rachel’s hand with his burning hot spoon.

  She instinctively retaliated, throwing her ice-cold glass of water in his face.

  Jacob returned, coughing from the outside cold, with a container from the nearby coffee shop.

  “I have to get out of here.” Rachel grabbed her coat and purse and breezed past Jacob out the door, leaving Daniel sitting wet and livid. She ran holding her coat like a cape, slipping in her high-heeled shoes, heading for the train station to take her home to Brooklyn.

  She heard the sounds of someone running behind her. Daniel. To apologize? She reached the train station and decided to face Daniel. She halted and pivoted on her feet.

  Only it wasn’t Daniel who had run after her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  While many people in Brooklyn were working on their romantic relationships, one person was working on a relationship of a different kind altogether. On a Saturday night in December, Aryeh Kaufman was in an intense discussion with his boss, Harry Green.

  Harry, over eighty years old, though with the countenance of a much younger man, sat behind his antique mahogany desk, searching the top drawer for a Cuban cigar, while Aryeh stood before him still in his raincoat, the collar haphazardly stuck inside his shirt.

  “Harry, we’ve checked your books again and again,” Aryeh said. “We’ve found terrible errors. Five million dollars flooded in from where?”

  Harry nodded the same way he would if his wife was telling him about what she just bought at Loehmann’s.

  “Business is good,” he said, suddenly pleased that he found what he had been searching for. He inhaled the pungent aroma of his cigar. “Aah, they make them good over there. Sweeter than the American ones.” He handed the cigar to Aryeh. “Want one?”

  Aryeh shook his head, instead pacing on the pink marble tiled floor in Harry’s study. A stack of papers secured under his arm, Aryeh paced as if he were mentally reviewing a Talmudic discourse. “But Harry, the same five million is going straight out to charitable contributions.”

  “I like to spread the wealth.” Harry bit the tip off of his cigar as if giving it a bris and leaned back in his wood-paneled study. While he kept his office like a pigsty, his home was his wife’s domain: a luxurious palace.

  “Spread wealth to Kaplinsky’s Monevitcher Yeshiva? Harry, please.” Aryeh arrayed the papers in front of his boss.

  Harry briefly looked them over, and then winked as if Aryeh was telling a good joke. An old joke, though. One that he’d heard before.

  “How’s your father, Aryeh?” Green lit up his cigar and motioned for Aryeh to sit down.

  “This isn’t about my father, Harry.”

  “You are a sharp boy, like your father. It’s good that you are on top of your work, kiddo. How about a raise?”

  Aryeh sat forward in the antique brown leather chair. “This isn’t about me either, Harry. It’s about you. It’s about your company.”

  Harry puffed on his cigar, blew out a ring of smoke, and stared straight at Aryeh. “What are you saying?”

  “Harry, you are a creative guy, and I’ve always known you to be a man of integrity. But what am I supposed to do with five million dollars of laundered money?”

  Green momentarily turned white, but he soon regained his jovial pink. “It’s not what you think, Aryeh. It’s just business.”

  Aryeh took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s monkey business.”

  “This goes on all the time.”

  “Keep this up and you’ll be doing time.”

  Harry laughed. “I’ve never seen you like this before, Aryeh. I always thought you to be the quiet type.”

  “Don’t digress, Harry. If I caught on to this, how long before the IRS catches on?”

  Green frowned. “How about you do your job well, so they don’t?”

  Then Aryeh turned white. “Are you asking me to commit fraud for you? To cook the books? It’s a federal offense.”

  “Only if you get caught.”

  Aryeh was so shocked that he couldn’t speak. Green took his silence as acquiescence.

  “Look, we’ve been doing this for years. I’m surprised it took you this long to catch on.”

  Aryeh shook his head. “No, I can’t be party to this. It’s wrong. It’s illegal. If you get caught, Harry, you’ll be going to jail.”

  Harry sighed. “So you think I’m just a greedy pig with nothing better to do?”

  Aryeh stared at him.

  Harry took another puff. “Coffee is doing phenomenal. I made upscale coffee what it is today.” He blew a series of smoke rings. “I don’t need the money. I’m doing this as a favor between friends.”

  Aryeh pounded his fist on Harry Green’s desk. “I don’t care why you are doing this. The Feds won’t care either. They will catch you and fry you. And anybody else associated with you.”

  “Then I guess it’s too bad that you already are associated with me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How long did it take you to catch on, kiddo? Years? You think the Feds will buy that from you?”

  Aryeh blanched. “Don’t play your mind games with me, Harry. I had no knowledge of this. And if I’m ever called to testify, I won’t cover for you.”

  Harry slowly exhaled his cigar smoke. “If they come for me, they’ll put you away, too. Put a Jew behind bars. It’s their favorite sport. Just like in the Old Country.”

  “Harry, please. This is not the Old Country.”

  Harry fumbled in his desk and took out a faded black-and-white photograph. A smiling, pudgy little girl sat in a formal pose with a solemn-looking boy. “Look.”

  “What is this?”

  “My brother and sister.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister. That’s E
lliot?”

  Harry’s eyes darkened to the spent coldness of ashes. “No. That’s not Elliot. This picture was taken when I was twelve years old, right before the end of World War II. In the Old Country.”

  Aryeh fingered the old photo.

  Harry got up from his chair and began to pace. “That was Avram Yitzchak. My younger brother. And my younger sister Sarah Rivkah; she looked just like our mother. Mama — what a beauty. She had a smile that could melt an ice block. She’d sent me with my older brother Elliot to the United States to live with distant cousins. It was her dream that we become Americans, and she was trying everything she could to join us. Everybody in the shtetl envied us for a dream that went up in smoke.”

  Aryeh gulped.

  “‘Come now,’ I’d begged her. ‘I can’t leave Grandma,’ she said. Her mother was sick, you know. ‘I need to find her someplace safe; I’ll come as soon as I can.’”

  Harry spoke, but he wasn’t there. He was in a distant time and place. “I worked hard for years and managed to get tickets for them on the S.S. St. Louis to Cuba. But when Cuba demanded an additional five hundred dollars a person to disembark, I didn’t have the money. The St. Louis sailed on to Florida and I went down to meet them. Surely America would let in refugees, right? The boat was in the harbor and I could almost touch them.”

  Harry looked Aryeh in the eye. “The Coast Guard didn’t let them land here. My family was fleeing Nazi persecution, and they were sent back to Europe, to the camps where the Nazi sons of bitches slaughtered my family. And there was nothing Harry Green could do about it.”

  “Harry,” Aryeh said quietly.

  “German marines they let into this country. But Jews with visas? Who filled their quotas? They all hate us, Aryeh. They all want to see us dead.”

  Aryeh solemnly shook his head. “Harry, I am so sorry about your loss. I never knew. But I can’t say that I agree with your philosophy.”

  “FDR knew about the camps, the trains transporting our families to death. He could have bombed the trains to stall even a few thousand deaths. But he didn’t care, Aryeh. What’s another Hymie, anyway?”

  Aryeh rose from his seat, realizing that any conversation about Harry’s accounting discrepancy was a moot point. “I’m sorry. But I can’t be a part of the way you do things, Harry.”