Lion's Share

by Rochelle Rattner

  “What are you doing over the next two hours?”

  She had to admit she wasn’t doing anything.

  “Why not come over now? I’ll get coffee started and put on the air conditioner—it’ll be nice and cool by the time you get here.” He recalled Jana’s previous complaints about how hot her apartment was, so he had a feeling that last comment would convince her to come right over.

  A half hour later his strong arms enveloped her, pressing her against him despite the heat. “I’ve got coffee all ready,” he said, pulling away. He poured two cups and brought them to the living room, then sat on the sofa, leaving room for her beside him. After a few swallows, he picked up the folder Jana had brought: “Let me take a quick look at these profiles.” He still found himself getting mixed signals from Jana; best to keep the business aspects of this visit within reach. Almost absentmindedly he leaned close as he read. Relishing the thought that her body might be able to respond normally after all, Jana moved closer.

  The mood was broken by the telephone’s harsh ring. Ed reached for it. Jana moved to a chair across the room, but couldn’t help overhearing his end of the conversation. “Look, you’re extremely lucky this time,” he was saying. “You’re able to see what’s going on.” Jana walked over to the large bay window. The last time she’d seen a window like this, complete with a cushioned window bench, had been in her grandmother’s house. “We’ve all been through periods where we need to talk to someone, if only to sort out conflicting feelings. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” The window needed washing, but the sun managed to shine through anyway; the apartment was high enough to avoid soot and traffic noise. “It’s a beautiful day out,” Ed said into the receiver, almost as if reading Jana’s thoughts. “Go out on your balcony, read a novel. The work will still be there tomorrow, or the next day. No one’s standing over you.”

  Turning back into the room, Jana held the entire apartment before her. The front door opened onto a long hallway that had two rooms off it: the kitchen and the bedroom; the bathroom, between these, could be entered from either room. The living room itself was huge and had French doors which could be closed to form two rooms. It impressed her as more comfortable than her own apartment, with her paints everywhere and no place to sit except the bed. Two people could easily live here. Taking a deep breath, she recalled an article she’d read a few years ago in New York Magazine or The New Yorker discussing life in singles bars—it mentioned that people with rent-stabilized apartments were very much in demand. The superficiality had struck her so much at the time that she’d quoted passages to several people. Yet here she was stooping to that level.

  “I know, dear, I know,” Ed said. “Nobody promised it would be easy. But remember, I’m here. Call me back if you want.” He put the phone down, lit a cigarette, and stared off into space, almost unaware of Jana’s presence. “I’m sorry,” he said finally, expelling a long stream of smoke. “She was desperate, and I didn’t want to say I’d call back later.”

  “No problem. Was that your sister?” Jana was anxious to reassure herself this wasn’t some girlfriend.

  “No, no. She’s an old friend. An old friend with a lot of problems.”

  “Sounds like she’s got a good friend in you.”

  “She used to, I guess. But there’s a limit. I don’t want to get caught up in her hysteria again.” Ed listlessly stretched his arm across the back of the sofa but got to his feet before Jana could come over to join him. “Why don’t we get out of here before Kathe calls back? Come on, I’ll treat you to brunch.” Jana glanced toward her watch, then decided the time didn’t matter, she could always take a later bus. She wanted to learn more about Kathe.

  They took the elevator down, walked through the cool marble lobby that was the high point of most pre-war buildings, and emerged onto the hot, muggy street. They walked along West End Avenue in silence among Orthodox families returning from the dozens of synagogues tucked away in this area, the men in heavy black coats that looked out of place in this heat. In stark contrast, there were groups of people with beach towels over their arms.

  Ed guided her toward the doorway to Marsala Cafe, a little place on the side street just west of Broadway. “The heat’s been getting to me this weekend,” Jana said, cautiously eyeing the outside tables. “Would you mind sitting inside?”

  “My sentiments exactly. I usually love sunlight, but this humidity is intense even for me.” Inside the air-conditioning was on high, but people were packed close enough to absorb any chill. They let themselves be ushered to a booth whose high back gave off a somewhat exaggerated air of privacy.

  “Have you ever heard that old saying about how people come to resemble their dogs?” Ed asked once they were seated. “Kathe has long, straight, strawberry blonde hair, parted in the center and curling slightly upward at the ends—just like a Yorkshire terrier.”

  “And she has a Yorkshire terrier as a pet, right?” Jana replied. She quickly decided on scrambled eggs and let the menu rest unopened on the table in front of her. Her eyes were still adjusting to the darkness after the bright sun outside. Ed exchanged a few words with the waitress; this obviously was a place he frequented.

  “Not one dog—Kathe had sixteen when I met her,” Ed said, turning his attention back to Jana as soon as the waitress left. “And they weren’t pets, they were an obsession.”

  “You’re kidding. How could someone have sixteen dogs?”

  “Kathe bred them. She had as many as twenty for awhile there.” Ed’s voice became animated as he eased into the story: Kathe went with a friend to a dog show, met a guy, and fell passionately in love with him. Kathe, the guy, and all his dogs spent two days together, leaving his RV only for meals. Then he was gone, promising to write and call, but he never did. Kathe started attending dog shows in the area, hoping to run into him. When she finally did, he seemed distant. She reasoned it was because they didn’t have enough in common, so she started breeding and showing Yorkies.

  “I discovered Kathe with a pack of caged dogs in her living room. Yap, yap, yap all night.” Ed yapped himself. “She was thrusting her motherly instincts onto puppy after puppy. I watched her hair grow uncombed while the dogs were treated to Brillcreem. A tiny red or blue bow above each ear became two bows, then three.”

  It was the wrong time to laugh, but the image Ed was presenting of this woman with the uncombed hair was too vivid. Besides, laughing prevented Jana from thinking about how, in teenage rebellion against the suburbia that threatened to engulf her, she’d let her hair go uncombed for days on end. Her mother once spent five hours brushing the knots out. It happened once, and it could happen again, but next time her mother wouldn’t be around. If she continued to live by herself, no one would be around to give a damn next time. She might end up an old woman with uncombed hair and sixteen dogs. Or sixteen stuffed dogs and one stuffed lion. Even if the dogs were live pets, she doubted she’d care enough to brush their fur and cart them off to shows. She’d more than likely stay cooped up in her apartment with the yapping, paint-stained dogs and a hundred cityscapes.

  “Go ahead, laugh,” Ed said, interrupting her thoughts. “At least now I can laugh, too. But at the time, I had myself convinced that all Kathe needed was someone who would care about her. And it worked for awhile. She gradually stopped going to dog shows. After a year, she had only two dogs left. You could sit down in her apartment without getting hair all over you. I honestly thought I was helping her.”

  “It sounds like you did help her.” Jana reached across the table and gently squeezed Ed’s hand.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes my being with her was more detrimental than anything else. I remember once she arranged to sell a dog to a woman in New Paltz. We drive sixty miles, drop him off, stay and chat with the woman, then drive home. Later that night Kathe became hysterical—the woman mentioned having an ulcer, and Kathe worried it might interfere with the care she would give the animal. The next day we drove back, returned the money, and picked up th
e dog.”

  “So having the car made it too easy?”

  “Sure. If Kathe’d had to traipse back and forth by train, she might have thought twice about it. And if I hadn’t been with her, she probably wouldn’t have spent time chatting with the woman to begin with. She’d have never found out about the ulcer, and the dog would be fine.” Ed took a long sip of coffee. “I wanted to help, but I couldn’t live her life for her.”

  Jana stared at him. She could easily imagine him chatting away with some woman to whom he was delivering a dog. Ed enjoyed talking, enjoyed learning about people, and easily drew them out. His sensitivity on the phone with Kathe entranced her. But maybe he was fed up with nurturing love-starved little girls who worked out their frustrations through dogs or paintings instead of with other human beings.

  “Anyway, enough about Kathe,” Ed said, buttering a slice of whole wheat toast. “How’s your painting going?” She answered easily. They talked about the panels she was painting, about being out of the city.

  “When I first took the job with APL, I thought it would give me more time to spend weekends at the shore, but the longer I’m there, the more I realize I’m happiest spending weekends in the city, working part of the day, maybe taking in a movie or a concert Saturday night,” Ed said. “And it’s interesting what advantages there are to working under stress: I’ve been running myself so ragged lately I don’t spend much time eating, let alone dreaming about food.”

  “Aha! The perfect example of the young executive climbing the corporate ladder,” Jana teased. “Working so hard you don’t even mind that you’re working.”

  “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Ed said. “I’m just happy doing what I’m doing.”

  “You don’t sometimes think about moving up in the company? Taking over Frank’s job, for instance? Come on, confess. You can trust me.”

  “I never doubted you for a moment. But seriously, Frank sits behind a desk most of the day. The only people he meets are CEOs and the board of directors. If I had to go to all those fancy luncheons, I’d gain weight again. It might be nice to be making Frank’s salary, but I’m not wanting for anything.” Ed heard himself talking and did a mental double-take. How many women had he met in the past few years who could tease him about “climbing the corporate ladder”? More to the point, could he have admitted the truth to any of the others? He wasn’t interested in those women for the same reason he wasn’t interested in Frank’s job: they insisted on being part of the social scene, going to all the chic places. Look at Frank running off to the Hamptons every weekend; contrast that with Jana’s telling him that growing up in Lakewood had been beach enough for her.

  “When I graduated college, I thought I’d become a journalist and write articles that would change the way people look at the world.” Ed laughed to think of his younger self and how easily he could share that with Jana; something about her seemed to encourage openness. “After two or three years in the work force, I realized that even political columnists can’t bring about such changes. Working as community coordinator for APL lets me at least affect the way a handful of people think.”

  “It took you two or three years to lose your innocence, did it? You should have been an artist. I moved to New York and spent my first three days here taking a portfolio of drawings around, not making appointments, just footing it from one gallery to the next. I didn’t even think to make slides. I lugged around the whole batch, assuming the galleries would be waiting with open arms to receive me. It was a shock to my whole system, not to mention my feet.” In a moment of giddiness, Jana let her leg brush lightly against Ed’s.

  The conversation continued effortlessly until Jana had to go. Ed helped her into a cab, making her promise to call and let him know she’d arrived safely. She climbed aboard the three o’clock bus a split second before it left, and settled next to a thin young man already absorbed in a book. His presence seemed innocuous. After this morning, Ed’s was the only body she could imagine getting close to hers.

  Jana spent Sunday and Monday working on the three-screen panel she’d been describing to Ed over brunch. It juxtaposed three park scenes—Bryant Park filled with winos, a black-and-white imitation of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Thames, and lunch-hour businessmen in City Hall Park. This, along with Mulberry Street and a few other paintings, was becoming an unplanned series depicting vanishing neighborhoods. She was filling in the details on the City Hall Park panel when she caught herself copying the ridged gray buttons on the suit Ed had worn to Friday’s meeting, three buttons on one sleeve, two on the other. “Good thing I’m not painting the winos,” she told herself, though Ed might make an interesting wino. He’d be a little thinner, his face would become drawn, giving him a more serious look. He’d still look damn good. “No he wouldn’t,” she mumbled, trying to push him from her mind and get back to work. If he were a wino, he’d probably have cigarette holes in that jacket and be wearing a pair of lopsided glasses taped together in ten places, since his contacts would be permanently lost. He’d also be almost totally bald now. “He’s not that interesting,” she muttered, laughing. But she couldn’t convince herself.

  She’d talked to Ed Saturday night, and already she was hungering to hear his voice again. She tried to think up some excuse for calling, all the while hating the woman she was turning into. Why couldn’t she simply pick up the phone, tell him again she’d enjoyed spending time with him Saturday, say she’d been thinking about him? Because she couldn’t. For all she knew, he might have another woman with him; Kathe might be with him, and they might be laughing about her the way they’d laughed about Kathe Saturday morning. She might hope that Ed had been thinking about her today, but she had no way of knowing. And she couldn’t take the chance of rejection.

  The only time she found it easy to reach out to people was when she was functioning as a curator. Then, she could distance her own thoughts and feelings. If a person didn’t recall her name, she simply reminded them: name, rank, and serial number. No chance of being hurt. In her curator role, she could call Ed to see if Phyllis had any reactions to the bios she’d given him to bring in. It was safer that way, one professional to another …

  Ed started by saying he’d just walked in from a good dinner, “And more than that, a good drink.”

  “Hard day?”

  “Among other things, my air conditioner here is broken.”

  “I thought you never used it. You said you only put it on for my benefit.”

  “Well, I want to use it now. Today’s been one of the most humid days of the summer.”

  “It’s cool here,” Jana said without thinking.

  “That doesn’t help me any.”

  “Well, you can come up here. I’ll sneak you into my room.”

  “I want you to come back to the city. We’ll have dinner tomorrow night, my treat. This restaurant tonight had one of the best pianists I’ve heard in a long time. I think you’d enjoy him.”

  “But you said your air conditioner’s broken.”

  “The air conditioner in my bedroom still works.”

  The conversation went back and forth for twenty minutes, the two of them laughing, hinting, flirting. By that time, she no longer needed an excuse for calling, but used it anyway.

  “I left them with Phyllis’ secretary,” Ed said, sounding somewhat cool all of the sudden. “If I know Phyllis, she’s already begun contacting the various local newspapers, but she seldom has any visible reaction other than to say ‘thank you.’”

  The minute she hung up the phone, Jana panicked. She’d wanted to feel loose, but not that loose. If Ed had been within a hundred miles of her, if there had been the slightest chance he would take her up on it, she’d never have suggested sneaking him into her room. How had the conversation gone off in that direction? There’d been the perfect opportunity to get into a discussion about music when he’d mentioned that pianist, but she’d been too busy thinking about herself to pick up on it. Maybe she ought to quit while she wa
s ahead. She wasn’t cut out for this, this, whatever you wanted to call it, this caring about others, this loving.

  Tired, disgusted with herself, she settled down on top of the bed. So much for artists being coddled at the colonies, she thought bitterly. A little coddling would help right now, something in the form of a soft down comforter. The blankets here were only slightly better than army blankets, like the ones they used when she went away to camp. She thought about how much she’d hated those scratchy camp blankets—the kids in her bunk had rejected her, she’d felt uncomfortable to begin with, and those blankets had accentuated her discomfort. That’s why she’d spent most of that summer in the infirmary. She recalled lying on top of a blanket, watching as the doctor moved slowly toward her. “Doesn’t that feel better?” he asked, his lips brushing her newly sprouting hair.

  She could feel all the tension in her body. This wasn’t camp, it was Yaddo. The people here were friends, they were close associates, they respected each other. Not one person was out there laughing behind her back. There was no reason not to be comfortable here, she told herself, closing her eyes again.

  When she was here five years ago, the main source of gossip had been some guy who’d been in residence for six weeks and had brought anywhere from six to ten different women into his room, depending upon who was telling the story. Not very subtle about it either, people said. All the more reason not to tease Ed about sneaking him into her room. She shouldn’t have risked it, even in jest. “Kibitzing,” as her parents called it, was a throwback to childhood. Since she’d moved to New York, she’d thrust herself into work with a passion that usually didn’t allow time for such trivialities.

  She crawled under the covers—maybe she could at least dream of Ed. Instead, it was Kathe she dreamt about. Tall, thin Kathe assumed her own small stature. Ed’s air conditioner was broken; she kept screaming that her dogs were going to die of heatstroke and it was his fault. She must have had thirty huge, filthy dogs living uncaged in his apartment. At least ten slept in the bed with her. She kept petting them, telling him to brush out their fur so they wouldn’t die so fast. Ed tried calming her down by telling her he’d find her a nice apartment with French doors and plenty of light, only Jana knew it was going to be a thousand miles away, far enough that he’d never have to see her. He promised it would be large enough to paint in, but it was a tiny shack with a leaky roof and tar paper walls. “I understand what you’re going through,” he told her. “But believe me, you’ll like it here once you get settled in.” And he fondled her hand as he said that.