by Zoe Heller
“Was this taken underwater?” she asked, pointing at a mass of coiled, springy-looking matter that looked as if it might be seaweed.
Rosa shook her head. “Look at the title, Karla.”
Karla leaned in to examine the pale, penciled cursive on the right-hand corner of the mount. “Black Cunt # 3,” she read.
“I see you’re admiring my dirty picture,” Berenice said. She had returned, holding a tray. “Here’s your tea.”
“Thanks very much,” Karla said, taking a mug. “Is…is that one of yours?” she asked, gesturing at the photograph.
Berenice smiled. “Yes. My photograph, my vagina.”
Karla felt her face grow hot.
Berenice turned to Rosa. “Are you sure you won’t have anything?”
“No, thanks,” Rosa said curtly.
Berenice put her tray down on the floor and sank down elegantly beside it in a cross-legged position. “Please,” she said. “Sit.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Karla and Rosa joined her on the floor.
“Would you like to see a picture of Jamil?” Berenice asked them.
“Oh, yes! Sure,” Karla said, still dizzy from her encounter with Berenice’s genitalia.
Berenice stood up again and went out to the hallway. “This was taken six months ago,” she said as she came back in. “He’s already changed a lot since then.”
Karla and Rosa looked at the gap-toothed, fluffy-haired little boy in the school photograph that Berenice held out. “He’s beautiful,” Karla said. “Where is he now?”
“At a play date.” Berenice sat down again. “I wasn’t sure what to expect from this meeting, and I didn’t want to risk exposing him to any, you know, bad energy…”
“Ah, right.” Karla nodded.
“I mean, I really hope that the two of you will want to have a relationship with Jamil. But things have gotten so ugly…I just felt like I needed to find out from you how you felt about all of this, before I…”
“Sure, no, we understand,” Karla said.
“How does your mom feel about your coming to see me?” Berenice asked.
Karla blushed. “We didn’t…she doesn’t know we’re here.”
“Oh.” Berenice smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll never tell.”
Karla looked away, offended by the idea of being in league with Berenice against her mother.
“Listen, you guys,” Berenice said, “you mentioned on the phone that you had questions you wanted to ask me.”
Karla and Rosa looked at each other.
Berenice laughed. “It’s okay. You needn’t be shy. I’m happy to talk about whatever. Just shoot.”
“How…how did you meet him?” Karla asked. “Our father, I mean?”
Berenice cocked her head in sentimental recollection. “I met him at a party in Chelsea. It was a book party for a poet friend of mine. Your dad and I got into this funny argument because he was eating cocktail sausages, and I told him he shouldn’t eat meat. He teased me for that.”
“When was this?”
“Let me think. We met in ninety-six. Do you know the Italian expression, rapporto di pelle? It means, like, rapport of the skin? Well, that’s kind of what me and your dad had. It was a very instant, chemical thing.”
“How long did it last?”
“Well, we stopped being romantically involved about three years ago. But you know, we’ve stayed friends. I mean, I’ll always love your dad.”
“And why did it end? If you don’t mind saying.”
“I don’t mind. It’s just kind of a hard question to answer. I mean, it’s always complicated, isn’t it? Trying to figure out why something ends. I guess with your dad and me, there was a point when the joy of it went away for both of us. It got very hard to take, after a while—the sneaking around and everything. Joel always had a lot of guilt.”
“Did you…want him to leave my mother?”
Berenice wagged her head from side to side, musingly. “No…no, I never really pushed for that. In the beginning we certainly talked about it. But I knew he really valued his life with you guys. And I’m not the kind of woman who’s ever been, like, desperate for a husband or anything.”
“No,” Rosa said suddenly. They turned to look at her. “Why would you bother with a full-time husband, when you can borrow another woman’s?”
Berenice gazed at her compassionately. “May I say something, Rosa? I can see that you’re in a lot of pain right now, but I’d like to give you some advice. Whatever anger you’re feeling, you mustn’t let it harden your heart against your father.”
“Oh, right—”
“Wait.” Berenice raised her hand. “I haven’t finished. Your dad was—is—an amazing person with a very, very special spirit. He is not a bad person. He didn’t choose to fall in love with me, any more than I chose to fall in love with him. It was something that happened. The truth is, we all do some hurtful shit in our lives from time to time, but it doesn’t, you know, make us evil. It’s part of what makes us human.”
“Ah yes,” Rosa said, flashing a terrifying incisor-filled smile, “I can see that must be a very convenient philosophy for you. Adultery as a humanist gesture.” She stood up now and turned to Karla. “I’m going. Will you come, or do you want to stay?”
Karla hesitated. Rosa was behaving unforgivably, she thought. It was not right to invite yourself into someone’s home and then treat them like this. Still family was family. She stood up. “I’ll come.”
At the front door, Berenice calmly handed them their coats and umbrellas. “I know this was hard for you,” she said to Rosa. “I want you to know that I value the honesty and passion you showed me today.” She turned to Karla and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re a special lady, Karla.”
When they reached the elevator bank, Berenice was still standing at the door, watching them. She held up a palm. “Peace.”
As soon as the elevator doors closed, Rosa’s indignation began to pour forth. “Can you believe it? The whole thing was even more squalid and pathetic than I thought. ‘Rapporto di pelle!’ She was awful! Awful! Not a bit of remorse! Not an apology! She actually tried to justify it…. How could he? A ridiculous woman like that with her revolting photographs and her…her peach tea.”
Karla listened uneasily. She could not say that she had liked Berenice, exactly. But she had not found her ridiculous. “You didn’t have to be so rude, you know, Rosa,” she said. “It was a very awkward situation for her, and she—”
“It was not awkward for her! She was having a wonderful time. She’s one of the most self-satisfied, narcissistic people I’ve ever met. Did you take a look at her idiotic books?”
“No,” Karla lied.
“Oh, God! It was all How to Read Palms and diet books.”
“Well, you don’t love someone because of the books they read—”
“Don’t you?”
Karla thought of Khaled and his astrology charts and enneagram tests. She shrugged.
In the street outside Berenice’s apartment building, roadwork was under way. The sisters paused beneath their umbrellas to look. Behind a crude fence veiled in bright orange plastic netting and dotted with round orange hazard lights, two great holes, each fifty feet wide and a hundred and fifty feet long, had been gouged in the road, exposing ancient-looking rust-barnacled pipes. In the middle of the site, a fat concrete funnel was steadily spewing bright white steam. The excavation had been hurriedly abandoned when it started to rain: a Coca-Cola can was standing on a carpenter’s horse, and on the little rickety plywood bridges that spanned the gaping cavities, plastic buckets attached to long pieces of string lay flung on their sides.
“Did you ever suspect before now that Dad was unfaithful?” Karla asked.
Rosa shook her head.
“Me neither. There used to be things in the papers that insinuated—”
“Oh, yeah. I always assumed that was just the right-wing press making up stuff.”
Karla nodded. “I guess
I did too. I remember once when I was little, I read something in the paper that called him ‘a notorious ladies’ man.’ I asked Mom about it, and she said it meant that Dad always ‘treated ladies like a perfect gentleman.’” Karla laughed. “I guess I was pretty naive.”
“No you weren’t!” Rosa protested. “It’s not naive to trust your father—to expect him to be loyal to your mother. It’s not your fault if Dad turned out to be a fraud.”
“He wasn’t a fraud—”
“Excuse me? Did you not hear what she said about that apartment? Dad paid a bribe to get her in there. He paid off someone so his girlfriend could jump the line for a rent-controlled love nest!”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Yes, we do! She said it, Karla!”
“Well, I’m not defending it, but…I don’t know, maybe they really did love each other.”
“Love!” Rosa made a disgusted face. “People use that word to rubber-stamp anything they happen to feel like doing. Love isn’t about submitting to your urges because ‘it feels right,’ and never mind who you hurt in the process. Love is about commitment, about caring for your family, your community, about recognizing something larger and more important than your own desires.”
Karla stared at a yellow hard hat that was bobbing about in the rain-water at the bottom of the pit. How lucky to be Rosa, she thought. Rosa would never be felled by her desires. Nothing Rosa had ever wanted to do had been significantly at odds with what she knew was right. Even as a little girl, she had been incorruptible. The anarchic spirit that had occasionally compelled Karla and her friends to throw their toys down the toilet, or to steal sprinkles from the kitchen cupboard, or to write FUCK very, very small in crayon on the living room wall, had never once possessed Rosa. It wasn’t that she had lacked the courage for mischief. She simply hadn’t seen what fun there was to be had from being bad.
“I don’t understand why you’re trying to deny it,” Rosa said. “He was a liar. He betrayed us, he stole from us. Every time he saw that woman, he was giving her attention and time that was rightfully ours.”
Karla considered this. Try as she might, she could not think of herself as a victim of her father’s sin. Whatever energy her father had expended on Berenice, it had surely not been embezzled from a finite family supply. To the extent that Berenice had made Joel happy, it was perfectly possible that Karla and her sister—even her mother—had actually benefited from the affair. She thought about the glowing goodwill she had felt toward her patients, toward strangers on the subway—toward even Mike—during the six weeks that she had been with Khaled. Never had she been filled with so much reckless magnanimity. It was one of the discomfiting paradoxes of her adultery: sin had made her a better person.
Rosa turned to her suddenly. “I’m sorry, Karla,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m giving you such a hard time. You, of all people, don’t need my lectures on being good.”
Karla blushed. “Oh, I’m not so good.”
Mrs. Mee was lying in wait when Karla got home. The way she leaped out from her front door just as Karla was getting off the elevator strongly suggested that she had been watching for her through the peephole. She wanted to discuss the latest developments in her war with the boss at her beauty salon. The letter that Karla had composed at the beginning of the summer had not succeeded in getting the old tipping system reinstated, and the women had never carried through on their threat to report the boss to the Labor Department. Now, the boss was proposing to keep the salon open until ten o’clock every night. “I told him,” Mrs. Mee said, “I got a family, this is no good for me. And he just says to me, ‘You don’t like it, you find another job’—”
Karla raised a hand like a pupil in a classroom. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Mee, I really want to hear about this, but Mike is waiting for his dinner. Would you mind if we talked tomorrow?”
Mrs. Mee smiled sympathetically. She knew how men were about their meals. “Of course, Karla. We talk about it tomorrow.”
Before Karla made it to her apartment, Mrs. Mee called out to her again.
“Karla! You want to come play bingo with me on Friday night?”
Karla pressed her index finger to her chest. “Me?”
“Yeah! You should come! Maybe you win!”
Karla shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m going to be busy that night.”
“Okay,” Mrs. Mee shrugged. “Maybe next week.”
Mike was sitting in the kitchen, elbows on the table, knuckles at his temples, reading the paper. He had had his hair cut that afternoon, and the kitchen smelled faintly of barbershop cologne.
“Hey,” he said, looking up.
Karla dumped her shopping bags on the floor. “Hey.”
“Did you see her, then?”
“Yup.”
“How was it?”
Karla looked away, repelled by the vampiric excitement in his voice. Mike’s official posture regarding Joel’s infidelity was one of deep sadness and disappointment, but there was a part of him, she knew, that had exulted in the revelation—that was still exulting. The Litvinoff family’s romance of itself had been dealt a mortal blow, and he was happy.
“It was okay,” she said.
“What did she say, then?”
“I don’t know. A lot of things.”
“What was she like?”
Karla thought for a moment. “Very…sophisticated.”
Mike made a derisive clucking sound. “Ohhh.”
“No”—Karla corrected herself—“I mean, unusual. Artistic.”
“Did she apologize?”
“No…not outright. She said she was very concerned that this whole thing would harden our hearts against Dad.”
“Duh. So, did you meet the kid?”
“No, he was out.”
“And what was her apartment like?”
Karla paused. She did not want to provoke further sneering by telling Mike about the vagina picture or the baksheesh. “Just a regular apartment,” she said. “What do you want for dinner?”
Mike turned back to this paper. “I’ll have a shake.”
Karla began unpacking the groceries. “I saw Mrs. Mee in the hall just now, and she asked me to go to bingo with her on Friday night. Can you believe it?”
Mike looked up. “You can’t go Friday. You’ve got canvassing that night.”
“I know, Mike. I wasn’t thinking of going. I was just amazed that she asked me, that’s all”
Mike shook his head. “That’s what people like her waste their money on. Lottery tickets and bingo.” He dabbed his index finger against his tongue and turned the page of his newspaper.
“No, I meant why would she think I would want to go with her?”
Mike shrugged. “Why not? You’re friends, aren’t you?”
“Mrs. Mee? And me? No, we’re not! We’re neighbors.”
“Well, you’re always talking to each other, sharing your little secrets.”
“That’s not true! I never tell her anything about my life.”
“Whatever.” Mike bent his head closer to his paper.
“I don’t understand how you could think of Mrs. Mee as my friend,” Karla said.
Mike did not reply.
The freezer door wasn’t closing properly. Karla took a knife from the silverware drawer and began jabbing at the furry white ice that was jamming it. “We have nothing in common,” she continued. “She’s almost as old as my mother—”
“All right, Karla, I get it!” Mike said. “You don’t have to make a federal case out of it!”
Karla turned around to look at him. The skin on the back of his neck was inflamed where the barber had shaved, and there were tiny bits of shorn hair stuck to the inside of his shirt collar. She had gone to sleep and woken up with this man every day for the last five years. Now she would go on doing so for what, thirty, forty more? Sooner or later, the adoption would go through, and she would become a mother. Her days would be taken up with washing baby clothes in sp
ecial hypoallergenic detergents and doling out Cheerios from plastic snack bags. She would go on working part time at the hospital and doing yoga on Thursday nights, and one day, no doubt, she would surrender and start going to bingo with Mrs. Mee
She resumed hacking at the ice around the freezer door.
“Don’t do it like that,” Mike said irritably. “You’ll get water all over the floor. Put down some newspaper.”
Karla laid the knife on the counter and walked out of the room, leaving the freezer door swinging open.
In her bedroom, the furniture seemed to be crouched in malign watchfulness, waiting for what she would do next. She lay down on the bed and stared at the bulge in the ceiling where water had come through from a leaking pipe in the upstairs apartment. Mike was right, she thought. She and Mrs. Mee were well suited. They were both of them too cowardly, too wedded to their own misery, to grasp happiness when it was offered.
After a while, she heard Mike moving slowly around in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards. A wave of remorse swept over her. Poor Mike. He could have married a beauty. He could have married someone fertile. And yet he has endured me—my fatness, my barrenness—without complaint. He has chosen to spend his life with me, not because I am beautiful or sexy, but because he believes I am a good person who shares his values and commitments. And how have I, foolish, vain woman, repaid him? By going to bed with the first man to tell me that my ugly body is attractive.
She got up and went back into the kitchen. Mike was standing at the sink, rinsing out the glass he had just been using.
“Mike,” she said, “I’m sorry—”
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Mike—”
“I put away the groceries,” he said quickly. “I didn’t want them to go bad.”
CHAPTER
21
Rabbi Reinman held up a pomegranate. “Esther, can you tell me why we eat this fruit on Rosh Hashanah?”