A Private Sorcery (12 page)

She lowers herself into the water, sinking down so she has to lift her chin to keep her mouth from being submerged. The first night she spent with Ascher, in a motel outside Monterey, they talked until the sky turned silver. Ascher told her how his green eyes were the heritage of a white horse trader who'd raped his great-grandmother, the thirteen-year-old house slave of a Louisiana farmer who'd taken one of the trader's horses as payment for touching “one of my niggers.” He told her about his father, who'd been in the black infantry that crossed from Calais to Normandy, and what it was like when the Panthers first came to Oakland and he'd been faced with trying to square the ethos of
dignity within
he'd learned from his father (forty years working for the Pacific Railroad, never challenging a system in which all the conductors were white and all the porters were black but never, either, letting anyone call him
boy
) with the ideas of black separatism and
smash whitey and their liberal do-goodism
.

He told her about his wife, Delia, with the face of a Nubian princess, the first black graduate of her pharmacy school, her voice a balm to the elderly customers whose prescriptions she filled, some of whom she called daily to check that they'd taken their pills—the woman from whose bed Rena, nineteen, had taken him. How he could not remember Delia ever losing her temper with either of their boys or ever going to bed with the dishes not dried and put away or without a scarf wrapped around her processed hair, how she seemed never to age so that at thirty-five she looked little different than she had at twenty and would, he imagined, remain so until she tumbled down the precipice to the frailty of real old age.

Rena lets the water out, climbs shivering from the tub, remembering how at dawn Ascher turned his face to the wall and whispered that Delia was a saint and he couldn't make love to a saint, and then told her how ashamed he'd felt when a bachelor party brought him to Alil's
and he'd first seen her in a black cocktail waitress uniform, the tops of her breasts visible over the neckline, her eyes fixed straight ahead like a mannequin staring out from a department store window. He couldn't get her face out of his mind, he told her, like a song that goes round and round in your head until you want to shoot your own ears, an obsession leading him to lie for the first time in his fourteen years of marriage to Delia about where he'd been the night he went back to Alil's.

She gets into bed with a towel still wrapped around her wet hair. She pulls the blankets up to her eyes. Two good men brought to their knees.

R
ETURNING AFTER
C
OLORADO
to the apartment, she feels oppressed by the magnitude of Saul's things: the books overflowing the shelves, the framed posters covering the walls, the file folders, records, tapes and CDs crammed everywhere.

When she first moved in, she'd urged Saul to undertake a purging and reorganization, but she'd given up after seeing how painful it would be for him to devote the precious little time he had after his seventy-plus hours a week of residency to sorting and weeding, tasks that seemed to him unnecessary given that he could always, well, nearly always, find what he needed. She'd comforted herself by undertaking a judicious pruning of Saul's ragtag furniture, keeping the better pieces he'd taken from Klara's basement collection of discards and replacing the shabbier items with the few warehouse sale purchases she'd made during her early years at Muskowitz & Kerrigan. Only now does it strike her as odd that she'd never thought to hang any of her own things, so that the two watercolors she'd inherited from Rebecca and the black-and-white city photos she'd bought after Gene moved back west (when, for the first time, she'd had a little extra money) had remained all these years wrapped in brown paper under the bed.

Her first morning back, she recalls her first dream since Saul's arrest. She's in a cage, like the glass enclosures at Alil's, and she and Braner are dancing together. Cassen stands by the door collecting money. She wakes with the thought
I have to quit
. All week, the idea grows. When she goes to Ruth and Maggie's for dinner, she talks to them about it.
Maggie gets a pad of paper, insists they write out a budget. Surveying the list of numbers, she circles the huge rent payment.

“You could move,” Maggie says, placing an asterisk next to the circle.

Rena must look startled, because she can feel Ruth studying her face. Maggie takes her hand. “Four years is a long time.” Had it been Ruth who'd spoken, Rena knows she would have said something like
Christ Almighty, no one expects you to pay the rent for a two-bedroom apartment out of loyalty.

She takes a cab home, the driver heading south on Riverside Drive. Frederick Law Olmsted, Saul once told her, had designed the drive to follow the shoreline. A piece of frozen choreography along the riverbank. She remembers, now, that she'd been thinking about this the evening before Saul's arrest, how the drive does not so much mirror the shoreline as suggest the movement of the water in the river below. Then, too, she'd gone to dinner at Ruth and Maggie's, taking the bus that night north along this same arbored sweep of road. Between the apartment buildings with their limestone façades and the street stretched a sloping field covered with snow that after two days of freezing rain had turned to a slick of ice. The hillside was cast pale blue from the streetlights and etched with the shadows of the branches above. Before coming east, she'd never seen frozen earth. In San Francisco, there'd been cold snaps—damp and chill, an occasional sleet storm. In the Sierras, there'd been heavy snowfalls in late winter. But never had she seen the ground crusted with ice. It had struck her as something horrific, like a frozen finger or a charred piece of flesh.

Eerie—the massive trees rising from the frozen slope, the grand apartment buildings like sentry guards at the edge of the city, the empty drive—and she recalls now, a season later, the sense of foreboding, prescience of the bang on the door to come.

A
T NIGHT, SHE STILL
hears the echo of the police bullhorn coming from the garden, thinks how relieved she would feel to move.

She yearns to be Klara, to do what she wants without concern for what it means. When she tells this to Ruth the following Sunday while they bike in the park, Ruth laughs and says, “Yes, in my next life, I'm hoping to come back as one of these trees.” She points up at an oak overhanging the walkway. “Waving my branches in the breeze, looking out at the river.”

Rena cannot help feeling slightly chastised.

Ruth reaches out to touch Rena's handlebar. “You don't have to quit in order to move if moving is what you really want. As I tell my students with their mangled term papers, S.I.S: keep separate ideas separate.”

“He has so much stuff. I don't think I could even fit into a smaller place.”

“Put his stuff in storage.”

“Oh my God, how could I do that? It seems so brutal. Besides, if I move anything, he'll never be able to find it again.”

“Don't be ridiculous. Finding his college notes about Hegel or his Louis Armstrong recording will be the least of his problems four years from now.”

Once Ruth has planted the idea of storing Saul's things, of living without his possessions, Rena's mind keeps coming back to it. When she first got to know Ruth, shortly after she and Gene moved to the city, she was struck by how streamlined Ruth keeps her affairs. While Rena routinely donates her old clothing out of fear of appearing shabby (her preference to make do with two new sweaters rather than a drawerful with stretched-out necklines and little stains, the kind she'd worn as a child), Ruth does so due to her belief that it's a drain to have more than one needs. While Rena usually feels as though the weekends are barely long enough to do the food shopping and the laundry and clean the apartment and write the bills, Ruth has an abundance of time. Every day, she works, she bicycles, she reads, she spends time with friends.

“When do you clean your tub, when do you wash your stockings, when do you do your taxes?” Rena once lamented.

“Look at our tub,” Ruth said. “There's primordial soup creeping up
the edges. Housework is the real cancer. You scrub the tub and two days later it's dirty all over again. My mother has a mop squeegee permanently attached to her hand. All her life, she's been trying to get caught up, to reach that mythical moment when the housework will all be done and she can do what she
really
wants. Only now, if she does have a free half-hour, her nervous system is so shot she can't concentrate or think about anything other than the next thing she has to do. Once you opt out of the American antiseptic ideal, you have loads of time. By not making the bed, you gain two and a half hours a month. Think what you can do in two and a half hours. You can read half a book. You can see an exhibit. You can have a love affair.”

Like Ruth's mother, Rena has lived with the illusion that after she “gets through” the next thing, then she'll be able to do what she wants. Only there's been an endless progression of things to get through: her mother's pregnancy, her mother's depression after Gene's birth, the breakup with Ascher. Joe's death, settling Gene first in New Haven and then in New York, adjusting to Muskowitz & Kerrigan, adjusting to Gene moving back west, adjusting to living with Saul. Adjusting, adjusting, adjusting. Her marriage, the merger with Cassen & Silvano. Now, Saul's arrest. Twenty years. It could go on and on until her death, past that, until her funeral and the headstone were set.

S
HE GIVES NOTICE
at her job that she will be leaving at the end of the month and to her landlord that she will stay through June. A farewell party is planned for the evening after her last day at work. A couple of people give her little winks and her secretary whispers that the office rumor is that she is leaving because she's pregnant.

Cassen arranges for Rena's farewell party to be held in a private room at a restaurant where reservations are usually required months in advance. Men in tuxedo shirts announce the hors d'oeuvres as though they're special guests: prawns infused with vanilla bean oil, carpaccio stuffed with red caviar. As Cassen supervises the uncorking of the wine, it dawns on Rena that he's treating her departure as a grand celebration, the removal from his life of a source of frustration.

Throughout the cocktail hour, Cassen watches her. Her neck bristles from his gaze. When, right before the dinner is served, she goes to the rest room, he follows her downstairs. She turns, her back to the ladies' room door. He stops so close she can smell the Macallan on his breath. In the flats she is wearing with her gray silk pants, they are exactly the same height. Knowing that this is the last time she will have to see him, that she will no longer have to manage him, she does not avert her eyes: a body shaped by boyhood games, college athletics, a social life centered on tennis and skiing and sailing—the sort of physique that will turn, perhaps in fifteen years, perhaps, if time treats him well, in twenty, from lithe to scrawn. A face etched with the marks of a million deceptions.

“I want to thank you,” he says, “for all your hard work.”

Her muscles tighten like a dog detecting an intruder.

“I know the transition to the new partnership was difficult for you—with your political affiliations.” He says the words
political affiliations
slowly, as though they are slightly unsavory. “I appreciate your professionalism in all of this.”

She listens carefully. She thinks, he is going to let it go with everything smoothed over.

“If you need any recommendations, I would be happy to provide them for you.”

“Thank you.”

He reaches out a hand as though to shake hers. Their fingers touch and then quickly he pulls her toward him, squeezing her hand so hard in his that she feels a sharp crushing pain. She gasps, and he pushes his tongue into her mouth. Across her front teeth and then deep inside. She digs the nails of the hand he's squeezing into his palm. There are voices and then footsteps at the top of the stairs. He releases her and smiles.

A man passes by them into the men's room. Rena waits until Cassen is gone from the stairwell before entering the ladies' room. She locks the door and runs the cold water. Pulling back her lower lip, she leans under the faucet so the water bathes her mouth.

She swishes and spits.
Bastard
, swish. He must have calculated that now, after her last day at work, he'd be safe from a harassment charge.
Bastard
, spit.

She puts on fresh lipstick, recomposes her face and heads back upstairs. An oversized white plate with a piece of seared tuna has been set at her place. She's seated between Cassen and Muskowitz.

“Rena looks a little shook up, doesn't she, Harold,” Cassen says to Muskowitz.

“Maybe she's having second thoughts about leaving us.”

“Let me open your tuna for you, my dear,” Cassen says. “One has to cut seared tuna the correct way or the juices seep out.”

He reaches over and swiftly cuts the piece of fish in half. A drop of pink liquid slides between the halves.

“Perfectly done,” Cassen proclaims. “Absolutely perfect.”

S
HE CANNOT SLEEP
. Unwilling to draw attention to herself, she'd eaten half the tuna even though the sight of it and Cassen's thinly disguised smirk had made her ill.
Got you
, she imagines Cassen thinking, as though it had been a game of tennis between them and he'd beaten her in the final match.

She'd had the same feeling ten years ago with her stepfather, Joe: that he'd timed his heart attack to coincide with her Christmas break, when she'd come west to care for Rebecca; timed it so as to sabotage her opportunity to help Rebecca, who'd helped her to leave Joe and Novato behind. At the police station, they had Eleanor sit in a chair and grip the arms before they would tell her about the girl who'd made the report: a sixteen-year-old hitchhiker who told the detective interviewing her that she'd gone in the back of the truck with Joe willingly, he had-n't forced her or anything, and how she'd thought his groan was—and here she had to look at the floor—
well, you know what
.