A Private Sorcery (19 page)

Santiago's toilet flushes. Rena's neck tightens. Sherry. Delia. Two madonnas. Beersden smells her hair and nuzzles her scalp.

“Do they know at the firm that you play in a band?”

“They know I'm a musician. They know I'm not going to give them eighty hours a week. We discussed that at the outset on account of the twins. But I'm a very fast writer. It's like playing jazz: being able to improvise on a theme. So the trade-off for them is they can't pad their billables with me but they get a lot of bang for their buck. And then, my father shifted just enough of his bank's legal work to the firm to make it
worth their while to keep me around even if I'm just a break-even deal.”

Santiago's apartment is quiet again. Has he gone back to sleep? And Saul—is he asleep? On his stomach, his head turned to the outside?

Beersden laces his hands over her stomach. His thumbs press her ribs. “I never lost my music. What I lost was my lust for my wife. Not my love for her. Not even my attraction to her. I just don't have any sexual feelings for her anymore. She thinks it's because of the changes after the pregnancy—that she never got her little waistline back and now has flesh in new places. She thinks if she could just get enough willpower to jog every day, things would be like before.”

He shifts onto his back, folding his arms under his head. Rena turns so she can see his face. “When I see her dragging herself out of bed at six in the morning on a January day to put on sweatpants and run through the streets, I know there is no God because if he existed, he would strike me dead on the spot. Here is this beautiful woman, this devoted mother who put her career on the back burner to raise our daughters, who's always supported my music. Who loves that I'm a musician. But when I look at her, what I think about is having to leave my piano in the mornings to face an office of people biting their cuticles over how a senior partner who lives on a five-million-dollar estate in Connecticut and gets chauffeured into the city will respond to their late legal briefs.”

His eyes are slits of anguish. Ascher, too, had loved his wife, but with Ascher the anguish had been at the thought of hurting Delia were she to find out. That, he could not bear. Having sex with Rena had never troubled him.

She wants to say, don't do this, let's stop now, but she sees that it is futile: he'd still not want his wife.

“I'm so sorry,” she whispers, drawing him into her arms and then further.

A
T FOUR-THIRTY, HE
gets up and pulls on his jeans. “I have to go. My girls are up by six, and I take them so Sherry can go jogging and get organized for the day.”

She watches him tuck his T-shirt into his pants, put on the leather vest. “Won't she wonder where you were?”

“Lots of nights I stay out after our gigs. Sometimes we get inspired and jam for a couple of hours after the club closes down.”

For a moment, she wonders if he's been lying, if he's done this before. No. She'd sense it in his body. Nothing about him felt that way.

“What do you do with your girls at six in the morning?”

“We have our little routine. First we go in and wake their mother and fool around on what they call the big bed for a while. Once their mother's up, we play three-handed piano. Then we have breakfast, which is a whole production unto itself involving four different kinds of cereal and Becky who likes hers with the milk on the side and Rachel who will cry if there's not enough milk.”

He smiles, thinking about his daughters, and Rena imagines him with the two little girls from the photograph and then his wife as a larger version of the girls, all of them pajamaed and laughing on a kingsize bed. “They can play the piano?”

“Ditties. ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider.' ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.' Things like that.”

Beersden pulls on his boots. He leans over the bed and kisses her on the cheek and then the mouth. She resists the impulse to reach out to him, is relieved that he knows not to say anything as he turns to leave.

B
EFORE BEERSDEN, RENA
had tried to resume a normal schedule on the weekends. But it had been impossible to engineer. She'd get home from work at eight in the morning on Saturdays from her Friday shift and need to sleep. Having slept all day, she'd be unable to get to bed until early Sunday morning. The whole thing would replay itself on Sunday, and then Monday would roll around and she'd need to sleep anyway before heading off to work that night.

With Beersden, she gives up entirely since it's after his gigs on Saturday and Sunday nights that he comes over. Two in the morning, he arrives with bags of food: bagels and lox, souvlaki, pastrami on rye. He stocks her refrigerator with dark beer, and they have a picnic on the
floor of her bedroom with a sheet spread out to catch the crumbs and pillows to prop themselves on so they can watch the night river traffic: the barges lit with only one red flare on bow and stern guided by perky tugs bedecked in green lights. On moonless nights, the water invisible, the tugs appear to be sailing through the sky with sparkling rubies in their wake. The gourmand's gourmand, Beersden calls himself, arching back his neck to open his jaw for the enormous sandwiches, dangling a slice of shiny red onion under his nose before tossing it onto the discarded wrapping paper. “Oh, what lust will do to a man—to give up raw onion!”

At first, she thinks that their affair is based on his taste for the night scene: that Beersden has spent so much time in clubs, he can sense her time at Alil's. He scrutinizes the selection of Saul's CDs and tapes she's kept, picking pieces they can dance to. “Usually guys take their music,” he says, but does not question her further when she tells him that Saul's new quarters are too cramped. Saul had been a listener, not a dancer; other than the obligatory slow dance at a wedding, they'd never danced together. Beersden holds her hips. He sings the lyrics like Bob Dylan gone jazzy. One night, they roll up the rug in the foyer and he teaches her how to samba to a recording he's brought of the Johnny Colon Orchestra.

“Hey, babe,” he teases, “we could run away to the Catskills and do a dance act. You've definitely got rhythm in your blood.” Walking to work the next evening, she can't get the phrase out of her mind:
rhythm in your blood
. Something in her blood. A link to her father.

She turns south on Columbus Avenue. It's early September, the week after Labor Day, and the restaurants are filled with people back in the city after the summer respite. Tanned faces sip Campari and white wine on the skimpy outdoor terraces. Everywhere, grilled meats, curlicue greens, baskets filled with herbed rolls. In fact, she really hasn't thought about her father in years. As a girl, she'd gone through phases when she would ask her mother the same questions over and over: how her mother had met her father, what he'd looked like, the things he'd done with Rena. “He used to sing to you,” her mother would say. “Sing and
play his saxophone. He bought you a toy saxophone, but of course you only wanted his.”

In all the years that she's been here in New York, it has never occurred to her that perhaps he is still here. She adds numbers in her head. Her mother nineteen when Rena was born; her father three years older. Fifty-six.

She doesn't even know his last name. Sam. That's all she knows.

S
HE WAITS FOR
the office to empty before calling Eleanor. As always, there's the surprise at how well her mother sounds—no hint of the leaden depression after Gene's birth, of the monumental frenzy after Joe's death. And yet, despite the changes, the years that have passed since the very bad times, she's not been able to bring herself to tell Eleanor about Saul's arrest.

“ESP,” Eleanor says. “Gene and I were just talking about you. He's been thinking about driving cross-country once he saves up enough money. He'd come visit you and Saul and then head down to see a friend who's living in Georgia.”

The low point between them had come shortly after she and Gene moved to New York when Eleanor, living in Eureka with a roll-towel salesman she'd met in a bar, accused her of stealing Gene. At the time, Rena had brushed it off as the alcohol talking, but later, after her mother pulled herself together and Gene returned to California, she found herself cautious with him, afraid of doing anything that would make it look like she was trying to usurp her mother's role. “When would that be?”

“Oh, don't hold your breath. His car needs a lot of work and he owes me five hundred dollars for his insurance. No trip, I've told him, until I'm paid.”

Rena lurches forward. “I know this is weird to ask now, only I just realized that I don't know my father's last name.”

Eleanor doesn't answer immediately. Then, slowly, she says the name. “Freedman. Freed with two e's.”

“Did he stay in the city?”

“I don't know. I haven't heard from him since you were three.”

“I thought I was two when we moved.”

“You were. For the first year, I kept a post-office box. He would write these letters about not knowing if he should get a private detective to find us and get custody of you or if he should just let me go and let us make our own life. I guess in the end that's what he did.”

“I've never even seen a picture of him.”

“I don't have any. When you leave the way I did, packing up in an hour, you don't bring the photo albums. Not that we had photo albums. We didn't live that way.”

“Did you know his parents?”

“I never met them. They lived in Riverdale. I don't think his mother ever knew about us. His father was a fancy lawyer. He knew, but he wouldn't visit.”

“Because you weren't married?”

“Because I wasn't Jewish.” Eleanor sighs. “It was a different time. Your father, they hardly left him room to breathe with all their demands. When I walked out that front door, or rather snuck out, I thought I was in love with that dumbo Johnny Campanella. If it was love, though, it was the quickest case to hit New York, since it disappeared by the time we reached Pennsylvania. I think maybe on some level I was trying to save your father. We were just barely scraping by. He was driving a cab during the day and playing his music at night. I couldn't control myself. I was complaining all the time that there wasn't enough money for diapers, for meat, for new shoes for you. He was starting to talk about maybe he should get a real job, maybe we should get married. I felt like I was destroying him.”

Rena feels everything moving in blurred, undulating patterns, Beersden's story, her father's story, as if she needs to clear her head, get fresh air, but all the windows are sealed, the temperature controlled from a box twenty-six floors below. After they hang up, she goes to the copy room and pulls down the Manhattan and Bronx phone books. In Manhattan there are three Samuel Freedmans and another five S. Freedmans. In the Bronx there are four Samuel Freedmans and another three with
the initial S. She tries to imagine telephoning all these numbers. What would she say? I'm Rena Peretti? I'm wondering if you're my father
?

F
OR SEVERAL DAYS
, it's cold and damp, never raining but always on the verge. Walking home in the gray mornings, she fantasizes about going back to California, about a path Reed once showed her south of Mill Valley that leads out to the beach, the long grasses yielding first to a warm lagoon before being overpowered by the huge rocks and the cold spray of the Pacific. She wonders if this is where Reed has gone, perhaps somewhere farther north, a bit inland, where countless people who, like Reed, have abandoned the lives their parents imagined for them scrape by doing a little this and that.

On a couple of occasions, Reed had driven her to visit Eleanor and Gene, the visits always timed with one of Joe's out-of-state hauls. Eleanor was still on medication then—not as much as when Rena had been in high school, but enough to keep her bloated and tired all the time. She and Rena would sit on the steps, not saying much, watching Reed teach Gene to throw and catch one or another kind of ball. After one of the visits, Reed said to her, “It's a question of the glass half empty, half full. In a way, you're free with your mother. Nothing you do is going to disappoint her.”

At the end of the week, what Rena thinks of as an Eleanor-letter arrives. Her mother began writing letters after she had left the roll-towel salesman and moved back to Novato to try and stitch together a life, the early letters page after page of uncontrolled thoughts, a great gush of language addressed to both Rena and Gene, oblivious, it had seemed, to either of her readers. Two or three would arrive each week, the pace slowing as Eleanor settled into her new pursuits: the bookkeeping course, the garden she planted in the yard where Joe's junked cars had once been berthed, the yoga classes she began attending. “Never again will I serve pancakes,” she wrote, “never again will I fill a ketchup bottle, count change from my apron pocket, argue with a cook about whose hair landed in the sunny-side-up eggs.” Then, later, after she ripped up the mildewed wall-to-wall carpet and bartered with Russell
(the junked cars, Joe's monster television set and old couch in exchange for Russell painting the walls, upstairs and down, a butter frosting), Rena amazed not only by the deal her mother had struck but by the fact that Eleanor had been able to see Russell for the two-bit philanderer but decent painter he was,
Never again will I live with a man.

Those letters were handwritten on the crosshatched ledger pads Eleanor had received as part of her bookkeeping course. Since she got her job and Gene returned to live with her, the letters have been printed on shiny copy paper.

Dear Rena,

After our phone call, I called my sister Betty. I asked her if she had any photographs of your father. We used to go to her house a lot when you were a baby what with my father being as he was and all of us scared of ruffling his feathers. That was where my mother would see you, at Betty's. Once, I told my mother that I was sick of it and I was going to tell my father about you. She looked me smack in the eye and said, I wouldn't do that, Elly. That's what she called me, Elly. I think she was afraid he'd kill you due to some crazed idea that a child with a Jew for a father was the devil. As if I'd had a baby with a goat.