Seventh Avenue (14 page)

Like a man without mind or will, he followed her into the hired car waiting by the curb to drive the four blocks back to her house. His eyes were glazed, and he stared at her without recognition. She held his hands and leaned her head against his chest.

“Jay, darling, I love you. I’m so happy . . . I don’t think I’ll ever be this happy again.”

“I’ve signed the lease for the store,” he said, waking from reverie. “This morning, I signed it.”

“Oh, gee, that’s marvelous,” she said after a moment’s hesitation and trying to regain her composure.

“We get possession next week, so that means we’ve got a lot to do.”

She gave him a blank, hopeless look.

“I expect to be open in two weeks.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why? The painters are starting on Monday as soon as the jeweler’s packed up, and I’ll have to be there and do the buying as well.”

“But we’re going on our honeymoon.”

“Oh? Well, we can’t do both can we? And the store’s more important.”

“Is it?” They were nearing her house, and she dug her teeth violently into the soft flesh in her cheek to restrain herself from screaming.

“What about Mr. Finkelstein? We’ve got to give him decent notice.”

“He can drop dead. You gave him seven years, isn’t that enough?”

“We can’t do things that way, Jay.”

“I don’t want to argue with you, Rhoda.”

“And I don’t want to either.”

“Well, you’ve got me! After all your planning and scheming, you’ve got what you wanted, so goddamnit, you’ll do as I say or you can go to hell.”

He helped her out of the car and smiled at some guests who had arrived before them. She held his hand as they walked up the stone steps, wondering how she could best deal with him; he flared up at everything she said, ignored her point of view, insulted her intelligence, discarded her every suggestion. At that moment, she accepted as fact what before had been a brooding uneasy intuition: that she and Jay were unsuited and that their marriage was doomed. Unsystematically, she considered her reasons for wanting him, for courting the disaster that was obvious to everyone. The child she was carrying,
his
child, counted for almost nothing; there was no rapport or sympathetic understanding to attract her; the act of merely sleeping with him was not enough to explain it. She never for a moment believed that fate, or forces within herself or the universe, compelled her to pursue him; the urge for self-destruction was latent in her, as in most healthy human beings, but she desired neither forgetfulness nor anguish. There was only one answer that came close to explaining her need for Jay: she loved him and she had chosen him, realizing that life with him would be hopeless, and insufferable; life without him would have been a living death, a valley of ashes almost inconceivable. She had chosen active suffering rather than passive death.

Reluctantly Jay held the door open for her.

“One thing, Rhoda, and remember it. Just because I married you doesn’t mean I’m divorced from the rest of the world.”

“You’re upset . . . nervous, like me,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“That’s just the trouble. I do know.”

It was late, dark and cold when they got to the small furnished apartment that Jay had taken for them in Williamsburg, just across the bridge from the East Side. He was drunk and slept on her shoulder in the train that took them there from her house. They walked three blocks south of the river to get to Roebling Street, and the smell from the river was vile, rank with fog and tug fumes. He breathed heavily, and the odor was a compound of cigarettes and cheap rye; he staggered suddenly into the roadway and grasped a fire hydrant to stop himself from falling.

“Jay, let me help you. It’s only another block, and we’ll be home.”

He moaned softly, and she lifted him up by the shoulders. His eyes were bloodshot, and the lids kept dropping like window shades with a broken spring.

“Agh,” was the sound, deep and guttural that burst forth from his lips, “Agh . . . I’m gonna . . .” He began to vomit into the gutter. He moved his head from side to side, as a nervous cat would, then spewed forth again, on his shoes and trousers. She held his head firmly, and he brought up some more and hit her dress with it.

He tried to say something but was unable to and waved her away.

“It’s all right, get it out of your system.”

“I should have listened to you and eaten,” he said, wiping the tears rolling down his cheeks. “I don’t know what happens to me, Rhoda.” He wanted to apologize, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“Don’t worry, baby. S’long as you’re feeling better. I’ll make you some lemon tea when we get home.”

He put his arm round her neck and leaned on her as they walked down the block. Roebling Street, where the apartment house was located, was a gray, dreary street, treeless and almost totally characterless. A few food shops and a delicatessen were spotted like mud patches amid the large number of apartment houses that lined the street on both sides: mausoleums for the homeless. In contrast to Borough Park, which was predominantly residential, Williamsburg seemed to Rhoda to combine all of the despicable features of the East Side with none of its vibrant life: a fine place to die in, but one hardly propitious to begin a new life in. The ugliness of this Gravesend area was so nondescript, so passive in its function of providing quarters for people who had been pushed to the edge of Brooklyn, that Rhoda’s spirit - geared to withstand most of life’s adversities and come back with a smile and a quiet shrug of the shoulders - fought against it. Somebody had been cooking fish in the building. A forty-watt bulb, flickering, and amber, provided what light the entrance had. Jay went ahead of her - her suggestion lest he fall backwards - up the three flights of stairs to their apartment. She had seen it only twice and for a total of twenty minutes; she had been too excited during these furtive visits to take it in, to compose a picture of the way it would look once the right type of furnishings were brought in. Jay toyed with the key and lock for some minutes until Rhoda took the key away from him and with the help of a match opened the door. A gust of damp air escaped, as though from a cylinder, and hit her in the face. Jay stumbled in over the threshold and she behind. He switched on a light and flopped onto a sofa, and she saw what the apartment was really like. It wasn’t quite a flophouse, but it appeared to be worse because it pretended to be more - a home! What set her against it was the realization that additional furniture, colorful drapes, would only serve to heighten the inhuman quality of the surroundings and that the landlord who had sparsely furnished the apartment with remnants from fire sales and bankruptcies had done all that could be done with the place. There were three rooms and a bathroom, free from cockroaches - at least she did not see any; she examined the bath, which was shaped like a cauldron and would only accommodate the full body of someone under three feet; the enamel had eroded and a dull metal sheen appeared from underneath; the faucets leaked and the sink had rust stains. The bedroom contained a fair-sized double bed with a sagging mattress from which feathers were escaping and a wooden headboard machine-carved in a design of some kind, intended to draw attention away from the quality of the wood which, if rubbed, would reward the rubber with splinters. She examined a series of regular marks on it; something with teeth, not necessarily biped, had used it to sharpen its fangs. She got out clean sheets and made the bed, then went into the living room, where Jay lay snoring on the sofa. She shook him gently. Stirring and blinking his eyes, he rose with her assistance and staggered the few feet into the bedroom. The bed moaned under his weight; methodically she undressed him. There were no hangers in the closet so she opened the top drawer of the dresser and forced the cuffs of his trousers in, then closed the drawer so that they would hang straight. His eyes opened and there was a flicker of recognition in them, and then they sank into oblivion. In the kitchen, she boiled some water and made them cups of tea and put some saltine crackers on a cracked plate. He was already under the blankets, his head hanging off the edge of the bed as though waiting for decapitation. She had never seen him so helpless, so lacking in aggression, and she discovered, when she cradled his head in her arms and fed him tea in a saucer, that when she assumed a maternal role the state of war that existed between them was suspended and a truce filled with affection, warmth, mutual appreciation, if not love, drew them closer together than they had ever been. His gratitude was real, and his reliance on her strength had become not the admission of weakness, but recognition of a function he had delegated to her that would permit them an uneasy peace. Secondhand and vicarious, it was hardly the form of love she wanted, but it was a state in which she could feel some security and dominance. He had stopped competing and was allowing her to love him, and indeed loving her in return. She changed in the bathroom into a nightgown that Myrna had bought her for the occasion and studied her reflection in the tarnished cracked mirror attached to the back of the bathroom door. Her hair had a faint glow and a reddish tint and fell down to her waist; her face was fuller and she had begun to bulge all over, but she thought that she was prettier than she had ever believed possible. Men stared and smiled at her, and she knew she was desirable. When she and Jay made love she never held back, giving everything that it was possible to give, doing whatever he asked of her and making the act itself something beautiful, transcendent, an act of homage to an ideal state of existence. Her eyes, green and luminous even in the poor light, revealed as nothing else did how far away she was from any ideal state and how unhappy the last few months with Jay had really been. Like a file, he had worn away the edges of her personality so that what lay underneath was raw and sensitive to every emotional prick. She cried more easily, worried about what people thought, had dirtied herself forever by abetting him in robbing the defenseless Finkelstein who, had she wanted, could have been her prey for the seven years she had been in his employ. She didn’t need Jay to tell her that he was a sucker and like all suckers dependent upon human decency. At the same time, she did not harbor any genuine grievances against Jay for forcing her to conspire against him, to bleed him, for it seemed the natural, the obvious, way for them to improve their position. Her principles had not suffered as a result, but her mind and body had, she thought, because she could not undo the act of deceit without further dirtying herself, and destroying any hope of happiness she and Jay just might have.

When she got into bed, he moved closer to her and touched her face.

“I’m practically dead,” he said.

“It’s okay, honey, I know.”

“Do you want to . . . ?”

She was silent.

“You must want to, and if we don’t you’ll hold it against me always.”

“I won’t.”

“You’re just saying that,” He supported himself on his elbow.

“The mystery’s gone, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it is.”

“Well, it’s not like the first time.”

“Would you want it to be the first time?”

“I would and I wouldn’t. There’s a feeling of doing something dangerous when it’s the first time, and here you are as undangerous as can be.”

“Well, that’s the way it is when a woman’s pregnant on her honeymoon.”

“It’s my fault.”

“It’s both our faults and not our fault.”

“I’m glad you didn’t go through with it in Scranton.”

“You wouldn’t have married me, then, would you?”

“I think I had to marry you, Rhoda, no matter what.”

“Not because you love me, that’s for sure.”

“I have a feeling for you. It’s just not the same as you have for me. You want to eat me up.”

“Is that why you’re fighting to get away from me?”

“Something like that. I don’t like the idea of someone owning me, having a claim, being responsible for them. But I don’t have much choice.”

“I want to help you. You’ve got good things in you fighting to get out.”

“Let’s wait till the morning? Okay? I’ll feel better then,” He rolled over on his side.

She listened for a while to the noises coming from the river, the urgency of tug hoots, the drone of cars on the bridge. The night passage of machines and people caught in them, and the pervasive smell of the river in her nostrils, the dampness of the apartment, and the camphor of the bed ticking, and Jay’s rye breath, his snoring, and the sudden inexplicable kick in her womb, irregular; she was overpowered, forced to sleep, despite the fact that she had planned to go over all the events of the most important day of her life.

In the middle of the night, she felt him move out to her, and his hands, warm, crept over her body. She resisted, and he increased his pressure on her thighs. Will it always be this way, she wondered, and then she gave in as she knew she would. Her reliance on him, his needs and urges, was total. “I’m committed . . “ she said in a whisper.

“Whaaaat?”

“Nothing. Just take it easy.”

The jeweler - a man in flight is concerned only with his freedom - had left the store in chaos: a counter was turned over on its side, the showcase was smashed and huge jagged pieces of glass littered the floor; wherever the eye roamed, mounds of dirt had accumulated like small coal piles in a yard.

“Must’ve been a fire,” a man called Shimmel said. He was the painter Fredericks had assigned the job of renovating the store. “Best idea is to make a fire and rebuild the whole place.”

“I may do that next year,” Jay said. “God, did you ever see such a craphouse?”

“Your funeral, my boy.”

“Thanks for the encouragement. Can you do anything beside painting, or are you just a
schmeerer?”

“Chippendale’s cabinets I’ll give you if you want to pay.”

“Can you wallpaper the place? It won’t show the dirt so much.”

“You got paper?”

“No, but I’ll get some. . . . Rhoda, we’ll have to go to Macy’s to get some paper, and I’ll stop off at Thirty-Ninth Street while you’re picking it out.”