Seventh Avenue (37 page)

“It’ll have to clear the bank before we can send it.” He studied the name as though calligraphy were one of his hobbies. “Hey, isn’t that . . . aren’t you . . . ?” But Rhoda was out of the door before he could get an answer.

In the street, she hailed a taxi and gave her address. She waited a few minutes to see if the driver was using his mirror to spy on her, and when she was satisfied that he wasn’t, she took out a bottle of pills and swallowed two.

Jay was having breakfast when she arrived, looking very tanned, fit and sad. She sat down at the table, poured herself a cup of black coffee. He stared at her, exerting the terrible fascination of a mongoose, sleek, canny, and fast enough to anticipate any sudden move; an expert in the coarse art of survival.

“Funny time to get home,” he said, cautiously. He was on dangerous ground, and he didn’t want to sink into a mire. “Your sister any better?”

“Fine . . . she’s a cabbage. Very good soil up there for growing vegetables.”

“
Maybe we ought to put her in a different place.”

“
Maybe you shouldn’t worry about it too much.”

“You’ve been crying,” he said, as she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Her eyes were like red welts.

“From the minute I met you I started crying. Funny you should notice now.”

Here it comes, he thought tremulously. He girded himself for the attack, but she held back . . .

“
If it’s going to be one of those . . .”

“
One of those what?”

“
Mornings. Your eyes are popping out of your head again.”

“Are they? Well, you won’t have to worry about it much longer, will you?” She sipped her coffee meditatively. “Did you know that Finkelstein’s dead?”

“
What?”

“
Dead.”

“
I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Skip it. I thought when I saw you I’d rant and rave and have hysterics as usual.”

“Yeah, I know the program . . . it’s been running for five years.”

“Jay, why don’t you die? Wouldn’t it be much better for everyone if you were dead?”

“Rhoda, if you’re going to be unpleasant the minute we see each other, then I think we ought to talk seriously.”

“‘
We should talk seriously.’”

“Don’t mimic me, I don’t like it. You must’ve met a guy if you’re acting this strong. Frankly, I don’t mind. Best thing that could happen to you.”

“I’m glad you approve. You see your lawyer, and I’ll see mine, and they can arrange things between them.”

“So long as I can see Neal whenever I want . . . that’s all I give a damn about.”

“
It’ll have to be discussed, won’t it?”

He got very hot under the collar, but he managed to maintain a hold on his temper.

“Sore spot with you, isn’t it?” she said, “Nice to see you at a disadvantage for a change.”

“
You’ll poison his mind against me.”

“Why should I? Typical of you, Jay. Imputing your own motives to other people. Now if the shoe was on the other foot, I’d have plenty to worry about. Actually, it’s your moral character that worries me. You’ve got a lot of influence on him, and he doesn’t know right from wrong, so too much time with you might be damaging in the long run.”

The conversation made him uncomfortable, as did all conversations dwelling on his character, and he lost that surefooted instinct that had enabled him to transcend, with a hawk’s guile and rapacity, all of the positive and glaring deficiencies that disguised a lack of feeling for the responses of other people, and that he had diverted, so that they assumed the plumed wings of strength. She had seen that he was vulnerable, and she dug her nails into the tender belly of his weakness - his love for Neal.

“
What do you want, Rhoda?”

“
To see you suffer.”

“The harder you make it for me, the harder it’ll be for Neal. So
before you make a decision, give that some thought. Even though we get a divorce, I’d like to try to give him a normal life.”

“
With you as a father? That’s a joke.”

“
And you as a mother!” he shouted, pointing an accusing finger at her.

“
Keep your voice down, Maggie’ll hear us.”

“
It’s
Myrna,” he said, losing his restraint.

“
Myrna?” she peered quizzically over her cup at him, and tears formed in the pockets of her eyes. “
Myrna .
. .”

“
You heard some crazy story. That doctor wrote to me about a year
ago .
. .”

“
Myrna. I suppose that rounds out the picture.”

“
It’s a goddamned filthy lie.”

“
Myrna.”

“
For Christ’s sake, stop saying her name.”

“
The village idiot appears on your list of conquests.”

“
That’s not true.”

She knocked her cup
over,
and the coffee ran down the side of the table onto the cream-colored carpet. She didn’t make a move to stop the drip and let it soak into the carpet, fascinated by the regular movement.

“
Myrna . . .”

“
Stop it. I can’t stand it.” He got up from the table and rushed into the bedroom to get his jacket and coat. She followed him.

“
You should’ve jerked yourself off if you needed a woman so bad.
Or why didn’t you call one of the whores in your book? You knew enough of them. Or was this too exciting to resist?
Sleeping with your wife’s sister.
A girl who was absolutely defenseless, who’d had a mental breakdown, and was living on her nerves. In our bed, with
my
sister,” He tried to push past her, but she stood with her arms out, pressed against the door. “Haven’t you got any shame, any decency?”

“
I’ll get my stuff moved this afternoon. I want to see Neal when he comes home from
school,
and I’d appreciate it if you weren’t
here.”

“
Whenever you got into our bed, you always had a funny smell.
The smell of other women, cheap perfume and powder, and their sweat.
It was such an ugly smell that it used to keep me awake all night. I couldn’t ever get used to it. Their bodies. And you, like a pig rolling over in his own shit.”

“
I don’t have to . . .”

“
You should die, and if there’s a God or any justice you should
spend the time after you’re dead frying in hell. But I suppose you
wo
n’t .
. . people like you get away with murder and then get congratulated for it, but someday
somebody’ll
cut your throat when you
least expect it.”

He lifted her arms which were still pinioned against the door and
forced his way past her. Their faces were almost touching, and as
she looked into his eyes, she could see that for the first time since
she had known him, he was hurt and pleading for help. His mouth
moved perilously close to hers, and she thought he was going to kiss
her. She pressed the heel of her palm under his chin, eased him away
and spit in his face. He stood for a moment, as though paralyzed,
with the bubbly saliva dripping down his face, then with a movement as swift as a flash of lightning, he lifted his hand to strike her,
and she screeched: “Neal, Neal, Neal,” as though the incantation of
his name would dispel the terrible vengeance of an enraged god. His
hand,
suspended in the air, the fingers brown like the leather thongs
of a whip, froze in motion, like a film which had suddenly been jerked
and was
ru
nnin
g
in slow motion.

“
I won’t forget this,” he said.

“
I hope you won’t. I hope it’s carved on your headstone.”

Six months of dreamlike apathy passed before Rhoda saw Jay again;
six months in which her emotional life resembled the frozen streets
and snowcaps of a Taiga Brooklyn
winter .
. . She would sometimes see his face in the
glassy
ice of the
pavements
or emerging
from the frozen breaths of people standing in line waiting for a bus.
She constantly had the sensation that he was stalking her, and she
would slink into obscure ill-lit little neighborhood bars where drunken
eyes
and mouths reeking of pizza and overcooked spaghetti, pursued
her. From time to time she went out with Barney, or sat, sloe-eyed
and “charged” in some small lurid club like a tongueless hoplite, listening to him tell jokes to bored and grizzled small-time businessmen
whose assignations with mousy, heavily mascaraed women seemed
to her affairs of petty and mutual despair. Barney clung to her, and
she couldn’t bear the responsibility that failure conferred on him.
Once or twice she paid his hotel bill when he couldn’t get work, and
this made him impotent in bed with her.

With a Prussian’s respect for punctilio and ceremony, Jay visited
Neal every Sunday at noon, and she would leave the apartment a
good hour before, to avoid a chance encounter, sit in the candy store
at the corner, sipping black coffee and trying in a totally automatic
way to find her bearings in the confused geography of her life. At
twelve-thirty,
she would return to the apartment, stare out into the
street through the opaque misted windows without a thought in her
head. The impending divorce represented a caesura in the action of
her life, and she could not see beyond it to make plans. Her relations
with almost everyone she had known in the past took on the static
quality of her own lethargy. Even Neal lost his reality for her, and
she avoided questioning him about his afternoons with Jay - how
wrong Jay had been, she thought. She lost the power of communicating anything but a simple imperative to the child. She saw Neal only
in a formal concrete
sense;
the rest of him was hidden behind two
translucent cataracts
that
had imposed themselves over her eyes.
He always seemed to her to be performing, living, with a thin gossamer veil over him that teased the eye. He was no more than an
optical illusion, a
trompe-l’oeil
that
moved from the foreground
into her path, then receded across some amorphous horizon, so that
what he did, what he said, what he was feeling, was only something
vague and putative
that
her brain carried to her senses. Occasionally, she realized, in the same unreflective way one recalls a useless
fact - that the Amazon is the longest river in the world - that she
loved Jay more than she ever had. Love would never become hate,
as black can never become white, but her love had lost its knifelike
edge, and had become unalterably passive. It was like a malignancy
whose growth had been arrested - but if she decided to cut it out,
it might grow back, larger and more virulent.

At the beginning of April, after
the divorce
settlement had been
agreed
upon,
and the hearing in court announced, she was startled
one morning to hear his voice on the telephone. It was like a voice
disembodied and eerie, coming from the back of an empty
theater,
and she wanted to ask to whom it belonged.

“
I thought I should call
you .
. .” he said in a halting, strained
manner, “. . . my mother died yesterday. I thought you’d want to
know.”

“
Oh, Jay.
I’m so sorry.
It’s so sudden.”

“
I loved her, you know.”

“I know you did. I did too, in my own way. She wanted us to be happy.”

“She loved you and Neal very much. It was a coronary . . . one, two, three. They couldn’t do a thing. Funeral’s today.”

“I’d like to go, if . . .”

“I’d appreciate it if you would. I mean you’re still my wife, and oh, God, Rhoda, I’m so unhappy I don’t know what to do. I’m falling apart.”

“It’s terrible, I know.”

He gave her the address of the chapel and then said: “I’d pick you up, but I’m not allowed to drive.”

“I’ll go to the cemetery. It’s maybe better that I don’t come to the chapel.”

There was a long silence, and she wondered if he had hung up, and she felt stupid and dazed because she had forgotten to ask the name of the cemetery.

“It’s Beth David,” he said. “Twelve o’clock . . . and thanks.”