Victory Over Japan (7 page)

“Leave the store,” the man said, coming around the counter. “You just go on now and leave the store.” He was moving toward her, his stomach marching before him like a drum. Rhoda retreated.

“Thanks for the diamond lesson,” she said. “I'll be able to use that in my work.”

The place at Melepomene and Saint Charles was a modern showroom in an old frame house. There were gardens in front and a shiny red enamel door. This looks more like it, Rhoda thought. She opened the door and went inside, pretending to be interested in the watches in a case. “Can I help you?” the boy behind the counter said. He was a very young boy dressed like an old man. “I don't know,” she said. “I have some jewelry I'm thinking of selling. Some people I know said this was a good place. I'm thinking of selling some things I don't wear anymore and getting a Rolex instead. I see you sell them.”

“What was it you wanted to sell? Did you bring it with you?”

“I might sell this,” she said, taking off the ring and handing it to him. “If I could get a good enough price. I'm tired of it. I'm bored with wearing rings anyway. See what you think it's worth.”

He took the ring between his chubby fingers and held it up above him. He looked at it a moment, then put a glass into his eye. “It's flawed,” he said. “No one is buying diamonds now. The prime was twenty percent this morning.”

“It is not flawed,” she said. “It came from Adler's. It's a perfect stone. It's insured for six thousand dollars.”

“I'll give you nine hundred,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

“How old are you?” she said. “You don't look like you're old enough to be buying diamonds.”

“I'm twenty-five,” he said. “I run this place for my father. I've been running it since it opened. Do you want to sell this ring or not? That's my only offer.”

“I don't know,” she said. “It's insured for six thousand dollars. I only meant to sell it for a lark.”

“Well, I guess it depends on how badly you need the money,” he said. “Of course if you don't like the ring there's not much sense in keeping it.”

“Oh, I don't need the money.” She had drawn herself up so she could look at him on a slant. “My husband's a physician. I don't need money for a thing. I just wanted to get rid of some junk.” She squared her shoulders. “On the other hand I might sell it just so I wouldn't have to bother with keeping it insured. There's a painting I want to buy, at the Bienville. I could sell the ring and buy that painting. It's all irrelevant anyway. I mean, it's all just junk. It's all just possessions.”

“Well, make up your mind,” he said. He held the ring out to her on a polishing cloth. “It's up to you.”

“I'll just keep it,” she said. “I wouldn't dream of selling a ring that valuable for nine hundred dollars.”

It was almost a week before she went back to sell the ring. “Seven hundred and fifty,” he said. “That's the best I can do.”

“But you said nine hundred. You definitely said nine hundred.”

“That was last week. You should have sold it then.” Rhoda looked into his little myopic piggy eyes, hating him with all her clean white Anglo-Teutonic heart. “I'll take it,” she said, and handed him the ring.

He left the room. She sat down in a chair beside his desk, feeling powerless and used. He came back into the room. She was trying not to look at his hands, which were holding a stack of bills.

“Here you are,” he said. “We don't keep records of these things, you know. We don't give receipts.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“There isn't any record. In case you want to file a claim.”

She took the money from him and stuffed it into her handbag without counting it. “My God,” she said. Her power was returning. She felt it coursing up her veins. Her veins were charged with power. A thousand white horses of pure moral power pouring up and down her neck and face and legs and arms and hands. “I've never filed an insurance claim in my life,” she said. “I probably wouldn't bother to file one if I actually lost something.” She stood up. “You are really just the epitome of too goddamn much, are you aware of that?” Then she left, going out into the sweltering heat of the summer day, out onto the Avenue where a streetcar was chugging merrily by.

I'm going to turn them in, she thought. As soon as I get home I'll call the mayor's office and then I'll call the Better Business Bureau and then I'll write a letter to
Figaro
and the
Times-Picayune
. I'll get that little fat Jewish bastard. My God, it must be terrible to be a nice Jew and have to be responsible for people like that. That's the strangest thing, how they all get lumped together in our minds, a saint like Doctor Bernstein and a little bastard like that. No wonder they all want to move to Israel. Oh, well. She got into the car and opened her bag and counted the money. Seven hundred and fifty dollars. Well, it would pay the bills.

It was several days before she called the insurance company and filed the claim. “It was right there in the jewelry box on the dresser where I always leave it,” she told the police when they came to make a report. “I can't imagine who would take it. My housekeeper is the most honest person in this city. My friends come in and out but none of them would touch it. I just don't know…”

“Have you had any work done on the house?” The police officer was young. He was standing in the doorway to her bedroom getting a hard-on but he was trying to ignore it. She was very pretty. With a big ass. He liked that in a woman. It reminded him of his mother. He shifted his revolver to the front and cocked his head sideways, giving her his late night look.

“Oh,” she was saying. “I forgot all about that. I had the bedrooms painted last month. I had a whole crew of painters here for three days. You don't think…I mean, they all work for Mr. Sanders. He's as honest as the day is long. He paints for everyone. Still, the ring is gone. It isn't here. It was here and now it isn't.”

“I'd bet on the painters,” the policeman said. “There's been a lot of that going on lately. This is the third claim like this I've had in a week. In this same neighborhood.”

“But why would he only take the ring?” Rhoda said. “Why didn't he take anything else? There was other jewelry here. Expensive things.”

“They're after diamonds. And flat silver. They don't mess with small stuff. No, I think we've got a pretty professional job here. Looks like he knew what he was looking for.”

“I only want my ring back,” she told Earl the first time he called. “Or one just like it to replace it. I'm so embarrassed about this. I've never filed an insurance claim of any kind. But everyone said I had to go on and report it. I didn't want to.”

“There's a lot of unemployment right now,” he said. “It makes things happen.”

“I know,” she said. “That's why I hate to report this. I don't want to get anyone in trouble, any poor person or someone that had to steal to eat or something like that.”

“You sure sound like a nice lady. I'd sure like to meet you sometime.”

“Well, sure,” she said. “Before this is over we'll have to see about that.”

That had been the beginning. He had called her several times, asking for details of the robbery, checking facts. The conversations had drifted into discussions of movies, city politics, civil rights, athletics, her divorce, his divorce, his little boy, her connections that could get his little boy into a summer painting program. Somewhere along the way she told him the rest of the robbery story and he filed the claim and the money had been sent on its way from the home office of the insurance company.

Then he was there, standing on her doorstep, all dressed up in a corduroy suit with an oxford cloth shirt and a striped tie, six feet three inches tall, soft brown eyes, kinky black hair.

“Come on in the kitchen,” she said. “Come have a cup of coffee.” She led him through a dining room filled with plants. Rhoda's whole house was filled with plants. There were plants of every kind in every room. Lush, cool, every color of green, overflowing their terra-cotta pots, spilling out onto the floor. It took the maid all day Tuesday to water them. Earl followed her into the kitchen and sat down on a maple captain's chair. He put his briefcase beside him and folded his hands on the breakfast room table. He smiled at her. She was trying not to look at the briefcase but her eyes kept going in that direction.

“Where are you from, Earl Treadway?” she said. “Where in the Delta did you escape from with that accent? Or is it Georgia?”

“I escaped from Rosedale,” he said. He was laughing. He wasn't backing off an inch. “My daddy was a sharecropper. How about you?”

“I escaped from Issaquena County,” she said. “Sixty miles away. Well, I only lived there in the summers. In the winter I lived in Indiana. I lived up north a lot when I was young.”

“Are you married? Oh, no, that's right. You told me you were getting a divorce. We talked so much I forgot half the things we said.” He picked up a placemat from a stack of them at the end of the table. It was a blue and yellow laminated map of the British Virgin Islands, bright blue water, yellow islands. The names of the islands were in large block letters, Tortola, Beef Island, Virgin Gorda, Peter Island, Salt Island, The Indians. All the places Rhoda had been with her husband, Jody, summer after boring summer, arguing and being miserable on the big expensive sailboat. Dinner on board or in some polite resort. Long hungover mornings with whiskey bottles and ashtrays and cigarettes and cracker crumbs all over the deck. Anchored in some hot civilized little harbor. While somewhere ashore, down one of the dirt roads where Jody never let her go, oh, there Rhoda imagined real life was going on, a dark musky, musical real life, loud jump-ups she heard at night, hot black wildness going on and on into the night while she sat on the boat with her husband and people they brought along from New Orleans, gossiping about people they knew, planning their careful little diving trips for the morning, checking the equipment, laughing good-naturedly about their escapades in the water, wild adventures thirty feet below the dinghy with a native guide.

Earl picked up one of the placemats and held it in his hand. “What is this?” he said again. He was looking right at her. His face was so big, his mouth so red and full, his voice so deep and rich and kind. It was cool in the room. So early in the morning. I wonder what he smells like, she thought. I wonder what it would be like to touch his hair.

“My husband bought those,” she said. “They're maps of the British Virgin Islands, where I have a sailboat. I used to go there every summer. I know that place like the back of my hand. I've been bored to death on every island in the Sir Francis Drake Channel. I guess I still own part of the sailboat. I forgot to ask. Well, anyway, that's what it is. On the other hand, it's a placemat.”

“I like maps,” he said. “I remember the first one I ever saw, a map of the world. I used to stay after school to look at it. I was trying to find the way out of Rosedale.” She smiled and he went on. “Later, I had a job at a filling station and I could get all the maps I wanted. I was getting one of every state. I wanted to put them on a wall and make the whole United States.

“How old are you?” she said.

“I'm thirty-four. How old are you?”

“I'm thirty-four. Think of that. Our mothers could have passed each other on the street with us in their stomachs.”

“You say the funniest things of anyone I ever talked to. I was thinking that when I'd talk to you on the phone. You think real deep, don't you?”

“Oh, I don't know. I read all the time. I read Albert Einstein a lot. Oh, not the part about the physics. I read his letters and about political systems and things like that. Yeah, I guess that's true. I guess I do think deep.”

“You really own a sailboat in this place?” he said. He was still holding the placemat.

“I guess I do. I forgot to put it in the divorce.” She laughed. His hand had let the placemat drop. His hand was very near to hers. “It isn't nearly as much fun as it looks in the pictures,” she said. “It's really pretty crowded. There are boats all over the place there now, big power boats from Puerto Rico. It's all terribly middle class really. A lot of people pretending to have adventures.” She was looking at the briefcase out of the corner of her eye. It was still there. Why don't you go on and give me the check, she wanted to say, and then I'll give you a piece of ass and we'll be square. She sighed. “What did you want to talk to me about? About settling the robbery I mean.”

“Just to finalize everything. To give you the check they cut this morning.”

“All right,” she said. “Then go on and give it to me. Just think, Earl, in my whole life I never collected any insurance. It makes me feel like a criminal. Well, you're an insurance salesman. Make me believe in insurance.”

He picked up the briefcase and set it down in front of him on the table. “Will this hurt the finish on your table? It's such a pretty table. I wouldn't want to scratch it up.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It's all right. It's an old table. It's got scratches all over it.”

He opened the briefcase and moved papers and took out the check. He held it out very formally to her. “I'm sorry about the ring,” he said. “I hope this will help you get another one.”

She took it from him. Then she laid it carelessly down behind her on a counter. She laid it down a few inches away from a puddle of water that had condensed around a green watering can. Once she had put it there she would not touch it again while he was watching. “Thanks for bringing it by. You could have mailed it.”

“I wanted to meet you. I wanted to get to know you.”

“So did I,” she said. Her eyes dug into his skin, thick black skin. Real black skin. Something she had never had. It was cool in the room. Three thousand dollars' worth of brand-new air-conditioning was purring away outside the window. Inside everything was white and green. White woodwork, green plants, baskets of plants in every window, ferns and philodendrons and bromeliads, gloxinia and tillansias and cordatum. Leaves and shadows of leaves and wallpaper that looked like leaves. “What are you doing tonight?” she said. “What are you doing for dinner?”