Crooked Hearts (35 page)

She closed her eyes; he’d started to kiss the back of her neck. “My favorite was when we pretended to be French aristocrats, father and daughter, in this country for a visit. In two weeks, we convinced the richest families in Sacramento to invest in the ‘Comte de Villefort’s’ new wine-making process, which he’d recently perfected at his chateau in the Loire.” Reuben chuckled; his breath tickled her ear and made her shiver. And he was running his fingers along her backbone, slowly, up and down. “The hardest part was keeping a straight face when Henry would try to speak French. I can speak French—my stepparents spoke it at home—but he can’t; he left Quebec when he was a boy and forgot everything. So he’d make words up, just gibberish that sort of sounded French—worse than his German—and everybody believed it. Thank God we never met any real Frenchmen.”

Now he was doing something to the front of her dress. Unbuttoning it, if she wasn’t mistaken. She didn’t think the story of her life had his complete attention anymore. “But then you fell on hard times,” he prodded, hurrying it along.

“Then we fell on hard times. It started when they banished him from San Francisco.”

“Who did?”

“Businessmen, city-father types. They didn’t like it when the silver mine he’d tricked them into investing in turned out to be nonexistent. But they were too embarrassed to prosecute, so they just banished him.” Her pulse was jumping, her mind starting to cloud at the edges.

“How could they ‘banish’ him?”

“They just did. They threatened him. They’re like the Croakers, only they work in city hall.” Reuben’s fingers began to play a game with the sensitive skin in the hollow between her breasts. “So anyway,” she resumed, eyes squeezed shut so she could concentrate, “that’s when things started to go downhill. He wasn’t allowed into the big action in the city anymore, so his schemes became more and more small-time. I knew we’d hit bottom when I caught him planning to bilk the life savings out of consumptive invalids in a sanatorium in Santa Barbara. Well, I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere. That’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands. I became Sister Mary Augustine.”

“And a beautiful nun you were. Especially after you got out of the habit.” In one smooth move, he had her flat on her back, with him on top.

“Reuben, wait—” He’d grown more hands, and they were all diligently going about their one job, which was to get her out of her clothes. “Wait, Reuben,” she said again, as ineffectively as the first time. “Stop! We can’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s your turn!”

Now he was using his teeth as well as his hands to get out the knot he’d made in the ties of her chemise. He lifted his head. “My churn to what?” He frowned, a lace sticking out of his mouth like a noodle.

“I want to hear about you—
your
life! The truth, Reuben. It’s only fair.”

He spat the lace out and sat back, incredulous. “Wait a second. Are you making it a condition?”

She thought about it. “Yes,” she said boldly.

His lip curled in a sexy snarl. “I don’t like conditions.” Before she could stop him, he took her by the shoulders and pushed her gently back to the ground. While he kissed her, he moved his bent knee across her legs, a maneuver that held her down and dragged her skirts up around her thighs at the same time.

Everything changed. His life story could wait. She let him know, with her pliant lips and her eager tongue, that she was willing—so he’d untrap her clenched fists between them and let her touch him. When he did, she, slipped her hands across the bunched muscles of his back and down inside the waist of his trousers, searching for skin. She found it, and used her nails on his hard buttocks to make him growl. The brilliant blue of the sky through the tree leaves dazzled her eyes; she closed them, and a raspy cricket opera assailed her ears. The soft, bruised grass under her body smelled wild and sweet—like Reuben. They kissed some more, and then she sat up, shaky fingers untangling the fine mess he’d made of her laces. She got everything untied and shrugged her shift over her shoulders half a second before he pressed her down again and fastened his mouth on her left breast.

“Ah, ahh—” She clenched her teeth to keep from yelling, while the fiery nerve path from her nipple to her vitals sparked like a lit fuse. Opening her legs, she let him press the place where he was hardest of all against her. She put her heels on the backs of his knees and arched up. “Reuben,” she cried, “Reuben—”

The delicious scraping pain of his whiskers on her chest stopped all of a sudden. He made a terrible groaning noise, full of ruined hopes and frustration. “Okay, okay,” he said nasally, his nose still mashed between her breasts. “Goddamn it to hell, I’ll tell you.”

Now she did yell. “What? What?” Fresh air hit her where his nose had been. “I’ll kill you! Reuben? Don’t stop
now
—”

He was sitting up with his head in his hands, scrubbing his scalp with his fingers. “You want to know the truth about me? Okay, I’ll give it to you.”

“Oh, no,” she wailed. “Now?”

“Now. But cover yourself up, Gus. Jeesus Christ.”

“Cover myself up,” she muttered, teeth bared, sitting up and sticking her hands into the two tawdry-looking halves of her chemise. “Who got me this way?” she asked in a high quaver, shaking inside like aspen leaves.

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

She flopped back down and crossed her arms over her middle. “I’m all ears. Hit me.”

17

When in doubt, tell the truth.

—Mark Twain

“F
IRST OF ALL, MY
name isn’t Reuben Jones.”

Grace covered her eyes with her hands and moaned. “I changed my mind, I don’t want to hear this.”

“Too late. You asked for it.”

“Just tell me you’re not married and you don’t have six children.”

“Will you be serious?”

“I’m deadly serious. All right, all right. Tell me your real name.”

He brought one knee up and wound his arms around it, staring down at the different impressions the heel of his shoe could make in the soft grass.

“I’m waiting,” said Grace. She still had her hands over her eyes.

He plucked three pieces of clover and plaited them together, admiring the tightness of the weave. He watched a bumblebee on a head of clover nearby, gorging itself.

“Still waiting.”

It shouldn’t be this hard; it wasn’t as if he were a pederast or something. “I’m—” He had to clear his throat; it felt rusty, as if he’d been on a desert island for twenty years and Grace was the first person he’d talked to. “I wasn’t born in Virginia and my father wasn’t a Confederate colonel named Beauregard. He was a tenant farmer in the Ukraine named Morris. That’s where I was born. My name is Jonah Rubinsky. I’m Jewish.”

He hadn’t expected laughter. “You’re
Jewish?”
she chortled, sitting up to stare at him, her face full of equal parts amazement and amusement.

“Half Jewish,” he corrected. “My mother was a gypsy.”

Her laughter broke off. “Damn it, Reuben! That’s not fair, you said you’d tell the truth!”

“This
is
the truth. Will you keep quiet and listen? I was conceived one night in a tent, after my mother told my father his fortune. He only saw her once more after that, the day she brought him his new infant son and gave him to him. Gave
me
to him.”

“I thought gypsies
stole
children,” she said suspiciously.

“She was dying. She told him she didn’t want her son to be a gypsy and die young.”

Her face softened. “What was her name?”

“Bella. Isabella, maybe, I don’t know. My father never even knew her last name. I grew up in Kalus—that’s a small town in Podolia Gubornia. My grandfather, Aaron Rubinsky, leased vineyard lands from a Polish high
mache—
man of substance—and sold the grapes to a vintner in Letichev. We weren’t rich, but we were better off than most of the Christian peasants in the village. I was a normal kid, I was—happy. My favorite pastime was following my grandfather around in the fields, watching him work. He had huge hands, but he was as dainty with a grafting knife as a surgeon.”

He lay down on one elbow, and Grace moved closer and stretched out beside him. “So that’s how you know so much about grapes,” she said softly.

“That’s how.”

“And you had a happy childhood—and then what happened?”

“Then … my grandfather died. He had a heart attack in the fields one day, and died that night in his bed. I loved him very much. I still miss him.

“My father tried to keep up the family business, but he was no good as a vineyardist, and pretty soon he couldn’t pay the rent on the fields. Rather than join the czar’s army, he decided to emigrate to America. The first thing he did when he got here was marry a pious widow named Leah Smilowitz. The second thing he did was choke on a fish bone and die.” Grace reached out with a gentle touch on his shoulder, but he didn’t need comforting. He could barely remember his father, a quiet, remote man who had always seemed more bewildered than pleased with his son’s existence.

“So there I was,” he resumed, “seven years old, stuck in a cold-water tenement on Division Street with a maniac.”

“Is that in New York?”

“Manhattan, yeah, the Lower East Side. From the first day, it was war. Leah was Orthodox. Do you know what that means?”

“Sort of. She—”

“It means the
halakah
ruled her life. Eat a piece of bacon, and you were delivered up to the devil. She thought Satan lived in the pages of the
Ladies’ Home Journal.”’

“The
Ladies’ Home Journal?”

“Also in Maxwell House coffee, in chewing gum, in a bed made with two sheets instead of one. It killed her that she couldn’t afford to send me to the Jewish school. I went to the public school until the day she heard me singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ ‘The glory of the coming of the Lord’ was too much for her—she yanked me out of school and taught me nothing but prayers at home for a year, until the social worker found out and made her send me back to the fourth grade.”

“We have something in common,” Grace exclaimed, delighted. “We both had religious stepparents who kept us out of school!”

“I know.” He grinned. “And we both made a career of spiting them. I just started earlier than you.”

“What did you do?”

“I was eight when I found out I had this amazing ability to make people believe anything I said. Partly it was my face, which at that age looked as innocent as yours—almost—but mostly it was the stories I could tell.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Oh, terrible tales of tragedy and loss, stories of abuse, orphaning, parental neglect, alcoholism—to total strangers, Grace, who’d listen and then give me money! The notes I’d forge to explain my absences from school were masterpieces, if I say so myself. In sixth grade, I invented this disease that was so complicated and debilitating it kept me out of class for four months.”

Grace looked awed. He took her hand and rolled over onto his back. “My early vices were pretty harmless. All I wanted to do was go to the ice cream parlor—a terrible sin, mind you—and consort with the goyim, who wore porkpie hats instead of yarmulkes. Later, I took up with more dangerous companions. One of them taught me the art of thimblerigging.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Exactly—the beginning of the end of my innocence. I’d skip school and play it all day on Second Avenue, then gamble my winnings at the all-night crap games under the street lamps.

“By thirteen, I could see my future didn’t lie in New York City. I wasn’t interested in pushing a cart or working in a sweat shop. I’d look around at the German Jews—‘uptown Jews,’ we called them—and I’d despise them because they were trying so hard to hide their Jewishness. When I’d hear about a Rothstein who changed his name to Ralston, I’d sneer along with the other Russian Jews. But at the same time, I desperately wanted to be an American. I had three goals in life: to get out of the ghetto, to make money, and to sleep with blond, blue-eyed shiksas.”

“What’s a
shiksa?”

He grinned. “You are.”

“Oh.”

“Getting an education might’ve helped me find a way out, but between my crazy stepmother and my own rebelliousness I let that chance slip away. So I ask you—what was a poor, slick-fingered Jewish boy to do except change his name and head west?”

“Nothing I can think of. How old were you when you left?”

“Fourteen. It took me ten years to make it all the way across the country to California. I’ve been here for two years.”

“What did you do while you were heading west?”

“Tended bar, prospected for silver.”

“Were you—”

“Sold real estate. Taught English to immigrants.”

“Did you—”

“Gambled On riverboats, punched cows. Clerked in a store. I think that’s all. Oh, I was a hotel desk clerk once.”

“You left out president of the International Society of Literature, Science, and Art.”

He put his finger on her nose. “That was in San Francisco; you asked me what I did on the way.”

“Have you ever been married?” she asked, playing with a button on his sleeve, not looking at him.

“Nope.”

“In love?”

“Once.”

“What happened?”

“She was too good for me, I had to let her go.”

She smiled knowingly. “In other words, you chickened out.”

“I did her a favor.” He took Grace’s hand and kissed it, marveling at how alike they were. And how easy it had been, after all, to tell her his life story. He couldn’t remember now what he’d been afraid of, except maybe breaking an old, old habit.

She was watching him intently, and it struck him that she had an almost masculine way of listening when he talked—unseductive, unself-conscious. But she was looking anything but masculine with her golden hair tumbling over her bare shoulders, her skin pink and glowing in the leaf-dappled light.

“Is all of that true, Reuben?” she asked carefully. “You wouldn’t lie now, would you? The other times it didn’t matter, but now …”

“I haven’t lied. I couldn’t now.”