East Into Upper East (34 page)

Annette kept her hand in Stella's, but she didn't pay much attention to her. She was still listening for sounds from the rest of the house. It disturbed her to hear the door of Dora's room open downstairs and then Paul going softly up the stairs, past Stella's door (Annette was so alert that she could hear him breathe), and up to his own room at the top of the house. She waited for Stella to doze off again, and then she disengaged her hand and went up to join Paul.

She was quite rough with him. “What's the matter with you?” she said. “Why aren't you with her?”

“We've said good night,” he answered defiantly.

She gazed down at him as he lay in bed in his striped pajamas. “Move over,” she said.

He was getting quite good with her—so good, in fact, that he had learned to put his hand over her mouth so that her cry could not penetrate the rest of the house.

After a while, she said, “Now go to her.” But he didn't move from her side.

“What shall I do with you?” she said, in loving despair.

He had his eyes shut, stretched out beside her like a knight on a tomb. “Just stay with me,” he murmured.

“Yes, that would be nice, wouldn't it?” she said sarcastically. She knew only too well that it would be glorious, but she could not afford to indulge herself.

“Get up!” she ordered. “Go down! Why not? You like her.”

“I respect her.”

She laughed. “And not me?”

He turned his face to her and sank his teeth into the soft, middle-aged, yet still full and luscious flesh of her naked upper arms.

She didn't urge him any further but gave in to the luxury of staying beside him. She knew that Stella might wake at any moment, but she didn't care. It was he who had to remind her.

“Let her wait,” she said. She was silent, and her thoughts made her bitter. “We can have these five minutes. We're not going to get much else. Not if you don't go down.”

“She doesn't want to,” he said.

“Doesn't she!” Annette gave her bark of a laugh. “They don't know what they want, those parasites. We have to teach them everything—what to do with themselves, their time, their money. Even that they don't know! When I first met Stella, I took her shopping. I made her buy all sorts of things: little purses and scarves and some nice pins and a lot of underclothes—mine were in tatters—and at lunch we got a little bit drunk on Martinis, and then I felt like going on one of those buggy rides around the Park, so we did that, and, my God, she loved it! Her big fat face went all red, and she said, ‘Isn't this fun, Annette?' Such a stupid, silly thing, which she could have done every day if she wanted! But they don't know how to enjoy anything. And me, who was born to enjoy a lot more than a buggy ride around the Park, I had to sit there jog-jogging along with her. Tchk-tchk, tchk-tchk,” said Annette in disgust, making coachman noises, while her naked arms above the bedclothes pretended to hold reins.

“I think she's calling,” Paul said, sitting up in bed.

“Who cares?” She pulled him down again. “All right, so you'll go back to being a waiter. You'll meet someone in a restaurant—a man, a woman—someone who'll like you and want to take care of you, and you'll start all over. But what'll I do?”

“What you've always done.”

“I need to rest, Paul.”

The way she said that made him look at her, and he saw that her face was old. But he took no pity on her. He said, “She
is
calling. You'll have to go.”

“I don't want to. I've done enough for her.”

He pulled the bedclothes back from her, but still she wouldn't get up. Stella was calling louder. Paul leaped over Annette's naked body, and, struggling into his dressing gown, went to the door. At the same time, Dora's door opened below. “Is Stella calling?” she asked.

Paul came down from his room and Dora met him on the stairs. “Something's happened,” Dora said. “Where's Annette?”

Then she looked up and saw her. Annette stood in the doorway of Paul's room, plump and nude, filling it completely; she had one arm raised against the doorpost. “You'll have to give her her pills,” she called down.

Dora went in and searched around for the right pills, but it was Paul who knew where they were. It was also Paul who got the water and supported Stella in bed to help her take her medicine. He spoke soothingly to her and said that Annette would be coming soon. Dora saw that Stella was in good hands for the moment, so she went to the telephone and dialed the Vineyard, and when her mother answered, she said, “You'd better come now.”

FIDELITY

When the doctor told Sophie that her disease was incurable, she would have liked to share the information with her husband. But she knew that Dave had many troubles—like his business and his creditors and his young girl friend—to which she did not wish to add yet another.

She also failed to confide in the other person closest to her—Dave's sister, Betsy. But she kept thinking what Betsy would have done in her situation—how she would have thrown herself into everything that gave her pleasure: eating all the cream cakes she wanted, going back to her two packs a day, buying masses of wonderful clothes, even trying alcohol which she didn't care for. On the other hand—and this too was part of Betsy's nature—she might have done nothing like that but only exactly what the doctors ordered, so as to keep alive a little while longer and have the chance to enjoy everything again.

Sophie and Dave lived around the corner to Betsy, on Park, and after Dave moved out to be with his girl friend, he took another place nearby, on 79th. The three of them spoke every day and often saw each other, so that each always knew exactly what the others were doing and also, with Betsy and Dave, what they were thinking. Sophie didn't have as many thoughts as the other two, nor their gift of volubly expressing them. Sometimes she imagined Dave's reaction if she told him her present piece of news—how everything in his mind and heart would come rushing out, washed ashore on a flood of tears. Dave had this ability of bursting into tears—it was a facility almost, anyway it helped him to feel better, so that when the outburst was finished and the last tear wiped away, he seemed to be almost happy with himself.

The first time Sophie had discovered Dave to be unfaithful was when they had been married less than a year. They were living in her grandparents' apartment, which was waiting to be sold—a vast old mausoleum stuffed with their heavy German furniture and thick with the smell of the heavy German meals they had eaten till they had sunk into their graves with repletion. It was an anomalous setting for someone as alive as Dave, but he soon filled it with himself, the way he did every place he inhabited. He was already running his family's carpet business and expanding it beyond all previous limits. This kept him busy till late into the night when, to relax, he joined his friends in a poker game. He and Sophie often ate at midnight, and he told her about his whole day and mimicked the people he had met and himself talking to them. He was up early in the morning, and when he saw she was awake, at once began talking to her again. He also sang something like “I can't give you anything but love, baby,” and performed a little dance shuffle in his underwear. His legs were hot hairy columns and his sexual organ bulged as though wanting to burst out of his tight shorts. He shaved with an electric razor, as closely as possible, though by late afternoon his beard had begun sprouting again. He doused himself in cologne and put brilliantine on his hair but dressed very quickly. He was always in a great hurry because of everything he had to do.

She didn't mind being left alone all day, especially as he phoned her every few hours—yes, with all his business, she was always in his thoughts. He kept her informed of his whereabouts, usually rather vaguely; but if he was going to be very late, he would cite some particular place where he could be contacted. Once it happened that someone from such a contact place phoned to ask where he was—people were always trying to find him—and laughed when she said, but he is with you. Then she became anxious and phoned several other places where he said he had been that day; none of them had seen him. When he finally came home—still shiny and scented and just a little bit more disheveled after his busy day—he found her sitting very still in a corner of her grandparents' sofa. When he lied, she said nothing, and then he told her the truth, more or less—he wanted to tell it, to spill it into her lap together with his tears, until he felt the touch of her forgiving hand on his head.

In the beginning she had never analyzed why she loved him so much, and his sister Betsy too, though later she realized it may have
been because they were so different from herself. They were full of a vitality that had been drained out of her before she was born. Dave and Betsy were exotic, semi-oriental—they were Sephardic Jews—whereas Sophie's family were German Jews and had been comfortably settled in small Westphalian towns before migrating to America, at the beginning of the century, for even greater opportunities. Although they had married only among themselves, they had brought with them the prominent pale blue eyes and thick ankles of the German community whose hospitality they had enjoyed for so long. Sophie had inherited these; she was not pretty at all and was prepared for people to say that Dave had married her for her family's money—which they couldn't say for long, because he very quickly made (and lost) a fortune of his own.

During those early years Betsy was living in Los Angeles. She was married twice, and both her husbands were in films, one in production and the other on the distribution side. For a while she had enjoyed the premieres and the film festivals and the stars, but they had palled, especially as she was not at the glamorous center but on the commercial periphery. It might have been different if the husbands had been better, but they ate too many business lunches and had too many huge business worries that gave them huge ulcers. Finally, disgusted at them and at whiling her time away in her lovely Beverly Hills home vying with other wives in theirs, she had returned to New York with her son Michael and taken an apartment on Madison Avenue around the corner to Dave and Sophie. Michael was just starting college, so Betsy lived alone with not much to do once she had furnished the new apartment. Lavishly spending her alimony on it, she created a bower of fruits and flowers for herself—some real, in silver bowls and vases, others a cascade of glass grapes or silk hydrangeas; even the antiques she bought were of shiny gold and looked freshly made.

Betsy's son Michael—Michael Goldstein—did not take after his mother or uncle, nor after his father, the first of what Betsy characterized as her animal husbands. It would be difficult to describe Michael in positive terms. He had grown up in Hollywood, and while going to school with other children whose parents were involved in films, had remained completely free of their needs—he didn't even want a car and had never learned to drive. He had no difficulty getting into Harvard, but here too he kept himself aloof
from its expectations, and in fact dropped out in his junior year. Then he began to travel. He almost became a Zen Buddhist in Thailand and almost a Tibetan one in Dharamsala. He spent time with Sufis in upstate New York and with Hasidim in Brooklyn; he read Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross. Betsy said he was nuts—“I'm sorry, he's my own son, but Michael is nuts.”

He had been twenty—it was the year he dropped out of college—when Dave left Sophie for the first time. By then Sophie had been married to Dave for twenty-five years and had been through many forgiveness scenes with him. She had also suffered several miscarriages and a few unsuccessful operations to correct the obstruction in her womb. Over the years, her heart had taken on a stone-like quality, not so much in hardness as in heaviness. And just as it is impossible to draw blood from a stone, so it is to draw tears, and it was always left to Dave himself to supply these, which he did in abundance.

And it was Betsy not Sophie who supplied the indignation when Dave went to live with his young girl friend. “Men are animals,” she told Michael.

Michael replied, “A man has to be an animal before he can become a human being.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“A quote: Aquinas,” Michael said—at twenty, he still prided himself on his erudite reading.

But his mother, who was as impatient of these interests as she might have been of comic strips or video games, cried, “Why can't you be serious!” Convinced it was a waste of time to talk to him any more, she rushed to the telephone to talk to her brother—the culprit himself. They had one of their famous fights that they both enjoyed, throwing all their energy into it. Once curvaceous, voluptuous, Betsy had with age grown very thin, as though consumed by her own intensity, which also seemed to issue out of her in sparks—literally, for she smoked far too much, and when agitated, she flicked wildly at her cigarette, scattering ash and fire in all directions.

Her indignation—her intensity—were often directed at Michael himself. Once, when he shaved his head preparatory to becoming a monk, she developed such high blood pressure that he had to give up on the idea, and instead of entering a monastery, had stayed with
her in the Madison Avenue apartment. Here his hair had grown back in stubbles, which made her laugh every time she looked at him. But she was very affectionate with him at this time, trying to steer him back toward a respectable life that would make her proud of him. For instance: “Why don't you become an artist, Michael?”

“But I can't draw.”

“Of course you can. You used to make such sweet pictures for me. You made an acrobat and a clown and a fish in a fishbowl, don't you remember?” She was perched on his chair, stroking his stubbled head.

He did remember—himself solemnly drawing with crayons while she watched over him, finally unable to refrain from hugging and kissing him, so that he frowned at being disturbed, which made her kiss him more. “Where are those pictures?” he said.

“Oh, I don't know—they might still be in that house on Woodrow Wilson Drive unless your disgusting father has thrown them out. Really,” she said, her mood spoiled, “what is this, hair you're growing or pins and needles?”

The weeks after Dave moved out, Betsy kept encouraging Michael to visit his aunt. When he asked, “But what should I say?” Betsy answered, “What do you mean, what should you say? Haven't you got any feeling?” Michael said nothing; he couldn't very well admit that he really had no feeling for this particular situation. It seemed to him that by now his aunt Sophie should be glad to be rid of his uncle Dave.

Although he liked his aunt, he found her company dull. Perhaps she was too much like himself, without natural high spirits and needing to be sparked up, ignited by someone else. In his case, this had so far been only his mother. At twenty, he had had a few girl friends, all older than himself, but with no particular enthusiasm, causing Betsy anxiously to ask Dave, “He's not gay, is he?” Of course, if he had been, she would have been the first to march in parades along with other, similarly situated mothers. Or, if his interests had led him to chant with a tambourine and a huge shaved head at street-corners, she would have clapped and sung along and dropped money in his collection box, encouraging other spectators to do the same.

Michael was prone to depression, for which he used to take pills, and sitting with his aunt in her dark apartment tended to aggravate
his condition. Sophie was no longer in her grandparents' apartment where she had spent her first married years, but in another, similar one, inherited from her parents together with some of the Biedermeyer furniture that the parents themselves had inherited from the grandparents. Sunshine did not fall on this side of the building, but would anyway not have been encouraged: Sophie had grown up with the idea, passed on by parents and grandparents, that it had to be kept out lest it fade the upholstery. Her pictures were also dark, and even when they featured fruits and flowers, their glow was extinguished by a center-piece of dead game or glassy-eyed fish. Once, when Michael was there, his uncle Dave unexpectedly arrived. First thing he did he tugged at the curtains to pull them apart: “Okay, so let the wallpaper fade, better than sitting in a tomb!” When the light fell on Sophie, it showed her eyes shining as though with the tears she hadn't shed in years. “
Now
what's the matter?” said Dave, pretending exasperation. She tried to smile: “No, nothing—only I'm glad you're here.” “But I'll always be here, you know that; always be here for you,” he said and held her face against his chest. He looked over at Michael, who was surprised to see that the tears that had failed to rise to Sophie's eyes were spilling in large drops out of Dave's.