Seventh Avenue (15 page)

“I’ve got to go to see Mr. F. to give notice.”

“Give him nothing.”

“Jay! He won’t know what to do or what hit him.”

“Sorry, he hasn’t got my sympathy. He was born a
schmuck
, and that’s how he’ll die. It’s time, Rhoda, time that he stood on his own two feet.”

“Your father-in-law?” Shimmel asked, full of sympathy.

“Ex-boss. A
putz
of the first order.”

“I thought it was your father-in-law. Mine lives off me like I was grass and him a cow. Listen, it’ll take a day at least to get all the
dreck
outa here before I can start
schmeering
or papering. You want I should get a
schvartzer
to gimme a hand? It’ll cost maybe fifty cents.”

“I’m going, Jay.”

“Hire him. Rhoda, I need you.”

“I’ll see you in Macy’s at one o’clock.” She was out the door before he could stop her.

“An honest wife I’ve got,” Jay said.

“She’s a shiksa?”

“No, I wish she was.”

“That’s a woman for you, a
shiksa.
They kill for their men. Someday, you’ll get lucky. We’ll both get lucky.”

Rhoda arrived at Modes a bit after ten. Finkelstein had by this time succeeded in jamming the register, starting a small fire in the lavatory, which Betty was attempting to put out by sprinkling sugar on it, and giving two women the wrong dresses. They were now angrily haranguing him. Another woman who claimed that Mr. F. gave her a goose during a fitting, one of Jay’s regulars, had brought her husband to plead for justice - a little worm of a man who was spitting tobacco juice on the floor and dancing round Finkelstein in imitation of a boxer. With all this activity surrounding him, Finkelstein, by some mystical trick of personality, had remained glacially unperturbed and was threatening to go into a trance or a swoon. He rolled his eyes maniacally when he caught sight of Rhoda standing in the doorway. In five minutes, she had cleared up the mess and Finkelstein embraced her.

“No honeymoon?” he asked.

“No, we’ve had to change our plans. That’s why I’ve come to see you.”

“Honeymoon?” he asked again.

“Not exactly. I’m afraid Jay and I are leaving.”

He sank onto his stool; the gelatinous soft green leather had long ago hardened and cracked under his weight. He shook his head and triggered his ear as if to rid himself of a fly that had entered the orifice. He rose from his seat and went outside, rolled down the awning to shade the store from the clouds, bought himself some pistachio nuts from a nearby machine, returned to the store and took up his newspaper.

“I said we were leaving, so don’t make believe you don’t understand,” she said, with some vexation.

“Understand, what’s understand?” he groaned.

“We’ve decided to start our own business.”

“This . . . yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yours . . . everything, who I got?”

“You can’t do a thing like that.”

“Can’t leave me.”

“I’ve got to. Jay says we have to. He can’t work for anyone.”

“The store . . . his.” Finkelstein opened his arms expansively like an eagle about to take flight. “Can’t leave me.”

“We’ve taken a store.”

Finkelstein swallowed a nut whole and began to choke. Betty ran to the back of the shop and brought a glass of water most of which Rhoda poured down Finkelstein’s shirtfront.

Finkelstein gave an enormous belch, and the nut came out with the speed of a pellet. He searched his pockets for a handkerchief and at last brought out a dusting rag that had lived in the garment for a decade. He sniffed into the cloth, expelled some mucus from the back of his throat, jumped to his feet and commenced a rhythmical stamping exhibition that in its perfect cadences would have done a West Point cadet proud. After some moments of this tribal gavotte, he ceased as suddenly as he had begun and stared helplessly at Rhoda.

“I’ve got to do what he tells me. He’s my husband.”

Finkelstein moaned and stretched out his arms to embrace some divine and invisible God, but Rhoda, her mouth firmly set, her eyes aimed unswervingly at the sign behind the register – NO EXCHANGES OR REFUNDS OR RETURNS - was adamant.

“Like that . . . finish?” Finkelstin declared, biting a hangnail.

“My final word.”

“Partnership!” he said.

“Oh, what’s the use?” she answered, losing patience with him and herself and discovering that the longer she stayed, the more indefensible her position became. She rushed into the street and crossed to the other side. She could hardly believe that she had spent seven years of her life in the store and that now she had walked out and closed a chapter in her life. In a way, she felt grateful to Jay, for she could not have left without him. He had made her act: he had set her free.

She got on a train and went uptown to Macy’s to meet Jay. She found him in the wallpaper department making life miserable for a salesman. He showed Rhoda twenty different types of paper, and she decided on one that would wear like iron and was washable. They had lunch at a Nedick’s hot dog stand and walked up to Thirty-Ninth Street, where Jay planned to launch himself on anyone who would give him credit.

It soon became apparent to everyone who knew Jay, did business with him, or was related to him, that he was destined for success. The store’s new windows gave it a display area and people who passed by could see that some kind of business activity was going on inside the brightly lit cavity. The wear-like-iron wallpaper had a greasy luminous quality and was the color of rancid butter. Two false walls had been liquidated by the industrious Shimmel and according to Jay’s count, forty people could be crammed into the space. Like most semiliterate people, Jay was sign crazy, and Shimmel’s assistant, a young Negro art student, with a predilection for unspeakably tasteless calligraphy, had plastered the walls with such inventive admonitions as: “Buy here now. Tomorrow may be too late.” “All dresses one price: cut price.” “Two Dollars Only.” “Original models as worn by the French.” The winter months marked the watershed for J-R Dresses and during the post-Christmas sales his business increased. On a slow week, he was able to move at least a thousand dresses, and by February the number of sales shot up to fifteen hundred. He bought with the astuteness of a gypsy, and he always seemed to know which jobber or manufacturer was in trouble and would, therefore, be vulnerable to price shaving, an art he had perfected. Everyone wanted his business because he paid promptly, often in cash, which enabled whoever got his order to cheat the internal revenue of a substantial sum. His first coup was pulled during the month of December, when with information provided by Marty Cass, who got twenty percent, he finagled his way into New York Fashions, owned by Marty’s father-in-law, who desperately needed to move his winter stock and was ripe for a cash sale. With $4,000 in his pocket, Jay succeeded in buying two thousand six-dollar dresses at
his
cash price. He was making tremendous dents in the business of his competitors. Manufacturers who dealt with him were blacklisted by the big chains, the Better Business Bureau investigated him after numerous complaints that he lured women into the store by window displays that suggested that twenty-dollar dresses were being sold for two. Nothing from the window was for sale, of course. Jay never had the right size of the come-on dress, as it was called, but shrewdly switched a customer to something he had in stock.

Rhoda still took an active part in the business even though she was now in the middle of the ninth month. She had always had a tendency to put on weight easily, and a combination of indifference, frustration with Jay as a husband, and simply the peculiar urges of pregnancy, forced her weight up, so that she had become massive. She worked in the store twelve hours a day and took no lunch or dinner hour, living on enormous meatball sandwiches and black coffee. To Jay she had become an object not merely of derision, but of disgust. Her obesity revolted him, although to others she still seemed attractive in spite of being overweight. As her time drew nearer, his attitude towards her altered slightly, for he realized that she would be in the hospital for at least ten days and he would be free to conduct his little campaigns with customers, shopgirls, staff, showroom secretaries, with less than his usual discretion. He had begun to live a dual existence from the first week of his marriage, using the excuse of a visit to his mother when he met women whom he had picked up during business hours. His affairs were indiscriminate and meaningless until for the second time Eva Meyers came into his life.

They met accidentally at a party given by Marty Cass. Jay had explained hastily to Rhoda that he would have to leave the store early because he had to meet some people who wanted his business.

“Here” - he gave her a five-dollar bill – “don’t take the subway, grab a cab.”

“Can’t you drop me first? You’ve got the car a week, and I’ve been in it exactly twice. Where’re you running all the time, Jay?”

“I can’t stand here talking all night. As it is, I’m late already.”

“What’s so important?”

“The business of course! I mean, look at you. Do you expect me to take you with me? Honestly, Rhoda, buy yourself a mirror - you’re a sight.”

Conspiratorially she whispered: “Don’t make nothing out of me in front of the girls. I’m supposed to be the boss also, and if you treat me like dirt, they’ll take advantage.”

“Then stop nagging me, will you, please? Do you do anything but piss and moan?”

“You’re my husband. I know it’s a fact you’d like to forget.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“What happens if I have pains while you’re out?”

“Pick up the telephone and call the hospital. What do you think I had a phone installed for? For its own beauty?”

“Please don’t be late,” conciliatory. “I worry . . .”

“See you.”

He lit a cigarette when he got inside his car, a brand-new maroon Chevrolet that he loved possibly more than anything he had ever possessed. He breathed easily, delighted that he had got away so easily.
Housebroken
was the word he used to describe Rhoda to Marty. The smell of the new leather seats excited him, and he rubbed his fingers lovingly on the glinting steering wheel. He pulled out from the curb, taking pleasure in simply changing gears and revving up the engine when he stopped for a red light. It was
his
car, and he was moving in the right direction: up. Luxury resembled a bottomless well: the more you got, the deeper the well appeared to be. Most of the people he had grown up with were still on Relief, and none of them had a hope of achieving so quickly - in the space of barely a year - all that he had. The thought comforted him.

He had passed Marty’s apartment house a number of times, but this was the first time he had been invited in. A doorman who looked like General Pershing opened the door for him.

“Can I leave the car here?”

“Yes sir, I’ll look after it.”

Jay handed him a dime, and the man doffed his cap, revealing a pink-ridged scalp. Not Pershing after all. The lobby had an odor of floor wax and carpet shampoo and Jay was greeted by another flunky who asked if he could help him.

“Mr. Cass,” Jay said, “Which apartment?”

The man picked up a phone and pressed a button on a lighted switchboard that had all the tenants’ names. He waited and then said: “Your name?”

“Blackman.”

“There’s a Mr. Blackman in the lobby. Right sir.” He put down the phone and gave Jay a smile of approval. Jay followed him to the elevator and held the door for him, but the man said: “After you, please, sir.” The elevator shot up to the eighteenth floor in a matter of seconds and Jay was led to the apartment. He hesitated about tipping the man and finally took out a dime, but the man smiled at him and said it was just service and something about being paid to do a job, which Jay didn’t catch. He pressed the buzzer and a colored maid, dressed in a black satin uniform that must have cost at least ten dollars, opened the door for him.

“Yes?” followed by a display of teeth.

Must look like a heist guy, Jay reflected.

“I’m Mr. Blackman.”

“Please come in,” all polite and with an ass wiggle that gave him ideas as he followed her through a long foyer with about ten wall lights on either side. The walls were painted mauve, and Jay’s lips puckered in an incipient whistle but he caught himself at the last moment. He adjusted his tie in the mirror, and the maid asked him if he’d like to wash his hands. Jay turned them over for her inspection.

“No thanks, they’re clean.” She tittered, and he thought of asking for her phone number.

Marty, dressed immaculately in a midnight blue suit, a white silk tie, and a white-on-white shirt with a pattern that made Jay dizzy, greeted him with an affectionate hug. He touched Jay’s suit.

“Klein’s had a fire sale?”

“No, handmade by Jewish peasants. You didn’t tell me it was formal. I would have worn my jock strap with luminous nailheads.”

“Tonight we’re on good behavior. My father-in-law’s here.”

“Never met him, but I don’t like him already.”

“By the way, why didn’t you bring Rhoda?”

Jay reddened slightly and lit a cigarette.

“I don’t take a salami sandwich to a banquet.”

Marty pulled Jay by his sleeve into the living room as though he were an entertainer. A small man with an enormous head and sparse grains of red hair sutured onto his scalp was playing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” at a concert Steinway and a woman was leaning on the piano gazing at him like Proserpina en route to the underworld. Her elbow slipped, and Jay said:

“Who’s the squiffed dame? She looks unconscious.”

“My wife.”

“Oh?”

“She’s supporting a quart of scotch.” A colored barman behind a small but elegant mahogany bar in the corner of the circular room was crushing ice, and two people whom Jay recognized as a manufacturer of expensive dresses and a model who worked in his showroom some of the time seemed to be plotting the death of his wife. About five people stood in the center of the room, all dressed to kill, sipping long highballs and munching cashew nuts. It was the largest room Jay had ever seen outside of a movie set. Marty’s wife approached them; she was carrying two drinks, both of them hers. She had raven black hair, a nose that had formerly been a chicken wing and which now, through the miracle of modern science, looked a shiny pearl onion. She wore a red evening gown with a slit down the side, revealing eight inches of suntanned calf. The gown had enormous square fullback shoulders, and she reminded Jay of a courtesan he had seen in a recent French Revolution epic that he had never for a moment pretended to understand. She looked the sort of woman who spent most of her time in league with bishops, planning to murder the king.

“You forgot to introduce us?” she said, screwing her face up into a perfect tomahawk. She peered at Jay’s speckled tie as though it were a curtain fabric she wouldn’t even consider for the bathroom. “And he’s the best-looking guy in this whole dump.”

This whole dump had an authentic Dresden chandelier lit by about two hundred candles, two elaborately fluted French settees that looked as though they were made from lobster skeletons and were covered in a kind of minstrel-playing-lute-to-milkmaid tapestry that he had once seen in a Viennese museum during his electrical days with Uncle Klotz. Three spindly tables supported Meissen lamps, and the walls were covered with a satin fabric and a number of paintings showing bearded men on horseback, which probably cost more than he would earn in five years.

“Jay Blackman, my wife Paula,” Marty said through the haze of her breath.

“You look like a bookmaker, Jay. Are you a bookmaker?”

“I’m a bookmaker like you’re Sylvia Sydney.”

She stared at him sullenly and took a sip of her drink.

“I’ll bet it’s the chaser that gets you,” Jay said.

“Hey, tha’s good,” she said downing four ounces of chaser.

“Paula, tell that guy to play ‘Hatikvah’ or something. He’s falling asleep.”

Two funeral attendants marched through the room bearing trays of drinks and bull’s-eye and sandwiches.

“I’ll have a scotch and water,” Jay said. He swallowed some and refrained from spitting it out because Marty was watching. His rye days, he thought, unhappily, were over. An enormous blonde and a little man who had probably been her patient attempted a foxtrot in the corner of the room. A saxophonist and a colored bass player appeared on the scene and tried “Stomping at the Waldorf” with the pianist who gulped down a drink and began bouncing on his rump. Everywhere people chattered excitedly and there was a tension and electricity in the air that Jay had never before experienced at a party; the type he was accustomed to usually started at seven o’clock with everyone fighting to get at the food, drinking suspiciously from his own bottle, and then taking a ride to Canarsie in someone’s jalopy with three girls: sex and heartburn in the backseat squashed between another couple who were trying to move up and down when he was moving sideways, and the girl invariably winding up with mild concussion because her head had been banged so regularly on the roof of the car. He succeeded in banishing Rhoda from his mind. She didn’t fit in with people like this, and he resented her now even more.

Paula shoved a plate of sandwiches under his nose.

“Here, have some.”

“No thanks, I never eat on an empty stomach.”

“Whaaaaaaa . . . gee, you’re a funny man.” She stretched out an arm that looked as though it had been designed to be a coat hanger. “Daddy, say hello to a funny man.”

A pudgy balding man with concentric groups of freckles on his scalp undid her arm from his jacket and wheeled around. Jay wondered how he got his tan and who sculpted his mustache, which was so carefully penciled that he must have kept a make-up artist. The man adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and tried to pick Jay out of the line-up. Yes, officer, he’s the one who had the gun, his eyes seemed to say. He wore a black mohair suit that matched his brooding eyes.

“You all right, Paula dear?” paternally solicitous.

“Oh, marvelous. Never better,” she said, collapsing on the edge of a table.

“Don’t let her have any more to drink, Marty,” he said in a commanding, low voice, that impressed Jay by the authority behind it.