Seventh Avenue (28 page)

“Take care of yourself, Eva. It was fun.”

“Fun?” She threw herself at his feet and grasped his ankles.

He lifted her up.

“I can’t stand begging. Come on and have some dignity.”

She writhed on the floor like a wounded animal, and he felt faintly disgusted.

“You couldn’t leave it alone, could you? Everything going fine, a nice life together. Friends into the bargain. But you? Were you ever satisfied?”

Her face was
smudged,
but she had gained control of herself.

“
I only wanted you.”

“Only? That was the trouble. I’ve given you everything I’m capable of giving. More I can’t do. Why does everyone want to tear my guts out? I can’t please anybody. Why? Why? I’ve dragged myself up from nothing . . . I make my whole family’s life easier, Rhoda’s family as well, and you’d all like to see me fall on my face. What do I have to do to make people happy?”

“
I wish I could tell you,” she said.

He put on his hat and coat, and to her surprise sat down on the sofa, then stood up and paced for a minute. He picked up his drink and swallowed it in a single gulp, then started for the door.

“You’ve still got two years to go on your contract,” he said as an afterthought. “If you want out, I’ll fix it. Have a think about it. Entirely your decision. If you can stay, so much the better, otherwise, I’ll send you your things.”

“
Send
them .
. .”

“You’re the boss.” She accompanied him to the door and with an embarrassed, awkward move, he clutched her in his arms and kissed her. “If ever you need . . .” She slammed the door in his face before he could finish. She could hear him breathing on the other side of the door, and she sat down on the floor in the entryway. Her body ached, and she had a painful constriction in her throat that almost made her choke. She swallowed hard and stared at the iris-printed wallpaper. When she got to her feet, she felt shaky and almost lost her balance. She had pulled herself up by the doorknob and her hands still firmly grasped it. She heard his footfalls in the hallway, and the sound of the elevator door opening and closing, and she stole into the living room, like a party guest who has passed out the night before and awakes to find himself amid strange and hostile surroundings, and who painfully tries to reconstruct the minutiae that preceded his loss of consciousness. She hummed tunelessly to herself, then began to chant:

“
I’m
dead .
. .”

The experience left its mark on Jay, but when he arrived at the office his business persona managed to conceal the mark, and towards the end of the morning he began to feel jubilant, released from a prison whose confines he had never dared to acknowledge. The taste of freedom brought with it a curious and inexplicable tenderness towards Rhoda, and before lunch he bought her a mink coat. He knew that he would have some difficulty persuading Marty that he had made the right move, but the problem, after all, was strictly personal. In the early afternoon, he peered cautiously into Eva’s office, next to his, half hoping that the janitor had ignored his instructions to remove her belongings. The room was bare, except for her drawing board, a metal filing cabinet, and a small wooden desk that she had never used, preferring even to talk on the telephone standing. He wondered now if he had ever loved her, and concluded that he had, but the tie had been strengthened, indeed forged, by a dead man. His volte-face was completed when he accepted an invitation to visit Douglas Fredericks in Miami that weekend.

When Marty bounced into his office, Jay was not only fortified by the promise of some fun waiting for him in Miami, but by the fact that he had triumphed over himself, discarding the woman he thought to be the most important person in his life, but who, in the fresh light of the sunny afternoon, now appeared to be a paralyzing indulgence, a form of subtle bewitchment that had drained his energy for four years.

“You know where I’ve just come from?” Marty said in an aggrieved voice.

“
I can guess.”

“Well, of all the idiotic, insensitive things to do. You can’t drop people just like that.”

Jay snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“
With no feelings?”

“Marty, my dear friend, I’m built for endurance. When they made me, they put iron in my blood.”

“It’s senseless. Personal feelings aside, she’s the best designer in New York.”

“I made her, and I can make someone else, but this time I won’t get involved.”

Marty scratched his balding head, rubbed an imaginary crease out of his two-hundred-dollar suit.

“
Jay, be truthful with me: did you ever love her?”

Jay’s face darkened, and the blood pulsated in his temples. Marty’s gray eyes stared at him expectantly, hopefully.

“
I did . . . once upon a time.”

“Oh, no! Don’t say any more. I should’ve guessed when you asked me to sign all the checks for her rent and expenses that you’d never leave Rhoda for her. So you slept with her because she was a good designer.”

“
You’re putting words into my mouth.”

“
How’d you keep up the
pretense .
. . to yourself?”

“
It wasn’t hard, because I did care about her.”

“
But more for the designs.”

“We’ve got six
pishers
in the designing room who can run rings around her. Eva was complicating my life.”

“Stop, I’ve heard enough,” Marty protested. He sat down and cast a suspicious glance at Jay who was beginning to be irked by his attitude.

“I loved her very much, but she expected too much from me. I wouldn’t bother explaining to anyone, but you, ‘cause it’s nobody’s goddamned business. Better this way, than a slow agonizing death when the hate sets in . . .”

“It’s so hard to believe,” Marty said, after a moment’s silence “Eva suddenly gone. After all, she was a part of us.”

It occurred to Jay then that Marty might also have been in love with her, and he felt oddly sympathetic towards him - a smallish balding man with an accipitral head, sharp eyes, who had made the mistake of marrying for money and then discovering that he had no need to do so because he possessed ability. In a sense they had made each other and Jay, despite his occasional impatience with Marty’s conscience and his endless banter, had a genuine affection for him.

“
Want to come to Miami with me?” Jay asked.

“
Who’ll mind the store?”

“
It’ll mind itself for a week.”

“I can’t really - I’ve got a crowd from California coming to see me next week. But you can get away provided Harry doesn’t want you for anything special.”

“I’ll check first,” he said, obliging Marty, who still took orders from his father-in-law who in turn took his from Jay. What made the situation even more absurd was that everyone knew who pulled the strings, but everybody had delicate feelings, and Jay played according to these rules. They had never, from the inception of the triumvirate, had cause to snap at each other’s heels, for the power rested with Jay, and he had no brief with politics. He accepted their ideas about the running of the business, so long as they didn’t conflict with his own. Both Marty and Harry had come to an understanding early on: if Jay’s approach paid dividends, there was no need to interfere, and the retail-manufacturing setup had proved immensely successful.

When he arrived home that evening he was surprised to find Rhoda out, and he was overcome by a curious listlessness he could not shake off. He played with Neal for an hour and then tucked him into bed and sat in the living room sipping a drink he did not particularly want. Like a child who had strayed from its parents, he had the sensation of danger, and he was anxious to see Rhoda. It was almost seven o’clock when he heard her key in the door, and he mixed her a drink.

“When did you come home?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

“About five.” He handed her a drink, and she kicked her shoes off and squatted on the floor.

“I had lunch with Howie today . . . I figure if I don’t see my family, then they won’t bother seeing me.” Her hand shook, and she spilled the drink on her dress.

“Whatsa matter? You nervous or something?”

“A little surprised to find you home. I suppose you have to go out right after dinner.”

“As a matter of fact, no.”

“You’re going to stay in with
me?”
she said incredulously.

“I can’t ever do the right thing, can I?”

“Please don’t feel sorry for yourself on my account.”

Rhoda’s eyes bulged, and she walked around the room clumsily, as though drunk.

“You haven’t been drinking?”

“No, just new diet pills and they make me a little dizzy.” She sat down on top of the radiator and glumly stared out of the window. Then she wrote her name on the misted pane, and his irritation mounted because he disliked being ignored, He left the room and came back a minute later with a box that said Russek’s on it and put it by her feet. Her face brightened, and she reached out and touched his face.

“You’ve got to lay off those pills, Rhoda; they’ll kill you.”

“Honestly, would it matter?” Her manner was so resigned that he became alarmed, and he lifted up the box and set it on her lap. She opened it without curiosity, peeped inside the corner and then began to cry. Her body shook as though jerked by electric impulses and her dark brown hair flopped over the side of her face.

“That’s no way . . .”

“You shouldn’t have bothered.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want presents for somebody else’s unhappiness.” She took a pillbox out of her purse, as though defying him, and swallowed one quickly. “Jay, I lied . . . I don’t know what to do.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I didn’t have lunch with Howie.”

He refilled his glass and heard a dim buzz of absonant words that bounced off his brain senselessly; he sipped his drink in a daze and poured another. His stomach was aflame, and he moved closer to the window so that he could make out what she was saying. She had her back to him, and her lips moved like those of a mute’s, soundlessly. She had stopped crying, but her neck muscles tensed convulsively, as though she was trying to wrest her head from her body. The room appeared to change before him: an abattoir of disembodied voices, filled with swirling gray evanescent shapes, twisting into the air like a wreath of cigarette smoke. He turned her face roughly around, and he stood transfixed, mesmerized by the shape of a word she was mouthing.

“
Eva,”
she said, and repeated the word endlessly until it lost its meaning, and he had to restrain himself from laughing because the syllables became nonsensical. She regained her voice.

“Not Howard . . . I saw Eva.” She stared at him, and he sensed that his face had lost its color. “It’s so sad.”

“I had to fire her, and she’s getting even with me,” he said desperately.

“Please, for God’s sake, don’t make it worse by lying. I know everything, and I believe her and I feel sorry for her, so don’t deny it.”

His body trembled, and he loosened his tie. He could not suppress a yawn, and his hands shook uncontrollably.

“Tell me,” she pleaded, “what makes you so unhappy? Is there any answer? Can anybody do anything at all for you? Do you want me to give you a divorce?”

“
No, I don’t think I do.”

“For years, you’ve been meeting her, living with her. Haven’t you got any guts at all, any human decency? Why didn’t you ask for a divorce . . . I’m not an unreasonable woman.” She seized his arm and shook him. “I’m flesh and blood, and you’re killing me by inches. I don’t pretend to be a clever woman . . . All I know is what I feel . . . in my blood. What is it you want from me? What have I done to deserve this kind of treatment? I keep going over my life, examining it bit by bit to see what I’ve done wrong . . . who’s paying me back. I gave you a child you didn’t want. I made a businessman out of a pushcart peddler. I brought you into a family that loved each other. What in hell’s name have I done? I can’t go out in public because I’m ashamed of the way you carry on. The last time I went to your office was over a year ago, but now I keep away because I know you’ve slept with every one of those showroom girls. They don’t laugh behind my back but in my face! When’s it all going to end?” She flung the box contemptuously on the floor and began to stamp on it as though it were an insect. “The terrible agony is that I still love you. Why I should is a mystery. When I think of the way you’ve humiliated me, treated me like I was a piece of dirt that got under your fingernail and could be picked out, I ask myself why, why, why?”

He had got through nearly half a bottle of whiskey by the time she paused, and the room seemed to be getting smaller, moving in concentric circles around him. He had the sudden, but imperious delusion of being swallowed up, sucked into the eye of a cataract.

“Jay, listen to me. I’ll do anything you want me to do: give you a divorce, get a separation, leave you, but I’ve got to be able to hold my head up.”

For the first time in years, since their early courtship, he felt a tremendous pull towards her, a burgeoning forth of affection and respect that made him dizzy with hope. He went over to her and kissed her with a sense of frenzy as though he was on the verge of death, and his only chance of survival was in the kiss of life she could give him.

“
Rhoda, please, let’s try again.”

She held him at arm’s length and looked into his white face. His hands gripped her shoulders and pressed into her flesh. She had a vision of two heads shaking and turning around her, and she realized that the pills had given her double vision.

Is it worth it, were the words that buzzed in her ears as she lay across the bed, exhausted and numb - her senses outraged. She scarcely believed that Jay was holding her, touching her, making love to her, not out of any need to placate her, but instinctively, and with a tenderness that she had been certain he was incapable of, with a depth of emotion that could not be simulated. What was the point of all her suffering, she wondered as he held her? Did this justify it? This guilt-ridden act of love? Or did it lead to more suffering? She was caught in the vice of her own weakness and indecision, and she knew with a certainty borne of grief and desperation that the situation was irreparable and that they must eventually break up. It was only a question of time.