The Oriental Wife (8 page)

Dr. Joseftal was coming to see him the next evening, he said. He would get the address from him then.

“Or I could just deliver the things to you tomorrow, and you could give them to him.”

It seemed a waste of her time in New York, but he gave her the address of his office. The following morning, shortly after ten, the receptionist told him, in a voice of muffled excitement, that a young lady wanted to see him.

Arnie, the boss’s son, had walked into his office a few minutes earlier. Arnie had a habit of dropping in on Rolf after he had been to see his father, whom he visited at odd intervals when he needed money: he directed avant-garde plays, some of them written by himself, at small theaters in the Village; he and his friends launched magazines with
bold green or orange covers that tended to run for only a few issues. He seemed to regard Rolf as his private joke. “How’s our golden boy?” he would ask, and tell Rolf how highly the old man spoke of him, as though such praise from his father was itself slightly comic. When the receptionist showed Louisa in, he pantomimed amazement, raising his eyebrows in his theatrical way, and then gave Rolf a knowing look.

She was looking quite theatrical herself, in red lipstick and a gray hat with a feather, though her face was drawn. Rolf introduced them.

“Do you work here too?” she asked Arnie, and he laughed.

“God, no. My father owns the place. I just come by occasionally to make sure he’s not exploiting the workers too much.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Anyway, I don’t need to work. Rolf works hard enough for two.”

Louisa looked uncertainly at Rolf, as though for a signal. “Louisa is visiting from England,” he said stiffly.

“You’re visiting Rolf?” Arnie asked in a tone of frank disbelief, looking her up and down.

“She’s here with her fiancé,” Rolf said, before she could answer.

“Ah,” the man said. “Your fiancé. So what brings you to Union Square this morning?”

She looked at Rolf once more, as though seeking protection; it occurred to him that whatever the cause of her distress the night before, it had not gone away. Again, Rolf jumped in. “She’s just come to drop something off,” he said, feeling the heat rise to his face. Arnie, meanwhile, was clearly enjoying himself.

“Here it is,” Louisa said, taking a little package, wrapped in pink tissue paper, from her bag. She placed it on the desk. “I put the note inside, that we talked about. You won’t forget to give it to him, will you?”

He shook his head. “I won’t forget.”

“All right, then.” There was a pause. “I’ll say good-bye now. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

“You’re not disturbing anything,” Arnie told her. “We were just engaging in our usual idle chatter. Where in England do you live?”

“In London,” Rolf said. Arnie looked amused.

“Great. I love London. I try to get over at least twice a year. Great theater there.”

“Are you an actor?” Louisa asked.

“A playwright.” He gave a little bow. “At your service. And a poet. Sometimes. So is this your first visit to New York?” She nodded. “How do you like it?”

She liked it very much, she said politely, without enthusiasm. Then she brightened. “I saw the most extraordinary things as I was coming here. A whole set of living room furniture out on the pavement. And then two taxis that almost crashed into each other, and both drivers leapt out of their cabs and shouted, and then got back in and drove off. In unison. Like something you’d see in a film.”

Arnie chuckled, a deep rich sound. “That’s New York for you. Pure theater. A movie a minute.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” she said, but coolly. It seemed to Rolf she did not care much for Arnie, which pleased him.

“I was just leaving,” Arnie said. “I could give you a lift uptown if you wanted.”

“That’s very kind of you. But I think I’ll go to Chinatown next.”

Another laugh, louder this time. “Okay. I can take a hint.” He winked at Rolf. “Behave yourself.”

“Did I seem very rude?” Louisa asked when he’d gone.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Would you like to sit down for a moment? Before you go to Chinatown?”

“I mustn’t keep you.”

“That’s all right. I’m sorry I don’t have a better chair to offer you.”

“Oh, but this is fine,” she said, and sat in the one upright chair opposite his desk, folding her gloved hands over her bag, like someone there for a job interview. There was a pause.

“What’s Dr. Joseftal coming to see you about?” she asked, just as he was about to speak.

“We’re trying to get a visa for his son, to get him out of Czechoslovakia. Before the Germans decide to march in. But he left Germany when he was eighteen, he’s got no skills to speak of, he’s been working as a clerk in a hops firm. That makes it more difficult.”

“So what will you do?”

“I’ve been talking to a hops merchant in New York who may agree to sponsor him. It’s ridiculous, but that’s how it works.”

“And you do this for lots of people?”

“I don’t, the committees do.”

“Otto says you work harder for the refugees than anyone.”

“That’s Otto being loyal. What he tells me is that I bark at them like a German magistrate, they go away feeling worse than ever.”

“Oh, dear,” she said, smiling. “That’s very naughty of him.”

“No, he’s right. When he’s there he always knows how to put them at ease. He even has them laughing at his stories. They never laugh with me.”

“But that’s just charm you’re talking about. Anyone can learn it.”

“I would say exactly the opposite. It can’t be learned, you’re either born with it or not. Like trying to play the piano when you’re tone-deaf.”

“You’re sure? Have you tried a drink or two?”

He shook his head. “It’s no good, it doesn’t work.”

“Never mind. There are more important things than charm. Anyway, Americans aren’t supposed to be charming, are they? They’re supposed to be terribly honest and simple and direct.”

“Now you are sounding like the others. They love to talk about how simple Americans are, by which they mean stupid. Uncivilized. Not like the Germans, that most civilized of people.”

“Don’t get huffy. I was only trying to cheer you up.”

“In fact Americans are very civilized, in the truest sense. They are only not sophisticated like Europeans. There’s a difference.”

“What about Arnie?” she asked demurely, and he had to laugh.

“All right, I concede the point. Arnie is definitely a sophisticate. And not necessarily a civilized one.”

“I suppose there have to be some exceptions. What was the name of that cowboy you told me about once?”

“I don’t remember,” he said stiffly, although he did.

“You were going to come to America because of him. And now you’re here.”

“Yes, now I’m here.” He remembered something else: how he had knocked Otto down the day he’d told her about Old Shatterhand, because she had smiled at Otto and not at him. He could have said that to her now, making a joke of it, but like so much else, it seemed too freighted to be safe.

After she had left—he had shaken her hand, and wished her a pleasant journey—he returned, with relief, to the memo in front of him. Arnie’s father had asked him to assess the likely risks of buying the lumberyard in Oregon from which the company purchased its wood for making pencils. The owner was interested in finding a buyer. It would reduce their costs considerably, but the geography would make it difficult, and they would have to find an outlet for whatever they could not use themselves; that would mean selling to their competitors, who might be reluctant to buy from them.

We must consider the following
, he wrote, colon.
Number 1 … Number 2 … Number 3
. But it was not as exhilarating, somehow, as such exercises usually were. A sense of dissatisfaction nagged at him. He did not permit himself to break for lunch, but wrote on doggedly, covering page after page of lined yellow paper with his angular script.

“
Wie lieb
,” Dr. Joseftal murmured that evening, when Rolf handed over the little pink package. “
Wie lieb von ihr.
” He seemed overcome.

Then he collected himself. “This will I am sure please my wife very much. You will thank Miss Straus for me? But my
wife will want to write to her herself. Will she be here a few days longer?”

Rolf explained that Louisa would be leaving in two days, Phillip was expected in Chicago. Dr. Joseftal shook his head. “I do not feel sure about this man she will marry. What was your impression of him?”

“He was extremely well informed about the plight of the refugees.”

The doctor made a face. “That’s not enough to make a man a good husband.”

“I suppose not. But I don’t really know much else about him.”

“I know even less. But from his face I suspect he drinks.”

That was the report Otto gave too when he came in late that night, as Rolf was making order out of the folders spread on his desk. Otto threw off his coat and sprawled on the couch, watching him in silence, as was his habit. The desk, the most massive piece of furniture in the apartment, occupied the alcove between the kitchen and the living room, where a dining table might have been. Otto usually waited until the papers were cleared away, and then reported on what he’d been doing—the movie he’d seen, the people he’d eaten dinner with; he seemed to expand his acquaintance daily. Sometimes he did not come home at all, until he returned in the morning to shave and go to work.

Now, supine on the couch, he groaned a little. “I’m drunk … that man drinks too much, you know.”

“Phillip?”

“Of course Phillip. At first I thought he’d decided to like me after all, he was much friendlier than the other night. But I suspect it was only to punish Louisa.”

“Punish her for what?”

“I don’t know. But he barely spoke to her. He was very amusing with me, very lively, telling stories about all the mad people who wrote for his magazine. And drinking, and urging me to drink. There’s a kind of vengefulness in him. It makes me worried for her.”

Rolf aligned the folders meticulously with the edge of the desk. At the best of times, he was uncomfortable speculating about such matters. “Do you think they love each other?” he asked, trying to sound casual. All thoughts of Louisa had become disturbing.

Otto gave a sigh that ended in a hiccup. “Who knows? I think she’s desperate for things to work out. But she’s not very happy, that’s plain.” He let out a groan. “I must go to bed, I’ll feel like death in the morning.”

Rolf, waiting for him to finish in the bathroom, read a report on potential sponsors in Philadelphia and made a note to himself about checking the production figures for the lumberyard. It was only when he was in the bathroom himself, brushing his teeth, that his thoughts returned to Louisa. As he replaced the cap on the toothpaste, it occurred to him that if things were really going wrong with Phillip, she might decide not to go out west with him after all, but stay in New York for a while instead. He felt a rush of blood through his body at the thought.

But she left on schedule. Three postcards arrived for Otto from Chicago (“Give my best to Rolf,” she wrote, under the signature). They had toured the stockyards, she wrote; Phillip was thinking of writing an article about conditions there. The second card had a Gauguin on the front. “This is the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen,” she wrote; “I’ve been
to visit it in the Art Institute twice now. Phillip has gone to a meeting of the packinghouse workers. He says they’ve been swindled by the bosses.” Then there was a card with a picture of Lake Michigan, covered in ice: “We’re leaving here next week, to take the train out west. They say they’re having snowstorms in the Rockies—imagine me in the Rockies! I don’t even have the proper shoes.” That was the last mail to arrive. The next time they heard from her, it was seven in the morning. When Rolf answered the phone she said, in a high thin voice, “May I speak to Otto, please?” He went and got Otto and then returned to his bedroom, where he had been getting dressed. A moment later, Otto knocked on the door. It seemed she had gotten off the train in Butte, Montana, and waited in the station until a decent hour to call them. She couldn’t talk long, she had said, there were two men outside the phone booth staring at her, and besides she had used all her change. But it was over with Phillip, she was coming back. She was very sorry, but could she possibly stay with them for a while, just until she could earn her fare back to England?

R
olf was having trouble sleeping, something that hadn’t happened since the hunger days of his childhood, when he’d lain awake with visions of stars swirling in his head, the vast blue-black skies over Montana. Since he had arrived in New York, even the most worrisome problems had not kept him from dropping off promptly after his scheduled half hour of English reading.

Now there were no swirls and no skies, only a certain disturbance in the atmosphere that kept him wakeful. On the surface, everything had been done to preserve his routine. Otto, who had vacated his bedroom for Louisa and now slept on the living room couch, never prepared for bed until Rolf had finished with his work in the alcove and gone to his room. When he spent the evening in what had become Louisa’s room, they kept their voices considerately low, so that Rolf could hear only a faint murmur through the wall.

Nevertheless, everything was different. Sometimes, as he was preparing his evening sandwich in the kitchen, Otto came in—Louisa remained closeted in the bedroom like an invalid—to make tea or coffee, or fetch a hunk of cheese to carry back with him, and would impart to Rolf, indignantly, some further detail of Phillip’s iniquitous behavior on the trip. He seemed to be piecing the story together bit by bit;
at first Louisa had been too ashamed to tell him much, but gradually he was dragging it out of her.

In Chicago Phillip had accused her of flirting with everyone from the conference delegates to the Polish slaughterers at the stockyards; he had been drunk almost every night, and would keep her up till all hours, shouting at her, demanding confessions and apologies. “It was terrible for her, frightening,” Otto said. On the very morning they were boarding the train to go out west, she awoke in their boardinghouse to find Phillip sitting beside her, in a chair he had pulled up next to the bed. He had not been to sleep all night, he told her, a note of triumph in his voice; he’d stayed up watching her in the light from the streetlamp, wondering how it would feel to put his hands around her throat and squeeze. It might do wonders for his state of mind, he said; one of these days he might not be able to resist the temptation. “Can you imagine how she felt?”