“Two months ago, I was raped. On the same night, I also made love to my husband.”
He was very still, very noncommittal. “Did you report it to the police?”
“No one knows! They mustn’t!”
“Well, I think, religious beliefs aside, the safest thing would be to have an abortion… It isn’t dangerous done under proper conditions, you know. It wouldn’t stop you from having more children…”
Kill it, he was saying. Kill the baby. Religious beliefs aside… She had considered as much herself. But now, in a place filled with all the precise instruments of sharp cold steel necessary to abort this fragile new life, to commit this sensible murder, the idea became utterly abhorrent.
“But what if it’s my husband’s child! Doctor, what if it is a perfectly healthy baby, the child of my husband? Can’t you tell me if it is, Doctor? Can’t you?”
“There isn’t any way to tell until it’s born.”
She closed her eyes tightly.
But I will say of the L-rd,
Who is my refuge, my fortress,
my G-d in whom I trust,
That He will deliver me from the snare that is laid,
from the deadly pestilence
He will cover me with His pinions and I will take
refuge beneath His wings: His truth is barbed shield
and an armor.
You need not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow
that flies by day.
“But are you sure there isn’t some way to tell, Doctor?” she pleaded with him.
He shook his head. “And the longer you wait, the more dangerous it will become. Talk it over with your husband and call me.”
He opened the door and called for his next patient.
She walked out into the clean, pastel waiting room. She paid the bill and pocketed the clean, white receipt. Then she walked out into the street and waited for a bus, hoping that it would take a long time to arrive. She was in no rush to go home.
“Jenny. It’s true.”
There was soft, uncertain breathing at the other end of the phone. “Are you all right? You don’t sound all right. Can’t you tell me, Tam?”
“There’s nothing to tell. Of course I’m happy. I’m… thri…” She couldn’t finish the word. The lie.
“G-d bless you. Trust in Him. He’ll help you.”
“Yes,” she answered, her heart cold and as hard as marble.
Long after she’d hung up, she sat by the phone, waiting
for something she couldn’t describe, her fingers clenched together fistlike, squeezing her knuckles white. Her eyes wandered to the small flowers on the wallpaper. Buds about to open, pink and fragrant, full of promise. But they would never open, would they? Her fingers eased open, palms up, questioning.
And suddenly she realized there was only one person in the world she wanted to talk to. The only person to whom she could tell everything, and from whom she would receive the most self-serving of advice. But how could she get in touch with her? No one had her number, except Jenny, perhaps, who would think it awfully odd for her to ask… Unless.
“Jenny. Me again. I need Hadassah’s phone number.”
“Can I ask why?”
Tamar, who had planned to lie, to tell tales of meeting Hadassah’s mother at the mikvah, of having messages to share with her, suddenly felt tired. “Please don’t.”
Jenny gave her the number. She wrote it down silently.
“Tam, you know I love you, don’t you?”
Hot tears stung her eyes. “I know.”
“I’m here, Tam. Remember that.”
“I’ll remember,” she said hoarsely.
She put down the phone, staring at it. Then she picked it up again and dialed.
Chapter five
“I think you should go with cinnabar walls,” said the decorator, a slim, youngish man in a trendy silk shirt with emphatic suspenders. “Cinnabar says serenity, quality, opulence.”
Hadassah Mandlebright ran her red, shiny fingernails through her mane of burnished gold hair as if pausing a moment for control. “And I say cinnabar is rust, the color of old pipes. I say it’s the dress your mother bought you that you never wanted to wear. I say I hate cinnabar.”
“Well, of course, it’s your home,” the decorator conceded grudgingly.
“It’s Peter Gibson’s home, and I’m just his mistress,” she said matter-of-factly, tucking her long legs beneath her, her toes wiggling comfortably against the white damask silk of the down-filled sofa.
She looked like an odalisque by Ingres suffused in a pale golden light, indolent and almost threateningly female, the kind of woman men love and other women can’t stand. Still, even another woman would have had to admit that Hadassah
Mandlebright knew how to take care of herself. She was wearing a silk lounging outfit of pale gold that set off the golden highlights in her tawny eyes. She wore no makeup, and her lightly tanned skin was sun kissed and rosy, like a young child’s after a lovely day at the beach. She looked fresh and young and unfairly beautiful.
She looked at the young man, her pretty lips pursed in annoyance: “Still, I guess I have some say. A little more, at least, than the hired help.”
She couldn’t stand homosexuals. Was it because she was a woman who measured her worth by what she saw in young men’s eyes, and handsome young homosexuals were so ego wounding? Or was it simply the last moral holdover from her Ohel Sara days? She wondered.
There was a silent pause.
“Well,” the decorator said with acidulous courtesy, “what colors would you prefer, sweetheart?”
She stared at him, her naturally heavy-lidded eyes suddenly widening with malice. “Sweetheart?” she repeated incredulously.
He rolled his eyes ceilingward, clasping his clean white fingers together in front of him. “I’m sorry. Miss, Mrs… ?”
“Mizz will do fine. Ms Desirée Bright,” she said, her eyes relaxing again into that misleading languid sleepiness that those who knew her well and didn’t like her identified with a cobra’s curled up on a rock in the sun. “Use Hawaiian colors,” she ordered him. “I want this transformed into some lush tropical island. I want to forget where I am… So please save the rusty pipe reds, subway dust grays, or any industrial muck waste black greens you had in mind for your boyfriends,” she snapped, getting up abruptly and walking to the large glass windows facing the Manhattan skyline.
It was like a jumbled drawer of old stainless-steel knives and forks, she thought, hating the gray pollution masquerading
as air, the distant patch of pale blue that substituted for sky, and the anemic rays of an unseen sun.
Why, oh why, had she ever agreed to come back?
She closed her eyes and pinched her lovely young forehead together with two perfectly manicured fingertips. The purple-hued valley of Kalalau. The cliffs of lush green pandanus overhanging Hanalei. The heart-shaped taro leaves growing wild beneath the gnarled kukui trees along the tumbling streams of Na Pali. The creamy white sands and turquoise waters of Kalapaki Beach.
What was that little twerp droning on about now? she wondered, his voice a grating annoyance. “Look, now that I’ve told you what I want, why don’t you just use all of that so-called talent of yours and leave me alone?”
Why did Peter have to inflict this on her too? she fumed. Wasn’t it enough that he’d installed her as his official mistress of the month in his official mistress apartment? He knew none of this garbage interested her. “I’ll tell him to do it himself,” she said out loud, knowing she didn’t have the guts. You didn’t tell Peter Gibson off. The spoiled brat in her secretly loved that most about him. He was like a substitute father, but one who let you do all the things you really wanted to.
She walked off into the bedroom and flung aside the great mirrored doors leading to the closet, wondering why its multifaceted reflections always felt like a slap in the face. It had once been Peter’s library and study. When she’d agreed to move in, he’d had all the books removed, replacing them with clothes racks, shoe trees and lots and lots of mirrors. “I wanted you to feel at home,” he’d said with that cryptic smile, and in a tone that someone else—someone who didn’t know him as well as she did—might very easily have mistaken for contempt. He was going to be home in a few hours, and she still hadn’t decided what she was wearing tonight, let alone made an attempt at getting dressed.
She knew it didn’t make any difference. Whatever she put
on, he would only look at the spaces in between. Whatever she put on, she would have to slip it off and then back on again at least once before they left the house for the party. She hugged herself, slipping her hands up her arms to touch her soft shoulders and the firm slope of her collarbone. Had he once been this way with Yvonne, too? she wondered. Back then… She shrugged off the thought. Old discarded wives. What did they have to do with her? She was young. And very, very lovely. Her skin was flawless, her hair shiny dark gold, her body full of free-running sap, like a tree in spring going crazy with blossoms.
Yet, in some strange, annoying way, the whole dressing and undressing thing reminded her of her mother. She remembered the childhood ritual of being inspected before she left the house, having to dress and undress until it was absolutely clear that not an inch of flesh that didn’t rightfully belong to her face and hands would be visible. Nothing less would do for the great Rabbi of Kovnitz’s only daughter.
She reached in and pulled out a tight tropical blue jersey with sequins and large pink flowers. The neckline, heart-shaped and plunging, the skirt a clinging bit of colored jersey, left nothing to the imagination. She held it against herself halfheartedly, then finally put it back, flipping impatiently through the rack with that practiced wrist movement developed by someone with lots of clothes on lots of quilted hangers.
She wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for. Something to please Peter? She took out the low-cut backless black dress that hugged her behind and revealed large tracts of thigh. She held it up against her and felt that familiar twinge of anxiety. You couldn’t call it guilt, really—it was too unfocused, too bravely ignored.
Every once in a while, she found herself seeing things through the eyes of her father’s Hasidim—especially their wives, the matrons of Forty-eighth Street and Thirteenth Avenue, Orchard Park, Brooklyn. In fact, in a way which truly embarrassed
her, she sometimes felt her own vision was not that different. She slipped off her clothes and pulled the black dress over her head and down as far as it would go, which was not very far.
Pritza, zonah!
her mind screamed at her. Tramp, whore. The blond, Polish girls in their short shorts riding through Orchard Park in their wide-finned De Soto convertibles with dark greasy-haired boyfriends, cigarettes dangling from too red lips.
Shiksas
ignored or ridiculed and spat upon.
Pritza. Zonah.
They’d already sat shiva for her, piling ashes on their heads and wailing for seven days, pretending she was dead. Her nostrils flared in an odd gesture of anxious defiance as she smoothed the tight black jersey over her breasts and behind.
She looked at her long, tan legs, the taut skin of her slim thighs—bare except for an expensive body lotion—her naked throat, and deep cleavage, remembering the high-buttoned collars and opaque stockings with seams, the long-sleeved blouses and midcalf skirts she had worn even in summer, until the very moment she had left her father’s house, her husband’s house, behind her for good.
What did the memory make her feel? she pondered. Misgivings? No, never! she protested, unsure of the truth. Relief? It would be good to think that, and it would please Peter enormously if he knew. But, truthfully, she didn’t have the sense of ease that would give substance to such an assertion. All there was, really, was a blankness, a void of feeling, as if that whole part of her life was encased in a sealed vacuum bag that prevented any smell or taste or living image to emerge and confront her indifference. Her memories were like the dead cremated beyond form, she thought. They’d lost all semblance to truth, evoking only mild wonderment and a slight suspicion and distaste. They’d lost their power to move her.
It was better not to think about the past at all. Like a walk on a newly tarred roof, it was sticky and unpleasant and potentially
dangerous, filling your lungs with a bad dose of pollution and ruining things with indelible stains. And once you started walking, you never got to the end, you just stayed there bogged down in the middle.
She lifted the dress over her head and threw it on the floor, lying back on the silk sheets, her arm flung across her eyes. The Past. The streets of Brooklyn. The Hasidim singing at her father’s table, their sidecurls bobbing, their mouths, dark pink against their black beards, swaying and singing until the room rocked with untainted joy.
Untainted joy. Tainted joy. Very, very tainted joy. Yehoshua, Cliff, Peter. Brooklyn, Maui, Manhattan.
It was that decorator, she decided. It was cinnabar, she thought furiously. Why else would she have started thinking any of these things? She would not think of them again, she swore, picking up the ringing phone.
“Hadassah?”
No one ever called her that anymore. “Who is this?”
“It’s Tamar.”
“Tamar?” She shook her head incredulously. The Past. “How did you find me?” she said with no pretense at cordiality. They had not exactly parted on good terms on that dark, dangerous Brooklyn street the summer they were fifteen. In fact, she had promised then and there never to speak to Tamar Gottlieb again as long as she lived.
There was a pause. What was that sound? Water running? A soap opera? A sob? “Well, how are you, Tamar?”
“Hadassah, can I come to talk to you?”
For Pete’s sake! “Well, sure, I’d love to one of these days, but just, you see, right now, everything is sort of crazy…”
They hadn’t been friends for so long. And even when they were, when they’d gone to the same school and practically lived next door to each other, there had always been that
antagonism… And now, after all this time… What did she want?
“Did my parents ask you to call me?” she asked sharply.
“No—nothing like that. It’s me. Please, Hadassah. I’m in terrible trouble, and I don’t know what to do.”