Three Women (3 page)

“I see him.”

I see him too, Suzanne thought, and I don’t much like what I see. “What does he do?”

“That’s all you ever ask about someone, isn’t it? Peg them. The next question is, where did they go to school?”

Suzanne waited. She was better at silence than her daughter. Finally Elena burst out, “He sells swimming pools. As if that defined who he is!”

“Divorced?”

“Twice. Satisfied?”

Suzanne shrugged.

Elena relented slightly. “Anyhow, he’s on his way out,” she said. “Doesn’t he complain all the time, a drone like Muzak in elevators? He’s boring. Like most of your generation, he whines.” Elena shook out her hair, weighing it in her hands. “Want a swimming pool? I can get you a deal.”

“Swimming is not my exercise. Nor his, I imagine.”

Elena snorted. “The only exercise he likes requires a partner.”

Suzanne was grateful to the outgoing pool salesman nonetheless, because when Elena was displeased with somebody else, she was friendlier to her mother.

They settled in gingerly. Elena was wooing the cats. Sherlock had succumbed to her at once, but Tamar belonged only to Suzanne and would not let Elena touch her. She had found them on the street, abandoned kittens of no more than seven weeks, flea-bitten, with worms of three kinds and a respiratory infection. Now they were huge and beautiful, Sherlock lean and muscular, with clearly Oriental head shape, a long nose (like hers). She considered his profile aristocratic. If she held him up extended across the doorway, his body stretched from doorjamb to doorjamb. Tamar was apricot rather than reddish and fluffier. Her eyes were huge and round, giving her a perennially astonished expression. She was as big as her brother but softer bodied. She had an enormous purr only for Suzanne. She slept pressed against Suzanne’s side and would have liked to keep her mistress on a leash. Both cats shared tiny squeaky voices, a remnant of their starving kittenhood and ludicrous in such large gorgeous cats.

Elena could not help being seductive with the cats, as with half the world. It was her way of wanting to be liked, Suzanne told herself. Jake and she had been chatting again about everything in their lives. She had told Jake all about Elena—well, a little about Elena would be more accurate.

Suzanne read the message that night in her office while Elena was moving stuff around in the next room. Suzanne was exhausted and would normally get into bed by ten-thirty on a Sunday night and read for fifteen to twenty minutes, something soothing like catalogs or a travel book about the Greek Islands or New Zealand. It was not that she intended to take an expensive or extensive vacation anytime soon, but someday surely she and Marta and Jim too would go off and see some of these places together. She had abandoned her earlier dreams of traveling with her daughters. Elena would not willingly go down to the corner deli with her, and Rachel was keeping kosher now, which made cooking for her less than fun. Kosher vegetarian: one of the world’s lumpier cuisines. Rachel never talked about going anyplace abroad now except Israel.

Tonight Suzanne was overexcited. She was yeasty with hope she labeled irrational that perhaps she and Elena could actually get along, could reach some breakthrough in communication, in affection. It was a new chance. She had never expected Elena to live under her roof again. Yet now Elena’s sounds seeped through the wall. Moving furniture? Pounding nails? The sound of salsa through the wall. She had overcome her earlier stupid sense of being invaded. Wouldn’t Jake be jealous of her, not only in contact with her daughter but once again living with her? She should appreciate what she had, instead of sulking about her privacy and her routine. She was lucky to have her daughter with her, and she should dedicate some of her energy to making things better between them. Still she had her policewoman to worry about, the sexual harassment case against the Dedham Police Department. She wanted very badly to win this case, for her client Sherry, and because if she won, it would set a precedent in the area, letting many other women who had been treated just as badly come slowly out of their private hells and begin to demand justice and reparation. The Latino music came
through the wall to her where she lay wide awake in her bed, and she found herself nodding to the beat.

She suddenly thought of Victor, his lean body, his olive face with the sculptured cheekbones and the sensual mouth, and even after all the troubles and all the years, something moved deep down in her. How she had been mad for him. Besotted. When he touched her, her bones liquefied. Her brain turned off like a computer whose plug had been pulled. They made love mostly in Spanish, besides the universal language of their bodies. How could she have loved him so strongly? But she had. He was not her first lover, but he was the most potent male force that had ever entered her life. He had left her pregnant, shaken, and mistrustful of the power and danger passion held for her. He had taught her how easily she could be rendered foolish, passive, all the things she despised; how easily she could be hurt. That was twenty-seven years ago, and still she shuddered. She had learned after that adventure how to protect herself from the possibility of subjection, her defenselessness before her own body’s desire. If only Elena could learn the same at a smaller cost. She had bequeathed to her daughter her terrible vulnerability, but not the lacquered shell she had grown to protect it.

Beverly

Beverly climbed the steep stairway from the 103rd Street subway station. “May, hello.” She greeted the homeless woman who always sat on the landing, where Beverly paused to catch her breath. Stairs took her breath away lately.

“Hello, Beverly. Is the world treating you all right today?”

“Not bad. I just hope the snow holds off.”

“As do I, dear.”

She knew all the street people in her neighborhood and made it a point to speak to them, the ones who weren’t too far gone. Half of them were mental. Fucking budget cuts. Save the state money and dump pa
tients on the street. The other half had just lost too much. Flo Kennedy had said many years ago that every woman was just one man away from welfare. Of course that hadn’t applied to her, since she had never relied on the support of any man since her poor father. Well, every old person was just one lost check away from the streets. Who said that? Beverly Blume.

She had been out to Brooklyn to see her sister Karla, as superstitious as ever. They had been fighting about Rachel. Beverly simply could not accept that such a bright able girl should do something so useless as becoming a rabbi. Karla was thrilled and defended her grandniece—as well she might, since she was the one who had infected the whole family. Beverly would never forgive her for that. It was one of the worst mistakes she had ever made, leaving her daughter, Suzanne, with her younger sister while she was down south organizing textile workers. Oh, she was as proud of being a Jew as Karla was, but it was the cultural heritage that meant something to her, not the religious mumbo jumbo. Why seek out irrationality when it leapt at you from the TV, from the tabloids?

But at least she had to give Karla credit for overcoming racism. After Suzanne had gone off to law school at Harvard, Karla had adopted first one mixed-race child and then another. She often said she would have adopted ten more if she’d had the money to support them. So after helping Beverly raise Suzanne, Karla had spent her middle years raising two more girls, Suwanda—generally called Wanda—and Rosella, with whom Karla had moved in when her health began to fail. It was her weight that was doing her in, but Karla had always loved to cook and eat. Karla lived now with Rosella, her husband, Tyrone, and the twins. Karla was very involved with Rosella’s children and Tyrone’s family, the way she had always been involved with any available kind of family. Karla was in many ways a very traditional woman.

“Miller, how’s the leg?” She greeted him at a table outside a Latino café on Broadway. It was cold to sit outside, but Miller had always smoked, and like her, he wasn’t about to stop because people had got fussy about it. God, to imagine how he had made her blood race. Was it Dorothy Parker who compared love to a bus accident? You were just going along the street minding your business when bam, love fell on you and flattened you. Or picked you up by the nape of the neck like a huge eagle and bore you off, tore your heart and liver out, and then let you
fall half a mile to earth. Certainly Miller had made her feel as if every bone in her body had been broken when he left her flat and took off with that Greek girl, Marina—who later became a follower of some guru and shaved her head like a bowling ball. Beverly stood patiently while he complained of his rheumatism and his heart before she could turn the subject to the governor and the mess he was making in Albany. He had promised to repeal that stupid mandatory sentencing law, and he had dropped it after election like a lump of dung. There were women in there for half their lives because of a purseful of marijuana, while gangstas who slit open their girlfriend’s belly were out in eight years. Women were the mules, the bottom of the heap. Suzanne would understand about that, even if she didn’t see much of the way the world worked.

Now here was Miller with his legs stuck out as if they could no longer bend, his complexion pickled, glasses thick enough to walk on like river ice. She could give him a big smile and a hello and not be able to imagine how once he had burnt her eyes like the sun itself. He had been a vigorous, charismatic man, full of stories and a line thick enough to tether an ocean liner. “Oh, Bev, you’re the only woman who’s ever understood me. You have the mind of a man and the body of a houri.” For a year she had been crazy about him and then he had bounced out the door, gone. And always, always, even in bed she had called him by his last name, for he would tell no one his given name. She had seen it years later in the FBI records when she had got her seven-foot stack under the Freedom of Information Act. Hymie, his name was, and he was ashamed of it as too Jewish, a borscht belt joke.

He had never been a good speaker, but he was a solid man in a demonstration, and he had thrust his tough big body between her and danger more than once. How he had loved a good fight. He was a natural brawler, quick and effective with his fists. She had liked that. They had enough talkers. She knew it was silly to respond to physical strength and daring in a man, but she couldn’t help it. It was after such a demonstration they had first gone home together and fallen into her bed. What an explosion. She could remember it yet. At first, one of the best lovers she had ever had, but he cooled down in a matter of months. He was the kind of man who was hot for novelty and tired fast of what he had. She turned on 105th and headed for Amsterdam.

“
Eh, Gutiérrez
,
cómo va?
” She always spoke Spanish to the dry cleaner, to the fish peddler, to the super. She’d had to get her good suit dry-cleaned after her old friend Charlotte’s funeral, it had been so muddy, and she’d need it Sunday when the neighborhood organization dedicated the pocket park she had helped lobby for, where the kids could play safe out of the streets. She wished she knew some Korean to speak to the greengrocer. She loved languages and had learned a bit of eight of them, just enough to get along and have a friendly conversation. She had friends who did crossword puzzles, but she had always learned languages for fun. It was a game you could play with people instead of alone—the best kind. You only had to be willing to take a chance, to make a fool of yourself and be a child in another language. Sometimes she felt desolate when she realized that at her age, she would never learn Chinese the way she had always intended. It was like realizing you were never going to meet that one person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, that it just wasn’t going to happen. Not that she truly minded living alone with her cat. She had only herself to please, and she was pleased with herself, as she always said when anybody asked her if she didn’t get lonely.

People said New York was cold, but she had little conversations with twenty people between the subway and the door to her apartment. She knew hundreds of people in her neighborhood, from the group trying to preserve rent control, to the tenants union created to fight the landlords, to the reform party meetings and all the people she had known in fifty-five years of being politically active. She had lived in this apartment on 105th between Columbus and Manhattan for thirty-one years. She had seen the neighborhood change and change again. Friends died and new friends came into her life. She felt sorry for old people like Miller who could only relate to people they’d known back when. She was determined to remain curious and ready to learn new things from new people until the day she dropped dead, preferably on a picket line.

She stopped at her favorite resale shop on Columbus to scan the clothing racks. She was still a size six, and she kept her hair a warm light red. “Oh, Bev,” Tina, the young Jamaican woman behind the counter, called to her, “I got a black number you would look great in. Asymmetrical, very stylish.”

“Now where would I wear such a thing?” But she took it, gave Tina her suit to hold, and went behind the partition where a mirror stood.
Umm, she liked it. At her age, she couldn’t wear décolletage any longer, and this dress covered her pretty well. The tag said thirty dollars, but Tina would usually bargain with her. “Such a dress, what would an old lady like me need with it?” But the tenants organizing group always had a Valentine’s Day party.

She got the dress for twenty-two dollars. No bottle of wine for the next few weeks, but she would knock the old guys’ eyes out at the party. She still enjoyed that, she couldn’t help it. And maybe Hank would get a few ideas. She saw one of the kids from her building, Bobby Choi, hanging around outside P.S. 145 as she passed and waved to him.

The super greeted her warmly and gave her a package. A friend in England had sent her his new book on British miners. She collected her mail and took the creaky hesitant elevator up, muttering to itself as if it were senile. It was a narrow old building the landlord did not bother with. If you wanted the apartment painted, you painted it yourself. The kids daubed graffiti on the walls that stayed until other kids spray painted over with new graffiti. She opened both locks on her door, went in, and shoved the dead bolt to.

Her sleek black tomcat, Mao, came to greet her, twisting about her legs and making that Siamese cry of his. No man had ever greeted her more ecstatically in her entire life than her cat did whenever she went out, even if it was just to the corner to pick up the Sunday
Times
. She hated to admit it, but Karla’s neighborhood had better kosher deli now than the Upper West Side. She had bought herself a good supply of pastrami and kishkes and knishes. What a supper she would have tonight, and she would share it with Mao. She could get good smoked fish in her neighborhood when she was willing to spend the money and good strudel still, bagels, rugola, but proper knishes and kishkes, no way.

Karla had also given her a plastic container full of chopped liver. Karla was a good cook, but then, she had always liked fussing around the house, the way Beverly could never be bothered. Most nights, she just opened a can of tuna to share with Mao or maybe a can of soup. Unlike most women her age, she had not gone to fat and she had not withered away. She was perhaps five pounds heavier than she had been at forty, and that was it. Weight was always visible on a small woman, but nobody would ever call her fat like Karla. Suzanne never gained weight either. That was one of the few ways they were alike, mother
and daughter. She hung up the black dress on the rack over the tub to shake out the wrinkles and get rid of the musty smell.

Suzanne had bought her an answering machine ten years before, and after letting it sit under the bed for three years, finally she had given in and begun to use it. She played her messages now.

“This is Gordon from the Tenants for Rent Control. We’ve got an important meeting with our state rep tonight and I want everybody on the steering committee to show up. Seven-thirty my place. Beverly, are you listening?”

About half the messages were political and half were friends. Her poker group was meeting again after a hiatus when Bianca had her heart attack. Nat had called trying to get her to go to a movie with him. He’d like to start up again, the old reprobate, but once fooled is smart afterward. She did not return his call. Let him stew. He had been so taken with that widow with the condo in Vero Beach. Now he thought he could just pick up where they had left off two years ago. She grinned. She was more interested in Hank, who was on the steering committee with her. His wife had died last year, and he was coming out of his mourning. He was a retired academic who had written a couple of books that had impressed her. She usually wasn’t that taken with writers, but he was good-looking with abundant snowy white hair and blue eyes the color of those weeds that grew in vacant lots in Brooklyn, chicory. Kept in shape. Yes, she would sit next to him tonight. If she had time, she’d flirt with him, but she had a proposal to push. It required research on the landlords, but she knew how to do that, and she’d teach the younger folks. It was important to pass on skills.

She sat down to her copyediting, putting on her reading glasses. She hated them, forgot them on every table and surface in the three-room apartment. She had never worn glasses until she’d turned fifty. But she could no longer do copyediting without them, and that was her livelihood. She freelanced for several journals and magazines and the occasional small-to middle-size publisher. She had a reputation for knowing many languages and jargons and being fast and careful. She operated mostly through messengers, because she had been dropped by a couple of large publishers when they realized how old she was. On the phone, no one could tell, for she still had a fine clear speaking voice. As if being seventy-two made any difference to her accuracy. Snobby little pip
squeaks out of Ivy League schools ran publishing now, and their knowledge of the world was as narrow as a shoelace.

She lit a cigarette and drew heavily on it as she began proofing the biography of a civil war naval captain. Karla would not let her smoke in Rosella’s apartment. They acted as if a puff of smoke would give the twins TB. Beverly had to ration her cigarettes, no more than half a pack a day, not because she gave a damn what the scare mongers said, but because that was all she could afford. She got by, she got by just fine on Social Security and her copyediting and the check Suzanne sent every month. That covered some extras, like a pack of cigarettes every other day and the deli from Brooklyn. An occasional bottle of wine. Scrupulously she used the check from Suzanne only for extras, so that no one could say she was not supporting herself, as she had since she was eighteen. It was absolutely essential to stay independent.