When Aaron comes home, he’s brought one of the restaurant’s doggy bags with him, a little greasy at the bottom. “The red snapper was pretty good at lunch,” he says. “Thought I’d bring some home.” He passes behind her and heads for the oven. “What should I set the temp at to warm it up?”
Rachel looks at her husband’s face, the crooked half grin. The hopeful boyishness in his eyes that shines through even his exhaustion.
She bursts into tears. He reacts with confusion at first. “Hey, what’s wrong? What did I do now?” Then his brow crinkles. “Honey, what is it? Whatssa matter?”
Is she hurt? Is she bleeding somewhere, what? But then he sees the painting.
The image of his wife behind the black curtain and then the gestating ghost of a child. His face crunches up. His eyes narrow. He’s on his feet, holding onto Rachel, who’s hugging his waist. All he manages to say is, “What the…”
“It’s my crime, Husband,” she whispers. “My precious crime.”
That night. That night in bed, Rachel grasps him before he can even turn off his bedside lamp. They are artless with each other, clumsy in their coupling, but it makes no difference. The crush is all that’s important. Rachel is on her back. The springs squeak. The mattress is ungiving, unforgiving. She uses Aaron as an anchor to keep her pinned. She grips his curls like she might like to rip them out from his head.
It’s hard to keep track. To be sure that she will make him pull out in time. Hard to focus on anything but the hard pulse between them. She is thinking but not thinking. “Fire” is all she is thinking. The fire consuming her. The fire defining her. Reducing her will to ashes. And when suddenly his body arches and spasms, it’s too late to think. It’s too late and she lets him flood her, with nothing between to separate them.
31.
The days are growing colder. Rachel witnesses Daniela changing a diaper, and she watches with disbelief. The safety pins. The pail full of smelly diapers. The small, naked baby squiggling at the center of attention, eyes goggling with curiosity. Daniela is planning for her mikveh after childbirth. The Jewish Women’s Club has made her an appointment at a mikveh on the Upper West Side. A ritual bath and a cleansing of the soul. It sounds so inviting to Rachel. To be so well cleansed.
At home, Rachel throws up in the toilet. She washes her mouth in the sink. Gargles with a cup full of Listerine and flushes the evidence into the plumbing. When Aaron asks if she’s okay, knotting his tie in her vanity mirror, she tells him she shouldn’t have eaten his leftover kung pao shrimp from the fridge. He accepts this explanation without question, stubbing out his cigarette in the seashell ashtray. “Kung pao,” he says, frowning. “Not for amateurs. You should let the professionals handle it, sweetheart.”
She takes the train to the Village. She finds Naomi is less of a mess in that she is no longer teary. No longer wearing a ragged sweatshirt with stains and has started bathing and washing her hair again. The long chestnut ponytail is still hanging down her back. But life is not perfect. Much less than perfect. Naomi makes that clear. She pulls out the bottle of wine, but Rachel finds she doesn’t have a taste for it and declines to join her. Naomi doesn’t seem to care. About that or much of anything. She dirties ashtrays, lights cigarettes, and sighs out smoke, her eyes clouded, staring, ringed with sleepless purple shadows.
Perhaps Rachel has come to say something, to make an intimate announcement. To use her sister-in-law as practice, as a test case for her news. To run it up the flagpole and see who salutes, isn’t that the expression? But she can see that Naomi is deaf to the world, so she keeps her announcement to herself.
Snow flurries sweep mindlessly around the park at Washington Square, but the game squares are still filled by players, wrapped in coats and sweaters, shivering against the chill of the concrete benches. She finds the scruffy white beatnik kid with the dirty horn-rims and uncombed hair. He’s wearing an earthy brown jacket from an army surplus store and must be freezing. His breath frosts, for heaven’s sake. “Haven’t seen him,” the kid tells her when she asks about Tyrell. “Not since Yaakov kicked the bucket.”
Rachel is surprised. The grand master?
“Yeah,” the boy tells her. “Middle of a game, just keeled over,
Crossing the square, Rachel sits on the wall around the fountain, facing Washington Arch, and lights a cigarette. She is surprised when she hears his voice.
“Hello, Mrs. Perlman.”
She turns her head. “Hello, Mr. Williams.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, actually,” she admits.
He stands with his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. “Well,” he says and looks away as if the pigeons bobbing around them have caught his interest. “If you’re here because Naomi sent you, Mrs. Perlman…”