“Hallo, Bissel. Shall I call you that? Little morsel? You look like you could be gobbled up in a single bite.” There was a teasing quality to the girl’s voice, but Rashka felt a pinch of fear. That she might be swallowed in a single bite? But before such a thing happened, in came Eema, her voice still heated by her dispute with Feter Fritz. “Rashka! Come!” her mother demanded. “Time for you to go. Your feter’s taking you to the Adlon to rot your teeth!”
“But I wanted to pet Gilgamesh,” Rashka complained, trying to gain time, trying to maintain herself in the girl’s presence a little longer. Just a little longer.
Eema, though, was not having it. She snatched Rashka’s hand and gave it a yank. “Come, I said!”
Rashka had no other choice but to obey. She glanced backward as Eema hauled her out of the studio. The girl, she saw, had returned to petting the cat as if Rashka had never existed.
***
The subway is packed. Rachel ignores the bumps and gropes of the crowd. Switching to the uptown I.R.T., she hops off at Columbus Circle, breathing in the open air, and walks down to West 57th, where she finds Lee’s Art Shop waiting for her.
Stretched canvases are neatly stacked by size in large sets or wooden racks. She slides out a 24 x 36-inch. Considers it with a frown. Slides it back in. Slides out a 36 x 48 instead. She needs the space. A great breadth of clean, unpainted canvas.
Returning on the Broadway Express, she stands with the large canvas wrapped in paper in front of her. But it is so big that it’s hard not to keep bumping the knees of the other passengers, who shoot her irritated looks. She pretends to see none of them and instead focuses on the advertisement of a contented husband holding a steaming coffee cup.
Now, even a man can make perfect coffee in just seconds!
Back at the apartment, she has placed the canvas on a chair stolen from the kitchen table so she can stare at its white emptiness from the sofa. It stares back at her with a vacant canvas face. A key turns in a lock. The apartment door opens without further warning, and Aaron steps in, his Alpiner shoved back on his head and his coat flopped over his arm.
“Halloo. Guess who’s home early?” he calls.
She is caught out—her private exchange with this canvas interrupted by the intrusion—but what can she do? “The king of the castle?” she guesses.
“None other,” he concedes and thusly bestows a hello kiss on her cheek before he stands back and surveys this new unexpected wrinkle. “So what’s this?” he wonders.
With Aaron home, it turns out that two’s company but three’s a crowd, especially if the three includes an empty canvas as tall as the coffee table is long.
“So you’re painting again? Is that it?”
“Is
“This gigantic thing on the kitchen chair.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What gigantic thing?”
“H’okay. I surrender.”
She feels exposed, vulnerable, naked in her desires. Here is a husband from Flatbush chomping on the corned beef sandwich he’s brought home from some stupid deli, wiping his greasy fingers and mouth with a paper napkin, when all she wants to do is sit with her canvas. And his tone confirms just how betrayed he still feels. By her. By her Episode. How suspicious he is of any uncertain development now. Once, he was happy to see her painting. And if he wasn’t happy, at least he wasn’t watching her like she was a bomb with a lit fuse. As if any deviation from normal was a threat. The anger settles in between them, her anger, his anger. And finally some comment he makes strikes Rachel wrong, or maybe it’s when he does that awful imitation of the woman on the subway making her sound like a nitwit, because doesn’t he really think all women are nitwits? Suddenly they are shouting.
In the morning, she remembers throwing her glass of Gomberg Seltzer at the floor.
Pulling herself from bed, she finds it cleaned up. She finds her husband sitting at the kitchen table in his shirtsleeves and with his necktie loose at his open collar. Smoking over a cup of coffee with sleepless, burdened eyes. The cat goes prancing before her as she enters, but Aaron ignores him, looking up at Rachel.
“Good morning,” he says blankly.
She is dressed in her pj’s as she pads in sock feet over to the stove and ignites the burner under the kettle with a match. “You made yourself coffee,” she observes.
“Just that instant stuff,” Aaron says. No big deal.
Now, even a man can make perfect coffee in just seconds!
Rachel feeds the mewing cat, Little Friskies poured into his bowl. She sets it down, then fills up a bowl for the cat’s water from the tap. Sets it down as all the while, she can feel Aaron watching her from his chair. Feels his eyes follow her as she passes him again and crosses to the sofa where she picks up the pillow and wrinkled sheet upon which her husband slept.
“You cleaned up the broken glass,” she says without making eye contact.