Then I caught them. It was after midnight, and I had left my coke up at the store so that I wouldn’t go through it all, but once I was home I changed my mind and drove back to the store. There they were, the Polack shouting in Russian or Polish on top of a jeweler’s bench with her hands on the back of Jim’s head. I watched them for a few minutes. She looked better with him than I imagined she did with me. I had never seen her naked from a distance like this. Naked, across the room like that, she didn’t look like she thought about money as much as I knew she did. She looked so trustworthy. I thought, If you sold naked, no one could outsell you. In my desk I saw they’d found my cocaine and it was all gone. Naturally Jim’s was gone, too. So I rifled the cash box to let him know I’d been there, and before he got the same idea.
I skipped work the next day and when Jim called at a quarter after ten I didn’t answer the phone.
I wanted to kill her then. When I came in, after the weekend, I sat behind my desk with my diamond tweezers pinched around my pinkie finger or on the lobe of one ear and imagined her with that tiny red laser-targeting dot following the back of her slender skull.
First it was Jim and Lisa. Now it was Jim and the Polack. Or maybe it went in the opposite order.
When she finally came into my office I had a customer at my desk. Janie Krantz, one of my favorites, who was a publicist and on the side wrote books about child therapy. She was looking for a medium-sized cabochon-cut pink tourmaline. I loved these stones myself, so we were having a good time together shuffling gently with our rubber-tipped tweezers through the large cotton-wrapped parcels. She looked up and frowned impatiently at the Polack.
“We speak,” the Polack said. “I explain something to you now.”
“I am with Janie, Polack,” I said.
“I’m on the run today anyway, Bobby,” Janie said. “I should let you get home to your family.” She gave the Polack a stare. Okay, Janie, I thought. “Put these three aside for me.”
“Thank you, Janie,” I said. We gave each other our private smile — I tell my salespeople, cultivate as many of those private smiles as you can — and she left.
“You said you wanted to talk to me,” I said. “I really don’t have anything to say to you at the moment.”
“It is over. I leave the business, too! Time for me to go. Not the business. But this store. You and Jim. I have enough of this, now. I stay for the season. Then, I go!”
“Wait a second. What are you saying? I catch you screwing around with Jim and you dump me?”
“You are making me nauseated, Clark! I look at you and I want to vomit! I cannot watch this ugliness anymore. Fresh air. You need it. This place smells bad. And it is you! You are the cause! Why do I fuck your brother? He, at least, is a man!”
I rubbed my fingers against my thumbs, like you might if you were rolling a bit of earwax between them. My eyebrows were itchy.
“You’re fired, Polack,” I said. “Get the hell out of here.”
“Fired?” she said. “You are joking me? I quit.”
She walked out the front door of my office, and then out the front door of the store.
We were in the car, fighting. I was drunk and I shouldn’t have been driving. At one point I thought I had somehow drifted over the line of the road and into oncoming traffic. I swerved back to the right, and then I realized that the lights I thought were headlights bearing down on us were just construction beacons.
“Let’s tell the truth, Lisa,” I plunged ahead. “You don’t want me to leave my wife. And you won’t be honest with me about why. I think it’s because you are ready to leave your boyfriend. That’s all I can guess it could be. And you don’t want me to think that now it’s going to be the two of us when you do. And Jim is in this somehow. I am just going to say it. I don’t know how, but I know Jim is in this, Lisa.”
I looked over at her. She looked back at me like I had thrown an object at her.
“You say you don’t want to fight but you give me that. Nice.”
She was shivering. I could have turned up the heat in the car but I knew I needed to keep both hands on the wheel.
“Why don’t you just tell me what you want, Lisa?”
You are not selling her anything, Bobby, I told myself. Therefore you do not have to try to read her mind and repeat her thoughts. She is your girlfriend. Or your hooker. Your girlfriend-hooker. Calm down, I told myself. For that matter, come to think of it, I am the customer here, I told myself. Or at least I should be. That is how the natural order of this is and ought to be structured.
We better get home, I thought. We need to get in bed.
“Bobby. Bobby. Don’t you get it? Did you even listen to a word I said to you? I’m pregnant, Bobby,” she said. “That’s what I have been telling you. If you would fucking listen. I’m pregnant.”
The air took a kind of slide to the left, as though someone had divided the world’s atmosphere into two halves, and then bumped the bottom to one side with her hip. I tried to steady the car. Someone blared their horn, and then again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I expect you to say now. Oh, fuck,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to see you tonight.”
“Let’s go back to my apartment,” I said. One step at a time. “You’ve never seen the whole apartment. Do you want to see Claire’s room?” Why did I say that? It was just a baby thing. It said itself.
“What a thing to say. Jesus. I need to get the hell out of here, Bobby,” she said. She looked like she might start to cry. “Pull over. Pull over right now.” I had never seen that expression on her face before.
“I am trying to talk to you. Give me a second, okay?” I said. “You just told me that we are having a baby. Can I catch up for a second? Can we talk for a minute?”
“Let me out of here. Get away from me, Bobby. Get your hands off me. Drive the fucking car, Bobby!”
I slammed on the brakes. There was a long, frightening noise, and I thought, that’s it. But we missed the telephone pole. We were up on the curb. The lights didn’t look right. I felt my face with my hands. Lisa pushed open her door and took off walking. I hurried out my door but I knew better than to try to grab her arm again. She needed her coat. All she had on was a skirt and a blue tank top. I had bought that tank top for her at Barneys one day, when I was in a hurry. I thought it was the wrong thing and almost didn’t give it to her, but then she loved it. Occasionally she would let me buy her clothes. But it was loose, you could see her whole body beneath the holes under the arms, she couldn’t wear it like that, walking down the street at two o’clock in the morning. Plus it was freezing. She would get sick. Who knew who might try to pick her up from the side of the road? She didn’t even have any shoes on.
“Lisa!” I shouted after her. “Lisa, you don’t even have your purse!”
She kept on going.
I turned around and looked at the car. I don’t even know if the damn thing is going to drive, I thought. I climbed back in and tried to start it but I couldn’t find my keys. When had I taken the keys from the ignition? I have to be at the store in six hours. I have a nine a.m. diamond appointment. My hangover was already starting.
•
When I arrived in the cab the two customers were outside our front door already, their hands in their coat pockets, waiting for me. I opened the door with my keys and let them in. Everyone smiled falsely up at them from their positions bent over the open showcases. Thousands of pieces of jewelry, our inventory twice as heavy as normal with the coming Christmas season, sat on the showcase tops in the white and blue plastic tubs. My salespeople were thinking: one less on the cases.