What drove us apart in the end was even more shameful. The girl in the wheelchair would understand this. It began with my Andalusian’s pride in me, her desire to flaunt me before the world, as though for her, a widow in the prime of life, I was a desirable catch and an enviable erotic property, in any case an achievement for which she could take embellishing credit. “You just want to show off with me,” I rebelled. “If you had your way, you’d get all dolled up like a Yiddish mama on shabbes and promenade through town with me on your arm and bask in the delight of the passersby at your boychik, isn’t that so?” She wanted to mold me according to her ideas; she smeared brilliantine in my hair and wanted me to wear certain suits — the very best, needless to say — and she gave me the most dreadful neckties.
I shuddered at the thought. I was horrified that the district representative of the Aphrodite Company would inevitably get wind of our affair. I could foresee the wave of gossip that would sweep through the Sudeten German and Transylvanian Saxon gentlemen in management. Although not quite able to suppress my pride at having succeeded in “melting the iceberg,” I told her that it could have very disagreeable consequences for me professionally if anyone found out about our affair. Of course, it was hard to explain why, especially to her. Since we had begun seeing each other regularly, I had had a free hand at the Parfumeria Flora. Soon, the displays were showing nothing but Aphrodite products, different ones each week. If I did not decorate the window, because it struck me as too conspicuous, then she did it, as a favor for me, behind my back. “It would be simplest if you just stuck me between the toothpastes and the soaps. If possible with the legend ‘Not so good in bed as my late husband, but still …’ Only that wouldn’t be what Aphrodite is aiming for,” I said venomously. “After all, they’re paying me to publicize their products, not to have their products publicize me.”
Only later on, after we broke up, did it sometimes cross my mind that there was something that might have helped me understand her vanity better, namely an element of defiance in her pride. No doubt her neighbors, all Jewish, did not fail to perceive what our regular get-togethers were about. Once, an elderly man had spoken to me: smiling into the evening, as it were, very amiably, very kindly, with discreetly closed eyes, he had asked me whether I did not care to come to prayers now and again, and I had replied, more gruffly than intended, that I was not Jewish. This must have got around. Ridiculous as the prejudice against the admissibility of our relationship might seem to me in an enlightened world, chances were that the bias existed. I ought to have been touched by the courage with which she stood by me.
But the very opposite was the case. When she suggested our dining in one of Bucharest’s large, well-frequented downtown restaurants, I suspected her of using me for an attempt at social climbing. “That’s all phony,” I tried to explain to her. “All the people you see there are nothing but philistines trying to put on the dog. The truly elegant people eat at home or in a few exclusive places like the Capşa, not in a dump like that.”
She looked at me blankly. “Do you want to eat in the Capşa, baby? Even if it’s more expensive, that’s all right.”
Yet I had been doing my best to show her something of my world — or at least that tiny bit of it which I took part in during the riding half of my double life. For I was still riding every morning, and indeed spent more and more of my free time in the stables and at the track. But her encounter with the fashionable milieu of the turf ended catastrophically. “That’s supposed to be fun?” she wailed. “Me, a hardworking woman, I’m supposed to get up at four in the morning and watch someone plopping onto a wild horse and galloping off like he’s crazy or something? Baby, please, you’re gonna break your neck! Just look at how skinny you are, all because you won’t eat anything to keep fit for such a stupid, boring thing. And that stench in those stables — it can’t be healthy. How can anyone feel normal that way? No wonder that old bag who talked to you for hours on end behaved so strangely with me. She didn’t even shake hands. With all that horseshit in her lungs, she lost her good manners. What did you say she was? Lady-in-waiting to the queen? She can be the queen herself, for all I care. If she feels all right in the horse manure, well, let her. She must know what she gets out of it; she lets the stableboy grab her tushy whenever he lifts her up on her nag — I saw it with my very own eyes — yet she must be sixty-plus if she’s a day. But you, baby, you don’t need that stuff. If you like, I’ll buy you a little buggy; a horse you can get cheap. There’s a market every Thursday out by your factory; you’re sure to find something suitable, and we can put it right here in the back yard; I’ll just give notice to the people keeping goats there now; well, and a little hay and oats — how much can that cost? And a little buggy won’t ruin us either; we can go riding every Sunday on Shossea Khisseleff. What else do you want from the nags except to have fun? You don’t wanna become like that gonif of a trainer who thinks he can milk those dumb rich people dry, and those fellows do the biggest business with those poor devils who bet away their last penny ….” She looked at me with tender solicitude. “You’re no shmegegge, baby, are you? Why do you want it?” It took her weeks to calm down.
I had even less success trying to open her eyes to what excited me about the seamy life of the suburbs: my snobbish passions, such as the turf, were bad enough, but this was truly unintelligible to her. “What’s so wonderful about the desperate face of a thief who’s been caught stealing? His despair? Do you know what despair really is?” she asked, shaking her head. “Honestly, baby, I just don’t understand you. First you go to pieces telling me about some dog that’s been run over and his master can’t stand seeing him suffer so he cries and kills him with a club. And then, when I ask you to come along to my neighbor’s funeral, you tell me it’s none of your business. First you tell me that I should throw away the stone I check the hundred-lei pieces with, because the riffraff bring so many phony coins into the shop, and that it’s hardhearted because they’ve been fooled themselves, and vulgar, too, not suitable for me, you say. And then you want me, a decent woman, to go with you to Crucea de Piatră and look at the hookers. You can watch them baking bread there for hours, with the cockroaches strolling all over the dough, but when I rub in my mascara with a little spit, you hit the roof. Has anybody ever seen so much contradiction? If you knew the Mahalà as well as I did — always scared of someone sticking a knife into your ribs — you wouldn’t say that life was more honest here than in the quarters where the rich people live ….”
I hated her when she talked such rubbish. I felt she was committing treason against herself. I could have beaten her for such petit bourgeois narrow-mindedness, for it snuffed out the face that made me love her whenever tenderness overwhelmed her.
But one day, even the sight of her happiness turned dull for me. We had gone out again one evening, for God’s sake, just to the kind of place she loved: a garden restaurant. Blue, yellow, and red light bulbs in chestnut leaves, a Gypsy band playing, and a singer singing with eyebrows raised like circumflexes. She was wearing an unspeakably awful dress, a kind of elflike, innocent version of a Pierrot costume in white, with gigantic black polka dots and a silly ruff. All she needed to do was let her breasts hang out and don a gauze cap with two huge feelers to play a splendid black-and-white ladybug in the masquerade teeming around Crucea de Piatră. But no, she had had some hair stylist in Văcăreşti bake one of her horsehair cakes again, and she had stuck in a celluloid Spanish comb with rhinestones — it just about turned my stomach.