“Yuck,” she says.
“Yuck to the kiss or yuck to the lo mein?”
“The kiss. My husband tastes like an ashtray.”
“What a coincidence,” he says, screwing out his Lucky in the ashtray. “So does my wife.” He sets the paper sack on the kitchen table and starts to unload it. “Do we need plates?” he wonders. Sniffs at one of the cartons.
“Yes.” Rachel has opened the cabinet in the kitchen galley that stores plates and cups. “I hate eating from the containers. They drip.” She clunks the plates down on the table.
Aaron’s mother gave them this china as a wedding present. Eight place settings of Syracuse China dinnerware, the Edmonton Blue Old Ivory pattern, plus one sugar bowl and one creamer, the handle of which Rachel has already had to reglue. Nice, but nothing too fancy, and good enough for every day. “I’ve had the same set for fourteen years, and there’s hardly a chip,” her mother-in-law had assured her confidentially, as if Aaron would not possibly understand such intimately household matters, which was absolutely correct.
Rachel can recall an evening as a child in Berlin when a young scion of a poor but ennobled Viennese family was dining at their home. The young man had insulted Eema with his impertinence by turning over his dinner plate to examine the backstamp, as if he could hardly be expected to eat his dinner off any dish that did not bear a crown mark. Fortunately for all concerned, Eema’s porcelainware was Berlin KPM. Le Cabinet Hohenzollern.
“What did you get?” Rachel asks Aaron.
“The kung pao shrimp.” He’s opened his container and picks out a shrimp with his fingers, popping it into his mouth.
Setting down forks and paper napkins, she says, “So then you’ll be up half the night with a sour belly.”
“You know, my mother didn’t eat a single shrimp until she was thirty-two years old,” Aaron announces. “And it wasn’t ’cause she kept kosher, either, ’cause she didn’t. She just grew up in Flatbush.” He pops another shrimp in mouth. “Who served shrimp on Utica Avenue?”
“And what if your mother saw her only son eating with dirty fingers? Go,” she shoos him lightly. “Wash.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Rachel removes a pair of water glasses from the shelf and plants them on the table. She is clinging to normal routine. Her normal paths of dialogue with Aaron. The jolting discovery of her mother’s painting knocked her off course. Home after the pawnshop, she had taken another two tablets of Miltown, off schedule. But instead of feeling balanced, she feels brittle. Vulnerable. The painting’s unwelcome incursion into the present has made her defenseless against the intrusion of her own past. It has ignited her memory of green eyes raw with feline hunger. The fiery red tresses. The monstrous beauty of a murderess.
Eema called her la muse du rouge.
A red-haired feline, who possessed both la beauté de Vénus and le feu de Feronia. But her name was not divine. It was Rosen. Angelika Rosen. A pretty Jewish girl from the crooked streets of the Scheunenviertel, scarcely nineteen when she first stood posing on the dais in Eema’s studio, more slum-born than foam-born. And now the painting has emerged. That terrifying, mesmerizing portrait in oils on canvas, which until that morning had been lost to the bonfires of history. But now? Resurrected from its ashes. A phoenix in an ugly frame, held captive in a pawnbroker’s prison between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
Yet how can Rachel possibly ransom it? Fifteen dollars short. Fifteen dollars! And even if somehow dollars fall from heaven like manna and the painting drops into her lap, what then will she do with it? She can’t give it to Feter Fritz, because he’ll sell it to God knows who for either a minor fortune or a bag of subway tokens, depending upon the madness of his moment. But how can she herself dare keep it? Where will it go? In her closet? Under the bed? And then what? It stays there until the eyes slowly burn through the bedsprings and mattress and the bed goes up in flames? Rashka had been a dusky little five-year-old when it was painted. Dark-eyed and dark-haired. But even as a child, she had been captivated by those wavy red tresses and jealous of them. Jealous, too, of the intensity this maidel drew from her eema’s gaze. It’s easy to see the proof of that intensity in the painting, even after twenty-some-odd years. Maybe she can convince Aaron that she bought it from the Goodwill in the Village for twenty cents. Or better yet, found it abandoned on the sidewalk beside the trash.
Of course there is another solution. She can hear her own rage whisper from deep inside her, urging her to destroy it. It’s a whisper that wants to see it burnt. Reduced to ashes or torn to pieces. A whisper that presses her to slash it into ribbons with the butcher knife from the kitchen drawer. Wouldn’t that be justice? Though, for now, her guilt is stronger than this whisper. Her guilty devotion to her mother. Her guilty terror of the dead.
Aaron lathers his hands in the kitchen sink with the sliver of Ivory Soap while, for the umpteenth time, the radio is playing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” prompting Aaron to break into song. “‘Day-vee—Day-vee Crockett—Took a dump on the wild frontier.’ I’m sorry I gotta turn this off,” he says. Snapping off the volume, he wipes his hands on a dish towel. “Any mail?”
Rachel plops the cardboard takeout containers on the plates. “A bill from the electric company and a bill from the telephone company.”
“The two biggest crooks in town.”
Rachel opens the refrigerator. The old Kelvinator often emits a dull, mechanical drone like it’s thinking too hard. “Will you have a beer?”
By now, Aaron has collapsed into his chair at the table. “Sure, why not?”
She snatches two Ballantine Ales from the back of the fridge with a light clink of bottles and brings them to the table, where she sits and uses the wood-handled opener to pop the caps. She tries to settle herself into the streamlined mood that Miltown offers, but even after another eight hundred milligrams, the painting has stirred her. She feels her blood churn too recklessly, so she tries to center herself using Aaron as a touchstone, as she so often does. The regular guy, her husband, a boychik from Brooklyn, steady as a heartbeat. His face has filled out since they married. He’s lost the boyish leanness of his cheeks he possessed in pictures while he was in the service. Sometimes she spies on him as he checks his hair for threads of silver in the bathroom sink. It makes him so human and so vulnerable.
But does she love him? Does she love her husband, ladies? Yes. Or at least she loves much about him. The quietly invested way he reads the newspaper. That thick disorder of his curls right after he wakes. Yes, she loves those curls. The strength of his hands opening the unopenable jar of Vlasic Kosher Dill Spears. And she depends on him too. She knows this. She depends on his eccentricities. His tastes for salty and sour write her shopping list. His restaurant hours underpin her nights and days. She depends on his punchy wit, their snappy to-and-fro, and even their ongoing arguments to give her structure that helps her breathe evenly on a daily basis. She can imagine herself continuing to depend on him for the rest of her life, though there are times when she suddenly goes dead to his touch. When darkness overtakes her, and she knows that they will always be separate, regardless of how long they are together. It makes her want to flee. To escape it all. Aaron, the apartment, their furniture, the impossibly slow drain in the kitchen sink. Herself.