“Morning, Wife,” he replies and yawns widely.
The coffee streams into a china cup on the sink counter. “What time did you get home last night?” she asks.
“I dunno. Late,” says Aaron as he plops down at the table. “Leo had a four-top from the U.J.A. who stayed forever. Mr. Big Shot as usual. Is there coffee?” he asks just as Rachel delivers the cup on a saucer. “Ah, great. Thank you.”
“I can make you a fried egg on toast.”
But Aaron is busy pulling a sour face. “What is this?”
“It’s instant. Good to the last drop.”
“The last drop? They should worry about the first drop. Where’s the sugar?”
Rachel pops a slice of Levy’s seeded rye from the bag into the toaster. “We have none. I forgot.”
To which her husband can only shrug. “S’okay. I’ll suffer.” He sips at the coffee and ignites a cigarette with his Zippo as Rachel is busy fetching an egg from the fridge and cracking it into an iron skillet.
“So I heard this story,” Aaron begins, exhaling smoke. “This guy, walking down the street on East Thirty-Third, minding his own business, when suddenly—ka-chunk! A piece of masonry falls off one of those big apartment buildings and lands right on his kop.”
The egg sizzles loudly in the pan. “What happened to him?”
“What happened to him? Well, honey, whattaya think happened when a hunk of masonry goes ka-chunk on your head?”
“And did it actually make that sound? ‘Ka-chunk’?”
“Yes. It made that sound exactly.” He smokes, done with this business of ka-chunking and what follows. “So. Any ideas for your birthday this year?”
The question automatically inserts a splinter into Rachel’s belly. “My birthday?” she asks and flinches inwardly at the sight of a dead rat sizzling in the skillet. Absorbing the horror, she blinks it away till it is once again a frying egg.
“It’s only a couple weeks away,” Aaron reminds. “Whattaya wanna do?”
“I don’t know. What did we do last year?”
Her husband relives the boredom. “Invited Naomi over for takeout and played Scrabble. Just like the year before and the year before that and on and on back to the beginning of creation.”
Rachel replies, defending something. “Okay. Well, I like Naomi.” The toast pops. Rachel grabs it by the edges and drops it on a plate, which she shuttles over to the table.
“Uh-huh. I like Naomi too,” her husband agrees in a flattened tone, scraping the burnt toast with a table knife. “She’s my sister, so what choice do I have? Is this butter or margarine?”
“Margarine,” Rachel tells him.
Again, he frowns but doesn’t complain aloud. “I thought this year we might do something else.”
This makes Rachel uneasy. “And what’s wrong with Scrabble anyway, I’d like to know? Scrabble is my favorite game.” The truth is that the Scrabble games with her sister-in-law make her feel safe. They make her feel as she did as a child in their home in the Fasanenstrasse, playing board games on the card table with school friends, rolling dice and counting off spaces. Walking the skillet over to the table, she scoops out the burnt egg using a spatula, plopping it onto the waiting piece of toast. “Sorry. It’s black around the edges.”
“S’alright. There’s pepper?”
She moves the pepper shaker from the middle of the table to a spot within Aaron’s easy grasp. God forbid he should have to reach for something.
The telephone rings. Aaron moves not a muscle to answer it. He only huffs a sigh. “H’boy. I wonder who that’s gonna be.”
The telephone is a black Bakelite instrument. It sits ringing on the old gossip bench that came from a flea market downtown. It continues to ring till Rachel picks up the receiver, because who else will answer it? “Perlman residence,” she announces.
A familiar voice responds. A male voice, a fatherly Brooklynese voice, greeting her over the noise of a busy kitchen. “Hello? Mrs. Perlman? It’s Abe Goldman.”
She can picture Abe, the restaurant’s majordomo. Aging but still a giant of a man with the kitchen wall phone tucked under his multiple chins, sweating into his tuxedo shirt.
“Can you tell Mr. P. that the refrigerator’s gone on the fritz, and we’re about to lose a shitload of red snapper, if you’ll pardon my French?”
“Hold on, Mr. Goldman,” says Rachel, proffering the receiver. “You’re about to lose a shitload of red snapper.”
Aaron has already left the table and appears beside her to accept the phone, muttering, “Stupid piece of junk.” Then into the receiver, he says, “So, Abe, did I mention I hate your guts? Where’s Leo?”
Aaron’s job is managing Charades, a swanky seafood palace opened for the theater crowd by that maven of the Great White Way eateries, Mr. Leo Blume. “Fine dining till curtain time” on Broadway across from the Winter Garden between West 15th and West 51st.
“Figures!” her husband shouts into the phone with a kind of sour vindication. “The place goes up in flames, and Mr. Big Shot is nowhere to be found, as usual.” His battles with Leo, his battles with the waiters, the busboys, the customers, the whole meshugaas—it consumes him like a flame consumes the candle. But Rachel is detached from his struggle. In fact, she’s relieved by it. His obsession with work means less pressure on her. More solitude.
Kibbitz is mewing loudly to be let out, so Rachel shoves up the window sash, smelling the street fumes greasing the chilly air. The cat hops out onto the fire escape and charges upward toward the roof. There’s an extravagant depth to the vastness above the buildings. The last ripe blues of November swelling the sky before the drabness of winter settles in. She compulsively breaks apart the color into painterly hues. Van Gogh said that there is no blue without yellow and orange. This sky holds undertones of cadmium yellow and vermillion to give it the proper weight. Then a blend of cobalt and white flattens it into an endless sheet.
“Haven’t you heard me tell him a hundred times, Abe, that we need a new freezer?” Aaron is demanding confirmation. “A hundred times at least.”
“You should tell him to phone the man you bought it from,” Rachel calls from the window.
“Okay, okay, I’m on my way,” Aaron is conceding into the telephone. “In the meantime, get what’s-his-name on the phone. Gruber. The swindler who sold us the piece of crap to begin with.” Aaron hangs up with a bang and puffs a sigh, resigned to his fate. “So whatta surprise,” he says, frowning his standard frown. “The joint’s in chaos, and Leo’s uptown smoking a Montecristo B on his terrace.”
Chaos! Enough to give him the gastritis. Just the way Aaron likes it! He is on his way to dress when the phone rings again. “If that’s Abe,” Aaron is yelling from the bedroom, “tell him I gotta put my pants on before they’ll let me on the goddamned A Train!”
“You should hail a cab and have Leo pay for it,” Rachel yells back to him and picks up the receiver. “Mr. Goldman,” she says, “he has to put his pants on before they’ll let him on the A Train.”
“Rashka!” she hears and feels her grip on the phone tighten.
“Feter Fritz,” she says loud enough for Aaron to hear as he reenters from the bedroom now wearing his trousers, his dress shirt unbuttoned. He responds to the mention of her uncle’s name with an eye roll. Seizes a brownish banana from the kitchen counter and starts peeling.
“Bistu gut, Feter?” she asks the phone.