She was quite proud of it, even though there was never a less likely Jezebel in the world.
Baley said, seriously, “My name is Elijah, you know. My full name, I mean.”
It didn’t register with her.
He said, “Elijah was Jezebel’s great enemy.”
“He was?”
“Why, sure. In the Bible.”
“Oh? I didn’t know that. Now isn’t that funny? I hope that doesn’t mean you’ll have to be my enemy in real life.”
From the very beginning there was no question of that. It was the coincidence of names at first that made her more than just a pleasant girl at the punch bowl. But afterward he had grown to find her cheerful, tender-hearted, and, finally, even pretty. He appreciated her cheerfulness particularly. His own sardonic view of life needed the antidote.
But Jessie never seemed to mind his long grave face.
“Oh, goodness,” she said, “what if you do look like an awful lemon? I know you’re not really, and I guess if you were always grinning away like clockwork, the way I do, we’d just explode when we got together. You stay the way you are, Lije, and keep me from floating away.”
And she kept Lije Baley from sinking down. He applied for a small Couples apartment and got a contingent admission pending marriage.
He showed it to her and said, “Will you fix it so I can get out of Bachelor’s, Jessie? I don’t like it there.”
Maybe it wasn’t the most romantic proposal in the world, but Jessie liked it.
Baley could only remember one occasion on which Jessie’s habitual cheer deserted her completely and that, too, had involved her name. It was in their first year of marriage, and their baby had not yet come.
In fact, it had been the very month in which Bentley was conceived.
(Their I.Q. rating, Genetic Values status, and his position in the Department entitled him to two children, of which the first might be conceived during the first year.) Maybe, as Baley thought back upon it, Bentley’s beginnings might explain part of her unusual skittishness. Jessie had been drooping a bit because of Baley’s consistent overtime.
She said, “It’s embarrassing to eat alone at the kitchen every night.”
Baley was tired and out of sorts. He said, “Why should it be? You can meet some nice single fellows there.”
And of course she promptly fired up. “Do you think I can’t make an impression on them, Lije Baley?”
Maybe it was just because he was tired; maybe because Julius Enderby, a classmate of his, had moved up another notch on the C-scale rating while he himself had not. Maybe it was simply because he was a little tired of having her try to act up to the name she bore when she was nothing of the sort and never could be anything of the sort.
In any case, he said bitingly, “I suppose you can, but I don’t think you’ll try. I wish you’d forget your name and be yourself.”
“I’ll be just what I please.”
“Trying to be Jezebel won’t get you anywhere. If you must know the truth, the name doesn’t mean what you think, anyway. The Jezebel of the Bible was a faithful wife and a good one according to her lights. She had no lovers that we know of, cut no high jinks, and took no moral liberties at all.”
Jessie stared angrily at him. “That isn’t so. I’ve heard the phrase, ‘a painted Jezebel.’ I know what that means.”
“Maybe you think you do, but listen. After Jezebel’s husband, King Ahab died, her son, Jehoram, became king. One of the captains of his army, Jehu, rebelled against him and assassinated him. Jehu then rode to Jezreel where the old queen-mother, Jezebel, was residing. Jezebel heard of his coming and knew that he could only mean to kill her. In her pride and courage, she painted her face and dressed herself in her best clothes so that she could meet him as a haughty and defiant queen. He had her thrown from the window of the palace and killed, but she made a good end, according to my notions. And that’s what people refer to when they speak of ‘a painted Jezebel,’ whether they know it or not.”
The next evening Jessie said in a small voice, “I’ve been reading the Bible, Lije.”
“What?” For a moment, Baley was honestly bewildered.
“The parts about Jezebel.”
“Oh! Jessie, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. I was being childish.”
“No. No.” She pushed his hand from her waist and sat on the couch, cool and upright, with a definite space between them. “It’s good to know the truth. I don’t want to be fooled by not knowing. So I read about her. She was a wicked woman, Lije.”
“Well, her enemies wrote those chapters. We don’t know her side.”
“She killed all the prophets of the Lord she could lay her hands on.”
“So they say she did.” Baley felt about in his pocket for a stick of chewing gum. (In later years he abandoned that habit because Jessie said that with his long face and sad, brown eyes, it made him look like an old cow stuck with an unpleasant wad of grass it couldn’t swallow and wouldn’t spit out.) He said, “If you want her side, I could think of some arguments for you. She valued the religion of her ancestors who had been in the land long before the Hebrews came. The Hebrews had their own God, and, what’s more, it was an exclusive God. They weren’t content to worship Him themselves; they wanted everyone in reach to worship Him as well.
“Jezebel was a conservative, sticking to the old beliefs against the new ones. After all, if the new beliefs had a higher moral content, the old ones were more emotionally satisfying. The fact that she killed priests just marks her as a child of her times. It was the usual method of proselytization in those days. If you read I Kings, you must remember that Elijah (my namesake this time) had a contest with 850 prophets of Baal to see which could bring down fire from heaven. Elijah won and promptly ordered the crowd of onlookers to kill the 850 Baalites. And they did.”
Jessie bit her lip. “What about Naboth’s vineyard, Lije. Here was this Naboth not bothering anybody, except that he refused to sell the King his vineyard. So Jezebel arranged to have people perjure themselves and say that Naboth had committed blasphemy or something.”
“He was supposed to have blasphemed God and the king,” said Baley.
“Yes. So they confiscated his property after they executed him.”
“That was wrong. Of course, in modern times, Naboth would have been handled quite easily. If the City wanted his property or even if one of the Medieval nations had wanted his property, the courts would have ordered him off, had him removed by force if necessary, and paid him whatever they considered a fair price. King Ahab didn’t have that way out. Still, Jezebel’s solution was wrong. The only excuse for her is that Ahab was sick and unhappy over the situation and she felt that her love for her husband came ahead of Naboth’s welfare. I keep telling you, she was the model of a faithful wi—”
Jessie flung herself away from him, red-faced and angry. “I think you’re mean and spiteful.”
He looked at her with complete dismay. “What have I done? What’s the matter with you?”
She left the apartment without answering and spent the evening and half the night at the subetheric video levels, traveling petulantly from showing to showing and using up a two-month supply of her quota allowance (and her husband’s, to boot).
When she came back to a still wakeful Lije Baley, she had nothing further to say to him.
It occurred to Baley later, much later, that he had utterly smashed an important part of Jessie’s life. Her name had signified something intriguingly wicked to her. It was a delightful makeweight for her prim, over-respectable past. It gave her an aroma of licentiousness, and she adored that.
But it was gone. She never mentioned her full name again, not to Lije, not to her friends, and maybe, for all Baley knew, not even to herself. She was Jessie and took to signing her name so.