Crooked Hearts

by Patricia Gaffney

  “And a beautiful nun you were. Especially after you got out of the habit.” In one smooth move, he had her flat on her back, with him on top.

  “Reuben, wait—” He’d grown more hands, and they were all diligently going about their one job, which was to get her out of her clothes. “Wait, Reuben,” she said again, as ineffectively as the first time. “Stop! We can’t do this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s your turn!”

  Now he was using his teeth as well as his hands to get out the knot he’d made in the ties of her chemise. He lifted his head. “My churn to what?” He frowned, a lace sticking out of his mouth like a noodle.

  “I want to hear about you—your life! The truth, Reuben. It’s only fair.”

  He spat the lace out and sat back, incredulous. “Wait a second. Are you making it a condition?”

  She thought about it. “Yes,” she said boldly.

  His lip curled in a sexy snarl. “I don’t like conditions.” Before she could stop him, he took her by the shoulders and pushed her gently back to the ground. While he kissed her, he moved his bent knee across her legs, a maneuver that held her down and dragged her skirts up around her thighs at the same time.

  Everything changed. His life story could wait. She let him know, with her pliant lips and her eager tongue, that she was willing—so he’d untrap her clenched fists between them and let her touch him. When he did, she, slipped her hands across the bunched muscles of his back and down inside the waist of his trousers, searching for skin. She found it, and used her nails on his hard buttocks to make him growl. The brilliant blue of the sky through the tree leaves dazzled her eyes; she closed them, and a raspy cricket opera assailed her ears. The soft, bruised grass under her body smelled wild and sweet—like Reuben. They kissed some more, and then she sat up, shaky fingers untangling the fine mess he’d made of her laces. She got everything untied and shrugged her shift over her shoulders half a second before he pressed her down again and fastened his mouth on her left breast.

  “Ah, ahh—” She clenched her teeth to keep from yelling, while the fiery nerve path from her nipple to her vitals sparked like a lit fuse. Opening her legs, she let him press the place where he was hardest of all against her. She put her heels on the backs of his knees and arched up. “Reuben,” she cried, “Reuben—”

  The delicious scraping pain of his whiskers on her chest stopped all of a sudden. He made a terrible groaning noise, full of ruined hopes and frustration. “Okay, okay,” he said nasally, his nose still mashed between her breasts. “Goddamn it to hell, I’ll tell you.”

  Now she did yell. “What? What?” Fresh air hit her where his nose had been. “I’ll kill you! Reuben? Don’t stop now—”

  He was sitting up with his head in his hands, scrubbing his scalp with his fingers. “You want to know the truth about me? Okay, I’ll give it to you.”

  “Oh, no,” she wailed. “Now?”

  “Now. But cover yourself up, Gus. Jeesus Christ.”

  “Cover myself up,” she muttered, teeth bared, sitting up and sticking her hands into the two tawdry-looking halves of her chemise. “Who got me this way?” she asked in a high quaver, shaking inside like aspen leaves.

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  She flopped back down and crossed her arms over her middle. “I’m all ears. Hit me.”

  17

  When in doubt, tell the truth.

  —Mark Twain

  “FIRST OF ALL, MY name isn’t Reuben Jones.”

  Grace covered her eyes with her hands and moaned. “I changed my mind, I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Too late. You asked for it.”

  “Just tell me you’re not married and you don’t have six children.”

  “Will you be serious?”

  “I’m deadly serious. All right, all right. Tell me your real name.”

  He brought one knee up and wound his arms around it, staring down at the different impressions the heel of his shoe could make in the soft grass.

  “I’m waiting,” said Grace. She still had her hands over her eyes.

  He plucked three pieces of clover and plaited them together, admiring the tightness of the weave. He watched a bumblebee on a head of clover nearby, gorging itself.

  “Still waiting.”

  It shouldn’t be this hard; it wasn’t as if he were a pederast or something. “I’m—” He had to clear his throat; it felt rusty, as if he’d been on a desert island for twenty years and Grace was the first person he’d talked to. “I wasn’t born in Virginia and my father wasn’t a Confederate colonel named Beauregard. He was a tenant farmer in the Ukraine named Morris. That’s where I was born. My name is Jonah Rubinsky. I’m Jewish.”

  He hadn’t expected laughter. “You’re Jewish?” she chortled, sitting up to stare at him, her face full of equal parts amazement and amusement.

  “Half Jewish,” he corrected. “My mother was a gypsy.”

  Her laughter broke off. “Damn it, Reuben! That’s not fair, you said you’d tell the truth!”

  “This is the truth. Will you keep quiet and listen? I was conceived one night in a tent, after my mother told my father his fortune. He only saw her once more after that, the day she brought him his new infant son and gave him to him. Gave me to him.”

  “I thought gypsies stole children,” she said suspiciously.

  “She was dying. She told him she didn’t want her son to be a gypsy and die young.”

  Her face softened. “What was her name?”

  “Bella. Isabella, maybe, I don’t know. My father never even knew her last name. I grew up in Kalus—that’s a small town in Podolia Gubornia. My grandfather, Aaron Rubinsky, leased vineyard lands from a Polish high mache—man of substance—and sold the grapes to a vintner in Letichev. We weren’t rich, but we were better off than most of the Christian peasants in the village. I was a normal kid, I was—happy. My favorite pastime was following my grandfather around in the fields, watching him work. He had huge hands, but he was as dainty with a grafting knife as a surgeon.”

  He lay down on one elbow, and Grace moved closer and stretched out beside him. “So that’s how you know so much about grapes,” she said softly.

  “That’s how.”

  “And you had a happy childhood—and then what happened?”

  “Then … my grandfather died. He had a heart attack in the fields one day, and died that night in his bed. I loved him very much. I still miss him.

  “My father tried to keep up the family business, but he was no good as a vineyardist, and pretty soon he couldn’t pay the rent on the fields. Rather than join the czar’s army, he decided to emigrate to America. The first thing he did when he got here was marry a pious widow named Leah Smilowitz. The second thing he did was choke on a fish bone and die.” Grace reached out with a gentle touch on his shoulder, but he didn’t need comforting. He could barely remember his father, a quiet, remote man who had always seemed more bewildered than pleased with his son’s existence.

  “So there I was,” he resumed, “seven years old, stuck in a cold-water tenement on Division Street with a maniac.”

  “Is that in New York?”

  “Manhattan, yeah, the Lower East Side. From the first day, it was war. Leah was Orthodox. Do you know what that means?”

  “Sort of. She—”

  “It means the halakah ruled her life. Eat a piece of bacon, and you were delivered up to the devil. She thought Satan lived in the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal.”’

  “The Ladies’ Home Journal?”

  “Also in Maxwell House coffee, in chewing gum, in a bed made with two sheets instead of one. It killed her that she couldn’t afford to send me to the Jewish school. I went to the public school until the day she heard me singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ ‘The glory of the coming of the Lord’ was too much for her—she yanked me out of school and taught me nothing but prayers at home for a year, until the social worker found out and made
her send me back to the fourth grade.”

  “We have something in common,” Grace exclaimed, delighted. “We both had religious stepparents who kept us out of school!”

  “I know.” He grinned. “And we both made a career of spiting them. I just started earlier than you.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was eight when I found out I had this amazing ability to make people believe anything I said. Partly it was my face, which at that age looked as innocent as yours—almost—but mostly it was the stories I could tell.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Oh, terrible tales of tragedy and loss, stories of abuse, orphaning, parental neglect, alcoholism—to total strangers, Grace, who’d listen and then give me money! The notes I’d forge to explain my absences from school were masterpieces, if I say so myself. In sixth grade, I invented this disease that was so complicated and debilitating it kept me out of class for four months.”

  Grace looked awed. He took her hand and rolled over onto his back. “My early vices were pretty harmless. All I wanted to do was go to the ice cream parlor—a terrible sin, mind you—and consort with the goyim, who wore porkpie hats instead of yarmulkes. Later, I took up with more dangerous companions. One of them taught me the art of thimblerigging.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Exactly—the beginning of the end of my innocence. I’d skip school and play it all day on Second Avenue, then gamble my winnings at the all-night crap games under the street lamps.

  “By thirteen, I could see my future didn’t lie in New York City. I wasn’t interested in pushing a cart or working in a sweat shop. I’d look around at the German Jews—‘uptown Jews,’ we called them—and I’d despise them because they were trying so hard to hide their Jewishness. When I’d hear about a Rothstein who changed his name to Ralston, I’d sneer along with the other Russian Jews. But at the same time, I desperately wanted to be an American. I had three goals in life: to get out of the ghetto, to make money, and to sleep with blond, blue-eyed shiksas.”

  “What’s a shiksa?”

  He grinned. “You are.”

  “Oh.”

  “Getting an education might’ve helped me find a way out, but between my crazy stepmother and my own rebelliousness I let that chance slip away. So I ask you—what was a poor, slick-fingered Jewish boy to do except change his name and head west?”

  “Nothing I can think of. How old were you when you left?”

  “Fourteen. It took me ten years to make it all the way across the country to California. I’ve been here for two years.”

  “What did you do while you were heading west?”

  “Tended bar, prospected for silver.”

  “Were you—”

  “Sold real estate. Taught English to immigrants.”

  “Did you—”

  “Gambled On riverboats, punched cows. Clerked in a store. I think that’s all. Oh, I was a hotel desk clerk once.”

  “You left out president of the International Society of Literature, Science, and Art.”

  He put his finger on her nose. “That was in San Francisco; you asked me what I did on the way.”

  “Have you ever been married?” she asked, playing with a button on his sleeve, not looking at him.

  “Nope.”

  “In love?”

  “Once.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was too good for me, I had to let her go.”

  She smiled knowingly. “In other words, you chickened out.”

  “I did her a favor.” He took Grace’s hand and kissed it, marveling at how alike they were. And how easy it had been, after all, to tell her his life story. He couldn’t remember now what he’d been afraid of, except maybe breaking an old, old habit.

  She was watching him intently, and it struck him that she had an almost masculine way of listening when he talked—unseductive, unself-conscious. But she was looking anything but masculine with her golden hair tumbling over her bare shoulders, her skin pink and glowing in the leaf-dappled light.

  “Is all of that true, Reuben?” she asked carefully. “You wouldn’t lie now, would you? The other times it didn’t matter, but now …”

  “I haven’t lied. I couldn’t now.”

  They sat up at the same time and reached for each other. She put her mouth next to his ear and whispered, “Jonah Rubinsky.” A shivery tremor passed through him, and not just because her breath tickled. He said, “Grace Russell” into her ear, and felt her shiver in answer. Their arms around each other tightened. This was a closeness he hadn’t expected, and in some ways it was better than sex.

  What was he saying? He pulled her head back and kissed her until they were both shaking. “Quick,” he muttered, “take your clothes off.”

  “Oh, I want you to do it.”

  “Okay, but help me, it’ll be faster.”

  “You’ve got ’em half off already.”

  They started fumbling with ties and laces and eyelet fasteners. Her simple flowered gown looked so easy, but it turned out to be mined with hidden traps and snares for the overeager, and her underwear was worse. “You do it,” he suggested again, and this time, in the interest of speed, she agreed.

  “I’ve been going meshugge,” he told her while he watched, “looking at you every day, so prim and proper in your pretty dresses. And cursed with knowing exactly how you look under ’em.”

  She wriggled out of her drawers and kicked off her last white stocking. “It’s your own fault,” she retorted, breathless, clumsy-fingered, coming up on her knees beside him. “You shouldn’t have been jealous.”

  Oh, what a sight she was. “You love saying that word, don’t you?” She practically smacked her lips over it.

  “I do,” she admitted, “I dearly do. You have on way too many clothes.”

  He was naked in half a minute. They came together for a hungry kiss, and tumbled to the sweet grass in a tangle of arms and legs, rolling and rolling. She landed on top, and stretched herself over him like a sheet over a mattress, trying to cover every inch. She took his wrists and pulled his arms over his head. “I’ve got you,” she gloated. “You can’t move.”

  “Right, I’m completely helpless. What are you going to do with me?”

  “Unspeakable things. Things for which there are no names.” She started with one he could name, a deep, stirring kiss, using her tongue and her teeth until he was squirming under her. “No moving,” she warned, sliding her stomach in lascivious figure eights across his belly. She put her knees on the ground for leverage, arched up, and offered him her breasts.

  “I’m not allowed to move,” he reminded her.

  “Just this once.”

  Lifting his head, he slicked his tongue across one of her tasty little nipples, drawing a satisfying groan from her. She lifted up with her hips to capture his stiff cock between her thighs, and began a slow, excruciating squeezing in time with the soft suction of his mouth on her breast. Raw, rough passion clawed inside him; he forced his hands to be gentler on her, afraid he’d leave bruises. But it was time for a new game; at this rate, they wouldn’t last two more minutes.

  Breaking her halfhearted hold on his wrists, he took her by the waist and pulled her up till she was straddling his middle. “I know something you like,” he said, running his hands along the insides of her thighs, following the lines of the taut tendons into her pubic hair. She was warm and wet; he watched her face, heavy with desire, teeth clamped over her bottom lip, while his fingers slipped and slid and his palm cupped her. She said, “Oh, mmm,” when he asked her if she liked it, and she threw her head back and wailed when he put his fingers inside her. Her exuberant, uncomplicated response laid to rest a fear he hadn’t even realized he was harboring—that she wouldn’t like this half as much without Wing’s drug in her system.

  Thinking of the Godfather could still make his blood boil. Hot, leftover anger prompted him to ask, “Would you really have done this with Wing if I hadn’t gotten you out of there?�
� As soon as he said it, he was sorry.

  She leaned over him, arms braced, letting her hair caress his face. “Maybe.” She bent lower and whispered against his mouth, “But I’d have imagined the whole time that he was you.”

  Laughing, he gathered her up and rolled over again. She folded her legs around him and he came into her, slow and easy, as natural as breathing. She held him tight, pressing her lips to his cheeks, his eyes. “I never thanked you for not laughing at me that night. You saved me, Reuben. What would I have done without you?”

  “If you really don’t know, Gus, I’ll tell you sometime. But not now.”

  “No, I mean it. You saved me.”

  “The pleasure was mine.”

  “And you were so gallant.”

  “That’s me. Now—”

  “If you hadn’t—”

  “Listen, ziskeit, I hate to tell you, but we’re only doing this once this time. So if you want me to get it right, you should keep quiet and let me concentrate.” She smiled, and he slipped his hands into her hair to anchor her. The fresh smell of the grass they’d flattened beneath them mingled with the scent of sunshine in Grace’s hair, filling his head, making him dizzy. Nobody kissed the way she did, wide, wet, luscious kisses that jolted into him like electrical currents, obliterating everything except the soft feel and the sweet taste of her mouth.

  “I’m not worried,” she said, pulling away to bite his chin. “About you getting it right. See, I know what was in the tea you drank this morning.”

  He blinked down at her. “Chinese wolfberries.”

  “And something else.”

  “What?”

  Her eyes twinkled. “You won’t believe me.”

  “What?”

  “Boiled bull’s balls.”

  What could he do but laugh? “You’re right, I don’t believe you. You made it up.”

  “No, I didn’t! Ah You says it’s good for virility. Henry swears by it.”

  Ridiculous, absurd, completely a product of his imagination—and yet—a definite, extra-powerful surge of energy came to him just then from somewhere. He used it to good purpose, regaining Grace’s complete attention.