The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  What had she wanted? Another city? Another world? Another life, certainly. All those dinners, and Abe with his gentlemanly Saturday evening routines of dining in the better restaurants and visiting her apartment, or in later years her house, making love with her and departing on Sunday to return to that other life of his, the one she would visit the public spheres of, the one linked to hers but untouchable. That was her bargain all along, and she’s become a woman nearing sixty. And if she leaves the city now, so much later, it is not to leave behind the house on Lancaster. And if she stays, it is not to stay in its orbit.

  “I have a client waiting,” Moshe tells her. The room is empty. He stands beside her now, beside the tall windows, a large, wilting man. “Have dinner with us tonight?” He offers to pick her up at her shop or her house, wherever she likes.

  Her mouth seems dry and she has to think the words before saying them. And then she speaks as if she’s a self-possessed woman, as if everything is fine. “Yes, good,” she says. She pictures her store, a checkerboard of light and shadow on the street beyond, Moshe’s Chrysler pulling up before the plate glass window, imagines Bertha and Moshe in the front seat, peering out for her. And in this moment, if she wants anything, she wants the waiting Chrysler. “The store at five-thirty? Don’t let Bertha cook. We’ll go somewhere nice.”

  He nods and gestures toward the door of the conference room, and for an instant she does not want to leave this room, this moment, this spot by the window, as if leaving the room—and not an implausible moment in August—marks Abe’s death. But the smaller, intangible deaths have taken hold: the world has changed. It is September, a day more August than October. In a moment she will be out on the street, passing department stores and bakeries and simmering crowds; and here is Moshe taking her arm and walking her, leisurely, into the hallway, and kissing her on the cheek. She is telling him to have a good afternoon, to give her love to Bertha, to choose a favorite restaurant, the words issuing as they always have, as if Lillian is in charge of saying them.

  CHAPTER 24

  Irving

  1948

  Irving’s hand rests three inches from Esther Rosen’s: for a moment the world seems reduced to the proximity of hands and the white linen tablecloth of the Hour Glass Restaurant, the small distance he does not know how to span. Sweat beads on his forehead, a cresting wave of sweat he associates with the war, and Esther—queenly Esther—smiles at him and sips her wine and asks him if he and Sadie were close as children. Because of course it’s Sadie they have in common, Sadie who convinced him to call Esther Rosen, the crème de la crème of marriageable women, elegant and German-Jewish and, at twenty-eight, a war widow. Even in her long-sleeved dress, even with her war widow sadness, Esther shimmers.

  She is waiting for him to answer and he forces his gaze away from the hands on the table—his own like dumb clay—to her eyes, chestnut and long-lashed, and what is it she wants to know? Sadie in childhood? A fine sister, sure, but his sisters had sometimes blurred together, a pervasive cloud of girl.

  “My favorite sister,” Irving says. “What would I do without her?” He winks. It’s involuntary, this wink, and Esther Rosen glances away. She tells him she feels the same about her oldest brother. Brothers then, more than one: dicey, isn’t it, with brothers around? He prefers sisters, though his own make a nasty hobby of his business.

  In January, when Sadie repeated the usual advice, It’s time, meaning marriage, he finally wondered if she might be right. He was lonely, the loneliness hardly bearable since their father’s death, though he wasn’t sure why. It seemed that for years his father had invisibly sheltered him from the deepest loneliness, and now that his father was himself invisible, the loneliness rose up stark and indisputable.

  “Papa would want it,” Sadie said, as if Irving’s mind were transparent. In spite of everything, his father had believed in marriage, hadn’t he? He’d wanted Irving to marry Rachel Brownstein, velvety Rachel, now the mother of four, living with her doctor husband in the suburbs.

  Shouldn’t Irving have listened? He’s thirty-eight, he should be married—even Leo, once-wild Leo, has been married for years, he’s got sons of his own and not much time for Irving. Twice a month Irving sees him at poker games, but then Leo is distracted by cards. In February, over drinks, Irving asked him, “You think I should get married?”

  Leo smiled and slapped him on the shoulder. “Who is she?” he said. “She must be something to get you talking like that.”

  The smile and the slap bolstered him. After his second drink Irving was flooded by a peculiar, fervent hope.

  SADIE INTRODUCED him to two Sarahs and a Rachel and an Edith: once she set him up with brainy, skittish Hannah Farber; once with Ida Levine, who had money and solid goodwill and no sense of humor; she set him up with Lora Goldberg, thirty-two and sweet, very sweet, doubtless a virgin, which was not in his view a selling point. Leah Berman he liked; she was earthy and funny and sexier than she knew. Just last week he took Leah to the pictures and thought about kissing her. This seemed to be progress. But in the presence of Esther Rosen, the other dates all seem somehow the same long date, the girls all blending into one Jewish girl, attractive enough, relentlessly nice, getting a little older, eager to please him without knowing what that actually required: they wanted to bake cakes for him. Or at least so it seemed. Perhaps they too were acting, perhaps they too were speaking in code and had hidden themselves away. It was impossible to tell. They seemed so wholly, convincingly good, so wholly, convincingly earnest and pious, not asexual—they were curvy, sometimes zaftig, sometimes sleek—but so wrapped in niceness could they know what sexual climax was?

  It had taken months to get a date with Esther, though she was the first one he called. In ’44 her husband had been killed in the Pacific, but even now no one expected her to date: Jacob Rosen had been her high school sweetheart, and this part of the story was always accompanied by a sigh, meaning incomparable romance. He’d been a medical student from a high-class family but at least he didn’t die in France, in Irving’s war: no one could say he died in place of Irving. And at least Esther would know a thing or two about marital relations.

  Here at the Hour Glass—a place his father had frequented— Irving would like to discover just what Esther knows, to unpeel her navy silk dress; he would like to be inside her right now. If she were a free and easy woman in someone else’s town, they might leave the table and find a room, even a bathroom, and do it right there, but you don’t try that sort of thing with Sadie’s set. He can’t even bring himself to touch Esther’s hand.

  “Family’s so important,” Irving says. He speaks with all the gravity he can muster. “These last few years must have been difficult for you.”

  Esther blinks and sets down her wineglass. Her eyes are wet, shining, and he thinks they must look the same in passion. She’s working on her composure, you can see that, he’s rattled her a little, which is not a bad thing.

  She nods. “For you too. The war, your father.”

  And at the mention of his father, his own eyes well, it’s perfectly genuine, a quick piercing jab he didn’t expect. He moves his hand the three inches over the linen tablecloth and covers her hand, which is warm, the warm sensation moving fast to his spine and groin. He strokes the back of her hand with his thumb, and a quote comes to him, perfect for the moment. “We have to remember the good in our lives.”

  “You’re right to say that,” Esther says. “We do.”

  She glances at their hands—he shouldn’t overplay this, slow is best—and he moves his hand away and raises his wineglass. “To the good in our lives.” They drink the Bordeaux, which tastes like thick velvet. Esther Rosen is beautiful, by any standard she is beautiful, and here she is with him: she could just be his luck. He feels a warm flush as the waiter brings their plates. Chicken in fragrant sauce, rice.

  “Have you met Sadie’s daughters?” he says.

  Esther is smiling, smiling. “They’re quite something.”

/>   “Sadie’s got her hands full,” he says, because this is what you say about teenagers, about all children, isn’t it?

  Esther nods and laughs. “I was trouble at that age too,” she says.

  “I suppose we all were.” He pictures himself, and Leo. “Though not Sadie. That wasn’t her style.”

  Esther’s smile—the one he’s been working for—fades out. “Your mother was sick then, wasn’t she?”

  And the image rises not of his mother, but of the house during snowmelt, a dripping from the eaves, crocus tips in a sunlit patch of ground, an earth smell. It’s unnerving, how direct Esther is, but her look, too, is open, as if this were a normal thing to say. He would like to get off the subject of dead people. True, he started it, but only because it was a way in. How else was he going to get past the dead husband?

  “She was a great lady,” Irving says.

  “That’s exactly what Sadie says.”

  “Didn’t I tell you about Sadie? My favorite sister.”

  For the moment they have recovered; for the moment they can eat their chicken and he can steer the subject to pleasure, starting with small pleasures, maybe the pleasures of summer. Long evenings, boats on the lake, Crystal Beach. Dinner with Esther is not so different from an ordinary date, is it? Not so different, for example, from meeting a woman in another town on one of his road trips. Take the club in Niagara Falls, the woman from last summer—Susanne. In July there had been a few uncertain, anticipatory weeks when he wondered what Susanne was capable of, a teetering, hopeful space he occupied until his father died in August and his road trips stopped. With Esther, Irving must work harder; he has to choose pleasantries that are in fact true, to behave at all times properly. But there’s the off chance that Esther prefers improper behavior. That would be something.

  They are finishing their meal when the waiter comes by with two glasses of champagne, compliments of the party in the far corner. It’s the Schumachers, Moshe and Bertha, there with Lillian. They are putting on their coats: have they been here the whole time? Watching Irving try to hold hands with Esther?

  He hasn’t seen Lillian in months, and she looks majestic, the lush grandeur undiminished.

  “I’d forgotten about your father and Miss Schumacher,” Esther says.

  And though Esther wouldn’t know to say so, it does seem odd, the three of them without his father. They stop by the table to greet him, and Irving kisses the women, shakes hands with Moshe, introduces Esther, who apparently needs no introduction.

  “Hello, dear,” Moshe says. “How is your family?”

  It seems that Lillian and Bertha are about to leave town for vacation. Florida, Lillian says. She’s taking Bertha.

  “The women are leaving me behind to work,” Moshe says. And he’s smiling, he kisses Bertha on the cheek, but Irving is struck: yes, they are leaving Moshe and everyone else behind. He has missed Lillian, he realizes. Now he will miss her more.

  “Miami,” Bertha says.

  “Have a wonderful time,” Esther says.

  “Yes,” Irving says. “Have a wonderful, wonderful time.”

  LATER, WHEN THEY LEAVE the restaurant, Esther seems more fully relaxed. Or perhaps it’s Irving relaxing? She touches his arm and together they cross the street, the city block to his car; he opens the passenger door for her with a flourish and then they are in the private realm of the Ford, driving to her house in Kenmore, the spring air sharp with melted snow and new grass.

  Does she desire him? He cannot tell. He does not know how to ask her, or even if one can ask Esther Rosen something like this: there are different rules here. You can tell she knows about pleasure, that shimmer she has, she’s probably a woman who likes sex, who no doubt misses it. And as he pilots the car across Colvin the street seems reduced to a series of lights—lit windows and streetlamps, occasional red or blue signs—and the interior of the Ford expands. Now the world is here, in the front seat of the Ford, the radio dial pouring jazz through yellow numbers, Esther Rosen’s face shifting with the passing lights. If he keeps driving, this space will hold, he is certain, they’ll remain suspended in the motion and dark and light, in the scent of wet bark and turned earth and budding forsythia, in the warm apple scent of Esther, which seems to be filling the car. They can stay here and still drive south and east, to the sea, to New York or to Atlantic City; they could travel as far as Florida, Miami, a hotel on the beach, a wide blue pool, and hot sun. He and Esther could slip into the pool, float with their drinks, warm water around them and the smell of oranges, the smell of coconuts, he and Esther then kissing in the pool—how smooth her skin, there in the pool, his hands on her, easing off her bathing suit, his hands then on her breasts and between her legs, all of him pressed against her, then inside her, inside the blue pool, in the warmth and blue and Esther.

  He pulls up in front of her house and stops the car. He does not want to break the spell of the silence, to leave the space of the car, but she is picking up her handbag, turning to the passenger door. It is terrible not to be touching her now. “Please,” he says, getting her to stay in the Ford just a few more seconds, while he walks around the car and opens the door for her.

  “Thank you, Irving.” She’s smiling again, maybe a little amused, but it’s nothing bad: she is indulging him, which is a good sign. Perhaps she will invite him in. Perhaps she is ready for the pleasure he can give her. It seems to him as if she too might have imagined Florida, but he can’t be sure, he can’t read her face. She glances away toward her house, which like the others has a few lights on. Then the nearby houses also come into focus, the lights receding into their indicator of house-ness, of occupancy. The houses swell. The neighborhood, he realizes, is quiet but watchful, alive. He follows Esther up the brick front walk, and in an instant it is as if the car no longer exists, and the plush languid feel of the drive has been replaced with numbness.

  Esther waves at some green shoots near the front steps. “The daffodils have started.”

  “Wonderful,” he says. He is dismayed: they are nowhere near Miami, where they should be. Here is the Esther Rosen Sadie knows, and now he imagines Sadie shadowing him, peering out of an unlit window somewhere along the street. He does not know how to wish Esther good night. A kiss? He doesn’t know how to kiss her, or rather, to do it in some acceptable way, pleasurable but not too pleasurable, not inviting passion. It would be too much for her, wouldn’t it? The neighborhood is crawling with her friends, her family, her temple congregation.

  This he knows: he cannot sleep with Esther without marrying her. Maybe he was wrong, maybe Sadie and even his father were wrong, and marriage isn’t for him, that sharp loneliness just part of the long winter. But it’s spring. And he cannot kiss Esther Rosen without his hands starting to move over her; he cannot touch her without trying to sleep with her, and if he tries to sleep with her, something will crack open, maybe the whole of his life. Her refusal would be crushing, but if she consents and he doesn’t marry her, disaster will strike.

  He walks her to her door and she thanks him for the evening. She seems sincere. She hesitates and for an instant he freezes, but finally manages to give her a peck on the cheek and step back, like a teenager, like a boy drowning in the smell of melting snow. He’s afraid he might cry. He folds his hands behind his back, waiting for her to cross into her house and lock the door behind her, leaving him to drive to Lancaster.

  The door opens. “It was lovely,” Esther says, and moves into the shadow of the hallway.

  “My pleasure.” Irving bows slightly, a gesture of his father’s, and hears her say, “Good night.” Then the door closes and he’s aware of the lighted windows of the nearby houses and the empty street.

  On his way home he allows himself to drive to the park, and for a quarter-hour there in the car to imagine it is Esther Rosen touching him, Esther Rosen making him come; then to sit quietly watching a square of night sliced by branches, and sip from his flask and smoke. And he returns to Lancaster, with its strange blend of d
esolation and claustrophobia, the dining room table covered by Celia’s latest jigsaw puzzle, which she has only just started. Three corners, two sides. In the dark the puzzle appears as shadows and pale shapes, the table itself part of the jigsaw, like a sea flooding a skinny chain of islands, though tomorrow Celia might tell him it is Paris, or a carnival scene, or bowls of fruit.

  SUNDAY MORNING Sadie calls him: she often calls after he’s met one or another of the marriageable girls, but the telephone still takes him by surprise. He’s drinking coffee in the kitchen, and Jo picks up, says Hello and Sadie, then starts in about trouble with one of the rain gutters. She is loud: it’s her habit to speak to Sadie in a half-shout, as if Sadie is deaf or culpable. Even when she asks Sadie about the nieces, she uses this loud, accusatory manner. “When you gonna bring them over? Haven’t seen them for a while.” (Jo does not speak this way to the nieces themselves, she likes them, you can hear her trying to be kind.) Quarreling with Sadie seems to sustain her, she’ll stay on the phone as long as she can, so it isn’t the best of luck to hear her say, “Yeah, Irving’s home,” and call his name. When he picks up the phone in the parlor, Jo’s interest shifts to Celia’s puzzle. He’s holding his coffee cup but no saucer, and no coaster for the table. From the dining room, Jo eyes him, eyes the cup, daring him to set it down on bare wood.