The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “How are you?” Sadie says. “How was your dinner?”

  “Good,” Irving says. “Nice dinner.” He turns his back to the dining room, but it’s difficult to hold the phone and the coffee cup and in some way cover his mouth to thwart Jo’s eavesdropping.

  “Well, good. I’m glad.”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “So you’re going to take her out again?”

  And here he tries to cover his mouth with the cup itself, saying “Maybe so,” but Sadie can’t hear him and chastises him for mumbling. He swishes some of the sugary coffee around his mouth, a sensation he likes, and tries again. “Maybe.”

  Jo slips away down the hall, perhaps recognizing he’ll say nothing revealing, perhaps already bored. There’s a squeaking of hinges, the loud slam of the back porch door.

  “You do like Esther,” Sadie says.

  “Sure I do.”

  “Well anyway, she had a good time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Her mother. We spoke this morning.”

  “Already? God, Sadie.”

  “Please don’t take that tone.”

  “You talked to her mother?”

  “Didn’t I say that? I said that.”

  There’s the passing image of Esther in the car, the blue pool feeling rising but quickly occluded. The porch door hinges squeak again, and a moment disappears, as if he has slept and awakened to find the clock advanced.

  IT WOULD DO him good to talk with Lillian: he used to talk to Lillian all the time, didn’t he? It seems that way. He pictures her in luncheonettes and at high-class clubs and on the far side of the jewelry counter, smiling at him and asking about his life while she waits for his father. She was the one who told his father, there in the store, to drop the idea of Irving courting Rachel Brownstein— as if recognizing in Irving qualities his father did not. Lillian would understand, but Lillian is going to Florida. And she’s been more distant since his father’s death. Maybe even before? It must have put her off, seeing him on the West Side, though you’d think she’d be the first to understand. But that was years ago. She seemed friendly enough at the Hour Glass.

  Of anyone, Lillian might know why he so resembles his father—on occasional, bleary days, in the shop’s window he glimpses his father’s reflection in place of his own—yet he cannot learn how to be his father. As if a secret key has been permanently hidden from him, and lacking the key he lacks command and the good fortune that must follow in its wake. There is only the knowledge of suits: he’s learned to choose good suits and he is careful in his grooming. He holds to his father’s routines of opening the jewelry store and polishing the cabinets. He greets the customers deferentially. And perhaps the accumulated days worked in the style of his father will finally reveal to him what he needs to know. This is a thought he returns to, even as he is more and more stunned by uncertainties. He’s gone as far as trying on his father’s suits, in case his father somehow still inhabits them. But the suits literally do not fit him: they are tight in the shoulders, the pants loose and too long. They seem to move around the closet independently, rearranging themselves according to season, as if sentient. Though it must be Celia’s doing, this feels like a sharp pinch from the other side, an edgy reminder of departure and refusal.

  Yes, loss of shelter, Irving thinks, though the idea confuses him. The house is standing and paid for, the store the same store it was ten years ago, the bank account solid enough. And often he has taken shelter in women—the most profound (if temporary) shelter in sex. He’s never really free of the lust, which is inextricable from need: they call and you answer. He hasn’t found another way to fully quell the panic, though he calms when he walks alone in the city, and when he visits new dance halls, and when he stops at the main post office to visit box 764, which he acquired last summer.

  MONDAY, the mild spring weather helps him stay buoyant. Sunlight falls in bright bands over the downtown streets, high cottony clouds move east from the lake, which seems bluer than usual. A new start seems more possible—exactly, in fact, what he needs. He sweeps the sidewalk in front of the store and polishes the glass cases before he opens for the day; he arranges a display of freshwater pearls; he is purposeful and resolute. He is wearing his father’s brand of aftershave.

  Maybe it’s this, the aftershave, which allows him a momentary pleasure in the thought of Esther: she had a nice evening, she told her mother, and perhaps felt more than she admitted. Perhaps she felt desire. He has a small window of time now, a few days: he can’t wait too long before calling her again, she’ll be expecting to hear from him. A call or maybe a note, though what follows next is not clear. He’s only considered a first date and the vaporous distant country of marriage, not what a whole courtship might involve. What happens on a second date, or a third, in the world of Esther and Leah, the Rachels and Sarahs? There are bound to be hidden traps, and the key is to keep his wits about him. But a nice evening is propitious, he thinks, and it is the season of new beginnings; it’s Monday; the good weather will bring in business. He has a window, it’s small, but a window. A good day, he thinks, to play the numbers.

  At noon Jo arrives, Celia with her. You can tell the way they walk in the door what the afternoon will be like. The prospects of the morning always shrink in the afternoon, but at the store Jo’s less aggressive than she is at home. Maybe it’s the presence of customers, or those reflections of his father in the window. Today Jo is quiet and uncomplaining, which passes for cheerful, and Celia clearly has bathed. They’re both wearing spring dresses, new ones, Celia’s yellow and white, Jo’s a pale green. They look almost ordinary.

  Of course he’d rather they left the store to him—Jo at her worst is snappish and mean—but whenever he decides to bar them from it, he falters. Inevitably, he’ll have a bad morning, a terrible morning, on which it seems his body has lost substance and might dissolve altogether in the next trembling wave. Jo and Celia arrive for the afternoon, and the feeling recedes, and he is safe again. And so he relents: he can see no other way.

  And at least Celia does not pin him to himself the way Jo does. Most days, Celia sits in the back with a card table set up and builds her jigsaw puzzles, which hold her concentration the way almost nothing else can. She causes no trouble, and most of the time she’s more peaceable than Jo. She turns on the radio and opens up a bakery box of cookies and quietly reconstructs panoramas, her puzzles of cityscapes and seaside towns, or the duller, static flowers and cats. She does not bring her actual cats with her to the store, but there is often a rank catlike odor on her. She keeps her hair wrapped in scarves and works the puzzles and seems to him a theatrical, prematurely aging babushka. He has taken to buying her bottles of perfume shaped like inverted tulips, which help with the smell. Some days, after closing, after his sisters have left, he finds himself working on the puzzles. They comfort him, though he cannot say why.

  He does not know how long their good moods will last. The weather helps; their trip to the department store helps. Celia’s hair is clean today, which is a kind of triumph. These are good signs, better signs than he’d expected, and he leaves the store quickly, before they evaporate.

  On his lunch hour he strolls. There’s a watery scent in the air, a lake smell overlaid with the fragrance of soup and bread and cooked meat from the restaurants; the city’s thick with noise, with buses and voices. On his walks, he’s grateful to be in Buffalo, grateful, still, the war is over and receding: he allows himself to dwell only on the orchards in Somerset. They were beautiful to walk in, those orchards.

  It’s been a long road since England, long and not happy, but Esther Rosen had a nice evening. He will have to find a way to explain his life to Esther Rosen, and this will take ingenuity, not only because parts should stay hidden but also because he is unsure about what exactly has happened. His other lives seem unthinkably far away. As if there was a before and now there is an after, or, rather, a series of befores, a series of afters. And once the afters accumulate, certain
befores seem nonexistent. Maybe this life began with a day in New York with Leo, a fancy dinner, though the memory has the patchiness of a dim room, the eye adjusted to a few details, the restaurant’s red-and-black carpet with fleurs-de-lis made bold and large, steak with onions. Whiskey from a glass with paneled sides, like small windows that caught the light and spread prisms over the drink. Leo paid, and the coat-check girl had one dimple. The rest is oddly blank to him, though loose pieces occasionally swim up, as in dreams, Meg’s face flashing into view and gone: someone else’s story he’s been told.

  Returning to Buffalo he felt exhilaration in the city, the victory overshadowing the war. There was plenty worth forgetting and he had a gift, he thought, for moving on. He worked with his father again: he felt less a boy. So there was that before, that after. Irving’s father seemed older, sure—Irving hadn’t kept watch and he’d become old—but he still lavished appreciation on Irving for being a returning soldier. It seemed all past wrongs had been washed away, and even Irving’s late, wild nights in the city were forgiven because the war was over, the war was over. Still, it was hard to ignore altogether his father’s somberness, the endless clippings from the dailies and the Jewish Review and sometimes from the New York Yiddish paper, the way he and Bertha Schumacher would huddle with their files and dictionaries and write letters of inquiry in English and Yiddish and Polish and Russian.

  The day Jo found their father unbreathing in his bed, Irving was hung over at the store, no eggs that morning, just toast and coffee and the prospect of a beautiful day spent inside. The first hours seem covered by a scrim, now a play of silhouettes: his own figure turned the CLOSED FOR THE DAY sign and covered the store windows while the sky outside was at its August brightness. His shadow figure walked to a small bar open early in the day, just for one drink before walking to the house, which was by then empty of his father.

  What is sharp and clear from that day is Celia sitting in the yard with Bill, one of the odder sights he’d seen—Bill in his summer suit and tie, quietly swelling in the heat beside Celia, the two of them gazing at the grass and the plain summer air. Jo was not there, nor Sadie. Irving stood on the porch and said Bill’s name and Bill turned his head and nodded and then Irving walked down to the wrought-iron chairs and the wrought-iron table, aware of his own smell, his drink, the cigarette he’d smoked. Bill’s left hand rested on Celia’s forearm, which seemed distinctly strange for Bill and distinctly strange for Celia.

  “Sadie’s gone to pick up Jo,” Bill said.

  And then Celia turned to Irving, Celia who had been so absolutely still. “I’m tired,” she said. “Aren’t you tired?” She made no move to get up.

  Bill stood and offered Irving his chair and Irving sat and then seemed for a long time to be simply a floating body in the green and heat, he and Celia floating in the green and heat. She was wearing a pale blue headscarf. There was dirt on her hands from gardening, and the yard seemed lush, blooming, the zinnias and snapdragons and roses all blooming, tomatoes forming on the vines in the sunniest part of the yard and the marigolds almost winking, and he drank from his flask and sat next to Celia. And later Sadie returned with Jo and brought them cold drinks, lemonade in fact, which seemed perfectly reasonable, in the heat. He stayed in the chair, and Celia stayed in her chair, and after a while Sadie carried wet sheets into the yard and pinned them to the line, enormous white flags. The windows of his father’s room were open, as if his father had escaped that way, crossing the rooftops the way an East Side boy might. One of the funeral home brothers appeared on the porch, wanting to know if Irving needed a viewing of the body. Irving’s answer was definitely no, though he couldn’t say why. Was this the right answer? If he could have moved from his chair, he would have called Leo, Leo would have known.

  IT’S ALWAYS the Schumachers who know, isn’t it? He should also talk to Leo now, about the Esther question, and how to handle it, and what he can tell her, and how to behave—maybe for once Leo will have lunch hour free—but when he calls Leo from a pay telephone, Leo says, “You okay?” and cuts in too soon with “Buddy, let me call you in a few days. I’m swamped.”

  He’ll have to write a note then, some flowery thank-you, a way to buy some time. And anyway, it’s a reason to go to Lillian’s shop: maybe she hasn’t left yet for Florida. The city seems alive today; it’s spring; he can do this, he can sort out the marriage question. It’s a matter of patience. He catches a bus up Main, and Lillian’s shop is open—there’s a little leap of hope—but a hired clerk is arranging notebooks on the counter. A snappy dresser in his twenties, a Mr. Green. He says he will pass on Irving’s regards to Miss Schumacher, though he can’t say for sure when she’ll be back.

  “I’m Abe Cohen’s son,” Irving says. “Maybe I’d better leave her a note.”

  “A note would be fine, Mr. Cohen.”

  But when he steps to the side counter to write, he realizes he cannot explain what is happening, that the matter of Esther is a thread linked to other threads he could untangle over drinks, given enough time, given enough drinks and Lillian’s willingness to listen, but in a note he can only scribble: Dear Lillian, How are you? Would you like to have lunch sometime? Fondly, Irving.

  AT A COFFEE SHOP, he orders a grilled cheese sandwich and works on the note to Esther Rosen. The first two sentences come easily, and then there’s the vexing question of whether to allude to seeing her again. He does not know. He does not know. Finally, he settles on: Dear Esther, Thank you for the marvelous evening. I hope this finds you well and enjoying the spring weather. Sincerely, Irving Cohen.

  He carries the note in his jacket pocket through the afternoon, and after closing, when Jo and Celia have again left the store, he places a stamp on it and drops it in the letter box on Main. He decides then that he deserves a small reward, a quick drink at a bar down the block, where he has taught the bartender to stop calling him Irving in favor of “TJ,” claiming TJ was his nickname during the war. Now he is known in the bar as TJ, and he is immediately happier, with his whiskey and beer and improved name. And once he is feeling solidly TJ, he has no interest in going home. There is nothing to do but buy a ticket to the burlesque, which is featuring a new fan dancer and a lineup with a redhead named Dannora.

  THE WINDOW of time is beautiful, free of worry. For two days he moves with ease, and a vague, giddy hope takes hold. Soon he’ll talk to Leo, soon Lillian will write to him: it’s spring, she’ll be back soon. They will know what to do next, they will tell him, and meanwhile he will relax.

  It’s Thursday when Sadie calls, her “Hello” today decisive, smacking of mission. Thursday, still window-time, a point she has failed to understand. She wants to talk about the state of the store, and at first he thinks she means the carpets. He thinks she means the paint. These seem to him worthy of discussion, details his father insisted they attend to. The paint should be more cream than white, the carpet does need cleaning. Maybe he should have fresh flowers now and then, something Celia could take charge of.

  “You could move north.” Sadie mentions a location on Hertel Avenue and another north on Delaware. “Get a pencil,” she says. “I’ll give you the realtor’s number.”

  For a moment he does not know what she means: it is as if she’s suggesting relocating an entire building from South Main Street— in fact, an entire block, and the next block, and perhaps the lake. The store has always been here, a snug shop in a busy commercial district, gold lettering on the plate glass, Abraham Cohen Jewelers, just as their father chose.

  “I don’t want a pencil,” he says.

  “Oh, Irving, it’s only an idea.”

  “I don’t care for your idea.”

  “Fine.”

  “Jo wouldn’t like it either.”

  “Maybe not,” Sadie says. “It would probably make her unhappy.”

  This sounds conclusive to him: it seems he has prevailed, and they can return to something easy, like commiserating. “More unhappy,” he says.

  Sadie hal
f-laughs, agreeing with him, yes, this is how they measure Jo’s moods, in degrees of unhappiness. “How’s the store for her these days?”

  “I wouldn’t say she likes it. Who knows what she likes.”

  “Well, you don’t really need her there, do you? Business is good, isn’t it? You could hire a clerk.”

  He does not know what to say. It occurs to him that she’s remaking the world and teaching him how to marry Esther Rosen: open a store in a genteel neighborhood, give his little profit to a smooth, good-looking salesclerk—another Mr. Green—keep Jo and Celia out of sight. And isn’t she right? It’s what he would need for Esther, or for Leah, or for most of those girls. What he would need to be the brother Sadie expects. Sadie doesn’t understand at all; how could she? She’s not like Jo and Celia, not like him. She’s luckier, she has always been luckier, and now she’s substantial, marrying the way she did. There’s even still a sexiness to her, which she wraps in suits and perfume and motherliness, and uses for persuasion. All part of the luck.

  But she has ruined his window of time. Ruined it. “I have a customer,” he says. “I have to go.”

  He hangs up the phone but his calm has vanished: his agitation spikes and soon the splintery vulnerable feeling returns. He closes the store for an hour and paces and smokes in the back. Where is the shelter? Where is the shelter? The store is his father’s and not his father. He’s confused, and Sadie’s taking advantage—using Esther Rosen to take advantage. This he feels with increasing conviction, though he can’t say he was forced into an evening with Esther. He phoned her, didn’t he? He drove the car, paid for the meal, brought her home again. But this is not the point. The loneliness is not his fault, it’s terrible and not his fault, and no one should take advantage.

  By noon, his mood is so foul it’s all he can do to keep himself from snapping at Celia when she arrives with Jo, smelling of cat. She gazes at him for a long moment, then asks if maybe he’d like to go for a walk now. She’s talking to him the way people talk to her, as if he is a bomb sheathed in glass. He does want to go for a walk, that’s exactly what he wants to do, to get out of the store, away from this place that is and is not his father, away from the cat smell and Jo’s cold gaze—but that’s none of Celia’s business, is it? Still, he manages to quickly say yes, and to leave without exploding.