Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  “I’m always starving after the show,” Masha said, filling her mouth with baked potato. “I’m gonna get fat.”

  “You’re okay,” said Leslie. “Oh, hey, I owe you something,” he added, handing her the check he’d been carrying in his wallet. “It isn’t much, but you earned it.”

  “Great,” she said, taking it.

  “You have a bank account, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re employed now. You’re on your way.”

  “Not necessarily. This kind of theater doesn’t pay much and we close next week anyway. I don’t know when I’ll get another job.”

  “If you need to, you can always work for me in the office.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you need to. You can file. Vera always says she could use a little help.”

  “I’m trained for secretarial.”

  “There you go, then. Shall we head home? You must be tired after all that lunacy.” Masha smiled. Leslie hated every avuncular quip that came out of his mouth. But he couldn’t tell her what he felt. It would scare her away. And anyway, he had no business wanting what he wanted.

  Driving along the LIE, they listened to the radio. A plaintive song. He parked in front of the Victorian house. She opened the door, hesitated.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Would you mind … just coming up with me and sort of walking around to make sure everything’s okay? Shelley’s in Manhattan with her boyfriend for the night. Once all the lights are on I’m fine. I just get nervous walking in alone.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said.

  The bare windows made the apartment seem a little sinister: streetlights blaring in, the place vulnerable to any Peeping Tom. She asked him to check her room, Shelley’s room, inside every closet, behind the couch, in the bathroom, for attackers. It was touching. She was really scared.

  “Anyone else moved into the building yet?” he asked as he pulled aside the shower curtain.

  “Not till they finish the renovation,” she said.

  They returned to the kitchen.

  “You want a glass of juice?” she asked, opening the refrigerator. “That’s all we have.”

  “Sure,” he said gently. He felt relaxed. Deirdre thought he was at the firehouse for the night. If anything went wrong at home, she would call his cell first.

  He lifted his eyes from his juice and saw Masha looking at him.

  “Is Shelley moving back to the city?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. She’s back and forth. They were broken up and now they’re sort of getting back together.”

  “But it freaks you out staying alone.”

  “I never even slept away from home until I moved in here,” Masha said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not even for sleepovers with your girlfriends?”

  She shook her head.

  “No wonder you’re uneasy.”

  “I’m getting used to it, though,” she said, pulling out her hair elastic, letting the heavy hair fall free around her face. “It hurts my scalp,” she said, scrubbing at her head with her fingers.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You know you are.”

  “There’s all sorts of things wrong with me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Yes, there is!” she insisted, smiling at him. “I’m bowlegged, and my ribs stick out. Look.” She pulled off her dress and took three steps to the middle of the room. Leslie dashed to the wall and turned off the light immediately, lest anyone see her from outside. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Folding in two, she slid off her underwear, standing up in the darkness. As his eyes adjusted, Leslie saw exactly the body I had imprinted in his brain all these weeks, glowing in a mix of light from the street and moon.

  “Can you see me?” she asked.

  “I can see you,” he said quietly.

  “See what I mean about the bowlegs?”

  “You’re perfect.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes.”

  She walked back toward him, reached down and pulled on her dress again, the underwear.

  “Masha,” he said urgently, as if to catch hold of the moment.

  She walked over to the wall and switched on the light, turned it up high. “I’m not scared anymore,” she said, biting her lip. There was a pause as they looked at each other.

  “Not scared of what anymore?”

  “Being in the apartment alone.” A moment slid by.

  “You want me to go?” he asked.

  “I should go to sleep. I’m sorry if. I just … can’t, um …”

  “It’s okay,” he said. He walked over to her, bent low, and kissed her on the cheek, weighing her heavy hair with his hands. Her skin was so soft, as soft as a child’s, but her gaze was frankly impenetrable. What was she doing?

  When Leslie left, Masha bolted the door and went straight to bed. I accompanied her, settling on the duvet.

  She had loved Leslie’s eyes on her skin. His gaze felt like sunshine. His hands, though, were too much. She could not transgress that far. Didn’t want to. Shooing the thought away, my chaste girl stared out the window, her mind void, till her eyelids fluttered and sleep enveloped her.

  Outside, Leslie sat in his truck, staring at the Victorian house. Masha’s light was out now. He imagined the house on fire. He could rescue her then. He wanted to rescue her so bad.

  34

  The basement of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where the Comédie-Italienne was housed, was a hive of storage chambers and scenery machines. On Sunday mornings before the matinee, or whenever we were both free, Antonia and I would wander from room to room down there, looking for a new place to secrete ourselves. There was one room filled entirely with fire equipment. Fires were so common in theaters, the Hôtel de Bourgogne had its own reservoir under the building, just in case. I have a precious memory of my girl reclining on a coiled sailcloth fire hose. As she arched her back, her small breasts emerged from that torrent of glinting hair like little white rocks in a streaming river. I dove in. She was tiny but fierce, with padded paws, sharp nails, biting teeth. She always fought me when we made love, made me find strength in my slender limbs.

  One day I asked Antonia if the count was as good a lover as I. She laughed. “But don’t you know?” she asked.

  “Know what?”

  “Villars is impotent, because of smallpox. Le Jumeau does all that for him.”

  “You mean …”

  “They are a team,” she said, smiling gaily and pulling me in for a kiss. I stood up, appalled.

  “Since I met you, my love, I haven’t allowed it,” she said unconvincingly.

  “But why—why can’t he use me?”

  “I have thought of that. I can’t ask him, though, he would be suspicious. I promise you, most of the time it is not a matter of … His demands are not typical.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I haven’t set eyes on Le Jumeau for ever so long,” she said breezily.

  “How can you just sit there and smile at me like this is a normal situation?” I asked, banging my head against the wall. Once she had checked me for blood, she settled back on the bed, stroking my back.

  “But why is one thing worse than another?” she asked blandly. “Your prick is part of you, and it works. Lucky you. His doesn’t. I feel sorry for him, in a way.”

  I rubbed the growing welt on my forehead, trying to believe that Antonia avoided Le Jumeau entirely. It didn’t work. I became tormented with jealousy, yet it only augmented my lust. I was permanently priapic, moving sluggishly through a thick soup of desire, barely seeing the world around me. The fact that I was betraying the count seemed irrelevant, separate. His relation to her was a convoluted business transaction. Mine was a bond of the flesh. In contrast to his paid evenings with Antonia, and, perhaps, Le Jumeau, I got mine for free; a greluchon was there to gi
ve pleasure. It was a courtesan’s right to have her own lover. The fact that Antonia’s greluchon was her patron’s valet—this was problematic, perhaps, but I was past caring. It was her former paramour, Algrant, I worried about. Whenever I walked by his ticket window with the count, he smirked at the two of us so openly that I worried the count would take him to task for his insolence, and get an earful of truth in exchange. Luckily for me, as a rule the count arrived by the side entrance reserved for people with season boxes, so we avoided the ticket collector. The affair went on quite smoothly for several months.

  One night during the interval, I was relaxing in Antonia’s dressing room, my feet up by the hearth, having brought the count a bottle of champagne in his box where he was entertaining several friends, when there was a knock on the door. Antonia and I both rose and looked at one another. The count had told me he would not be visiting Mlle Giardina during the interval. Why was he banging on the door? Antonia stalled him, I hid behind a screen, Villars stalked in and said in a voice of terrible, whispery calm, “Mademoiselle, may I trouble you to ask if there is a male person here with you?”

  “But monsieur,” Antonia said, “I am about to go onstage!”

  “I cannot leave until you answer my question,” said the count.

  “You can see there is no one here,” said Antonia haughtily. “I did not realize that my every action was to be monitored by you.”

  “Please do not insult my love,” said the count. “You have complete freedom apart from our time together. However, I have reason to believe that a man of mine is in this room, and that is a humiliation I cannot bear.”

  Antonia snorted. “That’s a good one,” she retorted. A merciful knock on the door warned Antonia she had a minute to get onstage. “Please go, monsieur! This is the wrong time to twist my wits.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Gebeck!”

  Another knock. The door opened. The stage manager hissed that she was about to miss her cue. Antonia panicked and ran to the stage. Like a furious bear, my master ripped away the flimsy screen, revealing me. He was reaching for his pistol when I ducked and fled, following the natural path down the wing onto the stage, where Antonia stood blazing in the footlights, a look of astonishment on her face. I ran toward her. Her leading man stepped aside as I slid past him on the waxed floorboards, coming to a stop center stage. It was hot here, and all was saturated with unearthly light. I squinted into the shadowy, packed house: seats, carpets, walls upholstered in velvet and silk as red as an inflamed vulva, a thousand white faces staring up at me like rows of teeth. Paralyzed by this vision, I stood stock-still as waves of laughter bombarded me: the audience took me in my blue livery for a valet in the play! I became obscurely aware that my deft mistress was attempting to weave me into the plot line. Copping on at last, I was about to improvise a bit when a teapot resting on the table beside me exploded into shards. There were screams from the audience. I turned and saw the furious count reloading, stage left. I ran offstage right, jumping over all sorts of theatrical paraphernalia in my wild bid for life, clattered down the stairs, through the foyer, up another quick flight, and down a hall past the guard room, where members of the French Guard were deep in a game of cards and only noticed me once I had passed them. At last I reached the stage door, held open for my convenience by the grinning, slit-eyed ticket collector—architect, no doubt, of my ruin.

  35

  The night of Charcot’s Women, Leslie shut his engine and lights off and coasted up to his house. It was past midnight; he didn’t want to wake Deirdre. The lights in the parent trap next door were blazing, and he could hear exuberant big-band jazz trumpeting inside. Don and Libby were having one of their all-night sessions. Leslie was anxious to get inside before he was collared to umpire a fight. As he reached the door, he noticed the big orange tabby huddled on the windowsill, imploring him with a furrowed brow. The cat had been scrounging around the place for months.

  “You again,” Leslie said to him with a sigh. “Okay, I give up.”

  Leslie unlocked the door carefully, slinking into the kitchen, spooned some cat food into a plastic bowl, and set it outside. The big cat oozed heavily to the ground, prowled over to the bowl, and set to, its head bobbing up and down as it picked out chunks of meat and gnawed them, needle teeth exposed, eyes on Leslie. Leslie slipped back inside and shut the door.

  “Do you have to rescue everybody?” Deirdre was standing, statuesque, in the kitchen.

  Leslie walked to the sink and began to wash his hands. “I got sick of him looking so miserable,” he said.

  “So he’s our cat now?” she asked, leaning against the counter.

  “I just gave him some food, Deirdre.”

  “And that’ll be you feeding him every day from now on, right?”

  “I’m not saying we have to feed him every day.”

  “Once you start that, there’s no end to it. You can’t just feed an animal once.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That cat is an aggressive animal. Our cats hate him, don’t you realize that? He bullies them. He steals their food. And then you go and feed him—for what reason, your vanity? The only way to get away from a cat like that is to move.”

  He was drying his hands, looking down at the dishcloth. “You want to move?” he asked.

  “Where would we go? We’ve got the whole frigging circus to drag along anyway.”

  “You mean your sons and your parents and your grandchild? That circus?”

  “Oh, excuse me. Pardon me for not being perfect for two seconds. You weren’t even on duty tonight, you faker.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I called the firehouse. Tommy tried to cover for you once he figured out you’d lied to me, but it was too late. So where were you?”

  “I went to a show.”

  “You went to a show?”

  “Yeah.” He was looking at her now, right in the face, and he didn’t recognize her at all.

  “What show?”

  “It was called Charcot’s Women. It was about a bunch of crazy females.”

  “Where was this?”

  “In the city. Some tiny theater.”

  “With who?”

  “Alone. I went alone. Okay? Masha White was in it. Remember her? She was okay.” There was a silence then.

  “Yes, I remember Masha White,” Deirdre said slowly. “And this play went on till, what, midnight?”

  “I gave her something to eat and drove her home.”

  “What’s going on, Leslie?”

  “What’s going on is I went to see a friend in a show.” He walked past her, brushing her shoulder. He continued through the kitchen and up the stairs, a block congealing in his chest.

  Deirdre stood at the counter, frozen. Strangely, it was his feeding the orange cat that had her really steamed. It was such a thoughtless thing to do, masked as a kind thing. Mr. Rescue. Meanwhile, their marriage was dying. But the cat, the asshole cat that would have murdered them all for a dish of slimy meat, that cat gets saved. All she wanted to do was run, take the car keys and drive away to a place where no one knew her. She could drive to California, rent a cheap apartment, get a job, write her stories, eat cereal for dinner if she felt like it. The fact was, they didn’t need her here. Leslie did all the things she could have done, better than she did: he knew how to be with Stevie, he had the patience. He managed her parents. He even cooked. She allowed herself to imagine a single day without her family. In her fantasy, she was driving home by sunset; she missed them all too much.

  She walked into the bedroom. He was already in bed with the light off.

  “Leslie?”

  “You just woke me up.”

  “Are you leaving me?”

  “I’m trying to go to sleep here.”

  “I’m asking if you’re leaving us.”

  “I’m here.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He lay there in
silence, hating her, hating himself.

  “What did you mean,” he asked, “when you asked me if it was vanity that made me feed the cat?”

  “I meant,” she said, “that you like to get in the phone booth and put on the cape and tights.”

  “Is that all I am to you, some pathetic Joe who signs up to save people because he needs to feel big?”

  “No,” she said.

  “So I guess that goes for all the volunteer guys, then, the whole system, fueled on vanity. You really are your father’s daughter.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re the big cynic, you figure it out.”

  The next morning, rain was battering the windowpanes. Leslie answered his cell phone at seven. It was Evie. Her car had broken down; she needed a ride to a job interview at a preschool. Deirdre was pretending to be asleep. Without hesitation, he got dressed and ran out of the house through the rain.

  Leslie got to Evie’s condo and parked, his engine idling. He didn’t want to knock in case he had to meet another one of her men. At last Evie rushed out the door, locking it. She was wearing a zebra-print slicker and a pink miniskirt with high-heeled rubber boots, frosty pink lip gloss glinting. She did not look like preschool material. She hopped into the truck, reeking of fruity shampoo, and beamed at him with her overtanned, mildly booze-puffed face.

  “Everything okay?” Leslie asked hoarsely, managing a smile.

  “Yeah,” said Evie. “Just need a ride, is all.”

  “Well,” said Leslie, “here I am.”

  As Leslie drove through the swirling skirts of the hurricane currently, according to the radio, waltzing across the Atlantic, he felt the rain outside his truck to be a solid thing, a tangible continuity of water. There didn’t seem to be individual raindrops anywhere. Headlights floated toward him, smeared and bleary as he moved along, his wipers beating frantic time, cutting ineffectual, temporary wedges out of liquid sheets that glided down the windshield like melted plastic. A red car popped up behind him, started flashing its lights, wanting him to go faster, even in this gale. Leslie slowed down instead. The radio was turned down low; barely audible frenetic guitar was mesmeric shoved down that deep. The hothead behind him was flashing desperately. Leslie slowed down to fifteen miles an hour, just to spite the guy. At last the road straightened out and the red car whooshed past him, the driver turning to glare as he passed. Leslie saluted. Chances were, the fire department would be cutting that moron out of his vehicle before too long.