Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  “I have to go this week.”

  “For what?”

  “We’ll talk about it.”

  “What talk?”

  “There’s all these hospitalizations and insurances. I can’t just walk away from that. I get all these benefits. If I stay for such and such a length of time, then I get so many things when I leave to have a baby.”

  The moment she said this, her breath held; she had, on record, just finished the fifth night of her period, which was about the modern record for female, Bergen County, New Jersey.

  “Being that you brought it up,” he said.

  “Tonight, probably.”

  “Probably?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Another thing. I don’t care what you do all day. When I come home, I get dinner.”

  “You will.”

  “Nothing off a silverfoil tray.”

  “You’ll get a regular dinner.”

  His street smile flashed. “You make it sound like a job,” he said. “I know guys would come two hundred miles to eat anything you cooked. Nobody knows how to cook like my wife. One day in the joint, a nigger done me a favor and I tell him, ‘Come here, I’ll give you something you never had before.’ I bring him in and give him some of the spaghetti and crabs you made up. The nigger goes, ‘What’s this?’ I tell him, ‘Just eat it’ When he ate it, he wanted to lick my feet. He said to me, ‘Is this how white folks eat like?’ I told him, ‘No, only people lucky enough to have my wife. And there’s only one person on earth got that lucky and that’s me.’ ”

  He jumped up from lacing his shoes and kissed her on the cheek. “I want you home at night right away because I don’t want anybody else even to see you all day.”

  “Now that you’re out of jail, you’re putting me in one?”

  He laughed. “You got Friday night. Deal? Friday night is yours. You go shopping with Angela or something. I give you the night.”

  “How much of it?” she said.

  “What time do the stores close?”

  “Nine.”

  “If you’re not here by nine-fifteen, I get a gun and go out looking for you.”

  “I thought you promised me a car?”

  “You’re going to have a car for the day and a car for the night. It don’t matter. I’ll find you wherever you are.”

  He laughed, teeth buffed and shining, and then kissed her on the neck. It was the bubbling, arrogant, tender, almost charming way in which he had first sought her and captured her so easily; she had been so overpowered by him that her agreement was almost involuntary. But that seemed to her now to be so long ago as to be part of some other decade. As he kissed her neck, her chin rose and she laughed, jogged by memory as much as manner. She would, she guessed, let this, along with a new car and a few other things, take the place of real love.

  She was at her desk at eight o’clock, reading productivity charts on the computer. She made an estimate that she would need fifteen hundred calls made during the day, and with an attendance report showing that three people were listed as being sick, and knowing that two more surely would call in, Nicki figured that she would have to inform her people to cut the number of rings from six to four on calls and then declare

  “no answer.” On a pad, she jotted the words “down time” and made a face. Over the months, the computer at least once a day boiled over as if it were stuck in traffic. Nicki figured the down time on the computer averaged out to ten minutes a day. In what she called the one-bucket category, those accounts that were from five to twenty days delinquent, she usually was able to have one hundred twenty-six calls made each day, ninety of them being “no answer.” This was an area where she wanted improvement, meatier answers, more payments. One of her people, Brooks, a slim black woman, had pulled in thirty thousand dollars during the month before. That was the productivity she wanted, yet she had to sit here and worry about losing time because the computer passed out. Somewhere in the offices behind her, she knew, an assistant vice-president, who had the job because of his pedigree, was back to full time at his desk after spending the last three weeks helping to fill in for Nicki. The assistant vice-president was using a computer to make the same estimates that she had just made on a scratch pad. She knew that his estimates were off from the start, for he was basing it on three people being out sick and she knew, simply from being alive, that at least two additionals would pick this day to call in and report nearness of death.

  At eight-thirty, the secretary who worked for the assistant vice-president came by and handed Nicki a low pile of mail and telephone messages. She went through the messages and stopped at the one she was looking for: “Mr. Escobar. Re: old account.” She looked at the date. He had called on the first day she was out. So he had to know when she was returning to work. Returning today. She put the message aside and began to go through the mail.

  “Good morning, Nicki.” Roy breezed in with his quick little feet sounding and a grin on his undersized mouth. He had a large coffee and oatmeal cookies on a cardboard tray.

  “Keep the cookies away from me,” she said.

  “Nicki, what did you have for breakfast?”

  “Orange juice.”

  “Then eat a cookie. You need the energy.”

  “I need the weight off. I diet, Roy.”

  “Energy comes first for you, Nicki.”

  “I’ve got plenty of energy.”

  “Oh, but you know you need more. Now with your husband home, I’ll bet you’re like a regular steam engine.”

  “Roy, how could you talk like that to me?”

  “Because I just know all you girls. All you must do is fuck.”

  “Roy, you’re a pig.”

  “Of course I am. Don’t you just love it?”

  As she was talking to him, she saw that it was a couple of minutes after nine o’clock. Of course there had to be a phone call from Maximo at any moment, and there really would be nothing wrong with it, for she knew exactly what she had to say to him. It was simply a matter of getting things out of the way.

  For a moment, she felt the excitement that always washed through her, a foaming wave splashing delightfully, as she walked up the short dark staircase on Pinto Avenue. The sounds of the South Bronx were outside, steel beams bouncing on racing flatbed trucks, trailer trucks changing gears, but on the stairs she always heard through her excitement only the purr of music. She would allow herself only this last act, bringing Maximo’s screen up on the computer terminal for a final review, closing out an account, and from here there could be no backward look. She would live by rule of flesh and blood, by habit and custom, and if longings had to be suffocated and great emptiness endured, then she would cover her body with clothes and spangles, with her colors, maroons and royal blues and ombre-striped shirts, with chains and bracelets, and she would worry about ovens and aunts and shoeboxes and nieces and, dominating all, the baby of her own.

  That, she knew, would cause all of life, all of her yearnings, to fold about her like pleats, while the days and weeks and months would be settled into her arms while she fed her own and, later, into her hand as she walked her own. So for now, she would take this last call from Maximo, certainly it had to come because, of course, she would never call him. Perhaps she would even see him—would that be good? Oh, there could be no harm in coffee or a drink; perhaps it would even become unpleasant, thereby making it all so much easier to leave. There could be no life with him, outside of the walk up the narrow staircase to his door.

  She put Maximo alone into her mind, and thought out her alternative to any action he would attempt. She decided that she would speak directly and handle any reaction with coolness. A drag on a cigarette. A sip of a drink. Somehow, keep her eyes from jumping ahead of her and revealing something they shouldn’t. My face, I have to stop my face from flushing and letting him notice. She drank her coffee and smoked a cigarette and then, awaiting her certain call, tried to concentrate on the business of the day.

  Later, at four-thirty, s
he felt the quiver of anticipation as the phone rang. She waved to Galligan that she would take the call herself.

  “Mrs. Schiavone.”

  “I’d like to talk to somebody,” a strange voice said.

  “Yes, sir. What is it about?”

  “That I’m going to sue you by the ass.”

  “Excuse me. Did you say that somebody was an ass?”

  The voice on the other end rose, “I go to the Town Tavern for lunch, I live in Cleveland, and I’m with three customers and I go to pay the check with my credit card and the waiter takes the card right in front of the table and cuts it in half with a fucking scissors. I’m going to sue you people by the ass.”

  “Excuse me. I will turn you over to someone who might understand what you are talking about when you tell me, at least that’s what I think I heard, that you are interested in being an ass.”

  She turned the call over to someone handling the prelegal accounts and sat numbly until five o’clock when she went home and, in furious movements, threw her frustrations about the kitchen.

  “You cook like you’re playing basketball,” her husband said.

  “Stay out of here,” she said.

  At eleven o’clock on Wednesday, Galligan called over to her, “Personal call on 09.” She pressed the button and heard his voice.

  “Hey, what’s doing?” Maximo said cheerfully, as if this were some off-hand call.

  “Nothing much,” she said, trying to match his unconcern, but she knew that the first word, the “nothing,” had come out with such hollowness to it that he had to sense her disorientation.

  “When am I going to see you?” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. How have you been?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “We’ll have a drink tonight and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “I can’t tonight.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  “Oh, no, not Thursday. What’s the matter with you? Every Thursday is macaroni. I have to be home cooking.”

  “Friday’s the last chance,” he said.

  “Tell me what you’ve been doing,” she said. Perhaps all this could be done away with right here on the phone. Her blood raced with so many feelings, anxiety and tenderness and, why certainly, lust, that she could not trust herself to be near him. Restrict everything to the phone, she told herself.

  “That’s a long story. I’ll tell you Friday over a drink.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “Friday.”

  “I want to know.”

  “See you Friday.”

  Her voice reluctant, she said, “All right. But it has to be early.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, I can leave here at four if I want to. But then I have to be home.”

  “By when?”

  “By long before you think I do.”

  He laughed. “Well, I’m going to be uptown at four-thirty.”

  “Where uptown?”

  “I’ll be in the place we ate in that time on Fordham Road. La Casa Wong.”

  “Not with all those people again,” she said.

  “No, just me. I have one stupid tenants group I have to go up there for.”

  “Stupid? You never called those wonderful people of yours stupid before.”

  “That’s the way I feel today.”

  “And that’s why I’m always ahead of you, dear. I always thought they were stupid.”

  The plausible reason for meeting him at the restaurant took the tension out of the conversation.

  “So four-thirty,” she said. “Then I have to be home early.”

  “So get home early,” he said. “This time don’t fall asleep on me and make me wake you up.”

  “I can have a drink with you,” she said, coolly. “Then I have to be home at eight o’clock.”

  There was a pause on the other end. “See you Friday,” Maximo said.

  Walking into the restaurant on Friday, she had in her mind a couple of things to say about the food as she remembered it, that jungle food, in order to put a sudden bend, produce a diverting smile, into any conversation she found uncomfortable. The moment she saw Maximo as stranger, his beard gone, smooth chin resting in the cup of his hand, everything else left her mind.

  As he saw her face, he knew that whatever way he was moving, and he now was deciding as he went along—he had only decided to shave the beard when he was in the drugstore the night before and, on an impulse, bought shaving cream and a new razor—it was worth it, if only to make her uncertain.

  Her mouth was open as she walked up to him, stood with legs apart, rocking from side to side on her high-heels, hands thrust deep into the pockets of the new gray Calvin Klein coat she had bought at the Sak’s in the Short Hills shopping center.

  “What did you do to yourself?”

  “What does it matter to you?”

  “It does matter; you look so different. Oh! I don’t even know you anymore.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Oh, I love it. You look just like a Puerto Rican doorman.”

  Her right hand came out elegantly and touched his head as she kissed him on the cheek as if he were a relation. She noticed the traces of the bruise Teenager had put on the side of his face.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, it is. Tell me.”

  “Forget about it.”

  Nicki turned her back to him. “Here, doorman, take my coat, please.”

  As Maximo helped her out of the coat, she gave the back of her hair a toss, then sat up on the stool, crossing her legs while looking away, not seeming to notice what she was doing, but creating just enough flash of legs, she hoped, to jar Maximo.

  “Do they have Harvey’s Bristol Cream in a place like this?” .

  Maximo looked at the bartender, a bored Chinese man, who placed a bottle of Gallo sherry on the bar.

  “That’s all you have?” Nicki said.

  The bartender nodded.

  “I suppose so,” Nicki said.

  “Just give me a glass of club soda,” Maximo said.

  “You don’t want a drink?” Nicki said.

  “I have a meeting to go to,” Maximo said. “I’ll take a drink only if you come home with me. Otherwise, I’ll keep my mind clear so I don’t fall asleep during the meeting.”

  Nicki picked up the sherry, took a sip, and said, “All right. So tell me what happened.”

  “I shaved it off because of you.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I did.”

  “I said, stop it. You make me feel terrible.”

  “That’s what I did.”

  “How could you do such a thing?”

  “With a razor.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “Do you know what I do next?” He pinched the flesh at the point of his chin. “Right here. I take a razor and cut myself so deeply that the mark is there for the rest of my life. Every morning when I get up, I’ll look at the scar and think of you.”

  “Maximo.” Instinctively her hand went out and touched his.

  “That’s where it stands,” he said.

  She withdrew her hand before he could start holding it; that could take her into areas she had drilled herself to stay out.

  “I know what I wanted to ask you,” she said brightly. “What happened to David? I haven’t seen you since the day you went to court with him.”

  “I know that,” Maximo said.

  “Yes, but tell me what happened to him. I want to know.”

  “It made all the papers.”

  “I never read the papers, you know that.”

  “I guess I do know that.”

  Someday, she thought, when neither of us can get hurt, I am going to tell you how often I look at your name in the paper under the shoeboxes. “So tell me,” she said.

  “Nothing happened. They held him as an adult on a homicide charge. He’s in.” He t
ouched his bruise. “I got this for it.”

  “A cop hit you?”

  “Teenager.”

  “I told you to swear to me that you’d stay away from that bum.”

  “I just saw him to talk about getting the kid out or something. It was stupid.”

  “You broke your promise to me.”

  “I was trying to help the kid.”

  “Oh, I’m so mad at you. I told you to say the truth to me and you lied to me. You did see him. Oh, I wish I could punish you for this.”

  “I won’t be around to give you the chance,” he said.

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “What are you going to do for me?”

  “Nothing, dear.”

  “So why care?”

  “I do. But I can’t change my whole life for you.”

  “I’d change mine for you,” Maximo said.

  “You mean leave these wonderful people of yours? Never.”

  “I’ll do it in a day.”

  “To do what?”

  “I’ll go downtown in the morning and they’ll give me a job for thirty-five thousand dollars and they won’t even let me go home for lunch. They’ll have me at a desk working before noon.”

  He had never spoken of anything like this before, and at first she thought it was some kind of bravado to lure her into a trap, but then she sensed that underneath the words this time there was fact.

  “When did you start thinking like this?” she said.

  “Oh, for some time now,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know about you. I can’t even think of turning my whole life over. I’m not a gypsy like you people.”

  “But you’re a grown woman. You can do whatever you like.”

  “I’ve got family, husband and a whole life that I’ve had all my life. I can’t walk out on that.”

  “What’s to hold you? You don’t even have children.”

  “In time.”

  “But not now.”

  “How do you know? I’m married, you know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Maximo leaned toward her, his eyes intensifying, and they commanded hers to look at him directly, which she did, steadily but apprehensively, for she was certain that her face was coated with her feelings.