A Red Death

21

I heard a door slam somewhere below me. Sometime after that I opened my eyes.

The window had a lace curtain over its lower half. There were big white clouds moving fast across a perfectly blue sky in the upper panes. Watching that sky helped my breathing. I remember how deeply I inhaled, not even wanting to let it out.

“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins.” It was a woman’s voice. “How are you feeling?”

“What time is it?” I asked, sitting up. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and the blankets came down to my stomach. Shirley Wenzler’s eyes were fast to my chest.

“Ten, I guess.”

She wore a no-sleeve one-piece cotton dress that had slanting stripes of blue, green, and gold, all very bright. Squinting at those bright colors let me know that I had a hangover.

“This your house?” I asked.

“Kind of. I rent. Poppa lives all the way in Santa Monica so we thought we’d take you here for the night.”

“How’d I get in bed?”

“You walked.”

“I don’t remember.” It was partially true.

“You were kind of drunk, Mr. Rawlins.” She giggled and covered her mouth. She was a very pretty young woman with extremely pale skin against jet-black hair. Her face was heart-shaped, everything seemed to point at her smile.

“Poppa just shouted at you, and told you where to go, and he kept on shouting until you did it. You…” She hesitated.

“Yeah?”

“You were kind of like crying.”

“Did I say anything?”

“About a dead woman. You said she killed herself because you made her leave. Is that true?”

“No, no it’s not. She got evicted from a place I clean for. That’s all.”

“Oh,” she whispered and then looked at my chest.

I liked the attention, so I left the blankets alone.

“Is Chaim here?” I asked.

“I took him to the church. I just got back. He said that you’d come later if you weren’t too sick.”

“Is this your room?” I asked, looking around.

“Uh-huh. But I stayed in the spare room in the attic. It has a bed and I like to go up there and read sometimes. Especially in the spring or fall when it isn’t too hot or too cold.

“Poppa slept on the couch,” she added. “He does that sometimes.”

“Oh,” I said, partly because I didn’t know what to say, and partly because my head hurt.

I watched her watching me for a few moments until she finally said. “I’ve never seen a man’s chest, I mean, like yours.”

“All it is is brown, honey. Ain’t that different.”

“Not that, I mean the hair, I mean you don’t have much and it’s so curly and…”

“And what?”

Just then the doorbell rang. Three short chimes that sounded like they were in some other world. Shirley, who had turned bright red, made to leave. I guess that she was kind of flustered. I was too.

When she was gone I looked around the room. The furniture was all hand-crafted from a yellowish-brown wood that I couldn’t identify. Not a surface was flat. Everything curved and arced, from the mirrored bureau to the chest of drawers.

There was a thick white carpet and a few upholstered chairs. It was a small, feminine room; just exactly the right size and gender for my hangover.

After a while I heard men’s voices. I went to the window and saw Shirley Wenzler standing outside of a wire fence in front of a well-manicured little yard. She was talking to two men who were wearing dark suits and short-brimmed hats. I remember thinking that the men must have gone shopping together to get clothes that were so similar.

Shirley got angry and shouted something that I couldn’t make out. Finally she walked away from them, turning every now and then to see if they’d gone. But they just stared at her attentively, like sentinels of a wolf pack.

While I watched I hustled on my pants. When I heard the door slam I wanted to go ask her what had happened, but the twins interested me. They walked slowly across the street and got into a dark blue or black Buick sedan. They didn’t start the car and drive away; they just sat there, watching the house.

“So you’re up?” Shirley Wenzler said from the doorway. She was smiling again.

I turned from the window and said, “Nice neighborhood you live in. Hollywood?”

“Almost.” She smiled. “We’re near La Brea and Melrose.”

“That’s a long drive from where you got me.”

She laughed, a little too loudly, and came into the room. She sat in a plush-bottomed chair across from the bed. I sat down on the mattress to keep her company.

“Did some woman really die?” she asked.

“Woman over where I clean couldn’t pay the rent and she killed herself.”

“You saw it?”

“Yeah.” But all I could remember was Poinsettia’s dripping toe.

“My poppa saw things like that.” There was a strange light in her eyes. Not haunted like Chaim’s, but empty.

“Many Jews,” she continued, as if reciting a prayer she’d gone to bed with her whole life. “Mothers and sons.”

“Yeah,” I said, also softly.

At Dachau I’d seen many men and women like Wenzler; small and slight from starvation. Most of them were dead, strewn across the paths between bungalows like those ants, I imagined, stretched out in their hives.

“You think you could have saved her?” she asked. I had the crazy feeling that I was talking to her father, not her.

“What?”

“The woman who died. You think you could have saved her?”

“I know it. I got the ear’a the man run the place. He’da let ’er stay.”

“No,” she said simply.

“What you mean, no?”

“We are all of us trapped, Mr. Rawlins. Trapped in amber, trapped in work. If you can’t pay the rent you die.”

“That ain’t right,” I said.

Her eyes brightened even more and she smiled at me. “No, Mr. Rawlins. It is wrong.”

It sounded so true and so final that I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I held my peace, staring at her pale delicate hands. I could see the trace of blue veins pulsing just under the white skin.

“Come on down when you’re ready,” she said, rising and moving toward the door. “I’m making breakfast now.”

As if she’d conjured it, I suddenly smelled coffee and bacon.

She sat at a maple table in an alcove that looked out onto a very green backyard. There was a tangerine tree right out the window. It was covered with waxy white blossoms. The flowers were being picked over by dozens of hovering bees.

“Come have a seat,” she said to me. She got up and took my arm just above the elbow. It was a friendly gesture, and it gave me a pang of guilt in the chest.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Coffee?” Shirley asked. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

“Love it,” I said as sexy as I could with a hangover.

She poured the coffee. She had long, lovely arms and skin as white as the sandy beaches down in Mexico. White-skinned women amazed me back in those days. They were worth your life just to look at in the South. And anything that valuable held great allure.

“Before the war started my father sent me out of Poland in a box,” she said as if continuing a conversation.

“He’s a pretty smart guy, your father.”

“He said that he could smell it-the Nazis coming.” She looked like a young girl. I had the urge to kiss her but I held it in check.

“That’s why my father works with you, Mr. Rawlins. He knows that the trouble he felt in Poland is just like what you feel here.” There were tears in Shirley’s eyes.

I thought of why I was there and the toast dried on my tongue.

“Your father is a good man,” I said, meaning it. “He wants to make things better.”

“But he has to think of himself too!” she blurted out. “He can’t keep doing things that will take him away from his family. He has to be here. He’s getting old, you know, and you can’t keep taking things out of him.”

“I guess he might spend a little too much time out on his charities, huh?”

“And what if no one worries about him? What happens when the Cossack comes to his door? Is anybody going to stand up for him?”

I could feel her tears in my own eyes. Nothing had changed since the night before. I was still traitorous and evil.

Shirley got up and went into the kitchen. Actually she ran there.

“Would you like some more toast, Mr. Rawlins?” Shirley asked when she’d come back in from the kitchen. Her eyes were red.

“No thanks,” I said. “What time you got?”

“Almost twelve.”

“Damn. I better get down there to help your father or he’s gonna wonder what we been doin’.”

Shirley smiled. “I can drive you.”

It was a nice smile. I shuddered to see her trust me, because her father’s ruin was my only salvation.

“You’re pretty quiet,” Shirley Wenzler said in the car.

“Just thinkin’.”

“About what?”

“About how you got the advantage on me.”

“What do you mean?”

I leaned over and whispered, “Well, you got to give your opinion on my chest but the jury still out on yours.”

She focused her attention back on the road and blushed nicely.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I always like to flirt with pretty girls.”

“I think that was a little bit more than flirting.”

“ ’Pends on where you come from,” I said. “Down here that was just a little compliment from an admirer.” That was a lie, but she didn’t know it.

“Well, I’m not used to men talking to me like that.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

She let me out at First African. I shook her hand, holding it a little longer than I should have. But she smiled and was still smiling as she left.

I watched the little Studebaker drive away. After that I noticed the dark Buick with the two dark-suited men. They were parked across from the church then. Just sitting there as if they were salesmen breaking for an afternoon lunch.