Shadows of Berlin

19.

Naomi’s Soirée

The next day, the late-afternoon sun grays the apartment. Rachel stands in the shower, allowing the water to pour over her. Staring at the empty white of the canvas has exhausted her. Emptied her. All that flat whiteness, and not a crack to pry it open. It remains the opaque blizzard the instant before the plane punches into the mountain, a solid storm of white.

Aaron appears at home an hour before his usual time.

“You’re here,” Rachel tells him, still dressing from the shower.

“I am,” he agrees.

“And it’s not even six o’clock.”

“Well, I was instructed by my darling wife to be home early,” Aaron replies, tossing his hat and coat onto the sofa. “Don’t you remember? I think your exact words were, ‘Please be home before six, because I will be forcing you to have dinner with your sister and her latest whatever.’”

“Those were not my exact words,” Rachel says. Her skin is damp and she is in her slip in the living room, a towel tied in a turban around her hair as she pours Little Friskies into the cat’s bowl.

“Whatever story makes you comfortable,” he says. Passing by her, he plants a kiss on a damp bare shoulder.

“Did you bring the wine?”

“Nope. Forgot.”

She puts back the Little Friskies on the shelf as Kibbitz crouches on his forepaws and burrows his nose into the bowl. “So go back out and get it. That place down the street is open till ten.”

“I don’t like the guy in that place. He always calls me ‘sweetheart.’”

“Calls you sweetheart?”

“I buy a six-­pack, and it’s: ‘That’ll be a buck ten, sweetheart.’ I dunno, it gives me the creeps.”

“Well, you have to go somewhere. We need wine.”

“So we’ll pick it up on the way,” he says, heading in the direction of the refrigerator. “Is there beer?”

“There’s root beer.”

“Okay, well, I guess that’ll have to do.”

“Do for what?”

“Do for I gotta fortify myself, don’t I?” is all Aaron says on the subject. “Hey, did ya know? You can buy Coke in a can now instead of a bottle. An aluminum can. Crazy,” he says. Then snaps off the cap of a bottle of A&W with the opener and takes a fortifying slug. “So how’s it going?” he wonders, frowning over in the direction of the canvas. “Looks like the canvas is still winning the staring match.”

She lights a Camel from a matchbook. “Don’t pressure me, please,” she says pleasantly enough.

“Who’s pressuring? I was just making an observation,” he says and glugs down root beer. “Hey, so whatever happened to those paintings you did when we first got married?”

Rachel says nothing.

“You know, the guy had one of ’em in his gallery for a while?”

“It was hardly any kind of a ‘gallery,’” she says dismissively. “It was in a tiny place on Tenth Street.” She cannot bring herself to speak the truth, which is that she left them on the subway or on the street. Just abandoned them, one at time. “I gave them to the Salvation Army,” she lies instead. An answer so preposterous that Aaron doesn’t bother to press further.

He emits a soft belch from downing the root beer.

“You know, I’m not wearing a tie to this little tête-­à-­tête,” he warns her.

“So who asked you to?” Rachel answers. “Besides, le tête-­à-­tête is a face-­to-­face, a private talk. What we will be attending, Monsieur le mari, is une soirée or une petite fête.” She says this, walking over and poaching a swallow of root beer from his bottle. Then she poaches another kiss, a kiss deep enough that she leaves him hard in the trousers. “But you should change your shirt,” she tells him. “You smell fishy.”

“Hey, that’s black beluga caviar you’re smelling,” he corrects. “Thirty bucks an ounce.”

Naomi answers the door dressed for a fancy affair in black capri pants and an elegant off-­the-­shoulders top that accentuates all those natural curves of hers. She also wears a look of happy surprise. That’s natural too. Rachel has always marveled at her sister-­in-­law’s ability to keep her smile so genuinely fresh. “Oh, hello, gorgeous,” Naomi announces gleefully and gives Rachel a loud smack on the cheek. When she turns to her brother, her expression makes allowances. “And hello to you, shtoomer,” she says affectionately in a tone that lightly teases the sourness of Aaron’s expectations for the evening.

“Look, let’s just get this little nosh-­up over with, okay, Red Riding Hood?” Aaron grumbles glumly. But he’s still brought a nice bottle of sauvignon blanc, along with a bottle of that particular Chianti that he knows Naomi loves. “Here,” he says, squeezing out a frown and handing over the sack. “Open ’em up early,” he instructs. “I gotta feeling I’m gonna be drinking heavily.”

Naomi shakes her head lightly. “Whatta ma-­roon,” she says. “How lucky you are to have snapped him up, Rach.”

Inside, Naomi tells them to make themselves at home as she pries the cork from the Chianti, pouring it out into three goblets that actually match. Rachel leaves her pumps by the door and sits stocking-­footed on the sofa, removing her cigarettes from her purse. She’s amazed at how clean the place looks. All the mess is stored in closets maybe, but still the surfaces are free of the standard clutter. The rug’s been vacuumed. And Naomi’s small dining table is set for a crowded four. There’s a large, elegantly shaped pottery ashtray with a red-­gold glaze on the coffee table that Rachel’s never seen before, and she tugs it closer as she lights up. Aaron, on the other hand, is still the wandering Jew, roving the boundaries of his sister’s apartment. He’s so antsy that he can’t sit, so he paces without destination, hands still stuffed in his pockets. “So where is he?” he wants to know.

“Tyrell?” Naomi says, raising her eyebrows as she hands her brother a glass. “He’ll be here soon,” she assures him.

“Tyrell, Tyrell,” Aaron repeats, jingling the change in his pockets as if he’s talking to himself. “What kind of name is ‘Tyrell’ anyhow?”

With a glance, Rachel spots a glimmer in Naomi’s lake-­deep eyes and the slight up-­curve at the corner of her mouth. “It’s a name” is all she says as she delivers Rachel’s goblet to her. But there’s definitely something she’s not saying. An agenda.

“Sounds Irish,” Aaron says after a hefty swallow of wine. “Is he an Irishman, this one? Should I brush up on my faith ’n begorrah?”

But Naomi is busy uncorking the white. “Aaron, can you just take a pill or something?”

“Oh, I can do many things,” Aaron answers with mildly menacing assurance. “Many things.”

Naomi snorts, and then the oven dings pertly. “Ah! That’s my cue!” She grins, delighted again, and returns to the stove with a pair of heat-­stained oven mitts.

Rachel drinks. The taste of the Chianti mixes with the taste of tobacco in her mouth. Actually, she misses the clutter and chaos of the place, and she’s happy to see that at least the bookcase retains it. A frantic old-­time mess. Books shoved this way and that, stacked atop each other, dust jackets ripped and tattered from the friction and overuse. She envies Naomi these shelves. She herself can never hold on to books. Books, letters, gloves, fountain pens, checkbooks, one earring out of the set, cigarette lighters, they simply slip through her fingers and are gone.

“Ten more minutes for the chicken!” Naomi sings out. Returning from the stove, she seats herself on the blanketed sofa beside Rachel with her wine goblet and lights up a cigarette, blowing smoke. “Hey, shtoomer. Can you quit your pacing, please?” she demands of her brother. “You’re wearing a hole in my rug.”

“Yeah, yeah, like I haven’t heard that before,” he says and falls into his impression of their mother. “‘Quit your pacing and sit. You’re wearin’ a hole in my rug, for heaven’s sake.’” He says this, dumping himself down on the sofa and puffing out a long breath. “So speaking of the crazy lady, does she know about your latest? Mister Faith ’n Begorrah?”

“Maybe.” Naomi shrugs.

“Which means no.”

“I don’t believe I need my mother’s approval,” she explains to Rachel. “Unlike some people.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell that to the woman who bore you, why don’t you?”

“I believe that we live in a world of individual freedoms, where people are responsible to themselves alone,” Naomi declares.

“Sure, well, that’s because Ma dropped you on your head when you were a baby.”

“Aaron.” Rachel scolds him with a slap on his leg.

“What? Ouch. It’s true. I get assaulted for the truth now.”

“It is true,” Naomi admits with a sigh. “She tripped over a throw rug in the bedroom and ker-­plop.”

“Yeah, and ever after, it was ‘I hate that rug. It’s a cursed rug,’” he says, mimicking their mother again.

“Cursed,” says Naomi, “but she never got rid of it.”

“Get rid of it?” Aaron’s mimic rises in pitch. “I should get rid of a rug while it’s still perfectly good?”

“So instead, for nearly thirty years, she walks around it.”

“Right,” Aaron agrees. “Like it’s a land mine or something.” He half laughs at the thought of this. The homey exchange with his sister at their mother’s expense has blunted his edge. The shared memory. The shared ridicule even. Then there’s a knock on the door. A confident knock. Not overly polite and not overly aggressive, but solid in its intention. The knock of a person who knocks on a door with self-­assurance, whether the door opens or not.

“That’s Tyrell,” Naomi announces, a swift excitement lighting her face. She sets down her wine and cigarette and eagerly crosses the floor.

Aaron stands in an obligatory manner. “Faith ’n begorrah,” he grumbles into the bowl of his goblet, taking a deeper swallow, but then quite literally, he begins to choke on his own words.

His sister must thrust herself up on her tiptoes to kiss the man now standing in the threshold of the apartment. “Hello, darling.” She smiles at him. The man smiles back at her and then smiles half blankly into the room. “This,” Naomi announces, looping her arm around his, “is Tyrell Williams.”

“How do you do,” the man says. His voice is deep, and he is over six feet tall. Must be over six feet tall. Dressed in a handsomely fitted gabardine suit. His features are striking. Powerful. Sculpted, one might call them. His hair is perfectly barbered. And he is Black.

Rachel jumps to her feet in the space opened by her husband’s gaping stare and sticks out her hand. “I’m Rachel,” she says.

“Very pleased to meet you,” Tyrell replies, shaking firmly.

“My sister-­in-­law,” Naomi informs him, as if this might be a surprise, and then turns to Aaron. “And this is my fuckhead brother, Aaron,” she says, but her voice is without rancor or sarcasm. Without mischief or satisfaction. It’s as if she calls him a fuckhead in a concerned, almost fretful manner.

Aaron snaps to quickly and juts out his hand as well. “Aaron Perlman,” he introduces himself in a soldierly fashion. “Pleasure.”

“Pleased to meet you too,” Tyrell insists.

“My sister’s got quite a mouth on her,” Aaron points out, maybe not so much of a compliment this time, more half an excuse and half a reprimand.

To which Tyrell replies, “So I’ve noticed.” Smiling, in a pleasant sort of way, though his eyes, Rachel can see, are watchful.

And then there’s only a splinter of silence before Naomi declares, “Supper’s almost ready. I’m going to pour you a glass of wine.”