Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

“Hey,” Iris said. “Don’t trip over us.”

“Okay,” I said. “Gus wants to take us home. He’s beat.”

Iris lay down in the backseat. She said her stomach was killing her. Gus and I talked about baseball, which was more interesting to both of us than other sports, and he told me that he’d seen the Girls Professional Baseball League and it was our loss that they’d fold up when the men came home. I looked at Gus’s big wrists on the steering wheel and at his dirty nails. He smoked while we talked about the war, about his bad leg, about my going to college. He said that his bad leg was no one’s fault but that if I didn’t go to college, he’d hold it against my father and my sister. I said that it was up to me, and he said he’d heard that opinion and he admired my attitude but that I was mistaken. I turned around to look at Iris when we went through the lights on Middle Neck Road. She lay with her arms around herself, crumpled on her side. She looked at me and she held a finger up to her lips. She was crying so hard, her whole shirt was wet. She had Reenie’s hair ribbon tight in her hand.

South Ken, London

England

March 1947

Dear Eva,

You would think it’d be hard to get a man plucked out of his everyday life on Long Island and shipped off somewhere. You’d think it’d at least be awkward. You had read that whole article about Ezio Pinza aloud at breakfast. Famous opera singer, basso cantante, and before this, famous only for his voice and for his first wife having sued a soprano at the Metropolitan Opera House for alienation of affection. According to you and Time magazine, he married another American girl (not the alienator of affection) and they had a daughter. The article said he was released after two months at Ellis Island and that he went back to singing opera right away. That’s what stuck with me. The man didn’t spend a day in jail. He wasn’t even arrested. He just went away for two months. Do you know, at the end of the war, Ezio Pinza sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” for General Patton and General Doolittle and the man who had ordered his arrest? This, also courtesy of Time magazine.

I was so scared, I thought I’d vomit on the bus. I walked past the railroad station, to put enough distance between it and me. I always ran into people I knew at that end of town. I had a handful of dimes in my bag. I put a handkerchief over the receiver. A man answered and I thought that they must all sound like J. Edgar Hoover, with his high, flat voice. I couldn’t remember the agent’s name five minutes after I hung up. I’d made up a character for the phone call. I was a single lady from Hartford, Connecticut, visiting friends in Great Neck. I worked in a bank. I told the man that Gus Heitmann might be, maybe, a German spy. I said that I knew that everyone had to do their part in the war effort. My voice shook like I was on a train. I said I hoped I was doing the right thing. The man did not say, You lying bitch. He said that I was doing my duty. He repeated Gus’s name and the address of his repair shop and he thanked me, twice. I was sweating like a whore in church, not surprisingly, and I wiped my face with my mother’s blue lace hankie and I threw it in the trash can at the train station.

I knew that if there was a God, I would be punished for this in unimaginable ways. My life would be like one of those medieval paintings, where misshapen devils climb out of the brain and across the body, with their tiny black pitchforks and sharp, silvery tails. I can only say I was unprepared. Love for Reenie had knocked all the sense out of me. What I’d had with Rose was lust (with great lighting and some terrific moments, but still, just lust) and what I felt for Reenie was a million times that. I was dancing in the street and singing in the shower. I’d walk into the empty kitchen, my heart hammering away, and find a note in Reenie’s schoolgirl script, saying that she’d gone home early, or driven to the grocery store with Edgar, and I’d stumble down to the water and cry like I had two weeks to live. I tried on three or four outfits every morning, before I walked over to the Torellis’. I applied all the face masques Francisco recommended, sometimes three at a time, and used salt scrubs on my arms and did the exercises I used to do in Hollywood. I sang Edgar’s old songs while I did them, because I knew that one of these days, Reenie would see me and love me and turn her life upside down for me.

I didn’t know a thing. I watched Reenie with Gus and their kindnesses to each other and their mild companionship and sometimes I despised them both and mostly I just despised myself. I worried when Gus made Reenie laugh and the night he tied one of her scarves over his head and did his Judy Canova imitation, I hoped Reenie thought he was a fool. You laughed your head off. I worried when he made Reenie tea and patted her shoulder as he walked by. I had in mind a fight to the death with a depraved brute. He would have strength on his side and I would have true love on mine and I would take him down like David took Goliath. It was terrible that Gus wasn’t a brute and after a while, I decided that was his strategy. His cleverness was to appear kind and decent, so she would never see how he stood, like the Rockies, between us. I made you distract Gus, so I could get close enough to profess my love in their dark backyard. I tried to be cleverer. I flirted with Gus and suggested that a man with his skills and wit could move out into the wider world. I made fond, damning remarks about Reenie, that she probably couldn’t keep up with a sharp customer like himself, and Gus said only, Don’t kid a kidder. Do you remember one morning, you got up early and you made me banana-stuffed French toast and you asked me if I was all right? I said that I was fine and you took my hand and you said that if I was dying, I should tell you, because there was an awful lot to do, if that was the case. I did eat that French toast. I hope that I did.

I found Reenie in the kitchen and, having failed at strategy and seduction, I sat on the floor and put my arms around her knees, until she pulled me up to her. (What can I say? I wasn’t a man, so I couldn’t go down on one knee and I did think that some abject pose was right for the occasion. I certainly felt abject.) I cried on Reenie’s leg and then on her shoulder and I tried to give her a pearl ring from Lutzmann’s on Madison Avenue. Reenie put the box back in my pocket. She backed away from me. I begged Reenie to open the box, and when she finally did, those beautiful brown eyes filled with tears. “I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know what this means.” I put the pearl ring on her finger and she took it off. She wiped her eyes and she stood there, sensible and kind, as if she hadn’t cried. “What would I say? Come on, Iris, you can’t give me a ring.” I took it back to Lutzmann’s and gave Reenie the silent treatment for two weeks.

I had failed, worse than in Hollywood. On the other hand, she had cried over me.

Every day, I threatened her with the loneliness and heartbreak of what we could have had, and I’m sorry to say that I made some noise about doing away with myself (I can see the look of disgust and disbelief on your face), at which point poor Reenie said she’d go work elsewhere. I made Reenie cry sometimes, for that dark pleasure, like pressing a wound, and then I begged forgiveness, which I got. (“I know,” Reenie said. “It’s okay. I know why.”) Edgar would pass me at the Torellis’ and roll his eyes.

Finally, finally, we got there. I came up close to her, the way I did whenever I had a chance. I pressed my lips to the back of her neck, where the black curls were pinned up, and this time she turned toward me, not away, and the door that had been between us swung open. The Torellis were all at Mass and we took advantage of the guest room. That became our time. During the week, we whispered to each other in the kitchen and in the rose garden and she said that she loved me. She said she loved me with all her heart, that when we held each other she thought at last, her life was beginning. She said she couldn’t turn her back on her wedding vows and her hope that a baby would come. She said she had made a promise, not just to Gus, but to God. I kissed her because she never said that she loved Gus. She said that she would love me, just me, until she died. I said I understood, because I did. I said that I would always love her, and I would always be there for her. We both lay on the floor of the guest room, crying like broken things.