Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“Would you ?”

“Sure.”

“Let me get my diaphragm.”

She gets out of bed and walks down the hall to the bathroom. I hear a colored woman shouting from an open window to her friends on the street below. “G’night, y’all, g’night,” and again, “G’night.” Silence. From the bathroom I hear the sound of running water. I lie back waiting, my hands behind my head. I suddenly remember a night in Stockbridge before we were married, when young Rebecca crossed the room as though traversing the burning sands of the Sahara, to climb into bed beside me, and surrender her virginity to me, and mourn its loss immediately afterward. I wait. She always takes an interminably long time to insert the diaphragm. A year ago, when she’d discovered she was pregnant again, she’d said, “I’ll never learn to put this fucking thing in!” She uses the word “fuck” a lot, my Rebecca, but never to describe what we do together in bed. In bed, we make love. (“Do you plan to make love?”) In bed, Rebecca is a contractor hired to construct an edifice, “make” a building she labels “love,” for want of a better word: Blueprints and specifications are tucked into her vagina just behind the diaphragm, while like a common laborer I sweat to bring her to orgasm. I touch her mouth often while we make love, I search her lips with my seeing-eye hands. There is never a smile upon her face, she “makes love” joylessly, straining for orgasm and achieving it soundlessly, with never so much as a grunt of pleasure, a groan of acknowledgment, certainly never a passionate shriek. When I ask her each time if she has come (I am never certain), she snaps impatiently, “Of course I came! Will you please shut up?” I always want to talk afterward. She always wants to sink back into the pillows, into silence, perhaps so she can admire from a distance this shining fifty-two-story office building we have built together from plans already dog-eared, this “love” we have “made.” The bathroom light clicks off, I hear her walking purposefully toward the bedroom. We are ready for the business of fucking.

“Who’s that man holding the baby?” Tante Raizel asks,

“That’s Ike’s grandfather.”

“He’s a tailor,” Sophie says. “He has his own tailor shop.”

“Yes? Avrum was a tailor. Do you remember your Uncle Avrum, Rivke? He was a tailor.”

Rebecca does not much care for my family. I do not understand this, but I do not have much time to care about her not caring. I am pursuing the hairy beast of success. She tolerates my grandfather because she knows how deeply I love him, but she describes my grandmother Tess as “a crabby, constipated woman,” my Uncle Luke as “Mr. Rumples,” my Uncle Matt as “the Mafioso,” and my mother as “the paranoid nut.” Once, when my Aunt Cristina takes the IRT up to 174th Street and walks to the housing project and knocks on the door, Rebecca seems not to know her at first, and then says, in surprise, “Oh, Cristie. Hi.” Cristie has come uptown because she wants to see the new baby. Rebecca has her coat on, and is preparing to do the weekly marketing. Andrew is bundled in his snowsuit. The thirteen-year-old girl from next door is in the living room doing her homework. Rebecca takes Cristie into the room where Michael sleeps “He’s beautiful, God bless him,” Cristie says.

“Thank you,” Rebecca says. “Cristie, I hope you don’t mind, but I was just on the way out.”

“That’s all right,” Cristie says, but later she tells my mother, “She didn’t even offer me a cup of coffee.” When I confront Rebecca with this, she says, “Well, I was all ready to go out; Andrew was in his snow-suit.”

“Honey, that was my aunt ! She made me lemonade every day of my life!”

“She should have called first,” Rebecca says.

We visit Harlem rarely. My grandfather still has the tailor shop on First Avenue, but the neighborhood is rapidly turning Puerto Rican, and Rebecca is fearful of making the trip downtown. Where Sophie had once protected her “treasures” from the goyim who drunkenly invaded the ghetto, Rebecca now refuses to bring her treasures — Andrew and little Michael — into another ghetto, where they may be harmed. I tell her the neighborhood is actually safer than the one in which we live, and she says, “You’re thinking of when you were a kid. It’s changed.”

I sometimes wish I could go home.

I sometimes know exactly how my grandfather felt during that decade when he was twenty-four and longing to return to Fiormonte.

“Oh, and these ,” Rebecca says to her aunt. “Oh, these are my favorite pictures.”

“That’s when Ike took the whole family to Florida,” Sophie says, a note of pride in her voice.

“Where?” Tante Raizel asks. “Miami?”

“Pass-A-Grille,” I answer.

“Where’s that?” she says.

The job is really in Treasure Island. The man who hires me for it, on recommendation from the leader of the house band where I am playing between sets, is fifty-four years old. His name is Archie Coombes, and he tells me at our first meeting that he is probably the world’s lousiest drummer, but his brother-in-law owns this small place on the Gulf, and this is how he gets a winter vacation each year; his brother hires him to come down with a pickup trio. The job doesn’t pay much, he says, but what the hell, it’s been a miserable winter, and maybe I can use some sunshine for myself and the family, he understands I have two kids. He tells me he is also looking for a good bass player, and when I recommend Stu Holman, he asks immediately if Stu is colored. He does not hire Stu. The bassist we end up with is a sixty-two-year-old white man, who reportedly once played with another Whiteman named Paul. I accept the job, but I have the feeling I will be making music with one of the Jimmy Palmer orchestras.

Rebecca is overjoyed. This is January of 1953, and she is six months pregnant with our third child (“I am going to burn that fucking diaphragm!”), and we have just come through a siege of chicken pox with Andrew and Michael. The children, in fact, still have drying scabs on their faces when we move into the rented house on Pass-A-Grille. The house is small — it once was the caretaker’s cottage for the sumptuous twelve-room mansion that sits on two acres of ocean-front property. We walk through the house with the real estate agent who found the rental for us. I can sense Rebecca’s disappointment. Kitchen, living room, bedroom, one bath. We are paying $750 for the month — which is exactly $250 less than I will be earning with the Archie Coombes trio. We are in the living room, the real estate agent is helpfully explaining that the two little boys can sleep together on the sofa bed. She is rattling a doorknob now, trying to open the glass-louvered doors leading to the rear of the house. She flings the doors wide with a sudden grunt, and I feel a rush of sunshine on my face and smell the heavy moisture-laden aroma of tropical plants. Beside me, Rebecca gasps and takes my hand, and leads me into the garden. I can barely keep up with her. She is ballooning with pregnancy, but she moves about the garden like a ballet dancer in flight, stopping at each bloom to identify it for me. “This is hibiscus, and this is bougainvillaea, and look, Ike, oh my God, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever, oh God. it’s an oleander!” In the distance I can hear the sound of the surf, and suddenly I smile.

“That was such a happy time,” Rebecca says to her aunt.

“What are you reading to them there?” Tante Raizel asks. “What’s that book in the picture?”

“Oh, they loved that book,” Rebecca says, and falls silent.