An Inconvenient Wife (24 page)

“Would you like something?” he asked. “Something to drink?”

“No.” I shook my head, dabbing at my face. “No, nothing. Just you. I . . . I had to see you.”

“Yes,” he said. Then, “I’m going to light the lamp.” He took his arm from my shoulders, and I heard the strike of a match.
There was the flicker of flame and the small, dim light of what I realized was a kerosene lamp, and the darkness of the room
eased. It was not a room, even, but a closet, like the closet between my room and William’s, but smaller still than that.
It held only the bed we sat on, no more than a cot covered with a stained, frayed quilt. The lamp was set on a shelf built
into the corner, and piled around it were books, and above them a top hat. A brown suit hung on a hook in another corner,
along with a coat. There was a lock on the door. The room held the strong, familiar scent of cigars.

“What is this place?” I asked. “You can’t possibly live here.”

I realized how undone he looked. His shirt was collarless. His braces were loose, looping at his hips, and his hair was tousled
and curling at the nape. He looked younger than I’d ever imagined. “Why are you here, Lucy? Why have you come?”

I had thought of nothing but getting to him. He was to be my salvation. He understood me as no one had. But his questions
were cold and faintly hostile, and I felt uncertain and embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” I said, crumpling the handkerchief. “I should not have come.”

“No, you should not have,” he agreed. “How did you find me?”

“I . . . I went to your office. Irene gave me your address.”

His gaze was assessing, dark. He was like another man altogether. “How did you get here?”

“I walked.”

“You walked?”

“I didn’t realize how far it was . . . or what it would be like—”

“You could have been killed out there. Didn’t you know—”

“How could I have? Why should I assume a doctor—a neurologist—
my
neurologist—would live in a . . . in a . . .”

“Tenement.”

“Yes,” I whispered. I looked at him. “Yes. Why? Certainly you could live better than this, with the money William pays you
alone.”

“The old man you met out there is my father,” he said grimly. “He and my mother have lived here since they came from Germany
thirty years ago. He owns it now.”

“Then he could sell it. There are other places, better ones.”

“For Jews, Lucy? Jews who aren’t of your class? Where else would they go?”

I had no answer.

“They have a decent life here,” he said, “though you wouldn’t know it just to look. He does piecework. That noise you hear—those
are sewing machines. They go nearly all night. He contracts with the mills and hires women to sew. Twenty, thirty women and
their families live and work on this floor alone. The money he makes paid for my schooling. That and a donation from a generous
mentor sent me to Leipzig.”

I did not know what to say.

“You wanted to know more about me,” he said bitterly. “Does this satisfy your curiosity?”

“I understand about your parents,” I said. “But you—”

“They’re getting old,” he said. “They struggled to give me a better life, and they deserve a son to look after them now.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? Sorry that you know where I come from? That I’m not what you wanted me to be? Or is it only that you’re sorry
you’ve trusted someone like me?”

“Don’t.”

His hand was on mine, holding me in place. “Why did you come, Lucy?” he said roughly against my ear. “Why are you here?”

“It doesn’t matter. Truly. I’ll go back home.” I was crying again, and I dashed my hand across my eyes, muttering fiercely,
“God, how stupid I am. What a silly, stupid woman.”

I rose. It was a single step to the door. He was there suddenly too, grabbing my shoulder, forcing me to face him. I put my
hands on his chest to push him from me. My vision was blurred, and I felt desperate in a way I could not explain, as if just
his presence was too much; as if I could not find ground steady enough to hold me. “I’ll be fine. If you’ll just let me go.”

He took hold of my wrists and moved my arms as if they were made of clay, pliable, elastic, down to my sides, trapping them
there so I could not move, and then he kissed me.

I felt his lips on mine with a little shock, and then he was pressing against me, his body holding me to the door. I had both
wanted and feared this, perhaps it was even what I had come to him to find, and I opened beneath him. He loosed my arms and
put his hands on either side of my face, and I leaned in to him and followed when he pulled me with him to the bed and we
fell onto the ragged quilt together. I did not hesitate but only reached for him when he backed away to slide up my cloak
and skirt and petticoats, when he pushed between my legs. Though we were both clothed when he came inside me, it seemed I
felt him with every part, that he freed me so I was thrusting against him, impatient, yearning, pleading, and then stunned
as the pleasure coursed through me, leaving me mindless and crying out into his mouth, gripping him until he collapsed upon
me with a final groan. We lay there for some time, it seemed, until the pleasure died, and I could not move for the intensity
of my release.

When he stirred, I did not want him to go. But he slid from me and sat up, tucking and buttoning while I lay there with my
clothing pressed up to my hips, my boots and stockings still on, my hat falling from my head, clinging to a loosened hat pin.

He sighed, and I became self-conscious. I pushed down my skirt and sat up. The hat pin fell out. My fingers trembled as I
reached for my hat and held it in my lap, afraid to look at him, to look at anything but a burgundy rose and a jaunty dark
green feather. I could not say anything, and I wanted him to stay silent as well; I did not think I could bear whatever it
was he would say.

But then he turned to me, and his gaze caressed me, and I found myself saying, “I . . . I’ve never felt like that. Not even
the electrotherapy . . .”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s not the same.” His eyes darkened and he said, “Someday I would like to see all of you.”

I reached for the fastening of my cloak, embarrassingly quick, to please him. “Yes,” I said. My breath came fast again; I
looked at his mouth. “Yes, of course. Just let me—”

His hand came over mine, stopping it. “Not now,” he said. “Not here.”

I was disappointed. “Oh. I thought—”

“It’s late.”

“Surely it’s not—”

“Where does William think you are?”

William. I had so completely forgotten him that when Victor spoke his name, it was like that of a stranger. I was horrified
at what I’d done, at what we’d done, and I scrambled off the bed, shamed by the wetness between my legs, by the scrapes of
mud my boots had left on the quilt. “Oh, I didn’t think . . .” I twisted my hat in my hand.

“Ssshhh,” he said, coming to me, taking the hat from my hands. “It’s all right, Lucy.”

“No,” I said desperately. “No, it’s not all right.”

“He keeps you caged.”

“Yes,” I said breathlessly. How much I craved the touch of him, already—so quickly—yielding to him again.

“You mustn’t feel guilty for this. You needed this.”

“Oh yes.”

“Does he know where you went?”

I shook my head. “I just left. I came by myself. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Good,” he murmured against my ear. “That’s very good.”

I lifted my mouth to his. “I suppose that he should know. . . .”

“We’ll talk about that later,” he said.

“But he’ll have to know. If I don’t go back—”

“You have to go back,” he said. It was a breath against my lips, but it startled me.

I jerked away from him. “What?”

“You have to go back,” he said. “Come, Lucy, you know this. You can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Look around you.” He motioned impatiently at the room. “You don’t belong here.”

“But . . .” I stared at him, uncomprehending. “But you can’t want me to go back to my husband. Not after this.”

“Where else should you go?”

The question had no meaning, no relevance. I could not bend my mind to it. “But we’ve—”

“You would be ruined, Lucy,” he said softly. “If you were to leave him now, I would be ruined.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Yes, it does.”

I was humiliated beyond bearing, but I could not escape him. The room was too close, he was too close. I looked at him in
confusion. “I’m falling in love with you,” I said miserably.

“Listen to me, Lucy,” he said. “You must listen closely. We must be careful. It’s not unusual for a patient to form such an
attachment to her doctor. Or to mistake feelings of gratitude for love.”

“Gratitude? That’s absurd. I know the difference.”

“Oh, Lucy,” he said. “We still have so much work to do.” He reached over to the bed, where my hat pins lay scattered, and
gathered them up. Then he set my hat on my head, gently—far too gently for any man—fastening it to my hair. He grabbed his
coat from the hook by his suit, and then his hat, which he tucked beneath his arm. “It’s late. You must go home. Come. I’ll
take you there.”

H
e opened the door and took my hand, and I let him lead me out without a murmur. The old man—his father—and an old woman who
must have been his mother sat at a table with another woman who was bent over a sewing machine that she operated in fits and
starts.

His mother was sewing by hand, by the light of a kerosene lantern. She was so hunched her eyes were nearly on the fabric.
As we came out of the room, her expressionless gaze raked over me, taking in everything, and I felt she knew exactly what
had gone on behind that door, what I had done with her son, what I had come for.

He said something to them in German, and they both nodded.

“You should lie down,
Mutter,
” he went on in English. “Your eyes are too tired for that.”

“Pssshhh,”
she said, waving at him in disdain before she bent back to her sewing. The father did not take his gaze from me as we went
to the door.

“You be careful, Victor,” he said, and then, “Take care, Fräulein.”

We went out into the hall, where the darkness was more pronounced, and the huddled sleeping bodies were harder to see. Victor
held my elbow, directing me down the stairs. At the foot he paused to lift a bundle of bound pieces and move it out of the
way, and then we were back into the night, which was cold now, and foggy, and very, very dark.

“Stay close to me,” he ordered, though I was pressed into his side, with no desire to leave it. There were only a few people
on the street, mostly women. As we passed them at a fast clip, one or two of them murmured to Victor, and he called back a
greeting.

“You know them?” I asked.

“I grew up here,” he told me curtly.

“So you know everyone.”

“No.” He shook his head. “When I was a boy, these were all German houses—German Jews. Now most of them are from Russia. They
aren’t like us at all.”

“Us? I thought you didn’t believe in religion.”

“I don’t practice Judaism, Lucy, but I can’t escape my heritage, no matter how I try. It’s changing here, faster than anyone
likes. These signs you see all over, they’re Yiddish. My parents don’t speak it. I don’t speak it. My father considers them
fanatics. They’re clannish and backward. But there are so many of them that any ground we’ve managed to gain has been stripped
away. When your people think
Jewish,
they no longer think of men like my father, who have come to terms with Western culture, who have even embraced it. They
think of the unemployed masses in the
Khazzer-Mark.
”

“My people?” I asked, hurt. “You sound so contemptuous of us. Of me.”

“Come, now, Lucy,” he said. “When you first heard of me, what did you think?”

I remembered Daisy Hadden’s words—
They say he’s a Jew
—and my own repulsion that a Jew might touch me.

“You see?” he asked, taking my silence for assent.

We walked on without speaking. Gaslights were here and there on the streets—dim gas here, while elsewhere in the city, arc
lights shone brilliantly. We passed men huddled in the corners; on Hester Street the market stalls were empty and the streets
were muddy and strewn with whatever garbage was too useless for even the rag-and-bone men. There was sound everywhere: talking
and coughing, girls calling out, music.

But we went quickly and soon left it all behind. We were again on Lower Broadway, where the warehouses were shut tight and
shops were dark and nothing but the ghosts of the day were left to haunt the streets.

“I’m sorry I don’t have a carriage,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I said, but that wasn’t the truth. My feet still hurt within my now torn boots, and I was tired and sweating,
but these were the least of my discomforts. When we had been near his home, I had not felt like myself. There was no one there
to recognize me; I was so profoundly out of place that it seemed I had lost Lucy Carelton. But now we were in places I knew,
and I felt myself coming back slowly, bit by bit. I began to watch for bright windows, people staring out, those who would
know me. I began to think of the row house where William would no doubt be waiting. I began to wonder what excuse I would
make, what I would say to him, where I would tell him I’d been. The lies came easily to me now, when only a short while ago
I had thought to end my unhappiness, to tell him the truth.