Little Odessa Page 3

  “My pleasure,” he said and waved the joint under her nose. “You sure?”

  She brushed his hand away. “I’m trying to be serious.”

  He took another hit. “What’s more serious than grass? Grass is my livelihood.”

  “No, Nathan.” She slid off his lap. “Though you won’t admit it, I’m your livelihood. Dope is your hobby.”

  “Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” he told her. “My parents didn’t drag me all the way from Tbilisi to push a hack.”

  “So you push grass instead?”

  “How many years in this country and still you don’t understand the language?” Nathan said. “I don’t push grass, I deal it. It’s a seller’s market. My customers are lucky to be getting it. I don’t have to push it on anyone.”

  “You push it at me. All the time. Breathing around you makes me goofy.”

  “Here,” he said. “It’ll give you an appetite.”

  He put the joint to her lips and she inhaled lightly. “Damn it, Nathan, at least you found grass. What have I got?”

  “Artistic freedom,” he said.

  She went back for her bag and carried it into the bathroom. She ran water in the tub and tested it with her hand, tempered the numbing flow with a surge hot enough to take off skin. She added some more of the cold, so that she could almost stand it, and went into the bedroom.

  An unmade mattress covered most of the scuffed parquet floor. Kate stood beside a mahogany dresser that was the only piece of furniture she had ever purchased new and brushed her hair at a wall mirror. She lowered the Venetian blinds and kicked off her shoes, wriggled out of her jeans, pulled the sweatshirt over her head.

  Redness had spilled over the burn on her chest. She felt a twinge beneath her breasts and found two small blisters she hadn’t known were there. Her hip was black and blue to the middle of her thigh. She heard a chair scrape against the kitchen linoleum and then Nathan came into the room with the joint glued to his lip.

  “Dressed for work? You just got home.”

  “Sometimes, Nathan, it stops being funny.”

  “Who’s being—Hey, what happened to you?”

  “I was shot,” she told him.

  “Perfect aim,” he said. “Who’d you make jealous, a gal with a shotgun?”

  “Nathan, you’re incorrigible.” She laughed in spite of herself. “No, it wasn’t a shotgun. You only see pistols at the Starlight, pistols and long knives.”

  “Whoever did it, it looks nasty.” He pressed his lips to her chest and kissed it several times. “Feel better?”

  “Uh-huh,” she sighed.

  “I don’t know about you, Kate,” he said, and went from the room. “Sometimes you act just like a little girl.” The medicine cabinet squeaked open and Nathan returned with a tube of Noxzema. “A kiss can’t make the pain go away. You need something stronger.”

  He tossed the Noxzema on the dresser and nudged her onto the mattress, knotted his fingers in the taffy hair. She wrapped her arms around his back. Nathan ran his lips to her breasts, raising away to study the burn in the weak light slicing through the blinds. Kate undid the buttons on his shirt.

  “What did happen?” he asked

  “It’s nothing,” she breathed, and pulled him back down.

  Nathan touched his fingers to the redness, resting his palm on her breast. “It doesn’t feel like nothing.” He put his hand on the other breast. “No way is this nothing.”

  She backhanded his elbow out from under him and he fell heavily on her. She circled her arms around him again and held him close. Feeling for his body melting against hers, she kissed him. His shoulders stiffened and he arced his neck.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “You never did tell me,” he said.

  “About last night? Later, Nathan. Why don’t you get out of your clothes?”

  She unlocked her arms and he rolled off. He picked up the roach from the ashtray beside the mattress and took a deep hit, then another. “What’s for supper?” he asked.

  She pulled the curtains inside the tub and raised her face to the scalding needle spray, scourged the corruption of her night in jail. Another milestone on the merry-go-round, and Nathan along for the ride. What was with him anyhow? He was more impossible now than ever. Ask him and you’d hear a lot of crap about a man caught between conflicting cultures and values, with only his dope and his woman to keep him going. Jesus, Kate thought, he came over when he was eight. New York was all he’d ever known. Most likely he was moving blow again, and most of it up his own nose.

  It was snowing when they went downstairs, stinging pellets that eddied about their eyes and collected in the folds of their clothing. In the early darkness Brighton Beach Avenue was dug in behind steel gates. Nathan took her hand and they darted across the stairstep shadows of the el, homing in on the dull beacon of an all-night fruit stand. Next door was the Cafe Kharkov and a booth beneath a watercolor of the frozen Dnieper shore.

  Their waitress was a pale dumpling of a woman with mottled, bleached hair. She unburdened herself of a couple of soiled menus and looked exasperated when Nathan didn’t open his. “How’s the salyanka?” he asked.

  “Srednya,” she answered expressionlessly.

  “Not so good, huh? Well, I’m not crazy for lamb anyway. I’ll have the chicken chahombili …What about you, Kate?”

  “Dalma.”

  The waitress removed the extra settings unhappily, reproving them for not being a four. As she backed through the swinging doors Nathan placed his wool astrakhan hat on the seat beside him like an invited guest. “I talked to your sister last night,” he said.

  “I didn’t know you could.”

  “About you, Hannah’ll always talk. I wanted to know where you were.”

  “What time was this?” Kate asked.

  “Around three. I didn’t know what was keeping you.”

  “You called my mother’s house at three A.M? What did … after the screaming stopped, what did Hannah say?”

  “She said you’d told her you were staying with Irina in the city.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I know,” Nathan said. “I called there, too.”

  “At three o’clock?”

  “More like three-thirty,” he told her. “I thought the train might be stuck, so I waited up. Care to tell me where you were?”

  “In jail.”

  Nathan tore a piece from a loaf of dark bread and began buttering it on both sides. “Gave everything you had at the Starlight? I’m sorry I missed it.”

  Kate’s face reddened. “Damn you, Nathan, can’t you be on my side … just this once?”

  “Who was he, Kate? One of the sleazebags who runs the club, or some jerk-off from the street?”

  Kate gathered her coat around her shoulders and slid out of the booth. “Good-bye, Nathan,” she said. “Enjoy the chicken.”

  He clamped a hand around her arm. “Who?” he asked again.

  “If you must know, it was a schvartzer in a fur coat and a felt hat with a wide brim. He had a diamond in his front tooth and I think he was diseased. You know how I’m drawn to men who drive avocado Lincolns.”

  “Just so long as it wasn’t some lowlife,” he said.

  He let go of her arm and she slumped down in the booth. “Nathan, why do you do this to me all the time?”

  “Do what?” He bit off a corner of the bread. “You said jail, so I said pimp. Or you did. Where’s the harm? I’m sorry I called your sister so late, but I was worried about you. Do you blame me? …Now, what happened?”

  “There was a black man involved,” Kate said. “A fat little guy, Prince somebody from somewhere. He scorched me with a cigarette.”

  “Is that what happened to your chest?”

  “Uh-huh. Have you ever burned your lip on a roach? Multiply the pain by ten and you’ll have an idea how it felt. And then I—” She began to laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “It wasn’t funny at the ti
me,” she said. “I saw red, Nathan, flaming red, and the next thing I remember I was leaping off the runway and chasing the fat guy through the crowd.”

  “You were chasing him?”

  “And then Washington tackled him and I didn’t have anything else handy, so I opened his head with my shoe.”

  “That’s funny?”

  “I guess you had to be there,” Kate said. “Anyway, this prince guy turned out to be a UN ambassador, or like that, and he called the cops. And I ended up in a cell with all these awful women I’ll bet started out dancing at the Starlight.”

  “I suppose you had a lot in common …”

  Kate’s face got redder and some of the color spilled over her eyes. Nathan didn’t notice. “A lot to talk about,” he went on. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because,” Kate said evenly, “I didn’t want to wake Phyllis Stern.”

  “Huh?”

  She opened her palms and pushed them at him. “Please, Nathan, don’t start. Your ‘Who me?’ routine hasn’t worked in years.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen Phyllis.”

  “Maybe the lights were out.”

  “You’re spending too much time on Times Square,” Nathan said. “You’re starting to fantasize, like everyone else there.”

  “Her earrings, Nathan, the nice silver ones I always admired. She left them under the pillow last weekend.”

  Nathan fielded that one slowly and then he bobbled it. “Very good, Kate,” he said. “You almost had me going there, you sounded so serious.”

  “It’s not good and I am serious. Nathan, open your eyes. I’m wearing them.”

  The kitchen door swung out and the waitress placed a steaming casserole dish in front of Nathan. When she went away he said, “They look very nice on you, Kate.”

  Kate asked, “Remember what I said would happen if you two were so much as seen together again?”

  Nathan wrinkled his brow. “Something bad, wasn’t it?”

  “Bad for you, Nathan.”

  He brushed the moisture from his hat and put it on his head. “You want me to pack my stuff?”

  “What stuff? All you brought with you were your scales.”

  “I’m not going to make a scene, Kate, if that’s what you want.”

  “I won’t hurt you, Nathan. I’m not wearing heels.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I just don’t want to fight.”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t think you would.”

  He got up to leave. “Bye, Kate.”

  “Good-bye, Nathan. Give my best to Phyllis.” The waitress came back with the second order and Kate pushed it out of the way without tasting it. “Nathan, you shit,” she called after him loud enough for everyone to hear. “I love you.”

  3

  PLAYING THE PRICE IS RIGHT in Abu Safwat Khader’s office over the Arabian Knights on Seventy-second Street, Kate guessed that the furnishings had set him back a cool $200 to $250. The estimate took in two olive-green file cabinets, a Mr. Coffee coffeemaker, a yard-sale desk, a pen-and-ink drawing of a soccer goalie—or was it a framed Rorschach inkblot?—not a single chair. She held her bid on a separate lot of factory-new Barcaloungers that cluttered the small room. She counted six of them upholstered in tangy simulated leather, two gray, two black, two in chocolate—one the dark bittersweet kind, the other lighter, milkier.

  In the year she had been dancing for Abu Safwat Khader she could not remember him in another kind of seat and only rarely in the upright position—about as often as he had seen her in anything besides sheer veils and the slippers with the curled toes that already were crushing her feet. Khader’s real name was Howard Ormont and he had papers from a court in Washington, D.C., to prove it. At another time he had been called Fatti Ben-Zvi and made his home on Kibbutz Altalena in the Negev. His first sixteen years, three spent hiding from the Nazis in Samarkand in the central Soviet Union, he was Isaac Grynzpun. He had paper to prove this, too, a certificate from a yeshiva in Glukhov, the Ukrainian town where his family was buried.

  He dated his love affair with Barcaloungers to his nineteenth birthday, which he had celebrated sowing land mines along the Hulda Road with the Haganah’s Givati Brigade. A sniper opening fire from a shallow wadi tore a small hole in his back, a painless wound he shrugged off until a sudden shortness of breath forced him to sit down and gulp uselessly for air. As he was blacking out, he toppled backward and was able to fill his lungs again. He lay beside the Hulda Road for forty minutes waiting to be evacuated, holding each new breath in his chest as though it might have to last forever.

  The medics explained that he had suffered a sucking wound; the bullet had opened up the pulmonary cavity, allowing the outside air to push against his lungs. That he had fallen on his back and plugged the hole rather than slumped forward and died he interpreted as meaning he should spend what future he had reclining. Four years later, he came to New York.

  With skills as a farmer and a sapper he went bankrupt in his first business venture, a kosher restaurant on the gray steppe of the Grand Concourse, newly Judenfrei in the wake of the postwar migration of Jews to the Long Island suburbs. Like many Israelis he spoke fluent, unaccented Arabic, and with embarrassed Egyptians backing him he opened an Arab restaurant on upper Broadway. Though his political loyalties were a poorly kept secret in Manhattan’s tangled Mideastern community, the partners prospered on the strength of his easy manner and weathered good looks. The Arabian Knights was his third and most successful enterprise.

  “Half of which, along with the most vulgarly large diamond of your choice,” he told Kate between shows on a torpid summer night, “is yours anytime you say the word.” He flailed a cigar about his head with thick hands, skywriting the offer in gray ash.

  “That’s very generous of you, Howard.”

  “Abu, remember? Or we’ll both be out on the street. And don’t look so morose when it’s my heart you’re trampling on.”

  “Abu.”

  “Do I frighten you? To look at me now would you suspect I killed seventeen men with these hands?”

  “Is that so, Abu?” Knowing what was coming next, preparing a smile.

  “Sad to say, it is. It happened years ago, when I was young and didn’t know better. Just before I lost my first restaurant I let go the cook and took over the kitchen myself. The carnage …” He hung his head.

  Kate forced the smile, but not hard enough.

  “Not funny? Let me try again.”

  “It’s not you,” she said. “It’s … really, it’s nothing.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see that.” He squeezed her arm, kept his hand there a little too long. “Then there’s still hope for me?”

  Again the watered smile. Kate turned toward the window and probed between the gritty blinds, staring out at the abandoned benches of what had been Needle Park. “Howard, we’ve been through this so many times. You’re very sweet and extremely attractive and you know how fond I am of you, but it wouldn’t—”

  “Sha,” he said with a finger to his lips. “Let me make a proposal of another sort, one I think may ease this existential trauma afflicting you.”

  She bent the blind back. “I won’t be part of your harem,” she warned.

  “Maybe some other sheikh’s? How would you like to be in the movies?”

  “Which one, the Baronet or the Quad?”

  “Please, I’m talking from the bottom of my heart.”

  She laughed out loud and immediately regretted it. “Howard, that line won’t work on anyone over fifteen. It was worn out before movies were invented.”

  “Listen,” he said, stretching out his legs and leaning back so that all she saw above his chin was the ruby tip of his cigar. “Two landsmen, friends of mine … well, maybe not friends but fellows we can do business with, are shooting a film and shopping around for a belly dancer and naturally they told Abu. And I’m telling Little Odessa.”

  “Why come here when they could just p
luck a girl off the street back home?”

  “For one, the street is Hollywood Boulevard. They, too, have expatriated themselves. For another, not many Palestinian girls would be caught dead in an Israeli movie, since that is likely what would happen if they were. And also because these fellows accepted incentives from the mayor’s office to use the Astoria sound stages …They’re anxious to meet you, Kate. I’ve gone out on a limb touting you.”

  “Hang on tight,” she said, brushing aside the tassles from her spangled halter to play her fingers over her ribs, “or did you tell them about these bones you say scare off your customers? Why not turn them on to one of the other women?”

  “Feh. Belly dancers they can find anywhere. A presence like yours—”

  “They’ll hide behind a veil.”

  “Don’t worry about details. Worry instead about getting the part. It’s a small one, but it pays handsomely for a few days’ work, and who knows where it can lead?”

  “I still don’t see why they’d want to use—” She pulled up short. “Oh no,” she said, hovering over the Barcalounger, snatching the cigar from his teeth. “Get yourself another girl. I didn’t give up flashing my tuchas on Times Square to do porno flicks.”

  “Would I ask that of the future Mrs. Abu Safwat Khader? This is going to be an R-rated production, could be a PG. Very soft at the core, very classy. You wouldn’t even have to go nude much.”

  “But I do have to audition for these friends of yours?”

  “Call it a screen test.”

  “I think we both know what that means.”

  “No, no … trust me. These guys are for real, their money is. What if I invite them to the show, let them have a look at you?”

  “It’s your restaurant,” she said with a quick hunch of her shoulders. “I just dance here.”

  “Kate, you’re doing yourself a terrific favor.” He took back the cigar and patted down his jacket for matches. “Now do us both another one.”

  “Yes, Howard?”

  “And put a little meat on those bones.”

  The rumble of Indian tablas ionized the stuffy room. Kate went to a tortoiseshell compact to plump her lips with Carmine Karma, darken her cheeks with powder. A raven fall swallowed the taffy hair. She hooked her fingers in cymbals the size of half-dollars and clattered them like tinny castanets, tugged at the rhinestone halter so that the pale fullness of her breasts spilled over the top. She said, “Your friends, the machers, they’re downstairs? Maybe I should lose my top.”