Besides, Felix could never keep the hours required by a wholesaler’s life. He was nocturnal. And he wanted to be rich-rich, as he called it, no-doubt-about-it rich. Stinking rich. Screw-the-world rich. How that goal meshed with ignoring the little bills of day-to-day life was a puzzlement to Bambi, but she didn’t want to be a dreary nag like her mother, so she let it go.
Felix had first spoken of his desire to be wealthy on their Bermuda honeymoon. They stayed in a pretty pink hotel on a pink sand beach, not that they saw much of the ocean, for they enjoyed the novelty of being in a bed together all night and all morning and into the afternoon, finally free of the fear of discovery that had marked their premarital adventures, as Bambi thought of them. Those had been limited to her car and, just once, the basement rec room in the house on Talbot Road, her parents’ heavy tread going back and forth, back and forth in the rooms above them. Bambi had been so nervous that she kept on even more clothes than she had in the car, which they had parked behind the old mansion on the Crimea estate in Leakin Park. Yet the rec room was the first time she had a genuine orgasm, and she wondered if the drama, the suspense, was essential to that experience.
She was very happy to be proven wrong on her honeymoon. It turned out there were quite a lot of ways to have orgasms and Felix wanted to teach her all of them.
“We’re going to be rich,” Felix told her, promised her. “Rich-rich. But we’re not going to play by the rules. The game is rigged, so I’m making my own game. It’s the only way to get out in front. But I need you to understand what that means. Late nights, long hours. Mine is a nighttime business.”
“What about the risk?” she murmured into the pillow. He was rubbing her back, running his fingers through her hair.
“Virtually none. Oh, I’ll get popped now and then, but they’ll never make it stick. You understand what I’m saying, Bambi?” He lay down next to her, turning her head so they were eye to eye. “Things will happen. There will be moments-people will gossip. But we’ll be so respectable-so rich-that no one will be able to afford to look down on us. We’re gonna be benefactors. To the synagogue, to the schools our children attend. We’ll be envied, which can be dangerous, but we’ll also be admired and liked. You’re beautiful and I’m smart.”
“I’m smart, too,” Bambi said, thinking of Bryn Mawr, her failure there, a story she had withheld from Felix. Pretty much the only thing she had withheld from Felix so far. She was shocked at herself, going all the way before they were engaged. But she knew he would propose, in a grand fashion, and he did-the Surrey Inn, the ring winking at her from a raw oyster in the first course, so she wouldn’t be on pins and needles all night. She also knew he would make her first time nice. And now it was getting better. No one had told her that. The veiled conversation with her mother-and there had been only one-had led her to believe that sex was something one got used to, like shots or other unpleasant but necessary things. Why hadn’t someone told her that it was good and got better? Obviously, her mother wasn’t going to share such information, but what about Irene? Bambi was sure Irene had done it, maybe with more than one boy. Irene had been maid of honor at Bambi’s wedding and then had her own big wedding in late January. No one got married in late January. Why not wait until Valentine’s Day? Bambi, who had noticed the way the waist of Irene’s bridesmaid dress strained despite the fitting in early December, was pretty sure she knew why Irene’s wedding had been scheduled for January.
“You’re smart, too,” Felix assured her. “You were smart enough to fall in love with me at first sight.”
“Did not.” She would never admit that.
“Well, I did, so I guess I’m the smarter of the two of us.”
“Which synagogue are we going to join?”
“Beth Tfiloh.”
“You want to attend an Orthodox shul?” That came as a surprise. Although Bambi had been raised in an Orthodox home and had married in an Orthodox temple, Felix had seemed indifferent to religion. She knew nothing of his family. Whenever she pressed him, he changed the subject, said they were gone. She worried he might have lost them in the Holocaust, but she didn’t know how to have that conversation.
“That’s the best one, the one with all those old Germans, the ones who act like they’re goys. Behind closed doors, I’m going to eat bacon and I don’t care if you mix up the plates. But in every part of our life that’s not my business, we gotta be respectable. Best synagogue, best country club, best schools. Behind closed doors, we do things our way.”
Then, much to her delighted shock, he yanked her up to all fours and showed her something else that a man and a woman could do behind closed doors. She was surprised at how much she liked it, given how unromantic the position was, like two dogs going at it. But she liked almost everything Felix did. When he was home, which wasn’t as often as she would have preferred, it turned out. Late nights, he had said. Long hours. Those words had been meaningless in a soft bed in a pink hotel. By the time Linda was born on September 1, they were all too real. The doctor said she could have sex again in two weeks, but Felix was never around. Football season was under way, he explained.
They had honored the Jewish tradition of not having a baby shower or decorating the nursery until after the baby was born, although Felix thought it a silly superstition. He had painted the room shell pink. (Without the landlord’s permission, and Ida was mournful about the cost of that as well. “You’ll never get the damage deposit back,” she said.) The nursery suite was lavish, too lavish for the apartment: matching crib, bureau, changing table, rocking chair, and toy chest, all white with stenciled roses. Felix said the furnishings were a gift from a loyal customer, but Bambi suspected it was a payment against a debt, as it had arrived on a plain truck, carted in by two surly men who grunted when she offered them lemonade on the unseasonably hot day they set it up last week. Once all the furniture was in, there was barely any floor space left. Ida was right: The hippo wouldn’t fit. It didn’t fit anywhere. It was going to have to stand sentry in the living room until they moved.
As it was, Linda had yet to sleep in her beautiful, crowded nursery. Bambi was breast-feeding and kept her in a Moses basket in their room. Her mother found this appalling as well-the breast-feeding, the little basket by the bed-and added it to the list of things that were Felix’s fault. As to Linda’s birth date, which came exactly thirty-five weeks after Bambi’s wedding day-Ida had no comment, other than the dry observation that nine pounds was an exceptionally good weight for a preemie.
Bambi was perhaps a month pregnant at her wedding, but who cared? The wedding, after all, had been in the planning stages for six months, so no one could ever say it had been forced on them. (Unlike Irene’s engagement, which was announced over the winter holidays, a scant month before the ceremony. Her son, Benjamin, was born in mid-August.) Bambi had no problem standing before her guests in the whitest of white gowns, perhaps the loveliest dress she would ever wear. Not long, but cocktail length, in keeping with the simple ceremony, much simpler than Felix would have liked. Simple, in part, because her parents were paying, but also because Bambi had urged them to scale back. Felix’s yen for extravagance scared her a little. Bambi sensed that this would be a theme for the rest of their lives together: Felix would want to be lavish, and she would pull back. He was the first person in her experience to use “middle class” as a kind of an insult. Her parents considered the life they had crafted for their only daughter to be one of their greatest achievements, but Felix thought them small-timers, she knew. And that was the worst thing Felix would say of anyone. Small-timer. He thinks small. He settles for scraps.