I study it, he say. I don't have it. I could get it.
SHE HAD SEVEN BEAUTIES like Mary mother of God, three sets of two, dexter and sinister, and one seventh universal oil that melted them all down and bound them together for you in a magic recipe-one ultimate Menu by Margaret, as she used to call her recipe column in the Winchester papers.
She had her highborn air, this came of being a Jew, of an ancient, select, and secretive people, though she didn't think anything about this herself. (You could sometimes catch her, though, idly picking out the Jewish names on any list-opera patrons, plane crashes, Nobel prize winners, This Week's Marriage Licenses, KNOWN FELONS WITH MOB CONNECTIONS REPORTED TO BE CURRENTLY OPERATING IN THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON AREA.) Whether it made her easy or uneasy to count herself one of this family, she was of it-she could bother to count or not, she had that luxury-and a great old family was deeply to be coveted. So much the better if they were an outsider race and small in number. They were never far from the centers of power.
This is another way women were luck and she was the luck of the luck. You could suck up family from them, even as you loosened them from it. Blood bound her and you together even as you commanded her, Leave your father's house and follow me. They would do it, too, that was the wonderful, the amazing, thing. On her own, she hadn't telephoned her father in eighteen months. She had even had to be told at Rosh Hashonah and Thanksgiving, Maggie, call your father. (Such courtesies might be of value later on, who knew.)
She had her highborn air, dexter, and right next to it she had her lowborn air, sinister, which also came of being a Jew, an outcast, a gypsy, and not giving one goddamn. She could up and follow a racetracker, a coarse adventurer, if she so chose. Moreover you could get to her through her body. It was a black, rich, well-watered way, between rock faces. The word podzol came to mind. The word humus. Soil. Slut. You could ask all you wanted of that flesh, you could whisper outrages into her ear and, no matter what she said, the flesh would tremble and fall open to you.
She was a slut, and not only that, she was a Mediterranean slob. She picked at scabs, she picked her nose, it was nothing to find one of her bloody tampons forgotten, stuck fast in a pool of browning gore to the side of the bathtub. Small as she was, she loved to eat and could put it away like a peasant. She had learned to cook from one of her clever lowborn boyfriends and now made free with that clown's excellent rustic cuisine-beans, ham hocks and rice, fish fried in golden dust, earthy bread, corn fritters light as bugs. Nothing was by definition too sweet for her. Once she discovered an old jar of crystallized honey in the back of the pantry-it had little black specks in it. Those are mouse turds, you pointed out, and she laughed, and ate the whole thing with a spoon. And her face was peasant, less Jewish than Cossack, even framed inside those prickly braids.
The beauties of her body dexter and sinister echoed the contraries of her breeding, the elegance of her shoulders and long neck as against the extreme punishable insolence of her ass. You didn't often see an ass like that on a white girl, a long flexible back ending in a short round bulb-like structure that really was rather rude. How dare it try to hide anything from you? The muscular lobes under its dimples begged to be pried apart, and of course you obliged.
Contraries of rank and body-ditto the spirit. She was intelligent. She had crisp clean logic to throw away, like a harbor of sunny, empty warehouses, and the value of this, besides that you could put into her with very little trouble anything you wished to teach her, was how lavishly she let it all go for you-O the sight of all those beautiful shining granaries receding into the distance! How willingly she put your shambles in place of her order, although she was smarter than you were, and often remade your mess into her order without even knowing it. Then you had to shake her out of thought altogether (for a time), which was easy to do, because of her matching stupidity.
Her stupidity. Her unruliness. You loved it best, for it gave all the other traits their reference to you. She needed someone to fight, her mirror image, only upside down-her twin, and that was you. Her unruliness seemed to lie just under her skull, at the roots of her kinky hair, and to be the continuation of that hair, or its germ. It was natural, then, to sink your whole hand in her incredibly thick, coarse hair, to bind her to you that way, all five fingers, with animal bluntness. Her own unruliness made it impossible for her to get loose from you, and if you whispered obscenities into her ear then, and reached the other hand between her legs, she was always wet.
And that was the seventh beauty, her perfect willingness to you, which was the basic ingredient of this particular Menu by Margaret, the tie of ties. The little key was pain, which turned the lock of every pleasure. No great credit to yourself, who had been born with it in the palm of your hand. It had taken a long time to realize what luck it was-how rare.
And not that that willingness was unique to her-it was in fact the commonest, the vulgarest quality of woman. It was the universal oil. It was the wonder of women, all in all, their willingness to receive you-you had that golden key-and why you in turn had to have a woman or you were lost. Your twin sister carried your soul in her little box, it came down to that. True, other traits, particularities, beauty, unruliness, were dissolved in her. Uniqueness drowned itself in her-all for you.
Betting her own money on Zeno's horse-that was a gorgeous, supreme bit of unruliness-well, you could hardly have taken away her last pathetic paycheck from that recipe writing job, now could you? Or have pounded the barrelhead for the cash from her dead mother's dining table. But who could have guessed that she would jump in with both feet-and even so how much were you talking-a hundred, two hundred bucks? So she walked back out with maybe eleven hundred dollars-all as if to say she wouldn't stop you, or even ask you how much of the common roll you had staked and blown-none of that low-grade wifely nagging for her-but if you could do it, by god so could she, she wasn't going to sit home and roll out biscuits.
And not that she was above nagging. She just dragged it up to her monumentally unruly level, drilling you with green-yellow monkey-witch eyes every time you came back from the racing secretary's office, wanting to know whether you had entered Pelter in a race yet, and if so for how much? None of this out loud, of course, at least not yet, but it went without saying you were a chicken and a liar too if you ran him in anything better than a 1500-dollar claimer after all this.
But if you lost that horse wouldn't all your hidden luck go with him? Wouldn't the magic of a chosen one desert you? Your twin sister carried your soul in her velvet box, but after all it had been Mr. Hickok who picked you out, gave you a job, saw something in you. It was better than winning any race, that red, beautiful, melancholy autumn afternoon, when the old man had limped around the corner and sat down on a bale of hay by you, seeming idly to want to talk horses-you always knew how to get him going, he liked your respect for the old ways-the subject of bute, luckily, hadn't come up. And suddenly turned and offered you, resignedly, wearily, for 1500 dollars, what was left of his one great horse-and so hooked to you that silken thread of merit that bound you forever to him as it had bound him to his famous father before him. Class. A month later he was dead.
Hickok himself had run Pelter in low-grade allowance races, non-winners of a bologna sandwich in their last three starts, that kind of thing, no fear of a claim there, but now and then in a 1500-dollar claimer too, for a two-grand purse, and the horse win easily at that price. Hickok had so much class he could put up the legend of that horse against the risk of an upstart claim, and no one dared to take him, and no one cried lese majeste. It was a kind of gallant joke, on the racetrack at that time, to let the old stakes horse pay for his own dinner. Now she challenged you with her monkey green eyes to do the same, but she didn't understand what it was to have no glorious family ties, nothing and nobody knitting you into this world but a grimy snarling gnome of a so-called father in the shop of a used car lot in Trempeleau, Wisconsin. What sort of class could you use to fend off an upstart's claim, when you were an upstart yourself? She didn't have to know what you knew, that if you lost that horse, you would lose her too.