A Book of Great Worth by Dave Margoshes Page B

cloud.”
    Rebeccah smiled at him. There was an attraction, of course, and no sense in denying it, but she already knew enough about him, from family gossip, to know better. She took the edge of her lower lip gently between her teeth and made a decision.
    “That’s too dizzying an abstraction for this poor lamb,” she said, and began to move away.
    His hand on her arm brought her up short. “Wait.” He looked embarrassed by his abrupt gesture. “I’d like to see you again.”
    “Again? I’m just going across the room to have a canapé. My stomach is growling. Look over there in a moment and you’ll see me.”
    “I mean,” Aaron said, twisting his resolve, “again, after this. Some place else. Perhaps we could have a meal.”
    “I don’t like to cook,” Rebeccah said with suspicion.
    “I mean in a restaurant,” he said in sudden English, as if it were a secret he wanted no one overhearing to understand.
    She took a step back and looked him over, from the top of his sandy brown hair, neatly parted in the centre of his well-shaped head, down along the smooth contour of brow, nose, cleanly chiselled mouth and chin, the starched white collar, down the perfectly tied necktie, the immaculate linen jacket, pausing for a moment at his crotch, where, despite the loose drape of his trousers, she believed she saw a barely perceptible movement, then down the crease of the trousers to the glimmering black wings of his oxfords, then up again, letting her eyes take their time while he stood motionless, waiting their verdict. “I want you to know,” she said finally, “that you represent just about everything that I detest and abhor about this society, capitalism at its most rapacious, mercantilism at its basest, petty bourgeoisie mentality at its narrowest, dandyism, masculine superiority, class and sexual arrogance...” Her hand darted out from her side in a palm-up gesture of dismay, as if she were overwhelmed by the enormity of the list she was prepared to recite, but her voice trailed off.
    Aaron observed her with the same aloof detachment she had spent on him, a small smile seeping into his lips, and he shrugged, a shrug coloured with a boldness that made her think she had, perhaps, been wrong. “I may represent those things,” he said. “I think you’re wrong, but I won’t argue with you now, here. I may represent them, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean I am them. You are wrong there.”
    Four days later, he showed up at the department store where she worked as a window dresser, resplendent in a blue and white striped gabardine suit and a straw hat, a bouquet of flowers in his freshly manicured hand. “We’re in the same business,” he said as he greeted her with the flow of employees through the staff entrance at six o’clock.
    “Not exactly. You sell, I decorate, though I’ll concede there’s a connection. More importantly, you own, I toil.” But she was pleased to see him, flattered by the flowers he now proffered, making a gallant sort of dip with his head and shoulders, his free hand behind his back.
    “The same business just the same. Mercantilism at its basest. And the fact that you’re a Williams had nothing to do, I suppose, with your getting a job at Loew’s.”
    “I’m not a Williams,” Rebeccah said fiercely. “I’m a Kristol.”
    “Excuse me, no disrespect meant to the memory of your father, who I’m told was a fine man. I regret I never had the pleasure of meeting him. Working here rather than in the family store eases the conscience, don’t you agree?”
    Rebeccah let a smile slowly form. “That’s a contradiction I’m still grappling with, yes.” She observed him coolly, conscious of the slight pressure at the back of her neck caused by having to tilt her head upward to meet his eyes. “I don’t know that meeting my father would have been a pleasure for you, though. He was a man who said what he thought.”
    “Like his daughter?”
    “Like his daughter,