The Jew's Wife & Other Stories by Thomas J. Hubschman

the glass doors leading to the balcony, apparently to
keep out the sun. Rosalie was not in the living room or the
adjoining kitchen. There was no sign of his hosts. He put some
water on to boil.
        The
electric coil heated slowly. He returned to the living room,
feeling better now that he was up and about. The air conditioning
also helped—he had left a window open in the bedroom when he lay
down. He started toward the balcony to open the heavy curtain,
since the sun was now well to the west. The drawstrings were
located all the way to the right where the curtains had not
completely closed, letting a thin strip of daylight in. He reached
for the cord, but hesitated when he saw that someone was on the
balcony. It was Rosalie, of course, sunbathing on a lounge chair.
Her eyes were closed. A book lay face-down on her bare
stomach.
        By the
time he had taken all this in he had decided to leave the curtains
be so as not to disturb her. But then he noticed that the bottom
half of her bathing suit was undone. An unbroken line of flesh,
pale where the tie had secured it, extended from her ribcage all
the way to her thigh. He assumed the suit had opened accidentally
until he saw that her left hand lay beneath the fabric. As he
watched, her fingers arched, causing the material to ride downward.
He had never before seen a woman’s pubic hair. Then he realized
that her fingers were not just idling there but were depressing the
flesh and moving it up and down. He looked at her face. The
expression on it was absurdly like a communicant’s waiting for the
host to be placed on her tongue.
        He
returned to the kitchen where the water he had put up was coming to
a boil. He poured it into a cup, spilling some onto the stovetop.
He spilled some more before he reached the living room, and again
on the heavily carpeted stairs as he made his way back
upstairs.
       
       “ Feel
better?” she asked. She had changed out of her bathing suit into a
blouse and wrap-around skirt. Something was sizzling on the stove.
She reached on tiptoe into the cabinet above the sink.
       “ Much better.
Can I help?”
        But she had
located the spice she wanted and began shaking it over the
simmering saucepan. When she had finished seasoning the sauce she
took a bowl of large white mushrooms out of the refrigerator and
put them down on the dining table. “You can start with these.” She
showed him what to do, then returned to the saucepan. He hadn’t
helped someone prepare a meal—at least not one as elaborate as
Rosalie was about—since he had peeled potatoes for his mother’s
stews. Margaret certainly wasn’t about to let him into her own
kitchen. In any case, Margaret wouldn’t know a mushroom from a
zucchini.
       “ Why are you
smiling?”
        He shared the
image he had of peeling mushrooms in his rectory kitchen, then went
on to describe his housekeeper’s fondness for blue along with some
of her other quirks. What he had witnessed on the balcony a short
while ago now seemed like a bizarre dream.
       “ It
sounds like your Margaret runs the place like a drill
sergeant.”
       “I guess you could say she takes
her job seriously.”
       She added something to the
skillet, causing it to sizzle in protest.
       “You don’t mind, her running your
life like that?”
       “I wouldn’t exactly say she runs
our lives. Margaret’s pretty typical as housekeepers go—actually a
good deal better than some,” he added, recalling the woman who had
kept house in his first parish, a harridan who used to complain
that he changed his underwear too often.
       “ I can’t
imagine letting someone decide what color curtains I can have or
choosing the food I’ll eat.”
       “ You
adjust,” he said, although he had never gotten used to pot roast
twice a week or to Margaret’s insistence on putting his socks in
the third drawer of his dresser instead of in the top drawer where
his mother had always