In fact, Evie hadn’t eaten meat in years. She’d been to a lecture once that extolled the virtues of purity and temperance, back when she was new in town and worked nights in dance halls. Prudish old women in heavy wool skirts and plain white blouses lectured on various topics to young women who lived on the River Ward and gave out free doughnuts and coffee to those who would spend a morning seated quietly on a bench and be berated in good faith. Why vegetarianism should stick in Evie’s mind and not a bit of the rest about chastity and restraint was a funny thing to her. Evie thought she was being cute, refusing to consume meat in a city known best for stockyards and slaughterhouses, and the habit stuck because she felt better only eating fruits and vegetables. She was a little insulted that night with Jake, that he hadn’t yet noticed this about her, even though they’d been seeing each other for months. Evie never served meat, and only rarely fish, when they ate in her rooms. Young men had always been and would always be self-involved, she figured. It shouldn’t surprise her if Jake couldn’t see past the end of his nose.
They sat up and had wine by the window. After a while a pair of bottles sat empty on the floor next to them. Jake looked worse. His stomach made curious, loud noises. He refused a soporific when she offered one, even when she insisted. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ve got a good heart. It will take more than a fever to slow me down.” He wanted to stay next to her. It was something Evie couldn’t argue against, the street busier than before. Stray men reeled drunk along the curbstone, either leaving a palace or looking for one that would take them in. Girls worked the walkway now that it was getting late. Cheap girls. Desperate biddies, or older ones too staggered by Chinese opium to keep a room in a respectable joint. A man might have too much shame to snatch a girl off the street early on, but that changed after midnight if he was too broke or too drunk to take his satisfaction indoors. If he was looking after midnight, a man took what he could get, in an alley, in the back of a car. Jake and Evie watched these characters couple off. It was fascinating how a cake eater talked to a girl, both discreet and pantomime, and how she drew him in. It was better than any melodrama the theaters put on.
Evie explained how false the whole performance was, but that it could be pleasant sometimes. “If he’s genteel” was how she put it. “Like you.” She’d worked in dime-a-dance halls when she came to Omaha, even though it turned out she wasn’t much of a dancer. She met a lot of weird men that way, a few nice ones. Jake looked uneasy when she talked like that but didn’t make her stop. It was true, anyway, that there was something charming about Jake, even if it wasn’t gentility. How he stared off blankly, mislaid in the world; how he grimaced in silence when at a loss for words, his mind grinding; how his hair flopped over his forehead, how a cowlick spiked up in back, Jake unaware until his woman was there to tamp it down; how he wore mud grained in the creases of his palms; how he dressed, not quite sloppy, but with mere deference to neatness. It usually wasn’t this easy with a man, but Evie liked taking care of Jake.
His feet were on the windowsill, Evie under a blanket next to him in the wide seat of the high-backed chair. Outside, a white woman walked arm in arm with a black man. An umbrella dipped intermittently over their faces, but you couldn’t mistake them. The two were married, Evie explained. “Not legally. They just live like they are.” This neighborhood was integrated, which was something that drew Evie here even though it made her worry sometimes that she might be labeled as high yellow by the black folks here. If black folks didn’t see her as white, that would change how everyone else saw her too. She worried constantly that somebody might call her out for pretending to be something she wasn’t—but, really, what was the difference? Either way she was a kept woman living in a notorious part of town. To what lower station could they consign her? Even when a person did inspect Evie closely, if they seemed to gaze into her on the street—making her wonder if something was wrong with her fingernails, the palms of her hands, the shape of her ears or teeth, which was why she never ate in a restaurant, on the off chance that an inquisitor might trap her at a table—even then the person doing the inspecting always mistook her for an Italian, Albanian, or Gypsy, assuming they saw anything at all to question.
It was distressing to see a couple like the one out for a walk in the misting rain, the avenue disrupted because of them, and the peculiar intimacy of two people sharing an umbrella. Evie watched, drawn to this affection between different tribes, as if there was a halo of light around them. The couple budged down the walkway, not looking up at any of the windows to see who saw them.
For a long time after they passed, Jake watched the walkway where the couple had been. Evie stared into his reddened face, his wine-purpled lips, his blank eyes. What was he thinking? He said he felt the cold from the window in his feet. She curled around his middle and asked again if he’d lie down. He shook his head in a perturbed way.
“Do you know,” he said, “when I first saw you, I thought you looked familiar? You weren’t, though, yeah. I didn’t know you. I hadn’t ever known anyone like you. What are you, Evie? What makes you so new?”
She didn’t want to hear him talk like that and spoke over him to get him to shut up. She told how her mother was a seamstress and that she didn’t really know her father. After four children the man ran off to Nevada to find gold and silver and never returned. Evie had some schooling where she came from in Topeka, but only enough to meet a few boys, and she regretted she hadn’t had more. It was her brother who supported the family when she was young.
“He wasn’t any good.” Evie opened another bottle of wine and turned the radiator full open. A rusty, damp smell filled the room as the heat banged on. “Ben found work when he was sober. He was a house painter, which isn’t bad money, you know, provided you’ll work when the boss says to.” Ben died when Evie was little. He fell asleep on some railroad tracks one night, drunk, and was run over by a train. That was the end of him. Evie shrugged as she told about his dying, as if nothing could have stopped it from happening. “His body was sliced into segments. They had some trouble burying him like that because Mama bought a coffin with a glass front on it. When the pallbearers moved the coffin, the different parts of him slid around inside his suit. It was pitiful. Poor, dumb, Ben. His corpse wanted to roll up in a ball.”
The undertaker couldn’t talk Evie’s mother out of buying that nice coffin. Ben was the only fool in the cemetery for their part of town with a glass-front coffin. Nobody understood why a seamstress with three kids left to care for wanted to be uppity about the one who died.
Evie didn’t shed a tear as she told the story. She wasn’t emotional at all. To say one’s history in a clear and even voice made it almost whimsical. She was born in Kansas. Her father ran off. Her brother was dissected by the iron wheels of a train. He was drunk. He was stupid. What else? In the end, another possibility didn’t matter. There was what happened. That was all.