The Laws of Gravity

by Liz Rosenberg

  Nicole’s chest burned; every breath was an agony, as if she were drowning. Her lungs were filling, her body was exhausted; she’d gone too far from shore. She heard from far off a babble of voices, sped up, slowed down, a warped record. Among them she made out the sound of a familiar loved voice, very close to her ear, a boy’s voice, one she had come to know as well as her own. All its inflections were familiar, yet she could not name him. He murmured, “I’ve got you,” but perhaps it wasn’t that at all, perhaps it was someone else now saying, “I’ve got to,” or a woman’s voice saying, “You’ve got to—”

  She smelled the sting of salt air. A hint of pine and raspberries. There was a thrilling buoyancy in her body. She felt herself rocked in an embrace that bobbed up and down in waves. She felt sun on her face, the warmth of it, though it must have been the hospital lights glaring down. The pain writhed inside her like a snake. And then it all stopped. As sudden as that. She had come up for air. Her pain disappeared as if it had been wiped off a slate. Nothing intervened with the sounds of the hospital room. For the first time ever she heard with absolutely perfect clarity, without even the interference of her own heart beating, blood rushing through her body. The relief was incredible. In that crystal stillness and calm, came the sound of her machines, making a new, loud noise, a ringing sound, a rustle of bodies, footsteps, and outside her window a bird sang once, two times.

  A minute later Jay said, “I think it’s over.” Then, “We can take them off now. My darling. My poor darling. Look at her resting.” They shoved the used morphine patches into Aunt Patti’s enormous tapestry bag.

  The room was filled with the strangest silence, Mimi thought, like falling into a well, a deep, stern, eerie silence, and then she realized what was missing—it was the sound of Nicole’s labored breathing. And in the midst of that absolute silence, heartless Aunt Patti began to cry.

  AUGUST 21–22, 2012

  You Shall Not Boil a Kid in Its Mother’s Milk.

  Arthur’s wife Ruth had joined the bat-mitzvah group because everyone else in her mah-jongg group was joining, and what was she supposed to do in the afternoons, sit at home and play solitaire? Then she threw herself bravely into the fray the way she did everything else. She and Sarah practiced Hebrew together out loud in the kitchen, Ruth braying the unfamiliar sounds at the top of her lungs.

  “Alef, bet,” Sarah would chant softly.

  Ruth would reply with something that sounded vaguely like “Oy vey!”

  “Alef, bet,” Sarah repeated, enunciating each sound.

  “Alphabet!”

  Sol escaped to the safety of their bedroom and closed the door.

  The philosophical discussions about religion were even worse.

  “I don’t get it,” he overheard Ruth say one night. “What’s with the free will?”

  “So we can choose. We can choose good or evil.”

  “That means God has no say in the matter? So we’re stronger than God?”

  “No, Ruth, that’s not it.” Sarah paused to grapple with the idea herself. “God is all-powerful. If He stopped caring even for an instant, the whole universe would cease. Remember Rabbi Teddy telling us that?”

  “Sort of,” Ruth grumbled. “So if he’s all-powerful and in charge, what does he care if we have free will or not?”

  “Because he wants us to choose Him,” Sarah said.

  “Wants, like I want an ice cream cone?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “Do you want an ice cream cone, Ruth? We can go to Baskin-Robbins.”

  “A lot of people choose evil,” Ruth said. “Hitler. My neighbor who hits his dog. Seems like a lousy plan.”

  Sometimes Sol thought that this Rabbi Teddy must be a saint. Either that, or a complete fool. Often, he reminded himself, the two went hand in hand.

  Sol stood at the back of the synagogue, where he could feel most invisible. Women and men—but mostly women—milled around like elderly children at a birthday party. There was a gigantic kosher cake with “Mazel Tov” written in pink frosted script. All the old bat-mitzvah women wore white blouses and blue skirts, an unofficial uniform, the colors of the Israeli flag. Ruth wore a too-tight white T-shirt and a too-short denim skirt. But she seemed diminished these days. She was anxious being apart from Arthur for even a few hours, and she didn’t give Sol such a hard time anymore. “When push came to shove, you came through,” she told Sol. “You could have knocked me over with a feather, the way you came through.”

  Arthur had lost thirty pounds since his illness. His cheekbones had grown prominent; his face and body had lost some of its eternal baby fat; he no longer even wore the gaudy rings—perhaps they had grown too loose on his fingers. It was his younger brother’s face Sol saw; the way it had looked when he went off to the Korean War. Handsome, vulnerable. Arthur was smiling, looking around at everything with interest, as usual, chatting and laughing. His new passion was heart-healthy cooking, and he now threw himself into making vegetable broths as enthusiastically as he’d once gushed over chocolate tortes. The man was unquenchable. He held Ruth’s hand as tightly as she held his, their fingers interlaced. When she walked off to talk to one of the other women about some last-minute detail, he watched her, and she never left an invisible circle she paced around him, close enough to reach out and touch him at any time.

  Sol thought of the lines of some remembered poem:

  Weave a circle round him thrice

  And close your eyes with holy dread

  For he on honey-dew hath fed

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  Rabbi Lewin gathered all the bat mitzvahs around him. There must have been thirty or forty women, none of them a day younger than sixty, but all smiling and blushing like teenagers. They ranged themselves on the stairs, lined up as if for a class photograph, according to height—all but Ruth, who squeezed her way to the front and winked at Arthur sitting in the front row, his camera clicking away. Someone else was videotaping the whole thing from the back of the synagogue. Sol had not brought a camera; he might have forgotten even to bring flowers, but luckily his daughter Abigail called and reminded him. He hung on to his bunch of roses for dear life, the green of the tissue paper starting to stain his fingers. He took a seat toward the back, near the aisle, but Sarah spotted him and smiled, cool as a cucumber.

  Sol knew the drill; Sarah had talked him through it beforehand. Each of the women would read a few lines of the day’s parsha, that week’s Torah portion. This week’s reading was Re’eh (Behold), Deuteronomy 11:26–16:17. It worked out well, she explained, because it contained so many of the laws set down for the Jewish people, divided into small sections. The more advanced students took the longer sections, the less advanced undertook the shorter. Each would read first in Hebrew with the rabbi standing close by, holding his silver Torah yad, or pointer, to help the woman find and keep her place. Sol slunk down in his seat, ready for a few extraordinarily tiresome hours, like those he’d spent at Abigail’s school concerts—all except when his daughter was actually performing, of course, her red hair catching the light. “A nap like this you can’t buy,” Arthur used to tell him, settling in for the long nights of junior orchestra.

  Sol tried to relax. Perhaps he was getting old and foolish. The assembled crowd was large, filled with family and friends. Each of the bat-mitzvah women seemed so touchingly earnest. Many stumbled over their Hebrew, and he heard the steady murmur of the rabbi’s voice, coaching them. Some of them sounded lost even reading the English. But when it came time to speak their minds, they put their heart into it. If not always their brains, Sol thought.

  “Behold,” the first woman had said, after butchering the Hebrew opening. She was a heavy woman, part of Sarah’s swim group at the JCC. Rolls of fat hung down from under her short-sleeved white blouse. “Behold, or see, look. It means we should open our senses and choose God. ‘Behold, I set before you today a blessing or curse.’ This parsha is not about punishment or reward, but about purpose. We have a purpose i
n this life, and every minute we can make bad choices or good ones. Today I feel I’ve made a good one.” She smiled at the rabbi, who smiled encouragingly back.

  And so it went, on down the line.

  Ruth had the shortest portion of all, but she trumpeted it at the top of her enormous voice, first in Hebrew, then in English. Arthur was on the edge of his front row seat, camera up, clicking away, as if he had captured a movie star stepping onto the red carpet. “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk!”

  “So!” Ruth went on. “A lot of people use this why not to eat a cheeseburger, or even chicken à la king. I don’t personally see how a chicken could be the mother of a cow, but the rule is don’t eat a baby goat boiled in its mother’s milk. It’s not nice and it sounds disgusting.” She sat down, beaming, to a spatter of laughter and applause.

  Sarah’s portion was one of the longest, and she got through it without a hitch. She was a natural student of languages. She was fluent in French, German, Russian. She had picked up quite a bit of Thai by listening to books on tape. Now she translated the Hebrew passage. Her voice was calm, her chin uplifted. Sol caught a glimpse of the young female student he’d fallen in love with so many years ago, her arms loaded down with books. Her eyes, sharp, brown, and eager, sought his now as they had then, and his heart soared.

  “If, however, there is a needy person among you, one of your kinsmen in any of your settlements in the land that the Lord God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman.” He listened to the notes of her voice, and let the words wash over him. “Later in this parshat of Re’eh, Elaine Newmark will read about the need to help ‘the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow in your midst.’ These two passages are connected, as we are all connected. Family can form between people of no blood relation. Family, very simply, are the people to whom we feel most closely bound. Family is where we hold nothing back.”

  She squared her small shoulders. “In the world to come, we will find that we are all related, to the poor, the needy, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow. In this holy month of Elul, God draws close to us. We draw closer to him when we turn toward each other, recognize our kinship, and act accordingly.” She sat down to warm applause. Somewhat to Sol’s horror, the stranger sitting next to him in the pew pressed his hand. Up front, Arthur blew his nose, and Ruth said in her ringing voice, “I meant that, too!”

  For the second time in two late August days, Sol attended a religious ceremony, trying to place himself where he would be least conspicuous. Because of him, a woman had died. Because of him, he stood at her funeral, the sun beating down on his bare head, bare except for the black yarmulke a familiar-looking boy had handed him. “Thank you for coming,” the boy said, and as soon as he heard the voice he remembered: this was Ari Wiesenthal’s son Julian, the boy who had testified in court against his father. The boy who knew what he did and didn’t want. Now, as then, his voice sounded adult, and Sol responded as he would have to a fellow adult. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said. The boy nodded politely, somberly, and moved on, handing a yarmulke to the next man in the crowd.

  Sol looked around, but he did not spot Ari Wiesenthal anywhere. This did not surprise him, of course. He caught the eye of Peter Allister, Nicole’s lawyer, and they nodded to one another. Then he did his best to fade against the backdrop of trees. Jonathan Swift, that most cynical of cynics, had written, “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” He hoped there were no visionaries at this event.

  A large crowd stood in the cemetery. When someone this young died, there was often an outpouring of grief from the community. Sol recognized only a few of the many faces. He did not know the rabbi, thin and blond, not as solid as that Teddy Lewin fellow. The rabbinate seemed to be growing younger every year. Maybe they just grew quickly in the Long Island soil, cropping up in the place of potatoes. Of course the traffic had been horrendous—a Sunday morning in August, heading east to the beaches of the Hamptons. Traffic, like death and taxes, was inevitable. Things invisible, things inevitable.

  Sol had sent a check to the charity listed in Newsday in Nicole’s obituary. Blood money. A fund to help poor children get educational opportunities. He knew it wasn’t enough—as much as it was, it wasn’t close to enough. He decided to volunteer as a reading tutor at their local elementary school. These were tiny steps, but he must try to make amends. If you ever gave up trying to change and improve yourself, you were finished, kaput. He remembered the last conversation he’d had with Tom Lieu, before he left the Supreme Court for good. It was late in the day; Lieu was alone, for a change.

  “I wish I had done better,” Sol confided in Tom. “I wish I had done more, and I wish I’d followed your advice on this last case. It was a no-win situation.”

  Lieu tried to wave this last bit away. “Let it go,” he said to Sol. “Do better next time.”

  “What next time? There is no next time.”

  “There is always a next time,” Tom had said, stirring the sugar into his iced tea with a pleasant, chiming sound.

  “I’m too much of a perfectionist,” Sol had admitted.

  “Everything is already perfect. Everything and everyone.”

  Sol wouldn’t have expected such a Buddha-like statement from the practical Judge Lieu. “Really?” he said. “How about Pescatori?”

  Lieu smiled. “Pescatori is a perfect asshole,” he said.

  Sol nearly laughed out loud at the memory, but quickly caught himself. You don’t laugh at funerals unless you want to be thrown out on your behind.

  But a few minutes later everyone in the somber-hued crowd was laughing at something the short, dark-haired woman was saying in eulogy to the dead. The young boy stood right next to her, and they looked enough alike that Sol realized they must be mother and son. The judge was standing too far away to hear anything more than the murmur of words, like the rise and fall of the sea. Maybe Sarah was right, he did need a hearing aid. He’d been told that years before, but thought it would look terrible on a Supreme Court judge. Justice was supposed to be blind, not deaf. Now he could relax, admit he couldn’t hear as well as he used to.

  The woman, with tears in her eyes, a face that the judge could see was constricted with pain, kept on making the crowd laugh. They were laughing and crying, but mostly laughing, a few people actually holding their stomachs. You’d have thought she was a professional comic.

  When the boy, her son, stepped up to say a few words, everyone started sobbing again. If you were watching from another planet, you’d have thought these people were insane—laughing one minute, sobbing the next. There was a little girl hanging on to the boy’s hand even as he spoke. She looked so much like Abigail as a child from the back, the judge caught his breath. He felt rooted to the spot, a man gazing at his own past. Her bright hair caught the light, like strands of brilliant copper wire. He was glad he could not see her face; he did not know how much more of this he could bear. But he would bear it for the sake of the woman who had borne more, and he vowed again to perfect himself—and not to become a perfect asshole.

  Ari had found a place above the graveyard in which to hide. It was a cliff overgrown with trees and brambles and high grass. He’d had to climb up the far side and claw his way through dense vegetation and buzzing insects to reach this vantage point, but it was perfect. He could see but not be seen. He could hear without being heard. He had worn a black suit in case he had the courage to show up at the funeral itself, but of course he had not, and now it was soaked with sweat, stained green with grass, all but ruined. Its blackness seemed to draw the sunlight directly into the fibers of the cloth. He envied those below who stood beneath a white tent, in its cool shadow. Hanging on to the trunk of a tree, edging as close as he could to the edge of the cliff, he felt like one of those wild outcast characters from the Bible. Esau. Ishmael. Cain. Am I my brother’s keeper?

  The press had been relentless once Nicole died. They’d called his house a
dozen times, till he seriously considered pulling the phone out of the wall. How do you feel about the death of your cousin? I feel terrible, I feel like throwing up, he told one reporter, till he’d decided to stop answering the phone altogether. How did they think he would feel—happy? Relieved? He was not a monster, even if he looked like one, in his ruined black suit, hunched over a cliff, gazing down on everyone he loved. His mother was there, in a ludicrous wide-brimmed black straw hat. His ex-wife, his son, even his daughter, since they had decided Arianna was too young to understand what was going on. He was not convinced. He had once read that by the age of four human beings have undergone every emotion they will ever feel for the rest of their lives—rage, joy, desire, abandonment, hope. He believed that was true. He had felt all these things and more. But no one consulted him. He had lost the only power he’d ever really cared about, the power to watch over the people he loved.

  The rabbi was speaking in praise of the dead. A devoted wife and mother, a beloved teacher, valued member of her community. He did not especially recognize his cousin Nicole in any of these words. He remembered her best as Nikki, her childhood nickname. He remembered his red-haired cousin, beautiful, noisy, alive, skinny, unpredictable, brave. A child. His baby cousin. Not a grown woman. Never one of the dead.

  The rabbi said, “In the words of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, ‘There are few things as crooked as the straight face of a con-artist. There is nothing blacker than the white garments in which a corpse is dressed. And there is nothing more complete than a broken heart.’ ”

  The rabbi began to recite kaddish in Hebrew, the prayer for the dead. Ari knew all the words. He had been at the top of his Hebrew School class; he still had a sterling-silver-and-blue-enamel circle pin somewhere to prove it. The teacher had said, Maybe you’ll grow up to be a rabbi, or at least a cantor, and even then Ari had thought, Yeah, sure. And live on less than nothing, and kiss the behind of every wealthy congregant. But he had nodded, as if he were giving it serious thought.