Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Later he supposed he should have been grateful for her blunt delivery but just then all he could do was grab the sink to steady himself and try to keep her face in focus in the mirror. The spray of freckles on her nose had blurred since he’d last taken note of it, her cheeks paled, the roses on her nightgown faded, as if, in retreating from the marriage, she’d been blanched. There was a bow at the neck of her nightgown, a soft, girlish tie that suited the flannel if not the chiseled plane of his wife’s jaw. He zeroed in on the knot of the bow for ballast.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s nobody’s fault. It just happened. Last summer, the night of the blackout when I got stranded at O’Hare. I went to Chicago that day, remember?”

  Zach remembered. Her Uncle Howard, recently widowed, was selling his house in Skokie and moving to an assisted living residence, and had to get rid of everything in his attic, including his mementos from the Spanish Civil War. A proud veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—the cadre of idealistic American volunteers who fought against Franco in the late 1930s—Howard was a hero to his niece who feared that his collection would fall into unappreciative hands or, worse yet, get tossed on the junk heap by someone who didn’t recognize its value. On Thursday, July 13, 1977, Bonnie had hopped a plane to Chicago to rescue it and that evening, had called Zach from O’Hare with good news and bad news. The good news was her uncle’s cache was a bonanza, one of the pictures might even be a Robert Capa. The bad news: because of the lightning strike that had knocked out the electrical grid in New York, all flights to the region had been canceled. Zach remembered that night well; Manhattan was a zoo, plunged into darkness, people walking in the middle of the street, traffic lights snafued, phone circuits overloaded. He’d been amazed her call got through.

  “Remember I told you the airline was giving out meal tickets and putting us up in a hotel overnight?” Bonnie stared at him in the bathroom mirror. “Please don’t look so blank. I was in Chicago. You were here. Remember?”

  Until he caught a glimpse of the dental floss dangling from his lips like drool, Zach thought he had absorbed her opening salvo and kept his dignity. Not quite, it seemed. He yanked out the floss and flicked it into the trash. “Chicago. Blackout,” he repeated, sounding idiotic, even to himself.

  “Right. Well.” Bonnie looked away, as if the sight of him was too pitiful to behold. She pulled at the shower curtain, white sailboats silhouetted against a blue sea, her fingers pleating its folds. “Anyway, when I called you, I had no idea what was about to happen.”

  What happened, she said, was Gil Benedict, an Australian magistrate, who’d been attending an international judicial conference in Chicago and was similarly stranded. The two of them had met, meal vouchers in hand, at the coffee shop in the airport hotel. It was crowded. The hostess asked if they would mind sharing a table. Most innocent situation in the world, Bonnie said, except that by the end of dinner, a fever burned inside her, feelings she had never experienced before. “We talked until the restaurant closed.” Bonnie was crimping the edge of the shower curtain like a piecrust. “The next morning, when the airport reopened, we flew back to LaGuardia together, postponed Gil’s return flight to Melbourne, booked a room at the Hilton, and saw each other on the sly every day for a week. I truly regret deceiving you, Zach, I know it sounds crazy, but I’m in love.”

  Mundane phrases like “whirlwind courtship,” “head over heels,” and “once in a lifetime” spilled from her lips, and then a sentence that knocked the breath out of Zach. “Obviously, an Australian magistrate can’t make a living in the United States but I can open a branch of my shop in Melbourne, broaden my inventory, expand the mail-order side of the operation, carry more international stuff—the Russian Revolution, the Greens, the ANC, the IRA . . .”

  “Are you crazy, Bonnie? You’re not moving to Australia!”

  “Melbourne,” she said, quietly. “We’ll need several months to get organized but Gil should have everything settled in time for me to enroll Anabelle in nursery school. In Australia they take kids under three if they’re toilet trained.”

  “Anabelle?” Zach said, weakly.

  “She’ll have to come with me,” Bonnie said in her most declarative tone. “A little girl needs her mother. But you can visit whenever you like for as long as you like. I’ve already thought it through. Until she’s old enough to travel on her own, I’ll bring her to New York for Thanksgiving at my parents’ place, as always, then I’ll bring her here to the loft for the whole month of December and you’ll have her all to yourself until New Year’s. Promise I’ll keep out of your way; I’ll hang out on Long Island with my folks. You’ll come to Melbourne every July and stay with us. Gil’s building a new extension, I’ve seen the plans, a lovely guest suite that’s separated from the rest of the house by a breezeway, so you and Anabelle will have complete privacy while you’re there.” Bonnie paused for a breath. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you end up spending more time with her than you do now. People tell me that’s a common by-product of divorce. It makes better fathers.”

  Wife. Leaving. Taking. Anabelle. Paralyzed, Zach watched Bonnie release the shower curtain and, as if preparing for bed on any ordinary night, squeeze a thin snake of Crest on the bristles of her toothbrush, and scrub her teeth methodically, front to back, gum to edge, then rinse her mouth and wipe her lips with the towel marked, YOURS. The monogrammed set—YOURS, MINE, OURS—had been his surprise gift for her, all three towels arrayed side by side on the rod when he brought her and Anabelle home from the hospital. He felt like ripping Yours to shreds.

  “Fuck you, Bonnie.”

  “Come on, now.” She capped the toothpaste. “I know it’s a big shock and I’m sorry, but there’s no going back, so let’s be adults about it, okay?”

  “Are you out of your mind? You meet some damn Aussie in a coffee shop, ditch your husband like a bad date, and I’m supposed to be the adult?” Zach slammed down the toilet seat so hard its lid cracked. “How can you do this, Bonnie?!”

  Fear flickered in her eyes then quickly vanished. Calmly, she padded back across the tiled floor and, as if tucking a blue blouse into a white skirt, calmly arranged the shower curtain inside the rim of the tub. “I’m really sorry,” she said and patted his arm. “I don’t know what else to say.”

  More than the bedrock in her voice, it was her maternal pat that told Zach his marriage was over. He looked her up and down in her granny nightgown. “I bet you don’t wear flannel with Gil. I bet you wear satin for him.”

  “Her,” Bonnie corrected him. “Gil’s short for Gillian.”

  CHAPTER 5

  A FATHER IN WINTER

  THE DIVORCE BECAME FINAL THE FOLLOWING JULY AND his ex-wife and daughter were gone before Labor Day. Zach anesthetized himself with alcohol, a too-heavy caseload, and obsessive workouts. Bonnie had been unfailingly accommodating throughout the separation process, agreeing to leave behind most of Anabelle’s toys, books, and clothes so her room would look familiar when she arrived in December for her first visitation. That turned out to be a mixed blessing. More like a shrine, it was no longer a lived-in, played-in space, but at least her things were there to help him conjure his absent little girl.

  A week after they had decamped for Melbourne, a large envelope arrived with a chatty letter from Bonnie describing their long flight, along with snapshots of Gil’s house and a heart-searing photo of Anabelle at her new nursery school. It didn’t take a picture of his daughter to bring Zach to tears; all it took was the discovery of her hair clip in his coat pocket, the sight of her yellow rain boots in the hall, or the line of tiny garments hanging in her closet. Some mornings before leaving for work, Zach would open her closet door, run his hand along the hangers, and mourn his loss—the miracle of the ordinary, the simple pleasure of helping her button her blouse or tie her shoes. At night, in lieu of tucking her in, he would hug the Big Bird shirt she’d worn on the last day he walked her to nursery school or the powder-blue snowsuit he’d bought for h
er at Gap Kids after she fell in the Central Park lake and got drenched.

  That Saturday Bonnie had to be at her shop so she wasn’t with them when Zach loaded his backpack with breadcrumbs and took Anabelle up to the park to feed the ducks. They had stationed themselves in the gazebo at the water’s edge where the mallard ducks always swam close to the shore and gobbled up crumbs as fast as she could throw them. A pair of turtles with shells the size of dinner plates had suddenly surfaced about a yard away, and Anabelle, thrilled, had leaned forward, lost her balance, and toppled into the water. For a split second, Zach had flashed on the old dream, his brother’s blond curls going under, but Anabelle’s puffy pink parka kept her afloat long enough for him to scoop her out of the lake before her face got wet. Dripping but undaunted, she’d giggled as Zach clutched her to his chest and jogged over to Broadway, where he remembered having seen a Gap Kids. He’d bought her an entirely new outfit: underwear, long-sleeved shirt, sweater, tights, fleece-lined boots, and a hooded, powder-blue, one-piece snowsuit to replace the soggy pink parka, as well as a Snoopy towel to wipe her dry. The clerk at the cash register snipped the tags off his purchases and Zach hustled Anabelle into a fitting room where he removed her wet clothes and redressed her top to toe, then he had carried her back to the park and they’d gone directly to the carousel. At home, she had recounted their adventures to her mother while he threw her soggy clothes in the washer and, though the pink parka came out good as new, from then on she would only wear the blue snowsuit. Before they left for Australia, she insisted it remain in her New York closet so she could wear it to feed the ducks when she came home in December. Home. Zach had nearly wept.

  Without his wife and daughter, colors dimmed, figures blurred, voices grated. He could not stop thinking about Bonnie, how he could have missed her deceit, why he hadn’t sensed her betrayal. Could he ever again trust his perceptions? How was it possible for love to leak out of one partner’s heart while the other’s remained full? He hated himself for his weakness, for not fighting for his marriage, for letting Bonnie take his daughter away.

  “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.” Everyone knows that, yet somehow, he had signed on to a visitation schedule that consigned him to six weeks of frost-bound fatherhood—Anabelle would come to New York in December, the coldest, darkest month of the year, and Zach would spend two weeks in Melbourne in July, the start of the Down Under winter. No wonder he would come to associate his daughter with the flu.

  At about three o’clock in the morning, a few months after they were gone, Zach was lying in bed revisiting his mistakes for the thousandth time when his sorrow weighed so heavily on his chest that he felt he would suffocate if he didn’t get some air. Throwing off the covers, he grabbed the blue snowsuit and climbed out onto the fire escape. What killed him was not that his wife had left him for a woman—her abandonment would have been no less excruciating had she fallen for a man—it was the asymmetrical custody arrangement that gave him his daughter only twice a year, always in winter, only in winter.

  Out on the fire escape, clad in nothing but a T-shirt and boxers, he bunched the blue snowsuit around his neck like a muffler, looked down at the yard, and wondered whether a flying leap six stories to the ground would put an end to his anguish or merely cripple him. There were no trees or bushes to cushion his fall, only hard packed dirt in the area between the rear of his building and the surrounding warehouses and tenements. While staring down, imagining his fatal splat, a sudden movement snagged his eye, the slanted doors to the basement pushed open, a figure in dark pants and a hooded sweatshirt emerging with a bundle in his arms wrapped in a blanket. Zach’s breath froze in his lungs as the man carried his burden to the far corner of the yard, set it down, dashed back inside, and reappeared moments later with a long-handled shovel. The man gouged at the crusty earth and dug up clods of earth until a small rectangle took shape. From the dimensions of the cavity, Zach knew it was a child’s grave.

  Like the voyeur in Rear Window, he was riveted to the scene except that it wasn’t a movie, it was happening in real time. He crept back inside, dialed 911 and described, quickly and coherently, what he had witnessed. Then, intending to restrain the man until the police arrived, he raced down the six flights of stairs and out the basement door into the yard.

  “Jesus, Zach. Thank God it’s you!”

  “M. J.! What the fuck!”

  The man gestured to the bundle on the ground. “It’s Possum,” he sobbed. “Poor girl was looking right at me when she passed, eyes blue as pilot lights. I think she was begging me to let her go.”

  “Why didn’t you come get me, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Didn’t want to wake you,” M. J. said, his craggy cheeks glossed with sweat. “I’ve got to bury her quick and quiet or the city’s gonna hit me with a summons.”

  As if on cue, two squad cars screeched to a stop on the street out front and four cops charged into the yard, brandishing pistols. “Hands up! Both of you!”

  Zach raised his bare arms in the air.

  The red-haired officer aimed his gun at M. J. “Drop the shovel, mister! Hands above your head!”

  The man complied. An officer with a Zapata mustache snapped handcuffs on M. J. while a third cop, skinny, with a boyish face, manacled Zach’s wrists. Aware of how ludicrous they must appear, one nearly naked with a child’s snowsuit draped around his neck, one dressed for graveyard duty, Zach assumed the just-the-facts tone that years of courtroom exposure had taught him law enforcement officers preferred.

  “I’m Zach Levy. I’m the one who called 911. I’m an attorney. This is M. J. Randolph. We’re friends and neighbors up on the sixth floor. I’m sorry I got you guys over here for nothing. I misperceived the situation.”

  “Misperceived the situation, did you?” mimicked the red-haired cop. He had an Irish accent and seemed to be in charge.

  Zach was so cold his skin looked like elephant hide. “I couldn’t sleep so I went out on the fire escape for some air. That’s when I noticed someone carrying something down here in the yard. From six stories up, it looked like a child’s body. It was dark so I didn’t recognize my friend. And I didn’t know Possum had died. I jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

  “Possum?”

  Zach gestured toward the bundle. “I knew she had cancer, but M. J. didn’t tell me she’d passed. He said he didn’t want to wake me.”

  The skinny cop trained his revolver on Zach’s neighbor while the cop with the mustache unwrapped the blanket.

  “It’s a goddamn dog!”

  M. J. took a step forward and got a strong shove back. “I took good care of her, I made her home cooked meals,” he moaned, and, as if his culinary claim required a credential, added, “I’m a chef.”

  The Irish cop shook his head. “I’ve never seen blue eyes on a dog.”

  “She’s a Labrador,” M. J. said.

  The lead cop gestured to the other officers to unlock both sets of cuffs. “One of you might want to shut her eyes,” he said to M. J. and Zach.

  His hands trembling, his shoulders shuddering with grief, M. J. kneeled beside Possum’s body and gently lowered her eyelids.

  Zach had a feeling it wasn’t every day that New York’s Finest saw a grown man bawl over a dead dog.

  “I need to say a few things about this, um, situation,” said the lead officer. “City law permits the burial of a pet on its owner’s property. Is this your building?”

  “He rents,” mumbled Zach. “We’re all tenants.”

  “In that case, he has to bring her over to Animal Care Control on East 100th Street and give them fifty bucks to have her cremated. Otherwise, he has to put her in a heavy-duty garbage bag, label it ‘dead animal,’ and set it on the curb for the next sanitation pickup.” With the jab of a thumb, the officer signaled his colleagues to leave the premises and when the basement door shut behind them, he laid a freckled hand on M. J.’s shoulder. “You didn’t hear this from me, Mr. Randolph, but if I was you
, I’d send your friend upstairs to put on some clothes and bring down another shovel.”

  M. J. WAS THE only one of Zach’s friends who let him rant and cry and act as miserable as he felt. Others mouthed clichés like, “Time heals,” or advice like, “Forget about the bitch.” One tone-deaf pal assured Zach that Anabelle would do fine without him. (“Kids adjust faster than you think.”) Months later, while he was still grieving, someone urged him to “reach closure” and move on with his life. The rest of his buddies simply avoided mentioning his wife or daughter.

  But ten minutes after Bonnie and Anabelle had moved out, M. J. had barged in with a bottle of Glenlivet Single Malt Whiskey in one hand, a platter of parmesan, prosciutto, and melon in the other, and a baguette stuck in the back pocket of his jeans like a flashlight. “I’m here to take the bull by the horns,” M. J. announced. “You can buck and snort as much as you like but I’m sticking with you all night whether you like it or not. Now wrap a thin slice of prosciutto around a hunk of honeydew and dig in.”

  MILLARD JAMES RANDOLPH was a celebrity chef known for his humility, a Texan who’d never forgiven Lyndon Johnson for the Vietnam war, and the heir to an oil fortune who’d put half his inheritance into solar energy and the other half into starting Lovage, the first New York City restaurant with a farm-to-table menu.

  “My granddaddy was rich before money became popular,” he liked to say. “Couldn’t find his ass with a flashlight but he struck black gold in his backyard.”

  The Times critic gave Lovage a two-star review that set it on firm footing from the start, but judging by his oven burns, knife scars, and sixteen-hour workdays, M. J. wasn’t coasting on his inheritance, he was cooking for all he was worth. Yet he always found time for his friends, especially for Zach, who, after Bonnie and Anabelle left, spent more time in his neighbor’s loft across the hall than in his own. M. J.’s red velvet sofa became Zach’s therapy couch, a safe place to lament his life, and when his crying jags turned into eating binges, M. J. produced truffled mashed potatoes and fettuccine Alfredo no matter how loudly Zach protested from his prone position on the sofa.