Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  “What?” Babka cupped her hand to her ear. “No, not Hollywood gossip—normal gossip, like when we talk behind each other’s backs. It’s a big Jewish crime, you know. Worse than murder.” She leaned further out the window. “Why? Because it don’t just kill one person, it kills three: the one who says it, the one who hears it, and the one they’re talking about. It’s called lashen hora. The evil tongue.

  “The punishment for gossip? Oy, gevalt.” Babka shook her head. “Stoning! Can you imagine? For a bissel chitchat, you could get killed with rocks.” She flicked her wrist as if to shoo away the idea. “So I’m thinking maybe we should stop.” Craning her neck toward her invisible neighbor, she replied, “I know we don’t mean any harm, but it’s better we stop for a while . . .”

  Suddenly, from the kitchen behind her came the amplified sound of bubbling liquid. “Oh, no!” Babka glanced over her shoulder. “My cholent’s boiling over! Stay where you are, Mrs. Mandelbroit. I’ll be right back.” She ducked inside the building. Twenty seconds passed. Zach heard quizzical murmurings from the audience: “Was that the end?” “Should we clap or what?” “You think maybe something happened to her?”

  Suddenly, Babka was back at the window. “My cholent’s okay but my stove, oy vey, such a balagan! So, did you hear the news? Arlene and Larry Futterman are adopting a baby from China. My cleaning lady, who’s friends with their cleaning lady’s sister-in-law, says Larry had a vasectomy during his first marriage on account of his first wife not wanting any kids, but . . .”

  Blackout.

  Babka did four more short sketches that night, each received enthusiastically. After taking her bows and signing a few programs, she and Zach were driven back to the bus depot. She snuggled against his chest and fell asleep at once, her cheek a millimeter from the folded-up page in his breast pocket. When they arrived at Port Authority, Zach stopped in the men’s room and threw away Cleo’s picture without looking at it.

  Her Molly Goldberg piece newly endeared Babka to Zach. It made up for her Tibetan bowls and the Tamil kolams by reassuring him that his girlfriend came from the same world he did. Not that his mother ever gossiped—how could she when she barely spoke to anyone? Still, the monologue evoked the chatter he’d overheard in the old neighborhood, the birdcalls of the Bronx. And because Babka knew that world, Zach felt he knew Babka.

  Except when he didn’t. Like the time he found a roll of institutional toilet paper under the bathroom sink and she confessed to stealing paper products from public restrooms—something she called “a little caper.” And the night at the movies when she scavenged an empty popcorn bucket from the trash and presented it at the concession stand to claim the “free refill for every jumbo bucket purchased.” Though in denial about her ethical lapses, it once crossed Zach’s mind that relieving him of his hundred-dollar bill might have been one of her little capers.

  On a freakishly frosty evening in October, as they were climbing under the bedcover to get warm, he caught a glimpse of her tattoo.

  “I heard they have a new way of removing those things with lasers.”

  Babka sighed. “What’s your problem, Zach?”

  “It bothers me.”

  “What doesn’t bother you?” Babka sat up.

  “I’m just saying—”

  “You have to stop obsessing over my frigging tattoo.” She pulled up her Barnard sweatshirt baring her naked chest. “This is what I look like, Zach. You want me, I come defaced. I come with vices.” Yanking open the drawer of the bedside table, she pulled out what looked like her cosmetic case and dumped its contents on the fur spread. “I have a pack-a-day habit. Take it or leave it.”

  At the sight of the Marlboros, the Bic lighter, and the lid from a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise that clearly had done service as an ashtray, Zach’s first thought was an inane, “Wait a minute! Didn’t my ad specify a nonsmoker?”

  Babka lit up and took a deep drag. She said she’d started smoking years ago when her husband was hit by a car and the cop at the accident scene gave her a cigarette to calm her down. She’d quit before she met Zach and stayed off until she hit a wall on the gender and comedy piece. The next day, when Charles happened to come by for his shower, she’d mooched a couple of cigarettes from him and got hooked again.

  “I’m definitely going to quit.” She stamped out the butt in the Hellmann’s lid. “It’s the second item on my to-do list.”

  “What’s the first?”

  “Finding a job.” She packed up her smoking supplies and put the cosmetic case in the drawer. “I’m broke. That’s why I don’t buy groceries. I owe two months rent. The phone company’s threatening to cut off service.” She collapsed against Zach’s chest.

  No wonder there was no heat in the studio. He put an arm around her but couldn’t let the subject go. “You know you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery with a tattoo.”

  “Oh my God, will you ever quit trying to reform me? News flash: I’m going to be cremated.”

  Rabbi Goldfarb’s voice thundered in Zach’s head. “Asur! If you burn the body, you shock the soul. You incinerate the luz, the bone of resurrection. When the Messiah comes, he needs that bone to rebuild your body for eternal life in the world to come.” Rabbi had demonstrated the location of the luz on himself, reaching behind his head to the knob where the base of his neck met his spinal column. Zach remembered asking him how the Messiah would rebuild the bodies of those who were incinerated in the Nazi ovens. “Don’t worry, their place in heaven is guaranteed,” Goldfarb said. “They didn’t choose to burn.”

  The next day, Zach moved back to Spring Street. Babka dropped off a fresh-baked babka with a note. He returned to her studio but only to pack up his things. She was wearing her yellow robe, five screwdrivers to the wind and counting.

  “You’re leaving because I smoke?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “The stupid tattoo?”

  “No.”

  “Because my work is weird?”

  “It’s not any one thing,” Zach said. “We’re just a bad match. We’re not happy.”

  Abruptly, she switched gears and went on the attack, told him what an easy mark he’d been, how gullible and naive. The missing hundred? She’d snitched it. Wall Street? She’d once worked as a temp in the back office at Merrill Lynch. Charles the sax player? He was also her sometime lover.

  When Zach was halfway down the stairs, he heard her yell, “I never wanted kids anyway!”

  “Babka was a mule passin’ for a pony,” M. J. declared later.

  “And I was a horse’s ass,” Zach said from the red velvet couch.

  M. J. snickered. “In Dallas, we got a name for a man who’s both stupid and an asshole.”

  Zach replied, “Heterosexual?”

  CHAPTER 17

  TO THE PLAYGROUND

  ON JULY 12, 1990, A THURSDAY MORNING, THE PHONE rang on Zach’s desk.

  “Hi, it’s me.” As though that voice could have belonged to anyone but Cleo. “I know I shouldn’t be calling but Terrell’s been asking for his daddy.” (Long pause) “Incessantly.” Zach gripped the receiver, his heart jumping around in his rib cage. “Before I tell him anything definitive, I thought I’d give you a chance to meet him.” (Short pause) “Or at least see him.”

  She’d had a boy. Zach wasn’t supposed to have been told the baby’s name or gender, not by the obstetrician or the lawyers, and certainly not by its mother. That was their deal. She had signed it. “Scott’s issue” was the legal term for the child she had carried to term despite his wishes; he’d been supporting “Scott’s issue” financially, as promised, and she’d kept her word for three years. Why go back on it now? Too late; she’d said it. Scott’s issue was a person. A boy. Terrell. Terrell? What the hell kind of name is that for a son of the tribe of Levi?

  “His little friends are always talking about their fathers and some of the dads pick them up at day care, so naturally Terrell wants to know where his daddy is. I can usually distract
him with a book or toy but he’s whip smart for a three-year-old and he won’t let go of the idea that he must have a daddy somewhere, and frankly, I haven’t had the guts to tell him the truth, but I can’t postpone it forever so before I say something neither of us can take back, I thought you might want to weigh in.”

  “Weigh in?” Zach couldn’t keep pace with the onrushing torrent of her words.

  “Reconsider. Whether you might want to be . . .” She stopped. “I know it’s a long shot. You’re probably sitting there fuming and—”

  “Cleo—”

  “If you want to stick to our deal, this is the last you’ll hear from me. But if you’re willing to listen for a minute, I have a proposition.” Her usually fluid sentences tumbled over one another as if to preempt his hanging up. She wasn’t breaking their contract, she said, just being a mother, and this wasn’t about the two of them, she wanted to make that clear; she was doing fine, didn’t need Zach for anything. “But a boy needs a father, so before I tell him his daddy died . . .”

  Absurdly, Zach heard himself ask, “Died how?”

  “I don’t know how! Mountain climbing, skydiving, spelunking. I’ll make you sound like a spectacular hero, for his sake. Terrell’s a spectacular kid and he deserves to have a great father, dead or alive. The point is I’ve got to tell him something. Soon.”

  Cleo was a proud woman, Zach knew better than anyone how difficult it must have been for her to make this call. “One second,” he said, “let me close my door.”

  His office door was already closed but he put her on hold, buying time to think. Few responses rose to the level of a speakable sentence. The sensible reply, “Thanks, but no thanks,” would have ended their conversation, a course clearly dictated by the fact that what got them into this bind in the first place, their original dilemma, had not changed. The lawyerly answer, “A deal’s a deal,” would have been similarly dispositive. The Jewish answer, one that meets a question with a question and leaves an opening a mile wide, was the one that rose in his throat. The phone’s flashing red light reminded him of emergencies, heart monitors, fire alarms, exit signs. He released the hold button.

  “What did you have in mind, Cleo?” An opening a mile wide.

  She said next Tuesday at noon, she would bring Terrell to Adventure Playground in Central Park, the one up the hill across from Tavern on the Green. Zach could meet them there—or not. If he didn’t show up, she would understand that he wanted their deal to stay in force. If he was curious about what his genes had produced, he could come, have a look at the boy, and leave. But if he was open to revisiting his decision, he could, without identifying himself to Terrell, and with no obligation to her, spend the afternoon with the boy—watch him play, talk to him, give him an IQ test, check his reflexes, do whatever he needed to do to get a sense of whether he wanted his son in his life. After that, Cleo would give him three days to think it over and tell her his decision.

  When Zach didn’t immediately respond, she assumed she had not made herself clear. “In other words,” she said, “it’s an eight-day proposition. Between now and Tuesday, you’ll consider whether or not to come to the playground. If you show up, you’ll have that whole afternoon to observe him. Three days after that, by midnight Friday at the latest, you’ll let me know if you want him. But if you do, you’ll have to swear to be fully present in his life—not mine, his. Terrell needs a real father, an involved father, or none at all. I won’t let you get away with being a drop-in dad.”

  Breaking a contract and making demands! He had to admire her chutzpah!

  “Here’s the addendum,” she said firmly. “If you don’t show up at the playground, or if you come and later decide you don’t want him, then you’re toast. Once I tell Terrell you’re dead, you have to stay dead. Don’t imagine you can turn up someday to claim him. You can never change your mind.”

  Listening was Zach’s first mistake. Yet as far as he could tell, her proposal gave him an out every step of the way—come, don’t come; stay, don’t stay; say yes, say no. It was an offer he could not refuse. Gazing out of his office window at the square patch of blue stitched between the tall gray rooftops, he said in a level voice, “Fair enough.” But when he hung up the phone and rushed to Herb’s office to report the conversation, he was trembling.

  “You’re right, it’s a no-lose proposition,” his friend said.

  “But nothing’s changed. I’m still Jewish, Cleo’s still not. I’m still carrying my mother around with me.”

  “An afternoon with the kid might be all it takes to make up your mind—and maybe end your obsession with Cleo. Then again, it might pull you back and change your life.” Herb squeezed Zach’s arm. “If I were you, pal, I’d go to that playground.”

  For the next five days, trial transcripts swam before Zach’s eyes. He couldn’t read or reason. His colleagues seemed to be talking gibberish. Old movies and sitcoms filled his nights. Mornings, he was too sleep deprived to go to the gym. Part of his torment was not related to potential fatherhood but to the fathering he’d already botched. Cleo gave him too much credit for his relationship with Anabelle—which, though idyllic when he broke up with Cleo three and a half years ago, had greatly deteriorated since.

  A pure delight as a child, his daughter had morphed into an angry adolescent, their connection no longer strained merely by geographical distance but by a deeper, wider gulf. During her most recent visitation, Zach had felt defeated by her hostility and diffidence. She’d been sullen, critical, absent for hours at a time, refusing to say where. One night she was two hours late for their usual lighting of the Hanukkah candles and Zach would have called the police had M. J. not persuaded him to give her an extra hour to come home. Another night, she’d stumbled through the door past eleven o’clock, clearly stoned. Her calls to her friends in Melbourne had jacked up his phone bill to the point where the grand total could have bought her an airline ticket home. Five days into her stay, he was ready to send her back.

  She’d been with him for nearly a week when he talked her into going to the movies. She chose Steel Magnolias. Afterward, he asked if she enjoyed it.

  “It was okay,” she said. Back at the loft, she threw herself on the couch and turned on the Rangers vs. Islanders game. She’d always been a Rangers fan. The score was tied 0–0 at the end of the first period.

  Zach ventured, “You think they have a chance at the Stanley Cup this year?”

  “Who cares?” she snorted and stalked toward her room.

  “What should we do tomorrow?” Zach called after her.

  “Whatever.”

  The next morning, he padded into the kitchen in his pajamas. “I just had to step over your dirty laundry to get to the sink,” he said. Anabelle didn’t look up. “Your wet towel and dirty underwear? You left them in a heap in the middle of the bathroom floor. Please go and pick them up.”

  Acting as if he were invisible, she served herself Raisin Bran, milk, blueberries, hunkered down over the bowl, and read the back of the cereal box while she ate.

  Zach raised his voice. “Would you please pick up your laundry and put it in the basket?”

  No response. She finished her cereal, plunked the bowl in the sink, and opened the coffee canister. That irked him, too. At fifteen, she had no business drinking coffee.

  “Now!” he shouted. “I want you to get your crap off the floor this minute!”

  Anabelle slammed the canister on the countertop. “And I want you to stop being such a fucking dictator!”

  Her brazen impertinence clearly demanded a response, but what? She didn’t care about clothes or anything else, so what could he deprive her of? Besides, penalizing her would only give her another reason to resent him. The last thing he wanted was for her to return to Australia with a sour taste in her mouth. He wondered if other fathers worried so much about being liked by their kids. Maybe leaving stuff on the floor wasn’t such a terrible infraction. Teenagers were famous for being slovenly. Yet wasn’t it his responsibilit
y, as much as Bonnie’s, to set standards? And didn’t he have the right to demand respect from his daughter? The right, yes. But, he realized in that frozen moment, not the power.

  He walked around the counter and took her by the shoulders. “First, you have to stop being rude,” he said. “Then you have to pick up your things.”

  She didn’t twist away, just looked him in the eye and spit out, “What if I don’t?”

  The gauntlet thrown, their faces inches apart, Zach replied in a voice as hard as the granite counter, “If you don’t, I will gather up your laundry and throw it in the hamper. But I will be deeply disappointed in you. We will share this space for the rest of the month, and you will continue to be mean and moody and I will keep trying to make you happy.” He took a breath. “I will wish to God that I knew what was making you so angry and why you’ve been so hell-bent on hurting me, and I will be indescribably sad.”

  His bare feet rooted to the floor, he released his daughter’s shoulders but kept her gaze until she looked away. She returned the coffee canister to the cabinet, rinsed out her cereal bowl, and, with a stiff spine, walked over to the bathroom and closed the door. Zach made a couple of scrambled eggs for himself. He sat at the counter and read the morning paper. He did not turn around when he heard the bathroom door open, Anabelle’s footsteps, the closing of her bedroom door. Ten minutes later, she came out wearing a turtleneck, jeans, and her winter jacket.

  “I’m going for a bike ride,” she said, coolly.

  Zach helped her maneuver her bicycle into the elevator. “I’ll be at the office if you need me,” he said, equally cool. As always, he had stored up vacation and personal days so he’d have more time to spend with her, but if she was going off on her own again, he may as well go to work. “Let’s meet back here at six and have dinner at seven.” She nodded before the elevator door slid shut. When Zach went to the bathroom to take his shower, there was nothing on the floor.