Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  At six, he came home to find her watching the news and eating cold leftover pizza. Without saying a word, but within her hearing, he canceled the restaurant reservation and made himself another plate of scrambled eggs.

  For the rest of the month, they tiptoed around each other, she morose but not belligerent, he formal but not aloof. Zach left it up to her to program each day as she wished—she was old enough to find the movie listings, the museum calendars, the sports team schedules—but beyond a trip to the bowling alley, she initiated nothing. Zach made simple suppers and she ate hers facing the TV or else took her plate to her room.

  On Christmas Day, he suggested they have dinner at an Indian or Chinese restaurant, the only places open. “Thank God for the Hindus and Confucians,” he joked lamely, “or we Jews would starve on December 25.”

  Anabelle chose Indian.

  Poori or naan, tandoori or curry, that was the extent of their conversation until she suddenly leaned across the table with a determined look on her face.

  “I have a serious question, Dad.”

  “Shoot.” He said. No matter what was coming, it had to be better than silence.

  “What’s your problem with women?”

  Zach almost laughed. “Relationships are complicated,” he replied, finessing it.

  “You keep letting women go: Mom and me. Cleo. Babka. I’m not sure I want to wait for the other shoe to drop.”

  “What other shoe?”

  “Me,” she said. “I don’t see why I should travel halfway around the world to spend time with a father who didn’t care enough to fight for me when I was little. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until you drop me a second time.”

  Zach felt as if he’d been punched. “That is not true, Annie! I was . . .”

  “Stop! It took a lot for me to work up the nerve to say this. I need you to just listen.” She chose a crisp of papadum from the breadbasket only to crack it into a dozen pieces.

  “Okay,” he nodded. “Sorry.”

  Anabelle twirled a lock of her hair, the way her mother used to. “I think I should stop coming to New York. And you should stop going to Melbourne. It’s too much of a hassle. Upsets everyone’s routines. And it’s way too expensive. We shouldn’t do it anymore. We should just quit.”

  Zach suddenly panicked. “NO WAY.” He swept aside the papadum crumbs and grabbed both her hands. “I love you more than anything. I miss you from the moment you leave until the moment I lay eyes on you again. I count the days between our visits. I plan our time together because I want you to have fun and be happy here. You mean everything to me. You must know that.”

  “I don’t know that. All I know is, you let Mom and Gil take me really far away.”

  “No! Wait! I don’t want to speak against your mother but . . .” But he did, because he had to; it was the only way he could make his daughter understand how they ended up ten thousand miles apart. He had to tell her about that scene in the bathroom on Thanksgiving night, the paralyzing shock of Bonnie’s revelation, her insistence on following Gil to Australia, the harrowing, nonnegotiable finality of her decision. And though it would surely weaken him in her eyes, he told her the truth about his breakdown, the shattering despair, the sense of absolute desolation and helplessness. “I was crazy about your mom. I couldn’t believe our marriage was over, that we couldn’t even talk about it. She wouldn’t listen. Her mind was made up. Not only did she love someone else, she was moving away and taking you with her, and I couldn’t do anything to stop her because you were a baby and a baby belongs with her mother. I wanted to fight, I swear it. But I was devastated. Numb. Hollowed out. It’s no excuse, but I had nothing left.”

  Their food came then, four platters, each under a brass dome—vegetable pakoras, chicken tandoori, lamb vindaloo, basmati rice—all at the same time. Two waiters raised the four domes simultaneously.

  Anabelle stared at her lamb. “I can’t eat right now.”

  “Me neither,” Zach said. “Let’s just sit here until we’re hungry, okay?”

  She nodded.

  He asked the waiters to put the brass covers back on. “You want a Kingfisher?”

  Anabelle looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Dad, they won’t serve me.”

  “I’ll order the large bottle. We’ll share it.”

  The beer loosened her tongue even more. She was also pissed at Zach for leaving Cleo. “We weren’t just a threesome, you know. Cleo and I had our own thing. We were chums. Then suddenly she’s gone and you never explained why.”

  Zach was quiet for a long moment, his finger circling the rim of the beer glass until it whined. Then he explained why he had to break up with Cleo. For the first time, he told her about his promise.

  He left out the part about Terrell.

  After their Indian dinner, Anabelle didn’t turn back into an angelic child but the chip on her shoulder softened. The next day, when she agreed to go ice-skating with him at Wollman Rink in Central Park and they had hot chocolate at the Boathouse, there was no further talk of canceling his trip to Melbourne in July or hers to New York the following December.

  On New Year’s Eve, Zach took her to see the Broadway production of Six Degrees of Separation. Anabelle said she wasn’t surprised by the white couple’s gullibility; people believe what they want to believe, especially when the made-up story is so much better than the truth. The next morning, her mother came by in a taxi to take her to the airport. Anabelle kissed him goodbye.

  WHILE ZACH WAS deciding whether to show up at the playground, he thought about his tough times with Anabelle and wondered if, on top of the complications of shared custody and religious difference, he might one day have to face a similar rebellion from Terrell—and be inadequate all over again. Other fears took hold: If he did decide to meet Terrell, some primal fatherly instinct hardwired in his genes might make him say yes before absorbing the enormity of the commitment. Or he might say yes out of some macho urgency to prove he could handle his responsibilities. Or simply to give himself an excuse to cross paths with Cleo on a regular basis.

  Worse yet, what if, after spending hours with the boy in the playground, his paternal instinct didn’t kick in? An absence of feeling could make him say yes out of shame or denial, which would not bode well. It was bad enough to abandon “Scott’s issue” before he was born. To reject him in the flesh would be callous and so antithetical to Zach’s sense of himself as a moral being that he could imagine himself saying yes just to avoid the self-loathing. Then, he would have to pretend to love a child who would have to pretend to not know he was faking it.

  Other possibilities shook him up: What if Zach proved to be the unlovable one? Suppose he said yes to Terrell and Terrell said no to him? What if he never found his bashert and never had more children? Terrell might be Zach’s last chance to ensure that a Levy from his father’s line survived in the world. The past being predictive, he would probably keep falling for the “wrong” women, by which he did not mean Cleo. The failure of his other romantic endeavors suggested the folly of privileging Jewish credentials above all the elements that make for a meaningful connection between two people. If his bashert did finally show up, what would she think of a man who let his daughter be taken across the globe, and then rejected his own son? If he didn’t tell his future wife and children about his secret son, and Terrell one day showed up on their doorstep, then what?

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK on Tuesday, Zach locked his office door, stripped to his boxers, and changed into the outfit he’d deemed appropriate for an afternoon in the playground—Springsteen T-shirt, cutoff jeans, flip-flops, and Mets cap. Shivering beneath the air vents, he yanked the zipper to close his gym bag and knocked over his coffee cup. Brown rivulets trickled under his phone and puddled on the yellow legal pad, transforming his case notes into a muddy watercolor. Every day for the last five, he’d made some blunder that broke his quotidian rhythms. If he wasn’t dripping soup on his tie or leaving his credit card behind at the dry cleaners,
he was slicing his lip while shaving or screwing up the photocopy machine—small indignities but discomforting to a man who, already depressed at having turned forty, was about to face a decision that, one way or the other, would alter the rest of his life.

  Catching sight of himself in a store window in his baseball cap and flip-flops, he thought he looked like an overgrown kid who’d shot up too fast and scissored the legs of his favorite jeans rather than donate them to Goodwill. Compounding his youthfulness was the hairstyle Bonnie used to call “Dennis the Menace meets Lord Byron,” the shaggy cut his mother had devised to mask his flaws. Though a teen growth spurt had long since recast his skull in proper proportion to his stick-out ears and the scar on his eyebrow, which once seemed to disfigure his face but now lent it gravitas, Zach had instructed all subsequent barbers to follow Rivka’s template. Today, he counted on his Dennis doppelganger to ease his way into the playground.

  He entered the park at the West Sixty-Seventh Street entrance. As he veered left toward Adventure Playground, a striking tableau in front of the Tavern on the Green stopped him in his tracks: newlyweds posing for pictures in a horse-drawn carriage. Once upon a time, on a June day just as soft and sunny, he and Bonnie had struck the same pose and moldering in a box somewhere was a photo to prove it. Also a ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, handwritten by a Hebrew scribe and signed in the presence of witnesses. If she hadn’t left him, he and Bonnie would would have been married seventeen years now.

  Turning from the sylvan scene, Zach continued up the path, perspiration encircling his neck like a wet rag, his pulse quickening with each step, not from the incline but in anticipation. At the crest of the hill, the vibrant life of the playground pulsated within its iron fence. He unlatched the gate and stopped midstep, intoxicated by the hubbub—boys in whisk broom crew cuts, girls in summer sunsuits, the whir and squeal, the pastels and primary colors, the jumble of tyke bikes and sand toys.

  “Shut the gate, Mister!” barked a woman in a hot pink halter. “We don’t want one of these kids toddling off to Times Square!”

  Mothers and nannies swiveled toward the new arrival, their eyes narrowing as they detected no toddler in the man’s wake to justify his presence. (Should have strapped a Snugli to his chest and stuck a doll in it, Zach thought belatedly.) He latched the gate and shambled to an empty bench as if it had his name on it. The seat felt as hard as the women’s stares. He checked his watch: he was twenty minutes early. And he was the only man in the playground. All the adults—pushing swings, handing out snacks, giving bottles, changing diapers—were women. Helping toddlers up steps and down slides, admiring lopsided sand castles, wiping runny noses, and rocking babies—all women, many of them scrutinizing him, some surreptitiously, others openly suspicious, as if at any moment he might unzip his fly. Whatever gave him the idea that a shaggy haircut and cutoff jeans were all it took to make him look like he belonged here? And where were all the other dads?

  Eleven fifty-four. Six more minutes in the riflescope of the Playground Surveillance Squad before Cleo and Terrell would arrive and legitimate his presence.

  Five minutes past twelve. Still no sign of them. He leaned his head back and shut his eyes—no doubt to the relief of the monitoring moms (What predator would nod off?)—and considered how honorably Cleo had fulfilled her end of the bargain, not contacting him until last week, and then only to give him the option of reconsidering. She would be surprised to know how often he’d had to restrain himself from sneaking up to catch a glimpse of her and their child. Now, minutes away from seeing them, he wondered how a forty-year-old makes conversation with a three-year-old. Especially if the forty-year-old can’t get a fifteen-year-old to give him the time of day. And how Anabelle would feel if, on her next visit, he presented her with a half brother.

  The wooden slats dug into his spine. His neck was in an awkward position; feigning sleep wasn’t easy. He snuck a peek at his watch. Twelve seventeen. Punctuality had never been Cleo’s strong suit. He swung his legs up on the bench and stretched out under the trees, sunlight dappling his body like camouflage, his thoughts adrift on the white noise of children at play.

  CHAPTER 18

  A CHURCH IN THE SANDBOX

  “SORRY I’M LATE.”

  Zach opened his eyes to Cleo Scott in a dress of cornflower blue, a string of coral beads around her neck. She wore dark glasses so he couldn’t see her expression. She was holding a book. He bolted to his feet. They shook hands; he wished he could have held on a few seconds longer. Her skin was still luminous but for the fine lines, like parentheses, at the corners of her mouth that appeared to have been etched there by laughter, and her air of calm self-assurance made Zach wonder if, over the last three and a half years, she had suffered less than he.

  “You look great, Cleo.”

  She didn’t comment on how he looked, just pointed across the playground. “Terrell went straight to the sandbox. He’s wearing the red plaid overalls. Feel free to talk to him. I haven’t taught him about stranger danger yet. He’s used to friendly guys.”

  Her familiar lilac fragrance weakened Zach. What guys? Pierced by jealousy, he wondered, How friendly? She gracefully lowered herself to the bench and did that thing she always did when she wore a skirt—flared it, then tucked the ends under her thighs.

  “He’s had his morning nap and his lunch. We usually hang out here until four, so take your time.”

  The book on her lap was Hands Clasped No More: Black-Jewish Relations and the American Dream by Jack Fingerhut, the professor whose carping had poisoned the Black-Jewish Coalition from the start. Back in 86, Cleo had blamed the group’s dissolution on Fingerhut for his having dismissed other people’s suggestions out of hand, and accused the blacks in the group of duplicity and intransigence.

  “How come you’re reading that?” Zach asked.

  “He’s coming on the show Sunday.”

  “But you hate Fingerhut.”

  “I don’t have to like the man to interview him. He’s provocative, he’ll get people calling in.”

  “I can’t believe that schmuck has written anything worth reading,” Zach said.

  Cleo raised a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “I’m confused. Did you come here for a book discussion?”

  He had been stalling; they both knew it. Only yards away from his child and he was dragging his feet, afraid of what he might feel. Now, he turned toward the sandbox and, at the distance of a first down, located the boy in red plaid overalls. The muscles in Zach’s legs tightened as he drew closer. Terrell’s face was in profile, inclined toward his labors in the sand and offering only the soft curve of a butterscotch-brown cheek, an uptilted nose, a neck as slender as a stalk. His hair was fuller, rounder, and springier than Cleo’s tightly coiled cap. His knobby ankles stuck out between his Mickey Mouse sneakers and the cuffs of his pants. Long limbed for a three-year-old, Zach thought. He’ll be tall, like his father.

  “Hi, Terrell.”

  No response. The boy was busy patting, pinching, and molding the sand forms he had already created—a tower attached to a boxy structure and off to one side, four or five blobs of sand plunked here and there.

  “You’re Terrell Scott, aren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.” He smoothed the surface of the tower with his diminutive palms.

  “I’m Zach. Did your mommy mention I might stop by?”

  “Uh-huh.” Terrell remained laser focused on his construction project.

  “She say anything else?”

  “She said you might play with me.” Terrell scooped up some of the wet sand in an attempt to shape the head and legs of some animal.

  “I’d be glad to play with you,” Zach said, though the only game he could think of at the moment was hide-and-seek and he wasn’t about to hide from the child he had just found.

  Terrell finally looked up. He had Cleo’s pale blue-gray eyes and gorgeous lips, Zach’s ears (and Yitzhak’s before him), Rivka’s cleft chin, Nathan’s broad forehead, the
high cheekbones that distinguished Ifs Scott in Cleo’s family photographs, and Althea’s dimples. But the sum of his features was more beautiful than its parts.

  Terrell cocked his head. “Whatcha staring at?”

  “Nothing,” Zach lied. “I’m just waiting for you to decide what we should play.”

  “Okay, but first, I need to finish my church.”

  “Your church?” Zach swallowed hard.

  “No, my grandpa’s church. I mean it used to be my grandpa’s church only he died when Mommy was little. My grandma took me there. It’s in Memphis.”

  Zach curled his toes in the sand. “What are those things?”

  Terrell followed his gaze to the sand blobs. “Goats. Grandma also took me to a farm. Could you make a pregnant goat and put her next to mine?”

  “A what goat?” Zach was sure he’d misheard.

  “Preg-nant. One of the lady goats was having a kid.” The boy fixed on his face as if expecting another stupid question. “That’s what you call a baby goat: a kid. Same as people babies.”

  Zach picked up a fistful of wet sand. “You know what a baby lion is called?” He told himself he wasn’t testing the boy, just making conversation.

  “Cub.”

  “Baby sheep?”

  “Lamb.”

  “Baby swan?” Zach wasn’t sure of the term himself.

  “Sig-net,” Terrell replied, matter of factly. “Now stop asking questions, I have to concentrate.” He found an old Popsicle stick in the sand and carved a Gothic-shaped outline onto the side of his boxy sand structure then filled it in with squiggles and crosshatches.

  “That’s a stained glass window,” Zach said, hoping to sound less dense. He molded a goat-shaped blob with a big stomach and added it to the others in the meadow.

  “I have to make two more windows,” Terrell said. “As soon as I’m done, I’ll go get Malcolm and we can play house.”

  “Who’s Malcolm?”