by Ragen, Naomi
He smiled and kissed her hand. “I don’t go to the theater. You know that. What play is it, anyway?”
“Chicago.”
“Whew. That’s definitely off limits. Those costumes. And murder and adultery. Religious Jews shouldn’t be watching that,” he said, shaking his head.
The primness of his dismissal made her jaw tighten.
“Maybe we could go to see Golda’s Balcony. Or Fiddler.”
She ignored that. “So, you don’t want to?”
He stared at her, shaking his head. “Why would I?”
That was certainly true, she thought, relieved. So taking Benjamin wasn’t actually taking anything away from Chaim.
She parked the car and met Benjamin in front of the theater. He wore a long camel-hair coat that looked handsome, if a bit worn. He had his fingers in the pockets and his thumbs beat a nervous tattoo against his thighs. She didn’t approach him right away, standing on the side to watch him, wanting to examine him a little more closely, to decide what exactly it was that attracted her.
But the more she stared, the more confused she became. He was good-looking, true, in a very Gentile kind of way that had never before attracted her. But it wasn’t his looks, not really. When they were together, a little voice inside always whispered with irritation, “So what?”
Truthfully, she liked him better when he wasn’t around. She liked the idea of him, the daydreams she wove around him, with herself in the center and him fluttering like a moth, irresistibly drawn to her charms. His attraction to her was his strongest, sexiest quality.
He, on the other hand, felt the opposite. As much as he occupied her thoughts when they were apart, she disappeared from his. He actually managed to forget what she looked like from encounter to encounter. But when he saw her, he always felt a little thrill.
She looked so pretty, her complexion a lovely, rosy color from the cold and her body unfashionably shapely and soft, with real breasts and real hips. It was the way a women’s body should be and had been, until designers and ad men decided to turn women into hipless, flat-chested, coltish adolescent boys, he thought.
For the first time, he offered her his arm. She decided not, hanging back. Then she decided—why not?—slipping her arm through his as they went off in search of their seats. What did it matter, after all, if their fully clothed bodies politely touched?
The show was wild. The costumes—if you could call those little bits of torn string a costume—draped provocatively over those perfect bodies; all that bumping and grinding. The music and dancing, the clever irony of plot, involving corrupt politicians, lawyers, and journalists, combined to make it a great show. Chaim might have enjoyed it too, whatever he said. But his public persona—the pious rabbi with the dignified public stature—would have insisted on coming along too, sitting between them, crushing both their joy with the weight of scandalized disapproval. If only her husband had been able to leave his public persona behind every now and then, she mused, inside the same Borsalino hat box that held his black Sabbath hat.
As an Orthodox woman, she understood the public need to defend modest dress and condemn loose women. She herself would not have wanted to actually wear any of those outfits she saw on stage. Still, she couldn’t go along with Chaim’s ban on Broadway, because that would be a slippery slope. First came Broadway shows, next was bathing beaches with bikini-clad women, then in-flight entertainment. And then where would she be? Stuck in a colorless Oz with no ruby slippers; inexorably hemmed in, trapped, by all those fences around the Torah that Chaim was always talking about.
Everyone had to decide on his own fence, Delilah thought. And some blessed creatures should always be allowed to roam the range with no barriers at all. Fences, after all, just gave certain people the urge to climb over or crawl under. In her personal experience, the only barriers that stopped someone from going where he shouldn’t were the ones that did severe tire damage, putting you and your vehicle out of commission. FORBIDDEN. KEEP OUT I was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. If you thought you might get away with it, including tiptoeing successfully through a minefield, then fences simply became a welcome challenge, a way to show you knew better than the fence makers what was, and was not, good for you.
After the show, they exited into the snowy city streets, his blond head bare of any covering. It was the first time she’d ever gone somewhere accompanied by a bareheaded man. She found it strange yet liberating. When you walked in the city accompanied by a mate possessing unmistakable religious symbols on his person, people tended to draw in their chests tensely, as if your mere existence demanded that they make some kind of decision, choosing one thing over the other. Now, if people stared, it was simply because they were such a handsome couple, both young, both blond.
The out-of-towners especially, in their inappropriate-for-every-occasion clothing and obscure sports-team caps, looked at them with envy, she thought, instead of the veiled, vague hostility that came her way whenever she ventured out into Manhattan tourist spots with Chaim.
“Let me take you out for dinner,” Benjamin offered. He liked her. She made him laugh, but she was never coarse. He like the innocent pleasures she fought with herself over enjoying, the way her clothes always left so much to the imagination. She thought she was daring and yet, she was at heart such an innocent. He began to remember why he had been drawn to her in the first place. There was something devastatingly attractive in a woman who struggles with her better instincts all the time and loses.
She turned to him, blushing. How much fun that would be! A proper dinner out. But it would have to be in a kosher restaurant, she realized. No matter in which fenceless fields she roamed, she was not about to trespass into anything clearly, black-and-white sinful, like eating unkosher food. But in a kosher restaurant, someone she knew was sure to spot them.
“Too public?” he surmised. She nodded. “So, why don’t I go into Broadway Deli and buy lots of takeout, and we can put it in the car and take it to my place and eat in peace.”
He wanted her to go up to his apartment. That was all she heard.
She hesitated.
“Listen, maybe I was out of line. But let me go in and buy you some food for dinner, just to thank you, and then you can just drop me off on your way home.”
That seemed reasonable, she told herself, already disappointed, as if he’d rescinded the invitation.
They drove along the busy Manhattan intersections, not saying much, because they both knew they were entering a no-turning-back zone. When they got to the Bronx and neared his building, he turned to her, putting his hand on her arm.
“Please, Delilah. Come up with me.”
Her thoughts jumped around in her head, doing back flips and somersaults, running forward, banging into brick walls, then going around and around until finally stopping with exhaustion. The idea of returning early to her staid married life in the drab apartment she hated, to the placid husband who bored her with his goodness, made her feel like an insect caught in amber. She felt sleepy and unwilling to resist any temptation that came her way.
“Just for a minute,” she told him, parking the car a block away, in a neighborhood she was sure was out of the radius of walking distance to their synagogue. She looked around her furtively as she walked with him toward his apartment. Only when they got inside did she concentrate on what she was seeing. His building was even worse than hers, with graffiti all over the walls and run-down hallways perfumed by cheap cooking oil. Only a brass door plate announcing DR. AVRAM MENDES, SECOND FLOOR gave the building its solitary touch of respectability.
“You have a doctor in this building?”
“A chiropractor who is at least one hundred and fifty years old, they say. I’ve never actually seen him come out of his apartment. He might have died ten years ago, for all anyone knows, and be lying there, rotting.”
She looked up at him, surprised. What did she know about him, really? He could be one of those serial ax murderers, the ones that have a
signature. Maybe he was the kind that wandered into synagogues and wound up strangling rabbis’ wives. Maybe there was a whole file on him that would become another episode on Law and Order
“Delilah?”
He was smiling at her, his feet on the stairs. She smelled the pastrami and sour pickles in the brown bags from the deli. She loved pastrami. She followed him up. His apartment was larger than hers—or maybe it just looked that way because it was so sparsely furnished. There was an old white couch with some colorful Indian pillows. An exotic animal-print throw rug on the floor. Framed prints of what looked like advertising posters on the wall. “Are those your ads?” she asked, hoping to be impressed.
“Some of them,” he said, waving vaguely in their general direction.
“Wow, they’re beautiful!” She was overwhelmed by talent of any sort, people who actually created something from nothing. She wandered into the kitchen. He was already taking the food out of the containers, putting them into plates and bowls.
“Urn, is this your meat set or your milk set of dishes?”
“Huh?”
“You have two sets of dishes, don’t you? Meat and milk?”
He shrugged. “Sorry. Just the one.”
She stared at the food. If it was cold, she’d be able to eat it. But not if it was hot and had been put into a dish that had once held ice cream. The biblical prohibition of not cooking a calf in its mother’s milk had, through the centuries, turned into one of the most exacting and wide-ranging set of laws separating meat from milk, to the extent that religious Jews waited up to six hours to allow milk to enter their mouths again after they’d eaten the flesh of cows, chickens, turkeys, ducks, bison, and any other living creature except fish, just in case some meat might still be caught between their teeth.
“Listen, why don’t you let me do that?”
She searched through his barely filled cupboards for paper or plastic plates, or maybe just some glass bowls, which the rabbis had decided were nonporous and thus could be used for both meat and milk dishes, if thoroughly washed in between. Luckily, the deli had packed plastic flatware. She carefully transferred the cole slaw and potato salad.
He sat down, watching her, amused. Here she was, back in rabbi’s-wife mode, making sure she had a perfectly kosher meal in the most unkosher of settings.
“Finding everything you need, dear?”
She looked up at him. Dear? Such a husbandly term, she thought. It made her feel strange. She unwrapped the sandwiches and placed them on paper plates. He sat down across from her at the all-purpose table he used for dining in his living room, reaching out for some food. A sudden, heavy silence fell on them both. Delilah looked around her. She was alone with another man, a man who adored her. A man who was probably expecting something more than a sour pickle.
And would she give it to him? Would she pole-vault over the fence and land straight into the quagmire of unforgivable commandment breaking, where she would be transformed for all time from a creature that tiptoed close to the edge of volcanoes to one who had actually fallen right inside, all her convictions, what she told herself about herself, going up in smoke, singed and blackened and unrecognizable?
And would it be worth it?
She thought back to the dates she had had with Yitzie Polinsky, the thrill that had filled her body at his touch, the sense of release and satisfaction she had felt in his arms. How he had made her laugh. . . .
Yitzie.
The bum.
Was Benjamin another Yitzie? Would she again be reduced to begging God for a miracle to save her from ruin? And, more importantly, was the risk worth taking? Were the rewards worth desiring? She looked at him: his fair skin, his long fingers. Then she looked around the house. He lived like a tramp, she realized. And the posters that he had hung on the walls were, she realized, famous ads for vodka or cosmetics she had seen hundreds of times in many magazines, absolutely nothing original.
“Let me get you something to drink, Delilah. Rum Coke? Bloody Mary?”
“Sure,” she said, suddenly needing less clarity.
All she wanted was a little excitement in life. Something to break the routine. To take her out of herself and give her a glimpse of the possible, a future where the sun rose and set by a new horizon. But the more she looked around—the broken floorboards, the scratches on the Plexiglas coffee table, the missing knob on the kitchen cabinet door—the more she felt she had taken a step backward, not forward.
She drained the glass he put in front of her and felt the soothing flow of alcohol loosen the tight knot of dismay pulling ever tighter in her chest. Her body felt warmer, calmer. Her mind was less judgmental, more open to suggestion.
“Why don’t I put on some music?” Benjamin suggested.
He was now on familiar turf, his role in this scenario a comfortable fit for his talents. He wrote advertising copy, created ad campaigns to convince people to do and think all kinds of things for all the wrong reasons. He seduced them to smoke by convincing them it would make them appear smart and muscularly independent and daring to the opposite sex; to eat high-cholesterol sweets because it would make them part of a crowd of youthful, healthy, beautiful people; to purchase cars that would put them in endless debt because it would show how successful and rich they were. And now he was busy creating an ad campaign that would convince the rabbi’s pretty wife that sleeping with him would make her life easier and more enjoyable.
He shut off the overhead lighting and lit a few lamps, an amazingly simple gesture that instantly created an atmosphere of intimacy and romance. He put a music disk into the stereo.
“Frank Sinatra!” Delilah exclaimed, finishing her second drink and reaching for a pickle. She started to hum along, then sing outright, finally getting up. “I did it my waaaaaaay!” she sang, sudden tears filling her eyes.
Uh-oh, Benjamin thought.
She put her arms around him and sobbed. “I’m such a bad person. Such a bad, bad, awful person!” He felt the shoulder of his new Ralph Lauren shirt dampen and wondered if she was wearing waterproof mascara. He put his arms around her and kissed her on the temple, smoothing back her soft shiny hair. It smelled like almonds and honey, he thought, wondering what kind of shampoo she used and who wrote the ads. They stood in the middle of the living room, clinging to each other as the music played. He patted her softly, then let his hands run smoothly up and down her back. She arched toward him like a cat.
She was tired, tired of everything, of the hypocrisy of it all, of straining toward a happiness that never seemed to get any closer, of craving money and a nice house and a passionate love life. She was tired of playing the dutiful little rabbi’s wife in her modest hats and wigs and long-sleeved over-the-knee clothing; tired of cleaning out people’s neglected, debris-filled mouths, flirting with elderly men, and kowtowing to their judgmental wives.
She wanted to smash something. To hit Chaim over the head for his consistency, his placid acceptance, his calm ability to wake up every morning and get through the day. Why not, then, just smash her life?
She felt the arms of the man around her. He was a cipher. Not important at all. She didn’t care about him, not really. She didn’t even know who he was, with his treife kitchen and no mezuzah on the door. He might as well be a goy, a Gentile prince. He didn’t even have money. And, she finally realized, he probably didn’t have a very good job either, if he was living in some run-down Bronx walk-up decorated with cliché posters produced by other, really successful ad men.
But what did any of this matter? She needed someone to fall in love with, someone who would destroy the channels through which her life flowed, allowing her to irrevocably change direction. He was at the moment the only one available. It would be good, she thought, her hands reaching up to caress the back of his head.
It would be good enough.
She felt his hands harden their grip around her, leading her into the bedroom.
She followed, almost in a daze, allowing herself to be led. He bent
over her, kissing her full on the lips. She tasted the pastrami. She pushed him back.
“What?”
“I—I’ve got to bentsch,” she told him.
“You’ve got to . . . what?”
“Bentsch. To say Grace After Meals.”
He sat down on the bed, flabbergasted. “By all means.” He waved her off.
She sat down by the table, trembling, wiping his kiss off her mouth. She took a little Grace After Meals book out of her purse, the souvenir of some cousin’s wedding.
“Blessed art thou, O God, King of the Universe, who feeds and sustains the whole world with grace, compassion, and pity.”
She felt the flush of shame crawl up her throat, turning her face hot.
“Tear God, you who are sanctified to Him, for there is no want for them that fear Him. Young lions have always become poor and suffered hunger, but they who seek God shall never want for any good thing. Avow it to God that He is good, and His love endures forever. You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.
She finished, wiping her full eyes. And there was Benjamin, leaning on the doorpost to the bedroom, completely naked. She stood up, grabbed her purse, and ran out the front door and down the staircase.
Just as she neared the last landing, the door to the doctor’s office opened and someone stepped out into the dark hallway. She veered to the side, nearly knocking him over.
“Delilah?”
She stopped and turned around. Horror washed over her. Oh, no! she thought. No, no, no!
There stood Chaim’s grandfather, coming out of his weekly visit to the chiropractor. She stared at the old rabbi, her cheeks burning. Then she looked over the old man’s shoulder. There, just above, running down the steps after her, was Benjamin, wearing a half-opened bathrobe. She motioned to him in hysteria.
“Delilah! Wait, don’t go! I’ll put my clothes back on!”
She watched helplessly as the old rabbi slowly pivoted, looking up the stairs behind him.
She turned and ran, down the steps and out into the street, not looking back. She sprinted to her car, her heart pounding as she rummaged frantically through her purse, searching for the car keys. Her hands trembled. She felt faint and breathless as a slow panic rose in her chest. In what seemed like an hour, she finally managed to open the car door, start the engine, and drive off.
