Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  “Jews are commanded to observe the sabbath. If you ask a Jew to break the sabbath you’re getting that person to sin.”

  “You believe that?”

  “No. But this isn’t about what I believe.”

  “What’s it about, then? And how about your father? Lots of his colleagues must be secular Jews. Does he think of them as sinners? Would he ask me to turn off a light on the sabbath, but not one of them?”

  “Jen,” I said, “I can’t explain my father. He probably can’t explain himself either. But yes, that’s what he’d probably do.”

  She read the books I’d given her and asked me questions when she didn’t understand. I did my best to answer her. I’m not a rabbi. I have a good memory, but I’ve forgotten some things over the years. She took seriously this crash course in Judaism, but she was also ironic about it. She became a fount of hypothetical questions, rivaling my philosophy professors at Yale, rivaling the rabbis of the Talmud in her pursuit of counterfactuals.

  “Let’s say you wake up,” she said, “and you’re riding in a taxi on the sabbath.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “What if you’re on the way home from work and you get stuck in a traffic jam and it gets dark?”

  “Then you get out and walk.”

  “What if you’re in an airplane?”

  “Are you asking me if you jump?”

  “Yes.”

  I laughed. “No, Jen, you don’t jump.”

  She was curious about Judaism, but she’s a curious person. She’d be as interested in learning Hindu practices or in picking up a few words of Swahili. Perhaps if I’d talked more about these rituals when we’d met, what was happening now would have made sense to her. But my interest was sudden—related, she suspected, to my having met Susan. On her mother’s side, Jenny’s family could be traced back to the Mayflower. But we didn’t reenact early American rituals. Jenny didn’t dress up as a Pilgrim.

  Still, she looked forward to our sabbath meal. I wrote out the blessings over the wine and challah in transliterated Hebrew. I did the same for a couple of sabbath songs, and taught them to her and Tara.

  The day of our sabbath meal, I came home after school and cooked. I showered and put on a dress shirt and slacks. Jenny and Tara had showered too, and were wearing skirts and blouses. Jenny had on a touch of makeup.

  “You two look beautiful,” I said. I kissed them each on the cheek.

  Jenny said the blessing on the sabbath candles, placing her hands over her eyes and repeating the Hebrew words after me.

  We sat down at the table, where I recited the kiddush. Between courses, we sang the songs I’d transliterated. Jenny and Tara caught on quickly to the tunes. It reminded me of Friday nights when I was younger, when I knew there was nothing else I could do besides sit and spend time with my family.

  “This is nice,” Jenny said.

  I agreed. “You don’t even have to think of it as religious.” I wasn’t sure whom I was saying this for—Jenny, Tara, or myself.

  “It kind of is religious,” Tara said.

  “But you don’t have to be religious to participate,” I said. “And it’s only a small part of the meal. It’s really just a chance to think.”

  “Are you becoming religious?” Tara asked me. She looked down at the transliterated Hebrew.

  “Not really.”

  “Because I like you the way you are. Most of the time. And it’s my home. I was here a long time before you.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So you can’t just show up and change things.”

  Jenny rested her hand on Tara’s arm. “Ben and I asked you if it was okay if we did this.”

  Tara didn’t respond.

  “And you agreed. We wouldn’t have had this meal if you didn’t want us to.”

  “This better not be the beginning of something else.”

  “Like what?” Jenny asked.

  “Whatever religious people do. Sacrificing animals.”

  I laughed. “There will be no animal sacrifices. I can promise you that.”

  “And I’m not interested in being a Jew.”

  “No one’s asking you to be one,” Jenny said.

  “Or a Christian either.”

  “Or a Christian.”

  “Or a Jew for Jesus, or anything, Mom.”

  “What did you think?” I asked Jenny when we were doing the dishes.

  “I liked it. It felt festive.”

  “Jen—if, hypothetically, I asked you to convert, would you consider it?”

  “Why, hypothetically, might you ask me to do that?”

  “You know what I mean. If we were going to stay together for a while—maybe even forever.”

  “You mean get married?”

  “Sure.”

  “Say the word ‘marriage,’ Ben. It isn’t going to kill you. It’s not like I’m pressuring you to marry me. God knows we have things to work out.”

  “All right,” I said, “what if we got married? Would you think about converting?” If Jenny had been Jewish, we’d have avoided some of the controversy we had that night. I’d also have avoided disappointing my parents. But I couldn’t live for my parents. It was unreasonable to ask Jenny to convert for them, especially since they’d made little effort to get to know her. Converting would make things easier for our children. They Wouldn’t be confused about who they were. But Jenny and I hadn’t even discussed children. Who knew whether we wanted to have them? I could have asked her to convert for me—I was asking her, wasn’t I?—because Judaism was important to me. But why did it have to be important to her too? We were different in many ways; you don’t look for a clone in a lover. Perhaps religion was an excuse to avoid contemplating the future. I was still spinning my wheels, convinced more than ever that something had to happen before I could think in those terms. Maybe this too was an excuse, and I was suffering from something as banal as an inability to commit.

  “You heard what Tara said. She’s not interested in being Jewish.”

  “I’m not talking about Tara. I’m talking about us, Jen—you and me.”

  “I’m talking about us too. Really, Ben, think about it. You wouldn’t want me to go through a sham conversion just to make things easier. I’m not religious, and I never will be. And I didn’t grow up with Jewish culture, so I’ll never be Jewish in that way. I liked dinner tonight. I’d be glad to do it again. But I’m interested in it because of you—because you said it was part of who you are.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “And that’s enough of a reason for me. But it’s your religion and your culture, not mine. Nothing’s going to change that.”

  Jenny had more pressing things on her mind than the question of converting to Judaism. She’d been a public defender for six years and was busier than before at work. She’d gone from working on misdemeanors to defending felony criminals, many of them violent. She’d gained respect in her office, winning cases no one thought she could win, plea-bargaining successfully on numerous occasions so that her clients were given probation or short sentences when they had expected to spend years in jail.

  I was struck by her aplomb. She was always professional, never grandstanding, simply doing her job. Jenny is calm when most people wouldn’t be—when I, certainly, wouldn’t be.

  But when I came home one evening at the end of May, I found her sprawled across our bed, looking anything but calm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I got assigned a rape case.”

  “So?”

  “Ben, I’m going to be defending a rapist.”

  “An alleged rapist, you mean.” Alleged was Jenny’s favorite word. She could cite examples of forced confession, police brutality, and tampered evidence; jurors sometimes followed their prejudices and disregarded the orders of the judge. She could list the names of people who had been wrongfully convicted—defendants later proven innocent, some of them too late, they’d already been executed. At her insistence, we’d rented A T
hin Blue Line, even though I’d already seen it once and she’d seen it three times. She stopped the tape again and again, pointing to the ways the state used its power, all the forces aligned against the suspect.

  Through a combination of luck and careful maneuvering, she’d avoided getting assigned any rape cases. But now that she had risen within the office, it had become simply a matter of time. She told me she’d considered trying to get off the case, but how could she justify doing that? She hadn’t been raped. If she had, she might have been more eager to take on the case, to prove that she’d overcome what had happened to her.

  “I met him today,” she said, “and he gave me the creeps.”

  “The creeps?” This didn’t sound like her.

  “When I saw the guy leering at me, all I could think was, Get me off this case—I don’t want to have anything to do with you.” Jenny was doing laps around the room, cogitating, ruminating, like a basketball coach, not knowing where to direct her energy. “I kept thinking, Your fingerprints match, you don’t have an alibi, and the semen’s at the lab and I have no doubt it will match. Just cop a plea. Don’t sully me with this.”

  Jenny’s freshman roommate at U.C. Berkeley had been raped by a stranger in an alley off campus. She’d dropped out of school and gone home to Missouri. As far as Jenny knew, she’d never recovered. “That guy ruined her life,” Jenny told me once.

  Still, that was fourteen years before. Lots of criminals ruined their victims’ lives; Jenny knew that. She’d heard hundreds of victims testify in court; she’d seen their families hold vigil; she wasn’t insensitive to what crime did to them. But if she was always thinking about the victims, she wouldn’t have been able to do her job. She could have chosen to be a prosecutor. Or she could have taken the easy route and worked for a law firm, making a good salary and avoiding many hard questions.

  “Don’t you think he has the right to a good defense?” I asked. Then I felt bad, throwing her argument back at her.

  “Rape is different.” On the nightstand was a picture of Jenny holding Tara hours after she was born. Jenny was still in college. I saw that picture every day, but it struck me now, perhaps because Jenny looked so young. One moment you were in college, the next you were a mother, and the next you were defending violent criminals in court. How did that all fit together? Was there a moment when you realized that your decisions had consequences, that other people’s lives depended on you?

  “Why’s it different?”

  “It just is. It’s something you can’t understand.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s a woman’s thing.”

  “It is a woman’s thing. Do you understand what it’s like to walk alone at night and know you could be raped?”

  “Not the way you do, obviously. But I can try to imagine it.”

  “That doesn’t compare.”

  Did she understand what it was like to wonder where you came from, to spend your whole life staring at strangers, thinking, He looks like me, so does she? We could compete over untranslatable experiences, deciding that no one understood anyone else and we should talk only to ourselves. “If rape is a woman’s thing,” I said, “then robbery is a property owner’s thing and pederasty is a child’s thing. Where does that leave empathy?”

  “Rape’s just different. I can’t explain it.”

  That might have been the end of the conversation, but when Jenny and I went to visit Jonathan and Sandy, I made the mistake of mentioning Jenny’s case. Jonathan asked her if she’d become less high-minded.

  “Don’t even start,” Jenny said. I didn’t know what it was about Jenny and Jonathan. They liked each other. But she could make him defensive, perhaps because she fought the battle he used to fight, back in college when he was political. “I’m going to defend this guy.”

  “So we’re back to where we began—you defending absolutely anyone.”

  “Come on,” Sandy said. “Leave Jenny alone.”

  “Tell me something,” Jenny said to Jonathan, “do you go through your patients’ tax records to see if they’ve cheated? Do you ask them whether they beat their wives or whether they’ve been arrested?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought. You don’t say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Mengele, no stool sample from you,’ or, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but do you love your children—and if you don’t, I can’t give you a CAT scan.’”

  “I took an oath when I graduated from medical school to help heal the sick.”

  “I took an oath too.”

  “Everyone’s entitled to medical care.”

  “They’re also entitled to legal counsel.”

  Jonathan wasn’t convinced. After Jenny left to get Tara, he continued the argument with me. “What would Jenny do if Sandy or I got beaten up? It happens all the time—kids with baseball bats kicking the shit out of gays. What if Jenny were hired to defend the guy?”

  “That’s absurd,” I said. “The odds are so small you’d do better to buy a lottery ticket. Besides, Jenny wouldn’t be allowed to take the case. It would be a conflict of interests.”

  “I think she does good work,” Sandy said.

  Jonathan ignored him. “Don’t get me wrong, Ben. I like Jenny. But sometimes it gets to me. You’ve chosen such a do-gooder girlfriend. It’s like you’ve married Mom.”

  “She’s not Mom, and I haven’t married her. And what’s wrong with being a do-gooder? You’re a do-gooder yourself. What do you think being a doctor is?”

  He didn’t answer me. “Why can’t you chart a new path for once?”

  Chart a new path? I’d met my birth mother. True, she’d contacted me first, but I hadn’t refused to meet her, as Jonathan would have done with his. I wasn’t afraid of my past. Did he think that because he was gay he was more of a man than I was, that he’d grown up and I hadn’t?

  When I got home, I found Jenny on our bed with her knees up and her shoes off, thin bands of dirt like zebra stripes along the tops of her feet. She’d changed into a black tank top and a long gingham skirt with a flower print across it. Her hair was tied back. “You look beautiful,” I said.

  “Your brother was a prick today.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought the subject up.”

  “It’s not your fault.” She rolled over on her stomach and asked me to give her a massage. I rubbed her back, shoulders, and neck.

  “I need a vacation,” she said.

  “I do too.”

  “We should go somewhere. We haven’t taken a vacation together in over a year.”

  “Vacations are expensive.”

  “I’m not talking about something fancy. Just a chance for us to get away for a while.”

  I thought about this the next day at work, and when I came home that night, I told Jenny that I’d take her on a vacation when Tara left for summer camp.

  “I didn’t mean take me. We can go in on it together.”

  “I want to take you. You can get a couple of days off work. We’ll go down the coast, maybe stay at a bed-and-breakfast.”

  When I went with Susan to see Apollo 13, she’d suggested that she meet Jonathan, Jenny, and Tara. She’d been patient, she said. She also thought it was a good idea for us to spend time together with other people around. As things stood, too much was at stake when we saw each other alone. We were having trouble relaxing.

  She may have been right, but it bothered me how she approached our relationship—as something to work on, to construct. Her casualness was willed, which made it not casual.

  But now, a month later, with Jenny apprehensive about her work, I thought that getting together with Susan might distract her. Also, my parents were coming to visit the next week, and Susan wanted to meet them too. I wasn’t prepared for that to happen. So Susan and I made an agreement. She could meet Jonathan, Jenny, and Tara, but not my parents.

  When we met, Susan was wearing a yellow cotton pantsuit that made her look like someone who belonged at a Miami Beach resort. The rest of us were in jeans and sne
akers. It was a Sunday. We’d agreed to have brunch at Noah’s Bagels on Irving Street, where bicyclists in Lycra shorts stopped in to pick up sandwiches, and teenagers holding skateboards tasted the lox trim with no intention of buying it. Susan looked out of place, and by association, we did as well.

  There was a series of handshakes, all of us sticking our arms across one another’s bodies, as if we were engaged in some sort of dance, reaching into the circle.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Susan told everyone.

  We ordered bagel sandwiches from the counter and sat down at a table. The space was too small. We sat huddled, our legs bumping, a profusion of apologies uttered as if we all were strangers.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Well,” said Susan.

  I’d had no expectations for this meal, nothing other than the hope that everyone would get along. Now, however, as we all sat in silence, I thought of myself as a host who had brought together the wrong combination of people. I felt responsible, but more than that. I wanted everyone to like Susan, not, principally, because I liked her, but because I considered her an extension of me.

  Jenny said that the weather was good.

  Jonathan agreed.

  It was good, but no better than yesterday and no better, in all likelihood, than it would be tomorrow. It was June in San Francisco; the weather was always good in June. I wished for a hailstorm, something remarkable for us to discuss. Maybe that was why there were so many boring people in California. They always talked about the weather, which hardly ever changed. It’s sunny out. It certainly is.

  Tara had her face low to the table. She was concentrating on her bagel. She seemed oblivious of the rest of us. She could as easily have been eating alone.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” Susan said again. She was talking to all three of them.

  Jenny smiled and gently nudged Tara, to get her to look up. “We’re glad to meet you too,” Jenny said.

  Jonathan seemed about to reach out and shake Susan’s hand. Had he forgotten we’d done that already? “How do you like San Francisco?” he asked.

  “I like it a lot. And you?”

  “Me?” Jonathan said.