by Sonia Taitz
Not worth it. Slam is sympathetic and kind (he gives her an extra sack of pasta, gratis)—but refuses to take Heidi to bed.
As he walks away, he suddenly feels kind and warm toward all women, his own wife included. It is so hard to make them happy—not just his wife, apparently, but Dan’s wife, too. Why is that? He pities them, and resolves to treat Jude more kindly in the future, time permitting.
The Holy Ghost
Rebbe Malach Gipstein continues to visit Jude Ewington. He is her secret, her holy of holies. His accent is a turnoff, a Jewish cliché, but his zeal fascinates her (she’s even affixed a mezuzah to her door). His mission, he said, was to awaken her soul from its quotidian slumbers. And she wants him to; she feels lucky, and chosen by him. He had told her she was special; she believes him.
She had been so young when her father had had his stroke; now, she is eager to learn all she can about the ancient ways. Jude sometimes imagines herself as the Rebbe’s wife, donning the sheitl, grinding the Friday-night fish. It seems too complicated. Maybe not his wife, actually. His lover, then? Is that even thinkable? Is she simply transferring her feelings from Collum to him?
When she asks the rebbe what his first name, Malach, means, he tells her: Angel. Now, sometimes, Jude can’t concentrate when the man speaks of holiness to her. She knows what’s really holy, deep down. She knows what’s true, in the Eden-garden way, what can’t be faked. She wants that holy union.
Jude is beginning to obsess about stripping Malach, layer by layer. She’s seen the hat come off, but now she wants him to toss the skullcap, too. She wants to peel off that long black jacket, that crisp white shirt. She’d lift up his tzitzis—the fringed undergarment worn by pious Jews—and then finally . . .
What would she see?
She tries to discern his body under the clothes. She can’t seem to forget the hug he’d given her, that first day, when she had cried. He had held her, and his arms had been strong, his chest hard as a rock. When she’d sat on his lap, there were thighs, hard as stone, and—something else. It was true. He’d said that his leg was asleep, but that part of him was anything but.
Truthfully, the Rebbe’s body is awfully developed for a man who all day studied Torah, and sometimes the Talmud. And his face, hiding under the glasses and the beard—it, too, is quite rugged and tan. His smile lines are deep and his neck is muscular.
Yes, Jude is increasingly hot for Rebbe Gipstein. “Heis,” as he would have put it in the Yiddish tongue, the dying language alive in his mouth. Thank God his holy quest has brought him to her door.
It happens in late September, what some call Indian summer. Jude is off from teaching, and Slam is off in Italy again. It is a Friday, the eve of the Sabbath, when her dream to know love comes to life.
It comes so true that Jude almost feels sick to her stomach at the shocking joy of it. It is as though Malach has read her mind and knows what she had been thinking of all summer long, even before she had ever met him.
“We seem to desire each other,” he quietly announces.
“We—we do? You desire me?” This is the greatest of surprises.
“I do not believe in lying, so I will tell you. Very much. I desire you as much as Israel desires God. No more perfect union could be imagined.”
“And I desire you as much as God desires Israel,” she attempts. She will remain in this holy vein, if it is called for.
“You are my vineyard,” he answers.
“And you are my—my vintage,” she replies, faltering a bit. “Harvest,” she amends. “My reward for being so good all my life.”
“Have you been good?” says the angel, taking Jude’s hair out of her barrette and loosening it. She throws her hair over her face, recklessly.
“Maybe too good.”
“Let me look at you and see how good,” he says, advancing toward Jude. He lifts her hair out of her eyes and holds it in his fist like a trophy. He stares at her naked face until she blushes crazily.
“Without my shtreimel and without my yarmulke, this you also need to see,” he adds, whipping off his fancy hat and skullcap.
His uncovered hair is so blue-black shiny that Jude wants to laugh. It is a Superman color, a Hollywood dream of Apaches and strength.
“Wow. Look at you! I’ve been daydreaming about this for such a long time, I have to admit,” she says. “I’ve imagined you and me together in my pool.”
“Your pool would be our mikveh, where you and I would purify ourselves, body and soul together.”
“Purify?” She hopes the pool has enough chlorine in it. Sometimes, the waters turns a faint green, and Slam has to “shock” it back to the right balance.
“Yes, and sanctify—as the marriage prayer says: ‘Behold, you are sanctified to me.’”
“The marriage prayer?“
“God and Israel could be together, yes,” he says.
“But Malach, you actually know that I’m already married—”
“According to the laws of Moses? According to the sacred laws of God and his chosen people, Israel?”
It is true, she concedes. She and Slam had had only a civil ceremony. Her father had died by then, and her mother had never cared much for religion. Slam’s parents, from a mixed marriage themselves, preferred the classic wedding march and only the most basic of vows. No one wanted the drama of the broken glass, signifying the destruction of the Temple and millennia of exile.
In Malach’s eyes, their paper bond is nothing. A sham and a shanda.
Jude looks up at him, shamefaced.
“I’ve never been properly married, have I?”
“Not as yet. May I consecrate you to me now? Shall we cleanse ourselves first, and make ourselves new again?”
Jude is happy to hear a catch in the Rebbe’s voice. Poised as he is, wise as he is, love has humbled and awed him.
She takes his hand and leads him to the backyard.
“Here is my pool.”
“It is not what I imagined when you said ‘pool,’ no, but still it is a body of water, and sufficient, I guess, for our needs.”
“I think so, too,” says Jude, happy that her husband had put a stockade around it for safety reasons. They would be hidden from the neighbors.
“Are you too modest to take off all your clothes?” asks the rebbe, beginning to unbutton his starched, white shirt.
“Yes, a little,” Jude admits. She wonders if her body is good enough for a man like him. So handsome, underneath it all.
“So let us leave each one undergarment. I will leave my shorts underneath, and you will leave your underwears.”
“My bra and underpants?”
“No, the bra top you should take off,” he says sternly. “The breasts are not used for the procreation of the human being, only for the nourishment. Israel is the land of milk and honey—so in conclusion, there can be no shame in shadayim!” he says, using the biblical word.
Jude complies. She takes off her pants and her shirt, and then she takes off her bra. Malach cannot take his eyes off her.
“Even more beautiful as God made you than with raiments,” he whispers.
“More beautiful, really?” She is heavier than she has ever been, and like most women her age, self-conscious about her arms, shoulders, breasts, legs, stomach, knees, ankles, bottom, waist, neck, and hands.
“Clothing. Just a shell for the body, obscuring the light.”
“Yes, exactly, take off yours now,” Jude retorts. “Come on, all the undershirts—”
“I’m doing that.”
“Well, hurry. I’m standing here alone and you have everything on.”
Even as she speaks, he tosses off garments.
“Now take off your pants.”
He does so, so quickly that he falls to the ground, trousers entwining his legs. Twisting, he manages to kick off the heavy gabardine, but falls in the process. He lies on the earth, on his back, wearing only cotton boxer shorts.
He looks beautiful, she thinks, sprawling on the
ground.
And she looks beautiful, standing above him, looking down with her hair flowing to her shoulders and her breasts naked and bare, as the scripture said.
“Rebbe?”
“Yes?”
“Why aren’t you—”
Something has popped up and sprung out of the boxers; Jude stares at it.
“Why aren’t you circumcised?”
“I’m not?”
The rebbe begins talking quickly. He tries to convince Jude that his foreskin had been much bigger before. And that this remnant of it was like the Shechinah that floated over the people of Israel . . . A tent in the desert, spiritually speaking . . . The Christians called it the Holy Ghost, but the Jews really knew it meant oasis . . .
Jude is staring, open-mouthed. His torso is ridiculously well-muscled. And while the hair on his head is that Hollywood hue, Jude follows a long trail of blond, leading from navel to groin. The hair on his arms is flaxen, too. It gleams like gold in the sun. This person is so handsome that she gasps.
He isn’t who he said he is. He isn’t a man sent from heaven to heal her soul, but the one who had broken her heart. Whose heart she had broken. They’d broken each other, long ago. Now here he is.
“Take off your glasses,” she orders.
“And by the way, somehow we never discussed this matter, but your sons are not entirely legitimate.”
“Oh, shut your mouth, ‘Rebbe.’ Really! Not one more god-damned word, even if it wins you the Oscar. Glasses off, now.”
Silently, as though with a sense of relief, he complies. Jude finds herself looking into a pair of sheepish, deep blue eyes.
“Oh, Reb Malach—you are my angel, and have always been,” she says, knowing her own Collum Whitsun. She has not seen him for over thirty years.
The rebbe stares at her as he pulls at his beard. It comes off in one piece, and he tosses it aside. The side-locks are next. Left and right.
A long silence.
Collum rises from the ground and she meets him halfway. They grab and hold each other tightly for a good, long time. Without his paint, his disguises, his extensive research, method acting, and poignant linguistic tricks, Collum is her helpless boy again. He is tender, searching, and vulnerably simple. Jude can feel his pain and his desire, that powerful blend that never failed to move her. He’s come back. And the feelings, too. Why had she been so afraid of them? She was glad he had found her. People were made to be found, discovered.
“Did you know it was me all the time, Judy?” he says, trembling so much she trembles, too.
“Yes,” she lies. But it is true. In her soul, there is no difference between the boy, the rebbe, and this gorgeous man whose body is now hers. They are all about love, as impersonal and perfect as that. She would take them all; they all blended into a quivering white beam in which she sees and can be seen.
At last.
“And do you love me still?”
“Do I love you,” she answers, exhaling as she nuzzles him with her mouth. They kiss each other again and again. With each moment, she rises. She has never kissed like this, even with Collum as a teen. There is knowledge there, and homecoming. There is pain there, and relief of heartache.
“This is good,” he says. “This is right. Here is my heaven.”
More Discoveries
Davey walks home from school, thinking of Delaney. He has decided to skip the last period, a review for a quiz in a subject he knows cold. In this new autumn term, he feels changed, more social now. He has even begun to help with the Angel-Fire kids on weekends, now that Shy is gone. He has never fully believed the stuff Delaney had said—theories about his mother, and how Shy was obsessed with her, and that he had left town because of some gossipmongers. Yes, the man had a crazy moustache that sometimes seemed glued on, but some of Delaney’s friends had green or purple hair. Some even shaved their heads and had their scalps tattooed.
Now that he is with Delaney, Davey has learned a broader range of self-expression himself. He is proud to be her boyfriend, kiss her under the trees on the high school campus, wear a cologne that she says makes her crazy. In a good way.
Davey really likes that kind of crazy. He will be fifteen in a week, and she is sixteen—they are not kids anymore. They can express even more of themselves if they want to. He thinks, for example, that he will be a good lover. He has touched her breasts many times, both over and under the shirt. Each time they felt bigger, as though they had grown under his hands. Delaney also tells him that each time, his hands are bigger. He has measured himself, and it is true—his body is growing, almost as though he is reaching out for adulthood as fast as he can. Delaney has put her hands on his body, too—and it feels so much better than anything he could ever do to himself. Her hands are soft and loving.
His brother Joey tends to talk about sex when he is home, but crassly—“anal” this and “blow-job” that. It is kind of disgusting, Davey thinks. Touching and being touched by Delaney has been special, and beautiful, and all the time they have looked into each other’s eyes. Not when they kiss—he knows you close your eyes for that, but when they have lain in the grass beyond the view of the stables, where he and Shy had once talked as friends. They have lain on earth that is part sand and part scrub and part weeds, but still heavenly, his flannel shirt off and cradling her head as he rises above her, and then her arms reaching up to stroke the skin of his chest and slide along his arms. And then down his long waist, and under his belt and down the back of his jeans, cupping his ass and pushing his hips down on hers . . .
Davey walks quickly into his house, running upstairs to masturbate. And then he hears—he thinks he hears—odd, sickly sounds, alternating between high-pitched pants and deep primordial groans.
“Oh . . .”
“Ahhhhh.”
“Ohhh . . . ohhh . . .”
Davey stands at the top stair of the staircase, frozen. He moves one foot to the landing, which creaks loudly.
“Honey?” says his mother. “Is that you? What time is it?”
“Mommy?”
Crazed, Jude and the rebbe rush around the room, frantic to alter the scene. The rebbe manages to put on his tzitzis, his boxer shorts, and hat. Jude can manage only her bathrobe.
“Are you OK, Mommy?” says Davey, opening her door.
His face changes from concern to horror when he sees a man there.
“Who the hell is that?” he screams, frightened. Davey stares at the man’s long bare legs, his arms emerging from a fringed and yellowing undershirt with strings hanging off it.
“This is my, my personal spiritual advisor,” says his mother, rattled to hear her gentlemanly son curse. “Didn’t I—didn’t I—tell you about him?” she stutters.
“No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t. I didn’t know you had ‘spiritual’ problems,” he says sternly.
“Well, honey, I do. I was very sad and had lost all my faith in things.”
“Permit me to make an introduction, I am Gipstein, Rebbe Malach Gipstein,” says the man, stepping over to Davey and taking his hand. He shakes it briskly, then pats the boy on the back in a fatherly way.
“So I’ll be leaving at this time,” he continues, as though he were making a community announcement.
“Oh, yes, yes of course,” Jude responds, just as loudly and formally.
“Let me just get you your yarmulke . . .”
“Don’t forget the pants, dude! Mom, really, who is this guy?” says Davey.
“I’m actually a rabbi, David, a student of the Tor—”
“What did you say?”
“To—? The Five Books of—”
‘No, quit it. My name. How’d you know my name?”
“What other name should a nice Jewish boy have,” says the rebbe, appearing only slightly rattled, “but the name of a king?”
“And you look so familiar,” Davey continues, but the rebbe puts on his thick glasses, and even his eyes are obscured.
“If you have seen one Chasid,
my friend, and I say this with all the love a Yid can have for all the Yiddin, you have seen them all. The beards, the glasses, the socks, and the coat. In fact”—he waxes loquacious—“this is not even a beard—I saw a beard once that came all the way to the waist. Once, a rebbe said to me, ‘where is your beard?’ and of course, naturally, I showed him my beard, nu, what else is growing mit hair from my chin,” he babbles, his Yiddish getting stronger, “and he says, ‘You call that a beard?’”
“Hang on—were you—are you Shy?”
“Why I should be shy? I am not ashamed, for the Lord our God is with me at all times, including, I hope, even now.”
That was close, thinks Jude, as she shuts the door behind the rebbe personified by the world-famous talent Colm Eriksen. It was a nice performance, and the actor paused to touch the mezuzah in the traditional way, kissing his fingertips, then bringing them to up the brass-covered scroll.
“It really wasn’t what it looked like,” says Jude, abashed, to her son that night at dinner. She isn’t lying—it looked like she had been in bed with a Chasid; actually, she had been in bed with the love of her life, a beautiful boy who’d been whisked off at fourteen to Australia.
Separating his vegetables from his potatoes, Davey says, “I’m not gonna judge you. Bodies are beautiful, and you only live once, but I really wouldn’t do stuff like that in the bed you and Dad share, you know what I mean?”
“I do know what you mean,” his mother answers, shamefaced.
“By the way,” her son continues, spearing a pea on a tine, “I’m thinking of getting a tattoo.”
Jude doesn’t have the strength to challenge him, but simply asks, “Of what?”
“Just one word on my heart: ‘Delaney.’”
The mother could caution her son that tattoos are permanent, and young love is not, but given the circumstances, she isn’t so sure of anything, and probably has no business giving advice.
Plaisir d ’Amour
