Cult

by Warren Adler

  She heard the click and the connection went dead.

  In the stony silence of her dark bedroom, she was shivering, not just from the cold. His presence had descended like a tornado, leaving a trail of destruction—her tranquility, her courage, her sense of self, her carefully erected barriers. It had taken her years to construct the protective walls. The tornado had shaken loose her foundations.

  She could clearly remember the beginning and the end. Between was not exactly a middle. There was no continuity, more like revved-up images on a projector gone awry, leaving impressions. He had never lived with her in her current place, but it did not stop the memories from coming. She smelled his presence in the room, an amalgam of his aftershave and musk.

  ***

  They had been sitting at a window table in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street, drinking white wine and looking into each other’s eyes. Hers were hazel, flecked with yellow, and it seemed as if he had been counting the yellow specks. His were blue-gray, heightened by the brightness of the late afternoon and the green from Central Park across the way.

  They had only known each other nearly three hours when he had said, “I loved you instantly.”

  “Pshaw,” she responded, mimicking the way cartoon characters said it.

  “Not pshaw,” he said. “Egad.” He looked at his watch. “A hundred and seventy minutes, actually.” They both knew that something momentous had happened.

  Of course, she didn’t trust it. Nothing happens that fast. “It’s the wine,” she said.

  “It’s the heart.”

  At the time, she had been working for an organization involved with women’s rights in Africa. He was selling smartphones and her office was in the market to buy a few.

  “I’m not the person to see,” she had told him.

  “You’re the person I see,” he had said, brash, flirtatious, self-confident, and true.

  “How do you feel about our cause?” she had asked, full of the idea and emboldened with the outrage.

  “I’m all for it. How can anyone be against it? Besides, I’ll be for anything you’re for. That’s why I’m doing this meeting. Smartphones will enhance your cause, speed the victory.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, I’m all for the cause. Mostly I like the messenger,” he said, watching her sipping the wine. She felt the intensity of his focus. She wondered exactly how casual an encounter this was.

  “You don’t sound sincere,” she had countered, while noting his good looks.

  “I can prove my sincerity,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Over drinks. It might take time. You look like a hard case to crack.”

  She had laughed. It was a Friday and it had been a terrible week.

  Naomi’s cause exhausted the mind and senses, left everyone ravaged with intensity, frustration, horror, and commitment. There was so much despair, so many injustices, terrible stories about the lives of women in Africa. There were times when she needed a respite. Something without tales of sorrow and pain. Barney Harrigan was a perfect choice for such a respite. She could tell he really couldn’t care less about the suffering of anyone thousands of miles away.

  When he invited her out for a drink, she eventually consented.

  “I don’t believe you,” she had said, laughing.

  “I am a great believer in women. I worship them.”

  “Don’t you have any real convictions?” she said.

  “You. You’re my conviction. Put me in a cell with you and I’ll take the rap.”

  “You’re patronizing me,” she had said. “I’m a very serious woman.”

  “That’s my favorite flavor.” It was banter, pure show. He had the kind of Irish charm that could conceal his real self. She had a mind that probed and reasoned. People had often told her that her compassion gave off too much heat, in general, her love for mankind was too intense, and it left little room for attention to an individual person. Men sensed that she searched too hard, too fiercely. They had a point, and she tried to correct this trait in herself, bank the fire. Her record was spotty on this point. After all, she couldn’t help who she was.

  “Don’t think and analyze so much,” her mother told her frequently. “It doesn’t make you sexy.”

  Then, as if to prove her stance as a serious woman, she had begun to tell him about, of all things, the practice of female circumcision.

  “Bad timing,” he said, winking.

  She had caught his drift. He was right. She retreated.

  “Clearly,” she said with a snicker.

  He lifted both hands. “Okay. I buy it. You are a serious woman. But I’m a serious, very serious, man. And I’m very serious about you.”

  “Blarney.” She giggled foolishly, enjoying the fun of their repartee. It was fun to be silly. Just what she needed. His persona wrapped her in a warm bath.

  I know he’s just using a line, she told herself. Just a salesman’s line.

  Barney took her hand in his and raised it to his lips.

  “It doesn’t happen like this,” she said, already growing dangerously comfortable.

  “Who said?”

  He had the Irish look as well, his skin colored like fine sand and a good, long, straight nose. He had a chin with a cleft and large teeth, although a front tooth was crooked. His hair curled and waved, covering his ears down to his lobes. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, wrapped in a button-down. The crisp edges were folded on either side of the tight knot of a tie.

  Her mother, a slave to Jewish chauvinism, would have called him a “scutch” and worried about his thing not being circumcised. The thought had made her blush blood red.

  “Is it hot in here?”

  “It’s me,” he said.

  Actually, it was quite cool. It was September. Summer was fading. There was a chill in the air and a sharp breeze, which made people who walked against it squint oddly, bowing their heads. Outside, she saw through the high windows, the setting sun threw long shadows along the pavement.

  “They’re changing now,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your eyes. The yellows are fading. The greens are getting bluish.”

  She had begun to wonder how long they could sit like this—not that she had wanted it to end. But she felt obliged to act, a compulsion to pull herself out of limbo, into action. It was another quirk of hers, that she felt guilty when time passed unproductively. She tore her eyes away from him to look at her watch.

  “I had planned to go back to work.”

  Then he looked at his watch. He snapped his fingers and took a little notebook from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He was, as he had told her later, an avid note taker. “Damn. I was going to the beach. See? You made me forget. Made me forget everything. The point of writing things down is that you’ll never forget to look at your notes.” He peered outside. “Too cold anyway. Your sun is a thousand times brighter.” He looked at her and sighed.

  “Come on, Harrigan,” she finally mocked him.

  He shrugged but did not seem insulted. “I know what I feel.”

  Her mother had taught her what thin ice was. She had learned that attraction often lied. Never make a step unless you know it’s solid. Anyway, she had no time for ‘relationships.’

  “It’s purely hormonal,” she told him honestly, feeling her own attraction.

  “You got that right.”

  “You’re just trying to book your weekend.”

  “Even your insults are like sweet nectar.”

  “You’re being a silly romantic,” she chided. “It’s called weekend panic. Fear of being alone, without a girl, for two whole days.”

  No substance here, she decided abruptly. It doesn’t happen like this.

  She was still on that tack long after that first meeting. One evening t
hey were at dinner in an Italian restaurant in the Village where he told her he had an expense account.

  “See,” she said, “We’re still just talking strictly business.” By then, of course they had exchanged lives, at least the surface narratives.

  “I want to make money,” he said. “I don’t want to be, as you’d say, a schlep. I believe in the golden rule: He who has the gold, rules.”

  “That is crass,” she told him, one of the many rebukes.

  “Neither,” he said seriously.

  He had spent some time justifying his sales career, calling himself a peddler. He had chosen sales, he told her, because it meant a quicker route to the pot of gold.

  “The world belongs to the salesman. My father was a goddamned bookkeeper. A butt-kisser.” A generation of bitterness poured out. She knew he was talking from his interior now. He was Irish to the core, and she saw a black gloomy streak. She sensed he had sharp mood swings. “I want money, a family, loving, luxury, fun, trust, goodness. A private nest to rest my weary brain and bones.”

  “What about ideals, making a better world?”

  He looked at her, not certain of her seriousness. “I’m more your bread-and-potatoes man. Let the world take care of itself.”

  “You can’t close your eyes to bad things. It can happen to you.”

  “I’m not a fool, Naomi. Shit happens. I just don’t want to step in it. I’m on the money trail. When I make it, I’ll give it away. Hell, you can help me spend it.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “I’ll concentrate on myself.”

  “Most people do. But my ship is on a different course.”

  “Saving the world, right?”

  “Fighting for good over evil. Helping mankind. People.”

  “A true liberal,” he sighed.

  “Jewish and flaming.”

  “I’m with the Pragmatic Party. It has one constituent: me.”

  “And its party platform?”

  “As I said, he who has the gold, rules.”

  So a curse had been on them from the beginning, but she hadn’t let herself dwell on it then. People changed, compromised, grew together. Besides, by that point in time, reason had surrendered to love.

  Later that night, her legs had floated her to the doorway of his small apartment in Greenwich Village, and now he pressed against her in the semi-darkness of the dusky corridor. The faint smell of provolone cheese drifted up from the Italian restaurant on the ground floor.

  “This is dumb. I’m not this kind of girl,” she said, the time-honored cliché.

  But bells were going off. Cannons exploding. The earth moving. She would never forget the moment.

  They spent the entire weekend in his bed, not able to get enough of each other while trying to understand why it had happened.

  “I never really saw one uncircumcised,” she said. “I guess I lived in a ghetto. My mother would be rabid.”

  Her mother was, but then Barney’s charm won her over. She would have loved to have had him for a son-in-law. Naomi remembered, too, that he had tried to describe what he was really feeling, to show her that under his salesman jargon was a sensitive and loving heart.

  “It’s like an incompleteness trying to find its completeness. A half of a thing looking for the other half. We’ve found it, Naomi. Don’t you see what this means?”

  “Trouble,” she had said, pecking his ear.

  “Nay,” he said, chuckling. “That’s what I’ll call you from now on… ‘Nay.’ As in ‘naysayer.’”

  “Stupid mick,” she whispered.

  “I found it, the other half. It’s you.”

  “Too fast. Don’t trust it.”

  For some reason, she started to cry. Tears bathed her cheeks and he licked them with his tongue, tear by tear.

  “You see,” he said, “I drank your tears. We’re like blood brothers now.” He chuckled at the reference. “Like Indians who cut their veins and transfer the blood.”

  A month later he bought a loft in SoHo and she moved in with him. He spent a great deal of time designing the space. Working on blue graph paper, he drew and redrew lines for rooms, pressing her for opinions about sizes, flow, asking for a sense of her own concept of space.

  “It’s yours to design, too,” he assured her. Yet she resisted the idea. The process was too materialistic for her.

  More important to her were her causes, not only women’s rights, but minority rights, equal justice, lifting people out of poverty, a smorgasbord of goodness and, to her, the only aspirations a concerned contemporary citizen should pursue.

  “And when all was said and done, what do you have?” he asked.

  “A better world.”

  “Ha.”

  “You mock me!” she cried.

  “I love you.”

  Through it all, from Naomi’s perspective, he maintained his worship of the material. He pressed her continually on how the loft was to be done; attention must be paid to things, to space, to comfort.

  “Any way you design it is fine with me,” she told him.

  “But two people live here.”

  Her indifference exasperated him.

  “I’m trying to make you part of everything in my life.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m building our nest, Nay.” It was his metaphor for them. “Look how the birds do it. Bit by bit. Relentlessly. Every strand has its place. The way space is allocated is important.”

  “Allocate it any way you want. I’ll fit in.” To be with him was all that mattered, to touch and love.

  Her doubts did not fully develop until a year had run out. She had made connections and was being pressed to join the action. There were jobs to be had. She needed a bigger platform for her missions—the nation’s capital, the center of the world. Washington was the place she needed to be. Because she vacillated, she lost her position at the Civil Rights Commission and another at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She got a job with the Mayor’s Office in Department of Cultural Affairs, but it did not satisfy her.

  “The action is in Washington,” she told him.

  “Am I holding you back?” he would ask, pouting.

  “Of course you are.”

  “I think it’s all in your imagination.”

  It wasn’t that he had the power of veto over her, but she did feel the unmistakable pull of his denial, and also, her growing subservience. At first being together was just their most precious priority, but now love was making her a vassal, and she hated it.

  She met his family. “Black Irish, the lot of them,” he had warned her, mimicking a brogue accent, although they were all-American Brooklyn. Even so, they harbored a mass of hardline of stereotypes and prejudices. He hadn’t bothered to warn his family about her being Jewish, and at their first dinner together his father rambled on about, “Reds and the damned sheenies. It’s them that got the niggers all riled up.”

  He kept Naomi calm with amused winks. At the table were two pimply sisters and a corpulent mother who scrutinized her and burrowed in with pointed speculation.

  They had begun the evening in the living room, which they called the parlor. It had a mismatched collection of worn upholstered velvet chairs and a sofa, all decorated with doilies, like Band-Aids. The radio had been left on, some right-wing talk show. Somebody mentioned Hillary.

  “Goddamned pinko,” his father sneered.

  “Christ,” Naomi had hissed, looking at Barney.

  Barney lifted his eyebrows in exasperation and shrugged, a gesture urging her to remain silent. With effort, she did.

  “Damned libs. I nearly lost my ass for them.”

  There was a picture of her father in uniform, World War II. What had he fought for, she remembered thinking.

  By the time they went to dinner in the shabby d
ining room, the hostility had expanded further.

  “Just a good old Irish homecoming,” he had whispered.

  “They express their love with meanness.”

  “Well, I don’t,” she responded.

  By dessert, the family knew the worst of it. Jewish. Liberal. Living in sin. They grew so cold and silent that she had to excuse herself to go to the bathroom just to warm up. From behind the thin walls, she heard Barney’s rebuking voice, certain that it was for her benefit as well.

  “She’s my girl, a part of me. I’ll have no nonsense about it. Keep your narrowness to yourselves. Any offense against her is an offense against me.”

  “You’ll bring no kikes in this house.”

  “Then I won’t bring me as well.”

  “You shut your mouth, John!” his mother shouted to his father.

  “Comes of leaving the church,” the father muttered.

  “Look who’s talking.” It was one of his sisters.

  She flushed the toilet twice and turned on all the faucets to drown them out. But when she came back, after stalling further, she could see that his parents had surrendered. There was no point in banishing him. He had already banished himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said later. “They’re awful, but they’re mine. Suffer them,” he pleaded. “They’ve been beaten.”

  “By what?”

  “Depressions. The old ways of the church. The old world just collapsed around them.”

  “It was full of ugly prejudices that hurt other people.”

  “Just ugly thoughts. They never really harmed anyone.”

  She kept silent, although it bothered her. Later, after they had made love, the troubled thoughts broke through the calm between them.

  “That’s exactly the problem. They’re bigots. Bigots are harmful to all of us. People must be judged as individuals. Hating groups is wrong.”

  “What goes on in their heads is their business,” he sighed, upset to have it thrown back at him. “The important thing is that it made no dent on me.”

  “But you don’t even question it. You let it pass. Indifference. That’s the real culprit.”

  “But I do question it. I told them off.”

  He rose on one elbow and looked into her eyes. A stray bead of light caught his own. They flashed back like burning agates, emphasizing his anger.