Good on Paper

by Rachel Cantor

  Benny. Called here, with quaint brevity, the bookseller. He begs Benny to look for her, tells him she’s unwell, hints at emotional instability. Benny develops a plan to flush her out, a colloquium on the Song of Songs. Poets, biblical scholars, a translator, even an artist or two. Romei promises to foot the bill when his ship comes in.

  Benny and Esther have never met, so Romei must describe her. But he remembers only what she looked like at thirty, he has to imagine what she looks like now. He doesn’t know what she likes to wear, how she does her hair, he’s haunted by images of the distant past—Esther chewing her finger on a park bench, watching him watch her, standing elegant and tall, a highball in her hand, pushed up against a wall, responding to his kisses, yes, yes, vomiting on the cobblestones. In a mad flurry, he writes up these scenes, scenes we recognize because we’ve read them before, and faxes them to Benny, so he might, through them, recognize Esther.

  Benny has a better idea: he asks all who attend to wear a name tag.

  And there she is, Esther Romei. Wearing stirrup pants, a silk top the tentative color of an April sky, a scarf over her hair. She doesn’t look unstable, she looks radiant, talking with her friends—a laughing man named Kendrick Weiner-Peshat, whom Benny remembers from a Midrash conference; a rotund woman named Miriam Remez, who may be a poet; rabbinical students named Marty Drash and Hannah Sod, holding notebooks, pens, tubby bottles of Perrier.

  You are mistaken, Romei says when Benny calls. That is not my Esther.

  She sends her regards. We’re having dinner tonight.

  Thus began one of the strangest stories I have ever read.

  Benny feeds Romei information about Esther, her vibrant life in New York, the classes she takes—classical Hebrew at the university, Talmud at a women’s yeshiva. One gets the sense that, amused, she feeds Benny stories to pass on.

  Romei is stunned. This is not his Esther! Who is this woman? How can a person change so much, and overnight? She has to have met another man! The idea sickens him. He takes to his bed, or so he tells Benny. Esther laughs: she is not changed, not one bit. Silly man!

  In daily faxes, Benny assures him that Esther is well, she’s cut her hair short, taken up photography. They meet at Joe’s to discuss her translation, which she’s picked up again: she frets about the hapax legomena—words that appear just once, making their meaning difficult to determine.

  Romei is such an ass, Benny observes: How could he let this woman get away?

  Romei accuses Benny of having an affair with his wife.

  Don’t be absurd, Benny says.

  I’m coming to get her, Romei says. I’ll cancel the Goethe-Institut readings.

  Don’t, Benny says. I strongly advise you not to. She doesn’t want to see you.

  What’s his name? Romei raves, and calls Benny Galeotto, using Dante’s language to accuse him of introducing Esther to a paramour.

  You’re jealous, Benny writes, but of what? You know nothing about your wife!

  Romei slumps into a chair. Benny’s right. Esther is a stranger—a fascinating, enchanting, mysterious stranger, who’s left him, probably for good. He sits a long while in his chair, not shaving, getting up only to piss in the sink and to admit Emilio, neighborhood vintner and one-time lover of Esther. He brings table wine, pizza rustica, souvenirs of Esther for night-long drinking sessions that leave Romei dehydrated and sentimental.

  His imagination is useless. He sits to write but the paper laughs at him. Fool! What do you see when you open your eyes, when you walk out the door? Yourself, obviously!

  Does she have money, he writes finally. I’m about to sell the English rights to Baby Talk.

  It turns out Esther has been left something by her mother, who on her death bed had regretted having disowned her. Esther went to the Hebrew Home, accompanied by her rabbi; she cried when the matron said they’d disposed of her mother’s effects. Naturally we thought she was alone, fifteen years with no visitors. Besides, there was only a book or two, some photos—yes, one may have been of you, how were we to know?

  Don’t send money, Benny says, send something else. She may not be unresponsive. I think she still loves you.

  Heartened, Romei shaves, kicks Emilio out the door, tries to imagine what he might send.

  He can think of nothing.

  What about some poems? he finally asks.

  Heavens, no! Benny says.

  Disheartened, Romei thinks some more.

  Give me a hint, he says eventually.

  Jesus, Benny says. Can’t you think of a way to tell Esther you love her? You do love her, don’t you?

  Romei, to his astonishment, realizes he does. He flings open the door to his apartment, strides into the piazza, is stunned by the sun shining onto his face, through the water of the fountain, glinting off the tesserae on the facade of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Last he knew it had been winter. But no, it was June! In a fanciful passage reminiscent of one of Calvino’s folktales, the mendicant Romei asks a series of unlikelies for advice on how to win his Esther back.

  Force her to stay, says Efesto, the crippled blacksmith.

  Buy her something extravagant, says Hera, the drag queen.

  Take her on a second honeymoon, says Mercurio, the travel agent.

  Massage her feet, whispers Cytherea, the “comfort woman.” Tell her she’s beautiful.

  She knows she’s beautiful, she will not be told what to do, she can go anywhere and get for herself anything she wants—why would she need me? he asks. What can I possibly give her?

  What about understanding? Benny says.

  But I don’t understand, Romei says.

  Exactly! Benny says.

  Romei pulls his chair up to the table, does the only thing he knows how to do: he writes. A rambling letter in which he asks Esther to come home: he’ll change, he says, he should be given another chance—but his words sound flat and whiny. He writes a dialogue between them, which quickly becomes a monologue in which Esther berates him for his inattention, his mistaken assumptions, his infernal self-absorption, asks why on earth she would ever want him back. People don’t learn new tricks, she says in English, especially not an old dog like you.

  This is not the offering he wishes to make. Esther already knows that he’s an ass. He puts down his pen. How to understand, how to offer understanding?

  He picks up his pen.

  I am Esther, he writes. I am fifty-five. I am beautiful, but I don’t know it.

  He will write her. He will write her skin, her pleasures, her habits and desires. He offers her stories he remembers her telling—about a brick house in Connecticut, a terrier named Sire, a roommate who dated Jack Kerouac—and when he runs out of stories, he interviews ex-lovers, colleagues at the school where she worked. His reputation as an eccentric disposes them to answer his questions: does she give change to the mandolin player; is she popular with the students; what did she do during her lunch hour; does she prefer pistachio or nocciola. He gathers facts, trivial and profound, also the answers to questions he didn’t think to ask: she plays practical jokes, she has nightmares about being trapped in a trolley with no brakes.

  Benny helps.

  Does she have green eyes or blue? Romei asks.

  Brown, Benny says.

  She tells of the loss of her family, her anguish, her feelings of impotence, all magnified by Romei, who is so exiled from his own loss that he can’t help her. He writes of the panic she feels during one of her episodes, he tries to imagine what it would be like to have your body turn against you, to suffer ailments you cannot understand, to lose your hair, to awaken with rashes across your face, to be unable to move, so great is your fatigue.

  These “first-person” reflections are mixed eventually with third-person views of Esther in New York. He imagines her in Talmud class, describes with loving attention her comments about oxen falling into pits, which detail, tossed off in a line or two, must have required hours of research. He rejoices in the success he imagines for her: the rabbi, ster
n-faced, pulls his pointed beard and mutters, Excellent, excellent; Esther flushes with pleasure. She wishes she—

  But the section ended here, mid-sentence. Had Romei not sent the ending? Did he win her back? He must have, because there she was, but how? How had he done it?

  I sat up on Andi’s bed, took a deep breath. Esther had to have been touched by this effort—it was monumental. She’d be overwhelmed by his devotion, his deep interest in the specifics of her life. She loved him, Benny said; of course she’d give him another chance!

  I was rooting for Romei—how had that happened? I found his borrowing of her first person convincing—moving, even: the lover walking in the footsteps of the beloved, demonstrating his willingness to adopt her perspective, wanting to understand. He’d mingled their first-person accounts rather as the woman and man share their stage in the Song—except his first person had become a third person, trailing behind her. As if he didn’t merit a first person, as if self-effacement in service of the beloved was, finally, the point.

  I liked Esther, too, now, laughing and learning her way through the City, I admired her bravery, her resourcefulness, I liked Romei for making me like her. She’d come alive, finally, not through praise, or exposure, but through detail and an empathic, imaginative leaping. But where was Romei’s harrowing? Yes, he realizes he’s been a fool, he even takes to his bed in a parody of Dante’s suffering. Unless the harrowing was Esther’s? Maybe now that their points of view had mingled, the story no longer belonged just to him: Your harrowing is my harrowing?

  I brought the pages back to the study, where two more awaited me. According to the time and date stamp, they’d arrived a half hour apart—and another was on its way! Romei was writing his pages on the fly, writing a single draft and faxing it to me! Not pausing for breath. What other explanation could there be? Unbelievable—not just because of the cheek involved, but because the writing was so damned good. But why?

  Finally, I understood.

  Romei wasn’t interested in publication—given what he’d written about his wife, and himself, he’d probably never intended it. He was writing for himself, to help him “cope” with his wife’s illness, so he wouldn’t have to look at her ravaged face. He wasn’t talking to her as she lay sick in bed, he wasn’t holding her hand—he was writing! Given the rush he was in, and the look of her, she was likely dying. Maybe he wanted to give her this testament, this “gift,” before it was too late, translated into her native tongue. She didn’t speak Italian, we knew that already.

  With this thought came more understanding, an answer to the question, why me? If Romei didn’t care about publication, if he only wanted a translation he could give his wife, he wouldn’t need a pro. He’d need a competent friend-of-a-friend, someone who’d keep his story in the family, as it were.

  Why not be straight with me? Did he think I wouldn’t be interested if fame and fortune were not attached? He didn’t know me—maybe I wouldn’t. Also, from what I could tell, she didn’t have a lot of time. Pros by their nature have places to go, people to see—I was probably the only semi-qualified translator available at a moment’s notice—a translation SuperTemp! Happy coincidence that Benny knew how to find me.

  Why all the funny business, then—the images from my stories, the mind-fucks, the bubbles of real life? He must have been trying to keep my interest. Flattering me after a rocky start. He didn’t want to waste time finding a replacement.

  Pretty simple, really.

  46

  THE FLAME OF LOVE

  Romei might hope for new life through this unlikely love letter, but for me, there could be no new life without publication. No authors lining up, no Translator’s Note praising the poet. Come Y2K, I’d be back at the prosthetics charity, or its Connecticut equivalent.

  I needed to get out of the house. Ahmad had left a message saying he’d pick up Andi after school, so I brought the three new pages to the Eight Bar.

  I sat in back where it was quiet and ordered a Hot Fudge Brownie McGee. I might not become famous because of Romei’s gift to Esther but, in Benny’s words, I still wanted to know what happened next.

  We are still with Esther in New York. She is sitting with Benny in People of the Book, leaning forward on her folding chair, discussing Midrash. She quotes Rabbi this and Rabbi that, using her imagination to fill in the blanks left by the Author of the Text, who demands that we be partners in creation.

  Midrash, we’re told: Story written between the lines of biblical narrative.

  Together, Esther and Benny translate verses 8:6–7 of the Song, discarding traditional versions.

  First, Esther reads aloud from King James: “For love [is] strong as death; jealousy [is] cruel as the grave: the coals thereof [are] coals of fire, [which hath] a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it …”

  No, they agree, that’s not it! That’s not it at all!

  Not strong, but ferocious! “Love is ferocious like death.”

  They do not translate Sheol, leaving the word as is to preserve its sense of the underworld, with its implication of suffering beyond death, an implication lost in the dead-end translation of Sheol as grave: “Love is ferocious like death, its jealousy cruel as Sheol.”

  Love and death conflate here: love finds its identity in the underworld, love is our harrowing, “its sparks, sparks of fire.” Sparks, not coals, Benny insists. To recall Isaac Luria, he says, mysteriously.

  They debate whether shalhevetyah, the most vehement flame of King James, includes in its fiery body Yah, the psalmists’ Name for God.

  Esther laughs: Of course it does—look, there it is!

  “A great God-flame,” they decide then, God’s name not absent from the Song at all, but inscribed in love’s fire, where it belongs. “Love is ferocious like death, its jealousy cruel as Sheol, its sparks, sparks of fire: a great God-flame!”

  “Great waters cannot extinguish this flame,” one of them suggests, the great waters being nothing less than the mayim rabbim of creation, the primordial waters which, according to some, predate creation, the waters God separates to allow for distinction—between two subjects, a subject and object—the waters that separate Romei and Esther. Or, better, “not even the great waters of creation can extinguish the great God-flame which is love.”

  Romei was writing his own Midrash, opening the sealed story of his wife, imagining what he couldn’t know about her, her secrets and illusions, her beliefs and silent moments, writing between the lines of her life. And writing about the mayim rabbim when from across the great waters he receives a call that changes his life.

  Esther’s in the hospital, Benny says. Kidney disease, brought on by a condition called lupus. Romei must come at once.

  47

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  Lupus: when the body can’t distinguish self from enemy, when it attacks its own cells and tissues, thinking them foreign bodies. From the Latin for wolf, because of the characteristic butterfly rash, which gives a “wolflike” appearance. Only ten percent of “lupies” have a parent or sibling with lupus, and only five percent of their offspring get the disease, usually between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, the first symptoms often appearing in pregnancy. Esther’s lupus is systemic, the most serious kind, as it affects the internal organs. The result: flares that can last for years, followed by periods of remission. Esther’s symptoms included hair loss, joint pain, extreme fatigue, facial rashes, and now renal disorder. Her ANA test came up positive, but a syndromic diagnosis would have been possible years before, had Esther seen a competent doctor.

  Her condition is serious, but she’ll be okay, this time. She wants to go home.

  Romei packs his bags, the page ending mid-sentence, also mid-page.

  Was the break intended to make clear the gravity of the disruption, or had the work itself been interrupted? What could interrupt Romei as he wrote by his wife’s sickbed? Only his wife’s sickness, I supposed.

  •

>   As I walked home down Broadway, I thought of Esther, how small she looked in that photo, like a child, her face barely visible among her crumpled bedclothes, and felt tenderness for her. It was hard to believe I’d despised her before—what had that been about? I’d send Romei a fax when I got home, ask him how she was—I should have done it ages ago.

  I was surprised to find no one in the Den. Ahmad said he’d pick Andi up after school, so where were they? Was something wrong? Another conference with Mrs. Chao? Something worse? It wasn’t like Ahmad not to call if he were late. My fingers felt prickly and light. Two hours? I tried calling but he didn’t pick up his phone.

  Before I could call again, I heard the sound of keys turning in our several locks.

  Where have you been? I asked as Andi burst into the room holding bags from Gap Kids and Saks, tugging a bike with training wheels. I pulled her to me, causing the bike to crash against the wall. I was so worried! I said as she wiggled from my grasp.

  Mom! You’re being weird again.

  What’s all this? I asked Ahmad. He also was carrying bags: his were from FAO Schwarz.

  A bike and some clothes, Andi said. What’s it look like, a toaster?

  Don’t get smart with me! I said. I am not in the mood.

  No need for that, Ahmad said.

  No need for any of this, I said, gesturing at the excess tumbling out of the bags.

  Andrea needs it for school. You didn’t do enough shopping.

  Andi’s got plenty for school. I just went through her clothes!

  Look, Mom, Andi said, holding up a pink satin dress that must have cost a fortune.

  Why don’t we agree to disagree, Ahmad said.

  I’m sorry, I said, trembling, that’s not good enough. I am Andi’s mother and, like it or not, I am capable of giving her what she needs.