Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  Without answering Joseph looked away; again a tremendous wave of sadness washed over him. “We have a little time, not much, but a little.” He stood, clapped his hands, and executed a few flamenco steps. “First the sea, then the sky, then the earth,” he announced enigmatically.

  He took her swimming. Now fully grown and the same age as her, he stripped off his shorts and stood in the water naked, holding out his hand. She found it hard to look at him directly, so, wearing a thin petticoat, she advanced and averted her eyes. A wave pushed her over and he caught her, pulling her up against him. The muscular tautness of his body felt utterly foreign to her. She pulled away shyly and from the corner of her eye caught the proud arc of his erection. Again she found herself torn between intense shame and desire.

  He grinned at her, then turned toward the sea. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. A minute later a pod of dolphins appeared, playfully leaping through the ocean spray. Joseph whistled again, and two of the sea mammals swam toward them. He waded toward one and, as it waited patiently in the shallows, straddled it and rode the beast, one arm held high, the other clasping its fin as man and delphis leaped through the waves. The image resonated with Clarissa; she tried to remember where she had seen it before, then it came to her: it was a motif she’d seen in a fresco in Athens. A boy riding a dolphin. So it had really happened, this ancient rapport.

  “Come!” he shouted over the crashing waves. “You ride too!”

  Clarissa hesitated. The smaller dolphin, obviously female, hovered in the shallows, waiting for her. Again Joseph beckoned. What the hell—the whole thing felt like a fantasy, and, as in fantasies, Clarissa assumed she was immortal. She waded out and cautiously hoisted one leg over the slippery but surprisingly warm back. The dolphin cocked her face up toward Clarissa as if to ask if she was ready. Clarissa firmly clasped the dorsal fin. And then they were off, speeding through the water. It was as if she were flying; the island became a shattered mosaic of sun, sea, and waving olive trees. Exhilarated, she felt like a god, the power of the creature surging between her legs as they swam. It lasted a few minutes, then Joseph threw himself off and dived into the warm water. Clarissa followed. The two dolphins stood on their tails and clicked a farewell. Joseph replied by making a similar noise in his throat and with a playful splash they were gone.

  Clarissa floated on her back, her arms and legs spread. She relaxed and surrendered completely to the sea. Above her was nothing but the immense blue of the sky. All human frailty dissolved into meaninglessness.

  After they’d dried off, Joseph led her toward a path that wound up the side of the mountain. They climbed in silence, with the song of the skylarks above them. Clarissa watched the straining muscles of Joseph’s buttocks and legs. He now looked older than her, somewhere in his early thirties. But she noticed that in the last hour the aging process seemed to have plateaued out. There was a new serenity to him, as if his form had stopped shifting and he was finally settling down. The path widened as it reached the top of the hill. Joseph leaned down and hoisted her up to the top.

  Clarissa stood in the sudden breeze. She found herself looking across a field of wildflowers: wild lavender, asphodels, forget-me-nots, all carpeted the clearing, which was fringed with pines. It looked like the rambling garden of an abandoned estate, cultivated grounds that had once run to the edge of the small mountain. She closed her eyes and breathed in the intoxicating scent. Joseph came up behind her and put his arms around her.

  “I knew this place once, many centuries ago,” he whispered. Still with her eyes closed she turned and kissed him. He kissed her back, biting her lips and tongue gently. He ran his tongue down her neck as he pulled open her blouse. Cupping a breast in each hand he dropped to his knees and buried his face between them as he pulled down her skirt.

  Clarissa opened her eyes and looked down at him. He was to be hers; this was a union she never even dreamed of. Yet she couldn’t believe how natural it felt, to have this near-naked man kneeling at her feet. She gasped as his fingers found the part of her she herself had never explored. It felt as if he was splitting her apart and blowing all her secrets to the wind.

  He began to caress her flesh, stroking her backward and forward. Clarissa weakened against him, bliss cutting through her in trembling waves. She clutched at his hair but still he continued relentlessly. He moved his mouth down to her sex. Clarissa was mortified with embarrassment. How could he be so intimate? How could he know how to pleasure a woman so? She closed her eyes again and surrendered herself to the intense pleasure, her knees buckling under her. He lowered her gently to the grass and parted her legs wide, nuzzling into her, his hand buried between her thighs. His fingers squeezed her breast as she writhed under his touch. She had never felt more alive, more at one with her physical self. It was as if she was about to break into throbbing blossom. She opened her eyes and saw the beauty of his sex pushing blindly against the grass. She reached down in wonder. Uncertain and trembling her hand fastened around the tip. What incredible softness, a velvet she had never imagined. She felt him tremble under her touch. Oh, the wonder of him expanding beneath her.

  He brought his face up to hers and, musky with her scent, kissed her. She wanted him. She wanted him in her, to fill the emptiness inside. She wanted to believe in something. In this. The inherent naturalness of the act. The very beginning when there was the Garden, then Adam, then Eve. And then love. Hot, pulsating, primal, and screaming. The guts of paradise, the hot salty stench of life, and with it, finally, tragedy.

  Joseph slowly entered her. The miracle of his flesh made her weep and gasp until she exploded into one blinding flash and she thought she would die with joy.

  But she didn’t. And afterward, in the sudden silence, nestled against his damp shoulder, Clarissa realized that her faith had returned. Belief lay not in some abstract paternalistic figure in the sky, nor in the painted blood oozing from Christ’s crucified feet or the muttering incantations repeated while kneeling on a cold marble floor, but in an elemental force that filled the sky, the sea, the soil, and every living cell that died, lived, and was reborn. And so it was that the young nun became one with the angel she was sure she had not summoned.

  She turned his face to her to kiss him. With a pang she saw that he was now aging rapidly. Gray was visibly creeping through his hair, wrinkles had begun to eat their way across his skin.

  “I told you we didn’t have much time.” He smiled sadly at her.

  She helped him down the mountain. Holding onto her shoulder, grasping a branch for support, he made his way painfully. His body had already started to buckle, his shoulders hunching over, the flesh of his chest shriveling as his skin mottled.

  By the time they reached the bottom he looked eighty years old. Clarissa lowered him carefully onto a flat rock by the sea. With an effort Joseph lifted his head and gazed at the horizon. The sun was already low in the sky.

  “When the light goes so do I,” he whispered hoarsely before collapsing.

  Clarissa ran to the cave and brought out a chair and a tape cassette player. She sat him down in the cane rocker facing the sea. Joseph was already speechless with exhaustion. Silently he kissed her hand. He was dying and there was nothing she could do. She switched some music on. It floated out majestically, rising and falling with the circling seagulls. Joseph smiled at her, his skin taut across his cheekbones, his eyes hollowed like those of a martyred saint. The sun was just above the horizon.

  “Beautiful. Music of the gods,” he murmured and with visible effort reached for her hand.

  “Do not mourn me,” he said. “I am as ephemeral as your dreams, a shadow dancing on the wall of a cave.”

  Clarissa kissed him and knelt. She held her rosary beads and administered the last rites. With tears streaming down her face she sat beside him and looked at the sea as she stroked his withering fingers.

  The sun edged toward the horizon, lacing the darkening sky with pink and purple hues. Finally it sank below the edge of t
he sea. A moment later Clarissa heard Joseph breathe out his last breath and his flesh grew cold in her hand.

  She laid his arm across his lap and forced herself to watch as his flesh putrefied on the bone. Soon the skeleton began to burst through the dead skin like a strange underworld fungus. The flesh became powder, the bones turned to dust. This is eternity, she thought, gazing not in horror but in wonder at the relentlessness of Nature.

  It was nearly dark but the rising moon was enough to illuminate the cane rocking chair. Joseph’s remains lay as a fine white dust that traced the outline of the living man. Clarissa stood and looked out to sea. She imagined she saw the faint silhouette of a whale’s rippling back moving through the waves. A breeze sprang up. It lifted the dust and carried it across to the sea, where it hovered, cloudlike, for a second and then scattered across the water.

  Three weeks later Clarissa returned to the convent. As she walked toward her cell a voice cried out her name. It was the abbess. The old woman was standing in the graveyard attached to the convent, clutching a wreath of flowers.

  Clarissa hurried over. As the abbess embraced the nun she immediately noticed her transformation. The young woman seemed softer, a new humility shone from her eyes. And she didn’t shrink from touch as she had before.

  “So the retreat was successful?” the abbess inquired gently.

  “It was extraordinary.”

  “Good. So all is as it should be,” the abbess replied as she laid the wreath onto a nearby grave. Suddenly Clarissa noticed the name inscribed on the simple tombstone.

  “Maria Stelopolis!”

  “Of course. She was my aunt, didn’t you know? And she led a very full and happy life,” the abbess said without missing a beat, then winked at her.

  That night, alone in her cell, Clarissa pulled out the photo of Joseph. The toddler was still visible, standing slightly out of focus in the illuminated cave. She propped the photo against the wooden crucifix and stared at it until morning.

  The next day Clarissa went back to the cannery. At the end of the counseling session she walked out the back and was gazing across the small harbor when Georgio ran toward her, dragging his sister by the hand.

  “Ask her,” he said to his sister, pushing her purposefully toward Clarissa.

  “Bless me again, for I see that now you have the touch,” she said to Clarissa in Greek.

  “Nothing has changed,” Clarissa replied in English, but the young girl leaned forward and looked closely at the nun. Over her shoulders she thought she could see the faint outline of wings, or could it be the sunlight behind her? Either way the childless wife was determined to bear the son she had promised her husband.

  “Bless me anyway,” she said in English.

  Reluctantly Clarissa laid her hands over the girl’s womb, then closed her eyes to conjure up an image of Joseph, his face smiling down at her.

  Time passed and Clarissa threw herself into setting up a women’s health-care center on the island, raising funds and organizing for a gynecologist from the mainland to consult two days a month.

  Then one day, as she was walking with Pater Dimitri through the town, she noticed that the village women were staring at her and whispering among themselves. Doors opened as she walked by and a small bunch of housewives gathered and followed her as she continued toward the church.

  “What is it?” she asked Dimitri, nervous that she might have unwittingly offended the community somehow.

  The priest turned toward the villagers. “We shall see,” he said in a low voice.

  One of the women, the butcher’s wife, a strident creature, stepped forward. She approached Clarissa and kneeled in front of her. “O, holy sister, bless me and cure me of my barrenness,” she murmured. The other women nodded in silent approval.

  Pater Dimitri raised the woman to her feet. He spoke to her, then turned to Clarissa. “It seems you have cured Christina, Georgio’s sister, of infertility. They say you have the holy touch.” He grinned, then whispered, “Even if you don’t bless them, don’t worry—faith manifests in many forms.”

  Clarissa paused for a moment, then reached out to place her hands gently on the woman’s womb, and felt life flow from herself into others.

  The Snore

  Aaron Solomon Gluckstein hurried along to the Fulton Street subway, his cumbersome body bent into the icy November wind blowing straight off the Hudson. His shoulders shook with unnatural urgency as he fought the temptation to look to his left and take in the gaping hole on the horizon visible since September 11 that year. May the Rebbe save us all, he thought as the ghost of his cousin rose up before him. Reuben Gluckstein had perished when the second tower fell. He was one of the volunteer medics who had worked for the Hatzolah ambulance—the ambulance service supplied by the Lubavitch community. Reuben’s death had been a great jolt to Aaron’s awareness of his own mortality, a vulnerability compounded by the trauma of the disaster that thrashed daily like a recurring nightmare in the souls of all New Yorkers.

  “Armageddon would be a breeze after this shit,” Aaron muttered, then looked behind him nervously. He’d had the sense of being followed, ever since he’d left the massive granite offices on Fifth, a prickly feeling that burned the back of his neck. A man in a brown anorak and jeans turned a corner sharply; Aaron wondered if he’d seen him earlier, when he stepped out of Safecom.

  Aaron was a claims assessor for one of the biggest insurance companies in the United States. Having completed half a medical degree, before training as an accountant, he’d found himself naturally slipping into insurance. He’d worked for the same company for over twenty years and was considered one of their most loyal and reliable employees. Tenacious with regard to his cases, he was feared among lawyers, many of whom had lost against his evidence in court. And he was fiercely proud of his ethical record…until today.

  What could they do? Kill him? It was a throwaway comment, until he remembered the mysterious disappearance of a colleague several months before. Aaron tried to dismiss the churning fear that had suddenly transformed his stomach into an uncomfortable soup. Hinkel. What case had he been investigating? Aaron racked his brains, but the cold was numbing. Hinkel had been due for retirement; he’d talked about living in Taos, New Mexico, he’d even bought himself a rundown hacienda, but it was strange how one day he suddenly just wasn’t there. His desk had been cleared and made devoid of anything that had marked it as Hinkel’s. Aaron had never heard from him again.

  Come on, Aaron told himself now, this is the civilized world, shit like that only happens in bad films, surely? But his accelerating walk betrayed his fear. Sucking the wind in between his teeth, he tucked the file he was carrying farther under his arm. As he descended into the steaming subway entrance he deliberately switched his thoughts to a pleasanter image: Miriam, his wife, waiting for him at home. Married for only one year, just to sound out the word wife made Aaron, a corpulent man who tended to disguise his shyness with aggression, smile.

  The tight-knit Lubavitch community in Crown Heights had all but despaired of seeing the only son of their oldest matriarch—ninety-year-old Myra Gluckstein—married. At fifty-two years of age, Aaron’s timidity was legendary. It was rumored he never took his clothes off in front of another person, even at the Mikvah in front of other men. Of Hungarian descent Aaron stood at six foot five inches and weighed in at twenty-five stone. He was blessed with a jutting chin and the kind of nose you could imagine leading an army, but Aaron seemed only to employ his testosterone for business. He was useless in the pursuit of women. He also displayed an unfortunate revulsion for women pursuing him—of which there had been many. After all he was a desirable male: a God-fearing Jew who took the Rebbe at his word, knew his Gemara backward and his Mishnah off by heart and, most importantly, was a man of means. In short, an honorable individual; a mensch. And an unmarried mensch living with his ninety-year-old mother in one of the largest brownstones in Crown Heights was naturally an attractive commodity.

  By the time Aa
ron had reached thirty the community was rife with rumors that he was (a) maybe homosexual, God forbid; or (b) a virgin.

  Luckily for him, by the time he hit forty most of the mothers had forgotten he was single at all. Even the widows had stopped pointing him out from the women’s balcony at temple and the supply of loaves of fresh-baked challah ceased appearing on his doorstep. Aaron Solomon Gluckstein had become invisible…until Miriam.

  His meeting with Miriam was a secret arrangement Myra Gluckstein made for her son via the Internet. The community had their own special Website, www.mitmazel.com, for such needs. Peering through her bifocals the matriarch screened dozens of profiles until she arrived at Miriam. Myra stared thoughtfully at the black-and-white photograph of the mousy thirty-year-old whose dark eyes seemed cursed with the same painful shyness as her son’s. The fact that the young woman listed poetry as her hobby and Rilke as her favorite poet clinched it for the older woman, who, in the 1930s, had taught philosophy and European literature at New York University. She was still a radical atheist then, before Abraham Gluckstein seduced both her body and her soul into Orthodoxy.

  “If she likes Rilke she’ll be a romantic, and if she’s a romantic she’ll see only what she wants to see, which, with God’s blessing, can only be a good thing in the case of my son,” Myra, a pragmatist, muttered as she jotted down Miriam’s mother’s number in Chicago.

  A week later the reluctant candidate flew to New York (only her second ever trip there); a month later Miriam and Aaron were married. And much to everyone’s amazement, not least of all Aaron’s, it turned out to be a union of great love as well as great bashfulness.

  And so it was, on that bitterly cold evening in November, that Aaron Solomon Gluckstein found himself hurrying to the front door of his house on Union Street, Crown Heights. The warmth of inside shone through the stained glass of the door and the smell of roasting meat wafted out. He glimpsed the shadow of his wife busily passing by. I love her, he reflected, and his happiness caught in his throat like a tickle, an effervescent sensation that immediately evaporated at the thought of the file tucked under his arm. Aaron kissed his fingers, then touched the mezuzah that hung over the front door for good luck.