Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  But strangely enough her mother had been telling the truth.

  “It is the tradition among our people to recall our sorrow at the destruction of the Temple…”

  “… by breaking something,” Marsha said in Liane’s ear, “at the instant of highest celebration, the union of two souls. Barbaric, wouldn’t you say?”

  The groom, who looked like a young Bill Clinton, a happy-go-lucky hound dog out to sniff his way around the world, gave a blithe shrug, set his foot down lightly on the glass to check its placement, then, satisfied, stamped down hard. A most gratifying crunch, and he grinned widely.

  “In this way,” Marsha continued, and it occurred to Liane that she was trying to be friendly, to say I’m on your side, “we take destruction unto ourselves, we become the destroyers! Mazel tov!”

  “Mazel tov!” Liane said, feeling as if something had snapped in her, too—a vial of smelling salts—she wanted to laugh, dance, take part in the thing, whatever it was. Naomi beamed on Trevor’s arm; her father, who with his orchestra conductor’s mane and pallor looked exactly like Jehovah, regal and mischievous at once, linked his arm in Barbara’s, and they came striding up the aisle with Trevor’s parents in the rear. A drop slid between Liane’s breasts: it was ninety-seven degrees and so still, not a tablecloth corner lifted. The fat roses hung their heads in their immense bouquets. It had happened, whatever happens at a wedding.

  “Mazel tov, Mazel tov!”

  “How touching,” Marsha whispered, “they’ve imported some real Jews for the occasion.”

  “Like stocking a pond!” Liane said. They were two lizards on a sunny rock, Marsha and she. “But was it? A genuine rabbi, I mean?”

  Marsha raised her eyes to the Unitarian heavens. “Genuine rabbis, my dear, do not reconcile Silverbergs with Tarringtons. Remember when Sharon married Mike O’Connor? Every rabbi she asked turned her down. Even the one from Provincetown, who married Joel and Adam at the Ramrod Room, said he ‘didn’t do mixed weddings’! Sharon thought he meant he wouldn’t marry women to men!”

  “Mazel tov,” Liane called as the bridal party went by, and saw a cloud shade Barbara’s face as if she took it as a gibe. Barbara had a Judaic sore spot, and Liane was always tempted to poke it, maybe to see if it matched her own. The last time they’d been out to dinner, Barbara had exclaimed, “It means the death of the Jews!” loudly just as the waiter arrived, so his spiel about salmon in cracked peppercorns with a ginger-wasabi sauce had sounded like a formal apology.

  “I mean, congratulations!” Liane amended, and Barbara’s eyes narrowed as if, though Mazel tov was suspicious, this was a real insult. Liane looked away. And glimpsed, suddenly, the profile of … Gabe Mizner! Or, a man with the same wild hair, square chin, and broken angled nose. It couldn’t be, though, the real Gabe would be younger. And Gabe lived in Jerusalem, but then one felt so much closer to Jerusalem today, and already there’d been the miracle of the genealogical table, and the heat made everything so strange—

  And they were all here together for the only time in their lives—everyone could fall in love as he liked. She followed Gabe’s ghost with her eyes as she’d followed the original Gabe at the bas mitzvah reception long ago. There was something in his face … the shape of the upper lip, the set of the jaw … something fascinating. Because of it she felt a suppressed excitement, as if something shocking and wonderful was about to happen. When he was out of her view for a moment her spirits clouded, until her eye lit on someone else, a woman whose hips spread wide as a double bass under her chiffon skirt. All Liane’s work to look slender, and here she found herself mesmerized by amplitude—how typical, how infuriating! This woman soon became more womanly yet, sitting on a step to weep, then abandoned to weeping, rocking her small daughter on her lap while the child gazed out through the embrace brightly as if this were the only window she had on the world. Liane imagined the woman’s husband had just died … or a divorce maybe, or … Whatever, she had never seen such frank public sorrow and this attracted her, too; she had forgotten what a luxury sorrow can be.

  As she watched the weeping woman, Gabe’s ghost seemed to be watching her. His eyes glittered avidly in a pale face: he looked Russian, she thought, without knowing what that might mean. One knows so little! But at the word Russia her mind raced, past daffodils and snowscapes (Dr. Zhivago), dachas in the Crimea where hearts beat all the faster for the fragility of the souls they must sustain (Chekhov), peasants haying (Anna Karenina)—then smashed up against a red wall (Stalin). That was her impression of Russia, and part of her impression of Gabe’s ghost, who would be conjuring some equally ill-informed idea of her right now. But when Derek excused himself, Gabe’s eyes followed him. He hadn’t been watching Liane at all.

  Derek was tending in the direction of the only African-American guests, a thin fragile woman with a painfully ingratiating smile and hair straightened, then curled, and—maybe her daughter? She looked as supple as her mother was brittle, with an animal grace Liane envied and would never have mentioned aloud since it was probably a racist notion. The back of her dress dipped far enough below her waist that it was clear she had not confined herself in any ridiculous undergarments—a dancer, Liane thought, or a goddess.

  “I’m going over to meet them,” Derek said, “they look so alone.” But another couple had gotten there first—old leftists, she guessed, still marching along the road to justice and thus clear-eyed, handsome and strong at seventy, and aware of their presence, their effect. He looked so easily authoritative he hardly had to move, but she, in silk blouse and pants the exact blue-gray of Mao’s tunic, seemed to move with the breeze. Her thick gray braid fell to her waist—she’d have been a cerebral, modernist dancer, cool as if her body were just an idea—Liane imagined the black woman had been her student, that they’d parted when the younger allowed her senses to overrule her intellect and broke her teacher’s heart. By now, though, the older woman would have had second thoughts; the younger second feelings …

  “What makes them seem particularly alone?” Liane asked. “None of us knows anyone. We’re all standing around in twos.”

  She turned to see the old leftist laugh, too heartily, at something the younger woman said, and break away toward the bar.

  “They’re probably friends of Barbara’s, from the ACLU,” he said knowingly. “I’ll just go over and say ‘Well, I see you’re all by yourselves,’” he said.

  “They are not all by themselves! People are trampling each other to reach them,” Liane snapped. “If you’re bound and determined to go, don’t do it to be a good boy.” His beneficent instincts flew awry: once some sot on the next bar stool had made an incoherent crack about Israel and Derek had introduced himself as Howard Goldstein and produced an erudite, if grandiloquent, lecture on the history of anti-Semitism.

  Or the Irishman they’d met on a train in France, Derek suddenly adopting a thick brogue and sympathizing with the man’s assumed craving for a pint of Guinness. “It’s the world’s great beer!” he’d protested when Liane, seeing the man wince, shook her head. “Yeats, Joyce, Guinness—Ireland’s pride!”

  He only wanted to dissolve that big white house he’d come from in an alcoholic solution, and join the real people—the ones in the bar. Her heart softened—she’d always said she married him because he made being a Wasp seem so ethnic. Ethnic meaning that cord between a man’s heritage and his aspiration where shame and aversion mix with longing and pride, exciting a woman’s tenderness and her passion. The mystery of his childhood had entranced her, tempting her to rifle the trunks in his mother’s attic, smell the heavy woolens, unfold the disintegrating letters sent back a century ago, from Calcutta or Singapore. The house was filled with Indian tapestry and Chinese porcelain and Indonesian brass, and redolent of sandalwood still. Yes, they ate dinners boiled beyond texture, then thoroughly creamed—they were above food, vain of their stoicism, thrifty and flinty and all the things those ancestors (the Reverend Sewall, Vestina the temperance crusader) wh
o glowered on their walls had passed down. It was very exotic, really—entirely grim and strange.

  “Go, go on,” she said, remembering that he had (would that she could have seen it) dated Angela Davis after college, brought her home to his assiduously welcoming parents. All was smooth and lovely until his mother forgot herself and directed her guest to clear the table. To be black, always marked off so certain people would hate you and others fawn on you, without knowing you in any way! To have the universal unconscious attached to you so you’re dragging the carcass of history behind you even when you’re just running in to buy a bottle of milk—no, no! What can it be, to love some group of people, some race or religion? It’s no better than hating them!

  As if he were reading her thoughts Derek started reminiscing about his childhood vacations … Butterworth Lodge, on Lake Setunquet, the lodge, the clambakes, the canoeing parties—

  “No Jews in those canoes,” said Marsha, looking as if further shellfish references might endanger her, and gazing at Derek very distantly as if she’d remembered suddenly an ancient feud between them.

  “But you’re a Unitarian!” Liane teased.

  “Not by the standards of Butterworth Lodge!” Marsha sighed. “No, I was really only a Unitarian wannabe.”

  (So you admit, you switch religious purely for conversational convenience! Liane thundered, in her mind.)

  “I only looked in at the windows of those houses, crammed with, with … Chinese gongs, for God’s sake, and embroidered footstools … and among them his mother” (she and Liane had a common subject in their horror of Derek’s mother), “this little white-haired lady no less imperious for her senility, got up in so many layers of lace and satin you thought she might die and just be lost among all the things—”

  “They were missionaries!” Derek said, taking mock offense. “People gave them things, gongs and things—”

  “Yes, and you see how their son followed in their footsteps, bringing lost sheep like me into the fold,” Marsha went on. “I remember the first time I went for dinner there—no one talked! I mean, no subject was polite enough!”

  “We were Wasps!” Derek cried. “That’s our culture! The Japanese take their shoes off and sit on the floor!”

  “So there they sat, saying how nice the weather had been, how leafy the tree was, even how good the dinner was, as if you could taste it! I believe an alarm would have sounded if a clove of garlic so much as entered that house.”

  “A chime perhaps, certainly not an alarm,” Derek said, imitating the tone of voice his mother had shared with Julia Child. “Blandness is a venerable Wasp tradition. I’ve never heard such bigotry! Let me tell you something—after Marsha and I got married I sat down to read the Old Testament, I thought I ought to get to know my wife’s people. Well, one tribe came and asked to join the Israelites, and the Israelites said they’d be welcome if the men were circumcised, so they submitted to circumcision and while they were all doubled over in agony the Israelites swarmed down and slaughtered them! I thought, my God, who are these monsters? I read no further.”

  “Very polite,” said Marsha, with an “I told you so” smile.

  * * *

  The harp was zipped into its sack and trundled back down the driveway. Night was coming—high luminous reaches of blue showed beyond the maples massed overhead, and across the street the still waters of the bay glowed. Next door a lamp blinked on behind a leaded window. One had the feeling of wealth, that is, of beauty, safety, and abundance. Dinner was served, and onstage a blues band was checking the mikes, which meant Liane would have to beg someone to dance with her, as Derek felt dancing was somehow demeaning.

  “If she were a real rabbi,” Marsha went on, finding Rabbi Melamed’s place card at their table, “she’d be seated with the real Jews. As it is they’ve got her surrounded by you and Derek, who don’t have the radar.…”

  Or else God does have a plan, Liane thought, and I’ve been called here, seated next to the rabbi, for a reason. Who knew?… A semi-rabbi might be more sympathetic toward Liane the instant Jew. But Liane could hardly lift her eyes from her plate, never mind introduce herself or tell her story. They’d accuse her of lying, shouldering in where she didn’t belong; they’d take the wonderful secret away from her. She bolted her chicken brochette while the rabbi spoke of her other job—she was an interior decorator, which might explain the dress—and detailed her exercise regimen, which began with a short run and ended with sixty-one laps at the health club pool. Fortified by the risotto with spring vegetables, Liane imagined backing this woman up against a wall and informing her that rabbis are supposed to be old and bearded and speak in parables, and never, ever, think about interior decoration, and certainly not go on and on about their damnable aerobic fitness as if endorphins were more important than faith.

  “Why sixty-one?” she asked instead, hoping to hear it was a number of mystical significance, maybe from cabala—but it had to do with the length of the pool. The phrase citrus allergy floated over from Marsha’s conversation, light as the lime sorbet.

  To whom could she say it? “I’m a Jew, a Jew!” What could it mean, the subterranean pull, all these years, of a religion or culture she hardly knew? The sight of little Rebecca Mizner, exalted suddenly, bearing the Torah down the aisle, the prayers, the cantor, the men in their tallises, her mother saying, in that lugubrious churchy hush with which she had kept her husband’s utilitarian attitudes at bay: “Do you see, here the sacred is a natural part of everyday life.” Then her mother had her own marriage of twenty years—never mind the four children—annulled. These religions know how to serve up the barbaric necessities, in a fragrant, mysterious sauce. One loves, one ceases to love. One wants a bite of Christ, a sip of his blood … or a slice of the baby’s penis, just a little one. One sins and wants to atone, fasts and feasts, dreads and longs for the moment when, finally one can set the dearly beloved body aflame.

  Feeling herself swept into the current of life, at thirteen, seeing Rebecca Mizner initiated into the fearful mysteries, she had felt so ready to say yes, yes, and let life take her, and there came Gabe Mizner back from the Six Day War. He’d been in mortal danger for a sacred reason, while Vietnam, a perpetual motion meat grinder, churned on. She’d asked him to dance, finally, and been mortified to see him look at her as a child—he who seemed to represent the entire continent of adulthood: eros, danger, belief. Years later a man, kissing her, called her “my shiksa,” and she determined to hear love in it, as “You’re not my mother, I can fuck you into the next world…” which he did for some months, until he began to feel she hadn’t properly bathed.

  “When you shower with someone you’re about to make love to, you don’t always wash behind your ears,” she’d said, hurt and prim.

  “It’s not the ears…” She just hadn’t been clean enough, that was all.

  “So, there was a mikvah?” Marsha baited the rabbi, eyes sparkling.

  “Well, in Reform Judaism…” She looked down at her plate.

  Lenny came over and put a hand on Derek’s shoulder. “Fishman’s been following you,” he announced.

  “Fishman!” Derek said. “Where?”

  Len looked toward the bar, the buffet, the dance floor—“I don’t know. I just saw him a minute ago.” Then he leaned down and whispered dramatically: “He wants to know all. I don’t think it’s too much to say he’s obsessed with you!”

  “What?” Derek asked in mock-horror, though it was anything but odd. Everyone shared Fishman’s fascination—Liane had used to feel it herself. And why? Because Derek looked like those ancestors, like a Wasp, his eyes stern, mouth set in righteous fortitude and cold certainty. Who ever sees such a facial expression today? He was counter-charismatic: seeming distant even when he was right beside you, slicing through a crowd as if nothing mattered but his destination (the bar). Liane thought of him as a deacon, who, finding his church insufficiently austere, had become an atheist as a more physical man might have turned to vandalism. Which
is to say, she’d made a romance of him, a story based on his ancestry—the way one makes a story out of everyone.

  “Len, why is Fishman legendary?” she asked, and his pursed lips trembled with suppressed comedy.

  “It’s not something you can really put into words,” he said. “I was going to introduce you…”

  “After all these years?” Derek said. “I’m not sure we should break the spell.”

  “Dance with me!” Liane begged the rabbi’s husband.

  “Your husband will kill me,” he said, glancing in Derek’s direction as if literally in fear. Which was correct! If people fall into love and fascination based on the color of eyes or the angle of nose, then they can stand in mortal terror of each other for just the same reasons. She’d had a Jewish doctor once who told her he’d used to cover the emergency room on Christmas. But he’d learned: “That’s when the guns come out.” A shiver had run over him, and he looked at her with eyes that seemed to have glimpsed a specter. Driving away from his office that windy day, she’d had to swerve to avoid a rogue Christmas tree that was barreling toward her like a tinseled tumbleweed. Life is treacherous; is it any wonder people stick with their familiars?

  “He won’t kill you!” she said. “He may be willing to pay you.” And she pulled him toward the dance floor though he looked utterly miserable. Derek jumped up as soon as they left and headed toward the black women, while Gabe’s ghost watched from across the lawn.

  So, Gabe’s ghost must be Fishman! This seemed nearly a miracle. Now she could follow his movements as he followed Derek, as Derek pursued the black women, who … well, it would be interesting to know. They were all part of the great human chain of stalkers, each avidly watching the next, intrigued by difference, consoled by similarity, searching, searching for some face, some being that might promise perfect union, absolute satisfaction.

  All the musicians were black, and all older, so they carried a mystical authority as if they might not be flawed live people but great blues players from history, become ideals now they were dead. The deep thrum of the bass felt like a man’s voice when your ear is to his chest, and the singer in her immensity might have been Mother Nature; she swayed like a windblown tree. The weeping woman was dancing with abandon now, as if she’d shed all her tears and been utterly freed. It was dark, the day’s heat dispelled; the waiters with their napkined bottles were no longer needed; there had been enough wine, enough talk, enough of everything, there was need only of music now. Everyone was alone, finally, in his own imagination, free to cast the silvered net of fantasy over whomever he chose. Liane thought of the weeping woman undressed—the frank swelling of her breasts, her thighs, the split red as a fig … yes, it was divine, being a woman, a person of the hips—she smiled at the rabbi’s horribly nervous husband, draped her arms over his shoulders, and leaned back against the swell of the music, until, to her amazement and his relief, Derek cut in.