The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  Singh smiled. “It’s not nearly as risky as many patients seem to think. You can safely resume sexual activity in a couple of weeks. Okay?”

  I hadn’t seen Valérie since I’d been in here, though she’d repeatedly called to check up on me. I’d asked the nurses to assure her there was no need to visit. The kids had been here pretty much nonstop—especially Samara, who, though she didn’t say much, stalked the hospital with a haunted look and insisted on sleeping in a chair in the hallway—and I didn’t want them running into Val. But I knew I’d want to see her before long.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Your daughter and son are here to take you home, then. Take care, Mr. Meyer.”

  Singh left and a nurse materialized at my side to transfer me, despite my protestations, to a wheelchair. She smiled at me with bright green eyes—oblivious to my rage at that traitor, my body—then offered to wheel me into the hall. I told her I could take it from here.

  The first person I saw was Samara, her arms crossed against anxiety or the artificial cool of the hospital wing. Behind her Lev was frowning nervously, but even that could not detract from the luminous quality of his boyish face, a face just saved from too-beautifulness by the tiny scar etched above his blue eyes and below the dark wisps of his hair. It was a sight that never failed to make me smile, and so, approaching him, I smiled—but only for an instant. In the next instant I realized that, just a few feet away, still and silent in an old-fashioned black dress, was Valérie.

  The kids came toward me and said their hellos. I hugged them both, all the while signaling at Valérie behind their backs, trying to convey through subtle dilations of my pupils that she should keep her distance. She must have understood my code well enough, because she just stood there, eyeing me darkly with a gorgeous torment in her face and hands.

  Lev wheeled me toward the elevator, chattering happily. Samara followed at a distance. Craning my neck backward, I saw her flash a glance at Val but couldn’t catch the meaning of her expression. Did she know? The elevator arrived, its doors opened, we were swallowed up. Probably not.

  The second we got outside, we were struck by a wave of humidity so powerful as to wipe out any higher functions of the brain. The pills I had taken were making me tired and woozy, and because the June air had a stickiness that made any movement whatsoever, speech included, seem gratuitous, I was silent as I watched the dark clouds rolling in overhead.

  While Samara went to bring the car around, Lev’s overbright voice filled the space between us, babbling about how glad our neighbors—Glassman, Katz—would be to see me back at home. I didn’t bother to remind him that these were his friends, not mine. When the car appeared, Lev asked, “Do you need help getting in?” and I grunted, “Yes,” feeling like a pathetic child as he eased me into the backseat.

  Samara turned on the air conditioning, and her long, dark hair billowed around her shoulders, just as her mother’s used to do before we married and she started covering up. Look how adult she seems behind the wheel, I marveled, as though years, not weeks, typically passed between sightings of her. I wished she would say something. Banalities like Lev’s, questions like Singh’s—something, anything. She said nothing.

  On the seat beside me were a couple of hastily packed oversize purses, a sleeve and a hairbrush peeking out of one of them. “Are you going somewhere?” I asked her.

  She glanced in the rearview mirror. “Oh, that. No, I’m going to move back home for a couple of weeks.”

  “Oh?” I whispered.

  “It’s no big deal. Classes are over now anyways, so.”

  “Right,” I said, more casually. “Summer break.” But the idea that she was concerned enough to come back, even if only temporarily, even if she insisted on minimizing the gesture, touched and surprised me.

  As we turned onto Côte-Sainte-Catherine, the humidity finally broke. The downpour was slow at first. Then, before you knew it, it was a flood. That was how it always happened in this beautiful, lunatic, impossible city. A cold rain fell down like manna into the gaping mouths of potholes, and, overflowing these, cascaded into the sewers. Samara turned on the windshield wipers. They swished back and forth with that small clicking sound that most people found comforting but that I, for reasons that were now opaque to me, had come to detest.

  I took a deep breath and placed a hand on my chest. Beneath the sounds of the rain and the cars, beneath the clicking of the windshield wipers, I thought I could now detect another sort of noise entirely. The sound of my own heart beating. The sound of a murmur. I closed my eyes and listened. Opened them and smiled. Closed them again and prayed for traffic.

  The morning after I got home from the hospital, everything looked different. The framed photographs, the mounted diplomas on the walls—they all bore a certain unheimlichkeit, an uncanniness that set me on edge.

  In my bedroom, opening a small trunk that had not been cracked in several years, I thought I smelled Miriam’s perfume lingering in the clothes. This was doubly ridiculous; not only had she been gone for more than fifteen years, but the scent I imagined myself to be picking up was that of a very ancient perfume, one she’d worn when we were both newly religious yeshiva students—she at the women’s seminary and I at the men’s. It was a pale vanilla scent that clashed absurdly with the perfumes I’d encountered since her death: the bold musk and spicy cardamom notes favored by my grad students were so strong they’d soaked into my shirts, making me worry that my kids would one day ask why I kept coming home smelling like the fragrance aisle of a department store. Luckily, they never seemed to notice.

  Between the strains of prayers drifting toward me from the living room—Lev’s joyful, nasal voice singing out one psalm after another—I heard my heart murmuring again. A rush of blood moving back and forth, back and forth, and behind it all a subtle whistling or whispering, like wind through a flute or breath through a harmonica. There was an empty space in there, as if the tissues of my heart were contracting, making room—for what?

  Struck by a sudden memory, I got up and snuck across the hall.

  Lev’s bedroom, with its pale blue walls and neatly made bed, felt peaceful even in his absence. It was as if, simply by living here, he had rarefied the air around him. I scanned the titles on his bookshelf until I found the volume I was looking for: one of Lev’s early primers on Hasidism, a sort of religious digest that cobbled together the ideas of various mystics, recasting them in language simple enough to entice new followers. I picked it up sheepishly—years ago, I had tried to warn Lev off this proselytizing genre—then flipped to the passage I remembered:

  You must make your heart like an empty instrument so that the spirit of God can blow through you. Any blockage at all will prevent the making of this divine music. Even something that is traditionally considered good and worthy can constitute a blockage: knowledge, for instance. What is required is a certain emptiness, or quietness, of mind.

  I gaped at the page. As much as I had always found the anti-intellectual approach to God distasteful, wasn’t this kind of right? Knowledge was a blockage, or at least it sometimes could be. After all, birds didn’t fly by studying the laws of aerodynamics; any brain capable of carrying that type of knowledge would be too heavy to stay up in the air. Flights into the Godhead called for weightlessness—that seemed like the main, if not the only, mystical prerequisite. And it was a prerequisite that I—weighed down by the cumbersome luggage of a graduate-level education—could never attain.

  Taking Lev’s book with me, I returned to my room and laid myself carefully on the bed. A haze descended on me; I fell asleep.

  I woke to a persistent ringing that filled the house. After a moment, I realized it was the telephone. Shuffling into the kitchen in bathrobe and slippers, I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  Silence.

  I hung up, but my hand remained on the receiver for a long ti
me, as if contact with the plastic would allow me to divine, through osmosis perhaps, the identity of the mystery caller with the blocked ID. For the thousandth time in the past ten years, I found myself wondering who it could possibly be. It was not a wrong number, prank call, or simple coincidence; a decade of repeated calls had ruled those three options out. But who, then, did that leave?

  The kitchen was hot and clammy and I was sweating profusely. I needed some air.

  When I opened the front door, I found Samara and Jenny sitting on the stoop, their shoulders touching. “Hello, Jenny,” I said.

  They sprang apart like startled animals.

  “Hi, hey, hi, Mr. Meyer.”

  “Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, um, very. How are you feeling?”

  “Much better, thanks. Do you two have anything fun planned for this afternoon?”

  Samara stared at me but said nothing. Jenny said, “Not really.”

  “Good day for a bike ride,” I suggested, keeping my voice as casual as possible and nodding toward the garage where Sam’s old bike was stowed.

  “I haven’t used that bike in about—” Sam stopped herself. “The tires are probably flat.”

  “Yes. Well. Just a thought. See you girls later,” I said, and retreated into the house.

  Closing the door, I made a mental note to add bicycles to the litany of things Sam and I did not talk about. I wondered whether she remembered that time, weeks after her mother died, when I had taken her and her brother cycling in the middle of the night. She had complained, earlier that day, that we never did anything fun together. And so, besieged with parental guilt, unable to sleep, I had woken them up in the small hours and insisted that they come outside—I would not tell them why. They balked when they saw their bicycles in front of the house, Sam’s red ten-speed and Lev’s green one-speed all newly polished and poised for flight. And fly we did: up suburban streets and down back alleys, through empty playgrounds and past deserted schoolyards. By the time we got to the mountain they were laughing and singing and swinging their bikes back and forth beneath the streaming stars. It was six thirty when I finally got them to bed. Years later, I still remembered the sibilance of Samara’s breath as she slipped into sleep; the cupid’s bow of her mouth, not quite closed, suffused in the orange glow of dawn. But she was too young, then, to remember such a thing now. As far as she was concerned, I had probably never taken them for a single ride. I had probably never taken them anywhere.

  Back in the kitchen, I poured a glass of lemonade and took the pills Singh had prescribed out of the cupboard. Honestly, for such a smart girl, Samara could be surprisingly naïve sometimes. As if anyone could fail to notice how happy she’d been since she and Jenny bumped into each other at a college art show, rekindling their friendship (“friendship”) after a years-long rift and later moving in together. How her features softened whenever the girl called or appeared at her side. Who could fail to understand exactly what this softness meant?

  I knew, I knew, of course I knew—but she didn’t know I knew. Why wouldn’t she just come out and say it already? Did she think I would judge, disapprove? Didn’t she understand that I didn’t believe in any of that traditional twaddle, that Leviticus 18 junk?

  I swallowed the pills down with the lemonade, then put the glass in the sink. Through the window I could see right into the Glassmans’ kitchen, and there was Mrs. Glassman, whose recent stroke had forced her to walk with a cane yet who was now pulling fresh challah out of the oven while Mr. Glassman sat at the table, sipping tea and not saying a word. I endeavored to remember a time when Samara and I used to speak freely. As a child she’d been talkative, even bubbly: at six or seven, she would sit on the floor of my study, running her fingers through the carpet, listening to me explain about Zeno and Pythagoras and Plotinus, asking me questions and spouting her theories . . . Six or seven. Right before her mother died. Was that when she became so secretive, so silent?

  The smell of freshly baked dough wafted over from the Glassmans’. I closed my eyes and saw myself coming home from work, briefcase in hand, to find Miriam in the kitchen teaching the kids how to bake challah. Sam giggled, trying and failing and trying again to copy her mother’s motions as she braided the ropes of dough. Lev’s pudgy fingers kneaded purposelessly, hitting the dough just for fun, and then he reached for the brush and dipped it in orange juice and sneaked up on Miriam and painted her cheek. She snatched him up and rubbed flour on his cheek—and then Sam was into it, too, squealing with delight, smearing both of them with flour and juice and dough. I stood there, marveling at the three of them together, their robust physicality. It hit me that although these were my children as much as hers, I had no idea how to interact with them. Certainly not with that simple solid faith of Miriam’s, a faith that was perfect for kids but that I knew even then I would never be able to access. She died that summer and a yeasty silence filled the house and rose, inch by inch, until it filled the space between us.

  Fully a week had passed since my release from the hospital before I finally screwed up the courage to call Val. When I did, she answered on the fifth, not the first, ring: a great relief.

  “Allo?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Oh.” Guarded. Concerned but distant. “How are you?”

  “Much better now. Listen, I saw you at the hospital, I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to—”

  “It’s okay. I saw your kids, by the way. Ils ont l’air très sympa.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Especially your son.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everyone says.”

  “Your daughter, she was giving me a bit of a funny—”

  “Listen, how are you? Eckhart treating you okay these days?”

  “Yes, he’s being very nice. In fact, I just finished a chapter this morning, so. Maybe we could take a coffee?”

  “What, now, you mean?”

  “Yes. I can pick you up in, we’ll say, half an hour?”

  I hesitated.

  “The kids are at home?”

  “No, actually, they’re gone.” Samara was out, presumably with Jenny. Lev was at Alex’s, probably building some telescope or model rocket.

  “So I can come get you.”

  “I—okay. But I’m not very—I mean, I may be a bit tired still.”

  “Of course. What’s your address?”

  With a certain constriction in the vocal cords, I gave it to her. Then, hanging up, I went to the bathroom and assessed my reflection in the mirror. For a man who had long prided himself on his physical appearance, his health, his ability to get by just upon a smile, baby, this was a sorry sight; hardly the stuff of student fantasy. My hair seemed grayer. My skin looked sallow and strained. I saw, or imagined that I saw, a yellowish tinge around the eyes. So much for the sexy-professor trope, I thought, nevertheless doing my best to clean up. I shaved, put on a fresh shirt and pants and, for the first time in a week, substituted loafers for terry-cloth slippers.

  By the time I heard her car pull up, I was hemorrhaging confidence fast. I opened the door; she was walking up the stone path, her green dress swirling about her knees, her step buoyant yet measured, as if she came to this house every day. Her smile, too, had the ease that comes with daily routine—but this was not that, could never be that, and I gripped her firmly by the elbow and steered her back toward the car. Only once we were shut up inside it did I kiss her; curiously, as soon as I did so, my anxiety melted away. I kissed her again, harder, and beneath my mouth I felt her smile with all the winsome coyness, all the premature cunning of her twenty-six years.

  “I see you’re getting your strength back,” she said.

  “Well. You have that effect. And you—I’m happy to see you chose green, not black, today. When I saw you in the hospital wearing that funereal dress . . .”

  She smiled, but the smile was only in the mouth. She turned the key in the ignition and we pulled away from the house. For a moment there was silence.

&nb
sp; “So where are you taking me?” I asked, strenuously jocular.

  She named the place. “Have you heard of it?”

  I hadn’t.

  “You’ll love it,” she said, and grinned at the road.

  Our destination turned out to be a coffee shop in Val’s neck of the woods, the Plateau Mont-Royal. Outfitted with mismatched chairs, “radical” zines, Scrabble boards, and a strictly vegan menu, it projected the look-how-quirky-and-idiosyncratic-we-can-be air that I’d come to associate with undergrad students.

  No sooner had we sat down with our coffees than a scruffy, plaid-wearing guy came toward us bearing a pamphlet. He was angry about pesticides, or the overuse of plastic spoons, or coffee shops’ failure to replace wooden stir sticks with fettuccine—and he wanted us to help him fight whatever corporate interests were perpetrating this travesty. Val smiled and nodded and accepted his pamphlet and he ambled away. By the window two girls wearing oversize glasses and baggy thrift-store dresses were talking in righteous, high-pitched tones about “development porn” and “post-structural semiotics.” At the table beside ours another girl, sporting yellow stockings and a maroon dress and what appeared to be the exact same oversize glasses, was attacking Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology with a highlighter.

  I raised an eyebrow at Val. “It’s all so—vaguely cultish, isn’t it?”

  She smiled into her mug.

  “Why did you bring me here, of all places?”

  She shrugged, eyes sparkling. “Isn’t it obvious? They make really good coffee!”

  I laughed and took a sip. She was right: it was hot and clear and bright. I studied her over the rim, my appreciation for her deepening. The other students I’d slept with would never have brought me here; they’d have known I would hate it, and they’d only permitted themselves to love what I loved. But Val had no interest in ticking boxes, no patience for costuming. She loved what she loved—and that was what made her my Valérie, ma valkyrie.

  With an upward puff of air, she blew the bangs out of her eyes—one of her lovely unconscious gestures—and then, glancing at her watch, said she needed to make a quick call. Take your time, I told her. I was happy to watch as she stepped into the slanting rays, to marvel at her litheness, her tallness, to contemplate how lucky I’d been to land her in my graduate seminar last spring.