The Mystics of Mile End
Page 11
It was only once I was lying flat on my back in the tubular MRI machine that I felt something like fear. I found myself wishing, for the first time in decades, that my parents could be at my side. Wishing for the iron-fisted but stolid presence of my engineer father, the meek and comforting presence of my mother. Their scientific-mindedness. Their zero tolerance for mystical mumbo-jumbo. The total and utter secularness of them. All the qualities that had driven me away at age seventeen, and straight into the arms of the yeshiva world, where I’d met Miriam—and then, years later, straight out of that world and into the world of academia.
Theirs had been a life of dinner parties and office parties, carved turkeys and apple pies: two personalities happily constrained by the trappings of the nuclear family and the traditional values that went along with it. There was no room in that tight-lipped world of theirs for doubt. It was an environment built for certainties, not for faith. Because there could be no faith, there could also be no miracles, and as a lonely geeky teenager I had wanted miracles, had needed the exhilarating upward swing into intimacy with something greater and wiser than myself, had been prepared to sacrifice anything—intellectual integrity included—on the altar of that great need.
But extreme swings of the pendulum lead, almost inexorably, to extreme swings in the opposite direction. And so, just a few years after Miriam gave birth to Lev, naming him “heart” in the full burst of our shared devoutness, I began to realize that my wife—like my whole religious life—embodied nothing more nor less than another iteration of certainty. Her belief was exactly like my parents’, only reversed. Repulsed by the bright glow of faith in her cheeks, I scurried into the cool and comforting shadows of forbidden bookstores. There, I read the sorts of secular treatises that would have made my yeshiva teachers spit in disgust. I was drawn to philosophy at first—Nietzsche, Kafka—and then to biblical criticism. As I surrendered the idea that every word in the Bible came directly from the mouth of God, another idea—that life was utterly meaningless and that was perfectly okay—leaped up to take its place. I dropped out of yeshiva and enrolled in university. Because I gave the impression that I was abandoning only a school, not the faith, Miriam accepted it. She wasn’t happy, but she accepted it.
And then I discovered Gershom Scholem. The founder of the academic study of kabbalah was doubly forbidden to me: for an Orthodox Jew under the age of forty to study mysticism was already taboo; to study it using this secular apparatus was unimaginable. I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop. In Scholem, I found a thinker who thrilled not to the long etcetera of petty details typical of organized religion, but to the transcendent aspects of Judaism. To read Scholem was to run along a razor blade, its sweet edge cutting into me again and again. With every page I became more bloodied and more brazen.
For Miriam, that was the last straw. When I’d brought Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil into the house, she’d frowned. When I’d brought books on biblical criticism, the frown had deepened to a scowl. But the day I came home carrying Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism was the day we had our first yelling match. She lost it then—maybe because she could see the light in my eyes, the light of a new love, a love that didn’t include her. She ripped the book apart in front of me. I did the only thing I could think to do, the thing I knew would hurt her most: I marched into the bathroom and shaved my beard.
For a day, two days, three days, she could barely bring herself to look at me. On the third day she came home wearing her usual scarf and, summoning me to the bedroom, swept it off to reveal a shockingly bald head. I stared at the egglike surface and something inside me cracked. Her long, sensuous black hair—which she’d kept covered ever since our wedding, but which had always been a source of behind-closed-doors pleasure for me—gone. This wasn’t just a competition anymore; we were locked in a war. I went to bed shaking with rage.
And that was why, when Miriam left the house the next day and went to the grocery store to buy saltines, fucking saltines, and got hit by a car and died, a part of me was horrified but a part of me was vindicated, was triumphant, and that was the part of me that felt like screaming from the rooftops: Yes! Yes! Exactly! Yes! That is how meaningless life can be!
I heard a beep. In the dark confines of the tubular machine, I opened my eyes. The MRI was done. My atomic particles, like kids at the end of a long school day, breathed a collective sigh of relief as the machine released them to their natural alignments. When I emerged, Singh told me to return in a couple of weeks; he would have the results then, and we would know more. He handed me a prescription refill. I took it shakily and passed him without a word.
The doorbell woke me from an afternoon nap. Twilight filled my bedroom with a soft blue glow. I heard footsteps shuffling down the hall to the front door, then voices from the stoop filtering in through my window. Samara and Alex chatting while they waited for Lev to get back from evening prayers. As always, the talk turned to Alex’s favorite topic.
“And yet it’s so weird, you know, because Einstein was totally right!” Alex was saying. “Except he didn’t have the courage to stick to his results! He was all like, ‘No, yeah, the universe can’t be expanding, I must’ve forgotten to carry a one, I must’ve miscalculated there.’ And then—can you imagine?—years later, the Hubble Telescope starts sending back all these crazy photos, and the scientists are like, ‘Um, hello, you were right! The universe is expanding!’”
Samara laughed.
I groaned inwardly. She thought she was being kind, but this was not kind. She was stringing him along. Case in point: When, for her sixteenth birthday, he’d given her a vintage five-volume box set of Scientific American books, she’d accepted it. Not only that, but she’d arranged these five books in an alternating pattern with the five books of the Torah, so that trailing your finger along her bedroom bookshelf you hit: Genesis, The New Astronomy, Exodus, The Physics and Chemistry of Life, Leviticus, Twentieth-Century Bestiary, Numbers, Atomic Power, Deuteronomy, Automatic Control. What exactly she was trying to convey about the relationship between science and religion, I had no idea—but whatever it was, Alex loved it. And his love was painful to see.
“Later, Einstein said it was the greatest blunder of his life. Sad, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Samara said. “Definitely.”
“Yeah. And now all scientists pretty much agree that the universe is just getting bigger and bigger, which, you know, is kind of weird to think about.” Alex paused, presumably to let the full weirdness of this sink in. In an oddly serious voice, he continued: “The funny thing is, Newton had predicted, way back in the seventeenth century when he discovered the law of gravity, that the universe can’t be finite. Because every object attracts every other object, right? So if the universe were really finite, the attractive forces of all the objects should’ve forced the universe to collapse on itself. But that hasn’t happened, right? Even though gravity is always attractive.”
Before Samara could react to this observation, Lev’s voice announced that he was back.
I got out of bed, made my way down the hall, and opened the front door.
“Hi, Dad,” Lev said. “Alex’s mom invited me over for dinner. Is it okay if I go?”
“Of course.”
He scrutinized me, as if trying to gauge the effect of his absence from the dinner table in terms of the minutes, hours, or years it might take off my life. “Are you sure? I could stay if—”
“No, go. Really, it’s fine. Samara and I can eat together, right?” She nodded—almost imperceptibly. As if the thought caused her physical pain. “See? It’s fine. Give my best to your mom,” I added to Alex, even though I had never actually met her. Even though I had actually studiously avoided meeting her. Not because I suspected there was anything wrong with her—if the praise Lev persisted in heaping on her over years’ worth of family dinners was any indication, she was a thoroughly lovely person—but because the boys’ blatant attempts to set us up had always made me feel uncomfortable.
With the boys gone, the house seemed colder, darker. I flipped the switches, saying, “Let there be light!” but the upward tilt of Samara’s lips was only the caricature of a smile.
Working side by side in a kind of meditative muteness, we threw together some leftover roast beef and stir-fried vegetables and sat down to eat. At Lev’s request, Samara had been coming home for Friday-night dinners since she moved out of the house three years ago. But she often made excuses not to, so her presence at the table still felt strange, unexpected.
“So,” I said. “How’s summer so far?”
“Good,” she said.
“Yeah? How’s Jenny?”
“She’s fine.”
“What’s she up to this summer? She working?”
“Well, no, she just graduated from her certificate program. She’s taking a bit of a break.”
“Oh, that’s nice. That’s good! Does she want to pursue music professionally, I mean, now that she’s graduated?”
“You mean painting. She studied painting.”
“What? No, I thought she was in music?”
“Nope.”
“Oh.”
“Can you pass the stir-fry?”
“You’re sure it wasn’t music?”
“Pretty sure.” Reaching across the table, she took the dish.
I tried to laugh. “You used to be kind of into music, though, huh? Remember when you were nine and I took you to Steve’s to pick out an instrument? Remember what you picked?”
She muttered something inaudible.
“Sorry?”
“Eight. I was eight.”
“Right,” I said impatiently. “But do you remember what instrument you picked out?”
“The triangle.”
“Yes! The triangle!” I laughed again, but she didn’t seem to see the humor in this. Didn’t seem to understand what was funny about a kid being taken to a top-of-the-line music store, cram-jammed with violins and flutes, Fenders and Strats, and, upon being told she could select any instrument in the store, choosing to leave with a dinky triangle!
I’d tried, gently, to interest her first in the Steinway piano, then in a couple of nice wooden recorders, even in an electric guitar. She wanted the triangle and only the triangle. Trying to be supportive, I’d bought it for her, assuring the salesperson that we’d probably be back for another, more serious instrument, you know, once she tired of this one.
But she hadn’t tired of it. She would sit there, on the floor of her bedroom, dinging that triangle for hours on end, as if all the secrets of the universe were audible in the rest between one note and the next. As she grew older she got less obsessive about the triangle, but not about listening in that strange way. When she was thirteen, I would find her sitting with the telephone pressed to her ear, saying nothing, hearing nothing, except, presumably, the dial tone. The next day, she’d be crouching in front of the dishwasher, attending to its chaotic rumblings as if she were in possession of a primer that allowed her and only her to hear its hidden harmonies. I told myself this was creepy. I told her to stop it. Didn’t she have homework to do, tests to study for?
But now, placing a hand on my heart to still its murmuring, I began to doubt my motives. What if I’d tried to stop her not because I found her behavior weird, but because, watching her, I had felt a twinge of envy? It was as if, by listening to the static embedded in musical notes, dial tones, dishwasher noise, she believed she could attain enlightenment. An enlightenment I already knew would never be mine. There was no secret chord I could play to please the Lord.
“That triangle,” I said, “do you still have it?”
“No,” she said.
We ate our dessert in silence, cleared the dishes, and went to our separate rooms.
Three hours later, I was lying in bed with Valérie, spent and exhilarated by the fuckfest that had ended minutes earlier. I felt relieved that she still wanted me in that violent, reckless way—and that I could still get it up—but also strangely sad. Her old landlord was moving around upstairs, and the lonely sounds of plodding footsteps, clinking beer bottles, droning television reruns—all of these struck me as singularly depressing.
It was a clear night. A star was winking at me through the window. The wink seemed congratulatory, like a dorm-room high-five bestowed on a geeky freshman who has bedded a girl everyone knows is out of his league. Then I remembered that the light had actually been emitted eons earlier. For all I knew, that star was probably dead.
Turning away from the light, I gazed instead at Val’s left leg, where a large and slightly raised birthmark sat an inch above the kneecap.
“What are you looking at?” Val asked.
“This bluish spot here,” I said, tracing it. “It looks like a map of an imaginary continent.”
“A map?” She laughed.
“Yes. Here are the tiny streets and houses. Out here are the rivers and forests. And here you’ve got the men and women and birds and fish all going about their business. Do you see?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Tilt your head to the side,” I said, “and squint your eyes a little.”
When she saw I was serious, she did as instructed. After a moment, she smiled. “Ah.”
I nodded. “Sometimes, if you look closely, there’s an invisible map hidden beneath the surface of things.” She was still, so I pressed my ear to the birthmark, hoping to hear . . . what? The hallowed harmonies of the grand design, the music of the spheres? Stroking the back of her knee, I listened with one ear for the sounds of her sighing and with the other for the spinning of this lost and secret world. But the sound of a lighter snapped me out of my trance.
Lying back, I saw that Val had a lit joint pinched between thumb and forefinger. In the glow of the Zippo she took a toke, then handed it to me. This was one of the rituals into which she’d inducted me months ago: the postcoital joint. Most nights I was happy to oblige; there had even been one or two occasions when we had gotten so stoned that I still felt the effects the following morning. Tonight, however, I held up a straight-edge palm to say No thank you.
“Ça va?”
“C’est rien. Just not in the mood.”
A pause, wherein she regarded me intently. Then, with her joint-holding fingers, she brushed the hair out of her eyes and straddled me. “So serious,” she said in a put-on baritone, imitating my furrowed brow. “And what are you thinking about now, so seriously?”
I studied her face suspended above mine, its soft vatic lines. The mouth was smiling. The cheeks were smiling. And the eyes? They were also smiling. But in them there was something else as well: an uncivilized, howling aloneness that never failed to make me feel grateful to know her, because it was the very facsimile of my own.
And yet: How could I tell her what I was really thinking? If I started babbling about Ayin, about how it was supposed to be the crown of Ani, about how this idea nevertheless made me feel vaguely sad and lonely, wouldn’t she look at me like I was crazy? Our relationship was based on irony, studied distance, intellectual detachment—not this earnestness, not all of these goddamn feelings.
I took her face in my hands and said, “I was thinking about Hubble.”
She laughed. “Of course.”
“I was thinking about how really fundamentally odd it is that the universe is expanding. Odd and, I don’t know, disturbing, I guess.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you find it disturbing?”
“Don’t you?”
She exhaled smoke. “No.”
I stared at her. After a minute, I shook my head. “No, I didn’t used to, either. I don’t know why it seems strange to me now. All that empty space.”
“You don’t know that it’s empty. There might be other people—creatures—out there.”
“
No, you’re right, that’s true. But I meant . . .”
“The abyss, c’est ça? The void.”
“Exactly. I keep picturing us, our little planet, zooming off into this never-ending space that only gets bigger and bigger, with nothing to zoom toward.” She was looking at me quietly, with the halved patience of a young mind that has spent its best years behind ivy-covered walls. The strands of ivy were already in her hair; soon they would be tangled in her eyes. “It’s stupid.”
“No. It’s not.” She touched my brow, then leaned down and kissed me.
It was a gentle kiss, and I knew that she meant it as a token of affection or support, but the gesture only made me feel old. I was reminded, suddenly, of the increasing grayness of my hair. Of the parched skin of my hands, my face, my lips. In the apartment above us, the old landlord pushed back a chair, stood up, walked across the room. The sound of a door opening and closing followed. I shut my eyes for an instant and, opening them on the doorway of the bedroom, thought I saw the shadowy profile of an ancient man. The Angel of Death, proffering my coat and hat, beckoning me out into the night. With a violent motion like that of a dog shaking water out of its fur, I shook the image from my mind.
Val looked at me oddly, but somehow, in the next second, she seemed to know just what to do. She ashed the joint, turned off the lamp, and lay down beside me. Our warm bodies just barely touching. Not the supernova of two people newly in love, not the sticky melding together of disparate identities, but a constellation of adjacent alonenesses, a parallel glide through space.