For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

by Nathan Englander

  The pair tackled the Jewish Santa, the impostor, only kept on by the store out of fear. It had been a bad idea from the beginning, authentic beard or not; a very terrible idea from the very first year. And they would have been rid of him, too, would have been rid of Itzik ten times over, if not for the head-lock that management was in. The department store had only in September paid out two-point-three million dollars for giving the boot to HIV Santa, and it didn’t have a penny more for Reb Santa or Punjabi Santa—didn’t yet have an inkling about how to handle the third application from Ms. Santa that had, this time, been submitted by her counsel.

  As Itzik was hustled away, his replacement, tuna-fish sandwich still in hand, was pushed in through a side door. The boy’s mother fought her way in from the back of what had been the line. Wielding her shopping bags like battle-axes, she moved toward her son. She called his name with the force of a terrified parent, so loudly that it carried over the echoing hysteria of the crowd, so that Itzik heard it and knew to whom the voice belonged. Reaching the boy, she stroked his hair, and finding the throne empty and her son seemingly unharmed, she asked the question to which every mother fears the answer.

  “Matthew dear, tell me the truth. Did Santa Claus touch you?”

  They held him in a storeroom, in a chair neither gilt nor comfortable. The chair was in a clearing surrounded by towering walls of boxes that looked more precarious than the walls of Jericho on Joshua’s sixth pass. Itzik sat with his suit undone, the patent-leather belt hanging at his sides along with his ritual fringes. The pale security guard, a bitter elf, chided him for his lack of professionalism in the face of duty, telling Itzik he was lower than the Muscatel Santas on the street—a travesty in red.

  “Better than to hang up my beard on a hook every night,” Itzik said. He waited with the elf for the chief Santa to arrive.

  Chief Santa was as much of a shock to Reb Itzik as Reb Itzik was to all the children, for the wizard behind this Christmas empire was not fat or jolly or even a man, but a small thin-lipped woman, without the slightest paunch from which to laugh, whose feet had clearly never donned a curly-toed bootee.

  She handed him an envelope.

  “Check,” she said, with such great force that Itzik half expected to see a waiter rush through the door.

  “You,” she said, the thin lips so white with tension that her face seemed an uninterrupted plane below the nose. “You are a disgrace to the profession! And as far as we, and all of our one-hundred-and-six satellite stores are concerned, you are no longer Santa Claus.”

  It’s not as simple as that, he wanted to tell her. Granting wishes that you don’t have to make good on is simple. Believing every child who says he wasn’t naughty but nice also can be done with little effort. But telling the man in the red suit—the only one in your employ with a real belly, the only one whose beard does not drip glue—that he is not Santa Claus is another matter completely. That, this woman hadn’t the power to decide; Reb Yitzhak from Royal Hills, Brooklyn, hadn’t the power to decide. The only one who could make such a decision was Buna Michla herself, and she had said that Itzik would finish out the year. This was the truth, he knew, as well as he knew that, sciatica or not, he would be carrying Passover dishes up from the basement again in the spring.

  Itzik considered what would be worse as he rode down the freight elevator. He leaned the satin box against an empty garment rack, the naked hangers banging against each other like bones. He pictured himself riding the subway the next morning with the apology Buna Michla had coached him on, or rejected and cleaning the pews in his costume with Buna standing over him. She’d see to it. Itzik was Santa until the end of the season, whether he lost his throne or not.

  The Last One Way

  I

  Electrolysis promises permanence, hair killed at the roots. As far as Gitta could tell, in eighteen years of weekly visits not a single hair had been dissuaded from growing. Still she crossed to the Italian edge of Royal Hills each week and lay back on the cracked Naugahyde table in Lili’s makeshift salon. They talked. Lili shocked and plucked. Then Gitta made her way home red faced and tender, the crisp sting of witch hazel humming in electrified pores.

  Gitta never blamed Lili, not her stiffening fingers or boxy outdated machine. She never expected results. Her life was one of infinite patience and unfinished business, an existence of relations drawn out.

  Quick she didn’t look for either. The only quick she had known was her shiddach. One flit of a date in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel and the next month married. For that bit of economy she had paid with eighteen years of miserable marriage and eighteen years separated, waiting for Berel to give her a divorce. She was Royal Hills’s agunah, their woman in waiting—trapped in Jewish marriage by loopholeless laws. Not to think that New York State did for her better. A state with no no-fault divorce. Even the blessing of the gentile court she couldn’t get. Her reasons weren’t prima facie. The judge was not impressed. What more should she have to say than she didn’t want to be married? Idiot rules. No-fault in itself an idiot concept. Anyone who’s experienced will tell you the same: when a marriage fails, always, always there is fault.

  Up on the stool, switches flicked, the circular bulb of the magnifying light crackled while the gases fired up and raced round the tube. Lili pushed the light into place—Gitta’s halo. She then witch-hazeled the glass center, witch-hazeled the needle, witch-hazeled Gitta, and leaned in.

  “I went to the kabbalist,” Gitta said, “went to the rabbi. Useless both.”

  “And who said useless from the start?”

  “Still, I thought,” Gitta said. “Better to try the others one more time. Mystical numbers, I brought. A kabbalist’s feast. Married at eighteen for eighteen years. And now eighteen years waiting for a divorce. One second it took to explain. Clear as I’m telling you.”

  “Easy numbers,” Lili agreed.

  “I got the same as they’ve been giving all along,” Gitta said. “The rabbi wanting to know if there was someone else, if I’d fallen in love, if, God forbid, I was pregnant. The kabbalist, no better. A blessing at the end, much mazal and a healed marriage and a house full of children. Fifty-four years old and wishing me children. And me with a hot flash in the middle.”

  “They’re waiting for Berel to die of old age. They’ll bring you a divorce when they can trail in the mud off his grave along with it. Enough is enough. If he needs to die for you to live, then see to it yourself.” For emphasis, Lili sank in the needle and hit the pedal twice, shock-shocking Gitta and tweezing out the freed hair.

  “I picture it done, sometimes. Berel face-down behind the supermarket drowned in a puddle, or in his apartment with a broken neck, by a broken ladder, an empty fixture hanging from the ceiling, and a lightbulb broken in his hand. Accidents.Who would guess? No trail from him to me, from me to you, from you to a husband with a cousin who knows people who do such things.”

  “It’s a simple transaction, Gitta. Berel’s life spent to buy back yours. At this point, a fair price to pay.”

  “Terrible. Terrible talk. There is still the matchmaker. A saner idea.”

  “Who’s been saying matchmaker from the start? You want business done, do it in a business way. You don’t go looking for some rabbi’s sympathy, you go to the source. If this guy made the match, let him undo it, and let him know there are more permanent solutions. Trust me, it’s not killing but the prospect of killing that gets things done.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then there is killing. Win-win situation. For once. For Gitta. Win-win.”

  Looking at her now, Liebman remembered her then. He was a pious man and not one for staring. But the matchmaker, well, he is part of a highly specialized field, like the doctor. He is forced to look, to see, with honest eyes.

  His memory confirmed what he saw before him: a woman not easy to match.

  This was not just a cruel judgment, not because so maybe one of her eyes was a little higher than the other, and o
ne of her breasts a whole lot lower so that it pointed out and down and looked like it was embarrassed on its own about the condition and trying to sneak behind Gitta’s back to hide. It had nothing even to do with her trademark hirsuteness.

  What Little Liebman could not afford to ignore was her nature. A generous person might pretend not to notice. But it’s the matchmaker’s job to know. Gitta Floog had always been different, and it threatened everyone. And for all the unfairness she’d seen in her life, Royal Hills somehow looked upon her thankfully. A sad case, but always someone has to suffer. Better it was Gitta. Somehow, underneath, they thought it. Gitta got what she deserved.

  For this prevailing, unspoken feeling, Liebman felt worst of all. In thirty-six years of successful matchmaking she was his only agunah. And to his only agunah he owed his success.

  Little Liebman had long trailed Heshel the Matchmaker begging a chance to make a match on his own. Drinking tea one afternoon with all the big machers, Heshel had called Liebman over, thought it would be funny to give his mascot a shot.

  Slurping at his tea, biting through a sugar cube clamped between rotten teeth, Heshel pulled Liebman onto his knee. “Shmegegge,” he said, “I’ve got a job for you. The Floog girl needs a man.” And in the way matchmakers joke privately, he added, “The time has come to cut off her braids and trim down that beard.”

  Liebman skulked off. He did not kid himself about the task. At a more delicate age Liebman’s own father used to slap him on the back of the head and tell him to drink some milk, to learn some more Torah. “Not a hair on you and already the girls in your grade have mustaches like they’ve learned the Gemara once through.”

  To everyone’s surprise, Liebman had married her off—and in one date, yet. Parents began sleeping better, no longer worrying over the boy with the short leg, the girl with the port stain, and, worse, the children with selfishness and anger etched in their eyes. Liebman’s business was airborne. For a short while, until the neighbors whispered about the noise from the newlyweds’ apartment and the loveless look to the husband and his head-hung wife, it was true glory for the new matchmaker.

  Gitta had long since become his shame. It was bad for business to have her standing there with arms crossed and tapping a foot, Gitta Floog on display in front of his dining room window. Liebman sighed. He waved her forward, rushed her down a hallway. Gitta expected no less. She followed him into a back office with a ratty couch and a file cabinet, a dingy room off the alley.

  This is how Little Liebman the matchmaker found himself alone with Gitta Floog trying to convince him to undo what he’d done.

  “Forty years ago, Gitta. My very first match.”

  “Why me for practice? Why my life sacrificed to get started yours?” She dropped down onto the crumpled sheet spread over the sofa.

  “A good rate, Gitta. Even for a first match. Even for then. A symbolic commission, I took, if ever there was.” He did not say what he was thinking, did not mention the miracle he had performed. Nothing nice to say so he said what he could. “Forty years is late for a customer to come back.”

  “Thirty-six, first of all. Eighteen married, eighteen waiting for Berel to break.”

  “So thirty-six. Still a long time for the customer to return.”

  Gitta stood up, moved close to Liebman. She looked down into his eyes.

  “A hammer,” she said. “At Sears they will replace a hammer for life.”

  “This is because of volume, Gitta. Where there is volume people can afford.”

  “So I’ll pay,” she said. “Same as a match. I’ll pay you to unmake a wedding, same as to do.”

  Her eye swims over the glass, swells and softens, runs suddenly long. Then precision focus and Lili’s steady gaze. This is how Gitta knows her, through snippets of clarity and a collection of ever-warping parts, her view from the underside of the magnifying light. Gitta was thinking about this and ignoring Lili’s diatribe, when Lili said, “Stubborn hair,” and turned up the power on the machine.

  “What do you mean, he doesn’t want to get involved? We have involved him already. The day he introduced you to Berel he involved himself. Tell him that, Gitta. Tell him when Berel shows up dead, he’ll have no trouble understanding he’s in.”

  “I can’t do any of this.”

  “Then plan B. Gennaro?” Lili screamed to her husband. “Gennaro, get over here.” They heard his footsteps as he approached the curtain that split the rest of the room from the salon.

  “What?” he said through the fabric.

  Gitta propped herself up on her elbows. “Do not, Lili. Do not start this yet. Not as a joke, not as a threat. Because I really might want it. If we do it, we do it for real.”

  “What?” Gennaro said.

  “Put on the rice. Go put on the rice for dinner.” They were silent while he walked off. Then Lili whispered, “You go explain to that midget. You go tell the matchmaker that he better beat a divorce out of your husband before you make the problem disappear. Tell him whatever you need to tell him, Widow Floog. Because you’ve got three choices. The matchmaker, Gennaro’s cousin, or shutting your mouth. If you’re never going to do anything, then save us both some energy. At least keep your mouth shut so I can do my work.”

  Lili guided the needle. “Back to the matchmaker,” she said, and she pressed the pedal and held it down until Gitta thought she saw smoke.

  Knocking did not bring him so Gitta looked round the alley for something with heft. Next to a Dumpster she found a pipe with a joint on the end and tested its weight. This she swung against the metal door at the back of the matchmaker’s apartment. Each blow left a dent and made a noise that carried. She raised the pipe for a third swing when Liebman peered through the grimy window and then opened the door to the back room. He had an arm raised. Gitta was a large woman, and even a small foe with such a weapon—well, he would not put anything past her. The old suspicion.

  “Put that thing down.” Liebman cowered. “I’ve got a front door, too, you already know.”

  “Not trying to complicate,” Gitta said. “Not trying to make extra trouble for you. You hide me in the back room, I’ll keep myself hidden. I’m interested only in finishing our business.”

  “Business we don’t have. You want your money back you can have it. I admit your match was no success.”

  Gitta dropped the pipe, pushed past Liebman, and made her way to the crumpled sheet on the ratty couch.

  Liebman wrung his hands. “I can’t help you,” he said. “What could you be back for but to hear it again?”

  “Do you know what my life is?” she said. “Do you know how it is?”

  Liebman thought about this. He sort of did, he thought. He kind of knew. She was trapped. She was a woman anchored to a foul husband, a married widow or maybe a divorced wife. He was also aware of the superstition that surrounded her, mothers stepping between Gitta’s crooked gaze and their newlywed daughters. She was a woman who raised whispers. Yes, he thought he understood.

  “I know they talk about you,” he said, “that all this time and they still talk.”

  “You think I don’t hear the nonsense.” Gitta turned red.“They treat me like a witch. They say Berel snapped, chased me around the house with a razor, and kicked me out in a rage. They say I made a deal with the devil and was suddenly free of hair and husband—but like any devil deal it went horribly wrong.” She covered her mouth. “I got rid of it to be pretty. The day I left. Got rid of it to maybe meet a new husband, have a child or two, and start a nice life.”

  “And?”

  And what should she tell him, that Berel had won if winning meant ruining her life and losing meant seeing her happy and free?

  Gitta told him what she needed to see the job done: “Maybe it is late, Liebman, maybe, you think, sad. But I’m here to tell you”—she smoothed her skirt, looked away—“Gitta Floog has fallen in love.”

  “Can’t be,” Liebman said, so surprised he didn’t consider the insult involved.

 
; “A shock, I’m sure. But such things happen on their own. Even to me. I’m in love, Liebman. And like our mother Sarah, even the greater wonder, I’m pregnant. When my period did not come, I thought it had gone, but fifty-four years old and I discover it’s otherwise.”

  “Not Berel’s?” was all Liebman could say. The scandal!

  “A genius you are, Liebman. A detective. No, it’s not Berel’s. But the father is in our community, a hot-tempered man.” She went on, though Liebman looked as though he might die. “We won’t have our baby born a bastard.”

  “Then there really is a man?”

  “Modern times, Liebman. Modern times. Still, in some form or another there’s generally a man. Listen to me, he has found someone from outside, someone to make me a widow. Berel would be dead already if I hadn’t begged a chance to talk with you. My companion is already decided. ‘On Liebman’s head’ is what he told me. ‘The whole mess, it’s butter sitting on Liebman’s head. Only Little Liebman can keep it from melting into his eyes.’ ”

  “Who is he?” Liebman buttoned and unbuttoned his collar.

  “When it’s done, you’ll know. You’ll be the first invited to the wedding. Right now, though, it’s time for violence. Only two facts that concern you. We’ll kill him and I’m pregnant. So take your pick. Take your pick for what’s more urgent. Take your pick for why it needs to get done. But the butter sits on your head, softening already.”

  Not long after Gitta stepped out of the alley, looked both ways, and crossed the street, a new rumor about Gitta Floog began to spread. Maybe it was someone who looked down from a narrow bathroom window with the banging of the pipe, or the sometimes homeless Akiva peering out from a Dumpster when the back door closed. Any number of people might have seen Gitta step out of Liebman’s alley into the bright light of day. But the base of the rumor, the meat of it, well, only one person, only Little Liebman, could be guilty of letting it slip.