by Rhoda Lerman
“Why the drugstore?”
“What I want to discuss doesn’t belong in the sanctity of our homes.”
“I’m pretty busy.”
“Chaim, I’m asking.”
The drugstore was next to Woodpecker’s, which was having a summer sale on blade sharpeners. The drugstore had pink-and-brown marble tables, mahogany walls, lots of sexy magazines in plastic wrappers, postcards, video tapes. Kids who needed haircuts fondled toys. Square-jawed mamas painted rough hands with lipstick samples, thumbed through movie magazines, told their kids not to touch anything. Chaim wore his cowboy hat, smelled of Brut. His shoulders were hunched over the table. He still looked like a victim. Yussel felt a surge of warmth in his chest. Chaim might help him.
“Your car needs new struts, Yussel.”
“You drove it across the country. That’s a rough trip.”
“You sell me something in good shape and suddenly it needs major work?”
“I didn’t sell it to you. You bought it from Bernie.”
“You got money for it, didn’t you? Any court would say you sold it to me.”
“Now you’re taking me to court, Chaim?”
“When I get the bill, I’ll send it to you. Then we’ll see.”
The waitress brought two coffees in Styrofoam cups. Yussel and Chaim wrapped their handkerchiefs around them to hold them. A family of blond kids came over from the toys to watch them. One carried a kitten in a basket. The little sister stroked Yussel’s fur hat.
“Listen, Chaim. I have to talk to you. I have to talk about …” Yussel gulped. “… love.”
“What about love?” Chaim shot back.
“Have you ever been in love?”
Chaim glared at him. “You accusing me of something?”
“No, no. Believe me, Chaim, I’m asking you.”
“You’re accusing me.”
Yussel let the kid try on his hat. “I’m not accusing you of anything. What are you so defensive about?”
“I don’t like you accusing me.”
“I told you …” The little girl put the kitten in Yussel’s hat. Yussel took his hat back, handed the kitten to the girl.
Chaim’s voice rose. The kids backed away. Their mother swooped over, hustled them to the sidewalk.
“Chaim, listen, you’re accusing me of accusing you,” Yussel tried to explain. He didn’t want Chaim to leave him.
“Just stay away from me. Just keep off my property.”
Yussel was bewildered. He put his hat on, patted the kitten in its basket, paid for both coffees, followed Chaim out the door. “How can I keep off your property if we have to go to you twice a day to daven?”
“Then to daven only. Otherwise, I don’t want to see you. Understand? I don’t want to see you.”
He called his uncles. Moses from Abnormal Psychology said, “It’s perfectly natural. You had erections in your mother’s womb, so what are you worried about? Just don’t do anything about it and it should go away.” Gimbel from Humanities said, “Come home. The desert’s no place for a Jew.” Nachman from Law asked Gimbel, “What are you telling the kid, Gimbel? Moses shouldn’t have been in the desert?” Then he told Yussel to make sure his leases were in order. Moses said, “You should defuse her. Invite her over to meet everyone. Your wife, your kids. Let her know who you really are.” Gimbel added, “And take sleeping pills so you don’t lie in bed too much at night. We’ve all been through it.” Yussel and his uncles were not/could not possibly be talking about the same thing.
One terrible night, near midnight, Yussel, light-headed from hunger, dry-mouthed from the thirst of yet another fast, was trying to run a wire to attach an outlet for the Eternal Light above the altar on the dance stage. Nobody was around. Grisha was snoring his great moist snores in his little room off the bar. Yussel stapled the wire along the woodwork, once into his own thumb. It came to him, what if he called her? Yussel paused with the staple gun in the air. What if he called her? What if you called her? Are you crazy? What if he just picked up the phone and called her? What would happen?
Yussel put the staple gun down, removed the staple from his thumb, went outside, was surprised it was raining. It was raining so hard he couldn’t hear any music. The rain beat on his shoulders, ran down his face, splashed above him in the water tower, fringed the mountains. Yussel sucked his thumb where the staple holes were. And asked himself, Are you crazy? And answered himself, Yes. Then he went back in, listened at Grisha’s door, heard the steady snores, tiptoed to the phone, stood over it. It was so small. It’s two A.M., Yussy. You’re a married man, a pious man, a Jew. You’re crazy to call her.
So he picked up the receiver, dialed information, told the operator he wanted to talk to Lillywhite Stevie. He whispered into the mouthpiece, had to repeat himself twice, louder each time. Sweat dripped from his collar down inside his shirt. “Lillywhite.” A Mountain Bell computer voice gave him a number. He punched the number.
She answered. Her voice was clear, polite. “Lillywhite.”
“Listen, what do you want from me?”
“Aah.”
“You make me deaf with your music. You beat me up. What do you want?”
“Who is this?”
“Very funny. I asked you what do you want.”
“I want you to know I exist.”
“Okay, you exist. Leave me alone.”
“You called me. You see me and you don’t even look at me. I exist as filth and evil to you. I know you guys.”
“I’m a married man.”
“I’m not talking about marriage. I’m talking about existence.”
“Philosophy isn’t my field.”
“If you called me up at two in the morning, you have something to talk about with me, don’t you?”
“I asked you, what do you want? Why are you making me crazy?”
She sighed. “You look like someone I once knew.”
“Redford it’s not.” Yussel sat down. “All right, I’m listening.” He sounded exactly like his father. “I’m listening.”
“You rented a room in Cambridge. We had to share a bathroom. You were Orthodox, forty. You weren’t a Hasid, but you wore a yarmulke. You were studying something at Harvard with permission from your Rabbi. That’s what the landlady told me. My father had just died. We weren’t speaking. I’d walked out on him and everything Jewish. You probably didn’t even think I was Jewish. You were right. I’m not. I wanted to tell you about my father, how he was a religious man, how he brought me up to be religious, how he sold pesticides that caused abortions in Third World countries, how I called him a murderer, how he had a stroke, how he died. I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to tell you that I never said good-bye to him, or I love you, or I’m sorry. Or anything. I just pulled the plug. And there you were, a religious man, with answers, in the room next to mine. You never came out of your room except to go someplace to pray, use the bathroom, get the mail. I wanted to ask you about pulling the plug. I wanted to ask you if I killed him. Once you came into the kitchen and saw me cooking sausage. “What’s that?” you asked. You looked at me as if I’d shit on the floor and was frying my stool. “Sausage,” I said. “Pig.” From then on you ate cornflakes with grape juice in your room three times a day and raw vegetables and never came near the kitchen. I heard you in your room next to mine, singing, praying. You washed your clothes out every night and hung them in our bathroom. I wanted to talk to you. I needed to talk to you. I wanted to go with you to synagogue, to ask you if I should have pulled the plug, to ask you where souls go, to ask you why things happen. You looked like you knew. Once when you went for the mail, I looked in your room. It was filthy. It smelled of old socks. I saw the broccoli and the paper bowls of soggy cornflakes purpled in grape juice. One morning I followed you to a synagogue to pray for my father. It was a big mistake. I was climbing the steps to the women’s section. They were concrete steps. I had to pass a dozen dry old men in the men’s section. One pulled up his pants leg and showed me that
his flesh was still firm on his ankle. You know how old men smell in the morning? I fell on the concrete steps, on my face, right next to the old men. Not one saw me. Not one helped me up. I had blood all over my face. Not one stopped to help me. I didn’t exist. One day you knocked on my door. I thought the moment had come, you’d heard me, you knew. ‘At night,’ you said, ‘when you use the toilet,’ you said, eyes on the radiator behind me, ‘could you please put the seat up so when I go to use it in the morning, I don’t have to touch it before I pray?’ I took your boots and burned them in the incinerator. Remember your boots were missing and no one knew where they were and you kept accusing everybody? You were right. You refused to pay your rent until you got your boots back. Finally the landlady kicked you out.”
Her pain clung to him like a garment of fire. Yussel wanted to hang up right then and there. He didn’t want to hear pain. He heard pain. He remembered his great-great-grandfather in Kiev who had the hiccups, who didn’t feel the white-hot iron on his back. He thought about the Cossack who felt it and jumped out the window. He wanted to jump out the window, roll in the snow, run home. The only trouble was, he was the Jew. The Jews stay. They can’t help it. “I want you to leave me alone. I’m a married man.”
Her voice dropped. “Then let’s not talk about marriage.”
“Who’s talking about marriage?” Yussel snapped. “I’m talking about sex.” Yussel hung up.
Nothing happened. Grisha was still snoring. The world was still turning on its axis. The rain was still splashing in the water tower, filling the mikveh pool. She’d turned on Ella Fitzgerald so loud Yussel could hear them both singing over the beat of the rain. In the morning, Grisha knocked on his door to wake him up. There were no reports of his kids terminally ill, no car accidents, no wife leaving him. Nothing happened except in the morning, two things. His Uncle Nachman called, said “Yussel, it’s almost the fast of Tammuz. For the next three weeks, from now to Tishabav, you know to avoid situations of danger.” And the other thing, mid-morning, when he looked out the kitchen window, he saw Chaim standing in front of the mikveh, towel slung over his shoulder, whistling.
Yussel blocked his way to the door of the mikveh. Chaim stopped whistling, smiled his visit-to-the-dying smile. “Ask Babe.” Whistled.
Ernie was tying string around a square of stakes. Natalie pounded the stakes into the ground with a soup ladle. Some local men who might have been Figueras and Alvarezes were delivering large wood joists. Grisha sat on his stool, singing psalms. Babe and Bingo were smoothing mortar in Ernie’s square with new trowels. “Like sheep you stand there while this wolf pollutes our mikveh?”
Bingo touched Yussel’s arm. “We took a vote.”
“I voted against, Rabbi,” Natalie called to him.
Mendl from Rikers Island walked out of the mikveh. Chaim walked in. Mendl dried his hair with a towel in front of Yussel. “Mendl, tell Chaim only for Shabbas, once a week, Mendl, and you have to call first.”
“A man could have an emergency, Reb Yussel.”
Yussel lifted his hands in front of him, which meant go no further. “In an emergency, of course.” A flush moved up around his neck. Everyone went back to work. Yussel took a walk around the new lake.
The next night, almost midnight, just as Yussel was picking up the phone, Grisha came out of his room to go to the bathroom. His pajama tops were safety-pinned to his pajama bottoms. Grisha asked him who he was calling at such an hour. Yussel told him he was calling his broker but he wasn’t answering.
“He lives in China he’s open for business at such an hour?” Grisha shuffled to the bathroom where he stayed forever.
Yussel finished the wiring for the Eternal Light, dusted the bookshelves, thought he should see if Grisha was okay, sanded the bottom of the front door, which was swollen from the flood, sanded it until it swung closed easily, knocked on the bathroom door, asked Grisha if he was all right. Grisha growled, grunted. Finally Grisha came out scratching his behind. “You reach him yet?”
“Who?”
“Your broker. The one who dances naked in a room full of books.”
Yussel punched a bunch of numbers, hoped it was the right amount. Grisha shuffled past him, slammed his bedroom door. Yussel yelled, “It’s still busy,” at the door. When he could hear Grisha snoring, Yussel dialed the number, said, “Hi,” very softly. “Guess who.”
“I know you,” she said to him as softly. “You were my father’s doctor, when he was dying. You stormed into the room with ten students following you. You filled the room. The nurses retreated. The students had notebooks, took down every word you said. You pulled the sheets from my father’s body and examined my father, put your hands on his body. You wore a ring from Yale. There were tufts of black hair on your knuckles. I could imagine the tufts on your body. Maybe you were fat. I didn’t see that. You were big, oxlike, a peasant-king. Strong, powerful, with that gorgeous Jewish mouth. You were Chief of Internal Medicine at Albert Einstein. You looked like those old sketches of Semites drawn by anti-Semitic anthropologists. The strong sweep of nose, the soft lips, the deep black eyes, the wings of brows, the beard, Oh God, the beard. You put your hands on my father’s body, explored, listened, touched, rolled him over, bent down, listened to his heart. Suddenly I’m in the bed being touched, listened to, explored by those hands, by that knowing arrogance, by that wisdom that knows death. You look up and say, ‘Your father is dead.’ All I wanted was that you would touch me with those hands. I followed you from the room. You turned, looked at me. Tell me things with those hands. Listen to my heart with those hands. ‘Yes?’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘Did I kill him? Did I do it?’ Your lip curled up. Your students surrounded you, held notebooks, pencils in the air. ‘You should talk with his attending physician. We’re paging him. Excuse me.’ And you turned to your students. ‘Now, where was I?’ Where are you? The man who knows why my father died, why we die, whose hands will touch me and know my destiny, where are you? Are you that man? I hope for your sake you aren’t, because I’ve known since I’ve been looking for you, I would rip you apart for ignoring me. And I would love you until I died.”
“This is what you want from me? To tell you why your father died?”
“I want you to show me something moral.” They were both silent. Then she asked, “What do you want from me?”
“My world would be destroyed. I’m a married man, a pious man.”
She shifted suddenly, revengefully. “Is it true you guys use a sheet with a hole in it?”
“No, we use the sheet to cover up your faces.” When he heard himself say this, he understood why he’d punched her the day of the flood.
He spent that night in the narrow bed in the small room off the kitchen with Lillywhite, listening to her heart, pulling off her blankets, rolling her over, listening to her heart, listening to her sing out his name. He lay awake until the sun rose. What she said she wanted and what she sang she wanted were two very different things.
In the morning, Grisha asked, “So how’s your broker?”
“Fine.” Yussel tried not to swallow.
“I thought last night maybe he was sick.”
“Brokers, Grisha. You know how the market is.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know all about the market.”
The women lined up outside the mikveh with towels over their arms. They sat outside in the afternoon sun, made the men leave, lifted their hair off their necks to let it dry. By sundown, thunderheads piled up like freight trains over the mountains, her music came on.
He called her from the Texaco. “Talk to me. I’m listening.”
“I know who you are. You’re the past coming to get me. You’re five thousand years old. You won’t look at me. I see you every place I go and you won’t look at me. I’m the future and you’re the past and the world would split in half if we touched each other here, here in my bed, here in the present.”
“How did this happen?”
She whispered. “You called. You stay up all n
ight. I stay up all night. I sing to you. You sang to me.” Her voice changed, softened. “The first day up in the mountains, at the pool, I saw your eyes when you smiled. Your smile lit up your face. It lit up the woods. And then you sang in the canyon and I heard your heart. I hate you guys. I always have. But you have something I want.”
19
IT WAS THE SEVENTEENTH OF TAMMUZ, THE FAST OF THE FOURTH month. Shoshanna had reminded him already that it was a day in which he should examine himself and undertake repentance from wrongdoing because it was still the month of calamities for the Jews, maybe for his family. “And the Lord saw their actions, Yussel.”
“That’s enough, Shoshanna. Don’t quote. Listen, what have you been doing with yourself? Are you keeping busy? Did you find someone to take your wigs to? Have you been shopping? If you’re dieting, I decided I think you should be a little fat. I wouldn’t mind a little fat.”
“Also this is the day Moses broke the tablets, the day his people worshiped the golden calf, the day the walls of the temple were breached, and the day I can’t travel for the next three weeks, until Tishabav. What are you doing to me, Yussel?”
“I’m doing what you want me to do. I’m being a rabbi.”
“A man isn’t whole without his wife.”
“Tell me about it.”
“This is the day Noah sent out the dove, Yussel.” She spoke very slowly. “And it could find no resting place in the flood. Do you hear me?”
“I hope you’re teaching all this to the children.”
“Who else is here to teach them? Their father?”
“Lay off, Shoshanna.”
“My place is there with you, Yussel. Shame on you. Oh, Yussel. I forgot. I found the deed. In the Chinese checkers. You bought only the surface of the land. No mineral rights, no water rights. Is that what you needed to know? Yussel? Yussel? I hear the kibbutzniks came. You don’t have to daven by Chaim anymore. Yussel? …”
Yussel parked Bingo’s cab by the SL in Chaim’s driveway, kicked the side of the SL, walked up to Chaim’s front door.
