Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  His older sister, Evie, was always calling him, panicked. It was her way, Deirdre told him, of letting him know she was still helpless. As if he needed a reminder. He drove up to a flat white brick building and parked. I was amazed to see a blond woman opening a door on the ground floor in nothing but a short multicolored shift that barely covered her pudendum, and a puffed-up red jacket. The flesh on her long thighs, Leslie noticed as he got out, was going spongy, melting slightly above the knee. This made her single status all the more worrying to him.

  “Thanks, Les,” she said, tucking her snarled blond hair behind an ear.

  “So where’s the problem?” asked Leslie, walking into the appalling apartment. Clothes were strewn on the couch, over the umbrella stand. A purple mat was rolled out onto the floor. On the walls, several primitive paintings, all of bare, moonlit fields, hung unframed.

  “Over the sink,” she said. “Look, the wall is bulging.”

  Leslie put his palm against the wall. It was wet. “The people upstairs have a leak, maybe a burst pipe. Do you know them?”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you knew what room was above this, it might be clearer what the problem is. Probably the kitchen,” he said. “You need a plumber. Like I said.”

  “I don’t have a good plumber. Who do you use?”

  Leslie took out his phone and started looking up a name. “John Green,” he said.

  “Can you call them?” she asked, chewing on her thumb. Leslie made the call, his eyes roving over the chaos of his sister’s sink: coffee-splotched cups, a plate with half a piece of cake on it, an empty canister of yogurt. His voice sounded friendly, cajoling as he arranged for the plumber to come at three that afternoon, even though he felt like weeping.

  “No—I can’t be here then,” whispered Evie.

  “When can you be here?” he asked.

  “Between now and two, or between four and whenever,” she said. He made the arrangements, conscious of a tightening in his chest.

  “You should go upstairs and make sure they turn off their water,” Leslie said.

  “This is why I hate this condo, there’s no real super,” she whined.

  “What about the—there’s gotta be at least a handyman,” said Leslie.

  “He’s useless,” said Evie, pouring herself a glass of juice. “You want something to drink?”

  “Nah,” said Leslie. “I got things I gotta do. How’s the job search going?”

  “You know,” said Evie, “I thought I had something in graphic design, but it didn’t work out. I’m working on a children’s book.”

  Just then I heard the sound of rushing water, and a topless man with a tanned, fleshy torso slumped into the room.

  “Oh,” said Evie, as if just now recollecting his presence in the apartment. “Alan, this is my brother, Leslie.”

  “Good to meet you,” said Alan, offering his palm. Leslie shook his loose-knit hand. Beneath the sweatpants, Alan wore no underwear.

  “How’d you two meet?” Leslie asked.

  Alan chuckled. “We’re, ah—”

  “New friends,” said Evie.

  “Okay,” said Leslie, blinking hard. “I’m late.”

  Evie followed him to his car, shuffling in fluffy white slippers.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, leaning into his open window.

  “So you met him last night?” Leslie said.

  “Yeah,” said Evie. “He took me home.”

  “Did you forget he was in there, or what?”

  “No, I …”

  “Next time you’re too smashed to get yourself home, call me,” said Leslie. “Call me or call a cab.”

  “He seems nice, though,” said Evie, looking back at the condo. “Doesn’t he?”

  Leslie didn’t know what to say. He just waved at her and backed up the truck.

  Of all his siblings, Evie was the most dependent on Leslie. The younger Senzatimore children’s postpaternal normality was their mother’s masterpiece. She and the slightly paranoid Vince McCaffrey became a bulwark of solidity, raising the three younger children with great love and many rules, dictated by the church. It was Leslie and Evie, the two eldest, for whom it had all been too late. Their childhoods were already almost over by the time Charlie de-selfed. Evie moved seamlessly toward badly chosen friends and substance abuse. Leslie created his life by using force of will.

  His next stop was the firehouse. The Patchogue, Long Island, Fire Department was a large sand-colored building with gleaming red fire trucks parked in its tidy, cavernous garage. I rode on my host’s back as he entered, greeting the other men, who were wearing dark blue T-shirts with a white crest reading PFD on the pocket. Their hair was shorn, like Leslie’s. There was a resounding back slap, which nearly killed me, but I jinked to the left just in time. The men seemed to be congratulating Leslie on his rescue of the night before.

  “And you know what, it turns out I know the guy,” said Leslie. “Mr. Tolan. He was my best friend’s father growing up. I gotta say he was an unpleasant man back then. But they all mellow out.”

  Tony, a short, burly man holding a mug of steaming coffee, quipped, “Too bad you can’t do a quick character reference before you heave ’em outta the smoke.” He leaned down as if to a victim and mimed removing an air mask. “Excuse me, sir. Are you an asshole, by any chance? Because if you are, I think I’ll just leave you here.” Everybody laughed.

  “This from the Fireman of the Year,” said Leslie. “I’m goin’ out to the hospital to see this guy now.”

  “Yeah?” said Tony, surprised.

  “I wouldn’t if I didn’t know him. But—I figure, he’s got nobody else. His son died in a stupid accident in high school, his wife is gone. You know.”

  “I never go,” said Tony, flattening one palm emphatically. He was a professional fireman, worked in the city. He couldn’t afford to be sentimental.

  Leslie shrugged. “I came by to find out who’s cooking tonight,” he said. “If it’s me I gotta shop on my way back.”

  “What are you makin’?” asked Tony.

  “I’m thinking spaghetti carbonara, Caesar salad. Maybe a Caprese.”

  “Dessert?”

  “You know it,” said Leslie.

  “Better be good. Yelding’s still way ahead after that chocolate soufflé last week.”

  Hiding under Leslie’s shirt collar on the ride to the hospital, comforted by the darkness, I wondered what my purpose as an angel here could possibly be. What could I help with? I already saw that Leslie was a noble soul overwhelmed with duty, visited by occasional odd little lustings he would never act on. He saved bitter old men who were about to die anyway from a little peaceful smoke inhalation, then went to visit them in the hospital to make up for the fact that he wished they had been children or young women. I worried that I would die all over again, this time of boredom. Confident that I wouldn’t miss anything important at this rate, I allowed myself a short nap.

  6

  Having fled the great house of the Comte de Villars and his bizarre offer of employment, I had returned gratefully to the routine of my days: my mother woke me tenderly at five o’clock each morning, bringing a basin of water to my bed. I performed my ablutions, washing my hands of the unclean spirits that might have settled on my body during the night, and said my morning prayer of thanks. I put on my tzitzit, a fringed protective garment, like a prayer shawl with a slit cut in the middle for the head to go through. Over this I wore what I hoped was a French-looking chemise, a red vest with silver buttons, and a black coat. I hid my yarmulke beneath a black felt three-cornered hat.

  I scurried to morning prayer with my brother and my father at one of several places of worship set up in various houses in our section of Paris—we did not have a synagogue—then my father and I yoked up our peddler’s boxes and set off to make a little money, calling out hoarsely, “Watch fobs! Knives! Snuffboxes!” etc. The streets of Paris were cacophonous with the cries of peddlers selling everything from b
aked apples to firewood to water pumped from the Seine. Each peddler had his or her own cry, and we milled through the streets, across the bridges, baskets and boxes strapped to us, crying out our wares. My brother Shlomo was exempt from this work; the treasured scholar of the family, he stayed back to study all day. I didn’t envy him. In the afternoons I played skittles with other boys in the courtyard, or ran wild through the neighborhood with my gang of friends. I had no inclination to study the holy texts in my free time as I was meant to—nor did I have any great interest in business. I just wanted to enjoy myself as much as possible. My father, a serious, even doleful man, thought I was a ruffian in the making. His selling was punctuated by prayer morning, afternoon, and night: Shacharis, Mincha, and Ma’ariv. He was also one of a group of stalwart men who volunteered to prepare the dead of our community in the traditional manner. His attitude toward me, his blithe eldest son, was one of resigned disappointment, occasionally peppered with disgust. I avoided him as much as I could.

  In addition to selling, I loaned small sums to the gentiles in the area—trifling amounts, really; I was no banker. People often needed a little something to tide them over to the next month, and usury was forbidden to Catholics. My father, brother, and I lent money at reasonable interest, collecting the pledges when they were due. Within our own community, we lent to one another without charging interest. That was our custom.

  Our world of German and North European Jews took up about four cramped and winding streets of Paris, branching off the rue Saint-Martin, on the Right Bank of the Seine. The Portuguese Jews lived on the Left Bank, near the rue des Grands Augustins. They traded in silks and chocolate, and received passports for twice the time we did.

  There had once been a much larger Jewish community in Paris. But in 1306, Philippe IV, in need of income for the bankrupt French state, had a brilliant idea: he simply arrested all the Jews in France, confiscated our money and property, and deported us. This initiated a series of expulsions that were revoked and reinstated several times during the coming centuries. We were let in or kicked out, depending on how important for business we were seen to be. Luckily for me, Louis XV was a tolerant king; in the past fifty years or so, we Jews had been allowed to slink into Paris in dribs and drabs, like rats trickling back into a house once the catcher has left the premises.

  My young life pattered on in its usual way for several months until I got the jolting news that I was to be married. I was seventeen. My betrothed had been selected for me out of the meager handful of Jewish girls in Paris by the local matchmaker in collusion with my parents; the marriage contract was hammered out through a marriage broker. Hodel Mendel was just fourteen. As my parents saw it, Hodel was a catch: her father, Mayer Mendel, was the only ritual slaughterer on the Right Bank. The ritual slaughterer was an important man in our community. On top of that, the Mendels offered a substantial dowry, plus room and board for three years. Who could resist? As for me, I was dying to sleep with a woman, and Hodel was not a bad-looking girl.

  I thought of marriage as a sort of Eden where you could pluck sensual—and sanctified—delight from every fruitier in the garden. I couldn’t wait. The day before my wedding, my scholarly uncle Yitzak sat with me, breathing thickly through the dense hairs in his nose, and explained that what I was about to do had been done by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and there was nothing to be nervous about. He gave me a brief layout of the geography of my future wife, and myself in relation to her, causing me to nearly faint with embarrassment, but teaching me nothing I didn’t already know from having once witnessed two stray dogs humping, and my habit of idling inside bookshops where livres philosophiques, with their carefully illustrated descriptions of persons in flagrante delicto, were clandestinely sold. Having fulfilled his duty, Uncle Yitzak stood up stiffly, kissed my head, and walked out of the room. My mother, to my surprise, stormed in the minute he left, weeping, and clasped me violently against her breast.

  When I saw little Hodel on the evening of our wedding, she was hanging by her elbows between her tall mother and her squat father, being guided through the courtyard of her family building like a blind person. Her face was entirely whited out by an opaque veil that fell to her waist, giving me the curious impression that her head was on backward. I stood with my parents beneath the wedding canopy, trembling in my white coat, waistcoat, and britches, over which I wore a kittel—a white linen robe, white for mourning, to remind me of my own death. Yet in truth my kittel could have been my own burial shroud, given what my marriage would turn out to be.

  Hodel looked very small and rigid beside her pantherlike, black-browed mother, who was maneuvering her toward me with a firm grip. Her little badger of a father had to raise the girl’s elbow in order to keep her level. It looked as if they were heaving a draped statue across the courtyard. Hodel seemed to be making no effort to walk; in fact, she was quite stiff. I wondered if her feet were being dragged along the ground beneath her wedding gown. The four candle-bearing matrons walking before this coercive procession lent the ceremony an eerie air of sacrifice. At last Hodel was beside me, perfectly hidden behind the thick white silk. After my father pronounced the seven blessings, when Hodel’s veil was raised, a corner lifted by each parent, I saw that her eyes were inflamed and swollen from weeping. Her round cheeks had tear tracks on them. Her breath shuddered and caught like that of a tiny child who has been bawling. I crushed the glass beneath my heel with a sudden rush of anger.

  7

  I awoke from my nap and crawled out from under my cotton tent. I was in a sterile chamber buzzing with greenish light. Mr. Tolan, the old man whom Leslie had saved in the fire, was sitting up in bed, his skinny, shriveled arm connected to a shiny tube. Rheumy, helpless eyes glistened in the dry landscape of his face like shallow ponds. With striking vanity, he wore a ratty brown toupée that seemed to hover over his scalp. Leslie couldn’t reconcile this pathetic figure with the powerhouse he had known as a child. Mr. Tolan’s rages were legend in the neighborhood; you could hear him halfway down the block, screaming at his kid, wife, dog.

  “If there’s anything Deirdre or I can do for you, Mr. Tolan … you let us know,” Leslie said. Ugh. Leslie was perfect! I felt so low in his presence, so unworthy. Was this what I was supposed to feel? Was this why I had been sent down here, to follow this exemplary man around day and night until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had no more will to live? Could angels commit suicide? I felt a sudden, acute dislike for Leslie Senzatimore. He reminded me, I realized, of my father, a man whose damning rectitude could scorch your eyebrows if you got too close to him.

  I spread my wings, jumped, and took off, circling the room as Leslie listened to the old man, nodding, his blue eyes wide with understanding, big jaw set. I was depressed—numbed by boredom and a sense of worthlessness. And then it occurred to me: maybe angels had free will. I had always been told that they did not, that it was only humans who were distinguished with that feature, that angels were bound to praise Him day and night for all ages. But here I was, on “Long Island,” whatever that was, not singing or praising, but floating around useless and invisible. What if I left? I decided to try it. I flew out the door and down the shiny hallway. My trajectory was interrupted by the sudden disappearance of the wall to my left. It dissolved, revealing a box full of expressionless people. I hung in the air, staring at this phenomenon, when the wall began to close up again. A woman rushed by me, stepping into the secret room. I was sucked into her wake, and hovered over the deanimated passengers, observing them with interest.

  All the people, dressed in strange, ill-fitting garments, the womens’ limbs exposed, hair disheveled, as though they had left their beds in a rush, stared dumbly at the doors, which glided shut magically, sealing us in. I now felt a sickening lurch in my stomach as the room plummeted through space. I was forced toward the ceiling, listening to the whoosh of the thing as it fell, then came to a soft halt. The doors opened again. All the people walked out. I followed, grateful to be free.

&
nbsp; I found myself in the mezzanine, assaulted by violent, inexplicable light. Many people walked back and forth, entering and exiting through a bank of glass doors that slid open and shut constantly of their own accord and led outside. The women were stripped down like Deirdre, with tight trousers, or short skirts. There was no modesty about them, no elegance. I noticed one such vision with white wires coming out of her ears, talking to herself emphatically. The nails on her fingers and toes had been lacquered to perfection and shone like black Chinese boxes. I wondered if this might be a lunatic asylum. Then I heard a tinny voice, crying out from within the wires: “You can fucking pick him up for once, but no, obviously not, your mother’s imaginary infection—” Was I reading the woman’s thoughts? A man seated on a low couch, his enormous feet splayed in a pair of egregious blunt-toed shoes, his neck bent over a tiny keyboard, played a fast-paced tune with his thumbs, but no sound emitted from the shiny ebony instrument. I hovered over him and saw minuscule words forming in a glowing rectangle: Get bucket of chicken am starving. Some of these people looked unwell, others merely unhappy. The women wore no white powder on their skin or hair, yet many of them had dipped their locks in yellow dye, and their eyes and lips were daubed liberally with glistening colors. You can imagine how confusing all this was to me, innocent as I was of the customs and mechanics of this new world with which I am now so deeply familiar.

  A shop selling bright flowers caught my eye. Inside, a woman with orange, greasy skin leaned on the counter, flipping the pages of a broadsheet. I flew closer to see what she was looking at: an amazingly rendered color image, so lifelike it seemed impossible to create with paint or the printer’s gravure, shiny with varnish. It was a portrait of a dark-haired woman and a blond man. They were smiling. I flew to a rack of other such publications. Here I saw the same set of handsome Viking faces, alone or together or in a pair, smiling down from each of the glossy covers in different poses, with different words beneath them. Sometimes a third female joined them in the images. They all three had strong teeth and bony, flat faces. They looked Nordic. Or perhaps they were Austrians? Stamped beneath them were a series of proclamations: “Brangelina’s secret wedding!” “Jen’s phone call to Brad’s weeping mother.” “Nanny tells all in Brangelina shocker.” I assumed Brangelina must be the name of the current monarch of this land, or perhaps his courtesan. In my time, we had libelous books whirling around town, depicting Mme de Pompadour, and, later, Mme du Barry, the king’s mistresses, in all sorts of licentious poses with men and women of the court. It was our entertainment.