The Book of Jonah
Page 30
Jonah wanted to reach for one of the joints, but he could feel his hands even under his legs shaking violently. How long would she sit on the bench? Was she still sitting there now? He thought of the alley—the coffeeshop. But spending a day getting high, eating Stroopwafels, contentedly watching pigeons in the square—these now seemed like someone else’s idea of time well spent, amusements borrowed from some other life. He might as well call up Sylvia and tell her he wanted to live with her on Bond Street after all.
“Is he okay, though?” asked the woman in the blue North Face jacket, looking up from her guidebook.
Jonah had been hoping they wouldn’t notice his agitation, or at least would ignore it. This, of course, was wishful thinking. And next he felt like crying—clenched his teeth to stop it—because whether he drank Scotch until he passed out on the floor of his apartment, whether he bargained with Becky’s marriage and the details of his career, whether he spent weeks (weeks! It seemed incredible now) hiding in a cloud of marijuana smoke in Amsterdam—it was all the same: rationalization piled upon rationalization, fear tied in knots of fear until he could believe it was something else. All of it was wishful thinking. In the end, these visions—the Hasid—Judith—they would always find him.
“Should we get him, like, a tea or something?” the blue North Face continued.
“I’m sure he’ll be alright,” Max answered her—maybe for once showing some sympathy for Jonah. “He’s well acquainted with the costs of religious life. What are you learning about Europe from your guidebook?”
“Just looking for places in Germany that aren’t too touristy,” she responded.
“The last thing a tourist wants is to be around other tourists,” Max said. “Too bad they all use the same guidebooks to decide where not to go.”
“Ha-ha,” the blue North Face replied, unamused.
Never one to be deterred by the unamusement of others, Max asked, “So what non-touristy places will you be visiting next?”
“We already did England, Spain, and France,” the red North Face answered, putting down her cards and pointing in the air, as though indicating an invisible map. “In two days we take the train to Germany, and then it’s Switzerland, Italy, and all around Eastern Europe. Then we’ll do Turkey, Israel, and maybe Egypt, y’know, depending.”
“Obviously,” Max said.
“For the winter it’s India and Southeast Asia, like Thailand and Vietnam, then Australia, New Zealand, some islands in the South Pacific, Hawaii, and finally home to California.” Reciting this list seemed to build up some momentum of joy in her, and as she finished she burst out laughing.
And Jonah could picture the two young women, in all these places: in a gondola in Venice; strolling the Old Town Square in Prague; posing before the Taj Mahal; in a tuk-tuk in Bangkok; hiking up to Angkor Watt; river rafting in New Zealand; wearing matching bikinis—red and blue, naturally—on the beach in Fiji. Travel was such a rite of passage for Americans of his generation—and in the end, where did it take you? How far had Judith traveled, to break down into sobs once again? How far had he gone, to end up back in this place?
“It’s all about having experiences,” the red North Face said. “And that’s what I feel like right now, y’know? This is one of those crazy experiences that we’ll always look back on.”
The blue North Face closed the guidebook. “You want to go to the bathroom, Bonnie?” she asked her friend.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, right,” she answered, standing up.
“It’s through the door on the left, though you’ll find it’s a bit cramped for girl talk,” Max told them. The two women left. Max smiled placidly at Jonah. “This is the ‘If you’re going to do it, then do it already, because I’m getting bored’ conversation. The fact that you’re such a terrible wingman might actually work in my favor, Rabbi.”
“Will you stop fucking calling me that…” Jonah said, his shaking hands still shoved under his legs.
“What did happen to you today?” Max asked. “Did they try to drown you for a witch? Or did you accidentally take a bite of a ham-and-cheese sandwich and from out of the whirlwind—”
With sudden ferocity, Jonah shouted, “What the fuck do you want from me?” He lurched forward, swinging his hands up to bang them on the table—succeeded only in smacking them against the bottom. The stinging pain of this only intensified his wrath as he repeated, this time almost screaming, “Tell me what the fuck you want from me!”
Max had a look on his face as if an unpleasant odor had entered the room. The jolt of fury drained away; Jonah leaned back slowly—sat on his hands.
Max took a moment to rearrange the disrupted piles of cards. It appeared that, for once, he didn’t know what to say. Predictably, though, this was not a condition that persisted for long. “You know, Rabbi, as King Kong said to Fay Wray, we actually have a lot in common,” he began. “The same college, mostly the same friends. And I’d say we both see a little more of things than most people do. The difference is I could never believe all the nonsense you do. And the truth is, Rabbi, I envy you. You really think that out of the thousands of millions on this planet, God chose to whisper in your ear and say, ‘Here I am.’ Do you know how many people wish they could think something as preposterous as that? So of course it disgusts me the way you skulk around this city in sackcloth and ashes, draped in the cowardice of your convictions.”
Whether any of this was meant to be taken seriously or not, it struck Jonah that he had always envied Max, too—for how comfortable he seemed, in his chameleon’s skin. “Yeah, you’d see it differently if the situation were reversed,” he mumbled in reply.
“We’ll never know, will we?” Max answered. “I’d like to have been a believer for a minute or two. But I just don’t have it in me. We all suffer what our faith demands, Rabbi. Or else we suffer from the lack. Or did you really think you were the only person on the planet with no fucking clue how to live?” They heard the North Faces coming back down the hall toward the room. “Anyway, try not to screw this up for me. I’ve been playing Uno for the last two hours.”
The two women reentered the room. The North Face in the blue jacket sat down at her guidebook, but the red North Face remained in the doorway. “This ship is really cool,” she said.
Max grinned. “Would you like a tour?”
“Okay, yeah, sure, yes, that sounds great.”
Max got slowly to his feet—making a show of savoring the moment—winked at Jonah, and they went out. Well, Jonah thought: She was having an experience.
Jonah and the blue North Face didn’t speak for a few moments. Eventually she said, “He shouldn’t be too proud of himself. She does this all the time.”
She was brunette, with an olive complexion, her face narrow, freckled, her eyelids resting low on close-set eyes, giving her a somewhat sleepy appearance. Something in this face surprised him, though he couldn’t say exactly what; maybe simply that it had the specificity of any face—a specificity he’d ignored until now. “What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Lindsey,” she said. “Look, I’m not going to hook up with you or anything, if that was the plan,” she went on. “It’s nothing personal I’m just, like, trying to do me on this trip.”
“Why?” he asked her.
“Oh, y’know,” she answered, smoothing her ponytail through her hand. “Bad breakup.”
“What happened?”
“The asshole cheated,” she said. “Bonnie basically came to my rescue with this trip, though, I probably wouldn’t have come if it hadn’t happened. So I guess it’s all for the best.”
He could imagine Sylvia saying something like this; he could imagine Zoey saying it, too. Had it all been for the best? He doubted it. Not when there were so many ways it could have been better. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault. All guys do it, right?” she said with a shrug. “So what’s your deal? Are you like a … sorry, this is a stupid question, what’s Matisyahu again?”
“Then why does he always call you ‘Rabbi’?”
But Jonah didn’t have the energy—couldn’t locate the will or the reason—to deny it anymore. “I have visions,” he said. There was no relief in the confession, though; it only seemed to reaffirm it in some new way.
“Visions…” she said, as if she’d suspected he was crazy, and now she was sure. But then she asked, “What are they like? What do you see?”
“I’m supposed to offer … something … to help … someone.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“Why don’t I do it?” he asked with a scoff. “Why don’t I do it?” he repeated, with desperation. “Why don’t I give in to some totally insane, these ridiculous—I mean, do I look like a Hasidic Jew? Do I look like the sort of person who would go around and—and—and, not for nothing, but I am angry! I am very, very fucking angry! I mean, this happened to me! And now I’m supposed to just give up and—and what? Seriously, I’m asking, what the fuck am I supposed to do? What do I have to offer—to anyone? I mean, look at me! Look at how I’ve ended up! And my nose is fucking killing me!” She was observing him worriedly—had her hands on the table, like she was thinking she might need to make a run for it. But the words were coming out in a flood now. “None of this was supposed to be this way,” he said, tears forcing themselves from his eyes. “I was supposed to be a success! I was supposed to accomplish things! Do things! Things that matter! But instead I’m—instead I’m … None of it makes any sense,” he said, sobbing. “None of it makes any fucking sense…”
She stood up from the table. He figured she was leaving—and why shouldn’t she? She had her own problems, her own disappointments, failures, losses—as anyone did. She had been dumped, she had been deceived—she would suffer worse than that. So much of it was just a matter of time.
She came around the table, leaned over and hugged him. She pressed her face into his shoulder, and after a moment he realized she was crying, too. “It’s going to be okay,” he heard her say.
He’d been certain in New York that these words meant so little—contained so little of use, of value. What difference did they make beside even the smallest tragedies, touching a single life—to say nothing of all the greater ones? But as they hugged each other—strangers in a strange city, crying for their own reasons, or for the same reason—he understood that she didn’t say it because she believed it would be okay, or because she had any reason to think so: only so that he would know—that she wanted it to be okay, too. There was something irreducible in that. There was something you could call holy.
They hugged for a few more moments, then she straightened and drew away, and wiped her eyes, and he wiped the tears from his. And that was all.
* * *
In the Amsterdam twilight, silent and still, the bench was empty, as Jonah had known it would be. He had run the whole way, as though spat from the houseboat—but she was at the airport, she was on her way back to Las Vegas. The emptiness of the bench was so complete it was possible to believe she had never been there at all—but Jonah knew she had. The setting sun cast swaths of red across the white and charcoal blue of the clouds—and he imagined he could see in these folds of light the fullness not only of the sky but of the city beneath it, and all its people—all the people he knew, and would never know: his parents, and Zoey and Sylvia—Philip Orengo and Aaron Seyler—Becky and Danny—Brett and his guru—Doug Chen and Scott Baker, Rafik and Geoff—Lindsey and Bonnie—and Max—Judith—and him, too—
And with longing and with fear, Jonah said, “Yes, I’ll go, I’ll see what good I can do there.”
IV. NINEVEH, LAS VEGAS
1. JUDITH AND THE KING
Prior to moving to Los Angeles from Princeton to begin work at the art gallery, Judith’s experience of living in large cities was limited to her brief stint in Paris—and there, of course, she had been a student. She wouldn’t have guessed that a city of so many millions would furnish her such privacy—and privacy was what she was seeking (that was one word for it, anyway). She discovered that in Los Angeles, people didn’t bother you. Every day she drove her car to work, and every day she got caught in traffic—and everyone in the cars around her kept their eyes straight ahead. Only she looked briefly at the faces suspended beside her, until she learned not to.
The galleries she worked at were all clustered downtown, among white stone buildings that glowed uniformly in the uniform sunshine. Walking in in the mornings, she might glance up and see in the distance the ice-blue glass of the Gas Company Tower, sheer and mirror-gleaming. She did her job competently, which seemed to distinguish her among her peers, and soon won praise for her “eye”—having learned that the trick to creating a successful gallery show was not identifying what was actually good but rather identifying what would be considered good by the kinds of people who bought art in downtown Los Angeles. She was promoted; she was hired away by competing galleries. Her success gratified her, to an extent, but she understood that it was the familiarity that really pleased her—the echo of other praise, other accomplishments that had once meant much more.
In the Los Angeles art world, a silent, solitary figure was not so unusual, and it turned out she had a lot in common with the younger ranks of the L.A. art crowd, many of whom had fled to the city from some childhood distress, whether tragic or banal (or, as in her case, she thought, both). But this similarity somehow made her feel even less inclined to spend time with her peers. She endured the opening-night receptions she was obliged to attend, the after-work drinks she consented to, with discomfort, impatience.
Men and women made passes at her, asked her out on dates from time to time. In high school, she’d imagined her chiaroscuro looks might one day be appreciated, and in the Los Angeles art scene, they were. The dates she agreed to would typically end in sex—she wanted them to end that way—but she never agreed to a second date, or even a second hookup. Those she’d spent the night with didn’t object much when they were rebuffed. Her attitude in this regard seemed familiar to people—acceptable.
During the years she lived in L.A., she rented a one-bedroom apartment in a complex in an undefined neighborhood east of Fairfax, furnished it during one long afternoon at IKEA. She forgot to buy a hamper—but after six months of piling her dirty clothes and underwear at the foot of her bed, it struck her she hadn’t needed one, after all. She didn’t know any of her neighbors, they didn’t seem to know one another: One of them played thumping techno on weekends; another smoked marijuana she could smell whenever she walked by his door.
And—the time went by. A rhythm developed in her life, of daily obligation, of task following task—and then she’d see a wreath on the face of a door and realize it was December; she’d get to the gallery and find it closed and an hour later be told Daylight Savings Time had ended. On her days off (another reason she did well at her jobs was that she never asked for any), she would run parts of the California Coastal Trail, from Venice Beach north past Santa Monica. The farther she ran, the fewer people she saw, and sometimes she would stop on an empty stretch of sand, succumb to the trite inducements to contemplation she observed there—the distant horizon, the waves crashing and receding—and take stock of her life. She didn’t think much about the past anymore—considered this a relief, a type of freedom—nor did she think much about the future. And as for the present: Judith regarded herself as content.
Once she had moved to Las Vegas, she would reconsider this sense of contentment. She did not believe it was facile, did not think, in retrospect, that it was a lie she had been telling herself. What she asked of her life in Los Angeles, it gave her. But there must have been something missing, some need must have gone unfulfilled, because the Colonel seemed to find it so easy to lift her out of this life and place her in a new one—like he was picking up a coin off the sidewalk and putting it in his pocket. (She would observe that he did this with a lot of people.) Her b
est guess was that it had been her zeal: that old, insatiable longing for something, anything, still lurking inside her without her knowing it—indifferent to the limits that she’d prescribed for her modest existence—waiting to fix on whatever object it could find to inspire it.
* * *
On the afternoon Judith met the Colonel, she was sitting at her desk in the back of the gallery where she was working then, writing a press release, a typical task for her. The weather was bright and sunny and clear; the events of the morning had been routine. It was, in other words, an unremarkable day—and she would think later that if some omen presaged the Colonel’s entrance into her life, she had missed it or forgotten it. (Though, of course, she knew better than to believe in omens.)
The press release announced the gallery’s upcoming exhibition of ink and pencil portraits of American movie stars. And it was just as she was trying to formulate a way of saying these works had artistic legitimacy because Andy Warhol had used celebrities as subjects, too, and everyone knew who Andy Warhol was—though without actually saying this—when the appearance of someone in the gallery caught her attention. He was dressed in a dark tailored suit, shirt open at the collar, a small American flag pin sparkling on his lapel—his head shaved and a neat auburn goatee surrounding his mouth. He was accompanied by a young woman Judith assumed must be sickly in some way, as, despite the afternoon heat, she was wore a jacket zipped up to her collar, a baseball hat, dark sunglasses.
Judith was by then the assistant manager of this gallery; Sonya, her junior colleague, was responsible for speaking with those who came in, sounding out as subtly as possible whether they had any intention to buy. Judith might be called upon to close the sale, to talk with anyone who showed more than a passing knowledge of art. She didn’t have any of the social skills associated with a good salesperson, but she had what one of her employers had once called “artistic gravitas”: Buyers took her seriously, which Judith attributed to the fact that she didn’t smile.