Authors: Heidi Jon Schmidt
“If she were a
real
rabbi,” Marsha went on, finding Rabbi Melamed’s place card at their table, “she’d be seated with the
real
Jews. As it is they’ve got her surrounded by you and Derek, who don’t have the radar.…”
Or else God
does
have a plan, Liane thought, and I’ve been called here, seated next to the rabbi, for a reason. Who knew?… A semi-rabbi might be more sympathetic toward Liane the instant Jew. But Liane could hardly lift her eyes from her plate, never mind introduce herself or tell her story. They’d accuse her of lying, shouldering in where she didn’t belong; they’d take the wonderful secret away from her. She bolted her chicken brochette while the rabbi spoke of her other job—she was an interior decorator, which might explain the dress—and detailed her exercise regimen, which began with a short run and ended with sixty-one laps at the health club pool. Fortified by the risotto with spring vegetables, Liane imagined backing this woman up against a wall and informing her that rabbis are supposed to be old and bearded and speak in parables, and never, ever, think about interior decoration, and certainly not go on and on about their damnable aerobic fitness as if endorphins were more important than faith.
“Why sixty-one?” she asked instead, hoping to hear it was a number of mystical significance, maybe from cabala—but it had to do with the length of the pool. The phrase
citrus allergy
floated over from Marsha’s conversation, light as the lime sorbet.
To whom could she say it? “I’m a Jew, a Jew!” What could it mean, the subterranean pull, all these years, of a religion or culture she hardly knew? The sight of little Rebecca Mizner, exalted suddenly, bearing the Torah down the aisle, the prayers, the cantor, the men in their tallises, her mother saying, in that lugubrious churchy hush with which she had kept her husband’s utilitarian attitudes at bay: “Do you see, here the sacred is a natural part of everyday life.” Then her mother had her own marriage of twenty years—never mind the four children—annulled. These religions know how to serve up the barbaric necessities, in a fragrant, mysterious sauce. One loves, one ceases to love. One wants a bite of Christ, a sip of his blood … or a slice of the baby’s penis, just a little one. One sins and wants to atone, fasts and feasts, dreads and longs for the moment when, finally one can set the dearly beloved body aflame.
Feeling herself swept into the current of life, at thirteen, seeing Rebecca Mizner initiated into the fearful mysteries, she had felt so ready to say yes, yes, and let life take her, and there came Gabe Mizner back from the Six Day War.
He’d
been in mortal danger for a
sacred
reason, while Vietnam, a perpetual motion meat grinder, churned on. She’d asked him to dance, finally, and been mortified to see him look at her as a child—he who seemed to represent the entire continent of adulthood: eros, danger, belief. Years later a man, kissing her, called her “my
shiksa,
” and she determined to hear love in it, as “You’re not my mother, I can fuck you into the next world…” which he did for some months, until he began to feel she hadn’t properly bathed.
“When you shower with someone you’re about to make love to, you don’t always wash behind your ears,” she’d said, hurt and prim.
“It’s not the ears…” She just hadn’t been clean enough, that was all.
“So, there was a mikvah?” Marsha baited the rabbi, eyes sparkling.
“Well, in Reform Judaism…” She looked down at her plate.
Lenny came over and put a hand on Derek’s shoulder. “Fishman’s been
following
you,” he announced.
“Fishman!” Derek said. “Where?”
Len looked toward the bar, the buffet, the dance floor—“I don’t know. I just saw him a minute ago.” Then he leaned down and whispered dramatically: “He wants to know
all.
I don’t think it’s too much to say he’s obsessed with you!”
“What?” Derek asked in mock-horror, though it was anything but odd. Everyone shared Fishman’s fascination—Liane had used to feel it herself. And why? Because Derek
looked
like those ancestors, like a Wasp, his eyes stern, mouth set in righteous fortitude and cold certainty. Who ever sees such a facial expression today? He was counter-charismatic: seeming distant even when he was right beside you, slicing through a crowd as if nothing mattered but his destination (the bar). Liane thought of him as a deacon, who, finding his church insufficiently austere, had become an atheist as a more physical man might have turned to vandalism. Which is to say, she’d made a romance of him, a story based on his ancestry—the way one makes a story out of everyone.
“Len, why is Fishman legendary?” she asked, and his pursed lips trembled with suppressed comedy.
“It’s not something you can really put into words,” he said. “I was going to introduce you…”
“After all these years?” Derek said. “I’m not sure we should break the spell.”
“Dance with me!” Liane begged the rabbi’s husband.
“Your husband will kill me,” he said, glancing in Derek’s direction as if literally in fear. Which was correct! If people fall into love and fascination based on the color of eyes or the angle of nose, then they can stand in mortal terror of each other for just the same reasons. She’d had a Jewish doctor once who told her he’d used to cover the emergency room on Christmas. But he’d learned:
“That’s when the guns come out.”
A shiver had run over him, and he looked at her with eyes that seemed to have glimpsed a specter. Driving away from his office that windy day, she’d had to swerve to avoid a rogue Christmas tree that was barreling toward her like a tinseled tumbleweed. Life is treacherous; is it any wonder people stick with their familiars?
“He won’t kill you!” she said. “He may be willing to pay you.” And she pulled him toward the dance floor though he looked utterly miserable. Derek jumped up as soon as they left and headed toward the black women, while Gabe’s ghost watched from across the lawn.
So, Gabe’s ghost must be Fishman! This seemed nearly a miracle. Now she could follow his movements as he followed Derek, as Derek pursued the black women, who … well, it would be interesting to know. They were all part of the great human chain of stalkers, each avidly watching the next, intrigued by difference, consoled by similarity, searching, searching for some face, some being that might promise perfect union, absolute satisfaction.
All the musicians were black, and all older, so they carried a mystical authority as if they might not be flawed live people but great blues players from history, become ideals now they were dead. The deep thrum of the bass felt like a man’s voice when your ear is to his chest, and the singer in her immensity might have been Mother Nature; she swayed like a windblown tree. The weeping woman was dancing with abandon now, as if she’d shed all her tears and been utterly freed. It was dark, the day’s heat dispelled; the waiters with their napkined bottles were no longer needed; there had been enough wine, enough talk, enough of everything, there was need only of music now. Everyone was alone, finally, in his own imagination, free to cast the silvered net of fantasy over whomever he chose. Liane thought of the weeping woman undressed—the frank swelling of her breasts, her thighs, the split red as a fig … yes, it was divine, being a woman, a person of the hips—she smiled at the rabbi’s horribly nervous husband, draped her arms over his shoulders, and leaned back against the swell of the music, until, to her amazement and his relief, Derek cut in.
“So, are they from the ACLU?” she asked.
“No,” he admitted. “They are the cleaning lady and her daughter, a nurse.” He gathered her up. “I feel like it’s
our
wedding,” he said. He loved her, her husband—it always felt strange.
“Every wedding deepens your own somehow,” she said. “They remind you what you intended.” And what would that be? Only to possess the other, free him, consume him, and become him, that was all.
“I suppose that’s so,” he said. Something had brightened, softened him—he held tight to her waist and let her carry him away. Over his shoulder she saw Fishman stride over to speak to Len. His curls looked like razor wire, Liane saw with a thrill—exactly like Gabe’s. She could feel again what it had been like, at thirteen, to brush against a real soldier. But she remembered, suddenly, that Gabe had
not
been a soldier. He’d been an exchange student, spending his year in Jerusalem, and she a girl who was looking for rapture, religious and erotic at once. How she had worried for Gabe, during the Six Day War—thank heaven it had only been six days!
Marsha had snatched up the rabbi’s husband and, attempting some kind of wild hora beside them, turned her heel and fell down.
“It’s the citrus,” she said thickly, while Derek, lifting her back to her feet, said, “I thought Jews didn’t drink,” so she grimaced and said, “You never understood,” and Derek, settling her in her chair said in puzzlement, “Come to think of it, the Jews I know drink like fish … The Jews … the Jews…” He put his hands to his temples as if trying to put down a sudden headache or receive an extrasensory communication.
“Anyway she’s a Unitarian,” Liane said spitefully.
And the music took a turn into “Take Me to the River.”
“I
love
this song!” Liane cried, and Derek said in the voice of an impartial jury that yes, it was a good song, and she held his hands in the air and danced absolutely against him, while he looked simultaneously ecstatic and appalled. The woman of the hips was dancing alone, aswim in the music, without sorrow or joy. Naomi, who would wake up the next morning to ask herself:
What have I done?
stood smiling up at Trevor, sweet and exhausted, while the singer intoned in her great, up-from-the-earth voice:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, you’ve been listening to the Twilight Blues Band, and we want to thank you for your wonderful hospitality. I’m a good Southern Baptist and I wish for
all of you
that you may
go
to the river and be washed in the waters of the lord…”
A baptism! Mazel tov! And here was Fishman, the embodiment of something she’d been yearning for for years, standing on the lawn in front of the dance platform, to peer up at her husband. She found her voice: “Fishman!”
He looked up at the dancers, but seeing no one he knew, looked higher, expecting a hovering angel maybe? Whether it was the music, or the champagne, or the way the tide had risen silently until now a wave lapped, then another, setting up a slow counterpoint as if a second drummer had just joined in … whatever, everything felt Jewish—as if the thread of the sacred was woven through the daily fabric—and Liane wanted to kneel down and say, “Fishman, it’s me, and we can get married and go to Israel where even the wars have meaning, and we’ll live and die for a reason and…”
“Fishman!” she repeated. “Down here!”
His eyes lit; he saw her, asking: “Do I
know
you?”
“You probably don’t believe this is my daughter,” my father said to the cabdriver. “You’re wondering: Where did a broken-down old guy like him come up with a gal like that?”
It was only an hour since I’d gotten off the train and already my father had explained to two strangers that we weren’t having an affair. The first was the bartender at the Oyster Bar, where Pop had pulled out my stool as if New York were his overcoat and he was spreading it over a puddle for me. The bartender looked as if he had long since stopped seeing individual faces or thinking of anything except whatever he himself was obsessed with—money or football or his prostate or maybe some kind of love or ideal. He nodded without listening, dealing out some packets of crackers like cards. The place was full—of men and women who looked busier and more purposeful than I’d ever been—and the chalkboard listed oysters named for all the places I’d have felt more at home: Cotuit, Wellfleet, Chincoteague—low-tide towns where the few people left behind through the winter huddle in the souvenir shop doorways, stamping their feet and swearing under the clouds of their breath.
To the bartender I’d given an apologetic smile, which went, of course, unnoticed. The cab driver, Ahmed Sineduy, license number 0017533, cried “Yes!” with wonderful enthusiasm, as if he had indeed been trying to imagine what would attract me to my father.
“In fact,” Pop crowed, “I
created
her!”
I’d convinced him to have a drink at lunch—a mistake, but I wanted one myself. He makes me nervous—I don’t know him very well. He and my mother married young, and after I was born he drifted away, taking long and longer visits to his mother in the city until finally we noticed that he was living with her and visiting us. I’d study the New York news every night, first thinking I might see him, later that if I came to understand the city, I’d get a sense of my father, too. Phrases like “truck rollover in the Midtown Tunnel” were invested with incalculable glamour for me, and when people spoke of the Queensboro Bridge or the East River they might as well have been talking about the Great Obelisk of Shalmanezar and the Red Sea.
Twice a year my mother put me on the train to the city so I could spend the weekend with him. In my grandmother’s apartment it was still 1945, and I pushed the mother-of-pearl buttons on the radio set, expecting to hear FDR, while Pop made supper and Grammy offered me hoarded bits of chocolate and cake. We tried to act familiar, which meant we couldn’t ask the kind of questions that might have helped us figure each other out, and year after year the distance grew. If Pop was doing well in the market he talked a mile a minute, spreading out maps and showing me pictures of the houses—sometimes whole islands—he meant to buy. When he was losing he was silent, and would start out of his trance every few minutes to ask how I was doing in school. As soon as I could I’d escape to the guest room, pull the velvet drapes, and fold myself into the heavy bed linens, where in my fantasies some man as commanding and enveloping as Zeus the swan held me in the tightest grip you can imagine, while all the lights of the city whirled over our heads.