Splendor (7 page)

“The Zohar?” It sounded like one of those old fortune-telling machines, the kind where you put in a coin and it spits out a little slip of paper with some predetermined snippet of wisdom, like a fortune cookie.

“It’s a Hebrew word. Translated, it means ‘splendor.’ The Zohar is actually a series of texts, and I’ve spent the bulk of my career—from my PhD dissertation onward—studying them. Among other things, the Zohar focuses on the oldest questions: what is God? What is Man? What is our connection? But studying the Book of Splendor—as the Zohar is called—is no easy undertaking. The hope is that within its pages one can find answers about the meaning of our time here and our connections to a higher power, however one might define it.”

“So the book you loaned me was theo…theosophical Kabbalah?” I tripped a little over the new word.

“Yes, definitely. Being my particular area of interest, it seemed a good direction to point you in. But now that I’m leaving, I think perhaps you may be interested in exploring a new path, one for which Sabine is the ideal guide—ecstatic Kabbalah.”

“Ecstatic Kabbalah. What is that?”

“Better to let Sabine explain,” Martin said. “Suffice it to say that while theosophical Kabbalah is about book learning, ecstatic Kabbalah is experiential. You have to feel it to believe it.”

“Sounds cool.” Honestly, it sounded kind of ridiculous, but I didn’t want to insult Martin by saying so.

His look told me that he heard the hesitancy in my tone, but he didn’t call me on it. “It is definitely cool,” he said, “if you can manage to let go of yourself enough to really experience it. I never could get the hang of it. Meryl, though, thought it was transformative.”

I didn’t know what to say. Meryl—Martin’s wife, Will’s mother—had died in a car accident that turned out not to be an accident at all. It was just before Will’s thirteenth birthday.

Silent, I sat with Martin as his thoughts turned, no doubt, to his wife. I’d seen his expression on each of my parents’ faces—I’d even seen it on my own face. But Meryl had been dead for more than five years now. Maybe wounds like that never really healed completely. They just scabbed over, and then reopened with the slightest touch.

“Visit Sabine,” Martin finally said. “You’ll like her.”

I nodded. My teacup was empty, but still I didn’t want to leave. At the end of the road waited my house, full of strangers. “Tell me something about Will,” I said.

“What sort of something?”

“Anything. What was he like as a little boy?”

Martin chuckled. “You know, if you asked most fathers about their children, each would tell you how his was the exception, the prodigy, the something special.”

“But not you, right? Will was perfectly ordinary?”

“No,” said Martin, “I’m no better than the rest of them. Of course I thought my son was special, even before I knew the ways he really was set apart from the rest of us. It’s funny, but now that I know about his gift, it’s the ways he was ordinary—rather than extraordinary—that give me comfort.”

“Like what?”

“He was—at best—a mediocre baseball player. It was my favorite sport growing up, so naturally when I was blessed with a son I envisioned teaching him how to pitch, the two of us playing catch. But it seems not all of a man’s dreams are meant to be manifested.”

“Let me guess…he hated it?”

“Not exactly. He kept asking me—over and over—why we were throwing a ball back and forth. What was the point? Who said that this activity should be fun? Who made the rules for baseball? And why? As long as I kept answering his questions, Will was perfectly willing to humor me, but it was clear that that was exactly what he was doing. He’d throw a few balls, catch a few pitches, then he’d drift off, staring at a bird or kicking at the leaves at his feet. He wasn’t terrible. He wasn’t great. Just average.”

I found this hard to believe. I couldn’t think of anything about Will that was “just average.” Certainly not his kissing. But then I remembered the way he danced—not terribly, but not great, either.

It felt strange to think about Will in a way that didn’t idealize him. And it was weird too to hear Martin focusing on his son’s weaknesses rather than his strengths.

This must have shown on my face, because Martin said, “You know, Scarlett, none of us is perfect.”

“Not me, that’s for sure,” I said.

“None of us. Perfect heroes—they’re the stuff of myths and legends. Of biblical stories.”

Even though I knew Martin wasn’t necessarily the most devout of men, it was still strange to hear a
rabbi
lump people from the Bible in with myths and legends.

“The Torah,” Martin went on, “what Christians call the Old Testament, is full of superheroes and supervillains. Everyone in it is there for a purpose—everyone has a metaphorical job to fill. Take Abraham. Do you know about Abraham?”

I shook my head.

“The father of the Jews. According to our story, it’s Abraham we have to thank for our covenant with God. You see, Abraham’s father—like most of the people of his time—worshipped a series of idols, praying to this one for rain and that one for sun, and so on. But Abraham felt this was wrong. It seemed clear to him that there could only be one true God, one creator.
Ein Sof.
And so he formed a covenant with God—he would leave his family, his people, his home…and God would build him a great nation and bless him. Abraham was unshakable in his faith, even going so far as to be circumcised at the age of ninety-nine to seal the covenant.”

Gruesome. “He sounds devoted,” I managed to say.

“Exactly,” said Martin, pleased. “He was a superman of his day. Unwavering faith. Absolute devotion. Unquestioning obedience.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“That, my dear, is a very modern question.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s so great,” I said. “What about Socrates? Questioning authority?”

“A good point,” Martin said. “What do you think?”

“I think unquestioning obedience is dangerous.”

He nodded. “So does Will. Will has many qualities that mark him as un-Abraham-like.”

“Such as?”

“God was fond of testing Abraham’s loyalty. He told Abraham that he wanted him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham prepared the altar.”

“He
killed
his
son
?”

“No, no. At the last moment an angel appeared and stopped him. A ram was sacrificed in Isaac’s place.”

“Yeah, I can’t see Will sacrificing anyone he loves, not for any reason.”

As I spoke, I remembered last spring, when Will had stopped calling me. It was after he’d learned that his mother had purposefully positioned her car to save the life of a pregnant woman who was about to be struck by another vehicle. A noble sacrifice…except her husband and son had been in the car with her. Neither of them had been badly hurt, but they could have been. Will didn’t ever want to be in that situation—forced to choose between my safety and answering the pull he felt to help someone.

Martin was watching me work through all of this. “It’s a lot to ask of anyone,” he said softly. “To weigh the worth of one life against another.”

I nodded. Suddenly it seemed that maybe Will had been glad to get into Yale for more reasons than just because it was an Ivy League school. Maybe he was glad to leave me behind—on the island, where it was safe.

The fire felt hot now, stifling. I rose to leave. Martin stood, too. “Thanks for dinner, Martin,” I said.

“Thank
you,
Scarlett, for the company. Drive safely, will you?”

I nodded. We embraced. Martin’s sweater was scratchy against my cheek and smelled like smoke.

Outside, the world blurred—cars and cars and more cars, red and black and white and red again. In front of him were the backs of two heads—in the driver’s seat, a woman’s, dark brown waves falling to her shoulders, and directly in front of him a man’s, hair curly and uncombed, woven with the occasional gray.

A CD played, one of his parents’ favorites, James Taylor. This song was a sort of lullaby—“Sweet Baby James,” about a cowboy and his horse and his cows, all alone together out on the range. The tune was quiet and dreamlike. As their car pulled off the freeway, James Taylor crooned, “With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go,” and their car slowed as they made their way through town, the trees in blossom, the sky bright and blue and open. Heading home. All was right with the world.

There was a moment of silence as the song’s last notes faded. He saw that his mother’s right hand had reached for his father’s left. Their fingers interlaced in a way that both embarrassed and pleased him as he watched from the backseat.

And then there was the next moment. In that instant all the air in the car was gone. Something electric replaced it, something charged and sinister and on the cusp of pain.

His father didn’t notice the change. His sloped shoulders didn’t raise, his thumb, gently rubbing the hand it held, did not stop.

But his mother felt the shift, too. Will saw her flinch, and the force it took her to settle, and then she squeezed his father’s hand and pulled hers away.

“You missed your turn,” his father said, but his mother didn’t seem to hear. She grasped the wheel tightly with both hands and her foot pressed down hard on the gas pedal, and the engine roared, and Will felt his heart beating faster and faster, as if it was that pedal, as if his mother was stepping on his heart, harder and harder until it would surely burst.

She turned the car sharply, tires squealing as they skipped across the asphalt. They raced down the street, his father shouting at his mother, but Will’s heart was pounding too loudly for him to make out the words, and then there was a woman—pregnant or fat, he couldn’t tell which—and another vehicle, a pickup truck, traveling too fast as well, into the intersection up ahead, and just before the impact, before his mother placed their car between the woman and the truck, he saw in the rearview mirror green, desperate eyes—his mother’s or a reflection of his own, he couldn’t tell which, not then or in the years to follow.

His father rode in the back of the ambulance alongside his mother. It screamed off without him, leaving Will standing in the rainbow of shattered glass and oil. It was almost pretty.

Finally a policeman offered him a ride in the cruiser; numbly he accepted and lowered himself into the backseat, behind the metal cage that protected the officers from their passengers. The policeman flipped on the siren. Its scream seemed to give voice to the feeling in Will’s chest. As they pulled away from the crash—his mother’s car and the pickup truck left behind, entangled like lovers—it seemed to Will that he was sitting exactly where he belonged.

And he wondered what the eyes in the mirror had wanted to tell him.

I
hadn’t been many places. The island had always been my home, and since our family business revolved around the tourist season, we were pretty trapped during spring break and summer. The farthest I’d ever gone was on a weeklong road trip with Ronny and my dad to visit colleges during the spring of Ronny’s senior year. Mom had to stay home at the B&B. The three of us had taken the ferry to the mainland and rented a car, heading up the coast to check out the schools Ronny had gotten into—UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley—and the one school he
really
wanted but was wait-listed at, Stanford.

I was a freshman. The weather was beautiful the whole trip. Ronny sat up front with Dad, taking turns doing the driving. I had the backseat to myself, and I’d brought a stack of books to read. Mostly, though, I held the books open on my lap, listening to my dad and my brother talk.

“Can’t we just line the pond with rocks?” Dad asked.

“No way!” Ronny sounded emphatic. “If you want the pond to last, and if you really want koi, we’ve got to use a rubber liner. And we need a bottom drain, and a good filter, and—”

“Do we really need koi? Why not just get some goldfish?”

“Jesus, Dad, come on. If we’re going to go to all the trouble of making a pond, we might as well make it the coolest pond on the island. Otherwise, what’s the point? I’m not interested in digging a freakin’ mud pit.”

That was Ronny’s philosophy—go big or go home. No wonder he was hoping Stanford would upgrade him from wait-listed to accepted.

Ronny turned around to look at me in the backseat. “What do
you
think, kiddo?”

I shrugged. “Aren’t koi really friendly?”

He nodded. “Like cats. They’ll eat from your hand.”

“Cool. Then let’s have those.”

Dad sighed. “Two to one,” he said. “Koi it is.”

They built the koi pond that summer, before Ronny left for UCLA. It was the last project they did together. I didn’t do much of the digging, but I provided moral support, hanging out in the gazebo with my books and watching them work. They laughed a lot.

Stanford didn’t end up accepting Ronny. Looking back, I’m glad; if they had, I probably would have seen even less of him that last year of his life.

But the fact that he ended up at UCLA meant that every time I traveled to the city now, I was reminded of Ronny’s death and felt myself calculating the distance to the soccer field on UCLA’s campus where Ronny collapsed and died.

On this day—the seventh of October—as I walked up a street named Linnie Canal in Venice Beach, I guessed I was no more than ten miles away from that soccer field.

My mom’s new apartment, in Westwood, was even closer. Two, three miles, tops. But I hadn’t been there yet. After the ferry had delivered me to Marina del Rey, I’d shouldered my backpack and started walking. It was only a couple of miles from where the boat docked to the house I was searching for—the home of Sabine Rabinovich.

She’d responded to the email I’d sent, writing that she’d be home all weekend and that I was welcome to stop by. So I was surprised when, after finding the house—number 234—and knocking on its door, no one answered.

The house wasn’t much to look at. From the street it mostly looked like a two-car garage, green-painted wood with one of those white slide-up doors, and a second story atop it. A long thin path along the side of the house led to the front door, and next to the door was a side gate.

Maybe I’d gotten the wrong house. I rechecked the map and directions I’d printed out. No, this was the right place: 234. But apparently, no one was home. I rang the doorbell and knocked again, loudly. Still nothing. On the right side of the doorframe, close to eye level, I noticed something familiar—a little rectangular metal object, hung on an angle, with a brass symbol on the front. It looked like a fancy
W
. I’d seen something like this before on the doorframe to Will’s house. The thought of Will sent a shot of longing through me and I turned away.

It was cold. I zipped up my hoodie, shoved my hands in my pockets, and contemplated my options. I’d told my mom that I’d call her when I was ready for her to pick me up, but it was barely past five o’clock and I was in no rush to see her so soon. Honestly, I wanted to put off our visit as long as possible.

I could walk to a restaurant and get something to eat. I was hungry. But I didn’t want to do that, either. I wanted to meet Sabine Rabinovich.

And then I heard the music. At first it was quiet, but it grew louder and I began to pick out the instruments—a flute, maybe, and drums. Cymbals. It wasn’t professional; it sounded cobbled together, and the musicians seemed to miss as many notes as they hit. The music came from the back of the house.

As I unlatched the gate and walked slowly along the side yard, people joined in clapping to the music’s quick beat. Someone laughed and a voice said, “That’s the way, Ziva!”

I came around the corner of the house and stopped short, not sure what I was seeing.

It was like a paradise. I realized now that what I had thought was the front of the house was actually its rear, and this was the home’s true face, with a wide covered porch and a small lawn spilling down toward a sidewalk, and on the other side of the sidewalk, a canal.

Of course. LA’s Venice was named—and modeled—after the famous canal city in Italy. All the houses here faced canals, many with a short private dock out onto the water and a rowboat tied to it.

The front of the house was shaded by a wide awning, and the porch was lined with tables, each draped in colorful cloth, with bowls of fruit and dip, and trays of crackers with cheeses atop them. In the center of the lawn was a tent, its walls made from panels of thick burlap painted in wild brilliant swirls of every color, its thatched roof formed of palm fronds. On the lawn sat a cluster of wooden chairs, two of which were occupied, by a woman and a man.

Next to the tent were the musicians, none of them more than twelve years old, a group of three of the most beautiful children I had ever seen. The oldest was a girl, her long dark hair in twin plaits down her back, each ending in a curl. She held a flute to her lips and tapped her foot as she played. She wore a dark green skirt that brushed the ground and a yellow-and-red scarf tied around her waist, a long triangle of it layering over her skirt in obvious mimicry of the woman who had to be her mother; they shared the same long curls, though the woman’s hair was loose instead of braided.

The other children were boys—the elder, about nine years old, sitting behind a drum set wearing a jaunty linen newsboy cap, a white shirt, and a brown linen vest, his eyes on his sister’s foot as she beat out the rhythm of their song.

The youngest was wild, spinning in circles and banging a tambourine to a tune evidently he alone could hear, totally offbeat, barefoot and half-naked in a pair of knee-length cutoffs and nothing else.

Their parents watched and rose, clapping, from their seats on the lawn. It wasn’t that the mother was so beautiful or the father was so handsome; they weren’t, particularly. He was an average-looking middle-aged man, well dressed in pressed slacks and a buttoned shirt, she a moderately heavy, large-breasted woman, almost exactly the same height as her husband. Their beauty was in their gaze, the way they looked at their children, full of delight and pride.

The song ended and they all clapped louder, even the children, for themselves. They still hadn’t seen me standing there, sort of awkward, off to the side.

“I probably should have called first,” I said, both as a way to call attention to myself and as an apology for obviously crashing their party.

All five heads swiveled in my direction.

“A guest!” screamed the younger boy, and he ran, flapping his arms, straight at me. I dropped my backpack and held my hands out in front of me in preparation for the impact, but he stopped just inches short of running into me, grinned widely, and stuck out his hand.

“Um…hi,” I said, extending my hand for him to shake. His grip was strong, nothing childlike about it. “I’m Scarlett.”

“I’m Ari,” he said, and then yelled over his shoulder, still gripping my hand, “Mama! We have a guest!”

“I can see that, Ari,” the woman said, crossing the yard toward us. “Scarlett, welcome! I am Sabine. We are so pleased that you’re here.”

“If it’s a bad time…,” I began.

“A bad time?” She laughed.

“I didn’t mean to intrude on your party.”

“Intrude? This party is for you!”

Confused, I said, “But you didn’t even know I was coming tonight.”

“It’s Sukkot!” Ari said, as if that should clear everything up.

“Um…I don’t know what that is.” I felt my cheeks reddening.

“You don’t know about Sukkot?”

“Ari, shush,” his sister said, coming to stand beside her mother.

“We’ll tell you all about it, Scarlett,” said Sabine. “Please, join us for dinner.”

It took them a few tries to convince me that I really wasn’t in the way. Finally they pulled me into their tent—“Our sukkah,” Ari enunciated carefully, as if speaking to a small child—and insisted I take the most comfortable seat, an upholstered straight-backed dining chair pulled to the head of the table.

The other children introduced themselves—the girl, Ziva, offered me a drink and went into the house to fetch it. Daniel, after shaking my hand, returned to his drums, where he sat quietly beating out a rhythm. Ari danced on the lawn, occasionally picking up his tambourine, then tossing it aside to turn a cartwheel or grab a handful of crackers from the table.

After introducing himself, Sabine’s husband, David, set to work roasting meat on the barbecue, long strips of sirloin with vegetables that smelled fabulous. Sabine and I sat in the sukkah. A breeze filled the structure with cool movement, the walls of fabric undulating gently around us. The palm fronds above smelled dusty and tropical, though there was no reason I should know what “tropical” smelled like.

We faced the walking path and, beyond it, the canal. A blue rowboat paddled by, two shirtless men inside it. They waved and Sabine raised her hand in response.

It was quiet in the sukkah. It reminded me of Catalina Island and I felt at home, peaceful. I was still a little worried, though, about being in the way.

Before I could voice my concerns, Sabine said, “Ari is right, you know. This celebration
is
for you—or any guest we are fortunate enough to receive this week.”

“What are you celebrating, exactly?”

“Sukkot is an ancient Jewish holiday. It’s a celebration of the harvest—therefore celebrated in the fall—and it joyously anticipates the promise of rains to come. And, most pointedly, we build a sukkah.” She spread her hands to indicate the structure we sat in. “Literally, a sukkah is a hut. We build it and live in it for seven days. The children, of course, love it. Their favorite holiday! It’s like camping right in our own yard. And it commemorates all the years our predecessors spent as wanderers, without a permanent home, without a permanent land, until they were permitted access to the Holy Land—Israel.”

“Neat,” I said, thinking the word wasn’t nearly big enough to encompass all Sabine was telling me.

“Indeed,” she said. “But I think too the sukkah reminds us of how temporary all of life is, and how there is beauty to be found in that temporality.”

“What about the guests?”

Sabine smiled. “Ah, guests. We consider the receiving of guests to be a tikkun—an act of healing. So your arrival was serendipitous. But it is not only corporeal guests we welcome.”

“There’s another kind?”

“There is. At Sukkot we invite our ancestors to visit and sit with us at our meal.”

“Like…ghosts?” I tried to keep the dubiousness from my voice, and I guess it’s a credit to my acting skills that I think I succeeded.

“Ghosts, spirits…different people give them different names.”

“Do they come?”

“Most definitely,” said Sabine, and she seemed to really mean it. “You see, the sukkah acts like a doorway. It is a liminal space, one in which transition is possible. A portal, so to speak. It allows us to draw more closely to our past—as wanderers—and to the earth itself, as we ask for rain, and our dead.”