The Angel of Losses (6 page)

Holly’s eyes shone under the blazing sign. “We spent all those years telling scary stories after Mom and Dad went to bed,” she said. “And it’s like, now you’re doing it professionally.”

Yes, as kids we spent hours staring at each other across the room, trying to read each other’s thoughts, taking turns emptying our minds so that the other’s could flow into the vacuum. We watched slasher films. Holly read my palm and speculated about my past lives; she led slumber-party séances with candles and magic incantations and bowls of water.

This wasn’t the same thing. I was steeping myself in sociology, psychology, history. I was learning German. I was building my life around this. I was hurt that it sounded like just a silly ghost story to her. We had been best friends when we ran to each other and hugged beneath the Japanese-printed awning; now I felt the first painful doubt worm into existence. We didn’t know each other’s friends. We didn’t see the same skyline outside our windows in the morning. Our bond could no longer be effortless. We had to make a choice.

She folded the sketch in half and in half again. “I’m not going to do it,” she said.

“Do you want to work on the picture more?”

She shrugged. “I just don’t want to.” I wouldn’t understand why she had changed her mind until later. Her new friends, the Orthodox Jewish girls on her floor, the friends she had never introduced me to, would disapprove. It was against their religion.

“You should really go ahead, though,” she said, encouraging me.

But I didn’t want to do it by myself. I didn’t care about a tattoo. I just wanted to do something together, something momentous and memorable, however cliché.

“We said we were doing this together,” I said.

Holly touched my arm. “I’m sorry, Marjorie.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed, trying not to sound angry. “It’s your birthday. We’ll do whatever you want to do.” She let go of my arm, and I pulled my jacket shut. “Besides, it’s bad enough we’re going to show up to Grandpa’s tomorrow hungover.”

“You’re right,” she said. I had been joking, but she was serious. We hadn’t discussed it, but we both knew he was failing. “We promised we’d visit, and we never do. Even after. You know.” A few weeks before, he had stopped answering his phone; we’d all driven down to Brooklyn to find him, and when we did, he wasn’t pleased to see us.

NOW I WATCHED TWO GIRLS BEHIND THE WINDOW, WALKING
slowly through the shop, their eyes traveling up and down the walls of pictures. Occasionally one would point, and the other would come to stand beside her friend. Eventually they left, untouched, and hailed a cab.

I imagined the night of Holly’s birthday having gone differently. We each got our half of Holly’s picture—small, just an inch in height, on our hips or backs, somewhere easily hidden. When Holly rejoined her new friends the next day, with their modest clothes and strict rules, she would have felt apart from them. She would have felt more like the woman she once imagined she would become, a woman I would recognize. We would have shared a secret, at least for a little while. We would finally look alike.

Or maybe if I had followed Holly’s urging and gotten something myself, I would have more easily shaken off my hurt, my senseless anger. We would still have our secret, and I would still have her drawing, the work of her hand in my skin. She wouldn’t question our relationship or which family she belonged to. She would always belong to us. Maybe the next day we wouldn’t have learned that while we were threading through the East Village—retelling old stories about friends and neighbors, ghosts and exorcists—Grandpa was dying of a heart attack in his apartment above the bay. He called for help at eleven thirty, and breathed his last in an ambulance not long after that. Our father drew comfort from the hospital’s claim that he didn’t suffer long, but I knew that wasn’t true. There was a voice mail from him on my campus apartment phone. He’d left it at eight o’clock, and his voice was already strangled, his words slow, his breath wheezing. I trembled at the way he dragged each syllable from the violent collapse of his body.

He’s coming, Grandpa told me. He’s coming for me. Then he’s coming for you.

Now here I was again, another hand-drawn picture at my reach, not from Holly but from Grandpa. Maybe I could rewrite the story Holly and I had begun that night. Maybe the ending we were moving toward—the alienation, the resentment—wasn’t inevitable after all. Or maybe I was just reckless, slowly abandoning all the old rules, just as Holly had, hoping to strike something better; maybe I just didn’t want to go back to my room alone. I went inside instead.

WE MEET IN A STERILE VISITING ROOM, NOT UNLIKE THE CONEY
Island Senior Center where he spent most of his time those last couple of years, surrounded by plastic trees in cheap baskets and murmuring televisions. We sit in hard beige chairs on opposite sides of a laminate folding table.

I know our allotted time is brief, and desperation flares inside of me—I can’t say good-bye for a second time.

I reach across the table and take his hands. His skin is cold.

He smiles. Oh, how weak I am, he says.

The fluorescent lights strain and buzz.

No, Grandpa, I protest. His gray hair is thick against his temples, his skin pink instead of sallow, his eyes bright and clear. Gray-blue, like mine.

I’m so happy to see your face, he says. Despite everything that is to come.

Now I’m aware that someone has orchestrated this meeting and that he’s given us very little time. This knowledge weighs on our moment together like the earth weighs on carbon, making it even more precious.

What do you mean? I ask.

My notebook, he says.

Don’t worry, I tell him. I have it.

He doesn’t look relieved. He doesn’t look relieved at all.

I SAT UP IN BED. THE ROOM WAS FLOODED WITH LIGHT, AND I
covered my eyes. My headache was gone, replaced by an alertness eerie in its intensity.

I had dreamed of the dead before, flashes of my second-grade teacher (cancer), the neighbor down the block (car crash), a junior high friend (overdose). But I had never dreamed of Grandpa, and those dreams never felt like this. Grandpa knew he was dead. There was something he needed to tell me. We met in a world adjacent to my waking one, invited by an unnamed other.

I lifted my arms to wind my hair away from my face, and something sharp dug into my back. The tattoo. I slowly maneuvered out of my shirt and stood with my back to the mirror. As the artist scraped through my skin, and the pain wore deeper and deeper, I had begun to worry that I had been too impulsive, that I would wake with massive regret. Besides that, it wasn’t exactly right—I had sketched it for him, but it was so complex that the third time he traced the guides on my skin, I had conceded it was close enough.

I had a sudden urge to call Holly and tell her I had done it, that it was for Grandpa, but that it was for her too, for that time in our lives when we stayed up late, meticulously imagining our futures, me contributing to hers, she contributing to mine.

It would be a mistake. Her whole nineteen years before Nathan were blasphemous, but the particularly gentile memories, the Christmases, the Tuesday-night cheeseburgers, the bikinis, the red heels that were the most expensive shoes she ever bought and would never let me borrow—it all seemed to embarrass her now.

We had spent the last two years building a wall. Her casualness—her chitchat in the car, her way of not meeting my eyes—her refusal to fight, to acknowledge my anger, just made me more angry, and I stacked brick after brick of silence between us, waiting for the wall to grow so high that she would be forced to beat her fists against it. Yet there were chinks in the wall too. We could stand on either side and whisper to each other, and listen.

I peeled off the plastic wrap taped over my skin, took a deep breath, and looked at my reflection. Thick black lines, glowing in a pink aura of tortured flesh. A three-inch-high wound on my back. Over my heart, but also following behind me, protection. It was beautiful. It was alive. I realized there was a part of my brain that I had learned to bludgeon, a primal thing desiccated by so much study, so much stale air. The symbol printed in my skin was newborn and tender. It was mine.

Three

D
uring Holly’s first semester at college, she fell into a whirlwind romance with a guy on her floor—he was tall, pre-med, from Connecticut, so good on paper that my mother began fantasizing and fretting about their life together. I hated listening to her excited speculation. I had never had a boyfriend serious enough for those kinds of conversations, and her claims of pride over my English Department awards sounded dry, forced. I was jealous.

My sister didn’t have a lot in common with her roommate, an Orthodox Jewish girl from Brooklyn who seemed to have arrived at school with a hundred of her closest friends. She was nice, but she ate at the kosher cafeteria with her girlfriends and disappeared all Friday and Saturday. Holly spent more and more time with her boyfriend. They slept in his room almost every night, studied side by side for Chemistry 101 and Introduction to Architecture, arrived at every party hand in hand.

My mother’s worries shifted from the future to the present. “I think he’s Holly’s only friend,” she said.

“It’s normal,” I reassured her. “Anyone who has a boyfriend is joined at the hip.”

“Well, you’ve never been like that. And she says the two of you’ve only gotten together once. She can’t even make time for you?”

“We’re both really busy,” I said, but her observation bothered me. I realized that the last time we had made plans was three weeks earlier—and I had canceled on her. There were few people, even then, that I would choose over work; Holly was one, but her boyfriend wasn’t. When I found out he was coming to the movies with us, I had told her I had a paper due and couldn’t make it. In the time since, I hadn’t heard from her.

By Christmas the boyfriend was done.

Holly was devastated. I asked her what happened, and her explanation gushed forth in fragments: something his friend had said, a favor he had forgotten to do, a comment she made that came out wrong, an explosive argument before her European History midterm. I could barely follow the story—I had missed so much of the buildup. I didn’t even know what he looked like, except for a fuzzy cell phone image of the two of them on top of the Empire State Building at night, their faces bleeding into the darkness.

Holly spent all of winter break crying. I didn’t know what to say. Grandpa had refused to come home for Christmas, and I went to visit him in Coney Island. He had let the mail pile up, and the windowsills were streaked with dirt.

“Grandpa,” I said. “Your gas bill is here. It’s already a week late.”

He waved his hand in front of his face. The corners of his mouth had sunk into a permanent frown. “What is money?” he asked. “Nothing. The dirt of this world. One day there will be yards of it above me. What do I care if it’s already starting to show?”

Grandpa wanted to go to the beach. I pointed to the snow already salting the fire escape. “This is nothing. This is swimming weather!” he said. It wasn’t a joke; he sounded disgusted, like I was weak, spoiled.

We stood in our coats and hats and gloves by the sea. He was still as stone. I gritted my teeth, willing myself not to shiver.

“When I was a boy,” he finally said, “I could hardly imagine this—water as big as the world. If the Almighty could be perceived by the human mind, he would be this. The filthy ocean biting down on Coney Island.”

“Grandpa,” I said, as if to be sure it was still him—the Eli who never spoke of his childhood, the Eli who insisted God was a myth. He didn’t answer me. Eventually he returned to his apartment, and I returned to mine, and we never spoke about it again.

HER SECOND SEMESTER AT COLLEGE, HOLLY HAD TO START HER
social life all over again. Her roommate, Rachel, was surprisingly sympathetic, and stayed up late that first week of classes listening to Holly’s story and describing her own breakup with her high school boyfriend, a passionate but chaste relationship that ended at graduation when he said he didn’t want to marry her.

Instead of studying alone in the dorm, Holly went to the library with Rachel, who had a particular spot by the window in the social science reading room. Holly started going to dinner with her and her girlfriends, at the kosher dining hall. When Rachel invited Holly to a Sabbath dinner in a senior dorm, where they had their own kitchen and a folding table in the common area, Holly went. She was uncomfortable at first, she told me—when we finally spoke, a month into the semester—not knowing what to do when they prayed, racked with anxiety when two guys got into a heated argument about some religious law, every other word foreign to her, but the older girls had cooked so much food—chicken and fish and potatoes and rice—that it felt like a holiday. When one of the girls invited her to the next dinner, she accepted immediately, and at the third Shabbat dinner, she met Nathan.

That same semester, my department accepted my application to finish my PhD, and Grandpa went missing for two days and then died within weeks of his return. I imagine the events of those months like a Chagall, like the picture Holly was painting while her baby slept inside her, the men floating amid stars on a deep-blue vortex. Grandpa appears in the distance after two days of wandering, a little old man beneath seagulls and billboards. I spend nights in the library, searching for a book that will explain ghosts to me. Holly and Nathan watch each other across a folding table piled with mismatched plates of food, in a cramped dormitory kitchen suspended above Manhattan. The bay gains on Coney Island, Hebrew and Yiddish voices circle my sister, obscure but comforting, a quilt of unreadable symbols.

I graduated, Holly finished her first year of college, and Grandpa was buried, according to his will, in a shroud and a simple wooden box. I moved into grad school housing and made a little money grading summer school papers. Holly won a scholarship to a six-week graphic design program in Chicago, and when she came home, she packed away her jeans and tank tops and registered to take Hebrew instead of Spanish. In September I heard his name for the first time. Nathan, the man she had been exchanging letters with all summer—real letters, pages and pages of handwriting, sent via post.

Man—that’s how my mother described him. “He’s a
man,
for crying out loud,” she said. He was twenty-six years old. Holly was nineteen.

“But it’s not like they’re doing anything,” I said, defending Holly out of habit, though it did seem bizarre. “I don’t think he’ll even hold her hand. She’s not going to get pregnant.”

“Marjorie, stop, I can’t even think about that.” Mom sighed. “I worried about you girls going away and, I don’t know, boys convincing you to drink or get tattoos. Not
men
helping you find God.”

“It’s just a phase,” I said. Because of losing Grandpa, I wanted to say; but I had no real reason to think that, so I kept quiet.

“Maybe I should meet this
man
.”

“Don’t get involved,” I said. “I’ll meet him.”

So I let Holly pick the time, and I rearranged my schedule for a Monday-night dinner with her and the man. She suggested an Indian restaurant downtown.

“It’s our favorite,” she said.

Our.
I cringed. High school had been a series of occasionally requited crushes, anticlimactic encounters, and awkward flirtations for both of us. But Holly had left home and immediately become the kind of woman for whom having boyfriends was easy, natural.

I arrived early and stood outside the restaurant reading a 1798 Gothic novel about a woman with a religious fanatic for a brother and a mysterious stalker intent on driving her insane. I was trying to keep an open mind about my dissertation, but I knew that I wasn’t going to change my topic. My heart belonged to the Wandering Jew.

Still, it was a good book. I read with a pen in hand, bracketing and underlining.
My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion; but if I live no longer, I will, at least, live to complete it. What but ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?

Holly came around the corner, her hands in the pockets of her long coat. She was nodding. The man beside her—the
man
—was speaking and gesturing animatedly, his eyes intent on her face.

I don’t know what I had expected him to look like. All I knew was that he was an Orthodox Jew and twenty-six, but in my mind the former had dominated the latter, and I had pictured a cartoon: small, round, with a white beard and a wide-brimmed black hat. Instead, he was tall and slight—towering above Holly—hatless, with light-brown hair and a faint beard. Holly looked up, and in the instant before she smiled and waved, I saw something else on her face, as if seeing me here was an unpleasant surprise.

She introduced us, and when she said his name, she looked up at him and smiled. I realized that he wasn’t quite as tall as he had seemed at first—he was so lean, he appeared taller than he was. He wore a black skullcap, and under his frameless glasses a rash of freckles spread across the pale skin of his nose and cheekbones. My shoulders were the same from summers at the beach. He had spent a lot of time outdoors.

I knew that he wasn’t allowed to touch women and had prepared myself for an awkward introduction, but now I felt a sudden urge to extend my hand, to challenge him. I reminded myself that I was an agent of peace, protecting Holly’s personal life from our mother. I just nodded at him, my hands by my side, the book in one, the pen in the other. In that first moment, I let him win.

We sat down in the small maroon dining room. I watched him drum his fingertips on the glass tabletop, and in the first quiet moments, I thought it wouldn’t take us more than forty-five minutes to eat. I had carved out two hours for them in my schedule, and I was relieved to take some of it back.

“So,” I said, breaking the silence. “The food here is good?”

Nathan looked at Holly. “We like it a lot,” she said.

“It’s the most authentic,” he said, his gaze still on her, like she had asked the question.

“Nathan lived in India,” Holly continued.

“Really?” I asked, surprised. I expected his experiences to have been more insular. Maybe he was a convert, like Holly.

Like Holly.
That was the moment I realized this wasn’t a phase at all. Anyone who walked in would look at us and think that the two of them were of a piece, and I was the outsider. A coworker, a friend of a friend.

Nathan wasn’t a convert, but he was, I came to learn, a black sheep in his community. In Israel, he had fallen in with a rabbi searching for the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, exiled from the Holy Land millennia ago during some conquest or another; he had sent Nathan to India to minister to an ethnic group he believed to be their descendants. Nathan was unconvinced, ultimately, and had returned home only to join the Berukhim Penitents, or the Fellowship of Penitents, or the Berukhim Fellowship, a small, secretive group, the same group that had built their American home in our town. It was meant to be, Holly said later of that coincidence, “it” being moving home after their marriage, or her conversion, or her relationship with Nathan, or all of it. One couldn’t, of course, argue against Providence. Holly believed and I didn’t, and that was the end of it.

I had learned what I could about the Berukhim before our first meeting. I knew that the fringe on the prayer shawl peeking from his coat was rainbow-colored instead of white, and that the shadows under his eyes were likely due to rising from bed each midnight, the Messiah’s hour, to pray. The Berukhim were ascetics, it seemed, mystics who wore amulets and appealed to spirits; no one was really sure, exactly.

Nathan ordered, and when Holly whispered, “Marjorie doesn’t like spinach,” I realized he was ordering for all of us.

“Marjorie’s dissertation is on the Wandering Jew,” Holly said, smiling bravely, and then turned to me. “Nathan’s stepmom jokes that he’s the next incarnation, with all of his traveling.”

“Of course, you know, that’s an anti-Semitic myth,” Nathan said. He was looking at the table but clearly addressing me. Holly’s smile faltered.

“Originally.” There was nothing he could tell me that I didn’t already know—and if there was, I would fake it well enough to win an Oscar.

“He taunted Jesus while he carried the cross,” Nathan said. “Wandering is his punishment.”

“Immortality is the punishment,” I said. “In early British stories he lives in an Armenian monastery. And in German, he’s known just as the immortal Jew.” I could go on—I loved the many differences, the profound meanings to be found in each variation—but now I just wanted to be right. I could tell Nathan didn’t like to be corrected.

“Immortality is not a curse,” Nathan argued. “Our rebbe was too holy for death.”

“At the end of his life, he ascended straight to heaven,” I said. It was one of the few facts I had found on the Internet.

Nathan shrugged. “Maybe. There are different stories. But he didn’t die.”

“Immortality can’t be anything other than a curse,” I said, irritated that our conversation about the supernatural had leapt from fiction to reality. Irritated by his use of
our
.
“Death makes us human, and a human who doesn’t die is, well, not human.”

Nathan tapped his fork against his plate. Holly glared at me.

I cleared my throat. “So are you going to go back to India?” I tried not to sound too hopeful.

Again he looked at Holly. I saw something pass between them. She had told him about our family’s skepticism; the two of them were already weaving a bulwark against us.

“No,” Nathan said. “Maybe after I start a family.” Now he looked at me. It was the first time he had held my eye longer than an instant.

The next day I called Holly. She didn’t pick up. I waited two days for her to call me back, and when she didn’t, I sent her an email.

What are you doing with him? I wrote. He is totally and completely wrong for you.

Sixteen hours later she wrote me back: How do you know what’s right or wrong for me? You barely even talk to me anymore.

You
barely talk to
me,
I responded, and let her be the one who broke off the thread, let the ensuing silence be her fault.