The Beautiful Possible (6 page)

She’elah: Can the body ask one question and the mind another?

Teshuvah: As God is one, the mind and the body are one.

Alone in the attic that night, Walter lies on the floor and gazes at the ceiling as he once gazed at the night stars in the fields of Shantiniketan. No one had intruded on him at the ashram; no one had tried to claim him as a fellow Jew. He could learn philosophy without the spitfire of Talmudic debate; he could digest the language of the spirit without a chavrusa leaning in for a kiss. And yet when Sol’s lips pressed against his, Walter knew that this kiss was not a whiskey-hazed indiscretion, but a declaration of love. Sol’s yearnings may have been misplaced, but Walter feels touched by his audacity.

He listens to the mice scurrying beneath the floorboards. Earned time, he thinks. The afterlife, the footnote. The students’ faces are question marks, asking everything of him.
Be one of us, deliver the goods, enlighten us, or confess! Who are you, Walter? What kind of Jew are you? Speak when you are ready; open the gate: Rabbi Walter omer.
He does not belong in this building, his way station to some vague future.
Soothe me with the words of the Song
, Sonia had said.
Walter, please. Promise me we will go home.
Walter lays his ear to the floorboards and listens to the laughter of the students in the hallway beneath the attic, their voices erupting with a joy he will never understand.

The next day, Sol rushes along Riverside Drive, muttering Talmudic phrases to himself. Rosalie trails behind, then sprints and grabs his hand.

“Slow down, sweetheart.”

“I need to get back and study.”

“Talk to me, Sol. I can’t marry a man who has his thoughts parked elsewhere.”

He slows down. “I’m sorry. Of course you can’t.”

“Why don’t you tell me,” she says.

“What?”

“Everything. All the details. What you are learning, how one becomes a rabbi, something. Anything. I need to prepare for your Talmud class.”

“So much doesn’t translate.”

“You make it sound like a secret society.”

“It’s not a cabal,” he says.

“But it is! Hebrew and Aramaic are your secret keys to the treasures that you twist around to make an argument. You use your implied wisdom to manipulate people into believing what cannot be proven.”

“You sound crass.”

“Look, you knew my father. One can be skeptical and still embrace a daring life of faith. And I don’t say this without love.”

“I have found a wise woman. Your price is above rubies.”

“Don’t toss me your rabbi lines. You haven’t even earned the title yet.”

“Rosalie, what—”

She puts a finger to his lips. “If you see me as a threat we won’t get very far. I’m on your side, sweetheart; I’m marrying you.”

Sol kisses her finger and takes her hand. He remembers how their arms touched at the Heschel lecture and how he literally felt a spark binding them together. Their courtship began so simply: a tinge of desire that felt inevitable. And his desire for Walter started off simply too—the lifelong bond of a true chavrusa—and then he corrupted it with a thoughtless gesture, a mistaken
kiss, a mistranslation. He had been listening with his deaf ear and misunderstood what was said. But no more.

“Thank God,” says Sol.

Rosalie smiles. “My handsome ilui. It’s going to be fun, driving off to the suburbs in a new car, starting a shul—”

“I was thinking about a Dodge. Morris has a friend who owns a dealership.”

“A Dodge is fine,” says Rosalie. “As long as you’re honest with me.”

“Then let me become the rabbi I am meant to be. The next few months are demanding.”

“So we will only speak of china patterns and the make of our car?”

“And the number of children you want. I still say three will be enough.”

“And I always wanted four,” says Rosalie. “Happy and layered and crowded with laughter, tables laden with food, the clanging of dishes, small hands wiping against my skirt. That’s what I want.”

“You,” says Sol, “are all I want.”

Rosalie and Walter sit together in the back row. The Radish has warned his students never to tell anyone that he invited a woman to his Talmud class, and he asked each man to seal his promise in the Talmudic way, holding one end of a handkerchief while the Radish held the other.

Sol sits up front. He is the Radish’s pet student, the first to volunteer to read, the one who understands the precise meaning
of the most obscure Aramaic phrases. At first Sol turns back and winks at Rosalie, but he doesn’t want to make eye contact with Walter, so he stares straight ahead at the Radish, allowing his mind to tether to his teacher’s words.

Walter and Rosalie pass notes: he draws a sketch of the Radish, passes it to Rosalie, who adds eyeglasses, styles a beard, earrings, a hat. In each class they draw more variations of the Radish until they fill an entire notepad with drawings of the Radish as a woman, the Radish fully naked, the Radish as a goat, the Radish as two goats having sex, the Radish as a radish. When he passes notes to her, Rosalie admires Walter’s long fingers. One afternoon she writes him a note that has nothing to do with the Radish, folds it slowly into quarters, and passes it to him under the desk.

With fingers like that you could be a pianist.

Walter writes back.

I am a sketcher, a dreamer, a lost man.

Rosalie takes the note, crosses out
lost
and replaces it with
found.

Walter writes back,
I believe Sol has a meeting with the placement commission today. Meet me at the top of the stairs after class. I want to show you something.

Walter is waiting for her, his head balanced in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. She sits beside him and can smell the spices on his breath. After a few moments, he takes her hand, opens the door to the attic, and begins his tour. She pauses at the section of Hasidic books and pulls out a volume.

“Ah! The Ishbitzer,” she says. “The
Mei HaShiloach
. My father taught me this.” She reads:
“When a man yearns for something, he should see that the object of his desire is the will of God.”

“What if the man has no God?”

“Let desire be your God,” says Rosalie.

“That works for me,” says Walter.

Rosalie points out the letters crowding the page. “This is easier than learning Talmud.”

Walter takes the book from her hands and turns it upside down. When he shakes the pages, a single sprig of faded freesia drops onto the floor. He picks it up, sniffs, and carefully tucks it behind her ear.

She runs her fingers along the spines of the books and Walter’s long fingers follow hers.

“I can teach you how to understand these books,” she says.

“My Hebrew is miserable. I can play games with the text but I make up the meanings.”

Rosalie laughs. “That’s half of it. These rabbis were playing games too. They were creating a new art form.”

She pulls out a random book and points to a word. “Look. Here’s the
shoresh
, the root. And then you have a starting place. The seed of the concept.”

“You should be a rabbi,” says Walter.

“Ha! The daughter of a rabbi marries a rabbi. That’s how it goes. A link in a chain.”

“You can be my rabbi,” says Walter. He opens a file drawer and pulls out a fresh bottle of whiskey.

“Is this where you and Sol come to study?”

“Yes,” he says. “Now you know.”

“The secrets of men.”

“I come here when I want to be alone. I sleep here most nights.”

“I’ll buy you better bedding,” she says. “This is America! No need to sleep under a dirty, frayed blanket—”

“Don’t tell Sol I brought you here.”

“Why would I do that?”

Rosalie brushes her lips against Walter’s and waits for him to respond. The first kiss is soft, nothing declarative. A dip in the waters. Walter’s kiss bears no reminder of Sol; his thumbs rest lightly on her neck and welcome her to a new country.

He pulls away. “We can’t—”

“Of course not,” she says.

Walter stands, extends his hand, and pulls Rosalie to her feet. They kiss again.

“That’s enough,” he says.

“More than enough.” She rests her head on his shoulder.

“Sol,” she says.

“Sol,” he echoes.

“This never happened.”

Walter rests his fingers in Rosalie’s hair and smiles.

“I will leave first,” he says. “Wait several moments and close the door behind you.”

She starts to say something but then stops and waits for Walter to walk out the door.

That night Rosalie lies awake in her childhood bed and counts the days until she will say goodbye to the only mattress she
has ever known. She imagines all her girlhood fantasies lodged within the bed’s casing: Her longings to shrink herself into a girl tiny enough to jump onto the pages of her father’s books, swim through the words, wrap her legs around the letters. Her yearning to know Hebrew as fluently as her father did, and Aramaic, and a few words of Ancient Greek. Her wish, when she was eight, for a Shetland pony that she could ride from one end of Brooklyn to the other. Her desire for a first kiss, practiced on the back of her hand for so many years. That desire vanished when Sol kissed her the first time and she closed her eyes and tasted him and believed he was meant for her. Her dreams of marriage and children, how she would crowd a table with more laughter than her own parents did: four children at least, how she would kiss their heads and hold their small fingers as they drifted off to sleep. And then there were the dreams within the dreams: the pony’s name (Spangle), the Hebrew letter she would wrap her legs around (
lamed
), how she would stand on a bench on upper Fifth Avenue and recite Hebrew poetry with perfect fluency. Rosalie wraps her arms around herself and then reaches under her nightgown, feeling Walter’s fingers resting on hers and then departing, as they travel across her belly and thighs, circling until they arrive. She knows her body well and holds out until she imagines Walter inside of her and then she bursts into tears.

The next morning Rosalie takes the subway to the Seminary, marches up to the attic, and bangs on the heavy door. She has rehearsed the scenario in her head. Walter will answer, she will look down at the floor instead of into his eyes, tell him that
she cannot see him again, that she will not return to the Radish’s class and certainly not back to this geniza. She will say to him,
It was a regrettable mistake
, and then she thinks,
no, it was a beautiful mistake
, and then she decides she will tell him,
that was beautiful and not a mistake at all
. She opens the door and lets herself in.

Walter stands beside the file cabinet and holds a plastic bag filled with brown seeds. He picks up his sil batta from India and methodically crushes the seeds into powder. Rosalie stands at a distance, watching the twitch of his arm muscles.

He looks up.

“I—”

“Shh,” he whispers. He takes her hand and they stand in front of the table where the Torah lies covered with a suit jacket. One kiss lasts for a long time, long enough for Rosalie to allow herself to say yes and long enough for Walter to move his hand up her skirt and explore her slowly and with care. Nothing is awkward between them; everything is permitted. Walter teaches Rosalie what she was waiting to learn about her body and Rosalie teaches Walter that it is possible, once again, to know pleasure.

Hours later, Rosalie skips down the attic stairs alone. She sprints outside the building, crosses Broadway, and runs into Riverside Park, where she collapses on the chilly grass, and reviews what just happened. Walter’s hands and tongue. The inside of her thighs, the unfolded map of her longing. The spice he held to her nose and rubbed on her leg. What she did not know. What she knows now.
Something so beautiful cannot ever be a mistake.

Rosalie presses her feet into the earth and stares at the clouds. She had left her shoes behind in the attic and when she returns to the Seminary an hour later Sol greets her in the lobby and asks why she is barefoot. She raises her hand to her mouth, pretending to be surprised.

No one can promenade around a text with Sol Kerem’s alacrity. While his fellow students stumble through the guttural Aramaic, Sol pirouettes with brisk confidence. He thinks of every text as a field that welcomes him to linger and listen to the rustling of the trees. The letters are alive to him; the words of the Talmud make Sol ache with longing for more words, more pages, more paths toward knowing his God.

Sol is in his final months of learning. He has completed his first round of interviews and the wedding invitations have been mailed. He has no use for Walter now. Why did he let his chavrusa slow down his learning? All those hours wasted while they pillaged the text for fun. Had he had a real chavrusa, someone like Morris with actual skills, Sol would have had a proper partner to challenge his thinking. He never should have crossed the threshold of Walter’s geniza. Something was calling out to him during those winter months—
more moments, more life, more love
—but what he craved was not another man but the words of the texts themselves. A sea of words. Law and lore. Storehouses of stories. Scripture in its skin. The tellings told anew. A rabbi without a Talmud is a heretic and Sol Kerem is anything but a heretic.

In the hallways he brushes past Walter and does not speak to him; in class he no longer turns to look at the back row. There
is no more time for goodwill toward refugees who wear cloth shoes and Indian outfits—Sol needs to shape himself into the next great American rabbi. Now, late at night, when Sol touches himself before sleep, he thinks of Rosalie, imagines their first time after the wedding, soon, so soon. Sol will ask his wife to undress slowly; he will elongate the seduction, making it last after all these months of waiting. He feels himself touching Rosalie’s thighs, her breasts, the skin he has not yet seen. When he is just about to come he can taste Walter’s kiss, at first like fruit and then like ashes.

Walter and Rosalie return once more to the back row of the Radish’s class. They stare straight ahead and pretend to listen to the Radish lecture about ancient laws of taxation. They do not pass notes. Rosalie senses Walter’s every gesture: his hand moving across a page, the turn of his head when he brushes his hair out of his eyes. When she has the urge to pull him close, she focuses on how the lining of her skirt presses tightly against her hips. She considers the silk of the fabric, conjures the person who wove the silk with his fingers, the silkworm that spun the cocoon from its body. She reaches for a sheet of paper and writes: