When deep snow blanketed the Shakespeare Garden, they were still together, still strolling its paths, clowning around, and reciting quotations in British accents. The following spring, Zach forced himself to face the truth: he was not leaving his beloved Baptist anytime soon. His lark had become his life; he was happier with Cleo than he’d ever been with anyone. A weight had shifted, his promise paled. And, because he’d made clear to her from the start that he could never marry someone who wasn’t Jewish, and Cleo had registered no demands of her own, Zach allowed himself to surrender to the feeling he refused to call love.
Anabelle arrived in December without homework—her visitation always coincident with her summer vacation—and ready to dive into whatever activities her father had planned. When Zach asked her if his girlfriend could join them on their Saturday adventure in Chinatown, the plucky nine year old said, “Sure!” At Nom Wah Tea Parlor, he let Anabelle skipper the dim sum selections for all of them, and Cleo loved every one of her twelve chosen dishes. Anabelle read out her own fortune cookie, “You need not worry about your future.” Cleo’s said, “You will have good luck and overcome many hardships.” When Zach refused to break open his cookie, Anabelle did it for him and read the message aloud, “Your love life will be happy and harmonious.”
Zach laughed, “So much for Chinese wisdom.” Cleo shot him a look that was hard to decode, but she didn’t say a word.
After lunch, they walked to Columbus Park on Mulberry Street, observed a tai chi session and then a chess match between two men who each looked a hundred years old. They browsed the street stalls on their way to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, where they ordered the craziest flavors on the menu—stinky fruit, zen butter, and black sesame—tasting them, dumping them, and going back for strawberry, chocolate, and mint chip instead. In a store window on Mott Street a pair of lime-green Chinese mesh slippers that cost $1.98 caught Anabelle’s eye and Zach bought them for her.
“Oh, Daddy, thank you, but it won’t be fair unless we can get a matching pair for my new chum. May we please?” Anabelle and Cleo wore the green shoes home on the subway.
The following weekend, since the weather was unseasonably warm, Zach reserved an Avis car to drive to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, the only nearby amusement park that was open in December and this time it was Anabelle who suggested they invite Cleo along.
“It’s about a four-hour trip each way,” Zach said. “We’ll have to stay over at a hotel.”
“Cool!” Anabelle enthused brightly. “I heard all the Hershey hotels have chocolate fountains.”
“Where do you think Cleo should sleep?” Zach asked, gingerly.
“In my room, of course. Just get us two beds.”
Zach smiled, called the travel agent, and booked two rooms at the Cocoa Motel.
Hershey Park was jammed when they arrived and somehow, in the crush, they became separated, or rather Zach lost sight of his daughter and girlfriend, who had been walking behind him hand in hand.
Once they realized Zach wasn’t with them, Anabelle said, “Let’s have a go on the Ferris wheel. We can keep an eye out for Daddy from above and yell down when we spot him.”
Cleo was as excited as Anabelle when they buckled themselves into their seats and the little car swung back and forth as the huge wheel carried them toward the sky. At the top of its arc, they surveyed the crowd below and screamed down to every man with tousled sandy brown hair, giggling hysterically as it became evident, on the way down, that none of the men were Zach. Afterward, they found the person in charge of the public address system and to Zach’s consternation he soon heard, “Mr. Levy, Mr. Zach Levy! Please report to the Lost Child desk to claim your daughter and her babysitter.” Rather than be offended, Cleo was amused.
Back in Manhattan, the night before Cleo left for Memphis to spend Christmas vacation with her family, the threesome made lasagna together at the loft. Zach had to restrain himself from asking his daughter if his girlfriend could sleep over. Anabelle was a sophisticated kid, she understood cohabitation, she’d seen Bonnie and Gil in the same bed for years, but at the Cocoa Motel, she’d claimed Cleo for herself; she hadn’t suggested that he and Cleo sleep together in the same room in the same bed, so Zach didn’t suggest it now.
On Thursday, January 1, after Bonnie picked up Anabelle to bring her to the airport, Zach resolved to start the new year with a new plan; he had to break up with Cleo when she returned from Memphis on Sunday or else another year would slip by before he knew it. Though nearly deranged by longing, he had tried to rehearse what he would say to her. He couldn’t even make it past the first line.
On Friday night, he passed a synagogue with open windows and heard the congregation singing a familiar melody, L’cha Dodi, the song that welcomes the Sabbath bride, and thought to himself that his future bride, the woman he should be dating, the bashert he was destined to marry, was more likely to be in that sanctuary than at whatever party he was supposed to be heading for, so he changed course. Zach detoured to the bar at Lovage, M. J.’s restaurant, and waited for the chef to join him once dinner service was under control. Minutes later, M. J., spiffy in his toque, white jacket, and checkered pants, plopped down on the next stool, summoned Brian, his bartender, and ordered a Virgin Mary for himself and a high-test Bloody Mary for Zach.
“Polish vodka in mine, please,” Zach told Brian, then turned to M. J. “I’ve decided to break up with Cleo as soon as she gets back on Sunday night, and I need you to put some starch in my spine. I’m afraid I can’t do it, but I have to.”
“Hold your horses, man. You’re too fast for me.”
Zach rubbed circles on his temples. “I’m going nuts, man. It can never work between me and Cleo. I’ve got to leave her and settle down once and for all.”
“Honey, if you and Cleo aren’t settled, I don’t know who is.”
“I mean get married. Have a family.”
“You got Anabelle. Ain’t she family enough? What’s missing?”
The question shamed Zach. His daughter was all he could possibly want in a child. The point is, she was his only child—and he was an only child. “She’s perfect,” he said. “But I have to do more than replace myself. I have to have more kids.”
The chef scowled. “Something’s wrong with this picture, Zachy. You got it all and you want more.” M. J. hopped off the stool. “I’m going back to the kitchen where the grateful people are—the ones who are just glad if they wake up every morning on the right side of the grass.” He crooked a finger at his bartender. “Brian! Throw an extra shot of vodka in this guy’s Mary and let him drink himself into the ground.”
When Zach finally dragged himself home, he did as he always did when he felt depressed, made himself scrambled eggs. Then he watched An Affair to Remember and fell asleep before Deborah Kerr got hit by the car.
Sunday afternoon, Cleo called him from the airport. “I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you too,” Zach bit his lip.
She said she was going directly to the station to pretape an interview. “Marcus booked me three politicos tonight. But we could meet up afterward if you’re not too tired. My place at ten?”
That was when Zach should have said they needed to talk about their relationship, and maybe do it on the phone, the new year was a good time for fresh starts, and he had to . . . Instead, his heart beating like the wings of a trapped bird, he said, “I’ll be there.”
At nine thirty, he practically sprinted to the subway and once they were nestled in each other’s arms under her beige satin sheets, the idea of leaving her seemed insane.
The next day, he unloaded to Herb Black in the office kitchen. Herb had made himself a peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwich on white bread, no crusts. Zach cadged an apple from the ACLU’s community fruit bowl and bit into the waxy fruit.
“I need your advice, Herbie,” Zach said. “You’ve left a few good women in your time. What should I say? How should I do this?”
“My advic
e? Don’t.”
Zach dipped a plastic knife into Herb’s Skippy jar and spread a thick coat of peanut butter on the white flesh of his apple. “I have to. The longer I’m with her, the harder it’ll be to end it.”
“Who says you have to end it?”
“Come on. We’ve been through this a hundred times.”
A thin strand of marshmallow goo stretched like a shiny silk thread between Herb’s sandwich and his front teeth. He wound the strand around one finger and licked it off. “Tell me again why it’s so important for you to marry a Jew even though it’s not important for you to live like a Jew?”
The question stopped Zach cold. He slid into a long silence. “Why do you think we’re still here?” he asked finally.
Herb rolled his eyes. “Is this about all the people who tried to kill us?”
“Babylonians. Romans. Spaniards. Germans. Arabs. How did we survive? Why are we still here?”
“Because Jews married Jews? Really, Zach?”
“I have to leave her, Herbie.”
“No, you don’t. But since you’re clearly planning to, I’m preaching to the coffee machine here. You asked my advice. I’m saying, let yourself off the hook. Marry Cleo. Let the next guy solder his link to the Jewish chain.”
“What if we all said that?” Zach was eating the peanut butter straight from the jar now, licking it off his plastic knife, whose serrated edge scraped his tongue in a weirdly satisfying way, as if self-inflicted pain was an appropriate response to the situation at hand. “We’re an endangered species.”
“We’re a paranoid species,” Herb said, as he screwed the cap back on the Marshmallow Fluff. “I don’t see us as fragile. We’ve got Oscars. Pulitzers. CEOs in the Fortune 500. We’re fine. The Jews will survive without you leaving Cleo.”
Zach shook his head. “Maybe you haven’t heard, but we’re actually shrinking. We haven’t even recouped our numbers since the war. We have the lowest birthrate on the planet. It’s not the anti-Semites who are killing us. We’re destroying ourselves. You want Jews to vanish from the face of the earth?”
Herb licked the last of the sticky Fluff off his fingers. “Not Jews. But maybe Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and all the rest. Think about how many wars have been fought over God. Maybe we’d be better off without religion.”
“I take your point. But do the Jews have to go first?” Zach tossed his apple core in the trash and went back to his desk.
CHAPTER 11
PLAYING FOR TIME
COHABITATION AGREED WITH THEM. THE MORE TIME they spent together the more Cleo relaxed into herself and the less inclined Zach was to fight his feelings. As for her racist relics, he trained himself to avert his eyes, recasting the living room as a hallway between the kitchen and bedroom, not a destination or a place to linger. Though he came to understand the power of the tchotchkes to buttress her commitment to remembering a painful history, it took one horrific old postcard to finally convince him to let up on her and stop complaining about the collection.
He was doing sit ups when she came home from one of her Saturday flea market outings, excited by her new find. “These postcards almost never show up north of the Mason-Dixon Line,” she said, squatting so he could read the postmark: Asheville, N.C., September 2, 1942. She flipped the card to the picture side.
“Jesus, Cleo!” Zach flinched at the photograph. “That’s sickening.”
“Maybe you need a stronger stomach,” she said, jabbing his gut. “More sit ups. More crunches.”
The postcard showed a photograph of a black man with a noose around his neck hanging from a tree; white men brandishing shotguns, women pointing, children laughing, people picnicking.
“I can’t believe they took pictures,” Zach said. “They didn’t even try to hide what they’d done.”
“The opposite,” she said. “Lynch cards were for sale at the corner drug store, two for a nickel. This one cost me a dollar.”
“It’s obscene!”
“Lynchings happened; better to face it than deny it. These cards were a terrorist ploy meant to intimidate blacks and scare us into submission. White folks only had to tack one of these up near the cash register and we got the message.”
“Don’t look at me like that.” Zach shook out the towel he’d been using as a neck roll and wiped his face. “My folks weren’t in Asheville in 1942; my mom was in Auschwitz.”
“Well, my people were lynched in the US of A,” Cleo said. “Asheville was my Auschwitz.”
“I don’t display yellow armbands in my living room, Cleo.”
“You don’t have to, Zach. They’re building you a Holocaust Museum—on the Washington Mall, no less. I’m not saying Jews didn’t suffer . . .”
“Thank you for that.”
“. . . but the Holocaust didn’t happen here. My people were enslaved here. Where’s our slavery museum?”
“Maybe you’d have one if you spent your time lobbying Congress instead of buying this repulsive junk.”
“Memorabilia.” She corrected. “The word means ‘worthy to be remembered.’ Your ‘Never Again’ is my ‘Never Forget.’”
“If it’s worth remembering, donate it to a museum. Don’t keep it on your wall. Send your collection to the Smithsonian.”
“Someday,” Cleo said. “When I’m done with it.”
Zach gave up the fight. It was her heritage. And her home. Eventually, he would be gone. In the meantime, he would hang out in the kitchen and bedroom and concentrate on her other astonishments.
A COUPLE OF weeks after Zach’s thirty-fifth birthday, he and Cleo were sunning near the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park when some kids whizzed by on skateboards, skimming the pavement like pond flies and click-clacking down the stairways, their boards, though unmoored, flying with them as if hooked to a toe, and solid as a landing strip when they slammed to earth. Since Zach was at home on skis, he thought he’d give skateboarding a try and was about to ask if he could borrow a board for a test run when he remembered he was thirty-five. Middle-aged. For his learning curve to pay off in the pleasure of mastery, he would need years of practice. Would he have enough time? Would there be limits to what his body could do? Were a few new thrills worth the risk of an injury?
He decided not to ask the kid for the board.
“You’re frowning,” Cleo said.
“I feel old.”
She followed his gaze. “Don’t be ridiculous. You could do that if you wanted to, but why would you want to?”
That wasn’t the point. The point was, if he didn’t have enough time left to learn to skateboard, he might not have enough time to find his bashert. Each day he spent cleaving to Cleo was another day stolen from his future. For all he knew, she might feel the same way about him. She was coming up on thirty, an earthquake age for everyone, and, given her biological clock, even more seismic. He had been honest with Cleo all along; she knew he was just passing through en route to the life he was supposed to be living. So why was she treading water with him? How long would she stay? What if she left him first?
The following Sunday night, he turned on the radio to listen to her show while preparing his shoes for a long-overdue polishing. He spread newspapers on the kitchen table, pulled the laces out of his cordovans, and opened a fresh can of brown shoe cream. Usually Cleo bounced her monologue off him in advance but she’d mentioned nothing about tonight’s subject.
“Good evening and welcome to Cleopatra’s Needle. The other day, I met with a group of well-educated black women to talk about men and marriage, or rather listen to the women complain about the paucity of educated black men. No surprise there, since fewer than half of black American boys finish high school and more black men are in prison than in college, which leaves a very small pool of appropriate black guys for middle-class, cultured, intellectual black women to choose from. This, in turn, explains why, when one of the classy brothers pairs up with a white woman, some black sisters get mad. My informants also commented on how much more common i
t is for black men to date white women than vice versa. So the first question I want to put to tonight’s listeners is this: What’s the story with black men and white women?”
Zach jammed his left fist into one of the cordovans to hold the shoe firm, then swished the sponge across the cake of polish and rubbed the cream into the leather. He looked over at the radio, waiting for Cleo’s answer.
“My theory is that racism and sexism meet on the doorstep of romance,” she began. “As long as whites are more valued than people of color and as long as males still hold most of the social prerogatives, the black man will want to, quote, ‘trade up,’ in the belief that having a white woman on his arm proves, or improves, his value. It doesn’t seem to be the same for black women. When we date white men, we don’t do it to trade up, we do it because the pickings are so slim among black males. As for white men—who hold both race and gender prerogatives—they’re two-thirds less likely to date a black woman. Studies show that black husband–white wife couples are two-thirds more common than white husband–black wife couples. White men have no reason to ‘trade down.’”
Zach put down the shoe. Where was she going with this?
“Instead of black men challenging these racist hierarchies, they project their own sense of inferiority onto black women so when they reject us, they can feel like they’re discarding the inferior part of themselves. Everyone is always focusing on the plight of the black male. Tonight I’m interested in the plight of the black female, specifically her marriage prospects in today’s society. W. E. B. Du Bois famously wrote about the ‘Talented Tenth.’ Where are those top-notch black men? Why are so many of them hanging with white women instead of with us? You know who you are, brother. Later you can tell us what your problem is and Cleopatra’s Needle will puncture your balloons. But first we’re going to take calls from the sisters and hear some truthful testimony.
Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate Page 14