Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  The sun dipped behind the twin battlements of the San Remo but the lake tenaciously held its glow. Zach yanked out more weeds as he watched a rowboat glide by, dad and daughter side by side, each working an oar, mom nursing an infant in the bow.

  “Let’s go,” she said finally. Neither of them had touched the food.

  “Sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to shout.”

  “Forget it. It’s done.” Cleo got up on her knees, returned both untouched pieces of chicken to the container, put away the food, cups, dishes, and cutlery.

  It was done. Finished. Zach corked the wine, secured the bottle to the inside lid of the basket, and buckled the straps. Then, in that mindless way people have of repeating grooved behaviors even after their relationship has self-destructed, they each took hold of one handle of the basket and started walking back uptown, leaving behind a frame of scarred earth and mounds of weeds piled up like cairns in the wilderness.

  Not a word passed between them until they shut the door of her apartment, emptied the basket, and gravitated to the kitchen table. As had been his habit, Zach sat facing the view. In the deepening dusk, the boulders just inside the park loomed as immense and immovable as the lovers’ impasse. It needn’t be spelled out: Cleo would tolerate no infant conversion, no bris; Zach would tolerate no baptism, no baby Jesus under the tree. She was the child of a Christian preacher; he couldn’t be the father of a Christian child. His training in alternative dispute resolution was useless; there was nothing to negotiate.

  “Want a beer?” he asked. The kitchen was so narrow he could open the refrigerator from his chair.

  She tapped her stomach. “Not allowed.” Her embryo, the size of a lentil, was the elephant in the room.

  Zach tore one can from a six-pack. Cleo edged past him to go to the bathroom. It surprised him that she’d held out so long. Bonnie used to have to pee every twenty minutes when she was pregnant. This time, he wouldn’t get to be around to witness the habits of the mother of his child, wouldn’t get to see her belly swell, palm it like a basketball, feel the first kick. There would be no couple’s Lamaze classes for him and Cleo. No arguments over names. Someone else would time her contractions and coach her breathing. After tonight, Zach would have to make himself forget this pregnancy ever existed.

  Through two sets of walls, he heard the water run in the bathroom sink for quite some time after the toilet was flushed and he knew she was not just washing her hands but her face. “Clean face, clean slate” she always said after finishing something difficult. His heart ached when she returned to the kitchen with a wet hairline; how well he knew her. As she squeezed past him to her chair, the patch pocket on her denim skirt caught on a cabinet knob and ripped along its seam. Cleo sat down holding the torn pocket against her hip.

  Zach fidgeted with the salt and pepper shakers. “You know I can’t break my promise,” he blurted out. “A million Jewish children were . . . I just can’t . . .”

  “Can we please leave the Third Reich out of this?” Cleo burped. “I think I might have to throw up again.” Zach grabbed the trash pail. “No,” she said, pushing it away. He raised the window. She leaned on the sill and stuck her head out. The air smelled of mulch but smacked of winter. “Speaking of murdered children, I hope you noticed which of us wants to kill this baby.”

  Zach flinched. “No fair, Cleo. I just can’t see another way out.”

  “I get it, but spare me your lecture on family loyalty, okay? I’ll match mine against yours any day of the week.”

  They were back to the day they met: black versus Jew all over again. Zach tried to imagine what was going through her head. Did she hate him for wasting two and a half years of her life? How did she expect him to respond? Did she think he would renege on his promise to Rivka, after all that his parents had lost? Thinking of his mother conjured his younger self, neglected, confused, and desperate for the slightest sign that she loved or wanted him. The pain of that ostensibly abandoned child provoked his usual protective response and by the time he turned back to Cleo, he was no longer her lover but her lawyer. He couldn’t be there as a husband and father, but he could provide the contract that would protect Cleo and her baby. He knew the child would have a loving mother. Even absent, he thought he could ensure the rest.

  The only sounds in the little kitchen were the hum of the refrigerator and the tick of the oven clock. Finally, Zach said, “If you’re sure you want to have it, we should put certain things in writing.”

  “What things?” she mimicked, acidly.

  The nearest paper was the pink phone message pad, each sheet imprinted WHILE YOU WERE OUT. The sentence completed itself in Zach’s fevered brain: WHILE YOU WERE OUT . . . of touch with your roots, you went out of control. WHILE YOU WERE OUT . . . of your mind in love, you forgot who you are and what you come from. On the blank side of the pink sheets, he wrote the terms of his proposed agreement: that all future contact between him and Cleo would be conducted through a third party (the sight or sound of her, he knew, would make him want her back); that the third party would notify Zach of the baby’s birth but not inform him of its name or gender; that he would pay all obstetric or pediatric bills not covered by the radio station’s health insurance policy; that he would pay monthly child support, acknowledge paternity should it ever be required for health or legal reasons; that the infant’s surname would be Scott.

  He read Cleo his draft and asked if it met with her approval. She said the last clause was unnecessary. “Why would I ever name my child after you?”

  Zach could see that she was both seething and fighting tears. It took all his will power to resist lifting her out of her chair and wrapping her in his arms. Her sorrow was his fault. Everything was.

  “I love you so much,” he said, his eyes welling up. “It’s killing me to leave you. You must know that.”

  She walked to the front door.

  He hadn’t touched his beer. Now he took a few gulps. “Tomorrow, I’ll have this typed and hand delivered for your signature.”

  “You do that, Counselor.” She stood in the doorway waiting for him to go, the torn pocket dangling from her skirt like a shutter on a broken hinge.

  OUTSIDE IT WAS already dark. His legs felt leaden but somehow carried him around the corner and down the steps of the 103rd Street Station to the deserted subway platform. How impossible that he would never see her again, never fall asleep with her breasts pressed against his back, never awaken to her alarm clock blasting “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” her voice singing in the shower, the smell of her chicory coffee. Never again. A Jewish lament for his Christian lover.

  Two teens, the only passengers in his subway car, were making out under a dermatologist’s ad, their fondling reminding him of the early days when he and Cleo couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The boy’s whiskers had reddened the girl’s cheeks, her smudged mascara made her eyes look like a panda’s. The advertising placard above the teenagers’ heads read like a comment on their skin: Acne. Eczema. Psoriasis. Guaranteed relief! Moles removed! Scars corrected!

  Soon after they met, Zach had told Cleo about the accident that left him with the scar on his eyebrow and she had made him promise never to have plastic surgery to repair it. “I’m glad you’re not perfect,” she’d said. “Nobody is.”

  Neither are relationships, he told himself as the train sped through the tunnel. His and Cleo’s had been close to perfect but doomed from the start. A man doesn’t break a vow to his mother, especially if she’s dead and can’t protest. Pressing his forehead to the cool subway window, he resolved to draw up the agreement and have Herb take it up to Cleo’s apartment for her to sign, and for the rest of his life, he would try not to think about the woman he would always love but could never, ever see again.

  At Forty-Second Street, he took the shuttle to the downtown Lexington Avenue line, caught the 6 train, and got off at Spring Street. Rather than face the musty gloom of his loft, he went straight across the hall. Mercifully, M. J. was h
ome, Lovage being shuttered on Sunday nights. Zach, who had entered without knocking, had caught his neighbor singing “I Feel Pretty” along with the cast album of West Side Story while arranging a fan of crackers around a wedge of brie and some green grapes. Even when snacking alone, Chef Randolph was a class act.

  “Ah! The prodigal returns. How are things on the Upper Best Side, my man?” M. J. offered Zach the cheese board, butler-style, upper body tilted slightly forward, one arm behind his back. “Voulez-vous de fromage?” Zach shook his head, collapsed into the red velvet couch, and stuck his feet up on the kidney-shaped coffee table. Instantly, M. J. slid a Gentleman’s Quarterly under Zach’s shoes with the resigned sigh of a long-suffering valet. “Man, teachin’ you manners is harder ’n strikin’ a match on a wet mule.” Usually, the Texan’s colloquialisms got a laugh out of Zach. Tonight, nothing. “Okay, what’s wrong?” M. J. asked. “You look like you been chewed up, spit out, and stepped on.”

  Zach let his head fall back on the couch. “Cleo’s pregnant.”

  “Fuck!”

  “That was basically my reaction.”

  “What do you want to drink? I have an amusing claret, a nice tawny port.”

  “Stronger. Harder. Cleaner. I plan to drink a lot of it.”

  M. J. went to the freezer and came back with a frosty bottle of aquavit and two cone-shaped flutes. “Begin at the beginning,” he said.

  “Long version costs extra.” Zach held out his glass for an immediate refill and drank his way through his report on the day’s events. The bottle of Swedish firewater was empty by the time he pulled out the notes he’d scribbled on the backs of the WHILE YOU WERE OUT sheets.

  M. J. fluffed up one of the red velvet cushions and wedged it behind his friend’s neck. “Between you, me, and the lamp post, I’m kinda surprised she made the ending so easy for you.”

  “Believe me, it was the furthest thing from easy.” Zach snatched the pillow and punched it. “Christ! What have I done?”

  “Mind the velvet!” M. J. checked the cushion for damage, then, as if to say friendship trumps upholstery, handed it back. “I know it hurts. That woman’s got more on her plate than a man can say grace over, straight or gay. But you had to leave her.”

  Zach wiped his wet eyes with a cocktail napkin.

  “You had to,” M. J. repeated. “You been chewing on this bone since the day you met her. She’s always known you can’t marry her ’cause your brother died and you’re the only one left. It’s not like you took advantage of her. You were always on the up-and-up about it.”

  Zach hugged the cushion even tighter.

  “You want my advice?” M. J. asked.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “It’s only a couple of weeks ’til Anabelle gets here. I think you should suck up your misery for now, then focus on your daughter for the next month. Annie always takes your mind off your troubles. When she leaves, if you still miss Cleo, that’ll tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “That maybe you need to say the hell with it. You can’t bring your brother back from the dead. You can’t carry your mama’s burden. You can’t save the Jews by yourself.”

  Zach crossed his legs with a jerk that shook his glass and splashed aquavit on the red velvet couch. “I’m hopeless, M. J.” He grabbed a sheaf of cocktail napkins and dabbed at the wet stain. “You should throw me out.”

  “I’m about to. Forget the spill, I’ll deal with it, but you need to close for renovation.” M. J. helped Zach to his feet and walked him across the hall and put him to bed in his clothes, but made him take off his shoes. Like a sentry, M. J. didn’t return to his own place until he heard Zach snoring.

  CHAPTER 13

  NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

  THE GRIND OF A SANITATION TRUCK SAWED THROUGH Zach’s brain at dawn. His lips were parched, his eyelids stuck to his eyeballs. After a cold shower and two Tums with a V8 chaser, and despite the Tibetan gongs ringing in his head, he threw on some shorts and went to the gym. It would take forty minutes on the treadmill to shape him up for his 9:00 a.m. meeting with Jamar Abiya, who Zach hoped would distract him from his misery. Instead, Abiya reminded him of Cleo because she had shown so much interest in his case. Just last week, when they were jogging around the reservoir, she had asked after Abiya, the New York City cop fighting for the right to wear dreadlocks on the job while the NYPD insisted the force had to maintain uniformity of appearance in the interest of esprit de corps and public safety. Zach had been explaining the constitutional ramifications—religious freedom versus security—but Cleo had seemed to take the case personally. She’d kept asking questions about what Abiya looked like and how he behaved toward his superiors.

  Dialing up the treadmill’s incline, it occurred to Zach that Cleo must have already known she was pregnant and was imagining her baby growing up to be a rebel like Jamar Abiya. Many guests on her show had talked about how African American males seldom reach manhood without getting arrested, imprisoned, or shot. How much more unlikely for a black boy to survive unscathed if he grew up to be the type who makes waves. Cleo probably wanted Jamar Abiya to be allowed to wear dreads on the job so that when her son grew up he, too, could be a rebel.

  Zach amped up the speed of the treadmill until he was running full out.

  AS THE YEAR spooled by, his longing for her intensified on certain dates—their respective birthdays, the anniversary of the day they met at the New School, even Christmas. When June rolled around, there was a new date to dread: the child’s birthday.

  In keeping with their agreement, Cleo’s lawyer (the official “third party”) called as soon as she gave birth, not to tell Zach her baby’s height, weight, gender, or name, just to inform him that “Scott’s issue” had arrived and child support payments should commence immediately.

  He chalked up a victory each time he resisted the temptation to run up to Central Park West to catch a glimpse of the baby and its mother. While his memories of his parents were fading fast—Rivka, a spectral figure, Nathan’s vigor eclipsed by his dementia—Zach’s image of Cleo crystallized with time. He studiously avoided listening to her show but could still hear her voice in his head. Whenever he saw a brown-skinned baby, he thought about her child and conjured the bliss of an imagined reunion. What he could not picture was the day after, or the week after that, or any way to bridge their divide.

  Without frequent refresher sessions on M. J.’s red velvet couch—where he grew dependent on Texas-size empathy, pep talks, and aquavit—Zach could not have stuck it out. But with his neighbor’s help, he hadn’t called Cleo, snuck up to the radio station to catch her leaving work, crouched in the bushes to watch her jog around the reservoir, or followed fifty feet behind when she wheeled the carriage in the park. He did, however, send an anonymous bunch of balloons on the baby’s first birthday, which was five months before Anabelle’s thirteenth.

  That November, for the fourth time since she was born, his daughter’s birthday fell on Thanksgiving Day. Because her bat mitzvah was the following Saturday, she wasn’t coming to New York this year. Zach was flying to Melbourne for the celebration and staying through most of December. He had already given Gil Benedict full credit for persuading Bonnie that sports were good for girls; now he had Gil to thank for talking Anabelle into having a bat mitzvah at all. Both her parents had tried to convince her, albeit for different reasons: Bonnie thought it important for Anabelle to know how it feels to succeed at a difficult challenge “before society has a chance to squelch her spirit.” Zach wanted his daughter to solder her link to the chain of Jewish continuity. Despite their entreaties, Anabelle—citing the fact that none of her friends were doing it and most Australian Jews considered the ceremony to be a silly American import—had initially refused. Yet, somehow, Gil had changed her mind.

  Zach’s bat mitzvah gift was a purposeful echo of his chain metaphor. He’d bought her a bracelet made of fourteen-karat gold links, with charms attached that symbolized his and Anabelle�
��s relationship: the tiny gold telephone for their main means of communication over the last decade; the tiny gold book for all the stories they had read together; the fork and spoon for their many meals; the bear, basketball, and ice skates reminders of their outings to the zoo, Madison Square Garden, and Wollman Rink.

  A few nights before leaving for Melbourne, Zach brought the bracelet over to M. J.’s to show it off.

  “I’m absolutely charmed. It’s charming!” said M. J. preening at his own wit. He spent a fair amount of time studying each miniature object before zeroing in on the tiny gold dreidel and menorah. “How great that you found Hanukkah charms.”

  Zach said, “I couldn’t choose between them so I got both.”

  M. J. held the bracelet up to the light. “The only thing missing is a golden latke. I hope you’re not planning to wrap this gorgeous bijou in some corny Happy Birthday paper! Let me decorate it!” He opened a drawer and pulled out a sheet of handmade rice paper, a roll of raffia, and a sprig of lavender silk lilacs.

  “What actually happens at a bat mitzvah?” M. J. asked, as he considered additional elements for his creation.

  “Come to Melbourne with me and you’ll see,” Zach said. “Anabelle is desperate for you to be there.”

  “Don’tcha think I want to, but if I left Lovage for a week, there’d be a double murder. I’m the only one standing between my head cook and my pastry chef. Just tell me what I’ll be missing.” He cut a square from the rice paper that turned out to be exactly the right size to cover the box, secured the wrapping with drips of sealing wax, and pressed his ring against the splotches, imprinting his seal, a steer wearing a crown.

  Zach applauded. “Basically, she’ll be the star of the Sabbath service at her synagogue. She’ll lead the congregation in some of the prayers, chant a portion from the Torah, give a little speech. Then, we’ll all go to a big party and people will give her presents. And checks.”