“That’s the payoff for all the prep, right?” M. J. cut a length of the raffia and shaped it into a multilooped bow.
“Yeah, but I think she also gets how meaningful it is. It’s like she’s saying publicly, ‘Okay, I’m in!’ Or put my mother’s way, a bat mitzvah hammers another nail into Hitler’s coffin and tells the anti-Semites we’ve spawned another Jew whether they like it or not.”
“Well, that sounds joyful.” M. J. looked up from his handiwork. “Is this a rite of passage or revenge?”
Zach didn’t answer, just smiled and picked up the beautifully wrapped package. “If the restaurant fails, you definitely have a future at Bloomingdale’s.”
HE RETURNED FROM Australia the day before Christmas, spent the rest of the week recovering from jet lag, then took off for a long weekend at Herb’s Vermont ski house. On Saturday night, he put on a ridiculous party hat and shared his New Year’s resolution along with the other guests. Out loud, he said he planned to learn Russian but in his mind, he made the same resolution he’d been making on December 31 for the last two years: “I will stop thinking about Cleo. I will stop thinking about Cleo.”
The trip home on Sunday took five hours. By the time he reached Soho, he was so hungry he went straight to the pizza parlor and ordered a pepperoni to go. The counterman switched on a transistor radio. Cleo’s voice filled the restaurant. Zach froze. He couldn’t not listen, couldn’t run out the door without his pie, couldn’t ask the man to change the station.
She was asking her listeners to call in their predictions for 1989, but she may as well have been whispering in Zach’s ear. He paid, dashed home with the pie, and picked up the phone.
As usual, Marcus Charlton was screening her calls. “First name and question, puh-leeze?” The producer always reminded Zach of a put-upon diplomat who had requested a post in Bermuda but got Haiti instead. Cleo used to call him an “in-group snob,” because he was born in Minnesota and, though dark skinned himself, looked down on every black who came from a Caribbean island or the American South. Charlton also had little use for white people, especially the Jewish variety, and most especially, for Zach Levy. The whole time Zach was seeing Cleo, he could feel Marcus disapproved.
“First name and question! You’re hogging a line here, brother.”
Hoping to ingratiate himself, Zach affected the patrician accent of the ACLU’s receptionist, who was from Barbados. “Uh . . . My name is Joseph, sir, and if you’d be so kind, I’d like to ask Ms. Scott her opinion of . . .” Zach glanced at the pizza box, “the relationship between Italian Americans and African Americans.”
“Well now, Joseph, that’s a fascinating topic,” said Charlton sarcastically, “but if you had been listening, you’d know we’re taking predictions for the coming year.”
“Let me think about that for a minute—”
“I have others on the line who already know what they think,” he interrupted. “I’m placing you in the queue.”
Here’s a prediction, Zach thought, as the line went to Muzak. Marcus Charlton will never put me through.
Caller’s remorse set in as soon as Zach hung up. Pizza box in hand, he charged across the hall where he found M. J. wearing his “Kiss Me, I’m Texan” apron and bright red oven mitts, a cookie sheet in each hand. Every surface of his loft was sheathed in aluminum foil and dotted with cookies, tarts, eclairs, and pastries Zach didn’t recognize.
“Baking in this space is harder than putting socks on a rooster,” M. J. said, sounding frazzled.
“What’s all this for?” Zach asked.
“Private equity firm. I agreed to do their dessert party in some partner’s fancy apartment on the Upper East Side. They scheduled it for nine to midnight on New Year’s Day. That’s tonight, if you haven’t noticed. We had a grease fire at Lovage this morning. Perfect timing. The Ansul system went off and the fire department flooded the place with goop. Pastry chef called in sick, probably had a hangover, so I’ve been working solo all day, trying to make magic with this puny little Magic Chef. Two of my waiters are coming by with a van in half an hour to take the pastries uptown.” M. J. found a place on the floor for the two cookie sheets he’d been holding. “Man, if ever I needed your kitchen, it was today! Of course you weren’t home and your damn door was locked—and the key? Where’d that go to? What was wrong with the service door lintel?”
“Sorry. Forgot I moved it.”
“Better grab a piece of couch before I cover it with cookies. And gimme a slice of that pizza. I haven’t had a gram of protein all day.”
Zach didn’t sit, he paced. “I’m such a fucking jerk!”
“Excuse me?” The chef pointed a pastry bag at him as if to threaten death by icing. “Whatever this is about, it simply cannot be about you right now. Did you just hear what I’m facing here?”
“I fucking called her show!” Zach slapped the counter, causing the cookie tins to clatter.
“Crack my meringues and you’re a dead man!” M. J. shouted. “What were you thinking, Zachariah? I’ve spent more than two years weaning you off that girl! I thought we agreed you wouldn’t listen.”
“I couldn’t help it. The kid at the pizza place had it on the radio.” Zach folded a slice of pie and handed it to M. J. who devoured it.
“What’d you say to her?”
“I never got through the Maginot Line.”
“Fucking Marcus. You must have sounded a few clowns short of a circus.” M. J. returned to his pastry bag and squeezed a tiny rosette of pink frosting on each petit four. “What would you have said if he’d put you through?”
Zach shrugged. “I hadn’t planned that far ahead.”
The chef sifted confectioner’s sugar over a flourless chocolate cake and some of the chalky powder wafted toward Zach. “It’s just fairy dust,” M. J. trilled, brushing the white stuff off Zach’s sweater. “Finish your pizza and you can choose your dessert—after you help me pack up everything.” M. J. set a large plastic box across two bar stools. “Just be sure the tarts are completely cool before you put on the lid or they’ll get soggy.”
Zach pitched in willingly, grateful for the busywork. When his friend offered him a black-and-white cookie, he said, “I think I’ll take a madeleine. Black-and-whites remind me of me and Cleo.”
That night, while it was still January 1, Zach made a new New Year’s resolution: “Find bashert by this time next year.”
HIS MISSION TURNED into a full-scale matchmaking project, enlisting not just M. J. and Herb but every friend, colleague, fellow tenant, or gym rat willing to help Zach find his Jewish soul mate, and in no time at all, he was awash in drink dates, which sounds better than it was. A flurry of one-night stands left him feeling depressed and depleted. Another martini, forced banter, hearing yet another woman’s, “So tell me about you . . .” until he dreaded hearing himself tell his own tedious life story. The last straw, an interminable Harvard Club winetasting, persuaded him to take matters into his own hands.
Zach pilfered an issue of New York magazine from the dentist’s waiting room and answered every ad in the “Women Seeking Men” columns that included the words “Single Jewish Female,” “SJF,” or just “Jewish.” Many women were seeking men who were “smart, funny, and financially secure.” Several described themselves as “clever and curvaceous” or “slim and spunky.” A few of the seekers he met through those listings were all those things; others deserved to be sued for false advertising. When they showed up at the appointed wine bar or cafe, Zach knew almost immediately that they were wrong for him—the brunette who came to brunch in blue eye shadow and chandelier earrings; the alarmingly skinny woman who ordered a Cobb salad and picked out the cheese; the sophisticate who said she loved jazz but looked blank when he mentioned Thelonius Monk.
After six or seven duds, Zach decided to reverse the process and write his own ad. Unsure how to describe himself and still be likable, he sought inspiration in the magazine’s “Men Seeking Women” columns:
�
�Venture capitalist with global interests, youthful fifty-six, seeks slender, cerebral vixen who can make me laugh, loves dogs, is mysterious, complex, and can karaoke!”
“Scott Fitzgerald searching for his Zelda. You should be witty and wear pearls to bed. Neuroses forgiven if you read Gatsby at least twice.”
“I’m easy; all you have to be is over five foot eight, under 120 lbs., down-to-earth, and rich. Divorced okay, but no kids, please.”
“You: intelligent but not pompous, attractive but not vain, affectionate but not needy. Me: brainy but not overbearing, secure but not arrogant, sexually adventurous but not kinky.”
Zach wondered how a woman must feel reading these absurdly exacting demands, but the nervy specificity of the men’s ads emboldened him. Two hours and four heavily edited, handwritten, legal-size pages later, he called the magazine’s classified department and dictated the following copy:
SJM, 38, lawyer, 6'1", seeking SJF, 28–35, for permanent relationship. Me: left wing, athlete, dad of one (want more), nonobservant Jew but committed to Jewish survival. You: intelligent, sporty, family minded, comfortably Jewish. Nonsmokers only. Include letter and photo.
Listening to the ad clerk read his copy back to him, Zach had a Groucho Marx moment: he could not imagine being interested in the sort of woman who’d be interested in anyone who could write such an ad. It had no edge, nothing witty or artful, no spicy innuendos. Yet he recognized the man it described. To hell with edge, he decided. His ad was accurate. Better an empty mailbox than a fake pitch.
CHAPTER 14
GETTING AHEAD OF HIMSELF
AS ANY WOMAN IN THE WESTERN WORLD COULD HAVE predicted, his mailbox was swamped. Professors, doctors, lawyers, a fitness instructor, a museum director, an architect, a travel consultant, even a Jewish airline pilot; they all wanted to meet Zach and have his children. He pored over every letter and photo but the packet that kept landing at the top of the pile came from a young woman with the comical name of Babka Tanenbaum, who described herself as a “performance artist.” She had enclosed a photo of herself dressed as a Hasidic man, above the caption “Babka Channels Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.” Her costume—black coat, black hat, ear curls, tallis—couldn’t disguise the fact that she was disarmingly lovely.
Cross-dressing was the least of Babka Tanenbaum’s religious transgressions. Instead of a regulation tallis with fringes, hers ended in red ostrich feathers. She carried what looked like an etrog and lulav, ritual objects associated with the harvest holiday of Sukkot, but rather than the unblemished citron prescribed by Jewish law, her “etrog” was a misshapen grapefruit encircled by a crown of thorns. And instead of the regulation lulav, which is supposed to be composed of palm, myrtle, and willow stalks gathered into a simple sheaf, her stalks were bound in the shape of a cross. Rabbi Goldfarb would be apoplectic but Zach could not resist Babka’s introductory note:
Hi SJM,
I’m a Barnard graduate, a thirty-four-year-old recovering investment banker turned performance artist and, as you can see in the enclosed photograph, Jewish themes are central to my work. Though some consider me heretical, my quarrel is not with Judaism, only with its sanctimony and sexism.
My “Yentl” piece was inspired by the first woman ever to run for a seat on a religious council in Israel (see tallis). The way the Orthodox machers treated her (see payess), you’d have thought she was a transvestite applying for the job of Chief Rabbi. The black hats nearly crucified her (see thorns and lulav) but she won (see ostrich feathers).
I went to a yeshiva and grew up Conservadox so I know a lot about Judaism, but I prefer to express my spirituality through my art. Feel free to check out my latest performance piece this Saturday night at the Broome Street Theater at 10 p.m. No admission fee. If you like what you see, come up and introduce yourself after the show. Otherwise, you can slink out and I’ll never know I was rejected.
PS I want four kids.
Clever. Intriguing. Best of all, risk free, she was offering Zach the chance to judge without being judged. At worst, he’d blow two hours of his so-called life and skip out before the lights came up. At best, the woman with the coffee-cake name could be his bashert.
Babka’s letter had promised free admission yet when he arrived, a girl with green hair was stationed at the theater entrance with a cigar box and a tented sign set up on a metal table, “Suggested Donation: $10.” Zach’s wallet contained nothing but four singles and the hundred-dollar bill a friend had given him to repay a poker debt. The deli had refused to break anything larger than a twenty and he’d had no time to stop at the bank. Ahead of him in the theater line were raggedy beatniks and bohemians, yet everyone tossed a ten into the cigar box. Zach wasn’t sure if he should plunk down the four singles and feel like a cheapskate or hand over his hundred and stand there while she held it up to the light.
“I’m afraid I forgot my wallet,” he mumbled when his time came, shambling past without donating anything. “I’ll make up for it next time.” The green-haired girl didn’t sneer at his face, she sneered at his blazer.
The theater, a dingy former warehouse, was retrofitted exactly as he had imagined—brick walls, folding chairs, a platform stage the size of a freight elevator. What he could not have imagined was the breathtaking impact of the young woman who bounded into the spotlight. At first, Zach thought she was naked, but what looked like skin was a flesh-toned leotard that clung to her sculpted torso and long legs like a wet suit. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a bun and as she stood there, arms folded, legs planted wide apart, accepting the applause of the audience, she exuded the confidence of a woman whose body had never known anything but praise.
From the large steamer trunk at stage left, the performer pulled out a red kimono and a white Noh mask, transforming herself from a sinewy Martha Graham into a prim Madame Butterfly. However, instead of a carnation or camellia, she fastened to her hair a red satin yarmulke. Then, rocking back and forth, she chanted from behind the mask, “Baruch atah adonai, elohaynu melech ha’olam, shehechiyanu, v’parmegiano, v’reggiano, la’zman ha’zeh.”
Zach nearly cracked up. It was the Jewish gratitude blessing with two of its words replaced by the names of Italian cheeses. Other audience members echoed his laughter of recognition to which Zach added his private delight at her flawless Hebrew and pitch-perfect tonality. Babka Tanenbaum wasn’t just a Jew but an educated one.
She bowed deeply and burrowed each hand into the opposite sleeve of her kimono. “Scene one,” she announced from behind the white mask. “Two Tokyo businessmen soak in a bath house. The first man says, ‘Hirokosan, I have unpleasant news. Your wife is dishonoring you with a foreigner of the Jewish faith.’ Hirokosan immediately scurries home to confront his wife. ‘I am told that you are dishonoring me with a foreigner of the Jewish faith.’ ‘That’s a lie,’ she says. ‘What putz told you such drek?’”
When the laughter subsided, Babka bowed again. “Scene two: Haikus for Jews,” she proclaimed, twirling around to show off her outfit:
The same kimono
the top geishas are wearing,
Mine comes from Loehmann’s.
No fins, no flippers,
The gefilte fish swims,
With some difficulty.
Love your nose ring, son,
Don’t mind me while I go and
Jump out the window.
The laughter built as the audience picked up on her parody of the seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form.
Beyond Valium,
the peace of knowing one’s child
Is an internist.
Sorry we’re not home
to take your call. At the tone,
please leave your complaints.
Zach felt himself observing his pleasure from a distance, as if it were a dimly recalled emotion or a childhood playmate whom he hadn’t seen in years. He leaned back and stretched out his legs beneath the chair in front of him. Babka, meanwhile, had tossed the Noh mask, yarmulke, and kimono in her prop
trunk and put on a long, gray military topcoat garnished with three rows of medals and a fur hat worthy of a Moscow winter. Looking every inch the Russian commissar, she hauled a full bottle of Smirnoff out of the trunk and announced, “Scene Three: The World According to the Czar.”
She dropped down on her haunches and danced a creditable Russian kazatzka while singing The Internationale in a Slavic accent with an occasional pause for a swig of the vodka. After finishing the song, she quoted various scholarly sounding opinions on whether Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina was or wasn’t a Jew. Zach was trying to unpack the meaning of this peculiar mélange of Russian references when a caustic growl arose from a man seated in the front row. Zach thought his interruption was part of the performance—the arrival of a Cossack? Stalin? the KGB?—until Babka jumped off the stage, fell to her knees before the groaning man, and, dropping her Slavic accent, shouted at him, “Show me where it hurts. Describe the pain.”
The man clutched his chest. “Sharp. Crushing. Tight.”
“Angie! Call 911!” Babka yelled to the green-haired girl, who had left the cigar box to operate the light board. “Tell them we’ve got an infarct.”
Amplified by the theater’s acoustics, the man’s cries were raw and chilling.
Babka shrugged off the heavy coat and flung the fur hat toward the back wall of the stage. “Is there a doctor in the house?” she called out urgently. In a Marx Brothers movie, that line would cue Harpo to enter, honking. At the Metropolitan Opera, it would summon a brigade of cardiologists in black tie. In the Broome Street Theater on the Lower East Side, it drew one unqualified volunteer in a Brooks Brothers blazer.
“What can I do?” Zach asked, rushing forward. “I’m not a doctor but . . .”
“Help me get him down on the floor. Careful he doesn’t hit his head.”
Zach gripped the man’s shoulders and the two of them lowered him into a prone position. Poor guy was scary looking: splotched bald head, ashen skin, lips bleached white with agony.
Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate Page 17