The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  “So how about dinner?” asks Sol.

  “I don’t know. I made a new friend and was hoping she and I could visit some museums tomorrow. There won’t be time for dinner.”

  The next morning Rosalie puts on a flowing skirt she bought from an Old City vendor and sets out for Walter’s hotel. She carries a map but can’t find her way around the streets of East Jerusalem. When she asks an Arab woman for directions, Rosalie doesn’t understand the answer and when the woman responds in pidgin Hebrew, she is even more confused. Rosalie walks in circles until she recognizes the street where Madame Sylvie lives and where Madeline is staying and she knocks on Madeline’s door.

  “Walter is at the American Colony Hotel and I can’t—”

  “Give me a few minutes to change into a skirt and I’ll make sure you find your way to him. Will you introduce me or will you slink off to his room like a thirsty paramour?”

  “I can’t do this.”

  Rosalie searches Madeline’s eyes, waits for an answer.

  “Do you want me to tell you to forget him? I can’t do that for you.”

  Rosalie breathes deeply. She has Madeline now, the friend who will open the gate and allow her to step inside.

  The lobby swirls with Arabs and sultans, a cacophony of languages and costumes. Rosalie hesitates at the entrance, tugs at Madeline’s arm like a child.

  “Let’s go. I changed my mind.”

  “No, pussycat. Walter has to be here. Point him out.”

  Rosalie looks around. “The table off to the side. He is with a woman, see? He has someone now. A girlfriend. This is all wrong—”

  “You didn’t tell me that he looked like George Balanchine. He’s lovely.”

  Rosalie pivots. “You can have him, Madeline. I’m turning back. He’s all yours.”

  “I didn’t bring you here,” says Madeline. “You brought me. And I’m too curious to leave. And look—”

  Walter glides toward them. Rosalie notices his cloth shoes, just like the ones that were caked with snow when they first met. He knew I would show up here, she thinks. He drew a circle and waited for me to step into its center.

  “This is a mistake,” says Rosalie. “I have to get back. The children—”

  “You have time for me.” Walter brushes his eyes with the back of his hand and smiles at Madeline.

  “My new friend. Madeline made sure I didn’t turn back,” says Rosalie.

  “Thank you for bringing her,” he says.

  Walter leads them to his table and pulls out chairs. “Everyone shows up in Jerusalem! This is Clara, a fellow passenger from the Conte Rosso.”

  A pale woman wearing a turban turns to Rosalie. “Your boyfriend was speechless on the ship. We called him the mute man,” she says.

  “He’s not my—”

  “Of course not,” says Clara. “Another chameleon that survived the ship of chameleons! We were a horrid bunch, drinking and fucking each other into oblivion! And no one could understand why a certain silent man disembarked before we reached Shanghai. Did you know Helmut Newton was on our ship? I won’t go into the salacious details. We were so young and so hungry.”

  “I followed a man off the boat,” says Walter. “A man wearing a hat. Bombay.”

  “Whomever you followed off the ship led you to the promised land, Walter. America has been good to you,” says Clara.

  “I found my words,” says Walter.

  “We all did, eventually.”

  Walter wraps his arm around Rosalie. “This woman freed me.”

  “Your girlfriend is lovely,” says Clara.

  Madeline and Clara exchange glances and excuse themselves from the table. Rosalie glances down at her hands, her rings. The boys will be home soon. Sol will return from the market with another parcel of snacks to set out on the balcony. Her life is complete just as it is.

  “I have to go,” says Rosalie.

  “You didn’t find your way here to meet my old shipmate.”

  She follows Walter up a staircase and down a long hallway to his room. Rosalie sits on the side of his bed and Walter kneels at her feet and removes her sandals.

  “The blisters from your wedding shoes have healed.”

  “Time will do that.”

  They make love silently, and then again with more languor and surprise, and then again, with all the daring of the lower geniza.

  “You have become a mute man again,” says Rosalie. “Just like on the ship.”

  Walter pauses. “I told you we would not be apart.”

  Rosalie begins to cry. “I wish I could despise you.”

  “It would be much simpler that way.”

  “Everything we did then seeped into my skin, a permanent stain.”

  “I can smell your life on your body. Your real life.”

  “Oh, that,” says Rosalie.

  “No. Not in the way of spices. Something else. I could smell it on your skin, the stretch marks on your belly, the way your breasts carry knowledge of the babies you nursed. You will always carry that smell—it marks you with found pleasure.”

  He doesn’t know me at all, thinks Rosalie, picturing the rubber nipples floating in a pot of boiling water, night after night, Charlie, Philip, Lenny, three little babies, thousands of floating nipples.

  “Translation is so imperfect,” she says. “My children—”

  “You never have to tell me anything,” says Walter. “No explanations.”

  They find each other again and stay in Walter’s room until the sun begins to set over the city.

  Walter tells Rosalie about his studio in the Berkeley hills, framed with bougainvillea, shrouded in fog. He invites her to visit, insists she find a way, use Madeline as an excuse—anything. Rosalie listens to the words flow from his mouth, his accent now softer, more American. But she can’t tell Walter the details of her life. The children cannot be funneled into this hotel room; the synagogue is a distant dream. After all these years, she thinks. Walter is a child with his books, his models, his one-room studio. She is a mother. The past is a closed book on a shelf. An abandoned geniza.

  “Sol told me he met you at Madame Sylvie’s,” says Rosalie.

  “Yes,” says Walter. “Your husband has become an adventurer of the spirit.”

  “I went with Madeline. When it was my turn, Madame Sylvie was speechless.”

  Walter laughs. “We’ll go together and she will find a perfect astonishment for you. Madame Sylvie won’t disappoint a friend of mine.”

  When they wander into her courtyard that evening, Madame Sylvie tells Walter that he cannot see her so often. “You keep coming back for more,” she says. “This is not a candy shop.”

  “What you gave me wasn’t enough,” says Walter. “I want another.”

  “You’re an exception,” she says. “Now close your eyes and picture a path that winds through a forest, tangled with vines. A girl walks ahead of you. She begins to run and you cannot keep up. Watch her become smaller before your eyes, until she is no bigger than your thumb, then the tip of your finger, then a pinprick. She becomes a point of light. Open your mouth. A little pucker is all you need. Now let out a breath. This girl you left behind in this imagined forest has blown away.”

  Walter rests his palm over his eyes, holds Rosalie’s hand with the other. He gathers his breath and whispers, “She is not you.”

  Madame Sylvie fixes her gaze on Rosalie. She tightens her lips and smiles.

  “Ahh,” she says. “I’m glad you returned. Maintenant, c’est possible.”

  Rosalie closes her eyes softly enough to feel the light touching her eyelids.

  “You see a braid, as long as a rope that pulls a ship into a harbor. Some strands of the braid are bright with colored ribbons and fresh flowers. Other strands are made from thorns and live wires—all tangled together. A woman walks in front of you and this braid runs down her back. You follow her, eyeing her braid, stepping with care. Keep going. Now open your eyes.”

  Rosalie stands and shouts, �
��Is that all you can give me? A braid? Where is my door, my astonishment, my open gate?”

  “I cannot free you, ma chère,” says Sylvie. “I dispense visualizations, small suggestive shocks that help you wake up, see something in a new way. I am not a fortune teller and I am not a psychoanalyst. You could recite psalms at the Western Wall or you could visit me. Some do both; keep the door flying open on both sides. Whatever you wish.”

  Rosalie grabs Walter by the hand and pulls him outside. Madame Sylvie turns to the next visitor who is asked to close her eyes and visualize a great river, light on one side and dark on the other.

  FAITH IS THE BIRD

  February 1969

  Rosalie lies awake and imagines Walter’s room in the American Colony Hotel. She conjures the sultans and sheiks who have since slept in the bed that marked their reunion, how the traces of their bodies were washed away with the traffic of other lovers. She listens to Sol snore beside her and thinks about the woven braid that Madame Sylvie described to her. Some nights the braid is made of ribbon, wool, and wires; on other nights fish swim between the strands of hair and she has to shoo them out of her ears. A nasty conundrum, a riddle with no solution. Good sex in Jerusalem in exchange for a useless vision from the renowned kabbalist. Perhaps it was a ploy: had she not arrived at Madame Sylvie’s with Walter she would have received an astonishment that would mean something to her now. But she waltzed into the courtyard holding hands with the very emblem of her betrayal and there was no fooling Madame Sylvie. Best now to obliterate the memory of that single episode, instead of wondering when they will meet again, and how does he see her when his eyes are closed and he explores her body like a blind man who can read with his hands?

  The flow of holidays marks the seasons and Rosalie is carried along with the calendar’s demands. Depending on the month, she shapes floured dough into a kreplach, a hamentashen, or a Passover noodle made from potato starch. The house pulses with the antics of her three boys who shred bedsheets to make flags of surrender for their raucous games. On Shabbat afternoons they wrestle each other in the yard until one of them—usually Philip—gets pummeled into the grass. At night Lenny calls to her and asks for another story, always another story. Rosalie sets her tales in Madame Sylvie’s courtyard. In some, children climb the garden wall like cats and morph themselves into cheetahs that run wild around Jerusalem and uncover artifacts. In others, a boy and girl lie together under a flowering tree and press their ears to the ground, listening to the voices of the ancient past bubble up into their ears. Lenny falls asleep before Rosalie finishes and she sits on the edge of his bed and basks in the silence. Month follows month: stuffed knapsacks and leather mitts pile up in the foyer, dirty clothes are washed and clean clothes folded, meat marinates for weeknight dinners and chicken is roasted for Shabbat, and when it arrives, Rosalie and Sol lay their hands on their sons’ heads, blessing them with long lives.

  After Sol and the children are asleep, Rosalie sits on a stool at the kitchen counter and dials Walter’s number. The time difference gives them hours to themselves. She speaks softly into the handset and winds the black phone cord around her arm as if it is a strap of tefillin. Her ordinary kitchen at night seems like an immense ocean and Rosalie is a ship afloat on its surface, drifting from one shore to another.

  One night she tells Walter that she wishes he would get married.

  “Make it possible for me to turn away from you,” she says.

  He laughs. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do and I don’t. You deserve so much more—”

  “Don’t question what we have, Rosalie. We are creating something bigger than we are.”

  “Of course you’d think that,” she says. “Talking about karma is your livelihood. You can justify anything.”

  “And you have religion, Rosalie. The karma game is all I have, and it is enough for me.”

  Rosalie never asks Walter about the woman in Madame Sylvie’s astonishment. She doesn’t pry into his past, and can sum up his known biography in two sentences: He followed a man off the ship and that man was Paul Richardson. He went to Bombay and Shantiniketan and then to New York, where they found each other. He is her personal Torah, written for her alone, a small necessary story that rings in her bones. The two of them can only live in the present tense. They are a word, a hyphen. Turmeric rubbed on a hip. Something faint and then lasting and then vapor. From the pulpit Sol speaks about the flow of Jewish history. The stories course through our bloodstream, he says. Jacob’s headrest made of rock is the foundation of our homeland; Joseph’s dreams are linked to our eternal longing for image and interpretation. Rosalie wonders if her love for Walter is an echo of an ancient story she hasn’t yet learned.

  A new housing development and good public schools have brought more Jews to Briar Wood, and new members to the shul. Sol offers Ask the Rabbi Anything to a fresh crop of pre–bar mitzvah students, and they also find their way to the wooded area behind the parking lot to get high. The only two girls in the Hebrew school skip class and teach each other how to French kiss in the girls’ bathroom. The elderly Hebrew school teacher sits in the stairwell and weeps, not because the students mock her, but because the money she earns doesn’t cover the cost of the trains and taxis that bring her to the suburbs twice a week. The shul is everyone’s laboratory, the testing ground for what life holds on the outside.

  On a winter Shabbat morning, Rosalie stands in the back of the sanctuary and watches the congregants shift in their folding chairs as they listen to the words of Sol’s sermon. He explains how Jewish survival relies on core beliefs that stand the test of time but history judges a peoples’ survival with fickle eyes. She has no idea what her husband is talking about, and neither do his congregants.

  Sol is failing them, she thinks. New congregants, same old rabbi. His sermons are impersonal, his words obscure. How could anyone be moved? Why would anyone care? Yet still they arrive in this paneled room. Rosalie watches Bev who stands behind her father’s wheelchair, smoothes the tallit over his sloping shoulders, and turns the pages of his prayer book. She watches Serena whose eyes dart nervously around the room. She finds Marv, who Rosalie knows is having an affair with his son’s fifth-grade teacher, and Nadine who carries on with a local politician. She looks at Delia, who has breast cancer, and Missy Samuels, who swears by Weight Watchers and nibbles on carrot sticks during kiddush. Rosalie loses herself in watching them. She searches for the fragile broken center in each congregant, tries to name the one thing that makes anyone want to show up in this synagogue when the world offers so many other choices, so many better places to go.

  Rosalie measures the distance between the yearnings of these people and her husband’s words. She views this as a geometry problem. What is the length of the line between Nadine’s love for the politician and Sol’s words about the double meaning of the name Yisrael? The distance between high-strung Serena and Sol’s sermon about the minor fast days? Between the hunched shoulders of Bev’s father and Sol’s hands that thump on the lectern like a heartbeat? Where does anyone’s desire meet the pastoral response? She sees the sanctuary as a room full of gaping hearts that cannot be healed or touched by Sol’s words. And yet, still they come, week after week: Bev and Serena and Nadine and Marv and Delia and Missy Samuels with her bag of carrot sticks. Missy winks at Nathan who stands in the back of the sanctuary. He fingers the fringes of his tallit and ponders his own geometry problem: the popularity of the rabbi and the duration of his contract.

  On Sol’s day off, Nathan asks Sol and Rosalie to meet him at the duck pond at the center of town. Rosalie carries a bag of leftover challah and tosses chunks into the water.

  “Let me get to the point,” says Nathan. “We—the board and I—want you to take a leave of absence.”

  “I don’t need a vacation.”

  “Just a little break. Go back to Jerusalem and study for awhile. Every rabbi needs to hone his skills, fill in his gaps.”

  “I’m in my prime,”
says Sol. “So many new members. I just ordered new prayer books—”

  “Real estate,” says Nathan. “Housing prices. Public schools. The Cosmos Diner.”

  Rosalie stops walking and tosses the entire bag of challah into the pond. She glances at Sol and wishes he wasn’t brushing tears from his eyes in front of Nathan Samuels.

  “I’m good. You got one of the best.”

  “I know, Rabbi Kerem.”

  “So give me a chance.”

  Nathan turns to Rosalie. “Maybe you can help him out. Lend some inspiration.”

  “I’m the rabbi,” says Sol. “You hired me.”

  “Yes, we did. We believed in you then, and Missy and I believe in you now. Just find better words; be less remote. Make us care.”

  “How long do I have?”

  “Get back in the game and there’s no limit.”

  As they drive home from the duck pond, Sol asks Rosalie what Nathan meant by be less remote. “Am I supposed to change into golf clothes and preach at the Cosmos? I thought they hired me to teach Torah, unravel meaning, make their lives better in some way. Now I utter a phrase and then cringe inside, wanting to take back what I said, but I can’t hear myself clearly and my ideas gush in all the wrong directions.”

  “At least you’re sincere.”

  “I stand up there on the bima, all alone, as if I’m supposed to be a symbol of something. But of what? My beloved texts are meaningless to them and they don’t have the skills to understand the patterns behind the words.”

  “Then summarize. Reduce. Leave out the boring details. Serve them cake and aphorisms.”

  “I can’t compromise my integrity.”

  “Figure it out, sweetheart.”

  “I sometimes feel as if I’m working an assembly line that doesn’t stay still.”