Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

  The day Jacob and Rachel Wolf returned from the Adirondacks, Jacob dismantled his shower. From then on, every night of their marriage, Rachel bathed Jacob. She bathed him on November 20, 1953, the night their first son, Elias, was born. It wasn’t something Rachel told her family or the doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital. She just did it: she checked intoSt. Luke’s in the morning, gave birth to Elias, and was home by nightfall to bathe her husband.

  Rachel made it home to bathe Jacob, too, on April 8, 1956, the day her mother died of a brain aneurysm. She bathed Jacob on every Sabbath, and on Jewish holidays. She bathed him during full moons and the World Series, bathed him when she was angry and when he was cruel. Jacob, for his part, made it home for his bath every night. On July 30, 1958, the night he received an award at Rockefeller Center for his Jeremiah’s Mustard jingle, Jacob refused a fifth beer at Duranigan’s and caught a cab home for his bath. On August 23, 1969, in a hotel room at the Plaza, fifty-year-old Jacob Wolf ended his affair with Broadway pianist Melodie “Three-Four Time” Sykes. He rushed home, convulsing with sobs, and climbed into the tub for his wife.

  For decades nobody knew the secret, the private font, of Jacob and Rachel’s marriage. Their parents didn’t know. Neither did their neighbors, or their children, Elias and Sarah. These latter figured, all through their adolescence, that their parents were simply horny. They watched Jacob and Rachel disappear every night into the master bedroom, which connected to the bathroom. When Elias and Sarah heard tub water running, they assumed that sex was being achieved, and that they themselves had been conceived in warm water. This led to some teenage confusion for Elias, who deduced that young women were at their most pliable and libidinous if you scuttled them into a shower and soaked them down. Sarah, of course, was like minded, right up until college. If a boy or man ran hot water anywhere within two rooms of her, she collapsed into giggles or scampered off in fright.

  The legend of Jacob’s bath went public in January 1991. Jacob was seventy-two, Rachel was sixty-five, and the Gulf War was on. Jacob’s mother had died five years before, and his father, the mighty Sherman Wolf, was ninety years old. Sherman had shrunk almost a foot. He lived now at Benjamin Home, a convalescence house on the Upper East Side. The facilities at Benjamin Home were extravagant. The beds were firm, with good wooden frames, the halls were carpeted, the nurses kind. Sherman Wolf growled at the old women who played canasta in the lounge. He followed the war proceedings religiously on his television and in the papers. In his heart, though, Sherman was anxious. The world had remained Big and Tall, but he had not. His lungs ached when he took deep breaths. He suffered from arthritis, poor hearing, and cold spells that made his limbs shiver. On top of it all there was a madman in Iraq, and Sherman was convinced that this madman would soon attack Benjamin Home and, more specifically, Sherman himself.

  “Dad,” said Jacob. “No one’s going to attack you.”

  “What?” Sherman glared at his boy, not comprehending. “What’re you handing me?”

  Jacob visited Benjamin Home every Sunday, and often during the week.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Dad. I won’t let them.”

  Sherman stared at Jacob in disbelief.

  “You?” he muttered. “You can’t stop the madman.”

  “Don’t worry about the madman.” Jacob arranged a quilt on his father’s shoulders. It was a quilt Jacob’s mother, Amy, had made.

  “You.” Sherman looked away and sighed. “You jingle writer.”

  Jacob’s bath became famous because of Susan March, Rachel’s maid of honor and colleague from way back. They’d started out together as fact checkers at the Times. When Rachel left work to raise Elias and Sarah, Susan March stayed in news. She worked at the Times for five decades, writing her way through Watergate, breakdancing, the Troubles in Belfast. By the late 1970s Susan had her own biweekly column, “March Madness.” The column ran the gamut from political satire to denouncements of fashion. Typically, Susan would send up some grotesque: a world figure of freakish disposition, or some no-name with a startling agenda. It was in “March Madness” that America first heard interviewed Dana Smith, the lover of accused serial killer Bobby Bobbington.

  “I’ll only talk to Susan,” sobbed Dana, and she meant it.

  Susan March also took swashbuckling offense to Denmark’s 1986 Mongoloid Crisis—to the point, some said, that she swung key Senate votes on the issue. All in all, Susan’s career attested that she had an eye for what mattered to the world, or at least to America. Susan had, apparently, a prudent heart, a savvy pen, and a willingness to touch the morally electric.

  The catch came on New Year’s morning, 1991. Susan March was in a cab, traveling down Fifth Avenue. It was four in the morning. Susan was returning home from a party, and she was drunk. It was one of those nights when alcohol had made her perceptive and depressed, and Susan gazed forlornly at the city as the cab sped along. It was snowing outside. There were very few other cars. The cabbie had figured Susan for a tourist and was narrating the sights of Fifth Avenue.

  “There’s Trump Tower,” said the cabbie. “There’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There’s two people fucking.”

  Susan started, blinked, looked hard. There indeed, on the steps of St. Patrick’s, were two teenagers in the snow. The cabbie had slowed down to get a good look, so Susan got one too. She wished she could’ve said the teenagers were making love, ringing in the New Year with healthy abandon, but the cabbie was right. The teenagers were fucking. The girl’s face winced. The boy had bunched the girl’s dress and coat up around her neck, but his own pants were only at his thighs. The nakedness, the snow, and the pain all belonged to the girl, and Susan was about to roll down her window and cry rape when the girl smiled. It was a hideous smile, Susan thought: permissive, rude, greedy, not to mention sacrilegious.

  The cabbie shrugged.

  “On we go,” he said.

  Susan couldn’t sleep when she got home. She kept thinking about the teenagers. In her younger, brasher years she would’ve dashed off an angry column about public mores, about sex, privacy, decency. The trouble was, Susan herself felt suddenly, completely indecent. Everything about the previous night had been unhealthy: not just the teenagers, but the party Susan attended. It had been a gathering of heavyweights: news anchors, models, actors, some respected journalists, and even a supposed hit man named Mr. Bruce. What disgusted Susan wasn’t the gin and cigars, or the presence of a killer, or even the rutting of a girl. What disgusted Susan was that she’d made a life out of embracing these things, giving them credence by writing about them. She was well into her sixties, and she’d never married, or been to Disneyland, or learned to sing. Instead, she’d drawn a bead on the large, savage habits of the globe: murder, extortion, hatred, crimes againstwomen and the earth. She’d stared long at these awful truths. The problem was, as Nietzsche said, when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. That New Year’s morning Susan March made a terrible realization: she craved baseness. Some fiber of her soul longed to kill, as Mr. Bruce did, or to cleanse countries with napalm, or to be taken viciously by a man on the steps of a church. Not only did Susanwant these atrocities, she wanted them so badly that she’d nevererected the means to fight them off. She had no husband, no children, no balm to ease her days. And her arrogance, her pride in her lifelong, clear-eyed independence, died hard that New Year’s morning: or so Susan thought, anyway.

  Susan threw up. She wept and shook. She tried to remember the lyrics to an Irish lullaby and couldn’t. She staredat her bathroom mirror for an hour, repulsed by the creases inher face, the marks of what she’d once considered wisdom. By nine A.M., Susan was on her couch, sniffling, clinging to Biter and Beater, her two cats, when the phone rang. Susan was in no shape to speak, but when she listened to the voice on the machine, she sighed with relief. It was Rachel Wolf calling, reminding Susan of their annual New Year’s brunch appointment at Duranigan’s. It was a ritual they’d kept up for twenty years.


  “See you at eleven,” said Rachel’s cheerful voice. The machine clicked off.

  Susan dried her eyes. She lay on the couch, recovering, thinking.

  Brunch, she thought. Brunch, what a wonderful word.

  It’s so simple, Susan thought. She believed she was having an epiphany.

  Brunch, Susan thought. Brunch and tradition and talking with a friend. Could a sixty-five-year-old, hungover woman write about such things, perhaps, instead of railing against misery?

  Susan hugged Biter and Beater. She took a shower.

  “What’d you do last night?” asked Rachel. She was eating eggs and potatoes with garlic and parsley.

  Susan ate cinnamon toast. “Party. Uptown.”

  Rachel smiled.

  She has a good face, thought Susan. Warm and wholesome, like toast.

  “The jet set?” asked Rachel.

  Susan nodded. “What’d you do, Raych?”

  Rachel’s hair was entirely gray, but long enough that she could still pull it back. Like a young girl’s hair, thought Susan.

  “The usual,” said Rachel.

  Susan leaned forward. “And what is the usual?”

  Rachel smiled. “Oh, you know.”

  Susan shook her head. “No.” Her voice quavered. “No, Raych, I really don’t.”

  Rachel looked at her friend. Her face became serious. She was a mother of two and a grandmother of five. She could see when someone she loved was in trouble, in need.

  “Well, Jacob fixed us two porterhouse steaks, like he always does on New Year’s Eve. We had a little wine. Then Elias called, and later Sarah.”

  Susan waited. “And then?”

  Rachel hesitated. It had been forty-three years, and they—she and Jacob—had never told anyone about what they did every night. But no one had ever needed to hear it, and now here was Rachel’s friend. Here was Susan March, with a black death in her eyes that Rachel had only seen once before: whenElias had been admitted to a psychiatric ward for three months,suicidal over the loss of a woman. That death, that hole in the desire to live, made Rachel shiver for her friend as she hadfor her son. It was all she needed for a forty-three-year secret to end.

  “And then,” said Rachel simply, “I gave my husband his bath.”

  Out came the legend. With the drive of a child Susan asked questions. Rachel answered them. She told the story of her honeymoon. She told about the skunk and the bathing. As she spoke, she forgot her eggs and potatoes. She related the days and nights of her marriage plainly and truly, without sentiment. She told how Jacob’s bath wasn’t about sex, but about devotion, and love. She even admitted, because she thought her friend needed her to, that Jacob had once had an affair, an affair she’d known about the entire time it went on.

  “She was a girl in an orchestra,” Rachel said. “Jacob met her for her lunch breaks, and they’d go to hotels.”

  “The bastard,” whispered Susan.

  Rachel stiffened. “He was home every night for his bath.”

  “But he lied to you! He was cheating!”

  Rachel stared at her friend, who didn’t understand men.

  “I was devoted to him,” she said evenly. “I was his wife, and I loved him. The affair stopped.”

  Susan licked her lips, astounded, thirsty.

  “And you still bathe him every night?”

  “Every night.”

  Susan’s eyes brimmed. “That’s so beautiful.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “Don’t cry, Susan.”

  “But it’s so beautiful.” Susan March sighed.

  Rachel frowned. For the first time she sensed the danger of what she’d said and to whom she’d said it.

  “It’s just my life,” she said.

  “But it’s so . . . so . . . saintly.”

  Rachel sat up straight. “For God’s sake, Susan. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  Susan reached for her friend’s hand. She reached for it earnestly, with the deep, soulful conviction of a person declaring war.

  “But I’m so glad you did, Raych.” She squeezed Rachel’s palm. “I’m so glad you did.”

  Susan March devoted one day of her column to the legend of Jacob’s bath. In what she thought was an act of homage she used Jacob and Rachel Wolf’s real names and told their intimate tale to the world. It was a column, Susan decided, that hallmarked her new hope in mankind. No more would she rage against the irrational, the evil, awful, and absurd. There was another option, she said in “March Madness,” for the true rebel, and that option was radical decency. Like Jacob and Rachel Wolf, people had but to choose a simple, decent action and devote themselves to it daily, entirely, without fail. It was the key to happiness, wrote Susan.

  “Oh my God,” whispered Jacob. He was reading the paper, reading about himself, his nightly bath.

  “I’m sorry,” begged Rachel.

  “She even gave the name of our building.” Jacob’s voice shook with fury.

  Rachel hung her head.

  The Wolfs got letters. If Susan March had devoted a day of her column to a couple’s bathing ritual, then that couple and that ritual deserved scrutiny and laud. One curious married couple even cornered Jacob in the Preemption’s lobby.

  “You could form a spousal cleansing club,” said the husband.

  “No, I couldn’t,” said Jacob.

  “You could inspire the elderly,” said the wife.

  “Go to hell,” said Jacob.

  There were critics too. A few acquaintances shook their heads sadly at Jacob and Rachel, convinced that the Wolfs had been hushing up decades of perversity. There was speculation that Elias and Sarah had been psychologically warped by their parents’ habit, and were even now practicing similar rites with their loved ones. The worst of this came from Sherman Wolf.

  “What’re you handing me?” Sherman was wrapped in his quilt, glaring at Jacob.

  “Dad,” began Jacob.

  “No.” Sherman made a bony fist. “There’s a madman in Iraq, and my son is taking baths with his wife. I read this in the paper.”

  “I don’t take baths with Rachel,” explained Jacob. He was blushing, though, livid inside. Some nurses had smiled at him today. They knew.

  “She gives me baths,” said Jacob quietly.

  “Shut your mouth,” said Sherman.

  “All right, Dad.”

  Sherman hunkered down in his quilt. He coughed feebly.

  “You were never a man,” he croaked.

  Jacob set his jaw. He thought of a jingle he’d once written for a greeting-card company. He thought of the myth of Pandora, and the way Rachel never got soap in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” said Jacob.

  The assault lingered in Jacob’s mind, turned to a paranoia. Each night he still climbed naked into his tub, and Rachel still washed him. She sang him bits of songs he loved and petted back his hair. But something had died. Jacob felt it. Whether they’d mailed him letters or not, certain inhabitants of the island now considered him and Rachel to be profound. Strange couples that they’d never met were surely aping them, Jacob thought. Men were submerging themselves in hot water, and women who loved these men were washing them. If such bathing had been brainless, coincidental—just a man and a woman and soap and water—Jacob could have stood it. But he knew what the world wanted. It wanted glory. It wanted the act of a wife bathing her husband to be capable of banishing adultery, impotence, boredom.

  “I can’t take it.” Jacob stood abruptly, climbed out of the tub.

  “What?” Rachel wrapped a robe around her husband, tried to calm him.

  Jacob paced. He wasn’t articulate.

  “People,” he said. “I can’t take people.”

  Rachel hugged her husband from behind, stopped his movement. The back of his neck was crazy with gray hairs. She nuzzled these.

  “I love you,” she said.

  Jacob wasn’t caving so easily.

  “Susan March is an intrusive bitch,” he said.

  I�
�ve ruined it, thought Rachel.

  “Yes,” she said.

  They stood there, Rachel holding Jacob. Jacob’s knees were gangly, dripping.

  “I love you,” said Rachel.

  Jacob sighed. He wanted there to be a fight. But there wouldn’t be.

  “I do,” said Rachel.

  His wife’s hands were belted together on Jacob’s stomach. He covered them with his own.

  “I love you too,” he said.

  The phone rang. Jacob left the bathroom, answered the phone.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Good evening,” said the phone. “This is Benjamin Home. Is this Jacob Wolf?”

  Jacob closed his eyes. He got ready.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Jacob and Rachel went together. Jacob’s father had had a stroke. The left side of his face and body were paralyzed, and he couldn’t speak. He could hear, though.

  “I’d like to see him alone first,” Jacob told Rachel.

  They were at Benjamin Home, standing outside Sherman’s room.

  “All right,” said Rachel.

  Jacob went in.

  Sherman looked terrible. There were tubes in his arms. Half of his face had fallen: the skin slacked, the eye lolled in its socket, the left side of his mouth sagged. His living eye, his right eye, looked radically, pleadingly afraid. It was fixed on a nurse, a young woman sitting at Sherman’s bedside. She whispered kind words to Sherman, and with a washcloth she wiped off his chin the drool that poured from his addled lips.

  It was very simple. Jacob walked to the bedside, took the cloth from the nurse.

  “I’ll do that,” said Jacob. “I’m his son.”