The judge was now, unconscionably, ten minutes late. She glanced around the courtroom but found no sign of her Coney Island cast of characters. The sleeping baby in the arms of the man next to her woke up and started to cry. The man didn’t make a move to calm the baby but sat looking fixedly ahead at the empty judge’s bench.
“Mrs. Berg?” Someone in the aisle was trying to get her attention. Sharon looked up and instantly recognized the five-o-clock-shadowed face of Officer Pols.
“Oh, where are you sitting? I didn’t see you when I came in.”
“We’ve been here for thirty minutes, waiting for you.”
The woman in the tight shorts either could not, or would not, move, forcing Sharon to climb over her and step on the toe of the pink-faced man with the crying baby.
“We?” she asked, following Officer Pols to the second row, closer to the window housing the poorly functioning air-conditioner, where it was only slightly cooler. What did one call him: “Officer,” “Mr. Pols,” “Ed?” Probably best not to call him anything.
“Yeah, Mr. Cantana and myself. We’ve been waiting for you, looking around all over the place,” he said, hurrying ahead. “Hey, I found her, here she is,” he shouted into the second row from the aisle.
“Hello there, still have your pocketbook, I see,” Junior Cantana said, his movie-star face illuminated with his perfect smile. He looked out of place sitting there in court, like an unexpected ray of color in a black-and-white photograph. All traces of the “army grunt” wrestling with Jorge Diaz on the beach at Coney Island were gone. She had judged Mr. Cantana too quickly the first time. Was her irrational attachment to her charismatic and unreachable Kabbalah master at fault? Or, more likely, could her frustrated love for Rabbi Joachim, her fantasied savior, be turning her into a man-hater? She’d read somewhere that it often happened to single women, as they got older. No, Sharon thought irritably as she crammed into a seat on the bench next to him, it’s just that the guy is wearing a suit and you can’t see that tacky skull pendant around his neck. Nonetheless, when Junior Cantana politely moved away and surrendered most of his seat to her, Sharon could not help noticing that he smelled pleasantly of trees in the rain.
An increasingly anxious Officer Pols was desperately trying to engage her in a conversation about the weather. Having exhausted that subject and gotten little response, he launched an attack on the city’s prison system by cataloguing the horrors he’d personally seen while on duty at the Tombs. A graphic portrayal of a prison riot was followed by an analysis of its causes. Ten more minutes passed, and still no judge. Sharon complimented Officer Pols for his open-mindedness, which prompted a further discussion of the inefficiencies of the justice system.
Junior Cantana, she noticed, was staring at her.
The snaggle-toothed woman in the red satin blouse had gotten up from her seat and approached the court stenographer demanding to know where the judge was. The court stenographer alerted the two security guards, who ushered the woman back to her seat.
Junior Cantana wondered aloud why the judge was so late, causing Officer Pols to launch yet another catalogue of complaints against the system of “revolving door justice” characterized by one-hundred and fifty working days, five hours, three hundred minutes and an infinite number of seconds spent by the average police officer sitting in court, waiting for judges who invariably arrived late only to suspend sentences anyway.
Sharon yawned. Something opened and closed deep inside her gut—the result of breakfasting on two hurried cups of black coffee. She needed to go to the toilet.
“I hope Jorge Diaz shows up,” said Junior Cantana.
“Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t,” Officer Pols shrugged.
Just then the judge arrived.
Case after case droned on, an endless litany of petty crimes, felonies, prostitution, pimping. Witnesses appeared, and so did plaintiffs—five of them bandaged. A constant stream of “no-shows” and suspended sentences elicited sarcastic quips from the judge. When the husband of the woman in the red satin blouse was finally led to the docket, she stood up and called to him sharply in Spanish. Again, the guards forced her to sit down. The husband, a small man with a pencil mustache and drug-befuddled eyes, bowed his head at the laughter of the court.
Sharon went to the toilet and returned. People were clustered around the doorways of every hearing room along the corridor. Out of one there emerged the loud soundtrack of what an onlooker informed her was an allegedly pornographic film. According to Sharon’s informant, it was a private hearing and the door should have been closed, but the air-conditioner had broken down and the judge had ordered it be opened. Sharon looked into the courtroom and saw that the shades were drawn. In the ribbon of light coming from the film projector, through dancing motes of dust, she saw that the room was packed with men. A microsecond’s glance at the screen in front revealed a naked man mounting a naked woman from behind. Sharon walked away, but still heard the sound of exaggerated moaning as the actors climaxed.
There had been no toilet paper in the stall so she’d been forced to use the crumpled tissues in her purse. The hot water faucets had run only cold water. For the past two days she’d been suffering from premenstrual cramps. On her way back to Room 104B, she’d been propositioned by a pimp in a pink fedora. Down the hall another pimp was berating a woman standing in front of him staring down at her platform wedgies, calling her “a good-for-nothing flat-tit bitch!”
“Don’t bother trying to get through,” said Officer Pols as Sharon prepared to make her way back to her seat. “It’s a no-show. They’ve got a bench warrant out for him. Stay put. I’ll go up and talk to the D.A.’s man and see if I can get you another date quick.”
She wanted to tell him not to bother, that she wasn’t coming back to this place, not ever, but Officer Pols had already gotten up and was approaching the bench. The judge had just called a recess and people were milling around everywhere. A woman was sobbing bitterly in a corner behind the American flag. Two lawyers hurried past her joking about the “allegedly” pornographic film screening next door.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” Junior Cantana said, sticking his hands into his jacket pockets.
“This is ridiculous,” Sharon said, “I don’t even know what I’m doing here in the first place.” What would Rabbi Joachim think of her standing in the aisle of a packed courtroom shoulder to shoulder with this goy?
“Same as me, doing your duty as a citizen,” Junior said.
“But you came all the way from Pennsylvania, for me it was only a subway ride.”
“I’ve traveled much further than that, for a cause,” he retorted. Why that mocking tone? Did he really mean for her to take him seriously?
Announcing the adjournment of hearings until two o’clock, the bailiff ordered everyone out of the courtroom, and Sharon and Junior inched their way out of the crowded aisle. They had lost sight of Officer Pols, who could now be seen elbowing a path through the milling crowd in the corridor. “Good news!” he called, waving. “Meet me outside.”
In the crowded lobby, frustrated plaintiffs were cursing the system in a variety of languages, the families of those who’d been convicted were condemning the judge to hell, and a bondsman standing next to a trash basket was contemptuously spitting on the floor. A security guard saw him but shrugged his shoulders and went outside for a smoke.
“Listen, I talked to the judge himself—he knows me from being here so often—and he absolutely assured me that they’d have your character here on the nineteenth. How’s that?” Officer Pols asked as Sharon approached him in front of the courthouse.
“Look, you’re awfully kind to go through so much inconvenience for me, but…”
What was all this excitement over one more junkie? It wasn’t as if Jorge Diaz had actually gotten away with her purse. He hadn’t really laid a hand on her, so it couldn’t be called an assault case, and the purse had been retrieved intact.
“So you’ll meet me here on
the nineteenth at nine-thirty on the dot?”
“I don’t know.”
Officer Pols’ face clouded over with disappointment.
“Why does it matter so much to you?” Sharon finally gathered the courage to ask.
Officer Pols started to answer, but a fight had broken out at the entrance and she couldn’t hear him over the hooting and booing of the crowd. Junior Cantana was pushed up against her as the opponents were quickly pulled apart and led away by two policemen. Sharon blushed, hurriedly excused herself, pulled away and turned again to Officer Pols.
“I have a job. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it.”
“Mrs. Berg, how are we going to get these operators off the streets if people like you aren’t going to help?”
“But why me?” she pleaded, pointing to different people in the crowd. “Look here, look over there, look at all these people!”
“Yeah, look at them, and then take a good look at yourself. See any difference?” Pointing at her and then at Junior Cantana, Officer Pols said heatedly, “It’s gotta be people like you and him who can speak up. That’s who the judges and the smart-guy D.A.s’ll listen to—not them.”
“It’s obviously very important to the man,” said Junior Cantana.
“Yeah, I’ll say it’s important. I got a kid in high school, a sixteen-year-old boy—on methadone,” Officer Pols finished grimly.
“Oh,” Sharon thought of her own problem son.
“You’ll come, won’t you?”
“And Mr. Cantana?” Sharon found herself asking aloud, for despite her reluctance, in fact lurking just below it, was the hope that Junior Cantana would indeed be there to protect her, though from what, she didn’t know.
“Be glad to,” Junior offered.
“You sure it won’t be inconvenient for you?”
“I can get away whenever I like. I’m a wounded war hero, remember.”
Sharon again detected sarcasm in his voice.
Officer Pols shook Junior’s hand. “Thanks, thanks. I’ll be looking out for both of you on the nineteenth, then. Same time, same place. Don’t disappoint me, now,” he said, pointing his finger at Sharon before melting back into the crowd.
SIX
“ISN’T IT UNHEALTHY to let yourself get so skinny?”
Junior asked bluntly.
“According to the latest research, rats on a starvation diet live twice as long as those on a normal daily calorie intake.”
“But you’re not a rat.”
They were “Junior” and “Sharon” now, seated across from each other in the red vinyl booth of a luncheonette on the ground floor of a bondsman’s office building, sipping the froth from their cappuccinos.
He’d maneuvered her through the densely packed courthouse corridors, carving a path through chattering lawyers and their laconic clients just wide enough for her to walk in, down the crowded grand marble staircase all the way to the front door. When three women lawyers near the newspaper stand in the lobby interrupted their conversation to stare at her handsome escort, Sharon had permitted herself to smile at them for envying her.
Officer Pols had left them standing together on the courthouse steps beset by a sudden dank wind that drove noisily past them under a storm-lid of darkness. Discarded newspapers thrashed against the curbstones, were temporarily airborne and then roughly deposited into running streams of water from the sewers at opposite ends of the street. Store gratings jiggled madly in their sockets; a flock of pigeons huddling under a tree for safety fought among themselves for a few shriveled grains of dried corn, remnants of the local “bird lady’s” early morning scatterings. Gathering their sparse harvest in their beaks, the greedy pigeons churned their wings and dispersed. The dark wind screamed and howled, vacuuming leaves from the trees and spewing a bolus of black dust into the mouth of the subway on the corner.
Junior had shielded her from the wind as, without having formally agreed to, they walked together toward the BMT. When they were halfway down the block, lightning sliced through the swollen clouds and it started pouring. “Let’s make a run for it,” he shouted over the noise of the wind, pointing at the restaurant across the street.
Hardy’s Luncheonette was filled with construction workers from a nearby site; idled by the storm, they had taken up every seat at the counter. One of them, a boy wearing a t-shirt with cutoff sleeves, looked too young to be a construction worker. He reminded Sharon of the Coney Island teenager who had operated the Whip when she was a kid, and then of the whole chain of events that had resulted in her sitting in the booth of a non-Kosher restaurant having lunch with a “stranger”—which, as Rabbi Joachim had informed her, was the literal meaning of the Hebrew word “goy.” As if to compound her transgression, the menu consisted entirely of meat dishes of the “ham steak” variety, and she refused to order anything to eat until Junior finally convinced the waitress to bring them meatless Swiss cheese sandwiches.
The construction workers were drinking beer and talking loudly, but instead of being annoyed, Sharon found their boisterous conversation a comforting diversion from her growing interest in Junior Cantana. She could hardly keep from staring at his sensuous lips and wondering what they would feel like pressing on her mouth. Her neck. Her breasts. No, no, that wouldn’t do. Could it be that her glimpsing the pornographic film in the tumid erotic atmosphere of that man-filled courtroom was belatedly exercising its effect on her? Or the fact that her period was coming on, redolent with the forbidden sexual overtones of Jewish orthodoxy? Quickly, she turned her glance back to the construction workers. When they could no longer hold her attention, she was assailed by the image of Rabbi Joachim, his resplendent voice fading to a whisper as he described the Kabbalistic miracles and wonders performed by his late uncle. Filled with dread and highly stressed at the sudden onset of well-hidden unfulfilled sexual longings bedeviling her since her divorce, Sharon felt a familiar tightness in her scalp—the hovering, ever-present threat of a migraine. This was accompanied by a flush of shame as she relived the near orgasmic experience of watching the rabbi enter the higher realms before leaving her behind with this Italian, this goy, sitting across from her in this duct-taped booth, offering lunch and a summer rainstorm’s-worth of male company. And what was she offering in return: a mournful expression and the refusal to order anything but coffee until he’d coaxed her into letting him order the cheese sandwiches? Sharon pulled two paper napkins from their holder, tore one in the process, and handed the whole one to Junior.
Marble-sized raindrops furiously pelted the windows. In the booth behind her, a man cursed the weather. A construction worker at the counter picked his teeth with the edge of a book of matches.
“Ain’t you got no color TV in this place?” he complained to the counterman.
“Sure, that’s all we’re missing around here,” mumbled the droopy-eyed counterman, waving an armful of colorful tattoos.
Sharon took another ramble through the punitive wood of Jewish guilt. Hadn’t she just been over this ground?
“So, why ‘Junior,’ why not—well, what is your real name? I’ve forgotten it,” she said in an effort to break the absent Rabbi Joachim’s stranglehold. Unnerved by her sexual longings, and without wanting to, she’d gone on the offensive, adopting a carping tone to mask her ambivalence about her attraction to the handsome goy who’d sat silently watching her.
“Carlo, my real name is Carlo. But nobody ever calls me that. It’s my father’s name, too. We used to get mixed up all the time, so my mother started calling me Junior and I kind of got used to it,” he said, almost apologetically. Clearly, she wasn’t the only one who felt uncomfortable.
“Junior,” Sharon murmured. It was an alien name.
Since neither of them seemed willing to discuss the attempted purse snatching that had brought them together in the first place, they lapsed into awkward silence. At the same time, both seemed to be lingering, deliberately dragging out their time together even as the downpour was stopping. Mercif
ully, their Swiss cheese sandwiches arrived then, and Junior resumed the conversation.
“You aren’t on a diet, are you?”
“No.”
“You certainly don’t need to diet.” Surprised at the vehemence of his own remark, he stopped abruptly.
He’s getting even for my mocking his name, Sharon thought as she lifted the sandwich from the plate and began eating. “I usually work so hard that I forget to eat,” she said.
“That’s not good.”
“I’ve inherited my father’s genes for high cholesterol so I have to watch what I eat anyway.”
“Okay. Peace.” Holding up two fingers in a V, Junior smiled at her.
Glancing into the mirror over the counter, Sharon saw herself reflected as a mousy, blond older woman enjoying the flattery of a very handsome younger man. It suddenly dawned on her that Junior might have been teasing her, giving her the compliment—or the lie—of being a woman he found attractive, and therefore worthy of his concern for her health. Then again, maybe he wasn’t teasing or lying. Maybe he really was attracted to her. She hadn’t been out on a date for so long that she couldn’t tell the difference. Rabbi Joachim’s indifference to her physical presence didn’t help, either. Consistent with her diminishing sense of self, her feeling of unworthiness, and her shame at being unloved and unlovable, Sharon’s negative assessment of her looks somehow made her feel more “spiritual.” Now Junior was calling that spiritual image into question, making her uncomfortable. Her face reddening, she bent over her plate so as not to see herself in the mirror. When she’d finished every crumb of her sandwich and devoured the pickle, Junior asked if she wanted more to eat.
“No thanks,” Sharon said, wiping her mouth with the torn napkin. “I’d better get going, it’s stopped raining,” she said, the sour acid of penitence already rising in her stomach. She’d betrayed the rabbi, forfeiting the right to savor the forbidden food.
The Kabbalah Master Page 5