Placing his hands on his knees under the desk, Seymour clenched and unclenched his fists. Two hours later, Mrs. Wolstein’s sweating attorney was standing in front of him at that same desk, addressing the assembled interested parties.
“Of course, there’s the real possibility that your Rabbi Joachim has flown the coop, left you all holding the bag—if you’ll pardon me for mixing metaphors.”
Seymour doubted that. Something inside told him that Albert Joachim would return. He’d doubted him briefly on Saturday, but not any longer, and was now determined to stick by him—whatever happened. Not because he believed in Rabbi Joachim’s hocus-pocus, but because Tayson, that self-serving son-of-a-bitch, had so quickly abandoned his mentor and joined the attack. Partly, too, Seymour was thinking, because aligning himself with quixotic types came naturally to him. He would back Albert Joachim for what he, Seymour, knew to be the Kabbalah master’s sincere and crazy (if misdirected) desire to repair the broken world. And partly, too, for the sake of Sharon Berg, who had been targeted by the venomous Rabbi Tayson as Albert Joachim’s mistress, and co-conspirator, in the hope that she would take the rap for the Center’s operations. Though he was usually not a vengeful person, there lingered in a far corner of Seymour’s mind the savor of taking a little revenge against both the quisling Rabbi Tayson and the vicious Mrs. Wolstein.
“He’s got to be nuts if he thinks he’s going to get away with this,” interjected Seymour’s nephew, wringing his hands. But his comment was drowned out by a new round of invective from Mrs. Wolstein.
The white-haired medium noted down every word, including the curses.
Seymour briefly considered that the widow might have been drinking, then returned to his own thoughts.
Sharon understood little of what was going on around her. The cubicle was sweltering, Mrs. Wolstein, whom she had never again expected to meet, was eyeing her malevolently. Charges were being flung at her, at the Center, at Seymour Priceman, who had called Sharon early that morning. Paulie had been feverish and she’d planned to stay home. She was still recovering from the weekend. Seymour had hurriedly mentioned an emergency, something having to do with Rabbi Joachim. The kitchen had turned upside down as she’d rocked against a cupboard holding her hand to her head.
“His plane crashed? He’s dead?” she’d screamed into the telephone.
“No, no, no, don’t be so morbid. He’s fine. I just got a letter from him. He won’t be back for a while yet.”
Seymour Priceman had a letter—and as Sharon listened to the details, she felt her relief turn to rage. Rabbi Joachim might just as well have crashed for all she cared. Once again, he’d passed her by, as if she were invisible, a cipher, a nonentity. Grandiose dreams were all he’d left her with, lost among the clover-covered cliffs of the Jersey Palisades. It was funny, the way she’d impulsively spilled out her story to Junior Cantana while they were driving back from Pennsylvania. No, not funny, laughable, the way she’d rambled on about her devotion to Rabbi Joachim, her Kabbalah master, who, despite the fact that she was a woman, and therefore forbidden to practice, had welcomed her into his sanctuary as his disciple and confidante, offering her the chance of someday proving herself worthy of receiving his transmission of spiritual power. How she’d betrayed her master’s trust by getting involved with him, a gentile, and even worse, how she’d sullied the code of chastity demanded of all Kabbalists by engaging in sex with him.
Junior didn’t say a word, didn’t even try to take her hand and offer comfort, remaining silent until he pulled the car up to her house. Only when he’d taken out her bag and carried it to her front door, did he say, “Let me think about this. I’ll call you.” Then turning from her he’d walked away without looking back.
“No, never! Never call me again!” she’d screamed.
The green bag still lay unopened in a corner of the foyer.
Standing in Seymour’s office, Sharon wondered whether, if he were there, Rabbi Joachim would have noticed that she was not wearing stockings. Whether, if Rabbi Joachim, and not Seymour Priceman, had been sitting behind the big desk looking at her sadly, he would have seen through her unkempt exterior, smelled the weekend’s sex on her regardless of the hours she’d spent trying to wash it away. Would he have given her the gift he’d brought her anyway? It would be just like him to confuse her by giving her a reward: a bag of Israeli apricots plucked from his jacket pocket, fresh and unspoiled despite much traveling. Moist and sweet. Flung like an afterthought in front of her on Priceman’s desk.
But there were no apricots, and Rabbi Joachim wasn’t coming back. Not if she was to believe the wildly gesticulating Mrs. Wolstein. Not ever. He was a fraud. A crook. A seducer. Sharon laughed bitterly to herself. Though everyone expected it of her, she did not say a word to defend him. How could she—the rabbi’s indispensable secretary, sharer of his mystical secrets, recorder of his plans—stand there and remain silent against the accusations flying all around her? What secrets? Sharon knew nothing about Rabbi Joachim at all. Nothing, except for her own desperate, unreturned love. She’d spent all that time reveling in her pain until it had been wrested from her by strangers. Now, even the newspapers were flaunting it.
“Quiet, everyone,” Seymour Priceman startled the group into silence. “We’ll accomplish nothing this way, except for sore throats and,” he crooked an eyebrow in the direction of his nephew, “ulcers.”
Mrs. Wolstein’s lawyer looked around for a seat. Finding none, he set his briefcase on the floor and sat down on it. Eyeing his watch, Rabbi Tayson edged toward the door. The widow collapsed in her chair, mascara streaking her wrinkled, tear-stained cheeks.
“I suggest everyone clear out but Mrs. Berg,” continued Seymour. “I’ll explain everything to her from the beginning, and maybe then we’ll learn what’s really happening here.”
The industrious medium moistened her pencil with the tip of her tongue and turned the page.
A Tibetan mandala featuring a bevy of multicolored, multi-limbed demons Sharon hadn’t noticed before glared at her from a poster on the wall behind Seymour’s desk. One of them danced on six legs as it flung human skulls into a cauldron. Sharon felt faint but quickly recovered at the thought of Paulie sick at home. But she didn’t want to think of home because Junior Cantana kept calling, and Pinnie was starting to complain about having to answer and make excuses for why Sharon couldn’t talk to him. No peace at home. No peace anywhere. Not since she had brought the goy—the stranger—into her life to tamper with Rabbi Joachim’s secrets. Now she was being punished, publicly exposed and humiliated.
“What for?” asked Seymour’s insolent nephew. “Anything she has to say should be heard by all of us. We’re all involved in this, considering we’re all liable.”
The nephew’s outburst was followed by further confusion about the extent and degree of each participant’s culpability or innocence in the matter. This time, Mrs. Wolstein’s lawyer did not join the discussion but sat on his upturned briefcase pondering the conflicting arguments being made around him. Granted, Priceman was an interested party and—intentionally or not—was on Rabbi Joachim’s side. He was eager to hear what the blond secretary had to say. So far, she’d said nothing, which was odd. She’d just stood around looking glassy-eyed the whole time. He’d seen witnesses like her before, people with plenty of valuable information who were too dazed to testify in anyone’s behalf. But given a little coaxing, assured that she had a friend—she was sure to come around. Mistresses, especially those who’d been cast aside, always did. (In addition to his J.D., the lawyer had a master’s degree in psychology.) This woman was definitely unstable, ready to break down. Thin, rangy, big hands and long legs, not very delicate features—something almost mannish about her. Probably wild in bed, though. The religious ones always were.
“I agree with Mr. Priceman,” Mrs. Wolstein’s lawyer said, rising from his seat on the briefcase. “Mrs. Berg was dragged in here at the last minute; nobody told her what was really going
on. It’s obvious that she’s upset—”
“What about me? I’m upset, too,” wailed Mrs. Wolstein.
Restraining the impulse to throw a sheaf of loose bills in her face, Seymour covered his eyes with his hands instead.
Rabbi Tayson, meanwhile, had quietly slipped out of the office during the heated exchange.
Ignoring his client, the lawyer assumed his most fatherly manner and, looking straight at Sharon, said, “This young lady here is equally entitled to advice from counsel. She did come on the scene a little late—”
“Of course,” the medium piped up in her tiny bird-voice. “This isn’t France, where they presume everyone guilty before proven innocent. This is America.”
Seymour’s daughter-in-law vigorously nodded her head in agreement.
“What say you give us an hour?” Seymour said reasonably.
“I’ll second that,” said Leon Berkowitz. His weak leg was tight with sitting so long, and he desperately longed to stand up. Besides, his newly acquired tyrannical air had worn off. Since he much preferred Rabbi Joachim’s company to the widow’s, and since money came so easily to him anyway, Mr. Berkowitz really didn’t mind so much that the Kabbalah master might have taken off with five thousand dollars from the Center’s account. Even more important, detesting publicity of any kind, Mr. Berkowitz was now truly sorry that he’d let himself be so hastily enlisted in the Widow Wolstein’s crusade against the Center for Mystical Judaism. He would have much preferred to call Rabbi Joachim long distance and have the whole thing out with him person-to-person by telephone. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know where Rabbi Joachim was.
The office was cleared. Receiving Seymour’s thanks for her services, even the medium left, and a reluctant Mrs. Wolstein, invited to lunch at Priceman’s expense, was tactfully ushered into a nearby delicatessen.
Left alone, Sharon and Seymour now faced each other—she diffidently, he with a head full of questions. What did one say to a woman who was madly in love with a man who didn’t know she loved him—or if he did, didn’t care? Worse yet, what did one say to said woman when she’d been abandoned by said man and left to answer for his questionable business practices?
Seymour let out a long sigh. Then he pointed to the armchair and said, “Take a seat, Sharon. You’ve been standing for an hour.”
Sharon sat down. The armchair was still warm and scented by Mrs. Wolstein’s heavy lilac perfume.
Seymour picked up the telephone and buzzed the one upstairs clerk, a lanky college boy who did him favors without complaining.
“Hello, Mel? Would you run across the street to the Italians like a good fella and order me two hero sandwiches.” Cupping the receiver against his shirt, he whispered to Sharon, “What do you want—cheese? Ham? The works?”
“No ham,” Sharon said, realizing that those were the first words she’d uttered since entering Seymour’s office an hour ago.
“Coke or coffee?”
“Tea, please.”
“They have everything,” Seymour said. Then, brushing an imaginary fly from his papers, he removed the receiver from his chest and shouted into it. “Mel? You still there? Good. Here’s the order: one pepperoni hero with the works and very hot coffee, black. And one cheese hero, no meat, and tea—lemon or milk?” he asked Sharon, this time without bothering to cover the telephone’s mouthpiece.
“Lemon.”
“Make that tea with lemon. I’ll consider you for a ten-day holiday next Christmas instead of the usual week.”
Mel’s gleeful shouts could be heard from the other end of the wire.
“Like fun, I will,” said Seymour, putting his hand over the receiver and winking at Sharon. It crossed his mind as he spoke that nothing could be that bad as long as you were in good health, which—despite the imagined circulation problems—he was. Knock wood. Then removing his hand from the receiver, he said, “Okay, Mel, I’ll pay you back when you come down. What’s that? Sure I’ll give you a tip—the tip of my shoe, now get going. I’ve got an important hungry customer waiting here.” Seymour replaced the telephone in its cradle and said, “Mel’s a good kid; he’s working his way through Cooper Union, wants to be an engineer. Now all he needs is a girlfriend; know anyone nice?”
Sharon started to cry.
Always awkward in the face of a woman’s tears, Seymour sat playing cat’s cradle with a rubber band until it snapped. Then he shoved a box of tissues toward her. Inwardly, he sighed—more for Sharon than for himself. What did it matter as far as the business was concerned? So he’d learned his lesson not to trust every maniac who came in off the streets with deals. Still, he’d go on doing favors; he was constituted that way. Partially, it was his fault; he wasn’t trying to pawn it off on anyone else. How long could a publisher get away with printing material that he’d never read? Who reads such stuff, anyway, he wondered. Women like this one, I’ll bet. Having answered his own question satisfactorily, Seymour swiveled from left to right in his creaky leather chair.
“Tell me something, Sharon,” do you really believe in all this?” He pointed to the book-lined walls with a pudgy, ink-stained finger.
Sharon looked up at Seymour in surprise. She was in the midst of blowing her nose with one of his tissues and couldn’t answer him right away.
“I don’t know,” she said at last, restraining further sobs.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You either believe in it or you don’t,” Seymour said, his tone indicating that he was slightly exasperated with her as well as sympathetic. “I got people upstairs who spend every spare penny on these books, and whatever is left over from that they put down on initiation fees to gurus, swamis, yogis, and Kabbalah masters like your Rabbi Joachim. Now that’s what I call believing.”
Sharon looked up at him again. Her eyes and nose were red. “Do you happen to have a cigarette, Mr. Priceman?”
“Seymour,” he corrected, rummaging through a drawer and coming up with a rumpled pack of Salems. “Mentholated only, and probably stale.”
“I’ll take one.”
Although he did not smoke, Priceman carried a very expensive opal lighter with him, a well-intended gift from a grateful congregation of an Ocean Parkway synagogue, where he’d lectured without a fee on “The Popularity of Occultism among Jewish Youth”. The flame danced between them, nearly singeing Sharon’s eyelashes as she lit up.
“Sorry, too much lighter fluid.” Seymour drew himself up in his chair, then leaned back and put his feet up, resting his clumsy orthopedic shoes on the desk. “Ugly shoes, no?”
Sharon nodded.
“You don’t have to agree with everything I say, you know.”
“Sorry.”
“Ah, now she’s sorry. Listen, kid, you have a mind of your own. Or don’t you? I mean, how can anyone your age be so naïve? Or is it an act?” Then, in an afterthought, “What are you, about thirty, thirty-five?”
Sharon’s lip began to tremble.
Okay, so he’d been too harsh and gone too far too quickly. Time to retreat. Seymour wished he hadn’t volunteered to talk to Sharon about her relationship with Rabbi Joachim. This was a delicate issue, and what did he know of love? He’d been married to Mrs. P. for twenty-seven years. She went her way and he went his. Seymour was married to the store, Mrs. P. said. “The store is your mink coat and your New Year’s vacation in Florida,” he replied. As for the goods he peddled—well, at least it wasn’t pornography—he’d settled that issue with his conscience long ago.
“There’s good and bad in everything,” Seymour said, as much to Sharon as to himself. “People take what they need; it all depends on your level of development.” Now where had he picked that one up? It must have been from the medium, a confirmed believer in reincarnation, who told Seymour he’d been a Tibetan brigand in a former life, assuring him afterward that owning the bookstore was an advance in his “karmic level of development.” Watch it, Seymour, he thought, or you’ll be buying this stuff yourself soon.
The food
arrived then. Crushing her cigarette in the ashtray Seymour had provided, Sharon unwrapped her sandwich and began eating greedily. The hero was bathed in olive oil and slathered with mustard and covered with hot red cherry peppers, onions, and shredded lettuce, and was delicious. It would destroy her stomach later, especially since she hadn’t eaten a full meal since the Purple Hen—and that was four days ago. But she was hungry, famished, and the hot, spicy food tasted good to her now. She took a sip of watery tea and burned her tongue. The paper tag of the tea bag fell into the cup.
Seymour took a bite of his sandwich. As he sat watching Sharon trying to fish the paper tag out of her cup with the wooden stirrer, Seymour decided to level with her. Years of experience dealing with harmless lunatics now lent him the confidence he’d been lacking a few minutes ago. Best was to give it to her straight. That had been his motto when customers came to him for advice about business deals, divorces, and changes of residence. Maybe the years he’d spent at Priceman’s had also rubbed off some of their “occult” wisdom on his shoulders. Why else would he be sought after as a home-grown oracle, a neighborhood sphinx, if his customers didn’t assume that being surrounded by all that arcana all those years had made him wise? Sometimes, although he would never admit it to anyone, even Seymour himself believed this to be true.
Being honest in his advice had cost him nothing. On the contrary, it had gained him friends and many influential customers. And he had only been robbed once in fifteen years—non-violently—by a stock clerk. If a college kid wanted to buy what Seymour considered to be a “bad” book, or a “drug” book, he would say, “It’s junk, I don’t carry it.” Pointing to a rear shelf, he’d add that so-and-so had written something more interesting on the same subject—even if he didn’t read it, Seymour knew his stock inside out—and he’d sell the kid a book that would keep him away from trouble. Word got around that he was honest and dependable. Soon even the astrologers and magicians were asking him for advice. He had “positive energy,” they said.
The Kabbalah Master Page 17