The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  The following Thursday, after regular school, he’d begun studying the Torah portion he’d have to read the next year for his bar mitzvah, and MacDowell, who was a man with a fondness for arcane trivia, told the mortified boy that in the olden days, a boy’s bar mitzvah wasn’t necessarily on or about his thirteenth calendar birthday. Rather, the men of a congregation would take him to the baths and pull down his pants and count his pubic hairs, of which the required number was thirteen. MacDowell didn’t mean anything by it—he just thought it was interesting, a grace note in a symphony of unimportant but entertaining facts—but Isaac flushed and shoved his head into his arms to hide his embarrassed tears. He had the worst of it in being a slow physical but early sexual bloomer. Abbie wasn’t the sort who bothered with, or understood, parental controls on the internet. Isaac had been looking at porn since he was seven or eight, and now that he was in junior high, he perceived his own diminutive physique and total hairlessness below the head as an almost existential inadequacy. The summer before, Marco Larimer, who was seventeen, had told him it was cool because he looked like a girl. It had briefly pleased and then terrified him.

  He was no closer to thirteen pubic hairs when he was called before the Torah on the Saturday after his thirteenth birthday, and yet, despite this disappointment, and despite his full conviction that this Judaism business was a dusty philosophy of superstitious collectivism wholly unsuited to Man’s fundamental individuality and heroic potential (Mr. Krupp, having found Isaac to be too precocious for seventh-grade honors English, had loaned him The Fountainhead), he felt actual pride in getting up and leading the service—it was, at least, an intellectual achievement to have learned to read Hebrew, even if only phonetically, and to have memorized all those monotonous prayers. And he felt equally pleased that he had made a friend who showed up to the permanently twilight interior of Tree of Life that Saturday morning, not out of co-religious social obligation, but because he wanted to be there.

  And, Isaac reflected as he mumbled through his Torah portion, that he really should have invited Adam Martens after all, because Isaac had drawn the Tazria-Metzora, a long and dreaded Parsha that trolled through three chapters in Leviticus dedicated to the detailed discussion of ritual impurity, the impurity of women after childbirth (gross), and then the odd and supernatural appearance of Tzaraat, something between leprosy, athlete’s foot, black mold, and Morgellons disease, an affliction of skin and clothing and even buildings, which, when it appeared, required the attentions of a priest and an extraordinary ritual:

  As for the live bird, he shall take it, and then the cedar stick, the strip of crimson wool, and the hyssop, and, along with the live bird, he shall dip them into the blood of the slaughtered bird, over the spring water.

  He shall then sprinkle seven times upon the person being cleansed from tzara’ath, and he shall cleanse him. He shall then send away the live bird into the open field.

  Rabbi MacDowell had said, “You might want to play down the particulars in your dvar, Isaac,” after Isaac had shown him his first draft. But Isaac had snuck them back in because he thought that Jake would be impressed.

  Afterward they all went to the Uniontown Country Club to eat stuffed chicken breast and dance to DJ Don Electric, who interspersed selections of beat-less Evanescence songs with R. Kelly tracks and the Electric Slide. Adults whom Isaac barely knew gave him money, although his mother forbade him from opening the envelopes in front of anyone, and Jake told him that “that shit about the birds was cool as fuck.”

  “Yeah,” Isaac said.

  “You should tell fucking Martens that you guys, like, really do that.”

  “Yeah,” Isaac said. He laughed. “It’s like a secret ritual, you know. We don’t let any non-Jews see it.”

  “Exactly,” Jake said.

  Then it was getting dark out, and the few kids’ parents had picked them up, and Jake had taken off with the pleasing near-promise of a very adult handshake and a “see ya soon,” and the congregants of Tree of Life had packed into their aging Buicks and gone home, and Isaac was sitting at his parents’ table while his mother gazed off and occasionally patted his hand and his father laughed too loudly with some men that Isaac didn’t know over by the bar. Arthur Imlak hadn’t come but had sent him an envelope with a thousand dollars and a note scrawled on the back of a business card: “Not all in one place.”

  “Can we go?” he asked his mother.

  “Ask your father,” she said. She looked at him and touched his face. “Abbie, I mean.”

  “Yeah, Mom. God. I know who you mean.”

  “Your tone, honey.”

  “Okay.”

  Rather than go to Abbie, who would put his big hand on his shoulder and yank him into some loud conversation that felt like a fistfight, he slipped out the side of the banquet room and down the service stairs on the side of the building with the intention of walking around the golf course for a while before returning to the club to gather his parents and force them to drive him home. There was a pond on the sixth hole with a tall willow tree where you could hear the oddly human cadences of frog calls at night. But at the bottom of the stairs, he found his English teacher leaning against a roll door in an alcove and smoking a pungent cigarette.

  “Hey, Mr. Krupp!”

  “Holy Jesus shit Christ!” He caught himself before he could complete the act of tossing away the joint, like a batter checking his swing. He put his whole body into recovering from it. “You scared the hell out of me, Isaac.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You want some?”

  “What? Oh, I mean, I don’t smoke.”

  Krupp gave a chill nod of his head, acknowledgment but not agreement. “This isn’t smoking, buddy. This is weed.”

  “Well, it’s still smoking.”

  “That,” Krupp said, “is just what they want you to believe.” He extended his hand and pinched fingers.

  Isaac took a tentative and then a deeper hit and felt the fog bubble up into the previously undiscovered chambers behind his eyes.

  “I’ve got to tell you, Isaac, that that . . . would you call that a sermon?”

  “Yeah. I mean, it’s called a dvar Torah, technically.”

  “Whatever, buddy. That was a great piece of writing.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”

  “Really.” He took a long drag. “Really. I mean, I’ve got to tell you, the way that you linked the, the impure men who were forced by the conventions of their tribe to live apart from other people with the heroic individuality of Howard Roark. I don’t know that I could have said it better. A truly impressive piece of oratory, young man.”

  “Thanks. Can I have some more?”

  “Oh, yeah. For sure. Don’t tell your dad, though.”

  “You know my dad?”

  “Sure. I mean, I met him. Yeah. Back in the day.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I thought I told you. Well, anyway, you’re a great kid. Or, I guess you’re not a kid anymore, right? You’ve got a real way with words. I’ve had a lot of students over the years, and I’ve rarely, if ever, been so impressed. Did you ever think about becoming a writer?”

  “I guess. I’m not sure.”

  “‘The afflicted man who dwells outside the city until he is healed represents the man of individuality who will not submit to the second-handers all around him and therefore insists on charting his own course in the world. What his inferiors believe to be a punishment, he knows to be a blessing,’” Krupp quoted and shook his head. “Just great fucking stuff, Isaac.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”

  “Well,” Krupp said, crushing the roach beneath the collapsing toe of his old brown loafers, “I’ve got a gig tonight. If I were you, I’d wash my hands before I head back inside. Get the skunk off, if you know what I mean.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”

  “I’ll see you Monday, Isaac.”

  “See you Monday, Mr. K.”

  Then Isaac, stoned for the fi
rst time in his life, walked back into the club and went to the handicapped restroom and found, after washing his hands for three straight minutes, that he’d been washing his hands for three straight minutes, and he smiled at his own face in the mirror, and Isaac laughed and discovered that he couldn’t stop laughing.

  14

  Isabel was fired. Barry called her into his office and asked her to close the door. He fussed with some items on his desk. He slid a piece of letterhead on which her resignation letter had already been written across his desk. He couldn’t look at her, and she took that as a small victory. “It’s not that I want to,” he said. But Isabel suspected—and she was right—that the question of particular desire had never entered into it for Barry. He was a man for whom life, professional and otherwise, consisted of passing like a thread through the fine demands of multiple constituencies. Stakeholders, he would have called them. He would never really please, nor not please, anyone; his project, and his paycheck, would endure.

  Penny, who’d gotten her Masters of Non-Profit Management and promptly been hired as Barry’s special assistant for executive projects, had warned Isabel it might be coming. The governor had personally called Barry—perhaps he’d even dialed his cell phone himself—to complain that the whole fucking thing (he said, “fucking thing”) put him in an untenable position: to show up at the gala and speak about his environmental programs only to be followed onto the dais by one of the most public faces of fracking in the state, who would then be honored for nothing more or less than greenwashing his oily money through a conveniently needy charitable organization, would be embarrassing and hypocritical. To cancel out of annoyance or pique would be a sign of political weakness, showing his opponents in the statehouse that some lousy accidental billionaire could force the chief executive of the sixth-largest state in the Union and a critical lynchpin of the electoral college to skip a public appearance. Etc., etc. Penny had listened in on the conversation; the forwarding system on the VoIP phones permitted the younger employees to do that sort of thing with a casual ease that Isabel had been born just five or ten years too early to inherit. Barry never had a chance. The governor raised his voice. He reminded Barry that there was a lot of popular displeasure with the state’s system for determining and awarding non-profit status to organizations. He had yet to really comment on the issue. Did Barry want the Future Cities Institute to be the public cause of his deciding to take a strong position on it?

  And Barry might yet have held out, except that somehow the City Paper got wind of it and ran a long expose on the links between the biggest gasman in the Commonwealth and a number of supposed environmental non-profits, the FCI most prominently. The cover featured a cartoon of Imlak as a sort of gaseous devil rising out of Panther Hollow to drag the Institute down into a fiery hell. An anti-fracking group organized a demonstration and picket at the William Penn Hotel, where the dinner was to be held, and the new state Attorney General, another Democrat who’d promised during her own campaign to crack down on the excesses of the industry, made several darkly imprecise comments about “looking into” the nexus of gas money and public environmental advocacy and lobbying. “The question,” she said, “is whether these non-profits are living up to their promise as purely public charities, advocating for the public good, or whether they are little more than public relations arms of the fracking industry.” Barry hastily announced that the 2050 Award would not be going to Imlak after all. Arthur only learned that Barry had hastily announced it when he read it in the Post-Gazette the next morning, because Barry hated confrontation and didn’t bother to call him first. Imlak promptly and furiously revoked his foundation’s pledge of two hundred and fifty thousand in annual general operating support over the next three years. The FCI senior staff began receiving ominous emails from their director of finance about departmental budget cuts, and then, at a staff meeting, Barry promised everyone, apropos nothing, that there wouldn’t be any staff cuts, whatever anyone may have heard. No one had heard anything to that effect, and that’s how they knew what was coming. Despite the modest forewarning, Isabel allowed herself briefly to believe it wouldn’t be her.

  It turned out that a sitting governor in the same party as the mayor and the county executive did indeed trump the twenty-second richest man in the Commonwealth. That probably should have been clear to everyone from the beginning. Imlak may have owned some state legislators and county commissioners, but the governor was a project of the national party; he was an avatar of even bigger billionaires. It was a little shocking to everyone involved, actually, Arthur included, to discover that a hundred million bucks could count, in certain circumstances, as mere loose change. And of course, although not so stratospherically wealthy as Arthur B. Imlak, the governor was a pretty rich guy himself, a millionaire many times over, and that was just how boys got when they start pulling their dicks out.

  Isabel was ultimately punished for arguing against giving Arthur the ridiculous award in the first place. Barry blamed her for the whole mess; there was nothing worse for a career than being right when your boss was disastrously wrong. In the email to the staff, also pre-written, probably by a university lawyer, he thanked Isabel for her hard work and dedication and hinted vaguely at a future of other challenges. Penny left the office early, though not too early to be noticed or to endanger her own job, and bought Isabel a few drinks at a grotty student joint in Oakland. A group of thirty-something MBA students were eating terrible, gigantic sandwiches and drinking beer and chilled Crown Royal a little farther down the bar. One of them offered a silent toast in her direction.

  “This doesn’t seem like your sort of bar,” she told him. A couple of them wore suits, and they had an air of easy spending.

  “Double-D,” he said, nodding to a companion down the bar, “likes their girly drinks.”

  “Double-D?” Isabel said.

  “Don Danielson.” The guy raised a glass full of something pinkish. Little candy worms hung off the rim.

  “You still give each other nicknames?” She waved the bartender over.

  “What else are we going to do, study cost accounting?” Her neighbor tipped his glass again. He had a punchable face and a fuckable body under that improperly tailored suit. She briefly considered, then decided against it.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Do you like girly drinks?”

  “Me?” Isabel said. “Oh, no.” She ordered a cheap scotch. “Never mix, never worry.”

  Isabel hauled herself home with that feeling of fogged regret that came with drinking before it got dark. She fell asleep on the couch watching a Werner Herzog movie about Siberia, and she dreamed she was a fish who spoke with a German accent. The water was bracing. She woke up around nine with a headache, no blanket, and with her phone trilling on her chest.

  “Eli?” she mumbled. She realized that she hadn’t answered but rather had swiped him directly into voice mail. She sat up and called him back. “Eli.”

  “Bell, you sound terrible.” He’d taken to calling her Bell because he knew it made her crazy. It was such an impossible trait of men, even the good ones, that they found this sort of minor but deliberate antagonism the funniest thing in the world. Your annoyance was the predicate for the humor of it while at the same time a demerit against your character.

  “God, don’t call me that.”

  “We kid because we love.” He’d also begun using this expression when he knew Isabel was annoyed. It was his way of smuggling the word into conversations to test the waters of its more sincere use. Isabel, sinusy and hungover, was tempted to tell him right out, right there, that she loved him. Force him to either affirm it or walk it back. But what if he were to choose affirmation, and what if she really did?

  There was a long pause, and then he told her that Abbie had a brain aneurysm. “My God,” Isabel sat up. “Is he . . .?”

  “No, no. You can’t kill him. He’ll live to a hundred seventy-five. But he’s in the hospital.”

  He’d been dizzy, and he beg
an to slur his speech. Eli had at first thought that Abbie was drunk or stoned, neither uncommon nor unlikely, but then his speech became totally nonsensical, and he vomited, and Eli called 911.

  Isabel said she’d drive down, but Eli told her there was no point. Not yet. “They’re doing tests, still, and he’s not lucid. Come tomorrow. Call me and I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

  So Isabel drank some water and tried to read and gave up and went to bed and lay in the dark with her mind persistently circling back to the question of when precisely it would pass from consciousness into unconsciousness, that unhealthy picking at the scabby edge of sleep. But eventually she did sleep. She dreamed of an immense, quiet forest on the other side of the continent, high pines and a steep slope down to cold water.

  Abbie was hardly more lucid the next day. Sarah had been with him all night. They allowed his other visitors into his room only briefly. Abbie complained that it was too bright, even though the blinds were drawn and the lights had been dimmed. He was having trouble moving the right side of his body, and now the doctors were saying that it may not have been an aneurysm after all, but a stroke. “Of some significance,” one of the in-and-out doctors added with an uncomfortable enthusiasm. Isaac and Eli took Sarah down to the cafeteria to force her to eat something, and Isabel was left momentarily alone in the room with him before two nurses come and shooed her away. Abbie’s eyes had the appearance of milk pluming as it was poured into weak tea. Isabel, with nothing to say but stupid encouragement, said, “You’re looking good, Abbie.”

  “Mmm.” His throat rattled. “I fell off the truck,” he said.

  “What truck?”

  “I tried to jump off the truck.” A wide grin spread on the good side of his face; the bad side caught up a moment later, but then the whole thing turned to a grimace.

  Isabel, who’d read somewhere that you should humor the lacunae of reason in stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients and the elderly in general, said, “What were you doing on the truck in the first place?”