We Are Gathered

by Jamie Weisman

  Other than doctors, Josh is the only man who has ever seen me naked as an adult. When I was young and lithe, with what I see now in photos were beautiful breasts, a narrow waist, a desirable neck, I was scared of wanting men. I had a boyfriend in high school, Jacob Steinberg, the name sounds like an old man now, but Jake was tall, and he would have had wonderful curly hair but he cut it short, the crew cuts of 1959. He had the slight hint of a mustache, but his cheeks were still soft and untouched by a razor. His arms were strong for the reasons a boy’s arms should be strong, throwing balls and raking leaves and pushing a lawn mower, daily life, not weight lifting or personal training. There were no gyms, only gymnasiums where basketball games were played, cheerleaders cheered, and girls tumbled in acrobatics. Jake and I kissed and kissed. We made out in his car, in the woods behind school, in the storeroom of the drugstore his father owned. We touched each other through our clothes. Any further and I pushed his hand away because I thought he wouldn’t respect me. We were taught that boys, even boys who insisted they loved us, would change when they won the battle and got from us the secrets of our body. I pictured a Roman soldier, his golden cape over his shoulders, surveying in disgust the ruined landscape of a battle, his pathetic vanquished foes. I had been taught that sex would hurt; that it was a responsibility of a married woman; that although a girl could love being kissed, that although kissing could bring up a whole confusion of feelings, it was a trick of nature; and beyond kissing, the contact of human bodies brought nothing but shame and pain for women. By the time I realized my mistake, I was married and had sworn off all other intimacies.

  My children would die to hear me say that their father is a kind and gentle lover. Our wedding night, he undressed me as carefully as I undressed our newborn babies, undid the buttons one by one, slowly eased my dress off my shoulders. He folded it over a chair before he turned back to look at me. He told me I was beautiful. He still tells me I am beautiful. When I become flustered over flat tires or tangled jewelry, he always says, “It’s okay, beautiful. It can be fixed.”

  I think it is true that tyrants give birth to poets. At least it has held so far in Josh’s case. When we first started dating, Helen Berman told me that Josh was a catch. So many of the Jewish girls in Atlanta wanted him. Handsome, smart, kind, and rich. His father had built an empire, and he was sure to inherit it. But, she warned me, his father was a horror. Albert Gottlieb ruled over the synagogue in his front-row seats bought with annual donations that were double any of his rivals except for the Schiffs and the Riches, and they brought their money with them from New York. Josh’s father started with nothing. He was a man devoid of pity. He famously was once asked to donate to Holocaust refugees, and he refused, saying, “I only give to people who bear no responsibility for their misfortunes.” Albert Gottlieb’s father had died of colon cancer, so he gave money to the cancer society. That and the synagogue, and he grumbled about the synagogue and called the rabbi a shyster to his face. I used to fear that one day my kind husband would become his father, but despite frustrations with his career and a brother always begging for money and worries about the kids, he has remained calm and affectionate, and I have never doubted his love for me or the children. He didn’t blink an eye at the cost of this wedding, although I did find him late at night with the checkbooks out on his desk, copies of bank statements, and a calculator. When I massaged his shoulders, he touched my hand. I said, “We don’t have to spend all this money.”

  He smiled. “Don’t worry, beautiful,” he said. “This is the reason I worked so hard and saved.”

  Josh is not the type to share his worries with me. He tells me about bad things once they have been resolved. A few years ago, a young man appeared at Josh’s law firm and claimed to be Eddie’s son from some unknown dalliance. It was ridiculous; Josh shook his head as he told me. He got copies of the boy’s birth certificate, and the problem went away. He has helped his ne’er-do-well brother through two divorces. His father’s stroke destroyed the family business, but Josh has handled untangling the finances, paying the creditors. People think we inherited a fortune, but although my father-in-law built a very profitable business and lived like a rich man, Josh now tells me that once his father’s care is paid for and his mother’s uncompromising needs are met (my mother-in-law will not give up the weekly hairdresser, lunches at the Neiman Marcus café, trips to Canyon Ranch, lessons with the tennis pro at the country club) there won’t be much of an inheritance, and what there is will need to go to Eddie, since he’s as poor as a church mouse, and now he has a child to provide for. But never mind, Josh says, he has worked hard and saved, and we have no need of handouts. His brother has no such compunctions.

  The whole wedding went by so fast, I barely ate and didn’t even get to taste the wedding cake. It is wrapped up now, the top layer in the freezer for a year, and all the rest, at least what I couldn’t convince people to take home with them, is in my refrigerator. I am going to get a piece to share with my husband at last.

  The kitchen is spotless. I must remember to thank Rita for suggesting an extra cleaning crew for the house. I open the refrigerator and find slices of cake already cut and sealed in Saran Wrap. I find a smallish one, pour a glass of milk, and put it on a tray. Josh still likes to drink a glass of milk before bed, one of the more endearing things about him. In the den, Josh is in his tuxedo pants, but the shirt and tie are gone, and he is wearing a Carolina sweatshirt. His face glows in the reflection of the television. “Are they winning?” I ask. I don’t know who “they” are in this case. For me, it’s just another sporting event, the modern-day battle of titans that draws men of all ages, with their loose and useless testosterone, not really so vital in the modern-day world where there are no chariots and the clash of armies is far away on unseen soil.

  “Yes, but they don’t deserve to.”

  I set the tray down on the coffee table. Josh clicks the TV to mute.

  “It was a perfect wedding,” he tells me. “Except for the fact that the mother of the bride looked so gorgeous that she almost upstaged the bride.”

  I roll my eyes. “No one upstages Elizabeth.”

  “Not if she can help it.” He takes a bite of cake, says mmmm. “Are there raspberries in this?”

  “The filling.”

  “So good.” I lean my head on his shoulder and he kisses my hair. “You must be exhausted.”

  “I am hollowed out,” I say.

  “Let me draw you a bath.”

  When he is grateful to me, Josh fills the bathtub that serves only me. He lights a candle, draws up a chair, and sits next to me while I soak.

  “Did you see Theresa and Brad Perry dancing?” he asks.

  “Unfortunately,” I say. I close my eyes.

  “They looked like John Travolta and what’s-her-name, disco dancing, dipping; and then Brad threw Theresa into Bunny Walton. You’d think Bunny had been set on fire. She actually shrieked.”

  “Bunny Walton,” I murmur. “She’ll tell everyone the wedding was awful.”

  “Let her,” he says. “She’s probably going to go to bed dreaming of being thrown around the dance floor by Brad Perry.” He turns the hot water on to keep the bath warm. “Did I tell you I have a new client? La Maison bakery. Apparently, a woman wants to sue them for making her fat. She claims that if bartenders can be sued for serving alcohol to drunk people bakeries should be liable for selling eclairs to the obese.”

  “Oh, good Lord,” I say.

  He rubs my shoulders and soaps my back, washes me with a washcloth.

  “Did we spend too much money tonight?” I ask him.

  “No,” he says. “And it was worth every penny. Elizabeth was so happy. She’ll never forget this day. Sometimes you just have to spend some money to gather everyone together, let the photographer take all the pictures, let fathers dance with daughters and mothers with sons. Let little girls wear flowers in their hair. It’s worth it. It almost stops time.”

  I squint up at him trying not t
o get water in my eyes. “What a beautiful thing to say.”

  He dries me when I rise from the tub, and though we have known each other’s bodies for thirty-six years now, he still likes to look at mine, and I still go soft when I feel his hands on my back, his hardness, when he lifts me, still strong enough to do that, and tells me I am as small as the day we married (a lie) and carries me to the bed.

  After we make love, Josh falls asleep, but I am awake. He is snoring softly. There is a half-eaten slice of cake on our bedside table, and I need to get it before it brings in ants. The icing on the cake is running, and the raspberry part looks a little scary, like bright-red blood, so fresh it had to come from a baby. I scrape it into the sink and turn on the disposal. Why do I always feel sad when I throw food away? I wash the plate by hand since the dishwasher is full, dry it, put it in the cupboard.

  It would have been nice to have a few other lovers. There must be a million ways for a man to touch a woman. I know that Elizabeth has had at least three lovers, and Ben lost his virginity at sixteen to Laura Lampkin in the comfort of his own bedroom on his narrow twin bed with the baseball-themed comforter. I know this because in their passion they knocked over and broke the lamp with the ceramic baseball player at the base and I heard the noise and found the door locked, heard the sounds inside. When I told my husband about it, he neither smiled nor frowned. He bought Ben a pack of condoms and warned him not to get anyone pregnant.

  The teacher in me must share this observation. The calculations of men and women never add up. Even now. Women may have had five, ten lovers; men always claim ten times that amount, and if we are supposed to match one to one, someone has to be lying. Or a handful of women are very busy.

  I have been married to my husband for thirty-six years, all of them faithful, and I think faithful for him too, and if this is not so, I don’t want to know. The urgency of total honesty fades in the first decade, I think. There are secrets I have kept from my husband and will take to the grave. Little things, like I hate the mole on his left buttock and that Bill Ferguson, the founding partner at his law firm, got drunk at an office Christmas party and put his arm around me, told me Josh was up for partnership but that no one made partner at the firm without his blessing. Then he went in for a kiss. This was not an uncommon event. Of course, we knew people who had affairs, midlife crises, got divorces, bought convertibles, but Josh and I felt sorry for them. We were happy together. I found Bill Ferguson repulsive. I tried to forget the vulgar things he said. I didn’t care if Josh got rich. That was never our aspiration. To raise happy children and love each other and be kind to the people in our orbit, not to damage too much of the world, those were our goals. I don’t need to spend time at the club with the likes of Chip and Bunny Walton. In fact, I am grateful that we do not spend time at the club with those people. I have never told Josh what Bill Ferguson did. He only knows that I hated Bill Ferguson and was not sad when he died relatively young at fifty-seven—the same age I am now—of liver cancer. Josh would shake his head at Bill’s suffering, at his wasted frame, and at the orange-yellow tint that seeped over him into his eyeballs. “ ‘Poor Bill,’ he said. ‘Dying so young.’ ” Terminally kind, my husband.

  When I said, “He did it to himself,” Josh would look at me as if I were stating a fact he wished wasn’t true.

  When Katie’s dog died, he told her, “They don’t make a dog that lives as long as we do, sweetheart.” He sounded as if he had researched it extensively before coming to this conclusion. After my mother died, Katie asked if she was in heaven. When Josh answered that of course she was, she said, “What’s it like in heaven?”

  “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “I’ve never been there.” Then he told her about the Eiffel Tower and Windsor Castle, places he has been, until she fell asleep, confusing croissants, princesses, and the clouds of heaven into a jumbled mess of perfection.

  “Maybe true,” he said of Bill Ferguson. “But no one deserves such an ugly death.” Here’s another secret I have kept from him. I have an angry streak, and I was happy to see Bill Ferguson suffer.

  Outside of my marriage, the only kiss that ever meant something to me was that night in our first house when Jack Chandler showed up high on something, skinny and eyes glittering with fear and mystery, clutching his sweat-soaked draft notice. My sweet and devoted husband offered a dozen ways to get him out of it. Josh would have married him if it would have kept Jack out of Vietnam. Neither of us believed in that ridiculous war, though we kept that opinion hidden from the red-blooded Republicans of Josh’s law firm and, for that matter, 99 percent of white Atlanta. I don’t think Jack really wanted our help; he just wanted to hear us try, the same way my kids would cry when they fell down, not because they were hurt but because it was so reassuring to have me swoop down over them, pick them up, and hold them close. Jack sat at our dining-room table and wolfed down the spaghetti I had made as if it were his last meal. That was something Jack would do—everything with him had the urgency of a last-time-in-life event, even this wedding when he presented that breathtaking painting to my daughter as if she were the Christ child and all the kings would come on bended knee bearing their best gifts instead of blenders and Wedgwood place settings. I am sure Jack has forgotten all about that night. At the wedding, he kissed my cheek with dry lips, and I saw him watching Elizabeth’s friends dancing. He has never burdened himself with the stability of middle-class life, no mortgage, no children, and I suppose in some way this allows him to never grow up, to dance with young girls, to bed his students, to lie on the hood of his car and stare up at the stars even as he approaches sixty-one. While everyone else wonders if they have saved enough for retirement, Jack Chandler is still dreaming about falling in love and getting famous, dreams that expired for the rest of us by age thirty.

  The memory of that kiss, late at night while my husband slept, his audacity, my audacity, my nakedness in a white cotton nightgown, a double dose of hormones with a child growing inside me. If Jack had pushed, I would have lain down beside him. I would have pulled the nightgown over my head and offered myself up to him under the cold November moon. He loved Josh more than he loved me. I pushed his hand away, and he let me. He stepped back, and we came to our senses. The picture he had drawn of me, the only time I have ever looked at an image of myself and seen someone beautiful, he tore it up. My whole body was burning. The feel of his tongue against mine in that moment was as intimate as if we had made love. He had been inside me. I am sure he has forgotten about it. Jack, no doubt, has had a thousand urgent kisses; I, only the one. I love my husband, but our lives, so scripted, so correctly lived, the biggest horror a speeding ticket and a fine, have never mustered the passion of that kiss. Warmth, tenderness, devotion, sacrifice. I would do anything for Josh. If he needs me to, I would give him a kidney. I will spoon-feed him in old age; I want to die when he dies, holding hands in our hospital beds in the nursing home, but that kiss with Jack, that was the passion the Indian women feel when their beloved dies, that was a bury-me-alive, set-me-on-fire moment, the only one in my life.

  What does my husband dream about while I drink this chamomile tea and watch the darkening sky over the detritus of all our accomplishments, this lovely house, that married daughter? Someone trampled the flower bed; there are daffodils with broken necks, bruised tulips. One of the bridesmaids tossed her bouquet up on the roof of the garage. I have carefully gone through the wedding site as if it were a crime scene looking for stray envelopes and gifts, earrings trampled into the lawn, a forgotten pocketbook. The panicked calls will come—did you by any chance find a wallet? A ring? A soul? A dream? A reason to live? I can hear the television. Josh must have left it on. Jack Chandler’s painting is propped up against a wall in our living room, too big for Elizabeth and Hank’s small apartment, and too much for this house that I have decorated in shades of blue and gray.

  In the den, I find the remote and turn off the TV. There is an empty glass etched white with milk sitting on the s
ide table. My husband drinks milk before bed, he wears pajamas, he checks with me before he sets the alarm so I know when to expect that clanging call of another day. I don’t have to get up anymore. The children are gone, and he knows that I could fall back onto the pillow and sleep until noon, not rise with him and brush my teeth, get dressed, start the day. In truth, the world does not care about the order we have imposed on it. It gives us light and dark; we are the ones who feel the need to chop the hours up into little pieces. Maybe it’s just a habit for the two of us; we drink coffee together, and I rinse the dishes and put them away before he leaves. Monday through Friday, we walk out of the house together, Josh in a tie and I in a tracksuit, though I don’t run. I walk three houses down and pick up Esther Tobin; then we go around the block and down to the river, greeting the other ladies like me who are trying hard to keep their figures.