Between You and Me

by Scott Nadelson

  Nocturne for left hand

  On either side of him, rapt attention. Maybe even rapture. The orchestra charges into the allegro of the final movement, and he can feel the kids—no longer children but always “the kids” in his mind—bracing themselves, leaning forward in their seats, Kyle’s elbows on his knees, Joy’s hands pressed between crossed thighs.

  They are listening to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, in the second tier of Avery Fisher Hall, and even from this distance he can see sweat shining on the bald spot of the guest conductor, a short, round Argentinean bristling with dark hair on cheeks, chin, and neck, everywhere but a clear circle on his crown. All evening his movements have been jerky and frenetic, pained even, as if his joints are stiffening as the concert proceeds. Whenever the music grows softer, his grunts are audible over the hum of oboe or the whistle of flute, and between movements he appears on the verge of collapse. Now, when he jabs his baton at the brass section, and then lifts, lifts, lifts, Kyle makes a move as if to stand, and Joy claps a hand over her open mouth.

  This night is everything Paul has hoped it might be, everything he has imagined, not just in the hours leading up, but for years prior. It’s just luck that both kids are visiting at the same time, luck that they have an evening free from seeing old friends on the same night Cynthia has a school function she can’t skip, luck that he’s been able to get tickets at the last minute. When, that morning, he casually suggested the three of them go into the city, catch an early dinner and a concert, they didn’t deflect, didn’t make excuses or roll eyes or exchange skeptical glances. “Sounds lovely,” Joy said, and Kyle agreed. “Man, I miss New York,” he said. “Baltimore just doesn’t cut it.”

  In their mid-twenties, they have become urbane, sophisticated, cultured. They travel regularly. They dress well, Kyle in slacks and wingtips, Joy in a sleeveless black dress, too short, maybe, but otherwise elegant. On the drive in they talked about other concerts they’ve seen in the last year—a Cuban jazz trio in a Los Angeles club, the Czech National String Quartet playing Dvořák and Smetana in a Prague chapel. At dinner they ordered the most unusual items on the menu, pappardelle in rabbit ragu, trout poached with sage and blueberries. They have seen interesting movies, have read interesting books. They tell stories about interesting friends. They seem to enjoy Paul’s company. And now they are moved by Mahler’s heroic composition, by the conductor’s maniacal energy, by the orchestra’s delicate skill and rousing spirit. What else can he ask for?

  And yet, sitting in seat 13, row CC, second tier of Avery Fisher Hall, he is terribly bored. Bored! He has never been so bored in his life. The exhilaration of the music bores him. The precision of all those violins moving in synch bores him. Even the conductor’s hysterics, the wild flinging of his baton, the sweat matting hair around his bald spot, all of it strikes Paul as flaccid and predictable, not an original gesture in his entire repertoire, every moment studied and rehearsed, calculated to bring Paul’s stepson to his feet, to make his stepdaughter cover her mouth with a lovely slender hand. You’re so boring! he wants to shout at the conductor when he slices the baton through the air for the finale, at the musicians when they hit the last note and freeze, at the audience members when they jump to their feet and cheer. Boring, boring, boring!

  He even wants to say it to his stepchildren, these beautiful young people just embarking on adult life, armed already with sophisticated tastes and admirable habits for which he has never allowed himself to take credit but now gives himself all the blame. What sort of people might they be if he hadn’t interfered? Don’t do it, he wants to tell them. Don’t wear slacks and elegant dresses and listen to boring old Mahler. Don’t read interesting books and talk about them with your interesting friends. Stop now while you have the chance. Do something wild and reckless and unexpected. Track wildebeest migration in the Serengeti. Prospect for precious metals atop secluded Alaskan mountains. Knock over liquor stores to support a gambling addiction. Anything. Just, for God’s sake, don’t be like me.

  Because yes, of course, his real boredom is with himself. He has felt it nagging, with increasing urgency, all evening. In the car, when he struggled to find something meaningful to add to the kids’ lively conversation and then, failing, fell silent. In the restaurant, where he ordered the same scallops with asparagus he’d ordered a month earlier, before going to the ballet with Cynthia. And now, edging down the aisle, creeping along with the buzzing crowd, nodding in agreement that this was the best performance of Mahler’s Fifth he has ever heard. He wishes he could say something shocking and original. He wishes he could provide the kids stories to tell their friends. Their real father, at least, has been inconsistent enough to keep them wondering about him all these years. What thought have they ever given Paul when he’s stepped out of sight?

  Joy takes his arm when they reach the stairs and holds onto him as they descend to the lobby. “That was delightful,” she says, and he has the feeling that she has been thinking the phrase over for some time, maybe planning to say it since before the concert started. Even her smile seems practiced. “We should do this every time I’m home.”

  Kyle adds, as they push through glass doors into the courtyard, the fountain lit up and burbling high over their heads, “I’ll never hear that fourth movement the same way again. The CD doesn’t do it justice.”

  The night is warm and clear, a few stars visible despite the city’s glare, and it seems to Paul that he is glimpsing the depths between them, far into that dark empty place. On and on it goes. One dull life leading to another. What crimes he has committed.

  When they reach the parking garage, however, the kids hesitate. Joy takes her hand from his arm. Kyle, he notices, has unbuttoned the second button on his shirt and rolled his sleeves. Their expressions are no longer placid and satisfied but oddly expectant, maybe uneasy. “Thanks for this, Paul,” Kyle says. “It’s been great, really. But—”

  “We’re heading downtown,” Joy says, and takes a step backward. Something in her voice has changed. There’s impatience in it, defensiveness, and he guesses that this is the first honest thing she’s said to him all day. “Some friends are meeting us.”

  “But the car,” he says, and gestures at the garage. Wearing the short black dress, he realizes now, had nothing to do with the symphony, or with him. All evening her thoughts have been elsewhere. He knows nothing of their lives, not really, except that they are nothing like his own. “I mean, I drove you—”

  “We’ll take the train home,” she says. “Don’t worry about us.”

  “Downtown?” he asks. He knows he shouldn’t hope for them to invite him along. If they did, he couldn’t promise to be as interesting as the most tedious of their friends, though he might order a drink he’s never had before. He shouldn’t, but he can’t help it. He has never wanted anything more.

  But already their backs are turned. They are walking away from him. As soon as they reach Broadway, they’ll slip into the crowd and disappear, claimed by the city he has taught them to love, by the interesting lives he has wished upon them. “Enjoy yourselves,” he calls after them. “I’ll leave the back door unlocked.” Kyle gives a thumbs-up without glancing around. Joy peeks at her watch. Paul hands the parking attendant his claim ticket and, picturing all the roads that lead away from here, tries to plot a new route home.

  Between You and Me

  1999

  Paul was tired of changes, but changes kept coming. His firm merged with a larger one for the third time in a decade, and once again the legal team was split between semi-autonomous departments with competing agendas and poor communication. Paul found himself working on contracts with an attorney half his age, a girl hardly out of law school, who pestered him constantly to start filing reports on his computer and sending them to her electronically. He still wrote out contracts by hand and had a secretary type them. He didn’t see the point of sending an email to someone who was three steps down the hall, and who was in his office all the time anyway, hopping onto
the corner of his desk, laughing at the dust on his computer’s keyboard, asking if he knew how to turn it on. When he complained, subtly, to the chief administrative officer, a man he’d known for twenty years and considered an ally, musing over lunch that he found it strange when two people were given equal authority though one had far more experience, the only response he received was a long, reproachful silence.

  The whole situation depressed him, and on weekends he sulked visibly enough for Cynthia to suggest he start seeing a counselor. Instead, he went to talk to Mike Molinoff, a recent acquaintance—no, friend; he could call him a friend—who also happened to be assistant rabbi at Temple Neveh Shalom. Rabbi Mike’s office was in the synagogue’s basement, whose asbestos ceiling had been ripped out a decade ago and never replaced. Wires dangled from a grid of exposed beams and pipes overhead, and the air below smelled of mildew. The office was cramped, hardly enough room for a desk and two folding chairs, a metal bookshelf stuffed mostly with bulging manila folders, the only adornment on the walls a framed degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

  While he was peeking in, and thinking about retracing his steps to the parking lot, a hand clapped his back, hard, right between the shoulder blades. The mint he’d been sucking blew out of his lips onto the floor.

  “What a nice surprise,” Rabbi Mike said. “Playing hooky? You must’ve known how badly I needed an excuse to reschedule my morning.”

  “If you’re too busy—”

  “Forget it,” Rabbi Mike said. “Hospital visits. Worst way to start the week. You saved my Monday.” He nudged Paul out of the doorway and cleared one of the folding chairs, also stacked with folders. “Welcome to my humble—what? Den? Trust me, it’s even worse than it looks. When the heat’s on, those pipes rattle like crazy.” On his way around the desk he crunched Paul’s mint, which stuck to the bottom of his shoe. “What the hell? I swear, no one ever vacuums this place.” He scraped his sole on the edge of a garbage can, then threw himself into his chair, clapped his hands. “Paul Haberman. In the shul. What a surprise. Like I said.”

  “I know I should come to services more often—”

  “Forget it,” Rabbi Mike said again. “Some people need the structure. You know, predictability. Good for those of us without imagination. But there are other ways of getting in touch with the Almighty.”

  Sensible. That’s how Paul had come to think of Rabbi Mike. Not brilliant or mystical, just equipped with an uncanny ability to say exactly what needed to be said. He was in his late thirties, round-faced and clean-shaven, with black curls that covered his ears and touched the top of his collar, a pair of tortoiseshell glasses less rabbinic than beatnik. In the five months Paul had known him he’d been talking about going on a diet, losing fifteen pounds, but if anything he’d put on another ten. Paul wondered if congregants took him less seriously because his belly strained his shirt buttons, but Rabbi Mike had a way of tilting his head when he looked at you, a finger of each hand pressed to his lips, that made it seem as if his eyes were focused not on the surface of your skin but an inch or two beyond, somewhere inside your skull.

  “So I take it this isn’t a social call.”

  “I guess not,” Paul said. “I’m here for your…” He couldn’t bring himself to use the word “counseling,” so instead finished, “professional expertise.”

  Rabbi Mike cracked his knuckles and sat up straight. What did he expect Paul to divulge? Marital trouble? Sexual problems? Kid with a drug addiction? Go ahead, his look seemed to say. I’ve heard it all.

  “Nothing too exciting. Just some difficulty at work. I could use advice. Perspective.”

  The change in Rabbi Mike’s expression was almost imperceptible, but Paul caught it all the same: shoulders sinking, smile flickering downward at the corners. Disappointment? Annoyance? Would he rather be making rounds at the hospital, offering words of comfort to the sick and dying? “All right, then,” he said. “This is why I get paid the big bucks. Fire away.”

  Paul had gotten to know Rabbi Mike at the gym of the Whippany JCC. Three Sunday afternoons in a row they’d ended up on adjacent treadmills, Paul lasting half an hour on a mild incline, Rabbi Mike ten minutes on flat ground. While Paul finished, Rabbi Mike mopped his face with a handkerchief and chatted. “This is my wife’s idea,” he said. “Thinks I’m headed for a heart attack at forty. I try to tell her not to worry. My people have always been round. My grandfather? Five-two and two hundred pounds, and he lived to ninety-four.” He reminded Paul of men he’d grown up around in Crown Heights. For one, his accent was pure Brooklyn. But even more, he spoke with an easy familiarity, as if he took it for granted that you’d known each other since one or the other of you was a few days old. “If anything’s going to give me a heart attack,” Rabbi Mike said, still breathing hard, “it’s walking on this death machine.”

  One afternoon, Paul was still in the parking lot, looking for his car, when Rabbi Mike came outside, hair wet, enormous gym bag slung over his shoulder. Paul had been up and down every aisle but couldn’t spot his Imperial among all the squat, sloping Toyotas and Hondas, Acuras and Lexuses, which were distinguishable only by the college logos stuck to their back windows: this one’s daughter went to Penn; this one’s son, a dolt, went to Montclair State. And only when he saw one with stickers from Williams and Rutgers did he remember he’d driven Cynthia’s Accord. His own car, now twenty years old, was in the shop with transmission problems. The Baron had finally retired, and his new mechanic was young, humorless, and never remembered Paul’s name. Along with the transmission, the car also needed a new alternator, he said, and quoted a ridiculous price before suggesting Paul consider trading it in. Paul spent an afternoon looking at Consumer Reports, which recommended a variety of squat, sloping Japanese models, and then called the mechanic and told him to go ahead and make the repairs.

  Rabbi Mike hailed him from two aisles away. “You in a hurry?” The big bag pulled him sideways. What did he have in there, a spare Torah? He couldn’t have needed much gear for his ten minute stroll. “Feel like grabbing a bite on the way home?” It wasn’t quite four-thirty. When Paul hesitated, he added, “All she’s going to feed me is rice and steamed broccoli. I’m dying for a burger.”

  He ate steak fries, too, and a big salad with French dressing, from which he scraped off the bacon bits, plus two bottles of Heineken. Whenever the waiter came near, he’d call to him for something he’d forgotten—ketchup, salt, extra dressing—and then needle him about how long the food took to arrive. Paul guessed this was his way of joking around, though his demands had an edge of impatience to them. “Got to keep them on their toes,” Rabbi Mike said, when the waiter stepped out of view. Paul kept up with him bite for bite, and afterward spent an hour groaning on the toilet. When his heartburn passed, guilt replaced it. The next week he spent a full hour on the treadmill.

  But from then on he and Rabbi Mike stopped at the steakhouse on Route 10 every Sunday afternoon, though Paul limited himself to a few onion rings and a sour pickle. At first Rabbi Mike did most of the talking, which set Paul at ease—even more so when Rabbi Mike started complaining about his job. Neveh Shalom had never had an assistant rabbi before. The congregation had doubled in size over the past decade, and the long-time rabbi, David Aronson, was already past retirement age. “But Aronson doesn’t want to give up anything,” Rabbi Mike said. “He wants to do all the services, all the bar mitzvahs, all the funerals. All I do is give speeches to the Men’s Club and discipline fifth graders who misbehave in Hebrew school.”

  As it happened, Cynthia had served on the committee that had hired Rabbi Mike—she was president of Hadassah now, and a member of the synagogue’s board of directors—and Paul had heard more about the process than he first let on. He knew, for example, that Rabbi Mike hadn’t been the committee’s top choice—in fact, he was third out of three finalists—but he was the only one willing to accept the salary. The only one, that is, who didn’t negotiate at all. According to Cynthia, they had no
doubt he was knowledgeable and intelligent, a dynamic speaker and an accomplished scholar, but his manner was brusque. The congregation was used to Aronson’s paternal generosity, his patient smile, his sagely stooped posture. The committee members weren’t convinced Rabbi Mike would be effective at the human side of the job. They made no commitment to promote him when Aronson finally retired.

  “If I have to listen to his greeting every week for the next two years, I swear,” Rabbi Mike said through a mouthful of burger. “‘Good evening, my friends,’” he went on, his impression sounding less like Aronson’s sober, resonant voice than that of a mediocre Elvis impersonator, “‘and thank you for being with us during these beautiful and troubled times.’ Puke.” Aronson was as inspiring as gelatin, Rabbi Mike said, and as ambiguously kosher. He delivered sermons as if they were news reports, and he handled the Torah like a piece of luggage, wrestling it into place and jabbing it with the silver pointer. “You know how he’s always got his eyes closed when the cantor’s singing? That’s not rapture. The guy’s figured out how to sleep standing up.”

  Though Cynthia went to services every Friday night and most Saturday mornings, Paul joined her only when she pleaded or threatened—“If I keep showing up alone, all the widowers are going to start hitting on me”—and even then he did so reluctantly. Just stepping into the sanctuary filled him with impatience, recalling long mornings in uncomfortable clothes, when his mother would pinch his leg if he started to squirm. He’d never minded the solemn opening prayers that prepared him to daydream for the following two hours or the rousing Adon Olam with which all the congregants leapt out of their seats and headed for the brownies and grape juice in the ballroom next door. If he could have snoozed or read a book through the middle part—the endless succession of Torah readings, the silent Amidah during which people showed off their piety by standing and swaying far longer than necessary—he might have come more often. As it was, he spent most Friday nights at home, watching old movies.