When he was satisfied that nothing in the bowl would kill him, he forked several bites into his mouth and for a minute was so absorbed in chewing that Paul thought he might be able to nudge him away from the thrust of their conversation, divert it toward loftier topics. “That sermon you gave a while back,” he said. “The one about Spiderman and Moses.” Rabbi Mike kept chewing, and when he finished the fruit, he spooned half the bowl of yogurt into his mouth, then washed it down with a colossal gulp of coffee. “You said something about the power each of us has—”
“Forget Spiderman,” Rabbi Mike snapped. His vexed look was softened only by the flecks of yogurt on his chin. “That’s kid’s stuff. I’m trying to talk to you like a grown-up.” Paul raised his coffee to his lips and kept it there. But he couldn’t swallow any and instead let it flow into his mouth and back into the cup. “This is what I’m hearing. Five times a day these gorgeous legs, toned by running, are right in front of you, and you can’t help imagining what it might be like to reach out and touch them, or maybe even to spread them apart and see what’s in between—”
“I don’t think—”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Rabbi Mike said. “Anybody in your situation would feel the same way. You’ve been doing your job for twenty-five years, and suddenly this woman comes along with skills you don’t have, flaunting her perfect legs and her youth and her power. She’ll be around long after you’re gone, and in her eyes you’re as up-to-date as an abacus and as virile as an office chair, and you don’t know whether you want to slap her or shtup her—”
“I don’t want—”
“Because probably you want to do both at the same time. I’m sure I would.”
“I never thought about it,” Paul said.
“The best thing you can do is be honest. Take control of your emotions. Otherwise you’ll just stay mad at yourself.”
“Who says I’m mad at myself?”
“You’re depressed, right? Same difference.”
Why did he care what the name of the road had become, or who’d bought the shop across the street? Why should it suddenly bother him that a synagogue he hardly ever attended might one day be taken over by this fat young rabbi with yogurt on his chin?
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?”
“So maybe it’s true.”
“What is?”
“What you said.”
“I need to hear you say it.”
“Jesus.”
Rabbi Mike laughed heartily now, the kind of laughter they’d shared in the Route 10 steakhouse after working out in the gym or rehearsing their play. But Paul had a feeling this was the last time he’d hear it. “He’s a whole separate matter. For another day, maybe. Just get it out.”
“I want to shtup her and slap her,” Paul said, louder than he meant to.
Rabbi Mike leaned back in the booth and smiled, but his smile was a patronizing one, no longer chummy and familiar, no longer suggesting they shared similar thoughts. Had that been the performance all along? Paul felt oddly sleepy, though it was only ten in the morning. It had been foolish of him to imagine they were equals, a man of God and Torah and a contracts lawyer who played the lead role in amateur productions at the JCC.
“But here’s the thing, Paul,” Rabbi Mike said. “You can’t do either. No matter how much you might want to. What you can do is show her you’re competent, that you work hard, that you know your business, and know how to respect your peers without taking crap from them. And if you can just focus on those things, then you won’t feel angry, or ashamed, or depressed. You’ll just understand that the world puts challenges in front of you, gives you burdens to carry, and you deal with them the best you can. And if people don’t appreciate what you’ve got to offer, that’s their problem, not yours.”
Exhaustion was creeping up on him, along with a desire to give in to it. His saliva had turned syrupy in his mouth and throat. He covered a yawn. “I’m afraid they’ll push me into early retirement,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll do with myself.”
“You and Aronson and everyone else,” Rabbi Mike said, with a sharp flick of his hand. His patient expression was gone. He finally wiped his face with his napkin, glanced at his watch and then at the door. When the waitress brought the bill, he jerked his chin in Paul’s direction. “He’s buying.” She gave Paul a look—of disgust, maybe? Sympathy? With the missing tooth and sunken lip it was hard to tell. Either way, he didn’t doubt she’d heard every word he’d said. Nor did he care. He handed over a twenty-dollar bill with relief. He wouldn’t wait for change. “I’m heading back,” Rabbi Mike said. He shimmied out of the booth and stood, breathing hard from the effort. “I hate using the john in these places.”
“All this,” Paul said. “It stays between us, right?”
“Just make sure to tell your wife I’m not so shabby at the human side of things after all.”
Before Paul could follow, the rabbi was out the jingling door. In the synagogue parking lot the old Imperial waited, patched-up and running, but creakier and less efficient than ever.
“Look at you,” Kat Harrow said that afternoon, when she came back from lunch to find him in his office, computer humming. He’d managed to make it past the login screen but had yet to figure out how to open his mail. For the past twenty minutes he’d been pushing the mouse back and forth on his desk, watching the little pointer appear and disappear on his screen. He’d opened a dozen windows but didn’t know what to do with any of them. He felt his uselessness expanding without bounds.
“I can adapt,” he said. “Just takes a little prodding.”
“That’s my specialty,” Kat said. “Or so my ex used to tell me. Let me help with this.”
Instead of hopping onto his desk, she stood next to him, close, leaning over his chair to see the screen, those full lips and round cheekbones set off against its glowing layers, window upon window upon window. Her skirt ended two inches above the knee, and below it the skin was tan and taut and glazed with a post-run lotion rub. The fabric of her blouse was half an inch from his nose.
One thing hadn’t changed: the way proximity to a woman’s body stirred him, the enduring surprise of it, as if he’d been given a gift he’d never expected, hadn’t even allowed himself to wish for. He still experienced it with Cynthia after all these years, on those rare occasions when her arms slipped around him. Even with Riva Edelstein, when her breath heaved in his ear. What was the feeling, exactly? Less hunger or lust than amazement at what life had to offer. He supposed this, too, would one day fade.
Kat clicked his mouse several times until all the windows closed. Then a new one appeared, with a long list of unopened messages. “Like magic, right?” she said.
“I know what I know,” Paul said. “That’s knowledge. I feel what I know. That’s wisdom.”
Around a slender, flexed arm, Kat looked at him with fresh attention. He breathed in the smell of her.
Anything Quite Like It
2001
To his surprise, once he retired, Paul didn’t miss the morning train ride to Penn Station, the crowded subway, the walk down traffic-choked streets smelling of garbage. He didn’t miss the view from his seventeenth floor office or the chatter of secretaries outside his door. He found himself perfectly content to spend all week in New Jersey, not even crossing from Morris to Essex County for a month at a time.
If Paul was surprised, Cynthia was flabbergasted, though she did her best to hide it. Only after he’d been home half a year did she confess to having been so worried when he was forced to accept the early retirement package—a generous one—and even more when he didn’t subsequently try to find consulting work, that she surveyed all her friends and acquaintances about their legal needs. Maybe they wanted to draw up a new will? Sue a neighbor over a property line dispute? She’d expected him to sink immediately into despondency, moping around the house, demanding her attention, quickly growing old. But now she could only marvel at how relaxed
he looked, how unexpectedly serene. “Your color’s improved, too,” she said. “All those years under fluorescent lights, your face was starting to turn gray.”
It was true: he felt better than he had in years. He had more energy, he slept more soundly. His appetite increased, but he ate with moderation and wasn’t tempted by sweets. Indigestion that had plagued him for longer than he could remember gradually vanished. “You look as good as when I first met you,” Cynthia said, stroking his hair, which was now white everywhere except for a small, stubborn dark patch on his crown. With gusto that made her gasp, he grabbed her hips and pulled her to him. “Maybe I should retire, too,” she said later, under rumpled sheets.
The only trouble was, he experienced a painful twinge in his groin while they were making love, and again several days later, when he was loading the recycling into the back of his car. My brand new car, he thought every time he saw it, though it was now nine months old. After two decades he’d finally traded in his Imperial, turning over the keys with as heavy a lump in his throat as when he’d had to put his cat down ten years before. He test drove a dozen smaller models before settling on a big black Jeep with tinted back windows and a chrome muffler. He enjoyed being higher up than people in compacts on either side and right away found himself far more comfortable than he’d ever been in the Imperial. As soon as he brought the new car home he realized he’d been driving hunched over since he’d first gotten his license, believing the cramping in his arms and back to be necessary consequences of navigating overcrowded freeways. For the first time, he took pleasure in cruising east on I-80, and last winter, when a sudden storm overtook him fifteen miles from home, he didn’t panic as he might have before; even with a few inches of snow on the ground, the Jeep barreled up the steep curve of Crescent Ridge without slipping or fishtailing once.
Today, though, he wished the Jeep had a lower trunk, so he didn’t have to lift the bags stuffed with newspapers and bottles so high. He held onto the bumper until the pain subsided and when it did, found a sheen of sweat covered his forehead and dampened his shirt. A pulled muscle, he guessed. He was no longer young, and Cynthia wasn’t light. Next time he’d have to be more careful when he rolled her on top of him. He was careful now, bending at the knees and easing the bags into the car, and then again when he made it to the dump, gently sliding the newspaper into its bin, emptying the bottles all at once rather than tossing them one by one as he liked to, listening to their pop and the musical plinking of shards.
After years of stalling, the township had finally begun collecting recycling at curbside, but Paul still preferred to make the twenty-minute drive down Union Knoll and across Route 46. The dump had always fascinated him. He never tired of observing what other people brought, their secret lives partially illuminated by detritus. Last week a woman his age unloaded six bags heaped with empty Southern Comfort bottles. A few months earlier, a man and his teenage son emptied from their trunk a dozen porcelain toilet seats. Somewhere in between, a young couple tossed several mysteriously wrapped packages, the size of small children, lumpy and covered in what looked like gauze, before hurrying to their pickup and peeling away. Illicit behavior, Paul guessed, and considered investigating. He liked the idea of calling the police and helping them track down criminals. He’d even made note of the pickup’s license plate. But worse than finding something horrifying would have been finding something mundane and soiling his clothes for no reason. So instead he went on with his day, which meant heading to the library, where he spent half an hour choosing books for Cynthia—suspense novels and gardening advice—another half hour perusing the legal journals he couldn’t bring himself to carry away from the stacks, and then the rest of the morning reading the Times beside a window that looked out on a weedy lot easing down to a shallow creek.
Simple routines were what he liked most about being retired, following them and also breaking them whenever the mood struck: continuing to sit on the patio listening to Brahms, for example, when he normally went to the gym, or going shopping for new tennis shoes on the day he’d set aside to pick up his dry cleaning. Today’s interruption, however, wasn’t his choosing. After only an hour at the library, he drove into downtown Denville and pulled up in front of the bakery. Cynthia had charged him with picking up the cake for Joy’s wedding, which was set for the following evening, ceremony and reception at a hotel in Morristown. It wasn’t a job he relished—he had too many flashes of collapsed tiers and smeared icing to feel relaxed as he approached the counter—but he’d quickly agreed to do it, putting on a brave face Cynthia had seen through instantly.
“If you don’t want to take it out of the car yourself, wait till I get home,” she said. “Just make sure you park in the shade.”
•
What troubled him more than the thought of carrying the cake, though, was imagining Joy cutting it and feeding a bite to her new husband. After years of burning through boyfriends a month or two at a time, she’d announced last fall, at twenty-eight, that she was engaged to someone she’d known most of her life, the son of one of her father’s business associates. “It’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard,” Cynthia said after Joy called and told her the news. “They met when she was three.”
He should have been pleased. He’d no longer have to see different men on Joy’s arm each time she visited, never again encounter a stranger walking out of the shower with a towel around his waist, smiling slyly, as if they shared a secret or a private joke, before joining her in the guest bedroom. Last year it had been a muscled boy, bald prematurely, his shining scalp seeming somehow lewd. Paul kept wishing he’d put on a cap. At dinner he talked nonstop—about surfing (a subject in which Paul had little interest), about Zen meditation (even less), and about politics (though they agreed on many things, Paul couldn’t stand his self-congratulatory tone)—and never took his hand from Joy’s thigh, rubbing it just at the spot where the hem of her skirt met skin. Paul, sitting on her other side, could do nothing but watch, biting his lip every time the muscled boy’s fingers slipped into the seam between her legs.
A husband, he’d always assumed, would have been far easier to take. Sure, at first he’d have his hands all over her, too. But the longer they were together, the more space would appear between them. As the years went by, as they had kids and grew bags under their eyes and worked their way toward middle age, they’d hardly even touch. If they managed to stay together, sooner or later they’d seem as intimate as business partners who’d shared an office too long.
But now that the time had come, he wasn’t sure he preferred this new version of Joy’s future: one man, with whom she’d share everything—not just her morning coffee and her unpaid parking tickets, but her most private thoughts and her deepest fears, her body and her bed. Even worse, one man connected to Russell Demsky, who, as usual, had found an excuse not to act like a parent. Paul was paying for the wedding, as he’d always known he would. Russell’s cash was once again tied up in investments that were complicated to liquidate, though judging by the recent remodel of his house on Budd Lake, his business had been booming. He’d pay Paul back as soon as he could loosen some strings, he said over the phone, and then added, with pre-emptive indignation, as if Paul had made outrageous accusations, “If you want, I’ll pay interest.”
“How does four percent sound?” Paul asked, and for a moment there was silence on the line. Then Russell laughed, too loud. Before he hung up, Paul added, “Accrued annually, of course.”
Yet it was Russell Joy would dance with after cutting the cake, Russell who would make the toast, while Paul sat on the sidelines and sipped the champagne he’d bought, surrounded by the groom’s extended family, half of whom wouldn’t speak English. Here was another thing he hadn’t imagined: that Joy’s husband would have such dark hair and skin, that he’d have a name like Aziz.
“An Arab?” Reggie said when he called to pass on news of the engagement. He’d waited a few days after they’d heard from Joy, in the event that she’
d made the announcement impulsively and would soon change her mind. By then the initial shock had begun to ebb, giving way to an uneasiness he couldn’t name. “What’s she thinking?”
“He’s not Arab,” Paul said. “He’s Persian.”
“Like the Ayatollah,” Reggie said.
“It’s an ancient culture. As old as the Greeks.”
“Does he bow down to Zeus five times a day? Are they going to be married by a priestess of Athena?”
In fact, they were going to be married by a friend who’d sent away for a minister’s license in the mail and who was going to read one poem in English, one in Hebrew, and one in Farsi. But Paul didn’t mention any of this. Instead, he reminded her that Aziz had started spending summers in New York the year he was born and had been living in the States full-time since he was eight. But Reggie didn’t seem to hear a word. If Joy liked Middle Eastern men, she said, why not at least try out an Israeli first?
“He’s practically family,” Paul said. “And Cynthia thinks he’s gorgeous. Of course he is, I told her. Joy’s got taste, just like her mother.”
To this, Cynthia hadn’t responded, and neither did Reggie. Nor did he go on to say what he really thought: that he agreed with her, a Persian man couldn’t possibly be right for Joy. Nor could an Arab, an Indian, a Spaniard, a Swede. Not even a Jew, unless he was on the short side, without the hairy arms and aggressive demeanor and lazy ethics of Russell Demsky. What she deserved was someone made stupid by her affection, who’d throw himself off a bridge if she asked him to—one who’d adore her, in other words, as much as Paul adored Cynthia. Most men, regardless of race or creed, were too arrogant for such humility. The young and good-looking ones especially so.
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