by Rebecca Dana
Before I could, the impeccably dressed women at the wedding grabbed my hands and pulled me into a large circle dancing around the bride. I danced next to Danya, a student from Berkeley and, of all the students at Yeshivacation, the one closest to my age and disposition. She wore jeans and some sort of knee-length hippie apron. Chana, the bride, was dressed head to toe in white lace. A high white fence separated her from Yitzhak, her new husband, and also kept the enormous men’s and women’s gatherings distinct. The marriage had taken place at 770 earlier in the day, and the party was in a giant event space across the street, which hosted around five Hasidic weddings a week. As the Yeshivacation girls filed past the men’s area, I peeked through the door and, for as long as they let me, watched the dense mass of formally dressed Hasids, wearing black top hats and black suits, dancing in a circle, hoisting the groom and his father and uncles up in chairs. A Hasidic band played onstage. A long cord traced along the back of the room and connected to one large speaker in the women’s section, which blasted the same music to a much different scene.
As the night went on, and we just kept spinning in circles, I began to forget how inappropriately I was dressed, forget even what a weird old biddy I was to everyone there. I locked arms with Danya and a middle-aged married Hasidic woman next to me, wearing a lavender dress and a smooth brown wig. We kicked our legs and twisted side to side while the band on the men’s section pumped out chorus after chorus of Jewish wedding music. Chana, the young bride, red-faced and beaming, stood in the middle, turning small circles of her own. Her hair—it looked like it was still her own, not yet shorn or covered by a scarf—fell in long brown ringlets, which bounced as she danced. Her makeup was perfect, and her eyes were full of happy tears. Periodically, on some prompting—I couldn’t tell what—all the women, arms linked, rushed in on her, closing ranks, cinching tight, and she waved her hands like a beauty queen.
Hasidic Jews believe a woman is closer to God on her wedding day. She has special prayers she gets to say and these get more traction with the Divine. At one point, Chana reached out and grabbed me from the circle. I had no idea what was happening and dug in my heels, shaking my head, urging her to find someone else, but she insisted. She held my hands in hers and we twirled around, just the two of us, while she spoke a prayer in Hebrew. I searched my body for any feeling of holiness, for anything at all. My thoughts immediately skipped forward a few hours, to the room where Chana and her betrothed would spend their first night together—almost certainly the first time either would touch the bare flesh of a member of the opposite sex. As she whispered in Hebrew, I looked at her closed eyes. She opened her eyes, smiled peacefully and let go of my hands as the circle of women closed around her.
Could this possibly be happiness?
A Stick with Two Ends
Hasidim do not date as the rest of us do, going out to dinner, telling the same three or four well-polished stories designed to emphasize our charm and humor, and then going back to someone’s apartment and groping each other in the dark. Hasidim date aggressively, with intent to marry, like darling Chana, who as I write this is probably already a mother of two. Marriages like hers occurred all the time in my neighborhood, and they were broadcast in red on a scrolling neon sign posted above the House of Glatt. Cosmo was a learned scholar and therefore a catch. Although he had decided he wasn’t Jewish anymore, he hadn’t told anyone, so members of the community continued to try to find him a match. Occasionally Hadassah Goldfarb would foist him on some poor Hasidische soul, even though he tried to beg off. But because Hadassah was such a great cook, he’d oblige.
During my first week living in the apartment, Cosmo went out on a date with a twenty-three-year-old Lubavitcher woman named Varda. He’d dreaded it from the start, and she’d confirmed his worst expectations. She was young and naïve. He took her to Park Slope, to a fancy coffee shop, and she asked him questions like, “Is Vienna in Austria or is Austria in Vienna?” She was timid and withdrawn. “In these modern times, a woman needs to have a projecting manner,” he told me as we sat in the living room after the fact.
“Oh, but she’s just a kid,” I said.
“In my world, people at twenty-three are real people,” he replied.
“Was she pretty at least? What did she look like?”
“Do you know Kelsey Grammer?”
I did know Kelsey Grammer, actually. I’d recently spent some time with the television actor and his blond, buxom, soon-to-be ex-wife at their sprawling Bridgehampton estate for a magazine story I’d written. I told Cosmo about this. “You could be from Mars for that price!” he howled. Grammer was one of his favorite actors. He made me describe the house in painstaking detail: the size of the swimming pool out back, the dimensions and contents of the library, the texture of the zebra pelt the Grammers use as a rug in their solarium, what a solarium was. Poor Varda had reminded Cosmo of the Frasier actor because of her gap-toothed smile. She was doomed.
“There have been only two women I’ve ever really loved,” Cosmo said. “One was married. She turned out to be less than I thought. Let’s just say our attraction was purely physical.”
The other was Odette.
“There is a kind of love where everything is just—it’s right,” he said. “You love and are loved in return. And that was her.”
He met Odette while he was training to be a rabbi in South Africa. At the synagogue there, he taught a class in Tanya, the central Lubavitch text, and Odette’s mother was one of his students.
“What did Odette look like?” I asked.
“She was a big girl. There was something about her…the cleavage.”
He paused for laughter.
“She was smart, well educated, a big talker—blah, blah, blah. I love that. We dated for a month. She dumped me. I felt miserable, and I talked her into dating me again for another month.”
It didn’t work out. Before long, rabbinical school ended and he was back in the United States. Odette went on to marry some other guy.
Falling in love accounted for about 24 percent of Cosmo’s 25 percent chance at a radically different life. My escapist dreams tended more toward the geographical, but wherever I went in my head, I took for granted that there would be a rugged stranger, possibly foreign, an excellent dancer who admired my eyes. Love, like religion or low-carb dieting, is an easy fix-all fantasy, the most alluring because it really can be true. There is nothing better than loving someone, not even being loved back. Love makes you forget about your pointless job or the fact that you’re just now tipping over from the glory years of “tremendous potential” into the long slow era of squandering it. Love obliterates productivity; it turns virtue to vice. It can make even the simplest, stupidest interactions seem bottomless in their profundity. When I’m in love, I can spend what seem at the time to be extremely productive hours reading and rereading a single e-mail.
Someone once told me that every time you relive a memory you change it in small but irrevocable ways. So the more times you flash back to that one thing he said or that time you took a long drive on a spring afternoon when the forsythia was just blooming, the more the moment evolves in your mind. To me, this is the sweet magic of love, that no time is static, nothing is fixed. It doesn’t begin in one place and go from there. Instead the whole sprawling mess of it shifts and changes over time, so the story of the forsythia writes and rewrites itself over and over, as does every moment before and after, smoothing and refining itself in a larger context, shading and coloring all the little corners of memory until your whole life is something softer: a photocopy of a photocopy of the original. First we write love stories, then they write us.
Love turns a lonely childhood into a series of small heartbreaks, little pops on violin strings that led me to you. Love turns a meandering career marked by strange detours and failures of ambition into a beeline straight into your arms. After losing his wife, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister longs to “immobilize” millions of moments in their life
together, as if pulling the emergency brake on a train. What else would you cling to when you’re stuck at a photocopy shop, or stuck wherever, but the promise of love? Not just to reset your life going forward but also to reach back in time, grab your childhood self by one little hand and say, “See, you’re okay.”
It is hard for me to mark the spot where hope bleeds into faith, but for Cosmo and me, in the winter of our discontent, love was not just something we wanted but something we believed in. In our own ways, we each felt we needed this thing that was invisible and intangible and seemingly impossible, and we needed it so much—we felt it was so central to our plans for self-redemption—that we had no choice but to have faith it would come. The love Cosmo wanted was a girlfriend, preferably a shiksa with a nice rack. The love I wanted was different, and not just because it didn’t have tits. Exactly how it was different was hard for me to grasp exactly, like trying to hold a fistful of sand. It had something to do with Yitzhak and Emily Blunt, and something to do with Harold Bloom, and something to do with Chana on her wedding day. What I wanted to do was to draw a circle around people and call them “home.”
IN THE FIRST WEEK of the New Year, Hadassah set Cosmo up on a shidduch date with a very sweet twenty-five-year-old Lubavitcher woman named Davinah, eligible in every way but unmarried, perhaps on account of a gender imbalance that was unsettling the foundations of domestic life in the Lubavitch community. Secular America was deep in the throes of its own marriage crisis during this period, as young women for the first time in history were out-enrolling men in college and out-earning them in the workforce. “All the Single Ladies,” an Atlantic magazine cover story, delved into the broad consequences of a dwindling population of quality men. In the Lubavitch community, different as it was, the situation was much the same. Marriage rates were falling, dating customs were changing and the number of educated single women in their twenties was ticking up, up, up. Out in the secular world, the marriage rate among members of my generation was around 22 percent, down 7 percentage points from a decade earlier, according to a Pew survey that incited a frenzy. In Crown Heights, the reaction was no less dire, though the numbers were slightly different. A 2009 survey of 5,319 female high school graduates, all between the ages of 24 and 29, found that 735 remained unmarried—“a tragic 14 percent,” according to the authors of the survey, called the NASI project. “I just feel there are more ‘better’ girls than ‘better’ boys,” a matchmaker named Raizy Edelman told Shmais, a Crown Heights community newspaper, as part of their special investigation into the neighborhood’s “shidduch crisis.” Many attributed the problem to a growing population. Because the Lubavitch community procreates at such a rapid clip, its numbers increase dramatically year to year. That means there are considerably more eighteen-year-olds, both male and female, this year than there were, say, five years ago. The problem for women like Davinah, according to this theory, is that her male peers are choosing to marry younger women. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were older men for her to date and marry, but they were all taken. Or mostly taken. There was still Cosmo.
Davinah was an accountant from California. Kind, pretty, frum—the gamut. By all accounts, she was an extremely eligible candidate to become Mrs. Cosmo, mother of eight or nine ginger-haired babes. They made a date to meet one evening at a coffee shop in Park Slope.
“It was doomed from the start,” Cosmo said the following night.
“Were you nervous?”
“I don’t get stage fright.”
“What happened?”
“What happened? I charmed the hell out of her.”
Here’s what happened: Cosmo had arrived at the coffee shop to find lovely, devout Davinah, in modest dress, patiently awaiting him. She had been told she was going out with a brilliant, charismatic, thirty-year-old rabbi—a scholar, a mensch. In fact, she had been set up with a shabbas-flouting heretic: a rebel, an agnostic, a former pillar of his community who was in the process of having the Yid knocked out of him by jujitsu and the promise of citizenship. He was Adam minutes after the apple. After engaging her in a heated two-hour debate about religion, he tore off his yarmulke and told her there is no God.
“I think the problems started when I ordered half-and-half in my coffee.”
“I…don’t think so.”
After that they went to a bookstore. Hasidim are supposed to steer clear of secular culture. They are not supposed to read non-Jewish books, see non-Jewish movies or page through the collected poems of W. H. Auden in the back corner of a Barnes & Noble. For a Lubavitcher woman wandering around a giant Western media emporium, cold, hard facts were the safest bet, so Davinah delicately made her way to the history section.
“She wanted to read books about the American Revolution,” Cosmo said, slumping his shoulders and hanging his head. “She likes people in uniform: Grant, Washington. Meanwhile my eyes were like this big”—he stretched his hands wide. “I went straight for Auden, then Dante.”
Cosmo sat on the floor, reading Dante’s Inferno, while Davinah hovered in the periphery. She was terrified. She was turned on. He barely noticed.
“I can’t shake the feeling that this girl who worked in the bookstore was flirting with me,” he said, “which is completely inappropriate.”
The next morning Davinah sent him a text message apologizing for being “really judgmental sounding” and expressing hope that “you do find G-d.” She didn’t want to see him again, she said, and the reason was “you are the kind of guy a girl slowly falls in love with.” She signed off adorably, “I hope I don’t sound like an idiot. ;)”
“Maybe she just likes bad boys,” he said.
The night after his date, Cosmo came as my guest to a film premiere at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle, opposite the southwest corner of Central Park. The movie starred Claire Danes as an autistic cattle whisperer, whose specialty was designing slaughterhouses. Cosmo missed the screening of the film because he couldn’t get out of work in time, but he made it for the dinner party afterward, held at a swanky Italian restaurant downstairs.
The Time Warner Center is the glass slipper of shopping malls, encased in crystal, with sweeping views of the park. During the day, you can stand in the back window of the J.Crew store and look out over the treetops to tourists in horse-drawn carriages and taxicabs shuttling harried businesspeople to and from their usual three-course lunches. Outside the enormous semicircular entry, it smells like Manhattan concentrate: a combination of gasoline, soot, perfume, hot dogs, sewer wafts and horse manure. Inside, it smells like new cashmere sweaters, floor wax, Italian leather shoes still in their boxes, buttery croissants from the bakery on the third floor. There are restaurants in the mall that serve five-hundred-dollar sushi lunches, stores that sell three-thousand-dollar diamond pavé evening bags and a hotel that hoists you forty stories up into some of the most expensive air in the world. In any of these places, including the J.Crew, which sells the same clothes for the same prices as every other J.Crew in America, you can press your forehead against a window and fog up a patch of the New York skyline. For the rich, who never have to come down, Manhattan is a collection of floating worlds like this, a big crystal jungle gym suspended in the clouds. Even before September 11, it was hard for me to look at these buildings without feeling a desperate urge to ride to the top and without also imagining them shattering to the ground. The Time Warner Center is what Zeus would step on if he ever married a Jewish girl.
That night’s party, like most parties in New York, was thrown by a miniature ageless doyenne named Peggy Siegal. Peggy was an institution in the city, a party planner for the glamorous and well-heeled. She wore doll-size Chanel suits, ballet flats, and an assortment of perfectly smooth, perfectly coiffed wigs. On the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, she published online a complete list of all her doctors, including the plastic surgeon who “gave [her] a new neck.” Her parties were lavish affairs, filled with celebrities, socialites and a small collection of preapproved journalists, inv
ited only for our ability to enhance any of the other attendees’—although preferably the host’s—public profile, bank accounts and fame. Peggy always smiled ecstatically when I arrived at her events. After years of inviting me to her parties, she seemed to have no idea of my name.
Dinner that evening was rigatoni followed by half a roast chicken, carrots and mashed potatoes, with piled-high communal plates of buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto to start and chocolate truffles, cake and ice cream for dessert. Cosmo, dressed in his best suit, arrived early and wandered around the mall, passing time until the screening wrapped up. I met him at the door to the restaurant, handed him his ticket and led him right to the bar for a vodka shot to calm his nerves. I persuaded him to tell the story of his date with Davinah and for fifteen minutes he held a crowd of agents and film executives captive. He finished the story with a flourish, took his seat at a table opposite half the cast of The Sopranos and demolished an entire plate of prosciutto.
“Next time I’m not dressing up for a date,” he said when we got back to Brooklyn that night, still discussing poor Davinah. It was around one in the morning, and we both sat in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil.
“What did you wear?”
Cosmo sighed, blowing a lungful of cigarette smoke out the window.
“My colorful pants.”
I imagined Cosmo strutting through Park Slope in his amazing Technicolor dream pants. I had never seen this particular garment before but somehow the image made sense: Cosmo in Skittles trousers. Cosmo dressed up like the handicapped bathroom stall at the Daily Beast. Cosmo riding a rainbow straight to hell.