Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  “And my orange socks,” he added.

  “It’s nice to dress up for a date,” I said.

  “We have a Russian expression: It’s a stick that has two ends.”

  “In America, we say it’s a double-edged sword.”

  “The Russian expression is better.”

  The kettle whistled, and Cosmo did nothing.

  “She was really smart, Davinah,” he said. “Really well spoken. She talks a mile a minute. I like that.” Cosmo’s type.

  “She sounds pretty great, actually. Especially considering what you put her through. Maybe you should give her a chance?”

  “She wasn’t well educated, though. That bothers me.”

  “But that’s not her fault. You’re never going to find a Hasidic girl in Crown Heights who’s ‘well educated.’ What matters is that she’s smart, right?”

  He was suddenly fully absorbed in the making of tea.

  NOT THAT I was really one to talk. I was dating occasionally, which is to say facing down the prospect of dying alone several nights a week over artisanal pizza and “How about a bottle of…the Pinot Noir?” The prospect of dating for the first time in years was exciting and exhausting in equal measure. Generally speaking, I like dates. I especially like the awkward parts, the nerves, the special strangeness of a first meeting, accidentally kissing someone on the ear instead of the cheek. I like losing my balance on unfamiliar pavement in high heels, and the rush of uncertainty before I recover, when I almost stumble or sometimes do stumble, and it’s still okay. I like anything strange for the momentary rush of it, for the little pinpricks on your skin that let you know you’re alive.

  But mostly I went on these dates because of a lack of imagination, a gravitational pull back to my old dreamed-of life. I’d taken this weird, dreary detour to Crown Heights. But in a way that’s the whole point of a life lived in deferment. You suffer a setback, and as quickly as possible, you get up, you dust yourself off and you begin clawing your way back toward the original distant, unreachable goal. Man, apartment, job, Manhattan—the whole movie, nothing left out. The girl I had spent my whole life wanting to be wanted that, and so the girl I was pursued it, even though all these dates left me pretty much cold. There were things I needed in this initial period—mostly I sought, and got, reassurance that I was “pretty enough”—but beyond that, I was a closed system, untouchable in every way but the most superficial. Every night, I’d put on these show-stopping outfits, and I’d look in the mirror and think, “Fine.”

  I went out with Isaac, the model from Salt Lake City. I went out with Ben the filmmaker, who once wrote an entire scene in a major motion picture about his own penis. I went out with John, an attorney. I went out with Frank, who loved monsters. Frank and I shared a bottle of Pinot Noir in his bachelor pad, with its parquet floors and dearth of furniture or paper products. I barely took a sip. A few hours later, while Frank was still sleeping, the depth of unfeeling in my gut suddenly took on its own sense of urgency. I made a break for the door, knocking over my full glass of wine, sending it shattering to the ground. In the absence of paper towels and with a mortal fear of turning on the lights, I grabbed the lone sponge in the sink and did my best to sop up the mess before racing out without leaving a note.

  “Did you kill someone on your way out this morning?” Frank e-mailed to ask.

  “I’m worried about what this looks like ten years from now,” my colleague Jacob said when I arrived at work seemingly splattered in blood.

  “This”—he waved a hand up and down, roughly in my direction—“does not go on forever.”

  “This” culminated in a trip to the symphony one winter night with my friend Steven and his girlfriend, plus two other couples. Steven arranged my blind date for the night far in advance. Unbeknownst to me, the setup was with a man named David, a bald, five-foot-tall film producer who happened to be dating my friend Frances. When I learned this, my one thought was: Of course. The universe does not send us signs. We are not in dialogue with the universe, but if we were, at this point I would have thrown a glass of water in its face and marched out.

  On the night of the symphony, David bailed, and I was left to shuffle alone through Carnegie Hall in my highest heels, surrounded by happy couples holding hands. As I dragged myself to my seat, I passed Steven and rolled my eyes. “Please kill me,” I whispered. He took my elbow and pulled me into a row of orchestra seats.

  “You journalists, all you do is wait for things to happen, and then when they do, you just want to run and hide.”

  Steven is in public relations.

  “This is a nightmare,” I said.

  “So what,” he said. “Lean into it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Lean into it.”

  Lean into it. What the hell kind of advice is that? It’s easy to say if you’re a happy, wealthy, forty-year-old public relations bigwig with a gorgeous, talented girlfriend who is about to become your fiancée. It’s a lot easier to lean into a charmed life in a four-story brownstone on the Upper West Side than it is to lean into an hour and a half of Mahler’s Second when you are hopelessly alone in the world, when your night will end with an hour-long solitary subway ride and twenty minutes rapping to yourself in the pouring rain while pit bulls bark at you from a dented van. Leaning into that is like leaning into a fist.

  “Lean into it,” he said, and I rolled my eyes again and walked past.

  I sunk down in my seat and surveyed Carnegie Hall, which was drafty. Old people up way past their bedtimes doddered to and fro. In the movie version of my life, the man of my dreams would have been sitting somewhere in that auditorium at that moment. And just when I was feeling lowest, when I was lost and hopeless and alone, he would catch my eye and smile. He would pull me close just by looking at me, and for the first time ever, my smooth tall cylinder with no parts for joining would melt and soften into him. We wouldn’t even have to talk, maybe. He would have kind eyes and a big soul and I would know instantly that he was mine. The train would slow to a halt on its tracks. Time would curl in around us. Everything else would slip away.

  Why can’t life just be like a movie sometimes? Why can’t the prince come and carry us off to happily ever after—even just once?

  I sat stiffly for an hour and twenty minutes, while the conductor led his symphony through Mahler’s Second, which is also called “Resurrection.” After that I went to dinner with friends at a restaurant on the Bowery and picked up our waiter, leaving him my business card with the check. He texted the next week to see if I wanted to go out, but I was leaning into a shabbas dinner by then and never bothered to reply.

  The Outer Reaches of the Universe

  In his short story “Monte Sant’Angelo,” Arthur Miller describes the whole of Jewish history as “packing bundles and getting away.” If you’re a Jew in New York in the media business, and this ancient stirring rises up within you, by far the easiest place to go is Los Angeles. It’s like New York, only worse and with more cars.

  It wasn’t until I boarded a seven a.m. flight to Los Angeles on the last day of the month that I realized I’d completely missed my five-year anniversary in New York, the point at which, according to the inviolable gospel of Candace Bushnell, I officially became a New Yorker. It was a milestone I’d eagerly anticipated since childhood, since long before I first landed in town, all saucer eyed and chubby. I swallowed a sliver of Ambien on the plane and thought back to how I’d inadvertently celebrated my anniversary: dancing at a subterranean nightclub with some model friends and the trust fund artist who paid for their drugs.

  California beckoned, and the Ambien started to kick in. I drifted off to the opening scenes of Inglourious Basterds, soothed by the slaughter of Nazis. I woke on the West Coast, a new promised land. It was a whole sixty degrees outside, and while the plane taxied, I worked through the logistics of a cross-country move. How long does it take to become a Californian?

  The trip was only five days. I was meeting my friend Lucy th
ere, and we were staying at a borrowed mansion in the Hollywood Hills, the barely used property of her family friends, a prominent entertainment industry couple. The house was on Hollywood Boulevard, atop a long driveway so steep we sang to our rental car as we floored it up the slope: “Go, go, Volvo, go!” I slept in the master bedroom, in a bed that may as well have been a cloud, with white Italian cotton sheets and a skylight that spanned almost the entire ceiling. A large Jacuzzi jutted out from the eastern side of the two-story home, and every morning I sat naked in the tub, watching the low pink sun rise over downtown LA. There were Emmys everywhere, on virtually every surface. And Writers Guild awards and Screen Actors Guild awards and books lovingly autographed by old, dear friends, like T. Coraghessan Boyle. Angelina, the housekeeper, came every other day, even though the actual owners of the place hadn’t been home for months.

  Los Angeles has always felt to me like a giant studio lot and all the people there merely extras, happy to make union rates to stroll around in the background of one another’s lives. Crawling through traffic in someone else’s car, sleeping like death in someone else’s bed, visiting places I have mostly seen before on-screen—it feels more like scratching a path through celluloid than moving around in a three-dimensional world. Mulholland Drive was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s before it was David Hockney’s before it was Jack Nicholson’s (and by extension Roman Polanski’s and thirteen-year-old Samantha Geimer’s) before it was David Lynch’s before it was mine. On my first day in town, I wound my way up Mulholland to visit a screenwriter friend beside her pool, where we ate pudding cups and drank champagne from a sixty-four-ounce bottle of Cristal she’d received as a gift from a producer. She had just completed three days of rewrites on a film called Hot Tub Time Machine. This is life in Los Angeles, or a certain kind of life at least: writing and rewriting other people’s stories, then drinking from novelty bottles of champagne beside your enormous rented kidney-shaped pool.

  Lucy and I had come out for a few reasons. It was the Grammys, so there were parties. They were more or less the same parties you could get in New York; the biggest difference was that here, you had to drive to them. We were going to an opening at the Hammer Museum in Westwood of a renowned artist who drew doorknobs on graph paper using Bic pens and Wite-Out. We were going to spend a day in Malibu. We wanted to see the famous sculpture of Herakles at the Getty Villa, the one in which the Roman hero is depicted in full splendor, dangling a hard-won lion’s pelt at his side—the Platonic ideal of masculinity, save his missing penis, snapped off by vandals.

  We were also there to work. Lucy is a screenwriter and playwright, and she was interviewing for staff jobs on television shows. She has blond hair and big dancing blue eyes and is without question the most captivating person I know. She gestures wildly and feels deeply, and the way she pulls you into her bubble is to spin you up in a story of insanity or outrage, as if knitting you into a sweater. Lucy’s job is to tell stories but she could also lead armies if she wanted to, such is her gift for dramatic tension. She is also, not incidentally, an actor.

  I was reporting out of our Los Angeles bureau for a few days. The bureau, which we called Beast West, and which was less a bureau than six cubicles in a West Hollywood office building, was a magical coven of brilliance, run by a pin-thin South African woman named Gabé. Gabé had begun her career as Tina’s secretary at Tatler, following her to Vanity Fair and Talk. They were soul mates. Tina called Gabé “Gabs” and Gabé called Tina “Teen.” Gabé drinks white wine spritzers, wears this-season Marc Jacobs and, in a good mood, will tell stories from the set of Zoolander, which she helped make. Mother only to a rescue dog named Snoopy (female), she became mother to all of us, in a fashion, sending me sweaters in the mail and giving life advice. We had traveled to Doha together, and the night of my breakup, she was the one I’d called. When, months later, I was still sulking around the office, my dyed-brown hair shoved under a knit cap, Tina suggested I move to Los Angeles to get a change of scenery. I asked to stay in New York and she said I could, “provided you go blond again.”

  I did not go blond again, but I did go to LA. Gabé took me for drinks at Bar Marmont. A year later, once the Beast had merged with Newsweek magazine, we would spend a lot more time together, once memorably raising Princess Diana from the dead for a story that ran when the late princess would have been fifty years old. We spent a week then trapped in a kind of séance, imagining what Diana would have worn, who she would have slept with, what kinds of things she might tweet about were she still alive. Without an ounce of makeup on her face and a social calendar scheduled entirely around piano lessons, Gabé was the most glamorous woman on the planet. She made outfitting a dead princess seem like a terribly chic and sensible thing to do. Her restorative abilities were miraculous; it was enough just to be in a room with her.

  One of LA’s very few virtues is that it’s a breeding ground for strange things. This makes it a marvelous place to visit and a terrible place to live because chances are, if you stay more than a week, you’ll end up in some sort of cult. I had come to Los Angeles mostly because I had learned of an up-and-coming faith healer who specialized in treating bankers, actors and professional athletes—people who seemingly had everything but still weren’t happy. His clients included anyone who could pay the $300 to $500 he charged for an hour-and-a-half session, conducted in the converted garage behind his Santa Monica home. I’d heard his method involved choking his clients until they nearly lost consciousness and then pounding their chests while shouting about the subtle beauty of life. My appointment was for eight-thirty on Monday morning.

  I arrived at my faith healer’s home a full hour early and so went to have a coffee and peruse the bookshelf at the local Scientology reading room down the street. The wacko religious fringe is my favorite part of the West Coast, and any time I’ve gone, I always tried to make time for at least one trip to the far reaches of the universe. I spent my extra hour that morning drinking a drip coffee with soy milk and paging through Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard.

  The faith healer was lurking behind a wooden gate that led to his backyard when I pulled up, a few minutes before our scheduled meeting time. I could tell it was him because he was six foot five and had shoulder-length gray hair and unblinking ice-blue eyes: the physique of an athlete, the physical presence of a sociopath. “Hello, Rebecca,” he said in a deep, whisper-soft voice. Then he gave the heavy gate a tiny push so it creaked open, comically slowly. I expected a black cat to leap screaming out of the bushes and land, claws out, on my face. Instead, he calmly walked me down the short flagstone path and into his garage, where it was freezing from jacked-up air conditioning.

  “You’re cold,” he said knowingly, as if he had just telepathically hooked himself up to my nervous system. He passed me a plush brown blanket that appeared to have been made out of teddy bear pelts and asked me to sit down on the couch. I removed my sandals, plopped down cross-legged under the cover and surveyed the room. It was decorated in a style that might best be described as French Country Lunatic. Opposite the couch was a matching chair, in the same overstuffed shape and taupe fabric, as if they’d been bought as a pair at Jennifer Convertibles. Next to the chair, where he sat, was a life-size stuffed animal tiger—not a real tiger that had been prepared by a taxidermist but more like a Beanie Baby on steroids. Behind him was a wall covered top to bottom with a cornucopia of religious imagery: the Virgin Mary with delicate hands clasped around her glowing, anatomically correct heart, a Hubble-style rendering of the cosmos, Vishnu, Buddha, abstract pictures of Jesus and so on.

  “So tell me, Rebecca,” he said, “what brings you here today?”

  “Well,” I replied, “I wanted to write a profile of you for my day job, as a journalist, but your wife said you wouldn’t do an interview, you would only do a ‘session,’ so here I am.”

  He nodded as if I’d just confessed to crack addiction and then explained to me that journalism was an elaborate ruse, that my brain had tricked me into coming
to see him by telling me it was “work” because the truth was I needed him, and deep down my subconscious knew it.

  “Okay,” I said. He asked me to try my best to take this seriously. I said that I would and meant it.

  He asked me about my life. I ran him through the gamut. He listened politely, as if he’d just seen this episode and already knew how it would end. When I finally stopped talking, he put his fingertips together in a pose of contemplation and brought them to his lips. “Do you mind if I come and lay hands on you?” he asked.

  “Um,” I replied. “No?”

  He came over and sat down next to me on the couch, so close our thighs were touching. Placing one hand on my midback and the other on my collarbone, he explained that he was now going to remove a number of “energetic vampire energies” that were clinging to different parts of my body, like my lymph nodes and my heart. Here’s what had happened, he explained: There had been so much loneliness in my childhood that at some point very early in my life, around the age of two or three, I had simply done what any sad little girl would have: I froze my true essence in my lumbar spine. Releasing those vampire energies—a process that would involve a pretty simple breathing exercise that would cause me to convulse and hyperventilate—would help free that little girl and set me on the path to happiness and success, once and for all. Professional athletes and Wall Street titans flew their private jets into California for the privilege of these sessions, and when they emerged, they hit home runs and made billions. The same would happen to me. He would perform a host of smaller miracles as well: I would no longer be cold all the time. I would shed what he called my “little girl voice.” “When you get back to New York, you’ll notice yourself sounding more and more like a woman.”

  It all sounded good to me, except the part about hyperventilating to the brink of unconsciousness, but what the hell, it would be nice not to have to carry a sweater around all the time. He set about identifying my vampire energies and having me address them diplomatically, which he said would set them free. One energy, which he labeled “Daddy’s Little Girl,” was attached to my stomach and had something to do with anger I felt toward my father. He had me beg my independence from “Daddy’s Little Girl,” then lean forward and take three loud, deep breaths. While I exhaled, he threw me backward against the couch. My eyelids fluttered and my shoulders shook. This happened five more times, while he rid me of “Prom Queen,” “Girl Interrupted,” and the rest of my demons, all of whom were named after romantic comedies or nail polish colors at any New York salon. I began crying from the emotional and physical strain of the whole endeavor about halfway through, when he had me speak to the spirits of all the siblings I’d wanted but never gotten, who apparently had a stranglehold on my liver.