Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  One afternoon at work, I went online and searched for a studio somewhere downtown. Ashes to ashes, Craigslist to Craigslist. The first listing that appeared was for a tiny one-bedroom walk-up in Nolita, a small neighborhood encompassing the area just north of what used to be Little Italy. I wrote to the e-mail address in the ad, and the response came back immediately.

  “When can you come see the apartment?” it said. It was signed “Moses.”

  “Is your name really Moses?” I wrote back.

  “Yes. —Moses.”

  I reminded myself of certain immutable truths: The universe does not send us signs. We are not in dialogue with the universe. Jews run the real estate business in Manhattan, and if he weren’t Moses, he would have been Abraham or Isaac or Jacob—or Cosmo. If he had been Cosmo, it really would have shaken my lack of faith.

  We set up a time for me to see the apartment, and on the appointed day, it poured. I canceled, and when I tried to reschedule, Moses never wrote me back.

  On the third day of my apartment search, after several other missed connections in downtown Manhattan rental real estate, I looked in the New York Times. There was a studio on East 11th Street, reasonably priced, with a renovated kitchen and bath. I wrote to the real estate agent. He replied. Robert. Phew.

  I made an appointment to meet Robert during the two-hour window he was showing the apartment and arrived five minutes late. Robert was already on his way back to the office, but I called and begged him to come back. “Whatever it looks like, I’ll take it,” I said. It was roughly a thousand degrees outside, and I was tired of schlepping around in the heat. He led me upstairs to the tiny fifth-floor studio, with a pink bathtub, a built-in air conditioner and eggshell-colored walls. It was small and innocuous and not in any way metaphorical or evocative of biblical times, not in any way like my old West Village apartment, beset by plagues and ultimately drowned in a flood. This was just a plain old studio—my own little place, three subway stops or one short mile from where I started but an infinite distance in space and time from the life I once had lived.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  “You haven’t even seen the best part,” Robert replied. He beckoned me over to one of the studio’s two windows, which looked out over a fire escape. On the fire escape was a nest, and in the nest was a dove.

  COSMO TOOK THE NEWS of my leaving in stride. Then again, it’s hard to care about much of anything when you’re head over heels in love.

  They’d met at a barbecue in early June. She was tall, slim, with red hair; a shiksa. “She drinks, smokes, smokes pot,” he’d said the next day, while cartoon bluebirds fluttered above his head. They had gotten drunk in his friend’s backyard, swearing and speaking Russian all night. She had come as the date of another friend. She was some other guy’s girl. But she had huddled with Cosmo next to the grill and traded dirty jokes with him and gotten up occasionally to fetch him a beer. They had—yes, kissed.

  It was all happening so fast. He was drafting Tolstoyan e-mails, spending hours crafting Facebook messages he almost never actually sent, worrying about what they would do on their dates. She was waiting days before responding, dashing off clipped, ambiguous replies, promising to meet him places, then bailing at the last minute. For their second date, she invited him to dinner, and when he arrived, her entire extended family was there.

  “I’m not even sure it was a date,” he said breathlessly. “She barely spoke to me the whole night.”

  Love, it was love, love! Heartbreaking love, impossible love, terrific agonizing Russian love, the kind that makes you forget about food, about work, about anything but smoking and drinking and her for days. Vera was everything Cosmo had ever wanted in a woman: irreligious, boozy, aloof. This was not a nice Jewish girl who’d marry him and have his kids, this was the sort of woman who tempted you and teased you and drove you crazy for years on end until you couldn’t take it anymore—the uncertainty, the deception, the jealous rage—and, in the throes of final desperation, just to make the pain stop, one night maybe you drank enough vodka to blind an army, then staggered through the streets crying her name, then screwed up the courage to throw yourself under an oncoming subway train. For the first full week of his infatuation, Cosmo didn’t once mention Vera’s boobs—it didn’t matter.

  What should he do? he asked over and over. Should he write or not write? Call or not call? Tell her exactly how he feels, lay it on the line, profess his love?

  “You should date other women,” I said.

  “I will never date another woman,” he said. He nodded his head vigorously up and down, a giddy smile slapped across his face.

  Cosmo turned thirty-one on a rainy, miserable day in July. He threw himself a small party at a beer garden near Crown Heights. Vera was nowhere to be found.

  “What does she do for a living?” I asked.

  “She buys death,” he said.

  “She what, huh?”

  “She buys the remainders of people’s life insurance policies, once they get tired of paying for them. They have a doctor who evaluates the people and determines how much longer they’re going to live, and if it’s not that long, they buy the person out of his policy and then collect once he kicks the bucket.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Sexy.”

  “I know.”

  Cosmo’s dream girl was the Grim Reaper. She occupied all his thoughts. He spent long hours hovered on the edge of the giant oak dining room table, feet propped on the windowsill, dragging off hand-rolled cigarettes, lighting his next one with his last. He was quoting War and Peace. There was no end to joyous misery.

  “I am falling apart at the seams,” he said, and the way he said it, it sounded like bragging.

  “Do you know, I’ve been walking right on the edge of the subway platform, right by where the train comes,” he said. “Even when it’s very busy and would be easy for me to fall in. It used to be I was afraid to do things like that, but not now for some reason.”

  The night I told him I was moving out was intolerably hot, well into the nineties. A family of rats the size of Pomeranians was running around in the cement courtyard below our kitchen window, but otherwise, all living creatures had retreated inside, underground, out of town—anywhere cooler. Instead of air-conditioning, our fourth-floor apartment had two small plastic window fans that pushed around damp, sweat-laden currents of air. This produced the opposite of a chill. The fans made the apartment seem even more swamplike and fetid by providing fresh reminders of heat, sending warm, slow gusts against the skin. The effect was like slapping a bruise. Cosmo, cooking dinner over two gas burners set to high, barely acknowledged my entrance. A half-smoked cigarette, trailing a full inch of ash, hung from a dead hand at his side.

  “Hey, Cosmo, I think I found a new place in the city.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said morosely. “Great.”

  “What’s up?” I said, wilting onto a kitchen chair.

  What was up? Nothing. It was all down, down. Vera hadn’t acknowledged his existence in more than a week. It was hot. He was miserable.

  Every time I saw Cosmo for the next week, he was even worse: gloomier, more depressed, increasingly resigned to his lot. The temperature hovered around 100 degrees, the humidity near 100 percent. A sticky glaze formed on your skin on the walk to the subway in the morning and stayed there all day, morphing into a kind of ashy coating once you spent enough time in air-conditioning. It was impossible to feel clean, impossible to breathe through your nose without gagging. I dreamed of swimming pools and woke to the sound, as always, of the couple next door screaming at each other in Yiddish.

  Then, on the worst, hottest, most unlivable afternoon of the whole summer, while I was at work, an e-mail came:

  HA!

  HA!

  guess what? i just got an e-mail from vera. guess how it starts? “my dear friend…” and then “where were you saturday night, what are you up to, and bla-bla-bla”

  it might be too early to tell, but preliminary rep
orts indicate that i might be singing and dancing.

  We met up for dinner in the East Village the day after I moved out. I picked the restaurant, an organic, fair-trade, locavore café half a block from my new apartment, the sort of place that serves five-dollar mini-plates of braised Brussels sprouts handpicked by legal immigrants at a family farm upstate. We arranged to meet at eight. I arrived early and sat outside. He arrived early and sat at the bar. It took us twenty minutes to find each other, and by the time we did, I was on the verge of collapse. A stomach bug had descended that afternoon. As with our first dinner, I had no energy and no appetite.

  I was sitting on a refurbished white shabby-chic wood bench, sinking ever closer to the pavement, when Cosmo appeared above me.

  “Hi,” he said. “This place is no good.”

  My body was now in open revolt, and I would have canceled earlier in the day, but Cosmo was skipping jujitsu for this, and by the time the nondescript ooky feeling in my gut graduated to a full-blown GI assault, it was too late to back out.

  Hipsters swarmed around us—boys in corduroy cutoffs with ironic calf tattoos; girls in sundresses with wide stripes of fake blond sun streaks in their hair—ticking down their forty-five-minute waits, tracing circles in each other’s palms. The August heat was breaking, and we were just on the verge of perfect weather in New York. It was still a few degrees too hot, though, still cloying and muggy. A light fog of city stench rose upward from a nearby sewer grate, mingling with the smell of freshly grilled sweet corn on the cob and fried country potatoes steaming out of the kitchen vent, down onto the sidewalk.

  Cosmo clarified his request: “Is there anywhere around here that makes a good burger?”

  We walked off toward First Avenue, where, one by one, Cosmo deemed a strip of restaurants either too crowded or too fancy or not in possession of the right kinds of beer. He stopped and pointed enthusiastically at a halal food truck on the corner opposite the Islamic Council of America. “Absolutely not,” I said, gripping my stomach. In the neon glow of a skate shop, he took note of the greenish pallor of my skin.

  “We have an expression in Russian,” he said. “You’ve been hugging the white friend.”

  On the edge of Tompkins Square Park was a nearly empty French restaurant called Flea Market Café, with a twelve-dollar burger on the menu and a passable array of beers. One enormous gay man with a thick neck ringed in tribal tattoos was trading blow-job stories, sotto voce, with a gal pal by the window. To their right were two petite French women, running forks idly through a crème brûlée. It was one of their birthdays, and the blown-out candle still stood in the middle of the dessert. I pointed to the table to the left of the BJ duet.

  “We’re eating here.”

  Cosmo nodded and squeezed in next to the muscle-bound hunk, while I slumped down beside his friend and asked the waiter for a ginger ale. Cosmo handed me a pay stub and a letter from Social Security, both of which had arrived in the mail for me that morning. Then he pulled Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus out of his bag and offered it reluctantly. It was the last book he’d borrowed. He found the writing “dry and difficult,” which is the morose Russian rabbi equivalent of a teenage girl finding something “cute.” He had spent the previous two weekends camped out, reading it, in Central Park but wasn’t done yet.

  Doctor Faustus, like any Faust story, is about a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for some earthly gift. In Mann’s version, the protagonist, a composer, gives it up for music. His immortal life buys him temporary access to divine inspiration, allowing him to write melodies wholly unlike any written before. I read the book in college, in tandem with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and spent many hours, with and without the assistance of marijuana, barely understanding a word. The paper that resulted was a triumph of footnoting, with most of its insights dug out of long-neglected secondary works gathering dust in the Yale library. I read Doctor Faustus again after graduation, and without the pressure of “bringing language as language to language,” in Heidegger’s words, I actually liked it. It’s a cautionary tale against extremism, against junking all established forms and starting over from scratch. On one level, it’s a nice book about why we should all be afraid of Nazis. On another level, it’s an argument against disengagement, against all those who stood around and allowed this idiot to sell his soul, setting off a chain reaction that (spoiler alert!) hurt everyone in the end. It’s an indictment of those who go unquestioningly through life. It’s an argument in favor of fucking with God.

  After War and Peace, Cosmo had asked for another book, and I gave him the choice between that and Valley of the Dolls.

  We studied the menu a minute in silence while our neighbors discussed ball-cupping technique. The waiter came to take our order. I had the wheat toast with avocado chunks, lemon juice and hot pepper flakes, minus the hot pepper flakes, plus water with no ice. Cosmo had a burger and a beer.

  “How do you want the burger cooked?” the waiter asked, staring out the front door and fingering the full fringe of silver loops that lined the outside of his right ear.

  Cosmo stared at me with big, unsure eyes.

  “Medium,” I said.

  “What kind of beer?”

  Cosmo scanned the menu and found nothing he liked, so he ordered the one he didn’t recognize: a pale German wheat beer, the kind bars serve with a ladylike sliver of lemon on the lip of the glass. I suggested maybe something darker, and he nodded in agreement. This was dinner. It arrived suspiciously quickly, as if someone had preordered. Before taking a bite, Cosmo picked up the salt and set to work. He shook out a layer thick enough to maintain its whiteness even after being absorbed into the burger grease on both sides of the half-pound patty, plus a solid dousing of salad and fries.

  “Oh God, you motherless boy,” I said. “Promise me you’ll eat the greens.”

  “I promise.”

  “I worry.”

  “Remember when you yelled at me about the bacon?” He took the biggest possible bite of the burger, stretching his jaws to their absolute limit, then chewed. “I will never make that mistake again.”

  “Remember we cooked pasta my first night?”

  “If I never eat pasta again, it will be too soon,” he said.

  “I taught you about al dente.”

  “And it has been that way ever since.” Seven minutes. He sets a timer.

  He told me about Vera, who was having Lasik surgery this week. He told me he had decided to suspend training for his motorcycle license. In four to eight months, his papers would come through and maybe he’d pick it up again then.

  “My old friend the heroin addict across the hall has been kicked out,” he said.

  “For not paying his rent?”

  “Yes, if you can imagine. He came to the copy shop today, and my boss bought him lunch, and I saw him after, and I said, ‘Chaim, why heroin? Why not alcohol? They’re both depressants. Why not get drunk on twenty or thirty dollars a day instead of getting high on sixty or seventy?’ And he said, ‘Alcohol destroys your liver, man.’”

  The check arrived, I paid, we left. Invigorated by the avocado and toast, I led Cosmo to a dessert place around the block. He shuffled down the street in agony.

  “Dude,” I said, “this is very exciting. You’re in love.”

  “Is it!”

  “Look: You’re even more miserable than usual. You’ve been dragging yourself around like death for weeks. I think she might be the one.”

  “Fuck,” he said, then paused for a minute to think. “Motherfucker! You may be right.”

  It was nine-thirty. We walked in silence through the hazy evening, no one noticing as we passed. In Manhattan, under the streetlamp glare, under the starless sky, Cosmo and I were invisible. He wore a bluish-gray Uniqlo T-shirt and jeans, dark glasses, his hair cut short, and his beard shorn down to a punk-rock nub. I wore jeans, a shirt.

  “I think I’m giving up on Hollywood,” he said.

  “Why?”

&nbs
p; “I just saw this movie with John Travolta, From Paris with Love. It was terrible.” The movie was about an American spy who teams up with a young Parisian to prevent a terrorist attack. Its tagline was “Two agents. One city. No merci.” Cosmo had downloaded it on the Internet and watched it one night in his bedroom.

  “I’m not sure you should give up on all American movies just because of one bad John Travolta action flick.”

  “Even still.”

  “What will you watch, then?”

  “Foreign films.”

  “This from the guy who can recite every word of Top Chef season six.”

  Cosmo and I continued to meet every few months for cheeseburgers and dessert. A few weeks after I moved out, he found a new roommate to replace me, a Mexican lesbian, and eventually had to evict her because she stopped paying her rent and brought two other Mexican lesbians in to live on the couch. He kept plugging along at Fast Trak while the final paperwork for his green card went through. He was still doing jujitsu. He was still trying to get me to do jujitsu.

  “I think my phase of falling apart is coming to a close,” he said that summer night in the East Village, while we waited in line at the vegan bakery for some nondairy ice cream and a green tea macaroon.

  “Baruch Hashem,” I said. “Why’s that?”

  “I’ve started to realize that the reason I can’t find answers to the questions that bug me—about the meaning of life, about love and such and such—is not because the answers are not there, but because the questions aren’t. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is not a question that objectively exists. Same goes for love, same goes for women.”

  “You mean, instead of thinking in big ways about things, it’s better to think in small ways?” I asked. “What you want for now, instead of what you want to be forever.”

  “That was exactly the problem,” he said. “What do you call this—‘thing of wisdom’?”