The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  “You know, for child support.”

  “Oh.” Audrey squeezed the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb.

  “She also has a lot of correspondence,” Daniel said. “Poems, cards…”

  “Poems!” Audrey spat. “See, now I know she’s full of shit. Joel never wrote a poem in his life.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Audrey.”

  “Why is she coming out with this now? What does she want?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. I think she wants to, you know, get things out in the open. And she’s mentioned that she’d like the child to have a relationship with his half-brother and sisters—”

  “Pfah!”

  “She needs money as well. Joel’s payments have stopped since he’s been in the hospital.”

  “Wait. She thinks she can come up with some cockamamie story about shtupping my husband and I’m going to pay her pocket money? Doesn’t she have a job?”

  “She’s an artist.”

  “Ohhh. An artist!”

  “Well, a photographer.”

  “Super.”

  “I think you have to take this seriously, Audrey. It’s not something you’d want to end up in court.”

  “Is she threatening that?”

  “No, no, she’s not threatening anything. But it’s the logical next step for her. She does have a legal right to support for the child.”

  “What does she say Joel was paying her?”

  “Uh, it varied, I think. But for the last two years, about twelve hundred a month.”

  Audrey squinted. Her math had never been very good. “What’s that a year?”

  “Fourteen thousand four hundred.”

  “Fourteen thousand?” Audrey was torn between rage at the significance of the sum and embarrassment at its inadequacy. She turned back to the window. The man across the way had wrapped a towel around his waist and was examining his face in the mirror above his sink. For years to come, she thought, her memory of this conversation would be bound to an image of pink flesh and white terrycloth glimpsed through a fogged-up window.

  “If you give me the go-ahead,” Daniel said, “I’d be happy to try to work out a deal with her.”

  Audrey shook her head. “No, thanks.”

  “Audrey—”

  “If there are any deals to be made, I’ll make them, Daniel.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  She glanced at him. “I think you can go now.”

  “I’m sorry, Audrey. I know this must be—”

  She turned away. “Good-bye, Daniel.”

  For a long time after he had gone, Audrey remained at the table, absently tracing one of the jagged channels that Lenny had carved in its wooden surface with a pen. A part of her seemed to be hovering overhead, disinterestedly observing her reactions. You’re a bit dizzy. Are you going to cry? Doesn’t this feel unreal? She remembered now the amazement—the affront—she had felt years ago, when as a little girl out shopping with her mother, she had come upon her second-grade teacher, Miss Vale, buying apples with her fiancé. Up until then, Audrey had tended, like most small children, to regard the world as a frozen parade of people and scenes that only came truly alive in her presence. It had never occurred to her that Miss Vale might have an independent civilian existence outside the classroom, complete with male companions and fruit preferences. The assault to her illusion of omniscience had been devastating. Reality, she had suddenly understood, was not a series of discrete tableaux staged solely for her benefit, but vast and chaotic and unmasterable. Even people she saw every day—even her family—contained worlds that she would never fully fathom.

  But she had forgotten that childhood lesson, it seemed. For forty years now, she had been confusing proximity with intimacy—believing that she had plumbed her husband’s mysteries—when all the while, she had been making love to his shadow. God knows, it wasn’t the infidelity that shocked her: she had always prided herself on her realism about that part of married life. The first time she had caught Joel cheating on her, they had been married less than four months. For a week, she had rent her garments and torn at her hair. And then, with solemn, nineteen-year-old munificence, having extracted all the appropriate promises about its never happening again, she had forgiven him. Six months later, a friend of Audrey’s had spotted Joel in Washington Square, holding hands with a girl from Students for a Democratic Society. And not long after that, Audrey had found a love note in his pants pocket—a patchouli-scented scrawl from a teenage folksinger called Spanish Wells. So it had gone on.

  There had been phases in their marriage when Joel had been faithful—at least she thought there had been—but these had never lasted very long. “It’s the great female mistake to take sex personally,” Joel had once told her. “Fucking is just a reflex, you know. Like scratching an itch.” Slowly, painfully, over the years, she had come to accept this rationale. It wasn’t that she had ever stopped minding about the affairs. She had always minded. But with considerable psychic effort, she had learned to put her unhappiness in perspective. What did it matter if a few little tarts got to boast about sleeping with Joel Litvinoff? Infidelity was short; married life was long. She was going to remain Joel’s wife and the mother of his children, long after all the tawdry, loveless fucking had been forgotten. From time to time, when a dalliance had seemed in danger of developing into something more serious, she had been forced to take discreet action—to call up the woman in question and warn her to stay away. (Joel, she sensed, was often grateful for these interventions.) Mostly, though, she had sat back and waited for the affairs to wither of their own accord.

  How pathetic it seemed now—how tragic—to have worked so hard, for so long, at making allowances and adjusting her expectations, only to discover at the eleventh hour that she had been a dupe, after all. That even Joel’s pip-squeak assistant had known more about her marriage than she did.

  She stood up suddenly and went to the kitchen drawer. After a moment or two of searching, she pulled out the family phone book and leafed through its grease-spotted, doodle-filled pages until she found Kate’s number.

  “It’s Audrey,” she said when Kate answered. “I’ve just had a visit from Daniel—”

  Kate’s voice was small and frightened. “I think I know why you’re calling, Audrey. I just want to say—”

  “No, no, I don’t want to hear what you have to say. I just want an answer to something. On the day that Joel had his stroke, did you phone that woman and tell her to go to the hospital?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the phone. “I didn’t tell her to go,” Kate said at last. “I just—you know—told her what was happening. I thought she had a right to know.”

  “That’s all,” Audrey said and hung up.

  Mechanically, she began to make a cup of tea. As she filled the kettle, her gaze lit on a row of glasses that Sylvia had left drying on the draining board. She put the kettle on the stove, and then slowly, in an almost experimental fashion, she encircled the glasses with her forearm and swept them onto the floor. She stood for a moment, inspecting the glittering mess she had made. Then she opened the cabinet and started taking out more glasses: tumblers, wineglasses, brandy snifters, liqueur cups. One by one she dashed them onto the linoleum. The destruction grew boring after a while, but having started on the project, she felt a dim sense of obligation to see it through. She delved into the back of the cupboard and retrieved the remaining breakables: three champagne flutes that Lenny had stolen from the Plaza Hotel. A Martini glass imprinted with the legend, “It’s Cocktail Time!” A Murano goblet that someone had given them for their twentieth wedding anniversary.

  When everything had been reduced to shards, she removed the singing kettle from the burner and crunched back to the kitchen table. She sat down and looked out of the window at the house opposite, searching for the shower man. But he was gone now, and the bathroom in which he had been standing was dark.

  PART

 
III

  CHAPTER

  9

  The Jewish Women’s Learning Center was located on the ground floor of a residential building on West End Avenue, in an apartment that had been bequeathed to the organization a decade earlier by a pious widow named Rivka Danziger. Almost no alteration had been made to the original layout and decor of the place since the old lady’s death: the kitchenette had its prewar faucets and tiles, the bathrooms had baths. The carpet of the former master bedroom, which now served as a seminar room, still bore four round marks where the posts of Mrs. Danziger’s double bed had once stood. It was into one of these blackened depressions that Rosa was absently poking the toe of her flip-flop one hot June evening as she listened to her instructor, Mrs. Greenberg, discuss the “poroh adumah” or “red heifer” commandment in that week’s Torah portion. According to the commandment, a perfectly red heifer was to be slaughtered and burned so that its ashes might be used in a purification ceremony for those who had come in contact with the dead. The paradox was that while the ashes purified those who had become contaminated, they also contaminated the people who performed the purification.

  “The commandments in the Torah are divided into three general categories,” Mrs. Greenberg was saying. “There are eidos—commandments that testify to past events, such as the observance of Shabbos and the High Holy Days. There are mishpatim—commandments that we understand instinctively, such as not stealing, not killing, and so on. And then there are the chukim—commandments that cannot be explained in logical terms, that defy human reason. The red heifer belongs in this category. King Solomon himself declared, ‘I have said I am wise but this matter is remote from me.’”

  Rosa had initially approached the center in a skeptical spirit, with the assumption that any instruction aimed specifically at women was bound to be a low-grade affair. She had pictured the parsha class as a sort of religious coffee klatch: a group of giggly women sitting around eating crumb cake while they discussed what God meant to them. But Torah study, she had discovered—even at this most elementary level—was a rigorous, challenging endeavor. There were no lighthearted digressions or jokes in Mrs. Greenberg’s class, and certainly no tolerance of idle personal opinion. Mrs. Greenberg began each week by outlining the general significance of the events described in the parsha and subsequently delivered a minute, sentence-by-sentence, phrase-by-phrase analysis of a particular section within it—referring, where appropriate, to the rabbinical commentaries. At the very end, she offered a brief interpretation of the text’s spiritual import.

  Rosa loved the methodical process of unwrapping the layers of meaning in the Torah. She loved the modesty that the process demanded. Above all, she loved the atmosphere of scholarly comradeship—of shared commitment to deciphering a complex, intricate text. It seemed to her that in excavating the wisdom of the rabbinical sages, she was discovering something distinctly Jewish about the way her mind worked.

  “Now the Torah specifies that the red heifer is ‘the decree of the Torah,’” Mrs. Greenberg went on. “Why is this? Why should this most mysterious of chukim—this commandment that baffled even King Solomon—be singled out thus? Because the red heifer represents the willing suspension of logic in deference to the divine will, and it is this humility before Hashem that is the central lesson, the very foundation, of Torah. When we truly follow in Hashem’s path, we do not demand explanations. We are motivated not by logic, but by our acceptance of the heavenly yoke.” Mrs. Greenberg laid her hands flat against the lectern. “That, I’m afraid, ladies, must be all for today. I hope to see you all next week.”

  The students began to disperse. Rosa put away her chumash and went out into the hall. One of the center’s volunteer workers, a pretty woman in a long denim skirt and a head-scarf, was standing on a chair, pinning a flyer to the notice board. “Hey!” she called out.

  Rosa waved. “Hi, Carol.”

  “How is your father? I’ve been praying for him.”

  “Oh, he’s pretty much the same…. Thanks, though.”

  Carol got down from her chair. “Good class?”

  “Great.”

  “I hear you are quite the scholar. Mrs. Greenberg was saying the other day that the angel must have touched you very lightly on the lip.”

  Rosa looked at her blankly.

  “The Talmud says that every child in his mother’s womb is taught the entire Torah by an angel. When it’s time to be born, another angel touches the baby on the lip, and all the knowledge is forgotten. So, if a person has a natural gift for Torah learning, we say the angel touched him lightly on the lip.”

  “Ah.” Rosa smiled uncertainly. Was Carol offering this as a charming bit of folklore, or did she really believe in angels paying in utero visits? It was hard to tell. Rosa liked Carol. She was intelligent and serious. But the intensity of her religious commitment made conversing with her a slightly exhausting business. Unlike most of the other young women at the center, Carol had been raised in a nonobservant family. As a teenager, she had been allowed to attend late-night parties and to date gentile boys, and even to dabble briefly in Wicca. It was only during her freshman year at Boston University, after she had fallen in with a group of Orthodox Union students on campus, that she had begun to wonder if there might be a God-shaped hole in her life. Over the course of many earnest late-night conversations with her OU friends, she had come to see that her parents’ lack of interest in shul was not, as she had supposed, a logical extension of their affable agnosticism, but a symptom of their Jewish self-hatred. She had also learned, with infinite sadness, that her brother, who had recently become engaged to a young Indian woman, was contributing to “the silent genocide of the Jewish nation.” Within three months, she had become a ba’alat teshuvah, a repentant Jew. Within six months, she had abandoned her anthropology major in order to study at a yeshiva in Jerusalem.

  Now, five years on, she was married with three kids and living in an Orthodox community in Washington Heights. She kept her hair covered in public. She did not carry keys or push a stroller on a Saturday unless she was within the boundaries of her community eruv. When she bought new clothes, she sent them to a special shatnez lab to make sure that they did not violate the biblical injunction against mixing wool with linen. And every time she defecated, she said a prayer, thanking God for creating her “ducts and openings.”

  The story of Carol’s transformation evoked complicated feelings in Rosa. It appalled her, of course. The idea of an educated, metropolitan woman voluntarily casting off every vestige of modernity in order to make herself over as a medieval ghetto-dweller was unconscionable—but it also inspired a sneaking envy. By submitting to the restraints of Orthodoxy, Carol had not only performed an impressive act of self-denial—an act guaranteed to appeal to Rosa’s ascetic sensibility—but also freed herself from the burden of trying to improvise her own moral code. These days, she always knew what the right thing to do was—or if she didn’t, she knew a rabbi who did. Every aspect of her daily life was consonant with her convictions. How did Rosa’s half-assed experiments with religiosity compare? She professed some woolly spiritual allegiance to Judaism but refused to observe a single tenet of Jewish life. She studied Torah, yet dismissed out of hand the possibility that any of its injunctions might apply to her.

  Rosa glanced up at the flyer that Carol had posted on the notice board.

  The Jewish Way of Life

  Starting in July, JWLC volunteer Carol Baumbach will be leading a series of field trips designed to explore various aspects of Jewish culture. Our explorations will include a guided tour of Crown Heights, a visit to a mikvah, an outing to a kosher bakery, and much more! Participation is free of charge and all are welcome! Please see Carol for more details.

  “What do you think?” Carol said, following Rosa’s gaze. “It’s the first time I’ve ever done something like this. I’m excited.”

  “It sounds fun,” Rosa said.

  “Really? Would you be interested in coming along on some of the tou
rs?”

  “Sure.” Rosa shrugged. “I mean, if I can make time, I’d love to.”

  “Listen, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Carol said. “Do you want to have lunch at my house this Shabbat?”

  Rosa blushed. “That’s really kind of you, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “No problem. You’ll come another time.”

  “Well, actually, Carol, I usually work on Saturdays in the summer.”

  “Oh!”

  Rosa’s blush deepened. “I’m sorry. It’s my job, you know—”

  Carol waved her hand. “No, no, I understand. Everyone has to go at his own pace.”

  Rosa hesitated. “Well, I’m not sure I—”

  “It’s always really hard when you start out,” Carol said. “You look at all the mitzvoth, and they seem like this unscalable mountain. Believe me, I’ve been there. But you have to keep in mind, Rosa, God doesn’t expect you to do everything all at once.”

  Rosa glanced at her watch. “I’m going to have to dash. I’ve got an interview with a parent at work.”

  Carol patted her hand. “Go. Just remember, Rosa—as long as you’re moving in the right direction, it’s okay to say to God, ‘I know I’m supposed to do this, but I can’t just yet.’”

  The heat that awaited Rosa on West End Avenue was so thick and confining that for the first minute or two after leaving the lobby, she could think of nothing else but trying to stave off her panic. Slowly, though, as she made her way uptown to the GirlPower Center, she began to settle into her discomfort and her thoughts returned to the conversation she had just had with Carol. She reviewed Carol’s pep talk with increasing indignation. She wished now that she had not apologized for working on the Sabbath. What a prig Carol was! She seemed unable to conceive of a person having rational objections to Orthodox observance that were not rooted in fear or denial; she spoke as if the only thing stopping Rosa from being frum was a lack of moxie. Rosa was not scared: she was unconvinced. Over the last six months, she had discovered a powerful affinity with Judaism, and—thanks to certain ineffable intimations she had experienced at Ahavat Israel—she would even go so far as to say that her lack of faith in God had been shaken. But none of this made her remotely inclined to give up oysters and bacon, or to thank God every time she took a shit. She would never want to live the way Carol did—she would never see the point of living the way Carol did—and it was maddening of Carol to insist that she would.