He knew exactly what he wanted. He had no problem imagining his life as a gay man: he’d have a boyfriend, a fabulous apartment, and maybe a cat, and they’d live in San Francisco. A total escape from his life so far in Rochester, which sounded surprisingly like mine, from Hebrew school to Jewish camp to visiting Grandma in Florida.
He described his future life clearly and concretely, as if he didn’t have any doubt that it was possible. He was ready.
Why was he telling me?
Donnie asked me about my plans, but my plans at that point didn’t stretch beyond high school. I knew I’d go to college, and I hoped that would offer some respite from my adolescent misery, but I hadn’t given much thought to what my life might look like after that. Maybe I’d been afraid to imagine it, afraid that picturing it—the boyfriend, the cat, everything I could only guess gay life involved—would make it too real.
A lot of things that might have happened that night didn’t happen. There was no attraction on that level, at least from what I could tell.
And even though I certainly had many opportunities, I didn’t tell Donnie that I thought I was gay, too.
But I knew that night that fate had brought Donnie and me together. Talking to him, I felt for the first time like things were going to be okay for me. Meeting him wasn’t like looking into a mirror. It was like looking into the future.
Irene stayed and talked until midnight—about her family, about the rabbi, about the Jewish community in North Beach—when she went home to bed.
“I volunteer on Saturdays,” she said. “And if I want to look presentable, I’ve got to get my beauty rest. At my age, every minute helps.”
She pulled me down to her to kiss me on the cheek and headed downstairs. There was still plenty of time for me to go out, catch one of the pre-White Party parties in South Beach. But I wasn’t really in the mood anymore. Instead, I stayed in, snooping around the rabbi’s condo, looking for traces of the man Irene had known, the sweet, flirtatious Zisel she had loved.
I didn’t find much. Bengay and Sanka and one box of very old raisins. Nothing revealing. I made up the sofa bed and went to sleep.
Saturday morning, North Beach was busy with people headed to their respective shuls. I got a couple of nasty looks—for wearing shorts, or driving a car on Shabbat, or going anywhere besides services, I’m not exactly sure—but I ignored them and headed back to South Beach.
An hour or two sunbathing helped me get a bit of a tan to offset the white clothes I’d bought.
An hour or two of shopping around Lincoln Road Mall allowed me to find the perfect shoes and the perfect cap, and the perfect postcard—with a photo of some serious Miami beefcake—to make Phil jealous.
An hour or two at the “Heatwave” pool party in the afternoon made me feel completely insecure about my body and made me wish I had another year to work out every day at the gym before that night’s big event.
But I didn’t have another year, so I made the most of it.
Even in my cutest white outfit, I was a bit apprehensive when I arrived at the White Party, but I exhaled after getting a few approving looks from other people in line. While other circuit parties often got a bad rap—for combining sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (or, in this case, house music) in such irresponsible ways—the White Party was another animal entirely. Spread across the grounds of a mansion called Vizcaya, the event included hundreds if not thousands of guests, yet managed to avoid feeling like a tacky, overcrowded club. A string quartet played classical music inside. Acres of gardens stretched back away from the building, with a performance space tucked away in the back, where the city’s top caterers offered their food. Throngs of people, in blinding white, danced to big-name DJs. And, to top it off, as an AIDS fund-raiser, it was all for a good cause.
I danced, I ate. I even got to hear Cyndi Lauper singing “True Colors,” which was one of my favorite songs as a kid.
But I just couldn’t get into it. After all the time and money I’d spent preparing and shopping, I couldn’t seem to relax and enjoy myself. In a sea of beautiful men, the only person I could think about was Irene.
I left the party early and arrived on her doorstep still clad all in white.
She didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see me standing there, at ten o’clock on a Saturday night.
“White Party?” she asked, pushing her glasses onto her nose, checking out my outfit.
“How did you . . . ?”
“Sweetheart, I volunteer at the Jewish Museum, smack in the middle of South Beach,” she said. “So I do know a little bit about the scene down here. And I certainly know when the White Party is. It’s all anyone in South Beach could talk about today.”
“So you knew . . . ?”
“That you’re gay?” she said. “I may need glasses, but I’m not blind.”
“It’s funny, Rabbi Zuckerman didn’t know.”
“We see what we want to see,” she said. Then she opened the door and showed me into her apartment.
It was easy to see which furniture she’d bought when she moved to Florida (a generically modern, overstuffed beige couch; a small, pine dining room table that had probably come straight from IKEA) and which items had been hers for decades (an antique china hutch filled with gilt-edged dishes, matching table lamps with porcelain bases shaped like Oriental vases).
And there were framed photos on every available shelf or tabletop. Irene walked me around the living room and explained who was in each picture. Her late husband. Her kids. Her grandkids—at least a dozen different shots. The photos told the story of her family through the decades: vacations, graduations, birthday parties, school portraits.
On top of the television sat a color snapshot, in a Lucite frame. “My son took that picture about two years ago when he came to visit,” she said. In the photograph, Irene stood between Rabbi Zuckerman and Sophie. All three were smiling. The women had their arms around each other’s waists and were looking into the camera. The rabbi stood slightly separate, hands at his side, looking at Sophie.
“It’s funny seeing the rabbi without his beard,” I said.
“Zisel has a beard now?” she asked.
I nodded.
“He must have grown it when Sophie died,” she said. “I guess he never shaved it off.”
This was the first time Irene had mentioned Sophie by name, so I decided to pursue it.
“Were you and Sophie friends?” I asked.
“Of course we were,” she said.
“Rabbi Zuckerman talks about her all the time,” I said.
“I imagine he does,” she said. “She was a wonderful woman, Sophie. Although of course I only knew her for a short time, and much of that time, she was sick. But when someone has a good soul, it doesn’t matter if they’re old or young, sick or not. You can tell.”
I picked up the photo and examined it more closely. On second glance, it appeared that the rabbi wasn’t looking at Sophie at all, but at Irene. Or was I seeing things? It was hard to tell from a slightly out-of-focus snapshot.
“When we were all together down here, the three of us became like a little family,” she said. “Sophie and I would cook and the three of us would eat together. And when Zisel would go to shul, Sophie and I would sit on the balcony and talk.”
“About what?”
“Well, I would talk about my children and my grandchildren, I suppose,” said Irene. “And Sophie would talk to me about the bookstore.”
“You didn’t talk about the past?”
“Sweetheart, can you imagine that conversation? Neither of us wanted to talk about the past.”
I felt like an idiot.
“But that didn’t matter, we were friends,” she said, pointing to a framed needlepoint hanging on the wall. “She made that for me.”
I went to look at the needlepoint and Irene turned on another lamp so I could see better. It was an orange sunrise coming over a green hilltop and had something written on it in Hebrew. “What does it say?�
�� I asked.
“I don’t remember the Hebrew words,” she said, “but it’s a quote from Hillel: ‘If not now, when?’ I always liked that quote. Sort of like ‘Carpe diem’ for the Jewish crowd.”
“I think the rabbi has a couple of things like this in his house,” I said, remembering the pictures I’d seen upstairs in his house—one with flowers, another with apples, both with Hebrew writing on them.
“I’m sure he does. Sophie was an expert. She told me that she used to needlepoint in the store in between customers.”
Without being invited to stay, I sat down on the couch. Irene sat in the chair next to me.
“Did Sophie know about you and the rabbi?” I asked.
“We never talked about it,” she said. “But Sophie was no fool. She knew that we were friends when we were teenagers. Did she connect the dots? Probably. And she knew that we were close again down here in Miami. Did she connect those dots? Probably.”
I looked at her in disbelief.
“Close?” I asked.
She paused. “You ask a lot of questions, Benji.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to answer. If it’s too personal.”
“At my age, most people I know want to talk about bowel movements and incontinence,” she said. “Nothing’s too personal.”
She smiled and I knew I hadn’t offended her.
“I’m just not used to talking about this,” she said. “But yes, you might say we picked up where we left off.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s not nearly as tawdry as you’re thinking,” she said. “Young people always go right to the sex, don’t you? Dressed in white, but you’ve still got a filthy mind. When I say we had a little affair, I mean that we sort of picked up where we’d left off when we were teenagers—and we weren’t having sex then, either! I was too young for all that then and I’m too old for it now. We just spent time together, a few minutes here or there, and talked.”
“About what?”
“About all the years we’d missed. The years we might have had together. Even after all that time, we still loved each other.
“We never had more than a few minutes. He always got up early to daven and then he’d go to the bakery to get rolls for breakfast. He’d drop a couple of them by my apartment on his way home and we’d have two, maybe three minutes together. Or Sophie would take a walk to the beach to collect seashells and we’d have ten or fifteen minutes before she came back. It was never much. But it was a lot.”
“Did Sophie ever find out?”
“No,” said Irene. “But one afternoon, when they were down here for a whole week around Christmastime, Sophie wasn’t feeling well—she’d been getting chemotherapy—and she lay down to take a nap. Zisel came downstairs and we thought we might have a whole hour together. A whole hour! He told me he still loved me, that he had never stopped loving me after all these years.
“It’s not that we didn’t both have good lives. He was happy with Sophie and they had a very nice life and a successful business. And I had been happy with Harold and wouldn’t trade all my years with him for anything. But still, we knew we had both been denied what might have been for us. And regardless of what else happened, this was a tragedy. Because, like I told you, we were meant to be together. So that night, while Sophie was upstairs napping, we sat at my table and cried, both of us.
“And when Zisel went upstairs afterward to check on Sophie, he found her passed out on the bathroom floor. She had woken up feeling very sick, and started vomiting blood, and passed out right there by the sink.”
“So what did you do?”
“We called an ambulance, of course, and Sophie went to Mount Sinai and got a transfusion and the doctor put her on some new medication and she came home a couple days later. But she was never quite herself after that. She never asked Zisel where he’d been that afternoon and he never told her. But he was convinced that God was telling him that what we were doing was wrong, that even though all we had done was talk, it was like he was breaking his marriage vows. So we had to stop seeing each other, even for a few minutes, without Sophie.”
“And that was the end of it?” I asked. “It just ended, and you went back to being friends with both of them?”
“Mostly, yes,” she said. “I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t talk to Zisel about it in front of Sophie and he wouldn’t see me alone anymore. And then they went back to Maryland, so it wasn’t really an issue. But he did come once more to my apartment, many months later, when they came back to Florida.”
“What happened?”
“He told me he had been praying a lot, and studying, trying to find a solution,” she said. “And he had one. Even though he couldn’t see me anymore while he was with Sophie, he told me that if, God forbid, Sophie should die before him, he would marry me.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, in his mind, being with me while Sophie was alive was adultery,” Irene said. “But if we were both—God forbid—widowed, then God wouldn’t want two widowed people to be lonely and miserable, and then, and only then, would it be all right for us to finally be together.”
“How much longer did Sophie live?” I asked.
“Just a few months,” she said. “She got very sick, poor thing. May she rest in peace.”
“So are you two going to get married?” I asked.
“Let’s just say I’ve stopped looking for a wedding dress,” she said with a flip of her hand. “After Sophie died, he stopped taking my calls, at home or at work. I send him letters, but he never answers. He hasn’t come to Florida once since she died.”
“He won’t talk to you at all?” I asked. I knew the rabbi was stubborn, but this seemed unnecessarily cruel.
“I thought I’d lost him forever,” said Irene. “Until he sent you here.”
The trip home was uneventful—no flirtatious flight attendant, no whole can of Diet Coke.
The weekend hadn’t turned out the way I’d planned at all. I had anticipated a few days of partying, hanging out on the beach with a bunch of guys, sipping fruity cocktails through silly straws. But while I’d dipped my toe into the gay scene, I’d actually spent most of my time in North Beach. And while I’d chatted with one or two guys, I’d spent most of my time talking to an old woman.
Irene made me see the rabbi in a new light. I wasn’t ready to forgive him, exactly, but I felt like I had a better sense of what was going on in his mind. He was a man who lived his life by the rules—a man who had been punished every time he’d broken those rules; a man who punished himself for breaking them, as well. Still, despite his own black-and-white sense of propriety, before our fight, he’d never forced his ideas on me, never insisted that I live according to his code. In fact, he was the only person I’d ever known in a position of Jewish authority who hadn’t told me I was a bad Jew if I didn’t keep kosher or go to synagogue or pray regularly. Even though he made his own ideas clear, he’d listened, and for a while, he seemed to accept that I might not be the same kind of Jew that he was.
When it came to relationships, however, he was indeed a rigid man; some things, he seemed to think, were not negotiable. If he wouldn’t permit himself to bend the rules, even after yearning for sixty years, he certainly wasn’t going to allow some kid to break them completely.
When I got back to the apartment, Michelle was in the living room, watching television.
“How was Long Island?” I asked, even though her face already told me the answer.
“Awesome,” she said. “His parents are totally cool—we stayed in his old bedroom and shared the bed.”
“Your parents would never let you do that,” I said.
“I know!” she said. “And I got to meet his sister, and his aunt and uncle, and his grandmother. The whole family. Everyone was really great and Dan and I had a fantastic time. Seriously, it was like the best Thanksgiving I ever had.”
“I’m sure your parents would be thrilled
to hear you put it that way.”
“Right? I told my mom that Dan’s mom’s turkey wasn’t anywhere near as good as hers, so she’s happy.”
“Smart,” I said.
“And how about you?” she said. “I see a little bit of a tan on your face, so you must have gotten some sun.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And was the White Party as amazing as you thought it’d be?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And did you meet anyone?” she asked with a smirk.
She laughed at my story about Ed and his Jew fetish, but by the end, I didn’t think it was so funny. “I think I should give up on dating for a while,” I said. “It’s getting ridiculous.”
“Come on,” she said. “The whole time you were down there, you didn’t meet anyone else?”
“I did, actually,” I said. “But not the way you think.”
I told her all about Irene and the rabbi’s affair.
“No way!” she said. “This is like a total soap opera!”
“I know.”
“So are you going to go tell the rabbi that you met his little mistress? His jilted woman? Or are you going to play dumb and pretend like you don’t know a thing?”
“Actually, I don’t know if I’m going to tell him anything,” I said.
Michelle looked confused, and I realized that I hadn’t seen her since before the holiday, and she didn’t know the rabbi had kicked me out of his house. It had only been a few days since our fight, even though it seemed like much longer. I filled in Michelle, who was rapt.
“I knew that rabbi wasn’t as hip as you thought!” she said. “I mean, Benji, come on. He’s a rabbi. What did you expect?”
“More, I guess.”
“So are you going to see him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m still thinking about that.”
I took my bags to my room and picked up the phone. Message waiting. I checked my voicemail and found just one message waiting for me.
“Benjamin? It’s Linda Goldfarb. I’m sorry to bother you at home, and I know you probably won’t get this until you’re back from Florida, but I thought I should call you. It’s about the rabbi. . . .”
Sweet Like Sugar Page 19