“Give Marcelo an example.”
Rabbi Heschel folds her hands and closes her eyes as if she were praying.
“Father, not my will but Your will,” she whispers, looking up to heaven. Then she turns to face me and says, “The ways we use sex to hurt each other are innumerable and unspeakable. Anytime we treat a person as a thing for our own pleasure. When we look at another person as an object and not as a person like us. When sex consists solely of taking and not giving. When a person uses physical or psychological force to have sex against another person’s will. When a person deceives another in order to have sex with them. When a person uses sex to physically or emotionally hurt another. Any time an adult has sex with a child. Those are some of the ways sex becomes evil. I can’t describe it any more. It’s not for me to give you images of evil. It saddens me to know that you will find out soon enough the different ways that we have devised to hurt each other.”
She stops and rubs her eyes the way a person with a headache rubs her eyes. I want to tell her not to worry about me, but I remain silent, unable to find any words to comfort her.
W
endell and I are having lunch on the top floor of what he calls “the club.” The tall wrinkled-face man who met us at the door went into a back room and came out with a blue jacket and a red-and-blue striped tie. He handed them to me and I didn’t know why until Wendell told me I had to put them on. Wendell helped me with the tie. Wendell is already wearing a jacket and tie, so the man did not have to get him anything.
We sit by a window overlooking Boston Harbor. Another older-looking waiter comes by and Wendell orders a drink called a “martini.” I order a Coke.
“I recommend the salmon,” Wendell says to me when he sees that I have trouble deciding what to get.
“I’ll have a salmon,” I say to the waiter, who has been waiting for me.
As soon as the waiter leaves, Wendell says, “I need your help with something.”
“Marcelo’s help? My help.”
“Yes. Why do you look so surprised?”
“I didn’t know there was anything I could do to help you.”
“There is something you can help me quite a bit with.”
The waiter comes and gives Wendell a martini and me a Coke. The martini is an extremely small drink. I look for a straw but there is none. Wendell eats the olive and drinks half of the martini in one gulp.
“I need you to help me get Jasmine.” Wendell puts his glass down and looks at me with a look I don’t recognize.
“What does ‘get’ mean?”
“What do you think ‘get’ means? Take a guess.”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Do you want to get Jasmine to love you?”
“Mmmm. That wouldn’t be necessary.” He finishes his drink.
“Do you love Jasmine?” I ask.
“‘Love’ is a peculiar word, isn’t it?” Wendell is lifting his glass at the waiter. The waiter nods. “The word stands for so many things. I love a dry martini, for example.” He waves the empty glass. “I love my father’s yacht. If by ‘love’ you mean wanting something so bad it hurts and feeling like you’ll die if you don’t have it, then, yes, I love Jasmine.”
“Do you want to marry Jasmine?”
Wendell shakes his head. It could be that he’s saying he doesn’t want to marry Jasmine, or the gesture could mean something else. Sometimes people shake their heads like that when I say something that they can’t believe I just said.
“People like me don’t marry people like Jasmine.” He is smiling when he says that, but it is not a friendly smile.
“But she is an Elemental Woman. You told me so.”
“I’m going to have to explain the way it is to you, my friend.” Wendell waits for the waiter to place the plates on the table. I stare at the pink flesh of the salmon. “Let me ask you this.” He puts a forkful of salmon in his mouth. After he swallows it, he asks me, “Has she ever said anything about me?”
This is a question that Wendell continually asks and it never ceases to be difficult. Jasmine has said things about Wendell. She has told me that she doesn’t trust him, for example, and that he makes her feel “creepy,” whatever that means. She has communicated to me in no uncertain terms that she doesn’t like him. But I believe those things were said to me in confidence and I’m not sure that I should repeat them to Wendell. On the other hand, I want to be Wendell’s friend. How do you stay loyal to two people when one of them doesn’t like the other? Don’t you have to choose one or another at some point? After a while, I say, “She doesn’t trust you.”
“What did she say exactly?” Wendell seems very interested in the answer to that question.
“It is a feeling she has about you.” Now I’m not sure whether Jasmine said that Wendell was creepy or that he made her feel creepy.
“You see? That’s where you come in. She trusts you because you’re harmless. What I’m thinking, and this is how you can help me, is that one day after work, you, Jasmine, and I go out on my father’s yacht for an evening cruise around Boston Harbor. She won’t come with me alone, I know. But if you ask her to come with us, she’ll come.”
It feels good to be needed by Wendell, and I want to help him as I believe friends should. But I also feel uncomfortable.
There is something that is not right about Wendell’s request, and I wonder whether this is what “creepy” feels like.
“What’s the matter? What are you thinking? We can make it a double date if you like. We’ll invite Martha. She likes coming on the yacht quite a bit. I know that for a certain fact.” He winks at me.
I need to retrace what Wendell has said to me so far so that I can find the source of the discomfort. There are words in the conversation we have just had that don’t fit logically with other words. Finally, I remember what was disturbing to me. “Why is it that people like you don’t marry people like Jasmine?”
“You haven’t taken a bite of your salmon. What’s the matter?”
I lift up my fork, move the rice around, and then put the fork down again. How is it that people can chew and taste and think and talk all at the same time? My head feels full, as if Wendell’s words are food that my brain is unable to digest. “I always thought one could marry whomever one loves. And you say you love Jasmine, although I never heard love defined the way you defined it.”
“Marcelo, Marcelo. Do you always have to think so much about things? I’ll break it down for you step-by-step. Yes, you can marry whomever you ‘love’ as you say. But the person also has to be, how can I put it, worthy enough to be a part of your life. Can you imagine Jasmine at dinner conversing with my father and mother about world events? Jasmine barely finished high school for one, and for another Jasmine has been…around.”
“Around.”
“Let’s just say that she is so unbelievably and incredibly hot that whatever she is or has done is not important for purposes of
my summer objectives. Besides, there’s something about someone saying no to me that burns me up. No one says no to me. Especially someone who has—” He stops suddenly, reconsidering what he wanted to say. Wendell’s look at that moment scares me. I have seen it before in the eyes of some of the kids at Paterson when frustration turns to rage. “In any event, what and who she is does not matter for anything beyond this summer. Now, what I want to know is whether you are willing to help me. All you have to do is say that I asked you to go for a cruise, and ask her, as a personal favor to you, if she would come as well. Then all you have to do on the yacht is entertain yourself for a while up on deck while I take Jasmine below.”
It doesn’t make sense to me. Why does Wendell want to be alone with Jasmine? Jasmine does not trust him. She will not agree to anything he asks of her. “Why?” I ask.
“Why what?”
“Why do you need to take her below to talk to her? Will it make a difference to the way she feels about you?”
“Once we’re below deck, it won’t matter what she feels about me. I’ll take care of her feelings. There are ways to create feelings or change them or make them disappear for a while.”
“You want to fuck her.” I hate using the word, but it is the word that most accurately describes what I think Wendell wants to do. The other alternatives like “making love” or even “sexual intercourse” do not seem precise enough.
Wendell laughs so hard people sitting at the next table turn to look at us. “Why, Mr. Mar
ch
elo, you are making progress in the ways of the world indeed. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt her. She just won’t be able to say no.” Then the laughter stops and he
fixes his eyes on me. “Well? What do you say? Can I count on your help, my friend?”
The way Wendell is looking at me makes me feel that he will be extremely angry if I say no. If I am to continue being his friend, I need to say yes—that’s what he is making me feel. I am afraid. I cannot distinguish whether I am afraid for Jasmine or for myself. Is this what lack of trust feels like, I wonder—this sense of hurt to come?
“No.” I look into Wendell’s face when I say this and see his pupils widen with surprise.
“Pardon?”
“No. I will not ask Jasmine to go.” I am hoping that he will not ask me why. I don’t remember any other time in my life when I have said something based solely on a feeling, without having figured out why I am saying it.
“I see.” Wendell’s face is red. It is either anger or embarrassment. He wipes his mouth with the napkin and then bunches it up and puts it on his plate. His face is looking everywhere around the room except in my direction. When the waiter comes, he tells him, “Put it on my father’s bill and add twenty percent.”
“Yes sir, thank you.”
He stands up and then sits down again. I can feel him staring at me for a long time. I don’t know where to place my eyes while he is looking at me. I look out the window. I want to say that I am sorry for refusing to do what he has asked me to do, but I’m not sure that it is appropriate to say that. I am sorry that he is disappointed in me and I am afraid to lose him as a friend. But I
am not sorry to keep Jasmine away from him. At that moment, she seems more important to me than Wendell’s friendship.
The waiter brings him another martini. Maybe Wendell asked for it while I was looking out the window. His head is swaying slightly as he speaks.
“Do you want to hear an interesting story?”
The way Wendell asks this, I think that maybe Wendell and I can still be friends. He seems his old self again.
“Okay, here it goes. I’m going to go fast, so see if you can follow me. Once upon a time there were these two supersmart lawyers. Both of them went to Harvard, both graduated at the top of their class, both ended up working after law school with the most prestigious law firm in Boston. One of them went into litigation, the other became a patent attorney. One was from an old Boston family. You could trace the family’s lineage all the way to the folks that arrived on the
Mayflower.
You’ve heard of the
Mayflower,
right?”
“Yes, I learned about it at…”
“Yes, I know, Paterson. Wonderful school, that Paterson. They teach everything there. Where was I?”
“One was from an old Boston family,” I remind him.
“Right. The other was what you call in professional circles a ‘minority hire.’ Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“What? There is something you didn’t actually learn at Paterson?”
Sarcasm is very difficult for me to detect except when Wendell uses it. “There are many things,” I say.
“A minority hire is someone whose descendants are from
another continent or country, whose skin is darker than the majority of folks, someone not born lily-white. A firm hires these people to show how broad-minded and compassionate they are.”
“I do not understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. The concept is not really relevant to the story. Let’s just say that for some reason these two lawyers did not like each other. There are various accounts floating around as to the origin of their animosity. One of them, the one I am most partial to, is that Minority Hire turned out, unexpectedly, to be an excellent lawyer. Not just in the sense of being super-proficient in his area of the law, but in his entrepreneurship. He went out and brought clients to the firm. Big, rich clients. What Minority Hire did was actually kind of brilliant. He traveled to Mexico and other countries in Central and South America on his own and found scientists who were working at universities or small laboratories, scientists who were inventing new chemicals and gadgets. Minority Hire promised them that if they became his clients, he would get their inventions patented in the United States and he would help them find companies that would produce their inventions and everyone would make loads of money.” Wendell raises his glass. The waiter nods. “Are you following me so far?”
“The person you call Minority Hire is my father,” I say. Aurora has told me the story of how Arturo became successful, but she did not tell the story quite the way Wendell is now telling it.
“Wonderful. I don’t care what anyone says—I think you are brilliant.”
“Thank you,” I say, even though I believe that to be sarcasm as well.
“Well, the other lawyer, let’s call him the Mayflower Lawyer for ease of identification, was consumed with jealousy of Minority Hire. That’s my theory anyway. It’s only speculation, but I have reason to believe in its accuracy because, how shall I say it, I am privy to insider information.” The waiter comes with another martini. “Any questions so far?”
“Is the Mayflower Lawyer your father?”
“Yes.” I expect him to say more but he doesn’t. It may be the first time that Wendell has answered one of my questions with a single word.
“Your father and my father are partners,” I say. “They work together and own the law firm together.”
“Yes. Fifty-fifty. Equal partners. But we are getting ahead of the story. The real interesting thing here, the conundrum that needs to be deciphered, is why these two lawyers who disliked, even hated each other—yes, I don’t think hate would be too strong a word here—why these two individuals who hated each other so much nevertheless decided to be partners.” Wendell stops. There is a crease in the middle of his forehead and I can tell he is thinking hard, perhaps trying to find the answer to the conundrum, as he calls it.