CHAP
TER 27
D
enise is surrounded by Denise. There are three of her, four if you count the real her, the one standing between these angled mirrors in the bridal salon. Four brides, in understated, backless white gowns. She loves the dress—so much more dignified than the frilly gumdrop of a dress she wore her first time around. And yet, somewhere in its ethereal simplicity there seems to lurk the faintest hint of apology; the rueful admission of her marital past.
She is in no state of mind to come to this fitting, but canceling the appointment seemed like a statement of some kind, to Rich, or to herself. She is angry at herself for this sudden bout of confusion, furious with Silver for causing it—at least, she thinks he’s the cause—and angry at Rich for . . . no good reason she can think of. After years of Silver’s bullshit, and then the divorce, life was like a knot that she had finally, through great effort, managed to untangle, and now here she was tying it all up again.
She turns to study herself in profile. Her stomach is flat, her breasts still poised, her skin smooth. She has held up well. Through it all, she has stayed in shape, healthy, and, dare she say it, pretty. The bride on her right is glowing. But the bride on her left looks like she’s been in a bar fight. She runs her fingers along her swollen cheekbone. Two weeks before her wedding. She wants to be the kind of person who can laugh this off, or at last shrug and say them’s the breaks. But she’s never been that girl. Things get to her. That was why Silver had been so good for her, and so bad for her.
Henny, the seamstress, comes back in and fixes her with a critical eye. “You lose weight since your last fitting.” She is Russian, or Ukrainian, or Chechnyan. Something tragically Slavic. Her accent is so thick, it feels like she is forcing her words through a membrane.
Denise shrugs. “Stress.”
“Why stress? This is happy time. The happiest.” Henny starts to pinch at the material near her waist, and then blanches visibly when she catches a glimpse of Denise’s reflection in the mirror. “He hit you?”
Denise laughs. “No! Of course not. I had an accident.”
“You don’t marry a man who hits.”
“He didn’t hit me. I got hit by a door.” Even as she says it, she knows it sounds unconvincing. There are some things that, for whatever reason, you can’t deny without sounding like a liar. “Do you really think I’d be considering marrying someone who hits me?”
Henny nods. “You get married in two weeks, no?”
“Yes.”
“So, you are not considering. You are done considering. Right?”
“Right.” She wished the woman would just shut up already.
They will be married by Silver’s father. She feels bad about that, feels that she is compelling him to betray his own son. But he’s the only game in town. She met briefly with Rabbi Davis at the Orthodox shul, but he had a long printed list of requirements—that they use a glatt kosher caterer, that she go to the mikvah the night before and take a dip in the ritual bath, that she present evidence of Rich’s Jewish birth—so she politely placed the sheet back on his desk and retreated as fast as she could.
Rabbi Silver, whom she suspected had always felt some measure of responsibility for her broken marriage, had given her a hug and agreed instantly to marry her and Rich. And even as she was moved to tears in his embrace, she felt guilty, like she was somehow taking a cheap shot at Silver. She wondered if maybe, subconsciously, she was. She didn’t think so, but she couldn’t be sure. Lately, her subconscious seemed to have an agenda all its own.
Henny is on her knees now, her mouth full of straight pins, which she is pulling out one by one to stab into the fabric at the small of Denise’s back. Denise can feel the woman’s breath on her spine, and it chills her unpleasantly.
The first time she got married, her mother had accompanied her to her first fitting in this very bridal shop, had cried the first time she saw her in the gown. They had both cried, missing her father, who had died a few years earlier. Then Silver had shown up early to pick her up, and he, too, seemed to be fighting back tears at the sight of her in the white gown. The seat her mother sat in is still there, against the wall next to the couch, but her mother is long gone. Breast cancer. And Silver is long gone, and she hasn’t told Rich about this fitting, and besides he’s working anyway, and Casey . . . don’t get her started on Casey . . .
“Why are you crying?” Henny says, her accent further complicated by the pins protruding from between her lips like fangs.
And she is, she realizes, turning to see the tears disappearing into the shadows of her bruise before reemerging on her cheek. She is getting married in two weeks, and she has never felt more alone in her life.
“You look beautiful.”
The man’s voice comes from behind them, startling them both. She turns around to the source of the voice and, seeing him there, she is only surprised that she isn’t more surprised. Silver is standing against the wall like he’s been there for a while, leaning in that way he has that always makes it seem like he belongs. He smiles at her, a small open smile, and it’s been forever since she’s seen that smile, and she feels it in her belly. That was how he used to smile at her, before things changed and his expression grew guarded, his eyes unable to rest on hers for more than a second at a time.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Déjà vu.”
She feels herself smiling. It’s incredible, she thinks, how worn and dirty love can get. But even as she thinks it, something in her bursts, and she can feel it spreading through her chest, and suddenly she is in motion, flying off the platform, practically knocking the needle-mouthed seamstress onto her ass, oblivious to the stream of Russian expletives that rise up and fill the room. She doesn’t remember getting there, and can no longer see him through the haze of tears, but she can feel his arms wrapping themselves around her as she collapses into him, sobbing like a baby.
CHAPTER 28
T
he ba
by boy is carried in by his grandmother on a pillow. He is wearing an ornate white bed shirt and a tiny white skullcap affixed to his head with two white straps. The crowd gathered in the large, festively decorated living room comes to a hushed silence. For a moment, there is no sound but the click and flash of the photographer, shooting the infant relentlessly as the grandmother, who is wearing so much makeup that she looks like a wax dummy, walks him into the center of the room. The women smile and cluck as the baby comes into view. His mother, looking frail and deflated in her maternity dress, smiles, but Silver can feel her ambivalence toward this ritual, as if it’s his own.
Or maybe it is his own, and he’s just projecting.
Denise, holding on to him, her breath lightly tickling his neck, the skin of her back, smooth and warm under his fingers. Casey had gotten moody after brunch, had decided to go see some friends, leaving him to make his way home from the North Point, and as he passed the bridal boutique, he happened to glance in and see that it was Denise up in front of the mirrors. He doesn’t know what made him go in—If he understood the thing in him that felt the need to see his ex-wife trying on her new bridal gown he’d probably understand pretty much everything—but either way, he hasn’t stopped reliving it since.
“Baruch Haba,”
the mohel chants. Blessed is the one who arrives. Meaning the baby. Who, at this moment, is anything but blessed.
The infant is just getting over the trauma of his birth, flushed from the warmth of the womb on a harrowing claustrophobic journey through the birth canal, and then thrust mercilessly into the cold harsh light of the world. And now, eight days later, just as he’s begun to develop a taste for breast milk and oxygen and is thinking that he might be able to make a go of things here, a strange man is going to pull down his diaper and take a scalpel to his minuscule cock.
Silver has to clamp down on the overpowering urge to snatch him from his wax-dummy grandmother, tuck him under his arm like a football, and run him to safety. The baby’s mother, Susie, is on the fence. Silver is almost positive this sort of disturbance will be enough to make her reconsider the whole enterprise. She is in her late twenties, pretty and plump, and he’s pretty sure, reading her expression, that this was not her idea. She converted to Judaism in order to marry Evan, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now her son will pay the price. Evan stands at the head of the room, between Ruben and the mohel, in a designer suit and a large black yarmulke, creased and worn askew to demonstrate that he normally doesn’t wear one. He watches as his son is carried in, feeling proud and not a little smug in this large, conspicuously expensive house that is a monument to both his wealth and his need for everyone to see it. He is circumcising his son for his father, who circumcised him for his father, who survived the concentration camps. Or else, because Evan feels an innate subconscious need for his son’s dick to resemble his own. And thus, the ritual endures, even among the lapsed Jews and their shiksa wives, thanks to a complex, self-perpetuating loop of guilt, narcissism, and daddy issues.
The feel of Denise’s body against his, her tears soaking his neck, the overall sense that right there, in that moment, she needed him. No one has needed him for a very long time.
The baby is passed to Evan’s father, who sits down on the designated chair while the mohel bends over him, muttering in a slew of Hebrew blessings. Silver looks around the room at the gathered friends and relatives, all smiling and taking pictures, and the absurdity of the entire thing washes over him. A group of civilized, upper-middle-class Americans getting together for some routine genital mutilation, followed by coffee and bagels. He’s pretty sure he saw an omelet station out there on the patio as well.
In his admittedly limited experience, he has come to identify two kinds of mohels: those who believe they are carrying out a sacred rite, and those who couldn’t get into medical school. The way this mohel snaps on his latex gloves and unfurls his instrument roll with a flourish leads Silver to believe he is definitely in the latter category. He is in his early forties, clean-shaven, and clearly enjoys this moment in the spotlight. He pulls out his scalpel, studies it for a moment, and then leans over the baby and reaches in. The room goes blurry, and Silver realizes that he’s in danger of passing out. He leans back against the wall and closes his eyes.
Denise’s face, inches from his own, her eyes red, her lips quivering, a trembling in his chest he hadn’t felt in years. She was looking at him and he was looking right back at her, and that may not sound like much, but for the first time in years, they were seeing each other.
The first uncircumcised penis he ever saw belonged to James Nevins. He caught sight of it in the boys’ locker room while they were changing for gym in the fourth grade. James had his shorts around his ankles—was trying to step into them without removing his sneakers, a task that left him exposed for a good thirty seconds or so. James’s thin, flapping member waved back and forth like the pendulum of a metronome, and it looked to Silver like someone had chopped off his tip. He immediately pictured a variety of horrifying, if farfetched, household accidents and, more vitally, wondered how the boy urinated. “What’s the matter, you never seen a dick before?” James snapped at him, and he realized he was staring.
“What happened to it?” he blurted out.
“Nothing happened to it, shithead,” Jimmy said.
He doesn’t remember what he said after that, but it led to his getting punched in the face for the first time. Two firsts in the span of one minute. That was a big day.
Even now, he can taste the blood on his tongue, and he opens his eyes just as the baby starts to wail. The mohel, having made his cut, shouts out a blessing in Hebrew. The father reads one too, his tongue tripping over the Hebrew consonants he hasn’t practiced since he was a little boy. Someone produces a silver wine goblet. The mohel dips the baby’s pacifier into the wine and then shoves it into the baby’s mouth. If you’re going to get the baby plastered, why not do it before you cut him? Silver thinks. None of this makes any sense.
And then, just as he was leaning in to kiss her, she turned away, the tip of her earlobe grazing his dry lips with a rough whisper. I’m sorry, she said, although what she was sorry for, like everything else, was utterly unclear to him.
Rabbi Silver addresses the room, attempting to place the procedure into context. “In performing the ritual of circumcision, we have entered this child into the covenant of Abraham and God, and now Susie and Evan will name their boy, as we welcome him into the Jewish community. We are born imperfect by design, and the circumcision is our first step in achieving God’s vision for us.”
Evan and Susan stand beside Ruben, who begins to chant in Hebrew, and Silver has the baby’s cries in his ears and his pain in his crotch and suddenly there’s not enough oxygen in the room, and he’s sweating profusely. He’s either stroking or fainting, or maybe both, but either way, he’s not going to do it here, collapsing onto chintzy, overpriced furniture that doesn’t look sturdy enough to accommodate a genuine adult body anyway.
He flees, down the hall and through a den, and then descends some stairs into a second, sunken den that they probably call a sunroom, and then out the sliding-glass doors and across the patio, where the catering staff are laying out platters and pouring mimosas.
I am not cut out for this, he thinks, and the cute, skinny bartender with the nose stud and big green eyes looks up and says, “You and me both,” which is how he knows that he’s spoken out loud. The heat out here is surprising, the sun radiating off the bluestones, cooking the air at eye level. After the blasting central air inside, it’s a welcome respite, like stepping into a different season.
“They wrapping up in there?” the girl says, working the white plastic cork out of a Champagne bottle. Her dark hair is short and uneven, like she cuts it herself, but she’s pulling it off.
“Yeah.” He can feel himself staring too closely at her.
This is the amazing thing about the male brain, or at least, his male brain, which is admittedly compromised by strokes, and an unrelenting lust that has been nesting there since early adolescence. He can be dying, can be taking in a sacred ceremony that is both deeply moving and somewhat horrifying, can be falling in love with his ex-wife all over again and, at the same time, still have the computing power to consider this hot little bartender, to note the monochromatic tendril of a tattoo creeping around the side of her neck, the way her tongue flicks up to lick her upper lip, to hear the cigarettes in her laid-back, punk-rock voice, and to contemplate how this would all manifest itself in her lovemaking.
She looks at him and smiles, amused and unthreatened, and he wants to kiss those laid-back lips, wants to run away with her and from her all at the same time.
“You played in that band, right? The Broken Daisies.”
“The Bent Daisies.”
She accepts the correction. “Cool.”
He watches her patiently work the cork, twisting and pulling until it comes out with a soft pop. She puts the bottle down and starts on another.
“You OK there?” she says.
“I’m dying.”
She considers the information casually. She is cute, and a bartender, a combination that renders her largely unfazed by default.
“I just needed some air,” he says.
“Well,” she says, looking around the vast yard, complete with an impressive free-form pool and a goldfish pond, “you came to the right place.”
* * *
Later, the guests mill about the patio enjoying a late-morning brunch and casting the odd look his way. He is sitting by the pool with his pants rolled up and his legs in the water, drinking Champagne out of the bottle. His father makes his way across the yard and sits down on the ground beside him.
“What happened in there?” he says.
“I don’t know, I just . . . I got a little claustrophobic.”
He nods. “How’s the water?”
“It’s nice,” Silver says. “Warm.”
“Listen,” Ruben says, “your mother is beside herself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Come for Friday-night dinner. Let her cook for you, let her see you. It will be good for both of you.”
“OK.”
His father looks at him, kind of measures him with his eyes. There are things Ruben wants to tell him, questions he wants to ask, but he can see that Silver’s not up for it right now. Instead, Ruben pulls off his loafers, and then his black socks, pulls up his suit pants, and puts his legs in next to Silver’s.
“It’s getting so I can’t take you anywhere,” he says.