Swimming Across the Hudson (25 page)

“It's not just that I lost. It's that I went through the motions.”

“At least it's over.”

“What about the next one? The cases are only going to get tougher.”

“The guy was guilty, Jen. No one could have gotten him off.”

“That's no excuse for not doing my best.”

“Besides, he's violent and dangerous. You don't want him on the streets.”

“I can't think that way. If I start thinking about who I want on the streets, I won't be able to defend anyone.”

I tried to comfort her, but I couldn't.

After work the next day, I went to the library and looked up Jenny's name on Lexis and Nexis. She'd been quoted in the newspapers several times in articles about cases she was working on, and received compliments from her clients and other lawyers. “Principled.” “A brilliant young defense attorney.” There had been a feature on her in the
San Jose Mercury News
, under the title “Head of Her Class.” I made copies of these articles and highlighted what had been said about her, then brought them home and spread them across her desk.

During Christmas season, Jenny and I got into an argument again. She and Tara were driving to Half Moon Bay to get a tree for our apartment. They invited me along, but I didn't want to go.

This was my first Christmas living with them. I'd known they celebrated Christmas; every year, the week after Thanksgiving, they drove to Half Moon Bay to cut their own tree. Why, then, was I surprised? Did I expect this year to be different?

But it
was
different. I lived with them. I had nothing against Christmas, as long as I wasn't involved with it. Now the tree would be in my home.

Jenny had agreed to have a mezuzah on our doorpost and occasionally to celebrate the sabbath. The least I could do was not object to a Christmas tree.

But I thought of Christmas trees as bottom-line. I was a history teacher. Judaism was about nothing if not history. That history included centuries of anti-Semitism. The Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition. The Holocaust. These lessons had been hammered into me all my life. To a Jew like me, Christmas was a reminder that I was a stranger in a strange land. It was about being swallowed up.

Jenny couldn't understand this.

“This isn't about God,” she told me. She and Tara had come
home with the tree, which they'd tied like a deer to the roof of Jenny's car. “Besides, Christmas trees are pagan symbols. They have nothing to do with Christianity.”

“The Jews had trouble with the pagans too.”

“The Jews had trouble with everybody. If you gave everyone a hard time who's descended from an anti-Semite, you wouldn't have any friends left.”

“I'm not trying to give you a hard time.”

“Well, you are.” She'd placed the tree upright and was wiping the sap off her clothes.

“This isn't about you, Jen, and it isn't about individual Christians. It isn't even about Christianity itself, which is practiced by many people I respect.”

“Well, then?”

“It's about my being involved in this. It's not my holiday, and I don't want to pretend it is.”

“I'm not asking you to pretend it's your holiday. I'm just asking you to recognize that it's my holiday.”

“I do.”

“And even if I didn't care about having a tree, Tara does. I won't deprive her of it. Considering all we've done when it comes to Judaism, you're being a little stingy.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

But I couldn't get beyond it.

For the next few weeks, I said nothing more about the tree. Still I resented it, and Jenny noticed. Our conversations were barbed; we snapped at each other.

One night, I moved the tree to another corner of the room. It was casting shadows across the TV set while I was trying to watch the Golden State Warriors on TNT.

Jenny came in and glared at me. “How much basketball can a person watch?”

“If you knew how little basketball I watched compared to a lot of other people . . .”

“I don't live with other people. I live with you.”

“Well, no one's asking you to watch it.”

On Christmas Eve, I sat in the living room and didn't say anything while Jenny and Tara decorated the tree.

“Stop moping,” Jenny said.

“I'm not moping.”

“You certainly are.”

“What would you like me to do? Get up and dance? Sing ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas'?”

“I don't care what you do. But if you're going to be the grinch, just leave.”

“Right now?”

“Why not? Go off for the evening, and come back when this is over. Everyone will be happier.”

I left abruptly and slammed the door behind me. I walked to Jonathan and Sandy's. I'd betrayed Jonathan by writing to Rebecca Harris, and there I was, turning to him for comfort.

I told him about my argument with Jenny.

“It's just a tree,” he said.

“Come on. It's a lot more than that. What if Sandy wanted a tree?”

“But I don't,” Sandy said.

“What if you did?” I turned to Jonathan. “Would that be okay with you?”

“Why not? I can tell you one thing. I wouldn't make a huge fuss about it.”

Hearing this saddened me, as if years before we hadn't spent Christmas Day in a movie theater, watching a series of double features
in order to drown out the holiday. Senior year of high school, on Christmas, we'd taken the bus to Atlantic City and sneaked into Bally's. Christmas: the one day when, according to tradition, Jews were allowed to gamble. In the darkened mirrored hallways of the casino there were so many yarmulkes by the slot machines you might have thought that this was our holiday, that we were there for a Jewish convention.

“Well, don't invite
me
to your Christmas party,” I said.

“Come on,” said Sandy. “Lighten up.”

I left their house a little before midnight and thought of going home. But I didn't want to fight with Jenny. It was better to wait until she'd gone to sleep. Overhead, clouds had settled along Twin Peaks, and as I walked down the hill it started to rain. The slick marks of tires shone beneath the traffic lights. Most of the stores on Market Street were closed. There was no line at the Wells Fargo cash machine. On the corner of Market and Castro, a couple of teenagers were listening to music on a boom box. Aside from them, the neighborhood was quiet.

I decided to go see Susan. Maybe being with her on Christmas Eve would give me a better sense of the meaning of Christmas, especially since she was religious. That was part of my problem—I was Orthodox at heart. The synagogue I didn't go to was Orthodox. Despite my own practices, I had an all-or-nothing attitude. Either you were religious or you weren't. The true Christians, the ones who went to church and believed in God, who were active all year and not just on Christmas, they alone were allowed a Christmas tree. For them Christmas wasn't a fake holiday. It wasn't just the windows of Lord & Taylor and the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV specials.

I walked to Twenty-fourth Street, then turned east. On Valencia, I stopped at a phone booth to call Susan. I let the phone ring
several times; she didn't answer. Maybe she was asleep, or at midnight mass. Maybe she was at home but just wasn't picking up.

When I got to her apartment I rang the buzzer. She didn't come down and let me in. I rang several more times, then sat on her stoop, waiting for her to return.

The rain had started to fall again, making patterns near my feet and seeping through my sneakers. It was almost one in the morning. I wished I could be many things at once: Susan's child and my parents' child, someone who went to synagogue but didn't mind a Christmas tree in his home.

A man walked past me holding a bottle of beer. He moved slowly, swaying from side to side. A car drove by. The streetlights were dull, the buildings along Susan's block formless.

I sat there until one-thirty, when Susan got home, dropped off by a cab. She was wearing a gray wool skirt and a dark blazer. She was searching for the keys in her pocketbook and didn't notice me sitting on the stoop.

“Hi, Susan. Are you coming from church?”

“God, Ben. You scared me. Yes, I'm coming from church.” She looked at her watch. “It's one-thirty in the morning. Is everything all right?”

“Everything's fine.”

“Then why aren't you home? Where are Jenny and Tara?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“At one-thirty in the morning?”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No, it's fine. You just surprised me, that's all.”

She invited me inside. A small, undecorated Christmas tree stood next to the window in a corner of her living room. The apartment looked sparser than when I'd last seen it. It had a somber air, perhaps because Christmas was supposed to be a family holiday. It
was sad to celebrate it alone. On the table in front of the wicker rocking chair sat a solitary copy of the Bible. It reminded me of a motel room.

“Were you planning to do Bible study?” I asked. I had no idea what people did on Christmas Eve.

Susan smiled. “It's almost two in the morning, Ben. I was planning to go to sleep.”

“I'm sorry. I'll leave.” I got up to go.

“No.” She raised her hand to stop me. “That wasn't what I meant. I was just saying you haven't interrupted anything.”

I sat down again.

“I got into a fight with Jenny,” I said.

“About what?”

“Christmas. Christmas trees, actually—specifically the one in our apartment. But there's always more to these fights. It's really about my willingness to compromise. Jenny thinks that I'm being a prick, and in this case, it's hard to deny it.”

“You're not a prick.”

“Thank you. But I can see how Jenny would think I am. It comes down to reason—and I think I'm generally a reasonable person—versus principle. What it really comes down to is whether Jenny and I are compatible.”

“You don't want a Christmas tree in your apartment?”

“No.”

I explained to her that by coming to see her I was hoping to get a better sense of what Christmas was like. “I know. It's ridiculous. If I truly wanted to get a better sense of Christmas, I should have gone with you to church. What did I expect to find here? Christmas is supposed to be a family holiday, and your family is in Indiana. You probably aren't happy spending it alone.”

“You're part of my family.”

I didn't respond.

I flipped through her Bible as if to glean some lesson from it. I lay
down on the sofa and closed my eyes. “I'd like you to tell me some Christmas stories. Not traditional ones—baby in the manger and stuff like that. Just stories about Christmas when you were growing up. Better yet, tell me what Christmas is like with your family.”

I realized this was a lot to ask. Two Christmases before, Scottie had been alive. The memories must have been painful.

I no longer remember what she told me that night, because even at the time I was focused more on the sound of her voice than on what she was actually telling me.
Hush
.
Moonlight. Candied ham. Waking up early Christmas morning. The creaking of narrow stairs
. I lay on the sofa until three in the morning, listening to her talk.

It was almost four when I got home. I was feeling conciliatory, less because of anything that had happened at Susan's than because of fatigue and the passage of time, because of the sense that I'd blown things out of proportion—that Jenny and I would work something out.

But Jenny was still awake and not feeling conciliatory. “Look at you. I've never seen anything more pathetic in my life. Have you been wandering around in the rain, looking for other people who hate Christmas?”

“No,” I said, “I haven't.”

“You've been gone for hours. I thought maybe you'd flown off to Israel so you could be with a whole country of people who hate Christmas.”

“That's very smart, Jen. As you might recall, Jerusalem's a holy place for Christians too. And Bethlehem is just a stone's throw away.”

“All right. Drop it.”

“Look, I'm sorry for how I handled this. If I could do it over, I would.”

I told her that next year we would work out a compromise. We
could have the tree in the apartment, only maybe she'd consider keeping it for less time—just the week of Christmas perhaps. I, in turn, would be respectful of her holiday. I'd even try to join in.

“I don't know if there will be a next year.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I'm not sure we're going to be together.”

“Because of this?”