The Saturday Wife (20 page)

“So, Chaim, does this mean… ?”

“What, my love?”

“That you’ll look for another job?”

He looked into her eyes, losing himself in a calm blue sea of ravishing possibilities. What did she want to hear? What should he tell her? he thought, trying his best to navigate toward a safe shore. “If you are really so unhappy, I will, my love. But in order for me to find a job, I will have to keep this
one a little while
longer.”

She took her hand back and placed it in her lap. “How long?” she demanded, her eyes narrowing.

He thought rapidly. “Another year?”

She got up and twirled around, heading for the bedroom.

He got up and went after her. “Well, nine months then. If I can write on my résumé that I’ve been assistant rabbi for over a year, we’ll have a chance of actually getting some offers.”

She stopped and turned around. “And then you’ll write to Swallow Lake?” She smiled.

Such a beautiful smile, Chaim thought. Such lovely white teeth. Of course, she was a dental hygienist. She knew how to take care of them. Her mouth was a temple of order and cleanliness and plaqueless good smells. And her body… .

“Chaim?” she repeated impatiently, her lovely smile shutting down like an unplugged computer.

He thought about it. Nine months was a long time. Perhaps the boycott would be lifted by then. Or they’d become a Conservative or Reform synagogue, in which case they’d have plenty of candidates, no doubt better qualified, flooding them with résumés. Why fight about it now? “Well, if the job is still open, yes. I’ll do that too.”

“Do you promise?” That smile, that delicious smile, was back.

“I give you my word,
b’li neder,”
he said, using the rabbinical formulation for swearing without actually promising anything that you couldn’t take back.

Delilah, who understood the formula, also knew that there were many, many exquisite methods of torture that could be employed if he even thought about going back on his word. Moreover, since she could piously refuse to go to bed with him now, it wasn’t as if this almost-promise was actually going to cost her anything. All around, it was a good deal. It was the tip of white sail in the distance she’d been looking for. It might take a while for the ship to arrive, but at least, she told herself, it was on its way.

ELEVEN

T
he very next day, she jumped out of bed, deciding that life was worth living after all. She cleaned up the house, using rubber gloves and putting on her Walkman. She played Donna Summers’ “She Works Hard for the Money” (
Somepeople seem to have everything
!); the Weather Girls’ version of “Big Girls Don’t Cry”; and Sade’s “Mr. Wrong.” When she got to Bruce Springsteen’s “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart” (
you say you don’t have no new dreams to touch
), she sang along, feeling tears come to her eyes. That Bruce, he really, really understood her. More than her parents, this husband of hers, or any of her friends.

She was full of love, passion, hope, youth, longing. She loved life. She wanted to do right by God, her parents, her in-laws, even Chaim and his grandfather and this synagogue full of doddering old folks. But she also wanted to squeeze some fun out of the planet before she got old and fat, like her mother, who’d spent her life stuffing her dreams down her children’s throats, making everyone around her miserable.

She thought of her mother coming to the door of those beautiful houses that belonged to her classmates, pathetic in her fake pearls and discount high heels, waiting patiently to be invited in and how she never was; her mother at the wedding in that custom-made dress with the sequins, her hair done just so, waiting for people to look at her and think. “Well, isn’t she something? Aren’t her children something?” And how all anyone had noticed was her bad complexion and her fat stomach. And now, her daughter, the rabbi’s wife, was living in a roach-infested apartment building in the Bronx, from which she couldn’t move, because according to the rules of God she had to be within walking distance from the synagogue, the only synagogue in the world where her husband was willing and able to get a job because he had family connections. A synagogue where there was not a single woman that couldn’t be her grandmother.

She put the radio on with a pounding full bass and sang along with Britney Spears (“Oops, I Did It Again!”), deciding that she might as well get a job. At least it would get her out of the house for the next nine months, and she’d be able to earn some money toward the wardrobe she’d need when she moved to Swallow Lake.

Through Bernstein’s placement service, she found a dentist in Riverdale in an absolutely beautiful home on Goodridge Avenue in Fieldston. You couldn’t believe this was the Bronx. It was like using the word
woman
to describe both Uma Thurman and Marilyn Goldgrab. The clients were all professionals or academics associated with nearby Columbia or Barnard, or they were people who lived in Riverdale. She found herself happy to be getting dressed in the morning and going out. And very soon she had a regular clientele, mostly middle-aged men who came in monthly for a cleaning, even though it really wasn’t necessary. They flirted with her and complimented her, but as soon as they found out she was a rabbi’s wife, they disappeared.

But then, one Friday night, Chaim showed up with a young man. He was respectable, not one of those homeless people who sometimes wandered in off the street during the cold winter months, looking for shelter and a little Saturday-morning booze. He was Jewish, and not a Hare Krishna or a confused Methodist out-of-towner, which also sometimes happened. He had wandered into the old synagogue simply out of curiosity, the way people sometimes step into churches to view the stained glass. He was unfamiliar with the Orthodox service and uncomfortable among all the old men. He’d had your basic American Bar Mitzva education, which sueceeds
so beautifully in leaving the student with a lifelong ignorance and lack of curiosity about anything related to the Jewish religion. Ascertaining all this, Chaim, thrilled, invited him home on the spot for Friday-night dinner.

“This is Benjamin Eckstein,” Chaim said nervously, recalling her reaction the last time he’d brought home an unexpected Sabbath guest. (“So what if Abraham sat outside his tent and dragged in every passing camel? Does that mean I’m running a soup kitchen?” she’d shouted at him. The guest, an elderly shut-in who’d twitched all evening, had luckily been hard of hearing.) “He’s new in the neighborhood and is thinking of joining our synagogue,” he added quickly.

But Delilah didn’t need any convincing. She just smiled demurely and set another plate at the table.

All through dinner, she studied him.

He was about twenty-eight, twenty-nine, she guessed, taller than Chaim but not tall. He looked like a clean-cut rock star, his face covered with a fashionable dusting of light blond stubble. He had a strong jaw, a sensuous mouth. His blond hair had been cut short but combed straight up with gel by a very hip hairstylist. He wore a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows and a long wool scarf that was very Parisian-Left-Bank-starving-student. He had pale furtive blue eyes and pale lashes.

He was recently divorced and his wife had gotten the Manhattan condo, he told them with a certain air of melancholy, implying an unfairness on which he was too decent to dwell, although the truth was it had been hers to begin with. He described a job at a small advertising agency in Manhattan that sounded like creative director, when he was actually a freelancer. There were no kids. He made it sound as if the choice of an apartment in the Bronx had been an existential, almost spiritual choice, rather than a financial necessity. “I think the area has something really interesting going on,” he told them, pouring the last of the wine into his glass and finishing it. He told long rambling stories about advertising rates and the cola wars. Chaim listened appreciatively. He loved hearing people’s stories, and he enjoyed not having to entertain anyone, since he was “on” all weekend.

Delilah found him intensely interesting, despite the fact that she couldn’t have cared less about anything he had to say. She made a special effort to sparkle and twinkle in his direction, speaking at length about her favorite commercials and how an infomercial on the shopping channel had once convinced her to buy a brush that spun around automatically, but it
had broken down after three months and they wouldn’t give her the money back.

He, too, tuned her out.

Yet all the while, voices inside them kept up a continuous murmuring communication that had nothing at all to do with what inanities their lips were forming. Secret knowledge passed between them through furtive, hidden glances; through eyes that narrowed and flashed, and did everything but outright wink. Like a promo for a new movie, these voices hinted at all the highlights and delights that awaited them if only they bought tickets to the show.

He began showing up at the synagogue regularly, secretly searching the pews for Delilah. It took him awhile to realize that almost no women showed up for services Friday night. So he started attending Saturday-morning services as well.

He was lonely and bored. The only women he met were blowzy middle-aged secretaries and jailbait from some of the modeling agencies. He didn’t like models, he decided, after numerous attempts, one of them serious enough to have landed him in divorce court. They were women who liked to talk but didn’t know how to listen, and for whom you functioned mainly as a mirror. While it was thrilling to wear one as an accessory out in public, where people could envy you, they soon became more trouble than they were worth, like stunning new shoes that killed your feet.

Delilah, on the other hand, was real, he told himself. He caught tantalizing glimpses of her through the lace curtains that hung along the wooden latticework that separated the men from the women, her face suffused in radiant light. The old, blazing chandeliers, the silver chalice covering the sacred Torah scrolls, the elderly rabbi’s long, white beard, the patina of heavy golden-hued wood—all of it together seemed to create an aura of saintliness that rubbed off on her the way a cat leaves its scent on its owners.

He focused on her prayer-murmuring, lipstick-less mouth, her charming retro hats, her modest but well-fitted suits. And that blond hair! And those big blue eyes! And the white skin! And the unbridgeable moat between them! It was deliciously tempting in all its contradictory allure. He felt elated by the possibilities and at the same time challenged, depressed, safe, and hopeless at the improbability of breaking down the walls that surrounded her.

Delilah, equally bored, was flattered and amused by him and eager to play the game. She made sure to pull back the little lace curtain, pretending
to want a better view of her husband, or the elderly rabbi, all the while aware of Benjamin’s head turning in her direction. At kiddush, she felt his shadow move across her plate as she filled it with kiddush junk food: cookies, various oversalted or oversweetened morsels from cellophane bags. She looked up and smiled into his eyes just a fraction of a second too long. It was he who lowered his gaze first, shuffling off to the other end of the room to speak to the rabbi.

“Why don’t we invite Benjamin for lunch?” Chaim suggested.

“Who?” she answered innocently.

“Benjamin. You know. The art director. The divorced one. He’s all alone.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said reluctantly, a small thrill hiding at the pit of her stomach.

“Don’t you like him?” Chaim asked her, surprised.

“It’s not that, it’s…” She shrugged, trying to look annoyed. “But if you want. If you think—”

“No, no, it’s not important…”

“But if
you
want,” she continued, with a new insistence in her voice that thoroughly confused him.

Chaim, by now, was used to being confused. In fact, he considered it whimsical and charming that he could never understand a single, solitary thing when it came to his wife’s motives, moods, interests, or desires. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“No. Why should I? If I’ve cooked already for four guests, what’s one more?”