“I just don’t feel comfortable,” Chaim explained. “You never know what you are going to see. Or hear! All those disgusting four-letter words… . Remember that movie
It’s a Wonderful Life?
When beautiful little Bedford Falls turns into sleazy Pottersville? Well, the whole world has become Pottersville. The old black-and-white movies are all right. But movies and the theater these days? No rabbi can be seen in such places.”
She understood him. But the idea that her entire life was now subject to a hidden committee who would be judging the appropriateness of all her actions, including anything she chose to see or hear on her own free time, was simply infuriating. And unlike her husband, she wasn’t stuck with a big neon light on her head that flashed
I’M A HOLY MORAL PERSON, AN ORTHODOX JEW
. She viewed herself as free, even if Chaim wasn’t. The fear of God, still firmly planted in some little corner of her heart, making her tremble during the closing prayers on Yom Kippur (
who will live, and who will die; who in his time and who before his time
) did not extend to weekday entertainment choices. The God she loved and believed in was a very busy, preoccupied, and long-suffering Deity, who couldn’t possibly be
checking the titles of the videos she borrowed. Her God was saving His time and energy to track all the really horrible acts being committed in the world: men who slept with their daughters; corporation heads who used up pension funds for million-dollar birthday parties; Muslims who slit the throats of their sisters; rabbis and priests who buggered small children. She figured, when He finished with all of them, He might have time to deal with her movie choices, which gave her plenty of time.
She took the train to Manhattan, took out money from the ATM, and bought orchestra seats to
Chicago
for a matinee the following Wednesday. Then she called up Benjamin and offered him a ticket. He said he had something at work that day, but he’d try to get out of it.
The truth was, he was confused. This was taking it a step further. Why he wasn’t absolutely thrilled, he wasn’t sure. Could it be because she had preempted him, thus wounding his male pride? Or had he started the process of rethinking the whole situation? He was feeling restless lately, with his go-nowhere job, his cramped Bronx walk-up, his sexless affair. The idea that he was now going to have to fit into her designs, fulfilling her impulses on demand, further eroded any sense of congratulation he might have felt in this proof of the progress he was making in pursuing the untouchable woman who was the rabbi’s wife.
Nevertheless, he agreed. He wanted to see
Chicago,
and the tickets were very expensive.
Even though it was a matinee and she expected to be home in plenty of time, a sudden urge prompted her not only to hide her trip to the theater from Chaim but also to tell him her boss might ask her to work an extra shift at the clinic that day, so she might be home really late. She didn’t explain this to herself, having found it was better not to tell herself everything.
Wednesday morning, she got up early and prepared Chaim a big breakfast: hot cereal with cinnamon and crushed walnuts, toasted whole wheat English muffins, a tomato-and-feta-cheese frittata. He sat there, pleased, slowly chewing, talking about some shul member who wanted to donate his house to the synagogue because he was a Holocaust survivor and had no one to leave it to. He had asked Chaim’s advice.
“But I don’t know. Maybe I should tell him to leave it to Israel or to shelters for abused women. I don’t know what to tell him.”
Something about his confusion, and the sincerity of his struggle with
something that would have presented no moral dilemma for most people, touched her.
“Chaim, maybe you’d like to go to the theater with me today? A friend of mine has two tickets for a matinee—”
“But I thought you said you had to work late?”
“I could call in sick. We could go together. Come on, it’ll be fun!”
He smiled and kissed her hand. “I don’t go to the theater. You know that. What play is it, anyway?”
“Chicago.”
“Whew. That’s definitely off limits. Those costumes. And murder and adultery. Religious Jews shouldn’t be watching that,” he said, shaking his head.
The primness of his dismissal made her jaw tighten.
“Maybe we could go to see
Golda’s Balcony.
Or
Fiddler.”
She ignored that. “So, you don’t want to?”
He stared at her, shaking his head. “Why would I?”
That was certainly true, she thought, relieved. So taking Benjamin wasn’t actually taking anything away from Chaim.
She parked the car and met Benjamin in front of the theater. He wore a long camel-hair coat that looked handsome, if a bit worn. He had his fingers in the pockets and his thumbs beat a nervous tattoo against his thighs. She didn’t approach him right away, standing on the side to watch him, wanting to examine him a little more closely, to decide what exactly it was that attracted her.
But the more she stared, the more confused she became. He was good-looking, true, in a very Gentile kind of way that had never before attracted her. But it wasn’t his looks, not really. When they were together, a little voice inside always whispered with irritation, “So what?”
Truthfully, she liked him better when he wasn’t around. She liked the idea of him, the daydreams she wove around him, with herself in the center and him fluttering like a moth, irresistibly drawn to her charms. His attraction to her was his strongest, sexiest quality.
He, on the other hand, felt the opposite. As much as he occupied her thoughts when they were apart, she disappeared from his. He actually managed to forget what she looked like from encounter to encounter. But when he saw her, he always felt a little thrill.
She looked so pretty, her complexion a lovely, rosy color from the cold
and her body unfashionably shapely and soft, with real breasts and real hips. It was the way a women’s body should be and had been, until designers and ad men decided to turn women into hipless, flat-chested, coltish adolescent boys, he thought.
For the first time, he offered her his arm. She decided not, hanging back. Then she decided—why not?—slipping her arm through his as they went off in search of their seats. What did it matter, after all, if their fully clothed bodies politely touched?
The show was wild. The costumes—if you could call those little bits of torn string a costume—draped provocatively over those perfect bodies; all that bumping and grinding. The music and dancing, the clever irony of plot, involving corrupt politicians, lawyers, and journalists, combined to make it a great show. Chaim might have enjoyed it too, whatever he said. But his public persona—the pious rabbi with the dignified public stature—would have insisted on coming along too, sitting between them, crushing both their joy with the weight of scandalized disapproval. If only her husband had been able to leave his public persona behind every now and then, she mused, inside the same Borsalino hat box that held his black Sabbath hat.
As an Orthodox woman, she understood the public need to defend modest dress and condemn loose women. She herself would not have wanted to actually wear any of those outfits she saw on stage. Still, she couldn’t go along with Chaim’s ban on Broadway, because that would be a slippery slope. First came Broadway shows, next was bathing beaches with bikini-clad women, then in-flight entertainment. And then where would she be? Stuck in a colorless Oz with no ruby slippers; inexorably hemmed in, trapped, by all those fences around the Torah that Chaim was always talking about.
Everyone had to decide on his own fence, Delilah thought. And some blessed creatures should always be allowed to roam the range with no barriers at all. Fences, after all, just gave certain people the urge to climb over or crawl under. In her personal experience, the only barriers that stopped someone from going where he shouldn’t were the ones that did severe tire damage, putting you and your vehicle out of commission. FORBIDDEN. KEEP
OUT I
was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. If you thought you might get away with it, including tiptoeing successfully through a minefield, then fences simply became a welcome challenge, a way to show you knew better than the fence makers what was, and was not, good for you.
After the show, they exited into the snowy city streets, his blond head bare of any covering. It was the first time she’d ever gone somewhere accompanied by a bareheaded man. She found it strange yet liberating. When you walked in the city accompanied by a mate possessing unmistakable religious symbols on his person, people tended to draw in their chests tensely, as if your mere existence demanded that they make some kind of decision, choosing one thing over the other. Now, if people stared, it was simply because they were such a handsome couple, both young, both blond.
The out-of-towners especially, in their inappropriate-for-every-occasion clothing and obscure sports-team caps, looked at them with envy, she thought, instead of the veiled, vague hostility that came her way whenever she ventured out into Manhattan tourist spots with Chaim.
“Let me take you out for dinner,” Benjamin offered. He liked her. She made him laugh, but she was never coarse. He like the innocent pleasures she fought with herself over enjoying, the way her clothes always left so much to the imagination. She thought she was daring and yet, she was at heart such an innocent. He began to remember why he had been drawn to her in the first place. There was something devastatingly attractive in a woman who struggles with her better instincts all the time and loses.
She turned to him, blushing. How much fun that would be! A proper dinner out. But it would have to be in a kosher restaurant, she realized. No matter in which fenceless fields she roamed, she was not about to trespass into anything clearly, black-and-white sinful, like eating unkosher food. But in a kosher restaurant, someone she knew was sure to spot them.
“Too public?” he surmised. She nodded. “So, why don’t I go into Broadway Deli and buy lots of takeout, and we can put it in the car and take it to my place and eat in peace.”
He wanted her to go up to his apartment. That was all she heard.
She hesitated.
“Listen, maybe I was out of line. But let me go in and buy you some food for dinner, just to thank you, and then you can just drop me off on your way home.”
That seemed reasonable, she told herself, already disappointed, as if he’d rescinded the invitation.
They drove along the busy Manhattan intersections, not saying much, because they both knew they were entering a no-turning-back zone. When they got to the Bronx and neared his building, he turned to her, putting his hand on her arm.
“Please, Delilah. Come up with me.”
Her thoughts jumped around in her head, doing back flips and somersaults, running forward, banging into brick walls, then going around and around until finally stopping with exhaustion. The idea of returning early to her staid married life in the drab apartment she hated, to the placid husband who bored her with his goodness, made her feel like an insect caught in amber. She felt sleepy and unwilling to resist any temptation that came her way.
“Just for a minute,” she told him, parking the car a block away, in a neighborhood she was sure was out of the radius of walking distance to their synagogue. She looked around her furtively as she walked with him toward his apartment. Only when they got inside did she concentrate on what she was seeing. His building was even worse than hers, with graffiti all over the walls and run-down hallways perfumed by cheap cooking oil. Only a brass door plate announcing DR. AVRAM MENDES, SECOND FLOOR gave the building its solitary touch of respectability.
“You have a doctor in this building?”
“A chiropractor who is at least one hundred and fifty years old, they say. I’ve never actually seen him come out of his apartment. He might have died ten years ago, for all anyone knows, and be lying there, rotting.”
She looked up at him, surprised. What did she know about him, really? He could be one of those serial ax murderers, the ones that have a signature. Maybe he was the kind that wandered into synagogues and wound up strangling rabbis’ wives. Maybe there was a whole file on him that would become another episode on
Law and Order
“Delilah?”
He was smiling at her, his feet on the stairs. She smelled the pastrami and sour pickles in the brown bags from the deli. She loved pastrami. She followed him up. His apartment was larger than hers—or maybe it just looked that way because it was so sparsely furnished. There was an old white couch with some colorful Indian pillows. An exotic animal-print throw rug on the floor. Framed prints of what looked like advertising posters on the wall. “Are those your ads?” she asked, hoping to be impressed.
“Some of them,” he said, waving vaguely in their general direction.
“Wow, they’re beautiful!” She was overwhelmed by talent of any sort, people who actually created something from nothing. She wandered into
the kitchen. He was already taking the food out of the containers, putting them into plates and bowls.
“Urn, is this your meat set or your milk set of dishes?”
“Huh?”
“You have two sets of dishes, don’t you? Meat and milk?”
He shrugged. “Sorry. Just the one.”
She stared at the food. If it was cold, she’d be able to eat it. But not if it was hot and had been put into a dish that had once held ice cream. The biblical prohibition of not cooking a calf in its mother’s milk had, through the centuries, turned into one of the most exacting and wide-ranging set of laws separating meat from milk, to the extent that religious Jews waited up to six hours to allow milk to enter their mouths again after they’d eaten the flesh of cows, chickens, turkeys, ducks, bison, and any other living creature except fish, just in case some meat might still be caught between their teeth.
“Listen, why don’t you let me do that?”
She searched through his barely filled cupboards for paper or plastic plates, or maybe just some glass bowls, which the rabbis had decided were nonporous and thus could be used for both meat and milk dishes, if thoroughly washed in between. Luckily, the deli had packed plastic flatware. She carefully transferred the cole slaw and potato salad.