Читать книгу Sarah/Sara - Jacob Marperger Paul - Страница 11

July 23

I’m beginning to smell. I’m beginning to smell and I saw other people for the first time today. Oilmen in a Zodiac. I don’t know what they were doing. I purposely cast off far enough east of Prudhoe to avoid that kind of thing, but maybe they were on some kind of survey. We were all shocked, myself and the three oilmen, to see each other. They seemed to emerge, fairly far away, from between ice floes, heading back west under full power. Their full power is a lot faster than my kayak to say the least. I waved. They pulled close enough for me to clearly read the Exxon logo stenciled on the boat’s inflatable body, about sixty feet off, a respectful distance. Still, I covered my ear with my hand though they were far enough away that I mostly made out what they were saying by gesture: Are you ok? I gave them a thumbs-up and they were off. I would have thought they’d be eager to see a woman up here, would’ve pulled up alongside and chatted a while, but perhaps not.

Seeing men suddenly after a week is strange and visceral; it reminds me that the stunning landscape is only a backdrop largely lacking human actors, a perfectly composed, scenically set portrait, strangely devoid of the subject for which it was devised. One man sat in the rear of the boat, by the motor. The other two shared a bench though they leaned to opposite sides. All three wore orange life jackets over yellow rain slickers and orange hard-hats. It was the man on the south side of the boat, starboard at the bow, who yelled at me. From what I could tell, he looked almost exactly like Sven, the last goyishe man I dated, not even too much older than Sven would be now. He had curly blonde hair that poked out around his helmet and burnt orange stubble thick enough for me to discern even at my distance. And they were gone like that, off probably to Prudhoe, to the oil-works.

I felt empty with them gone. I’d slipped slowly into an acceptance of solitude. They ruptured it, made me realize the loss of human company, of someone to talk to. But they left, before letting me have any conversation. My father warned, once, that he’d read in Waterman’s book that in Canada, the Inuit were incredibly friendly, but the Americans at Prudhoe Bay treated everyone like a trespasser, like an attacking Green Peace boat. If they had pulled up close, it would have been very hard to keep to my shomrei n’giah. I wanted to rub the flat of my palm the wrong way against his orange stubble, anchor my hand with pulling fingertips on the wind-roughed red of his upper cheeks. I wanted to feel flesh.

Afterwards, I found myself rubbing my arms, chicken-wing style, against my sides, tracing the outlines of my eyebrows, my nose, my ears, my lips. I didn’t want to touch him sexually. I wanted to feel human contact. I wanted blood-warmth, still want blood-warmth. If we had touched, it probably would have been something more like shaking hands, his hand covering mine while we locked eyes or something silly like that, maybe his left hand on my shoulder, covertly feeling the strength of months training, and a week on the water. I must look so distant from the woman I was in Jerusalem. The past two days I’ve worn a blue coolmax tank-top and a sports-bra while rowing. My arms are all muscle and brown, my brown hair, chopped short, is undoubtedly matted and bleached by the constant sun and a week without showering. I’ve lost weight from not eating as much as from exercise. My face must be taught and brown, despite all the sun-block and the special cream. I usually wear a pair of cycling shields while I row to cut the glare off the ocean, though not always. I probably should wear a helmet but I don’t. While paddling, I wear red nylon shorts, and sometimes Tevas, if any footwear at all. My legs are almost as pale as my arms and face are brown, staying, as they do, below decks. My sea-skirt mimics the Chasid’s cloth belt which divides the mental from the visceral. Of course, only Chasidic men wear the belt to symbolize a separation of their heart and minds from their rutting gear. It’s not necessary for the women; we aren’t ruled by the need to penetrate, to fornicate.

People often suggest that we orthodox simply don’t know what we’re missing. They say that we’ve locked ourselves into a strange cloistered society and simply don’t know any better than shadchin, and chaperoned dating. But I am here by choice. What are the chances of happiness through random and competitive sexual interactions? This again goes back to what Rabbi Shem Tov was getting at, Judaism isn’t a sacrifice in this world in order to get into the next; it’s an embrace of the best way of living in this world which leads to the pleasure of olam habah. I mean, take Sven, AKA The Last Straw.

It was during what I call my dual period. Hillel was already my primary social outlet and I was going to the Chabad House for Friday night services and Shabbat dinner. Yet, outside of those activities, I continued to maintain my secular lifestyle. And so, one Spring Thursday night, I went out to a bar, McNulty’s at 105th and Broadway, with my roommate, Marie. We ordered a pitcher of cheap light beer, as flavorless as possible, and sat down at the end of a long table to get to drinking. McNulty’s ambience blends the air of a boy’s boarding school dining hall with that of an ivy-league college bar. Lot of guys in rugby shirts, no music, just the din of voices. Din of voices! Today I heard the following sounds: the ocean, the crack of sea-ice breaking apart (which startled me), a bevy of grounded molting geese warning me off, the man on the Zodiac’s muffled halloo, and of course, mosquitoes buzzing. That’s one, two, three, four, five different sounds, not counting my own voice and some tangential noises, like the kayak hull grating against the shell beach I’m pulled up on now, the wisp my lighter makes and the whump of the Whisperlite’s priming fuel igniting and then its jet-roar once it reaches cooking temperatures. Even counting all of that, I can still measure all the sounds of my day on two hands. What I’m talking about is the overwhelming din of voices, voices that drown, muffle and coddle with their blanketing fabric of sound.

A couple of guys walked over to our table, mysteriously empty excluding Marie and myself, and asked if they could sit down. Sven leaned over and commented that women drinking a pitcher was ballsass, though we certainly weren’t the only two girls with pitchers. Marie rolled her eyes and looked at me with what you would call a meaningful look, Eema, and then told them that balls and ass were a combination that it would take a lot more than a pitcher of beer to induce. Unfazed, Sven offered to buy us glasses of whiskey. Marie suggested they buy the drinks for themselves as it was with each other that a meeting of the pubes seemed most likely.

Nonetheless, Sven proved to be quite a charmer, and I agreed to meet him for dinner two nights later. We went out to an Italian place on Amsterdam Avenue with red checked tablecloths and cheeky waitresses in peasant costumes - again, liberation of sex does not equal liberation of the sexes. I think that might have been the last time, or one of the last times that I actually ate at a non-kosher restaurant. He was outgoing and funny and I let him kiss me in front of my dormitory but I did not give into his suggestions that I follow him to his place up in Washington Heights nor did I invite him past the security guard at my front entrance. We met again, and again I refused the offer to go uptown though I let him feel up my breasts on a couch in the downstairs room at 42O, a terrible bar on Columbus Avenue. On the following date, I had to push his hands away from the waistband of my dress while we listened to an outdoor concert over at Lincoln Center.

But I liked him. He had a penchant for punning that made me smack him adoringly. He was a couple of years older than me, just out of school and working as an editorial assistant at a textbook publishing house. He called me almost every night and after waiting an hour or two, I would call him back. I made it clear that intercourse wasn’t in the near future and he seemed ok with that. But after about two weeks of this, he called and said he couldn’t continue. “Why?” I asked, hurt, crushed.

“Listen, it’s like this,” Sven began. He told me he’d picked me up because his therapist wanted him to try picking up different women, one a week for a month, to help him break out of his shell. He’d been following her advice and found that he could talk to girls after all. He said he liked me very much but the future was elsewhere, he’d never really been that into me as a lover, more as a pleasant company thing, and to see how far he could go, now that he had this new personality that he’d purchased at a hundred forty dollars a session. As a side note, I asked how he had all this money for psychotherapy anyway; we’d agreed to pay for alternating dates and his usually involved some free activity. He’d claimed entering the publishing world had impoverished him, which I believed.

“Oh, that,” he said. “Well my father is the president of Holt books, that’s how I got the job, you know? But I can’t have money for just anything, he like gives me cash for specific things.” I started yelling at him, cursing—I still cursed then—and he offhandedly mentioned that he owned a gun. I hung up. I didn’t really believe the threat—I don’t think he wanted to see me at all; he just wanted to get rid of me—I didn’t need to hear more. I knew better. I knew where to find genuine people and genuine love and genuine meaning. He wasn’t the last boy I dated, or kissed, but it really all ended with him. Ok, yes, I was really scared after the gun comment. I told Marie and she suggested we notify campus security, which we did, and they offered to go to his house, but we felt it was just better that they know about it, we didn’t want to stir things further—what if they went there and he didn’t have a gun and then he came to find me, angry because I’d snitched? But we didn’t sleep well for a few nights, despite the chair we’d taken to wedging under the doorknob.

And it doesn’t get better. My father’s aunt Maxine started dating again at eighty. The first guy she met, who mind you didn’t speak a word of English (we speak the language of love, she’d say, oblivious to the fact that she was quoting Better Off Dead) was about as intolerable as they come; arrogant, snide, self-obsessed. He would pass around topless photos of his deceased first wife at Sunday brunches in Maxine’s Fifth Avenue apartment, approximating, in his pidgin English, a boast about how for him there were only the finest ladies. He’d pinch Maxine’s butt while he was doing this, and she’d swear he was a devil in bed. Well apparently, what he didn’t communicate in the international language of love or in any other language or linguistic equivalent, was that he was epileptic and had no business behind the wheel of a car. She’s lucky she lived through the wreck he got them into on their way out to Montauk. A few years later, she found a new guy, he spoke English all right, only he professed to being a player, and I don’t mean bridge. He had the pinky ring, the Italian loafers, the silk sweaters, the iodine-tinted tan and a birth certificate from the roaring twenties. “He’s like a mezuzah,” Maxine would say, “All the women want to touch him.” Need I say more?

No. Giving up dating was not a sacrifice. Losing my parents’ respect was. I mean, sure, I gained it back. Or, I gained my father’s respect back. But when I was growing up, I was everything to them, and they to me. I never fought with my parents. I wasn’t a rebellious child. But this thing began to happen. If I had to pinpoint a start date, it would be when I was on debate team sophomore year of high school. I was up against a pimply kid from Jericho High wearing a yellow button-down shirt with a pink Polo logo and one of those cloth belts with the braided leather ends. I rocked back and forth on my feet behind my podium. I figured: I can take this kid. The announcer called the topic: Organized Religion, irrelevant in today’s world. He pointed at me and said, “Yes,” at pimple-face and said, “No.”

At first, I was a lot happier to be on the side of religion’s irrelevance. I possessed an entire rhetoric of that persuasion, inherited from parents, teachers, and daily culture. We each had two minutes to lay out our initial positions. And I felt strong about mine, stronger than the Jericho-preppie. Initial statements were followed by rebuttals and then a short period of personal interchange. I hammered on standardized complaints: war, repression, dissimilation. Up until that point he’d recited a standardized list of religion’s perceived benefits: social order, ethical structure, spiritual definition; but then he turned and said, “But you, Sarah, to what degree would you be able to measure and define the meaning and success of your own life without the spiritual constructs of deity and divine order?” I stopped. I mean, I’m sure our debate continued. But for the first time I peeked, however briefly, into the possibilities of life, my life. I saw nothing. I saw years spent waiting, years spent competing for the spoils of living: material wealth, showable mate, enviable career, fashionable lifestyle. I saw a checklist dictated by a society that would never fully accept me, even if through some great effort I managed to tick off every single item on it. A treasure hunt, which if won would win resentment. And it seemed exhausting.

Of course, I was fifteen then. These are my interpretations and extrapolations ten years later. At the time, I didn’t even have the intelligence to associate the possibility of meaning with religion. Instead, I simply glimpsed a debilitating life filled with routines I cared nothing for yet felt compelled to pursue. I imagined going to classes every day, doing homework, studying for SATs, enrolling in extracurricular activities I didn’t care about, all to get into a good college where I would do more of the same to get into a good job. I imagined going home after the meet, and trying to select the right outfit to outdo everyone else, trying to select the right combination of phone calls and allegiances and friendships and dates, the right car for my father to buy when I turned sixteen, the right TV shows to follow and movies to watch, all to stay ahead, to compete for lousy dates with assholes like Moskowitz who’d stopped lighting his crotch on fire with bug-spray but not really outgrown it; and it all seemed so tiring. The deal with debating is that after the round, you defend opposite positions. One would think that after my soon-to-be acne-scarred competitor so jostled my actual thinking process, I could have easily defended the relevance of religion. Instead, my coach yelled at me afterwards, it was like the will to compete had abandoned me, and instead of my usual passionate, nuanced declamations, I mumbled generic lines that hardly stretched to the edges of my time limits. Jericho had deeply unsettled me. “I thought you wanted to be a lawyer, Frankel,” Coach White, our history professor chastised after I tried to explain. “Are you going to sacrifice your clients if a prosecutor convinces you they’re guilty?”

But once you begin to look for meaning, there is no turning back. You can’t blissfully backslide into not caring about the measure of your life’s success, the motivation to continue.

But, Sarah, if you had never found meaning, would your parents have ever come to Israel? Ever stopped downstairs with you to sample rugelach and café au lait?

Abba said that after 9/11 he realized that America was just as dangerous as Israel, maybe more so. He said either you’re going to die or you’re not. He told me the story of a woman who cheated death three times. She was in an elevator going down in Tower Two. When the plane hit, it must have severed the elevator cables. They plummeted. But somehow, the car jammed in the shaft and came to a halt. They were bruised and in the dark, her, another woman, and three male coworkers. Abba said that they managed to pry the doors open, all the while terrified that doing so would loosen the elevator and they’d fall again. When the doors were open, they realized that they were between floors. The men didn’t think they could fit into the tiny space through which they’d have to drop down so they sent the two women first. The first woman dropped through, but when she landed, she twisted her ankle badly. Then the other woman, our protagonist, dropped through, this time guided by the woman who’d gone first. She hurt her wrist and got banged up a bit dropping, but not too bad. Then the elevator did fall. Later, she assumed that the men died in the fall. They certainly died at some point. They were not among her company’s survivors. She and the other woman helped each other down the dark waiting area for the elevator bank. At its end was a stairwell. They were on the 14th floor. Inside the stairwell, other evacuees helped them walk down. On the mezzanine level, two firemen led them out to West Street to an ambulance. There, an EMT began doctoring their wounds. All of a sudden, as a rumbling began, he threw open the ambulance doors and yelled, “Run!”

This woman who was the daughter of my father’s boss’s friend started running through a massive cloud of grey dust as Tower Two began its fateful descent. She clung to her friend’s hand, but her friend fell and so she kept running without her. She was barefoot, but hardly noticed. She was training for a marathon and ran her race through a grey cloud of soot, through falling pieces of building of furniture of people. Dark shapes flitted through the anti-light, shadows of ghosts, polygons of longing, vehicles, screaming. She was coated with detritus but felt nothing. She kept running. She broke through the cloud but couldn’t tell for sure, her face covered in grey and other things. So she ran on in her serge suit dress, her beige silk sleeveless top, her silk hose long worn through at the feet; she ran. She ran from the death behind her, the viscerally understood but yet unacknowledged demise of her three colleagues in the elevator, the EMT who’d sent them on their way but bizarrely stayed, briefly contemplating the bravery of a sinking ship’s captain before debris relieved him of choice, the woman she’d made it so far with, ultimately ripped from her hand either by a blow, her ankle or some other incident, whichever, whatever, dead. And so this woman my age, my generation, a marathon runner ran for seventy blocks, to Hell’s Kitchen, straight up West Street.

I never asked my father why she wasn’t stopped earlier, and he didn’t tell me, so I don’t know. But in the fifties, a couple stopped her. Apparently she was covered in other people’s blood and dust. They forced her into their west-side apartment. She must have been the same size as the woman, because after sponging her down, after listening, and on that day believing and respecting, her incessant and solitary demand to keep moving, to run—“I have to run.” They dressed her not so differently than I dress to paddle, lent her shoes and sent her on her way. She ran to the Queensboro bridge at fifty-ninth street. She ran across it and through Astoria until she reached her aunt’s house, some seventeen running miles from where she began. I don’t know when she began to speak again. But at the time my father heard the story, three weeks later, over coffee at the Red Cross tent on a shift he shared with his boss, she’d still refused to return to her apartment in the city. Family members had gone and collected her clothing, some essentials. She was staying in Queens.

I’m not like that. I’m resilient. I will return to Yerushalaim.