For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (15 page)

“Sue, your tablecloth.”

“Fuck my tablecloth,” she said.

“Oh my.” He took a sip of water.

“Oh my is right. You bet, mister.” She made a noise that Charles considered to be a growl. His wife of twenty-seven years had growled at him.

“If you think I’ll ever forgive you for starting this when I was crippled with Novocain. Attacking me when I could hardly talk. If you think,” she said, “if you think I’m going to start paying twelve dollars and fifty cents for a roast chicken, you are terribly, terribly wrong.”

“What is this about chickens?” Charles did not raise his voice.

“The religious lady at work. She puts in orders on Wednesday. Every week she orders the same goddamn meal. A twelve-dollar-and-fifty-cent roast chicken.” Sue shook her head. “You should have married an airline chef if you wanted kosher meals.”

“Different fight, Sue. We’re due for a fight, but I think you’re veering toward the wrong one.”

“Why don’t you tell me then,” she said. “Since all has been revealed to you, why don’t you enlighten me as to the nature of the conflict.”

“Honestly, I think you’re threatened. So I want you to know. I still love you. You’re still my wife. This should make you happy for me. I’ve found God.”

“Exactly the problem. You didn’t find our God. I’d have been good about it if you found our God—or even a less demanding one. A deity less queer.” She scanned the table again, as if to find one of his transgressions left out absent-mindedly like house keys. “Today the cheese is gone. You threw out all the cheese, Charles. How could God hate cheese?”

“A woman who thinks peaches are too suggestive for the fruit bowl could give in on a quirk or two.”

“You think I don’t notice what’s going on, that I don’t notice you making ablutions in the morning?” Sue dipped her napkin
into her water glass. “I’ve been waiting for your midlife crisis. But I expected something I could handle, a small test. An imposition. Something to rise above and prove my love for you in a grand display of resilience. Why couldn’t you have turned into a vegan? Or a liberal Democrat? Slept with your secretary for real.” Sue dabbed at the wine stain. “Any of those and I would’ve made do.”

Charles scrutinized her.

“So essentially you’re saying it would be OK if I changed into a West Side Jew. Like if we suddenly lived in the Apthorp.”

Sue thought about it.

“Well, if you have to be Jewish, why
so
Jewish? Why not like the Browns in six-K? Their kid goes to Haverford. Why,” she said, closing her eyes and pressing two fingers to her temple, “why do people who find religion always have to be so goddamn extreme?”

“Extreme,” Charles felt, was too extreme a word considering all there was to know and all the laws he had yet to implement. He hadn’t been to synagogue. He hadn’t yet observed the Sabbath. He had only changed his diet and said a few prayers.

For this he’d been driven from his own bedroom.

Occasionally Sue sought him out, always with impeccable timing. She came into the den the first morning he donned prayer shawl and phylacteries, which even to Charles looked especially strange. The leather box and the strap twirled tightly around his arm, another box planted square in the center of his head. He was in the midst of the Eighteen Benedictions when Sue entered, and was forced to listen to her tirade in silence.

“My Charley, always topping them all,” she said, watching as he rocked back and forth, his lips moving. “I’ve heard of
wolf men and people being possessed. I’ve even seen modern vampires on TV. Real people who drink blood. But this beats all.” She left him and then returned with a mug of coffee in hand.

“I spoke to Dr. Birnbaum. I was going to call him myself, to see how he was dealing with your change.” She blew on her coffee. “Guess what, Charley. He calls me first. Apologizes for crossing boundaries, then tells me you’ve stopped coming, that you won’t take his calls. Oh, I say, that’s because Charley’s Jewish and is very busy meeting with the rabbi. He’s good, your shrink. Remains calm. And then, completely deadpan, he asks me—as if it makes any difference—what kind of rabbi. I told him what you told me, word for word. The kind from Bolinas. The kind who doesn’t need to be ordained because he’s been a rabbi in his past nine lives. And what, I asked him, does one man, one man himself ten generations a rabbi, what does he need with anyone’s diploma?” Sue put the mug down on a lamp stand.

“Dr. Birnbaum’s coming to dinner next week. On Monday. I even ordered kosher food, paper plates, the whole deal. You’ll be able to eat in your own house like a human being. An evening free of antagonism where we can discuss this like adults. His idea. He said to order kosher food once first before leaving you. So I placed an order.” She smoothed down her eyebrows, waited for a response. “You can stop your praying, Charles”—she turned to leave—“your chickens are on the way.”

Charles had no suits left. Shatnez, the mixing of linen and wool, is strictly forbidden. On Zalman’s recommendation, he sent his wardrobe to Royal Hills for testing and was forced to go to work the next day in slacks and suspenders, white shirt, and tie. Walter hadn’t left him alone since he’d arrived. “It
ain’t Friday, Charley,” he kept saying. “Casual day is only once a week.” This he interchanged with “Why go to so much trouble? A nicely pressed bathrobe would be fine.”

Charles had worked himself into a funk by the time Zalman entered his office. He’d accomplished nothing all morning.

“I am weakening,” Charles said. “The revelation lasts about a second, comes and goes, a hot flash in the back of a taxi. But the headache it leaves you with—a whopper of a headache—that persists.”

Zalman scratched at his nostril with a pinkie, a sort of refined form of picking. “Were you in a fraternity in college?”

“Of course,” Charles said.

“Then consider this pledging. You’ve been tapped, given a bid, and now is the hard part before all the good stuff. Now’s when you buy the letters on the sly and try them on at home in front of the mirror.”

“Wonderful, Zalman. Well put. But not so simple. I’ve got to tell my boss something soon. And tensions have risen at home. We’re having dinner on Monday. My wife and my shrink versus me. She’s even ordered kosher food, trying to be friendly about it.”

“Kosher food.” A knee-slapper, a big laugh. “The first step. Doesn’t sound anything but positive to me. By any chance, has she gone to the ritual bath yet?”

Charles spun his chair around, looked out the window, then, slowly, spun it back.

“Zalman,” he said, “that’s a tough one. And it sort of makes me think you’re not following. Sue refuses to go for a couple of reasons. One because she hates me, and our marriage is falling apart. And two, she maintains—and it’s a valid point, a fairly good argument—that she’s not Jewish.”

“I see.”

“I want you to come on Monday, Zalman. A voice of reason will come in handy after the weekend. I’m going to keep my
first Shabbos. And if Sue remains true to form, I’m in for a doozy.”

“Find out where the food is from. If it’s really kosher catered, I’ll be there.”

The clocks had not changed for the season, and Shabbos still came early. Charles put on his suit jacket—deemed kosher—and his coat and went home without explanation. He didn’t touch the candlesticks on the mantelpiece, didn’t risk raising Sue’s ire. Instead he dug a pair, dented and tarnished, from a low cabinet in the overstuffed and unused butler’s pantry. The maid passed, said nothing. She took her pocketbook and the day’s garbage into the service hall.

In the absence of wife or daughter, the honor of ushering in the Sabbath falls upon the lone man. Charles cleared a space on the windowsill in the study and, covering his eyes before the lit candles, made the blessing. He paused at the place where the woman is permitted to petition the Lord with wishes and private blessings, and stood, palms cool against his eyes, picturing Sue.

The candles flickered next to the window, burning lopsided and fast.

Charles extended the footrest on his recliner. He closed his eyes and thought back to his first night away from home, sleeping on a mattress next to his cousin’s bed. He was four or five, and his cousin, older, slept with the bedroom door shut tight, not even a crack of light from the hallway. It was the closest to this experience, the closest he could remember to losing and gaining a world.

The candles were out when Charles heard Sue pass on her way to the bedroom. He tried to come up with a topic of conversation, friendly and day to day. He came up with nothing, couldn’t remember what they’d talked about over their life
together. What had they said to each other when there was nothing pressing? What had they chatted about for twenty-seven years?

He got up and went to her.

Sue was sitting at the far window on the petite antique chair that was intended only to be admired. She held a cigarette and flicked the ash into a small porcelain dish resting on her knee. In half silhouette against the electric dusk of the city, Sue appeared as relaxed as Charles had seen her since long before his revelation. He could tell, or thought he could, that she was concentrating on ignoring his presence. She would not have her moment of peace compromised.

This was his wife. A woman who, if she preferred, could pretend he was not there. A woman always able to live two realities at once. She could spend a day at work slamming down phones, storming down hallways with layouts she’d torn in half, then come home to entertain, serve dinner, pass teacups in a way that hushed a room.

How was he to explain his own lack of versatility? Here was a woman who lived in two generations simultaneously. How was he to make clear his struggle living in one? And how to tell the woman of two lives that he had invited over Zalman, who carried in his soul a full ten?

On Sunday Charles was reading a copy of Leon Uris’s
QB VII
when Sue ran—truly ran—into the study and grabbed him by the arm. He was shocked and made the awkward movements of someone who is both dumbfounded and manhandled at the very same time, like a tourist mistakenly seized by the police.

“Sue, what are you doing?”

“I could kill you,” she said. And though smaller, she had already pulled him to his feet. Charles followed her to the foyer.

“What is this?” she yelled, slamming open the door.

“A mezuzah,” he said. “If you mean that.” He pointed at the small metal casing nailed to the doorpost. “I need it,” he said. “I have to kiss it.”

“Oh my God,” she said, slamming the door closed, giving the neighbors no more than a taste. “My God!” She steadied herself, put a hand against the wall. “Well where did it come from? It’s got blue paint on it. Where does one buy a used mezuzah?”

“I don’t know where to get one. I pried it off eleven-D with a letter opener. They don’t even use it. Steve Fraiman had me in to see their Christmas tree last year. Their daughter is dating a black man.”

“Are you insane? Five years on the waiting list to get into this building and now you’re vandalizing the halls. You think anyone but me will believe your cockamamy story? Oh, I’m not a Nazi, Mrs. Fraiman, just a middle-aged man who woke up a Jew.”

“It happened in a cab. I didn’t wake up anything.”

Sue put her other hand against the wall and let her head hang.

“I’ve invited the rabbi,” Charles said.

“You think that’s going to upset me? You think I didn’t know you’d drag him into this? Good, bring him. Maybe they have a double open at Bellevue.”

“This is very intolerant, Sue.” He reached out to touch her.

“Go back to the study,” she said. “Go paw one of your books.”

They considered the table. Charles and Sue stood at opposite ends, appraising the job the maid had done.

It was admirable.

There was a paper tablecloth and paper cups and plastic champagne glasses with snap-on bases. There were patterned
paper napkins that matched the pattern on the plates, plastic forks and plastic spoons, and a few other things—cheap but not disposable. Knives, for instance, the knives were real, new, wooden-handled steak knives. Sue had even gone to the trouble of finding a decent bottle of kosher wine. One bottle. The other was a blackberry. Charles wondered if the blackberry was a warning as to what continued religiosity might do to the refined palate. Screw-top wine. Sugary plonk. He was going to comment, but looking again at the lavish spread, both leaves inserted into the table, the polished silver on the credenza, he reconsidered. It was more than a truce. It was an attempt to be open—or at least a request that the maid make it resemble as much.

“Mortifying,” she said. “Like a child’s birthday party. We’ve got everything except for a paper donkey tacked to the wall.”

“I appreciate it. Sue. I really, really do.” He had sweetness in his voice, real love for the first time since he’d made his announcement.

“Eighty-eight dollars’ worth of the blandest food you’ve ever had. The soup is inedible, pure salt. I had a spoonful and needed to take an extra high-blood-pressure pill. I’ll probably die before dinner’s over, and then we’ll have no problems.”

“More and more,” Charles said, taking a yarmulke from his pocket and fastening it to his head. “more and more, you’re the one that sounds like a Jew.”

When Charles answered the knock on the study door, he was surprised to find Zalman standing there, surprised that Sue hadn’t come to get him.

“She is very nice, your wife,” Zalman said. “A sensible woman, it appears.”

“Appearances are important,” Charles said.

Zalman brightened, and exuded joy as he did.

“It will be fine,” he said. He hooked Charles’s arm into his own and led him down the hall.

Sue and Dr. Birnbaum—sporting a yellow sweater—were already seated. Charles sat at the head of the table, and Zalman stood behind his chair.

The most painful silence Charles had ever experienced ensued. He was aware of his breathing, his pulse and temperature. He could feel the contents of his intestines, the blood in his head, the air settling on his eardrums, lake-smooth without sound.

It was Zalman who spoke.

“Is there a place where I can wash?” he asked.