Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (31 page)

“Whoa,” he said, as I grabbed on to him as if I were drowning. “You okay?”

Shimon had a faint scar over his left eye from when he’d fought in the ‘73 War in Israel. He’d faced the brutality of the world long ago. He saw its handiwork every time he looked in the mirror.

I sort of collapsed on him, then started sobbing like a three-year-old, emitting big, lunatic strangulated hiccups.

“Ah, shit,” Shimon said. He grabbed me beneath my armpits to help keep me vertical. As I wailed, I beat my head deliriously against his flak jacket, behaving the way everyone wants to behave, of course, in front of their professional colleagues. “Okay, easy now,” Shimon said. “Steady.”

“I’m sorry,” I said later, as I sat on the bench outside the snack bar, sniffling and wiping my nose on a paper napkin.

Shimon shrugged. “This whole trip is a little much. In Israel, they don’t do this. We have one moment of silence once a year. A siren sounds, we say a prayer in our heads, and then we move on.”

Move on. That suddenly sounded so wise. Shimon loaded a fresh roll of film into his camera while I slowly collected myself and opened my notebook. Together, we set out to follow the March between Auschwitz and Birkenau. For the occasion, a lot of the kids had donned bright blue March of the Living windbreakers with white Jewish stars emblazoned on the back. Even though they took their role very seriously, they were still strangely ebullient, radiating energy the way teenagers do, and I had to admit, I felt proud of them. As if cued, the sky became overcast, and a soft rain began falling as we marched past the ominous watchtowers and under the brick archway of Birkenau, where railway tracks ran, then came, chillingly, to a halt.

The day would become even more emotionally brutal before it was over. Holocaust survivors would speak of the atrocities they’d endured at that very site. Group prayers would be said, and Elie Wiesel himself would become too choked up to finish his speech. In the end, even Shimon would be weeping. It was a mass funeral for a mass grave. There was no getting around it.

Later that night, after Shimon and I got drunk together for the fifth and final time, I finished typing my last dispatch from Poland on the floor of the bathroom. At the tourist hotel outside of Krakow, the only electrical outlet in my room was located next to the toilet: another peculiar vestige of Cold War culture, I supposed. The next morning, while everyone else headed off to Israel, I flew back to Paris. I faxed my articles from the post office in time for my deadline, then fell exhaustedly into Didier’s bed. The day after that, I returned to New York. By then, I’d recovered enough to be disappointed that my arrival went unheralded. No paparazzi snapped my picture at the gate. I was still a Nobody, writing for an obscure ethnic newspaper. The only difference was that now I would do so with a glimmer of dedication. Amid all my bitterness and inappropriate behavior, something had occurred to me. It was noble, really, to write about nitwits, artists, dissidents, and yokels—to document Jews—or
anyone,
for that matter—who managed to live life passionately and inventively, who managed to do more than suffer or antagonize others. These alone, in this brutal world, were accomplishments enough. To the living and hopeful, attention must be paid.

I’d try to remind myself of this from time to time—even as I continued bombarding other newspapers with my fatuous rÉsumÉ. Even as I still yearned to interview Kevin Bacon. Even as I sauntered into work an hour late eating a jelly donut. Even as I leaned over Lippy’s desk and said, as I grinned wickedly, “So what’s up with us nor getting the day off for Good Friday? I mean, isn’t that like a major holiday or something?”

Chapter 11

I Was a Professional Lesbian

A LITTLE INITIATIVE
can be a dangerous thing. My final year as a reporter for
The Jewish Week,
I took it upon myself to write a lengthy, compassionate article about gay and lesbian rabbis. Feeling magnanimous and, perhaps, professionally suicidal, my editor, Sheldon, took it upon himself to run this article on the front page.

Gay spiritual leaders are hardly news. But back in the early 1990s,
The Jewish Week’s
idea of racy and controversial journalism was to publish a low-fat recipe for potato kugel.

“Oh, are we going to get phone calls over this one,” groaned the managing editor. “Fifty readers canceled their subscriptions last year just because we changed the typeface. When we ran that article on Jewish nursing homes, we were besieged with angry letters from geriatrics complaining we’d given their children ‘ideas.’ Now we’ve got a photograph on the front page of a single, pregnant, lesbian rabbi.” He tossed a copy across his desk. “I might as well just harvest my own organs with a letter opener.”

Sure enough, the paper had barely been on the newsstands an hour when the phones started ringing, lighting up the receptionist’s desk like a Las Vegas casino. Sheldon announced that while he would handle all the calls from irate community leaders, all those from lay lunatics, religious zealots, and freaked-out grandmothers should be directed to me. Helen, the receptionist, attempted to screen my calls. However, since I’d never managed to figure out the intercom system, this basically resulted in her shouting across the newsroom to me:

“Susan, there’s a Mrs. Ida Mandlebaum on line one. SAYS SHE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT YOUR GAY RABBI ARTICLE.”

“Ooh,” my ever-supportive colleagues hooted gleefully from behind their computer monitors. “Susan’s in trouble! Susan’s in trouble!”

“Have fun,” said Steven, slinging his feet up onto his desk. “Remember, our subscription office is based in Omaha. Tell ‘em they’re wasting their time coming in here for a refund.”

Before picking up the phone, I braced myself. Certainly, I’d gotten angry calls from readers before. But until now, these had always been due to my own ineptitude: misspelling the name of the deceased in an obituary, for example, or referring to the head of the B’nai B’rith Sisterhood as “sixty-ish” when, it turned out, okay, she was only thirty-nine. But this time, my critics would not be mollified by an apology and a simple printed retraction. I’d actually have to defend what I’d written on principle.

To be sure, there were a lot of lofty and noble reasons to profile gay and lesbian rabbis. These were people, after all, who felt such a profound love for Judaism they’d dedicated their lives to it despite the fact that the Bible condemned their sexuality. Their work was a testimony to the power of faith and to the desire to serve God. None of this, however, had been what motivated me. I’d simply written the story because the topic seemed titillating and I was sure it would piss off our readers.

As I’d compiled my research, I relished the idea of thousands of complacent, self-righteous Orthodox Jews picking up the morning paper over a steaming cup of coffee and prune Danish, then having a seizure. It hadn’t occurred to me that, in place of doing this, they might simply opt to call me instead.

“Yes, Mrs. Mandlebaum,” I said hurriedly. My tactic, I’d decided, was to sound offhand and distracted—and therefore, maybe, not fully accountable.

“Are you Susan Gilman?” the woman on the other end of the line demanded. Her Long Island accent was so thick that for a moment I thought one of my friends might be playing a joke on me. That I worked for
The Jewish Week
seemed to amuse my cohorts to no end. Friends were constantly calling the office, asking to speak to me, then disguising their voices as they offered up bogus story suggestions.
Hello, this is Mr. Manischeweitz from the Manischeweitz Matzo Ball Factory. I was wondering if you might be interested in doing a story about my balls. You see, they’re not quite as firm as they used to be.
That sort of thing. Great wits, my friends.

“Okay, who is this, really?” I said now, reaching for my nail file. “I’m on a tight deadline, you know.”

“I told you,” the voice said. “I’m Mrs. Mandlebaum. And I need to know, are you the lady who wrote the story about the lesbian rabbis?”

“Why?” I said cagily.

“Because of my daughter, Brandi,” said the woman, “she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s attractive—and I’m not just saying this because I’m her mother, either. She has a degree in psychology from Brandeis and an MSW from Columbia. So I was thinking that—oh, Brandi would kill me for doing this—but, I was thinking that, are you by any chance single?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“It’s just that Brandi isn’t getting any younger,” Mrs. Mandlebaum sighed. “And some of the girls she’s dated in the past. A housing contractor. A dance instructor. Augh. Don’t even get me started,” said Mrs. Mandlebaum, clearly getting started. “Her last girlfriend was a truck driver. Can you believe that? Whoever heard of such a thing? Worse yet, that no good little
gonif
broke Brandi’s heart. Smashed up her Subaru, then took the VCR
and
the food processor when she moved out. I told Brandi, I told her, ‘Don’t date
goyisha
dyke.’ But do children ever listen? No, they do not. So when I read your article, it occurred to me. You’re obviously such a well-educated, nice, gay Jewish girl. So I thought to myself ‘Ida, maybe you can make a
shiddach.’
Why not? Crazier things have happened.”

“Urn, Mrs. Mandlebaum,” I said.

“I thought ‘Who knows? Maybe Brandi and this Gilman girl will meet, fall in love, and the next thing you know, they’ll do one of those little ceremonies they do nowadays, and I’ll finally get to buy a dress. And then they can do a follow-up article on it, too, right in
The Jewish Week
—”

“Mrs. Mandlebaum? I’m flattered that you’d like to fix me up with your daughter,” I fairly shouted. Glancing around the newsroom, I noticed all my colleagues were grinning at me like maniacs. “But I’m not gay.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Mandlebaum. There was a pause. “You’re not?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oh, well. Naturally, reading your article, I thought … well.” She sounded apologetic and embarrassed. For a moment, an uneasy silence percolated between us.

Then she seemed to brighten. “Well, what about that rabbi on the cover?” she asked. “The cute, pregnant one.
She’s
still single, isn’t she?”

No sooner had I hung up when the phone lit up again. “Susan,” Helen called over, “a Mrs. Lowenthal’s calling for you about the rabbi article.”

“Susan Gilman,” I said, picking up the receiver.

“Susan Gilman?” a woman said primly. “Is this
the
Susan Gilman who wrote the article this week on lesbian rabbis?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

“Well, Susan, my name’s Harriet Lowenthal,” said the woman, “And I know this is probably going to sound really strange to you, but are you by any chance single?”

By the end of the day, I’d gotten no fewer than seventeen calls from Jewish mothers wanting to fix me up with their nice, lesbian daughters. This was not including the dinner invitation I received on my voice mail from a woman who described herself as a “fabulous fifty-one-years-young kosher dyke just back from three years in Nairobi.” I also got a call from someone named Alma, who told me she was a “goddess-worshipping but culturally Jewish” mother of three. “I’m really bisexual,” she explained. “And while some people think I’m just kidding myself, the fact is, I really do like to date men once in a while. After reading your article, I thought I should ask you out because you seemed like an open-minded-enough lesbian to handle it.”

I did receive one disgruntled phone call from someone named Myron Leftcort, who told me it was a good thing Jews didn’t believe in hell because otherwise that’s where I’d be going—along with all the gay rabbis I’d profiled, my editor, my publisher, Noam Chomsky, Ivana Trump, Andy Rooney, the Pointer Sisters, Imus, Caspar Weinberger, Al Sharpton, and about three dozen other public figures he seemed to have some gripe with. Someone also walked in and handed Helen an angry, anonymous letter scribbled on the back of a paper placemat from a Chinese restaurant. On one side was a handwritten diatribe declaring that
The Jewish Week
was a disgrace to the Jewish people and that “lezzies and fags are abominations.” On the other side were the standard little red drawings of animals and the question
What’s Your Chinese Zodiac Sign?
The anonymous letter writer was apparently a Goat—he’d taken great pains to circle it and write in the margin “the best!!!”

“He’s telling us we’re all bad Jews while he’s eating pork fried rice and dabbling in the occult down at Woh Hopp’s?” Lippy laughed. “Wow. You can’t make this stuff up.”

Rather than being shocked or appalled by the idea that there were gay and lesbian rabbis in their midst, our readership, it turned out, seemed far more concerned that there might be someone—anyone in the Jewish community—who had not yet been set up with their still-single gay daughters.

All week long, phone calls came in from desperate mothers and exuberant dykes. Rabbis called, hoping to set me up with their closeted gay colleagues. Grandmothers called, offering to mail me pictures of their granddaughters. It wasn’t people’s assumption that I was gay that bothered me; rather, it was the relentless wisecracking from my colleagues.

“Maybe you should change your voice mail message,” Steven suggested. “You know.
Hi, this is Susan Gilman, lesbian reporter at
The Jewish Week
newspaper. By that I mean I write about Lesbians
—
not that I actually am one.
”

“We all knew you were desperate,” said Lippy, “but using a cover story to troll for dates? Why couldn’t you just use the personals like any other pathetic loser?”

“Maybe, up until now, you were straight by default,” my colleague Toby suggested. “You know, maybe you’ve just been going out with men because you’ve never thought a woman would ever have you.”

Even Sheldon got into the act. “Susan, I know that homosexuality is something you’re born with,” he said slyly, “but maybe you should try converting anyway. Because let’s face it. You haven’t gotten this much action since the day you walked in here.”

Though I prided myself on being able to take a joke, by the end of the week, I had pretty much had it.