For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories Read online

  “More,” called the voice. “The farce can’t have already come to its end. More!” it said. Another voice, that of a woman, came from the same place and barely carried to the stage.

  “Yes, keep on,” it said. “More of the Jewish ballet.” The fatuous laugh that followed, as with the other, was picked up by the audience and the cavernous echo so that it seemed even the wooden cherubim laughed from above.

  The Rebbe took a deep breath and began to tap with his foot.

  Mendel waved him off and stepped forward, moving downstage, the spotlight harsh and unforgiving against his skin. He reached out past the footlights into the dark, his hands cracked and bloodless, gnarled and intrusive.

  Mendel turned his palms upward, benighted.

  But there were no snipers, as there are for hands that reach out of the ghettos; no dogs, as for hands that reach out from the cracks in boxcar floors; no angels waiting, as they always do, for hands that reach out from chimneys into ash-clouded skies.

  Reunion

  The house has an odd smell to it, an odor. The rabbi’s got thirteen kids and that’s the smell. The constant cycling of daily needs. Someone always eating or shitting, putting on socks or taking them off. But it’s not white like on the ward. Not sterile and faked. It’s real life over there with the smells that go with it.

  Marty is saying this himself, explaining it to another patient in the dayroom as he grinds out a cigarette and picks a bit of tobacco from his tongue.

  Marty feels at home on the ward. Both his children had been born there when it was maternity, before they changed it all around and put in the steel doors. You can’t wipe away that kind of feeling, though, the joy of births and new lives, of daughters and sons. Maybe that’s why they keep the mentals there now, to give the place a metaphysical boost—let them recuperate on a ward with hope-soaked, life-affirming walls.

  He treats the place as if it were a country club, dressing in expensive, casual slacks and loafers, pressed shirts and V-neck sweaters that give off more of a feeling of money than would jackets and ties. He plays the part as well. Acts as if, as long as he can’t get back to his golf game, he might as well make the best of it, smiling at the other patients, shaking hands, quipping and winking, and laughing through his nose whenever the chance arises.

  The staff favors Marty and encourages the new friendship he’s made.

  A John Doe is picked up off the street of a neighboring suburb in the midst of a violent rage; he is rolled onto the ward strapped to a gurney, fighting to free his wrists from the canvas bands or tear his hands off trying.

  The nurses land a needle in his thigh.

  Then Marty, big man on the ward, wanders into Doe’s room as a pair of nurses is removing the restraints. With a finger keeping place in a hardcover biography, Marty leans over, peers into Doe’s drugged face, and says, “I could swear we’ve met. Is it possible that you were here with me last spring?”

  And Doe answers a moment later, maybe two. “No,” he says, “I don’t believe I was.”

  Most of the nurses and all the rest of the patients are afraid of Doe. But Marty has found in him a huge, brooding confidant. A willing ear. Doe is not outwardly compassionate or wise, but the companionship is enough. For Marty has a lot to say and not enough time to say it with the thoughts coming so fast and the drugs slowing Marty down.

  “Like having a honeycomb in my head,” he says. “A geometric form with every side as much up as down. Soon as I have my feet firmly planted, I discover I’m sideways—and all the other slopes looking flat as floor.”

  When Doe is preoccupied, when he nods off or is simply caught in his own head, Marty pictures himself moving from chamber to chamber, walking up walls like Fred Astaire. Taking these odd angles on and seeing where they go.

  Sometimes it is the plate falling and falling and falling. A satellite. His moon. Marty at home with his family watching himself, watching the plate, watching everything go terribly wrong.

  Then there is shul, him reaching, the gabbai yelling. The Torah falling and unfurling and spreading outward like a red carpet, black word after word after word.

  Doe is street-ugly. That is, not unhandsome naturally, but his nose has had breaks, and there are old scars and new sores, a tangle of beard, and a dangerous look that is always there so that even if Doe is stumbled upon sleeping behind a Dumpster a person is forced to think twice. And the nurses do. They double up always, especially for late-night check-ins, when, considering how deeply they sedate him, it is a precaution more easily attributed to fear of the dark.

  Marty, on the other hand, arrived at the nurses’ station ready to sign himself in with a whole set of Italian-make hard-case luggage in tow.

  Marjorie, the head nurse, knows him of course. He is in and out more and more often over the years. The cycles speed up that way with age. “The wife,” he says, shrugging. He is there for Robin, as a favor to her.

  The nurses are prejudiced against this wife. Their patients are not generally debonair and handsome in a way that makes the heart rush. When she arrives to make sure Marty is in, they see a little woman, drawn and tired in her cheap blouses and A&S shoes. Robin has no smiles or anecdotes, no warmth for them. After she leaves they wonder if she cuts her own hair.

  This time, as soon as the wife left, Marty put a case up on the counter and popped it open, click and then click. So staged in his motions, so dramatic, still talking while he rifled through. “Looks like I’ve been making scenes again. Seems I’ve stretched the family budget a bit too far.” Pulling back his arm, he said, “Here it is. A gift for you, Marjorie.” He lowered the case, passed her a ribboned and bowed box. A younger nurse blushed. “In Milan,” he said, “I had a feeling that we’d be seeing each other, thought I might be back this way soon. Fine leathers,” he said, “fine women. Fine weather. A beautiful country. You should try and get there this time of year.”

  “Tell Robin you were thinking of her in Milan,” Marjorie said, handing back the gift. “Now why don’t you get set up. Nurse Williams will take you to your room.” Marjorie would have none of it. She never did. In the past, other nurses had been more susceptible to his flattery. There was one, once, back a while, that had been dismissed. She had been seen straightening the seams of her white stockings as she made her way out of his room.

  “A chopped-liver moon,” Marty says, “if I had to freeze it, freeze the moment when I knew it’d gone wrong. I walked into the house after synagogue, same as always. Table set, wine and challah, four small plates of liver, each with a little slice of carrot on top. Hardly in the room a second and the plate is up in the air, headed toward me. And there’s this moment when I’m watching it high in its trajectory, hanging in an are over the table. Robin’s looking at it, the kids are looking up at it, we’re all watching this plate hanging there. A perfect little moon that is all the sadness and anger that is my home.” Marty bites at a nail, looking off. “Once the dishes start to fly, it’s not long until I’m back in here.” He turns to Doe. “Something’s gone very wrong in my life.”

  “Better in here,” Doe says. “Something goes right if I’m in here.”

  “Nah,” Marty tells him. “You don’t mean that. Loving the kids so much, my Leah and my Sammy, loving Robin the way I do, it’s only trouble. You did it right for people like us. Living on the street. Free. Cut loose.”

  “Cut myself loose,” Doe says. “But I didn’t drift very far.”

  The children, Leah and Sammy, had beat him home from services. Marty had taken his time, strolling down Walnut and thinking to himself all the things he should have said. He had stepped into the dining room muttering a righteous speech, and Robin, raging, had thrown a small Corning Ware dish at his head. It shattered on the wall and he felt the splinters against his neck. She threw a glass and it hit the wall with greater force. Marty touched a finger behind his ear and there was blood. Leah screamed, “Ima!”

  “Go now,” Robin said, “anywhere. Just go. Disappear or I’ll hav
e to kill you for what you do to this family. I’ll stab you to death right here in front of the children and that will really ruin their lives.” Leah caught her mother’s glance toward the table and grabbed for the serrated challah knife on the cutting board. “Unnecessary, dear, I’m going to use a butcher knife. I’m going to stab your father through the heart, not saw off his head.”

  “Ima!” Leah screamed, holding it long so that her voice broke and the tendons in her neck went taut. “Ima, don’t,” she screamed, dropping to her knees. Sammy did not scream, did not say anything. And if his mother had wanted to get a meat knife from the kitchen, he would have stepped aside and let her pass.

  “Robin would have left me long ago if it weren’t for the rabbi. The master of forgiveness. He can explain anything away.

  “Not so much what he says, either. But his style. The example he sets. A good man, the rabbi. Always ready to roll up his sleeves to save a Jewish marriage. Sits behind his big desk in front of a mint’s worth of silver picture frames. Talks about peace in the home in his high girl’s voice, with that sweet stink of a smell in the air. And Robin can’t get away. My wife’s helpless inside that house, with a football team at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the place running like a machine. If they can pull that off, what’s Robin got to say? Two lovely children and a problem husband are too much? The rabbi and his wife have a baker’s dozen: two of them slow and one with leg braces, clanking around the house like the Tin Man.”

  “My brother,” Doe says. “My brother is the rabbi of your shul.” Doe takes a long, long pause, looking past Marty. He gives a short sigh. “Maybe,” he says.

  Marty is leaning forward in his chair, rubbing both palms in circles against his knees. He heard it right. Not the claim, but the word. “Shul” is what Doe said. Not “temple” or “synagogue,” but “shul.”

  “What do you mean ‘rabbi’?” Marty asks.

  “Over at Ohav Shalom, In Bridgelawn.”

  The silence is Marty’s this time. He’s considering. The delivery was sincere. But they are short on sanity, not sincerity, on the ward. There is the old lady with rouge caked on her cheeks who stands patiently by the nurses’ station, a paper flower taped to her wrist and waiting for her prom date to arrive. There is the tiring textbook schizoid who thinks the CIA is out to get him, and another patient who corresponds with her dead daughter and the drowned star Natalie Wood. She writes them joint letters—fully aware they never write back. Each of these people is sincere as can be. And now Doe: “My brother is your rabbi.” Doe, Marty’s good listener. Like the rabbi. Doe, his friend. Marty looks, studies, decides in a flash.

  “Of course,” Marty yells, and brings down an open palm on the low table. “I knew I knew you,” he says. “Did I not say so from the start? Your last name, what is it, after all?”

  “Baum,” Doe says. And Baum it is. Rabbi Baum of Bridgelawn.

  “You’re lying,” Marty says; his smile is broad.

  “Not in for lying, if they locked up liars …”

  Marty lets out a yelp, starts to stand, sits, gives the table another slap.

  “I’ll be damned. So that’s where I know you from. From the pull to your eyes, and the way you walk. I know your genes. I recognize the prominent strands of Baum DNA.” A nurse comes by to check on the noise. Marty stands, puts a hand on Doe’s shoulder. “Did I not say it? Did I not say this man looked familiar?” He pinches a cheek. “Did I not from day one recognize a classic Baum face?”

  On the night of the broken dishes, Marty went away to anywhere. To Milan.

  When he returned, when he walked through the door with the Connecticut Limousine driver following, carrying in case after beautiful case, Robin, after thirty-one days of cooldown, said, “A real piece of work, you are.”

  “You told me to disappear.”

  “And to steal my credit card?”

  “You cut mine up. And being you is so easy. Is it my fault you have a flexible name?”

  “Madman’s logic,” she said.

  “I brought gifts.”

  Robin blocked the driver as he came in with a trunk. “Back out,” she said, “wrong address. To Five Cedars. To the loony bin.” Like she was sending them out for milk, or a video, out to cruise the quiet streets searching for the kids’ lost dog.

  “For real?” the driver said.

  “No joke,” Robin told him. She turned to Marty, “Otherwise the next time you go out for cigarettes, walk down to the duck pond, bend over to get the newspaper off the edge of the lawn, we will be gone. Me, the kids, the house itself. One spin around the block and you’ll come back to a parking lot, to a quarter acre of potatoes. The neighbors won’t even remember what was here.”

  “Does your brother know you’re here?”

  “Dead to him,” Doe says. “Sat shiva over me, tore his shirt.”

  “What’d you do?” Marty asks.

  “Something bad.”

  “Must’ve been if you ended up dead to such a generous man.”

  A male orderly tries to get them out of their chairs for dinner. He condescends, addresses Doe as a half-wit. Without moving anything but his arm, Doe, with surprising alacrity, reaches out and grabs the orderly’s inner thigh. Doe has a good grip, judging by the orderly’s whimpering and the number of nurses it takes to pry his fingers free.

  “Well, now you’ve done it,” Marty says. And Doe has done it; they lock him up in solitary for the rest of the day.

  He embarrasses them. That is Marty’s great sin. And Robin, whenever she accuses him of it, makes sure he understands exactly how he has transgressed, whether he has embarrassed them into deeper debt, or further embarrassed the family’s future. There are also the endless public embarrassments, which consist, as far as he can tell, of Marty’s being himself and his loved ones being ashamed.

  It is this last form that first landed Marty in the rabbi’s study eight years back. A little prank, a tug at a bathing suit, some joking around with Sammy and his friends at the public pool.

  The picture frames on the rabbi’s desk stand clear in Marty’s mind. The rabbi across that broad desktop, and the many black backs of frames, like tombstones, between them.

  “My own kid, Rabbi.” Marty had been on the defensive. “My own son says to me, ‘I wish you were dead.’ ”

  “And so he hits him.” Robin with both hands on the purse in her lap, finishing his sentences. “First he mortifies his son, then slaps Sammy so hard he knocks a tooth loose.”

  “A baby tooth,” Marty had said.

  “Turned my baby’s cheek blue.” Robin started crying. She didn’t reach for a tissue either, just let her makeup run, hands resting on her bag. “I can’t live like this, Rabbi. I’m still a young woman.” And the rabbi—how odd now, remembering. The rabbi, Doe’s brother, his own hidden shame—he had circled round the desk, had grabbed hold of their chairs and lowered his head.

  “Do you think Marty would have been created in this way,” the rabbi said, “if he were not also given the means to triumph over his condition? Do you think, Robin, that your husband would have special needs if his wife were not special enough to hold the family together?”

  Craning their necks, looking into his face, they both considered the questions. The rabbi smiled a warm clergyman’s smile. “This is not about God,” he said. “It’s not about religion. What this is, is basic humanity. To shirk our responsibilities to each other as human beings is to let the family unit crumble, to hurry society as a whole on its return to dust.”

  The rabbi stepped back in a half bow, his fingers trailing off the backs of the chairs. Robin reached in her purse and pulled out her car keys, then snapped it closed.

  “He turned my Sammy’s cheek blue.”

  “Wishing me dead, my own son.” Marty slapped at his chest. “That,” he said, “turned my whole life blue.”

  With Doe locked away Marty turns his chair toward the window; he reads three chapters of his book; he calls home frequently to make sure his f
amily is still there. He hangs up on his wife. He gets information from his daughter. And tries, over and over again, to catch his son.

  Sammy answers the phone.

  “Hiyah,” Marty says. “Heh, there.” The boy will have nothing to do with him when he’s like this, so Marty strikes quick: “Everything going OK? School OK? Any new girlfriends?”

  “You can’t be serious.” Marty is surprised by his son. Proud. Already a cynical little man.

  “Sure I’m serious. I called special to talk to you. You know,” Marty says, “you’re allowed to come by and visit. What I’ve got’s not catchy, I can promise you that. Like painting a picture or carrying a tune, like people who can bend their thumbs all the way back. You’ve either got it or you don’t. Understand?”

  Nothing. Only silence.

  “You were born here for Christ’s sake. Don’t you even want to see the place?”

  Sammy hangs up the phone.

  These are the things his Leah has told him: The rabbi kept calling as he had promised Marty he would. The rabbi continued to call even after Robin asked him not to—until Robin told him to say she wouldn’t take his calls. “Tell Marty that I wouldn’t talk to you,” her mother had said. “Tell him I slammed down the receiver in your ear.” As far as Leah could tell, the rabbi was happy with this. He never called again.

  Marty is a Kohen, of the priestly class of Jews. In the Orthodox community in which they live this holds weight. The Levites wash Marty’s hands on High Holydays. During the repetition of the Eighteen Benedictions he approaches the ark in stocking feet and drapes his tallis over his head. He fans his fingers, presses together his thumbs, and, turning to face the congregation, blesses them in the name of God.

  Out of the one hundred and seven families who attend, there are only eight Kohanim, including Marty and his son. The first aliyah to the Torah, the first called up to say the blessing over the weekly portion, goes to the Kohen. Marty should have been called up for an aliyah every eighth week. He kept a tally in his head. They had cycled three times fully and not once called his name.