For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories Page 7

  Marty knew why they passed over him but considered his community self-righteous and unjust. They shushed him when he sang louder than the hazzan, and hissed when, in the tradition of the Talmudists, he engaged the rabbi in a dialogue during his speech. Others might behave differently, Marty knew. But he’d committed no crime. The disrespect they showed him, in comparison, was indefensible according to Jewish law—a sin greater than murder for which one loses his place in heaven. Marty had learned this himself from the books that the Habad missionaries, milling about outside Penn Station, give away.

  So he had gone up on Saturday to get his aliyah, gone up to the bimah even though the gabbai had called Irv Wexler’s name. He felt like tradition was on his side. For what other reasons are birthrights given except to be rightfully claimed? Marty beat Irv to the Torah and grabbed hold of the rollers. He told the gabbai, Dave Falk, to cancel Irv Wexler and call his Hebrew name. Dave Falk rolled his eyes and spoke to Marty out of the side of his mouth. “Marty, this ain’t the bank. You can’t cut in line.”

  “Call my name,” Marty had said, squeezing tighter as if he wanted Falk to say “uncle,” as if every twist to the rollers sent him a rush of pain.

  Leah was upstairs in the women’s section, consigned to the audience. Robin was home making lunch. Sammy had acted, walked briskly to his father’s side. “I’m begging you,” he said. He gave his father’s sleeve a tug. But Marty was making a point. The gabbai wouldn’t take back what he said and looked to the rabbi for help. The rabbi, with all those years of private counseling, could not have known more about whom he was dealing with, could not have had better odds at knowing just what to say. This might be the reason the rabbi stayed in his seat; maybe he was trying to figure out the halachic solution, if it was indeed possible to cancel the aliyah of Irv Wexler—a man present, willing, in good standing and good health. As for talking Marty down, he had to know this couldn’t be done.

  Irv Wexler was not seeking Talmudic remedies. He had grown up in Brooklyn with Dave Falk and Marty and half the congregation. He had a solution of his own. Irv climbed the two stairs and stepped through the opening in the railing that circled the dais. He told Marty to beat it and gave him a shove. That’s how the fight broke out. It was like a boxing match at the Garden, all the men in suits surrounding the ring, the women in the blue seats screaming down from above. It wasn’t even Marty, but the gabbai, Dave Falk, who knocked the Torah to the floor.

  Very strict. They live by the letter of the law. When a Torah hits the ground, is disgraced in such a way, the community must share in a fast of forty days. They split the days among them.

  Thinking back, Marty decided he got short shrift. It was Dave who knocked over the Torah. Robin should have turned Dave Falk out of the house, sent him to Five Cedars for a rest.

  Leah told Marty this also: The rabbi wasn’t the only one making calls. Robin had called the rabbi first. She begged him to cancel the fasting. It was torture, her mother said, to have the community fasting in her husband’s name. The rabbi, of all people, knew Marty was a sick man. But Rabbi Baum wouldn’t ask anything of anyone. Sick man or not.

  “I’m not sick,” Marty told Leah. “Do I sound sick to you? It’s a matter of levels. My levels are ajar. Not exactly typhoid fever. It’s not the black death, after all. It is a number that doesn’t match some other number on some chart. A discrepancy. Only a small discrepancy in my blood.”

  “It’s a waste if you’re not going to smoke them,” Marty says. Doe takes a second puff to show his good faith. After a day in solitary that’s all Marty can expect. “Now don’t go trying to prove anything,” Marty tells him, “we’ve got it damn good, as long as we have to be in here.” Leaning back in his chair, Marty feels his eyelids sliding down over his eyes. “Like heaven,” he says. “It’s like being in heaven.” Marty means this in so many ways. There is the soft light from the windows and the soft white-clad nurses floating in their silent white shoes down the halls. There are the medications that seep like molasses into all the crevices of the mind. After meds at night, who can say, lying back in bed, that it isn’t like being cradled in the dense ether of a cloud?

  The luggage is piled by the nurses’ station. “His brother is my rabbi,” Marty is telling them for the thousandth time. “Now isn’t that a kick?” Doe is at his side, waiting for a goodbye.

  Marty pulls out a gold-plated card case and hands a business card to Doe. He passes a second to Marjorie. “In case he loses that one,” Marty says. He gives her a wink, like it’s a private joke. To Doe he says, “Come. You’ll stay with us when you get out. You’ve helped me get better in here. Like your brother, more and more. Next it’s my turn to get you back on your feet; no more nights on the street. Stay by me,” he says. A slap on the back and a nurse buzzes Marty out the door.

  The house is there when Marty pulls up, no potatoes or parking lots, no wrecking crew tearing down walls. It’s evening and all the lights are on. There’s a dish on the dining room table and a half-full half gallon of milk—still cool. He finds a glass on the kitchen counter with the last sip forgone; a spaghetti pot soaking in the sink. Sammy’s room is a mess as usual. Leah has a family photo album open on top of the schoolbooks on her desk. Marty’s bedroom, their bedroom, looks as if Robin called in a maid. There is a studied organization to their knick-knacks, every surface has a lemony shine. Someone has gathered up all the short, wide, one-hundred-pill bottles of lithium from around the house and piled them into a pyramid in the middle of the dresser. It’s something Leah might have done while waiting for her mother. Something her mother might have done instead of saying goodbye.

  Marty grabs the pewter ashtray from his night table, takes a fresh pack of cigarettes, and sits down in the middle of the stairs. He pulls at his pant legs and hunkers down, resting his elbows on his knees.

  Marty calls the rabbi, sure that Robin would have spoken to him first. “She must have told you something,” he says.

  “She didn’t consult me, Marty. She called me after and didn’t leave a number. She said she’d call once a week until you call. And then. Then the usual time, the usual meeting, but not to fix things. In the past I’ve always talked her into meeting with you when she’s given up. Now I’m asking you to give her the same courtesy when, it appears, she’s given up for good. She wants to meet you, with me here. To settle things, as it were.”

  Marty does not tell the rabbi about Doe.

  “You should know, Rabbi,” he says, “I feel pretty bad about the Torah, even if it was David Falk who knocked it over. I feel bad about messing up the service. I wasn’t exactly myself. I hope you understand.”

  “Things like that shouldn’t ever happen, Marty.”

  “I know, Rabbi. You know I know.”

  “Yes,” the rabbi tells him. “I guess I understand.”

  “Well, the house is still here. That’s a sort of triumph, of sorts.” Marty is showing Doe around. The upright piano in the living room. “A gift for my Leah.” An antique clock on the mantel: porcelain, fine, detailed with lavender flowers and emitting a slow and masculine tick. “My grandmother brought it from Vienna. Martin, you know, is an Austrian name.”

  Doe still has his bag in one hand and a paper sack from the Five Cedars pharmacy in the other. Marty has not invited him to put anything down. “They’re gone, huh?”

  “So it seems,” Marty says, “so it seems. Want to see the upstairs?”

  “Yeah,” Doe says. “Let’s.”

  Marty stops with Doe at each of the doors, following them along the hall. First the master bedroom, spotless, only the pyramid of bottles out of place, then the bathroom, then Leah’s room, exactly as it was when he arrived, just as the plate and the glass and the now sour carton of milk sit out downstairs. “Sammy’s room,” Marty says at the end of the hallway. “You can stay in here.” Marty considers his friend for the first time since his arrival, as if giving him the once-over for a menial job. Doe is clean shaven. His jeans and shirt, dingy but laun
dered. His old boots, shined up.

  The room is a mess.

  “Like a museum,” Doe says. “The ones with the rooms that you can’t go in. Rooms with glass half filling the doors.”

  “I can see that,” Marty says. “Very sharp. They sharpened you right up in there.” Marty enters first, feigning ease. “Make yourself at home. But don’t touch anything. When they come back I want it all right as it was.” Marty lifts a record album from the unmade bed. A sock hangs by its heel from the record’s sleeve. He puts it on the desk across the room.

  “What’s with the sock?” Doe says.

  “Tape,” Marty tells him. “It has to be just right.”

  They both nap. Marty in Leah’s and Doe in Sammy’s bed. Marty is up first and walks down the hall, comforted to see someone sleeping under the covers. “Wake up,” he says, and gives Doe a shake. He looks at his watch. It’s time for them to take their pills.

  “What?” Doe says. “Sleep,” he says.

  “I told you,” Marty tells him. “I’m going to get your life on track this time. That means schedules—for both of us. Dinner at dinnertime. Sleeping at night. Awake during the day.” Doe has lined his pill bottles up on the base of the night-table lamp. Marty goes through the prescriptions as Doe stirs.

  There is one name that he doesn’t recognize. A pill he has not taken or read about or heard mention of before. He pops the cap and pours a couple of giant green tablets into his hand.

  “What the hell are these horse pills for?”

  “Which?” Doe says, his eyes still closed.

  “Green. And dry looking.”

  “They’re supposed to keep me from turning violent.”

  “Do they work?”

  “Never have before.”

  The owner of the kosher pizza place is a member of Ohav Shalom. She is a kind woman and keeps a tab for Marty. She knows Robin will eventually take care of the bills. She always does.

  Marty and Doe share a table for four. Marty is in a suit and wears a black yarmulke, Doe is wearing a yarmulke of Sammy’s, the boy’s name knit around the border by a girl in his class. Doe looks like a bum even clean. The customers stare without restraint.

  Marty and Doe eat an extra-large pizza. They drink can after can of Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda.

  Doe is a grand listener, even off the ward. Marty has never had someone with the same background and similar problems to talk with before. He has never been open in the down-there world, never been honest off the ward. Now he sits out in public talking, telling Doe about his first episode as if it were first love.

  “There is nothing in your body then. No inhibitors, no drugs. And it all happens at once. The response is hidden somewhere in your makeup, building up for a lifetime, waiting with its own biology, its own need to be born. For me, it started with synesthesia. I’m outside walking and it’s a bright day. Summer. And I can see the grass. And it’s green. And I can smell the grass but it’s not grass smell, it’s green smell. And I can taste it and hear it and everything, my whole me was green-grass green. It lasted a minute or a second or an hour. But I saw what I could do. What I could make happen. Like when you wake up in a dream and know it’s a dream and until you fall out of it you can fly and fuck strangers and turn yourself into an astronaut or a wolf. But I was calm, and feeling good, and thinking about my dead mother. I loved her so much. Missed her like anything. And so that’s what I used it for. And she was there in this all-around all-sense way, and I could talk to her and touch her and remember her while I walked with her. See her young and old in the same blink of an eye. It was a miracle. And I walked in that miracle for a day and a night and a day. And I brought my mother home that way, the whole experience of her. I was so happy, so overjoyed and overwhelmed and at peace, I wanted to show Robin. To have Robin see this, to share this all-sensory, all-being, honest-to-goodness miracle with my wife.”

  “She couldn’t,” Doe says.

  “Of course not. I didn’t even get to explain it. A whole mess. She was outside dragging me into the house soon as I turned the corner. She was crying, shrieking: Where had I been and where were my shoes and how did I cut my leg and how in the hell could I laugh? Well, how could she scream in the face of the magic of that moment? She just went on with her tantrum. The kids, small, were terrified. Right to the hospital. Right then. And I lost it on the way. The ability. I didn’t get to say goodbye. And I wanted to, desperately. A chance to say it right, no one gets that. I had it and I wanted it. And I tried for it in the car. I was clawing at this all-around place, trying to get back in.” Marty leans over, takes hold of Doe’s arm. “I never admitted to anything. Knew enough to deny it. But that feeling, that last time with my mother, it’s as real to me as my wedding day. Only it’s more real because it was better than real. More wonderful and amazing than anything I’ve experienced before or since. And sometimes it’s too tempting to try to get there again. To skip the meds and see where I land. Now tell me—how am I supposed to explain that to Robin?”

  “Can’t,” Doe says.

  “Exactly. That’s why I need your brother. He gets her back for me. He swings things my way with Jewish family talk and pity-for-the-ill and lots-in-life and fathers-for-children. He talks her home for me.”

  “Does he know that I’m with you?”

  “No,” Marty says. “But he’ll find out on Wednesday. Robin wants to see me at his house. We’ll have a double reunion. You and I will arrive all gussied up and well balanced. They will look at us and know. It will be emotional—that can’t be helped. People will cry. Maybe all of us. But they will see us looking handsome and healthy, and your brother, the master of forgiveness, will be first. His usual fine example. And then both families will be reunited. Simple as that.”

  There was finagling involved, a call for the manager, some trained, disgruntled-customer-style indignation, and Marty succeeded in getting his Brooks Brothers account reinstated. Both he and Doe left for the reunion at Rabbi Baum’s house in sharp, classic pinstripes—the picture of sober style.

  Doe fiddles with the glove compartment. He tries to slide his hand into a jacket pocket sewn shut.

  “Probably I should wait,” he says.

  Marty turns off the main avenue onto Baum’s block. He stops the car.

  “No, sir. We should go in there together. Dazzle them. Sweep them off their feet with our fine appearance and good intentions.”

  “Tell him first,” Doe says. “Go tell him that I’m here.”

  “And what, you’ll sit in the car and wait? Like an idiot?”

  “Yes,” Doe says, “an idiot.”

  “Won’t have it. We’ll make our entrance together. A pair of fallen men reborn.”

  Robin is talking to the rebbetsen on the front steps as Marty and Doe make their way up the slate walk.

  “Moish,” the rebbetsen calls into the house. “Moish, get out here,” she calls through the closed storm door. It is the tone she uses when the children fall and there is blood. Robin turns and her smile drops away. Rabbi Baum is out on the steps, his breathing short. He does not touch his wife in public, and over the years physical cues have been shunted into looks. He gives his; she responds. Wordless. And he focuses on the man behind Marty.

  A reunion. The rabbi runs down the stairs. He is a small man, narrow, though his face is large, with the tacked-up eyes. A Baum face, if ever there was. As he approaches, Marty thinks he may be reversing in scale, getting smaller instead of larger with every step.

  “A nightmare,” Rabbi Baum says. “Horrible enough over the years, wondering when you’d be in together. Each time you were out, I’d wait, then nothing. I thought maybe I’d be spared.”

  “Your brother, Rabbi. Looking like a million bucks.”

  The rebbetsen covers her mouth with both hands. She is talking, you can tell, into her palms. Robin makes her way over.

  “Who is this?” she yells. “Tell me what you’ve done.”

  The rabbi and Doe stand staring at each
other. The similarities between them are clear.

  “The rabbi’s brother, Robin. He was in with me on the ward. A fluke. A friendship. He sleeps in Sammy’s bed. Today is the day of the double reunion. I’ve brought the rabbi’s brother back from the dead.”

  The rabbi takes his brother by the shoulders. He does not hug him but turns him around. “Go,” he says, “back to your gutter. Take your fancy clothes and get away.”

  “No reunions,” Robin says. “No more wasted life.”

  “Go,” the rabbi yells. He stamps a foot, as one might to scare off a cat. Doe is still facing the street, his cheeks and neck and ears turning bright red.

  “Take it easy there,” Marty says and touches Doe’s arm. “We don’t want any trouble.” Marty says this to all of them. “We are better now, under control. We have made mistakes and now we are sorry.”

  “You are a man without boundaries,” the rabbi tells Marty. “There are limits, prescribed, written. You’ve overshot, both of you. Mercy is not required. Nowhere does it say I must forgive.” From behind the rebbetsen’s hands comes a noise, a weird triple-sound that is yelling and crying and praying to God. And behind her, in window after window, faces begin to pop up. One little one behind the storm door tries to get out. The rebbetsen steps in front of her, stands half in and half out of the house, watching from behind the glass of the door.

  Marty does not answer. He is watching the rebbetsen and the half-open door. He can’t help but think of that sweet stink from their house, the by-product of life, of their happy home, seeping out into the air. Seal it in, he wants to tell her. If they ever leave, you will need it to survive.