DISOWNED (19 page)

time is too many. It is all said in her look.

   "Now, why did you two elope?" Genevive asks Matthew once or twice more over the weekend. But she never listens for an answer. In her presence Rivkah is turned into a phantom. She is not seen, may not be heard, and spends most of the weekend outside alone, walking back and forth on the beautiful, rolling lawn.  After the weekend is over neither Rivkah nor Matthew return to see Genevive again.

As the days pass, Rivkah and Matthew are friendly to one another, strangers in some ways, companions in others. Little emotion passes between them. It is as if cool winds were blowing over all parts of Rivkah's life. 

A world without emotion,
she writes in her diary,
is a world of clarity. Empty though. Peculiarly empty, like unformed snow.

Outcasts from the separate worlds they were raised in, the two of them share meals, conversations and a group of new friends.

My own world is gone,
she writes.
Vanished. But how can a world vanish just like that?

But it has. There is no sight, taste or sounds of her family. Not one of them is allowed to contact her. She is completely dead.

Still, Matthew enjoys introducing his friends to Rivkah and she enjoys meeting them. Before he takes her to them, he carefully chooses the dresses and colors she is to wear. For Matthew it is comforting. It is as though he has found some exotic creature. A creature that in no way reminds him of his home.

She is a creature, too, that asks little of him. When he stays up, alone, through the long hours at night, needing space, unwilling to come to bed, Rivkah stays by herself in the other room, deep inside her little book,
On Zen
.

"Keep reading that book," Matthew is delighted with it. "I agree with it whole-heartedly. Attachment is ridiculous. The whole world is absurd."

  "That's not what it says. That's a complete misunderstanding."

"What does it say?"

"Come read it yourself."

   "Not today." He never takes it beyond that either. 

  As the days go by, hungry for more, Rivkah decides it is time to return to college, in the city this time. Matthew decides to leave theater and finds himself a place in the business world. Change is upon them Rivkah realizes, and it is good. 

   Early that autumn, just before the new term, Rivkah and Matthew move uptown into a bright, one bedroom apartment near Columbia University. She brings wooden eating bowls, straw mats, books, and pictures of Zen Masters, which smile at her from the walls. Gratefully, she smiles in return.

   
Rabbis,
she writes that night,
I have moved uptown, here on the fourteenth floor with sun, sky, and pictures. But not your pictures! I have new pictures with me, pictures of the Awakened Ones. They keep me company all night long and look at me with no judgments in their eyes.

Rivkah thinks of her own family then. There is no one she can tell about what is going on. Most of all she wonders about her little brother David, about how he is growing, and if the family ever talks to him about her at all.

Classes at college start a few days later and she also takes a part-time job in a nearby bookstore. A slightly bent over, old Jewish man with grey hair, runs the bookstore. Hyman Needleman. He says very little to her during the week, but puts her salary in a paper envelope for her every Friday afternoon and hands it to her directly.

   "Is it enough for you?" he asks kindly.

   "It is."

   One Friday afternoon, he looks at her more closely from under his bushy eyebrows as he is handing over the envelope. "You're married so young?"

   "I am." She doesn't want to talk further.

   "It's personal?"

   Rivkah flushes.

"You don't want me to ask you anything?" 

   Rivkah pulls sharply back. "Of course it's personal."

  "You'll excuse me," he says very slowly, "but for no reason at all, you look very familiar to me."

Rivkah's heart starts beating madly. "How can that be?"

"I can't put my finger on it."

Trembling, she puts the envelope down on the counter. Her mind starts racing. Could he be from Brooklyn? From the old neighborhood?

   "Here take it back. I don't want it."

  The old man is startled. "It's your pay."

"I don't want it."

   "What?"

   Then, like a fugitive, she turns on her heel and runs to the door.

   Babbling a little, he chases after her. "Did I say something? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What did I do?"

   But, by then, Rivkah is out of the store and down the street. Far down the street.

   He must know me from Brooklyn. Where else can he know me from? But she doesn't want anyone to know she is here. Not even a trace of herself does she want to leave behind.

"I've got to find a new job," she tells Matthew after a few days.

"Why?" He looks at her strangely. He is rising in the company and a group of new people have started to surround him. There are meetings, lunches, calls and dinners with tall, blonde and elegant people, not unlike, Rivkah imagines, the people he once knew at home.

   Matthew is delighted with this new world he's found himself in. He buys new suits, combs his hair back straight, and many nights sits in his office late at work. When he has to, he takes Rivkah to meetings with him. Only when he has to. 

Quickly she learns how to look like his companions, talk with them, go to fashionable restaurants, drink cocktails and laugh. What are they laughing at, she wonders?  Though she is not certain she laughs along, and looks away from the scathing emptiness that is growing inside.

   Whenever Rivkah arrives with Matthew, a tall blonde, Vivien, who works in his office, throws her a long side glance. She is cool and uncomfortable with Rivkah though Rivkah can't put her finger on why.

"That's a marvelous dress you're wearing, Vivien." Rivkah tries to make her feel better. "The account is doing very well, I suppose."

Vivien turns away uneasily, and dashes over to someone else. After two or three more cocktails, she rushes over to Matthew's side, slips her arm in his arm and chatters madly. Rivkah watches the two of them nonplussed. They fit together, she thinks to herself.

   In many ways Matthew is good to Rivkah. He encourages her studies and even insists that she go on.

   "I want you to know," he tells her outright one evening as they are both sitting on the couch reading, "that I am thrilled you spend so much time with your books."

   Rivkah has been deep inside a book. She looks up from it surprised.

"You don't make all kinds of crazy demands on me. Some women can't stop making demands."

The book Rivkah has been reading falls open in her lap.

"Hungry women." Matthew sneers.

Rivkah wonders who he is talking about? "Which women, Matthew? There's another woman?"

   "Don't be ridiculous. I'm just trying to tell you that no woman should expect all her satisfaction in a marriage with a man. Least of all from me. I'm not that kind of guy."

Rivkah swallows hard. 

"I like having a woman who can take care of herself. I never meant to marry a cow." He declares this with surprising force.

   "A cow?" Rivkah feels stung, insulted. She thinks of the women she has known growing up in Borough Park who stayed at home and raised huge families, one child after the next. She had never thought of them as cows. "I wouldn't exactly call women cows!"

"I despise cows," Matthew speaks with more intensity, stretches, and gets up from the sofa.

 Rivkah suddenly wants to cry.

   "I can't respect women like that."

"What kind of women do you respect, Matthew?"

"Business women, in sleek suits."

Rivkah notices him licking his lips.

"The smell of success around a woman excites me."

   An odd nausea takes hold of Rivkah. "The women I grew up with," 

   But he interrupts her. "Were they exciting?"

   "Not like the women you're talking about."

"Stimulating?"

"Maybe not."

"Interesting even?"

   "In their own way."

   "I can't imagine why you're defending them now." Matthew is  irritated.

   "It's not exactly that I'm defending them."

   "They hurt you, didn't they?"

   "Maybe."

   "So, tell me one good thing about those kinds of women."

   They were surrounded by love, Rivkah suddenly remembers and feels a throbbing pain inside.

   "Can you tell me something now?" He is persistent.

"No, I can't," she answers, "but I'm not a sleek, blonde, business woman, Matthew. And I never will be."

   "Too bad," he whispers under his breath.

 *  *  *

   As time proceeds Rivkah and Matthew fall into a comfortable pattern. He advances at work and takes up collecting early Americana which he keeps in his office, and which Vivien admires a lot. Rivkah studies hard, and collects fine Eastern calligraphy. They spend weekends with their circle of friends at parties, or in the country. Rivkah goes walking alone there and Matthew goes to old antique shops and brings back little pieces.

In his spare time on the weekends, Matthew has taken to making etchings of the generations of his family, as he remembers them. He doesn't like showing them to Rivkah, and neither of them ever speak of home.

   In the autumn Rivkah has gathered pine combs and put them on their window sills, along with autumn leaves and heather.

   "You must go on to graduate school," Matthew kept insisting, as Rivkah's senior year in college comes closer. "And not graduate school in philosophy either. The papers you write are impractical. Graduate school in psychology would do the trick."

   "What kind of trick?"

   "It will help you deal with reality." Matthew has developed an odd commitment to Rivkah's understanding reality, as he sees it. 

Rivkah sighs. She has given up trying to explain her questions to him. They are her questions, not his.

"You live in your own world more and more these days," Matthew says often.

   "So do we all," she plainly replies.

"Not like you do."

   "According to who, Matthew? According to who?" What does Matthew know of reality, Rivkah muses to herself. His days seem hollow to her, formulated, cut in stone. More and more when they speak these days, his eyes look past her at something or someone he is remembering. He barely sees her there at all.

   "Where is the man I married?" she sometimes asks when he comes home late, his briefcase stuffed full of papers and notes.

"Right here," he replies dryly.

I'm lonely Matthew, she longs to call out, but is afraid to. Forget your papers. Come sit here with me.

   "And I have no desire to discuss this further," he concludes as he drops the heavy load of papers on his eighteenth century desk that sits in the corner of the room. "Just be grateful that at least I come home."

"I am grateful," Rivkah replies.

* * *

As her senior year arrives Rivkah decides to go on to graduate school in psychology.

"Why psychology?" Rivkah's best friend Janice doesn't really understand it. "You're doing it to please him, aren't you?"

   Rivkah and Janice have taken to walking in the park together every day after classes. Now they sit down on a small wooden bench facing the river as the boats go by.

   "Possibly," Rivkah says softly.

   "But why?" Janice bristles, "who is he anyway?"

"My husband."

"So? Are you terrified he'll go and leave you alone?"

"Maybe, I am."

   "So, let him go, and study philosophy! It's what you love. It's who you are."

   "I can't let him go," Rivkah can barely whisper.

Janice turns and stares at her then. "Why not?"

   "I just can't."

"You work so hard. You are either working, studying or entertaining Matthew's friends. They're so different from you. Do you like them particularly?"

"Not very much."

"I didn't think so. They're not very interesting. And also, they're not very nice to you."

"Janice, stop."

A cool breeze from the river comes in at them and slaps both of their faces then. Janice almost gets up from the bench then. "Rivkah, these days you look so sad."

  "Do I?" Rivkah raises her hand to her face, touches it lightly, almost to remind herself she is there. Then she gets up from the bench.

"Don't you realize you're a beautiful woman? Unusual. Interesting."

   "Janice, I beg you."

"Do you love Matthew?"

   Bitter tears fill Rivkah's eyes.

   "Rivkah, Rivkah," Janice goes on, "what happened to you? You've never told me."

   Rivkah's whole body starts shaking.

   "I'm worried about you. Really. You can't even ask yourself if you love him or not!"

A few hours later, back in her apartment, Rivkah sits at her desk but cannot study. The words on the pages blur in front of her eyes.  She gets up and goes to the windows that look down the block to the edge of the river, and thinks of the conversation with Janice. It is the first time in a long time that anyone has said they were worried about her. She had no idea how much those words could mean.

That evening Rivkah decides to talk to Matthew about it."I had the oddest conversation today, Matthew," she begins as she clears away the dinner dishes and gets ready to bring out a small cup of the expresso Matthew so loves.

   "About what?" His words come from behind the pages he is rustling.

"Us," Rivkah says very quietly.

   Matthew's head looks up for a moment from the top edge of the paper.

"Are you happy, Matthew?"

   "Yes, I am. Why shouldn't I be?" Not a word follows. After a long while, Matthew continues. "If you go onto graduate school in psychology, it will help you to be happy too."

   "But Matthew, what about us?"

   The words land and stay in the air between them. Matthew gets up from his seat. "I don't know exactly what you expect from me. Really!" A little perspiration breaks out on his forehead. "Do you think another person can make you happy?"