The Beautiful Possible (12 page)

“No. Not in the way of spices. Something else. I could smell it on your skin, the stretch marks on your belly, the way your breasts carry knowledge of the babies you nursed. You will always carry that smell—it marks you with found pleasure.”

He doesn’t know me at all, thinks Rosalie, picturing the rubber nipples floating in a pot of boiling water, night after night,
Charlie, Philip, Lenny, three little babies, thousands of floating nipples.

“Translation is so imperfect,” she says. “My children—”

“You never have to tell me anything,” says Walter. “No explanations.”

They find each other again and stay in Walter’s room until the sun begins to set over the city.

Walter tells Rosalie about his studio in the Berkeley hills, framed with bougainvillea, shrouded in fog. He invites her to visit, insists she find a way, use Madeline as an excuse—anything. Rosalie listens to the words flow from his mouth, his accent now softer, more American. But she can’t tell Walter the details of her life. The children cannot be funneled into this hotel room; the synagogue is a distant dream. After all these years, she thinks. Walter is a child with his books, his models, his one-room studio. She is a mother. The past is a closed book on a shelf. An abandoned geniza.

“Sol told me he met you at Madame Sylvie’s,” says Rosalie.

“Yes,” says Walter. “Your husband has become an adventurer of the spirit.”

“I went with Madeline. When it was my turn, Madame Sylvie was speechless.”

Walter laughs. “We’ll go together and she will find a perfect astonishment for you. Madame Sylvie won’t disappoint a friend of mine.”

When they wander into her courtyard that evening, Madame Sylvie tells Walter that he cannot see her so often. “You keep coming back for more,” she says. “This is not a candy shop.”

“What you gave me wasn’t enough,” says Walter. “I want another.”

“You’re an exception,” she says. “Now close your eyes and picture a path that winds through a forest, tangled with vines. A girl walks ahead of you. She begins to run and you cannot keep up. Watch her become smaller before your eyes, until she is no bigger than your thumb, then the tip of your finger, then a pinprick. She becomes a point of light. Open your mouth. A little pucker is all you need. Now let out a breath. This girl you left behind in this imagined forest has blown away.”

Walter rests his palm over his eyes, holds Rosalie’s hand with the other. He gathers his breath and whispers, “She is not you.”

Madame Sylvie fixes her gaze on Rosalie. She tightens her lips and smiles.

“Ahh,” she says. “I’m glad you returned.
Maintenant, c’est possible
.”

Rosalie closes her eyes softly enough to feel the light touching her eyelids.

“You see a braid, as long as a rope that pulls a ship into a harbor. Some strands of the braid are bright with colored ribbons and fresh flowers. Other strands are made from thorns and live wires—all tangled together. A woman walks in front of you and this braid runs down her back. You follow her, eyeing her braid, stepping with care. Keep going. Now open your eyes.”

Rosalie stands and shouts, “Is that all you can give me? A braid? Where is my door, my astonishment, my open gate?”

“I cannot free you, ma chère,” says Sylvie. “I dispense visualizations, small suggestive shocks that help you wake up, see
something in a new way. I am not a fortune teller and I am not a psychoanalyst. You could recite psalms at the Western Wall or you could visit me. Some do both; keep the door flying open on both sides. Whatever you wish.”

Rosalie grabs Walter by the hand and pulls him outside. Madame Sylvie turns to the next visitor who is asked to close her eyes and visualize a great river, light on one side and dark on the other.

February 1969

Rosalie lies awake and imagines Walter’s room in the American Colony Hotel. She conjures the sultans and sheiks who have since slept in the bed that marked their reunion, how the traces of their bodies were washed away with the traffic of other lovers. She listens to Sol snore beside her and thinks about the woven braid that Madame Sylvie described to her. Some nights the braid is made of ribbon, wool, and wires; on other nights fish swim between the strands of hair and she has to shoo them out of her ears. A nasty conundrum, a riddle with no solution. Good sex in Jerusalem in exchange for a useless vision from the renowned kabbalist. Perhaps it was a ploy: had she not arrived at Madame Sylvie’s with Walter she would have received an astonishment that would mean something to her now. But she waltzed into the courtyard holding hands with the very emblem of her betrayal and there was no fooling Madame Sylvie. Best now to obliterate the memory of that single episode, instead of wondering when
they will meet again, and how does he see her when his eyes are closed and he explores her body like a blind man who can read with his hands?

The flow of holidays marks the seasons and Rosalie is carried along with the calendar’s demands. Depending on the month, she shapes floured dough into a kreplach, a hamentashen, or a Passover noodle made from potato starch. The house pulses with the antics of her three boys who shred bedsheets to make flags of surrender for their raucous games. On Shabbat afternoons they wrestle each other in the yard until one of them—usually Philip—gets pummeled into the grass. At night Lenny calls to her and asks for another story, always another story. Rosalie sets her tales in Madame Sylvie’s courtyard. In some, children climb the garden wall like cats and morph themselves into cheetahs that run wild around Jerusalem and uncover artifacts. In others, a boy and girl lie together under a flowering tree and press their ears to the ground, listening to the voices of the ancient past bubble up into their ears. Lenny falls asleep before Rosalie finishes and she sits on the edge of his bed and basks in the silence. Month follows month: stuffed knapsacks and leather mitts pile up in the foyer, dirty clothes are washed and clean clothes folded, meat marinates for weeknight dinners and chicken is roasted for Shabbat, and when it arrives, Rosalie and Sol lay their hands on their sons’ heads, blessing them with long lives.

After Sol and the children are asleep, Rosalie sits on a stool at the kitchen counter and dials Walter’s number. The time difference
gives them hours to themselves. She speaks softly into the handset and winds the black phone cord around her arm as if it is a strap of tefillin. Her ordinary kitchen at night seems like an immense ocean and Rosalie is a ship afloat on its surface, drifting from one shore to another.

One night she tells Walter that she wishes he would get married.

“Make it possible for me to turn away from you,” she says.

He laughs. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do and I don’t. You deserve so much more—”

“Don’t question what we have, Rosalie. We are creating something bigger than we are.”

“Of course you’d think that,” she says. “Talking about karma is your livelihood. You can justify anything.”

“And you have religion, Rosalie. The karma game is all I have, and it is enough for me.”

Rosalie never asks Walter about the woman in Madame Sylvie’s astonishment. She doesn’t pry into his past, and can sum up his known biography in two sentences:
He followed a man off the ship and that man was Paul Richardson. He went to Bombay and Shantiniketan and then to New York, where they found each other.
He is her personal Torah, written for her alone, a small necessary story that rings in her bones. The two of them can only live in the present tense. They are a word, a hyphen. Turmeric rubbed on a hip. Something faint and then lasting and then vapor. From the pulpit Sol speaks about the flow of Jewish history.
The stories course through our bloodstream
, he says.
Jacob’s headrest made of rock is the foundation of our homeland; Joseph’s dreams are linked to
our eternal longing for image and interpretation.
Rosalie wonders if her love for Walter is an echo of an ancient story she hasn’t yet learned.

A new housing development and good public schools have brought more Jews to Briar Wood, and new members to the shul. Sol offers Ask the Rabbi Anything to a fresh crop of pre–bar mitzvah students, and they also find their way to the wooded area behind the parking lot to get high. The only two girls in the Hebrew school skip class and teach each other how to French kiss in the girls’ bathroom. The elderly Hebrew school teacher sits in the stairwell and weeps, not because the students mock her, but because the money she earns doesn’t cover the cost of the trains and taxis that bring her to the suburbs twice a week. The shul is everyone’s laboratory, the testing ground for what life holds on the outside.

On a winter Shabbat morning, Rosalie stands in the back of the sanctuary and watches the congregants shift in their folding chairs as they listen to the words of Sol’s sermon. He explains how Jewish survival relies on core beliefs that stand the test of time but history judges a peoples’ survival with fickle eyes. She has no idea what her husband is talking about, and neither do his congregants.

Sol is failing them, she thinks. New congregants, same old rabbi. His sermons are impersonal, his words obscure. How could anyone be moved? Why would anyone care? Yet still they arrive in this paneled room. Rosalie watches Bev who stands behind her father’s wheelchair, smoothes the tallit over his sloping shoulders, and turns the pages of his prayer book. She watches Serena whose eyes dart nervously around the room. She finds Marv, who Rosalie
knows is having an affair with his son’s fifth-grade teacher, and Nadine who carries on with a local politician. She looks at Delia, who has breast cancer, and Missy Samuels, who swears by Weight Watchers and nibbles on carrot sticks during kiddush. Rosalie loses herself in watching them. She searches for the fragile broken center in each congregant, tries to name the one thing that makes anyone want to show up in this synagogue when the world offers so many other choices, so many better places to go.

Rosalie measures the distance between the yearnings of these people and her husband’s words. She views this as a geometry problem. What is the length of the line between Nadine’s love for the politician and Sol’s words about the double meaning of the name Yisrael? The distance between high-strung Serena and Sol’s sermon about the minor fast days? Between the hunched shoulders of Bev’s father and Sol’s hands that thump on the lectern like a heartbeat? Where does anyone’s desire meet the pastoral response? She sees the sanctuary as a room full of gaping hearts that cannot be healed or touched by Sol’s words. And yet, still they come, week after week: Bev and Serena and Nadine and Marv and Delia and Missy Samuels with her bag of carrot sticks. Missy winks at Nathan who stands in the back of the sanctuary. He fingers the fringes of his tallit and ponders his own geometry problem: the popularity of the rabbi and the duration of his contract.

On Sol’s day off, Nathan asks Sol and Rosalie to meet him at the duck pond at the center of town. Rosalie carries a bag of leftover challah and tosses chunks into the water.

“Let me get to the point,” says Nathan. “We—the board and I—want you to take a leave of absence.”

“I don’t need a vacation.”

“Just a little break. Go back to Jerusalem and study for awhile. Every rabbi needs to hone his skills, fill in his gaps.”

“I’m in my prime,” says Sol. “So many new members. I just ordered new prayer books—”

“Real estate,” says Nathan. “Housing prices. Public schools. The Cosmos Diner.”

Rosalie stops walking and tosses the entire bag of challah into the pond. She glances at Sol and wishes he wasn’t brushing tears from his eyes in front of Nathan Samuels.

“I’m good. You got one of the best.”

“I know, Rabbi Kerem.”

“So give me a chance.”

Nathan turns to Rosalie. “Maybe you can help him out. Lend some inspiration.”

“I’m the rabbi,” says Sol. “You hired
me
.”

“Yes, we did. We believed in you then, and Missy and I believe in you now. Just find better words; be less remote. Make us care.”

“How long do I have?”

“Get back in the game and there’s no limit.”

As they drive home from the duck pond, Sol asks Rosalie what Nathan meant by
be less remote.
“Am I supposed to change into golf clothes and preach at the Cosmos? I thought they hired me to teach Torah, unravel meaning, make their lives better in some
way. Now I utter a phrase and then cringe inside, wanting to take back what I said, but I can’t hear myself clearly and my ideas gush in all the wrong directions.”

“At least you’re sincere.”

“I stand up there on the bima, all alone, as if I’m supposed to be a symbol of something. But of what? My beloved texts are meaningless to them and they don’t have the skills to understand the patterns behind the words.”

“Then summarize. Reduce. Leave out the boring details. Serve them cake and aphorisms.”

“I can’t compromise my integrity.”

“Figure it out, sweetheart.”

“I sometimes feel as if I’m working an assembly line that doesn’t stay still.”

“You’re a rabbi, for God’s sake. And people are fluid. You need to dance with them, get playful.”

“Walter called it a messy brew of imposed grace.”

“That sounds about right.”

“What am I supposed to do?” asks Sol.

“Let me try it,” says Rosalie.

“What?”

“Being you. Next Shabbat. I’ll give the sermon. Just a few remarks. I’ll put myself in your shoes.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Shh. I’m not replacing you. I’ll just give my own talk, a little teaching from the rebbetzin. Hannah’s tears, Miriam’s tambourine—I’ll wing it. And no one would ever compare me to you.”

Rosalie phones Walter that night and asks what she should talk about.

“Think about what your father taught you. Mine your own life for material.”

“Got it,” says Rosalie.

Sol walks into the kitchen as Rosalie hangs up the phone.

“Who are you talking to?”

“No one. I’m just casting about for ideas.”

“The phone won’t help you but an open volume of Talmud could lead you somewhere.”

Rosalie smiles.

“I have what I need now,” she says.

Sol introduces Rosalie as his first lady who has some words she would like to share. She approaches the bima in a skirt she crocheted herself, a matching silk blouse, and a new hat. At first she speaks about her children, how Philip sometimes asks if they can keep Shabbat on Wednesday and if God knows the days of the week, and then Rosalie stops herself because she thinks of the congregants who don’t have children and maybe she shouldn’t speak as a mother, parading her private bounty.

“When I was young my father shared a teaching from the Ishbitzer Rebbe that has stayed with me all these years,” she says. “The human experience—the story of your life—is a prism of God’s desire. Think about how your eyes adjust to daylight when you first wake up; this is an entry in God’s personal diary. The way you hand the dry cleaner your ticket and thank him for your pressed suit—also an entry in God’s diary. And how you deny or
respond to the dreams that tug at you until you find a way to make them come true—this, above all, is written in God’s diary. Our lives are fodder for the great sacred story. Every moment.”

She suddenly stops speaking. Nathan and Missy lean forward in their seats. Bev wraps her arm around her father’s shoulders and looks up. Charlie and Philip sit in the back row with their friends, barely containing their laughter. Rosalie peers down at the congregants and feels as if she and the Ishbitzer have been standing on a distant planet, trying to emit a signal that will penetrate the silent darkness between the bima and the folding chairs. Mars to Earth. Jupiter to Saturn. Rosalie to everyone. She tugs on her skirt, adjusts her hat.

“Thank you for listening,” she says. “We will now return to your regularly scheduled program.”

Sol proceeds with services and after the final line of Adon Olam Bev tells Rosalie that her speech was just beautiful. Missy tells Rosalie that she cried. And Sol whispers in her ear, “Thank you. Maybe some of them will come back next week.”

Rosalie spends her days behind the wheel of the Dodge, looping the circumference of Westchester County: soccer practices, dentist appointments, visits to the mall, and Lenny’s trumpet lessons, an hour’s drive each way. If these miles were spread out over an actual highway, she thinks, I would be on the other side of the country by now.
I would have actually traveled somewhere.
The force field of motherhood is unyielding; some weeks Rosalie cannot sit down long enough to read a magazine or write a letter. After dinner, if she stops washing dishes and daydreams
out the kitchen window, Lenny stands close to her and takes her face in his small hands.
Earth to mom
, he says.
Come back to us.
Philip once drew a portrait of his family that showed Sol and the boys sitting at the table and Rosalie standing at a sink, washing a dish. She was of them and outside of them, their center and their distant star.

Rosalie believes Sol is showing improvement on the bima. Since she gave her speech, he asks her for insights on the Torah portion and uses her ideas. The congregants seem more attentive, less distracted. But she has no idea that Sol visits the wrong hospitals and drives to the wrong cemeteries, looking for a funeral he is scheduled to conduct at some other grave.

Sol’s undoing is subtle at first. At an unveiling service in the rain, the pages of his Rabbi’s Manual tumble into a muddy puddle. On the way out of the cemetery, he tosses the soggy remnants of the book into an open grave to fulfill the mitzvah of shaimos
.
But he never replaces the Manual, believing he has memorized all the prayers. Most of the congregants don’t know Hebrew well enough to realize that Sol recites joyful psalms at burial services, and sings psalms of mourning at weddings.