To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (25 page)

“Where’d you get this?” asked Sookhart, looking up from his desk. “I check your bio page every day. I haven’t seen this on there.”

“It was emailed to me.”

“By whom?”

“ ‘Paul C. O’Rourke.’ ”

Sookhart was reading a printout of the attachment “Paul C. O’Rourke” had included in his last email: a scan of two columns of text laid out on a yellowing parchment scroll, composed, according to Sookhart, in Aramaic, and frayed, or nibbled at, along the uppermost edge. The translation came in a separate attachment, numbered according to cantonment and verse, with the names of people and places done up in diacritical marks. Safek was “S
ă
-f
ĕ
k” The Amalekites were “
Ă
-m
ă
l-
ė
-k
ī
tes.”

“What’s interesting,” he said, and dropped off as he resumed studying the printouts. “What’s interesting,” he said, a second time. He lifted the hair from his arm and held it erect between his fingers, as if to snip its tips like a barber, before burrowing in again. After a full five minutes, he peeled off his reading glasses, sat forward, and peered across the desk at me.

“There’s always been a vigorous debate surrounding Job’s authorship,” he said. “Certain terms and expressions are undoubtedly Aramaic in tone, and the lack of any reference in the book of Job to historical events leads many scholars to argue it had non-Hebraic origins. The writer almost certainly predated Moses. What’s interesting to me is this man Eliphaz. He’s the only one besides Job who appears in the biblical account and… whatever account it is you have here. They’re characterized differently, of course, but the name’s the same.”

“Why is that interesting?”

“Well, you see, Eliphaz came from the city of Teman, which was in Edom. And Amalek was the grandson of Esau, who was the chief of the Edomite tribe. The Edomites and the Amalekites were related.”

I looked at him stupidly. He tried again.

“The account of creation in Genesis, as you may know, is rather like that of the Babylonian myth
Enuma Elish
. And of course the story of the Flood had its origins in the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, possibly even Hindu mythology. They are cruder accounts than the ones we know from the Bible. Nevertheless, they came first. They are urtexts, prototexts.”

“Sure,” I said. “This one borrows from that one, that one steals from the other one. It’s all a crock of shit.”

“No, now, listen,” he said, rocking his butt cheeks to scoot the chair closer to the desk. “If the book of Job was originally written in Aramaic, as we suspect, and if it’s an Edomite text, as we have reason to believe, because Eliphaz was born in an Edomite town, and if the two tribes, the Edomites and the Amalekites, were as closely connected as we think they were, both at war with the children of Israel, both harboring at Mount Seir, then what you have here… in the scan of this scroll, this rather poor scan… if it’s an original, the scroll, I mean, and if the translation is indeed faithful, it could very well be…”

He paused.

“What?” I said.

“The first draft of Job,” he said.

Connie wasn’t really all that beautiful. Sure, she had all the trappings of beauty: that hair, those speckled brown eyes. And she had beautiful breasts whose perfection was happily suggested by every variety of blouse and blazer and winter jacket you can imagine, to say nothing of the summertime wonders of T-shirts and bikini tops. To watch Connie cook eggs topless, which she did only once, at my request, while I took pictures I had every intention of deleting, was to live happily ever after for an entire afternoon. She was
also extraordinarily well proportioned in a classical way, so she could wear anything just as well as the models and mannequins and not have to forgo that year’s trends because of a bummer body type. She was never just plain shit out of luck for a season because of an awkward waist or hip thing and didn’t have to hate other women on principle and talk about them being bitches and sluts because they wore a size 2. Her skin was as tight and tanned as parfleche, and her belly button went ovoid when she stretched naked. But if you got up close, or studied her closely night after night, year after year, you could see that her nose was too closely placed to her upper lip, the effect being a foreshortened or miniature upper lip and a nose that was slightly elephantine in comparison, which wrecked the perceived harmony and symmetry of her other features. It was a problem. I could ignore it when we were together, because not to ignore it while we were together would have been ungenerous. It would have put the focus on the superficial things and permitted the superficial things to diminish the substantial things, the delicate things that required careful nurturing like respect and friendship, and to fault her for something she essentially had no control over. She just had the misfortune of favoring her father in that one respect. On Howard Plotz there was practically no upper lip there at all.

Whenever I found myself concentrating too much on this particular aspect of her, and her likeness to a male, even one I admired as much as I did Howard, I consciously diverted my thinking. I thought of something else: her breasts, her wit, her tenderness toward me. But after we broke up, her truncated upper lip and flarey-nostril nose were practically all I noticed. They jumped out at me every time I talked to her, and instead of turning my attention away, I deliberately studied them, congratulating myself on escaping the fate of having to suffer them for the rest of my days.

And now on top of the lip, she was a believer in God.

I came back to the shop after my meeting with Sookhart and sat briefly inside my waiting room where I took a long hard look at Connie. Her facial disharmony was totally out of control that day. I almost had to look away. And I used to find it so endearing! It was that one incontestable piece of evidence that she was as human as the rest of us. If I had known that she secretly harbored a belief in God, I wondered, watching her at her various tasks, would I have romanticized that, too? If she had been honest about her theism, and if I had made myself more available, more vulnerable, as I had with Sam and the Santacroces, might I have opened my heart, as they say, to an impassioned plea or two and inquired honestly and without judgment how I might allow God to enter my life and love me? Might I have been the one all swept up and willing to change?

But she had not been honest, I had not made myself vulnerable, and now I felt relief. I had made a fool of myself with the Plotzes, sure, but it could have been a lot worse. I could have converted. I could have auditioned to become a cantor. But what were the Plotzes to me now? What was Judaism? What was Job to its first draft? And who was Connie next to Clara, the girl in the weathered Red Sox cap who had lovingly collected and shared with me the details of my family tree? I recalled Clara only vaguely, through a dreamlike haze. Compared with Connie at the front desk, roughed up by office light, in the humdrum backdrop of medical files, and possessed of a huge proboscis hovering above a withered lip, Clara possessed a spectral, perfectly proportioned beauty. All at once, I knew I was no longer in love with Connie. I was finally over her. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t even remember how I felt in the final minutes of our last breakup, when I was crying and crying and wholly unsure of how to go on.

My thoughts were interrupted when someone took a seat beside me. I looked over… it was Connie! I looked back to the front desk; there was no one there. She had stood, entered the waiting room, and sat down next to me, all while I was intently scrutinizing her. Sometimes I thought myself fully present when in fact I was so coiled up inside my own head that I was blind to whatever was happening before my very eyes.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

And then she did something unexpected. She reached around my elbow, which was planted on the arm of the chair, and took my hand, then turned it over and placed her other hand on top, holding my hand between hers. Her knees were turned so that her right knee was touching my left knee, while her left knee was jutting out so that she could face me better. She smiled, but the smile had nothing good to say. It required a lot of effort just to briefly raise the one side of her lip. “There’s something I think you should know,” she said. Whenever someone thinks you should know something, it’s usually something you really don’t want to know. “I’m seeing someone,” she said.

A music of everyday magic ceased forever, at once.

His name was Ben. He was a poet. They were kind of serious.

I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “What does ‘kind of serious’ mean?”

And she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “You know. Kind of serious.”

And I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “Are you in love with him?”

And she didn’t say anything, long enough for me to know that she was. Then she said, “I don’t know, it hasn’t been that long.”

And I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “Is he Jewish?”

She didn’t say anything. I thought the question might be an irritating one and that she might let go of my hand, but she actually held it a little firmer and said, “Does it matter?”

It did matter, it did. He probably believed in God, too. But I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “I’m happy for you.”

And she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “Are you okay?”

And I didn’t say anything, and then I said, “Of course.” And I looked at her and smiled. But I had no control over the smile and everything it told her.

I wished it had turned out differently. I wished I had been better all around. I wished above all that when I believed something, like that I was finally over her, that I knew myself even the slightest bit.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER
starting my first private practice in Chelsea, I wrote Samantha Santacroce an old-fashioned letter and mailed it to her parents’ house, confident that it would find its way to her because she was living, I assumed, just down the block, or at most across town, if not in her very childhood bedroom. I tell myself I don’t know why I wrote to her, but I do: I wanted her to know that I had a private practice, that I was a success, that I had put the misery of my childhood behind me and made it out of Maine. She would have been so lucky, I was telling her by way of that letter, to have stuck by me after I’d admitted that I was an atheist at the Santacroce dinner table, and to have married me. A few weeks later, I received a reply, via email—my YazFanOne account, which I’ve had since the days of dial-up—a reply I read so many times that you would have thought I was off at war. “What do you mean,” she asked, “you only wanted to be a part of things? You had every opportunity to be a part of my family. Didn’t you know that? You just had to accept my parents, and you never seemed interested in that. They weren’t going to stop being Catholics for you, Paul, which I think is the least you would have settled for, back then. You wanted everyone to come around to your way of
thinking. You had really strong opinions, and you never gave an inch. As I remember it, you were more interested in being yourself than being ‘a part of things.’ And sometimes you’re not always, or at least back then you weren’t, the easiest guy to get along with. I’m sure now, with all your success, things have changed.”

I wasn’t at all sure, and so didn’t write back.

I’d seen a headline on one of the celebrity magazines while sitting with Connie in my waiting room. “Harper and Bryn Are Huge Family People,” it read. Harper’s heterosexuality was in hot dispute, while Bryn had had that bad stumble when her first three kids were removed by court order on the season finale of
Bryn.
But now they were together, according to a “source” and a “pal,” and expecting a child. I was happy that things had worked out for them when for so long they were such a national shitshow. I also admit to feeling jealous. Harper and Bryn were huge family people. For them, nothing was more important—not the haters, not the paparazzi, not the weight gain, not even the LAPD—whereas I had given up all the families I had known. I’d given up Sam and the Santacroces, and now, I thought, I’ve given up Connie and the Plotzes. Connie had moved on to Ben, and I would never be a Plotz and would never again have them for a family. Which was an absurd thing to think, because I’d never really had the Plotzes to begin with. The only people who ever had the Plotzes were the Plotzes. I was never going to have the Plotzes even if Connie and I had married, because I was an O’Rourke. The Plotzes would never accept an O’Rourke—not because I was not a Jew, but because, as an O’Rourke, I acted in ways that were weird and distancing. And now I had to contend with the fact that I wasn’t even an O’Rourke. I was a Boruch from Białystok, whatever the hell that was, and, according to the goddess in the Red Sox hat, not even a Boruch from Białystok but something even more removed. Harper and
Bryn knew who they were, they were huge family people. Who was I?

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

Connie was standing in the doorway.

“When you get a minute,” she said.

I finished up with my patient and walked over to her.

“My uncle’s here to see you,” she said.

“Your uncle?”

“Stuart,” she said.

“Your uncle Stuart?” I said, taking off my white smock. “He’s here? Your uncle Stuart is here? I haven’t seen Stuart in how long? What’s he doing here?”

“I didn’t say a thing. He found out on his own.”

“Found out what?”

“I tried to explain.”

I was only half listening. The other half was wondering how I looked, if I looked put together, if I looked self-respecting.

When my father was manic, he would lift me off the ground and squeeze me in a big bear hug. Upon first spying Stuart, from the vantage point of the front desk, I wanted to do the same to him. He was sitting alone, hands folded in his lap, waiting patiently. I told myself not to hug. Look at him. You don’t hug a man like that, no matter the impulse. As I backed away from the desk, I almost stepped on Connie’s foot. Finding her there watching me watch Stuart through the front-desk window, and just after hearing that she was dating someone new, I knew that she took the full measure of me, and saw me for what I was, and knew the relief of being rid of me. I also knew that my excitement was absurd. The sight of Stuart should have brought me more sadness, nothing more.

He stood to greet me as I entered the waiting room. Just stop and hold out your hand, I instructed myself. Anything more would
be inappropriate. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I kept moving forward. I put my arms around him. He had none of my father’s bulk, and he hardly hugged back. I held on for as long as was acceptable—none of it was acceptable—a total of three or four seconds at most, being sure, before I let go, to slap him twice on his back, as if he was just an old buddy from the golf course and not the man I had hoped to sit next to during the Passover Seder.

“Stuart,” I said. “It’s good to see you again.”

He smiled, and perhaps only on account of my enthusiasm, his smile seemed warm and genuine.

“What brings you in?”

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” he asked.

“Of course!”

As I took him back, I explained, in a voice that was suddenly too loud, that when I moved out of my two-room clinic in Chelsea, I designed the new place, to my eternal regret, without a private office.

“So we’ll have to talk in here,” I said, gesturing him inside an open exam room.

Once in the room I pulled up a stool for him. He settled down quickly, leaning forward with his hands gathered serenely together. I folded my arms and leaned against the patient chair. I was reminded once again of how austere and commanding his quiet presence could be. I blurted out something stupid, of course.

“Are you here to take me up on my offer?”

“What offer is that?” he asked.

“A good cleaning. X-rays. Make sure everything’s in order.”

“No,” he said.

No, he had come to discuss what was being written in my name online. I shifted against the chair.

“I hope Connie told you that I’m not writing those things,” I said. “That’s not me.”

“She did.”

“Good,” I said. “Because that’s not me writing those things.”

He was preternaturally still on that stool, which begged to be swiveled at least a little.

“Do you know who is?”

“Specifically?”

“It must be someone,” he said. “Do you have a name or something else to go by?”

It was probably whoever I was emailing with, I thought. But that person’s name was my own, and I didn’t want to tell Stuart that, and hoped Connie hadn’t.

“No,” I said. “It just… happened. First the website, then Facebook, then everything on Twitter.”

“Connie also mentioned that you seem… maybe a little persuaded by some of what’s being said.”

“Me?”

“Suggestions that the Amalekites survived and underwent a transformation.”

“I am an avowed atheist,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “But any opinion you might have about God would not necessarily be brought to bear on the question of the existence of a people like this. Do you know who the Amalekites are?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Not really.”

“When we invoke the name Amalek today,” he said, “we are invoking not just the ancient enemy of the Jews but an eternally irreconcilable enemy. Anti-Semitism in whatever form or manifestation that happens to take. Defaced synagogues. Suicide bombs.
Hate speech. You might compare them to the Nazis. Amalek was the very first Nazi,” he said.

He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, then returned the handkerchief to his pocket. I have always admired a man who can blow his nose gracefully while another man looks on.

“Amalek lives today in the radicals and the fundamentalists. He also has a more metaphorical meaning. Amalek can be temptation. It can be apostasy. It can be doubt.”

“Doubt?”

“I hope that doesn’t offend you,” he said. “I don’t think you hate the Jews like an Amalek just because you doubt God.”

“I don’t hate the Jews at all,” I said.

“It never occurred to me that you did,” he assured me.

“So you know it’s not me writing those things?”

“If you say it isn’t, I believe you.”

“It isn’t.”

“But what’s being written in your name remains upsetting to me and to others,” he said.

He removed his me-machine and in the silence that followed called up my Twitter account. Without a word, he passed the phone to me.

I gave the phone back.

“Stuart, I find those remarks abhorrent.”

“But you are an atheist,” he said. “You must agree with their substance.”

“No, I find them abhorrent.”

“Why?”

“The Jew this, the Jew that,” I said. “I’m not even Jewish, and it makes me cringe.”

“Well,” he said, “somebody has made those remarks.”

“I don’t know who,” I said.

“Do you believe you descend from these people?”

“No,” I said, “no, of course not, it’s… no, it’s unlikely.”

“Do you remember when you came to see me at my office?” he asked.

I hesitated. I wondered if Connie was listening. I was sure she was. The incomplete dental walls invited it. Mrs. Convoy was probably standing right next to her.

“I do,” I said in a very low voice.

“When you asked about Ezra?”

I nodded. I never wanted Connie to know about my visit to Stuart’s office to discuss how I might be more like Ezzie. I mean, on a formal basis: a practicing, atheistic Jew. Nothing came of it except a little embarrassment on my part, a little shame at my grotesque misapprehension of the most basic ways of Judaism and the world more broadly. What made me think I could emulate Ezzie? I had apologized to Stuart for any offense I might have caused and quickly left. Then for months and months afterward I lay in bed at night, and just as I was about to fall asleep, I’d recall this misbegotten inquiry and Stuart’s patient suffering of it, and my heart would jump and I would rise with a shock, incinerating with horror and shame.

“You had learned a few things about Judaism by that time,” he said. “Do you remember what a mitzvah is?”

Suddenly I felt like we were back at Connie’s sister’s wedding, at that deserted table in the dimness as the music faded, when he
asked me if I knew what a philo-Semite was. After that, I never again wanted anyone who knew more about Judaism than I did to ask me basic questions about Judaism.

“I think so,” I said, “but can I be honest with you, Uncle Stuart?”

Uncle Stuart! It just came out! And there was nothing I could do about it! I couldn’t retract it any more than I could retract “Time to take a stool sample.” And this time there was no way of saying it was just a joke. My face went hot. I stopped breathing. I wanted to weasel out of the room, but I waited, wondering if he would acknowledge it or take mercy on me and let it pass.

“Please,” he said. “Honesty is best.”

He took mercy on me. “Thank you, Stuart,” I said. “Sorry,” I said. “What were we talking about again?”

“A mitzvah,” he said.

“Oh, right. I think I know what that is, but I’m guessing you know better than I do.”

“A mitzvah is a law,” he said. “There are 613 mitzvot to follow in accordance with the Torah. We take them very seriously, you understand. Every one of them, every day. They are moral laws, but also divine commandments. And three of them,” he said, putting his thumb and two fingers in the air, “concern Amalek.”

His fingers remained in the air.

“Remember what Amalek did to you out of Egypt,” he said, touching his thumb. Touching his forefinger, he said, “Never forget the evil done to you by Amalek. And destroy the seed of Amalek,” he concluded, touching the final finger. “They sound harsh, which is why so many go to such lengths to soften them, to turn them into metaphors. But others believe we face a real enemy, an existential threat, in every generation. Every generation must
recognize who Amalek is for that generation, and every generation must prepare to fight it any way it can. Now,” he said, “can you tell me who Grant Arthur is?”

“Who?”

“It’s a name Connie gave me. You don’t know it?”

“I’ve heard it a few times.”

He stood up from the stool and took a step toward me. He let a minute of silence pass between us while I was still cringing at having called him “Uncle.”

“Grant Arthur had his name changed to David Oded Goldberg in 1980,” he said.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“The Internet,” he said. “How else? Now, do you know why he had his name changed?”

“I don’t really even know who he is,” I said.

He went on to tell me a few things about Grant Arthur. I shrugged. He looked away. When he looked back, he wore a modest, patient smile. The calm passage of air in and out of his nostrils was audible in a grave way. He extended his hand, and I took it. Then he thanked me and left the room.

“I know who you are now,” I wrote.

That night I drove to a place in New Jersey called the Seehorse. I’d been there once or twice before. It was a windowless block structure on the outskirts of Newark. The cars washed by on the highway a hundred feet away, past a parking lot of broken glass and a garroted pay phone. Inside, the regulars stared up at a rotation of three seahorses: the fat one, the black one, and the one with tattoos. A one-armed DJ in a Hawaiian shirt and POW/MIA hat clapped the microphone against his chest at the end of every song. He encouraged everyone to tip. “These ladies aren’t dancing the cueca,” he said. “They have mouths to feed.” Terrific, I thought. Strippers with mouths to feed.