To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (7 page)

“ ‘If thou makest of me a God,’ ” she said, reading aloud the last bit slowly, “ ‘and worship me, and send for the psaltery and the tabret to prophesy of my intentions, and make war, then ye shall be consumed.’ I don’t think Jesus ever said anything like that,” she said.

“So where’s it from?”

“The Old Testament would be my guess,” she said. “It’s a very stern, Jewish thing to say.”

She handed the iPad back to me.

“Maybe you should talk to Connie,” she said.

I would be less annoyed to be portrayed as a Jew online than a Christian. Still annoyed, because I was not Jewish, but it would be better somehow. You could be a nonpracticing Jew, and while I was not a nonpracticing Jew, because I had not been born a Jew
and converting to Judaism just to persist in nonpractice would have been pointless, I could not be a nonpracticing Christian in any respect. You either believed or did not believe in Christ the Savior and all His many miracles and prophesies. It was ironic, I thought, to talk about “practicing” Christians when, to be a Christian, you didn’t have to do much of anything at all, you just had to profess your faith, while Jewish people, even nonbelieving ones, did more in a single Seder than a full-bore Christian obedient in his pew might do all year. Whether you were born a Christian or a Jew seemed tantamount to the same thing from the perspective of the newborn, but growing up made all the difference in the world. A Christian could slough off his inherited Christianity and become an atheist or a Buddhist or a plain old vanilla nothing, but a Jewish person, for reasons beyond my understanding, would always be Jewish, e.g., an atheist Jew or a Jewish Buddhist. Some of the Jews I knew, like Connie, hated this primordial fact, but as a non-Jew, I had the luxury of envying the surrender to fate that it implied, the fixed identity and tribal affiliations—which is why I minded the slander of being Jewish online less than the outrageous and vile insult of being Christian.

I knew nothing about Judaism before Connie. Before Connie I didn’t even know if I could say the word “Jew.” It sounded very harsh to me, to my Gentile ears, maybe particularly inside my indisputably Gentile mouth. I was afraid that if someone Jewish heard me say it, they would hear a reinforcement of stereotypes, a renewal of all the old antagonisms and hate. It was a minor but significant legacy of the Holocaust that non-Jewish Americans born long after World War II with little knowledge of Judaism or the Jewish people had a fear of offending by saying the word “Jew.”

My interactions with Jewish people before Connie were limited to looking inside their mouths. A Jewish person’s mouth is
identical in every way to a Christian’s. It was all one big mouth to me—one big open, straining, gleeking, unhappy, discomfited, slowly decaying mouth. It was all the same cavity, the same inflammation, the same root infection, the same nerve pain, the same complaint, the same failure, the same fate. Look, here’s what I knew, all I cared to know, and for that matter, all I thought I’d ever need to know, about the Jews: they’d given the world a son, a southpaw by the name of Sandy Koufax, who pitched three Cy Young seasons for the Dodgers and hated the Yankees like a true American hero.

Connie came from a family of Conservative Jews, and to my surprise I found I liked attending the High Holidays, participating in the atonement, and even sitting through the absurdly long services, because they weren’t played out for me. They were plenty played out for Connie, who was no longer an active Jew and felt pretty much as I did on the subject of religion, even if she could not yet bring herself to say, “I do not believe in God.” Not on account of a superstition, or some vestigial faith, but rather a quibble with definitive statements. She preferred to call herself a nonpracticing atheist. This, she thought, would not totally close out the religious impulses that a poem sometimes demanded.

She was an interesting contrast to Sam Santacroce, who thought that Catholicism was tops and that her family dwelled in a three-dimensional holiday card of matching sweaters and Titleist health. Although years had passed since I’d been disabused of Santacroce nuclear perfection, having discovered, beneath a Huxtable veneer, their cynicism, venality, and prejudice, I still regarded Sam’s open love for her family as a demonstration of remarkable poise. I wanted us all to have such unchecked hearts. I wanted it for Connie above all, because her family, I thought, might actually deserve it. But she hesitated. The traditions were dull. Her family
was nuts. And there was so much God. Wouldn’t the God stuff get to me?

The God stuff did not get to me because it had nothing to do with a guy on a cross. The God of the Jews and His effect on His people were blessedly free of punishment and priggishness, the Savior and His rising from the dead on the third day, the Eucharist, the logical contortions brought about by the Trinity, a long history of bloodshed and torture, looming threats of damnation, sexual prudery and guilt, stubbornly persisting Puritan mores, smugness and the foreclosure of curiosity, and, above all, the warrior mind-set ready to kill for Christmas trees and the Ten Commandments. In place of all that, the Plotzes had prayers and songs whose dogmas were disguised by the Hebrew they were sung in; rituals and traditions with a provenance of thousands of years and a persistence against great odds; heated debate at the Sabbath table; distant relatives as at ease with one another as the closest of siblings; debates in which bits of food flew from impassioned mouths; deeply learned references casually tossed into the conversation; and, at the end of the night, a parting so spirited it alone might leave you hoarse. I had no problem with any of it, and that was the problem.

Connie never gave me reason to break and enter or masturbate in a stranger’s closet or call her mother, as I had once called Samantha Santacroce’s mother, and make desperate, cryptic remarks like “The voices… the voices.” Connie returned my love as no one who had cunt gripped me ever had, and while that came with its own problems—namely, my suspicion that for the sake of love she was muting her true self as effectively as I was mine and that a day of reckoning awaited us—I was able to act more or less like a self-respecting adult aware of personal boundaries and in possession of his mind. I did not fall in love with Rachel and Howard Plotz as I
had fallen in love with Bob and Barbara Santacroce or with Roy Belisle and his arm veins before them. I behaved. But for a while I was in danger of becoming a little too fixated on Connie’s entire extended family, and the feeling was not dissimilar to the one I had had in the company of the Belisles and the Santacroces: the ingratiating, slightly unhinged desire to belong to them, to be one of the family, to fit in with self-assurance, to reach without apology across the table for a baby carrot or a potato chip, to sprawl out upon their carpeted floors and speak my mind (which would accord perfectly with their innermost thoughts), to initiate hugs readily returned, and to hear, from the doorway, at the end of the night, “We love you, Paul.” It was really that “we” I wanted more than anything else. For all my proud assertions of self, I really only wanted to be smothered in the embrace of an inclusive and coercive singular “we.” I wanted to be sucked up, subsumed into something greater, historical, eternal. One of the unit. One with the clan. Connie’s extended family was the very essence of such a “we.” It had a central core—her mother, father, a brother and two sisters—and then offshoots and branchings of uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, nieces, nephews, grandparents, and great-uncles and -aunts: a family like none I’d ever known. Inside that sprawling mass of humanity hummed a tightly coiled heart of unified purpose whose signal achievement, it seemed to me, was a defense against loss. There were deaths, of course, and apostates among the young who acted out, smoked pot, and disliked being Jewish. But those were exceptions. Most of the time they took good care of each other. They kibitzed and gossiped and worried over this one and that, rescued one another from trouble, and of course gathered together, come hell or high water, for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, wedding anniversaries, important birthdays, Passover, and the High Holidays.

Though Connie initially rolled her eyes and feigned dread when we had to spend time with her family, I gave her license to love them freely, without embarrassment, and soon enough I witnessed the special closeness between her and her mom and the tenderness that passed between her and her dad. She teased her siblings and laughed with her cousins, and she tended to her elders as if taught to do so in a small hamlet in the Pale of Settlement. But she was also fiercely protective of me, her
shegetz.
If she ended up marrying a non-Jew, it would not be cause for family celebration. They would accept it, just as they had “accepted” Connie’s secularizing, but they would hold out hope that we would move closer to Judaism and that I would convert—which I never would, of course, because I didn’t believe in God. For my part, I refrained from insulting them with cold declarations of my atheism, as I had failed to do with the Santacroces, because I loved them. I tried not to let on that I loved them, both because I didn’t want to look desperate in Connie’s eyes, and because I thought it was a kind of sickness in me, how I always fell in love with the close-knit and conservative families of the girls who stole my heart. I was tired of putting myself at the mercy of these unsuspecting recipients of irrational love. I wanted to be one of those criminal-looking boyfriends put-upon at family gatherings for having to take part. Dudes like that basked in a cool reticence and never gave a damn what was being said behind their backs, and the girls loved them all the more for it. If I managed not to wear that goofy smile of mine whenever a Plotz opened his or her mouth, if I refrained from laughing the loudest at their witticisms, and if I resisted the urge to send gifts in the mail following a gathering, I could never be that shining example of male surliness. Irrepressible enthusiasm still made me feel like a happy whore at the Plotz dinner table. Womanish tears still spilled out during Connie’s sister’s wedding.
I still got drunk at the wedding feast and went from Plotz to Plotz telling this one how much I liked her shoes and that one how impressed I was with his medical-supply business. I danced the hora, the traditional celebration dance in which the bride and groom are lifted into the air on chairs and dipped up and down on a tide of dancers. I really got in there, I really lifted the groom’s chair (I hardly knew the groom) and went round and round the room and had a blast.

When the dance ended, I couldn’t find Connie, so I got another drink and sat down to take a breather. Her uncle Stuart came up to me. “Hey, Stu,” I said. I instantly regretted it. To call such a man Stu! I had this obnoxious tendency of shortening certain men’s names in a transparent bid to fast-track a friendship. It was never the name that prompted it, but the man who bore the name. Connie’s uncle Stuart was small in stature but loomed large in the room. He was quiet by nature, but when he spoke he was heard. The eldest brother, the patriarch, the leader of the Passover service.

Now, maybe my calling him Stu didn’t have a thing to do with what happened next. Maybe he overheard some of the compliments I had paid Connie’s relatives throughout the night and found them excessive. Or maybe he just didn’t care for my abandon out on the dance floor. He sat down at the table, keeping a chair between us, and leaned in slowly. I had no prior evidence that he had so much as noticed me.

“Do you know what a philo-Semite is?” he asked.

I said, “Someone who loves Jewish people?”

He nodded slowly. His yarmulke, arced far back on his thinning hair, adhered to his head as if by magic. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

I didn’t consider him the sort of man who would tell a joke. Maybe he knew I liked jokes?

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.”

He looked at me a long time before beginning, so long that, in memory, the blaring music faded to near inaudibility, and his eyes eclipsed the light.

“A Jew is sitting at a bar when a Jew-hater and a Jew-lover walk in,” he said at last. “They have a seat on either side of the Jew. The Jew-hater tells the Jew that he’s been arguing with the philo-Semite about which of the two of them the Jew prefers. The Jew-hater believes the Jew prefers him over the philo-Semite. The philo-Semite can’t believe that. How can the Jew prefer somebody who hates the Jews with a murderous passion over someone who throws his arms open for every Jew he meets? ‘So what do you say,’ says the Jew-hater. ‘Can you settle this for us?’ And the Jew turns to the philo-Semite, jerks his thumb back at the Jew-hater, and says, ‘I prefer him. At least I know he’s telling the truth.’ ”

Uncle Stuart didn’t laugh at the conclusion of his joke. He didn’t even crack a smile. My laughter, which was excessive but almost entirely polite, stuck in my throat as he got up and left the table.

“Why me?”

“She says it’s not something Jesus would say,” I said. “She thinks it’s a Jewish thing.”

“A Jewish thing?”

“Something from the Old Testament.”

“Well, if it’s a Jewish thing,” she said, “it must be me, right? I mean, I am the Jew here.”

“Will you please just take another look and tell me if you think it’s from the Old Testament?”

“I have the Bible memorized?”

“You had how many years of Hebrew school?” I said.

“And look where it got me: to this great think tank dedicated to all things Hebraic.”

“Connie,” I said. “Please.”

She took another look at the passage.

“Still sounds to me like one of those ass-backward things Christ is always saying to make the people go ‘Ohh, ahh, wow,’ ” she said. “But who knows. Maybe it is a Jewish thing. Why don’t you Google it?”

Connie was a big one for Googling things. It helped out enormously with all sorts of crises and brought relief to the most pressing concerns. At a restaurant, the two of us would momentarily forget the difference between rigatoni and penne, and she would Google “difference between rigatoni and penne” and provide us the answer. We no longer had to listen to the idiosyncratic replies of the waitstaff on the differences between rigatoni and penne, which were always so full of human approximations and stabs at essences. We had hard definitions straight from the me-machine. Or while we were drinking our wine, I might ask Connie, who knew more about wine than I did, “Do white wines need time to breathe like red wines?” She wouldn’t know the answer, or had known it at one time but had forgotten it and now needed to know it again very badly, so she’d look it up right then and there, at the dinner table, while I waited, and learn not only about aeration effects on white wines but also quite a lot about grapes, tannins, and oxidation techniques—random snippets of which, with her eyes cast down on the phone, she would share with me across the table, distractedly and never coherently. She’d also forget who starred in what, who sang this or that, and if so-and-so was still dating so-and-so, and for those things, too, she’d abandon our conversation to secure the answer. She no longer lived in a world of speculation or recall and would take nothing on faith when the facts were but a few
clicks away. It drove me nuts. I was sick to death of having as my dinner companions Wikipedia, About.com, IMDb, the
Zagat
guide,
Time Out New York,
a hundred Tumblrs, the
New York Times,
and
People
magazine. Was there not some strange forgotten pleasure in reveling in our ignorance? Couldn’t we just be
wrong?
We fought about that goddamn me-machine more than we fought about where to go and what to do, sex and its frequency, my so-called addiction to the Red Sox, and a million other things combined. (With the exception of kids. We fought most about kids.) I’d had enough and would say things like “The moon is really just a weak star” or “Flour tortillas have ganja in them” or “My favorite Sean Penn movie is
Forrest Gump
” and then really dig in until she’d Google it and waggle the screen before my eyes as if the thing itself were saying
na na na na na
, and I’d say, “Tom Hanks my ass! It was Sean Penn!” and she’d say, “It’s right fucking here, look!
Tom Hanks
,” and I’d say, “I can’t believe you needed the Internet for that!” and the night would descend from there.