Jeremy Thrane (35 page)

“That’s harsh,” I said.

“That’s nothing,” said Max darkly. “For the Jews that’s like a little spanking.”

Fischl stirred in his chair, which caused tectonic tremors under his rumpled white shirt. “What is the first commandment?”

“You will love God,” said Fernando in his accent, which on NPR would have been accompanied by a chicken.

“That’s right,” said Fischl. “And Torah is like the Promised Land, we are spies sent in to scout out the truth. Our midrash is what we bring
back. If we read believing that Hashem wrote every word we read, we are rewarded with the delicious fruit of truth.” He gasped for a moment, catching his breath. “If we read without faith, we see only according to our fear. We see giants everywhere, and we’re too scared to understand.”

“Hashem is God,” Max told me.

“I knew that,” I lied. I was beginning to feel a nice warm glow in my chest from my drink. “But weren’t the spies right? They got killed by the Canaanites, so their fears were justified. They were grasshoppers after all.”

“They died because they had no faith.” Fischl looked at me. “What is sin?”

“Sin,” I said, thinking fast, since my feelings about sin were essentially quite positive, “is going against the word of God. Hashem.”

“There are six hundred and thirteen commandments. It’s impossible to follow them all, I mean physically impossible, even if you did nothing else. Why? The Temple no longer exists. We can’t make burnt offerings there the way the Torah tells us to. Why do I wear this ridiculous garment coming out from under my shirt in these tassels?”

“Those are tzitzit,” said Fernando, “and you wear them to remind you of the commandments.”

I stared at him. Teacher’s pet, I thought balefully. How the bejeezus did he know this? Had Max primed him?

“Because I can’t remember them all the time,” said Fischl. “The heart covets, the eyes seek out, according to Rashi. ‘And not explore after your heart and after your eyes after which you stray.’ Feelings are deceptive, what we see is illusory. Hey, the game’s starting. Maxie, go tell Rita the game’s on.”

“We can’t ask Rita to turn up the volume,” Max said to me as if he were my tour guide, and as if he enjoyed this role. “All we can do is tell her that the game is starting. If she chooses not to take a hint, there’s nothing we can do.”

“Except fire her,” said Fischl.

“Well, I could turn up the volume,” I said, feeling quick-witted for the first time since I’d arrived, “or Fernando could, he’s closer.”

“Fernando can’t,” said Max, “he’s Jewish.”

“You are?” I asked, staring at Fernando, who blinked limpidly at me
as if to imply that it was racist of me to assume that because he was Mexican he couldn’t also be Jewish, but he had expected nothing more; he was used to it.

“Mexico City has twenty-three synagogues,” he said, pronouncing “Mexico” the American way, which I was pretty sure wouldn’t have flown on NPR.

“I didn’t know that,” I answered, smiling with false apology.

“Remind me, Jeremy,” said Fischl with some urgency. “What were we just talking about before?”

I thought for a moment, then got up and turned up the sound on the television. A sports announcer’s voice gabbled hysterically away.

“You like it that quiet?” said Fischl and Max in doleful unison.

I turned it up, sat down again, and stared glumly at the men on the screen, who wore those cute billed caps and tight, cozy outfits that looked like foot pajamas. After a while, I began to cheer up a little; baseball players’ big round butts, bellies, and arms were very much to my liking. I took another pull of my rye and was astonished to discover that it was almost half gone. My pinkie was sticking out faggily; I clamped it onto the glass with the rest of my fingers and did a quick check to make sure Fischl hadn’t noticed.

“Ha!” Fischl yelled a moment later as the Yankees did something organized and coordinated, startling me out of my reverie about the shortstop, an adorable fellow with a relaxed, serene, joyful stance.

It was too bad the Goldenbergs weren’t allowed to know that Fernando was their son-in-law, because it seemed that in addition to being a Jew, he was a baseball fan. “Good one!” he shouted, and Max clapped his hands once, loudly, as if to cement their shared jubilance. I had no idea what had just happened. I was intrigued by but wholly ignorant of the significance of all the hand gestures the catcher made in his crotch. Nothing much seemed to be happening at any given time; clearly, baseball had a numerical structure and precise rules that played themselves out on the diamond in an inexorable temporal flow, but it seemed that the more you knew about it, the more complex and arcane it all became, and, judging from these exclamations from Max, Fischl, and Fernando about things I didn’t even see, the more exciting. The aerial view of Yankee Stadium reminded me in some obscure way of the synagogue service
I’d once let Max drag me to: During the service, some people yakked to each other while others davened to beat the band. There seemed to be no holier-than-thou piety involved: The more you participated, the more you seemed to get out of it, but no one seemed to judge anyone either way.

I noticed then with some amusement that Max and Fernando were sitting as far apart on the couch as they could get, with a whole chaste cushion between them. The air between them was suspiciously neutral. They neither slapped each other five nor kept up a riffing, boisterous running commentary the way two straight male friends would probably have done.

“Hello, boys,” came a loud voice from the doorway. It belonged to a wiry woman with a black bouffant I identified immediately as Rita. “Am I too late for the kickoff? Oh, I see you found another Shabbos goy for the evening.”

“That’s me,” I said.

“Lucky you,” she said, and grinned at me. She was gap-toothed, which according to the old-wives’-tale canon meant, I seemed to recall, that she liked sex.

“This is my friend Jeremy Thrane,” said Max. “Jeremy, this is Rita.”

Rita set a tray on the coffee table near Fischl. He immediately palmed a handful of something and tossed it into his mouth with the fluid delicacy of a circus elephant eating peanuts with its trunk.

“Then you,” Rita said, turning toward the couch with a puckish glint in her eyes, “must be Fernando.”

She knew, I thought with a jolt of pleasure. She knew exactly who Fernando was. Had Max told her? Of course he hadn’t. She must have guessed everything somehow.

“I am pleased to meet you, Rita,” said Fernando, rolling the “r” in her name and rising to his feet to shake her hand with old-world gravity. “Fernando Narvaez.”

“I’m very pleased to meet
you
,” she said significantly. “Oh, Jeremy,” she said, turning back to me, “it’s not sundown till around nine. They’re just being lazy. They start as early as they can every Friday.”

“We’re training him,” said Max. “Gotta get him with the program right away.”

“You,” said Rita, swatting Max’s head, “are the worst. The liverwurst. And, Fishy,” she said to Max’s father, “don’t look so innocent. Jeremy, watch out or they’ll have you wiping their noses and God only knows what else.” With an abrupt honk of a laugh, she disappeared.

“Oh no!” Fischl howled through a mouthful. “What is this, Little League, what a bunch of pansies, they’re throwing like girls!”

Max and Fernando and I avoided each other’s eyes. “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked, standing up and setting my empty glass on a coaster on the coffee table.

“Closest one is downstairs in the basement, first door on your left,” said Max. “Want me to show you?”

“No, I’m sure I can bushwhack my way to it,” I said, not quite sure what I meant by this, but gripped by a craven, unaccountable need to prove something to the fat man in the armchair. The bathroom was right where Max had said it was. I went in and turned on the light, which came on with the roar of an invisible fan. I hated those fans; they made me claustrophobic. What if the house caught fire while I was in here? I’d never hear them calling me until it was too late. I turned off the fanlight and peed in the dark. When I was finished, I zipped up, put the seat cover down, and sat there in the silence and darkness. I rested my cheek against the toilet paper roll and closed my eyes.

I realized in the post-urinal silence that I could hear Rita and Rivka talking as clearly as if they were in the room with me. There was probably a heating vent in the ceiling that connected this room to the kitchen, because I could also hear the clang of pot lids. I didn’t technically mean to eavesdrop; it just happened that their words started to make sense to me once I’d figured out what they were talking about, and there I was.

“So good-looking,” Rita was saying. “Fishy seems to like him too.”

“Well, as long as he doesn’t know,” said Rivka.

“Are you kidding me? He doesn’t notice anything unless it has calories.”

Rivka laughed. “Rita!”

They laughed together, in unison, at the same frequency, as if they’d laughed together before many times.

“Look at these strawberries,” said Rita then in a completely different tone.

“I know, they’re so small this year,” said Rivka. “Next year let’s go back to those chemicals.”

“Okay,” said Rita. “I guess I better set the table now. Should I put these flowers out too? Aren’t they nice, they’re so fresh.”

“White tulips,” Rivka agreed huskily. “Very classy. That Jeremy seems like a nice boy too. I wonder, do you think he and Maxie ever …?”

“Rivka,” said Rita, “get your mind out of the gutter for once, why don’t you.”

They laughed together again, and then their voices faded as they moved into the dining room.

I fell asleep. When I awoke I had a crick in my neck and the house was silent. I checked my watch; the glow-in-the-dark numbers said it was just after eight, which meant that I’d been asleep for fifteen minutes. Then I remembered that I’d been dreaming that the prostitute, Hector, was here too, sitting in the den upstairs, watching the game with the rest of us, a squat, taciturn bruiser with cigarette-stained teeth who could have squashed me like a bug if he’d wanted to. He’d leered menacingly at me, threatening me, while everyone else obliviously watched the game.

My inner voice suddenly began taunting me in a mewling singsong, “I’m so alone, I’m so alone,” and then I thought, Well, it’s true, I am so alone, and put my cheek back down on the toilet paper roll and began to cry, getting the paper all wet. I felt ridiculous, would have looked ridiculous if anyone had walked in on me; of course I was alone, everyone was alone, it was the price we paid for getting to have our separate skulls and individual perspectives and autonomous fields of operation. But why the hell wasn’t anybody buying my novel? And how had I so totally misread Hector’s cues? How could I have been so naive? And he’d stolen my new CD player, which had cost me a half hour of teeth-grinding conversation with a patronizing squid of a salesman at Radio Shack. I wouldn’t have knowingly traded that CD player for any blow job, no matter how passionate and masterful it may have been, which Hector’s had not been in any way.

I washed my hands and face and went back upstairs, where the
rest of the night unfolded inexorably according to the three-pronged dictates of the rituals of Shabbat, birthdays, and houseguest entertaining. Rivka said Hebrew prayers as she lit the candles, her sophisticated face above the light, her cheekbones thrown into bas relief. Fischl chanted some Hebrew blessings in his out-of-breath tenor over the bread, the wine, his wife, and son, his legs miraculously supporting his body as he stood at the head of the table. Finally, the divine, amazing brisket was served, of which I ate three helpings and would have attempted a fourth if I’d been willing to rupture my stomach. After dinner, Rita brought in the nondairy birthday cake decorated with the too-small strawberries, whose candles she and I then blew out together before we opened Max’s presents for him.

“Shabbos goys to the rescue once again,” I said.

“We should get ourselves up in some superhero capes and tights,” said Rita, laughing. “Sew a big red ‘S.G.’ on our shirts.”

“Shabbos Goy!” I sang, and punched my fist in the air as if I were flying under my own power. “It’s a bird!”

“It’s a plane,” said Rita, handing Max the card I’d brought for him.

“It’s a gift certificate from Steiner’s,” said Max. “Jeremy, I need a new pair of running shoes, this is great. Thank you. I can really use this.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” I said.

“New running shoes,” said Fischl. “Good, you can wear them at Yom Kippur. The ones you wore last year looked terrible. I was embarrassed for everyone to see my son in these things. They were all thinking, Fishy’s son is a doctor and he can’t afford new shoes?”

“Dad,” said Max, “don’t you think they had other things on their minds on the Day of Atonement besides my sneakers?”

“No,” said Fischl, his eyes protruding with the force of his opinion.

“Also,” Max persisted, “do you ever wonder why we wear sneakers on Yom Kippur when the whole point of not wearing leather shoes is that we should be uncomfortable? Sneakers are the most comfortable shoes there are. It seems to me,” he began, and then stopped, his cheeks ruddy with wine and nervous tension. “Well, anyway, there are other ways we follow the letter of the law but not the spirit.”

“What other ways, Maxie?” Rita asked with sly curiosity.

For some reason, Fernando and I exchanged a cool, probing, not wholly unfriendly glance.

“It doesn’t matter, really,” said Max through a bite of cake.

“Can I ask you all something?” I said. “What do you all think is the correct spelling of ‘dog-do’?”

Everyone stared at me.

“I know this is out of the blue,” I said. “But it’s related to what we were talking about, I promise. It has to do with this letter-spirit question.”

“D-o-g-dash-d-o,” said Fischl.

“Two o’s,” said Rita.

“D-o-g-d-o,” said Max, “no dash.”

“Let’s see,” began Rivka slowly, thinking. “D-o-g.” Then she stopped, chuckling. “It’s a trick question, that’s what it is. There’s no correct answer. That’s Jeremy’s point, I bet: It doesn’t really matter how you spell it because it’s not a real word.”