Paradise Park (41 page)

So there were some tensions in the trio, yet everyone was dancing too hard to care. As long as the music kept coming, as long as those rhythms kept pouring on, we danced. And I held hands with the other ladies; I locked arms with Estie’s cousins. I had several different drinks from the bar, where there was also a whole smorgasbord set up with crudités and chopped liver sculptures in the shapes of swans, and miniature rye breads, and whitefish salad, and turnips carved like roses. I was wearing a borrowed dress from one of Estie’s cousins, which was an old bridesmaid dress, a lace-covered apricot satin concoction with great big muttonchop sleeves, which was not exactly my style. Yet who knew what my style was at that point? I had the shoes that came with the outfit, the kind dyed to match, so they were apricot, too, but scuffed in back and big on me, so my feet and my toes kept feeling their way inside these hollows and little caves that Estie’s cousin’s feet had previously established. I must have looked ridiculous, but I danced and danced. I kicked off the shoes into a corner of the room. I sweated up the satin of the dress. My face was hot.

The band stopped. There was a playful drum roll, and everyone burst out clapping. There stood Estie, alone in the doorway, like Princess Aurora, perfect and smiling, not a wrinkle in her white satin gown. She had a crinoline underneath, so her skirts poofed out and swished as she walked, and her dress was covered with frothy white tulle. Yitzy was off with the men. It was as if Estie had ditched him at the door. There wasn’t going to be any of that first dance as a married couple, or feeding each other bites of wedding cake. None of that. Estie smiled upon us, and her face was lit up with joy, but also confidence, as if to say, I’m back! She danced with her mother, and her grandmother, and, like the song says, her sisters and her cousins and her aunts, and as she danced, her dress flew up across the floor, and you could see the white slippers
she was wearing underneath. Her lacy double veil came loose, and people had to help her pin it back onto her hair, and she had to stop and wait patiently, and she was so beautiful, I have to say—not just her face and her fair skin and slenderness, but the hope in her eyes, and, I want to say, her youth, but it wasn’t just that, it was the way she carried off being young, the way she was at peace with her seventeen years, so joyful in her family’s expectations. Gorgeous in her conformity.

Inspired by the sight of her, I ran up to the band. “Could I request a niggun?”

They couldn’t hear me at all, what with their earplugs and their massive speakers.

“Could I make a request!” I screamed.

The sax player knit his brow at me, as if I were disturbing him during a sacred act. The drummer ignored me altogether and just kept pounding on. So I went over to the guy on keyboard and I started humming to him. He looked at me and grinned, and immediately started picking up the tune. He began to play and then the drummer followed. When the sax looked peeved, my keyboard player started making exhortations in Russian, and after some back-and-forth the sax finally picked up his instrument and began to play, or rather, belt, the tune.

Then I ran over to Estie and said, “I want to teach you guys a dance!”

I got everyone into lines. Then I put on my teacher’s voice. “Okay, ladies, this is a traditional dance from the seventies. Let’s go now: forward, walk, walk, walk, back, walk, walk, walk.” I taught everyone the Hustle.

The party went on long into the night. The children were crashed out near the dessert table, so when people started leaving and collecting their kids, they had to pick through the sleeping bodies on the floor. The band was packing up, the caterers stripping and collapsing the tables, revealing them to be particle board. Some ladies collected all the centerpieces, which were silk flowers rented from the ladies’ charity group. Estie took off with her new husband and a bunch of other relatives. You had to wonder when the bride and groom got a chance to be alone for real.

As for me, I wandered down the hall to the ladies’ room, and then padded back in my stocking feet, slipping and sliding on the tile floor. The women’s ballroom was deserted. No one had thought to collect me
and bring me home. Not being a child, no one had thought to include me in the head count of cousins or carry me back to the house. Everything hurt. Maybe I’d had a little bit too much to drink. Nausea was starting to overtake me. Real life was coming crashing down. I leaned against the wall in the hallway. In my shiny apricot dress I slid down to the floor and sat.

“These are yours?” I looked up to see the red-haired Russian-speaking keyboard dude coming over and holding up my satin shoes.

“Not really,” I said. Still, I rustled to my feet and took them.

“You are related to the bride or to the groom?” he asked.

“Neither one,” I told him. In my current state, wondering if I was still even going to have a home at the Karinskys’, I felt offended at him asking. I felt as if he were asking a really personal question. I shot back, “Are you?”

“No! No, I am a musician,” he said.

“What do you have, a pickup group, or a regular band?”

Now it was his turn to look offended. “They are a regular band,” he said. “I came to try them out.”

“Oh, it was a tryout,” I said.

He lowered his voice. “I do not like their tempos.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

The other two musicians were coming out now, wheeling the equipment. As they walked, I felt a ripple of contempt sweep past.

“Their style is not mine,” Mr. Keyboard was telling me. “In fact I am a classically trained pianist! I have been a student at Berklee College of Music!”

“No kidding,” I said. “That’s a good school. Do you live in Boston?”

“Yes, in Brighton.”

“That’s bizarre! I used to live right there. I lived in Allston!” “Oh, yes?”

“Years ago. I’m from Boston—originally. Probably from a somewhat different background than yours,” I added, taking into account his black frock coat, and his black tasseled sash, and in general his whole Bialy-stoker outfit, which I knew by that time was the exact garb of the gentry of Bialystok in the eighteenth century. “My background is somewhat secular,” I said. “I am in the process of learning the Hasidic lifestyle.”

He beamed. Everyone was always beaming when I mentioned my learning. “I am also in the process!” he said. “You! You look like a rabbi already.” “I have been learning three years.”

“Well, I’ve just been learning something like—I don’t know, three months,” I confessed. “I’m just scratching the surface. Estie was my teacher. That’s the main reason I’m here.”

“No. No, Hashem brought you here,” he said solemnly. And he looked right into my eyes. He was freckled, and still sweaty from playing. His face, and beard, and his whole body, were long; his brown eyes were so bright and intense he looked like someone from an El Greco painting—he had such a beautiful yet unrealistic look about him.

“And, what brought you to …”

“When I was twenty-two years old I received a Jewish visa to leave Leningrad. I came to this country in 1980.”

“I was going to say what brought you to Hasidism.”

“My divorce,” he said promptly. “During which my wife was leaving me for another man, and I grew mad.”

“Mad angry, or mad insane?” I asked.

“Without a mind. I returned to life through Rabbi Nachum Jarosiewicz—you have heard of him?” I shook my head.

“He came to me, and together learned with me until once again I remembered who I was, and so I lived with him a time until once again I returned to the apartment of my aunt, who has kept my piano. To which I returned for my studies and my learning together.”

“What are you studying for now?” I asked. He looked to be in his thirties at least.

“I am to be a concert pianist,” he said.

“What, classical?”

“Everything,” he declared. “Classical, romance, jazz, rock.”

“Rock.”

“Rock, ragtime, pop. Also harpsichord.”

I must have been looking skeptical, because he said, “I would show you now if they had not taken my equipment.”

“They took your stuff?” I looked down the hall to where the other two musicians had disappeared.

“The stuff was belonging to them,” he admitted. “However, they do not understand musicianship.”

“Do you do a lot of weddings?”

He reddened. “This is my first wedding.” He was starting to get that offended look on his face again. I don’t know what the rest of the band had told him, but it was probably something like You’ll never play in this town again. He said, “My wish is only to be a Bialystoker Hasid living as a concert pianist.”

For a moment I pictured the guy up onstage in white tie and frock coat. Then I tisked my tongue. I said, “It’s hard with Shabbes.” Meaning, it’s hard to play all those concert dates and travel internationally while still observing the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays. “You could always work in the studio like Glenn Gould,” I said.

“You know a studio?”

“Listen,” I said, “let me tell you something. Music is all about connections. Believe me, I know. These big stars work in a world of their own. They have whole staffs of people just to answer their mail. Music is just an industry like everything else—it’s just part of the human machine. But Hashem!” I said. “He is forever!”

“Baruch Hashem!”
he declared.

“Hashem is the ultimate reality, and the rest—all the things of this world—they’re just illusions—that’s the one thing I know,” I said. “And all of us—all we can do is try to ascend nearer to His presence.”

Then he smiled at me such a quick smile, it was like a flash of light across his face. “In the past I feel that I have known you before.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“It could be possibly we knew each other before we were born.” I hesitated a second. I wasn’t sure whether that statement was part of Hasidic Judaism or a mystic pickup line. “What’s your name?” I asked. “Mikhail.” “I’m Sharon.”

He was looking at me intently. “I think yes I knew you before.”

“Seriously, do you think people’s spirits could float around like that? Do you think they’re like birds, and then they’re born into human bodies, but still they try to fly, and they ride prayers like updrafts … ?”

“Of course!” he said.

I stood there with my mouth open, I was so surprised. I whispered,
“Do you think a soul could be like a molten fire, and you have to throw it in the furnace to be forged?”

“Oh, yes. Yes,” Mikhail said. “In mitzvos, and halachos.” In good deeds and Jewish laws.

Oh, my God, I thought to myself. Oh, Hashem, what is happening? He knows everything in my heart. He understands. He can see all the things no one else can see. “Do you like Blake?” I blurted out.

“What is Blake?” he asked.

Oh, well, I thought.

The two of us walked outside into the hot city night. The two of us walked along the dark streets where all the stores had their metal grilles pulled down and the shadowed houses were surrounded by herds of cars parked in alleyways. It wasn’t far to the Karinskys’, which was a good thing, since the neighborhood was not the safest. But we weren’t thinking about that. We were discussing the stars we could not see, and the way lights could be illusory or they could be true, and only God could help you tell the difference.

Since Mikhail didn’t really work, apart from teaching piano lessons, he stayed on in Crown Heights for three days with friends of his Brighton rebbe, so we could pursue more dialogues on theosophy. We talked about knowledge, and how you had all of yours before you were born and then you lost it at birth. And we spoke of music and how it came straight from Hashem, and how the rhythms and the melodies could carry you straight upward to the angels, and how the angels themselves were singing Holy! Holy! Holy! for everyone to hear, if only you would listen. If only you opened up your ears to their delight. And we talked of instruments, and my long-lost guitar, and Mikhail’s piano that had been something of a sticking point with his ex-wife, since he had found the money for the down payment by selling their car. His wife just didn’t get that. She called Mikhail selfish. As if a piano weren’t just as much a vehicle as any car could be—and more, given pianos can take you across time and states of consciousness, and cars only drive on the ground!

We talked music. We talked about my songs that I had once composed. We discussed the folk movement in America, and how there were these divisions between so-called high culture and low and middle, just to keep some people out. And we talked about how even democracies can be so exclusionary and voices can be silenced and people’s self-expression
unheard, because they might not have the right connections or the money or education—or their vision might be just different! But most of all we talked about Hashem and how he had taken hold of each of us and how when that happens you just want to dance and sing. And how we were both impatiently expecting any day for the Messiah to come—how we expected his arrival even right that second, even at that very moment, which is what we as Bialystokers devoutly believed. And I said how I imagined it would be when he came—how the night would turn to day, and the dirt swept away. How the stars would dance and every plant and animal and insect and human and spark of fire and particle of dust would rise and proclaim, “The Lord God is King! His majesty rules forever!” And Mikhail said people would play the music of the angels, and angels would play human music! Because there would be no gaps anymore between the two. The people would play music they had never heard. But the angels would play Stravinsky’s
Symphony of Psalms.

“Why that piece?” I asked.

“I personally should not predict,” he said, philosophically. “I myself couldn’t say. But if I have to mention one candidate for them to play,
Symphony of Psalms
would be the one.”

“I’ve never even heard it,” I said.

“You will,” he said.

We were sitting outside on the Karinskys’ brick steps, and the sun was setting. The sky was growing pale, and above the buildings the sun was even shinier than an apricot satin dress. For a second there the two of us could barely breathe. For a second there we could almost imagine the Messiah actually coming forth out of that sunset, illuminating the brick and fake fieldstone and corrugated metal storefronts. We heard a roaring like the depths of the ocean! Yet then we saw the roaring was just a delivery truck breathing down the street, and a bus fwishing its hydraulic brakes. Which was kind of prosaic, yet did not ruin our mood at all, which I attribute now to the fact that the two of us had found each other. When you think about it, isn’t that practically as miraculous as the Messianic age? The two of us were both in thrall of music and of angels, and the miracles performed by the rebbes of Bialystok. We were full of lore and piety, yet still, somehow, even then, when I looked at Mikhail, I didn’t just see another Bialystoker. I saw someone who was questing and seeking and searching and yearning. I saw someone on a
pilgrimage, and with the kind of soul that asks a lot of questions, and the kind of imagination that loves God to pieces. Except his imagination was calmer than mine, so when I was with him I felt like I was just gliding into cool pools. As opposed to splashing around all the time.