Sweet Like Sugar (24 page)

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Authors: Wayne Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General, #Jewish Men, #Male Friendship, #Rabbis, #Jewish, #Religion, #Jewish Gay Men, #Judaism

BOOK: Sweet Like Sugar
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“Of course we were,” she said.
“Rabbi Zuckerman talks about her all the time,” I said.
“I imagine he does,” she said. “She was a wonderful woman, Sophie. Although of course I only knew her for a short time, and much of that time, she was sick. But when someone has a good soul, it doesn't matter if they're old or young, sick or not. You can tell.”
I picked up the photo and examined it more closely. On second glance, it appeared that the rabbi wasn't looking at Sophie at all, but at Irene. Or was I seeing things? It was hard to tell from a slightly out-of-focus snapshot.
“When we were all together down here, the three of us became like a little family,” she said. “Sophie and I would cook and the three of us would eat together. And when Zisel would go to shul, Sophie and I would sit on the balcony and talk.”
“About what?”
“Well, I would talk about my children and my grandchildren, I suppose,” said Irene. “And Sophie would talk to me about the bookstore.”
“You didn't talk about the past?”
“Sweetheart, can you imagine that conversation? Neither of us wanted to talk about the past.”
I felt like an idiot.
“But that didn't matter, we were friends,” she said, pointing to a framed needlepoint hanging on the wall. “She made that for me.”
I went to look at the needlepoint and Irene turned on another lamp so I could see better. It was an orange sunrise coming over a green hilltop and had something written on it in Hebrew. “What does it say?” I asked.
“I don't remember the Hebrew words,” she said, “but it's a quote from Hillel: ‘If not now, when?' I always liked that quote. Sort of like ‘Carpe diem' for the Jewish crowd.”
“I think the rabbi has a couple of things like this in his house,” I said, remembering the pictures I'd seen upstairs in his house—one with flowers, another with apples, both with Hebrew writing on them.
“I'm sure he does. Sophie was an expert. She told me that she used to needlepoint in the store in between customers.”
Without being invited to stay, I sat down on the couch. Irene sat in the chair next to me.
“Did Sophie know about you and the rabbi?” I asked.
“We never talked about it,” she said. “But Sophie was no fool. She knew that we were friends when we were teenagers. Did she connect the dots? Probably. And she knew that we were close again down here in Miami. Did she connect those dots? Probably.”
I looked at her in disbelief.
“Close?” I asked.
She paused. “You ask a lot of questions, Benji.”
“I'm sorry,” I said. “You don't have to answer. If it's too personal.”
“At my age, most people I know want to talk about bowel movements and incontinence,” she said. “Nothing's too personal.”
She smiled and I knew I hadn't offended her.
“I'm just not used to talking about this,” she said. “But yes, you might say we picked up where we left off.”
“What does
that
mean?” I asked.
“Oh, it's not nearly as tawdry as you're thinking,” she said. “Young people always go right to the sex, don't you? Dressed in white, but you've still got a filthy mind. When I say we had a little affair, I mean that we sort of picked up where we'd left off when we were teenagers—and we weren't having sex then, either! I was too young for all that then and I'm too old for it now. We just spent time together, a few minutes here or there, and talked.”
“About what?”
“About all the years we'd missed. The years we might have had together. Even after all that time, we still loved each other.
“We never had more than a few minutes. He always got up early to daven and then he'd go to the bakery to get rolls for breakfast. He'd drop a couple of them by my apartment on his way home and we'd have two, maybe three minutes together. Or Sophie would take a walk to the beach to collect seashells and we'd have ten or fifteen minutes before she came back. It was never much. But it was a lot.”
“Did Sophie ever find out?”
“No,” said Irene. “But one afternoon, when they were down here for a whole week around Christmastime, Sophie wasn't feeling well—she'd been getting chemotherapy—and she lay down to take a nap. Zisel came downstairs and we thought we might have a whole hour together. A whole hour! He told me he still loved me, that he had never stopped loving me after all these years.
“It's not that we didn't both have good lives. He was happy with Sophie and they had a very nice life and a successful business. And I had been happy with Harold and wouldn't trade all my years with him for anything. But still, we knew we had both been denied what might have been for us. And regardless of what else happened, this was a tragedy. Because, like I told you, we were meant to be together. So that night, while Sophie was upstairs napping, we sat at my table and cried, both of us.
“And when Zisel went upstairs afterward to check on Sophie, he found her passed out on the bathroom floor. She had woken up feeling very sick, and started vomiting blood, and passed out right there by the sink.”
“So what did you do?”
“We called an ambulance, of course, and Sophie went to Mount Sinai and got a transfusion and the doctor put her on some new medication and she came home a couple days later. But she was never quite herself after that. She never asked Zisel where he'd been that afternoon and he never told her. But he was convinced that God was telling him that what we were doing was wrong, that even though all we had done was talk, it was like he was breaking his marriage vows. So we had to stop seeing each other, even for a few minutes, without Sophie.”
“And that was the end of it?” I asked. “It just ended, and you went back to being friends with both of them?”
“Mostly, yes,” she said. “I didn't have a choice. I couldn't talk to Zisel about it in front of Sophie and he wouldn't see me alone anymore. And then they went back to Maryland, so it wasn't really an issue. But he did come once more to my apartment, many months later, when they came back to Florida.”
“What happened?”
“He told me he had been praying a lot, and studying, trying to find a solution,” she said. “And he had one. Even though he couldn't see me anymore while he was with Sophie, he told me that if, God forbid, Sophie should die before him, he would marry me.”
“I don't get it.”
“Well, in his mind, being with me while Sophie was alive was adultery,” Irene said. “But if we were both—God forbid—widowed, then God wouldn't want two widowed people to be lonely and miserable, and then, and only then, would it be all right for us to finally be together.”
“How much longer did Sophie live?” I asked.
“Just a few months,” she said. “She got very sick, poor thing. May she rest in peace.”
“So are you two going to get married?” I asked.
“Let's just say I've stopped looking for a wedding dress,” she said with a flip of her hand. “After Sophie died, he stopped taking my calls, at home or at work. I send him letters, but he never answers. He hasn't come to Florida once since she died.”
“He won't talk to you at all?” I asked. I knew the rabbi was stubborn, but this seemed unnecessarily cruel.
“I thought I'd lost him forever,” said Irene. “Until he sent you here.”
 
The trip home was uneventful—no flirtatious flight attendant, no whole can of Diet Coke.
The weekend hadn't turned out the way I'd planned at all. I had anticipated a few days of partying, hanging out on the beach with a bunch of guys, sipping fruity cocktails through silly straws. But while I'd dipped my toe into the gay scene, I'd actually spent most of my time in North Beach. And while I'd chatted with one or two guys, I'd spent most of my time talking to an old woman.
Irene made me see the rabbi in a new light. I wasn't ready to forgive him, exactly, but I felt like I had a better sense of what was going on in his mind. He was a man who lived his life by the rules—a man who had been punished every time he'd broken those rules; a man who punished himself for breaking them, as well. Still, despite his own black-and-white sense of propriety, before our fight, he'd never forced his ideas on me, never insisted that I live according to his code. In fact, he was the only person I'd ever known in a position of Jewish authority who hadn't told me I was a bad Jew if I didn't keep kosher or go to synagogue or pray regularly. Even though he made his own ideas clear, he'd listened, and for a while, he seemed to accept that I might not be the same kind of Jew that he was.
When it came to relationships, however, he was indeed a rigid man; some things, he seemed to think, were not negotiable. If he wouldn't permit himself to bend the rules, even after yearning for sixty years, he certainly wasn't going to allow some kid to break them completely.
When I got back to the apartment, Michelle was in the living room, watching television.
“How was Long Island?” I asked, even though her face already told me the answer.
“Awesome,” she said. “His parents are totally cool—we stayed in his old bedroom and shared the bed.”
“Your parents would never let you do that,” I said.
“I know!” she said. “And I got to meet his sister, and his aunt and uncle, and his grandmother. The whole family. Everyone was really great and Dan and I had a fantastic time. Seriously, it was like the best Thanksgiving I ever had.”
“I'm sure your parents would be thrilled to hear you put it that way.”
“Right? I told my mom that Dan's mom's turkey wasn't anywhere near as good as hers, so she's happy.”
“Smart,” I said.
“And how about you?” she said. “I see a little bit of a tan on your face, so you must have gotten some sun.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And was the White Party as amazing as you thought it'd be?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And did you meet anyone?” she asked with a smirk.
She laughed at my story about Ed and his Jew fetish, but by the end, I didn't think it was so funny. “I think I should give up on dating for a while,” I said. “It's getting ridiculous.”
“Come on,” she said. “The whole time you were down there, you didn't meet anyone else?”
“I did, actually,” I said. “But not the way you think.”
I told her all about Irene and the rabbi's affair.
“No way!” she said. “This is like a total soap opera!”
“I know.”
“So are you going to go tell the rabbi that you met his little mistress? His jilted woman? Or are you going to play dumb and pretend like you don't know a thing?”
“Actually, I don't know if I'm going to tell him anything,” I said.
Michelle looked confused, and I realized that I hadn't seen her since before the holiday, and she didn't know the rabbi had kicked me out of his house. It had only been a few days since our fight, even though it seemed like much longer. I filled in Michelle, who was rapt.
“I knew that rabbi wasn't as hip as you thought!” she said. “I mean, Benji, come on. He's a rabbi. What did you expect?”
“More, I guess.”
“So are you going to see him?”
“I don't know,” I said. “I'm still thinking about that.”
I took my bags to my room and picked up the phone. Message waiting. I checked my voicemail and found just one message waiting for me.
“Benjamin? It's Linda Goldfarb. I'm sorry to bother you at home, and I know you probably won't get this until you're back from Florida, but I thought I should call you. It's about the rabbi. . . .”
CHAPTER 10
“O
ne of the congregants from B'nai Tikvah stopped by to walk Rabbi Zuckerman to shul on Saturday and found him on the bathroom floor,” Mrs. Goldfarb told me in the bookstore on Monday morning. “He's the one who called the ambulance. It must have been an awful scene, because you know it takes a lot for one of them to use the phone on Shabbat.”
“So what's wrong with him?”
“Another stroke,” she said. “Much worse this time.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“We're not sure yet. He still can't talk,” she said. “They're doing all sorts of tests to see if there's permanent brain damage, but even if there isn't, they're not sure how quickly he'll be able to recover.”
“Do they know what caused it?” I asked. I knew he was supposed to be avoiding stress—could our argument have brought this on?
“They don't know,” Mrs. Goldfarb said. “But you remember when he had his first episode, they told him that it might happen again.”
I stood silently, replaying our fight in my head.
“I'm sorry you had to come home to this kind of news,” she said, touching my arm.
“Me, too.”
“I thought about calling you at the Zuckermans' apartment, but I figured there was nothing anyone could do,” she said. “And I didn't want to ruin your vacation.”
Funny, I thought, that she still talked about it belonging to the rabbi
and
Sophie. Although it made sense.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “Not that it was really what you'd call a vacation. It was a pretty interesting weekend.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I looked at her and it dawned on me that she'd known the rabbi for many years and probably knew much more than I realized.
I decided to test her: “I met his downstairs neighbor.”
“Irene?” she asked.
Bingo.
“Yeah, Irene,” I said. “Have you met her?”
“No,” she said. “But we've spoken on the phone. She's quite something, isn't she?”
“You can say that again,” I said, staying vague.
“So, what did you two talk about?” she asked.
I started to wonder if Mrs. Goldfarb wasn't testing me, too.
“About the rabbi, mostly,” I said.
Mrs. Goldfarb nodded. But exactly what did she know?
“And about how he won't answer her letters or her phone calls,” I continued.
Mrs. Goldfarb looked me square in the eye, waiting to hear what else I knew.
“And about how they had planned to get married,” I said.
She blinked.
“So she told you the whole story,” Mrs. Goldfarb said.
“I suppose,” I said. “Unless there's still more that I don't know.”
“No, I think that's about it,” she said.
Mrs. Goldfarb had heard about Irene for a few years. It wasn't the rabbi who first told her about Irene, it was Sophie. Sophie who was so amazed to see how people's paths could diverge for years only to cross again unexpectedly, Sophie who was so delighted to make a new friend so late in life, Sophie who was so pleased to see the rabbi reconnect with someone from his childhood.
“Sophie talked about Irene quite a lot,” Mrs. Goldfarb said. “Sometimes Irene would call her at the store to tell her about something that happened in Miami. And I remember Sophie spent quite a while making a big needlepoint for Irene—she only did that for people she really liked, because by that point, her eyesight wasn't so good and her arthritis was acting up and needlepoint was pretty difficult for her.”
“Yeah, she told me they were friends,” I said.
“Very much so,” she said. “But I guess that's all over now.”
“The rabbi won't even talk to her?”
“Not since Sophie died,” said Mrs. Goldfarb. “At first, when Irene would call the store and the rabbi would tell me to say he wasn't in, I thought it was all just part of his grief. Like he was too despondent to talk to anyone. So I didn't think it was a big deal. I figured he'd get beyond that eventually.
“But then one day last spring, Irene called the store in tears,” she continued, “and she said she wanted to talk to
me
. We'd chatted here and there over the years, but we'd never really had a serious conversation before. She was hoping I'd be able to explain to her why Rabbi Zuckerman had cut her off. I told her I didn't really know and that Rabbi Zuckerman really didn't talk to me about his personal life. So Irene told me her whole story.”
“Were you surprised?” I asked.
“Definitely,” she said. “But I could empathize with both of them. I lost my husband when he was very young, so I know what it's like to be widowed. I knew that Irene had been horribly lonely after her husband died and what a godsend it was for her to find the Zuckermans. And I knew that Rabbi Zuckerman was going to have a very difficult time without Sophie—if you'd met her, you'd understand, she truly was his better half. What the rabbi was doing didn't make any sense. He wasn't just resigning himself to living out his remaining years alone. He was also leaving Irene all alone. Again!”
I thought about Irene. She seemed so strong and independent. But then I remembered how I first saw her, crying in the doorway, fragile and scared.
“It'd almost have been easier for Irene if she'd never met the rabbi again,” I said.
“That's right,” said Mrs. Goldfarb. “But here, she felt like she'd somehow been lucky enough so that she wouldn't have to be alone anymore and he went and abandoned her. Without even an explanation.”
“So what did you do?”
“I told Rabbi Zuckerman that I'd talked to Irene and that I thought he should call her,” she said. “He didn't want to hear it. I tried to convince him that calling Irene would make both of them much happier and it wouldn't be hurting anyone. But he didn't want to hear that, either. So then I told him that Sophie wouldn't have wanted him to be all alone.”
I thought back on my fight with the rabbi and remembered how bringing up Sophie had been my ultimate error.
“That probably didn't go over well,” I said.
“You got that right,” she said. “He told me to mind my own business and stay out of his personal life. And he told me never to mention Sophie again. And I haven't.”
“But you still talk to Irene?”
“Not for many months,” she said. “After I had that talk with Rabbi Zuckerman, I called Irene and told her that I'd tried, but I didn't think he'd budge. Irene said she understood and she'd try not to get me more involved. She hasn't called since. I figured she finally gave up.”
“Not quite,” I said. “She's still sending him letters at home.”
“How do you know?”
“I've seen his mail,” I said. “But he throws them all in the garbage without reading them.”
“See? Stubborn.”
“Believe me, now I know just what you mean,” I said. And I told her about my fight with the rabbi the previous week. I'd never talked to Mrs. Goldfarb about being gay, but I'd always just assumed she'd figured it out. After all, she knew me as a child; she probably knew I was gay long before I knew myself. Whether or not she'd already known for sure, or guessed, she didn't seem taken aback by this bit of information.
“You know, Benjamin, I really thought he'd be different with you,” she said. “But I guess he fights with everyone. Sooner or later.”
 
I didn't get much work done that day.
As I sat at my desk, staring at the Barry Sisters poster he'd given me, all I could think about was the rabbi. I wondered if our fight had brought on his stroke; after months of progress, with the rabbi finally learning how to relax and take care of himself, I might have unintentionally put him right back in the hospital with a ten-minute argument.
And besides, even if I wasn't the direct cause of his stroke, the plain truth was that I wasn't there when he needed me. I wasn't there to call the ambulance. I began to understand how the rabbi must have felt when he left Sophie alone: He was gone only for an hour, but that hour continued to haunt him almost two years later.
I may have forgotten the tunes to some prayers for Shabbat, and my Hebrew might have been rusty, but my sense of Jewish guilt was as keen as ever.
I called my mother—the one who'd done such a good job of instilling that guilt—and told her about the rabbi. For once, she didn't try to get in any digs about him or tell me why I should avoid all Orthodox people. She just listened.
“It's not your fault, Benji,” she said. “You've already done more for that man than anyone could have expected. You can't be with him twenty-four hours every day. You're not his nurse.”
“I know.”
“And you knew he was sick,” she continued. “You knew it was just a matter of time until he had another stroke, right? That's what you told me the last time he was in the hospital. So it's not your fault.”
“I know.”
“So if you know,” she said, “then what's the problem?”
I explained that I felt guilty, despite everything I understood to be true.
“Guilt can be very useful,” she said, “depending on what it makes you do.”
“What do you think I should do?” I asked.
“All of a sudden you care what I think you should do?” she replied.
Touché.
“Listen,” she said, “you know that I always thought it was a bad idea to get involved with that rabbi. But now you're involved, and it's up to you to figure out what to do.”
She told me that she'd make a
misheberach,
a prayer for the sick, in synagogue that Saturday—which seemed like an unusually kind gesture until she added, “because I know you wouldn't deign to go to services and do it yourself.”
Nice, Mom.
I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. On the one hand, I was still angry about what the rabbi had said to me the previous week. I could put up with a lot, but that kind of thoughtless bigotry, veiled in piety and sanctimony, really got my hackles up. The rabbi and I had different views of our Judaism and how it informed our lives; so why did he get to judge my life by his standards, rather than the other way around?
On the other hand, if he really was like a grandfather to me, shouldn't I have been able to get past the arguments and forgive him? Wasn't our bond strong enough, after these months, to withstand a few harsh words—especially at a time like this?
I didn't have an answer yet when Mrs. Goldfarb knocked on my office door after five o'clock.
“I'm heading over to Holy Cross after work,” she said, standing in the open doorway, one hand holding a lit cigarette just outside. “Do you want to go with me?”
I shook my head. “I'm not sure if I want to see him,” I said.
She was taken aback. “Look, Benjamin, if you two are going to patch things up, somebody here is going to have to make the first move. And right now, Rabbi Zuckerman can't do it. So it's going to have to be you.”
She waited for my answer, but I didn't respond.
“All right, not today,” she said before she turned to leave. “But don't wait too long. You have all the time in the world. Rabbi Zuckerman might not.”
 
I didn't go to the hospital that day. Or the next day. Or the next.
By Friday, Mrs. Goldfarb had stopped asking if I wanted to go. She still stopped by every afternoon to give me an update: “He's sitting up” or “He can hold a cup steady” or “He's getting a few words out.” But no more talk of visiting hours at Holy Cross.
On Friday, I went straight home from the office after work. Michelle was already there, unpacking groceries.
“Still no visit?” she asked
“Nope,” I said.
She nodded. “Still pissed, huh?”
“Yup.”
That was it. No guilt, no pressure, no cross-examination. I didn't know what Michelle really thought—or if she actually had an opinion one way or the other—about the situation. But I appreciated having someone who'd just listen without questioning me.
I went to my room and kicked off my shoes.
Michelle came in behind me and sat on my bed.
“I think I've got a solution to your problem,” she said.
“The rabbi?”
“You are totally obsessed with him, aren't you?” she said. “I'm not talking about your rabbi problem. I'm talking about your
man
problem.”

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