Love Sick Read online

  “Paul.”

  “Paul.”

  “Yeah. Like Paul the Apostle. Wrote the Epistles in the New Testament. Maybe his middle name is Schlomo.”

  “Paul the musernik.* Innnt-errr-esting.” Her exaggeration meant I had her rapt attention, and she only hauled out her Yiddish for good reason. “Keep me posted.”

  • • •

  Will would have been in fits at this point. When I was in eighth grade my mother and I took the train from Missoula to Portland, Oregon. We sat down in our scratchy Northern Pacific seats and she handed me a copy of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. I didn’t speak another word until I had to greet my grandparents the next day.

  I’ve always been enchanted by a long dress and a couple of archaisms. Add a chemise and a bonnet and I’m good to go. It was 1970 and I couldn’t believe no one had told me there were people living in the eighteenth century. I announced that I didn’t want to be confirmed in the Catholic Church because I intended to convert to Hassidic Judaism as soon as I could find a Hassidic Jew to do it.

  My father was not amused.

  In fact he gave me a clear choice: Be confirmed and he’d never make me go to Mass again, or else find someplace else to live.

  My confirmation name is Bernadette, and I didn’t go to church for anything except weddings or funerals until I was in college and fell in love with a priest.

  By the time I actually met some Jews, in graduate school, I had long ago relinquished my dream of having babies while my husband twirled his peyos and dreamed of Maimonides. I realized East Coast Jews really are different from Montana Catholics and that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about summer camp and arguing for the sake of arguing. I do, however, feel that Jews, Catholics and Baptists make the best writers because we live in a sea of broken thou-shalt-nots.

  Will has never let me forget my years of wanting to convert. It’s funnier than Yiddish to him and we both find Yiddish hysterically funny.

  “Glad you like Yiddish,” Paul said when I told him of my fondness for the language. “Ever notice how practically all the insulting terms start with a ‘sch’ (shlemeil, shlemazel, schmuck, etc.)?”

  He forgot to include shiksa.

  • • •

  I was not clicking with Paul-guy, but after Sol and the Orange Rose Guy, his willingness to get to know me was refreshing. Also, he had the luck or ability to touch upon just enough Yiddishkeit that I always had to reply. When, for example, I mentioned that Kuffel is Polish, he topped me by mentioning both that his people were a polyglot of Eastern Europeans and that if it was probable that I didn’t like Polish jokes, did I like Jewish jokes?

  I could only groan.

  If the mention of a tin can reminded him of a Far Side cartoon or Simpsons episode, Jewish heritage always reminds me of a boss who, in the first week I worked for her, was nattering on about her Jewish ancestors in the seventeenth century. She stopped and looked at me. “I forgot to ask you, Frahn-ces. What was your family doing in the seventeenth century?”

  I didn’t yet know this woman from Adam and without thinking I answered, “Well, Barbara, in the seventeenth century my people were busy killing your people.”

  The expression on her face defined the word “askance.”

  “I love priest/rabbi jokes and I had a whole collection of Jesus jokes at one time,” I wrote back, and added, “Easterners don’t really tell jokes, at least not like Westerners. We use them as a substitute for conversation.”

  Which summoned this joke:

  “Person Number One: I’ve got a joke for you. Two Jews . . .

  “Person Number Two: Stop! Why does it always have to be two Jews? Why can’t it be two Albanians or two Swiss or two Zulus?

  “Person Number One: Okay. Two Zulus were standing at the back of a synagogue . . .”

  • • •

  It was going on a month after my Looking for Mr. Goodbar debacle, and I hadn’t gone out with anyone else. I figured I should meet Paul and check out the chemistry in person. He couldn’t have been more blatant. Along with the right logistics of where I lived, he wanted to find “someone before the summer with whom to start a relationship,” which felt like ordering a hamburger, but I was going into all of this with an open mind. I’ve fallen in love at first sight and I’ve fallen in love after knowing a man a long time. After much back-and-forthing, we finally set a lunch date. I wasn’t thrilled about going to House of Tofu (I like meat), but it was certified kosher.

  And he sent me two articles about Montana Jews. Each featured a Lubavitcher rabbi.

  How . . . strange, I thought. Every New Yorker knows Lubavitchers on sight, the fedora-wearing, bearded, black-suited men with their Chanukah mobiles rumbling through the streets making sure there is a menorah in every home and vodka in every campus Chabad outreach house.

  I couldn’t imagine Lubavitchers in Whitefish, Montana. They must all migrate for Passover because I’d bet my life there wasn’t a piece of matzo between there and Minneapolis. And where did they get meat and milk???

  One of the articles came from a website called crownheights .info. Its ads flash with blinding speed for brises, shtender stores, professional kosher cooking schools and—holy frugivore shit, Batman!—psychotherapist matchmakers. What does it say that this is part of his reading material?

  I’m noddingly acquainted with Lubavitchers. They own and run my favorite office supply store six blocks from my house. The young ones at the registers are funny and breezy and barricaded behind their high counter. The older ones in the back scowl perpetual questions at customers. You don’t really want a Xerox of that, do you? Why do you need an office chair? Every New Yorker knows why the attitudes and the barricades are up:

  And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. . . . And whosoever toucheth any thing that she sat upon shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.*

  No woman in Brooklyn would dream of trying to shake hands with a man with peyos. We are, as a gender, unclean.

  But what else was involved with dating a member of one of the Twelve Tribes? The Saturday before lunch, I curled up with Daisy and the Old Testament. When it comes to sex, everything was there in the Pentateuch. No adultery, no sex before marriage, no bestiality, no homosexuality, no incest, no ejaculation anywhere besides your wife’s sausage wallet.*

  One could expect anything from death by stoning to expulsion from the tribe for committing one of these, um, acts. My apologies to Moses, but I can’t go along with the word “abominations” for a few of these choices.

  The news wasn’t good for the ecumenical couple either.

  . . . we have forsaken thy commandments, Which thou has commanded by thy servants the prophets, saying, The land, unto which you go to possess it, is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of the lands, with their abominations [read: my abominations], which have filled it from one end to the other with their uncleanness. . . . therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives, and such as are born to them . . .*

  So if doing the naughties with your Jewish wife has an infinity of restrictions and the Old Testament prophets happily banished the half-Jewish kids—the Gershom—from hearth and home, how could Paul possibly justify a goyishe girlfriend? Wouldn’t he be sinning all the way to the Catskills and back with this defilement?

  • • •

  How do you dress for your first date with a big-time Orthodox Jew? Am I supposed to wear tights? A hat? A wig? What would be considered disrespectful? I think about what nuns in civvies wear and figure that would probably be about right, so I brush my hair, put on black jeans and an airy—which is to say, transparent—pink linen shirt. With a royal blue bra. You want shiksa, I tell the blue eyes looking back at me in the mirror, I’ll give you shiksa
.

  It’s no mystery which man coming into the House of Tofu is Paul. That would be the guy in the straw fedora, knotted fringes flying and a beard broad enough for us to picnic on.

  The head shot had not shown how shaggy his beard was, but I couldn’t just blurt out, “What’s with the haystack on your chin?” If the frum* who sell the only pens I can write with are clean-shaven, why can’t he be? I wondered.* Kissing . . . that . . . would scrape my face raw.

  We order quickly and sip our musty Chinese tea. My mouth is dry, as it always is on a first date. I want a diet Coke and a cigarette. Badly.

  Paul has Googled me and has questions about my past. I squirm under the interrogation. I am tired of myself; it goes with the territory of writing memoirs. It occurs to me as he asks about my romantic history that one reason it would be nice to have a boyfriend is so that I’d be so otherwise-directed that I could stop thinking and writing about me-me-me all the time.

  “Arrr-nd have your books sold well?” he asks.

  “The first did; the last not so much.”

  “How many copies?”

  I shrug and look wildly for a waiter bearing tofu. “I don’t really know. I don’t think it would be good for me to know.”

  “Rrrrr-eminds me of a joke. One gentile says, ‘How’s your shop doing?’ and the second one says, ‘Great! Thanks for asking.’”

  There would be time to go sauté my own string beans in the silence.

  “You don’t think that’s funny?”

  “Uh, sure.” The art of conversation is in being a good listener, my mother always told me.

  “Bee-caws if it was two Jews, the second one would say, “We haven’t gone out of business yet, p’ttt, p’ttt, kneina hura.”

  Tiny bubbles of spittle remain on his lips. I stare at him, fascinated, then push the bottle of soy sauce toward him. “There’s no salt on the table. Maybe you can toss this over your shoulder.”

  “That could hurt someone.”

  “Not the bottle, the sauce. At most you’ll have to pay dry cleaning.”

  “Ha, ha, ha.”

  It’s genuine appreciation, but that’s what he says: ha, ha, ha.

  “Did you like the articles I sent you?” he asks before digging into his shiny scarlet sauce–covered glop.

  “Yes, although Lubavitchers in Montana is not the Montana I grew up in.” I spear a green bean. “Both of those articles are about Lubavitchers. Are you a Lubavitcher?”

  He sits back in his chair and regards me for a moment before saying, slowly, “I know the Lubavitchers . . .”

  Jaysus, Mary and Joseph, I think. He “knows” them?

  “But you date shiksas.”

  “No Jewish woman would have me.”

  I look at the other people in the restaurant, a couple of Gen X moms talking with their chopsticks, two mail carriers, an older man absorbed in a book. They’re all having themselves a party while I’m in purgatory. Do Jews believe in purgatory?

  We bump haltingly through the meal and after we pay the bill, he stands to let me go out first.

  “This was fun,” he says when we were out on the street. “We should do it again.”

  “Sure. Soon.” I start to reach out to shake hands but pull back. I’m rolling right along through the last of a fairly eventless menopause, but I’m not mikvehed or absolved or anything.

  I stop at the newsstand across the street to buy a soda, walk over to sit in Jean and Ben’s garden and tell her about the big date. I describe his flat voice and some of the other men I’ve met or am talking to while I smoke my way back to feeling normal.

  “You know nothing can happen with him, right?” she says.

  “Yeah. But it’s interesting research.”

  “Or would be, if he was interesting.”

  When I get home an hour later there is an email waiting. “Since your ad was only a head shot, I took a few glances in order to check out and admire your physique. I apologize if you found that too obvious.”

  I hadn’t noticed. I’m too nervous on a first date to tune in to men’s reactions to me, all that body language stuff that Cosmo promises will let a gal psych the guy out before he’s asked her last name. It was nice that he approved and that he apologized, but . . .

  • • •

  I called Bette.

  “Will you be offended if I call this guy the Jew Boy?”

  There was another one of those silences bearing down the telephone at me.

  “Why would you want to do that?” she asked cautiously.

  “He tucks his peyos behind his ears. When I asked him if he was a Lubavitcher, he said, ‘I . . . know the Lubavitchers.’”

  “No, you cannot call him the Jew Boy. That’s an offense to Jews. He’s the Big Fat Jew Boy.”

  “But he’s not fat.” I laughed.

  “It doesn’t matter. Did he have tzizit?”

  “Hard to tell with that much beard.”

  She groaned. “Not acne, Franny. But don’t tell me he has a beard? Did his food get stuck in it?”

  “He was neat and clean from what I could tell. Except for the beard.”

  “And the tzizit? Fringes?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I drawled. “He had fringes.”

  “Then he’s a Big Fat Jew.”

  • • •

  I thought Bette was being cruel for the sake of hilarity until Daisy and I ran into our neighbors, Carol and Celia, making the sundown circuit with Hazard and Pooh, their shepherd mix dogs and Daisy’s good friends.

  “So I had lunch with this guy yesterday,” I said as I fell into step with them. Celia extracted a cigarette as we passed out of view of their apartment building and the vigilant eyes of her ten-year-old daughter. “He’s a divorced Orthodox Jew. When I asked him why he wanted to date a goy, he said no Jewish woman would go out with him.”

  Carol shrieked. “No shit, Sherlock! And you can’t either. I like you too much.”

  “But there must be plenty of divorced or widowed Jewish women who would love to bag themselves a lawyer.”

  Carol and Celia exchanged looks. The kind of looks you exchange when you haven’t told the other person she has pancreatic cancer. Yet.

  “Tell us more,” Celia said. I love Celia’s voice. It has the clean, clear resonance of a bell. It’s no wonder she’s a hotshot lawyer for a city agency for the elderly. People would tell her anything.

  “I don’t know much more than that. He has two kids who are going away to summer camp in a couple of weeks so he dates in the summer. I asked him if he was a Lubavitcher and he said no but he ‘knows’ them. He’s a lawyer with the city but I don’t know for what.”

  “Probably a tax lawyer,” Carol said dryly.

  “I went to Cardozo School of Law,” Celia said. “My class was full of yeshiva boys. They could argue night into day and still want to twist the sun into something else.”

  “I didn’t know you went to Cardozo,” Carol said. “I figured you went back home in Ohio.”

  “No, that’s how I came to New York.”

  “Oh . . . I actually went to Boston College. That was pretty wild, a Jewish girl among the Jesuits.”

  “You must have killed them,” Celia said.

  “I liked it, but I couldn’t wait to get to New York. Where is this guy from, Frances?”

  “Baltimore. He didn’t become observant until college.”

  Both women sighed an exaggerated “oh.”

  “A BT,”* Carol said knowingly. “They’re the worst kind.”

  “I hope you didn’t wear slacks to lunch,” Celia said, her eyes crinkling up in laughter.

  “Or a linen and wool blend,” Carol added.

  I looked from one to the other. “I don’t get it. He wore a hat to lunch. He has the beard and the peyos and the fringes and disappeared for S
havuot, which I still can’t pronounce. Why would he want to date a shiksa when there are a million rules I’m going to break just by breathing?”

  “Six hundred and thirteen of them, actually,” Celia said.

  “Get it?” Carol asked.

  “Get what?” I was completely bewildered.

  “Of course no Jewish woman will go out with him. Who wants to deal with all those laws? And besides, the beard. Yuck.”

  “Ugh,” Celia concurred. “They’re all so—”

  “Clumpy,” Carol said.

  “And if he’s a Lubavitcher—”

  “Arrogant,” Carol filled in. “They give me the willies.”

  “But you guys are Jewish!”

  “Oh, Frances.” Celia crinkled. “Didn’t you know no one hates Jewishy Jews more than other Jews?”

  “At least the frummies,” Carol said. “Woof.”

  Daisy, Pooh and Hazard looked up at that. Pooh pawed my shin and Daisy and Hazard began asking very loudly for cookies.

  • • •

  It was my psychiatrist, Dr. Roseblatt, whose MD is from another Yeshiva University school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who was most horrified.

  “A Black Hat??? You can’t go out with a Black Hat, Frances. They’re horrible. I interned at Beth Israel and when I walked by them I could feel their eyes drilling into me. I’m blonde so they didn’t know I’m Jewish. It was like a field day for ogling.”

  I was so amused by my psychiatrist’s reaction that I emailed it to Carol. “Big hats have little yelmeke,” she responded.

  I began teaching summer quarter not long after lunch with Paul. There were other guys I was seeing and/or flirting with, and the lack of a weekend date night was counter to my purposes in dating. I suggested we might not be a match.

  And yet I remain fixated on the puzzle of Paul. Perhaps I should be grateful for the do-si-do of the few weeks we communicated. Because of him, I’ve ended up reading more of the Old Testament than I did for my bachelor’s degree in religious studies. I have come to admire a great deal of the joy and tenaciousness that are the story of Hasidic Jewry, and I’ve come to see how much of Catholicism’s ritual and canon are derivations from its Judaic roots. I continue to be suspicious that Paul was looking for sex, but sex based on conversation is the least of what I’m looking for and all too rare at that.