The Mystics of Mile End (12 page)

The kitchen was hot and clammy and I was sweating profusely. I needed some air.

When I opened the front door, I found Samara and Jenny sitting on the stoop, their shoulders touching. “Hello, Jenny,” I said.

They sprang apart like startled animals.

“Hi, hey, hi, Mr. Meyer.”

“Nice day, isn't it?”

“Yes, um, very. How are you feeling?”

“Much better, thanks. Do you two have anything fun planned for this afternoon?”

Samara stared at me but said nothing. Jenny said, “Not really.”

“Good day for a bike ride,” I suggested, keeping my voice as casual as possible and nodding toward the garage where Sam's old bike was stowed.

“I haven't used that bike in about—” Sam stopped herself. “The tires are probably flat.”

“Yes. Well. Just a thought. See you girls later,” I said, and retreated into the house.

Closing the door, I made a mental note to add bicycles to the litany of things Sam and I did not talk about. I wondered whether she remembered that time, weeks after her mother died, when I had taken her and her brother cycling in the middle of the night. She had complained, earlier that day, that we never did anything fun together. And so, besieged with parental guilt, unable to sleep, I had woken them up in the small hours and insisted that they come outside—I would not tell them why. They balked when they saw their bicycles in front of the house, Sam's red ten-speed and Lev's green one-speed all newly polished and poised for flight. And fly we did: up suburban streets and down back alleys, through empty playgrounds and past deserted schoolyards. By the time we got to the mountain they were laughing and singing and swinging their bikes back and forth beneath the streaming stars. It was six thirty when I finally got them to bed. Years later, I still remembered the sibilance of Samara's breath as she slipped into sleep; the cupid's bow of her mouth, not quite closed, suffused in the orange glow of dawn. But she was too young, then, to remember such a thing now. As far as she was concerned, I had probably never taken them for a single ride. I had probably never taken them anywhere.

Back in the kitchen, I poured a glass of lemonade and took the pills Singh had prescribed out of the cupboard. Honestly, for such a smart girl, Samara could be surprisingly naïve sometimes. As if anyone could fail to notice how happy she'd been since she and Jenny bumped into each other at a college art show, rekindling their friendship (“friendship”) after a years-long rift and later moving in together. How her features softened whenever the girl called or appeared at her side. Who could fail to understand exactly what this softness meant?

I knew, I knew, of course I knew—but she didn't know I knew.
Why wouldn't she just come out and say it already? Did she think I would judge, disapprove? Didn't she understand that I didn't believe in any of that traditional twaddle, that Leviticus 18 junk?

I swallowed the pills down with the lemonade, then put the glass in the sink. Through the window I could see right into the Glassmans' kitchen, and there was Mrs. Glassman, whose recent stroke had forced her to walk with a cane yet who was now pulling fresh challah out of the oven while Mr. Glassman sat at the table, sipping tea and not saying a word. I endeavored to remember a time when Samara and I used to speak freely. As a child she'd been talkative, even bubbly: at six or seven, she would sit on the floor of my study, running her fingers through the carpet, listening to me explain about Zeno and Pythagoras and Plotinus, asking me questions and spouting her theories . . . Six or seven. Right before her mother died. Was that when she became so secretive, so silent?

The smell of freshly baked dough wafted over from the Glassmans'. I closed my eyes and saw myself coming home from work, briefcase in hand, to find Miriam in the kitchen teaching the kids how to bake challah. Sam giggled, trying and failing and trying again to copy her mother's motions as she braided the ropes of dough. Lev's pudgy fingers kneaded purposelessly, hitting the dough just for fun, and then he reached for the brush and dipped it in orange juice and sneaked up on Miriam and painted her cheek. She snatched him up and rubbed flour on
his
cheek—and then Sam was into it, too, squealing with delight, smearing both of them with flour and juice and dough. I stood there, marveling at the three of them together, their robust physicality. It hit me that although these were my children as much as hers, I had no idea how to interact with them. Certainly not with that simple solid faith of Miriam's, a faith that was perfect for kids but that I knew even then I would never be able to access. She died that summer and a yeasty silence filled the house and rose, inch by inch, until it filled the space between us.

F
ully a week had passed since my release from the hospital before I finally screwed up the courage to call Val. When I did, she answered on the fifth, not the first, ring: a great relief.

“Allo?”

“It's me.”

“Oh.” Guarded. Concerned but distant. “How are you?”

“Much better now. Listen, I saw you at the hospital, I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to—”

“It's okay. I saw your kids, by the way.
Ils ont l'air très
sympa
.”

“Thanks.”

“Especially your son.”

“Yeah, that's what everyone says.”

“Your daughter, she was giving me a bit of a funny—”

“Listen, how are you? Eckhart treating you okay these days?”

“Yes, he's being very nice. In fact, I just finished a chapter this morning, so. Maybe we could take a coffee?”

“What, now, you mean?”

“Yes. I can pick you up in, we'll say, half an hour?”

I hesitated.

“The kids are at home?”

“No, actually, they're gone.” Samara was out, presumably with Jenny. Lev was at Alex's, probably building some telescope or model rocket.

“So I can come get you.”

“I—okay. But I'm not very—I mean, I may be a bit tired still.”

“Of course. What's your address?”

With a certain constriction in the vocal cords, I gave it to her. Then, hanging up, I went to the bathroom and assessed my reflection in the mirror. For a man who had long prided himself on his physical appearance, his health, his ability to get by just upon a smile, baby, this was a sorry sight; hardly the stuff of student fantasy. My hair seemed grayer. My skin looked sallow and strained.
I saw, or imagined that I saw, a yellowish tinge around the eyes. So much for the sexy-professor trope, I thought, nevertheless doing my best to clean up. I shaved, put on a fresh shirt and pants and, for the first time in a week, substituted loafers for terry-cloth slippers.

By the time I heard her car pull up, I was hemorrhaging confidence fast. I opened the door; she was walking up the stone path, her green dress swirling about her knees, her step buoyant yet measured, as if she came to this house every day. Her smile, too, had the ease that comes with daily routine—but this was not that, could never be that, and I gripped her firmly by the elbow and steered her back toward the car. Only once we were shut up inside it did I kiss her; curiously, as soon as I did so, my anxiety melted away. I kissed her again, harder, and beneath my mouth I felt her smile with all the winsome coyness, all the premature cunning of her twenty-six years.

“I see you're getting your strength back,” she said.

“Well. You have that effect. And you—I'm happy to see you chose green, not black, today. When I saw you in the hospital wearing that funereal dress . . .”

She smiled, but the smile was only in the mouth. She turned the key in the ignition and we pulled away from the house. For a moment there was silence.

“So where are you taking me?” I asked, strenuously jocular.

She named the place. “Have you heard of it?”

I hadn't.

“You'll love it,” she said, and grinned at the road.

Our destination turned out to be a coffee shop in Val's neck of the woods, the Plateau Mont-Royal. Outfitted with mismatched chairs, “radical” zines, Scrabble boards, and a strictly vegan menu, it projected the look-how-quirky-and-idiosyncratic-we-can-be air that I'd come to associate with undergrad students.

No sooner had we sat down with our coffees than a scruffy,
plaid-wearing guy came toward us bearing a pamphlet. He was angry about pesticides, or the overuse of plastic spoons, or coffee shops' failure to replace wooden stir sticks with fettuccine—and he wanted us to help him fight whatever corporate interests were perpetrating this travesty. Val smiled and nodded and accepted his pamphlet and he ambled away. By the window two girls wearing oversize glasses and baggy thrift-store dresses were talking in righteous, high-pitched tones about “development porn” and “post-structural semiotics.” At the table beside ours another girl, sporting yellow stockings and a maroon dress and what appeared to be the exact same oversize glasses, was attacking Žižek's
The Sublime Object of Ideology
with a highlighter.

I raised an eyebrow at Val. “It's all so—vaguely cultish, isn't it?”

She smiled into her mug.

“Why did you bring me here, of all places?”

She shrugged, eyes sparkling. “Isn't it obvious? They make really good coffee!”

I laughed and took a sip. She was right: it was hot and clear and bright. I studied her over the rim, my appreciation for her deepening. The other students I'd slept with would never have brought me here; they'd have known I would hate it, and they'd only permitted themselves to love what I loved. But Val had no interest in ticking boxes, no patience for costuming. She loved what she loved—and that was what made her my Valérie,
ma valkyrie
.

With an upward puff of air, she blew the bangs out of her eyes—one of her lovely unconscious gestures—and then, glancing at her watch, said she needed to make a quick call. Take your time, I told her. I was happy to watch as she stepped into the slanting rays, to marvel at her litheness, her tallness, to contemplate how lucky I'd been to land her in my graduate seminar last spring.

The only Québécoise student to enter the department in years, from a staunch Catholic background to boot; intelligent and en
gaged, but without the slightest trace of earnestness; lacking both the grades-crazed fervor of her academically minded classmates and the ersatz zealousness of her more mystically minded peers. As I had discovered over the years, graduate students in Religious Studies came in two flavors: aspiring professors and aspiring saints. Personally, I preferred the former—or, rather, found them slightly less detestable than the latter.

Myra Goldfarb, for example, in last semester's Eastern Philosophical Texts—there was something grotesquely unsettling about the way she stared at you, unblinking as a cat, with the enormous, nearsighted blue eyes of the bodhisattva-in-training. You could tell from her seminar papers that she secretly believed she would achieve satori if she just plowed through enough books, ladled up enough pea soup at the soup kitchen, and managed to squash that pesky little illusion we called the self. Minus a catechism and a wimple or two, she was like Mother Teresa on speed: she padded her spiritual résumé with the furious zeal of a high school senior intent on getting into Harvard or Yale. Val, praise be, had none of that.

She reentered the coffee shop, tossed her phone into her handbag, and sat down across from me, radiant. Her stylish bob had grown out in recent weeks, so that the tips of the hair now skimmed the tops of her shoulders. The effect was extremely becoming. We drank the rest of our coffee, chatting about the courses I'd be offering next year (Development of Jewish Mystical Thought, The Gnostic Worldview) and about her dissertation (“Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism: The Unthought Debt”). Words tumbled across the table—Neoplatonism,
Gottheit,
Merkabah, demiurge—and sat there, and that was what I loved: neither of us felt the need to beat our words into swords, or to roll them toward some overwhelming question. Free from the burden of persuasion, the words became carriers of pleasure. So that by the time the sky had been recast in
a series of pinks and purples and oranges, I began to feel as though someone had opened up the taps in my nervous system and flooded the veins with red wine. Taking her elbow for the second time that day—but with a different kind of pressure in the grip—I steered her down the street toward her apartment, looking forward to an evening of
luxe, calme, et volupté
.

B
ack home in my study the next morning, with the red wine glow gone from my system, I stared at the heaps of research on my desk.

Before the heart attack, I'd begun a book on kabbalah, focusing on the Tree of Life and based on notes for my lectures in Development of Jewish Mystical Thought. Leafing through the pile, I realized that for all their physical thickness, the notes I'd put together were shockingly thin. Scanning page after page, I was struck by the shallowness of my textual exploration. I'd written:
The kabbalist's goal is to climb the Tree of Life by spiritually binding himself to each of its ten vessels in turn, until he reaches God and becomes one with Him.
Okay, I thought, but “bind” how? Why hadn't I gone into more detail? Wasn't the “how” the most interesting part?

In my discussion of two vessels—Ani, the lowest, and Ayin, the highest—I'd noted:
Commentaries warn that undirected meditation on Ayin is perilous and should only be done under a master's supervision. Pre-Hasidic thinkers do not reference this practice, and even the Hasidic thinkers reference it very obliquely.
Yet I hadn't given a single example of these “oblique” references.

A scrap of paper fell out of the pile and landed on my knee. Here, right here, was one of the phrases I could have mentioned: “Ayin is the crown of Ani.” Why hadn't I cited that quotation? It seemed to suggest that the highest vessel was intrinsically linked to the lowest—but how, exactly? I got a pen and a sheet of paper and wrote out Ayin, then, below it, Ani.