The Mystics of Mile End (14 page)

I opened my mouth, then closed it. “You're saying my heart is a radio?”

Alex smiled the grateful smile of a person who is, for once, in his element. “Well, not exactly a radio, maybe, but definitely able to pick up signals. More like an antenna,” he said, his body turning ever so slightly toward Samara. Even after all these years, he never missed an opportunity to show off in front of her.

“Did the doctor say it was okay for you to be running?” Lev said.

“What kind of signals?” I asked Alex.

“Oh, well, you know. Like, doctors use radio frequencies to repair damaged passages in the heart sometimes? Like, radiofrequency ablation of an accessory pathway, let's say?”

“Maybe I should call Dr. Singh,” Lev said.

“Oh, I already called,” I lied. “He said it's fine as long as I take it easy. Which I am.” Lev looked dubious, so I picked up the pill
bottle on the counter and poured some of the white capsules into my palm to show him. “Besides, Dr. Singh gave me this. Digitalis, it's called.”

“What does it do?”

“These little white helpers? Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.”

“What?”

“They help the ticker tick faster.”

“What?”

“The heart. They make it contract. Make it pump harder.”

“Harder? But is that, you know, safe?”

“Doctor's orders.” I shrugged, tilting the pills back into the bottle. “Don't worry. I've got an appointment with him on Thursday, so I can double-check then.”

Lev nodded, placated at last, and bit into his sandwich. But now Samara was looking me over as if I might collapse onto the kitchen tiles at any moment.

I weighed the advantages and disadvantages of asking Alex to elaborate on the radio heart concept. Showing interest in his field of study was dangerous. There was a bloodhound devotion to the way he pursued his science, and a certain catching sadness in the relentlessness of it; you had the impression that he looked skyward not just for pulsars and quasars but for emotional companionship and spiritual solace. I excused myself and went to my study.

T
wo weeks after the heart attack, I found myself back in the hospital. Singh had called to say he wanted to run additional tests. What kind of tests? I asked. And was told: The usual. A chest X-ray. An ECG. A cardiac MRI.

Because I didn't want to give Singh the satisfaction of seeing that his spooky medical acronyms unsettled me, and because I didn't want to worry my kids any more than was strictly necessary, and because my sexy-professor image had been diminished enough in
Val's eyes as it was, I'd come alone. And remained convinced of the rightness of this decision throughout the first two tests. An X-ray was nothing; I'd done it a dozen times at the dentist's over the years. An ECG? Piece of cake. Singh placed probes on my chest and monitored the signals around my heart. His eyebrows shimmied higher on his forehead, and even when his face failed to hide his growing consternation, I did not pester him with questions. I was, in short, a model patient.

It was only once I was lying flat on my back in the tubular MRI machine that I felt something like fear. I found myself wishing, for the first time in decades, that my parents could be at my side. Wishing for the iron-fisted but stolid presence of my engineer father, the meek and comforting presence of my mother. Their scientific-mindedness. Their zero tolerance for mystical mumbo-jumbo. The total and utter
secularness
of them. All the qualities that had driven me away at age seventeen, and straight into the arms of the yeshiva world, where I'd met Miriam—and then, years later, straight out of that world and into the world of academia.

Theirs had been a life of dinner parties and office parties, carved turkeys and apple pies: two personalities happily constrained by the trappings of the nuclear family and the traditional values that went along with it. There was no room in that tight-lipped world of theirs for doubt. It was an environment built for certainties, not for faith. Because there could be no faith, there could also be no miracles, and as a lonely geeky teenager I had wanted miracles, had needed the exhilarating upward swing into intimacy with something greater and wiser than myself, had been prepared to sacrifice anything—intellectual integrity included—on the altar of that great need.

But extreme swings of the pendulum lead, almost inexorably, to extreme swings in the opposite direction. And so, just a few years after Miriam gave birth to Lev, naming him “heart” in the full
burst of our shared devoutness, I began to realize that my wife—like my whole religious life—embodied nothing more nor less than another iteration of certainty. Her belief was exactly like my parents', only reversed. Repulsed by the bright glow of faith in her cheeks, I scurried into the cool and comforting shadows of forbidden bookstores. There, I read the sorts of secular treatises that would have made my yeshiva teachers spit in disgust. I was drawn to philosophy at first—Nietzsche, Kafka—and then to biblical criticism. As I surrendered the idea that every word in the Bible came directly from the mouth of God, another idea—that life was utterly meaningless and that was perfectly okay—leaped up to take its place. I dropped out of yeshiva and enrolled in university. Because I gave the impression that I was abandoning only a school, not the faith, Miriam accepted it. She wasn't happy, but she accepted it.

And then I discovered Gershom Scholem. The founder of the academic study of kabbalah was doubly forbidden to me: for an Orthodox Jew under the age of forty to study mysticism was already taboo; to study it using this secular apparatus was unimaginable. I didn't care. I couldn't stop. In Scholem, I found a thinker who thrilled not to the long etcetera of petty details typical of organized religion, but to the transcendent aspects of Judaism. To read Scholem was to run along a razor blade, its sweet edge cutting into me again and again. With every page I became more bloodied and more brazen.

For Miriam, that was the last straw. When I'd brought Nietzsche's
Beyond Good and Evil
into the house, she'd frowned. When I'd brought books on biblical criticism, the frown had deepened to a scowl. But the day I came home carrying Scholem's
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
was the day we had our first yelling match. She lost it then—maybe because she could see the light in my eyes, the light of a new love, a love that didn't include her. She ripped the book apart in front of me. I did the only thing I could think to do,
the thing I knew would hurt her most: I marched into the bathroom and shaved my beard.

For a day, two days, three days, she could barely bring herself to look at me. On the third day she came home wearing her usual scarf and, summoning me to the bedroom, swept it off to reveal a shockingly bald head. I stared at the egglike surface and something inside me cracked. Her long, sensuous black hair—which she'd kept covered ever since our wedding, but which had always been a source of behind-closed-doors pleasure for me—gone. This wasn't just a competition anymore; we were locked in a war. I went to bed shaking with rage.

And that was why, when Miriam left the house the next day and went to the grocery store to buy saltines, fucking
saltines,
and got hit by a car and
died,
a part of me was horrified but a part of me was vindicated, was triumphant, and that was the part of me that felt like screaming from the rooftops: Yes! Yes! Exactly! Yes!
That
is how meaningless life can be!

I heard a beep. In the dark confines of the tubular machine, I opened my eyes. The MRI was done. My atomic particles, like kids at the end of a long school day, breathed a collective sigh of relief as the machine released them to their natural alignments. When I emerged, Singh told me to return in a couple of weeks; he would have the results then, and we would know more. He handed me a prescription refill. I took it shakily and passed him without a word.

T
he doorbell woke me from an afternoon nap. Twilight filled my bedroom with a soft blue glow. I heard footsteps shuffling down the hall to the front door, then voices from the stoop filtering in through my window. Samara and Alex chatting while they waited for Lev to get back from evening prayers. As always, the talk turned to Alex's favorite topic.

“And yet it's so weird, you know, because Einstein was totally
right!” Alex was saying. “Except he didn't have the courage to stick to his results! He was all like, ‘No, yeah, the universe can't be expanding, I must've forgotten to carry a one, I must've miscalculated there.' And then—can you imagine?—
years later,
the Hubble Telescope starts sending back all these crazy photos, and the scientists are like, ‘Um, hello, you were right! The universe
is
expanding!'”

Samara laughed.

I groaned inwardly. She thought she was being kind, but this was not kind. She was stringing him along. Case in point: When, for her sixteenth birthday, he'd given her a vintage five-volume box set of
Scientific American
books, she'd accepted it. Not only that, but she'd arranged these five books in an alternating pattern with the five books of the Torah, so that trailing your finger along her bedroom bookshelf you hit: Genesis,
The New Astronomy,
Exodus,
The Physics and Chemistry of Life,
Leviticus,
Twentieth-Century Bestiary,
Numbers,
Atomic Power,
Deuteronomy,
Automatic Control
. What exactly she was trying to convey about the relationship between science and religion, I had no idea—but whatever it was, Alex loved it. And his love was painful to see.

“Later, Einstein said it was the greatest blunder of his life. Sad, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Samara said. “Definitely.”

“Yeah. And now all scientists pretty much agree that the universe is just getting bigger and bigger, which, you know, is kind of weird to think about.” Alex paused, presumably to let the full weirdness of this sink in. In an oddly serious voice, he continued: “The funny thing is, Newton had predicted, way back in the seventeenth century when he discovered the law of gravity, that the universe can't be finite. Because every object attracts every other object, right? So if the universe were really finite, the attractive
forces of all the objects should've forced the universe to collapse on itself. But that hasn't happened, right? Even though gravity is always attractive.”

Before Samara could react to this observation, Lev's voice announced that he was back.

I got out of bed, made my way down the hall, and opened the front door.

“Hi, Dad,” Lev said. “Alex's mom invited me over for dinner. Is it okay if I go?”

“Of course.”

He scrutinized me, as if trying to gauge the effect of his absence from the dinner table in terms of the minutes, hours, or years it might take off my life. “Are you sure? I could stay if—”

“No, go. Really, it's fine. Samara and I can eat together, right?” She nodded—almost imperceptibly. As if the thought caused her physical pain. “See? It's fine. Give my best to your mom,” I added to Alex, even though I had never actually met her. Even though I had actually studiously avoided meeting her. Not because I suspected there was anything wrong with her—if the praise Lev persisted in heaping on her over years' worth of family dinners was any indication, she was a thoroughly lovely person—but because the boys' blatant attempts to set us up had always made me feel uncomfortable.

Alex acknowledged my words with a polite nod, shot Samara a quick backward glance, and led the way down the path. Lev said, “Bye, Dad,” and followed.

With the boys gone, the house seemed colder, darker. I flipped the switches, saying, “Let there be light!” but the upward tilt of Samara's lips was only the caricature of a smile.

Working side by side in a kind of meditative muteness, we threw together some leftover roast beef and stir-fried vegetables and sat
down to eat. At Lev's request, Samara had been coming home for Friday-night dinners since she moved out of the house three years ago. But she often made excuses not to, so her presence at the table still felt strange, unexpected.

“So,” I said. “How's summer so far?”

“Good,” she said.

“Yeah? How's Jenny?”

“She's fine.”

“What's she up to this summer? She working?”

“Well, no, she just graduated from her certificate program. She's taking a bit of a break.”

“Oh, that's nice. That's good! Does she want to pursue music professionally, I mean, now that she's graduated?”

“You mean painting. She studied painting.”

“What? No, I thought she was in music?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

“Can you pass the stir-fry?”

“You're sure it wasn't music?”

“Pretty sure.” Reaching across the table, she took the dish.

I tried to laugh. “You used to be kind of into music, though, huh? Remember when you were nine and I took you to Steve's to pick out an instrument? Remember what you picked?”

She muttered something inaudible.

“Sorry?”

“Eight. I was eight.”

“Right,” I said impatiently. “But do you remember what instrument you picked out?”

“The triangle.”

“Yes! The triangle!” I laughed again, but she didn't seem to see the humor in this. Didn't seem to understand what was funny
about a kid being taken to a top-of-the-line music store, cram-jammed with violins and flutes, Fenders and Strats, and, upon being told she could select any instrument in the store, choosing to leave with a dinky triangle!

I'd tried, gently, to interest her first in the Steinway piano, then in a couple of nice wooden recorders, even in an electric guitar. She wanted the triangle and only the triangle. Trying to be supportive, I'd bought it for her, assuring the salesperson that we'd probably be back for another, more serious instrument, you know, once she tired of this one.