The Mystics of Mile End (15 page)

But she hadn't tired of it. She would sit there, on the floor of her bedroom, dinging that triangle for hours on end, as if all the secrets of the universe were audible in the rest between one note and the next. As she grew older she got less obsessive about the triangle, but not about listening in that strange way. When she was thirteen, I would find her sitting with the telephone pressed to her ear, saying nothing, hearing nothing, except, presumably, the dial tone. The next day, she'd be crouching in front of the dishwasher, attending to its chaotic rumblings as if she were in possession of a primer that allowed her and only her to hear its hidden harmonies. I told myself this was creepy. I told her to stop it. Didn't she have homework to do, tests to study for?

But now, placing a hand on my heart to still its murmuring, I began to doubt my motives. What if I'd tried to stop her not because I found her behavior weird, but because, watching her, I had felt a twinge of envy? It was as if, by listening to the static embedded in musical notes, dial tones, dishwasher noise, she believed she could attain enlightenment. An enlightenment I already knew would never be mine. There was no secret chord I could play to please the Lord.

“That triangle,” I said, “do you still have it?”

“No,” she said.

We ate our dessert in silence, cleared the dishes, and went to our separate rooms.

T
hree hours later, I was lying in bed with Valérie, spent and exhilarated by the fuckfest that had ended minutes earlier. I felt relieved that she still wanted me in that violent, reckless way—and that I could still get it up—but also strangely sad. Her old landlord was moving around upstairs, and the lonely sounds of plodding footsteps, clinking beer bottles, droning television reruns—all of these struck me as singularly depressing.

It was a clear night. A star was winking at me through the window. The wink seemed congratulatory, like a dorm-room high-five bestowed on a geeky freshman who has bedded a girl everyone knows is out of his league. Then I remembered that the light had actually been emitted eons earlier. For all I knew, that star was probably dead.

Turning away from the light, I gazed instead at Val's left leg, where a large and slightly raised birthmark sat an inch above the kneecap.

“What are you looking at?” Val asked.

“This bluish spot here,” I said, tracing it. “It looks like a map of an imaginary continent.”

“A map?” She laughed.

“Yes. Here are the tiny streets and houses. Out here are the rivers and forests. And here you've got the men and women and birds and fish all going about their business. Do you see?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Tilt your head to the side,” I said, “and squint your eyes a little.”

When she saw I was serious, she did as instructed. After a moment, she smiled. “Ah.”

I nodded. “Sometimes, if you look closely, there's an invisible
map hidden beneath the surface of things.” She was still, so I pressed my ear to the birthmark, hoping to hear . . . what? The hallowed harmonies of the grand design, the music of the spheres? Stroking the back of her knee, I listened with one ear for the sounds of her sighing and with the other for the spinning of this lost and secret world. But the sound of a lighter snapped me out of my trance.

Lying back, I saw that Val had a lit joint pinched between thumb and forefinger. In the glow of the Zippo she took a toke, then handed it to me. This was one of the rituals into which she'd inducted me months ago: the postcoital joint. Most nights I was happy to oblige; there had even been one or two occasions when we had gotten so stoned that I still felt the effects the following morning. Tonight, however, I held up a straight-edge palm to say
No thank you
.

“Ça va?”

“
C'est rien
. Just not in the mood.”

A pause, wherein she regarded me intently. Then, with her joint-holding fingers, she brushed the hair out of her eyes and straddled me. “So serious,” she said in a put-on baritone, imitating my furrowed brow. “And what are you thinking about now, so seriously?”

I studied her face suspended above mine, its soft vatic lines. The mouth was smiling. The cheeks were smiling. And the eyes? They were also smiling. But in them there was something else as well: an uncivilized, howling aloneness that never failed to make me feel grateful to know her, because it was the very facsimile of my own.

And yet: How could I tell her what I was really thinking? If I started babbling about Ayin, about how it was supposed to be the crown of Ani, about how this idea nevertheless made me feel vaguely sad and lonely, wouldn't she look at me like I was crazy? Our relationship was based on irony, studied distance, intellectual detachment—not this earnestness, not all of these goddamn
feelings
.

I took her face in my hands and said, “I was thinking about Hubble.”

She laughed. “Of course.”

“I was thinking about how really fundamentally odd it is that the universe is expanding. Odd and, I don't know, disturbing, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you find it disturbing?”

“Don't you?”

She exhaled smoke. “No.”

I stared at her. After a minute, I shook my head. “No, I didn't used to, either. I don't know why it seems strange to me now. All that empty space.”

“You don't know that it's empty. There might be other people—creatures—out there.”

“No, you're right, that's true. But I meant . . .”

“The abyss,
c'est ça
? The void.”

“Exactly. I keep picturing us, our little planet, zooming off into this never-ending space that only gets bigger and bigger, with nothing to zoom toward.” She was looking at me quietly, with the halved patience of a young mind that has spent its best years behind ivy-covered walls. The strands of ivy were already in her hair; soon they would be tangled in her eyes. “It's stupid.”

“No. It's not.” She touched my brow, then leaned down and kissed me.

It was a gentle kiss, and I knew that she meant it as a token of affection or support, but the gesture only made me feel old. I was reminded, suddenly, of the increasing grayness of my hair. Of the parched skin of my hands, my face, my lips. In the apartment above us, the old landlord pushed back a chair, stood up, walked across the room. The sound of a door opening and closing followed. I shut my eyes for an instant and, opening them on the doorway of the
bedroom, thought I saw the shadowy profile of an ancient man. The Angel of Death, proffering my coat and hat, beckoning me out into the night. With a violent motion like that of a dog shaking water out of its fur, I shook the image from my mind.

Val looked at me oddly, but somehow, in the next second, she seemed to know just what to do. She ashed the joint, turned off the lamp, and lay down beside me. Our warm bodies just barely touching. Not the supernova of two people newly in love, not the sticky melding together of disparate identities, but a constellation of adjacent alonenesses, a parallel glide through space.

T
he feeling I had after running for forty minutes was midway between nausea and vertigo. I stood with my hands on my thighs, a grimace on my face. Three Hasidic boys in identical striped shirts whizzed past me on their scooters. A pair of girls raced in the opposite direction, yellow silk bows flashing in their hair. Plastic dolls ogled me from the neighbors' peeling steps.

As I waited to regain my breath, my eyes fell on Katz, who was sitting cross-legged on his front lawn in the blistering summer sun. He had dabbed sunscreen on his face, but had done a careless job of it; a big glob of white was visible on the bridge of his nose, while the entire right side of his face was pink and sunburned. He looked happy as a lark.

Still surrounded by his tin cans, he was running twine through the holes he'd created in each of them, humming as he did so. The tune was the sort of wordless, joyful melody often heard in synagogues on Friday nights—a Polish
nigun
—yet Katz's face registered none of the simple pleasure usually worn on the faces of
nigun
singers. Instead, his eyes had a laser-beam focus that reminded me of Alex preparing a science experiment.

The stitch in my side had finally relaxed. I gave Katz a perfunctory wave; then, seeing that he had been completely unaware
of my presence, I began to jog down the block, ducking along a back street when I saw the indefatigable Mrs. Glassman tottering toward me, muttering under her breath. The green of the trees and the red of the fire hydrants zinged on the undersides of my eyelids. The countless baby strollers, scooters, tricycles, and toy cars that overflowed the porches and littered the curbs—I hurtled over all of them. Houses whipped past. My hands, flat as knives, sliced the wind on either side of me. First my feet, then my legs began to ache, each strike against pavement sending a shock through the arches and around the ankles and up into the calves, which seized up, relaxed, then seized up again. Bouquets of pain blossomed in each muscle and I welcomed them. In the past few weeks, pain had become, paradoxically, my greatest source of pleasure. Had become my pathway to the still, small voice—which was not so still now, not so small, that was growing louder with every heartbeat . . .

Aaaahhhh . . .

The first syllable was audible—I tilted murderously forward—the second syllable was welling up, I could hear it wanting, waiting to burst forth . . .

Aaaahhhh . . . aaaahhhh . . .

Ani.

I froze in mid-lunge, crumpled to the ground. A stinking heap of screaming tissues and beaten, battered bones. Ani. I let my body stretch itself out. The pavement felt cool and welcoming against the base of my skull. Ani. Not the indeterminacy of Ayin but Ani, Ani, the nexus of great absolutes—Authority, God, Meaning. I closed my eyes.

Somewhere a voice was calling. Another voice was answering. I opened my eyes. A flock of blackbirds was darting across the whiteness of the clouds. I stared, for a long minute, at the piano-key sky. Then I got up and slowly, painfully, began to walk.

Judging from the position of the sun, it must have been at least
noon; I marveled at the fact that I had lain undisturbed on a suburban sidewalk for upward of an hour. Then, bending my steps in the direction of home, I found myself marveling at everything around me. The parked car at the corner of Lajoie and Querbes was leaking gasoline onto the pavement, and the iridescence of the resultant rainbow seemed magical and poignant and also terribly human and wasteful and also, for that very reason, achingly beautiful. Tears sprang to my eyes. How vastly things could change in a matter of minutes! In the space of a single heartbeat! Light streamed down, imbuing everything it touched with purpose. On the neighbors' lawns, each blade of grass was swaying with a deliberateness, a grace, that could only have been preordained. I thought of the Hasids in Chagall's hometown, who claimed that behind every blade of grass stands an angel urging it on:
Grow! Grow!
I thought of Epictetus:
I move not without Thy knowledge!

I reached home, drew a deep breath, and smiled at my own obtuseness. Everything my mind had been pitting itself against all these years, I thought as I turned my key in the lock, was everything my heart had been laboring so hard to teach me.

O
n the first morning in July, I was reading in my study when the ringing of the phone laid siege to my ears. I sprang up to get the portable. “Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello?”

The sound of the phone being replaced in its cradle followed.

Cursing the mystery caller under my breath, I returned to my book only to be disturbed a minute later by renewed ringing. With an edge of irritation that I didn't bother to keep out of my voice, I snapped, “Hello.”

“Hello! Um, David, it's Ira.”

“Oh. Ira. Hello.”

“Hello,” he repeated, somewhat stupidly.

“Yes. Now that we've established that, was there any specific reason you called?”

“I thought I'd see how you're feeling these days. How are you feeling these days?”

“Not very well,” I answered, with increasing tremolo. “Unfortunately.”

“Ah, mm-hm, yes? Well. That is unfortunate, yes.” A pause. “Nevertheless, I—”

“I've been working on grading those papers, though.” I glanced at the corner of my desk, where the eighty exam booklets were gathering dust beneath a jumbo-size box of tissues. The rest of the desk was strewn with my notes on the Tree of Life.

“Ah! The term papers? Really?” he said with manufactured surprise.

“Really,” I said, adding, “slow but steady wins the race.”

“Yes, absolutely! So, ah, when can we expect, I mean, when do you think you might have the papers ready by, approximately?”

“Oh, well . . .”

“Yes?” he encouraged.

“It's hard to say . . .”

“Yes?”

“But possibly . . .”

“Yes, yes?”

“Next week. Assuming—”

“Great! That's great. Well, I'm glad to hear you're feeling so much better, and I'll look forward to seeing those grades next week. How are the kids?”

The shrewd bastard. “Excellent. Really excellent.”

“Glad to hear it! Well, David, I'll let you go. Bye for now!” he said, and hung up.

I stood in place for a long moment, listening to the dial tone as if it were speaking to me in a foreign dialect that, with some little skill, I might be able to parse successfully. After several seconds of concerted effort failed to yield any tangible results, I gave up and dialed.

“
Allo?
” answered the voice at the other end.

T
wo hours later, Val and I were sitting across from each other at her kitchen table, late-afternoon light haloing her warm brown hair. She was reading
The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart
. I was reading papers from last semester's Eastern Philosophical Texts.