The Middlesteins(14)

Other law students exited the building, books in hand. They were all going to do better than her in class, in life. She had so much work to do, and she couldn’t catch up; she was, for the first time ever, only a merely adequate student. She didn’t even know what kind of lawyer she wanted to become. She should know by now what she was going to be someday. Why was she going to eat pizza with a stranger?

She wore her hair down, a good idea, the dark curls a tantalizing contrast with her green dress, and she had dug out a small bottle of lip gloss from the bottom of her underwear drawer, where it had fallen six months before and where she had not so accidentally forgotten about it, as if even the slightest lick of makeup would slow her down.

And then there he was, in a suit (it was his only suit, but she didn’t know that yet), and he was smiling (his happiest days were behind him the minute he met her, but he didn’t know that yet), and tall, much taller than Edie, so that she felt even smaller, and he walked confidently, like he liked what he had swinging between his legs. And the curly hair she had been told about was indeed thick and dark, just like her own hair, and so he instantly felt familiar to her. A different kind of woman might not have wanted the familiar. Five years down the line, who knows? Maybe Edie would have become that kind of woman, who wanted nothing to do with someone who came from the same place. He might have been from New York City, but he was just the same as she was. As her father hovered on the edge of something terrible, as he dwindled down into a pale, bony version of his former self, as he threatened to disappear entirely, here was a man who was tall and healthy and full of something Edie found herself wanting to devour.

“Let’s go,” she said.

But how far did they make it? One block, two blocks, and then they were approaching the hospital. And then how many steps past the hospital until she felt her gut pull her back toward her father? Even though he had encouraged her to go meet this young, single, Jewish man. “The test results will be the same no matter what time of day,” he told her. But she stiffened like stone on the corner of St. Clair Street, the wind pushing back at her dress and her hair, frozen and alive at the same time.

Here was what she wanted to say to this Richard, making his jokes, touching her elbow: Did you know that my father translated three books of Russian poetry into English? For fun, he did it. It wasn’t even his job. He just loved poetry. I have the books. I can show them to you. The titles are embossed in gold.

Here is what she would have said to this Richard, looking at her lips: All he ever did was love my mother and help people.

Here is what she would have said if she felt like herself, whatever that meant anymore: A life well spent, do you know anything about that?

Instead she said, “My father is sick.” Still looking at him, she pointed her hand faintly in the direction of the hospital.

And he said, “I heard.”

“I can’t eat,” she said.

“You gotta eat,” he said kindly, and now both of his hands were on her arms. “I’m going to take care of this,” he said.

And that was how Edie and Richard’s first date ended in a hospital room, a mushroom pizza from Gino’s on the nightstand, Edie’s father coughing and laughing at every single one of Richard’s jokes, everyone in the room pretending that Edie did not twice excuse herself to the bathroom to cry. It was the story Edie told at their ten-year-anniversary party, when there was still a chance they were in love. “He did not abandon me in my time of need,” she said to their friends gathered before them in a private room at a suburban steak house. “It was the beginning of everything.” Everyone raised a glass. To love, they said. To love.





Middlestein in Exile



On the one hand,” said Richard Middlestein, Jew, local business owner, ex–New Yorker, “my wife and I were married for close to forty years, and we had built a life together, a home, a place in our community with our friends and family, a role in the synagogue.” He had to admit that his relationship with the synagogue had diminished in the last few years for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was his wife’s health. “And there were the kids to consider, although I didn’t think Robin would care that much, and I thought, hey, Benny has his hands full keeping that wife of his happy. Isn’t he busy enough? Maybe it would impact the grandkids, but how much?

“On the other hand,” said Richard Middlestein, newly single gentleman, not-quite senior citizen, respectable, dull but fighting it, “my wife, who is a very smart woman who has done a lot of good for a lot of people so I can’t totally knock her, my wife made me miserable, she picked at me till I bled on a daily basis, so much worse lately, more than you could ever imagine. And she got fat, so fat I could not love her in the same way anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I like a little meat on the bones. I knew what I was marrying. But she was hurting herself. Every day, more and more. That is hard on a person. To watch that happen.” He lowered his voice. “And it had been a long time since we’d had marital relations.”

He could not bring himself to explain further that he had imagined that his sex drive would fade away in his late fifties and he would just forget that they had been sleeping on opposite sides of the bed, clinging to their respective corners as if they were holding on to the edge of a cliff. But sixty came, and his sex drive still simmered insistently within him, unused but not expired, a fire in the hole. He had never cared before, but now suddenly he realized that he could not go the rest of his life without sex, that he refused to give up the fight. But he knew also he would never want to touch his wife’s pocked, veined, bloated flesh ever again. If not now, then when?