Before the Fall(90)
On layovers, you could always find James Melody reading. He’d sit by the pool at a hotel in Arizona paging through Spinoza, or eat at the bar of a nightclub in Berlin reading social science texts like Freakonomics. He was a collector of facts and details. In fact, this was what he was doing now at the restaurant in Westwood, reading the Economist and waiting for his mother. It was a sunny morning in August, eighty-three degrees out, prevailing winds from the southeast at ten miles per hour. James sat drinking a mimosa and reading an article on the birth of a red heifer on a farm on Israel’s West Bank. The cow’s birth had both Jews and fundamentalist Christians in an uproar, as both Old and New Testaments tell us that the new Messiah cannot come until the Third Temple is constructed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And as everyone knows, the Third Temple cannot be built until the ground is purified by the ashes of a red heifer.
As the article explained (but which James already knew), Numbers 19:2 instructs us, “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke.” The animal must not have been used to perform work. In the Jewish tradition, the need for a red heifer was cited as the prime example of a hok, or biblical law for which there was no apparent logic. The requirement was therefore deemed of absolute divine origin.
As the reporter wrote, the Economist published the story, not because of its religious significance, but because it had reignited the hot-button issue of ownership of the Temple Mount. They cited the region’s geopolitical significance without commenting on the religious validity of fundamentalist claims.
After he was done reading the article, James tore it out of the magazine and carefully folded it into thirds. He flagged down a passing waiter and asked him to throw it in the trash. The danger in leaving the article inside the magazine was that his mother would pick it up in passing, see the article, and go off on one of her “tangents.” The last tangent took her down the rabbit hole of Scientology for nine years, during which time she accused James of being a suppressive person, and cut all contact, which he didn’t mind so much, except he worried. Darla surfaced again years later, chatty and warm, as if nothing had happened. When James asked her what had happened, she said simply, “Oh, those sillies. They act like they know everything. But as the Tao Te Ching tells us, Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment.”
James watched the waiter disappear into the kitchen. He had the impulse to follow him and make sure the article was thrown away—in fact he wished he’d told the waiter to bury it under other refuse, or that he himself had torn it into small, unreadable pieces—but he resisted. These obsessive impulses were best ignored, a lesson he had learned the hard way. The article was gone. Out of sight. Unreachable. That was what mattered.
And just in time, for in rode his mother on her Ventura 4 Mobility Scooter with adjustable angle, delta tiller (bright red, of course). She rolled down the handicapped ramp, saw him, and waved. James stood as she approached, navigating past diners (who had to move their chairs so she could pass). It’s not that his mother was obese (in fact, just the opposite: She weighed no more than ninety pounds) or that she had a disability (she walked just fine). It’s that she liked the statement the fire-engine-red scooter made, the import it brought. This was clear from the entrance she’d just made, wherein everyone in the restaurant had to stand, and adjust their seats, as if for the entrance of a queen.
“Hi there,” said Darla as James held out a chair for her. She stood without effort and took it. Then, seeing his mimosa, “What are we drinking?”
“It’s a mimosa. Would you like one?”
“Yes, please,” she said.
He signaled to the waiter to bring another. His mother put her napkin in her lap.
“So? Tell me I look wonderful.”
James smiled.
“You do. You look great.”
There was a voice he used only with her. A slow and patient elucidation, as if speaking to a child with special needs. She liked it, as long as he didn’t go too big with it, pushing to the point of patronization.
“You seem fit,” she said. “I like the mustache.”
He touched it, realizing she hadn’t seen him with it.
“A little Errol Flynn, ay?” he said.
“It’s so gray, though,” she suggested with a wince. “Maybe a little boot black.”
“I think it makes me look distinguished,” he said lightly as the waiter brought her drink.
“You’re a darling,” she told him. “Have another ready, will you. I’m dreadfully thirsty.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, withdrawing.
Over the decades, his mother’s British accent had morphed into something James had taken to calling pure affectation. Like Julia Child, she had a grandness about her that made the accent seem simply aristocratic. As in, This is just the way we speak, darling.
“I researched the specials,” he said. “I’m told the frittata is divine.”
“Ooh good,” she said. There was nothing she loved more than a good meal. I’m a sensualist, she told people, which was something that sounded sexy and fun when she was twenty-five, but now—at seventy—just sounded wrong.
“Did you hear about the red heifer?” she asked after they ordered. He had a brief, panicked flash that somehow she had seen the article, but then he remembered that she watched CNN twenty-four hours a day. They must have done a story.