My Last Innocent Year(43)
“Why would I want to do that?” Bo said, laughing. “I thought the whole point of getting married was so I didn’t have to pick up strangers in bars anymore.” I laughed too but knew it was the beginning of the end of us. I needed something from him, something I didn’t know how to ask for or explain. When we made love that night, at home, in bed with the lights off, I thought about Connelly, imagined myself back in his office at the end of the hall, winter light filling the room, the leather sticky on the backs of my thighs, the feel of cold metal against my skin. Sometimes when Connelly came, he’d bite my lip, hard enough to draw blood. “What happened?” Bo asked when we were finished. He pointed at my face. I reached up, wiped my mouth with my hand and tasted blood, rusty like a key.
14
IN April, I went home for Passover. Abe asked me to, which surprised me: we didn’t put much stock in holidays, Jewish holidays in particular, but because he asked for so little, I told him I would come.
“Tell me about Passover again?” Connelly asked when I stopped by to see him before I left. He didn’t know much about Judaism—he’d been raised Catholic—but I always thought he would, or should, that because he knew me so well, he would know this part, too. It didn’t make sense but still, the disconnect felt strange.
He was on the sofa so I sat at his desk, put my feet up and told him everything I could remember about Passover: the Jews in slavery, Moses in the bulrushes, the parting of the Red Sea. Connelly listened intently, his fingers steepled beneath his chin.
“And we only eat matzah for eight days,” I said. “No bread.”
“That sounds awful.”
“It’s hard at first, but then I kind of like it. Something about pushing through the wanting and coming out the other side.” Connelly was looking at me with a funny expression. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I just like to listen to you talk.”
I blushed. It felt like the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.
I usually rode home with Debra, but she was skipping the holiday this year, so I took the bus.
“Wow,” the guy sitting next to me said as I pulled out my knitting. Nearly three feet long, the scarf spilled across my lap. “You making that for your boyfriend?”
I shook my head but, despite my mother’s warning, I was thinking of giving it to Connelly.
“Lucky guy,” he said, inching closer. He smelled like garlic and patchouli oil. As the bus lumbered down the interstate, he talked, mostly about Clinton and the political theater playing out in Washington. According to him, what a man did behind closed doors was his own damn problem, and the only people he had to answer to were his wife and his God, in that order. “So a guy cheated on his wife,” he said. “So what? Happens every day, every goddamned day.”
Every time I came home, the neighborhood had changed a little more. On my walk from the subway station, I passed a gourmet dumpling shop and a boutique hotel where a rival appetizing store had once been. On the corner was a hole in the ground where Litkowski’s bakery used to be. Growing up, I went there every weekend with my mother to get a seeded rye and a Linzer tart. Mr. Litkowski was a stout, unsmiling man; when I was little, I called him “the white man” because he was always covered in flour. Abe liked to say that New York was a city allergic to nostalgia, buildings always rising and falling, the old cleared away to make room for the new. That made it a perfect city for the Jews, he said, because we were a people used to reinventing ourselves. “Reinventing ourselves?” my mother said. “We leave because people want to kill us, Abe, not because we want a change of scenery.”
As I walked past the ghosts of everything that used to be here, I realized what a miracle it was that Rosen’s Appetizing had survived. My father had been unlucky in many ways but lucky in one: he was the nephew of Ruben “Ruby” Rosen, an enterprising pushcart salesman who’d opened Rosen’s Appetizing in a storefront on Orchard Street in 1920. Abe was fatherless and poor, so Ruby, a difficult man with no sons, took him in. My father rarely spoke about those early years when he’d worked long hours to support his mother and younger brother, Leon. If he talked about them at all, it was to say he was lucky not to be a butcher.
“Meat’s a tough business,” he told me once. We were sitting at the kitchen table. Abe was drinking tea out of a glass. “Most butchers are missing part of a finger or a hand. Some more than that.
“My friend Stewy Horowitz came from a family of butchers,” he went on, the steam from his tea fogging up his glasses. “I was only in the back of the store once. His father was wearing this long bloody apron, and there were feathers everywhere and a wire basket full of feet. And in the middle of the floor was a giant drain where all the blood went.” Abe shuddered. No, he said, in the scheme of things, he was lucky to be in appetizing.
Lucky or not, the work was hard. In nearly every memory I would have of my father, he was standing behind the counter, a white apron tied around his waist, a wax crayon tucked behind his ear. His life had been filled with long days on his feet and brushes with financial ruin. And yet here he was, still in business. “One day we’ll all be gone, but for now, I’m still here.”
I pushed open the door and the smell of smoked fish and vinegar filled my nose. Everything here always looked the same. Ruby, who’d been dead for more than fifteen years, would have recognized the sawdust-covered floors, the long glass counter with its theatrical display of salmon, cream cheese, olives, shriveled yellow sturgeon. The only improvement Abe had made was replacing the front window after someone threw a brick through it. When he did, my mother had convinced him to have the words “Rosen’s Appetizing, Est. 1920” stenciled on the glass in gold.