Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

What a thing it is in this world to have somebody always on your side.

“I hope Gideon sees it that way. I worry that he’s about to become the most disappointed man in the world.”

“I don’t know. He’s got a lot of contenders.”

Cass was staring at Roz.

“What is it, Cass? Do I still have shampoo in my hair?”

He stooped down swiftly to one knee.

“I love you, Suwäayaiwä!”

“Well, I love you, too!”

She followed suit and got down on one knee in her purple towel.

“No, no. You have to stand, and I have to kneel!”

“Okay.” She got back up. “What are we playing?”

“We’re not. I’m proposing.”

“What are you proposing?”

“Marry me! Marry me and become Suwäayaiwä Seltzer.”

“Good one!” She laughed. “No, wait a minute! You mean it! Darling boy, get up. You’re upsetting me down there.”

He got up. She put her hand on his cheek.

“I can’t marry you, Cass.”

“Never? I know I’m young, but I’m getting older quick.”

“Cass, I can’t think about marriage, and you’re only thinking about it because you’re having a breakdown and haven’t realized it yet.”

“I don’t think I’m having a breakdown. I think I’m realizing that you’re the most perfect woman in the world.”

“Well, of course I am.” She gently stroked his hair. The tender gesture made her feel even more impossibly tender. “I’ll always be there for you, but I need a life of maximal options.”

“Don’t you think you could live with maximal options married to me?”

“I have all kinds of things I need to do with my life. You do, too, only you don’t know what they are yet. Don’t look so woebegone! You’re going to have a lot more loves in your life.”

“That’s supposed to cheer me up?”

“You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

“I’m asking you to marry me.”

“You’re trying to replace your infatuation with Jonas Elijah Klapper with an infatuation with me. You’re trying to do it so quickly that the loss won’t register on your mind. It’s a rebound reflex.”

“That’s not what love is.”

“Okay, I’m game. What’s love?”

“Love is this. It’s real. It’s not infatuation or bewitchment or enchantment. It’s the splendor that’s still there after the disenchantment of the world.”

If they got married, they would be able to tell their children that he had proposed to their mother while she was wearing a purple towel. It was the purple towel that gave him hope as he waited for her to break her long silence.

Cass was grateful-and surprised-when Pascale remembered to scrawl him a note and leave it where he would be certain to see it, telling him that his mother had called.

“Deb. Call. Urgent.”

She had put it on a front burner of the kitchen stove. Of course he would be certain to notice it when he came home from work to start dinner, as he did every night except when they ate out. The symbolism was perfect, worthy of Pascale, whose every gesture was touched by her poetry. Was she aware of the English idiom “putting something on the back burner”? Was there a similar expression in French? Cass’s colloquial French wasn’t good enough for him to know. It would be like her, though, the poetic economy and compression that wrapped the message in metaphor.

Still, his stomach lurched at the three words. His mother’s tone must have been truly urgent to break through the heavy fog of Pascale’s poetic distractions. He was almost sure the urgency had something to do with Jesse. There was no reason to think that Jesse had collided with disaster, unless one considered as a reason Jesse’s whole history, the reckless belief in his ability to push past the limits of the strictly moral, not to speak of the legal, and assume that he’d get away with it.

Things had been going well for Cass’s little brother for the last two years. He was working on Wall Street, for a firm called New Empire Reinvestment Opportunities, and he had soared to the top. He was living largely and glamorously. His girlfriends were supermodels, his apartment in SoHo so fabulous that Woody Allen had used it to film one of his movies, paying him twenty thousand dollars a day, which was chump change, Jesse said, but he’d agreed to it because it was so cool.

All of this made his mother nervous. Cass could tell because when she spoke about Jesse she only quoted him and never added her own commentary-as if she was willing herself to believe no more and no less than what he was telling her. It didn’t reassure her that the acronym for Jesse’s firm was NERO.

But the phone call had nothing to do with Jesse. It was Azarya Sheiner that his mother was worrying about.

“Things have reached a crisis state. He wants to leave. He doesn’t feel he can do anything else. He needs to go to a university. He needs to meet mathematicians.”

“He must be going through hell.”

“If it was hard for me, I can only begin to imagine what it’s like for him.”

“What do you think we can do for him?”

“That’s why I’m calling you. You know he’s been corresponding with that professor at MIT.”

“Gabriel Sinai.”

“Right. Gabriel Sinai. Seems like a lovely man.”

“He does.”

In the past few years, his mother had had more contact with the town where she’d grown up, America’s only shtetl, but only because of Azarya. It was because of Azarya that she’d overcome her aversion and reconnected with her extended family and with the Rebbe. Cass had enlisted her help ten years ago, in her capacity as a school psychologist, when he and Roz had realized the nature of the Rebbe’s son.

Three years ago, Azarya had turned thirteen, the age that marks the end of childhood for an observant Jewish male.

Cass hadn’t been able to go to Azarya’s Bar Mitzvah, since he couldn’t very well take Pascale to New Walden-it would have been overwhelming for her-and he hadn’t wanted to leave her at home. In fact, he hadn’t seen Azarya in years. It was his mother who kept him up to date. The festivities for Azarya’s Bar Mitzvah had lasted an entire week, with all of New Walden, as well as many Hasidim from other sects, participating. Azarya’s birthday was in May, and the streets of New Walden had overflowed with celebration, the Valdeners dancing beneath the lilacs.

His mother had gone to the opening event. She’d planned to go to more, arranging to stay over with her cousin Shaindy for the Shabbes that would crown the tumult, but realized that she couldn’t take any more of it, not even for Azarya’s sake. And she couldn’t get close to him anyway, claustrated as she was in the curtained-off women’s section. The event she had attended had begun with the Rebbe and Azarya handing out awards to Valdener students who had excelled in special examinations that had been given in honor of the Bar Mitzvah. Each of the children came up to the dais, where the Rebbe and his son stood, and picked up a plastic cup of grape juice, whose contents had been mingled with a cup from which the Rebbe himself had sipped, toasted l’chaim -to life- and then received a holy book, the difficulty of which varied with the student’s age.

After that the Rebbe had made a long speech recounting the saga of the Valdener Hasidim, the story of one sect but also of one family, going back from the Bar Mitzvah boy to his father, the present Valdener Rebbe, to Azarya’s grandfather, who had brought a portion of his followers over to America in time to escape Hitler, though many had perished, and past that time to the other rebbes, fathers and sons with the occasional son-in law, ending finally back at the root of it all, the Ba’al Shem Tov himself. The story of the Rebbe’s family was the story of the Valdeners, which was the story of Hasidism, which was the story of the Jews. Azarya’s becoming a Bar Mitzvah was a triumph in a long, unlikely tale of survival.