Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

She mingled awkwardly, admiring the rabbis’ long coats, very Comme des Garçons. A woman asked her to light a candle. Were candles lit each Sabbath night or only on Passover? She was clueless. She only knew you lit candles for the dead, though her mother never did.

Nondescript men in poorly cut suits approached, abashedly letting on how they were Fallen Ones, come back to the fold. There were South Africans and San Diegans, Australians and Czechs, Muscovites and New Yorkers, and a dance troupe from Tel Aviv — the girls were gorgeous. Rachel stared like she used to at counselors during summer camp, envying their tawny bodies and musky élan. Again, she felt like bolting.

She was targeted by a schlemiel. He was about to speak — the mouth opened, showing braces — when a rabbi bounded up and introduced himself as “Schwartzee’s son.” Rachel put a hand out but he demurred.

“I’m a rabbi, I don’t shake hands! I don’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just a choice — the only hand I touch is my wife’s. Let’s just say I don’t like to start what I can’t finish!”

A woman lunged forward. “Then I’ll shake it, I’m his sister !” She pumped Rachel’s hand, exclaiming, “I’m not so choosy!”

Schwartzee himself appeared, holding a clipboard in such a way as to discourage the flesh-pressing impulse. He was coatless and wore Mickey Mouse suspenders. “Moishe Moskowitz,” the rabbi crowed, thumbs tucked in each side, “for the children!” He checked off Rachel’s name and was sorry to hear “my old friend Tovah” was sick. The rabbi’s naked, musty breath evoked a weird mosaic of memory and sensation — of synagogue, family and dread. The doors to the banquet hall swung open and Schwartzee shouted after the guests, “It’s fat-free, so enjoy!”

She entered the cavernous room in haphazard search of a table.

“Rachel!”

She spun around. Standing there was her brother, Simon.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, dismayed.

“I got a call from Schwartzee — there’s something dead in the basement. Could be Lazarus! Or should I say Charlton Heston.”

He wore a dark suit and looked thoroughly in his element — the Dead Pet Detective, born-again. Simon had left a slew of messages that she hadn’t returned.

“You never called me back!” he said, oddly enthusiastic.

“I was going to. I’ve been real busy, Simon.”

“I was just wondering if there was any way I could get with your boss.”

“Simon, I’ve already told you, Perry doesn’t know any of the Blue Matrix people—”

“Oh come on, Rachel! All those people know each other.”

“That’s not necessarily how it works.”

“I have three scripts, okay? Can’t you at least get one to your boss?”

“Simon, let’s not talk about this now.”

“Where are you sitting?”

“Not with you . I’m with about twenty people.”

“Well, excuuuussse meeeeee !” She started to go. “Wait! What does a man with a ten-inch penis have for breakfast?”

Rachel was beyond ill will; she didn’t even feel like leaving anymore. She had accepted her lot as among the condemned.

“Uh, well,” Simon stammered, “let’s see now. Uh, I had two eggs, toast…a glass of o.j. — ” He cracked himself up as she moved away.

A blithe, bitchy couple sat across. The woman let everyone know they’d met during one of Schwartzee’s relationship seminars at the Bel Air Radisson. On Rachel’s left was an overweight, attractive Canadian called Alberta. Mordecai, the lovestruck schlemiel with braces, hovered breathlessly, too nervous to sit beside her; he took a chair by the great Province. The place beside Rachel remained empty, a sitting target for the requisite Elijah jokes.

After her father’s death, Rachel’s family joined the landlocked diaspora of the faithless. She had been so far and so long away from the water that the dizzying, chimerical ceremonies at hand made her feel like an ethnographer in the field: symbolic foods on plate, the leaning to the left, naming of plagues — boils, hail, cattle disease, slaying of firstborn…like crashing a meeting of freemasons. Yet when she heard the congregants’ intonations and the indomitable old songs of her father, her otherness burned away. Schwartzee’s six-year-old son (the fertile rabbi’s latest) took to the stage and sang a flitting, singsong prayer. Rachel blotted her tears with the hackneyed inventory of images: Sy at the pulpit, mighty and dour, a gray, businesslike Moses, neck vibrating like a turkey’s when he sang; huge white hands and slicked-back hair; fat gold ring.

Schwartzee asked how many commandments were in the Bible. Someone raised a hand and shouted, “Six hundred and thirteen!” Rachel puzzled over that one during the ritual hand washing. She asked Alberta about it.

“You’re not really supposed to say anything after the washing of the hands,” the big woman said. “Until you eat the matzo.”

“Oh! I’m sorry.”

“Sit in the corner,” said Mordecai, leaning over to be seen. “No matzo for you tonight!”

“It’s tradition ,” said Alberta, contritely. “I mean you can , but you’re not supposed to.”

“Then I won’t,” said Rachel, unperturbed.

Mordecai shushed her, holding up an admonitory finger. “Please reply in the universal sign language.”

“It’s all right — really!” said Alberta. “I just wanted to tell you what was traditional.” To her annoyance, Mordecai sang a few bars of “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof .

“Schwartzee’s seders tend to go till midnight,” said the woman across, to no one in particular. The boyfriend watched the waiters like a hawk, making sure to get double portions. Timing was everything.

A woman in her sixties was ushered to the vacant seat along with edgy Elijah jokes from the hawk-eyed man, who clearly regarded her arrival as a threat to the food bank. Birdie was from New York and, as it turned out, a cantor’s daughter. She ran a mortuary in the Fairfax district, a chevra kaddisha , or “holy society.” Rachel remarked how difficult it must be to work in such a place, but the woman said it was “her greatest mitzvah.” Birdie was a shomer , a member of a volunteer group that attend the dead before burial. She explained that shomer meant “watcher.” Mordecai made a dumb eavesdroppy joke about “birdie-watching” and the woman tensed her lips in a bloodless smile.

Birdie’s father died just last year, at ninety-five; it surprised her Rachel’s loss had come so long ago. Spontaneously, the younger woman offered that he had been killed.

“What is your last name?” Birdie asked.

“Krohn.”

She stared at her plate, then turned and looked at Rachel with a dead blue eye. “I knew your father,” she said.

“You — knew—”

“Yes. My husband did his taharah .”

“His what?”

“Your father’s taharah . The ritual cleansing — the prayers. He sat with your father before he was buried.”

Perry Needham Howe

He took Jersey to all the black-tie benefits and still, hardly anyone knew. That’s how he wanted it. He felt strangely invisible — imperishable, even — a dapper traveler incognito in the land of the living. He hadn’t succumbed to the savage placebos that made one a bald vomit-machine: that would be sheer cowardice. Perry wanted to die on his own terms, not like some whore pretending to be a hero.

They went to the Bistro Gardens for the Hospice of the Canyon, an outpatient program in Calabasas for the terminally ill. Perry liked the irony. He cracked death jokes under his breath, but Jersey wasn’t up to playing Mrs. Muir. A few friends knew, with his permission — like Iris Cantor, their great guide. Iris had networked them through Memorial Sloan-Kettering and was there tonight, along with the usual crowd. There were bevvies of doctors and nurses (Jersey felt like buttonholing Leslie Trott and pouring her heart out) and a monsignor, for show.