The Golem of Hollywood Page 11

  He couldn’t stall forever. He reached the correct row. Hers was the ninth plot in.

  BELOVED WIFE & MOTHER

  BINA REICH LEV

  MAY 24, 1951–JULY 11, 2000

  He didn’t care to think how long it had been since his last visit. His father went several times a year: on the anniversary of her death, of course, and also before major holidays. Nigel drove him, helped him make his way to the grave.

  A son’s job. Sam had never asked.

  Jacob wasn’t about to volunteer.

  Her gravestone was unadorned, strange for a woman who could only express herself through her art, the uneasy coexistence of piety and radical independence, asymmetry and order.

  Look at her work and you saw a creator whose contradictions made her beautiful.

  Look at her and you saw a cipher.

  Jacob’s friends’ mothers drove carpool to soccer games and whipped up elaborate Friday night dinners with fatty beef, potatoes, and a half stick of margarine. At her best, Bina Lev was scatterbrained, introverted, perfectly capable of sending her son to school wearing mismatched shoes or toting an empty lunchbox.

  She was not often at her best.

  And he was a logical child, brutally so. He understood cause and effect. He could look at the photo albums and parse the gaps. Her first hospitalization had come when he was a toddler.

  Bouts of depression were hard, but at least he could slog along in peace. Mania was the real terrorist, holding all of them hostage. She argued with voices. She broke things. She stayed in the garage for days without eating or sleeping. Eventually she would reemerge, having created dozens and dozens of new pieces; she would drop into bed, never attempting to explain herself, not to Sam and certainly not to Jacob.

  In retrospect he understood that she was trying to shield him from the ongoing avalanche of her mind. At the time, however, he’d felt as if he were staring up an insurmountable slope, silence denying him any context for her deterioration.

  It was not swift. It was not merciful.

  His sole consolation that he hadn’t been around to witness the worst of it.

  At the start of his senior year of high school, the head rabbi spoke to Jacob’s class about the value of taking time off before college to study in yeshiva. Some boys were dismissive, others skeptical but open to persuasion, and some, like Jacob, already had their bags packed.

  He couldn’t get far away fast enough.

  Every six weeks or so, he’d call home from Jerusalem on a scratchy pay phone and hear the desperation mounting in Sam’s voice.

  I’m worried about her.

  But Jacob was eighteen, high on freedom, and bursting with righteous indignation. He was eight thousand miles away.

  What do you want me to do about it?

  College provided a whole new set of excuses not to come home. His newly minted girlfriend invited him to have Thanksgiving dinner. Her family had a place on Cape Cod and she wanted him to experience a real Christmas. Then she ditched him for a hockey player and he spent the money meant for his spring break flight to go to Miami with his roommates, also smarting from being dumped.

  She’s asking for you.

  She had never asked for him before.

  Let her ask a little more.

  He stayed in Cambridge that summer, working as a research assistant to an English professor whom he hoped to enlist as a thesis adviser down the line. He wangled a stipend and a dorm room that came with a campus extension that never rang until it did.

  —

  OFFICIALLY JUDAISM SHUNNED SUICIDES, condemning the soul to an eternity of wandering and forbidding the survivors to observe the laws of mourning. But there was a workaround, the rabbi explained.

  We assume that the deceased was not of sound mind—a prisoner of their illness, if you will—and therefore not responsible for his or her actions.

  If anyone fit that description, it was Bina. But the suggestion that they needed a loophole to grieve enraged Jacob, and he would later point to it as the shining example of why he’d had it with religion.

  Don’t throw everything away because of one fool Sam said.

  It wasn’t one fool, though. All four of Jacob’s grandparents had died before he was born, and his first hands-on experience with the mourning process convinced him that he would never go through it again. The rigidity, legalism, the miming of emotion. Tearing one’s clothes. Sitting on the floor. Not bathing. Not shaving. Praying, and praying, and praying again.

  To me it’s a comfort Sam said.

  It’s inhuman Jacob said.

  For seven days the two of them sat in the dusty living room while strangers paraded through, offering hollow support.

  She’s in a better place.

  She would want you to be happy.

  May the Lord comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

  Just him and Sam, nodding and smiling and thanking these assholes for their wisdom.

  When he got back to school, his voicemail was full up with condolence calls that he deleted mechanically. He didn’t know then that he was establishing a template for years to come: the periodic shedding of attachments, his deciduous heart.

  The voicemail said, “Tuesday, July 11.”

  The day of: his father, presumably, calling to tell him something he didn’t need to hear again. He started to thumb DELETE but the voice that filled his ear wasn’t Sam’s.

  It was Bina’s.

  Jacob she said I’m sorry.

  He couldn’t say which was worse: that he’d been too busy to answer her call, or that it was the first and only time he could remember her apologizing.

  He squeezed down his thumb.

  —

  “SIR? WE’RE CLOSING SOON.”

  Jacob stood up, brushed the grass from his pants, looked down at the stone one final time.

  A large black bug skittered to the center of the granite and stopped.

  Jacob frowned, crouched to shoo it away.

  The bug dodged, ran a slant, paused at the stone’s upper right corner.

  The light was different, and he was viewing the insect’s top side rather than its belly, and he was no entomologist.

  But to him it looked like the same one he’d seen at the murder house.

  Had it gotten into his car?

  Ridden home with him?

  You have roaches.

  Jacob had known more than a few vermin in his time. This was far bigger than any cockroach he’d seen. A drunk woman might not be in a position to make comparisons, though.

  “Sir? Did you hear me?”

  Jacob reached slowly for the bug, expecting it to dart off.

  It waited.

  He laid his hand on the stone and let the insect crawl onto his fingers.

  Lifted it up to examine it.

  It stared back at him with bulbous, bottle-green eyes.

  A spade-shaped head, adorned with a menacing horn; jagged, protruding jaws. Remembering the red welt on the bar lady’s foot, he almost flung the insect away. But the jaws opened and closed gently, and he felt no threat. He fished his cell phone from his pocket to take a picture, and it appeared to comply: posing, rearing up to reveal its lacquered abdomen, its numerous legs flimmering.

  “Sir.” It was the man from the front office. “Please.”

  The insect parted its armor, extended gossamer wings, and flew away.

  “Sorry,” Jacob said.

  They walked back toward the gate.

  “I thought you’d left hours ago. I almost locked up. That wouldn’t’ve been fun for you. We don’t open again till Sunday.”

  “Depends on your definition of fun,” Jacob said.

  The man looked at him strangely.

  “Enjoy your weekend,” Jacob said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEE
N

  The apartment complex Sam Lev had lived in for the last twelve years belonged to a wealthy co-parishioner named Abe Teitelbaum. Abe and Sam had known each other since their twenties; they were long-time Talmud study partners, which explained how Sam had come to occupy the superintendent’s unit.

  God knew he didn’t do any actual superintending. His expertise was limited to a memorized list of phone numbers. Called upon to confront a broken toilet or a faltering A/C, he’d say, “Right away,” depress the hook-switch, and dial the appropriate handyman.

  Nonetheless, Abe took pains to frame the arrangement as a job rather than an act of charity, paying Sam a nominal salary and refusing to take rent, claiming that it had been deducted from Sam’s paycheck.

  The apartment was tiny, fronted by a stamped concrete patio furnished with a pair of sooty plastic chairs and an equally uninviting bistro table. A terra-cotta planter contained a barren clod of potting soil. Jacob paused amid the splendor to silence the ringer on his phone and withdraw a suede yarmulke from his pocket. The leather was stiff and dry, permanently creased into a taco shell shape from having been folded and crushed at the bottom of a drawer. He tried without success to iron it out against his leg, then pinned it on with clips, conscious of its weight and the jutting peak. In his mind’s eye, he looked like a crested parrot.

  Sam was slow in answering his knock. Worried, Jacob knocked again.

  “Coming, coming . . .” The door opened. “Good Shabbos.”

  His father wore a baggy gray suit, white shirt, black loafers, and anomalously large red sunglasses. The skinny end of his necktie stuck out below the fat end, and Jacob tamped down the urge to reach out and fix it.

  “Sorry I’m late. I got stuck downtown and traffic was horrendous.”

  “Not at all. I just got back from shul. Come on in.”

  Jacob made his way carefully across the living room. Cardboard boxes stacked two deep and four high housed a motley library, traditional Jewish texts as well as countless works of physics, philosophy, philology, astronomy, and mathematics. There were also a number of books whose unorthodoxy Jacob had only recently come to appreciate: classics of Sufism and Buddhism, Christian mysticism and gnosticism. In third grade he had scandalized his teacher by bringing in a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for show-and-tell, resulting in a conference with Rabbi Buchbinder, the rosh yeshiva.

  Eyes that read such nonsense should go blind.

  On the car ride home, Jacob had sat curled up in the bucket seat, quaking in anticipation of ghastly consequences. They came to a stoplight and Sam reached over to take his hand.

  Not everyone who wears the title of rabbi deserves it.

  But he said—

  I know what he said. He’s a fool.

  At nine, this was a mind-boggling revelation.

  The light turned green. Sam eased off the brake.

  You can’t be afraid of an idea he said. Follow the argument, wherever it leads.

  Another decade passed before Jacob realized that his father had been quoting Socrates.

  But the weight of evidence seemed to fall in Buchbinder’s favor, because in the interim, Sam really did start to go blind. It began a few years after the show-and-tell incident: a sludgy spot at the center of his field of vision that gradually crept outward, sucking up shape and color. He saw better in low light, and had taken to wearing sunglasses, indoors and out; he kept the living room curtains drawn and the track lighting dim; he alone could navigate his library, by following the map in his mind; and while his vision appeared to have stabilized, that could always change: the condition was considered chronic and incurable and, best of all, heritable.

  Yet more for Jacob to look forward to as he got older.

  Insanity?

  Blindness?

  Why choose . . . when you can have both?

  He said, “Someone walked you home, I hope.”

  Sam shrugged.

  “You went on your own?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Fine,” Sam said innocently. “I’ll drive.”

  “Hilarious. Have Nigel take you.”

  “He does enough.”

  Jacob placed the bakery bag on the dinner table, which was laid with a white stainproof tablecloth, wine, and two crooked place settings. He stepped into the kitchen, sniffing. His father wasn’t so good at reading the oven knobs.

  No burning.

  No nothing.

  “Abba? Did you put the food in to warm?”

  “Of course.”

  Jacob lowered the oven door. Foil-wrapped pans sat on cold racks.

  “Did you remember to turn the oven on?”

  A pause.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Sam said.

  —

  THEY BEGAN WITH Shalom Aleichem, a song welcoming the Sabbath angels. Jacob then fell silent, listening to Sam’s mellow baritone as he intoned Eishet Chayil, the closing section of the book of Proverbs, a hymn to the woman of valor.

  Grace is false, and beauty is vain.

  A woman who fears God—she is praised.

  Give to her of the fruit of her hands,

  and her deeds will praise her at the gates.

  It angered and awed Jacob that, after so many years and so much heartbreak, his father was still singing to Bina.

  “Your turn,” Sam said. He reached for Jacob’s head but hesitated. “If you want.”

  “Go on. I can use all the help I can get.”

  As a young boy, he would listen to the parental blessing, mumbled from on high, the words of a marble-mouthed angel. Sometimes Sam would smile and crouch down so that Jacob could place his hands on Sam’s head and reciprocate with a solemn string of nonsense Hebrew. Kama rama lada gada Shabbos amen.

  Now they stood with their faces inches apart, close enough for Jacob to smell his father’s Irish Spring, to be momentarily hypnotized by the flicker of his lips. Physically, Jacob favored Bina’s side, her dense, charcoal hair, delicately salted at the temples; her fluid jade eyes, even more unearthly than his; the open, questioning features that, on his face, plucked a maternal chord in women, endearing him to them at a glance, and later becoming a source of ire.

  Don’t look at me that way.

  What way?

  Like you don’t know what I’m talking about.

  Sam, on the other hand, was angular, whittled, with decisive bone structure and a mildly bulbous forehead—a brain outgrowing its housing. Jacob thought it was good his father had found an outlet in his writing; otherwise the theories and concepts and other bits of nuclear theologic cognition would pile up, pressure mounting, skull swelling and swelling until it ruptured, spraying gray matter and words of Torah over a half-mile radius.

  Sam had removed his glasses. The disease had not caused any outward change; as ever, his eyes were a glossy brown, verging on black. They trembled, half closed, as he murmured.

  May God make you as Ephraim and Menasheh.

  May God bless you and guard you.

  May God light up His face to you and be gracious to you.

  May God lift His face to you and establish for you peace.

  Sam pulled him in and gave him a wet kiss on the forehead. “I love you.”

  Twice in one week.

  Was he dying?

  Jacob filled one of Bina’s ceramic goblets to the brim with red wine, setting it carefully in Sam’s hands. The wine sloshed across Sam’s knuckles as he recited kiddush, dripping onto the white tablecloth and diffusing, a lavender diaspora. They drank, washed their hands with another of Bina’s cups, and sat to break bread: hunks of challah dipped in salt.

  Electing to skip the cold soup, they went straight to the main meal. Sam insisted on playing waiter, setting out platters of roast chicken, sweet potato, rice pilaf, cucumber sa
lad.

  “What it lacks in temperature, it makes up for in quantity.”

  It was indeed a lot of food, and Jacob felt touched. His father didn’t have money to spare. Before his weakening vision had forced him to stop, and he’d taken on his so-called superintendent duties, Sam had scrounged a living doing freelance bookkeeping and tax prep, usually for elderly neighbors and always at a deep discount. His indifference to the material world was, like his continuing devotion to Bina, a source of admiration and frustration for Jacob.

  “Everything’s delicious, Abba.”

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  “You can sit down and eat, please.” Jacob forked a piece of Jerusalem kugel, sweet and peppery and springy to the touch. “So. What’s up?”

  Sam shrugged. “The usual. Scribbling.”

  “What’re you working on?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Maybe you’re just being polite.”

  “You say that like there’s something wrong with being polite.”

  Sam smiled. “Since you ask, it’s a supercommentary on the Maharal’s Chiddushei Aggados to Sanhedrin, with special attention given to the themes of theodicy and reincarnation.”

  “I smell bestseller,” Jacob said.

  “Oh, definitely. I’m thinking we get Tom Cruise to play the Maharal.”

  Sam was ordained—although he wouldn’t permit anyone to call him rabbi—and not a few of the books piled up around the apartment bore his authorship: lengthy, esoteric tracts written in longhand in composition books. Whenever he completed one, Abe Teitelbaum paid to print a few dozen copies, which Sam then sold.