for themselves as it was with each other that a meeting of the pubes seemed most likely.
Nonetheless, Sven proved to be quite a charmer, and I agreed to meet him for dinner two nights later. We went out to an Italian place on Amsterdam Avenue with red checked tablecloths and cheeky waitresses in peasant costumes - again, liberation of sex does not equal liberation of the sexes. I think that might have been the last time, or one of the last times that I actually ate at a non-kosher restaurant. He was outgoing and funny and I let him kiss me in front of my dormitory but I did not give into his suggestions that I follow him to his place up in Washington Heights nor did I invite him past the security guard at my front entrance. We met again, and again I refused the offer to go uptown though I let him feel up my breasts on a couch in the downstairs room at 42O, a terrible bar on Columbus Avenue. On the following date, I had to push his hands away from the waistband of my dress while we listened to an outdoor concert over at Lincoln Center.
But I liked him. He had a penchant for punning that made me smack him adoringly. He was a couple of years older than me, just out of school and working as an editorial assistant at a textbook publishing house. He called me almost every night and after waiting an hour or two, I would call him back. I made it clear that intercourse wasn’t in the near future and he seemed ok with that. But after about two weeks of this, he called and said he couldn’t continue. “Why?” I asked, hurt, crushed.
“Listen, it’s like this,” Sven began. He told me he’d picked me up because his therapist wanted him to try picking up different women, one a week for a month, to help him break out of his shell. He’d been following her advice and found that he could talk to girls after all. He said he liked me very much but the future was elsewhere, he’d never really been that into me as a lover, more as a pleasant company thing, and to see how far he could go, now that he had this new personality that he’d purchased at a hundred forty dollars a session. As a side note, I asked how he had all this money for psychotherapy anyway; we’d agreed to pay for alternating dates and his usually involved some free activity. He’d claimed entering the publishing world had impoverished him, which I believed.
“Oh, that,” he said. “Well my father is the president of Holt books, that’s how I got the job, you know? But I can’t have money for just anything, he like gives me cash for specific things.” I started yelling at him, cursing—I still cursed then—and he offhandedly mentioned that he owned a gun. I hung up. I didn’t really believe the threat—I don’t think he wanted to see me at all; he just wanted to get rid of me—I didn’t need to hear more. I knew better. I knew where to find genuine people and genuine love and genuine meaning. He wasn’t the last boy I dated, or kissed, but it really all ended with him. Ok, yes, I was really scared after the gun comment. I told Marie and she suggested we notify campus security, which we did, and they offered to go to his house, but we felt it was just better that they know about it, we didn’t want to stir things further—what if they went there and he didn’t have a gun and then he came to find me, angry because I’d snitched? But we didn’t sleep well for a few nights, despite the chair we’d taken to wedging under the doorknob.
And it doesn’t get better. My father’s aunt Maxine started dating again at eighty. The first guy she met, who mind you didn’t speak a word of English (we speak the language of love, she’d say, oblivious to the fact that she was quoting Better Off Dead) was about as intolerable as they come; arrogant, snide, self-obsessed. He would pass around topless photos of his deceased first wife at Sunday brunches in Maxine’s Fifth Avenue apartment, approximating, in his pidgin English, a boast about how for him there were only the finest ladies. He’d pinch Maxine’s butt while he was doing this, and she’d swear he was a devil in bed. Well apparently, what he didn’t communicate in the international language of love or in any other language or linguistic equivalent, was that he was epileptic and had no business behind the wheel of a car. She’s lucky she lived through the wreck he got them into on their way out to Montauk. A few years later, she found a new guy, he spoke English all right, only he professed to being a player, and I don’t mean bridge. He had the pinky ring, the Italian loafers, the silk sweaters, the iodine-tinted tan and a birth certificate from the roaring twenties. “He’s like a mezuzah,” Maxine would say, “All the women want to touch him.” Need I say more?
No. Giving up dating was not a sacrifice. Losing my parents’ respect was. I mean, sure, I gained it back. Or, I gained my father’s respect back. But when I was growing up, I was everything to them, and they to me. I never fought with my parents. I wasn’t a rebellious child. But this thing began to happen. If I had to pinpoint a start date, it would be when I was on debate team sophomore year of high school. I was up against a pimply kid from Jericho High wearing a yellow button-down shirt with a pink Polo logo and one of those cloth belts with the braided leather ends. I rocked back and forth on my feet behind my podium. I figured: I can take this kid. The announcer called the topic: Organized Religion, irrelevant in today’s world. He pointed at me and said, “Yes,” at pimple-face and said, “No.”
At first, I was a lot happier to be on the side of religion’s irrelevance. I possessed an entire rhetoric of that persuasion, inherited from parents, teachers, and daily culture. We each had two minutes to lay out our initial positions. And I felt strong about mine, stronger than the Jericho-preppie. Initial statements were followed by rebuttals and then a short period of personal interchange. I hammered on standardized complaints: war, repression, dissimilation. Up until that point he’d recited a standardized list of religion’s perceived benefits: social order, ethical structure, spiritual definition; but then he turned and said, “But you, Sarah, to what degree would you be able to measure and define the meaning and success of your own life without the spiritual constructs of deity and divine order?” I stopped. I mean, I’m sure our debate continued. But for the first time I peeked, however briefly, into the possibilities of life, my life. I saw nothing. I saw years spent waiting, years spent competing for the spoils of living: material wealth, showable mate, enviable career, fashionable lifestyle. I saw a checklist dictated by a society that would never fully accept me, even if through some great effort I managed to tick off every single item on it. A treasure hunt, which if won would win resentment. And it seemed exhausting.
Of course, I was fifteen then. These are my interpretations and extrapolations ten years later. At the time, I didn’t even have the intelligence to associate the possibility of meaning with religion. Instead, I simply glimpsed a debilitating life filled with routines I cared nothing for yet felt compelled to pursue. I imagined going to classes every day, doing homework, studying for SATs, enrolling in extracurricular activities I didn’t care about, all to get into a good college where I would do more of the same to get into a good job. I imagined going home after the meet, and trying to select the right outfit to outdo everyone else, trying to select the right combination of phone calls and allegiances and friendships and dates, the right car for my father to buy when I turned sixteen, the right TV shows to follow and movies to watch, all to stay ahead, to compete for lousy dates with assholes like Moskowitz who’d stopped lighting his crotch on fire with bug-spray but not really outgrown it; and it all seemed so tiring. The deal with debating is that after the round, you defend opposite positions. One would think that after my soon-to-be acne-scarred competitor so jostled my actual thinking process, I could have easily defended the relevance of religion. Instead, my coach yelled at me afterwards, it was like the will to compete had abandoned me, and instead of my usual passionate, nuanced declamations, I mumbled generic lines that hardly stretched to the edges of my time limits. Jericho had deeply unsettled me. “I thought you wanted to be a lawyer, Frankel,” Coach White, our history professor chastised after I tried to explain. “Are you going to sacrifice your clients if a prosecutor convinces you they’re guilty?”
But once you begin to look for meaning, there is no turning back. You can’t blissfully backslide into not caring about the measure of your life’s success, the motivation to continue.
But, Sarah, if you had never found meaning, would your parents have ever come to Israel? Ever stopped downstairs with you to sample rugelach and café au lait?
Abba said that after 9/11 he realized that America was just as dangerous as Israel, maybe more so. He said either you’re going to die or you’re not. He told me the story of a woman who cheated death three times. She was in an elevator going down