talk.
But Jackie Brendel ignores the question and walks in.
It doesn’t occur to Lenox to ask why she has an Indian middle name.
SHE SITS down at the kitchen table and starts speaking in Yiddish.
Es hot zich oysgelozt a boydem! Nothing will come of this.
Oyf a boydem is a yarid! Much ado about nothing.
Boydem klots! They have nothing to do with each other.
Zogn boydem! A bunch of hokey.
Shlepen di ku in boydem aroyf! Treading water.
An odd language. The code of dead Jews. Moses Brendel was the one who passed down the secret Jewish language’s finer points to his daughter. The only thing to make its way into Hebrew was boydem.
And what remains of the lost Indian languages? Lenox wonders as he listens to the Jewish woman’s soft voice scattering its warmth through his empty space. She turns down the Jack Daniels, and he feels uncomfortable drinking in her presence. They are trapped in forced intimacy, separated only by the towel.
Aren’t you writing this down? Jackie asks urgently, as though offloading a burden.
A boydem is a narrow, elevated space, usually above the bathroom ceiling, where Israelis keep old items they don’t use anymore. It’s also where the hot water tank is often housed. Boydem: a wasted overhead space that gathers mildew. Boydem: an excellent hiding place.
So said Moses Brendel, from his resting place in the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale.
Why do Israelis need a boydem?
How many Israelis can fit in one boydem?
What dangers might impel an Israeli to seek refuge in a boydem?
Where could Simon T. Lenox hide in times of danger?
Boydem: a fascinating conversation topic, notes the matchmaker who watches impossible shidduchs between dead people.
Boydem: foreplay.
THAT IS what Lenox wrote in his notepad afterwards.
JACKIE BRENDEL gets rid of her remaining cargo:
In Israel, they don’t have basements or attics like they do in Europe or America. In the Middle East, there are no wide expanses to spread above houses or burrow beneath them. Moses Brendel visited Israel as a tourist only once, and his daughter has no intention of going there. She buys Israel Bonds, and that’s enough. Fifty dollars a year. It’s tax deductible, and will eventually be repaid with two-percent interest. Not a bad investment, her accountant says. Jewish. Of course he’s Jewish.
The room goes silent, and the two inhabitants consider various options for advancing the conversation. Finally Lenox gets up, remembering to tighten the towel around his dangling parts, and floats a hypothesis:
Maybe Israel is the Jews’ boydem?
The tension instantly shifts and dissipates. Jackie Brendel promises that next time she visits the nursing home, she will ask her father, a German refugee, to translate that phrase into Yiddish for her, since it is a commonly accepted wisdom that Jewish humor gets lost in any other language.
Lenox is infected by her rolling laughter, as though they are accomplices in an impending crime.
God forbid. Sex is no crime.
HE CAN’T exactly call it “lovemaking,” yet he is reluctant to dismiss it as just a fuck. At first he recognized a blend of sadness and fear, followed by mutual thirst with perfect timing. He is unable to reconstruct the precise moment at which her clothes were removed. He, on the other hand, had only to drop his towel.
Perhaps because he was surprised, Lenox had trouble restraining himself, and when she straddled him and guided him inside her, gazing into his pupils from above, the semen suddenly burst out. Without making excuses, Lenox stared at it oozing out on the two of them and then pooling into a dimple.
He forgot about the Israeli. Until morning.
He lay there facing the window, staring at the crisp dawn. Perhaps this was how Liam Emanuel saw the world: gray on gray.
Affirmative action.
HALF-ASLEEP, HE drifts away on a flood of Jack Daniels, kneeling in a canoe, wearing shoes with nonskid soles. He tries to use a pair of javelins to row to a thicket of auburn facial stubble. The sky is clear, though he wears a raincoat with holes in it. He searches for his grandmother’s lost pipe. A defaced body floats down the current. Has the disaster already occurred, or is it about to happen? Perhaps it is a cyclical calamity? He cannot find land. He drops the oars and has to row with his hands. The pain is so intense, it’s as though they have been amputated.
When he opens his eyes he does not know whether he is lying on a bed of mud or on the indentation between Jackie’s shoulder and her breast, but he knows for sure that he has had this dream once before.
DON’T GO. Stay.
She begs him to let the Israeli man grieve alone. We have to respect his choice. So he’s mistreating his son, his ex, and the whole state of Israel. Who cares? If he wanted to commit suicide, he wouldn’t have bought a map and a raincoat. Let him lick his orphaned wounds, like animals who leave the pack to focus on their pain and then return. We should admire those who are willing to look finality straight on. He’s a big boy, the Israeli. He managed to shake off the herd of comforters with their repository of clichés. Their time will come.
Lenox is almost convinced, but as she talks, Jackie is already shoving spare underwear, a pair of jeans and balled up socks into the tiny suitcase under the bed. She stands on her tiptoes to reach a sweatshirt on the top shelf. He can’t remember which of his wives bought it for him; it was a rare show of sentimentality.
She moves through his space as though she had memorized the layout while he slept.
Now she holds his toothbrush as if she’s about to toss it to him. A faint odor rises from the bed sheets. He hasn’t brushed his teeth yet, and the taste of her orifices—salty mud—comes from his palate.
When he leaves the apartment, he will wonder if he remembered to put the toilet seat down.
ON THE morning after, the partners in sex recede into their fortresses to conduct their private post-mortems. He considers the breasts that made his blood surge, the thighs that kneaded his erection. From close up, at magnifying-glass range, the flesh appeared flawless. But distance allows a sober mutual examination. Jacqueline Winona Brendel is not particularly attractive. Her youth is long gone. Her wrinkled skin seems incongruous with her revelations of passion last night. Nor did she fail to notice Lenox’s flabby waist and the mound of his belly, whose outlines she licked up and down and across. On the morning after, there is an unseen presence between them. Perhaps the Israeli is the spirit that ties them together—a matchmaker of sorts.
As Jackie picks up last night’s towel to toss it in the laundry hamper, Lenox unzips the suitcase.
If he were Liam Emanuel, he would have gone back to pick up Keisha.
Happy ending. Headlines.
But there was something else that needed to be done.
On his way out, Lenox grabs the last document from the pile—the one he always keeps for the end. Standing at the door, he reads the résumé, while Jackie peers over his shoulder.
Liam Emanuel. Born: May, 1948, Tel-Aviv. The father, Mordecai Emanuel, is a Holocaust survivor from Manheim, Germany. The mother, Tzippora, a native of Tunisia, was killed in a motor accident when Liam was a child.
1967: Enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, served as a soldier in the Six-Day War and the War of Attrition. Reached the rank of captain. As a reserve duty soldier, took part in the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War, and the First Intifada.
Graduate of the Theater Department