Jephte's Daughter (33 page)

She got into her wide, empty double bed. Since leaving Isaac, she had learned to treasure it as a sanctuary where she could revel in the comforting silence of privacy, the immeasurable pleasure of uninterrupted, protected sleep. But now, for the first time, it felt cold to her, an uninhabited and unfriendly place. She was frightened at the chaos inside her and terrified she would not be able to put it right, to straighten the sails of the carefully constructed craft that had allowed her to float safely along for these eleven months. She felt the waves of desire and anger and disappointment, of pleasure and joy and love, crash against her chest like the waves of a hurricane.

She felt so alive again, like the young Batsheva who had jumped headlong into the cooling pool of blue water to still the fever rampaging through her veins. Only this time, she understood clearly, she would drown. Her mind, overcome with sleep, felt no fear, but the irrational pleasure of losing control, of being enveloped by the blue, immaculate water that shone like crystal. She felt the surging joy of helpless pleasure as she sank, unable to resist, to breathe, deeper and deeper into that blue, laughing, kind, intelligent, blue water.

To her surprise, Batsheva carried on very well. Yes, extremely well, she told herself several times a day. She took the pictures of teachers and students carefully, moving the little umbrellas and floodlights painstakingly to set up just the perfect lighting conditions. She was a conscientious mother, playing with Akiva even more, teaching him the Hebrew and English alphabets, reading him stories.

But each time the phone rang, she felt her heart leap up uncomfortably in her chest, and goose bumps rise on her flesh. And when she heard the stranger’s voice on the other end asking for a portrait sitting, she found herself filled with a bitter disappointment that was almost too much to bear.

She ate too much, or forgot to eat at all. And all day long, she went around with a bright, hard look in her eyes that bordered on despair. She began rehearsing for his call, going through her part all over the house, watching her face reflected in windows, the glass frames of pictures, and mirrors, as she mouthed the words: “David,” she would begin, oh, simply, very simply. “I think it would be best if we didn’t see each other anymore. It’s wrong for us to get involved in something there can be no happy ending to.” She never questioned her ability to deliver those lines, or that their relationship must end because it could never be a casual, platonic friendship. She began to count the hours. Sunday all day was twenty-four. Monday all day, forty-eight. Tuesday, all day, seventy-two. And then, finally Wednesday, at 1:10
P.M
., eighty-five hours and ten minutes after she had seen him last, he called her.

“I can’t believe you’re actually calling me. I’ve waited so long,” she blurted out, then froze up in utter horror at hearing her thoughts spoken. She heard his wonderful, generous laughter come like magic through the hard, ugly plastic of the phone. So, what is to be done now, she thought, lost completely. The last thing in the world that had occurred to her was that she would actually spill out her honest feelings to him, feelings she had yet to admit to herself. She felt her cheeks burn with humiliation.

“You’re wonderful,” he said. “You’ve saved me from lying through my teeth about portraits I desperately need done, about misfortunate children I want you to help me with…Eighty-five hours and…” he paused, “…eleven minutes.”

There was silence on both ends of the line as they reflected on what had happened. They had bypassed a whole step of false casualness and been brought face-to-face with the reality of the depth and uncomfortable strength of the attraction between them. I must see him once and for all to end this insanity. He cannot look as wonderful, be as wonderful, as I imagine him, Batsheva thought. I will find that his ears are too large, or his face is too ruddy. He will say something offensive (bound to, eventually, a priest!), she thought somewhat desperately. It’s best if we spend time together so that I may see these things sooner, so that they may hit me harder.

I must see her, he thought. I must finish my ministry, or at least prove to myself it was a hopeless challenge. I must reach out to her in Christ’s name. I must test myself to see if I can relate to her as a soul, if I can quell my desire for her as a woman. I must elevate and purify my carnal love into pure spiritual love. But this I can only do with her by my side. It is the only way to end this obsession.

“I must see you,” they said simultaneously, and then didn’t know whether to laugh or be appalled.

“I’ll pick you up in an hour. We’ll feed the ducks in Hyde Park. Your little boy will like that.”

“Yes. All right. In an hour then.”

Her hands shook as she brushed her hair so hard it crackled like an electric wire. She tried on dress after dress, rejecting one because it made her look young and innocent, another because she seemed old and worldly. She looked in the mirror and racked her brain to understand how she should look, what exactly she was trying to accomplish. Did she want to look ravishing and unforgettable? Or businesslike and unapproachable? Did she want to make it easy, or impossible, for him to accept her farewell? Was she going to say good-bye at all, or was that simply beyond her? She kept going round and round and coming back to the same point. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, decide. She finally just grabbed the sweater and skirt she had worn to Robin’s house. It was a little frayed now, after much use, but the color had remained just as beautiful and rich.

He hung up the phone and lay back on his narrow, hard bed at the seminary, staring at the ceiling. He felt himself in a total state of chaos. He thought of her, trying to concentrate on ideas. But her face, her soft body, would intrude. She had touched him, reaching in deeply to his mind, his heart, his loins. He felt ravished and destroyed, all his beliefs brought into doubt. Ever since he had been a small child, he had been tortured by questions that never occurred to anyone else—not to his father or mother, Ian or his classmates or teachers. Why are we on earth? What does it mean to be good, to be evil? What does God want of us? They had all treated the questions lightly, the way one reacted to a why-is-the-sky-blue-and-the-grass-green kind of question. Perhaps they had all had these questions themselves but had been able to resolve them with pat answers from catechism.

It was funny, when he thought about it. The Church had never given him the answers that satisfied him. It had only enticed him forward with more mysteries, more questions, until he felt that it would take him his whole lifetime to find the answers. That was why he had decided to become a priest. He wanted to find the answers, to live out their truth undeflected by any false, time-consuming sidetracks through ordinary life. And so he had thought until he met Batsheva.

She was not the first woman who had attracted him. He loved all women, in the abstract. In high school, he had felt himself drawn to pretty young girls, wanting to touch them the way one feels one must caress a fluffy little kitten. They had touched his body with their sweetness, but he had grown tired of it. They satisfied such a small part of his incredible hunger, like a little piece of cake without the whole meal that goes before it. He had realized then that in order to satisfy his hunger, there would have to be an endless stream of women, and still the main part of him would remain unfed. And so he had decided to have no woman, but to seek something more solid and difficult to satisfy his soul.

But in Batsheva he had sensed some indefinable essence that drew him like a magnet. It was more than just incredible womanly beauty. It was an inner radiance, a glow. She seemed to have answers that he had never dreamed of, answers the Church had kept from him. Or, more truly, it was his love of questions. She posed the most incomprehensible combination of questions of all: added to the eternal mystery of Woman was the eternal question of the Jew. And so, he told himself, he would minister to her needs. He would reach out to her and let Christ offer her salvation. Yes, it was his duty to sublimate this desire, to turn it into a service to the Lord. He would save her soul, the unbaptized soul of the unbelieving Jew who has denied Christ. He would be her salvation. This would be his gift to her, out of the growing love he felt for her.

She opened the door and let him in, afraid almost to look at him. An indefinable thrill ran through her that was almost frightening.

“And so this is Akiva?” He didn’t bend over the child, but squatted down so that they were almost equals, face-to-face. He put out his hand ceremoniously. “So happy to meet you, sir.” Akiva put his little hand out and giggled as David tickled him under the arm. “Laughing at me, are we? Well, we shall have to see about that, yes indeed.” He was about to pick the child up and swing him, but thought better of it. After all, he was a stranger and very tall, and the height might be frightening. He would do it later, when they got to know each other, he thought, somehow never questioning that there would be a later. “And how do you feel about feeding the ducks, sir?”

“I like ducks,” Akiva answered thoughtfully, “but I was in the middle of reading a book.” He looked at his mother doubtfully.

“And what is the book about?” He loved children and thought Akiva the most wonderful little thing—so bright and mischievous and handsome.

“About how the world began. It was dark, oh, so dark, and then light…”

“He’ll keep you here for the whole seven days of creation,” Batsheva laughed. “Come on now, up we go, Akiva. You can read your book later.”

The child skipped between them on the grass, chasing the ducks. A current flowed between David and Batsheva that was so strong it seemed to fill up the empty space that separated their bodies. It swirled around them like fine steel wires, pulling them together without their willing or understanding it. Slowly, to her utter amazement, Batsheva began to tell David everything. She described her childhood, so isolated and filled with religion and custom, and how she had loved the rituals and felt herself close to God. She described her dreams as a young girl, her desire to travel, to read, to learn, to become a wife and mother and to lead a good life, fulfilling all the demands of custom and religion, yet being herself as well. She hesitated when she came to the part about Isaac, knowing she was opening a door that would be impossible for her to ever close again; knowing that she would risk his disgust, and his condemnation. But it could not be helped. He had to know everything, every detail she had not yet admitted to herself. An instinct told her this.

She described Jerusalem and he saw her eyes shine with love. She described Isaac, and he saw the glow fade and harden and disappear. “It was as if Isaac cut me up into little pieces and kept taking one piece and then another away until there was nothing left, until I was almost totally destroyed. And worst of all, he did it in God’s name until I almost believed they were the same, Isaac and God, until I almost hated God.” She took a deep breath, trying to keep her voice steady. “I know that I am young and still ignorant, but I have learned through everything that has happened one thing: that God does not want that. I understand—oh, not everything, I will never understand everything—but enough to know that He gives us lives that are separate and beautiful and expects us to develop whatever there is inside us. Isaac cannot imagine anyone who is not a clone of himself. There is no room in his heart for forgiveness and understanding for the things that make us individual and human—our weaknesses, our desires. I used to think he was both evil and ignorant. I don’t anymore, I don’t even hate him anymore. I feel sorry for him and everyone like him. They want to do the right thing, but they think the right thing is to crush themselves, to stuff their lives into tiny, tiny cubbyholes and to cut off all the parts that don’t fit.

“When I was young, I had so many questions, so many doubts about what we are doing here, being alive. I thought—if I marry a scholar, I will have someone to teach me, to explain things to me. I see that was wrong. You can’t give over your doubts to someone else and ask him to hand you the answers on a silver platter. That’s like handing him over your soul. The best you can do is to struggle with the questions honestly and try to be a good person.”

“You’re so good!” he said softly.

She looked up into David’s eyes and quickly looked away. No, she did not want his compassion, his understanding. She was afraid it would soften her, take away her courage to tell the whole truth. She took a deep breath. “You don’t know anything about me. I am a wife who abandoned her husband. A daughter who brought grief and shame to her parents. A mother who almost killed her son.” She saw his shocked face stare at her sharply, but she plunged forward, describing the way they took Akiva from her; the tottering chair and the open hotel window.

“Good God!” He gripped his hands together painfully.

She was bent over and her shoulders trembled. He took her in his arms, his hands caressing her head and humbled shoulders, blindly, with a blind instinctive love and tenderness. He held her until the trembling stopped, then used his large hands to wipe the tears from her face.

“But you see, I am not dead. So there must be a purpose to my life, which I…I don’t know. I must find it somehow, on my own. He wants us to live, you know.” She nodded with perfect conviction. “That’s the reason we are here, to go through it. That is why He pulled me back to life. And so I live, trying to reconcile all the opposites—to be myself, and to make that self pleasing to Him. And now you know everything.” She looked at him full of pain and unhappiness. “I am a runaway. An outcast from my family, from my people. An eternal foreigner condemned to live among strangers.”

This was the moment, his rational mind cried out to him. Offer her Christ’s comfort. His guidance and friendship, to ease her burden of loneliness. Ask her to join you in a new life, to become one with a new people. The words caught in his throat and he felt a disgust with himself that almost nauseated him. Never had he felt more inadequate, more humiliated and small, thinking of his earlier arrogance. He felt heartbroken and yet incredibly elated, as if at the edge of an enormous, life-shattering discovery: I cannot offer her Christ’s forgiveness, he thought with a flash of frightening clarity, because she doesn’t need it.

She had been at the edge of spiritual and physical death and both times, through her own strength, had pulled back. Her pain, her incredible struggle, had purified her. She was a purer soul than he would ever be, he knew. She was drawing her strength and her conviction from a deeper source—a source that as yet evaded his comprehension. He cupped his hands around her beautiful face and stared into the radiant light that filled her wet, shining eyes. She had pulled back from death and was filled with life, with faith, with forgiveness, and with understanding.

While he…he felt such contempt for himself. He had been no woman’s husband, no child’s father. He knew God only vaguely, filtered through books, through mysteries, through other priests. He had, until now, he thought bitterly, lived vicariously. It was a miserly, selfish life. A coward’s life.

Batsheva, misunderstanding his bitter silence, felt the full weight of his imagined contempt wash over her. Now he knows it all. It will be over now. He will hate me now. She tried to find some satisfaction in the thought of the total rupture of their relationship, the break that she knew had to come. But instead, she felt an emptiness, a loss almost like the death of a loved one.