The Golem and the Jinni (53 page)

His life was no different than before: the shop during the day, the city at night. But the hours now felt interminable, ruled by a numbing sameness. At night he walked quickly, as though driven to it, barely seeing his surroundings. He tried returning to his old favorites—Madison Square Park, Washington Square, the Battery Park aquarium—but these places were haunted now, pinned to memories of particular evenings and conversations, things said and unsaid. He could hardly walk within sight of Central Park before a weary anger turned him elsewhere.

So he went farther north instead, tracing aimless paths into unexplored territory. He walked up Riverside to Harlem’s southern border, then cut through the university’s new grounds, past the columned library with its gigantic granite dome. He forged up Amsterdam, crossing streets numbered well into the hundreds. Gradually the well-kept brownstones gave way to Dutch clapboard houses, their trellises heavy with roses.

One night he discovered the Harlem River Speedway and walked its length, the river glittering to his right. It was well past midnight, but a few of society’s more reckless specimens were still out in their racing carriages, chasing each other up and down the course. Their horses strained white-eyed at their bits, kicking up dust from the macadam. At dawn he found himself at the amusement park at Fort George, its shuttered fairway eerie and silent. The wooden rides seemed skeletal, like the remains of huge abandoned beasts. The Third Avenue Trolley had its terminus at the park’s entrance, and he watched as the day’s first car disgorged its passengers: carnival barkers and ride operators, yawning beer-garden girls in faded skirts, an organ-grinder whose monkey slept curled around his neck. No one seemed happy to be there. He boarded the car and rode south, watching as the trolley filled and emptied, delivering workers to the factories and printing presses, the sweatshops and the docklands. The more he rode the trolleys and trains of New York, the more they seemed to form a giant, malevolent bellows, inhaling defenseless passengers from platforms and street corners and blowing them out again elsewhere.

Back on Washington Street, he trudged to Arbeely’s shop, feeling as though he were caught inside a single day that stretched like molten glass. There was nothing to anticipate, except Matthew. He enjoyed the boy’s wide-eyed attention, enjoyed giving him tasks and watching him perform them with silent absorption. He supposed that eventually Matthew would grow older and lose interest, and take his place with the feral young men who slouched on the neighborhood stoops. Or—even worse—he’d become just another streetcar rider, dull-eyed and unprotesting.

He sat down at his bench without a word of greeting. Behind him, Arbeely puttered around the shop, making irritating humming noises. The man was deep into a large order of kitchen graters and had spent an entire week punching diamond-shaped holes into sheets of tin. Just watching him made the Jinni want to go mad. But Arbeely gave no sign that he minded the repetition, and the Jinni was beginning to detest him for that.

You judge him far too harshly
, he could hear the Golem say.

He scowled. It was clear they would never speak again, and yet he was hearing her voice more and more often. He rubbed at his cuff, felt the square of paper shift beneath it. Enough: the necklaces were due to Sam Hosseini. He took up his tools and tried to lose himself in the creation of something beautiful.

Michael Levy slowly woke to the thin glow of morning. The other half of the bed was an empty sea of sheets and counterpane. He closed his eyes, listened for his wife. There: in the kitchen, bustling about. It was a comforting sound, a childhood sound. The air even smelled of fresh-baked bread.

He padded out into the tiny kitchen. She was standing next to the stove in her new housedress, leafing through her American cookbook. He snuck his arms around her waist and kissed her. “Couldn’t sleep again?”

“Yes, but it’s all right.”

Apparently it was an insomnia she’d had all her life. She said she was used to it; and indeed, she looked more awake than he felt. If it were him, he’d be dead on his feet. An amazing woman.

He still couldn’t believe they were married. At night he’d lie next to her, tracing his fingers around her stomach, up to her breasts, her arms, amazed at how thoroughly his life had changed. He loved the feel of her skin—always
cool
somehow, though the days had been sweltering. “I suppose it’s because of the ovens at the bakery,” he’d said once. “Your body’s used to the heat.” She’d smiled as though embarrassed, and said, “I think you must be right.”

She was often shy, his wife. Many of their meals together were silent, or nearly so: they were still tentative with each other, unsure of how to act. He’d look across the table and wonder, had they married too quickly? Would they always be strangers to each other? But then, even before the thought had passed from his mind, she would ask about his day, or tell him a story from hers, or else simply reach across and squeeze his hand. He would realize it was exactly what he’d needed, and wonder how she’d known.

Then there was the matter of the bedroom. Their wedding night had begun tentatively. He was well aware that as a previously married woman, she would be much more experienced than he. But what did she like? What
pleased
her? He had no idea how to ask, and not nearly enough nerve. What if she suggested something outlandish, even terrifying? His friends, when they’d had a few drinks, boasted of their exotic nights with “emancipated” girls, but his own fantasies had never ventured far from the prosaic. Perhaps it was a failing; perhaps she’d be disappointed.

If she was, she didn’t say so. Seeming to understand his distress—and there, again, was that
knowing
—she had led him into the act with her usual calm and steady demeanor. If their lovemaking was a little too workmanlike—if, afterward, he’d been unsure of her own pleasure—still he was relieved that it had been accomplished at all.

And then there’d been the night a week or so later, when she’d started as though surprised, and placed a hand between their bodies, pressing at a particular spot. To Michael’s utter regret he’d frozen, chagrined, as his Orthodox upbringing rushed clamoring to the fore, insisting that this was
immodest
, unbecoming in a wife—and slowly she’d removed her hand, and replaced it on his back, and resumed their rhythm.

He couldn’t talk to her about it, later. He just couldn’t. He tried, once, to repeat what she herself had done; but she took his hand and moved it away, and that had been that.

Already there were things unsaid between them. But he loved her; he was certain of it. And he liked to think she loved him in return. He imagined them in thirty years, with children grown, holding hands in bed and laughing at how unsure they’d been, how delicately they’d tiptoed around each other.
But you always knew just what to say
, he’d tell her; and she would smile, and nestle her head in his shoulder, both of them completely at home.

He’d ask her about these things someday. He’d find out what had prompted her to propose to him, just when he’d given up hope. Or what she’d been thinking as she stood next to him before the justice of the peace, looking so composed and serene. He only hoped it wouldn’t take him thirty years to ask.

The Golem placed a glass of tea and a plate of bread before her husband, and watched as he ate quickly, in big bites. She smiled in real fondness. He was so earnest, in everything he did.

She turned back to the sink to clean the few remaining dishes. They lived now in three tiny rooms crammed at the end of a first-floor hallway. The thin light that filtered down the air shaft illuminated a pile of garbage that climbed halfway up the bedroom window. Sometimes she’d watch as a cigarette butt fluttered down from above. The kitchen was more like a closet, with a stove barely big enough to roast a chicken. At night she did her sewing in the parlor, which hardly merited the name; it was perhaps a third the size of her old room at the boardinghouse. The rooms’ main advantage was that they sat at the back of the tenement, which had been dug into a slight rise, so that the earth kept them cool while the rest of the building sweltered. “It’ll be warmer in winter too,” Michael had said. She hoped this meant she wouldn’t feel so stiff and creaky, so driven to walk in the evenings. But deep down she knew that her proximity to Michael’s restless mind would hound her to distraction as surely as the weather once had.

Within days of their marriage she’d realized how much she’d underestimated the difficulty ahead. Unlike the Rabbi, who’d been so circumspect, so careful in his thoughts, Michael’s mind was a constant churn of wants and fears and second-guesses, most of them directed at herself. The noise wore down her composure and tested her self-control. She found herself serving him second helpings when he was hungry, talking when he wanted conversation, taking his hand when he needed reassurance. She’d begun to wonder whether she still had a will of her own.

Also there were the endless practical dilemmas. The long stretches of lying next to him in bed, remembering to breathe in and out. The excuses for her sleeplessness, her cool skin. Would he notice that her hair never grew? Or, God forbid, that she had no heartbeat? And what would happen when she failed to bear children? She’d hoped to keep marital relations to a minimum, to put some protective distance between them—she was afraid, above all, of hurting him accidentally—but then his desire would grow too strong to ignore, and she would feel driven to respond, or else lie there frustrated by reflected lust. There’d been that one night, when she’d felt her own warm tingle of desire, and tried eagerly to encourage it; but it had been doused by Michael’s awkward, guilty horror. It wasn’t his fault: she could feel his chagrin at his reaction, and he’d later tried to remedy the situation, but with such tortured ambivalence that she’d put an end to the attempt. Was it the pleasure itself, she wondered, that was somehow shameful? Or only what she’d done to increase it?

Unbidden she heard the Jinni say:
It should be easy. They’re the ones who complicate it beyond reason.

No. She couldn’t afford to listen to that voice. It was wrong, ludicrous even, to resent Michael for her decision. She’d bound herself to him; she would see through what she’d begun. And perhaps, one day, she would tell him the truth.

At last the necklaces for Sam Hosseini were finished. Arbeely delivered them to Sam’s shop himself, not trusting the Jinni to strike a good bargain. But he needn’t have worried, for Sam was so pleased with them that he barely remembered to haggle. Besides the Jinni’s original necklace, with its disks of blue-green glass, there were versions with garnet-colored teardrops, brilliant white crystals, and lozenges of a deep emerald green. The Jinni had flattened the links and added the faintest edge of tarnish to the metal, which gave them a timeless beauty, while also looking like nothing Sam had ever seen.

Arbeely had expected Sam to display the necklaces in his largest glass case, but Sam had a better plan. Lately it had become fashionable for Manhattan’s society women to pose for portraits while dressed in a fanciful “Oriental” style, such as they imagined a Near Eastern princess or courtesan might have worn. Sam’s shop was a popular destination for these ladies, who often sent their maids or even came themselves to buy props and costume pieces. Most of them viewed bargaining as gauche, which meant that Sam was turning a tidy profit in curl-toed slippers, billowing silk trousers, and faux Egyptian armbands. The new necklaces would certainly appeal to them; and Sam knew they would like them even better if they came with a story.

It was only a few days before the first likely customer arrived. A sleek, expensive brougham pulled up in front of Sam’s shop—causing a good deal of gawking from the passersby—and a dark-haired young woman emerged. The afternoon heat was baking the sidewalks, but the young woman wore a heavy, dark dress and a thick shawl. She looked about with polite curiosity until an older woman, dressed just as finely in black, stepped from the carriage. The older woman eyed their surroundings with distaste, then took hold of her companion’s elbow and led her swiftly into Sam’s shop.