Tremble (33 page)

The rabbi stopped them at the front door and took Aaron’s arm.

“I hope we haven’t said anything to offend you? Normally you are so good at debate.”

“No, Rabbi, it’s just that tonight I have no energy or patience to discuss philosophy. There is too much real life out there to worry about.”

Aaron stepped out into the street, the bluish air freezing his cheeks and beard.

“Come.”

Miriam, wrapped by now in a voluminous gray woollen coat and hat, whispered a quick apology and left the chagrined cleric standing in the doorway.

“May the burden he is carrying be lifted,” the rabbi muttered before closing the door against the wind.

Outside it had begun to snow. Aaron, in a bid to clear his whirling brain, took a few deep breaths of the icy air. What did it matter about the file? He had his wife and his family. Now slightly ashamed of his behavior, he checked to see whether the street was empty—it was—then quickly brought his wife’s hand up to his lips to kiss. Physical contact between men and women in public was a religious transgression, even between married couples, but Aaron couldn’t control his affection. Miriam smiled back and they strolled together, like an established married couple should, relaxed and unworried by the swirling snow.

On Union Street Aaron noticed that a light was still burning in the window of Number 770, the great synagogue. Excusing himself and promising he’d be home ten minutes after her, Aaron left Miriam and ran across the road. The door was still open. Knocking the melting snowflakes from his shoulders Aaron entered.

He sat in the back row, fingering his prayer shawl beneath his black coat as he stared at the Torah, its scrolls encased in silver and gold locked behind the gates of the ark. Then, sighing deeply, he bowed his head and began rocking, mouthing a meditation given to him personally by the Rebbe himself before he passed over to the other side.

Five minutes later the claims assessor stood, astounded at the clarity that streamed through him. He knew exactly what to do; there would be no more agonizing, no more arguing with himself. Cheered immensely by his newfound resolve he left the synagogue.

Miriam lay in bed waiting for Aaron to finish in the bathroom. She could hear him brushing his teeth, knew that after that he would step on the scale, then sigh, then—if they were going to make love—he would splash on aftershave before unlocking the door and climbing carefully into bed beside her, as if frightened of waking her. She, of course, would be playing along, her heavy flannel nightgown pulled down below her knees; her hair, long and luxurious, now exposed for her husband’s eyes and spread artfully across the pillow; her eyes pressed shut, pretending she is sleeping.

He was opening the bathroom door now; the floorboards squeaked as he attempted to walk silently across to the bed. Miriam sniffed quietly. Yes, there was the faint smell of aftershave. Immediately her heart quickened in excitement; she even imagined herself moistening at the scent. It was their signal, his first move in the elaborate game of courtship they’d built up over the year.

Both virgins, their first forays into lovemaking had been disastrous, a parody of clumsy gestures they’d gleaned separately from friends and clandestine glimpses at instructive magazines to which they had no proper access. Having grown up within the Orthodox community, where sex was considered a sacred and spiritual communication between married people, they were both desperately timid. It was a naïveté that was understandable, but a considerable hindrance to a practical knowledge of important working parts.

It had taken a week before Aaron was able to penetrate Miriam at all, his fear of hurting her superseding his desire. It was only when Myra found her daughter-in-law weeping in the corner of the dim bedroom
one morning that she discovered their utter lack of experience. Myra, a pragmatist and ex-libertine, would have none of it.

“Oi gevalt!” the ninety-year-old had exclaimed after laughing a little then weeping a little. “Such pleasure is sanctified by God! Look at the Song of Solomon! To worship your husband’s body and he yours is not a sin but a spiritual duty. In fact, according to religious law if he is not pleasuring you there are grounds for divorce. But even Sarah and Abraham needed a little instruction.”

Grabbing the young woman’s hand she pulled her up to the crowded bedroom at the top of the house where Myra had slept since the death of her husband some fifty years before. She pulled an ancient copy of
The Joy of Sex
from the bookshelf, dusted it off, and pushed it into her daughter-in-law’s hands.

“This you read, you learn, and then you leave it accidentally on purpose on Aaron’s desk. If he asks, it is mine from my sinful days. Believe me, it will work.”

And so it did. A few weeks later at the mikvah, the bath attendant was prompted to ask Miriam why she was smiling so much.

“Because my husband has sent me to heaven at least five times this month.” A reply that caused the bath attendant, a sober woman in her fifties, to smile too.

In short, Aaron’s clumsiness had been replaced by an enthusiasm tempered by a newly acquired knowledge he was happy to practice on his wife. No wonder Miriam now waited in the bed with such impatience.

She lay quietly beside her husband for a few minutes, anxious for him to make his customary move—a deft caress of her breasts beneath her nightdress—but nothing happened. Finally abandoning any pretense of submissiveness she reached across and touched his penis. It was limp.

“Sorry, honey, it’s work.”

Miriam switched on the bedside lamp. “Is it the file?”

He sat up, amazed at the intuition of women.

“You haven’t read it, have you?”

“Of course not. I would never do anything like that without your permission.”

“I can’t talk about it, not yet. But you trust me, don’t you?”

“Always.”

“It’s an ethical issue, there’s a lot at stake. My job, the company’s future, maybe even my life….”

Startled, she sat up.

“Aaron! Stop being dramatic, you’re frightening me.”

“I don’t know, remember Hinkel? Hinkel made a noise about something, I’m not sure what, and then he’s gone. Suddenly, just like that.”

“You think the company—”

“Shhh! I’m trying not to think anything at the moment. All I know is that when something’s wrong the public has the right to know….”

“But the company’s never let you down before.”

He drank in her confidence, wishing he had more of her blind faith. She is younger than me, he thought, she is sheltered by the community. She hasn’t experienced the world beyond, a cosmos that is morally ambiguous, that is complex in its judgment, but I love her nevertheless. Kissing her he felt a ripple of passion in his loins.

“Wake me early in the morning,” he whispered softly, as if he feared the Almighty would hear his lust, then he relaxed his morally conflicted bulk and in an instant he was asleep and snoring.

Aaron Gluckstein was famous for two things. One was his sneeze: allergic to dust, he would often fire off a series of earsplitting eruptions that sounded like sudden sharp gunshots. The other was his snore. It was legendary: an incessant rumbling that began in the back of the throat, like a low growl, and built until it reached a pitch that caused eardrums to vibrate, set windowpanes rattling and dogs howling. Oblivious to the suffering it inflicted, the snore continued to increase until it peaked suddenly in a high-pitched whistle, only to start the cycle all over again, all night through. Complex in its musicality it was the mother of all snores, the maestro of uncontrollable body noises, putting other physical faux pas such as burping, breaking wind, and stomach growls firmly in the shade.

In another era Aaron might have had a lucrative career as a circus performer, Myra often told him. “Aaron: the snore that shook a nation,” she would say, picturing an enormous striped tent with a hand-painted sign with gold lettering, her son sleeping soundly in his pajamas behind a veil of gauze watched by an amazed and adoring audience. Myra had even considered the possibility of matchmaking him with a deaf wife, so worried was she about finding any woman who would tolerate such a racket. When she had come upon the weeping Miriam a month after
the wedding, Myra was terrified Aaron’s new wife was going to announce that she could no longer tolerate his sleeping habits. To hear that her son was merely an incompetent lover was a huge relief—this she could rectify.

As for Miriam, the snore
had
been a problem. For the first week the poor woman had hardly slept, lying beside this colossus who transformed into a howling wind-box every time he fell asleep. Driven to the brink of exhaustion she took sleeping pills, but found that the snore penetrated even through the muffled dreaming the drugs induced, thus transforming the beating of an angel’s wings into the roar of an approaching train, the gentle lapping of a phosphorescent sea into a screaming tempest.

After much deliberation and a visit to her favorite rabbi who had advised her to, “Be like water around a rock: embrace the rock, accept it, then begin to erode it quietly,” Miriam had decided that her only course of action was to incorporate the noise into her own rituals for falling asleep. And so Aaron’s young wife from Chicago trained herself, like Pavlov’s dog, not only to relax alongside her husband’s snore but to love it and even expect it. Within a month she could not get to sleep without the accompanying orchestrated cacophony of whistling air and grunts. So now, smiling at the familiar rumble, she curled up against him and fell asleep.

She woke to find her husband’s mouth between her legs, his tongue already creating a whirlwind of pounding pleasure that left her thighs trembling. Not wanting to arrive at what she shyly referred to as “the top of Jacob’s ladder” without him she pulled him up. Carefully positioning himself above her, he took his full weight onto his elbow and eased himself inside her. He was an expansive man in all matters and it always took a moment before Miriam’s pain transformed itself into a mounting bliss.

Staring down at his wife, Aaron thought he had never seen such beauty. Pacing himself carefully to the growing blush that traveled from her neck up to her forehead, he increased his tempo until he too was tottering on the highest rung of pleasure. Miriam’s climax began first; contracting, she cried out and her cries triggered his own. Deep waves
of pleasure rippled from deep within his body, shaking his flesh and causing flashes behind his eyes. In a moment of spiritual revelation he realized it was the most powerful orgasm he had ever experienced. It was then that his heart exploded and Aaron realized he was dying. “I love you!” he shouted and collapsed on top of Miriam. His huge heart gave one last thud then stilled forever.

For a moment she lay there confused. Then, as Aaron’s mass solidified into a profound weight that pushed her down into the mattress, she began screaming.

A story above, Myra woke, dutifully screwed in her hearing aid as she did every morning, then wandered downstairs for breakfast. As she hobbled past her son’s bedroom she heard a pitiful moaning. Pushing the door open she found Miriam, still pinned beneath her dead husband, sobbing in shock.