At the time of his disappearance, Epstein had been living in Tel Aviv for three months. No one had seen his apartment. His daughter Lucie had come to visit with her children, but Epstein installed them in the Hilton, where he met them for lavish breakfasts at which he only sipped tea. When Lucie asked to come over, he’d begged off, explaining that the place was small and modest, not fit for receiving guests. Still reeling from her parents’ late divorce, she’d looked at him through narrow eyes—nothing about Epstein had previously been small or modest—but despite her suspicion she’d had to accept it, along with all the other changes that had come over her father. In the end, it was the police detectives who showed Lucie, Jonah, and Maya into their father’s apartment, which turned out to be in a crumbling building near the ancient port of Jaffa. The paint was peeling, and the shower let down directly above the toilet. A cockroach strutted majestically across the stone floor. Only after the police detective stomped on it with his shoe did it occur to Maya, Epstein’s youngest and most intelligent child, that it may have been the last to see her father. If Epstein had ever really lived there at all—the only things that suggested he had inhabited the place were some books warped by the humid air that came through an open window and a bottle of the Coumadin pills he’d taken since the discovery of an atrial fibrillation five years earlier. It could not have been called squalid, and yet the place had more in common with the slums of Calcutta than it did with the rooms in which his children had stayed with their father on the Amalfi coast and Cap d’Antibes. Though, like those other rooms, this one also had a view of the sea.
In those final months Epstein had become difficult to reach. No longer did his answers come hurtling back regardless of the time of day or night. If before he’d always had the last word, it was because he’d never not replied. But slowly, his messages had become more and more scarce. Time expanded between them because it had expanded in him: the twenty-four hours he’d once filled with everything under the sun was replaced by a scale of thousands of years. His family and friends became accustomed to his irregular silences, and so when he failed to answer anything at all during the first week of February, no one became instantly alarmed. In the end, it was Maya who woke in the night feeling a tremor along the invisible line that still connected her to her father, and asked his cousin to check on him. Moti, who had been the beneficiary of many thousands of dollars from Epstein, caressed the ass of the sleeping lover in his bed, then lit a cigarette and stuffed his bare feet into his shoes, for though it was the middle of the night, he was glad to have a reason to talk to Epstein about a new investment. But when Moti arrived at the Jaffa address scrawled on his palm, he rang Maya back. There must be a mistake, he told her, there was no way her father would live in such a dump. Maya phoned Epstein’s lawyer, Schloss, the only one who still knew anything, but he confirmed that the address was correct. When Moti finally roused the young tenant on the second floor by holding down the buzzer with a stubby finger, she confirmed that Epstein had in fact been living above her for the last few months, but that it had been many days since she’d last seen him, or heard him, really, for she had gotten used to the sound of him pacing on her ceiling during the night. Though she couldn’t know it as she stood sleepily at the door addressing the balding cousin of her upstairs neighbor, in the rapid escalation of events that followed, the young woman would become accustomed to the sound of many people coming and going above her head, tracing and retracing the footsteps of a man she hardly knew and yet had come to feel oddly close to.
The police only had the case for half a day before it was taken over by the Shin Bet. Shimon Peres called the family personally to say that mountains would be moved. The taxi driver who’d picked Epstein up six days earlier was tracked down and taken in for questioning. Scared out of his wits, he smiled the whole time, showing his gold tooth. Later he led the Shin Bet detectives to the road along the Dead Sea and, following some confusion as a result of nerves, managed to locate the spot where he had let Epstein off, an intersection near the barren hills halfway between the caves of Qumran and Ein Gedi. The search parties fanned out across the desert, but all they turned up was Epstein’s empty monogrammed briefcase, which, as Maya put it, only made the possibility of his transubstantiation seem more real.
During those days and nights, gathered together in the rooms of the Hilton suite, his children tossed back and forth between hope and grief. A phone was always ringing—Schloss alone was manning three—and each time it did, they attached themselves to the latest information that came through. Jonah, Lucie, and Maya learned things about their father that they hadn’t known. But in the end, they got no closer to finding out what he had meant by it all, or what had become of him. As the days passed, the calls had come less often, and brought no miracles. Slowly they adjusted themselves to a new reality in which their father, so firm and decisive in life, had left them with a final act that was utterly ambiguous.
A rabbi was brought in who explained to them in heavily accented English that Jewish law required absolute certainty about the death before the mourning rituals could be observed. In cases where there was no corpse, a witness to the death was considered enough. And even with no corpse and no witness, a report that the person had been killed by thieves, or drowned, or dragged off by a wild animal was enough. But in this case there was no corpse, no witness, and no report. No thieves, or wild animals, as far as anyone knew. Only an inscrutable absence where once their father had been.
No one could have imagined it, and yet it came to seem like a fitting end. Death was too small for Epstein. In retrospect, not even a real possibility. In life he had taken up the whole room. He wasn’t large, only uncontainable. There was too much of him; he constantly overspilled himself. It all came pouring out: the passion, the anger, the enthusiasm, the contempt for people and the love for all mankind. Argument was the medium in which he was raised, and he needed it to know he was alive. He fell out with three-quarters of everyone he had fallen in with; those that remained could do no wrong, and were loved by Epstein forever. To know him was either to be crushed by him or madly inflated. One hardly recognized oneself in his descriptions. He had a long line of protégés. Epstein breathed himself into them, they became larger and larger, as did everyone he chose to love. At last they flew like a Macy’s parade balloon. But then one day they would snag themselves on Epstein’s high moral branches and burst. From then on, their names were anathema. In his inflationary habits Epstein was deeply American, but in his lack of respect for boundaries and his tribalism he was not. He was something else, and this something else led to misunderstanding again and again.
And yet he’d had a way of drawing people in, bringing them over to his side, under the expansive umbrella of his policies. He was lit brightly from within, and this light came spilling out of him in the careless fashion of one who hasn’t any need to scrimp or save. To be with him was never dull. His spirits swelled and sank and swelled again, his temper flared, he was unforgiving, but he was never less than completely absorbing. He was endlessly curious, and when he became interested in something or someone, his investigations were exhaustive. He never doubted that everyone else would be as interested in these subjects as he was. But few could match his stamina. In the end, it was always his dinner companions who insisted on retiring first, and still Epstein would follow them out of the restaurant, finger stabbing the air, eager to drive home his point.
He had always been at the top of everything. Where he lacked natural facilities, by sheer force of will he drove himself beyond his limits. As a young man he had not been a natural orator, for example; a lisp had gotten in the way. Nor was he innately athletic. But in time he came to excel in these, especially. The lisp was overcome—only if one listened microscopically could a slur be detected where he had performed the necessary operation—and many hours in the gym, and the honing of a wily, cutthroat instinct, turned him into a champion lightweight wrestler. Where he encountered a wall, he threw himself against it over and over, picking himself up again until one day he went right through it. This enormous pressure and exertion were perceptible in everything he did, and yet what might have come off as striving in anyone else, in him seemed a form of grace. Even as a boy, his aspirations were gargantuan. On the block where he grew up on Long Beach, Long Island, Epstein had charged ten houses a monthly retainer fee, for which he was available twenty-four hours a day, with a cap of ten hours a month, to deliver his services, outlined in an ever-expanding menu he sent out with the invoice (mowing, dog walking, car washing, even unclogging toilets, for he did not have the switch in him that seemed to turn others off). He was going to have endless money because that was his fate; long before he married into it, he already knew exactly what to do with it. At thirteen, he bought with his savings a blue silk scarf that he wore as casually as his friends wore their gym sneakers. How many people know what to do with money? His wife, Lianne, had been allergic to her family fortune; it stiffened her and made her quiet. She spent her early years trying to erase her footsteps in the formal gardens. But Epstein taught her what to do with it. He bought a Rubens, a Sargent, a Mortlake tapestry. He hung a small Matisse in his closet. Under a ballerina by Degas, he sat without pants. It wasn’t a question of being crude or out of his element. No, Epstein was very polished. He was not refined—he had no wish to lose his impurities—but he had been brought to a high shine. In pleasure he saw nothing to be ashamed of; his was large and true, and so he could make himself at home among even the most exquisite things. Every summer he rented the same “shabby” castle in Granada where the newspaper could be thrown down and the feet put up. He chose a spot on the plaster wall to pencil in the children’s growth. In later years he grew misty-eyed at the mention of the place—he had gotten so much wrong, he had made a mess of it, and yet there, where his children had played freely under the orange trees, he had gotten something right.
But at the end there had been a kind of drift. Later on, when his children looked back and tried to make sense of what had happened, they could pinpoint the beginning of his transformation to the loss of his interest in pleasure. Something opened up between Epstein and his great appetite—it receded beyond the horizon a man carries within himself. Then he lived separately from his purchase of exquisite beauty. He lacked what it took to bring it all into harmony, or got tired of the ambition to do so. For a while the paintings still hung on the walls, but he no longer had much to do with them. They carried on their own lives, dreaming in their frames. Something had changed in him. The strong weather of being Epstein no longer gusted outward. A great, unnatural stillness settled over everything, as happens before radical events of meteorology. Then the wind shifted and turned inward.
It was then that Epstein began to give things away. It started with a small maquette by Henry Moore handed off to his doctor, who had admired it during a home visit. From his bed, laid up with the flu, Epstein instructed Dr. Silverblatt on which closet he could find the bubble wrap in. A few days later, he twisted the signet ring off his pinkie and dropped it in the palm of his surprised doorman, Haaroon, in place of a tip; flexing his naked fist in the autumn sunlight, he smiled to himself. Soon afterward he gave away his Patek Philippe. “I like your watch, Uncle Jules,” his nephew had said, and Epstein unbuckled the crocodile strap and handed it to him. “I like your Mercedes, too,” said his nephew, at which Epstein only smiled and patted the boy’s cheek. But quickly he redoubled his efforts. Giving farther, giving faster, he began to bestow with the same ferocity with which he had once acquired. The paintings went one by one to museums; he had the crating service on automatic dial, and knew which of the men liked turkey on rye and which baloney, and had the deli delivery waiting when they arrived. When his son Jonah, trying not to appear driven by self-interest, tried to dissuade him from further philanthropy, Epstein told him he was clearing a space to think. If Jonah had pointed out that his father had been a rigorous thinker all his life, Epstein might have explained that this was thought of an entirely different nature: a thinking that didn’t already know its own point. A thinking without hope of achievement. But Jonah—who had so many chips on his shoulder that one evening, on a private tour of the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met, Epstein had stood before a second-century bust and seen his firstborn in it—had only answered him with injured silence. As with everything Epstein did, Jonah took his father’s deliberate draining of assets as an affront, and yet another reason to feel aggrieved.
Beyond this, Epstein made no effort to explain himself to anyone, except once to Maya. Having arrived thirteen years after Jonah, and ten after Lucie, at a less turbulent and agitated epoch in Epstein’s life, Maya saw her father in a different light. There was a natural ease between them. On a walk through the northern reaches of Central Park, where icicles hung from the great outcrops of schist, he told his youngest daughter that he had begun to feel choked by all the things around him. That he felt an irresistible longing for lightness—it was a quality, he realized only now, that had been alien to him all his life. They stopped at the upper lake, thinly sheeted with greenish ice. When a snowflake landed on Maya’s black eyelashes, Epstein gently brushed it away with his thumb, and Maya saw her father in fingerless gloves pushing an empty shopping cart down Upper Broadway.
He sent friends’ children through college, had refrigerators delivered, paid for a pair of new hips for the wife of the longtime janitor of his law office. He even made the down payment on a house for the daughter of an old friend; not any house, but a large Greek Revival with old trees and more lawn than the surprised new owner knew what to do with. His lawyer, Schloss—the executor of his estate, and his longtime confidant—was not allowed to interfere. Schloss had once had another client who’d caught the disease of radical charity, a billionaire who gave away his houses one by one, followed by the ground under his feet. It was a kind of addiction, he told Epstein, and later he might come to regret it. After all, he was not yet seventy; he could still live thirty more years. But Epstein had barely seemed to listen, just as he hadn’t listened when the lawyer strenuously argued against letting Lianne walk away with the entirety of her fortune, and just as he didn’t listen a few months later when Schloss again tried to dissuade him, this time from retiring from the firm where he’d been a partner for twenty-five years. Across the table, Epstein had only smiled and changed the subject to his reading, which had recently taken a mystical turn.
It had begun with a book Maya had given to him for his birthday, he told Schloss. She was always giving him strange books, some of which he read, and many of which he didn’t, a practice that never seemed to bother her—naturally free-spirited, she was the opposite of her brother, Jonah, and rarely took offense at anything. Epstein had opened the cover one evening with no intention of reading it, but it had pulled him in with an almost magnetic force. It was by an Israeli poet, Polish-born, who had died at sixty-six, two years younger than the age Epstein had just turned. But the little autobiographical book, the testament of a man alone facing God, had been written when the poet was only twenty-seven. It had overwhelmed him, Epstein told Schloss. At twenty-seven, he himself had been blinded by his ambition and appetite—for success, for money, for sex, for beauty, for love, for the magnitudes but also the nitty-gritty, for everything visible, smellable, palpable. What might his life have been if he had applied himself with the same intensity to the spiritual realm? Why had he closed himself off from it so completely?
As he spoke, Schloss had taken him in: his darting eyes, the silver hair that came down over his collar, striking because of how meticulous he had always been about his appearance. “What do you have to say about the steak versus its competitors?” Epstein was known to demand of the waiter. But now the plate of Dover sole remained untouched, belying his usual appetite. Only when the waiter came by to ask if anything was wrong did Epstein look down and remember the food, but all he did then was push it around with his fork. It was Schloss’s sense that what had happened to Epstein—the divorce, the retirement, everything coming loose, coming away—had begun not with a book but rather with the death of his parents. But afterward, when Schloss put Epstein into the back of the dark sedan waiting outside the restaurant, the lawyer paused for a moment with his hand on the car’s roof. Looking in at the strangely vague Epstein in the dark interior, he wondered briefly whether there was something more grave going on with his longtime client—a kind of neurological turbulence, perhaps, that might develop toward the extreme before it was diagnosed as medical. At the time, Schloss had brushed the thought off, but later it came back to him as prescient.
And indeed at last, after nearly a year of chipping away at the accumulations of a lifetime, Epstein arrived at the bottommost layer. There, he hit on the memory of his parents, who had washed up on the shores of Palestine after the war and conceived him under a burned-out bulb that they had not had enough money to replace. At the age of sixty-eight, having cleared a space to think, he found himself consumed by that darkness, deeply moved by it. His parents had brought him, their only son, to America, and once they’d learned English, resumed the screaming match that they’d begun in other languages. Later his sister Joanie came along, but she, a dreamy, unresponsive child, refused to take the bait, and so the battle remained triangulated. His parents screamed at each other, and they screamed at him, and he screamed back at them, together and separately. His wife, Lianne, had never been able to accustom herself to such violent love, though at the beginning, having come from a family that suppressed even its sneezes, she had been attracted to its heat. Early on in their courtship, Epstein had told her that from his father’s brutality and tenderness he’d learned that a person can’t be reduced, a lesson that had guided him all his life, and for a long time Lianne thought of this—of Epstein’s own complexity, his resistance to easy categorization—as something to love. But in the end it had exhausted her just as it had exhausted so many others, though never his parents, who remained his tireless sparring partners, and who, Epstein sometimes felt, had lived on with such tenacity only to torment him. He’d taken care of them until the end, which they’d lived out in a penthouse he bought for them in Miami, with deep-pile carpets that came up to their ankles. But he had never found peace with them, and only after their deaths—his mother following his father within three months—and after he’d given nearly everything away did Epstein feel the sharp stab of regret. The naked bulb sputtered on and off behind his inflamed lids when he tried to sleep. He couldn’t sleep. Had he accidentally given sleep away, along with everything else?
He wanted to do something in his parents’ names. But what? His mother, while still alive, had proposed a memorial bench in the little park where she used to sit, while upstairs his father was giving up his mind in the presence of Conchita, the live-in nurse. Always a big reader, his mother would bring a book with her to the park. In her last years, she had taken up Shakespeare. Once Epstein overheard her telling Conchita that she had to read King Lear. “They probably have it in Spanish,” she’d told the nurse. Every afternoon, when the sun was no longer at its peak, his mother rode down in the elevator with a large-print edition of one of the Bard’s plays in the knockoff Prada bag she had bought—over Epstein’s protests that he would buy her a real one—from an African selling them at the beach. (What did she need with real?) The park was run-down, the play equipment caked with the shit of seagulls, but there was no one in the neighborhood under the age of sixty-five to climb on it, anyway. Had his mother been serious about the bench, or had she suggested it with the usual sarcasm? Epstein couldn’t say, and so, to be sure, a bench of ipe that could withstand the tropical weather was ordered for the grimy Florida park, bolted with a brass plate that read, IN MEMORY OF EDITH “EDIE” EPSTEIN. “I AM NOT BOUND TO PLEASE THEE WITH MY ANSWER.”—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. He left the Colombian doorman of his parents’ building $200 to shine it twice a month at the same time that he polished the brass in the lobby. But when the doorman texted him a photo of the pristine bench, it seemed to Epstein that it was worse than if he had done nothing. He remembered how his mother used to call him when too much time had gone by since he’d last phoned, and in a voice hoarse from sixty years of smoking, would quote God who called out to the fallen Adam: “Ayeka?” Where are you? But God knew where Adam was physically.
On the eve of the first anniversary of his parents’ deaths, Epstein decided two things: to take out a $2 million line of credit on his Fifth Avenue apartment, and to go on a trip to Israel. The borrowing was new, but Israel was a place he’d returned to often over the years, drawn back by a tangle of allegiances. Ritually installing himself in the fifteenth-floor executive lounge of the Hilton, he had always taken visits from a long line of friends, family, and business associates, getting into everything, dispensing money, opinions, advice, resolving old arguments and igniting new ones. But this time his assistant was instructed not to fill his schedule as usual. Instead, she was asked to set up appointments with the development offices of Hadassah, the Weizmann Institute, and Ben-Gurion University, to explore the possibilities of a donation in his parents’ names. The remaining time should be kept free, Epstein told her; perhaps he would finally hire a car to tour parts of the country he had not been to for many years, as he had often spoken of doing but hadn’t, because he’d been too busy having it out, getting overly involved, and going on and on. He wanted to see the Kinneret again, the Negev, the rocky hills of Judea. The mineral blue of the Dead Sea.
As he spoke, his assistant, Sharon, glanced up, and in the familiar face of her employer she saw something she didn’t recognize. If this worried her a little, it was only because knowing what Epstein wanted, and exactly the way he liked things, was what made her good at her job, and it mattered to her to be good at it. Having survived his explosions, she’d become aware of the generosity that lived alongside Epstein’s temper, and over the years he’d won her loyalty with his.
The day before leaving for Israel, Epstein attended a small event with Mahmoud Abbas, hosted by the Center for Middle East Peace at the Plaza Hotel. Some fifty people representing the American Jewish leadership had been invited to sit down with the president of the Palestinian Authority, who was in town to address the UN Security Council, and had agreed to quell their Jewish fears over a three-course meal. Once Epstein would have leaped at the invitation. Would have gone barreling in and thrown around his weight. But where could it get him now? What could the square-hewn man from Safed tell him that he didn’t know already? He was tired of it all—tired of the hot air and lip service, his own and other people’s. He, too, wanted peace. Only at the last minute did Epstein change his mind, firing off a text to Sharon, who had to scramble to snatch back his place from a late-joining delegation from the State Department. He had given up much, but he had not yet lost his curiosity. Anyway, he was going to be around the corner at the office of the bank’s lawyers beforehand, signing documents—despite Schloss’s pleas—for the loan against his apartment.
And yet as soon as Epstein was seated at the long table shoulder to shoulder with the banner carriers of his people busily loading chive butter onto their rolls while the soft-spoken Palestinian spoke of the end of conflict and the end of claims, he regretted his change of heart. The room was tiny; there was no way out. Once he would have done it. At a state dinner honoring Shimon Peres at the White House only last year, he’d gotten up to take a piss halfway through Itzhak Perlman’s rendition of Tempo di Minuetto—how many hours total of his life had he spent listening to Perlman? A solid week? The Secret Service had convulsed toward him; after the president was seated, no one was allowed to leave the room. But when the call of nature comes, all men are equal. “It’s an emergency, gentlemen,” he’d said, pushing past the dark suits. Something gave, as it had always given for Epstein; he was escorted past the brass-buttoned military guards to the restroom. But the need to assert himself had gone out of Epstein.
The Caesar salad was served, the floor opened, and Dershowitz’s sonorous voice—“My old friend, Abu Mazen”—was carrying. To Epstein’s right, the ambassador of Saudi Arabia was fiddling with the cordless microphone, at a loss for how it worked. Across the table, Madeleine Albright sat heavy-lidded like a lizard in the sun, radiating an inward intelligence; she too was no longer really there, having moved on to matters of a metaphysical nature, or so it seemed to Epstein, who was struck by the desire to take her aside and discuss these deeper concerns. He patted his inside pocket for the small book bound in worn green cloth that Maya had given him for his birthday, and which he had carried with him everywhere for the last month. But it wasn’t there; he must have left it in his coat.
It was then, removing his hand from his pocket, that Epstein first noticed, out of the corner of his eye, the tall, bearded man in a dark suit and large black skullcap standing at the edge of the group, not distinguished enough to have been granted a seat at the table. The little smile on his lips brought out the crinkles around his eyes, and his arms were folded across his chest as if he were bracing a restless energy. But Epstein sensed it was not self-control in the service of humility at work in him, but something else.
The American Jewish leadership went on unspooling their questionless questions; the salad dishes were removed by the Indian waiters and replaced with poached salmon. At last it came Epstein’s turn to speak. He leaned forward and flipped the switch on the mic. There was a loud pop of static that made the Saudi Arabian ambassador jump. In the silence that followed, Epstein looked around at the faces turned expectantly toward him. He had not given any thought to what he wanted to say, and now his mind, which had always honed in on its target like a drone, drifted leisurely. He looked slowly around the table. The faces of the others, at a loss for how to respond to his silence, suddenly fascinated him. Their discomfort fascinated him. Had he once been immune to the discomfort of others? No, immune was too strong a word. But he had not paid it much attention. Now he watched them look down at their plates and shift uncomfortably in their seats until finally the moderator broke in. “If Jules—Mr. Epstein—has nothing to add, we’ll move on to—” but the moderator was forced to swivel around just then, being interrupted by a voice behind her.
“If he doesn’t want his turn, I’ll take it.”
Searching for where the intrusion had come from, Epstein met the keen eyes of the large man in the black knitted skullcap. He was about to answer when the man cut in again.
“President Abbas, thank you for coming today. Forgive me: like my colleagues, I don’t have a question for you; just something to say.”
A ripple of relieved laughter rolled through the room. His voice carried easily, making the use of the microphones seem fussy.
“My name is Rabbi Menachem Klausner. I’ve lived in Israel twenty-five years. I’m the founder of Gilgul, a program that brings Americans to Safed to study Jewish mysticism. I invite all of you to look us up, perhaps even to join us on one of our retreats—we’re up to fifteen a year now, and growing. President Abbas, it would be an honor to welcome you, though of course you know the elevations of Safed better than most of us.”
The rabbi paused and rubbed his glossy beard.
“As I stand here listening to my friends, I’m reminded of a story. A lesson, actually, that the rabbi once taught us in school. A real tzadik, one of the best teachers I had—had it not been for him, my life would have turned out differently. He used to read aloud to us from the Torah. That day it was Genesis, and when he got to the line, ‘On the seventh day God finished his work,’ he stopped and looked up. Did we notice anything strange? he wants to know. We scratch our heads. Everyone knows that the seventh day is the Sabbath, so what was so strange?
“ ‘Aha!’ the rabbi says, leaping up from his seat, as he does whenever he’s excited. But it doesn’t say that God rested on the seventh day! It says that he finished his work. How many days did it take to create the heavens and the earth? he asks us. Six, we say. So why doesn’t it say God finished then? Finished on the sixth, and on the seventh rested?”
Epstein glanced around, and wondered where all of this was going.
“Well, the rabbi tells us that when the ancient sages convened to puzzle over this problem, they concluded that there must have been an act of creation on the seventh day, too. But what? The sea and the land already existed. The sun and the moon. Plants and trees, animals, and birds. Even Man. What could it be that the universe still lacked? the ancient sages asked. At last a grizzled old scholar who always sat alone in the corner of the room opened his mouth. ‘Menucha,’ he said. ‘What?’ the others asked. ‘Speak up, we can’t hear you.’ ‘With the Sabbath, God created menucha,’ the old scholar said, ‘and then the world was complete.’”
Madeleine Albright pushed back her chair and made her way out of the room, the material of her pantsuit making a soft scuffing noise. The speaker seemed unfazed. For a moment Epstein thought he might even seize her empty chair, just as he had seized the turn Epstein had forfeited. But he remained standing, the better to command the room. Those nearby had edged back to open a space around him.
“ ‘So what is the meaning of menucha?’ the rabbi asks us. A bunch of restless kids staring out the window, whose only interest in the world is to be out playing ball. No one speaks. The rabbi waits, and when it becomes clear that he’s not going to give us the answer, a kid at the back of the room, the only one with polished shoes, who always goes straight home to his mother, the many-generations-removed progeny of the grizzled old scholar who carried within him the ancient wisdom of sitting in corners, opens his mouth. ‘Rest,’ he says. ‘Rest!’ the rabbi exclaims, spit spraying from his mouth as it does when he’s excited. ‘But not only! Because menucha doesn’t simply mean a pause from work. A break from exertion. It isn’t just the opposite of toil and labor. If it took a special act of creation to bring it into being, surely it must be something extraordinary. Not the negative of something that already existed, but a unique positive, without which the universe would be incomplete. No, not just rest,’ the rabbi says. ‘Tranquillity! Serenity! Repose! Peace. A state in which there is no strife, and no fighting. No fear and distrust. Menucha. The state in which man lies still.’
“Abu Mazen, if I may”—Klausner dropped his voice and adjusted the kippah that had slipped to the back of his head—“in that classroom of twelve-year-olds, not a single one of us understood what the rabbi meant. But I ask you: Do any of us in this room understand it any better? Understand that act of creation that stands alone among the others, the only one that didn’t establish something eternal? On the seventh day God created menucha. But He made it to be fragile. Unable to last. Why? Why, when everything else he made is impervious to time?”
Klausner paused, sweeping his gaze across the room. His enormous forehead glistened with sweat, though otherwise he gave no sign of exerting himself. Epstein leaned forward, waiting.
“So that it falls to Man to re-create it over and over again,” Klausner said at last. “To re-create menucha, so that he should know that he is not a bystander to the universe, but a participant. That without his actions, the universe God intended for us will remain incomplete.”
A lone, lazy clap rang out from the far reaches of the room. When, unaccompanied, it drifted into silence, the leader of the Palestinians began to speak, pausing for his translator to convey his message about his eight grandchildren who had all attended the Seeds of Peace camp, about living side by side, encouraging dialogue, building relationships. His comments were followed by a few last speakers and then the event came to an end, with everyone rising to their feet, and Abbas pumping a row of extended hands as he made his way down the table and out of the room, followed by his entourage.
Epstein, also eager to be on his way, headed toward the coat check. But while standing in line, he felt a tap on his shoulder. When he turned, he came face-to-face with the rabbi who had delivered the sermon on stolen time. A head and a half taller than Epstein, he radiated the wiry, sun-beaten strength of someone who has lived a long time in the Levant. Close up, his blue eyes shone with stored-up sunlight. “Menachem Klausner,” he repeated, in case Epstein had missed it earlier. “I hope I didn’t step on your toes back there?”
“No,” Epstein said, smacking the chip for his coat down on the table. “You spoke well. I couldn’t have said it better myself.” He meant it, but had no desire to get into it now. The woman working the coat check had a limp, and Epstein watched her head off to fulfill her task.
“Thanks, but I can’t take much credit. Most of it is from Heschel.”
“I thought you said it was your old rabbi.”
“Makes for a more captivating story,” Klausner said, raising his eyebrows. Above them, the pattern of deep lines on his forehead changed with each exaggerated expression.
Epstein had never read Heschel, and anyway the room was warm and what he wanted above all was to be outdoors, refreshed by the cold. But when the coat clerk returned from the revolving rack, it was with someone else’s coat slung over her arm.
“This isn’t mine,” Epstein said, pushing the coat back across the table.
The woman looked at him with contempt. But when he returned her hard stare with a harder one of his own, she capitulated and limped back to the rack. One leg was shorter than the other, but it would take a saint not to hold it against her.
“Actually, we’ve met before,” Menachem Klausner said behind him.
“Have we,” said Epstein, barely turning.
“In Jerusalem, at the wedding of the Schulmans’ daughter.”
Epstein nodded but could not recall the encounter.
“I never forget an Epstein.”
“Why’s that?”
“Not an Epstein, or an Abravanel, or a Dayan, or anyone with lineage that can be traced back to the dynastic line of David.”
“Epstein? Unless you’re referring to the royalty of some backwater shtetl, you’re wrong about Epstein.”
“Oh, you’re one of us, all right.”
Now Epstein had to laugh.
“Us?”
“Naturally; Klausner is a big name in Davidic genealogy. Not quite the same clout as Epstein, mind you. Unless one of your ancestors pulled the name out of thin air, which seems unlikely, then the chain of begetting that led to you backs right up to the King of Israel.”
Epstein had the competing urges to pull a fifty out of his wallet in order to get rid of Klausner and to ask him more. There was something compelling about the rabbi, or there would be at another time.
The coat clerk continued to spin the rack lazily, stopping it now and then to inspect the numbers on the hooks. She took down a khaki trench coat. “Not it,” Epstein called out before she could try to pass it off to him. She shot him a disapproving look and went back to her spinning.
Unable to stand it any longer, Epstein maneuvered his way behind the table. The clerk leaped back with exaggerated surprise, as if she expected him to club her over the head. But her expression was replaced by one more smug as Epstein began to look through the coats himself without luck. When she limped off to try to take Menachem Klausner’s chip, the sermon-maker with a three-thousand-year-old bloodline protested—“No, no. I don’t mind waiting. What does the coat look like, Jules?”
“It’s navy,” Epstein muttered, slapping the tweed and woolen sleeves as they swung past. But the coat, which he could not say was rather like the one on the table, only far softer and more expensive, was nowhere to be found. “This is ridiculous,” he sputtered. “Someone must have taken it.”
Epstein could have sworn that he heard the clerk laugh. But when he spun around to look, her stooped, squarish back was turned and she was already helping the person in line behind Klausner. Epstein felt the heat rise to his face and his throat constrict. It was one thing to give away millions of his own volition, but to have the coat taken off his back was something else. All he wanted was to be away from there, to walk alone through the park in his own coat.
There was a ring as the elevator arrived and its doors rolled open. Without another word, Epstein snatched the coat lying on the table and hurried toward it. Klausner called after him, but the doors closed just in time and the elevator carried Epstein down alone through the floors.
At the hotel’s side exit Abu Mazen’s men were piling into the limousine. On the last of them Epstein spotted his coat. “Hey!” he shouted, waving the rough garment in his arm. “HEY! You’re wearing my coat!” But the man didn’t hear or chose not to, and as he slammed the door behind him, the limo pulled away from the curb and floated down Fifty-Eighth Street.
Epstein looked after it in disbelief. The hotel doorman eyed him nervously, concerned, perhaps, that he might make a scene. Glancing morosely at the coat in his hands, Epstein sighed instead and dipped one arm and then the other into the sleeves and shrugged it onto his shoulders. The cuffs hung over his knuckles. As he crossed Central Park South, a cold gust blew through the thin material, and Epstein reached instinctively into his pockets for his leather gloves. But all he came up with was a little tin box of mints printed with Arabic script. He popped one into his mouth and began to suck; it was so spicy it made his eyes tear. So that was how they grew the hair on their chests. He descended the stairs and, entering the park, made his way along the path that edged the pond filled with reeds.
The sky was a dusty rose now, failing orange to the west. Soon the lamps would come on. The wind picked up, and overhead a white plastic bag billowed past, slowly changing shape.
The soul is a sea that we swim in. It has no shore on this side, and only far away, on the other side, is there a shore, and that is God.
It was a line from the little green book Maya had given him for his birthday almost two months ago, parts of which he had read so many times that he knew them by heart. Passing a bench, Epstein doubled back and sat down, reaching into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Recalling that it was empty, he jumped up in alarm. The book! He’d left it in his coat! His coat, which at the moment was making its way east on the back of one of Abbas’s henchmen. He fumbled around for his phone to text his assistant, Sharon. But the phone was also nowhere to be found. “Fuck!” Epstein shouted. A mother pushing a double stroller along the path gave him a wary look and increased her speed.
“Hey!” Epstein shouted, “Excuse me!” The woman glanced back, but continued moving briskly. Epstein ran after her. “Listen,” he said falling breathlessly in step beside her, “I just realized I misplaced my phone. Can I borrow yours a second?”
The woman glanced at her children—twins, it seemed, bundled into fur-lined sleeping bags, noses wet and dark eyes alert. With a clenched jaw, she reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. Epstein plucked it out of her palm, turned his back on her, and dialed his own number. It rang through to his voice mail. Had he turned his phone off earlier, at the closing for the loan, or was it Abbas’s man who’d done it? The thought of his calls going through to the Palestinian filled him with anxiety. He dialed Sharon’s number, but there was no answer there, either.
“Just a quick text,” Epstein explained, and with numb fingers tapped out the message: Contact UN Security Council ASAP. Coat mix-up at Plaza. One of Abbas’s cronies made off with mine: Loro Piana, navy cashmere. He pressed send, then typed another line: Phone and other valuables in coat pocket. But just as he was about to shoot that one off, too, he thought better of it and erased it, lest he tip Abbas’s man off to what he unknowingly had in his possession. But, no: that was ridiculous. What could he possibly want with a stranger’s phone and an obscure book by a dead Israeli poet?
The twins started to sneeze and snuffle, while the mother shifted impatiently from foot to foot. Epstein, who had no experience with the receiving side of charity, retyped the text, sent it, and went on holding the phone, waiting for it to buzz to life with the assistant’s response. But it remained inert in his hands. Where the hell was she? Not my phone, obviously, he typed. Will try you again soon. He turned to the woman, who grabbed back the phone with a grunt of exasperation and marched off, not bothering to say good-bye.
He was supposed to meet Maura at Avery Fisher Hall in forty-five minutes. They had known each other since they were children, and after his divorce Maura had become his frequent companion at concerts. Epstein began to angle west and northward, cutting across the grass, frantically composing texts in his head. But as he passed a bush, a flock of brown sparrows shot up from it and scattered into the dusky sky. At their sudden burst of freedom, Epstein felt a wave of consolation. It was only an old book, wasn’t it? Surely he could track down another copy. He would put Sharon on the case. Or better yet, why not just let the book go as easily as it had come? Hadn’t he already taken what he needed from it?
Lost in thought, he entered a tunnel under a pedestrian overpass. As he shivered in the dank air, a homeless man stepped out of the dark and into Epstein’s path. His hair was long and matted, and he reeked of urine and something festering. Epstein removed a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and stuffed it into the man’s callused palm. As an afterthought, he fished out the box of mints and offered those as well. But it was the wrong decision because now the man moved jerkily, and in the darkness Epstein saw the flash of a knife.
“Gimme the wallet,” he grunted.
Epstein was surprised—Really? Could the afternoon strip him any further? Had he given so much that, stinking of benefaction, the world now felt free to take from him? Or, just the opposite, was it trying to tell him that he hadn’t yet given enough, that it wouldn’t be enough until there was nothing left? And was it really possible that there was still a mugger left standing in Central Park?
Surprised, yes, but not frightened. He’d dealt with plenty of lunatics in his life. It might even be said that, as an attorney, he possessed a certain gift with them. He assessed the situation: the knife wasn’t large. It could hurt but not kill.
“All right, then,” he began calmly. “How about if I give you the cash? There must be at least three hundred dollars in here, maybe more. You take it all, and I’ll just keep the cards. You don’t have any use for those—they’ll be canceled in two minutes, and anyway you’ll probably just toss them in the trash. This way we both go away happy.” As Epstein spoke, he held the wallet in front of him, away from his body, and slowly removed the wad of bills. The man snatched it. But he wasn’t through with Epstein apparently, for now he was barking something else. Epstein failed to understand.
“What?”
The man raked the blade quickly across Epstein’s breast. “What’s in there?”
Epstein stepped back, clamping his hand over his heart.
“Where?” he gasped.
“On the inside!”
“Nothing,” he said quietly.
“Show me,” the homeless man said, or so Epstein thought; it was almost impossible to make out his slurred speech. The thought of his father, whose own speech had become permanently slurred after a stroke, flashed through Epstein’s mind, while the man continued to breathe heavily, weapon poised.
Slowly, Epstein unbuttoned the coat that wasn’t his, and then the gray flannel suit jacket that was. He opened the silk-lined pocket that usually held the little green book, and tipped forward on his toes to show the man that it was empty. It was all so absurd that he might have laughed, had there not been a knife so near his throat. Perhaps it could kill after all. Glancing down, Epstein saw himself lying underfoot in a pool of blood, unable to call for help. A question came into focus in his mind, one that had lingered vaguely for some weeks, and now he tried it, as if to test its fit: Had the hand of God reached down and pointed at him? But why him? When he looked up again, the knife was gone, and the man had turned and was hurrying away. Epstein stood frozen for a moment, until the man disappeared into the circle of light at the other end, and he was left alone in the tunnel. Only when he lifted his hand to touch his throat did he realize that his fingers were shaking.
Ten minutes later, having safely arrived in the lobby of the Dakota, Epstein was borrowing another phone. “I’m a friend of the Rosenblatts’,” he’d told the doorman. “I was just robbed. My phone, too.” The doorman lifted the house phone to call up to 14B. “Don’t bother,” Epstein said quickly. “I’ll just make a call and be on my way.” He reached behind the desk and dialed himself once more. It went through to his voice again, recorded long ago but still arriving. He cut the line and called Sharon. She picked up, full of apologies for having missed his earlier call. She’d already put in calls to the UN. Abbas was speaking in fifteen minutes, and at the moment no one in his party could be reached, but she was getting in a cab now and would make sure to intercept them before they left the building. Epstein told her to call Maura to say that she should go ahead to the concert without him.
“Tell her I was mugged,” he said.
“OK, you were mugged,” said Sharon.
“I really was,” Epstein said, more softly than he had meant to, for once again he saw himself sprawled on the ground, the dark blood slowly spreading. Glancing up, he caught eyes with the doorman, who he saw didn’t believe him either.
“Seriously?” his assistant asked.
Epstein cut her off: “I’ll be home in half an hour. Call me then.”
“Listen,” he said to the doorman, “I’m in a pinch. Can you lend me a twenty? I’ll remember you at Christmas. In the meantime, the Rosenblatts are good for it.”
Having handed over the bills, the doorman hailed a cab going south on Central Park West. Having nothing left to tip him with, neither cash nor rings, Epstein offered only a humble nod and gave the address of his building, across the park and fifteen blocks north. The taxi driver shook his head in annoyance, rolled down the window, and spat thickly. It was always the same: if you diverted them from their natural course and asked them to reverse direction, they always took it badly. It was a nearly universal aspect of the psychology of New York City taxi drivers, Epstein had often lectured to anyone who was with him in the backseat. Once they were in motion, having been stymied by traffic jams and red lights, everything in them longed to continue the motion. That money was to be made by turning around and going in the opposite direction hardly mattered at the moment the news was delivered: they felt it as a defeat and resented it.
The atmosphere in the cab only darkened when the traffic going uptown on Madison turned out to be at a dead standstill, and the streets going west were blocked off. Epstein rolled down the window and called to a policeman, fat and muscular like a ballplayer, stationed by a sawhorse.
“What’s going on here?”
“They’re filming a movie,” the officer reported dully, scanning the sky for fly balls.
“You’re kidding me, right? That’s the second time this month! Who told Bloomberg he could sell the city to Hollywood? Some of us still happen to live here!”
Released from the smelly cab, Epstein marched down Eighty-Fifth Street, which was lined with humming trailers powered by a giant, roaring generator. Passing the catering table, he lifted a doughnut without slowing down and bit into it, the jelly spurting.
But when he turned onto Fifth Avenue, he halted, for there he found that snow had fallen. The trees, lit by huge lights, were cloaked in white, and along the sidewalk great drifts sparkled like mica. All was silent and sedated; even the team of black horses hitched to a hearse stood unmoving with bowed heads, the snow swirling down around them. Through the carriage’s glass windows, Epstein saw the long shadow of an ebony coffin. A flood of grave respect coursed through him—not just the reflexive awe one feels at the passing of life, but something else, too: a sense of what the world, with its unfathomable pockets, was capable of. But it was fleeting. A moment later the camera crane came rolling down the street, and the magic was broken.
As at last he came in sight of the warmly lit lobby of his building, a wave of exhaustion broke over Epstein. All he wanted now was to be home, where he could ease himself into the giant bathtub and let the day drain away. But as he began to walk toward the entrance, he was thwarted once more, this time by a woman in a puffy anorak wielding a clipboard.
“They’re shooting!” she hissed. “You have to wait at the corner.”
“I live here,” Epstein snapped back.
“So do plenty of others, and they’re all waiting. Have some patience.”
But Epstein was all out of patience, and when the woman glanced back at the creaking hearse now starting up behind the horses, he sidestepped her and, with a last burst of strength, began to sprint toward the building. He could see Haaroon, the doorman, peering out at the action on the street. He was always there, face to the glass. When there was no excitement, he liked to scan the sky for a sighting of the red-tailed hawk that nested on a ledge down the block. At the last moment Haaroon caught sight of Epstein barreling toward him, and with a look of surprise pulled open the door just before the tenant of Penthouse B could smack into it. Epstein sailed smoothly in, and the doorman bolted the door shut again, spun around, and flattened his back against it.
“It’s a movie, Haaroon, not a revolution,” Epstein said, breathing hard.
Ever amazed at the new ways of his adopted country, the doorman nodded and straightened the heavy green cape with golden buttons that was his uniform in the cold months. Even confined indoors, he had refused to remove it.
“You know what’s wrong with this city?” Epstein said.
“What, sir?” Haaroon asked.
But, catching the doorman’s earnest eyes, still filled with wonder after five years of watching Fifth Avenue go past, Epstein thought better of it and let it go. The doorman’s hands were bare, and suddenly Epstein wished to ask him what he had done with the signet ring. But here, too, he swallowed his words.
When the wood-paneled elevator opened to the familiar colored rug from Isfahan in his foyer, Epstein sighed with relief. Once inside, he turned on the lamp, hung the wrong coat in the closet, and put on his slippers. He had lived here for ten months since he and Lianne had divorced, and there were still nights when he missed his wife’s body in the bed beside him. He had slept next to her for thirty-six years, and the mattress felt different without her weight, however slight, and without the rhythm of her breath the dark had no measure. There were times he woke feeling cold from the lack of the heat that once came from between her thighs and behind her knees. He might have even called her, if he could have momentarily forgotten that he already knew everything she could possibly say. In truth, if he was touched by longing, it was not for what he’d had and given up.
The apartment wasn’t large, but its main rooms overlooked Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum to the south, where the Temple of Dendur was housed under glass. This nearness to the ancient world meant something to him; though the Roman copy of an Egyptian temple had itself never impressed him, catching sight of it at night, he sometimes felt his lungs inflate, as if his body were remembering what it had forgotten about the vastness of time. What it had been necessary to forget, in order to believe in the grandness and the uniqueness of the things that happened to one, which could mark life the way a new combination of letters could be impressed on the ribbon of a typewriter. But he was no longer young. He was made of matter more ancient than any temple, and lately something was returning to him. Was coming back into him, as water comes back into a dry riverbed it formed long ago.
Now that the walls of the apartment were rid of paintings, and he had given away the expensive furniture, he needed only stand in the middle of the empty living room, looking out at the darkly moving treetops, to feel goose bumps rise on his arms. For what? Simply the fact that he was still there. That he had been alive long enough to arrive at a point where the circle was drawing to a close, that it had almost been too late, he had very nearly missed it, but in the nick of time he had become aware of it. Of what? Of time as a shaft of light moving across the floor, and how at the end of its long tail was the light falling across the parquet in the house where he had been a child, in Long Beach. Or the sky over his head, which was the same sky he had walked under since he was a boy. No, it was more than that. He had rarely lifted his head above the powerful currents of his life, being too busy plunging through them. But there were moments now when he saw the whole view, all the way to the horizon. And it filled him equally with joy and with yearning.
Still here. Stripped of furnishings, of cash, of phone, of the coat on his back, but not yet, after all, ethereal, Epstein felt a gnawing in the pit of his stomach. He’d barely eaten at the Plaza, and the doughnut had whetted his appetite. Poking in the refrigerator, he discovered a chicken leg that the chef who cooked for him three times a week had left, and ate it standing at the window. A great-great-great-great-great-grandrelative of David. The boy shepherd who slung a stone at the head of Goliath, of whom the women used to say “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands,” but whom, so that he should not remain a cold and calculating brute, so that he be given Jewish softness, Jewish intelligence, Jewish depth, they later made author of the most beautiful poetry ever written. Epstein smiled. What else was there still to learn about himself? The chicken was good, but before he got to the bone he tossed the rest in the trash. Reaching up to open the cabinet for a glass, he thought better of it, ducked his head under the tap, and drank thirstily.
In the living room Epstein touched a switch, and the lights, wired to an automatic dimmer, came to life, illuminating the burnished gold of two halos on a small panel that hung alone on the east wall. Though he had seen it happen countless times before, he could not watch this effect without feeling a tingle in his scalp. It was the only masterpiece he’d kept, a panel of an altarpiece painted nearly six hundred years ago in Florence. He had not been able to bring himself to give it away. He wished to live with it a little more.
Epstein moved toward them: Mary bent and nearly bodiless in the pale pink folds that fell from her dress, and the angel Gabriel, who might himself be taken for a woman were it not for his colored wings. From the little wooden stool wedged beneath Mary one gathered that she was kneeling, or would be kneeling, if under the dress there were still anything physical left of her—if what was Mary had not already been erased so that she could be filled up with the son of God. Her curved shape was an exact echo of the white arches overhead: already she was something no longer herself. Her long-fingered hands were folded over her flat breast, and on her face was the grave expression of a mature child meeting her difficult, exalted destiny. A few feet away, the angel Gabriel looked lovingly down on her, hand over his heart, as if he, too, felt there the pain of her necessary future. The paint was shot through with cracks, but that only added to the sense of breathlessness, of a great and violent force that strained below the still surface. Only the flat golden discs around their heads were strangely static. Why did they insist on painting halos like that? Why, when they had already discovered how to create the illusion of depth, did they always revert, in this instance alone, to a stubborn flatness? And not just any instance, but the very symbol of what, drawn close to God, becomes suffused with the infinite?
Epstein took the frame down off the wall and carried it under his arm to his bedroom. Last month, a nude by Bonnard had been carried out on her back, and since then the wall opposite his bed had been empty. Now he had the sudden desire to see the small annunciation hang there: to wake to it in the morning, and to look on it last as he drifted off to sleep. But before he could manage to catch the wire on the hook, the phone rang, disturbing the silence. Epstein strode toward the bed, propped the frame against the pillows, and picked up the receiver.
“Jules? It’s Sharon. I’m sorry, but apparently the guy with your coat was feeling ill and went back to his hotel.”
Outside, across the expansive dark, the lights of the West Side glimmered. Epstein sank down on the bed next to the Virgin. He pictured the Palestinian in his coat, kneeling over a toilet.
“I left a message but haven’t gotten through yet,” Sharon continued. “Would it be all right if I waited until tomorrow to go over? Your flight isn’t until nine at night, which leaves plenty of time for me to go first thing in the morning. It’s my sister’s birthday tonight, and there’s a party.”
“Go.” Epstein sighed. “Never mind about this. It can wait.”
“Are you sure? I’ll keep trying by phone.”
But Epstein was not sure; such had been the slow unfurling of self-knowledge these last months, but only now, when his assistant posed the question, did he feel the wing beat of clarity pass overhead. He did not wish to be sure. Had lost his trust in it.