I had recently celebrated my eighteenth birthday, and I was living on borrowed time. The Law requires a man to marry when he reaches age eighteen. Do you know, there is no word for “bachelor” in the Old Testament? That’s because the Jews couldn’t even conceive of a man being unmarried. Marriage would be his only way of coping with the Evil Inclination. After all, eighteen is the age when the male sex drive is at its peak.
There was no question that my libido was in full flower, and I think I would have had erotic dreams even without having seen those exotic foreign films at the Thalia. Moreover, I was painfully aware that the Talmud regarded sinful thoughts as tantamount to the deeds themselves.
I concluded that if I was going to be punished just for thinking of sex, I might as well try the real thing. But of course I had absolutely no idea how to go about it.
Then, consciously or not, Beller afforded me the opportunity.
Toward the end of April, he invited me to a party at his home. It was mainly for his students at Columbia, but I knew I would also encounter girls from Barnard. Still, no one could accuse him of leading me into temptation. He merely opened the door. It was I who walked in of my own accord. Eagerly.
He never said it, but I knew that even my best Sabbath clothes would not fit the bill for such an occasion. And so I made a self-conscious expedition to Barney’s, where I bought my first secular garment: a neat blue blazer.
Then came the moment of real soul-searching. Could I attend a New York cocktail party with curly sideburns rolling halfway down my cheeks? Admittedly, I had seen posters of some rock and roll performers whose coiffures were far longer and more stringy than my own. But since I couldn’t sing or play guitar, I thought it best to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.
I therefore visited a barber (twenty blocks away from school) and asked him to trim my sideburns till they were just long enough to satisfy the biblical decree forbidding hair to be cut above the juncture of cheek and ear.
“What about the curls, mister?”
“Uh, sort of … shorten those too,” I responded nervously.
“No way,” he dissented. “You’re not the first Orthodox kid I’ve had in my chair. You’ve gotta make up your mind—if it’s short enough to be ‘modern,’ it won’t be long enough to be kosher. Know what I mean?”
Alas, I knew all too well. I closed my eyes—a gesture he correctly interpreted as assent. His blades were swift and painless. My subsequent pangs of conscience were neither. I took to wearing a low-brimmed hat, a practice my fellow students assumed was one of deepened piety. More hypocrisy.
I tried to convince myself it would be worth it.
What first struck me was an orchestration of new sounds. The tinkle of ice against glass, the voice of Ray Charles (as I later learned) on a stereo, loud conversation rising above the music, everything blending into a buzz, which sounded like the whir of my mother’s Mixmaster.
I stood on the stairs to Aaron Beller’s sunken living room and gazed in disbelief.
There were men and women everywhere talking freely to one another. Some were even touching. It all looked … alien.
“Rabbi Luria, you aren’t Moses on Mount Nebo. This is a promised land that you can enter.”
It was the host himself, at his side an elegant blonde in her early forties.
“Come in, Daniel. There’re lots of people I think you’d enjoy meeting. For a start, this is my wife, Nina. You know that silkscreen in my office you admired? She’s the artist.”
Mrs. Beller smiled. “Nice to meet you at last,” she said. “Aaron’s told me so much about you.”
“Thank you,” I replied, wondering what exactly Beller could have said. That I was a mixed-up Jew in the throes of an identity crisis?
Though Mrs. Beller herself was beautiful, I could not keep my glance from wandering past her. There were lots of women here, all exquisite.
“Aaron,” she addressed her husband, “why don’t you see to the punch, while I make the rounds with Danny?”
There were also many distinguished minds in the Bellers’ salon, including a prize-winning poet who kept calling me “man”—perhaps because he’d forgotten my name—while soliciting my opinion on the relative merits of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg.
To my chagrin, I had read neither Leaves of Grass nor Howl. Once, in a bookstore, my father had picked up the hippie poet’s Kaddish and after only a few seconds cast it back as “blasphemous.” I made a mental note to buy both books.
After half a dozen introductions, Nina left me to fend for myself, advising, “Just walk up to anyone and say hello. You’re among friends here.”
I looked around, still feeling insecure, for I had never heard such uninhibited laughter—except perhaps at Purim parties.
Suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard a breathy female voice.
“Are you some kind of holy person?”
I turned and saw this … creature. She was blond and bare-shouldered in a skin-tight black dress. She was smoking a long, thin cigarette. Her smile was dizzying.
“I don’t understand,” I stammered.
“That’s okay,” she answered. “Actually, it was just an excuse to meet you. But I mean, that cap you’re wearing makes you look just like the pope.”
“Good joke,” I rejoined, assuming she knew full well I was an Orthodox Jew.
Nevertheless, her quip made me self-conscious. As we continued talking, I removed my skullcap as inconspicuously as possible and stuffed it into my pocket.
Yes, I felt guilty … traitorous even. But I rationalized it as a gesture to preserve the good reputation of truly pious Jews. Why should my sins be ascribed to them?
“I’m a rabbinical student,” I explained.
Her eyes widened. “Really? How fascinating! That means you must believe in God.”
“Of course,” I answered.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Do you know you’re probably the only person in this entire room who does?”
Somehow I didn’t think she was being completely facetious. There was a sense of—I don’t know—pagan hedonism about this whole party. And this girl in particular.
“What do you do?” I inquired casually.
“Oh, I’m into lots of things,” she replied. “Officially, I’m a graduate student in Art History at NYU. But I have all sorts of projects going. By the way, my name’s Ariel.”
“Do you know your name means ‘Jerusalem’ in the Bible?”
“Really?” she retorted. “I always thought it was the ‘brave spirit’ in Shakespeare’s Tempest.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve never read The Tempest.”
“That’s okay. I’ve never read the Bible, so that makes us even. Are you really sure about my name?”
“Absolutely,” I replied, feeling comfortable for the first time. “It’s Isaiah twenty-nine, verse one—‘Ariel, the city where David dwelt.’ ”
“That’s fascinating. How much of the Good Book do you know?”
“A bit of it, I guess,” I replied.
“I bet you’re being modest—I bet you know the whole damn thing by heart. You could probably go on a quiz show. I expect you even know what they ate at the Last Supper.”
“Right,” I answered, managing a grin. “It was matzos.”
“You mean those little balls you put in soup?”
“No, the Last Supper was a Passover seder, and that’s when Jews eat only unleavened bread called matzos.”
“Hey, that’s right—Jesus was a Jew.”
“But did you know he was also a rabbi?”
“You mean, like you’re going to be?”
“Well, more or less,” I equivocated.
For some reason she was interested in pursuing this line of questioning. “Tell me—do rabbis have to take a vow of chastity?”
I think I blushed. “No,” I replied. “Only priests do.”
“That’s a relief,” she commented. “Don’t you think it’s a little unnatural for people to deny that part of human nature?”
It took only a few more exchanges with this intoxicating blond Lilith to make me realize that the subtext of our conversation was not sexual abstinence but sexual indulgence. Hers … and mine.
At this moment, Nina Beller approached with a tray of assorted tidbits, none of which looked familiar to me.
“Well, I’m glad you two have gotten together,” she smiled, offering the food to Ariel.
“Gosh, Nina,” she enthused, “I’m a sucker for your pâté.”
She took a cracker with her long, graceful fingers. Nina then offered the array to me. I thought I recognized little squares of smoked salmon and was just reaching for one when Ariel suggested, “Try those, they’re one of my favorites.”
“Which is that?” I asked warily.
She pointed to crescents of cantaloupe wrapped in some kind of unrecognizable meat.
“Actually,” Nina said pointedly, “I think Danny would prefer the egg and olive.”
Here the hostess was considerately steering me in the right direction, yet this woman deliberately tempted me to eat something that was manifestly unkosher.
“Go on,” Ariel urged. “You’ll really like it.”
I had no illusions. This was a flagrant sin with no mitigating circumstances.
I reached for the melon. And—I’m ashamed to admit—my primary worry was not the wrath of Heaven, but the fear that I might gag on it.
At last, I closed my conscience, reached down, and opened my mouth. I swallowed the … item as quickly as I could.
By a supreme mental effort, I succeeded in numbing my taste buds so I would not recall what I had ingested.
“Well?” Ariel asked, grinning.
“You were right. It was very good,” I lied. “What did you call it?”
“Prosciutto,” she answered.
“Oh.” I tried to sound casual. “I must remember that.”
“Prosciutto’s the Italian word for ‘ham,’ ” Nina Beller said and glided off, leaving me in the hands of a woman who was clearly the quintessence of the Evil Inclination. And to whom my senses were completely prisoner.
With new, unblinded vision, I looked at Ariel and imagined I saw the sensual body scarcely hidden beneath her black silk dress.
Nothing was going to keep me from seducing this seductress.
As the party began to break up, I looked at my watch. It was nearly midnight. I had a class at nine the next morning, which meant I had to be up by seven so I could pray.
Yet I wasn’t about to stop this side of Paradise.
“Ariel, it’s been so nice talking to you. Could we continue this conversation somewhere else?”
Some secret part of me hoped she would say no.
“How about my place?” she quickly replied.
It took us about two minutes flat to zoom in Ariel’s Italian sports car to her duplex apartment on the upper floors of an expensively furnished town house just off Central Park West.
On the way, she placed her hand on a part of my anatomy that heretofore had been touched only by my mother, myself, and the mohel.
That night I ecstatically experienced a second, more protracted ritual of manhood.
As I walked all the way home in the early dawn, I contemplated the number of transgressions I had committed within the past twelve hours.
I’d eaten unkosher food. I’d missed my morning prayers—and since I was planning to sleep, would miss class, showing disrespect to my teachers. And, worst of all, I’d surrendered to the Evil Inclination. I was riddled with sin.
And happier than I had ever been.