DAVID MARKUS
He invited her to supper at his house.
“Will Sarah be there too?”
“Sarah is having a big, formal dinner with the cooking club at the regional high school,” he said. He regarded her contemplatively. “You can’t come to my house unless a third person is around?”
“No, of course I’ll come. I was just hoping Sarah would be there.”
She liked their house, the warmth and friendliness of the thick log walls and comfortable old furniture. There were lots of paintings on the walls, the work of local artists whose names didn’t mean anything to her. He gave her the tour. Eat-in kitchen. His office, full of real estate paraphernalia, a computer, a big gray cat sleeping on his desk chair.
“Is the cat Jewish too, like the horse?”
“Matter of fact, she is.” He grinned. “We got her with a beat-up, horny old tomcat Sarah said was her husband. But the male hung around only two days and then ran off, so I named this one Agunah. That’s Yiddish for deserted wife.”
His monastic bedroom. There was just a bit of sexual tension as she took in the king-size mattress and box spring on legs. There was another computer on the desk, a bookcase full of volumes about history and agriculture, and a pile of manuscript. Under probing, he admitted he was writing a novel about the death of small farms in America and about the early farmers who settled the Berkshire hills.
“I always wanted to tell stories. After Natalie was gone, I decided to give it a try. I had Sarah to clothe and feed, so I stayed with real estate when we moved, but real estate is not exactly a pressured business out here. I have plenty of time to write.”
“How’s it going?”
“Oh …” He smiled, shrugged.
Sarah’s room. Terrible multicolored drapes on the windows; he said Sarah had tie-dyed them herself. Two Barbra Streisand posters. All over the room, trays of rocks. Big rocks, little pebbles, medium-size stones, each of them roughly in the shape of a heart. Geological valentines.
“What are they?”
“She calls them heartrocks. She’s been collecting them since she was a little girl. It’s something Natalie started her on.”
R. J. had taken a year of geology at Tufts. As she looked at the trays she thought she could identify quartz, shale, marble, sandstone, basalt, schist, feldspar, gneiss, slate, a red garnet, all heartshaped. There were crystals she couldn’t even guess at. “This one I moved in the bucket of the tractor,” David said, pointing to a heart-shaped granite boulder more than two feet tall, propped in the corner of the room. “Six miles, from Frank Parsons’s woods. It took three of us to carry it into the house.”
“She just finds them on the ground?”
“She finds them everywhere. She has a knack. I almost never find one. Sarah is tough, she rejects a lot of stones. She doesn’t call it a heartrock unless it has a true heart shape.”
“Perhaps you should look more carefully. There are billions and billions of rocks out there. I’ll bet I can find Sarah some heartrocks.”
“You think so, eh? You have twenty-five minutes before I serve the food. What will you bet?”
“A pizza with everything. Twenty-five minutes should be enough time.”
“You win, you get a pizza. I win, I get a kiss.”
“Hey.”
“What’s the matter, you afraid? Put your money where my mouth is.” He grinned, daring her.
“You’re on.”
She didn’t waste much time in their barnyard or drive, figuring they would keep the area around the house well patrolled. Their road was unpaved, full of stones. She walked down it slowly, head bent, studying the ground. She had never been aware how varied stones were, how many shapes they came in, long, round, angular, thin, flat.
Now and then she would stoop and pick up a stone, but it was never right.
After ten minutes had gone by, she was a quarter of a mile from the log house and had found only one stone that looked even remotely like a heart, but it was misshapen, too low on one side.
A bad bet, she decided. She wanted to find a heartrock. She didn’t want him to think she had failed on purpose.
At the end of the allotted time, she was back at his house. “I found one,” she said, holding it out.
He looked at it and grinned. “This heart is missing … what’s the name of the upper chamber?”
“Atrium.”
“Yeah. This heart is missing the atrium on the right side.” He carried it to the door, flipped it outside.
What happened next would be important, she told herself. If he used the bet to demonstrate his machismo, either with a clinch or an exchange of saliva, she would have no interest in him at all.
But he bent and barely touched her mouth with his lips, a kiss that was tender and incredibly sweet.
Ooh.
He gave her a simple but wonderful supper: a large, crisp salad made entirely from his own garden stuff, except for the tomatoes, which were store-bought because his weren’t ripe yet. It was served with the house specialty, a honey-miso dressing, and garnished with asparagus they picked and steamed just before they sat down to eat. He had made his own sprouts from a combination of seeds and legumes he assured her was a secret, and he had baked crispy rolls filled with tiny pieces of garlic that exploded flavor as she chewed.
“Hey. You’re some cook.”
“I like to potchky around.”
Dessert was homemade vanilla ice cream, with a blueberry torte he’d baked that morning. She found herself telling him about the religious mixture of her clan. “There are Protestant Coles and Quaker Regensbergs. And Jewish Coles and Jewish Regensbergs. And atheists. And my cousin Marcella Regensberg, who is a Franciscan nun at a convent in Virginia. We have something of everything.”
Over the second cup of coffee she learned something about him that was astounding. The “graduate study” about which he had been vague was completed at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in New York.
“You’re a what?”
“A rabbi. At least, I was ordained, a long time ago. I worked at it only a while.”
“Why did you quit? Did you have a congregation?”
“I just …” He shrugged again. “I was too full of questions and insecurities to take a congregation. I had begun to doubt, I couldn’t make up my mind about the existence of God. And I felt a congregation at least deserved a rabbi who had made up his mind about that.”
“And how do you feel now? Have you made up your mind since then?”
Abraham Lincoln looked at her for a long moment. How could blue eyes become so sad, hold such fleeting pain? He slowly shook his head. “Jury’s still out.”
He didn’t blurt things. It was only after weeks of seeing him often that she learned details. When he had finished at the seminary he had gone directly into the army, ninety days at officers’ school and then right to Vietnam as a second lieutenant chaplain. It was comparatively cushy work, safely behind the lines at a large hospital in Saigon. He had spent his days with the maimed and dying, his evenings writing letters to their families, and he had absorbed their fears and anger long before his own body was injured.
One day he was riding in the back of a troop carrier with two Catholic chaplains, Major Joseph Fallon and Lieutenant Bernard Towers, and they were caught in the street during a rocket attack. There was a direct hit on the front of the vehicle; in the rear seat the blast was narrow and selective. Bucky Towers, seated on the left, was destroyed. Joe Fallon, seated in the middle, lost his right leg at the knee. David suffered a serious wound in his left leg, into the bone. It required three operations, long recovery. Now his left leg was shorter than the right, but the limp was negligible, she hadn’t even noticed it.
He had returned to New York when discharged and delivered one guest sermon in application for a job. It was in Bay Path, Long Island, at Temple Beth Shalom, the House of Peace. He spoke of keeping peace in a complex world. Halfway through the sermon, he looked up to where the temple decorating committee had placed a large plaque emblazoned with the first of Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith: I have perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be His name, is the author and guide of everything that has been created; and that He alone has made, does make, and will make all things.
It came to him in a moment of frozen terror that he could not with certainty agree, and he had somehow stumbled to the end of the sermon.
He had applied to Lever Brothers as a real estate trainee, an agnostic rabbi too full of doubt to be anybody’s clergyman.
“Could you still marry people?”
He had an attractive, slightly twisted smile. “I suppose I could. Once a rabbi …”
“It would make a great combination of signs. MARRYIN’ MARKUS. Right under I’M-IN-LOVE-WITH-YOU HONEY.”