16
Friday comes too quickly and yet, at the same time, not quickly enough. It’s like the universe can’t decide if I’m more nervous or excited—because as much as I dread the dinner itself, I can’t stop thinking about Wyatt. Who said yes. Who is going with me. On our sort-of date.
It’s not really a date, of course. This dinner falls well within the purview of instructional content—I’m only going for my capstone project, which Wyatt is helping me plan. And because Michal invited me. So I probably shouldn’t be reading too much into things.
I’m definitely reading too much into things.
Michal, when I tell her I’m coming, lights up immediately. “You’re going to love it,” she says, already flipping through her notebook to find a scrap of paper, scribbling down the address. “We have a really good group of people. Everyone will be so excited to meet you.”
I’m not so convinced.
“Um…listen,” I force myself to say because not saying would be a dick move, “I kind of invited Wyatt Cole. Is that okay?”
Both Michal’s eyebrows shoot up. “Like my professor Wyatt Cole?”
Ugh, die now. “That’s the one.”
She barks out a laugh, and instead of rescinding the invitation as I expect, she goes, “I mean, yeah. Bring him. I’m definitely not saying no to feeding challah to Wyatt Cole. He seems like he’d be fun once he got the stick out of his backside.”
I mean. She isn’t wrong.
“And is it okay if I take pictures?” I ask. “I’m doing my capstone project on different spiritual paths within Judaism and—”
She doesn’t even let me finish. “Yes, of course! That sounds like an amazing project. We’d be thrilled.”
So I guess that’s that, then.
My last class of the day ends at six, which is almost but not quite early enough for me to make it back to Astoria, get changed, put on makeup, and then fight either traffic in an Uber or the absolute mess of train transfers required to get from Queens to Brooklyn before sundown. I’d just stuffed a black dress and some Glossier in the pit of my backpack and hoped for the best.
But as I’m swiping mascara onto my eyelashes in the fluorescent light of the Parker bathroom, I’m not really sure why I’m so concerned. I don’t think anyone at this dinner will care what I look like. Michal’s seen me looking worse. And Wyatt…well, I might care what he thinks, but he’s seen me in a variety of humiliating states, so the shine has probably worn off there.
I find him in his office at six-thirty, backpack slung over one shoulder. My lips feel weird and dry beneath their layer of red lipstick. “Hey. You ready?” I ask.
Wyatt glances up from his desk and meets my gaze. For a moment it’s almost like he doesn’t recognize me—a moment that stretches on long enough for me to wonder if he’s already forgotten that he agreed to come to dinner tonight. If this, the dress and the lipstick and the shoes with metal studs on them, is all just a bit too much.
Or if maybe, just maybe…
A coal flares in the pit of my chest, and I stare right back at him, refusing to look away even as that heat spreads like liquid through my entire body.
He clears his throat, one hand rising to grip the back of his neck. “Yeah. Sure. Ready whenever you are. Just—hold on.” He clicks at a few things on his computer, then finally pushes away from his desk to rise to his feet. His cheeks are slightly flushed, despite the healthy rattle of the window unit blowing cool air into the office. “Where is this place again?”
“Greenpoint.”
“Ah yes, the most inaccessible part of Brooklyn. Love it. How do you get there from here again?”
The answer is a route that involves more effort than any trip to Brooklyn is worth, in my mind, but I also understand I’m biased. You have to take the W or the R to the L and then switch to the G train, which is—in fact—the only train that goes to Greenpoint. Like, at all.
Greenpoint sits at the northern tip of Brooklyn, cut off from Long Island City—and the rest of Queens—by a slim creek, crossed by the Pulaski Bridge. It’s an old Polish neighborhood, the kind with short, narrow streets arranged in alphabetical order and little bakeries selling luscious marbled babka for prices half what you’d pay at Orwashers. It also has what might be the best pizza in New York. Hence it being an exception to my “never setting foot in Brooklyn again” vow.
It’s rush hour, of course, because rush hour is really like rush three hours in New York. That means Wyatt and I are crammed together on the train, shoulder to shoulder, his hand gripping the gross subway pole just above mine. I’m hyperfocused on that point of near contact, on how easy it would be for him to slide his hand just an inch downward and cover mine. The way it would feel illicit somehow, in public like this. My whole body aches to just…lean back against the firmness of his chest and let him envelop me.
Okay, be cool be cool. Look at something else. Someone else.
Only, fuck, no, don’t do that either. Awkward. It’s an unspoken rule that you don’t look at other people on the train. You’re supposed to just gaze blankly into space, absorbing without seeing, as if in a trance, until your stop. And even if you might talk to someone you know on the train during normal times, when it’s this busy, it doesn’t feel right. It’d be like clipping your nails in public—doing something that everyone does but that’s weird in this context.
I shift away from the rest of the train to turn toward Wyatt, not that staring at Wyatt’s broad chest improves my predicament. He’s wearing a navy-blue shirt that puckers slightly at the base of his throat. The color is heathered, intertwined with threads of gray and gold. One of them has come loose just over his heart. I stare at that thread like I can cauterize it with the heat of my gaze alone.
This close, even on the train, even surrounded by the stench of body odor and urine and someone’s McDonald’s fries, I can smell the low, warm scent of Wyatt’s shampoo.
Ahhrgjgjgjhgsd. I’m going to die here. I am going to perish, and on my grave they will write, Died horny for teacher.
Two transfers later, we emerge onto street level, and I take in several steady breaths of air that doesn’t smell like Wyatt. And I immediately dig out my phone and pull up the address on Google Maps.
“Okay,” I say at last, once I trust my voice to remain steady. “It should just be a couple blocks from here, if we head south.”
“This isn’t weird, is it?” Wyatt asks abruptly. “Michal’s my student. I probably shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s fine,” I insist. “I told you, I already talked to her about it. She’s excited. She wants to make you eat challah.”
He laughs weakly, but then we pass by a bakery, and his gaze tracks over to the plump gold pączki in the window. “Should we bring something? Aside from the…”
He means the grape juice I have stowed away in my bag. I don’t really anticipate that our hosts will have anything nonalcoholic for kiddush, so I brought our own.
“Probably,” I say. “Sure. Just not this bakery, though; I don’t think they’re kosher. Do you like babka?”
“Can’t say I’ve ever tried it.”
“Oh, man. Okay. Well. Come on. We’re gonna fix that.”
When we finally make it out of the adjacent kosher bakery, we’re laden with far more bags of baked goods than we intended to come out with—kołaczki and babka and rugelach and apple tart and a steaming-hot Americano for me because these things can go late. Really late. And I’m old now.
“Is this extra?” I ask, lifting one of our brown bags of pastries.
“Where I come from, this is the bare minimum. If you really want to impress, we could pick up flowers from the bodega on our way.”
I flap the fingers of the hand that holds my Americano, waving him off. “Okay, I clearly would not survive in the South. My idea of a host gift is a six-pack of nonalcoholic beer.”
“See, personally I would love that host gift.”
“It’s really more of a gift for me. I mean, nobody else drinks it.”
We turn the corner onto a side street and I pause, glancing back down at my phone. I’m not used to being back in a neighborhood where streets have actual names.
“Is that it?” Wyatt says, peering over my shoulder, then pointing at the brick building on the corner.
I double-check the address. “Yeah. I think so. Hopefully we aren’t too early.”
“Unfashionably prompt.”
The nerves are back. They scratch at the inside of my sternum as we cross the street. Wyatt rings the bell, and we stand on that tiny stoop, my knuckles going white around my Americano and my heart in my mouth.
What am I even afraid of? That Michal’s friends will take one look at me and declare me not a real Jew and kick me out? That it’ll be the opposite—that they’ll somehow smell the Chassid on me and declare me an extremist Jew and kick me out? Because now I’m out here imagining that total strangers can tell intimate details about my past just by looking, and that’s what my therapist back in LA would call magical thinking.
I should probably chill.
My anxiety must be rising off my skin like heat, because Wyatt shifts his bag of pastries to the other arm and reaches over and squeezes my shoulder once. Some of the tension drains out of me at that single, simple gesture, his touch warm and miraculously grounding. I glance at him, surprised, and he offers a tiny smile.
“You got this,” he says, right as the door buzzes.
I exhale and try to breathe my panic out with the air. Wyatt’s hand falls away, but I can still feel the heat his touch left behind, steadying me as we enter the foyer and head for apartment 1B.
I hear laughter inside, the clink of cutlery and glassware. The low thrum of music playing on a record player. This could be anyone’s house, anyone’s party. Wyatt and I could be two people who met anywhere, a couple who fell for each other normally and now brings Polish pastries to friends’ dinner parties.
Then the door opens, and I’m greeted by the smiling face of a woman with bushy gray hair and purple cat-eye glasses. “Hello,” she says, beaming even wider at the pair of us. “You must be Ely. And who’s this? Your boyfriend?”
Heat floods my cheeks. “This is my—um—”
“Wyatt,” Wyatt interjects smoothly, stepping forward and shaking the woman’s hand. “Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it.”
“Of course, of course,” she says. “I’m Kinneret, one of Michal’s friends. I’m just so happy you could both make it. Please, come in.”
We step inside. My hand twitches reflexively toward the mezuzah on the doorframe, but with my arms full of coffee and pastry, the gesture is abortive.
A sidelong glance at Wyatt reveals his anxiety is back too, despite his smooth introduction. The skin around his mouth is vaguely green—and I can’t help thinking back to that night I first met him, the strange and intriguing juxtaposition of confident Revel Jamie and the softer, sweeter Wyatt I met in the hotel bedroom.
The interior of Michal’s apartment is what I always fantasized my house would look like, if I grew up to be rich and became the kind of person who, like, donates to art museums. There are musical instruments I don’t recognize leaning against the wall, next to sculpture pieces from cultures I’ve never visited and paintings by artists I’ve never heard of. The whole place smells faintly of myrrh, and I spot an incense cone burning idly by the record player. Is Michal secretly an heiress or something? Because damn.
The other guests are here already—at least, I assume this is all of them. My brain reflexively wants to try to categorize them—Modern Orthodox, yeshivish, Reform, Chassidic—but this group defies categorization. There’s a man with a black hat and peyos deep in conversation with an androgynous person with dyed-pink hair. A woman in a straight brown wig carries challah to the table while Michal, in a violet tichel, moves dishes to the sink to be washed before Shabbos officially begins. A little boy around twelve years old, who I assume is Michal’s stepson, darts around vrooming his model rocket ship. All in all, viewing this scene feels like watching a movie where the director did some research but not quite enough.
Michal catches my eye from the kitchen, and a huge grin splits her face. She immediately abandons the dishes, drying her hands off on a tea towel as she hurries over to greet us. “You made it!”
“Always with the tone of such surprise,” I tease, even though we both know I almost didn’t come.
Michal’s gaze flicks to my left, toward Wyatt. If she’s intimidated by his presence here, she does a great job of hiding it. “Professor Cole,” she says. “Wow, I’m hosting a legend.”
“I come bearing gifts,” says Wyatt, lifting the bags of baked goods and grape juice. I wonder if I’m supposed to make some clarifying remark about how we’re just friends or something, if Wyatt will think I’m taking advantage of the fantasy if I don’t.
But then again, it’s not like he’s said anything to explain his presence here either.
“Oh, you didn’t need to do that,” Michal says, but when she peeks inside and spots the babka, she goes, “Hell yes, good choice. People are going to fight over this bread.”
She introduces us to some of the other people who have gathered here, including her wife, Shoshana, an adorable five-foot-nothing woman wearing a blond wig and a gauzy kerchief who ignores my extended hand in favor of outright hugging me—one-armed, since the other arm holds the fattest baby I’ve ever seen.
“Gut Shabbos,” Shoshana says. “Michal’s told me so much about you.”
I feel my cheeks pinken. I can only imagine what Michal had to say. I mean, how would I describe me to someone else? Especially after I flaked on the last Shabbos dinner?
“It’s so nice to meet you,” I say, falling back on politeness. “And who is this?”
“This is Hadas,” Shoshana says. “She just turned six months.”
I grin and hold out my finger for Hadas to latch onto. She gives me a gummy smile, just two little teeth sticking out above her bottom lip. “She’s adorable. I had no idea Michal had a daughter.” She’d mentioned the stepson, but that’s it.
“She’d tell you she’s glad you missed her awkward pregnant stage,” Shoshana says.
“Valid.” I glance around at the apartment, its gorgeous art, and I’m overwhelmed by the sense that I ought to be here. Or at least, if not here, then someplace like this. Someplace warm, with someone I love. A future with a family, even if that doesn’t involve children. Not for me.
I want it so bad it’s like a sailor’s knot twisted rough and tight in my stomach.
You gave up this life, a voice murmurs in the back of my mind. You left.
“You have a beautiful home,” I say at last, although with my dry mouth it seems to come out scratchy and raw.
“What?” Shoshana says. “Oh, no, this isn’t ours. This is Kinneret’s house. We’re just borrowing it for tonight. We switch around—someone new hosts each time. And sometimes, if the weather’s nice, we’ll meet in a park for Kabbalat Shabbat instead.”
Somehow it had literally never occurred to me that you could celebrate Shabbos outside. But I guess there’s no real prohibition against it, at least for the evening services. Usually those just involve a few prayers and songs, followed by dinner—or at least an oneg with snacks and wine. I just—still—can’t put my finger on this group. Kinneret seems to have materialized a mechitza from somewhere and is erecting it in the space between the living room and the small fenced-in backyard. Which I guess means we’re going to have a service at Kinneret’s house, the way you might with a Chabad couple on shlichus. The mechitza cloth is meant to separate men and women during prayers and is very much an Orthodox thing. But on the other hand, I’ve never been to an Orthodox service quite like this.
“Would you like to do the honors?” Michal asks me when it’s time to light the candles, offering me a box of matches. They’re the long kind, the sort that can be used for decoration or to light fireplaces.
“I—” I glance sidelong, hoping for Wyatt to step in and save me. But he, traitor that he is, just nods and smiles encouragingly. “Well, I was hoping to get a photo of someone else doing it. For my project. If that’s still okay.”
“Ah, right, of course,” Michal says, tossing both hands up as if to say, Silly me. “How could I forget! Shoshana, it’s all you, my love.”
Her wife takes over, and I lift my camera, focusing the lens so that the flame sparks like magic as she bends it toward the wick. I want to capture the glow of gold light in the air, the warmth that bathes Shoshana’s face as she folds her hands around the flames and draws them toward herself once, twice, three times. Here, only Shoshana is performing the mitzvah—but in Chabad every girl lights candles, even as young children. Every Shabbos I’d light my little votive next to my sisters and my mother. We’d murmur the blessing together. I wish my lens could immortalize the feeling of standing there whispering the bracha and knowing you’re carrying on the same tradition as your mother, and her mother, and her mother, all the way back for thousands of years.
A tradition I broke.
One of the men starts singing “Lecha Dodi,” and I snap another photo, another, as other voices join in.
If I were to close my eyes, I could be back there again. I could hear my father’s voice coursing over the notes like cool water over stone. See my mother’s cheeks amber in the candlelight, auburn strands glittering in her sheitel and falling across her face as she tips forward in prayer. My sisters and I lighting our own candles and murmuring brachos under our breath. Dvora with her secret smile just for me, our hands lacing together as our mother prays for us. For our family.
I wonder if she really believed that would be enough.
I lower my camera and glance down at the screen, flipping through the last few shots I’ve taken. Wyatt peers over my shoulder, his breath a warm gust against the curve of my ear.
“These look good,” he says, low enough that only I can hear him over the song. “You’ve captured the magic.”
I don’t know if that’s true or if it’s even possible. I feel strange right now, disembodied almost. Similar to the way I used to feel when I was high—as if flesh and bone were just constructs. My skin tingles where Wyatt’s breath touched it, and I sway on my feet. I imagine him wrapping his arms around me and pulling me close, holding me like Michal is holding Shoshana, her lips grazing Shoshana’s temple.
Too much. I whisper my thanks and step back, letting Wyatt join the stream of men heading into the back garden for prayers.
This part is familiar. I’ve been to a thousand Chabad services just like it—the murmur of baritone voices reciting Hebrew, the women whispering among each other, one lady bouncing a baby on her knee while Shoshana and Kinneret fawn over its tiny chubby hands. The only person not separated out is the nonbinary person I’d spotted earlier, whose chair is positioned exactly halfway between inside and outside, one foot in the women’s space and one in the men’s.
I was worried about how we were going to get away with skipping the wine at kiddush without making things awkward, but I shouldn’t have been. Wyatt is smoother than I give him credit for; I’ve just finished snapping a fresh photo as the mechitza comes down before he’s there, passing a cup of grape juice into my hand. I don’t think anyone even notices.
Not that I’m ashamed of my sobriety. But.
Some of the tension has leached out of me by the time we’re seated properly at the dinner table. The food is a mix of things I’m used to—typical Ashkenazic cholent and kugel—and more Sephardic things, like golden-brown kibbeh stuffed with mint and lamb. I help myself to a stuffed pepper that oozes spicy tomato sauce onto a bed of couscous and tastes better than a lot of meals I’ve had in Manhattan restaurants.
“Oh my god,” Wyatt comments between mouthfuls, pointing down at the borscht with his spoon. “This is incredible. Can I convert?”
“Nope,” I say. “But I’ll send you my grandmother’s recipe.”
Shoshana smiles at us from across the table. “So, how long have the two of you been together?” she asks, punctuating the question with a sip of her wine. Next to her, Hadas smashes some mushy carrots against her mouth. “Am I allowed to guess?”
I almost choke on my bite of kibbeh. I’m still struggling to clear my throat and fumble up some appropriate words to say when Wyatt—thank fuck—steps in.
“We aren’t,” he says, easy as anything. “We’re friends. I’m helping Ely with her photography project, so she invited me to tag along.”
One of Shoshana’s thick brows goes up. “Aha. Friends. Yes. Michal and I used to be ‘friends’ too.”
“Shosh,” Michal interjects, covering her eyes with both hands, but I can’t help it—I laugh. Which earns me a predictable kick in the ankle from Wyatt.
“Sorry, sorry,” Shoshana says, waving her fork through the air like a conductor’s baton. “I’ll stop. I just can’t help myself. I watched too many Disney movies as a child.”
“Same,” I say. “Holding out for a suitor on a horse.”
Wyatt quirks a smile and gestures toward himself, almost self-deprecatingly. “Horseless.”
If I thought I’d be ready to flee the premises by this time in the dinner, I was mistaken. That is, I don’t fully want to yeet myself out the window just yet. Reserving the right to change my mind in the future.
But this is easier than I thought it would be. Maybe that’s the Wyatt effect.
“So what made you decide to do this project in particular?” Kinneret asks later in the evening, once the main course is just bone and sinew on our plates and everyone (aside from me and Wyatt) has gulped their way through at least three glasses of wine.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“You’re doing a project on Judaism, right?” she says. “You said you’re taking photos of different ways people approach Jewish spiritual life. What got you interested in that?”
She has no idea what a loaded question that really is. I find myself glancing toward Wyatt, as if he could answer in my stead—but of course he just looks back at me, opaque as ever. The fucker probably sees this as a learning experience. Like I’m supposed to take this opportunity to practice what I’d say at my hypothetical gallery opening or some shit.
I take another bite of now-cold food to buy myself time. A mistake, frankly; room-temp meat never tastes great.
“Um…well…I guess I’m still trying to figure out where I fit. Spiritually.” I had hoped that would be enough, but everyone’s still looking at me like they expect there to be more information coming. “I grew up Orthodox. My parents are Chabad.” I’m not sure how much anyone here even knows about Chabad or if they just think we’re the guys in college towns who host Seders for religiously confused freshmen. “But I left the community…obviously…and now I’m just…I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re still Jewish,” Michal says, punctuating her words with a gesture of her fork. “That never changes.”
“Do you believe in G-d?” asks Shoshana, because why not cut right to the real questions.
My palms are sweaty; I scrub them against my thighs under the table and laugh awkwardly. “Yeah. I do. I guess that never changed either.”
I can feel Wyatt looking at me. His gaze is like a hot coal boring into the side of my face. Suddenly I’m too keenly aware of the effort it takes not to look back—to keep my eyes fixed forward on these strangers across the table. My heart is beating so fast I can almost taste it like blood in my mouth.
I don’t know why I’m scared. And I don’t know what cosmic fist I expect to come crashing down on me right now.
But I know it’s coming.