The Affair

My last moments will consist of this fucking kosher Jell-O—kosher Jell-O!—dripping onto my beard the length of the prophet Elijah’s while my grandson—god bless him, earnest and stupid, it is better that way—fixes a pair of phylacteries on my gaunt, black, and bump-ridden arms. They are assembling outside, the bunch of fuckers, the men who take away the dead. I can hear them; what do they think, just because I have this trachea down my throat I can’t hear anymore? They are coming to remind me that there is nothing a person takes with him after he passes on. But oh, this is the final joke. Because I take! I take plenty. I take secrets.

They’ll never know. I had eleven children, a respectable Hasidic family, even grandchildren with beards themselves, gave a bit of charity to this fund and that tea party—all in all, a pious life. They’ll never know. It is good I can’t be caught in talk, won’t have the chance to slip up anymore, can’t start being the wise guy and give it away. Yeah, my eyes follow the tuches of the shiksa nurse—that’s nothing a good Jew can’t atone for if you get enough beards into the room before the soul departs and the shvuntzes become dust.

What do they know, though, these chevra here, with their heads in their psalms, crying a river? I was a saint they say, I was a Hasidic man for all to emulate, the way I served god, the way I put on the gatkes—those hideous underpants made of cotton with a giant slit inviting your dick to perversely emerge—like the makers of that abomination for underpants didn’t get the memo that if you don’t tuck your little shlong away you’ll get to hear it from America. I put that on. I put on the whole sweltering gehenom of the three-piece suit, even. What do they want of a 69-year-old man with a paunch, with those pants that even suspenders couldn’t hold up above my stomach anymore, and the vest, and the long coat, and the hat, and the sidecurls around my ears for weekdays but nicely curled for shabbes? Year after year in the whole fucking costume, I stood there and said little, like always, and it was all it took for them to make me out as a saint, so now they can’t let me go.

Look at my wife. She’s shrivelled and expanded all at once, a defiance of the laws of physics, which is suitable, and how she’s crying into her psalms on that chair near my IV drip. What’s she crying for? Five weeks ago before the stroke, she was shouting hell over high waters that I stole from the chollent pot and then wouldn’t talk to me for a day, and now she is crying like she was ever in love! In love!

What does she know of love? We didn’t even meet until our wedding. Our parents, holocaust survivors, hers living in Canada and mine in New York, made a match when I was 17 and fucking clueless, and next thing I knew I was lying on top of her in a strange bed in a new little apartment with potpourri everywhere, a pile on the nightstand and some sprayed on the pillow.

The fucking potpourri—it was all I could think of. I was going to develop asthma right there, keel over and die, with my dick as wild as those million times I wonked it between Mincha and Maariv. And I—with my dick knowing not what to do with that 18-year-old braided girl lying still as a plank, stiffer than my you know what, her breasts clearly exposed, the nightgown pulled up, so perverse, so fucking perverse—all I could think was, I’m going to die from all the potpourri on the brand new bedspread, packed in lace right next to the insane book on how to properly insert this into that and produce a baby. I was going to die.

And I pulled through another 50 years, through 11 children, that good old southern orifice below the Hasidic belt always, always keeping me busy. But what do they know about that?

I know the morphine is working because the agony is no longer stopping me from being able to think. I can finally watch them, those Chevra Keddisha, the men in their final rites, and enjoy it too. I enjoy seeing them talk amongst each other like they are saving the world. What a selfish thing it is, to be a do-gooder. Not only do you get all those endorphins, but you get to believe you’re a saint.

I—I, Chaim Meilech Braunstein with the big glasses and the serious beard, am reciting al chet—my last confession of a million crimes, which makes me a saint. What do they know about my sins, the naïve bunch of them?

While some young tsutsaks, boys in their healthy youth, long coats and important faces, stand around—some of them are my grandkids—one sits by my bed and goes on with this ridiculous list.

Al chet—I atone, for I did x

Al chet—I atone, for I did y

Al chet—I atone for I did z

He cries, the idiot, into his prayer book, saying the words for me. You douchebag! That’s all I did? Let’s start at the beginning. They don’t have one for those first sins, oh, those juicy ones, like seeing her collarbone and enjoying it. For the sin of getting your coffee at Green’s Pizza by Rodney every morning only for a glimpse of her neck in her frilly top.

Do I feel regret? I do, but I tell you, I shouldn’t. They marry you off at 18, you’re a father of two gorgeous children by 21, and then you discover there is a whole world out there. A whole world! Literature, art, philosophy. The realization that it is all a bunch of bogus fantasies, all that these people who told you throughout your wide-eyed childhood that god had created us freaks, and everyone else is just extras on the set, waiting to turn on our air conditioners on shabbes. And you realize, they are all duped! You want to run home with your coat and tefillin and tell your wife, but when you so much as bring an English magazine into the home, you are immediately reported on to her sisters in hysteria, and you realize that you better go on pretending. Holding a little one on your lap while he gets sidecurls, and then taking mazel tovs while he gets baar mitzvah’d, and being truly proud while he says his pshet’l, and listening to him on the way to the synagogue talk to his brother about all those carefree things of his life, hatzolah cars, powerful armies, you just know you now have a secret, and if there’s a mission in life, it’s to take it to your grave.

Al chet. I wore a cap to the game. And al chet. I watched millions of indie movies. And al chet, I got my coffee at Green’s, where she talked to the other men behind the counter and moved her shoulders so that her pretty blouse showed enough to satisfy my imagination.

Why is she crying, my wife? I tell you. She doesn’t even know that!

She knows nothing. 20 years it went on with Blima, my Blimala, and the wife knows nothing.

Blimala. The way she moved behind the counter. Off I went to the hatzolah base, and I felt the sweet aftertaste of having seen her. And then the call came. From 326 Clymer apartment 3B. I was surprised it was her. On the table, hysterical. A mouse! There was a mouse! She called 911 for a mouse! Blimala from Green’s, a grown ass woman, on the table because she saw a mouse. How ridiculous!

I looked under the oven, and tell me, why do you look under the oven but to hide that your you-know-what is riding out of the gatkes, and that you’re perspiring? They say the heretics are gluttonous. So we are. So are the believers, though.

I took her to the dining room where she was polishing the silver for Pesach—my geshikte Blimala. I opened her blouse a little to put the stethoscope in, and the way she looked at me and asked, “Can you kill it for me?” There was never a more romantic thing said. Of course I’d kill for her. Heretics are amoral, they say, they love stereotyping, and I’m not against gorging myself on their fantastical glory. So I set some mouse traps with peanut butter, and she nearly fell to her knees in gratitude.

The men of the burial society have just finished with final rights, and the doctor says I may have a few minutes left. They all look so grave. They look grave almost as if they know how important it is that I go now, before I cause any trouble.

I have to say, I’m no small amount proud to have pulled my shtik up to the last minute. I was kissing my Blimala only six weeks ago in the coffee shop; I could see my own sunglasses reflected in her eyes! And then boom, I fell over on my way home from the morning Mikva run and that’s it, final goodbye. After this, there is nothing. Nothing worth dying for. The afterlife? No kisses, no Blimala, no smoking with smokin babes. All the boring corpses are supposed to be in that garden of purity. The way I see it, all the options in the soon-after amount to hell or hell. I’d rather be in the burning gehenom than with all those prudes in “paradise.” Or you know what I’d rather be? Sneaking out for a rendezvous with you know who. Ack, Blimala. Good bye.

This one here, from the burial society, Avrum Cheskel Strauss, I can’t believe he’s here. What a nut. He is the one who takes the carcass away after the soul departs. He is already prepared to dunk my naked body in water and pat down my grey beard and put me in that hideous white coat in that box. What do I care? He annoys me. He is too fucking fat. And he came too fucking close to knowing what was going on, that day he saw me and Blimala at Starbucks. He’d passed on Myrtle, looked in. I thought nothing of it, but then he confronted me all hot heat in the coffee room in the synagogue where you drink Nescafe instant coffee with sugar cubes dropped in it. He stood there panting, his suspenders stretched over his polyester white shirt. He is a cousin of Blimala’s poor shlimazl of a husband, so now he’s licensed to mix in, you see? I denied it, top to bottom. Said no way José. As we say in Yiddish, shteyn and beyn, stone and bone! He wasn’t convinced. He was itching to make a big stink. Animal.

Thank god that blew over. For four weeks I overdosed on Tums and suffered such indigestion they could hear me burp from my balcony to that of Steinmetz three brownstones down!

Strauss is at the door, and I can tell he has found something to get himself stinky sweaty over. He is arguing with someone who is out of sight. He says that it’s not an appropriate time for volunteers from the organization Bikur Cholim to come in.

“We already have the burial society here…nu, nu! It’s not…”

I hear this voice argue back. I think I recognize it, because I can hear the machines beep alongside it. This voice. God in heaven, this voice! She says she is here for the patient on the other side of the room.

“The bed behind him.”

The bed behind me? That’s the Indian woman who talks a mile a minute into the phone nonstop, not a word of which I can make out.

She comes in with a tray. I see it right away. That three layer cake. That’s no volunteer food tray. She looks terrible, my Blimala, washed out, in some hideous frumpy suit that makes her look much older than her 50 years. No makeup, almost stooped, her wig and hat have no charm.

The machines beep. I want to scream. What the fuck is she doing going to the Indian lady?

Beep. Beep. Ah, to hell! Strauss and Morgenstern gather around and watch me. My wife runs to get the nurse. I hear Blimala talk to the Indian woman.

“Hello, how are you feeling? I bought you some a yummy yummy Jewish cake!”

The Indian woman is delighted. She screams, “Tank you, my oh my, So swit!.”

Blimala asks if she can help with anything else. I can hardly breathe.

She’s mad, Blimala! She’s gone mad! What’s she doing here? What in the name of the Ribono-shel-oilmen is she doing here? Why is she walking past my bed to go get some tissues and passing slowly again?

“Don’t. No, tank you honey no leave it, I’m going to make a phone call now, okay?” says the patient. Blima, she could be so crazy (it takes a crazy woman to have an affair, I suppose). She seems not to want to leave the other half of my room. The Indian woman is getting annoyed, and Strauss is edging over to the curtain to find out if he can mix in. And my machines, oh, my machines, they let everyone know that I’m about to get off this bed and strangle Blimala for showing up here just as I’m about to die as a sheyene yid.

Strauss says in Yiddish, “Why are you bothering this goyta?” with innocent befuddlement.

Blimala leaves the other patient be, while the Indian woman yells behind her, “Tank you again! Very nice, very nice honey!”

Strauss says to her, “What are you making yourself crazy here? Leave her alone.”

She looks awful. So flustered. That ugly Landau’s shopping bag. She bundles up in courage and asks Strauss,

“Ever heard of a mitzvah?”

“What’s this hullabaloo?” says Greenbaum, shoving Strauss. “Bikur Cholim shouldn’t come in a man’s last moments.”

“Okay, please! I just brought some things.”

She puts down her shopping bag marked Honey bundt. Her hands look so soft. How I want to touch them and say goodbye! 20 years I loved her. More! 20 years of fucking on the rooftop on Yom Kippur while wearing ugly black crocks and smelling of mints to mask the smell of the fast. Or making out in my minivan while her children called nonstop to ask what to do about the sponge cake she forgot in the oven. 20 years like that. 20 years and we got away with it. That’s the biggest thrill, I tell you, it’s that we fucking pulled it off!

Greenbaum glares. My wife shows up. Greenbaum says, “This is a woman from the volunteer organization.”

My wife says, “Ah, hullo, thank you,” with her sweetness.

That innocence. I feel sick, I mean, in a different way, in a much worse way. I can’t believe I’m tied to this bed and can’t stop these two women from being in the same room at once. My last moments are the real life version of the bad dream where you’re paralyzed, only I actually am fucking paralyzed, and it’s on a gurney, and every shitty person in my life has come to see it!

Blimala blushes as she talks to my wife. “Do you need anything? Is everything okay?”

Oh my Blimala, my lover, my volunteer, my bringer (supposedly) of kosher hospital food, my crazy woman.

My wife thanks her.

Strauss suddenly has a bright idea, that idiot.

“You’re Klar, that Klar woman?” he asks.

I cough, I curdle, I make a distraction. It doesn’t work.

He gets more animated.

“Are you Klar, married my second cousin, Nuchem Yeedle, from Hayward?”

“Yuh” she says. Another idiot!

My wife is alarmed. The tone of the conversation is suddenly tense.

Strauss is looking at her. He is looking at me. There is a giant tube in my mouth but my eyes are screaming—please! I can’t breathe. The machines are beeping really fast. He says,

“I knew what you disgusting zoneh are up to! I knew—ever since that Starbucks. I also saw you in the minivan parked outside the wedding hall one night. I’m not an idiot. You think I’m an idiot? You think people won’t know?”

It’s the last thing I hear.