Simcha

As they were preparing for bed, Efrem, coming out of the bathroom with his toothbrush had said, “I don’t even see what the deal is with you. It’s not like you’ve even been to church since the divorce.”

“The deal,” Isaac said the word deal a little harshly, “is that I’ve broken so many promises and reversed so many decisions. I thought I could at least keep this one.”

Efrem had no time for pity. He said, “The interesting thing about the Church of Rome is even when you leave it, it never accepts that. According to Church law, even if you join an ashram, you’re still a Catholic. And you said that according to Judaism, you’re always a Jew, no matter what.”

“I’m going to a synagogue,” Isaac said quickly.

“You can,” Efrem said.

“Would you come with me?”

“I will,” Efrem said in a tone that meant, I don’t want to, but I will.

They went on Saturday morning, Efrem was put off by the lack of cars in the parking lot, but Isaac explained, “It was always a little like this.”

Isaac moved toward a little door, and Efrem thought there should be a bigger door.

“There is,” Isaac said, “and a main lobby. But unless things have changed, they really use this door next to the parking lot.”

They had to ring the doorbell, and Isaac said, “I had forgotten about that.”

A middle aged man opened the door. Isaac thought to himself, “Nervous Jew,” and wondered if he looked like a nervous Jew.

“We’re here… for service,” Isaac said. Efrem only nodded.

The man let them in and said, “We’re all in the chapel and let them through a little lobby and past a cloak room.

“Get yourselves a book,” the man said, showing them to some very large blue books with English and Hebrew letters inscribed in gold. “We’re all right in here,” he said, pushing through stain glass doors.

Isaac handed Efrem a book and said, “Can I admit that I’m glad you’re here.”

“Are you going to grab a tallit?” Efrem said.

“Nope.”

“I’m glad you remembered the head covering thing.”

“I have no idea how I found two kippahs so quickly. I haven’t worn these in years.”

Efrem looked about. “Does it look familiar?”

“Not really,” Isaac said.

Of course when Isaac had come he had been a holiday Jew. He’d gone to synagogue school to learn enough for his bar mitzvah and he had come on the big days when the congregation gathered in the great sanctuary.

“I’ll show it to you later if I can,” he said.

With an intimate gesture, his hand light on Efrem’s hip, he guided him into the chapel.

It reminded Isaac of a hospital chapel except that there was a gilded cupboard, an ark that housed the Torah. There was also a youngish large nosed bespectacled rabbi, a very Jewish looking rabbi, Isaac thought, who looked like he was trying to be warm and engaging. Some of these people didn’t look like Jews at all, which was a relief. Isaac had never asked himself why he’d stopped… well. No, why he had never been interested in Judaism, why he had never pressed his father very hard about how lapsed they were. Now he realized, at least to him, it was a religion of the look. How much did he look like what he was supposed to be here? How much did he want to? To be vaguely Jewish looking was one thing, to be all out Jewey… He was thinking too much, and aware that he was thinking nonsense.

His thoughts were interrupted by the gently swaying rabbi strumming his folk guitar and saying, “You can find the text on page sixty five of the Mishkin T’filah. Ma Tovu.”

Everyone else knew it. Efrem could pick up on a tune, and he stopped himself from swaying, as some were doing in their seats, and began to sing, “Ma Tovu, Ma Tovu, ohalekha Ya'akov, mishk'notekha Yisra'el.”

It was syrupy and sweet, but Efrem more or less liked it. He felt like he liked it better than Isaac. There was something off about the rabbi whom Efrem could only think of as not as nice or liberal as he seemed to be, and there were snacks after the service and they all talked a while. Isaac seemed more evasive than usual and Efrem said, “My husband was bar mitzvahed here. He wanted to show me the main sanctuary. That a problem?”

Rabbi Michael blinked a couple of times, put on a smile, breathed and said, “Not at all.”

“Well, then come on, lover,” Efrem directed the taciturn Isaac away.

“You called me your husband,” Isaac almost hissed as they went up the incline away from the other to the doors of the sanctuary.

“We’re getting a little long in the tooth for you to be a boyfriend, partners seems too business like, and we were never very good at business. I hope you weren’t trying to be in the closet for that man. He’s supposed to be liberal anyway. See he keeps leering at those lesbians?”

Suddenly Isaac roughly pushed Efrem against the sanctuary door and as they fell into the large auditorium. Isaac kissed him hard and said, “I am honored to be your husband, Efrem Walker, and I want to hear you say it again and again and again.”

“Very well,” Efrem pulled Isaac’s head to his in the large sanctuary, so that their foreheads were touching.

“Husband. Husband. Husband.”

They kept going, but not because they liked Or Chadash synagogue so very much. Rabbi Feldstein was smarmy and insincere and seemed to be hitting on the women and tolerating them. There were very few people who came to services and it seemed to only matter if they paid their yearly dues and sent their children to Sunday School. Everything felt a little… Episcopalian, Efrem said. Antiseptic. Isaac had the strong feeling that he would not have gone by himself. He despised the rabbi’s folk guitar.

But they went because, in what they heard from people who came occasionally, or from very old members, there was a glimpse of something more. What they met at Or Chadash Reform hinted at more, and it was a more that Isaac wished for, but was not sure he was ready to undertake.

“Usually we go to the Conservative synagogue,” a woman said. “We thought we’d try a little something different.”

Efrem was always the more talkative person, the one who easily had conversations with other people.

“How do you like it?” he asked.

“It’s alright,” her husband said, tilting his hand.

A woman named Miriam said, “This is just fine, but if you go to the South Side in the Orthodox neighborhood, there’s something for real.”

“I’m actually,” Isaac began to admit, “a little afraid of them.”

“I am too,” Miriam said, “but it looks like so much fun, It looks like the real thing.”

Efrem, always one to see into the heart of matters, returned from a day out and decided to not comment on how the lights were out in the apartment even though it was approaching evening. Isaac was hunched over his desk, ruining his eyesight as he read his student’s papers and Efrem came behind him and set a book on his head.

Isaac shook and the book fell into his hands.

“What the hell, Ef? Oh, what’s this?”

He answered his own question. “It’s a Siddur.”

“Not a Mishkin Tafillah or that thing they use at the Conservative synagogue, but a straight up Ashkenazi siddur for the Ashkenazi in my life, and had you noticed the last two syllables in Ashkenazi are… Nazi?”

“I had not,” Isaac said, grinning more because he loved Efrem very much than because of that observation.

“Oh…. It’s got the pronunciations!” Isaac said.

“Yes… transliterations. I know you did your bar mitzvah and all, but I thought your Hebrew would be a little rusty.”

“Oh,” Isaac said, tenderly, standing up and wrapping his arm around Efrem as he kissed him, “thank you, my lover.”

Then he said, “We’re not going back to Or Chadash, are we?”

“The only proper movement,” Efrem declared, “is the movement forward.”

They were, as so few are, in a state of joy. And maybe this is because they had suffered in another time, or maybe it was because as long as they had been friends they had been trying to be good and honest people and truth had been a friend. They were still more or less boys, only recently in their thirties and they held onto life lightly. When Isaac’s aunt Hannah died, she willed him and Ef, was very sure to include Ef, her little almost cabin in the almost woods. It was toward Grasshouse, on the outskirts of town, a bungalow that resembled something kids slept in at summer camp. They sat on the front porch barefoot, smoking cigarettes, handrolled and otherwise, or sometimes they smoked something stronger, getting high and looking at the tall trees while Isaac sang:

Mizmor shir leyom hashabbat.
Tov lehodot Ladonai, ulzamer leshimcha elyon.
Lehagid baboker chasdecha ve-emunatcha,

baleylot.

Alei asor va-alei-navel; alei heegayon bekinor.
Ki simachtani adonai befoalecha; bema'asei yadecha aranen.
Ma-gadlu ma'asecha Adonai, meod, amku machshevotecha.

Ish ba'ar lo yeda, uchsil lo yavin et zot.

Isaac had a fine tenor voice. They both did and they could harmonize together beautifully. At a Conservative synagogue they were bound to be accepted, and at High Street Orthodox, much like in a good old fashioned Catholic church, no questions were asked. Women looked down from the balconies and there were only men in the main sanctuary so Isaac’s arm around Ef meant nothing.

After that very first time at High Street, when they had no intentions at all of having the absolute rest that the Talmud required, they went out hiking in thick socks, shorts and staves with their walking packs. They’d gone higher and higher in the hills, to the glorious trees until Efrem began kissing Isaac down the back of his neck. Isaac had laughed to himself while Efrem had taken down his shorts and had him against the tree. He rejoiced in the day, in the feel of the sycamore skin against his check, in Ef’s arms about him, Ef inside of him, his strong thighs clashing against him. He had reached back to caress Efrem’s ass, heavy and and firm, and they had moved together quickly. It was over as quickly as it had begun, the two of them laughing.

“Stay in me until you finish coming,” Isaac panted. “I want to carry you in me a while.”

The first part of their lives had been so lonely, so controlled, and Efrem was always in order. He loved when Efrem was out of order, when Efrem was fucking him, growling into his ear and when, in the moment of orgasm he lost control and his hands flew up and his voice made that cry.

Hand in hand making sure not to stumble over stones, they had walked on and come to a creek. Isaac looked around to see if anyone was there and told Efrem, “Shield me.”

He squatted in the river to clean himself, to release Efrem’s seed, and decided he didn’t want to dress again.

“Come on in,” Isaac laughed, beckoning Efrem.

“It has got to be freezing.”

“No,” Isaac shook his head. “It still feels like summer.”

Efrem, unsure of this and unsure of being seen, undressed quickly and plunged into the white water only to scream.

“You lied!”

“I did,” Isaac said calmly. “You get warmer if you swim.”

And so they swam in the current and climbed out of the water and onto moss under trees, laughing and tangling themselves in each other’s arms, they made love again and dressed and went home.

They had been in a state of joy that day, and they were in one now, some years later, an Orthodox Jew and an honorary one, in their mid thirties, with a pack of strong cigarettes and a bag of marijuana between them, barefoot on the porch of their almost cabin in the almost woods when to their mild surprise, a black truck roared off of the road, headed toward them, crashed mildly into the oak tree at the front of the property, and out of the passenger’s seat reeled the tall, curly haired, scarecrow figure of Michael Cleveland, and from the driver’s seat climbed a man who looked like and unlike Efrem, and who they both knew to be Jay Strickland.