David needed to get out of this deli.
“My jaw,” David said. He kept his eyes focused on his lap, didn’t dare look up at Bennie, since he was pretty sure he had tears in his eyes. Christ. Had it come to this so quickly? Six months and a few weeks and a couple thousand pages of Judaica, and he was suddenly a big fucking puss. The Jews, the thing was, they didn’t get down with this woe-is-me shit. They took vengeance, you fucked with the wrong person, you woke up with Mossad standing over your bed. “It’s, uh, I need a Percocet. It’s tightening up. Shooting pain into my eyes.”
“Fine,” Bennie said, all business. “Why don’t you take Rabbi Kales back with you to get your baby aspirin, and then we can meet back at the temple in, say, thirty? Give you both some more time to argue about what the food means.”
Rabbi Kales hadn’t taken his eyes off David the whole time, or at least that’s what David felt. Rabbi Kales exuded a sort of kindness that David had never experienced. The man was a hard motherfucker, that was clear enough; weird thing was that he also seemed like he had a real vested interest in other people’s wellness, something David was not particularly familiar with.
“That would be fine,” Rabbi Kales said. When David finally got his shit together enough to look up, he saw that Rabbi Kales was still staring directly at him. He looked profoundly sad.
CHAPTER FOUR
“You ask good questions,” Rabbi Kales said. They were weaving through the streets of Summerlin, David still keeping his speed low, though with Rabbi Kales periodically waving at people in the cars beside them, David didn’t know why he even bothered. “Inconspicuous” was apparently not a word in Rabbki Kales’s vocabulary. He had a volume of the Talmud on his lap and was flipping through it, not reading, just looking at the pages and at the notes David had left in the margins. He closed the book, but kept his hand on it, his thumb running back and forth over the gold-leafed pages.
“When you know a test is coming,” David said, “it’s easier to figure out what you don’t understand.”
“Is that your philosophy?”
“No,” David said, though, now that he thought about it, it was probably better than “everybody dies,” which had managed to get him through the previous thirty-five years. “Just something I’ve noticed.”
“Yes, well,” Rabbi Kales said, “it is the basis of much of what you’ve been reading. Trying to figure out the unknowable. Place order onto chaos. All anyone wants to know is how they’ll find happiness, what it will feel like to die, and what happens next.”
“And do you know that?”
“Of course not,” Rabbi Kales said. “Nobody does. Not definitively.”
“I thought all the Jews rolled to Israel,” David said. “And the Mount of Olives opens up. Isn’t that what Ezekiel said?”
“That’s when the Moshiach returns,” Rabbi Kales said. “It’s one of the thirteen principles of our faith. But no one knows. How can they? Even the prophets, they just speak prophecy.” Rabbi Kales made a tsking sound. “Everyone so concerned about what’s next. No one cares what they’re doing now. There’s no present anymore.”
“So it’s a racket,” David said. You want to run a racket, you’ve gotta give people the hope that there is a tangible result in the end — money, sex, a free futon, TV, trip to Tahoe, whatever. God, it seemed, was the biggest racket of all. You sell people the afterlife, you sell them resurrection from the pine boxes they’re buried in down in Palm Springs, you’re not gonna be around when they find out if you were right or not. In David’s books, the Orthodox Jews were always talking about how everyday items could be cloaked in radiance, how a wet towel in the bathroom suddenly bore messages.
“Yes,” Rabbi Kales said, “I suppose you could look at it that way.” David stole a look in his direction, saw that the Rabbi was staring out the window, but still with his hand on the Talmud, his thumb moving over the edges of the pages.
“Tell me something,” David said. “What does Bennie have on you?”
“He loves my daughter,” Rabbi Kales said.
“Bullshit,” David said.
“I believe that’s honestly true,” Rabbi Kales said.
“No,” David said, “I meant bullshit on that being all he has on you. Guy like you doesn’t just fall into a racket. Don’t try to play me like that. At least show me that respect.”
Rabbi Kales tapped on his window. “You see all this land out here? All these houses? When I was your age, this was actual desert. Just thirty, thirty-five years ago. No buildings. No people, maybe a few living off the grid, as they say now, but then, just living. I could come out here and walk and think and imagine what my life might be like without worrying about getting run over by someone driving the equivalent of an aircraft carrier. Coyotes, rabbits, desert squirrels, field mice, all of them gone now. For what? Who is going to live in all of these houses? Has anyone given any thought to this?” Rabbi Kales paused, then tapped his window again. “You see those mountains?”
“The Red Rocks?” David said.
“Yes,” Rabbi Kales said. “When I first arrived from New York — this was 1965—you could actually see their real color. What you see now, that’s a product of the air quality we now have, all that carbon monoxide, because all of these houses and buildings and casinos have changed the way the shadows fall, changed the way light works. Just in the last ten years, it’s all changed. Everything has become diffuse right before my eyes.”
“Could just be your eyes,” David said, finding that parlance again, the way he used to talk to the old-timers in the Family, give them a little hell as a backward way of showing respect. David was learning that dealing with retired Family members and religious figures wasn’t all that different: They both wanted you to solve your own problems and be a man and listen to the stories of how things used to be, the past always a pristine vision of a golden age, the present always a bag of shit, the future a vast, unknowable wasteland. Sometimes being a man meant showing that you were bold enough to tease a little, confident that your intention was clear — that you were a person who knew the score, whatever that score might be.
“Could be that, I suppose,” Rabbi Kales said. He pondered that for a minute, though the thing of it was, David already had similar thoughts about the mountains, too. Here, everything was the color of old, rusted blood; the mountains jagged and ripped, at night they sat against the sky like pieces of broken glass. “My son-in-law,” Rabbi Kales continued, “offered me an opportunity to fill that desert with my faith, to see my dream come true, to provide education and culture to my people. He offered me an opportunity to create a place of understanding and faith. With opportunity comes sacrifice.” He shrugged, like this was nothing, starting up a temple funded, apparently, by the Mafia. “We have big plans for Temple Beth Israel.”
“Bullshit,” David said again.
“I have made mistakes in my life,” Rabbi Kales said. It came out with such finality that David didn’t feel he could question what those mistakes were, though he sensed that if Bennie were his chief benefactor, it must have been bad. “My son-in-law offered me a chance to start with a fresh ledger. So maybe we aren’t that different.”
“You don’t know what I’ve left behind,” David said, “so don’t try to tell me we’re the same.”
“Why don’t you tell me something,” the Rabbi said. “Who are you?”
David hesitated. He wasn’t supposed to speak that name. His own name. “I can’t say,” he said.
“I’m your rabbi,” Rabbi Kales said. “We have the privilege of confidentiality. Nothing you tell me can be repeated, legally.”