My Life as a Jew

I met Marc Greenblatt in our building's one arthritic elevator. As I stepped aboard, I gave him a curt but friendly nod and faced front, following New York protocol for strangers occupying the same confined space. But I didn't miss the wary glance he gave me.

As the old box struggled upward, I shook my head to show I was all too familiar with its sclerotic ways. "Takes forever," I said, eyes-front. "The management says it's planning to put in a new one, but that doesn't mean bupkis."

The bupkis was cheating a bit. I could just as easily have used a more common expression, though everyone in New York sprinkles Yiddish in their talk, even Latinos and immigrants from India and China. But I had taken an immediate shine to my presumptive neighbor and wanted to make him feel at ease. The truth is, I'm attracted to grumpy, introverted types. Even my sweet Sheila has her moments, sometimes entire days, when she seems possessed by her inner Grendel.

I decided to go for broke.

"Gerry Stein," I said, extending my hand. "4E."

Marc regarded my pink palm as if it were a piece of questionable beefsteak. Meanwhile the elevator lurched to a stop. Its accordion door stuttered halfway open, then froze as if confused about what floor it was on. Marc took a step forward, thought better of it as the door trembled menacingly then jerked backward like an old retainer who was losing his marbles but refuses to ask for help. "It does that," I said. When the door finally seized up at three-quarters, Marc squeezed through, a spooked rabbit making a bolt for its burrow.

It turned out Marc had moved into the apartment directly beneath ours. The building had thick plaster walls, so there was rarely noise from neighbors, the exception being the cellist above us who sometimes practiced till midnight. But after our meeting on the elevator, I had an uncanny sense of Marc's presence: Marc in his kitchen heating up something out of a can, Marc in his still unfurnished living room watching old black-and-white movies.

All the "D" apartments were laid out the same, one-bedrooms, four windows facing the street and two more on an airshaft that acted as amplifier for the voices of neighbors below and above. They hectored each other day and night while an anonymous dog barked anxiously in the background. I pictured Marc making a cup of instant coffee, black no-sugar; Marc reading—Schopenhauer? The Financial Times?—Marc brushing his teeth in front of a cracked mirror into which he glanced only long enough to arrange what was left of his mostly gray hair. But there was never a sound from his apartment, not even the proverbial bump in the night, never mind the one-way conversations we used to hear when the previous tenant was on the phone and standing next to an open window. Marc was apparently a loner, no friends or family, every day the same, Bartleby the Scrivener.

"Why don't you invite him up for coffee?" my wife said when I wondered out loud, as I suppose I sometimes did, about our new neighbor. "All you do is talk about him. You may as well make friends."

I didn't appreciate the insinuation. I was not obsessed with the man. But I had to admit I was disappointed. There are only a couple people I enjoy talking to in more than a superficial way. Neither of them lives nearby and they always have other, trivial things to do like raising a family. I suppose if Sheila and I had kids of our own, I wouldn't have so much time to kill. Marc, on the other hand, obviously had nothing but time.

One warm June evening our doorbell rang—croaked like a dying pigeon, itself a relic of the building's glory days in 19-ought-something. When I looked through the peephole, I saw Marc Greenblatt, scowling as if it was me who had rung his bell and at none too convenient a time. I opened the door, and we stared at each other wordlessly. I realized mine was probably not the first bell he had rung and that he hadn't had any idea who lived in 5D.

"Sorry to bother you," he said like a kid who has been rehearsing his one line for the school play. "I'm doing my wash in the basement, but I've run out of quarters."

"Of course," I said." We have a jarful of them," pulling the door open and noting two single-dollar bills in his clenched fist. "Sheila!" I called down our long entrance hallway, which you could use for a bowling alley. "Our new neighbor needs quarters for his wash."

My wife appeared behind me as if by miraculous translation, drying her hands on a kitchen towel. She glanced my way, then gave Marc a generous sample of her world-class smile. Sheila has a grin that can charm the pants off a rattlesnake, and she knows how to calibrate it to just the right wattage—bright enough to make a shy man feel at ease without scaring him off by its intensity. The result in this case was predictable: the corners of our neighbor's mouth angled upwards as if by a will of its own. I don't know what kind of look Lazarus had on his face when he stepped out of the crypt still wrapped up in his winding sheet, but it couldn't have been more blissful. He squeezed by me as if I were the hired help or a guest who was just leaving anyway.

"I guess the layout looks pretty familiar," Shelia tossed over her shoulder when the two of them reached the "French Cream" walls of our living room, 30 bucks a gallon and presently ablaze in the rays of a setting sun. "Weird layout," she said, turning to give Marc the supernova she zapped me with the night we met at a mutual friend's, the dazzler the angels in heaven can't wait to have brighten up their beatific boredom.

"Have a seat," I said.

Marc tried to produce a credible version of his chronic frown, but his heart wasn't in it. "I really should..."

"Cup of tea?" Sheila called from the kitchen, already putting the kettle on.

Despite the way he had reacted to her at the door, I wasn't sure he would say yes. But the creases on his high brow vanished like a spent storm cloud as he dropped into the deep recliner where I pursue my serious reading. I had to make do with the faux-Shaker straight-back Sheila and I carried home from someone's trash.

He began inspecting our furniture—a dark turn-of-the-century sideboard my wife inherited from her immigrant grandmother, an equally ancient stand lamp from a relative of the same generation, our threadbare American carpet—never once looking my way. We might have been strangers in an airport lounge waiting for the same flight to board. For some intelligent company, though, I could forgive worse manners than his, never mind the way he had appropriated my favorite chair.

"Settling in okay?" I said.

"What?"

"The apartment. Plumbing? Radiators? Well, it's still a little warm for heat, but in the fall..."

"Yeah. Sure."

"By the way, those washing machines in the basement, they're on their last legs. Can shut down for no reason. You have to feed them extra quarters to get them going again. You can get your money back from management, but you have to fill out a bloody affidavit." I considered warning him in a neighborly way that there were also a few rats in the basement—a few dozen, actually—but decided not to. "Better take some extras."

Sheila waltzed in carrying a big silver tray—another heirloom—and laid it down on our retro-1950s coffee table. The tray immediately claimed Marc's attention. It was an ugly thing but, like our sideboard, had belonged to my wife's Russian grandmother. The woman lived to be 99 and was in perfect health right up to the end. I was quite fond of her. She had a wealth of stories about the old country and was good at telling them in a heavy Russian-Yiddish accent.

I perhaps should mention that all my adult life in this city I've been taken for Jewish. Before that I lived in a Catholic cocoon. True, my first playmate was Larry Ginzburg, a pale skinny boy who lived above a shoe-repair store around the corner from the house where I grew up in New Jersey. Halfway through our morning's play, Larry's mother would call us in for vanilla junket, which was even better than the vanilla ice cream cones Mr. Allen made at the Cozy Corner Sweet Shop around the corner.

But I have fond memories of Mrs. Ginzburg, not on account of her junket but because I sensed qualities in her that even at a young age I found irresistible. I knew my mother loved me, but she never expressed it the way Mrs. Ginzburg showed affection toward her own boy. My mother's highest praise was a backhand compliment like, "He's not so bad, I suppose." But Larry's mother exuded human warmth like an exotic scent. I think it was in her kitchen I decided I would marry a woman like her.

And I did. Sheila is a sweetheart. She happens also to be Jewish, though she's always taken for gentile in a city that has more Jews in it than any other on earth. She looks and talks like New York Irish because she grew up in that kind of neighborhood. It's not her fault people assume she's what they want to think she is. It's the same reason, thanks to my big nose and German last name, most people assume I'm Jewish. I have never pretended to be Jewish, and it's only after the fact that it dawns on me that a particular job interview went so well or a personal confidence half-whispered in my ear happened not because I'm such a likable, obviously trustworthy fellow, but because of mistaken identity. When we're in a playful mood, I sometimes introduce Sheila as my shabbos goy (the gentile who performs ordinary tasks forbidden to Orthodox Jews on the sabbath) and she refers to me as her rebbe (rabbi). Of course, we always let people in on the joke.

"My father's mother had a tray just like that," Marc said, staring at ours as if it were the very same one. He turned toward me as if I must be the source of the object in question.

"It was my nanna's," Sheila said. "She brought it with her from the old country. Weighs a bloody ton, but we keep it for her sake."

"Amazing," he mumbled, ignoring the sugar and milk Sheila was pushing his way. He twisted around for another look at the sideboard and other items that had caught his attention earlier. "And those...?"

"Nanna's too. Most of them. She never threw anything out and never bought anything new. Sentimental, I guess. Like me," she added with a smirk I happen to consider only appropriate to our bedroom.

Marc scarcely touched his tea. He seemed content to sit and listen to my wife blather on about how happy we were to find our apartment when we did, both of us being out of work at the time, and how much she liked living in that part of town though she had grown up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she had been happy too... plus half a dozen other topics. Finally she produced a small plastic bag from the pocket of her jeans. "Here's your quarters. Twelve of them."

"But I only need..."

"Like Gerry said, the machines sometimes give up the ghost. You have to bribe them to finish the job."

Marc stared despairingly at the two crumpled singles he had laid down beside his cup. "I only..."

"You'll pay us next time. We're neighbors, aren't we?" Sheila said, extending her small white hand toward his hairy knuckles. But she only patted the air above his wrist. "Don't be a stranger. Sure, next time I'll make a soda bread."

He grinned as if she had just invited him to stay for dinner and come back tomorrow, too, when in fact she was giving him the bum's rush. We had plans to catch a movie that was scheduled to start in half an hour.

I led him back down the long hallway. He ignored me just as he did earlier as soon as my wife came on the scene. I doubt he heard me repeat her invitation to come visit again. He didn't even say goodbye.

The movie wasn't very good, the remake of a comedy that was a big hit 30 years earlier. Sheila didn't think much of it either. But she likes going to movies, almost any movie, and is always in a good mood afterward. There wasn't much to say about the film, so we reverted to the event that had claimed our attention earlier in the day. I asked if she thought Marc was married.

"No way."

"Because he's not wearing a ring?"

"Not just that."

"What, then?"

"I can tell. And never has been."

"How do you know?"

She shrugged and assumed the expression I used to see on her grandmother's face when I asked for her views on a particular political issue or the possibility of rain that day. Then she smiled and asked if I was in the mood for Chinese.

It must have been the idea of a young Marc Greenblatt that put me in mind of someone else my wife and I befriended back when we were first married. David Lapidus was the son of a short white-haired man who taught philosophy at Yeshiva University. David's mother was a tall, elegant woman whose own mother was a refugee from Nazi Austria. We only made their acquaintance because the name that appeared on our letter box—the legal tenant being long-gone—as well as on the panel of doorbells in the building's entrance foyer, happened to be the same as theirs. If management knew the original tenant from whom we "bought" the apartment wasn't living there, they could have evicted us. But having the same name on the bell as the Lapiduses also meant we sometimes got their mail.

It never crossed my mind that they assumed I was Jewish when they invited us into their apartment to ask that we pass on their letters to them. Nor did it occur when soon after that their son began dropping by our apartment a couple times a week. He was about ten years younger than us and attending nearby New York University. Small like his father, David was shy but eager for company and good conversation. Sheila liked him as much as I did and treated him to her homemade breads and cookies. In turn, his grandmother who lived in the apartment right next to ours shared her honey cakes and hammantaschen (my wife insists it's pronounced hum-mantaschen) on Purim.

David and I would talk about everything and everything until Sheila started to get ready for bed. He took that as his cue to leave. Not that my wife wasn't part of the reason he came to visit. She rarely joined in our conversations, but she kept passing back and forth through the living room, and David's eyes never missed a chance to feast on her. When she smiled, I doubt he heard anything I said.

After NYU David went on for post-graduate studies at the University of Michigan. When he returned to New York he took a teaching job at City College and we rarely saw him.

Years passed. We looked forward to having a child of our own, but Sheila's gynecologist told us a pregnancy could be risky. We considered adopting but decided to devote ourselves to our jobs as social workers. Then we moved. Our new apartment, the one we live in now, isn't far from our old place, but it's in the East Village, a different world from Greenwich Village proper, which was then filling up with migrants from the Midwest and South, replacing an older generation of native New Yorkers like the Lapiduses.

More years passed. One day we got a letter from a former neighbor, an elderly woman, saying she was moving and would we like the writing desk Sheila had always admired whenever we visited. I drove over to pick it up and ran into David Lapidus in the elevator. I gave him a big hello, but he barely nodded in response. The more I talked, the more uneasy he seemed. I was shocked to see he was prematurely gray and had deep lines in his face.

The elevator door opened on the main floor. Waiting in the lobby was an old man in a wheelchair. His aged but still attractive wife stood protectively behind him.

"How are you, Mr. Lapidus?" I said.

"How does it look?" he growled. His wife raised an eyebrow, and I realized she was waiting for me to step aside. I held the elevator door open until she had the wheelchair safely within. I waited till the box started its climb, then turned around expecting to see David again. But he was already on his way out of the building's main entrance.

Why is it we remember certain moments with a pang, not only remember, but can't stop recalling them over and over? That moment at the elevator, looking down at Mr. Lapidus—he died the following year—recurs to me almost daily. Is it because of the embarrassment I still feel for the insensitive way I greeted him? Was it the shock of seeing three people I had known as young or in the fullness of life disabled or prematurely aged: a vigorous man in his prime felled by stroke, a young man's youth vanished before he ever got to live it? Or do I still cringe at the memory because I suspect they had believed all those years that I was Jewish, had somehow found out otherwise, and resented my having deceived them?

That scene replayed itself even more than usual in the days after Marc Greenblatt came to ask for coins to do his wash. I regretted having used a Yiddish expression when we first met on the building's elevator.

"You're overthinking as usual," my wife told me. "What makes you think Marc cares if you're Jewish or not? Some Jews can't stand other Jews, just like some Catholics can't stand other Catholics."

"But you saw how he warmed up to you after you told him about your grandmother... not that he needed much encouragement."

She gave me her nanna's narrow old-country stare, then went back to packing up our wash for the weekly trip to the basement. I do the actual washing, though I fear the rats more than she does.

But that day I had more than rodents for company.

"Hello," I said in what I hoped was an impersonal tone. Marc glanced my way as if he had never laid eyes on me, never mind been treated to my wife's hospitality while occupying my favorite chair. I began stuffing clothes into the only other machine in the tiny wash room, just an extension really of the space where the garbage cans were kept, annoyed I couldn't hide my wife's panties and bras from his line of sight. He began transferring wet clothes into the dryer behind us. I put four quarters into the machine's slot and pushed hard. It started with a jerk, much like its elevator cousin, and began squirting a thin stream of tepid water into the drum like an old man with prostate.

Marc finished putting his own wash into the dryer—less than half a load, a bachelor's mix of old-fashioned boxer shorts and long dark socks. I was hoping he would leave without our having to exchange any more words. By this time I was sure he had figured out I wasn't Jewish and resented my "pretending" to be so. Then I recalled that the dryer rarely got clothes dry on just one cycle. To dry anything properly, it took at least one and a half. But surely he had discovered that by now, or maybe the old dryer did dry his smaller load well enough for him not to have to put it through a second go-round.

"That machine isn't exactly state of the art," I said. "I have extra quarters if you need them."

He slammed the dryer door shut and reached into the back pocket of his baggy black chinos. He pulled out a bulging wallet—receipts he couldn't bear to part with? family photos? ancient love letters? He took out a very wrinkled dollar bill. "I owe you," he said, stiff-arming the money my way. Then he turned toward the dryer's oval window and began staring at the rotating wash as if he were looking at a TV screen, a lonely ten-year-old sitting cross-legged on the floor watching Saturday-morning cartoons.

"You're from New Jersey," he said as if talking to someone inside the dryer.

"That's right."

"Clifton, wasn't it?"

I had mentioned when he came to visit that I was not a native New Yorker, but couldn't recall saying more than that.

"Cliffside Park."

"Right," he said. "I knew a couple guys from Cliffside Park. Did you know the Silbermans? They lived on Knox Avenue."

"I... don't think so."

"Joe Glassberg? Short, fat guy."

"Cliffside Park was a pretty big place even when I was growing up."

"Sure, sure. I just thought maybe you'd run into them..."

I realized what he was implying. Jews were few and far between in Cliffside Park. There was only one in my high school class.

"Look," I said, "I'm not actually..."

But he wasn't listening, and I realized what he was seeing through the window of that old dryer had nothing to do with either wet wash or old TV shows.

"How long have you two been married," he said, "if you don't mind my asking?"

"Sheila and I will be married 22 years next month."

He removed his gaze from the dryer and nodded as if I had told him something extraordinary. "That's a long time. Mazel tov!"

It was now or never. Otherwise he would go on assuming I was what I wasn't, maybe with a similar moment to the one I had experienced that day with the Lapiduses. But I said, "Have you ever been married?"

"Me? No. Well, briefly. Less than a year."

"Sorry to hear that."

He shrugged. "My mother talked me into it. The girl was nice enough. Old-fashioned, though. All she wanted was a house and a bunch of kids... Orthodox. I should have put my foot down and said no. But... well, you know how mothers are."

My own parents would have preferred that I married a Catholic girl. But they took to Sheila big-time, and after that it didn't matter.

"Great gal, your wife," Marc said, hitching up his pants and pulling his belt in a notch. "I gotta run. Nice talking to you."

"Same here," I said as the elevator door opened as if it had been waiting there for him. "I'm not Jewish!"

Marc turned slowly and regarded me as if I had just announced I was gay or Inuit.

"Okay," he said with a nod and a faint grin.

"Stop by again," I stammered. "Sheila makes a wicked pound cake... on a Sunday, I mean."

He laughed. You wouldn't think that mug of his was capable of so much levity.

"Sunday's good," he said. "But any day is fine. I'm not observant," he added as he turned toward the waiting elevator and stepped inside with surprising agility.

"See you," I said as the usually arthritic doors snapped shut without hesitation, as if, despite the heft of its load, it felt 50 years younger.