'Am I really that transparent? Fuck!' Her look is quizzical, but I don't feel like this is a quiz.
'We could go break into St. Patrick's instead,' I suggest.
'With our clothes off?'
'I'd have to keep on my socks. Do you know what kind of people touch the ground there?'
'I'll have to say ix-nay on the athedral-cay. I can see the headlines now: 'RECORD EXEC DAUGHTER FOUND PLAYING PORNISH PRANKS IN PATRICK'S. 'We thought she was such a nice Jewish girl,' neighbors say. ''
'You're Jewish?' I ask.
Norah looks at me like I just asked if she was really a girl.
'Of courseI'm Jewish.'
'So what's that like?' I ask.
'Are you kidding me?'
Do I look like I'm kidding her?
'No,' I say. 'Really. What's that like?'
'I don't know. It's just something that is. It's not something that's like. '
'Well, what are your favorite things about it?'
'Like the fact that there are eight days of Hanukkah?'
'Sure, if that means something to you.'
'All it really means to me is that I was slightly less bitter about not having a tree when I was a kid.'
'So what about the real things?' I ask. I want to know more.
'The real things?'
'Yeah. Try.'
She thinks for a second. 'Okay. There's one part of Judaism I really like. Conceptually, I mean. It's called tikkun olam. '
'Tikkun olam,'I repeat.
'Exactly. Basically, it says that the world has been broken into pieces. All this chaos, all this discord. And our job-everyone's job-is to try to put the pieces back together. To make things whole again.'
'And you believe that?' I ask. Not as a challenge. As a genuine question.
She shrugs, then negates the shrug with the thought in her eyes. 'I guess I do. I mean, I don't know how the world broke. And I don't know if there's a God who can help us fix it. But the fact that the world is broken-I absolutely believe that. Just look around us. Every minute-every single second-there are a million things you could be thinking about. A million things you could be worrying about. Our world-don't you just feel we're becoming more and more fragmented? I used to think that when I got older, the world would make so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You'd think we'd be getting better at it. But there's just more and more chaos. The pieces-they're everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself grasping, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it's right, but because it will mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe in that.'
'Do you really think it's getting worse?' I ask. 'I mean, aren't we better off than we were twenty years ago? Or a hundred?'
'We're better off. But I don't know if the world's better off. I don't know if the two are the same thing.'
'You're right,' I say.
'Excuse me?'
'I said, 'You're right.''
'But nobody ever says, 'You're right.' Just like that.'
'Really?'
'Really.'
She leans into me a little then. Not accidental. But still somehow it feels like an accident-us being here, this night. As if she's reading my mind, she says, 'I appreciate it.' Then her head falls to my shoulder, and all I can feel is her fitting there. I look up, trying to find the sky behind the building, trying to find at least a trace of the stars. When I can't, I close my eyes and try to conjure my own, glad that Norah's not reading my mind just now, because I don't know how I'd react if anyone knew me like that. As we sit in that city silence, which is not so much silence as light noise, my mind drifts back a few minutes, thinking about what she said.
Then it hits me.
'Maybe we're the pieces,' I say.
Norah's head doesn't move from my arm. 'What?' she asks. I can tell from her voice that her eyes are still closed.
'Maybe that's it,' I say gently. 'With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces.'
She doesn't reply, but I can tell she's listening carefully. I feel like I'm understanding something for the first time, even if I'm not entirely sure what it is yet.
'Maybe,' I say, 'what we're supposed to do is come together. That's how we stop the breaking.'
Tikkun olam.
16. NORAH
Nick and I have fallen silent again but I don't think it's the uncomfortable variety of silence. I think it's dawn closing in and we're both as sleepy as we are stimulated, and as Saturday rolls into Sunday, it's almost mesmerizing to look up the canyon to the clouds, murky gray and yellow from the city lights, while on the ground the banking and secretarial types smoke outside the building lobbies as Lincoln Town Cars idle at the curb, waiting to take the overnight workers home. The scions of the financial world here do not appear to notice or care that time could stop at any moment, so why not obey that 'on the seventh day ye shall rest' thing? At least, go out and enjoy your life. Like I am now, watching you.
But I am so greedy to learn more about Nick that I can't bear the silence, even if it's a nice one. Maybe the way to find out more about him is to tell him more about me. So I inform him, 'I get my flannel in the men's department at Marshalls.'
'My mom loves that store,' he says.
'Your mom is smart.'
I wait. Will he tell me more about his mom?
While my mind plays through the information I've compiled about him so far on this night, my mouth is talking stupid fucking Marshalls because my head is still getting around Nick's words about tikkun olam: Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces.
Because I am trying to put together the pieces that make up this guy. Let's review. Straight-edge guy who survived a six-month relationship with Tris. Bassist in a queercore band, promising lyricist. Can get profound (at least for a goyim) in the matters of tikkun olam. And he's a fucking great kisser-but one who said NO to the no- strings-attached sex that was basically offered to him by an idiot girl in a closet at a Where's Fluffy show a couple hours ago, and yet somehow he still managed to pop up at Veselka for her later (pretty fucking sexy move); but then he didn't make a move on her on the 6 train when opportunity and ambience were just so converging as the lights dimmed and the train lurched their bodies together. What am I supposed to do with this guy?
As I lean my head on Nick's arm, I can smell him up close and personal without the club haze of beer and smoke, and he smells faintly of either a cologne spritz or like he had an aromatherapy massage at some spa before this night started, which strikes me as a disturbingly high-maintenance scent for a punk boy. His scent sends the pieces in my mind together, into finally making sense of him.
I may have to issue a retraction to Randy from Are You Randy?
There's no fucking way this Nick guy is one hundred percent straight.
As if to prove my suspicion, Nick takes some Chapstick from his jeans pocket and rubs it on his lips. I'm a Blistex whore myself, so it's not the Chapstick that alerts me; it's the cherry flavor.
If he turns out to be gay, I will be furious. They get all the good ones! I will have no choice but to take it
