“Not bloody likely,” Ritchie said.
“What type of atheist are you, anyhow?” Grelitch asked.
“How many types are there?”
“At least two. Intellectual and instinctive.”
“I guess I’m the intellectual type.”
“Aha!” Grelitch said.
“What, aha?”
“Out of your own mouth you have proven a thesis which I have long held. Jews are not instinctive atheists. Jews, even the dumbest among us, are born arguers, which is to say, intellectuals. No Jew comes to suicide without a long, reasoned argument in his mind, an argument that takes into account the question of God’s view on suicide.”
The doorbell rang again. Grelich opened the door. “Solomon!” he cried, seeing the tall black man on the other side. “Solomon Grundy, the Ethiopian Jew,” he explained to Ritchie.
“Can you hear me, Moise?” Solomon said. “Esther gave me this address.”
“Yes, yes I can hear you, Solomon. You have come to the apartment of therman who owns my body. Unfortunately, I’m still in it.”
“How can that be?”
“It’ll be sorted out presently. Meanwhile, what do you have to tell me? Some more of your mystic African Hasidic pseudo-scientific nonsense?”
“I simply come as a friend,” Solomon said.
“That’s very nice,” Grelich said. “The murderer returns to weep over the corpse he has made.”
“I don’t quite understand your point,” Solomon said.
“The point is, where were you when I needed a friend? Where were you before I killed myself?”
“Killed yourself? You don’t sound very dead to me.”
“I tried. It’s an accident that I’m alive.”
“So might we all say. But something that is tantamount to an accident can be said never to have happened.”
“Sophistry,” Grelich shouted.
Solomon sat silent for a long moment, and then nodded his head. “I’ll accept that. The fact is, I was not a very good friend. Or rather, I was not a good enough friend at the time you needed one.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Grelich, momentarily uncertain of the line Solomon was taking.
“We are both responsible for what happened,” Solomon said. “You elected yourself a victim, I perforce became a killer. Together we obliterated a life. But we reckoned without God.”
“How do you figure?” Grelich asked.
“We thought we could produce the nothingness of death. But God said, “That’s not how it’s going to be.” And he left us both alive and able to suffer the consequences of the deed we attempted, but didn’t quite bring off.”
“God wouldn’t do that,” Grelich said. “That is, if He existed.”
“He does.”
“What kind of a principle could He make of that?”
“He doesn’t have to make a principle out of it. He is not restricted to His own precedent. He can do what he wants fresh every time. This time it’s for you to suffer, and you deserve it, since God never told you it was all right to suicide.”
Ritchie loved listening to what was going on. He qvelled (a word he would soon learn) to hear the aggressive, intellectual Grelich getting it in the neck from a guy like Solomon, who came on like a religious rapper and really knew how to dish it out.
But it occurred to Ritchie that all the talk was on Grelich, and none of it was on him.
“Hey, fellows,” he said, “it looks like this talk could go on for a while, and I haven’t even been introduced.”
Grelich sullenly made the introductions.
“Why don’t we get a bite to eat?” Ritchie said, now that he found himself able to speak. “I could use something, myself.”
“Is there a vegetarian restaurant around here?” Grelich asked.
“Christ, I don’t know,” Ritchie said. “There’s a pretty good Cuban cafe just a couple blocks from here.”
“I wouldn’t eat that
“So recommend your own place, big mouth,” said Ritchie.
“Gentlemen,” said Solomon, “we will take a taxi, which I will pay for, and we will go to Ratstein’s on the Lower East Side.”
The taxi dropped them on the corner of 2nd Avenue and Fourth Street. A corner place, Ratstein’s was open. Inside it was big—it must have had over a hundred tables, all empty except for two men at a front table, arguing over coffee and blintzes.
“We’ll sit in the back, at the Philosopher’s Table,” Solomon said, and led them to an oval table with chairs for eight.
“Schlepstein from NYU often shows up here,” Solomon said. “And sometimes Hans Werthke from Columbia.”
Ritchie had never heard of these men. And he didn’t much like vegetarian food. He settled for a plate of egg cookies and a celery tonic. Grelich ordered strawberry blintzes, Esther took rice pudding, and Solomon ordered the rice and vegetables dish.
Their waiter was a short, plump, middle-aged man with a fringe of pale thinning hair and a vaguely European look. He moved slowly on what appeared to be painful feet.
“I’ll need this table by 7 pm,” he said. “It’s reserved.”
It’s only 3 o’clock now,” Grelich said. “God forbid that your famous philosophers should have to sit anywhere else. We’ll be out of here long before they start their discussions.”
“Our customers are used to seeing them here,” the waiter said. “I am Jakob Leiber and I am here to serve you.”
The talk was general for a while, with one after another relating incidents of their day. From their conversation, Ritchie got an impression of an older New York, filled with old law tenements, push carts, micvahs, and study rooms for young scholars. He wondered if they weren’t talking about a New York of a hundred years ago, not today.
In the taxi down Second Avenue he had noticed the Hispanic food stores, perfumeries, lunch counters and laundries. What once might have been a Jewish neighborhood had become a Hispanic barrio or whatever they called their slum neighborhoods.
He commented on this to Esther. She told him, “Everything’s changed. I’ve heard Ratstein’s only stays open because of the support of some wealthy Jewish mafia types who live in New Jersey and need a place for lunch on their trips into the city.”
“That reminds me of this movie I saw,” Ritchie said. “There was this Jewish mobster and his daughter, and this other mobster, a young guy, falls in love with the first mobster’s daughter and goes back in time to kill the man who became her husband but didn’t treat her right. I forgot how they got the time machine, but it seemed pretty logical at the time.”
“Did he get the girl?” Esther asked.
“Sort of. But there was a complication.”
“There’s always a complication in invented stories,” Grelich said. “But life isn’t like that. Life is terribly simple.”
“I don’t agree,” Ritchie said, recognizing Grelich’s propensity for climbing out on an unstable premise and inviting someone to knock him off. “I was writing a story about a similar situation—it’s an old theme, you know— and all I found were complications. Christ, even my complications had complications.”
