For this Woman Listen Her Name It’s Not So Important Whose Husband the Schmuck He was Affiliated and Died Old Story I Know You’ve Heard it All Before the Long and the Short of It Both but He Really Left Her Without a Shekel in Life Insurance and—the line’s essentially endless, and selfserving, snaking down the most civic of streets from City Hall to the Battery to wall all of lower Manhattan in bitch lately kvetch, advertised large; everyone complaining to bargain whether a plea or a promise, demanding a hearing, a ruling, advice, God the Law, someone asking is this goose kosher yet (it’s been spoiled a week she’s been waiting), another wanting to know if she should immerse her new plates in the sink or like what, you want I should go knock a hole in the ice of the Hudson, my husband won’t grant me a divorce, my son’s possessed by a dybbuk but the dybbuk’s better behaved than Sammy ever was, what should I do? I’m sorry, she goes on talking to an infertile woman seeking interdiction, divine or not, whatever you have, intervention, I’ll have what she’s having, a willing ear, an open coat to cry in, you call that a lining, call that a line — I placed all my trust in Him. He said pray, God I prayed. He said fast, futz me I fasted, right quick. I lost sleep over this. And weight, too, but that I don’t mind. I’m talking a moon of my life getting squared with the shylocks. He said if I call in the next ten minutes He’ll throw in a set of knives at no extra cost. A totebag our gift to you, an umbrella free I could really use now. Winter prevailing. A week later, still in line, her matter unheard by the court, she’s sleeping on the steps along with the other supplicants under the weather, that indivisible democracy the sky and its heaven holding their Law above nature’s, above rules & orders menschmade, tented out in the freeze under the waterproof of the lawyer’s suitjacket, spread over the hang of the higher step and held there in place by the sound sleep of another: his wife she’s moaning in dream, mumbling she’s talking, exposed…no widow, how she was only Abe’s lover, and one of many at that, what’re you talking suspected, we knew all along, his old shiksa receptionist, couldn’t you tell, I mean just take a look at those thighs — booking package cruises out of the Port of Miami by morning, afternooners he’d called them a quick shtup under the desk or in the trash alley adjoining the kurva, the slut, poo poo poo my wife, her lawyer says, notified Him in writing, a letter, notarized, it’s gotten a smudge damp if it’s not just all wet: her pilgrimages detailed, receipts stapled to prayers, itemized her 1.) hopes, & 2.) dreams, waving a sheaf of them under the nose of the press, sniffling, dripping ink to tissue the morning editions…Gottenyu, she’s saved everything.
Menschs in departmentalissue white, laundered daily at a host of area prisons, stream down the steps into morning, keep the supplicants in order with their shepherd crooks, comedy canes.
Ben needs to be found, the woman’s weeping drastic mascara by noon, and the court needs to find Him, hold Him accountable.
Clapboards clap board — we need to do it again.
Slate the docket.
He’ll pay for His sins upon the Day of Judgment, says an old mensch seeking a last name change to a calling surely unpronounceable. Little Timmy Czyczwitz-Szyszkowitz. If that’s still available.
Too late, she says stifling, too late for me.
A finger — which one, unwedded — over a handful of hours earlier for Ben way out on the coast, catching wind of what westerly passes for calamity these days: dirt unearthed to be made verity as scandal, a dungheaped museum or monument, the pile aside the wait of a grave…received ideas convening conventional wisdom, what courtroom’s that in, by closing an adjournment to truth too lazy to check up on or within which to bog down, just the facts.
Having arrived in the realm of Angels, He’ll read the news in the paper this homeless mensch, His benchmate, has folded into a skullcap over his burgeoning fro. His tallis a trashbag ripped through. Womenfolk poodle down the promenade, leashed to their menschs by tzitzit, tefilin, how they’re stalking their shadows, their noses buried a moshl, a nishl, in the middling pages of books. New beards scratch on old chins. An icy gust of skirts. Scarves and nippy mittens and hats.
