is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau. “All right,” she finally says. “I’ll try one last time, but that’s it. Yes, you’re right this anti-oppression stuff can have a silly side. But that’s true of everything. There’s nothing in life that can’t be ridiculed — even your precious tax law. As for your argument that some people ‘at the bottom of the heap’ have fucked up their own lives, yes, some have. But most of them haven’t. A single mother, black and on welfare, has a million barriers working against her. So social workers — we ‘lefties,’ as you’d say — try to eliminate these barriers and redress structural inequities, like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, so people can live lives of dignity. C’mon, Bobby, don’t look at me like that. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.”
“Avanti popolo.”
Bobby spent one childhood summer in a socialist Zionist camp singing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, every morning, and “The Internationale,” the socialist worldwide anthem, every night, and this was the worst summer of his life.
Judith, sitting cross-legged, facing his sullen profile, touches him on the knee. “You must admit at least it’s a good dream.”
“It’s a stupid dream because it’s just a dream, and built on false premises. You and your ‘idealistic’ profs, and your lefty friends in Israel, you all believe deep down no one can be rich and also have a social conscience. Well, you’re wrong. Some of my clients are extremely wealthy, and donate millions of dollars to charity.”
“So what?” she asks, feeling tired. It’s been a long day, and this isn’t what she was hoping for when she came here tonight. “It’s just a tax break. One of the legal loopholes you find for them so they can pay as few taxes as possible.”
“Fuck, Judith. You spend one day at Dunhill, and you come home a left-wing Moonie.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’ve had the same politics, as you know, ever since high school, when I started thinking for myself. Anyway, if I were a Moonie, I’d rather be a left-wing Moonie than a right-wing Moonie like you.”
“I’m not right-wing. I’m normal.”
“Oh, I see. And I’m abnormal?”
“Well, you’re sure different from everyone else I know.”
“Maybe you know the wrong people.”
“Maybe you do.”
She doesn’t answer. Just stares down at the carpet, thinking fiercely that there’s nothing wrong with her or with the people she met today. She likes them. They make sense to her. A lot more sense than Bobby, who in under a half-hour has managed to ruin all the happiness of her day — the first day she’s felt truly happy or hopeful about anything since coming back to this country almost a year ago.
“Judith,” he says.
“What?” she answers without looking up.
“Judith.”
“What?” She whips her head upwards, glaring.
“I hate fighting with you. Why do we keep fighting?”
“Because we don’t see life the same way. We have different values, politics, weltanschauung. Trivial things like that.”
He sighs. “But that’s what’s so aggravating about you. I don’t believe you actually see life so differently than me. You know as well as I do exactly how things are, and underneath all that lefty shit you’re as hard-headed as they come. But you pretend not to know. You blather on with that mealy-mouthed crap when, underneath it all, you understand exactly how the world really works.”
She turns and looks straight into his eyes. “Yes, Bobby. I do know, as you put it, exactly how the world really works. But maybe I want there to be more to life than just being born, accruing as much wealth as possible, and then dying. What’s so awful about that? At least I’m not just giving up on the world.”
He looks at her more gently now. “Fair enough. I agree, as you know, that there’s more to life than making money. But Judith, don’t waste yourself on lost causes. Don’t throw away all that talent and passion fighting windmills. It’s one thing to try and change things where you have some reasonable chance of success. But banging your head against a brick wall isn’t going to help you or anybody else.”
“I’m not banging my head against a brick wall. Anyway, what would you know? You always play the game — you never challenge, or try to change, anything. You weren’t like this when we were in high school. What happened, Bobby? How did you become so conservative? How did you turn into such a right-wing shmuck?”
“A right-wing shmuck?!” says Bobby. “Well, how did you turn into a left-wing shmuckette?”
“Shmuckette?”
“Well, if there’s a shmuck, there must be a shmuckette.”
She tries not to smile, but can’t help it. “You learned that word in French class, I suppose,” she says.
“From Madame Benoît.” Now they’re both smiling, picturing their wizened prude of a grade nine French teacher teaching them the word shmuckette. “She also taught me this,” he says, leaning forward, bringing his face close to hers: “Ma chérie. Je t’aime.”
“Yeah, sure. Madame Benoît taught you to say, ‘Je t’aime.’ Madame Benoît was your ‘chérie.’”
“You are my chérie. My one and only chérie.”
“Oy,” she says, but smiles. Then she grins.
“Ma chér-r-rie,” says Bobby in what she recognizes as his best attempt at a Parisian accent, and he swoops and plants a kiss on her laughing mouth. His lips feel smooth and firm. Younger than Moshe’s. Then he kisses her neck. Her ear. Her eyes. And again her mouth. His lips on hers are somehow both cool and warm at the same time, like sun-drenched marble. His lips move down and kiss her throat, and now they are sucking gently on her left nipple. Then harder. She forgets all about politics. She forgets about everything.
An hour later she wakes up, déshabillée on the living-room carpet, to the sound of pots and pans clanging in the kitchen and the smell of burning meat.
— 4 —
On Monday Judith makes the hour-long drive to Dunhill, again listening to Israel at Forty. When she arrives, there’s an atmosphere of excitement: that special crackle in the air of the first day of school. Her first class today is with Weick, and he starts off with another class go-around. When her turn comes, Judith speaks briefly, offering an abridged version of what she said four days ago. But she adds, since this course is “Knowledge and Values in Social Work,” that knowledge interests her more than values because it seems to her that most social workers’ values are anyway quite similar, and she’s eager to increase her knowledge about the latest social work theories, having been out of school for the past ten years. When she finishes, she sees Cindy off to the right, waving two fingers at her, and she waves back. Then she recognizes, a little past Cindy, some of the other students from Orientation, including the two women she rode in the elevator with that day. They’re sitting together in the row in front of Cindy, and the pretty dark-haired one is wearing a magenta Chinese-style jacket. Judith didn’t pay much attention to their spiels during Orientation,
