Mitzvah Man

6

Early next morning, Adam leaves a note and goes for a walk. Down Broadway he walks and across 72nd Street to the park. The sun shines. He walks through the little pocket of green with the mosaic “Imagine” for John Lennon, then up along the pond where he and Shira bumped against each other in drunken love weekends when he came to town. She was a final-year med student then. She worked like hell to carve open an occasional weekend for them. Sex, new between them, felt like discovery. Holy discovery, he thinks now. Mornings there’d be an awkwardness, an embarrassed innocence he didn’t mind; innocence seemed a privilege they’d attained. Holy. Oh, innocence can be denial: “We’re simple, we live in our own Eden.” But innocence can be a conscious stripping away of ironies, of guardedness. You look deep into her eyes, she into yours, and each of you is caught by the other and pulled under into mystery , both suffused by a holy Presence. A cheap imitation of religion? Adam doesn’t think so. Simply an intimation of the holy—the best that two untrained, worldly people can do to live in God’s Presence. They’d have a cup of coffee and go back to bed; so by the time they left her apartment or, when her housemate was around, a hotel or a friend’s apartment lent them for the weekend, it would be eleven in the morning, and sleepily they’d walk through the park to the little pretend castle of real rock, rocky theater behind the Shakespeare theater, climb stone steps to|6| the terrace he’s climbing now, look down at the Metropolitan and out at the massive apartment buildings along Central Park West and Fifth Avenue, one of them his uncle’s, and the lawn where he played ball as a kid before the park was restored. Clean and beautiful now, it was funky, trashy, then—the fields with scattered bare patches and litter. Even so, beautiful, this castle their domain—he means his and his friends when they were children, his and Shira’s later. He retraces their morning walk this morning. He won’t admit it, but he’s waiting for a message, maybe her voice, some indication of a direction, a secret. The castle, with its weather instruments in the tower, is a center, a receiving station. No secrets come. But the blood is singing in his ears, his heart thumping, his whole body is humming like a great turbine. So, he thinks, he must be heading the right way. He’s lightheaded but also light on his feet. He’s guided by the intensity of the humming. But suppose, he thinks, all there is, is stupid blood singing in my ears. Nothing out there. I look down from up here and maybe there is no pattern unless I create one? Just the park. Just detritus until someone makes a pattern? His heart is beating as if he only recently met Shira and she’s waiting for him, an angel leading him somewhere. On the castle terrace there’s only a couple of old people. But he feels he’s supposed to be here. Then, all of a sudden, whoosh, he’s drawn away—he has to chase the angel—and he runs two steps at a time down the stone steps, lopes through the quiet little garden, Shakespeare’s Garden, south through the park. But where is he going? Is Shira leading him somewhere? When he has to turn east or west to go around the pond, he sees a man about his own age wearing baggy trousers and a down jacket too warm for this beautiful June weather and carrying a green contractor’s bag over his shoulder. The man holds out an open palm. So Adam heads his way and hands the man—or angel—a dollar. Does he want to lead him to the café on the pond? Or maybe to Alice in Wonderland and the model boats? Once they saw Woody Allen on a bench right there, near Fifth and 72nd. He keeps going as the pulse leads and the humming intensifies. He listens down under the hum of blood for her voice, which is always there, retrievable| 61 Mitzvah Man more easily than her face. In fact, he can never, behind his eyes, see her face...