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He sat up, amazed at the intuition of women.
“You haven’t read it, have you?”
“Of course not. I would never do anything like that without your permission.”
“I can’t talk about it, not yet. But you trust me, don’t you?”
“Always.”
“It’s an ethical issue, there’s a lot at stake. My job, the company’s future, maybe even my life….”
Startled, she sat up.
“Aaron! Stop being dramatic, you’re frightening me.”
“I don’t know, remember Hinkel? Hinkel made a noise about something, I’m not sure what, and then he’s gone. Suddenly, just like that.”
“You think the company—”
“Shhh! I’m trying not to think anything at the moment. All I know is that when something’s wrong the public has the right to know….”
“But the company’s never let you down before.”
He drank in her confidence, wishing he had more of her blind faith. She is younger than me, he thought, she is sheltered by the community. She hasn’t experienced the world beyond, a cosmos that is morally ambiguous, that is complex in its judgment, but I love her nevertheless. Kissing her he felt a ripple of passion in his loins.
“Wake me early in the morning,” he whispered softly, as if he feared the Almighty would hear his lust, then he relaxed his morally conflicted bulk and in an instant he was asleep and snoring.
Aaron Gluckstein was famous for two things. One was his sneeze: allergic to dust, he would often fire off a series of earsplitting eruptions that sounded like sudden sharp gunshots. The other was his snore. It was legendary: an incessant rumbling that began in the back of the throat, like a low growl, and built until it reached a pitch that caused eardrums to vibrate, set windowpanes rattling and dogs howling. Oblivious to the suffering it inflicted, the snore continued to increase until it peaked suddenly in a high-pitched whistle, only to start the cycle all over again, all night through. Complex in its musicality it was the mother of all snores, the maestro of uncontrollable body noises, putting other physical faux pas such as burping, breaking wind, and stomach growls firmly in the shade.
In another era Aaron might have had a lucrative career as a circus performer, Myra often told him. “Aaron: the
snore that shook a nation,” she would say, picturing an enormous striped tent with a hand-painted sign with gold lettering, her son sleeping soundly in his pajamas behind a veil of gauze watched by an amazed and adoring audience. Myra had even considered the possibility of matchmaking him with a deaf wife, so worried was she about finding any woman who would tolerate such a racket. When she had come upon the weeping Miriam a month after the wedding, Myra was terrified Aaron’s new wife was going to announce that she could no longer tolerate his sleeping habits. To hear that her son was merely an incompetent lover was a huge relief—this she could rectify.
As for Miriam, the snore had been a problem. For the first week the poor woman had hardly slept, lying beside this colossus who transformed into a howling wind-box every time he fell asleep. Driven to the brink of exhaustion she took sleeping pills, but found that the snore penetrated even through the muffled dreaming the drugs induced, thus transforming the beating of an angel’s wings into the roar of an approaching train, the gentle lapping of a phosphorescent sea into a screaming tempest.
After much deliberation and a visit to her favorite rabbi who had advised her to, “Be like water around a rock: embrace the rock, accept it, then begin to erode it quietly,” Miriam had decided that her only course of action was to incorporate the noise into her own rituals for falling asleep. And so Aaron’s young wife from Chicago trained herself, like Pavlov’s dog, not only to relax alongside her husband’s snore but to love it and even expect it. Within a month she could not get to sleep without the accompanying orchestrated cacophony of whistling air and grunts. So now, smiling at the familiar rumble, she curled up against him and fell asleep.
She woke to find her husband’s mouth between her legs, his tongue already creating a whirlwind of pounding pleasure that left her thighs trembling. Not wanting to arrive at what she shyly referred to as “the top of Jacob’s ladder” without him she pulled him up. Carefully positioning himself above her, he took his full weight onto his elbow and eased himself inside her. He was an expansive man in all matters and it always took a moment before Miriam’s pain transformed itself into a mounting bliss.
Staring down at his wife, Aaron thought he had never seen such beauty. Pacing himself carefully to the growing blush that traveled from her neck up to her forehead, he increased his tempo until he too was tottering on the highest rung of pleasure. Miriam’s climax began first; contracting, she cried out and her cries triggered his own. Deep waves of pleasure rippled from deep within his body, shaking his flesh and causing flashes behind his eyes. In a moment of spiritual revelation he realized it was the most powerful orgasm he had ever experienced. It was then that his heart exploded and Aaron realized he was dying. “I love you!” he shouted and collapsed on top of Miriam. His huge heart gave one last thud then stilled forever.
For a moment she lay there confused. Then, as Aaron’s mass solidified into a profound weight that pushed her down into the mattress, she began screaming.
A story above, Myra woke, dutifully screwed in her hearing aid as she did every morning, then wandered downstairs for breakfast. As she hobbled past her son’s bedroom she heard a pitiful moaning. Pushing the door open she found Miriam, still pinned beneath her dead husband, sobbing in shock.
On the last day of shiva, the seven-day formal mourning period, Miriam and Myra ushered friends and mourners from the house, uncovered the mirrors, replaced the photographs of Aaron, and gave the last of his clothes away to charity.
Dressed from head to toe in black with a heavy wig covering every strand of her light brown hair, Miriam collapsed in a chair. It was the first time she’d been alone since Aaron’s death, and, with the clarity that comes with grieving, it finally occurred to her that her life would never be the same again. It was a terrible realization. As she reached for a piece of matzo—Miriam had dropped ten pounds in weight in under a week—she began to shake with fear of the void that had suddenly opened before her. What was she to do now?
“Continue living. This is what all widows do—believe me, I know. Tomorrow you will go back to your job at the kindergarten, then you will come home and we will eat, maybe take a little walk, go to shul, and eventually the pain will subside. Time blunts everything.” Myra spoke as if she had read Miriam’s mind.
The retired academic had aged twenty years in a week, her face collapsing further in on itself as if grief had literally punched her. Her eyes, which had always retained the mischief and flirtatiousness of her youth, had dimmed, and she could hardly walk for the sorrow of losing her only child. Leaning heavily against the back of a chair, the ancient matriarch pulled herself toward the table.
“Maybe God has blessed us; maybe you are with child?” Myra’s face filled briefly with hope, but Miriam shook her head and squeezed down the sorrow that filled her chest for the hundredth time that day.
That night the widow turned back Aaron’s side of the bed as she always did, wiped her face clean with cold cream, peeled off her wig, and pulled on the heavy flannel nightgown he had given her as part of his wedding gift. As she reached into the cupboard for a new tube of toothpaste she noticed the bottle of aftershave tucked behind some towels. “It is a small sin of vanity,” Aaron would say, smiling. “God forgives us the small sins.” Remembering, Miriam opened the bottle. The scent immediately conjured up her dead husband. Furtively she splashed some behind her ears then breathed in. It was like he was holding her again in his arms. Carefully replacing the bottle she went to bed.
Her side of the bed was glacial. It was now December and New York City had plunged into its usual big freeze. Thankful for the woolly socks on her feet she stretched her limbs over to Aaron’s side. It was strange not to bump immediately against his body. He used to take up three-quarters of the bed and Miriam found herself even missing the little slope his weight made that she constantly had to avoid rolling down. Sighing gently, grateful for her faith and her belief in heaven, where she would see her husband again, she began to drift off into sleep. And then she heard it.
