Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard goes to the party in the dead orthodontist’s suit with a liter of water in a canvas bag on the passenger seat.
Gideon Sonnenfeld’s novel has been optioned. A producer named Alec Ravitch holds the rights and a director attached for nine weeks and a house off Doheny with a view of the whole basin from Century City to the towers downtown, and he is throwing a dinner for forty on a Thursday in June, and Sonnenfeld has asked Grossbard to come, and Grossbard said yes before Sonnenfeld finished the sentence.
Two valets work the street with clipboards. The one who takes the car is a young man named Arturo who says good evening rabbi, because the yarmulke is right there, black suede, and Grossbard says good evening and asks how many cars he has done tonight, and Arturo says thirty one, and it is nine minutes past seven.
Inside, the glass wall stands open and the pool runs to the edge, and past it the city has started to come on.
He takes the bottle out of the bag and carries it. He does not set it down all night.
A woman in her fifties in a black jumpsuit reaches him in the first four minutes. She runs marketing at a streamer and she has decided in advance that he is about to be uncomfortable.
“I hope you’re not offended by any of this.”
“By what.”
She waves at the room.
“It’s a beautiful house,” Grossbard says. “Whose is the Diebenkorn.”
She has to go find out. She comes back nine minutes later with the answer, which is that it belongs to Ravitch’s second wife and hangs here under an arrangement, and they talk about that for twenty minutes and she does not apologize again.
He eats nothing. He drinks his own water.
A young actress named Simone, twenty six, up for the part of the gabbai’s daughter, comes at him with real questions and a notebook open on her phone. He answers all of them. When she asks what the gabbai’s daughter would have worn to a wedding in 1994 he tells her he has no idea and gives her the number of a woman at the Barn who does. He does not flirt and he does not teach, and afterward she tells two people he is the least strange religious man she has ever met.
At 7:50 Alec Ravitch finds him by the kitchen island and apologizes about the food.
“I should have gotten a kosher caterer. Gideon told me not to bother and I listened to him and I’ve been sick about it for a week.”
“He was right.”
“You’re not eating anything.”
“I’m not eating anything.”
“Is there something we can do.”
“There is,” Grossbard says. “You can stop talking about it inside ten seconds and never raise it again, and I’ll have the best night of my month.”
Ravitch laughs and stops. He tells his wife later it was the smoothest thing anybody did to him all year.
Somebody’s cousin asks whether it’s a fast day.
“No. I just don’t eat here.”
“Is that a religious thing?”
“Yes.”
“Cool,” the cousin says, and that is the end of it.
He reads the room the way he reads a kiddush, because it is the same room. Twenty minutes in he could draw it. The director between projects with three people around him, two of whom are there because the third one is. The executive of about thirty four who has survived a regime change by nine days and whose laugh comes half a beat early all night. The first wife who still gets invited and has been seated at the far end on purpose and knows it. The lawyer everyone uses, who talks to no one for more than ninety seconds and touches every person in the house. And Sonnenfeld, the reason for the evening, backed into the corner by the pool and unable to get out.
Nothing here that isn’t at a bar mitzvah on Pico. Better lighting. Same arithmetic.
At dinner they put him between the marketing woman and a man named Sol Bregman, seventy eight, three Emmys in the eighties, buried his wife in 2019, who decides over the soup that he is going to get somewhere with the rabbi.
“I don’t believe any of it.”
“Neither do half my members.”
“I mean I’ve read it. The whole thing, a decent translation, cover to cover, two years ago. It’s a mess. A jealous character who drowns everybody and can’t take criticism.”
“That’s a fair reading of about a third of it.”
“So how do you do it.”
“The arguments are bad,” Grossbard says. “I want that on the table first so we don’t lose an hour. I’ve read the arguments for God, the good ones and most of the bad ones, and they don’t work. Aquinas doesn’t work. The fine tuning thing doesn’t work. If you came at me with the arguments I’d take your side and I’d run it better than you’re running it.”
Bregman puts down his fork.
“Then what.”
“I don’t believe in Him on Tuesdays.”
The table laughs, six people, and the marketing woman writes it down.
Bregman does not laugh. He waits.
“You want the other answer.”
“I’ve got nowhere to be.”
“Four minutes.”
“What?”
“Four minutes of certainty in fifty nine years. Total. Cumulative. Ninety seconds of it at my father’s kevurah and the rest spread out over some mornings.” He turns the bottle a quarter turn on the tablecloth. “I built the entire thing on those four minutes and I’d do it again tomorrow. That’s the answer. It doesn’t sell and I don’t sell it. From the bimah I give them a better answer that I believe less.”
Bregman looks at him a long moment.
“That’s the first honest thing anyone has said to me in this house.”
“Wait till you hear the second one.”
They talk until the plates go and the party has moved outside without them.
Around ten he ends up at the pool with Ravitch’s wife, Dahlia, forty seven, who has kept the house between them all night and has now run out of house.
Ocean Parkway. Beis Yaakov through eleventh grade. Her father has not taken her calls since 2006 and her mother calls on Thursdays from a phone in the basement.
She tells him this in about ninety seconds, flat, the way you say a thing you have said before.
“So,” she says. “Go ahead.”
“Go ahead what.”
“You people always have the speech.”
“I don’t have a speech. I have one question if you want it and you can say no.”
“What’s the question.”
“Does your mother know about the Diebenkorn.”
Dahlia Ravitch laughs until she has to put a hand on the coping.
They talk twenty five minutes and she does most of it. He asks about her father twice and lets it go both times. He does not mention a shul. He does not mention Shabbos. He does not give her a card, and at the end she says, so you’re not going to try, and he says no, and she says why not, and he says because you’d say yes to be polite and then you’d have to avoid me for a year, and I’d rather keep the twenty five minutes.
The car comes at 11:50. A hundred and four total, Arturo says. He is nineteen and takes two classes at Santa Monica College.
Grossbard drives home on Sunset with the windows down.
He gets in at 12:35, hangs the jacket on the chair, and stands at the counter eating corn flakes with a banana cut into them, the first thing he has eaten since two in the afternoon.
Dina comes in in her robe.
“How was it.”
“I had a great time.”
“You always do,” she says, and takes a flake out of the bowl and eats it and goes back to bed.
Dahlia Ravitch comes to the Barn on a Shabbos in March. She sits in the last row of the women’s section with her coat on and leaves eight minutes before the end.
He does not see her. Nobody does.
