The Book of Life

by Stuart Nadler

Genres: Short Stories

Synopsis

Forced together on a trip from Manhattan to Rhode Island, a father and son attempt to renew their bond over lobster, cigarettes, and a buried secret. A pure-hearted artist finds his devotion cruelly tested, while his true love tries to repent for the biggest mistake of her life. Unwittingly thrust into an open marriage, a man struggles to reconnect with his newly devout son. And in the book's daring first story, an arrogant businessman begins a forbidden affair during the High Holidays. Written in clear, crystalline prose, The Book of Life comprises seven stunning tales about faith, family, grief, love, temptation, and redemption that signal the arrival of a bold and exciting new writer.

Release date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 256

Sample

“Stuart Nadler will end up being compared to people you’ve heard of. Bellow, I’m guessing; Nathan Englander, probably Malamud, I. B. Singer. Heavy hitters. This is both apt and not. Nadler’s great, and those guys are great—so it makes sense. But Nadler (like each of the others) is great in his own way. He addresses tradition, but he captures the right-now as well as anyone I know of. He’s heartbreaking, yet he’s funny. He writes beautifully, but his prose is lean—fat-free, even. He’s really worth reading, so please do.”

—Darin Strauss, bestselling author of Chang and Eng,The Real McCoy, More Than It Hurts You, and Half a Life

“Stuart Nadler is an artist of secrets. Line after line of clear, revealing prose turns out to be incendiary. These are stories that expand without warning. A striking, rousing collection of people waking up fast. Nothing in The Book of Life is without consequence.”

—Rosecrans Baldwin, author of You Lost Me There

“Stuart Nadler treats his characters like people. The Book of Life is a fitting title for this collection—that’s what it’s about: life. These are stories about fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, wives, husbands, friends, lovers—people with complex lives, troubled souls, deep hearts, and messy desires. Nadler is a writer who, like Alice Munro, John Cheever, or Bernard Malamud, does not write about ‘ordinary people’ because he knows there’s no such thing as an ordinary person. Each of these carefully wrought stories is as moving and masterful as a Chopin sonata; the notes and the silences between them will resonate with the reader for a very long time after they’re done.”

—Benjamin Hale, author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“A writer of keen perception and sensibility, Nadler describes the difficult thresholds that separate absence and presence, arrivals and departures, the sacred and profane, bright memory and dark nostalgia. His writing reminds me why I love to read.”

—Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, People I Wanted to Be, and The Necessary Grace to Fall

“In The Book of Life, Stuart Nadler offers a fresh, funny, perceptive take on the current state of the Jewish family, including the families we make with our friends and lovers. Nadler has a gift for comic dialogue and for setting thoroughly modern characters on a collision course with the distant past. A truly talented writer.”

—Sharon Pomerantz, author of Rich Boy

“Stuart Nadler has written seven of the most gorgeous, poignant, intricately crafted, and compulsively readable stories I have read in a long time. His flawed protagonists tend to be forever on the brink of heartbreak, yet the unlikely effect of Nadler’s fiction is that life is continually reaffirmed.”

—Frederick Reiken, author of Day for Night, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, and The Odd Sea

She appeared first to Abe in the parlor, carrying a platter of dates, each wrapped delicately in a thin ribbon of bacon. It was Rosh Hashanah. This was the sort of house his friend Larry Reinstein ran. It was a calculated bit of brashness that made him popular among those he wished to impress, and repulsed those whom he felt obliged to invite, like the rabbi who was milling around, still in his tallith and kippah. Under the lights, the bacon glistened. She held the tray to the side of his body and leaned forward to whisper into his ear, “L’shanah tovah,” her lips brushing against his skin. She was Larry’s daughter.

“You have no earlobes,” she said, stepping back and then rubbing the skin of his ear between her fingers. “I’ve never noticed that before. How strange.”

“Maybe you weren’t looking close enough,” he said.

She smiled and then turned her bare right shoulder toward him. Her blouse seemed designed to fall off her this way. “Oh, I think I’ve looked close enough,” she said.

“Have you, now?”

“Once or twice,” she said. “Or perhaps three times.”

Her laughter sounded very much like her father’s. It was a husky sound, a gust of wind caught within her. She wore a low-cut black blouse and a short black skirt that ended two inches above her knees. He couldn’t look away. Shoshanna, his wife, allowed this sort of behavior, but little else. They held to the old adage, looking but not touching.

“Have you seen my wife?” he asked.

“I haven’t. Isn’t that funny?” She smiled and ran her free hand along the length of his necktie. “I adore silk.”

“Maybe she’s in the yard with the girls,” he said.

“Yes, maybe,” she said, letting go of his tie, her hand brushing the buckle of his belt. “She’s quite the woman, your wife.”

“She is.”

“My mother and my father speak of her often.”

“I’m blessed,” he said.

“Give thanks to God for that,” she answered.

He felt himself flush with color. Behind them, one of the children at the party changed the music on the stereo. The new song was too loud for Rosh Hashanah, and someone immediately rushed toward the radio dials. She put the platter of dates down on a table and stepped slowly out of her heels. For the girl she’d been, she was an improbably sophisticated young woman. He saw no sign of Shoshanna or his girls in the yard. She stepped closer to him. Without her heels, she rose only to his chin.

“Tell me something,” she said.

“As far as Rosh Hashanah parties go, this one’s swinging,” he said.

“You’re not very funny, are you?”

He touched his ear. “You know, they say that not having any earlobes is a sign of hereditary brilliance.”

“So you have no sense of humor, but you think you’re brilliant?”

“Your father and I have made a living selling mediocre food,” he said. “That means one of us is brilliant.”

“I think the jury’s still out,” she said, looking away, her eyes narrowing. “Either way, I like your strange ears.”

“Where’s the booze?” he whispered. “I haven’t seen any.”

“My mother’s trying to quit,” she said, winking. “We’re trying to be accommodating.”

“That’s understandable,” Abe said. Jackie Reinstein was a famous, if not a gentle, drunk. “You wouldn’t have a secret stash somewhere, college girl?”

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Rivkin, I might,” she said. “Follow me.”

Abe had seen little of her over the years. As a girl, she’d been awkward, bucktoothed, clad in orthodontics from the day after her bat mitzvah until the day she graduated high school. He was glad to see she’d changed. She walked in front of him. He held onto the banister as he made his way down the stairs. She carried her heels in her hand. It began quickly. She stepped toward him, put one hand on his shoulder, the other on his belt buckle, and as if she were a physician about to anesthetize him, she whispered, “Just relax.” After a moment, he backed her up against the pool table.

He was not the sort of man to do such a thing. This was something he knew, unquestionably, deep in his heart. If ever he was to turn into one of these men, he would not do it with the daughter of his best friend, however terrific she looked in her skirt and blouse, and then, later, without her skirt and blouse. He had always admired his friend’s pool table, but he had never wished to use it this way. In fact, he thought to do so might violate some deeply crass cliché. And this was a holiday. He would most certainly never commit such a sin during the High Holy Days. In all of Westchester County, he was perhaps the poorest and least observant of Jews, but he knew, at least, when to give respect to God. All of this aside, he knew he shouldn’t expect this ever to happen again. A repeat performance, an encore, or some subsequent rendezvous would certainly be a catastrophically foolish thing to do. Abe Rivkin, for all of his flaws, was not a man who liked to do wrong. He was, after all, a man of business, and this, he knew, was bad business.

Her name was Jane Reinstein.

 

The next day, she appeared on the sidewalk outside the office, standing in the wind on lower Broadway. She was beautiful. This he couldn’t argue with, even if, in the course of the preceding day, he’d hoped otherwise, wishing away the lust he’d felt in Larry’s basement. He’d never met a man who hadn’t been ruined by his mistress. One way or another, something went to hell when a man’s cock ended up where it wasn’t allowed. If there was ever a maxim to live by, this was it.

He paused in the lobby to watch her. She wore a black raincoat that she’d tied loosely at the waist. It was the sort of coat—cut at the knee, open at the chest—that allowed the thought that nothing else was on underneath. The thought was a pleasant one. Her face possessed no lines, only a trace of makeup, and, most important, none of the signs of mischief he took pride in recognizing. This was a skill of paramount importance for any half-decent businessman: a man needed to know when someone was trying to take something from him. In one hand she was holding a black-and-white leather handbag, and in the other she clutched a yellow umbrella. He hadn’t been anxious in the presence of a woman in years.

“What a nice surprise,” he said, a hand on her shoulder. He thought this was a suitable nod to what had happened. “Are you here to see your father?”

“I’m not,” she said, pulling his elbow. “Let’s go for a walk, Abe.”

They turned the corner onto Spring Street. He and Larry had picked SOHO for the headquarters of their business because of the status it afforded them. They’d been nearly destitute as children, and they’d never tired of the accoutrements of good fortune. The rent was exorbitant, but, as Larry liked to joke, it wasn’t as if either of them kept a mistress. It wasn’t just the woman that presented the trouble, but the money a man spent to keep her happy—using the company card at Le Cirque, renting a Carrera soft-top for the day trip to Montauk, booking the honeymoon suite at the St. Regis—that could sink a company’s free capital.

“First thing,” she said. “If we’re going to keep doing this, you’re going to need to get an apartment in the city. I’m not schlepping all the way to Westchester to see you.”

“Do you want to keep doing this?” Abe asked.

“Oh, Abraham,” she said, a hand on his cheek. “Don’t be foolish.”

She pushed him against a wall and kissed him. Her eyes were closed. His were open. In the reflection of a store window, he caught sight of himself. He was good-looking enough. However dubious he was of Jane’s intentions, he allowed himself the benefit of the doubt. He was funny, he knew, and he was successful, and, on a good day, he looked decent in a blazer and slacks.

“I don’t know if I can spring for an apartment, darling,” he said. “New York’s quite an expensive city for a pied-à-terre.”

“Oh, please,” she said, smirking. “You’re lying.”

“I certainly can’t write a check on your behalf.”

“I’m not asking you to write a check,” she said.

“Then what are you asking?”

“Just pinch a little off the top,” she said, pinching him on the stomach.

“Your dad’s a hawk with the books,” he said. “You know that.”

“Don’t lie to me, Abraham,” she said. “I know you control the purse strings. Everyone knows that.”

“They do?”

“Yes, darling,” she said. “You’re the good Jew. My dad’s the bad Jew. This has been established.”

He paused to consider her, standing here with him in the middle of the afternoon. In the light, he thought, she seemed like she might be someone entirely new. She touched the back of his palm gently.

“What do you say?” she asked.

“If I were to do this, however unlikely the possibility,” he said, “where should this apartment be?”

“Wherever,” she said. “Brooklyn is good.”

“I love Brooklyn,” he said.

She pulled him close to her, bringing his head toward the folds of her raincoat. “Look,” she said, pulling the fabric at her chest away to reveal a body unaffected by gravity or childbirth.

“You’re trouble,” he said. “You’re certainly trouble.”

“Tell me I’m sweet.”

“That would be a lie.”

He brought her to Hotel Paulette, a small boutique hotel hidden away in the intricate crosshatch of the West Village. A year ago, he’d taken Shoshanna there to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary. Just a day earlier, he might not have considered ever doing such things, but he found the arrangement—the furtive lurking, the promise of an afternoon in a hotel room, the temptation beneath her raincoat—so foolish that it thrilled him. At his core, he considered himself a serious, intelligent man. He had always thought himself capable of anything he desired. Even this most explicitly forbidden of trysts felt to him somehow manageable. All of life came down on two sides, he believed: that which was within his control, and that which was not.

He looked into the eyes of the receptionist, the same woman who had, twelve months earlier, complimented Shoshanna on her earrings. It felt brazen to do this. His marriage had become an arrangement bereft of such boldness. There was a saucer filled with mints resting on the reception counter. He took one, and put another in his mouth. He wanted to taste good. In the room, Jane was naked within moments.

 

He picked Brooklyn Heights not simply because it was gorgeous, but because, when he was a boy, the neighborhood had seemed so outlandishly extravagant, an exclusive province of the wealthy, the subway stop at which every rich-looking man, wearing a cashmere overcoat and carrying the Times under his arm, left the train with his head high. His mother once made the claim that any random dog plucked indiscriminately off the sidewalk in Brooklyn Heights was apt to be wearing more expensive jewelry than she. As he walked to meet a real-estate broker, he thought of this, and of his poor mother, dead now for half his lifetime. She would be proud of the money he’d made, but she would undoubtedly be ashamed by what he was about to do. The streets weren’t crowded, but they weren’t empty, and in the face of every stranger that passed him he thought he detected an implicit knowledge of his wrongdoing. He stopped to take in the view, leaning against a lamppost near the broker’s office. He lit a cigar. Smoking allowed him time and the proper rush of blood to the brain to think well. A good cigar also helped to stanch the guilt.

He took great pleasure in surveying the riches before him: the row houses on Pierrepont Street, the bare cherry trees near the river promenade, the garden planters blooming with chrysanthemums, the patisseries on Montague blowing sugar and nutmeg and cinnamon into the wind. If there was ever a place to make love to a beautiful young woman, this was it. It seemed a far more profitable experience to think of this private triumph than to think of the wrong he was committing.

When his broker, an older woman with white hair, long fingers, and short, chewed fingernails, asked why he wanted to live in Brooklyn Heights, he cracked his knuckles.

“My wife’s leaving me,” he said. “And she hates the city.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the broker said.

“It happens,” he said. “Such is life.”

He felt terrible saying such a thing. He and Shoshanna had long since stopped making love, as she put it, but they hadn’t stopped, as far as he knew, actually loving each other. Theirs was a love that transcended displays of physical affection. She’d been his girlfriend when he was a boy, his next-door neighbor on Division Street. No one alive knew him better than she did. If they wanted to make love, they could remember how it had been when their bodies were young. It was like a song they’d adored since childhood, learned by heart, replayable in their memories at any time.

“How much are you willing to spend?” the broker asked.

“However much I have to,” he said, reaching into his briefcase. He put an envelope of money onto the desk. Doing such a thing felt absurd, but he couldn’t deny the pleasure. The experience was the sort of thing he’d have told Larry if the circumstances had allowed it.

She showed him a studio near the river. It had a small galley kitchen, and a window that looked out at the downtown skyline. The view possessed none of the famous buildings, but merely the lumped, anonymous cluster of steel and glass that now sat at the foot of the island. He stood there for a moment watching the early autumn chop on the East River, and the cars stuck in traffic on the bridge. An oak tree rose from a garden across the street, its branches poking through the steel grates of a fire escape. The broker stood near the doorway, scribbling onto a pad of paper, chewing her fingernails. He imagined leading Jane through the door here, taking off her raincoat, fucking her on the floor. He’d buy a small stereo and a television. She’d smoke her cigarettes here, stub them out into the houseplants she’d put on the windowsill. The beginning of his own marriage had looked something like this: a small Brooklyn studio, a mattress on the floor, cold dinners eaten by the television. Shoshanna wasn’t the sort of woman who’d become angry at his infidelity, he knew. She was the sort of woman who’d crumple and dissolve and shut down.

“It’s not the Taj Mahal,” the broker said. “But it has fresh paint.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Draw up a lease.”

He stayed behind for a few moments. The place was clean, but it seemed, in the marks he found on the walls, and in the scuffs on the hardwood, so very ordinary, and so clearly possessed by the life of its previous tenants, that he couldn’t help but feel disappointed. The complexity of this affair was beginning to feel underwhelming. He felt foolish that he might have expected otherwise. An old studio in Brooklyn Heights was the same as its counterpart seven miles south in Bensonhurst. Somewhere, a few miles from here, a young couple was living in the apartment where he and Shoshanna had lived and fought and where they’d conceived their first daughter. He’d never imagined that he would be in such a position. His mother had always warned him against turning into a fool. It was three in the afternoon. His wife, he knew, was about to pick their girls up from school.

 

Shoshanna had dinner waiting when he came through the door. When they’d met, she’d had aspirations of working in public service. Her life in Westchester had dispossessed her of the boundless energy Abe remembered from their youth. There was now a permanent expression of disappointment on her face, and most days Abe believed it existed there as the result of some judgment she’d made of his character, one that he hadn’t yet been made aware of. On the coffee table, she’d splayed a collection of her recent reading material. She was a policy wonk, and because of it she enjoyed lecturing him. The topics were numerous, and uniformly beyond Abe’s interests. She could speak as easily about energy conservation or about the imminent consequences of Chinese ownership in American T-bills as she could about the various teenage boys who doted on their daughters. He was far less intelligent than she, but it was something he was used to. He gave her a small kiss. She grabbed onto him.

“I just received the most disturbing telephone call,” she said, leading him by the arm into the kitchen.

His two d. . .