Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde by Rebecca Dana

Author:Rebecca Dana [Dana, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

Christmas with the Goldfarbs

Christmas Eve dinner was the prix fixe menu at Jean-Georges, one of the finest restaurants in New York. I was with my friend Kate and her mother, Karen, a rich divorcée who arrived, humming, from church, in a wide-brimmed feathered hat. The menu was sautéed scallops, steamed cod, beef tenderloin with horseradish crème and a sampling of seasonal desserts, including a deconstructed apple tart, cinnamon-maple buns, chocolate noodles with vanilla emulsion, something called Textures of Cranberry, plus two $150 bottles of a nice California Pinot Noir. Kate and I went dancing afterward at a club called Avenue, and crawled up to the DJ booth around two a.m., where we met and chatted with an enormous blind pimp in a full-length fur coat, smoking a blunt.

I came home in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, Christmas Day, and found Cosmo and two houseguests sitting in the living room, drinking beer. Michael and Stephanie were both in their twenties, both Orthodox, both wearing jeans. It took a while for me to realize this was a date, since they barely spoke to each other the entire time.

Michael was Cosmo’s last roommate and remained one of his only friends. He’d stayed five months in the room that was now mine and then moved to a place on the Lower East Side, where he worked as a computer consultant and sporadically pursued a Ph.D. in applied math. He wore a black zip-up fleece, white socks and a pair of those overdesigned hybrid loafers, with the thick black rubber soles, made for men who don’t want to buy separate shoes for work, shul and silent Friday afternoon dates. Small wire-frame glasses sat so high on his nose they were nearly contact lenses. The brim of his baseball cap angled sharply down, covering his forehead and most of his eyes. The lights were off in anticipation of shabbas, and when he talked in the fading daylight, his mouth didn’t seem to move. He and Cosmo were sipping beers.

Stephanie, a doctor, was in town from Minneapolis, where she was doing her residency in dermatology. She was slim and pretty, with a pale face, dark eyes and shoulder-length brown hair that she periodically tucked behind her ears. She was utterly un-made-up, and I instinctively imagined how she’d look in heels, mascara and a cocktail dress, something low-cut and flattering. She wore a buttercup-yellow turtleneck sweater that was just loose enough to be modest but which showed off her distinctly Midwestern figure, curvy and athletic.

“Let’s let the ladies schmooze,” Michael said, dragging Cosmo into the kitchen.

Once they’d gone, in quiet tones Stephanie explained that she and Michael had met on a Jewish Internet dating site called Frumster and that this was their second date ever, although they had been “corresponding for several months.” They’d met for the first time in person over Halloween weekend, when Stephanie had come to New York for a visit. Michael had invited her over to cook shabbas dinner, but she’d declined. “I was going to go, but then I thought, ‘This is a strange man.

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