“Ely!”
I shake my head firmly. “I can’t. I’m serious. I’m trying to respect his boundaries.”
“Is he trying to respect his own boundaries? Because he looked pretty happy to stick around right next to you the whole time.”
Did he? I try to think back over our interaction, teasing apart my memory of his facial expressions, his body language. Was he reluctant to see me go? Or is that my wishful thinking imposing on him what I want to see?
Maybe a little bit of both.
11
Hanging out with Wyatt has clicked something into place in my mind. A determination, maybe, to finally pull my shit together. Or perhaps it’s inspiration—like he’s just that good at planting himself in my mind and growing there.
I’m still suffering from the paralysis of not knowing how to start, though. You should take Michal up on her invitation, a voice repeats in the back of my head every time I see her on Monday. The idea of going to Shabbos still makes me want to slam my head into an anvil. Only I don’t have to go to Shabbos dinner to hang out with her. Right?
I sit on the idea the rest of the day, paralyzed by my own indecisiveness. Or maybe it’s not indecisiveness. Maybe it’s something much more insidious. Something like fear.
But the whole thing turns out to be much more bloodless than I imagined.
“Absolutely” is what Michal says when I actually get up the nerve to ask her about hanging out come Tuesday afternoon, as late in the day as I can get before we all head home. “I’d been hoping you might want to do something sometime. Are you free tomorrow?”
We decide to meet for coffee at this place down in the East Village between classes. It’s half bookshop, half café, with full-size windows that swing open so that the place feels like an extension of the sidewalk. I’ve never been to Europe, but this is what I’ve always imagined being in Paris might feel like: sitting at a table with a breeze in your hair and a demitasse cup of espresso at your fingertips.
“This is so dangerous,” Michal says, eyeing the book-lined walls within. “I’m supposed to be on a no buy.”
“They also serve wine and beer, in case you wanted to weaken your impulse control a little more.”
Michal gives a dramatic shudder. “Speak no evil. I really need to read all the books I already have before I go off and buy more.”
“Oh, same. And I should probably use all the empty notebooks I’ve bought before buying more, but we both know that’s not happening.”
“I have that problem but with sketchbooks,” Michal says. “But what am I supposed to do? They’re all so cute. I found one the other day that had embroidered flowers on the cover. I mean, come on.”
“That’s completely understandable,” I say.
“Thank you. Now please tell my wife that.”
I have to fight not to show a reaction. I didn’t expect a visibly frum woman to casually disclose that she’s in a lesbian relationship. It’s so far from how I grew up. Sure, there were queer people in my community, but they kept their mouths shut about it. Chaya was a lesbian, but I was the only one she ever told; she knew damn well she was going to end up matched to a nice boy from good yichus just like the rest of us.
I suppose Michal could be a super-progressive form of Modern Orthodox? I honestly feel a little creepy trying so hard to figure her out, but she fascinates me.
She has everything I always wished I had growing up.
“I didn’t realize you sketched,” I say instead of tumbling into all the questions quarreling for space in my brain.
She laughs. “I didn’t say I was good at it. But yeah, I started with that before getting into photography.”
“What made you switch?”
“I went to an arts high school up in the Bronx,” she says. “They had a really good photography program, so I took a couple classes and fell in love.”
Another surprise. I’d just assumed that Michal—like me—grew up in a religious family. That she went to private school and studied Torah and Hebrew as I did. But she chose to become observant. She wasn’t FFB, or frum from birth; she walked into that life with her eyes wide open.
I’ve only met one ba’al teshuva—an observant Jew who was raised more secular—in my life. But my father said that according to the Talmud, a ba’al teshuva stands higher in heaven than even the most righteous scholar because their passion for Torah is greater.
“I can’t draw to save my life,” I admit. “I can take pictures, and I can paint on those pictures, or cut them up, or use them in papier-mâché, but I can’t draw. And believe me, I tried. I wanted to be one of those art girls who always have charcoal smudges on their fingertips and a notebook full of floral doodles. Sadly, it was not meant to be.”
Michal crumbles the corner of her scone between her fingers. “It’s cool that you always knew you wanted to do photography, though. I feel like most young artists aren’t nearly that focused.”
I smile slightly; I can’t help myself. “That was because of my father. He got me a camera when I was ten, and then it was basically over for me. I couldn’t stop taking pictures of absolutely everything. My dad had to literally hide my camera on Shabbos so I wouldn’t be tempted.”
“That’s adorable. Do you still have all the pictures you took back then?”
I wish. But I left them behind along with all the other artifacts of my old life. No doubt they’re rotting away in my parents’ storage space now—if my parents didn’t just throw them out. “No. I have no idea where they ended up. Probably for the best, though; I’m sure they’re embarrassingly bad. It’s cringeworthy enough to look at the stuff I created when I first moved to LA.”
“That’s right. You’re a West Coast girl. What’s the scene like out there?”
I feel like Michal is being nice by asking a lot of questions about me and my life, but I would honestly rather hear more about hers. My time in LA is split into two halves: the four years I spent in a haze of drugs and liquor, and the four years since I got clean. I’d just as soon pretend the first four never existed.
“Very different from here, so far. Not that I’ve been here long enough to judge, really. But it’s much more…Hmm. I guess you’d say product-focused? Like, sure, you have a gallery opening to show off your work, but you’re also hoping to land a deal shooting for National Geographic or whatever at the same time. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, just…different.”
And to a certain extent, the way it was in LA was necessary. You had to make a living somehow. I got a job as a barista after I got clean—lots of long days and nights headed home smelling of burnt milk—but I supplemented my income with freelance gigs on the side. Truly, if I never shoot a wedding or maternity session again, it’ll be too soon.