“Okay,” I say at last, once I trust my voice to remain steady. “It should just be a couple blocks from here, if we head south.”
“This isn’t weird, is it?” Wyatt asks abruptly. “Michal’s my student. I probably shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s fine,” I insist. “I told you, I already talked to her about it. She’s excited. She wants to make you eat challah.”
He laughs weakly, but then we pass by a bakery, and his gaze tracks over to the plump gold pączki in the window. “Should we bring something? Aside from the…”
He means the grape juice I have stowed away in my bag. I don’t really anticipate that our hosts will have anything nonalcoholic for kiddush, so I brought our own.
“Probably,” I say. “Sure. Just not this bakery, though; I don’t think they’re kosher. Do you like babka?”
“Can’t say I’ve ever tried it.”
“Oh, man. Okay. Well. Come on. We’re gonna fix that.”
When we finally make it out of the adjacent kosher bakery, we’re laden with far more bags of baked goods than we intended to come out with—kołaczki and babka and rugelach and apple tart and a steaming-hot Americano for me because these things can go late. Really late. And I’m old now.
“Is this extra?” I ask, lifting one of our brown bags of pastries.
“Where I come from, this is the bare minimum. If you really want to impress, we could pick up flowers from the bodega on our way.”
I flap the fingers of the hand that holds my Americano, waving him off. “Okay, I clearly would not survive in the South. My idea of a host gift is a six-pack of nonalcoholic beer.”
“See, personally I would love that host gift.”
“It’s really more of a gift for me. I mean, nobody else drinks it.”
We turn the corner onto a side street and I pause, glancing back down at my phone. I’m not used to being back in a neighborhood where streets have actual names.
“Is that it?” Wyatt says, peering over my shoulder, then pointing at the brick building on the corner.
I double-check the address. “Yeah. I think so. Hopefully we aren’t too early.”
“Unfashionably prompt.”
The nerves are back. They scratch at the inside of my sternum as we cross the street. Wyatt rings the bell, and we stand on that tiny stoop, my knuckles going white around my Americano and my heart in my mouth.
What am I even afraid of? That Michal’s friends will take one look at me and declare me not a real Jew and kick me out? That it’ll be the opposite—that they’ll somehow smell the Chassid on me and declare me an extremist Jew and kick me out? Because now I’m out here imagining that total strangers can tell intimate details about my past just by looking, and that’s what my therapist back in LA would call magical thinking.
I should probably chill.
My anxiety must be rising off my skin like heat, because Wyatt shifts his bag of pastries to the other arm and reaches over and squeezes my shoulder once. Some of the tension drains out of me at that single, simple gesture, his touch warm and miraculously grounding. I glance at him, surprised, and he offers a tiny smile.
“You got this,” he says, right as the door buzzes.
I exhale and try to breathe my panic out with the air. Wyatt’s hand falls away, but I can still feel the heat his touch left behind, steadying me as we enter the foyer and head for apartment 1B.
I hear laughter inside, the clink of cutlery and glassware. The low thrum of music playing on a record player. This could be anyone’s house, anyone’s party. Wyatt and I could be two people who met anywhere, a couple who fell for each other normally and now brings Polish pastries to friends’ dinner parties.
Then the door opens, and I’m greeted by the smiling face of a woman with bushy gray hair and purple cat-eye glasses. “Hello,” she says, beaming even wider at the pair of us. “You must be Ely. And who’s this? Your boyfriend?”
Heat floods my cheeks. “This is my—um—”
“Wyatt,” Wyatt interjects smoothly, stepping forward and shaking the woman’s hand. “Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it.”
“Of course, of course,” she says. “I’m Kinneret, one of Michal’s friends. I’m just so happy you could both make it. Please, come in.”
We step inside. My hand twitches reflexively toward the mezuzah on the doorframe, but with my arms full of coffee and pastry, the gesture is abortive.
A sidelong glance at Wyatt reveals his anxiety is back too, despite his smooth introduction. The skin around his mouth is vaguely green—and I can’t help thinking back to that night I first met him, the strange and intriguing juxtaposition of confident Revel Jamie and the softer, sweeter Wyatt I met in the hotel bedroom.
The interior of Michal’s apartment is what I always fantasized my house would look like, if I grew up to be rich and became the kind of person who, like, donates to art museums. There are musical instruments I don’t recognize leaning against the wall, next to sculpture pieces from cultures I’ve never visited and paintings by artists I’ve never heard of. The whole place smells faintly of myrrh, and I spot an incense cone burning idly by the record player. Is Michal secretly an heiress or something? Because damn.
The other guests are here already—at least, I assume this is all of them. My brain reflexively wants to try to categorize them—Modern Orthodox, yeshivish, Reform, Chassidic—but this group defies categorization. There’s a man with a black hat and peyos deep in conversation with an androgynous person with dyed-pink hair. A woman in a straight brown wig carries challah to the table while Michal, in a violet tichel, moves dishes to the sink to be washed before Shabbos officially begins. A little boy around twelve years old, who I assume is Michal’s stepson, darts around vrooming his model rocket ship. All in all, viewing this scene feels like watching a movie where the director did some research but not quite enough.
Michal catches my eye from the kitchen, and a huge grin splits her face. She immediately abandons the dishes, drying her hands off on a tea towel as she hurries over to greet us. “You made it!”
“Always with the tone of such surprise,” I tease, even though we both know I almost didn’t come.
Michal’s gaze flicks to my left, toward Wyatt. If she’s intimidated by his presence here, she does a great job of hiding it. “Professor Cole,” she says. “Wow, I’m hosting a legend.”
“I come bearing gifts,” says Wyatt, lifting the bags of baked goods and grape juice. I wonder if I’m supposed to make some clarifying remark about how we’re just friends or something, if Wyatt will think I’m taking advantage of the fantasy if I don’t.