Chasing Feinman

I've been chasing Feinman since I was twenty-one. By that I mean beyond the man himself, the ideal of true love and all its promise.

I met Jakob Lee Feinman in 1979 when I was just nineteen and waiting tables at a neighborhood bar, The International.

Two years older than me, Jake was in his last year of college at Washington University in St. Louis when our paths crossed. It was all quite by chance and it saved my life. And, it sort of ruined it, too. Ruined me. For anyone else who came along after Feinman, that is.

Paulina, our bartender who was majoring in dance at the same college as Jake, introduced us. One slow night at the bar, Paulina was schmoozing a threesome of young men at the far end of the bar when she waved me over to the service station.

"Do you see the handsome guy down there in the gray sweatshirt?" she asked.

I glanced over, then looked back at her with a nod.

"He thinks you're really cute and wants me to get your phone number."

“OK, I guess. If he has your endorsement."

"He's phenomenal," she said as she slid a bar napkin across the bar, pulled a pen from her topknot and handed it to me.

Moments later, Paulina leaned into her friend in the gray sweatshirt.

 "See that waitress over there? She thinks you’re really cute and asked me to give you her phone number," she said, wagging the napkin with my scrawled digits on it in front of him.

The rest of the week passed inside my busy social life. On Saturday night, I was going to a surprise birthday party for Skizzy, the guy I had been dating. He was seven years older than me and ran with a crowd he had known since grade school, guys that were dyed-in-the-wool South St. Louis boys of German descent, like so many in that town. They loved women, beer and the St. Louis Blues.

I went with my sister Annie who was dating one of Skizzy's friends, Mike. Around nine o'clock, we got word that Skizzy was on his way. Lights were turned down and a giggly hush filled the room. Imagine my consternation when the door opened, the lights came on and everyone yelled surprise — but the surprise was actually on me. There stood Skizzy with a pretty blond on his arm, kissing him in excitement. I edged in close enough to glean that the blond was Skizzy's real girlfriend, and everyone knew that but me.

Where was Annie!

She and Mike had slipped away. She had the car keys and I had no cab fare so I was stuck for the duration. An endless night faded into black and the next thing I knew I was waking up on a couch. My contact lenses were pasted to my eyeballs. I was humiliated and hungover, wondering when I might finally get home. Annie appeared suddenly, coming down the staircase looking apologetic.

"Let's get out of here and get some breakfast at the Majestic. It's on me,” she said.

Realizing it was Sunday, I told Annie about Jake, doubtful it would even happen. When we got home to my parent’s house, I fell into a deep sleep. I nearly missed Jake’s call. Trapped in a dreamscape of delirium, I heard a voice calling out to me. It was Annie's voice urging me to wake up.

"Go away . . ."

"No, wake up. That guy called," Annie said.

"Who?”

"Get up. Go call him back. Now!" 

I stirred out of my slumber well enough to realize my eyes were supremely dry and my mouth even dryer and a sense of urgency was doubling back, waiting for me to catch up to it. Shaking off the grit and dismay of the night before, I took the piece of paper with the phone number on it from Annie’s hand, sat up and stuck it in back pocket. I paced around with an ugly gut and finally mustered up the courage to call.

 "So. You have time tonight?" he asked.

. . .

That’s how it all began. A near miss. That turned into a perfect love. After our first date, I felt like I had a chance at real happiness. My senses had been awakened. New sights, new smells, new tastes erupted all around me. I was a newborn emerging from the darkened womb into a world I previously did not know existed.

Our love blossomed, cooking together or going to our hole-in-the-wall pizza joint on Grand run by two Italian men who barely English. We took walks through campus with his dog, Layla. He liked my friends and the bar and the parts of the city he had never known before meeting me. If we appeared to be in slightest disagreement about something, Jake would say this one sentence.

“Let's have a glass of something.”

He was a diplomat. A non-reactive Buddha. A sophisticate and a bon-vivant who saw no point in wasting time on being discontent. We had the same temperament and shared an ironic sense of humor. Not a beat was missed. There was just one thing, though.

But I’ll get to that later.

On my birthday, Jake and I sat in the backyard drinking cold mugs of beer. He went inside to get a couple more and returned with a small box.

“Happy Birthday, babe,” he said.

I took the box from his hand.

“What's this?”

I pulled slowly at the little pink ribbon, letting it fall into my lap as I slowly lifted off the top. I pulled apart the leaves of tissue to find a brilliant ruby stone set into a gold heart shaped pendant.

“Oh, my goodness, Jake! This is beautiful!” I said, looking up at his beaming face.

He stepped in closer and turned the pendant over in the box to reveal the etched letters “RJF” — our combined initials with our shared J in the middle. I pulled it from the box and asked him to clasp it around my neck and he did. I took the pendant into my hand and rubbed it softly. I stood up and we embraced for what seemed like eternity.

I've worn that necklace every day of my life. Putting it on with great care every morning and touching that ruby softly each time, I would ritually wonder the proverbial “what if” in the later years of my life. Because, you see, things didn't work out for Feinman and me.

. . .

Walking back to our apartment after getting ice cream, Jake began to explain something lost on me until that moment.

“Jewish people are ‘The Chosen People.’ We are a tribe. We see ourselves as special." 

I didn't understand why he was sharing this suddenly, but I listened.

“We have survived so much as a people and there’s both a sense of pride and a responsibility to that,” he explained.

It was then that he shared his truth, right there on our walk. Two blocks from home. I could feel the beginning of an end as he spoke.

“My brother said if we carried on our relationship into a marriage, he would never speak to me again.” 

I was shocked and dismayed, my eyes started to well up, my heart pounded in my chest. Jake and I were best friends wrapped up in a love beyond any definition I had ever thought possible. I tried to weather the blow, but my emotional body was coming forward through my skin. Past bones and blood and soft tissue, right to the surface.

“But what if we want to get married?”

Feinman looked down.

“We can't. My whole family would not approve of it and I have to do right by them. You see?” 

I couldn’t see. I was blinded by a swirl of grief.

“My children have. to. be. Jewish. By blood.”

I was fully dissolving. Feinman grabbed my arm in his.

 "Let's walk. We can talk about it some more when we get home."

Neither of us spoke the next two blocks to our apartment and I made a beeline to the bathroom immediately. I splashed some cold water on my face. When I emerged, Feinman was standing in the kitchen facing the bathroom door, waiting.

"Let's have a glass of something," he said.

His signature sentence, he said it whenever something was in need of resolution. He'd utter it when receiving sad or happy news, to begin the planning of some new adventure or idea. When it was time to celebrate. But this was not a time for celebration. It was a time of mourning.

Surely, he had always known this very conversation would unveil. He was prepared and I was not. It was not his decision. Decisions were made by and for the whole family to support an ethos that simply could not be violated. It would be like knowingly throwing water onto an eternal flame. But to me, the flame wasn't “my people.” It was our love. And his words were coming down in a slow but steady rain. What was this, Romeo and Juliette, for fuck's sake?

. . .

A year later, Jake was in Chicago. I sat at the bar after a long night sipping on a warm "glass of something" thinking about him. It was two in the morning and I was waiting for Marcie, my best friend who I was living with now in the apartment I had shared with Jake.

An image of a trip to Chicago we had taken in the early days of our romance surfaced. That perfectly cool breeze that glides across you on a summer afternoon while driving around Lake Michigan. Windows rolled down, birds chirping.

Now. I was in the pentimento layer of a painting that was covered up. Sitting just beneath the surface of a less exquisite rendering by the artist, trying to peek through to the light. Calling out to be found. Restored.

Marcie slid onto the stool next to me. We’d been best friends since we were twelve, knew everything about each other's thoughts and feelings. We shared everything with each other, intimate details about our "firsts" with guys, our dreams for getting out of St. Louis, our disappointments and triumphs.

“What’s up with you lately?” Marcie asked.

I shrugged.

“Hey. Did you ever see that guy who was so hot after you, what’s his name?"

I dropped it just under my breath.

"Joey Sumner. Nope," I said.

"Why the heck not?” she asked.

"Well, Marcie, it's like this. I will never top Jake. He was the best I will ever have. My one true love. Anyone else is not worth my time."

Marcie sat silent then spoke with a puzzled look on her face.

"Jake? Who’s Jake?"

"I've got to pee," I said, ignoring her question.

I stood and walked into the Ladies Room and locked the door.

So, indeed. Who is Jake?

Maybe I invented him in a moment of desperation after Skizzy's party. Was an idyllic romance born out of the haze and humiliation of that night? What if Jake didn't even exist? Maybe he was just an invention from the deepest recesses of my heart and soul. I sat on the toilet pondering the possibility of such a grand delusion.

I picked up the June issue of Glamour Magazine at my feet and leafed through it.

"Get Your Best Swimsuit Body in Three Weeks"

"The Ten Things Men Want to Hear"

Good grief. No wonder I'm delusional. What are we trying to live up to, anyway?

. . .

I was ruined by Feinman, you know? I told you that at the beginning.

It was like chasing cocaine. It's never going to be as good as that first euphoric moment that you spend the rest of the night trying to recreate. That is how it felt to date other men after Jake. The years have passed I’ve met a lot of guys at the bar and my friends were always trying to fix me up.

The closest I got to anything else was with Brian Mason. Brian was my friend Joanie's cousin from Maplewood. She invited me to go to one of his adult league softball games one summer evening so we could meet. He was a handsome guy who kept in shape. He had thick brown hair and kind eyes, a good sense of humor and solid beer drinking skills, so I kept an open mind. He told me he loved me three months into our relationship on a rainy Sunday afternoon. It would take me longer to get there but I felt like I might. Brian was great.

He just wasn't Jakob Feinman.

Brian had big plans that felt confining to me. The end of the road. Somewhere on that road, I was sure, was a detour back to Feinman, if I could only find the right map. By the Fourth of July, it was over. It wasn't even dark yet as he walked me to my car, well before the fireworks display.  His faith in me had completely fizzled out like a dud firecracker. With a hiss and a pop, leaving barely a wisp of smoke.

After Brian, I couldn't go through the charade again with another guy. I could be quite decisive when it came to who was deserving of my time. At age thirty-seven, I bought the bar. George, the longtime owner, had decided to retire and offered it to me and I had been there so long it felt like I owned the place anyway.

. . .

A guy walks into a bar . . .

No. Let me start again. I'm sixty-four now and a stale joke is not the way to end this story. Or is it just the beginning? Time is a funny thing. Not always linear in our memories. I sold the bar three years ago, which gave me a nice nest egg.

Right now? I'm on a train to New York City for a week as I do every June to visit old friends. The train is starting to slow down to hypnotic pace. I'm lost in a distant reverie, feeling the words of the song playing in the air. Or is it just playing in my soul?

Dixie Chicks.

“Lullaby.”

You know it? There’s a part that goes, How long do you want to be loved? Is forever enough?

I get sort of lost in it.

The train has slowed to a stop now and I hear the conductor over the loudspeaker:

“Chicago, folks, Union Station.” 

I'm sitting in the crowded bar car, fully immersed in a cheese plate and a glass of chardonnay, voices mingling around me. People are boarding, others gather up their things having reached their destination. A revolving door of lives in transition.

“Is this seat taken?"

I look up and my eyes meet those of a handsome man, leaning in close to let others get by him in the aisle. My mouth is full of cracker and Havarti, so I nod and extend my hand towards the seat across from me.

We trade small talk. I can see he doesn't want to sit quietly nodding off to the sound of the rails. He wants connection. He tells me about his years of being a pediatrician. Married with four grown kids, divorced.

“She was never the right woman for me — only in theory, how my family wanted it. A girl from the same background, you know.”

I’m silent but attentive, swallowing the last of my chardonnay.

“She gave up her career to raise the kids. She probably blames me for getting in the way of her dreams.”

He pauses, staring off. Then looks me right in the eye.

“You know what they say. You always wonder about the one that got away,” he says.

"Things seldom turn out how we expect them to,” I say to him.

I am revealing little about my own life to this stranger, dwelling safely in generalities. But something resonates in his story. Things shift in a split second. Like being suddenly stirred awake from a deep sleep after a long night of drink. My eyes, supremely dry they are, and my mouth even dryer as a sense of urgency is doubling back, waiting for me to catch up to it.

“It's warm,” I say.

I begin to remove my cardigan.

He reaches to help with my sleeve. As I lean towards him, my ruby necklace swings forward and catches the light. And his eye.

“What a beautiful necklace,” he says.

I press my hand to the ruby, hold it in my palm as I’ve done a million times before. Yes, it is. I tell him it was a gift from long ago. That I have worn it every day since the day I got it.

He nods.

“I bet someone who loves you very much gave it to you.”

He looks at it again.

“Is that a ruby?” he asks.

I tilt my head to the left.

"Yes. Yes, it is. Like my name. I'm Ruby,” I say, extending my hand to him realizing we never properly introduced ourselves.

He places his hand into my warm palm. Held in a moment in time. Suspended in freeze-frame. Is this happening now or is it a fragment on a wheel of life? Block universe.

“Let's have a glass of something,” he says.

I nod.

He calls a waiter over and orders two glasses of champagne. We sit in silence then. Not an awkward silence, mind you, but one that sort of blankets us in familiar comfort. Like a breeze that glides across you on a summer afternoon as you drive around Lake Michigan. I could even hear birds chirping.

The champagne arrives and we lift our glasses to each other.

“It's a good life,” he says.

And I agree.