The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter fourteen

First came the hipsters, colonizing Silver Lake and Los Feliz and Echo Park, so that these days you were as likely to see a gourmet taco truck run by mustachioed culinary school grads with earlobes stretched to hula hoops as you were an actual taquería.

Then real estate developers who’d hit the ocean and run out of raw material sniffed the trend and headed back inland to perform CPR on downtown. They built luxury “green” high-rises with fitness centers and underground parking, and attempted to lure buyers with the promise of a burgeoning nightlife. In Jacob’s view, they were kidding themselves. Real wealth would always flow westward. Lacking a center, Los Angeles would always be seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.

Even the most ardent downtown boosters steered clear of Boyle Heights. It claimed one of the city’s highest homicide rates; crossing over the trickle of river via the Olympic Boulevard bridge, Jacob saw drugs dealt openly and handguns flashed with a smirk.

Beth Shalom Memorial Park attested to the neighborhood’s long-fled Jewish community. It was actually three cemeteries — Garden of Peace, Mount Carmel, and House of Israel — wedged between the 710 and the 5. Only the first still accepted new burials; the latter two had been full since the seventies.

Entering Garden of Peace, he saw EST. 1883 carved into the gatepost and wondered how much room they had left.

The dead kept on stacking up, relentless as debt.

The man at the front office had the chatty sheen of the newly hired. He wrote down the plot numbers for Janet Stein and Bina Lev, marking them roughly on the map. “You know Curly’s here.”

“Curly.”

“Like from the Three Stooges?” The guy asterisked a section labeled Joseph’s Garden.

“Thanks,” Jacob said. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

The day had turned mushy, and his shirt stuck to his back as he walked the lawns to Janet Stein’s crypt inside the Hall of Memories.

A stained-glass window cast an array of pinks and purples on the terrazzo. There was no air-conditioning — it wasn’t like the residents needed it — and flowers languished in their holders, layering the floor with more color in the form of shed petals.

He found her in the middle of the corridor.

The quote from Donne intrigued him. More typically, you’d expect a passage from the Bible. Jacob supposed it was fitting for a lover of literature, and it gave him another degree of kinship to her. Before coming, he’d looked up Janet Stein’s former bookstore. Like most brick-and-mortar sellers, it was shuttered. He stood in communion, trying to telegraph to her that the man who had cut her down young was gone in a terrible way. It made him feel silly and useless.

—

To buy himself some time, he went to find Curly.

The headstones of Joseph’s Garden were upright, carved with symbols signifying the deceased’s status in the community, or occupation. A pair of hands, raised in priestly blessing, for a Kohen. For a Levite, a cup pouring water. Lawyers got scales and doctors got caduceus staffs. Movie moguls — there were several — got reel-to-reel cameras. Palm trees swooned in perpetual infatuation. Jacob could tell from the lack of pebbles placed atop the headstones that there had been few recent visitors to these parts.

Curly had been accorded slightly more attention. Atop the grave, someone had laid out, in pebbles:

Laughing, Jacob left his own pebble and walked on.

He wandered around for a while, swirling around the section containing Bina’s plot, like a ship caught in a slow-turning whirlpool. The relative newness of Esther’s Garden was reflected in its more modern headstones, black granite set flush with the grass. From a distance it evoked a tilled field. He found himself stooping to read markers, to place a pebble on those that had been neglected. The sun was ferocious, and he hadn’t brought a hat or water. It was half past two; he could beat traffic back to the Westside, but only if he left right now; he still had to shower and get over to his dad’s. He really should come back later, when he had more time to devote to her.

He couldn’t stall forever. He reached the correct row. Hers was the ninth plot in.

He didn’t care to think how long it had been since his last visit. His father went several times a year: on the anniversary of her death, of course, and also before major holidays. Nigel drove him, helped him make his way to the grave.

A son’s job. Sam had never asked.

Jacob wasn’t about to volunteer.

Her gravestone was unadorned, strange for a woman who could only express herself through her art, the uneasy coexistence of piety and radical independence, asymmetry and order.

Look at her work and you saw a creator whose contradictions made her beautiful.

Look at her and you saw a cipher.

Jacob’s friends’ mothers drove carpool to soccer games and whipped up elaborate Friday night dinners with fatty beef, potatoes, and a half stick of margarine. At her best, Bina Lev was scatterbrained, introverted, perfectly capable of sending her son to school wearing mismatched shoes or toting an empty lunchbox.

She was not often at her best.

And he was a logical child, brutally so. He understood cause and effect. He could look at the photo albums and parse the gaps. Her first hospitalization had come when he was a toddler.

Bouts of depression were hard, but at least he could slog along in peace. Mania was the real terrorist, holding all of them hostage. She argued with voices. She broke things. She stayed in the garage for days without eating or sleeping. Eventually she would reemerge, having created dozens and dozens of new pieces; she would drop into bed, never attempting to explain herself, not to Sam and certainly not to Jacob.

In retrospect he understood that she was trying to shield him from the ongoing avalanche of her mind. At the time, however, he’d felt as if he were staring up an insurmountable slope, silence denying him any context for her deterioration.

It was not swift. It was not merciful.

His sole consolation that he hadn’t been around to witness the worst of it.

At the start of his senior year of high school, the head rabbi spoke to Jacob’s class about the value of taking time off before college to study in yeshiva. Some boys were dismissive, others skeptical but open to persuasion, and some, like Jacob, already had their bags packed.

He couldn’t get far away fast enough.

Every six weeks or so, he’d call home from Jerusalem on a scratchy pay phone and hear the desperation mounting in Sam’s voice.

I’m worried about her.

But Jacob was eighteen, high on freedom, and bursting with righteous indignation. He was eight thousand miles away.

What do you want me to do about it?

College provided a whole new set of excuses not to come home. His newly minted girlfriend invited him to have Thanksgiving dinner. Her family had a place on Cape Cod and she wanted him to experience a real Christmas. Then she ditched him for a hockey player and he spent the money meant for his spring break flight to go to Miami with his roommates, also smarting from being dumped.

She’s asking for you.

She had never asked for him before.

Let her ask a little more.

He stayed in Cambridge that summer, working as a research assistant to an English professor whom he hoped to enlist as a thesis adviser down the line. He wangled a stipend and a dorm room that came with a campus extension that never rang until it did.

Officially judaism shunned suicides, condemning the soul to an eternity of wandering and forbidding the survivors to observe the laws of mourning. But there was a workaround, the rabbi explained.

We assume that the deceased was not of sound mind — a prisoner of their illness, if you will — and therefore not responsible for his or her actions.

If anyone fit that description, it was Bina. But the suggestion that they needed a loophole to grieve enraged Jacob, and he would later point to it as the shining example of why he’d had it with religion.

Don’t throw everything away because of one fool Sam said.

It wasn’t one fool, though. All four of Jacob’s grandparents had died before he was born, and his first hands-on experience with the mourning process convinced him that he would never go through it again. The rigidity, legalism, the miming of emotion. Tearing one’s clothes. Sitting on the floor. Not bathing. Not shaving. Praying, and praying, and praying again.

To me it’s a comfort Sam said.

It’s inhuman Jacob said.

For seven days the two of them sat in the dusty living room while strangers paraded through, offering hollow support.

She’s in a better place.

She would want you to be happy.

May the Lord comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

Just him and Sam, nodding and smiling and thanking these assholes for their wisdom.

When he got back to school, his voicemail was full up with condolence calls that he deleted mechanically. He didn’t know then that he was establishing a template for years to come: the periodic shedding of attachments, his deciduous heart.

The voicemail said, “Tuesday, July 11.”

The day of: his father, presumably, calling to tell him something he didn’t need to hear again. He started to thumb DELETE but the voice that filled his ear wasn’t Sam’s.

It was Bina’s.

Jacob she said I’m sorry.

He couldn’t say which was worse: that he’d been too busy to answer her call, or that it was the first and only time he could remember her apologizing.

He squeezed down his thumb.

“Sir? We’re closing soon.”

Jacob stood up, brushed the grass from his pants, looked down at the stone one final time.

A large black bug skittered to the center of the granite and stopped.

Jacob frowned, crouched to shoo it away.

The bug dodged, ran a slant, paused at the stone’s upper right corner.

The light was different, and he was viewing the insect’s top side rather than its belly, and he was no entomologist.

But to him it looked like the same one he’d seen at the murder house.

Had it gotten into his car?

Ridden home with him?

You have roaches.

Jacob had known more than a few vermin in his time. This was far bigger than any cockroach he’d seen. A drunk woman might not be in a position to make comparisons, though.

“Sir? Did you hear me?”

Jacob reached slowly for the bug, expecting it to dart off.

It waited.

He laid his hand on the stone and let the insect crawl onto his fingers.

Lifted it up to examine it.

It stared back at him with bulbous, bottle-green eyes.

A spade-shaped head, adorned with a menacing horn; jagged, protruding jaws. Remembering the red welt on the bar lady’s foot, he almost flung the insect away. But the jaws opened and closed gently, and he felt no threat. He fished his cell phone from his pocket to take a picture, and it appeared to comply: posing, rearing up to reveal its lacquered abdomen, its numerous legs flimmering.

“Sir.” It was the man from the front office. “Please.”

The insect parted its armor, extended gossamer wings, and flew away.

“Sorry,” Jacob said.

They walked back toward the gate.

“I thought you’d left hours ago. I almost locked up. That wouldn’t’ve been fun for you. We don’t open again till Sunday.”

“Depends on your definition of fun,” Jacob said.

The man looked at him strangely.

“Enjoy your weekend,” Jacob said.