One Last Thing Before I Go

Hebrew. The father reads one too, his tongue tripping over the Hebrew consonants he hasn’t practiced since he was a little boy. Someone produces a silver wine goblet. The mohel dips the baby’s pacifier into the wine and then shoves it into the baby’s mouth. If you’re going to get the baby plastered, why not do it before you cut him? Silver thinks. None of this makes any sense.
    And then, just as he was leaning in to kiss her, she turned away, the tip of her earlobe grazing his dry lips with a rough whisper. I’m sorry, she said, although what she was sorry for, like everything else, was utterly unclear to him.
    Rabbi Silver addresses the room, attempting to place the procedure into context. “In performing the ritual of circumcision, we have entered this child into the covenant of Abraham and God, and now Susie and Evan will name their boy, as we welcome him into the Jewish community. We are born imperfect by design, and the circumcision is our first step in achieving God’s vision for us.”
    Evan and Susan stand beside Ruben, who begins to chant in Hebrew, and Silver has the baby’s cries in his ears and his pain in his crotch and suddenly there’s not enough oxygen in the room, and he’s sweating profusely. He’s either stroking or fainting, or maybe both, but either way, he’s not going to do it here, collapsing onto chintzy, overpriced furniture that doesn’t look sturdy enough to accommodate a genuine adult body anyway.
    He flees, down the hall and through a den, and then descends some stairs into a second, sunken den that they probably call a sunroom, and then out the sliding-glass doors and across the patio, where the catering staff are laying out platters and pouring mimosas.
    I am not cut out for this, he thinks, and the cute, skinny bartender with the nose stud and big green eyes looks up and says, “You and me both,” which is how he knows that he’s spoken out loud. The heat out here is surprising, the sun radiating off the bluestones, cooking the air at eye level. After the blasting central air inside, it’s a welcome respite, like stepping into a different season.
    “They wrapping up in there?” the girl says, working the white plastic cork out of a Champagne bottle. Her dark hair is short and uneven, like she cuts it herself, but she’s pulling it off.
    “Yeah.” He can feel himself staring too closely at her.
    This is the amazing thing about the male brain, or at least, his male brain, which is admittedly compromised by strokes, and an unrelenting lust that has been nesting there since early adolescence. He can be dying, can be taking in a sacred ceremony that is both deeply moving and somewhat horrifying, can be falling in love with his ex-wife all over again and, at the same time, still have the computing power to consider this hot little bartender, to note the monochromatic tendril of a tattoo creeping around the side of her neck, the way her tongue flicks up to lick her upper lip, to hear the cigarettes in her laid-back, punk-rock voice, and to contemplate how this would all manifest itself in her lovemaking.
    She looks at him and smiles, amused and unthreatened, and he wants to kiss those laid-back lips, wants to run away with her and from her all at the same time.
    “You played in that band, right? The Broken Daisies.”
    “The Bent Daisies.”
    She accepts the correction. “Cool.”
    He watches her patiently work the cork, twisting and pulling until it comes out with a soft pop. She puts the bottle down and starts on another.
    “You OK there?” she says.
    “I’m dying.”
    She considers the information casually. She is cute, and a bartender, a combination that renders her largely unfazed by default.
    “I just needed some air,” he says.
    “Well,” she says, looking around the vast yard, complete with an impressive free-form pool and a goldfish pond, “you came to the right place.”
    * * *
    Later, the guests mill about the patio enjoying a late-morning brunch and casting the odd look his way. He is sitting by the pool with his pants rolled up and his legs in the water, drinking Champagne out of the bottle. His father makes his way across the yard and sits down on the ground beside him.
    “What happened in there?” he says.
    “I don’t know, I just . . . I got a little claustrophobic.”
    He nods. “How’s the water?”
    “It’s nice,” Silver says. “Warm.”
    “Listen,” Ruben says, “your mother is beside herself.”
    “I’m