Chapter Thirty-Five
THIRTY-FIVE
It didn’t take long for Chief Eric Myers to be apprehended, and for Greg to hear what had happened. Even though there was a part of him that wanted to check on Faye, she had been placed in protective custody. Until the FBI was certain that all members of The Paper Boys operating in Woodstock had been apprehended, he wouldn’t be able to reach her.
He tried to see the forced separation between them as a blessing. As a message from the universe to regroup after everything that happened between them.
Greg stepped into his tiny New York apartment, overlooking midtown Manhattan. It was just as he remembered. Save for the dead plants—even the succulents—everything was just how he left it. The curtains on the large windows were open.
His bed—a sleeper futon—was still pulled out and made up with sheets. Some T-shirts and pants lay in piles on the bed, remnants of his last morning packing before heading to upstate New York. And of course, as a journalist, his apartment was packed full of books and papers. Photos from his time traveling the globe. Pictures of him with subjects of his stories. And the centerpiece of his mainly unused bachelor pad—a large desktop computer, sitting on a cheap plastic desk.
He threw his stuff down by the door and moved to check the messages on his landline.
He had three messages. As was often the case when he went undercover, or on assignment, his editor had checked in on his home phone twice. Once, wondering if he was alive, as he had missed his monthly check-in. The second time, his editor having found out he was alive, asking Greg when he could expect his article about The Paper Boys.
The third message was from his brother.
His editor and his brother—those were the two people who had called him when he went missing for two months. Those were the only two people in the world who cared about his story.
Everything was the same—New York, his career, his apartment—yet Greg felt different. Changed in some way. He had never been a golem, but Faye, and her friends, and his time in Woodstock, had cast an irreversible spell.
And now, all he felt was lonely.
Faye had stopped counting the days since she had last seen Greg—even though she understood now that she was not magical, her spell had worked. After helping Nelly uncover the identity of The Paper Boys, Greg had gone back to his old life. His real life, which apparently was as some sort of bigwig investigative reporter in New York City.
She tried not to spend too much time thinking on it. She also resisted the urge to begin googling, tracking him down herself. What had happened with Greg, what she had worked so hard to destroy between them, was a lesson she needed to learn.
“Aha,” Nelly said, laying down a seven-letter word on a triple word score. “Take that.”
Faye stared down at the word Nelly had created. “Killers?”
“What?” Nelly said innocently.
“Anyone ever tell you that you have a one-track mind?”
Nelly waved away Faye’s jab. Faye bit back a smile. Even though she was no longer in the protective custody of the FBI—Chief Eric Myers and the three men who worked with him had all been caught and jailed on multiple charges—she had taken up Nelly’s offer to come stay with her for a while.
At first, packing her bags and taking one of the bedrooms on the second floor—toting Hillel along for the ride—she was certain she had made a mistake. Certain the old woman would spend the entire time there berating her for her terrible life choices. But very quickly, she realized she enjoyed living with Nelly. She liked how the old woman fawned over her, and made her chicken soup when she was feeling sad...and humored her obsession with Scrabble.
She was also surprised at how much of her pottery was in Nelly’s home. She had no idea that Nelly was such a fan. Or that she had spent so many years buying her pottery under the name Sam Jones.
“I still can’t believe you own so much of my work,” Faye said.
“Everybody deserves a few secrets,” Nelly said.
Faye wanted to understand. “Yeah, but you’re always telling me how my pottery looks like shvantzes and pupics ...”
“Maybe I like shvantzes and pupics ?”
“Come on,” Faye scoffed. “You have spent thousands of dollars on my work.”
“Fine,” Nelly said. “I’ll tell you the truth. I buy all your pottery because I like it. Because I think you’re talented. Because, unlike my grandchildren—who I love, but are unfortunately talentless hacks who would be much better off focusing on the sciences—I actually like your work. No, scratch that. I actually love your work. I like having it in my house.”
She shifted in her seat a little. “Why not just buy it direct from me? Why go to all those lengths to hide it under an assumed name?”
“Because,” Nelly said, laying tiles on the board, “if I bought it direct from you, you would say, ‘Nelly is just buying my art to be nice. Nelly doesn’t appreciate my pottery. I’m a talentless hack who doesn’t deserve all the good that happens to me.’ So that’s why I never let you know I bought it. You would ruin it, turn it into something bad, turn it into something ugly. You would never just accept that I thought you were talented. So, instead... I didn’t give you the chance.”
Faye stared down at the board, comparing how she felt about her art to how she handled her relationship with Greg. Nelly wasn’t wrong. “But,” Faye couldn’t help but ask, “you don’t notice all the mistakes in my work?”
“The mistakes?” Nelly squinted.
“The misshapen lips to the vases,” she said, pointing out the flaws. “The rough edges, sometimes even the lingering fingerprint.”
“You mean because of your finger?” Nelly asked. “Because your mother broke your wrist, and everything you do, all the artwork you’ve created since then...is a reflection of the experiences that have made you? Because your work will never be perfect.”
“Yes.”
“Silly girl.” Nelly shook her head. “That’s exactly why I like your pottery.”
Faye stammered. “I... I don’t understand.”
“You think because you don’t create perfect art, that it has no value? You think because your vases don’t look like everyone else’s vases, that they’re ugly and misshapen, broken in some form...that no one will ever love them.”
“Yes.” Faye could feel the tears coming to her eyes.
“But only you can make those vases,” Nelly said. “Only you can make those ring dishes, and jars, and even golems. Because of that broken wrist, and that one disabled finger, and the story you lived...when you create a piece of pottery, it bears the truth of you.”
“It’s just...so hard.”
Nelly nodded. “Because you don’t see what I see. You look at the pottery, and you see every flaw. And you think those flaws are bad. I see those fingerprints and bubbles, and I think, ‘That’s a Faye Kaplan piece. Only she can make it!’ All that talent, all that backstory, coming from these two potter’s hands. That’s your downfall, Faiga Kaplan. You don’t see that something doesn’t need to be perfect to be loveable.”
It was enough. Her words caused a flood to appear inside her. The dam broke, and with it, all the feelings of the last few weeks—of an entire lifetime—came flooding to the fore. Nelly left her Scrabble tiles and, rising from her seat, hugged Faye.
“Faiga,” Nelly said, stroking her hair. “My dear, sweet, beautiful child...”
Faye cried, the words falling from her deepest places now. “He didn’t ever protect me.”
“I know.”
“All those years,” she said, the words finally coming, “why didn’t my dad ever once stop her? All those nights, he could have just intervened. He could have left my mother, and taken me with him. But instead, he just hid. He hid...and he let her hurt me. No one ever, ever protected me. And I’m so tired. I’m so tired of being strong all the time. It’s not fair.”
“It’s not,” Nelly said, still stroking her hair, kissing the top of her head, the mother Faye never had growing up. “What happened to you is so unfair.”
“I need...help.”
It was the first time in years that she considered going back to therapy. Not because she was broken, but because she deserved to live a life that brought out the softness in her. Her mind wandered back to Greg, to the way he had been there for her at her worst moments, to her friends, and Nelly—her chosen family. They were people who cared about her. They were people who fought for her, too.
No, she didn’t have to be perfect to be loved.
But she wanted to be better. She wanted to feel better, too.
“So, you’ve been hurt by the past,” Nelly said, shrugging her shoulders. “Okay? You’ve been shaped by the past, too. But when we live in the past, my dear sweet Faiga-la, we never get the chance to write our own story.”
“Like the golem?” Faye reflected quietly.
“How so?”
She thought back to what she had learned from Rabbi Solovechick. “The golem isn’t one story,” Faye explained. “It’s actually a whole bunch of stories, layered on top of each other. It started one way, yes. But each generation added to it and supplemented it, until it became a new type of story for each new creator. I guess that’s the beautiful lesson of the golem... We can hold on to memory, bear the things that shape us, but also...write our own story going forward.”
Nelly nodded. “So, perhaps this whole journey was for good, after all?”
“You know what, Nelly?” Faye felt her tears drying. “Going forward, that is absolutely the story I plan to tell.”
That night, Faye couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t due to her nightmares, or to the half pound of kosher salami she had downed for a snack with Nelly. It wasn’t even because the old woman kept the house the temperature of an igloo. Rather, it was this strange type of energy bubbling away inside of her. A sensation, not of magic...but rather, of hope.
She wandered about Nelly’s house in her robe and her pajamas. And whenever she came across some nightstand or desktop where a piece of her pottery was laid out, she took a few minutes to analyze it. She picked it up, turning it in her hands, analyzing all those missteps and mistakes that made her art uniquely hers.
Of course, the instinct was there—to tear herself apart, to notice each flaw and each mistake, to allow that voice in her head, the voice that belonged to Stuart and her mother, to penetrate how she saw the world. But she resisted the urge. Instead, she told herself a new type of story.
In this story, the fingerprint was the mark of a survivor. The misshapen lip on the lid of a jar was her ability to craft a new type of life, despite a past filled with trauma. And she told herself that all the rough edges of her vases, all the missteps and mistakes that made her, were beautiful. She didn’t have to be perfect to be loved.
When she had finally finished walking through the house, she found her way to a computer. She wasn’t a writer, but she felt the need to explain herself, to write her own story, to craft a new narrative.
She told her truth. She poured her whole life into a twelve-page story. She wrote about her mother who was mentally ill, and the father that didn’t protect her from emotional and physical abuse, and how that experience led to her shutting down emotionally, mired in her own trauma, constantly believing the worst about herself—a self-fulfilling prophecy.
She wrote about how these self-destructive patterns, and an anti-Semitic attack in Woodstock, led her to believe that a man with amnesia— the best man she had ever met in her entire life —was actually a golem. She admitted her mistakes. The way she pushed him away, the way she so adamantly was determined to get rid of him, until finally, she dragged this human being to a cave and dumped sludge all over him.
But there was a happy ending to her story. For the first time in her life, she could walk around a room and look at her pottery—and see that it had value. That it was beautiful. That it deserved to be loved, and respected, and honored. Finally, exhausted by memory, but also possibility, she titled that essay:
THE ART OF IMPERFECTION
She left it on the coffee table for Nelly to read. And then, she found a therapist in Woodstock who specialized in posttraumatic stress disorder, and booked her first appointment via their website. She was just about to head back to bed when she swore...she heard four wolves, howling together.
Her ears perked up. She shifted towards a window, peering out into the woods. She pressed her lips into the shape of an O—and quietly, so as not to wake Nelly—howled right back. Jews were not magical. But somewhere, beyond the environs of Woodstock, in those dark spaces where both the caves and the forests welcomed magical creatures, a lone wolf had found its way home.