Jessica Hecht

"'We like the same things,' he said, bewildered.

"'And then, with one arm around my daughter, "'he put his other hand shyly to my brow, "'I suppose to remind me that I too was lovely.'

At that moment of supreme pleasure and recognition, I found my way into his and baby's embrace by wriggling myself inside, and then, as preposterous and natural both, into the path of each other's lips.

When eventually we shyly parted, he whispered heart-rending words of apology, but I waved them off.

No need, I was glad for it all, and not sorry at

One little bit.

After that, the rabbi came to me at the end of the day several times a week to instruct me on the congregation's needs during Shabbos.

If anyone needed groceries or medical supplies, I was their dreidel-maidel.

As I could handle money when payments for my deeds was involved, it came to me in advance so that it felt like a gift instead of labor.

But all of it felt to me like a gift.

The payment, the work, the blessing of being able to help make a mitzvah for someone else, supporting the rabbi, being in his company, there in my apartment before evening services, the baby napping in the pack-and-play by my bed, the afternoon courtyard light streaming into the bedroom.

He would read to me out loud from the Russian poets,

Savetseva, Mandelstam and Pushkin in English and then in Russian his grandmother's native tongue when you're drunk it's so much fun your stories don't make sense an early fall has strung the elms with yellow flags Akhmatova wrote this for the Italian painter Modigliani when they were lovers in Paris their spouses out of sight and out of mind reading together this way was so intimate

I suppose, in a sense, we too were having an affair.

I mean, I had made a couple of passes at him, but it was a no-go.

I'm married, he'd whispered in my hair, but it didn't really matter.

Sex I could get anywhere.

I have a good wife, he said, but we married so young.

And in the fading white jet stream trail of his sentence, I imagined her as a baby bride herself,

like the child I first saw in Rue de Tornel, someone beyond envy.