I know things about people who are virtual strangers to me, things that no one else knows about them, even their closest friends. I have seen people at their worst; I have seen the most honest attempt to cheat, the most cool-headed and steady explode with anger. I have heard things that I wish I had not heard between husband and wife, between mother and child. I know a young woman who spends most of her day talking on the phone about clothing. I know a mother who feeds her child schnitzel straight from the freezer because it keeps him quiet for a longer period. I know a couple who teach classes on shalom bayis who are actually on the verge of divorce. I know all this not because I am in the habit of peeking into other people’s houses; on the contrary, I am invited into their homes, encouraged to spend hours and hours there. I renovate apartments to individual needs and specifications, and I keep quiet about the things that I see and hear while within the rapidly changing walls of my clients’ homes. While they may sometimes curdle my blood, I keep quiet about it all. And you can count on that. And so, true to form, I was quiet about the bachur who introduced himself at my latest worksite as a nephew of the apartment’s owners and proved it by waggling a spare key at me. “Can I help you?” I asked him when I spied him in the doorway, taking in the controlled chaos that signifies the beginning of a renovation job. He wanted to come in.
The clients had gone to America for two weeks, and there was no one but me to ask for permission to enter. I eyed his black suit jacket and pants, his crisp white shirt and hat. “You’re going to get filthy,” I warned him. The air was already thick and chalky from knocking down walls. He ignored my warning and walked past me to a back room that I was not currently working on. I caught a glimpse of the nephew sliding onto a desk chair in front of a computer before the door closed behind him. I shrugged. Not my business. I turned back to my workers, who were my business. Nephew was a regular visitor to my worksite, showing up during the time before seder, after seder, once or twice during seder, holding his black hat to his head with both hands while dodging my workers and work debris to get to the computer in the back room. I grimaced, I swallowed, I shook my head. And I said nothing, of course. It was none of my business. Like a therapist, I know too much about people, and like a therapist, I keep it all confidential. Well, sometimes I talk to my wife. “He’s a bachur from a really prestigious yeshivah,” I told her over grilled salmon and sweet potato fries. “And here he is, spending hours staring at a computer screen in a home with Internet access.” “So his parents spend a fortune on tuition and send their golden child off with high hopes and this is what he’s doing with his time?” she shook her head. “Poor parents.” “Poor kid!” I corrected. When she frowned in puzzlement, I elaborated. “He must hate himself. It’s a terribly hard thing to fight. He’s a yeshivah bachur, sure, but he’s still a teenage boy, and there is the computer just sitting there, available, and with unlimited Internet access. He has a spare key to the house, the privacy of a closed door, and all the time in the world. It’s hard, you know, to fight something like that. It’s a perfect setup for failure.” “Are you going to tell?” I hesitated. I did want to help him, a kid stuck with a rough yetzer hara like this, but it just wasn’t professional.
And it was really none of my business. “I don’t see how.” “He’s probably not really looking at anything bad,” my wife said. She wanted to make me feel better about the situation that I was in. “I have no idea what he’s doing and I don’t want to guess. None of my business. But even if he’s just perusing Jewish news and watching Jewish music videos, he’s still wasting an unbelievable amount of time, and he knows that. Poor kid,” I repeated. But the next day, “poor kid” was the furthest thing from my lips. “That kid!” I said as soon as I walked through the door. “That kid!” “Hello, how are you, how was your day?” my wife said with her eyebrows raised. “Sorry, sorry. But that kid,” I sighed. “I might have to kill him.” “That’s not very legal.” “I’ll hide the body.” “They always find the body.” “Leave that to me.”“What did he do?” When I had come to work that morning, it was to discover that the house was a mess, and none of it was from my workers. I make sure that they clean up after their own work each day as much as possible. Besides, it wasn’t the sort of mess my workers would leave; it wasn’t plastic cups with bitter Turkish coffee grounds at the bottom, jumbles of wires, or piles of white concrete dust that greeted me; it was an open and empty pizza box, greasy paper bags that once housed French fries, squeezed out ketchup packets, mostly empty bottles of Coke, a few crushed beer cans and an intimidating scattering of crusts and used napkins. “How do you know it was him?” my wife asked. The day before, I was the last one at the worksite. I had sent my workers home and was checking up on a few things and then I was planning on going home, changing into a clean shirt and shoes, and meeting my chavrusa.
I was almost at the door when it opened of its own accord and five boys spilled in. The one carrying the sodas had yelled, “Party!” before the other guys shushed him. “They were all from the yeshivah?” my wife looked horrified. “Looked like it. They watched sports with their hats on.” She cracked a smile. “Seriously?” “I have no idea. It’s just a funny image that I thought of to keep me from killing him.” The horrified look faded from her face. She looked remarkably calm for the wife of a would-be murderer, no matter how justified a murder it was. “Okay, so they watched some sports. I mean, that’s not good, but just like everything else that went on with the computer beforehand, it’s not really our business, is it?” True. And I didn’t really care whether he had indeed watched sports or it had been a documentary on the vanishing rainforests of the Amazon, or even that he brought his friends along into his cozy little den of iniquity. I wasn’t his father, and besides, a man’s chesbon is between him and his Creator. What I did care about was that he had had a party at my worksite and had left the evidence scattered all over the apartment. “Listen, if it’s starting to interfere with your work, I think it’s time to call,” my wife said. I still hesitated. This time I hesitated for too long. I got a phone call later that night from my client. “I don’t want to point fingers or accuse you of anything, and you are doing great work,” he began. “But the fact of the matter is, I asked a neighbor of mine to peek in on the place, you know, give me an idea of how things are going, and he said that you guys left a mess. ‘A real pigsty,’ he said.” Most contractors actually do leave messes, but I am very careful to leave things at least broom clean every single day.
I felt annoyed at the nosy neighbor’s misinformation. “We always leave the apartment clean,” I protested. “I mean, listen, it’s a worksite, it’s not going to be pristine, but I’m not quite sure…” “I spoke with my nephew; he says that he pops in every now and again to check his email— ‘Every now and again, I thought ironically’—and when I asked him about how the place looks, about what the neighbor said, he was quick to concur.” I bet he was, I thought. I felt more than a little exasperation now. That kid. “It was your nephew who left the place like that,” I said, even though I knew that it sounded like I was just making up lame excuses. “He had some sort of party with his friends.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Are you accusing my nephew of lying? Do you know what kind of boy he is, what kind of yeshivah he goes to?” And still I didn’t want to out him, didn’t want to be the one to reveal exactly how little time he was spending in the yeshivah. I gave as little information as possible. “All I know is that last night he came with friends, and they kind of trashed the place.” “I see,” he said in a tone that I couldn’t read. “Well, can you get the placed cleaned up?” “I suppose I can,” I said reluctantly. There was another pause. “Okay, then. Fine.” He hung up without saying goodbye and as I hung up too, I thought, Does he think I’m the one who is lying, pushing the blame off on his cream of-the-crop nephew? I never knew. I never pressed the issue. But there was a definite cooling down in his tone, and I never received a single recommendation through him, even though I did impeccable work. His neighbor began poking his head in every day until the work was completed, but of course, he never saw the nephew, who was safely tucked away in the back room, his head bent over the glare of the computer screen.