“Lightweight, but I should think it keeps one quite cozy astride a good, strong jumper taking the hurdles and hedges of a brisk morning.”
“They haven’t any sachel.”
“Would it also come in a herringbone jacket, do you suppose?”
“All chutzpa and shpilkes.”
“Pinched at the waist and flared at the hips? With little leather patches at the elbows?”
“To say such awful things? To strangers? A shanda! What? No,” she said, “I haven’t seen it in herringbone.”
She was there, she told me, to check out the acoustics for the Nathan Nizer bar mitzvah. She’d heard I was selling graveyard properties and happened to have seen my name on the special events board in the lobby. Was my seminar over already?
“No, no. It doesn’t start till seven.”
“It’s twenty to eight.”
“Sometimes they’re a little late.”
“Oh?”
“Sometimes they don’t show up.”
“Oh,” Joan Cohen said.
“I give them a couple of hours.”
“Oh.”
“Then I’m out of here.”
“I see.”
“Oh, yes. Two hours. Then I’m history.”
“Are those brochures?”
“Hmn?”
“On those chairs you set up. Are they brochures?”
“Well, yes, in a way they’re brochures. They’re cemetery plats. They describe the services we provide. The different perpetual care options you can choose from. The legal height you can have your monument. Examples of the sort of thing we do. What, would you care to see one?”
“Oh, yes, please. May I?”
“I don’t see why not.”
She took a piece of literature up off one of the empty chairs and appeared to study it.
“Well,” I said, “what do you think?”
“It’s very interesting,” Joan Cohen said. “I like Plan D. Creeping euonymous is my favorite ground cover. I love a dark, shiny leaf. And it’s green all winter. It never drops off.”
“Well,” I said, inspired and suddenly ruthless with desire and decision, “I’ll tell you something about Plan D and your creeping euonymous.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a forbidden vine.”
“Really?”
“Strictly. You didn’t know that?”
“There’s forbidden ground cover?”
“There’s trayf fruits and vegetables.”
“Really?”
“French fries. Guavas and papayas are outlawed fruit, certain kids of nuts and grains.”
“I never heard that.”
“A good rule of thumb is, Only what grew in the Garden of Eden is kosher.”
“Oh, Rabbi,” she said, “you’re teasing me.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “I am. The jury’s still out on the french-fried potatoes,” I whispered.
“Oh, Rabbi.”
I really believe she meant Shelley no harm, that it was her piety did her in, her fervent, terrible, swift Godbent. We did it right there in the paid-up hospitality suite.
“Oh, Rabbi. Poor, sweet Rabbi Goldkorn.”
She said my name but I was just the surrogate, the middleman, her humble conduit to the Lord. Hey, it’s lonely at the middle, let me tell you. What else can it mean, a lady comes and she screams, “Oh, oh, Rabbi, oh, you’re giving me the suntan!” That’s what she told me. That I was giving her the suntan. Reflecting glory, glamour. Spritzing sperm and wonder. She couldn’t get enough of my insider’s wowser connections, this God-juiced, God-foreplayed lady. My inside info a turn-on. Treating me to her giggled deference and excited by all the landmined, bedmined, riskwrath. God was my copilot that night, let me tell you. And hers too, into all the holy sacreds, and embracing, as I say, who knew Whom in her head. Just as I, in mine, the both of us naked in that Rutherford Best Western, made love to some idea I had of her clothed in her own forbidden ground cover. Until, Godspent, she shoved out from under me. “Hallelujah,” she sang, “is that all there is?”
It was. We didn’t see each other again.
Though at night, alone in my bachelor’s bed or, afterward, when Connie returned from Chicago, alongside Shelley but still alone, her image continued to inflict me. Displayed in all her crisp, beautiful golden basket tones like some woven woman or a girl made out of plaid, appeared in my consenting head in all her gorgeous barks and browns, the tarnished hues of open, airing apples, come dressed to kill, got up in all the muted splendids of Joan Cohen’s fall and fallen fashions.
As always, as I walked along Main Street, I felt cheered, my heart lifting, lifting, lifted by the pink Federal-style buildings all around me like so many small banks. I opened the door to Sal’s barber shop and stepped inside, tripping the modest tinkle of Sal’s prop bell. Someone was lying back in one of Sal’s three chairs, his torso covered by a barber’s cape, his face by a hot towel. The bell must have startled him awake because the minute I entered he sat bolt upright, tore the cloth from his face and, the cape bunched in his fist, looked about wildly.
“Easy,” Sal said, “easy there, Bubbles. It’s only our skullcap. It’s only the rov.”
The fellow stared at me a moment, then relaxed back into the chair.
“It’s cold,” he said of the still-steaming towel.
Sal resettled him under the barber’s cape, fixed another towel he lifted from the sink with tongs and laid it across the man’s face like a cloth over a bird cage. And with something like the same effect. In seconds I heard a light, companionable snoring. Sal grinned at me above the man’s heaped absence and, reaching in under the back of the hot towel, began to massage Bubbles’s hidden scalp, vaguely working him like a magic trick.
“I can come back,” I said.
“No, no, I’m practically done,” Sal said, motioning me to a chair. “Sit, he’s a pussycat.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“No, really,” Sal said, “I don’t cut his hair, I don’t give him a shave. He already had that forty-dollar manicure on his hands when he came in. That’s so, ain’t it, Bubbles?”
“People notice your hands. It’s the first place they look.”
“Bubbles has his priorities straight,” Sal said.
“I’m here for the shmooz and hot towels,” Bubbles’s voice said behind its wrappings, and he sat up again, at his leisure this time, fastidious as an actor as he picked the linen cape off his suit and peeled the towel from his face. “Yeah,” he said, studying himself in a hand mirror, “that’s good, Sal. That brought the blood up good.” He turned to me. “What do you think? How do I look? Sally’s tip rides on what you tell me.”
“You look fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Bubbles,” Sal said, “hey, Bubbles, come on now.”
“That’s all right,” I told Sal.
“Sure,” Bubbles said, relenting, holding open palms up at the level of his lapels, a broad, innocent “Who, me?” smile on his face. “No more shop talk.”
“Next?” Sal called out nervously, and I took a chair different from the one Bubbles had just vacated. The two of them did some business at Sal’s big brass register and then Bubbles left. “ ‘Next,’ “ Sal said, “you know how long it’s been since I said that?”
“Business is bad?”
“Business is booming,” Sal said, watching Bubbles cross the street and get into a car. “He brings his own towels,” Sal whispered after Bubbles had started the car and driven off.
“Who is he?” I asked.
Sal didn’t answer. He pointed to some loose locks, clipped fur-balls of different-colored hair scattered about the floor of his shop. “That’s off of dead people,” he told me. “I put it down there. To make the place look lived in. What do you think? Too much?”
“It’s nice.”
“Yeah? Maybe I’ll get a darky with a push broom. Give me shoeshines, fetch me coffee. Hey,” Sal said, “you were safe there with
Bubbles. You think I’d jeopardize a pal? He’s a wise guy. So how is it having the kid back? Is it great? Kids,” Sal said, “you can’t live with ’em, you can’t live without ’em. Hey,” he said, “she came in one time, asked me some stuff about Jesus. Said it was for a report she was doing for her school. I told her what I know. I don’t know much. Did I do wrong?”
“Who is he?”
“I said,” Sal said. “Just some wise guy. Hey, those birds don’t shoot you for kicks, you know. There has to be something in it for them. Sure,” he said, “the hardest guy in the world to rile is a professional hit man. You can give him lip, butt in front of him in line, spill soup down his pants, he won’t lift a finger. I don’t know, it’s a professional pride, something.”
“Sal,” I said, “I saw his gun.”
“A calling card, a trademark. Like my barber pole, like that shit on my floor.” Then, urgently, he leaned toward my ear. “All the years you been coming into this shop,” Sal scolded, “did I ever hold out on you? Wasn’t I always up front? Didn’t I already tell you fifty-sixty times about the American way of death? What’d you think that stuff was I was feeding you? Folklore? It was hard information. Jesus, Padre, show me a guy brings his own towels, I’ll show you a fuck working hard on his image! And he ain’t shy, that one. Or even like I was in some need-to-know relation to him. Hell,” Sal said, “I’m a dime a dozen with a man like that. We all are. He’s got barbers all across New Jersey, throughout the entire tristate viewing area. A hot towel here, a manicure there, a haircut somewhere else. Dropping hints all over. ‘Here, Sally,’ he says, ‘use my towels instead.’ Fucking showboat.”
“It’s a sickness,” I said. “Some people are terrified of germs.”
“He don’t give a shit about germs. It’s in case they shoot him while he’s in my shop. He says he don’t need it on his conscience he’s the one responsible for ruining my towels. Who the hell does he think he is, Anthony Anastasia? Fucking showboat! How do you want it today, Rabbi, the usual?”
“What hard information did you ever give me?”
“Oh, come on,” Sal said, “what more did you need?”
“What hard information?”
“Oh, please,” Sal said.
“No,” I said, “really.”
“What do you want to see, Rabbi, a bill of lading? You want to look in a body bag? Come down to the basement of the business parlor with me. We’ll look in the one Bubbles brought in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“No, no,” Sal said, “we’ll check him out against the death certificate. You’ll see for yourself.”
“What will I see for myself? What are you talking about?”
“No, no,” Sal said, “don’t take my word.”
“Boy,” I said, “who is it this time? Jimmy Hoffa?”
“You already did Jimmy Hoffa.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. Some guy who’s connected.”
“He couldn’t have been too connected,” I said.
“They disconnected him.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I seen him, Rov. What they done to him. He looks like Beirut.”
“Watch out, Sal, the goblins’ll get you.”
“Probably,” Sal said. “Yeah,” he said quietly, “they probably will.”
“Come on,” I said, “what’s this? You can’t really be scared. This is more shmooz and hot towels, right?”
“Right.”
“Talc and toilet water.”
“That’s right,” Sal said.
“A little hair oil and stickum.”
“Why do you think they tell me?” Sal demanded suddenly. “Why do you think he showed off in front of you? Why do you think they let us know their business? What’s wrong with you? If they didn’t want to make certain we were going to protect their secrets, why would they let us learn them in the first place? Guys like that? Like him? God damn Tober’s goddamn Edward! God damn his sporty poster kid who can’t tell here from there, up from down, in from out. God damn Shull’s fucking goddamn needs. God damn need itself or whatever else it was stole shit from the gods and brought it to goddamn Lud!”
“Hey, easy,” I said, “easy there, Sal. Easy.”
“Like Beirut. I swear. Like he was in an earthquake. Jesus, Rabbi, he looks like a fucking act of God!”
“Who, Sal? Who does?”
“Who knows who does?” Sal said, and showed me a death certificate. “The guy, the special delivery in the business parlor, but who knows who does? He could have been anybody. They bring them in from all walks of life. Guys behind on their payments. Insider trader guys from Wall Street whose inside information didn’t pan out. He could have been anyone who ever disappointed them.”
“This has a woman’s name on it.”
“So,” Sal said, “I guess they’ll be wanting a closed casket then, hey, Rabbi?”
Our own odd version of the car pool—sillier than ever, I suppose, since Connie would no longer permit her classmates to ride with her—had started up again. She was adamant about the point, even though some of the mothers had begun to call, making overtures, devising schedules, proposing ways to divide the labor. She was too humiliated, she said, and told us that the only reason the kids were willing to start up a car pool with us was her notoriety, that she’d become a character. Nor, for the same reasons, would she agree to ride in the school bus. I tried to reason with her, but she had put her foot down, made up her mind.
“The only one you’re punishing here is your mother,” I said.
“I’ll run away if you make me ride to school with other kids,” Connie said.
“It’s all right,” Shelley said. “I don’t mind driving. Really. Real-la-le-lee.”
“This isn’t fair,” I said. “Do you think this is fair, Connie?”
“Whoever said life is fair?” Connie said.
“No one,” I said.
“I don’t even mind if life isn’t fair,” Shelley said.
“Hey,” Connie said, “no sweat. I’ll run away.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Go ahead and do it.”
“I’ll turn tricks on Forty-second Street for a couple of weeks. What have I got to lose? It’s not as if I still had my cherry or anything.”
“Go ahead,” I agreed, “run away and turn tricks on Forty-second Street. It’s not as if you still had your cherry.”
“Sure,” she said, “I’ll lick some dick for a couple of weeks, put a few bucks together, then come home for a visit.”
So the strange car pool started up again, on the road again in the brand-new season’s one-woman show in that year’s late-model, big new traded-up Buick station wagon, an open door speaking to them for company, an unfastened safety belt, a still-engaged emergency brake, a tank low on gas or an unnecessary light, all the machine’s articulate parts nagging at them for attention. More ridiculous than ever, Shelley more like a chauffeur than ever, Connie more like the poor little rich kid, no matter what they did or where my daughter sat, beside her mother or way behind her, deep in the boondocks of the huge automobile, looking more than ever as if they had already arrived at the end of whatever journey they had been on, even as they were pulling out of the driveway, as if everyone else must already have been dropped off or, peculiarly, as if the car had been hired. It seemed a sort of Air Force One, some company jet, I mean, vaguely conspired, tax loopholed, as if, if you came right down to it, it was no one’s station wagon at all, or a station wagon under some Bahamian or Liberian registry. And though their route no longer required them to make doglegs and detours to pick up anyone else, it seemed as if the car might accumulate mileage by the simple fact of its existence.
Despite what it may sound like, Shelley and I had settled into a sort of truce with each other. As if not just the station wagon but we too had settled beneath some flag of convenience, pulling our testiness, our neutrality a legal fiction. Whatever else, we were each of us relieved to have someho
w made it through the summer.
And, whatever else, we had.
I said nothing about Sal. I never mentioned Bubbles.
We went almost directly from summer into Indian summer that year. There was a blustery Labor Day weekend when a sudden, fast-moving front lay down cold, withering, hard-driving rains during the nights like sustained blasts of heavy incoming, and left the days out to dry in a thin, heatless sunlight. This was followed by a week or so of damp, stalled cold weather, bright, freezing days alternating with nighttime cloudbursts and record lows. (Resorts in the Poconos and Cape May and Atlantic City and Greenwood Lake screamed blue murder over their lost profits.) Then, suddenly, a few days after Rosh Hashanah and before Yom Kippur, the front moved out to sea, and New Jersey looked washed, fresh in the new, immaculate weather like God coming out. The foliage flamed on the trees and then some of it began to fall, laying a torn, bruised cover over the yellowing fields, motley as pizza.
I would have come clean too, the troubled tzadik, I would, the muddled chuchm, and went off to Tober’s to burst Bubbles’s bubble. I meant to make it up to Shelley, too, for my infidelity, and balance the books with Connie.
But the boys weren’t in, were off on some errand and, when I got back, Shelley was crying.
“What?”
“Joan Cohen,” she said.
“Shelley, I’m sorry.”
“Elaine Iglauer told me,” she said. “I picked her up after I dropped Connie off. We were going to look at a house in Oakland.” She spoke—and wept—in griefless tones of shock in some register beyond outrage.
“Shelley, I’m so sorry,” I said. And I was, and cursed my lousy timing and wondered how I could have allowed them to beat me to the punch and why it had never occurred to me that Joan Cohen would ever share Rutherford with anyone. Meanwhile thinking, the sons of bitches. Thinking, kiss and tell, kiss and tell. Thinking, base kissers; thinking, base tale bearers. “Shelley,” I said, emotionally toed-in as a child, “if there was anything I could do …”
“I know,” she said, and laid her hand on my arm. “Elaine would have been with her. It was only because we had this appointment.”
The Rabbi of Lud Page 29
