The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  Then he’d reached a depth where the darkness was absolute. The tree bark had become less coarse, more slippery with bubbling sap; there were whole stretches where, still hugging the trunk, the merchant was unable to find a purchase. In addition, exhaustion had begun to overtake him in every limb, and he wondered again how such precipitous folly could result in the recovery of his bride. He was slipping more often, barely hanging on until his gumsoles could snag on a protuberance or his fingers grab hold of another indentation. Still Pinchas had no thought of turning back; the climbing up would in any case be more arduous than the climbing down, and the oblivion that awaited him if he fell was no more menacing than the oblivion he’d already penetrated. Then his foot struck what seemed to be a solid bough projecting from the trunk and, completely spent, Pinchas folded onto his haunches, sitting down at long last and dangling his legs. But before he could draw a breath in relief, his stomach lurched into his throat and his brain was swamped by a wave of total disorientation; bereft of his internal compass, he found himself hanging by the crook of his knees whose strength was close to giving out. In a moment he would drop into the abyss and God (whose authority the merchant disdained) help him.

  At that juncture a hand grasped his arm and hauled him upright, where he was seated on the bottommost limb of the patriarch oak. “Aliyah tzerichah yeridah,” came the singsong voice of Rabbi ben Yahya, who, perched on a neighboring branch, appeared to have aged a decade or so in reverse. “To ascend you got first to descend,” he chirped. “What took you so long, Reb Pin?”

  His heart kettle-drumming in his ears, Pinchas looked out over the park and the street beyond, and had no idea where he was. Then gradually it dawned on him that this was the Pinch, though this particular incarnation looked to have awakened from the sublime dream of itself to a threadbare reality. The houses and buildings from his elevated vantage were smoke gray against the heliotrope sky, the park itself appearing neglected, the neighborhood deserted though unaltered by natural disaster. With a groan the dry goods merchant began creakily to lower himself from the stout branch. The rebbe dropped neatly to the ground beside him, his billowing caftan covering his head as he landed. When he swept it back, Pinchas saw there was color in the tzaddik’s pursy cheeks, his wispy beard become robust and full. Even his previously deflated skullcap rode his head like a proud cupola.

  “Nu?” said the rejuvenated old man.

  “It’s a ghost town,” asserted Pinchas, but the rebbe begged to differ.

  “We are here the ghosts. Is waiting, this place, for the world to get tired from magic.”

  Pinchas squinted at him. “You don’t make no more sense down here than you did up there.”

  “What makes you think this ain’t ‘up there’?”

  Then Pinchas felt again the hot pain of his loss boiling up from his chest into his throat. “Katie!” he cried, and heard his voice echoing through the empty streets and alleyways surrounding the park.

  The rabbi rested a hand on his shoulder. “Go home already,” he said.

  The merchant let go of one last sob, pushed his eyeglasses back over the hump of his nose, and was calm. Though he hadn’t run since who could remember, Pinchas began to lope down the gravel path past the dry fountain, out into Second Street and over to North Main, gaining momentum. He ran beneath unflapping awnings past vacant shopfronts whose dirty windows showed his reflection with its lanky legs pumping like pistons. Arrived at the grimy portals of Pin’s General Merchandise, he burst through the front door and bolted up the stairs through the parlor and into the kitchen, where he found his wife seated at the table, singing a cradle song (“Oh hush thee my lapwing …”) as she peeled the skins from a bowl of spuds.

  Looking up at him with her emerald eyes clear of clouds, she said, “Sometimes I think my whole life was about potatoes.”

  In his head he’d already rushed forward to take her in his arms, so what held him stalled and still hesitating in the doorway? Winded from his sprint, Pinchas swallowed the heart that had heaved into his throat again. “Katie,” he replied, “I don’t believe you are all-the-way dead.”

  She was nowhere as pale as the blue marble woman he’d left in their marriage bed, though her complexion was still a bit tallowy, the bones still prominent beneath the flesh. Here and there about her fingertips and split ends were signs of a transparency that might, if uncared for, spread to the rest of her anatomy. Ignoring his remark, Katie reflected aloud that the illness that had taken her was perhaps a reprise of the one that took half the town in the early days of their romance. “Sure all our years together were borrowed from the distemper that returned to take back the years.”

  But Katie’s symptoms were not those of the yellow jack; Pinchas rejected her theory out of hand, and in so doing summoned the courage to dismiss it with an emphatic “Feh!” “Speakink of which,” inching a gingerly step closer to the enameled table, “to take you back is why I came here.”

  “Back to where?” asked Katie, tilting her head quizzically.

  It irked Pinchas that the question should deserve consideration. But the quiet of this abandoned North Main Street did have a seductive quality, peaceful compared to the carnival aberration that the postdiluvian neighborhood had become. In truth, this alternative version was more faithful to the original, homelier and less rigorously demanding of one’s energies. In its recent manifestation everything in the Pinch was so hugely important, whereas here only Katie mattered.

  Just then a voice was heard at the open window, and husband and wife looked to see Rabbi ben Yahya standing outside on the fire escape, smiling in all his abnormal good health. “Excuse me my lack from discretion,” he said, “but I wanted to see with my own eyes you are safe.”

  Jerked from his brooding by the interruption, Pinchas wondered that the rebbe, who with his minions had turned the whole cosmos inside out, should worry about being discreet. Apparently satisfied that things were in order, the old Hasid said a bit flightily, “So good-bye and good luck,” and turned to leave. But Pinchas, realizing to his chagrin that he had no earthly notion of how to get back to the world, lunged for the window. “Rabbi,” he asked in a panic, “where are you going?”

  “Where else?” replied the blooming ben Yahya. “To pray. Should be nice and quiet, my shtibl, without all those tochesleckers hangink around. Oh,” pivoting his head to whisper by way of an afterthought, “you should know by your Katie that her days are still numbered.”

  “What are you saying?” gasped Pinchas. This was cruel and unreasonable.

  “Once it gets the habit from wandering, the soul,” the rebbe shrugged, “nishtu gedacht, it’s a hard habit to kick.”

  Pinchas shuddered as if the earth’s tremors had started up again. “Rabbi,” he blurted in desperation, “I will need still from you a guide.”

  Stepping deftly onto the horizontal ladder, the holy man mentioned in parting the condition that qualified his own return. “If is allowed your wife to go back with you, then somebody got to, how you say, stand surety. Somebody got to stay here in her place.”

  The horizontal iron stair dipped his plump person toward the sidewalk—though how he’d mounted the thing in the first place was anyone’s guess.

  Still languidly engaged in her labor, Katie had shown small interest in their conversation. Was this then her postmortem punishment, wondered Pinchas, to peel potatoes in this unpeopled purgatory until the hill of skins grew to a height she could scale to heaven? But why should Katie be punished at all? She’d been an exemplary wife, endured with equanimity her life as a colleen among yentes only to expire before her time. True, their marriage had been without issue, for which she’d always taken the lion’s share of blame; but if anyone was at fault it was Pinchas himself for allowing her to assume his portion of guilt as well. It was an attitude that had contributed in part to his neglect of her in recent years, but nobody died from a dereliction of affection, did they? No! thought the merchant, there was no rhyme or reason for her being here,
and he was perfectly within his rights (by the authority that sheer chutzpah had vested in him) to fetch her back.

  But there was nothing of penance about her activity; in fact, she looked, despite her sere and slightly pellucid countenance, quite self-possessed. Like Rabbi ben Yahya, the afterlife became her. It seemed almost a shame to drag her away, and Pinchas, torn now himself, felt the temptation to linger awhile amid the tranquil reassurance of the spice pantry, coffee mill, and brass-bottom tea kettle—household objects pleasantly divested of the totemic aura they’d acquired back in creation.

  “Katie,” began Pinchas, his brain near to exploding, “it’s lonely here.”

  She placed the peeler atop the curlicued pile of skins on the chopping board and looked up. “Husband,” she sighed, “you’ve a face like a slapped donkey’s arse.”

  At that the merchant fell to his knees wringing his hands, scooting forward in that perpetual twilight until his chin was practically resting on the table between them. “I miss you!” he cried in a beseeching tone that seemed finally to get his wife’s complete attention.

  A wry smile spread across her features as, abruptly, she shoved the table into his chest, which knocked him sprawling onto his backside. Then she was standing over him, yanking the pin from her hair and shaking it out until it framed her head in a rusty corona. From flat on his back Pinchas admired how the points of her breasts poked like pear stems through the thin material of her chemise, its hem brushing his brow as she stepped across him.

  “If you want me,” she said, looking over her shoulder, coquettish for all her years, “you’ll have to catch me.” Then she fled the room.

  “Oy,” groaned Pinchas. It wasn’t enough he’d come all this way for her, he had now to play with her hide-and-seek? But he was on his feet again, staggering after her, prepared to pursue her to the ends of eternity if need be. He plunged into the dust-mantled parlor where, hidden behind the door, she darted past him back into the kitchen. Turning about, he followed, chasing her several times around the table, which she managed always to keep tantalizingly between them.

  “Didn’t I climb already down a hole for you?” he pleaded.

  “And didn’t I one fine morning plumb the plague pit to find you?”

  As he stood pondering the difference, she slipped past him again, though he’d reached out to snatch her waist. Or had his hands passed through her, grasping only vapor? Whatever the case, he’d begun to warm to their game, convinced that if he captured her spirit he captured everything. He chased her back through the parlor and along the narrow hallway with its flickering gas sconce, past the closet-sized room they’d once set aside for a nursery but was occupied now in another dimension by a scribe. The scribe was at that moment busy recounting how a harried husband chased the shade of his wife around the underworld …

  Pinchas blundered into the bedroom at the rear of the flat, where he could barely perceive the outline of her shadowy form, standing there beside the iron bed in the coppery gloom.

  “Katie, I never lost for you the yetzer,” he told her breathlessly, “the wanting.”

  “Prove it,” she challenged.

  At that Pinchas became aware of a throbbing in his pants, the beginnings of a pride he hadn’t achieved in an age. As he contemplated this signal event, Katie made to sprint past him again, but this time, holding wide his outstretched arms, he was quick to bar her way. She passed straight through him—a puff as from an atomizer—then stopped and turned around, husband and wife now facing each other in a reciprocal sorrow-stricken distress.

  “Beg pardon,” came the voice of Rabbi ben Yahya, who appeared at the window (the bedroom window beneath which was no fire escape) again. “This I forgot.” Then he began to intone ex cathedra, “‘Thy dead shall live, for thy dew is as the light, and the earth shall bring forth the light of shades.’ Isaiah twenty-six, nineteen. Of course,” he stipulated further, “Maimonides don’t mention resurrection, while Nachmanides maintains that, after Judgment Day, the soul don’t necessarily get back the body it had before …” His voice faded as his head disappeared below the windowsill, by which time Pinchas and Katie, who had already embraced, were no longer listening anyway.

  The heat that met Pinchas upon holding his wife was torrid, as if he’d clasped a lighted bundle of kindling to fuel his own immolation: that was his mad thought as he lifted her, laying her gently across the creaking bed and crawling in after. He touched the warmth of her midsection, which yielded under the stuff of her chemise; felt, as he gathered her into his arms, the washboard ribs that illness had carved from her once ample frame, and exulted in her compliant palpability. Ablaze himself, he marveled that he wasn’t consumed, that his limbs, which he shucked of his garments, remained wondrously intact—as did his wife’s, whom he also feverishly stripped bare, while she returned his attentions with an equal appetite. Then what they exchanged along with their voracious kisses was the sense that neither was any longer the sole occupant of his or her own skin; so that Pinchas thought Katie’s Gaelic outcry, “A choisel mo chroí!” issued likewise from his own lips, just as Katie heard herself bellowing in Yiddish, “A leben zolt ir!”

  When they were finally able to peel themselves apart, gasping and glad to find that they were still capable of separation, it was morning, or whatever passed for it in that bravura atmosphere. The sun slanted through the bedroom windows like a boat oar dipped in gold; the reflection from the canal was a school of silvery minnows on the ceiling, and blue notes from a nearby fiddle dashed themselves against the furling wallpaper like birds that had lost their way.

  “Katie,” said Pinchas, “I think we are home.”

  “Lord save us,” she replied, burrowing her head beneath his arm.

  Now that the crisis of her infirmity had passed, Katie was visited by a parade of neighbors congratulating her on her miraculous recovery and bearing unbefitting gifts: nursing flasks, nipple shields, colic remedies. Among the visitors were a company of Hasids, hungover and shamefaced in the absence of their rebbe, greeting the merchant’s wife with an obligatory “Mazel tov!” “HaShem that he tells us,” said their rodent-faced spokesman in the tone of one citing a little bird, “you going to have a blessed event.” Dismissing the news as more of the sort of twaddle they were accustomed to hearing from that quarter, Katie began despite herself to snicker then laugh out loud; she gave herself up to an unblushing salvo of horselaughs until she saw on the faces of the gathered fanatics that God has no sense of humor at all.

  11

  Man without a Country

  When I wasn’t at the bookshop or waiting around my digs for Rachel, I still hung out at Beatnik Manor, even though I had nothing to sell. While nobody told me to get lost, I sensed a coolness that made it abundantly clear that a Lenny Sklarew who wasn’t holding was less welcome than the Lenny who was. This hurt my feelings, though not enough to keep me away, admiring as I was of the Psychopimps’ counterculture bona fides. The most bona fide of them all was Elder Lincoln, master musician and erstwhile hustler, though these days he made his presence at the manor pretty scarce. Increasingly alienated from the band, he spent his time conspiring with the circle of young turks who’d gathered about him; he was talking a brand of black nationalism and violent overthrow of the system that exceeded the humbler objectives of the other band members. On the evening I took Rachel to the manor, however, Elder was there, seated in the parlor at his upright piano, striking keys and listening to the respondent hum of a steel tuning fork. With the garland of paper blossoms that a groupie had strewn in his puffy ’fro and the fork one tine short of a triton, he looked like some black Neptune perched astride his throne.

  I introduced him to Rachel a bit anxiously, wanting to gain merit in her eyes by my familiarity with the player but a little leery of his legendary attraction for women. He raised his drooping lids a fraction by way of acknowledgment then tilted his head back toward the vibrating instrument. Hoping, I suppose, to score points with him, I mentioned in passing
that I’d been reading about a blind street musician of the 1910s, a fiddler who used his busking money to pay the bail and court costs of jailed brothers. “And one time when the costs were too high, he contrived to break them out of jail. He wormed his way through the sewer system and popped up from a grate in a holding cell, then took out a dozen or more …”

  But Elder was way ahead of me. “That would be the same celebrated fiddler used to read the whiplash stripes of former slaves like they was some kind of Braille? Sucker could hear like with his fingers the whole harmonic progression. Found his own groove in them grooves that later on the Delta bluesmen would put words to, and later still some snake-hip yokel with hair like Lucite paint sped up the tempo—and that’s how the Southland gave birth to rock ’n’ roll? Yeah, I heard tell of him.”

  Feeling scooped, I wanted to ask how Asbestos’s music had made its way into not-so-common knowledge, but Elder wasn’t done.

  “As for them court costs you speak of, see, the cops used to round up your nigra”—he gave the word a cutting emphasis—“on bogus charges—adultery, say, or eavesdropping. Then the judge would fine them what he knew they couldn’t pay. That’s when the whip boss from the cotton plantation or the turpentine camp’d step up to defray the expense. ’Cept the nigra had to work it off like a pee-on in the field or the camp or the coal mine, where he was treated even worse than slavery times. ’Cause your endless supply of convict labor meant it was cheaper to work him to death than provide even the creature comforts you’d give a common slave. And as y’all can see from the treatment of our boys the sanitation workers, ain’t much changed. However,” he grinned the visual echo of his piano keyboard, “‘everything under heaven is in chaos; the situation is excellent.’ Chairman Mao said that.” Then the grin collapsed. “That’s your history lesson for today, young ofays. But what do y’all puff-the-magic-dragon-headed hippies care about history?”