by Steve Stern
“That’s not fair …” I began feebly to protest, wavering between resentment and guilt. But Elder was no longer listening, and Rachel tugged at my sleeve that it was time to move along.
Still I was stung by the indictment; it was wrong to think I wasn’t concerned about the current state of things. Didn’t I want the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat as much as the next dude? I was aware that the mayor had backed off from a compromise, that strike leaders were being arrested on frivolous charges and the National Guard was staging riot drills. I knew there was a war on. But I was lately subject to a condition I hadn’t previously experienced, which altered my attitude regarding the urgency of the political situation; it was a condition I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed until it took hold of my heart and genitals: I was in love.
Rachel was pure oxygen, and while her association with me had seemed to make her less conventional in manner and dress, mine with her secured me more firmly to the family of man. Menschlikeit is what Avrom might have said I was acquiring, if Avrom were in the business of paying compliments. It was a consequence about which I still had reservations, since my role as Rachel’s companion threatened to jeopardize the image of L. Sklarew as unreconstructed misfit. And too, there were times when I felt that, for all her Gypsy concessions to fashion, Rachel was still slightly embarrassed to be seen with me in public. Unhygienic as was my apartment, she preferred to meet me there, and though I’d seen her place in midtown—an ivy-clad greenstone edifice with a courtyard—I’d yet to be invited to spend the night. These things were finally immaterial in the face of what really mattered: that the girl could short-circuit my instinct for self-sabotage with a finger to my lips; with a well-timed furrowing of her brow she could break me of a lifelong habit of longing.
Whereas before we met I’d been in a stupor of self-medication—as stuporous from books as from drugs if the truth be known—now I lived in the real world with a girl and only occasionally resorted to reading a book. Or rather the book, which we read together, so that with Rachel I struck a fine balance between fiction and fact.
We read slowly, interrupting the narrative at random points to fool around. Sometimes the narrative itself inspired a friskiness that broke the rhythm of our reading; sometimes the friskiness, acquiring gravity, overwhelmed the narrative’s affecting influence. I might be reading aloud a passage in which the barber Ivan Salky, asked to give a trim (close back and sides) to the angel Ben Nez, took umbrage at the angel’s patronizing tone and clipped his wings—when Rachel, whose nakedness beside me I never got used to, would interrupt to offer some item from her research: “You know, Ivan’s son Oscar started Salky’s Paper Bag after the war, which made him a mint. His wife, Sophie, is very active in Hadassah and on the board of the Lightman Nature Preserve.” Then I would thank her for the edification and devour her with kisses. But much as I wanted, I was never able to lose myself wholeheartedly in our lovemaking, since the moment always came—often at the height of passion—when I remembered that I couldn’t take Rachel back with me to Muni’s street of amaranthine time. That’s when I missed the intimacy with characters that were at least temporarily immortal, especially given the surplus of mortality outside the book.
Because like I said, I knew well enough what was going on in the world. I knew about the Tet Offensive and Khe Sanh and Hue, and the major who said, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” I knew, pace Elder, about the protesters murdered by the highway patrol at a bowling alley in South Carolina. I knew that Life magazine declared Jimi Hendrix the most spectacular guitarist on earth, and that 116 strikers were arrested in Memphis for sitting in at a council meeting at city hall. I knew that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who some said had had his day, was coming to town to march. Sometimes I thought the state of the planet was bodeful enough to make you want to trade all of creation for an instant of righteous make-believe.
It was also around this time that other peripheral events had begun to intrude. No sooner had Lamar Fontaine allowed his attorney to secure his release from the county jail than he jumped bail and disappeared. The rumors of his relocation—on a houseboat moored off an island in Plaquemines Parish, in an ashram in Kuala Lumpur—persist to this day. Meanwhile, I’d already met some of Lamar’s creditors, a horror show assortment of motorcycle outlaws with lurid tattoos, and had no desire to encounter them again. They would be looking for my landlord’s cat’s-paw, anxious for news concerning Lamar’s whereabouts, and the fact of my ignorance would not deter them from trying to extract that information by any means necessary. I had no choice but to appeal to Rachel for temporary refuge, and despite the unspoken scruples aflicker in her hazel eyes, she obliged.
I came to her with only a toothbrush and a skittish grin. Leaving the Pinch, I deliberately left behind The Pinch in anticipation of a total immersion in all things Rachel. Her tidy apartment was located in a quiet old neighborhood whose sidewalks heaved and plunged above the roots of tall trees. The street was a stone’s throw from the zoo, a fact in which Rachel delighted, and at night you could hear peacocks yawp and lions roar. The apartment’s interior was impregnated with her scent of vanilla and roses, which clung to the clothes in her closet and the sheets on her bed, and tinged a little the taste of her chamomile tea. There were objects that affirmed her identity—reproductions of primitive art alongside the Chagall and Ben Shahn prints on the walls; a bookcase crowded with essential volumes: The Thousand Nights and a Night, Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, The Golden Bough (“Wow,” I said, “The Bough! Wow!”), National Velvet. There was a small black-and-white TV with an antenna like a caduceus, a portable stereo and a stack of albums full of strange bedfellows—Barbra Streisand and Joni Mitchell, Stravinsky, Burt Bacharach, and Spike Jones; there was a fat marmalade cat named Jezebel that barfed lozenge-shaped hairballs into my discarded shoes.
Rachel would leave in the morning for the Folklore Center, then drive into the suburbs where the Jews lived to conduct her interviews, returning in the late afternoon. By then I would have made a token pass at housekeeping before browsing her library and lingerie drawer, handling books and brassieres invested with a taint of sanctity because they were hers. I watched a cooking show on daytime TV and tried to duplicate the recipes, though the incinerated loaves and imploded soufflés prompted Rachel to state a preference for takeout. Occasionally I attempted a cautious constitutional along the shady streets with the uncooperative cat on a leash. As a hideout Rachel’s apartment seemed a safer haven than any I’d known, more so than even the bookshop or Beatnik Manor, both of which were off-limits till the coast was clear. Moreover, I believed that we’d turned a corner in our relationship. So what if her friends disapproved of me, if she took phone calls behind the closed door of her bedroom, from which I sometimes heard aggravation in her muffled voice. Relaxed as a convalescent, I thought without remorse that I was making a genuine bid for normality. Maybe there was a future in which I might return to school, avoid the draft, communicate with my parents—and Lenny Bruce would come back from the dead.
I felt like an urchin in a penny dreadful who’s rescued from the streets and given a bath and a hot meal. Only instead of a jowly financier, my benefactor was a pretty girl, who allowed me to undress her and plumb her mysteries to the length and breadth of my tongue. After making love (and before our heads settled back into their respective entities) we would read to each other from her treasury of folktales—stories of tricksters who juggled their own eyes and stole magic hats from the gods—while the cat accommodated itself to the space between our adjacent bodies. In the mornings before she left Rachel brewed strong coffee and squeezed a medley of juices whose liquid incandescence caused (lifting my shirt to prove it) my extruded navel to glow. Then I would wave good-bye to Rachel from a window, which made her laugh: “You’re like Penelope reminding Ulysses not to forget his lunch.”
Early on I’d phoned Avrom to say I would be away from the shop due to a family emergency. I was di
sappointed that he failed to even inquire about the nature of the emergency (“Since when you got a family?”), letting me know through his fruity cough—which he may have exaggerated to pique my guilt—that I wouldn’t be missed. We both understood that the job had more to do with charity (his toward me and mine toward him) than actual labor, but I did worry that he might need some looking after in my absence. I soothed my conscience by calling Old Man Zanone, who had the Planter’s Peanuts shop next door to the Book Asylum and was himself a relic of Main Street, asking him to please look in on Avrom every once in a while.
Avrom’s disinterest was the flip side of Rachel’s persistent third degree; she was forever pestering me about my past—“and don’t tell me you were raised by wombats or whatever.”
“I have a family,” I was finally compelled to admit, “of sorts.” I had an obese mother, I told her, whose Valium addiction had left her in the vegetative state of a beached manatee; a father who, when he wasn’t foreclosing properties, napped with an open Wall Street Journal over his face. This was all more or less true, though I tended to err on the side of less, but Rachel seemed to find the current version feasible enough.
“So you hate your parents because they’re not … what? Sonny and Cher?”
“Who said anything about hate? I hardly know them.” Having just made their acquaintance.
Rachel emitted the sigh that was her signature assessment of my character. “I’m fond of you, Lenny, really I am,” cupping my jaw between her palms as if she intended to squeeze my face into two dimensions, “but you know, you’re not all that special.”
“Fankoo,” I told her, my lips still squinched between her fingers, which I removed. “I appreciate your honesty.”
She did this circumflex thing with her eyebrows by way of apology and made herself pliant again, leaning against me so I could fold her in my arms like a hero. We were seated on a stone bench in her apartment’s courtyard, the air practically narcotic with the fragrance of honeysuckle and hyacinth. A blue butterfly played about Rachel’s hair, the warm sun highlighting her unconfined breasts through a translucent blouse. “Must have been some awful trauma that made you want to erase your own past,” she mused.
“Yeah,” I confessed, “the trauma of boredom.”
Then it turned out I had a limited tolerance for bliss. Like a fish that’d scrabbled onto dry land to become a person, I felt I’d evolved too fast, and wanted to turn tail and flop back whence I’d come. I loved the girl but missed the Pinch (the place and the book), and began to feel as if I were under house arrest. I tried my best to conceal my unease from Rachel, but it didn’t help that she reminded me repeatedly that I shouldn’t get too comfortable in her apartment: our arrangement was never meant to be permanent. The caveat made me painfully aware of how comfortable I’d become. Having determined that the solution lay in consolidating the book and the girl, I decided that enough time had passed; I would return to North Main Street and retrieve Muni Pinsker’s desultory saga. If we resumed our custom of reading from it aloud, it might resolve my restlessness and at the same time placate Rachel’s growing impatience with the space I took up in her flat. But when the bus dropped me off in the early morning at the corner of Winchester and Main, I discovered that my building was padlocked as if in solidarity with number 348 across the street. Ordinances advising No Trespassing were pasted to either side of the crumbling entrance.
Undeterred, I stepped into the vacant lot next to my building and shinnied up a budding mimosa tree to a second-story window. From a swaying limb I managed to raise the unlatched sash a few inches before it stuck; then I slithered into the room, in effect illegally breaking into my own life. Even standing amid the cuckoo’s nest of my unshelved library, I felt like a burglar. I had a fleeting urge to organize the books, arrange them in uniform stacks according to subject and author; the exercise would unclutter my mind and provide a blueprint for an ordered existence. Because the truth was I felt no more like I belonged in those mildewy rooms than I did in Rachel’s harmonious abode. Muni’s homely beige book lay splayed open on the mattress where we’d left it. I stooped to pick it up, closing the covers as if afraid its contents might spill out, then tucked the book under my belt. As I ducked out the window back into the tree, I promised myself I’d return with a wheelbarrow to cart the whole library back to Avrom’s.
I grappled down a branch of the mimosa until I felt my feet touch the weedy ground, but rather than drop back into the lot, I pushed off again with my toes. The limber branch tossed me into the air like a trampoline. I bounced high and, when the branch nodded back toward the earth, bent my knees and shoved off again. I let out a whoop, wanting just to keep bouncing—a human yo-yo—between North Main Street and the shell-pink firmament, but the bough snapped and I came crashing to the ground amid a furor of exploding dandelions. Rattled but unhurt, I rolled over to find that I’d landed on the open pages of Muni’s book, which I credited if irrationally with having broken my fall.
I located a phone booth and dialed the office of Bernie “the Mouthpiece” Rappaport, who made it clear he had no time for anyone associated with Lamar Fontaine, whose flight from justice had left his attorney holding the bag. He explained the situation in brisk officialese, using jargon like “angary” and “writ of replevin” until I begged him to please speak in plain English. Then he told me that the former owners of Lamar’s properties, which the scofflaw had failed to develop since their purchase, had invoked a legal loophole supporting their reclamation of the deeds. The tenants of said properties—of whom, to my knowledge, I was the only one—were to be promptly turned out.
Back at her apartment I fretted over my eviction to Rachel, who asked me, “Where will you go?” Which left me to understand that, assurances of abiding affection aside, she wasn’t renewing the invitation to stay longer with her.
When later that same day I pounded on the door of the Book Asylum, mysteriously locked during business hours, nobody answered. I stood on the sidewalk with nothing but my bintl of belongings and the increasingly dog-eared copy of The Pinch, feeling that all doors had been bolted against me.
“Where’s Avrom?” I asked Mr. Zanone in his flyblown nut shop next to the Asylum. (The irony of their juxtaposition was not lost on me.) He was an old codger, Zanone, whose stubble-dusted dewlaps trembled like udders when he spoke; his red-rimmed eyes blinked every time the mechanized Mr. Peanut tapped his cane against the window, where a silver dollar protected the glass from the cane’s nickel tip. He told me that, after being discovered barely breathing on the floor of his shop by a passing pedestrian (a demonstrator who fanned him with his I AM A MAN placard till the ambulance arrived), Avrom had been taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital.
I found him on a harshly lighted ward whose odor of mortification was only slightly mitigated by the tang of cleaning solvents. The rows of beds containing patients in varying stages of decrepitude were separated by folding privacy screens. Loomed over by a metal pole like the tree in Godot hung with transparent fruit, Avrom lay flat on his back in the adjustable bed. He was connected by tubes, hoses, and what looked like electrodes to a console of winking and ticking machinery. At first sight of him I was put in mind of the victim of some ghastly experiment—as if the machines, rather than sustaining him, had sucked the essence out of him and left in his stead the husk of a sick old man. But such a notion was gilding the lily in the case of Avrom, upon whom the worst had already been perpetrated. On the trolley table beside a beaker of water and a bowl of untouched pablum lay his thick glasses, which left his open eyes looking as vulnerable as poached eggs. I approached his bedside reluctantly, a little ashamed of my aversion to being in such close quarters with the ebbing geezer. His glaucous eyes, registering a visitor, rolled slightly in my direction, and in a voice just above a hoarse whisper he declared, “I ain’t contagious.”
Feeling guilty for having failed among other things to bring a gift, I asked him, “Avrom, what can I do for you?”
“Don�
�t do for me no favors,” he groused, and let loose a whistling exhalation.
“I thought I should ask …”
A turquoise-veined hand worked its way from beneath the sheet to clutch my wrist, which made me recoil as from a tentacle. “Awright,” he said, “you can mind in my absence the shop.” He made a gruesome sound in his throat that may have been intended for a chuckle. “I think will be permanent, my absence.”
This last was pure melodrama, no doubt meant to reinforce my guilt. “You’ll be up and around again in no time,” I said, because wasn’t that what you were supposed to say?
His fluid-filled lungs gurgled like water down a plughole, giving the lie to my blandishment. “And don’t sell cheap the incunabula,” he managed.
“Incunabula?” There were no incunabula.
I cautioned myself not to be fooled. Death was for Avrom an anticlimax; it was a sham even if it was real. If he expected me to honor his words with the weight of some final request, he was sorely mistaken. It was the age of Sgt. Pepper and Benny Profane; my fellow freaks were milling peyote buttons in supermarket coffee grinders, cultivating their hysteria with pleasure and terror, and I too had other fish to fry. To quell the disquiet in the pit of my stomach, I announced that, with all due respect, I would prefer not to return to the bookstore.
He relaxed his grip on my arm but gave no indication that my answer had discouraged him. “It’s bashert,” he muttered, actually showing the teeth I was relieved to see were still in his head, “your destiny.”
I inclined my chin at the word. “Since when have I got a destiny?” I wanted to know.
A rattling cough, then: “It is written.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard.”
“Where is it written?”
