by Barry Rachin
With a frenetic wave of the hand, he dismissed the question. “In the morning the Jew with the coke-bottle glasses told the desk clerk to reserve the room a second night.”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” When there was no response, he continued, “Then Joel ate a leisurely breakfast at a diner a few blocks down – bacon and eggs, Italian toast and home fries. At the mall, he purchased a whole new wardrobe, which he lugged back to the motel, where he snipped most of the scraggily beard away with a pair of scissors. A Gillette, twin-blade razor finished off the rest.” The interloper’s head bobbed up and down, confirming the stark veracity of what he was telling me. “At a hair salon three blocks from the college, he completed the style makeover.”
“But Joel wore old-fashioned, wire-rimmed glasses,” I protested.
Reaching into his pocket, the youth withdrew a small contact lens case with two, round compartments. “Among my family, I’ve always been considered,” he rushed ahead, anticipating my muddled thoughts, “a bit of a rabble rouser.... non-conformist.”
Someone who colors outside the lines! “That’s putting it mildly.” I grinned sheepishly. “I’m glad you’re back, Joel.”
“Never left.” He glanced at the Buber lying open on the reading table and then placed a hand gently on my forearm. “Don’t tell Celeste about our little conversation.”
*****
“Have you seen the dreamboat who moved into the Yarmulke’s old room?” Celeste tittered. She had already set her sights on the undergraduate Adonis and, in dirty-street-fighter fashion, was warning off the female competition.
“Good luck.”
“You already met him?”
“After a fashion.” I had no intention letting her know that the pretty boy three doors down was one and the same with the tortured Jew she scared off premises less than a month earlier.
I hated Celeste. I hated her smarmy, self-promoting nastiness - the way she reduced everything decent to chintzy reproductions. I hated the way she smelled the morning following her drunken debacles and her unwillingness to ever accept a molecule of responsibility for the mayhem she caused. I hated her tabula rasa approach to the human condition and where no consequences applied for loutish behavior.
Celeste ran a comb over her brunette hair and smeared a clear gloss on her thin lips. “If you got no objections, I’m gonna make a little visit to the male hotty down the hall.”
“Should I leave a night light?”
She flashed me a dirty look and flitted out the door.
Déjà vu. A rotten feeling welled up in the pit of my stomach. Grabbing my sweater, I headed over to the campus lounge and settled in with a cup of mocha latte cappuccino. Nerves on edge, the caffeine only further scrambled my agitated brain. Around eight o’clock I headed back to the dorm. Celeste was curled up in a fetal position on top of the bed whimpering fitfully. “What happened?”
“Nothing… not a goddamn thing!”
“He didn’t…”
“No, of course not.” She cupped her hands over her face too ashamed to even look at me. “I almost wish the jerk had molested me,” she added with self-loathing. “At least I wouldn’t feel nearly as bad.”
“You’re making no sense.”
Celeste finally uncurled her legs and sat up on the edge of the bed. “We got to talking… joking around and one thing led to another. He was kissing me on the neck and then …” Celeste suddenly fell silent, showing no inclination to continue.
“Then what?”
“He asks, ‘Who’s president of the United States?’” “‘George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge… who’s president?’ he repeats the same foolish question over and over again and like a fool I say ‘George W. Bush.’”
“That was last time around,” I replied. “Obama’s been in the White House six and a half years now.”
“He said he could never date a woman who wasn’t up on current events.”
Wrapping Celeste in my arms, the girl held on for dear life. “Well, if nothing else,” she quipped, “now I know who’s running the goddamn country!”
I waited until Celeste fell off to sleep before picking my way three doors down. “She came looking for me,” Joel insisted.
“Celeste… she’s clueless… still hasn’t figured out who you are.”
Joel shrugged. “There’s a vote at the United Nations tomorrow morning. The Palestinians want recognition for statehood but the Israeli and American delegations are adamantly opposed. I’m the only one in my family who supports the measure.”
“Yes, it’s been all over the news,” I replied. A familiar, well-thumbed paperback lay on the floor next to the single bed. “World leaders need to learn a thing or two about I-Thou or the UN resolution won’t amount to diddlysquat.”
Joel nodded his head but had nothing more to say on either topic. Five minutes passed in total silence. He seemed perfectly at home in both parallel universes. The religious Jew, who read Guy de Maupassant and Martin Buber and half-heartedly fondled Celeste, was reinventing himself, morphing into some as-yet-to-be-determined, hybrid species.
Finally, Joel cracked a convoluted smile. “There’s a foreign film playing at the cinema in town, and I was wondering if you might…”
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