The Rabbi of Lud (36 page)

So instead of all is forgiven, nothing was. Shelley huffed and puffed, fussed and bothered, preening her car-pool temperament and conscientiousness like nobody’s business. The very picture of a mother right down to the last detail. As, before Connie came along, she’d been the very picture of the brand-new bride and, after, the perfect picture of a wife and lover. Or, throughout, had the rebbitzin, if not letter-perfect—I never said Shelley was letter-perfect—down pat, at least in the sensibilities. And, as now, she had become some vehicle of born-again reproach to me. We
didn’t
sleep together. Oh, we shared the same room, even the same bed, but we might, absent and yearning, have been in different cities. It wasn’t even as if she felt a sexual antipathy toward me. (I know my Shelley.) No, this was the judgment of the court. She was serving time, waiting until the next down-to-the-last-detail down-pat picture came to her.

Connie, God bless her, harassed me with attitude while she—I thought—thought up new ways to go public. I asked if she meant to run away again, and she said, “Where would I go?” Sealing the ménage. Locking us, forever could be, into her tight, airless little game plan.

And me? What about me, the Rabbi of Lud?

Well, to tell the truth, I was in love at the time and couldn’t be bothered. I don’t know, maybe it was my problems at home made it happen, one of those cause-and-effect, chicken-or-egg deals that make you crazy trying to fathom. Connie had already revealed God’s plan for her in the scheme of things, split Lud, and sent Shelley off packing into the spare bedroom with her jewels and lucky porcelain, so I was probably already half a goner anyway when I ran into one of my wife’s singing sisters in the hospitality suite of a nearby Best Western when I was working the interment circuit for Klein and Charney. Of all the musical Jews, God knows she was the one I’d always found the most attractive.

It was Joan Cohen, the one who shopped. The tall, elegant Chaverot in the suedes and knits who, in her wool autumnals and graduated rusts and yellows, looked like camouflage, and seemed, as I’ve said, some quick tweed movement in a field, fashionably earthen as a saddle or the burnished stock of a rifle, a step from blood sport. She could have been poster lady for the National Rifle Association. Joan Cohen was like moonlight in Vermont, autumn in New York.

Oh, oh, Joan, Joan, it wasn’t just the leaves you set ablaze when you stepped up to fill the brisk fall air with your smoky, musky chlorophyll, but whole heaped piles of my heart. You were aristocratic and as full of gorgeous, solid presence as some handsome, tweedy lady sensibly shod. Foxy Joan Cohen, do ye ken John Peel?

I don’t know, she made me feel, well, Church of England, as though I had a “living,” two hundred a year, say, like some curate in a country parish on a great estate in a novel. Jerry Goldkorn, Rabbi of Dorchester House. Well-met we were in that Rutherford, New Jersey, Best Western.

“Yoicks! Is that Joan Cohen?”

“Rabbi, it is,” she said. “Shalom.”

“Hail! Halloo! What cheer?”

“I read about your Connie in the papers.”

“My,” I said, “what a beautiful sweater. Shetland, is it?”

“Kids,” she said, “go figure them. A bunch of nudniks.”

“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.”