Visiting Professor (15 page)

Eventually Goodacre’s jaw snaps shut. He pushes himself to his feet. “Thank you for stopping by,” he tells his visitor. He
does not offer to shake hands.

Lemuel hikes a shoulder. “Nuch,” he mumbles. “Fly.”

“You said what?”
Rain explodes when Lemuel phones up Tender To to tell her about his conversation with J. Alfred Goodacre. “You think there
was no subtext, right? but there was.”

Lemuel hears heartache where he expected happiness. “So what was the subtext?”

“Like you don’t want to stay on in Backwater, that’s the subtext. Like you don’t want to live with an undergraduate barber
half your age.” Lemuel starts to protest, but she cuts him off. “You relate to my butterfly tattoo, but you don’t much like
the female
Homo sapien
that goes with it.”

“You are reading this wrong,” Lemuel protests. “He wanted me to stop the bus and get off our relationship. I said him not.
I said him to fuck off.”

“Hey, terrific. What are you going to do when the visiting professorship expires? Who else in America is going to employ a
Homo chaoticus
who’s passionate about something that doesn’t exist? Boy, are you out to lunch!”

“
Give her time
, she’ll maybe calm down,” the Rebbe tells a depressed Lemuel when he turns up in Nachman’s office for tea and sympathy.

“Is it true what Goodacre said about you going back to Eastern Parkway when the school year is up?”

“It happened very suddenly. I sold IBM, I sold General Dynamics, I raised some seed money from a third party for whom I occasionally
do free-lance work, I used the money to buy into a cooperative yeshiva opening on the corner of Kingston Avenue and Eastern
Parkway in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn. The object is to create a parochial school that is not parochial. There are
two other Rebbes besides me, one will teach anti-anti-Semitism, a positive approach to the New Testament that will stress
the Jewishness of Jesus and the Apostles. The other Rebbe will teach a survey course on martyrology from the serpent in Eden,
condemned to crawl on the surface of the earth for the capital crime of recommending fruit, to Jesus of Nazareth, condemned
to crucifixion for the capital crime of claiming to be King of the Jews. Me, I will offer a course called “Chaos and Yahweh:
Two Sides of the Same Coin.” I came across a delectable quote for the course description in the yeshiva’s three-color catalogue,
maybe you know it, maybe you don’t, it’s George Russell warning the young James Joyce, ‘You have not enough chaos in you to
make a world.’ What do you think?”

Before Lemuel can respond, the Rebbe has hurtled off on another
tack. “My predicament, I was agonizing over it last night, I am agonizing over it this morning, is that I love Yahweh, how
could it be otherwise? but I don’t really
like
Him, blessed be His name. There are days when I am sick to my gut. Why, I ask myself, is the Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh,
who lusts among other things after order, sucking up to a God whose middle name is Randomness? There are days, I will admit
it to you, when I am tempted to follow the advice of Job’s wife—I’m talking Job 2:9. When she finds her poor bastard of a
husband scraping away at his boils, she tells him, ‘Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.’ “

“Hey, what stops you?”

The Rebbe flings his arms into the air in a gesture of resignation. “I love life,” he admits, “especially when you consider
the alternative. Also, there’s an old Jewish proverb which I am about to invent. It holds you should live as long as possible
so that you’ll be dead as short a time as possible.”

One of the two phones on the Rebbe’s desk purrs. He snatches it off the hook, mumbles “
Hekinah degul
,” listens, raises an eyebrow, passes the phone to Lemuel. “It’s your amanuensis,” he says. “That’s Lilliputian for girl Friday.”

Over the phone, Mrs. Shipp sounds as if she is broadcasting from an airport control tower. “Another one of those journalist
creatures has requested permission to land on your runway,” she informs Lemuel. ‘This one is a she who speaks with an accent
which reminds me of yours, only thicker. When I asked her where she hailed from, she said something about other people’s chaos
being greener. Is that a country? I put her into a holding pattern in the conference room at the end of the hall.”

“I do not trust journalists,” Lemuel tells the Rebbe. “Marx, Lenin, Trotsky were all, at one time, journalists, and look what
they did to Mother Russia.”

Lemuel barrels through the door into the conference room, prepared to send the journalist packing, he only gives interviews
by appointment, he never gives apppointments, but comes to a skidding stop when he spots the lady journalist in question.

“
Zdrastvui
, Lemuel Melorovich.”

“Yo! Axinya!
Shto ti delaesh v’Amerike?–

“
Horoshi vopros
,” she says excitedly.

If you cannot believe your own eyes, whose eyes can you believe? Yet there she was, large as life, larger even, flashing an
uptight smile that had no relation to humor, her tits sagging into a brassiere that had been washed so often it looked like
a dust rag, the dust rag of a brassiere clearly visible through a rayon shirt that had turned yellow with age, her eyebrows
plucked to the bone and arched in anxiety. My mistress from St. Petersburg, Axinya Petrovna Volkova, come to coax God knows
what from my reluctant flesh.

“
Zdrastvui
, Lemuel Melorovich.”

“Yo! Axinya!
Shto ti delaesh v’Amerike?”

“
Horoshi vopros
, “she said excitedly. “Where can we talk?”

Speaking Russian felt awkward. I racked my brain in vain for the equivalent of “Z’up?” or “Don’t have a cow.” “It depends
on what you have to say,” I finally told her.

“Your Russian has grown rusty,” she remarked. “You speak with an accent.”

I could see she was tense. She kept glancing at Mrs. Shipp through the open door, she kept ironing nonexistent wrinkles out
of her skirt with the palm of her hand, a
gesture which brought back to me an image of Axinya in Petersburg—after making love, she would spread a towel on my desk and
meticulously iron each of her garments before putting it on. Once I accused her of trying to erase the traces of passion,
but she vehemently denied it. “Wrinkles, even in clothing, make you look older than you are,” is what she answered.

“My editors at
Petersburg Pravda
,” she was saying now, “subscribe to the Associated Press. They saw the story about the crazy Russian lying down on the ramp
to stop the bulldozers from breaking ground for a nuclear-garbage dump. They sent me to interview you.”

“That happened more than three weeks ago. You took your sweet time getting here.”

“I came by train and cargo boat and bus,” she said. “Plane fares are too expensive for
Petersburg Pravda.”

Something told me I should have been out of there like Vladimir. “You did not come all this way to ask me my opinion about
abortion or the ozone layer,” I guessed.

She leaned closer. Her breasts fell into their washed-out safety net. “Has someone else’s chaos turned out to be greener?
Come home to the chaos you know, Lemuel Melorovich. I made discreet inquiries; your tenure at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics
has not been revoked.” She let her fingertips drift onto my thigh. I noticed that her nails were bitten to the quick. ‘Things
have changed in Russia,” she went on. “The Americans have established a fund to keep Russian scientists from going to work
for Libya or Iraq; now they pay everyone except the cleaning women at Steklov in United States of America dollars. I have
been told that someone with your seniority would get sixteen dollars a week. That comes to almost sixteen thousand rubles
a week, sixty-four thousand rubles a month.”

“There is no such thing as a ruble anymore,” I started to say, but Axinya forged ahead with her pitch.

“That’s not counting a year-end bonus of fifty dollars, that’s not counting what you can pilfer from faculty luncheons—”

“I am toast,” I told her in English.

“What language is ‘I am toast’?” Axinya asked in Russian.

“It is Lilliputian,” I informed her. “It means I am tired,” I added tiredly.

Axinya got up and shut the door and came back and pulled her chair around so that we were sitting side by side. She leaned
to her right, she talked to me out of the side of her mouth, her eyes fixed straight ahead, I leaned to my left, I listened
to her with my eyes closed.

“The truth is they sent me because they thought the message would be more congenial if you had screwed the messenger.”

“Who sent you?”

Her lips barely moved. “They. Them. The people you did the cipher work for. They also subscribe to the Associated Press.”

I was alarmed to hear her refer to my work in ciphers, I myself had never breathed a word of it to anyone back in Petersburg.
In situations like this I almost always clear my throat, so I suppose that is what I must have done.

“They are not angry at you, Lemuel Melorovich,” she rushed on. “They will not hold your leaving against you as long as there
is a coming back to balance the scales. The way they see it, you panicked when your request for a visa was not turned down.”

It occurred to me that her little speech had the wooden ring words acquire when they have been rehearsed. In front of a mirror?
In front of the
they
who would not hold my leaving against me as long as there was a coming back?

“You decided chaos had infected the rotting core of the bureaucracy,” Axinya was saying. “Those were your words. You decided
the situation was worse than you had imagined. They want you back, Lemuel Melorovich, which means the situation is better
than you imagined. Which also means things are not as chaotic as they appear to be. You decided the time had come to go because
they gave you permission to leave. Now the time has come to return because they want you back.”

I raised a finger, a student requesting permission to get a word in edgewise. “I would like to ask you a delicate question.”

Out of the corner of an eye I saw her hesitate.

“Do you have something called a G-spot?”

She turned to stare at me. “A what spot?”

I admitted her that I was enormously relieved to hear it, and every syllable of every word came from the heart.
Please understand, after a certain amount of instruction from Rain I more or less knew
where
the G-spot was, but I was still not absolutely sure
what
it was. There are only so many questions you can ask without looking like the idiot you are.

I decided to change the subject. “Where are you staying?”

“In the motel at the edge of town,” Axinya replied. “It costs forty thousand rubles a day. Thank God it’s not me who’s paying.
I only earn four thousand, eight hundred rubles a month.” She burst into tears. “For the love of God,” she blurted out, her
breasts heaving in time to her sobs, “come home.”

I opened the door and called down the hall for Mrs. Shipp to get Rain on the phone for me.

A moment later the telephone in the conference room buzzed. I snatched up the receiver and heard Rain’s voice in my ear.

“Z’up?” she said.

“Hey, you are not still pissed?”

“Not,” she replied in a tone that made it clear she was.

I turned my back on Axinya and cupped my hand around the phone. “I relate to your body,” I said quickly. “I think it is fly.
I relate to your Siberian night moth—”

“Like I don’t need this “

“You take getting used to,” I insisted with some urgency.

“Yo.” She sounded reluctant to be gotten used to.

“I need you.”

“What you need is a clue or two.”

“I am seriously weighing the pros and cons of becoming passionate about someone who exists.”

There was a long pause.

“Did you hear what I said you?”

“I’m not deaf.”

“A Russian friend from Petersburg has turned up in Backwater. …”

“Hype for him.”

“Him is a she.”

Rain hesitated an instant, then casually dropped an invitation into the conversation. “Hey, bring her home for supper.”

I explained the situation to Axinya. The person I shared an apartment with, a barber, right? a senior at the university
specializing in the economics of the home, had invited her for supper. Axinya, to whom communal apartments were the rule,
not the exception, anything else would have caused her to become suspicious, shrugged. “I don’t mind,” she told me with a
distant look in her eyes, “as long as the going involves a getting there.”

She let me work her arms into the sleeves of her leather overcoat lined with an old cloth overcoat, she let me lead her out
of the building, down the street past the laundromat to the block of flats in the alleyway off North Main, up the narrow flight
of wooden steps. She never uttered a word the whole way. I was running my fingers over the cement lintel, feeling for the
hidden key, when Rain threw open the door. Angling her head, smiling an iceberg-lettuce smile, she sized up the Russian competition.

“Axinya, Rain. Rain, Axinya.”

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” Rain announced in a strangely masculine voice. She took Axinya’s coat
and flung it over the back of the couch, which was piled high with coats and sweaters and miniskirts. “Like where does she
go for her glad rags?” she asked me out of the corner of her mouth.

Axinya eyed the room with distaste. Left to herself, she would have rolled up her sleeves and put it in order. “
Shto ona gavorit?
– she wanted to know.

“She is asking where you bought your shirt. She has a weakness for transparent clothing.”

“Hey, the two of you must be talking Russian, right?” Rain decided. “Like I’d actually forgotten L. Falk was a foreigner.”

At supper Rain pulled out all the stops, serving sunny-side-downs on cold toast, serving Italian wine from a bottle covered
with plastic straw, serving whole wheat bread and thin slices of cheese so badly made it had holes in it. She set a plate
in front of Axinya, offered her the bottle of catsup, smothered her own eggs with catsup when Axinya warily declined.

To her credit, Rain tried to strike up a conversation with the extraterrestrial who had landed on her doorstep, which was
how she saw the Russian lady with the see-through blouse and the washed-out brassiere. “So what do you do when you’re not
visiting Backwater?” she asked Axinya.

“I khad a gooood voyage, tank you so much,” Axinya replied.

Rain was not put off by the failure of the answers to have any immediately apparent relation to her questions. “Is this your
first visit to America?”

Axinya looked at me. “Isn’t she on the young side for you?” she inquired in Russian.

“Our relationship is platonic,” I informed Axinya in Russian. “She cracks eggs, she makes sunny-side-downs, I wash up afterward.”

Axinya hung out a smile to dry on her face, a sure sign that she had not swallowed a word I had said. She turned back to Rain.
“I vas borned”—she asked me in Russian how to say
after in
English—”affta de death of Iosif Stalin, so I am not k-n owing vat it vas like.” Having gotten this off her chest, Axinya
for some reason breathed a sigh of relief.

“Hey, I want you to know I’m really sorry,” Rain, her face longer, grimmer than I had ever seen it, told her.

“She says you she is sorry,” I translated when Axinya looked blank.

“She talks like a machine gun,” Axinya remarked in Russian. “For what is she sorry?”

I batted the question on to Rain.

“I am sorry about Stalin. Dying.”

Mayday picked that moment to stagger into the kitchen and sniff at the patterns on Axinya’s stockings. Wagging an obscenely
hairless stump of a tail, peering through cataract-studded eyes, the dog must have thought she was getting a whiff of an exotic
skin disease.

Jerking her knees away from the snorting pink nose, Axinya shrieked in Russian, “What is it?”

“A dog. She is very old,” I added, as if it explained everything—the folds of gray skin hanging from the neck, the black tongue
trailing from the drooling mouth, the runny eyes, the pink pig’s nose.

“Age is no excuse.” Axinya detected a noxious odor and screwed up her nose in disgust.

Rain, always alert to Mayday’s social failings, coaxed the dog away from Axinya’s feet. “Chill out, Mayday. Go fart into your
blanket.”

Axinya said smugly, “She called the
thing
Mayday.”

“That happens to be its name.”

“Could it be you fled Soviet chaos only to wind up sharing a flat with an American Communist?”

I laughed under my breath. “The only Marx she ever heard of is Groucho.”

Axinya was not convinced. “She named that grotesque animal after the proletariat’s high holy day, the first of May.”

When I passed this tidbit on to Rain, she giggled nervously. “Hey, Mayday’s not named after a holiday. She’s named after my
dad’s last words. He was a sergeant in the air force, right? He was heading back to the air base late one night in January
when his Volkswagen Beetle skidded into a telephone pole. I was mostly living alone at the time, my dad’s squeeze was hanging
out with this chief petty officer from the
Forrestal
, so when he dialed the only number he knew by heart, it was me that picked up the phone. He was calling from a booth which
turned out to be down the road from the scene of the accident. All he said was
Mayday
. Over and over. Again and again.
Mayday. Mayday
. I decided he was drunk and hung down on him. To this day I don’t know what Mayday means, assuming it means anything. The
next morning the military cops came by to say they’d gone and found my dad’s body in this telephone booth. They said he’d
bled to death.”

Rain’s story, or more exactly the matter-of-fact way she told it, took my breath away.

“If you’re going to faint,” Axinya said anxiously, “put your head between your knees.”

In my skull I could hear a child’s voice whine, over and over, again and again,
It was not me who hid the code book
. For the first time in my life I recognized the voice. It was mine, though God knows why I was denying hiding a code book.

I turned on Rain. “What are you telling me?” I demanded in the fierce whisper Russians employ when they argue in communal
apartments.

She freaked out. “If he’d gone and used the King’s English like any normal human being, maybe I would’ve understood he was
in some kind of difficulty.”

“Your father was bleeding to death in a phone booth and you call that some kind of difficulty?”

“The last thing I need is for you to lay a guilt trip on me.” She kicked at the plastic garbage sack in exasperation.
“All this happened before I gave my first blow job to Bobby Moran, I wasn’t even a consenting adolescent, forget adult. Get
off my case.”

Axinya was thumbing through the M’s in her English-Russian phrase book. “Mayhem. Mayonnaise. Maypole. But no Mayday.” She
looked up, hoping to pour oil on our fire. “It’s probably some kind of American Indian religious rite. It sounds like the
kind of thing a primitive person would say before dying.”