Visiting Professor (29 page)

From the seemingly endless depths of the shopping satchel he produced a wine opener and a dusty bottle of Chateau Montlabert
1979, deftly removed the cork, savored the aroma of the wine on the cork, then half-filled a wineglass and raised it in a
toast to the bride and groom. Rocking gently back and forth on the balls of his feet, he intoned,
“Borukh atoh adoynoy, eloyheynu melekh ha’oylom,
boyrey pri hagafen
. Blessed art Thou, God, King of the universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine.”

He sipped the wine. “Blessed are Thou, God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by His commandments and given us the
laws of marriage.”

He motioned for me to produce the ring and slip it on Rain’s finger. “Repeat after me,” he said, glancing again at the storm
clouds.
“Hareï at mekudeshes …”

“Harei at mekudeshes.”

“… li betaba ‘as zo kedas …”

“Li betaba ‘as zo kedas.”

“… moyshe veyisro eyl.”

“Moyshe veyisro ‘eyl.”

“What language is he talking, angel?” Shirley asked Dwayne behind our backs.

“Lilliputian,” I said under my breath. “It is the mother tongue of one of the lost tribes of Israel.”

“Behold, you are sanctified to me by this ring,” the Rebbe intoned, “according to the law of Moses and Israel.”

When I hesitated, he nodded vigorously for me to repeat it.

Still clinging to Rain’s hand, I turned to her. “Behold, you are sanctified to me by this ring …” I cleared my throat.

“So what are you nervous about?” she whispered. “You’ve been married before.”

“That is what I am nervous about,” I whispered back.

I started to slip into a fiction, but caught myself at the last instant. It dawned on me that the chaos of the moment was
infinitely more interesting.

I took a deep breath and completed the ritual sentence. “… according to the law of Moses and Israel.”

The Rebbe’s head bobbed gleefully, his coiled sideburns cavorting in the air. “With these words the delicious deed is done.
Under Jewish law the bride is considered a married woman, the groom a married man.”

“Hey, I don’t feel different,” Rain announced.

Shirley burst into tears. “It’s … so … fucking … fly.”

Fighting back tears, Rain reached up and with a strength I did not know she possessed pulled my head down to hers. She pressed
her lips fiercely against my cheek, when she spoke I felt her breath singe my ear.

“I swear to Christ I’ll be there when you need me.”

“Me also,” I whispered back, I was too emotional to say more, it is not every day you marry someone you are wildly, eternally,
achingly in love with.

The Rebbe, his enormous Adam’s apple bobbing, tilted back his head and polished off the glass of Chateau Montlabert in one
long gulp, then wound a piece of cloth around the wineglass and placed it on the ground.

“Stomp on it,” he told me. “It brings good luck.”

I stomped on the glass with my heel, shattering it into a million fragments.

“Mazel tov!”
cried the Rebbe.

“Check it out,” whooped Dwayne, caught up in the excitement.

“Hey, I am freaking out.” Rain laughed nervously. “Totally.”

An elated “Yo” was all I managed to cough up.

The Rebbe, it turned out, had not completed the ceremony. “One of the perks of being a Rebbe,” he said, holding out a palm,
feeling the first drop slap against it, “is you get to deliver the homily to a captive audience.”

Behind me, I could hear Dwayne muttering to Shirley, “Chill out, babe.”

“I can’t,” she sobbed. “I think I want to become Jewish, I think I want the Rebbe to marry us too.”

“What better way to celebrate a beginning,” the Rebbe said, davening impatiently, “than to go back and take a quick look at
the Big Bang. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was
tohu-vavohu
. I’m talking Genesis 1:1. The
schlimazel
King James translates this, ‘the earth was without form.’ But
tohu-vavohu
happens to be the Hebrew word for ‘chaos.’ The … earth … was … literally … chaos!”

“Tohu-vavohu,”
Rain murmured, “sounds like the most Florida city in the Pacific. Hey, maybe we could honeymoon there sometime.”

“Are you hanging on my every word, Lemuel and Rain?” the Rebbe forged on, he did not appreciate interruptions. “You don’t
have to be an Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh to maybe know chaos didn’t sneak through the door uninvited, it was also
created. Knowing Yahweh, we can assume it was within His power to create night and day and
grass and trees and seasons and sun and fish and fowl and Eden and Adam without first creating chaos. So what coded signal
was Yahweh sending down through the ages to Jews being joined together in holy matrimony when He created chaos before He moved
on to Creation with a capital C?”

If I live to be a hundred and six, which is how old I was when Rain jump-started my battery, I will never forget the Rebbe’s
talmudic eyes bursting with biblical originality. He absently slipped a finger between his starched collar and the welt on
his neck as he supplied the answer to his own question.

“You want an independent opinion, He was maybe telling us what every artist instinctively knows, namely that there is no such
thing as creation without chaos.” Heavy drops of rain started to spatter at our feet, Shirley and Dwayne exchanged worried
looks, the Rebbe lunged toward his punch line. “So, my darlings, if you are lucky enough to get a whiff of honest-to-God chaos
in your life as a couple, don’t run away from it, run toward it, embrace it, use it, for God’s sake.”

Dwayne sensed the Rebbe had run out of words. “Now, babe!”

He and Shirley pulled recycled paper bags from their pockets and began pelting us with fistfuls of bird seed. Instantly the
carillon tower came alive with blurred wings as waves of pigeons beat down to peck at the ground. Below, in the valley, a
prong of lightning split the sky, followed immediately by a slow roll of thunder. The rain began in earnest.

I took off my sport jacket and held it over Rain’s head. The sight of the pigeons fluttering down from the tower made my hearts
beat faster—I understood that the trivial turbulence created when wings flail the air sets off tiny ripples that amplify with
time and distance to bring, into the life of a Russian theoretical chaoticist no longer on the lam from terrestrial chaos,
Occasional Rain.

Go figure.