The Rabbi (14 page)

Dear God, he thought, please help me. I'm in love with a
shickseh
.

 

9

The following Tuesday it rained. He awoke that morning and listened to the drumming on the tarpaper roof with a sense of doomed resignation. He hadn't tried to see his blonde pigeon, his naked Amazon, his dancer in the dark—his Ellen—since he had spied on her at the beach. Instead he had spent his time dreaming about what Tuesday afternoon would be like. And now he knew: wet.

Bobby Lee looked at him for a long moment when he asked if he could have a picnic lunch.

“Where are you going to picnic today?”

“Maybe it'll stop.”

“Not stop.” But he packed the lunch. When Michael got through at noon the rain had changed in character, turned finer and gentler, but it fell with discouraging regularity and the skies were a uniform heavy gray.

He had planned to pick her up at two. But there seemed to be no point. There was no place to take her. “To hell with it,” he told the spider, and reached for Aristotle. It was quiet in the bunkhouse. There was only the spider and he and Jim Ducketts, the gray-haired old driver who lay on his bunk near the door looking at the pictures in a girlie magazine. Ducketts was on call, and when the knock sounded about three o'clock he jumped up and answered the door. A second later he dropped down on his bunk again.

“Hey,” he said. “It's for you.”

She was wearing a red raincoat and a floppy rainhat and rubbers. Her cheeks were wet with rain and there were tiny drops on her eyelashes and brows.

“I waited and waited,” she said.

“The beach would be pretty wet.” He felt foolish but very glad that she had come to him.

“We could go for a walk. Do you own a raincoat?”

He nodded.

“Put it on.”

He did, and grabbed the lunch on his way out. They walked along in silence.

“You're angry,” she said.

“No, Im not.”

They turned down a path leading through the grove to the forest. Unable to help himself, he said, “Aren't you afraid?”

“Of what?”

“To come in here alone? With me?”

She looked at him sadly. “Don't be angry. Try to understand how things are.”

They were stopped in the middle of the path. Water from overhanging limbs dripped on their heads. “I'm going to kiss you,” he said.

“I want you to.”

It was strange. Her face was wet and slightly cold, the flesh firm and clean-tasting when he put his mouth to her cheek. Her mouth was soft and slightly open. She kissed him back.

“I may be in love,” he said. It was the first time he had ever said that to a girl.

“Aren't you sure?”

“No. But—it scares me a little. I never felt this way before. I don't even know you.”

“I know. I feel the same way.” She put her hand into his as if she were giving him something and he held it even in places where the path narrowed so they had to walk single file. They came to an enormous pine tree whose branches made an umbrella. The needles under it were thick-fallen and dry, and they sat there and ate their lunch. They talked very little. After lunch she lay back in the needles and closed her eyes.

“I'd love to put my head in your lap.”

She undid the hooks of her raincoat and threw it open. She wore shorts and a jersey. He put his head down cautiously.

“Too heavy?”

“No.” Her hand came down and began to stroke his hair. Her lap was warm and yielding. Around them the world dripped. When he rolled his head his cheek fell on the incredible skin of her thigh.

“You aren't cold?” he asked guiltily. Her hand left his hair and gently covered his mouth. It was slightly salty to his tongue.

All during the next morning as he made his juice and cut and sliced his fruits and vegetables he sat so he faced the swinging doors in order to catch a glimpse of her. The first time she came through the doors she smiled, for him alone. After that she didn't have time to notice him. The waitresses worked like frantic slaves, practically roller-skating through the swinging doors with their order and then, tray held high above their heads on the fingertips of one hand, using their hips as bumpers to open the doors the other way and roller-skate out again.

She came into the pantry from time to time and, while she picked up salads or grapefruit, he managed to get in a few words.

“Tonight?”

“I can't,” she said. “I go to sleep right after dinner.” She bustled away again, leaving him there like a pot on the stove.

He began to simmer. What the hell is this, he thought. Yesterday we were talking about love, and today she's worried about sleep.

He was sullen next time she came in. She leaned over him as he sat and sliced lemons. There was a soft line of what looked like the last of her baby fat under her chin.

“I go to sleep early so I can get up before dawn and go swimming at the hotel beach. Want to come?” Her eyes were excited with the secret.

He could have eaten her up.

“I guess so,” he said.

There was an insect buzzing in his ear and no matter where he moved his head it wouldn't go away. He opened his eyes. The bunkhouse was dark. He slipped his hand under the pillow. The alarm clock was wrapped in two undershirts and a towel and
its buzz had been muffled by several pounds of feathers, but after he silenced it he lay and listened to see if it had awakened anyone else. There were only sleep-noises.

He slipped out of bed. He had hung his bathing trunks over the front rail of his cot and he found them in the dark and carried them outside before putting them on. It was very quiet.

Ellen was waiting for him at the grove. They held hands and ran toward the water.

“Don't splash too much or shout,” she said in a half-whisper.

They went in like thieves, making the Atlantic Ocean their private swimming pool, nobody else allowed. They swam straight out, side by side, then he turned on his back and so did she and they floated and held hands and looked at the dark sky and the quarter moon that had about an hour to live.

When they left the water they stood and wrapped their arms around each other, shivering in the breeze. He began tugging at her head with his fingers.

“What are you doing?”

“Letting down your hair.” There was an incredible number of both hairpins and bobby pins. Some of them fell to the sand.

“Those things cost money,” Ellen said. He didn't answer her. Soon the coiled braids were free. The thick blonde ropes fell and, when she shook her head, loosened into a mane that reached below her white shoulders. He held two handfuls of thick hair as he kissed her. Soon he let go of her hair. When he touched her she pulled her mouth away.

“Stop that,” she said. Her fingers closed around his hand.

“I wonder who's going to say it first?”

“Say what?”

“I love you,” he said.

Her hands dropped to her sides. But only temporarily.

And so the days passed. He made mountains of fruit salad and oceans of juice. After supper they took walks into the woods and then went to bed early, to wake while the world slept and swim and kiss and caress and tease each other unmercifully with mutual desire that Ellen savagely refused to allow them to fulfill.

They saw Cape Cod on their days off. One Tuesday they hitchhiked all the way to the Canal and back, finishing the last
leg of the trip in the back of a Portuguese vegetable peddler's open horsedrawn cart, in a drenching rain, with Ellen huddled against him and his hand between her warm thighs underneath a tarpaulin that smelled of damp manure and the toilet water she wore.

They didn't escape unnoticed. One evening as he exchanged his white work-ducks for jeans Al Jenkins stopped by his bunk for a neighborly chat.

“Hey, spider man. You actually makin' it with that Radcliffe icicle?”

Michael just looked at him.

“Well,” he said loudly, “how is it?” One of the busboys dug another one in the ribs. Michael felt taut and ready. He hadn't hit another human being since he was a small boy, but now he knew what he had been saving up for. He closed the top snap in the jeans and walked around the bunk.

“Just one more word,” he said.

Jenkins had started to grow a mustache, and Michael knew that he would hit him there, on the light blond fuzz between his nose and the smirking lips. But Jenkins disappointed him.

“Shit,” he said as he walked away. “People around here are gettin' mighty friggin' sensitive.”

The busboys hooted, but there was no mistaking the fact that it was not Michael they were hooting at.

He should have felt fine, but a couple of minutes later he found himself walking in the direction of town in a black humor. The mood hadn't dissipated by the time he got to the drugstore. There was a skinny, pimpled girl behind the counter, and a gray-haired man waiting on trade at the other end of the store.

“Can I help you?” the girl said.

“I'll wait for him.”

She nodded coolly and walked away.

“Three or a dozen?” the man asked calmly.

The season still had three weeks to go. “A dozen,” he said.

That night when he went to meet Ellen he carried a small blue zipper bag.

“Do you plan to run away from home?”

He turned it over so she could hear the gurgle. “Sherry, my love. For thee and me. After the sea.”

“You are my genius.”

They swam and they stood in the water while they kissed and touched one another and murmured of their love; then they moved up onto the beach. He had counted on the wine, but he found himself removing her bathing suit without resistance and the zipper of the bag hadn't been opened.

“No, Michael, don't,” she said dreamily as the suit descended over her hips.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please.” Her hand stopped his. Her fingers were determined. She kissed him and the tips of her breasts touched his skin.

“Oh my God,” he said. He held one of her breasts, soft and warm. “Let's just undress,” he said. “Nothing else. I just want to be naked with you.”

“Don't beg me,” she said.

He grew angry. “What do you think I'm made of?” he said. “If you
really
loved me—”

“Don't you dare put that kind of price on us.”

But she was doing something with her hands at her hips, and the bathing suit fell on the sand around her feet.

With numb fingers he pulled off his trunks. They sank together on the soft sand. In the darkness her body was full of tiny shocks and little surprises. Her buttocks sat in his hands, smooth and firm. They were much smaller than he had imagined. She flexed them and he gasped into her mouth.

He couldn't speak. He reached to touch her, but she held him off. “Not now. Please, not now.”

He couldn't believe it. He wanted to howl. He wanted to smash her in the mouth and violate her. His fingers dug into her shoulders. “Not
now?
Well, when?
When
, for Christ's sake?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“What's different about tomorrow?”

“Try to understand. Please.”

He gave her shoulders a little shake. “What the hell is there to understand?”

“I don't know anything about sex. Hardly anything.”

Her voice was so low he could barely make sense out of what she was saying. Under his hands he could feel a steady shivering that made him want to hold her close until it went away, and he felt ashamed and oddly afraid. He pulled her face into his shoulder.

“Honestly, Ellen?”

“I want you to tell me about it. Everything. Exactly how it will be. Don't leave anything out. I want to think about it and think about it, every second from now until tomorrow. Then I'll be ready.”

He groaned. “Ellie.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Please.”

So they lay there together, naked in the dark, with her lips on his shoulder and his hand moving in small circles in the beautiful hollow at the small of her back, which was the least inflammatory place he could find to touch. He closed his eyes and began to talk. He talked for a long time. When he had finished they lay without moving for a couple of minutes. Then she kissed him on the cheek and picked up her bathing suit and ran.

He stayed stretched out on the sand long after the shower had ceased its hissing. Then he took the wine out of the bag, opened it and waded into the surf. The sherry tasted of cork. He wanted to say a
brocha
, but he suspected it would be sacreligious. The warm tide pulled at his unprotected genitals and made him feel very pagan. He took a long drink from the bottle and then poured some into the sea, a libation.

She had been right. Thinking about what was going to happen that night was a torture, but it was pain of the most pleasurable variety. He lived in a state of ecstatic anxiety while he waited to catch his first glimpse of her from the pantry.

Had she been disgusted by his little recitation? Had it added to her fears?