The Rabbi (30 page)

“I hope you like a large lunch,” she said.

“I do. Then I can buy you a small dinner. Think of the money I'll save.”

They had blue cheese and crackers and tomato juice and an antipasto with lots of anchovies, and veal cutlets parmigiana and lemon pie and black Turkish coffee. Afterward they started the
Times
crossword puzzle together and when they got stuck she washed the dishes and he wiped.

When the dishes were put away he sat on the couch and smoked and observed the way her breasts were mashed flat when she lay on her stomach chipping away at the puzzle.

He looked away, at her books. “Lots of poetry,” he observed.

“I love it. I learned about poetry and about men and women from the same place, the place every minister's kid does.”

“The Bible?”

“Mm-hmm.” She smiled and closed her eyes. “When I was a young girl I used to daydream that on my wedding night my husband would recite the Song of Songs.”

He wanted merely to touch her face with his hands, to push the hair back from the soft pink flesh of her ears and kiss her there. Instead he reached past her for an ashtray and tapped the dottle from his pipe. “I hope he does,” he said gently.

On Monday she managed to leave the office early and they went to the Bronx Zoo and spent a lot of time laughing at the monkeys and at the horrible stink in the enclosure, which she swore turned his complexion an attractive light green. On Tuesday they went to
Aida
at the Metropolitan and then to Luchow's for a late supper. She exulted over the dark beer. “It tastes as though it were brewed from mushrooms,” she said. “Do you like mushrooms?”

“Love, not like.”

“Then you'll quit the rabbinate and I'll quit the magazine and we'll become farmers, we'll raise thousands and thousands of mushrooms in lovely steaming beds of manure.”

He said nothing and she smiled. “Poor Michael. You can't even joke about leaving the rabbinate, can you?”

“No,” he said.

“I'm glad. That's the way it should be. Some day when I am an old woman and you have become a great leader to your
people I'm going to remember how I helped you spend your vacation when we both were young.”

He watched her lips cover the rim of the glass and sip in the dark brew. “You'll make a beautiful old lady,” he said.

On Wednesday they ate early and visited the Museum of Modern Art, looking and talking and walking until their spirits flagged. He bought her a small framed print to help the curtains fight the drabness of her room, three bottles done in orange, blue, and burnt umber by an artist neither of them knew, and they went to her apartment and hung it on the wall. Her feet hurt and he ran hot water into the bathtub while she removed her shoes and stockings in the other room and then gathered her skirt above her knees and stepped into the tub and sat on the edge. She waggled her toes in the hot water, making sounds of such pleasure that he took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pants legs and sat next to her while she laughed, having to hold on to the edge of the tub to keep from falling in. Their toes began making underwater signals at one another, and his left foot went out to meet her right foot, and her right foot ventured out halfway, and their feet played together like children and then like lovers. He kissed her hard, and his right pants leg unrolled and slid down his shin into the water. She laughed some more when he became annoyed and hopped out to wipe his feet. When she came out, they had coffee together at the table while his tweed cuffs itched damply against his ankle.

“If you weren't a rabbi,” she said slowly, “you would have made a serious pass at me long before this, wouldn't you.”

“I am a rabbi.”

“Of course. But I would just like to know. Wouldn't you? Even though the Jewish-Christian thing were there, if we had met before you were ordained?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I knew that.”

“Shall we stop seeing one another?” he said regretfully. “I've had a marvelous time with you.”

“Of course not,” she said. “It's been wonderful. There's no use denying the presence of physical attraction. But while this . . . chemical reaction . . . is a mutual compliment—that is, if you feel that way about me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, while this says something nice about our tastes in the opposite sexes, it doesn't mean that there has to be a physical affair, or anything like that. There's no reason why we can't rise above the physical thing and continue a friendship I'm beginning to value tremendously.”

“I feel the same way. Exactly,” he said eagerly, and they put down their coffee cups and shook hands. They talked for a long time after that, about many things. The cuffs of his trousers dried and she leaned forward to listen to him with her arms flat on the table, and as he talked he traced with a friendly fingertip the lovely line of her forearm, his finger sliding over the outside of her arm where there were short hairs so golden as to be almost transparent, passing the narrow bony wrist, then tracing the promontories of her fingers, down and around and in and out, and in and out, and in and out, and in and around the thumb and then up along the soft warm inner part of her arm while her face warmed with pleasure and she talked to him and listened, laughing often at the things that he said.

On Thursday he took her to Maury Silverstein's party. The station wagon had been left at a Manhattan garage for a tuneup and he picked it up before he called for her. They were early so he drove uptown first, toward Morningside Heights, but when he came to the block in which the
Shaarai Shomayim
Synagogue was located he parked the car and pointed out the
shul
to Leslie and told her all about Max.

“He sounds wonderful,” she said, and then was silent. “You're a little afraid of him, did you know that?” she asked finally.

“No,” he said. “You're wrong.” He felt annoyed.

“Have you seen him during the past ten days?”

“No.”

“That's because of me, isn't it? Because you know he would disapprove of your seeing me?”

“Disapprove? He'd have apoplexy. But he lives in his world and I live in mine.” He started the car again.

Maury's apartment was small and it was a large party when they got there. They pushed through a forest of drinkers and glass-holders, in search of the host. Michael recognized nobody with the exception of a dark, molelike little man who was a
famous saloon-and-television comic; surrounded by a group of laughing people, he was telling jokes as fast as they tried to stick him with off-beat subjects.

“Here he is,” Maury bellowed, waving, and they pushed their way to where he was standing with another man. “You son of a gun,” Maury said, gripping Michael's arm with the hand that didn't have a drink in it. Maury was heavier and slightly pouchy under the eyes, but the stomach was smooth and hard-looking. Michael could imagine him going directly to the gym when he left the office every evening; or perhaps one of the closets of this apartment was full of Indian clubs and a set of barbells like the ones Abe Kind had used for so many years.

Michael introduced Leslie and Maury introduced his boss, Benson Wood, a smiling man with a large face and the heaviest horn-rimmed glasses Michael had ever seen. Wood ignored Michael, smiling drunkenly at Leslie and not letting go of her hand after he had shaken it. “Any friend of M. S.,” he told her, pronouncing each syllable very distinctly.

“There's somebody here you've got to meet, one of my talents,” Maury said to Michael, taking his arm and leading him back to the group around the man with the head like a mole. “Here he is, George,” he told the comedian. “The fellow I told you about the other day. The rabbi?”

The comic closed his eyes. “
Rabbi. Rabbi
. Did you hear the one about the rabbi and the priest—”

“Yes,” Michael said.

“—who were buddies and the priest says to the rabbi, Listen you really ought to try ham, it's delicious, and the rabbi says to the priest, Listen, you really ought to try girls, they're better than ham . . . ?”

“I did. Yes,” Michael said again, while the group laughed.

“Yes?” The man closed his eyes and touched his fingers to his forehead.
“Yes. Yes
. . . . Did you hear the one about this fella takes this Southern loose lady to the drive-in movie and he asks for her favors, and by the time she could drawl Yes the picture was over and they had to move the car?”

“No,” he said.

The man closed his eyes. “
No. No
,” he mused. Michael turned and went back to Leslie, who was glaring at Wood.

“Would you like to leave?” Michael asked.

“Let's have a drink first.” They moved away and left Wood standing there.

The bottles were on a table next to the wall. Two girls were already there and Michael waited patiently while they made their drinks. They were tall girls, a redhead and a blonde, with exceptional figures and pert faces that carried too much makeup. Models or television actresses, he thought.

“He was a different man after he had the hernia fixed,” one of them was saying.

“I should hope so,” the redhead replied. “I couldn't stand taking dictation from him when he called the pool and the witch sent me. I don't know how you stood it all those months. Between his disposition and his breath I almost died.”

A woman behind them screamed suddenly and they turned to see Wood spouting vomit, while people scrambled in the crowded room to create a clearing, spilling drinks as they fled. Maury emerged from nowhere. “It's okay, B. W.,” he said. He grabbed his boss' body, his hand supporting the drunken man's forehead as Wood heaved. Maury looked as though he were accustomed to performing the service, Michael thought. The girl who had shrieked was holding her dress away from her bosom, making short sounds of disgust and outrage.

Michael took Leslie's hand and led her away.

Later, back at her apartment, they had their drink. “Ugh,” she said, shaking her head.

“It was a mess. Poor old Maury Silverstein.”

“That loud boor. And that ugly little man with the jokes. I'll shut off my television set next time he's on.”

“You're forgetting the star.”

“Indeed I am not. That horrible pigsty with the changed name.”

His glass had been raised to his lips but he did not drink. Instead, he placed it on the table. “Changed name? Wood?” He stared at her. “You mean you think his name was once something like Rivkind?”

She was silent.

He stood up and reached for his coat. “He was a
goy
, sweetheart. A loud, sloppy, lecherous
goy
. A drunken Christian vomit-wallower. One of
yours
.”

She sat there unbelieving as the door slammed behind him.

On Saturday evening Michael stayed home and played casino with his father. Abe was a good card player. He knew at all times how many spades were out and whether the good two and the ten of diamonds were still in the pack. In defeat he was the kind of opponent who slapped the cards on the table in frustration, but when playing against his son he seldom was forced to lose his composure.

“I got cards and spades. Count points,” he said, puffing his cigar. The telephone rang.

“All I have is two aces,” Michael said. “You get nine more points.”

“A
shmeer
.”

“Michael,” his mother called. “It's Western Union.”

He hurried to the telephone. His parents stood in the kitchen and waited as he said “Hello?”

“Rabbi Kind? I have a telegram for you. The message is ‘I am ashamed. Thank you for everything. If you can comma forgive me.' Signed Leslie. Do you want me to repeat that?”

“No, thank you, I got it,” he said, and hung up.

His parents followed him back to the card table. “
Nu?
” his father said.

“It was nothing important.”

“So what's so unimportant that it requires a telegram?”

“One of my boys in Arkansas is going to be
bar mitzvah
. His family is a little nervous. They were just reminding me of some details.”

“Can't they even let you alone on your vacation?” His father sat down at the table and shuffled the cards. “I don't think casino is your game. How about a little gin?”

At eleven o'clock his parents went to sleep and he went to his room and tried to read, first the Bible and then Mickey Spillane and finally his old Aristotle, but nothing worked and he noticed that the binding of the Aristotle was cracked and torn. He put on his coat and let himself out of the apartment and downstairs he unlocked the door of the station wagon and got in and drove, taking the Queensboro Bridge instead of the tunnel because he wanted to see the lights on the East River. He fought traffic in Manhattan and then, like a good omen, there
was a parking space directly in front of her apartment house.

In the brown hallway he stood for a moment, uncertain, and then he knocked on the door and heard the whisper of her feet.

“Who is it?”

“Michael.”

“Oh, God. I can't see you.”

“Why not?” he said angrily.

“I look a mess.”

He laughed. “Let me in.”

The lock clicked free. When he was inside the room he saw that she was in faded green pajamas and a brown flannel robe so old that the edges of the sleeves were threadbare. Her feet were bare and her face was scrubbed free of makeup. Her eyes were slightly reddened, as if she had been crying. He put his arms around her and she leaned her head against him.

“Were you crying because of me?” he asked.

“Not really. I have a stomach ache.”

“Can I get you something? Should you see a doctor?”

“No. It happens to me every time there's a new moon.” Her words were muffled by his shoulder.