The Rabbi of Lud (38 page)

“They’re getting married in Philadelphia. His parents live there. Miriam wants the Chaverot to entertain. Of course, we couldn’t think of charging anything. It’s a professional courtesy.”

“Of course you can’t charge them,” I said. “It will be your wedding present.”

“Oh, no,” Shelley said, “we have to get them a
gift.
Anyway, we’re all invited. The Chaverot spouses too. We could go down on Friday. The wedding’s Saturday night and we can drive back Sunday. The ceremony’s in this wonderful new hotel, which is supposed to be very nice. They have a weekend special. Miriam says the groom’s people will make all the arrangements. Can we, Jerry, can we?”

Why not? Every once in a while every now and then you have to make a weekend of it. I say this in my rabbi mode.

So we drove—the Chaverot colleagues, the Chaverot husbands—the eighty or so miles down to Philly in three of our big cars and checked into the hotel. The Barry Bernstein bar mitzvah was posted on a black hotel reader board in the lobby, Lou and Gloria Kaplan’s Silver Wedding Anniversary was. An announcement for the Mindy Weintraub Sweet Sixteen party was up on an easel. (Shelley was right, I thought, it
was
a wonderful hotel. Understand me, when I say that every once in a while every now and then you have to make a weekend of it, I don’t mean you must get away. The opposite, rather. You have to go back. You must ground yourself in the familiar, settle back in the thick, sweet old gravity of things.)

There were a dozen of us, five men and seven women. Miriam and the lucky man had gone down before us and would be staying with the Perloffs. Fanny Tupperman (divorced, she was Fanny Lewis then) shared a room with Joan Cohen, who was also single. (I’d never met Joan’s husband, and until that weekend hadn’t realized she hadn’t any.)

We’d hardly unpacked when there was a knock on the door. It was Jack Perloff, big in the doorway, rubbing his hands, kibitzing, bullying welcome. “How is it,” he asked, stepping inside, “is it all right? Is it going to be big enough? Oh, yes, it’s a
nice
size. Jesus, you could sleep three in the front and five in the back in here,” the car dealer remarked amiably. “What about closet space? Got enough? What’s this, a walk-in? Oh, yeah, terrific. Swell threads. Gorgeous gown, Shelley. Am I marrying the wrong chick, or what? Hey, how about these soaps? That’s some classy odor. Very delicate. You don’t have to use ’em, you know. Take them home if you want. With the shampoo and the shower cap. Souvenirs. Call the desk, say the maid didn’t leave you any. Have them send up some more. Wait a minute. Something’s amiss here. Where’s your rose? There’s supposed to be a long-stemmed rose in this room.”

“That’s all right.”

“The
hell
it’s all right! It’s part of the deal. Listen, you don’t have to do a thing. When I’m in the lobby, I’ll speak to the concierge. There won’t be any trouble. Oh, wait a minute. You got the fruit. Some get the fruit, some get the flower. Would you rather have the flower or would you rather have the fruit? I know the Iglauers got a rose. Maybe you could trade. There’s your TV. Look, they’ve got a movie channel. If you’re still up at three, they show an X-rated film. If you slipped the kid a fin, I bet they’d probably run it for you now. Sure, all they do is throw it up on their VCR and just plug you in. You’re too shy, I’ll say something on your behalf myself. Rabbi, and give him the finif, too, for that matter.”

“Thanks,” I said, “that won’t be necessary.”

“You’re not offended? I didn’t offend you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Hey, just because old Cupid stings
my
toches with his arrows I think
all
blood is boiling. I shouldn’t be that way. I’m too romantic.”

“Perfectly understandable.”

“Yeah?”

“Certainly.”

“Miriam and I are delighted you came. Rabbi and Shelley,” he said gravely, “and only hope that this weekend will be as memorable for you as I know it’s going to be for us.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

“Thank you,” Jack Perloff said. “Coming from a rabbi, I’m going to regard that as a blessing.”

“That’s how I intended it.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“Jerry, Jack.”

“Jerry,” he corrected. “Hey, I almost forgot,” he said, and opened a door next to the desk. “It’s our hospitality suite,” he said. “It’s for the wedding party, but I want everyone to feel free. Mi casa, su casa,” he said, and just then we heard his intended in the hall.

“Knock, knock,” Miriam said in the open door.

“Hi there, sweetheart.”

“Just a minute,” she said, and moved a foot or so back out into the corridor. “On the count of three,” Miriam called down the hallway. “One!” Jack stepped up to a door at the side of the television set, and turned the little whoosis in its round, recessed fitting. “Two!” she proclaimed.
“Three!”
she sang out. Jack opened the connecting door and, on their side of the wall, the Picklers did the same. Rose Pickler stood at the threshold between our two rooms. “Hi, stranger,” Rose, grinning, greeted Jack, “how you doin’?”

“Come here, Miriam,” Jack Perloff said, “will you just look at this, will you?”

Shelley and Jack and Miriam and I crowded around the connecting doors. Through some repeated suite, double, double, suite arrangement peculiar to the hotel, we could see down the entire length of rooms. I looked past Rose and Will Pickler in their room, and Al and Naomi Shore in theirs, beyond the Iglauers where Elaine held her rose, and beyond Ted and Sylvia Simon to where, at the distant end of the queer railroad-flat configuration, Fanny was handing Joan Cohen a piece of complimentary fruit.

And
that’s
how I saw her.

And later, after dinner, in Perloff s hospitality suite, where we had gathered to shmooz and tell jokes, to play cards and listen—and some of us dance—to the music on the FM, and watch the lights of downtown Philadelphia, and pick from the bowls of nuts, and nosh from the platters of food Perloff had had sent up (not so much without appetite or edge as somehow ahead of it), and drink from the bar he had stocked, lying about, secure, lulled by the movements of the ladies, by the sweet, soft music of their commentary like a kind of vocalizing, brought back to some ancient, lovely treehouse condition, that’s how I saw her, too. Then, later, after Perloff had left with Miriam, and some of the others, tired out, had mumbled vague good-nights and gone back to their rooms (actually too tired to leave the hospitality suite, too tired or too reluctant, and choosing the shortcut, returning through the inner corridor, through our rooms, through the Picklers’ and Shores’ and Iglauers’ and Simons’), and then a few more did, and then the rest, until, deep in the dark Shabbes, neither of us speaking and the volume turned low, only Joan Cohen and I were left to watch the X-rated movie when it came on at three.

Because I saw her all sorts of ways. (I couldn’t
stop
seeing her. Should I try to put that in?) How she danced at the wedding. With me, with the others. Sensing some distant availability in her, something game and something ready. Up for a frelach, leading a hora. Maybe there was nothing more to it than her bachelor-girl pluck, the simple, ordinary honor of the privately led life. And I could bring in how gorgeous she looked in a lobby. Jesus, she did! Never
mind
the fancy Philadelphia hotel where the Perloffs tied the knot. In the Rutherford Best
Western
even. How she shined
there
! They could just imagine what she must have looked like, how she must have been, set off against all that Philadelphia Bulgari and Pucci, the high glitz of all those upscale outlet stores! I’m a rabbi, a teacher. I leave nothing to the imagination. If they were to get a last good glimpse of her during that brief, last patch of time before I consigned her to earth forever, then I would have to lead her to them up through the murk of seance and memory. Presented like a girl on the arm of a pop. Handed off like a deb, handed off like a bride.

I’d certainly have to tell them about the lobby. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I would
have
to tell them about the lobby, occupied by that vast guest population, guests not just of the spiffy Philadelphia hotel but by the guests of those guests, invitees to all the showers, weddings, parties and anniversaries, all the affairs and mitzvahs, floating their generous mood like a kind of collective weather, and packing their gifts like handguns.

People checking in, people checking out. (And didn’t I wish I could stay there forever? Held inside the gold parameters of the handled, splendid atmospherics of the place? Didn’t I just?)

We sat near one of the hotel’s bars and breathed the lovely alcoholic spice lofted out over the lobby, and watched the richish, sporty, middle-aged Jews importantly lounging, guys in crew necks, guys in gold, guys with a bypass under their sport shirts and a hint of Sunday brunch on their breath, Wasps in a Jewey register. Except that I felt almost like some pale, poor relation beside them, thinking, Oy, the savvy Sabbath motley of our crowd.

I could repeat our conversation for them, explain the conditions—I mean the context—in which it took place—Shelley gone back to the room after the late breakfast we took with the rest of the wedding party—our last collective act before it broke up and we went back to New Jersey—to see if she’d left anything behind, to try to move her bowels.

“Well,” I said, “it was a lovely wedding.”

“Yes, it was fun. Everyone enjoyed themselves.”

“I’m glad we decided to make a weekend of it.”

“Yes, it was nice.”

“I like this hotel. I’m glad we stayed here.”

“It’s lucky Jack’s parents live in town and knew about it.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “It’s an advantage when you’re not familiar with a city if someone you know is.”

“Philadelphia’s so close. It can’t be ninety miles.”

“Sure,” I said, “but New York is closer. New York’s where we go when we go out to dinner.”

Joan Cohen chuckled.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “The way those rooms were connected.”

“I know,” I said.

“That was cute.”

“Look, that girl brought those people drinks from the bar. How about a drink, would you care for a drink? They serve you right in the lobby.”

“After last night? No, I don’t think so. But you go ahead if you like.”

“Who, me? No. Drinking’s not one of my vices.”

“It’s not one of mine either really. Though I guess you wouldn’t be able to tell that from last night. I was pretty pissed. Oh,” she said, “excuse me.”

“I say ‘piss,’ ” I objected. “I say ‘piss.’ I say ‘shit.’ ”

“You do?”

“Hey,” I told her, blushing, looking down, “I watch the X-rated movie channel.” And try to explain to them the sense I had of her hand above my head, feeling some hypnotic, unheard tonsorial snick-snick in my hair, some tingled attraction, the energy of her fingers, of her rings perhaps, doing tentative passes. I don’t know, a gravity, an electric pleasure, some gentle force field of flesh. “Well, that one time anyway,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “me too.”

“You think people do that stuff?”

“I suppose some people do,” Joan Cohen said. “I suppose some people do everything.”

“Others don’t do anything at all,” I said. “I guess most of us go our whole lives without ever getting a blow job,” I said.

“Or giving one,” Joan Cohen said.

I could put this into my eulogy, how Joan Cohen and I talked about blow jobs, how it came up naturally. In the course of the conversation.

“Did you see all those things he shoved up her behind?”

“Yes, I did,” she said.

“That was probably trick photography,” I pronounced in the rabbi mode. “Don’t you think?”

“I should certainly hope so.”

“It sure wasn’t responsible sex.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Not when there’s AIDS.”

“Certainly not,” Joan Cohen said.

“I think I
will
have a drink,” I said, and signaled the girl where she stood in the bar’s broad, open entranceway. “There’s something about the sharp smell of a highball in these places.”

“So what is?” she asked me.

“What is what?”

“If drinking’s not one of your vices.”

Her curiosity. I could put in about her curiosity. How we discussed sin, vice, good and evil in the lobby of that Philadelphia hotel while we waited for Shelley to come down with the floral arrangement she’d taken from our table the night before. Just a rabbi talking shop with an interested, dead, lone congregant untimely taken, prematurely plucked out of season.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t one of the commentators tell us that the last thing a man knows is himself?”

“I love it when you talk religious,” she said. “But really,” she said, “if you had to guess.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t.”

“No, of course,” she said. “You don’t
have
to, but tell me,” she teased,
“what?
That you haven’t any will power? That you don’t exercise regularly? That you can’t stick to a diet?”

“Do I look out of shape? You think I’m too fat?”

“No,” she said, “they’re examples. I’m poking around.”

“I really
don’t
know,” I said. “Maybe that I try to lie low.”

“Oh,” she said, “what a
good
one.”

And pick this moment to bring in something of the stunning mystery of death. This was just two years ago. Two lousy years! The day before yesterday, for God’s sake! And I’m rounding it off. What would that be in terms of seasons? Two or three wardrobes? Six or seven shopping sprees? How much hose, how many leather accessories? What naps and wools, what hides and knits and fine finished fabrics? All that chic, organic cloth, all those hues like altitude tinted on maps, pale as sea level, amber as mountain range. Her blood-sport wraps and fashionables, her swift kinetic tweeds.

Of death more mysterious than life. Because death is harder, I’d tell them, or what are we grieving for here? (Though life’s pretty mysterious too. Come on, two people chatting each other up in a hotel lobby, and one’s got the hots, and chances are the other has too? All this while the one’s wife of twenty years is upstairs, possibly humming a tune or sniffing stolen flowers?) Bringing in God. The mystic extrasensories and supernaturals. Because ain’t it just at this point that the heart did its tap dance while the head figured all the possibilities like a good gambler counting cards? And the
body,
don’t forget. What’s all this terrible new energy, these sweet swoopswoons and tickles, these pit-of-the-stomach accelerations and acrobatics like a belly lifted in an elevator? Come on, two people side by side in a hotel lobby. Sharing a couch but not even touching. Heart rates up. Palms moistening. (I mean, it was all I could do to hold on to my highball!) What, this
isn’t
mysterious? This isn’t a sort of mind-reading, this isn’t some kind of out-of-the-body travel, or bending nails without touching them? This ain’t God loose in the lobby? Tell it to the Marines.