Visiting Professor (8 page)

The Rebbe trembles in exasperation. “Consider, please, the possibility, I’m flirting with
probability
even, that this God of our fathers, this Yahweh, holy be His name, maybe has a flaw in His character. The flaw is that He
can only relate to people who fear Him. ‘Serve the Lord with fear,’ the Psalmist advises us—I’m talking Psalm 2:11. And how
does Yahweh instill the fear of God? By being unpredictable is how. Which is to say, by inflicting punishment at random.”

“I dig what you’re saying,” Rain remarks. Three heads swivel slowly toward her. “Like if God didn’t punish randomly, if He
only killed certified sinners or blonds who stuttered or left-handed lesbians, everyone’d know where they stood. They’d know
whether or not they were potential victims. And the ones who figured out they weren’t potential victims wouldn’t fear God.
I mean, why bother? Fearing God? If you’re not a potential victim? It’s because God punishes at random that anyone could become
an actual victim without even knowing she was a potential victim. So to be on the safe side”—Rain’s voice starts to peter
out—”everyone fears God, right?”

“I could have maybe phrased it better,” the Rebbe declares, “but you hit the nail on the head.” He turns back to D.J. and
Lemuel. “Fear is His flaw, randomness is His vice, randomness is His middle name. Yahweh keeps the chosen people on their
toes through randomness. He has decided that without
yir’ah
, which means fear of God, there will be no
emunah
, which means faith in God. And who can say He is wrong?” The Rebbe aims a lopsided grin at Lemuel. “Here you are, all hot
under the collar to find randomness, and it’s staring you in the face. Seek God! Selah.”

“You put on a good show,” Lemuel observes mildly. “Yahweh’s randomness, assuming He exists, assuming it exists, is neither
pure nor unadulterated. It looks like randomness to us because we do not know enough about Yahweh and what is going on in
that head of His. In the end, Yahweh’s randomness will turn out to be like all randomness—which is to say, fool’s randomness
and nothing more than a footprint of chaos.”

The Rebbe shrugs, leans toward D.J. and starts to whisper something to her. She blushes, murmurs “Not now” under her breath.

The Rebbe is not put off. “You have maybe heard of Rebbe Hillel, an
illui
, which means genius, if there ever was one. He is remembered, among other things, for a second-century sound bite: ‘If not
now, when?’ “

Rain tugs at Lemuel’s elbow and draws him toward the door. “Where are you taking me?” he wants to know.

The Rebbe’s taunting laugh follows them out of the room. “Remember what that archetypal goy Augustine once said,” he calls
after Lemuel. “ ‘Lord, make me chaste’—ha!—’but not yet.’ “

“I’m taking you to the bowels of the earth,” Rain confides gleefully, pulling Lemuel down the winding staircase toward the
basement. They thread their way around boys and girls sitting on the stairs passing a cigarette from hand to hand.

“Yo, Rain,” one of the boy says. “We’re almost high and dry.”

A handsome boy with hawklike features and pitch-black hair grips Rain’s ankle. “We could use a refill.”

Rain jerks her ankle free. “You need a refill, Izzat,” she shoots back, “see me in my orifice.”

Lemuel is struck by the total concentration of the boys and girls as they follow the cigarette with their eyes. A whiff of
smoke reaches his nostrils. The odor seems vaguely familiar.

Passing an open door at the bottom of the staircase, he spots half a dozen boys wearing purple cardigans, each with a large
yellow “BU” sewn on it, sitting around a bare wooden table with several pitchers in the middle. A girl with long hair falling
across her pimply face is topping off tiny shot glasses from one of the pitchers. She glances at her wristwatch. “Okay—now,”
she says. The boys raise their shot glasses and drain off the liquid in one gulp.

“Kid stuff,” Rain comments, steering Lemuel toward a room at the end of the corridor. “I’ll show you what the consenting adults
are into.”

She pulls him into a room. Black-and-white images shimmer on a television screen. A haze drifts lazily through the flickering
half-light. Lemuel sniffs at the haze. It reminds him of … ah! the rain cloud hovering over the Rebbe’s stock-market pages.
He inhales again, begins to feel giddy.

A voice comes out of the darkness. “Hey, Rain.”

“Yo, Warren.”

“I see you made it after all.”

“Shhh.”

“Shhhhhhhh,” someone says to the person who said “Shhh.”

“Like there’s no sound track,” says Rain. “So why can’t we talk?”

“What’cha doing, Rain,” someone else whispers, “robbing the grave?”

“Fuck you, Elliott,” Rain whispers back. “In ways which are over your head, he’s younger than both of us put together.”

Elliott laughs. “Aren’t you confusing youth with innocence?”

“You guys want to have an intellectual conversation, take it upstairs,” Dwayne gripes.

“For crying out loud, knock it off,” someone else calls.

The television screen is obscured by the smoke swirling in front of it. Guided by Rain, Lemuel settles heavily onto a cushion,
his back to a wall. As his eyes gradually become accustomed to the darkness, he makes out a dozen or so boys and girls crowded
onto low couches and cushions. Several of them seem to be joined together like Siamese twins. From the darkest corner of the
room comes the throaty purring sound that a cat produces when it is being caressed.

Rain slips her arms through Lemuel’s. “This may be one of the best fucking films I’ve ever seen,” she breathes.

Lemuel pats his jacket pockets in desperate search of his eyeglasses, fumbles them onto his nose, rivets his eyes on the television
screen. Thoroughly intoxicated by the haze, he feels as if he is peering through the wrong end of binoculars. Everything looks
incredibly small. … He wipes perspiration off his forehead, blinks hard several times, concentrates on the tiny images on
the television screen. Through the haze, he manages to distinguish three silvery figures who appear to be engaged in some
sort of stylized, musicless ballet, alternately leaning over each other and impaling themselves on one another.

“Elliott, babe, why don’t’cha dial back and run that part again on slow?” suggests Dwayne.

Someone sitting on the couch separates himself from his Siamese twin and points a small black box at the television set. The
film skids backward. With a jerk the impaled figures disengage, causing everyone to laugh. The image freezes for an instant,
then the ballet begins again in slow motion.

In the darkest corner of the room a boy moans, “For God’s sake don’t stop.”

A girl giggles quietly. “I need to come up for air.”

“Knock it off, huh?”

“Shhhhh.”

“Oy!”

Walking Rain back
to her apartment after the film, Lemuel is lost in a beguiling fiction. He is twenty-five years younger, a student at the
mathematical faculty of Lomonosov University on the Lenin Hills overlooking Moscow. Medium shot of Lemuel, a wallflower at
a Komsomol dance in a basement cultural center. Suddenly the lights dim and loud rock music blasts from the speakers. Tight
on Lemuel as he glances to his left, discovers that he has a Siamese twin attached to his hip, a girl with a long, dirty-blond
ponytail. Various shots of students moving in excruciatingly slow motion, lighting up hand-rolled cigarettes and impaling
themselves on one another. Pan to Lemuel’s Siamese twin as she leans toward him. On Lemuel’s face as he feels one of her breasts
brush against his arm, smells her lipstick. “Kid stuff!” she calls over the music. Her words seem to tickle his ear. Quick
cut of the Siamese twin reaching for the night moth hiding inside his fly. “I’ll show you what the consenting adults are into.”

“Oy …”

Walking next to Lemuel, Rain notices the faraway look in his eyes. “A ruble for your thoughts?”

“There is no ruble anymore, at least not one that is worth anything.”

Rain tries to keep the ember of conversation alive, but runs smack into his guttural “Uh-huh.” They pass a twenty-four-hour
laundromat, swing into an unpaved alleyway, stop at a narrow wooden staircase leading to a second-floor loft. Rain, breathing
into her mittens to warm her fingers, turns to confront Lemuel. She looks at him, trying to make up her mind.

Lemuel holds out a hand. “I thank you for an interesting evening.”

Rain ignores his hand, searches for an ironic tone. “I welcome you for an interesting evening. So what did you think of the
flick?”

“The flick?”

She shuffles her feet nervously. “Flick, as in movie. Like they must have X-rated flicks in Russia, right? I’m curious how
American pornography compares.”

An agitated grunt escapes from the back of Lemuel’s throat. “I was looking through the wrong end. … The figures were too small.
…”

“You didn’t see it?” She reads the answer on his face. “Get a life, L. Falk. You’re not only a doorknob, you’re an earlobe.
If I had an ounce of sense I’d be out of here like Vladimir. Here I go and take you to an X-rated flick and you don’t goddamn
see it! How is a girl supposed to turn you on?”

“Turn me on?”

“Arouse. Stimulate. Stoke the fire for a major merge.”

Lemuel says quietly, “You turned me on when you cut the hair sticking out of my nostrils. You turn me on when you walk into
the room.”

Rain’s mouth falls open, then slowly closes as she comes to a decision. “Like I could talk subtext, right? I learned all about
goddamn subtexts in introductory psychology. You say one thing, but you mean something else? ‘I can’t’ means ‘I won’t.’ ‘I
don’t know’ means ‘I don’t want to think about it.’ I could invite you up to Y-jack with me.” She spots the blank look in
his eyes. “I keep forgetting you’re from another planet. Y-jacking is when you plug two sets of earphones into the same jack
on a Walkman. So if I asked you up to Y-jack, what I’d really be saying, the subtext, right? is: I am totally stoked, I have
decided you’re nonviolent enough to collaborate with me in a violent act. Are you reading me at all, L. Fucking Falk? Most
dudes spend their lives saying one thing and meaning another. Not yours truly. Which is why I don’t beat around the goddamn
bush.” Rain takes a deep breath. “Hey, would you or wouldn’t you? Like to fuck? R.S.V.P.”

“You are asking me,” Lemuel repeats the question to be sure he has decoded it correctly, “if I want to … fuck?”

Rain blows air through her lips in exasperation. “Like do you or don’t you? Will you or won’t you?”

“Fuck is a … brutal way … of putting it.”

“What would you say, ‘make love’?”

“ ‘Make love,’ yes.”

“ ‘Make love’ misses the point, L. Falk. It misses the violence. It misses the orgasm.”

“I can understand how you would not want to miss the orgasm.”

“Listen up, L. Falk: I steal sardines from the E-Z Mart, I steal money from church baskets, I cheat at strip poker and midterm
exams and I don’t declare the tips I get cutting hair to the IRS. But I don’t cheat at words, right? I call things like fucking
by their real name. And I never fake an orgasm.”

At a loss for words, Lemuel pulls off a glove and, reaching out,
touches the side of Rain’s face with the back of his callused fingers. “You are a young girl,” he says huskily. “Also a beautiful
girl. Boys would kill to make love to you. Only smile to them, you can have all the lovers your heart desires. Only cross
your legs wearing that short skirt, you will have to call in the police to keep order. You do not want to take an old man
like me into your bed. If you please, take a good look at me. I am a doorknob, I am an earlobe, I am forty-six going on a
hundred and six, my back aches when I walk uphill, my knees ache when I walk downhill. I am on the lam from terrestrial chaos,
but I seem to take my chaos with me wherever I go.” Lemuel elevates his chin a notch. “I can honestly say you I am not a great
lover. I can even say you I am not a good lover. After a certain age sex is spoiled for men by the worry over whether you
will perform … each orgasm is a triumph. I am a run-down battery—you push the starter button, you hear a grinding noise, the
motor turns over, you hold your breath hoping it will catch, praying even, then nothing.” He shrugs. “Nothing at all.”

Rain struggles with a lump in her throat, a pain in her chest. “Hey, I could jump-start you,” she whispers, “like when you
roll a car downhill and it picks up speed, right? and the motor cranks over even if the battery is low. And the next thing
you know, whooooosh, you’re pushing the speed limit on the interstate.” She leans toward him and brushes her lips against
his so lightly he catches his breath. “I’ve had it with the uphill crowd,” she says. “What I need is someone who’s downwardly
mobile.” She angles her head, bats her eyelashes, stares at him with the seaweed green eyes that he is sure he has seen before.
“Like what do you say we check out your battery, L. Falk? Yo?”

Slipping into a delectable fiction, Lemuel imagines that what is happening to him is really happening to him. He watches her
closely to see if she is suffering from second thoughts before he finally clears his throat.

What he coughs up is a timid “Yo.”

Once again Rain, unsmiling, holds out her hand. Once again Lemuel, unsmiling, takes it. They shake.

Like I could see right off L. Falk was walking wounded, I’m talking sexually, not physically, right? My instincts told me
he’d have trouble getting it out, forget up, so for once
I decided it wouldn’t hurt to beat around the goddamn bush. I switched off the overhead and put on the projector with the
piece of mauve silk over it, I poured him a shot of one-star cooking cognac, I burned some incense, I tried to make small
talk. “So what is it you actually do for a living?”

For furniture I have a low couch I once liberated from a Salvation Army truck and some folding kitchen chairs, some of which
still fold, some of which don’t, time takes its toll on everything, right? The apartment was a riot; it was not that things
were out of place, it was more a matter, I openly admit it, that nothing had a place. I stashed my French horn in the bathtub,
kicked the dirty laundry under the dresser, collected the magazines scattered around into a pile, buried the loose Tampaxes
under Mayday’s blanket and tugged the blanket, with Mayday clinging to it, into the spare bedroom. I didn’t want my arthritic
rat of a dog spoiling the atmosphere with one of her silent farts. The vet attributes her farting to age: Mayday’s fifteen
dog years and two dog months old—which, talk about coincidences, is the same as 106 human years. I kicked off my shoes and
sprawled on the couch, my mini riding up my green tights, my arms back so that my nipples were pressing against the inside
of my shirt. This last is a little trick I picked up when I was working summers as a parole officer in Atlantic City. (It’s
a lousy lie that the paroler, yours truly, was fired for sleeping with the parolees; I was fired for pleading no contest to
shoplifting a pair of seventy-nine-cent earrings from Woolworth’s.) I patted the couch next to me, but L. Falk pulled over
a folding chair, turned it so the back was to the front and straddled it.

“I dabble in chaos,” he said, as if what I was waiting for with bated breath was an answer to my question, “but my life’s
passion is pure randomness, which probably does not exist.”

“I like randomness, I like things that happen out of order,” I told him. “But I still don’t see how it’s possible to be passionate
about something that doesn’t exist.”

“I can say you it is not easy.”

I told him to put on some music while I slipped into something less comfortable. I have this Arab-type robe, the good news
is it plunges to my belly button, the bad news is
it itches, but I figured I’d better pull out all the stops. I could see L. Falk’s nuts were going to be tough to crack.

I was in the bedroom spritzing rose-scented toilet water on the sheets when some music I didn’t recognize came on. “Where’d
you find that?” I called through the partly open door.

“On the pile of records.”

I remembered D.J. had converted the Rebbe to CDs, which is how come he gave me some of his old LPs the night he told me about
the oral tradition in the O.T. and the birth-control pioneer named Onan. The Rebbe could have scored, too. I mean, he talked
a nonviolent game and he was convincing enough for me to collaborate, except I was menstruating.

Remember
averted? Menstruating
‘s in the same goddamn league.

Where was I? When the Rebbe saw red, his eyes bulged more than usual, he mumbled something about me being impure and packed
it in.

Me.

Impure.

Go figure.

I opened the door of the bedroom and positioned myself so I was in a frame. I picked this one up from a Lauren Bacall flick.
When I spoke, I purred like a kitten. “So what’s the record you went and put on?”

“It is a quintet …” He turned toward me, he took in the Arab-type robe, he followed the V down to my belly button, he swallowed
hard.

The secret to good sex can be summed up in one word, which is
foreplay
, right? though to be really effective, fore-play, contrary to the conventional wisdom, should take place after as well as
before the dirty deed. Which is another way of saying that good sex should not start or stop, it should go on forever. Obviously
different people mean different things by
foreplay
. My freshman year at Backwater I roomed with a girl from Corning who used a Water Pik as a vaginal spray—she described it
as the longest ejaculation in the history of the universe. My roommate loaned me her Water Pik once, but it was too wet for
my taste, so I stuck with my trusty Hitachi Magic Wand.

I’m wandering. Foreplay.

Like it was only natural, right? when I tried to jump-start L. Falk’s battery, for me to concentrate on foreplay. After what
seemed like an eternity of small talk, I got him to stretch out on the bed, though his idea of making himself comfortable
bore a curious resemblance to the fetal position. He wanted me to turn out the bed lamps, but we negotiated and compromised
on turning one out and putting the other on the floor. I had a hell of a time untying his goddamn shoelaces, would you believe
he had double-knotted them? and straightening out his legs.

“Hey, relaaaax,” I said in my sexiest voice as I began to unbutton the buttons on his shirt. Sitting up, I reached for the
hem of my Arab-type robe and pulled it over my head, I was still wearing my green tights, I leaned over him, letting my tits
graze his chest. Then I started sucking his nipples.

Nipples, in my humble opinion, are the most neglected part of a man’s body, dudes tend to melt with gratitude when you pay
the slightest attention to them. After a while L. Falk’s became erect, which I took as an auspicious, even positive, sign.
I began to escalate. I undid his belt buckle and the top button of his trousers and slowly unzipped the zipper on his fly
and snaked my hand down along his belly, which was surprisingly smooth, I had expected steel wool—to discover this soft, wilted
Willie of a cock cringing in a tangle of underbrush.

My
Homo chaoticus
had a long way to go to become a
Homo erectus
.

L. Falk became very agitated, clutching his trousers, tugging at the zipper. “Oy … I said you I was a run-down battery.”

I stretched out alongside him, one thigh draped over him, I kept my hand on his cock, nothing aggressive, just holding on
to it the way you hang on to a strap in a subway, and I started whispering in his ear. “I don’t know how things are in Russia,”
I remember saying something like this, “but you have an awful lot to learn about we Americans. There’s nothing that turns
a girl on more than a dude who has trouble performing. We get fed up with all those hard-ons men get at the drop of a hat.
Some stud asks you to dance and, whoops, he’s got to advertise his goddamn erection by pushing it into you. What we really
like, what we
lust after, is a dude whose sexuality is more subtle. You’ll get it up, L. Falk, and when you do it’ll be me who did it, it’ll
be me who gets the credit.”

The funny part was I had never thought these thoughts before, but when I heard myself say them, I knew I believed them. L.
Falk must have believed I believed them too, because I could feel his body, which had been to say the least strung like a
bow, relax under mine, I could feel his cock begin to stiffen in the palm of my hand.

Weird how the body can grow soft while part of it grows hard.

I won’t bore you with dirty details, I’ll only give you highlights. At one point, when we were kissing, I came up for air
long enough to tell L. Falk, “Hey, I like your music.”

Thinking I was talking about the Rebbe’s LP, he said breathlessly, “Schubert … it is his quintet … in C major.”

“C major, wow! Rock ‘n’ roll. Like what can you do that I haven’t done before?”

In the other room the phonograph needle began scratching around in the end grooves. “I can put the record on again,” he said.

If I am ever nominated for sainthood, don’t smile, the idea may not be as far out as you think, if I’m nominated, for sainthood,
right? it will go on the credit side of my ledger that I went to Mass every single Sunday I was in Italy and I was impatient
with my
Homo chaoticus
, L. Falk, only once that night. “I don’t want to hear What’s-His-Face’s C major,” I coolly informed him. “I want to hear
your
C major.”

It must have been about then he rolled over on top of me and began paying attention to my boobs, which is when he spotted
the tattoo, which is located in a field of freckles under my right tit. I got the tattoo on sale in Atlantic City in a moment
of madness. L. Falk must have been a butterfly in a previous incarnation, because the tattoo made a big impression on him.
He reached for the lamp on the floor and held it up to get a better look.

“A Siberian night moth!” he cried, touching it with his fingertips.

“It’s a goddamn butterfly,” I corrected him, but I don’t think he heard me.

“Imagine coming across a Siberian night moth in Backwater, America,” he whispered in surprise. Then he said some strange things
I didn’t really understand, things about how turbulence is created when a moth’s wings flail the air, how the turbulence sets
off ripples, how the ripples, I’m not sure I got this right, right? could paralyze the east coast of America the Beautiful.
Something like that.

You need to have a weird imagination to blame a butterfly for the weather.

Like different folks have different strokes. So the sight of the tattoo really turned him on and the next thing you know we
were doing it, the wild thang, the major merge. He was sweating and grunting and panting and looking down every now and then
to make sure the butterfly hadn’t flown the coop, and then he seemed to freeze in midair, his bloodshot eyes wide open and
unblinking and startled. And then he collapsed on me.

No, I didn’t actually feel him come off, but I didn’t want to embarrass him by asking.

I’ll answer the question before you ask it. How it was was … different. In ways I haven’t really figured out yet, how it was
was … satisfying. His performance, also the time it lasted, also the actual size of his equipment, excuse me for putting it
so crudely, left something to be desired. On the other hand I could feel that L. Falk …

Just give me a sec. …

I could feel that L. Falk wanted … me, which is an impression I must have had before, I just couldn’t remember when.

Naturally L. Falk needed to know how he’d done, what is it with dudes that they always have to hear what fantastic lovers
they are? I didn’t want to hit him with the truth—that for sheer physical sensation I couldn’t see there was much of a difference
between safe sex and no sex. So I hit him with a joke. “Like I’ve always imagined what I call the phenomenal fuck—a fuck so
totally awesome that it’s the mother of all fucks. In my imagination, it’s so out of sight that the two or three or four who
participate decide to never fuck again. So the bad news is that screwing you wasn’t the phenomenal fuck. Which means the good
news is we can fuck again.”

I laughed. He smiled that razor-thin smile of his, which comes across as one-third faintly amused, two-thirds intensely thoughtful,
as if he was trying to read between the lines.

“Hey, you asked.”

“And you answered.”

Later on I let Mayday back into the living room and went and warmed up some frozen pizza in the clothes drier, my stove has
no oven, pizza is one of the few things I can do in a kitchen besides sunny-side-ups. I had slipped back into my Arab-type
robe, but L. Falk kept parting the V with a fingertip to get a look at the butterfly. We were sitting around the table staring
at the dirty dishes when he spotted this piece of chalk hanging from a string next to the blackboard where I list what I need
to buy or who I need to call or when I had my last period. Suddenly L. Falk lunged for the chalk, he was a man possessed,
and scribbled like a madman on the blackboard, I never erased it, it’s still there if you want to check it out, y.y.a.y.t.f.h.r.m.c.o.m.a.a.t.i.o.h.f.m.
Naturally I asked him what it meant, but all he said was it’d been written by L. Tolstoy, that every Russian schoolchild knew
the story, that I needed to decode it for myself.

Coming back to the table he sat down so hard the folding chair folded and L. Falk landed flat on the floor.

Like I cracked up, right?

So did L. Falk. We cracked up together. I don’t know why, I started laughing and he started smiling a smile that was two-thirds
amused and pretty soon he was also laughing, and suddenly I was laughing so hard at him laughing I was crying. And then, I
swear to Christ, he started crying too. You should have seen us, L. Falk on the floor, me kneeling next to him, doubled over
with laughter, tears streaming down our faces. When we finally wiped away the tears we started in laughing all over again.
Somewhere in all the laughing and crying and laughing he blurted out something else I couldn’t get a handle on—something about
him understanding how it was possible to wear a heart on a sleeve.

The next thing you know we were into the foreplay that comes after.

L. Fucking Falk.

Go figure.