Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“Well,” I said, inspired and suddenly ruthless with desire and decision, “I’ll tell you something about Plan D and your creeping euonymous.”

“Oh?”

“It’s a forbidden vine.”

“Really?”

“Strictly. You didn’t know that?”

“There’s forbidden ground cover?”

“There’s trayf fruits and vegetables.”

“Really?”

“French fries. Guavas and papayas are outlawed fruit, certain kids of nuts and grains.”

“I never heard that.”

“A good rule of thumb is, Only what grew in the Garden of Eden is kosher.”

“Oh, Rabbi,” she said, “you’re teasing me.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “I am. The jury’s still out on the french-fried potatoes,” I whispered.

“Oh, Rabbi.”

I really believe she meant Shelley no harm, that it was her piety did her in, her fervent, terrible, swift Godbent. We did it right there in the paid-up hospitality suite.

“Oh, Rabbi. Poor, sweet Rabbi Goldkorn.”

She said my name but I was just the surrogate, the middleman, her humble conduit to the Lord. Hey, it’s lonely at the middle, let me tell you. What else can it mean, a lady comes and she screams, “Oh, oh, Rabbi, oh, you’re giving me the suntan!” That’s what she told me. That I was giving her the suntan. Reflecting glory, glamour. Spritzing sperm and wonder. She couldn’t get enough of my insider’s wowser connections, this God-juiced, God-foreplayed lady. My inside info a turn-on. Treating me to her giggled deference and excited by all the landmined, bedmined, riskwrath. God was my copilot that night, let me tell you. And hers too, into all the holy sacreds, and embracing, as I say, who knew Whom in her head. Just as I, in mine, the both of us naked in that Rutherford Best Western, made love to some idea I had of her clothed in her own forbidden ground cover. Until, Godspent, she shoved out from under me. “Hallelujah,” she sang, “is that all there is?”

It was. We didn’t see each other again.

Though at night, alone in my bachelor’s bed or, afterward, when Connie returned from Chicago, alongside Shelley but still alone, her image continued to inflict me. Displayed in all her crisp, beautiful golden basket tones like some woven woman or a girl made out of plaid, appeared in my consenting head in all her gorgeous barks and browns, the tarnished hues of open, airing apples, come dressed to kill, got up in all the muted splendids of Joan Cohen’s fall and fallen fashions.

As always, as I walked along Main Street, I felt cheered, my heart lifting, lifting, lifted by the pink Federal-style buildings all around me like so many small banks. I opened the door to Sal’s barber shop and stepped inside, tripping the modest tinkle of Sal’s prop bell. Someone was lying back in one of Sal’s three chairs, his torso covered by a barber’s cape, his face by a hot towel. The bell must have startled him awake because the minute I entered he sat bolt upright, tore the cloth from his face and, the cape bunched in his fist, looked about wildly.

“Easy,” Sal said, “easy there, Bubbles. It’s only our skullcap. It’s only the rov.”

The fellow stared at me a moment, then relaxed back into the chair.

“It’s cold,” he said of the still-steaming towel.

Sal resettled him under the barber’s cape, fixed another towel he lifted from the sink with tongs and laid it across the man’s face like a cloth over a bird cage. And with something like the same effect. In seconds I heard a light, companionable snoring. Sal grinned at me above the man’s heaped absence and, reaching in under the back of the hot towel, began to massage Bubbles’s hidden scalp, vaguely working him like a magic trick.

“I can come back,” I said.

“No, no, I’m practically done,” Sal said, motioning me to a chair. “Sit, he’s a pussycat.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“No, really,” Sal said, “I don’t cut his hair, I don’t give him a shave. He already had that forty-dollar manicure on his hands when he came in. That’s so, ain’t it, Bubbles?”

“People notice your hands. It’s the first place they look.”

“Bubbles has his priorities straight,” Sal said.

“I’m here for the shmooz and hot towels,” Bubbles’s voice said behind its wrappings, and he sat up again, at his leisure this time, fastidious as an actor as he picked the linen cape off his suit and peeled the towel from his face. “Yeah,” he said, studying himself in a hand mirror, “that’s good, Sal. That brought the blood up good.” He turned to me. “What do you think? How do I look? Sally’s tip rides on what you tell me.”

“You look fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Hey, Bubbles,” Sal said, “hey, Bubbles, come on now.”

“That’s all right,” I told Sal.

“Sure,” Bubbles said, relenting, holding open palms up at the level of his lapels, a broad, innocent “Who, me?” smile on his face. “No more shop talk.”

“Next?” Sal called out nervously, and I took a chair different from the one Bubbles had just vacated. The two of them did some business at Sal’s big brass register and then Bubbles left. “ ‘Next,’ “ Sal said, “you know how long it’s been since I said that?”

“Business is bad?”

“Business is booming,” Sal said, watching Bubbles cross the street and get into a car. “He brings his own towels ,” Sal whispered after Bubbles had started the car and driven off.

“Who is he?” I asked.

Sal didn’t answer. He pointed to some loose locks, clipped fur-balls of different-colored hair scattered about the floor of his shop. “That’s off of dead people,” he told me. “ I put it down there. To make the place look lived in. What do you think? Too much?”

“It’s nice.”

“Yeah? Maybe I’ll get a darky with a push broom. Give me shoeshines, fetch me coffee. Hey,” Sal said, “you were safe there with Bubbles. You think I’d jeopardize a pal? He’s a wise guy. So how is it having the kid back? Is it great? Kids,” Sal said, “you can’t live with ’em, you can’t live without ’em. Hey,” he said, “she came in one time, asked me some stuff about Jesus. Said it was for a report she was doing for her school. I told her what I know. I don’t know much. Did I do wrong?”

“Who is he?”

“I said,” Sal said. “Just some wise guy. Hey, those birds don’t shoot you for kicks, you know. There has to be something in it for them. Sure,” he said, “the hardest guy in the world to rile is a professional hit man. You can give him lip, butt in front of him in line, spill soup down his pants, he won’t lift a finger. I don’t know, it’s a professional pride, something.”

“Sal,” I said, “I saw his gun.”

“A calling card, a trademark. Like my barber pole, like that shit on my floor.” Then, urgently, he leaned toward my ear. “All the years you been coming into this shop,” Sal scolded, “did I ever hold out on you? Wasn’t I always up front? Didn’t I already tell you fifty-sixty times about the American way of death? What’d you think that stuff was I was feeding you? Folklore? It was hard information. Jesus, Padre, show me a guy brings his own towels, I’ll show you a fuck working hard on his image! And he ain’t shy, that one. Or even like I was in some need-to-know relation to him. Hell,” Sal said, “I’m a dime a dozen with a man like that. We all are. He’s got barbers all across New Jersey, throughout the entire tristate viewing area. A hot towel here, a manicure there, a haircut somewhere else. Dropping hints all over. ‘Here, Sally,’ he says, ‘use my towels instead.’ Fucking showboat.”

“It’s a sickness,” I said. “Some people are terrified of germs.”