Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

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.