The Rabbi of Lud (4 page)

Do declarations of love embarrass you? I suppose it is difficult to accommodate to other people’s passion. Rapture’s the only feeling state that looks silly from the outside. Even, I guess, the other person’s absorption, your own partner’s in the bed. Listen, did
I
make the world? Was I around when they poured the foundations of the earth? Did I command the morn or cause dawn to know its place? I can’t draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, run a rope through his nose or put him on a leash for my maidens. The wild ox never spent the night at my crib. I never bound the chains of the Pleiades, I never loosed the cords of O’Brian. You’ve got no quarrel with
me,
what I’m saying. Close your eyes, shut your ears—I’m nuts about my wife. It’s a federal case, almost pathological,
past
pathological.

I’ll lay my cards on the table. I’m a licensed, professional rabbi, a certified, bonded spiritual counselor. Good and evil are my stock in trade. I carp and I hector, or would if I had anything like a real congregation and not just a bunch of dead people. I cavil, crab, deprecate and reprove. I chalk talk temperament like a coach of character. Yet despite what it says in the job description, and that for all my faults I’m no hypocrite, I tell you that if, on Rosh Hashanah, on Yom Kippur, I were to catch some fellow merely glance in my wife’s direction, at her legs or her figure, in what I construed as a lascivious, concupiscent manner, on the highest holiday, the
highest
holiday, I would stop whatever I was doing, it could be the holiest prayer on the most sacred day of the year, and beat the son of a bitch over the head with a Torah.

So past pathological.
Way
past.

I don’t care she’s eccentric, what I’m saying, I don’t care she’s idiosyncratic—I’m nuts about my wife. Smitten. Smited, I sometimes think. Yes, a visitation from the Lord, love like the Plague of Lud.

No, really. I get this bolus of lust whenever I look at her, in my throat, in my gut. Well, she’s a looker, of course, enough to drive even a high-minded religious like myself to apostasy. Great big bedroom eyes and this really sultry mouth and smashing, come-hither schnoz and hair. If I’d known her back on the atoll it’d have been curtains for this rebbe’s concentration. And, believe me, her face is the least of it. I don’t much care for locker-room tales or the men who tell them. Smut isn’t my métier, and even the mildest suggestiveness or whispered, low-key insinuation passed among the good old boys like loose change laid down on a table for a tip gets my Irish up and makes me want to sock somebody and do righteous things, but if I’m to be honest I have to admit that Shelley’s figure, even now, at thirty-seven, makes me think that the Creator has got to be at least part pornographer. She’s got these really incredible knockers and these long hubba-hubba legs and thighs. She’s built like a brick shithouse, my Shelley is, and has a behind on her, God bless, could make old Solomon sing all over again. Her scarlet lips and the halved pomegranates of her cheeks and those twin-fawn, lily-fed titties and her wheat-heaped belly and all those apple exhalations … So when I warned her about blasphemy that time she caught me in my phylacteries, in my prayer shawl and leathers, it wasn’t
her
soul I was trying to save, it was my own. Shelley, for all she’s the rabbi’s wife or speaks longingly about ultra-Orthodox Williamsburg, is essentially soulless. But does that bother me? It does not. What bothers me is something else entirely.

I swear it on the Bible, Shelley today is even lovelier than when we married. Her hair is longer and softer, her figure is shapelier, her breath sweeter in the mornings. She’s
taller
! I’m crazy about her. Do you know what this can do to a man? Always to go around like some goony, love-struck schoolboy? I could be burying somebody, no kidding, I could actually be saying Kaddish over some poor sap’s fresh grave, and all I have to do is see, oh, say, a dress that Shelley might have had once in a similar shade and that’s it, I’m a goner, my concentration is shot and I lose my place, not just in the text but literally. It’s as if I’m not in Lud anymore, not in New Jersey, and I’m horny as hell and off somewhere in fantasy cuckooland, and all I can think of is how soon it will be before I’m with Shelley again, grazing in my head her varied parts and wondering which square inch of her to nuzzle first.

And, as I say, she only gets lovelier. And has ever since she gave birth to Constance, our first child. It wasn’t that, like any woman, she sloughed off her pregnancy. No, she left the hospital slimmer, firmer, not just than when she went in but than before she got pregnant. And her
features
had changed, molded into gorgeous new Scandinavian planes and angles on her face. After Shelley gave birth it was as if she merely
resembled
Shelley, and don’t think it didn’t occur to me for a minute that, my God, what a place
this
is, they don’t switch the babies on you, they switch the
mothers!
I mentioned she’s taller? Here’s what I think happened. I don’t say this lightly. It goes against nature, and I’m enough of a scholar to know what God thinks about
that
sort of thing. I think her stretched-out belly not only snapped back into place and readjusted itself but was somehow recast in inches of actual height. Crazy, huh? Tell me about it. Because the same thing happened her
second
pregnancy!

And growing lovelier, always lovelier, and here am I, the humble Rabbi of Lud, a slave to my passions, married almost seventeen years to the same woman and practically a sex maniac, certainly a lunatic, taking what I take, accepting what I accept. All, I mean, the fair Shelley’s mishegoss and enthusiasms. Her obsession with playing the rebbitzin, for example, the rabbi’s wife. Of course we’re starved for community here, but some of the lengths Shelley goes to are absolutely potty. By nature she’s a warm and generous woman, compassionate and kind, but I grow fearful if I see her standing at the back of the room when I’m delivering a eulogy. I know that before I even began the service, that while the organ music was still playing and the chief mourners were gathering in the front benches to accept with their nods and all the authority of their grief the condolent, embarrassed sympathy of their relatives and friends, my Shelley has already been by to offer her solicitude on behalf of herself and her husband, the rabbi. If there’s
any
thing she can do … she tells them, or invites them, transients in Lud, arrivals from out of town, people, many of them, bound for the Newark airport when they’re through at the cemetery, over to our house for “coffee and.”

Or there’s the business of the car pool.

Because there’s no school in Lud, Constance, who’s in the ninth grade at the high school in Fairlawn, is entitled to be bussed. Since it’s about an eleven-mile ride, it only makes sense to take advantage of what we’re paying taxes for anyway, but Shelley won’t hear of it. Shelley insists the kid should be driven in a car pool. As I said, I don’t see the sense myself, and neither, for that matter, did the other moms Shelley approached to share the ride. When they declined, Shelley volunteered to take their kids anyway, to drive
both
ways in fact, not twenty-two miles every day but more like thirty or thirty-five when you take into account the doglegs she has to make, the distance she goes out of her way each time to pick up or deliver the shirkers’ children. When I ask her why she goes to this trouble, she reminds me she’s the rabbi’s wife and it’s the duty of the rabbi’s wife to be useful. I’d say it’s got at least something to do with staying busy, with helping to keep her from going nuts. I’d say that, but she
is
nuts.

You need better evidence?

“Oh, Jerry,” she tells me after the stillbirth of our second child, a son, whose right leg would have been almost two inches shorter than his left, “Oh, Jerry,” she says, this beautiful woman in her late twenties who’d grown still another inch since the one she’d put on when Connie was born, “I don’t want to be tall if it’s to be at the expense of my children. Some of my height is rightfully the baby’s. I feel so guilty. I stole a piece of my stature from his poor little life. I’m not fit to be a mother. I must never allow myself to become pregnant again.”

She was serious, but I’m not so innocent in the matter myself. By now she was
so
beautiful I didn’t need anyone in the house who would make extra demands on her time or distract her attentions. I was too compliant. To my shame, I agreed. Sometimes I think I’m too uxorious for my own good.

You know she thinks she’s a frump? She actually believes she’s this dowdy, inelegant woman, some humble blind spot in her like the anorexic’s phantom weight. This is one of the reasons she stands by me, I think, why she’s the first to back off if we quarrel. I could take advantage here, never let on, cover the mirrors, keep her benighted, and I wouldn’t be the first, I bet, to withhold valuable information, but do I know my Shelley or do I know my Shelley? Every chance I get I’m all over her with the evidence, Johnny-on-the-Spot with the facts and the figures, Shelley’s advance man, Shelley’s flack. And I acknowledge up front I benefit from this, that Shelley believes I’m only being supportive and loyal. I even own up it could be some bread-on-the-waters, New Testament thing. So what if it is? Am I not supposed to do the right thing just because I stand to gain? I can just hear the disputations. “It depends,” says the one, “whether you do what’s right because it’s right or
only
because you stand to gain.” “No,” objects the other, “a world pleasing to God, a proper world, a good world, a successful world, is put together by piling right action upon right action.” Then a third puts in about intention and will. Another county heard from! Oh, please. I’m the rabbi, but you tell
me,
is it
all
religious? It makes my brains breathless to think of the possibilities. Let the Talmud stay put in the Talmud.

Anyway, I’m bringing all this in just to let you know what’s on the mind of a lowly man of God, a humble servant of the Lord, Yahweh’s instrument in New Jersey, as he ambles down Lud’s main drag of a beautiful Tuesday morning, fresh from his shower and his breakfast Shachris on his way to see Sal, codependent of Shull and Tober, Funeral Directors, and barber to the dead.

Sal’s is just about one of the swellest barbershops I’ve ever seen, the building itself in that neat Federal style, like a trim, salmon-brick Acropolis, three chairs, no waiting. There’s one of those heavy brass eagles over the entrance and a wooden barber pole next to the door like an antique in a restaurant. The minute you walk in you’re bathed in the sweet, crisp atmospherics of wonderful shampoos from the hair-oil orchards.

“Hey,” Sal said over the easy-listening station on the FM, “it’s Mr. G. What can I do you for, Rabbi?”

“I’m up for a trim, please, Sal,” I said.

“Take a chair. Any chair. Any chair at all,” he intones like someone setting up a card trick. I almost don’t have to hear him to hear him. It’s what he always says, a reference to his situation. Which is not unlike my own, for if I’m the Rabbi, then Sal is the Barber of Lud, la Figaro Figaro la, Figaro la. Because for all it’s one of the world’s swell barbershops, it’s only, like practically everything else in this town, a front. I’m not even certain it belongs to Sal. Perhaps Shull and Tober hold the paper on it, or Art Klein or John Charney of Lud Realty, or all of them perhaps, the whole entire complicated interlocking directorate behind the operation here. And except for myself and the pool Sal can draw from of maybe fifty or so people who live in Lud or work for one of the town’s businesses, he has no regulars. Sal is the contract barber for the two funeral parlors—he calls them “business parlors”—and tells me he doesn’t do badly. Not a soul goes into the ground, Sal says, until he gives them that final haircut. “I’m just like you, Father,” he tells me. “Here’s a mirror, see is it all right in the back.”

As usual, I’m a little saddened that my haircut’s finished, for it makes me realize how underemployed I am. I should challenge Sal with weird stylistic demands—to move my part from one side of my head to the other, or request dye jobs, layered sideburns, a more interestingly shaped nape. If I left now I’d have to kill time till lunch. I would be unwelcome at Seels, the stonecutter, who, though he works for a Jew and makes his living chiseling Jewish names and perfectly formed Stars of David and scraps of prayer in astonishingly fine Hebrew lettering, is a vicious anti-Semite. And I’d feel foolish poring over the greeting cards in the little Jewish notions shop. The flower shop is out. I see enough flowers. And I have no desire to kibitz the gravediggers or the guys scrubbing down the hearses and limos. And to be perfectly frank, dropping by the cleaner’s or the funeral home to see what’s up just isn’t the treat it once was. Of course I could always go home and shtup my wife thirty minutes before we have lunch, but I just shtupped her thirty minutes after we had breakfast.

“Sal,” I said, “I could do with a shave.”

“You’re clean-shaven.”

“A manicure.”

Sal gave me a funny look. “You know,” he said, “you say something like that to the ordinary barber, he’d probably tell you to get lost. It happens because of the nature of my work I
do
hand care. Head care
and
hand care.

“You know what else?” He’d lowered his voice.

“You apply their cosmetics.”

“You knew that?”

“You already told me.”

“I talk too much, don’t I?”

“Of course not.”

“Yeah,” Sal said, “I talk too much. Occupational what-do-you-call-it.”

“Hazard.”

“Yeah, but it’s interesting. If I had anything like a regular clientele instead of those stiffs on the preparation table over in Shull and Tober’s basement, they’d be popeyed at some of my tales.”

He’d taken a manicurist’s dish and emery board from a kind of doctor’s bag he kept stashed inside one of the cabinets under a shelf that held some of his razors and combs.

“You talk about cosmetics,” he said, “but most folks got no idea what that entails. I mean when you’re making up a corpse after it’s embalmed. You know we’re talking of at
least
one lipstick? Probably half of another. And a whole
dish
of rouge. And pancake and moisturizers? Forget it. Way too prohibitive. You could make up the entire cast of a Broadway musical for what pancake would cost you. And moisturizers, you start moisturizers into these folks they’ll drink you under the table. It’s because their skin’s so dry. You have to go to special tinted powders, slap on some fixative and hope the wind don’t blow.