A Serious Man (3 page)

The teacher interrupts himself briefly to make a couple of phlegm-
hawking sounds, then resumes
.

The doctor palpates Larry’s midriff, digging his fingers into the hairy,
baggy flesh
.

A young girl holds a hank of her bangs in front of her face, separating
out individual hairs to examine them for split ends
.

The teacher turns from the board and begins to pace the desk aisles,
looking back and forth among the students, posing questions
.

The booger-seeker, having successfully withdrawn a specimen, drapes it
carefully over the sharp end of his pencil, to what end we cannot know
.

Danny, apprehensively eyeing the teacher, slides the twenty into the
transistor radio’s cover-sleeve
.

A huge white rubberized cone, pointed directly at us
.

We hear a rush of static and the doctor’s voice filtered through a talk-
back:

Wider: Larry is in his shorts lying on his back on an examining table
that is covered by a sheet of tissue paper. The X-ray cone is pointed at
the middle of his body
.

There is a brief sci-
fi-
like machine hum. It clicks off
.

The clock-watching student’s head is bobbing slowly toward his chest
.

The teacher’s circuit of the classroom has taken him around behind
Danny. Danny’s book lies face-down on the desk, covering the radio,
but the white cord snakes out from under it up to his ear. The teacher’s
questions and perambulation stop short as he notices the cord
.

He yanks at the cord
.

The cord pops out of its jack and Jefferson Airplane blares tinnily from
beneath the book of Torah stories
.

The teacher lifts the book to expose the jangling radio
.

Outraged, the teacher projects above the music:

Some of the students sing along with the music; some beat rhythm on
their desks.

Three students join in a chorus:

The nodding student’s head droops ever lower
.

Other students join in the chant:

The nodding student’s chin finally reaches, and settles upon, his chest
as a long clattering inhale signals his surrender to sleep
.

Larry, now fully clothed, is seated across from the doctor
.

The doctor examines his file. He absently taps a cigarette out of a pack
and lights up. He nods as he smokes, looking at the file
.

He holds the pack toward Larry
.

The doctor takes a long suck
.

The portrait, old, in an ornate gilt frame, is of a middle-aged rabbi
with a small neat moustache and round spectacles. He wears a tallis
hood-style and has a phylactery box strapped to his forehead. A plaque
set into the picture frame identifies the man as Rabbi Marshak
.

Wider shows that the portrait hangs in the Hebrew school principal’s
office, a white cinderblock room. It is quiet. The only sound is a deep
electrical hum
.

Just visible behind the principal’s desk, upon which is a low stack of
books and a name plate identifying the occupant as
MAR TURCHIK,
is the top of a man’s head – an old man, with a few wispy white hairs
where his yarmulka is not
.

Danny, seated opposite, pushes up from his slouch to better see across
the desk
.

We boom up to show more of the principal. He is short. He wears a
white shirt and hoist-up pants that come to just below his armpits.
He has thick eyeglasses. He fiddles with the transistor radio, muttering:

He experiments with different dials on the radio
.

The old man holds up one hand
.

The old man looks down at the little earpiece pinched between two
fingers. He examines the contrivance like a superstitious native
handling an unfamiliar fetish
.

We cut to the source of the electrical hum: a wall clock whose red sweep
second hand crawls around the dial very, very slowly
.

The reb continues to squint at the earpiece
.

Danny sighs. He encourages:

The principal’s tone is harder:

This time his cold look holds until he is sure that the admonishment
has registered
.

He looks back down at the earpiece
.

The door opens, ignored by the principal, and an old woman shuffles
in with a teacup chattering on a saucer. She has thick eyeglasses.
She wears thick flesh-colored support hose. She takes slow, short steps
toward the desk. The principal continues studying the radio
.

The old woman’s gait makes for slow progress and a continuously
rattling teacup. She bears on toward the principal. The tableau looks
like a performance-art piece
.

She reaches the desk and sets the teacup down. She summons a couple
of phlegm-hawking rasps and turns
.

She takes slow short steps toward the door
.

The principal raises the earpiece experimentally toward his ear
.

Close on his hairy, wrinkled ear as his trembling fingers bring in the
earpiece. The fingers push and wobble and tamp the earpiece into
place, hesitate, and then do some more pushing and wobbling and
tamping
.

The principal keeps Danny fixed with a stare as his hand hesitantly
drops from his ear, ready to reach back up should the earpiece do
anything tricky.

Satisfied that neither the student nor the earpiece are about to make
any sudden moves, he looks down at the radio. He turns a dial
.

Issuing faintly from the imperfectly lodged earpiece is the tinny jangle
of rock and roll. The rabbi stares blankly, listening
.

Danny waits
.

The rabbi is expressionless, mouth slightly open, listening
.

Tableau: anxious student, earplugged spiritual leader
.

Muffled, from the outer office, the hawking of phlegm
.

We are behind a man who writes equations on a chalkboard, shoulder
at work and hand quickly waggling. Periodically he glances back,
giving us a fleeting look at his face: it is Larry Gopnik
.

Students watch, bored
.

Larry enters the physics department office. The department’s secretary
wheels her castored chair away from her typing
.

He takes the three phone messages
.

A waiting Korean graduate student rises from his outer-office chair
.

Larry flips through the messages. Absently:

The messages:

He crumples the last one
.

Clive nods gravely
.

Clive shakes his head, dubious
.

Clive impassively considers this
.

He rises
.

He goes to the door, shaking his head, and Larry watches his
unexcused exit in surprise
.

Larry stares at the open door. The secretary outside, her back to us,
types on
.

Larry looks stupidly around his own office, then shakes his head
.

He picks up the phone message from Sy Ableman – “Let’s talk” – and
dials. As he dials, his other hand wanders over the papers on his
desktop
.

There is a plain white envelope on the desk. Larry picks it up as the
phone rings through. A ring is clipped short and a warm basso-baritone
rumbles through the line
:

Larry picks idly at the envelope
.

Inside the envelope: a thick sheaf of one-
hundred-
dollar bills
.

Larry reacts to the money
.

He slams down the phone

He rushes out the door, through the secretarial area and into the
hallway
.

Empty
.

He looks at the stuffed envelope he still holds
.

He goes back to the departmental office. The secretary sits typing. She
glances at him and, as she goes back to her typing: