The Pinch (37 page)

“Back to where?” asked Katie, tilting her head quizzically.

It irked Pinchas that the question should deserve consideration. But the quiet of this abandoned North Main Street did have a seductive quality, peaceful compared to the carnival aberration that the postdiluvian neighborhood had become. In truth, this alternative version was more faithful to the original, homelier and less rigorously demanding of one’s energies. In its recent manifestation everything in the Pinch was so hugely important, whereas here only Katie mattered.

Just then a voice was heard at the open window, and husband and wife looked to see Rabbi ben Yahya standing outside on the fire escape, smiling in all his abnormal good health. “Excuse me my lack from discretion,” he said, “but I wanted to see with my own eyes you are safe.”

Jerked from his brooding by the interruption, Pinchas wondered that the rebbe, who with his minions had turned the whole cosmos inside out, should worry about being discreet. Apparently satisfied that things were in order, the old Hasid said a bit flightily, “So good-bye and good luck,” and turned to leave. But Pinchas, realizing to his chagrin that he had no earthly notion of how to get back to the world, lunged for the window. “Rabbi,” he asked in a panic, “where are you going?”

“Where else?” replied the blooming ben Yahya. “To pray. Should be nice and quiet, my shtibl, without all those tochesleckers hangink around. Oh,” pivoting his head to whisper by way of an afterthought, “you should know by your Katie that her days are still numbered.”

“What are you saying?” gasped Pinchas. This was cruel and unreasonable.

“Once it gets the habit from wandering, the soul,” the rebbe shrugged, “nishtu gedacht, it’s a hard habit to kick.”

Pinchas shuddered as if the earth’s tremors had started up again. “Rabbi,” he blurted in desperation, “I will need still from you a guide.”

Stepping deftly onto the horizontal ladder, the holy man mentioned in parting the condition that qualified his own return. “If is allowed your wife to go back with you, then somebody got to, how you say, stand surety. Somebody got to stay here in her place.”

The horizontal iron stair dipped his plump person toward the sidewalk—though how he’d mounted the thing in the first place was anyone’s guess.

Still languidly engaged in her labor, Katie had shown small interest in their conversation. Was this then her postmortem punishment, wondered Pinchas, to peel potatoes in this unpeopled purgatory until the hill of skins grew to a height she could scale to heaven? But why should Katie be punished at all? She’d been an exemplary wife, endured with equanimity her life as a colleen among yentes only to expire before her time. True, their marriage had been without issue, for which she’d always taken the lion’s share of blame; but if anyone was at fault it was Pinchas himself for allowing her to assume his portion of guilt as well. It was an attitude that had contributed in part to his neglect of her in recent years, but nobody died from a dereliction of affection, did they? No! thought the merchant, there was no rhyme or reason for her being here, and he was perfectly within his rights (by the authority that sheer chutzpah had vested in him) to fetch her back.

But there was nothing of penance about her activity; in fact, she looked, despite her sere and slightly pellucid countenance, quite self-possessed. Like Rabbi ben Yahya, the afterlife became her. It seemed almost a shame to drag her away, and Pinchas, torn now himself, felt the temptation to linger awhile amid the tranquil reassurance of the spice pantry, coffee mill, and brass-bottom tea kettle—household objects pleasantly divested of the totemic aura they’d acquired back in creation.

“Katie,” began Pinchas, his brain near to exploding, “it’s lonely here.”

She placed the peeler atop the curlicued pile of skins on the chopping board and looked up. “Husband,” she sighed, “you’ve a face like a slapped donkey’s arse.”

At that the merchant fell to his knees wringing his hands, scooting forward in that perpetual twilight until his chin was practically resting on the table between them. “I miss you!” he cried in a beseeching tone that seemed finally to get his wife’s complete attention.

A wry smile spread across her features as, abruptly, she shoved the table into his chest, which knocked him sprawling onto his backside. Then she was standing over him, yanking the pin from her hair and shaking it out until it framed her head in a rusty corona. From flat on his back Pinchas admired how the points of her breasts poked like pear stems through the thin material of her chemise, its hem brushing his brow as she stepped across him.

“If you want me,” she said, looking over her shoulder, coquettish for all her years, “you’ll have to catch me.” Then she fled the room.

“Oy,” groaned Pinchas. It wasn’t enough he’d come all this way for her, he had now to play with her hide-and-seek? But he was on his feet again, staggering after her, prepared to pursue her to the ends of eternity if need be. He plunged into the dust-mantled parlor where, hidden behind the door, she darted past him back into the kitchen. Turning about, he followed, chasing her several times around the table, which she managed always to keep tantalizingly between them.

“Didn’t I climb already down a hole for you?” he pleaded.

“And didn’t I one fine morning plumb the plague pit to find
you
?”

As he stood pondering the difference, she slipped past him again, though he’d reached out to snatch her waist. Or had his hands passed through her, grasping only vapor? Whatever the case, he’d begun to warm to their game, convinced that if he captured her spirit he captured everything. He chased her back through the parlor and along the narrow hallway with its flickering gas sconce, past the closet-sized room they’d once set aside for a nursery but was occupied now in another dimension by a scribe. The scribe was at that moment busy recounting how a harried husband chased the shade of his wife around the underworld …

Pinchas blundered into the bedroom at the rear of the flat, where he could barely perceive the outline of her shadowy form, standing there beside the iron bed in the coppery gloom.

“Katie, I never lost for you the yetzer,” he told her breathlessly, “the wanting.”

“Prove it,” she challenged.

At that Pinchas became aware of a throbbing in his pants, the beginnings of a pride he hadn’t achieved in an age. As he contemplated this signal event, Katie made to sprint past him again, but this time, holding wide his outstretched arms, he was quick to bar her way. She passed straight through him—a puff as from an atomizer—then stopped and turned around, husband and wife now facing each other in a reciprocal sorrow-stricken distress.

“Beg pardon,” came the voice of Rabbi ben Yahya, who appeared at the window (the bedroom window beneath which was no fire escape) again. “This I forgot.” Then he began to intone ex cathedra, “‘Thy dead shall live, for thy dew is as the light, and the earth shall bring forth the light of shades.’ Isaiah twenty-six, nineteen. Of course,” he stipulated further, “Maimonides don’t mention resurrection, while Nachmanides maintains that, after Judgment Day, the soul don’t necessarily get back the body it had before …” His voice faded as his head disappeared below the windowsill, by which time Pinchas and Katie, who had already embraced, were no longer listening anyway.

The heat that met Pinchas upon holding his wife was torrid, as if he’d clasped a lighted bundle of kindling to fuel his own immolation: that was his mad thought as he lifted her, laying her gently across the creaking bed and crawling in after. He touched the warmth of her midsection, which yielded under the stuff of her chemise; felt, as he gathered her into his arms, the washboard ribs that illness had carved from her once ample frame, and exulted in her compliant palpability. Ablaze himself, he marveled that he wasn’t consumed, that his limbs, which he shucked of his garments, remained wondrously intact—as did his wife’s, whom he also feverishly stripped bare, while she returned his attentions with an equal appetite. Then what they exchanged along with their voracious kisses was the sense that neither was any longer the sole occupant of his or her own skin; so that Pinchas thought Katie’s Gaelic outcry, “A choisel mo chroí!” issued likewise from his own lips, just as Katie heard herself bellowing in Yiddish, “A leben zolt ir!”

When they were finally able to peel themselves apart, gasping and glad to find that they were still capable of separation, it was morning, or whatever passed for it in that bravura atmosphere. The sun slanted through the bedroom windows like a boat oar dipped in gold; the reflection from the canal was a school of silvery minnows on the ceiling, and blue notes from a nearby fiddle dashed themselves against the furling wallpaper like birds that had lost their way.

“Katie,” said Pinchas, “I think we are home.”

“Lord save us,” she replied, burrowing her head beneath his arm.

Now that the crisis of her infirmity had passed, Katie was visited by a parade of neighbors congratulating her on her miraculous recovery and bearing unbefitting gifts: nursing flasks, nipple shields, colic remedies. Among the visitors were a company of Hasids, hungover and shamefaced in the absence of their rebbe, greeting the merchant’s wife with an obligatory “Mazel tov!” “HaShem that he tells us,” said their rodent-faced spokesman in the tone of one citing a little bird, “you going to have a blessed event.” Dismissing the news as more of the sort of twaddle they were accustomed to hearing from that quarter, Katie began despite herself to snicker then laugh out loud; she gave herself up to an unblushing salvo of horselaughs until she saw on the faces of the gathered fanatics that God has no sense of humor at all.

When I wasn’t at the bookshop or waiting around my digs for Rachel, I still hung out at Beatnik Manor, even though I had nothing to sell. While nobody told me to get lost, I sensed a coolness that made it abundantly clear that a Lenny Sklarew who wasn’t holding was less welcome than the Lenny who was. This hurt my feelings, though not enough to keep me away, admiring as I was of the Psychopimps’ counterculture bona fides. The most bona fide of them all was Elder Lincoln, master musician and erstwhile hustler, though these days he made his presence at the manor pretty scarce. Increasingly alienated from the band, he spent his time conspiring with the circle of young turks who’d gathered about him; he was talking a brand of black nationalism and violent overthrow of the system that exceeded the humbler objectives of the other band members. On the evening I took Rachel to the manor, however, Elder was there, seated in the parlor at his upright piano, striking keys and listening to the respondent hum of a steel tuning fork. With the garland of paper blossoms that a groupie had strewn in his puffy ’fro and the fork one tine short of a triton, he looked like some black Neptune perched astride his throne.

I introduced him to Rachel a bit anxiously, wanting to gain merit in her eyes by my familiarity with the player but a little leery of his legendary attraction for women. He raised his drooping lids a fraction by way of acknowledgment then tilted his head back toward the vibrating instrument. Hoping, I suppose, to score points with him, I mentioned in passing that I’d been reading about a blind street musician of the 1910s, a fiddler who used his busking money to pay the bail and court costs of jailed brothers. “And one time when the costs were too high, he contrived to break them out of jail. He wormed his way through the sewer system and popped up from a grate in a holding cell, then took out a dozen or more …”

But Elder was way ahead of me. “That would be the same celebrated fiddler used to read the whiplash stripes of former slaves like they was some kind of Braille? Sucker could hear like with his fingers the whole harmonic progression. Found his own groove in them grooves that later on the Delta bluesmen would put words to, and later still some snake-hip yokel with hair like Lucite paint sped up the tempo—and that’s how the Southland gave birth to rock ’n’ roll? Yeah, I heard tell of him.”

Feeling scooped, I wanted to ask how Asbestos’s music had made its way into not-so-common knowledge, but Elder wasn’t done.

“As for them court costs you speak of, see, the cops used to round up your nigra”—he gave the word a cutting emphasis—“on bogus charges—adultery, say, or eavesdropping. Then the judge would fine them what he knew they couldn’t pay. That’s when the whip boss from the cotton plantation or the turpentine camp’d step up to defray the expense. ’Cept the nigra had to work it off like a pee-on in the field or the camp or the coal mine, where he was treated even worse than slavery times. ’Cause your endless supply of convict labor meant it was cheaper to work him to death than provide even the creature comforts you’d give a common slave. And as y’all can see from the treatment of our boys the sanitation workers, ain’t much changed. However,” he grinned the visual echo of his piano keyboard, “‘everything under heaven is in chaos; the situation is excellent.’ Chairman Mao said that.” Then the grin collapsed. “That’s your history lesson for today, young ofays. But what do y’all puff-the-magic-dragon-headed hippies care about history?”

“That’s not fair …” I began feebly to protest, wavering between resentment and guilt. But Elder was no longer listening, and Rachel tugged at my sleeve that it was time to move along.

Still I was stung by the indictment; it was wrong to think I wasn’t concerned about the current state of things. Didn’t I want the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat as much as the next dude? I was aware that the mayor had backed off from a compromise, that strike leaders were being arrested on frivolous charges and the National Guard was staging riot drills. I knew there was a war on. But I was lately subject to a condition I hadn’t previously experienced, which altered my attitude regarding the urgency of the political situation; it was a condition I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed until it took hold of my heart and genitals: I was in love.

Rachel was pure oxygen, and while her association with me had seemed to make her less conventional in manner and dress, mine with her secured me more firmly to the family of man. Menschlikeit is what Avrom might have said I was acquiring, if Avrom were in the business of paying compliments. It was a consequence about which I still had reservations, since my role as Rachel’s companion threatened to jeopardize the image of L. Sklarew as unreconstructed misfit. And too, there were times when I felt that, for all her Gypsy concessions to fashion, Rachel was still slightly embarrassed to be seen with me in public. Unhygienic as was my apartment, she preferred to meet me there, and though I’d seen her place in midtown—an ivy-clad greenstone edifice with a courtyard—I’d yet to be invited to spend the night. These things were finally immaterial in the face of what really mattered: that the girl could short-circuit my instinct for self-sabotage with a finger to my lips; with a well-timed furrowing of her brow she could break me of a lifelong habit of longing.