Visiting Professor (21 page)

“Add hot water. So were you wearing the T-shirt that does not cover your navel?”

“Yo. I put it on after the bath like I always do. Somewhere along the way it must have disappeared, because I don’t remember
taking it off, but I remember him kissing my nipples … Then he went down on me.”

“… does Dwayne give good head?”

“… yeah. As a matter of fact he does. Give good head. He makes you feel he’s doing it because he likes cunts, not because
giving head happens to be next on the menu. He makes you feel like you don’t need to go and douche with yogurt.”

“… was he wearing his granny glasses?”

“Jesus, you ask a lot of questions. Dwayne always wears granny glasses.”

“If he was wearing his granny glasses, it meant he could see the Siberian night moth in the sea of freckles under your knocker.”

“Hey, Dwayne’s no greenhorn, he knows his way around the female body without granny glasses. Anyhow, after that I sucked his
nipples, but you’ll be gratified to know they didn’t get erect like when I suck your nipples.”

When I hesitated, L. Falk hit me with, “You are only up to the M in your E to Z.”

“Right. M … So then I went and sucked him a bit.”

“How long is a bit?”

“Five minutes … eight on the outside.”

“… did he do the dirty deed in your favorite position?”

Looking back, I can see we should have stopped while we were ahead. He was pushing me past where it was safe to go. I don’t
like to be pushed. Maybe that’s why I decided to get clinical, which was my way of pushing back. I suppose you could make
a case that I wanted to hurt him.

So much for my nomination for sainthood.

“Okay, after you hear the answer, do me a personal favor and remember you asked, right? So where was I? When I finished sucking
him, which might’ve lasted ten or twelve minutes now that I think of it, I rolled over onto my stomach so he could fuck me
from behind. But he rolled me back onto my back and fucked me from in front. Very slowly. The way someone who’s sure his erection
will last forever fucks. I folded my legs back and dug my heels into his butt.”

“… did you come off?”

“Sure I came off. The juices were really flowing.”

“… did you like fucking Dwayne?”

“I more than liked fucking Dwayne. I loved fucking Dwayne. It’s fly to fuck with a friend, especially if the friend in question
happens to have a beautimous body. I don’t understand why more people don’t do it more often. I got this theory, I remember
telling you about it the night of the Delta Delta Phi bash, you always love the person you’re fucking while you’re fucking.
You lose yourself in the act, you stop growing old, you stop dying.”

L. Falk let this pearl sink in. After a while he cleared his throat several times, which I interpreted to mean he was about
to drop an economy-sized A-bomb.

“So what ever happened to monogamy?” is what he muttered with his ventriloquist’s lips.

So what ever happened to monogamy! What a chuckle, right? when you need to educate a consenting
Homo chaoticus
as to the facts of life. What is it with men, they have this incurable double standard? I mean, he sure as hell wasn’t into
monogamy while Shirley was going down on him. So he hears me fucking with a friend, what could be more natural? and all of
a sudden he’s pitching new, improved monogamy.

I wasn’t looking for a fight, so I tried to pass the whole thing off as a joke. “I prefer knotted pine.”

Dudes have gone and told me I don’t know how to deliver
punch lines. L. Falk provided the living proof when he lobbed his next observation into the conversation. “Monogamy has nothing
to do with mahogany,” is what he said. “What you need is a good dictionary,” is what he said.

A good dictionary!

Me.

Go figure.

So there we were, eyeing each other across a tub that suddenly felt as if it was filled with ice cubes, his periscope sunk
below the surface of the ocean that had come between us, on the threshold of our second fight.

“So don’t beat around the goddamn bush,” I remember telling him, “come right out and say it. You think I’m uneducated, right?”

“I think you are educated … differently. You know how to fuck, but you do not know how to make love. I can say you it is possible
to make love and still not miss the violence, the orgasm. I can also say you I think there is nothing wrong with you that
cannot be corrected.”

I vaulted out of the tub and shuddered like a dog to get the water off and wrapped the only body I’ll ever have in a beach
towel. “What do you say we go directly to the heart of the heart of the goddamn problem,” I sneered, I must have raised my
voice an octave or two because L. Falk’s eyes took on the startled gawk that made him look like a bird about to take to the
wing. “Just because you get to fuck me doesn’t mean you get to fix me. I mean, I am not broken.” I tried to chill out, I half
succeeded, which means I half didn’t. “Jesus, L. Falk, for a while back there I thought we had something going. …”

He followed me out of the tub. “We had something going,” he said with maddening calmness, there’s nothing more infuriating
than dudes who get cooler as you get hotter. He opened the medicine chest and took out the Swedish safety razor that bitch
with the sagging tits gave him. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was going to goddamn
shave
. With
her
goddamn razor.

“J. Alfred Goodacre was not out to lunch after all,” he mumbled. “Who I fuck
is
chaos-related. In America the Beautiful, fucking is chaos-related.”

Talk about sunny-side-ups over easy, the doorknob still didn’t know which side was up. “Fucking is definitely a
form of chaos,” I agreed angrily. “That’s what makes fucking fun. Hey, how did you describe chaos? It’s determined, right?
but it’s unpredictable. Like that’s me. I’m determined. I’m unpredictable. Check it out. I’m goddamn chaos!”

I stomped out of the bathroom and threw on some glad rags and padded barefoot into the kitchen to make myself some mango chutney
and yogurt. After a while L. Falk came through the door, whistling to hide his nervousness. I’d never seen him whistle before,
I did not take it as a positive, forget auspicious, sign. Mayday must’ve also been worried by the whistling; she kept her
head down but her raw pointed ears jerked straight up like antennas. L. Falk was wearing his faded brown overcoat and carrying
his Red Army knapsack in one hand and his duty-free shopping bag in the other. He kneeled down in front of the drier and opened
the porthole and began sorting through the dry laundry. His socks and underwear and a shirt or two he stuffed into the shopping
bag.

I have to admit my heart was pumping blood to beat the band, but I was goddamned if I was going to give him the satisfaction
of knowing it. “Going somewhere?” I asked so casually you’d’ve thought I was vaguely curious about the time of day.

He avoided my eye. “I am going to take one of those nonstops to the most Florida city I can find,” he announced huskily. “Dayr-az-Zawr
on the Euphrates is a hot possibility—I heard on the grapevine it is more Florida than Miami. I am going to check into a fully
staffed cockroach condominium and never check out.”

With that, L. Falk … up and walked out… of my entire goddamn life.

Hey, it was no big deal. It’s not like he’s the last
Homo chaoticus
on earth, right? Besides which Mayday and me, we’re already used to living without him … Like the thing I’ll miss most, even
though I still have my trusty Hitachi Magic Wand to fall back on, is the safe sex … That and the bleeding heart he wore on
that goddamn sleeve of his … And the weird way he had of starting sentences with “I can say you” and then babbling on about
pure, unadulterous what’s-its-face which, if I read him right, doesn’t exist except in his imagination. Jesus, the way he
went on and on about it, you’d think randomness was some kind of goddamn religion.

Read it and weep, the Gospel according to Saint Fucking Lemuel.

As for the drums in my ear, I can say you I am one hundred and ten percent sure it was pure coincidence they came back the
day, the hour, the minute L. Falk walked out the door with his goddamn duty-free shopping bag thumping against his thigh.

Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat.

Pretty soon I’ll wear see-through shirts and nobody … nobody will want to look.

Me.

Toast.

Fucking L. Fucking Falk.

Patrolling the apartment
over the Rebbe’s head in the early hours of the morning, pausing occasionally to discard one of the sheriff’s serial-murder
files and pick up another, Lemuel becomes aware of faint high-pitched shrieks drifting down the hill from another Delta Delta
Phi bash. He has an irresistible urge to drop what he is doing—the solution to the serial murders will still be there tomorrow—to
climb Mount Sinai, to dance a slow with Rain, to feel her breasts against his chest, to feel her thighs against his legs,
to smell her lipstick.

Imagining the bash, Lemuel feels himself being sucked into a fiction that is two-thirds exhilarating, one-third irritating.
Close in on Lemuel, sitting with his back against a wall in a murky basement room. Pan through a haze of marijuana smoke and
zoom in on tiny images on the television screen. Three silvery figures appear to be impaling themselves on one another. On
Lemuel, glancing to his left. On what he sees. Rain, in a corner, hikes her miniskirt and deftly impales herself on the enormous,
hey, go ahead and say it, penis, right? of the young man reclining on the cushions next to her.

Lemuel recognized the blond beard, the earring, the granny glasses. The penis in question is attached to Dwayne.

“Shirley adores you,” he hears Dwayne say. “Don’tcha, babe?”

Shirley, nude, as they say in movie land, presses her tiny tits into Rain’s back, reaches around her, unbuttons her shirt
and starts to caress the night-moth nesting under her right knocker. Shirley giggles
awkwardly. “You’ll love it, angel,” she whispers hoarsely in Rain’s ear. “Three’s a trip you want to take.”

“Rain, babe, why don’tcha dial back and run that part again on slow?” Dwayne urges.

The fiction in Lemuel’s mind’s eye skids backward. With a jerk the impaled figures disengage, the miniskirt comes down like
a curtain. The image freezes for an instant, then the tantalizing ballet begins again, this time in slow motion.

Behind the images, there is a voice-over. “How many times has a dude got to repeat something before it sinks into that thick
skull of yours?” Lemuel could swear he hears Rain murmur between the soft gasps that originate in the back of her throat.
“It’s me, goddamn chaos. Check it out. This may be as close to pure, unadulterous what’s-its-face as you’re ever going to
get.”

Close in on Rain, backlit, light shimmering through her dirty-blond hair, as she arches her body in a languorous stretch and
melts back into Shirley’s thin bare arms.

“If I’m lying,” Rain breathes, “I’m dying.”

Visions of disorder press like a migraine against the back of Lemuel’s eyeballs. “Fucking Occasional Fucking Rain,” he groans.
“I cannot live with her, I cannot live without her.”

Standing on a
wooden box, his shirtsleeves turned back to his bony elbows, his suspenders trailing down the sides of his shapeless trousers,
the Rebbe is scrubbing dishes when Lemuel shows up for supper. “
Hekinah degul
,” the Rebbe calls to his guest. He notices Lemuel sniffing the air. “That’s bacon you are getting a whiff of,” he admits.
‘There is a culinary snobbery that claims the expression ‘kosher food’ is an oxymoron. As the Diaspora’s preeminent practitioner
of
nouvelle
kosher cuisine, I am the living proof that ‘kosher’ is not incompatible with ‘food.’ Which is why, to give it flavor, I am
roasting the guinea fowl wrapped in strips of bacon.”

Lemuel grunts. “I thought religious Jews did not eat bacon.”

“Who said anything about eating it? I only smell it. I happen through no fault of my own to be addicted to the odor of bacon.
The yeshiva where I studied as a child was situated behind a twenty-four-hour diner. In the summer we had to open the windows
to breathe, so all day long we read Torah and smelled bacon cooking on the griddle.
I came to associate the two. When I smell bacon, I think Torah. When I think Torah, I smell bacon. Oy vey.”

“Who invented kosher?”

The Rebbe rinses a dish in running water and sets it on the slotted plastic drier reserved for meat dishes. “Torah instructs
us, ‘Thou shalt not cook lamb in its mother’s milk.’ From this molehill our Talmudists created a mountain called kosher,
and I am its faithful climber. I possess, feel free to count them if you think I am exaggerating, I will not be offended,
six sets of dishes: two for meat and dairy every day, two for meat and dairy on Shabbat, two more for meat and dairy on Passover.
Only to set the table I need to consult a scorecard.”

“If you carry kosher to its logical conclusion,” Lemuel observes dryly, “you would need two sets of dentures, one for meat,
one for dairy.”

The Rebbe stacks the last of the dishes. “In kosher, as in all things, it is important to draw the line between the ritual
and the ridiculous.”

Waving Lemuel to a seat at the kitchen table, he distributes paper napkins swiped from the Kampus Kave, glances at his watch,
darts to the oven and removes a sizzling roast guinea fowl wrapped in slices of bacon. He carefully peels away the slices
of bacon and drops them into the plastic garbage pail lined with pages from
The Jewish Daily Forward
. Sharpening a knife, he sizes up the guinea fowl as if he is about to perform open-heart surgery.

“Thank God for Noah,” the Rebbe mutters under his breath as he begins to dissect the bird. “Before the Flood, everyone was
vegetarian. Then Yahweh gave Noah the good news. I’m talking Genesis 9:3. ‘Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for
you.’ “

Lemuel clears his throat. He has an announcement to make. “I want to say you I appreciate your discretion, Rebbe. I have been
here five weeks today and you have not hit me with any questions.”