Visiting Professor (28 page)

He let this percolate in his brain a while, I could tell from his expression he wasn’t buying a word of it, then he said,
very slowly, very angrily, very quietly, I had to strain to hear him, “If you please, stop bullshitting me. Stop bullshitting
yourself. If you are really ready to marry someone who is toast, say why.”

He was right on, of course. I glanced at him, he was staring at me across the table with an anxious half-smile, so I decided
to come clean, if there’s a better way of getting a consenting
Homo chaoticus
to consent, I’m not familiar with it. So here is roughly what I told him.

“The way I see it, a dude who plunges toward infinity isn’t toast— how could he be when he’s doing something that’s never
been done before? I don’t really follow all the dirty details, right? but what I do get is you’re on a trip with no hope of
a getting there, which is the toughest kind to take, you need to be goddamn gutsy to get involved in something like that.
Marriage, when it works, is also a trip without a getting there. It’s what the dudes over in the art department call a work
in progress.”

Suddenly, I don’t know why, I hadn’t done any dope in weeks, I had this weird feeling I was plunging toward infinity myself,
picking up speed, pushing the limit on the Interstate, whooshing past a line of eighteen-wheelers with psychedelic twenty-threes
splashed across their sides, I couldn’t’ve stopped if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t.

“So I sorta thought, hey, as long as we’re going in the same direction, we might as well travel together.” He was teetering,
he needed one last nudge. “In case you’re interested,” I remember adding, “I have a last but not least.”

I could see he wasn’t not interested.

“Okay, here it is, my last but not least. I never met anyone in your category before.”

“What is my category?”

“An erection is not the single most original thing you have going for you. … Jesus, do I have to go and spell it out?”

He didn’t say anything, which I took to mean he needed it spelled out.

I closed my eyes and took another deep breath and opened my eyes, I could see I hadn’t lost my audience, L. Falk was still
hanging on my every word, which I took as an auspicious, even positive, sign. “The fact is … I love you to death, L. Fucking
Falk.” The freckles on my face were burning again. “So what do you say we stop beating around the goddamn bush? Would you
or wouldn’t you? Like to? Get hitched? With yours truly, the Tender To?”

“You are asking me,” L. Falk must’ve been repeating the question to make sure he had decoded it correctly, “if I want to marry
you, right?”

I remember blowing air through my lips in exasperation. “Like do you or don’t you? Will you or won’t you? R.S.V.P.”

He watched me like a bird ready to take to the wing at the first sign of second thoughts. After what seemed like an ice age,
he cleared his throat.

What he coughed up was a jubilant “Yo!”

I can say you the first time I got married, the ridiculous overwhelmed the ritual. I remember standing there in a thirdhand
suit with threadbare patches on the threadbare elbows, shifting my weight from foot to foot on a moth-eaten carpet, gazing
up at the faded color photograph of the paramount
Homo sovieticus
hanging askew on the peeling wall as the ceremony, if that is what it was, droned on. I remember feeling Vladimir Ilyich’s
cramps pinch my intestines. “Do you or don’t you?” the painted
babushka
doll presiding over the one-minute ceremony in the Leningrad Palace of Marriage insisted impatiently. I remember tearing
my eyes away from V. Lenin. “Do I or don’t I what?” I asked. The woman who was destined to become the mother of my daughter,
she was already twelve weeks pregnant, jabbed me in the ribs. Behind us, my future ex-father-in-law,
the rector at the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics, leaned forward and provided me with some stage coaching. His voice
had an exasperated edge to it, I was not on his short list of prospective sons-in-law. “Do you or don’t you take my daughter
to be your wedded wife?” is what he whispered.

“I always said you had an ear for detail,” Rain observed when I told her the story of my first wedding, we were waiting at
the foot of the carillon tower for the Rebbe to show up and join us in wedlock. “So what did you do?”

“Hoping against hope to get a meal ticket, and eventually tenure, by marrying the rector’s daughter, I let a barely audible
‘why’ and ‘not’ float up from my paralyzed vocal cords. The
babushka
doll pronounced us man and wife. My future ex deposited a dry kiss on my chapped lips, a down payment on ten years of listless,
lustless marriage, and pulled me toward the door.”

“I’ll bet someone went and threw goddamn rice.”

“As a matter of fact, her father, the rector at Steklov, stood on the steps of the Marriage Palace flinging Vietnamese rice
he had bought on the black market.”

“Poor fucking Russian birds,” Rain said.

“Poor fucking Russian birds,” I agreed, though I had in mind a larger category of victims.

Lugging my Red Army knapsack and my duty-free shopping bag, I had moved back into Rain’s loft the evening of the day she proposed
marriage to me. We quickly settled into a routine, with Rain cutting hair at Tender To until noon and showing up at the E-Z
in the afternoon to score supper. I worked the day shift distributing cartons, keeping the shelves stocked, searching for
the order I knew to be lurking beneath the appearance of disorder, and went in evenings to access the Mart’s supercomputer
and continue my headlong plunge through the decimal expansion of pi toward infinity. Every second Saturday, weather permitting,
we would kick Rain’s Harley into life and buzz up to Rochester, me piloting, her head glued to the back of my new flight jacket,
there is nothing like a motorcycle to make you feel ten years younger, for some chaos-related fucking, which Rain calls lovemaking
these days, with Dwayne and Shirley. I would lie awake next to Shirley listening to her snore, listening to the traffic on
the beltway, listening to the
planes roar off the runway, listening most of all to the soft gasps escaping from the back of Rain’s beautiful white throat
in the next room. Sometimes I would pad into the living room and finger their clothing. Once, talk about coded messages, I
found Rain’s blue jeans, her ribbed sweater, her Calvin Klein underpants, Dwayne’s chinos, his turtleneck sweater, his plaid
boxer shorts all neatly folded over the back of the couch. I winged a playful message back at her—I unfolded everything. Later,
waiting for the frozen pizzas to heat in the oven, I caught Rain smiling wistfully at me, reminding me, as if it was something
I could forget, where the core conspiracy was.

Hanging out under the carillon tower, keeping an eye peeled for the Rebbe, Dwayne studied the storm clouds gathering overhead.
“If he doesn’t show soon, the wedding’s gonna hafta be postponed.”

Shirley batted her eyelids innocently. “Does that mean we get to get one of Rain’s checks?”

“The bus ride up from New York probably wore the Rebbe out,” I guessed. “One of us ought to go down to the cockroach motel
and make sure he’s not sleeping.”

We had filled out the marriage license as soon as we received the results of the blood test. Without thinking I tried to sign
with my second signature, you never know when you might need to deny being married, right? but at the crucial moment I discovered
I could no longer write my name backwards and wound up signing my real signature on the dotted line. That night Rain phoned
up the late-night talk show to say she would not be calling in anymore.

“So which horizon are you finally sailing off to?”

“Here’s the deal. …” “Here’s the deal. I’m in love, I’m starting out on a trip that has no end, it’s called marriage.”

“Well, different folks have got different strokes. Two’s a trip some couples need to take. If you’re listening up, Charlene,
honey, don’t get any ideas in that gorgeous head of yours. Two for tea, tea for two is great lyrics for a song. As a lifestyle,
it needs work.”

Rain went straight up the wall. “You can go and ram …” “You can go and ram your advice to Charlene, who probably doesn’t exist,
right? I mean, what girl in her right mind would want an inner eyelid for a squeeze? You can ram your advice up your asshole,
asshole.”

The sky over Backwater was growing darker by the minute. I was beginning to wonder if my second wedding would be called on
account of rain when Shirley clambered onto the first crossbeam of the carillon tower and spotted the Rebbe. “I see him, angel,”
she called excitedly to Dwayne, who was peeing behind a tree. “He didn’t sleep through it after all.”

The Rebbe, you want an educated guess, must have come up the hill along the footpath running behind the Kampus Kave; must
have, while passing the exhaust fan in the kitchen window, smelled bacon, because when he arrived at the carillon tower, short
of breath, red in the face, sweat staining his starched collar, he was definitely thinking To-rah.

“I didn’t sleep a wink all night,” he groaned, judging from the bags under his eyes he was not exaggerating. He set the new
E-Z Mart canvas shopping satchel I had given him on the ground, he took off his black fedora and wiped the sweatband with
the tip of his tie. “I teased meanings out of passages in Torah that have mystified rabbinical brains for a thousand years,
I skimmed the Babylonian Talmud looking for clues.”

“Clues as to what?” Rain wanted to know.

“Clues as to how an ordained Rebbe, a Brooklyn Or Hachaim Hakadosh no less, can join together in holy matrimony a Jew to a
Catholic, even if she is lapsed.”

I knew the Rebbe well enough to understand the problem was not academic. In ways I could never get a handle on, he cared about
the do’s and don’ts that What’s-His-Face brought down the mountain, he believed the ritual needed to be protected from the
ridiculous.

Dwayne, buttoning his fly, ambled over. “You make lapsed sound like a venereal disease,” he teased the Rebbe.

Shirley slid her hand into the rear pocket of Dwayne’s jeans. “He must have come up with something, angel, or he wouldn’t
have showed.”

“To tell the truth,” the Rebbe said, “I had just about given up, you can only read so much in one night, when it suddenly
came to me. Rain could convert! At which point there would be nothing standing in the way of my marrying you.”

“Hey, I don’t mind being Jewish if it’d make life easier for the Rebbe,” Rain said.

“I thought you needed to be circumcised to be Jewish,” Shirley said.

“Only the males of the species are circumcised, babe,” Dwayne informed her.

Shirley seemed disappointed. “There he goes again, opening his fly and exposing his Harvard education.”

“I read somewhere it takes months to convert to Judaism,” I told the Rebbe. “Your bus for Brooklyn leaves in two hours.”

He looked at me with a gleam of satisfaction in his bulging eyes. ‘You have maybe forgotten the story I told you after the
faculty lunch, the one about Rebbe Hillel and the goy.”

Turning toward Rain, he ordered her to stand on one foot. Without a word she followed his instructions. “Whatever I say, you
say,” he told her. “ ‘That which is hateful to you …’ “

Balancing easily on one foot, taking the whole thing very seriously, Rain said softly, “Like ‘that which is hateful to you.’
“

“ ‘… do not do to your friend.’ “

“ ‘Do not do to your friend.’ “

“This is the whole Torah,” the Rebbe explained solemnly. “The rest is commentary.”

Rain digested this with a thoughtful nod. “I get it. This is what the Torah boils down to. Everything else is window dressing.”

Shirley looked at Dwayne. “Well, I don’t get it.”

“You want to dial back and run that past us again on slow?” Dwayne asked.

“I have taught her the heart of the heart of Torah,” the Rebbe said. “For an ultra-un-Orthodox Jew like me, someone who understands
Torah as well as Rain has to be Jewish.”

You must be wondering, you are too discreet to put the question into words so I will preempt: Did this dope-smoking Rebbe
really swallow his own blah-blah-blah? Does he really believe disorder is the ultimate luxury of those who live in order?
Does he really think chaos is at the heart of the heart of Torah?

Hey, do not make the mistake of thinking you can tell a rebbe by his cover. I love the little guy; he looks more like
a messiah every time I see him. In ways I have not really figured out yet, he is holier than all of us put together. I do
not doubt, when he sees a three-piece suit, that he looks around for a tailor. I do not doubt that he discovers Him. So the
answer to your unasked questions is yes to all of the above. I myself think there is a serious possibility the Rebbe may be
an exalted person—someone who weeps without making a sound, who dances without moving, who bows down with his head held high.

If I close my eyes, I can see the Rebbe reaching out awkwardly to touch Rain’s shoulder, I could tell he enjoyed the physical
contact, he may be exalted but a saint he is not. “Being Jewish,” he informed her with great formality, “you are free, according
to the laws handed down to Moses by God, to marry a Jew.”

“Let’s go with the flow,” Rain said happily.

Through his E-Z contacts in Rochester, Dwayne had gotten hold of one of those
Nonstops to the most Florida cities
billboard ads and strung it up on the side of the carillon tower as a sort of in joke. Rain and I, with Dwayne and Shirley
forming a parenthesis, gathered under the ad, facing the Rebbe. I felt Rain’s arm slip through mine, I felt her breast press
into my elbow. Over our heads, the pigeons nesting among the bells of the tower set up a throaty clamor. In my mind’s eye
I imagined they were standing on one foot and discussing the merits of birds of different feathers flocking together.

The Rebbe fished yarmulkes from his shopping satchel and handed them to Dwayne and me. Eyeing the threatening sky, it looked
as if a thunderstorm would break overhead any instant, he said, “So we’ll dispense with the traditional canopy, the storm
clouds are canopy enough, and maybe use the abbreviated version of the ceremony, it’s not as if anybody present is a virgin.”