“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.”
“The fact you moved back upstairs speaks unfortunately for itself,” the Rebbe says without looking up. “For a shiksa,” he adds, rolling his head mournfully, “Rain has a sensational ass.”
Lemuel is following his own thoughts. “If anybody was at fault, it was me. I do not love, I cannot live with, chaos.”
“Funny you should talk about living with chaos. I am in the process of finishing the rough draft of the last thesis I will do for the Institute before I follow my Star of David to Brooklyn,” the Rebbe explains. “I call it Torah as Crapshoot.” He looks up from his carving, winks both his eyes at Lemuel over his silver-rimmed spectacles. “Snappy title, even if it’s me who says so. I am toying with the idea of maybe expanding the thesis into a book-length book, in which case I am going to retain the movie rights. With a hot title like that, you never know how many millions could come your way. Today a modest chaos-related yeshiva in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn, tomorrow a chain of chaos-related yeshivas linking Jewish outposts in the Diaspora.” He spoons two boiled potatoes and some shriveled peas onto a plate. “Leg, or maybe breast?”
“Breast, thank you, Rebbe.”
“Left or right?”
“Left or right?”
“Where’s the advantage to being a consenting adult if you don’t consent?”
“That sounds like something Rain might say.”
“It does. She did. I was telling her about Onan being a pioneer in coitus interruptus when she came out with it.”
Lemuel eyes the two breasts without enthusiasm. “Left. Right. Either or.”
Using his fingertips, the Rebbe drops a guinea fowl breast onto the plate, sets it in front of his dinner guest and starts to prepare his own plate.
“My launching pad for the paper, I take it for granted you want to know, is the story of the scapegoat—I’m talking Leviticus 16:8-10.” Inclining his head, closing his eyes, absently curling a sideburn with a fingertip, the Rebbe recites from memory: “ ‘And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord’s lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.’ “
Setting down his dinner plate, the Rebbe flicks on the radio, plays with the dial to tune in the classical-music station from Rochester, then joins Lemuel at the table. He cocks his head toward the radio, listens for a moment, identifies the music.
“I’d recognize that with my ears closed. It’s Ravel’s ‘Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.’ The music haunts me—it was playing on the radio the night I lost my cherry.”
Rolling his head in time to the music, the Rebbe meticulously half-fills two long-stemmed crystal glasses from a bottle bearing the label “Puligny Montrachet,” clinks glasses with his guest. “Le’hayyim,” he growls. He closes his eyes, sips the wine, rolls it around in his mouth, swallows, nods in satisfaction. “It is maybe a little on the young side, I could have let it breathe another hour or two, a good wine you can never open too early, but it beats Manischewitz. … About the scapegoat,” the Rebbe continues, talking and chewing at the same time, “there is a Jewish legend about Azazel, some say he was a fallen angel, some say he was a demon, either or, it doesn’t change the story. Every year on Yom Kippur two male goats were chosen by lot, one for the Lord, the other, a scapegoat, for Azazel. The high priest, I don’t envy him the job, transferred all the sins of the Jewish people onto the scapegoat, after which the animal, no doubt staggering from the weight on its back, was driven into the wilderness and stampeded off a cliff to its death.”
The Rebbe peers at Lemuel over the drumstick he is gnawing on. “You are probably wondering, it is a relevant question, by all means ask it, what coded signal Yahweh is sending to the resident scholars and visiting professors at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies when He decrees that the goat must be selected by lot, which is to say, at random. My thesis makes the case that Leviticus 16:8-10 should maybe be seen as the heart of the heart of Torah, more important even than the manifesto of monotheism in Deuteronomy 6:4, ‘Shema yisro’eyl, adoynoy eloheynu, adoynoy ekh-o-o-o-d.‘ … ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.’ In Leviticus 16:8, Yahweh, a consummate poker player, He normally holds His cards close to His vest, always assuming He wears a vest, Yahweh, as I was saying, tips His hand. He wants to persuade us to embrace what looks to us like randomness, and inasmuch as His randomness is a footprint of you-know-what, to embrace chaos. If I’m on to something, and I think I am, He wants us to learn to live with chaos even if we are not comfortable with it.”
“I do not see …” Lemuel blinks rapidly. He begins again. “How can it be possible to live with something if you are not comfortable with it?”
The Rebbe picks with a fingernail at some guinea fowl caught between two teeth. “It becomes possible when you grasp that it is chaos which gives zest to life.”
He spots a single tear welling in the corner of one of Lemuel’s bloodshot eyes. Embarrassed, he peels his spectacles away from his face, noisily fogs the lenses with his breath and occupies himself polishing them with a napkin.
“What is your opinion of bacon-wrapped guinea fowl?” he asks, eager to move on to a safer subject. “You know the Yiddish joke about guinea fowl? When a Jew eats a guinea fowl—ha!—one or the other will be sick.”
Neither man laughs.
Sighing, the Rebbe settles back into his chair, concentrates on the music coming from the radio. “In your intellectual hegira, you have maybe stumbled across Ravel’s maxim?” When Lemuel hikes a shoulder, the Rebbe cracks a lopsided smile. “ ‘Order. Routine. Chaos. Joie de vivre’—that’s his maxim.” Suddenly his bulging Talmudic eyes burn with secular discovery. “Could it be … do you think it’s within the realm?”
“Could what be? Is what within the realm?”
The Rebbe’s palm slaps against his forehead. “I could kick myself I didn’t see it before, I could kick myself harder for seeing it now, who needs this kind of information rattling around in his brain?”
“For God’s sake, what kind of information—”
‘The Gospel according to Ravel is pointing us in the direction of an awkward conclusion, namely, that chaos is not the pits, but only a pit stop.”
Carried away by the logic of what he is proposing, the Rebbe bounds from his chair, circles Lemuel waving his drumstick at him. His corkscrew sideburns dance in the air.
“Here we are, 5,752 years down the rocky road from Creation and the Garden of God, which happens to be, count them, 3,304 years after Yahweh personally hand-delivered the itemized list of do’s and don’ts to the first Jewish mountain climber to conquer Mount Sinai, and we are still blind to the moral in Ravel’s music, deaf to the handwriting on the wall. Consider the mouth-watering possibility, I’m flirting with probability even, that you weren’t out to lunch when you gave that insolent after-lunch speech to the resident scholars and visiting professors at the Institute, when you startled them with the suggestion that chaos was maybe only a way station.”
The embroidered yarmulke slips off the back of the Rebbe’s head. He snags it in mid-air. “The real terminus,” he goes on, waving the drumstick with one hand, the yarmulke with the other, “I catch a whiff of it when I read Torah, I feel it in my gut, I feel it in my groin, may be joie de vivre! Oy, Lemuel, Lemu
el,” he rasps, swept away on a tide of emotion, “consider also the possibility, I’m flirting here with heresy, so what, I’ll take the plunge, that joie de vivre is maybe only a fancy French handle for pure, unadulterated randomness.”
Breathing heavily, smirking in embarrassment, his hands spread wide, his sweaty palms turned up, the Rebbe backs away from his dinner guest—backs away from the idea also. “I was talking hypothetical, it goes without saying. Any idiot knows there’s no place in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn for pure, unadulterated randomness.”
Lemuel whispers huskily, “You almost reached the Promised Land, Rebbe. For God’s sake, don’t pull back now. I can say you Yahweh is not as uptight as you think. Go with the flow. Make the leap.”
The Rebbe looks as if he has swallowed bacon. “What leap are we talking about?”
“The leap of faith. Pure, unadulterated randomness has to exist or nothing makes sense. If it exists, it has to be the work of God. Hey, it is God!”
“You are off your rocker,” the Rebbe declares, patrolling the room. “If pure, unadulterated randomness, alias joie de vivre, were really the terminus, life would be bursting with succulent alternatives. Faced with such a feast, we would go crazy, not to mention hungry. Nobody would get an act together. Painters, terrorized by an infinity of possibilities, wouldn’t paint, architects wouldn’t architect, girls wouldn’t give in and go to bed with boys, you, Lemuel, would never nibble on a drumstick again. Your left, right, either or would miss the point, would miss the violence of having to choose, would miss the orgasm that comes from having chosen. Oy, what words can I find to make you see the light? We think we are tossing lots for the scapegoat, but Yahweh has loaded the dice, which is another way of saying He selects the scapegoat for us. You were right all along: Yahweh’s randomness is fool’s randomness, which means His randomness is a footprint of chaos. Which means, thank God, that everything under the sun is determined even if it’s beyond our power to predict what will come next. Left, right, either or works because your choice is determined; therefore you don’t have to choose. Oy, how could it be otherwise? Where would the Yahweh of Torah, this visceral avenger we know and love but don’t particularly like, where, I ask you, answer if you can, would He fit into the big picture if pure randomness existed, if nothing were determined, if we had to pick and choose a thousand times a day, if we, as opposed to God, were the real masters of our destiny?”