“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 swa
llow 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.”
From the seemingly endless depths of the shopping satchel he produced a wine opener and a dusty bottle of Chateau Montlabert 1979, deftly removed the cork, savored the aroma of the wine on the cork, then half-filled a wineglass and raised it in a toast to the bride and groom. Rocking gently back and forth on the balls of his feet, he intoned, “Borukh atoh adoynoy, eloyheynu melekh ha’oylom, boyrey pri hagafen. Blessed art Thou, God, King of the universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine.”
He sipped the wine. “Blessed are Thou, God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by His commandments and given us the laws of marriage.”
He motioned for me to produce the ring and slip it on Rain’s finger. “Repeat after me,” he said, glancing again at the storm clouds. “Hareï at mekudeshes …”
“Harei at mekudeshes.”
“… li betaba ‘as zo kedas …”
“Li betaba ‘as zo kedas.”
“… moyshe veyisro eyl.”
“Moyshe veyisro ‘eyl.”
“What language is he talking, angel?” Shirley asked Dwayne behind our backs.
“Lilliputian,” I said under my breath. “It is the mother tongue of one of the lost tribes of Israel.”
“Behold, you are sanctified to me by this ring,” the Rebbe intoned, “according to the law of Moses and Israel.”
When I hesitated, he nodded vigorously for me to repeat it.
Still clinging to Rain’s hand, I turned to her. “Behold, you are sanctified to me by this ring …” I cleared my throat.
“So what are you nervous about?” she whispered. “You’ve been married before.”
“That is what I am nervous about,” I whispered back.
I started to slip into a fiction, but caught myself at the last instant. It dawned on me that the chaos of the moment was infinitely more interesting.
I took a deep breath and completed the ritual sentence. “… according to the law of Moses and Israel.”
The Rebbe’s head bobbed gleefully, his coiled sideburns cavorting in the air. “With these words the delicious deed is done. Under Jewish law the bride is considered a married woman, the groom a married man.”
“Hey, I don’t feel different,” Rain announced.
Shirley burst into tears. “It’s … so … fucking … fly.”
Fighting back tears, Rain reached up and with a strength I did not know she possessed pulled my head down to hers. She pressed her lips fiercely against my cheek, when she spoke I felt her breath singe my ear.
“I swear to Christ I’ll be there when you need me.”
“Me also,” I whispered back, I was too emotional to say more, it is not every day you marry someone you are wildly, eternally, achingly in love with.
The Rebbe, his enormous Adam’s apple bobbing, tilted back his head and polished off the glass of Chateau Montlabert in one long gulp, then wound a piece of cloth around the wineglass and placed it on the ground.
“Stomp on it,” he told me. “It brings good luck.”
I stomped on the glass with my heel, shattering it into a million fragments.
“Mazel tov!” cried the Rebbe.
“Check it out,” whooped Dwayne, caught up in the excitement.
“Hey, I am freaking out.” Rain laughed nervously. “Totally.”
An elated “Yo” was all I managed to cough up.
The Rebbe, it turned out, had not completed the ceremony. “One of the perks of being a Rebbe,” he said, holding out a palm, feeling the first drop slap against it, “is you get to deliver the homily to a captive audience.”
Behind me, I could hear Dwayne muttering to Shirley, “Chill out, babe.”
“I can’t,” she sobbed. “I think I want to become Jewish, I think I want the Rebbe to marry us too.”
“What better way to celebrate a beginning,” the Rebbe said, davening impatiently, “than to go back and take a quick look at the Big Bang. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was tohu-vavohu. I’m talking Genesis 1:1. The schlimazel King James translates this, ‘the earth was without form.’ But tohu-vavohu happens to be the Hebrew word for ‘chaos.’ The … earth … was … literally … chaos!”
“Tohu-vavohu,” Rain murmured, “sounds like the most Florida city in the Pacific. Hey, maybe we could honeymoon there sometime.”
“Are you hanging on my every word, Lemuel and Rain?” the Rebbe forged on, he did not appreciate interruptions. “You don’t have to be an Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh to maybe know chaos didn’t sneak through the door uninvited, it was also created. Knowing Yahweh, we can assume it was within His power to create night and day and grass and trees and seasons and sun and fish and fowl and Eden and Adam without first creating chaos. So what coded signal was Yahweh sending down through the ages to Jews being joined together in holy matrimony when He created chaos before He moved on to Creation with a capital C?”
If I live to be a hundred and six, which is how old I was when Rain jump-started my battery, I will never forget the Rebbe’s talmudic eyes bursting with biblical originality. He absently slipped a finger between his starched collar and the welt on his neck as he supplied the answer to his own question.
“You want an independent opinion, He was maybe telling us what every artist instinctively knows, namely that there is no such thing as creation without chaos.” Heavy drops of rain started to spatter at our feet, Shirley and Dwayne exchanged worried looks, the Rebbe lunged toward his punch line. “So, my darlings, if you are lucky enough to get a whiff of honest-to-God chaos in your life as a couple, don’t run away from it, run toward it, embrace it, use it, for God’s sake.”
Dwayne sensed the Rebbe had run out of words. “Now, babe!”
He and Shirley pulled recycled paper bags from their pockets and began pelting us with fistfuls of bird seed. Instantly the carillon tower came alive with blurred wings as waves of pigeons beat down to peck at the ground. Below, in the valley, a prong of lightning split the sky, followed immediat
ely by a slow roll of thunder. The rain began in earnest.
I took off my sport jacket and held it over Rain’s head. The sight of the pigeons fluttering down from the tower made my hearts beat faster—I understood that the trivial turbulence created when wings flail the air sets off tiny ripples that amplify with time and distance to bring, into the life of a Russian theoretical chaoticist no longer on the lam from terrestrial chaos, Occasional Rain.
Go figure.
Robert Littell, The Visiting Professor
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