“Avrom’s dying,” I said, and felt instantly ashamed: I was exploiting the old man’s condition to gain pity for myself. All the same, it seemed to work. I made a noise like I was trying to clear my throat of my heart, and Rachel took my hand; she drew me round to the other side of the car, deposited me in the shotgun seat, and drove me home with her to her greenstone building.
She undressed in the window outlined by the spiky sunlight whose beams appeared to emanate from her pores. She revealed herself in full consciousness of the gift she knew her body to be — its skin smooth as a blanched almond, her navel like a tiny knot in a balloon. Dayenu, I said to myself, because it would have been enough just to behold her, even had she not begun to crawl into the bed. She crawled like she was stalking me, scaring the cat, which leapt from the pillow, and began to unbuckle my belt. With every button she unbuttoned, zipper unzipped, she uttered a gasp, as if my pasty flesh and bones were some great surprise. Her lips performed lamprey-like kisses, suctioning my nipples, my thighs, my organ, which rose with comical alacrity like a jack-in-the-box, the only part of me not behaving like her victim. But once drawn into the arena of her sensuality, I wasn’t so passive anymore. Then we were indivisible, bucking and writhing as if we shared the symptoms of some saint’s disease — a sublime seizure that purified us of contaminents in the blood, such as fear. When it was over, I told her I’d ejaculated a crazy glue that would cement us together for all time. So I was bewildered at the ease with which, immediately after, she disengaged her body from mine and said she had to get to work. I couldn’t account for her abruptness, but later that afternoon, slouched again in Avrom’s “siege perilous” (perilous because it was so hard to get out of), it dawned on me she was saying good-bye.
15 Party in the Park
Muni glanced again at the kid in the doorway who’d outgrown his Dutch vestee suit, his knees smudged and raw below his short pants. One stocking had fallen down around his ankle and his rust-red hair fanned his brow in an unruly cowlick.
“Where have you been?” asked Muni, or rather he mouthed the words in silence: because it had been so long since he’d conversed with another person that his voice box had lost the knack of making sounds. But the boy seemed to have no problem reading his lips.
“Nowhere,” he replied.
There should have been no more need of asking the second question (“Where is your mama and papa?”) than the first, since everyone’s fate had already been recorded in Muni’s hill of loose pages. So why couldn’t Muni himself, the instrument of that record, recall what he’d inscribed? He glanced at the heap of manuscript turning sepia on the floor, then back at the boy with his faraway eyes, and realized that something was amiss: he’d awoken, it seemed, from his protracted dream and could no longer recall a single word of what he’d written. The recognition sucked the air from his lungs.
Starting again from scratch, from nowhere, Muni inquired, “Who are you?” and this time his voice was audible, if only just.
“I’m the boy,” replied the child with an offhand precocity, “that my papa made with my mama’s ghost. That was before it came back in her own body again, the ghost.”
It took all the patience Muni could muster to express any interest, so great was his wish to spend his sympathy on himself. “You don’t say,” he muttered; then he stood up, which was no easy undertaking, since he hadn’t stood in a very long while. He was aware of the odor his unbathed body exuded through his grubby underdrawers, the itch of his scalp and beard. His knee joints shed cobwebs and creaked like unoiled machinery; his brain felt as if an hourglass had turned over in his skull. Taking the boy’s hand less out of kindness than the need to secure his balance, the weary scribe set off with him in search of his mother and father.
They didn’t have far to look: turn left out of the neglected nursery, shuffle to the end of the hall, open the door into the wrecked bedroom, and there in the collapsed iron bed, scattered over the disheveled sheets, was the dust of Katie and Pinchas Pin. Muni was unable to identify it at first. Despite being slightly incandescent, as what wasn’t in the Pinch in those days, it might have been egg cookie crumbs left over from a late-night snack. But a reference to his handwritten chronicle back in the nursery revealed to Muni not only what had happened but also that there were telltale clues to what was coming all along. Because one of the distractions Muni had suffered repeatedly during his marathon scribbling — distractions he’d incorporated into his text — was the noise of Pinchas and Katie’s rampant copulation from down the hall.
Not that anyone in the Pinch could have been accused of conventional behavior, but the proprietor of Pin’s General Merchandise and his resurrected bride made noises such as their nephew had never heard in the years prior to the quake. His sleep, back in the days when Muni still slept, had seldom been interrupted by anything other than the music of the blind musician who accompanied the girl who danced on the clothesline, before the girl went away. But for all their unreserved devotion to their infant son, the physical appetite of Katie Pin for her husband, and his for her, had increased exponentially since the boy’s birth. In fact, their enduring gratitude for the gift of the child was sometimes overwhelmed by their delight in their newfound lasciviousness.
Pinchas could reason that their intemperate relations were part of a healthy regimen. For he had it on Rabbi ben Yahya’s authority — and he was willing now to credit the rebbe with some authority — that Katie’s time on earth was imperiled, and hadn’t their steamy union in the underworld proved to have revitalizing properties? Didn’t the shtupping quite simply restore her to life? Meanwhile Katie, for her part, wanted desperately to lengthen her days for the sake of their son. Moreover, there was the mutual conviction that they were making up for lost time. But in the end their rationalizations mattered little in the face of the unabashed randiness that compelled them to fling themselves hammer and tongs into each other’s arms.
Though each was likely to blame the other for initiating the frolic, it was usually Katie who made the first move. That might consist of no more than a shoulder shrug or a finger teasing a lock of her hennaed hair — or perhaps the scratching of an armpit, since the gesture required nothing overtly erotic, only some slight indication of the instigator’s corporal presence. Then they would come together, husband and wife, in a blind heat that caused their clothing to smolder until they tore off whatever they wore. Their bodies collided with a jarring impact that generated hairline fractures that would result later on in a splintering of bones. They tried to control their urges in a responsible fashion, to coordinate their reciprocal itch to correspond with the times when their child was asleep. But as Tyrone grew older and his napping more irregular, there were long periods when the boy was left on his own. The Pins weren’t too terribly concerned: he was a solitary kid capable of amusing himself, more wedded to fancy than material interests. (His most abiding occupation consisted in the vigilant observation of his cousin Muni at his writing.) Their periodic abandonment of Tyrone, his parents reasoned, was an unavoidable consequence of their serial abandonment of themselves, which is not to say they were able entirely to escape a measure of guilt.
So when they weren’t fornicating to beat the band, Katie and Pinchas Pin were attempting to atone for the times when they left their child to his own devices. Coming back to themselves after their spent passion, they would coddle and indulge their son. They gave him toys he seemed to outgrow as fast as he received them, plied him with Mrs. Rosen’s compotes and choice cuts of Makowsky’s manna-fed flanken that, with his bird-like appetite, the boy scarcely touched. They took him for strolls along the canal to view the sights that beggared belief, stopping in at various storefronts, some no more than painted facades, where they introduced him to the neighbors’ children. But Tyrone showed little interest in the other kids — whose games included exorcisms and a variation of hopscotch that involved skipping over whole calendar cycles. On their side the kids, all older than he, were wary as well of Tyrone, who wasn’t so much timid as remote. Plus, he was the only kid on the street who (despite the stalled clocks) was still growing in stature and advancing in age, a dreamy boy at a moment when no one else seemed to have need of dreams.