It was Joan Cohen, the one who shopped. The tall, elegant Chaverot in the suedes and knits who, in her wool autumnals and graduated rusts and yellows, looked like camouflage, and seemed, as I’ve said, some quick tweed movement in a field, fashionably earthen as a saddle or the burnished stock of a rifle, a step from blood sport. She could have been poster lady for the National Rifle Association. Joan Cohen was like moonlight in Vermont, autumn in New York.
Oh, oh, Joan, Joan, it wasn’t just the leaves you set ablaze when you stepped up to fill the brisk fall air with your smoky, musky chlorophyll, but whole heaped piles of my heart. You were aristocratic and as full of gorgeous, solid presence as some handsome, tweedy lady sensibly shod. Foxy Joan Cohen, do ye ken John Peel?
I don’t know, she made me feel, well, Church of England, as though I had a “living,” two hundred a year, say, like some curate in a country parish on a great estate in a novel. Jerry Goldkorn, Rabbi of Dorchester House. Well-met we were in that Rutherford, New Jersey, Best Western.
“Yoicks! Is that Joan Cohen?”
“Rabbi, it is,” she said. “Shalom.”
“Hail! Halloo! What cheer?”
“I read about your Connie in the papers.”
“My,” I said, “what a beautiful sweater. Shetland, is it?”
“Kids,” she said, “go figure them. A bunch of nudniks.”
“Lightweight, but I should think it keeps one quite cozy astride a good, strong jumper taking the hurdles and hedges of a brisk morning.”
“They haven’t any sachel.”
“Would it also come in a herringbone jacket, do you suppose?”
“All chutzpa and shpilkes.”
“Pinched at the waist and flared at the hips? With little leather patches at the elbows?”
“To say such awful things? To strangers? A shanda! What? No,” she said, “I haven’t seen it in herringbone.”
She was there, she told me, to check out the acoustics for the Nathan Nizer bar mitzvah. She’d heard I was selling graveyard properties and happened to have seen my name on the special events board in the lobby. Was my seminar over already?
“No, no. It doesn’t start till seven.”
“It’s twenty to eight.”
“Sometimes they’re a little late.”
“Oh?”
“Sometimes they don’t show up.”
“Oh,” Joan Cohen said.
“I give them a couple of hours.”
“Oh.”
“Then I’m out of here.”
“I see.”
“Oh, yes. Two hours. Then I’m history.”
“Are those brochures?”
“Hmn?”
“On those chairs you set up. Are they brochures?”
“Well, yes, in a way they’re brochures. They’re cemetery plats. They describe the services we provide. The different perpetual care options you can choose from. The legal height you can have your monument. Examples of the sort of thing we do. What, would you care to see one?”
“Oh, yes, please. May I?”
“I don’t see why not.”
She took a piece of literature up off one of the empty chairs and appeared to study it.
“Well,” I said, “what do you think?”
“It’s very interesting,” Joan Cohen said. “I like Plan D. Creeping euonymous is my favorite ground cover. I love a dark, shiny leaf. And it’s green all winter. It never drops off.”
“Well,” I said, inspired and suddenly ruthless with desire and decision, “I’ll tell you something about Plan D and your creeping euonymous.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a forbidden vine.”
“Really?”
“Strictly. You didn’t know that?”
“There’s forbidden ground cover?”
“There’s trayf fruits and vegetables.”
“Really?”
“French fries. Guavas and papayas are outlawed fruit, certain kids of nuts and grains.”
“I never heard that.”
“A good rule of thumb is, Only what grew in the Garden of Eden is kosher.”
“Oh, Rabbi,” she said, “you’re teasing me.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “I am. The jury’s still out on the french-fried potatoes,” I whispered.
“Oh, Rabbi.”
I really believe she meant Shelley no harm, that it was her piety did her in, her fervent, terrible, swift Godbent. We did it right there in the paid-up hospitality suite.
“Oh, Rabbi. Poor, sweet Rabbi Goldkorn.”
She said my name but I was just the surrogate, the middleman, her humble conduit to the Lord. Hey, it’s lonely at the middle, let me tell you. What else can it mean, a lady comes and she screams, “Oh, oh, Rabbi, oh, you’re giving me the suntan!” That’s what she told me. That I was giving her the suntan. Reflecting glory, glamour. Spritzing sperm and wonder. She couldn’t get enough of my insider’s wowser connections, this God-juiced, God-foreplayed lady. My inside info a turn-on. Treating me to her giggled deference and excited by all the landmined, bedmined, riskwrath. God was my copilot that night, let me tell you. And hers too, into all the holy sacreds, and embracing, as I say, who knew Whom in her head. Just as I, in mine, the both of us naked in that Rutherford Best Western, made love to some idea I had of her clothed in her own forbidden ground cover. Until, Godspent, she shoved out from under me. “Hallelujah,” she sang, “is that all there is?”
It was. We didn’t see each other again.
Though at night, alone in my bachelor’s bed or, afterward, when Connie returned from Chicago, alongside Shelley but still alone, her image continued to inflict me. Displayed in all her crisp, beautiful golden basket tones like some woven woman or a girl made out of plaid, appeared in my consenting head in all her gorgeous barks and browns, the tarnished hues of open, airing apples, come dressed to kill, got up in all the muted splendids of Joan Cohen’s fall and fallen fashions.
As always, as I walked along Main Street, I felt cheered, my heart lifting, lifting, lifted by the pink Federal-style buildings all around me like so many small banks. I opened the door to Sal’s barber shop and stepped inside, tripping the modest tinkle of Sal’s prop bell. Someone was lying back in one of Sal’s three chairs, his torso covered by a barber’s cape, his face by a hot towel. The bell must have startled him awake because the minute I entered he sat bolt upright, tore the cloth from his face and, the cape bunched in his fist, looked about wildly.
“Easy,” Sal said, “easy there, Bubbles. It’s only our skullcap. It’s only the rov.”
The fellow stared at me a moment, then relaxed back into the chair.
“It’s cold,” he said of the still-steaming towel.
Sal resettled him under the barber’s cape, fixed another towel he lifted from the sink with tongs and laid it across the man’s face like a cloth over a bird cage. And with something like the same effect. In seconds I heard a light, companionable snoring. Sal grinned at me above the man’s heaped absence and, reaching in under the back of the hot towel, began to massage Bubbles’s hidden scalp, vaguely working him like a magic trick.
“I can come back,” I said.
“No, no, I’m practically done,” Sal said, motioning me to a chair. “Sit, he’s a pussycat.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“No, really,” Sal said, “I don’t cut his hair, I don’t give him a shave. He already had that forty-dollar manicure on his hands when he came in. That’s so, ain’t it, Bubbles?”
“People notice your hands. It’s the first place they look.”
“Bubbles has his priorities straight,” Sal said.
“I’m here for the shmooz and hot towels,” Bubbles’s voice said behind its wrappings, and he sat up again, at his leisure this time, fastidious as an actor as he picked the linen cape off his suit and peeled the towel from his face. “Yeah,” he said, studying himself in a hand mirror, “that’s good, Sal. That brought the blood up good.” He turned to me. “What do you think? How do I look? Sally’s tip rides on what you tell me.”