“Thanks,” I said, “that won’t be necessary.”
“You’re not offended? I didn’t offend you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Hey, just because old Cupid stings my toches with his arrows I think all blood is boiling. I shouldn’t be that way. I’m too romantic.”
“Perfectly understandable.”
“Yeah?”
“Certainly.”
“Miriam and I are delighted you came. Rabbi and Shelley,” he said gravely, “and only hope that this weekend will be as memorable for you as I know it’s going to be for us.”
“I’m sure it will be.”
“Thank you,” Jack Perloff said. “Coming from a rabbi, I’m going to regard that as a blessing.”
“That’s how I intended it.”
“Thank you, Rabbi.”
“Jerry, Jack.”
“Jerry,” he corrected. “Hey, I almost forgot,” he said, and opened a door next to the desk. “It’s our hospitality suite,” he said. “It’s for the wedding party, but I want everyone to feel free. Mi casa, su casa,” he said, and just then we heard his intended in the hall.
“Knock, knock,” Miriam said in the open door.
“Hi there, sweetheart.”
“Just a minute,” she said, and moved a foot or so back out into the corridor. “On the count of three,” Miriam called down the hallway. “One!” Jack stepped up to a door at the side of the television set, and turned the little whoosis in its round, recessed fitting. “Two!” she proclaimed. “Three!” she sang out. Jack opened the connecting door and, on their side of the wall, the Picklers did the same. Rose Pickler stood at the threshold between our two rooms. “Hi, stranger,” Rose, grinning, greeted Jack, “how you doin’?”
“Come here, Miriam,” Jack Perloff said, “will you just look at this, will you?”
Shelley and Jack and Miriam and I crowded around the connecting doors. Through some repeated suite, double, double, suite arrangement peculiar to the hotel, we could see down the entire length of rooms. I looked past Rose and Will Pickler in their room, and Al and Naomi Shore in theirs, beyond the Iglauers where Elaine held her rose, and beyond Ted and Sylvia Simon to where, at the distant end of the queer railroad-flat configuration, Fanny was handing Joan Cohen a piece of complimentary fruit.
And that’s how I saw her.
And later, after dinner, in Perloff s hospitality suite, where we had gathered to shmooz and tell jokes, to play cards and listen — and some of us dance — to the music on the FM, and watch the lights of downtown Philadelphia, and pick from the bowls of nuts, and nosh from the platters of food Perloff had had sent up (not so much without appetite or edge as somehow ahead of it), and drink from the bar he had stocked, lying about, secure, lulled by the movements of the ladies, by the sweet, soft music of their commentary like a kind of vocalizing, brought back to some ancient, lovely treehouse condition, that’s how I saw her, too. Then, later, after Perloff had left with Miriam, and some of the others, tired out, had mumbled vague good-nights and gone back to their rooms (actually too tired to leave the hospitality suite, too tired or too reluctant, and choosing the shortcut, returning through the inner corridor, through our rooms, through the Picklers’ and Shores’ and Iglauers’ and Simons’), and then a few more did, and then the rest, until, deep in the dark Shabbes, neither of us speaking and the volume turned low, only Joan Cohen and I were left to watch the X-rated movie when it came on at three.
Because I saw her all sorts of ways. (I couldn’t stop seeing her. Should I try to put that in?) How she danced at the wedding. With me, with the others. Sensing some distant availability in her, something game and something ready. Up for a frelach, leading a hora. Maybe there was nothing more to it than her bachelor-girl pluck, the simple, ordinary honor of the privately led life. And I could bring in how gorgeous she looked in a lobby. Jesus, she did! Never mind the fancy Philadelphia hotel where the Perloffs tied the knot. In the Rutherford Best Western even. How she shined there! They could just imagine what she must have looked like, how she must have been, set off against all that Philadelphia Bulgari and Pucci, the high glitz of all those upscale outlet stores! I’m a rabbi, a teacher. I leave nothing to the imagination. If they were to get a last good glimpse of her during that brief, last patch of time before I consigned her to earth forever, then I would have to lead her to them up through the murk of seance and memory. Presented like a girl on the arm of a pop. Handed off like a deb, handed off like a bride.
I’d certainly have to tell them about the lobby. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I would have to tell them about the lobby, occupied by that vast guest population, guests not just of the spiffy Philadelphia hotel but by the guests of those guests, invitees to all the showers, weddings, parties and anniversaries, all the affairs and mitzvahs, floating their generous mood like a kind of collective weather, and packing their gifts like handguns.
People checking in, people checking out. (And didn’t I wish I could stay there forever? Held inside the gold parameters of the handled, splendid atmospherics of the place? Didn’t I just?)
We sat near one of the hotel’s bars and breathed the lovely alcoholic spice lofted out over the lobby, and watched the richish, sporty, middle-aged Jews importantly lounging, guys in crew necks, guys in gold, guys with a bypass under their sport shirts and a hint of Sunday brunch on their breath, Wasps in a Jewey register. Except that I felt almost like some pale, poor relation beside them, thinking, Oy, the savvy Sabbath motley of our crowd.
I could repeat our conversation for them, explain the conditions — I mean the context — in which it took place — Shelley gone back to the room after the late breakfast we took with the rest of the wedding party — our last collective act before it broke up and we went back to New Jersey — to see if she’d left anything behind, to try to move her bowels.
“Well,” I said, “it was a lovely wedding.”
“Yes, it was fun. Everyone enjoyed themselves.”
“I’m glad we decided to make a weekend of it.”
“Yes, it was nice.”
“I like this hotel. I’m glad we stayed here.”
“It’s lucky Jack’s parents live in town and knew about it.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “It’s an advantage when you’re not familiar with a city if someone you know is.”
“Philadelphia’s so close. It can’t be ninety miles.”
“Sure,” I said, “but New York is closer. New York’s where we go when we go out to dinner.”
Joan Cohen chuckled.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “The way those rooms were connected.”
“I know,” I said.
“That was cute.”
“Look, that girl brought those people drinks from the bar. How about a drink, would you care for a drink? They serve you right in the lobby.”
“After last night? No, I don’t think so. But you go ahead if you like.”
“Who, me? No. Drinking’s not one of my vices.”
“It’s not one of mine either really. Though I guess you wouldn’t be able to tell that from last night. I was pretty pissed. Oh,” she said, “excuse me.”
“I say ‘piss,’ ” I objected. “I say ‘piss.’ I say ‘shit.’ ”
“You do?”
“Hey,” I told her, blushing, looking down, “I watch the X-rated movie channel.” And try to explain to them the sense I had of her hand above my head, feeling some hypnotic, unheard tonsorial snick-snick in my hair, some tingled attraction, the energy of her fingers, of her rings perhaps, doing tentative passes. I don’t know, a gravity, an electric pleasure, some gentle force field of flesh. “Well, that one time anyway,” I said.