“Yes,” she said, “me too.”
“You think people do that stuff?”
“I suppose some people do,” Joan Cohen said. “I suppose some people do everything.”
“Others don’t do anything at all,” I said. “I guess most of us go our whole lives without ever getting a blow job,” I said.
“Or giving one,” Joan Cohen said.
I could put this into my eulogy, how Joan Cohen and I talked about blow jobs, how it came up naturally. In the course of the conversation.
“Did you see all those things he shoved up her behind?”
“Yes, I did,” she said.
“That was probably trick photography,” I pronounced in the rabbi mode. “Don’t you think?”
“I should certainly hope so.”
“It sure wasn’t responsible sex.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Not when there’s AIDS.”
“Certainly not,” Joan Cohen said.
“I think I will have a drink,” I said, and signaled the girl where she stood in the bar’s broad, open entranceway. “There’s something about the sharp smell of a highball in these places.”
“So what is?” she asked me.
“What is what?”
“If drinking’s not one of your vices.”
Her curiosity. I could put in about her curiosity. How we discussed sin, vice, good and evil in the lobby of that Philadelphia hotel while we waited for Shelley to come down with the floral arrangement she’d taken from our table the night before. Just a rabbi talking shop with an interested, dead, lone congregant untimely taken, prematurely plucked out of season.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t one of the commentators tell us that the last thing a man knows is himself?”
“I love it when you talk religious,” she said. “But really,” she said, “if you had to guess.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t.”
“No, of course,” she said. “You don’t have to, but tell me,” she teased, “what? That you haven’t any will power? That you don’t exercise regularly? That you can’t stick to a diet?”
“Do I look out of shape? You think I’m too fat?”
“No,” she said, “they’re examples. I’m poking around.”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that I try to lie low.”
“Oh,” she said, “what a good one.”
And pick this moment to bring in something of the stunning mystery of death. This was just two years ago. Two lousy years! The day before yesterday, for God’s sake! And I’m rounding it off. What would that be in terms of seasons? Two or three wardrobes? Six or seven shopping sprees? How much hose, how many leather accessories? What naps and wools, what hides and knits and fine finished fabrics? All that chic, organic cloth, all those hues like altitude tinted on maps, pale as sea level, amber as mountain range. Her blood-sport wraps and fashionables, her swift kinetic tweeds.
Of death more mysterious than life. Because death is harder, I’d tell them, or what are we grieving for here? (Though life’s pretty mysterious too. Come on, two people chatting each other up in a hotel lobby, and one’s got the hots, and chances are the other has too? All this while the one’s wife of twenty years is upstairs, possibly humming a tune or sniffing stolen flowers?) Bringing in God. The mystic extrasensories and supernaturals. Because ain’t it just at this point that the heart did its tap dance while the head figured all the possibilities like a good gambler counting cards? And the body, don’t forget. What’s all this terrible new energy, these sweet swoopswoons and tickles, these pit-of-the-stomach accelerations and acrobatics like a belly lifted in an elevator? Come on, two people side by side in a hotel lobby. Sharing a couch but not even touching. Heart rates up. Palms moistening. (I mean, it was all I could do to hold on to my highball!) What, this isn’t mysterious? This isn’t a sort of mind-reading, this isn’t some kind of out-of-the-body travel, or bending nails without touching them? This ain’t God loose in the lobby? Tell it to the Marines.
“So what about you?” I asked. “How is it a girl like you never got married?”
“You sound like my parents.”
“How is it?”
“Maybe I’m just waiting for the right man to come along.”
And stick in here about her character, her qualities and virtues. Her righteous probity and defense against temptation as if she were protected by fire retardant, or Scotch-Gard, say. Her loyalty, for example. What she said next. “Not you,” she flashed. “Shelley’s my friend. She’s only your wife.”
I could tell them I underestimated her, and go on, pushing the landmarks and saliencies, the highlights and points of interest, putting her together, too like a police-artist’s sketch.
“Did you misunderstand me? Oh, you misunderstood me,” I objected. “No, I’m just curious. A nice Jewish girl. Intelligent, attractive. It just seems to me that someone like you would have no difficulty meeting fellows. Perhaps at your temple. In your job where you work. I’m told that sometimes, if you take your wash to the laundromat …”
“Oh, I meet plenty of men,” she said. “That’s not the problem. Last night.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Last night. After the ceremony. After the dinner. During the dancing.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It was so stuffy. I was all overheated.”
“Yes?”
“I needed some air.”
“Some air. Yes?”
“So I came down here.”
“Down here.”
“Well, I was on my way out.”
“Outside you mean.”
“Yes, out. Outside for fresh air.”
“I see.”
“I was crossing the lobby and got as far as that bar, and suddenly there was this Japanese man. He was quite good-looking. And, well, he hit on me.”
“He hit on you?”
“Well, it was no big deal. He asked if I wanted to have a drink with him.”
“You’d gone into the bar?”
“No,” she said, “I was crossing the lobby, I was going out for some air. He saw me crossing the lobby. He was in town on business, I guess. He was alone. I mean, he wasn’t with anyone. Colleagues or customers, a woman, a friend.”
“He just asked if you wanted to have a drink with him.”
“That’s right.”
“Just like that.”
“Yes.”
“So what did you tell him?”
“Well, I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“I said, ‘How come the sport coats you guys wear always have all those lines and bars and look like blowups of a computer chip?’ ”
“Goodness,” I said, “that was a little rude. It was sort of a racial slur, wasn’t it? What did he say then?”
“He was hurt, but I made it up to him,” she said. “I bought him a drink. Then, afterward, I took him up to the room.”
“Oh?” I said. “Yes?”
“I didn’t go outside after all.”
“So you never did get your fresh air.”
“We opened the windows.”
I would tell them … And just then remembered. Her parents. She’d mentioned her parents. They would be there. That’s it, I decided. And destroyed my notes. Just ripped them up. Just threw them away. All my notes. Toward my eulogy for Joan Cohen.
And decided to play it straight.
The place was packed. Joan Cohen’s bewildered parents sat in the front by themselves, rent strips of grosgrain pinned to their clothing like black campaign ribbons. The Chaverot were there, their Chaverot husbands and children. Musicians I recognized from bands that had played at their affairs. People I’d never seen in my life.