Llona squirmed under his weight, abandoning herself to their mutual lust. His hands were under her, the nails digging into her nether-cheeks, pressing the fluttering lips below her mound of passion against his manhood. Her fingers ran wild through his hair, urging his mouth to sample the tautness of her breast-tips.
She was never sure whether it was his lips or his hands that sent the sudden—almost painful thrill through her body. All she was sure of was the result. Her body jerked spasmodically and her hands clenched to tear at the curly hair and scalp beneath them.
When the spasm passed, Llona opened her eyes to find that Rammer’s hairline had receded a full three inches. She raised her arm and discovered she was clutching a hirsute handful whilst the skull beneath was as shiny as a billiard ball!
Probably feeling the breeze, Raunch suddenly became aware of what had happened. He turned brick red. His unshakable aplomb was not only shaken; it was shattered.
For a moment Llona just looked. Then she lost the battle to control herself and burst into laughter. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she gasped. “But I didn’t realize -- I mean, you’d told me— Well, you have to admit, it is funny!"
“I fail to see the humor.” Raunch groped for dignity. “Now, if you don’t mind returning my hair-piece--”
“I thought they called them toupees.” Llona began to giggle uncontrollably.
“Regardless of what they call them, I’d like mine back.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Llona handed it back to him.
“Now,” said Raunch, putting it in place. “Where were we?”
“We were about to—- Oh, but I couldn’t!” Llona’s giggles were replaced by hiccoughs. “I mean, I just can’t stop laughing. I know that's awfully nasty, but I can’t help how l feel, can I?”
“I suppose not.” Raunch was icy. “Immature reactions are uncontrollable, I guess. You might as well leave then.”
“But I thought there was work to do.”
“Forget it. Just leave. Please.”
“All right.” Llona dressed quickly. “Do you want me to come into work tomorrow?” she asked when she was finished.
“Of course. You’re not fired. Just as long as you do me a favor and keep this our little secret.”
“Naturally. I’m sorry,” she told him sincerely as she left.
“Sorry!” Raunch was having trouble picking up the pieces of his self-image after she’d gone. “What the hell good is sorry?”
He hadn’t even remembered to c1aim the panties as a prize. Sorry!
CHAPTER NINE
H. Reb Klein’s paternal grandfather was the son of black Africans made slaves to white cotton. His maternal grandfather was a Hassidic scholar from Poland who was too occupied with unraveling the complexities of his Torah to be bothered assimilating the prevalent prejudices separating white goy from black goy in his adopted land. With such a heritage, Afro-American and Orthodox Jew, a man learns early that a sense of humor can be the most important item in his survival kit.
Reb learned it by growing up in a neighborhood whose population balance shifted slowly from immigrant Jew to relocated black (and later from black to Black to BLACK with the building of individual awareness of group identity) over a period of many years. When he was very small he learned the uses of a smile when you happen to be coffee-colored in a milk-skinned environment. When he was older, and he went to the yeshiva with the other Orthodox Jewish children, he learned how laughter can grease the skids when you’re the only black kid on a half-black block who has a white mother, a grandfather who speaks nothing but Yiddish, and are required to wear a yarmulke and pais curls. i
At home as well—and perhaps even more so-—Reb knew from his earliest days that humor was the balance wheel. His parents’ marriage had not come off without howls from both ethnic camps. His mother’s father hadn’t blinked one eye at the prospect of a black man for a son-in-law, but a goy!—generations of rabbinical ancestors would rend their shrouds in their pine-box coffins! His father’s mother turned off the first time her son brought his intended home for dinner and this snit of a white girl, this Semitic white missy, turned up her off-white nose at the roast pork repast because it wasn’t kosher! About kosher, Reb’s paternal grandmother knew nothing, but about the duplicity of white logic vis-à-vis black people, she was an expert with the credentials of a lifetime of experience.
Despite the barrage of black flak and Semitic spears, the marriage took place. Agreement to bring up offspring in the Orthodox Jewish faith mollified Hebrew wrath to a mumble, although Reb’s father’s refusal to personally convert ensured that the mumble would never completely die out. And when Reb’s mother brought the bloodline determination of a Talmudic scholar to bear on Afro-American history, culture and current problems, her ebony in-laws slowly and grudgingly began to believe in her sincerity. Both sides harbored doubts, but they learned to coexist and even to respect each other.
Still, for Reb, the more direct abrasiveness stemming from his mother and father’s different backgrounds marked the classroom in which his appreciation of the compromise of humor was formed. If there was reinforcement of his self-image in his father’s insistence that “Black is beautiful!” and his mother’s belief that Jews are the chosen of Jehovah, there was also the recognition that his mother silently put down her husband for refusing to learn Yiddish and that his father disapproved of much of The Word Reb brought home from the yeshiva. His parents’ love for each other and for him easily sidestepped such sandtraps during his childhood and adolescence. But when Reb hit his twenties and left home to set himself up in his own apartment not too far from theirs, the friction seemed to grow between his parents in a way which paralleled the manner in which it was growing between the two minority groups in the community at large.
With age, his father’s sense of black pride increased and he edged more and more into the black power camp. And with the years his mother seemed more and more strongly to cling to the Orthodoxy of her faith, perhaps because of the knowledge that with adulthood her son had rejected all but the outward appearances of belief, and that he adhered to them not so much for his own sake as for hers. Also, with Reb out of the house, his parents bickered over both attitudes as much to fill the hours as for any other reason. With the years love always grows abrasive; but if sarcasm frequently sparked the dialogue, love still prevailed -- and with it the recognition that the dialogue itself (for them as for the world) was more important than the conclusions it never arrived at.
Reb was often called upon to referee. He loved his parents even when they exasperated him, and so he didn't really mind. And his humor always proved effective as the coolant.
That humor was so ingrained a part of his personality, so appealingly on the surface of it as well as deeply imbedded, that it came close to charisma in its effect on those with whom Reb came in contact outside the family circle. Jobwise and socially the black Jew had an easy time of it. People just naturally cottoned to him. Llona was no exception. She fell under his spell from the first. Whenever she encountered the attractive photographer during the working day she found herself responding to him with genuine pleasure.
Reb’s suggestion that they stop and have a drink together as they were leaving the office after work one day seemed casual and unplanned, although it really wasn’t. Llona had been burned when it came to extracurricular office activities, but with Reb it really did seem different; his friendliness was so much a part of him. She accepted his invitation without hesitation.