The Kabbalah Master

by Besserman, Perle;

FIFTEEN

  THE ROOM AT THE PURPLE HEN INN was just as Sharon had visualized it: an enormous four-poster bed; a blue-and-white porcelain pitcher and basin on a spindle-legged table; and a big window overlooking the Delaware Canal. It wasn’t until she pulled aside the curtains and found herself confronted by a thick brown stream swollen with filth that she remembered Wendy’s warning: “It’s picturesque, but the Delaware is one of the most heavily polluted bodies of water in the country.”

  Sharon quickly drew the curtains, opened her overnight bag, and, after removing her cosmetics, lined them up in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Junior had gone into the Lagans’ room to borrow an extra hanger, mercifully leaving her alone to remove her underwear and stuff it quickly into the top drawer of the bureau. She was in too much of a hurry to notice that her plastic diaphragm case had come loose from its hiding place in the folds of a slip—in her last-minute abandon, she’d hidden it there—and it clattered to the floor just as Junior entered the room.

  Skeejit! cried a saucy blue jay perched on the windowsill, distracting him while Sharon hurriedly retrieved the case and shoved it into the drawer. She was certain he’d seen her drop it but was tactful enough not to say anything.

  They took dinner on the inn’s big, screened-in porch. The temperature had dropped and a chill wind blew through the trees. Sharon shivered and was about to suggest they go inside where there were several empty tables, but Wendy wouldn’t hear of eating indoors on a full moon night like this, and, removing her own shawl, draped it around Sharon’s shoulders.

  “Don’t worry, Sharon. You’ll warm up after a drink or two,” said Icaro, rubbing his tapered fingers together as if blessing the table. He had shaved and slicked back his hair with water. Sitting next to him, Sharon could smell his heavy, pungent cologne. The points of his handlebar moustache glimmered in the candlelight, reminding her of a circus ringmaster. All he needed was a red dress coat, a silk top hat, a pair of black boots, and a brass-headed whip.

  “Waitress!” Icaro snapped his fingers. “We’re ready to order now.”

  Some Communist, Sharon thought.

  Wendy had changed into a short, sleeveless pink summer dress that revealed her bare tan legs to their best advantage. She wore midsize circular gold earrings but no makeup and was, Sharon grudgingly noted, even more beautiful without it.

  Icaro ordered whiskey sours all around, and then, as the meal was brought to the table (in deference to Rabbi Joachim, Sharon had ordered filet of sole—a fish with gills being neither Kosher nor non-Kosher but somewhere in-between) and a whole carafe of Sangria was emptied and replaced by a second, Junior and Icaro regaled the women with army jokes, making them laugh almost to choking at the sheer stupidity of their commanding officers. Suddenly, Junior pointed at Sharon and, addressing the table at large, asked, “What do you think of this Kosher Jewish girl dating this Italian boy?” Sharon shrank into her seat. Fortunately, there was too much loud conversation and laughter among the heavily drinking diners on the porch and his friends didn’t hear him. Spurred by the wine, Icaro launched into an Amazonian folk song with a tremolo refrain and Junior, not to be outdone, displayed the rose tattoo on his leg. Their boyish silliness ended by the time the dessert arrived, the talk moved to politics, with Icaro expounding his socialist goals for the peasants of the lower Amazon. Pounding the table with his fist, he ranted against his “parasitic” Colombian plantation-owning cousins and their CIA backers for what he called “La Violencia.” The usually effervescent Wendy did not seem especially compelled to talk, and sat gazing placidly at the stagnant moonlit canal. Sharon was trying to imagine what Wendy was thinking when Junior suddenly touched her knee under the table, reminding her of what was awaiting her in the big four-poster bed upstairs.

  The moon traveled across the sky. Frogs croaked in the bulrushes lining the canal; the diners were beginning to leave the restaurant and the laughter and conversation gave way to the sound of mating crickets rubbing their legs together under the porch. The temperature had dipped even further, and Sharon was not only shivering but her teeth were now chattering. Suddenly a woman at a neighboring table let out a shriek, and the manager rushed over to see what was wrong.

  “It’s nothing,” the woman’s embarrassed companion assured him. “Just a little bat. My wife’s afraid of them.”

  “A bat!” The three waitresses serving the diners on the porch dashed behind the bar in tandem.

  “What is it?” Always gallant, Icaro was already standing, poised to come to the aid of the damsels in distress.

  “A bat—a bat, the horrid thing! I hate them!” the woman at the next table screamed. Her husband remained seated and waved his credit card at the waitresses hiding behind the bar. He, too, appeared to be afraid of the bat.

  “They’re both terrified,” Wendy said quietly to Icaro. “You’d better go over there.”

  Sharon was now frightened as well as cold. She knew from her reading that bats did not get tangled up in people’s hair and that a bat bite was dangerous only if the bat was rabid, which was rare. But this didn’t stop her from being afraid.

  Icaro walked across the porch to the bar where the bat had landed before ascending to the rafter immediately above it.

  “That’s my husband,” said Wendy, “always number one on the scene.”

  “I’ll say,” Junior agreed thickly, “old ‘Lifesaver Lagan’ himself.”

  For about ten seconds no one on the porch moved.

  “There aren’t any bats here, it was probably just a big moth,” the restaurant manager said dismissively.

  Suddenly, the bat swooped down in a rapid Kamikaze arc, almost grazing the ear of the poor blue-lipped woman who had first spotted it. One of the waitresses hiding behind the bar screamed and bolted for the kitchen. Curious, or more likely too ashamed to follow her, everyone else on the porch stayed put. The excitement had drawn a crowd of diners from the indoor tables to the doorway of the porch making it difficult to leave even if anyone wanted to.

  Sharon now saw the event in two ways: on the one hand, the bat—or whatever it was—which was hiding again, could have been sent to her as a warning sign from Rabbi Joachim to get up and leave the inn before she had compromised herself. Another possibility was that the rabbi had embodied himself in the form of a bat to personally prevent her intended sin of fornication.

  “That’s crazy altogether,” Sharon said aloud. Fortunately, the others thought she was talking about the situation at hand and made no comment. The creature chose that moment to make its second dive, and in the full light of the candle on the table, was revealed in all its “batness”: scalloped wings, downy marsupial fur, beady black eyes—taking into account its Transylvanian cinematic associations, of course. If indeed it was the embodied astral form of Rabbi Joachim come to save Sharon from the inevitable fornication about to take place upstairs... But she had no time to pursue that thought any further, for at that moment the bat soared upward and flew out over the canal through the same unnoticed hole in the porch screen through which it had entered.

  “Die Fledermaus!” Icaro shouted, pulling Wendy up from her seat. The two of them started waltzing around the porch.

  Something had definitely gone wrong. If, as Sharon now believed, the bat was the astral Rabbi Joachim signaling her downfall, something had gone terribly wrong. Instead of curtailing Sharon’s sexual impulses, it was as if the bat’s entry and dramatic exit had provided everyone on the porch a license to run wild. The uptight husband and wife at the next table were locking tongues in an openly erotic display of relief; the manager was fondling the breasts of the most buxom of the three waitresses in full view of the diners; Icaro and Wendy were no longer waltzing but rubbing up against each other; and Junior was leading Sharon through the crowd and up the stairs to their room. Yes, if she were on the other side of the screen, winging her way through the cold, spooky moonlit night alongside Rabbi Joachim, Sharon would definitely have judged the scene on the porch the result of a Kabbalistic
formula gone terribly awry.

  REFLECTED IN THE BATHROOM MIRROR ON THE DOOR, Sharon surveyed her naked body while Junior lay on the bed waiting for her. How long ago was it that she’d dropped her diaphragm case on the floor? And here she was, holding it again in her hands, not daring to open it just yet. Still, Rabbi Joachim pleaded with her: There’s still time, Sharon. You don’t have to do this.

  At first they had kept their clothes on as they were lying side by side on top of the eiderdown quilt, but then, despite her protests, Junior had insisted on showing her the long pink scar left by the wound on his belly, and taken off his shirt. Sharon had expected the scar to be worse and said she was relieved to see that it had healed so well. To keep from running her finger across the scar, she’d asked him exactly how he’d gotten the wound, and Junior had described the ride in the jeep with the soldier who’d been blown up beside him right after handing him the skull on the chain for good luck. Sharon stared at the ashtray on the night table with “Colonial Inn, Sarasota, Fla.” inscribed around the rim in big black letters and wondered what an ashtray from Florida was doing in the non-smoking room of an inn in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Finally unable to restrain herself, she’d touched Junior’s smooth, taut, scarred stomach and, moving down to kiss it, let her face be smothered in the piney sweetness of his flesh.

  A landmine had exploded directly under the jeep Junior was in. Junior believed he’d been saved by his friend’s skull charm, ordered from one of those ads on the back of a pumping iron magazine. He’d been so sure of it that he’d broken down, refused to talk to anyone, refused to accept the medal his C.O. had pressed into his clenched fist as he lay recuperating from his gut wound. He hated the army. He hated himself for surviving when there was nothing left of his friend to be put in a box and sent home.

  Sitting up, Sharon continued stroking Junior’s stomach.

  “Icaro said it was the guilt over my buddy’s death that set me off, the idea that there was some kind of magic attached to that skull, and that in taking it from him, I’d taken his life. But that’s all over now. Being with Icaro and Wendy these past few months has taught me that the only magic in life is what you make of it yourself.”

  “Icaro is a born debunker.”

  “He’s a doctor, not a medicine man.”

  “Yes, but they’re related,” Sharon said, hearing faint music from behind the thin wall separating them from the Lagans. Was it Frank Sinatra singing “Embraceable You”? She couldn’t tell; the volume was turned down too low.

  “Of course magic doesn’t fit into Icaro’s life scheme, he’s a Communist. He and Wendy have everything so perfectly tallied up. It makes you sort of hate them a little, doesn’t it?”

  “Poor Sharon,” said Junior, unexpectedly placing his hand on her breast, then moving it down to caress her belly, hips, and thighs.

  I need him now, but I don’t love him, Sharon thought.

  Letting him explore her body with his hands, she said, “Did you ever wonder why such a cold, sterile, and airless lump like the moon would be associated with love?”

  “Take off your clothes,” he answered, his voice low, almost menacing, as he tugged at her skirt.

  And that’s what had brought her into the bathroom where she now stood, surveying her small, goose-bumped breasts and taut red nipples in the mirror. Her aroused nipples appeared to be staring back at her. Sharon turned around and inspected the skin on her back for pimples. The awkward bas relief of her naked spine stood out like a bony ruin on an empty plain. She could delay the inevitable no longer. She removed the diaphragm from its case, smeared it with KY Jelly, and deftly inserted it. Turning off the bathroom light behind her and covering her pudenda with both hands like the modest Jewish virgin she wasn’t, she tiptoed across the cold bedroom floor and joined Junior in bed.

  In the next room, Wendy had turned up the volume on the tape recorder. She and Icaro were probably dancing naked. The dog that he’d rescued from the strangely ravenous Koreans was probably lying on its back near Wendy’s riding boots, dreaming of bones, and hitching its legs in the air.

  Sharon heard the music clearly now. “Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you.” It was Frank Sinatra. Another Italian, like the one hovering over her, the red eyes in the sockets of the mournful skull on the chain around his neck twinkling lugubriously in the dark. Her body taut as a tightrope, strung between panic and laughter, she’d forgotten to ask Junior if he was wearing a condom. She hadn’t thought to look. But it was too late. Junior had entered her by then, and the tightrope split in two. Unbidden, like the sudden stab of pain he was inflicting on her, came the stomach-wrenching image of Jorge Diaz hanging in his cell: bulging eyes, head lolling off to one side, saliva-streaked chin and semen-stained pajamas. No matter how hard she tried, Sharon could not get that hideous face to go away. It grew bigger and bigger as Junior pumped and heaved and groaned, thrusting inside of her, and though she fought like mad to allow herself to enjoy the pleasure she was feeling, the stars bursting forth new worlds throughout her body in an orgasm like no other she’d ever experienced before, she felt nothing but disgust even as Junior emptied himself and their lovemaking ended. When he withdrew, she was relieved to see that he’d been wearing a condom.

  Sharon turned uncomfortably in the oversized bed and half sat up, resting on her elbow. Junior Cantana lay beside her, spent, his shoulder blocking a clear view of his face.

  “Are you circumcised?” It was a stupid, inappropriate thing to say, but it was all she could think of at the moment.

  “A lot of guys my age were circumcised at birth, Jewish or not. It was considered healthy. So, yes, I’m circumcised.”

  “I’m sorry for asking,” Sharon said, ashamed. She hadn’t been at all responsive lying there rigidly, letting him do all the work; now he must be musing on her failure to respond—thinking it was because she’d feared that he wasn’t circumcised. Or maybe he was disappointed because he’d heard somewhere that older women were better in bed because they were hornier, or maybe he loved her and thought the sex had been great. He was probably thinking that she must have wanted him badly enough to have come this far.

  To make up for her poor performance, Sharon wanted to say something nice but couldn’t—later, maybe tomorrow morning when they were driving home together. She’d insist on leaving earlier than planned; she couldn’t stay here another day. She would explain to him then, in the car, how the sudden startling image of Jorge’s face had merged with his as he’d hovered over her, his death’s head pendant sweeping back and forth in front of her; how the face kept changing so fast—three times in succession—from Jorge Diaz to that of a dying old man with a foam-flecked mouth until it had been transformed into facelessness, leaving nothing behind but a black, headless log bobbing up and down in the darkness. What she would not tell him was that there had been yet another face, the final one—that of Rabbi Joachim. And that it was still there, hovering in front of her, even with her eyes open.

  Junior had fallen asleep and was snoring softly. Sharon looked over at the radio clock on the night table and saw that it was past midnight. She would tell him tomorrow, too, that she’d been ashamed for having let him bring her here and letting him fuck her as if she were some alley cat in heat, that she resented him for luring her into it with the aphrodisiac of his pine-scented body.

  Tomorrow, in Wendy’s Volkswagen, she would tell him, finally, about her love for Rabbi Joachim, whom she could never leave—not for any man—and she would break it off with Junior Cantana once and for all.

  SIXTEEN

  THERE WAS A COMMOTION IN THE BASEMENT of Priceman’s Occult Books. It was only ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning, an otherwise slow day because of the cloudburst that had turned into a full-fledged rainstorm, when Seymour’s sallow-faced nephew, always on the alert, had thought to turn the “Open” sign around to read “Closed: Cerrado Until Noon.” Only a handful of customers browsed upstairs, two whose faces Priceman’s nephew didn’t recognize, and a lady au
ra reader in a blue Salvation Army-style suit wearing a neck brace, waving at him with her booklist from the other end of the store. If she were not such a good customer, he might have ignored her, for it was a true effort for Priceman’s nephew to smile—evenly half-heartedly, as he was now. Secretly, well, not so secretly (for every so often he was known to air his views aloud) he had no use for the “kooks” who were always hanging around, sniffing his benevolent (read: “sucker”) Uncle Seymour’s ankles like dogs around a fire hydrant. Take this one, for example, Priceman’s nephew muttered, as he flipped the blue-and-white sign on the door, hoping the aura reader with the punch-drunk boxer’s nose and gooey eyes would take the cue and leave. Given the fact that her unpaid credit was three stapled pages long, you’d have thought Seymour would have gotten rid of her long ago. Not a chance. Not only did Seymour let her pay off her bills on a nonexistent “layaway plan”—he didn’t even add a monthly finance charge. As if that weren’t enough, on her mammoth-sized mail orders, his sucker uncle omitted the cost of shipping and handling!

  “She’s a sick woman, an old maid with no one and nothing but aura reading to live for,” Seymour would say by way of justification for his largesse, hunching his rounded shoulders, licking the tape, and sealing and addressing the package himself. “She can’t even turn her neck to see who’s behind her. I just hope she doesn’t get mugged one of these days.”

  Not contented with her special privileges, the aura reader would corner the nephew and besiege him with stories of psychic experiences from her childhood in Lincoln, Massachusetts—during inventory, no less, when he was busiest. Brandishing a thick sheaf of booklists she’d clipped out of theosophical magazine indexes and pasted on long yellow sheets of legal paper, she would then turn the subject (insidiously, like all religious fanatics, he thought) to the Search for God Society or the Association for Edgar Cayce Research in the frail but persistent hope that he might join in. The nephew was single—a skinny, confirmed bachelor who shared his dingy Upper West Side hotel room with a cat, two withered palm plants, and a radio. He had no intention of marrying, had never dated when his parents were alive and saw no reason to start doing so after they died. It therefore never occurred to him that the aura reader’s probing into his religious life might be a lonely spinster’s way of asking him to dinner.