Lemuel stops by the E-Z Mart on his way to the Institute, takes a quick turn around the aisles with Dwayne trailing after him, a stub of a pencil poised over his pad. He has discovered in Lemuel a natural talent for supermarket management. The visiting professor has figured out that a supermarket has a lot in common with a ship: both are perfect metaphors for the science of chaos in the sense that order is thought to be lurking behind the appearance of disorder. On more than one occasion, searching for traces of order amid the chaos of the shelves, Lemuel has alerted Dwayne to flaws in the Mart’s computer program, which tailors the inventory to meet the projected needs of the community.
“I have a sinking feeling you are low on iceberged lettuce,” Lemuel observes as they pass the vegetable counter. “Ditto for Dijon mustard, Mrs. Hammersmith’s low-calorie doughnuts, the imported French dressing, economy size Stay Free.” Lemuel stops in front of an item he has not noticed before. “Yo! Like what is a Roach Motel, Dwayne? If someone checks in what would prevent him from checking out?”
Making his way past the checkout counters, Lemuel is saluted by Shirley. She runs her fingers through her naturally wavy hair. “Z’up?” she asks.
“Nuch,” Lemuel tells her.
Shirley arches her body, pushing tiny pointed breasts into her white smock. “So I still got this soft spot for gate crashers.”
“Don’t have a cow,” Lemuel laughs.
A scrawny cashier, ringing up the purchases of a squat Oriental man at the next counter, interrupts her work to shyly ask Lemuel for an autograph.
The Oriental man, dressed in a pin-striped suit and speaking with a clipped British accent, asks the cashier, “I say, is he a celebrity?”
Shirley giggles happily. “Is he a celebrity or is he a celebrity?”
The scrawny cashier bats enormous false eyelashes. “I seen you on the tube,” she tells Lemuel with great solemnity. “I think you was fly.”
The Oriental man grimaces. “Fly?”
Lemuel snickers, “Like your customer needs a clue or two, right?” He turns to the Oriental man. “I can say you ‘fly’ is the same thing as ‘beautimous,’ which is a kissing cousin to ‘volumptuous.’ The King’s English,” he adds with a wink. “Go figure.”
Lemuel’s girl Friday flags him down as he is entering his office. ‘J. Alfred wants a word with you,” Mrs. Shipp confides.
“I am delighted to see you,” the Director tells Lemuel, drawing him into his corner office a few minutes later. He steers his visitor to a leather couch, hovers over him wringing his hands. “Coffee, tea, slivovitz with or without mineral water?”
Goodacre nods in eager agreement when Lemuel suggests that it is too late in the morning for coffee, too early in the day for alcohol. The director settles onto an Eames chair, swivels 360 degrees as if he is winding himself up, gnaws thoughtfully on his lower lip, clears a throat that doesn’t need clearing.
“Is your work going well?” he inquires solicitously. “Have you been made to feel at home in the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies?”
Lemuel blinks slowly. “Like being here is opening my eyes to a lot of things.”
“I’m relieved to hear it,” says Goodacre. “You convey the impression of someone who knows which side his bread is buttered on, who is not offended by a discreet word to the wise. The day you arrived I remember dropping a hint about grooming. No sooner said than done.” He fires off a jovial burst of conspiratorial laughter in Lemuel’s direction. “I can tell you the Institute is not insensitive to the distinction of having someone of your caliber on the faculty. We like to think we are giving the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton a run for its money. Having the likes of you around certainly helps make us competitive. Which brings me to the kernel of the corn, the eye of the storm. Even though we are located in an out-of-the-way valley in an out-of-the-way corner of Puritan America, we like to think of ourselves as a citadel of liberalism, a tolerant community composed of consenting intellectuals. What you do, whom you do it with, is your affair.”
Lemuel grunts.
“Still,” Goodacre goes on, his voice barely distinguishable from the sound emitted by a rusty hinge, “there is a threshold to pain. … There are limits to liberalism. …”
Lemuel reads between the lines. “You are talking about Rain.”
“You moved out of the apartment over the Rebbe. You moved in with her.”
“The goddamn phone was all the time ringing off the hook, right? The nights were artificially white—there were klieg lights on the street. I could no longer use the night to—”
“I was confident I would be able to get through to you—”
“Rain offered to teach me American English—”
“There is a chair opening up … a resident scholar’s contract …”
“I can say you our relationship, Rain and me, is purely oral—”
“The Rebbe has made it known he wants to return to Eastern Parkway and set up a yeshiva that teaches chaos in the O.T. …”
Both men take deep breaths.
“To dot the i’s and cross the t’s,” Goodacre begins again, “a high-profile liaison between one of the Institute’s visiting professors and an undergraduate barber half his age strains our liberal tradition. You are here, Lemuel—you don’t mind if I call you Lemuel?—on a one-semester contract. It was our hope, and, given what is happening in the former Soviet Union, I suspect yours, too, that this would lead to an offer of a permanent chair.”
Lemuel stirs uneasily on the couch. His heart tells him the Russians who fought Napoleon were wrong to give ground, Rain’s dad was right: Territory has got to be defended at the goddamn frontier. I am going to make a big deal out of a big deal, he thinks, I am going to say something for the first time in my life without a subtext. Can I reasonably expect to survive the experience? Do I really want to survive the experience? He closes his eyes, kneads a lurking migraine with his thumb and third finger, sees himself, in an aching fiction, stride up to the officer in charge, identify himself as the youngest candidate member in history of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and begin to protest against police brutality.
“I am probably missing something, J. Alfred,” he hears himself mutter in a voice he can not quite place; like the second of his two signatures it is certainly not his. “You do not mind if I call you J. Alfred? Is who I fuck chaos-related?”
Goodacre’s mouth falls open. For a moment Lemuel has the impression that the director is suffering from cardiac arrest. He wonders if you can be convicted for manslaughter in America the Beautiful for saying something without a subtext.
Eventually Goodacre’s jaw snaps shut. He pushes himself to his feet. “Thank you for stopping by,” he tells his visitor. He does not offer to shake hands.
Lemuel hikes a shoulder. “Nuch,” he mumbles. “Fly.”
“You said what?” Rain explodes when Lemuel phones up Tender To to tell her about his conversation with J. Alfred Goodacre. “You think there was no subtext, right? but there was.”
Lemuel hears heartache where he expected happiness. “So what was the subtext?”
“Like you don’t want to stay on in Backwater, that’s the subtext. Like you don’t want to live with an undergraduate barber half your age.” Lemuel starts to protest, but she cuts him off. “You relate to my butterfly tattoo, but you don’t much like the female Homo sapien that goes with it.”
“You are reading this wrong,” Lemuel protests. “He wanted me to stop the bus and get off our relationship. I said him not. I said him to fuck off.”
“Hey, terrific. What are you going to do when the visiting professorship expires? Who else in America is going to employ a Homo chaoticus who’s passionate about something that doesn’t exist? Boy, are you out to lunch!”
“Give her time, she’ll maybe calm down,” the Rebbe tells a depressed Lemuel when he turns up in Nachman’s office for tea and sympathy.
“Is it true what Goodacre said about you going ba
ck to Eastern Parkway when the school year is up?”
“It happened very suddenly. I sold IBM, I sold General Dynamics, I raised some seed money from a third party for whom I occasionally do free-lance work, I used the money to buy into a cooperative yeshiva opening on the corner of Kingston Avenue and Eastern Parkway in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn. The object is to create a parochial school that is not parochial. There are two other Rebbes besides me, one will teach anti-anti-Semitism, a positive approach to the New Testament that will stress the Jewishness of Jesus and the Apostles. The other Rebbe will teach a survey course on martyrology from the serpent in Eden, condemned to crawl on the surface of the earth for the capital crime of recommending fruit, to Jesus of Nazareth, condemned to crucifixion for the capital crime of claiming to be King of the Jews. Me, I will offer a course called “Chaos and Yahweh: Two Sides of the Same Coin.” I came across a delectable quote for the course description in the yeshiva’s three-color catalogue, maybe you know it, maybe you don’t, it’s George Russell warning the young James Joyce, ‘You have not enough chaos in you to make a world.’ What do you think?”
Before Lemuel can respond, the Rebbe has hurtled off on another tack. “My predicament, I was agonizing over it last night, I am agonizing over it this morning, is that I love Yahweh, how could it be otherwise? but I don’t really like Him, blessed be His name. There are days when I am sick to my gut. Why, I ask myself, is the Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh, who lusts among other things after order, sucking up to a God whose middle name is Randomness? There are days, I will admit it to you, when I am tempted to follow the advice of Job’s wife—I’m talking Job 2:9. When she finds her poor bastard of a husband scraping away at his boils, she tells him, ‘Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.’ “
“Hey, what stops you?”
The Rebbe flings his arms into the air in a gesture of resignation. “I love life,” he admits, “especially when you consider the alternative. Also, there’s an old Jewish proverb which I am about to invent. It holds you should live as long as possible so that you’ll be dead as short a time as possible.”
One of the two phones on the Rebbe’s desk purrs. He snatches it off the hook, mumbles “Hekinah degul,” listens, raises an eyebrow, passes the phone to Lemuel. “It’s your amanuensis,” he says. “That’s Lilliputian for girl Friday.”
Over the phone, Mrs. Shipp sounds as if she is broadcasting from an airport control tower. “Another one of those journalist creatures has requested permission to land on your runway,” she informs Lemuel. ‘This one is a she who speaks with an accent which reminds me of yours, only thicker. When I asked her where she hailed from, she said something about other people’s chaos being greener. Is that a country? I put her into a holding pattern in the conference room at the end of the hall.”
“I do not trust journalists,” Lemuel tells the Rebbe. “Marx, Lenin, Trotsky were all, at one time, journalists, and look what they did to Mother Russia.”
Lemuel barrels through the door into the conference room, prepared to send the journalist packing, he only gives interviews by appointment, he never gives apppointments, but comes to a skidding stop when he spots the lady journalist in question.
“Zdrastvui, Lemuel Melorovich.”
“Yo! Axinya! Shto ti delaesh v’Amerike?–
“Horoshi vopros,” she says excitedly.
Chapter Two
If you cannot believe your own eyes, whose eyes can you believe? Yet there she was, large as life, larger even, flashing an uptight smile that had no relation to humor, her tits sagging into a brassiere that had been washed so often it looked like a dust rag, the dust rag of a brassiere clearly visible through a rayon shirt that had turned yellow with age, her eyebrows plucked to the bone and arched in anxiety. My mistress from St. Petersburg, Axinya Petrovna Volkova, come to coax God knows what from my reluctant flesh.
“Zdrastvui, Lemuel Melorovich.”
“Yo! Axinya! Shto ti delaesh v’Amerike?”
“Horoshi vopros, “she said excitedly. “Where can we talk?”
Speaking Russian felt awkward. I racked my brain in vain for the equivalent of “Z’up?” or “Don’t have a cow.” “It depends on what you have to say,” I finally told her.
“Your Russian has grown rusty,” she remarked. “You speak with an accent.”
I could see she was tense. She kept glancing at Mrs. Shipp through the open door, she kept ironing nonexistent wrinkles out of her skirt with the palm of her hand, a gesture which brought back to me an image of Axinya in Petersburg—after making love, she would spread a towel on my desk and meticulously iron each of her garments before putting it on. Once I accused her of trying to erase the traces of passion, but she vehemently denied it. “Wrinkles, even in clothing, make you look older than you are,” is what she answered.
“My editors at Petersburg Pravda,” she was saying now, “subscribe to the Associated Press. They saw the story about the crazy Russian lying down on the ramp to stop the bulldozers from breaking ground for a nuclear-garbage dump. They sent me to interview you.”
“That happened more than three weeks ago. You took your sweet time getting here.”
“I came by train and cargo boat and bus,” she said. “Plane fares are too expensive for Petersburg Pravda.”
Something told me I should have been out of there like Vladimir. “You did not come all this way to ask me my opinion about abortion or the ozone layer,” I guessed.
She leaned closer. Her breasts fell into their washed-out safety net. “Has someone else’s chaos turned out to be greener? Come home to the chaos you know, Lemuel Melorovich. I made discreet inquiries; your tenure at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics has not been revoked.” She let her fingertips drift onto my thigh. I noticed that her nails were bitten to the quick. ‘Things have changed in Russia,” she went on. “The Americans have established a fund to keep Russian scientists from going to work for Libya or Iraq; now they pay everyone except the cleaning women at Steklov in United States of America dollars. I have been told that someone with your seniority would get sixteen dollars a week. That comes to almost sixteen thousand rubles a week, sixty-four thousand rubles a month.”
“There is no such thing as a ruble anymore,” I started to say, but Axinya forged ahead with her pitch.
“That’s not counting a year-end bonus of fifty dollars, that’s not counting what you can pilfer from faculty luncheons—”
“I am toast,” I told her in English.
“What language is ‘I am toast’?” Axinya asked in Russian.
“It is Lilliputian,” I informed her. “It means I am tired,” I added tiredly.
Axinya got up and shut the door and came back and pulled her chair around so that we were sitting side by side. She leaned to her right, she talked to me out of the side of her mouth, her eyes fixed straight ahead, I leaned to my left, I listened to her with my eyes closed.
“The truth is they sent me because they thought the message would be more congenial if you had screwed the messenger.”
“Who sent you?”
Her lips barely moved. “They. Them. The people you did the cipher work for. They also subscribe to the Associated Press.”
I was alarmed to hear her refer to my work in ciphers, I myself had never breathed a word of it to anyone back in Petersburg. In situations like this I almost always clear my throat, so I suppose that is what I must have done.
“They are not angry at you, Lemuel Melorovich,” she rushed on. “They will not hold your leaving against you as long as there is a coming back to balance the scales. The way they see it, you panicked when your request for a visa was not turned down.”
It occurred to me that her little speech had the wooden ring words acquire when they have been rehearsed. In front of a mirror? In front of the they who would not hold my leaving against me as long as there was a coming back?
“You decided chaos had infected the rotting core of the bureaucracy,” Axiny
a was saying. “Those were your words. You decided the situation was worse than you had imagined. They want you back, Lemuel Melorovich, which means the situation is better than you imagined. Which also means things are not as chaotic as they appear to be. You decided the time had come to go because they gave you permission to leave. Now the time has come to return because they want you back.”
I raised a finger, a student requesting permission to get a word in edgewise. “I would like to ask you a delicate question.”
Out of the corner of an eye I saw her hesitate.
“Do you have something called a G-spot?”
She turned to stare at me. “A what spot?”
I admitted her that I was enormously relieved to hear it, and every syllable of every word came from the heart. Please understand, after a certain amount of instruction from Rain I more or less knew where the G-spot was, but I was still not absolutely sure what it was. There are only so many questions you can ask without looking like the idiot you are.
I decided to change the subject. “Where are you staying?”
“In the motel at the edge of town,” Axinya replied. “It costs forty thousand rubles a day. Thank God it’s not me who’s paying. I only earn four thousand, eight hundred rubles a month.” She burst into tears. “For the love of God,” she blurted out, her breasts heaving in time to her sobs, “come home.”
I opened the door and called down the hall for Mrs. Shipp to get Rain on the phone for me.
A moment later the telephone in the conference room buzzed. I snatched up the receiver and heard Rain’s voice in my ear.
“Z’up?” she said.
“Hey, you are not still pissed?”
“Not,” she replied in a tone that made it clear she was.
I turned my back on Axinya and cupped my hand around the phone. “I relate to your body,” I said quickly. “I think it is fly. I relate to your Siberian night moth—”
“Like I don’t need this “
“You take getting used to,” I insisted with some urgency.
The Visiting Professor Page 14