Free The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin Page B

one of my wife’s elaborate downcast-eyes gestures could do to this little man of God.
    Or I, apparently, in my rabbi mode, to her.
    “Go, doll,” I told my daughter, “go play.”
    “No,” Shelley said in what I can’t help but think of as her piggy Jew Latin, “go on with the lessons-e-le. Don’t mind-a-le me.”
    “It’s all right, Shelley. We were through anyway.”
    “Oy, I’m interrupting,” Shelley said, pouting obeisance.
    “Really,” I said, “we’re finished. Aren’t we, Connie?”
    “I guess.”
    “Sure,” I said. “Go on, sweetheart. Go and play.”
    “Who with?”
    “What about Robert? Go find Robert and keep him company.”
    “That’s so grisly. Daddy. Robert’s crazy.”
    “Robert is not crazy. Don’t say Robert is crazy. Robert has a touch of Alzheimer’s.”
    I don’t know what it is Shelley does to me. Or vice versa either. Some mutual sucker punch to the wayward randoms of our drifting sexuals, I guess. A shove in the frictions, the rubbed chilblains of our underground plates and riled, misunderstood tectonics of all low nature’s abrasive underbite, I suppose. The attractions and curious customaries—tits, testicles, elbows and armdown, great gams, fleshy cocks, muscles and eyebrows, kneecaps, jawlines and hairlines, the heft of an ass or tone of a tooth—in us converted to stuff lifted above conventional flesh and blood and bone, lifted beyond fact or even ordinary aberrant deviation, the quotidian fabrics and metals, I mean—your leathers, your irons, I do declare! In us converted to stuff beyond parsing, mysteries, enchantments, beyond, in fact, my rabbi’s mode to understand, all my offshore learning notwithstanding, all that talmudic quease and quibble I was telling our Connie about. Our aphrodisiacs, our spice and pick-me-ups, sorcerous endearings, something amiss in the character perhaps. In Shelley a thing—though I wear none—for beards. (Didn’t I say lifted above the conventional flesh and blood and bone?) The gray and unkempt beard she cartoons in on me in her imagination to her only some necessary high sign of spirit. God the turn-on and the rabbi, in her mind, merely the conductor or maybe the buffer or just the good grounding that will keep her from harm. Or in love, could be, with the dark Jew gabardines of the head and heart. And in me—the attraction—to quirkiness itself, Shell’s forlorn, fussy, pseudo-baleboste ways. I don’t know what it is Shelley does to me. Well, of course I know what. It’s how that sends me to the encyclopedias.
    Meanwhile I’m growing a hard-on as big as the Ritz and Shelley is filling up with wet like you could let in a tub from her. She’s probably raining on herself. I know this. I can tell. It’s urgent. We’ve got to dispose of Connie. And it’s Shelley who’s going to handle it.
    “Sha,” she says. “Let-e-le me. I’ll talk-e-le to her.”
    “I under stand Yiddish, Ma!” Connie, exasperated, said.
    “I know that, darling. We’re just so proud of you. But you know,” she said, “Daddy’s right. Robert’s always been so fond of you. It cheers him up just to look at you. I know it does. And I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve been meaning to send over some of that bread of mine he loves so much. You could do Mommy a favor and take it over for her.”
    Connie rolled her eyes, but Shelley had already turned her back and was headed into the kitchen. When she returned she was holding a loaf of Wonder Bread. She held it out to our daughter. “Tell Robert he’s always in our thoughts and that I’m going to get over myself just as soon as I can make time-e-le.”
    “Sure,” Connie said, and left.
    “Oh, oh!” Shelley exclaimed as I danced around her and shook my head and snapped my fingers like a naked Tevya. “Oh! Oh!”
    “In Yiddish,” I groaned, coming.
    “Oy!” she said. “Oy!”
    We lay back, breathless, spent.
    “Maybe,” Shelley said after a while, “I should have sent over some of