Masturbating rabbis
I had just come back from Skinny’s when the doorbell rang. The video screen showed a person in a breather and an orange suit standing outside. I hesitated, wondering who it was. Then they lifted their mask and waved at the camera — it was Audrey. She was early. I buzzed her in.
“Sorry, I hope it’s okay if I came early,” she said after going through the decon tube and dumping her suit and boots in the designated spot. “It was a slow day. Only two guests were scheduled for the next week, so the boss let me get off early. Figured I’d surprise you!” She paused and smiled. “Surprised?”
“No, yeah, surprised. And glad you’re early,” I said. We hugged, and she gave me a peck on the cheek.
“Hold on. I have something for you,” she said and then bent down, rummaged through her oversized bag, and came up with a bottle of wine and a paper bag. “Careful,” she said, handing it to me. “The bag’s fragile.” I peeked inside. It was a bunch of eggs. “They were hatched this morning. I picked them myself.”
“Is this wine? Real wine?” I asked.
She smiled. “Yeah, I snuck one out. It’s a Pinot Noir, I think. Hard to tell because the label rotted off,” she said.
“Are you hungry?” I said. “I got some fresh tomatoes from my neighbor’s greenhouse and a bit of milk from the goat he keeps. I can work up an omelette fast.”
“No, thank you,” she replied. “I had lunch at the resort before I came.”
We walked to the kitchen and I carefully stored the eggs in the fridge. She had sat down at a table in the corner and was now rummaging in her bag again.
“Should I open it now,” I asked. “Or we can save it for later…I have this cider the neighbor makes from our food scraps. It’s not bad. Quite well balanced, actually.”
“Let’s do the wine. Actually…do you mind if I smoke inside?” She hold up her little weed pouch, which she had been trying to find in her bag all along. “They don’t let you smoke in the company shuttle.”
RADIANCE, my serialized novel, continues.
“Sure, go ahead.” I found two wine glasses on the top shelf of my cabinet and, as I uncorked the bottle and poured, Audrey rolled her joint expertly — first crumbling the buds in her hand and then encasing them in paper with one quick roll with her two thumbs and a quick sideways lick. She lit up — quickly, almost nervously — and then blew out a thick cloud of smoke in relief. “Actually, let’s go into the living room,” I said, handing her a glass. “There’s more light and an ashtray, too.”
I had bought this apartment with the money my parents had left me and, before the divorce and the war, had rented it out for income. It’s one of four units in a corner Victorian, and it’s got this awkward old-timey layout that gives it a certain charm. From the stoop, the front door opens up into a narrow windowless corridor that runs the length of the flat — with doors to the bedrooms and bathroom and kitchen and closets jutting out from a central walkaway. Spending months and weeks under lockdown with windows covered and the air filtration unit blasting, I began to imagine the hallway as a central tube of a one-man space station, connecting all the different sections: life support, control room, food intake, waste disposal…
Audrey walked out into the hallway and instead of turning into the living room, the first door immediately to the left, she kept going. “Do you mind if I take a tour?” she asked without really asking.
“Of course,” I said, following behind her. She was wearing a tight-fitting black sweatshirt and matching sweatpants — standard under rad suit wear. The pants sat low, accentuating her wide hips and extremely thin body. I could see the spines of her tailbone protruding just below her waistline, moving left and right as her hips swayed. Looking at her hips, I remembered a flash from a dream I had the night before — Audrey was naked on the bed with me…legs spread open…wearing her full head breather. She glanced into the bedroom and briefly paused in front of a portrait of my daughter that my ex-wife had painted. Then she glanced into the bathroom and then moved on to the last door at the end of the corridor. This was the second bedroom, which was my office. She stood in the doorway, surveying the worn leather love seat and armchair and the big glass desk. Shelves with books covered every wall and there were books on the floor in piles, many of them collected during my medicine cabinet raids in those first few months after the war. Walls
“It’s so cozy in here,” she said, coming up to inspect some of the sketches I had pinned to the wall above the desk — a two headed coyote, a pigeon with three legs, a multicolored Moses with a fucked up skin…“I expected…I dunno…well you know how single men live sometimes,” she said.
“I guess.”
She picked up a big brown book lying open face down on my table…a big thick tome with a hard brown binding. On the cover, the word “BERAKHOT” was stenciled in gold. She transferred the joint to her mouth, holding it between her lips, and turned the book over with both hands. “Interesting,” she said, and then started reading: “There was a particular bathroom in the city of Tiberias, where, when two would enter it, even during the day, they would be harmed by demons,” she read aloud from open pages. “When Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Asi would each enter alone, they were not harmed. The Sages said to them: Aren’t you afraid? Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Asi said to them: We have learned through tradition: The tradition to avoid danger in the bathroom is to conduct oneself with modesty and silence.”
