Was my face, too, a mirror for the rabbi? Did my face offer him an answering surface, as a mountain’s reflection in a lake answers the mountain? Did Pablo’s face answer Dito’s, and was that capacity to answer the source of their sexual attraction?

  Monica Prague had an answering face, I feared, and her answeringness “cockblocked” my preeminence in the rabbi’s heart. Because her face could answer his face with a more direct and electric immediacy, could she worm her way into the rabbi’s roots and infiltrate the veins of his decisiveness?

  The rabbi’s consciousness, hardly a loose and shipwrecked thing, was like an axe, an abruptness; and I could remember its foreshadowings in the corridors of my earliest life, when I longed for a schoolmate to cut me open with a decisive word or glance; such a glance would announce that this axe-person craved my body’s nearness as we waited in line at the smorgasbord for a second portion of a Jell-O casserole containing walnuts, cream cheese, and strawberries.

  That particular smorgasbord was where my parents (or their paid stand-ins) deposited me on Saturday mornings, right before lunch; I was given reading materials or educational playthings and told to spend a few hours at the smorgasbord, an all-you-can-eat affair, and someone would come pick me up at 3:00 p.m. to take me to the next deposit-site in my Saturday pilgrimage. When I told the rabbi this story of how I spent some Saturdays of my youth—for how long? two months? one summer? three years? how extended was my apprenticeship at the Jell-O casserole station?—the rabbi said that his Saturdays as a child were occupied in a more elevated and scholarly fashion. I knew he meant religious observances that were beyond my ken; the last thing the rabbi wanted, when we spent naked time together, was to rehearse the broad strokes or fine points of his sacred vocation. My presence in his life did not contaminate the sacredness. I added a different flavor, a mere window dressing, perhaps, an artificial and slapped-on set of materials that lightened the burden of his inner life. But was I the decor, or was I the concrete, the inbuilt essence of his constitution? And should I be imitating Monica Prague in her insinuation procedures, so I could learn how better to ensorcell the rabbi in my erotic web? I imagine that Monica Prague would tell me I was too dutiful in my attentions to the rabbi; I needed to deprive him of affection, and cease to make my face that answering surface he craved. Could I recede from him, though, without damaging my internal organs? Could I rip out from my body’s core the filaments of responsiveness that woke to service whenever I saw the rabbi’s face or heard his voice?

  93.

  The rabbi, my lover, lay on the ground in his backyard, in a fetal position, under the ornamental cherry tree, his favorite tree, whose rough, mossy bark excited his fingertips. I saw him lie there; I was standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window at the backyard, wondering when he would come inside and finish making dinner.

  Self-huddling, he hugged his thighs and calves tightly to his chest; his face leaned against the grass, and I think his eyes were closed. It was getting dark outside, and cold; he wasn’t adequately dressed for this particular display of melancholy hardiness.

  He lifted up his arms to grab hold of the tree, and gradually drew himself up to nearly a standing position. But every time he seemed ready to attain verticality, he fell back down again. Eventually, he managed to pull himself fully upright. Then he reached his hands above his head and seemed to be grasping for some interceding object to propel him into the air. No rope, pulley, lever, or pole descended from the sky to assist him in his apparent quest to elevate himself.

  As I watched him, I considered coming outside to offer assistance, but I didn’t understand the logic of his endeavor, so I was powerless to aid him. Was I behaving with my usual tropism toward cruelty? It occurred to me that he might be rehearsing his own suicide, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions and alarm him by bringing up that interpretation; Carla, his first wife, had killed herself, and sometimes the rabbi intimated that it was only a matter of time before he repeated her error.

  I went into the backyard and told the rabbi, while he tried to hoist himself up into the tree, “Negative events don’t always repeat themselves.”

  Still trying to climb up the tree, he said, “Nonsense, I’m the death expert, I’m the ethicist, I know how destinies unfold and how sanity can unravel, I know about despair and its traditional rituals, you never met Carla, you’re not an expert on wives or suicide or mental instability.”

  “I know a thing or two about mental instability.”

  He stopped trying to climb. “You’re not mentally unstable,” he said, curled up again in a fetal position on the grass. I remained standing, staring down at his subordinate posture. “You have a few bugaboos and superstitions,” he said, “but you’re an intact specimen. I wouldn’t be with you right now if you were mentally unstable.”

  “Do you avoid the mentally unstable?” I asked the rabbi. “As a spiritual healer, isn’t the population of the mentally unstable your stock-in-trade?

  “I’m worried about Dito,” the rabbi said, “not about you.”

  “But I’m worried about you,” I said, knowing it was a lie. I wasn’t worried about the rabbi. I desired and feared him but I wasn’t worried about him. Worry is a lesser emotion. It belongs to the realm of smorgasbords and Jell-O casseroles.

  Suddenly I recalled the restroom of the smorgasbord where my parents and their substitutes deposited me on Saturdays. I remember standing at a urinal, with no divider, next to a grown-up man, and shyly looking down to see his urine forcefully stream out of a cock that seemed then to me so large it might have qualified as a medical curiosity, the surrounding cloud of hair, like an octopus, embellishing the cock to such a many-tentacled extent that the exclamation articulated by the hairs seemed the melancholy, scandalously desirable echo of an atrocity.

  94.

  “Dito is undisciplined,” said the rabbi, my lover. “That’s his ailment.”

  As he “dissed” Dito, I looked at the rabbi’s thick, hairy wrists and felt suddenly that they were not wrists ever liable to be self-slashed; these were wrists of an unusual, bulwarked impenetrability. Ignorance or immaturity pocked me with holes, but the rabbi, as represented by his wrists, was impermeable and optimistic, despite his performance of despair, the evening before, beneath the ornamental cherry tree. The wristbones themselves, protruding from the place where wrist met palm, were UNESCO World Heritage Sites, in my besotted estimation. These bones were as thick as chicken drumsticks or the round end of a conductor’s baton.

  The rabbi said, “Dito needs a job, or he needs to go to college. Dito is no scholar, but he could benefit by following a strict course of study.”

  “Dito,” I told the rabbi, “is a latent aristocrat who will never take to any organized pattern of labor or learning. His finest talent is his ability to dither.”

  “Dito may be a ditherer,” the rabbi said, “but in the name of my brother, to honor his memory, I need to act as a disciplinarian, and to rein in the swelling of Dito’s lethargy.”

  “I’d noticed Dito’s stupor,” I admitted.

  The rabbi said, “Monica Prague is the person best suited to correct the stupor, to spank it, as it were, to polish the stupor until it acquires the glow of the highest industriousness.”

  “Is stupor reversible?” I asked the rabbi.

  “Stupor, like most human emotions, is malleable. With Monica Prague’s assistance, we could convert Dito’s stupor into a currency of effort, sweat, and application.”

  I wondered to myself, but didn’t tell the rabbi, whether I, too, was conspicuously a possessor of stupor, an exemplar of a detestable lethargy.

  The rabbi often pulled up the waistband of his own pants, as if nervous that they’d fallen down. Each time he anxiously pulled up his pants, I felt as if he were calling out to me with a secret signal. He was announcing to me that he was stricken with fear that he had only an unstable hold on decency. And he was anointing me as the person best qualified to coat him with a protective mantle of moral uprightness. The rabbi didn’t want me to assure him that, no, in fact, his pants were not on the verge of slipping down. He wanted to perform, again and again, this comedic semaphore of the helpless downward drift of trousers, to reiterate his nearness to indecency; and I knew that the thickness of his wrists, a thickness that threatened to destroy me, so hollowed out with desire (or envy?) did I instantly become when I beheld that thickness, was intimately linked to the shameful downward almost-plunge of the pants, again and again the rabbi hoisting up his pants, as if responding to gravity’s persistently resurrected wish to single out his trousers and pull them down, down, down. Gravity knew me, in this uncanny sense, to be its collaborator. I wanted the rabbi’s pants to fall down; I wanted to see him undone by their descent.

  95.

  The rabbi shaved his beard closely, with a high-powered electric trimmer; the sound the trimmer made became a national anthem of our relationship, rousing me to new heights of patriotism. With his tight beard, no scraggly hairs permitted—the beard a natural skullcap, affixed not to his pate but to his jaw—the rabbi made more frequent appearances in my daily life, because he was doing a temporary stint as sacred advisor to a major art museum in the Hoboken area, a museum with ample resources but without the international attention it deserved. The rabbi spent several afternoons a week, during his stint as visiting consultant, advising the museum’s curators about how to emphasize the spiritual implications of their permanent collection, particularly the Pre-Raphaelite prints, whose scenes of spiritual suffering affected the rabbi strongly, with the power of a suddenly acquired affliction, a virus whose lethal effects he could feel in every organ. I shared the rabbi’s visceral sense of how his new position changed his physiology; I, too, felt lightheaded, my chest and my legs cramped and constricted, my stomach roiling with a seasick uncertainty of orientation and plumb line, my temples pierced by knives. I wanted our malady to be relieved, but I also wanted it to intensify. I wanted our consciousness to be dominated by uncannily shared sensations of unrest and disease. Dr. Regis, who remained in control of the rabbi’s anal ailment, said that this new battery of symptoms didn’t affect the course of treatment; the anal ailment had, in the doctor’s words, “a mind of its own,” and kept to its own quarters, unconcerned with the tribulations besieging the rest of the rabbi’s body, all in presumed if illogical response to his work on the spiritual dimensions of the museum’s Pre-Raphaelite depictions of exaltation, suffering, and penury.

  96.

  Monica Prague brought Dito to the one public event associated with the rabbi’s residency at the museum—a discussion, with a local chaplain, about the connection of Pre-Raphaelite images of suffering to contemporary politics and psychology. The discussion addressed practical considerations of interest to the general public, such as how to alleviate addiction, how to prevent harassment in the workplace, and how to teach children about reproduction and venereal disease.

  Dito looked dazed and uncomfortable during most of the discussion; I sat next to him in the auditorium and could hear him grinding his teeth and rocking back and forth in his chair, which squeaked every time his body oscillated. Monica Prague, seated on the other side of Dito, looked over at me from time to time with an approving expression, as if I’d been the organizer of the event and she’d wanted to assure me that I’d done my duty and that the discussion was a success.

  Onstage, the rabbi periodically took off his glasses and put them on again, a nervous, repeated gesture, which reminded me of the way he insistently pulled up his pants to prevent their imagined descent. I worried that actually the rabbi’s performance at this event was a failure, and I suddenly felt empathy for generous Atlas, with his mop of ginger hair and his toothy smile, a man more attractive than the rabbi but somehow more pitiable. I felt sorrow for Atlas, who was saddled with a husband or “charge” whose nervous habit of constantly reassessing the position of his pants and his spectacles confirmed the shakiness of his hold on sanity.

  After the discussion, the rabbi, Monica Prague, Dito, and I went to a nearby pancake house, and Dito demonstrated his recovery from psychological disintegration by eating a whole stack of flapjacks and a side order of breakfast sausage, which he refused to share with Monica Prague when she asked for a taste. I knew she didn’t really want a bite of sausage; she was just testing Dito, seeing if his “boundaries” had been repaired, and if he could find a balance between generosity and miserliness.

  Fully miserly was Dito, but that, too, was within Monica Prague’s schedule and forecast, the rabbi later told me.

  “Monica wants Dito to become a more ornery and truculent person,” the rabbi said, “and so do I. We aim for Dito to become tyrannical. Only that ascension to an autocratic personal manner would signify full recovery.”

  97.

  The rabbi, my lover, called and said he wanted to come over at six o’clock to blow me.

  I said, “I might be busy at six. Depends on how my schedule shapes up.”

  “I’m not anywhere near Hoboken, I’d need to go out of my way and drive to see you, a trip I’m willing to make if you can carve out a half hour of privacy for me, I don’t need more than a half hour, I know you come quickly these days, you’re at a peak of horniness and virility, and I want to capitalize on your vitality, I want to squeeze your manhood dry before it disappears.”

  “My manhood,” I told the rabbi, “is in no danger of disappearing. My manhood,” I said, with unjustified pride and arrogance, “is like Mount Rushmore or Niagara Falls.”

  The rabbi said, “Atlas is in Charlottesville, I’m here alone at the friendship center, I could drop groceries off for Monica and Dito at the Imperial Plaza Apartments and then head north to you, if you’ll permit me,” he said, with a newly subordinate meekness and an elaborateness of explanation that made me wonder whether Dito’s mental instability was contagious and whether the rabbi had received a strong dose of infectious lunacy at the pancake house after the Pre-Raphaelite discussion.

  I said, “I don’t know whether I’ll be still be horny at six o’clock.” In truth, I knew I’d be horny, I’m always stimulated, whenever I think of the rabbi my heart beats fast and I sigh and I can feel a rising in my southward region, an uncomfortable rising, for the oncoming erection signals my victimhood, my subordination to the rabbi as image and as actuality. As image, I could tolerate him, but not his actuality, the feeling of his closely trimmed beard against my stomach and abdomen and downward as his face sought my pole of curiosity, the rod of impersonal, veined tenderness, a phallus that was skin and blood and much else but that had no inner life, no memory, just a sick surfeit of curiosity, like a mole or weevil or raccoon, digging in the earth with a loud, persistent, rumbling investigativeness that rose to meet the rabbi’s mouth and assault it with a barrage of curiosity, a meddlesomeness and busybodyishness that the rabbi mostly was appalled by, except on those occasions when he was using my cock (call it the rod of busybodyishness and meddlesomeness) as a placeholder for all the earlier cocks he might have desired but could never lay claim to because he hadn’t yet figured out how to balance his sacred profession with his carnal appetites.

  I told the rabbi I’d call him by 5:00 if I was free to see him at 6:00, but at the moment I was suffering (I didn’t say this to him aloud) from an uncharacteristic bout of indifference to his body; I disapproved of his rigid adherence to sequentiality, his belief in a grand, inexorable trajectory of historical progress, binding together all generations, while I, in contrast, believed that history was moving backward, and that each generation had the obligation to devour its predecessors.

  98.

  My primary concern at the moment was Dito, what Dito was eating, what he was feeling, what Monica Prague was saying to him, whether she planned to steal Dito permanently away from the rabbi, whether Dito was lifting weights at the fitness center of the Imperial Plaza Apartments while staying with Monica, whether he was sleeping on a fold-out cot in the living room or den or whether Monica had an extra bedroom of which I wasn’t aware, and whether that extra bedroom (if it existed) had an en suite bathroom for when Dito wanted to urinate or defecate or shower or brush his teeth or wash his hands or put on his anti-acne cream or insert his suppositories if he was suffering from hemorrhoids, but how could I find out whether Dito was suffering from hemorrhoids without asking the rabbi, who in turn would need to ask Monica Prague? I had no direct pipeline to Dito; currently, I was forbidden from telephoning, texting, or emailing him. Was Dito too lunatic at the moment to respond to messages or was he sufficiently recuperated (revived by Monica Prague’s steak dinners) to be a more dutiful and speedy correspondent than ever before in his sane phases, when the rabbi often complained to me about Dito’s chronic irresponsibility (“a failure to thrive,” said the rabbi, “like what Carla went through in the months leading up to her suicide, an unhealthy preoccupation with her body”)? I could ask the rabbi whether Dito had hemorrhoids, and if he did, then I could surmise that Carla, too, had hemorrhoids in the months leading up to her self-slaughtering episode, the final event in her calamitous life as the woman the rabbi should never have married, nor should she have chosen the rabbi, who curtailed any chance she had for maintaining compos mentis.

  First I’d need to ask the rabbi if Carla had suffered from hemorrhoids before her death, and if she had, I could hypothesize that, though there was no genetic relation between Carla and Dito, who was the son of the rabbi’s late brother, there was nonetheless an uncanny affinity, a tie worth investigating with fact-based tools and not the unruly imagination. I could then tell the rabbi that we could unlock Dito’s latent sanity by retrospectively decoding Carla’s depressive mania, her reliance on astrological charts, obituaries, and out-of-date maps; without consulting one of these dubious sources, she couldn’t even put on a pair of Supp-hose or pour herself a ginger ale.