clear in his memoirs that he had little patience with the yokels who’d carted him about in a casket like a vampire for over a hundred years—since all they’d had to do was melt the ice (and maybe rattle a grager in his ear) to bring him out of his trance. Still, he allowed that his lengthy dormition had been a kind of blessing because he’d reawakened to the world with renewed fervor. In his second coming he felt he had a mandate not so much to lift up lost souls as to restore them to their rightful place on earth. Of course he offered the conventional transcendence to seekers, but only as a preliminary relief, after which they would be better equipped to take advantage of the material world. This was the point where the argument became a bit fuzzy for Lou, twirling a coil of viridian hair around a thrice-pierced ear. She was unsure how the rebbe’s ministry had swerved from the traditional theme of redemption through spiritual discipline to a passionate embrace of the free-market economy—never mind a strain of self-interest the girl had not encountered since she’d first read Ayn Rand. Nevertheless she was a pushover for a good hagiography, especially one written about himself by a living saint.
Which isn’t to suggest that Lou had any inclination to visit his House of Enlightenment. Having a boyfriend with his own saintly proclivities was handful enough for her, thank you very much. Moreover, she was greatly concerned about Bernie these days and felt in large part to blame for his current condition. True, she’d been frustrated at his inability to take her beyond herself, but having used what charms she had at her disposal to reel him back to earth, she now wondered if her efforts might have backfired. Lately he seemed to dwell in a kind of perpetual ekstasis-interruptus—a phrase of her own pleased coinage. Tiresomely he expressed his gratitude for what he regarded as her well-intentioned efforts at seduction, insisting that, had she not drawn him back, he might have crossed over for good. Such a woman was worth more than rubies, he assured her, prompting a dry response from Lou Ella to “that old saw.”
“I guess,” she chided him, not without malice, one evening beneath the Harahan Bridge as they sat watching a late-summer sunset, “I guess you got to be an inept before you can be an adept.” Then she was rendered speechless when Bernie suddenly thrust aside his grandfather’s journal and shouted, “Marry me!” The plea was accompanied by the ticktock of the wipers that he’d accidentally switched on in his attempt to fall to his knees on the floorboard. Wedged awkwardly between the dash and Sue Lily, whom Lou had been bouncing on her lap, he further promised that if she wasn’t ready he would remain in a state of self-imposed groundedness until she was.
Lou closed the jaw of the mouth-breathing baby sister, who seemed not to be growing any older, and returned her to the backseat. “And that’s what passes for being faithful in your pea-brain?” she replied, having finally found her tongue. “Ooie gevalt, I’m faithful by default,” she mocked him, never able to resist a dig at the subject of his chastity. But while she was realist enough to know that a wedding was not in the cards, she nevertheless allowed herself to picture it: the gaunt groom in a tophat like Mottl the Tailor from Fiddler on the Roof (she’d become well acquainted with the video store’s musical archive), the bride in what?—maybe Sally Bowles’s merry widow, fishnet stockings enmeshing the dolphin tattoo on her thigh. The two of them standing beneath an ocelot chupeh with their feet “a hand’s breadth above the earth.” Impatient with herself for succumbing to fantasy, she snarled, “Get up, dude,” and when he had she added almost tenderly, “Bernie Karp, you’re a visitor from outer space, and some day…” She failed to finish the thought.
While she liked to think of herself as a girl of broad experience, Lou sometimes felt that with this strange boy she was in over her head. “I s’pose you think your mad affection for me is flattering,” she said. “It makes me feel like some temptress and all, like I’m Sa-lou -mé.” Lingering accusatorily over the middle syllable.
“Doesn’t it?” Bernie asked artlessly.
She gazed at the mare’s nest of his hair, his increasingly cadaverous body, which he inhabited with ever more authority. “Well,… yeah,” admitted Lou, touching his