Karp, when he was enraptured. Nothing in the world he’d inhabited these sixteen years was as real as his extraterrestrial forays; everything else was phony: his neighborhood, phony; the houses with their plantation colonnades and lantern turrets, phony; his family was phony. Nothing could touch the places he’d ascended to for authenticity. While on the other hand, nothing on earth—he had to concede—was quite as real to him as Lou Ella Tuohy. But nobody could accompany him on his excursions, and if he had been able to take her with him, which was impossible, wouldn’t he be depriving the planet of a precious natural resource? It was a sentiment he could no more articulate than he could explain where it was he went.
What was abundantly clear, however, was that while she kept him tethered to the terrestrial (for he’d yet to make an ascent since he’d met her) you couldn’t really blame the girl. After all, she’d never inspired in him the kind of appetite that had consumed him in the days before the rabbi’s unfreezing. This was a good thing, for as the Shulchan Arukh stated unequivocally, he who gazes at even the small finger of a woman in order to enjoy its sight commits a sin. Not that Bernie set much store by such prohibitions, but if life happened to comply with them, then so much the better. Lou, of course, tended to mask her looks more than augment them, though her soft features were never totally obscured, and even without the subtler cosmetic embellishments of the popular girls, she was fetching. But preoccupied with loftier concerns, Bernie felt no carnal itch for her whatsoever, and since desire was not an issue between them, he had lately begun to relax in her company. But that was before this afternoon, when she’d gone and spoiled their friendly relations with her invasive request. And then, compounding the outrage, she made another, inviting him in her annoyingly off hand manner to come see her room.
IT WAS MUCH as she’d described it, if a little less otherworldly: the wilderness of dog-eared paperbacks—some draped in mildly gamy castoff garments—scattered about the floor, the Matisse dancers thumbtacked to the wall, the ancient marmalade cat with its molted tail resembling a fishbone, the peacock feathers in a Mason jar. To get there they had traversed the living room, its walls as flimsy as a Japanese teahouse, where her mother, a faded woman in Capri pants and hair curlers, sat on a ruptured sofa in front of the TV. She was dandling on her knee a sticky-faced infant with eyes as dull as Orphan Annie’s, watching a game show. Lou had introduced a fidgeting Bernie, whom her weary mother ignored, reminding her daughter that her shift at the Hub started in an hour. Lou said yassum, then hustled Bernie into her bedroom and locked the door behind them, inviting him to sit on her bed between the cat and a family of pretzellimbed sock monkeys. (He would have preferred to sit elsewhere, but there was no chair.) She put on a CD of a singer with a French accent, whose adenoidal trill sounded as if she were strapped to Julius Karp’s vibrating recliner. Bernie looked toward the locked door as the girl settled herself beside him, opening the clasp of a quilted diary filled with crabbed writing, from which she began hesitantly to read.
“He comes back to me from the outer reaches of the galaxy like Rimbawd the poet, who come home with one leg to his mama and baby sister telling stories about crossing deserts with a caravan of guns and slaves. I give him tea with opium and look after him like that other Lou, which is my namesake, who looked after Nitchie, Rilkie, and Frood.…”
Bernie was just beginning to realize that the person to whom she was ministering in her fantasy was him, when she abruptly left off reading to announce, “It’s all a crock, id’n it? Truth is, Bernie Karp, you don’t really know shit from Shinola.”
He had started to tremble, feeling never so out of place. What did she mean by making him the captive audience to her flaky journal? Did she think she was casting some kind of a spell? He was all for exploring the heights, was himself a veteran of celestial altitudes, but this girl contained unplumbed depths that frightened him. Also he noticed—all right, so he’d already noticed—that she was wearing a skirt today, a short, tiered