denim mini, and her spindly, criss-crossed legs were encased in striped woolen warmers pulled above the knee. Bernie had never been so conscious of her legs, and when she caught his eye, he became aware that she was aware.
In the face of what he took as her flung gauntlet, he understood it was now his turn to make some reciprocal disclosure. “It all started,” he began, working hard to overcome his diffidence, “when I found an old rabbi under the frozen foods in my parents’ deep freeze—” But no sooner had he embarked on the tale than she interrupted him.
“It’s okay, Bernie, you don’t have to make up stories on my account. This ain’t a competition.” Having said which, she tucked her knees under her chin, allowing the skirt to fall back, revealing the blue-veined underside of her thighs above the stockings and the scallop-shell gusset of her ribbed underpants. Bernie grew dizzy, and as Lou watched the blood depart his head for nether regions, she grinned. It was the first time she had smiled in his presence.
“So,” she said speculatively, “if you can’t carry me to heaven one way, maybe you can take me another?” Then she pulled up her sweater to expose her small breasts with their nipples the size of pink catkins. Her rib-cage framed the hollow of her belly like a pair of wings in whose shadow the tattoo of a tiny scarab crawled from her navel.
Bernie straightaway lost his head. Before his brain could intercede to insist that he had no interest in the girl’s bare anatomy, he lurched forward to embrace her, his nose and lips nuzzling her breasts. Her rapid breathing fueled his own, which chuffed like a locomotive as he felt her hands caressing his spine; then she was yanking at the waist of his jeans, overlarge since he’d lost so much weight, pulling them down along with his shorts over his bony hips without bothering to unzip them. Now they were tussling, embroiled in a heedless roughhouse while trying to stifle each other’s nascent hilarity, rolling about as if caught in a wildfire that tickled rather than burned. More clothes were shucked in the process, though Bernie, swept into a near delirium, couldn’t have said exactly how. During the fracas the cat was displaced, rearranging itself in its lassitude among the monkeys, themselves upended like bodies tumbled under a steam shovel’s plough. (The image reared up as a last desperate damper to passion, then just as quickly dissolved.) When she touched him at his root, the first intimate touch he’d ever received from another, he sprang to such rigid attention that he thought his organ would pop its cork and fizz like a Roman candle. She canted her hips to remove her powder blue panties with one hand while holding onto him with the other, guiding him toward the bow-strung sinews of her parted thighs. He almost wept to realize what was happening, how she was about to introduce him to the waking world’s premier mystery; but just as he was poised to enter the flesh of a living girl, feeling himself more present on the material plane than ever before, his soul brimmed over and was launched clear out of his body. Looking back from the stratosphere with a thousand eyes, Bernie glimpsed the frustrated diminution of his desire and heard the girl saying before he surrendered himself to eternity,
“If you can’t take me with you, at least bring me something back.”
1908.
Until he was thrown out on his ear from his Aunt Dobeh and Uncle Zaynvil’s apartment, Shmerl Karp had no leisure to enjoy the clamorous streets of the Jewish East Side. The eviction itself did not particularly distress him; worse things could have happened: He might for instance have remained shackled to relations who used him for a Hebrew slave. But the circumstances surrounding the eviction left him confirmed in his belief in the inherent evils of technology.
For a time Shmerl was satisfied that the innumerable tasks he was assigned throughout the working day—a day which began at dawn and continued into the evening—were a fitting penance; they were the chastening he deserved for the arrogance of his messianic pursuits back in Shpinsk. So he never complained on discovering that he had ceased to be a guest of the Oyzers in their handshake tenement, a discovery that became apparent after his first cup of tea. Childless, the choleric couple had welcomed him into their home with the assurance that