Muni understood that Jenny was no ordinary girl, and that by coaxing him into empyrean altitudes, she introduced him to a new order of being. Above the earth they were beyond the range of the rude world’s conventions. The fear he felt the first time she placed his hand over her breast gradually dissolved into an ambrosial delirium. And when, tentatively, she drew his fingers under her dress until they rested on the stocking fabric above her knee, he could believe that the warmth that infected his vitals was somehow holy. The sounds that reached them at that lofty height — train whistles and automobile klaxons — were muffled by the wind, though a measure from the blind man’s fiddle might still be audible. Although his music was not made a whit more cheerful for being tempered by tenderness.
“Are we bad?” Jenny would whisper to Muni, who honestly didn’t know; he’d traveled too far from his largely forgotten youth when he had the statutes of the rabbis by heart. But while it may have been merely self-serving, he maintained that the rabbis had no jurisdiction over their aerial petting.
Their conversation was still more conspicuous for what they didn’t say than for what they did: Muni continued doling out his somewhat unreliable memories, while Jenny invoked a wanderlust she was increasingly less invested in. Once or twice Muni asked her what she and his aunt Katie shmoozed about, since it was only in Jenny’s company that his aunt appeared untroubled these days. “Girl stuff,” Jenny assured him with a wink, as if he would know what that meant, and Muni nodded like he understood before admitting he didn’t. But in the language of their arboreal bundling each was becoming fluent. Muni could now reciprocate Jenny’s clippings and claspings with equal fervor if not virtuosity. The more graduated was his exploration of her person, the nearer he felt to inhabiting the place he’d been living in for a solid year. He needed only Jenny Bashrig’s express invitation to finally arrive.
It came on a midsummer night during the first real heat wave of the season. The jaundiced sky above the Pinch contained the humid swelter like a bell jar, impelling neighbors to flee their airless apartments. They lolled about under the boughs of the great oak in Market Square Park, swapping complaints and fanning mosquitoes away from their sleeping children, while high above them Muni and Jenny disported themselves. Fireflies flickered in an intermittent semaphore answered by flashes of heat lightning over the Arkansas floodplain. Jenny sprawled among the rustling branches as if relaxing in a hammock while Muni straddled the fork of an adjacent limb, admiring her languor.
Then he did something he hadn’t done before: unprovoked, he volunteered a memory — though the accuracy of his hindsight was always in question.
“When I’m in the taiga a runaway,” he began, “the dogsleds are on my heels. They might be a party of trappers or they might be peasants out to capture and collect on the fugitive his bounty—” but he couldn’t afford to wait to find out which. Whips cracked, oaths were shouted, and Muni took off on his clodhopping snowshoes over the glassy expanse of the steppe. Ahead of him was a cloud bank he hoped to reach before the sleds overtook him. Hobbled by the broken racquets attached to his feet, however, he stopped to tear them off, but the snow’s brittle crust only slowed his progress. Then for all of his panic, he was aware of a stunning phenomenon: a burst of sunlight had turned the rolling steppe golden, illuminating the cloud bank before him in a celestial nimbus. At the same time the ground itself had begun to stir under him. “Comes a loud noise like, excuse me, the firmament is breaking wind—” then the ground beneath Muni’s feet erupted and he was catapulted into thin air.
Despite the evening’s dimming half-light Muni could see that Jenny’s mouth hung open, and for once he felt like the seducer and savored his power. He assured her the event was no less remarkable for its logical explanation: that a grove of dwarf pines, bent horizontal by its burden of snow since the previous autumn, had been stirred by the first warm sunshine of spring. The trees were further alerted by Muni’s footfalls, which had cracked the ice that embalmed them so that they snapped in a sudden snowquake to attention. Thus did the reawakened trees fling the fugitive like a shot from a sling into the gilded fog, where he landed toches-over-teakettle on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal, the inland sea.
“Jenny,” said Muni, his heart lifting heavy wings to confess, “when together we smotsken, I am flying again in the air.” His next utterance might have been to ask her to marry him, had she not spoken up first.
“So what are you waiting?” she replied, smiling brazenly. “Ravish me already.”
Muni knew better than to take her seriously. It was her talent to sound in deadly earnest even as she teased him, this time with a phrase she might have borrowed from some dime novel. After all, both of them were aware in their bones that the trespass they entertained was more than the Law (which who could remember?) allowed. Nevertheless, as Jenny still lay carelessly cradled by the pitch and sway of their perch, Muni was further inspirited by her boldness, intoxicated by their perilous altitude. Above their heads the Milky Way spiraled like cream stirred in black coffee and the blind man’s fiddle could be heard playing some incidental melody of the spheres. Leaning forward, Muni gingerly lifted the dust-ruffled hem of her skirt, as Jenny, biting her lip in concentration, fumbled with the buttons of his fly. She reached into his pants the way a naughty child steals into a jar to snatch a macaroon, only to find that she’s pulled out a serpent instead; but fascinated more than alarmed, she couldn’t let go — while Muni, submissive to that part of his anatomy that had leached the blood from his spinning brain, cried aloud as he seized the girl in an ultimate embrace.
The initial shock of their coupling nearly jettisoned them from the top of the tree, each hanging on exclusively to the other. Muni’s rapture purged him of every concern that wasn’t Jenny. Released from the familiar world, he dangled in a hanging garden of sensations that were utterly strange in their sweetness, convinced that no one before him had ever known such bliss. But the seismic tremors they shared at the nether extreme of their passion had roots that troubled the depths of their fears as well. Because their shuddering embrace, Muni suddenly realized, had generated a contagion that prompted in its turn a universal trembling. Opening his eyes he saw from Jenny’s expression that she had reached the same frightened conclusion: they had gone too far and the impact of their union had unseated nature itself. Or was it the reverse? Nature was settling scores with the wayward lovers. Whatever the case, the great patriarch oak had become unstable; tilting slowly, it groaned as if mortally wounded, wrenching its roots free of the planet to which it was moored, and with a sound like a nail pried from the vault of heaven, it started to topple. The lovers, holding on to one another now for dear life, declared their mutual devotion even as they rode the tree down its windy decline toward the earth, which gaped open to receive them.
5 Bolivar
On the night Rachel turned up again at the 348, I had come back only a short time before from a band rehearsal in midtown. Lamar Fontaine had received a shipment of high-grade Owsley acid from California, and I’d made a delivery to the once genteel neighborhood where Velveeta and the Psychopimps had set up their ménage. Before going I’d scooped the powdered LSD into gelatin capsules, which I invariably made a sloppy job of; I dropped more on the floor than I got into the caps. A portion of the spilled powder was transferred via a licked forefinger from the floor to my tongue. So I was pretty wasted by the time I hitched a ride out to Madison and Cooper with the newly criminalized drug. My destination was a gaily painted turn-of-the-century pile known as Beatnik Manor, headquarters of the Psychopimps and their circle, among whom I counted myself. I was as much drawn to the atmosphere as the music. The place was regularly filled with young people faithful to the watchword of the poètes maudits, to be always drunk “on wine, poetry, or virtue,” give or take the virtue. They were originals, the tenants of that steep-gabled manse, and I felt that by association so was I. Traveling between Beatnik Manor, Avrom’s shop, and 348 North Main, I moved from one safe house to another, passing only briefly through the fallen world. Though lately, between sanctuaries, I often risked slipping into the past.