It was also around this time that other peripheral events had begun to intrude. No sooner had Lamar Fontaine allowed his attorney to secure his release from the county jail than he jumped bail and disappeared. The rumors of his relocation — on a houseboat moored off an island in Plaquemines Parish, in an ashram in Kuala Lumpur — persist to this day. Meanwhile, I’d already met some of Lamar’s creditors, a horror show assortment of motorcycle outlaws with lurid tattoos, and had no desire to encounter them again. They would be looking for my landlord’s cat’s-paw, anxious for news concerning Lamar’s whereabouts, and the fact of my ignorance would not deter them from trying to extract that information by any means necessary. I had no choice but to appeal to Rachel for temporary refuge, and despite the unspoken scruples aflicker in her hazel eyes, she obliged.
I came to her with only a toothbrush and a skittish grin. Leaving the Pinch, I deliberately left behind The Pinch in anticipation of a total immersion in all things Rachel. Her tidy apartment was located in a quiet old neighborhood whose sidewalks heaved and plunged above the roots of tall trees. The street was a stone’s throw from the zoo, a fact in which Rachel delighted, and at night you could hear peacocks yawp and lions roar. The apartment’s interior was impregnated with her scent of vanilla and roses, which clung to the clothes in her closet and the sheets on her bed, and tinged a little the taste of her chamomile tea. There were objects that affirmed her identity — reproductions of primitive art alongside the Chagall and Ben Shahn prints on the walls; a bookcase crowded with essential volumes: The Thousand Nights and a Night, Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, The Golden Bough (“Wow,” I said, “The Bough! Wow!”), National Velvet. There was a small black-and-white TV with an antenna like a caduceus, a portable stereo and a stack of albums full of strange bedfellows — Barbra Streisand and Joni Mitchell, Stravinsky, Burt Bacharach, and Spike Jones; there was a fat marmalade cat named Jezebel that barfed lozenge-shaped hairballs into my discarded shoes.
Rachel would leave in the morning for the Folklore Center, then drive into the suburbs where the Jews lived to conduct her interviews, returning in the late afternoon. By then I would have made a token pass at housekeeping before browsing her library and lingerie drawer, handling books and brassieres invested with a taint of sanctity because they were hers. I watched a cooking show on daytime TV and tried to duplicate the recipes, though the incinerated loaves and imploded soufflés prompted Rachel to state a preference for takeout. Occasionally I attempted a cautious constitutional along the shady streets with the uncooperative cat on a leash. As a hideout Rachel’s apartment seemed a safer haven than any I’d known, more so than even the bookshop or Beatnik Manor, both of which were off-limits till the coast was clear. Moreover, I believed that we’d turned a corner in our relationship. So what if her friends disapproved of me, if she took phone calls behind the closed door of her bedroom, from which I sometimes heard aggravation in her muffled voice. Relaxed as a convalescent, I thought without remorse that I was making a genuine bid for normality. Maybe there was a future in which I might return to school, avoid the draft, communicate with my parents — and Lenny Bruce would come back from the dead.
I felt like an urchin in a penny dreadful who’s rescued from the streets and given a bath and a hot meal. Only instead of a jowly financier, my benefactor was a pretty girl, who allowed me to undress her and plumb her mysteries to the length and breadth of my tongue. After making love (and before our heads settled back into their respective entities) we would read to each other from her treasury of folktales — stories of tricksters who juggled their own eyes and stole magic hats from the gods — while the cat accommodated itself to the space between our adjacent bodies. In the mornings before she left Rachel brewed strong coffee and squeezed a medley of juices whose liquid incandescence caused (lifting my shirt to prove it) my extruded navel to glow. Then I would wave good-bye to Rachel from a window, which made her laugh: “You’re like Penelope reminding Ulysses not to forget his lunch.”
Early on I’d phoned Avrom to say I would be away from the shop due to a family emergency. I was disappointed that he failed to even inquire about the nature of the emergency (“Since when you got a family?”), letting me know through his fruity cough — which he may have exaggerated to pique my guilt — that I wouldn’t be missed. We both understood that the job had more to do with charity (his toward me and mine toward him) than actual labor, but I did worry that he might need some looking after in my absence. I soothed my conscience by calling Old Man Zanone, who had the Planter’s Peanuts shop next door to the Book Asylum and was himself a relic of Main Street, asking him to please look in on Avrom every once in a while.
Avrom’s disinterest was the flip side of Rachel’s persistent third degree; she was forever pestering me about my past—“and don’t tell me you were raised by wombats or whatever.”
“I have a family,” I was finally compelled to admit, “of sorts.” I had an obese mother, I told her, whose Valium addiction had left her in the vegetative state of a beached manatee; a father who, when he wasn’t foreclosing properties, napped with an open Wall Street Journal over his face. This was all more or less true, though I tended to err on the side of less, but Rachel seemed to find the current version feasible enough.
“So you hate your parents because they’re not … what? Sonny and Cher?”
“Who said anything about hate? I hardly know them.” Having just made their acquaintance.
Rachel emitted the sigh that was her signature assessment of my character. “I’m fond of you, Lenny, really I am,” cupping my jaw between her palms as if she intended to squeeze my face into two dimensions, “but you know, you’re not all that special.”
“Fankoo,” I told her, my lips still squinched between her fingers, which I removed. “I appreciate your honesty.”
She did this circumflex thing with her eyebrows by way of apology and made herself pliant again, leaning against me so I could fold her in my arms like a hero. We were seated on a stone bench in her apartment’s courtyard, the air practically narcotic with the fragrance of honeysuckle and hyacinth. A blue butterfly played about Rachel’s hair, the warm sun highlighting her unconfined breasts through a translucent blouse. “Must have been some awful trauma that made you want to erase your own past,” she mused.
“Yeah,” I confessed, “the trauma of boredom.”
Then it turned out I had a limited tolerance for bliss. Like a fish that’d scrabbled onto dry land to become a person, I felt I’d evolved too fast, and wanted to turn tail and flop back whence I’d come. I loved the girl but missed the Pinch (the place and the book), and began to feel as if I were under house arrest. I tried my best to conceal my unease from Rachel, but it didn’t help that she reminded me repeatedly that I shouldn’t get too comfortable in her apartment: our arrangement was never meant to be permanent. The caveat made me painfully aware of how comfortable I’d become. Having determined that the solution lay in consolidating the book and the girl, I decided that enough time had passed; I would return to North Main Street and retrieve Muni Pinsker’s desultory saga. If we resumed our custom of reading from it aloud, it might resolve my restlessness and at the same time placate Rachel’s growing impatience with the space I took up in her flat. But when the bus dropped me off in the early morning at the corner of Winchester and Main, I discovered that my building was padlocked as if in solidarity with number 348 across the street. Ordinances advising No Trespassing were pasted to either side of the crumbling entrance.