Naked Came the Stranger (6 page)

The sense of challenge was already waning. And Gillian Blake, warm
and rested, allowed her mind to speculate on the next candidate.
Someone a trifle harder, she mused, someone who would put up more of
a… struggle.

Melvin Corby – he was so frightened by his wife; he would
surely be a challenge. Or maybe Paddy Madigan, the retired prize
fighter, but there was something missing there, something about him
she didn't quite understand. Marvin Goodman, the skinflint….
Willoughby Martin, if he even cared about girls. The possibilities
seemed endless. But a challenge, who would be a challenge? There was
Mario Vella; everyone said he was a member of the Cosa Nostra. No,
not him, not yet.

Rabbi Joshua Turnbull, a man of God. That would surely be a
challenge. Well, why not?

"You must be so tired," she said to Morton Earbrow.

"Wouldn't you like to take time for a drink?"

"I think I've found the problem," Morton said.

"Something seems to be dogging the fuel line."

Gillian reached down and let her uncalloused, satiny hand stroke
the back of his neck. He jumped to his feet immediately.

"Come on in and have a drink," she said. "Come on, you deserve
it."

"A little break wouldn't hurt, I suppose," he said.

From the garage to the den, darker and cooler. He sat on the couch
and let the air conditioning unit strike him directly.

"I'm going to get your slipcovers all…," he started and
stopped.

"A Tom Collins this time?" she said. "Change your luck?"

"It wouldn't hurt," he said.

She carried the drinks to him, sat down beside him. That bathing
suit; he couldn't imagine how it was held together. The
stresses….

"What's next?" Gillian said.

"Excuse me?"

"On the house," she said. "What's your next project?"

"Who knows? Gloria makes lists. She doesn't let me see them until
the weekend. But there's lots to do. Lots of work on an old house.
Never ends. Sometimes I wish we hadn't bought it."

"What does your wife think about it all?"

"She likes it," he said. "She says it keeps her busy. That's what
I can't understand… you must hear this kind of thing all the
time. I guess you know almost everything about marriage."

"Everything," she said. It sounded cynical. It was cynical.

Her eyes were amber in the dark. "Everyone has problems. People
don't seem able to reach out to each other any more."

"l know what you mean," he said. "I know exactly what you mean.
But what do you do when that happens?"

"I could tell you what I say on the radio," Gillian said.

"Reason, patience, share mutual interests – but what I say
when the microphone is off is something else. I don't think the
people out there in radioland are ready for what I really think."

She was reaching out her right arm to emphasize the point, and
Morton Earbrow looked through one side of her net bathing suit and
received a clear vision of her right breast. It seemed both soft and
firm. Not like a melon perhaps, more like a pear. But then he had
nothing against pears.

"The important thing" – she was still talking – "and
this is what I wish I could say on the radio, is that you
communicate, communicate with someone, anyone. Reach out and touch
another soul. Love someone, that's the important thing. Love and be
loved."

"But how?" Morton said. "Who?"

"Use your imagination," she said.

Morton timidly reached out and touched Gillian's knee. His
fingers, his fingers would surely leave dust marks on her. But there
was no stopping now. He slid his hardened fingers above her knee, to
the flesh of her thigh. Slim but soft. He could feel her skin quiver
beneath his fingers. He could feel her hand on his knee, feel her
hand tightening, moving. His hand slid higher on her thigh and she
moved toward him, made it easier for him.

It was then that Morton Earbrow's mechanical genius paid
dividends. Without stopping to think about it, without ever having
seen a blueprint, acting on instinct alone, he found the string that
held her bathing suit together. It came off in three sections. Then
they were touching each other in the deepest, most secret places,
reaching out. Yes, by God, communicate with someone. Morton bent her
beneath him and she was beyond resistance.

"I'm going to soil your couch," he remembered. "My knees and
elbows, they're…."

"Kindly shut up," she said.

She had removed the belt to his Bermuda shorts and was pulling
them down, down and off. And then, without more words, they merged.
In the dark, in the cool darkness, they communicated. Faster and
faster they communicated, harder and harder, in dozens of places, in
countless ways. Fingers and nails on skin, teeth on skin, then great
shudders of total communication. There were explosions of
understanding, and the long drawn-out paroxysm of being as together
as two people can be.

"You see," she whispered later. "That's what I meant. That's what
I was trying to tell you."

"It seemed so easy…."

They came apart then and rested in the dark. Morton began to laugh
and he couldn't stop.

"I'd forgotten about this," he said. "I'd forgotten there was more
to life than mowing a lawn."

"There are lawns to mow and lawns to mow," she said.

"A lawn is a lawn is a lawn" – and he was laughing again.
Laughing and reaching for his shorts.

"What's your hurry?" Gillian said. "The lawn can wait. That lawn
can wait."

"My wife," he said. "It's afternoon and I should have started the
seeding by now."

"I think you just did," Gillian said. "I'll let you go, but only
if you promise to come back."

"When?"

"Almost any time," she said. "My husband hasn't been coming home
much lately. Just check the driveway. If the car is here, he'll be
here. If the car's away, then we can… play."

"I'm sorry about the dirt on the couch," he said.

"Never apologize," Gillian said.

There were other visits that week. There were Tuesday and Thursday
and Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. And that following Sunday
afternoon, with his wife out shopping for spreading junipers, Morton
lay down in his uncut crabgrass and rolled over like a puppy and felt
happy to feel the cushion that was growing beneath him.

It wasn't just that the lawn never got mowed. Everything fell
behind. He painted one window and didn't do the one beside it. He
ordered the ceramic tile for the kitchen counter but never ordered
the adhesive. He constructed half of a redwood deck and threw his
hammer into Mario Vella's yard. The lawn became a field and the house
was winning the fight and Morton Earbrow enjoyed the luxury of a
world disintegrating around the core of his happiness.

Gloria, meanwhile, scraped the woodwork and stained it and covered
it with liquid plastic. She peeled the wallpaper from the hall and
put up some more. And, unsurprisingly, she could not help but notice
that Morton was no longer keeping pace. She stopped making her lists
because she suspected they were not even being read.

On Monday there was an argument.

"I think you owe me an explanation," she said. "You go out to
Modell's for paint and it keeps you three hours –"

"You know those crowds at Modell's," he said.

"And you come home without any paint. And that smile – I
don't see anything so funny. Then on Thursday you have the office
softball game and you say you're so tired you can't do a thing around
here."

"Well, I do work during the week," he suggested.

"Sit at a desk," she said. "While I'm here trying to make us a
nice home, a good life. And you're sitting there at that desk and you
don't care how we live."

"I care," he said. "I
care
. But not twenty-four hours a
day. It's inhuman to slave around this house all day. There's no time
for anything else. God, when I think of what it was like when we were
first married –"

"That's all you ever do think about," Gloria said. "I'm beginning
to think I married some kind of a sex maniac. That may have been all
right before we had responsibilities. We've finally got a home. Soon
we'll have children. We've got to start getting organized."

"
Children!
" Morton was shouting now. "How in the hell can
two people have children when they don't even sleep together?"

"Sex maniac!" she screamed.

"Damn right!"

"If that's all that being married means to you," she said, "then
we have one beautiful relationship."

"Oh, shit!"

"All you want is my body," she went on. "What about building a
life together, a home for our…?"

"Shit, shit, shit!" The deep end. "Screw a life together. Screw
the home. Screw your body."

"I'm not listening to you," she said.

"Goodbye," he said.

The dream returned then. The neat, always tidy bachelor apartment.
The predecorated, regularly cleaned, air-conditioned, bachelor
apartment. The stereo set, the sleep-in guests, Gillian Blake. And
Morton Earbrow knew what must be done. He walked up the freshly
finished stairs, entered the recently papered bedroom, shoved aside
his work clothes, jammed his suits and shirts into two suitcases. And
left.

A week later he made the phone call. "Gillian?"

"Morton," she said.

"What's doing?"

"What's doing with you?" she said. "Where are you?"

"I've got this great new pad," Morton said, "here on 66th Street.
You can see the East River right behind the smokestacks."

"That sounds great," Gillian said. "Where's Gloria?"

"Gloria who?" he said. "Hey, you've got to drop up here after the
show. I'll show you the East River. I'll show you my etchings."

"You mean it's all over with Gloria?" she said.

"It never was with Gloria," he said. "How about…?"

"Goodbye," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Goodbye," she said.

Click. Morton Earbrow felt the phone go dead in his hand. He stood
there, looking beyond the smokestacks at the East River. He was aware
of the mechanical hum of the air conditioner, and the room seemed
suddenly cold. Morton Earbrow, a do-it-yourselfer with nothing to do,
spent the next hour listening to his new FM radio. He mixed himself
two martinis. He changed the linen on his new bed. And it was not
until late that night that he began constructing a small and somewhat
crude wine rack out of coat hangers and an orange crate. It was hard
going, mainly because he didn't have the proper tools.

Before retiring for the night he wrote himself a note:

"Buy new drill on way to work."

Gilly: Say, Billy, did you see the newspaper
stories about the special religious service that's planned for our
own King's Neck?

Billy: You mean at the Jewish temple?

Gilly: Yes, where they're going to feature a rock 'n' roll
group.

Billy: Wild.

Gilly: I know, it's too fascinating. I've heard about using
jazz as part of the liturgy, but rock 'n' roll! To say the least,
that's a bit different.

Billy: Of course, the rabbi there, Rabbi Joshua Turnbull, is
well known as an innovator.

Gilly: He's a comparatively young man, too.

Billy: You know, he might make an interesting guest. Gilly:
Yes, I think he would be extremely interesting. I've never drawn out
a rabbi before.

It was too simple, too easy. Ernie Miklos…
Morton Earbrow… Gillian, weary of automatic conquests, was
tempted to abandon her plan. What was needed at this juncture was a
challenge. Something that would permit her to test her mettle.

Joshua Turnbull, spiritual leader of the tiny Jewish community in
King's Neck, had in recent months become a figure of modest
controversy. It began when he announced plans to amplify a Friday
night service the following month with a rock 'n' roll group known as
"Jonah and the Wails." It was this announcement that qualified the
rabbi for a guest appearance on the
Billy & Gilly Show.
And the rabbi's public relations man had said Rabbi Turnbull would be
delighted to come.

So it was that William Blake – philanderer, cuckold and
moderator – looked on naïvely that Monday morning as
Gillian hoisted sail. Rabbi Turnbull was difficult from the outset.
Not only was he oblivious to Gillian's charm, he even seemed unaware
of her presence, and he directed his conversation to the radio
audience. He wasn't responding properly to her sallies. He answered
them obliquely and continued following a course of his own charting.
Gillian added canvas, sailed recklessly after him.

Turnbull, a product of Union Theological Seminary in Cleveland,
was a beefy, thick-muscled man in his mid-thirties who sported an
ash-blond Vandyke, jaunty salt-and-pepper tweeds and no yarmulke.
William noted a resemblance to Skitch Henderson. Rabbi Turnbull
sprang from a family of Reform rabbis that had emigrated to the
Midwest from Germany before the Civil War. Rabbi Turnbull was
considerably more than reformed; he was reconstructed. American to a
fault, he was the residual of four generations of reformed Jewry that
had refined the stiff-necked, insulated, and anachronistic worship of
a desert God into a white precipitate of acceptability and consensus
that bordered on the Episcopalian.

Rabbi Turnbull's Sunday School, for example, happened on Sundays.
The rabbi had constructed a Temple of steel and glass that was the
envy of all the other faiths in King's Neck. (He sometimes took
delighted malice in the Greek epigram: "The crucified martyr made
light of his loss/ Till he spotted another on a higher cross.") The
Temple was built with three prongs jutting skyward, symbolizing the
Hebrew letter "shin," a symbol that burst with significance in Jewish
lore but was also a symbol that could represent any trinity that one
cared to apply. Detractors said it looked like Neptune's trident
thrust through the earth, and they claimed it would not be surprising
if a huge pagan fist reached up from the waters of Long Island Sound
to reclaim it. Vandals from the city had once desecrated the building
by painting the words, "By you, this is a shule?" across the front
doors.