Visiting Professor (14 page)

Lemuel shakes his head in despair. His voice thickens. “You should have seen us, hanging out on the subway, holding on for
dear life to the straps, leaning toward him so as not to miss a word, a syllable, him in his two-sizes-too-big overcoat, pausing
at each stop when the recorded announcement came on to say us the name of the station, then plunging back into chaos. Folded-towel
diffeomorphisms I learned about between Aeroport and Rechnoi Vokzal. Smooth-noodle maps, between Komsomolskaya and Marx Prospekt.
We relished the voyage, we dreaded the getting there. We never knew at what station the lecture would end. Litzky always waited
until the last instant, leaping out of the train as the doors closed, once his coat got pinched in the door, we had to pull
the emergency cord to free him. He would stalk off and disappear in the crowd, his head pulled in like a turtle’s, lost in
his coat, lost in his thoughts. We would look at each other, bewildered by things he had not explained, had assumed we would
understand, bewildered by a world where chaos was passed from hand to
hand, like an old shirt, to passengers on a subway. Later, when we sat for orals we were asked to cite our sources, but no
one had the courage to mention Litzky, so we lied and named papers by obscure Tran-sylvanians or Magyars.” Lemuel shakes his
head, trying to digest his own story. “In
Crime and Punishment
, Dostoevsky has a character named Razumikhin say us how it is possible to lie your way to truth.” His voice chokes up, his
eyes focus on something in his past. “I have, all my life, God help me, lied my way to truth.”

Walking with one shoe on, one shoe off, Rain comes up behind Lemuel, pulls his head back onto her chest and massages his brow.
“Russia,” she hears him mutter, “is an inner eyelid.”

“Compared to America,” Rain says, following her own thoughts, “Russia is totally hype. The only interesting thing that ever
happened to me on a subway was when this dude exposed himself. Go figure.”

Insomniac, Lemuel patrols
the cluttered living room into the early hours of the morning, contemplating the lack of whiteness to the night, scribbling
differential equations on the backs of envelopes, trying to unravel the mystery of the serial murders, which keep coming up
random no matter how many times he tosses the coin.

Sometime after midnight Rain wanders through in search of a glass of water. She is wearing furry bedroom slippers with no
backs and a T-shirt that has shrunk in the wash and barely covers her navel. The faded letters across the chest read: “Women
who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.” Under the message is the name “T. Leary.”

“Who is T. Leary?” Lemuel asks as Rain shuffles back from the kitchen.

“I think he was a contemporary of L. Tolstoy.” She flops into the only easy chair in the room, her legs dangling over the
arm. On her blanket, Mayday stirs, yawns, then closes one eye and watches Rain with the other. Glancing back through the open
kitchen door, Rain notices the “y.y.a.y.t.f.h.r.m.c.o.m.a.a.t.i.o.h.f.m.” on the blackboard. “So I’ve been meaning to ask
you,” she says with elaborate casualness, “how long are you signed up for at that chaos institute of yours.”

“The visiting-professorship contract is for one semester.”

The silence between question and answer is suddenly alive with electricity.

“What happens then?”

Lemuel shrugs.

“Like did you ever think of staying? At the Institute? In America?”

“What do I have to do to become American?”

Rain manages a strained smile. “Hey, buy a gun.”

Lemuel laughs, but his heart obviously isn’t in it. “Me staying on at the Institute depends on whether there is an opening
as a resident scholar.”

“So if you decided to stay in America, there might be other ways, right?”

He grunts.

“I mean,” continues Rain, annoyed, “do you
want
to stay in America?”

“I have not given it much thought,” Lemuel says vaguely.

“Maybe you ought to give it much thought,” she says. When he does not respond, she shrugs irritably. Her bare arm reaches
out to flick on the radio. She catches the end of the WHIM news break:

“… weather in the tri-county on this third day of March looks to be partly cloudy, which means partly not cloudy, with occasional
showers in the afternoon and temperatures rising into the high forties or low fifties. If you’re staying indoors, you want
to wear as little as possible. Are you taking notes, Charlene, honey? Ha ha! Okay, we’ll go and take some more calls now.”

The host chats for a few minutes with a woman who is against abortion, then talks with a Catholic priest who is against contraceptive
devices. “What justifies carnal knowledge,” the priest says, “is the possibility of procreation.”

Incensed, Rain grabs the phone and punches in a number, which she seems to know by heart. “I have enough credits to get a
goddamn bachelor’s degree in carnal knowledge,” she remarks. “Hello,” she shouts into the phone. “So it’s me again.”

A staticky voice echoes back at her from the radio. “It’s me again.”

“You’re up kinda early, Rain. Or maybe you’re up kinda late.”

“I got woken up …” “I got woken up by the previous caller shooting off his mouth about carnal knowledge. Like is he out to
lunch. He knows so little he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”

“Can you play that back for me slow like.”

“Like what do priests know …” “Like what do priests know about screwing? The reason I’m a practicing Catholic but Catholicism
is not what I’m practicing, right? is because organized religion is a conspiracy against women.”

“Pay attention, Charlene, honey. Rain’s coming up with a new conspiracy theory.”

“Fucking A. You want my opinion …” “Fucking A. You want my opinion, religion is a male plot to deny women multiple orgasms,
which men can’t have, by making us feel guilty if we take pleasure from sex. And lets not beat around the goddamn bush. Everyone
knows good orgasms come in twos.”

“I take it you’re speaking from experience.”

“Hey, I’ve had my share …” “Hey, I’ve had my share of experiences. The best ones were with people of the Jewish persuasion.”

“What’s so great about Jewish lovers? What with me being a practicing Seventh-Avenue Adventurist, maybe it’d be better if
you don’t listen in to this part, Charlene, honey.”

“Like I’ll tell you …” “Like I’ll tell you what’s so great about Jewish lovers. First off, you stand less chance of getting
cervical cancer, right? if your partner’s circumcised.”

“Where’d you shop that pearl of wisdom from?”

“I read it …” “I read it, it was either in
The Hite Report
or
The Backwater Sentinel
or
National Geographic
. The reason I know it was one of these three is because they’re the only things I read extracurricular.”

“I always heard men who were circumcised had less feeling.”

“I never had …” “I never had complaints along those lines.”

“I’ll bet you haven’t. You want to leave your phone number with the operator before you hang up. Ha! Only kidding, Charlene,
honey. Nice talking to you, Rain. For anyone just joining us, you’re listening to WHIM Elmira, where the elite meet to beat
the meat. I’ll take another call.”

“Hey, I could tell you a thing or two about priests,” Rain forges on. “Like the time I had to confess to kissing my cousin
Bobby on the lips …” She notices her voice is no longer echoing from the radio. “How do you like that? The earlobe went and
hung down on me.”

Lemuel stops by
the E-Z Mart on his way to the Institute, takes a quick turn around the aisles with Dwayne trailing after him, a stub of
a pencil poised over his pad. He has discovered in Lemuel a natural talent for supermarket management. The visiting professor
has figured out that a supermarket has a lot in common with a ship: both are perfect metaphors for the science of chaos in
the sense that order is thought
to be lurking behind the appearance of disorder. On more than one occasion, searching for traces of order amid the chaos of
the shelves, Lemuel has alerted Dwayne to flaws in the Mart’s computer program, which tailors the inventory to meet the projected
needs of the community.

“I have a sinking feeling you are low on iceberged lettuce,” Lemuel observes as they pass the vegetable counter. “Ditto for
Dijon mustard, Mrs. Hammersmith’s low-calorie doughnuts, the imported French dressing, economy size Stay Free.” Lemuel stops
in front of an item he has not noticed before. “Yo! Like what is a Roach Motel, Dwayne? If someone checks in what would prevent
him from checking out?”

Making his way past the checkout counters, Lemuel is saluted by Shirley. She runs her fingers through her naturally wavy hair.
“Z’up?” she asks.

“Nuch,” Lemuel tells her.

Shirley arches her body, pushing tiny pointed breasts into her white smock. “So I still got this soft spot for gate crashers.”

“Don’t have a cow,” Lemuel laughs.

A scrawny cashier, ringing up the purchases of a squat Oriental man at the next counter, interrupts her work to shyly ask
Lemuel for an autograph.

The Oriental man, dressed in a pin-striped suit and speaking with a clipped British accent, asks the cashier, “I say, is he
a celebrity?”

Shirley giggles happily. “Is he a celebrity or is he a celebrity?”

The scrawny cashier bats enormous false eyelashes. “I seen you on the tube,” she tells Lemuel with great solemnity. “I think
you was fly.”

The Oriental man grimaces. “Fly?”

Lemuel snickers, “Like your customer needs a clue or two, right?” He turns to the Oriental man. “I can say you ‘fly’ is the
same thing as ‘beautimous,’ which is a kissing cousin to ‘volumptuous.’ The King’s English,” he adds with a wink. “Go figure.”

Lemuel’s girl Friday
flags him down as he is entering his office. ‘J. Alfred wants a word with you,” Mrs. Shipp confides.

“I am delighted to see you,” the Director tells Lemuel, drawing him into his corner office a few minutes later. He steers
his visitor to a leather couch, hovers over him wringing his hands. “Coffee, tea, slivovitz with or without mineral water?”

Goodacre nods in eager agreement when Lemuel suggests that it is too late in the morning for coffee, too early in the day
for alcohol. The director settles onto an Eames chair, swivels 360 degrees as if he is winding himself up, gnaws thoughtfully
on his lower lip, clears a throat that doesn’t need clearing.

“Is your work going well?” he inquires solicitously. “Have you been made to feel at home in the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary
Chaos-Related Studies?”

Lemuel blinks slowly. “Like being here is opening my eyes to a lot of things.”

“I’m relieved to hear it,” says Goodacre. “You convey the impression of someone who knows which side his bread is buttered
on, who is not offended by a discreet word to the wise. The day you arrived I remember dropping a hint about grooming. No
sooner said than done.” He fires off a jovial burst of conspiratorial laughter in Lemuel’s direction. “I can tell you the
Institute is not insensitive to the distinction of having someone of your caliber on the faculty. We like to think we are
giving the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton a run for its money. Having the likes of you around certainly helps
make us competitive. Which brings me to the kernel of the corn, the eye of the storm. Even though we are located in an out-of-the-way
valley in an out-of-the-way corner of Puritan America, we like to think of ourselves as a citadel of liberalism, a tolerant
community composed of consenting intellectuals. What you do, whom you do it with, is your affair.”

Lemuel grunts.

“Still,” Goodacre goes on, his voice barely distinguishable from the sound emitted by a rusty hinge, “there is a threshold
to pain. … There are limits to liberalism. …”

Lemuel reads between the lines. “You are talking about Rain.”

“You moved out of the apartment over the Rebbe. You moved in with her.”

“The goddamn phone was all the time ringing off the hook, right? The nights were artificially white—there were klieg lights
on the street. I could no longer use the night to—”

“I was confident I would be able to get through to you—”

“Rain offered to teach me American English—”

“There is a chair opening up … a resident scholar’s contract …”

“I can say you our relationship, Rain and me, is purely oral—”

“The Rebbe has made it known he wants to return to Eastern Parkway and set up a yeshiva that teaches chaos in the O.T. …”

Both men take deep breaths.

“To dot the i’s and cross the t’s,” Goodacre begins again, “a high-profile liaison between one of the Institute’s visiting
professors and an undergraduate barber half his age strains our liberal tradition. You are here, Lemuel—you don’t mind if
I call you Lemuel?—on a one-semester contract. It was our hope, and, given what is happening in the former Soviet Union, I
suspect yours, too, that this would lead to an offer of a permanent chair.”

Lemuel stirs uneasily on the couch. His heart tells him the Russians who fought Napoleon were wrong to give ground, Rain’s
dad was right: Territory has got to be defended at the goddamn frontier. I am going to make a big deal out of a big deal,
he thinks, I am going to say something for the first time in my life without a subtext. Can I reasonably expect to survive
the experience? Do I really want to survive the experience? He closes his eyes, kneads a lurking migraine with his thumb and
third finger, sees himself, in an aching fiction, stride up to the officer in charge, identify himself as the youngest candidate
member in history of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and begin to protest against police brutality.

“I am probably missing something, J. Alfred,” he hears himself mutter in a voice he can not quite place; like the second of
his two signatures it is certainly not his. “You do not mind if I call you J. Alfred? Is who I fuck chaos-related?”

Goodacre’s mouth falls open. For a moment Lemuel has the impression that the director is suffering from cardiac arrest. He
wonders if you can be convicted for manslaughter in America the Beautiful for saying something without a subtext.