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By Root 12468 0

sense of dwelling in a dream. I was not merely on the verge of getting laid; I was embarking on a voyage to Arcady, to Beulah Land, to the velvet black and starry regions beyond Pleiades. I recalled once more (how many times had I summoned their sound?) the pellucid indecencies Leslie had uttered, and as I did so—the viewfinder of my mind reshaping each crevice of her moist and succulent lips, the orthodontically fashioned perfection of the sparkling incisors, even a cunning fleck of foam at the edge of the orifice—it seemed the dizziest pipe dream that this very evening, sometime before the sun should fulfill its oriental circuit and rise again on Sheepshead Bay, that mouth would be—no, I could not let myself think about that slippery-sweet mouth and its impending employments. Just after six o’clock I rolled off the bed and took a shower, then shaved for the third time that day. Finally I dressed in my solitary seersucker suit, extracted a twenty-dollar bill from my Johnson & Johnson treasury, and sallied forth from the room toward my greatest adventure.

Outside in the hallway (in memory, the momentous events of my life have often been accompanied by sharply illuminated little satellite images) Yetta Zimmerman and the poor elephantine Moishe Muskatblit were embroiled in a vigorous argument.

“You call yourself a godly young man, and yet you do this to me?” Yetta was half shouting in a voice filled more with severe pain than real rage. “You get robbed in the subway? Five weeks I’ve given you to pay me the rent—five weeks out of the generosity and goodness of my heart—and now you tell me this old wives’ tale! You think I’m some kind of innocent sweet little faygeleh that I should accept this story? Hoo-ha!” The “Hoo-ha!” was majestic, conveying such contempt that I saw Moishe—fat and sweating in his black ecclesiastical get-up—actually flinch.

“But it’s true!” he insisted. It was the first time I had heard him speak, and his juvenile voice—a falsetto—seemed appropriate to his vast, jellylike physique. “It’s true, my pocket was picked, in the Bergen Street subway station.” He seemed ready to weep. “It was a colored man, a tiny little colored man. Oh, he was so fast! He was gone up the stairs before I could cry out. Oh, Mrs. Zimmerman—”

The “Hoo-ha!” again would have shriveled teakwood. “I should believe such a story? I should believe such a story even from an almost rabbi? Last week you told me—last week you swore to me by all that was holy you would have forty-five dollars on Thursday afternoon. Now you give me this about a pickpocket!” Yetta’s squat bulk was thrust forward in a warlike stance, but once more I felt there was more bluster in her manner than menace. “Thirty years I run this place without evicting nobody. Pride I’ve got in never kicking anyone out except for some weird oysvorf in 1938 I caught dressed up in girls’ panties. Now, after all this, so help me God I’ve gotta evict an almost rabbi!”

“Please!” Moishe squeaked, with an imploring look.

Feeling myself an interloper, I began to squeeze by, or through, their considerable mass, and excused myself with a murmur just as I heard Yetta say, “Well, well! Wherefore art thou going, Romeo?”

I realized it must have been my seersucker suit, freshly laundered and lightly starched, my plastered-down hair and, doubtless above all, my Royall Lyme shaving lotion, which, it suddenly occurred to me, I had slathered on with such abandon that I smelled like a tropical grove. I smiled, said nothing and pressed on, eager to escape both the imbroglio and Yetta’s vaguely lewd attention.

“I’ll bet some lucky girl’s gonna have her dream come true tonight!” she said with a thick chortle.

I flapped an amiable hand in her direction, and with a glance at the cowed and miserable Muskatblit, plunged out into the pleasant June evening. As I hurried down the street toward the subway I could hear above his feeble peeping protests the hoarse gravelly female voice still yakking furiously, yet dying away behind me with an undertone of patient forbearance that told me that Moishe would