The Visiting Professor Read online

  Dazed, dazzled, blundering from side to side, Lemuel turns a corner so abruptly he almost collides with a dirty blond ponytail. He notices the young woman attached to the ponytail slip a tin of fancy sardines over her shoulder into the hood of her duffle coat.

  “What are you doing?” he blurts out.

  The girl, wearing tight faded blue jeans and ankle-length lace-up boots under the duffle coat, turns on him. “Yo! I’m scoring sardines,” she announces innocently. She bats enormous seaweed-green eyes as if she is having difficulty bringing him into focus. “What are you scoring?”

  Lemuel has the eerie feeling he has looked into these eyes before. … Nonplussed, he thrusts out his empty hands, palms up. “I am not scoring nothing. I am not even playing.”

  The girl flashes a deliberate smile, half defiant, half defensive; freckles dance on her face. “Hey, don’t be a doorknob. Score something. Everyone knows supermarkets pad their prices to make up for shoplifting. Which means someone’s got to shoplift to keep the supermarkets honest, right? To make sure they don’t profit by people not shoplifting.”

  “I can say you I have never looked at it that way.”

  The girl hikes a shoulder. “Hey, now you know it like a poet.” Smiling dreamily, she wanders off down the aisle, inspecting labels, casually stealing the cans that appeal to her.

  Lemuel meanders on to the beer area, where he is overwhelmed by the choice. Confronted by cans and bottles and six-packs and twelve-packs and cases of every imaginable size and shape and color, he rolls his head in bewilderment. A young man with a three-day blond beard, long hair tied back with a colorful ribbon, granny glasses, and a small silver ring dangling from one earlobe, struggles past pulling a dolly loaded with cases of alcohol-free beer. A tag pinned to his flannel shirt identifies him as “The Manager” and “Dwayne.”

  “If you don’t see what you’re looking for,” Dwayne says, “ask.”

  Lemuel works up his courage. “Do you by any chance sell kvass?”

  The manager scratches at his beard. “Is that a brand name or a generic?” When Lemuel looks back blankly, he asks, “What exactly is kvass?”

  “It is a kind of beer brewed from bread.”

  “If someone out there’s smart enough to make beer out of bread,” Dwayne declares with an engaging laugh, “we sure as heck want to market it. In case the word hasn’t reached you, at the E-Z Mart the customer is king.” He produces a pad and a stub of a pencil. “How are you spelling kvass?” he wants to know, licking the point of the pencil, staring at Lemuel expectantly.

  “I am spelling kvass K, V, A, double S.”

  Dwayne looks up from his pad and peers at Lemuel through his granny glasses. “You speak with some kind of an accent.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, babe, I think so. An accent’s nothing to be embarrassed about. America is a melting pot of accents. Where is it you’re from?”

  “St. Petersburg, Russia.”

  Dwayne brightens. “That’s cool. When I was working toward a master’s in business administration at Harvard, I did my thesis on the disadvantages of central planning on a non-market-oriented economy. It had a catchy title—Trickle-Down Incompetence.’ “

  “With a master’s in business administration from Harvard, what are you doing running a supermarket in Backwater?”

  Dwayne pulls a pack of Life Savers from the pocket of his shirt, offers one to Lemuel, takes one himself when he shakes his head. “I did the Wall Street bit for a while,” Dwayne says, “analyzing the infrastructure of companies for a Fortune 500 brokerage house, making big bucks, washing my hands in corporate bathrooms where they got real towels, living in a condo on Third Avenue, the whole Manhattan scene. Then Shirley, she’s the cashier with the naturally wavy hair, Shirley and me, we decided we’d rather be ordinary fishes in a small unpolluted pond than minnows in a sewer. So here we are”—Dwayne makes swimming motions with his arms—”swimming away.” He stuffs the pad back in his jeans, sticks out a paw. “I’m Dwayne to my friends.”

  Lemuel shakes his hand. “I am Falk, Lemuel, to everyone.”

  “So it’s been nice talking to you, Lem, babe. See you around the pond, huh?”

  Back in the street, Lemuel experiences something akin to rapture of the deep—he feels like a skin diver who has surfaced from giddy depths. A melody he does not recognize fills his head. It takes a minute or two before he discovers, to his relief, that it comes from the steel carillon tower on the wood line of the hill. Further down Main Street, he ducks into a Kampus Kave with something called “A Money No Object Pizza” advertised in the window, hikes himself onto a stool, orders coffee from the woman reading a comic book behind the counter.

  She looks up. “With or without?”

  Afraid of appearing ignorant, Lemuel replies, “If you please, one of each.”

  The woman snickers. “Now there’s one I ain’t heard before.”

  Warmed by the coffees, one with, one without, Lemuel asks directions to the general store. He winds his khaki scarf around his neck and sets out. Passing a modern, one-story glass-and-brick building, he spots an electric billboard flashing the hour and the temperature and something called “Today’s Money Market Rates.” He notices a line snaking out from the building’s vestibule. Without giving the matter a second thought, he joins it.

  “If you please, what are they selling?” he asks the girl in front of him.

  Her jaw stops working on a stick of gum as she uncorks an earphone from an ear. “Huh? Sorry?”

  “Could you say me what is for sale.” Lemuel gestures toward the vestibule with his chin. “With such a line, it is undoubtedly something imported.” He rummages in his pockets for the small notebook that he always carried in Russia, opens it to the page containing his mistress’s measurements—brassiere size, glove size, shoe size, pantyhose size, hat size, shirt size, inseam, height, weight, her favorite color (crossed out, with a note in Axinya’s handwriting next to it saying “Any color will do”).

  The list arouses in Lemuel an aching nostalgia for the familiar chaos of Petersburg.

  “The line’s for the ATM,” the girl explains in a whiny voice. Plugging the earphone back in her ear, she executes a little shuffle with her feet, almost as if she is dancing to a snatch of music.

  Lemuel turns to a young man who has joined the line behind him. “If you please, what is an ATM?”

  “Automatic Teller Machine.” He notices the bewilderment in Lemuel’s eyes. “It distributes bread, as in money?”

  Lemuel assembles the pieces of the puzzle. The phrase “Money Market” on the electric billboard, an ATM that distributes bread as in money, the twenty or so people queuing patiently despite the minus ten degrees Celsius. What could be more logical? In Russia you queue for bread, in America the Beautiful you queue for another kind of bread. The streets may not be paved with Sony Walkmans in this Promised Land he has come to, but it is nevertheless a country full of wonders.

  Lemuel turns back to the young man to confirm his suspicions. “When my turn comes, bread“—he winks to show that he has caught on to the code—”will be distributed to me?”

  “You have to have plastic.” The boy holds up a credit card for Lemuel to inspect.

  “You need plastic to get bread?”

  “Yeah. That’s the deal.”

  “Where can I acquire plastic?”

  “Inside. But the bank only gives plastic to people with bank accounts.”

  Lemuel eyes the building. “This does not look like a bank.”

  “It looks like what?”

  “It reminds me of a dacha I once saw in the Crimea.”

  “What’s a dacha?”

  “A dacha is where the nomenklatura spend their weekends.”

  “What’s a nomen-whatsis?”

  “In Russia, they are the ones who decide which side is up. If I can offer you a word of advice, young man, in any given country, the single most important thing you need to know is who decides wh
ich side is up.”

  Lemuel startles the young man with an awkward high-five, then slips away from the line to continue exploring the Promised Land.

  Lemuel’s Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds; he knows expressions Raymond Chandler, may he rest in peace, would have to look up if he were alive. High-five. Handle. Money market. Bread. Plastic. Ah, he must not forget the chest off of which you get things. Not to mention doorknob, which is clearly something you do not want to be. Pushing through a door into the Village Store, which takes up the ground floor of a worn, gray, peeling, century-old two-story clapboard building on the corner of Main and Sycamore, Lemuel walks up to the counter. “I am looking for the barbershop,” he tells the teenage clerk, who is trying to pry open the drawer of an old-fashioned cash register with a screwdriver.

  The clerk jerks his head in the direction of the back of the store. Lemuel makes his way between racks of ski jackets and cross-country skis and track suits to a rickety wooden staircase. A large hand with its middle finger rudely extended in the direction of the second floor is painted on the barn-side planks of the wall next to the staircase.

  The steps creak under Lemuel’s weight as he starts up. The silvery snip-snip-snip of scissors comes from behind the curtain that has been nailed up in place of a door at the top of the stairs. Pushing through the curtain, Lemuel finds himself in the barbershop.

  The young woman who was stealing sardines in the avenue of the E-Z Mart aisle is ducking and weaving around a young man sitting in an old-fashioned chrome-and-red-leather swivel chair. Her ponytail flailing, she leaps back to survey her work, then bounds forward and attacks the hair over an ear. Snip-snip-snip-snip. Behind her, beams of speckled sunlight knife through a large plate-glass window with faded letters arched across it. Lemuel sounds out the words, reading from left to right, OT REDNET. It dawns on him that the letters form words, and the words are meant to be read from the outside, his right to left.

  “ ‘Tender …’ Ah!” he mutters. “So this is a Tender To.”

  The woman cutting hair nods toward the straight-backed chairs lined up against one wall. If she recognizes Lemuel from the E-Z Mart, she doesn’t let on. “With you in a min,” she murmurs. Turning back to her client, she plants herself behind the chair and studies him in the mirror. “Yo, Warren? You look almost but not quite beautimous.”

  “My sideburns suck.”

  “You want a second opinion, they make you look sort of … Rhett Butlerish.”

  “You think so?”

  “Hey, you know my motto—’My haircuts grow on you.’ “

  Lemuel jams his scarf into the armpit of his faded brown overcoat, folds it and his jacket over the back of a chair and settles into a seat next to a low table piled high with copies of Playboy. He picks up one that has been read so often its pages have the texture of cloth. Glancing at the barber to make sure he is not being observed, he leafs through it to the center spread. When Petersburg was still Leningrad, he had browsed through a copy of Playboy in a streetcorner flea market. It had been selling for what amounted to a week’s wages, which had not prevented him from purchasing it in order to improve his English. He thought then, he thinks now, that the stark naked ladies smiling out from the magazine’s pages, their pubic patches neatly trimmed into goatees, the nipples on their flawless breasts aimed like artillery at the reader, look about as erotic as frozen fish. The nudity, in his view, is only skin-deep.

  Across the room the sardine thief crouches in front of her client and, using the point of her scissors, delicately snips away the hair protruding from his nostrils. That done, she dusts talc across the back of his neck with a soft brush, then whips off the blue-and-white-striped sheet and shakes it out on the floor, which is covered with a thin layer of hair that swirls around her feet as she moves.

  “Yo,” she summons Lemuel.

  The student hands a bill to the lady barber. “Keep the loose change, Rain. Are you signed on for the Delta Delta Phi bash tonight? I hear they’ve booked some good flicks for the occasion.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

  Suddenly defensive, she says, “ ‘Maybe’ means maybe not.”

  Lemuel hefts himself into the barber chair.

  “Like you must be new in town, right?” the lady barber comments. “So did you take my advice and score something to keep the supermarket honest?”

  Lemuel has been hoping she would recognize him. Flustered, he answers, “I tried to score kvass, but I could not find any on the shelves.”

  The sardine thief shrugs. “It’s a good thing I scored enough for the both of us.”

  With a laugh, she deftly slips the striped sheet over his head, tucks the end under his collar. She stares at him queerly for a moment, then leans forward and gently peels the patch of dried toilet paper away from his chin. Her face is so close to his he can smell her lipstick. Once again he has the impression he has looked into her eyes before.

  He brings up an embarrassed grunt. “I cut myself shaving.”

  “I didn’t think you cut yourself dueling.” Brandishing the scissors in one hand and a comb in the other, Rain surveys the tangle of gray hair on Lemuel’s head. “So what do you want?”

  “A haircut.”

  “No kidding. What kind of goddamn haircut? How do you want to come on? Intellectual? Academic? Athletic? Woody Allenish? Rhett Butlerish? I do a Renaissance man that’ll have you beating off the Renaissance women.”

  ‘There is a faculty lunch,” Lemuel says stiffly. “I am supposed to look like a Homo chaoticus, as opposed to a Homo sovieticus.“

  “I know what a homosexual is. But a Homo chaoticus …”

  “It is man in his role as chaoticist, which means a professor of chaos.”

  “Yo! I get it. You must be one of the suits from the goddamn Institute tucked away in that dilapidated building behind the library. Hey, if you want to look like a professor of chaos, you ought to go and leave your hair like it is.”

  Using her fingers as a comb, she struggles for several minutes to untangle his hair. At one point Lemuel winces.

  “Sorry about that.” She unfurls the half-defiant, half-defensive flag of a smile he saw on her face in the E-Z Mart.

  Tentatively at first, then with growing confidence, she snips away at his hair. “Like you must have a name.”

  “Falk, Lemuel.”

  Rain stops cutting and talks to Lemuel’s reflection in the mirror. “L. Falk. You’re the Russian dude from the talk show last night. I remember you said something about randomness being ignorance. I wasn’t sure what you meant, but it sure sounded goddamn cerebral. Hey, check it out—it’s a small world, right? I mean, I was the person who called in right after you.”

  “You were saying about a G-spot …”

  “So you heard me?”

  “What in the name of God is a G-spot?”

  Rain positions Lemuel’s head and continues snipping away. “I suppose it was discovered by S. Freud and Co. It’s an extremely sensitive spot about the size of a fingerprint on the face inferior of the …” The scissors hesitate. “You’re pulling my leg, right?”

  Lemuel understands that he is not even touching her leg, which means that “pulling someone’s leg” is another idiom he has to reckon with. He also understands that “G-spot” is a sexual term. He tries to recall if his mistress back in Petersburg had one, decides the subject is a mine field and tiptoes around it.

  “Is Rain your first name or your family name?”

  “First. My family name’s Morgan. I happen to have the same name as a dude you’re probably not familiar with, you being Russian and all. J. P. Morgan? No. I didn’t think so. He had something to do with money, which is what I want to have something to do with.” Pursing her lips, she peers over Lemuel’s head at his reflection in the mirror. Apparently satisfied, she begins trimming the other side.

  “How did you acquire a … handle like Rain?”

/>   “I was named after the weather the morning I was born. My full name, it’s written in on my birth certificate, is Occasional Rain, but I only use the Occasional occasionally. I have a kid sister named Partly Cloudy. Hippie parents. Go figure.”

  “And what is the significance of ‘Tender To’?”

  Rain gazes at the

  painted on the window. “I sublet from the Village Store. Tender To’ came with the lease. The way I see it, ‘tender to’ is how women see themselves—we’re tender to men, in the sense that we are gentle and loving and sympathetic to them. But men have a tendency to see us as the tender to—the small boat that services a big yacht.” Rain shrugs. “I try not to let men depress me. I don’t always succeed.”

  Her legs spread wide, her knees flexed, Rain circumnavigates Lemuel’s scalp, chattering away as she shears his hair. “Dudes who don’t know each other usually start off talking horoscope. You’ve heard of the zodiac in Russia, haven’t you? Personally speaking, I don’t believe in all that Capricorn crap. It’s all right for ice-breaking, but after that what are you left with? Ascending this, descending that. I’m a practicing Catholic, though what I practice is not Catholicism. The last time I attended Mass it was because I was hitchhiking through Italy and needed to steal money from the collection basket to eat. I also scored candles and sold them on streetcorners.”

  “If you do not practice Catholicism, what do you practice?”

  “I practice hairstyling, but only part-time—I cut hair to work my way through college. I practice the French horn in the Backwater Marching Band even though I can’t march and I can’t read music, I play by ear. I practice safe sex, which I also play by ear, though these days safe sex more often than not means no sex. I practice home economics, which is my major, and motion-picture history, which is my minor. I practice …”

  Gradually Lemuel finds himself tuning out. He hears her voice droning on, but no longer makes out what she is saying. It is like watching a film without a sound track. From time to time he mutters “Uh-huh,” which is an American expression he has never been able to locate in a dictionary, but everyone seems to understand. It occurs to him that having your hair cut by a lady, and an attractive one at that, is a curiously intimate business. He has not been this close physically to a woman he does not know since the KGB handcuffed him to the lady movie reviewer after his arrest for signing a petition. When Rain leans diagonally across his chest to trim the hair falling over his eyes, he feels the air stir, he gets a whiff of female flesh, of rose-scented toilet water that has almost but not quite worn off. Out of the corner of his eye he inspects her narrow hips, the line of her thigh, her wrists, the shape of her fingernails, the rings she wears on almost every finger, no two are alike. When she turns away to reach for a comb, he takes a long look at her ass, which strikes him as nothing less than glorious, encased as it is in washed-out, skin-tight jeans. At moments her breasts are level with his eyes, and only centimeters away. With his peripheral vision he sees the buttons straining at her shirt, catches the barest glimpse of flesh, the faintest swell of breast between the buttons. She is obviously not wearing a brassiere, something unheard of in the workers’ paradise he fled. Once the soft tip of her breast grazes his ear—or is he merely slipping into an agreeable fiction?