Kissing in Manhattan (4 page)

Or perhaps not, thought Jacob, looking out at his reception. Perhaps the power and vibrance that shone so exquisitely in these guests lay dormant inside Rachel too. Jacob lived in the Preemption apartment building on West Eighty-second, and he planned for Rachel to move in with him after the honeymoon. But how long would she be content there? Maybe a month into the marriage she would demand magic: a move to the Upper East Side, tickets to
Carmen,
papaya for breakfast. What if she suddenly decided that California was an important place? Or craved oysters? Or wanted to discuss Churchill?

Rachel squeezed Jacob’s hand. “You look worried.”

“I’m not,” said Jacob.

“You’re lying. Stop worrying.”

Jacob looked at his new wife. He looked at her sparkling gown, her cleavage, her rather ugly eyebrows.

Rachel shrugged. “I’m just a girl,” she said. “You’re just a guy.”

Thank God, thought Jacob.

The legend of Jacob’s bath began later that night, in the mountains.

Jacob and Rachel’s honeymoon lodge was called Blackberry House. It was a compromise between a Vanderbilt retreat and a contemporary bed-and-breakfast. The house itself was vast and wooden and just an hour south of Canada. The ground-floor common room was paneled and studious. It featured bearskin rugs, racks of antlers, and a chessboard with pieces cut from tusk. The bedrooms, however, were warm and dear, with quilts on the beds, lighted candles, and, in the bathrooms, free-standing tubs with brass lion’s feet. In Jacob and Rachel’s room—the Blackberry Room—there was an antique loom, and a giant dormer window that looked out over Raquette Lake. Outside this window, on the roof, in the moonlight, was a skunk.

“There’s a skunk out there,” said Rachel. She still wore her wedding dress. She pointed at the roof, looked out at the night. It was spring in the Adirondacks, but the windowpanes were cold.

“It’s two in the morning,” said Rachel. “There’s a skunk outside our window.”

Perhaps Jacob should have been thinking about consummation. Instead, he was wondering how a skunk could possibly scale a three-story building.

“Mephitis mephitis,”
said Rachel. “That’s Latin for the common skunk.”

For the
Times,
Rachel had once checked animal facts.

“How’d he get up there?” said Jacob.

The man and his bride watched the skunk. The skunk was black and white and did not currently smell bad.

Rachel removed her shoes, rubbed her feet. “I don’t know how romantic this is. A
Mephitis mephitis
outside our window on our honeymoon night.”

Jacob didn’t reply.

“I’m going to take a bath,” said Rachel.

She went into the bathroom, closed the door. Jacob stayed looking at the rodent. The skunk wasn’t moving. It was planted five feet from the window, in plain view of Jacob and Rachel’s nuptial bed.

Jacob heard the chirp of pipes, the running of water. His wife, he knew, was up to something feminine. As he thought this, Jacob decided to get rid of the skunk.

“Honey?” called Rachel. “What’re you doing?”

Steam leaked from the crack under the bathroom door.

“Nothing,” said Jacob.

He removed his good leather shoe, put it on his left hand like a shield. With his right hand Jacob opened the window, slowly, just a few inches. He stuck his left hand outside.

“Go away, skunk,” whispered Jacob, waving his shoe. “Hit the road.”

The skunk looked at Jacob. It seemed terribly bored.

“Fuck off,” hissed Jacob. “Scram.”

He glared at the skunk. He waved his shoe carefully.

“Shoo, now,” he said.

Jacob kept waving his shoe. He didn’t want the skunk to fall to its death, necessarily. He just wanted it to move to a different part of the roof, to eavesdrop somewhere else. As it turned out, the skunk did neither of these things. Instead, it pulled a one-eighty and sprayed Jacob’s shoe.

“Oh, shit.”

Jacob pulled his hand out of the shoe, yanked himself back inside. He closed the window as quickly as he could, leaving his shoe outside. But it was too late.

“Uh-oh,” said Rachel from the bathroom.

“I’m sorry,” called Jacob.

He stood up, plugged his nose. The stench was unbearable.

“You’d better come in here,” said Jacob’s wife.

I’ve ruined it, thought Jacob. I’ve ruined our honeymoon.

“Come on,” said Rachel.

She was standing, wrapped in thick white towels. One towel wrapped around her hair, turban style. The other was fixed over her breasts and came down to her thighs. There was a scab on her knee.

“We’d better plug the door,” said Rachel. She took an extra towel from a shelf, laid it across the crack under the door.

“I tried to get rid of the damn thing,” said Jacob. “It sprayed my shoe.”

Rachel had been in the tub. She was wet beneath her towels.

“I’m sorry,” said Jacob.

“It’s all right,” said Rachel.

The air was fogged. The tub was still full. Jacob looked at his woman, at the way she’d wrapped herself in towels. It was a manner in which women often wrapped themselves in towels, one for the hair, one for the body. It wasn’t original, but it was something men never did. Jacob liked it.

“Um.” Jacob blushed. After all, under the towels was his wife.

“He only sprayed my shoe,” said Jacob. “He didn’t get me.”

Rachel giggled. She wrinkled her nose.

“He got you,” she said.

Jacob laughed. Rachel laughed too. They fell silent, watching each other.

“Maybe you should get in the tub,” suggested Rachel.

Jacob panicked. He’d heard about women who made love in bathtubs.

“I don’t know about that,” he said.

“You smell,” said Rachel. “Undress, and get in the tub.”

Rachel smiled. Jacob took her smile to mean she wouldn’t get kinky. So he relaxed. He undressed slowly, letting her see him. He got in the tub.

Rachel picked up Jacob’s clothes, threw them outside the door. She closed the door, knelt by the tub.

“You’re . . . um.” Jacob was eye level with Rachel’s bosom. “Are you going to . . .”

“I’m not getting in there with you,” said Rachel.

“Oh, fine,” said Jacob quickly.

“I’ve already had my bath.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t take long baths.”

“Yes. No problem.”

Rachel laid her cheek on the side of the tub. She looked at Jacob’s body in the hot, clear water. She saw all of him.

“Rachel,” said Jacob. He was embarrassed now, sitting in the tub, water to his neck. He felt like a boy.

Some of Rachel’s hair fell from her towel, mingled with the water. She reached out, stroked Jacob’s neck.

“I love your neck,” she said. “Your neck and your jaw.”

Jacob let her touch his face. She was his wife.

“I love you,” he said.

Rachel sighed happily.

“I do,” said Jacob.

Rachel stopped rubbing Jacob’s jaw.

Now what? thought Jacob.

Rachel picked up a white cotton washcloth. She lathered it on a bar of soap. The soap smelled like wintergreen.

“What’re you doing?” asked Jacob. He kept his eyes on the washcloth.

Rachel rubbed the washcloth till it foamed. She arranged the cloth over her hand, dipped her hand under the water. She massaged her husband’s chest.

“Be quiet,” said Rachel. “I’m going to give you a bath.”

Jacob obeyed his wife. He remained quiet, and she did what she said she would. She gave her man a bath.

In the bath’s early stages Jacob laughed. He had ticklish underarms, and he was self-conscious about his body. But as Rachel proceeded to wash him head to toe, Jacob stopped laughing. His wife was committed to her action. She scrubbed her new husband carefully. She was firm with his hands—which had been tainted by skunk—and hard on his feet. She worked thoroughly on his torso, but she was tender with his groin. Finally, overwhelmed with the care being shown him, Jacob closed his eyes. A mellow joy stole over him. For weeks he’d been planning for tonight—for his conquest of Rachel’s body—but now his plans faded. He still wanted to make love to her in the bed, but right now something simpler was happening. Rachel’s fingers were tending his skin, grooming him wetly, kindly.

“You like this?” whispered Rachel.

Jacob kept his eyes shut. His body had gone over to goose bumps, and his mouth came open in surprise. Jacob felt sure, suddenly, that Rachel had never bathed another man.

“Hmmm.” Rachel’s throat was pleased.

“You like this,” she whispered.

The bulk of Jacob and Rachel’s honeymoon was their business. But one warm fact remained: after a meal and a walk in the forest Rachel gave Jacob a bath every night. Within three days husband and wife were hooked on the ritual. They came to enjoy it not as a luxury, a sign of some new, candied life, but as a necessity. It was as if Jacob had been climbing a mountain all his years and had come now to a decent peak, where there was a woman and a well of water. The woman was there to strengthen the man, to quench his thirst, and the man loved the woman and he was grateful. It wasn’t about equity: Jacob never bathed Rachel. He was ready to perform a lifetime of chores for her, but this isn’t about that. This is about the bath: the legend.

Jacob and Rachel returned to Manhattan. Rachel returned to checking facts, Jacob to writing jingles. They moved into Jacob’s place in the Preemption apartment building.

The Preemption was located at West Eighty-second and Riverside Drive. It was a cryptic old brownstone, with gargoyles on the roof, and it loomed over the Hudson River like a watchtower. Inside, the Preemption was special for three reasons. It featured the oldest working Otis elevator in Manhattan, a hand-operated antique with mahogany doors at each floor. The Preemption also featured a peculiar doorman, a Negro man named Sender. Sender was tall, wiry, and dignified. He wore a blue suit like a train conductor, and he never seemed to age or leave his post. Some Preemption residents guessed that Sender was not quite fifty, some that he was over one hundred, but nobody could beat him at arm wrestling. He had an oval scar on his forehead between and just above his eyes. Whispers went around every October that Sender had been born with a third eye, and that the doctors had removed it from his forehead when they cut his umbilical cord.

The third, fatefully unique characteristic of the Preemption was the fact that Elias Rook, the building’s originaldesigner and owner, had installed freestanding bathtubs in every apartment. Elias Rook finished the building in 1890, but he was an endowed, strict Presbyterian, and he had eternity in mind when he fashioned the Preemption. As a result the apartment floors and walls were cut from the sturdiest oak. The glass on each vaulted window was inches thick. The tubs, however, were the masterpieces. They were cast iron with white enamel coatings, brass pipes, and brass fittings. If a fact checker like Rachel ever bothered to research the Preemption, she might discover the incredible truth that not a single resident had ever, in half a century, suffered foul water, broken pipes, or even crumbled enamel in their tubs. Of course, over the years, most tubs had been converted into showers, Jacob’s included. It was against Preemption rules to remove the original tubs—which were cemented into place anyway—so most residents hired plumbers to raise a pipe like a mast and fit the mast with a shower head. These people—the majority—then fenced their tubs in with plastic curtains, showered quickly, and returned to the world. But a few Preemptioners never erected showers. They stewed themselves slowly in their tubs, their old-fashioned cauldrons, and they thought of Sender, and they pondered the Preemption’s elevator, which also never broke, and they were not afraid.

The day Jacob and Rachel Wolf returned from the Adirondacks, Jacob dismantled his shower. From then on, every night of their marriage, Rachel bathed Jacob. She bathed him on November 20, 1953, the night their first son, Elias, was born. It wasn’t something Rachel told her family or the doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital. She just did it: she checked intoSt. Luke’s in the morning, gave birth to Elias, and was home by nightfall to bathe her husband.

Rachel made it home to bathe Jacob, too, on April 8, 1956, the day her mother died of a brain aneurysm. She bathed Jacob on every Sabbath, and on Jewish holidays. She bathed him during full moons and the World Series, bathed him when she was angry and when he was cruel. Jacob, for his part, made it home for his bath every night. On July 30, 1958, the night he received an award at Rockefeller Center for his Jeremiah’s Mustard jingle, Jacob refused a fifth beer at Duranigan’s and caught a cab home for his bath. On August 23, 1969, in a hotel room at the Plaza, fifty-year-old Jacob Wolf ended his affair with Broadway pianist Melodie “Three-Four Time” Sykes. He rushed home, convulsing with sobs, and climbed into the tub for his wife.

For decades nobody knew the secret, the private font, of Jacob and Rachel’s marriage. Their parents didn’t know. Neither did their neighbors, or their children, Elias and Sarah. These latter figured, all through their adolescence, that their parents were simply horny. They watched Jacob and Rachel disappear every night into the master bedroom, which connected to the bathroom. When Elias and Sarah heard tub water running, they assumed that sex was being achieved, and that they themselves had been conceived in warm water. This led to some teenage confusion for Elias, who deduced that young women were at their most pliable and libidinous if you scuttled them into a shower and soaked them down. Sarah, of course, was like minded, right up until college. If a boy or man ran hot water anywhere within two rooms of her, she collapsed into giggles or scampered off in fright.

The legend of Jacob’s bath went public in January 1991. Jacob was seventy-two, Rachel was sixty-five, and the Gulf War was on. Jacob’s mother had died five years before, and his father, the mighty Sherman Wolf, was ninety years old. Sherman had shrunk almost a foot. He lived now at Benjamin Home, a convalescence house on the Upper East Side. The facilities at Benjamin Home were extravagant. The beds were firm, with good wooden frames, the halls were carpeted, the nurses kind. Sherman Wolf growled at the old women who played canasta in the lounge. He followed the war proceedings religiously on his television and in the papers. In his heart, though, Sherman was anxious. The world had remained Big and Tall, but he had not. His lungs ached when he took deep breaths. He suffered from arthritis, poor hearing, and cold spells that made his limbs shiver. On top of it all there was a madman in Iraq, and Sherman was convinced that this madman would soon attack Benjamin Home and, more specifically, Sherman himself.