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which they have an excellent view of the Rabbi 's apartment through an
open window. They watch the rabbi and his wife dance naked to a rumba , and
then see the two adults, prototypes of their upbringing - she bald and
wigged in blond, he bearded and with his penis slapping in time - begin to
have sex standing up. And here, partly , is the difference between Heming–
way's twenties and Michaels's fifties . This voyeurism of the primal scene is in
contrast to Nick Adams 's many direct confrontations with different aspects
of reality .
As the boys observe the rabbi and his wife engaged , one of them is
masturbating in a "cocktail-mixer motion ," one is watching that , all are
aroused in different ways from their communal experience, and then one of
them slips on the water tank roof; his" ring hooked on a nailhead and the ring
and ring finger remained . The hand, the arm, the rest of him , were gone ."
And at that moment , ina "freak ofecstasy ," the rabbi's wife sees the boys, and
the rabbi, not yet aware of what's really happened , runs to the window and
yells, "Murderers ." The boys get sent to a camp in New Jersey, where, at
night in the bunkhouse , Phillip listens to owls: ''I'd never before heard that
sound, the sound ofdarkness, blooming , opening inside you like a mouth ."
A city boy's vision of death in the natural world, which makes this reviewer
wish that Michaels would mine more deeply the Orthodox heritage underly–
ing his books and spoken of more openly in some of his casual published
prose, a heritage as primitive and edifying as the Old Testament.
In "Getting Lucky, " which must have an eye of overview on Beckett's
Godot,
Liebowitz enters again, about fifteen years older, again riding the
subway. He's now the employee of a scrofulous publisher, who will later
reappear in the book, and as he rides dreamily to work he suddenly feels a
hand, "a soft, inquisitive spider pinching the tongue of his zipper, drag–
ging it toward the iron floor that boomed in the bones of his feet." He tries
to
figure out from the faces around him who's doing this, but doesn't want
to
make a scene . Was this perhaps a new fad , since fads in New York spread
so rapidly? In the seventies, he might be more aggressive and self–
protective, perhaps like the woman who recently yelled at a subway
exhibitionist, "That's the littlest one I've ever seen!" But now Liebowitz
"didn 't think 'filthy need .' He made a bland face. It felt good . Some might
call this 'a beautiful experience .' "
He comes, but is unable to allow the experience
to
end there (for he's
felt that this is the epitome ofNew York sophistication, and he's got for free
something that many New Yorkers would pay for), and he's sure he
recognizes his inamorata in a vacuous-looking, heavily made-up highschool
girl. She gets off at the next stop, and he follows her to the door of a Ladies
Room , takes her arm, and is about to say , "'You know me, don 't you?' " At
