There Is Nothing Like a Brain

Saturday Short Story

The other day, groping on the floor to retrieve a copy of Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous that had slipped from my fingers as my consciousness ebbed, I managed to secure the volume under our lamp table and, snapping up a tad too triumphantly, anointed my sconce with an echoing resonance familiar to cinema buffs who recall the J. Arthur Rank logo. 

Coincidentally, I had just that morning scanned a review in the New York Times about a book on head trauma and its ability to induce synesthesia, a condition that can, from a single blow, produce savant-like genius in the arts, science, and a host of other miraculous mathematical and odd feats of mental gymnastics. I recalled my own brush with just such an exotic cranial adventure, which I have set down, thus providing a written document scientifically engineered to release its full energy when rendered combustible by the common safety match. 

It was a midsummer afternoon, the kind only Turgenev or Strindberg might rhapsodize over aptly with their flair for nature’s variegated splendors. I, on the other hand, a rabid urbanite wedded less to the trilling of larks and crickets and more to the roaring traffic’s boom, to quote the bard of Peru, Indiana, was aimlessly noodling up Madison Avenue serenaded by the warming bleat of a streaking ambulance. And then I heard that voice. 

“Morris! Morris Inseam,” it fluted. I turned, and there she was as I had remembered her from college, older by two decades but still a beauty trumping any of the Praxiteles marble goddesses. 

“Rita Moleskin—what are you doing here?” I said, discreetly pocketing the melting remains of my Snickers in a move Cardini would have envied. 

“I’ve just taken a pad in Gotham,” she replied, her speech saturated with provocative implications. “Hesiod and I are uncoupled, and I’ve rented a flat, looking to start a new life.” 

In college I always had a mad crush on Rita but never seemed to be in the running. Despite my glory days as captain of the Nerf ball team or my sidesplitting comic routines with Ivo, a potato puppet, I could not seem to ignite that hot little double X chromosome with the fatal overbite. It was always the class poet, the class intellectual, the class scientist that managed to negotiate his way into her heart and from there, directly into the back seat of her Nash. 

“I always gave my body freely to unusual men,” she confessed after we repaired to the Bemelmans Bar and sloshed back a brace of potent dividends. “Men of distinction, interesting men. But it wasn’t just me who viewed you as a soporific little pustule,” she explained with vodka-fueled candor. “All the sorority sisters in Phi Delta Buttocks feigned leprosy when you called. I mean, there were so many really fascinating hunks on campus. Remember Harvey Pondscum? Today he’s a highly successful architect—if you’ve ever been to Israel and seen the magnificent clock tower at One Chazerei Square. And Mohandas Crestfallen has a play opening on Broadway: a murder-and-revenge tragedy much like King Lear about the evils of gluten. Not to mention all of my three husbands who were brilliant in their own diverse bailiwicks. Word Spellcheck was a shrink whose specialty was female sexuality. He wrote the definitive book on How to Achieve Orgasm in a Rent-Controlled Apartment. And, of course, my great white hunter, Atticus Wunch. We met on safari in Kenya; honeymooned on the Serengeti. Unfortunately, his rifle jammed, and a charging lion chased him up a tree. Terrified, he remained up the tree for seven years, at which point our marriage became legally annulled. 

“I wish I had known you between husbands,” I said, marveling at her porcelain complexion mottled not a jot by Father Time. 

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” she said. “You wouldn’t have stood a chance. You’ll probably take this the wrong way, but you were always a colorless little roach with no flair or distinction, bland and lackluster as Muenster cheese.” 

“You needn’t hold back,” I said, “no point sugarcoating your appraisal of me with tact and euphemisms.” 

“For me a man must be special,” she went on, pouring down another tumbler of fermented Russian potato potion. “My last husband was an inventor. Designed a flat-screen video that also deboned fish. Made millions. Terrible story. Went into Columbia Presbyterian for a routine appendectomy, and his parachute failed to open. Left me a rich widow, still luscious, a sexually active cougar smothered in specie. What do you do?” 

“I don’t know if you know that papaya stand on Eighty-Sixth street.” I said, arching my eyebrows in the coyly assured manner of Clark Gable but then unable to get them back down. “It’s a very refreshing drink, as is our coconut milk.” 

“You own a papaya stand?” she said incredulously. 

“I don’t exactly own it. See, I never graduated. I had to leave school. If you remember, Paucity Knox got pregnant and I did the honorable thing—removed my fingerprints with acid and fled to Latvia.” 

“And here we are,” she cooed. “After many years, sitting opposite one another over candlelight in a dark bar. Me still desirable, searching for that special off-beat Mr. Right, and you, verging on decrepit but holding your own. Okay, maybe a little paunch, and perhaps the slight onset of osteoporosis, but with that Dynel toupee and vacant stare you’re still the same Morris.” 

“I still love you,” I said. “And as we’re both free, could it be you and me?” Not since the lady sitting in front of me at the Loew’s Pitkin had to be carried out trying to catch her breath from the Marx Brothers horseplay did I hear such titanic laughter. With that she grabbed the tab and rose. 

“I’ve got it,” she said peremptorily. “You’d get tennis elbow jerking enough tropical fruit drinks to cover this mortgage.” 

I thought of putting up a fuss and wrestling the check from her, but discretion suggested a display of brute strength could appear overbearingly macho. 

“I’ll leave the tip,” I said, snapping open my purse and foraging for quarters as several emerging gypsy moths took flight. 

Once outside, I walked her home, chatting about this and that, trying to impress her with tales of my brief stint in the Navy SEALs throwing fish to our men each time they completed a successful mission. At the door to her flat, I contemplated stealing a kiss but noticed whenever I eased closer to her, her fingers tightened around a small canister of pepper spray she carried. She bid me goodbye and explained how much she would have loved to ask me in, but it was late, and thanking me for curing her insomnia, she said goodnight. With that, she opened the door to her apartment and, as in a Weegee photo, interrupted a burglar hastily bagging her valuables. Clutching my arm, she pushed me forward to confront the burly miscreant. It was then I realized fate had dealt Morris Inseam a royal flush. Here was my chance to play David to this marauding Goliath, come off a hero in Rita’s eyes and hopefully get me off the schneid with her romantically. Now my years of kung fu training would harvest lavish nutrients. Lithe as a jaguar I leaped into the classic combat pose, a menacing crouch, arms raised, my hands lethal weapons prepared to chop mercilessly all that dared oppose me. 

I let out a bloodcurdling Japanese war cry, and the last thing I recall was an object, not dissimilar from a frying pan, describing a giant arc and coming to rest on the top of my head, mimicking the driving in of the golden spike that linked our transcontinental railroad. After a brief nap in which I dreamed I was singing the song “Soliloquy” from Carousel to an audience of white mice, I awoke on Rita’s sofa, the culprit having fled. Apart from a knot on my head the size of a kiwi, I was intact. “Poor boy,” Rita consoled, pressing an ice bag to my frontal lobe. 

“When he crowned you with that pan, I must admit I had to fight to suppress a guffaw. I mean, talk about classic slapstick. You went down like a sack of wet meal. Lucky I carry pepper spray, or that bozo’d still be purloining my flatware. If I were you, incidentally, I’d see if I could get a refund on those judo lessons.” 

“I’m fine,” I said, rising above her playful sarcasm. “Fortunately, I’ve got a pretty sturdy noggin. By the way, are you aware that on November 12, 442 BC, which was a Tuesday, Socrates ate lamb and roasted potatoes for lunch in Athens?” 

“What?” she asked. 

“Whereas on that same date in 1856 Dostoevsky lunched on chicken Kiev, borscht, and a side order of buttered carrots.” 

“What are you talking about?” she asked. 

“Give me any person in history and any date,” I said eagerly. 

“What? Why?” 

“Just do it,” I said. 

“Fra Angelico, March 5, 1446,” she shot back. 

“Dinner was a baked sea bass, pasta with broccoli, topped off with tiramisu for dessert, and I believe he had a double espresso.” Now Rita was just staring. “Or take Thomas Aquinas on Wednesday April 7, 1255. Thomas ordered two fried eggs over easy, which he sent back because he specified he wanted the smoked salmon on the side, not chopped in.” 

“My god, Morris, you’re some kind of a savant!” she said. 

“August 5, 1685, a Sunday. Leibnitz wants the chicken pot pie but is trying to watch his weight. He forces himself to order the mixed green salad but then ruins it by getting the house dressing, which is Roquefort.” I was on a roll now. “January 6, a Friday in 1591. Christopher Marlowe—dinner with friends. Goose with applesauce and shredded cabbage. He ate at a German restaurant. Got stuck with the check even though Sir Walter Raleigh made the reservation.” 

Rita was on her feet, tears in her eyes. One could see the look of wonder and admiration. “Oh Morris—I’ve never experienced anything like this! What a gift. What an extraordinary mind.” 

“Monday, July 6, 1604. El Greco orders the egg drop soup but asks them to leave out the MSG.” 

From this impressive epiphany, I can only say it was a straight run to her four-poster and six months of paradise, which only ended when a line drive at Shea Stadium ricocheted off my left hemisphere, returning me to the ranks of the average Joes and sending Rita packing. 

I’m still tapping beverages from the islands on Eighty-Sixth Street, but I’ll lay odds I’m the only one in that line of work who still remembers that on the very Thursday in 1756 when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the Jupiter Symphony, he knocked off a piña colada and two franks with mustard.