Page 124 - Contrast2012

glances at articles on aerospace engineering while my mother looked
longingly at Father McDowell and nodded at her favorite bits of doc-
trinal wisdom as they came to her, sometimes shouted and sometimes
whispered, but rarely just spoken. Various other Jews and Jewesses made
their way into the synagogue, none of which struck me with as much
interest as the angry young heathen and the pretty girl. I'll admit I rarely
saw women as attractive as her back in my church-going days=-although
perhaps they were there and I was too busy burying my head in Popular
Mechanics to notice.

The chazzan, who was handsome, distinguished, and graying
around the temples, opened his mouth and released an incantation of
beautiful notes married to guttural foreign utterances. He was a pleasure
to listen to, and for a moment, I was awestruck at the beauty of his
song, incomprehensible to me though it was. The pretty girl in front of
me leaned her head back, letting her long curtain of lustrous black hair
flow down behind the back of her seat. I wondered if it was considered
sinful to fantasize sexually in a synagogue-or, at the very least, if it
was considered distasteful. I couldn't help myself no matter how hard I
tried: I pictured how her tits would look without that ugly gray sweater,
and I pictured her bending over in front of me and exposing her asshole
to me. I pictured us making love on the wooden pew, which seemed
needlessly uncomfortable, and so, in my head, I switched the locale to
some ugly bed in a dingy hotel room in Jersey. I pictured the peeling
wallpaper and the tacky painting of a flower on the wall-or maybe a
bowl of fruit-and I imagined the possibility that I'd accidentally forget
the "DO NOT DISTURB" sign on the doorknob, and that room ser-
vice would accidentally confuse the room number of an order and barge
in on us with a tray of food-God forbid they'd bring her something
non-kosher-and there we'd be, together in bed, completely unclothed
and committing an act of adultery under the watchful eye of the angry,
wrathful Old Testament God.

I think the Old Testament punishment for adultery is death
by stoning.

The thought of seeing this lovely woman pummeled by rocks
put a damper on my arousal. Bored by the rabbi's droning, I opened up
Popular Mechanics. There was an article about fuel efficiency in foreign
cars.

122 I contrast