Beneath the Ivory Tower by Warren Adler

Author:Warren Adler [Adler, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

It was nearly three in the morning when he returned to find two messages from Alice, one at eleven and one at midnight, adding a major complexity to his tormented emotional state. He hadn’t felt like that since the defining moment in his courtship with Alice, when he discovered that he, too, had fallen in love. It had arrived in his psyche when he was away from her and found that his yearning to be in her presence had become a powerful magnetic force beyond his comprehension or control. It was only then that he understood Alice’s reckless compulsion to sexually embrace him.

The memory of that moment arrived to torment him, since that was exactly the feeling he had just experienced in his embrace of Rebecca Frank. In the dark emptiness of his hotel room, he tried to shake away his confused emotions as if he were stomping snow off his boots after returning indoors from a fierce blizzard. Unfortunately, no amount of figurative stomping could remove the clinging crystals.

Guilt aside, he was genuinely frightened. When he could not rid himself of it emotionally, he tried reasoning it away. After all, it made little sense. There was no obvious commonality between them. They were diametrically opposed politically, philosophically, even ethnically. She was a Jew, a type he had barely encountered in his life. He had dealings with Jews in his law practice and had known Jews at university and law school, but none had become intimates or real friends or colleagues.

Perhaps he was the one who refrained from pursuing such contacts, and he did admit to himself that he, despite protestations to the contrary, might have been fearful of the breed. He did not consider himself bigoted or prejudiced, but knew he could be indifferent to institutions or country clubs or places where Jews were not welcome. It hadn’t mattered and he felt no guilt in being accepted for membership into these places.

He hadn’t thought about it much and, up to then, had often ignored intolerant remarks, jokes, and derisive insults that referred to Jews as kikes or sheenies or whatever. He rarely, if ever, joined in the derision. He supposed he secretly accepted all the clichés and stereotypes about Jews, although the horrors of the holocaust had moved him, if not to tears, certainly to condemnation.

Her looks, too, enhanced the cliché of the mysterious sexy Jewess embedded somewhere deep in his thoughts. It was a bizarre attraction of opposites. She was the flaming liberal Jew, the archetypical enemy of his mostly conservative views. He tried to put his feelings into the context of opposites attracting. He was the quintessential gentile, blonde, straight-nosed, an uncut Christian. She was the stereotypical Jew, with the curved nose, curly hair, and thick lips of the cartoon Jewess.

His thoughts went round and round as he tried to summon up the poison to kill the feeling. The Jewish thing, he decided finally, was irrelevant, and no amount of rationalization on this topic had any effect at all.

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