The Chiropractor's Assistant, Barry Rachin [bts book recommendations .txt] 📗

table until the knuckles ached and his hatred of Marilyn Moneghan and the entire Christian community became slightly more manageable.

Two weeks. A British fortnight. Elliot had to survive the next three hundred and thirty-six hours - Twenty-one thousand, one hundred and sixty minutes - and hope that, between now and then, which would put him into the middle of June, Marilyn Moneghan would not become formally engaged and with-child. Elliot was crushed, demoralized; the idea of anyone else putting their grubby hands on her body made him physically sick.

Shiker ist a Goy, und nichter ist a Yid. Drunken Cossacks rioting in the streets. That had been his grandmother Esther’s reality. Here Elliot was, less than a century later, fawning over a devout Catholic with breasts the size of melons - a woman who dated other men, humiliated and degraded him with her unwavering edicts.

At the end of the two-week hiatus, Elliot and Marilyn picked up where they left off with no apparent damage to the relationship. There was no further mention of the other man, and Elliot had the good sense not to bring the matter up again. In the bedroom, he might have wished for more variety, but there was something comfortably engaging in Marilyn’s blunt, no-nonsense approach to sex. When the lovemaking was over, Elliot would stare at her lovely body, the ivory skin lathered in a thin film of sweat, and count his blessings. The sight of her with her wide shoulders thrown back and hips rocking gloriously from side to side as she glided naked about the room, took his breath away.


"How can you stomach that awful nonsense!" Friday night they were sitting on the sofa at her Silver Lake apartment. Marilyn was watching The Wheel of Fortune.

She turned and stared at him with mock indignation. "It's just something to pass the time."
Vanna White had just revealed another letter. Marilyn, her lips moving silently, was cycling through a series of words that might unravel the phrase on the game board. She leaned forward, momentarily tuning Elliot out. "I hate these shows," Elliot groused. " They drive me nuts!"
"Would you like me to turn the volume off?"

She reached for the clicker, but Elliot grabbed her hand. "No, that's not necessary. I just don’t grasp what you see in it."

"I could say the same about some of the books you read." She lifted a hard-cover volume from his hands and, fixing her eyes on a paragraph midway down the left-hand page, began to read out loud:

"Deconstructive fiction is parallel to revisionist
history in that it tells the story from the other
side or from some queer angle that casts doubt
on the generally accepted values handed
down by legend. Whereas metafiction deconstructs
by directly calling attention to fiction’s tricks, - "

She stopped reading but kept her eyes glued on the printed matter. "You obviously like this stuff or you wouldn't waste either your money or your time on it."

Elliot could feel his ears burning. She handed him back the book, lowered the volume on the television by half and settled in with what was left of her game show.

"How's the stiffness in your hip?" he said shifting gears. "You never mentioned it after the trip to Horseneck Beach."

"Everything's fine now."

"You went to Dr. Edwards?"

"There wasn't any need. The pain went away."

Elliot ran his finger over the spine of his book. "The red cloth miraculously healed your leg?"
"I'm sure it helped," she said in an offhand manner.

Elliot was more put off by her blind faith, her pig-headed guilelessness, than by the fact that something inexplicable might have occurred. "But there's no proof that anything happened."

"The stiffness is gone." Again, her tone was bland and unquestioning.

"Perhaps it went away of its own accord. A spontaneous remission."

"Yes, that's also a possibility." Her mind was like a body of water flowing easily and smoothly around an immovable object.

"Shiker ist a Goy, und nichter ist a Yid."

"What was that?" Elliot told Marilyn the story of his Grandma Esther.

After he had finished she kissed him on the cheek and said, "Now I understand why you are such a doubting Thomas."

Tears glistened in his eyes, which he made no effort to hide. "I was thinking," he said in a choked voice, "of asking you to marry me."

If the abrupt shift in both his tone and mood caught Marilyn off guard, she revealed nothing. "When were you planning to do that?"

"In a month or so." Elliot rose and went to the window. There was a warm breeze. The smell of summer barbecues and fresh mown grass hung sweetly in the humid air. "I was wondering what your answer might be."

"Hard to say. A month is a long way off and a lot could happen." Marilyn took an elastic band from her pocket, gathered up her hair and secured it in a cropped ponytail. "I suppose that, if things continue as they have, I'd agree to marry you." She rose and joined him by the window. "A word of advice, though. Between now and then, you might want to work at improving your delivery."

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Publication Date: 12-23-2010

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