Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (21 page)

He was on the landing, his arms reaching out for her.

“Did you have lunch?” she asked him. “The truth now.”

“Yup. The machine is fed.”

He untied the bow at the neck of her blouse, eased off her suit jacket. “I’ve had a good working day,” he told her. “Fourteen pages, almost final draft caliber. I’m working smoothly of late, and I don’t think I have to spell out why.”

“Good, that’s good.”

“It’s you, knowing you’ll be here, or if not, at least on the other end of that phone line. I don’t know what I did to deserve you.”

“Oh, I love hearing you say that. Hang this up, will you? I can’t very well leave here all crumpled and such. I must keep up my reputation as the well-dressed Mrs. Jennings who lives in 9E.”

She stepped out of her skirt, spread it over a chair. “A nice lunch with friends, but it seemed endless,” she told him. “I couldn’t wait to get here. I love you. Oh, I’m so glad you’re working well. Did you know I’m a very proficient typist? Can I do your manuscript?”

“You mean in about two years?”

“Oh? I guess I didn’t realize — ”

“It could be two years, Chris.”

“Hell, that doesn’t
throw
me. I just — well, I’d just like to help you in some way.”

“You’re doing that.”

“Sometimes I think — ”

“Don’t think now, okay?”

“All right, I’ll think tomorrow.”

“What time do you have to leave?”

“Five. Or so.”

“Would you stay on through dinner sometime?”

“Yes, I’ve already decided on that. Sometime soon. I promise, Jack.”

“That’s nice.”

“We’ll have a lovely time. Make room for me, you pig. Don’t hog the whole bed.”

“I thought you’d never get here.”

“So did I.”

• • •

It was not all screwing, though, not by a long shot. It was long, companionable walks, and going to the Abigail Adams house over near York Avenue, to refresh themselves with glowing woods and winking chandeliers and artifacts of the past, or stopping in for a movie at one of the art theaters, or window shopping, or the Cooper Hewitt — any one of a number of things, infinite variety.

Jack introduced her to Yorkville, the Yorkville he knew, and she helped him food shop at Schaller & Weber, where he ordered in German:
“Eine pfund süss Butter,” “Halbe pfund Schinken, bitte.”
It was certainly more than a stone’s throw from where he lived, but he said it was worth it for the quality of the food, with which she heartily agreed, sampling the ham and the pure, sweet butter.

There was also, on Third Avenue, a bakery, Mrs. Herbst, where they went occasionally for its adamantly old-world atmosphere. It was many-mirrored, with a lincruster ceiling, its vast front counter offering all sorts of goodies, like Demel’s in Vienna. Mrs. Herbst was really Vienna transplanted, a chip off the old block, and you never, ever heard English spoken there. Christine knew she would never dare to go in alone, she was sure she’d be shown the door if she had the temerity to ask for some of the bakery goods in English, as the women behind the counter were so intimidating.

But they did have mouth-watering wares: Rigo Yanchi, Dobos torte and Sacher torte, kipferln, Milles feuilles, pig’s ears and Florentines and what all. In the rear were a few booths and tables, painted in a French blue, a dewy red rose in a bud vase on each. There you sat, after selecting your rich tidbit from the counter, chatting over Kaffee mit Schlagobers, whiling away a half hour.

New places for Christine, new scenes and ambiances. The Cafe Geiger, on Eighty-sixth Street, was another discovery for her. Jack said he really preferred Eine Kleine Konditorei, but he get a kick out of saying to her over the phone, “How about meeting me at the Geiger counter?”

The Geiger too had its big, overflowing display of sinful pastries for the Yorkville sweet tooth, its glass case presided over by starched and officious ladies with accents you could cut with a knife. Jack said they too were horrid if you didn’t speak German, tried to pretend you weren’t there, but then that was true of most of the tradespeople in this area, they looked down their noses at “foreigners,” as if Yorkville was a separate and sanctified principality, like Vatican City.

Beyond the Geiger counter there were three or four tables for someone who wanted beer and a sandwich, or just a cup of coffee, then a short flight of steps led up to the main dining room, quite large and with every table swathed in a white linen cloth. The napkins were linen as well, very large and smelling slightly of the laundry room. The men and women dining at these tables were distinctly middle-European, as if they had just been imported from Berlin or Vienna or Munich, and they ate heavy lunches, taking their sweet time about it and conversing in German or Wienerische or Hungarian. Mostly these people looked coldly arrogant, with the women wearing hats that seemed peculiarly out of style. The men were brusque and peremptory when giving their order.

Jack said to listen for someone asking for Wiener Schnitzel. “Why?” Christine asked him. He said they all sounded like Peter Sellers doing his Viennese turn, but particularly with that dish. “They say ‘buttocked,’ he told her. “Wiener Schnitzel viss buttocked noodles … ssss.”

Her laugh sounded like a small explosion in the quiet restaurant. There were generally some thirty-odd diners at the white-clothed tables during a lunch hour, but their conversations were habitually in low tones, as if some secret agent might be listening, or perhaps a member of the Gestapo. Except for an occasional ebullient gentleman who had imbibed too freely on Löwenbrau, the Geiger dining room was stiffly genteel, many a pinkie extended with the coffee cup.

It was another world, really, though Jack said much of it was going by the board, with speculators and developers buying up whole blocks of the old tenements to replace them with highrises. “I never gave much thought to it when I found myself down here,” Christine confessed. “I just noticed that it was rather swarming, and quite ugly — you know, a Coney Island air. I guess I thought of it in terms of an eyesore. You’ve made me see it differently, and I enjoy it very much. It’s like something out of Grosz, particularly in the stores and restaurants.”

“It was a hotbed of Nazi Bunds at one time, of course. World War II. We weren’t around then, but I guess the Teutonic mentality at its worst was very much in evidence. Well, never mind, you try to forget about that, and the thing is it’s so damned easy. Anyway, I like it down here because it’s not chic and glossy and artificial. They’re mostly working class people, rough and ready, and you can believe New York’s still a neighborhood kind of place, there’s something so inhuman about the rest of it.”

“There’s Ninth Avenue and little Italy, the Village, still, or a lot of it, the West Village.”

“Yeah, but where you live, where you walk around, you want a certain chummy coziness. Well, a home ground, like the
arrondissements
of Paris.”

Jack said he liked to walk along Second Avenue from Eighty-sixth to Seventy-second Street on a Sunday morning. “When it’s sunny, particularly. Then you get the feeling of old times, the turn of the century, Edward Hopper. Old red brick buildings, like some small town in middle America, and not very many people on the street. It must have been nice years ago, the clop-clop of horses drawing a milk wagon, the steam of fresh horse dung on cobbles — I like the smell of horse dung.”

“I guess I do too, because I like the smell of stables. I used to go horseback in Central Park — oh, for about a year. With some friends. There was a riding academy on the West Side, I suppose it’s still there. I wore jodhpurs, I looked pretty snazzy.”

“I bet you did, you little witch.”

“And I loved the smell in the place, I thought it was very refreshing. Very earthy.”

“I like the smell of fresh gasoline too.”

“As to that, I’m not sure.”

“Oh, it’s pure and pungent, it’s only from the exhaust that it becomes putrid.” He pointed out a cubbyhole of a store, its window dim and fly-specked. “That’s my typewriter place, where I get it overhauled when necessary.”

“Is that often, Jack?”

“Not now, the one I have is new. Or newish. The old one was a Smith Corona, I was very attached to it, but I worked it to death and the keys started popping off. First one, and I had that replaced, then a second one I had to see to. In the end, six of them gave up the ghost, just flew off. That was it. I think I got around fifty dollars off the new one, which was gratifying, and now I’m off the hook.”

“Use it in good health.”

“Both mine and the machine’s, I hope. This guy’s an old German, a character, he’s straight out of Graham Greene. So’s the shop. You get the feeling it’s a ‘safe’ place, where spies and counterspies shamble in with hats pulled over their eyes and weather-stained trench coats. Some password or other. ‘The cuckoo sings in the spring …’ Eyes meeting eyes and a quick exchange of something — a microfilm concealed in a tube of toothpaste. Then the guy in the trench coat slips out a back door.”

“Does the typewriter man look like Sidney Greenstreet?”

“No no, not at all. He’s small and slight and short, with a goatee and heavy eyebrows. He looks quite a bit like Dr. Only.”

“Dr. Who?”

“My father’s eye doctor. Piercing gaze. I always found Dr. Ohly a bit sinister.”

“Jack, you’re a hell of a lot of fun.”

“I try,” he said modestly.

Carrying packages, leaving Yorkville and heading for Sixty-first Street. Up the stone steps and then the inside carpeted stairs. Setting the packages down and putting the groceries away in Jack’s fridge, in the overhead cabinets, the toilet things in the bathroom. The newspaper,
TV Guide, New Yorker
in the magazine rack, then sitting down opposite each other at the kitchen table, tired from their ramblings and chatting idly.

Something said would lead to a silly joke or anecdote or reminiscence. Sometimes a
very
silly joke, springing into Jack’s head in what seemed an arbitrary way, but which was generally connected to a previous observation. “This young girl came home at seven in the morning after staying out all night. She was confronted by her fuming father. ‘Good morning, daughter of Satan,’ he says. ‘Good morning, father,’ daughter replies.”

“I heard that when I was I think about ten years old.”

“Screw you.”

“No, screw you.”

“I said it first.”

“All right, you win. What led up to that dumb story?”

“Lets see — oh yes, you said it was a wise child who knew its own father.”

“Reasonable enough,” she conceded.

Palindromes, he was fond of palindromes. The only one Christine knew before she met Jack was the classic “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” He had an awesome collection, of which her favorite was “Naomi, sex at noon taxes, I moan.” “Who makes these up, I wonder?” she pondered.

“People with nothing better to do.”

“I guess. Did you ever try your hand at it?”

“Sure. I failed. It just kept me awake that night, trying to work something out. It’s bad enough as it is. I write dialogue in my sleep. I’m not kidding. In my sleep I see typed sheets of paper. Occupational hazard.”

He was a wonderful, endlessly absorbing companion. There was a bird in residence in some tree or other, he told her. “I can hear it in the mornings. First comes the sneeze from next door. Then the bird starts in. Same old refrain, tirelessly repeated.
Stop it, stop it, stop, stop, stop
, it says. It’s like some prissy housewife being goosed by her spouse. “Stop it, stop it for goodness sake, Henry, not in front of the children.”

He had an imaginative ear. Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, he informed her, had a passage in which the instruments clearly sounded the words “Good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon.”

“I perforce have to wait for it,” he said. “‘And good afternoon to you, Felix,’ I respond. It would be impolite not to return the greeting.”

Entertaining him in turn, she did her takeoffs of Brando and Barbara Walters, Jackie Onassis, John Belushi. “Cagney?” she said disdainfully when he suggested it. “Everyone does Cagney, I wouldn’t lower myself.”

Preludes and preambles to lovemaking, and after the lovemaking sitting up against the pillows, hair tumbled, played out and resting, a head on a shoulder, clasp of hands. It was good to be in bed with him, not doing anything even, just being close to him in his skin: she felt a new respect for bodies, the vulnerable bodies under the clothing, their demands and bothersome functions, and the restraints imposed on them, the pretenses respectability and taste dictated.

You said of someone that he/she had a good mind, but you didn’t say they had a good bod, unless it was a film star or a stripper or Mr. America. Suits and ties met dresses and scarves: you recognized a friend on the street from something he/she was wearing. And all the while women walked about with Maxi pads, or a tampon whose string dangled: you never were aware of that. Men got in the wrong position and the apparatus became uncomfortably malplaced, but if they had good manners they didn’t publicly squirm it back, so you never knew that either. You told people you had a headache, a tummyache, but you would never announce that you had a sore rectum or an irritated vulva: you might be in agony with a need to urinate, but you wouldn’t consider it legitimate distress even if it hurt very much, and you’d go to any lengths to hide your plight, probably let your bladder burst, requiring a hospital stay. Only small children were not ashamed of the machinery of their bodies, a state quickly outgrown as they learned, from their elders, to hold it in low esteem.

Decorum was one thing, shame another. Or contempt, devaluation. It was because Christine, for really the first time, was able to shed herself in lovemaking unabashedly and with a hearty enthusiasm, that her preoccupation with the body which gave her such overwhelming pleasure —
carnal
pleasure — was so profound. Perhaps, she thought, she had grown up to it. There had never been anything wrong with her libido: she could be strongly attracted, but it was the wanting more than the getting that lured her. The getting generally had failed to measure up. She had a short attention span, it seemed, as in mathematics, when it came down to sexual performance.