JD (2 page)

The sensible thing cost a lot of money, if you didn't want a butcher. I knew Jonathan didn't have any cash. At lunch I looked over at my writer friend and wondered if his proletarian epic was still paying royalties. I skimmed through my Smith yearbook, mockingly named
The Madeleine
, trying to recall if any of my friends were rich, wishing I had been just a little nicer to Bunny McCormick, the reaper heiress. I tried to write to Mom, leaving so many crumpled drafts in the waste-basket that Jonathan asked if I was trying my hand at poetry again, the smug son of a bitch. I tried to call Daddy, went down four flights to the pay phone in the front hall clutching my nickel, and then imagined my pathetic narrative echoing up the stairwell.

I went outside to the booth next to the drugstore, recited my parents' number, Tuxedo 9-6787, to the operator, declared that I was calling collect, and then burst into tears. I dropped the earpiece and stood in the booth crying, while the operator's faint voice squawked on and passersby peered in and made up stories about me. Some of them possibly accurate: surely I was acting out one of the few classic plots that end with a young woman weeping in a phone booth. I wasn't, not exactly, crying because of my predicament, or crying for the unMickey. It was the phone number, Tuxedo 9-6787, that I had given out so often to boys who wanted a date, that I had always repeated for the operator on Sunday nights when I would call home from Smith. Yes, in Baltimore, operator, that's my number.

That was my phone number, I had no other number. That was my home, and I needed to go to Baltimore and endure the clucking and we-told-you-so and let them help me, if not with an abortion then with one of those genteel boarding houses for the well-to-do
knocked-up. Some pretty little place in the country operated by a genteel woman very like Mrs. Wedgwood, my housemother at Smith. At the end of my (ahem) trip abroad, the relict of my unfortunate lapse would be whisked away, an unperson to me but a real person in the world, named by somebody else.

Then I would go home, no one the wiser, and the nice boys I had met at coming-out parties or college mixers would start calling Tuxedo 9-6787. I would marry one of them, walk down the aisle at St. David's—wearing white, no one the wiser. For all the world as if there weren't, somewhere, a child with my blue eyes and, to some poor couple's bewilderment, Jonathan Ascher's nose.

I was still in the phone booth, a little giddy in the way you can be when you've just left off blubbering. I pictured an infant with Jonathan's prodigious nose and smiled. I don't mean that I suddenly wanted that infant—it was just as naggingly inconvenient as it had been—nor that I felt any affection for Jonathan's nose or any other organ of the-man-who-got-me-in-trouble. I think I smiled at the thought that my comical hybrid could only have been begotten in New York, that I had been knocked up by a Jewish intellectual in Greenwich Village after too much muscatel. And I was not not not going to be dragged back to Baltimore, much less drag myself back.

I didn't decide to keep the baby. If the man who was waiting outside the phone booth, wearing a homburg on a sizzling August afternoon and ostentatiously checking his watch every few seconds—if he had reached in his breast pocket and thrust at me the five hundred I needed, I would probably have skipped straight off to Dr. Limbo. I only decided that what was happening, however it resolved itself, was my life. My life wasn't over, I was living it.

A
couple of indecisive weeks later we had dinner at Café Lucien, in the Village. Café Lucien, with the fireplace and the candlelight and the old-fashioned entrees for two—rack of lamb, chateaubriand, it didn't matter. Sharing a hunk of meat was once a prelude to romance; taking a woman to the Lucien was, for our generation, about as brazen as a boy of today announcing to a girl that he has brought his condoms. Possibly Jonathan had some postprandial plans, but we were splurging that night because of two miraculous events.

Jonathan had finally landed a real job, a full-time lectureship at the School for Liberal Studies on Ninth Street. The SLS: Vienna West, people called it, there were so many famous refugees. Jonathan would teach comparative literature instead of drilling English into immigrants in night school. He was starting right away because somebody had dropped dead and they needed Jonathan to take over his sections. At a salary of three thousand five hundred dollars!

Then a couple of days later Jonathan's Uncle Sidney died. A cousin called with the news, we were at the building signing the lease for his apartment practically before they'd borne the body out. A weird apartment, with a salon that had once been used for theosophy meetings and that Uncle Sidney had carved up into three bedrooms—each the size of a bath towel. But the wartime housing squeeze in New York was just easing. To find a vacant three-bedroom in Chelsea in 1951! A bedroom for us, a study for Jonathan, a room for … some other use.

Jonathan had to get his brother, Bernie, in Boston to wire the deposit, promising he could pay back ten or twenty a month. Jonathan said it was humiliating, borrowing money from his adenoidal little brother. I heard myself answering that he, too, could have been a neurologist. “Yeah, and you could have been a taxi dancer,” he said. “Still could, if you lost a little weight.” I laughed dutifully and didn't explain why I was gaining weight.

Was it time to tell? We could manage now, we had the money and the space, if Jonathan just happened to be interested in raising a baby. I didn't think at the time that the way to my baby's life had been cleared by a couple of deaths, some poor refugee at SLS and old Uncle Sidney. Only that the life was possible now, in a crude practical way. If Jonathan happened to be interested.

At Café Lucien we each had two martinis and a shrimp cocktail and a tossed salad with chunks of blue cheese the size of golf balls. Jonathan sprang for a bottle of wine, following what I would learn was his iron rule: order the
second
cheapest bottle on the list, so they won't think you're a tightwad. I was over my morning sickness, which Jonathan had never detected. Well, it mostly happened when I was at the office anyway. That evening I worked my way through an
Epicure
-sized repast without gastric incident, eating for (probably, not yet
certainly) two and listening to Jonathan rattle on about politics—the Korean War, maybe, or whether Truman would run again next year, in which case we were positively going to vote for Norman Thomas.

I didn't suggest that perhaps I might exercise my franchise all by my little self. I just went on shoveling in the garlic bread, until at last the dread chateaubriand for two appeared, on a plank the size of my drawing table and surrounded by the annual agricultural output of New Jersey. I took one look and sprinted to the powder room. A false alarm, as it happened, I recovered as soon as the chateaubriand was out of sight, but I stayed in the powder room a minute or two, pressing a damp cloth to my forehead. The attendant gave me a hand towel, and I realized I'd left my handbag at the table. “Never mind, honey,” she clucked. “You can catch me next time. When's the blessed event?”

I said, “April.” As casually as that. Yet as I stepped out of the ladies' room, I had for the first time the sensation, not of being pregnant, but of being expectant.

Jonathan had vacuumed up his half of the steak and was starting an incursion on mine. He looked up and said, thoughtfully, “You okay?”

“I guess,” I said. “I've had a little nausea lately. Off and on.”

“Oh yeah?” he said, without interest. He chewed, looked around the room. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly. He swallowed. I nodded.

“Hm,” Jonathan said. He gazed into the unlit fireplace for a while. Finally he said, “What the hell.” He didn't go all misty, but at least he didn't mutter—as I had a few weeks earlier, sitting at my desk—“Oh shit.” But then, weeks earlier, there hadn't been a job or an apartment.

My appetite returned. I polished off my half of the steak and its attendant produce so fast that Jonathan stared at me. Then he poured me the last of the claret, lit my cigarette, and said, “I guess maybe we ought to think about …” Even Jonathan recognized this was too brusque. He cleared his throat, took my hand, and said, “I want you to be my wife.”

I finished my wine and took a drag of my cigarette—what innocent mothers we were back then! I had, amazingly, the presence of mind to ask: “What if I—will you want to be my husband if it turns out there's no baby?” I didn't specify how things might
turn out
that way.

Only in retrospect does it seem to me that I was turning Mickey into a test. What would I have done if Jonathan had failed to supply the right answer? As it was, he had to think a good while—still absently holding my hand.

“I will,” he said. So unMickey became irrevocably Mickey. Or past my revocation, at any rate.

“I will,” he said, and I said “I will,” as if we were taking the vows right then. Perhaps we meant the words more, that evening at the Café Lucien, than when we—soberly—repeated them a week later at City Hall.

As the flames died down on the crêpes suzette, Jonathan leaned close and murmured, “You know, I've slept with a lot of people.” It was 1951, I was just a girl fresh out of school, but I must have registered that the object of the preposition was rather … inclusive. Must have, because I can remember the word “people” fifty years later. In retrospect, I guess I am thankful he didn't say he'd slept with a lot of vertebrates. But then, what did I think of it then?

Not enough to hesitate. It was just a couple of years after the Kinsey Report, which suggested that many, many men had sometimes slept with “people.” And we were in the Village, after all; a little catholic experimentation was almost mandatory in that not yet altogether sclerotic bohemia. I just shrugged, actually thought of offering a reassuring “me, too.” I didn't, not just because it would have been a lie—unless two college boys plus Jonathan was a lot—but because somehow I already intuited that Jonathan's wish to subvert bourgeois norms did not imply any eagerness to repeal the double standard.

I shrugged; we dug into the crêpes suzette. Whatever he had been up to wouldn't matter, not when we were married and raising our child.

A
fter we were done raising our child, and then done burying him, I took over Mickey's bedroom and drew pictures. Then Jonathan died, and I drew pictures.

Today I am drawing pictures of a dead daffodil. Something I have not shaken off.

L
aurence calls. Jonathan's old editor at Aurora, the one who found me that first cookbook job after Mickey died. I haven't spoken to him in five or six years. Why? No business to transact, for one thing; the last of Jonathan's books went out of print years ago, when Aurora was bought by Krupp or I.G. Farben or somebody and the whole backlist was pulped. Besides, I had the rather vertiginous sensation, the last time we met for lunch, that Laurence was flirting. When I had pretty much assumed that he, like everyone else in the entourage that surrounded Jonathan in his last years, was gay.

Even now, as he proffers an indistinct “something to talk over,” he won't just meet me in his office, but insists that we have dinner instead. Is this just manners, a gesture toward a doddering widow who probably doesn't get out much? Or does he have a penchant for doddering widows?

I capitulate.

“Next Thursday?” he says. “I'll come by around—”

“I'll meet you,” I say. Perhaps abruptly, but I will not have him coming by for me, as if it were a date.

“All right. Maybe the Plymouth Room?”

“Is there still a Plymouth Room?” How thoughtful, to take me to a restaurant as old as I am. “Fine. Six o'clock?”

“Six?” he repeats, unable to keep the incredulity from his voice. I suppose for him six is practically lunchtime. But I insist: at six he can't possibly imagine we're having a date.

L
aurence never understood a word Jonathan wrote. Perhaps that is just a long way of saying Laurence was Jonathan's editor. But he really did seem to think of Jonathan as some sort of fuzzy and benevolent social commentator, making earnest recommendations for small improvements. And that is how he packaged him. A friendly sage, a mild-mannered kvetch with an endearing one-sided smile and an unlit pipe. While Jonathan thought of himself as carrying around an unlit Molotov cocktail that he would ignite any day now, as soon as he got angry enough.

The title of his most famous book,
JD
, referred, of course, both to juvenile delinquents and to James Dean. Some people never got past the awful little mock-pastoral elegy to Dean that opened the book. (“Strew, if you must, some bay on his blood-matted hair …”) But most people got further and found a love song to baby-faced hoodlums, tricked out with a mass of interdisciplinary hoo-ha. Bakunin and Jung meet the Jets and the Sharks.

Jonathan called himself an anarchist sometimes—partly as a way of sticking his tongue out at his Marxist and ex- Marxist and neo-Marxist and Marxist-with-sprinkles buddies, and partly because he wasn't sure what else to call himself. What Jonathan meant by anarchy wasn't atomic individuals living in the woods and eating nuts and berries. His ideal society was the New York of his boyhood, twenties New York, in the reign of Tammany and gangsters and bohemians and immigrants and crooked cops, the heyday of Harlem and the Village, a seething ungovernable mess from which the skyscrapers rose like spontaneous manifestations of the orgasmic explosion of unfettered human energy.

JD
was a hymn to people in free association, little knots of people forming and dissolving, bumping up against one another, the friction and sparks lighting up the city. He claimed that the boys' gangs, with their private language and their turf and their chivalric codes of honor, were the last example of the spontaneous coming-together that had made New York great, in contrast to the urban planning and the big corporations that utilized personnel and fed them like punch cards into their room-sized vacuum-tube computers.