Heart of the City (25 page)

THE NEXT three days were a whirlwind. The threesome ate dinner in Chinatown, walked through the Lower East Side, lunched at Reuben’s, tried barbecue in Koreatown. They went to three museums.

Each day, Claire found herself more drawn to Tom, even if at first as a buffer against Chuck. Tom was unlike other men she knew in academia. At Tougaloo, with its lopsided male-to-female ratios among faculty, only the alpha males—loud, aggressive—managed to get her attention. And she admitted that she didn’t mind feeling sought-after. But Tom was reticent. He gave her space to talk. He listened. “What is it like to be a white professor at a black college in the South?” he had asked.

When she told him that white supremacists had bombed the dean’s house and the synagogue, he looked openly concerned. When she explained how conscience had driven her to take the job, he was self-effacing. He had convictions, but often felt too
self-conscious to act on them, particularly if it meant rocking the boat. “I wish I had that kind of nerve,” he told her.

“But didn’t Columbia have a big student uprising last year?” she had asked, reminding him that his school wasn’t exactly a bastion of conservatism. “I heard about all kinds of stuff: teach-ins, building occupations, class boycotts, a walkout at graduation.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Tom said. “Students were angry because Columbia wanted to build a new gym in Morningside Park.”

“It was more than that, wasn’t it?”

“Well, I guess some students saw it as an attempt to wall the university off from Harlem, with poor blacks on one side and privileged white students on the other.”

“You didn’t get swept up in all of that?”

“I sympathized, but I can’t say I did a whole lot,” he said. “The main thing I remember was that I didn’t have to go to class for a few weeks.”

It’s refreshing, Claire thought, to be around a man who isn’t always trying to impress you. Tom had been at Columbia for three years now, and was clearly more of an expert on the city than either she or Chuck. But he wasn’t trying to pass himself off as some know-it-all. If anything, Claire thought, smiling to herself, he came off a little hokey.

“You can’t trust that New York drivers will heed red lights,” Tom had said at one point.

“Heed?” Chuck interjected.

“Yes,” Tom said. “The signal may say to cross, but you still have to look both ways.”

ON SATURDAY afternoon, after a long walk through Midtown, Chuck whipped some kind of program from his coat pocket and flashed his friends a catlike grin.

“Broadway?” Claire asked.

“Better,” Chuck said. “Playboy Club. I’m a Keyholder.”

Inside the club, a seven-story building on East Fifty-ninth Street furnished in teak and leather, a bosomy woman in satin leotard, black bow tie, and three-inch heels walked over and perched provocatively on the back of a chair. Her hair, strawberry blond, was pulled back behind a pair of bunny ears.

“I’m your Bunny Evelyn, may I serve you?”

“Well, this is interesting,” Tom said, casting a nervous glance at Claire, who was sitting opposite Chuck.

When Bunny Evelyn strutted back with a tray of drinks, Chuck looked at his companions and winked.

“Watch this,” he said, nodding as she leaned back and dropped to her knee.

“That’s called a Bunny Dip,” Chuck said, winking at the waitress. “It’s so, you know, their”—he cupped his hands in front of his chest—“don’t fall out.”

“Yeah, I know all about it,” Claire said.

Chuck drained his martini and gave Claire a once over. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah, really,” Claire said.

Tom raised his eyebrows and gave a crooked smile. “You’ve worked as a, um, Bunny?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “But Gloria Steinem did. Went undercover and wrote a magazine piece about how awful the girls are treated.”

“Here she goes with the women’s lib,” Chuck said.

Tom kneaded his hands. This was quite an awkward situation: Claire was a single woman with two men in a club where nearly every other woman was a sex object in a rabbit suit. But how unruffled she looked. She clearly didn’t approve, but was somehow still enjoying herself. Tom felt both perplexity and a kind of admiration. “No, I’m interested,” he said. “Is it really that terrible? With all these tips, it doesn’t seem like a bad life.”

“Um,” Claire said, “Either of you ever tried a Bunny Dip in high heels?”

“Just a kilt,” Chuck said. “Here, Tom.” He handed his friend a dollar bill. “Some Bunny Money for our Bunny’s troubles.”

Tom looked at Claire, who nodded approvingly toward Bunny Evelyn as the young woman returned with another round. “Go ahead,” Claire said, patting Tom on the hand.

Tom folded the dollar into quarters and then held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “Where shall I put it?” he asked Bunny Evelyn, looking her in the eye and grinning.

“Sir, it’s always the tray.”

BY THE end of the next day, after a Circle Line boat tour around Manhattan, they were giddy from exhaustion.

Tom and Chuck walked Claire to Penn Station for her train back to Long Island. “So when are those exams you’re so worked up about?” Claire asked Tom as they stood beneath the clicking departures board. Chuck had gone off to buy them cups of coffee.

“A few weeks,” Tom said, taking off his tortoiseshell glasses and rubbing his eyes. “Thanks for reminding me.”

“I promise I won’t disturb you before then, but I do visit the city sometimes to see, you know, museums and the like,” she said. “Do you have a phone number?”

“Um, well, sure.” Tom hoped she didn’t see his hand tremble as he put his glasses back on and fumbled in his coat pocket for a pen and scrap of paper.

“I’ll give you mine, too,” she said. She took his pen and put down the phone extensions to both her lab and her home.

The word “home” on the piece of paper seemed so personal, Tom thought. He wondered what a home at a government lab compound looked like, whether she had decorated it with her own feminine touches or left it spare, like a vacant college dorm room. He had never had a girl this pretty ask for his phone number, and he felt a little unsteady. If anyone deserved a chance with her, Tom thought, it was Chuck, who had seemed
so smitten. Nothing will come of this phone number business, Tom told himself. Even if she and Chuck weren’t really dating, she was probably just one of these women who flirted a bit with everybody.

JUST THREE weeks remained until the exams that could make or break Tom’s career. He had been fascinated by Stalin’s purges of the Leningrad party and had already chosen it as the subject of his dissertation. But if he didn’t first pass his qualifying exams, there would be no dissertation. The dense readings took every ounce of concentration.

“I’m glad you had a good time with Chuck,” Tom’s mother wrote in early October. “Hope it didn’t interfere too much with your studying.... Be sure you get the right date for your test so you won’t miss it.”

She was right: he needed focus. But his thoughts kept detouring back to this unexpected weekend and his first sight of that woman atop the Empire State Building. What had happened with Claire, exactly? Should he call? Or maybe write? Would she? Was the “few weeks” he told her he needed to study so much time that she’d lose interest? Was she interested? Tom had liked the subtle but sassy way she sparred with Chuck—Tom had never quite figured out how to parry his friend’s occasional inanities. Plus, she was a bona fide scientist, working at a national laboratory. How often—outside a James Bond movie—did you run across women who could wear a lab coat and a miniskirt with equal credibility?

The days crawled along, with autumn stealing sunlight and chilling the air. Many nights Tom would emerge from the library into darkness, his eyes throbbing and his brain putty. Back at his dorm, he took off his glasses and wool blazer and fell into bed, only to resume the drudgery the next morning.

CLAIRE HAD little time to reflect on her weekend with Chuck and his friend. Her bosses at the lab conscripted her for a painstaking project to devise a new technique for DNA analysis. Her weekends, too, were full: trips to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island, and sailing and dinner with her boss and his wife.

But the third weekend in October was distressingly free. The blank space in her otherwise chockablock calendar was so desolate that she felt compelled to fill it. “Autumn leaves,” she wrote, looking out her apartment window.

Sunday dawned cloudy and cool, and her thoughts turned to the nice Columbia boy, the friend of Chuck’s, she’d met a few weeks back. She wondered how his studies were coming. She recalled how anxious he was. She felt for him. He was the sort of guy, she thought, who’d loosen up a lot if he had the right kind of girlfriend. He had potential. She scolded herself for not trying harder to find him a date that weekend. It wasn’t just that she didn’t know many people in New York. It was also that you couldn’t count on anything Chuck said. She might well go out of her way to rustle up a date, only to discover that Chuck’s “friend” was a ruse meant to gin up additional female company—for Chuck. How could she have known Tom would be not just real but possibly a catch?

A high school friend of Claire’s had just moved to New York from their hometown in Missouri for a job as a secretary to a bank executive. Myrna was smart, well-dressed, always abreast of the news. Tom might like her, Claire thought.