The Anglophile (2 page)

G
ary whispers in an awful imitation of a British butler voice: “Lord Faggot of Faggot Manor—”

“He's not gay.” I hush him quickly with an angry look.

I can't get over how Gary really hasn't changed since college, save a few physical details: his once-skinny physique has widened out by quite a few inches, and two gray hairs peek out of his left sideburn. But his mild bigotry and harmless puffery is cozily familiar, as is the royal-blue turtleneck he's wearing. He used to order the exact same item in threes from the L.L. Bean catalogue—a half-successful effort to prove to the frat brothers that he wasn't a Bensonhurst cliché of gold chains and scenic disco shirts.

“I'll stop.”

“Good, homophobe. Plus, I don't even need the Englishman. I'll have you know I'm seeing someone really nice now.”

Gary's smile is speculative. “What's his name? Wait, let me guess—uh, Chris?”

That's a standard joke amongst my college friends— I hold the unofficial Guinness record for
Jewess Who Has Gone Out with the Most Christophers in All Its Variants.
There were two serious boyfriends, Chris and Kris; and four short-haul runs, Christopher, Chris, Christian and the Christopher who preferred to be called by his initials, CK.

“Kevin.”

“Kevin what?”

“Who are you, the president of my aunt's synagogue?”

“That the aunt with the skunk?”

“Hey! When did you meet her?”

“At graduation. C'mon, Kevin who? Fess up.”

I hate him right now. “Kevin Bernstein.”

He smirks. “You're dating a Jew?
Auntie Dot
will be pleased.”

“Jesus. You really remember her from that long ago?”

“Her name was
Dot.
She had a pet
skunk,
and she had those eyebrows—” Gary snorts, because my aunt's over-plucked eyebrows are always redrawn in with dark brown liner at right angles. How do you tell your elders that there should never be sharp turns in makeup application? (My mother, forever Dot's submissive sister-in-law, says, succinctly, “You don't.”)

“You know what she said to me?”

I cringe. “Do I want to hear this?”

“‘Gary,
you
talk to her, hon. I want my niece to respect her heritage. Doesn't your mother want you to date Catholic? Tell Shari that Christ is in Christopher.
He's not our guy. She won't listen to her old aunt, so maybe she'll listen to her friends.'”

His raspy impersonation of two-pack-a-day Dot is so spot-on that it makes me a little sick. I'm mad all over again at Dot so inappropriately riled up at my graduation ceremony—my roommate, not normally the fink, had spilled the beans about my many Christian Chrisses. Not so privately, Dot took it upon herself to chew me out, invoking her status as activities chairwoman of her Catskills synagogue—a reinforcement of her cultural commitment that made her as proud as her ownership of three successive de-stunked skunks with their “spray” capabilities removed at four weeks. (She's also treasurer of a nationwide skunk-enthusiast group.)

Our guide loudly claps his hands by the front door. “Folks, who's ready to brace the cold again? If we walk faster, it won't hurt so much.” He is commendably chipper as the frigid early afternoon wind bullwhips our faces. This man has years of knowledge still to impart as the windowed tips of Chicago's revered skyscrapers glisten pink in the bright cold sky. We've already heard why in 1871 architects hovered like vultures over Mrs. O'Leary's burnt city, the exact location of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and the date Enrico Fermi launched the nuclear age.

As we exit the office lobby I tug at a stubborn forty-year-old zipper on my
zingy turquoise wool Very Twiggy
coat I bought last month on eBay from CarnabyJane, a seller in Sussex. Costly for a vintage buy, especially with the overseas postage, but I splurged to cheer myself up about the lack of progress on my dissertation.

“Still buying dead women's clothes?” Gary teases after the zipper finally zips. He looks downward and shakes his head in further disdain. “I didn't even see the boots. How are those fuckers still around?”

“I just resoled them for the sixth time.”

Gary is appalled. “Give them a retirement party. Do you want me to take you to Neiman Marcus later? The girls in my office buy their boots there….”

If Dot could hear this conversation, she'd nod vigorously. On my first Thanksgiving break from Binghamton, when she saw me in my favorite thrift store dress in the worst condition, a yellow mini with a cigarette hole, she rapped her stick of celery on one of my mother's many chipped plates, and decreed, “You can't go back to college looking like a ragpicker. The time has come for some adult clothes.” She demanded a shopping trip to Macy's. “You need nice sweaters, and slacks—we'll make it a day.” She did buy me a good black cardigan and new faded black Levi's that came in awfully handy. But mostly I wore my prized juicy-colored slightly tatty Mod dresses with tights all through a chilly, snowy Binghamton winter, warming my ankles and feet with my proudest thrift score, a pair of deep purple go-go boots.

 

The brutal wind continues to batter as the tour race-walks the three blocks to the next Windy City architectural jewel. Face red raw, Gary complains that cold days in his current hometown are even worse than the ones in Binghamton, and ten times worse than New York City's doozies. So his big plan is to bring a corn-
fed gal back East next year, when he's done ten years in Chicago. “I'm cold and I'm thirty-five, old as the hills. Cold and old. Time for a wife.”

I snort. “Have someone in mind then?”

“Not the one I'm dating. Hailey's too bitter.”

Bitter in Gary Marino's universe means sarcastic, which is okay for girls you hang out with in the dorm floor lounge when you watch
Letterman,
but it's not okay for girls you actually date for a long run. Although Gary is a funny guy, sarcasm is not his forte—even though he's an account executive for a major ad agency. Gary's humor would fit right into the Delta House living room, but a lot of the time I find his manner a pleasant shift away from the sardonic take on life so prevalent in my Ph.D. set. Hell, I'm bitter, too, a “second-rate existentialist,” as one short-haul Christopher so meanly put it just before he gave me the heave-ho.

 

Opposite a public Calder sculpture, our guide breezily informs us that the name Chicago is derived from the Algonquian word for the onion grass that grew around Lake Michigan. His words are freezing midair. With my sleeves pulled down over my hands, only my fingertips have warmed; I feel like a chicken in a partially defrosted state.

I steal another peek at the Englishman. Despite my growing lust for the man on the tour, I want out. I should have listened to Gary and gone with him to the neighborhood bar he frequents in Lincoln Square, the one with the crackling fireplace, but I idiotically pushed him on his first poorly pitched suggestion: “Well, there's
a weekly architecture tour for people into Chicago's culture shit.”

“I like your coat. Very stylish,” the Brit says from somewhere right behind me. I lost track of where he was during my wandering thoughts, and I turn around with a start.

“Didn't mean to scare you.”

“It's okay, and thank you.”

“It looks vintage, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Quite a lovely blue. Like a robin's egg.”

“It's British,” I spurt out.

“Oh? Did you buy it in England?”

“No, on eBay. From a woman in Sussex. Or was it Essex?”

“Maybe Middlesex,” he offers.

“So much sex in England.”

He looks at me curiously, perhaps to sort out if my weak pun was an accidental come-on or I was deliberately the siren.

“That's quite an old joke, you know,” he says evenly. I'm not sure what to say next.

Gary taps me. “Whaddaya think—time to say sayonara to the skyscrapers?”

I reluctantly nod to Gary, and give this sexy stranger a parting grin. I'm a taken woman anyhow. My English friend gives his own careful parting smile that acknowledges my obvious interest as reciprocated. Another lifetime, I promise myself.

Gary is so very Gary as he informs our guide about our defection: “Hey listen bro, the two of us are freez
ing our effing butts off. My pal and I need something hot to drink.”

“I see,” the tour leader harrumphs. “Just twenty more minutes and then I let you loose. You can't suffer for a little history?”

I could easily be guilted into staying, especially with my flirtation still on the tour, but I can tell by my old floormate's face that he's truly had enough. So I add, just to soften the crass defection, “You were fantastic. I learned so much, thank you.” I mean what I say. If only I had as much passion for my work as this man does for his.

After a cautious sideways step in my direction, the Brit quietly asks, “Where're you headed?”

The guide frowns at him.

“Dunkin' Donuts,” I whisper.

“Right. It'll be warm there, I suppose?”

“We're banking on that.”

The guide's mood has taken a downturn as he starts the trivia again. “Oak Park is worth a ride, even in this weather. There are nine, count them, nine Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses in this residential neighborhood—”

Gary silently counts out three fingers and the two of us tiptoe out of sight as quickly as possible when the guide isn't looking.

“Poor guy was disgraced,” I say, but only after we're safely inside Dunkin' Donuts, waiting in line behind other Arctic refugees.

“Why, because a couple of people left his tour slightly early on a cold day?”

“You could see he took pride in his expertise.”

“Yeah, but I bet half of the others wanted out, too. So what did the lord say to you?”

Before I can answer him, I hear “Mind if I join you two?” in that devastating English accent.

I'm all smile, a Jane Austen coquette. “Sure, go right ahead.”

A pretty young blond woman (the one Gary was ogling on the tour) has followed suit as well. Except for her iced-pink lipstick, everything about her clothing is winter-white, a supposedly edge-of-fashion color-coordinated concept that has few takers back in determinedly black-clad Manhattan.

Gary's mood instantly jazzes up. “Hi,” he says with an open grin.

“I'm f-f-f-frozen,” she says and then smiles with teeth whiter than her pants.

“We were thinking of some hot chocolate.”

“Cocoa,” says the Brit. “Good idea. Yanks say London is cold, but Chicago is positively freezing.”

“Are you also from out of town?” Gary says to the woman. In my Masters of English Literature mind I have dubbed her
The Woman in White,
but Gary would never in a billion years get that Wilkie Collins reference, so why even share? When I tried to explain the pilgrimage that inspired Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
the day he made me toast pizza in his dorm room, he pretended I was holding up a chunk of kryptonite and collapsed theatrically.

“No, I live here. I swore to myself I would finally take the tour.”

That's all the information he needs. Gary leaves my
side to chat her up. They're flirting in one line while I'm chatting with my Brit in the alternative one closer to the door.

There are three hungry and cold customers still ahead of the Brit and me.

I rub my cheeks to warm them up and ask, “Are you visiting America?”

“I'm here from London for the week—work-related.”

“The receptionist in my hotel said she's never seen the mercury drop so low in March. Even in a city used to wind, it's caught everyone off guard.”

“Oh, I see. It is dreadful, isn't it?”

“Yes,” I say. Silence. I think for a few long seconds: should I probe further? The always-cautious English make me wary of talking too much. Being a world-class chatterbox—my everyday manner—is something that fellow New Yorkers think nothing of. I'm a linguist who feels self-conscious in the face of a perfect little Brit accent. My profession helps keep my outer-borough nasal twang in check. But there are telltale words and phrases that sell me and every other striving native Noo Yawker right down the river:
a dozen aiggs, dine-o-saw, a glass of waw-da
and
Harry Pott-a.

These mile-a-minute thoughts are once again punctured by that highborn BBC voice: “I hate to break this news, but I do believe your lad is ditching you.” A few feet ahead, Gary is nodding earnestly and ordering for the blonde.

“Who, Gary? He's an old buddy. He's definitely not my
lad.
”

“Then he won't mind if I pay for your cocoa.” I study
him for a moment. He's got a good poker face but he's flirting—his eyes are his tell.

“No, he wouldn't,” I say coyly.

“It's warm in here, just as you foretold.”

“Yes it is. Are you defrosted yet?”

“Almost, except for my eyeballs.”

The word eyeballs is always funny and my laugh is appreciative.

The Brit beams and says, “Where are you visiting from?”

“New York City.” Well, that's what he asked. Why rush to tell the man matching my fetish to a T about my boyfriend back in Manhattan? I'm just flirting, too. “Gary and I have been great pals since college. One weekend he kidnapped me—well, he very
convincingly
convinced me to drive all the way from upstate New York to Indiana just to see a college basketball game. We bonded during the road trip.”

“Did you go to Cornell then?”

“No, SUNY Binghamton. You've probably never heard of it,” I say, a bit deflated. Yeesh. Will my lowly state-school past thin this privileged man's enthrallment?