Three-Martini Lunch (21 page)

E
den was very much in favor of my idea of becoming a writer and the idea was we were going to settle down together and I was going to spend my days writing while she worked at Bonwright and then in the evenings she would come home and type up everything I had written that day and we would make love and bask in the assurance that good things had been written and that we were living out the script of what was destined to become a chapter in literary history. It was a good plan except the words did not come to me right away and during the first couple days when I hadn't written anything and Eden had come home, ready to type, we had made love anyway and afterwards she stroked my hair and told me the words would come and said perhaps I was just a nighttime writer and didn't know it yet. Then she would stand in front of the hot plate in the little kitchenette and boil some coffee as the light from the streetlamps glanced off her smooth-bodied nakedness and dark, liquid hair. I enjoyed balling her tremendously and afterwards I always felt light and hungry and hollow and spent in a way I'd never felt with anyone who had come before her.

I would lie there watching her boiling the coffee in the dark and feel I had done a good thing in marrying her. Eden was a small girl but nevertheless was very long in the torso and despite her slenderness her hips flared in a beautiful, generous way and in the phosphorescent light of the streetlamps she looked like something on loan to me from another planet and maybe also another era, too, and it was all very surreal. When she had finished with the hot plate she would snap the electric lights on and put the coffee in front of me and I would go to the desk and sit and stare into the dim pages of the notebook that had all day lain empty. Eden would shimmy her shoulders into the tattered silk robe she had bought on a whim one day while in Chinatown and had worn every day thereafter and then she would pick up a book or a manuscript and quietly read with the idea that we should let inspiration take its course.

Eden always reminded me I had written two stories I liked very much and if I could write two good stories, then I was capable of writing more and even better and it was just a matter of coming up with the right strategy for unblocking my creativity. Being that we ran with a bohemian crowd, naturally Eden was open to all kinds of solutions to my writer's block, but I had to draw the line when she started harping about how I ought to go see a head-shrinker. Lots of people in our circle were going to shrinks in those days and reporting back wondrous things, but if you ask me, the ones who said all the best things about being in analysis were women and queers who had sex problems. I didn't have a sex problem and didn't see how a shrink could help me be a better writer and after a few disagreements on this subject I got Eden to lay off about the whole business.

The other major theme that turned up often in our disagreements was Rusty. After Eden and I were married, it wasn't long before Rusty turned up again. Eden detested him from the first second she laid eyes on him and this was partly because when Rusty showed up on the stoop he expected me to drop whatever I was doing and take him all over the city to
get some kicks on my dime, which was really
our
dime now, Eden's and mine. At one point Eden threatened me with the prospect of having to go out and take a day-job if I didn't stop blowing all our rent money on that whiney sonofabitch. That Whiney Sonofabitch was Eden's name for Rusty when Rusty was not around. When he was around she never said a bad word to his face and was just as nice to him as I was and I realized the aura of Rusty's boss had gotten to her, too, and she was afraid to ruin my prospects if she told Rusty where he could go stuff it. Neither of us could be sure whether Rusty truly planned to hand my stories over to the famous literary agent but the simple thought of it alone was enough to put us on our best behavior.

At one point Rusty told us he had given the pages to his boss but then he said his boss had taken the train up to Westchester and had accidentally left them on the train and would we mind typing up new copies for Rusty to give him. Of course we said we didn't mind at all and Eden set about typing the new copies right away. Rusty said the agent had read and finished one of the two stories and that he had liked what he had read. I thought that this was incredible news. I asked Rusty which one but Rusty couldn't remember and then each time we saw him after that he had forgotten to check with the agent which one it was.

“He's bluffing,” Eden said one evening while we were alone. “He hasn't given anyone anything.”

This was likely true but in the moment I hated her for saying it all the same.

“Rusty isn't lobbying for anybody but himself,” she continued.

“Well, I think that's a case of the pot calling the kettle black,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “
You
work at Bonwright. It's not as if you're arguing my case to My Old Man, now, are you?”

She froze where she stood ironing a shirt with her big eyes blinking at me and I could tell the thought had never even occurred to her.

“You . . . you don't honestly think I ought to do that, do you?” she asked.

“No,” I said, but I had to think about my answer for several minutes because when I pondered it I realized maybe I
did
think she ought to. She could somehow bring my talents to his attention, say . . . somehow get him to read my story that was about to run in
The Tuning Fork
, even if she had to play dumb about our marriage or go about it anonymously.

I kept this idea to myself but it only made a certain amount of sense. Now that we were hitched she ought to understand that what was good for me was also good for her. I had helped her win the job with My Old Man by tipping her off in the first place and she had even said herself she ought to thank me for it. Besides all that, she had technically lied to My Old Man about her name and I'd kept that secret for her, too. All and all, I'd been a bang-up husband if there ever was one, and what was the harm in a wife helping out her husband, anyway?

33

Y
ou've saved up enough money to go now, haven't you?” Janet asked in a quiet voice.

We were sitting on a bench in our usual spot: the northeasternmost end of Central Park, by the Harlem Meer, the little duck pond that bordered 110th Street. I turned to meet her gaze, but she was staring out over the water, so I observed her profile. She had a very long, regal neck. I hadn't ever taken close note of this distinctive feature before. In fact, the more I looked at her, the more I was impressed by the fact I'd never noticed how much she resembled some kind of tall, graceful variety of bird. She wore her hair slightly curled and clipped short to her head, possessed a small forehead and chin and a triangular, beaklike nose. Her eyes were large, wide, and up-tilted, like that famous bust of Nefertiti. She was, paradoxically, both meek looking and expressive at the same time.

“It's difficult to know how much will be enough,” I said. “But I suppose, yes, I think I've got enough saved now to make the trip.”

“When will you leave?”

“I'm not sure yet. I've . . . well, I've got to give notice,” I said.

“That old man is certainly paying you a lot of money.”

“Yes. He is. I've been lucky,” I said. She shot me a look I couldn't read. “Maybe he'll want to rehire me when I get back to New York,” I continued, hoping to encourage her. “And we'll have enough to get married saved up in no time at all.”

“No. There'll be other jobs,” Janet said with somber conviction. “I wouldn't want you to work for him again.”

I nodded. To my surprise, I agreed with her. While I'd grown to like Mister Gus, there was a strange kind of comfort in knowing my employment with him was only temporary. It was his overwhelming loneliness, perhaps, that unnerved me. I felt sorry for him, but it was almost as if I believed his loneliness to be contagious, and some primal instinct signaled to me that I ought to avoid catching it.

“You'll tell me, though, won't you?” she asked. “When you buy your ticket to leave?”

“Of course.” Her concern was endearing. “Of course I'll tell you,” I repeated.

“And you'll say good-bye?”

“Yes, of course; that, too. And you realize I'll be back before you know it, right?”

I reached for her hand, and she instantly folded her face into my chest. I put an arm around her and attempted to comfort her. She had the fine, thin bones of a bird, too, and her skin was perpetually cool to the touch.

“Don't you . . .” she said, in a tiny voice, muffled by my shirt,” . . . don't you want to try it . . . just once, before you go?”

She was talking about being together. I knew this was so, because she talked about being together quite a lot lately. A modest girl and a virgin to boot, she had become inexplicably fixated on the idea that we should make love before I departed for California. I wasn't sure what to make of
this. It struck me as an act of girlish desperation, not that of an adult woman who was full of desire and acting on her own volition.

It worried me. I was worried the timing was wrong. I was worried we wouldn't be enough for each other. I was worried I would fail her somehow—not in any of those trite physical ways, but worse: in some way neither of us would be able to face or put a name on.

First encounters were bound to be a bit of a letdown, and I didn't want Janet's first time to be like mine. I'd lost my virginity not long after my father died. Anxious to get the act over with, I had cast my eye around and wound up going to bed with a neighborhood friend, a big-hipped, bosomy girl named Leota who was three years my senior. Leota was the first woman I'd ever known to wear a “fall,” a sort of false-hair contraption that she daily clipped into her own short hair, which she wore brushed flat to her skull and pinned up in a tiny bun that was—more often than not—only half-concealed by the fall. The resultant effect was something of a perky, cascading ponytail with an odd nub of hair poking out from the top. Like the other neighborhood girls, Leota had always flirted with me in that hollow, benign way, and yet while the other girls skittered away after making their bold offers, Leota gave me the impression she might be willing to take things further, if only to satisfy a bet she had with herself about me.

My overtures were brief; I invited Leota to come over to my family's apartment one summer day when I knew my mother and Wendell would be out, and bravely slipped a hand under her blouse. I found she was not only willing but enthusiastic about the matter. She was already experienced in the act of love, as girls whose bodies blossom at an early age often are, and I recall the air of absolute practicality she conveyed as she removed her fall from her hair just before we embarked upon our joint endeavor. A short time later, once the act had been completed, she stood before the bureau clipping it back in. Her eyes slid from where she worked
the clips into her hair to my face as it was reflected in the mirror, and I sensed she was figuring out something about me in her mind, something she had never directly acknowledged before. At the termination of our lovemaking I had very quickly slipped my undershirt back over my head and tugged my shorts on. But now, as Leota looked at me where I sat with the rumpled sheets caught in the waistband of my shorts, my legs hanging awkwardly over the side of the bed (my socks, in an absurd comical twist, had never left my feet throughout the entire episode), I suddenly felt undressed and exposed. For a fleeting moment she narrowed her eyes at me in the mirror and it was as if she were already trying to review the session of what had just happened between us, trying to recall the phantom shape of my manhood inside her—as if in doing so she might uncover the shape of what was in my heart.

“Huh” was finally all she said, snapping the last clip into place and picking up her purse to go.

After that, Leota seemed to understand something about me, something I'm not certain I even understood about myself at the time. Our interlude was a secret we kept between the two of us, and we remained friends, exchanging relaxed smiles and saying hello whenever we saw each other at school or around the neighborhood. I even danced with her once or twice at the local dance hall, but our interactions were brief and polite; never again did she unclip that fall from her hair in my honor.

I'd had other encounters with women since. Women liked me, were charmed by me, but even when they were willing to go to bed they maintained another kind of distance. None of my escapades translated into anything lasting. Janet was the first woman I'd met with whom I could picture a future. She was bright and wanted to be a schoolteacher. She was sensitive to the world around her; she looked more closely and listened more carefully than most people. And she gracefully accepted the facts of life she could not change, a skill I had never mastered but always coveted.
No, I would not disappoint Janet, I thought to myself. Not over a matter that could be remedied with simple patience.

“Darling, you know we have no place to go,” I pointed out. It was true; I didn't care to repeat the experience I'd had with Leota at my mother's apartment—nor did I think I could ensure its vacancy these days—and the apartment where Janet lived was packed to the hilt with three adults and four children.

“I know,” she said in a dull voice.

“Let's have something special to share when I get back,” I said, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “Something to look forward to, something just for you and me.”

“All right, Miles,” she said. “You know best.” She sniffed and stiffened her jaw and moved her face away from my chest. Two little stains from where her eyes had watered up marked my shirt, but when I looked at her, she did not appear to have been crying. Perhaps it was just the wind or the awkward angle of our embrace. Either way, her eyes were dry now and she was looking away again, out over the duck pond.

“I'm looking forward to when you get back,” she said.

“Me, too,” I replied.

I glanced at the park around us. It was beautiful, newly lit up with autumnal color. I remember summer ended that year the way it always did in Manhattan: in an effusion of smoldering oranges and otherworldly yellows that always sent a pang to the heart.