by Laurie Graff
So on a night off, when the phone rang last minute and it was Rodney Schwartz asking me to meet him for dessert, I agreed. It had been over six months since I became aware of his orange legs, and I thought it took great courage for him to call. I gained enough perspective to know that saying I had been rude hardly said it. It would be good for us to talk.
I changed clothes, threw some money inside my purse, and as evidence of another season change, grabbed a leather jacket from the closet. I thought about Paul Schroeder as I walked north to the trendy dessert cafe where I was to meet Rodney. I’d recently heard from Paul when he sent an e-mail from London telling me things were moving along well with Women and Manhattan, he thought they might even get a distributor soon. He was staying on as he had also met a girl in the underground—Paul obviously had a thing about transportation and meets—that he had taken a shine to, and was having a less than tormenting time getting to know her! Had I found my answers? I wrote and told him that so far I had only found one question, but getting that answer was helping me to find more.
It was eerie seeing Rodney. I had brought along several photos from college. I placed them on the table, looking down at a twenty-one-year-old Rodney examining a piece of film. But when I looked back up to this grown man, the temples of his bushy hair turning gray, I could not find the boy I once knew. All I felt the entire time we made forced, uncomfortable, what-are-we-doing-here, stilted conversation, was the astonishment that I had chosen to give myself to this person. That decision alone made Rodney, who had been forgettable in most respects, unforgettable in one. Aside from us both still being single, and the small item of my virginity sitting next to the pictures out there on the table, Rodney and I had nothing in common. But I was there because I needed something from him.
I needed something badly, and I couldn’t ask for it because I didn’t know what it was. It made me nervous. It made me so nervous that I started tapping my fingers on the small, marble table. Tapping around the cappuccino, around the chocolate mousse pie, tap-tap-tapping around the water glasses, tapping with two hands just like I was...
“The typing!” we both said, at once. A memory, a shared memory, one nice shared memory of the time we had spent together so many years ago.
“You remember?” he asked, a smile finally coming to his dour face. He clumsily pushed his hair out of his eye and looked vulnerable, and in that moment I saw, well not completely and I was really trying hard to see, but I almost saw the boy I had met that day in the Fine Arts building. “Where did you do it? Wait,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pen. “I’m going to write the answer down on this napkin and then you tell me, and we’ll see if we remember it the same way.”
“Ready?” I asked before I said it. “I typed on your back,” I said, turning the napkin over and reading Rodney’s scribble that said “She typed on my back.” We looked at each other, not speaking, only remembering how we would lay in bed and I would type him messages as if an imaginary keyboard was on his back. “What did you just write?” he would ask. I would tell him and he would kiss me, and then I would type some more.
While Rodney and I were awkward with each other as adults, while it seemed we should have more in common, while it would have made one heck of a happy ending had we been able to walk into the sunset, what we really shared was a mutual disconnect.
If I couldn’t get more answers, I was at least beginning to formulate more questions. This next one was a little off the track but important, having gained just the smallest smattering of celebrity. With great trepidation I asked Rodney, who now designed Web sites for a living, what had ever happened to his film. Millie may not have believed I was ever nude in The Geometry of Love, but we didn’t need to see it sold to Entertainment Tonight as evidence to the contrary.
“I lost it,” he said, simple as that.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Don’t worry. I never even finished editing it. It was sixteen-millimeter film and I misplaced it somewhere and I lost it. I really didn’t want to go into film. I suppose I didn’t really care.”
While I felt sheer relief, a wave of wistfulness I would never have expected swelled up inside me. As scary and painful as it might have been, I would have given anything to catch a glimpse on screen of the young woman I was when all this first began. And with that, I got another question.
What was I like when I was a little girl?
How many Lee Loran’s could there be in America? If it worked it was going to be just as easy as that. And when I went online and typed in his name, it was. There were two listings for a Lee Loran in San Diego and I jotted down the numbers assuming it would be him. While I took Charlie out for his walk I pondered how you call someone up you hadn’t talked to in almost thirty-five years to ask what they had thought of you when you sort of kind of went steady for two hours...when you were ten!
I memorized the numbers and called them both. It was clear from the outgoing messages that Lee was married, and both he and his wife each had a home business. But I didn’t want to leave a message. I waited and called again, and then a man answered.
“Is this Lee Loran?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Ummm...don’t hang up, I’m—well, I looked you up on the Internet and I’m not crazy or anything, I mean... Before I go any further, by any chance are you the same Lee Loran who perhaps grew up in Sunnyside, Queens?” Lee’s family had moved when he was twelve and a half. It was one of my big disappointments that I didn’t get to go to Lee Loran’s Bar Mitzvah.
“Yes,” said a man who sounded somewhat astonished, but had obviously grown up to be rather trusting.
“Do you remember a Karen Klein? I lived on your block. We went steady, sort of, in fourth grade. We were in Hebrew school, and then you moved away, just before your Bar Mitzvah?” I cringed as I spoke, the years peeling off me as I talked to this boy. This boy who used to sneak a peak at my panties in kindergarten, when I bent over on the step stool that helped me reach the water fountain.
“Oh my goodness! Yes, Karen!” said Lee. “Yes, I absolutely do. I am so fuzzy about that time in New York, but yes, I sure do remember you.”
“Well, I remember you, too,” I said. “But you sound really different. Well, I guess you would. I mean, let’s put it this way, you don’t sound twelve.”
“And neither do you.”
We settled into the talk, filling each other in. After we caught up on the elementary school memories, of which I remembered everything but Lee had mainly forgot, and after we brought the conversation into the present where we had even less in common, I asked my question.
“Can you tell me anything at all that you remember about me? From when we knew each other?”
I didn’t know what Lee would say, and I waited a long while as he sadly explained his memories of the New York years had been left behind in the old apartment in Queens. However, he did remember one thing.
“I remember you were a very proper young girl,” he said, me listening intently to a man’s voice on the phone, though the face had remained unchanged from our sixth-grade class photo. “I remember you had light brown, blondish hair, blue eyes and bangs.”
So he did remember the bangs! I was happy to hear that, and chose to keep quiet about the panties.
“I remember that you were very pretty, Karen, and that you dressed great. You had pretty dresses, outfits. You were always put-together, I liked that, and it made you stick out because a lot of the other girls were not.”
We chatted about his kids and exchanged e-mail addresses and said we’d stay in touch. When I hung up the phone I observed how fashion represents who we are in society, how we are a product of the times. It was the expectation then that girls—big ones and little—were proper. But that was before Vietnam and before Kent State. After that girls gained permission to skip the skirts and dresses and wear pants to school. It took a little longer for permission to wear
T-shirts, flannel shirts and jeans.
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For the first time in history, men and women wore the same clothes. And in public! The change of that dress code was probably a big contributor to the liberal changes in dating and mating, the casualness of clothing representing the new casualness between women and men. But I wouldn’t know because it all unfolded when I was an adolescent, alongside my first turkey kiss to Lee Loran. The mores of the world may have been considered new, but that was the world I inherited, the only ways I knew.
I would have been a whole different girl had I been born a generation earlier. But I wasn’t. And by the time I was coming of age, proper was out, because Women’s Lib was in. It was confusing enough to be in college, and the confusing times didn’t help as I tried to find myself. I was hoping now to find out who I was when I had been looking.
In college I became friendly with a guy named Jed in my dorm who was friends with Gary Waks, my Catskills Kisser, from their high school in Brooklyn. When Jed and I got to playing Jewish Geography, I learned that Gary wound up at M.I.T. He and I had dated the summer I turned sixteen, but we had a parting of the ways that winter when I didn’t make enough time to see him in the city. As part of an accelerated program I was only sixteen when I applied to college, turning seventeen just weeks before high-school graduation. I was very involved with school and a little overwhelmed. The train ride from Gary’s house in Brooklyn to mine in Queens could take up to two hours. Not to mention the small detail that he began suggesting it was time I lose my virginity. I couldn’t. I felt too young. I wasn’t ready. Gary found someone in his local high school who was, and that pretty much was that.
One night, first semester freshman year, late after a long rehearsal, I walked into my dorm and allowed the smell of pot and the blare of the Rolling Stones to bring me down the hall to Jed Grossberg’s room where I was stunned to see Gary, sitting on Jed’s bed and getting stoned.
I was thrilled to see him again! Upstate New York and Boston were farther apart than Brooklyn and Queens, but to me it was another chance. And while I still wasn’t ready, I was closer.
My roommate was sleeping with somebody so my room was free. I had never taken my clothes off with a boy before, but I couldn’t imagine that losing my virginity, doing it, having sex whatever that was, could have been any more exquisite than that night that I had spent naked with Gary. He told me no one was a virgin anymore. But I was. I guessed someone had to be. When I did it with Gary, it was going to be important. So I waited.
Weeks went by without word from him, until finally one night I went down the hall to the pay phone, closing the door tight so no one would hear, and I called. It rang three times, four, and then five, until a breathless Gary answered the phone. Lighthearted and laughing until he heard it was me.
“Hi,” I said, sounding scared. “It’s Karen. How are you, Gar?”
There were muffled sounds on the other end. He put his hand over the mouthpiece to tell someone he was on the phone. Then he came back and said, “Game’s up.”
Shattered, I threw down the phone, ran down the hall to my room, slammed the door, flopped on my bed and cried. The following semester I met a guy in the Fine Arts building and, sick of being heartbroken over Gary, decided I’d had enough. It was time, so I did it with a film student named Rodney.
I typed whitepages.com into the empty white bar, entering the name Gary and Waks and “All States” into the appropriate fields before immediately backspacing. Stopping myself from making another call I might regret. There were some things in life you didn’t need to know. This was one of them.
I thought Gary was a special boy who didn’t know how to tell me he had met someone at school, and he wasn’t involved enough with me to feel that he had to. I had beautiful kisses from a young man I hoped went on to have a beautiful life. Even if Gary had called, even if I had lost my virginity to him, even if everything had been perfect, I don’t believe I could have possibly sustained that relationship over the last thirty years. I could never have put down those kinds of roots at twenty, not even thirty. For me, it only began to turn around at forty.
I lost my virginity to Rodney Schwartz because I had lost Gary Waks. I had forfeited my prince and, instead, made the decision to go frogging. I never consummated my feelings with Gary, but I still got to have them. And I still had a pretty hot and heavy thing going with life, with love, with passion, and possibilities. Not to mention with my old standby—New York. I hoped Gary had found himself at a young age. I was still on my search. And once you really began to look, you’d just keep finding more.
* * *
“You know, that stuff is very powerful,” said Jane, sitting on the edge of my bed watching me pack as she read Rodney’s letter. It had arrived in today’s mail, two weeks after I’d seen him, and a week since I got the call.
I was going to L.A. to meet with a producer who had seen the show when he was in New York and was strongly considering optioning the play to try to sell to film. He invited me to do a one-night-only invited performance of Frogaphobia to see if anyone might bite. Jane had come over to pick up Charlie and take him to New Jersey, and judging by the way he and little Eve were getting along I wasn’t sure he’d be coming back!
“It’s an incredible letter.” Jane held it up and waved it in the air. “God, what didn’t you like about this guy? He sure can write.”
The letter had been incredible. The letter was important. The letter also showed there was an amazing Rodney hidden inside the package he presented to the world, but alas, we had no chemistry or rapport compelling me to dig to find it.
“What stuff is powerful?” I opened the closet and pulled out two skirts. “For after the show...this or this?” I asked, soliciting Jane’s good opinion. “I want to look savvy actressy, not funky actressy,” I said pointing to the black skirt and the white that were identical.
“Kar, what are you talking about? The two skirts are identical,” said Jane, catching me on one of my overly analytical moments of fashion analysis.
“Well, I guess I want to say I’m an actress who wants her show optioned, but I also want to say I would like that show to be optioned with me!”
“Oh, honey.” Jane folded Rodney’s letter before helping me fold the black one because you can never go wrong as a New Yorker dressed in black. “You know how weird it is out there. I don’t want to sound like the voice of doom, but you know...it’s hard enough for a female star to get to carry a film. Unless it’s an indie movie they really would never go with an unknown,” she practically whispered because she so did not want to hurt my feelings.
“Look, don’t worry about it, Jane. I’m already in a win-win. I can’t believe this much has happened,” I told my friend while last week’s conversation with the producer replayed itself in my mind.
I reserved a theater space for you. I’ll fly you out, put you up, and with your permission I would like to tape it. It reads okay on the page, but it really comes to life with you.
I didn’t say anything to Steve, the producer guy, because I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. But I felt that there was no way I wouldn’t get to star as me in the movie version of a show about me that I wrote that was getting great attention because of the great work I was doing playing me in my show.
“It’s just logical that if my show made a sale I’d be brought along with it.”
“But we’re not talking logic, Kar. We’re talking Hollywood,” said Jane, and then she changed the subject back to what was suddenly a more neutral topic—the guy I lost my virginity with. “You know, I really believe that first time sets such a precedent, not so much for sex but your attitude about it. I mean you chose Rodney almost at random and then you dumped him, and me, the good Catholic girl I was, practically got engaged to my guy just because he was the first.”
“Yeah, and you’re married now with a beautiful little girl and another on the way, and I’m trying to cash in big-time on all my wanton randomness!” We both laughed. “Where’s that nude film when you really need it?”
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That night on the plane I pulled Rodney’s letter from my pocketbook, yet again, to read. Flattening it out on the tray table in front of me, I took a sip of the wine I was drinking to quell my small fear of flying. I used to be fearless, but it was not quite like that anymore. Life events, stories, terrorist attacks and the news had upped the ante. You didn’t have to make every trip but if you longed for adventure, if you had that desire, if there was a place you needed or wanted to go, you had to brave it. You had to fly.
I looked down at Rodney’s words that helped to heal so much.
While enjoyable to reminisce and see that old picture of me from the day, what was most poignant was the one little detail of our time together that was recounted. That was when you talked of “typing on my back.” The specificity of that memory, the uniqueness of that gesture all sent a big tear lolling down my cheek after I left you. I felt your fingers jad-jad-jinging on my scapula as you recalled doing that. How playful and sensitive, how perfect, and that odd thing sent all the memories flooding back.
I’m the first man to have made love to you and, for better or for worse, that will always be a singular event in your life. But nobody before or since has typed on my back and probably nobody ever will. Stupid, maybe, but means a lot to me. For that and everything that means, you’ll always be special to me.
Your advent reacquaints me with a former self—a guy I realize I love very much. I hope you feel the same about a woman, who many years ago, gave herself for the first time for whatever reason to a man with wild hair and wilder ideas about art, a man who loved her on a tiny bed in a college dorm room in upstate New York.
* * *
I would write Rodney back. I would thank him. I would let him know what his letter meant. I would let him know that all of it had mattered. But now I would put the tray table back up because now I needed to get ready. Now it was time to land.