In front of a cubist Picasso he said, “You know, I never understood cubism until quite recently. I knew intellectually what it was about but I didn’t really comprehend it on a gut level. Do you ever smoke marijuana? I swear by all that’s holy I’m not an undercover policeman.”
She laughed. “I have smoked,” she said. “Not in years.”
“I don’t often, but once in a while. Usually when I’m alone listening to some music that I really want to absorb. But the point is that a couple of months ago I got high, you see, and I came here, and for the first time I looked at cubist things, at this particular painting as a matter of fact, and I was able to dig it. To understand just what was going on. It’s as if I learned a new way of seeing things, and I can still do it now without being high.”
“That’s interesting.”
“On the other hand, I still don’t like cubism much. But now I have a better idea why I don’t like it.”
She laughed. “You almost had me ready to try it. But if I’m not going to enjoy the paintings any more I guess I’ll pass it up.”
“Oh, I think it’s worth knowing why one doesn’t like something, don’t you? You really ought to try it some time. Do you get a chance to come here often?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m from out of town.”
“Oh? Whereabouts?”
“Upstate. Buffalo.”
“I’ve never been there. Do you like it?”
“It’s not a bad city. Do I like it? Well, it’s home, you see. I was born there.”
“I would have thought you were a New Yorker. You’ve lived here, haven’t you?”
She nodded. “For a few years. After college.”
“Radcliffe? Smith?”
“Bryn Mawr.”
“That would have been my third guess.” He smiled. He had a very easy smile. He looked at his watch, then at her. “I have twenty after two. Are you planning to go to the movie?”
“I hadn’t even thought about it.”
“It’s Citizen Kane again.”
Did she want to sit through a movie? It seemed silly to squander part of a free day in New York at the movies, even to see Citizen Kane, even in the Modern. She told him she didn’t think she would go.
“I’m not going either,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have time for a cup of coffee? Or a drink, if you’d prefer.”
“Oh, I don’t—”
“You don’t want to spend too much time on your feet, you know. It’s very easy to do that in New York. We could have coffee downstairs, or there’s a decent sort of pub just around the corner.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Which shall it be? Coffee or cocktails?”
He was trying to pick her up. He was very obviously trying to pick her up, and how had she managed to be quite so stupid about it? The Modern during the afternoon was a standard meeting place, as established as Bloomingdale’s on Saturdays. And he had been trying to pick her up all along, and doing a rather good job of it, and it was only now dawning on her what had been going on.
She felt herself blushing and couldn’t seem to do anything about it.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I have to meet my husband. I’m late, I have to meet him—”
“Oh, really.”
“I—”
“You don’t have to meet him for a few hours, do you? Or you wouldn’t have weighed the prospect of seeing Citizen Kane. Is that your way of telling me you’re married? I’d already noticed the ring, you know.”
Involuntarily her eyes went to his hand. He was not wearing a wedding ring. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Not all men wore them.
“Divorced,” he said. “Almost three years now.”
“I’m not divorced,” she said. “I’m very happily married. I have a fifteen-month-old child.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Why? A girl.”
“I have two girls. Eight and five.”
“I’m sorry, but I—”
“Rachel and Melissa.”
“Pardon me?”
“My daughters. Their names are Rachel and Melissa. What’s your girl’s name?”
“I don’t see that it concerns you.”
“It doesn’t. How long have you been married?”
“That’s none of your business either.”
He raised his eyebrows. “The hell of it is,” he said, “that we were having a perfectly enjoyable conversation. At least I was enjoying it, and I had the feeling you were enjoying it, too. Was I wrong?”
She didn’t say anything.
“I don’t think I was wrong. Then you suddenly decided that having a cup of coffee with me was tantamount to violating your marriage vows. I don’t recall making an immoral proposition. Or even a moral one. I didn’t expose myself or use bad language or anything of the sort. Did I?”
“Please,” she said.
“Is your husband wildly jealous? Would he object to my buying you a drink?”
“I would object.”
“Would you happen to have any idea why?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. It was a hell of a thing, she thought, when a woman couldn’t go to a museum alone without some idiot making a pest of himself. But he was not an idiot. And it was her fault as much as his; she had stupidly played a particular role in a particular scene without knowing what was going on.
Speaking very deliberately, she said, “Look, it’s my fault. I’m just a dumb little housewife from the sticks. I thought you were being friendly.”
“I was being friendly.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, but do you know what I mean? You’re all uptight because you’ve suddenly discovered that I’m attracted to you sexually. I won’t deny it. You’re a very attractive woman.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Let me finish. Because I find you interesting and attractive you assume I want to have sex with you. Well, there’s no time for that even if we were both so inclined. I’m not terribly casual about sex. It’s not something I have with strangers. I’m not good at that sort of thing. I asked you to have coffee or a drink on the chance that we might get to know each other and might discover that we liked each other. I think I might have liked getting to know you. I think we both might have liked it.”
“Please leave me alone.”
“I’m making you uncomfortable. I don’t mean to, but I want to say this.” He looked, she realized suddenly, as if on the verge of tears. “I don’t want to have coffee with you now. It’s a shame but we would both just make each other increasingly uncomfortable. But I want to ask you something. You used to live in New York. Were you always like this?”
“I never let strangers pick me up, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s not. Were you always this opaque? This closed off.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Really?” He smiled suddenly. “Then we’ll both have something to think about, won’t we?” He glanced at his watch. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I think I’ll see that movie after all.”
There was a bar around the corner. A few tables were occupied toward the rear, and at one end of the bar two men in suits were involved in a conversation that evidently required a lot of manual gestures. She took a seat at the opposite end of the bar from them and ordered a dry bourbon Manhattan.
Was this the decent sort of pub he had alluded to? Would he have brought her here if she’d permitted him to?
She swallowed half her drink, lit a cigarette. She thought of the man and the conversation they had had and could not imagine a way she could have handled things more ineptly. She held her hand out and looked at it. Her fingers were trembling perceptibly.
There were so many better ways open to her. Would it have been so terrible to have had a drink with him? Hardly. She had enjoyed his conversation, and as long as he knew in advance that a drink was not prelude to anything, she might leg
itimately have accepted his offer. “A drink? I’d like that, but it would have to be a quick one. I’m meeting my husband in an hour.” That would have done the job neatly enough, and it would have been fair and aboveboard. If he was honestly willing to settle for her company he could have it; if he was looking for a bed partner he would know to look elsewhere.
I’m sorry, she thought. But I really am just a dumb Jewish housewife from Buffalo.
How would her friends have handled the matter? It was instantly tempting to say that they never would have walked into the Modern in the first place, but that was not really altogether fair. Barbara Singer would have moved mountains to get to the museum if only someone had told her it was a cultural must. And Eileen Fradin would have gone if a good friend—Andrea, for instance—told her she was likely to enjoy it. And some of her other friends—
But concentrate on those two, Barb and Eileen. How would they have handled the Post-Impressionist Romeo?
Barb would have flirted, she decided. She would have kept it entirely in hand, but she would have taken unbridled delight in it, perhaps accepting the drink, or else refusing it in such a manner as to convince the man that it broke her heart to leave him. Yes, she would have flirted, and she would have been damned good at it, and yet there would have been something curiously innocent about the entire performance, perhaps because its resolution was predestined from the onset; Barb would go home to her husband virtue intact, and Jerry Singer would reap the benefit that night of passion inspired by another man.
And Eileen? Andrea narrowed her eyes in concentration. She knew Eileen better than she knew anyone else, certainly better than she knew Barb Singer, yet it was more difficult for her to predict Eileen’s reaction. The girl was a curious mix of naiveté and intuitive shrewdness. There were, she decided, any number of ways Eileen might have handled the man. She might have chopped off the conversation at the beginning, never giving him the opportunity to make the overtures to a pass. She might have mentioned her husband and children eight times in the first two minutes, so stressing her marital status as to put the man utterly off stride. Or she might have managed, with perhaps unconscious subtlety, to drain the entire incident of its sexual implications.
And could either of the two have followed through? Could Barb or Eileen, in some fantasy whirl, have accepted the drink and then taken a further drink at the man’s apartment?
A hard image for Andrea to entertain, even in fantasy. Barb had evidently had some experience before she married Jerry Singer, and she was so flirtatious as to become occasionally aggravating, but it was quite inconceivable that she might spend an afternoon in amorous dalliance with a stranger. And Eileen had slept with no one before she met Roger Fradin, and surely no one but him since, and was quite likely to go through life never knowing the touch of any man but her husband.
Yet if she had to pick one of the two for a casual encounter, it would be Eileen. Why, for heaven’s sake? Simply because she knew her better?
“Another of those?”
She looked up, startled. Had she suddenly become herself a magnet for lecherous males? But it was only the bartender, doing his job. She shook her head and asked him for the check.
She rode the bus all the way down Fifth Avenue and got off at Washington Square. She stood at the arch for a moment, smoking a cigarette. Then she walked diagonally through the park, still pretending with at least a portion of her mind that she was bound for no specific destination. It was, certainly, a pleasant day for a walk, with Millay’s April babbling and strewing flowers.
The Village, certainly, was as good a place to walk as any.
The park had a different air to it, and she wondered if it had actually changed or if she was simply viewing it through altered eyes, older eyes. She was undeniably older than when she had been here last, but even allowing for the few years which had passed, it still seemed to her that the people sitting on benches or lying loose-limbed on the ground were impossibly young.
They were certainly shabbier, and the boys had longer hair. And the girls—was it just her impression, or were they all nothing but echoes of the same girl, identical impressions stamped out interminably with a cookie cutter? They all had the same absolutely straight long hair. They all wore granny glasses over utterly empty eyes. They all beamed with vacant smiles of inner peace, a peace no doubt chemically induced. They were also all quite beautiful, but it hardly seemed to matter.
And there were far more blacks in the park. More in number, and more willing to make their presence felt. Or was that, too, a change in her own vision? Was she more aware of blacks now that she lived in a clean white suburb?
She quickened her step, walked past the old men playing chess and checkers. She crossed the street and headed west. She knew where she was going and it really was not possible to pretend otherwise.
It was hard to determine at what point the Lion’s Head had become her bar. There was a period first when it had been one of several bars she might or might not go to in the course of an evening, depending upon whom she was with or what sort of mood she was in. She had not been much of a drinker at that stage, but the fact remained that she had spent a considerable proportion of her time in places where liquor was sold. The White Horse on Hudson, the Remo and sometimes the Kettle on Macdougal, the Riviera, Julius’s (before it turned gay), the Back Door (before it closed down). And the Lion’s Head.
And then at some point the Lion’s Head became her particular place. She would tend to end her evenings there. Friends might call her there, and would leave a message if she was not there at the moment. And one evening Don smiled over the bar at her and said, “Missed you last night. I was gettin’ worried about you.”
“Well, it’s not as though I’m here every damn night,” she had said. And he smiled and shrugged and moved down the bar, and she realized that it was as though she was in there every night. Every damned night.
Now she hesitated at the entrance. It looked the same, unobtrusive enough. You almost had to know it was there in order to find it. She descended the half flight of steps, opened the door.
It seemed to be the same. It was unremarkable enough in appearance, a dark old New York saloon, one long room with a bar running the length of it, another room around the back with tables. But it was the same, the same as she remembered it, and she took a considerable degree of satisfaction in discovering this.
The bar was not crowded. Three men were at its far end, another man alone with a beer in the middle of the bar. The bartender had high Slavic cheekbones and a ragged Zapata moustache. His hair was as black as shoe polish. She had never seen him before.
But she did recognize one of the other drinkers. A man about forty, jowly, wearing a bulky sweater and corduroy trousers. She did not know his name or anything about him but she did know that she had seen him before, that he had spent time at this bar when it was her bar.
It surprised her that this pleased her quite so much, this recognition.
She took a stool at the near end of the bar and got her cigarettes out of her bag. She lit one and sat for a while, smoking, watching the smoke rise to the stamped tin ceiling. After a moment or two she became aware that the bartender was standing in front of her, waiting for her order.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was lost in thought.”
“Sure. It’s that kind of day. Get you something?”
“A light beer, I think.”
“Sure.”
The beer tasted good. The bartender took her dollar, brought back her change, and left her alone. In the next twenty minutes the outside door opened three times, and each time she turned her head at the sound. But the people who walked in were all strangers to her.
When she had finished her beer she caught the bartender’s eye. He brought her another beer. She had learned his name from another conversation, and she used it now.
She said, “Frank, does John Riordan still come here?”
“Sure. Haven’t seen him yet today. You a friend of
his?”
“Old-time friend.”
“Usually he’ll come in around this time. Little sooner or a little later. You couldn’t set your watch by him”
“You never could,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“His book over there on the wall. The cover.”
“Oh?” Over beside the jukebox the wall was a montage of book jackets and photographs.
“The jacket, what they call it. You read it?”
“No.”
“Me neither. I don’t know how it’s doing. Selling, I mean.”
She hadn’t even known he’d had a book published. One had come out about a year after she was married and she’d read a review of it. It had been a collection of magazine and newspaper pieces. She’d stopped at Ulbrich’s to see if they had it in stock but they hadn’t. She could have had them order it, but hadn’t bothered.
She looked down at the beer glass. There was an expression her mother used frequently. Perhaps the phrase was not peculiar to her mother. It seemed to her that many of her mother’s friends used it. “He was beside himself.” It indicated that the subject of the sentence was enraged, taken aback, disconcerted, or any of a number of superlatives. It was a very useful expression, covering one’s reaction to all manner of outrages.
I am beside myself, she thought. And saw that the expression was a literal one, and that she’d had indeed been beside herself all day. One Andrea Kleinman was sitting there on that bar stool gazing down into that glass of beer and planning God knows what while another Andrea Kleinman, quite another Andrea Kleinman, was hovering somewhere in the middle distance, beside herself, watching and wondering, perhaps taking notes.
Andrea Benstock, idiot. You’re married, you have a house and a baby and two cars. Don’t you remember?
One or both of the Andreas saw a signature on an unread petition. “Andrea Beth Kleinman. 47 Jane Street. N.Y.C.”
A Week as Andrea Benstock Page 11