Time to get ready, to meet the challenge. The girl is in shape, best legs in town, flattest tummy, pertest ass. A little perfume here, a little oil there. A little robe—the Gypsy Robe—a little sashay out of the bathroom and into his bedroom. What? He isn’t there? Then on to the living room where—ah, there he is. Unaware of me. So I’ll pose in the doorway, like so. One arm on the door frame, one hand on my hip, and one knee forward, protruding from under the robe. Provocative. Irresistible. He senses. He turns. And wide-eyed he says,
“What the hell is that?”
“What?”
“What the hell are you wearing? What is it?”
“Oh—this old thing. It’s the Gypsy Robe. I forgot to give it to someone else.”
“It’s got bananas on it—”
“Yes, well, that’s—”
“And feathers!”
“Yes. It’s one of a kind. No other robe like it.”
“You’re not going to wear that to dinner, are you?”
“Don’t be silly. I only put it on to hand you a laugh.”
“Well, you got your laugh. Now, let’s get dressed and go to dinner. I’m starved.”
So much for romance.
We had dinner at a little French restaurant on West Forty-ninth Street. Le Champlain. Lots of atmosphere and passable food at $5.95 a setting, wine included. I wore to dinner a very high sweater, turtlenecked to my chin, a baggy jacket that Abbott and Costello used to fight in, and a dirndl skirt that would have made Delilah look like Edna May Oliver. I was overreacting, of course, a touch foolish at having been turned down with a laugh and a “what the hell is that?” I had gone crazily in a desperately opposite direction, dressing down to such a degree that the nearest thing to a female that I could possibly have been mistaken for would have been a frumpy nun going to a masquerade party as an awning.
I had the dreadful feeling that Ben had yet to take a good look at me. I mean, when I met him I was in tights, the outlines of the greatest body in the Western Hemisphere just a grab away. When I had stepped out of the bathroom (we’ll forget the robe, shall we?), my hair was piled on my head and doused in enough perfume to bring down a rhino. And there, at the restaurant, wearing practically widows’ weeds, I had yet to hear a comment on any of my many disguises. It was dis-heartening, to say the least, so I overate.
“That’s quite an appetite,” he said.
“So what? I’m paying.”
“That’s no reason to eat like a brontosaurus.”
“I’ll eat like whoever I please. I happen to be very hungry.”
“You can’t still be hungry.”
“I am. Order me some more escargots. And get some more bread. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
He refused to order anything else for me to eat, which was just as well since he had gotten the point that I was unhappy. Still, it was hard for me to be all that angry with him because he had to have been very tired from his trip and couldn’t possibly know that he was breaking bread with a nymphomaniacal virgin.
Conversation soon took a turn for the better as I told him of the Pickering Trio and of my upcoming television appearance (I left out Russia, which is what the UN should have done). He told me about the infiltration course incident and about the deaths of Tony and Holdoffer and the others, and I was afraid it was the wrong time to ask about the society lady he had met up with at the USO.
We walked a million miles back to the apartment and he held my hand which was nice except that it had no significance other than to keep me from falling into a pot hole or a sewer or something.
We climbed the stairs and it got silly.
“Well,” he said, turning to me at the door, “thank you for a lovely evening.” And he opened the door with his key.
“You’re welcome.”
“And for the nice dinner. It was really delicious and I hope we’ll be seeing each other again and—” He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Good night.” And he stepped in and pulled the door closed, leaving me standing like a lump in the hallway.
“Hey!” I said, knocking on the door.
He opened it a little. “Yes?”
“What’re you doing?” I was hopelessly off balance.
“Well, I’d ask you in but it’s only our first date and—”
“I live here, too, remember?”
He thought for a moment, very concerned. “You don’t have another place to stay?”
“No.”
“Hmmmmmm, that is awkward.”
“What?”
“I guess you’d better come in.”
“I guess I will,” I said, going in, wondering whatever had become of my legendary sense of humor.
“You can sleep on the couch, if you like.”
“I have my own room, remember?”
“That’s right, you do. Well, then—by all means—go to your room.”
“What?”
“I’m going to sleep. It’s been a long day.”
“So who’s stopping you? You want to go to sleep, go to sleep!”
“I don’t see why you’re so angry.”
“Who’s angry!”
“You are.”
“I’m not angry! I’m pissed-off!”
“Why?”
“Because—” My sense of humor was returning, but I still played it miffed. “—when a person takes another person to a very nice dinner, that person expects a little more than just a little good night peck on the cheek!”
“What did you have in mind?”
“How about a little fuck?”
And he laughed so hard he actually fell to the floor. And I laughed so hard I fell down next to him. And there we were, the pair of us, lying on the floor, holding on to each other, laughing in the dark like drunken loons. And in that position, in the dark, on the floor, laughing till it hurt, I lost my precious, invaluable, irreplaceable virginity. It was not at all as I had imagined it would be—breathless and promising and sighing. It wasn’t at all like that. It was just a fucking laugh.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ben
1952
It had been one helluva long time since I’d been in New York, almost a year and a half. I would miss Don’s mad presence but still, in that bus that was grumbling into the Thirty-fourth Street terminal, I felt as “coming home” as Caesar. No brass band, no welcoming committee of mayor and alderman, none of that, but the smells came up and said hello, all of them oppressively familiar, slamming up my nose as if shoved by a huge, wet palm. Cracker Jacks and popcorn and frankfurters, gasoline, urine, beer, dog shit, vomit—a congealed Mulligan stew of foul odors curling hazily dank out of aromatic subway holes. The Manhattan skyline is for tourists and foreigners. But it’s not what says home to New Yorkers. Smells are what say home. Smells first, the other stuff later. That’s the way it works. Duffel bag on my shoulder, I headed uptown, walking slowly through the last simper of a freaky January rain.
At about Fifty-second Street I’d had enough of starry-eyed hiking with a fifty-pound duffel bag on my shoulder so I took a cab the rest of the way. It made me feel very affluent and I overtipped Marvin Wittenberg, who smiled and said, “You’re an officer and a gentleman.”
“Wrong. I’m a civilian and a schmuck.”
“Ain’t we all.” And he drove off, richer for having known me.
The five flights were not easy, not with the baggage I was carrying. But I made it, only to find that ye olde key no longer fit ye trusty lock. I rang the bell—no answer. So I sat down in the hallway, my back against the door, and I thought about a lot of things for I don’t know how long.
About Don, of course. Poor guy, I couldn’t blame him for going for a change of climate. Still, all that wit and intelligence, he’d make something happen. Somewhere and somehow all the pieces would come together and something good would happen. I just wished that he’d kept in touch. That he hadn’t I took to be a bad sign.
I thought about Arnie Felsen who had finally gotten drafted and who wrote to me f
rom Korea where he was an MP, of all things, little Arnie Felsen an MP. Evidently he was still pursuing his writing because he had sent along various clippings from various Army newspapers, little articles he had written. At last he was a published author. He was a tenacious sonofabitch and I figured he’d bust through, too, quietly, in his own way, in his own sweet time.
Big Al Epstein—he had gotten his wife pregnant too late for him to qualify for a deferment, so the Army came by and scooped him up. But it was okay, he ended up in the Signal Corps and was stationed at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he was very much into the making of training films. Big Al had lucked out. He always had and always would.
I thought about Bob Steinman, but not for too long because I couldn’t deal with it. So I just relegated it to “things to think about when miserable and drunk.”
I thought about Tony and that really did me in. Tony Wesso, dead at twenty-three, lost his head and got killed. That, too, I was unable to think on for too long primarily because I missed him, but also because that bastard McArdle had me believing that I was more than just a little bit responsible for Tony’s death. I didn’t want to believe it, but everytime I thought of Tony, I thought of McArdle, and the issue of my guilt came with it. The whole thing was going to take time.
I thought about Johnny Munez and that was good. Johnny was a survivor, a street kid who could take care of himself no matter how tough the situation. Johnny would be all right. He’d come back. Bet on it.
I thought about Pat Jarvas because her I would be seeing again. She had been kind of a random fuck and I had deliberately not written to her because she was in no way the girl of my dreams. But now that I was back, the sudden idea of her seemed very exciting, and it warmed me to realize that she’d be there when I got back to the office. She wasn’t all that bad, and with Maggie out of my life—
Maggie. I thought about Maggie because I’d always think about Maggie, especially her tears during our last kiss. She had to be the greatest thing in bed that I would ever know—but all the way home I was haunted by the knowledge that, despite her madcap exterior, she smacked tragically of doom, aiming herself at self-destruction while laughing it in the face. Still, if indeed I were to never see her again, I would never forget that chic lady—for she had favored me, introducing me to a brand of sex that, despite its fuck-in-the-gutter overtones, was, all the same, vital and exalting and strangely tender.
Maggie, so candid, so easy in her lovemaking, so pretty, so “older woman,” so “back in Boston” that I winced at the missing of her. That face, that tilt to her head when she said the foulest of things, taking the most obscene phrases and speaking them as if they were Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. On the floor, on the ceiling, up the ass, in the mouth.” And there she was. Coming up the stairs. Outlined by the hall light behind her. It was her silhouette, her gait, so unmistakingly Maggie that I almost called her name. But it wasn’t Maggie.
It was Ginnie. Ginnie, my roomie, and what a package she was, dropping all her groceries and throwing herself at me like a medicine ball. She hugged me and welcomed me and called me “Christ” over and over until I almost believed it.
We went inside and she showed me around. She also showed me a body the likes of which no one gets to see except in an erotic dream. Her legs, seeming to sprout from on high, made her look ten feet tall. And her ass—well—her ass was the living end.
Only after recovering from her legs and ass did I realize that there was more to her. She had breasts, tightly packed into her leotards, I’d say thirty-three and counting. And hips modeled, no doubt, on the Venus de Medici, or vice versa. And she had a head. And, goddamnit, it was a beauty. Eyes—watery blue, as though just used for crying. Nose—aquiline, patrician. A slight tilt to the tip but not so’s you’d notice. Mouth—mostly lower lip with a built-in pout, turned up at the sides, the quicker to laugh with. Teeth—glaring white, with just enough irregularity to the upper canines to make them interesting without being frightening. Chin—a touch of the jut, cantankerous yet delicate. Cheekbones—Garland. Jaw—Dietrich. Ears—Allyson. Neck—Lamarr. All of it framed within a crop of blonde hair, natural but assisted, pulled back and gathered into the most audacious ponytail since Seabiscuit’s.
Still in her rehearsal clothes, she glided rather than walked, moving from room to room as natural and as easy in her actions as a slow-motioned cat. And were it not for the fact that I was so utterly dumbfounded by it all, I would have grabbed her and loved her and asked questions later.
She had kept the apartment nice, a little to the “girlie” but not enough to remark on. My own room was unchanged except that my clothing was arranged neatly, as if overseen by Jeeves. We made small talk through which she revealed a ready wit and a gangly charm. Everything about her was gangbusters, multiplied by Cadillac and mixed with jam. And she was my roomie. Soldier, beware.
After I showered, she bathed. She came out of her room in some kind of clown suit that I properly laughed at. The garment, feathered and beaded and flying a banana, I took as further evidence of her piquant sense of the absurd. To dinner she wore clothes more suited to a fat man who had lost an election bet than to a young girl who had won a dashing roommate. Unsure whether or not I should comment on her odd attire, I decided to say nothing.
Returning to the apartment, I decided to be funny since she had been doing it alone until then. So, playing the young girl coming home from a first date, I left her standing in the hall as I said good night and went inside. Again her flashing humor came to the fore as she quickly assumed the role of antagonized suitor, banging on the door until I opened it.
One word invariably leading to another, she went full into character, shoving her chin out pugnaciously and demanding, as payment for the evening, “a little fuck.” Expecting nothing that appalling from my own sweet Ginnie, I found myself dissolving into laughter and sinking to the floor, my sides splitting with the sudden incongruity of such an ingenuous middle-class request.
She was laughing, too, and sliding to the floor likewise. And our arms filled up with each other, and our legs. And there was a ponytail on my shoulder and a woman at my side. And we were not two people who had just met, but lovers from before, as familiar with each other’s bodies as we were with our own.
But how could that be? How could I know her so well that the Chinese puzzle of how a woman responds in bed was so quickly unraveled? Could fuzzy letters and sleepy phone calls before the fact have caused traditional clumsiness to fall away? Could they have turned oafish foreplay into practiced ecstasy, and made of a first-time loving a series of unerring rockets to the moon? Or were Ben and Ginnie such inherently skillful lovemakers that they made no mistakes, required no excuses, and offered no apologies?
Throughout our lovemaking, questions surfaced and questions subsided, none of them answered so all of them left. We had met, of course, somewhere where perfection is commonplace and love is the rule. Call it Casablanca and be done with it. Call it Bogey sees Bergman and Bergman sees Bogey and simply by the way they look at one another we know that they have loved before. The where and the when all coming later if we’re patient and if we care and if we truly believe that “a sigh is but a sigh.”
Afterwards, still clinging, the two of us lying together on that cold, hard floor, as wrapped up in each other as an eel swallowing its own tail, damned if I didn’t raise an imaginary glass and say to her, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” And damned if she didn’t cry.
Ginnie—five days and six nights of her. We never knew what time it was, the days and dates but crosseyed approximations. We ate when we remembered to, slept when we ran out of steam, and did not let go of each other except when nature called. We turned on television and then ignored it, our own show more to our liking. Newspapers were anathema, weather beyond our ken, downstairs a place to run up from, and the telephone a thing off its hook. Life was horizontal, the pair of us seeming to fall whenever we touched. Our beds, no sooner
made, were rumpled. First mine, then hers, then mine. Switching off like newlyweds, we could never make up our minds—Beautyrest or Simmons? The couch, the chair, the floor, the rug. The shower was kicky, the tub and we almost drowned.
Horizontals used up, we went for verticals—the wall, the door, the armoire, the refrigerator. The closet was cozy, the window was risky (must remember to draw the blinds). We were drawn to each other like magnets and flew at each other like hawks, breaking only for rehearsals because The Joey Magnuson Show was drawing nigh.
I went with her. It was a barn of a place and cold. I met Florrie who looked at me strangely, as though I had just flown in from Tibet, on a chicken. Richie Pickering was civil but nervous, more concerned with his routines than with meeting Ginnie’s fella. No one else was there. They were rehearsing to a record and had yet to do it on camera.
I watched them and they seemed very good. I couldn’t really tell because, first, I knew nothing about dancing. And second, I only had eyes for Ginnie. Whatever Florrie and Richie were doing could have taken place in Pittsburgh for all I saw of it. They could have jumped up and fucked on the ceiling, I’d never have noticed; I was only watching Ginnie. And she was a thing to behold, her feet never seeming to touch the floor, and when she leaped up, she could have stayed up, her only reason for coming down being that it was a dance act and not a glider launching.
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