by Susan Isaacs
“Mustard?” the man at the cart was asking. Higher than a B if she kept working the way she had been.
“Lee?” Jazz asked.
“Umm …”Jazz was going to think she was an idiot. A person either likes mustard or doesn’t. She doesn’t stand there with a stupid, apologetic grin on her face, assessing the pros and cons of mustardhood.
But the September air felt cool on her face. The people in the park—undergraduates, mothers and toddlers, junkies—all looked radiant. The first fallen leaves, the litter, even the dog shit, appeared to be the perfect examples of their kind. Isn’t this the most gorgeous day ever? she wanted to ask him. Red stems brought out the vivid beauty of yellow leaves on the pavement; a Yoo-Hoo bottle resting against the crumpled sports page of the Daily News might have been arranged by Renoir; a Newfoundland puppy left a proud, steaming heap of feces. Lee felt something rising inside her. Exhilaration. She was not going to fail. She was going to be a lawyer! Jazz Taylor had made her see that.
“Lee?” And he was saying her name! This wasn’t any exceptionally cute-looking guy, slender (but with powerful arms bulging out of his army-green T-shirt). This was literally the man of her dreams, saying her name! “Lee.” Jazz Taylor!
“Mustard,” she told the hot dog man. “And tons of sauerkraut.”
Life is rarely as thrilling as fantasy, or as well scripted, so it was a double pleasure that two days after Halloween, after they had already sipped seven cups of coffee together and enjoyed two dinners in each other’s company, Jazz finally got around to asking: “Where are you from?”
“Long Island,” Lee responded casually.
“No! You’re kidding! Me too. What part?”
The revelation was precisely as she had imagined it. Well, not precisely. They were friends, not lovers. And the sad fact about the pressures of law school was that Jazz was still the only close friend she had made. She didn’t yet know any woman in her class with whom she could share the do-you-think-it’s-that-he’s-secretly-shy-or-that-he’s-only-interested-in-me-as-a-friend? conversation and get reassured that he was indeed secretly shy. So unlike in her dreams, Jazz wasn’t kissing her fingertips at the very moment he found out where she lived. He was sitting across from her, sipping his usual half-coffee, half-cream concoction—cream of coffee soup, he called it. She said, offhandedly, as if he probably never heard of the place: “Shorehaven.”
“No kidding! Me too!” His enthusiasm, as always, was boundless. It seemed that no matter what the circumstance, Jazz was filled with a happy energy. Streaks of exhilaration shot out of him and zapped whoever was in his presence. Lee had watched him outside of class, in the hall in the dorm; anyplace Jazz was became a party. What was remarkable, she decided, was that unlike many individuals with gregarious natures, he was not Class Clown. In fact, he was more Most Popular Boy, which in the fall of 1972 meant that he managed to maintain an air of Jack Nicholson—like perpetual irony. His conviviality was always in perfect balance with his cool.
“Right,” Lee said, with the tolerant look of amusement she had practiced so often in fantasy. “You live in Shorehaven too.”
“I do! I swear I do!”
She shook her head. “I went to elementary school, junior high, high school and I never saw—”
Jazz put down his mug and leaned toward her. “I went to private school! That’s why you never saw me. Now tell me where you live.”
“No. You’ll tell me you live right next door.”
“Okay,” Jazz said, clearly delighted that he was about to convince her of the validity of his Shorehaven credentials. “I live on Taylor Farm Lane.” Lee had practiced so often she knew not to gape; a mouth wide open into an O! would have been too theatrical. But she let her eyes open wide. She puckered her brow, as if she were trying to resolve a most perplexing dilemma. “Do you know where that is?” he asked, although he could tell she did.
“There’s only one house on Taylor Farm Lane,” she said slowly.
“Right! Mine.”
“You’re …”
“Come on, Lee. What’s so funny?”
“Your house … what do they call it?”
“Hart’s Hill.”
“Down the street from there, right near North Road, there’s a modern house. Fieldstone front.” He nodded. He knew the place. Lee was relieved he had not pretended to retch in revulsion. “That’s my house.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I swear.”
“You’re making it up.”
“Jazz, how would I make up something that specific? I mean, I know the street name, what the house looks like.”
“If you’re kidding me …”
“Why would I kid about being your neighbor, neighbor?”
And just like in her fantasy, Jazz Taylor finally comprehended that he was the boy next door, and he beamed with unadulterated delight.
Lee and Jazz became the best of friends, a delightful relationship but one Lee hoped was remediable. It was also a friendship with certain limits. They had not yet met each other’s families.
In Jazz’s case, this was because the Taylors, after the requisite exhausting one-day celebrations of Christmas and Easter, would board the basenjis and fly away to their vacation house just south of St. Petersburg, a stucco-and-Spanish-tile affair they called (with the lack of originality that often goes hand in hand with inherited wealth) Casa Mildew.
For Lee’s part, she told Jazz quite openly that she did not want him at her house. Her sister and brother-in-law had remained ensconced in Robin’s bedroom in a hostile fog of sex and drugs, thus causing Sylvia to have a nervous breakdown—the ambulatory variety, where she could still, on a good day, go for her manicure. The situation was so excruciating that the stalwart Greta began to suffer what she designated tummyaches but which were, in fact, the pains of peptic ulcers.
Furthermore, Lee could not tell Jazz that she couldn’t bring herself to invite him home, because she feared her father would suffer a major coronary, or at least a paralyzing stroke, from the sheer excitement of having a Taylor in the house. Or, worse, that Leonard might make an ass of himself, saying “cahn’t” for “can’t.” “Cahn’t” first emerged the summer between her junior and senior years at Cornell: Upon any annoyance, her father would say, “I cahn’t abide it,” as if he were a character in a bedroom farce. A shiver of dread went through her at each “cahn’t.”
However, by the end of her first year of law school, as she was packing to go to Washington for the summer, her father came into her room and, in his alluding to what he now called the “Situation”—the seizure and occupation of the house by Robin and Ira—Lee noticed another change in his diction. “I can’t take it anymore,” he was saying. Lee noticed not just the loss of “cahn’t” but the acquisition of a new, cosmopolitan manner of speech: still a little world-weary, yet, despite the solemn words, not upper class. Snappy. He sounded like any successful Manhattan man: a tabloid reporter, a urologist, a (and this surprised her) prosperous furrier.
“So tell them to get out,” Lee replied, a little absentmindedly, since she was engaged in a furious internal debate as to whether she should bring a pair of heels to Washington. She was now, after all, an editor of the Law Review. And she was going to be an intern at the Kroll Institute for Justice, a prestigious left-wing think tank where great ideas were mulled over by people in denim and where no one wasted a neuron of brainpower on a subject as frivolous as patent-leather heels.
“It’s easy for you to say, ‘Tell them to get out,’” Leonard said, in his snappy new manner. “I happen to be her father. I’m the one who would have to deal with the consequences.”
“What consequences?” Lee asked. If she took the heels, she’d have to buy panty hose. She sighed, went to her closet, and brought a pair of never-worn heels over to her suitcase. But even if there was a place she could go to where heels were required, would she want to be in such a place?
“
Consequences like … Who knows what can happen to Robin with that putz?” Lee, who had never before heard a word of Yiddish coming from her father’s lips, turned to scrutinize him. Despite his anguish over the Situation, he looked good. Well, except for the trendy wide tie with an Op Art black bull’s-eye on a white background and his new long, fluffy sideburns. “We’ve got to get him out.”
“How are you going to do that? He’d be crazy to get out. Free meals. Clean laundry—not that it matters to him. All the money he can steal. All the silver he can pawn.”
“We don’t know for sure …,” her father began, but then gave up, knowing that the Frank Lloyd Wright silver tea service had been taken not by a burglar with splendid taste, but by their very own in-house junkie. “Listen, I have a plan to get rid of him.”
Lee, who was about to take her heels back to her closet, stopped in her tracks. Her father’s dark eyes were sparkling, moist with almost lunatic anticipation. Her first thought was: Oh, God, he’s hired a hit man to rub out Ira. “How are you going to do that?” she asked, keeping her voice steady so as not to agitate him.
“Move.”
“Move?”
“Sell the house,” he explained. “Look, I’ve had it with commuting. All these years.” He did not mention that he’d also had it with staying with Dolly four nights a week. What had begun as wild sexual revelry on an antique iron bed they had bought together had ended up as three obligatory screws a week, and he looked forward to the one night with her—usually Wednesdays—when he could just sit in front of the TV with his Chinese food takeout dinner on a tray and watch Merv Griffin. If he had Sylvia in the city, he’d be able to cut Dolly down to one or two nights a week, plus have the perfect excuse not to sleep over at all. “It’ll do your mother a world of good, being in the city.” Seeing Lee’s dubious expression, he added: “You have no idea how many things would open up to us if we were there. Socialwise, living on Long Island is the K.O.D.”
“What’s K.O.D.?”
“Kiss of death,” he replied, in the casual manner of the true insider. “We can’t throw a dinner party out here, because no one would come. No one who matters. No one from Manhattan. We could buy a co-op on Park or Fifth with a big entrance gallery and a formal dining room and have people over and get invited”—his eyes grew even more luminous; his chest puffed up—“everywhere!” Leonard, catching his daughter’s wary expression, took pains to dampen his fervor. “Look, I’m not talking about being social butterflies. You know I wouldn’t go for that shallow kind of life. But why shouldn’t I have some fun? I’ve made a modest success.” He paused until Lee smiled at his understatement. “And your mother was born with a great sense of style. She’d be fine, once she got a little self-confidence.” He tried an insouciant wink, but all that happened was that his cheek twitched and his upper lip curled, exposing his newly capped canine tooth. “Can you imagine what your mother could do for the gross national product, shopping for a really full social life?”
“Dad,” Lee said, “I don’t know if she’s in any shape for a really full anything.”
“That’s because she’s stuck here, with them, with this … this unbearable Situation. If we lived in the city, had dinner parties to go to, believe me, she’d be high as a kite.”
“She’d be high as a kite if someone told Robin and her husband to get out.”
“Where would they go? What would they live on?”
“Whatever they could earn.”
He shook his head hard, angry to be yanked away from the dinner party in his head. “You’re being simple.” Simplistic, Lee wanted to correct him. “You’re the one who’s going to be the lawyer,” he went on. “She’d go out and sell drugs. Do you know how long she could wind up in jail for?”
“That’s how she’s keeping you under her thumb! Keeping you in fear of all the terrible things that can happen unless she gets her way. Do you honestly think that you can get rid of the problem by selling the house out from under her?”
“That’s not the only reason I’m selling it.”
“Don’t you think she’d move into the apartment?”
“We wouldn’t have a room for her!” Leonard said triumphantly. He walked to the window and pulled aside the curtain. In the twilight, all he could see was the backyard and the land rising up toward Hart’s Hill. “I’ve had it with the suburbs, with boring goyim. This isn’t for me. I spend my business life dealing with the most successful people in the city. They like me. And I’m not just talking about the fur business, or even fashion. I could be going to parties with the most fascinating people! Journalists. With movers and shakers in big business. Wall Street. With people in show business, for crissakes. Did you know that your mother and I could have been at a dinner party last Thursday with the producer of Pippin?”
Without thinking, Lee shoved the high heels into her suitcase. The next morning, she left for the nation’s capital.
She did not wear the shoes all summer. As her Constitutional Law professor had promised, the Kroll Institute was a place for profound thought, so Lee spent June, July, and August in a pair of handmade sandals she had bought at a crafts fair in Ithaca in 1969, and not a single Kroll fellow even glanced at her feet. They were interested—to the degree that they were interested in any of the legal interns—only in her mind. So for fourteen hours a day, six days a week, she researched defective grand jury proceedings in Jackson County, Missouri, for one of the resident thinkers, a man who could not remember her name but instead called her Rita. She countered with “Lee,” eleven or twelve times, then gave up for a day or two. But working in the belligerent stillness of the institute and living with a roommate who worked for the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, an agency that apparently required a vow of silence, she had a great deal of time to think.
So she thought: If I give up and let him call me Rita, all that will happen is that I’ll show myself that I back down easily. Not from direct confrontation. I’m okay at that. But I have a tendency to get wounded by oblique hits: a raised eyebrow by an intern from Harvard at the way I footnote; an invitation to have lunch in the park that I almost said yes to until I realized it was meant for the guy across from me at my table in the law library; not making enough of an impact to have my name remembered. So if I’m going to be a lawyer, I’ve got to watch out for the indirect thrusts. That’s where I’m vulnerable. If I let myself go to pieces when someone mocks my case citations or doesn’t ask me to join him for a reading of the Magna Carta at George Washington University, I can’t fall apart. Well, I can’t let them see me fall apart.
So every time the great thinker called her “Rita,” she responded with “My name is Lee White.” That made her feel better. But not much.
She missed Jazz so much that thinking of him brought her to the verge of tears. Since she thought about him almost constantly—defective grand jury proceedings in Jackson County not being as fascinating to her as perhaps they should have been—she spent a great deal of time swallowing the lump in her throat and opening her eyes wide, so that even if she blinked she would not cry.
He missed her, Jazz told her when they spoke, usually once or twice a week. Of course, he said it in a friendly way, as in: I miss my great pal. Clearly, Jazz was having a wonderful summer. Through his uncle, the senior corporate partner, he had gotten a summer job at Matthison, Appleby on Wall Street, a plum usually reserved for second-year students with averages a point higher than his. The work, he informed her, was the dullest in the world, and the partner for whom he was working was a drag, a man whose sole passion in life was his role as peacekeeper in the unending internecine war at International-Hudson Machine Tools. But he was sharing an apartment on the Upper East Side with three of his college fraternity brothers, and they were having a blast. “And don’t think I’m not getting culture,” he told her. “I saw Two Gentlemen of Verona and a play about an English soccer team where the guys come onstage naked. What a pathetic collection of peckers! And I went to a couple of rock c
oncerts in the East Village. So what have you been doing?”
“This week?” Making sure not to crinkle the pages, she leafed through the Washington Post until she came upon the calendar of events and reported having seen Six Characters in Search of an Author and gone on a picnic.
“Sounds great!” Jazz said.
“Well …”
“It isn’t?” His voice was so filled with solicitude that he seemed to Lee not only to understand her loneliness but even to know the details of it: the bologna-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches on the park bench at lunch, the solitary nights trying to read Dubliners so she wouldn’t be too limited as a human being but instead falling asleep.
“No. The work … I’m okay at it. Not good, though. And I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not an intellectual.” She laughed, trying to sound lighthearted.
But there was no echoing laughter. Jazz could tell how miserable she was. “You don’t like the work you’re doing?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I keep telling myself every case I’m reading is a human life, but it doesn’t feel that way. It just feels … like words. And the words are ideas; and ideas qua ideas … to tell you the truth, I don’t give a flying fuck about ideas. I never did. Even in college, all my antiwar stuff stemmed from seeing pictures of people burned by napalm, not from any serious intellectual objection to warfare.”
“Okay, so what do you give a flying fuck about?” Jazz asked.
A small smile played across Lee’s lips: Could I tell you a thing or two about flying fucks! she thought. “People. I care about people.”
“See? You’ve learned something this summer.”
“Right. I should have been a social worker.”
“No. You learned you’re not an academic type. You don’t belong in a think tank. And you probably shouldn’t think about a big law firm, because let me tell you, all you do for the first twenty years is research one tiny aspect of one big and boring case.”