by Peter Golden
Grinning, Kendall held up the pint carton and sang, “All gone!”
Julian put away the fudge. “How’re you feeling?”
“Like I could clap my titties!”
Kendall dropped the carton in the garbage can under the sink and sat on the windowsill.
“You know what Christina told me?”
“Not a clue.”
“Christina told me on their first date Brig—that’s what everyone calls him—Brig showed her where her clitoris was.”
“Guys can be helpful like that.”
“Can you find mine?”
“If you didn’t move it.”
“Why would I move it? I like it right where it is.”
Julian agreed that it was in an optimal location and carried her to their room. Kendall felt as serene as a sleepy child when he lowered her onto the bed. She was aware of time passing, but she didn’t know whether it was a minute or an hour. When she saw Julian’s dark wavy hair between her thighs, her serenity vanished, and a mobile of images spun underneath her eyelids, images of Christina and Brig in their own bed, Christina on the bottom, her face contorted as Brig hammered away at her. Kendall was light-headed, as though watching the scene from a rooftop. She was afraid of heights—acrophobia was the technical term, memorized from her psych textbook in the hope that knowing the scientific name would help. It didn’t. Intellectualizing was overrated, she thought, and laughed out loud and didn’t quit laughing until Julian was inside her.
In Kendall’s mind, Christina and Brig, bound by their chain, were really going at it, and Kendall couldn’t recall if the Reefer Madness documentary claimed marijuana would turn you into a voyeur. Kendall imagined herself sitting beside Christina and—this shocked her—moving her mouth to her friend’s breasts. Her guilt gave her pause, but Christina cooed that her intimate joys were her own affair, and the longer Kendall sucked on those breasts, the harder her own nipples became.
Kendall held Julian, feeling the rippling of his muscles in his back. Christina and Brig were gone, but Kendall could hear the dizzying jangle of their chain. Realizing that she was ensnared in a bondage that was hers alone, Kendall threw herself against Julian, trying to break free, the tension inside her terrifying because she didn’t know if she were seeking freedom or oblivion or, most daunting of all, whether freeing herself was only possible if she let herself go and merged into this man. Her one solace was that she didn’t feel a speck of guilt, not for the wantonness of her fantasies or her reality or that, clamping her hands on Julian’s buttocks, she wanted to pull him so far inside her that he too would vanish.
Yet still he was there, she could hear him calling her name, and Kendall gave up, forgetting her terror and flinging herself from a rooftop, like Christina in Brig’s painting, and plunged through an unfamiliar darkness, where she screamed—oh yes, screamed herself silly—screamed until her throat burned and she heard herself, in a raspy burble, tell Julian that she loved him.
Later, Kendall awoke and unwound herself from Julian. Replaying their lovemaking, she grew excited, but remembering the rattling chains made her shudder. Kendall was staring at the ceiling when the first fires of dawn pressed against the windows.
Chapter 24
On Tuesday, as Kendall left class, she asked Dodd Brigham if he and Christina would like to have dinner with her and Julian.
“Kind of you to invite us,” he replied, “but Christina is under the weather, and I’ve a dinner with several of my patrons.”
Then Brig took off down Fifty-Seventh Street, while Kendall went downtown. She didn’t have to meet Julian at the Minetta Tavern until six, and her new plan was to comb the Village for handwritten For Rent signs, reasoning that people who could afford to advertise in the classifieds wouldn’t be as desperate for a tenant as those less fortunate souls who stuck homemade placards in their windows. She started at Washington Square and trudged as far as the Jewish cemetery by West Eleventh but didn’t spot any signs. Frustrated, Kendall wandered across Fifth Avenue until she decided to visit Christina. Her mother would have chided her for dropping by someone’s home without an invitation. But Kendall was lonely, and Christina wasn’t feeling well. No doubt Garland, who disliked guests appearing empty-handed, would have approved of her daughter’s next move, going into Veniero’s and emerging with a bag of freshly baked butter cookies.
“Such a lovely surprise,” Christina said, when Kendall found her seated on the settee in the courtyard.
Christina, who had been reading a book Kendall had never heard of—The Awakening by Kate Chopin—didn’t look sick. Her complexion was ruddy, and she was even wearing shoes and real clothes: beaded moccasins, beige wool slacks, and a pullover sweater the color of Chianti.
Kendall took a seat next to Christina. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
“Brig claimed I was unwell?”
Kendall explained about Julian and the dinner invitation. Christina grimaced. “Brig and I had a tiff, and he’s sulking.”
Kendall didn’t know what to say.
“No prying, is that it?” Christina asked, smiling warmly. “You can hang on to your manners, but if you’re not curious about people, how can you be curious about yourself? Curiosity is all an artist has.”
Kendall felt her face flush. “What did you and Brig fight about?”
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Maybe—a little.”
“This morning, Brig showed me a new painting, and I told him it wasn’t among his best. He got in a huff, and I say, ‘Do you want the truth or not?’ He says, ‘Not today,’ so I tell him it’s marvelous. His face lights up like the Woolworth Building, and he says, ‘You think so?’ and I answer, ‘No.’ Then he shouts if I’d wear the chain more, he wouldn’t be so distracted.”
“Distracted?”
“Distracted. Because if I’m not chained, I could scoot on him.” Christina laughed bitterly. “I am sick of his insecurities.”
Kendall couldn’t imagine ever speaking about Julian with such bitterness. And she’d never wear a chain. Ever. “You could come to dinner with us.”
“No thank you. Then I’d have to have another fight about that with Brig when he got home.”
Kendall saw nothing for rent on Bleecker or MacDougal, and since it was too early to meet Julian, she turned onto Minetta Lane, which was steep and no wider than an alley. Christina must have been right about the Italians running off the Negroes, because Kendall heard opera blaring, and the music grew louder when, on her left, she came to Minetta Street. Halfway down the block, she discovered the source of the music. An old, slack-jawed man was sitting on the slate stoop of a townhouse with the first-floor window open and the horn of a gramophone aimed outside. He wore a grayish-brown striped suit with a lemon-lime necktie that was louder than the opera and a fedora with the brim flipped down like a lady’s sunhat. Kendall did a double take when she saw a professionally printed For Rent sign taped to the stained glass inset of the front door. She smiled at the old man as if he were her long-lost uncle, and when the music ended, the man, who was missing most of his upper teeth, said, “Aspetta un minuto, you wait, sì?”
He shuffled inside. Kendall heard the window close and, given her dismal experience with Village landlords, she thought he’d ditched her.
The man reappeared. “You here for rent l’appartamento of Mr. Ciccolini?”
“Yes, sir. I am. Is Mr. Ciccolini home?”
“Io sono—I a Mr. Ciccolini. You come.”
The ground-floor apartment was walled off from a carpeted staircase, and on the second-floor landing, Mr. Ciccolini unlocked a door and switched on a frosted glass chandelier. It was one enormous, high-ceilinged room with a knotty pine floor, pastel-blue walls with brass-and-crystal sconces, and a marbled mantelpiece around the fireplace. As Mr. Ciccolini showed her the kitchenette, the bathroom, and, pointing through the row of tall windows, the garden in back, Kendall prepared herself to hear that she was expected to be his maid or to fuc
k him once a week. But all Mr. Ciccolini said was “My a grandson here for college. Now he go to the Albany Law School, and I got nobody. My wife, she gone, and I like a somebody up here again. L’appartamento, it is very nice, sì?”
“Very nice,” Kendall said.
When Julian arrived, the Minetta Tavern was noisy with the laughter of the customers at the gleaming oak bar. He slipped the maître d’ ten bucks, then followed him across the sawdust floor to a table against the wall where he could watch for Kendall and the Brighams. Before the waiter had a chance to take a drink order, Kendall entered alone. As always, Julian was struck by her beauty, and so were some of the men at the bar, who admired Kendall as the maître d’ brought her to the table. She smiled as Julian stood, helped her off with her coat, and held the chair for her.
The waiter came. “A vodka martini, please,” Kendall said. “Straight up with olives.”
Julian ordered the same—his usual drink. Kendall generally preferred wine. “A martini? That mean a good day or a bad day?”
“Good, but the Brighams couldn’t make it.”
“Too bad.”
Kendall laughed. “Because you won’t get to see their chain?”
“Guilty as charged.”
Kendall spread her napkin on her lap. “I rented an apartment.” She studied his face for any change in expression.
“Congratulations.”
“You’re not mad at me?”
“I’ll miss you, but that was the plan, right?”
Kendall, the irritation plain in her voice, said, “I asked if you were mad.”
“You wanna have a fight? To make it easier for you to go?”
Kendall relished that Julian knew these things—another reason she loved him—and yet, for no reason she could name, it frightened her.
Julian said, “If people don’t get what they want, they’re unhappy, and so are the people who love them. I don’t want to be unhappy. Tell me about the place.”
“The rent’s just fifty dollars a month; I could’ve afforded more. It has lots of light, a fireplace, a backyard, and it’s around the corner from here. We can go see it after we eat.”
The waiter brought the martinis. They clinked glasses and drank.
“You want to hear one of the best things about the apartment?” Kendall asked, her hand going into her satchel hanging from the chair.
“I do.”
Kendall plunked something down on the table and, drawing back her hand, said, “It comes with two keys.”
Chapter 25
Kendall’s move from South Orange to Greenwich Village was less traumatic than either she or Julian had anticipated. Kendall was pleased to be there, and Julian spent a couple of nights a week and every weekend with her. And the move itself had its lighter moments. Julian offered to buy Kendall some furniture, but no, this was a solo project. She trolled the secondhand stores, digging up a dresser, an oak refectory table, a brass bed, two mismatched Morris chairs, and a cherrywood drop-front desk that had been left at the curb for the junk wagon. Kendall granted Julian and Eddie the privilege of toting her finds around the apartment, and on the third try with a pinkish-white damask sofa, an oak-winged Victorian that seemed as heavy as a battleship, Julian said to Kendall, “I thought you wanted to do this by yourself?”
She laughed, explaining that carrying furniture was man’s work, and when Julian started to object, Fiona said, “Do your job. It’s almost dinnertime, and I made reservations.”
Julian finally circumvented the no-gift edict one afternoon as they wandered over to Warren Street. Kendall was gazing longingly in the windows of Haber & Fink’s, a camera shop, and Julian said, “That second pantry off your kitchen, with the sink in it. Wouldn’t that be good for a darkroom?”
“That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to buy—”
“Your birthday’s on Tuesday.”
“For your birthday I only bought you—”
“A diaphragm.”
“That was for me.”
Julian grinned. “It was?”
Kendall gave him a playful nudge. “I don’t deserve so many presents.”
“Don’t you know how happy you make me?”
“But I don’t do anything.”
They settled on Julian’s buying her an enlarger, while Kendall bought herself a safelight, developing tank, hard rubber trays, enamel jugs of chemicals, and other accessories. Kendall sometimes shot and developed photographs but mainly she concentrated on her painting. With a black-and-gold Chinese screen, Kendall divided a portion of her walk-up into a studio. Her goal was to capture the quirky Greenwich Village she adored, and Kendall labored at it sixty hours a week. Julian loved to watch her work. He couldn’t draw a squiggle and marveled at people who could, especially if, like Kendall, they could produce an oil painting as detailed as a photograph.
On the weeknights that he slept over, Kendall cooked, and on weekends Julian took her out. They rarely ventured above Fourteenth Street, not simply because the classier nightclubs and restaurants in midtown were as segregated as a Klan rally, but because New Yorkers tended to stick to their neighborhoods. Kendall and Julian were regulars at the Minetta Tavern and Peter’s Backyard over on West Tenth, the juiciest steak downtown. For a taste of Paris, they crossed Washington Square Park and ordered coq au vin in the basement café of the Brevoort Hotel, alive with debate, gossip, and well-fortified denizens reading the latest headlines—mostly about the war in Europe—from the news ticker.
What they loved most was listening to music and dancing at Café Society. Billie Holiday, Hazel Scott, and Josh White sang there, and Julian’s favorite, Big Joe Turner, who with that rockslide laugh of his could make a bad day a whole lot better. The owner, Barney Josephson, was a Jewish guy from Jersey, and Barney described his joint as “the right place for the wrong people.” And most of New York City agreed, because in Barney’s smoky, rambunctious dungeon on Sheridan Square, white and colored made music together, drank together, and danced together, and if that twisted your knickers in a knot, tough shit.
Just how tough it could get became apparent on that Saturday night when Otis, up on semester break, joined Julian, Kendall, Eddie, and Fiona. Big Joe’s piano player had a cough and a half, and Eddie assured Big Joe that Otis would spin his head sideways. Otis got behind the piano and broke out a boogie-woogie, and Big Joe shouted and moaned about this shy little gal who worked Big Joe till he was dry as July cotton.
Otis got a big hand, and he returned to the table as Barney was seating a young white couple. The man, with a shocked glance at Otis and Kendall sitting with Julian, Eddie, and Fiona, said, “We’ll sit somewhere else.” A white woman at the next table, ancient enough to recall when the redcoats occupied the Village, rose with the help of her cane and said, “Go fuck yourself,” and before the young man could react, she brought her cane down on his head, and Barney had a bouncer hustle the couple out the door, while everyone else in the place gave the lady a standing ovation.
Julian was surprised by how much he liked Greenwich Village. The curl of Minetta Street and the sun striking the Japanese maple in Kendall’s backyard. Relaxing in a Morris chair in her apartment and reading before a fire in the cozy gloom of a rainy afternoon. Holding Kendall’s hand and walking the curious twists and turns of the old streets. Seeing the beauty of the brownstones and townhouses with their wrought-iron railings, and the grand churches, hidden alleyways and courtyards. Reveling in the quiet during their early-morning strolls through Washington Square Park, with the white marble arch and the sculptures of George Washington reflected in the glassy surface of the fountain.
On one of these mornings, Kendall stopped and turned to Julian, resting her hands on his shoulders. “I feel like I dreamt this. Being here with you.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me,” he replied, and they stood under an elm, alone in the park, streaked with the scarlet and gold of sunrise.
Julian only had one complaint about New York: Kendall in
sisting that he accompany her to Chumley’s, a former speakeasy that was now a watering hole for the arty crowd, including Brig and Christina, who lived down the block. Julian didn’t object to picking up the tab for everyone in his orbit, or mind that Brig droned on about his lofty stature among modern painters, or that he felt lost in the chatter about unfamiliar novels, poems, and paintings, or even that some people recognized him from the newspapers or his days as a regular in the city’s speakeasies.
Actually, that aspect could be amusing: most of those who approached him were young women, and they stood close enough to him at the bar to catch Kendall’s attention. Once, while Julian was at the tail end of his fourth martini, a curvy redhead in a sheer white peasant dress pressed one of her legs against him and said that she admired gangsters because they were the high priests of the unconventional. Yeah, Julian replied, mobsters were real artists, especially when it came to rubbing out the competition, and Kendall, observing the scene and overhearing his remark, glared at him before returning to her conversation with Christina.
Her friendship with Christina was why Kendall dragged him to Chumley’s. Julian didn’t care much for her or her egomaniacal husband. He wondered if he was being childish, resenting that Christina and Kendall whispered to each other like schoolgirls. But it rankled him that frequently, after an evening with Christina, Kendall would embark on a Let’s Improve Julian campaign, beginning with his encouragement of boozy hussies and ending with his indifference to discussing the latest trends in art.
“You could talk to some of the men next time,” she said.
“But I got to listen to them. How else am I gonna find out how important everybody is?”
“Be serious.”
“Fine. I’ll read The Communist Manifesto so I’ll know what to say.”
Kendall went southern on him: “Keep on joshing, boy, I like to snatch the taste out your mouth.”
“Hey, I gotta read my Marx to understand why I should always pick up the check.”