As for me, one of the most complicated questions you can ask is what do I do for a living. I went to law school, at DePaul, but found law practice too constricting, too boring, really. I suppose I’m an operator, a hustler, a scrambler, all words I happen to consider honorifics, whatever the rest of the world thinks. I put together real-estate deals, I arrange meetings between the right people, I sometimes briefly take over small businesses, patch them up, and then turn them over to new owners. I keep a one-room office in the 30 N. Michigan Building; if you walked into the joint you’d think it was a set from a black-and-white Sam Spade movie. I’m not there much. Mostly I work, as the old-timers used to say, out of my car. “Always keep a low overhead,” my father used to tell me.
When I was a teenager and shlepping his sample cases, my father gave me a great deal of advice, a lot of it irrelevant, but the one thing that stuck in my mind was his iron rule: “Always work for yourself. Only a schmuck works for somebody else!” With the exception of those few years I worked for my father, I’m pleased to say that I haven’t worked a day in my life for anyone but myself.
In my time in the field, as I like to think of my two decades and more chasing (and occasionally being chased by) women, I believe I’ve developed a reasonably good eye for quality. Beyond the age of thirty, most women are, like me, whether they know it or not, in business for themselves, operators, hustlers, scramblers, out to grab what pleasure is available and make the best possible deal they can. Most men, too, let me add, in case you jump to the mistaken conclusion that I’m down on women, which I’m not. I happen to like a lot more about women than rolling around in the sack with them. I often find I can be less on guard, more myself, around women than around men, where the competitive thing has a way of edging in.
I first met Lynne as her patient. I had developed something called winter’s eczema, which gave me a terrific rash on both my shins. She had sandy-colored hair, wonderful skin, great legs, and—here was a new twist for me—impressively upright posture, which I somehow found very sexy. She instantly recognized my condition, daubed my rash with an ointment, wrote me a prescription, told me to make an appointment to see her again in two weeks. She was very formal, business-like; charged me $150 for ten minutes of her time.
For two weeks I thought about that posture, the way it did good things for her short haircut, made her neck seem longer, her small breasts more upright, allowed her to carry her head in an attractive way. That she was a physician wearing a well-fitting grayish coat with “Dr. Lynne Ross, M.D.” sewn in cursive in blue thread above the left pocket no doubt added to her allure.
At my second appointment, Dr. Ross asked me to lift up my trousers so that she could see my legs.
“I’ll bet you ask that of all the boys,” I said. “Or have you heard that one before?”
“I haven’t,” she answered. “But I’ve heard better. Your legs, by the way, are fantastic. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I mean that your rash has healed completely. You see, you’ve flustered me.”
“Good,” I said. “I mean good that I flustered you. So now that I have you flustered and off guard, is there any chance I might one night take you to dinner? I’d like that a lot.”
“Sorry, but I have a policy never to see patients outside the office.”
“But I’m healed, completely cured. After I leave this office I’ll no longer be your patient. And, if the rash returns, I promise to see another doctor. Maybe you can recommend someone now.”
“You’re very determined,” she said. “Did you ever sell vacuum cleaners?”
“Almost everything else but. How are you on Italian food?”
“You’re indefatigable,” she said.
“I’m not sure what that means,” I said, “but I certainly hope so.”
We had dinner at a restaurant called Francesca, on Bryn Mawr, off Sheridan Road. The place was much noisier than I remembered. When did restaurants get so noisy? A friend in the business tells me that the young like the feeling of tumult; they don’t want to be overheard whispering at the next table; they prefer to shout intimacies at each other.
Lynne ordered linguini with seafood; she manipulated her noodles, with the help of a large spoon, very adroitly, I thought. I ordered a veal dish, a little nervous about making a mess of myself with tomato sauce. Destroying shirts and ties with the stuff has been a little specialty of mine.
“How come you decided to practice dermatology?” I asked her.
“No night calls,” she said. “In dermatology, patients don’t call you at night. I was married to my first husband while I was finishing medical school. He wasn’t that keen about my practicing medicine. Actually, as I was soon to learn, he wasn’t that keen about my practicing breathing, either.”
When I told her I had never been married, she asked me how I had avoided it. “Nobody wanted me that badly,” I replied, “despite my obvious charms.”
She smiled, twirling a forkful of linguini in her spoon. I was pleased to see that she had a sense of humor. Most of the really beautiful women I’ve known tend to come up a little short in this department.
Lynne’s first husband, Irwin, was a lawyer. The marriage lasted less than three years. Her second husband, Richard, was a cardiac surgeon. He was also a player; never met a nurse under thirty, she said, who didn’t require, as she put it, “breaking in.” She thought she had at last come into safe harbor with her third husband, who was neither doctor nor lawyer but instead made a serious fortune as a commodities trader. She was his third wife also, and he’d had kids with the first two, so owing to the pre-nup she’d agreed to sign, when he went down with his stroke, she didn’t come away with a great deal of money. But that was all right, she said; at least Harry (she referred to each of her former husbands by his first name) had left her with a notion about what a good husband is like. As soon as she said it, I wondered if I myself knew what a good husband is like. I decided, looking at her, I wouldn’t mind trying to find out.
Lots of women are able to attract men, but a far smaller number are closers. Lynne, with four marriages (mine being the fourth), was obviously a closer. Where or from what did this power in her derive? I still can’t say for sure; all I can tell you is that there was something in her that made me want to protect her, and the idea of my being able to do so was as powerful in its appeal as her good looks and elegant manner. Did her three previous husbands, I wondered, feel the same impulse?
I won’t bore you with the details of our courtship. It lasted something like eighteen months. I sensed it would be best not to employ a full-court press but instead pick her up around half-court, giving her plenty of room to bring the ball up. We went to plays and movies, lots of chichi restaurants, very expensive. She was interested in cooking and had me over for meals on weekends. We did all right—maybe a little more than all right—in the sex department. We bought each other extravagant gifts. I let her slowly make small alterations in the way I dressed. We each kept our apartments and didn’t finally move in together until our wedding.
We married at City Hall, on a Tuesday morning, a court clerk our sole witness, after which we both went back to our offices to work for the remainder of the day. We had a one-week honeymoon trip to Hawaii, and when we returned I gave up my small apartment on Richie Court and moved into her larger one at 3800 N. Lake Shore Drive.
I don’t think anyone would spend a lot of time puzzling over what attracted me to Lynne: she was beautiful, accomplished, intelligent. Some, like my dear mother, might question my judgment in marrying a woman who had been married so often before. But in fact Lynne passed my own personal test by being unfailingly kind to my mother, which isn’t always easy. As for my mother, after she became partially reconciled to my new wife, I became for her something like the heterosexual equivalent of the son in the old Jewish joke who brought his mother sadness and joy: the sadness was that the son was homosexual, the joy was that at leas
t he was going with a doctor.
But the more interesting question, I suppose, is what did Lynne see in me? I’ve stowed away a fair amount of money, but she did well enough on her own not to need mine. If I prefer to think myself more savvy about the world than she is, she, no argument here, is much more cultured than I am. All I can think to say on my own behalf is that she may have sensed how protective I felt about her, and responded to that. I’ve also heard about women who love men because they realize how much more the men love them. The origin of the universe may be easier to explain than the reasons people marry.
Lynne’s ninth-floor apartment was light and bright, with a view of the Waveland Park clock tower and the Belmont Harbor out her front windows and of Wrigley Field, five blocks or so away, out the back. She had redone the kitchen, put in new floors. Of the four bedrooms in the place, she used one as a den in which she had her television set and stereo; another she used as an at-home office, the third was her bedroom, and the fourth, which was once a maid’s room and which she kept locked, she told me was filled with things she still hadn’t straightened out since she had moved in three years earlier.
After our marriage, when I moved into the apartment, I suggested that perhaps this unused room would be a good place for me to keep my clothes, possibly my computer, and a few other items. I sensed her hesitance and so didn’t push it. When I brought it up again a few weeks later, I felt her tense up before she agreed to show me the room.
Far from being the mess I expected, this small room contained, in the most careful arrangement, shelves with athletic trophies on them and photographs of a young man in basketball and baseball uniforms and in tennis clothes. A blue-and-gold University of Michigan basketball jersey, number 19, was mounted and framed and hung on a wall. A glass case, with a light on the wall above it and a photograph of this same young man in a Marine officer’s blues, contained medals: a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. In other photographs of him scattered around the walls, he was gracefully muscular and very handsome: he might have been my wife’s twin, except his hair was dark, curly, and close cropped, his face, in the posed athletic and Marine photos, serious, even slightly stern, suggesting great powers of concentration.
On a table in the center of the room were three thick photo albums, containing photos of two children on horseback, swimming, deep-sea fishing. The young man was Lynne’s brother, Billy Ross, and the small room we were now standing in, which had heavy maroon drapes pulled closed, was her shrine to him. I figured that this was not the time to tell my wife that, my senior year at Sullivan High School, I was the eighth man on a basketball team that finished the year with six wins and thirteen losses.
I had known that Lynne had had a brother, five years older, who had died flying a helicopter in Vietnam. She had looked down when she gave me these few bits of information. I mumbled that I was sorry and said nothing further, and the subject hadn’t come up again until this moment.
“I didn’t know your brother was so serious an athlete,” I said, noting all the trophies.
“He was all-state basketball at Lane Tech. He started for Michigan. He also played baseball for Michigan. He was a natural athlete.” When we left the room, she locked the door.
Once Lynne had shown me the room she created for her brother, she felt freer to talk about him. But her information came out in dribs and drabs. She said that as a kid she had lived in the glow of his fame. In West Rogers Park, everyone knew Billy Ross. Along with being an all-state basketball player, the White Sox had offered him a signing bonus of a hundred thousand dollars, a big number in those days, but he turned it down to go to college. He planned to go to medical school, to become a surgeon.
Once, when we were watching a 60 Minutes segment on Vietnam, Lynne said: “My brother could have got out of Vietnam, but he didn’t want to. Our father fought in World War II, and Billy idolized him. He told me Vietnam was going to be the adventure of his generation, and he didn’t want to miss out on it.”
Lynne kept her maiden name after our marriage, which she had done during her previous two. We went off to our separate labors together most mornings. Running a full-time medical practice didn’t leave much time for cooking, so we usually met for dinner at a downtown or near-north-side restaurant. Sometimes we’d bring in food from Chinatown. She dragged me along to Steppenwolf for plays, many of which I didn’t understand and those I did I found I didn’t much like. I did better going to the symphony with her, where I could at least let my mind drift off to the business deals then on my plate or nap off. I kept my Bulls and Bears season tickets, but used them less and less.
At one Bulls–Trail Blazers game I did go to, at halftime, my friend Mel Rosen introduced me to Irwin Harris, Lynne’s first husband, the lawyer. Irwin was in his middle fifties, with a lawyerly look of slightly oily prosperity about him, beginning to run to stoutness. No man, I’m sure, likes to be in the company of another man who has slept with his wife, but, for some reason I didn’t find this guy as irritating as I thought I would.
“She’s a great girl,” he said. “Smart, too. And still a beauty, I’ll bet. I haven’t seen Lynne in ten years.”
“She is all those things,” I said.
“Did you get to meet her parents before they died?” I shook my head no. “Remarkable people, Sid and Essie Ross. He was in scrap iron. Went to work in a Hickey Freeman suit and changed into coveralls and worked in the yard with the blacks and the Polish guys. A very tough guy. Aggressive. Used to play softball at Loyola every Sunday and in his fifties could still beat out slow grounders to third. Loved his kids, but especially Billy. Billy was everything to him. When Billy died in Vietnam, the lights, I’m told, went out in Sid’s eyes.”
“Did you know Billy?” I asked.
“Never met him,” he said.
“She hasn’t spoken all that much about her brother to me,” I said.
“But,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard me, “if I were to name a correspondent in my divorce with Lynne, it would have been one William Ross. The main problem with our marriage was that I couldn’t come anywhere near the standard set by her brother. I hope you get closer. Have you been given access to the Billysaleum yet?”
Before I had a chance to answer, the buzzer for the second half sounded, and it was time to get back to our seats.
I’m not sure why, but I decided not to say anything to Lynne about my meeting her first husband. What, really, would be the point?
“You know,” Lynne said to me one evening after an early dinner at home of omelets and salad, “I often wonder what Billy would be doing now if he were still alive.”
“He would be how old?”
“Today’s his birthday,” she said. “January 9. He would have been fifty-four. He’d been accepted to Yale Medical School. But he was worried that Vietnam would all be over by the time he got out. He was planning to do surgical research after medical school. He would have been marvelous at it.”
“He had to have been an extraordinary guy” was all I could think to add.
“Billy wasn’t like anyone else. I think I knew that even when we were little kids. He was always advanced for his age, far ahead of everybody.”
“Were you ever envious of him? Did you ever sense that maybe he set the bar too high for you?”
“I might have felt some of that if I’d been his younger brother. But as a sister I felt nothing of the kind. I just remember being proud of him all the time, of his brains, of his athletic prowess, of the way he carried himself. Everything he wore looked perfect on him. All my girlfriends had crushes on him. He was always very kind to them, kind to everybody, really.” Her eyes began to tear up.
On Lynne’s 49th birthday, I took her to a restaurant in Evanston called Trio, where not only did I not recognize a single item on the menu but the waiter, a young guy with a very ambitious hairdo, gave us very careful instructions on how to eat each dish. I had bought
a Bulgari watch for my wife, which I was planning to give her before dessert arrived.
“Billy always made a terrific fuss over my birthdays,” she said. “He would come up with sweet goofy gifts, surprise me with tickets to musicals and things for me and my friends to do. Once he actually got Mel Tormé to call just before I was to blow out the candles on my cake for my sixteenth birthday party and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me over the phone. I have no idea how my brother managed it, but it was really Mel Tormé. After Billy died, for years I felt I never wanted to have another birthday.”
Lynne and I didn’t have our first argument until we were married a year and a half or so, which may be a world record, though I haven’t checked this in the Guinness Book. We didn’t have money problems to argue about; being childless, disputes about child-raising caused no conflict. What we finally argued about—what I, to name the goddamn culprit, really argued about—was Lynne’s showing up an hour and a quarter late for dinner one Friday night at a restaurant on Halsted Street called Vinci. I’d had a rough day. I’d also had two martinis—not a usual thing for me—and was working on a third. I made the mistake of taking our table, reserved for 6:30, instead of waiting for Lynne at the bar. She was usually punctual. I tried to call her office, but no one answered. My irritation turned to anger and crested up around rage when, at ten of eight, she walked in.
“Where the hell were you?” I said.
“It’s a complicated story,” she said. “I’ll explain.”
“I hope it’s also a good one,” I said, though I knew I wasn’t going to let her tell it. I was, I now realize, the booze working its ugly magic, a lot happier at that moment being angry. I began dressing her down, in a loud voice, right there in the middle of the small and crowded restaurant. Dumb. Really stupid. She fled. When after a minute or two I went out in the street to find her, she was gone.
Frozen in Time Page 4