When I return to the bar, I tell Cindy that, while waiting for her, I’d looked over the lunch menu and couldn’t find anything that really interested me. I was in the mood for a steak. Would she mind, after we finished our drinks, if we left Kiki and went on to Gene & Georgetti’s, four blocks south on Franklin Street? She looks at me questioningly, but doesn’t argue.
The lunch at Gene & Georgetti’s goes well. We talk—or rather I encourage Cindy to talk—about what turns out to be her thwarted ambitions. She had wanted to be a nurse, but couldn’t get by the killer course called organic chemistry. She had briefly been engaged to a man, twenty-three years older than she, who, she discovered, was a serious depressive. She has a dog, a Yorkie-Poo named Edwin. She lives alone, in an apartment in Andersonville. She loves to cook. She wonders if I would be interested in coming over one night for dinner.
“I would like that a lot,” I say. We decide the following Wednesday would be good. I put her in a cab back to the East Bank Club, feeling that in laying the groundwork here I have accomplished a good day’s work.
Jules Feingold, for whose law firm I signed on as an associate right out of law school, a man of wide experience with a taste for philosophizing about human nature, once told me that in his time he knew quite a few skirt-chasing men. “Funny thing,” he said, “none seemed ever to regret it.” Jules himself, married to a woman still beautiful well into her late sixties, was, far as I could tell, not himself a player. Was he right about the absence of regret on the part of men devoted to the chase?
So far it is true for me. Has it, I wonder, been so for my father? I don’t of course know the extent of my father’s philandering. Whatever its extent, it doesn’t appear to have brought him much happiness. Certainly he doesn’t carry himself as a happy man. He fought in a war nobody appreciated, he married an unobliging woman, he works at a job that gives him a living but little pleasure. I hope his love affairs enliven his days.
Mine do. Everyone needs something that does. My love affairs are for me what litigating was for Jules Feingold, who came most alive in the courtroom. My wife seems most alive in her role as mother, driving our kids around to their various tennis, ballet, and piano lessons, exulting in their achievements in school. My mother is most alive expressing disapproval.
What we don’t know about even the people supposedly closest to us! That I knew absolutely nothing about the side of my father who is the charmer, the lady-killer, the seducer, is just one example of what I mean. And while I’m at it I have to wonder if my father’s playing around turned my mother into the chronic complainer she is or did her complaining turn him into a player. I’m unlikely ever to know.
“Can you talk?” my father says over the phone.
“Yes, sure,” I say. “Carol’s out. What’s up?”
“I wanted to thank you for accommodating me earlier today at Kiki’s. It made things a lot more comfortable.”
“For me, too,” I say.
“The thought of the two of us in one room with women not our wives seemed not such a hot bad idea?”
“No argument,” I said.
“A beautiful young woman you were with, by the way.”
“Her name’s Cindy Olson. She’s a personal trainer at the East Bank.”
“You seeing her regularly?”
“Not really. This is the first time I took her to lunch.” I thought about asking him about the redhead he brought in to Kiki, but decided that might be pushing it.
“Well,” my father says, “I mainly called to say thanks. Take care, kid.”
“Take care,” I say, and we hang up.
Wednesday night I arrive a bit before six at Cindy’s apartment on Rascher off Ashland Avenue. (I told Carol I had an appointment with a client in Valparaiso, a guy with lung problems suing a construction company that used asbestos in its buildings, and that I might be home late.) I have an expensive bottle of Merlot in hand as I ring Cindy’s bell. Her apartment is small and doesn’t get very good light. The night is warm, and she is in shorts and a tank top, over which she is wearing an apron with dogs on it. From the front, it looks as if she has no other clothes on but the apron. Very sexy. Her own dog, Edwin, is asleep on the carpet, and doesn’t move when I enter the living room.
“Not the greatest of watchdogs, my Edwin,” she says, with a smile.
She says she hopes I like French food. She’s cooking a cassoulet for dinner, made from a Julia Child recipe, very complicated. She’s not done it before, and hopes it will turn out.
“I’m betting it will be great,” I say.
She says she has a bottle of white wine, a Reisling, open, and asks if I’d like a glass. I sit on a red velour covered couch in front of the windows and look down at the sleeping Edwin. Dejected people say that it’s a dog’s life, but his looks pretty good to me. Cindy returns from the kitchen, hands me a glass of the Reisling, and sits in an armchair facing the couch.
“I’m glad you could come,” she says.
“My pleasure. I like the smells coming from the kitchen. Very promising.”
“Is your wife a good cook?” she asks. A trick question, or so at least I sense it to be, a way of feeling me out about my feelings toward my wife. “A good but not an ambitious cook,” I say, “everything wholesome and tasty, but nothing fancy. She has to feed two kids and a moderately gluttonous husband.”
“Does she know you’re here tonight?”
“I told her I was with a client in Indiana,” I say.
“Would she be angry if she knew where you really were?”
“If she knew how good-looking you are, I don’t see how she couldn’t be.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she says.
“I was hoping so,” I say. “This Reisling is excellent, by the way.”
I ask her how long she’s lived in Andersonville. Did she know that the neighborhood was also called Mandersonville, because so many older, now settled-in gay couples lived here? Mandersonville opposed to Boys Town, around Belmont and Broadway, where younger gays had clubs and baths and leather shops, and the rest of it.
“The neighborhood feels wonderfully safe,” she says. “I can walk Edwin as late as midnight and not have to look over my shoulder.”
The cassoulet is good. I sop mine up with a sourdough bread Cindy bought from the Swedish Bakery on Clark. During dinner I tell her I admire her being able to live alone, that I think her brave, being on her own, and that not everyone could do it.
“My therapist thinks my being alone so much is pure avoidance mechanism on my part,” she says, “and therefore unhealthy.”
“Been in therapy long?”
“Nearly seven years,” she says. “Have you ever been? In therapy, that is.”
“Not thus far, though a few of my angrier clients have suggested I could use it.”
“My therapist tells me that I have a fixation on my father, who died at a crucial time in my life, when I was just fourteen.”
“What’s his evidence?”
“Hers, not his. My therapist’s name is Brenda Spivak. She claims I have a thing for older men.”
“Really?” I say. “I wonder if I qualify.”
“Very funny,” she says, “but by older she means twenty and thirty years older. I’m afraid I’ve got entangled with a few such men, each time with unhappy endings. She’s also suspicious of my having no desire to marry.”
“Marriage isn’t a good fit for everyone,” I say.
“I grew up with parents who didn’t have a very good marriage. They didn’t yell at each other, or argue much. But there wasn’t much feeling there. You didn’t have to be a genius to tell there wasn’t much love lost. My sister Maggie, she’s four years older than me, she lives in L.A., works as a masseuse there, is also unmarried. Our parents made the whole proposition of marriage pretty unattractive.”
We bo
th had parents with unhappy marriages in common, I think, but decided not to bring it up.
“I don’t want children,” she says. “I hate the thought of being completely dependent on a man. Solitude doesn’t bother me. I’m fine the way I am. I don’t really have anything against marriage, it’s just not for me.”
After we finish the cassoulet and the bottle of Merlot, she brings out coffee and sorbet. I am less than certain where this is going, but still hopeful.
“May I help with the dishes?” I say, after we finish.
“No need. I’ll get them after you leave.”
I take that to mean I won’t be staying.
“A great dinner,” I say.
“Thanks,” she said, “but I ought to think about getting to bed. It’s been a long day, and I have a client, an overweight cardiologist named Rosenbloom, scheduled for a 6:30 a.m. appointment.”
We get up from the table. She walks me to the door, leans in, and lightly kisses me on the mouth.
“It’s been sweet,” she says. “Thanks for the wine. See you at the club.”
“I enjoyed it a lot,” I say, playing at being the good sport.
No point in pushing it, I tell myself, walking to my car. Give it time. The next day I send a dozen yellow roses to her Rascher Street apartment with a note: “Thanks for a lovely evening. Hope we can do it again soon. Next time on me.”
I stay away from the East Bank Club the whole of the following week. My plan is to give her room to breathe, not to feel in any way pressured, time to let her think about linking up with me.
“How go things?” I say, when the following week I see her in the workout room.
“You’ve been away,” she says.
“I was out of town,” I lie.
“Someplace pleasing, I hope.”
“Boston, trying a case. Are you up for dinner sometime this week?”
“I don’t think so,” she says.
“The following week maybe?”
“Think I’ll pass.”
“Anything wrong?”
“No, nothing,” she says. “I just think things between us aren’t going to work out. No hard feelings, I hope.”
“Of course not,” I say. “Everything’s cool here. Good to see you.”
“I’m glad,” she says, and, touching my elbow, walks off.
Were the roses a mistake? Make me look too earnest, too insistent? How did I misjudge Cindy Olson? She invited me to her apartment for dinner, after all. Should I have pressed my case more firmly that evening in her apartment? Some women prefer a stronger lead than others; some don’t in the least mind sexual aggression. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed away from the club for a full week. I did something wrong, but what exactly?
Over the next few weeks, I thought a good deal about how I blew it with Cindy Olson. My judgment in these matters, while far from perfect, is usually pretty good. This time I went off the tracks, but how, and at what point exactly? Normally I don’t like to dwell on these things. I do, though, like to get them right, to learn from experience. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll write my memoirs. The Casanova of LaSalle Street is the title I have in mind.
I have a new client, a young woman, an assistant professor at Northwestern who is suing the anthropology department there for not giving her tenure. She’s been giving me proceed-with-caution signals since our first interview. I’m hesitant. She’s a bit nuttier than I like. Far from concealing some deeper inner personality, everything about her is too much out in the open. Still, if I can arrange it, I like to have something going, at least simmering on the back burner, at all times.
It’s five weeks or so after Cindy Olson put the kibosh on what I hoped would be our pleasing relationship, and I am sitting in Gibson’s on Rush Street with a client, a man named Ernie Ross, who wants to sue for negligence the nursing home where he stowed his ninety-two-year-old mother. She fell, fractured her pelvis, and died a week later. He wants me to sue for $10 million. Where he got that number, I don’t know. I tell him to think more in the neighborhood of $25,000, if we can get that, and to think hard about it while I excuse myself to use the men’s room. As I’m heading toward the men’s, I spot the crowded bar twenty or so yards away, and who is standing there, margarita in hand, but Cindy Olson. In the men’s I decide to go up to her, just to say hello, to show her that I’m a man who holds no bad feelings of any sort. On my way toward the bar, I note her standing there still, when the man standing next to her turns around, and goddamn if he isn’t my father.
You may be way ahead of me here, but let me nevertheless try to connect the dots, if only for myself. When my father first saw me with Cindy in Kiki’s, he must have been attracted to her; she is, after all, a beautiful woman. Over the phone that same night, he asked me who she was and if I’d been seeing her for long. I both gave him her name and told him she worked at the East Bank. He must have called her, using what line to get her to see him, I don’t know, but it must have been very impressive. At her apartment, Cindy mentioned her problem of being attracted too much to older men, and there aren’t many older men more attractive than my father. Had he called her and met with her before I had dinner at Cindy’s? Can’t know for certain, but I suspect so. I, standing there with my $85 bottle of Merlot in hand at her door, was probably already out of the picture. What a schmuck!
I suppose I should be angry, feel betrayed, and by my own father, of all men. Somehow, though, I can’t work up much anger nor feel betrayed. If anything, I rather admire my father’s prowess. A joke is buried here somewhere in all this, but I haven’t quite got it.
I return to my table and Mr. Ross, my client.
“I’ve been thinking over what you said,” he tells me, “and maybe you’re right. Let’s ask for $5 million, and see where things go from there.”
You live, I guess, and you yearn.
Kizerman and Feigenbaum
Some people, including maybe even my kids, probably consider me a flop. I lasted less than a year in college, at Drake in Iowa, and went into the family business, the only member of the third generation in our family to do so. My older brother Arnie is a successful dentist, specializing in root canals. Carol, my younger sister, is a partner in the family-law firm of Levin, Feldman, and Engel. After working fourteen years at Rappaport’s, our family’s delicatessen, some say the last authentic one in Chicago, on Broadway two blocks north of Belmont, I took over the business after my dad died, and I have been running it ever since, a total of thirty-two years in all.
Started by our grandfather and featuring my grandmother’s soup and fish recipes, Rappaport’s was originally on Kedzie, just off Lawrence. Following the migration of the Jews northward across Chicago, the deli moved under my dad’s management to West Rogers Park, at the corner of California and Devon. When the Jews in West Rogers Park moved again, this time mostly to the northern suburbs, and Indians and Pakistanis moved in along with a community of ultra-Orthodox, who consider most of the food I serve treyf, I moved the restaurant to its present location. We’re not setting the world on fire, but we do a steady business. Steady enough to have sent my two girls to college—Naomi to Miami of Ohio, Sheryl to Dennison, also in Ohio—and to keep a condo in Boca Raton, where Bobby, my late wife, who died of cervical cancer three years ago, used to stay through most of the winter. I’ve been thinking about unloading the Boca place, since I myself can’t get away for more than a week or so at a time. You run a restaurant, you need to be on the premises: greeting people, kicking ass, worrying. Believe me, I know.
I’ve never regretted going into the family business. My brother stands there all day, jabbing away at dead nerves in people’s mouths, my sister further inflames angry women to get the most out of men they once loved. In running a good deli I’m providing a service. People come into my place with clear and specific wants, and I’m able to satisfy them. We won’t include here those occasional
mumsers who dedicate themselves to giving my waitresses and me a hard time.
To accommodate diet-conscious women customers, I’ve had to add “The Liter Side” to my menu, which is mostly salads and egg-white omelettes. My dad used to say that the only green thing allowed in a Jewish deli should be a dill pickle. Cholesterol is another big worry. The other day a woman asks me if there is any cholesterol in our pastrami. It was all I could do not to tell her she shouldn’t worry, we’ve managed to trap all the cholesterol between the fat and the grease. She ordered a Caesar salad. Chiefly, though, people come in for the old Jewish staples: the soups (mushroom-barley, chicken matzoball and kreplach, cold borscht, lentil, split pea), the brisket and corned-beef and salami, the white fish and flounder, the cheese cake and strudels and rugelach.
The people left who enjoy these things, who grew up on them, are no longer kids. Some days I look around at my customers and feel I’m not running a restaurant but a nursing home. I’ve had to keep the aisles wide to allow for customers on walkers. I’ve got a number of elderly men and women, regulars, coming in with Filipina caregivers. Also men who eat wearing caps that show they fought in World War II. Occasionally they’ll bring in their grandchildren, or, more accurately, their grandchildren will bring them in.
I got a customer, Mrs. Rose Kleiderman, she comes in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon, she must be ninety-five. Her skin looks like parchment. She lives somewhere in the neighborhood. She comes alone. She can’t weigh more than eighty pounds; maybe she’s four foot six, eight tops. She orders the same things every time: a bowl of chicken matzoball soup, a salami omelette with hashbrown potatoes, drinks maybe four cups of coffee, finishes it off with a piece of rugelach, leaves a ten percent tip, reminds me that she knew my parents, and shuffles out onto Broadway.
I got a customer, Morton Grolnik, he comes in every day except Sunday for a breakfast of coffee, orange juice, oatmeal, and whole-wheat toast. He tells me that he likes to start his day among Jews. He lives in a nearby assisted-living joint on Sheridan Road called The Wrenwood. He brings a Sun-Times in with him and every morning makes a number of hypothetical bets on baseball, football, and basketball games. “Can you believe it, Jerry,” he’ll say to me, “the Bears are six-point dogs,” or “I’m taking the Eagles and the points.” Every morning, on leaving, he tells me how much he is ahead or behind for the year.
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