“I was. A much older man,” she said. I didn’t say I knew that older man.
“Funny but I happened last to be seeing a much younger woman. She was in her early thirties, but it didn’t work out. We didn’t know the same songs, if you get my drift. I also felt uncomfortable going with her to her clubs with people younger than my two daughters.”
“You have two daughters,” she said. “I have no kids myself, but if I had I would have wanted girls. I think I would have understood them better than boys.”
“Ever hear from Ted Levinson?”
“He died in his forties, I heard, from cancer. He was living in Milwaukee. But tell me about this 45th reunion.”
“It’s all very tentative,” I lied. “I don’t know why I even offered to serve on the planning committee. I don’t see why we can’t wait until the 50th year reunion.”
“This reminds me,” she said, “of a friend of my last husband. He was nuts about a little college he went to in upstate New York. Hamilton or Madison maybe was its name. I don’t remember exactly. He was a wealthy man, and he gave the school lots of money. He showed me a letter announcing his 60th year class reunion. As I began to read it, he said look at the bottom. ‘Walkers and wheelchairs will be provided.’ ‘Screw it,’ he said. ‘I’m not going.’” She laughed.
She had a good laugh, Dinky Weiss, lots of nice teeth. Expensive dental work? Hard to say. I searched her face to see if she had had work done. Maybe an eye-job, I decided. She was an appealing woman.
“Do you still go by the name Dinky?” I asked.
“Only with old girlfriends. It’s a name my parents gave me, and comes from my infant attempt at saying daddy.”
“It has a nice ring to it.”
“I never minded it. Maybe it’s not so fitting for a woman of a certain age, but call me it if you like.”
We began talking about the old days in West Rogers Park, about some of our teachers at Mather, about the kids we grew up with. Lots of laughter. Looking across the table at her, I saw the attractive girl I knew from high school. It was as if the forty-odd years since that time had never happened. I, Jerry Rappaport, was on a date with Dinky Weiss, and enjoying the hell out of it.
I looked at my watch. It was 5:30 p.m. I should have been back at the restaurant for the dinner hour. We’d been together two-and-a-half hours, schmoozing away. I walked her to her car—a three-series white BMW. At her car door, she offered her cheek for me to kiss. She asked me not to wait too long to call so that we could meet again. When I got to my car, parked on Southport, I found a $60 parking ticket, but didn’t mind, so much did I enjoy myself with Dinky Weiss.
She was good company, with a sense of humor, and an interesting outlook. She’d been around the block a few times, but she didn’t come back from the trips empty-handed. She was no dope. As for Kizerman’s telling Feigenbaum she needed protection, about that I wasn’t so sure. I was fairly sure that if she really did need it, Hal Kizerman, in his middle eighties without much dough, wasn’t in any position to provide it.
Kizerman came into the restaurant the following Friday. He greeted me as always, curtly, and took a booth, ate his lunch alone reading the Sun-Times. I was awaiting some sign that he knew I had met with Deborah Shapiro, but he gave none. My best guess is that she never bothered to tell him. No reason for her to do so, really. Maybe she was no longer seeing him. She said she “was” seeing an older man, past tense.
I waited a full week to call Dinky Shapiro. She was free for dinner on Friday, and I took her to a dark and rather noisy Italian joint on Clark Street in Andersonville called Calo. She ordered salmon. I thought of ordering the barbeque ribs, but decided I didn’t want the mess that ribs bring. I ordered the white fish, tail portion.
“Why the tail portion?” Dinky wanted to know when the waitress left.
“Fewer bones in the tail portion,” I said, “Old Jewish wives’ wisdom. I learned it from my grandmother.”
The restaurant was darker and noisier than I remembered. I don’t know what I hoped for from the evening, except getting to know Dinky Weiss-Shapiro, as I started to think of her, better. Nothing that Feigenbaum said about her checked out, at least in my reading.
She told me she never went to college, and resented it. Lack of money wasn’t involved. Her father, an old-fashioned tough guy, didn’t believe in college for women.
“He never said so directly,” she said, “but he believed women functioned best in the kitchen and on their backs. In not getting to go to college I’ve always felt I missed out on something major. Not that I was such a hot student, because I wasn’t, but I felt a hole in my life that I could never fill in.”
“I went for a year, to Drake in Des Moines. I found nothing there, at least for me. I would sit in a class in biology or political science and ask myself what am I doing here anyway? I decided I’d rather spend a week at the Drake Hotel than four years at Drake University. At the end of my first year I never went back. I’ve never regretted it.”
“At least you had a shot at it,” Dinky said. “That’s something.”
“True enough,” I said.
“What not going to college did to me was to turn me into a professional wife. I went to work for my father at eighteen, and at nineteen married a man, also in the liquor business, twenty years older than me. The marriage lasted twelve years, which was eleven years and ten months longer than it should have lasted, but I didn’t want to admit failure and so rode out all those years of misery.”
She didn’t mention her other two marriages, which was fine by me. The conversation jumped around. We had a bottle of wine with our dinner, a Cabernet Sauvignon.
“I don’t know anything about wine,” I said, after ordering it.
“I prefer that you don’t,” she said. “My last husband was a great wine connoisseur. He didn’t mind dropping 200 dollars for a bottle of wine, and making goo-goo eyes at the bottle as he drank it. Someone once told me that there are three kinds of people: highly educated people who talk about ideas, normal people who talk about other people, and trivial people who talk about wine.”
We were out of the restaurant by 8:45 p.m. I asked her if she’d care to catch a movie.
“I’m not very comfortable in the new Cineplexes,” she said. “I also find myself disappointed with lots of movies. Why don’t we go back to my place? Maybe there’s something we can watch on television.”
I am in Dinky Weiss-Shapiro’s bed, in my boxer shorts, waiting for her to emerge from her bathroom. I’ve been in this position before with other women, awaiting them, listening to jars opening and closing, atomizers spraying, and whenever I am I have the same slight feeling of doubt whether I am the successful hunter or instead the prey subdued, the seducer or the seduced. I feel some of this at this moment. But I also feel strangely elated. A high-school fantasy of mine is about to come true forty-odd years later.
During my high-school days guys practiced what was then called kiss-and-tell. My own suspicion then was that there was a lot more telling going on than there was kissing. I’m not going to attempt to describe what Dinky and I did in her bed. I’m not that great at description. I’ll only say that at the conclusion I didn’t want my money back and leave it at that.
“It’s times like these,” she said as we were lying in bed afterward, “that I most miss smoking. Were you a smoker?”
“Practically a professional,” I said. “Two packs a day. Kools.”
“Why did you quit?”
“Little thing called fear of death.”
“Me, too.”
“May I ask you a question?” I said.
“Of course.”
“You know a man named Harold Kizerman?”
“I know him very well. He proposed marriage to me three or four weeks or so ago. I must have given him the wrong signals,” she said, “either that or he misinterpreted my kin
dness to him. I told him that I was honored to be asked but I’ve already had all the marriage I can handle. Three marriages is a lot—four practically makes you a sociopath, or something.”
“You’re serious about never remarrying?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” she said. “I have come to the conclusion that I am not a good judge of men, present company excepted, at least so far as I know. I also receive a decent alimony payment from my last husband that is an additional inducement not to marry again. If I remarry, he’s off the hook, where, if I may say so, he richly belongs.”
Listening to this, naked, under a sheet, I thought of Kizerman. Did being turned down leave him heartbroken? Defeated? Feeling that life now really was at an end for him? I also thought of Morrie Feigenbaum, who got the woman lying next to me so wrong, Feigenbaum who sacrificed a friendship of so many years through the need to give unnecessary advice. What a stupid muddle the whole thing was!
Four days later Feigenbaum drove his chair into Rappaport’s. He took his usual table. I had greeted him at the door, but now walked over to his usual table.
“How goes it, Jerry?” he said.
“Not so bad, Mr. Feigenbaum,” I said, “not bad at all. But I wanted to ask you if the situation with you and Mr. Kizerman has changed.”
“Why should it have changed?” he asked.
“Because I heard that your friend isn’t going to marry this woman you told me about a few weeks ago.”
“Where’d you hear that?” he asked.
“From her, actually,” I said. “She told me she never had the least intention of marrying him.”
“Really?” He looked up at me, his right eyebrow raised. “Where do you come to know her?”
“Turns out we went to high school together,” I said, “and I had dinner with her the other night. I found out that she doesn’t need your friend Kizerman’s money, doesn’t require his protection, and never had any intention of marrying him. Oh, and there was no canoodling going on, either.”
“Ex-friend, you mean,” Feigenbaum inserted. “I miss the son of a bitch.”
“I wonder if you shouldn’t call Mr. Kizerman,” I said, “and confess you had everything all wrong about Deborah Shapiro and apologize? Not, you understand, that this is any of my goddamn business.”
“It isn’t,” said Feigenbaum, “but in this instance you happen to be right. To be out of line is one thing, but be both out of line and completely wrong is worse. I’ll have to get up my nerve, but I’ll make the call. At least I’ll think about it.”
“Lunch today is on the house,” I said, and left his table.
The following Tuesday Hal Kizerman walks into the restaurant, and holds the door open for Morrie Feigenbaum and his motorized chair. I am at the register. Kizerman doesn’t bother to nod to me, Feigenbaum winks as he drives past. After lunch, Gladys reported they were reading aloud to each other, back to working on their play, I guess.
As for Dinky and me, I almost wish I could say that I was still seeing her and we were going strong. Wasn’t in the cards. We went out together another five or six times, and found ourselves running out of things to say to each other, both before and after sex. Can’t live in the past, I guess. A damn nice place to visit, though, at least for a while.
The Man on Whom Everything Was Lost
Via email I received an invitation to contribute to a memorial tribute to Jeremy Jacobson, of whom I’m fairly certain you’ve never heard, unless you happen to be deeply addicted to the internet. Jeremy was a college teacher of English, and a blogger and twitterer of relentless energy. He died in his late fifties, and in his lifetime wrote a single book: a published version of his doctoral thesis on the incursion of literary critics into American English departments beginning in the 1950s and through the 1980s. Jeremy Jacobson was also, briefly, my student. I didn’t take long to decide that I would not be contributing to his online memorial.
He came in ten or so minutes late, took a seat in the front row, and, looking up eagerly at me, spread out his notebook and made himself at home. The course was on Henry James, with forty or so students, which I taught from 10:30 a.m. to noon, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. First day of class, I hadn’t planned to keep everyone the full ninety minutes. I gave a twenty or so minute talk outlining James’s life and career, passed out copies of the syllabus, wrote my office hours on the board, and ended by remarking that Henry James was a leading figure in my small pantheon of gods. Before dismissing the students, I warned that I planned to do all in my power to convert them to the cult known as Jamesianism. As everyone was beginning to leave, Jeremy raised his hand.
“How, exactly, do you expect us to read these novels?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“I mean,” he said, “from a Marxist or feminist or Derridean perspective, or what?”
“I hope I don’t disappoint you,” I said, “but we’ll read them to discover what is in them and what Henry James might have had in mind in writing them. I’m fairly sure this will be enough to keep us busy through the term.”
After everyone had left the room, and as I was gathering up my notes, he came up to introduce himself.
“Jeremy Jacobson,” he said, putting out a hand. “I’m a graduate student, but very passionate about Henry James. With your permission I was hoping to audit this course, even though it’s for undergraduates.”
A small man, on the plump side, wearing rimless glasses, brown hair parted near the middle of his head, he looked Jewish, though as I later learned, he wasn’t. He was twenty-six, older than most beginning graduate students, having worked for a while on a small-town newspaper in Oregon. He had gone to school at the University of Washington.
“I’m especially interested,” he said, “in the influence of Henry James Senior’s Swedenborgianism on the development of William but especially on that of Henry James.”
“I know next to nothing about it,” I answered. “You may be wasting your time sitting in this class.”
“I don’t think so,” he answered. “I’ve read your novels and really love them. If you don’t mind, I’d like to continue auditing.”
“I’ll be pleased to have you,” I said, as we walked out of the classroom together.
Turned out I wasn’t in the least pleased to have Jeremy sit in on my class. As Henry James would never have said, he was, not to put too fine a point on it, a royal pain in the ass. He spoke three times more than anyone else. He offered many opinions, most of which went contrary to my own views. He regularly compared James to Philip Roth, for example, to the favor of the latter. One day he asserted that the greatest novel of the past century was Lolita. I suppose I could have argued him out of these views—they were opinions, really, little more—but I didn’t wish to interrupt the flow of the class’s discussion of James’s novels, so I just let them pass.
Truth is, I didn’t want to seem to be putting Jeremy Jacobson down. When he spoke his younger classmates would often roll their eyes or make faces at what they took to be his outrageous pretentiousness. Pretty pretentious he could be. Once in class he carried on for a full five minutes—it seemed to last a full academic quarter—about his possession of a first edition of James’s early novel Roderick Hudson. He often dragged in nearly incomprehensible disquisitions about the views of R. P. Blackmur and F. R. Leavis and other critics on James. The other students in the class hadn’t a notion of what he was talking about. They must have wondered why I didn’t cut him off.
The reason I didn’t was that I grasped that Jeremy Jacobson was one of those unfortunate people who, so enraptured are they by their own performance, haven’t the least notion of the effect they have on other people. I thought about talking to him in my office about his misguided behavior in class. I thought I might tell him that he was giving the mistaken notion that we were team-teaching this course, making plain to
him that if he wished to continue auditing the class, he would do well to remember that the root meaning of the word audit was to hear, to listen. Somehow, though, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I regretted that he was the unknown (to him) target of my other students’ probably appropriate yet still philistine disdain and felt sorry for him because of my foreknowledge that his life, with his crippling imperception, couldn’t possibly be an easy one. Henry James it was who invoked his readers to try to be young men and women on whom nothing was lost. Jeremy Jacobson was a young man on whom nearly everything was lost.
One day we bumped into each other off campus, and he suggested a cup of coffee at a nearby Starbucks. Over coffee he told me that he planned to write a dissertation about how practicing critics would slowly replace philological scholars in English departments across America.
“A rich subject,” I said.
“And one still relatively untouched,” he said. “I was wondering if I could get you to serve on my dissertation committee.”
When I asked him if he had approached anyone else, he mentioned two men for whom I had very little regard, one a dogmatic older professor, the other a refugee from the country known as the Sixties, a man who taught in jeans and unlaced Air Jordans and insisted his students call him by his first name in class. Jeremy Jacobson’s taste in people, I concluded, was not of the best, and that he had chosen me to join these other two teachers was no compliment.
“A lot of the critics I have in mind were of course Jewish,” he said. “I’m thinking of men like Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin and Philip Rahv and William Phillips. I’m not Jewish myself, though with my last name I’m often taken for a Jew. My parents were born-again Christians. They came to it late in life, too late to bring me along with them.”
When he pressed me about when he might have my decision on being on his dissertation committee, I told him that, not having a PhD myself, I didn’t think it would be quite de rigueur for me to serve on his committee.
“That’s a shame,” he said. “I know you lived in New York and you’ve had dealings with some of my key figures—Howe and Kazin, for example—and your input and feedback would have been helpful. Hope you don’t mind if I pick your brain, even though you won’t be on my committee.”
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