Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

In fact, Laurie hadn’t, apart from thinking that they might extend her life. “I feel good after my late afternoon jog,” she said. “I feel better for eating carefully.”

  “When was the last time you had a corned-beef sandwich?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe twenty years ago.”

  “If I were to offer to donate a thousand dollars to your favorite charity, would you cancel that egg-white omelet and eat another one now?”

  “I don’t think I could get it down,” Laurie said, with a smile. “The idea is too upsetting.”

  “And what do you deduce from this?”

  “What should I deduce from it?”

  “Maybe that you don’t have to be so tough on yourself. Worrying all the time about what you eat or missing your daily run. On the subject of running I have always been impressed by the claim that running lengthens a person’s life but only by the exact amount of time he or she has spent running. It’s a wash, in other words.”

  The waiter appeared with their food. Howie’s soup had two enormous kreplach. Laurie’s omelet, with a few red grapes, a large sad strawberry, and a slice of cantaloupe on the side, seemed rather pale.

  “I have a friend named Eliot Rosen, seven years older than me, who still competes in triathlons,” Howie said. “I told him that I thought he was in training for Alzheimer’s. Stay in such great shape you’re sure to live long enough to make it to dementia, I told him. I’m afraid I ticked him off.”

  “I think it does me, too,” said Laurie, dabbing at her egg-white omelet.

  “In which case I take it all back,” Howie said. “But if you saw the pills I purvey every day to pluck up people’s health, you might not feel so differently. You know, Jews always say, ‘Just so long as you’ve got your health.’ ‘The main thing is you should be healthy.’ ‘What good is money if you haven’t got your health?’ True, all of it. But it seems to me one thing to have your health and another to be thinking about the damn thing nearly full-time.”

  Laurie found herself giggling, which she ordinarily never did.

  “Look, the main reason I went into this diatribe is that, with the size of these kreplach being what they are, I’m going to need your help in eating half my corned-beef sandwich. Can I count on you, kid? Whaddya say?”

  “Maybe I’ll try a half of a half,” she said. “But if word of this gets out, I’ll know who told.”

  “What happens at The Bagel stays at The Bagel,” Howie said.

  When the sandwich arrived, it was enormous, the corned beef piled four inches high. Laurie ate not a quarter but a full half of Howie’s sandwich. He gave her the slice of pickle as “a reward for her courage.”

  “The awful thing is,” she said, “I really enjoyed it. God, it was good.”

  “If you’d care to belch emphatically,” Howie said, “I’ll be glad to give you privacy and leave the table.”

  After lunch they left Laurie’s BMW convertible in The Bagel parking lot and walked east and then over to the Lincoln Park Zoo. They discovered a common affection for giraffes, for what Howie called “their goofy serenity,” and lingered for perhaps half an hour watching two giraffes and their baby cavort behind the fence in the open air. When they got back to Laurie’s car, it was nearly four o’clock.

  “I better get back,” Howie said. “I have tickets to the Milwaukee Symphony. I have to change clothes and pick up a friend.”

  Somehow or other Laurie thought he might stay on and they would have dinner together. And this “friend” he mentioned going to the Symphony with. A man? A woman? Am I jealous? she wondered.

  Laurie didn’t hear from Howie on Monday or Tuesday. She had expected one of his all lower-case emails, but nothing arrived. She checked her phone for emails first thing in the morning and just before going to bed, and twenty-odd times during the day. Nothing. Had she said or done something to offend him? Or had he had enough of her after two meetings?

  And why was she worried in the first place? Howie Klein was not in any way the sort of man she was hoping to meet when she joined JDate. What she hoped for was a tallish man, dark, a lawyer, an artist, maybe a physician like her father. She had in mind someone serious, authoritative, in command of the world. When her father spoke of wishing to see her in safe harbor, he meant, surely, that she would find a man who would look out for her, protect her from the sharks, wolves, and other beasts out there who might prey on a woman alone. The man would probably be a widower or divorced, or so she assumed. Howie Klein, as the old song had it, was not the type at all.

  Laurie remembered reading an article that argued that the least suitable mate, the worse possible catch, was a man who had got to the age of 50 or beyond without ever having married. By that age, the article argued, they had locked in habits unlikely to be changed; they also figured to be too fault-finding, too critical, finicky in the extreme. No woman could possibly be good enough for them. A great mistake on the part of any woman to pursue such a man, or so the author of the article claimed.

  On Wednesday, an email from Howie arrived. In it he explained that the wi-fi service in his building had gone out. He didn’t carry a smart phone and the only computer he had was a desktop klunker, so he had no way of getting back to tell her how much he enjoyed their lunch at The Bagel and their walk in Lincoln Park Zoo on Sunday. He hoped she enjoyed it, too, and wanted her to know he was ready for what he called “a rematch” whenever she was. The email, all in lowercase letters, was signed “best wishes, howie.”

  The ball, Laurie knew, was in her court. She decided to return it with a heavy topspin forehand by suggesting that, if he was free, she wouldn’t in the least mind driving up to Milwaukee this coming Sunday, when he could, if he didn’t mind, show her the city. This would be their third meeting. Perhaps by the end of it, she felt, she could sort out her thoughts on Howie Klein. An email came zinging back:

  Laurie, great idea. meet me at my apartment at 11:00 am. instructions on how to get here along with map attached below. fondly, howie

  Well, thought Laurie, we’ve gone fairly quickly from “best wishes” to “fondly.” That was progress, or so she thought. She assumed progress was what she wanted made.

  Howie’s apartment was on the eleventh floor of a white brick building. Lovely light from Lake Michigan lit up the rooms. He kept the place simple and orderly. The furniture was mostly of black leather and metal, the tables of glass. A large television hung on a wall over a screened-in fireplace. Howie didn’t offer a tour of the place, but instead they went directly to the Milwaukee Art Museum, with its dramatic Calatrava annex in the shape of a whale’s tail.

  Once in the museum, Howie took Laurie over to a painting by a nineteenth-century Pole named Jan Matejko of Stanczyk, The King’s Jester. The jester is seated in a chair placed at the end of a bed in a darkened room. He is a small man in a red costume, with cap and bells, and in repose, the fingers of both hands entwined, looking as all jesters not on the job should, thoughtfully sad.

  “I love this painting,” Howie said. “It’s nearly a perfect likeness of my dearest friend Marty Selzer, who may have been a genius if he hadn’t been so screwed up. Marty died at forty-two, of prostate cancer.”

  In another room he stopped at a painting called Feast of the Trumpets showing Hasidim praying alongside a creek, the background darkly late autumnal, the sky overcast, small fishing boats in the background.

  “These could have been my ancestors, or so I always think when I see it. I’m afraid I’m a pretty sentimental Jew. Not sentimental enough to belong to a synagogue, you understand. But sentimental enough to be unable ever to imagine myself as anything other than Jewish. I even like being a member of a minority. On my one trip to Israel, I was sitting in the Jerusalem Music Centre, listening to Shlomo Mintz, when I had the thought that everyone in the room might be Jewish. It made me oddly uncomfortable. I prefer not to be of the majority, no matter where I am. You figure tha
t one out.”

  This man, Laurie felt, was more interesting than she had at first thought.

  Later Howie drove her past the neighborhood in which he had grown up. He showed her the location of his father’s grocery store, whose lot was now the location of a Taco Bell, which he joked was a good name for a Mexican telephone company. They walked the River Walk. He told her about the anti-Semitism his father endured in his early days in Milwaukee from the city’s then heavily German working-class population. He said that she didn’t know how lucky she was that he was sparing her a tour of the breweries.

  He took her to an earlyish dinner at a restaurant called The Rouge in the old Hotel Pfister, where they sat next to each other on a banquette facing out toward the center of the room. They had an easy flow of conversation going, much of it about the snobberies of what he called fancy feeding. He ordered a cabernet sauvignon to go with their dinner. He waited until the sommelier disappeared after the smelling and tasting nonsense were done with to raise his glass to touch hers and say: “I think you’ll find this a promiscuous but ultimately responsible little wine, with ever so faint a hint of a Snickers bar in its aftertaste.” She giggled. Again.

  After dinner they walked from the Pfister back to Howie’s apartment. In the lobby he asked her if it were possible for her to spend the night. Laurie looked at him, and heard herself say, “Thank you but I have to be up early for school tomorrow. And I didn’t bring a change of clothes.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Don’t give it another thought.”

  He walked her to her car in the garage of his building. After she got in behind the wheel, he leaned in, and they kissed, lightly, on the mouth.

  “Thank you for a perfectly lovely day,” Laurie said. “I really mean it.”

  “I’m glad,” said Howie. “I enjoyed it, too.”

  As Laurie got back on the freeway, US 41, back to Chicago, she wondered if she had lost her nerve in telling Howie that she couldn’t spend the night at his apartment. In fact, she had packed an overnight bag that was in the trunk of her BMW. Did she think it too soon for them to fall into bed with each other? Why was she nervous about it? And what, precisely, was she nervous about? She was coming to like this man, who met none of her expectations. Did she fear that sex with him would be a disappointment and kill everything? What was she saving herself for? The Senior Prom, which was already thirty-five years ago? These questions occupied her during the ninety-five-mile drive back to Chicago.

  When Laurie was back in her apartment, it was 10:38 p.m. She called Howie in Milwaukee.

  “Glad you got home safe,” he said.

  “The reason I’m calling,” Laurie said, “is to tell you that I regret not spending the night with you in Milwaukee. It was a mistake on my part, and I wanted you to know that.”

  “I don’t know when I’ve ever had a nicer phone call,” Howie said, “and that’s no kidding.”

  “I’m glad,” Laurie said. “We’ll be in touch soon, OK?”

  “Sleep tight,” he said.

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she returned and clicked off her phone.

  The next day, at 4:15 p.m. coming out of school, Laurie saw a light blue Prius with Wisconsin plates at the curb. Before she was able to walk up to it, she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me, lady, but you know anywhere I can get an egg-white omelet with half a corned-beef sandwich on the side?”

  Laurie turned and hugged him. His lips grazed her cheek. Her heart jumped. Lots of details to be worked out, but land, she felt, was in sight, and she thought she glimpsed, off in the distance, a safe harbor at last.

  About the Author

  Joseph Epstein is an essayist, short story writer, and, from 1974 to 1998, the editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s The American Scholar magazine. He was also a lecturer at Northwestern University from 1974 to 2002. He is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard and a longtime contributor of essays and short stories to Commentary, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.