“I guess I do too, because I like the smell of stables. I used to go horseback in Central Park — oh, for about a year. With some friends. There was a riding academy on the West Side, I suppose it’s still there. I wore jodhpurs, I looked pretty snazzy.”
“I bet you did, you little witch.”
“And I loved the smell in the place, I thought it was very refreshing. Very earthy.”
“I like the smell of fresh gasoline too.”
“As to that, I’m not sure.”
“Oh, it’s pure and pungent, it’s only from the exhaust that it becomes putrid.” He pointed out a cubbyhole of a store, its window dim and fly-specked. “That’s my typewriter place, where I get it overhauled when necessary.”
“Is that often, Jack?”
“Not now, the one I have is new. Or newish. The old one was a Smith Corona, I was very attached to it, but I worked it to death and the keys started popping off. First one, and I had that replaced, then a second one I had to see to. In the end, six of them gave up the ghost, just flew off. That was it. I think I got around fifty dollars off the new one, which was gratifying, and now I’m off the hook.”
“Use it in good health.”
“Both mine and the machine’s, I hope. This guy’s an old German, a character, he’s straight out of Graham Greene. So’s the shop. You get the feeling it’s a ‘safe’ place, where spies and counterspies shamble in with hats pulled over their eyes and weather-stained trench coats. Some password or other. ‘The cuckoo sings in the spring …’ Eyes meeting eyes and a quick exchange of something — a microfilm concealed in a tube of toothpaste. Then the guy in the trench coat slips out a back door.”
“Does the typewriter man look like Sidney Greenstreet?”
“No no, not at all. He’s small and slight and short, with a goatee and heavy eyebrows. He looks quite a bit like Dr. Only.”
“Dr. Who?”
“My father’s eye doctor. Piercing gaze. I always found Dr. Ohly a bit sinister.”
“Jack, you’re a hell of a lot of fun.”
“I try,” he said modestly.
Carrying packages, leaving Yorkville and heading for Sixty-first Street. Up the stone steps and then the inside carpeted stairs. Setting the packages down and putting the groceries away in Jack’s fridge, in the overhead cabinets, the toilet things in the bathroom. The newspaper, TV Guide, New Yorker in the magazine rack, then sitting down opposite each other at the kitchen table, tired from their ramblings and chatting idly.
Something said would lead to a silly joke or anecdote or reminiscence. Sometimes a very silly joke, springing into Jack’s head in what seemed an arbitrary way, but which was generally connected to a previous observation. “This young girl came home at seven in the morning after staying out all night. She was confronted by her fuming father. ‘Good morning, daughter of Satan,’ he says. ‘Good morning, father,’ daughter replies.”
“I heard that when I was I think about ten years old.”
“Screw you.”
“No, screw you.”
“I said it first.”
“All right, you win. What led up to that dumb story?”
“Lets see — oh yes, you said it was a wise child who knew its own father.”
“Reasonable enough,” she conceded.
Palindromes, he was fond of palindromes. The only one Christine knew before she met Jack was the classic “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” He had an awesome collection, of which her favorite was “Naomi, sex at noon taxes, I moan.” “Who makes these up, I wonder?” she pondered.
“People with nothing better to do.”
“I guess. Did you ever try your hand at it?”
“Sure. I failed. It just kept me awake that night, trying to work something out. It’s bad enough as it is. I write dialogue in my sleep. I’m not kidding. In my sleep I see typed sheets of paper. Occupational hazard.”
He was a wonderful, endlessly absorbing companion. There was a bird in residence in some tree or other, he told her. “I can hear it in the mornings. First comes the sneeze from next door. Then the bird starts in. Same old refrain, tirelessly repeated. Stop it, stop it, stop, stop, stop, it says. It’s like some prissy housewife being goosed by her spouse. “Stop it, stop it for goodness sake, Henry, not in front of the children.”
He had an imaginative ear. Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, he informed her, had a passage in which the instruments clearly sounded the words “Good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon.”
“I perforce have to wait for it,” he said. “‘And good afternoon to you, Felix,’ I respond. It would be impolite not to return the greeting.”
Entertaining him in turn, she did her takeoffs of Brando and Barbara Walters, Jackie Onassis, John Belushi. “Cagney?” she said disdainfully when he suggested it. “Everyone does Cagney, I wouldn’t lower myself.”
Preludes and preambles to lovemaking, and after the lovemaking sitting up against the pillows, hair tumbled, played out and resting, a head on a shoulder, clasp of hands. It was good to be in bed with him, not doing anything even, just being close to him in his skin: she felt a new respect for bodies, the vulnerable bodies under the clothing, their demands and bothersome functions, and the restraints imposed on them, the pretenses respectability and taste dictated.
You said of someone that he/she had a good mind, but you didn’t say they had a good bod, unless it was a film star or a stripper or Mr. America. Suits and ties met dresses and scarves: you recognized a friend on the street from something he/she was wearing. And all the while women walked about with Maxi pads, or a tampon whose string dangled: you never were aware of that. Men got in the wrong position and the apparatus became uncomfortably malplaced, but if they had good manners they didn’t publicly squirm it back, so you never knew that either. You told people you had a headache, a tummyache, but you would never announce that you had a sore rectum or an irritated vulva: you might be in agony with a need to urinate, but you wouldn’t consider it legitimate distress even if it hurt very much, and you’d go to any lengths to hide your plight, probably let your bladder burst, requiring a hospital stay. Only small children were not ashamed of the machinery of their bodies, a state quickly outgrown as they learned, from their elders, to hold it in low esteem.
Decorum was one thing, shame another. Or contempt, devaluation. It was because Christine, for really the first time, was able to shed herself in lovemaking unabashedly and with a hearty enthusiasm, that her preoccupation with the body which gave her such overwhelming pleasure — carnal pleasure — was so profound. Perhaps, she thought, she had grown up to it. There had never been anything wrong with her libido: she could be strongly attracted, but it was the wanting more than the getting that lured her. The getting generally had failed to measure up. She had a short attention span, it seemed, as in mathematics, when it came down to sexual performance.
Before she met Carl there had been a few experiments — some of them little more than sophomoric fumblings — with young and not very proficient men, but it hadn’t been the men, it had been her own self-awareness that wrecked the sex, a kind of “let’s get it over with” damper that got in the way of things. Or she would start thinking of something else. She had been accused of scratching her nose at the “crucial moment,” which obviously had been crucial for him, but for her simply a welcome windup of this tiresome, disappointing business. Give me your undivided attention was the watchword, and rightly so, but since all the touted sensations seemed to be taking place in someone else and not in herself, it was difficult to comply. You can lead a horse to water but you can not make him drink.
As for Carl, she had enjoyed, still did, his nearness, and during the early years of joyous felicity had met him halfway. As far as she knew she had never scratched her nose, not even when she had a pile of undies soaking in the washbasin. He was the first man who gave her love and honor and respect without infatuation: other men went overboard for the perfection of her facial features and t
he color of her hair — that was, when they were not eyeing her legs and her bustline. He treated her as an adult personality and as a woman to be admired for her liveliness and sense of fun and, according to him, her goodness. Suddenly she had a partner, a very decent guy who saw things in her other men hadn’t, and he didn’t keep saying, God, you’re so gorgeous, or surreptitiously put his hands here and put his hands there and pant in her ear.
They “went together” and met for dinner when Carl could manage it (he was doing his internship) and twice attended the opera: they saw Boris Godounov and Forza del Destino. She was living in the apartment at Ninety-second Street, but they didn’t go whole hog in their lovemaking, even though they had complete privacy. The first time they did it was in his room, the size of a walk-in closet, at Montefiore, where there were items like a brain pickled in a big Mayonnaise jar, anatomy casts, great medical tomes that must have weighed ten pounds each, a skeleton with a silly smirk on its wobbly skull and a cot bed so slenderly proportioned that almost any normal person would have fallen to the floor just by turning over.
It was what they coupled on, however, and they managed exceedingly well. Her wholehearted attention was with him, no diversionary thoughts, and while she failed to achieve orgasm (hell, she didn’t expect to, she half believed it was a myth) she was glad and happy and not one bit turned off, and he was so clean and fresh-smelling, nice and immaculate, and he didn’t say the way dreary drips were wont to, “Did you come? Did you? Did you come?”
She knew she would marry him. If she hadn’t been sure before she was that night. He couldn’t even take her home, poor thing, being on call: she cabbed back to Ninety-second Street all the way from the Bronx. She felt secure and shielded forevermore from harm. She had Carl now, and the whole rest of her life was no longer a stretch of years with a question mark, but laid out and designed, rosy and glowing, everything was okeydokey.
Then when he didn’t want to wait, but instead to be married as soon as he transferred to his third year residency at Cornell Medical, dissension raised its ugly head. That was when she got so cross and upset and everything began to get colored gray, and she didn’t see him anymore because he told her he would bide his time, but she would have to be the one to make the overtures if she changed her mind. It was money, of course, he was paid a pittance in his internship and she would have to give up the apartment on Ninety-second Street because there was insufficient closet space, insufficient walking space for two, insufficient everything. She went down with a crash, started crying at the office file cabinets at work; it was horrible.
And of course she couldn’t stand it. Neither could her mother, whose telephone calls became increasingly shrill. “Christine Elliott, you must be out of your head, a wonderful man like that, will you come to your senses!”
“It’s me,” she said over the phone. That was, after cooling her heels for about fifteen minutes, on hold and waiting for him to answer the beeper, also the paging system, she could hear it over the wires. “Dr. Jennings. Dr. Jennings …”
“I was wrong,” she said when his voice finally came. “We’ll do it your way, Carl.”
So it was the two of them again; he seemed to be the other part of her and there was never again any thought of division. Bemused as she was now, in these latter and bewitching days of love, laughter and enchantment, there lay beyond it a reality she very carefully put aside, as in a vaults for safekeeping. She had locked it up, nobody could steal it, and it was intact.
What she felt for Carl was firm and solid and well established. It wasn’t, never had been, anything like what she felt for Jack Allerton. This was the romance she had never had, it was exactly that, a romance, an enrapturing poem of love, with a fragility about it that haunted her. What is perfect is destructible — even diamonds, it had lately been revealed, were not forever. Was every beautiful thing doomed to fade and die? Well, of course a diamond was a coarse comparison, it had lustre and light but not the warmth and vibrancy of a human body, with its incredible intricacies, its network of veins and arteries, its ligaments, tissues, bones, glands and ganglia, all of these meshing pieces and parts sheathed, in the most masterly way, with muscle and fasciae and then layered with skin: no man-made material could approximate the skin of a man’s body or a woman’s body.
It had never been Carl’s body Christine prized, it had never threaded through her dreams or seemed a miracle of creation. He was a big, sturdy, strong and comforting man, sitting across a table from her, going places with her, making babies with her, coming home from the office with a smiling hello, darling.
With Jack it was different. Walking home when she left him, she stifled laughter at something he had said, or they had both said, and a block later after successfully controlling this untimely mirth, would see before her — as if it were actually there, right out on the street, Lexington Avenue — his naked form limned on the horizon, the way he lay after coitus and sliding off her to relieve her of his pressure, arms outstretched on the pillow, legs spread, chest heaving, ribs and flat belly and navel, loins bathed in sweat and semen. The armpit hair, the luxuriant sprout at the crotch, the penis, having done its stint, shrunken and spent, faintly rosy.
The apparition vanished, or was banished, when she went through that outside door to the lobby of the Colonnade, and the transition to the other Christine, the one who was married to Carl Jennings, took place. “Hi, Jimmy,” in the elevator, then her key in the lock. Getting out of her street clothes and into pants and a shirt, opening the door of the fridge. It was like coming home from a job. Or it was like going to a job after hours of joyous freedom. Braising the eye of round, washing the lettuce. Coming down.
Carl arriving. “How was your day?”
“Fine. Yours?”
Bruce joining them, his day at the park concession over. “Something smells good.”
“Sauerbraten.”
“It smells like pot roast.”
“Which it is, only with vinegar it’s Sauerbraten. Want to make something out of it?”
“You’re cute, Mother. Can I help?”
“Not yet, dear. You can set the table later. Nothing to do now.”
Even if you weren’t going to see him tomorrow, or the day after that as well, perhaps, there would be his voice on the phone in the morning, it meant a lot. Even just his voice. He would say something amusing and she would laugh, then his own rumbling laugh would come over the wires. The sound of his voice would stay with her all day, in her ears and mind: she hoped it was the same for him, that what she had said and the way she said it would linger for him too, through all the day’s hours.
14.
The first thing to do when she walked into Jack’s apartment was to go to his desk, it was almost a compulsion. She had to see if the pile of typed sheets was increasing noticeably. A way to ease her conscience, she knew. If she saw a substantial rise in the stack she felt less guilty. He was spending time with her but he was also adding to his output.
“I think it’s growing, Jack.”
“It’s grown by sixty-four pages since you were here.”
“That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
“That’s damned good. What do you want, blood?”
“When are you going to let me read the books you’ve got out? You promised.”
“Not at the moment.”
“Why not? You said you weren’t ashamed of them. Anyway, why should you be ashamed of them? Were they pornographic?”
He laughed. “No, they were far from that. I did have offers to do a line of raunchy stuff, it’s wanted, sells well, plenty of demand. You write children’s books, hard-core and science fiction, you’re in business. I can’t do any of the aforementioned. Sci fi — nothing is more alien to me. A pertinent adjective, isn’t it, aliens from outer space? Aliens from outer space put me into a doze, they have no sense of humor in any of those yarns, Pompous and orotund or wearyingly diabolical.”
“You never read comic books when you were a kid? That’s
un-American.”
“The funny papers in the newspaper, that was it. I was a little snob, didn’t you know that? I did read the Fu Manchu books, though. And my grandfather had a whole collection of books by a man named Karl May, a German author who wrote about the American West, cowboys and Indians. Old Sure Hand, old Fire Hand. I loved those. That was my mother’s father.”
“The one that was Czech.”
“Yeah.”
“You said the books you had published were suspense. Crime?”
“No. I mean, not police stuff, not procedurals. There are specialists in that genre, Wambaugh, Hunter, et al. And of course that wonder of wonders Simenon. I didn’t do anything painstaking like that. A complex character with a psychological blemish, a frailty, a moral defect. Plot based on human weakness, mainly a character study of a soul gone wrong. No supermind solving the riddle, elementary, my dear Watson, nothing like that. Very primitive stuff, but it taught me some discipline.”
“It also brings you some checks once in a while.”
“Yup, it does that.”
“You said children’s books were a fertile field. Yes, I can believe that. I’d make a guess that those, plus cookbooks, top the field in overall sales.”
“About right. Science fiction’s right up there, as I said, and then I guess girlish gothics and those period epics with crinolines and bursting bosoms.”
“And the raunchy stuff? Where does that stand?”
“Nickel and dime. It’s women who buy books, and women want make-believe. They don’t want it spelled out.”
“But you said there was a demand for it.”
“There is, but men won’t shell out much for a book, they can get their kicks from the smut magazines, why pay $4.95 for a paperback? So the list price is low, peanuts really, and they can pick up four or five at a time. Which means that the author’s advance is peanuts too. In order to make anything worthwhile out of it he has to turn them out a dozen or so a year. It’s sweat work.”
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 21