“It’s the same cost as Binghamton if you live here, and take the F Train into the City.”
“I’ll visit all the time. I’ll take the bus home. It’s not expensive from Binghamton.”
Mom squeezed a bony fist by her thigh. “I want my little girl here.”
I went to Binghamton anyway, after Gene talked to her. I could hear Mom sobbing in the kitchen as she admitted to him that she wasn’t giving me room to grow. Gene knew I needed to get away back then. My guilt was swallowing me up. I even secretly applied to the English program at Yale. For the pricey Ivy League application fee, I used my Hanukkah money from Mom’s much-older half brother. My uncle Sam, a World War II veteran, had half-decent money from his partnership in a Bronx catering hall, but I didn’t tell Sam, or my mother, or even Gene that I got in. I knew that with the paltry scholarship Yale offered I’d kill Mom with humiliation when she was forced to say that it was impossible.
We could never afford that junior year abroad in London, so dating New Yorkers and New Jerseyans of Anglo-Saxon heritage was the closest I got to my beloved Brits back in college.
Besides, it didn’t cost anything to travel to England with a library book.
CHAPTER 2
London Calling
Gary whispers in an awful imitation of a British butler voice: “Lord Faggot of Faggot Manor—”
“He’s not gay.” I hush him quickly with an angry look.
I can’t get over how Gary really hasn’t changed since college, save a few physical details: his once-skinny physique has widened out by quite a few inches, and two gray hairs peek out of his left sideburn. But his mild bigotry and harmless puffery is cozily familiar, as is the royal-blue turtleneck he’s wearing. He used to order the exact same item in threes from the L.L. Bean catalogue—a half-successful effort to prove to the frat brothers that he wasn’t a Bensonhurst cliché of gold chains and scenic disco shirts.
“I’ll stop.”
“Good, homophobe. Plus, I don’t even need the Englishman. I’ll have you know I’m seeing someone really nice now.”
Gary’s smile is speculative. “What’s his name? Wait, let me guess—uh, Chris?”
That’s a standard joke amongst my college friends— I hold the unofficial Guinness record for Jewess Who Has Gone Out with the Most Christophers in All Its Variants. There were two serious boyfriends, Chris and Kris; and four short-haul runs, Christopher, Chris, Christian and the Christopher who preferred to be called by his initials, CK.
“Kevin.”
“Kevin what?”
“Who are you, the president of my aunt’s synagogue?”
“That the aunt with the skunk?”
“Hey! When did you meet her?”
“At graduation. C’mon, Kevin who? Fess up.”
I hate him right now. “Kevin Bernstein.”
He smirks. “You’re dating a Jew? Auntie Dot will be pleased.”
“Jesus. You really remember her from that long ago?”
“Her name was Dot. She had a pet skunk, and she had those eyebrows—” Gary snorts, because my aunt’s over-plucked eyebrows are always redrawn in with dark brown liner at right angles. How do you tell your elders that there should never be sharp turns in makeup application? (My mother, forever Dot’s submissive sister-in-law, says, succinctly, “You don’t.”)
“You know what she said to me?”
I cringe. “Do I want to hear this?”
“‘Gary, you talk to her, hon. I want my niece to respect her heritage. Doesn’t your mother want you to date Catholic? Tell Shari that Christ is in Christopher. He’s not our guy. She won’t listen to her old aunt, so maybe she’ll listen to her friends.’”
His raspy impersonation of two-pack-a-day Dot is so spot-on that it makes me a little sick. I’m mad all over again at Dot so inappropriately riled up at my graduation ceremony—my roommate, not normally the fink, had spilled the beans about my many Christian Chrisses. Not so privately, Dot took it upon herself to chew me out, invoking her status as activities chairwoman of her Catskills synagogue—a reinforcement of her cultural commitment that made her as proud as her ownership of three successive de-stunked skunks with their “spray” capabilities removed at four weeks. (She’s also treasurer of a nationwide skunk-enthusiast group.)
Our guide loudly claps his hands by the front door. “Folks, who’s ready to brace the cold again? If we walk faster, it won’t hurt so much.” He is commendably chipper as the frigid early afternoon wind bullwhips our faces. This man has years of knowledge still to impart as the windowed tips of Chicago’s revered skyscrapers glisten pink in the bright cold sky. We’ve already heard why in 1871 architects hovered like vultures over Mrs. O’Leary’s burnt city, the exact location of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the date Enrico Fermi launched the nuclear age.
As we exit the office lobby I tug at a stubborn forty-year-old zipper on my zingy turquoise wool Very Twiggy coat I bought last month on eBay from CarnabyJane, a seller in Sussex. Costly for a vintage buy, especially with the overseas postage, but I splurged to cheer myself up about the lack of progress on my dissertation.
“Still buying dead women’s clothes?” Gary teases after the zipper finally zips. He looks downward and shakes his head in further disdain. “I didn’t even see the boots. How are those fuckers still around?”
“I just resoled them for the sixth time.”
Gary is appalled. “Give them a retirement party. Do you want me to take you to Neiman Marcus later? The girls in my office buy their boots there….”
If Dot could hear this conversation, she’d nod vigorously. On my first Thanksgiving break from Binghamton, when she saw me in my favorite thrift store dress in the worst condition, a yellow mini with a cigarette hole, she rapped her stick of celery on one of my mother’s many chipped plates, and decreed, “You can’t go back to college looking like a ragpicker. The time has come for some adult clothes.” She demanded a shopping trip to Macy’s. “You need nice sweaters, and slacks—we’ll make it a day.” She did buy me a good black cardigan and new faded black Levi’s that came in awfully handy. But mostly I wore my prized juicy-colored slightly tatty Mod dresses with tights all through a chilly, snowy Binghamton winter, warming my ankles and feet with my proudest thrift score, a pair of deep purple go-go boots.
The brutal wind continues to batter as the tour race-walks the three blocks to the next Windy City architectural jewel. Face red raw, Gary complains that cold days in his current hometown are even worse than the ones in Binghamton, and ten times worse than New York City’s doozies. So his big plan is to bring a corn-fed gal back East next year, when he’s done ten years in Chicago. “I’m cold and I’m thirty-five, old as the hills. Cold and old. Time for a wife.”
I snort. “Have someone in mind then?”
“Not the one I’m dating. Hailey’s too bitter.”
Bitter in Gary Marino’s universe means sarcastic, which is okay for girls you hang out with in the dorm floor lounge when you watch Letterman, but it’s not okay for girls you actually date for a long run. Although Gary is a funny guy, sarcasm is not his forte—even though he’s an account executive for a major ad agency. Gary’s humor would fit right into the Delta House living room, but a lot of the time I find his manner a pleasant shift away from the sardonic take on life so prevalent in my Ph.D. set. Hell, I’m bitter, too, a “second-rate existentialist,” as one short-haul Christopher so meanly put it just before he gave me the heave-ho.
Opposite a public Calder sculpture, our guide breezily informs us that the name Chicago is derived from the Algonquian word for the onion grass that grew around Lake Michigan. His words are freezing midair. With my sleeves pulled down over my hands, only my fingertips have warmed; I feel like a chicken in a partially defrosted state.
I steal another peek at the Englishman. Despite my growing lust for the man on the tour, I want out. I should have listened to Gary and gone with him to the neighborhood bar he frequents in Lincoln Square, the one with
the crackling fireplace, but I idiotically pushed him on his first poorly pitched suggestion: “Well, there’s a weekly architecture tour for people into Chicago’s culture shit.”
“I like your coat. Very stylish,” the Brit says from somewhere right behind me. I lost track of where he was during my wandering thoughts, and I turn around with a start.
“Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay, and thank you.”
“It looks vintage, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Quite a lovely blue. Like a robin’s egg.”
“It’s British,” I spurt out.
“Oh? Did you buy it in England?”
“No, on eBay. From a woman in Sussex. Or was it Essex?”
“Maybe Middlesex,” he offers.
“So much sex in England.”
He looks at me curiously, perhaps to sort out if my weak pun was an accidental come-on or I was deliberately the siren.
“That’s quite an old joke, you know,” he says evenly. I’m not sure what to say next.
Gary taps me. “Whaddaya think—time to say sayonara to the skyscrapers?”
I reluctantly nod to Gary, and give this sexy stranger a parting grin. I’m a taken woman anyhow. My English friend gives his own careful parting smile that acknowledges my obvious interest as reciprocated. Another lifetime, I promise myself.
Gary is so very Gary as he informs our guide about our defection: “Hey listen bro, the two of us are freezing our effing butts off. My pal and I need something hot to drink.”
“I see,” the tour leader harrumphs. “Just twenty more minutes and then I let you loose. You can’t suffer for a little history?”
I could easily be guilted into staying, especially with my flirtation still on the tour, but I can tell by my old floormate’s face that he’s truly had enough. So I add, just to soften the crass defection, “You were fantastic. I learned so much, thank you.” I mean what I say. If only I had as much passion for my work as this man does for his.
After a cautious sideways step in my direction, the Brit quietly asks, “Where’re you headed?”
The guide frowns at him.
“Dunkin’ Donuts,” I whisper.
“Right. It’ll be warm there, I suppose?”
“We’re banking on that.”
The guide’s mood has taken a downturn as he starts the trivia again. “Oak Park is worth a ride, even in this weather. There are nine, count them, nine Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses in this residential neighborhood—”
Gary silently counts out three fingers and the two of us tiptoe out of sight as quickly as possible when the guide isn’t looking.
“Poor guy was disgraced,” I say, but only after we’re safely inside Dunkin’ Donuts, waiting in line behind other Arctic refugees.
“Why, because a couple of people left his tour slightly early on a cold day?”
“You could see he took pride in his expertise.”
“Yeah, but I bet half of the others wanted out, too. So what did the lord say to you?”
Before I can answer him, I hear “Mind if I join you two?” in that devastating English accent.
I’m all smile, a Jane Austen coquette. “Sure, go right ahead.”
A pretty young blond woman (the one Gary was ogling on the tour) has followed suit as well. Except for her iced-pink lipstick, everything about her clothing is winter-white, a supposedly edge-of-fashion color-coordinated concept that has few takers back in determinedly black-clad Manhattan.
Gary’s mood instantly jazzes up. “Hi,” he says with an open grin.
“I’m f-f-f-frozen,” she says and then smiles with teeth whiter than her pants.
“We were thinking of some hot chocolate.”
“Cocoa,” says the Brit. “Good idea. Yanks say London is cold, but Chicago is positively freezing.”
“Are you also from out of town?” Gary says to the woman. In my Masters of English Literature mind I have dubbed her The Woman in White, but Gary would never in a billion years get that Wilkie Collins reference, so why even share? When I tried to explain the pilgrimage that inspired Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the day he made me toast pizza in his dorm room, he pretended I was holding up a chunk of kryptonite and collapsed theatrically.
“No, I live here. I swore to myself I would finally take the tour.”
That’s all the information he needs. Gary leaves my side to chat her up. They’re flirting in one line while I’m chatting with my Brit in the alternative one closer to the door.
There are three hungry and cold customers still ahead of the Brit and me.
I rub my cheeks to warm them up and ask, “Are you visiting America?”
“I’m here from London for the week—work-related.”
“The receptionist in my hotel said she’s never seen the mercury drop so low in March. Even in a city used to wind, it’s caught everyone off guard.”
“Oh, I see. It is dreadful, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say. Silence. I think for a few long seconds: should I probe further? The always-cautious English make me wary of talking too much. Being a world-class chatterbox—my everyday manner—is something that fellow New Yorkers think nothing of. I’m a linguist who feels self-conscious in the face of a perfect little Brit accent. My profession helps keep my outer-borough nasal twang in check. But there are telltale words and phrases that sell me and every other striving native Noo Yawker right down the river: a dozen aiggs, dine-o-saw, a glass of waw-da and Harry Pott-a.
These mile-a-minute thoughts are once again punctured by that highborn BBC voice: “I hate to break this news, but I do believe your lad is ditching you.” A few feet ahead, Gary is nodding earnestly and ordering for the blonde.
“Who, Gary? He’s an old buddy. He’s definitely not my lad.”
“Then he won’t mind if I pay for your cocoa.” I study him for a moment. He’s got a good poker face but he’s flirting—his eyes are his tell.
“No, he wouldn’t,” I say coyly.
“It’s warm in here, just as you foretold.”
“Yes it is. Are you defrosted yet?”
“Almost, except for my eyeballs.”
The word eyeballs is always funny and my laugh is appreciative.
The Brit beams and says, “Where are you visiting from?”
“New York City.” Well, that’s what he asked. Why rush to tell the man matching my fetish to a T about my boyfriend back in Manhattan? I’m just flirting, too. “Gary and I have been great pals since college. One weekend he kidnapped me—well, he very convincingly convinced me to drive all the way from upstate New York to Indiana just to see a college basketball game. We bonded during the road trip.”
“Did you go to Cornell then?”
“No, SUNY Binghamton. You’ve probably never heard of it,” I say, a bit deflated. Yeesh. Will my lowly state-school past thin this privileged man’s enthrallment?
“You’re right, but let me try another one. Was that basketball game at Notre Dame?” he asks with a small but just as wolfish smile. This chap is definitely interested.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. You played basketball in England?”
“Me? Oh heavens no. I rowed.”
“What British rower follows American basketball?”
“This one.”
“Name four players!”
“Not the university ones, I’m afraid. But the NBA, sure, I could do it.”
“Go ahead then.”
“Shaq, of course. Kobe Bryant, he’s a natural—shame about the legal problems. Jason Kidd, and Jefferson and Martin, they’re also Nets. There’s Reggie Miller in the Indiana Pacers, he’s brilliant, and there’s that forty-year-old bloke, Karl Malone—”
“Okay!” I stop him with my upturned palm as I chuckle. “I believe you. That’s amazing. I can’t think of one athlete from your neck of the woods except—who’s that soccer guy, you know, Bend It Like Beckham—”
“Beckham,” he says with a wink.
> I’m officially in love.
“We had an uncle doing a stint in Boston who sent my brother and me an overseas subscription to Sports Illustrated. That got us hooked. I worshipped Wilt while Nigel was the Dr. J expert.”
Nigel, I echo in my brain. I have never met even one American named Nigel. I have a brief vision of Nigel and his so-far nameless brother reading Sports Illustrated taking turns tending a raging peat, stoking it with an antique poker topped with a family crest.
I guess I was smirking again because he says, “Humorous stuff, is it?”
“No, uh, I was just thinking that you’d love what Gary does for a living. He’s an executive on the Bulls account, and has season passes.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You’re making me bloody jealous here. I tried to get tickets to tonight’s game, but my concierge told me even nosebleed is like asking him for front row seats to Oprah.”
“I’m going tonight.”
“Really! Brilliant!”
“The girl Gary was supposed to go with came down with chicken pox from her cat—sounds weird, I know—and when I called him to tell him I was in town—”
Gary slides into the conversation as soon as he hears his name, a bag of donuts and cocoa in his hand: “I told her it was her lucky day.”
I playfully poke Gary. “I’m not so sure about her story.”
“Why?” asks Gary.
“Who ever heard of cat pox?”
Gary shrugs. “I’ve never heard of it either. But it’s exactly what she said to me.”
I turn back to my Brit, who is still looking amused: “I told him my work here kicks off tomorrow, so yes, I’d love to go to the game.”
“So you like Notre Dame basketball?” the Brit asks.
Gary is floored. “You follow ND in England?”
“Well, I’ve heard of it of course—”
“My dad went to ND. Fucking loved it.”
Now I remember the whole issue with Gary’s father’s “enchanted” college years, one of the big topics of conversation during our epic road trip. Gary’s rejection from the school still was a sore spot for him. How could it have happened? He was a legacy applicant with a ninety-one percent high school average. Either of those qualifications alone should have gotten him in. Gary had been wait-listed to no avail. His theory was that he was rejected because he was coming out of a public school and he asked for financial aid. Gary’s father wasn’t big money like so many other legacy applicants; his Dad had attended ND in the sixties on scholarship. Yet Gary still refused to say a bad word about the school.
The Anglophile Page 2