These days I live in Manhattan’s East Village, a neighborhood of historical note where there thunders an imposing herd numbered in the thousands: the artists, musicians, writers and social activists, and savvy young executives down-dressing to pass as cool. The prime “grazing” ground for this easy-to-spot mass is the unofficial heart of the neighborhood, Tompkins Square Park, a cube of three short city blocks between two longer avenues that was once a salt marsh belonging to peg-legged Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant. My small rent-controlled apartment over Tompkins Park Laundromat was “inherited” through my roommate’s way-older brother who was an NYU student before the East Village real estate boom. It overlooks Tompkins Square’s Hare Krishna Elm, the tree on the southern end of the square that is revered by Krishna converts as the site where their religion was introduced to the west in 1966. We have but two windows that face the southern end of Tompkins Square Park; it can get very noisy because just a few feet over on Avenue A there are nine bars with heavy traffic even for Manhattan.
My roommate Cathy Loeb, a Ph.D. candidate in Asian studies, has filled every inch of our groovy (i.e., cheap and small) apartment with her many bonsai and other Asian curios like her miniature jasper “Tang dynasty-style” horse, and a hilarious costume jewelry charm bracelet with Plasticine tamago, ebi, maguro and ikura that hangs on her doorknob.
“I can’t believe I’m in the real East Village,” Kit says as he parks himself and his coffee cup on Cathy’s mother’s old couch slip-covered with a remnant blue poplin score we actually found on the street. He peers out the window. “So where are the famous beatniks?”
“Dead or in a nursing home.”
He takes his first sip from the take-out coffee we bought before we went upstairs to my place, almost undrinkable brew from coffee.dot.com a late-nineties cyber boom relic two blocks down Avenue A. “No offense, but this is bloody atrocious.” In stating his horror he almost knocks over an inch-high Chinese mudman from the Guangdong Province that Cathy claims protects her favorite oak bonsai and gives her good feng shui. She is so worried about her plants that I was shocked that she was spending ten days away. I rush to the oak—the mudman teeters but lands on his feet.
“Yeah, coffee pretty much sucks in New York.”
“What is it?” Kit asks when I’m encased in thought. What’s troubling me is that the soil in one of the bigger bonsai pots looks freshly wet. When did Cathy leave again? I was sure that she left the day after I left for Chicago almost a week ago. But I let it go and keep up my share of banter:
“Nothing. Just thinking to myself.” Where was I? “Oh, I read that Lavazza sent over their espresso expert from Italy but he threw his hands up in disgust.”
Kit laughs. “The BBC picked up that story. The press is always up for an American bash.”
“My roommate makes good coffee but I don’t. I’m afraid you’ll have to suffer.”
“So where is your roommate again?”
“At a giftware convention in L.A. She makes these Jewish origami ornaments.”
“Pardon?”
I laugh. “An ironic Jewish thing.”
“Oh, is she Jewish? We had a lot of Jewish Americans at Cambridge.”
The tone of that statement troubles me. “Do you know that I’m Jewish?”
“Really? Diamond? Is that a Jewish name? I didn’t pick it. Do you avoid eating—”
“Pig?” I answer for him.
“Yes.” Is he too afraid of offending me to continue?
“I’m not Kosher, but I’m definitely Jewish.”
He says nothing.
I study his face. “Do you care?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that—are you okay with me? I’m Church of England, you know.”
“Of course I’m okay with that.” Now is not the time to bring up Aunt Dot. Or for that matter, her back-up agent—my traveling roommate with her additional lecturing on Jewish self-loathing. Once, a month or so before I met Kevin, Cathy tried to get me hooked up with her humorless single cousin with a fat face and a twirly mustache who sold scaffolding brackets to construction companies. He may be a Cohen, a descendent of Moses’s brother, but I sure as hell didn’t want to help him continue his five-thousand-year-old line. Her reaction to my refusal to go on a date was so predictable: “Your birthright is a gift, not a curse. Why do you hate yourself so much?”
Hate myself? I almost moved out that night, and later when she apologized for the cranky rant, and begged me to watch the third-to-last-ever episode of Sex in the City with her, she admitted that Kevin is her ideal of the perfect man. “Could I borrow him?” she asked.
“What, for sex?” I laughed nervously.
No, Cathy likes Kevin’s comical “deep” radio voice he could summon at the drop of a hat so much that she’s had him narrate her two videos: Folding Your Heritage and Folding Your Heritage Two that have upon release been big hits with the Heeb Magazine and Jew-cy T-shirt crowd.
Kevin needed no coaxing—and just before the record button was pressed he admitted that he had five rabid townie fans when he hosted the Ode to Grunge hour during his undergraduate years at Michigan State.
“Oy, three more folds to get you a Chanukah dreidel,” he articulated into the mic with a boyish grin in the shoebox NYU recording studio we’d secured through another one of Cathy’s NYU friends. Cathy was laughing hysterically when he told us during a coffee break about the time his henpecked father over-dramatically stormed to the bottom deli drawer in the refrigerator with a hole-punch “to fix things” after Kevin’s mother Dee Dee scolded him for buying Munster cheese and not Swiss like she had written on the list.
Cathy later said I was incredibly lucky for finding myself “one of the nice ones,” and I have to say I nearly loved him that day, squeezed in so close to his vocal adorableness.
Kit’s managed to finish his awful coffee. “So how much origami does she have to make to pay the rent? How much is tuition?”
“The cost, the whole degree will reach—actually I can’t think about it, suffice it to say that current tuition is around thirty thousand a year.”
“That’s a joke, right?’
“No, unfortunately that’s the figure.”
“That’s sickening! What kind of bloody country is this?”
“Usually you can get that covered in grad school, but I’m still recovering from my undergrad bills, and it’s been ten years already. We’re pretty lucky—our rent here is only thirteen hundred a month for this matchbox, and that’s pretty damn good.”
“Thirteen hundred dollars is pretty damn good? That’s over eight hundred quid if you do the converting—”
“That’s a great deal for this neighborhood.”
“Matchbox. I never heard that word used for an apartment before.”
“Really? In New York it is the second most common word after rip-off.”
“Did you have Matchbox toy cars here?”
I look at him, confused, and then say, “Oh, you’ve changed topics. Yes, they sold them here.”
“My favorite was the fire engine and the combine harvester.”
“Ah, the combine harvester.”
He shoves me a little after the mild mocking. “I was trying to remember what happened to them.”
“My brother had a Matchbox collection, too.”
“You have a sibling, then?”
“Two. Both brothers.”
“Do they live in New York?”
“One’s out in Queens, in Forest Hills, in a nice place.”
“So which queen was Queens named for?”
I smile. “I happen to know this.”
“I didn’t doubt for a second that you would.”
“It was chartered in 1683 for Queen Catherine, although I don’t know much about her.”
“She was the wife of Edward Charles the Second, I believe,” he says in academic tit-for-tat.
“So if I ever go on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, you’re my number one lifeline.”
&n
bsp; “You have that show, too? A child could answer those questions. ‘Jack and who went up the hill—’”
I do a little raspberry with my tongue. “That’s the warm-up level for a hundred dollars. It gets harder.”
Kit shrugs with continued game-show contempt. “So where is the town of Queens anyway?”
“No, Queens is a borough. We passed through it when we landed at LaGuardia.”
“Oh was that it? It throws you off, doesn’t it? Queens sounds so royal.”
“A definite no to that, but a few neighborhoods are upmarket, like Forest Hills.”
“Where your brother lives?”
“Yes.”
“Tennis area, right?”
“Yes. The U.S. Open used to be held there.”
“You know, my brother lives next door to my mum.”
“Do they live in an apartment in London?”
He pauses a second as if he is measuring how much he should reveal. “No, they’re in the country alongside a stream.”
“That sounds pretty amazing.”
“It is. Nigel lives in a gristmill that was abandoned in the next lot. It still has an original sawmill and granary—it was a real fixer-upper across from some unkempt medieval watercress beds.”
“You’re just saying all that to turn me on, right?”
“Pardon?”
“Gristmill? Medieval watercress beds? Do you have any idea how exotic that sounds?”
“It’s lovely, I must confess.”
“What does your brother do for a living?”
Kit smirks. “Do?”
“What? Doesn’t anyone in your family work?”
“Ah, not really, since I don’t make much money from what I’ve written for the journals. Nigel collects things though. He’s a bit of an oddball.”
“Not as odd as my family.”
“Try me.”
I really don’t want to go into too much detail with a man whose mother lives across from medieval watercress beds. The most sophisticated possession in my extended barely middle-class family is the photo my uncle made us all copies of since he joined a World War II veterans social group. It’s a photo he took in 1945 of horses pulling a wagon loaded with a massive cask of wine down the cobbles of a small French town. After that we’re talking mom’s and Aunt Dot’s historical romance novels and Gene’s vast library of World Wrestling Federation DVDs.
And what about Dot’s skunks? My brothers and I have pooled our memory, talked over plausible explanations, and have continually come to the conclusion that there simply is no sane explanation. And there’s much more insanity to Dot than her skunks. There’s Eric, her six-foot-three life partner who Dot met seven years ago online at Skunk Chat, the skunk lovers’ Web site.
“C’mon, I’m waiting,” Kit says, arms crossed.
I offer Kit the more palatable insanity of my mother’s significantly older sister, Fay.
“My aunt Fay’s the World’s Greatest Talker who constantly carps on about her neighbor Delores who wouldn’t shut up.”
“That’s all? Weak. I need better than that.”
I’m not ready to broach Dot yet. It may make a good story, but I want this man in my life.
I tell him about Fay’s enormous soap frog collection, and that she makes everyone collect bagfuls of orange peels she reincarnates as vile orange-peel chocolate bark that she neatly repacks in cookie tins hand-painted by her, cookie tin beach scenes of waves, angelfish and albatross. “Oh and Fay has bought up America’s supply of watermelon tea candles that no one has the heart to tell her really smell like nail polish remover.”
Kit sneers. “Sorry, your auntie Fay doesn’t have a patch on my brother—hoof trimmers.”
“What?”
“That’s what Nigel collects. Vintage hoof trimmers.”
“Okay that’s pretty damn odd,” I concede with a laugh. “What’s the prize in his collection?”
“I don’t know. I think he has some eighteenth-century duke’s hoof trimmers. He buys them on—on eBay, like you.”
“Another sucker ’cross the pond.”
“What does your brother do?” Kit asks.
“The older one has something to do with a bank. But I’m throwing my other brother in the ring here, he lives in a commune on Staten Island that supports itself making environmentally-sound sandals that involve no animal slaughter or pollutants.”
Now why am I telling him that?
Kit is unfazed. “Pretty good, but I’m sure I can ante you. Did I tell you about Uncle Frederic with his gong collection?”
I laugh so hard my coffee jiggles in its take-out cup.
“That’s it? No more after that sentence?”
“End of story. Frederic goes to church and at night he collects gongs via mail correspondence with gong collectors across the globe. Good lord did he get ‘a boot out of’ the gong exhibit last year at Christie’s. Made his year.”
In the past ten minutes Kit’s speech has quickened to that of a nutty Queens passenger telling the weary bus driver in the front seat all about his winning pick at Belmont. Is it the pace of Manhattan that has him going, or the foul caffeine?
I nudge him. “Hey listen, chatty, since you’re obviously not jet-lagged, do you want to take a little walk around the Big Apple now?”
“Love one.”
“Hungry?”
“Starved.”
“Over in the West Village there’s Corner Bistro—it’s been voted the best hamburger in the city for about ten years running. It’s a bit of a hike, but—”
“Take me there immediately please. I haven’t eaten a hamburger since Mad Cow broke.”
While Kit’s in my loo, Kevin calls on my cell.
“When are you coming home?”
Kit and I moved our flights up by two days—we’d heard all we wanted to hear at the conference, and maybe I’m a coward, but I’m grateful for a bit of time to plan the kindest goodbye I can come up with. I never said anything to Kevin about calling in every day. I’ll face my fate later.
“In two days.” I grit my teeth as I hang up, not even nearly ready to deal with my not-exactly watertight lies.
On the pavement, Kit slips his arm into mine, and under the midday sun our combined body-form is a double-headed midget. His midget head is higher than mine though, for in our real dimensions, I’m five foot four and he’s about six foot.
After those days in Chicago together as teammates, there is no question that we are on our way to being a couple. It took us all of three hours after Kit’s meteoric rise in linguistics for me to sleep with him again.
Yes there is that major hitch to this fabulous, pinch-myself-to-believe-it union (other than the small fact that my dissertation is in ruins)—I haven’t broken up with Kevin yet.
“What are you grinning at now?” I say to Kit.
Kit nudges me. There’s a stray tabby on a brownstone stoop awakening with a hilarious look on his face. “Churchill.”
“Huh? I don’t get what you mean.”
“There’s a well-known photo of Churchill looking maniacal. The photographer yelled at the old bastard to get the perfect shot. Everything else on the roll was a real dud.”
During the next three hundred yards, a fish tackle sign in a vintage collectibles store inspires Kit to tell me how to catch trout using a lead sinker. “Rod fishing for trout is very calming,” he said. “You can sit there for hours. When you throw a lead-weighted line into the water it travels a long way. On a quiet day only the current in the water drags your lines to one side, and then they go taut—”
I’ve never listened this hard to Kevin. Am I a snob for wanting sharper banter than: “Check this out, Shari. I have finally found the secret for perfect oatmeal. None of that one-minute, five-minute crap. You have to buy the long-cooking kind and cook for at least ten minutes, and then instead of sugar you put in four packets of Equal.”
Am I a snob for hating the minutia Kevin insists on telling me about his Manga collection? My t
hirteen-year-old neighbor—an eighth grader at the Earth School—collects those Japanese comics, too. I’ve wanted to yell at Kevin all last month: Listen up. I really cannot give a rat’s ass about Marmalade Boy!
There is a luxurious depth to our conversations. We could talk all the way into the early hours, and we do. Kit knows about so many different things that I’m intimidated. I’ve never met a man who could utter a sentence like, “The reason so many Americans collect stoneware was that it was a truly indigenous art form; sending for dishes from England was a costly endeavor,” and then cough and explain that, “Of course, salt-glazed stoneware was the Tupperware for the early nineteenth century.”
“Of course,” I laugh, and he winces a bit.
“I’m being terribly pompous, aren’t I?”
“Not at all. I love hearing you talk.”
He seems positively relieved, a fact that thrills a bit. “No, I love hearing you talk.”
“The mutual admiration society,” I say, and he squeezes my hand.
The only area that seems off limits is his personal life. For once in my life I don’t probe.
As the sun rouses me from sleep I give my new lover’s sleeping lips a quick peck. I sneak some more marvelous looks of him from the sink as I brush my teeth and remove the traces of eye makeup never removed the previous night. Even though he’s out like a light I gabble on about how he is as handsome in slumber as an RAF test pilot played by Leslie Howard or David Niven during World War II, power-napping after extraordinary figure-eights in the feathery white cirrus clouds over Europe.
“Where are we going today?” he says when he awakens a half hour later.
“You are going to the Empire State Building. I think tourists should do those things by themselves.”
“And you?”
“I have an appointment with a doctor.”
The Anglophile Page 8