The Anglophile

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  “May I be afforded an explanation as well?” Kit says with his own backward glance.

  That elevator that is such a luxury in the East Village, even if it breaks down at a drop of a hat? I’m stuck in it. With Kit. And Kevin.

  Is this Divine punishment meted out? What further castigation do the fidelity gods have in store for me?

  I press the alarm button.

  Kevin crushes a foam-packing peanut littered in the corner of the elevator with his hiking boot. “Listen, Shari, no more baloney, please. Can you at least tell me what is really fucking going on here?”

  Hatred is really spooky in surround sound.

  “Can we just speak privately, please?”

  “I want to know the truth now!”

  Kit looks intently at the ceiling.

  “She didn’t tell you about me?” Kevin says.

  “No.”

  Now Kevin glares at me, face scarlet-red. He’s holding back tears the best he can. “That’s even more insulting.”

  I look at Kevin directly for the first time of the day. “I like you to pieces, but I’ve never been in love with you. And I never said I have. Circumstances have made it difficult to call this whole thing off, but even if I hadn’t met Kit it was going to happen. I just hate that it’s happening this way.”

  Kevin puckers.

  The door opens. We’ve been rescued by Max, the six foot Vietnam veteran handyman of Avenue A, a man who’s been on the cover of at least three tattoo magazines for his almost completely tattooed face.

  He greets us with a fat grin. “Ehhhh—it’s the linguist. Where’s your friend with the bonsai?”

  Between Cathy and myself, we’ve been stuck four times in the past two years, and that’s on the low side for residents of this building. Even though it’s chilly outside, the fix-it man has on a white undershirt. He once told me that ever since Vietnam he feels the seasons differently than the rest of us; he claims autumn in New York feels like a hot rotten summer, while summer is “Max’s inferno.”

  I give him a thumbs-up. “You’re the best,” I say feebly.

  Kit and Kevin step out.

  “No problem.” Max jokingly pops his left bicep, the one with a photorealistic tattoo of Robert DeNiro in The Deer Hunter. “Your janitor called me. He was too sleepy to do it himself.”

  After killing people, everything, according to Max, is “No problem.”

  Locked bathroom door? No problem. Kid wedged salami down the sink drain? No problem. Love triangle stuck in elevator? No problem.

  “You’re lucky I wasn’t at my girlfriend’s, kids. I’ve had it to here with sleeping at her place. Today there was another holdup on the number five, a robbery. I had customers in the morning, floor tiling, and they were fit to be tied. I lost a hefty tip they usually give. Everyone from the zoo stop was late again today.”

  “The zoo stop?” Kit says, the first words he’s uttered since Kevin’s tirade in the elevator.

  “Just across from The Bronx Zoo. When the gorillas urinate, I know it, and when the giraffes move their bowels. That scent just floats over.”

  Despite our own shit going down, Kit opens his wallet fat with money. “Here’s to make up for the gorilla piss delay.” He slips Max twenty and Max appreciatively slaps Kit on the back.

  Kevin takes this in, glances at me and heads for the glass door.

  “Wait, Kevin.”

  “Just get the hell away from me.” He turns the knob and is ready to flee.

  I won’t let the door slam and I hold him by the arm.

  “Get the HELL away from me.”

  “What’s happening here, man?” a Goth teen asks from atop a parked purple Volvo. His voice croaks either from all-night drinking or puberty.

  Kevin is sure of his sympathy. “My girlfriend’s screwing me over, that’s what’s fucking happening.” He looks at me once more, eyes full of hatred, and then stomps away toward the horizon.

  Kit, cigarette quickly rolled and lit, mulls over this unseemly development. He drags deeply on his cigarette before his verdict. “I didn’t want that.” It’s hard to hear his incensed voice with all of the traffic. “I’m a bloody tosspot for—”

  I’m not thinking straight, but I also didn’t pick him as a man to instantly flee my side, even in this mess. “You weren’t so angry a second ago when you were doling out gentleman’s tips for gorilla piss stories.”

  “Don’t give me that tone. You had a serious bloke in New York and you kept that from me.”

  “Please. We didn’t discuss anything. For all I know you have a wife.”

  He takes a few seconds to answer. “Well, I don’t.”

  Kit scurries ahead of me to the park, to a bench near the Hare Krishna elm.

  “Wait! Wait, Kit, please,” I say to the winter air. He’s across the street and sitting down on a bench, head in his hands. I notice my feet for the first time, when Kevin entered the room I was in the yellow furry duck slippers with orange beaks he bought me as a gag gift since my feet are always cold.

  “Won’t you let me talk?” I say a minute later after I waddle across Tompkins Square Park to sit down next to him. I can feel a few pebbles wedged into the synthetic nonslip soles of my slippers.

  He’s staring straight ahead as I begin to sob.

  “His mother died. It’s not an easy story.” Even if Kit’s not going to listen, I’m telling. The saga of the unwanted I love yous tumbles out of me. “Add that stress on to my missteps with my master’s—I’m sorry, Kit. It wasn’t working with Kevin, but I wasn’t strong enough to break up with him.”

  He’s still not biting. It would be easier to draw emotion from a medieval knight in armor.

  I clutch his arm as I plead. “Haven’t you ever stayed with someone out of guilt?”

  Kit stares at my hand. “Is there anything else you’re keeping from me?” he says finally.

  “No. What about you? Is there someone back home?”

  Kit doesn’t answer. We sit in silence. I pluck a leaf from a bush next to my bench and strip it along its veins.

  An elderly white man across from us brushes his bald scalp to relieve an itch. He violently spits. Pleased with his creation, the man lowers his glance to consider it.

  A pigeon picks at half of a sandwich thrown out by a young woman with frizzy hair.

  Another old-timer calls to the pigeon. But the bird has other things on his agenda, like eating, for one.

  Kit surprises me with a quiet question. “Did you ever go to fairgrounds in the country?”

  I’m very confused by his first choice of words. But if this is his olive branch, I’ll take it. “Not really. Am I missing out?”

  “This is a sad story.”

  Has he forgiven me? “Yes?” I say cautiously.

  “I was seventeen. I would not lose my virginity for another six months.”

  “To who?”

  There’s the faintest smile on his lips. “All you need to know here is that I am a seventeen-year-old virgin, and that the ultimate embarrassment at a carnival is to be one of two seventeen-year-old virgins tagging along with a carload of couples. You’re trapped, as a carnival is built for couples. Young teen couples. Everything you do you do with your girlfriend. Everything a man does in a proper working teen couple is designed to lead up to possible sex. Everything an unattached straight male did, just leads to humiliation.”

  “This does sound sad already.”

  “Ian, the other virgin, was my de facto date. We went on the Ferris wheel, the swinging pirate ship—actually I got some relief with that one, that one seated a lot of people in the row. Then the water flume, which has a machine that actually took an instant souvenir picture of you when you went down, which for some stupid reason Ian paid five quid for. I told him to destroy it.”

  I laugh. It really feels good to laugh.

  “But it was the bloody Zipper which ruined me.”

  “Not the Zipper!”

  “You’ve heard of it?’

&nb
sp; “They had that ride at Coney Island once, but from the look of it I steered clear.”

  “Good thing that.” He stares at me with a fixed grin. “More story?” he says finally.

  “More story,” I say softly.

  He tamps down a bit of unearthed soil at the base of our park bench before he continues. “To compound the humiliation, he screamed. I actually thought he was going to try and hold my hand as our basket started to rise over the air. The basket goes upside down and you think, okay this is pretty bloody scary, because there’s another basket of upside-down terrified people you can see clearly in front of you if you can stand to look. I quickly grabbed hold of the bars in front of me, and pressed my face against them, and tensed my whole body, I said nothing as it was running on its track.”

  “Does this get worse?”

  “The individual carriages start to swing—”

  “Oh, God—”

  “You’re feeling like you’ll lose your lunch, it can’t get any worse—”

  “It does?”

  “It does. Everyone on the thing is spun as fast as socks in a spin dryer.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Ian blubbers out that he is gay and in love with me. That was a bit of crimp in my afternoon, as I was already nauseous. I’m a straight virgin spending all day on stomach-churning rides with a gay virgin. I’m nauseous. I’m humiliated.”

  I bravely reach for his hand and he allows me to take it. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “It’s not funny?”

  “It’s very funny, but—”

  “Humiliation. That’s the theme here.”

  “Aha.”

  At least we’re inching toward some form of resolution. We sit in silence again as an overjoyed squirrel feasts on the goodies at our feet, a rotting apple core and half of a blueberry bagel.

  The sparse clouds a few blocks away drift over to right above our heads and promptly veil the silver three-quarter moon.

  Kit extends his other hand. I turn it over and I rest my chin in his palm like it’s an optician’s chin rest. He tilts my face up and gives me a long look. He doesn’t have to tell me that we’re still together. I have to admit, I feel sorry for Kevin, and I’m swollen with guilt. But when I thought I’d lost Kit, my heart almost stopped. I run a finger along the weathered crags of his face.

  He rises. “Let’s go back to your flat.”

  “Yes.” I can feel my pulse again.

  How will Kevin ever expunge his hatred caused by my betrayal? I will try to call him in the morning, and if he doesn’t pick up, I’ll send him an e-mail. I will plead with him to forgive me, it took me three decades, but I’m finally falling in love. That has to be what I’m experiencing. Well maybe I won’t say that exactly. I will, however, explain once again how dear Kevin is to me, and that circumstance and deep “like” stretched our commitment out, not love. I know Kevin cannot not read his e-mail; he is of that generation, my generation.

  Did I want to drop a boyfriend so carelessly? Never. But I’ve finally stepped inside the decompression chamber, and the relief I feel is monumental.

  CHAPTER 8

  Uncle Sam

  Apparently Kevin can not read his e-mail: since we are both America On Line subscribers I can tell his AOL e-mail has not been opened yet. He won’t answer his phone, or his door, despite my pounding for half an hour.

  When I return home from Kevin’s building, defeated, Kit rubs my back. “You’re so tense. You have a huge knot.”

  “Oh, man, that feels great.”

  “What else can I do for you?”

  Kevin may be shunning me as if I were the plague, but at least Kit has forgiven me. Kit and I were supposed to leave for England tomorrow, but there’s no sign of my expedited passport. “Terrorism delay,” was all our issuing service would say. “No one’s speeding through unless there’s a family death.”

  Kit and I need to discuss options on how to pass the days until the passport arrives.

  “This might sound weird, but we can go to my uncle’s Second World War meeting,” is my first suggestion. “He’s getting an award from his group in Westchester. My mom’s been pleading for me to go since she has a doctor’s appointment she can’t break. I was going to take a train there—”

  “That actually sounds quite interesting. What unit?”

  “The Ninth. He was a ski-trooper or something”

  “Ski-trooper. You have to mean The Tenth Mountain Division. They’re legendary worldwide.”

  “They are?”

  “I just finished reading a book about them. They were the elite force. They were all Harvard or Yale ski bums, adventure hounds. After the war a bunch of them launched the U.S. ski industry, and I’m pretty sure one of them went on to start Nike.”

  “Are you sure? The last I checked, my uncle never went to college.”

  Kit looks genuinely surprised at that fact.

  “Does your uncle have a wife I need to remember?” Kit says, as I drive our rented Chevy down the F.D.R. I’ve never owned a car, but I’d take my sorry driving over someone used to the other side of the road. Kris, the third of my Chrisses in Binghamton taught me, and I’ve kept up the license for ID.

  I shake my head. “Divorced years ago. No kids.”

  “Are you close to your uncle?”

  “I never ask him that much, but he gives me hugs, we get along fine. He invited me to this event after all.”

  “I bet he has superb stories to tell. The Tenth Mountain! Do you even understand what that means?”

  “No,” I say truthfully. “Just what you told me yesterday.”

  “They are supposed to have the highest IQ of any group of soldiers ever.”

  “Really? I told you—I don’t think my uncle ever went to college.”

  “There’s a story right there. If your uncle wasn’t Ivy League, he must have been frightfully talented in some arena to gain admission to their ranks.”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never really asked. He’s street-smart, but we vote differently every presidential election. I’m scared of engaging him in conversation.”

  “Ask. Before it’s too late.” He hesitates a second. “There is so much I would ask my father if I had the chance.”

  I wish I could look at him instead of the road. “I’m sorry he’s gone.”

  “We didn’t talk much, but my mother loved him. He was a good old British stodge.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He was a very private man.”

  “Like someone else I know?” I tease as carefully as possible.

  “It didn’t help that at school I was the squib on the line, the little guy ’til forever. He was born with a defined torso. He didn’t really have compassion for what I was going through, and I resented him for that and hardly conversed with him.”

  “I cannot imagine you short, ever.”

  “Before my growth spurt I was Piggy from Lord of the Flies.”

  There’s a backup before the Willis Avenue Bridge that crosses Harlem River, connecting uppermost Manhattan to the Bronx. I touch Kit’s smooth-shaven chin during a red light. “I’ve seen your belly button. You’re naturally cut.”

  “Hardly. I was short and fat for one year but it seriously ruined me. I had to get into rowing to get my self-esteem back. I worked out in private for a year.”

  “What about Nigel?”

  But this private man with a quick leak of emotion has morphed back to unreadable. My question is left hanging as a teenage driver passes us with a subwoofer so loud that neither of us can speak.

  “My ears are still ringing from that bloody car,” Kit says when we are safely on the Interstate Eighty-seven towards Nyack.

  “Nothing like that in London?”

  “No,” Kit says.

  “That’s a thing here.”

  “What’s a thing? A bass that reverberates to Jupiter is a thing?”

  “I think there are guys who genuinely get a kick out of setting off ca
r alarms.”

  “Sometimes your country is harebrained.”

  “Do you want to talk about your father?”

  “When the time is right. All right?”

  “Kit, of course that’s all right.”

  Apparently I have to go gentle here.

  When we enter the Best Western Hotel in Tarrytown seeking out my uncle Sam’s meeting, there’s no one behind the reception desk. We call out to no avail, do some exploring past an indoor fountain with water gurgling over rocks, and find ourselves in front of a mural of a headless horseman.

  “Is this something to do with The Headless Horseman?”

  “We’re in Tarrytown.”

  “The Ichabod Crane Headless Horseman? Set in this town?”

  “Is there another Headless Horseman?”

  “But wasn’t it in—” he struggles for a second or two “—Sleepy Hollow?”

  “Next town over. They named it that to get some tourist dollars. But this is the place.”

  “How bloody amazing! That was Nigel’s favorite story. He used to scare the bejesus out of me running around the house—”

  Even before he takes a photo, and writes in his pad, I can tell he’s not being sarcastic. I’ve been to Tarrytown a zillion times to visit Sam but I never thought much of it. I guess it would be kind of cool to see a town a favorite novel from childhood was set in. I’d pinch myself if I were ever ambling around the real secret garden.

  “By the way, how hilarious is it that you have an Uncle Sam who was in the military?”

  I look around the corner, smile and point my thumb. Kit stops his commentary when he has a look: there’s a roomful of octogenarians chatting up a storm. Sure enough, there is an easel set up with plastic event letters. Tenth Mountain Veterans. I catch sight of my uncle in full uniform; he’s thin like my mother, but much shorter. He looks weighted down by his impressive slew of badges and medals. I’ve never seen Sam in uniform before. He gives me a big bear hug, and I introduce him to Kit.

  “I thought his name was Kevin,” Sam says gruffly.

  “No, that was—Kevin and I broke up,” I say uncomfortably. “Kit and I are a recent development.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” Kit says quickly. “You were part of a legendary outfit.”