The Receptionist

by Janet Groth

  The following Sunday he took me to brunch at his brother’s loft in SoHo. Three documentary-film makers, the Maysles brothers and Donn Pennebaker, and the Village habitué barkeep Bradley Cunningham were there. Along with one or two other men, and various wives and girlfriends, we sat around knocking back Bloody Marys. Strong ones. The Bloody Marys kept coming. The brunch didn’t. My Heisenberg beau soon became too drunk to stand and sank deep into the arms of a wing chair.

  One of the other men present was Friedrich Steffan-Freude— a.k.a. Fritz. (His name and those of his family and friends have been changed.) He was a struggling playwright and a master cabinetmaker who, when we met, was building Pioneer Forts (“Perfect for Young Dan’l Boones”) at FAO Schwarz. Six feet tall, blond, and handsome, he looked like a cross between the German played by Hardy Kruger in A Bridge Too Far and the one played by Marlon Brando in The Young Lions. He had the advantage over the movie Germans of being anti-Nazi. Of course I didn’t know that then, or anything about him, except the part about his looks. I just thought that as he leaned on one elbow against the room divider that served as a bar, Fritz, in white shirtsleeves and chinos, exuded a raffish European charm. When, at two o’clock, I despaired of ever seeing eggs Benedict, I went over to Cranston and said, “I want to go home.” Cranston could not be roused from his snoring collapse. I never saw him again, and as far as I know, Bill Murray never did either.

  Fritz stepped up to me and made a small bow. I almost think his heels came together, but in his desert boots it was hard to tell. “I will see you home, ja? It is too expensive for me, the taxi, but I will be glad to walk with you.” It was a distance of at least a mile and a half, but the day was fair, the man was grand, and I found it an offer I couldn’t refuse. He was still finding his way around English, so the conversation was stilted. We tried out some of my German and found that it, too, was pretty rudimentary. However, he took my phone number, and that evening he gave me a call.

  “Do I speak to Janet?”

  I assured him that he did.

  “Here is Fritz. Ah, please, can you tell me how to prepare a beef heart?”

  “Do you mean—the heart of a cow?”

  “I believe that is right, ja.”

  “Well, frankly, Fritz, I haven’t the faintest idea,” How odd, I thought. It would never have occurred to me to eat a beef heart. “I suppose you’ve already bought it?”

  “Oh, ja, it lays already in the oven.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of any help. I wish you well with it. Let me know how it turns out.”

  I asked about the outcome when we had dinner later the same week, and received his assurance that the cow’s ticker had been “succulent.” After the meal, Fritz suggested a walk. At the corner of West Fourth Street and Washington Square we came across a knot of men playing chess, and as though drawn by a magnet, Fritz steered us toward it. A well-established scene of ad hoc chess games, this area of the park had concrete tables with boards etched in their tops, though players often superimposed their own boards. “Many of these players are quite accomplished,” Fritz said after watching awhile. I learned that he played chess the way some men play video games or follow the ponies—that is, incessantly. And he was sufficiently good at it to have been ranked the junior master of Mecklenburg, Germany, in his teens.

  Because neither of us had any money to spend on entertainment of the ticketed sort, it became a custom for us, after our eaten-in meals, to take long walks, often ending up downtown in Washington Square Park or some other green square dotting the urban environment. There, the paths and benches offered valuable options for city-dwelling couples, parks being one of the few cost-free environments for holding serious conversation. Bed is practically the only alternative. Kitchens, maybe, but almost nobody in New York has more than a Pullman kitchen. As for living rooms, I’ve always thought authors of plays set in New York make a mistake locating plays there. Practically all the drama takes place offstage. Restaurants, hotel lobbies, are too noisy. But in a park you can sit down in a place where something is growing and you can talk quietly. Grass and trees make talking quietly make sense. Soon we were meeting for coffee at the Peacock Café, going for long walks around the Village, and ending up at the park.

  Fritz loved me first. I was five feet seven, had a 36-26-36 figure, and wore my hair in a twelve-inch blond ponytail. What more did a man need to know? So he loved me before he knew me, and when his growing knowledge seemed to change his love, I held it against him. I held off, got to know him first, and only came to love him with our growing intimacy. Each dubious thing I learned only seemed to endear him to me more. He brushed his hair forward, straight into his face, with mad, compulsive strokes, his face screwed up in an expression of unwavering disgust; he crammed his pockets with screws, nails, money, stamps, envelopes, and string; he was an obsessive pusher-up of the glasses on his nose, grabber of himself about the upper rib cage, flexer of shoulders, scratcher behind the ear, and reader of the last page of every book he picked up.

  I see now that I was falling, not only for the idiosyncrasies of a handsome fellow, ten years older than I, but for a European way of life. I had been drawn to it in the books I’d been reading since I discovered Henry James and the Russians in my teens. By linking my life to his, I was trying on a whole new set of identity markers, much more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than any I had acquired as a birthright. It excited and perplexed me in about equal measure.

  One evening, Fritz invited me to a party at Brad Cunningham’s. It was my one and only pot party. Everybody let me know they thought I was a real prude for not taking my turn at a toke, but judging from the conversation—Pause. “Anybody catch Monk the other night at the Five Spot?” Pause. “Far out, man.” Heads nod. Pause—I decided pot was not good for the brain. To me, alcohol was far superior. People improved their talk on scotch and martinis; this was a downer. The apartment was interesting, though, a Village classic of high ceilings, sparse furniture, and large, inscrutable art on the walls. The party was a farewell for Brad and his wife, Jean, who were about to take off for Florida, leaving Fritz in charge. Fritz, I knew, was an accomplished cabinetmaker. He’d quarreled bitterly with his father over his father’s participation in Hitler’s war effort, and as a result, he wound up with a trade certificate in lieu of a university education. He was going to stay at the Cunninghams’ rent-free, house-sitting and doing some cabinetwork. Brad and Jean never did come back and live in that flat, but the island Fritz built—in an eat-in kitchen, no less—undoubtedly upped the selling price when the divorcing couple put it up for sale. I lost track of what became of Jean, but Brad remarried and had a family. His big success came later when he owned and operated Bradley’s, a bar on University Place that Nat Hentoff once called “The Perfect Jazz Club.”

  Among their few furnishings, Brad and Jean had a grand piano, and when I went up to have an after-dinner coffee with Fritz the week following their departure, I discovered that he had made a bed for himself by laying a full-size mattress on the floor under the grand. By now I was quite enamored of the charming Kraut, and we wound up making love under the piano. We had gotten to about the fourth turn in our bolero when I found myself gazing into the eyes of the Cunningham cat, of which Fritz was also in charge. Making love on odd surfaces—or under odd surfaces—became a kind of theme. Down at my place in the Village, where Fritz spent more and more time, it meant making love on top of a door slung over two sawhorses, whose usual function was to serve as a dining table, as well as on a couple of twin couches shoved together, which made up my living room seating. Once, when we both had head colds, Fritz pulled the mattresses off my couches and laid them side by side on the floor, where we tumbled around feverishly between trips to the bathroom, the water jug, and the tissue box. On occasion we even used the bed in my bedroom. It was an odd size, somewhere between twin and full, called a princess. We were a pretty tight fit, which suited us just fine. Between Fritz’s pad and mine it was a kind of traveling Decameron
. We were exciting together sexually, and we made the most of it.

  I don’t remember when things got more domestic, but we were soon taking all our meals together and all our weekends, too. I found myself clearing my calendar of the remaining unimportant men so I could be free for Fritz. It may have been my failure to get it absolutely cleared that led to our first quarrel. From one point of view, it was quite dramatic: Fritz threw the Cunningham cat at me. I wasn’t hurt, the cat wasn’t hurt, but fearing more scratches from an angered feline, I put on my clothes and went home.

  In early July, when Fritz’s house-sit ended, he came to live with me. He was broke. FAO Schwarz would not start adding new Pioneer Forts to their inventory until October. Fritz and I agreed that he would be the househusband, and he began work on Peer Gynt, next up in the series of Ibsen plays he was translating for a German publisher.

  One Saturday afternoon he returned to the apartment to hear soft thuds issuing from the kitchen. He stood in the doorway and looked upon a scene of desolation. I was seated cross-legged on the floor, tears rolling down my cheeks, surrounded by fruit, which I was angrily trying to shove into a paper bag.

  “Na, what’s this?” he asked, sweeping a hand over the narrow kitchen and its contents. “What can be the meaning of this spectacle? Why is honey [as he called me—I called him honey, too] sitting on the floor? Why is she crying? What is she doing with all these fruits?”

  “These aren’t fruits,” I said, choking back tears. “They’re nectarines. They—they’re crosses of peaches and plums. Oh, Fritz, the flavors are just fighting with each other in there. Bitter tasting. It’s terrible. And the poor pits are grown all out of shape. They must be so confused.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Fritz.

  “I don’t have to be sure.” I held up a sticky fist and opened it to reveal a large, misshapen stone. “I can see it. And that’s not the worst of it. I’m almost sure it can never have little nectarines.” More tears.

  “Honey,” he said, reaching over to extract the pit from my hand and throw it away. “Now, honey, is this not ridiculous to get so sentimental over an inanimate object?”

  “It’s not inanimate,” I objected, sniffing. “It grows.”

  “Well, just let me help you up here.” He steered me to a chair around the corner in the front room. “Now, sit right over here where you won’t see them, all right?”

  “They could have been just plain peaches or just plain plums. And they’d know what they were. A peach knows how to be a peach. Only those terrible humans come along and mess everything up and try to ‘improve’ them.”

  Fritz clapped. “I agree. You are absolutely right on the peach question. Now, please, come out with me, won’t you? I will shoot the nectarine man and afterward I will buy you a granita di caffè in the Peacock, nicht?”

  And that is what we did. The coffee ice, not the shooting.

  Although Fritz had been in New York only six months at the time of our meeting, he already played an active role in a circle of people who revolved around a couple named Jillian and Hugo Braun. It consisted of emigrated Europeans and of Americans who had done time as expatriates in Europe, many of whom seemed to be the rebellious children of wealthy families in Kansas City. Hugo was built along the lines of Edward G. Robinson, but the other men in the group all had tall, fit bodies going for them, and the women were good at that leotard-wearing, dark-hair-pulled-back-in-a-ponytail look that spelled bohemian chic in the sixties.

  Fritz spoke of these people constantly, and Hugo was practically a fixture in our apartment, but my love made no move to introduce me into the larger circle. I would come home to find Fritz and Hugo hunched over the little traveling chess kit Fritz had given me shortly after we met. (My own game had me staving off checkmate OK but never learning to go in for the kill.) Hugo often stayed through dinner and the evening. If he did not stay, Fritz would go to the apartment Hugo shared with Jillian.

  True, I had one brief meeting with Jillian and Hugo and one of the former expats named Ruby, which took place in the Braun’s apartment. Fritz and I dropped by one evening in the company of the abstract artist we’d dined with, also an expat. But Fritz was mad at the artist, the artist was mad at Ruby, Jillian was mad at Hugo, and Fritz, finding that the rapid-fire exchange of insults outstripped his English, retired into a neutral corner, leaving me in a position that could only be called the lurch.

  I felt I’d wandered into a hostile camp, but Fritz later shifted the emphasis to an unfavorable impression I had made. How I could have made any impression at all, I was at a loss to explain. However, Fritz said the general agreement on this point had done much to reestablish harmony among the others in subsequent me-less encounters. When I look back on those people now, I don’t know why I disliked them so. I believe at bottom there was some leftover feeling of inferiority behind it. They were all, in one way or another, artists or artists manqué. It was clear that I, at twenty-three, was regarded as not having lived enough to be in their league. Unlike Rabe, I had never worked on the water­front or written a history (unpublished) of the American Civil War in hipsterese. Nor had I lived in Europe for two years like Rabe’s ex-wife, Hester, and Hugo, and almost everybody else, except Jillian, who, however, had chalked up three husbands and three divorces, which seemed to balance things out where she was concerned.

  Hester was the sister of a famous abstract expressionist. She and Rabe had already decided on divorce when Hester gave birth. Now, meeting in the cozy confines of the Braun circle, they talked happily of how they’d named their daughter the Aztec word for “regret.” Hugo, it developed, had once been the lover of Stella, now divorcing Sid. As in all exclusive groups, this one ran to a lot of cross-fertilization. They seemed to like the fact that Fritz had “background” and “breeding,” and they thought his rebel stance put him in their own iconoclastic mold. But I thought the whole construct a rationalization on their part. It overlooked the sharp distinction between their minirebellions against their bourgeois families and Fritz’s breach with his father. Herr Steffan-Freude was a shipbuilder who switched to aeronautics in the 1920s and became one of the major architects of the bombers that devastated London. The Americans in the Braun circle still enjoyed the fruits of their trust funds, while Fritz, in fact, was disinherited. He was a real rebel. Another reason they liked to have him around was that he was not a proven failure. They read his work. They had the evidence of his sharp perceptions and his original mind. He lent the whole group a welcome air of greatness-to-be.

  As to what Fritz saw in them, I grudgingly had to admit that with all the objections one might have to their characters, they made better conversation than most people I knew.

  I tried hard, that summer, to reconcile the Fritz I knew when we were alone and Fritz as he behaved when he was the coddled darling of the Braun circle. One evening when I came back to an empty flat from a cocktail party given by a New Yorker friend, I started thinking about Fritz’s closed circle again. I knew I had made a hit at Ved Mehta’s party, and I wanted, more than anything, for Jillian and Hugo Braun to know it, too.

  The sensible thing to do, of course, would have been to eat some supper, take a long bath, and go to bed. But I had never been good at the sensible thing, and I now conceived the idea of going over to the Brauns’. People dropped in on them unannounced all the time. Fritz had made a point of extolling this swinging form of informality. So why shouldn’t I drop in? These were people who, I had been told, appreciated style. So I would carry it off, with style. Disarm them with gay chatter, amusing anecdotes about James Thurber and E. B. White . . . Perhaps Fritz would be there. It seemed to me he almost always was.

  I refreshed my makeup and walked the few blocks to the Brauns’. Even in my slightly elevated condition, I may have lacked the nerve to actually push their doorbell. But as I turned onto their street, I saw Hugo and Jillian crossing from the other side, in my direction, on their way home.

  “Why, hello,” I said, trying to sound surpris
ed. “I was just thinking of you. As a matter of fact, if I had seen a light on, I would have been tempted to call on you.”

  They exchanged glances that were too nuanced for me to interpret in my fuzzy state.

  “Well,” said Jillian, “you’re here. We’re here. Why not come up with us and have a drink?”

  “Delighted,” I said, and I followed them into their brownstone. I had been there for only a quarter hour when Fritz telephoned to say he would drop by. Jillian must have intimated that I was there, for he spoke to me crossly when he walked in the door. I knew he wouldn’t like it, I thought, but he doesn’t have to show it in front of them. He brooded over near the fireplace. After a while he announced that he was leaving.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  “I don’t want you to,” he all but snarled.

  “Ooh,” said Jillian, raising her eyebrows. “Has somebody ever displeased somebody.”

  “Very well,” I said haughtily, “I’ll just stay here with these nice people.”

  Fritz departed. I chattered on. How successfully, I could not tell. It slowly dawned on me that I had openly challenged Fritz’s authority. Difficult for an American female to grasp the enormity of that. At the moment, I was only conscious that the impossible had happened. I had committed a social faux pas, and I was uncomfortable over the novelty of it. I had failed myself in many ways, but I had always prided myself on my social acumen, my flair for getting on with diverse types of people. As though if there were a heaven, I might yet get into it by behaving well at teas.