When he makes another reference to “those dogs,” I hear myself saying, “You’re kind of hard on those working girls, aren’t you? I thought they were fine. The one could speak English better than either of us. I liked her,” I add, experiencing a swelling in my chest.
Sherman gives me a mocking look. “You’re hopeless,” he says. “You’ll learn.”
“I hope not,” I reply, meaning that I have no intention of becoming like him.
Friday evening along Bindlach’s neon-lighted main drag, I go along feeling happy and hopeful on the early November evening. With half an hour to kill, I’m approaching what I’ve never approached before in my life: a date with a girl! Showered and shaved, wearing PX civvies–sweater, jacket, khaki pants, and a new shirt–date excitement is alive in me and has me walking with anxiety while keeping my positive anticipation in check.
It pleases me to know that Lotte is older, that she is impressively educated with language skills I can hardly believe. Anyone I’ve ever known would be impressed with her, would like her as much as I do. (This, I caution myself in my striding, is what is known in every song as falling in love…an area wherein I’ll need to tread carefully. As if, in falling, I’ll be able to control my raw impulses.)
At twenty to six, well ahead of time, I turn into the Gasthaus where we ran into each other and take one of the familiar two-person tables next to the wall. I accept a menu and sit waiting, trying again to read the pages like a foreign language textbook and decipher certain words.
It’s as I’m looking at the entryway that I see Lotte Lengemann enter. I take in a young woman in a full-length coat and dress, shoes and stockings, a small purse in her hands at her waist, angling her neck to gaze about the busy dining room in search of her date. She’s nicely dressed, and I know enough to be flattered.
Thrilled and terrified, I get to my feet and walk over to shake hands in the German style, to smile and say hello, to guide her to the table I selected next to the wall. “You’re here!” I say to her. “This is wild! Nice to see you.”
“I am here, we are here,” she agrees, smiling as I present a chair for her.
It occurs to me yet again that I like Lotte Lengemann for the simple reason that she likes me, that friendship is in place between us and has nothing to do with popularity or age or any kind of tawdry flirtation. A brightly educated young woman with a quick sense of humor, and a nineteen-year-old soldier who has been striving to improve himself by learning all he can. Where was Sherman coming from, accusing this neat and lovely girl of being desperate and homely? Accusing her of racism when all she meant was to flatter him for possessing rhythm in the way that every movie, song, publication says African Americans possess rhythm? DeMarcus wouldn’t be such a snob, is my sudden thought. He might be immature and do dopey things, but he wouldn’t be a snob. Look at his infatuation with that sodden beauty in Bayreuth who means to teach the world everything and is old enough to be his mother!
As Lotte helps with the menu, and as we agree that we aren’t really hungry (“I’m too nervous to be hungry,” I confess), we settle on glasses of wine and are soon on the sidewalk taking our time as we stroll along, teasing and laughing, questioning and informing. “Are you hungry now?” I ask, though hardly ten minutes have passed since we agreed, in the restaurant, that we were too nervous to be really hungry. “They sell popcorn at the movie,” I tell her.
“Please, not to tease, certainly not over popcorn…for which I have a lifelong weakness.”
We keep glancing and smiling at each other foolishly. My urge is to take her hand, to touch her, while I maintain a respectful distance. “You have a neat smile,” I tell her. “Your smile lights things up. Do you like to walk?”
“More than anything I enjoy walking out of doors. Window shopping, also. And you?”
“I do now,” I say. “I never thought much about it…before now.”
“As before, Mr. Murphy, I believe you are teasing me.”
We smile as we go on. She’s petite and I feel physically strong with her, aware that it’s something she has granted me, like a gift, though I don’t know how.
“I tried, the other day, to call up what you look like,” I admit. “All I could see was your pretty smile when you turn it on.”
She can’t help smiling at this, while saying, “You are succeeding in making me feel self-conscious.”
Sneaking a glance, I think, yes, she’s skinny and sort of gawky, but with that pretty smile. Main thing…she’s fun and smart. My date! My girlfriend…if a girlfriend is what I want her to be.
Feeling bold, I say, “I’m going to take your hand. In case someone tries to snatch you away.” Her face brightens again as if lighted–I sense having scored with her–and her expression warms again me as it did earlier.
“You may take my hand, this pleases me,” she says.
An added eye-exchange lets me know, on a startled realization, that anything might go with her, that we have made clear our mutual affection.
“We’re friends already, aren’t we?” I say to her.
“I believe you are a wonderful young man, beyond words,” she says.
“No one has ever called me something like that,” I say. “What a nice thing to say.”
“You are daring. To take my hand, to say we are friends. Therefore I shall admit that I have liked you at once, when you have stopped at our table. It was apparent that you were nice, while we were acting foolish. Not everyone is nice,” she adds, which has me thinking that she is referring to Sherman in his arrogance.
“I should tell you…I’m a devil at heart…maybe not so nice,” I confide.
“Devilish, not a devil. To be nice is okay. You need not worry.”
“What if I try to take advantage of you?”
“I shall be disappointed if you don’t.”
“How did you get to be so clever?”
“If I am clever, in any way, it is only by intuition. With you I am knowing, in one instant, what I have not known before. That you are strong, nice as a human being. Again, I say this not from experience. From intuition. I’m adoring you, you see, Mr. Murphy, more than I can believe.”
At a loss for what to say or do, I plant a kiss on her cheek as we walk. “You’re something else,” I tell her. “You really are.”
Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors is captivating and memorable if for no other reason than the similarities between Lotte and shy Mia Farrow on the screen. Small waists and slight figures. A dress on one resembling the dress on the other. Tiny lovely wrists extending from their cuffs. My Lotte, with whom (as never before in my life) I am instantly enamored and swept all but off my feet.
As we re-enter cool autumn air and decide at the main gate to take a cab into Bayreuth for drinks and window shopping, I note to Lotte how pretty her dress is. “You have pretty wrists and hands. Did you know that?”
“Thank you, dear Jimmy,” she says.
“Am I embarrassing you?”
“I don’t mind.”
“The tiny flowers on your dress are pretty, too. Can I smell one of those flowers?”
“You are devilish,” she says. “While the proper usage is ‘may I,’ you know. We are taught, endlessly, that in making a request one is to say ‘may I’.”
It’s exciting to be corrected and taught by her. I find it endearing, even provocative.
“The point is to press my face against one of those tiny things on your dress,” I say. “May I do that?”
“Dear Jimmy, I am aware of your point,” she replies.
“Is that your answer?”
“I don’t believe the flowers are offering an aroma.”
“Over your breast, I’m sure they do.”
“Absolutely, you are devilish,” she says. “You may smell a tiny flower. It is what you wish to do?”
“It is what I wish to do.”
“May we have refreshments in Bayreuth? Then you may smell me, and kiss me, too, if you like,” she adds in a whisper tha
t is not without understated passion.
Startled, I say, “You’re the one who is devilish!” And add something I’ve never said to anyone. “You like me, don’t you?”
“Madly so,” she says. “From the very beginning. Do you think I approach every table in every Gasthaus? I am knowing at once how much I adore you. I think it is love at first sight.”
I’m thrilled by her words, and at an immediate loss for what to say.
“The feeling is somewhat mutual?” she wishes to know.
“The feeling is somewhat mutual,” I tell her.
We find a table not much larger than a sheet of typing paper in a noisy cavern that appears to be a hangout for the young people of Bayreuth, probably students from the university. Rock and roll hammers from a bubbling Wurlitzer against a rear wall. At Lotte’s suggestion that I try a drink consisting of beer and raspberry juice, I hold up two fingers and imitate, “Berliner Weisse,” to the waiter, who bows away and remarks “Bittesehr.”
“Your accent has promise for an American,” Lotte calls through the din of music and dancing. “It will improve, if you practice at every opportunity.”
“American accents are bad?”
“They are at all times the worst, for the simple reason–I believe–that Americans are unwilling to practice.”
“Are you teasing me or picking on me?”
“I enjoy to tease you,” she says.
When she asks about my family, I tell of my mother living at home, working at Gillette, and of my father having died in Vietnam. Thus does the topic of World War II (ever lurking, it seems, in Germany) join our conversation within the rocking volume of the red and yellow flashing juke box and sporadic dancing in the aisles.
“What kind of soldier?” I ask when she says her grandfather was imprisoned at the end of World War II by U.S. forces.
“Oh, only a boy, and a conscript. A prisoner of the Americans for but one month,” she says, shifting closer in her chair. “I know Americans say no German will ever admit to having been with the Nazis. My grandfather also says this. He has been a teacher in Gymnasium, as is my father today. Both are gentle persons. Always, as my mother says, their faces are in books.”
I sip the sweetish red beer and ask in turn how she likes living at home.
“Oh, space is dear in Germany,” she tells me. “One is fortunate to find a room to let, and the cost, how do you say–is excessive.”
On a smile she adds, “Tell me…do you enjoy to dance?”
I laugh, feeling nailed in my ignorance of girls and dating, and when she asks what is so funny, I say, “My mother tried to teach me once how to dance. In the kitchen. I didn’t learn very much. I wasn’t popular in school…didn’t know many girls or learn how to dance and stuff like that.”
“Perhaps I may teach you…?”
“You’re so nice to me.”
She gazes at me before saying, “You know you are sweeping me off my feet.”
I enjoy her words, while finding them hard to believe. So it is that I let her guide me onto a dance floor, to grant me an occasion, as clumsy as I may be, of holding her as I move my feet. My efforts have us laughing and allow me to kiss her fleetingly on the cheek as we return to our tiny table.
If anyone is being swept off his feet, of course, it’s me. All by this young woman who has submitted to an adventure known as a date. A young woman whose tiny waist can be contained in two hands. A skinny girl with a brain as bright as the neon signs adding color to this autumn night in Bayreuth.
“I like how we walk together,” I tell her as we stroll again along the sidewalk.
“Walking together is dancing of a kind,” she says.
Pleased, I say, “I guess it’s one kind of dancing I can do.”
“I trust you,” she tells me as we reach the location back in Bindlach where we agreed at the outset to part…where she can board the last bus home at midnight. “As a female, I trust you to be strong for me,” she says as the big lighted vehicle pulls over to the curb right on time.
Quickly, I kiss her on the lips, which rapid kiss she returns in confusion.
“You will telephone?” she asks on boarding.
“Soon,” I say. “I’ll write, too, if we deploy. Will you write back?”
“Of course I will write.”
There is the bus door closing, enfolding her within its light as, at once, it pulls away. I wave, aware that my wave may not be seen, and pause another moment in the streetlit night air before turning to begin an extended walk home to Christenson Barracks, to Geo Troop, First Squadron, 2nd Armored Cav, which has been giving every sign, to be sure, of deploying to the Persian Gulf for a clash with what is known as the Iraqi Elite Republican Guard.
In the morning after chow, when the simulators are available as they usually are at such times, I practice firing for more than two hours. When the nod comes from the Lieutenant to take the gunner’s position, I’ll be ready. My date the night before remains pleasantly on my mind (I’m smitten, no doubt about it) while the rumors of deployment that continue flying everywhere have me wanting to be on my game in the likely event that we are sent to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Again, it’s like working out in the weight room, in a pool hall, with speed and body bags, getting into it and perspiring until I’m firing more by impulse than through the conscious action of my hands. My movement is becoming as automatic as rapid-fire typing on a keyboard. Bring on the Elite Iraqi Republican Guard, is my thought. I’m ready to take them on.
CHAPTER SIX
Rewriting a Dream
I have no choice but to rethink the ultimate chapters of the quiet life I’d like to live. Having enjoyed many months in a relationship with Bert, I determine all the same that I won’t be able to overcome my disillusionment with her daughter and the girl’s impulse to lead with her chin. Nor can I see, at my age, trying to correct an impossible situation of the kind by trying to re-educate the girl, presumably against her will. Why enter a relationship dominated by an adolescent who remains too blindly devoted to her father to entertain a larger picture of her mother? It’s okay with me that she’s attached to her memory of him (and of herself) as a daredevil, but I have neither the time nor the interest to try to open her eyes.
The most difficult moment in breaking with Bert comes several days later when I’ve resumed my classroom life and haven’t called her as in the past. My weekend getaway routine is on the rocks, there’s no doubt about it, and as the days go by I neglect taking up the telephone. When my phone at home rings and I know it’s her, I take up the receiver intending to speak the truth without hurting her feelings. If I can.
“Is something wrong?” she wants to know straight off. “Were you offended by Haley?”
“I was taken aback by her,” I admit. “I believe I know where she’s coming from, but yes, I was offended. More than I care to admit.”
“I apologize for her,” Bert says.
“You don’t have to. I understand. She’s young. Devoted to her father. It’s not hard to see where she’s coming from.”
“I was afraid you would feel that way.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re saying…you won’t be coming this weekend?”
“I think it’s best if I take a break for a while.”
“You really were offended, weren’t you?”
“I was. I don’t know how else to say it.”
“Will you be visiting again?”
“Let me just say that I’ve thought about it a lot…and believe it’s best that I take a break for now. I’m sorry for that. What it’s brought to mind is that we’ve have been rushing into something we should have taken more slowly. I need to back off and sort things out.”
A pause follows over the line, while in my mind I’m thinking that I have no wish to visit Bristol ever again, that nothing is a bigger turnoff to me than the thought of facing one expression or another from Bert’s angry daughter. Haley is probably not a totally bad person (maybe s
he is, I don’t know), and my thought is that I came close to committing to something that could have buried me and that I should be thankful to her for giving a clear sign before I dove in and had to run for my life.
“Let’s give it a few weeks,” I say.
“You’ll call?” Bert wants to know.
“I will,” I say, knowing that I probably won’t.
“I apologize for Haley.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’ll be waiting for your call,” Bert says.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” I say.
Feeling miserable, if relieved, I go out for a walk in the chilly autumn air. Walking after dark in Bristol was appealing for its safety, while walking in the city as a middle-aged man has me aware that any passerby, or person or persons within a passing car, might circle and attempt a gratuitous assault or robbery threatening my life and well-being. Life in the city…though more tolerant than small towns controlled by ignorance. It’s a paradox of the freedom that I’ve gained by building up my cash and credits: Finding a place to live and work where I’ll be safe in the ways that youthful strength allowed me to be for so long…when, in truth, I may not be free at all.
At home, organizing papers and tasks at my desk, I devise a project of the kind I’ve been looking for: Jimmy Murphy’s handwritten steno pad journals. I decide to transcribe his entries onto my computer, to create a file that will be of use to him as he proceeds through his enlistment (hopefully surviving Kuwait and Iraq) and moves on, presumably, to college. As I discovered writing and began writing personal essays after my time in the army, he might do the same. (In fact, he’s further along at this time in his life than I was at the same age.) It’s a task I find challenging, even exciting. At the least, he will end up with a record of experience in a computer file he can read in search of details and narratives large and small. (I loved reading at his age; his focused journal-keeping is far more pointed than was my free-ranging through the libraries I came to frequent.)
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