“Summer of
love, my ass.”
Brit tears
at the silver paper, and jerking her body sideways to protect her spotless
white bellbottoms, angles a softened Hershey bar into her mouth. She readjusts
the strap on her shoulder bag. It is big yellow leather thing, a Salvation Army
find, buttery soft and nothing like she has ever owned. It carries all she holds
dear: lined notebook—black cover, red binding, spiral-bound sketchbook, favorite
pens—her precious Mont Blanc, and a few felt tip markers. Slotted inside, at
least two of the many books she has on the go at any time. Joan Didion’s, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Revolution For the Hell of It, by the
self-professed ‘nosy Jew-boy’, Abbie Hoffman. Some days she leans toward the
cool, spare non-judgmental tone of Didion. On others she faces life
raw-knuckled and ready for a fight. That’s when Abbie steps into the ring. Not
so much a referee as promoter. At the bottom of her bag is a green and gold
pack of menthols. In among the cigarettes she can hardly afford, a freshly
rolled joint.
An image
of her soon-to-be-ex slithering nearly naked in acres of mud at some hippie
fest upstate, getting up to god-knows-what, makes her laugh out loud. An old
woman looks up bewildered and Brit shrugs her shoulders in an I-can’t-help-it kind of way.
Seth is more likely one of the hundreds stuck
in traffic on a freeway going nowhere, arced like a jockey over the steering
wheel of a platinum-colored El Dorado, that too-big car his father had leased
for them. Seth, in his ratty navy blue Lacoste polo, collar cocked with purpose.
His clip-on sunglasses flipped like cartoon eyebrows.
That car had
been an embarrassment, conspicuously nosing through uptown streets on a hunt
for dime bags. The magic gas-guzzler will look ridiculous alongside psychedelic
VW busses and the anti-establishment parade of laboring pickup trucks heading
for Woodstock.
Seth
missed the whole summer of love thing. He told her the festival was a last
fling before he settled into grown-up life. His old ethical buddies from
Fieldston had gone along for the ride. They’ll be gorging on sliders from White
Castle, littering the dashboard and floor with grease-stained paper sacks and
the sticky aftermath of spilled sodas. The interior of the car will be well
seasoned with the aroma of fried onions, greasy burgers and marijuana.
It is
August, still early in the month with plenty of dog days ahead. Brit tolerates the
heat and walking suits her. She screws her nose to the already exhausted early
morning air. It reeks of rotting vegetables packed into metal trashcans
awaiting pick up outside the markets on upper Broadway, where she has a small
sublet near Columbia University. Her bare arms glisten with perspiration.
Already New Yorkers are bitching about the demand for exact change on busses
that will come at the end of the month. But whenever she can save a couple of
dimes, she walks. She’s already spent half the fare on the chocolate.
Brit strides
with purpose, avoiding the odorous proof that dogs have left in the street. She
is on her way to the East Side to pick up Harry. He is a very wealthy man who
requires a walker. She is the walker.
Brit looks
good. Real good. High cheekbones support a sleepy gaze. She has long naturally
blonde hair and a headlight smile when she bothers to turn it on. Her favorite
tight-fitting bellbottoms cling to her slender hips. A bright yellow and red
sleeveless tie-dyed t-shirt tucks loosely into a wide patent leather belt. As
soon as Brit leaves Harry, the hem of her loose shirt will be gathered and
knotted tightly, exposing her tanned midriff. Bangs that come to her fine
eyebrows stick to her satiny forehead. But her ponytail defies humidity and swings
jauntily in step with her determined pace.
“You look
like Joni Mitchell,” Seth had said—wistfully—before asking for her keys to
their apartment on the Upper East Side.
She is
twenty-five and senses a symbolic re-awakening; the first steps out of the dark
marital cave to stand upright and squinting into the anticipatory glare of
starting over. She just needs to follow those hand stencils out of the cave and
toward her future.
That
Sunday she’d been rescued from a weekend of recrimination, mostly self-directed.
Her friend Hugh, whom she’d met at the Art Students League, had not deserted
her when she married Seth. It did not stop him from telling her what an idiot
she was. Hugh never lets her forget that she is an artist. Brit knows his heart
is in the right place, beating for her. When she moaned about missing out on
Woodstock—this could be history in the making—he’d set her straight. “That’s
rich white hippie shit,” he told her.
He’d packed
her into the crowd in a ragged rectangle of a Harlem park ringed by Black Panthers,
with thousands of others who ignored the heat and disproved the cops’
prediction of another Newark, another Detroit. Instead of rioting, the laid
back crowd sucked on fat joints and grooved to Nina Simone. From the stage the
singer demanded: “Are you ready Black people?” The crowd whooped their assent.
Hugh’s unaffected grin beamed like a pearly crescent in a dark sky. He’d
squeezed Brit’s eager white hand. She’d tightened her grip on his.
Hugh had
been the unwitting matchmaker for Brit and Seth. ’63 was her introduction to
soul food and jazz. He introduced her to a new restaurant in Harlem called
Sylvia’s. They’d gorged on fried chicken, BBQ ribs, grits, collard greens and
black-eyed peas.
After
dinner he’d walked her to the Lenox Lounge to see a modern jazz quartet. Brit
was new to the genre and fell quickly in love with the furious beat that both shocked
and hypnotized her. The antics of a pack of over stimulated white college boys
seated near them distracted her. She’d leaned over to one who bore the
bespectacled look of a mad scientist atop a footballer’s physique and, ever so
politely, told them to shut the fuck up. Seth was smitten. He’d abandoned his friends
at the bar, followed Brit into the street after the gig and—ignoring
Hugh—pleaded for her phone number.
They were
a bad fit from the start, but the foreshocks only became apparent in hindsight,
when their marriage crumbled from the earthquake it turned out to be. Enamored
of their differences—his wealth, and for her the paucity of it—their brief,
drug-fueled affair resulted in pregnancy. The live-in maid for the family of a
friend of Seth’s, who enjoyed comfortable radicalism in ten rooms on Central
Park West, came to Brit’s rescue. She arranged the abortion, much to Seth’s
relief. Afterward, Brit’s demeanor was wrongly interpreted. She’d mourned
something, but could not put her finger on what that something was.
Brit
married Seth in Baltimore, Maryland. They had not waited for very long near the
entrance to the Holland Tunnel before they’d hitched a ride south. The driver,
in an undisguised effort to out them as a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, immediately
revealed that he was armed. Brit had bolted from the car to the curb again. The
man waved her back. Said the gun was in the glove compartment and was not
loaded. Seth urged her back into the car, annoyed. The driver leaned across
Seth. The glove compartment flipped open. “Take a look at that College Boy,” he said.
Perched in
the back seat, like a watchful film extra, Brit held her breath as Seth
extracted a handgun from the glove compartment. He palmed it under the driver’s
watchful eye.
Brit was directed
to a cardboard carton filled with sawdust. At the driver’s urging she’d picked
out a delicate bisque figurine. It was a miniature nude the man called a
‘naughty’. Its skin was the color of peach ice cream. She’d brought the 6-inch
figure closer for inspection. Its enigmatic expression defied cute.
The man
bellowed above traffic as they’d sped southward: “Can you all believe that was shocking?”
“It’s
beautiful,” Brit had murmured.
“She’s an
innerestin’ collectible. Cheap in her time, but could be worth a lottuh money.”
Seth had
gingerly replaced the handgun.
“She’s a
real beaut that,” the man crowed, nodding to Seth.
Brit
discovered soon afterward that she’d lost the marriage license on the bus ride
home. Five years later the marriage lost her.
At 86th
and Broadway, Brit veers east. She enters the park along the transverse,
picking up speed. She loves Central Park and misses the closer proximity when
she’d lived on the Upper East Side with Seth. Breakfasting on black coffee and
cheap chocolate keeps her alert and she slows her pace, enjoying the summer
day. She has more than enough time to get to Harry’s apartment on Park Avenue.
He is
doing well. In the past couple of months they have walked more often at his
request. Apart from a few mystifying tremors he was calm. Harry is
rediscovering speech. They are able to hold conversations, many abstract conversations
and a few closer to home. His gait is steadier than it had been on the first
outing.
Brit thinks
the man he must have been once is remerging. Tall, and though slightly stooped
to ingratiate himself and put one off guard, she is sure he is a man who had
been used to running the show, whatever that show was. Harry might have been a
flirt—surely a kibitzer.
She doesn’t
often get beyond the front hall, the foiyay,
as his wife calls it. She’d answered an ad in the Village Voice. At her interview, in the well appointed, if dated,
living room, she’d been offered a cup of tea, which she’d accepted from the
platinum-haired, carefully dressed woman who’d kept her eye on her husband.
Harry had stood near the grand piano, trembling slightly, staring straight
ahead. Brit guessed from the black and white photos framed in gaudy silver
frames and displayed like awards across the grand piano, that Harry had been in
entertainment. Harry’s doctor, the psychiatrist, had asked Brit if she felt she
could handle Harry.
Brit had
smiled at the twitching man holding onto the piano. She’d stood up and taken
Harry’s arm.
“I think
we’ll do just fine,” she’d said.
The doctor
and Harry’s wife had exchanged glances. “You’re hired,” the doctor said. Brit had
shuddered a little at the mirthless grin buried in a dense walrus mustache.
After a
few sessions with Harry, Brit ruminated on how detached Harry’s wife was from
her husband. She’d talk about him, not to him. He was less of a husband and
more like a ward. And then sometimes she stepped out of the character of a
well-dressed manikin and displayed a fawning affection for Harry that made Brit
uneasy.
Brit
collected her pay at the psychiatrist’s office a few blocks further north from
Harry’s building. The doctor had no receptionist, which struck Brit as strange.
She rang and he buzzed her into a windowless outer room. A deep pile carpet,
the color of sand, covered the floor of the nearly bare room. The walls matched
the carpet. One large abstract print in desert pastels hung on the wall behind
the lone chair in the room. If the doctor was unable to see her he left a check in an envelope on the seat
of the leather wing chair.
She was
always relieved when he was too busy to engage her. She felt shy and skittish
around him, more so since the incident with Harry when she’d taken him to see
Roman Polanski’s new film, Rosemary’s
Baby.
It was a
stupid thing to do. She had been walking Harry for only a few weeks. When asked
how their day went Brit usually mustered a cheery reply. “Fine,” or “Great!”
Truthfully, she’d very nearly quit Harry after the first week. He shouted convulsively
when she had least expected it. Sometimes he’d stop dead in the street, fearful
of crossing some invisible line and Brit had to learn to wait patiently for
Harry’s motor to shift gears. She mostly gravitated to Central Park with him
and spent as much of the time sitting on a park bench. Children were frightened
of him. She’d watch Harry as he trembled a hot dog into his mouth, sauerkraut
raining onto his lap. Once they had visited the Central Park Zoo. They were
both sad after that.
But on a
dreary day, just after a rainstorm in early spring, Brit had been at a loss.
Park benches were pooled with rain. In just a few weeks they’d exhausted the
museums closer to home. Everyone was talking about the new Polanski film. If
they sat in the balcony for an early afternoon screening perhaps they would
disturb no one. Harry might even fall asleep.
As it
turned out the doctor in the film who terrorized Mia Farrow’s character shared
Harry’s psychiatrist’s surname. Harry grew visibly more agitated whenever Ralph
Bellamy appeared onscreen in the role of malevolent obstetrician. Brit had
finally abandoned the film when she’d offered popcorn and he’d flailed his arms
like a pinwheel in a storm and began shouting unintelligibly.
Outside of
the theater she’d picked salty white buds from her hair. The rain had stopped
and a glimmer of sunshine made her hustle him past the Plaza Hotel and into the
park at 59th Street. Brit had prodded an agitated Harry to an empty
bench near the pond and tried to calm him down.
“Sapisfucking…tryna…fuck…fucking…trynakill—,”
Harry bawled.
At a loss,
Brit had shouted at him: “Stop it Harry. Stop
it now!”
Like a
mechanical toy at the end of its wind, he’d collapsed into silence beside her.
“Harry,” she soothed, “The doctor is trying to help you. Your wife loves you. I’m
here, Harry. No one is going to hurt you.”
She’s kept
quiet about their failed expedition and Harry’s outburst. Brit had been warned
not to overtax him, to keep to the park, stay off public transportation. Take a
taxi if they had to, but best to stay close to home. She’d held his hand in the
cab. Harry was steadier by the time she’d dropped him off, almost tranquil.
“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Brit reasoned.
After
that, when she picked up her pay at his office, Brit noticed the doctor’s brass
plaque was missing from the front of the building. She waited while he wrote
out the check.
“Somebody
steal your plaque?” she asked, making small talk.
He’d
looked startled at first and then that expansive off-putting laughter, brimful
of evil: “It’s a very interesting story actually. That film? Rosemary’s Baby?” He advised her not to
see it. Brit blushed deeply and shook her head. “It’s rather gruesome, not for
a young woman like yourself.”
“Have you
seen it?” she asked.
No, it
wasn’t his thing.
Brit had fidgeted
nervously, anxious to leave and cash her check.
“I’m
telling you this in confidence, okay?”
“Okay,”
Brit replied. She’d listened restively as he told her about his odd connection
to the Polanski film.
“The
author of that book had a gripe against me. I’ve decided to drop my lawsuit.
Better for my patients. Seems I was treating his girlfriend—at the time—I don’t
know if he is still with her. She’s no longer a patient.”
He stopped
to gauge Brit’s reaction. She remained politely poker-faced.
“Anyway,
he called me, livid with accusation. I was trying to drive her insane. I would
kill her. I was evil. I had to be stopped….”
The
doctor, seated at his desk, drifted off. His eyelids lowered. His head was
thrown back. A silent minute passed, compounding Brit’s unease. Just as Brit
was about to speak, to tell him she had somewhere else to be, he jerked
forward.
“This
character, this doctor in the movie, is his revenge.” He reached across the
desk, her check in his outstretched hand. “Pathetic.”
She did
not have to work, at least not for a while. Not until she’d sorted herself out
with a real job. Seth’s family was loaded.
Her
father-in-law was a corporate attorney who had done well. A lucrative sideline
in pork belly futures gave his wife free rein with her hobbies, most of which
was spending money. A disenthralled line of underachievers and hapless dreamers
in Brit’s family had come before her and her girlhood in the Jacob Riis
Projects on the Lower East Side. Seth had never worked outside of his private
schooling and had enjoyed an indulged youth growing up in a sprawling apartment
on Fifth Avenue. Brit had always held some kind of job during and after high
school. He went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She skipped college
and embraced the artist’s hardscrabble life. When they married Brit left her
tenement flat on East 9th Street and moved in with Seth to a
brightly lit one-bedroom in a doorman building on the Upper East Side, close to
the hospital where Seth would begin his doctoral work. His father paid for the
apartment. She worked part time selling art supplies at NY Central Art Supply
and returned to the Art Students League at night. Her parents had long since
divorced and fled New York—her mother to relatives in Lowell, Massachusetts and
her father to Hartford, Connecticut to sell insurance and drown his sorrows in
the bowels of the Shipwreck Lounge on Farmington Avenue.
Brit
strove for independence. Her husband had let her have it for her lack of
feeling, her callousness toward him. “You’re just emphasizing the differences,”
he’d say when she complained that his family looked down on her. She’d quit her
part time job at Seth’s urging. She stopped going to the Art Students League. Very
soon after she was looking in the Village Voice classifieds for something,
well, different. Seth was disconcerted. “You don’t have to do this. Who is this
guy Harry? Paint or something, or I don’t know, those woodcuts.”
It was
true. She had retreated from a creative life. She had allowed herself to be
callously tossed, an object of curiosity, among Seth’s family, his disapproving
mother and her social circle, the girl from the projects, the outsider.
Seth
accused her of overreacting. Who balks at having money? You marry a rich guy—well,
a guy from a rich family—and you are suddenly shot of who you are. Who are you? Well, to start with, not rich.
When she’d been introduced to Harry, Brit immediately recognized a head-shakey
attitude toward life.
Brit exits
the park onto Fifth Avenue. The Metropolitan Museum stretches downtown. She isn’t
sure what’s on special exhibit, but they can wander the period rooms, have a
bite in the cafeteria. She loves eating off a tray at the little tables
surrounding the reflecting pool. At the far end stand the smiling Etruscans.
She and Harry guess at punch lines to the sculpture’s ancient jokes.
They have
not been back since the spring. That an extensive exhibition like Harlem On My Mind was too much for Harry
had been a possibility, though it merely tired him. Throughout he’d been alert
and communicative, especially in the rooms devoted to the 30s. He paused at
practically every photograph, scrutinizing as if for clues. They had stood
silently and watched a video of a former slave who lived in Harlem. Harry had
not taken his eyes off the woman.
When
they’d returned, Harry’s wife was incredulous. “Why would you take him there?”
she’d asked.
Harry had
stuttered a retort for the first time since they’d begun their outings. “I-I-I wanted to go.”
“But it’s
awful,” she’d said nonplussed. “What he’s done to the façade. It looks like a
fire sale, that ridiculous sheet hanging there.” His wife nervously patted
Harry’s arm and called for the maid. “Tom’s up to his old tricks, I fear.” She’d
spoken of Thomas Hoving like he was a friend, which he probably was. “It’s too
confrontational,” she’d sniffed. Brit had read the newspaper article calling
the exhibition irrelevant. Calling Negroes irrelevant. She didn’t understand.
Harry
responded as he’d been led away, catching her off guard. “It’s s-s-supposed to
be.” Brit had registered something like shock creeping into his wife’s
expression.
Brit
crosses Fifth Avenue. Harry’s apartment building is just up ahead on 83rd
at Park Avenue. She looks forward to seeing Harry in his now customary
seersucker suit, always with a club tie and a pastel-colored shirt. He’s
started wearing a yellowed straw hat with a broad brown grosgrain ribbon that
he tips at a rakish angle.
His wife
fussed when it had first appeared. “That old thing.”
The
doorman at Harry’s building greets her, calling her ‘Miss’. She is early and knows
not to show up before the appointed hour. “I’ll just sit for a few minutes,”
she says and breezes into the elegant floral bedecked lobby that stretched like
one of the great halls in the Metropolitan Museum. She settles onto an
upholstered bench near the elevators. Her flushed appearance draws another
smile from the white-gloved elevator operator who knows the routine.
Brit fans
the pages of Abbie Hoffman’s book. She feels a wave of unease. Maybe it’s the
gory details being played out in the tabloids about the Manson murders, the
whole Polanski thing all over again. Maybe it’s too damned hot. Nowadays Harry is
ready and waiting for her no matter the weather. They used to go to Soup Burg
on Madison, which Harry likes but his wife disapproves of what she calls greasy
spoons. “You’ve seen p-p-plenty,” Harry had said. His wife had checked her
expression and responded blithely: “Well, as you can see Brit, he’s still got
his imagination intact,” effectively making the cozy diner off-limits.
Maybe they’ll
take a cab to Serendipity. Apple pie for Harry; she’ll order a Chef’s Salad and
a frozen hot chocolate. Then they can still catch a movie. The Odd Couple was sure to be harmless fare. Her job is getting
easier, the perks growing.
Harry had asked if she liked walking with him.
Of course she did. Then he told her that he pretended to be crazy at home just
to keep up the walks with her. Brit had been terribly moved by that. She wonders
how long before she can get Harry on the Staten Island Ferry. How long it will
be before he tells her about himself, his past. How long before they can step
out of the still constrictive present.
The week before Brit had ventured to ask the
doctor how she was doing. She had long-range dreams, how it will be when things
got better.
“Good,”
he’d said. And then, inexplicably, he’d added: “A little too good.” Only he was
kidding her he’d said.
The first
thing Brit notices in Harry’s apartment is the light. Until that morning the
living room is nearly always shrouded in heavy dark green velvet drapery.
Massive oak furniture disappeared in the darkened room. Now the room glows with
sunlight from bare windows. The walls have been stripped of paint. The claret
colored carpet has been removed from the foyer, exposing a veined white marble
floor. There are paint samples in shades of ivory and beige taped to the walls.
Brit sees the piano covered in plastic, the photographs removed. She waits in
the foyer as the maid instructs until Harry’s doctor appears.
“We won’t
be needing you any longer,” he says. He hands her a check. “Thank you for
everything. You’ve been most helpful.”
“Harry…?”
she manages. Brit’s confusion only exacerbates when he prods her to the front
door.
“Unfortunate,”
is all he says. “Most unfortunate.”
She stands
for a moment in front of Harry’s building. “Well, that was weird,” she mutters.
The doorman stares straight ahead.
What next, she wonders.
Hugh would
say: “No excuses now girl.” She can finally lay siege to her life in cartons.
Liberate her few possessions once and for all. Seth had let her take the
stereo. He was getting a new one anyway. He’d said that in the offhand manner
he’d affected since they had agreed to divorce. There is a new album Hugh had
given her called Karma, by some way
out sax player named Pharaoh Sanders. There is a joint in her bag. When she gets
back to the sublet she’ll dig out her woodcutting tools. She’ll sharpen them
slowly and carefully on a whetstone while ideas ruminate. With a brush loaded
with India ink, she’ll commit those ideas to paper. When she is satisfied she will
transfer the ink drawing. Then she will ravage a clean block of pine with
chisels and Japanese knives until the image it bears resembles her pain.
Brit starts
back across the park. Walking suits her. She is not a collectible.
