Claire
MY FIRST WIFE MET A WOMAN WHOSE NAME, AS I recall, was Claire. Met is perhaps the wrong word, since Claire was abruptly in my first wife’s life, or circle, as she liked to call it, and, in some vaguely peripheral way, in my own. My first wife knew many people whom I did not, nor did I want to. This arrangement, if that’s what it was, worked fairly well, or so I choose to believe: it was a long time ago. Claire, however, was someone I did get to know, slightly, but I can’t remember having a conversation with her about anything of a personal nature. What I do remember was her beauty. She was amazingly beautiful, possessed of a kind of innate, profound womanliness, a deep feminine actuality. The semi-idiotic pout that marks commercialized and marketable eroticism was foreign to Claire; she simply stunned people into silence, a silence that was, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavy with resentment. She neither adorned nor exploited this beauty, but was as Helen, Helen at that magical instant when she made Paris stupid with desire. Just before she died at twenty-three of ovarian cancer, I found out that she’d had a child at the age of twelve, a child who was the issue, it seems, of coterminous incestuous relationships that she’d carried on with her father and his younger brother, Uncle Ray. She called these entanglements romances. She wasn’t sure which of the two had fathered the child, whom she had drowned in the kitchen sink and left in a trash basket, snugly wrapped in the World Telegram, in Sunset Park. Odd that I should think of her after all these years, a memory occasioned by watching an old Irene Dunne movie on television. I don’t believe that her name was Claire after all.
Rockefeller Center
NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1949. THE YOUNG MAN IS SITTING IN A booth in a Bronx saloon with a young woman. He doesn’t care for her but she is pretty. They had stopped off for a quick drink on the way to somewhere, a party, a Fifty-second Street club, a movie. Now it is 11:30 and they are still in the saloon, half-drunk. He is dramatically suggesting that he is falling in love with her, but this is a lie, and she, of course, knows it, despite her youth. She is, however, flattered that he should lie. She is seventeen, and wearing a black velour dress with silver stitching on the bodice, and the dress accents the soft contours of her breasts. Perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, or perhaps it’s her breasts or her dress he cares for. Midnight. He leans across the table and kisses the girl, then gets up and sits next to her, puts an arm around her shoulders and a hand under her skirt. He strokes her thigh where the flesh meets the tops of her stockings. She doesn’t try to stop him but she keeps her thighs pressed tightly together. He kisses her again; perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, or perhaps it’s her thighs or her stockings he cares for. He is nineteen. He’s saying vapid things to her and then suddenly says that he’ll meet her, no matter what, in five years, at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, where people look down at the rink, by the statue of Prometheus. What? she says. Who? The glamorous ice, he says. You know. He looks at her very closely. I could say bella bella, he says. You know that Saroyan story? She does not. About 1:15 A.M. They kiss in windless cold on the roof of her apartment building and manage a sex act that neither of them is much good at. Still and all, still and all. Five years pass, he is married. He actually goes to Rockefeller Center on New Year’s Eve, as dumb as they come. Another bad movie on a moronic theme. The wind is strong and bitterly cold, and his wife will be very angry yet hatefully silent that he has not shown up at the quiet little boring fucking party that her boring fucking friends in her circle, as she calls it, give each year. Suddenly, he can smell the girl, a light perfume, or soap, an ingenuous smell, and he turns around, but she is not there. She will not be there. He circles the block, looking at faces. Perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, but he doesn’t. What is it, then, that he does care for? She will not be there. I could say bella bella, he says in a whisper. He heads for the subway and his wife and the little boring party. Better late than never. Maybe.
Brothers
RAY AND HIS OLDER BROTHER, WARREN, SHARED EVERYthing. That’s the kind of hairpins they were, as Warren liked to say, using an expression employed by Jimmy Cagney in Strawberry Blonde, a quiet, oddly dark movie, in which he plays a dentist, or perhaps a barber. Although the movie is intended to be sunny, there is a persistent sadness to its story. The great Jack Carson is Jimmy’s nemesis, and, oddly enough, both Ray and Warren reminded me of him in many of the roles he inhabited. They both flaunted a blustery, friendly, yet oily charm, a kind of nervous, blunt manliness that is endemic among American men. Both brothers married fairly late in life and both had children: Warren, a daughter, whose name I forget, a beautiful child who became a beautiful woman. Ray had two children, a daughter, who died in an automobile accident in Sheepshead Bay at the age of twenty-three; and a son who joined the Marine Corps and simply cut off all connections with his family, such as it was, to live, as Ray took absurd and wistful pleasure in calling “a real life for a real man.” Warren was a greengrocer and earned a good living, although his wife complained that he “worked like a nigger,” and Ray became a credit investigator for Dun & Bradstreet, invested wisely, as they say, became a Republican as soon as he had established a modest portfolio (and how Warren loved to edge that phrase with venom whenever he spoke of his “tycoon” brother). They had, of course, stopped sharing. Warren was relieved when his wife died, for she had begun to scorn him, hate him, really, for reasons that she never disclosed to anyone. He decided to stay in the same small apartment in which the family had lived for years, and he kept a bedroom ready for his daughter should she decide to stop living what he called her wild life; but she never came home to live with him, nor, for that matter, did she ever visit or even call him. Ray once mentioned that she’d become pregnant by some guinea bastard truck driver, but, thank God, miscarried, no doubt because of her drinking and carrying on with any son of a bitch with a phony smile, a few bucks, and a car. Her father seemed to agree with him, although the brothers had grown distant, to say the least, over the years, and when Warren died, some six months after his daughter’s premature death, Ray sent a floral spray to the funeral home, but attended neither the wake nor the burial. The sateen sash across the arrangement read, in glistening gold letters on a dark red field, OLD HAIRPIN, bewildering the mourners, who were few indeed. Ray, a widower soon after Warren’s death, was found one day dead in his shabby apartment, sitting in a battered, sprung easy chair in his pajamas and overcoat, a stained homburg on his head and an unopened pack of Lucky Strikes on his lap. He had died intestate, and after probate settlement and taxes and surrogate’s court fees, his son, Warren, a gunnery sergeant with almost thirty years in the Corps, got about $240,000. Warren had never married, so this money and his military pension most probably assured him a comfortable retirement in Oldsmar, Florida, a Tampa suburb which, or so I understand, is a pleasant enough town.
A Small Adventure