ghetto and all of her father’s family were murdered by the Nazis in Byelorussia. She was born five months after her parents got here in ’47. Conceived in Paris, a stopping-off place for them, which she said could account for her love of French language and culture. “I may be a Bronx baby, but before that I was a French fetus. I love humor but can’t make up or tell a joke. I think I’ve told you that.” In high school she wanted to be an actress and was the lead, “because I showed modest early talent and had good diction and could remember the lines, in all the musicals and plays. In elementary school, I played Alice because of my long blond hair.” She didn’t want her parents spending their hard-earned savings on her expensive college, so for the most part she paid it all herself by working in school dorms and their cafeterias for four years.” Her birthday. Eleven days before his. “So we’re both Geminis,” he said, and gave his birthday, “not that that or astrology, as a whole, is of any significance,” and she said “I’m not so sure. We’re talking here of stars and planets.” They finished their drinks and he said “Like another Guinness?” and she said “No, thanks. Two would unglue me.” “Does that mean no wine with dinner? Because I’m going to have another beer, if you don’t mind, and at the restaurant order some wine,” and she said “By then, on a full to medium-full stomach, I should be able to drink a glass of wine without later needing you to help me home. Please, have some more beer.” He got his beer and said “I was just thinking. I’m eleven years minus eleven days older than you. Do you think that number means anything?” and she said “A numerical coincidence, but that’s all. You might also happen to have eleven siblings in your family,” and he said “Because of the way it ended up, like you, none. The two of us, one and one.” About her living in the Bronx till she was around fourteen. It turned out that the high school he transferred to from Brooklyn Tech—“Transferred to illegally too; I didn’t live in the district, but the high schools I would have been forced to go to in Manhattan were even worse”—was near where she lived. “Maybe I saw you once or twice when I walked from the subway to school or back. I thought you looked familiar,” and she said “Come on.” “All right, that was silly, but we must have crossed paths a couple of times after your family moved to the West Side. Both of us in the same neighborhood, you 78th, me 75th? At Fairway, for instance, which I’ve frequented a lot over the years, the cheese and olive departments particularly. I have to admit that if I saw you there and you looked older than eighteen — no, I’ll be honest: sixteen — I would have stared a little or maybe just looked at you on the sly, so as not to alarm you. I’m saying, because of your looks,” and she said “Please stop talking about it. It makes me feel self-conscious, and I hardly see the point of all this.” “Again, that was stupid of me. I shouldn’t have brought any of it up,” and she said “Forget it. It was nothing.” How did her mother’s father — he asked — happen to leave his family in Poland and settle in New York? He wanted the entire family to come, but her grandmother said the Germans didn’t harm the Jews in the first war, they won’t hurt them in this one, and she also didn’t want to leave her own mother and home. “My mother was studying in Russia at the time, which saved her.” Her mother’s mother was Rose. Her middle name is Rose. Soon after her grandfather learned his wife and two sons were dead, he married a woman named Rose. “Rose, Rose, Rose,” he said. “A bouquet of Roses. It’s a pretty name.” She visits her second Grandmother Rose in Kew Gardens once a month. “She always makes a brisket of beef or roast chicken for me and a noodle kugel you can smell the sweetness of as you enter her apartment building, and sends me home with a shopping bag full of leftovers and other foods.” “She sounds like my Aunt Esther, my father’s sister, but she would travel from Flatbush to our apartment with these Jewish goodies. She died three days after my father, I wasn’t allowed to the Orthodox funeral because, technically, I was still sitting shiva.” “And your mother?” and he said “Bright and energetic and healthy and still interior decorating for a living.” Her mother’s a psychotherapist, her father’s a C.P.A. Some people see them in the same visit for therapy and taxes, her father in the dining room, which he’s turned half of into his office, her mother in Gwen’s old bedroom. Incidentally, she said, her father had been a lawyer in Minsk. But he felt because his English was so bad and nobody could understand his accent that he wouldn’t succeed at law in New York, so he switched to the universal language of numbers, if she can put it that way. “No,” he said; “nicely put. And the switchover must have been very difficult for him,” and she said “After going through what he did in the war, he said, nothing was.” She lived in Paris twice, once for a year. “Another possible place our paths might have crossed,” he said. “I lived there for half a year in ’64,” and she said “Before my time.” She married too young. Her ex-husband was even two years younger than she. But they got their Ph.D.s the same year at Columbia — his also in literature, but English — and attended the same graduation ceremony, but by then they were divorced for three years. He’s remarried, has twin infants and an assistant professorship at a college in Nebraska. “Nebraska,” he said. “It’s a good job,” she said. “Pays well, complete medical and dental coverage for the family, two-three course load”—he asked “What’s that?”—“and his children will get half their tuition paid for by his school to whatever college they attend. Tenure-track jobs are short in literature and you have to grab what’s offered, though I think I told you I’d never leave New York. That could easily condemn me to adjunct teaching and, if I hit it big, visiting assistant professorships for the rest of my academic life, but at least I get to keep my beautiful apartment.” “Oh, I’m sure you’ll do much better than that. You’re so smart and no doubt very good in your field,” and she said “And you’re so full of compliments.” “Too many?” he said. “I’m only saying what I believe. But all right, I’ll try to exercise some self-control.” She likes to cook. “I like to cook too,” he said. “Maybe one day we can cook dinner together, or it could just be an elaborate lunch,” and she said “I prefer cooking alone and taking all the credit and blame. What are some of the dishes you like to make?” and he said “Risotto with shitake or oyster mushrooms and artichoke hearts, lots of things with tofu, thick soups made with red lentils and various vegetables and Indian spices. But my favorite — you can call it my special specialty, since, as far as I know, I’m the one who devised it — is a meatless bratwurst with sauerkraut, baby Brussels sprouts — you can only get these frozen — and peas and corn and ground-up peanuts in a heated mustard sauce,” and she said “It doesn’t seem like something I’d like — the sauerkraut and sprouts — but the rest of it is okay.” “What do you like to make,” he said, “which I should have asked you before instead of going on about my own cooking?” and she said “That’s all right. Right now? Mostly French dishes you wouldn’t eat because they have some kind of meat in them. I’m sorry, but eating meat is more satisfying to me than its substitutes,” and he said “I can understand. Every now and then I get a ferocious urge for a slice of roast beef.” She’s translated, and a few have been published, a lot of French and Italian postwar poetry. “Italian too?” he said. “I’d love to read them. It’s been an unattainable goal of mine all my adult life to read and speak French fluently…what I went to Paris for in ’64 and eventually to get a news job there. Would you send me some translations with the originals, if it’s not too much of a bother?” and she said “They might take a while for me to find. I’m not the most organized person and I’m always forgetting to buy more file folders. I should just steal them from my department,” and he said “No rush; whenever you can. And the Italian.” She goes to Maine every summer for two to three months. Takes her and her parents’ cats along. “They’re one big happy Siamese family: mother, spoiled son and two sweet daughters.” She rents a car for the summer. “That can get expensive,” and she said because she takes their cats, her parents help out. “Where do you go, not that I know Maine?” and she said “A small coastal village, where every other summer person is a writer or professor or spouse or child of one — Brooklin with an ‘i.’” She started renting this cottage three years ago to be close to where her doctoral advisor spends the summer with his family. It had no water or electricity or gas — it had been vacant for more than five years — so she had to have all that brought in. “I learned how to prime a pump to get the water going, which I’ve had to do twice first thing after getting there because the caretaker forgot to or was drunk.” “How do you?” and she said “Please, you don’t want to know,” and he said “I’m a writer. I like being informed of obscure technical things I know nothing of so I can encumber my fiction with them,” and she told him and he said “Very complicated; I’d have to have your help.” He said “Two to three months in a cottage in the woods? Doesn’t it get lonely sometimes?” and she said “I have dinner a lot at my advisor’s house, my parents each come up separately for a week, and if I get lonely I invite other company,” and he said “Then you’re set.” He said “Another thing I always wanted to do—” and she said “What was the other one?” and he said “Learn French…was to rent a cabin or cottage — you know, I’m suddenly not sure of the difference, if there is one,” and she said “A cabin is more rustic and usually smaller and often doesn’t have the basic amenities a cottage does.” “Then just a cottage, but in Maine or Vermont for a month or two in the summer. A fantasy of mine since my early twenties. But I guess lack of money or that I was working summers at the time and that I’ve gone to Yaddo three of the last six Augusts, stopped me from doing it, and I also didn’t know how to go about renting one.” “I’ve spent summers in both,” she said, “and I like Maine better. From my cottage I can see the ocean through the trees, or the bay of the ocean. It’s only a thirty-second walk down to it from the back porch, and the cottage comes with its own secluded cove.” “You’re making my mouth water,” and she said “Then one of these summers you should rent a place, while they’re still affordable, in the same area I go to. I could give you the names of a couple of real-estate agencies that specialize in summer rentals.” Most of her time in Maine is spent writing essays and poetry and also some translating and preparing her fall courses. “Do you send your poetry out? Or should I say, has any of it been published?” and she said “So far I haven’t had the courage. It’s different with the translations, because I only pick works I love. By the way, I’m sure I’ll find them and can send a few to you, but you’d have to give me your address.” He wrote his name and address on a piece of paper he tore out of his memobook and gave it to her. “I’d like to give you one or even three of my books that have been published,” and she said “Just one. You choose.” He said “Let’s start from the beginning, my first. Came out two years ago. Five stories, a hundred-twenty-eight pages, a cinch to read.” She asked what the title was and then said “I’m afraid I haven’t heard of it.” He said “It didn’t get around much and only a couple of reviews. Big pans. Both found it too scatological and one objected strongly to the couple in the longest story — they’d met in the hospital two days before — coupling in a chair in the room his father was dying in. I have your address but not the zip. Or maybe I’ll just give you the book the next time we meet, if we do,” and she said “We can do that. I’ll save my poems for then too,” and he said “No, send them, unless we’re going to see each other in the next two days,” and she said “I’ll send them, then. Do I have your zip?” and looked at the piece of paper with his address on it and said “Yes, I do. Let me give you mine,” and he wrote it down in his memobook. He said “May I ask you a personal question?” and she said “Depends. I don’t think we should speak too personally so soon.” “Then I won’t.” He was going to ask if she was presently seeing someone. They talked about something else. Then she said “All right. What was the personal question you wanted to ask? I have to confess; I’m curious,” and he asked it and she said “I’ll be honest with you, Martin,” and he thought Oh, shit; here it comes. “There is an English architect whom I see whenever he passes through,” and he said “And his name is David.” “Why do you say that?” and he said “I don’t know. I was once involved with a woman who began dating an English architect named David, so something in my stupid head assumed they were all named David.” “He isn’t. He’s Evan,” and he said “A good English name. How often do you see him?” and she said “Not very much, really. Every other month. Sometimes twice in two months,” “So why isn’t it more than that? Is he married?” and she said “No. I think it’s because his London firm flies him here on business and it’d be expensive for him to fly here on his own. And that both of us are quite satisfied with the arrangement as it is,” and he said “Do you ever go to London to see him?” and she said “Yes, once; it was fun. But I think we both knew things would never get that serious between us,” and he said “Well, that’s okay, then, not that I know what I mean. But it must be wonderful to go to London or Paris or a city like that to see someone. Anyway, thanks for answering me so frankly, and now we should probably drop the subject,” and she said “Good idea.” “What else do you like to do?” and she looked puzzled and he said “Do you like to go to plays, concerts, movies, opera, ballet?” and she said “All of them, when I have time, but opera the least. I like contemporary operas, though,” and he said “Same with me. Chamber music?” and she said “More on LP’s than in concert halls.” “Friends? I’d think you’d have lots of them,” and she said “I’m sure no more than most people.” “Hate to sound like a loner, but I really only have three. Two men — a writer and a filmmaker — and a woman whom I’ve been close to as a friend for years. She’s in publishing and we have lunch about every other week. She tries to fix me up,” and she said “That’s good,” and he said “Not for me.” She has two best friends. One lives in SoHo with her husband — both are artists — and the other’s moved to California with her husband, but they talk all the time on the phone. The one in SoHo’s been her best friend since their first day in college. “I was giving Melissa, my pet guinea pig, an outing on the campus green, and my future friend literally tripped over us.” “They let you keep pets in college?” and she said “Some of the girls brought their horses from as far away as Oklahoma and boarded them at the school’s stables.” He asked where’d she go for Thanksgiving and she said her parents don’t celebrate it, as they don’t Mother’s and Father’s Day, so she always goes to the SoHo couple’s loft. “Where’d you?” “I took my mother out as I always
ghetto and all of her father’s family were murdered by the Nazis in Byelorussia. She was born five months after her parents got here in ’47. Conceived in Paris, a stopping-off place for them, which she said could account for her love of French language and culture. “I may be a Bronx baby, but before that I was a French fetus. I love humor but can’t make up or tell a joke. I think I’ve told you that.” In high school she wanted to be an actress and was the lead, “because I showed modest early talent and had good diction and could remember the lines, in all the musicals and plays. In elementary school, I played Alice because of my long blond hair.” She didn’t want her parents spending their hard-earned savings on her expensive college, so for the most part she paid it all herself by working in school dorms and their cafeterias for four years.” Her birthday. Eleven days before his. “So we’re both Geminis,” he said, and gave his birthday, “not that that or astrology, as a whole, is of any significance,” and she said “I’m not so sure. We’re talking here of stars and planets.” They finished their drinks and he said “Like another Guinness?” and she said “No, thanks. Two would unglue me.” “Does that mean no wine with dinner? Because I’m going to have another beer, if you don’t mind, and at the restaurant order some wine,” and she said “By then, on a full to medium-full stomach, I should be able to drink a glass of wine without later needing you to help me home. Please, have some more beer.” He got his beer and said “I was just thinking. I’m eleven years minus eleven days older than you. Do you think that number means anything?” and she said “A numerical coincidence, but that’s all. You might also happen to have eleven siblings in your family,” and he said “Because of the way it ended up, like you, none. The two of us, one and one.” About her living in the Bronx till she was around fourteen. It turned out that the high school he transferred to from Brooklyn Tech—“Transferred to illegally too; I didn’t live in the district, but the high schools I would have been forced to go to in Manhattan were even worse”—was near where she lived. “Maybe I saw you once or twice when I walked from the subway to school or back. I thought you looked familiar,” and she said “Come on.” “All right, that was silly, but we must have crossed paths a couple of times after your family moved to the West Side. Both of us in the same neighborhood, you 78th, me 75th? At Fairway, for instance, which I’ve frequented a lot over the years, the cheese and olive departments particularly. I have to admit that if I saw you there and you looked older than eighteen — no, I’ll be honest: sixteen — I would have stared a little or maybe just looked at you on the sly, so as not to alarm you. I’m saying, because of your looks,” and she said “Please stop talking about it. It makes me feel self-conscious, and I hardly see the point of all this.” “Again, that was stupid of me. I shouldn’t have brought any of it up,” and she said “Forget it. It was nothing.” How did her mother’s father — he asked — happen to leave his family in Poland and settle in New York? He wanted the entire family to come, but her grandmother said the Germans didn’t harm the Jews in the first war, they won’t hurt them in this one, and she also didn’t want to leave her own mother and home. “My mother was studying in Russia at the time, which saved her.” Her mother’s mother was Rose. Her middle name is Rose. Soon after her grandfather learned his wife and two sons were dead, he married a woman named Rose. “Rose, Rose, Rose,” he said. “A bouquet of Roses. It’s a pretty name.” She visits her second Grandmother Rose in Kew Gardens once a month. “She always makes a brisket of beef or roast chicken for me and a noodle kugel you can smell the sweetness of as you enter her apartment building, and sends me home with a shopping bag full of leftovers and other foods.” “She sounds like my Aunt Esther, my father’s sister, but she would travel from Flatbush to our apartment with these Jewish goodies. She died three days after my father, I wasn’t allowed to the Orthodox funeral because, technically, I was still sitting shiva.” “And your mother?” and he said “Bright and energetic and healthy and still interior decorating for a living.” Her mother’s a psychotherapist, her father’s a C.P.A. Some people see them in the same visit for therapy and taxes, her father in the dining room, which he’s turned half of into his office, her mother in Gwen’s old bedroom. Incidentally, she said, her father had been a lawyer in Minsk. But he felt because his English was so bad and nobody could understand his accent that he wouldn’t succeed at law in New York, so he switched to the universal language of numbers, if she can put it that way. “No,” he said; “nicely put. And the switchover must have been very difficult for him,” and she said “After going through what he did in the war, he said, nothing was.” She lived in Paris twice, once for a year. “Another possible place our paths might have crossed,” he said. “I lived there for half a year in ’64,” and she said “Before my time.” She married too young. Her ex-husband was even two years younger than she. But they got their Ph.D.s the same year at Columbia — his also in literature, but English — and attended the same graduation ceremony, but by then they were divorced for three years. He’s remarried, has twin infants and an assistant professorship at a college in Nebraska. “Nebraska,” he said. “It’s a good job,” she said. “Pays well, complete medical and dental coverage for the family, two-three course load”—he asked “What’s that?”—“and his children will get half their tuition paid for by his school to whatever college they attend. Tenure-track jobs are short in literature and you have to grab what’s offered, though I think I told you I’d never leave New York. That could easily condemn me to adjunct teaching and, if I hit it big, visiting assistant professorships for the rest of my academic life, but at least I get to keep my beautiful apartment.” “Oh, I’m sure you’ll do much better than that. You’re so smart and no doubt very good in your field,” and she said “And you’re so full of compliments.” “Too many?” he said. “I’m only saying what I believe. But all right, I’ll try to exercise some self-control.” She likes to cook. “I like to cook too,” he said. “Maybe one day we can cook dinner together, or it could just be an elaborate lunch,” and she said “I prefer cooking alone and taking all the credit and blame. What are some of the dishes you like to make?” and he said “Risotto with shitake or oyster mushrooms and artichoke hearts, lots of things with tofu, thick soups made with red lentils and various vegetables and Indian spices. But my favorite — you can call it my special specialty, since, as far as I know, I’m the one who devised it — is a meatless bratwurst with sauerkraut, baby Brussels sprouts — you can only get these frozen — and peas and corn and ground-up peanuts in a heated mustard sauce,” and she said “It doesn’t seem like something I’d like — the sauerkraut and sprouts — but the rest of it is okay.” “What do you like to make,” he said, “which I should have asked you before instead of going on about my own cooking?” and she said “That’s all right. Right now? Mostly French dishes you wouldn’t eat because they have some kind of meat in them. I’m sorry, but eating meat is more satisfying to me than its substitutes,” and he said “I can understand. Every now and then I get a ferocious urge for a slice of roast beef.” She’s translated, and a few have been published, a lot of French and Italian postwar poetry. “Italian too?” he said. “I’d love to read them. It’s been an unattainable goal of mine all my adult life to read and speak French fluently…what I went to Paris for in ’64 and eventually to get a news job there. Would you send me some translations with the originals, if it’s not too much of a bother?” and she said “They might take a while for me to find. I’m not the most organized person and I’m always forgetting to buy more file folders. I should just steal them from my department,” and he said “No rush; whenever you can. And the Italian.” She goes to Maine every summer for two to three months. Takes her and her parents’ cats along. “They’re one big happy Siamese family: mother, spoiled son and two sweet daughters.” She rents a car for the summer. “That can get expensive,” and she said because she takes their cats, her parents help out. “Where do you go, not that I know Maine?” and she said “A small coastal village, where every other summer person is a writer or professor or spouse or child of one — Brooklin with an ‘i.’” She started renting this cottage three years ago to be close to where her doctoral advisor spends the summer with his family. It had no water or electricity or gas — it had been vacant for more than five years — so she had to have all that brought in. “I learned how to prime a pump to get the water going, which I’ve had to do twice first thing after getting there because the caretaker forgot to or was drunk.” “How do you?” and she said “Please, you don’t want to know,” and he said “I’m a writer. I like being informed of obscure technical things I know nothing of so I can encumber my fiction with them,” and she told him and he said “Very complicated; I’d have to have your help.” He said “Two to three months in a cottage in the woods? Doesn’t it get lonely sometimes?” and she said “I have dinner a lot at my advisor’s house, my parents each come up separately for a week, and if I get lonely I invite other company,” and he said “Then you’re set.” He said “Another thing I always wanted to do—” and she said “What was the other one?” and he said “Learn French…was to rent a cabin or cottage — you know, I’m suddenly not sure of the difference, if there is one,” and she said “A cabin is more rustic and usually smaller and often doesn’t have the basic amenities a cottage does.” “Then just a cottage, but in Maine or Vermont for a month or two in the summer. A fantasy of mine since my early twenties. But I guess lack of money or that I was working summers at the time and that I’ve gone to Yaddo three of the last six Augusts, stopped me from doing it, and I also didn’t know how to go about renting one.” “I’ve spent summers in both,” she said, “and I like Maine better. From my cottage I can see the ocean through the trees, or the bay of the ocean. It’s only a thirty-second walk down to it from the back porch, and the cottage comes with its own secluded cove.” “You’re making my mouth water,” and she said “Then one of these summers you should rent a place, while they’re still affordable, in the same area I go to. I could give you the names of a couple of real-estate agencies that specialize in summer rentals.” Most of her time in Maine is spent writing essays and poetry and also some translating and preparing her fall courses. “Do you send your poetry out? Or should I say, has any of it been published?” and she said “So far I haven’t had the courage. It’s different with the translations, because I only pick works I love. By the way, I’m sure I’ll find them and can send a few to you, but you’d have to give me your address.” He wrote his name and address on a piece of paper he tore out of his memobook and gave it to her. “I’d like to give you one or even three of my books that have been published,” and she said “Just one. You choose.” He said “Let’s start from the beginning, my first. Came out two years ago. Five stories, a hundred-twenty-eight pages, a cinch to read.” She asked what the title was and then said “I’m afraid I haven’t heard of it.” He said “It didn’t get around much and only a couple of reviews. Big pans. Both found it too scatological and one objected strongly to the couple in the longest story — they’d met in the hospital two days before — coupling in a chair in the room his father was dying in. I have your address but not the zip. Or maybe I’ll just give you the book the next time we meet, if we do,” and she said “We can do that. I’ll save my poems for then too,” and he said “No, send them, unless we’re going to see each other in the next two days,” and she said “I’ll send them, then. Do I have your zip?” and looked at the piece of paper with his address on it and said “Yes, I do. Let me give you mine,” and he wrote it down in his memobook. He said “May I ask you a personal question?” and she said “Depends. I don’t think we should speak too personally so soon.” “Then I won’t.” He was going to ask if she was presently seeing someone. They talked about something else. Then she said “All right. What was the personal question you wanted to ask? I have to confess; I’m curious,” and he asked it and she said “I’ll be honest with you, Martin,” and he thought Oh, shit; here it comes. “There is an English architect whom I see whenever he passes through,” and he said “And his name is David.” “Why do you say that?” and he said “I don’t know. I was once involved with a woman who began dating an English architect named David, so something in my stupid head assumed they were all named David.” “He isn’t. He’s Evan,” and he said “A good English name. How often do you see him?” and she said “Not very much, really. Every other month. Sometimes twice in two months,” “So why isn’t it more than that? Is he married?” and she said “No. I think it’s because his London firm flies him here on business and it’d be expensive for him to fly here on his own. And that both of us are quite satisfied with the arrangement as it is,” and he said “Do you ever go to London to see him?” and she said “Yes, once; it was fun. But I think we both knew things would never get that serious between us,” and he said “Well, that’s okay, then, not that I know what I mean. But it must be wonderful to go to London or Paris or a city like that to see someone. Anyway, thanks for answering me so frankly, and now we should probably drop the subject,” and she said “Good idea.” “What else do you like to do?” and she looked puzzled and he said “Do you like to go to plays, concerts, movies, opera, ballet?” and she said “All of them, when I have time, but opera the least. I like contemporary operas, though,” and he said “Same with me. Chamber music?” and she said “More on LP’s than in concert halls.” “Friends? I’d think you’d have lots of them,” and she said “I’m sure no more than most people.” “Hate to sound like a loner, but I really only have three. Two men — a writer and a filmmaker — and a woman whom I’ve been close to as a friend for years. She’s in publishing and we have lunch about every other week. She tries to fix me up,” and she said “That’s good,” and he said “Not for me.” She has two best friends. One lives in SoHo with her husband — both are artists — and the other’s moved to California with her husband, but they talk all the time on the phone. The one in SoHo’s been her best friend since their first day in college. “I was giving Melissa, my pet guinea pig, an outing on the campus green, and my future friend literally tripped over us.” “They let you keep pets in college?” and she said “Some of the girls brought their horses from as far away as Oklahoma and boarded them at the school’s stables.” He asked where’d she go for Thanksgiving and she said her parents don’t celebrate it, as they don’t Mother’s and Father’s Day, so she always goes to the SoHo couple’s loft. “Where’d you?” “I took my mother out as I always