Four Seasons of Romance (16 page)

It started when he invited her over for a drink. “Hey
there,” he called to Catherine from his front porch as she was pruning her
rosebush. “Why don’t you give the bush a break and come have a glass of wine?”

Catherine felt a slight flush in her cheeks at the
invitation. “It’s only two in the afternoon!” she said.

“It’s never too early when the wine is right.”

“I... I’m not much of a drinker, I’m afraid.”

“Are you a drinker of tea, then?”

“Yes,” she stammered, “I suppose I am.”

In Gregory’s kitchen, he poured her a tall glass of homemade
mint tea as the ice cubes popped and crackled, which seemed somehow forbidden
in his large, empty house.

“It’s a beautiful place,” she said, looking around her. “Did
you design it?”

“Some of it, yes. Let’s just say there were significant
renovations after I moved in.” He smiled. “Would you like to see?”

Sipping her mint tea like a coquettish schoolgirl, Catherine
nodded, attracted by his energy as they moved through his home. He pointed out
the spiral staircase, the skylights—all the little touches he’d added,
Catherine thinking she’d never seen a man take more pride in his living space.
After nearly twenty years of cohabiting with Walter, she’d assumed that a man
could be happy living in a shoebox.

As he took her into the hallway, Gregory reached out and
took hold of her wrist. His finger slipped down her soft skin until it rested
on her pulse, a small but intimate gesture.

“I do say, Miss Catherine,” he said, his voice low and
musical in her ears. “Your heart is racing.”

She pulled her hand away. “Architecture always intrigued
me,” she said, a little breathless.

It was weeks before he touched her again. Gregory invited
her over several times, always during the day when her husband and children
were out of the house, but she always had an excuse. She had her bridge club,
or a gardening party, or “dirty dishes stacked a mile high”—Catherine prided
herself on taking care of many household chores even though they could afford
to hire help for everything.

But the truth was Gregory had rekindled something deep
inside her—something that had lain dormant for many years—and the thought of
reawakening it terrified her. Having an affair with Gregory could destroy her
marriage, rip apart her family, and jeopardize everything she’d worked for, and
it was all she could think about, day and night.

Though Catherine barely knew it, her resistance to Gregory’s
charm was gradually wearing down; though she hadn’t stepped across his yard
since the day he offered her wine, the mere fact that she fantasized about it
made it seem possible. The idea of an affair crept steadily from the realm of
impossibility to reality’s domain.

Then, one sunny morning, Catherine was startled by a knock
at the front door. She’d been dusting, so she peeled off her cleaning gloves
and apron and went to answer it. Walter had full staff cleaning the house, but
Catherine found that it gave her something to do during the day and did it
anyway.

Gregory looked handsome as ever, the sun shining off his
salt-and-pepper hair. “Hello,” he said, “hope I didn’t disturb you.”

“Not at all.”
She was grateful
she’d taken off her gloves and apron; Catherine didn’t want him to think she
was cooped up inside cleaning, not the most glamorous of impressions.

“I was wondering whether you could help me with something,”
he said.

“Of course, what do you need?”

“You might want to grab your pruning shears. It seems a
problem of foliage.”

“I’ll meet you over there in two,” Catherine said, her heart
pounding in her chest as she closed the door.

As she padded back through the house, she stopped to look at
her reflection in the hall mirror. Even at forty-eight, her figure stayed slim.
Though her hair had taken something of a beating during the sixties—she
experimented with both a beehive and bouffant and even trimmed it short once—it
was still remarkably full and glossy. Catherine cupped her breasts with her
hands; though perhaps not as firm as they once were, they were still beautiful,
especially for a woman pushing fifty. She applied a touch of makeup before
grabbing the garden shears from their place in the garage and making her way
next door.

Over the white picket fence, Gregory was standing in his
backyard and looking up as he motioned her over. “It seems my oak has begun a
love affair with the power lines,” he said, his voice tinged with sarcasm.

Catherine shielded her eyes against the sun. The branches of
the large oak shading his backyard intertwined with the wires shooting out from
the telephone pole.

“Those dreadful power lines,” she said. “It’s the same in
our yard—they hang awfully low around here.”

“But now, we have the right weapons to fight our battles.”
He gestured toward her clipping shears. “Do you mind?”

“Be my guest,” she said, handing him the shears. “But
please, be careful!”

Gregory scaled the small ladder he’d brought outside while
Catherine noticed the spry way he carried his lithe body, despite being in his
fifties.

“Careful,” she said. “Don’t get shocked!” While she was
genuinely concerned for him, she couldn’t deny the electricity she felt
coursing through her body.

With finesse, Gregory clipped away the branches until the
telephone wire was standing bare, hoisted
himself
down
the ladder and handed her the shears. Then, he lightly touched her
elbow,
just for a moment but long enough that Catherine was
sure there’d been a spark when his skin touched hers.

“Please,” he said. “Come in for a drink.” This time, she
didn’t object.

They had hardly made it to the kitchen counter when Gregory
trailed his hand down her neck. Catherine didn’t dare turn around; she didn’t
walk away, either though, as his fingers combed through her hair gently and
caressed her nape the way Leo used to do. Then, his fingers dipped beneath the
fabric of her dress as he tugged on the zipper.

“I hope I’m not being too forward,” he whispered into her
ear.

“Don’t stop,” she breathed as he slid the zipper down her
back, and her dress pooled around her ankles.

*

It was easy for Catherine to carry on the affair without the
knowledge of her husband who was gone during the day and many evenings. Her son
Leo only came home from college on the occasional weekend he didn’t have a
party to attend, and the girls were swept up in drill team, 4-H Club, and the
high school science fair. Catherine was a mother with an empty nest, which made
her even more susceptible to being swept off her feet by a clandestine
relationship with her charismatic neighbor.

The sex felt sublime for her, even though in reality, it was
short of that. Gregory was a selfish lover, and even though he had a smooth,
lean body and knew just what to do, Catherine sensed that his own pleasure was
his main objective; but at least she felt wanted again, even if he only wanted
her to satisfy himself.

But before long, the trysts lost their initial spark.
Gregory, who at first had seemed interesting, became more monotonous and
absent-minded, the main difference between him and Walter being that he droned
on and on about architecture, whereas Walter harped about the stock market. Gregory’s
taste in wine turned out to be little more than a symptom of longtime alcohol
addiction. In short, Gregory had Walter’s dullness and Leo’s substance abuse.

After a few months, she broke off the affair. The
relationship was far less fulfilling than she had hoped, but the guilt gnawed
at her daily. Gregory put his house up for sale just days after and was gone by
the end of the month.

She chided herself for expecting something long lasting from
the fleeting dalliance.
I’m just being silly
, she told herself.
I’m
fifty, too old for romance! Besides, I have my children to think of.

By the summer of 1977, her son had graduated from Temple
with a degree in art history. Leo decided to remain in the city to work on his
master’s while Catherine’s daughter Lily, a burgeoning writer and poet, was a
junior at Rutgers, and Sarah was entering her freshman year at Brown. Catherine
was alone in a big house with a man she liked, but not loved—a man who was her
friend but rarely did so much as kiss her.

So, she threw herself into the rose garden and her
ladies-only bridge group, staying up late reading spicy novels that provided an
escape late into the night. Plenty was missing from her life, but she managed
to dull the ache somewhat. It was the life she’d chosen, after all.

*

The day Catherine rejected him in
1954,
Leo went straight to the bus station, his grief creating a haze so dense he
could hardly see his hand in front of his face. “Give me a ticket to the first bus,”
he barked at the woman behind the counter, not even bothering to look at the
Greyhound callboard of departures and arrivals.

“Where’s your destination, sir?”

“Anywhere.”

She gave him a look that made it clear she thought he had
been drinking. If only I had, Leo thought.

“There’s a bus for Chicago that leaves in twenty minutes.”

“Fine,” he said. “Chicago it is.”

“Round trip?”

“One way.”

And that was how Leo ended up in Chicago for the next twenty
years. The bus trip dragged on forever, but he spent time staring out the
window, watching the world fly by, shedding tears, and trying to forget, which
was challenging, as Catherine saturated his every thought and memory.

He transferred once in Pittsburgh, just long enough to buy a
bottle of Ram’s Head Ale, downing it before he’d even walked out the store. Leo
was falling back into the pattern that cost him Catherine but didn’t care
anymore.

He arrived in Chicago as planned and there, began another
journey to reinvent himself.

Chicago in 1954 had large populations of African Americans,
Jews, Italian Americans, Poles, Germans, Greeks, and even Czechs tucked in
various pockets of the city, a place of constant clashes and contradictions—the
perfect city for Leo.

Leo found excellent jazz—and plentiful liquor wells—at the
Blue Note Jazz Club, where he had the privilege of hearing the likes of Duke
Ellington and Count Basie. He loved a slice of deep-dish pizza on one street,
and then walked two blocks over for a steamy plate of potato
pierogi
. With no structure, no plan, and no expectations,
Leo was living the only life he knew how to live.

The postwar art scene in Chicago differed from Philadelphia
or Paris; artists in the Windy City rejected the abstract aesthetics of their
counterparts and embraced political satire and poignant social criticism, which
spoke to Leo’s rebellious nature. Eventually, he found work assisting sculptors
with large projects and had no trouble translating his considerable talent into
the Chicago aesthetic.

Before long, he’d settled comfortably into the lifestyle of
the Beat Generation, which suited him. He spent time with artists, poets, and
writers, who embraced and extended his values, sneering at oppressive estates
and emotional constipations of the establishment and embracing drugs, alcohol,
and free love. For a while, Leo lived in a downtown loft just off S. Federal
Street with three beautiful female artists.
Catherine would never have let
me do any of this
, he told himself. Unfortunately, the mere thought of her
name was often enough to send him spiraling into a weeklong depression. 

Two of the beautiful artists moved out after a while—theirs
was a transient society—but one stayed. She was, for all extents and purposes,
Leo’s girlfriend, but none of the Beats was much for labels, so they kept it
casual.

She encouraged Leo to pursue his art further, and after a
few years of wallowing in self-pity and much pot smoke, he took her advice and
applied to the Chicago Institute of Art. Even though he claimed to oppose “The
Man,” Leo attended the institute for several years and had his sculptures
featured at Chicago’s most progressive galleries by the time he graduated. It
wasn’t much in financial success, but it was something, and Leo’s spending
habits did not lend themselves to saving, anyway. Besides, he’d accomplished
what he’d always wanted to. Yet, some heaviness from the past always made the
taste of success bittersweet.

As the fifties eased into the sixties, Leo wholeheartedly
adopted the hippie lifestyle, wearing his hair long and trading his jeans for
bell-bottoms like everyone in his social circle. He participated in the
protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention and was among those arrested. The
Chicago
Tribune
featured a story with Leo’s photograph on the front page, as two
police officers escorted him to the patrol wagon. Proud of the picture, Leo
made a dozen copies of it,
papier-mâchéd
them all
over his naked body with thick paste, and headed for a stroll down Lincoln
Avenue. He called it “Living Sculpture,” his first foray into performance art.
It led to his second arrest, causing him to spend another night in the holding
tank before one of his independently wealthy hippie friends posted bail.

For Leo, the sixties were consumed with sex, drugs, rock ‘n’
roll, and the sporadic and haphazard creation of art. When conflict in Vietnam
escalated, he and his friends did everything to topple the military-industrial
complex. They made art, love—and trouble. But Leo never felt whole once he left
Catherine, and nothing he did could change that.

By 1972, Leo was broke, burned out, and serving a two-year
sentence for destruction of property, with much time to think about his life as
he found himself flashing back to the early days with Catherine, back when life
was simple, and they thought they’d spend the rest of their lives together,
naïve as it seemed now.