Heart of the City (26 page)

TOM RECOGNIZED the voice and smiled. A cheerful sound, after all that library silence.

“I’ve got this friend who’s new in town,” Claire said. “I’m of half a mind to set you up.”

“Oh. Um. I see.”

“Are you okay?”

“Sorry, yes, everything’s fine.” He was sure she’d detected his disappointment.

“How are you feeling about the big test? It’s this Thursday, right?”

“A little uneasy, to tell you the truth.”

“Well, you’re going to love Myrna. I’ll be in the city this weekend, too. I’ll chaperone, okay? Make sure you two don’t get into any trouble.”

“I mean, if you don’t mind.”

“We can all go out to celebrate your acing the exams.”

Two days later, a letter arrived that only deepened his confusion.

“Dear Tom,” Claire had written. “I’ll arrive at Penn Station at 2:59 Friday afternoon. That will give us plenty of time to call Myrna—and I might even go to a very interesting seminar at the Columbia Medical School at 4 that afternoon. Make plans for the weekend however you like—I might suggest a bit of feminine logic tho’. Even if Myrna doesn’t have plans for Friday she might prefer to wait until Saturday.”

Tom scratched his head. He was no expert on women, but he was no dummy, either. If Claire wanted him to meet Myrna on Saturday, why was she arriving on Friday and hinting that he keep that evening free? What was this odd business of “feminine logic”? Was it Myrna’s logic or Claire’s? And why did Claire let drop that she would happen to be on the Columbia campus—a few minutes’ walk from his dorm—within about an hour of arriving?

The whole situation made him feel a bit out of his depth. But there was more: “I am sure you can do well on your exams, Tom,” her letter concluded. “Remember, even the New York Mets won the World Series!”

How wonderful: she was likening him to the “Miracle Mets,” the come-from-behind team that had shed its “lovable losers” image the week before with its World Series upset over the Baltimore Orioles. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be felt sorry for. Nor did he necessarily like that she set the bar so high. If he failed the exams, he worried, then he’d just be a loser. And not necessarily a lovable one.

THE QUESTION came, as Tom had dreaded, the moment Claire spied him on the train platform.

“So?” she said, beaming, her voice climbing, as other passengers whooshed through and around them.

“So what?”

“The exams yesterday.” She seemed almost to be shouting. “How’d they go?”

“I punted.”

“What?”

“Here, let me carry your bag.”

She handed him a small piece of luggage, and they began walking toward the station. “Punted? What does that mean?”

“I put off the exams till February. I was too nervous.”

Claire narrowed her eyes and tilted her head. Tom couldn’t tell whether she looked sympathetic or disappointed.

“It’s normal to be nervous,” she said. “But don’t you think you’ll be just as nervous in February?”

“Probably.” He laughed, looking at her; then she shook her head and laughed, too.

“We’re going to need to work on you, Columbia man,” she said. “Teach you some study habits, as I do my own students.”

“Good luck.”

That night, at her suggestion, they went to see
Alice’s Restaurant
. It was a film adaptation of the Arlo Guthrie song, about a man who parlays a trumped-up littering charge into a ticket out of the Vietnam War.

WHEN TOM showed up at her hotel the next morning, Claire, who was wearing a batik miniskirt, thought she caught his eyes wandering for the briefest moment to her legs.

“Ready for your big date?” Claire chirped.

“Are you certain she’ll like me?”

“I’m sure.” But the truth was, she wasn’t. Not now that Claire knew Tom better. Myrna was stiff, proper. She was every bit the banker’s secretary, a woman whose conservative sensibility and fashions still mirrored the 1950s nearly a decade later. Tom, with his tortoiseshell glasses and short hair, was no hippy. Still, Claire was no longer sure how she felt about him and Myrna together.

They took the subway to the Barbizon Hotel for Women, on East Sixty-third Street. “You’ll have to stay down here while I get her,” Claire said in the lobby. “No men allowed above the ground floor.”

Over the next eight hours, Claire watched with jumbled feelings as Tom and Myrna scrabbled for common ground. Myrna kept talking about how important it was that banks would soon be lowering the prime rate. Tom tried Soviet politics, the World Series, and one of his favorite topics of late: Republican New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, whom he admired for carrying on even after his own party refused to renominate him. Myrna nodded politely, and then shoved the conversation back to the only topic that seemed to interest her: the stalwart soldiers who were the nation’s small banks.

“The prime rate, it affects everything, it really does,” Myrna said over dinner.

“I don’t doubt it,” Tom replied, scratching his ear.

The date was a bust. Claire felt responsible. They dropped Myrna off at the Barbizon and headed to the subway. As they stepped down into the station, Tom looked at his wristwatch and yawned.

Claire looked at him. “It must be hard to have to pay for two girls on graduate student wages. But it was really nice of you.”

Tom shrugged.

“I’m sorry if that was a waste of time. It’s been so long since I’ve seen Myrna. I guess I didn’t realize how much she’d changed.”

“I should get back to my dorm,” Tom said.

“On a Saturday night?”

“You were right about my study habits. If I’m going to make anything of myself, I’ve got to buckle down.”

They exited the subway station silently.

“It was good to see you again,” Tom said outside her hotel, smiling weakly. “Have a safe trip back.”

As Tom turned to go, Claire said, “Well, wait, what are you doing tomorrow?”

Tom looked up at her cautiously. “I thought you said you had a morning train.”

“Did I?” She leaned her head coyly over one shoulder so that her hair partly covered her eyes. “You know, I was thinking I didn’t necessarily need to rush back.”

THEY MET at a Japanese restaurant for a lunch of bean-thread noodles, then strolled under sunny skies for what seemed like miles.

In a coffeehouse window, they saw a poster for a rally at Lindsay campaign headquarters that evening. A little over a week was left before election day, and Lindsay, elected in 1965 as an anti-corruption crusader, was fighting for survival after a string of crises, including a botched response to a major blizzard. Even after losing the GOP primary to a little-known conservative state senator from Staten Island, Lindsay resurfaced as the candidate of the anemic New York Liberal Party.

He was now trying for a miracle with a new coalition of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and wealthy liberals.

“He certainly is handsome,” Claire said.

They got a table at the coffeehouse, and Tom handed her a newspaper opened to an article about Lindsay. They leaned in to read together. “I like his gumption,” Tom said. “Did you see this? A big transit strike almost shut down the city his first day as mayor. Just two hours of sleep in his first couple of days in office, and that was just the start of the bad breaks. You’ve got to hand it to him for sticking with it.”

“What kind of volunteering have you done?” Claire said.

“Excuse me?”

“Are you involved? In the campaign? You know—signs, knocking on doors, stuffing envelopes. You’re the political science major.”

“Oh, well, no, Claire,” he said. “I’ve just been reading about him a lot.”

“The world isn’t going to change all by itself,” she said. “If you spent five minutes at Tougaloo, you’d see the work it takes.”

“Well, I mean, there is that rally tonight.”

“And?”

“Would you go with me?”

By the time they arrived at the Lower East Side campaign office, a party was in full swing. Strobe lights pulsed from the ceiling, and Cream boomed from speakers someone had stood on a folding table. Young people—black, white, brown—in long hair and bell-bottoms gyrated on a makeshift dance floor. Tom felt like a bit of a square until Claire pulled him into the mass of swaying, sweaty bodies. They were pressed close, and Tom could feel her fingertips on his chest as she tried to repel the people crowding around them.

“Isn’t this great?” Claire said as they danced.

“If Stalin had thrown parties like this, history might have been kinder to him.”

“I don’t know. I think this may be a sign Lindsay’s going down. People are having too much fun.”

Claire’s train was set to leave Penn Station around 9 p.m. As they walked out, she stopped in front of a blown-up
New Yorker
cartoon propped beside the front door. It showed two pedestrians looking up as King Kong, astride the Empire State Building, crushed airplanes. The caption, apparently spoken by one of the bystanders, said, “Well that settles it, I’m voting for Procaccino.”

“I don’t get it,” Claire said.

“That’s because, as a Long Island resident, you’re not as
hip
to New York news as I am,” Tom said.

“So tell me.”

“People blame Lindsay for everything, even if it’s not his fault,” he explained. That’s why Mario Procaccino, the city comptroller, who was Lindsay’s conservative Democratic rival for mayor, had such strong poll numbers, even though by everyone’s lights he was a buffoon of a politician.

“You sound passionate,” Claire said.

“I don’t know I’d call it that.”

Just outside the front door, they stopped at a table where a young man with long sideburns sat beneath a sign that said “Volunteers.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Tom said, putting his hands on the table and looking defiantly at Claire.

“Sure, man,” the young man said, “like, whatever moves you, you know? It takes all kinds.”

“Something for beginners,” Claire said, leaning in to look over the list of jobs.

“We need poll watchers,” the young man said. “You’ll be at the polling sites, keeping an eye on things, making sure everything’s kosher. Can you dig that?”

“Do I need training?”

“Yeah, brother, we got orientation later this week. But mostly it’s just common sense,” the campaign worker said, winking at Claire. “What do you say, sweetie, he’s got any?”

“More than enough to spare,” she said, suddenly squeezing Tom’s hand. With his other hand, Tom signed his name to the paper. He couldn’t recall when he’d last felt this happy.

They stepped quickly down the sidewalk, as fast now as some of the natives, passing under the awnings of fancy restaurants and thrilling to the jazz of the night-drunk city. “Thanks,” Tom said, taking Claire’s hand.

“For what?”