Love Me (12 page)

 

 

 

 

One morning I was eating breakfast on the terrace with a young woman whose name I could not for the life of me recall. She was talking about how she hated auditions so evidently she was an actress or a musician. She mentioned us maybe flying to Antigua for a week so perhaps I’d mentioned something about that the night before. Then the phone rang and the doorman downstairs said, “Mr. Wyler, your wife is on her way up.” I said, “My wife? You mean Iris?” He said, “I didn’t get her name. She’s wearing a Gopher hockey sweatshirt.” I said, “Try to slow her down.”

Sixty seconds to clear the decks.

I said to the girl, who was in a baby-blue bathrobe, “Grab your clothes and go down on the service elevator and I’ll call you later. My wife is on her way up.”

She wanted to discuss this, unfortunately—she wanted me to look at this from her perspective, starting with her assumptions when she met me the night before at the Piebald Pony or P.J.’s or that little bistro off Sheridan Square with the snail appetizers—and I had to steer her vigorously to the bedroom and scoop her stuff into a Fairway sack and head her out the back door and wait an agonizing half-minute for Pepe to bring up the service elevator while Miss Dallas or whoever she was said, “I feel ridiculous about this—did you mention to me that you were married?”

“The subject never came up,” I said. I caressed the elevator door and thought positive thoughts.

“I don’t want you to think that I’m that sort of person.”

“None of us is that sort of person,” I said. “Think of it as an accident. A wonderful accident.”

I almost asked her name but that would’ve seemed so crass—and then the elevator door opened, Pepe smiling, and off she went, and seconds later, I was at the front door, smiling, horrified, to let Iris in, and we embraced. “What a lovely surprise,” I said. Then she sniffed perfume.

“I just put it on,” I said. “A gift from someone. I forget.”

We stepped out onto the sunny terrace. “What a glorious day,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk until the cleaning lady is done.”

“Why two coffee cups and two plates?” she said.

“A guy from the magazine was here to talk about a piece I’m writing.”

“What piece is that?”

“It’s about Denmark. That’s why we had the cheese Danish.”

“What do you know about Denmark?” I ignored that. “I’m so surprised to see you, my love.” I said.

“Should I have told you I was coming?”

“No, no, no, no. Heavens, no.”

I cleared the table and brought her a Danish from the kitchen and a cup of coffee.

“I don’t see how people can live here,” she said. “All the extravagance. The Mercedeses and doormen and little kids in designer clothes. Who pays for all this? And two blocks away there are homeless people sleeping in the park. People in sleeping bags in cardboard cartons.” She walked over to the railing and peered down to see if she couldn’t spot some poor people on 90th Street. And found a little golden earring right there on the rail.

“I meant to tell you,” I said. “I’ve decided to get my ear pierced.”

 

 

Iris and I sat on the terrace and talked. New York has this effect on Minnesotans, it opens up the vocal canal. People who don’t ever talk back home come to Manhattan and suddenly the chains loosen, the gates clang open, and big secrets come flapping out like storks.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “Everybody I know thinks I ought to have my head examined. But I had to come out and see how you were doing.”

I am doing fine, I said. I am very happy here. Working hard. Eating sensibly. Walking. Getting my sleep.

“Are you coming back for the fair?”

“I’ve been busy,” I said, apropos of nothing. “I can’t seem to finish anything for the magazine. I keep trying and nothing works out.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be just fine.” She paused a couple beats. “I’m not sure whether to order season hockey tickets for next season or not,” she said. “Well, of course, you should. You can find somebody to go with.”

“Wouldn’t be the same without you.”

She drank her wine. The sun went down and the moon came out. A summer night and the stars in the sky and the lights of airliners on the approach to Newark and a helicopter chugging up the Hudson valley, the city humming along. “You like it here, don’t you,” I said. “It’s all right,” she said. “Say
I love New York,”
I said. “Let me hear you say it.
I love New York.”
“It’s all right,” she said.

“How’re you getting along with all your girlfriends?” she said.

“Well, it’s a scheduling problem, but so far, okay. Can’t complain. Could be worse.”

Iris laughed. She said, “It’s our anniversary tomorrow, you know.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know. I was thinking of coming home.”

She said she thought we should make love. New York has that effect on Minnesotans, I guess. You go through the harrowing landing at LaGuardia, skimming over the rooftops of Brooklyn and thinking about the short runway ahead and the one slight miscalculation that sends the plane skittering off the end of the tarmac into Long Island Sound and you’d have to push and kick and punch your way through the panic-stricken mass of passengers to get to the exit row and step on small children to propel yourself out the little window and onto the wing and into the water and paddle to shore, using your seat cushion as a flotation device, and blue lights flashing, the screams of the burned, the drowning, the pounding of helicopters—and then the plane lands and you collect your luggage and ride into the city and by George you’re in the mood to take off your clothes and hop into bed.

I said, “I thought we were separated.”

She said, “I’ll let you know when we’re separated.” We got into bed. She said she wished I’d come home for the fair. She held my cock and talked about how beautiful the midway is at night, the cotton candy and Tilt-a-Whirl and the doughnuts, and the double Ferris going up, up, up above the trees and then we fell upon each other like cougars and made love and good Lord the astonishment and delight, the sheer fervor, tall trees fell in the forest, boulders rolled, lightning crashed, and in the aftermath, the sense of accomplishment—two old married people, estranged but nonetheless able to put on a show—I wanted to say, “Of the three women I’ve slept with this month, you were by far the best!” She kissed me and we went to sleep together, me and Iris, entwined, like in the old days, her hand on my leg, her breath on the back of my neck.

William Shawn took a shine to me right off the bat, and I was intimidated and couldn’t imagine writing anything good enough for him to read. Every time I ran into him in the halls, I became a kid in junior high and he was Mr. Big, the Hercules who edited every sentence in the magazine. I saw him at a party at Roger Angell’s when he’d just returned from Alaska, where he and an actress named Delilah Van Kaar had climbed Mount Young and shot a caribou from a whitewater raft, and in his excitement he spilled whiskey on me and as a gesture of comradeship he poured whiskey on himself and we sort of bonded.

“Did you and Delilah do any fishing, Mr. Shawn?” I asked.

“Fuck you if you think I’m going to tell you about that,” he replied.

I threw back my head and laughed hard.

“Glad you’re not creepy and obsessive like some of these introspective sons of bitches around here,” he said. “I’ve had a bellyful of neurotics. White and Thurber drove me nuts and all those affected Harvard snots. What a bunch of phonies. Pretending to be sophisticated when they’d never been west of the Poconos. You look like a midwesterner. Me, too. Chicago. Call me Bill.”

“What does caribou taste like?”

“Like snake. Bull snake. Not bad if you fry it with onions and chase it with whiskey. It’s gamy but that goes with the territory.”

I walked him home to the apartment of the starlet Theresa Montouth (he and Delilah had split up three days before—she was bitter about some little thing or other) and we stopped to shoot billiards at a little smoke-filled joint called Patsy’s and at the jukebox we discovered we shared a fondness for old Chicago bands like the Jazz Equestrians and the Skippers of Rhythm and the bass saxophonist Adrian Rollini. We both knew the rules for a poker variant called footsie. He was an excellent bowler and arm wrestler and could toss cards into a top hat with accuracy at up to thirty-five feet, farther if he was drunk. He knew everything by Irving Berlin and also, oddly enough, Schopenhauer. His eagle eye could detect a great deal about a man from the soles of his shoes and his pocket linings. He could tell if you’d recently been to church or Zabar’s or taken an unmarried woman to the movies. He knew every species of bird and he could open any lock with a paper clip and a smidgen of gum. He and I were the only Rolling Stones fans in an office full of Beat lephiles. He knew all the words to “Tumbling Dice” and “Brown Sugar.” He could disassemble a typewriter and put it back together in two minutes flat. One night when he and Shochine Deligny and I went bowling (this was two weeks later, the thing with Theresa hadn’t worked out), he told me his life story: it just flowed out. All about his mama and how she prayed every night that The New Yorker would be free of typographical errors. His childhood in Chi town. His Irish dad, Sean Hanratty, a button man for the Bugs Moran gang, killed in the Arbor Day Massacre. Young William changed his name and hitchhiked to Vegas to deal blackjack for Bugsy Siegel and then was called to New York as Harold Rossi’s stickman, back when the magazine was a hotbed of steady tipplers and wisecracking women with hinges on their heels.

“Did you say Rossi?”

“I meant to say Harold Ross,” he said.

“But you said Rossi.”

“It was a nickname.” I could tell he was lying, but I didn’t want to push him.

“And Bugsy Siegel? You worked for him?” I asked.

“Did I say Bugsy Siegel? I meant Martin Segal.” Another lie. Mr. Shawn got a flush in the cheeks when he told an untruth.

“You’re so different from the William Shawn I always imagined,” I said. “James Thurber portrayed you as a flustered guy who spoke in a whisper and obsessed over commas and ate dry cornflakes for lunch and dreaded elevators and other motor vehicles.”

He had his arm around Shochine there in the lounge of the West Side Bowl, drinking a boilermaker, and he said, “Thurber was blind, you know. The phone rang and he’d pick up the steam iron. He needed a lot of supervision. Him and White both. He struggled to operate an ordinary stapler. A coffeemaker was beyond him.
The Years with Ross
was about as true to life as
Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm.

“Sometimes I feign fluster—it’s a useful stratagem with women,” he said.

“I liked hanging out with Dorothy Parker because she could talk louder than anybody else. Glamorous woman, if you like the sweet smell of gin. She had a voice that could crack ice. Most guys were scared shitless and of course her pal Benchley was completely in the bag, so Dotty needed a man to stand up to her. We were having lunch at the Algonquin and Kaufman was there and Marc Connelly and Harpo Marx and Joe Kennedy and Dietrich and that whole crowd, and I said to Dietrich in kraut, ‘I got a sausage for your bun,
mein Schatz,’
and that got Dotty all jealous and she was running her toe up and down my calf. So I took off her shoe and pissed in it without anybody noticing and handed it to her and said, ‘Hey, you’re in luck,’ and she jumped up and yelled, ‘He pissed in my shoe!’ and they all said, ‘Aw, shuddup, you’re drunk.’ All except Dietrich. She saw the whole thing. She saw that the great thing about being a quiet little bald guy is that you can piss in a lady’s shoe at lunch and nobody will ever believe you did it. She leaned over and said, ‘I have a sentence I’d like you to invert for me.’ And we went upstairs to her suite and we steamed up the windows for a while. Hemingway was passed out on the couch. I put a ladyfinger in his shirt pocket. She was crazy about me, and so were some others, but who’s counting? Now I’ve got Shochine and I’ve never been happier.”

This was before he broke up with Shochine and took up with Louise Twelve Trees.

He gave me the nickname Prairie Dog and he’d ring me up around 5:30 on a Friday afternoon and yip into the phone, “Come on, Skip, let’s go get our pants-legs wet,” and off we’d go to the 79th Street Boat Basin with a bag of groceries and board the
Shawnee
and cast off the lines and motor down the Hudson. “Ain’t this the life!” he said. He got out of his suit and into shorts and a sleeveless black T-shirt. He just felt so much freer out on the water, seeing midtown slide past on the port side, the cross streets like corn rows, and when 43rd passed, we yelled, “Boogers!” and hooked little fingers. Around Canal Street I hoisted the mainsail and we caught fresh wind at the Battery and flew around Governors Island and out under the Verrazano Bridge to sea and he sang out, “The sun’s over the yardarm, Prairie Dog!” and I broke out the bourbon and poured two china cups full and he drew a chestful of salt air and started talking.

“I’m a hunted man. Crazy magazine’s got me jumping like a rat on a hot plate. Some fool stuck his head in my office today and asked what’s the difference between a solecism and a solipsism. Go spend a week with a dictionary, I tell him. A writer is supposed to know the English language, dang it.”

I asked him about the perils of success and how fame and fortune seem to dig a deeper hole for a guy and throw up roadblocks you never dreamed of... like with me and
Spacious
Skies—it felt like I’d crossed the Red Sea and was headed for Canaan after years of bondage and suddenly I had enough money to afford good wines and good times and whammo, I wind up with a case of the cold shakes. Can’t write. Nothing works anymore. Sitting there on the seventeenth floor writing notes and throwing them out.

“An old story. You’re swinging too hard. Trying to aim the ball.” He spat. “Listen, kid. Every writer I know is on a winding mountain road in the fog. Some try to deaden their fear with bourbon and wind up confused about their capabilities, like a sumo wrestler trying to run the 440 low hurdles. Or they wind up as preachers pandering to high-minded dipshits. The Betterment of Man is the worst motive for writing. It’s the worst. Better to write out of sheer cussedness and heave a cherry bomb into the ladies’ latrine and make them all jump out of their camisoles than climb into the pulpit and pontificate about the meaning of it all.