NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (31 page)

Teddy sat primly on a corner of the studio couch with her knees pressed together and a paper napkin spread over them, sipping coffee and nibbling on a Triscuit and speaking only when
spoken to. Phil got me off in the john at one point and said, grinning and shaking his head and winking in his nervous way, “You’ll never make that girl.”

I was annoyed, but I wasn’t exactly sure why. “What makes you say that?”

“Aside from the fact that she’s a virgin and terrified of you and your highbrow friends, she’s too clean. I’ll swear she uses those soaps they advertise in
The American Girl
.”

“How would you know about
The American Girl?
”

“I’ve got a little sister.”

I thought of the contests that Teddy used to enter—Find 7 Hidden Faces—and I found myself hurrying back to her side with her trench coat.

“Yes, let’s go,” she said. “I’m getting worried about Stevie. If my mother knew, she’d kill me.”

“I wouldn’t let her do that,” I replied manfully.

“I’d like to see you stop her,” Teddy said to me over her shoulder on our way out. “You don’t know my mother.”

I didn’t know quite how to answer that, so I busied myself with finding a cab—no mean trick in those days, when they weren’t allowed to cruise. I didn’t want to know her mother, but on the other hand I wasn’t about to come out and say so. When we were settled in the taxi that I had gone several blocks to find, Teddy said mournfully, “Your friends are very talented people.”

That made me a little suspicious. “Most of them aren’t my friends. And besides, who’s talented?”

“Well, take that Army lieutenant. He’s an artist. He told me so.”

“Rollini? He paints camouflage on the sides of airplane hangars. I don’t see that that’s such a big deal.”

“You know what I mean. I just don’t think I fit in with those people. I can’t do anything special.” She gestured helplessly. “Look at me.”

The cab swung sharply onto Sixth Avenue, and Teddy was flung into my arms. I kissed her while her mouth was still open to say something else.

“Wait,” she panted, breaking free. “I want to ask you something.” She huddled up, very small, out of my reach in a corner of the cab. “Do you really like me?”

“Like you?” I asked. “My God, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve every known. All week in those cruddy barracks I keep telling myself—”

She interrupted my protestations. “That’s not what I mean. I wasn’t fishing for compliments. I didn’t ask you if you thought I was pretty, I asked you how much you liked me.”

Teddy knew as well as I how hard that would be for me to answer. Maybe that was why she didn’t stop me when I reached out for her once again, wanting to substitute caresses for words. Only when we were within a few blocks of Columbus Circle did she part from me again, her forehead wrinkled and her lower lip trembling just the slightest bit.

“I just don’t understand,” she said wonderingly and not very happily. “It’s all wrong.”

What was I going to tell her—that I wanted to make love to her? She knew that already. Before I could say anything we were caught up and blocked in the traffic of the bond rally that was on the point of breaking up. Teddy darted out of the cab door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll write you!” as she dashed off in search of Stevie. While I stood there in the eddying crowd, paying the driver, the band broker into “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” and I saw Stevie the mouth-breather, standing with his jaw agape and staring at the trombones through his eyeglasses.

Before the week was over I had my letter from Teddy. I am not going to try to reproduce it here. I will only say that it can best be described as a love letter and that it was so gauche, so overwritten, so excruciatingly true (“I am simply not used to going out with boys like you”) and at the same time so transparently false (“my brother Stevie thinks the world of you”) that it was immediately, painfully, terribly clear to me that I would never be able to answer in kind, and that there was no sense in my deluding myself into believing that I would. I hope it does not make me sound completely impossible if I add that her words not only released me from thinking seriously about her; they also made it all but impossible for me to think of anything but conquering her.

What inflamed me all the more was that shortly after I found
Teddy’s provocative letter on my bunk, my entire platoon was restricted to the base for the weekend. Trapped in that raw, artificial place, in its womanless wooden huts thrown up hastily to house some thousands of frightened boys being converted into sailors of a sort, I spent my mornings bobbing on a whaleboat in the bay, rowing in ragged unison with my freezing mates, and my afternoons ostensibly learning knots and braiding lines but actually lost in an erotic reverie of Teddy—of her slim arms, her tumbling hair, her pulsing lips—gone all wanton and yielding.

By the time we finally met again, I had memorized every line of her, from her slanting cheekbones to her small feet that toed out the least bit—and I could hardly remember what she looked like. We were constrained then, two weeks after the bond rally, not only by what had passed between us but by the heedless souls shoving us away from each other in the 42nd Street entrance to the Times Square subway station. It was the worst possible place for a boy and a girl to meet on a Saturday afternoon, in that blowing surf of old newspapers and candy wrappers, with the hot, rancid smell of nut stands assailing us. We hardly knew what to say to each other.

She smiled at me nervously, and I was emboldened to take her by the hand. “Let’s get out of here.” Willingly she mounted the stairs with me to the street, but when we came out onto the sidewalk the raw rain had turned to sleet; it cut at our faces like knives. I cursed the world, the war, the weather.

“But if you were stationed at that Merchant Marine camp in St. Petersburg,” Teddy pointed out, “we would never have met.”

“Oh great,” I said. “Now you’re going to do the Pollyanna routine.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Teddy replied humbly.

“I want to kiss you, that’s all. Are we supposed to stand out here in public and freeze to death while I make love to you? Come on, Teddy, let’s go down to my friends’ apartment. Like civilized people, like folks. What do you say?”

She could tell I wasn’t going to push it too hard, so she laughed and tucked her arm in mine. “Come on, Mr. One-Track Mind, let’s get out of the sleet.”

It was driving down hard, and we had to run into a doorway,
which turned out to be the entrance to a second-floor chess-and-checkers parlor. When Teddy laughed, still gasping a little and shaking off wetness like a puppy, and said, “I wonder what it’s like up there,” I took her by the arm and led her up the stairs. It never ceased to amaze me how a New York girl could know so little.

Teddy hadn’t played much chess, only with her brother (their father had taught them), so I showed her a few openings, but she was frankly more interested in sizing up the habitués.

Later, while we were having a drink at an Eighth Avenue hotel bar (I teased Teddy into having a Pink Lady instead of her usual ginger ale), I asked her if she’d ever eaten a real Chinese dinner. She looked a little disappointed. “We have Chinks in the Bronx almost every Saturday. Sometimes we even take it home with us.”

“I’m not talking about chop suey, Teddy. I’m talking about the greatest cooking this side of Paris.”

As if I’d ever eaten in Paris, much less in Peking! But that made no difference. I knew a real restaurant down on Doyers Street, and when we got there the headwaiter even remembered me. Or at least he claimed to, which was just as good; and when he followed the bird’s-nest soup with platters of crisp glazed duck, Teddy gazed at me in awe.

Afterward we walked off the dinner through the dim, narrow streets of Chinatown, echoing with soft, slurring voices, and then took a subway back up to midtown in order to see Noël Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
. We were fortunate to get tickets, and made it just after the curtain had gone up, groping our way to our seats.

Teddy poked frantically in her purse and came up at last with a pair of shell-rimmed eyeglasses. She was seeing bright comedy on the stage for the first time; I was seeing her in glasses for the first time. For both of us it was a revelation. She thought the play was brilliant; I thought she was delicious.

When the play let out, we stopped in at Jimmy Ryan’s on 52nd Street, ostensibly for a drink, but actually so that Teddy could see how casually I greeted the boys who were playing there—Pee Wee, and George Brunies, and Zutty Singleton—poker-faced at the drums like Joe Louis—and Art Hodes, whose daily jazz program, I told Teddy, I used to follow on WNYC. But since Teddy’s musical
background was confined to André Kostelanetz and Lily Pons, she was only impressed, and not overwhelmed, by my acquaintance with the great. I took her across the street to hear Billie Holiday.

We stood at the bar, Teddy’s back against my chest, and stared through the throat-tearing smoke at Billie, who sang “My Man” and “Strange Fruit” and “Gloomy Sunday.”

Teddy’s eyes were wet and shining. She raised her head. “You’re opening a whole new world for me.”

That was precisely what I was trying to do, but it bothered me to have her put it so patly. It reinforced my conviction that she would always be like that, forever, and that there was no point in my even considering that she might ever be otherwise.

She went on, “And I don’t know that it’s such a good thing. For either of us. Why should we kid ourselves? It’s not going to be my world—it never will.”

It was a somewhat melancholy note on which to end the evening, but in a way I preferred that. It struck me that it would be almost diabolically patient to let Teddy stew overnight, torn between guilt and gratitude. The next day was to be the climactic one. I forced myself to kiss her more lightly in parting than I wanted to, and we agreed to meet the next day by the lions in front of the Public Library.

For a change the weather was on my side. The wind was brisk, and Teddy had tied her print scarf around her blond hair babushka-style—it accentuated the slope of her cheekbones when she laughed—but the sun was out. We walked all the way up to the Frick Collection and were lucky enough to get in to the Sunday concert. Teddy had never even heard of the institution and made no attempt to conceal her ignorance.

Although she knew no more of chamber music than she did of jazz, Schubert stirred her, and she held tight to my arm throughout “Death and the Maiden,” breathing softly and shallowly while she squinted (no glasses in the daytime) at the musicians. When the recital was over, we walked on up to the Metropolitan Museum, which Teddy hadn’t visited since she was ten.

I led her directly to El Greco’s
View of Toledo
. “This is worth
the trip, this and the Courbets inside. Better to see just these than to get a headache from looking at too many.”

How insufferable I must have been, lecturing Teddy first on music, then on painting, about which I knew so little! But she smiled at me gratefully, and let me know by the way in which she clung to me that I was both patient and wise.

As we left the Metropolitan and walked south through Central Park, darkness caught up with us and the wind came up too. Our breaths frosting, we hurried on across Central Park South against the traffic, skipping in and out of the dimmed, blurry headlights until we had gained the rococo refuge of Rumpelmayer’s.

Warm, snug, soothed, we spooned up the great blobs of whipped cream floating on our hot chocolates and laughed over inconsequential things, and then suddenly, as if by common accord, we both stopped. I stared into Teddy’s lavender eyes, so soft and moist that I wanted to kiss them closed, and she opened her mouth but without speaking, as if she dared not utter whatever it was that she wanted to say.

“I must kiss you,” I murmured.

She nodded dumbly.

We went outside. In the dimout across the street the aging men who took you on carriage rides through the park and along Fifth Avenue were adjusting the straps on their horses’ feedbags and hoisting blankets over their hides to protect them from the chilly evening. I signaled the leader of the line.

Teddy said apprehensively, “This must be terribly expensive.”

Without answering, I raised her up into the carriage and climbed in after her. The driver tucked us in with a warm comforter, swung himself aboard behind us, clucked to his horse, and we were off.

Teddy and I turned to each other so precipitately that we bumped foreheads, searching, in the sudden dark of the covered carriage, for each other’s lips. We rode on through the lamplit evening, clinging to each other, kissing, until the current that flowed between us warmed not only our lips but our cheeks and our hands, our fingers and the tips of our fingers.

“You have been so nice to me, so nice to me,” Teddy whispered.

I responded by kissing her into silence. It was only after a long time that she could protest, trembling in my arms and frowning, “You shouldn’t kiss me like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know. It’s not right, that’s all.”

“Nobody can see.”

“Silly! I mean, I think it’s for married people, or anyway for engaged couples, and like that.”

We weren’t engaged or like that—the very thought was enough to frighten me out of my ardor—but I had every intention of our becoming lovers, and the sooner the better. “There’s only one way,” I whispered into her ear, “for you to stop me.”

“What’s that?”

“Kiss me back the way I kiss you.”

Before she could express her shock, I had stopped her mouth again. We must have been near 72nd Street on the west side of the park before we drew apart, panting.

“You know where I’m going to take you to dinner?” I asked.

“Where?”

“Phil and Charlene’s. And I’m going to cook it myself. Wait till you taste my soufflé! On the way down we’ll pick up some French pastries, and—”

“They’re not there, are they?”

“Who?” As if I didn’t know.

“Phil and his wife. Because if they’re not there, I’m not going. I don’t think you ought to take advantage of the fact that you’re so attractive and I’m so weak.”