The Anglophile (5 page)

I can barely hear what Kit says next—a swarm of soccer players have entered the Hyatt lobby bar high-fiving and screaming at each other in Portuguese. Kit smiles in frustration. As far as this man's looks go, I suspect he is the kind of guy who needs softening bar light to really look good to the rest of womankind, save the Anglophiles. He desperately needs a tan, and while his teeth aren't stereotypically nasty, they could use a good cleaning. Smoking isn't helping him in that department. My roommate back in New York would cringe; Cathy has been trying to land a nice Jewish boy with nice white teeth since I've known her. Call this a Gary stereotype if you will, but I agree with her that American Jewish men take amazing care of their teeth. But what can I say? Kit and his slightly discolored incisors and cuspids just do it for me.

And sadly, Kevin with the bright whites back home just doesn't.

I sigh to myself. I haven't had sex with Kevin for a month. I hate faking it. I can come with Kevin, if he's
patient, and especially if I'm on top. But these days I just don't have the energy to spend thirty minutes on anything with a high activity level.

True, my listlessness is not entirely Kevin's fault.

I have recently arranged an appointment back in New York City with a thyroid specialist. I got the name of the doctor from Velma, the Jamaican secretary for my graduate department. She tapped me on my hand before handing over the American Airlines tickets and the check advance for my conference. “Listen, mon. You are tired, too tired for a young girl. You see a doctor. It's your thyroid, mon. I was conking out everywhere but now I take Synthroid.” She claimed her visits and medicine were covered in the student and clerical staff plans, and that some of the most respected doctors at New York University gallantly do student and faculty clinic work once a week.

I think Kit is talking to me again through the clamor. I scootch over even closer.

When I'm half an inch from his ear, he has a question for me. “Are you peckish? Because I'd really fancy a crumpet about now.”

I nod and shout, “What actually is a crumpet?”

His voice is raised, too. “It looks like a hockey puck. You melt cheese on it or butter.”

“It sounds like an English muffin.”

“No, I had one of those in my hotel today. There's nothing English about an English muffin. A crumpet is—it's a crumpet.” He smiles for a brief second and says even louder and more coyly, “Oh, it also means sex, but that would be rude now to use it like that, wouldn't it?”

I smile big in response because, even shouting, I cannot vocally compete with the soccer team.

We mime to each other to move away from the fray.

When we can hear again we investigate our options. All Seasons Café in the lobby is closed for renovation, and at the concierge's suggestion we move shop to Knuckles Sports Bar, which wouldn't normally be my first choice for an intimate chat. A college basketball game is on that appears to be very important to not one but two men with bright red W. C. Fields noses. Both of their angry yells are directed toward the projected image that dominates the room.

“Asshole!” screams yet another fan at the screen. He's minus the gin blossom, but just as drunk.

Kit grins at me over the din, yet he manages a peek at the TV screen. I'm not insulted—even though he said he doesn't know much about college basketball, he has confessed his love of the sport.

My next question is solely to aid my nervousness. My family unanimously disapproves of my habit of filling silences with chitchat. “Do you know what hijiki is?”

“Not really,” he half-yells after a perplexed look. “Can you use it in context?”

“A Japanese man on my flight was hyper-concerned about the arsenic levels in hijiki.”

“Seaweed?”

“Of course,” I yell. “Seaweed.”

“Shari, I can hardly hear myself. Can you hear me at all?”

Now the whole room goes berserk. “Bring it home!” a chunky woman in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt yells at the screen.

“We could go to my room,” I say uncomfortably, but thrilled with myself for the big push.

Kit agrees with a neutral up and down dip of his chin.

A
fter I push seventeen, a linguist I have a nodding relationship with enters the elevator. He nods hi. I nod hi. I have no need for embarrassment. You'd never know the man at my side was headed to my room. Kit's face is dignified, with a certain sexy-as-hell arrogance.

When Kevin is in the elevator he pushes me up against the corner and imprisons me under the stinky hollows of his surprisingly fleshy armpits. I've had doubts about him, but never this harsh. Why am I thinking of him as a total horror, a too-nice loser? Even if I've had my reservations, others want him. My roommate for one, and she's an attractive, smart woman. “Okay,” I say to myself as therapist, “so if Kevin doesn't do it for you, why haven't you broken up with him yet? Is it fear, or guilt that his mother has died earlier in the year?”

“Actually,” I answer myself, “I suspect Kevin really
does love me as much as he says he does, and with all of my dissertation stress, right now I couldn't bear the wounded seal pup look I'm sure will come when I pull the cord.”

I've lost a parent and I know how painful it is. He has years of grieving left to do and even that won't numb it all: it's a cruel line of dominoes, memory. But I do not love Kevin, and I have never said I do.

Kevin and I met six months ago at a film aficionado costume party thrown in honor of my longtime friend Tom Cohen's successful Cinema Studies dissertation.

Tom, the Man of the Hour, was outlandishly dressed as the “King of the Rumba,” i.e., Xavier Cugat. He'd grown a thin moustache for the occasion, bought a South American hat and borrowed a chihuahua to carry in his arms. I had thought Cugat wasn't an actor, just a famous Spanish bandleader, but Tom then cited three Esther Williams's films that Cugat appeared in playing himself. Tom had obviously spent hours thinking out what would floor a roomful of Ph.D. students. His dick-head brother Doug took the piss out of Tom's earnestness by wearing a $5.99 Rite Aid Batman plastic Halloween outfit—he mocked Tom by walking around the room saying he was “citing
Batman Forever”
—a funny joke any day except the day someone's ten years of academic sweat and labor is being celebrated, his brother's, for God's sake.

Doug had one redeeming thing going for him though, at least as the single ladies in the room saw it. He had brought along a cute friend all of us were checking out—Kevin with wavy brown hair and big almond-
shaped brown eyes. I privately gave Kevin's costume an “A for effort”—his adorable Sherlock Holmes getup was built around the expected houndstooth detective hat with earflaps tied together at the top. I smiled at his plastic pipe, and he said hello.

I could tell off the bat that Kevin was taken with my racy forties dress that was lined with flesh-colored silk, and my black peep-toe three inch mules. (I didn't have to spend a dime on my costume as everything was culled from my thrift store vintage wear.) I happily explained to cute Kevin that it was a tribute to Vivien Leigh's role in
Waterloo Bridge
—I was Myra Lester, the ballet dancer who falls in love with handsome Roy Cronin, a First World War British army officer, who has been called to duty. When she mistakenly thinks he's dead, scandal mushrooms around her as she turns to prostitution. “I'm sure I'm boring you to death here,” I remember apologizing.

“Not at all. I love how you talk.”

I could tell he was trying really hard to follow. He picked up on the word British, and the conversation drifted to Kevin's obscure Kinks and Stranglers record collection.

That Anglophile in me knew all the tracks on the Kinks'
Village Green Preservation Society.
Kevin was
amazed.
Doug, Tom's brother, drunkenly interrupted us: “Yo, Kev, Batman has to drop the Batkids off at the pool, hold my beer.” Doug cracked himself up, and left our vicinity.

Mortified, holding a beer, Kevin said, “I know him well, but right now I wish he'd just leave.”

I whispered nicely, “It's okay, really,” and then to make
Kevin feel better I brought up my fondness for “Always the Sun,” the only Stranglers song I know the lyrics for.

“I am your slave now, you realize that,” Kevin cracked.

Soon after that Doug left Tom's apartment altogether with my friend Marni, a shocking exit—Marni is an academic lady if there ever was one, a year or two away from finishing her dissertation on courtly love in
The Canterbury Tales.

Free of his embarrassing buddy, Kevin, as per his promise, stuck to me like glue. It was cute at first, but eventually he got on my nerves even if in appearance, he was the adorable catch of the party. About that I was proud.

At least I'd thought he was the catch. My weak fidelity halted abruptly when a new guest, a handsome English biology Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, introduced himself on the three-person line for the bathroom. I beamed like a girl on the hunt when the scientist said he'd christened his new orange-ringed kitten Helix the Cat.

Kevin hovered nearby as I admired the party Brit's Hamlet costume. “Are you Olivier tonight?”

“Nay. Richard Burton's Hamlet.”

When I offered up that I was a linguist with training wheels on, he said politely, “What was the first language you learned outside of English?”

“Ubba Bubba, from
Zoom
.”

“Pardon?”

“It's an American kids' show. Ubba Bubba was
Zoom
's version of pig latin. To be or not to be becomes
‘Tubbo bubbe ubbor nubbot tubbo bubbe.'
”

I cribbed that example off a fellow linguist's blog, but
it was still pretty funny flirting if you ask me. The scientist, however, only looked mildly amused.

As I emerged from the bathroom after my own pee and a careful check for mascara smudges, another very single woman greeted Hamlet by saying, “my friend Annette claims you are Columbia's brightest young star.”

I looked over this gal's amazing figure, shown off in a costume even raunchier than mine. I was outrivaled and literally outdazzled: at first glance my competition looked almost nude. But she was wearing
something
—her boobs sparkled and glowed with swirls of dark and light gold. I bitchily noted that her obviously flat-ironed hair had enough spray wax on it to look like high gloss on a car, and that her pimple, colored over by brown eye-liner to look like a birthmark, looked more like a wet Cocoa Puff. But Hamlet was obviously taken with his beautiful fan of the Genome Project. As I silently sipped the particularly strong vodka gimlet Tom had poured me—it never left my hands, even in the bathroom—I overheard her say “Don't worry about the religious right. I have a ten-year-old cousin with rheumatoid arthritis and damn straight I want you to explore what stem cells can do. Nobody should live a shitty life because her DNA is not good.”

Hamlet nodded enthusiastically. “Science saves lives. Ignorance doesn't.” He whispered something else in her ear, and then she said much more seductively, but loud enough for me to step out of her sandbox, “That's very flattering, I was nervous about the costume but many of the risqué Ziegfield girls wore bodystockings.”

“Can I ask you something important?” Sherlock Kevin wondered. How long had he been standing there, waiting for me to look at him? Defeated, I turned and smiled at him.

He took a deep breath: “I have to get your number. You're gorgeous and brilliant. That English guy you were talking to is really a complete asshole.”

On any other night I might have realized that after the initial attraction wore off, Kevin was, in the end analysis, a bit pathetic. But he said some magic words there. Gorgeous and brilliant? Me? Did he know that was the exact flattery that would get me in a moment of vulnerability? Kevin of America was receptive to everything I had to say. Within ten minutes I was passionately kissing him in the kitchen next to a sink full of iced beer.

We walked the nine blocks to my apartment during which time Kevin explained that he was the first in his family to go to college and that his parents back in Michigan were working-class good eggs in a factory midmanagement life.

I admitted that I was working-class Jewish, too, but mostly just listened to him talk. I was drunk and I wanted to get laid.

Cathy smiled jealously when I brought Kevin inside and introduced him. We'd only yesterday talked about how desperate we were for any half-decent male companionship. I offered Kevin all we had to drink, cold club soda. My party pickup was loudly amused by how many bottles of salad dressing were in the refrigerator when I opened it up—fifteen in all including ranch, Italian, green goddess, Caesar and tarragon.

Cathy explained that we were both following a new
Glamour
diet of nibbles instead of full meals, and needed whatever flavoring we could get.

I coughed loudly when enough was enough; this girl can talk as much as me. Cathy flashed a knowing grin at me and retired to her room.

“How do you say, ‘You're so amazingly hot?' in Ubba Bubba?” Kevin said, just before he kissed me again.

Kevin's first
I Love You
came quickly, at the Fourth of July outing on Roosevelt Island two weeks after the party smooch. We were with his friends, and he seemed five years younger, and not in a good way. Kevin's face was covered with gooey melted chocolate hazelnut gelato. He was also plenty smashed—buddy Doug saw to that, personally handing Kevin Bud after Bud, trying to pry him away from me. He wanted Kevin to see how he'd mastered “Stairway to Heaven” on a toy pineapple-shaped ukulele his parents had bought in Hawaii.

I was taken aback by Kevin's drunken holiday announcement, but since I hadn't heard a sexual
I Love You
said for several years, secretly I was a little moved. I playfully tugged at the bendy green glowstick around his wrist that we'd each bought for a buck from a Puerto Rican street vendor turning his own holiday hibachi chicken. I told Kevin that it was early for me but I was “really digging him”—which was true—and he waved over another holiday peddler darting through the crowd, chancing for a quick sale to the newly in love.

The red rose was rather sweet. But the next day as we nursed his hangover I'm not even sure he'd remembered buying the rose, let alone what he'd said.

The next
I LoveYou
came in mid-September right after I had decided three months was enough of a go. He was sweet and sex was okay, but I knew in my heart of hearts that this wasn't a match. I had what I was going to say all worked out. I would lead off with what a catch he is. “I mean seriously,” I practiced out loud before Kevin's arrival, “how many women in New York are looking for a handsome and kind Jewish guy? You'll forget about me in a millisecond.” But just before my letting-him-off-easy speech, Kevin fractured his wrist. In a New York scene the writers from
Friends
might have written, I rushed him to the emergency room in a pedicab: we couldn't get a taxi and he was too embarrassed for me to call an ambulance because he'd apparently brought this injury upon himself after he'd heard that his mother in Michigan was diagnosed with cancer. Nick, our cyclist, deserved a medal for pretending he couldn't hear a thing Kevin was saying and for that record time he made a mile and a half to St. Luke's Hospital in the Village.

Not the day to break up.

His mother died in November, and then before I knew it, it was New Year's Eve.

I know, I know. How could I let this continue? But he was having such a terrible year.

We were dining at Roberto's in the “real” Little Italy of New York City, Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Kevin had made reservations after I'd casually mentioned that I had just finished the “Best of New York City” issue of
The Village Voice:
Robert Sietsema, the notoriously per
snickety and adventurous food critic for the
Voice
thought Roberto's modern Italian was ten times better than the dime-a-dozen red-sauce joints on the strip.

“I love you more every moment,” Kevin said with a teeny bit of mozzarella sticking to his tongue. I was already a bit nauseous from the texture of the tomatoey mussels in my mouth. I decided right then to drop the bomb sooner than later; it was just not right spending the New Year deceiving someone in mourning. He deserved real love back.

I smiled uneasily. Why ruin his day during an expensive dinner? At coffee, that's when I'd do it.

We shifted over to one of the coffee houses whose windows brimmed with cookies and cannolis, and we dug our spoons into the icy rock-hard chocolate and strawberry spumoni he'd ordered for dessert.

“So no
I love you
from you?”

“Kevin—” I really was going to answer him this time, but after one look at my face he quickly brought up how his mother gasped for words as she neared death. He squeezed my hand as he said, “She was calling out her kids' names, and bits of recipes, and Blade, the name of her first dog. She was staving off death, Shari—”

And just like at the party, he'd said the exact right thing to get me to do what he wanted. I'd tell him tomorrow…honest.