The Receptionist (14 page)

But then, as a short and feisty bantamweight, Jack had fought his way out of rougher playgrounds than theirs, and he had the last laugh. Over the course of his fifty-six years at the magazine, he saw many more of his own pieces get into print than did anyone else—amounting to three million words, all told. He also published a number of books, including not one but two on his favorite subject:
About the New Yorker and Me: A Sentimental Journey
(1979) and
Year of Change: More About the New Yorker and Me
(1988).

Five feet five, trim and tanned, with crinkly, sandy hair and crinkly eyes—the eyes were blue with amber lights—Jack was both a man’s man and a great favorite with women as well.
Th
e son of the well-known New York architect Ely Jacques Kahn, Jack was as close to being a charter member of the New York Jewish elite (written about in Stephen Birmingham’s
Our Crow
d
), as you get, but had less side than anybody on the floor. Feisty, yes; snooty, no.

I liked Jack a lot and got along well with both Ginny and Ellie, as his second wife Eleanor was called. It was Ellie who saw to it that I was invited to their big annual cocktail party and even bigger New Year’s Eve parties.
Th
ese were laid-back but amply catered affairs where one might gaze around the room and see the likes of Teddy White, Walter Cronkite, a Broadway actress or two, and of course Jack’s illustrious sisters, the painter Olivia Kahn and Joan Kahn, who had her own mystery imprint at Harper.

When Jack learned that I would be leaving the magazine to take an assistant professorship at the University of Cincinnati, he went to considerable lengths to “launch” me in Cincinnati society. I was an overnight guest of his and Ellie’s at the Kahn place in Truro. Jack baked one of his famous clam pies—or six of them, more like—hosting a large group of regular summer residents on the Cape who hailed from Cincinnati, people who served on the symphony board and represented the A-list of the Cincinnati social scene, all of whom had me round for dinner when I got out to my new home. It was a typically warm gesture from a warm and lovely man.

I was shocked and sad to read of Jack’s death in 1994 at the age of 77. A bad auto accident, and Ellie had to bear not only his loss but the burden of having been behind the wheel. Ellie is a strong woman, however, and she has borne up bravely in the sometimes difficult role of survivor. She gets finely and fiercely angry when she feels Jack has been underappreciated at the magazine.

Peter De Vries, the author of
Comfort Me with Apples
and half a dozen other terrific comic novels, was a man of fine instincts. Never willing to fob off gift giving to a salesperson, he always asked for “tips” and, when told I liked Elizabeth Bowen, got me a book by Elizabeth Bowen or, following other tips, an album of lieder or some Monteverdi on Deutsche Grammophon. His and his wife’s agonizing loss of their daughter to leukemia is rendered beautiful in
Th
e Blood of the Lamb,
and I even liked it in the uneven but wrenching, tragicomic movie with Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett called
Pete ’n Tillie.
His other daughter, Jan, often sat at my desk and chatted with me while waiting for her dad. A son, Jon, is a good actor who has worked with La MaMa and, aptly enough, in Greek tragedy.

Kevin Wallace, another Californian (he’d been brought onboard by his pal Bernard Taper) wrote a lot of fact pieces for the magazine but very seldom appeared in it. Tall and tawny and well connected in California—like Taper, but on the
wasp
side—Kevin was totally correct yet flatteringly attentive. He was one of the casualties of Mr. Shawn’s sadomasochistic streak. Shawn, unwilling to confront a writer’s disappointment, would buy long pieces he had no intention of running, let them molder in the “bank,” and allow their authors to twist slowly in the wind. Kevin, battling alcoholism on top of this, managed to stay sober, but I think the strain of it may have cost him his marriage. One winter, to preserve his sanity, he rigged up a photography kit modeled after that used by his idol Ansel Adams. With what I thought great skill, he took pictures of me and anybody else he could talk into it. When we found that both of us were planning to attend the anti–Vietnam War November Moratorium in Washington, he arranged for me to accompany him and his son and daughter—both in their teens—on the ACLU’s chartered bus.
Th
ere, on a day so cold that we could see our breath, he shot roll after roll of us amid hundreds of thousands of peaceniks. Kevin finally moved back to his native San Francisco—a place his family practically started, and a place where he was once a popular feature writer on the
Chronicle.
But before he made that belated decision, we spent an evening at the Knapps’ country club, where Kevin patiently taught my nearly danceproof feet (and more willing hips) how to rumba.

I thought of these men as quasi–family members.
Th
eir affection for me meant the world to me, I did not know why. I suppose they functioned as the brothers, fathers, and husbands of my dreams, and so my Christmas gifts for these five were terribly important. But even I knew it should not matter so much to me that my choice of mugs proved a bad mistake: It was clear I should have gone in for blue, gray, or brown pottery, not the bright ceramic cups on pedestals that screamed California, and Southern California at that. Economy and a momentary lapse of judgment accounted for it, but I suffered greatly as I saw the pained expressions that flitted across the faces of my pets and were as quickly squelched in order to spare my feelings. Nobly, to a man, they stepped up and filled their ghastly vessels of buttercup yellow, persimmon red, pea green, and peacock blue. Men behaving badly?
Au contraire.

F
RITZ

I
ACQUIRED MY NEXT SERIOUS
boyfriend indirectly by way of a Talk reporter named Bill Murray. In those days, men who came up to meet
New Yorker
writers for lunch and arrived early often passed the time chatting with me on my post at the reception desk. Sometimes they even convinced me to go out with them. Murray’s too timely friend Cranston, as I shall call him, wanted to put the world back to rights by proving once and for all that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—the source of all that was wrong with the twentieth century—was mathematically incorrect. He was going to do this despite his lack of academic credentials in the field—hadn’t Newton or somebody been without them as well?
Th
e pampered son of old-money parents, Cranston may have been certifiable. He was, for sure, bipolar, though he was charming and reasonable enough, when not on his Heisenberg hobbyhorse, and probably had, as he casually informed me, a liberal arts degree from Princeton. He had the tweedy good looks of the Ivy League, to which I had already proved receptive. What’s more, he was a man who didn’t mind a late lunch with a fellow who didn’t mind a late lunch either. When Murray called to say he had been detained on a story and would have to cancel, Cranston asked me to eat with him instead. I went and was sufficiently entertained to accept another date.

Th
e following Sunday he took me to brunch at his brother’s loft in SoHo.
Th
ree documentary-film makers, the Maysles brothers and Donn Pennebaker, and the Village habitué barkeep Bradley Cunningham were there. Along with one or two other men, and various wives and girlfriends, we sat around knocking back Bloody Marys. Strong ones.
Th
e Bloody Marys kept coming.
Th
e brunch didn’t. My Heisenberg beau soon became too drunk to stand and sank deep into the arms of a wing chair.

One of the other men present was Friedrich Steffan-Freude— a.k.a. Fritz. (His name and those of his family and friends have been changed.) He was a struggling playwright and a master cabinetmaker who, when we met, was building Pioneer Forts (“Perfect for Young Dan’l Boones”) at FAO Schwarz. Six feet tall, blond, and handsome, he looked like a cross between the German played by Hardy Kruger in
A Bridge Too Far
and the one played by Marlon Brando in
Th
e Young Lions.
He had the advantage over the movie Germans of being anti-Nazi. Of course I didn’t know that then, or anything about him, except the part about his looks. I just thought that as he leaned on one elbow against the room divider that served as a bar, Fritz, in white shirtsleeves and chinos, exuded a raffish European charm. When, at two o’clock, I despaired of ever seeing eggs Benedict, I went over to Cranston and said, “I want to go home.” Cranston could not be roused from his snoring collapse. I never saw him again, and as far as I know, Bill Murray never did either.

Fritz stepped up to me and made a small bow. I almost think his heels came together, but in his desert boots it was hard to tell. “I will see you home,
ja
? It is too expensive for me, the taxi, but I will be glad to walk with you.” It was a distance of at least a mile and a half, but the day was fair, the man was grand, and I found it an offer I couldn’t refuse. He was still finding his way around English, so the conversation was stilted. We tried out some of my German and found that it, too, was pretty rudimentary. However, he took my phone number, and that evening he gave me a call.

“Do I speak to Janet?”

I assured him that he did.

“Here is Fritz. Ah, please, can you tell me how to prepare a beef heart?”

“Do you mean—the heart of a
cow
?”

“I believe that is right,
ja.
”

“Well, frankly, Fritz, I haven’t the faintest idea,” How odd, I thought. It would never have occurred to me to eat a beef heart. “I suppose you’ve already bought it?”

“Oh,
ja,
it lays already in the oven.”

“Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of any help. I wish you well with it. Let me know how it turns out.”

I asked about the outcome when we had dinner later the same week, and received his assurance that the cow’s ticker had been “succulent.” After the meal, Fritz suggested a walk. At the corner of West Fourth Street and Washington Square we came across a knot of men playing chess, and as though drawn by a magnet, Fritz steered us toward it. A well-established scene of ad hoc chess games, this area of the park had concrete tables with boards etched in their tops, though players often superimposed their own boards. “Many of these players are quite accomplished,” Fritz said after watching awhile. I learned that he played chess the way some men play video games or follow the ponies—that is, incessantly. And he was sufficiently good at it to have been ranked the junior master of Mecklenburg, Germany, in his teens.

Because neither of us had any money to spend on entertainment of the ticketed sort, it became a custom for us, after our eaten-in meals, to take long walks, often ending up downtown in Washington Square Park or some other green square dotting the urban environment.
Th
ere, the paths and benches offered valuable options for city-dwelling couples, parks being one of the few cost-free environments for holding serious conversation. Bed is practically the only alternative. Kitchens, maybe, but almost nobody in New York has more than a Pullman kitchen. As for living rooms, I’ve always thought authors of plays set in New York make a mistake locating plays there. Practically all the drama takes place offstage. Restaurants, hotel lobbies, are too noisy. But in a park you can sit down in a place where something is growing and you can talk quietly. Grass and trees make talking quietly make sense. Soon we were meeting for coffee at the Peacock Café, going for long walks around the Village, and ending up at the park.

Fritz loved me first. I was five feet seven, had a 36-26-36 figure, and wore my hair in a twelve-inch blond ponytail. What more did a man need to know? So he loved me before he knew me, and when his growing knowledge seemed to change his love, I held it against him. I held off, got to know him first, and only came to love him with our growing intimacy. Each dubious thing I learned only seemed to endear him to me more. He brushed his hair forward, straight into his face, with mad, compulsive strokes, his face screwed up in an expression of unwavering disgust; he crammed his pockets with screws, nails, money, stamps, envelopes, and string; he was an obsessive pusher-up of the glasses on his nose, grabber of himself about the upper rib cage, flexer of shoulders, scratcher behind the ear, and reader of the last page of every book he picked up.

I see now that I was falling, not only for the idiosyncrasies of a handsome fellow, ten years older than I, but for a European way of life. I had been drawn to it in the books I’d been reading since I discovered Henry James and the Russians in my teens. By linking my life to his, I was trying on a whole new set of identity markers, much more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than any I had acquired as a birthright. It excited and perplexed me in about equal measure.

One evening, Fritz invited me to a party at Brad Cunningham’s. It was my one and only pot party. Everybody let me know they thought I was a real prude for not taking my turn at a toke, but judging from the conversation—Pause. “Anybody catch Monk the other night at the Five Spot?” Pause. “Far out, man.” Heads nod. Pause—I decided pot was not good for the brain. To me, alcohol was far superior. People improved their talk on scotch and martinis; this was a downer.
Th
e apartment was interesting, though, a Village classic of high ceilings, sparse furniture, and large, inscrutable art on the walls.
Th
e party was a farewell for Brad and his wife, Jean, who were about to take off for Florida, leaving Fritz in charge. Fritz, I knew, was an accomplished cabinetmaker. He’d quarreled bitterly with his father over his father’s participation in Hitler’s war effort, and as a result, he wound up with a trade certificate in lieu of a university education. He was going to stay at the Cunninghams’ rent-free, house-sitting and doing some cabinetwork. Brad and Jean never did come back and live in that flat, but the island Fritz built—in an eat-in kitchen, no less—undoubtedly upped the selling price when the divorcing couple put it up for sale. I lost track of what became of Jean, but Brad remarried and had a family. His big success came later when he owned and operated Bradley’s, a bar on University Place that Nat Hentoff once called “
Th
e Perfect Jazz Club.”

Among their few furnishings, Brad and Jean had a grand piano, and when I went up to have an after-dinner coffee with Fritz the week following their departure, I discovered that he had made a bed for himself by laying a full-size mattress on the floor under the grand. By now I was quite enamored of the charming Kraut, and we wound up making love under the piano. We had gotten to about the fourth turn in our bolero when I found myself gazing into the eyes of the Cunningham cat, of which Fritz was also in charge. Making love on odd surfaces—or under odd surfaces—became a kind of theme. Down at my place in the Village, where Fritz spent more and more time, it meant making love on top of a door slung over two sawhorses, whose usual function was to serve as a dining table, as well as on a couple of twin couches shoved together, which made up my living room seating. Once, when we both had head colds, Fritz pulled the mattresses off my couches and laid them side by side on the floor, where we tumbled around feverishly between trips to the bathroom, the water jug, and the tissue box. On occasion we even used the bed in my bedroom. It was an odd size, somewhere between twin and full, called a princess. We were a pretty tight fit, which suited us just fine. Between Fritz’s pad and mine it was a kind of traveling
Decameron.
We were exciting together sexually, and we made the most of it.

I don’t remember when things got more domestic, but we were soon taking all our meals together and all our weekends, too. I found myself clearing my calendar of the remaining unimportant men so I could be free for Fritz. It may have been my failure to get it absolutely cleared that led to our first quarrel. From one point of view, it was quite dramatic: Fritz threw the Cunningham cat at me. I wasn’t hurt, the cat wasn’t hurt, but fearing more scratches from an angered feline, I put on my clothes and went home.

In early July, when Fritz’s house-sit ended, he came to live with me. He was broke. FAO Schwarz would not start adding new Pioneer Forts to their inventory until October. Fritz and I agreed that he would be the househusband, and he began work on
Peer Gynt,
next up in the series of Ibsen plays he was translating for a German publisher.

One Saturday afternoon he returned to the apartment to hear soft thuds issuing from the kitchen. He stood in the doorway and looked upon a scene of desolation. I was seated cross-legged on the floor, tears rolling down my cheeks, surrounded by fruit, which I was angrily trying to shove into a paper bag.

“Na, what’s this?” he asked, sweeping a hand over the narrow kitchen and its contents. “What can be the meaning of this spectacle? Why is honey [as he called me—I called him honey, too] sitting on the floor? Why is she crying? What is she doing with all these fruits?”

“
Th
ese aren’t fruits,” I said, choking back tears. “
Th
ey’re
nectarines.
Th
ey—they’re crosses of peaches and plums. Oh, Fritz, the flavors are just
fighting
with each other in there. Bitter tasting. It’s terrible. And the poor pits are grown all out of shape.
Th
ey must be so confused.”

“Are you sure?” asked Fritz.

“I don’t have to be sure.” I held up a sticky fist and opened it to reveal a large, misshapen stone. “I can see it. And that’s not the worst of it. I’m almost sure it can never have little nectarines.” More tears.

“Honey,” he said, reaching over to extract the pit from my hand and throw it away. “Now, honey, is this not ridiculous to get so sentimental over an inanimate object?”

“It’s not inanimate,” I objected, sniffing. “It grows.”

“Well, just let me help you up here.” He steered me to a chair around the corner in the front room. “Now, sit right over here where you won’t see them, all right?”

“
Th
ey could have been just plain peaches or just plain plums. And they’d know what they were. A peach knows how to be a peach. Only those terrible humans come along and mess everything up and try to ‘improve’ them.”

Fritz clapped. “I agree. You are absolutely right on the peach question. Now, please, come out with me, won’t you? I will shoot the nectarine man and afterward I will buy you a
granita di caffè
in the Peacock,
nicht
?”

And that is what we did.
Th
e coffee ice, not the shooting.

Although Fritz had been in New York only six months at the time of our meeting, he already played an active role in a circle of people who revolved around a couple named Jillian and Hugo Braun. It consisted of emigrated Europeans and of Americans who had done time as expatriates in Europe, many of whom seemed to be the rebellious children of wealthy families in Kansas City. Hugo was built along the lines of Edward G. Robinson, but the other men in the group all had tall, fit bodies going for them, and the women were good at that leotard-wearing, dark-hair-pulled-back-in-a-ponytail look that spelled bohemian chic in the sixties.

Fritz spoke of these people constantly, and Hugo was practically a fixture in our apartment, but my love made no move to introduce me into the larger circle. I would come home to find Fritz and Hugo hunched over the little traveling chess kit Fritz had given me shortly after we met. (My own game had me staving off checkmate OK but never learning to go in for the kill.) Hugo often stayed through dinner and the evening. If he did not stay, Fritz would go to the apartment Hugo shared with Jillian.