PART 22: RUM CAKE, CHEESE CAKE, TENNIS AND POOL

After we had dated for about six months, Nancy moved out of her apartment on 93rd Street and into 338 with me. There were a couple of problems that I hadn’t expected. She hated its tiny Pullman kitchen (no one could have loved it), but also, she wasn’t crazy about the terrace, which surprised me. It’s true that furry animals small enough to slip under the metal door used it as a convenient entry to the apartment in search of crumbs. But I still loved my tree, and the light slanting into the living room in the afternoons. Of course, that terrace and the backs of the buildings surrounding it were a nostalgic link to my earlier years. The interior courtyards formed by streets lined with single-family apartment buildings are unique; no other big city has them, and they give New York a special ambience. Nancy didn’t share my sentimental attachment; she had grown up in a free-standing house with a real back yard.

The neighborhood was everything it had always been, a source of nourishment of every kind – intellectual, sensory, gustatory. We ate out a lot, at restaurants long-gone. For Chinese, there was the Great Shanghai, maybe the most ubiquitous Asian-restaurant name in the country; there had been one in Ann Arbor, too, though this one, Nancy admitted, was incomparably better once we convinced them to leave the MSG, to which she was allergic, out of our food. Tony’s Italian Kitchen, on 79th between Broadway and Amsterdam, was our go-to red-sauce joint; I usually ordered the veal parmigiana, Nancy some form of pasta, which she’d never before encountered in its al dente form. Then we’d ask the waiter about desserts, just to hear him intone a litany that never changed: “Rum cake, cheesecake, spumoni, tortoni.” For special occasions, we went to Café Biarritz, on West 57th. It was a splurge – a three-course dinner – seafood crepe, roast leg of lamb, and gateau St. Honoré – cost us $35, but it was worth it.  Tony’s didn’t make it into the 80s, but Biarritz hung on until just a few years ago.

We spent many evenings in a large pool hall on the second floor of the building on the northeast corner of Broadway and 79th, until it became an ABC carpet store. We were terrible pool players, and we knew it, but we didn’t care; our wedding presents to each other were custom billiard cues, beautiful to look at but completely wasted on us -- though we looked good doing it.

 

And of course, all those movie theaters were within walking distance: The Beacon, RKO 81st Street, Loew’s 83rd Street, the New Yorker, the Thalia, the Midtown. Once in a while we went to the East Side to see first-run pictures. I remember us standing on line for an hour at a theater on Second Avenue for The Graduate in 1968.

We played a lot of tennis at the public courts in Riverside and Central Parks. One afternoon, a good-looking young guy watched us for a while and then, when Nancy had had enough, asked me if I’d like to play. Afterwards, we strolled out of the park with him. His name was Charlie Frank, and he was an actor on All My Children, so the two of them had television in common. I began to play with him regularly, usually in Central Park where the 30 Har-Tru courts were better-maintained. The facility was the focal point of a whole Manhattan tennis subculture, where the same guys (and women) hung out all day every day in the summer, schmoozing and occasionally hitting a tennis ball if a court opened up.

We played a lot of tennis at the public courts in the parks. One afternoon, a good-looking young guy watched us for a while and then, when Nancy had had enough, asked me if I’d like to play. Afterwards, we strolled out of the park with him. His name was Charlie Frank, and he was an actor on All My Children, so the two of them had television in common. I began to play with him regularly, usually in Central Park where the 30 Har-Tru courts were better-maintained. The facility was the focal point of a whole Manhattan tennis subculture, where the same guys (and women) hung out all day every day in the summer, schmoozing and occasionally hitting a tennis ball if a court opened up.

The courts in Central Park

In Central Park, Charlie was instantly recognized and surrounded by a horde of pubescent girls, who cheered when I double-faulted, and who changed ends every odd game along with us. He went on to a middling career as an actor and director; probably his biggest role was as Scott Carpenter in The Right Stuff, but from the point of view of ego-gratification, nothing could have topped his stint in the soaps. We stopped playing tennis after he moved out of the city, but he went back to All My Children when Nancy was producing it in the 90s, so we stayed in tenuous contact. 

When everyone started jogging, we did too, and eventually took it seriously enough to enter 10K races held by the New York Road Runners’ Club, but back in those days, people who ran long distances every day were thought to be afflicted with OCD. One of them was Ciba’s brother, who ran in the earliest versions of the New York Marathon beginning in 1970. It wasn’t the wonderful 5-borough city tour that it later became; it consisted back then of four laps of the Central Park roadway, each just over six miles long, which meant that the runners had to face Heartbreak Hill at the northern end four times. In 1972, we were waiting for Geoff Vaughan at the finish line, along with Ciba, to congratulate him and the few other competitors who actually finished. In a circular race that long, he told us, the temptation to quit after the third lap was all but overpowering; today, once you get into the Bronx, there’s nowhere to go but the finish line, so you somehow limp in. But to have run the same 6-mile loop three times, to contemplate a fourth called for real fortitude.

In the summer, we were thankful for the enormous, noisy but efficient air-conditioner I’d liberated from my mother when she moved. Summers were just as hot then as they are now, but we loved eating at outdoor cafés and at the elaborate al fresco restaurant at the Belvedere Fountain in Central Park, whose specialty was a huge bucket of iced shrimp. I discovered the hard way that I was violently allergic to shrimp when, after one such lunch, I went off to play tennis with my friend Jim Goldman and suddenly, halfway through the first set, I felt faint and began to itch all over. I could feel my airway closing as I slipped into anaphylactic shock. Jim half-dragged, half-carried me to St. Luke’s emergency room, where I was pumped full of Benadryl and norepinepherine, which, according to the resident, saved my life; ten more minutes and I might have choked to death. I haven’t eaten shrimp since, of course, but I miss it; Tony’s did a mean scampi.  On weekends, we sometimes went to Jones Beach if someone had a car; we’d set off as early as we could, fight the hideous traffic heading east on Long Island, fight other pleasure-seekers for a parking space, and finally fight for space to make camp in the sand, along with a million other people, as close to the water as we could get. In those days, we all wanted tans; I suffered any number of sunburns for which I’m now paying every time I visit the dermatologist. The beach was not only incredibly crowded but also incredibly wide; we always ran out of sandwiches and drinks by early afternoon, and someone would have to make the quarter-mile trek to the concession stands, over sand that roasted your feet unless you had had the foresight to bring sandals, which I never did.

I’d never owned a car in the city. At Cornell, in her typical conflation of emotion and money, my mother bought me an old Plymouth in an attempt to make my father’s death less painful to me, but I’d sold it when I graduated for about $30. Nancy and I now made the mistake of buying a car from friends – a Triumph Herald,  a convertible with stick-shift painted the classic British Racing Green – for $500. It had no power but lots of panache: and it handled beautifully. 

But it was designed to putter up and down country lanes in Surrey in mild weather, not forge through ice and snow. Unfortunately – and our friends neglected to tell us this – if the outside temperature was under 40, you couldn’t get the engine to turn over. The starting motor was made of aluminum, and it continually broke under the stress of trying to revolve that miniscule crankshaft. Everyone knows how hard it is to find a parking space in New York, but for us it was even worse: we had to find spaces at the tops of hills, so we could push the Herald into the street and coast it until it was going fast enough to jump-start. But we had fun in that car. We drove it to Ogunquit one summer weekend to visit Richard and Helen Freedman, about 350 miles, in one day – a very long day, as we had trouble keeping up with the traffic on Route 91. But for excursions to Jones Beach, it was perfect, at least for us; sometimes there was another couple along for the ride, crammed into its practically nonexistent back seat. I don’t remember anyone doing that more than once.

Our best friends were Ciba and her boyfriend Tom Jackson, whom we had introduced. Tom, who was my best man at our wedding in 1969, had been a Navy test pilot, and though I still hated to fly, I loved his stories about flying; he’d had more close calls than the Great Santini. He actually was pretty much the Scott Carpenter that Charlie Frank had played in his movie; Tom certainly had the Right Stuff, in the air and on the ground. Once, he’d had to bail out at 65,000 feet; he was unconscious from hypothermia when he hit the ground, and he was immediately arrested because his wingman had radioed back to the base that he’d lost control of his F7 by clowning around – when in truth, his hydraulics had malfunctioned and the wingman, for some reason, didn't his distress call on the radio. He lived in a sunny apartment on East 74th Street and gave terrific parties, to which, in his pre-Ciba days, he invited many of the stewardess crowd I’d known when I’d dated Jo-Alice. He came on to all of them, apparently with much success. After I’d overheard him making an assignation with one dimpled blonde, he turned to me, sighed deeply, and said, “God, I love to fuck, I LOVE to fuck!” Well, in those innocent days, who didn’t?