PART 17 KATHRIN NEE JANE

17 KATHRIN NEE´ JANE

I was 26 when I was seeing Jo-Alice; she was 27. I had never had a girlfriend younger than myself: Sue was a few months older; Mary a year older; Adrianne two years older. This was to be expected when I was in college, because, having skipped a grade in junior high, I was a chronological year behind my female classmates, but the trend continued until my mid-20’s, which is still young enough so that single years make big differences. When you’re 22, any girl young enough to be in the stage of maturity just below you is probably still in high school, especially if you’re as immature and inexperienced as I was. So I had to wait a while before I got a chance to impress some starry-eyed young thing with my maturity and experience.

Jane was that young thing. I met her a week before my 27th birthday, and she had just turned 22, having graduated the year before from Barnard. We had been set up by Michael’s girlfriend Dorothy, who had met Jane on a summer-abroad program in France, and who told me later that she hadn’t given much thought to the wisdom of introducing us: we were healthy young animals of the same species but different genders, so why not? There turned out to be reasons why not, but I didn’t discover them until later. Michael, who had met Jane, told me that she was unimaginably sexy, so I phoned the number Dorothy had given me, went through the formalities of introduction, and asked her out for a drink. In retrospect, it’s surprising that we ever saw each other again; the more we talked, the more we disconnected. Perhaps because her mother taught high-school French, but more likely during her stay in France, her tastes in art and culture – and men – had been formed by her absorption in Existentialist attitudes (she’d read all of Simone de Beauvoir and selections from Sartre, and she knew Camus’s The Stranger by heart) and movies by the New Wave directors who were becoming the latest thing (Chabrol, Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut and other darlings of Les Cahiers du Cine´ma). When she opened her door to me, I’m sure she was hoping to find Jean-Paul Belmondo or Alain Delon or Charles Aznavour standing there. Instead, here was this incarnation of American preppiness in his Brooks Brothers tweed jacket, clean-shaven, hair freshly trimmed – the very picture of the bourgeois philistine that French intellectuals despised. And I took her to Dorrian’s, about as different from the bistros and cafes of Paris as it was possible for a drinking establishment to get. So much for me as her mentor and guide. Why didn’t she politely get rid of me as soon as she could?

When I took her home, I expected her to say goodnight at the door,  but to my great surprise, she took my hand and walked me in. To my great pleasure, we were kissing five minutes later:  healthy young animals indeed, awash in hormones. It was I, out of some instinctive caution, who called a time-out and left before we moved into the bedroom, but we did make a date (or is assignation a more accurate word?)  for the following day. I paused at a wine store on my way, picked up a nice bottle of Chablis. and put it in my refrigerator because I knew we’d end up at my apartment.

The following afternoon I called for her and we walked ten blocks south in Riverside Park until we were in front of my building. For the rest of the day and evening, in my apartment, we finished what we had begun the night before. We drank the Chablis and later, I went out for a pizza Things were a little awkward, physically, because she had an elbow-to-wrist cast on her left arm, which had been broken a few months earlier in an automobile accident. Luckily, she no longer had to wear the full-body corset in which she’d been trapped for the first month. Still, it was tricky. Remember the old riddle, “How do porcupines make love?.” The answer is “Very carefully.” But eagerness trumped inconvenience; she’d had sex with only one other guy, her college boyfriend, and that had been over a year earlier. The fragility of her body, and the restriction of her range of motion was frustrating to both of us, but after a month, the cast came off and gradually, I was able to introduce a little more variety into our repertoire. Finally, I was with a woman who had less sexual experience than I, so here, at least, she ceded control to me.

But socially, culturally and intellectually, problems not so easily solved were apparent from the start, which persisted throughout the year we were together. When I’d begun graduate school, she’d been fifteen, so many of my conversational gambits were about people and events she’d never heard of. She didn’t care for jazz, and the music she listened to – Aznavour and incessant Piaf -- was not interesting to me, though we both loved the Rolling Stones, and “Satisfaction” was at the top of the charts that year. By virtue of my age and education, she conceded that I was more widely read, except in the area of contemporary French fiction – but though we bonded over Camus, neither of us much cared for Balzac and Dumas and Hugo. Bonjour, Tristesse seemed to me pretentious crap, though Jane, pulling rank, said that was because I had read it in translation, and she was right; I couldn’t match her native fluency in French. Nor did I have much success interesting her in my favorite English and American authors; she didn’t think Catch-22 was funny; Bellow was too ethnic and Tom Wolfe too over-the-top. She didn’t get Shakespeare, or theater, for that matter. We did have the same taste in film, but for different reasons: I watched The 400 Blows and Breathless as movies made with great artistic skill; she experienced them as ideal representations of a life she wanted, and intended, to live. So enthralled was she with Catherine, the central female character of Jules and Jim, played by Jeanne Moreau, that she eventually changed her first name to Kathrin. I thought that was an odd sort of homage, but by that time we were no longer together.

Often, I felt, as I indulged one of her tantrums or new enthusiasms, that I was dealing with an adolescent. She was irresponsible to a fault; in this era before cell phones, I’d find myself waiting at a bar or on a park bench while she pursued some new opportunity that had just presented itself – she was having a drink with a friend she’d just made an hour before, she’d passed a new shoe store and had to try on seven pairs of boots. My own punctuality almost reaches the level of OCD, and I never stand people up. So I was hurt when, for example, only ten days after we’d met, she’d promised to meet me at LaGuardia when I came home from one of my infrequent trips and simply . . . forgot.

She had grown up in Great Neck, a bedroom town on Long Island, and had attended Great Neck North High School, a testament to how good public education can be in a wealthy community that cares about its children. There was also a Great Neck South, equally prestigious academically but a little less patrician, and the two districts bisected the town in such a way that North was almost all Jewish and South everything else. But Jane, who wasn’t Jewish, went to North, because both her parents taught there – French and shop. Consequently, most of her school friends were Jewish, and almost every one of her classmates came from money, which she did  not.  She confessed that she had always felt, or been made to feel, different at school, and that probably had to do with social status as well as religion, though her upbringing had been in no way religious, any more than mine, so that was one of the few subjects we never quarreled about. But since we quarreled about everything else, what was the true source of our attraction to each other? Did I mention that she was gorgeous? I wasn’t the only person to notice that she could have been Catherine Deneuve’s younger brunette sister. Her body was lush beyond description; I was overwhelmed, the first time she undressed in front of me, by the sheer womanliness of her. She was deeply embarrassed, however, by the fact of that she had a lot of body hair; she was always running off to get waxed and plucked from the eyebrows on down. She required me to reassure her, at regular intervals, that I loved every hair on her body, no matter where it grew. I neither loved them nor hated them; they were part of the earth-mother package. Perhaps one reason she so disliked the hair on her arms, her upper lip, and her brows was that, combined with her zaftig body, it gave her a kind of smoldering Jewess vibe, which was fine with me. I myself, in those days, what with my clothes and haircut and fair complexion, often passed for Gentile without meaning to. Once, in a Jewish bakery on Broadway, I asked the lady behind the counter for a loaf of challah, pronouncing the “ch” with the correct uvular wiggle, and she said to Jane, “You should be proud; he did that very well.” Jane, to her credit, laughed at that. But I changed my looks to please her; I let my hair grow over my ears; my wardrobe turned darker and darker; when I didn’t have to meet classes, I walked around with a two-day stubble, which she loved.

  

     \What we looked like then

17 KATHRIN NEE´ JANE

I was 26 when I was seeing Jo-Alice; she was 27. I had never had a girlfriend younger than myself: Sue was a few months older; Mary a year older; Adrianne two years older. This was to be expected when I was in college, because, having skipped a grade in junior high, I was a chronological year behind my female classmates, but the trend continued until my mid-20’s, which is still young enough so that single years make big differences. When you’re 22, any girl young enough to be in the stage of maturity just below you is probably still in high school, especially if you’re as immature and inexperienced as I was. So I had to wait a while before I got a chance to impress some starry-eyed young thing with my maturity and experience.

Jane was that young thing. I met her a week before my 27th birthday, and she had just turned 22, having graduated the year before from Barnard. We had been set up by Michael’s girlfriend Dorothy, who had met Jane on a summer-abroad program in France, and who told me later that she hadn’t given much thought to the wisdom of introducing us: we were healthy young animals of the same species but different genders, so why not? There turned out to be reasons why not, but I didn’t discover them until later. Michael, who had met Jane, told me that she was unimaginably sexy, so I phoned the number Dorothy had given me, went through the formalities of introduction, and asked her out for a drink. In retrospect, it’s surprising that we ever saw each other again; the more we talked, the more we disconnected. Perhaps because her mother taught high-school French, but more likely during her stay in France, her tastes in art and culture – and men – had been formed by her absorption in Existentialist attitudes (she’d read all of Simone de Beauvoir and selections from Sartre, and she knew Camus’s The Stranger by heart) and movies by the New Wave directors who were becoming the latest thing (Chabrol, Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut and other darlings of Les Cahiers du Cine´ma). When she opened her door to me, I’m sure she was hoping to find Jean-Paul Belmondo or Alain Delon or Charles Aznavour standing there. Instead, here was this incarnation of American preppiness in his Brooks Brothers tweed jacket, clean-shaven, hair freshly trimmed – the very picture of the bourgeois philistine that French intellectuals despised. And I took her to Dorrian’s, about as different from the bistros and cafes of Paris as it was possible for a drinking establishment to get. So much for me as her mentor and guide. Why didn’t she politely get rid of me as soon as she could?

When I took her home, I expected her to say goodnight at the door,  but to my great surprise, she took my hand and walked me in. To my great pleasure, we were kissing five minutes later:  healthy young animals indeed, awash in hormones. It was I, out of some instinctive caution, who called a time-out and left before we moved into the bedroom, but we did make a date (or is assignation a more accurate word?)  for the following day. I paused at a wine store on my way, picked up a nice bottle of Chablis. and put it in my refrigerator because I knew we’d end up at my apartment.

The following afternoon I called for her and we walked ten blocks south in Riverside Park until we were in front of my building. For the rest of the day and evening, in my apartment, we finished what we had begun the night before. We drank the Chablis and later, I went out for a pizza Things were a little awkward, physically, because she had an elbow-to-wrist cast on her left arm, which had been broken a few months earlier in an automobile accident. Luckily, she no longer had to wear the full-body corset in which she’d been trapped for the first month. Still, it was tricky. Remember the old riddle, “How do porcupines make love?.” The answer is “Very carefully.” But eagerness trumped inconvenience; she’d had sex with only one other guy, her college boyfriend, and that had been over a year earlier. The fragility of her body, and the restriction of her range of motion was frustrating to both of us, but after a month, the cast came off and gradually, I was able to introduce a little more variety into our repertoire. Finally, I was with a woman who had less sexual experience than I, so here, at least, she ceded control to me.

But socially, culturally and intellectually, problems not so easily solved were apparent from the start, which persisted throughout the year we were together. When I’d begun graduate school, she’d been fifteen, so many of my conversational gambits were about people and events she’d never heard of. She didn’t care for jazz, and the music she listened to – Aznavour and incessant Piaf -- was not interesting to me, though we both loved the Rolling Stones, and “Satisfaction” was at the top of the charts that year. By virtue of my age and education, she conceded that I was more widely read, except in the area of contemporary French fiction – but though we bonded over Camus, neither of us much cared for Balzac and Dumas and Hugo. Bonjour, Tristesse seemed to me pretentious crap, though Jane, pulling rank, said that was because I had read it in translation, and she was right; I couldn’t match her native fluency in French. Nor did I have much success interesting her in my favorite English and American authors; she didn’t think Catch-22 was funny; Bellow was too ethnic and Tom Wolfe too over-the-top. She didn’t get Shakespeare, or theater, for that matter. We did have the same taste in film, but for different reasons: I watched The 400 Blows and Breathless as movies made with great artistic skill; she experienced them as ideal representations of a life she wanted, and intended, to live. So enthralled was she with Catherine, the central female character of Jules and Jim, played by Jeanne Moreau, that she eventually changed her first name to Kathrin. I thought that was an odd sort of homage, but by that time we were no longer together.

Often, I felt, as I indulged one of her tantrums or new enthusiasms, that I was dealing with an adolescent. She was irresponsible to a fault; in this era before cell phones, I’d find myself waiting at a bar or on a park bench while she pursued some new opportunity that had just presented itself – she was having a drink with a friend she’d just made an hour before, she’d passed a new shoe store and had to try on seven pairs of boots. My own punctuality almost reaches the level of OCD, and I never stand people up. So I was hurt when, for example, only ten days after we’d met, she’d promised to meet me at LaGuardia when I came home from one of my infrequent trips and simply . . . forgot.

She had grown up in Great Neck, a bedroom town on Long Island, and had attended Great Neck North High School, a testament to how good public education can be in a wealthy community that cares about its children. There was also a Great Neck South, equally prestigious academically but a little less patrician, and the two districts bisected the town in such a way that North was almost all Jewish and South everything else. But Jane, who wasn’t Jewish, went to North, because both her parents taught there – French and shop. Consequently, most of her school friends were Jewish, and almost every one of her classmates came from money, which she did  not.  She confessed that she had always felt, or been made to feel, different at school, and that probably had to do with social status as well as religion, though her upbringing had been in no way religious, any more than mine, so that was one of the few subjects we never quarreled about. But since we quarreled about everything else, what was the true source of our attraction to each other? Did I mention that she was gorgeous? I wasn’t the only person to notice that she could have been Catherine Deneuve’s younger brunette sister. Her body was lush beyond description; I was overwhelmed, the first time she undressed in front of me, by the sheer womanliness of her. She was deeply embarrassed, however, by the fact of that she had a lot of body hair; she was always running off to get waxed and plucked from the eyebrows on down. She required me to reassure her, at regular intervals, that I loved every hair on her body, no matter where it grew. I neither loved them nor hated them; they were part of the earth-mother package. Perhaps one reason she so disliked the hair on her arms, her upper lip, and her brows was that, combined with her zaftig body, it gave her a kind of smoldering Jewess vibe, which was fine with me. I myself, in those days, what with my clothes and haircut and fair complexion, often passed for Gentile without meaning to. Once, in a Jewish bakery on Broadway, I asked the lady behind the counter for a loaf of challah, pronouncing the “ch” with the correct uvular wiggle, and she said to Jane, “You should be proud; he did that very well.” Jane, to her credit, laughed at that. But I changed my looks to please her; I let my hair grow over my ears; my wardrobe turned darker and darker; when I didn’t have to meet classes, I walked around with a two-day stubble, which she loved.

Our plan for that evening had been dinner in her neighborhood. By this time she had moved to Cornelia Street, in the West Village. I had begun to appreciate the Village, especially her block on which was located Zito’s, an Italian bakery whose ovens perfumed the whole neighborhood early every morning in the best smell in the world, freshly-baked bread.

I tried to call her when the lights blacked out but the phones were out as well. Another man would have assumed she’d understand when I didn’t show up, particularly since not showing up was her own modus operandi, but I had said I was coming, so I set off. The subways, of course, weren’t running, but the buses were, though navigating the city’s streets without traffic lights was tricky, taxis and trucks honking their horns and jockeying for position. But after an hour, I was in Jane’s darkened vestibule. When I called her name up the echoing stairs, I heard her answering call – I thought of Jane and Tarzan in the nighttime jungle. She was in her next-door neighbor’s apartment, just hanging out, but she was hungry, so we went in search of a restaurant that was open. There were plenty; restaurants cook with gas, not electricity, and were so eager to use up the food in their fridges they were practically giving it away. The sidewalks were crowded with people in a festive mood; it was almost like Mardi Gras. We found a mobbed diner with two stools vacant at the counter, and ordered food as if we were stocking up for the ordeal to come – who knew when the stores would run out? I think we had the meat loaf special, unusual fare for fastidious Jane. We were carrying on simultaneous conversations with everyone around us while we ate; everyone was an old friend. A guy in his 40’s announced that he had just bought a case of Beaujolais Nouveau and was eager to sample it; would we (meaning everyone in the restaurant) care to join him? We would; about a dozen of us followed him to his loft a couple of blocks away, and we spent the whole night there, listening to him play the piano and drinking his wine. Then we went back to Jane’s and fell asleep on the bed, lit by the dawn filtering through the curtains.

I was under no illusion that our affair would last very long, and I knew she’d be the one to break it off, One day – almost a year after we’d met – Jane met a young French photographer, and that was that for me. It was June, and I now had a summer ahead of me in which my dance card was empty. I know, I thought to myself, I’ll write my dissertation! So I did.