PART 14: TOOKIE

CHAPTER 15: TOOKIE

With the orals behind me, and my dissertation not yet pressing, it was time to get down to the serious (though unfamiliar) business of enjoying my life.  Enter my girlfriend Adrianne, long of leg, of hair, and of pedigree. She had one of those Dutch names that goes back to Peter Stuyvesant and 16^th-century Manhattan. She had made a formal debut into New York society a couple of years before I had met her. Her friends from Vassar called her Tookie, a nickname that embarrassed her; “Soooo Piping Rock,” she called it. (Piping Rock was a WASP-only country club in Locust Valley on Long Island; “Piping Rock lockjaw” was her name for that Waspy upper-crust accent that marked the speech of George Plimpton, William F. Buckley, and, well, herself).

What was I doing with a shiksa debutante from northern New Jersey? A better question was, what was she doing with me, a West Side Jew, other than sticking her thumb in her family’s collective eye? My mother adored her, not in spite of but because she seemed to reek of old Gentile money – though in fact, her family was only modestly well-off. She was the first of several non-Jewish girlfriends I went through in my twenties, all of whom had come to New York with an agenda that included plumbing the mystery of Jewish men. Also, Adrianne was five-ten, so she welcomed the fact that I was six-two. She was, in addition to having killer cheekbones and a regal carriage, a serious person and an intelligent one, who had enough perspective on where she came from to know that she would fight a lifelong battle to break through the cloak of WASP insularity in which she had been enfolded from birth. The fact that we were together for four years testifies to the success of her efforts; the fact that I let her go after four years testifies to its limits. Eventually, her seriousness caught up with me.

Not that we didn’t have fun – though it tended to be serious fun. She liked the things I liked: yes, Jones Beach on summer weekends, art cinema and Monopoly games with friends, but also fine arts and classical music. I had never been fond of opera, but Adrianne was, and my mother’s friend Wanda Horowitz had a box at the Met from which we heard, on successive Mondays, all four parts of Wagner’s Ring cycle. It made me an instant convert, to Wagner at least; when we got around to the Italian composers, Verdi was the only one who provoked my enthusiasm, which was based more on his Shakespearean sources than his music. Adrianne wasn’t quite as fond of jazz as I was, but she did love Miles Davis, and when he was in town, we caught a set or two at the Blue Note or Birdland.

Our default evening out was going to the movies. The Midtown, RKO 81st Street and the 77th Street Theater, where I’d spent so many Saturday afternoons as a kid, were gone, but Loew’s 83rd and the Beacon were still there, and art houses were beginning to flourish, notably the Thalia and the Symphony on Broadway between 94th and 95th, and, at the top of the list, the iconic New Yorker Theater, which Dan Talbot and his wife Toby had opened on Broadway and 88th. The New Yorker almost alone redefined the viewing habits of the city’s intelligentsia and made the Upper West Side a mecca for cinephiles. The Talbots brought the New Wave to us – Godard, Truffaut, Bertolucci – as well as The Red Balloon and The Wrath of God, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Ran, Chaplin and Keaton, Woody Allen, John Frankenheimer, Billy Wilder and more.  The physical theater itself became an important locus of cultural exchange. Woody Allen, in Annie Hall, got the ambiance just right in a scene of pure wish-fulfillment (which he actually filmed in the New Yorker’s lobby) that shows him stuck in the ticket queue behind a pompous young Columbia professor loudly pontificating about Marshall McLuhan. Woody steps out of line and comes back with the real Marshall McLuhan in tow. “You know nothing of my work,” says McLuhan to the startled pedant. “If only life were like this,” comments Allen in an aside to the audience. Life may not often give us such clear-cut victories, but that scene could have been set in no other movie lobby in the world.

Though Adrianne had been a book designer when we met, and would be again, her true vocation was painting, and I admired her work hugely; I still have hanging on my wall a monotype she did of Don Quixote jousting at windmills that perfectly catches Cervantes’s conception. It’s still intact, and I hope it never needs reframing, because it’s done on newsprint and would probably disintegrate with the slightest handling. I had minored in art history at Cornell, so I had enough knowledge to keep the conversation going as we strolled through the Modern, the Frick and the Met. Her tastes in art were offbeat: she introduced me to the erotic Expressionism of Klimt, Balthus, and Egon Schiele, and I reciprocated by pointing her toward Shakespeare and Rabelais.  She had a job at the Perls Gallery on Madison Avenue, which had exclusive representation rights to Alexander Calder, and the gallery’s basement was like a bat cave of his mobiles suspended from the ceiling. Once, when she and I were down there alone, the lights unaccountably went out, and we had to feel our way to the exit, anxious about damaging the art and about it damaging us, because the pieces were full of spiky projections just at eye level. Part of her job was to assist Klaus and Dolly Perl in hanging shows, and I was happy to spend an evening or so a month helping out, measuring canvases and typing labels.

The Perls had a house on Fire Island, quite close to the Carrs’ in Seaview, and sometime in the first summer we were together, they invited us for a weekend. As soon as we arrived, at their direction we all immersed themselves (literally) in their obsessive pursuit of clams. All four of us put on bathing suits, jumped into Great South Bay (which was only three feet deep at the shoreline) and shuffled barefoot through the ooze, probing with our toes for the shells. It was easy enough to stoop, pry the clam out its bed, and drop it in a floating bucket – easy for me, Klaus and Adrianne; not so easy for Dolly, who was five feet tall and had to submerge completely to capture her prey. We spent two whole days doing little else during daylight hours.

For the Perls, clamming was not sport but subsistence. Every meal they served us featured clams – fried, steamed, raw, Clams Casino, Clams Rockefeller, linguine with clam sauce. If they’d been oysters I’d have been ecstatic; once, years later, while the catering crew was cleaning up after a party my wife and I had given, I slurped down fifty leftover Blue Points. But I could take clams or leave them alone, except that leaving them alone was not an option at the Perls’.

Klaus and Dolly Perls

After we’d been together for two years, Adrianne moved to a brownstone on 88th Street between Riverside and West End, with the default layout of my apartment on 105th and everybody else we knew: one bedroom, one bath, a living room and a Pullman kitchen. Part of the reason for her move was the inconvenience of living on East 30th Street, in a neighborhood that offered no charms or amusements whatever. And to reach hers, I’d have to take the Eighth Avenue subway down to 34th Street and then the crosstown bus to Second Avenue. I was the one doing the travelling; she seldom visited my apartment, because 105th was not a pleasant street at night for a young woman to walk alone. Or a young man, for that matter. After I moved back to 77th Street, we were only a ten-minute walk apart.

We never considered giving up one of the apartments and living together in the other. People our age were doing that by early 60s, but it never even occurred to us. It was partly her sense of propriety, though girls she had gone through the whole debutante thing with were comfortably shacking up, whether their parents approved or not. My mother wouldn’t have cared, but her family would. Even if I’d thought to suggest it, it would have made for a serious rift with her family. And to me, It would have seemed like a serious commitment, and I still wasn’t ready for a training marriage. Besides, I loved my new apartment, and enjoyed being alone there. Besides, we spent most of our nights in her place, even though space was tight because she’d turned her bedroom into a painter’s studio, and we slept on a fold-out couch in the living room, which was too short for both of us. But I didn’t get fussy about sleeping arrangements until much later in life, and I grew used to the smell of turpentine and acrylic in my nostrils as I dozed off. Not that I could have been said to be living there; I had my own toothbrush, but she never gave me a key. So, with my orals looming, I’d study in my apartment or Butler Library, and then I’d close whatever book was open in my lap at six o’clock and make my way up or down to Adrianne’s. We’d boil some spaghetti or fry burgers, or we’d splurge on a Chinese restaurant – the Great Shanghai was convenient to all those movies. Or we’d go back to her place, where she’d paint while I studied some more. Then we’d go to bed.

There were other lines she wouldn’t cross besides keeping her apartment off-limits when she wasn’t there. Every summer she went on vacation with her sister and brother-in-law, who lived in and worked at Bryn Mawr, she the dean of students and he a professor of physics. I was never invited to join them on these trips, which involved driving to various point of interest like Williamsburg, or Gettysburg, or the eastern national parks. I never asked if I could tag along, and Adrianne never brought the subject up, not to me and probably not to them. They were nice enough people but very strait-laced, and perhaps she just intuited that they’d veto the idea of our sharing a room on the road. I missed her a great deal when she was away on these two-week jaunts, particularly because she almost never phoned; she was taking a vacation from me as well as with her family. Did her love for me take a time-out every July? Did she, in fact, love me, and did I love her? Because of her reticence and my passivity, we never talked about it until the night we parted.

I can remember only one time when Adrianne’s reluctance to display emotion crumbled. One afternoon in November of 1963, I found myself pushing through a large crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Butler Library, which was usually empty. Everyone was talking to everyone else, and I could make out phrases in the buzz like “Not dead yet” and “With her sitting right next to him!” When I had gathered what had happened, I couldn’t believe the magnitude of the event; it was almost surreal, like watching the second plane fly into the World Trade Center thirty-eight years later. I went straight to Adrianne’s apartment, and she ran to me and hugged me, and I could feel her shaking. Though both of us had voted for Kennedy (the first time either of us had been old enough to cast a ballot), neither of us was what you would call political at that point. Her grief was purely personal. Just that once, what she was feeling was on display.

We stayed inside for the next couple of days, watching the story unspool on TV. We talked over the various possible scenarios; conspiracy theories were already circulating about the Cubans, the Mafia, the CIA. By the 25th of November, I’d had enough, and wanted to be outside, eat a meal, walk around. Nothing else is going to happen, I told Adrianne, and then of course it did, the awful déjà vu moment of the second assassination, this one caught in closeup, Oswald’s face screwed up in pain as the bullet punched through his chest.

Eventually, though, the trauma faded and we resumed our lives. Our friends in those days were mostly my buddies from graduate school, who went on to academic careers with various levels of success and satisfaction – Michael Rosenthal (who had no more use for Columbia than I did, but who shocked me by becoming the associate dean of Columbia College) and his girlfriend Dorothy, who became a lifelong friend; Herb Leibowitz, who founded the poetry journal Parnassus; David Gordon, who wrote several Freudian-tinged studies of D.H. Lawrence and G.B. Shaw; and Tom Steiner, who taught for three decades at UC Santa Barbara and retired early because he hated the sunshine, the blandness and the right-leaning politics of the place. The West Side provided us with everything we needed except a great bar, but Tom, who had moved from West End Avenue to First Avenue, showed us the way to Dorrian’s Red Hand Saloon on 84th and Second, which offered big foamy drafts, terrific cheeseburgers and the company of every rugby player in the Metropolitan area, who staged a mock-revolt when Jack Dorrian sent his daughter to NYU and raised the price of beer to 50 cents a pint. Dorrian’s reputation suffered years later because it was where Robert Chambers, whom the press dubbed “the preppie killer,” had been drinking with Jennifer Levin before he strangled her in Central Park, but Jack was a kind and decent man who took the welfare of his customers seriously, so that was a bum rap. Dorrian’s was a welcoming place, never more so than on one cold evening when Adrianne, Tom and I were sitting disconsolately at a table pooling our available funds, which totaled just enough for a bowl of chili and two beers. I happened to glance at the floor, and there, nestled beside my left foot, was a twenty someone had dropped. “Jack!” I shouted. “Three drafts and three medium-rare cheeseburgers!”

We thought of Dorrian’s more as a restaurant than a bar, and so did its owner; it’s still there, with white linen tablecloths and a menu that’s more bistro than burger. Neither Adrianne nor I were drinkers – neither of us wanted to sit on a barstool for a whole evening, getting sloshed with other people whose ability to converse diminished with every passing round. But the city, particularly the East Side, was changing, along with its demographic. People were marrying later, which delayed the white flight to the suburbs, and singles bars started popping up – sleek places that catered to the hookup culture that was in its infancy. Malachy’s, Glennon’s, Martell’s and Dresner’s were such places; Elaine’s was more highbrow, catering to the literary crowd that included Norman Mailer and Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. It was not for the likes of us; we could never get in once it established itself, and the overpriced food was terrible. If there were comparable saloons on the West Side – apart from the West End, which catered to Columbia undergraduates -- we didn’t know about them.

Quite often, Adrianne and I would go over to Richard and Helen Freedmans’ apartment on 80th Street to play a Monopoly game that seemed to last for years, because no one was willing to make the kinds of deals that would have allowed someone to win. “I’ll give you . . . Park Place for Ventnor, five hundred dollars and free lands on two of your monopolies.” “OK, if you throw in one railroad and State Street.” “Not a chance!” So on we played. Richard, who was still teaching at Columbia before they denied him tenure, drank Scotch all evening, Helen abstained, and Adrianne and I settled for Coke, or, as Richard called it, horse piss. Helen’s maiden name was Baird; she had emigrated from Glasgow, and, after several years of marriage to Richard, spoke an interesting mixture of Scottish and Yiddish. “I’ll have a wee schmeck of that Danish,” she might say. Once, we were discussing Jewish food and Richard happened to mention chocolate halvah. Adrianne’s eyes grew big. “Is there really such a thing as chocolate halvah?” she asked. Such was her enthusiasm that, despite a pouring rainstorm outside, Richard shrugged into his mac and headed for Zabar’s, a block away. When he returned, he put the huge chunk of halvah he’d bought on a plate in front of us, and went to dry off. Adrianne looked at the plate disdainfully. “I hate that stuff,” she said.

“You what?” I stage-whispered. “Richard went out and bought it just for you!” She looked stricken. “But I thought halvah was that sort of braided shiny bread,” she said despairingly. “That’s challah,” I explained. “Eat your halvah.” And bravely, she and I forked down enough of it so that Richard wouldn’t discover the dimensions of her goyische kopf.

I was content to drift along in the relationship, imperfect as it was, but one evening in the fall of 1964, as we finished our dinner in a restaurant on Broadway, Adrianne said to me, “We have to talk.” What we had to talk about was breaking up. She was tired of waiting for me, she told me. I was utterly bewildered. The fact that she had an agenda that included marrying me had never occurred to me – since I had no agenda for myself. More than a year had passed since I’d taken my orals, and I’d done nothing but live contentedly from day to day since then. I was teaching, of course, which gave some structure to my life, but I wasn’t studying, I wasn’t making preparations to write my dissertation, I wasn’t planning what my career would or could or should be after I’d received my Ph.D, and I wasn’t thinking about where my relationship with Adrianne was heading -- any more than I was thinking about where my relationship with Michael or Tom or others of my male friends were heading; they were my friends, and she was my girlfriend. Except for her summertime departures, the relationship was simply part of the pleasant state of affairs in which I lived.

But Adrianne was a couple of years older than I. At 25, I had the luxury of not looking ahead, but at 27 – more mature and focused -- she wanted some resolution. She explained that she’d been content to wait for some sign from me that I wanted either to formalize or end our affair until I was over the trauma of the orals, but here we were, a year later, and no such sign had been forthcoming. As she explained the facts to me, she started to cry, and I realized with a pang that, with the exception of the day Kennedy died, I’d never seen her cry before. We’d never discussed marriage, either abstractly or as a possibility for us. We’d never talked about whether either of us wanted children. Another woman might have brought all this up much earlier, but Adrianne had had a lifetime of training in controlling and concealing her feelings. We were, in a strange way, perfectly matched: two people who, for different reasons, couldn’t communicate with each other about the most basic of issues.

The breakup was presented to me as a fait accompli.  There was no waffling – no imposition of a time limit, no suggestion that we might separate for a while, no thought that maybe we should see other people. Put up or shut up was not the way she phrased it, but that was the underlying message. Seeing her lose her composure for almost the first time might have been an emotional breakthrough for me as well as for her, but, given no time to process it, I retreated even further into passivity. I walked her home, I hugged her and she hugged me back. She was shaking. I was not. I made my way back to my apartment alone. A year later, a mutual friend told me that she’d moved back to Bryn Mawr and married a much older man who chaired the Department of English.