My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  Simona was at the door at five after eight. I closed up. On the corner of Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue and in the growing chill of a fall night, she asked, “Where shall we go? Show me what you like.”

  In a flash it came to me: “A little café in the Village.”

  “Greenwich Village? I have never been there.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, feeling relieved and in grown-up command of the situation. We were going where I was known and where I thought she would feel at ease, as it had a European flavor and thus also hinted at my cosmopolitan savvy.

  Simona suggested we take a taxi. “Of course,” I said. Then I stepped into the traffic and hailed a cab as if it were something I did every day, even twice a day. Once in, I checked the running meter and saw my money vanishing with every click. But when we arrived at the Figaro, Simona said, “Let me charge this to my office.”

  The meter rang to twice my hourly wage, not including the tip. I made some feeble protests, but finally and gratefully I surrendered. “On the condition that the coffee is on me,” I said.

  Cynthia, one of the waitresses, greeted me with a kiss on the cheek. Simona’s smile froze. After coffee had arrived, she said, “So we come to a place to meet your girlfriends?”

  “I have no girlfriend.”

  She defrosted after that, and we entered into the realm of biography. Not that hers flowed freely. “I’m not used to talking about myself so soon,” she said. “It’s what you Americans do.”

  “Don’t Italians do it?”

  “Between a man and a woman? Do you think an Italian man cares what a woman thinks?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. This turn in the conversation bewildered me. It proved again how inexperienced I was.

  “And the English are not better,” she continued. “The men chat you up, as they say, and try to charm you with talk and talk about books and the BBC, but they don’t give a fig what you think, only to go on about themselves.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s the English idea of flirtation: chatting you up.”

  “And the Italian men?”

  “They can spend a hour praising your eyes. That’s their way to flatter you into bed.”

  “Simona, your English is excellent. How is that?”

  “Ha-ha! Is this the American technique?”

  “I never used it before, so I don’t know. But I just wanted to compliment you.”

  “I’ve lived some years in London, among literary people.”

  “Do you miss Italy?”

  “I miss my mother and sister. I miss my street in Roma. I don’t miss the Italians. I hate the Italians.”

  “Hate all the Italians, Simona?”

  “Of course not all. But let me tell you a story. When I got my doctorate, I went to my professor and said that I wanted to teach in the university: Could he help me? He tapped me on the shoulder several times with a kind of fatherly pat. He said, ‘Oh, Simona, Simona. Why would you want to take a job away from a man? Get married. Have children.’ I have never been treated like this in America, and that’s why I love it.”

  “And your father, is he alive?”

  “Unfortunately. And what about yours?”

  “He left us when I was ten. He was a communist and went out to save the world.” I faked a laugh.

  “Maybe he just left for another woman.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, hurt by the idea. It stripped away his glamour and left him an ordinary adulterer.

  “So how did you and your mother survive?”

  “Barely,” I said. “We were poor.”

  “Before I came to New York, I never heard of poor Americans,” she said. “During the war, we were hungry, but we were not poor.” She excused herself to search for the bathroom. I rose. She smiled. I rose when she returned.

  “Who taught you such good manners in the Bronx?”

  “My father’s only gift.”

  “Some fathers leave you only poison.”

  I let that pass and added, “My father was from Savannah, Georgia; he was a bad boy but with Southern-style aristocratic manners. I had to say ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ and ‘May I leave the table, sir?’ ”

  “Sounds terrible.”

  “At fifteen, he was sent to one of those military academies to break his wildness. I suppose he wasn’t ‘Yes, sir’–ing and ‘No, sir’–ing enough for his father. He ran away and joined a relative who ran rum between the Florida Keys and Cuba.”

  “I don’t know what it means, ‘ran rum,’ but it sounds romantic. I think I would have liked him.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  We were hungry and settled on provolone sandwiches from the thin list. “This is fine,” she said. “Maybe also a glass of wine?”

  But there was no wine; the café had no liquor license. I made my apologies. Simona was sweet about it.

  “It’s a little late for wine anyway,” she said, “and I would rather stay clearheaded to form my impression of you.”

  “What idea have you formed already?”

  “That you are a good boy, maybe even a sincere one.”

  “I hope both are true, but I’m a little too old to be a boy.” I laughed lightly to show that I was not offended, but I was offended. I felt called out for the boy I was, the boy trying to seem grown-up.

  “I like you, Frederico. I like that you read Pavese because I love Pavese and that he understands the sadness of women. I like that you are still sweet and do not flatter yourself, although I’m sure the girls chase you.”

  At that moment Cynthia came by and gave me a check and a long look and a warm smile and said, “I’m going off work now, Fred.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, in the most neutral way I could without seeming cold.

  “She’s very beautiful,” Simona said. “Don’t let me stop you if you want to go home with her.”

  “I’m with you, Simona, and you are more beautiful.”

  “Finally, the Italian in you comes out.”

  “Anyone can see that you are beautiful, even an American.”

  “Better and better,” she said. “Soon you will be the perfect Italian charmer. Anyway, it’s getting late, my dear Frederico.”

  We walked along Sixth Avenue to look for a cab. I wanted to take her hand but dared not. I was a boy before a serious woman, and I was in awe of her.

  “It is wonderful, your New York,” she said.

  I opened the door to her cab and kissed her on both cheeks, as I had seen done in the French movies. She gave me a look whose meaning I could not fathom. She smiled, but not completely—it was on the way to a smile.

  I walked home in a pleasant daze and with the still-fresh aroma of her jasmine perfume. Wasn’t that the same aroma that had clung to me when I left Miss Middleton’s office so many years ago, and only moments ago? It seemed to take longer than ever to get home. It started to get dicey after Avenue A, and I checked who was behind me, slowing up to let the hoodlum-looking ones go by. If I saw any thuggish guys lingering on a corner, I took another street; it was longer but safer that way. I got to my building and stood in the hallway, listening. Maybe someone was on a landing waiting to mug me. It had happened to others. But my thoughts of Simona made me brave. She was greater than any bad that could happen to me.

  I finally arrived at my landing and was glad to find the door still intact and the double gates to my fire escape window still fixed in place. I tried to read for a bit, but the words danced away, and soon Simona visited me in my dreams.

  Tugboats and Clouds

  Manhattan, Alphabet City, circa 1963–1964

  The next morning I started again to practice Martin Eden’s writing schedule and got to my typewriter at five a.m., skipping everything but a cup of coffee. I thought the discipline would see me through; it had worked for Martin Eden and, after all, it had worked for Jack London, his creator. Somehow I knew that Simona had spurred my return to writing. She was a serious person; could I not, in knowing
her, become a serious person, serious to myself? Simona: una vita nuova.20

  I was writing a book about a young man on the Lower East Side who made his meager living by collecting bottles in the trash bins at night and turning them into cash. My hero was an urban Thoreau who lived close to the bone and had a waitress girlfriend, an aspiring painter, who lived with him and pressed him to get a paying job. Her dream was to leave the city and live in rural Vermont, to have a home and three children. His was to live as he was and to read and write and one day see the world, maybe even Paris.

  He borrowed books from the Tompkins Square Library and read them, weather permitting, on a bench in the park on the East River. There he wrote his impressions of all the passing freighters and tugs making their watery passages, and of the seagulls and the sounds of the engines swirling in the river. He noted the changes in the sky and the clouds, too. Some clouds were heavy and fiercely gray and hinted at rain and storms that flooded rivers and took away houses. Some were feathery and high and would cross mountains and cover them in chilly shadow. He would fill his notebooks with such impressions and imaginings. His idea was to write a novel—or an antinovel—without a character or a story or a plot, an impersonal book that breathed personality.

  My novel was intercut with newspaper items both found and invented, and with quotes from American literature, mostly from Emerson and Thoreau and Melville and Poe. The intercut passages provided ironic comment or a parallel light on the narrative and my hero. If the book was a mess, it didn’t matter: it was my mess, imitative of no other and reading like no other. And hadn’t the novelist Albert Halper, years earlier when I was a student at City College, advised me, “Kid, when you’re writing your first novel, no one is looking over your shoulder, so throw everything in it, even the kitchen sink”?

  I had written thirty pages of this book and was hopeful for its future. A future with rewarding work ahead, with travel, maybe, finally, to Paris. “Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience” was what was needed, Melville wrote in Moby-Dick. I would have added “Love.” What was all the rest without that?

  Simona phoned me at the store ten minutes after I had opened the door. A friendly good morning and a thank-you for showing her the Village. Then: “Do you think I’m your aunt?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why did you kiss me like I am?”

  “Next time I won’t.”

  “Good. Ciao, Federico. By the way, do you like opera?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why of course? Some people hate opera.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like my father. So, do you want to go or no?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “I have two tickets to La Bohème for next week. You are a bohemian, so you must love it.”

  “I love Tristan und Isolde, so what does that make me?”

  “A man who can sit through noise.”

  Richie came in and gave me looks as if to say, “You are on my time.”

  “I have to get off. I’m sorry, Simona.”

  “Me, too. Meet me in the opera house lobby next Tuesday. Ciao, buon lavoro.”

  I had listened to opera on the radio but had never been to one live. I had no idea where the opera house was. I had no idea what I was required to wear. In the thirties black-and-white movies men wore tuxedos to the opera and women wore gloves and gowns and jewelry. I wondered if I had to rent a tux, and where, and how much it would cost.

  “I have to talk to you about something,” Richie said.

  “I never get calls here. It was just a fluke today.”

  “No, no, Freddy, I have good news. I’m opening another store on Broadway. A big one.”

  He wanted me to manage the new store, with a raise to a hundred dollars a week, and I could hire someone to work with me. Seven days a week, but I could close at six on Sundays.

  I said that I would think about it. But what was there to think about? If I didn’t do it, he would hire someone else, and I would work under a stranger. I could use the money, but I would have to get up at four thirty every morning if I expected to write a book. By the evening I said yes and asked for a hundred and twenty-five a week. We agreed to a hundred and fifteen. I would be able to open a checking account.

  My newfound wealth emboldened me, and as soon as Richie stepped out, I phoned Simona to invite her to dinner. Her boss, Marcello, answered, and when I asked for her, his voice got cold.

  “She’s not here.”

  “Oh. Can I leave her a message?”

  “If I can remember.”

  “Please ask her to call me. I’m at the store all day.”

  “I doubt she’ll call you today. She left for London.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “In time for the opera,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  It was ten when the phone rang. I hoped it was Simona stuck at the airport in New York or maybe calling me from London, having just arrived. I was sure she had gotten my message or that she had already felt, as I imagined and wished, our deepening connection and wanted to hear my voice.

  “I’ve missed you,” Rebecca said.

  “Me, too,” I said, although it was not true. I missed Simona. Rebecca was starting to vanish from my mind, and what was left of her I found fault with. A painter who didn’t paint. A woman without fire or a singular passion or a mission that she pursued with fervor. When did I start to think that beauty was not enough, that there was no beauty without flair, without spirit?

  “Can I come over?”

  “Yes, that would be great, but I’m really tired tonight.”

  “I’ll be very nice to you,” she said.

  “You are always nice to me.”

  “You know what I mean. If you’re too tired tonight, OK,” Rebecca added. “But I want us to move ahead in our relationship.”

  The last times with her had been boring. Conversation circled the reasons she could not paint: “My studio is too small and I want to make large-scale paintings like Frankenthaler or Hartigan, or even Jackson Pollock himself.”

  “So find a big studio,” I said. “You have the money.”

  “Am I a painter, Fred?”

  “Of course, as long as you like doing it.”

  Boring also was the sex. The only position she allowed was missionary; everything else made her feel like a bad girl.

  “I’m not that kind of girl,” she said when I asked her to go on all fours.

  “What kind of girl is that?”

  “A girl dog.”

  “And I’m not a missionary.” I loved myself for what I thought was my witty answer, but I also felt like a jerk for being so mean.

  We hung up the phone. I got into bed. Bach’s Cantata 140, “Sleepers Awake,” played on WQXR. I was reading The Magic Mountain. Hans Castorp was sitting in a darkened room, listening to Aida on the gramophone, and suffering from unrequited love. Then the phone rang again. I was sure it was Rebecca with new thoughts on our relationship. Finally, I couldn’t stand it; the ringing won.

  It was my mother. She had received another official-looking letter from the welfare department. She nervously read it. I asked her to read it again. I had been hired for the investigator’s position, a job that would give me time to dream, to write, if that was in me to do.

  * * *

  20SIMONA: THE AFTERMATH

  Simona and I continued seeing each other for a year, and eventually we moved in together. Many of her friends wondered why she had anything to do with me, a guy who clerked in a bookstore and who, maybe, was soon to work in the welfare department. It was a mystery to me, too. All the same, we enjoyed each other in a happy, relaxed, moneyless way. We were close, affectionate friends who had sex.

  From 1962 to 1964 we lived near the East River in my sixth-floor walk-up with my famous bathtub in the kitchen. The rent: twenty-eight dollars a month. Simona—who was a journalist for Italian magazines, had come from a middle-class family of journalists, and been raised in a spacious apar
tment with her own room and a terrace overlooking Rome—pronounced our little tenement charming.

  “A bathtub in the kitchen. That’s so convenient,” she said. “And wood floors, too. My parents’ floors are marble, which is less expensive than wood in Italy. Italians hate nature. They chopped down all the trees. And they’d cut them down in the parks if they had the chance.”

  She never complained about the dangerous neighborhood, the fear of muggings, the break-ins, the broiling heat under the tar roof, or sunning ourselves on that same roof-tar beach, as we called it.

  In 1964 we found a place facing trees and sky on Tompkins Square Park, and we thought ourselves blessed. And we were blessed, although we were worried how to come up with the one hundred and sixteen dollars a month rent every month. We managed.

  One late snowy afternoon we got married in Brooklyn in a justice of the peace’s no-frills office. The wedding music cost five dollars extra.

  Simona said, “Thank you, but we will not need the music.”

  “I like you, kids,” the justice said. “I’ll throw it in free.”

  We said our “I do’s” to the accompaniment of Dvŏorák’s New World Symphony.

  We had gone to Brooklyn by subway and returned to Manhattan the same unceremonious way. We stayed happy for several years.

  Acknowledgments

  There are no precise words to say how grateful I am to the many who have helped me in the making of this memoir.