Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

  the dapper diapers!

  “Diapers can’t be dapper,” fumed Sherman. “Men’s clothes are dapper. Suits and vests, dammit.”

  “It sounded good,” said Jacob.

  “Besides,” said Sherman, “I know Mitch Kyper. He dresses like shit.”

  “Dapper diapers,” explained Jacob. “Alliteration, Dad.”

  Sherman threw up his hands. His exasperation and embarrassment over Jacob seemed like divine decrees, permanent curses on his life. All he wanted was for his son to be a man. A man worked hard, played cards, drank whiskey, thought about women’s tits. A man paid for things, and then, if he wasn’t sick or dead, he laughed. But a man did not write songs about toothpaste and hair cream.

  “He just needs a wife,” Amy Wolf told her husband.

  In January 1948 Jacob Wolf found his wife. To Sherman and Amy’s undying relief the girl was Rachel Cohen, daughter of Alex and Amy Cohen of West Seventy-ninth Street. Alex Cohen was the sports editor of The New York Times. His family hadn’t been in news for as many generations as Wolfs had been cutting cloth, but Alex’s published opinions about the Yankees and the Giants were sober and correct. Alex Cohen, Sherman Wolf felt, was not a man of levity. Alex understood the honor a man bore when he crushed an opponent, whether that opponent was Adolf Hitler or the Boston Red Sox. Sherman hoped that some of Alex’s nobility had come down to his daughter Rachel—as much nobility, anyway, as a woman could carry—and he hoped in turn that Rachel’s nobility might rub off on Jacob.

  As for Rachel, she loved Jacob. She was twenty-two when they met, and she worked as a fact checker in the Times’s features department. Rachel was responsible for discovering and accurately reporting to her superiors the exact height of Benito Mussolini, or the wing speed of the hummingbird, or the precise ingredients in the vichyssoise at Duranigan’s of Madison Avenue. In fact, Rachel was at Duranigan’s, arguing with the chef—who had agreed over the phone to publish some recipes, but was now being tight-lipped and haughty—when she noticed Jacob Wolf eating lunch alone at a corner table. She’d seen Jacob while growing up, at temple on Eighty-ninth, but she’d never noticed him. She’d never noticed the particularly strong cut of his jaw, or the frailty of his fingers. She’d never been privy to the sadness, the unselfconscious melancholy with which Jacob ate a Reuben sandwich when he figured no one was looking.

  “My God,” whispered Rachel. “Jacob Wolf?”

  “I say nothing.” The chef shook his head in triumph. “The vichyssoise, it is private.”

  Rachel floated out of the kitchen, toward her lone and future lover, who glanced up to meet her gaze.

  “Private,” the chef hollered after Rachel. “You hear?”

  Four months later Jacob and Rachel married. It was a regal wedding. Cousins poured in from Long Island and Washington, D.C. Pure-white long-stem roses were strewn on the synagogue floor. Susan March, Rachel’s close friend and fellow fact checker, was the maid of honor. Susan wore a dress that revealed her excellent calves, and many guests felt privately that Susan was more beautiful than Rachel.

  At the Plaza reception, under Amy and Amy’s discerning command, steak tartare was served, and champagne, and then lemon sorbet and then dinner. All the best people in Manhattan attended, including June Madagascar, the Broadway soprano, and Jacqueline Hive, who ran an orphanage, and ominously tall men in waistcoats. During a lull in the gaiety Robby Jax, the famous comedian, grinned and called for a toast.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Robby, his glass of Scotch raised, “for the love of summer, for the love of husbands and wives, for the love of Cutty Sark and dancing, for the love of Jacqueline Hive’s stupendous bosom, for the love of your mothers and fathers, for the love of Jews and starlight and well-crafted wool suits, but mostly, God bless them, for the love of Jacob and Rachel Wolf . . . cheers.”

  A hurrah went up. Glasses clinked. Dancing was permitted, children smiled, and a cavalcade of gifts was bestowed on the bride and groom. All of the gifts were impeccable. There were silver knives and gold jewelries. There were bottles of wine and examples of art. There was nothing lewd, grotesque, comical, or personal: no lingerie, no cash, no recordings of jazz, no books. Every gift pointed toward a useful, lavish life.

  Presiding over the night was six-foot-seven Sherman Wolf. True, Alex Cohen had footed the bill, but that was nothing magnanimous. It was Sherman who imbued the night with class: he sank his teeth into steak tartare, he danced with wives, he shook hands with his cousin Ida to end a long-standing feud. Above all, Sherman was happy. No goofy jingle writers had appeared—Sherman had feared there might be a union of them—to sing stupid songs or snort laughter. For the evening’s end a limousine had been hired to pull up to the front doors of the Plaza and spirit Jacob and his bride off to an Adirondack mountain resort. Finally, in the reception’s pi`ece de résistance, the governor himself appeared for fifteen minutes. He kissed the bride, pounded the groom’s shoulder, then took Sherman aside for some intimate words.

  Amid all this wonder was Jacob Wolf, twenty-eight, newly married and utterly dismayed. Jacob sat at the head table beside Rachel and watched the night go unhappily by. The Plaza was glorious, of course. The food was glorious, and the lighting, and the violin music, and even Jacob’s snot-nosed cousin Lucy from New Haven had somehow lost her baby fat and vulgar tongue and become glorious too. But Jacob was not built for glory. He’d known this all his life. He smiled at his and Rachel’s guests because they wished him well, but in his heart he was terrified of these people. Contrary to myth there was nothing pretentious or phony about them. They were everything they believed themselves to be. They were rich, shiny, intelligent, and, Jacob guessed, they were moral champions of every perseverance. It was exactly their goodness that chilled Jacob’s heart. For he knew himself to be a flawed, simple man. He wrote breezy, foolish song lyrics for a living and was content to do so. He took long walks in Central Park, not so as to appreciate nature or become fit, but rather for no reason whatever. He’d chosen Rachel as a wife because she’d been an easy catch. She’d walked up to him at Duranigan’s, and, through body language and the English language, madeit known to Jacob that she was available. They dated for a month, and Rachel said things that made Jacob laugh. She had a capable body, as did Jacob—though they didn’t sleep together before their honeymoon—and Rachel neither loved nor disdained the jingles Jacob wrote. Out of what might have been joy but was certainly relief, Jacob asked Rachel to be his wife. She immediately said yes, and that was that.

  Or perhaps not, thought Jacob, looking out at his reception. Perhaps the power and vibrance that shone so exquisitely in these guests lay dormant inside Rachel too. Jacob lived in the Preemption apartment building on West Eighty-second, and he planned for Rachel to move in with him after the honeymoon. But how long would she be content there? Maybe a month into the marriage she would demand magic: a move to the Upper East Side, tickets to Carmen, papaya for breakfast. What if she suddenly decided that California was an important place? Or craved oysters? Or wanted to discuss Churchill?

  Rachel squeezed Jacob’s hand. “You look worried.”

  “I’m not,” said Jacob.

  “You’re lying. Stop worrying.”

  Jacob looked at his new wife. He looked at her sparkling gown, her cleavage, her rather ugly eyebrows.

  Rachel shrugged. “I’m just a girl,” she said. “You’re just a guy.”

  Thank God, thought Jacob.

  The legend of Jacob’s bath began later that night, in the mountains.

  Jacob and Rachel’s honeymoon lodge was called Blackberry House. It was a compromise between a Vanderbilt retreat and a contemporary bed-and-breakfast. The house itself was vast and wooden and just an hour south of Canada. The ground-floor common room was paneled and studious. It featured bearskin rugs, racks of antlers, and a chessboard with pieces cut from tusk. The bedrooms, however, were warm and dear, with quilts on the beds, lighted candles, and, in the bathrooms, free-standing tubs with brass lio
n’s feet. In Jacob and Rachel’s room—the Blackberry Room—there was an antique loom, and a giant dormer window that looked out over Raquette Lake. Outside this window, on the roof, in the moonlight, was a skunk.

  “There’s a skunk out there,” said Rachel. She still wore her wedding dress. She pointed at the roof, looked out at the night. It was spring in the Adirondacks, but the windowpanes were cold.

  “It’s two in the morning,” said Rachel. “There’s a skunk outside our window.”

  Perhaps Jacob should have been thinking about consummation. Instead, he was wondering how a skunk could possibly scale a three-story building.

  “Mephitis mephitis,” said Rachel. “That’s Latin for the common skunk.”

  For the Times, Rachel had once checked animal facts.

  “How’d he get up there?” said Jacob.

  The man and his bride watched the skunk. The skunk was black and white and did not currently smell bad.

  Rachel removed her shoes, rubbed her feet. “I don’t know how romantic this is. A Mephitis mephitis outside our window on our honeymoon night.”

  Jacob didn’t reply.

  “I’m going to take a bath,” said Rachel.

  She went into the bathroom, closed the door. Jacob stayed looking at the rodent. The skunk wasn’t moving. It was planted five feet from the window, in plain view of Jacob and Rachel’s nuptial bed.

  Jacob heard the chirp of pipes, the running of water. His wife, he knew, was up to something feminine. As he thought this, Jacob decided to get rid of the skunk.

  “Honey?” called Rachel. “What’re you doing?”

  Steam leaked from the crack under the bathroom door.

  “Nothing,” said Jacob.

  He removed his good leather shoe, put it on his left hand like a shield. With his right hand Jacob opened the window, slowly, just a few inches. He stuck his left hand outside.

  “Go away, skunk,” whispered Jacob, waving his shoe. “Hit the road.”

  The skunk looked at Jacob. It seemed terribly bored.

  “Fuck off,” hissed Jacob. “Scram.”

  He glared at the skunk. He waved his shoe carefully.

  “Shoo, now,” he said.

  Jacob kept waving his shoe. He didn’t want the skunk to fall to its death, necessarily. He just wanted it to move to a different part of the roof, to eavesdrop somewhere else. As it turned out, the skunk did neither of these things. Instead, it pulled a one-eighty and sprayed Jacob’s shoe.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Jacob pulled his hand out of the shoe, yanked himself back inside. He closed the window as quickly as he could, leaving his shoe outside. But it was too late.

  “Uh-oh,” said Rachel from the bathroom.

  “I’m sorry,” called Jacob.

  He stood up, plugged his nose. The stench was unbearable.

  “You’d better come in here,” said Jacob’s wife.

  I’ve ruined it, thought Jacob. I’ve ruined our honeymoon.

  “Come on,” said Rachel.

  She was standing, wrapped in thick white towels. One towel wrapped around her hair, turban style. The other was fixed over her breasts and came down to her thighs. There was a scab on her knee.

  “We’d better plug the door,” said Rachel. She took an extra towel from a shelf, laid it across the crack under the door.

  “I tried to get rid of the damn thing,” said Jacob. “It sprayed my shoe.”

  Rachel had been in the tub. She was wet beneath her towels.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jacob.

  “It’s all right,” said Rachel.

  The air was fogged. The tub was still full. Jacob looked at his woman, at the way she’d wrapped herself in towels. It was a manner in which women often wrapped themselves in towels, one for the hair, one for the body. It wasn’t original, but it was something men never did. Jacob liked it.

  “Um.” Jacob blushed. After all, under the towels was his wife.

  “He only sprayed my shoe,” said Jacob. “He didn’t get me.”

  Rachel giggled. She wrinkled her nose.

  “He got you,” she said.

  Jacob laughed. Rachel laughed too. They fell silent, watching each other.

  “Maybe you should get in the tub,” suggested Rachel.

  Jacob panicked. He’d heard about women who made love in bathtubs.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said.

  “You smell,” said Rachel. “Undress, and get in the tub.”

  Rachel smiled. Jacob took her smile to mean she wouldn’t get kinky. So he relaxed. He undressed slowly, letting her see him. He got in the tub.

  Rachel picked up Jacob’s clothes, threw them outside the door. She closed the door, knelt by the tub.

  “You’re . . . um.” Jacob was eye level with Rachel’s bosom. “Are you going to . . .”

  “I’m not getting in there with you,” said Rachel.

  “Oh, fine,” said Jacob quickly.

  “I’ve already had my bath.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t take long baths.”

  “Yes. No problem.”

  Rachel laid her cheek on the side of the tub. She looked at Jacob’s body in the hot, clear water. She saw all of him.

  “Rachel,” said Jacob. He was embarrassed now, sitting in the tub, water to his neck. He felt like a boy.

  Some of Rachel’s hair fell from her towel, mingled with the water. She reached out, stroked Jacob’s neck.

  “I love your neck,” she said. “Your neck and your jaw.”

  Jacob let her touch his face. She was his wife.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Rachel sighed happily.

  “I do,” said Jacob.

  Rachel stopped rubbing Jacob’s jaw.

  Now what? thought Jacob.

  Rachel picked up a white cotton washcloth. She lathered it on a bar of soap. The soap smelled like wintergreen.

  “What’re you doing?” asked Jacob. He kept his eyes on the washcloth.

  Rachel rubbed the washcloth till it foamed. She arranged the cloth over her hand, dipped her hand under the water. She massaged her husband’s chest.

  “Be quiet,” said Rachel. “I’m going to give you a bath.”

  Jacob obeyed his wife. He remained quiet, and she did what she said she would. She gave her man a bath.

  In the bath’s early stages Jacob laughed. He had ticklish underarms, and he was self-conscious about his body. But as Rachel proceeded to wash him head to toe, Jacob stopped laughing. His wife was committed to her action. She scrubbed her new husband carefully. She was firm with his hands—which had been tainted by skunk—and hard on his feet. She worked thoroughly on his torso, but she was tender with his groin. Finally, overwhelmed with the care being shown him, Jacob closed his eyes. A mellow joy stole over him. For weeks he’d been planning for tonight—for his conquest of Rachel’s body—but now his plans faded. He still wanted to make love to her in the bed, but right now something simpler was happening. Rachel’s fingers were tending his skin, grooming him wetly, kindly.

  “You like this?” whispered Rachel.

  Jacob kept his eyes shut. His body had gone over to goose bumps, and his mouth came open in surprise. Jacob felt sure, suddenly, that Rachel had never bathed another man.

  “Hmmm.” Rachel’s throat was pleased.

  “You like this,” she whispered.

  The bulk of Jacob and Rachel’s honeymoon was their business. But one warm fact remained: after a meal and a walk in the forest Rachel gave Jacob a bath every night. Within three days husband and wife were hooked on the ritual. They came to enjoy it not as a luxury, a sign of some new, candied life, but as a necessity. It was as if Jacob had been climbing a mountain all his years and had come now to a decent peak, where there was a woman and a well of water. The woman was there to strengthen the man, to quench his thirst, and the man loved the woman and he was grateful. It wasn’t about equity: Jacob never bathed Rachel. He was ready to perform a lifetime of
chores for her, but this isn’t about that. This is about the bath: the legend.

  Jacob and Rachel returned to Manhattan. Rachel returned to checking facts, Jacob to writing jingles. They moved into Jacob’s place in the Preemption apartment building.

  The Preemption was located at West Eighty-second and Riverside Drive. It was a cryptic old brownstone, with gargoyles on the roof, and it loomed over the Hudson River like a watchtower. Inside, the Preemption was special for three reasons. It featured the oldest working Otis elevator in Manhattan, a hand-operated antique with mahogany doors at each floor. The Preemption also featured a peculiar doorman, a Negro man named Sender. Sender was tall, wiry, and dignified. He wore a blue suit like a train conductor, and he never seemed to age or leave his post. Some Preemption residents guessed that Sender was not quite fifty, some that he was over one hundred, but nobody could beat him at arm wrestling. He had an oval scar on his forehead between and just above his eyes. Whispers went around every October that Sender had been born with a third eye, and that the doctors had removed it from his forehead when they cut his umbilical cord.

  The third, fatefully unique characteristic of the Preemption was the fact that Elias Rook, the building’s originaldesigner and owner, had installed freestanding bathtubs in every apartment. Elias Rook finished the building in 1890, but he was an endowed, strict Presbyterian, and he had eternity in mind when he fashioned the Preemption. As a result the apartment floors and walls were cut from the sturdiest oak. The glass on each vaulted window was inches thick. The tubs, however, were the masterpieces. They were cast iron with white enamel coatings, brass pipes, and brass fittings. If a fact checker like Rachel ever bothered to research the Preemption, she might discover the incredible truth that not a single resident had ever, in half a century, suffered foul water, broken pipes, or even crumbled enamel in their tubs. Of course, over the years, most tubs had been converted into showers, Jacob’s included. It was against Preemption rules to remove the original tubs—which were cemented into place anyway—so most residents hired plumbers to raise a pipe like a mast and fit the mast with a shower head. These people—the majority—then fenced their tubs in with plastic curtains, showered quickly, and returned to the world. But a few Preemptioners never erected showers. They stewed themselves slowly in their tubs, their old-fashioned cauldrons, and they thought of Sender, and they pondered the Preemption’s elevator, which also never broke, and they were not afraid.