by Lou Aronica
~~~~~~~~
Manhattan is made for springtime, Mickey thought as he walked up to Gina’s building that night. In the summer, the pavement sizzles and makes you weak. In the winter, the wind cuts right through you and you can’t walk more than a couple of blocks without wanting to go inside. But in the spring, Park Avenue is like one long welcome mat, inviting you to stroll for as long as you wish, admire the architecture, appraise restaurant menus, take note of the tens of thousands of things for sale. The weather is fine; no need to hurry in the springtime. Unless of course you’re on your way to seeing the most beautiful, most fascinating woman you’ve ever met.
Mickey had been to the opera exactly once before in his life. Right after he’d arrived at QBK, he went out a few times with a woman named Marla. Just coming to terms with his new environment, he had taken her to see “La Traviata” on their third date, believing that this was something the person he wanted to be would do. He spent the first act trying to convince himself that he would be more impressive if he became passionate about opera, and the second act convincing himself that it was acceptable for him to find it all incomprehensible. By the end of the evening, he’d decided that both opera and Marla were incapable of maintaining his interest.
However, if attending the opera meant seeing Gina dressed like this, he would gladly go every night of the week. She was wearing a cream-colored dress made of raw silk, her hair was pinned up, and she wore a cream hat that drew attention to her shimmering eyes. She looked as elegant as a movie starlet, but with a smile and bearing that made her eminently more approachable. As they left the apartment, Gina took Mickey’s arm. Was it his imagination, or was she walking just a little closer to him tonight, leaning just a little bit more in his direction?
“Do you know ‘Pagliacci?’” Gina said as they settled into a cab.
“That’s the one about the clown, right?” Mickey had meant to learn a bit about the performance they were attending earlier in the day, but he couldn’t get away from his office to do so.
Gina smiled amusedly. “Yes, the clown.”
Mickey felt a bit of awkwardness about his ignorance, but when he saw nothing in Gina’s expression to suggest that he should feel that way, he relaxed. “I told you the other night that I’m pretty uneducated when it comes to this subject.”
Gina patted him on the arm. “I promise I’ll make it easy for you.”
I’m sure you will, Mickey thought. You would make lifting the Empire State Building easy for me.
The Metropolitan Opera House bubbled with the energy of a community celebrating something it loved. While he could not at this time count himself among those who had strong feelings for this art form, he could certainly appreciate what it brought out in others. Here in this auditorium, the wealthy and the well bred gathered to wear their finest clothing and witness an act by performers at the very tops of their fields. And while Mickey was certain that some members of the audience were here only to placate others in their party, and some others were here exclusively because they believed it to be an accessory of their station, most were here because there was no form of entertainment in the world like this one.
Until about halfway though the show, Mickey found his attention wandering. The singing was impressive, if utterly foreign, but Mickey found it difficult to follow. Compounding his distraction was the fact that Gina’s arm was still around his, and she would squeeze it during dramatic passages. While this could have focused his attention more closely on the performance, it drew his mind instead to consider the excitement of her nearness, the sculpture of her ankles, the sweetness of her perfume.
At some point, though, perhaps inspired by the rapt expression on Gina’s face, the opera began to transform for Mickey. Its language began to clarify itself for him, the emotional power began to work its way into his heart. Mickey found himself moved by the swells in the music and the torment in the singers’ voices. When he turned to Gina to find her openly crying, the performance took on a greater force. After the final curtain, Mickey looked at Gina again. She turned to him, eyes glistening, and smiled in corroboration. It was only then that he realized that there were tears in his own eyes.
Mickey rose with the rest of the audience in applause, but then sat back down as others began to file toward the exits. He was overwhelmed.
“Did you enjoy it?” Gina said, sitting back with him.
“More than I ever would have thought I would. Thank you for bringing me here tonight.”
“My mother will be delighted that her ticket went to good use. It’s nice to see that you were so comfortable crying like that. Most men in the audience spend a lot of time wiping their eyes and pretending it’s dust.”
Mickey wiped at his own eyes at that point. He had no idea that the tears had run down his face. Gina threaded her arm into his again and they sat silently while the theatre slowly emptied. Eventually, they were alone except for the ushers and the cleaning crew.
“I’d like to come back here again soon,” Mickey said after a long period of quiet.
“We can come here whenever you’d like.”
This thrilled Mickey on a number of levels. “They probably want us to leave now though, don’t they?”
“Probably. I’ve never been here so long after a performance.”
When they headed outside, they saw a daunting line of people waiting for taxis.
“I guess we shouldn’t have taken so long to get out of the theatre,” Mickey said, wishing he were in a position to hire a limousine to drive Gina anywhere she wanted to go.
“Let’s walk.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Do I appear too delicate to you? It’s a beautiful night. Let’s make the most of it.”
They walked toward Fifth Avenue and then slowly south. There was no question now that Gina was nestled more closely into him as they strolled. Or was it that he was nestled more closely into her? Regardless, Mickey walked with no real desire to get to their destination. He would have been perfectly happy walking this way to the end of the Earth.
As they headed downtown, Gina said to him, “If a man really wanted to make an impression on a girl, he would know exactly what to do right now.”
Mickey was baffled. He wanted to make an impression on Gina more than he wanted to breathe, but he had no idea what she was talking about. The confusion must have shown on his face, because Gina broke into laughter and temporarily loosened her grip on his arm.
“Schrafft’s,” she said.
“Ice cream?”
“Is there anything better?”
“There is, actually.” He tipped his head toward her. “Schrafft’s with you.”
Mickey was in for yet another surprise when Gina ordered: three scoops, hot fudge, walnuts, and double whipped cream. He had been on many dates with women who would barely eat for fear that he would find it unladylike.
“There’s a tiny morsel of fudge at the bottom of your dish,” he said after watching her eat with gusto. “Did you not like it?”
Gina grinned at him. “I love ice cream.”
“I never would have known.”
“You should probably know right now that I can’t walk anywhere near Schrafft’s – well, any ice cream place, really – without stopping for a sundae.”
“So your suggesting we walk from the theatre was an elaborate invention to get us here.”
“You’ve seen right through me. Does that make me naughty?”
“Inconceivable.”
When they walked back outside, Mickey stepped toward the curb. “I suppose you’ll want a taxi now that you’re finished duping me into buying you ice cream.”
Gina reached for his arm. “No, it’s lovely out here and I am very happily filled with butter pecan and whipped cream. Now I just need a handsome man to walk me the rest of the way home.”
Had Mickey been by himself, the walk to Gina’s would have taken him no longer than twenty minutes. Instead, it took more than an hour, Gina pulling on his
arm to explore a shop window, asking his opinion on dresses and hats, imagining out loud what he would look like in a certain suit or blazer, revealing little secrets gleaned from colleagues in the Mayor’s Office about certain shopkeepers.
“Four Board of Health violations,” she said, pointing to a pricey restaurant across the street.
“You must be confusing this place with someplace else,” Mickey said, remembering a meal he had there a few months back.
“No doubt about it. They’re probably working on their fifth right now. Let’s go in and tell the Maitre d’ that we’re with the Mayor’s Office just to see the expression on his face.”
“I take it back. You are in fact very naughty.”
A minute later, they passed a toy store window where an enormous stuffed bear resided. Gina giggled at it and revealed that only a few years earlier she had cajoled her father into buying something similar for her.
“That was shamelessly manipulative of me, wasn’t it? I really do love it, though. I think of my father and get this warm feeling inside every time I look at it. I don’t suppose you have anything like that, being a man and all.”
“No, no stuffed bears for me.”
“Anything that has sentimental value?”
“I’m not really the sentimental type.”
“Come on, there must be something that makes you go all soft inside when you look at it.”
Mickey considered the statement briefly before answering.
“There’s a tie,” he said softly.
“A necktie?”
“Yes. It’s a beautiful thing, really.” Mickey saw the tie clearly before him and felt the tenderness he always felt upon seeing it. “My sister Theresa has been very troubled in recent years, but when I started working at QBK, she somehow managed to go out shopping for me and bring me a present of this beautiful necktie. I wore it only once and got a little spot of sauce on it. Now I won’t wear it anymore for fear of staining it. Every time I go to pick out a tie, though, it’s there, and it ‘warms my heart a little’ as you would say.”
Gina squeezed his arm toward her. “That’s sweet. Your sister must mean a lot to you.”
“Always,” Mickey said, nearly to himself. “No matter what happens to her.”
After that, they walked slowly and quietly, with perhaps ten blocks passing before they spoke again. Mickey wondered briefly if his talking about Theresa had cast a pall on the evening, but a glance at the expression on Gina’s face suggested otherwise.
When they finally arrived at Gina’s building, she turned to him and took each of his hands in one of hers.
“It’s okay to be sentimental,” she said. “It shows that your heart is open.”
Mickey smiled at her. “I think I could come to appreciate that.”
“There aren’t many men who are willing to be that way. You’re lucky to have that in you.” She hesitated and looked down. “And so am I.”
Gina squeezed his hands and then looked up at him, her eyes again shimmering. “So where are you taking me this weekend?”
Mickey laughed. “You certainly are sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“Do you mean you don’t want to go out with me this weekend?”
“Oh, I definitely didn’t say that. I’m just accustomed to being the one to set the dates.”
“I’m terribly sorry. I’ll hold my tongue in the future.”
“That would be an awful shame.”
Gina offered Mickey a sly glance. “So you still haven’t told me where you’re taking me.”
Mickey considered a number of options and then said, “Dinner and dancing at the Carlyle. How does that sound?”
“Absolutely lovely. I accept.”
They stood quietly, looking at each other and holding hands, for a lengthy moment. Mickey considered the fact that nothing in his dating experience had compared to what he had been feeling these two nights with Gina. He couldn’t wait for next Saturday and for all the days with her that would follow.
At last he reached over and kissed her lips. That they were indescribably soft and inviting was something he had been expecting. What was completely unanticipated was the wave of emotion that washed over him as their lips touched. Mickey felt at that moment that something had been released within him, that he had just reached down into a new level of feeling that he had never before known. He wanted to spend the rest of his life like this. They lingered over the kiss, neither seemingly willing to separate from the other. When at last their lips parted, Gina hugged Mickey close to her, their cheeks resting together. When she pulled back, Mickey memorized the closeness of her face, the brush of her skin, knowing that he would keep that memory with him forever.
“Until Saturday,” she said softly.
“Saturday.”
Gina took a step toward her building and then turned back to Mickey, gifting him with one more smile. Mickey wasn’t at all sure that his legs would support him when he turned to walk toward his apartment.
~~~~~~~~
He sat in the chair in Jesse’s office, fully immersed in the memory of those moments. He was drained. It felt like he had walked back half a century. He looked over at Jesse’s face and knew that his son was rapt. Jesse would be disappointed if he was expecting Mickey to continue, though. There was no way that he could tell any more of this story today.
Chapter Fourteen
After presenting me with the second installment of his saga, my father spent a great deal of time in his room. This storytelling seemed to sap him of so much energy. Was he uploading the entirety of his relationship with Gina before he talked about her, the sheer volume of the memory requiring him to suspend other functions? Was it possible that after he talked about her for a while, he flashed forward to their breakup and the memory of that bitter event wore him down?
For the first time, I considered the possibility that perhaps he could even be making up the entire thing. Perhaps this was some sort of allegory, the moral of which I would come to understand in time. Maybe the reason he couldn’t tell me more in one sitting was because he hadn’t invented it all yet.
Whatever it was, I was absolutely mesmerized. I couldn’t get over how interesting it was to hear my father talk about a love affair and all of its accoutrements this way. The New York of another era. “Pagliacci” at the Met. Schrafft’s (we had gone to the last one in the City when I was a kid – that memory would certainly take on a new cast in the future). I knew something about all of these things, but never before had I considered them from the perspective of my father as a young man. A young man in love.
The reason I knew that my father was in his room for much of the day was that I spent a good portion of it wandering through the house seeking inspiration to work on the damned parquet floor piece. By the early afternoon, I realized that this story was no more inane than any other I’d written, and that I had been entirely aware of what the assignment was before I accepted it. That it had hung me up – and that I was having an increasingly harder time getting started on even the most rudimentary articles – had little to do with the articles themselves and everything to do with my having done nothing but this kind of piece for several months now. I know a number of people who make a good living vacuuming up assignments such as these from a variety of magazines and spitting them out, sometimes several in one day. It required a certain kind of demeanor and, I’m sure, a certain kind of talent, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was the writer’s equivalent of flipping burgers. It wasn’t in any way why I had chosen my profession and I was beginning to fear that by taking work that wasn’t challenging or edifying I was losing the ability to imagine challenging or edifying stories. My pitches were flopping regularly. Hence half a year of wondering if the editor wanted fries with that story.
I eventually belched the parquet article into existence. Once I succumbed to the reality that not a single reader of this piece was going to care about cadence or nuance, it only took a couple of hours.
Around 4:30,
with my father still in his room (I assumed he was sleeping), I decided to go to the fish store to pick up something for dinner. They had Dover Sole available, which they almost never did, and I decided to splurge.
When I got home, my father was sitting in the den watching the news. This was unusual, since he did most of his trading in the afternoon. The online brokers offer the opportunity to keep going after the closing bell, so he usually did so until around 6:30. The television was of course blaring.
“Hey, Dad,” I called over the din. “I got some fish for dinner.”
“Sounds good.”
“No trading?”
“The market can do without me for a day.”
Were I more of an alarmist (like my brother, for instance), I might have found reason to be concerned about that last comment. I just took it as another indication that he was a little off his game.
I went into the kitchen, put the fish in the refrigerator, and began to think about the various ways in which I could prepare it. With a tarragon vinaigrette. Some olive oil and capers. A few chopped tomatoes and basil.
Then I remembered that my father loved Sole Amandine. My mother would make it regularly, and I regarded it in the matter-of-fact way that kids regard so many things they grow up with. When I started eating out and becoming interested in cooking myself, though, I realized the dish was bland, unnecessarily rich, and horribly old-fashioned. The fact that my father loved it so much was just another indication of how one-dimensional his tastes were. Considering this in the context of the stories he was telling about the life of a man living on the town after World War II, though, my perceptions changed. I realized that it was the kind of thing he would have grown fond of eating in those lavish New York restaurants of the time. Suddenly, he wasn’t an elderly man with too much affection for butter, but rather a gourmand from a different era.
I decided to make the dish for him that night. I pulled out a French cookbook I had taken from the house after my mother died. I probably could have figured out the preparation on my own, but I wanted to make sure I got it right.
