Despite her awkward Oh-did-I-lead-you-on? delivery, I’m surprised Gary hasn’t snatched the tickets back.
“You have a boyfriend?” he says to Sally. “You’re breaking my heart.”
Sally sways her head with another guilty grin. She’s a good girl with a voice of conscience. Unlike the New York floozy standing a few feet from her.
While we all say our goodbyes Guy says in an extremely low voice, “Go for it, I’ll go next week.” Then, loud enough for Kit to hear he says, “You need me to draw you a map back to your hotel? If I was you I’d hop a cab.”
“I’ll find it. Don’t worry.” I give Gary a forehead kiss. “But let’s have a drink before I leave. What’s the name of that bar you wanted to go to again?”
“There’s a place you’d like more. The Red Lion. Very British. Right up your alley.” Gary shambles away with one last cry behind him, “Call me when the conference is settling down!”
“British pub, eh?” Kit says, when Gary is partway down the block. “So you make a habit of hanging out with the likes of me?”
I improvise: “He means because as an undergraduate I majored in English Literature. He grabbed my study notes once and couldn’t believe I knew what machicolations were.”
“What are they?”
“Medieval openings in the floor for attacking enemies.”
“Well, that’s new to me. But I read English at Trinity. So feel at home here.”
I bob my head in appreciation. He read English at Trinity. I last heard that phrase during a documentary about Salman Rushdie.
“How many hours to the Bulls game?” Kit reaches in his pocket and removes his tobacco and rolling papers.
I look at one of the tickets I’d shoved in my bag as he rolls his own cigarette in the cold air. “Five,” I say.
Cigarette in mouth, he reaches for a shiny gray lighter with red jewels on the engraved snake’s eye. Once his tobacco is lit, out pops a cell phone and a business card he must have requested from a previous taxi ride in Chicago. “How shall we kill that time? Or should we meet later?”
“Would you like to come back to my hotel for a drink?”
He holds my gaze. “Where’s that?”
“The Hyatt.”
“You got a room there? I couldn’t get a room there. As I said, so many bloody conferences going.”
“It was booked for me two months ago. It’s busy, but they have lots of restaurants. We could get a nosh.”
“A nosh? You use that word, too? That’s rather English of you.”
It is? I laugh a little, confused. I thought nosh was a Yiddishism. “Everyone says nosh in New York.”
“Really? They say nosh in New York City? Nosh? I can’t believe that. A nosh, then. Shall we?”
“Did you know that Tony Blair will be here next week?”
“Where did you hear that?” Kit says after he’s refused any cab money from me, even the tip.
“On the way to my hotel from O’Hare. He’s staying here—”
“In the Presidential Suite,” our driver pipes up.
Feet on the curb, Kit tightens his argyle as another brutal prairie wind gushes through to our bones. I point out the fluttering Union Jack on one of the hotel flagpoles. He frowns. “They have the flag upside down.”
“They couldn’t—”
“A major insult to the crown, unless one is signaling distress.”
After a nervous laugh I say, “Well then, you’d better talk to the concierge before Blair gets here.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure anyone you talk to will be appreciative for the heads-up.”
The young woman serving as the lunch-break concierge noisily shuffles through papers and brochures, giving us no heed until Kit coughs politely.
She shrugs her shoulders at the bad news. “I’m sure our hotel knows what it is doing.”
“Maybe not,” I say emphatically.
She hates me already. “Does it really concern you? Do you have a specific problem about your room?”
“Ma’am, doesn’t it concern you if your hotel is reflected badly?” Kit says more diplomatically.
She huffs and gets the older Indian manager with a pale brown face and bushy eyebrows. He’s apparently been clued in to the problem couple—after a raced hello he says, “Sir, I am well aware of how the British flag should fly. My father lived in England for some time.”
“Sir, I really think this is not a matter of pride. You have a head-of-state coming, and I think perhaps you should fix your mistake.”
“Sir, I have not made a mistake, sir.”
Kit pulls out his flag-emblazoned passport holder and shows the manager where he’s gone wrong. The manager’s nose wrinkles as his error sinks in. He angrily hits a pylon next to the check-in desk; his punch causes a particularly ugly piece of corporate art, a lithograph of green and blue rotary telephones, to bounce a bit on the wall.
“I’ll leave you a diagram,” Kit says. The manager remains silent as Kit tears a bit of paper out of his spiral memo book. Out comes the expensive silver pen from the architectural tour. “The United Kingdom flag isn’t symmetrical. When you are facing the flag, you have to look at the white diagonals. On the left-hand, the hoist side, the white bands above the red diagonals are wider. On the right-hand side, the fly side, the wider white bands sit below the red diagonal.”
“Thank you, sir,” the manager says coldly. “We’ll fix it right away, sir.”
“It was the right thing to do,” I say comfortably from my new seated position in a plush lobby armchair.
Kit takes the seat opposite. “But I knew he was mad as hell, and I felt badly about his resentment.”
I felt a little badly, too, but I’m impressed how Kit kept to an unpleasant task until it was done. “Yes, an uncomfortable moment there, but you had to do it, sir. You might have saved his job. I’d speak up if the American flag was flying wrong.”
It’s hard not to compare what Kevin would have done—that is, nothing, as much from timidity as from a sense of for godsakes, give the small guys a break. Like my mother, Kevin does not like to offend anyone, which makes him well liked by men, but gives him that nice-guy whiff that turns a good number of women off even considering his boyish good looks.
I can barely hear what Kit says next—a swarm of soccer players have entered the Hyatt lobby bar high-fiving and screaming at each other in Portuguese. Kit smiles in frustration. As far as this man’s looks go, I suspect he is the kind of guy who needs softening bar light to really look good to the rest of womankind, save the Anglophiles. He desperately needs a tan, and while his teeth aren’t stereotypically nasty, they could use a good cleaning. Smoking isn’t helping him in that department. My roommate back in New York would cringe; Cathy has been trying to land a nice Jewish boy with nice white teeth since I’ve known her. Call this a Gary stereotype if you will, but I agree with her that American Jewish men take amazing care of their teeth. But what can I say? Kit and his slightly discolored incisors and cuspids just do it for me.
And sadly, Kevin with the bright whites back home just doesn’t.
I sigh to myself. I haven’t had sex with Kevin for a month. I hate faking it. I can come with Kevin, if he’s patient, and especially if I’m on top. But these days I just don’t have the energy to spend thirty minutes on anything with a high activity level.
True, my listlessness is not entirely Kevin’s fault.
I have recently arranged an appointment back in New York City with a thyroid specialist. I got the name of the doctor from Velma, the Jamaican secretary for my graduate department. She tapped me on my hand before handing over the American Airlines tickets and the check advance for my conference. “Listen, mon. You are tired, too tired for a young girl. You see a doctor. It’s your thyroid, mon. I was conking out everywhere but now I take Synthroid.” She claimed her visits and medicine were covered in the student and clerical staff plans, and that some of the most respected doctors at New York Univers
ity gallantly do student and faculty clinic work once a week.
I think Kit is talking to me again through the clamor. I scootch over even closer.
When I’m half an inch from his ear, he has a question for me. “Are you peckish? Because I’d really fancy a crumpet about now.”
I nod and shout, “What actually is a crumpet?”
His voice is raised, too. “It looks like a hockey puck. You melt cheese on it or butter.”
“It sounds like an English muffin.”
“No, I had one of those in my hotel today. There’s nothing English about an English muffin. A crumpet is—it’s a crumpet.” He smiles for a brief second and says even louder and more coyly, “Oh, it also means sex, but that would be rude now to use it like that, wouldn’t it?”
I smile big in response because, even shouting, I cannot vocally compete with the soccer team.
We mime to each other to move away from the fray.
When we can hear again we investigate our options. All Seasons Café in the lobby is closed for renovation, and at the concierge’s suggestion we move shop to Knuckles Sports Bar, which wouldn’t normally be my first choice for an intimate chat. A college basketball game is on that appears to be very important to not one but two men with bright red W. C. Fields noses. Both of their angry yells are directed toward the projected image that dominates the room.
“Asshole!” screams yet another fan at the screen. He’s minus the gin blossom, but just as drunk.
Kit grins at me over the din, yet he manages a peek at the TV screen. I’m not insulted—even though he said he doesn’t know much about college basketball, he has confessed his love of the sport.
My next question is solely to aid my nervousness. My family unanimously disapproves of my habit of filling silences with chitchat. “Do you know what hijiki is?”
“Not really,” he half-yells after a perplexed look. “Can you use it in context?”
“A Japanese man on my flight was hyper-concerned about the arsenic levels in hijiki.”
“Seaweed?”
“Of course,” I yell. “Seaweed.”
“Shari, I can hardly hear myself. Can you hear me at all?”
Now the whole room goes berserk. “Bring it home!” a chunky woman in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt yells at the screen.
“We could go to my room,” I say uncomfortably, but thrilled with myself for the big push.
Kit agrees with a neutral up and down dip of his chin.
CHAPTER 3
My Mensch
After I push seventeen, a linguist I have a nodding relationship with enters the elevator. He nods hi. I nod hi. I have no need for embarrassment. You’d never know the man at my side was headed to my room. Kit’s face is dignified, with a certain sexy-as-hell arrogance.
When Kevin is in the elevator he pushes me up against the corner and imprisons me under the stinky hollows of his surprisingly fleshy armpits. I’ve had doubts about him, but never this harsh. Why am I thinking of him as a total horror, a too-nice loser? Even if I’ve had my reservations, others want him. My roommate for one, and she’s an attractive, smart woman. “Okay,” I say to myself as therapist, “so if Kevin doesn’t do it for you, why haven’t you broken up with him yet? Is it fear, or guilt that his mother has died earlier in the year?”
“Actually,” I answer myself, “I suspect Kevin really does love me as much as he says he does, and with all of my dissertation stress, right now I couldn’t bear the wounded seal pup look I’m sure will come when I pull the cord.”
I’ve lost a parent and I know how painful it is. He has years of grieving left to do and even that won’t numb it all: it’s a cruel line of dominoes, memory. But I do not love Kevin, and I have never said I do.
Kevin and I met six months ago at a film aficionado costume party thrown in honor of my longtime friend Tom Cohen’s successful Cinema Studies dissertation.
Tom, the Man of the Hour, was outlandishly dressed as the “King of the Rumba,” i.e., Xavier Cugat. He’d grown a thin moustache for the occasion, bought a South American hat and borrowed a chihuahua to carry in his arms. I had thought Cugat wasn’t an actor, just a famous Spanish bandleader, but Tom then cited three Esther Williams’s films that Cugat appeared in playing himself. Tom had obviously spent hours thinking out what would floor a roomful of Ph.D. students. His dick-head brother Doug took the piss out of Tom’s earnestness by wearing a $5.99 Rite Aid Batman plastic Halloween outfit—he mocked Tom by walking around the room saying he was “citing Batman Forever”—a funny joke any day except the day someone’s ten years of academic sweat and labor is being celebrated, his brother’s, for God’s sake.
Doug had one redeeming thing going for him though, at least as the single ladies in the room saw it. He had brought along a cute friend all of us were checking out—Kevin with wavy brown hair and big almond-shaped brown eyes. I privately gave Kevin’s costume an “A for effort”—his adorable Sherlock Holmes getup was built around the expected houndstooth detective hat with earflaps tied together at the top. I smiled at his plastic pipe, and he said hello.
I could tell off the bat that Kevin was taken with my racy forties dress that was lined with flesh-colored silk, and my black peep-toe three inch mules. (I didn’t have to spend a dime on my costume as everything was culled from my thrift store vintage wear.) I happily explained to cute Kevin that it was a tribute to Vivien Leigh’s role in Waterloo Bridge—I was Myra Lester, the ballet dancer who falls in love with handsome Roy Cronin, a First World War British army officer, who has been called to duty. When she mistakenly thinks he’s dead, scandal mushrooms around her as she turns to prostitution. “I’m sure I’m boring you to death here,” I remember apologizing.
“Not at all. I love how you talk.”
I could tell he was trying really hard to follow. He picked up on the word British, and the conversation drifted to Kevin’s obscure Kinks and Stranglers record collection.
That Anglophile in me knew all the tracks on the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society. Kevin was amazed. Doug, Tom’s brother, drunkenly interrupted us: “Yo, Kev, Batman has to drop the Batkids off at the pool, hold my beer.” Doug cracked himself up, and left our vicinity.
Mortified, holding a beer, Kevin said, “I know him well, but right now I wish he’d just leave.”
I whispered nicely, “It’s okay, really,” and then to make Kevin feel better I brought up my fondness for “Always the Sun,” the only Stranglers song I know the lyrics for.
“I am your slave now, you realize that,” Kevin cracked.
Soon after that Doug left Tom’s apartment altogether with my friend Marni, a shocking exit—Marni is an academic lady if there ever was one, a year or two away from finishing her dissertation on courtly love in The Canterbury Tales.
Free of his embarrassing buddy, Kevin, as per his promise, stuck to me like glue. It was cute at first, but eventually he got on my nerves even if in appearance, he was the adorable catch of the party. About that I was proud.
At least I’d thought he was the catch. My weak fidelity halted abruptly when a new guest, a handsome English biology Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, introduced himself on the three-person line for the bathroom. I beamed like a girl on the hunt when the scientist said he’d christened his new orange-ringed kitten Helix the Cat.
Kevin hovered nearby as I admired the party Brit’s Hamlet costume. “Are you Olivier tonight?”
“Nay. Richard Burton’s Hamlet.”
When I offered up that I was a linguist with training wheels on, he said politely, “What was the first language you learned outside of English?”
“Ubba Bubba, from Zoom.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s an American kids’ show. Ubba Bubba was Zoom’s version of pig latin. To be or not to be becomes ‘Tubbo bubbe ubbor nubbot tubbo bubbe.’”
I cribbed that example off a fellow linguist’s blog, but it was still pretty funny flirting if you ask me. The scientist, however, only lo
oked mildly amused.
As I emerged from the bathroom after my own pee and a careful check for mascara smudges, another very single woman greeted Hamlet by saying, “my friend Annette claims you are Columbia’s brightest young star.”
I looked over this gal’s amazing figure, shown off in a costume even raunchier than mine. I was outrivaled and literally outdazzled: at first glance my competition looked almost nude. But she was wearing something—her boobs sparkled and glowed with swirls of dark and light gold. I bitchily noted that her obviously flat-ironed hair had enough spray wax on it to look like high gloss on a car, and that her pimple, colored over by brown eye-liner to look like a birthmark, looked more like a wet Cocoa Puff. But Hamlet was obviously taken with his beautiful fan of the Genome Project. As I silently sipped the particularly strong vodka gimlet Tom had poured me—it never left my hands, even in the bathroom—I overheard her say “Don’t worry about the religious right. I have a ten-year-old cousin with rheumatoid arthritis and damn straight I want you to explore what stem cells can do. Nobody should live a shitty life because her DNA is not good.”
Hamlet nodded enthusiastically. “Science saves lives. Ignorance doesn’t.” He whispered something else in her ear, and then she said much more seductively, but loud enough for me to step out of her sandbox, “That’s very flattering, I was nervous about the costume but many of the risqué Ziegfield girls wore bodystockings.”
“Can I ask you something important?” Sherlock Kevin wondered. How long had he been standing there, waiting for me to look at him? Defeated, I turned and smiled at him.
He took a deep breath: “I have to get your number. You’re gorgeous and brilliant. That English guy you were talking to is really a complete asshole.”
On any other night I might have realized that after the initial attraction wore off, Kevin was, in the end analysis, a bit pathetic. But he said some magic words there. Gorgeous and brilliant? Me? Did he know that was the exact flattery that would get me in a moment of vulnerability? Kevin of America was receptive to everything I had to say. Within ten minutes I was passionately kissing him in the kitchen next to a sink full of iced beer.
The Anglophile Page 4
