Manhattan 62

by Nadelson, Reggie

  Max glances at the chess players on the north side of the park, eye on a couple of men in hats, one white, one Negro, hard at it.

  “You play?”

  “Some,” he says.

  “You any good?”

  “It depends who is on the other side of the table.”

  “Let’s get that beer.”

  “Yes. Sure. It is Mrs Muriel Miller, by the way, my, what would you say, landlady, who helps me with shopping. She is very kind, Pat. I think she considers me like a son, or better to say, a nephew. I believe she is lonely because her own son is married, and on Long Island.”

  “The clothes?”

  “Of course. Last week she accompanies me on top of a Fifth Avenue bus to many stores.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I think she wants to convert me to your system through shopping, and to be honest, the stores are quite amazing, especially this F.A.O. Schwarz. Of course, we have a grand toy store in Moscow, but I am like a ten-year-old boy here. Grown men in suits are admiring the train sets. Perhaps Mrs Miller thinks I will defect for a beautiful Lionel train set.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  He looks at me, startled, perplexed, concerned suddenly.

  “I’m kidding you, man.”

  “I see.” He’s uneasy now, just for a moment, fumbling for his cigarettes.

  “It was a joke, Max. I’m kidding, I’m fooling around with you, man.”

  “Of course. Can you believe how time flies, Pat? It’s almost a month since we first met. I have been meaning to tell you how grateful I am to you for answering so many of my questions. So many of the graduate students are, would you say, square? I try. I try to sound more, more swinging. Can you say that would be copacetic? Or am I cruisin’ for a bruisin’?” He bursts out laughing. He makes me laugh. I say, “Very American, daddy-O.”

  “I have also become pretty fond of the whisky you introduced me, too. I am down with it. By the way, Mrs Miller asks if you would come for dinner. She is awfully kind, I have my own room, and a bathroom for myself,” says Max. “Mrs Miller believes I, a young man, must have my privacy, and I am not sure what this means. We do not have this concept, you see. I feel I have fallen into a magic rabbit hole. What is privacy precisely, Pat? This is not something we understand in my country.”

  I explain as best I can. Crossing 3rd Street, Max looks around MacDougal like a kid eating cake with both hands, he takes out his notebook and scribbles in it, puts it back.

  “What language do you write in?”

  “Ah, only English. I promise myself I will only speak in English, I will write in English. If I dream in English, this means I am truly fluent.”

  “What do you write about?”

  “Oh, everything. This is like theater. So many things I have to recall, to write to my family.”

  Every night the Village throbs with music, music from folk clubs, jazz clubs, bars, cafés, coffee houses. Along MacDougal, kids wait to get into the Gaslight Café and Café Wha and they’re crazy with excitement. “Did you hear that new guy, Dylan? You heard him? Is that her, is it Mary?” cries a girl in sandals. “My mother will flip her wig when she hears I’ve been to the Village.”

  Suburban kids dressed in black as if for a costume party, return tickets to Long Island in their pockets, throng the street, drunk with the prospect of a night out in Greenwich Village. Italian boys stand around, posturing; like Bobby Darin, or Tony Curtis, they figure, pompadours glistening with Brylcreem, hands jammed in pockets, eyeing tourists with disdain, maybe spoiling for a little action on a hot summer night.

  “This is like theater,” Max says. “So much.” He has out the little notebook, scribbling furiously. Puts it away. Extracts his pack of Lucky Strike. “Where shall we go for our beer?”

  “Let’s go to Minetta Tavern, it’s across the street.”

  Inside Minetta, Max examines the photos of boxers on the walls and then climbs onto a stool at the bar next to me. He orders Rheingold for us both. I add a double Scotch for myself. Me, I also want some meatballs. I haven’t been eating. The food here is good, and it’s cheap.

  I down the drinks in one gulp and order cheap red wine. I eat a couple of meatballs and order more wine. I feel better. This is what I need, a night off the case I can’t solve, and from my nightmares.

  “So what’s new, Max?”

  “I am now familiar with disc jockeys such as Cousin Brucie Morrow, and Murray the K. and his Swinging Soirees for Submarine Watchers, isn’t that it, Pat?”

  “Max, man, I am proud of you, so easy to fall for the folkie stuff, living down here in the Village, as a reward I am going to take you to a real rock and roll show, maybe even the Brooklyn Fox, or the Apollo.” In Max, I can see a potential convert. “The music will send you. The chicks will dig you. You will become Moscow’s ambassador of cool, the Messiah of cool even, and some day, I will visit Moscow, and who knows, you will take me to a rock and roll concert over there.”

  “But cultured people will say it is just noise. I don’t think rock and roll can ever have a place in the Soviet Union. But I hope you will come to visit me, of course.”

  “Wait and see, pal. It’s catching on like wild fire. Listen, down here in the Village, the folkies, most of them, think of rock and roll as music for lower orders, peasants you might say, but, man, I took some of my 45s over to Liverpool on vacation last year, and I played them my music, Smokey, and Marvin, and James Brown, of course, and Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry, and they say, we want you to hear something. I think, Jesus, rock and roll is American. But they drag me into this lousy cellar in the middle of the day to hear these four boys. They are really good. When I go, I leave my cousins a few of the discs, and I got a letter saying the guys in that cellar went on tour with Little Richard who taught one of them, Paul was his name, his hoo holler.”

  Max thinks Ray Charles is certainly fine so we agree on this and also that it’s shame “I Can’t Stop Loving you”, number one most of the summer, has been topped by Bobby Vinton, who is a drip, singing “Roses are Red”. I feel I’ve done some basic work on Max. “You want to share another bottle of this vino with me?”

  “With pleasure. What do you think of my new shoes?” He sticks out his feet to reveal his brand new loafers. “They are called Bass Weejuns, I purchased them at the store, B. Altman, and there is a slot for a penny. I say to myself, Maxim, only in this country could there be shoes with a space for money. It is, as someone said to me, crazy. I call them my Capitalists.”

  The bartender overhears him and starts to laugh, and it’s infectious. Everybody roars with laughter, and Max, too, lets out that infectious chuckle of his, and tells a Soviet joke involving sausages. Soon a guy, still laughing, buys a round of drinks. Max offers to perform a magic trick. I’ve seen him in the park, entertaining the little kids in the playground, pulling coins from their ears. Look, he says, a Russian coin, twenty kopecks. Max the Magician. Changes his clothes, changes himself. “Can I confide in you, Pat?”

  I gulp some wine. “Sure.” I’m flattered.

  Loose now, Max tells me how he practices English in his room, how he tries to speak less formally, like an American.

  “I think this sounding American and looking American go together,” he says, and tells me that when he’s alone, he stands in front of the mirror in his room, to get the posture right. He understands you have to stand loose, casual, get easy in your joints. Bend your knees, amble around like nothing matters, swing your arms, snap your fingers.

  “You see? So in my room, where there is privacy, I rehearse this. What a miraculous piece of language making, a true art form this American slang is, Pat. In the subway I eavesdrop on people, I hear one fellow say to his friend, ‘Me and the chick, we are Splitsville.’ This is marvelous.”

  “But you must have slang in Russia.”

  “Sure, sure, naturally.”

  Naturally, I think. Sure, they have everything we have, and it pisses me off, a little, th
is response. “Let me ask you something, Max. Are you a member of the Communist Party?”

  “Why do you ask?” He leans forward, and I think for a crazy moment he’s going to proposition me, that he thinks maybe I’m a candidate myself. “Yes,” says Max. “Of course. It is quite an honor.”

  “Do they force you?”

  “No, Pat, it is something to be desired. Why do some people fear it so much in the United States? They hate us. They say bitter things about Fidel Castro too, and that the Cubans are victims, that all socialists are spies and murderers. I hear them say, better dead than Red. Do they truly believe such a thing?”

  “Some. Sure.”

  “Do you believe this, that it is better to be dead than Red? You know in Russian, red is a beautiful word. It means beautiful.”

  “I don’t want to be dead under any circumstances. No.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Better dead than Red. Strange, how it would turn out JFK himself said he’d rather his kids were Red than dead. It didn’t come out for fifty years until one of his girlfriends published her trashy little book about him, our handsome young Irishman, our best President; and he would be dead a year and a half after I had that conversation with Max on MacDougal Street.

  “In Greenwich Village, many of us feel socialism can be good,” says a familiar voice, and Nancy hops up onto a barstool. “Hello, I’m Nancy Rudnick,” she says, putting her hand out; she’s so beautiful in the soft bar light, it’s hard for me to look at her. She’s had her dark hair cut very short, thick bangs over her forehead; it shows off her long neck and the round very blue eyes. She focuses on Max as if he’s the only person in the bar.

  Sliding off his stool and blushing, Max takes her hand, and gives a little bow. “Ostalsky, Maxim. Max.”

  “I know who you are. Welcome. It’s lovely to have you in New York. I hope we are treating you well.” She smiles. She’s playful. She raises one long slim arm—she has these very long arms, and sometimes I think: the better to make you mine—raises it to adjust a gold hoop earring, and this shows off her figure because in the heat she’s wearing only a sheer white Mexican blouse, and a full blue skirt, and red cotton shoes she got in France with ribbons wound around her ankles. She kisses me on the cheek. “Hello, Pat, darling, it’s been a while.”

  I haven’t seen Nancy since she let me drive her to Jones Beach in June. Been trying to forget her. “Where have you been?”

  “The usual, here and there, but I’ve missed you, Pat, sweetie,” she adds, always in that husky voice that drove me nuts even the first time I see her, hanging on a strap on the A-train, a spring night in ’.

  I’m riding the A-train home from 125th Street, been to see James Brown at the Apollo, the first time I’ve seen him in the flesh. Whatever records of his I can get hold of, I play over and over. Never before tonight have I seen anything like this, it’s different from a record or the radio. Clayton Briscoe, a cop works Harlem and who was at the Academy same time as me, one of the few Negro detectives in the city, gets me into the show gratis. I owe Clay. This night changes my life. In return I plan on inviting him down to the Village when Sonny Rollins is on at the Vanguard. He’s crazy for Rollins.

  So I’m high on it, smoking and whistling tunelessly what sounds to me like a fine rendition of “Night Train”, remembering Brown’s moves, how he works the stage, like a man with wheels implanted in his feet.

  The A-train makes its fantastic run all the way from 125th to 59th, no stops, and I’m hanging on a strap, singing, staring at the Miss Subways poster, and suddenly I’m aware of a girl next to me. “What are you singing?”

  “You call it singing? Thanks.”

  “If it makes you feel good,” she says and laughs, a low husky laugh.

  “Just something I heard.”

  “I saw you when I got on,” she says.

  “You’re following me?”

  “Maybe, but I’m harmless.” She laughs again, and I look at her sideways, this tall girl—almost as tall as me—with long thick shining dark hair held back in a pony tail, the very blue eyes. She’s about twenty. She’s wearing a straight black skirt, tight black turtleneck sweater, red cinch belt around her little waist. A big brown leather bag hangs over her shoulder, the strap decorated with those peace buttons you see around the Village.

  The long legs, the eyes, the voice, the clinging sweater, she is easily the sexiest girl I’ve ever seen, and she smells like lilies of the valley. I’m glad I’m wearing a new light-blue plaid sports shirt, and slacks I only got a month earlier.

  She nods at the Miss Subways poster. “I’m surprised they have Negro girls.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, it matters. Definitely, it matters when there is any advancement for the Negroes. Don’t you believe that?”

  “Why? You’re not colored.”

  “Never mind,” she says, but I can see she files it, and might hold it against me.

  I’m wrong. She comes on to me. I get off at West Fourth, and she follows me. When I ask her if she’d like some espresso coffee, she agrees, and we walk, not speaking, to Bleecker Street where she spots an empty table on the sidewalk at Figaro.

  “My name is Nancy Rudnick,” she says, and asks me what I do.

  I tell her I’m a cop.

  “Gosh. Seriously? Do you like it?”

  “Yeah, I do, what’s wrong with it?”

  “I just don’t know any policemen,” she says.

  “I’m a detective.”

  “I see. Where did you go to school?”

  I tell her Fordham. “GI Bill. Korea. Graduated in ’55. You?”

  Idly, she twirls her hair around a finger, and looks down into her coffee. “Upstate,” she says.

  “New Paltz? I have a cousin at the state university there. Or Binghamton?”

  “Vassar.”

  But we drink a lot of coffee, and she tells me about how she grew up in Greenwich Village, about her father’s house on Charlton Street. She tells me she plans to be a painter and has her own little studio at her father’s place and, out of the blue, she invites me over. “Them Village girls are all nymphomaniacs, they believe in free love,” my pop would say. Me, I think, if so, good. Great. This girl I just picked up in the subway—or did she pick me up—I’m hooked.

  “Do you like music?” she asks when we’re at her place, and I nod, and she says, “Crazy”, and without waiting for an answer, selects an LP album by Odetta, the folksinger, not my thing, but then Nancy pats the bed that doubles as a couch and is covered with an orange and blue Indian bedspread, and she’s singing along to “Dark as a Dungeon” with so much fervor you might think she comes from a long line of miners. So I fall for her. I fall for it that she loves singing and just like me can’t carry a tune. For this girl, I’ll listen to anything. I’ll listen to her politics. For the legs, and the eyes. “It’s kind of not your thing, is it?” says Nancy, and shuffles her albums, puts on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!.

  “You like Sinatra?”

  “Everybody likes Sinatra, what did you think, I only listen to stuff about the workers? Don’t be silly. I have almost all his albums.”

  We smoke a little pot for a while, and giggle, and eat lumpy brownies she baked earlier, maybe with some hash, I can’t tell for sure because I’m so high from being around her, and so excited I’m half out of my mind, especially because she tells me straight out that she has a diaphragm and we don’t need to worry about her getting pregnant. I’m not used to girls like Nancy.

  After that night, I always connect Nancy and James Brown doing his thing at the Apollo, the two great events for me that spring of 1959. Then she’s gone, and it’s not until the fall of ’61 that I see her again, this time in the park, eating a toasted almond Good Humor. Offers me a bite. Says she graduated college, went to Paris to meet some artists, and is now starting grad school at NYU.

  I can’t take my eyes of her. I’m hooked, and a little desperate; I think of wild stuff I want to do t
o her, with her, things that I could never tell anyone. We go out on and off, but she’s not making any commitments. I’m jealous. I figure if she slept with me when we just met, who are the others?

  That year I start signing up for courses at NYU. I follow her around like a dog and sometimes she feeds me scraps, like she was doing at Minetta that night she shows up, when I’m sitting at the bar with Max.

  “We don’t all believe what Mr Hoover tells us,” Nancy is saying to Max. “Some of us even believe that Karl Marx was quite a smart fellow, perhaps Lenin, too. My father believes. My cousin Irma went to a youth festival in Moscow in 1957 and she says there are many wonderful things in the Soviet Union, and everyone was very nice, and all the students danced together.”

  This makes Max smile. “It is true. I myself was at the festival. It was quite amazing with so many young people debating, declaring friendship, promising to support peace and love, it was such an important event. One young lady taught me to do the Lindy Hop.”

  “I’ve been very much wanting to say hello,” Nancy says. “I saw you at a party the other night, the artists, over on the Bowery? You know, Maxim, I know my father would like to meet you. He would be so interested,” she says. “Please, Maxim, do come to Daddy’s house, or we could go listen to some music. Or both. Do you like folk music, or jazz, Maxim?”

  “Oh, yes, very much. We like jazz quite a bit in my country, and we have a few good jazz musicians of our own.”

  “Who do you like?”

  “I very much like Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald. We like many American musicians. The great Paul Robeson, of course. Pete Seeger. Mr Van Cliburn, of course.”

  “Do you like Miles Davis?”

  “Yes,” he says. “But I only know his music from records.”

  “I have a feeling Pat makes you listen to his stupid rock and roll. We’ll go hear Miles one evening,” she says. “It’s a disgrace how badly Miles Davis was treated as a Negro, even though he’s a genius.”