Chapter One
Happy Valentine's Day 1980
I could look out the window. I could look at the window. I could look in the window. That day I did all three.
Snow covered the city street like a bleached sheet, a thin clean layer. White would become as gray as the gunmetal sky but grimier eventually. Even in the congested metropolis it would take awhile. Not much exhaust fumes altered virgin snow in the quiet one way street that led no one anywhere with any convenience beyond itself. And few residing there owned those pollutants. Few could afford them and even fewer really needed them. City buses and subway trains got you anywhere needed getting to; even places beyond the edges of the borough, beyond the water that defined it as an island.
It could make you feel peaceful, the gently floating snowflakes, if you allowed it. I wished I could. I felt too upset.
The pane held my pain in. No one strolling by outside could see my pained eyes and avoid them. No one could hear my sighs or my sobs or my shouts of frustration that would tear at the interior walls of my larynx even if I did let them out instead of keeping them inside building tension in my throat and my chest while fueling the burn in my stomach.
The pane, held by an old frame scraped and painted many times, had a dinginess to it that spoke of age as well, as if time itself became a filter in which to view the outside world. It really just needed a good cleaning.
The pane and its frame reflected the room they held within, the dinginess and the age, multiple paint jobs hiding aging walls of the shotgun apartment, an exact replica of hundreds in the block long row house. Only décor, furniture and furnishings and knick knacks and pictures, made it different; made it mine. And to tell you the truth, there weren't a lot of those things. Maybe the absence of clutter defined it.
The pane, as the dark sky got darker before streetlights illuminated the street, became more and more reflective, becoming a mirror holding me as its central image.
Me the morose. Me the despondent. Me the fucking whiner.
I had time to study my reflection. I had nothing better to do.
I saw the untamable, thick, wavy brunette hair reaching my shoulders as it framed my face, its thickness creating a sort of lion's mane, which is what I often called it, especially when even longer than it was.
The face it framed looked elongated, an oval thin at the sides. The elongation continued at the nose standing out long and thin, a combination of my dad's long thick Jewish nose and my mom's smaller straighter WASP nose. The elongated visage also reflected the body that held it: long and thin. Six feet six inches to be exact, including the head of course, but not the extra inch or so of hair.
My fairly wide mouth with its narrow subtly purple lips stretched quite a bit wider when I smiled and created dimples like parentheses below my slightly pronounced cheekbones. In my youth it had been deemed cute, this effect. Less so as I aged and my skin tightened and matured, but somehow still there despite my height and long face making cuteness less likely. I always found cute girls to be of short stature. Cuteness attracted me in females despite the great difference in height between them and me. So me being called cute seemed odd, but I'd heard it a few times.
My mouth also helped the expressiveness of my face. I had a hard time hiding emotions. But it was the eyes, despite their smallish size, that did most of the expressing. A blue/gray hue, they seemed to emphasize every emotion, whether cheerful or sad, playful or serious. They'd water at the most inopportune times; very unmanly.
Unfortunately my eyes revealed seriousness most of the time. I found seriousness not to be conducive to seductiveness. Along with confidence, which, being both shy and unsure (maybe the same thing), I lacked, women seemed to prefer something else than what I offered; the more playful man, one who could make them laugh.
I did have my moments though when I freed myself of seriousness or self-consciousness and presented an attracting front to ladies. Out of those moments I gained lovers, sometimes for just a night, sometimes for a few weeks or months. Only once did it last longer than that, and that had been my high school sweetheart. We had given each other our virginity and shared our lives for two years until I abandoned her to move east to college and then, quitting college, to Manhattan.
By and large, that was the only relationship I ended. The others the women abandoned me.
Which brings me back to the moment of staring forlornly at my refection in the mirrored window.
I hated Valentine's Day. It creates the worst expectation: love celebrated. Monica, my current (or so I thought) lover, never showed up. She never called. My calls went to her answering machine. After three times, I thought I'd be bordering on annoying or worse if I left another message.
We planned to spend February 14th together, walking hand in hand across town, from East to West Village. We'd stop and shop at boutiques and record stores. We'd share lunch together and then a really nice dinner and then a concert of one of my favorite (and I thought hers) jazz pianists, McCoy Tyner. I had two tickets burning a hole in my pocket.
She never showed up. I waited for her to be late. I waited an hour to make the first call. Two hours later I knew I had been abandoned. Fuck Valentine's Day. I wanted to die it hurt so much.
Monica was smart. Monica was beautiful. Monica was playful. Maybe too playful. She loved to flirt. She loved to drink and get high, mostly pot but anything else really. I wasn't interested or could not afford much of anything else. I could afford nickel bags of pot at my friendly neighborhood Puerto Rican social club. Drinks were on the house at the bar/restaurant I worked at at the end of my shift, and the tips let me buy her drinks at the afterhours club we enjoyed.
The post work drinking happened exclusively on Friday and Saturday, at least with her. She worked days during the week uptown at a publisher as a receptionist. She hoped to move to assistant editor or assistant agent or something. Her roommate had become an editor that way. In fact her roommate had gotten her the job when she advanced.
Her roommate. Jill. They shared a small two bedroom apartment only a couple blocks from their place of work on the Upper East Side.
They met in graduate school, a SUNY school on Long Island, both studying for their Masters in English Lit.
They couldn't have been more different. Monica was tall and lithe with lovely handful breasts and soft handful buttocks. Jill barely broke five feet in height and filled that height with curves. I wasn't sure of the dimensions of those curves as she tended to hide them in loose clothing. Even her power suits fit loosely.
And they had opposite temperaments: party girl as opposed to serious and studious.
During the month and a half of our relationship (Monica and I met drunk at a New Year's Eve party, fucked all night and made love the next night enabling it to continue) on my days off during the week, most often I'd be invited to spend the evening and night at their apartment. Those evenings occurred no more than twice a week and often less. Sometimes we only saw each other on weekends. We talked on the phone though almost every other evening between when she got home and I went to work.
On those occasions when I visited, if we didn't order in pizza or Chinese, either Jill or I cooked. Mom instructed me on cooking when I decided to quit school and live on my own. She was (and still is) a good cook albeit with simple fare. I did well with her lessons.
