Blind Date (24 page)

Slowly she sat up and turned to him. “You are the first fortuneteller I've ever known who reads not from the palm but from the nose,” she said. “Unless my nose is only a pretext?” She caught him glancing at her body. “What else do you see?”

Levanter closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against his brow. “I see another man, in America. You never knew him, but he saw pictures of you. I see him writing to your lover, begging him to go to America, to leave Europe — and you — behind. I see you in another fight, angrily tearing up these letters. I see him leaving you, and I see that man greeting him in New York.” Levanter paused and glanced at her. She was lying down again. Her eyes were shut, but her head was twisted in his direction. He closed his eyes once more. “Ten years have passed. I see you sunbathing naked in Cannes. I see the man who wrote the letters. He sits beside you on the beach.”

She sat up again and faced him. She put on her sunglasses and studied him. “Then you must be that man: George Levanter,” she
exclaimed. “Levanter!” she repeated. “How I once hated that name!”

“Only the name?” asked Levanter. They were both speaking their native Slavic language now.

“That was all I knew.” She turned and lay down on her front, her chin resting on one hand. She looked straight ahead and spoke in an even voice. “When I met ‘this handsome, strong man' — Woytek — you had been in America for years.”

“Woytek often told me you were the most beautiful girl he had ever seen,” said Levanter. “He said you were still in grade school when he met you and that he started sleeping with you right away. Was that true?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It was and it was not. Who cares? He was my first lover. Later, you started writing to Woytek, urging him to defect to the West. Your letters turned our life upside-down. Suddenly, all Woytek talked about was Levanter — his closest friend, already settled in America, while he was wasting his time with me. He imagined himself with you in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles. With a successful investor for a friend in the West, how could he fail? And how could I, simple flesh, compete with such a vision? So I lost him to you, Levanter. And to Gibby, that American heiress you found for him. And look how it all ended!” She took her suntan lotion out of her bag and handed it to Levanter. “Could you put some on my back?”

He took the tube, stood up, and leaned over her. He squeezed the cream onto her shoulders and began spreading it. Her skin felt warm and smooth. When he reached her waist, she looked back over her shoulder at him. “There was a time,” she said, smiling, “when if any man touched me, Woytek would take him apart.”

As Levanter spread the lotion over her hips and thighs, he found himself thinking back to the time when securing Woytek's future in America was his main concern.

Levanter had telephoned Gibby and told her he had to see her alone to talk about Woytek. They met at a café near Central Park.

“How is Woytek's English coming along?” he asked.

“It's improving,” she said. “But surely you didn't ask me to meet you to talk about Woytek's English.”

“I didn't. It's about the two of you.”

Gibby looked apprehensive, almost panicky. “Did Woytek ask you to talk to me?”

“No.”

“What is it then?” She stared at him, her eyes magnified by the thick lenses of her glasses.

Levanter was having difficulty beginning.

“I know you and Woytek have no secrets from each other,” she encouraged. “You're his only close friend in New York. You can be direct with me.”

“Ever since I introduced you to Woytek,” said Levanter, trying to sound casual, “you and he have lived in the same tiny West Side studio. Yet you have unlimited charge accounts at all the best shops in town, your wardrobe is made by the finest designers, and your jewelry is worth thousands of dollars. Woytek doesn't have a penny. If he wants to buy a pack of cigarettes, he has to borrow money for it from his friends. He's wearing the clothing he arrived in from Eastern Europe because he can't afford anything new. It looks to me as if you've suddenly turned into a penny-pinching shrew, acting as if you were on your own.”

Gibby shifted in her chair. “What's wrong with being on your own?”

“Nothing. But you aren't exactly on your own. You come from one of the richest families in the country and have a trust fund that yields a great deal of money. On top of that, there have been large financial gifts and inheritances over the years. Still, with all your wealth, you won't help Woytek, the man you love.”

“I won't give Woytek money, if that's what you mean. I don't want people to think that the one man I want is the one I have to pay for,” she said stubbornly.

“Are you going to live your life with Woytek according to what other people might think?” asked Levanter.

Gibby looked away. For a moment, Levanter thought she wasn't listening. He grew impatient.

“If you're so concerned with what people think, why do you tell them everything about yourself? Why do you say that before you met Woytek your life oscillated between drinks and sweets, with pot in between? That, intellectually, Woytek is the first man you haven't had to talk down to? That only with Woytek can you be open and honest?”

Gibby interrupted. “Woytek loves me for what I am. What I do with my money is my own business.”

“But not what you do with Woytek,” said Levanter. “I feel responsible for him. I arranged a blind date for you and Woytek so he could have someone intelligent to speak French with, since that was the only other language he knew then. I didn't expect him to be destroyed. With you, he's vegetating, but he loves you too much to leave you. It seems to me that you are preventing both of you from enjoying your money and the life it could offer: the world of travel, of new experience, of ideas, of people.”

“I don't want Woytek to be known as a man without a profession, living off my money,” said Gibby. “I don't care what kind of work he does, as long as he supports himself like everybody else.”

“But he's your lover, and you're not like everybody else,” Levanter said sharply. “You are unusually rich. You and your lover are thereby excluded from the fate of the ordinary. Woytek was once a wealthy and educated man. Then he became a refugee. He's been here only a year — half of which he's lived with you. He doesn't know English well enough yet to pursue his profession. You quit your own job when you fell in love with him. Why do you want him to work? Don't you understand that getting a job would keep him from studying English? And what do you suppose he could do? Don't try to answer me,” said Levanter. “Just listen for a minute.”

Gibby glared at him.

“All Woytek is suited for at the moment is menial labor: parking cars, scraping paint off ship decks, cleaning bars, something like
that. He could earn about as much in one month as you spend in one week on restaurant tips when you take your rich cousins to lunch. And it costs you more to pay your monthly phone bill for long-distance calls to your college chums than Woytek would make in an entire year.”

Levanter paused. Gibby did not speak.

“What is your reasoning?” Levanter asked. “Do you believe that as long as he's penniless everyone will think Woytek stays with you for yourself, whereas if you give him money, everyone will think he loves you just for the money?”

Gibby remained silent.

Levanter went on. “Woytek was a superb athlete. He used to play soccer and basketball and was one of the best swimmers in his country. He loved company and enjoyed being surrounded by creative people. Now he's cooped up in your ground-floor apartment where he can't even see daylight, and he can't afford to go out. You've made him your prisoner.”

“Maybe I should take him to California,” Gibby said, more to herself than to Levanter. She went on without waiting to hear Levanter's opinion. “My family is there, and Woytek knows people in Hollywood. There are also those film directors he knew in Europe,” she mused. “Near them, Woytek might regain his own sense of accomplishment and pride — and possibly find work.”

She looked at Levanter, expecting some response, but now he said nothing.

Levanter was in Paris one summer researching the prospects for the marketing of a new American-made ski safety binding. Just before he was to return to New York, he received a long letter from Woytek. He and Gibby were staying in California with their friend Sharon, whose baby was due soon. Sharon had invited Levanter, whom she hadn't seen for a long time, to join them for the rest of August.

New York would be every bit as hot and empty as Paris, Levanter
knew, and Sharon's house, a large Beverly Hills estate overlooking the center of Los Angeles, offered an inviting escape. He reserved a seat on a flight from Paris to New York, with a connecting flight to Los Angeles, and he cabled Woytek:
ARRIVING FRIDAY AFTERNOON STOP ANXIOUS TO SEE YOU ALL.

At the airport he asked the airline clerk to arrange for three of his bags to accompany him and three to be unloaded in New York and held for his return at the end of the month. The clerk handed him a baggage form, which he filled out and returned to her.

“You've made a mistake here,” she said. “You wrote a New York address, but we need your return address in Paris, in case your luggage is not claimed.”

“My home is in New York,” said Levanter, “and that's where the luggage should be sent if something happens to me and I am unable to claim it.”

“But you have to claim it,” the clerk insisted.

“What if I die?”

“Death finds you without a return address,” the woman said impatiently. “Your luggage does not.”

“I can only repeat that my return address is New York.”

“As you wish, Monsieur,” she said with a smirk.

During the New York stopover, a stewardess checking his ticket for the Los Angeles flight looked at Levanter's baggage stubs. “I see that all your luggage has been unloaded in New York,” she said. “Are you continuing to Los Angeles without any baggage?”

“I have a lot of luggage,” said Levanter. “Three of my bags were supposed to be transferred to this flight.”

“There must be some mistake, sir,” the stewardess said. “All your luggage was labeled in Paris for unloading in New York. No transfer has been indicated.” She phoned the baggage dispatcher. “Your suitcases are already on their way to the inspection ramp,” she said. She checked her watch. “I'm sorry, sir. You won't have time to go through customs before this flight takes off.”

Levanter realized that he should not have argued with the airline clerk in Paris. Once again, he thought, he had been defeated by the French character, as once again the French had somehow
confused logic with the facts of human existence and emotion.

He went through similar ordeals each time he was in France, and each time strove to defend himself against the French bureaucracy of the mind. His comprehension of the French language far exceeded his ability to express himself in it. Consequently, the French treated him in one of two ways: if he succeeded in making himself understood, he was just a foreigner treated with contempt for not having been born French; if he failed, he was a mental invalid to be brushed aside for being incapable of even verbal communication.

One day, he decided to by-pass altogether the dilemma of language. As an investor, Levanter was required to retain all receipts and bills as proof of his business expenses for the United States Internal Revenue Service. Therefore, each time he bought stamps at a French post office, he would politely ask for a receipt. And each time the French postal employee would routinely refuse, claiming that at the time of purchase he had to submit two copies of a letter of request on his firm's official stationery, addressed to the specific post office. But there was no room in Levanter's life for filling out forms in duplicate.

Stumbling and jerking, he entered a crowded post office in the center of Paris that day, going straight to the front of the line. As he twitched past the men and women who stood waiting their turn for service, he peered at them defiantly; they looked at him, then, uncomfortable, dropped their gaze, as if ashamed to be staring at a pathetic cripple.

He pounded the counter several times and an alarmed clerk raced over. Mumbling incoherently, and spitting saliva through his twisted mouth, Levanter managed to communicate his need for a pencil and paper. Then, his left hand grabbing his right as if to guide it and prevent it from shaking, Levanter wrote that he wanted three dozen air-mail stamps. He pushed the money toward the clerk, who averted his eyes from the cripple's distorted face and promptly slid the stamps to him. His left hand once again guiding the right, Levanter scribbled down his request for a receipt. The clerk hesitated. Levanter again banged the counter with his fist.

The supervisor approached, glanced at Levanter's note, motioned him to calm down, and, whispering that the man might be a French war invalid, ordered the clerk to issue the receipt.

Now it occurred to Levanter that he should have thought about this, and many other such experiences he had had in Paris, before engaging the French airline clerk on the subject of his return address. Now the French bureaucracy of the mind was having its revenge — all his luggage was in New York.

Dispirited, he left the plane, claimed his luggage, cleared customs, and went to his New York apartment. He would fly to Los Angeles the next day. He tried to phone Woytek, but there was no answer at Sharon's house. Exhausted from the journey and the mix-up, he fell into a sound sleep.

The next day, Levanter's phone rang, waking him. A man's voice said, “Los Angeles Police Department, Coroner's Office,” and asked to speak to the next of kin of one George Levanter.

“There are no relatives,” Levanter told him.

“How well did you know this Levanter?”