The Receptionist (9 page)

His features were of a comic lumpiness. He had a jug chin, a knobby nose, and a pair of blue eyes that looked too close together and tended to disappear under light brows and lashes that did nothing to mitigate the rest. It was a face that invited teasing on the playground, on the gym floor, and on the parade ground. Evan knew by the time he was thirteen that he was never going to be taken seriously. So, like Lou Costello, Buddy Hackett, and other non-Adonises before him, he decided to protect himself by making the jokes before the other guys got around to it.
Th
at defense mechanism got him through the minefield of junior and senior high, but college was tougher. He lost valuable support on account of his father’s long periods away from home. Evan worshipped the guy, but his father seemed happy to do anything and be anywhere but home. Evan’s mother may have been the root cause of this reluctance. She was a mousy-looking woman, and very weird socially.

All this made it hard for Evan to find himself as a man, and easy for him to be resentful and somewhat suspicious of the female of the species. But the army worked wonders in forcing upon him a certain amount of male bonding, and Japanese women did the rest. He came out of his tour in Tokyo with confidence in himself, both as a man who could fend for himself in a man’s world, and as a guy who could go after, and get, the prettiest women he met, from the East or the West.

One of Evan’s chief strategies for coping came from listening to his father’s lessons on how to manipulate people. As a propaganda officer, the senior Simm put together war-bond drives; pro-American, anti-Nazi scripts for Hollywood films; slogans; posters; and patriotic campaigns of all kinds, designed to sway public opinion, elevate public morale, and keep enthusiasm and support for the war effort at an optimum level. Evan listened with fascination to all this—on his dad’s precious sojourns at home—and picked up tips that he found useful when laying siege to a young woman’s defenses.

Evan was a realist. He knew that number two would have to try harder. Aggressive courtship was his answer to the glamour boys whose more obvious physical appeal led them barely to exert themselves, knowing that, without their lifting a finger, women would fall all over them. He followed the first request for a date—nearly always refused—with a barrage of requests, until a yes was secured. He then made it his business to come up with interesting places to go and indulge a gift for openhanded expenditure—on food, booze, music, and culture. Excellent entertainment became the signature of an Evan Simm courtship. Evan in full swing seldom left the object of his desire unmoved or unconquered.

So it was with the popular and vivacious Marta. She was slender, long waisted, even featured, and bright eyed and had a shaft of swinging chestnut hair, a package that was accompanied by swaying hips, a flirtatious smile, charmingly accented English, and a manner that manifested plenty of confidence in all these attributes. Marta was every bit as experienced and sophisticated sexually as Evan and would often slip out of his clutches and into the arms of a waiting Eurasian, European, or Japanese rival if Evan did not work ceaselessly at commandeering her time. She became, finally, a prize he felt he must claim. And so, before her international job assignment in Japan came to an end, he bought an emerald ring (both thought diamonds too clichéd) and dropped to one knee in the classic mode of the marriage proposal. Somehow the ring got accepted before the proposal. It seemed there were going to be conditions that might take weeks, even months, to meet. Marta would need to return to Austria, her native land, make arrangements to get her travel papers in order, pay a long-promised six-month visit to her mother.
Th
en, and only then, would she be ready to join Evan as his betrothed.

In 1958, Evan reentered the United States, where
Th
e New Yorker
had, on the strength of the drawings he’d been submitting—and, increasingly, selling—over the previous year, offered him a starter contract. He began attending weekly art gatherings and took a rent-controlled fourth-floor walk-up in the rear of a building near the corner of West Fourth and Bank Streets. He had a lothario of a landlord, Al, whom he idealized and who would come to play a major role in my own life. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Old brownstones lined the streets, and spindly, wire-protected, yet peed-upon ailanthus trees shaded the brownstones. Treasured by the residents were backyards full of gardens, koi ponds, cobblestone paths, bamboo fences, barbecue pits, and little French bistro tables. Evan’s place on the top floor overlooked this pleasant panorama. From a minuscule front hall, it went two steps up to a small library fitted only with a German metal swing lamp and a beanbag chair; the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, filled with a large collection of art books, ran the length of the apartment.
Th
e other wall was left with its bricks exposed. Up another step was the bedroom, or, rather, a Japanese open-box canopy frame above a platform bed that made a kind of room of its own.

Evan, dressed in a navy-and-white kimono, listening to Count Basie’s “Li’l Darlin’,” Billie Holiday, and other jazz records on his Bang and Olufsen turntable, was to all outward appearances at home with the condition of bachelorhood. However, as the days and weeks of his separation from Marta stretched on, he began to cast about for a replacement.

Th
is is where I come in.

My affair with Evan Simm began in late spring of 1959 and lasted for less than a year.

We had been seeing each other for several weeks—a lunch, two dinners, and a movie—when Evan said, “Come up to my place for dinner and I’ll show you my Japanese prints.”
Th
e joke was he wasn’t kidding.

I walked up to his fourth-floor apartment at 7:30 p.m, on a mild, seventy-degree evening in June. After a good look at his book of Arno drawings and, yes, some Japanese prints, we moved for a second round of Tanqueray martinis to the back porch, where night had fallen; lights were flickering in the buildings across the way, and paper lanterns swung and glowed in the gardens below. Evan prepared two T-bones, medium rare, over a charcoal-burning hibachi, and pulled out of the refrigerator two green salads, which he tossed lightly with vinegar and oil. I put candles inside the hurricane shades and lit them and we settled down to some serious eating. Fred Astaire sang “
Th
ey Can’t Take
Th
at Away from Me,” accompanied by Oscar Peterson. I remember Evan’s saying as we touched glasses, “Here’s to the beautiful children we’ll have together.”

Th
e apartment, the dinner, the cocktails, the love songs, the reference to what beautiful children I could give him, all signified to me, in my misreading of the code we were following, that it was a serious relationship we were about to enter, one that justified the surrender of my hitherto carefully guarded virginity. Soon we were naked on top of one another, in the candlelit confines of Evan’s platform bed, where he tenderly discovered and then set about physically confirming the virginal state of my body. I rode through the experience as if borne along on an ocean wave, taking in the surprising gentleness of Evan’s lovemaking, and appreciating to the depths of my English-major soul the compliment he paid my breasts: “
Th
ey look like the faces of two young perch.” To my trusting mind, all of this was following a classic pattern. I knew—or thought I knew—that these references to children and this biblical flattery were oblique allusions to a forthcoming proposal of marriage. As a practiced hand at this sort of thing, Evan knew better.

Th
e follow-up was equally irresistible. I was delivered home at sunrise, and after I had slept only a few hours, two dozen long-stemmed red roses—the first ever in my date book—were delivered to my door, impressing the hell out of my British roommate.

It must have been about noon the “morning after.” I had just finished trimming the stems and arranging the roses when Evan called and said he would be picking me up in half an hour. He said he owned a cunning orange Volkswagen and we were going to take a little trip in it to Lancaster County—Pennsylvania Dutch territory in the Brandywine Valley. I put on a black cotton dress, with a wide, swinging skirt and bright pink sprigs of dogwood on it, and some strappy raffia sandals, and by the time I had packed a big straw bag to sling over my shoulder, the buzzer told me he was at the door.

So began a surreal thirty-six hours during which Evan kept up a steady stream of chatter regarding the delights, cultural, ethnic, equine, gustatorial, and architectural, of the terrain toward which we were headed.

We stopped midafternoon in a little tea shop on the outskirts of Amish country, and I had my first mint julep, in a frosty silver tankard with a fresh mint leaf sticking out of the top. All very heady, but my excitement was somewhat tempered by concerns that there was something wrong; I had needed a sanitary pad to stanch bleeding I had no clue about the significance of. Was I damaged goods in some literal sense? Was I jeopardizing my ability to have those “beautiful children” Evan had so seductively dangled before my eyes the night before? Ought I to be recovering from this earthshaking change in my body by twenty-four hours of bed rest in a darkened room instead of swanning about the countryside with cocktail stops on the itinerary?

If I spoke at all, God knows what I said. Certainly nothing to the point. Meanwhile, Evan solicitously plied me with BLTs and a roster of local pleasures that included quilt shops and the Andrew Wyeth gallery. As I was to learn, he never failed to pursue a piece of art or sculpture he admired, and the hyperrealism of the Wyeth country scenes touched that area of his aesthetic makeup that he had so fully developed in Japan.

In the late afternoon we drew up to a parking lot outside the Lancaster County Fair. Evan exclaimed with pleasure at an advertising bill announcing a stage show appearance later that evening by Anna Russell, a singer from New South Wales who made fun of opera. Her condensed account of
Th
e Ring of the Niebelung,
Evan assured me, would have me in stitches. He bought tickets, and fortified with further drinks (no more juleps, but gin and tonics, as I recall), we did indeed laugh lustily at Miss Russell, a buxom woman in her fifties, who played the appreciative crowd like a maestro, polishing us off with a second of her famous set pieces, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera.”

Did I worry about where I would lay my fuzzy blond head that night? What,
me
worry? I was in no state to ponder the sexual mechanics of lovemaking through Kotexes or to go in for woozy wonderings about my moral condition. Was I a young woman no longer a maiden but still respectable? Or was my moral condition conditional upon my being—or not being—engaged to be married? We stayed, as I recall, in a twee bed-and-breakfast with such a quantity of mattress and bedding that I forgot whether any of it turned pink during the night’s amours. A breakfast of popovers was still being served as we exited around noon the Sunday of this extraordinary trio of days.

Was ever a seduction so drawn out and so hedged about with museum viewings, green fields, and fresh garden-grown salads? I was deposited back at my West Seventy-Fifth Street lodgings sometime after midnight, none the wiser, though maybe an indefinable bit sadder than when I had left them.

My roommate’s head was deep in her pillow on the parlor couch. She had not taken the cover off my bed. I suppose she was convinced by this time that I had gone for the duration of the weekend, if not permanently decamped.

My
head did begin to clear after stumbling into the office at ten on Monday morning, glad of
Th
e
New Yorker
’s staggered office hours. But somehow I never did take myself in hand for an examination of my own actions. I thought at the time that it was because I was so fascinated to see what new act of extravagant courtship Evan would come up with. I now think I was so alienated from my own feelings as to have—in the emotional sense—none. Physically, I soon grew out of that initial state of stiffness and soreness, awakening to an entirely new erotic bliss that was as much due to a native “taking to it” on my part, which surprised us both, as to the expertise of my lover. Whenever I was not actually in bed with Evan in those first weeks of summer 1959, I was dreamily contemplating being in bed with him. It was a whole new world, all right.

Th
roughout June, July, and August, Evan suggested with gratifying regularity that we lunch together as well as breakfast and dine together. And he seemed to know a bewildering array of Midtown restaurants.
Th
e two or three specializing in Japanese cuisine were high on his list. He waxed so mystically eloquent about the Japanese broth called miso that I believed I liked it. Similarly, the delights of tempura and dipped sweet potato or turnip and a variety of cold noodles. Fumbling with chopsticks and sitting cross-legged on mats became for me, if not poised accomplishments, at least no longer occasions for general hilarity.

Our nighttime entertainments were dim-lit cocktail
lounges all over town. One bar on Fifty-Seventh Street, called the Menemsha, was famous for its feature of a not very convincing storm.
Th
e room was lined on three sides with sailing-ship dioramas. Every forty minutes or so, the lights would dim, followed by bursts of lightning, claps of thunder, and dangerously rocking tanks full of water, which required all gentlemen present to put their arms around their ladies for safety. As if a tankful of water could—even by bursting—put us at hazard. Every woman in the room played along. Pretty clever, the restaurateur who thought that one up.

We checked out Chumley’s and the Cedar and the King Cole and Bemelmans and pretty much all the best-known bars in the city. Dinner, when not Japanese, was often at some other cozy little ethnic restaurant up or down Second Avenue. I began to realize that Evan was spending an awful lot of money, for although the places we ate might have been relatively modest, the habits that we indulged were expensive—cover charges and high-priced drinks at every jazz spot in town. We saw and heard Stan Getz and Anita O’Day. We caught Nina Simone at the Village Vanguard, Maynard Ferguson at Birdland, Roy Eldridge at Jimmy
Ryan’s, and Bobby Hackett at Eddie Condon’s.
Th
e
New Yorker
cartoonist Lee Lorenz played every Monday down at Marie’s Crisis Café, and we often went down to see him at the bar where
Th
omas Paine wrote a series of his most inflammatory tracts, called “
Th
e American Crisis,” at the window table in the front. We also saw on several memorable occasions at Marie’s a wonderful tap dancer called John Bubbles.