I Loved You Wednesday (21 page)

I’m always with her. Always there. Always on call; twenty-four hours a day.

Sometimes, even in the very early hours of the morning, I’ll roll closer to her in bed and pinch those two scrumptious buns, letting her know I’m still with her even when she’s out cold.

Quite an exhilarating experience, this business of being in love for the first time. Wonderfully all-consuming in the attentive energy it requires.

I want to tell you just exactly what it is that produces the glow, just what it is that now brings design and purpose to my every day, just what it is that has so swiftly relegated all previous sexual encounters to meaningless bodily functions.

I want to tell you all these things, but I cannot.

I cannot, furthermore, tell you where in the biochemical makeup of my body such rewarding feelings of elation first stir. I can’t tell you what it was that first gave the go-ahead to my normally limited range of emotional outpourings, suddenly running them rampant, expanding and blossoming as they are.

No. I don’t know the whys or hows of any of these incredible changes in me.

I do know, though, I want them never to stop.

With everything else, certainly one of the nicer aspects of our collective happiness has been retaining the same sound friendship as before. We still joke about the same ridiculous things and argue with the same ferocity and enjoy the other’s company at least as much as before.

We’re having such a good time, in fact, we decide to move over to my place for a while.

Our apartments are similar one-bedroom affairs, both on fourth floors in old, time-eaten buildings.

The big difference between them, actually, is that Chris’ apartment is in a walk-up. Mine at least has the added luxury of an ancient, craggy elevator that may or not arrive on the floor of your choice in fits and starts.

And one hundred and forty-five combined pounds of stubborn bulldog travel better by elevator than by pushing, pulling, lugging, tugging, shoving and dragging those two wheezing fatties up and down four long, narrow, squeaking flights of peeling stairwell.

It’s a rather smooth transition over to my place, and things continue to climb, progressively getting better, growing stronger. We’re forever demonstrative, constantly caring and always arousing each other. My repeated reassurances to Chris eventually pay off as she gradually relaxes into believing and finally accepting how well everything’s working out.

And seeing her relax, at last seemingly secure in my total commitment, puts me at ease, placing me less on the lookout for trouble.

We can each freely and openly admit we’ve never been happier.

I bicycle around Manhattan nowadays, swerving in and out of honking cars, singing news of my romance to the tops of buildings as I pedal along carefree, blindly ignoring cabs and trucks cutting me off, trying to kill me.

I’m Gene Kelly singing in the rain; Donald O’Connor breaking all the balloons; Louis Jordan running around the fountains of Paris.

I’m in love, and it’s just as MGM always promised.

Day after day, week after week, I assault acquaintances I run into on the street who make the mistake of mechanical-

ly asking, “What’s new?” I flaunt them with a barrage of enthusiasm, going into great detail, ranting on and on about Chris, Chris, Chris.
LOVE
, I tell them, is “what’s new!”

Yes, it’s true!

Love has indeed landed on Seventy-second Street, and as the next five weeks go by, nothing else matters.

We’re in love. We’re happy. We’re on top of the world.

Nothing even remotely precarious about it.

Now that includes just about everything two people could hope for together, doesn’t it?

And all this sounds just like the best happily-ever-after situation possible, right? Just like in the movies, right?

Wrong!

If you really want to get depressed, read on.

Chapter Twelve
 

“How could I be so lucky?” asks the voice of Chris somewhere in the back of my head.

“What did you say?” I mutter, basically still asleep.

“I asked how I could be so lucky.”

“That’s nice,” I summon, rolling my tongue around the inside of my dry mouth, chomping my teeth.

“Well?” comes a definitely insistent tone.

Well, what? I ask myself, surfacing toward reality.

“Something’s wrong somewhere, Steve. It’s impossible to be this happy!”

There!

She did it. She woke me. Opening my eyes with a squint, I focus in on Chris, flat on her back, eyes glued to the ceiling, one hand on her stomach, one hand on mine. “What’d you say?” I ask again, though I’m sure it’s for the first time.

“Nothing. I was just talking out loud.”

“What time is it?” I grunt, maneuvering my head over to the digital clock, getting a five thirty-two reading, before moaning disagreeably, “Why the hell are you waking me?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Because?”

“I’m so happy.”

“Chris, no one loses sleep over being too happy.”

“I wasn’t. I was lying here wondering how much longer we’ve got.”

Patience.

“Let’s go back to sleep for a few hours, huh, Chris? Let’snot worry ourselves over not having anything worth worrying about, okay?”

“You know, good things don’t last forever.”

“That’s yesterday’s news,” I say, plotting a way to fall back to sleep while giving her the impression she’s got my undivided attention.

“ ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’! That’s Robert Frost!”

“What’d he know?”

“Don’t make light of this, Steve. I’m getting
very
upset!”

Patience. Patience. “All right!” I say, actually taking the trouble to sit up in bed, looking her directly in the eye. “I promise not to make light of this. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Well, I . . . I’m not sure.”

“That’s not bad for a start. But what was the question?”

“The question was: How could I be so lucky?”

I lean over and kiss her nose, allaying all fears, I hope, by adding, “No, Chris. The question is, ‘How could I be so lucky?’ “

Chris throws her arms around me, singing “I love you!”

Kissing her nose again, I send the signal directly back to the source. “And I love you, Chris. Very, very much.”

Chris sighs a joyful release.

“Now can we join the dogs in going back to sleep for a while?”

“But I’m not tired.”

“Then why don’t you get up and read?”

“I don’t feel like reading.”

“Well, there must be a happy medium.”

“There is. On Seventy-ninth Street. I went to see her last August. She told me I’d be falling in love with a brilliant actor, and she was right.”

“Gotcha. All right, kid. You’re on your own. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, I’m going to bed!”

“Okay. Good night, Steve.”

“Good night, Chris.”

“See you in a few hours.”

Right! Now what was I dreaming?

“Did you hear me, Steve? I said I’ll see you in a few hours!”

This is getting silly. “And I’ll see
you
in a few hours.”

“I’ll miss you,” purrs Chris.

“And I’ll miss
your

“Sweet dreams, darling.”

“Sweet dreams to
your

Lifting the covers over my shoulders, I turn over on my stomach, and as I close my eyes again, the voice in the girl next to me, still, I assume, staring at the ceiling, says matter-of-factly, “Face it. It can’t last!”

Patience. Patience. Patience. Let’s remember with whom we are dealing. But why is she again flaunting her insecurities?

I’d laid all doubts to rest weeks ago. Yet here she is, popping up, out of the blue, insisting again, with no justification, that it can’t last.

I must remember how nervous she gets. Perhaps since she sees how much stronger it’s grown between us, so much better each day, she may be afraid the deeper she gets, the harder she’ll fall.

I’ll just have to be even more reassuring. I’ve got to let her know I’m here to stay. I love and at least half understand her.

I’m determined to make this thing work.

Period.

Several evenings later Chris asks, “Steve, have we planned anything for tomorrow night?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good. My friend Astin wants to get together with us for dinner.”

“Who’s Astin?”

“Astin. Astin Mondale. You’ve heard me talk about Astin. My art designer friend.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Oh, I must have. We met on the Clairol set and have since become friends.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, really. You’ll meet him tomorrow, and I just know you’ll adore each other.”

The following evening Chris and I travel down to the Village to visit her new friend before we all go out to eat.

Well.

An amazingly slight, charming, almost whimsical fellow, a veritable shriveled prune of a man with the most enormous mustache, opens the door and leads us into an apartment I do great injustice by calling unusually cluttered.

The whole of the small three-room place is a mess. And I don’t just mean a mess. I mean a
MESS!

Scattered about every which way are a myriad of dirty dishes, loose shoes and socks with holes, tiny marbles, a turned-over lamp still lit, a half-eaten, very old TV dinner, yards of string, wads of already-chewed gum, loose tobacco, half a dozen newspapers, ashtrays rampant with butts and ashes, crooked hanging pictures, piles of records with no jacket covers, closets so stuffed they haven’t space for another item, empty, label-less beer bottles, moth-eaten sweaters, greasy, egg-stained silverware, both clean and dirty laundry folded or strewn every which way, broken collar stays, melted rubber bands, broken-pointed pencils, dried felt-tipped pens, torn grocery bags, carrot peelings, endless candy wrappers, dozens of scattered vitamin bottles, yards of unraveled toilet paper strung festively about like crepe paper streamers at a birthday party and I swear twenty back issues of
House Beautiful.

And that’s just the hallway.

The rest of the place is worse.

We fight our way into what I assume must be the living room, clear away enough clutter to find what looks like the couch and sit down in a puff of dust.

Astin walks over to us, picks up a filthy sock, twirls it around his wrist and, shrugging his shoulders in part apology and part explanation, announces, “
Art is chaos!”

Astin then tells us how he’s usually neat as a pin. But when he flies off into one of his rages of creativity, he insists on being surrounded by the security of runaway debris.

“I take it you’re having a creative period then?” I foolishly ask.

“You noticed,” answers Astin, proudly pointing to his latest achievement.

And there on opposite walls are these two enormous canvases both of which are painted off-white. Period. There is nothing else on them.

“Brilliant!” exclaims Chris. “Where do you get your ideas?”

Astin and Chris now delve into an obtuse, in-depth discussion to which I contribute little principally because I have no idea about what it is they’re speaking.

“Plain is plane,” labels Chris.

“Life as a white womb!” answers Astin.

“The appearance of reality,” submits Chris.

Astin’s not so sure. “Or is it,” he ponders, “the reality of appearance?”

And so on.

Eventually, Astin goes into his contaminated kitchen, returning with tasty little fruit-nut bars created from Alice B. Toklas’ original recipe.

And after an hour or so we are all very stoned, even if more zonked on a paralyzing stupor than anything else.

The three of us eventually manage miraculously to make our way over to Astin’s favorite neighborhood Bulgarian restaurant for some inedible substances the menu unknowingly refers to as dinner.

Afterward, in the taxi ride uptown, Chris clamors enthusiastically, “Well, didn’t you just
love
him?”

“He seems very nice.”

“Nice? He’s brilliant!”

“He must be to live that way.”

“What way?”

“In that pigsty.”

“That was no pigsty. That was organized disorder!”

“Chris, that place was a disaster area!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just being difficult because you feel threatened by Astin.”

“Threatened? That’s absurd. He seems very pleasant. I just don’t see why you need someone like him.”