He loved her as much as one could love a stranger without hearing her speak and ruin it. She wore a light Aquascutum raincoat, open, with a soft short white cotton dress, white anklets, and loafers, and carried a large leather shoulder bag that would have been the envy of any postman. In it one could see a paperback copy of Miss Julie by Strindberg. Her ears were pierced, and she wore medium silver hoops. Aside from the earrings, she had no other jewelry. No watch, and more importantly, no rings. Sachs was not good at picking up women. The truth was he had never actually picked up a woman. He had had a number of dates before Gladys, but usually with girls he knew from school or if he was fixed up. The few times he had been smitten by someone across a crowded room, his shyness paralyzed him. When it came to beautiful women, he had always seen himself as the plaintiff, a seller wandering ineptly through a buyer’s market. He could not bear the hypocrisy of hearing his own voice trying to make a moment seem natural and casual when in fact two strangers are testing the waters to see if they have enough in common to maybe one day share a cemetery plot. Too, he always felt self-conscious about his erotic desires, which he felt could be read on his forehead like the news streaming across the Times building on Forty-Second Street. With Gladys, she had initiated the conversation at a New Year’s party. If she hadn’t asked him to please get off her foot, they might never have wound up man and wife. Sachs did not want to be caught staring but could not take his eyes off the girl. He tried to make it seem he was concentrating on the Fifth Avenue skyline and nothing else, but he could not resist stealing sideways glances at her face, causing his endorphins to fuse with her pheromones and eureka! The chemistry was already good. But wait; soon she would finish her cigarette, rise, and walk out of his life. He would return home, resume his seat at dinner opposite Gladys, resume his far side of their bed, resume his hunch over the Olivetti portable typing fiction, always fiction, immersed in a world of make-believe. Even now, his brain was creating the tragic tale of a man who falls in love with a girl he sees in Central Park, is too inhibited to speak, and regrets it the rest of his life. He watched her take a final drag on her cigarette and toss it. Suddenly, he heard a horrible sound and realized it was his own voice.
“Please don’t think I’m being rude, but I couldn’t help noticing you’re reading Miss Julie, and I’m a playwright and Strindberg is one of my all-time favorites, so I know that play inside and out and, if you have any questions, I’d be happy to help.” His Jiminy Cricket, who sometimes spoke to him and was usually quite critical, congratulated him. “There, schlemiel, was it so terrible?” the cricket said. It was Jiminy Cricket, but somehow, it sometimes sounded like his mother.
“I’m doing a scene from it for my acting class,” she said with a smile that was sweet and warm, making him want to hurry her down to City Hall and marry her.
“So you’re an actress,” he said, realizing this was a hardly brilliant batting back of the conversational tennis ball.
“I’m giving it my best shot,” she said.
“It’s a great role,” he said, “and you look perfect for it.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
“You don’t think I should lose two pounds?”
“Are you kidding? You have the shape every man dreams of.”
“Gee, you’re a pushover,” she said and laughed.
“You’re a perfect Miss Julie, and if you have any questions about the character or the themes . . .”
“I do have a question,” she said.
“Shoot.”
“Why do you keep looking up at my apartment?”
“What do you mean?” he said. “Are you saying you live in one of those penthouses?” His eyes widening to the size of two fried eggs.
“I live in that one, with the terrace.”
“I’m stunned,” he said. “I come here often and sit on this bench and dream up plots about the people who live in those elegant rooftop apartments. Maybe someday I’ll write a play about someone like you. If I’m lucky enough to get to know you.” By now Sachs’s heart was beating like a tom-tom at a human sacrifice.
“I live there with my parents. They’re interesting, but I don’t know if we’d make good play characters. There’s not much conflict.”
“Were you raised in Manhattan?”
“Born and raised, overlooking the sailboat pond.”
“So Central Park is sort of your garden.”
“I guess you could say that, since my school friends and I spent so much time in the park growing up. And why not? It never disappoints. I still love to come here and sit, people-watch, and smoke. My mother won’t let me smoke in the house. She says the smoke gets into the fabrics of the furniture.”
Sachs envisioned her parents’ apartment. No plastic slipcovers up there, he thought. No oilcloth, no linoleum. When she grew up, no drinking her orange juice or chocolate milk out of glasses that were once Yahrzeit candles.
“So what did you invent about me and my family for a play? Or do I have to wait and pay a scalper’s price to catch it at the Morosco?”
He loved the sound of her voice, and she had such a charming delivery.
“I see you all upscale and beautiful and trading snappy patter over cocktails. Of course, the only penthouses I’ve ever seen have been in black-and-white at the Midwood Theater or the Loew’s Kings or the Brooklyn Paramount. Incidentally, my name is Jerry Sachs,” he said, offering his hand to shake. She shook it and, for a brief moment in the chaotic meaningless cosmos, he was gripping something that mattered.
“Lulu Brooks,” she said.
“Lulu? Like Little Lulu the cartoon character?”
“It’s Lucinda, but everyone calls me Lulu,” she said, flashing an Ipana smile that made him realize for the first time her face was both innocent and sensual. Another contradiction in a world especially designed for him never to figure out.
“I always liked Little Lulu,” he said. “As a kid I loved the drawings and the mysterious cartoonist’s Spartan signature, Marge.”
“I think of it more like ‘Lulu’s Back In Town.’ You probably never heard the song but there’s a great recording of it by Fats Waller. You ever heard of Fats Waller?”
“Oh, now you walked right into it,” he said. “I’m very up on jazz piano. I know everyone from Cow Cow Davenport to Cecil Taylor. Fats is one of my main men. What surprises me is that you know Fats.”
“I just love his singing. He and Billie Holiday kill me,” she said. “I like to sing.”
“‘You’re Laughing at Me’ and ‘How Can You Face Me?’ And ‘There’ll Be Some Changes Made’ with Gene Sedric on the clarinet.”
“I play piano,” she said. “I studied with John Mehegan, ever heard of him?”
“Not—no—I.”
“Mainly to accompany myself. I love singing and I love acting. I’d love to be in a musical.”
“Where did you go to school?” he asked her.
“Brandeis, but I dropped out so I could get going with my career. I have no patience. One of my myriad flaws.”
“I dropped out of Brooklyn College,” he said. “I also was impatient to move into Manhattan and take the city by storm. But not with a musical. I wanted to write The Iceman Cometh or Miss Julie.”
“Have any of your plays been produced?” she asked.
“My first one is slated for the fall,” he said.
“Is there a part for a twenty-one-year-old spoiled dropout?”
“Now I wish there was. No, the characters are all older. Older and disillusioned. But the mother is spoiled.”
“I can play disillusioned but in life I’m not cynical, or am I?” she said. “I think I still have most of my illusions.”
“Hang on to them. We need our illusions. Without our self-lying, it would be hard to get through the day.”
“Hey—is your play also so pessimistic?”
“O’Neill is my strongest influence.”
“He got his vision from Nietzsche,” she said.
“Oh, so you know about O’Neill,” he said.
“And Freud,” she said. “Freud was the premier pes-simist.”
“Pessimism is only realism under a different name,” he said.
“Sad, isn’t it? That we need our false hopes to live.”
“My illusions come mostly from MGM,” he said. “I still hang on to the dream there’s a penthouse somewhere with people popping champagne corks and tossing off dazzling come-backs.”
“Would you like to see an actual penthouse on Fifth?” Lulu said. “Although I don’t think it will live up to your fantasies about anything you’ve seen starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.”
“I would love it,” Sachs said. In that split second his mind flashed back to the words of a Jewish uncle whose misanthropic humor always tickled him. “If something seems too good to be true,” Moishe Post had counseled, “you can bet it’s not.” And hearing that echo in his ear, he proceeded to leave the park with Lulu, cross Fifth Avenue, and enter a prewar limestone building he had, prior to that day, only passed and admired. He imagined the doorman gave him the fish eye when she took him into the lobby, the kind of look Louis Pasteur gave when he peered through his microscope. But why should he feel self-conscious? He looked presentable in his tweed jacket, crewneck sweater, and corduroy trousers. Nothing to be self-conscious about. So why was he? Perhaps it was five thousand years of tribal guilt that made him focus on the fact his shoes needed a shine.
The elevator operator was warm and friendly to Lulu and had taken her up and down since she was little.
“Are my parents home, George?” she asked him.
“Yes, they are,” he said pleasantly.
The elevator did not open directly into the apartment, but still it was the finest home he’d ever been to. There was a book-lined gallery and spacious rooms with high ceilings and a sweeping staircase leading to a second floor, and the living room was vintage with original moldings and a wonderful fireplace with a pine mantel. There were tall doors that opened to a terrace that overlooked Central Park. There was a paneled den with an actual bar that someone could stand behind and serve drinks. It was all furnished impeccably in a combination of traditional and contemporary. The rugs were oriental or custom designed, and the walls were hung with drawings and prints, often by artists he was familiar with. There were signed pencil sketches by Matisse and Picasso, by Miró. A Marie Laurencin watercolor, a van Dongen print. And many photos taken by her father, Arthur Brooks, a professional fashion photographer.
“This is Jerry Sachs,” she told her mother. “He picked me up in the park.”
I love Woody’s Manhattan- past and present. Midnight in Paris was brilliant but it’s the Manhattan stories I return to. Weird because I live a few thousand miles away in the UK and I’ve never been there. But Woody’s Manhattan is lit up like a motel in Hopper painting beckoning me in from the dark.
I was born and bred in Brooklyn. Yeshivah of Flatbush, Midwood (a few years after Woody) then Adelphi on LI. In spite of my BA in psychology [pop said I should have taken typing!), I have been a travel agent for 54 years (BC before computers). Worked in the Trinity Buildings writing the travel for a large IT company in 2001. Used to schlepp to Brooklyn to my old agency to get my airline tickets. On 911, I was in Brooklyn, picking up tickets….needed to leave and I found Prince Edward Island! When folks (ha! don’t use that word in Brooklyn) say I’m funny, I tell them I went to the same high school as Woody Allen: there must have been something in the chalk! They still think I’m funny, even after that! This place is magic…. I have been named the “official “ PEI Bubbe and I even fed our premier Bubbe’s brisket last Hanukkah!
Not sure what I am supposed to do now! See ya