The bride’s parents also urged against marrying, but after Sachs sold a satirical sketch to a cabaret revue 141 and got a nice mention in Cue Magazine, they felt maybe Gladys knew something. And as the first few years slipped by, between his work and his dedicated after-hours writing and her job and night school, fate mercifully left them limited time to get on each other’s nerves. This was not to say that there were no moments of pleasure where they laughed together and held each other like when they first met, but those times were not enough to counter the skirmishes. Her capacity to enjoy every mediocre movie, play, or meal bothered him, and he put it down to a lack of discrimination. She found him too critical and annoying with his smorgasbord of psychosomatic complaints. Once, when he lost his temper and called her “a member of the low IQ club” because he had to explain to her what was funny about a cartoon in The New Yorker, he was racked with remorse, unable to write, and bought her roses to atone. He had by then found a job on a morning TV show supplying topical gags; a job he hated, but it got him out of the mailroom and paid handsomely. One piece of real good news came when a play of his was optioned for an Off-Broadway production. To celebrate, he took Gladys to Toots Shor’s, where he’d never been but only read about. They were given the once-over by the maître d’ and seated in Siberia. They had a fine time and, leaving, he overtipped the waiter by double. He also gave far too much to the maître d’ and the coat check girl and the doorman, but he would have rather died than tip too little by mistake. At the dinner at Toots the subject of perhaps seeing a marriage counselor came up, and they both thought it might be worth thinking about but never followed through.
Jerry Sachs had a long time ago developed the habit of thinking out his creative ideas while walking the streets and juggling plot points. Rather than sweating out second-act problems or curtain lines over his Olivetti portable, he would wander the town and let the change of venue stoke his imagination. Often he’d walk through Central Park, and he liked to sit on a particular bench on the west side of the sailboat pond and stare up at the apartments and penthouses along Fifth Avenue. He would imagine who lived there, and wonder if their lives in any way resembled the scenes he’d grown up enchanted by. Were there beautiful people at that moment exchanging bright dialogue and sipping cocktails on a Cedric Gibbons set? He liked to think that if his play was a success Off-Broadway and could be moved to Broadway and become a smash, he might one day be able to live high above the city he loved, dress in a tux for dinner, and have the Lunts over or Noel Coward. And who was his wife in this daydream? Was she Irene Dunne? Carole Lombard? Was she Katharine Hepburn? The sad fact for him was that it was not Gladys. He just could not see himself spending the rest of his life with her. Dying in her arms. She was a lovely person who would make the right man a great wife, but he was not the right man and he disliked himself for it. Soon, the sun began to dip, as he always put it, somewhere behind New Jersey, and a soft golden glow bathed the building facades along the coast of Fifth Avenue, and New York didn’t get much lovelier. It gave him a feeling of melancholy, Manhattan melancholy with its Tin Pan Alley score sneaking in and making him feel sad yet pleasant. He liked being pleasantly awash in melancholy, which was a contradiction in logic, but where was it written that everything can be explained? He would return to that bench many times and play the assorted escapist movies in his head, eventually going home to his walk-up downtown to face the regrettable vows he and Gladys leapt into before they looked. He was twenty-two now, and the situation between them did not improve nor did it get worse. It drifted. Tolstoy had written that every unhappy family was unhappy in different ways, and he and his wife were always coming up with fresh ways. Perhaps he balked at having dinner with her sister and her sister’s husband, a broker obsessed by white water rafting, a subject of interest to Sachs on a par with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or there was the time Gladys found one of his favorite recordings by the Count Basie Orchestra just so much noise. And he definitely was not interested in going apple picking with her and another married couple in Vermont or doing archery with her brother. Also, Gladys had become somewhat interested in liberal politics, and while Sachs was also a liberal, he did not enjoy accompanying her to hear folk singing. The unkindest cut of all was her saying the city was great now, but if they ever have children, it’s no place to bring them up.
One day in mid-spring when the buds were opening and Central Park was fleetingly at its most beautiful, Sachs was sitting on his favorite bench trying to figure out how he could end act one of his play with a laugh. The loveliness of spring in New York was one of the few things he and Gladys agreed on. Summer she hated, and winter she found punishing. For Sachs, summer in the city was divine with everyone away. It was truly a city that Larry Hart had said was made for a girl and a boy. He loved all seasons in Manhattan; winter blizzards, the birds of April, the crisp red and yellow leaves of fall. It all moved him. Now he stared up at the Fifth Avenue rooftops, the melody of a Richard Rodgers tune going through his head. There were some amateur admirals at the sailboat pond guiding their small vessels across the surface of the water with remote controls or just letting the breeze do the work. Miniature craft crisscrossed the placid sea of the city’s east Seventies. The air smelled of honeysuckle from the early bloomers. He was rapt in thought, adrift in his enigmatic melancholy, thinking about his play and how he could send an audience out for intermission on a high. He failed to notice at first that someone had sat down at the other end of his bench. For a while he didn’t look over, but the most delightful whiff of blended tobacco smoke from a Lucky Strike caused him to glance left and so he saw her. Like the character of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, who drinks till he hears that click in his brain, Sachs heard a very definite click in his. Sitting a few feet away was an incredibly lovely young girl and lovely in the exact way Sachs had always found particularly beautiful. A country-fresh face, dark hair, dark eyes, violet eyes, white skin, a face not just beautiful but beautiful in an interesting way. Her hair fell to her shoulders, and she wore little or no makeup and needed none. Sachs thought she had the look of a sexy Pole or Ukrainian farm girl, but her eyes projected sophisticated city smarts. And if all that were not enough, she had an overbite: for Sachs, a gift from heaven. Suffice it to say, if he was a pinball machine all the lights would be flashing, the bells ringing, and the jackpot sign blinking away. He was a firm believer in love at first sight and had seen it happen in dozens of delightful movies made feasible under the most impossible circumstances.
There was no question in Sachs’s mind, she had that thing that Cole Porter nailed as “the thing that makes birds forget to sing.” You name it, Sachs thought, everything I find special is there in spades.
Shalom. Babka.
Central Park has its lure.
This is fascinating! It’s my dream to live in New York. Was wondering if you could take a look at my newsly published newsletter and lmk what you think? If you enjoy, I would love a sub or a shoutout! I am looking for someone to just give me a chance and as someone who grew up and got into the entertainment business, I bet you must know what that feels like. Much love!