How To Catch A Lover

Wait for the flood tide

There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.

William Shakespeare , Julius Caesar

I was alive that summer of my 24th year. Buoyant, stuffed with golden motes. But anxious too. For I was going to visit my lover who I had not seen since April.

Humidity makes your hair frizz. It also marinates street smells and reduces a city to one defining smell. Boston smelled of popcorn. The air was hot and humid in the gap between the plane and the tunnel. It was like entering an oven.

I had come from London for a two-week holiday. But the holiday was a ruse. I had really come to catch my lover and secure him.

His apartment was on the ground floor of a large Victorian building, a bachelor pad with sofas and paintings. The windows were sashed, layered with glass and more glass and nets called bug screens. In England, we opened one pane to the open air. There was a bookcase with no books I would want to read, only dry accounting stuff. I was a reader of novels, scavenging them for the path through life.

My lover worked and his roommate worked, so they would dress themselves in their big American closets and disappear, leaving me in a popcorn town on the outskirts of Boston. There was a large stairwell and a heavy front door that echoed and clanged when I closed it and emerged onto the hot, close streets.

It was a short walk to the shops and library and park. The streets baked, and the brownstones cracked, the fire hydrants creaked and the pavements simmered their popcorn heat.

There were lots of exotic shops with strange implements in their windows and foreign symbols, which I learned were Jewish shops. The shops had exotic names such as Ruben’s and Cooperman’s.

With the toy shop, I was on familiar ground; on a corner with long curved windows and apple green woodwork. I remembered the pleasure of childhood when sweets and toys and picture books supplied all the joy I needed.

The popcorn smell disappeared at the bagel shop, overrun by garlic and onions and the warm yeasty smell of dough. Cooperman’s in white painted letters arched along the window. I had never eaten a bagel, but recalled one in a picture book when I was a child.

I didn’t dare walk in. I wouldn’t know what to order or how, because no one understood my London accent. At a deli, when I had asked for a tuna sandwich, the man — short, black-haired, white cap — had screwed up his eyes and bellowed to the woman behind me, ‘What’s she sayin’?’

My hair was frizzy, the hairs individually rising and tangling over the trays of bagels. I wiped my hand over my head, but it was more in hope, pure habit.

From the grocery store, the smell of oranges being juiced spilled onto the pavement through the air conditioner. I would have liked to enter and inspect the breads, all earthy and brown and nutty. But I could only take in so much newness.

Opposite the bookshop was a cookie store where you could buy ten cookies all at once and they put them in a box with a handle. The smell of chocolate wrapped around the storefront and the red and white awning trapped the smell of chocolate and made that patch of street warm and sweet.

At the bookshop, I had no qualms about entering. It had tables of books and shelves of books and that nice peaceful hubbub you find in bookshops and the popcorn smell mingled with the smell of paper and calendars. But even here the familiar was exotic, for books wore different covers. The Great Gatsby was bigger and bolder and brighter in its American cover.

I bought a book because the dry accounting books were not books to cheer the soul and I had finished Vanity Fair. The Age of Innocence was only one dollar and had a Bostonian cover of a woman with her hair piled high and not a strand of it frizzing. I felt better with the book. For the halcyon days were tinged with the deadline of my return to London.

My lover’s family lived in a big Victorian house with wood floors and elaborate fireplaces. My lover’s mother bought sliced meat for sandwiches and the slices piled to the thickness of a brick. That had been the same with the tuna sandwich I had found so embarrassing; the tuna filled the bread like a baseball, a big round glob that bent the bread slices into hemispheres.

There were lots of paintings at the house because the mother was an artist. She even had paintings in the bathroom, a dreamy green-scape of a pregnant woman. ‘But her thighs are too thick,’ said the mother. I didn’t know you could do that, pick holes in a painting. I thought if it was on the wall, it was complete and perfect.

I took the train to Boston some days. It was called the T and when it disappeared into the earth, there were blasts of warm air from the tunnels and the popcorn smell mixed with the smell of burnt coffee. At the stations, an announcer drawled the name, extending and pulling as if the names were toffee. Arlington was Ahhhlington and Park Street was Pahhhhk street.

I walked the city in one day and when I asked where the rest of it was, I was told there was no more. In London, there was always more.

I was learning all kinds of wondrous things like how it was normal to go often to a restaurant and have enormous plates of food and hunks of bread and slabs of cheesecake that wasn’t cheesecake at all, because cheesecake came in thin slices and was always yellow with raisins, but here was strawberry and chocolate and vanilla and came slathered in whipped cream and strawberries and blueberries and bananas.

My lover took me to Cape Cod and Nantucket and Vermont, and we stayed in old houses swathed in swags and festoons. We drove everywhere and every night we ate out, and I made up for rarely eating out all my twenty-four years.

I coped with this eating out and was confident I could keep coping. I had no desire to go back to beans on toast and mugs of tea and spitting showers and on and off trains and waiting in the rain for buses.

When the two weeks were up, I had to do some maneuvering. Fortunately, my lover was a man, which made things so much easier.

‘Well, I go home on Monday,’ I said on the Saturday. I cried a little and bit my lip and wrung my hands.

My lover didn’t say, ‘Stay.’ He never said the word as a question or an imperative. He did not tell me to go home, did not even hint at that. What did he say, exactly? How did he speak for those ten minutes? What words and sentences did he wield that said nothing, but said enough? I kept quiet and let him make his own trap.

‘I suppose you have your job that’s waiting for you. Yes, time for a change…. you are right… change… yes you could change your job… well, tomorrow, two weeks, it has gone fast, I love you… you could, I suppose if you, maybe, what do you…. I think,… two weeks, decision, a decision… to stay, well… it’s a small… so… this is a … and you get on well with… and he does like you… there’s no problem, decision, that’s it then… we’ve decided. Tomorrow… I love you…’

Reader, my flood rose to its peak and I jumped. On Tuesday, the day when I ought to be in London, behind my bank clerk’s desk ready for the bank doors to open at nine, was not yet daytime in Boston.

It was four in the morning, still dark, when I crept to the telephone, my heart thudding. How strange, in sultry dark Boston, to hear the echoes and clinks of lumpy, grey London.

‘I’m not coming back,’ I told my manager, and that I was three thousand miles away, that the earth where I crouched was still in darkness, emboldened me.

‘No, never,’ I replied.

What could the old man say? With his pipe now stuffed with my implacable resignation. Behind him came the buzz of the enquiry desk and the rumble of the phone and the thumps and clicks of the cashiers and the heavy bags of coin pounding the cashiers’ desks.

I crept back to my lover. Pulled the sheet to my chin. What was the manager doing now? Was he going around the office informing my colleagues that they had lost me to America? How were my colleagues reacting? Were they green, incredulous, shocked, impressed, dazzled by my chutzpah?

They would not know such a word. It’s Jewish and American. But who was sitting in my seat, leafing through my files, wishing they too were three thousand miles from pipe smoke and pounds and the 5:35 from Waterloo?

I was free, unshackled, unmoored, adrift in the land of Steinbeck and Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Were my erstwhile colleagues even now assembling the envelope for my whip round? How much would they collect and what would they buy me and could they send my present in the post?

I was no longer a London bank clerk. I lived in the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave, the nation of the dollar, and doggy bags and doughnuts.

I was also an illegal alien and unemployed. I wrapped my arm around my lover. His maleness enchanted me. The entanglement of chest, the bristles of jaw, the muscle of arm. He was mine.