Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(41)

What was so appealing about imagining a future with Max was that I stood to do as much for him, if not more, than he stood to do for me—at least financially. We could live well in the city and take trips and have a summer home, and he would not only let but quite likely need me to keep working, and I would revel in that.

And I had been imagining a future with him, even as he’d worked shirtlessly in my apartment. I suppose it was something I’d done before with other men, but never so readily. It was as if his very unlikeliness as a match—young, striving, freshly American—made it easier to contemplate: less of a trap, more of a game. What would Mother think? It was delicious.

“My dad’s in the import business, too,” said Max, wiping his lips with a napkin. “Owner of Caputo Company, Inc., over on Hudson Street. Dad would really like your selling style, I think. The way you’re so funny.”

“That’s sweet,” I said. “Do you want to know the trick? This is a trade secret, so I hope you can be trusted. The trick is that you can’t joke about merchandize indiscriminately. Inexpensive items can be treated with a tongue placed more freely in the cheek than expensive ones can. It’s all right to say something smart about a nice homey shower curtain, while it wouldn’t seem quite decent to joke about a Chippendale chair. You don’t see banks waxing whimsical about trust funds, or Tiffany growing elfin on the subject of emerald rings. But a double boiler is something else again. Or a package of prunes. Or a baby’s undershirt.”

He folded his napkin on the table and laughed.

“Lillian, you’re too much,” he said. “I could listen to you talk all night.”

“Oh, let’s don’t do that,” I said. “Enough about work. Shall we go?”

On the way home we stopped and picked up some gin.

We took the elevator back up to my floor.

I knew what I wanted to have happen, but I didn’t know if it would.

“Kiss me quick before I close the door,” I said.

And he did.

“I don’t want to leave yet, Lillian,” he said.

“Well then, come in,” I said.

And in he came.

Dinner had been such a din of jokes and easy rapport that I could hardly eat for just wanting to talk to and listen to and look at him. He let me be funny, let me be a poet, and he didn’t try to overexplain my own interests to me.

He was the same as we sat on the davenport, drinking our drinks: martinis he’d made, meticulously mixed.

Harmonium still sat on the coffee table, and he picked it up and flipped through.

“Huh. ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,’” he read aloud. “I can see why you’d like this guy. He’s serious about what he’s doing, but he can kid around.”

“I love that one,” I said. “I’m only partway through, but I also really like ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico.’”

And I reached over to show him, and he put his arm around me.

“Strange coincidence,” he said, “but my father’s named after a poet. Dante.”

“I think I’ve heard of that guy,” I said. Then we looked into each other’s eyes, and I dropped the book atop the newly laid rug, and we kissed some more.

I felt intoxicated—drugged by his presence. We went to bed. An infant moon, an evening start. A night as throbbing as any metropolis. He was magnificent.

My clothes on the floor had never looked so right as the morning after he spent the night: chiffons and crepes mixed with his soft gray trousers and navy socks.

The outdoors beyond the window had never been more polished: a mackerel sky over a misty dawn. Even my cat Tallulah liked him, and she didn’t like anybody but me.

We passed the entire weekend that way, only saying good-bye after lunch on Sunday.

Nothing felt the same after that, nor did I want it to.

*

Before I met Max, it had begun to feel like the heretofore gentle maw of work had grown little mandibles and begun to gnaw at me. But afterwards, the teeth dulled and then fell out completely, and I was fresh and happy all over again.

Before I met Max—though I wouldn’t admit it to myself—every morning when I punched the time clock, and every evening when I crept out to smack it another feeble blow, I’d get to coveting a different life, maybe, than the one I had. A motto of mine had long been, “When the heart isn’t in it, all zest in the job is destroyed,” but I could not acknowledge that perhaps my zest had diminished. How could I, when I had to keep working? Had to keep hiring all these new Little Bright-Eyes, the way I used to be, for whom life was just one potentially enriching experience hot on the heels of the last?

Before I met Max, I had still been working. Not tirelessly—you bet your baby I was tired—but unceasingly, even as everyone around me ceased, at least from time to time. They went abroad, they wed, they spawned, they got appendicitis. But me, I never stopped.

And there’d be days when, as I came home from work in the drizzle, even the food stalls on Third Avenue looked weary: limp parsley, worn cabbage, forlorn spinach. I’d think of sandwiches—rye with a spot of mustard—and how I’d give my left eye to eat them under a sunny rural sky in the company of someone fascinating.

Hence my new apartment. But that alone would not be enough to revive me—so I had begun to realize, now that I had met Max.