Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(42)
He had come along at just the right instant and revivified me without ever being patronizing. He was manly—maybe even the type some would describe as a man’s man, if they didn’t really know him—but also awake to the world in a way that few men were: childlike without being childish.
Before I met Max, I’d been giving my time to undependable and hence absurdly charming men. But Max proved to be both charming and dependable.
We didn’t keep our relationship a secret. Couldn’t: Though R.H. Macy’s was the Largest Store in the World, it was quite like a small town when it came to gossip. But Max was unfailingly discreet and refined.
*
Waiting for him on our second date, when I had him over for dinner, I still felt those proverbial butterflies, close as we’d grown that previous weekend. I polished the silver and laid out the savory tart, very smart, from a bakery I liked down the street. Opened the strawberry jam, plumped the cushions, powdered my nose and powdered it again. Still felt utterly uncomposed. Then the shrilling of the doorbell. Then Max, looking like an old-fashioned Valentine with his little box of candy tucked under his arm. Other times it would be sherry. Or brandy.
Peppermint patties and twelve-year-old Scotch—high and low, that was Max.
We played and replayed this scene many times through that late summer and fall.
We bought each other gifts. I’d seen an ad in an Altman window, for instance, over and over, on my walks at lunchtime: “He’ll be a perfect panorama in silk pajamas.” I got them for Max to keep at my place.
Max knew better than to get me only flowers and went instead to a Fifth Avenue florist run by a Mr. Schling who sold potted four-leaf clovers. Never a man unable to emote, Max had said, “Because the day I met you was the luckiest of my life, Lils” as he handed them to me.
“You’re more fun than anyone in the world,” was the best compliment he ever gave me.
When he would stay over—which was every weekend—I’d think of the etiquette manual I was writing. “A lady is wise to leave her host’s apartment long before cockcrow,” I advised, which was certainly true, and advice that I myself had always followed with other men, never staying the entire night—honestly never wanting to. But Max lived in Rutherford, so that was not an issue, and he could stay at my place as long as he liked. I relaxed better beside him than I ever did alone.
Max would prove—years hence, at the bitter end—not to be addicted to monogamy. I might have known it even back then, but I did not care—or I failed to predict how much I’d come to.
He’d come over for cocktails, and we’d have cocktails, often Manhattans, which taste best when one is in Manhattan. Sometimes we’d go out to places I knew, places Max loved—places that my residency in the city had helped me discover, in the neighborhood, or uptown to Fifty-Second Street, or far uptown to Lenox Avenue—but more often than not we’d stay in. The stars would fling themselves across the sapphire sky, and below our voices would run the rumble of cars on Fifth Avenue. The air would be humid with hints of the sea, and somewhere from the floors below, Armenian cooking smells would creep their way in.
“You love me a lot,” I said to him one Saturday morning in early October when we were still in bed. “But I love you more than you love me.”
He laughed and denied it, but I said it again, for I knew I was right. It was the sort of statement that might, if spoken within my earshot by one of the office girls, have caused me to grimace and retreat to my desk and shake my head at the varieties of silliness to which modern womanhood subjected itself. But now the concern seemed reasonable and necessary: Who loved whom more? How much of myself I could expect to lose?
We’d have a breakfast of toast and ginger ale, coffee and tea, and go back to bed, and then out again, for lunch down the street. Hungry from exertion. We’d be so tired in those days from staying up late, but I didn’t mind. Sleep no longer rated.
His laugh was a merry roar, and his sartorial excellence was unmatched. Later, much later, after we’d been married for a time, I’d even come to like the cool, astringent style with which he put me in my place during fights.
We found we traveled well together when we took a late-autumn weekend in the country, in Maine: a rural dell well full of truculent birds, a rented farmhouse. Fresh and tasty lungsful of air. I was not much of a bird-watcher, though I did prize the simple birds I could recognize: doves, sparrows. Max knew them all, both by call and by plumage.
And that is how we passed those months.
Then, just after the New Year, January of 1935, when I’d returned from a holiday visit to my family in D.C., Max came over to my apartment and proposed.
Tallulah rubbed her auburn cat head against his ankle territorially as he went down on one knee.
“From 1935 on, Lils,” he said. “If you say yes, this’ll be my happiest New Year. I don’t want another twelve months to go by where I’m not married to you.”
I said yes without question and felt stupid with happiness.
*
Once our engagement was announced, of course, others did question it, so at odds was this turn of events with my heretofore strident bachelor-girl pride.
Why, the papers asked, why would I get married when I stood alone as the undisputed queen of the world—for even then Manhattan had taken to calling itself “the world”—when all impediments had been removed, and everything was wonderful?