THE PECULIAR THING ABOUT MY FIRST DATE WITH CINDY Sanders was that the whole thing was arranged more or less directly under the anguished gaze of her fiancé, Harris Fullinwider Harisse.
I say more or less directly because the first thing I noticed about Harris was that it was hard for him to fix his gaze directly on anything—up to and including a woman as easy to look at as Cindy. His gaze wandered nervously from place to place, object to object, and person to person, darting away like a hummingbird if it seemed likely that other eyes were about to make direct contact with his own.
When I mentioned this to Cindy, in bed the next morning, she sighed, up to then the first evidence I had that she was capable of even momentary discouragement.
“He looks that way because he can’t decide whether to come in or go out,” she said.
It was early morning—my brain hadn’t started its day.
“Come in or go out what?” I asked.
“The door, of course,” Cindy said. “Doors confuse him. He gets one leg through and then he can’t decide whether to put the other leg through. So he stands there looking that way.”
It was true that Harris had neither come in nor gone out during the hour I was in Cindy’s shop. But, apart from noting his anguished gaze, I had been so entranced with Cindy that I hadn’t paid him much attention.
“That’s a strange problem to have,” I said, for so it struck me. I had known confused people in my day, but none so confused they stopped in doorways.
“Not at all,” Cindy said. “It’s a perfectly well-bred indecision. Choice for Harris is like poetry for poets. It’s so filled with nuance that he usually just stops. You have to respect it.”
Maybe you did, but it was hard for me to imagine Cindy Sanders waiting sweetly while Harris worked out the nuances of every doorway they came to, as if it were a sonnet.
Cindy got up and tromped off to her kitchen. She returned in a minute, clutching a knife, an expensive Italian salami, a big slab of Brie, and a half-gallon of apple juice. Then she sat cross-legged on the bed and ate heartily, occasionally whacking me off a hunk of salami or swiping up a glob of Brie and offering it to me on her finger.
I was at a loss to understand how a man so indecisive had managed to become engaged to Cindy, a girl who expected immediate contact, eye, mouth, and genital. She liked direct looks and direct kissing.
“Tell the truth,” I said. “You’re not really engaged to Harris.”
Cindy had her mouth full of salami and couldn’t talk, but she shook her head vigorously and looked slightly outraged.
“I certainly am engaged to him,” she said indignantly, as soon as the salami was on its downward path, somewhere between her breasts.
“Who are you to question it?” she asked, with the open defiance I seem to inspire in emphatic women.
What was I supposed to say to that? I was nobody to question it. I wasn’t particularly ill-disposed toward Harris, just curious as to how such an arrangement had come about.
After all, Cindy had made the moves, where I was concerned. When I drove up and parked in front of her shops—she had three, all in one elegant nineteenth-century building on O Street—all I had meant to do was sell a carful of cowboyana. The only reason I was in Washington was because Boog insisted that the East had gone cowboy crazy.
“The twain’s done met,” he said. “Cowboy boots is sellin’ quicker than two-dollar pussy, even up in New York, where two-dollar pussy don’t have to stand on the street corner very long.”
“Not if you’re in town, you pot-gut,” Boss said. She was making biscuits in her big airy kitchen and Boog just happened to wander past, drinking what he called his breakfast toddy, a mixture of vodka, gin, tequila, and orange juice. Boss turned around and plastered him right in the face with a big wad of biscuit dough, laughed heartily, and immediately set about mixing some more dough.
Boog’s uncontrollable lust for cheap women, unabated through three decades of marriage, had inadvertently contributed to Boss’s own fame, since she had long since chosen to fight fire with fire.
“What I told the old fatty,” she confided one day, “was that I’d fuck six famous Yankees for every little pot he stuck his dipstick in.”
Boss had implemented her threat with vigor, if legend was to be believed. She was a tall woman, with raven hair and looks that still stopped people in their tracks, though she was fifty-two and had been married to Boog over thirty years, an experience that would have marked most women deeply.
Since most of those years had been spent in Washington, Boss had not lacked opportunity. Writers were her over-all favorites, though she excluded most journalists and all sportswriters from contention.
“Why would I want a sportswriter when I’ve already got six kids to raise?” she asked, when the subject came up.
Scarcely a poet or novelist of consequence had escaped her, in her time. It was not uncommon to find her latest, a tiny Jewish poet named Micah Leviticus, sobbing quietly in her motherly lap, or else perched on the cabinet watching television, depending on his mood. Micah lived upstairs, sharing a room with Tommy, the Millers’ youngest child.
About politicians Boss was more discreet. There were gossips who felt they knew which of the major figures she had accepted, but Boss herself was inscrutable when the great names were reeled off. She spoke of Jack or Adlai or Lyndon as of any other friend, though once in a while a special light would come into her restless gray eyes at the mention of Estes Kefauver.
The light was not lost on Boog, who sometimes dropped Kefauver’s name just to see it come on.
“Ain’t women sumpin’?” he would say. “Remember Estes Kefauver? Why that big gawky son of a bitch could get pussy Jack Kennedy wouldn’t have got the merest whiff of.”
When Boss mentioned her threat about the famous Yankees she was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee.
“I learned a harsh truth as a result of that remark,” she said.
“Which is?”
“Which is that there’s more cheap women than famous Yankees,” she said, opening The Wall Street Journal to the real estate ads. Boss had a pilot’s license and would fly off in her Cessna to any part of America where there was a good property to buy. Her local operations she ran mostly by phone from her spacious bedroom, leaving the legwork to competent young women such as Kate, Coffee, or Tanya Todd—another old girl friend of mine, who ran her Dallas office. I sometimes called Tanya Roger the Dodger, since over the years she had proved about as hard to sack as Roger Staubach. Once in a while she could be blindsided, if one felt up to a sexual blitz, but that was the only method likely to prove effective.
Though neither famous nor a Yankee, I was crazy about Boss and was always shooting her looks of love. I shot her a few while she read the Journal, but she looked up and disposed of my candidacy with a vivid smile.
“Get up and go buy some doodads,” she said. “I class you with the sportswriters.”
“In my view that’s very unfair,” I said.
Boss ran her fingers through her long black hair, idly testing its texture as she smiled at me.
“Yeah, but your view don’t count,” she said, and turned the page.
Before I could get her to look at me again, Micah Leviticus came dragging into the kitchen, wearing gym trunks and an old C.C.N.Y. T-shirt. He was carrying a tiny TV, which he plugged into an outlet near the sink before climbing up in Boss’s lap. A Roadrunner and the Coyote cartoon happened to be playing. Micah watched it raptly, as Boss read the Journal. The minute a commercial came on he looked up into her beautiful face.
“I dreamed about Rilke again last night, Boss,” he said. “Why is it always Rilke? I don’t even like Rilke.”
“You sweet thing,” Boss said, and gave him a couple of not-so-motherly kisses. Then she favored me with another of her cheerful and vivid smiles.
I wondered sometimes if her cells weren’t just better than other people’s—more ripe with the lifestuff, or something. It was one way to account for the fact that she seemed twice as alive as the rest of us.
Micah Leviticus was exactly five feet one inch—sixteen inches shorter than myself. That fact alone blew the one solid theory I had about women, which is that even the best of them are suckers for tall men.