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.
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.