25

 

21 Jan. 92

 

Betty and Daniel are back at college. For Betty of course it’s the winter semester of her first year at the cégep. For Daniel it’s the spring semester (it’s what they call it in the US) of his junior year (it’s what they call the 3rd year, like U2 at McGill) at Columbia University, but in the US they call it going to college as long as one is an undergraduate. In fact, as he explained to me, he is a student at Columbia College, which is a division of Columbia University. Another division, for women only, is called Barnard College, but there are also women at Columbia College, though that is a recent change. Except that Barnard is not actually a division of the university but an independent institution that is affiliated with it.

And why am I telling you all these trivial details, my journal? Because Daniel, during his just-ended winter vacation, told me about them. Yes, he actually talked to me. No deep confidences or grand revelations, but free, easy talk about his life, both academic and personal.

Academically, he told me that in his history minor he will have enough credits to turn it into a second major, but he is not sure if he will do that.

Personally, that since Cici he has not had a real girlfriend but he has been casually seeing two girls, one Jewish and one Chinese. He made a point of saying it in French, une Juive et une Chinoise, just as he had switched to French when he told me about his loss of interest in Amy. I can’t quite figure out his language policy, sa politique linguistique as Betty calls it.

La Juive, by the way, is not Rachel like in the opera but the same Audrey from two years ago, back after a year in Israel.

He also told me that his friend Roger is gay but in the closet. He asked me if être dans le placard is used to describe the situation in French, and I told him that I had heard it but it was not common. Of course I thought of Jean-Marc, and I felt myself shudder. I don’t know if D noticed.

I flirted with the idea of having Bob over to the house, but it still doesn’t feel right. After a year and a half! But Bob doesn’t seem to mind. Perhaps, if he saw that I am the mother of a 20-year-old, it would destroy his idea that we are of the same age. No, my journal, I am being too self-conscious. He remembers Betty from the flight from London and knows that she is almost an adult. He has occasionally remarked on how beautiful she is, saying ta belle (pause) fille, with a laugh, to make sure that it doesn’t sound like my daughter-in-law or my stepdaughter. The only reference he has ever made to Daniel, as far as I remember, was an oblique one, when he once said that some day I would probably have une belle-fille,

Daniel spent a good deal of time with his friends while he was here, and this time he told me matter-of-factly whom he was seeing: Harvey of course, but also Roxane, Leslie (Harvey’s ex-girlfriend), Alex and Megan. I asked him if Megan was Megan Kenner and he blushed when he said yes. He didn’t ask me how I knew about her.

He also decided that he would no longer take the bus to go to New York. In August he got sick after getting back, and he thought that it might have been something he picked up on the bus. So, he said, from now on he is going to fly. It was Harvey who drove him to Mirabel, and Paul and Betty went along for the ride.

Paul and Betty. It has become quite natural to say the two names together, just like Greg and Marcia, or Mark and Julie. They are 18 and 17, but they give the impression of a mature couple. Of course they have known each other all their lives. But they became friends only when Betty started Sec. III at NAA.

Bob and Mireille? No, that does not sound the same. Why, my journal?

Freak, spook and geek

 

It was only in mid-January, after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and when Daniel was back from Montreal, that he heard from Karen Litov. She suggested a meeting at her office on the twenty-first floor of a nondescript Midtown building, near Grand Central. She did not ask what his business with her might be; it seemed that she already knew about him – from Audrey, most probably – and was expecting him.

By then the photograph of the Mossad’s Ora was in his possession, and some vague intuition told him that there might be a connection between the two women. He would bring the photograph with him to the appointment, he decided, though not sure of how he would use it.

Having read through his mail, he checked his e-mail and found that that, aside from official communications from Columbia, there was a message from Claire. Of course it was something that the Chinese geek, as she called herself, would use. But he decided to hold off opening it. There was something else that he wanted to do.

When Harvey – who was no longer living with Leslie, though they were “still friends” – dropped him off at Mirabel, he gave him a videocassette in a blank box. “Watch it when you’re home alone,” Harvey said, declining to make any further comment about it. And now he was home alone. His finances looked good. All his bills were paid. All his classes were set. Time to relax with Harvey’s mysterious videotape.

It was a movie, titled Trouble at QCI. The title sequence consisted of the title, seen as a headline on a nameless newspaper, with the credits – names that Daniel did not recognize – appearing as the pages of the newspaper were turned. Daniel surmised that the setting would be a high school in Toronto, since most of the high schools there were named “[Something] Collegiate Institute,” abbreviated CI, and he was proved right with the first shot: a school-like building, with a sign in front of it reading Queenstown Collegiate Institute. The camera then zoomed in on a window, showing the inside of a classroom. Next, a male teacher was seen from the back, writing a poetry quotation – Have ever you heard of the Land of Beyond, / That dreams at the gates of the day? – on the blackboard. He then turned around – he was young and very good-looking – and scanned the faces of the students until he focused on one girl, and his gaze, as embodied by the camera, quickly went down to her partly unbuttoned blouse, showing the better part of a full, ripe bosom, and then back to her face. At this point Daniel felt his heart stop. The girl was Megan Kenner.

After taking a deep breath he pushed the rewind button to return to the credits. Among the first acting credits shown was May Green. He guessed that this was Megan’s screen name. He fast-forwarded back to Megan’s cleavage shot and paused for a few second before pushing the play button..

“Do you recognize this poem, Miss Flowers?” the teacher asked.

“Uh, no, sir,” Megan, or May Green, or Miss Flowers, answered. Snickers were heard from the rest of the class, but the nerdy-looking boy sitting behind her kept a straight, serious face.

“It was assigned, you know.” The camera now panned to the teacher’s lasciviously smiling face.

“I know, sir. It’s just that I’ve been having trouble studying. I need some help.”

“All right, Miss Flowers. See me after class.” Turning his face slightly in direction of the boy behind Megan. “Mister Anderson?” The teacher said.

“It’s The Land of Beyond, from Rhymes of a Rolling Stone by Robert W. Service, sir.”

“Perhaps you can help Miss Flowers.” The boy blushed, and the class snickered again. “Yeah, Tommy, you can help Katie,” someone exclaimed, and the class laughed.

Katie Flowers now gave a saucy smile and looked straight at the teacher. “I’d rather get help from you, Mister Taylor.”

“We’ll talk about that,” Mr. Taylor said. He turned to another girl, a slim bespectacled redhead who reminded Daniel of Audrey, and said, “Miss Howard, can you continue the poem?”

Miss Howard recited with a self-satisfied look on her face and exaggerated emotion in her voice:

“Alluring it lies at the skirts of the skies,

And ever so far away;

Alluring it calls: O ye the yoke galls,

And ye of the trail overfond,

With saddle and pack, by paddle and track,

Let's go to the Land of Beyond!”

“Very good, Miss Howard,” Mr. Taylor said. “Now let’s discuss some of the language here. ‘The skirts of the skies,’ anyone?”

Dissolve to Mr. Taylor’s office. Katie Flowers smooths her skirt as she enters.

Daniel pushed pause again. He needed to think.

The Megan that he saw in the film was the large-bosomed one that he had come to know in the preceding August. Making the movie was evidently the summer job that had kept him from seeing her in June. The boob job must have happened shortly before.

She had never said anything to him about any ambition for acting. Nor had she told him anything, either in August or in December, about the movie she had made. What was going on?

He pushed play and then fast forward. And it shortly became evident what was going on. The movie was a porno.

Soon enough, Katie Flowers was in bed with the teacher. Daniel pushed play again, and what he saw and heard was hard-core, unsimulated sex. In fact, Megan could hardly be said to be acting: what she did with her fellow actor, in front of the camera, was just what she had done with Daniel, as recently as a week before.

He remembered thinking, when he first saw the new Megan at Harvey and Leslie’s party, that with her adolescent’s face and her ripe woman’s body she would appeal to the sexual fantasies of middle-aged men. Apparently she had been noticed by just such a man, one who happened to be a porn producer.

As he was watching the sex scene, Daniel found himself able to predict Megan’s moves. The actor playing Mr. Taylor – Dick Somers was his screen name – was a relatively passive participant, and the director seemed to have let Megan control the action. What about the undressing? Daniel rewound to the beginning of the sequence, as Katie entered Mr. Taylor’s studio apartment, a large book under her arm. “Ooh, it’s warm in here,” she said cooingly. “Can I help you get comfortable?” the teacher asked. “Sure,” she said, sitting down on the sofa as she put first the book and then her feet on the coffee table. Mr. Taylor turned on a floor fan, which blew Katie’s skirt above her knees and exposed her thighs. “That feels nice,” she said and pulled her skirt up a little more, enough to show her bare hips; she was not wearing panties. Mr. Taylor sat down beside her and began to unbutton her blouse. After removing it, he undid her bra and buried his head in her bosom, causing her to moan while his right hand sought the zipper in the back of her skirt.

It was Megan all right, Daniel thought.

In the plot, the nerdy Tommy Anderson, who had the hots for Katie, and the redheaded Lucy Howard, who had designs on Mr. Taylor, independently discover the illicit affair and team up to expose it. In the process they discover each other, and Lucy gives Tommy a lesson in sex. Mr. Taylor is fired and Katie is expelled. Lucy now becomes the school’s queen bee; she drops Tommy and takes up with the school’s football players. Tommy seeks out Katie, who now works as a waitress, and expresses his remorse by saying, “I’m sorry I was such a freak.” “You’re sweet,” Katie says and kisses him. “I was the freak,” she adds. Soon they are on a bed, with the no longer inexperienced Tommy ripping Katie’s clothes off her. As soon as she is naked, Katie climbs on Tommy and a furious bout of copulation ensues. THE END.

The movie affected Daniel as it was meant to: it made him horny. He thought of Audrey. Their pre-Thanksgiving date had been followed by two more in December and another two since his return to New York, the last one just two nights since. In fact there had been no other woman in his life since reconnecting with her, aside from an after-dinner quickie on Thanksgiving with Monica Lehmann – she lured him into her room, in French, on the pretext of having something to show him – and the usual holiday encounters with Megan. And so, in a sense, he could now think of Audrey, once again, as his girlfriend.

But he preferred not to, for it was Claire Chen that he now desired. Perhaps because her full, curvaceous body was – with no surgical help, as far as he knew – more like Megan’s, while Audrey’s was more like that of the girl who played Lucy, and in the movie it was the scenes with Katie that excited him more than those with Lucy. He wondered if Claire was back from California.

He called Claire’s number, and got her answering machine. Her outgoing message, unlike Cici’s, did not specify whether she was out of town. He left a message saying that he missed her and hoped that she had a nice vacation, and asking her to call him back.

 

The sign on the door read MS. K. LITOV / YOUTH OUTREACH COORDINATOR. He knocked and heard “Come in!” in the same accent as on the answering machine.

“Hello,” he said as he entered. Karen was standing behind her desk, extending her hand to him. She was a plain-featured woman, her face unlined, probably in her mid-thirties, tall and muscular with short light-brown hair and large glasses, dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting white sweater. “Shalom,” she said, “sit down please.” He removed his parka and hung it on the back of the chair before sitting down. She then sat down too.

He didn’t quite know how to begin, but she opened the conversation. “I know two things about you. One is that you are Audrey Seligman’s boyfriend.”

He was unsure of whether to confirm or deny it. In a sense it was true, as he had reflected the other night. But the implication of being known as Audrey’s boyfriend were too strong, given his interest in Claire.

“Sort of,” he said. “We’ve been dating, but there’s no, like, commitment, you know.” He felt awkward, but Karen Litov did not react.

“And the other,” she went on, “is that you are Michael Wilner’s son. I am too young to know about your father, but older people that I talked with remembered him. He was a little controversial, I hear,” Karen concluded with a smile.

“That’s what I’ve heard too. I didn’t know him, and I haven’t thought about him until recently, when I got interested in my Jewish side.” He felt himself exaggerating, if not lying, but it didn’t bother him. “And in Israel,” he added emphatically.

“Then your mother isn’t Jewish.”

“No, she’s French Canadian, and that’s what I’ve always thought of myself as. But I happened to get in touch with my father’s first wife…”

“Really? The German movie star?”

“Yes, Brigitte Wilner. From her I found out that I might have a sister in Israel.” He was now lying outright. He was not going to mention Ora Rozen or Nili Rosen. He was having fun.

“Really?” Karen sounded truly surprised.

“Well, maybe. It seems that back in nineteen-seventy a girl came to visit him in Hamburg and said that she was his daughter by a girlfriend that he had in the kibbutz. She would now be, oh, thirty-eight. I have a picture of her at seventeen. Here it is.” He pulled the photograph from the inside pocket of his parka and placed it on the desk.

He was quite sure of seeing a flicker of recognition in Karen’s eyes, followed by a deliberate blanking of her face. She smiled. “I can think of several women who looked like this at seventeen,” she said. “Are you asking the Jewish Agency to help you find her?”

“No, of course not. I would like to go to Israel, to learn more about my Jewish identity, and while I’m there I’ll make some attempts to find this woman who might be my sister. But I wonder if you have any programs for people like me.”

“People like you?” Karen laughed good-naturedly. “You mean half-Jewish, that didn’t have any Jewish upbringing?”

He laughed too. “You’ve got it,” he said.

“The Jewish Agency doesn’t have any program like that directly, but I know about other organizations that have them. Give me your address and I’ll send you a list.” She put a blank sheet of paper in front of him, and he wrote his name and address. He added his phone number for good measure.

“Very good,” she said, reaching her hand out to him. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise,” he said as he shook her hand. “Shalom,” he added, standing up to leave.

Shalom u-l’hitraot,” Karen Litov said with another laugh. “That means to see you again.”

L’hitraot,” he said.

 

It was a cold, cloudy, windy day. The wind was blowing from the west. While it had been in Daniel’s back when he walked from Times Square to Third Avenue, it would be in his face on the way back and so he walked to Grand Central, from where he would take the 42nd Street shuttle, one of the few things about New York that he didn’t like.

Just before entering the station he stopped at a little coffee shop for a coffee and croissant. The place was surprisingly pleasant and quiet, its small tables occupied by groups of two or three people who were chatting softly. It almost didn’t feel like New York.

While sipping his coffee he thought about Karen Litov. On the basis of her demeanor he felt pretty sure, without quite knowing why, that she was some sort of spook. Most likely a Mossad agent. The feeling of certainty kept increasing after he left the coffee shop and walked through Grand Central to the subway, almost reaching the point of elation when, finally feeling warm, he reached the platform. Later he would sift through his feelings and impressions to determine what it was about her that seemed to be giving her away.

And he would have to find a way to make her give herself away so that he could somehow penetrate the mystery of that organization…

“Stand back from the closing doors…”

He would befriend her. Try to get close to her.

Penetrate! Of course!

It was just as well that he had refuted Karen Litov’s characterization of him as Audrey’s boyfriend.

 

It was about four in the afternoon. He was back in his warm, almost overheated, apartment, sipping a cup of tea and reading an article about Mario Cuomo – would he or would he not run for President? – in one of the issues of The New Yorker that were in his accumulated mail. But thoughts of Megan – or her alter ego May Green – and images from the movie were intruding on his mind. Between paragraphs of the article he found himself composing the letter that he would write to Megan, telling her what he had seen and asking her to tell him more about it.

The telephone rang. It was Claire.

“Hi Daniel, I just got in from the airport and I found your message. What’s the problem?” She giggled.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean like with your computer.”

He laughed. “No problem. I just wanted to see you.” He had thought of saying ‘to have with sex you’ or ‘to fuck you’ but refrained.

“Oh, sure. You mean like right now?”

“Not necessarily…”

“Because right now would be great. I’m like freezing. In LA it was like seventy-five degrees, and in my dorm there’s no heat yet.”

“Sure, come on over. It’s nice and warm here, and I’ll make you some tea.”

“That’s great! See you soon!”

It seemed to Daniel that Claire’s California vacation, where she had visited relatives and old friends (she had lived there till she was twelve), had left her with a distinct Valley Girl accent. He wondered if his own speech, on his returns to New York from Montreal, would sound like Montreal English.

He imagined that Claire, once she was enveloped in the warm air of his apartment, would rush to undress. He would stop her, he decided. He would help her off with her parka or overcoat, playing the gentleman, and then he would begin to caress her through her clothing, which he would slowly remove.

But his fantasy was not realized. When Claire came through his door, a small duffel bag in her hand, she said, “Do you mind if I take a shower? I had to get up like at five to catch my flight and didn’t shower because I thought I’d do it in my room, but there’s no hot water. I would’ve gone to my folks’ place, but you’re closer.” She giggled as she moved closer to him and put her bag down on the floor. He took her in his arms and kissed her just as she removed her glasses and placed them on the telephone stand. Her cheeks were cold, but her lips felt warm and moist.

They held the kiss for a long time. “Sure,” he said as he released her, “go ahead and shower.”

“Thanks,” she said. Without removing her overcoat she picked up her bag and took it with her to the bathroom. While she was showering he made another pot of tea.

She came out wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe and flip-flops, with her now much bulkier duffel bag in one hand and her overcoat draped over the other arm. The robe was open at the neck and showed parts of her breasts. She put her load on the arm of the sofa and sat down, crossing her legs and revealing her shapely legs. Daniel wondered if she would put her feet on the coffee table, like Megan in the movie, but she didn’t. “Would you like some tea?” he asked her.

“You’re, like, asking a Chinese girl?” she answered with a giggle. As he poured her tea, he noticed that she was leafing through the travel section of the preceding Sunday’s New York Times that was still on the coffee table. “Look at this!” she exclaimed when he set the cup in front of her, and showed him an article titled Booking With a Computer. “Next time you go traveling you can, like, be your own travel agent. I can show you how to do it.”

“Not now,” he said as he sat down beside her, teacup in hand. She took a sip of her tea and kissed him. He did the same in turn. They each drank about half of their tea, exchanging kisses between sips, and simultaneously set their cups down and embraced. Clumsily, they got up from the sofa with their arms around each other and, without letting go, made their way to the bedroom, stumbling and laughing along the way.

 

By the time classes were well underway, at the end of January, Daniel Wilner knew that he was dating two girls at the same time, with everything that ‘dating’ might entail. He already knew that Audrey regarded him as her boyfriend. Claire, for her part, no longer waited for him to call her for a date but called him whenever she wanted to get together. (Roger had been right about her aggressiveness.) Up to this time there had been no conflict between such requests and dates he had already made with Audrey, but there was no doubt that one would come up sooner or later. What would he do then?

That shouldn’t be too hard, he thought. He could simply say that he is busy.

Did Audrey and Claire, by any chance, know each other? They were classmates at Barnard, after all. But they lived in different dorms, and their majors were far enough apart that, as juniors, they were unlikely to have any classes together.

But of course, the real problem would arise if one girl should see him out with the other. There was no point in deciding in advance how he would deal with that.

What was most clear in his mind was that he liked both of them, but each one had some annoying qualities. And, of course, he was not in love with either one.

 

 


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