September 23, 2006--Saturday Story: "I Married Lydia"--Part One
It was at the end of a disastrous and humiliating evening that I last saw Lydia. That was, until the following summer. And shortly after that, a mere eighteen months later, we were married.
This is a lot to absorb, so let me go back a bit before telling you about what turned out to be truly disastrous.
We met for the first time at the legendary West End Bar up by Columbia University. It was legendary less because of its location or tepid beer than because it was the college haunt of the founders of the Beat Generation—Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg. Especially Ginsburg who inhabited the place instead of his classes; and, since he showed more promise as both a poet and drinker than a scholar, he had a stool set aside for him at the end of the bar’s long horseshoe.
I came there some years later, a confused pre-med English major who was struggling less with Organic Chemistry than with what I wanted to do with my life. My oxymoronic drift toward thinking about medicine by majoring in English should have been a clue that I was inclining toward writing and teaching rather than dissecting cadavers and being on call all night as a cardiologist.
One chilled autumn day, while peering into my beer glass, searching there, as had so many before me, for guidance, reading the remnants of the evaporating foam for answers, as out of a movie cliché, Lydia walked into my life. Lydia Riffelstein from East Paterson. Decidedly east of the Paterson, New Jersey of Ginsburg’s early years and where his idol William Carlos Williams practiced and wrote. Practiced medicine I did not at the time know. If only I had!
But Lydia, in spite of the handicap of the mislocation of her birth, was a dancer, a modern dancer, which was evident by her cut-off black leotards, black tights, black beret, black jewelry, and black eye shadow. She was a Barnard student, which meant she was good at taking tests, but her real passion was for dance. Martha Graham’s version, where her disciples, and Lydia was certainly one of those, spent endless hours writhing on the floor, learning and practicing the pelvic contractions that were at the heart of the Graham Method.
That first afternoon, with her dancer’s feline assurance she slid onto a stool just to my left and ordered a Compari and Soda, pronouncing it as one word, CompariSoda, which from the distance of these many years should have warned me not to pull my nose up from my beer mug and not to have said, as I did, referring to Martha Graham, “I thought she was dead.”
“You should be so dead,” Lydia snorted and turned back, aggressively ignoring me, to her Dance Magazine and CampariSoda.
“I know that was stupid.” I said masochistically, “I’ve never known a modern dancer before and couldn’t think of anything witty to say.”
“You have a lot to learn,” She shot back, “about both dance and wit. That I can see.”
Benevolent fate, clearly, was not on my side, then or later; and so, without recounting any of the sordid details of why she would have thought to invite me to accompany her to a Merce Cunningham dance concert or why I would have accepted or more perversely why, never having been to a French restaurant, I would have made a reservation for us to go to La Cave Henri IV after Merce’s performance, she referred to him as Merce, let me bring you directly to the end of that fateful evening, after Lydia conversed with the waiter in flawless French after I did not know to taste the wine to test if it had turned (I thought it strange that le garcon had “served” me first before pouring a glass for Mademoiselle Lydia), let me take you to the entrance to her dormitory where, after my pathetic performance (I will spare you my fumblings with the escargot holder), I certainly was not expecting to “get any,” but I was hoping for at least a kiss, perhaps a French version, in the spirit of le soir, how, when I leaned toward her face, knowing in the dark, without being able to see, that that was where I would find her lips and perhaps, perhaps her mouth, at that very moment I could feel her turn toward me and heard her spit, “I hope I never see you again. Too bad you didn’t go to Brooklyn College, where you belong. Just my luck--now I have two more years to get through with you prowling around just on the other side of Broadway.”
From this you would undoubtedly imagine that when we unexpectedly encountered each other during the summer, nine months later, at a children’s camp on Saranac Lake up in the Adirondacks, she would have shunned me and I would have dived for cover into the huckleberry bushes. But rather we feel into each other’s arms like long-lost lovers. And within forty-eight hours I had claimed that French Kiss. Many in fact. And much more. In fact, I even “got some” on a lawn of balsam pine needles, under the bows of a hundred year-old tree, with a trite half-moon cradled by the far edge of the lake.
The coincidence of our meeting so unexpectedly, and there of all places (the son of the camp owner was a classmate of mine and I drove up for a visit--Lydia was employed as the dance counselor and in just weeks had transformed her minion into tiny Graham acolytes) made us think we were star-crossed. Destiny had brought us together. And the fact that we had both just finished reading Winesburg, Ohio and were halfway through The Bothers Karamazov, equally loving the dark and the darker, overcame whatever residual feelings there were about that night on the town and her wishing me banished back to my native borough.
It also didn’t hurt that Lydia, also a student of Wilhelm Reich and his theories of orgone energy, had not to that midpoint of the summer gotten any, at least none that took her to the perfect orgasm about which Wilhelm wrote so eloquently. And so I, in splendid shape from all my working out with the Columbia crew, puffed up with energy and rippling with muscles and flexible sinew, became the beneficiary of the other use to which the Graham contractions could be applied. I learned that fist night that they were good for use both on stage and off.
They were put to that use for me, but not entirely for Lydia. As it turned out, Lydia alas informed me, that my energy was more of the athletic than orgone sort. But I came close enough, rather Lydia came close enough, so that I continued to be useful to her at the end of the summer, back in New York City, where being separated by just Broadway turned out to be an asset rather than the liability she had earlier perceived it to be. Prowling was now encouraged.
And during my senior year, as we got to know and like each other while pounding away relentlessly in assorted sordid places, perhaps even once approaching that perfection, Lydia agreed to talk about the possibility of getting married. We could use the cash, I said, as well as a better bed, she replied.
To be continued . . . .
This is a lot to absorb, so let me go back a bit before telling you about what turned out to be truly disastrous.
We met for the first time at the legendary West End Bar up by Columbia University. It was legendary less because of its location or tepid beer than because it was the college haunt of the founders of the Beat Generation—Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg. Especially Ginsburg who inhabited the place instead of his classes; and, since he showed more promise as both a poet and drinker than a scholar, he had a stool set aside for him at the end of the bar’s long horseshoe.
I came there some years later, a confused pre-med English major who was struggling less with Organic Chemistry than with what I wanted to do with my life. My oxymoronic drift toward thinking about medicine by majoring in English should have been a clue that I was inclining toward writing and teaching rather than dissecting cadavers and being on call all night as a cardiologist.
One chilled autumn day, while peering into my beer glass, searching there, as had so many before me, for guidance, reading the remnants of the evaporating foam for answers, as out of a movie cliché, Lydia walked into my life. Lydia Riffelstein from East Paterson. Decidedly east of the Paterson, New Jersey of Ginsburg’s early years and where his idol William Carlos Williams practiced and wrote. Practiced medicine I did not at the time know. If only I had!
But Lydia, in spite of the handicap of the mislocation of her birth, was a dancer, a modern dancer, which was evident by her cut-off black leotards, black tights, black beret, black jewelry, and black eye shadow. She was a Barnard student, which meant she was good at taking tests, but her real passion was for dance. Martha Graham’s version, where her disciples, and Lydia was certainly one of those, spent endless hours writhing on the floor, learning and practicing the pelvic contractions that were at the heart of the Graham Method.
That first afternoon, with her dancer’s feline assurance she slid onto a stool just to my left and ordered a Compari and Soda, pronouncing it as one word, CompariSoda, which from the distance of these many years should have warned me not to pull my nose up from my beer mug and not to have said, as I did, referring to Martha Graham, “I thought she was dead.”
“You should be so dead,” Lydia snorted and turned back, aggressively ignoring me, to her Dance Magazine and CampariSoda.
“I know that was stupid.” I said masochistically, “I’ve never known a modern dancer before and couldn’t think of anything witty to say.”
“You have a lot to learn,” She shot back, “about both dance and wit. That I can see.”
Benevolent fate, clearly, was not on my side, then or later; and so, without recounting any of the sordid details of why she would have thought to invite me to accompany her to a Merce Cunningham dance concert or why I would have accepted or more perversely why, never having been to a French restaurant, I would have made a reservation for us to go to La Cave Henri IV after Merce’s performance, she referred to him as Merce, let me bring you directly to the end of that fateful evening, after Lydia conversed with the waiter in flawless French after I did not know to taste the wine to test if it had turned (I thought it strange that le garcon had “served” me first before pouring a glass for Mademoiselle Lydia), let me take you to the entrance to her dormitory where, after my pathetic performance (I will spare you my fumblings with the escargot holder), I certainly was not expecting to “get any,” but I was hoping for at least a kiss, perhaps a French version, in the spirit of le soir, how, when I leaned toward her face, knowing in the dark, without being able to see, that that was where I would find her lips and perhaps, perhaps her mouth, at that very moment I could feel her turn toward me and heard her spit, “I hope I never see you again. Too bad you didn’t go to Brooklyn College, where you belong. Just my luck--now I have two more years to get through with you prowling around just on the other side of Broadway.”
From this you would undoubtedly imagine that when we unexpectedly encountered each other during the summer, nine months later, at a children’s camp on Saranac Lake up in the Adirondacks, she would have shunned me and I would have dived for cover into the huckleberry bushes. But rather we feel into each other’s arms like long-lost lovers. And within forty-eight hours I had claimed that French Kiss. Many in fact. And much more. In fact, I even “got some” on a lawn of balsam pine needles, under the bows of a hundred year-old tree, with a trite half-moon cradled by the far edge of the lake.
The coincidence of our meeting so unexpectedly, and there of all places (the son of the camp owner was a classmate of mine and I drove up for a visit--Lydia was employed as the dance counselor and in just weeks had transformed her minion into tiny Graham acolytes) made us think we were star-crossed. Destiny had brought us together. And the fact that we had both just finished reading Winesburg, Ohio and were halfway through The Bothers Karamazov, equally loving the dark and the darker, overcame whatever residual feelings there were about that night on the town and her wishing me banished back to my native borough.
It also didn’t hurt that Lydia, also a student of Wilhelm Reich and his theories of orgone energy, had not to that midpoint of the summer gotten any, at least none that took her to the perfect orgasm about which Wilhelm wrote so eloquently. And so I, in splendid shape from all my working out with the Columbia crew, puffed up with energy and rippling with muscles and flexible sinew, became the beneficiary of the other use to which the Graham contractions could be applied. I learned that fist night that they were good for use both on stage and off.
They were put to that use for me, but not entirely for Lydia. As it turned out, Lydia alas informed me, that my energy was more of the athletic than orgone sort. But I came close enough, rather Lydia came close enough, so that I continued to be useful to her at the end of the summer, back in New York City, where being separated by just Broadway turned out to be an asset rather than the liability she had earlier perceived it to be. Prowling was now encouraged.
And during my senior year, as we got to know and like each other while pounding away relentlessly in assorted sordid places, perhaps even once approaching that perfection, Lydia agreed to talk about the possibility of getting married. We could use the cash, I said, as well as a better bed, she replied.
To be continued . . . .
posted by Steven Zwerling at
3:19 PM
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