Morningside Heights Read online

  —

  When they got upstairs, she took him into the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” she said. “Would you like some food?” She removed leftovers from the fridge and placed them in the oven.

  “I don’t want to eat your dinner.”

  “There’s enough for us both.” She put some stew onto his plate, and some string beans and rice.

  “You made this whole meal for yourself?”

  “A person has to eat.”

  They ate and talked, while from outside on Broadway came the whoops of college kids and the pneumatic sigh of a stopping bus.

  She had a loft bed raised almost to the ceiling. Seeing the ceiling fan swinging languidly on its hinge, Spence said, “Just don’t go bolting up in the middle of the night. You’re liable to get decapitated.”

  This time she initiated the kiss.

  He pulled the chain on the ceiling fan and the clanking stopped.

  “Better?”

  “Certainly safer.” He’d heard of autoerotic suicide, but this would be something else.

  They lay together: two halves of a clam. Outside she could hear a woman singing. “I’m knock-kneed,” she said, and she knocked her knees against his. She rested her chin on the little triangle of flesh beneath his throat. She could feel his Adam’s apple like a sparrow pulsing.

  2

  “So you’re sleeping with your professor,” Camille said. “Weren’t you the one lecturing me about the casting couch?”

  “I wasn’t lecturing you,” Pru said. “Spence isn’t casting me in anything, besides.”

  “But he’s giving you a grade. And letters of recommendation. Don’t those professors get you jobs?”

  Jobs? Pru wasn’t even a semester into graduate school. She had more immediate concerns: she and Spence had to sneak around.

  “I would think the sneaking around would be fun.”

  It was in a way. No holding hands above 59th Street. Even below 59th, they had to be careful. At the end of the day they would leave the library, making sure to walk several yards apart. “Shall we go north or shall we go south?” South meant Pru’s apartment, north the extra hundred yards to Spence’s, the two of them descending the hill past Chock full o’Nuts, hurtling down the cliff of 116th Street.

  When she stayed over at Spence’s place, Pru would leave in the morning while it was still dark out, and when Spence stayed over at her place, he would do the same thing. They would go to the Met or the Guggenheim, and she’d walk into the gallery from one entrance and he’d walk in from the other entrance. One time, she saw someone she recognized, and she ducked into the ladies’ room.

  When she spoke in seminar, half the time she forgot what she was saying. Was there a raised eyebrow? A smirk?

  She and Spence would eat lunch at Woolworth’s, the soda fountain gleaming across from them. “Be careful,” she said. “Those security guards have eyes.”

  Years later Spence would say, “I can’t believe I dated my graduate student.”

  “Not only that, you married her.” But Pru didn’t think anything of it at the time. It was the 1970s, she thought, looking back: a decade when no one knew anything.

  * * *

  —

  Soon it was no touching above 72nd Street, then no touching above 96th Street, then no touching above 110th. One time, Spence grabbed her hand just blocks from campus and kissed her on the neck. Another time, she pinched him on the butt, which startled him: he liked to maintain a certain decorum.

  But the next time, he was the one who pinched her.

  “Maybe we should just tell people.”

  “We can’t,” he said. “I’m your professor.”

  Finally, at the department Christmas party, she’d had enough. Winter break was coming, 1979 was being ushered in, the age of disco was upon them. Music was playing, and the students had started to dance. Some of the professors were dancing, too, though not Spence; he was across the room, conferring with a colleague.

  Pru handed him a glass of eggnog.

  “I think it’s spiked.”

  “Of course it’s spiked. It’s eggnog.” She was standing beside the Christmas tree, and a couple of pine needles got lodged in her hair. “Dance with me.”

  He hesitated. “I’m not a good dancer.”

  “So what.”

  A graduate student brought out a broomstick, and everyone started to dance the Limbo.

  “Look at Professor Robin!” someone called out. “He’s dancing the Limbo!”

  “Hey, check it out!” someone said. “Guess who’s dancing with Pru!”

  When the party was over, they walked across College Walk, Pru resting her hand on Spence’s shoulder. Seeing them together, someone whistled.

  * * *

  —

  Pru thought spring term would be easier: she wasn’t in his class anymore. But in Philosophy Hall everyone looked at her differently. “Someone caught the big fish,” a classmate said.

  “I’m not even his student this semester.”

  But what about the next semester, and the semester after that? She wanted to study the Elizabethans, and if you did that at Columbia you did it with Spence Robin. Maybe she should transfer to NYU. But what good would transferring do? She could have transferred to Berkeley—she could have sailed clear across the world—and she would always be known as Spence’s girlfriend.

  “I hate it,” she told him, out to dinner one night.

  “Give it time,” he said. “People will move on to other things. And you’ll make your mark. I promise you.”

  She had a couple of glasses of wine and her mood calibrated. After dinner, they walked up Broadway, hand in hand.

  They stood on the corner of 116th Street; gazing north, she could see the galaxy of lights strung like wire along the rooftops.

  “Take a look,” Spence said, and he opened his mouth so she could see inside. “There’s not a filling in there. Not a penny’s worth of orthodontia.” He handed her his jacket. He was wearing loafers, a pair of slacks, an Oxford shirt tucked into them: not exactly running gear, but he took off. Across the Street he went and up Claremont Avenue, and Pru called out, “Spence, what in God’s name are you doing?” but he was already gone, getting smaller as he went. She held his jacket in one hand while in her other hand she clutched her leftover pasta, which she was planning to eat for the next day’s breakfast.

  Then she heard her name being called (“Pru! Pru!”), and there he was, having run a square block, sprinting toward her in his loafers.

  He placed her hand against his forehead. “I’m not even sweating. I’m in perfect health.”

  “Who said you weren’t?”

  “Look,” he said, “I know I’m older than you.”

  “Not by much.” Her last boyfriend had been more than double her age.

  “Both my parents died young. My mother had cancer. My father had heart disease.”

  “I’m not worried about that.” Years later, when Spence got sick, she would wonder whether he’d been warning her that night. But of what? He didn’t have cancer or heart disease. He couldn’t have known.

  “I want to marry you, Pru.”

  “You do?”

  “I’d marry you tomorrow. I’d marry you yesterday if I could.”

  3

  Everything came in a rush after that, starting with meeting Spence’s sister. “You must think it’s strange you haven’t met her.”

  Pru didn’t think it was strange; Spence hadn’t met her brother, either. The difference was, her brother was a banker in Hong Kong, and when Spence told her his sister lived in New York, she did think it was strange, because she’d been led to believe his sister was far away, that she was, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible.

  “Enid’s brain-damaged,” Spence said. “She was in a car crash when she was
sixteen. Drunk driving.”

  “She was drunk?”

  “The other driver was. But she hung around with the wrong crowd. I was always waiting for something to happen to her.” They were standing in the lobby of a nursing home, waiting for the elevator to take them up. “I was thirteen when she got hurt. It’s the great sadness of my life.”

  They found Enid upstairs in the cafeteria, taking a stab at playing cards. She was thirty-three, but she looked as if she could have been sixty-three, her hands callused, her hair gray and slung unevenly in back. “Enid, this is my fiancée, Pru.” But nothing registered on her, and the air in the room was thick and smelled of salami, and Pru thought she might retch.

  On the subway home Spence was quiet. “I’m just carrying out my brotherly duty. Fifteen minutes and I’m gone.”

  “A lot of people don’t even do that.” Pru was thinking of Hank in Hong Kong, calling home just once a month.

  Back at his apartment, Spence seated himself across the room from her. “Are you ready for the next secret?”

  “What next secret?”

  “I’ll understand if you won’t forgive me.”

  “Forgive you, Spence? What in the world are you talking about?”

  “I was married before.”

  She was so boggled she couldn’t speak. A raft of pigeons settled on the balcony, gaping at her. Finally, she said, “Did your wife die?”

  No, Spence said, his ex-wife was alive and well. At least she had been the last time he’d heard from her.

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s a whole lot of things.” She’d been a Barnard student when he met her. A late-stage undergraduate: she’d been on the six-year plan. But even six years hadn’t been enough for Linda. She’d dropped out of college short of her degree, though she continued to beach herself on campus, where, for the purposes of the antiwar movement, she was always front and center, shackling herself to some building when she wasn’t shackling herself to some man. For a time Spence had been that man—long enough to get married, but how long did that take? You just needed an hour to get to City Hall.

  Pru just sat there, taking this all in, while outside she heard a siren go off, then the sound of a car backfiring.

  “That’s not all of it.”

  What now? she thought. Was there a second ex-wife? A whole harem?

  “There was a son,” he said. “Pru, I’m a father.”

  The room canted on its axis; she was being tilt-a-whirled through space. “Where is this son?” Nothing would have surprised her. If Spence had told her his son was in the next room, that he’d been there for the last five months, an exceedingly quiet child, she’d have believed that too.

  “I wish I knew where he was.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t know where your own son is?”

  “Last I heard, he was in Maine.” He sent monthly checks, so he knew where Linda and Arlo had been last month, but where they were one month had little bearing on where they’d be the next month. He’d proposed splitting custody, but Linda wasn’t having it.

  “So your son could just show up at your door?”

  “My bigger fear is I’ll never see him.” Arlo had been a baby when Spence and Linda had split up; he was still only a toddler. “What I said before, how Enid is the great sadness of my life? Well, Arlo’s really the great sadness.”

  Pru was making little knitting motions with her hands. This called for resources beyond her.

  “If you need some time alone…”

  She did need time alone, enough of it and sufficiently soon that she stood up all at once and left his apartment.

  She didn’t see him the next day, or the next. The phone rang, but she didn’t pick up. The next time she saw him he might have a new girlfriend. Perhaps a new baby too.

  * * *

  —

  She saw him one day on College Walk, eating lunch with a colleague. She headed in the other direction, fast. Afterward she thought, He’s still eating. It was more than she could say for herself.

  She came downstairs one afternoon and found him on her steps. His hair was uncombed, and he had several days of stubble. She didn’t think it was possible, but he seemed to have lost weight.

  “I want you to know how sorry I am.”

  She just stared at him.

  “If you don’t want to see me again, just say it. Give me the word and I’ll go.”

  “How long were you two married?”

  “Less than a year.”

  “Why did you get divorced?”

  “Linda was sleeping with someone else. The only reason I married her was she got pregnant by accident.”

  “Did you drive her around on your moped?”

  “Pru, come on.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about your son? Describe him to me.”

  Back at his apartment, Spence removed an album from his bedside drawer. The word Arlo was printed across the front. On the first page was a photo of Spence holding a newborn. On the next page, the baby appeared to be two months old.

  “How old is he now?”

  “Two years, three months, and eleven days.”

  She looked up.

  “You think I don’t miss him?”

  “So what does this make me?” Pru said. “The evil stepmother?”

  “I’ll be the evil one, I promise you.”

  Already she could feel herself starting to break, the tectonic plates shifting within her.

  “I was scared of losing you,” he said. “I know it’s no excuse, but I was.”

  He was still tentative beside her, and even in bed there was a hesitancy to him. The night-side lamp dimpled his back, and from out the window came the last prodigal rays of sunlight. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start over.” He got down on one knee. “Pru Steiner, will you marry me?”

  * * *

  —

  The first thing she did when she moved into his apartment was kosher their kitchen. She contacted Go Kosher—it sounded to her like a football cheer—and the next day, two men in beards and black coats arrived with blowtorches, and then they were running the dishwasher and dunking Spence’s silverware in boiling water and turning the burners on high.

  Afterward, lying in bed, she said, “How do you like that? We have a kosher kitchen.” It wasn’t lost on her that Spence was doing for her what her mother had done for her father. And when she told him that her mother had continued to eat non-kosher outside the home, she was giving him license.

  On Saturday mornings, they would climb the hill to campus, Spence off to the library, Pru headed to shul. She would return from Kiddush with a piece of kichel, the driest, most tasteless biscuit in the world, but Spence liked kichel. She would hand him the kichel, swaddled in a napkin, and they would spend the next hour wandering around campus until it was time for him to return to the library.

  When did she start to slip? Was it simply that Spence let her do what she wanted, that if she’d had more opposition she’d have remained steadfast? Was it that her father died, and she was waking up early to say Kaddish for him? Day after day, Kaddish after Kaddish: before long, she was all Kaddished out.

  Now, in restaurants, she would order the onion soup without asking about the ingredients, though onion soup was almost always made with beef stock. She would start Shabbat half an hour late. One Saturday, when Spence had already left for the library, she turned the bathroom light on. She wasn’t about to pee in the dark, and she certainly wasn’t about to shower in the dark, though she’d done both those things countless times in college.

  She told herself it was because of her father. It was for him that the house in Columbus had been kosher, for him that they’d had Shabbat dinner and said Kiddush and sung zemirot.

  Now she would accompany Spe
nce to the library instead of going to shul. Other times, she would head to the gym, where she would shower and blow-dry her hair (more electricity), then buy a drink from the soda machine (spending money: another violation). It wasn’t long before she was eating traif—first just outside the house, then inside it also.

  It scared her, this giving up of things, but it was exhilarating too, and over dinner one night at a midtown bistro, the bouillabaisse seeming to egg her on, she told Spence she’d decided to do what she hadn’t realized she’d decided to do until she told him she was doing it: she was dropping out of graduate school. “It’s your field,” she said.

  “I don’t have a monopoly on it.”

  But she felt as if he did. He’d won a Guggenheim, and he’d signed on with Knopf to do a book: Who Really Wrote Shakespeare? She was doing good work herself; her professors thought she might make it in the field. But did she have the necessary passion? Even if she did, people would say she’d succeeded because of Spence, the youngest English professor ever to receive tenure at Columbia. Spence, the golden boy: even his hair shone like ore in the sun. She was the girl he’d plucked from class, and it made her feel plucked just to think about it, like a dandelion ripped from the ground.

  “Choose a different century,” he said. “Or a different continent. I’ll give you Asia and Africa.”

  He made it sound like a game of Risk. She felt as if he might take over the world; he had that quiet way of overpowering you.

  “Or stick with Europe and become a modernist.”

  Shakespeare, the Elizabethans: it was where she’d done her work. And, sure, she could switch, and maybe she would turn out to love her new field, but she would always know she’d chosen it to get out of his way.

  Also—she hadn’t told anyone this—she was pregnant.

  4

  She must have started a trend, because three of her classmates, Marie, Claire, and Theresa, dropped out, too. The M-R-S-es, the female graduate students were called. Get your master’s in literature, marry, have children, then set up a nice home.