Bronx Park East Ch. 01

It was right after Memorial Day weekend of 1974 when a new family moved into my building. At first I only noticed one of their members, a dark-haired girl. I was nineteen at the time and she appeared to be close to my age.

I remember seeing her come out of the building on a couple of occasions when I was going in. Once I saw her a few yards ahead of me, and some sense of diffidence made me wait until I was sure she had gone up in the elevator.

At that time I had never had a girlfriend although I was certainly on the lookout for one. Yet I'd never anticipated that I'd find one in my own neighborhood. My plan always was that I'd met somebody at the City College of New York, where I had just completed my freshman year. That had been a letdown as I hadn't managed a single date in my first two semesters there.

Otherwise, I was happy enough to be living in a big old building overlooking Bronx Park; my old neighborhood in the southwest Bronx had become dangerous to the point where I was afraid to walk the streets even in daytime. The building sported turrets in the roof-line with slits, presumably for archers. Back in the 1920s people moving up from the Lower East Side could fantasize about living in a castle prepared for a siege - or at least the architect thought it was a selling point.

That summer I took a desultory part-time job downtown as a messenger; I was there each weekday until about 2:00 PM. Then on one hot Saturday in late July the inevitable happened. It was about one o'clock in the afternoon and I was at loose ends. I decided to go out; I had no particular destination, but just being away from the house was enough.

The elevator stopped at the fourth floor and the dark-haired girl got on. She greeted me immediately, "Oh, hey, I've seen you around here."

Perhaps I should have prepared something for this moment; all I had to say was, "Yeah, I'm up on Six."

"I'm Lenore Roget; I'm in 4G."

"Hi, I'm Paul D'Amato." I was about to continue with, pleased to meet you, but I stopped myself.

My first impression was that this could just be an exchange of pleasantries between neighbors. She offered more info about herself, "We just moved here a few weeks ago, as you probably have noticed."

"Well, I've been here for almost three years now." I didn't tell her that she was the first one I had noticed so far.

At that moment we reached the first floor and we got out. I assumed that we would both walk out the front door, but she stopped there in the lobby. I had an unsteady moment as I clueless about how to handle this; I thought it likely that we might just leave the building and then go our separate ways.

She said, "I guess I'm being nosy, but are you going any particular place?"

"No, I was just going for a walk, nothing special." I decided to turn the question around on her. "How about you, are you going someplace?"

"Not really. I know this sounds kind of lame, but I might go to the library over at Fordham."

So I have a reader here. That was actually a plus for me. "Well, I go over there too sometimes."

She stayed in place by the elevator door, and I got the sense that it was okay to take a few moments to look her over and make a quick assessment.

She was about my height, which was five-foot eight; her slightly wavy hair was parted in the middle as the majority of girls styled it back then. It was down just above her shoulders, which was a bit on the short side for the 1970s. Her skin had a slightly olive complexion, and her nose was not the smallest I had ever seen. Both of those features were common in hyper-ethnic New York.

I was a bit abashed about looking too long at her body, but I noted that she wasn't willowy but neither was she very curvy. There was a nice solidity to her that appealed to me. Her clothes were very causal, which was typical of that period. She had a white pullover top under an open short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, what I guessed were tennis shoes and no socks. That was an era long before Abercrombie and Fitch got into the teen apparel market.

I didn't have a knack for starting conversations, and I was aware that, had this been a guy of my age, I would probably be looking for a way out by now. I thought: she must know that; she must realize that talking to me in this lobby is not mere chit-chat.

She gave me a bemused look and tilted her head a bit, as if to signal: well, what's next? I took a chance and said, "Are you hungry? Because, we could go over to that pizza place on Lydig Avenue."

I must have made the right move because she brightened and replied, "That sounds fine to me; let's go." Then she went on to say, "By the way, everybody calls me Lenore; I mean, it's not Len or Lenny or something like that."

Is it possible that she had made up that bit of dialogue just for me? It sounded like she had been anticipating an elevator meeting, and then she had tripped a little on her own lines. She continued in that vein, "A lot of people mess up my last name and pronounce it as Roe-jet."

I was confused because I had heard it as Roe-jay but I had no idea how it was spelled. "They get my name wrong too; they think it rhymes with 'tomato.' "

The shop was only three blocks away. During the walk I was very aware of doing something I wasn't used to -- namely, going down the street with a girl my own age. To anybody seeing us, we must have looked unexceptional -- just a generic guy and a generic girl, two students like tens of thousands of others in the city. From my perspective, I was feeling very self-conscious.

On the way over there she confirmed that she had moved in about two months earlier, and I told her that I was entering my second year at City College. At the store I paid for her slice and soda and we sat at the one table by the window.

During the next twenty minutes or so I detected a bit of nervousness in her too. Yet, as I look back to that day, the fact that neither of us really knew how to do this -- how to approach each other -- actually made it possible for us to be spontaneous. We didn't have any experiences to guide us so we just winged it. I'm reminded now of the first few times I had played chess, when I had learned the rules but none of the strategies about actually playing the game. I just moved pieces forward randomly and hoped for the best.

At one point she said to me, "I know I'm prying again, but do you have a girlfriend or something down there at City?" Or something? I guessed that I shouldn't be too forthcoming about what I had and hadn't done yet. I probably did say the right thing, "Well, it's a little unsettled right now."

She may have understood that I was evading the question, but she smiled and offered her own evasion, "I get it, that's like my situation too."

In the minutes just before that we had gone through the usual student chat about our schools. She had just graduated from the local high school, Christopher Columbus, while I had attended one of the city's specialized schools, Stuyvesant downtown. I hoped that didn't make me look too nerdy. Maybe she'll think that's an asset; anyway, it's out of my control. I remembered that song lyric, maybe by being an A student baby, I can win your love for me.

She was going to be a freshman at Lehman College, which was on the other side of the borough. Thus she had to be about a year younger than I was. Maybe she was on the same line of thought because she said, "I should mention that I actually turned eighteen in March."

I thought about that fact for a second. Okay, I sort of guessed that. Then it occurred to me that she might be dropping a very large hint on me. She couldn't be mentioning that because -- I mean is she implying her sexual availability?

I said something non-committal and went on to what seemed like the only plausibly interesting thing about me, namely that I wrote for one of the college newspapers. I remember saying, "They've got five papers down there, and The Salient is, or was at least, a kind of hippie/counterculture paper. I mean, they publish some weird stuff at times."

Lenore was paying attention, "Really, like what? What's special about them?"

I knew I had overshot the mark. By "weird" I had meant sexually explicit, pornographic even. If this had been another male lunching with me, I would have had a good story to tell. It involved a staff member named Bobby who was aiming to be an artist -- a cartoonist really -- in the style of R. Crumb. Bobby had caused an uproar on campus the previous semester by publishing a crude but effective drawing of a masturbating nun. This being the '70s, the paper got away with it without being suspended (which had indeed happened a couple of times before I had arrived at City.)

That was far beyond what I had intended to discuss with Lenore on this casual date. I tried to get around it by coming out with another fact about Bobby, "Well, last year he lifted an R. Crumb cartoon and reproduced it without permission."

"I know about Crumb; I've seen his stuff. Which bit did he steal?"

On one hand it seemed promising that she knew what I was talking about. But then I recalled the stolen cartoon. It was one of the Joe Blow series, the one in which Joe and his wife indulge in incestuous activities with their own son and daughter. Having gone from convent sex to intra-family misbehavior, I had put myself into another corner.

I fumbled for an answer, "Well, it was sort of controversial."

Lenore gave me a knowing look, a sort of squint but she smiled too. "That's okay, you can describe it some other time."

In my relief I almost missed the last three words, some other time. I thought, maybe I'm doing okay; she seems to be considering more dates beyond this one.

Our ethnic backgrounds, always something of significance in this diverse city, was our final topic at the pizzeria. Lenore was French on her father's side and English and Dutch on her mother's. That was a bit out of the mainstream for The Bronx, where the Big Three identities for white people were Irish, Italian and Jewish. I had roots in the first two, plus German -- one of the secondary ethnicities -- on my mother's side.

Lenore said, "My dad was a French-Canadian living in northern Vermont. He met my mother when they both had summer jobs at a resort on Cape Cod. That was back in 1953." I wanted to know how they landed in New York but she didn't offer more and I didn't ask.

As we finished our slices and sodas I was feeling a bit more relaxed and I sensed that Lenore was too. I dared think to myself that this impromptu date had been a modest success. I also decided that this had been almost enough for one day, but I wanted to push on one chance for the future. I started out by saying, "How would you feel about . . ." I stopped for a second. Don't make it a question; just state what you want. "Let's go to the movies soon -- like this week."

"I'm up for it. In fact, tomorrow evening would be good." Tomorrow was Sunday, a day I didn't have to be at work. "What do you want to see?"

So she had conceded the decision to me. A notable aspect of The Bronx back then was that there were still a lot of local movie theaters available. That was an advantage, because I wasn't ready yet to take Lenore all the way into Manhattan. I didn't have a car and the long subway ride, at this early stage, could be an awkward hour of mostly dead time. It also wasn't easy to have a conversation on those noisy trains.

There was a small place, the Globe, just two blocks away -- of course, it was nothing like the 16th Century original. But Fordham Road, about two miles to the west, still boasted four active theaters out of the eight or so that had once operated there. It had the misnamed Capri, which was virtually a storefront, the Art Deco UA Valentine, the Neoclassical RKO Fordham, and the grandest of them all, the "Venetian" Loew's Paradise.

Each Friday I read the film reviews and I often staked out a movie I might catch over the weekend. No new releases had caught my attention that week, so I picked one from about a month earlier. On this day with Lenore it seemed that decisiveness, which was not my usual strong point, might work well for me.

"I had been planning to see Thunderbolt and Lightfoot; it's playing at the Valentine this week." I tried, without being too obvious about it, to watch for some wince or other sign of dissatisfaction from Lenore. I had no expertise on female cinematic tastes.

She said, "I've heard of it."

I told her all I knew about it, "It's some Clint Eastwood movie; it's set in the modern West. I did read one good review of it." Years later I found out that it had been the first movie Michael Cimino had ever directed.

I hoped she didn't have some grudge against Eastwood, perhaps because of the Dirty Harry pictures which wouldn't be called "politically correct" in today's phrase. She thought for a second, "All right, let's go."

I lunged for a follow-up point, "He was -- I mean Eastwood -- in this movie filmed right over here in Fort Tryon Park."

"Oh yeah, I've seen that; it was Coogan's Bluff. It's up by The Cloisters."

The Cloisters was a museum of Medieval art, a branch of the larger Metropolitan Museum of Art downtown. I ventured, "I used to go there with my family -- to The Cloisters I mean."

"I've been there a couple of times."

I considered that I had a third date concept there, but I kept that in reserve. I did realize that I had both Clint Eastwood and the Middle Ages going for me at this point. Thank God I'm not boring the shit out of this chick; she seems to get what I'm talking about.

She took a pen and a receipt out of her purse and wrote her phone number on it.

I said, "I'll call -- tomorrow afternoon?" I couldn't keep the tone of a question out of my voice. I've got to work on that.

"Sure. It's likely I'll answer, but otherwise just ask for me."

I was curious again about her family situation in that 4G apartment -- who would answer the phone if she didn't? - but I figured I'd find out soon enough.

Out on the sidewalk we had the tricky issue of parting from each other. Lenore handled the situation for me. She laughed a bit as if she understood the silliness of it, "Look, I'll go this way." She pointed towards the way we have arrived, back west along Lydig. "And you go that way," indicating north on Holland Avenue.

I expected her to start walking, but she startled me by leaning forward and giving me the briefest of kisses. Neither of us aimed very well, and her lips brushed my cheek. It was almost platonic, but I knew it wasn't intended that way. Perhaps she had surprised herself. She gently poked my arm and said, "So, hey, you said you were calling me tomorrow?"

"Of course." I probably sounded a little too eager with that.

I kept looking at her as she started down the block. I wasn't sure I wanted to think this but I couldn't help myself: she fills out the back of her jeans really nicely. Then she looked around at me and smiled. Hah, caught you! At least, that's how I interpreted her look. Maybe I was projecting my own hopes, but I could imagine her saying, so, do like what you're seeing?

Yeah, Lenore, you're behind looks just fine. Then she turned away and continued along Lydig.

I was struck with sexual thoughts about her that I had suppressed for the last half-hour. It started with my inventorying her clothes again and then guessing about what I hadn't been able to see. Was her blouse, under her shirt, sleeveless? It likely was in weather like this. That led to the next question, which was: what kind of bra and panties is she wearing today?

I had to get away from that uncomfortably hot street corner, and I headed north as she had suggested. Holland Avenue was lined with apartment buildings on both sides, so I was shielded from the afternoon sun. But I was barely aware of that; instead I trued to give attention to what had just happened. In the lobby I had thought she was just being flirtatious with me. Since I knew nothing about flirting, I had gotten right to the point of asking her out.

At the end of the block I sat down on a low wall facing Pelham Parkway. I hoped I would be distracted by the traffic passing in front of me, but I was still thinking about her. I imagined her sitting on my lap. She'd grind the seat of her jeans into my crotch, then she'd turn around to kiss me.

It was a good fantasy -- a little too good perhaps. But I did have the one completed date and the promise of another to console me. That was easier than I had had expected it would be. For quite a while -- maybe for the previous two years -- I had agonized about how to arrange a date. Then Lenore had walked into the elevator and the thing had almost arranged itself.

Actually, it was Lenore herself who would do much of the arranging from this point, even if she had to improvise along the way. I would soon know that even with her own inexperience she had some intuitive shrewdness about dealing with me.

As I sat on the wall was I remembered an old song I had heard in a cartoon. As easy as rolling off a log. I also thought of a Judy Garland song that my mother sometimes played, "The Boy Next Door," from Meet Me in St. Louis. That was the one in which the heroine lives at 5135 Kensington Avenue while pining for the guy at 5133. But he doesn't know I exist, no matter how I persist.

Lenore and I were both at 2096 Bronx Park East, although on different floors. But it was a different world from 1904, and Lenore wasn't much like Esther Smith. For one thing, she was very direct in getting what she wanted. I would find out that she was setting an agenda -- in part a sexual one -- that included me, and I was happy to go along with it.

Funny, I forgot to ask her what she would be majoring in.

#####