“Where’s your basic black?” he said.
“What?” She turned from the stove with a small inquiring smile, her hands on her hips.
“Freud.”
“Oh. I’ve got him down in the office.”
“It’s too bad I’m not Edward Voegler,” he said cheerfully. “You could have had a ball with me.”
“Why? Who’s Edward Voegler?”
“An escaped lunatic.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Didn’t you read the paper?”
“No. Where’d he escape from?”
“Central Islip.” He paused. “For a while today, I thought I might be him.”
“What made you decide you weren’t?”
“I met a real lunatic.”
“That’s always a good gauge. Do you like your coffee very hot?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. This is ready, then, if you want some.”
“Yes,” he said expansively, “yes, I want some. There is nothing I would rather have in the world right now than a good cup of coffee.”
“Do you always get like this?” she asked.
“When?”
“After...” She shrugged. “After you make love?”
“How am I?”
“I don’t know. Gentle, I guess. Your face looks very soft. You seem...” She shrugged again and sat at the table. “Just... soft.” Naked, he got off the bed and went into the kitchen. He stood behind her chair and bent over her and cupped her breasts and kissed the side of her throat. “Hey,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I love you.”
“Okay.”
“You’re supposed to say you love me, too.”
“I do.”
“You do what?”
“I do love you, too.”
“So say it.”
“I love you, I love you, I love you.” She paused. “Too.”
“If you love me so much, why don’t you pour my coffee?”
“I’m waiting for you to sit down.”
“Do I need a tie in this place?” he asked, and she began laughing. “Because if I do, I’m sure I can borrow one from the headwaiter.”
Still laughing, she went to the stove for the pot. She poured his coffee and then gently touched the top of his head and bent to kiss him on the forehead.
“Will you excuse me a minute?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said.
He watched as she crossed the room. The bathroom door closed behind her. He heard her turn on the water tap.
Before their marriage, they had considered taking an apartment with a bathroom down the hall, but L.J. had said it was important for a new bride to have her own bathroom. L.J. had been married to the girl from Boston for more than a year by then, so Buddwing and Grace automatically assumed he knew what he was talking about. They had taken the more expensive Third Avenue apartment with its own bathroom, but for many months after they moved in, they had wondered aloud just what the hell L.J. had meant. Why did a new bride need her own bathroom? It was Grace who, with her curious combination of innocence and candor, came out of the bathroom one morning, woke Buddwing as usual, and said, “It’s for putting in the diaphragm.”
“Huh?” he said. “What?”
“Our own john. It would be very embarrassing down the hall.”
“What would?” Buddwing asked sleepily.”
“Putting in a diaphragm down the hall.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and rubbed his eyes.
Their bridal couch was the sofa bed they had bought on 34th Street, and upon which they were still making installment payments. The folding spring mechanism was bolted to the heavy upholstered frame of the couch, and one night while they were making love in a particularly energetic fashion, the head and part of the bolt snapped off, leaving a portion of the threaded body in the frame of the couch, and dropping the spring a good six inches from where it should have rested. In the morning, Buddwing Scotch-taped the broken head onto the frame and into the metal hole, where in some miraculous fashion it continued to support the spring, though in a rather lopsided manner. Grace went to the 34th Street store to complain about the broken bed, but she did so in such high good humor that they never came to fix it. In her eyes, he was sure, the bed had taken on a personality and an identity, which was all a part of being married, something like making coffee on one’s own stove. He told her this one morning while she was washing in the bathroom. From behind the closed door, she said, “Oh, so who cares? We’ll tell all our friends that our marriage is held together by a Scotch-taped screw.”
Buddwing burst out laughing, but he heard no sound from behind the door. He went to the kitchen table, sat, poured himself a cup of coffee, and then said, “Hey, did you know that was funny?”
“Of course,” she answered. “Why do you think I said it?”
“I never can tell with you.”
“Ha, I’m a woman of mystery.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she said, and opened the door.
She came to the table and watched him as he put cream and sugar into his cup. He lifted the cup to his lips very delicately, with his pinky outstretched, wearing the look of a bored, supremely confident, magnificently poised English peer taking his tea in the vicar’s garden, totally unaware of his nudity. “Ahhh,” he said, smacking his lips, “magnificent! This is magnificent coffee!”
“Thank you.”
“Aren’t you going to have any?”
“I was just watching you.”
“And?”
“Nothing. I love you, that’s all.” She gave a curious little wiggle, as though it were an involuntary shudder of joy.
“Do that again,” he said.
“What did I do?”
“I don’t know, that sort of writhing motion.” He tried to imitate it.
“This?” she asked, and she did it again, and then laughed.
“I like it when you laugh.”
“I don’t laugh enough,” she said. “I’m usually very solemn. I guess it’s my Russian background. My parents are both Russian Jews, you know.”
“I didn’t know you were Jewish.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Really?”
“Well, sure really. What would I be doing otherwise? Trying to pass for Jewish if I wasn’t?”
“You don’t look Jewish,” he said.
“Oh, boy,” she answered. “The Chinese rabbi. You know that one, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, and smiled. “I meant, you look Italian.”
“Who? Me? No. Italian? With this blond hair?”
“Northern Italians have blond hair.”
“Yes, but still. Look at my face. It’s a very respectable sort of Jewgirl face that you can find on the New Lots Avenue Express every day of the week including Sundays. It usually has blue eyes, though. That’s the only difference.”
“I still think you look Italian.”
“No, non sono italiana,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’m usually taken for Irish. I’m what is known as a Yiddishe shiksa.” She turned suddenly on her chair and fell into his arms in a mock swoon of despair, the back of her hand pressed to her forehead. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “It’s all over between us, right?” He laughed and was about to answer her when she said, “The truth, now! You were a Nazi storm trooper during the war, right? Worse yet, you were a baker.” Still laughing, still trying to answer her, he jostled his coffee cup with his elbow and spilled half of it over the table. “Ah-ha!” she said. “See! It’s true!” She turned suddenly in his arms, precariously balanced, and kissed him on the mouth.
On Thursday of each week, they both had classes that broke at five o’clock. They would have coffee in the Chock Full O’ Nuts near the school, and then walk uptown to Klein’s, where Buddwing would impatiently hang around while Grace shopped for bargains. She rarely bought very much, and never anything expensive, but she told him she was used to an extravagant way of life, and did not want to get out of the habit now that she was married to a starving young student. From Klein’s, they would take the subway up to the theater district, have a meal in the Automat, and then see a Broadway show. Their tickets were always mail-order balcony seats, ordered months in advance, $2.40 the pair. The actors they saw on the stage sometimes resembled performing fleas, but they enjoyed their Thursdays immensely, and considered them an essential luxury to which they were undeniably entitled. Actually, they allowed themselves very few luxuries. Occasionally, they would take a break from their studies each night and walk up to Addie Vallins’ on 86th Street, where they would indulge themselves in banana splits brimming with ripe Burgundy cherries and toasted almonds at sixty cents apiece. Once they bought a hand-tooled edition of Shakespeare’s plays for thirty-eight dollars, and on another occasion they had a wooden radiator cover designed and built by a carpenter in the Village for twenty-two dollars, simply because they could no longer bear looking at the huge cast-iron monstrosity in their living room. But for the most part, they lived frugally on Buddwing’s G.I. allotment, asking neither his parents nor hers for help. At the time, if they had been asked what they thought of being married as opposed to being single, they both would have answered, “It’s the same thing, except we live together. It’s lots of fun.”