If someone were to ask me to sum up that year in Boston with one story, this is the one I would relate.
In the building to which I moved after Joy Street, my next-door neighbors were two heroin addicts undergoing methadone treatment to try and beat their addiction. Robby was about 5’10”, dark haired, and affable. His girlfriend Abby was shorter, thin as a stick, and also dark-haired. Robby was affable, bur Abby was nervous and quiet. Once when she was trying to tell me about something that had happened to Robby—I think it had to do with his having stolen some running shoes—her chin began quivering and soon her upper and lower teeth were tapping together like a rodent eating cheese. Whether this physical malady stemmed from heroin or methadone I don’t know, but it was bizarre.
If someone were to ask me to sum up that year in Boston with one story, this is the one I would relate.
In the building to which I moved after Joy Street, my next-door neighbors were two heroin addicts undergoing methadone treatment to try and beat their addiction. Robby was about 5’10”, dark haired, and affable. His girlfriend Abby was shorter, thin as a stick, and also dark-haired. Robby was affable, bur Abby was nervous and quiet. Once when she was trying to tell me about something that had happened to Robby—I think it had to do with his having stolen some running shoes—her chin began quivering and soon her upper and lower teeth were tapping together like a rodent eating cheese. Whether this physical malady stemmed from heroin or methadone I don’t know, but it was bizarre.
The three of us shared the bathroom at the end of the hallway. One morning I went there to brush my teeth and found a blood clot lying on the bathroom floor. It looked like a slug, a thick, viscous worm of blood. That blood belonged to one of them, and I left it as I found it. When I came back in the evening, the blood clot was gone.
At any rate, Robby and I were once talking outside my room. “You know what’s weird?” he asked.
By this time, having lived on Beacon Hill for six months, I could think of a hundred examples of weird. But I had just returned from work at the Old Corner Bookstore and was beat out. “What?”
“We’re the only completely heterosexual floor in this entire building. Think about it. And not all of the other floors are all gay either.” I wasn’t sure, but I think he was referring to the man on the fourth floor with the dog.
Our brief conversation pretty much captures that year in Boston. And with his comment, more than any other experience, I understood, as I said earlier, my own status: I was an observer, a recorder, a middle-class misfit grown familiar with people very different from me but unable mentally and morally to participate in their lives and activities. I lived there, yes, but I wasn’t a part of that life.
In those days, I didn’t have much money, but sometimes late in the evening, after I had finished writing, I would walk down the Hill to the Harvard Gardens and order a single drink, a beer or a Black Russian. Beer for the hot weather, Black Russian for the cold. The bar, I should add, was misnamed: Harvard was in Cambridge, and the only hints of a garden were some desiccated plants on the windowsills. But the drinks were affordable, it was an easy stroll from my building, and some of the patrons knew me.
That night I was sitting with Joe, who was a little drunk. Sometimes when he’d taken in too much beer Joe would comment, in the foulest way possible, on every female who walked through the door. One evening Sean O’Leary called him on his obscenities and told him to knock it off, which Joe did, but the next evening he was at it again.
This night, however, Joe was on his good behavior, and we talked about work.
At the next table were four nurses coming off the evening shift at Massachusetts General Hospital, which was just across the street. This was the thing about the Harvard Gardens—you’d see workmen and secretaries, businessmen and plumbers, nurses and doctors in their scrubs, all in the same bar.
One of the nurses—a small-boned woman with dark short hair and chiseled features—caught my eye. “She is really pretty."
“You like her?”
“Yes.”
In spite of his crass talk, Jim had a good heart and had felt since meeting me that I needed a love life. He summoned the waitress and asked her to take one beer to the next table. One beer? Even I knew this was inappropriate.
Yet when the waitress delivered the beer, the nurses laughed and beckoned for us to join them. We did so, and right away, sitting close to her, I was even more attracted to that nurse.
Part of this allure, of course, was physical. Her hair was dark and cut nearly as short as mine, and her eyes were bright and kind, and smiled when she laughed. There were other physical charms as well, but after three hours of attempting to write a description here I am giving up. Nothing works. Instead, I find myself thinking of the lines about love and attraction in Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific: “Who can explain it?/Who can tell you why?/ Fools give you reasons/Wise men never try.” Three hours is quite enough time for me to have played the fool here. Suffice it to say that I loved her look. Twenty years later, after she had carried four babies and gained twenty pounds, I still loved her look.
Despite the warnings of Mr. Rogers and Mr. Hammerstein, I do know with absolute certainty one reason why I found this nurse so captivating that night. As she told me a little about growing up in Milwaukee—“Mwaukee,” as she pronounced it— and then described a trip she and a friend were taking to Disney World the next week, she gave off a sense of innocence and wholehearted goodness that drew me like a perfume. Given all the strange characters I’d encountered in the previous six months, meeting Kris Gillet, R.N. was like finding a Rothschild’s Orchid in a patch of weeds.
Even possessed of this revelation, I almost terminated any possibility of a future together by my foolish lack of courage. I was always shy about asking women out, and when the nurses got up to leave, I just sat stupidly still in my chair, watching them depart and probably looking pathetic and forlorn. But as they walked away from us, Joe said, “Don’t let her get away, man! Don’t let her get away!” Kris later told me with a laugh that she’d heard his words and wondered if I would heed them.
I did. I followed her outside into a stiff March breeze with midnight already around the corner and caught up to her a few paces from the tavern door. “I don’t usually do this,” I said, “but I wondered if I could get your number.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t usually do this, but I’ll give it to you.”
Her friends had walked to the corner to give us some privacy, glancing at us over their shoulders and giggling while she pulled a pen from her purse and I wrote her phone number on the palm of my hand.
It was then my guardian angel put in an appearance. Many people think of their guardian angels as sporting wings and dressed in immaculate white robes. Mine was a small man in need of shave, shabbily dressed and smelling of whiskey. He came out of nowhere from behind us, put his arms around our shoulders, and said, “Give the guy a chance. Give him a chance.”
And then he vanished into the night.
Bless you forever, my stumblebum angel. Kris gave me a chance.
On our third date, we went to a bakery on Cambridge Street. Kris loved sweets—her favorite foods that summer were Hawaiian Punch and Chocolate Covered Grahams. While we were sitting in the bakery, she noticed a Raggedy Ann cookie jar on a shelf behind the counter. “Oh, that’s so sweet,” she said. “I always loved Raggedy Ann.”
The next day I returned to the bakery and asked the price of the cookie jar. “It’s really not for sale,” the owner said, “but I’ll let you have it for twenty bucks.”
Twenty dollars was a steep price for me at that time in my life—I was making about ninety a week—but I paid the price and so bought my first gift for the woman who would become my wife. Later, after Kris’s death, her mother accidentally shattered the lid on the jar, and we were both devastated, but then Kris’s sister Karyl, who has the soul of an artisan with the fingers to match, repaired the lid so well that the breakage is almost invisible.
Once she returned from her vacation in Disney World, Kris and I saw each other almost every day over the next three months. She had more corn in her than a field in Iowa, and I adored her for it. A Milwaukee girl to the bone, she had spent some of her summer childhood vacations on her grandfather’s dairy farm. She had won her nursing degree at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and had migrated east to work for a year in a large hospital. She gave names to her cars. She enjoyed camping as long as she didn’t have to cook, she revered her family and her country, and she disliked pessimism and black thoughts. Once I told her that from time to time I had thought of suicide, not in a serious way but more along the lines of Nietzsche: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” Kris didn’t find this revelation amusing. In fact, she was horrified and told me that thought of suicide had never once entered her head and that I should bar it from mine as well.
One of the few other times she ever criticized me was on our first date. I was a smoker then, a practice she despised, and as I was putting out a cigarette to enter the restaurant she asked, “Where did you pick up that filthy habit anyway?”
She lived in a nice apartment in Cambridge with three other women. The few times I visited there, I was always a trifle stunned at how messy that apartment was. Looking at the piles of dishes in the sink, the skirts and blouses tossed about the living room, and the piles of clothing forlornly awaiting the washing machine, I foresaw a future with Kris, correctly as it turned out, of meals made from boxed foods, dishes unwashed, and clothes strewn about the bedroom. Among themselves, her roommates referred to me as “Jeff Three” because she had dated two previous Jeffs. When I telephoned, I could hear them summoning Kris: “Jeff Three’s on the phone.” Well, I would think, third time’s the charm.
Kris kept asking to see where I lived, and I kept inventing excuses to keep her away. I was too ashamed of the place and of my circumstances. She had a career and a good salary; I was working as a clerk and trying to become a writer. She drove a car; I used my feet or the subway. She lived in a large apartment in a good neighborhood; I was renting a room in a basement. Finally, though, she prevailed, and feeling a little sick with nerves, I escorted her to my building and opened the door to my room. I was stunned—and I remain stunned—that she had nothing negative to say about that room. Kris took me as she found me in all ways, even with my filthy habit.
By June I was in love with her.
At any rate, Robby and I were once talking outside my room. “You know what’s weird?” he asked.
By this time, having lived on Beacon Hill for six months, I could think of a hundred examples of weird. But I had just returned from work at the Old Corner Bookstore and was beat out. “What?”
“We’re the only completely heterosexual floor in this entire building. Think about it. And not all of the other floors are all gay either.” I wasn’t sure, but I think he was referring to the man on the fourth floor with the dog.
Our brief conversation pretty much captures that year in Boston. And with his comment, more than any other experience, I understood, as I said earlier, my own status: I was an observer, a recorder, a middle-class misfit grown familiar with people very different from me but unable mentally and morally to participate in their lives and activities. I lived there, yes, but I wasn’t a part of that life.
In those days, I didn’t have much money, but sometimes late in the evening, after I had finished writing, I would walk down the Hill to the Harvard Gardens and order a single drink, a beer or a Black Russian. Beer for the hot weather, Black Russian for the cold. The bar, I should add, was misnamed: Harvard was in Cambridge, and the only hints of a garden were some desiccated plants on the windowsills. But the drinks were affordable, it was an easy stroll from my building, and some of the patrons knew me.
That night I was sitting with Joe, who was a little drunk. Sometimes when he’d taken in too much beer Joe would comment, in the foulest way possible, on every female who walked through the door. One evening Sean O’Leary called him on his obscenities and told him to knock it off, which Joe did, but the next evening he was at it again.
This night, however, Joe was on his good behavior, and we talked about work.
At the next table were four nurses coming off the evening shift at Massachusetts General Hospital, which was just across the street. This was the thing about the Harvard Gardens—you’d see workmen and secretaries, businessmen and plumbers, nurses and doctors in their scrubs, all in the same bar.
One of the nurses—a small-boned woman with dark short hair and chiseled features—caught my eye. “She is really pretty."
“You like her?”
“Yes.”
In spite of his crass talk, Jim had a good heart and had felt since meeting me that I needed a love life. He summoned the waitress and asked her to take one beer to the next table. One beer? Even I knew this was inappropriate.
Yet when the waitress delivered the beer, the nurses laughed and beckoned for us to join them. We did so, and right away, sitting close to her, I was even more attracted to that nurse.
Part of this allure, of course, was physical. Her hair was dark and cut nearly as short as mine, and her eyes were bright and kind, and smiled when she laughed. There were other physical charms as well, but after three hours of attempting to write a description here I am giving up. Nothing works. Instead, I find myself thinking of the lines about love and attraction in Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific: “Who can explain it?/Who can tell you why?/ Fools give you reasons/Wise men never try.” Three hours is quite enough time for me to have played the fool here. Suffice it to say that I loved her look. Twenty years later, after she had carried four babies and gained twenty pounds, I still loved her look.
Despite the warnings of Mr. Rogers and Mr. Hammerstein, I do know with absolute certainty one reason why I found this nurse so captivating that night. As she told me a little about growing up in Milwaukee—“Mwaukee,” as she pronounced it— and then described a trip she and a friend were taking to Disney World the next week, she gave off a sense of innocence and wholehearted goodness that drew me like a perfume. Given all the strange characters I’d encountered in the previous six months, meeting Kris Gillet, R.N. was like finding a Rothschild’s Orchid in a patch of weeds.
Even possessed of this revelation, I almost terminated any possibility of a future together by my foolish lack of courage. I was always shy about asking women out, and when the nurses got up to leave, I just sat stupidly still in my chair, watching them depart and probably looking pathetic and forlorn. But as they walked away from us, Joe said, “Don’t let her get away, man! Don’t let her get away!” Kris later told me with a laugh that she’d heard his words and wondered if I would heed them.
I did. I followed her outside into a stiff March breeze with midnight already around the corner and caught up to her a few paces from the tavern door. “I don’t usually do this,” I said, “but I wondered if I could get your number.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t usually do this, but I’ll give it to you.”
Her friends had walked to the corner to give us some privacy, glancing at us over their shoulders and giggling while she pulled a pen from her purse and I wrote her phone number on the palm of my hand.
It was then my guardian angel put in an appearance. Many people think of their guardian angels as sporting wings and dressed in immaculate white robes. Mine was a small man in need of shave, shabbily dressed and smelling of whiskey. He came out of nowhere from behind us, put his arms around our shoulders, and said, “Give the guy a chance. Give him a chance.”
And then he vanished into the night.
Bless you forever, my stumblebum angel. Kris gave me a chance.
On our third date, we went to a bakery on Cambridge Street. Kris loved sweets—her favorite foods that summer were Hawaiian Punch and Chocolate Covered Grahams. While we were sitting in the bakery, she noticed a Raggedy Ann cookie jar on a shelf behind the counter. “Oh, that’s so sweet,” she said. “I always loved Raggedy Ann.”
The next day I returned to the bakery and asked the price of the cookie jar. “It’s really not for sale,” the owner said, “but I’ll let you have it for twenty bucks.”
Twenty dollars was a steep price for me at that time in my life—I was making about ninety a week—but I paid the price and so bought my first gift for the woman who would become my wife. Later, after Kris’s death, her mother accidentally shattered the lid on the jar, and we were both devastated, but then Kris’s sister Karyl, who has the soul of an artisan with the fingers to match, repaired the lid so well that the breakage is almost invisible.
Once she returned from her vacation in Disney World, Kris and I saw each other almost every day over the next three months. She had more corn in her than a field in Iowa, and I adored her for it. A Milwaukee girl to the bone, she had spent some of her summer childhood vacations on her grandfather’s dairy farm. She had won her nursing degree at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and had migrated east to work for a year in a large hospital. She gave names to her cars. She enjoyed camping as long as she didn’t have to cook, she revered her family and her country, and she disliked pessimism and black thoughts. Once I told her that from time to time I had thought of suicide, not in a serious way but more along the lines of Nietzsche: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” Kris didn’t find this revelation amusing. In fact, she was horrified and told me that thought of suicide had never once entered her head and that I should bar it from mine as well.
One of the few other times she ever criticized me was on our first date. I was a smoker then, a practice she despised, and as I was putting out a cigarette to enter the restaurant she asked, “Where did you pick up that filthy habit anyway?”
She lived in a nice apartment in Cambridge with three other women. The few times I visited there, I was always a trifle stunned at how messy that apartment was. Looking at the piles of dishes in the sink, the skirts and blouses tossed about the living room, and the piles of clothing forlornly awaiting the washing machine, I foresaw a future with Kris, correctly as it turned out, of meals made from boxed foods, dishes unwashed, and clothes strewn about the bedroom. Among themselves, her roommates referred to me as “Jeff Three” because she had dated two previous Jeffs. When I telephoned, I could hear them summoning Kris: “Jeff Three’s on the phone.” Well, I would think, third time’s the charm.
Kris kept asking to see where I lived, and I kept inventing excuses to keep her away. I was too ashamed of the place and of my circumstances. She had a career and a good salary; I was working as a clerk and trying to become a writer. She drove a car; I used my feet or the subway. She lived in a large apartment in a good neighborhood; I was renting a room in a basement. Finally, though, she prevailed, and feeling a little sick with nerves, I escorted her to my building and opened the door to my room. I was stunned—and I remain stunned—that she had nothing negative to say about that room. Kris took me as she found me in all ways, even with my filthy habit.
By June I was in love with her.