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.The photo we both liked best showed Sam playing the guitar, absorbed in his music,while I nuzzled his neck.It was my favorite because it captured the intensity of Sam's face,but it was his because of the way his right elbow surreptitiously nudged my left breast as heplayed.Neil Perlmutter, who lived in the apartment below ours, completed the East Eleventh Streetfamily.Since Swarthmore, he had grown his hair to shoulder length and sprouted a stragglyblack mustache.His clothes were baggier either because he had lost weight or because thecloth had stretched with age; they were certainly the same expensive slacks and jackets hehad worn new five years ago, to which he now added strings of beads and occasionalpatches.To my surprise, Neil and Sam got along splendidly.Neil, I guessed, was attractedto the same qualities in Sam that appealed to me: his imposing physical presence, hismusical gifts, his confident, hero-of-the-working-class manner.Neil's permanently sleepylook and the pauses he took between sentences had made him the subject of sometimesnasty teasing at college.They were well suited to the slow tempo of the Lower East Side,where what had been lethargy on campus was now called "mellow."My parents were convinced that my move was evidence of self-destructiveness.When I toldthem that I had at last found a man I could love for the rest of my life, they responded withskeptical silence, followed by a barrage of questions about Sam's age, employmentbackground, and marital status.Then they invited us to Forest Hills for dinner.I acceptedbecause I wanted them to like him, but I should have known that the evening would be adisaster.The blunt outspokenness that I found so appealing in Sam was merely offensive tomy parents.When my mother introduced herself as Mrs.Alpert, he looked at her coolly andasked, "Don't you have a first name?" I think he was more nervous than intent on insultingher, but the effect was the same.She looked shocked, then very prim, and said, "Yes, I do,but Jane's friends call me Mrs.Alpert." My temperature rose five degrees, and I couldn'tlook at either of them.At dinner Sam answered their questions in monosyllables.Of course,he despised their bourgeois style and was refusing on principle to accommodate himself toit; still, I wished that he would bend a little or that they would stop acting as though he hadcome to sell them something.79After dinner I suggested that Sam and my father play chess.Since they were both betterthan average players, I thought the game would help them face each other as equals.Instead, it transferred the antipathy onto other grounds.I drank tea with my mother whileSam and my father played.My mother's eyes kept drifting from Sam's open-at-the-collarwork shirt to the lugged soles of his boots, then back to me, their blankness showing shehad heard nothing of what I said.My father and Sam did not exchange a word through thegame.My father lost a knight early, a second in the middle of the game, and then resigned.At ten o'clock they showed us to the door.My parents never met Sam again.If they calledand Sam answered the phone, they asked for me without greeting him.They would not visitthe apartment, although my mother admitted (with a shudder) that they had driven by itonce.I continued to have dinner with my parents in Forest Hills every month or so.If Ibrought up Sam on those occasions, they would talk about the weather or Skip's progress atBrandeis, where he was then a freshman.For once the two of them were in perfect accord,facing me with a wall of disapproval in which I could find no crack.Sam and I had wonderful times together that fall.Early Saturday mornings we would rideDiane's bicycles to the Williamsburg Bridge to watch the sun rise, then pedal home, eatingfresh rolls from our favorite Italian bakery.At night we would stroll along the East River,listening to the strange electrical hum of the city at night, smoking a joint, then stopping fordouble-dip ice cream cones at a candy store on Avenue B where they cost only fifteen cents.We had midnight dinners in Chinatown, often with Greg Rosen or Robert Carpenter, andRobert's girl friend, a graduate student in biology.One night, after a couple of joints,Robert, Sam, and I tested the almond cookies at every restaurant on Mott Street, finallybuying a pound of those that won our contest and eating them until we were sick [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]