Tanner’s Virgin

Chapter 1

At 2:30 one fine October afternoon I ripped the telephone out of the wall. Minna said, “Evan, you have ripped the telephone out of the wall.”

I looked at her. Minna is seven years old and looks like a Lithuanian edition of Alice in Wonderland, all blond and big-eyed, and it is generally a pleasure to look at her. Now, though, something in my glance told her that coexistence was temporarily impossible.

“I think I shall go to the park,” she said carefully. “With Mikey.”

“Mikey is in school.”

“He stayed home today, Evan. It is a Jewish holiday.”

Mikey, né Miguel, belonged to no church in particular and was thus free to become an ex-officio member of whatever religious group was staying home from school on any given day. I said something caustic about Mikey and the many paths to divine enlightenment. Minna asked if we had any stale bread, and I told her I couldn’t be expected to keep track of that sort of thing, that kitchen inventories were her problem. She reappeared with three slices of bread for the pigeons. They didn’t look especially stale.

“Good afternoon,” she said in Lithuanian. “I forgive you for the intemperance of your mood, and trust you will be better suited to discourse upon my return.”

She ducked out the door before I could chuck a shoe at her. Minna always speaks Lithuanian when she does her queen shtik. She has the right, after all. As the sole surviving descendant of Mindaugas, the first and only king of independent Lithuania, she is unquestionably a royal person. She has vowed to make me her prime minister upon the restoration of the Lithuanian monarchy, and I keep her promise in a drawer with my Czarist bonds and Confederate money.

So I sighed heavily, and Minna went off to poison the pigeons in the park, and I sighed again and got a screwdriver and opened up the little telephone thing on the wall and put the phone together again. There’s much to be said for venting one’s anger upon inanimate objects, especially when they are so readily repaired.

It took perhaps ten minutes to rewire the telephone, just a fraction of the time the little black monster had already cost me that day. It had been ringing intermittently since five in the morning. Since I do not sleep, friends and enemies feel free to call me at all hours, and this was one of those days when they had been doing precisely that.

I was devoting the day to working on a thesis on color symbolism in the nature poems of William Wordsworth, and if you think that sounds slightly dull you don’t know the half of it. It was not at all the sort of thesis topic I would have selected, but for unknowable reasons it was precisely the sort of thesis topic Karen Dietrich had selected. Miss Dietrich was a school-teacher in Suffolk County who would receive a raise in pay if she earned a master’s degree. I in turn would receive $1000 for furnishing Miss Dietrich with an acceptable thesis, said thesis to run approximately twenty thousand words, making my words worth a nickel apiece, color symbolism notwithstanding.

Anyway, I had to finish the damned thing, and the phone kept ringing. For a while I gave Minna the job of answering it, a task she does rather well most of the time. This wasn’t one of those times. Minna is fluent in Lithuanian, Lettish, English, Spanish, and French, can struggle through in German and Armenian, picked up shreds of Irish last summer in Dublin, and knows occasional obscenities in perhaps half a dozen other tongues. So all morning long the phone kept ringing and Minna kept answering it and various clowns kept coming at her in Polish and Serbo-Croat and Italian and other languages outside her ken.

Until ultimately I ripped the damn thing out of the wall and Minna fled to cooler climes. And when the clime in my apartment cooled somewhat, I repaired the telephone. As you now know.

It was one of the major mistakes of my life.

For almost an hour the phone remained stoically silent. I probed Wordsworth and pounded my typewriter while the silent phone lulled me into a false sense of security. Then it rang and I answered it and a voice I did not recognize said, “Mr. Tanner? Mr. Evan Tanner?”

I said, “Yes.”

“You don’t know me, Mr. Tanner.”

“Oh.”

“But I have to talk to you.”

“Oh.”

“My name is Miriam Horowitz.”

“How do you do, Miss Horowitz.”

“It’s Mrs. Horowitz. Mrs. Benjamin Horowitz.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Horowitz.”

“He’s dead.”

“Pardon me?”

“Benjamin, he should rest in peace. I am a widow.”

“I’m very worry.”

“Oh, it’ll be eight years in February. What am I saying? Nine years. Nine years in February. Never sick a day, a hard worker, a good husband, he comes home tired from the office, like a candle he drops dead. It was his heart.”

I changed ears so that Mrs. Horowitz could talk into the other one. She had fallen silent. I decided she needed prompting. “I’m Evan Tanner,” I said.

“I know.”

“You called me, Mrs. Horowitz. I don’t want to, uh, be brusque with you, uh, but-”

“I’m calling you about my daughter.”

I’m calling you about my daughter. There are bachelors in their middle thirties who can hear those words without erupting in panic, but they generally wear pink silk shorts and subscribe to physical culture magazines. I felt a well nigh irresistible urge to hang up the phone.

“My daughter Deborah. She’s in trouble.”

My daughter Deborah. She’s in trouble.

I hung up the phone.

Deborah Horowitz is pregnant, I thought. Deborah Horowitz is pregnant, and her idiot of a mother has decided that Evan Michael Tanner is personally responsible for this state of affairs, and is presently measuring him for a son-in-law suit. Or a paternity suit.

I stood up and began pacing the floor. Now how in God’s name, I wondered, had Deborah Horowitz managed to get pregnant? Why didn’t she take her pills? What was the matter with her? And-

Wait a minute.

I didn’t know anyone named Deborah Horowitz.

The phone rang. I picked it up, and Mrs. Horowitz’s voice was saying something about our having been disconnected. I broke in to tell her that there was some sort of mistake, that I didn’t even know her daughter.

“You’re Evan Tanner?”

“Yes, but-”

“ West 107th Street? Manhattan?”

“Yes, but-”

“You know her. And you have to help me, I’m a widow, I’m all alone in the world, I have nowhere to turn. You-”

“But-”

“You know her. Maybe you don’t know her by her real name. Young girls, they always get fancy ideas about names. I remember when I was sixteen all of a sudden Miriam was no good, I had to call myself Mimi. Hah!”

“Your daughter-”

“Phaedra, she calls herself now.”

I said slowly, softly, “Phaedra Harrow.”

“See? You know her.”

“Phaedra Harrow.”

“The ideas they get. Both names, from Deborah to Phaedra and from Horowitz to-”

“Mrs. Horowitz,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Horowitz, I think you’ve made a mistake.” I took a deep breath. “If Phaedra – if Deborah, that is, if she’s, uh, pregnant, well, I think it’s impossible.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, if that’s the case, I think you’d better start looking for a very bright star in the East. Because-”

“Who said anything about pregnant?”

“You did.”

“In trouble, I said.”

“Oh.” I thought for a moment. “So you did.”

“Her name wasn’t good enough for her, she had to change it. Her country wasn’t good enough for her, she had to go overseas. God knows what she gets mixed up in. I always get letters, and then the letters stop, and then I get this one postcard. Mr. Tanner, I’ll tell you frankly, I’m frightened for her life. Mr. Tanner, let me tell you-”

I didn’t hang up. I said, “Mrs. Horowitz, maybe we shouldn’t go into this on the phone.”

“No?”

“My phone is tapped.”

“Oh, God!”

I thought her reaction might be a little extreme. When one is a recognized subversive, the unashamed member of any number of organizations pledged to the violent overthrow of one government or another, one learns to regard every telephone as tapped until proven otherwise. The Central Intelligence Agency maintains a permanent tap on my telephone, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation reads my mail. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. I can never remember.

“I have to see you,” Mrs. Horowitz said.

“Well, I’m sort of busy-”

“This is a matter of life or death.”

“Well, I have this thesis I’m writing, you see, on, uh-”

“You know where I live, Tanner?”

“No.”

“In Mamaroneck. You know Mamaroneck?”

“Well-”

She gave me the address. I didn’t bother writing it down. “You’ll come right up to me,” she said. “I have everything here. I am waiting with my heart in my head.”

She hung up, and a few minutes later so did I.

“I have never been on a train before,” Minna said. She was squinting through a very dirty window, watching the very dirty East Bronx roll by. “Thank you for bringing me, Evan. This is a beautiful train.”

Actually it was a terrible train. It was a commuter local of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, and it had left Grand Central a few minutes after five, and some minutes after that Minna and I had boarded it at the 125th Street station. Soon, albeit not soon enough, it would deposit us in Mamaroneck.

I had not really planned to be on this train or any other. I didn’t take down Mrs. Horowitz’s address for that very reason. Mrs. Horowitz on the phone was less than a pleasure, and Mrs. Horowitz face to face promised to be even worse. If Phaedra was in trouble – and God knows she deserved to be – I was fully confident she could land on her feet. Mothers like Mrs. Horowitz with daughters like Phaedra are always worried, and they usually have every right to be, but when they try to do something about it they almost invariably make matters worse.

“I don’t see any animals,” Minna said.

“You won’t. That’s the Bronx.”

“I thought we would see the Bronx Zoo.”

Minna has an insatiable passion for zoos. I gave her a brief geography lesson on the Bronx. I don’t think she paid much attention, because she went on to tell me how she had gone to the Bronx Zoo with Kitty Bazerian once, and how Arlette Sazerac took her to the zoo in Dublin when we were over there, and how she had several times permitted Phaedra to accompany her to the children’s zoo in Central Park. Minna has an uncanny knack for conning people into undertaking such excursions. I often suspect that she thinks I fall in love solely to provide her with zoo-takers.

I closed my eyes and thought about William Wordsworth, which was something I had been unable to do since the conversation with Phaedra’s mother. Instead, I had passed the better part of two hours staring at the sheet of paper in my typewriter and thinking about Phaedra. I kept telling myself that there was nothing to worry about, and certainly nothing that I could do anyway. But the fact remained that one of the things I too obviously couldn’t do was concentrate on the damned thesis while my mind was busy brooding over the possible whereabouts of an eighteen-year-old virgin with an incredible body, an implausible name, and an impenetrable chastity.

Phaedra Harrow. She came into my life, or I into hers, at a party held by the Ad Hoc Garbage for Greece Committee. Back in February the New York landscape had consisted of garbage, tons upon tons of garbage, its collection waiting upon the settlement of the sanitation workers’ strike. Somebody is always on strike in New York, and this time it was the garbage men. The city was hip-deep in potato peelings and empty plastic containers, and packs of rats left sinking tenements to forage in the streets. It is perhaps illustrative of the current state of New York that the strike was three days old before anyone noticed the difference.

In any case, a group of prominent Greek-Americans, including one actress and twelve restauranteurs, took it upon themselves to organize the Garbage for Greece operation. It was conceived as a sort of viable alternative to Care packages; for five dollars one could send ten pounds of garbage to Athens, thus helping clean up New York and expressing one’s feelings toward the Greek military junta in one swell foop.

Well. In ten days the strike was settled, with the result that the program never got off the ground (although the garbage did, finally). I don’t think much more would have happened anyway. The main idea had been to garner a little newspaper space – very little, sad to say. But the group had retained its esprit de corps, and the night before Easter the group was throwing a party to celebrate the end of winter. And the party itself was an unqualified success. The membership of the New York chapter of the Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society was present in full force. The founders of the committee bankrupted their respective restaurants to provide food and drink. There was lamb roasted in every possible fashion, pilafs of rice and pine nuts and currants, fluffy and gooey confections of dough and walnuts and honey. And there was wine.

Lord, was there wine! Case upon case of retsina and rhoditys and mavrodaphne, wine to sip along with the food, wine to swallow along with the fiery speeches, wine to swill while George Pappas plucked his oud and Stavros Melchos pounded his copper drum and Kitty Bazerian offered up a furious dance as tribute to the cause of Hellenic (and sexual) freedom.

Phaedra Harrow. She stood in a corner of the cavernous banquet room drinking retsina from a half-gallon jug. Her hair was a glossy dark-brown waterfall flowing down her back almost to her waist, which in turn was small, which the rest of her emphatically was not. She wore what was either the ultimate miniskirt or a rather wide cummerbund. Her legs began precisely where this garment left off; clad snugly in green mesh tights, they ran a well-shaped course to her feet, which were tucked into a pair of green suede toes-turned-up slippers of the sort cobblers make for elves. Her sweater had been designed to drape loosely, but it had not been designed with Phaedra in mind. It fit snugly.

I saw her from halfway across the room, and I stared at her until she looked my way, and our eyes locked as eyes are wont to do. I walked to her. She passed me the jug of wine, and I drank, and she drank, and we looked into each other’s eyes. Hers were the color of her hair, almond-shaped, very large. Mine are nothing remarkable.

“I am Evan Tanner,” I said. “And you are a creature of myth and magic.”

“I am Phaedra.”

“Phaedra,” I said. “Sister to Ariadne, bride to Theseus. And hast thou killed the minotaur? Come to my arms, my beamish boy.”

“O frabjous day,” said Phaedra.

“And would you hang yourself for love of Hippolytus? He’s naught but a loutish lad and hardly worthy of your attentions. Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“And second and third.”

“Phaedra. Easter is upon us, and Phaedra has put an end to winter. Now is the winter of our discotheque – ah, you laugh, but that’s the real meaning of Easter. The rebirth of the world, Christ is risen, and the sap rises in the trees. Do you know that just a dozen blocks from here Easter will be properly celebrated? There’s a Russian Orthodox church where they do this particular holiday superbly. Singing and shouting and joy. Come, my Phaedra. This party is dying around us” – a lie, it went on exuberantly for another five hours – “and we’ve just time to catch the midnight Easter service, and I love you, you know-”

The Russian services were glorious. They were still in progress when we left the church around two. We found a diner on 14th Street and drank coffee with our mouths and each other with our eyes. I asked her where she was from, where she was living. She quoted Omar: “I came like water and like wind I go.” And, more specifically, she said that she did not presently have any place to stay. She had been living with some hippies on East 10th Street but had moved out that afternoon; everyone was high all the time, she said, and nobody really did anything, and she had had enough of that sort of thing.

“Come to my place,” I said.

“All right.”

“Come live with me and be my love.”

“Yes.”

And as our taxi raced from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side, she settled her head on my shoulder. “I have things to tell you,” she said. “I am Phaedra Harrow. I am eighteen years old.”

“Half my age. Do you believe in numerology? I think the implications are fascinating-”

“I am a virgin.”

“That’s extraordinary.”

“I know.”

“Uh-”

Her hand pressed my arm. “I am not anti-sex or frigid or a lesbian or anything. And I don’t want to be seduced or talked into it. People try all the time-”

“That’s not hard to believe.”

“-but it’s not what I want. Not now. I want to see the whole world. I want to find things out, I want to grow. I’m talking too much now. When I drink too much I talk too much. But I want you to understand this. I would like to stay with you, to live with you, if you still want me to. But I don’t want to make love.”

At the time, what I wondered most about this little speech was whether Phaedra herself believed it. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t even believe she was a virgin, for that matter. I had long felt that the species was either mythological or extinct, and that a virgin was a seven-year-old girl who could run faster than her brother.

So all the way home I was certain I knew how we would celebrate the coming of spring. I would convert my couch into a bed, and I would take this fine, sweet, magnificent girl in my arms, and, well, write in your own purple passage.

The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes aren’t. Phaedra certainly wasn’t. At my apartment I was shocked to discover that she really meant just what she had said. She was a virgin, and she intended to remain a virgin for the foreseeable future, and while she would willingly sleep with me with the understanding that we would do no more than share bed space in a platonic fashion, she would not countenance any sort of sexual involvement.

So I made the couch into a bed, all right, and I put her to sleep in it, and then I went into the kitchen and made myself some coffee and read several books without being able to pay much attention to them. A mood, I told myself. Or a monthly plague, or something. It would pass.

But it never did. Phaedra stayed at my apartment for just about a month, and it was as acutely frustrating a month as I have ever spent in my life. She was in every other respect a perfect house guest: absorbing company when I wanted company, perfectly unobstrusive when I had something to do, an ideal companion for Minna, a reasonable cook and housekeeper. If the delight that was Phaedra had been purely sexual, I would have quickly sent her away. If, on the other hand, I had not found her so overpoweringly attractive, I could have quickly adjusted to the sort of brother-sister relationship she wanted to maintain. Unless one possesses the mentality of a rapist, after all, one regards desire as an essentially mutual thing. Lust cannot long be a one-way street.

At least I had always found this to be the case. Now, though, it wasn’t. Every day I found myself wanting the cloistered little bitch more, and every day it became more evident that I was not going to have her. The obvious solution – that I find some other female with a more realistic outlook on life and love – worked better in theory than in practice. I was not, sad to say, a horny adolescent who purely and simply wanted to get his ashes hauled. There are any number of ways to ameliorate such a problem, but mine was something else again. When lechery is specific, substitutes don’t work at all; they make about as much sense as eating a loaf of bread when you’re dying of thirst.

This went on twenty-four hours a day for a month, and if you think it sounds maddening, then perhaps you’re beginning to get the point. After the first night Phaedra had moved into Minna’s room and shared Minna’s bed, so at least I didn’t have to watch her sleep; but even at night the presence of her filled the apartment and addled my brain.

Yet I couldn’t even talk to Phaedra about it, not at much length. Any conversation on the subject served only to heighten my frustration and her guilt feelings without bringing matters any closer to their logical conclusion.

“It’s so wrong,” she would say. “I can’t stay here any-more, Evan. You’ve been wonderful to me and it’s just not fair to you. I’ll move out.”

And then I would have to talk her into staying. I was afraid if she moved out I would lose her. Sooner or later, I thought, she would either give in or I would cease to want her. It did not happen quite that way, however. Instead, I was like a man with an injured foot, limping automatically through life without being constantly conscious of the pain.

Hell. I wanted her and didn’t get her, and by the end of the month I had grown used to this state of affairs, and then one day she said that she had to go away, that she was leaving New York. She wasn’t sure where she was going. I felt a dual sense of loss and liberation. She was half my age, I told myself, and desperately neurotic, and her neurosis seemed to be contagious, and much as I loved her I was bloody well rid of her. So she moved out, and for a while the apartment was lonely, and then it wasn’t. There was, briefly, a girl named Sonya.

And now it was the middle of October, the one month of the year when New York is at its best. The air has a crispness to it, and the wind changes direction and blows most of the pollution away, and on good days the sky has a distinct bluish cast to it. Spring had been drizzly and summer impossible and it stood to reason that winter, when it came, would be as bad as it always is, but this particular October was the sort they had in mind when they wrote “Autumn in New York,” and I had been looking forward to it for months.

So before the week was out I was on the other side of the Atlantic.