“Ready for the holidays?” Mr. Gardiner asked when she approached.
“Almost.” Phoebe searched for a witty line. Her energy had been spent angling to be last to place her report on his desk. Now, as she faced him, new concerns jumped forward. Her dry mouth might breed anything from bad breath to stuttering.
He meant Christmas; they’d celebrated Hanukkah over a week ago. Even in New York, non-Jews assumed that everyone spent the days before Christmas wrapping presents and drinking eggnog, when, in fact, her family would be eating a luxury spread from the delicatessen for Christmas Eve dinner: a platter of lox interspersed with silky sable and golden white fish. Chocolate-covered grahams—made even more delicious with the addition of a layer of jelly between the sweet cracker and the thick hard shell of chocolate. Blackout cake from Ebinger’s, the best bakery in Brooklyn. Chopped liver. Egg salad. Rare roast beef sliced thin. Fresh rye for her grandfather. Honey cake for her grandmother. Bialys for Deb.
Religion didn’t rule her family, but her parents respected the altar of heavy Jewish cuisine, making up for their lack of Christmas festivity with food-packed silver trays.
“My grandparents are coming over,” Phoebe said.
“Ah, so you do mark the occasion. Thought I put my foot in my mouth for a moment.”
“We don’t have presents or a tree,” she said. “Blintzes and bagels—that’s our rejoicing.”
“I know bagels, but I’m a little vague on the blintzes.”
“You never ate blintzes?” Maybe she lived in too homogenous a neighborhood, but his unfamiliarity surprised her. “Something delicious is in your future.”
He leaned back and put his hand behind his head. “Perhaps you’ll introduce me to the custom. Expand my sociological knowledge of cuisine.” His crisp blue shirtsleeves, rolled up two perfect times, revealed golden, fine hair on his arms.
“How are you still tan?” she asked.
He laughed, and she blushed at her stupid boldness. “I play tennis until I slip in the snow.”
She pictured him and his wife batting the ball back and forth, their classic gold wedding bands reflecting the sun—a woman so exquisite that even a drop of cosmetics disturbed her flawlessness. They likely spoke about Proust in bed.
Jake read Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming.
“I always thought missing out on the brightness of the holidays must be sad.”
“We light candles for eight nights,” Phoebe said.
They remained silent for a moment. Professor Gardiner doubtless pictured a dingy menorah in her shtetl-like home, compared with an evergreen crusted with ropes of lights and shimmering with ornaments placed before a brownstone’s fireplace.
He grabbed her hand. “I apologize for insinuating that Hanukkah is any less important than Christmas.” His warm skin sent sparks through Phoebe. She wanted to run her fingers over and around his knuckles, caress the light hair on his wrist.
“Black hair with blue eyes. A stunning combination. You’re magnificent,” he said. “You must hear those words constantly.”
“Not really.” Why had she lied? Jake complimented her on everything from the sheen of her hair to the curve of her cheek. She strained for memories of Jake’s generosity to offset Professor Gardiner’s charged touch. The gold bracelet he’d bought Deb for her birthday. How he challenged her mother or anyone else who dared to be unkind to her. Distributing her questionnaires to his buddies.
She forced herself to see a vision of Mrs. Gardiner. “Your wife is lucky,” she said. “Your talent for praise is outstanding.”
His smile disappeared. “Presently, she’s not appreciating many of my talents.” He dropped her hand. “We’re apart at the moment.”
At the moment. What did he mean? A week of breathing space? A few steps from a divorce attorney? How old was he? Thirty, at the most? She could almost touch her eighteenth birthday.
“You should try blintzes sometime,” Phoebe said. “I think you’d like them.”
“Yes. I think I would.”
? ? ?
In February 1964 Rob Gardiner tasted his first blintzes at Katz’s Deli. Running into anyone Phoebe knew seemed unlikely in this no-frills room, crowded with yellow-topped Formica and chrome tables. People from Brooklyn didn’t trek to Manhattan—not even to the Lower East Side, which was just across the Williamsburg Bridge—for food that was already available around the corner.
Between bites, they exchanged life stories as though gifting each other rubies and gold. Now Phoebe knew that Rob had married without thinking—caught up with, as he said, “the will of the crowd.” She bent her interpretation of his hazy words to meet her wont: Professor and Mrs. Gardiner, an ill-matched couple, joined in haste, ecstatic at separating.
Over the next few months Rob and Phoebe moved from Rob tasting his first blintz at Katz’s to him introducing her to Chinese-Cuban restaurants, along with the hushed Cloisters in Upper Manhattan. The Cloisters’ stained glass, sculpture, and medieval manuscripts in the midst of acres of greenery seemed impossibly exotic just an hour’s drive from her house. That the subway traveled there—a place so quiet, so not related to Brooklyn—astonished her.
They first kissed in the shadow of a worn tapestry hanging on a wall. Elation at being in Rob’s arms swirled with overwhelming guilt toward Jake. Wrong, so wrong, what they were doing, but true love had arrived.
She and Rob should marry in the Cloisters, surrounded by the hush of cool walls covered by ornate fabric. Phoebe conjured up a June ceremony, her body draped in yards of white eyelet with a form-fitted top. Tiny pearl earrings would be her only adornment until Rob placed a burnished gold wedding band on her finger.
Now, two months later, with breaths of warming April air drifting through the open window, she sat on the edge of Rob’s desk in his small office. Dusk obscured the campus; they’d only allowed themselves the luxury of meeting at school in darkness.
“Can you sneak out for dinner?” Rob ran a finger down the nylons covering her leg—the Hollywood gesture turning her inside out. “What say you?”
“My parents will go crazy if I don’t get home soon.” She tamped down thoughts of Jake, coming at eight to take her to see the new Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Not her choice, but when she suggested seeing a Black Orpheus rerun down in the West Village, Jake said, “Why stop there? Let’s go see Shakespeare, m’ lady,” as though seeing a Brazilian foreign film was a joke.