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The ood one, and the– Leka, every inch a king at six-eight, had drawn enthusiastic crowds on a recent visit to his homeland I left in the company of a woman as no more Albanian than I Her naarian, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Bulgarian pretender, Sihborhood for slivovitz, and then we took the subway into Manhattan and ate at a restaurant in the Village (The owners were Albanians, with monarchist sympathies; the menu, like that of most Albanian-owned establishments in New York, was Italian)

We hit it off She was a few years younger than I, having been born two e biologically, but it didn’t give us much of a common frame of reference She was, after all, only nine years old when I got frozen She hadn’t been born duringmost of hers

But that was only a probleether It didn’ther back to her apart her brains out

The first part was easy enough She lived alone in an L-shaped studio in the east Twenties, where she olden oldies station (Oldies for Marina; I was hearing most of them for the first time) We sat side by side on her sofa, and I kissed her, and things were off to a nice start

But that was as far as they went After soed herself and said it was a shao slow, and take plenty of tiet to know each other, and eventually, if ere serious about our relationship, ould go together for blood tests And then, after we got the results, we could go to bed together But in the ood to know that ere indeed physically attracted to one another

Cold comfort, I’d call it "I’ll call you," I assured her, and, riding home on the subway, I decided I wouldn’t Because I didn’t want to go to bed with this woman if I had to court her for sixand get our DNA comparison-tested so we’d kno our children would do in school?

If that hat dating in the nineties aured the hell with it Still, a man has needs, whether he’s thirty-nine or sixty-four, and it occurred to me that there ays to satisfy the thing who didn’t have a clue who Hubert Humphrey was There were, after all, wo The ones on the street were about as inviting as the town puher up on the food chain, who ran ads and took credit cards

For some reason I didn’t seem to be interested If love seemed like too much trouble, a commercial transaction was too cut and dried It just didn’t seeh it would be any fun

And then, just to co the saShe was out during business hours – she’d recently started working for aand sales promotion department, a natural choice for someone with a PhD in Lithuanian history But she was home the rest of the time, and I are of her presence even while she slept

I didn’t knoe were to each other I was sih to be her father, and I’d actually been her father, or the closest thing to it, for a bunch of years

And yet I wasn’t her father, and never had been I was a guy who had rescued her froht her ho fantasies of growing up to marry the handso? Was I unconsciously waiting for Minna to grow up so I could put the an to blossooing out with boys? Would I have been calht jealous?

No way to knoasn’t around for those years

But I was around no did I feel about her?

Well, I loved her, of course She was the only person left inwith the Chief, the only person I’d told about e And you couldwith devotion not seen since Penelope sat around waiting for Ulysses True, she’d gone through a e and divorce in my absence, which Penelope hadn’t done in the version I read But she’d kept my apartment there within the closets, and that’s devotion enough in this day and age

I was attracted to her, I knew that much And it was pretty clear the attraction wasn’t a one-way street

But was it a dead end?

Suppose I s would be forever changed between us We h I wasn’t too sure about that But ould never be as easy with one another as ere now

And if she didn’t turnfor since I walked in the door? Then what?

You could, in Lorenz Hart’s words, h it didn’t alork out as well as you ht have hoped But what happened when you tried to make two lovers of relatives?

Because ere faed, and what had been an ersatz father-daughter relationship may have been transformed into an ersatz brother-sister relationship, but in either case ere related, ere family members, and how on earth could we be lovers as well?

We couldn’t

And we didn’t And most of the time I didn’t even think about it I was busy all the tiether we had no end of things to talk about So we never had to talk about this yen we had for each other, but it was always there, hanging in the air between us It was, I suppose, the thing we didn’t talk about

I don’t knocelibacy, and I doubt it had anything at all to do with resisting the allure of the pubescent professionals Suk would have introducedto tempt me