The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank [21]
She handed me a cigarette, lit mine and then hers. While she cataloged the flaws of the first act, I kept an eye on the famous couple, trying to learn something.
My aunt was asking me my opinion of the play.
"Good," I said.
" 'Good'?" my aunt said. "Children are good. Dogs are good. This is theater, Jane."
"Urn," I said, and just as I was taking a last, loving look at the couple, the man caught me. I turned away fast, but I saw him say something to his girlfriend and head toward us.
"Oh," I said, and I heard the man's voice, like a growl, right beside me.
"Rita," he said.
She gave him her standard two-cheek air kiss, but he said, "Nope."
He kissed my aunt right on the lips.
When she introduced me, I was too surprised to speak. After all, she was old enough to be his mother.
—•—
His name was Archie Knox, and my aunt liked him. That was rare. In the cab home, I asked her if he was famous.
"More famous than an editor should be," she said. "The best are invisible." She herself was a novelist.
"I bet his girlfriend is famous," I said. "A writer maybe. Or an actress. Somebody."
"No," my aunt said. "If she were, he would've brought her over."
"Archie Knox kissed you," I said.
She squeezed my hand and said, "Did you have a good time?"
When we got home, we took brandies out to her little terrace. There was a bigger one below us, and as we sat there, a couple came out and shared a cigarette. The woman stood against the wall, with her arms crossed.
"Who lives there?" I asked.
"Nina Solomon," she said. "She makes documentary films. Her husband is the painter Ben Solomon. If you were staying a little longer we could go to his gallery. And there's a book party I could take you to tomorrow night." She swirled her glass of brandy. "But literary people are so dull nowadays," she said. "I wish there were more Archie Knoxes."
I wanted to know about him, but I couldn't ask outright. "What did literary people used to be like?"
"They were Livers," she said. "Big livers."
I pictured the purplish-brown organ, and assumed she meant hard drinkers.
My aunt said, "Now all they do is talk."
—•—
After my freshman year in college, I spent a long weekend with my aunt on Martha's Vineyard. Late on a hazy afternoon, she took me to the clay baths. We walked down the beach, and as we neared the baths, I saw that everyone was naked, their clay-coated bodies varying shades of gray, depending on dryness. I looked over at my aunt.
She said, "A parade of statues," and I could tell by the way she said it—listening to herself—that she was testing the line for a novel.
I didn't feel young with her now so much as provincial. When we got to the clay pit, she said, "You go ahead," and I didn't hesitate. I took off my bathing suit, handed it to her, and splooshed right in.
Afterward, she rubbed some clay off my back and smeared it under her eyes. "You have my breasts," she said, as though I'd accomplished something.
I asked her to tell me about Archie Knox.
She glanced over at me, as though she still wasn't sure I was worth telling things to. Then she said, "He used to be very wild. In his martini days."
"Wild how?" I asked.
"Women," she said. "Women just loved him." She told me there was a story about one very young woman who'd committed suicide. I waited for her to go on, but she didn't. She was quiet. Then she brightened. "And dogs," she said.
"Dogs?" I asked.
"Dogs followed him everywhere."
—•—
"He was some sort of boxing champion," she told me the night she took me out to celebrate my graduation. "He was always punching someone in the nose."
"Macho," I said.
"No," she said. "It was the clarity of expression that appealed to him."
—•—
I was twenty-five before I saw Archie Knox again. It was at a party on Central Park West, which I attended as the guest of a guest of a guest. I was an editorial