Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

My Circe aroused herself from sleep, blushingly pulled down her skirt, and got off at New Hope, Penn. I never learned her name, nor what town she lived in.

Aunt Myra was my father’s older sister and had always been a shadowy black sheep of the Belsons’. I had not met her before that summer of my thirteenth year. Myra had clearly been around. I knew she’d gone to Duke with President Garvey, had played bridge with Kronstadt the demon poet, had written the lyrics for an operetta, was rumored to have had a baby by her chauffeur, and had been the mistress of three different millionaires. The last of these had left her a small fortune in cash and an apartment hotel in the East Eighties. She had lost the cash in the depression of 2004. Myra, my mother said in icy reflection over a martini, had taken her financial advice from Arab astrologers and Roman Catholic choirboys. She had lost the apartment hotel but managed to hang on to the twelve rooms of its penthouse for her lifetime. She owned nothing else.

Aunt Myra was about sixty-five that summer. She wore faded bib overalls and walked barefoot around her apartment, smoked Black Russian cigarettes and wore gold-rimmed glasses over which she peered at me in a kind of bemusement. She popped vitamin pills continuously and laughed a lot. She was a bit under five feet tall—I towered over her, even at thirteen—and despite crow’s-feet, gray hair and gray tee-shirts under her overall bibs, she looked youthful. I had never seen anyone like her. I arrived at her place about suppertime, having adjusted my tie a half-dozen times in the elevator. I was carrying my cheap suitcase. I felt awkward as hell. When I knocked on the elegant gold-and-white doorway of her penthouse I expected to be greeted by some kind of sagging debauchee with dewlaps and a gown. What met me was this pretty little person in overalls and bare feet.

“For Christ’s sake. Come on in,” she said, peering up at me over the gold rims of her glasses. She held out a tiny unmanicured hand and I shook it. It felt cool and friendly and as small as a child’s.

“How do you do?” I said in the reserved way I had learned from Mother.

“Let’s have something to eat,” she said, and led me through a big empty hallway to a cluttered living room. But what clutter! One wall was covered with paintings and watercolors; there must have been twenty of them. Bright as an African stamp collection. Oriental rugs all over too. A black corduroy sofa. A half-dozen tables. Cats—six or seven cats. There were four cats on the window ledge, below high windows overlooking Central Park. It was a park filled with trees in those days. We passed through this astonishing room and into the kitchen. It was done in a spare way—Hungarian peasant, a turn-of-the-century style in rich people’s kitchens. Crude ceramic tiles, blue and white, on the walls. A grass rug on the wooden floor. Oak countertops. A terra-cotta stove. But she had a refrigerator, the first I’d seen. In Athens we used iceboxes. When Aunt Myra opened the door of her big brown refrigerator I saw shelves with bright jars and bottles, fruits and vegetables, like a picture in an old magazine. What she fixed me for dinner that night was a thick slab of pâté de foie on Bibb lettuce, a dozen tiny cornichons and a glass of Polish lager. I’d never eaten that eccentrically before. Dessert was chocolate mousse. It was delicious. I’ve been eating it ever since, in extended tribute to Aunt Myra and her liberation of the spirit.

She handed me a cracked Haviland plate with the lettuce and pâté on it and then the beer in a crystal pilsner glass and I stood there stupidly holding it while she fixed herself the same. Then I followed her out of the kitchen, and it took me a minute to realize that we weren’t going to sit down; this would be a peripatetic supper. I worked up the nerve eventually to set my beer glass down after one sip of the bitter stuff—it was my first taste of beer—and started eating the pate with my fingers. Myra led me around the apartment. She had four bedrooms, three of them empty and from which I could pick the one I wanted. I chose the one with the most windows. Its furnishings were all gray and white, and it had a little Corot on one wall—two old men at a table.

While we walked around she talked from time to time in a pleasant voice about the apartment and about her cats. She asked me about my father in a kind of offhand way, and when I said he was doing okay she sniffed and said, “ I never could figure out that boy. He was always so goddamned calm .” It was strange to hear that and to realize that Aunt Myra was fifteen years older than my father and, from the tone of her voice, didn’t care about him much. She was nothing like my father or mother, nothing like any adult I’d known. She may have been the last person I loved—and it was love at first sight.

That summer with Aunt Myra gave me a sense of the possibilities of a city that has never substantially diminished. I have forgotten the plays and ballets we saw, but I remember the marble floors, the high-ceilinged lobbies, the soft lighting at the bars between acts, and the expansive feeling to be in New York City at the theater. We saw holo shows and two museum openings and sky music concerts in Central Park. I remember elevators, before the Energy Acts outlawed them. I remember the lights in the upper floors of skyscrapers at night. And most of all, I remember walking down quiet streets on the East Side between rows of old brownstones, looking into the windows of brightly lit apartments, wanting to live in one more than I’d ever wanted anything before. I became a spiritual New Yorker while walking the East Seventies between Park and Second Avenue at the age of thirteen.

I also learned about eating from Aunt Myra—salads and desserts, arugula and chocolate mousse. My diet is a tribute to her memory. Myra taught me another thing—chess. After a week of shows and concerts, she announced that we were going to spend a night at home and entertain ourselves. “Do you play chess?” she asked me, looking up over her glasses. In her hand was a plastic packet the size of a billfold.

“No,” I said. “I play Monopoly.”

“Well, you can play that too with this thing. This electronic marvel,” she said. “But a smart young man should know chess.”

I started to say that no one played chess anymore, for the same reason no one ever did arithmetic: human effort had long been outclassed at that kind of thing. Luck games were what my generation played. But Aunt Myra was no dummy; she might have a point. “Okay,” I said, “will you teach me?”

“I’m going to roast a duck,” she said, “and then change for dinner.” She had just come home from shopping and was wearing her striped coveralls. “This will teach you the game. Learn it and we’ll play during supper.” She handed me the thing. “Unfold it on a table somewhere and press the red spot.” Then she went into the kitchen.

It was made of some kind of rough old plastic and it looked well-worn. I took it into one of the living rooms where a walnut refectory table sat by a window, pushed a few ginger jars, paperweights and African violets aside to create a space, and then unfolded it. It turned out to be a big white square about the size of a Monopoly board with a red dot at the lower left-hand corner. I pulled up a chair, seated myself in front of the board, and pressed the dot.

The surface was immediately covered with print, like a menu. Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, Go, Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Bridge, Poker, Canasta, Casino and so on, were listed down the left side, with a red dot to the left of each. On the right, in capital letters, were three options: 1. RULES AND INSTRUCTIONS, 2. PLAY, and 3. OPPONENT PLAY (CHOOSE LEVEL). This last was followed by the numbers one through twelve. At the bottom right-hand corner, in gold letters, was written MYRA BELSON.