Laurie Graff - You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs

“That’s great. When is the audition?” Roman had learned the lingo.

“I don’t know if I will actually get one. The casting director has to select which actors they will give appointments to after they get the agent submissions. But I really, really want to read for this,” I said.

“Is it a great part?”

“Who cares? The show would be six months of work. In Boston.”

Silence.

Awkward.

Head down.

Shut down.

“What? I thought you’d be happy.”

He took a long time to answer. “Don’t give up your dreams for me, Karrie.”

“Don’t what?” I felt so betrayed. Misunderstood. “My agent submitted me for a role. For a job. A job! I’m not exactly chasing you to Boston. Are you afraid of that? What’s going on?”

He felt guilty. He was supposed to stay at home and marry Julie and raise a family. Instead he came to New York. He loved it. He met someone new. No one approved.

“Did you ask for this transfer?” I needed to know.

“No,” said Roman. “I didn’t. But it happened. And it makes me wonder why.”

“So do it. Go back. Trade stocks. Make money. And in a year ask to be transferred back here. It’s not such a big deal.”

Roman wasn’t so sure. He was sure I was special. But he was unsure how we fit. He was still pondering the question the day he left. Ninety-five-degree heat, a dog day of August, apartment packed, boxes picked up from UPS, two suitcases loaded into the trunk of cab, Roman ready for the airport.

“I’ll miss you, young lady. Move on. And keep a little mystery when you meet someone new. Let them know you slowly. Be happy.”

“I don’t want to be mysterious. I don’t want to meet someone new. I don’t want to move on. I like you.”

“Me, too,” he said as the cab took off, and Roman flew away. I walked back home through the park. I knew time would turn Roman into a memory I could live with, and it would be some time before that happened. But it did.

Eleven months later he called from Boston.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

Yes, I remembered. I remembered well. The voice. Those pieces. I hoped they would thread together the sound of Roman’s transfer back to New York.

“Do you remember me?” I asked.

“I sure do.”

“Tell me what you remember….”

Roman paused. “I wanted to tell you that I’m marrying Julie.”

I paused.

“It’s right for me,” he said. “It’s right for my life here, with the company. Our families are here. I’m sorry. I don’t feel I was fair to you.”

I wondered if he had been fair to himself. There was so much in New York he had yet to discover. Inside the city. Inside himself.

“Do you love her?” I held my breath hoping the right answer would not hurt too much.

“She would follow me anywhere,” he said. “Look, if you ever need anything. Money, anything, you can always contact me. Always. I’ll always remember you.”

“I’ll never forget.”

I never have. Sometimes on a moist and balmy New York night, when I take a walk, I can still see all the colors of the Roman rainbow.

New Year’s

Day Chelsea, NYC 1992

The day after the party he called. I was bedridden, feeling comatose from the twenty-four-hour bug that had hit six hours earlier.

“I was so glad you gave your card to my sister,” he said.

I’d thought his sister was his wife. They were holding hands all night.

“Can we go out?”

“Okay,” I mumbled in my delirium.

“I’m so anxious to see you,” Arthur blathered. “I’ve never been this excited before. How’s Thursday? What do you like to do for fun? Am I too forward?”

“No. No.”

“Do you think it’s a possibility we’re going to have a great time?” he questioned. “I want you to come to this date really open with positive feelings. I’ll talk to you before Thursday. I can’t wait. This will be the best date of our lives.”

We never went out. He never called.

Arthur must have literally burst from anticipation.

Passover

Port Authority, NYC 1992

“Need some help?” the homeless man asked while he watched me schlep my bags from the Airport Bus Center through the Port Authority.

“No, thanks,” I said, kicking the flowered one that was bigger than me and wouldn’t stay on my shoulder. The yellow cabs were all lined up on Eighth Avenue, just waiting to be hailed.

“We have to make a quick stop,” I told the cabby while I stood to the side and watched him put my baggage in the back seat. He was a big, chubby guy with wild, messy brown hair in baggy jeans and flannel shirt.

“It better be fast,” he said.

“Why? You have someplace to go?” I asked him, thinking that after he dropped me off, he’d probably like to go back twenty years, run over to the student union, lead a peace march and drop some acid.

“Well, no,” he said. “I just don’t feel like stopping.”

I opened the door to get out.

“But I will,” he said.

“Thanks a bunch.”

We sped between the traffic up the avenue.

“You just get back from a trip?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Where’d you go?” he asked, stopping the cab at a red light.

Through the window, I watched a man shoving leaflets at passersby.

“Check it out. Check it out,” he said, hoping to entice them into entering the House of Heavenly Delights. I looked up and saw an enlarged color photo of two women having their way with each other, while a man, dressed as the devil, held a pitchfork over their heads.

“Florida,” I said.

“Vacation?”

He was turning out to be pretty chatty, this…I looked to the front seat to see the name on his identification card. Alan Cohen.

“Passover,” I answered. Mom, Henry and I flew down to spend the holiday with Aunt Cookie and Uncle Sy. It had become a new tradition since my aunt and uncle had retired there five years ago. Uncle Sy’s Passover seder was so different from the holiday I remembered as a little girl when Grandpa Lou was still alive. He would recite the whole haggadah in Hebrew. My cousins and I would twist and turn in our seats for what seemed like a century until, finally, we could eat. After the meal, Grandpa Lou would hide the Afikoman, the magic piece of matzoh, and give a quarter to the kid who found it. All of us kids would search the Brooklyn apartment high and low only to find that, once again, our grandfather had hidden it in his suit jacket.

Some years later, after Grandpa Lou had passed on, Sy had stood at the head of his Long Island table and flipped on a small tape recorder. After a series of static sounds, Sy’s voice had filled the room. “Your mission tonight, if you choose to accept, is to skip the formalities and go directly to the Passover meal catered à la Cookie.” Everyone thought it was very funny, except for Grandma Rose, who was missing her husband and the days when “the holidays” meant her house.

“Yeah, Passover. Yeah,” said the cabby with the recognition I expected. “The folks glad to see you?”

“Thrilled.” There seemed no point explaining my folks didn’t really live there.

“Boca?” Alan Cohen asked in shorthand.

“West Palm.”

“Nice.”

Alan Cohen probably had family in Boca, I thought, and wished that he had gone down for Passover to see his parents. They probably lived in a development with two swimming pools, four tennis courts and a clubhouse. Alan would always think he was going to play tennis when he visited, but it never happened. He probably never went to see them much, being the black sheep of the family. Alan had probably had great potential. He was probably the salutatorian of his graduating class at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. His parents had thought he would be a doctor, or at very least, a dentist. But he went away to college, did too many drugs and never got out of the Sixties.