A Round-Heeled Woman Read Free Page A

And what would my landlady say or think? She and her family live in the main house on the other side of the garden. What would she do if she saw men coming and going? Even one man coming and going? Would she throw me out? Besides, did I really want to welcome a stranger into my home? Oh my, oh my. Already I was doing a “yes, but”: the kind of thinking that had kept me walled off from risk, change, excitement. Hell, I would figure this all out. “Do not borrow trouble,” my grandmother, who did it all the time, used to say. Probably no one would answer the ad anyway.
    Outside the gate, I walk everywhere: to concerts, to football games, to the movies, to restaurants. I walk to my library every day to read
The New York Times,
a ritual necessary to fuel my lifelong fantasy of a week in New York, where I would see every play on and off Broadway, hear every concert in Carnegie Hall, and eat knishes from the corner stands. What was a knish, anyway?
    The library is my candy store. I can have whatever tastes good at the time: my daily
Times
fix, poetry, fiction old and new. At the end of my thirty-three years of teaching high school English, I ran, not walked, to the library and booted onto the screen the love of my life: Trollope, Anthony. There he was— eighty-four entries! I was set for life. Except not long after, maybe two years later, I was out of Trollope; I had read all his novels and loved all of them, the good and the not so good. What an amazing writer, a man who admired and respected the women of his time and who sympathized with their vulnerability in the Victorian world of men. In case you’re thinking about befriending Trollope, know that he is not clever the way Dickens is clever, though he sometimes tries to be (and fails). But Trollope is ever so much more confident and talented in the rendering of women as genuine people. And with titles like
Can
You Forgive Her?
and
He Knew He Was Right,
how can you resist? Forgive me, but the answer to the first is yes, only a fool would not forgive her; to the second, Trollope says, No, he wasn’t right, just look at all the trouble he made.
    So now you see why Trollope appeared in my ad. He had been a significant man in my life. Wouldn’t it be nice if a live man shared my affection for him?
    A favorite section in my library is the biography section. Here are all these famous people, some more famous than others, some surprises. Like Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife. There she sat, on the shelf, waiting for me just the way she sat on a real-life shelf from which Ernest Hemingway plucked her. “I wish,” he wrote, “I had died before I could love anyone else.” Now, if Scott Fitzgerald had married Hadley instead of Zelda, he would have lasted longer as a writer and as a man. But Ernest dumped Hadley for the designing Pauline. Fitzgerald would probably have dumped Hadley, too—she was so nice. Zelda, now, was not so easy to get rid of. My library is full of wonderful people. Margaret Fuller is there. She is a hero of mine, too.
    For now, in late October, in this library, I sat at a table, the recent issue of
The New York Review of Books
spread out before me. Outside, the rain slapped the sidewalks. Inside, the homeless were gathering, bringing the smell of the streets with them, adding their own pungency. Not much like Rohmer’s Rhône Valley.
    The New York Review of Books
is a periodical for serious readers. It claims to review books written on serious subjects, and it does. More than that, though, very smart people write very thoughtful, very long essays on everything from Freud to Jon-Benet Ramsey. It’s also expensive, which is why I read it in the library. I save the best part for last: the personals, the most distinguished personal-ad column in the country, how about that? I was about to join it.
    Most of these ads did not sound as if they had been written by very smart people; to wit: