My Beautiful Man

“Da da da da duh; da da da da da da da duh”

“If I have to listen to that music one more minute, I’m going to go stark raving mad,” I say to Jane, who is hanging around my information booth on the third floor of the Harvard Coop. It is the spring of 1967 and the movie A Man and a Woman is the hit of the season. The sound track continuously wafts up from Records on the floor below.

Luckily the phone rings and it is my beautiful man, calling to order books for his poetry class. “Saved by the bell,” I mouth to Jane, and she moves back to her customer service desk where a couple of professorial types have been impatiently waiting.

My beautiful man, as I have taken to calling this disembodied voice on the phone teaches a poetry class to Harvard undergraduates, and he is continually searching out obscure eighteenth century volumes. Many are them are out of print, so we need to talk a lot.

What is beautiful about him is his voice. It is a voice of no accent, but of many tones, with notes of taffy being gently pulled or butter as it is churned from white to gold. His voice pours into my ears and the sound of A Man and a Woman is erased.

All that spring he calls, but he never comes in. The maddening music plays downstairs, the hairy eyebrowed professors come and go; students rush about noisily looking for this or that textbook, counting crumpled dollar bills in front of the bored cashier. The boss, a thin man of about fifty, with a military hair cut and an unfortunate resemblance to my high school vice principal Mr. Lister, pops in and out of his back office, just to make sure the employees aren’t goofing off.

If I am on the phone talking to my beautiful man, whose name I have learned after several months, is Bill, he seems to know and starts walking in my direction. “I have to go,” I say, hanging up. How does he know that wasn’t just another customer on the line, I think; is he listening in on an extension? I never find out.

I couldn’t tell you today what I talked about with the beautiful man on the phone; he could have been reciting Keats or reading recipes from the Joy of Cooking.  All that mattered was the voice.  The voice on the phone, Jane’s penchant for gigantic sundaes and the astronomy class I audited at Harvard during lunchtime were all that kept me from diving down the up escalator to throttle whoever kept playing that maddening music.

At night, I would wander Harvard Square and down to the River with the marijuana smoking young men who may or may not have been students. David Lettvin, whose mother was Maggie of Maggie and the Beautiful Machine, an exercise show on WGBH; J.R. Getsinger, whose father worked with Timothy Leary on early LSD experiments or so he said; Vernon, with the bent in half wife; not a single boyfriend in the bunch. 

Or I would go to a class in Creative Writing with a teacher named Ken at the Cambridge Adult School who would openly sneer at my writing as adolescent drivel. “Thank you Ms. LeMieux, for sharing that adolescent drivel with the class.” It made me want to scream, but I kept at it, revising and redoing  late at night hunched over the portable typewriter I’d dragged with me from the dorm when I made the big move that spring from Christian College girl to Cambridge hippy chick.

Or I would attend classes in film-making at the Boston Cinemateque, where I saw my first “art film” with Helaine Haaland, the night I got caught sneaking back into the dorm at Gordon College, only months before, and where you could take out 8 millimeter cameras and make any kind of film you wanted, if you paid for the film. 

I still have a film made at a be-in in the Cambridge Common, me in a striped sailor’s shirt I associated with what beatniks wore, sitting on the grass, making a peace sign with two fingers, long hair, eternally young. One of the Harvard Square boys, no doubt, on the other end of that camera. And once I made a film with my friend Naomi from Brockton, after a night spent in her Volkswagon beetle near the shore on Cape Cod. The film was of a lonely boy, just wandering the dawn streets of a still deserted beach town, hands in the pocket of his pea coat, Beatle haircut, impossibly young. We saw the boy when we climbed, tousled out of the car, unkinked our legs an turned on the camera. We asked him to wander for us and he complied, it was what he was doing anyway. We rolled the film. The boy has now wandered off into memory, along with the film.

One day as the music plays, I hear someone coming up the escalator. At the top he stops and looks around, a large man around thirty with shaggy not entirely clean brown hair, a square face, pale complexion. He wears an army surplus jacket. “Jane, it’s him” I whisper. Jane looks up from where she has been leaning on counter and is not impressed, he eyes slanted, her lips pressed tightly together. “A peon,” she  turns away.

Then he opens his mouth and says my name. It is of course him. It is he. He is him. “I thought I’d come see where my books live,” he says, smiling through crooked teeth.

“This is Jane,” I say, indicating. 

“Hello,” she says in her icy voice, already back at her desk in Customer Service.   Jane’s high standards and pronouncements of “peonism” notwithstanding,  little pit-a-pats are alive in my chest; he looks just like his voice, and that makes him just about perfect.

He doesn’t stay long. Jane wanders back once he has gone and says, “Not much to look at is he?”

“Jane, he’s beautiful!” 

“Kind of unwashed looking,” she answers, mouth turning down. “Let’s go get a Bailey’s sundae.”

He continues to call that summer, then one day asks if I would like to babysit for him and his wife. Oh, his wife.  “Oh his wife” says Jane when I tell her. “Will you do it?”

“Sure, why not. I’m curious about the wife,” I reply.

So it comes to pass that I go to the home of the beautiful man and I meet the wife. I meet the kids, and I meet the dirty dishes in the sink, the overgrown weeds in the lawn and the springs in the sofa. 

I do not go back, and the rest of the summer, I just sigh and cover my ears until the music changes to the next popular sound track. When the “Beautiful man” calls, I treat him just like any other customer. He never comes back into the store.