The usual answers rolled out automatically and we got that out of the way.
Maybe Maggie isn’t very bright but she seemed glad to see him. She’s shooting for her Doctorate in sociology at N.Y.U., she does part-time case work for the city, she has one of those three-room Greenwich Village apartments with dyed burlap drapes and studio couches and home-made mobiles. She thinks writing is something holy and Joe’s careful not to tell her different
They drank some rhine wine and seltzer while Joe talked about the day’s work as though he’d won the Nobel prize for biochemistry. He got downright brutal about Maggie being mixed up in such an approximate unquantitative excuse for a science as sociology and she apologized humbly and eventually he forgave her. Big-hearted Joe.
But he wasn’t so fried that he had to start talking about a man wanting to settle down—”not this year but maybe next Thirty’s a dividing point that makes you stop and wonder what you really want and what youVe really got out of life, Maggie darlin’.” It was as good as telling her that she should be a good girl and continue to keep open house for him and maybe some day… maybe.
As I said, maybe Maggie isn’t very bright But as I also said, Thursday was the day Joe picked to outdo himself.
“Joe,” she said with this look on her face, “I got a new LP of the Brahms Serenade Number One. It’s on top of the stack. Would you tell me what you think of it?”
So he put it on and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer and he turned it over and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer until both sides were played. And she kept watching him. Not adoringly.
“Well,” she asked with this new look, “what did you think ofitr
He told her, of course. There was some comment on
Brahms’ architectonics and his resurrection of the contrapuntal style. Because he’d sneaked a look at the record’s envelope he was able to spend a couple of minutes on Brahms’ debt to Haydn and the young Beethoven in the fifth movement (allegro, D Major) and the gay rondo of the—
“Joe,” she said, not looking at him. “Joe,” she said, “I got that record at one hell of a discount down the street. It’s a wrong pressing. Somehow the first side is the first half of the Serenade but the second half is Schumann’s Symphonic Studies Opus Thirteen. Somebody noticed it when they played it in a booth. But I guess you didn’t notice it.”
“Get out of this one, braino,” I told him.
He got up and said in a strangled voice, “And I thought you were my friend. I suppose 111 never learn.” He walked out
I suppose he never wiB.
God help me, I ought to know.