As The Time Goes By
Haresh Shah
Exactly thirty six years ago today on April 5th. 1977, in Santa Barbara, California, it was another fucking beautiful day, as my neighbor Greg Ketchum and I had began to refer to our forever such gorgeous weather, whenever we both found ourselves out on our respective balconies, overlooking the awesome Santa Ynez Mountain Range. I was done with my writing for the day and was sitting around in my living room with Mike and Guusje, drinking beer, when the phone rings.
Without any pleasantries, the female voice on the other line dives right into it.
‘I understand you are auditioning young ladies for Playboy.’
‘Not quite.’ I respond with trepidation, trying hard to think who it might be. Sensing confused silence on my end of the line, the voice breaks out in a hearty laugh.
‘This is Carolyn,’ it says.’ It still doesn’t ring the bell.
‘I was just passing through. I am on my way down south to see Gwen in LA.’ And then I knew.
‘Where are you?’
‘I am here. In Santa Barbara.’
‘You are? Why don’t you come on over?’
‘Okay.’
She doesn’t ask for the direction. Soon I see her pulling up on the Linfield Place in her yellow Volkswagen, named Rachel Rabbit. She had once lived here before moving up north to Sacramento. She plans to spend a couple of days walking down the memory lane, perhaps meet up with some people she knew and then continue on to Los Angeles to see her sister. As soon as she walks in, we hug, ever so self consciously, but there is a feeling of a certain intimacy, which becomes apparent after Mike and Guusje leave. We stand in the middle of the room with our arms wrapped around and holding each other as if we were long lost lovers, and then abruptly but gently step back.
I invite her out for dinner and we drive down to Dobb’s in the city center from Goleta, where I live off the UCSB campus. The dinner is animated and we talk a lot about relationships. Hers with her husband Bob has just ended and they have filed for no-contest divorce. I am trying to build a long distance relationship with Patricia in Mexico City, but neither of us is quite sure. We are sort of oscillating. Carolyn has also been sort of dating someone. But as we talk, the magnetic pull between us two is obvious. After dinner we take a walk on the beach, feeling mellow, listening to the gentle waves of the Pacific splashing the shore. The vast expanse of the beach is deserted that night. I don’t remember for sure if it were a full moon night, but let’s assume that it was, just to give an extra romantic edge to the evening. We feel the ocean breeze lightly feather our exposed skins. The stars seem to be aligned just right on this clear cloudless night. We are walking hand-in-hand and feel the tender but intense energy transpiring through our entwined fingers.
The way I normally tell the rest of the story is: I bring her back home that night, thread my three hour long reel-to-reel tape containing Keith Jarrett’s soothing Cologne concert. And keep her.
●●●
I first met Carolyn and her husband Bob in the bar of a canal side little B & B in Amsterdam, where I had stopped by to look for a room. They were fully booked. But I stayed to have a beer in their bar before venturing out in the early January cold. Sitting diagonally opposite from me was a young couple from Duluth, Minnesota.
I had not planned to be in Amsterdam on this trip. Certainly not to spend the whole week there. A little over a week earlier I had run away from Chicago in hopes to mend my broken heart. I had picked Denmark literally by putting my finger on the map. The place where no one I knew lived and the place where I could be face-to-face with my lonely self, the place where I could nurse my wounds and disappear in its anonymity. Copenhagen seemed to do just that for me. Regaining some of my spirit back, I flew on to Stockholm – thinking I would celebrate my New Year’s Eve up there. But on that morning, it got to be too lonesome. At the last minute, I called my friend Franz-Hermann Gomfers in Wachtendonk, a little town in the lower Rhine, that bordered with Venlo in Holland. As usual, he was hosting the Sylvester party and I found myself amongst the jubilant throng of the New Year’s Eve revelers.
Four years earlier, also at Franz Hermann’s Sylvester party, I had met the flaming red head, Felicita. Fe, as everyone called her, grew up in a house in the alley diagonally opposite from Fran Hermann’s house. Shy as she was, we had clicked and spent most of the night sitting on a corner sofa, talking. Getting up once in a while to slow dance and then sit down again. There is a photo of me sitting next to her, holding her wrist in my hand and twirling her bracelet, gazing at it as if in admiration. As good a pretense as any to hold her hand. Three weeks later I had left Europe to come to the United States.
Reconnected, we drive to Krefeld to have dinner the night of the New Year. Staying out late, we leisurely stroll the deserted streets of the town. Stop frequently at store fronts and window shop. Four years earlier, she wore her hair very short. Now seeing her in a longer than shoulder length hair, I am blown away by how breathtakingly gorgeous she looks. Her radiant smooth skin matches the color of her hair, her shy smiles has me absolutely captivated.
Playfully, I say to her: ‘I’ll marry you when your hair grows down to here,’ pointing to the small of her back with the blade of my hand.
‘Be careful what you say, because my hair grows very fast. In fact, I did have it down to my waist up until a month ago.’ She responds with an impish smile on her face.
And our game begins, as if we were an engaged couple, soon to be married. We pick the bridal gowns and the tuxedos that she and I would wear on our wedding day. We build an imaginary house and begin to fill it with the furniture we see on display. We select baby clothes and the little booties and bonnets for our baby. Even toss around a few names for the daughter we would have. And as we continue our silly little make-believe game, I imagine her walking down the aisle, her radiant face luminous behind the veil.
My plan is now to spend the remaining eight days of my escape from Chicago in Amsterdam. Something I had dreamt of doing with Karen. But it wasn’t meant to be. And now my fickle heart is longing for Fe to explore with me the canals, the bridges and the alleys of the Venice of the north.
●●●
On that Sunday evening, as I stand over one of the thousand bridges of Amsterdam and watch the canal floating down below, I see in its ripples the faces of the women that dot the canvas of my emotional landscape.
Netty, who worked at Drukerij Bosch when I was an intern there seven years earlier, now lives in Amsterdam. It’s been nice seeing her again, but I can still feel a certain amount of tension linger between us. Her girlfriend Reneé, on whom I had an incredible crush, leading to a few stolen kisses, is now married and also lives in Amsterdam. Both Netty and I went to see her and her husband one evening. There is also Carolyn. I thought she was pretty and liked her American way of dressing in blue jeans and a simple top. Lacking of any visible makeup and the hair almost touching her waist. She reminded me of Joan Baez . But I don’t carry any deeper impression of her. And of course, there is Karen, back in Chicago – the woman I have run away from. But the face that superimposes all of them is that of Fe’s. What I see clearly in that fluid water is the parting image of her, clutching the bunch of red tulips, her eyes fogging up and the tail light of her disappearing train.
Having spent the whole weekend together, walking around Amsterdam till wee hours of the morning – still feeling weary and sleepy after the late morning breakfast, we are lying sideways on her single bed – talking, almost whispering – sharing with each other and feeling a certain closeness at our parallel stories of the bruised hearts, I am overwhelmed at the silence that has fallen between us. Us staring deep into each other’s eyes.
‘Willst du mich heiraten?’ It just pops out of my mouth. Something I had never asked anybody up until then and have not to this day since. ‘Will you marry me?’
The fog has fallen dense on the city of Amsterdam. My emotions are torn. The longing intensified. The faces dissolving in the ripples as they march on.
●●●
It’s January 3rd 1979. Delayed by two and a half hours, our United flight from Los Angeles is the last one to land that night at 12:30 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, before the back-to-back snow storms would blanket and paralyze the city for weeks and months to come. We check into the Playboy Towers – the old dame of the hotel known as The Knickerbocker, before and after its present avatar – at two in the morning with a whole bunch of boxed live potted plants that make up the bulk of our excess baggage. Because we are told that they would never make it to Chicago in the truck. I have returned to Playboy full time to work out of their head offices. Carolyn is seven months pregnant. We have bought a condo in Hyde Park and would move in soon as our stuff arrives. The side streets remain buried under mountains of snow up until April. When the truck finally makes it to Chicago area, they deliver bits and pieces by minivans. Soon as they deliver the mattresses on the 26th, we move in.
After three weeks of being stuck in a hotel, it feels good to be in our own place. However inadequately equipped. We are prepared to sleep on the hardwood floors if we had to. In the meanwhile, I keep trucking. Of which Lee Hall writes in his International Publishing Newsletter dated February 5: Haresh will be returning from Spain this weekend to assist in the last minute birth of his first child. He and Caroline (sic) have recently moved into a delightful apartment in Chicago but are currently awaiting the arrival not only of the baby but of their furniture van which has been marooned somewhere in the Mid-western snow.
And then its March 6. Its 04:04 in the morning – the drama of a new child being born is enacted in the bedroom of our apartment. Propped up and leaning on the wall at the edge of the bed is me, Carolyn’s head resting on my shoulder. At the ready is the midwife Kay with her experienced hands to clutch and catch the baby pushing to emerge into this world. Surrounding the bed are Dr. Elvove, Anita and Keeline while Bob is clicking away with the little Kodak Instamatic with his trembling hands. We see first Anjuli’s head pop out and then with another push, all of her. Dr. Elvove hands me a pair of scissors to snap the umbilical cord. A daughter born in Playboy family receives Playboy kind of welcome by telexes from around the world in response to Lee Hall’s following announcement, barely making it in his Newsletter dated March 5, but not mailed until later.
PS: Anjuli Shah-Johnson, the first daughter of Haresh Shah and Carolyn Johnson, was born on March 6.
© Haresh Shah
Illustration: Jordan Rutherford
SISTER SITE
Next Friday, April 12, 2013
FACE TO FACE WITH JAN CREMER
It is very likely that the most of you have never heard of Jan Cremer, the ultimate enfant terrible of the Dutch literature and the art. He once famously said in an interview: Rembrandt? I have never heard of him. I’m not interested in sports. Arrogant? Brilliant? Whatever. But I am a big fan of his books, I Jan Cremer and Jan Cremer Writes Again. And have had a pleasure of meeting and talking to him.
playboy stories 