Tanner’s Virgin

I didn’t hang up. I said, “Mrs. Horowitz, maybe we shouldn’t go into this on the phone.”

“No?”

“My phone is tapped.”

“Oh, God!”

I thought her reaction might be a little extreme. When one is a recognized subversive, the unashamed member of any number of organizations pledged to the violent overthrow of one government or another, one learns to regard every telephone as tapped until proven otherwise. The Central Intelligence Agency maintains a permanent tap on my telephone, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation reads my mail. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. I can never remember.

“I have to see you,” Mrs. Horowitz said.

“Well, I’m sort of busy-”

“This is a matter of life or death.”

“Well, I have this thesis I’m writing, you see, on, uh-”

“You know where I live, Ta

“No.”

“In Mamaroneck. You know Mamaroneck?”

“Well-”

She gave me the address. I didn’t bother writing it down. “You’ll come right up to me,” she said. “I have everything here. I am waiting with my heart in my head.”

She hung up, and a few minutes later so did I.

“I have never been on a train before,” Mi

Actually it was a terrible train. It was a commuter local of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, and it had left Grand Central a few minutes after five, and some minutes after that Mi

I had not really pla

“I don’t see any animals,” Mi

“You won’t. That’s the Bronx.”

“I thought we would see the Bronx Zoo.”

Mi

I closed my eyes and thought about William Wordsworth, which was something I had been unable to do since the conversation with Phaedra’s mother. Instead, I had passed the better part of two hours staring at the sheet of paper in my typewriter and thinking about Phaedra. I kept telling myself that there was nothing to worry about, and certainly nothing that I could do anyway. But the fact remained that one of the things I too obviously couldn’t do was concentrate on the damned thesis while my mind was busy brooding over the possible whereabouts of an eighteen-year-old virgin with an incredible body, an implausible name, and an impenetrable chastity.

Phaedra Harrow. She came into my life, or I into hers, at a party held by the Ad Hoc Garbage for Greece Committee. Back in February the New York landscape had consisted of garbage, tons upon tons of garbage, its collection waiting upon the settlement of the sanitation workers’ strike. Somebody is always on strike in New York, and this time it was the garbage men. The city was hip-deep in potato peelings and empty plastic containers, and packs of rats left sinking tenements to forage in the streets. It is perhaps illustrative of the current state of New York that the strike was three days old before anyone noticed the difference.

In any case, a group of prominent Greek-Americans, including one actress and twelve restauranteurs, took it upon themselves to organize the Garbage for Greece operation. It was conceived as a sort of viable alternative to Care packages; for five dollars one could send ten pounds of garbage to Athens, thus helping clean up New York and expressing one’s feelings toward the Greek military junta in one swell foop.

Well. In ten days the strike was settled, with the result that the program never got off the ground (although the garbage did, finally). I don’t think much more would have happened anyway. The main idea had been to garner a little newspaper space – very little, sad to say. But the group had retained its esprit de corps, and the night before Easter the group was throwing a party to celebrate the end of winter. And the party itself was an unqualified success. The membership of the New York chapter of the Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society was present in full force. The founders of the committee bankrupted their respective restaurants to provide food and drink. There was lamb roasted in every possible fashion, pilafs of rice and pine nuts and currants, fluffy and gooey confections of dough and walnuts and honey. And there was wine.

Lord, was there wine! Case upon case of retsina and rhoditys and mavrodaphne, wine to sip along with the food, wine to swallow along with the fiery speeches, wine to swill while George Pappas plucked his oud and Stavros Melchos pounded his copper drum and Kitty Bazerian offered up a furious dance as tribute to the cause of Hellenic (and sexual) freedom.

Phaedra Harrow. She stood in a corner of the cavernous banquet room drinking retsina from a half-gallon jug. Her hair was a glossy dark-brown waterfall flowing down her back almost to her waist, which in turn was small, which the rest of her emphatically was not. She wore what was either the ultimate miniskirt or a rather wide cummerbund. Her legs began precisely where this garment left off; clad snugly in green mesh tights, they ran a well-shaped course to her feet, which were tucked into a pair of green suede toes-turned-up slippers of the sort cobblers make for elves. Her sweater had been designed to drape loosely, but it had not been designed with Phaedra in mind. It fit snugly.

I saw her from halfway across the room, and I stared at her until she looked my way, and our eyes locked as eyes are wont to do. I walked to her. She passed me the jug of wine, and I drank, and she drank, and we looked into each other’s eyes. Hers were the color of her hair, almond-shaped, very large. Mine are nothing remarkable.

“I am Evan Ta

“I am Phaedra.”

“Phaedra,” I said. “Sister to Ariadne, bride to Theseus. And hast thou killed the minotaur? Come to my arms, my beamish boy.”

“O frabjous day,” said Phaedra.

“And would you hang yourself for love of Hippolytus? He’s naught but a loutish lad and hardly worthy of your attentions. Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“And second and third.”

“Phaedra. Easter is upon us, and Phaedra has put an end to winter. Now is the winter of our discotheque – ah, you laugh, but that’s the real meaning of Easter. The rebirth of the world, Christ is risen, and the sap rises in the trees. Do you know that just a dozen blocks from here Easter will be properly celebrated? There’s a Russian Orthodox church where they do this particular holiday superbly. Singing and shouting and joy. Come, my Phaedra. This party is dying around us” – a lie, it went on exuberantly for another five hours – “and we’ve just time to catch the midnight Easter service, and I love you, you know-”

The Russian services were glorious. They were still in progress when we left the church around two. We found a diner on 14th Street and drank coffee with our mouths and each other with our eyes. I asked her where she was from, where she was living. She quoted Omar: “I came like water and like wind I go.” And, more specifically, she said that she did not presently have any place to stay. She had been living with some hippies on East 10th Street but had moved out that afternoon; everyone was high all the time, she said, and nobody really did anything, and she had had enough of that sort of thing.