"Days of Pragma"

One day in December of 1978 I stayed home from work with a high fever.
Ina intuitively knew to call me at home, though we hadn’t talked in six months, and she realized I was delirious. She came over and took me to her doctor, who happened to be familiar with Epstein-Barr virus—dubbed “The Yuppie Disease.”
He instructed Ina to take me to her place and watch my temperature and to give me a cool sponge bath when the fever spiked upward. This she did devotedly. My only lucid moments, when I came-to, were during these sponge baths. I would look around, realize what was happening, and the sense of lack of control would make me start to cry. Then I would lose awareness again. 

I gradually recovered and when Ina went away to Milan for a month of modeling work in January, I continued to stay at her place.   Refaela had just landed in New York after a bad break-up, staying with a mutual friend. She bore razor scars on her wrists, she was in a fragile condition indeed. When she mentioned plans to hear live music, I invited her to a concert on Bleeker Street. We stopped for dinner at the All-State Cafe on 72nd Street. I knew she was attracted to me—she couldn’t keep her legs still. She was wearing faded blue jeans that were soft and sexy, and her knees kept moving under the table. She made clear, however, that she wasn’t looking for a relationship and needed time to recover. I pursued her anyway because of her body language. If not me, I thought, it would be someone else. A woman like that doesn't stay out of circulation long. We had simulated sex on the floor, with those same blue jeans grinding against me. That was as good as the real thing, except for the blue balls I had afterwards. It was wonderful, pure attraction.
When Ina came back, I told her about the affair. She was particularly incensed that Refaela was younger.

Ina was a very strong personality. She should have been a novelist. That would have been a healthy way for her to exercise her gift. Instead, she wrote fiction using real people’s lives. She would advise all her friends how to go about their lives, and would tell people just what kind of a person they really were! She often got enough right to seem trustworthy, but it was really more like a funhouse mirror. I was only then starting to figure this out with my newfound objectivity after having lost a lot of brain cells during the fevers. I had never realized it before, but I now believed that her friends and I had been under a hypnotic spell, a long-term hallucination.
Ina and I were sitting on the stairs just outside her apartment—I had begun to leave and she came out to say the last word. She was sitting on the stairway, blocking my path, and determined to speak her mind. She did so with destructive bitterness, shocking my ego so severely that I suddenly found myself out of body again, seeing myself and Ina from a different place in the room from where my body was. I felt absolutely no identification or compassion for that person sitting there on the stairs known as Kevin. I completely lost any sense of “I”…
I had never entertained the thought of anything like reconciliation with Ina, and we hadn’t talked about it. But in her mind it was already a done deal. 
Refaela was all for breaking-off our affair before it got started, at her roomie’s insistence. She met me at a playground in the west 80’s to let me know how she felt about my cad-like behavior. My protestations were not accepted. She didn’t believe me, yet she felt my strong love and was attracted to me.
Her roommate, a devoted friend of Ina’s, condemned our relationship. But after many false starts, in the end she moved in with me—because her roomie had kicked her out.
She got a job in a framing shop on 72nd Street and would take the bus along Central Park West back and forth to our apartment on 95th. One day, as the bus was pulling in heading north, she spied a box of kittens and impulsively took the shiest of the babies huddling in the corner. All the way home she was worried that I would object. Walking into the closet-like foyer of our apartment, she gently pulled that tiny kitten out of her knit hat. I just said, “Well, you know, we’ll have to get her to the vet for her shots…” That kitten made her happy, and she made me happy. We named it Minkowitz, and bedded it down inside a shearling slipper. It became a member of our family, and we all took care of each other.
Refaela said: “I was at your mercy because I was so broken and lost, and I didn't have a solid plan. You swept me off my feet as well as offered me a safe place. You were strong and decisive, and I was confused. I just trusted you. I'm just so sorry that I was immature and wild.”
She didn’t want to work in a framing shop for the rest of her life, so that fall she enrolled in a photography program at SUNY New Paltz, a town of hippies and bikers, 80 miles north of New York. She came to visit me every other weekend and that was the perfect rhythm for our relationship. I never saw her in curlers, and during those weekends all mundane concerns were banished. We loved listening to Elvis Costello, Patty Smith, and the Talking Heads.

I used to meet her at the Port Authority bus terminal but when ‘Mike’ offered to give her a ride all the way to and from school she jumped at the offer. The problem was that I soon developed genital herpes, and though she denied it, I was convinced she contracted it from Mike.
This emotional sore spot never healed, because I never knew for sure how I came to have this painful recurring virus, and since she didn’t admit to giving it to me, I couldn’t forgive her. 
I moved south in December of 1979, to take a job in Baltimore. I bought an olive drab '73 Volvo and loaded up the moving van and drove south, Minkowitz riding quietly on the laundry bag next to me. At that distance our visits became less frequent, only at holidays. You might guess that was how this story ended.

With the end of the semester in late May, I drove up to New Paltz in a rented U-Haul truck to bring her to Baltimore and arrived to an unfolding drama. Her friend from Sierra Leone, Amadu, had disappeared. Refaela was upset and thought of going to search for him in the surrounding woods, even as we were loading the truck. She was clearly torn, and I judged that any delay would increase the chance of her staying, especially if Amadu should reappear. “Well, get in now honey,” and off we went. 
That was a quiet drive. She stayed in touch with Amadu for a long time.

Frank and Carol moved out of the city a year before I did. But I got very sick and fell out with my partners, so I needed a place to go. Frank told me Avalon Hill had allowed him to collect a salary for that whole year without publishing anything. The management called him to the main office to review his progress, and he told them, “I guess you’ll have to fire me.”
They said, “No Frank, we love you. Just give us something we can print. It doesn’t have to be your best work.”
It sounded like just the place to recover from my virus, so I followed Frank to Baltimore and we even lived in the same row house on Linden Ave. Frank and Carol had the ground floor and we were above them. They were typically LOUD New Yorkers and we’d hear them bickering, especially Carol. Even the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Saar, would shout from her window, in her German accent, “Be quite!”