Here’s the memoir with a glimpse of my authentic fifteen year old self.

REMEMBERING JON
a memoir

My relationship with Jon Altman began during the summer I was fifteen. It was an unusual affinity, and even decades later, there are aspects of Jon’s behavior which still remain a mystery. Jon lived alone on the first floor of the southeast Bronx apartment building where I spent most of my childhood. Two floors above, I struggled with an endless teenage misery. At fifteen, it seemed I could neither say nor do anything that met with my father’s approval, and he often hurled hurtful words which took their toll upon my fragile temperament. Anxious and depressed, I found little empathy among my usual friends, but in Jon, who understood what it was to feel different, I recognized an ally.

Even as I felt a communion with the peculiar, at that age, I did not want to be identified with it, and I was embarrassed by the ways in which my life did not seem to be “normal.” For instance, my friends’ parents all had their own bedrooms, while my twelve year old sister and I shared the one bedroom we had, mother and father sleeping in the living room on a Castro Convertible. They had at least redecorated that year, choosing a new sofa bed upholstered in shades of mauve which blended with the darker mauve carpeting. In front of it stood a rectangular, walnut finish coffee table with inlayed ceramic tile, and to its left, my father’s reclining, black Naugahyde “throne.”

A console piano took up a good part of one wall, and for a dreaded hour and a half each week, I was forced to take lessons from a somber and unreasonable German émigré named Mrs. Stein (pronounced Shtein), who insisted that I remove “those horrible bleck eyes,” my exotic — à la Sophia Loren — eye shadow, eyeliner and mascara, before I sat down at the keyboard. I liked the piano, but hated the lessons. Scales, études, Mrs. Shtein.

And there was a hi-fi cabinet beneath the double window with a top that lifted up to reveal the turntable and record storage areas — one for 45’s, and a separate compartment for 331/3’s. In 1962, even though Elvis Presley was still hot, for me, sexy was synonymous with the voice of Johnny Mathis, and I had every album he ever made. I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places, that this heart of mine embraces, all night throoough… What more could a girl want?

Being less than normal, my family spilled over into the apartment building across the street. There, on the sixth floor, my two Russian great aunts, Lena and Goldie, rattled around in a large, five room apartment, my grandmother having died when I was nine. And on the fifth floor were my favorite old people, Aunt Fanny and Uncle Abie, an adopted great aunt and uncle, part of the family for as long as I could remember.

It was because of my grandmother and great aunts that my parents sold the grocery store they had owned on E. 78th Street in Manhattan and moved to the Bronx when I was seven. Downtown, we had lived in a long, two bedroom “railroad flat” with twenty foot ceilings on the first floor of what would now be called a pricey brownstone, two blocks from the East River. Family responsibility, to my parents, came first; and with Aunt Esther, mother’s sister, getting married — finally, and my grandfather, who was both deaf and blind, living at the Home for the Blind on Long Island, and with grandmother also being deaf, and my two great aunts becoming elderly and frail, there seemed to my parents to be no alternative.

Mother was a college graduate and both my parents, out of necessity, worked full time, so it was Aunt Lena who was there when I came home from school, Aunt Lena who nagged me about refusing to put on a sweater or going to visit the “wrong,” meaning not Jewish, girlfriends. But she also graciously prepared the pot roast mother left ready to be put on the stove, picked up after me and my sister so mother wouldn’t yell at us, and gave us money when Christy, the Good Humor man, sounded his bell. She was a kind, well-meaning soul, but I, insecure and angry, showed her little of the respect I knew she deserved. I have often wished I had listened more closely to her stories about the Russian village where she lived, about life under the Czar, about the time she was mysteriously and very briefly married.

Once, when I was in my thirties, I dreamed of her. We sat together on the top of a deep green hill looking out at a sky the color of tangerines and violets. We didn’t speak, but just sat together. Looking. Smiling. Loving. But at fifteen, I resented being treated like a child. I resented being teased by my friends about needing supervision. I resented being made to feel afraid of everything.

My older aunt, Goldie, hardly ever left the house. She could offer her contribution to my troubled teenage psyche from right where she was. Her job, when she was not davening — praying in a standing position, her body swaying forward and back, her mouth forming an endless stream of almost inaudible and totally unintelligible words of supplication — was to hang out of the sixth story window shouting in the Yiddish voice of doom, embarrassing me in front of my friends. “Ruchel, Ruchel,” she would shout. From her perspective, danger lurked beneath every roller skate or bicycle wheel, behind every bat and ball, across every street. Sometimes I yelled up at her to leave me alone. Mostly, I ignored her. Either way, I looked and felt like a terrible human being.

I don’t know exactly how I first became aware of Jon Altman as more than just a familiar face around the neighborhood. In a blurry way, he had always been there, but maybe because of our mutual vulnerability, or the search for a kindred spirit, during the summer of ’62, something shifted into focus for both of us.

The record of Jon’s life did not slide easily into any Boynton Avenue groove. His parents divorced when he was a teenager — something he never completely reconciled within himself. After his mother and father went their separate ways, Jon and his older sister, Beverly, continued living together until she, too, eventually moved out. On his own, Jon seemed to find his only sense of purpose being the perennial student. Whether it was intellectual stimulation, the security of routine, or an escape from his pain, Jon liked the world of academia, and at the time I was fifteen, he turned twenty-one and was working toward a Master’s degree at CCNY.

Five foot eight, olive skinned with a slender, compact build, Jon had dark, cautious eyes which guarded many private doors. His soft, brown hair, which fell stubbornly onto his brow, was already streaked with considerable silver — colorless threads which perhaps could be traced to disturbing childhood tapestries. Unconcerned about his appearance, Jon often looked like the orphaned soul he felt himself to be — unkempt, uncared for, his white tee shirts overwashed and graying, his Bermuda shorts faceted with creases from being balled up right out of the dryer. It broke my heart to see in him the consequences of abandonment.

It was probably apparent to anyone who cared to notice, that something was developing between Jon and me, but neither of us risked the possible embarrassment or rejection of seriously acknowledging our feelings of attraction. The more comfortable practice was the twisted banter known as “sound fighting,” a kind of verbal battle of quick and sometimes unkind wit calculated to maintain the stance of denial. Jon was a pro at this, and even though I could be easily hurt, his comebacks didn’t carry any real edge for me. I saw through their sharpness to the dull, harmless side of his gibes.

“Where’d you get that outfit, the Salvation Army?” he’d say, if I was dressed especially nicely.

Translation: I notice you’re dressed up, and I like it.

“If you had a heart, you’d buy me an ice cream,” I’d say, often to cajole him in front of others.

“In your dreams,” he’d reply.

Translation: Ask me when we’re alone.

On a day when the humidity had gotten to my hair, he’d say, “Well, if it isn’t little Shirley Temple.”

Translation: I think you look kind of cute.

Despite these incessant games, I began to calculate ways to hang around with Jon. I would casually poke my head out of my third floor windows to see if he was sitting on the front steps, or walking his dog, Max, a docile, affectionate creature which accompanied him everywhere without a leash; one whistle and Max was right by Jon’s side. If I spied Jon, I would find some excuse to put myself in his path. I even resorted to offering to run errands for my mother, knowing I could talk him into “walking me” to the store. Sometimes, he would ask if I wanted to take a walk.

On one such occasion, Jon and I walked Max up toward Bruckner Boulevard and across the pedestrian overpass, which spanned its six lanes, toward the old Quonset huts where bright gypsies used to set up camp telling fortunes in the field behind our elementary school. It was an early July evening, the afterglow of sunset just beginning to deepen into sapphire. The warm, still air of a city summer folded itself against our damp skin. The whoosh of passing cars rose and fell in the distance.

After strolling a while, we turned around ready to head back when Jon brushed his shoulder generously against me and slid his hand into mine. I didn’t resist. We walked on, joined in silence, self-consciously looking to the starry vastness as if it might be able to explain this sudden shift in feeling. Just before we re-crossed the overpass, Jon turned toward me, took me in his arms and kissed me full on the mouth. It was not the kiss I wanted, not the kind I would have expected. It was not softly placed and sensuous, but wide-mouthed, slightly hard and tongue-less.

Kissing was something I knew about. I had gone to my share of “make-out” parties in Toby Fisher’s basement, her little brother (for a price) standing guard against parental intrusion, ready to rap three times on the heating pipe so we could quickly flip the lights back on and act “natural.” I had made a study of good kissers, and Jon was not one of them. Yet, what seemed to be happening between us wasn’t about kissing itself, but about why this man, six years my senior, was kissing me. With chubby cheeks, frizzy brown hair and, a slightly pear-shaped figure [at that time], it certainly wasn’t for my looks. And since I was neither an Einstein, nor a Dorothy Parker, it couldn’t have been my intellect or brilliant wit that attracted him. As young as I was, I felt more suspect of his intentions than flattered by them.

“Why do you want to kiss me?” I said. “I’m only fifteen.”

“Ah, but inside you’re a lot older,” he replied.

He was right. I might have been immature in outside ways, but when it came to inner longings of the heart, I felt old. Even at fifteen, I experienced the kind of loneliness, emptiness, and spiritual yearning that transcends age. Inside, mine were old feelings. Older than chronology. Older than eternity. Begun the very instant of cosmic separation.

After that evening, I began to trust Jon with more of my personal stories. In public, he was still the same teasing, sharp-tongued kidder he had always been. But now, whenever I fought with my father, which was often — we both hoarded so much deep and complicated anger, it didn’t take much to start an argument — I would turn to Jon.

“She’s a whore who goes to men’s apartments,” Father would yell. “What will that yenta, Mrs. Aaronson from the second floor, say?”

“I don’t give a damn,” I would yell back, leaving mother, an expert manipulator who endlessly tried to make peace between me and my father, to clean up the emotional mess.

At the other end of the hall and down two flights of stairs was Jon’s apartment, a dreary place. There was no carpet or linoleum and the old wood floors were the dark, dull color of grime. The sparse living room furniture was faded, frayed and dusty; the walls were painted with hopelessness, a color I knew well. His was not the manly messiness of a bachelor, but the anxious disarray of someone who tried to pretend that his current situation was temporary and therefore could be ignored.

When I knocked on the door, Jon let me in. He would always let me in. He would always listen. And most of the time, we would wind up kissing on the couch with Johnny Mathis in the background. It’s not for me to say, I love you… And kiss is all we ever did. He never even tried to touch me below the neck, not that I would have let him. Despite or maybe because of my father’s hurtful accusations, I was still a sexual innocent. But I also wondered why Jon, at his age, didn’t seem to desire anything more of me than that. In spite of this, I felt an intimacy between us that was beyond sexuality, and even beyond words.

By ten o’clock, Jon would tell me it was time for me to go. “You better leave, before I don’t want you to,” he said once. “I don’t want your father coming after me with a shotgun,” he said more often, and walking me to the door, I would go, reluctantly, hoping my father had already fallen asleep in front of the TV, snoring on his throne, so I could get to bed in peace.

My encounters with Jon continued. In summer, we sat on the stoop or took walks. Later, there were drives in my girlfriend Pam’s boyfriend Sydney’s Chevy convertible, Jon’s arm around me in the back seat, the wind wildly whipping through my newly straightened hair. In winter, there were the days when a plush blanket of snow turned everything fantastic, the days when school was closed, yet my parents managed to get to work. Jon would inconspicuously (one must always be on the alert for the Mrs. Aaronsons of the neighborhood) whistle up at my windows, and I would join him in an early pedestrian plow through the calf-deep virgin whiteness. Afterwards, there was hot chocolate, Johnny Mathis and Winter Wonderland.

The year I was sixteen, Jon decided to apply to the Peace Corp. He spoke fluent Spanish and hoped to be placed somewhere in South America. After his initial acceptance, he had to attend a three month session in which he would be trained and evaluated. He wrote to me several times, long letters describing in detail his surroundings and daily activities. He did not address his feelings. In his last letter, he simply “reported” that he would be home shortly, since he had been rejected on the basis of psychological testing.

When I finally saw him, Jon appeared to be in a carefree mood — too carefree —making wisecracks, teasing me, laughing. I could sense the failure, rejection and devastation which gnawed at his defeated spirit. I tried to reach out to him, but he was only available for superficial conversation. I wanted to tell him that it was safe to show the face of his pain, that I could embrace it with compassion. I wanted to tell him that I saw the scarred and battered soul beneath his too smooth facade, and recognized it as my own.

By that time, both of us had started therapy, and, after a while, we briefly talked only about the fact of it with each other. I had been seeing my psychoanalyst for several months. I would dress in my most sophisticated outfits, sometimes a beige knit suit with bone colored matching shoes and handbag, and take the subway into Manhattan. The sessions with Dr. A consisted mostly of me being cajoled, through his silence, into letting wild thoughts run untamed from my mouth like a herd of stallions. Mostly I trampled my father. Sometimes I talked about Jon.

Every so often, Dr. A would ask me a question. “Do you masturbate?” he said once. I became terribly embarrassed, not only because I did and had no intention of discussing it with him, but also because I wasn’t sure exactly what that term meant, whether or not it encompassed something more or different than I was actually doing.

“What exactly does that mean?” I said, surprised by my own courage.

“Sexually stimulating yourself,” he replied.

I’m not sure what I told him after that. I could not speak easily about sexuality. It was a thing only addressed by my father in order to squelch. I was not allowed to have a sexual identity. Eventually, Jon and I were shocked to discover that both of us had been seeing the same psychiatrist! Dying of teenage embarrassment, I canceled my next appointment and never went back to him again.

Time had not yet begun to run away with itself the way it does when one gets older, and my remaining high school years meandered along. Although he always had a place in my heart, I no longer had a “crush” on Jon, and interaction between us thinned out. I was busy with friends and personal emotional challenges, and for a while, Jon seemed to be romantically involved with a red-headed woman I had seen him with on occasion. When I broached the subject, however, he would only talk around it, never owning that he was actually having a relationship. Later, I found out that the woman broke off with him because he didn’t “have it together.”

In January of 1964, a month after I turned eighteen, I graduated from High School, half a year ahead of schedule. In February I began my first semester at Hunter College. And Jon took a roommate. His name was Lewis. He had lived across the street in my aunts’ building. His mother had died of Parkinson’s disease. A year later, his father passed away of a heart attack, and since both he and Jon were alone, they came to pool their resources.

I knew Lewis. In fact, I had dated him, once, when I was a high school junior. He was two years older than I and had already graduated. He had been going with a girl named Sally for years, and the whole neighborhood thought they would surely marry, but for some unknown reason, they broke up. And for some unremembered reason, I wound up going to a dance with him. It was a disaster. I don’t think either of us liked the other much, and his very brief, sort of puffy good night kiss left everything to be desired. I could not have imagined that I would ever again date, let alone marry, Lewis. But I came to do both. And I could not have anticipated Jon’s reaction.

Lewis worked in the 42nd Street Post Office and switched to the night shift so he could take some courses at Hunter College only offered in the day session. Since he didn’t know many day students, and I felt the need to rescue the lonely, I befriended him. At the time, I was a member of a popular House Plan, which was like a sorority, and was casually dating someone named Steve from our affiliated fraternity. With Steve’s help, Lewis pledged and was accepted as a member and we saw a lot of each other. We even double dated, winding up in Jon’s — now also Lewis’s — apartment. Conveniently, Jon often seemed to be “out.”

There wasn’t any great passion between us, and it seemed surprising that Lewis and I eventually became involved. He did, however, prove himself to be a half-way decent kisser, and we often made out on the opened sofa bed — the same closed sofa on which Jon and I had once held each other; the same sofa bed on which, ironically, I would lose my virginity. But there was something about Lewis that did not smell right. Not that he exuded an odor, but rather that his was not the scent of someone with whom I was destined to fall in love.

Once I began seeing Lewis, Jon made himself more and more scarce. The times our paths did cross, he was either overly silent and introspective or harshly critical. He seemed to harbor an underlying anger toward me which was never addressed, and which he, himself, may not have understood.

In the late spring, my House Plan and Lewis’s fraternity were to have their big dance at an upstate resort, and Lewis asked me to be his date. My best friend, Rose, did not yet have a date, and Lewis and I thought Jon could use a night of celebration, and might enjoy Rose’s company. Even though neither of them was terribly attracted to the other, they both agreed to go together.

It turned out, however, to be a grave mistake. Not only did Jon act uncivil to Rose all evening (much of which I was too engrossed in having my own good time to notice), but Rose later told me angrily that he drank too much, appeared to be on a very frayed emotional edge, was verbally insulting to her, and that during the entire drive home (we did not ride together), she felt the potential of physical harm and actually feared for her life.

Shocked and embarrassed, my best friend hardly speaking to me, I trembled at this new, dangerous face of Jon which I would not have recognized. Outwardly, my sympathies were with my girlfriend; Jon was unreachable on every level. Inwardly I blamed myself, and also grieved the apparent toll which lack of love could claim upon the human psyche. When had Jon become so wretched? Was there something I could have done to help? Was any of this because of me?

Meanwhile, the battles between me and my father escalated into full scale war. Nothing I did seemed acceptable to him. Both of us, at the time, were strong-willed and unyielding, and no truce seemed possible. Soon, I began to see more and more of Lewis, with whom, like every other man I even casually dated, my father eventually found fault.

There was no doubt that Lewis had a rebellious temperament. He had little use for the suffocating rules of social consciousness, yet he did nothing outwardly disrespectful, and was hurt by my father’s disapproval of him. Lewis, therefore, encouraged me in my defiance and quest for freedom. We did not talk about being in love, and I don’t remember that Lewis actually proposed to me, nor I to him. Our decision was more a jointly calculated battle strategy, a tactical maneuver designed to get us out of the line of fire. And although we professed to be rebels, in 1965, neither of us was willing to tackle the backlash of “living in sin,” so marriage seemed the only viable solution.

By this time, my family had moved into a new Co-op just north of Pelham Parkway, and I only went back to Boynton Avenue to see Lewis and Jon. When I told Jon that I was marrying Lewis, he simply and abruptly stopped speaking to me. I sent him an invitation to the wedding, but he never responded. After Lewis and I married, I heard little of Jon, and would have few reasons to return to the old neighborhood. Aunt Goldie, then uncle Abie, then Aunt Lena, would die. Aunt Fanny would be moved to a nursing home in New Rochelle. Eventually, I, too, would leave the city.

Lewis and I lasted a little over two years in our studio apartment on Pelham Parkway. Ours was a phantom marriage, an unsolid mark upon the blueprint of a life, a shadowy encounter which was not destined to flesh itself out. Several years later, I saw what I thought was Lewis on the train. I couldn’t even be certain I recognized the man who had been my husband. I wondered if I could have dreamed the entire relationship. Only when Lewis got off at Pelham Parkway, where I’d heard he still lived, was I sure it had been him. From then on, I would examine the scent of a man very carefully.

As for Jon, I’ve thought of him over the years, pondering the design we each shaped upon the living canvas of the other. A cerulean sweep of tenderness. An ebony stroke of madness. I’ve wondered what became of him. I like to think he was able to make peace with his demons and rescue himself from his own loneliness. I like to think he was able to put his incredible mind to use in a way that brought him joy. And I like to believe that he can still recall the fifteen year old girl who returned his kiss one long gone summer night, and has ever since remembered him with love.