My Friend

It's winter in Sarasota, nights can go really low, dangerously low for the citrus industry to the thirties occasionally, otherwise uncomfortable forties and low fifties.  Most days it bounces back to seventy five unless the sky is overcast.  On those cold nights since I tend to sleep with open windows on both sides of my room thus allowing the Gulf air full passage. I put on top of my modest quilt a peculiar yet recognizable item: a limousine robe, I guess you'd call it, some grey fabric that mimics fur to cover the knees and feet of the passengers.  A friend sent it from California when she was making one of those housecleaning sweeps; her parents who always were driven in a limousine were dead, the chauffeur long since dismissed, she herself lived modesty and drove a Volvo. She knew my New England house leaked cold air in winter and saw me reading in my big chair with the robe draped over my knees.  Years later it has migrated to my dear little bed in Sarasota.  Every night when I snuggle under it I think of her.  What was she?  My surrogate mother?  wife?  I met her whee I came to teach at Stanford, she was at a meeting representing the administration where the discussion was promoting the newly launched fund raiser.  She had just arrived at Stanford, in her forties, formerly an assistant to the famous Mike Todd who had just died in a plane crash.  She was "Hollywood," though the mystique of her moneyed youth in a grand mansion on San Francisco's Pacific Heights clung to her; she was that snobbish.  Still she dressed like Carol Lombard or Greta Garbo, neat and tailored blouses, often in pants suits and always the prefect gold bracelet, trim simple loafers made from the most expensive leathers.  When she opened up as I got to know her she described Ceorge Cukor's Sunday brunches "actually a lot of fun" to which her art galley owner husband was always invited, weekends sailing off Catalina island, as guests of what were still real "movie stars."  None of this impressed.  The sweet young faculty wives asked her once at a reception why she had left LA to come north and I overheard her say in a direct matter of fact tone "Well, I had slept with all my friends' husbands and there was nobody left." and then in her tone and facial expression made clear that the subject was now dropped.  I loved her style.  She had a small house filled with marvelous bits and pieces from a life of picking and choosing at random, she had wonderful drawings on her walls.  I once complimented her on her taste and she furiously turned on me "don't ever use that word, disgusting!"  I talked to her every day, then when I moved back East by telephone, we traveled  to every major art museum in the United States, as well as England, France, Germany, and Italy.  i was besotted with her but not sexually.  She said that if she were an Inca Princess she could have been my mother with the sixteen year age gap.  I have photographs of her living room to remind myself of her on the wall near my desk.  She knew everything there was to know about style, aesthetics, color; she defended herself against other people with her irony.  It was Jewish irony although she dismissed being descended of the Jewish merchants who outfitted the miners who came to Sutter Creek.  In her own way she was so super Boston Wasp.  I can never stop talking of her, but now I will snuggle up into the chauffeur's robe and dream.  I think of her every day, something I can say of no other person who has ever crossed my path.