Frieda

Each woman he'd loved had added something important to his life. But Frieda, should he really count her? He was sixteen, she fifteen, when he went with his friends to a dance at her all-girls private high school on the Upper East Side and first saw her, dancing the Lindy, he thinks, with another girl in the gymnasium turned into a seedy nightclub. She looks like a model, he thought, so beautiful and slim and dressed so well and sophisticated-looking. "Hands off," he told a couple of his friends who were admiring her. "She's mine, or at least give me a clear shot at her before you horn in." She was the first girl he was in love with. It never came to anything, and he never told her how he felt but she knew by the way he acted to her, other than for a number of dates, all but two of them on Sunday afternoons and a Jewish religious holiday during the week and one big long kiss at her apartment door at the end of their second and last evening date and a few French kisses in the Loew's Eighty-third Street movie theater. Just "Loew's Eighty-third" did they call it? He said on the phone weeks after she stopped going with him, "Didn't those kisses we did mean anything?" She said, "I don't want to hurt you any more than I may have, but I'm new at it and was just practicing." He went over to her and said something like "Hi, I'm Martin, and I wonder if I could have the next dance," and she said, "I don't see why that couldn't be possible. Jessica." "Hi, Jessica." "It's actually Frieda, but I'd like it to be Jessica." They danced several dances in a row. He was surprised no other guy cut in on him, and told her so. She said, "Oh, I'm a very unpopular girl," and he said, "Tell me another one." She seemed to be having a good time with him—laughing and joking and whispering something in his ear he couldn't hear—and he found himself falling for her. She had a nice smell about her—carnation or something. It didn't seem like perfume or cologne—not as strong—so probably from soap. Wherever it came from, he thought, it was intoxicating, as they say. He imagined sitting in a movie theater, her head on his shoulder, and he smelling that smell. When the Charleston was announced over the loudspeaker as the next dance, he said, "Darn, I don't know how to do that one. But my aunt, who tried to teach me it, was one of the six original dancers in the George White's Scandals to introduce it to America." She said, "You're making that up," and he said, "I swear," and put his hand over his heart. "We can call my mother right now—it's her sister—and ask her," and she said, "Okay, I believe you. It's not a man's dance anyway—you don't have the legs for it. It'd be like a man dancing the cancan. It's my favorite dance, though—I'm so glad it was brought back—so I'm going to dance it with my best girlfriend, if you'll excuse me." He said, "In case my friends suddenly drag me out of here, can I have your phone number?"—she had her own phone, in her bedroom, something he'd never heard a girl her age having—and called the next night for a date, and she said, "Thursday's okay, but it'll have to be an early night; I don't want to be too tired for school Friday." They went to Radio City Music Hall. Took the Broadway bus down and then walked the two blocks to Sixth Avenue. But a cab back because he didn't want her to think him cheap. Weekday afternoons and all-day Saturdays he worked as a delivery boy for a...