The Receptionist by Janet Groth Page B

room played along. Pretty clever, the restaurateur who thought that one up.
    We checked out Chumley’s and the Cedar and the King Cole and Bemelmans and pretty much all the best-known bars in the city. Dinner, when not Japanese, was often at some other cozy little ethnic restaurant up or down Second Avenue. I began to realize that Evan was spending an awful lot of money, for although the places we ate might have been relatively modest, the habits that we indulged were expensive—cover charges and high-priced drinks at every jazz spot in town. We saw and heard Stan Getz and Anita O’Day. We caught Nina Simone at the Village Vanguard, Maynard Ferguson at Birdland, Roy Eldridge at Jimmy Ryan’s, and Bobby Hackett at Eddie Condon’s. Th e New Yorker cartoonist Lee Lorenz played every Monday down at Marie’s Crisis Café, and we often went down to see him at the bar where Th omas Paine wrote a series of his most inflammatory tracts, called “ Th e American Crisis,” at the window table in the front. We also saw on several memorable occasions at Marie’s a wonderful tap dancer called John Bubbles.
    But the place we came back to again and again was the Five Spot in the East Village, to hear Th elonious Monk in what must have been a summer-long gig. Here my education in the stratosphere of jazz piano became complete. Th e room was always covered in a blue haze of smoke; the crowd was always putting away quantities of scotch. Dewar’s and soda became my drink for its ability to build to a not incapacitating buzz that could be sustained through the four or five drinks that Evan consumed during an average stay. Was I listening? he’d ask. Did I hear that? Did I follow what sophisticated variations the Monk was pulling out of the long-since-abandoned melody? Yes, I was listening. Yes, I heard, and yes, I was caught up in the sense of a musician far, far away inside his own head; but truth to tell, I have never been able to keep hold of a melodic line past the third or fourth variation, and the atonal stuff left me completely at a loss. Never mind, Evan liked it and I was there to learn.
    When I got back from the grand tour that separated me from Evan for nearly four weeks—and me from the New Yorker art department forever—it was immediately apparent that something had shifted. Mainly him. He had become shifty eyed. Th is was unnecessary, since he had seen this coming all along, but perhaps it made him nervous that I had been a virgin. He was used to more experienced partners who were better at the game. He began using a cutting style of mockery, making fun of what he called my “Aw, shucks” manner and attributing it to my “Spamtown upbringing.” I couldn’t seem to stop hunting for relationship clues. Were we engaged or weren’t we? And why, each time I attempted clarification, did Evan turn so mean?
    On the first of October, at Evan’s suggestion, I moved down to Jane Street in Greenwich Village to an apartment with no roommate. He said it was more convenient. Th e places we went to in October were basically the same places we had gone to all summer, but their importance as glamorous lead-ups to bed now seemed a bit threadbare and transparent.
    In early November I was heartened when Evan asked me to arrange a long lunch hour in order to view an apartment he wanted me to see, which was for rent and immediate occupancy, on Washington Square. We were welcomed into the bare flat by the landlady, a bright-eyed woman with a curly frizz of salt-and-pepper hair, the leathery, wrinkled skin of a heavy smoker, and the determinedly cheerful demeanor of the businesswoman ready to close a deal.
    After she finished showing us through the somewhat dim one-bedroom apartment on the second-floor front of the old brownstone (a matter of a very few minutes), Evan invited me to give him my opinion.
    “Well,” I began dubiously, as I peered into the shallow hall cubbyhole that separated the front parlor from the rear bedroom, a hall