Manhattan 62 by Reggie Nadelson Page B

look at her sideways, this tall girl—almost as tall as me—with long thick shining dark hair held back in a pony tail, the very blue eyes. She’s about twenty. She’s wearing a straight black skirt, tight black turtleneck sweater, red cinch belt around her little waist. A big brown leather bag hangs over her shoulder, the strap decorated with those peace buttons you see around the Village.
    The long legs, the eyes, the voice, the clinging sweater, she is easily the sexiest girl I’ve ever seen, and she smells like lilies of the valley. I’m glad I’m wearing a new light-blue plaid sports shirt, and slacks I only got a month earlier.
    She nods at the Miss Subways poster. “I’m surprised they have Negro girls.”
    â€œDoes it matter?”
    â€œYes, it matters. Definitely, it matters when there is any advancement for the Negroes. Don’t you believe that?”
    â€œWhy? You’re not colored.”
    â€œNever mind,” she says, but I can see she files it, and might hold it against me.
    I’m wrong. She comes on to me. I get off at West Fourth, and she follows me. When I ask her if she’d like some espresso coffee, she agrees, and we walk, not speaking, to Bleecker Street where she spots an empty table on the sidewalk at Figaro.
    â€œMy name is Nancy Rudnick,” she says, and asks me what I do.
    I tell her I’m a cop.
    â€œGosh. Seriously? Do you like it?”
    â€œYeah, I do, what’s wrong with it?”
    â€œI just don’t know any policemen,” she says.
    â€œI’m a detective.”
    â€œI see. Where did you go to school?”
    I tell her Fordham. “GI Bill. Korea. Graduated in ’55. You?”
    Idly, she twirls her hair around a finger, and looks down into her coffee. “Upstate,” she says.
    â€œNew Paltz? I have a cousin at the state university there. Or Binghamton?”
    â€œVassar.”
    But we drink a lot of coffee, and she tells me about how she grew up in Greenwich Village, about her father’s house on Charlton Street. She tells me she plans to be a painter and has her own little studio at her father’s place and, out of the blue, she invites me over. “Them Village girls are all nymphomaniacs, they believe in free love,” my pop would say. Me, I think, if so, good. Great. This girl I just picked up in the subway—or did she pick me up—I’m hooked.
    â€œDo you like music?” she asks when we’re at her place, and I nod, and she says, “Crazy”, and without waiting for an answer, selects an LP album by Odetta, the folksinger, not my thing, but then Nancy pats the bed that doubles as a couch and is covered with an orange and blue Indian bedspread, and she’s singing along to “Dark as a Dungeon” with so much fervor you might think she comes from a long line of miners. So I fall for her. I fall for it that she loves singing and just like me can’t carry a tune. For this girl, I’ll listen to anything. I’ll listen to her politics. For the legs, and the eyes. “It’s kind of not your thing, is it?” says Nancy, and shuffles her albums, puts on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!.
    â€œYou like Sinatra?”
    â€œEverybody likes Sinatra, what did you think, I only listen to stuff about the workers? Don’t be silly. I have almost all his albums.”
    We smoke a little pot for a while, and giggle, and eat lumpy brownies she baked earlier, maybe with some hash, I can’t tell for sure because I’m so high from being around her, and so excited I’m half out of my mind, especially because she tells me straight out that she has a diaphragm and we don’t need to worry about her getting pregnant. I’m not used to girls like Nancy.
    After that night, I always connect Nancy and James Brown doing his thing at the Apollo, the two great events for me that spring of 1959. Then she’s gone, and it’s not