the table) building tennis courts. When he was sixteen, he bought himself a red Camaro (at cost, from yet another friend of his father’s) to drive himself around to the suburban estates where he gave private tennis lessons to wealthy ladies bemoaning their backhands. The ladies adored him. (“You are so kind, Howard,” Mrs. Lane said once, handing him a twenty-dollar tip. “You make me feel as though everything’s going to be all right, even my tennis.”) And the husbands trusted him. (“She hasn’t had a martini before five all summer,” Mr. Lane said, handing him a two-hundred-dollar bonus.) When one of his dad’s friends built an indoor tennis complex, Howard was hired part time and his summer clientele followed him.
When Howard won a partial scholarship to Duke, the Rotary Club bestowed another on him. That, with what money Ray could throw in, with the good deal of money Howard already had (and would continue to make over the summers), enabled Howard to arrive at Duke with no worries save academic and social success. And he achieved both, making the folks back home terribly, terribly proud—of his honors, of his editing the newspaper, of his fraternity, of how Ray could still take Howard down to Leo’s Bar for a “couple of cold ones” and show the boys how their investment was taking shape. (His first summer home, Howard’s parents had promptly sent him up to see Allyson’s family in Shaker Heights. “Make sure Father knows that Ray’s given you money so you don’t have to work at school,” his mother whispered to him. “And if he starts in about your cousin Alfred at Harvard, you tell him to go to hell and come straight home.”)
No, during those first two years in New York, Howard did not want to tell his parents that he made seven-thousand dollars a year, spent his days answering other people’s phones and typing their memos and letters, and spent his nights with cotton in his ears, trying to read manuscripts while his roommates partied around him. And no, not to this day had he ever told his parents that he had sold his car to support his courtship of Melissa.
Ah, yes, Melissa.
It’s important, at this point, to visualize the kind of figure Howard cut in those days. He was nearly six feet, had a strong, outdoorsy kind of build, and yet had this bookish air about him, fostered by the tweed jackets, baggy corduroy pants and horn-rimmed glasses he always wore. He had marvelously wavy, unruly brown hair. His face was imbued with serious lines—a strong nose and jaw—but was almost always seen in varying degrees of good humor. His blue eyes twinkled in any mood; his premature crow’s-feet invited trust; and his mouth held a kind of mysterious promise for many of the women at Gardiner & Grayson. “This mouth is wonderful in any romantic scenario you may care to imagine,” they thought it said.
Harrison Dreiden regularly took Howard to the Century Club for drinks. Harrison—in a way that reminded Howard very much of his dad’s friends in Rotary—had set his sights on Howard as a protégé. Which was fine with Howard, since he thought Harrison might well be God’s twin brother. After Howard started working on Harrison’s long list of bestselling authors, the two of them would have long talks that began with Howard’s quest for Dickens, Wharton, Fitzgerald & Gang, and ended with Harrison’s strong recommendation that Howard lower his sights and expand his horizons for the sake of some kind of future in the business.
Even though Howard was the captain of the company softball and squash teams, even though there wasn’t an employee at Gardiner & Grayson who did not like Howard, there was still a bit of a row when Harrison promoted him to associate editor. Apparently some of his colleagues did not seem to think Howard had done much to deserve it, and thus, at the age of twenty-four, Howard acquired a nickname around the house: Prince Charming. (“This is our head publicist, Harriet Wyatt,” one editor had said to an author at a cocktail party, “and this is Mr. Charming, who works in editorial.”)
The Friday night after his promotion, Howard had gone to Crawdaddy’s to meet an old college roommate for a drink. He did so with the first genuine enthusiasm he had felt since arriving in New York. Okay, so what if Teddy was making exactly twenty-three thousand dollars more than Howard at Manchester Hannonford Bank? Howard was an editor at the finest trade publishing house in the world. And so, over a million Heinekens (it seemed), Howard reveled in the feeling of having regained his place in the world.
Enter Melissa.
The noise in Crawdaddy’s was so loud, Howard did not hear her name when Teddy introduced them, and yet Howard felt as though he knew exactly who she was—his. It is true; it happened like that. Howard looked up and instantly felt that he would never find a finer woman to be his wife than the one standing before him. She was perfect. Everything about Melissa was slim, elegant, cool and classy. And it was in that moment, that very first moment, that Howard vowed he would try to win her as his own.
But first there was the overgrown preppy with her to contend with. “Stephen Manischell, Manchester Hannonford,” he said to Howard, shaking his hand. The four of them sat down together at a table, where Howard learned that Melissa Collins also worked at “Manny Hanny” and was currently seriously involved with the creep next to her. But Melissa was not immune to Howard’s intense fascination with her. In fact, within an hour she had moved her chair over to Howard and, with their heads looming closer and closer to each other, told him all about the important aspects of her training program at Manny Hanny (pausing only to tell Stephen to please be quiet, couldn’t he see that she was talking), and what it was like commuting every day from New Canaan, Connecticut. She told him about her parents’ guest house that she lived in. She told him that her mother had cancer and that her father, “Daddy,” imported more cocktail napkins, plastic toothpicks and swizzle sticks than anyone in the world. (She didn’t describe it like that, but even through the haze of alcohol and his fantasies of what her breasts might be like, Howard had figured out what “cocktail accouterments” were.)
Then it was Howard’s turn. Howard was an editor at Gardiner & Grayson, the youngest, he added, that they had ever had. Duke. Yes. Phi Beta Kappa. Columbus, Ohio. “Uh, well, Mom is a housewife…. Dad? Oh, Dad’s in real estate.”
Miracle upon miracle, Melissa whispered to Howard that if he left now she would meet him outside in five minutes and he could walk her to the train. If he wanted to, that is. Whether it was his heart or the Heinekens talking, Howard was never sure, but Melissa to this day swore that he said, “Want to? God, I would crawl if only to see you.”
And so Melissa had given Stephen the slip that night and Howard had walked her through Grand Central to her train. At the door of the train Melissa kissed Howard on the cheek and he tried to kiss her on the mouth and she stopped him. Her hand placed lightly over his mouth, she laughed (looking so beautiful, so right, so utterly glorious in a Town and Country kind of way) and said, “It would be so wonderful if you turned out to be the man I want to give myself to.”
And then Howard went slightly mad. He had never met a girl like Melissa before. There was something about her that drove him wild inside, a kind of craving, a kind of nameless longing that he had never experienced before. Oh yeah, there had been Debbie, at seventeen, with whom he had launched his sexual career in the back of his mother’s station wagon. (“Heh-heh,” his father had said, winking, when Howard requested to drive it instead of his Camaro one night. “Make sure you take a raincoat—it might rain, heh-heh.”) And there had been Susie the Senior his freshman year, and then Cornelia Fordyce the next three. And one or two quickies in New York, and always something with Debbie whenever he was home, and all of them, all of them, were very smart, very attractive women. But they weren’t anything like Melissa. God, Melissa. Walk into a room with her on your arm and, well—everything that could be said was said just by looking at her.
But then, as it has been said, Howard had gone slightly mad.
Melissa explained to him that while she knew it was terribly old-fashioned of her, she really couldn’t even think of engaging in any sexual activity until she was married to the man she loved.
Did
