The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker by Janet Groth

Author:Janet Groth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781616201319
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2012-06-26T07:00:00+00:00

FRITZ

I ACQUIRED MY NEXT SERIOUS boyfriend indirectly by way of a Talk reporter named Bill Murray. In those days, men who came up to meet New Yorker writers for lunch and arrived early often passed the time chatting with me on my post at the reception desk. Sometimes they even convinced me to go out with them. Murray’s too timely friend Cranston, as I shall call him, wanted to put the world back to rights by proving once and for all that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—the source of all that was wrong with the twentieth century—was mathematically incorrect. He was going to do this despite his lack of academic credentials in the field—hadn’t Newton or somebody been without them as well? The pampered son of old-money parents, Cranston may have been certifiable. He was, for sure, bipolar, though he was charming and reasonable enough, when not on his Heisenberg hobbyhorse, and probably had, as he casually informed me, a liberal arts degree from Princeton. He had the tweedy good looks of the Ivy League, to which I had already proved receptive. What’s more, he was a man who didn’t mind a late lunch with a fellow who didn’t mind a late lunch either. When Murray called to say he had been detained on a story and would have to cancel, Cranston asked me to eat with him instead. I went and was sufficiently entertained to accept another date.

The following Sunday he took me to brunch at his brother’s loft in SoHo. Three documentary-film makers, the Maysles brothers and Donn Pennebaker, and the Village habitué barkeep Bradley Cunningham were there. Along with one or two other men, and various wives and girlfriends, we sat around knocking back Bloody Marys. Strong ones. The Bloody Marys kept coming. The brunch didn’t. My Heisenberg beau soon became too drunk to stand and sank deep into the arms of a wing chair.

One of the other men present was Friedrich Steffan-Freude— a.k.a. Fritz. (His name and those of his family and friends have been changed.) He was a struggling playwright and a master cabinetmaker who, when we met, was building Pioneer Forts (“Perfect for Young Dan’l Boones”) at FAO Schwarz. Six feet tall, blond, and handsome, he looked like a cross between the German played by Hardy Kruger in A Bridge Too Far and the one played by Marlon Brando in The Young Lions. He had the advantage over the movie Germans of being anti-Nazi. Of course I didn’t know that then, or anything about him, except the part about his looks. I just thought that as he leaned on one elbow against the room divider that served as a bar, Fritz, in white shirtsleeves and chinos, exuded a raffish European charm. When, at two o’clock, I despaired of ever seeing eggs Benedict, I went over to Cranston and said, “I want to go home.” Cranston could not be roused from his snoring collapse. I never saw him again, and as far as I know, Bill Murray never did either.

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