The Trap of Love

By John Gaffney

The Trap of Love is a three-part memoir in which the author recounts his days in the 1970s in New York City, at Columbia University Film School, in pursuit of the perfect marriage of art and love in order to construct a creative life. The search turns into both an impossible dream and nightmare involving three unforgettable women who, in recollection, are muses of a modern-day divine comedy that does for the Big Apple of forty years ago what A Confederacy of Dunces did for the city of New Orleans circa the same period. Movies, art, literature, music, and most of all, devotion to finding the ideal mate to inspire the best one has in one are what is featured in this colorful, uproarious volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781645842330

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The Trap of Love

Jace

Copyright © 2019 Jace

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-64584-232-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64584-233-0 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

To John Friedman and my cousin Chuck

1

Risqué Business

To Hilarie (Purgatorio)

1 Outkicking My Coverage

During this time, my best buds at the Columbia University Film Division were an Iranian, Nader Ordoubadi, and his beautiful, partially deaf girlfriend from Chicago, Randi Hoffman. They were more than just my friends; they looked after me, put me up when I didn’t have a place of my own, and they were, regularly, on the lookout for girls to fix me up with. But they had nothing to do with the next girl up who was the one who changed my life.

My first encounter with Hilarie, which began with an impulsive pickup line in the Film Division’s one big screening room, lasted one whole weekend. When Monday finally came and Hilarie had to get up to go to work, I was like George Constanza in a wacky Seinfeld episode (more than a decade before Seinfeld was a gleam in either Seinfeld’s or Larry David’s eye). But make no mistake about it. I was bustin’, Jerry. I was bustin’.

I had to talk to somebody. I had to call them up. I felt like Clark Kent and George.

Is that you, Randi?

Jace, is that you?

Randi, you won’t believe what happened.

Yes. Nader and I had been wondering where you were.

I met this person. She’s the secretary of the school president.

Nader, it’s Jace. He’s met a girl.

It’s about time.

Well, Jace, that’s good news. Is she nice?

Randi, you don’t understand. This isn’t just a girl I’m talking about.

It isn’t?

This is… This is…

I felt a grain of concern enter into her voice, into that lovely affected way she had of speaking because of her hearing loss.

What, Jace, what is it?

Well, first of all, she’s hardly a girl. She’s a divorced woman.

You’re being awfully theatrical this early in the morning. Where did you meet her? How old is she? Wait a minute. Nader wants to know if she is pretty.

I can’t honestly tell you. You’re just going to have to meet her. The French have an expression. De trop.

What?

She’s beaucoup incroyable.

What did he say? I don’t know. I think he said, ‘She dropped.’

Dropped? Dropped from where?

When Nader did meet her for the first time, he was agog, but he wasn’t as energetically solicitous as he usually was around girls. This was an endearing trait, totally male and very charming, but in the past, it had already led to him getting seduced a couple of times, so Randi had her guard up. Ironically—and curiously—after the first couple of minutes in her company, she wasn’t overly concerned. It wasn’t because Hil was with me when we made the connection. It was something about Hilarie herself that was, that was, alien. I noticed it in the corridors at the film school when walking among the other kids. I noticed it when I met her much younger sister (in mentality, if not years), Melinda, who was a stunningly buxom brunette who didn’t look the least bit like her.

Once, pretty early in our first courtship go-round, I came to her apartment. Melinda and some friend of hers were there when I arrived. An area of the living room was in shambles. Every knickknack and glass geegaw belonging to the low-rising glass coffee table was smashed to smithereens. Melinda had a powerfully concerned look on her face. She and her friend (I can’t remember if the friend was boy or girl) were sweeping up the remains in a dispiriting, heavyhearted manner as if the powerful destruction on the floor represented a death. It was sad but in a scary, pathetic way that, momentarily, gave me the creeps.

What happened? I asked.

The queen had one of her fits, she quipped.

It hadn’t hit me until just now while writing this how much the pulverized remains on that floor symbolized the depths of bottled up frustration and torment that was within the soul of a twenty-eight-year-old woman who really didn’t have another person in the world (her therapist, notwithstanding) to let down her hair with. Apparently, the explosion was cocaine induced from the night before. I went into the bedroom to see what the story was. She was bent down on one knee. Her back was facing me but at enough of an angle that I could see a portion of her face. She was bent down, bracing herself with her left arm. I didn’t know if I imagined it or not, but I thought I spotted a tear in the corner of her right eye. It was a real-life tragic pose, frozen in time; the only one I had witnessed firsthand in my life.

Is Melinda still outside?

Yeah, she and—

Tell her it’s all right.

Only the author, Salter, had the talent and temperament to do the scene justice.

2 Comic Interlude: Three Days and Three Nights

So out of the blue, I had a hot trophy girlfriend (not exactly, but close enough for the time being) to start my second year at film school. I wasn’t oblivious to the speed of things in Manhattan in the ’70s (AIDS hand not entirely taken hold yet) nor was I dumb to the practice of one-night stands. However, running through my body was a one-night stand which had gone three days and three nights; and, for me, in my innocence, three days and three nights of uninterrupted happiness was more than three days and three nights—it was eternity. (And if by the chance of biological time-lapse photography it should happen again encore, it would still be eternity.)

But I had nobody to brag to about her (except Nader, who became—no fun at all—the Koran-reading scholar all of a sudden right after he had just met her). I did try to boast about her to a classmate, Paul Velasquez, whose father was a retired head waiter at the Café Carlisle, thinking that, by osmosis, he would know of the circles Hilarie once regularly traveled in. Yet for some reason, after presenting him with the bald facts of the case (his face was instinctively unbelieving), I lost my taste for recreating a lip-smacking description of this ecstatic weekend. But I had to sound off to somebody. It was ridiculous. It was decidedly immature—and obscenely ungallant—this uncontrollable need to kiss-and-tell out of school. Still, there it was (thirty-four years later) in all its degrading, despicable ignominy. Make no mistake about it, this was a report provided by an abject failure in the game of life, by a man of low moral fiber.

So I did a truly insane thing. I called up a former French teacher and guidance counselor at my old Jesuit Prep School, Anthony Ignatius McHale, SJ.

McHale smoked his Gauloises¹ with a holder and bore a striking resemblance to Benny Hill. He was the only character in my limited experience I thought was sophisticated enough to appreciate the auspiciousness of the moment. I called him up. I gave him a description of my paramour worthy of Madame de Sevigne. He was quick in his response. He told me in no uncertain terms that Hil was a whore and that I was cracked to be gushing about her to a Roman Catholic priest in good standing. I guess he had a point.

He said, The devil, too, works in strange and mysterious ways and for some reason that is clearly evil and, at the same time, beyond my immediate comprehension, he has made you the plaything of this tragically disturbed young woman. My sincere advice to you, young man, is to escape her clutches as fast as you can before it is to late—if it isn’t too late already. God did not put you on this earth to be a poule to a tart. If you had followed my advice when you were in my charge and had done as I told you, which was read to Colette, you would have become familiar with the tale of Chéri. Now, if you don’t turn back immediately, you are doomed to follow in the footsteps of this lamentable figure of fiction. My prayers are with you. Now, I must go. The brats are waiting, and I have classes to attend to.

I wasn’t exactly the most knowing young man on campus when all this was happening. Along with not knowing about Chéri, I also did not know anything about Stendhal or about his theory of crystallization, which if I had known anything about it at the time would have precluded the possibility of anything like it occurring.

The fact was I believed something was germinating inside me. I was pregnant with something even if Hilarie wasn’t or couldn’t be. Thus, ironically, I was emboldened, perversely by what Tony had to say. His words had exactly the opposite intended effect. Instead of discouraging me, I felt more certain that this was an experience I had to see through to the end.

3 She Came to Me in Sections

I connected crystallization in my mind to the familiar film noir theme, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The theory depends on the idea of two taps. Something automatic, like an electrical shock, happens between you and the woman. Then later on, when more consciously aware of one’s ardor, boom! A second epiphany occurs, and you, the lover, are marked for life.

Because there was so much suppressed (family) sludge to be blasted away for healthy sentiment to come out, it was inevitable that the taps (in my case) needed to be doubled. In fact, there was precedence for Hilarie (in my life) in the person of Marcia Yost—an aspiring actress who was also a big blond whom I knew from home. Secondly, I actually saw Hil twice on that first day. Earlier, she was seen by me walking down Broadway. For some mysterious reason, I made a vow to myself to look every girl straight in the eye walking toward me in the opposite direction. Most of them reacted squeamishly to this male provocation except for this pale, eerie-looking underwater Amazon in a plain, tight-fitting, turquoise-colored T-shirt and an even tighter-fitting pair of jeans.

In all our time spent together, this encounter was never acknowledged by either one of us.

And I knew, without knowing Stendhal specifically, that at least one more blockbuster with Hilarie was in the offing and that what McHale had said was not going to stop it from happening.

Reading over what I’ve written thus far, I know that two things in particular are impossible to believe. The first is that the apparent parallel to our connection and the one in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was not so transparent as not to be self-consciously inhibiting. The similarity did come up in conversation, but our references to it were lighthearted, and in some uncanny way, this freed us from slavish comparisons. She had a picture of Marilyn Monroe in the bedroom, and it prompted me to mention that she was Capote’s first choice to play Golightly. She said that at her house (which meant herself, her mother, and Melinda), the two names of Marilyn and Holly went together like soup and sandwich, much more than the name of Audrey Hepburn did. Hepburn was too genteel.

Hilarie didn’t look like Monroe, nor was she ingenuous in the manner of the Marilyn persona. But she had a similar roller-coaster personality. She could appear cold and stonily aloof one moment and surprisingly uproarious the next. Her timing was unique. Nobody was as funny in bed as Hilly Bags.

Anyway, I wanted to be, in my own mind, Henry Miller, not Truman Capote. I knew I’d never rack up the number of babes Miller did in his lifetime, yet I wanted a wild, transformative relationship like the one he had with June that would turn me into a writer. Of course, the fact that Melinda referred to me as her sister’s pretty baby made me sound more Tru than Henry. I didn’t know exactly why she called me that. I guess girls have a right to exaggerate to get a point across when attempting to communicate with their own about sexual matters. After all, we do it about them all the time.

The other thing impossible to believe is that being a bed partner to such a creature was an obligatory ritual. (She pretty much slept with all her beaus.) What I mean to convey was that for the lady dispensing her favors, it was an obligatory ritual, not for the gentleman on the receiving end of them.

I had no sensory memory of that first weekend which began with a pickup on a late Friday afternoon and ended with an early wake-up call for her to go to work on Monday. (I didn’t have a class that day until ten.) However, I did remember a time later on when Hilarie noticed that my heart was palpitating out of my chest when lying naked under the covers beside her. She was deeply touched and concerned and became like a mother hen bending over with her great mouth to kiss my breast so as to calm me down. In truth, it was the most physically intimate moment we ever shared, but I was too immature at the time not to be embarrassed by it. I moved away and parked my head on her wondrous runway-long belly so I could look up, like a frightened pup, at her small, perfectly shaped breasts.

Darling, either keep going south and recharge my batteries or come back up and keep me company.

She was funny that way. She made me laugh in bed. And I made her laugh out of it.

I can’t do her voice justice, and faced with the reality of this daunting task, I’m struck by the evil thought that, because of this failure, I will never ever really be able to discover my own. Her voice haunts my dreams more than her body does.

In personal powwow mode, it was quintessentially adult, older than its years, smoky, low-slung Betty Bacallish. It wasn’t like any other. It definitely wasn’t like her mother’s. (Nor was it anything like Melinda’s, who, for some reason, affected a gum-chewing Chicano patois.)

At a party (hers or somebody else’s), the voice was throatier, more laugh-laden, a little on the filthy side (if you want to know the truth), gleeful, having in it a wave of hearty anarchy rising above everybody else’s in the room.

She had the rare talent of being a perfect scold. Nobody could chastise a man the way Hilarie did. Men came from all corners of the earth and called up at all hours of the night to be chastised. She never chastised you about the things a girlfriend routinely made an issue about (and this made her, in their eyes, a dumb blond), nor did she make like a fishwife when she pulled you aside. She picked on faults that you were, in fact, privately proud of possessing and was flattered that she noticed. The moment she sensed your acknowledgment, she didn’t pursue it any further. She never belabored a sore point. On the other hand, she used cocaine to get through her own difficulties, and she did not take criticism well that was directed at her.

She was a feminist (I guess which female wasn’t?), but she never bothered to compete with men. She was a former Finch grad, and what she was good at—modeling and being a first-class secretary—she appeared to have mastered without work. How many terrific currently divorced secretaries and former professional models were there? I once quite seriously asked her.

I’m it. The last of the Mohicans.

Who was kidding whom? I might have had fantasies of The Rosy Crucifixion, but so far, the only proof of literary genius I provided her was the finals term paper I wrote for her for her course on the Western, an example of critical brilliance she was miffed by because it only garnered a B-plus. In the eyes of the world, I did look like I was exactly what Father McHale said, and some days, it didn’t go down well with me at all, and I wanted my own back. There was one day in particular. I wanted to get at least some degree of satisfaction out of my situation, and I did a wicked thing because I was still annoyed at Nader for being such a pious pooh since the evening when I first introduced her to him.

4 Amour Propre: Picture This

It was a Sunday in August, a little too early to know whether the bad heat had finally let up, and it was a little dicey to be calling her up this early on a weekend morning. I was calling her from a pay phone in my dormitory basement where there was a community coffee machine we all paid into. So I had my coffee. The thing was you really didn’t want to wake her up because you never knew what was going on. To be her lover (or one of her lovers), you had to accept the fact that you were bound to feel like Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes a good portion of the time: I see nothing I (want to) know nothing!

The plan was that Nader had some friends or relatives from home visiting him in New York, and I thought it might be fun to introduce this group of guys over to the place so that the young Iranian male could see, with his very own eyes, how a single (recently divorced) New York City woman made it in Manhattan.

Hilarie answered the phone. It was obvious that she was not up yet. I suddenly felt a death wish aspect to the whole idea because I knew that my agenda was no good and, consciously, not in good faith, and that if there were an Allah, I should be severely punished. I told her about it, and she was surprisingly agreeable. Most girls would have said, You might have given me a day’s notice. But we had a day off from one another on Saturday, and we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since Friday lunch.

Yet she just inquired in a kind of dopey, half-conscious way, How many are you talking about coming over?

And I answered, Three, not counting myself.

And then she said, Well, make it around three.

And then I responded, Great, I’ll come over and give you a hand. This woke her up sharply.

No, you don’t. The place is a mess and I know exactly how to prepare things and you are the most impractical man I know and you’ll just get in the way of what needs to be done. Is Nader one of the people coming?

Yes.

Good.

Click.

I was in a frenzy: Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three. Seven hours until I see her. I’ll call Nader around ten (Randi was visiting her folks). God, I’m already paying the price for this stupid practical joke! Why didn’t she want me over? Was she with somebody? Was she, presently, rousing him from his slumber? Would she be hustling him out the door at the same time I was calling Nader to remind him that the meet was on?

Believe me, I might have been innocent, but I wasn’t naive. I must have been the youngest of her admirers, but I knew who and what Hilarie was. About her peccadilloes, I was a sage, the wisest, most philosophical man in the world; but this personal gambit had turned on a dime against me and made me into something out of Cavalleria Rusticana. The thought of anybody else having her was, all of a sudden, driving me mad. I was absolutely beside myself. I had an hour to kill (by myself), and I couldn’t even spend it going to Mass. I hoped to hell that Nader remembered the date we had tentatively agreed on and that I could take advantage of his company until, finally, three o’clock rolled around.

And so they came over, and the first thing they spotted on the walls of the living room was the gallery of pictures of Hilarie in her modeling days, most of which were of her posing in the nude without having actually exposed herself (the most popular one was the defunct Oui cover of her fashioning a pair of strategically placed frisbees). The upshot was blushing, giggling, convulsions galore. Worse than my most idiotic, corrupt fantasies. However, Hilarie didn’t bat an eye. She was oblivious to the riot she had generated, remaining the perfect hostess, giving a brief history of each picture, and serving tea for everybody.

Needless to say, the episode didn’t reflect well on me although it did end with an ironic twist of sorts. She told them, as they were leaving, that her grandmother was the chief representative for the Hoover vacuum corporation in Persia, in the thirties, and she made such a powerful impression on the country’s topman that he presented her with a ruby necklace as a token of his highest appreciation. The gift had stayed in the family over these many years and was currently being held, for safe keeping, in a vault.

PS: My mother, who looked like a more petite version of Valli in The Third Man, was always a little bit interested in what was going on in my life romantically and a bit intimated by my big blond craze. (This was mystifying to me too because it was steamy dark-haired beauties who filled up my fantasies before Hilarie, not cool blonds.) When I’d arrived at Thirtieth Street Station to alert her that I was soon to be home, she’d respond by saying, Now, are you here, or are you there?

Later on, she discovered a snapshot of Hilarie wearing a red one-piece swimsuit in all her wide-screen, horizontal splendor. She asked me, How well do you know that rather attractive girl?

And I told her, without being rude about it, Well enough.

And then she followed upon that sally with Well then, tell me this. Where do her legs begin, and where do they end?

5 Down the Rabbit Hole

That what happened, happened was not surprising because my innocence during this period could not be underestimated. But was it innocence or a perverse wish fulfillment? I thought the agreement was that I’d come over, we’d order takeout, then go meet Nader and Randi for a late movie (I believe it was a Hungarian picture called Time Stood Still that Randi wanted to see). I arrived and it sounded like a fracas in the bedroom or, at the least, the act of somebody trying to corral a greased pig against its will,