Jeanne Marie Has Left You

Jeanne Marie in her city-lights style is dressed for the art-deco air of West 54th Street. The padded shoulders of her black-on-white gown echo to perfection all the glass buildings that accompany her. Careful – careful – but she is so simply indifferent to an entire sea of wandering Manhattanites as she breaks through their bustle with the strength of her majestic height and the black tiger stripes on her long Norma Kamali.

Those locks around her face are there as a private message for you. For you are the only person in Manhattan that day who knows they were only colored for your eyes. She makes the most of them at home with you, when she sings the title song of “Cabaret” and throws her head back at just the right moment to show her hair moving to its own life.

You know as you move toward Jeanne Marie that the entire atmosphere of the city is celebrating with you the first anniversary of your marriage with this woman who seems to turn any walk to a subway station into a scene from a classic movie.

You wonder as you move toward her why you are taking notes of so many details with a woman you have been married to for over a year. It was as if you were drawing her into a painting you have just entered at her side.

Then you start saying things that are so wrong you feel yourself helpless to stop the uncontrollable thing you are dumping into her perfect ears: “Kid, you’re better than anyone in Warhol’s factory on a good day.”

She pinches you on your houndstooth coat, so considerately only the houndstooth feels it. “What good is it to be better than a bunch of Picasso freaks?”

She keeps pinching you as you walk alongside her, until you are stepping into her cycle.

“You know that Ultra Violet is no Picasso freak.” you say, and by now you realize you have become a prisoner to your own incredibly stupid conversation that is coming from an alien pop-culture brain. Why talk about Ultra Violet with her – that now matronly French woman was with Andy Warhol so many years ago – when the god of youth has so clearly changed into your beautiful 24-year-old Jeanne Marie with locks that hang perfectly above eyes wide open to add to her drama-queen talk.

She is six-feet tall and at every place, she is tall and angular and as present as the Star of India, just as she is now bending all of that into a yellow taxi.

What Jeanne Marie hates
Jeanne Marie resents – you can just hear it in her voice – the fact that you only pay her teasing compliments. How much she would prefer a total compliment that has no dirt on it. You lose a little something with every piece of partial praise, but it started out seeming like minor losses. You did not at first understand how you minor losses build into something tragic.

In the taxi you look only at the paraphernalia of the streets, where a stream of pure Mid Manhattan women line up like fashion hieroglyphics. There is an insane problem of avoiding looking at Jeanne Marie, as if paying even a minimum of homage to her would subtract you.

But when Jeanne Marie is moving out of the taxi at Steve Rubell’s VIP door in Studio 54, you take the opportunity to linger on her carved bare leg, until her next leg pulls out, and you feel you have seen more of your life in New York in those twin legs than you have looked at in anything on the street.

Paparazzi on West 54th Street are stationed to lift a garden of flashing lights. They are coming right at your wife, kneeling, shooting at her like a gang of bandits. “What’s her name?” says a familiar face and Cambridge accent. “She with you, old man?”

“Jean Marie Platzer. She’s my wife.” In a couple of seconds you have gone through a cognitive file to find “John Dukas” and “The New York Times.”

“I’m married like hell now,” says John Dukas. He used to work with you in the fashion-trade press but since his Cambridge and Harvard quality helped bring him to the Times he has become a minor celebrity in his own party scenery. “The poor girl is sick. Been sick a long time.”

“Sounds like it could be morning sickness, maybe.”

“No. We’ve checked her out. The Times has marvelous health coverage but there’s no explanation for her being this sick.” It sounds so odd, because John Dukas has hardly traded ten words with you before but now he’s going on about his new wife’s sickness as if it were a world news event. “She’s always dehydrating now, because of night sweats around the clock.”

“I’m sorry,” you say, in a deep tone to stop him from continuing his description.

A new blonde and fresh face has entered the scene to change everything. It is heiress photographer Berry Berenson, holding a heavy and more serious camera than that carried by the Paparazzi. “Say mon-ey,” mouthed Berry Berenson. “Or just be mad as bees.”

Jeanne Marie’s freelance photographer
“Money, honey,” says Jeanne Marie, spreading her arms and turning out her hands. Berry Berenson takes her portrait slowly in her manner of helping turn New York from a city of old-money names like Astor into a party of spontaneous lively faces of the like of Jeanne Marie.

“She just wants to sleep,” John Dukas says, still talking about his absent wife, even to the people guarding the guest list at the reception table. Tonight the two charmed sentries are Steve Seifert, whose agency mostly puffs esoteric films from abroad and Warren Knowlton, a young gypsy who has traveled over three theatrical publicist offices in the past few years.

Steve Seifert is always smiling while Warren Knowlton is freezing a look that is between sad and intense.

“You’re looking so good, John,” says Steve Seifert.

John Dukas brightened and touched something near his hairline. “Thank you, Steve.”

Jeanne Marie has already moved into the party, ignoring as she always does the guest list. At each event these days, her own good looks are her invitation. Meanwhile you are still leaning over Steve Seifert’s list of names, which since it isn’t alphabetical requires a genuflecting manner before a not-so-beautiful person can be admitted to this party.

“There you are, Erik Platzer, almost at the bottom.”

“Maybe, Steve, you think more about tops.”

“You’re good. That’s good.”

Inside the party, there is much more stuff. Right between the steep bleacher seats and the dance floor reigns a kidney-shaped bar brought in complete with a stiff rented bartender with a Wyatt Earp mustache and so shirt at all. You take a glass of water, not because you’re thirsty, but because you need a glass of something in your hand as a social microphone so people will hear your questions.

The crowd is trying to be even more eclectic than how they came in. The theatrical contingent is represented by Charles Ludlum of the Theatre of the Ridiculous and another very popular actor in young Peter Evans from the Yale Drama School and director Michael Bennett of “A Chorus Line.”

Then the great Tarter dancer Rudolf Nureyev statuesquely moves between perennial moving bodies as he carefully stacks hors d’ouevres on his friend Monique Van Doren’s plate while simultaneously describing something to Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell.
 Designers Perry Ellis and and Willi Smith hold further back in their uptown clothes, Ellis practically drowning in a big black tie and Smith parading baggy Williwear.

“Mr. Platzer,” says the novelist Jerzy Kosinski, pulling his Polish accent by the throat to get it closer to your ear. “You, you.”

“Yes, Mr. Kosinski. How are you tonight?”

“After polo all day, I made it here. But you. You wrote such an amazing piece about me last month.”

“Thank you.”

“I love life as you know, even if things aren’t rosy.”

“That’s true,” you say, just to get rid of him. He is still wearing his white breeches and patent-leather boots from polo. For some reason, you just cannot believe his claim that the Holocaust took away his voice for years. You would believe him much more liberally if he simply said he’d had no desire to talk during his silence.

Jeanne Marie worked the crowd
At this point, you are letting your eyes stay around the museum to find Jeanne Marie.

“Tell John,” Kosinski says, as if he were mainly intent on giving evidence of his friendship with your publisher, “tell John what I told you.”

“I’ll tell him,” you say, swinging around and then behind this painted bird to look in the most obvious feeding or watering places for your tall wife.

But Jeanne Marie was not at the hors d’oeuvres table.

Neither was she at the fold-out bar.

You hate to go back to the reception table, but that’s what you have to do.

“Steve, did you see Jeanne Marie?”

“Jeanne Marie left.”

“How’d she do that?”

“She left with some people.”

“What people?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you say that? That’s the purpose you won the bid to sit here all night, to know who the people are.”

“The truth is, I don’t know half of these people. But they all looked okay to me.”

“But you know they were chosen people.”

 “Yes, they had all the characteristics of the chosen people tonight.”

“How many were there that left?”

“A lot of people left.”

“So what did Jeanne Marie say when she left. Did she say anything?”

“She said she needed air.”

“Seriously.”

You step out into the streets of madhouse Manhattan, with all of its honking and blowing, the celebrity bouncer jabbing his forefinger at a line auditioning to be admitted, but you see no one you recognize.

“Jeanne Marie,” you shout.

The range of your shouting changes nothing.

“Jeanne Marie,” you yell, even louder, until you wake yourself up, over twenty years later, in the studio apartment you live with a cat in the Chatsworth section of Los Angeles.

She said she needed some air

The cat didn’t move a little bit. She just continued to look at him from the safe haven of her towel. Now that Erik Platzer was 58, he had been taking lessons from his cat on the basic economy of movement, which on days when he wasn’t called to work involved switching to and fro his bed and his TV.

The daylight told him how late it was, how futile it was to expect a $90 assignment to substitute teach that day. In the meantime, his cat was making eyes at him to signal that if he really wanted to be a smart cat like her, he would go back to sleep.

He owned a telephone, but because he was on a late billing probation, he couldn’t call anyone in a different area code.

“So stupid,” he said.

Since taking life-style lessons from his cat, he was beginning to feel real anger about leaving the house when he wasn’t working. When he stood, the cat jumped down and rubbed against his shin to remind him she wouldn’t leave the house in even in her most desperate moods.

“I’m coming back, of course. Then Uncle Erik will feed you and you can teach me to be a happy cat.”

He threw back on the clothes she took off the night before, in no mood to impress anyone. His car with its gurgling battery turned over slowly before it finally fired into a Hyunda that lurched forward. It made no difference to him what anyone saw in any of his. He had completed a New York marriage with Jeanne Marie and then after a short hiatus he did the same with a Southern Californian marriage. After about twenty years of all this domesticity he figured what he had left was just about enough for his cat.

As he drove to a pay phone he reminded himself of an exercise he took to feel some gain about his second life in California after leaving New York on his 40th birthday. On some nights he listed on lined paper all the people he’d known when he was a young society reporter in New York who had died, either by suicide or AIDS.

On the top of his list was the suicide of the polo-playing novelist Jerzy Kosinski, who survived the Holocaust in Europe but The City. Then he had read in People Magazine of the AIDS deaths of John Dukas and his wife. Then the AIDS deaths of Peter Evans and Charles Ludlum and Michael Bennett and Rudolf Nureyev.

Anthony Perkins died of AIDS before his wife Berry Berenson said something that appeared in the papers about her and her two young children: “What can we do now?” Within a decade she died on a plane that destroyed a World Trade Center Tower.

Platzer had to drive about a mile before stopping at the pay phone mounted at the independent grocer up the street. The phone number in the glove department proved to be as available as the deep avuncular voice on the other end of the line.

“Is this her former husband?” said the avuncular voice, after Platzer had given his name to Jeanne Marie’s true and lasting husband.

“I was married to Jeanne Marie many years back in New York City. It’s been about a year since I last talked with her.”

In fact, Platzer had looked up her phone number by buying a membership in her high-school alumni class over the Internet.

“So what did she say to you?”

“That she was happy at last,” Platzer said. He was breathing so hard he decided not to say more than one word at a time.

“Jeanne Marie passed away just this morning.”

 What Platzer could do was only breathe.

“You know she was sick, right?” said the man who had taken care of her in her last days.

“Yes.”

“She died just an hour ago. Not even that.”

“Thank you,” Platzer said.

“Excuse me?”

“Thank you for being with her.”

The next thing he said came a few seconds later.

“For taking care of her and making her happy.”

“Okay.”

“I loved her, too,” Platzer said, his voice rising. “We lived in New York together. Did she say anything about that?

“Yes.”

“Did she say she needed air? It was an idiom she liked to use.”

“Please. Please, sir.”

When the line went dead Platzer got back into his car, which started a little easier now that it had already been exercised. In the car, he asked himself the question he had just asked Jeanne-Marie’s gravel-voiced husband.

“Did she say she needed air?”

When he got back to his apartment he sat carefully and after the room stopped spinning he told his cat that Jeanne Marie had left them.