Family of One Remembers an Interesting Encounter

As I lounged on the couch in front of a lovely fire at my beloved Hotel Sainte-Beuve in Paris recently listening to my iPod, a song came on from the early 80s (Hall and Oates’ “Private Eyes”) that took me back to when I briefly lived in Austin, TX and, from there, a memory that I had not thought about in a long time came rushing back and has stayed with me ever since. Interesting how that happens, isn’t it?

Before I moved to Austin, I took one last trip to NYC from my current home in Richmond, VA and was looking forward to seeing Rex Harrison in a production of My Fair Lady with a dear friend who was working on her doctorate in English at Princeton. We agreed to meet for dinner at one of those French bistros that, at the time, lined W. 45th and W. 46th Street in the theater district.

For this auspicious occasion, I was wearing a dress which I had seen pictured on the front of the Fall Lord and Taylor catalog, then considered the very best in working woman fashion. It was a navy paisley pseudo-polyester with matching belt, white Peter Pan collar, and floppy red bow tie. It cost $125 which would be like $800 today. I had seen Nina Courtlandt wear a very similar dress on All My Children and I felt that it was the height of sophistication. To accompany this dress, I had a similarly priced pair of navy leather pumps that were not quite Ferragamos, but the next thing to them.

As I waited for my friend, I stood outside perusing the menu and a middle-aged fellow walked up to join me, standing just a little too close. I glanced at him in annoyance, but he did not appear to notice. He was probably in his late 40’s, salt and pepper unruly hair and beard, dressed in the style of the artiste of the day which was a beige linen shirt, white painter’s pants, and some kind of sandals. I seem to recall some kind of backpack or bag carelessly slung over his shoulder.

This was not the kind of man to whom I would have given a second glance as I preferred the clean-cut, preppy look. In thinking about this now, it is clear that he resembled nothing less than a grayer version of the character that Alan Bates played in An Unmarried Woman, a movie that had had a seminal effect on my life choices, but I wasn’t paying very close attention. Perhaps the thought of an evening with Rex Harrison was dancing in my brain.

At any rate, we struck up a conversation about the menu and one thing led to another and, before I could say coq au vin, he had asked me if I would like to go into the restaurant and have dinner with him. I was slightly horrified. What would a young, Nina Courtlandt wanna-be do with such an invitation? This fellow had told me that he was an actor and a writer (as if who, dressed like him, wasn’t?). I could see my friend coming down the street, so I told him that I would not be able to have dinner with him. He then invited me to see the apartment he was renovating on the corner of 45th Street and Ninth Avenue, a neighborhood with which I was not all that familiar. He scrawled his name—Keith A. Walker—and his phone number on a piece of paper and asked me to call him the next afternoon.

He loped off down the street and, before I could tell my friend about this encounter, she took a nasty spill in a puddle of water in the restaurant and did great damage to her skirt, the fact of which consumed us for our evening as she dealt with getting the restaurant to pay for a new skirt, etc.

After My Fair Lady, I headed back to Minetta Lane where I was staying with college friends with whom I regaled the tale of the actor/writer and they all agreed that he was setting me up for, if not robbery, then a possible gang rape, since he had told me not to be worried about coming to his apartment because there would be plenty of workmen around and we would not be alone. “He lives in HELL’S KITCHEN,” they kept stressing in particularly ominous tones. It occurs to me now that they must have been trained at the Mother School of Scary Situation, but, nonetheless, I ignored their entreaties which were made all the more interesting as they never met a recreational drug that they didn’t like and were constantly having unsavory affairs with stockbrokers, lawyers, etc.

I met Keith A. Walker at his apartment on Saturday afternoon. Because I wanted to come across as fierce and independent, I wore (also from Lord and Taylor) a raspberry faux-polyester of a particularly pillable fabric with matching belt and shoulder pads. I complemented this look with a pair of faux leather beige pumps with what we now call peektoe, but then we called professional.

Keith took me on a tour of the duplex that he was renovating and introduced me to the lone Hispanic worker who was grouting the kitchen floor. The only time that he touched was me when he gave me a gentlemanly hand to help me up and down the various steps and over the carpentry tools spread all around. He suggested that we go to get a cappuccino. I was beside myself with excitement. At that time, cappuccino was not widely available in instant powder formats, let along being served at McDonald’s. I doubt that I had ever had a cappuccino. To sit on a Saturday afternoon with what was quickly becoming an interesting companion was the height of sophistication.

Keith told me that he was an erstwhile actor (having appeared in such shows as Mannix, Quincy, and The Rookies), but that his true love was writing and that his dream was to write a movie that would make enough money for him to live on farm in Tennessee, using land that he had bought. He was married to an actress who found a role as the maid on Dynasty, but, at the time, was an actress in Los Angeles. He made vague allusions to some sort of open marriage which I chose to ignore.

Talking with him was engaging and provocative in a way that I had rarely experienced and, in fact, was slightly intimidating. I felt sad that I was getting ready to go to Austin and that I would not be able to continue this whatever it was.

We still had some time to kill before I had to leave for the airport, so we strolled back to his brownstone and sat on his stoop on a lovely September afternoon. In the middle of discussing our favorite movies and books, he suddenly said, “there is something I want to say to you that I don’t think you will ever hear from anyone else. You have so many gifts that you are not using and you are completely wasting your time in college textbook publishing. Please don’t let yourself languish there when you could be doing something that could really have a huge impact”. I disagreed with him. I told him that I realized I wasn’t on my way to being Maxwell Perkins, but I had come from a mean little town and gotten myself into a business that was interesting and fun and where I knew I could flourish. He nodded resignedly. I told him that I would keep his advice in mind.

After I got to Austin, we became great correspondents although, interestingly, we never talked on the phone. He asked me to come back to NYC to see him but I told him that I needed to focus on getting to know my new territory. He also made me an offer that no one else has ever made—to go to Paris—but, as put it, either for a long weekend or for six months which, he said, was the only way to do it. I asked for a rain check.

I only stayed in Austin a short while, but, by the time I was back to my regular visits to NYC, I was seeing a couple of other men who were not as intimidating (even though they were also twenty-plus years older like Keith) and so our correspondence drifted away.

Years later, I had just moved back to Boston from NYC where I had lived for two years when I read his obituary in Entertainment Weekly. He had written the screenplays for the Free Willy series of movies and had, indeed, been able to move to Tennessee and live on his beloved farm. He was only 61. I was so sad that our paths would never cross again because I had always thought that somehow we would be back in touch.

Around this time, my beloved friend B was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. After our initial shock had worn off and we realized that we needed to spend our time together talking about what was ahead for her, I told her about Keith A. Walker and asked her to look him up. Her fact lit up. She said, “he sounds so wonderful and I love the fact that he established such a strong connection with you so quickly”.

Perhaps they are having a cappuccino right now.

As for me, I am very grateful that I went to Hell’s Kitchen on a sunny September day and only wish that I could have had the courage to take a long weekend in Paris.