Un amour de Staub

Chapter 11 of Our Lady of Brattle Street, copyright (c) 2026 by Richard Smoley

11

Un Amour de Staub

The conversation with Staub ended on a sour note, and he cut short his visit, staying only long enough to arrange shipping for the Masonic library. The two men had no more real conversations before he left.

Staub had not been in the best mood even before coming to Cambridge. He had always been in two minds about buying the estate and was far from sure he had made the right decision.

But that was not the main matter. In one respect, his bad mood had a precognitive quality. People of great sensitivity—and Staub was one of those—sometimes have a bad feeling, not because of something that has happened, but because of something that is about to happen or has already happened but they did not know about.

Although people often say, “I’m mad at myself” disingenuously, to mask the fact that they are actually irritated with the other person, in Staub’s case, this was true. It had to do with something that had happened two months before.

On an uneventful weekday evening, Staub and one of the clerks, Jasper, were closing up. Up to the point of meeting her, Staub had always considered Jasper to be a man’s name rather than a woman’s, but then this was California. Jasper was a slender, petite twenty-two-year old with frizzy hair with badly administered self-coloring that created an unsatisfactory compromise between blond and red. She dressed in the hippie manner as updated fifty years afterward: long skirts and décolleté tops that showed at least as much of her bosom as was decent. She had sought the job, and had been given it because of her intense interest in the occult. To a great extent, this consisted of crystals and herbology, but Staub, having introduced a small collection of crystals to his store a few months before and seen their sales burgeon to a point where he feared they could take over the whole place, did not consider this a drawback.

One day Jasper was at the counter when Staub came into the store. “Have you eaten today?” she asked earnestly.

“Yes, thanks, I have,” Staub replied.

“I greet people that way because it’s a way of showing care.”

“I see. May you never thirst.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Jasper was a waif. Her parents had her, she said, on the erroneous supposition that a baby would save the marriage. Her father, a carpenter in Contra Costa County, was a fundamentalist Christian. She saw him rarely. Her mother was a California free spirit, of a type that was becoming increasingly rare in increasingly expensive San Francisco. Some economic uncertainties lay in the background: Jasper had learned from her mother all the tricks of milking groceries from food banks, both secular and religious.

Jasper was an intense young woman. She always greeted Staub more enthusiastically than seemed normal. He was inclined to be suspicious of this, but he forgave her this quirk partly because he liked her, partly because it was pleasant to have an attractive young female around.

On this particular evening, nothing unusual had taken place; the shop had been sleepy since the afternoon. As Jasper was drawing the blinds and Staub was locking the door, he asked out of the blue, “Would you like to go for a drink?”

“Sure!”

They went to Staub’s local, Elixir (formerly Jack’s Elixir and before that Jack’s), at the corner of 16th and Guerrero. Staub had gone here for many years. He remembered a time when he had been there with his friends Ron and Leah Feiler. It was crowded. “House of the Rising Sun” came on the jukebox. Staub looked around and said to them, “Do you realize that we’re the only three people here who were alive when this was first a hit?” And that had to have been 1996 or 1997. (At that point, Jasper was still a soul waiting to take human incarnation.) These days the crowd was slightly older than that of the typical Mission bar; no doubt Staub and his peers were a factor.

It is unfortunate that Ron Feiler plays no great role in this narrative, because he was a man of some interest. He had come to San Francisco in the great wave of the sixties and found it congenial enough to be unable to imagine anything else. He was a short, dark-haired man, bald, with a thick beard. His wife was, like him, rotund, and about the same height: a wit might describe them as a pair of countercultural salt and pepper shakers.

Feiler was and is principally known for Birdbath, a magazine he founded in the mid-1980s. It focused plainly and simply on things that Feiler found interesting or amusing from almost any quarter. The magazine devoted space to such items as an interview with a Samoan who practiced the art of tattooing in a traditional and extremely painful way; the mystical visions of Philip K. Dick, then still unknown outside of science fiction circles; and issues devoted to “Future Sex,” “Pranks!” and “The Greatest Heretics of All Time.” The cover of the first issue displayed a Russian satirical print from 1881 called “The Cat of Kazan.”

Birdbath carried no subtitle—Feiler had chosen it only because he thought it the most ridiculous possible name for a magazine—so sometimes he received ads submitted from the lawn ornaments industry, which he published gleefully and for which he charged handsomely. Once or twice it even amused him to publish industry press releases.

Birdbath commanded a firm and durable reputation: years after its lifetime, people still remembered it and its editor. But such a magazine was unlikely to succeed commercially, and its circulation never exceeded 20,000. Nevertheless, it attracted a set of sophisticated aficionados through the country and even found an audience abroad.

The only reason for this success was Feiler himself as the editor. He chose what he liked, and his taste was brilliant (in an extremely unorthodox fashion). Indeed all great magazines are the creations of one great editor: Harold Ross for The New Yorker; Helen Gurley Brown for Cosmopolitan; T. George Harris for Psychology Today. For Playboy (in the days when men also read it for the articles), the genius was not its founder, Hugh Hefner, a man so capriciously obnoxious that in our time he could have been president of the United States. The genius behind Playboy was the executive editor, A.C. Spectorsky, and those who read the magazine during this period—the mid-sixties through the mid-seventies—feasted on his brilliance without realizing it. Once these editors left, the magazines subsided into mediocrity.

For Birdbath, the genius was Ron Feiler. Through considerable financial discipline (Staub said Feiler was the only man he knew who was stingier than he was), he managed to nurture the magazine along during the narrow window when a combination of desktop technology and numerous small distributors enabled periodicals like his to survive. In the case of Birdbath, this period extended from 1984 to 1999. After that, even Feiler’s financial dexterity could not sustain the publication, and he closed it down—managing, however, to pay all the debts owed.

For a year or two Feiler was plunged into a grief like that caused by the death of a child. After that, he immersed himself in computer graphic design—he felt a loyalty toward Apple that a devout Catholic has for the pope—and ended up making quite a decent living.

On the evening previously mentioned, Staub and Jasper were able to grab a high table for themselves at Jack’s. Staub ordered a Grimbergen (a heady Belgian dark beer that was a rarity on tap, which it was here) and Jasper said, “Make it two.”

Later Staub did not remember what they had talked about. The words of the conversation were becoming increasingly detached from what was going on. Staub felt a magnetic charge between them that was arousing him more and more. He had had this experience before. Staub had dated beautiful women with whom he felt not the slightest hint of this charge; he had also dated plain women with whom he did. In every case, the woman was feeling it too. The thought only crossed his mind later that this had been the start of his relationship with Ellen Scherini.

This energetic exchange was not unbreakable; Staub (and Jasper) could have ended it at any time simply by getting up and saying, “It’s time to go.” But neither of them did. In the back of his mind that was barely accessible to his consciousness, Staub decided that he was going to go ahead with this, everything else be damned.

When they were finished with their beers, Staub said, “Do you want to come to my place for a drink?” It was immediately clear to both of them what that meant. All the same, he was slightly surprised when she said, “Absolutely.”

They went back to Staub’s cottage, and he poured them glasses of whiskey. They sat down on the other ends of the couch and kept on with their conversation. Staub stretched his arm over the back of the couch and then set it down. Jasper took his hand and squeezed it.

They drank no more that night and slept very little. She preferred to be taken from behind.

The next morning, he woke up first and lay in the bed, looking at her. What was this? Who was she? Staub was not sure whether he regretted what he did. She lay on her side, facing him, her eyes still closed. Then they opened. She smiled impishly and said, “So how do you like my hot little kitten?” (This was her personal variation of a common slang term for the female pudenda.)

Staub squeezed her hand. “I like it just fine.”

He hugged her, and they made love again.

Nothing more was said about the matter on either side. Everything continued as it was. But Staub was displeased with himself. He felt that he had fallen somehow. Maybe it was even against the law: California was as promiscuous in passing laws as in everything else. Jasper was of age, but was there some prohibition against sleeping with employees? “I’m going to let this drop,” he resolved.

It appeared to be fine with Jasper. She only changed in that she greeted him less intensely but more warmly.

Yet he felt something was not quite right, and it cast a shade over his entire mood. This was his state of mind two months later, when he went to Cambridge.

A few days after he came back, a somber Jasper said to him, “I need to talk to you.”

Staub did not want even to guess what this might be about; he would take it as it came. “Maybe you should come to my house after work,” he said.

She nodded in a serious way that was unusual for her.

Jasper came over in the early evening. “Have you eaten?” he asked her.

“Yes. I had an apple.”

Staub went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses containing Austin Hope’s Troublemaker red blend. But she did not take any of the wine.

“So what’s going on with you?”

“A lot of things.”

Rather than asking, Staub let the conversation pause: something big was coming.

Finally, she bent over, grabbed her head with her hands, and began to sob.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“More animalium, ritu quadrupedum . . .” The tag from Lucretius ran senselessly through Staub’s mind: the great Roman poet had indicated that intercourse from the rear was believed to be optimal for conception.

Staub’s precognition had known this was coming; that was why he had been so irritable for the past couple of months, even though he did not realize it consciously.

“Is it mine?” he asked.

“Of course it is,” she said. “Do you want me to take a DNA test?”

“No. I trust you. What do you want to do?”

“What do you want to do?”

Staub sighed. “Well, it’s ultimately your decision. You could have it with or without me or you could get an abortion with or without me.”

“I’ve already had two abortions.”

“All right. Then what do you want?”

Jasper began to sob again. “I could get an abortion. I’m young. There’s plenty of time for me to have kids.”

“Is that what you want? If it is, I will pay for it. All of it. And I’ll go to the clinic with you.”

She sobbed some more, shaking her head. “Don’t you see? I’m in love with you.”

Staub had sensed that Jasper had a crush on him, but people have crushes all the time—Staub as much as anyone—and he did not think much of it. Even after that one liaison, the age difference—fifty-seven versus twenty-two—had put the thought of love out of his mind.

Staub shook his head. Then he said something that he had never planned to say: “I’m in love with you too.”

This time she sobbed again, but it was in his arms.

“John, I love so much! I’ve loved you right from the very start.”

“I had those feelings too, but I didn’t want to think about them. I couldn’t think of any outcome that wouldn’t end in unhappiness.”

“Can you think of one now?”

“Maybe.”

So it came to pass that despite an age gap of thirty-five years, Staub and Jasper were engaged.