The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  But she could love. And she could work. There was nothing to stop her from either of those. She tipped her chin at the light, her heels clicking through the sun.

  Men seldom make passes at a girl who surpasses, the song went, but Joan didn’t worry about that. She had learned how to type at boarding school, how to make hollandaise, and how to pack a linen skirt so it didn’t wrinkle. Two of these had been useful, but the third had been the ticket to the party. Fast and efficient, Joan could type like no one else, the words streaming through her like music. When Isobel Day had heard a little publishing house was looking for someone, Joan had gone in for the job, and now here she was at the center of a firestorm, typing for Barney Rosset, the man who had defied the U.S. Postal Service and the Comstock Laws and brought the uncut version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to press, and then to market, where all copies were promptly seized. The fate of the novel rested now in the hands of a United States District Court judge, and the ruling was due to come down next month.

  She had told no one where she actually worked. All eyes were on Evelyn and her September wedding under the wide white tent in Oyster Bay. And that suited Joan fine, because D. H. Lawrence was just the beginning for Rosset. He had his sights on Henry Miller, on William S. Burroughs, on all the sham boundaries the world had put up, as he said, and that he was determined to rip down. What was obscene about a man and woman coupling? What was dirty about the longing to touch another human being? This was the talk in the tiny crowded office where four men sat, manuscripts stacked on every flat surface, magazines on the floor, desks askew, and smoked and picked up phones and slammed them down and drove their days with an urgency, a power, like nothing she’d ever seen.

  She stopped at the corner. Though she had blushed up there in the park just now with Fenno, it wasn’t a game. When he’d hired her, Mr. Rosset told her he thought perhaps she might be useful somehow—a young woman of impeccable pedigree, he’d said, a Mayflower girl, an original Pilgrim. The backbone of the kingdom. We might stage a reading, he said. If we can get you to say the words, and show that they are made obscene simply by our hypocrisy, that could make it into the papers—of course we’d get a few marquee names to do it too. She had nodded and slid behind the desk he pointed her to, put her pocketbook at her feet, and pulled the typewriter toward her, keeping to herself the fact that she was neither an original Pilgrim nor a particularly good public speaker. But never mind, she thought. Never mind all that—she was here on this boat, this boat with its four argumentative crewmen, riding the surge straight through the sluice gates.

  “I’m rereading,” she’d said, looking up at Mr. Rosset this morning. He had picked up her copy off the desk, opening it to where she’d left her bookmark, and nodding at the spot—closed it again.

  “Is it arousing?”

  She eyed her boss. He sat down on the edge of her desk and crossed his arms. “Arousing” was the charge against them in court.

  “That’s a dare,” she responded.

  “Yes.”

  “No takers,” she said.

  Grinning, he opened the book again to the first page and read the sentence aloud to the office. “‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.’” Then he flipped the book shut.

  “What’s the key word there?”

  “Tragic,” she answered without hesitation.

  He studied her.

  “Nope,” he said. “Refuse.”

  * * *

  AT PENNSYLVANIA STATION, she pulled open the great brass doors and stopped at the top of the marble stairs, surveying the cavern below. The day’s heat that hung above the pavement and in the doorways outside, wilting the lilac boughs in the florist buckets, the newspapers folded upon the stands, drawing close in here, wilting the men still streaming out of the railway cars, their sweatbands dark upon the hats they couldn’t cast off until they reached the cool of a bar, or a spot on a park bench under suburban elms at the end of the long day. Voices rose in drifts to where she stood, and though it was the end of the workday, the people below her still rushed around, bent on some purpose, and only the air and heat and marble acre of the station stood between them and what they were bound to do.

  IF I HAVE ONLY ONE LIFE—the girl in the Clairol advertisement winked at her from the wall across the station—LET ME LIVE IT AS A BLONDE.

  Joan winked back, her dark hair waving around the pale flower of her face. She crossed her arms and leaned her hip against the balustrade, idly following the figure of a man in a seersucker suit cutting a straight path through a crowd clustered around the information booth. He walked easily forward, going somewhere. A burst of laughter from the crowd he passed through fluttered up to her there under the vast dome of the station, and Joan had the sudden uncanny image of herself as one of the overlooking angels painted into the corners of cathedral ceilings. She uncrossed her arms and leaned forward.

  Slim, with the sculpted shoulders of a good athlete, she could pitch a softball and bat like hell. She was an excellent archer, Oyster Bay’s winning shot. And though she was not immediately pretty—that was, everyone agreed, her sister’s terrain—it was moments like this when she drew the eye.

  The man in the seersucker suit was standing completely still in front of the newsstand. She considered him. The seersucker, the short crop of dark hair, the calm suggested an Ivy man, groomed but not impeccable. A large man, she noted as he moved again into the crowd, who wore his height easily, joyfully, almost, it seemed to her—as though he relished taking all that room.

  “Very nice.” Evelyn pinched her arm. “But he’s not your stew.”

  “Hello.” Joan turned around and smiled at her sister.

  Though three years Joan’s junior, Evelyn generally sought the upper hand, and Joan generally gave it. The sisters shared the same high cheekbones and small round chin, the same dark eyes under soft brown bangs, but Evelyn’s features were sharper, more defined, as though the master’s hand had understood its lines and drawn them firmly in.

  Now the two of them turned twin sets of dark brown eyes, appraising the man below, like cats perched atop a dresser.

  “He doesn’t look like he can carry a racquet or a tune.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to,” Joan replied.

  “Maybe so. How dull,” Evelyn said. “Did you get to ask Fenno today?”

  “Ask him what?” Joan’s smile faded.

  “If he’ll play his ukulele at my party in August?”

  “Damn,” Joan said, and shook her head, “I completely forgot. But he’s up there every summer. I’m sure he will.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man put the paper down and turn around.

  Evelyn snorted.

  “No.” Joan turned toward her, irritated. “Don’t get any ideas. I hardly saw him to speak to. I sat on my own and listened to Mr. Ginsberg read his poem. Fenno was far in the front, organizing the whole thing. Anyway, I don’t like him that way, Evelyn, and you know it. I wish he’d get the picture.”

  Evelyn raised her eyebrows. “You’re going to have to do more than wish.”

  Joan groaned and looked back down without thinking; the man below was now staring up at the sisters perched against the marble balcony.

  And Joan, who was accustomed to the shift in attention as natural as rain crossing the faces of those who stood when she and her sister entered a room, who took her hand and nodded, who looked at her and then slid their attention to Evelyn, saw—with a little jolt—that this man was not looking at her sister; he was looking at her. He was staring. And for a moment, she couldn’t move.

  “Lord.” Evelyn nudged her. “Doesn’t he think he’s the nuts.”

  Paying no attention to her sister, Joan leaned a little forward in an elaborate and playful bow. She saw the surprise and then the smile, but his laughter vanished soundlessly into the stone air around him. He pulled his hat from his head and held it high. Not doffing it, or bowing, simply holding it up like a balloon. Laughing too, Joan stepped ba
ck from the balcony’s edge, turning toward her sister, the fun of it all on her lips, about to say something about the man, about a man staring, about how nice seersucker suits are in the summer, when the seizure split her—as it did every time—straight down the middle, quick enough to knock her to the ground before she could cry out.

  The waves crashed into Joan and she pushed back, jerking against the tide of air that shook at her, trying to call to Evelyn, trying to pull her arms into her chest to beat off the tossing air. She felt her body hit the marble floor, heard it thump at the same time as the breath was knocked out of her, and saw all in one glimpse the fear on her sister’s face. It was black and white and gray all around, and silent. As though the sound had been switched off in the world but for the thick beat of blood in her head. She was drowning with her eyes open, and Evelyn remained on the surface above her, her mouth opening, calling. Something grabbed her mouth and yanked it open, put something cold between her lips. She shook in the waves, shook and shook and twisted helplessly, her eyes on Evelyn up above her, so far up there. Don’t fall in, Evelyn, Joan opened her mouth to say. Spots of light glittered high up, higher than Evelyn poking and winking at the black surface of the world, like shook foil, the phrase swam up and passed by. Joan shivered. The air tensed. Joan—

  And Evelyn reached through the air that was like water, and Joan heard her this time, the sound came first and her sister’s voice pulled her, like a rope, slowly back up, bit by bit. Joanie. Joan.

  The fit eased. Up she came, back to the surface of time, just before it shook her, back into the heat and the afternoon, and onto the floor of Penn Station, where she lay gasping, back in her own body, the waves pushed off, as though spat back onto dry land. She closed her eyes.

  “Get away,” Evelyn hissed above her at the little knot of the curious who had stopped to watch. “Please,” she was saying. “It’s all over. It’s none of your business. Leave us alone.”

  “Do you need an ambulance?” a man asked.

  Joan’s breathing slowed. She could feel again the floor, separate from herself, her toes in her shoes, her fingers curled in the fabric of her skirt.

  “Is she all right?” the same man asked.

  “She’s fine now.”

  “That’s not the first time,” he said quietly. “Is it?”

  “It’s the heat, that’s all.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Evelyn snapped. “Please—”

  Joan opened her eyes on the man in the seersucker suit and her sister staring at each other across her chest.

  “Evelyn?”

  “I’m right here.” Her sister patted her arm. “Don’t worry, Joanie.”

  Joan closed her eyes again and waited for the swell of nausea to pass through her. The floor was warm, and then she realized with a start that it was because the man’s hand had covered hers, holding it calmly under the folds of her skirt. She opened her eyes.

  “Can you sit up?” he asked.

  Joan turned her head toward the voice and settled her gaze on his chin and then up farther into a pair of deep blue eyes. He waited for her attention to get to his face. She stared up at him, still disoriented. Up this close he was even more attractive, and his eyes had green shot through the blue. His hand remained on hers.

  “Are you a doctor?” Evelyn asked him.

  “Not a chance.” A smile cracked open his rather serious face. “Leonard Levy. Len.”

  Joan stirred, and he pulled away his hand.

  “Sit up, Joanie,” Evelyn pleaded. “The floor is filthy.”

  Joan pushed herself up to sitting. She couldn’t look at Len Levy. He was a man with a name now. And she was a girl with the shakes. A condition. She flushed.

  “Don’t breathe a word to Mum,” she said to her sister.

  “Agreed.” Evelyn nodded.

  “She doesn’t know?” Len asked.

  “She does.” Evelyn’s eyes rested on her sister thoughtfully before turning to the man and unfurling her famous smile to stop him asking any more. “But she doesn’t like scenes.”

  Joan curled her legs underneath her and pushed herself to standing, not taking his hand up. She felt confused and funny on her feet. And the three of them stood a minute, awkward and stuck like partygoers at the end of the party waiting for a cab. There was a brief silence, and then he raised his hat to the sisters just as Joan put her hand out to thank him. He looked at her, and he took it in his, and without thinking she stepped forward and gave him a quick darting kiss on the lips.

  She stepped back and risked a glance. “Thank you,” she said.

  He did not seem to know what to say. He dropped her hand and nodded.

  And then he was off back down the wide cold steps into the crowd grown dense and loud as it veered closer to rush hour.

  “What was that?” Evelyn asked.

  Joan watched him move through the vaulted room. “My thank-you.”

  “I’ll say.”

  He had kissed her back. Joan shivered and refastened the buttons on her cardigan down to the last three, not looking at Evelyn. And his lips had been warm. “Well, he is a Somebody, you can tell.”

  “By the suit?”

  “By his bearing.” Joan smiled up at her sister, teasing, “His noble and erect carriage.”

  “By way of Ellis Island, I’ll bet. An Italian, or a Jew.”

  “Agreed,” Joan said. “Nobility under the bushel.”

  “Definitely under a bushel.” Evelyn wrinkled her nose.

  “Don’t be a snob, Evelyn.” Joan cocked her eyebrow. “It’s unbecoming.”

  Their mother’s phrase made them both smile, easing them back into their regular life. But it raised Kitty between them.

  “Oughtn’t you go and see Dr. Southworth, Joanie?” Evelyn ventured.

  Joan shook her head firmly. “There’s no need.”

  “That was the second one in as many months.”

  “You shouldn’t worry.” Joan tipped her head at her sister. “I’m not.”

  But her sister was right, she ought to go to the doctor—if she was having the fits again, she ought to change her dose. Though it had happened only twice, and both times Evelyn had been there, and both times it had passed over her quickly. If it happened in Mr. Rosset’s office, or in her apartment alone, or crossing the street, she didn’t like to think about.

  Never mind. These were the cards she had been dealt. She’d manage. And without any more help. There were limits. More of the pill would only make her weak; it already made her feel woolly-headed and numb. She slid her pocketbook up to her elbow and looked at her sister.

  “All right?” Evelyn asked.

  “As rain.” Joan nodded and drew her hand through Evelyn’s bare arm.

  The Milton girls walked slowly down the stairs and into the crowd, toward the train for Oyster Bay. And Joan wondered, as they went, which direction Len Levy had taken, and wondered where he was going, and last of all, wondered if he pitied her. She tossed her dark head and squeezed Evelyn’s arm. She hoped to hell he didn’t pity her.

  * * *

  BUT PITY WAS the farthest thing from Len Levy’s mind just then, walking away from the sisters through the crowd. The surprise of the girl’s lips on his lingered, and when she’d stepped away, she’d looked as startled, as lovely, as any girl he’d ever seen. It got him, all right, the look she gave him, sweet and somehow—daring. He felt it in his groin. As though she had a secret for him and him alone. Accident, his father had always said, is not accidental.

  Len turned down the marble hallway heading for Seventh Avenue. Some girls did and some girls didn’t have any idea what they had. And that girl sure as hell didn’t. Her sister, however, knew exactly what she was about, and knew exactly how to let you know it. And typically, she hadn’t bothered to introduce herself after the thank-you. But then, their kind never did. She was one of these girls who tucked their white-gloved hands under the arms of men named Hunnicutt or Pierce and wandered th
rough life, gracious and polite, beaming as all get-out. As though all the world were a glorious party. As if that glory would never die. And though a Levy may be invited to the party—even if he behaved—his would never be an arm they slipped their hand beneath.

  So what. There it was.

  Raised outside Chicago, Len had been taught to see the limit as well the horizon of a Midwestern sky, and it served him in good stead. Now he pushed open the glass doors of the station into New York, which was the world.

  The midsection of the island recalled his heartland city, the broad and regular avenues lending a predictable pattern to the streets, dissected only by the diagonal, irregular slash of Broadway. For fifty blocks, you could rely on the park remaining to your right as you went south, the green tops waving in summer at the ends of blocks, the stark branches holding the white sky up above the gray buildings in winter. Then on past the park into the city’s grid, where still you could imagine yourself in charge, the world pivoting evenly on its bearings, twenty blocks to a mile, a light at the end of every block, the buildings climbing straight to the horizon over your head. You could walk this way for nearly one hundred blocks, and then it all ran to a happy hell in the Village.

  He had stepped off the train from Chicago ten years ago headed for Columbia University and wanting everything. And knowing that whatever that was, it was right here. All of it. He spent four years at the rough-and-tumble Ivy, where good old boys rubbed shoulders with the Jewish sons of Brooklyn and argued the world into shape. Argued and prowled through the streets of New York, in search of their fortunes. In search of their future. Impatient. Eager to get it all started.

  Graduating with honors in 1953, he had gone to Korea with some idea of honor, some idea of paying back the country that had taken in his mother and father, fleeing Germany. Instead, he stood in the humid KP lines waiting for meals and saw nothing there except the others like him, released for the duration from the forward engine of their lives, who—bored, tired, and fearful—saw nothing at all, until the morning his division was hit from nowhere and he had found himself in a pocket of air beneath the kitchen rubble, looking stupidly across the three feet at the guy he’d just passed the coffeepot to, dead.