Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  I’d only been to Rex’s pad once before and that was for another house-party and much of that night had been lost to my crummy alcoholic memory. But even if I’d forgotten what the brownstone looked like, we still would’ve been able to tell which one it was by the colored Christmas lights blinking like a hundred tiny Roman candles going off in every window and by the sound of Latin jazz drifting into the open street. The music was some sort of bossa nova business: the sound of a xylophone being busily worked over, a few sassy chords on the piano, some easy bongo drumming, and the steady shake of maracas throughout, all punctuated by the occasional angst-ridden blast of a trumpet or sax. It was frenetic and easy all at the same time.

  Once inside we looked for Rex so we could present him with the six bottles of scotch, which at that point had transformed into five and a quarter bottles of scotch.

  “Rex!” I shouted.

  The record player was turned up full blast and Rex was in the living room tinkering with it to see if he could make it go even louder. We shouted our hellos and Rusty was quick to jump in and take credit for having brought the booze. Later I came to find out that Rusty hadn’t even paid for the scotch at all but had swiped it instead from a delivery intended for his employer’s wet-bar. He was very proud when he told the story about swiping the scotch to me and Bobby because he bragged that the famous literary agent trusted him so much he didn’t even bat an eye when Rusty blamed it on the delivery boy, he just picked up the telephone and had the delivery boy fired right then and there. Rusty avoided mentioning this was the same six bottles he had “generously” brought to Rex’s party but the math was the same and once you got to know Rusty better it was hard to picture him paying for anything at all, let alone six bottles of very expensive scotch, and so it didn’t take a genius to figure it all out.

  “Make yourselves at home, fellas!”

  Rex always had a generous indifference about him and never went in much for who paid for what. The volume on the record player suddenly got louder and Rex smiled at us. We asked Rex a few more questions but he just went on smiling and shook his head as though he couldn’t hear what we were saying over all the music and commotion and finally just waved an arm in the direction of a table overflowing with bottles of every sort of liquor. We understood from the wave that we could deposit our bottles there if we liked or we could keep them to ourselves; it didn’t matter much to him what we did as long as we were having a swell time and enjoying all of Rex’s unearned pleasures.

  It wasn’t very long until we were surrounded by girls, most of whom made it pretty clear as they clambered over one another that all the fuss was for Bobby. A lean and wiry brunette with heavy black eye make-up gave out a hoot of recognition and threw her arms around Bobby to hug him hello, then simply remained hanging on his neck as though her body were some sort of soggy scarf that had been knotted there and forgotten. A second girl—a chubby bottle-blonde who was pretty in a way but had a piggish sort of nose—stood off to the side touching Bobby’s shoulder and trying in earnest to have a conversation as he nodded and smiled and tried to listen with one ear. But it was a shy toffee-skinned girl standing in a corner who ultimately caught Bobby’s eye and who I could tell Bobby would probably ball before the night was over. I glanced over at Rusty and could see his jaw clenching and I could tell already he’d fallen in love with Bobby’s beauty in a way that reduced him to feeling stingy and mean about things. He was watching the colored girl with a look of pure hate in his eyes and I could only guess about the kinds of ugly names he was probably calling her inside his head just then.

  The roof of Rex’s brownstone had a pretty decent view and later that night Rex and Rusty and I and also Bobby and his colored girl all ended up on it. The three of us stood there drinking and talking and flicking cigarette butts off the top while Bobby nuzzled and necked with his girl until he had her in a corner pressed up against the roof’s ledge. Bobby was always a man for steady progress and eventually he worked that colored girl’s skirt up enough to expose the majority of her toffee-colored buttocks and it wasn’t long afterwards that he began to press himself against her and the slow peal of a zipper sounded. We adjourned to the other side of the roof in order to give Bobby some privacy to do what he needed to do with the girl. I had tried to get the little plump blond girl up on the roof for myself but once I’d gotten her alone she kept talking on and on about the boy she was going steady with and so eventually I got bored and gave up and had decided smoking cigarettes on the roof with Rex and Rusty wasn’t such a bad idea after all. It was a nice night out, one of those unreal reprieves from winter when you find you hardly need your coat, and we smoked in silence and looked up into that vacuous space above New York where the stars are supposed to be. We tried to relax and there was a lot of sighing but it was difficult. It was clear from the sneer on Rusty’s face he was sore about Bobby and the colored girl, and his bitterness smoldered in a way that filled the air all around the three of us. Then finally someone spoke and it was Rusty and he was asking me what I did for a living.

  “Cliff here is going to be a writer. An important one,” Rex answered for me, and in his voice I heard the pride he had for his friend and immediately felt myself cringe with embarrassment.

  “That true?” Rusty asked.

  “That’s the idea, I guess,” I said, not catching on to how the bitterness in Rusty’s sneer had twisted into something else now and he had suddenly perked up with alertness, his eyes as clear and sharp as a hawk’s. He looked me over, studying me from head to toe with what I took to be a freshly interested appraising air. I had no clue why I suddenly interested him so much. He narrowed his eyes and smiled and when I looked at him again it struck me that the expression was the Machiavellian smile of a tiny tyrant. The moans of Bobby’s colored girl grew louder and floated over to us from the other side of the roof and we all did our best to ignore it. Then Rusty cleared his throat and looked me in the eye and told me in that deliberately slow, over-articulated way he had what it was he did for a living and who he worked for. He paused and waited for the information to blow me over sideways as he knew it would. I must’ve had a look of great hunger on my face after he told me this because the tiny tyrant’s smile stretched wider and his eyes narrowed in increased smugness and I became vaguely aware of the fact he knew he had me on the hook then.

  Rex rejoined the conversation and changed the topic and we all went on talking amiably as ever about baseball and about communism and about whether or not the two things could ever exist simultaneously together in a single culture and it was a good talk and all real groundbreaking stuff, but when I think really hard on the origin of things I realize that night on the roof was when all the trouble with Rusty truly started. He knew he had me on the hook, and I knew he had me on the hook, and the only person who didn’t know it was Rex because Rex didn’t care about who wrote what or published it and how. The only thing Rex cared about was would the Cubans ever really have a league as good as the Americans.

  4

  Once I found out about Rusty’s boss, I kept my eyes peeled for Rusty in the Village. Besides Rusty, there were a handful of young publishing types who ran around the hipster scene. You could tell them apart from the other Village kids because they wore turtlenecks and jackets and glasses and skewed more to the bookish side of things. They arrived in New York on Greyhounds from all over America with an air of great optimism about them, young single people willing to live in terrible apartments and work for peanuts so long as Manhattan dazzled them with her bright lights and taxi-horn siren song. Mostly the publishing folks were young men but there were tons of young women who worked in publishing, too, mostly as typists and secretaries. They came to the city after graduating from Vassar or Mount Holyoke or else some women’s college in the Midwest whose name you were bound to forget two minutes after it was mentioned. Generally, they tried to behave like the good girls they had been brought up to be and confined themselves to women’s h
otels uptown so you weren’t as likely to see them down in the Village as you were the fellas. Mostly these girls were waiting to meet their husbands. Once that happened they were destined to quit working and return to the suburbs from whence they came and throw bridge parties and tell one another stories about the madcap year they lived as single gals in the city.

  But there was one girl who Swish started bringing around on a regular basis and that was Eden. The way he had met Eden was he was cutting through Central Park and riding his bike very fast through a section where bikes aren’t really allowed and where Eden was sitting on a park bench reading a book and as he dodged between a schnauzer and an old lady Eden yelled after him to slow down. Like I said, Swish was always in a hurry, but he was never in too much of a hurry to enter into a great debate with a willing adversary over his “goddamn God-given rights,” as he liked to call them. Differences of opinion excited him and arguing was like making love for Swish: He did it with passion and vigor and really it was his way of loving you and loving all the differences. When Eden yelled at him, Swish circled back and the way Eden tells it Swish was already wearing an eager grin as he turned and pedaled furiously back to her. The way Swish tells it, his grin got bigger when he saw the book in her hands was The Secret Agent by Conrad because there were few things Swish loved more than a book with a plot that revolved around a bunch of anarchists. When he saw the book he knew right away to invite her to the Village to come hear Pal’s first poetry reading.

  I guess I didn’t think much of Eden when I first met her because even though Swish had twigged to her the way he did I took one look at her dark hair combed into a tidy ponytail and her sweater sets and figured she was only slumming it and as soon as some nice bond salesman proposed, that would be the last we saw of her.

  “Hey, Cliff!” Swish shouted to me that evening as I strolled into the San Remo. “Over here!” He was standing at the bar with Eden. The San Remo was one of Swish’s favorite watering holes, as it was always buzzing with lively debate and on any given day you could find someone willing to engage you about politics or art or philosophy. Swish made the introductions and I shook hands, finding Eden’s how-do-you-dos every bit as buttoned-up and boring as her sweater sets.

  Eden was very petite with elfin features. She had pale skin and large black eyes. Later, people would say she looked a little like Audrey Hepburn but that was only after she went and got her hair cut very short. When I bumped into her again later that year I saw right away Eden had reinvented herself with that haircut. She was all right to look at before, but afterwards she was really something because the thing about Eden that got everybody in the end was her style. She became one of those sharp-looking chicks with very dark hair and her bangs cropped in a very precise line high up on her forehead, running around the Village in boat-neck shirts and black Capri pants, shimmying to jazz with a mysteriously aloof, blasé look in her eye.

  But that’s not how she was on the day I first met her. On the day I met Eden she hadn’t transformed yet and her ponytail swung high atop her head and her Sears, Roebuck sweater hung lumpy and dull on her small frame and she looked like any other girl you might see walking the street in Des Moines or Wichita or what have you.

  “We were just talking about Sputnik,” Swish said, by way of inviting me into the conversation. Back in those days Sputnik was one of Swish’s favorite topics of conversation because Swish loved a good conspiracy theory and they had just announced in January that the satellite had burned up as it fell from orbit and reentered Earth’s atmosphere. The physicists said this was to be expected but Swish insisted this was proof it had never existed in the first place and the whole business was a hoax. I’d had an earful of these theories because Swish could always manage to bait someone into a debate on the topic: young and old, liberal and conservative. Space travel was getting to be the great leveler of our generation.

  “I mean, c’mon,” Swish said, making his argument to Eden now. “That Khrushchev is one mad cat! Mad enough that no one’ll call his bluff, but you can see it in his eyes. The whole thing was a big theater production.”

  “Do you really think so?” Eden asked. I could see from her expression she was less concerned with the question of Khrushchev’s sanity than she was with Swish’s. Swish often had that effect on people, especially girls, and it was really too bad because it was only a question of too much intensity and sincerity because beneath his wiry, paranoid-seeming exterior he was really a sharp and decent guy.

  “You bet I do!” Swish replied. “These governments, they have to control people somehow, brainwash them with patriotism and get them to comply, get them to pay their taxes and never ask where their money went when all they ever do is build more and more missiles. Right, Cliff? You agree, don’t you?”

  I’d been over this with him before and grown tired of the subject and I decided to say so. “I don’t know, Swish,” I said. “I don’t know about any missiles and maybe I should’ve lived during a different time because I can’t seem to get very excited about the Soviets one way or another. But Russian poets, on the other hand . . . now, that’s a conversation I’d be willing to weigh in on . . .”

  At this, Eden whirled about and her eyes lit up. “You like Russian poetry?”

  “Well, I like Pushkin, of course,” I said, naming the one poet everyone knew so as to not make her feel too dumb. “You?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “And Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova and Pasternak, too.”

  This caught me off guard. She was far smarter than I’d expected and I wondered if she hadn’t just said some kind of sentence in Rooskie.

  “Keep it down,” I said jokingly, “too much of that jazz and they’ll arrest us for communism.” I decided it was time for another subject change, so I asked, “What do you do in the city here again?”

  “Oh. I’m a secretary at Torchon and Lyle.”

  “Really? You don’t say.”

  Torchon & Lyle was one of the bigger publishing houses in midtown. The only one bigger was Bonwright, where My Old Man worked. I wasn’t all that surprised but I could see she wanted me to be impressed, so I played along.

  “Do you like it there?”

  “I love it,” she said, nodding so vigorously I thought her head might come unhinged from her neck. “It’s why I came to New York—my goal is to become an editor someday.”

  Eden was quick enough to catch the look of surprise that crossed my face.

  “You don’t think I would make a good editor?”

  “No, I do; you seem to me like a regular go-getter. That’s swell. I thought most girls were just waiting for a ring.”

  “Well, I am waiting for a ring,” Eden said. “On the telephone. From my boss. Telling me I’ve been promoted.”

  I took a closer look at her face.

  “What was your name again?” I asked.

  “Eden,” she said, putting out her hand. “Eden Katz.”

  “Well, then, I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for Eden Katz, future star of publishing,” I said. We smiled at each other. She really was quite attractive once you’d had a chance to get a second look at her. In any event, before I could get too far considering the possibilities, Swish cut back in, putting a hand on Eden’s shoulder to remind everybody who’d brought her around in the first place, irritated that we’d managed to steer the conversation away from Sputnik for so long.

  EDEN

  5

  When I first began my employment at Torchon & Lyle, I attended as many of the company’s parties as I could. If I am being honest I will tell you I was hoping to get a glimpse of all the famous literary people it publishes. Of course I was only hired on as a secretary but that didn’t much matter, because even the lowest-ranking secretary in the typing pool had a standing invitation to the parties. I remember thinking at the time that this was very generous of them but now I see it was less a matter of generosity and more a matter of practi
cality: Secretaries are good if you want to fill up a room with fresh-faced warm bodies and in a pinch a secretary can be asked to lend a hand if the caterer turns out to need an extra smiling waitress here or there to walk around with a tray of drinks. This happened to me on a few occasions and each time it did, it made me realize it was no small feat to cater a publishing party and an even bigger feat to keep the publishing types’ glasses full.

  Back in those days, publishing parties were great lavish affairs, with pigs-in-a-blanket and stuffed olives and lots of other fashionable little canapés, and of course an open bar with “enough gin and scotch to wash an elephant,” as Truman Capote might say. If you were a single girl who had to pinch pennies just to pay the rent on her room at the Barbizon it was a rather clever trick to skip dinner and fill up at the parties. Most of the parties happened on weeknights and if you played your cards right you could arrange it so you only had to buy a couple of cans of soup or beans for Saturdays and Sundays. It was a funny thing indeed to go from one night eating water biscuits heaped with miniature mountains of jewel-toned caviar and deviled eggs dusted with iron-red paprika to the next night eating nothing but canned beans on stale toast, but publishing is a funny business that way. If you worked in publishing you did it for the exciting books and authors and all the parties that went along with them; you didn’t do it for the groceries your paycheck bought and if you didn’t understand that much going into it, then you were a silly little fool. I should know. I was a silly little fool. I would go to the parties and if I wasn’t asked to help the caterer I’d get to floating dreamily around the room with a cocktail in my hand feeling like Dorothy Parker and eventually I’d get so carried away that by the end of the night I’d even pay the extravagant sixty-five cents it cost to take a taxi back to the Barbizon. Then the weekend would roll around and I’d wonder why I had so little money that I had to cancel my visit to the hairdresser and be very careful at the grocer’s. My poverty was a subject of great mystery to me and I rarely thought of it in connection with Torchon & Lyle.