Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  “Oh, you bet they are, ma’am,” I said with what I hoped sounded like sincere enthusiasm. Gushing was not a disposition that came naturally to me, but I pressed on. “I have to pinch myself half the night to keep from thinking I’ve dreamed the whole thing up!”

  “Hmm, yes. Isn’t that something. I heard from a colleague that you’ve managed to turn up at every single party he’s been to in the last week and a half. What a busy little bee you’ve been.”

  “I thought it would be a good way to get to know who’s-who—you know, in case it comes in handy down the road when I’ve been promoted to editor.”

  “That’s very ambitious of you. Of course, there’s more to this job than socializing, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “After all, you do want to be an editor and not a debutante, is that correct?”

  “More than anything, ma’am.”

  “More than anything?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Mmm. ‘More than anything’ sounds rather extreme. I’d be mindful, if I were you, of anything that implies you’d be willing to go to immoral lengths . . .”

  I nodded with all the vigorous sincerity I could muster. I was glad to have her on my side, despite her odd preoccupations with certain subjects. For instance, Miss Everett seemed particularly concerned with giving me advice about how to be “a proper lady” and about how to avoid wanton behavior. She told me about other girls she’d hired in the past, girls who’d disappointed her by finding themselves in the family way, and unwed to boot. Miss Everett said no matter how nice, one simply couldn’t keep a girl on staff once she’d gone and gotten herself in that sort of situation. I think she felt she was giving me a thoughtful warning—the kind of warning where, if I ever did find myself in the family way, Miss Everett could tell herself: Can’t say I wasn’t generous . . . After all, I warned that girl.

  The funny thing was, whenever Miss Everett launched into a lecture on the value of not giving in to a man’s demands, I always found myself staring at her carefully lipsticked mouth and imagining her at home, dressed in a chiffon peignoir, eating bon-bons and reading a Harlequin pocketbook. Picturing her like this, it was a challenge to take her seriously. There was an air of profound loneliness about Miss Everett, an impression that some sort of yearning had ripened on the branch and then was left to go rancid. I immediately chastised myself for these thoughts; after all, she was being generous with her time, and a willing mentor was certainly nothing to sneeze at. The very fact she—a woman executive—existed at Torchon & Lyle gave me hope that I might someday make editor after all.

  8

  One morning, when I reached up to rub the shiny talon of the phoenix, I was startled to see a dark hand appear next to mine. I turned to see a young Negro man in horn-rimmed glasses. He was strikingly handsome, with high cheekbones and a tall, athletic build.

  “Oh!” I said. “You must work at Torchon and Lyle.”

  He smiled politely at my surprise. “In a roundabout manner. I’m a messenger-boy,” he answered, then nodded in the direction of the phoenix hovering over us. “But I suppose I like it enough to want to keep my job.” We turned back to gaze again at the phoenix.

  “It’s silly, isn’t it? I’m not at all superstitious,” I lied, suddenly feeling the need to explain myself.

  “Neither am I,” the young man said. “But I like a good ritual.” He put a finger to the bridge of his nose and pushed his glasses up. He regarded me through the lenses. There was a glimmer of shy, bookish intelligence in his eyes. It was a kindred glimmer, one I recognized in myself.

  I thought to ask him about what it was like to be a bicycle messenger for Torchon & Lyle; whether he ever got sent out on any odd deliveries or else brought things to famous authors’ houses. But I was too timid to ask. So the young man and I stood there staring at each other, a pair of awkward smiles on our faces, neither one saying another word, until finally we both nodded and turned to go through the revolving door and into the building. He went downstairs to the mail room, and I waited for the elevator to go up.

  Later that afternoon I was typing up some dictation I’d taken earlier that morning, when Mr. Turner emerged from his office and tossed something onto my desk. I recognized the reader’s report I’d written a few nights prior, recommending a novel I’d found in the slush pile. I braced myself for him to announce what terrible judgment I had, but the criticism never came.

  “This one isn’t half-bad,” he said, frowning. “I pulled the manuscript and I agree it has promise. The quality of your report itself is middling, but I expect you may improve over time if you’re to be a reader from now on.”

  “Reader?” I repeated in disbelief. My heart leapt and I couldn’t help but smile. “Am I being promoted to reader?”

  As he caught sight of my smile, Mr. Turner’s frown deepened. “It’s more work, but not more money—understand?”

  “Oh yes, sir! I’m still very honored! I . . .” I hesitated, searching for the correct word. “. . . I accept!”

  Mr. Turner gave me a disdainful look, and I understood my naked enthusiasm, coupled with the presumption I was somehow entitled to accept or decline the position, had annoyed him.

  “Fine,” he grunted. “You can start with these.” He placed a small stack of manuscripts on my desk. “And get in touch with the author of that unsolicited manuscript.” He pointed back to my reader’s report.

  “Oh, I will, sir! Right away,” I said. He vanished into his office, the door swinging shut behind him.

  I didn’t care if he’d been annoyed by my eager attitude. I was a reader! I was one tiny step closer to becoming an editor. Perhaps rubbing that statue was lucky after all. As I looked the submission log over in search of the unsolicited author’s address and telephone number, I picked up the telephone to dial someone else entirely.

  “Judy?” I spoke into the receiver. I could hear the clackity-clack of her uninterrupted typing.

  “Mmm?”

  “Say, let’s go for a drink tonight. I’ve got something to celebrate!”

  • • •

  Later, when I told Judy the details, she was happy for me and eager to celebrate, but I had to twist her arm to get her to go down to the Village.

  “Why not let’s go to a bar here in midtown, or else on the Upper East Side?” she complained, slicking on a fresh coat of red lipstick once the clocks had struck five and we were riding the elevator down. “That’s where all the eligible bachelors are.”

  “It’s fun in the Village; you’ll see,” I promised. “There’s a real energy. I’ve met the most interesting people down there. You never know who you might meet: a painter or a musician or a poet!”

  Judy snapped her compact shut and slipped it back into her pocketbook. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Judy! Who knows? The next Hemingway or Salinger could be down there, and Torchon and Lyle might someday publish his book!”

  “You forget,” she said. “You’re in it for the books. I’m in it for a husband.”

  She sniffed and pretended to pout, but followed me in good humor out to the street to catch a taxi. We rode down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, giggling with excitement as the wedding-cake arch loomed into view. I had decided on the Minetta Tavern, over on MacDougal. It was cozy inside, dim, with lots of dark wood and a black-and-white checkerboard floor.

  “How do you know about this place?” Judy asked, raising an eyebrow as we walked through the door. We pulled out two stools at the bar and wobbled onto them in our pencil skirts. I explained about the day I’d met Swish, and how he’d introduced me to a whole slew of bohemian cafés below Fourteenth Street.

  “I wish I could come down to the Village every day after work,” I said. “There’s always something interesting going on—some poetry reading or improvisational band or . . . well, some of it I don’t even qui
te know how to describe!”

  “Yes, well, going out can get expensive,” Judy said. “Especially if you’re not out with the kind of gentleman who knows he’s supposed to foot the bill.” I could tell she had not liked the sound of Swish one bit.

  “Well, I’m not interested in him like that.”

  “So?” Judy said. “He still ought to treat. It’s what a fella does.”

  “Anyway, you’ll find it’s not at all expensive down here. Most of the readings and art shows and music are free. It’s the time, not the money, that I can’t spare. Too many manuscripts to read!”

  Judy rolled her eyes. “You and your career gal ambitions,” she said in a mock-scolding voice. “What am I going to do with you?”

  Just then I felt someone brush by my elbow.

  “Say—Eden, right?”

  I looked in the direction of the voice and saw a man with a slight build, sandy hair, and pale blue eyes.

  “Oh! Yes,” I replied. “How good to see you again. Judy, this is Cliff.”

  “How d’you do?”

  Judy shook his hand and gave him an appraising look, but almost immediately her gaze slid to another boy standing just over Cliff’s shoulder, and she blushed.

  “This is my buddy Bobby,” he explained. “Bobby, meet the gals.”

  Bobby grinned in an extremely charming, lopsided way. He was tall and very good-looking, with the kind of relaxed, slouchy posture that suggested he was very reassured about how good-looking he was, too.

  “Listen,” Cliff continued. “We were just headed over to Chumley’s. There’s a playwright who wants a few actors to do a cold reading of his new play, and Bobby is going to volunteer.”

  “What d’you say, Judy?” I asked. I wanted to go but I wanted her to feel comfortable, too.

  “All right,” she agreed, still smiling at Bobby in a wistful fog.

  • • •

  The play was fairly awful. It was obvious the playwright fancied himself some variety of absurdist, like Ionesco or Beckett, but possessed only a fraction of the talent. However, Bobby read his lines with fierce commitment, and the whole room sighed dreamily every time it was his turn to speak. When it was all over, we clapped Bobby on the back, and the boys suggested we relocate to the Cedar Tavern. I hadn’t planned on taking a tour of all the bars in the Village, but it seemed like that was what the night was shaping up to be. Once at the Cedar, a third man came over to join us. I was startled to recognize the bookish-looking Negro with horn-rimmed glasses.

  “I saw you this morning in front of the phoenix!” I exclaimed. He smiled and the sense of camaraderie we’d shared earlier that day returned.

  “You’ve met?” Cliff asked.

  “Well, not formally,” I said, realizing we’d never introduced ourselves. “I’m Eden.”

  “Miles,” he said, extending a polite hand. We chatted a bit.

  “How long have you been a bicycle messenger?” I asked.

  “For almost a year. I only do it part-time,” he said. “I’m still in school.”

  “Oh!” I said, cocking my head in confusion. He didn’t appear young enough to be high school age.

  “College,” he said, reading my misapprehension. “Columbia.”

  I was impressed, and was about to say so, but just then a stranger spilled a drink on Judy’s lap, and she leapt up from her barstool. I could see she’d had enough. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. Cliff and Bobby wanted to go to yet another bar for more drinks, and looked slightly disappointed when Judy and I excused ourselves.

  “Time for us career gals to turn back into pumpkins,” I said, “or it’ll take a whole lot more than coffee to wake us up in the morning.”

  In the taxi on the way back uptown, Judy sat dabbing her skirt with a handkerchief.

  “Was it terrible?” I asked.

  “Not terrible,” she said. “But I’ll send you my dry-cleaning bill.”

  I asked her what she thought of them.

  “Well, that Bobby is about as handsome as they come,” she said, still blotting away at her skirt. “But he’s not marriage material. You can see he’s more trouble than the devil himself! And Cliff . . .” She considered for a moment. “Well, he might be different. He seems like he’s from a nice family, and a college boy, too: I noticed a class ring!” I was glad she liked Cliff. I liked him, too. “But I don’t know . . .” She qualified her endorsement: “He runs around with so many Village kids . . .”

  “More of them might’ve gone to college than you’d think,” I murmured, lost in thought and watching the city flying by outside the taxi window as we zoomed up Third Avenue. “Miles told me he’s due to graduate Columbia this June.”

  “Who’s Miles?”

  “That young man I was talking to just now.”

  “The Negro?”

  I nodded, and she sighed.

  “Oh, honestly, Eden . . . hipsters and Negroes! Don’t you ever want to get married?”

  MILES

  9

  A few weeks prior to my graduation from Columbia, my mother surprised me by pressing a small nickel-chrome key into my palm and telling me a secret.

  This happened in our family apartment in Harlem, but I wasn’t living there at the time. At Columbia, I had worked out a way to stretch the scholarship money to afford a room in one of the dormitories, thinking—with that tragically flawed logic of mine—that not living on campus was all that stood between me and making friends. As it turned out, it was a pathetic room and I hated being in it. I was profoundly lonely and I had no roommates to speak of; no one in the housing office wanted to make any assumptions as to how another student might feel about sharing a room with a colored boy. They had resolved this predicament by giving me my own room. I was well aware they could have done much worse by me, and I felt guilty each time I looked at the cramped, windowless space and wondered if my room wasn’t really a broom closet they had converted at the very last minute in the hopes I wouldn’t notice—or, at the very least, that I wouldn’t be brave enough to raise a ruckus upon making such an observation.

  In any event, this rather sad broom closet of a room was where I was when the telephone in the hall rang and one of the young freshmen—I was the only upperclassman on my floor—began hollering for me. “Tillman!” he shouted. “It’s your ma on the horn!” I got up from my bed, grateful for the chance to leave my room, and thinking my mother was simply calling to check in on me.

  “Miles?” she said. “You gotta stop by the house this afternoon.”

  “What time?” I asked, knowing better than to ask the reason.

  “I got some errands to run right quick, but why don’t you c’mon over now. I be back real soon.”

  Her command that I come over was nothing unusual, but her urgency was. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, no, nothing’s wrong. But ever since I woke up, I been thinking about somethin’ and I needs to talk to you. Your brother’s out playing with the neighborhood boys, and be best to talk before Wendell get home.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll see you in a bit.” I hung up and walked back to my broom closet to put some shoes on. The dormitory halls were full of that particular manic energy that occurs at the end of a school year, when half the students are whooping with hilarity over having already finished their exams and the other half are still studying like mad to pass them. It was the season when clothes and books are being boxed up and old hot plates are left abandoned near the trash chutes by virtue of some undergraduate’s careless thought that some custodian might want to adopt what he, the undergraduate, no longer wants to transport elsewhere.

  Walking from Columbia to Harlem was mostly a matter of descending the hill that separated the stony Gothic façades of Morningside Heights from the green streetlamps and brownstones of Harlem, and the most pleasant route to take was through Morningside
Park along the eastern side of campus. It was a warm day; little beads of sweat tickled my temples as I ambled down the sloped path. A hot day meant, of course, that Harlem would be busy with people sitting outside on their stoops, fanning themselves and gossiping. There would be greengrocers pouring buckets of ice over their produce, pushcarts selling ice cream, and children dancing spastically in front of gushing fire hydrants, cheering and laughing—and, of course, eventually booing in protest when the firemen came to shut the spouts down again. I had these sights and sounds memorized; together they made up my childhood.

  “Hey, Miles,” a young woman called to me from her stoop, flirting out of pure boredom.

  “Hey, Sherrie,” I called back. “Hot enough for ya?” At this, she rolled her eyes, nodded, and shrugged, all the while continuing to fan herself. Then she gave me that uneasy look I knew well, looking me up and down more critically from out the corner of her gaze. I sensed she wouldn’t engage me further. None of my peers from the old neighborhood knew what to make of me, especially the girls. I was tall, I ran track and field; the girls would flirt, but most would stop short of any real overture. I knew on instinct it wasn’t because I had a girl, although I did: I had a lovely girl named Janet who I sometimes took out for egg creams and long walks through the little botanical garden at the northernmost end of Central Park, near the Harlem Meer. No, it was because to them I was a curiosity, intriguing but vaguely unsettling.

  I was accustomed to their standoffish treatment. In those days, I straddled more than a handful of worlds, which is also to say I belonged wholly to none. I had been born in Harlem but sent to school on the Upper East Side. This had been arranged when a schoolteacher at P.S. 24 had noticed my “outstanding aptitude” and petitioned a series of Manhattan church organizations on my behalf. Charitable donations were given, mostly by elderly white widows whom I have never met but to whom I have been made to write thank-you letters. I remember the way my former Harlem classmates used to see the eternal heap of Latin books in my arms and eye the burgundy blazer of my private school uniform with suspicion. That was the first time my life took on a split nature. Little did I know this is all too often what it means to grow into adulthood, and that my sense of self would fracture yet again, and again, in the years to come.