Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  “Mother, this is Eden Collins,” Cliff introduced me. Upon hearing my first name, Eden, not a single flicker of recognition passed over her face. I was relieved. Cliff continued. “And Judy . . .” He paused, realizing he did not know Judy’s last name.

  “Wheaton,” Judy supplied.

  “Wheaton, how lovely,” Doris purred. “And such a fresh face, wholesome as the wheat itself.”

  “Why, thank you,” Judy replied. She was gazing at the diamonds in Mrs. Nelson’s ears with stunned wonder.

  I was surprised. Doris Nelson had struck me as a cold, unfriendly woman over the phone. But here she was, elegant and warm, and clearly full of philanthropic spirit; the luncheon doubled as a fund-raiser for an orphanage in a nearby town.

  “I’m so delighted you’ve come,” she said now, smiling in my direction. “You managed to get my Clifford out to the club on a weekend!” She chatted with us for a few more minutes and floated away—purely due to obligation, she assured us—to mingle with the guests who’d bought tickets and were donating to the orphanage.

  We sat at a large round table with five other guests. Either Cliff had contrived for the arrangement of our place cards or else he had gotten very lucky: Immediately to the left of Judy’s elbow was a handsome young law student named Chester. Five minutes into the meal, Cliff and I were left to make much of our own conversation. I got to know a great deal more about him. In particular, I admired his determination to become a writer, especially given that he had Roger Nelson for a father. I knew firsthand Roger Nelson cast a long shadow and was not an easy man to impress. And I felt Cliff and I had something important in common: We both straddled the publishing world and the grittier world of the Village.

  “Thank you for coming,” Cliff said after we had gotten through soup and salad and reached the dessert course. “Are you having any fun at all?”

  “Oh, tons,” I said. “It’s so nice here, and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation together.” We exchanged bashful smiles and a lingering gaze.

  • • •

  Later that evening, once Cliff had dropped Judy off at her women’s hotel and me back at the Barbizon, I telephoned Judy so that we might gossip about our day. She and Chester had already made plans to have dinner the next night, and Judy recited the laundry list of personal details she’d gleaned about him over lunch. I shyly brought up Cliff.

  “He’s awfully sweet on you, Eden!” she said over the line.

  “Really, you think so?”

  “Mmm-hmm. And you know, you could do a whole lot worse than to wind up with a fella whose parents belong to the Cedarbrook Club.”

  “Oh, but the future . . . I don’t see how it could work out!” I said.

  “Why not? What’s the problem?”

  “Well, for starters, I’m his father’s secretary. I doubt Mrs. Nelson would like that much. I’m sure she would much prefer Cliff date a girl who’s never worked a day in her life: a society girl like herself. And as for Mr. Nelson . . . well, say things got serious . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I probably couldn’t work at Bonwright anymore. How could I? And Mr. Nelson would be awful mad if I quit to run off and marry his son.”

  “Oh, pshhh!” Judy scoffed. “It’ll be a fun detail in the story of how you two met—you know, something to tell the grandkids. Roger and Doris . . . they’d both get over it as soon as the first baby turns up. Besides . . . if Cliff’s father is the way Cliff says he is, well, then maybe it serves him right for not paying very much attention to his son!”

  “Gosh, I hope that’s not what Cliff sees in me,” I said. “You don’t think that’s it, do you?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Judy said. “The way he looks at you with little stars in his eyes? Not a chance.” There was a pause, and I could tell she was fiddling around with something—perhaps a nail file—in the background, which she put down. “Listen, Eden,” she said, her voice growing serious, “I think it’s admirable that you have your aspirations about becoming an editor, but what if that never happens? Or what if it does and you find you’re not fulfilled by it? Don’t you want to take out some insurance on your own happiness?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m just saying, you’ve complained a lot about how Mr. Nelson doesn’t seem like he ever intends to promote you. And you already know what it’s like other places; I don’t need to remind you about Miss Everett, and there are plenty like her out there. Maybe it’s time to, you know, cultivate some back-up options. It couldn’t hurt. If you like this Clifford character, maybe that’s not the worst thing you could do.”

  I was quiet, thinking about this.

  “All I mean to say is that I know you’re a career gal, sure, but I also think every woman should live up to her potential, and you’d make a good wife if you wanted to, Eden,” Judy said. “Honest, I mean that as a compliment. And what does Cliff want to do anyway? Be a writer, right? I don’t see how being an editor is that different from being a writer’s wife. Don’t most writers’ wives type up all their husbands’ work and edit it, too?”

  “I suppose so . . .”

  “Anyway,” Judy said, her tone suddenly shifting. “I hope you don’t mind me speaking my mind. Listen, I’d better go soon. There’s another girl who wants to use the phone.”

  “All right. Good night, Judy.”

  I hung up, but Judy’s argument stayed on my mind. I was certainly attracted to Cliff, and it seemed he was attracted to me. And he was very determined to make something of himself; perhaps it might be exciting, after all, to be a writer’s wife. Judy had a point: A writer’s wife was a first editor of sorts.

  I laughed out loud when I realized I was getting ahead of myself. Cliff, after all, hadn’t even asked me out on a date yet.

  CLIFF

  31

  I proposed to Eden during the summer of ’58, not long after our first date. The whole marriage business was spontaneous as hell and I hadn’t ever really pictured myself married, but I liked Eden and together we liked to laugh and shake our hips in spastic ecstasy to bop and of course we had a dandy time in the sack. But mostly I married her because it made me heartsick to think of her marrying someone else.

  There was also some business with My Old Man—not about him cutting me off but about all that Brooklyn business I mentioned—that Eden understood. I’d never told anybody about the time when I was eleven and I followed My Old Man on the train out to Bensonhurst and what I’d seen once I got there. But I told Eden about it one day when we were lying naked together in the middle of the afternoon with sunshine pouring through the bars of my studio’s little window. We both had our eyes closed when I told her the story and she intuited enough about me to stroke my arm as I talked to let me know she was awake and listening and hearing all of it but she also knew enough never to bring it up again in any of our other conversations and I figured a man could do a lot worse than to marry a girl with this quality.

  When I asked her to marry me Eden’s eyes grew big and bright and excited, but of course Eden being Eden, she had a hell of a lot of questions about how things would work. Would we tell our folks and should she keep working for My Old Man and what about her name and blah, blah, blah, and before too long it became obvious that we weren’t planning a wedding so much as an elopement. But if I’m being honest, an elopement suited me just fine and it suited Eden, too; I didn’t want or need her to quit her job at ol’ Bonwright, and she didn’t want to, either. The things we liked about each other were tangled up in our ambitions, and our ambitions were tangled up in each other, too, but of course we hardly knew it at the time.

  Eden felt awfully guilty about the fact she would have to miss some work but eventually I managed to convince her to give My Old Man some line about visiting her sick aunt back in Indiana and before too long we were making plans to go down to City Hall and Bobby was composing a little
song for us on his guitar and Pal was writing a special poem for our day and calling it an epithalamium, which I was too embarrassed to admit I had to look up in the dictionary in order to find out was the Greek term for a wedding poem.

  Seeing as how our folks weren’t invited that day, it was just Bobby and Swish and Pal and a handful of other people from the café circuit, and of course Eden’s friend Judy, slicked up in her red lipstick, wringing Chester’s arm with excitement and jumping up and down, eager to catch the bouquet. There we were, standing around at City Hall, all of us looking a little thin and lanky in the photographs that were taken that day, as though we were all just young pups still waiting to grow into our bodies and tripping over our feet in the meantime. Swish with his madman hair and leathery face from all the hobo-ing and Bobby standing loose at the hips with that glint in his eye and his Golden Boy looks and Pal with those long, black lashes and shy smile and me and Eden and our nervous half-smiles walking wobbly-kneed like a pair of foals as if it were our first time for everything all over again.

  The whole group saw us off later when Eden and I boarded the bus at Port Authority for Niagara and threw rice and called out sweet and sincere encouragements to us. As I waved good-bye to the group of them I caught Swish’s eye and for the most fleeting of seconds I saw a hint of something rueful there and I knew all too well this was about how Swish felt about Eden and how I’d been a bit of a bastard to come between them. When the bus’s engine roared to life I looked back and it was gone, and a week later when Eden and I returned from our honeymoon I looked for it again in Swish’s gaze but if it had ever truly been there by then he had decided to let it go and I believe in the spirit of a true friend he had decided to occupy himself with other things and never again gave it much thought.

  When we got back to New York, Eden packed up her two suitcases at the Barbizon and deposited them in my little studio in the Village. I made a jokey show of carrying my bride over the threshold and this made us both laugh and together we had ourselves a second honeymoon on the mattress on the floor.

  32

  Eden was very much in favor of my idea of becoming a writer and the idea was we were going to settle down together and I was going to spend my days writing while she worked at Bonwright and then in the evenings she would come home and type up everything I had written that day and we would make love and bask in the assurance that good things had been written and that we were living out the script of what was destined to become a chapter in literary history. It was a good plan except the words did not come to me right away and during the first couple days when I hadn’t written anything and Eden had come home, ready to type, we had made love anyway and afterwards she stroked my hair and told me the words would come and said perhaps I was just a nighttime writer and didn’t know it yet. Then she would stand in front of the hot plate in the little kitchenette and boil some coffee as the light from the streetlamps glanced off her smooth-bodied nakedness and dark, liquid hair. I enjoyed balling her tremendously and afterwards I always felt light and hungry and hollow and spent in a way I’d never felt with anyone who had come before her.

  I would lie there watching her boiling the coffee in the dark and feel I had done a good thing in marrying her. Eden was a small girl but nevertheless was very long in the torso and despite her slenderness her hips flared in a beautiful, generous way and in the phosphorescent light of the streetlamps she looked like something on loan to me from another planet and maybe also another era, too, and it was all very surreal. When she had finished with the hot plate she would snap the electric lights on and put the coffee in front of me and I would go to the desk and sit and stare into the dim pages of the notebook that had all day lain empty. Eden would shimmy her shoulders into the tattered silk robe she had bought on a whim one day while in Chinatown and had worn every day thereafter and then she would pick up a book or a manuscript and quietly read with the idea that we should let inspiration take its course.

  Eden always reminded me I had written two stories I liked very much and if I could write two good stories, then I was capable of writing more and even better and it was just a matter of coming up with the right strategy for unblocking my creativity. Being that we ran with a bohemian crowd, naturally Eden was open to all kinds of solutions to my writer’s block, but I had to draw the line when she started harping about how I ought to go see a head-shrinker. Lots of people in our circle were going to shrinks in those days and reporting back wondrous things, but if you ask me, the ones who said all the best things about being in analysis were women and queers who had sex problems. I didn’t have a sex problem and didn’t see how a shrink could help me be a better writer and after a few disagreements on this subject I got Eden to lay off about the whole business.

  The other major theme that turned up often in our disagreements was Rusty. After Eden and I were married, it wasn’t long before Rusty turned up again. Eden detested him from the first second she laid eyes on him and this was partly because when Rusty showed up on the stoop he expected me to drop whatever I was doing and take him all over the city to get some kicks on my dime, which was really our dime now, Eden’s and mine. At one point Eden threatened me with the prospect of having to go out and take a day-job if I didn’t stop blowing all our rent money on that whiney sonofabitch. That Whiney Sonofabitch was Eden’s name for Rusty when Rusty was not around. When he was around she never said a bad word to his face and was just as nice to him as I was and I realized the aura of Rusty’s boss had gotten to her, too, and she was afraid to ruin my prospects if she told Rusty where he could go stuff it. Neither of us could be sure whether Rusty truly planned to hand my stories over to the famous literary agent but the simple thought of it alone was enough to put us on our best behavior.

  At one point Rusty told us he had given the pages to his boss but then he said his boss had taken the train up to Westchester and had accidentally left them on the train and would we mind typing up new copies for Rusty to give him. Of course we said we didn’t mind at all and Eden set about typing the new copies right away. Rusty said the agent had read and finished one of the two stories and that he had liked what he had read. I thought that this was incredible news. I asked Rusty which one but Rusty couldn’t remember and then each time we saw him after that he had forgotten to check with the agent which one it was.

  “He’s bluffing,” Eden said one evening while we were alone. “He hasn’t given anyone anything.”

  This was likely true but in the moment I hated her for saying it all the same.

  “Rusty isn’t lobbying for anybody but himself,” she continued.

  “Well, I think that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged. “You work at Bonwright. It’s not as if you’re arguing my case to My Old Man, now, are you?”

  She froze where she stood ironing a shirt with her big eyes blinking at me and I could tell the thought had never even occurred to her.

  “You . . . you don’t honestly think I ought to do that, do you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, but I had to think about my answer for several minutes because when I pondered it I realized maybe I did think she ought to. She could somehow bring my talents to his attention, say . . . somehow get him to read my story that was about to run in The Tuning Fork, even if she had to play dumb about our marriage or go about it anonymously.

  I kept this idea to myself but it only made a certain amount of sense. Now that we were hitched she ought to understand that what was good for me was also good for her. I had helped her win the job with My Old Man by tipping her off in the first place and she had even said herself she ought to thank me for it. Besides all that, she had technically lied to My Old Man about her name and I’d kept that secret for her, too. All and all, I’d been a bang-up husband if there ever was one, and what was the harm in a wife helping out her husband, anyway?

  MILES

 
33

  You’ve saved up enough money to go now, haven’t you?” Janet asked in a quiet voice.

  We were sitting on a bench in our usual spot: the northeasternmost end of Central Park, by the Harlem Meer, the little duck pond that bordered 110th Street. I turned to meet her gaze, but she was staring out over the water, so I observed her profile. She had a very long, regal neck. I hadn’t ever taken close note of this distinctive feature before. In fact, the more I looked at her, the more I was impressed by the fact I’d never noticed how much she resembled some kind of tall, graceful variety of bird. She wore her hair slightly curled and clipped short to her head, possessed a small forehead and chin and a triangular, beaklike nose. Her eyes were large, wide, and up-tilted, like that famous bust of Nefertiti. She was, paradoxically, both meek looking and expressive at the same time.

  “It’s difficult to know how much will be enough,” I said. “But I suppose, yes, I think I’ve got enough saved now to make the trip.”

  “When will you leave?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ve . . . well, I’ve got to give notice,” I said.

  “That old man is certainly paying you a lot of money.”

  “Yes. He is. I’ve been lucky,” I said. She shot me a look I couldn’t read. “Maybe he’ll want to rehire me when I get back to New York,” I continued, hoping to encourage her. “And we’ll have enough to get married saved up in no time at all.”

  “No. There’ll be other jobs,” Janet said with somber conviction. “I wouldn’t want you to work for him again.”

  I nodded. To my surprise, I agreed with her. While I’d grown to like Mister Gus, there was a strange kind of comfort in knowing my employment with him was only temporary. It was his overwhelming loneliness, perhaps, that unnerved me. I felt sorry for him, but it was almost as if I believed his loneliness to be contagious, and some primal instinct signaled to me that I ought to avoid catching it.