A Week as Andrea Benstock

by Lawrence Block

  “I hope you’re not a man according to that definition.”

  “Nope, still a little boy.”

  “Well, that’s good.” She fell silent for a moment. Then she said, “She told me they never talked about it after it was over. Except that one night he took her hand and said, ’I want you to know that everything’s all right now, and there won’t ever be anything else to worry about.’ Or words to that effect.”

  “And that was that.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And they were set for the rest of their lives. You have to give them both a hell of a lot of credit. It’s obvious that she deserves credit, but so does he. Or don’t you agree?”

  “That’s exactly how I feel, but I thought it might be the way I felt about my father. You used an expression before. Faster than a bullet?”

  “Faster than a speeding bullet.”

  “Yes. What’s that from?”

  “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a mighty locomotive, able to leap tall women in a single bound—”

  “Tall buildings.”

  “I like it better my way.”

  “You would. It’s Superman, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh. The old radio program.”

  “I thought so. Well, I always thought my father was Superman. Not literally, obviously, but the same way that Robin thinks you’re something special.”

  “When actually we both know I’m nothing much.”

  “Oh, you’re something special, and don’t think I don’t know it. But you’ll never get the devotion from me you’ll get from Robin, because that’s a very special thing between fathers and daughters. The point is, you never outgrow it. Or at least I never did. I still think my father was Superman. I’ll tell you what I’d like to know.”

  “What?”

  “Did he still have sex with my mother while he was in love with the woman? I don’t know why I care. Just the kind of curiosity you have when your mind’s in the gutter. Naturally I didn’t ask her.”

  “Of course not. Does it matter whether he did or not?”

  “Not to me it doesn’t.”

  “That doesn’t interest me as much as wondering what the woman was like. That’s what I’d find fascinating.”

  “It’s probably someone we know.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. She was at the funeral. My mother happened to say that, and I wanted to try to find out more, but I decided not to. She came to his funeral. I wonder how she felt. I wonder—oh, there are a million things I wonder. What it felt like for mom to see her at the funeral. But then again she’s probably seen her hundreds of times since it all happened. Thousands of times, even. Maybe they’ve been invited to the same parties for all those years. Maybe they run into each other constantly at the club. And by now it doesn’t matter any more.”

  “That rounds it all out,” he said. “Don’t you think it does? I kind of like the idea that she came to his funeral.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “You made these drinks on the heavy side, didn’t you?”

  “I may have. Why?”

  “Because I’m feeling mine.”

  “Well, so am I, but in an enjoyable way.”

  “Oh, I never said I wasn’t enjoying it.”

  “You know what would be nice? Except that you don’t like to drink too much when you’ve got work the next morning, but it would be nice if I made us one more round of drinks, and we could take them in the other room and sit on the couch and watch the news.”

  “Oh, is it time already?”

  “Just about. We could sit on the couch, and we could maybe get a little drunk, and we could possibly even do a little country-style necking.”

  “You think we could do that, huh?”

  “Except that you have an office to go to tomorrow, and we might wind up having still another round of drinks, and the necking might tend to get out of hand.”

  “It just might. Old down-home country-style necking has a way of doing just that. But do you know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think you should make the drinks.”

  She took his glass from him and hurried into the kitchen. She swerved just the least bit en route—she really was feeling the drinks.

  In her mind she heard a voice. Her father’s voice . . . Mark’s voice. “Everything’s going to be all right now. There won’t ever be anything else to worry about.”

  Oh, it might not be all that easy for Mark and her. But you took things as they came and you found the right way to handle them, and sooner or later things worked out as they were supposed to.

  She smiled, a very private and very self-satisfied smile, and then she finished making the drinks. Bringing them back to him, unsteady on her feet, she nonetheless felt calm, in control. It felt good, being in control again.

  Friday

  December 15, 1972

  THE morning started badly. She had wanted a shower and had planned on washing her hair before going to work. Toward that end she’d gotten up a half hour early to give her hair ample time to dry. But there was no hot water. While she stood sponging herself at the sink, a pale brown cockroach walked rather nonchalantly up the wall and scuttled into the medicine chest. A shudder went through her and she gritted her teeth, annoyed as much with her own reaction as with the insect itself. Roaches were a fact of life in New York. You couldn’t escape them, certainly not on her salary, and even the expensive new high-rises became infested sooner or later. She had been seeing more than usual lately, probably because a neighbor had had the exterminator come around with his chemicals and sprays. When she got around to it she would call the exterminator herself, and for a few days her apartment would smell of insect killer, and the little bastards would slip through the walls or tunnel through the plumbing and bother someone else. Just a fact of life, a drop of urban local color, like muggers and stalled subway cars and high rentals, and it was true that you could live in a suburb and ride in your own car and never see a mugger or a cockroach, but a couple of months ago she had decided finally and forever that she for one could not live that way, that sharing an apartment in Manhattan with transient insects was a better bargain than sharing a house in Tonawanda with a man she never should have married in the first place.

  It was hard to say precisely when she had made the decision. But it had been October when she’d acted upon it, and now it was mid-December and she still couldn’t look at the little bastards without shivering. She could accept them well enough intellectually. Certainly there were enough things about them that could have been worse. They didn’t bite, for example, and they didn’t seem to eat much of anything, and she’d fallen in love with archy and mehitabel in high school, and none of this prepared her for the sight of the creature walking up her wall and into her medicine cabinet as if he owned the place.

  Half of her English muffin got stuck in the toaster and she mutilated it getting it out. And she just missed one subway train and waited an unusually long time for the next one. When it came it was crowded. She had to stand all the way from Eighty-sixth Street to Times Square. Normally she would have taken the shuttle across town to Fifth Avenue but she was tired of being crowded, so she left the station and walked across Forty-second Street. After she had gone a block it began raining.

  “Well, that just fucking figures,” she said aloud. “Shit!”

  No one paid any attention to her.

  This was her fifth week at the store. It was a foreign language bookshop at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, and Andrea had managed to get the job because she was more nearly fluent at French than the store manager. That her French was actually quite tentative turned out to be unimportant. The store carried a large stock of titles in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, plus scattered titles in a dozen other languages. No one could be expected to converse in all of those tongues, nor was it often necessary to speak anything but English. While the store’s customers might prefer to read in their
native languages, virtually all of them spoke English quite competently.

  “The odd merci or danke doesn’t hurt a bit,” Cal had told her, “but appearance and manner is the whole thing. That’s why old Hubbell hired you. It’s all image. You look slightly intellectual but not severe, you don’t talk through your nose, you don’t pop chewing gum, and you don’t dress like a hippie. Considering that you’re overworked and underpaid, how much more can they expect of you? He was lucky to get you.”

  “Well, I’m lucky to have the job.”

  “Oh, please. How could anyone be lucky to work here? Either the store’s empty or there are sixteen harpies yammering at you in as many languages, none of them one’s own. And when someone dishy does walk in, which happens once every third blue moon, he speaks either Swedish or Urdu and all the English he knows is I goink now and meet my wifes.” She laughed, Cal always made her laugh, and then he’d said, “I don’t know why I stay. I’ve been here almost two years now. I don’t know why I started in the first place. Yes I do. I’d had a little disagreement across the street with that pig at Doubleday. He’s not even there any more. And most of the stores in the neighborhood seemed to be full up, and I thought I’d get on the list and live on unemployment for a month or three, and then I was on that unemployment line once and I couldn’t believe what they put you through. It’s so incredibly tacky, the whole process, and when you think it’s not charity at all, they take it out of your check every week and when you come to get some of your own back they make you feel like you’re on a bread line. Well, my dear, I cashed my first check because I’d waited so long for it, and then I took this job just until something better came up.”

  “And here you are.”

  “And here I am, lucky me. The months go by and here am I, and I can’t quit now, not until Christmas comes and brings my merry little bonus check with it. Not that it’s going to be enough to retire, but why save them the cost? If my bonus covers my own Christmas tips to the doormen and super and all the other seasonally smiling faces, I’ll be glad to break even. But I don’t think I’ll stick it out much after that. My goodness, I’ve been in bookstores since I came to this town.

  That’s—well, it doesn’t matter how many years that comes to. Enough years, let us say. I can walk in anywhere and get a job just like that. I don’t have to stay here with the Urdu speakers. You know, I started working in bookstores in the first place because I always loved to read and I welcomed the chance to associate with literate people. Well, presumably literate people, anyway. So here I find myself surrounded by books I can’t read and people who don’t talk too good the English.”

  “You could get a manager’s job, couldn’t you? With your experience.”

  “Oh, who would want the responsibility, Andrea? If I were to have anything so crass as ambition I’d want to be ambitious for something more worthwhile than managing a bookstore. No, I’m far happier being a flighty little faggot clerk, and there’s a great security in being paid less than your worth, you know. If makes the bastards quite reluctant to see the last of you. I suppose I could earn more money but all that would mean is I’d pay more taxes and take more cabs. The walking’s good for my waistline. I have simple tastes, you know. And my apartment’s rent-controlled, and I’ve never cultivated a palate for caviar or cocaine. Now what sort of palate would you want for cocaine, do you suppose? Cleft, I daresay. Oh, Andrea, don’t stare, but get a load of what just waltzed in. Isn’t he divine?”

  “Not my type, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, he’s certainly my type. But am I his? I just know it’s going to be another of I goink now and meet my wifes. Ah, once more into the breach, dear friends.”

  At the beginning she had decided she could get along well enough with Calvin Burleigh, but she hadn’t expected that they would become at all close. She had never been friendly with a homosexual, not to her knowledge, and while Cal was not at all effeminate he was obviously gay and quite candid about it. Indeed, it was his openness more than his manner that made her uneasy at first. The homosexuals she’d dealt with in Buffalo—a hairdresser, a florist, a photographer who’d taken some unremarkable pictures of Robin—had been at least as patently homosexual as Cal, but would never have alluded to their homosexuality in front of Andrea.

  Ultimately, of course, it was his openness that made it possible for them to be friends. And in the short time she’d known him she’d come to the conclusion that a male homosexual was an ideal sort of friend for her to have just then. She was at a very difficult and demanding stage in her life, and it was fortunate that she was able to realize as much. Her life was exciting for the first time in more years than she wanted to think about. She was constantly meeting new people, constantly going places and doing things, finding out over and over again the extraordinary extent of her new freedom. She could go anywhere, do anything, take any route she wished to become her own real self. That was wonderful, thrilling freedom, but it was also hazardous.

  The people whose lives touched hers were among the hazards. Friends were essential because you needed them because living alone after almost ten years was very nearly impossible to begin with, and the city, cold and grim in the late fall, tended to magnify solitude immeasurably. That solitude constituted a kind of personal space which she very much needed, but at the same time it could become in itself a negative presence.

  Friendships with heterosexual men did not seem to be genuinely attainable. Either they were founded upon sex or they withered away for lack of it. And friendships with women were also difficult. For women without men Andrea was competition; for women with men she was a threat.

  So her friendship with Cal had arisen in response to this situation. At the onset she began to think of him as the closest thing she had to a friend. Now she dropped the qualification. He was a friend, and a good one.

  This morning he was already in the shop when she arrived. She managed a smile in response to his greeting, then hurried into the back room and hung her coat on a hanger. In the rest room she did a quick job of drying her hair.

  “Oh, poor thing,” Cal said. “You really got caught in that mess, didn’t you?”

  “It started just after I left the subway.”

  “Well, it seems to have ended now that you’re safely inside. All for your benefit, lucky you.”

  At least her hair was short and would dry with no difficulty. She’d had it cropped close to her head on her third day in New York. She had been letting it grow for some time and the transformation had been startling. The symbolism of the gesture had not eluded her at the time. She had just cut off all her ties, and now she was cutting off her hair, and rendering herself just a shade butch in the course of this liberation. Well, she had decided, to hell with symbolism. Short hair was easier and made her look and feel younger. And the air was filthy in Manhattan. You had to wash your hair several times a week and with long hair that was just too much trouble.

  She got a carton of books from in back and busied herself making room for them on the shelves. They had arrived the day before from Gallimard, and they were an assortment of suspense novels in French. All of the books were by American authors. They had been originally published in English and had subsequently been translated laboriously into French, printed in France, and now this carton had made the trip back across the ocean, its contents waiting to serve as bedtime reading for chefs and waiters and Senegalese diplomats.

  The morning passed with little incident and less strain. She waited on a handful of customers, checking their credit cards and making out the sales slips, listing each title sold on the inventory-control sheet. An American woman—Midwestern, by her accent—wasted fifteen minutes of her time comparing French dictionaries without finding one she liked well enough to buy. The manager, Mr. Hubbell, arrived a little after eleven and went into the back room to go over the day’s mail. He was a plump, owlish little man, always polite but quite reserved, who lived somewhere on Long Island with his wife and mother-in-law. His name was
J. R. Hubbell, and neither Andrea nor Cal had learned what the initials stood for.

  It wasn’t a bad morning, all things considered, in light of the awful way it had begun. It was dull, but in a way that was not uncomfortable, and the hours passed quickly enough. The worst mornings were those which followed nights of heavy drinking, and it had been quite a while now since she’d had a morning like that. A month ago she had found herself slipping all too easily into a pattern of fairly constant drinking (and the old fear from last time started to creep back). It was so easy to do when you lived alone. Since then she’d kept an eye on herself. She would drink socially, she would have a glass of wine with her dinner, and on weekend nights she would sometimes let herself get drunk, alone or with company. But when she had work the following morning she had taught herself to go to bed sober. It would have been worth doing if only to avoid those breathless hungover mornings when the hours from nine to noon took days of subjective time to pass, when every customer was a challenge and every word that she had to speak an effort. But it was also a good discipline, and she needed to discipline herself and keep herself operating within some sort of orbit.

  It was all too easy to lack discipline in this city. All too easy to spin haywire, to shake loose of one’s moorings. And then you looked beneath your feet one day and couldn’t see the ground, and that could be a very terrifying sensation indeed.

  At noon Cal went off to lunch and Mr. Hubbell joined Andrea in the front of the store. As usual they worked efficiently enough together but without the special harmony she enjoyed with Cal. At one o’clock Cal returned and she went around the corner to the crowded little luncheonette where she usually had lunch. She sat at the counter and ordered a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich and a cup of coffee.

  The counterman had curly black hair and prominent eyebrows. He smiled a lot, revealing badly aligned teeth, and he refilled her coffee cup without her having to ask.