“There were plenty of people who had things given to them, who were middle-class, who had drive.”
“So what. I don’t care what they did. I care about what I’m going to do. What the hell am I going to do with my life? Tell me what to do?”
“I can’t. It wouldn’t mean anything if I told you. You got to tell you.”
“It’s so hard.”
“For Christ’s sake, it’s always hard no matter who you are, where you came from, what color your skin happens to be or what sex you got stuck with. It’s the hardest decision every individual has to make in their life, probably.”
“Yeah, I know. I know it’s hard where you’re at right now and I’m not doing you any good with my emphasis on the pleasure principle.”
“And I know it’s hard where you’re at, too. I’m sorry.”
“Me too, I’m sorry I yelled at you and I’m sorry I lost you the job. I’m such a dumb shit. I have to go off and get my head together. Maybe I’ll ask Kim for the money to go to Paris for a couple of months or maybe I’ll go to Ethiopia—I have a friend there from college. It might be easier to make up my mind if I’m out of this insane city.”
“You can make up your mind anywhere, even in jail. Going to Paris sounds like a ritzy cop-out.”
“Fuck you. You have to throw in my face that you don’t have that option, don’t you. People like you make me sick, wearing your poverty like a badge of purity.”
“I didn’t mean it to sound that way. Maybe I did sound self-righteous. Well, hell, I’d like to go to Paris myself or wherever. But all I’m trying to say is, don’t make a ritual out of getting your head together, that’s all.”
“Yeah, okay. I can’t tell anymore if you’re putting me down or being level. I get pissed off at you a lot these days. I guess we’re out of phase, you know. Maybe one of the ways I’ll get myself together is not to see you for awhile.”
“If that’s the way you feel about it, then that’s the way it has to be.”
“You don’t seem very upset.”
“Goddammit, woman, I’m doing the best I can to help you do whatever it is you have to do. No, I’m not crushed. Do you want me to be crushed and fizzle in a puddle at your feet like the Witch of the West? And yes, I will miss you. I’ll miss making love with you and going to the Thalia and you’re probably the only woman I’ll ever know who kicked a fat pig down the stairs when she’s in total drag. Okay?”
“Oh shit, I do love you. I do.” She picked up her cape, slid open the police lock, and closed the door behind her. I listened to her footsteps until she opened and closed the front door. She strode to the corner and hailed a cab. I watched until she tucked her feet in and closed the door.
I set out among the subways, the red-and-white Coke machines and ads for Dr. Scholl’s foot powder to find another job. Night work ran in two categories: telephone operating or various forms of entertainment. Since Hal Prince did not rush out on the street to sign me up I found myself dancing nightly in a bar in the West Fifties. That lasted two weeks—until I provided a dentist with a patient needing a new set of uppers. There was nothing to do but change my schedule, cut down on classes, and work during the day.
I got a job as a secretary at Silver Publishing Company. Every morning at nine a.m. I roared into the office in complete female rig—skirt, stockings, slip. I couldn’t cross my legs because some of the more obvious sperm producers would try to look up my leg, couldn’t put my feet on the desk because that wasn’t ladylike, and if I didn’t wear make-up everyone, including the boss, would ask me if I was “under the weather” that day.
My immediate superior was Stella by Starlight. Stella had married the president of the company, David Cohen, so she worked “just for fun.” Stella looked exactly like Ruby Keeler and someone must have told her this back in 1933 because she had been trying ever since to be a carbon copy of the original. At the merest suggestion of Ruby she’d go into the routine from Footlight Parade. Then, her husband, aroused by the sound of tapping feet, would have to come out of his office to remind her there were galleys to be read and would she save the dance until after five.
We lowlies were herded into the bullpen where we cheerlessly typed up anything from a bill to the latest manuscript as well as churning out back-copy, front-copy, and captions for bent photographs. In a short time Stella managed to notice that I could both read and spell, two points in my favor, joined by a remarkable third: I could dash off copy on command. Stella rescued me from the bullpen and threw me in with one of the prized editors, James Adler.
Rhea Rhadin, another groundling who had fought her way up to being head receptionist, unfortunately had a full blown heterosexual crush on James. She’d practically slide into the office on her own lubrication and croon at him, “James, may I fetch you some coffee—anything at all this morning?” James abhored her and gave her a curt “no” on these persistent occasions. Rhea exhibited the peculiar twists so often found in the brains of straight women: she became convinced that James treated her brusquely because he and I were having a hot fling. She decided to make life miserable for me. Any work she got from my hands she deliberately botched and then blamed it on me. Once a week she would slip into Mr. Cohen’s office with another horrendous mistake she had saved the printer from committing because of my laxity and poor work habits. James in an heroic effort to save me reported his perceptions of the situation to Mr. Cohen, who couldn’t believe anyone, even Rhea, could be such an ass.
A bad case of the hots was only one of Rhea’s faults. She was notoriously lazy and connived to get other luckless lowlies to do her job for her, thereby giving her time to file her fingernails and change the color of the polish daily. Mr. Cohen turned a blind eye to her eternal manicure by saying we should be kind to her, after all her mother did kill herself when Rhea was eleven. The situation grew daily more intolerable, and so the mixture of loneliness since Holly left and the irritation at work gave birth to a scheme I was sure would do old Rhea Ratface in. Sunday night I went out with a plastic garbage bag and collected every agreeable specimen of dogshit I could find. I got half a bagful and I carefully twisted the candy-striped red wire and put it next to my briefcase for tomorrow’s labor.
Seven in the morning I was dragging that damn bag through the subway station, up the stairs, and into the square office building streaked with grime, pigeon patties, and car exhaust. By eight I had feverishly crammed the presents into Rhea’s desk drawers. Then I evacuated by the back stairway and didn’t come back until 9:10.
Rhea was at her desk, Revlon’s Mocha Mist by her right hand, the telephone in her left, chattering away as usual. Mr. Cohen came in with Stella trailing after him at 9:20. Rhea was still on the phone. James and I were working on a book about medieval art when Rhea paraded through the open door, “Really, James, I don’t see why you and Miss Bolt have to sit so close together when you work. Photographs of Flemish churches can’t be that interesting.”
“Rhea, don’t you have some work to do?” James muttered.
“Yes, I was taking a little break. Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
She oozed away, thoroughly happy that she had needled her love. Through the open door I could see her plopped at her desk behind the glass partition on the phone again. She hadn’t cracked a desk drawer. The entire morning crept along and she never opened even one drawer.
James and I were having lunch in the office, because we had an enormous amount of copy to cover before the author came in at 3:00. As if sensing we were in a hurry, Stella sashayed into the office and noticed James eating a Hershey almond bar.
“I thought you were on a diet. What’s the matter, are you tired of eggs and tuna fish? You know eggs cause special acids and mucus in your system.”
“No, I didn’t know that but—”
Stella cut him off, “Dave has a little yellow pill that clears it right up. No mucus problems for him. I made him go to the doctor, Dr. Bronstein, the one who says I�
�m the spitting image of Ruby Keeler. Bronstein says there’s not a thing wrong with Dave but he should take the pill for his drip. You should see the doctor about a diet. I had a friend who went to a special clinic for her weight. All she ate was grapes and watermelon. After three days she felt much lighter. Grapes and watermelon.”
James rallied a smile, after all you can’t tell the boss’s wife to fuck off. “I loathe watermelon, although I like them pickled.”
“Yes, I like pickled watermelons, too, Did you ever have mushmelons? I like those a lot. I bought a mushmelon before Dave left for Chicago. When did he go there? September? Well, I bought a mushmelon in September, but it wasn’t ripe so I put it in my refrigerator and as soon as it got ripe I ate it. I ate a little bit of it each day. It was wonderful not to have to cook for Dave and just pick at mushmelon. He’s so fussy that it’s a relief when he goes on these little trips. Our refrigerator is full of oranges. He won’t drink anything but freshly-squeezed orange juice. Today I was naughty and reveled in not washing out the squeezer.” James looked up wearily from a colored photograph of Henry the II’s heaven cloak and started again to try to indicate she should leave but Stella shifted into second gear and ran him down: “Mr. Cohen has to have his orange juice fresh and everything just so. He won’t sit down to the table if I put luncheon napkins next to his plate when he has breakfast. I have to keep three sizes of napkins around the house to please him. We bought new cereal bowls and he complained that I gave him too much cereal, so I had to pour the cereal in the old bowl then pour it in the new bowl in front of him before he was satisfied. But coffee brings out the worst in him. He is pickier about his coffee than he is about these manuscripts.”
“That’s impossible,” James asserted.
“Ha. If you think he’s hard as a boss, you should live with him.” Stella, realizing what she had said, took a step back and peeped around the door to make certain no one had heard such blasphemy. “James, I have to grind the beans myself for him. First, I have to run after him with orange juice. Then he sits at the table and inspects the napkins and demands to see the cereal measured. Then he demands his coffee and each morning there’s something wrong with it. After all this activity it’s 9:10 and he says to me, ‘Hurry up, we’ll be late,’ and I haven’t even had a cup of coffee or orange juice myself.” As she inhaled for a refueling we were saved by an earsplitting shriek from behind the glass partition.
“Shit! Shit! My desk is full of shit. Every drawer has turds and crap and yuk in it.”
From down at the end of the longest corridor in the office’s dull grid structure you could hear running feet. People swarmed out of their cubicles which had pictures of Chiquita banana on the wall. In the press by Rhea’s desk, her photograph of Rhett Butler was rubbed off the wall.
Stella blustered to the front of the mob. “Rhea, what terrible language, what’s the …” Before she could finish she was rendered speechless for the first time in her long life by the sight of all that carefully arranged dogshit. The ruckus drew Mr. Cohen out of a conference and he slammed the door behind him for full effect. The crowd parted for their patriarch like the Red Sea.
“What the hell is going on out here? Rhea, what’s the matter with you?”
Rhea, her face bloated with rage, spat out, “My desk is full of dogshit.”
David Cohen with impeccable logic answered in a calm, fatherly voice, “But that’s impossible. There are no dogs in this office.”
Stella nudged her husband’s shoulder. “Look in her desk, Dave.”
He briefly glanced toward the drawers, turned his head and bent over for a second look then he said to his wife in a little voice, “But that’s impossible.”
Stella held her ground, “Impossible or not, her desk is filled with dog … uh, droppings.”
“This must be someone’s idea of a joke,” Dave concluded. “Whoever did this should apologize to Rhea immediately and clean up this mess.” Silence. Utter silence. “Maybe it’s one of the Puerto Ricans in the shipping room. It’s absurd to think anyone in the front office would do such a thing.” Armed with his new conclusion, fortified with the knowledge that men who don’t wear coats and ties are capable of any crime, he turned on his heel and started for shipping. From the shipping room we could hear excited voices in Spanish. David Cohen came back looking confused and angry.
“All right. Back to work, people. This is a publishing house not a circus. The janitor will clean up this mess.”
Rhea by the time of the boss’s return had worked up a good cry. Melted by the sight of this unfortunate in tears, Mr. Cohen gave her the rest of the day off. James and I had settled back over the manuscript when Rhea came in.
“It was you, Molly. I know it was you. Only a lesbian would stoop to such a thing. Did you know that, James? Your girlfriend is a dyke. She told me so herself. But you’re even lower than a lesbian, Molly Bolt. You’re a lesbian who steals men!” As she was ranting and waving her arms her pocketbook, which was half open, opened all the way when she had it on the upswing and her bag of wares rained on the floor. For a lazy girl she moved fast but not fast enough. James had picked up her birth control pills.
“Give me those.”
“Delighted to, dear Rhea, but don’t take them on my account.”
Hell hath no fury like a woman who has been told she doesn’t need her daily dosage of uterine cancer by the man she loves. Rhea took a swing at James with her full-loaded and prudently-closed purse. He ducked and she gave up with another earsplitting shriek and ran out the door directly into Polina Bellantoni, author of The Creative Spirit of the Middle Ages, who was right on time for her afternoon appointment. James and I broke for the door where we each took an arm and raised the woman to her feet.
Polina Bellantoni was firm of flesh, at least her arm was in good shape. She was forty-one years old, had been married twenty years, had mothered a child who was sixteen and had managed to raise the daughter while completing her Ph.D. in Babylonian underpants for Columbia University. Currently, she was teaching at Columbia having left ancient fashions for medieval studies. Polina’s hair was blue-black with strands of perfect, electric gray and her eyes were a soft brown. Wrinkles played around those eyes and made her look both knowing and beautiful. I realized in a flash that men were total fools to put middle-aged women out to pasture for a smooth and boring strawberry face. I don’t know about love at first sight, but I decided right then and there to bridge the generation gap. Somehow, someway, someday I was going to love this married lady with the sixteen-year-old daughter and camelback trucks filled with remnants of archaic undies.
Every two weeks Polina showed up at the office. She was the nervous type and double-checked everything that James and I did. This drove James right up the wall, so I volunteered to take care of matters. Every other Thursday Polina and I went over manuscript changes, photographs and captions. She was impressed that I was so careful with her work and amazed that I was going to school while working full-time. On her fourth visit she asked me if I’d like to have dinner with her family.
On the night of the dinner I showed up in the best clothes I could piece together. She lived in a spacious apartment overlooking Morningside Heights. After meeting me at the door she deposited me in the living room with her husband, while she went back to the kitchen. Mr. Bellantoni treated me like a student, giving me those fatherly smiles and calculated pauses in his delivery. You’re supposed to smile during those pauses. He had earned his Ph.D. in art history. His original thesis was cataloging cows in nineteenth century French paintings and he had expanded this original interest to a thorough knowledge of cows in Western art. This very summer he had been invited to deliver the definitive paper on this subject to a group of his esteemed colleagues at Cambridge, England. Soon, he confided, leaning over to draw me into his words, he would begin his greatest project: cows in Indian art—a long smoldering passion.
He was forty-nine, paunchy, with sagging red cheeks already betraying age spots. I forg
ot his name. But Alice, the daughter of the cow man and the underpants woman was unforgettable. Her complexion radiated sweetness and her almond eyes were a pure, piercing green. Alice’s hair hung down to her ass and changed from brown to honey to ash at the tips. Her large breasts stood straight out without benefit of a bra. Alice was a Renaissance princess come back to life.
Polina was delighted that her daughter and I could talk. Mostly we talked about Janis Joplin, the Moody Blues and Aretha Franklin—things Polina never heard about other than to yell at Alice to turn her stereo down. Polina rarely left Babylon except to vacation in the tenth century. But on those sparse moments when she peeked into the present, she seemed to enjoy me.
Polina asked her husband questions throughout our meal to try to get him to act alive but mouth to mouth couldn’t have revived him. After dinner he wandered back into his den, the obligatory pipe dangling out of his mouth.
The three of us sat around a brass coffee table. Polina told me about Hrosvitha, a tenth-century German nun who wrote plays in crystal clear Latin. She played with Alice’s hair and continued her tale of the nun. Her Latin was as good as Terence’s, the Roman playwright. And that was so pure that no one would believe a woman could write such perfect verse. It was a raging controversy in the medieval scholars’ world, equal to the controversy over black intelligence in the psychology world. There was something pathetic about all that intelligence of hers squandered in the murky past and defined by the dusty priorities of academic life. But she was intelligent, and I had lived long enough to know that’s cause for celebration.
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