Franny’s boss said, “Of course you can have a month off.”
“I’m afraid she expects something urgent and despairing about city life,” said Franny.
It was he who was despairing. But: “The assignment sounds pretty open to me,” he said. “What’s that stuff in your bangs?”
“Mousse.”
Whatever the editor of the monthly expected, what she got was Gills. Franny wrote about a tuxedoed waiter, huge as a Nubian king, hurtling home on the midnight subway. And a Frenchspeaking fish-broker, waiting at dawn on the glistening wharf. And a three-shift Pakistani family, some of them sleeping, some eating, some minding the store.
“We’ll run it,” said the editor. “But the title?”
“The adaptations of the hopeful,” explained Franny.
She wore her new clothing and make-up whenever she went out during the day. But at home, and in the evenings, she still reverted to the dull old clothes and the naked face.
One night, at the twenty-four-hour grocery in Godolphin Square, she noticed a Russian émigré. They were all over town; even before she heard the accented speech she could always recognize Russians by the lined, homely faces and the hair that was washed once a week. Moscovites, most of them. She’d do a piece, some day.
The man in the store was about forty. He was buying cigarettes. She tailed him. His shoulders were stooped during the first part of the walk, but as the street climbed the hill he took on the jauntiness of a boulevardier, and by the time he settled himself on a metal bench at the top of Godolphin Hill she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d snapped his fingers and caused a waiter to materialize. Instead, solitary and grand, he lit one of his new cigarettes. Like royalty he gazed down at his domain. Franny crouched in a sandbox and gazed at him. The Russian smoked a second cigarette at one-twenty, and a third at quarter past three. Then he walked down the hill, slumping as it slumped, until he reached his rooming house.
Gills was published in the fall. A week later Franny received a telephone call from the producer of the local PBS news show, Quidnunc. Quidnunc wanted to interview her about other corners she’d found while creeping about the city as if on all fours; about what else she had seen with those eyes at the back of her head.
Ramsay Magraw, the dominant anchor of Quidnunc, was a rumpled slope of a man, his skin pitted, his irises the color of hemp. “We can talk about whatever you want to talk about,” he said. Then he told her what to want to talk about. “General libertarian utilitarian egalitarian principles should inform your conversation. Vignettes to support them are always welcome. Did your iced bag lady have a right to be rescued? Did she have a right to be crazy? What’s crazy, when you snuggle down beside it? Be intimate and deep, that’s the ticket. Keep the fans always in mind.” He looked down at his thighs, bulging in checked pants. “I love the fans, actually.”
“Why?”
“They love me.”
The anchors’ desks stood on a low round platform, lit queerly from the circumference. The cameras trained their lenses on the desks. Beyond this cleansed battleground, in the shadows, Franny saw backstage debris: ropes, cables, hooks, boxes, a flung book, some bottles, stacked folding chairs.
“Wow,” drawled the director after the interview, “what an exotic pairing, alert observer plays off deep thinker, we’ll have to do this again. Call you?”
That meant good-bye, Franny figured. But no; she was invited to be a guest again, and then again.
“Are you getting paid for this?” asked her boss.
“No. Should I be?”
“I don’t know.”
All of a sudden Ramsay’s co-anchor gave notice. “She’s decided to stay home with her three daughters,” Ramsay groaned to Franny. “I can no longer keep abreast of theories of child development. Won’t those kids grow up deprived, without day care?” He fixed her with his manila eye. “Do you have children?”
Franny got the offer the next day, in the newsroom. It was not tactful of Ramsay to call her there, but it was politic. She could look around at what she was being invited to leave—the desks jammed together, the anemones drooping in clouded water, the boss behind the glass partition, the obese secretary who knew everything, the staff tippler... “I’ll have to think it over,” she lied.
Three days later, in the middle of the afternoon, she and her boss walked up Godolphin Hill. They reached the top, and settled themselves on the same bench the Russian had occupied.
“Summits,” said Franny.
“I distrust them.”
“Pseudo-clarifying,” she agreed.
They talked of her new job. “An opportunity,” he said. “Also an honor.”
“I was on the spot at the right time,” she explained.
“Fortune favors the brave,” he reminded her.
Sunlight made her gold earrings sparkle and warmed her carefully blended make-up. The bench they sat on was cruel to his ageing buttocks. But in crepe trousers Franny lounged like a dandy. Her right foot, caressed by a pink suede shoe as if by a loving hand, rested on her left knee.
“I’ll miss the newspaper,” she said.
“But you’ll like the tube,” he said. “And the tube will like you back.”
She didn’t answer. This gentle man had hoped to teach Latin but had dutifully taken over the family publishing business. She knew that the wry face he was making, apparently because he could not suppress his distaste, was in fact a sign of vigorous self-control. He wanted to pull his hair out. Or hers. Or spank her, maybe.
She had rarely watched TV, not because the programs were offensive—content seemed irrelevant—but because the activity bored her. Now the thing was to become her livelihood.
She bought a VCR for her set. She took the Quidnunc tape home the night of her debut as an anchor. She slid it into the machine. In the unlit apartment her brilliant garments merged with the darkness. She sat on a hassock, elbows on knees, chin on knuckles. She watched herself. Then, forgetting the remote, she reached forward and rewound, staring at the spinning green numbers as if she could keep track of them. She watched herself again, then again. Content still didn’t matter. She studied her face.
What a peculiar mug! The mirror in the bathroom didn’t begin to catch its oddities—the touching slant of the jaw when she made a certain turn, for instance, or the way the moussed hair got separated by the tip of the ear thrusting palely upwards. Mirrors threw back only two things: the greedy stare of one eye as a line was drawn across the lid; and the preen of a finished full-face . . . Was that spittle in the corner of her mouth? She leaned forward like an anxious mother, one hand floating in front of the screen as if it could wipe away the dot of silver. The dot disappeared by itself.
She got used to her features. In a few weeks she was working on expression—still sitting on the hassock in the dark, head in hands, still treating the person on the screen as something to be studied. A thoughtful sympathy quivered on its face when it reported unhappy news. There was a friendly frown of exasperation when it gave some example of human silliness. But the chin lifted a bit too readily when a guest started to preach. Better to appear chastised; let the audience get mad on your behalf. And don’t laugh at your own jokes, she directed the woman in the frame. She was its mentor now as well as its chronicler. You! You with the bump on the nose and the cantilevered lower lip. You’re not attractive, you know—you only look attractive. She laughed at that unvoiced quip, or half-laughed; her left fist was embedded in her left cheek and only the right side of her mouth was able to smile. She wondered whether asymmetry would be captivating.
After a few weeks she stopped being critical. Now when she played herself at night she watched with admiration as her glossed, eye-lined lids rose and fell. Her frosted mouth grinned in the new crooked way. She was not so much at ease as accustomed. And cleverness had leaped into her mouth like a gremlin. She had put aside the metaphors she was accustomed to use and had taken up instead the bon mot. “A man to be fecund with,” she sighed after
a report on a young millionaire. “She snoops to conquer”—that was how she summed up a luminary of network news.
“Your remarks have become pointed,” said her old boss at their weekly lunch.
“Like pencils?”
“Darts.”
“I do miss you,” she said softly.
But his place in her world had been taken, not by the affected Ramsay Magraw, but by the two steady cameras, each with its glass lens and red light, scrupulously in attendance.
And people were beginning to recognize her. She who had been indistinguishable from her surroundings now stood out in colorful relief. “The TV lady, right?” She wondered if that Russian was a Quidnunc fan. He’d prefer the networks, wouldn’t he? all those conflagrations in all those other places. On the other hand, public television supposedly stretched the mind. “We must expect that what we believe to be right will soon be proved wrong,” she said, uncharacteristically solemn, quoting but not citing Max Weber, imagining the man from Moscow watching her in his solitary room. He lit another cigarette. She put her fingers to her lips in the un-self-consciously thoughtful way she had been practicing; she let the fingers slide to her lap, as if remembering all of a sudden that she was on camera; the right side of her face lifted in her trademark grin.
It was a sweet moment, she thought, playing the tape an hour later. Now she was the Russian. She tilted a pen between fingers and took an occasional puff, and watched the credits unscroll over a long shot of two anchors soundlessly chatting, Ramsay disheveled, she running her hand through her hair, she knew exactly how to do it, three fingers began at the corner of the brow and danced lightly to the crown, the bangs fell back perfectly into place.
It was perhaps too sweet a moment. She was never to achieve that repletion again. She began to feel gorged instead. Some days she shuddered with nausea, as if a substance was poisoning her and she couldn’t stop ingesting it. (“We can’t bear the stuff,” the Cambodian women at the candy factory had told her. “We snack on celery and rice cakes.”)
What disgusted Franny was the endless self-care. She resented counting grams of fat. She hated working out. She begrudged the time spent shopping for clothes. Mostly she felt tyrannized by the need to make up . . . she confessed this to her old boss over the telephone; she was too busy for lunch. “Painting the same pale egg of a face, morning after morning,” she said. She didn’t tell him that she now recoiled from the unpainted egg—not an egg at all, really: a beige lump, expressionless unless you counted the morning pout. Sometimes she was too hasty: her hand would slip and a clownish crescent would appear over an eye, and she’d have to wipe the stuff off with baby oil and wait for the oil to dry and start again. “I’m going to try surgical tattooing.”
It was a new method of outlining the eyes, she explained to him, a method approved by the FDA but not by third parties. “Insurance plans won’t have anything to do with this operation. You have to pay out of your pocket. Not to mention through your nose.” She giggled. “Maybe I should do my nose at the same time.”
“Don’t touch the nose.” Restraint had been his only tone-of-voice for so many years; now he found he could summon no other. He tried repetition. “Don’t touch the nose. Don’t get tattooed.”
She left her nose alone. She hadn’t really been considering rhinoplasty; she’d just been making conversation. But she wanted the tattooing. It was her destiny, like the contact lenses.
She scheduled the procedure for a Friday morning—Ramsay would do the show without her that night.
The reception area was mauve. She was led into a very bright room with a recliner, and after she had made herself comfortable a plastic sheet was slung across her body and tied behind her neck. Then the recliner was tipped backwards and the tattooist came in, very tall, gowned and masked in green. A cone was applied to her nose—she had agreed to this, she remembered—and for some portion of time, not measurable, she floated in a vitreous bliss. The lordly tattooist concentrated on his millimeter of skin. Franny’s hands grasped her own elbows in an enchanted embrace.
The procedure ended. The ecstasy faded. Her eyes were now permanently beautiful, or would be, once the slight swelling had gone down. She could get the eyebrows done too, the tattooist informed her. Lips were an entirely other matter—that was real surgery, the Paris mouth they called it, Hollywood hopefuls all wanted to look like Michelle Pfeiffer, it cost them a fortune, and they still had to wear lipstick anyway. Ever think of having those ears pinned back? You could mention my name on your show, I hear you have a show, never have caught it myself—cable’s my game.
A week later Franny got an infection of the eyelashes.
“Palpebritis,” she informed the camera, the audience, the Russian, herself, grinning crookedly, her right eye gorgeous behind its contact lens, her left one squinting under the outraged lid.
She stopped the tape. PAUSE said the letters; the numbers were still. The infected lid looked warm. It was warm; a crockpot for bacteria. The asymmetrical mouth looked wretched. The moussed hair surrounding the besieged face could have passed for barbed wire.
PLAY. The homuncula—femincula?—oh, who cared?—continued with the news.
Things happened fast this time, too. Franny’s right sclera developed sympathetic conjunctivitis. Now she looked as if a rival had been scratching her eyes out.
There were drops for the pain and drops for the inflammation and drops to correct the blurring. “Your eyes will heal,” said the ophthalmologist. “But, my dear, tattooing . . . Really, I wish you had consulted me first. Of course you can’t wear your lenses.”
Eyeglasses quenched Franny’s new face. She tried the standard frames she’d worn when she worked for the newspaper. Perhaps she looked no plainer now than earlier; but she had become accustomed to distinctiveness. She tried grannies and goggles and harlequins. Nothing helped.
She couldn’t manage the lopsided smile.
She became too uneasy to run her hand through her hair.
The nervous wit pried itself loose from her tongue and ran off.
She felt her charm draining away, like life. And everybody at Quidnunc was so noticeably kind, to her face, and so patently engaged in sabotage, behind her back.
When Ramsay told her that the contract wouldn’t be renewed; that her predecessor, driven crazy by the kids, wanted the old job back, Franny shrugged inside a brown sweater. “I was not cut out to be an anchor,” she said at last.
“No? What were you cut out for, then?” shuffling some papers.
An anchorite . . . But she wouldn’t waste the pun on him.
She is good at free-lance editing, but the pay is skimpy. Her eyes have recovered. She walks up Godolphin Hill most nights. She thinks about the bag lady a lot, she told her boss at their most recent lunch. “Maybe I should study social work,” she mused. “Or become a cop.” He didn’t reply. Suddenly animated, she said, “I’ll take up stemming. I’ll wear shades and a cardboard sign. Seduced and Abandoned!” and for a forgetful moment, she lifted one corner of her mouth.
Mates
Keith and Mitsuko Maguire drifted into town like hoboes, though the rails they rode were only the trolley tracks from Boston, and they paid their fares like everyone else. But they seemed as easy as vagabonds, without even a suitcase between them, and only one hat, a canvas cap. They took turns putting it on. Each wore a hiker’s back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack. Two lime green sneakers hung from Mitsuko’s pack.
That afternoon they were seen sharing a loaf and a couple of beers on a bench in Logowitz Park. Afterwards they relaxed under a beech tree with their paperbacks. They looked as if they meant to camp there. But sleeping outside was as illegal twenty-five years ago as it is today; and these newcomers, it turned out, honored the law. In fact they spent their first night in the Godolphin Inn, like ordinary travelers. They spent their second night in the apartment they had just rented at the top of a three-decker on Lewis Street, around the corner from the house I have lived in
since I was a girl.
And there they stayed for a quarter of a century, maintaining cordial relations with the downstairs landlord and with the succession of families who occupied the middle flat.
Every fall they planted tulips in front. In the spring Keith mowed the side lawn. Summers they raised vegetables in the back; all three apartments shared the bounty.
Anyone else in their position would have bought a single-family house or a condo, maybe after the first child, certainly after the second. Keith, a welder, made good money; and Mitsuko, working part time as a computer programmer, supplemented their income. But the Maguires kept on paying rent as if there were no such thing as equity. They owned no television; and their blender had only three speeds. But although the net curtains at their windows seemed a thing of the moment, like a bridal veil, their plain oak furniture had a responsible thickness. On hooks in the back hall hung the kids’ rain gear, and Keith’s hard hat, and Mitsuko’s sneakers. The sneakers’ green color darkened with wear; eventually she bought a pair of pink ones.
I taught all three of the boys. By the time the oldest entered sixth grade he was a passionate soccer player. The second, the bookish one, wore glasses. The third, a cutup, was undersized. In each son the mother’s Eastern eyes looked out of the father’s Celtic face; a simple, comely, repeated visage; a glyph meaning ‘child.’
Mitsuko herself was not much bigger than a child. When the youngest began high school even he had outstripped his mother. Her little face contained a soft beige mouth, a nose of no consequence, and those mild eyes. Her short hair was clipped every month by Keith. (In return Mitsuko trimmed Keith’s receding curls and rusty beard.) She wore tees and jeans and sneakers except for public occasions; then she wore a plum-colored skirt and a white silk blouse. I think it was always the same skirt and blouse. The school doctor once referred to her as generic; but when I asked him to identify the genus he sighed his fat sigh. “Female parent? All I mean is that she’s stripped down.” I agreed. It was as if nature had given her only the essentials: flat little ears; binocular vision; teeth strong enough for buffalo steak, though they were required to deal with nothing more fibrous than apples and raw celery (Mitsuko’s cuisine was vegetarian). Her breasts swelled to the size of teacups when she was nursing, then receded. The school doctor’s breasts, sometimes visible under a summer shirt, were slightly bigger than Mitsuko’s.
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