“I’m sorry; maybe we could play another time.”
Lisa pushed the cards back toward Harriet, and she moved to make her way across the shop. As she waded her way through the crowd, she struggled to maintain her balance in the whirl of activity.
This was all so different. Lisa had been living in Brooklyn her entire life, but she had never beheld a place like this. Women streamed around the space, holding delicate cups of drink, as others sat cross-legged next to mannequins, making pastel sketches of fashion. Still others emerged from the fitting room, modeling glamorous ensembles for clusters of friends.
It all sparkled, and it was such a shock to Lisa’s weary eyes that she nearly forgot to look for Elaine. Then she suddenly remembered her envelope of dollar bills, still clutched in her fingers, now coated with sweat.
She searched the store, unable to find Elaine, until she finally spotted her head of jet-black hair behind some coatracks.
Elaine was in the lead position of a circle. The other ladies were observing her with rapt attention as they held little instruments, metallic triangles and miniature drums, which they plinked and thumped as Elaine rested, with half-closed eyes, between reading the lines of a poem.
Lisa thought of Billy, who had often talked of beatniks. He used that term for people he didn’t like. Those damn beatniks. He would gyrate his hands in a series of little snaps, and Lisa could never help but laugh.
“Drip, drop.”
Lisa’s cheeks reddened. Elaine’s voice was husky, breathy—sensual.
“Heated rain on my tongue lashing besides your body. Mind open, thoughts closed, the time has come for a little—wandering.”
A woman struck a metallic triangle with a little mallet.
“Elaine!” Lisa’s voice quavered.
Most of the women in the circle gawked at her—this interrupter—yet Elaine didn’t even lift her head. In some sort of trance, she continued. “I’d like to know the wistful world in which you live. I’d like to eat your sugared words, and your silent dreams.”
“Elaine!” Lisa hissed.
Elaine seemed to hear her at last; her half-open eyes widened as she brightened and gave Lisa a friendly smile:
“Well! You made it here!”
Lisa clutched her sweaty little envelope. “I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“That’s fine! I was worried you got lost!” Elaine set her poetry book down on her chair. “Can you take over, Gloria?” She whisked herself away from the group and grabbed Lisa’s arm as if they were old friends. “I’m so happy you made it here safe! I really should’ve been firmer about not having you come out—it’s so nasty out there.”
“I feel awful for letting you pay for that cab ride, but thanks so much.” Lisa kept her eyes averted and pushed the envelope into Elaine’s hands. Lisa scratched her own wrists, itchy from the wool of her mother’s coat.
“It’s perfectly all right, dear, but thank you. It’s all worked out. You’ve gotten to experience the Starlite!”
Elaine led them over to the cashier’s counter on the side of the store, which was piled high with poetry books, novels, and biographies. Behind the counter, women perched on high stools, sketching portraits of each other on long shopkeeper ledgers.
Lisa turned to Elaine, her voice tinny. “May I ask, what sort of club is this?”
“A women’s social group. But, you know, it’s a lot of things, really. Improvement of the mind, joining together for fun. Girls being girls, really!” Elaine’s laugh had a melody like a song.
“Yeah.”
To the side of them, Madeline held a tray of drinks in balance as she gyrated her shoulders in dance.
“Care to join us for another read?” Elaine asked as she flipped through a poetry book.
“I really have to get going.”
“Oh?”
“I do,” Lisa insisted. Her twenty-two-year-old lips were drawn, and her eyelids sagged with exhaustion. She bundled herself back up into her thin brown coat.
Lisa opened the heavy door to the sidewalk and exited the shop, entering the quiet night. The air was bitter. On the street, tiny snowflakes glinted like glitter in the beams of the streetlights, a crystalline path in the night.
She made her way around the block, trying not to slip, and hoisted herself into the driver’s seat.
Alone, she rubbed her hands on the steering wheel, trying to warm them. Her breath formed a thin white cloud in front of her face, which soon faded to darkness.
Lisa sat without driving for some time, her mind pulsating in shock from what she had just seen—all of these women, so free.
4
Elaine
It was about two in the morning when Elaine made it back to the brownstone—a little tipsy, but mostly infused with other potent elements.
It was an hour of calm at the brownstone. Tommy snoozed on the sofa downstairs, his face quiet as his jazz record finished its rotation. Elaine switched off the record player and turned off the overhead light, went upstairs to the bedroom, and flopped under the cold sheets. In only a short while, a comfortable cloud of slumber had possessed her.
Tommy soon tromped upstairs with a tense energy. He scrunched on the bed next to her with lengthy puffs of a cigarette.
She groaned. “I’m trying to sleep.”
Tommy’s voice was rough, accusatory. “You came home late. Why did you come home so late?”
“I need to sleep.” She exhaled and buried her face in the valley of the pillow.
“Guess that none of those women at that place you go have got a man in their home.” She kept silent. He continued. “A man in his home … lonely in his home. All alone in his home.” He turned on a dime suddenly, chuckling to himself. He whistled a tune.
Elaine exhaled with a roar of primal exhaustion. “Go to sleep, Thomas!”
He seemed to decelerate a moment later. He sidled up to her, rested his head on her shoulder, and fell asleep soon after.
Elaine slid the cigarette out of his still-upright hand and extinguished it on a marble coaster by their bedside.
Shortly afterward, she collapsed into a deep sleep, with scattered visions of a countryside farmhouse playing out in her head. Her as a little girl on the moors, trying to get back to London. Her parents sheltering under a kitchen table as she and Catherine ran to the city, trying to save them. Always the same dream since they evacuated the flat years ago, during the war.
At four in the morning, she woke again. This time, it was to the sound of his feet on the creaky boards.
When Tommy was in a melancholy mood, he would play blues records for her in the dark, wrapping his fingers around her waist and telling her stories about his childhood. He said he had been alone a lot in the large, empty rooms of this brownstone, and he would take things apart—cabinets and radios—just to see how they worked, then try to reassemble them. Each night, a maid would feed him dinner as his mother remained in bed. Maids never lasted too long; his mother always forgot to pay them.
Tommy couldn’t stay too long in bed, he said. His mother always stayed too long in hers.
With heavy eyes now, Elaine watched him pace the bedroom with a Marlboro clutched between his fingers. He moved in little winding paths, unable to settle.
She grasped his hands for a moment. Then he stood still.
The steady pressure of her fingers, at times, could still tame him.
* * *
In the morning, Elaine woke to the bleeding part of her cycle. She sipped her tea slowly, holding her temples as her head throbbed.
Though it was late in the morning, her sister still wasn’t back—she must have slept at the Starlite. Catherine had made her grand entrance at midnight, well dressed for such an hour, in an emerald-green gown, her limbs stretched languid, catlike. She was lucid, in her typical way of drinking only to the precipice of possibility and emerging unscathed, ready to go full-out. Catherine could sip gin all afternoon and go on to win game after game of cards.
Last night, Elai
ne had followed her to the card circle, where the ladies were engaged in a game she had never heard of, called bridge. Elaine couldn’t muster enthusiasm to learn the rules, but she made herself mingle and dance with the others. Catherine started to sing to the ladies—she’d brought along some new record album—but Elaine soon said farewell to Madeline and the others.
Now Elaine’s body seized in a turgid twinge as cramps squeezed her from within. She threw her gaze upstairs; Tommy was still sleeping. The phone rang—loudly, near her ear. She grabbed it.
“Hello?”
Tommy stirred in the room above. His thuds rumbled on the ceiling above her head.
“Miss Huxley?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Frank Stephens, from the Chronicle. We received your application for fact-checker. We would like to invite you in for an interview, if you’re available.”
She blinked in time with the pulse of her headache. “Oh?” A flush came to her cheeks.
“Are you still interested in the job?”
“I’m very interested!” Her voice was ebullient—too childlike; she quieted herself. “When shall I come in?”
“Next week, if you’re available. How’s Monday at two?”
“That should be fine.” She suppressed a sudden tickle in her throat as her throat seized with the unknown. The noise of Tommy opening a closet came from upstairs.
“We’re on Forty-Third Street, between Seventh and Eighth.”
“Yes, I know the area.”
“Okay, then—we’ll see you on Monday.”
Elaine subdued her heavy exhalations. “Thank you.”
Mr. Stevens hung up. She cleared her throat and mechanically took a sip of tea.
Tommy came bounding down the stairs. This morning he appeared full of energy—giddy. His black hair was wet, slicked back from the shower. Seeing her, he made a little satisfied sound and slid behind her, arms wrapped around her waist.
* * *
Five years ago, she had worked at a news radio station with Tommy. He was an engineer, she a fact-checker. Elaine had applied for the fact-checker job after graduating college as a possible stepping-stone to a better position, yet she felt alternately lonely and bored in the role—calling sources but never permitted to hunt down a new story on her own.
Her lunch hour was spent with the other girls at the station, each talking over the other as they ate their cold-cut sandwiches on white bread. Their chatter would inevitably tilt toward wedding planning—all of these girls were engaged, which made Elaine twitch, because she’d never even had a steady boyfriend. She usually excused herself mid-lunch to hide out in the hallways of the radio station building.
It was during one of these jaunts that she first caught sight of Tommy, through a control room window. He was tall and broad, with wavy, jet-black hair set above a Roman nose. She stood for a moment to admire this handsome man as he wrote on a clipboard. Soon he noticed her looking, and he flashed her a grin.
Elaine reddened and fled to the restroom. But she couldn’t help herself; on the following day, she returned to linger by the control room window again, until he noticed—giving her a wide smile that made her heart thump wildly.
He opened the door and peered into the hallway. “I saw you casting an eyeball in here. Care to take a tour of the control room?”
She began to stammer, which was quite unlike her. “That’s all right. My-my-my lunch break ends in a few minutes.”
Tommy smirked. “How about the abbreviated tour, then?”
“All right then,” she consented.
Tommy led her on a tour of the panels, the wires, and the buttons, explaining their functions in turn. Elaine had actually never seen the control room, although she had worked at the radio station for a few months. Female employees weren’t usually invited into the mechanical rooms.
“Where does the sound go from here?” she inquired.
“The tower transmits everything from a little island off the Bronx.”
“An island off the Bronx?”
“Sure, a little island. Nothing fancy.” Tommy’s posture was casual as he held his clipboard in hand. “There’s really nothing on that little island but that tower.”
“I didn’t even know there was an island in the Bronx.”
A grin spread across his face. “Yeah.”
“It’s all quite interesting.” Elaine didn’t want to interrupt him any longer, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave. “I’ve only been to the Bronx a few times.”
Tommy looked down at his clipboard for some time, seeming to take notes about the functions of the control panel. Then he looked up, locking eyes with her.
“You seem interested the workings of the station. How would you like to take a trip to see the island?”
“Right now?” Her kitten heels felt glued to the linoleum.
“I have to go do some maintenance on the tower. You can come check it out with me, if you’d like.”
Elaine tried to swallow the nervous knot in her throat. “Go with you to the island?”
“Sure. We’ll have to take the boat. The station owns a little boat; we use it for inspections.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Why not?” He was matter-of-fact, confident. “You’re a station employee, aren’t you? You should learn about the operations of your employer.”
“I’m just a fact-checker. And I’ve only been working here for a few months.”
“Hey, well, I’ve been here for three years, and I know the rules around here. There’s no rule saying you can’t assist me off-hours.”
He grinned at her again, and her heart thumped fast. She would have to be bold in order to be given more responsibility at the station.
She did want hands-on involvement with the workings of the news. She also sensed that there could be another kind of opportunity with this man.
Tommy smiled at her, and his blue eyes danced across hers playfully. “So, what do you say? How about tomorrow, after your shift? I get off at four. We could take the bus together.”
“Well—”
“Well?”
“All right.” She took a deep breath. “I’m Elaine, just so you know.”
“And I’m Tommy.” His eyes twinkled as he gave her a firm, businesslike handshake.
* * *
After work the next day, they waited for the bus together. Tommy was smoking, and he gave her a light for her own cigarette. Elaine smoked only when she was nervous; her fingers trembled as she brought the cigarette to her lips.
After they boarded the bus, Elaine took the window seat and Tommy sat next to her, his legs crossed in the opposite direction, slung all the way over in the aisle. They were quiet for a bit, and then on impulse she offered him a biscuit from her purse. He accepted the snack, and they sat eating crumbly bits of the biscuit and talking about food, which led to a conversation about the portrayal of food in books. Just like her, Tommy liked to read—and just like her, he spoke French. As they chatted, he swung his legs from the aisle closer to her own, though not touching.
Elaine had never been that close to a man’s legs, having barely even seen a man at Briarcliff College.
Tommy struck up a dialogue about nineteenth-century French literature, and they discussed their favorites as their bus crossed the bridge onto City Island. The quiet main road was flanked by narrow residential streets lined with picturesque homes. Every one of these side streets terminated in the choppy, blue-gray expanse of the Long Island Sound. Elaine gazed at the water in the distance, feeling the leg of Tommy’s trousers graze against her own, ever so slightly.
At the last stop on City Island, they got off the bus. She dawdled behind Tommy’s long strides as he led her down to the radio station’s boat, a little dinghy docked in the sound. As he helped her into the boat; Elaine took his arm, her face growing warm. He set up some paddles and pushed them offshore, down toward the radio tower, which was perched on a little mound of land.
&nbs
p; Tommy’s dark eyes were alert and focused as he paddled—then he paused, looked at Elaine, and leaned forward. At once, his lips were touching hers. It was firm and quick, of a piece with their encounter—something else that moved ahead unexpectedly.
Her first kiss.
They continued to see each other, maintaining a professional distance at the radio station but spending hours together each weekend at cafés in Greenwich Village, sipping tea and espresso, talking in French and reading poetry. He would kiss her in alleyways, long and slow—then they would head out for the evening to literary readings or plays or sumptuous afternoons under the oaks in Central Park.
He was intense, and he captivated her.
* * *
Now behind her, in the brownstone, Tommy nestled his chin, heated from the shower, straight into the soft spot above her shoulder. It was an exquisitely sensitive place—the same spot where a gossamer scarf had rested on her neck the other night at the Starlite. A beautiful melody had drifted over to the literary circle that night. She had sailed into song as the ladies around her clapped, and she had danced in a way like never before, with her arms wide open.
Elaine closed her eyes. There were so many demands on her attention.
Yet there were also so many things for which she wanted to be present.
“You look ravishing right now, with your cheeks flushed like that,” Tommy laughed. His lips were hot on her neck.
He didn’t enjoy it when she left for the Starlite—and he certainly wouldn’t want her to leave him alone for most of the day if she got a job at the Chronicle.
There was no way she could tell him about her interview—not just yet, anyway.
5
Lisa
Lisa’s mother was up at six, pressing a shirt for her husband to wear to his factory job while he shaved.
Last night, when Lisa arrived home from the Starlite, past midnight, her mother had been upright on the living room chair, hair in curlers but face in full makeup, writing in the crossword pages. She didn’t acknowledge Lisa’s return but simply swished her slippers down the worn carpet and settled in near the snores of Lisa’s father.
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