by Susan Isaacs
But as it turned out, all my agonizing was wasted; John’s breathing grew slow, low, slower, and then very loud. He hadn’t been going crazy over how to ditch me; he’d fallen into a drunken sleep.
At least I knew all about that. What he was to international commercial law, I was to boozers. And John was a doozy: stretched out flat on his back, one arm hanging limp over the edge of the mattress while the other gently cradled his pillow, his hand now and then moving as if he was still doing it, stroking the pillow or cupping a feather-filled corner.
Slowly, I slid off the bed and tippytoed over to my clothes. But no, I didn’t have to be careful. I could have belted out “The Star-Spangled Banner”; it would have taken a ton of TNT to blow John out of bed.
I got dressed slowly, as if he was watching me—arching my foot like a ballerina when I put on my stockings, then lifting my leg up real high. When I hooked my brassiere, I turned my back to him, but then I peeked back over my shoulder: so coy. I said to myself, You must look like a soon-to-be has-been starlet in the back pages of Photoplay. But then I realized I was just copying any sexy gesture I could, because I’d never really felt that the part of me from the neck down was so…so useful. I touched—caressed, really—the skin on my shoulder and then turned around to look straight at John.
But then I couldn’t stand to leave. What was there in Ridgewood—in all the rest of the world—that could beat this? I sat on the edge of the mattress, right beside him, like a wife. When I combed back his hair with my fingers, he didn’t stir.
He was so wonderful to watch. Everything. The curlicues of hair on his stomach made little c’s and o’s. Finally he rolled away from me, over onto his side. His back was graceful, wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted and strong, as if he spent his days on parallel bars instead of practicing law. At last I stood, covered him with the sheet and left the room.
But when it came to leaving the apartment…Well, I couldn’t. Not only did I want to know more about him; I wanted a detailed map of his life. I wanted every question answered. I moved around, poking into drawers and closets. I went through every room like a sleazy detective. Down on my knees to see if there was anything interesting under the pale living room couch. (Just beige carpet.) I opened the linen closet, to check the color of the towels: beige again, with Nan’s monogram in white. I even examined the dishes in the sink: white.
If John and Nan’s apartment meant anything, it meant good taste was the opposite of what I liked. Nothing there had any color, not even the food; all that was in the refrigerator was a bottle of milk that smelled as if Nan had bought it right before she caught the 8:02 to Reno (to prevent John, starving to death a day or two later, from committing some atrocious crime, like bringing orange juice or red meat or green beans into the apartment).
Only the few paintings she’d left had color. There were four or five empty picture hooks. But you’d have to be a big smear fan to appreciate the art she’d left. Yellow globs and black brush strokes in the hall. In the living room, one with skinny blue lines, like a close-up of varicose veins.
Suddenly, I felt so tired. I turned my back on the blue lines and walked over to the window. I opened it a crack, leaned my forehead against the cool glass and looked down at the street. Silent, except for one “Come on, stupid!” of a man walking his wife’s toy poodle. Even from six stories up, you could see the rhinestone collar on the dog’s neck. What kind of a man would let a woman make him walk a dog with a rhinestone collar?
My eyes closed. Oh, how I wanted to sleep. But one thing I knew: Either I got out right away and made the long subway trip back to Queens, or I’d be drawn back into the bedroom.
What got me going was the picture of John’s horrified face as he woke in the morning—to me.
I left, and fast.
I invented whooping cough, imagined the mumps. I even created old Grossvater Oskar, who had a fatal attack, and—Listen, um, Mr. Berringer, I’m real sorry—the funeral arrangements had been left to me. But in the end, I was at my desk the next morning. I waited. Nine, nine-fifteen, ten, ten forty-five. John hadn’t called. He hadn’t come in.
I’d once read in an article in the Brooklyn Eagle that when you’re afraid, you’re supposed to force yourself to think of the most awful thing. Then, whatever finally happens will be a breeze. But that turned out to be crummy advice. I thought of all the worst things—how could I help it?—and by eleven o’clock my stomach was killing me. It wasn’t a normal bellyache, like after an iffy piece of Boston cream pie. This was agony, so that every breath, every involuntary movement, was like being ripped open by a knife.
One fourth of a sloe gin fizz was no excuse for what I’d done the night before. At least John was drunk. I hadn’t considered the consequences for even two seconds and the consequences were frightening. I could get fired.
The pain was so bad. Just losing my job would be a picnic. I could get tossed out on my ear without a recommendation. Up and down the street, every employment agency saying, Sorry, Miss Voss, but without a letter from your former employer…Going home to concoct some story for my mother, having to take charity handouts.
John could call me into his office, call me names. A guy’s drunk and you don’t even have the decency to push him off. Slut. (Or whatever happens could be better. Ha-ha. He could burst into the office with one of those long white boxes they put roses in and announce—real loud—Linda, I love you. Talk about daydreams. But at least my stomach felt soothed for that minute.)
He finally came in, a few minutes after eleven. He nodded but didn’t look at me, walked straight into his office and closed the door. I couldn’t look at him, either, but out of the corner of my eye I caught the shadow of his dark suit.
It was keep busy or go nuts. I said to myself, No matter how terrible the pain is, you’ve got to move. I made myself squat down and spent a half hour straightening out file folders in the bottom drawer that were already as straight as a company in Rommel’s Seventh. That was the German in me: neat, precise. Like my Grandma Olga’s icebox, where the cheese had marched behind the milk, where the carrots almost stood at attention and the chicken wings practically saluted.
But I hadn’t been so German the night before. I don’t know what I’d been, but the scratch marks I’d seen on his back were not made by a controlled person. But then, neither of us had been exactly under control. I had the marks his teeth made along the soft underpart of my arm. When I thought about them, they throbbed, like a pulse.
“Miss Voss.”
I hadn’t heard the door open, but there he was, standing, waiting for me. I got up slowly. I walked into his office and closed the door, but then my heel caught on one of the tiny gray-brown nubs in the rug. It was a miracle I didn’t fall splat on my face, although it took some fancy footwork—step, jump, step—not to go sprawling across his desk; for a second I must have looked like I was doing some dopey dance, trying to be cute. So when I sat down, I made my expression doubly serious, to show him this secretary was no silly, dancing fool. This was the ever-efficient Miss Voss.
He sat at his desk, hands clasped, looking at me, serious, lawyerly. Just let it be quick, I began to bargain silently. No “I’m sure you comprehend what an awkward situation this is, Miss Voss, and much as I wish we might avoid…” Oh, God, my stomach.
“Do you have your pad?” he asked.
“What?”
“Your pad,” he said. “I have a few letters, and then I have some calls to make.”
Nothing showed in his deep blue eyes. He wore the face of a man who had spent the night before at a Bar Association meeting instead of rolling around in his bed, naked, drunk, crazy.
“Is this a good time for you, Miss Voss?” A slight smile, about what he would give the guy at the newsstand, or a men’s room attendant.
“Yes, Mr. Berringer.”
I left to get my pad. So this was how he wanted it: It never happened. I could get all worked up and think about standing on a breadline, but in the real world, how ma
ny bilingual legal secretaries were there who took shorthand at one hundred twenty words a minute? In the real world, real men need real stenographers, so they pretend real things never happened.
But then I thought: Is it possible he could have forgotten? Could he have blacked out, blanked out, and not remembered what had gone on between us? I returned to his office, and even as I sat down he was saying, “To Gunther Hoff-mann. Do you have his address in the files?”
“Yes, Mr. Berringer.”
He wanted to forget. Or he couldn’t remember. I would never know which.
I turned a corner in the hall and ran smack into Edward Leland. “Whoops!” It just slipped out, and when I said, “I’m sorry,” I sounded too loud, too emotional. I lowered my head in embarrassment, but since he didn’t move, I looked up again. He looked different, and for a second I couldn’t figure out why. “Excuse me, Mr. Leland.” That sounded better, although he just stood there, looking through me with those black, spooky eyes. But then, before I had time to become a basket case, I did a silent Aha! Mr. Leland was different: darker, healthier-looking. If he was in a movie, he’d adjust his tie in a mirror and say, I do feel fit.
But what he actually said was: “I’m glad I ran into you. Could you spare some time for me tomorrow, Miss Voss?”
“Yes, Mr. Leland.”
He’d definitely been in the sun. His nose was peeling. It was easy to see his nose because he wasn’t very tall. I realized I’d never seen him standing before and had assumed a giant was behind that desk. But he was only a few inches taller than I was. Big, though, with too-broad shoulders, as if his mother had snuck out on his father and had a fast one with a prizefighter.
The tops of his cheeks were peeling too. But when you looked harder, it wasn’t the tan rich lawyers get sitting on one of their rich beaches. His skin was red beneath the brown—the kind of burn you get from wind as well as sun. That time I’d been in his office, looked in his valise at his heavy snowflake sweater and—crazily—imagined him on some spy mission in Scandinavia. Could it actually have happened? Could Edward Leland have—
He interrupted my thoughts. “I’ll need you for at least an—”
But then all of a sudden he just walked away. Like I hadn’t been there, like he hadn’t stopped to talk. He just strode down the hall toward his office, taking confident, there’s-only-me-in-the-world, senior-partner steps. I turned around; then I saw what Mr. Leland had heard. It was Mr. Conklin, an associate who would never make partner because he wore bow ties. It was spooky that Mr. Leland had known Mr. Conklin was there; even when he’d been talking to me, acting as if he hadn’t a care in the world, he’d been listening, not trusting.
Mr. Conklin looked at me a little strangely: Why was a secretary standing alone in the middle of a corridor? And then I realized that was exactly what Mr. Leland had wanted him to see: a secretary. A secretary. Big deal.
Late in the afternoon, John came back from a meeting in the conference room. As he walked past my desk, his jacket sleeve touched my shoulder. Naturally, I was as cool as a cucumber; I jumped so that I nearly ripped out the Kapital to Kartoffel page of my German-English dictionary. He murmured, “In my office, please.”
This time I was all set with my pad. But John just put a small piece of paper, the kind torn out of a pocket diary, on the far edge of his desk near where I stood. I waited for some clue—a nod, a wink—but I got nothing. I didn’t exactly rush to reach for the paper, but since he didn’t yell, Hey, what do you think you’re doing? I picked it up. It said: Hebel’s, 325 East 87th Street.
When I looked up, he said, “Seven-thirty.” And when I looked back down at the paper, he added, “That’s all for now. Thanks.”
Unless you were a sauerkraut tycoon, there was no reason to like Hebel’s. It was one of those phony gemütlichkeit places in Yorkville where waiters from Saxony ran around in Bavarian lederhosen. Their pale, fat thighs looked like bratwurst. Beside the cardboard Wiener schnitzel on the plates they were toting were balls of potato mixed with sauerkraut, sprinkled with caraway seeds; they looked like bombs made to Luftwaffe specifications.
Hebel’s was a German restaurant strictly for Americans. It was always advertised in the papers, a place where some tourist from Indiana would say, Gee, Mary Lou, let’s do something crazy and try this here Nazi food so we can tell the folks back home.
I sat alone at the table, ignoring the beer stein collection on the high shelf that ran around the restaurant. I made eyes, noses and mouths on the frosty outside of my water glass. John wasn’t there, even though it was ten to eight. So that’s when I started feeling sorry for myself again; if I’d had a hankie, I would have dabbed my eyes. I saw myself starring in a silent movie—the country girl led down the garden path by the city slicker: seduced, abandoned. There’d be a close-up, I’d blink a couple of times, my mouth would form a big, sad “O” and then the words would flash on the screen: Oh, the shame of it all!
That was so corny even I couldn’t stand it. Anyway, if I still needed to be pathetic, I could feel sorry for myself all the way home. It was time to go. John—who in all the years I worked for him had never been more than forty seconds late for anything—wasn’t going to show. So naturally, just as I pushed back my chair and stood up, my head crashed into his chin.
“God, oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, with much too much heartiness for someone who’s just been clipped. “Fine.”
Slowly, we both lowered ourselves into our chairs. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.
I wasn’t really ready to trust my voice, so I just shook my head. He moved his finger a tenth of an inch and a waiter leapt to the table, responding to John’s handsomeness, his authority—his rightness—with menus and a wide lackey’s smile.
The two of us got very busy for a few minutes examining the menus. You would have thought John was going over the toughest contract of his career, the way he was reading every word. I kept sneaking little looks at him. Hey, I wanted to ask, how come you were twenty minutes late? You left the office a half hour before I did. Where were you? He wasn’t giving out anything, except, suddenly, a stare—right into my eyes. It made me nervous, but I could learn to live with it. His eyes, locked on mine, were something! Funny, but I never realized what beautiful eyelashes he had. They were light, but long, and they made thick shadows on his cheeks.
I tried to take in everything: the comb marks in his hair, the bulge of his knuckles. But then the waiter came, and John looked up.
“What would you like?” he asked me.
“Gee, well…I’m not…uh…Whatever you’re having.” My shining hour.
I was so nervous I didn’t even hear John order, but two minutes later the waiter brought out two plates of stew; it had probably been simmering since the day of von Hindenburg’s funeral. The way it was heaped on the plate, this was the cook’s last chance to get rid of it. They must have been shouting with glee in the kitchen.
The waiter opened a bottle of wine. I couldn’t believe it! Wine.
I sipped (I once read in Look: “Ann Harding delicately sips champagne by her swimming pool”), which was a plus, because so did he, because that was obviously what you were supposed to do. Both of us studied the mound of food in our plates with passionate concentration.
Don’t think I didn’t try to start a conversation. “Have you been here before?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. He did give me one of his better smiles, but he wasn’t talking.
That’s when I remembered the advice the sob sisters give to girls. Never ask a question that has yes or no for an answer. Instead, ask him about his interests. I already knew two of his favorites. The law. And the interest he’d shown me the night before. Both of them were great icebreakers. What’s your favorite international trade agreement? And how about: That thing with your tongue—did you ever try it on Nan?
John poured himself more wine.
Part of me wanted to stay with hi
m forever. Another part was so sure it belonged in Queens, it was all I could do not to bolt and run like hell for the subway.
The awful thing at a time like that is you actually feel your eyes, your cheeks, the little valleys between your fingers. You’re so miserable with your own wrongness, everything about you feels homely, clumsy. You’re afraid to eat—not because of the lousy food, but because you know you’ll dribble gravy down your chin. And the worst thing is to know it’s more than just a matter of not being able to make light conversation. You have real questions you can never, ever ask:
Are you embarrassed? Are you ashamed?
Are you going to fire me? Or wait a few months—so I won’t think it’s because of what I did with you—and then fire me?
Now that you’re not drunk…did you like it?
Did you really mean it when you said I was beautiful?
Are we going to do it again?
If we do, you don’t want me to call you Mr. Berringer. Do you? And I can’t call you John. Should I just not call you anything?
Is this your way of saying thanks and goodbye? (My mother would say, No, Linda, dollface. A man of his caliber would give you at least perfume—and I don’t mean just eau de cologne.)
But if this is the big kiss-off, I thought in that silence, then what about me? I know—as you often dictate—it is not germane to the matter at hand, but if these are our final moments, if I have nothing more to hope for, then how can I bear the rest of my life? If this gloppy stew now and, later, memoranda of law at some other firm and watching Hitler consume the world are my present and my future, then why—
It was weird, but just then, at my saddest, I began to feel lighter. Better. And of all reasons, because I remembered I was also working for the tan, scary Mr. Leland. Spy stuff. It made me a little excited. I started wondering how Mr. Leland would explain his new color to his friends. Mountain climbing, Chip. Bit of a windburn, Dick. Deep-sea fishing. Golf. Polo. Tennis, Bob. The rich have a million opportunities to change color.