A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “No, thank you. I’m fine on my own.”

  Stella smiled as if Lucybelle had answered correctly. What nice girl let a stranger walk with her in a big city?

  “Hey,” Stella said, “you look like a reader.”

  Lucybelle didn’t walk away, but she looked away. And refrained from asking what the girl meant.

  “Those glasses and eyebrows. The set of your mouth.”

  “Make me a reader?”

  “Yeah.” She opened the flap of her satchel and dug through the contents, reminding her again of Clare. She handed Lucybelle a small book called HOWL. “Do you know it?”

  “Yes! I mean, no. Not the book. But I met Allen Ginsberg. He was in school with me at Columbia.” She hadn’t known he was publishing a book.

  “Columbia? Fancy.”

  “No, just smart.”

  Stella laughed. “Must be. I don’t think there’s any fancy in Arkansas.”

  Lucybelle laughed too. “How do you know Pocahontas?”

  “I come from a farming family myself. Well, back a generation. My parents are both teachers. But I still recognize country when I see it.”

  “My father is a judge.”

  “Oh. So you are fancy.”

  “In a tiny town. He’s a farmer too. We have Herefords, hogs, rice. You weren’t wrong.” Lucybelle tried to hand back the book.

  “Wait.” Stella dug in her canvas satchel again and this time withdrew a pen. She took the volume of poetry from Lucybelle and opened it up to the first page. “Never write in books,” she mumbled as she wrote. “I always write in books. It keeps them alive. Books aren’t artifacts to let get dusty on a shelf.” Stella handed the book back. “When you’re finished you can return it to me. That’s my telephone number.”

  She didn’t give Lucybelle a chance to say no. Stella turned and strode away, the affected swagger a code, a comical one, and Lucybelle laughed. “Hey!” she called, but too quietly, and Stella kept going.

  That night Lucybelle read HOWL four times, each time nearly losing her breath on the fifth stanza where Ginsberg had written, “who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas . . .”

  Tuesday, November 13, 1956

  Bader didn’t even stop at the open door of her office as he stomped by saying, “My office. Now.”

  She shook a cigarette from her pack and followed him to his office, where she stood in front of his desk. The unlit cigarette embarrassed her, as if she expected a chivalrous gesture from him.

  “Where’s your pad and pen?” he asked.

  “What is it you need?”

  “Dictation.”

  “I don’t know shorthand. Ruthie is the secretary. I’m the editor.”

  “I’m leaving for Greenland tomorrow. I can’t—”

  “Tomorrow? You are?” She spoke with too much feeling, a wave of panic cresting. “But I—”

  “But you what?”

  “I don’t know. I just, well, you’re the only person I know here. I’m not sure how it’ll go without—”

  He smiled like a wolf. “Without me? I’m flattered, sugar, especially coming from you. But I spend more time in the field than in these human fortresses called cities and I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. You have enough work to keep you busy until long after I get back.”

  “No, it’s not that.” She grasped for something reasonable to say. “It’s November. No one goes to Greenland in November.”

  “Worried about me?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. In any case, I want to spend the winter there. So what is the problem?”

  He looked impatient but also curious, as if he might really listen, but she realized that anything she said would work against her, would count as whining. She’d been at SIPRE for three months. She was exhausted already and didn’t have any friends. The scientists barely looked at her when they dropped their papers on her desk. She bet they wouldn’t be able to tell their wives whether she was blond or brunette. Bader was right: there was an enormous backlog of editing and even though she’d been working her way through the pile there was no end in sight. Of course no one thanked her for her work. Why should they? She was being paid money, not compliments. She could handle the reticence. But she was growing quite tired of putting in the long hours only to have the scientists change their sentences back to whatever ungrammatical mess they’d written in the first place. She’d been meaning to speak to Bader about this. He’d said when he hired her that she’d have his full support, but what exactly did that mean? Most of the scientists thought she was just another secretary, maybe a little smarter. Even he seemed to think that, asking her to take dictation.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Months.” No smile when he said, “Really? You’ll miss me?”

  “No,” she lied. “I won’t miss you. But I’d like you to tell your scientists that I’m head of publications and an editor. I can’t make them let me improve their prose, but they can at least know that’s my job.”

  Bader nodded and then looked at his watch. “Damn,” he said. “Okay, get Ruthie in here. And tell her that I can’t tolerate a single snicker out of her, not one. That habit of hers irks the hell out of me.”

  As she turned to go, he added, “And Lucy, get the report from Ruthie as soon as she’s finished typing it. I’ll need it edited tonight. In my hands by tomorrow. Here’s my address.” He scratched it down on a matchbook and then before handing the book to her, he tore off a match and lit it. Lucybelle cupped her hands around the cigarette in her mouth and leaned gratefully toward the little flame. As she inhaled, Bader said, “Drop it off any time before eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Is it even possible to fly to Greenland this late in the season?”

  “I meant to leave two months ago. So much damn work. I need to be there for a winter season, so I’ve convinced them to give it a go.”

  Lucybelle crossed an arm under her breasts and rested her other elbow on her wrist. She drew from her cigarette while examining his long face. His ferocity appealed to her. “And if you don’t get there?”

  “I’ll dally in Paris or somewhere else civilized until I can get there. Lucy, please, get Ruthie.”

  Ruthie, the secretary, and Beverly, the office manager, both had desks in the open foyer. Lucybelle was glad to have an office with a door that closed so that she wasn’t on permanent display as they were. She stopped in front of Ruthie’s desk and told her that Bader wanted her in his office to take dictation. In her peripheral vision she saw Beverly waving her hand in the air about her head, something she’d never do in the presence of the scientists who smoked.

  “Now?” Ruthie snickered, as if Lucybelle had suggested she go fornicate with Bader in his office. She did have an odd habit of laughing nervously and flinching at sudden movements. A few years older than Lucybelle, Ruthie had sensitive gray eyes, an upturned nose, and a delicate chin. She wore her black hair in a shoulder-length pageboy, the fringe of bangs softening her pointed features.

  “Yes. Now.”

  Ruthie coughed. Lucybelle needn’t have punched the word “now.”

  They both glanced at Beverly who didn’t look up from the paperwork on her desk but who did lift a penciled eyebrow and shake her head, almost imperceptibly, but enough to make Ruthie hesitate. Beverly lacquered her bottle-auburn hair into hard waves that framed her heavily made-up face. A layer of foundation did little to conceal her pocked skin, and Lucybelle couldn’t imagine why she plucked out and then drew back in her eyebrows. She went about every task, no matter how minor, with a raw and angry determination. On her first day at the lab, Peter Hauser told Lucybelle to look out for Beverly, that she was “a real martinet.”

  Lucybelle took a final pull on her cigarette and looked for an ashtray. The two women seemed to try extra hard to make her feel unwelcome. If the scientists were oblivious to her job as editor, these two were hyper-aware of it
, resentful of her private office and perhaps even of her attempts to speak with the scientists as a peer. She wasn’t their boss, the secretary and office manager found ways to make clear with every interaction. Bader had said she’d have a staff but she didn’t yet and apparently wouldn’t until he returned from Greenland, at the very earliest, and that was not going to be for months.

  “Girls,” Bader said coming out into the foyer. “Lucy is in charge of all documents, got it? If she needs something typed, type it. Ruthie, in my office now. Dictation.”

  When late that afternoon Bader dropped the sixteen-page report on her desk, Ruthie and Beverly were long gone for the day. Lucybelle stayed until two in the morning editing and then typing a clean copy. She took a taxicab to Bader’s apartment on the north side of Chicago, planning to leave the document in his mailbox, but when she saw light along the edges of the window shade, she rang the bell. If it was so important that she finish it tonight, she’d better put it in his hands.

  She expected a pajama-clad, sleepy-eyed Bader to open the door, grab the report, and growl something about being awakened.

  “Lucy,” he said. “Come in. Come in.” He was fully dressed and wide awake. She stepped into an apartment strewn with clothing and dirty dishes and assorted oddities, including two huge earthen pots, nearly as tall as Lucybelle, and a hand-painted Japanese screen, and as she followed him into the kitchen, she encountered a stuffed jaguar. She managed to swallow her gasp just in time, and because she was behind him, he didn’t see her recoil.

  “Nerves of steel. I like that,” Bader said. “Most girls scream.”

  She stopped in front of the jaguar and tried to look into the two marble eyes, not knowing whether to run or laugh.

  “Drink?” Bader asked, lifting a bottle of gin off the kitchen counter.

  Lucybelle nodded.

  He poured a couple of fingers into two juice glasses, removed a metal ice cube tray from the freezer, and pounded it on the counter. Gin splashed out of the glasses as he dropped in the ice, and again as he swung one of the drinks in her direction.

  He returned to the living room, sat on a wicker chair designed for a patio, and read the report, turning the pages quickly, until finally a smile cranked up one side of his face. “Washburn was right. Smart girl.” With the grin that was more of a leer still in place, he added, “With nerves of steel.” He went back to the kitchen, wrapped his arms around the midsection of the taxidermic jaguar, and brought him to the front room. “Like my cat?”

  “Not really.”

  He roared his laugh and then said, “Help me pack.”

  “No. I have to get home.”

  “Not your job, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I understand. But I don’t see how I’m going to pull everything together for a couple of months in the Arctic in what—?” He consulted his watch. “Three hours.”

  “What are you going to do in Greenland?”

  “What?” As if the question had an obvious answer.

  No, that wasn’t it. He was stalling. He wanted to talk but was curbing himself. His hesitation was so uncharacteristic it made her curious. “Drilling in the winter?”

  As Bader stared at her, it was as if she could see, just below his skin, the gathering storm of some hidden enthusiasm. He said, “Classified.”

  She nodded. “Still, I’m interested.”

  “You’re going to know soon enough. You’ll be editing the plans, the feasibility reports.”

  “So tell me.”

  She saw him lose his battle with himself. He wasn’t supposed to tell her. But he couldn’t help himself. “State of the art research facility. One hundred percent manned. Year round.”

  “On the ice cap? But—”

  “Inside the ice cap.” He practically glowed as he watched for her reaction.

  She enjoyed teasing him by being blasé. “Inside. How is that possible?”

  “A complete city under the ice.”

  “Just for the ice cores?”

  Now he looked away and shook his head tightly, briefly. “You’ll know more later. Much more. For now, do you mind?” He waved at the mess of his apartment and then looked at his watch.

  Lucybelle finished the gin in her glass and as she picked her way through the detritus to the door, he began digging through a pile of clothes, seeming to have already forgotten her. She let herself out and walked toward downtown until she found an available taxicab. She got home just in time to walk and feed L’Forte, shower, and go back to work.

  Wednesday, November 14, 1956

  The mail boy slouched into her office and dropped the fat packet of letters on her desk. She’d told him at least once a week that mail distribution was his job, not hers, but although he was a good ten years younger and was paid considerably less, he liked to think he could tell her what to do.

  “You’re documents,” he would reply.

  “Yes, and you’re mail,” she’d answer, noting the double entendre, though of course he did not.

  On several occasions she’d considered dropping the pile of mail on one of the tables in the lunchroom and letting everyone find his own, but that would have backfired and made her, not him, look bad. She was new and would have to pay her dues.

  Today she didn’t have the energy to do anything other than walk around the lab offices and make the deliveries. As she flipped through the letters, sorting them, she found one addressed to her in purple ink and a familiar hand. The return address: 277 West 12th Street, New York. Lucybelle shoved the letter into her purse, snapped the clasp shut, and kicked the purse under her desk.

  At home that evening she had a glass of gin and a cigarette for dinner and then carried the sealed envelope into her spare room. A fleeting optimism had caused her to take this large, two-bedroom apartment all for herself. Her typewriter sat on the floor, next to the boxes of books she’d asked Harry to pack up and ship, making him promise to not give Phyllis her address, not even the city or state. The typewriter squatted among the books, scabrous and skeletal, like a starving poet.

  She stood hugging herself, hoping for an infusion of courage from the sight of what she hadn’t yet allowed herself to call her “study,” but the typewriter and books seemed to shrink away from her, their mistress who couldn’t even provide them with a desk, chair, or shelves. She dropped the letter on the floor and dug through a box of papers until she found the picture of Willa Cather with a brush cut. She set Cather, face up, on top of the typewriter.

  “I’ll be back,” she said.

  Then she took Phyllis’s letter to the living room, scoffed at the purple ink—always so dramatic—and tore it open.

  My Sweetest,

  How dare she begin with a term of endearment.

  I know you have no respect for what I’ve done, and how could you, being who you are, so committed to the Truth, in all its forms. You with your feet so securely in the soil of the Earth, your head filled with the Classics, your eyes trained on that new and amorphous Future that will hold you better than this Now.

  The capital letters! Lucybelle brandished the pages, considered tearing them to shreds, but her curiosity kept her reading.

  Fred and I got married. I know that sentence will fill you with . . . what? Rage? Sadness? Disgust? I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry, though I’m sure you’ll never believe that. You’ll always think I acted out of self-interest, and nothing more.

  Was she really going to try to make a case for her actions being about anything other than self-interest?

  Fred needs me. It’s that simple. You don’t. And I need to be needed. You know how devastated I am about my Dead Career. I’m old now, Lucy. Too old for this life of auditions and eyelash batting and competing against girls far prettier than me.

  Pretty. If it were only about pretty. That was like settling for a thought when you could have an epiphany.

  I can still have a family. There. I’ve said it. Yes, a family. And why not? You could too, my sweetest. There are plenty of
men out there whom you might tolerate. I know, you don’t suffer fools. And oh so many men are fools. But really, don’t you have to suffer them anyway? At work? On the street? Why not get the goods too? I want children.

  Lucybelle lowered the pages and stared at the black windowpane. The goods: children.

  Please write me. I can’t stand not having you in my Life. Fred is here, yes, for the Duration. But he’s not so bad, now is he? You and I have too much together to let it drain away with this little storm.

  This little storm: Phyllis’s marriage.

  You know my address. Write me. Better yet, call me.

  Love always, Phyllis

  P.S. I’m keeping my stage name, just in case. But my legal name is now Phyllis Higgins. It has a solid ring, don’t you think? Can’t you just picture me at a PTA meeting?

  Lucybelle couldn’t bring herself to make confetti out of the letter, and so she carried it back into the other room. She dug through the shipment of books until she found Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Daddy had given it to her on her twenty-first birthday, and she liked to keep the rich block of text close, like a talisman. She should have unpacked it right away. Now she considered the green marbled pattern on the edges of the pages, selected a place about one inch in from the front cover, and opened the book. She tucked Phyllis inside The Merchant of Venice and then lugged the doorstopper out to her living room. She set it on the floor next to her new wingback chair. Phyllis and Shakespeare. How the former paled next to the latter. It was comforting diminishing Phyllis that way.

  Her head hurt. She found a box of Ritz crackers in the kitchen and sliced up some cheddar cheese. The sandwiches made her feel a little better.

  She called Harry.

  “Lucy! Oh, we’ve missed you.”

  “So much so that you gave Phyllis my address. My work address.”

  “What? Of course I didn’t. You asked me not to. I don’t even have your work address.”

  “So how did she get it?”

  “How am I supposed to know? The telephone book maybe?”