They spent four days keeping her under observation and letting her rest. At first she was not at all impatient to leave the hospital. She was strong enough, completely recovered, but she had no place to go and nothing to do, really, and so she was happy enough to stay where she was. In the hospital there was a room for her and a bed for her, and they brought food to her and told her when to wake up and when to sleep. The security was as comfortable as a warm blanket. But by the fourth day it began to get on her nerves. She still had no real plans but she knew that it was time for her to go, time to leave, time to get started doing something.
They seemed to know it, too. In mid-afternoon of the fourth day of consciousness they told her it was time to go. She signed herself out and left.
For a week she went through motions without giving herself time to do any thinking. She went to her old room and collected her clothing and books from the landlady. She did not want to live there any more. There were too many memories in the room and they were all wrong ones. She picked up a copy of the Times and looked at the listings of furnished rooms. She wanted a neighborhood which was somewhat familiar but not one where she had lived before. The West Seventies were as full of memories as the room she was giving up. Brooklyn and the Bronx were too far away. She would be living in Manhattan and she wanted to live reasonably close to her job. Greenwich Village would have been ideal, but the few rooms listed were too expensive.
She took the first room she looked at, a small but comfortable room in a brownstone rooming house on East Nineteenth Street near Irving Place. The rent was twelve dollars a week, and the man who rented it to her told her she could heat things up on a hot plate if she wanted.
She settled herself down, applied for half a dozen jobs, drank a great many cups of coffee, smoked innumerable cigarettes, took long quiet walks through her new neighborhood. She decided that she liked it. The residential parts were quiet and clean, the people in the area mostly widows with insurance money and older couples living on pensions. There were not many children. Some students, a handful of young married couples.
On a Friday, six days after she signed herself out of the hospital, she went to an office on Fourth Avenue to apply for a job. The office was hardly larger than the room she lived in, and the man in the office was a fifty-year-old theatrical booking agent with sparse hair, a facial tic, and a gravel voice. He sat behind a desk covered with papers and photos. The walls were plastered with inscribed photographs of girls Karen did not recognize.
“Easy job,” the agent told her. “First of the month I get out of here and into a better office. More space, you know what I mean? One room like what you see here, except bigger, and there’s an anteroom in front for a receptionist. That’s you. You answer the phone, you place calls for me, you look pretty.” He furrowed his forehead. “That’s the main thing, I’ll tell you now. Looking pretty and having a pretty voice on the phone. That’s why I wanted you to call first, so I could see how you sound on the phone. Too many of the girls who would go for a cushy job like this, they chew gum all the time or they’re ugly as pigs or they got a voice that’s pure Bronx. Doesn’t give an office a feeling of class, y’unnerstand?”
She nodded uncertainly.
“What it is, see, is there’s not much real work. Twenty years I sit behind a desk, I answer the phone myself, I make calls myself. All right, it works fine that way. A cinch. That’s what this business is—knowing who to call and knowing the person and what to say to him and how much to ask. Your office is your hat, that way, that type of scene. The clients I represent, it’s like you’re selling meat in a meat market. But I figure a little class doesn’t hurt. Twenty years in this business and if you make it, well, you begin to attract a higher type of client, or some of your clients begin to break through and some of them stay with you instead of jumping to William Morris. It happens one or two of them have a feeling of loyalty. You want the job?”
She blinked at him.
“Yes? No?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Sixty a week?”
She would have agreed readily except that she was too dazzled by the endless flow of words to say anything at all. The hesitation was not a bad idea. The agent misinterpreted it.
“So let’s say seventy,” he said. “Sixty would be better for me. I won’t kid you, that extra ten is money. But if I have a girl working for me I want her happy where she is, you know? She should have enough dough so she won’t spend her lunch hours looking for another lob. Seventy?”
“That’s fine,” she said.
“You could start now only there’s no place to put you, not in this place. First of the month we move up to Third Avenue and forty-third. It’s a better location than this. This they call Park Avenue South now, but anybody with a head knows it’s still Fourth Avenue. And Fifth is better.”
There was more but she just nodded politely and half-listened until he stopped to answer a phone and mutter something unintelligible into it. When he finished he asked her if there were any questions, and she said that there weren’t. He told her he would see her the first of the month at the new office. She thanked him and left.
So she had a job. Later that afternoon she sat in her own room drinking a cup of instant coffee and smoking a cigarette and thinking about it, The agent’s name was Leon Gordon, and his office was called LeGo Associates, and she was working for him. The pay was not too bad, either. She had been earning seventy-five dollars a week on her last job, and this was less than that, but in time she might be able to get a raise.
And she was just as glad that she had some free time before the job began. She could afford it—the money from her savings account was more than enough to sustain her until the job started. She had been busy for a week, job-hunting, getting settled. Now a few weeks of inertia were welcome.
She had almost killed herself.
This was rather hard to believe. So much had happened, all so strange and out of character. She had become pregnant. Ronnie had left her. She had gone slightly crazy, and she had wound up bleeding very nearly to death in a foul little room somewhere on the Lower East Side.
Hard to believe, and quite terrifying. She had to straighten herself out, had to work out a little pattern living. The routine of work would be valuable to her, but in the meanwhile a little time to herself would be very good for her.
Ronnie.
His name leaped at her without warning, and she felt herself stiffen at once with fear and horror. She stood up and walked to her window and held onto the windowsill to steady herself. He had seduced her, he was the first and only man to do that, and she had fallen in love with him, so completely in love with him. She conceived his child and he left her and she tried to kill herself and killed his child—and her child as well.
Where was he now? In California, she guessed. He had said something to that effect on the awful night when he left her. And he had mentioned California before. He wanted to be an actor, and he had not been able to get anywhere in New York, so now he would try his luck in Hollywood.
She prayed that she would never see him again. She had loved him so much, and now all she had in love’s place was cold and uncompromising hate. She had loved him and he took her love and threw it in her face. She had loved him, and had damn near died of it.
No more.
Never again, she told herself. Not with Ronnie, not with anyone. A man’s love could only be bad for a woman. A man was a two-faced, a worrisome thing who—no, that was from a song, some kind of song that she could not quite remember. But true, very true. Men used you and when they were done they left you with your heart in pieces or else they stayed with you, and you wound up with nothing but a ratty apartment surrounded by children and dirty dishes and unpayable bills and a man out of work, wound up trapped by a man and drowning in marriage.
Oh no, never again. No more loving, no more cutting yourself into bite-sized pieces for a man who would use you up and discard you when he was done with you. No more of that. Not no
w, not later, not ever. Never, never.
Her room felt suddenly like a cage. She grabbed up her purse and put on her coat and bolted. Outside she walked to Gramercy Park and stood outside the heavy iron gate. The park was a private one, and only the tenants in certain buildings had the right to enter it. There was something horrible about this, she decided. A park ought to belong to whoever wanted to sit in it. It wasn’t right to fence off a rare chunk of trees and greenness and make them off-limits to anyone who lacked a key. But that was the way it was. She had no key, and she could not go inside.
She smoked a cigarette. In a way, she knew, she was a very lucky young woman. She knew this herself, and one of the doctors at the hospital had taken great pains to reinforce the fact. She was very fortunate. She had done a stupid thing with a stupid razor blade, and she would always carry scars on her wrists to remind her of her stupidity. She had done something stupid but now she had a second chance. She was alive. With care, she could build a new life for herself. She could grab hold of this second shot at life and make something good out of it.
The next day, Saturday, she slept late. She had brunch around the corner at a luncheonette and wandered around the neighborhood and went to a movie, an Italian film that proved its artistic integrity and high purpose by drifting in and out of focus. She ate dinner at an inexpensive Armenian restaurant on Eighteenth Street and went back to her room and read for awhile.
Sunday she spent most of the day reading the Sunday Times. There was a free concert of baroque chamber music in the Village, on Bedford Street. She went to it and got utterly lost in the music. Afterward she had a little trouble falling asleep. There were bad dreams, and she wound up getting out of bed while it was still fairly dark outside.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Wednesday evening, at dinner, she realized quite suddenly that she had somehow managed to go several days without speaking to a single person. Beyond the words necessary to order a meal or buy a newspaper, she had not spoken at all to anyone.
She did not know anyone. She might have called someone on the phone but there was no one to call. The friends from her last job were office friends—you chatted gaily with them from nine to five and then forgot them completely. The friends from her life en West 74th Street were Ronnie’s friends more than her own. She would not have seen them for anything.
She felt terribly alone, violently alone. She went to her room and thought how alone she was, tried to read a book but could not keep track of the words on the pages. She put the book down and stretched out on the narrow bed and buried her face in the pillow. All at once she was crying. The tears flowed like a river. She lay very still on her bed and cried her eyes out.
There was nothing suicidal about her depression, nothing deep and bitter. She was a girl alone and she wanted someone to talk to and had no one, and she cried.
This would change, she tried to tell herself. Once the job started, once she began to meet people, all of this would change soon enough. She would meet a few girls, and some of them would be interesting people to talk with, and gradually she would become someone’s friend. All she needed was a friend. Movies and concerts were more fun if you went with someone than if you crept alone to them. A simple thing like a walk around the block meant more if you had company. Every aspect of your life had more meaning if there was another person on earth who could react to it.
In a way, she realized, it was loneliness that had prepared her for Ronnie. With her mother dead and Ted in the army she had been terribly alone. Ronnie had been such fine company at first, so good to be with. The sharing, the closeness—that had been the force that made love so wonderful for her. The rest of it, the bed part, it all came from the loneliness.
She would not make that mistake again. There was a way to avoid loneliness without making a fool out of yourself for a man. There had to be a way. A girl could stay single without turning into a lonely friendless caricature of spinsterhood. There would be a way, and she would find it.
Two days later, on Friday, she saw the new girl for the first time. She had gone down to the front hall to check her mail, not that she ever expected any mail. There was none, of course, but in the hallway she had seen the girl come in carrying a small suitcase. A cab driver followed her with more baggage in tow.
The girl was a striking blonde, tall, full-formed, with long hair that fell loose to her shoulders. She looked about twenty-four or twenty-five. Karen smiled at her, and the girl smiled back quickly, and then she was on her way up the stairs.
She thought of the girl later that day. She saw her from her window the next morning. The blonde girl was on her way to the corner mailbox with a letter in hand. It would be so good to have a friend in the building, she thought. And she smiled wryly and thought that it would be good to have a friend anywhere.
But how did you begin? Probably the blonde girl was not looking for friends. Probably the blonde girl had friends all over the city and was perfectly happy as she was. Probably the blonde girl was engaged, and after a few months on East Nineteenth Street she would marry some rising junior executive and move out to Long Island to make babies and gain weight.
Sunday she met the blonde girl and spoke to her for the first time. She was on her way back from the newsstand with her Times in tow, and the blonde girl was headed for the luncheonette. They smiled at each other, and the blonde girl said, “I guess we’re neighbors. You live at one-oh-five, don’t you?”
“Yes. You just moved in?”
“Friday. I thought you were the girl I saw in the hallway. But I always get sort of dizzy when move into a new place. It’s confusing, trying to keep track of your luggage and to guess what you forgot to pack. Have you been here long?”
“Less than three weeks.”
“Do you like it? My room’s tiny but it seems comfortable so far. I’m not used to just a room, actually. I was sharing an apartment with another girl, but when she moved out I couldn’t afford to stay there by myself. My name is Rae, by the way. Short for Rachel, which is a pretty terrible name. Rae Cooper.”
“I’m Karen Winslow.”
“My pleasure.” Rae smiled suddenly. “I’m not going to hold you up. I’ll see you around the dormitory, neighbor.”
Twice that afternoon she was on the point of finding the blonde’s room and going to it. Once she forced her force her attention back to the crossword puzzle and another time she took a walk around the block instead. Rae had been very friendly and she couldn’t help hoping it might turn into a real friendship, but she was afraid to be pushy about it. That would not be good at all.
In a way, she had trouble understanding her own nervousness. She was twenty-two years old, old enough to carry on a conversation with another girl without getting shaky in the knees. Maybe it was just that she was so very much alone, she thought, or that she had built up this need for a friend in her mind to the point where it made her shaky.
Whatever it was, she was sure it would work itself out. She and Rae were just two girls who happened to live in the same building. With any luck at all they would get to know one another. And the big glaring gap in her life would start to fill itself a little.
When the knock came at her door a few minutes after six, she was not expecting it. She almost jumped.
“It’s me,” she heard Rae say, “Busy?”
She opened the door. Rae was standing there, dressed in a sweater that was tight on her large breasts and a skirt that clung to her hips. She had a coat over one arm.
“If I’m interrupting anything,” she said, “just tell me and I’ll go away.”
“Oh, I was just sitting around.”
“Did you have dinner yet?”
“No, not yet”
“Any plans? A big evening with some man or anything? Because if you haven’t got anything lined up, I thought we could have dinner together. Unless you’re tied up…”
“I’m not.”
“Good. I hate eating alone and I’ve been doing nothing else latel
y. There’s a Chinese restaurant a few blocks from here that’s not half bad. Do you like Chinese food?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Throw a coat on” Rae said. “If you feel like it, that is, I’m starving, myself and I’m sick of sitting around staring at the walls. I’m dying for company, Karen.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Chinese restaurant was pleasant enough but she hardly noticed it. She was too excited by Rae’s company to pay much attention to her surroundings or the food she ate. It seemed as if she couldn’t stop talking, as though everything Rae said to her was the most fascinating thing she had ever heard. How lonely I’ve been, she though. How very lonely I’ve been.
She talked about her job and how impatient she was to get started with it. “You’d better watch yourself,” Rae said. “Some of those Broadway types are pretty quick at chasing a girl around a desk.”
She grinned at the image of Mr. Gordon chasing anyone anywhere. “I don’t think my boss is the type.”
“You can never tell, Karen. Especially with a pretty girl like you.”
“He won’t even notice me.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“Now with all the showgirls he handles.”
“Handles?” Rae said archly. They both laughed. “Of course,” the blonde girl went on, “some girls like to be chased. And to be caught.”
“Not me.”
“No?”
She lowered her eyes, stared at her cup of green tea “I’m not very interested in men,” she said
“Oh?”
“There was…oh, I don’t know. Private problems, I guess. Now here I’m getting all moody, and that’s a terrible thing”
“Feel like talking about it, Karen?”
“I don’t think so.”
Enough of Sorrow Page 2