“Hang on,” she said, catching my wrist. Her eyes quickly ran from my head to my feet. “What a shambles we are!” she exclaimed. Still laughing, still clutching my wrist in her hand, she stepped off the curb and raised her opposite arm to hail a taxi. “I think I may know a good remedy.” Considering taxi-cabs a very lavish expense and rarely taking them myself, I briefly struggled to demur. But my instincts for economy were quickly overcome by my instincts for survival and comfort, and as the taxi slowed to a stop in front of us, I felt a wave of desperate gratitude wash over my cold, wet, tired body. Before I knew it, I had gotten in of automatic accord and listened as Odalie gave the driver the address of a hotel only slightly farther uptown.
I had heard of girls who lived in hotels before, but in my experience they had all either been very rich or else very improper. It made me nervous to realize Odalie might be either—or both—of these things. If I am being completely honest, I should admit it likely made me a little excited, too. When we pulled up to the curb, she paid the driver and allotted a generous tip. I followed her out of the cab door in a daze.
“Stay dry, misses,” the driver said in a kind, grandfatherly tone as we exited from the cab. But he needn’t have worried—we emerged under an electric-lit awning and walked the length of spongy red carpet that led up the stairs and into the gilded revolving door of the hotel. Inside the lobby, Odalie strode confidently over to the elevators, which looked to me like a pair of elaborately wrought birdcages. Stunned by the unexpected luxury of my surroundings, I followed her like a fawn staggering on new legs. Once the elevator had made its descent to the lobby, we got in and Odalie purred in a friendly voice, “The usual, Dennis.” Evidently, “the usual” was the seventh floor, for it was at that floor that Dennis put the brake on and slid open the golden birdcage doors.
“Ma’am,” he said cheerfully, and turned to smile at Odalie, who returned nothing but a grimace.
“Ugh,” she said as though he were not still in earshot. “I hate it when they call me ma’am.” She touched a hand to her hair, which was drooping and damp with rain. “Thank you, Dennis,” she said to the now very distressed Dennis.
“Ma’am—I mean, miss?” he said, disconsolate. His dejection was short-lived, interrupted as it was by the demands of hotel business. Abruptly a tin bell sounded, and he retreated back into his gilded cage and cranked a lever. Odalie turned to me and smiled a rather rare, frank, thin-lipped smile. “The young man carbuncular,” she said with a roll of her eyes, as though explaining something, and I suddenly had the impression that she was quoting something, although I didn’t know exactly what.
She ushered me briskly down a long corridor. The carpet beneath my feet was plush, thick, red. My ankles wobbled ever so slightly as I walked on it, adding to the unsteady feeling that had already been building in my legs. I began to feel overwhelmed; it was all a bit too much, and the steam heat in the hotel was turned up rather high. But lured on by some entranced impulse, I followed Odalie as she drew up to a door, unlocked it, and threw it open. Inside was a large sitting room with fashionably modern green-and-white-striped furniture. Even the carpet was a deep, vibrant green and stretched wall to wall. I remember thinking there was something very clean and crisp-feeling about that particular shade of green. It was the color of a freshly mown lawn—and not just any lawn; the kind of lawn belonging to a golfing green or to the kind of wealthy estate I’d only ever read about in books. It was the color of money, in more ways than one.
I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, idling like a forgotten croquet ball lost on too large an expanse of very green grass, still dripping from the downpour and not daring to touch the furniture. Then I heard Odalie latch the door behind me and felt her hands firmly on my back.
“C’mon,” she said, laughing in her musical manner. “Let’s get you out of these cold wet things.” I was aware of being pushed in the direction of a bathroom. Once there, Odalie became a flurry of activity, opening the bath taps and unleashing a steaming torrent of water, extracting several little glass bottles and golden jars filled with all kinds of perfumed oils and unguents and adding them in different amounts as if by precise recipe to the bathwater. When finally her witches’ brew frothed over with a foot’s worth of stiff, foamy bubbles, she shut the water off, pinned my hair up for me (I stood frozen, dumbstruck, watching in the mirror), and handed me a cream-colored silk robe. Less than an hour ago this woman had simply been another office girl, another typist, and now here I was, being given a glimpse into a life I could not have even imagined, being persuaded to slip into her bathtub and surrender my rain-soaked clothes. Seeing the consternation written on my brow, Odalie shrugged and giggled.
“Go on—hop in. I’ll find you some dry things to wear when you get out,” she said, and disappeared down the hall again. I looked around at the black-and-white tiled floor, at the marble sink and shiny brass piping, and then at the large enameled claw-foot tub, nearly heaping over now with bath bubbles. I hesitated for a few moments, glanced nervously at the tub, then unbuttoned my blouse and skirt, let them drop to the floor, rolled my stockings down, and finally slid out of my combinations. The silk robe in particular was an emblem of the kind of personal luxury I’d never known, and as I gazed at it the awe I’d experienced first in the lobby and then in Odalie’s foyer reached an ultimate crescendo within me. While I do enjoy a good clean scrub, I admit my bathing rituals have always been of a very quick and functional variety. I was dimly aware I had somehow wandered far, far away from the world I’d always known and into some sort of wonderland. But a shiver brought me temporarily back into my body, and cold as I was, I had to forgo the robe altogether. The hot bathwater was calling urgently now, the soft crackle of popping soap bubbles like a siren’s song. I stepped in carefully with one foot, then the other, and felt the sting of hot water on my very cold skin.
Odalie left me to my own devices for quite a while. It was nearly forty-five minutes before she returned, and by then almost all the bubbles had dissolved and the whole tubful of water had turned a very foggy pale shade of aquamarine. I heard Odalie humming to herself as she came down the hall. I suddenly became aware of the fact there was no longer an adequate amount of bubbles to hide my rather scrawny nude body and stood up in the tub in an abrupt reflex. The water sloshed noisily, rushing into the vacuum of space I had left behind. I quickly grabbed at the brass rack for a towel to cover myself.
“How’s this?” she asked, taking no note of my embarrassed posture and holding up a hanger to display a very lovely, peacock blue drop-waist dress.
“Oh,” I murmured, blinking at the dress. “I couldn’t wear that home. But just think . . . oh . . . Helen would turn absolutely green and die from envy.”
“Who’s Helen?” Odalie asked innocently.
And I began, for the first time since we’d met, to tell her.
• • •
THAT NIGHT MARKED the first night of our mutual confidence. Still warmed and relaxed from the bubble bath, I grew unusually loquacious. I described Helen to Odalie, along with all the petty thieving and snide insults I’d had to endure on a daily basis in my unfortunate role as Helen’s room-mate. Odalie patted my arm and exclaimed over again and again, What an obnoxious little wretch! I don’t know how you put up with it. Of course, in retrospect, I see how it was to Odalie’s advantage to agree with me, to pet me and prop me up and ultimately fan the flames of my rage against Helen. But even so, I like to believe she would have thoroughly disapproved of Helen no matter what. As a manipulator, Helen did not possess one iota of the great store of panache Odalie had so carefully cultivated. But Odalie’s charisma is another matter; I am getting ahead of myself again.
Odalie confided in me, too. Well . . . I thought she did, at the time. Once I was dry and dressed, we sat on great velvet cushions by the fire in the sitting room and drank from a couple of mugs of hot tea as I recounted the many details of Helen’s habitual miscon
duct. I admit, I was in a daze and hardly knew where I was. It had taken me some time to get comfortable with the utter luxury of Odalie’s apartment, but there’s a funny thing about luxury I learned that night: Once you grow accustomed to it, you can’t imagine being uncomfortable with it ever again. I was in no hurry to go home to the boarding-house in Brooklyn and back to horrible Helen, but good sense and proper decorum told me the time was drawing near. Never one to violate the rules of etiquette, I stood and prepared to make my departure when suddenly Odalie’s cool hand was on my arm and she was peering into my face with a very bright and earnest gaze.
“Before you go, I suppose I should explain, shouldn’t I? About the apartment, I mean.”
Of course I’d wondered, but the restraint of good manners meant I never would’ve asked. I blinked at her and held my breath, worried if I said anything at all it might dissuade her from revealing the tricks behind the magic.
“My father pays the rent, you see.”
I nodded.
“My family—we’re a little rich, I guess. Not obscenely wealthy or anything in poor taste, mind. It’s just that my father likes to know I’m well cared for, so here I am.”
Still hoping for more, I remained silent and nodded again.
“The thing is,” Odalie began in a coy voice, then hesitated. I got the sense I was about to be asked for something. “The thing is, I’m not sure the others down at the precinct would understand. But you, you’re such a bright girl, Rose, with such an enlightened mind—you know that, don’t you? Oh, well, you should know it; it’s the honest truth! Speaking of how smart you are, I’m going to invite you to have coffee with my little group of bohemian artists. They’re a wonderfully intellectual set; they keep me in the know about paintings and poems and such. You’ll positively love them!” In a friendly gesture she took hold of my other arm and shook me gently by both shoulders as she said this, and I felt a familiar tingling warmth creep into my cheeks. I wasn’t as sure as Odalie seemed to be about the prospect of my falling in love with what promised to be a group of derelicts posing as intellectuals, but I was becoming increasingly sure that I was about to allow myself to be charmed by Odalie herself. She gave a little laugh, cleared her throat, and looked at me again with serious interest. “But getting back to the matter at hand, I’d appreciate it immensely, Rose, if we didn’t tell anybody about where I live. Or how I live. They might get some funny ideas about me.”
I suppose more warning bells should’ve chimed inside my head than did at the time. Mostly, the whole incident had simply set off a sort of insatiable curious instinct within me. Perhaps, I remember considering at the time, Odalie was aware of the rumors that trailed her like a persistent cloud of gnats swirling over a fruit bowl. She only wants to minimize all those silly tales of nonsense about her, I said to myself. In any case, I nodded my complicity, and with great reluctance departed from the plush oasis that was Odalie’s apartment and headed back out into the cold gray world.
And just like that, I had won the lottery for Odalie’s friendship. After that fatefully stormy night, she began regularly inviting me to lunch; Iris and Marie shot us sulky looks every noontime as we donned our coats and tripped laughingly together out the door and down the precinct steps. Or at least I imagined they did, for I was quickly learning anyone who fell just outside the ebullient rays of Odalie’s attention was subject to the cold sensation of a dark cloud passing before the sun. I assume Odalie had finally discovered just how much of a frigid bore Iris could be, and had ruled Marie out on the principle Marie could not keep a secret and therefore couldn’t amount to much as a bosom friend. Now, I had surmised, she was all mine.
Odalie also made good on her promise to introduce me to her “bohemian set.” She brought me along one evening after work to a smoke-filled café not far from Washington Square. I am not certain what Odalie had hoped to accomplish with this introduction, unless it was to sound out my depths—which I’m certain she was surprised to discover are very shallow. I can’t really stomach much of the newfangled nonsense that passes for art these days, and I find the people who chastise me to “broaden my mind” often have an offensively narrow view of how one should go about following this advice. My personal belief is that people who cannot work within the parameters of art’s great time-honored traditions simply lack the talent and discipline to do so.
The night Odalie brought me along, her fellow bohèmes were rapturously reading and discussing a long poem that had been published over a year or two ago in a rather poor-looking magazine called The Dial and had evidently caused quite a stir in the process. If I recall correctly, the poet was called Eliot Something-Or-Another and the poem itself was all a bunch of jibberish, the ravings of an utter lunatic. But they ate it up with surprising zeal. At one point, the woman on my left turned to me and exclaimed, “Poetry will be forever changed after this, won’t it be?”
I peered searchingly into her countenance for the tiniest signal of sarcasm, but found only earnestness. Her clear brown eyes and white cheeks were lit up brighter than one of the advertising billboards in Times Square. “Yes,” I said, “I daresay it will be quite some time before the great institution of poetry recovers from the immense wrecking ball of a poem this gentleman has swung so brutally in its direction.” I hadn’t meant this as a compliment, but she gave a gleeful titter and smiled as brilliantly as if I had just proclaimed my deepest admiration. I watched the woman in puzzlement. She winked and held my gaze as she leaned over the table and allowed the man seated across from us to lift a match to her cigarette.
That was the first and only time Odalie invited me to join her “little group of bohemian artists.” While I didn’t exactly feel inspired by this outing, I can see now how it was nonetheless very smart of her to bring me, as the experience further inflected the impression of Odalie that was quickly taking shape in my mind. With that one little evening wherein I sat in a smoky café watching her argue passionately about expatriated poets and Spanish painters, she had, ever so subtly, managed to shift the light that would illuminate her actions. It changed the mind-set with which I would eventually perceive future events. Things I might have otherwise perceived as illicit would ultimately be reemphasized as whimsical and avant-garde. Whether she actually cared about the mad-minded experiments of Spanish painters I have little doubt; I know now she only cared about looking like she cared. In any case, once I’d had my single dose of la vie de bohème, Odalie did not bother to invite me back. She was an astute observer of human behavior; I firmly believe by then she was already secure in the knowledge I had not tagged along because I craved artistic stimulation, but rather because I craved the privilege of her companionship. Already by that point, this assessment had become rather accurate.
The first two weeks of our friendship flew by, and it was suddenly as if I couldn’t remember what life was like before Odalie had first smiled her brilliant pearlescent smile at me. Before I knew it, we were sitting in a restaurant staring at each other as our lunch dishes were cleared away, with the words You ought to just move into the hotel with me still hanging in the air.
“I’ve been meaning to look for a girl-friend who can take on a portion of the rent anyhow,” she said in a brisk, careless voice.
“Doesn’t your father pay for the apartment? He probably expects you to live there alone.”
“Oh, sure, but he doesn’t have to know about the room-mate, you see,” she said, leaning in with a devilish smile and a sharp wink. I did see. There were no gleeful tears on the way. This was not an invitation for sisterly intimacy; this was a business proposition. My heart sank a tiny bit, but still not completely. We’d been fast friends for a few weeks by that point, spending all of our afternoons together. As I looked at her, the perfect cupid’s bow of her mouth took on a slightly wicked, complicit expression. “The additional income would be quite beneficial,” she said, and glanced at me sideways, “for both of us.”
Thi
s was likely true. I’d come to the conclusion Odalie was something of an incorrigible spendthrift. Perhaps I could help her, teach her the art of frugality, I thought. I could impart the techniques Mrs. Lebrun had taught me. Over the duration of our friendship—a matter of mere weeks at that point—Odalie and I had dined in a total of nineteen rather intimidating and costly restaurants (and not just for dinner; for lunch, too! That there existed people who went to such extravagance over a meal as functional as a midday lunch absolutely fascinated me). We sat at tables draped in snowy white tablecloths and were attended by dapper waiters who wore tails and gloves. It seemed to me there was a man for everything, even a man whose sole job it was to stand at attention with a silver gravy boat and perpetually offer his ladle. These were exactly the sorts of restaurants I had previously dreamed of visiting, but had never had the proper occasion (or company). And so far, I had yet to catch a glimpse of a bill. When I asked Odalie how this was all possible, she always waved an imperial, dismissive hand in the air and said the same thing—that it was “no bother.” Indeed, if there was one thing that was true about Odalie, it was that she never looked very bothered over anything.
Our meal that day was reaching its conclusion. With a silver tray in one hand and a white towelette folded tidily over the opposite arm, the headwaiter brought the coffee service to the table, along with a discreet slip of paper for Odalie to sign.
“Thank you, Gene,” she said, and smiled again in her innocently bright, sunny manner. I had already observed that Odalie had at minimum one hundred smiles in her arsenal, but this one—the particular variety she was smiling now—was the one she called upon most often. Gene nodded and moved on. She dropped her voice: “I’ll tell you a little secret: I can’t recall if his name is actually Gene. But he’s never said anything, and I’ve been calling him that for so long now, it may as well be!” She gave an amused giggle and, wanting to feel complicit, I couldn’t help but join in with a laugh of my own.
The Other Typist Page 9