The Other Typist

by Rindell, Suzanne

  Later that same evening, when I relayed the message to Odalie and handed her the bottle Dr. Spitzer had given me, she did not look especially surprised.

  “Oh yes, he’s a bit of a quack, Dr. Spitzer,” she said, taking the bottle with unseeing eyes and setting it absently on a nearby side table. She shook her head. “Well, I won’t hold my breath. Heaven knows why Gib hired him in the first place. Not much of a chemist in the end, I’m afraid.” I thought of what Dr. Spitzer had said about the last batch—Not if we don’t want another chap dying, like last time. . . . As if she could detect my thoughts, Odalie ignored the abandoned bottle now sitting on the side table, turned a page in the magazine she was reading, and with a faraway look added, “There are stories about him . . . believe me.”

  She didn’t need to convince me; I believed her. The catch was, though I had gone to great pains to become her most trusted confidante, I was beginning to realize there were some things I’d rather not know.

  Though Odalie’s little “favors” forced me to step beyond the boundaries of my comfort, I continued to complete these occasional odd tasks, happy at least I’d finally secured the position I’d coveted for so long—that is, I had finally established myself as the most important person in Odalie’s life, and she had clearly been appointed the most important person in mine.

  It is impossible to explain to someone who has never made Odalie’s acquaintance how glorious this is. It is not enough to say she had a way about her. If you were feeling heavy, she had some sort of trick to make you feel so light as to become giddy with it. If you were slighted at work, she made the person who slighted you the butt of an inside joke. When you were with Odalie, it was impossible to be an outsider. For me, this latter phenomenon was nothing short of a miracle. After all, I had been an outsider all my life.

  And so, despite my growing unease with the little errands Odalie requested every now and again, I nonetheless think of those days as perhaps the happiest and most blissful time in all my life. I had reached a pinnacle. But of course, I didn’t know it. Pinnacles are only defined as such by that which surrounds them, and in this case my high point was fated to be followed by a very low point.

  Little did I know, my low point was looming just out of my line of vision. I would soon unwittingly turn a corner, and there it would be.

  • • •

  I REACHED THE CORNER in question when I caught a glimpse of a man in the holding cell whose face looked familiar. I couldn’t be sure, but thought perhaps I’d seen him at the speakeasy once or twice before. When I alerted Odalie, she appeared to recognize him immediately, and I could tell she intended to take action about the situation. As she had in previous times, she managed to get herself assigned to the case. Once Odalie and the Sergeant had taken the man into the interrogation room, he was released only minutes later. I watched him amble through the precinct and out the front door. It was as though I was seeing an echo of Gib strolling leisurely out the door on that first day after the raid. I rose from my desk and walked toward the interrogation room. At the time, I told myself I was merely curious about Odalie’s methods, but this was a lie. I see now I always knew what her methods were; I had quite simply and stubbornly blinded myself to the fact.

  There was a long hallway along one side of the precinct that led to the interrogation room. Or, rather, the INTERVIEW ROOM, as was stenciled in brassy gold paint upon the window of the door. I turned into the hallway and immediately glimpsed Odalie and the Sergeant standing at the far end. I saw them plain enough from where I stood, but it was clear they took no notice of my presence in return. I was about to approach them when some instinct within told me not to. There’s a certain sensation you get when you blunder into two people who are sharing an intimate moment, and as I turned the corner into the hallway I had that sensation. It stopped me dead in my tracks, and I stood there, dumbstruck, looking on. They seemed deep in conversation, but they were speaking in such low voices that I was at pains to make out what they were saying. And then a very simple thing occurred that stopped my heart in my chest.

  As they were talking, Odalie reached a hand to the Sergeant’s chest and idly fingered his lapel, leaning in and smiling flirtatiously as she did so. I was aghast. The Sergeant was such a painfully formal man, I expected him to immediately correct her errant behavior. But I awaited a reprimand that never came. Instead, he went on talking as though it were perfectly natural that Odalie should touch him so intimately. For a fleeting moment, I considered the possibility the Sergeant was being polite. Perhaps he meant to simply ignore Odalie’s foolishness rather than point it out and cause her the pain of embarrassment. I knew he was capable of such gallantry. But as her hand slid from his lapel and came to rest on the upper shoulder of his sleeve, I was utterly disabused of this conclusion. When the Sergeant finally reacted, time slowed down and the warmth drained from my cheeks. As I continued to look on, the Sergeant lifted his own hand to cover hers, then traveled in a friendly way down and then up along the length of her lithe, short-sleeved arm.

  I had seen enough. I was trembling with rage, and the sight had instantly set the pains of nausea to twisting in my stomach. I quickly turned on my heel and scurried away in the direction of the ladies’ room, where for several minutes I retched nothing but air into an empty sink. Then I stood staring at my reflection in the mirror and, for a while, everything went black.

  Later, someone would point to a series of long, spidery fissures that now run the length of the bathroom mirror and claim that I had contributed to their creation. But I cannot see how this is possible, as it only stands to reason the mirror would’ve left some mutual evidence upon my person, and I don’t recall having noticed any such scratches or cuts on my skin. In any case, when I finally reemerged from the bathroom I was still quite unsettled. My muscles quivered and quaked with an indignant sense of betrayal. Every inch of me was poised to take immediate action.

  By virtue of pure disciplined effort I was able to go about my work as usual, but the scene I had witnessed haunted me for the rest of the day, flashing into my brain at inopportune times, each recollection of it more vivid than the last. Dr. Benson theorizes I have what he calls an overactive imagination. He says I am altogether too ready to jump to conclusions. During our sessions he lets his eyeglasses slip down until they barely have any purchase left at the tip of his nose, and peering at me from over the top of those empty flashing mirrors he often says, Tell me, Rose, how can you be so certain there was something inappropriate going on between Odalie and the Sergeant? Or else he will sometimes say, How can you be sure your imagination wasn’t playing tricks on you? And I take offense to the latter question, because no one has ever accused me of having too much imagination, and even if what little imagination I do possess was to play tricks, they certainly wouldn’t be tricks from the gutter. Once, Odalie described me as a “bluenose” to someone at a party, right in front of my face, and I wasn’t a bit mad because, after all, I do think I have an exceptionally clean mind and would never think to be ashamed of this fact.

  Odalie was too busy to talk to me for the rest of the day; otherwise I might’ve lost control of myself and chastised her in front of everyone—an event that, in the long run, would’ve ultimately humiliated me as much as her. In retrospect I have to say I’m still very glad I didn’t do this, as it probably would’ve served as yet another piece of evidence to be used against me in my current situation. Instead, the minute hand moved twice around the clock during Odalie’s absence, and as I watched it from the corner of my eye I devised another way to teach her a lesson . . . I would withdraw my friendship! Yes; ever so quietly I would pack my suitcase that very evening and let myself out the front door in the middle of the night, unobserved. The next morning Odalie would notice my absence, and upon checking the room where I regularly slept she would no doubt see all my things had gone missing during the night and she would intuit why I had left. As I typed up a stack of reports, I thought
of the letter I would leave on my tidily made bed for her to discover, composing several rather dramatic drafts of it in my imagination and making several typing errors in the process. I debated which tone would shame and therefore hurt her more: an anguished one that expressed my heartsick disapproval of her, or a disconnected, indifferent one that would signal my superiority and disdainfully suggest that her transgressions were of a rather tawdry, cliché nature. Then I considered leaving no note at all, and decided perhaps that would hurt her most of all.

  As for the Sergeant, I supposed there was no need to punish him. I cannot explain why, as I do not precisely know, but after witnessing their interlude in the hallway I did not have the same feelings toward both perpetrators. Waves of white-hot anger washed over me when I thought of Odalie; there was a sense of urgency in my feelings for her, a desperate need to punish her, to show her how incorrect her behavior was. Meanwhile, I felt nothing for the Sergeant but a cold, soggy sense of disappointment. In my mind, he had come down from Mount Olympus, and he had come down to stay. When I thought of him, I could only see his hand traveling up the length of Odalie’s sleeve.

  Of course now I see that while I had lost one god in the Sergeant, I had nonetheless gained another in Odalie, as I was more obsessed than ever with the uncharted depths of her manipulative powers, which I was beginning to believe had no bounds. She was not the clean, regimented sort of idol the Sergeant had been to me. Instead, she was something else entirely, something I could not yet name, for at that time I still lacked a panoramic comprehension of Odalie and of the effect she would ultimately have on me. I had no inkling then of how her most terrible power would show itself not in her own actions, but in what she was capable of driving others to do. Of what she was capable of driving me to do.

  But all that would come soon enough. That evening, I went home with Odalie according to our regular routine. I made a point of being rather stiff and chilly with her, but I do not think she took much notice of my cool reserve. I decided it was simply best to bide my time until I could slip out unseen and protest Odalie’s misdeeds with my absence. Gib slept at the apartment that night and was surlier than usual. Shortly after the dinner hour they disappeared together into Odalie’s bedroom. I noted the date and his name in my little journal. I also wrote Sergeant Irving Boggs, then scribbled it out, and finally wrote it in again with a question mark next to it. Then I played a record on the phonograph on my nightstand. I opted for some tidy Bach concertos in an attempt to infuse the atmosphere with some manicured civility, and I began to pack my things. Through the wall, I could hear Odalie and Gib quarreling. And then I could hear them . . . not quarreling. Their passion turned to conversation, and the hum of their voices rose and fell like a tide until eventually, when it had grown quite late, they fell silent altogether. The last record I had put on finally ended, and the needle began to skip, threading into the final groove only to be pushed into the center of the disc over and over and over again. I lifted the phonograph’s thick brass arm and switched the contraption off.

  By that point my bags were packed—or rather my bag, I should say, as I had arrived with a sole suitcase and I intended to take exactly only what was mine. Of all the things I now had to part with, the clothes were the most difficult. It surprised me how attached I’d grown to the furs, the beaded dresses, the satin gowns. But if I was going to hold myself to a superior moral standard, I couldn’t very well traipse around in Odalie’s finery knowing it had all likely been gained via her improper behavior. I pulled open a dresser drawer and ran my hand over a pile of embroidered silk undershirts as though stroking a beloved pet one final good-bye. I lifted the diamond bracelet from where it lay cradled in the plush pile of a sable mink stole and shut the dresser drawer with an air of finality. I unclasped the bracelet and laid it lengthwise on my pillow, in the vacant place where my head would no longer rest. With a pang I thought of the brooch, still in my desk drawer at work—you see, I’ve always liked to be absolute in my measures. Oh, but that couldn’t be helped now. I looked again to the suitcase where it sat on a chair in a corner by the painted Oriental screens. I had tidied the room with the utmost care, so as to make the space appear more noticeably denuded. I wanted my disappearance to have the maximum effect. As I surveyed the barren room with approval, I knew it was finally time to make my move. I stood to go and lifted my bag from the chair.

  But then I hesitated. With my suitcase in my hand and dressed in my plainest calico blouse and long skirt, I stared at the door before me and swayed almost imperceptibly over my rooted feet. Some unnameable doubt was holding me back from following through with my intended departure. I considered the possibility Odalie might not even notice my absence for some days, or worse yet, not care. I pictured her poking her head into my empty room in that breezy perfunctory way she had, shrugging her shoulders, and going about her business as usual. I worried that while she mattered plenty to me, there was a chance I did not matter quite so much to her. I looked down at the suitcase where it dangled from my arm. Already it was heavy, already the trip wearied me, and I hadn’t even taken my first step toward the door. I realized that in my eagerness to punish Odalie with my absence, I had not yet worked out where I was going—my mind had only gotten so far as to imagine the leaving.

  I put my suitcase down and sat on the bed with a sigh. I was going about this all wrong. I wanted to send a message to Odalie, but I wanted something else from her, too. I wanted her to be sorry.

  I decided to stay. At least for the time being. Slowly, meticulously, I dispatched the items in my suitcase and restored them to their proper locations in the room. Then, once dressed in a nightshirt, I crawled into bed. Now I was resolved to go to sleep and awake tomorrow to confront my new task—the task of loving Odalie and therefore forcing her to face the crucial fact she had wronged her most devoted friend, that her scheming and her risky behavior had to stop.

  20

  On Friday of that same week, an unexpected visitor came into the precinct looking for Odalie. As luck would have it, Odalie had gone to run some errands on her lunch hour. Exhausted and wary after my unexpected introduction to Dr. Spitzer, I didn’t ask any questions about her errands this time. In any case, all this is to say she had a visitor that day, yet wasn’t available when her visitor came to call upon her. I was seated at my work station, eating a sandwich and drinking coffee that had already gone cold, when I saw Teddy approach the receiving desk. Involuntarily, I gave a little yelp, which of course only alerted him to my presence. His youthful face lit up.

  “Hullo, Rose!” he called in a cheerful voice across the room. He waved in my direction. I got up from my desk quickly, spilling the paper cone of coffee I’d been drinking down the front of my blouse as I did so. I didn’t care; it was a blush-colored silk charmeuse number I had borrowed from Odalie and now it was probably ruined, but if I had learned nothing else by then I knew Odalie went through clothing the way other people went through talcum powder or toilet tissue. I hurried across the room toward Teddy. All eyes in the precinct lifted to see what the commotion was about.

  “Shh! Keep your voice down,” I said to Teddy. “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, I . . . I thought I might talk to Odalie.”

  I gripped him by the upper arm and steered him out the precinct entrance and down the stoop so we might talk on the street. “Honestly, Teddy,” I mumbled as I tried to shepherd his lanky, adolescent body. As an obedient and loyal friend, I knew it would be ideal if I could get rid of him now, before Odalie ever caught wind of the fact he had come to find her. It’s funny, but I swear I can recall thinking at the time, and rather prophetically, too, That way nobody will get hurt. Once safe on the street, I shook him and repeated my question.

  “What are you doing here?” I released him and waited. He didn’t respond straightaway. His eyes went wide, and when he looked down at his shoes, he shuffled his feet sheepishly. I took all this in and felt something soften in me.
You see, I recognized my likeness in Teddy. There was an element of earnest urgency in his behavior toward Odalie I had to admit was not so different from my own.

  The long and short of it is Teddy and I were both trying to make sense of Odalie’s code of conduct. We were trying to get the truth from her, of all things! Teddy was trying to get the factual truth of her history, while I was trying to get the sentimental truth of her heart, but really we were not so very different creatures. We had both chased after Odalie and were now waiting for her to dictate the circumstances and outcome of the interaction.

  As he looked at me with that pleading in his eyes, we had an unspoken exchange. I felt a tremor of sympathy ripple through my extremities. But then I collected myself. “Teddy,” I said in a stern voice, “You can’t be here.”

  His brow furrowed as though he were uncertain this was true. “I can tell she recognizes me, Rose,” he said. “It’s her. She’s changed some things about herself, but it’s her. I know it in my bones. What I have to ask her . . . it’ll only take but a minute.”

  I surveyed him with a long and thorough stare, and it dawned on me that he might never give up. Convinced she was Ginevra, Teddy would not rest until Odalie had answered his questions to his satisfaction, a feat I wasn’t sure she could accomplish, not ever. I thought through the long list of false stories Odalie had given me during our time together and about the number of times she’d purposely misled me. I thought, too, about Odalie and the Sergeant as I’d seen them standing in that hallway together. A tiny flare of indignant anger went up from somewhere deep inside my chest. As I looked at Teddy’s face, still marked with that faint stippling of peach fuzz and acne so typical of adolescent young men, I realized I was approaching yet another fork in the road.