“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I finally said, having made my decision. I produced a little pencil and note-card from my purse. “I’ve got to get back inside now,” I said, writing down an address and a quick instructional paragraph with careful penmanship. “But here. Take this.” I handed Teddy the note-card.
I left him standing there, perplexed and staring at the card, as I turned to trot back up the stairs of the stoop. “Thank you!” he called after me, once he’d gotten over his confusion. “Thank you, Rose.” Halfway up the stoop, I froze.
“Don’t mention it,” I replied.
I suppose if there was any time I should have fretted about what I’d just set into motion—about what kind of potentially horrific collision I’d just initiated—it would’ve been then. But I didn’t feel anything of the sort. Instead, I was peculiarly relaxed and calm.
As I remounted the last few stairs, I noticed the shape of Marie ducking away from the windows. So, we’d been observed. I knew that meant I’d have to endure Marie perpetually inquiring, Who was that chap? And wasn’t he a little young to be my boyfriend? I pushed through the precinct door and decided not to care. At the time I couldn’t have anticipated how Marie’s having glimpsed this scene might one day affect my future.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, we went to the speakeasy as was our routine. It began as one of those evenings wherein the moon loomed big and balloonlike, rising upward from one horizon before the sun had a chance to fully dip below the other. I remember standing on the apartment terrace and watching the moon make its slow, plodding ascent, a dusty pink half-crescent pocked with gray craters.
It had been another warm and sticky day, but now a cooling breeze was pushing the dirty haze of the city farther out to sea. The leaves would start turning soon, I realized, and I was surprised this meant that in a few months, I would’ve known Odalie for a full year. I mused on this revelation and must’ve gotten lost in my reverie, for I jumped when I heard her voice calling me to get dressed for our evening out. I rarely came out to the terrace, but when I did it was easy to be hypnotized by the way the electric lights of the city took on a supernatural glow as the sun ceded his territory to the sensuous moon and twilight turned to dusk.
When I came inside, I found Odalie had laid out a pair of outfits for us. To this day, I don’t know if the resemblance of style between these outfits was a coincidence, or whether it was achieved on purpose. I can’t imagine how she could have known the similarity would come in handy. Odalie is many things, and she has an impressive capacity to anticipate human behavior, but I do not believe she is an all-out clairvoyant. Nonetheless, presumably without knowing how it would help her cause, she dressed us that night in similar black evening gowns adorned with silver beading. Although one dress (mine) had a square-cut neckline and the other (hers) was strapless, the beading on both dresses was such that the silver beads gradually intensified as the pleated skirt flowed downward to skim the knee, giving the pair of us a crested-wave, mermaid-like appeal.
She also put hair cream in my mousy brown hair to darken it and make it shine, and pinned it under so it would swing at an angle along the line of my jaw—just as her bob did. I recall catching a glimpse in the mirror of us standing side-by-side just moments prior to leaving the apartment. We looked ever so slightly like twins. A beautiful, shining woman and her slightly duller, slightly dowdier counterpart. In an eerie final touch, Odalie had insisted we wear the two matching diamond bracelets—a peculiar twist indeed, as up until that point we had never worn them outside of the apartment. Once we slipped them on, our toilet was complete. Odalie promptly called downstairs and put in a request for one of the doormen to procure a taxi, and just like that, the evening had been set into motion.
Over the course of the last nine months I’d spent with Odalie, I had discovered the speakeasy—her speakeasy, that is—moved around sporadically, but mainly made use of about three or four regular locations. On that night (which was to reveal itself to be our last night) I suppose there was some sort of poetic circularity in the fact we found ourselves right back at the selfsame location as the first one I had ever attended. This time I felt like an old hand when the taxi drove to the Lower East Side and let us out upon a deserted street lined with darkened storefronts, and I barely batted an eyelash. As expected, one storefront still glowed with electric light. Upon pushing through the door of the wig shop, we found the same boy wearing the same pair of oddly colored suspenders sitting at the register. And he asked exactly the same question, a question I realized from the tone of his voice had long since become threadbare from overuse.
“Can I help you find sompin’, ma’ams?” His voice delivered the rote line so the word help had been dissected of all trace elements of original meaning. He pushed a long greasy lock out of one eye and waited. Odalie ignored him altogether, taking out her compact and dusting her nose with talcum. I realized it was my turn to spring into action.
“Yes,” I said, looking around for the iron-gray wig done up in an elaborate Victorian bun. They always relocated the wig to a different shelf in the store, so it was never in the same place twice. Perhaps this was part of the test to further separate the initiated from the uninitiated, or perhaps the boy simply did it out of boredom. Finally my eyes alighted upon the object in question. Truly it was a wretched-looking thing. I lifted it from the mannequin’s unsuspecting head. “I hear this is lovely in chestnut, but mahogany’s twice as nice.” I knew when I said it that it did not come off sounding nearly as seductive as when Odalie had said it in times past, but nevertheless it proved effective enough. The boy plugged away at the cash register keys, and soon enough a loud clunk sounded and the wall panel behind the front counter sprang open.
“You may enter, ma’ams.”
Odalie went in first, and I followed. Once again, as the wall panel clicked shut behind me, I felt my eyes suddenly peering into absolute darkness, working diligently to make out the shape and path of the hallway. The sounds of a lively party echoed all around us. I sensed Odalie moving in front of me, and I trailed blindly in her wake until together we pushed through a velvet curtain. We stood there for thirty seconds, but before we’d even had a chance to fully take in the scene, a woman rushed over and kissed Odalie on both cheeks.
“There you are!” the woman exclaimed.
“So good to see you again,” Odalie replied with equal enthusiasm. I recognized the woman from my long-ago session with the bohemian group, but I could tell Odalie did not remember the woman.
“I was just saying to Marjorie—oh! See Marjorie over there? Wave, dear!—I was just saying to Marjorie, ‘I wonder when she’ll get here,’ and right away you appeared, poof! Like magic—here you are!”
“Here I am,” Odalie echoed. People were always coming up and talking to Odalie in this manner, and as a result she had developed a very graceful but vague manner of responding.
“You really must come over and say hello,” the woman said, her breath washing over us in a hot whiskey-scented wave. Her arm was already linked through Odalie’s in a manner that suggested she would not take no for an answer. She flinched with a silent hiccup and tenaciously pressed on. “There’s a man by the name of Digby who’s a downright wag of an impressionist. He’s got some real funny stuff you really shouldn’t miss! And of course the painter Lebaud is over there, too, telling all about how he plans to paint you in that new modern style where it’s you but it doesn’t look like you at all, where the features are all funny and out of order . . .”
The woman’s dogged persistence was a success, and I suddenly found myself standing alone. I spotted Redmond from across the room, and he nodded in my direction. The misunderstanding that had occurred the night of the raid had never been discussed, but rather it melted between us a little bit at a time; a rigid ice cube slowly turning back to easy-flowing water that (I hoped) might soon run under the bridge. I watched as he toddled over to take
my drink order. It was a terse exchange, but one I knew signified that we were progressing in a positive direction.
As I waited for Redmond to return with a champagne cocktail, I took a sweeping look around the room. A woman with a gardenia tucked over her ear was singing in a flirty voice that brimmed over with a sort of cheerful sarcastic glee, moving her hands at the wrists as she sang. It was one of those perky-sounding songs that turned out to be somewhat deceptive; it had a jaunty enough melody, but upon closer observation it was actually characterized by a spate of fashionably cynical lyrics. Couples that seemed impervious to pessimism danced in the center of the room, happy to ignore the lyrics and keep time instead with the upbeat tempo of the melody.
It’s funny how that night things already felt changed. Perhaps I’m only imagining this now that I have the advantage of hindsight, but I swear that’s the way it goes in my memory: Somehow I had the distinct impression a portion of the magic was already gone forever. Perhaps I am only remembering my sensitivity to the changing seasons. Who knows. After all, summer was over. It had abandoned us, leaving behind a feeling of dissatisfaction, and taking with it all those too oft unfulfilled beach-day aspirations of a brown-skinned, primitive freedom. The weather would turn cold before we knew it and drive us back into the cramped and stuffy steam-heated rooms we called civilization.
But I looked around me and felt there was something greater informing my feelings that night than simply summer’s annual eulogy. In a flash it came to me, and I suddenly understood something about my own generation. It was the kind of comprehension only granted to a true outsider as she is looking in, and it was this: The couples dancing in the center of the room had seen many summers and many winters; they would reconfigure themselves many times, and had tacitly agreed to forget the waltz in favor of the foxtrot and then forget the foxtrot in favor of the Charleston. They would act as though each whirl around the dance floor marked the hilarious advent of something new; each kiss they gave out they would pretend was their first. In short, their youth was not an act, but their innocence most certainly was. Their youth was what kept them moving, a sort of brutal vitality lingering in their muscles and bones that was all too often mistaken for athleticism and grace. But their innocence was something they were obligated to go on faking in order to maintain the illusion something fresh and spontaneous and exciting was just around the next corner. I began, for the first time that night, to dimly perceive that the relative electricity in the air all hinged on this illusion. Somehow we had gone off to war and had come back world-weary . . . yet at the same time we’d managed to make a generational career out of pretending virginal adolescence. In short, I had come to the conclusion the whole pack of us were fakes.
I continued to look around. Without realizing it, I was searching the room for Gib. I had heard them arguing almost every day that week. Even in my state of displeasure with Odalie, I was nonetheless eager to see her cut him out of the picture at long last. I roamed the room. He was not in the cluster of men puffing away at their cigars. He was not hovering over the roulette table, watching for men purposely leaning against the rim of the wheel to slow it. He was not in the crowd of nervous bodies shimmying the Charleston (though to be honest, he rarely was). When I finally found him, it appeared Odalie had, too. They were seated upon a red velvet settee in a far corner by the bar, and together they were discussing something with great animation. Neither was smiling, and after several minutes it became clear their discussion was taking the form of yet another argument. Curiosity soon got the better of me. I set the cocktail that was already in my hand down on a nearby table and approached the bar, where I feigned thirst to the bartender and ordered a fresh drink. The entire speakeasy had grown impossibly boisterous by that hour, but I was nonetheless hoping to hear a fragment or two of Odalie and Gib’s conversation.
But no sooner had I edged my way within earshot than a tipsy young girl tried to perch on the arm of their settee, and finding Gib’s hand under her derriere, jumped up with a yelp. As she sprang from where she had accidentally sat upon his hand, she upset the contents of her martini glass over his head and proceeded now to flutter anxiously about the settee, squawking with apology. With an intermingling of bathtub gin and hair oil dripping into his eyes, Gib did not appear amused by this new development. Odalie, for her part, deftly extracted Gib’s pocket square from the breast of his jacket and began blotting the offending gin from his face. In seconds she had sent the girl away and was soothingly urging Gib into a back room with her, where it seemed they intended to adjourn indefinitely.
With my reconnaissance mission thwarted and my curiosity unquenched, I let out a sigh and turned to regard the wild revelry transpiring in the center of the room. Someone had rolled a cart into the middle of the dance floor and stacked it high with a pyramid of champagne glasses. Meanwhile, a pretty little slip of a girl in a bright yellow dress stood atop a step-stool and poured a golden stream of champagne from a very cumbersome and heavy-looking magnum. The champagne frothed and bubbled over the glass at the very top until it cascaded down the small mountain of glasses, filling each along the way. People all around me, drunk and sober alike, applauded the girl’s coordination.
For the briefest of seconds, I caught a flash of suspenders and spats and thought I’d glimpsed the Lieutenant Detective, standing just behind the makeshift champagne fountain. It wasn’t him. Even so, the tremor of recognition had jolted me into a state of nervous alert, and I found myself suddenly restless. Perhaps even a greater shock to my system was the half-formed realization that I might indeed welcome his company. I was unsettled and couldn’t remain leaning at the bar for long. Before I knew it, I had dumped down the glass of gin and vermouth in my hand and proceeded to do something I rarely did while still sober enough to remember the experience—that is, I ventured out to the dance floor and threw myself into the jittery crowd of Charleston dancers. I don’t know how much time passed during my exertions on the dance floor, but it was likely a full thirty minutes later when I pulled off to the side to catch my breath. By then I had begun to sweat so much, my pinned bob had plastered itself to my cheeks and I tasted salt whenever I licked my upper lip. Red-faced, I stood to the side and watched as others carried on.
I had lost track of Odalie completely when all of a sudden her luminous oval of a face buoyed up at me, thrust forward into the candlelight from the dark. A bit startled, I staggered backward.
“Oh!”
“Rose, dear—there you are!” Her voice sounded funny; there was a brittle, accusatory quality to it. Something was wrong. Perhaps it was a trick played by the flicker of the candlelight, but it looked like Odalie’s mouth was twitching. I slowly became aware of another shape standing nearby, just over her shoulder. It was the shape of a man. The shoulders were reasonably broad, but the hips were narrow and the head was disproportionately small. I blinked and looked more closely.
“Oh!” I said, startled all over again. Although to be fair, upon seeing his face I shouldn’t have been startled at all. I had given him the address myself, not to mention a description of how to enter through the wig shop.
“You remember Teddy, don’t you, Rose? From the Brinkleys’?” I believe she knew it was an unnecessary question. Of course I remembered. The overly polite tone of her voice was laced with a bitter anger. I had been planning all along on telling her I had been the one to invite Teddy, but now that the fateful moment of confrontation had arrived, I found myself swallowing nervously and extending a hand in Teddy’s direction.
“Of course,” I said. “Teddy. So good to see you again.” He smiled and accepted my outstretched hand as if he had not just seen me mere hours earlier at the precinct. Once he’d released my hand, the three of us were left standing around awkwardly. No one made conversation for several minutes; meanwhile the party roared on all around us. I slowly became conscious of the fact we had come to constitute a static point amid a sea of vibration. Finally, Odalie spoke.
“As I’m sure you can imagine, Teddy and I need to have a little chat, Rose,” she said. I nodded awkwardly, suddenly uncomfortable in my body. I knew my discomfort had to do with the guilt I now felt; I could see in Odalie’s eyes she knew I’d brought them to this moment of final confrontation by giving Teddy the address of where we’d be that night.
“And we can’t very well chat here,” Odalie added. “Would you mind, Rose, taking him back to the apartment? I’ve got some things I need to finish up here, and then I’ll be right over so we can all sit down good and proper.”
I agreed to Odalie’s request that I temporarily play host for her, but I didn’t feel confident about any of it anymore. No sooner had my betrayal been revealed than I had immediately begun to regret it. I’m not sure what I thought would happen by giving Teddy the address to the speakeasy that night. But whatever it was, I still hadn’t acquired the stomach for it.
Odalie flipped open a silver case and extracted a cigarette. Teddy fished around for a lighter and found one swimming in the depths of his jacket pocket.
“So, Rose’ll show me to your apartment, and then we can talk more about . . . about Newport,” Teddy said, holding up the flame. The tone of it rendered it half-question, half-statement.
“Oh, I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about,” Odalie said. “Go on, now. I’ll be right behind you two.” She patted his hand and winked, then disappeared back into the crowd of dancers, which greedily swallowed her up.
Content to wait for Odalie at the apartment as instructed, Teddy held out a genteel arm to me. Together we headed for the back door.
Our journey over to the apartment was uneventful, despite the obvious tension. Silence prevailed between us throughout the trip. Twice—once in the taxi-cab and once as the elevator cage ticked off the floors, making its ascent—Teddy drew a sharp breath as if he was about to speak, but then seemed to think better of it. It wasn’t until we were in the apartment and had been sitting there for some minutes that I broke the silence by asking him whether he’d like a drink. It was not something I historically had a habit of doing—offering people drinks, that is—but it was something Odalie would’ve done, and besides, I had begun to develop new habits during my tenure with her. I did not think Teddy, undoubtedly a charter member of the Boy Scouts during his youth, would accept the drink. But to my surprise, he did. Under ordinary circumstances I think he might’ve refused the drink; he seemed like the type to preach on about the virtues of “keeping a clear head.” But I believe he found himself in extenuating circumstances that night; it was clear Odalie made him nervous. I found myself flipping through a little recipe book Odalie kept near the bar titled Harry’s ABCs of Mixing Cocktails, attempting to build some sort of drink called a sidecar.
The Other Typist Page 28