The Social Climber of Davenport Heights

by Pamela Morsi

The light changed and I turned onto the expressway.

  “Do you think it was…like God?” I asked.

  He gave me a faint little smile. “I’ve never said that aloud.”

  “But do you think it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think it was God in the jungle. I think it was God getting Chester to that car. And I think it was God bringing you into my little store.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t God back in the old days when I got such a thrill out of cheating you.”

  He laughed and he reached over and laid his hand atop mine on the gearshift.

  “Well, you know, Janey, I’ve been thinking about all my worldly goods to thee endow,” he teased. “Perhaps I can see about getting that made retroactive.”

  It was a little joke, of course. A silly, intimate little girlfriend/boyfriend-type joke. Somehow it kind of thrilled me all over.

  When I pulled into my parking spot in front of the store, he asked me to come in with him. It seemed very natural to do so.

  We walked right past the counter area where our tête-à-têtes were commonly held, to the mezzanine stairs. Holding my hand in his own, we hurried up the oak steps. He didn’t bother to unhook the flimsy cord that held up the Private Keep Out sign. He just climbed right over it and helped me to do the same.

  I just went rather naturally into his arms. I don’t know how long it had been since I had been kissed; really, sweet, soul-searching, heights-reaching kissed. Maybe I never had been, or perhaps I had just forgotten what it was like. But at that moment, it was everything.

  We continued up the stairs once more, only to stop at the landing and kiss again. This time our knees turned to jelly and we ended up sitting on the stairs, necking, only ten steps from his doorway.

  Like a couple of hormone-driven teenagers, we were eager and hesitant. Both of us aroused, neither of us in our right minds.

  Scott pulled away from me. Sweat was beaded up on his forehead and he was breathing heavily.

  “Okay, Janey,” he said. “This is your call. Do we go upstairs and have sex or do we go downstairs and pretend this never happened?”

  “Let’s go upstairs and have sex,” I answered. “We can go downstairs and pretend that it never happened later.”

  He laughed. He slid one arm around my back and another behind my knees and lifted me up into his lap.

  “I’d like to carry you to my bed,” he told me, “but I don’t think my leg could stand it.”

  “Save your strength,” I told him. “You’re going to need it when we get there.”

  We continued to kiss and grope and tease each other on the stairs. I loved sitting in his lap, feeling the hardness in the front of his trousers pressing urgently against my tush. I was eager to get a look at him naked. But he was in a better position to undo buttons and drag down zippers. By the time we made it across the threshold of his apartment, his shirt was hanging open and I was stripped down to diaphanous blue panties.

  We made it to his bed eventually and were squirming passionately when I mentioned the word condom. It had the effect often seen in the great newspaper movies of the 1930s, where the editor, upon hearing the hero’s latest communiqué yells out, “Stop the presses!”

  He searched fruitlessly in the drawer beside the bed. Then he checked out the shelves in the bathroom. While I found the interruption of our romantic moment somewhat irksome, it was also endearing and reassuring.

  “Found ’em,” Scott said, hurrying back to bed, where he tossed the small box of Magnums.

  “Did you check the expiration date?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “We still have time,” he said. “But I do think we ought to hurry.”

  I laughed. And he laughed.

  We went into each other’s arms once more, but it was without the mindless rush. We took our time, enjoying the moment, reveling in the experience.

  I admit, it had been a while since I’d had sex. It wouldn’t have taken all that much to impress me. Scott managed it. It had obviously been a while for him, as well.

  We were good together, neither of us really unsure about ourselves, both of us willing to take some chances. There is always excitement in newness, but especially so when trust and respect are already firmly established.

  Afterward, exhausted, we lay in each other’s arms. I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to luxuriate in the warmth of it all.

  “That was great,” I told him for starters as I snuggled up close.

  A moment later I was sound asleep.

  When I awakened, it was very dark. Across the room a match sparked into life. In its faint glow, I watched Scott light a kerosene lamp.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said as he carried the light to the beside table. “You haven’t paid your electric bill.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed next to me.

  “I’ve got two bare bulbs overhead,” he told me. “Bright and harsh. I thought I might look better dimmer.”

  “Dim guys are my specialty,” I assured him.

  He leaned down and kissed me.

  “The Janey Domschke I knew at Sunnyside wasn’t particularly interested in guys at all, especially not dim ones.”

  “That Janey was only fifteen years old,” I said.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “Innocent and virginal, young Janey had not yet discovered the sins of the flesh. And how good she was at them.”

  “I don’t actually recall you being Mr. Conquest,” I pointed out.

  He shrugged. “I was slow getting off the mark,” he admitted. “But I’m a real player now. Luring women up to my badly lit mezzanine apartment and driving them crazy with insatiable lust as I search for protective latex.”

  “Insatiable?”

  “Or maybe insensible?”

  “More like incensed.”

  “You’re thinking of that Strawberry Alarm Clock song, you know, about mad-candy disease, ‘incensed peppermint.’”

  I groaned as if in pain, and then simultaneously, we broke into song.

  “‘Who cares what games we choose? Little to win but nothin’ to lose.’”

  Scott’s expression was stern. “Janey,” he said, “you’re gorgeous, but you can’t sing.”

  I smiled. “What a lovely compliment,” I said. “I’ll be sure to pass it on to my plastic surgeon.”

  “He probably can’t sing either.”

  “Stop, you’re killing me.”

  “What a way to die!”

  It was three-thirty in the morning. We were both wide-awake. So we made sandwiches, took showers—one together and two separately—and we had more sex.

  The dawn was seeping in through the windows when I thought about going home.

  “What’s your hurry?” he asked as he came up behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist.

  In truth, there was none.

  I was reluctant for the idyll to end. He seemed to feel the same way. I think we both worried that once we stepped back into the real world, into our real lives, what we’d shared together would all slip away like a pleasant dream that had you smiling when you awakened, but that you were never quite able to recall to mind.

  So I didn’t go home. I put on yesterday’s picnic clothes, used his comb and toothbrush and wore only the lipstick, powder and blush that I carried in my purse.

  He fixed a breakfast fit for ranch hands: sausage, eggs and toast. We ate at his little table next to the window with the street view. We decided we were a perfect division of the newspaper. I got the Metro and Style. He took the front section and Sports. But neither of us read much. We kept getting distracted by things we wanted to say, thoughts we wanted to share.

  We opened the store promptly at nine. Scott wanted to write a letter about political favoritism in the presidency.

  “I read the president said he considered loyalty to be the most important trait he looked for in the people around him,” Scott told me.

  “It’s a good quality,” I agreed.

  “Yeah, it sounded okay to me, too,” he
said. “Then it stopped me in my tracks. That kind of committed single focus can be scary. I mean, Hitler’s supporters were absolutely committed and faithful.”

  “So you’re going to compare the president with Hitler?”

  He shook his head rapidly. “Far too incendiary and not anywhere near fair,” he said. “I guess you could say I’m writing about loyalty versus leadership. A truly forward-looking leader ought to seek out independent thinkers, not try to stifle their influence.”

  As the sun came pouring in through the front windows, Scott pursued the clear expression of his thoughts and I sorted through boxes of costume jewelry.

  We had a broad range of morning shoppers. Traffic in the store was up, and I took some personal pride in that. It was amazing what a generous amount of friendly, personal service could do for a business.

  I sold some badly weathered and damaged picture frames to a young artist from the college, who said he’d heard about us from a friend who’d purchased a broken mirror the week before.

  The fellow’s girlfriend, who was probably about eighteen but looked twelve, went crazy over my quilt display. She couldn’t actually afford to buy any of them, but I gladly spent forty-five minutes telling her what I knew about the styles and patterns.

  Ramon Glasse, an interior decorator whom I had known for years, dropped in. His eyes lit up at the sight of me, and we hugged like old friends.

  “So you have bought yourself this store,” he said. “It’s a very good one. Lots of quality inventory and priced very cheap.”

  “Not as cheap as it used to be,” I warned him. “And I haven’t bought the place. I just work here.”

  The expression on his face changed immediately. He was embarrassed for me to be caught employed.

  I diffused any further sympathy by suggesting that the management was instigating new store policies and we would be willing to offer him a small professional discount on items he purchased for his clients in return for helping us establish our name. Ramon was completely amenable to that.

  “I heard about your divorce,” he said, tutting sympathetically.

  “I suppose it is still prime gossip at the club,” I said.

  “Up until a week ago,” he told me. “Now the gossips have a new, more luscious tidbit.”

  “Oh?”

  “Gil Mullins has left his wife,” Ramon said emphatically.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I never kid,” he assured me. “And the woman he left her for is an absolute nobody.”

  “Young bimbo?”

  “If only!” Ramon said. “That would be understandable. This woman is dumpy, middle-aged and wears knockoffs.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Some real estate woman,” he said. “You probably know her. Ann…what is it they call her?…Ann Roller Hind.”

  “Ann Rhoder Hines!”

  “Yes, that’s her! You do know her. Enough said then.”

  He left laughing, happy and carrying a set of ceramic chickens that were kitchen canisters. The rooster was for flour, the hen sugar and the two little chicks, one brown and one yellow, were tea and coffee. I had unearthed them in a back room. And they were, in my opinion, four of the ugliest examples of arts and crafts on earth. But they were just the kind of eclectic fribble that Ramon would convince his customers they couldn’t live without. I made him pay through the nose for them.

  We had a lull about one-thirty and I raced up to the mezzanine and threw together a salad from what flotsam I could find in Scott’s refrigerator. We shared it together behind the counter as Scott read the first draft of what he’d written from the screen of his laptop.

  The man truly had a fine way with words. When he finished I gave him a well-deserved round of applause.

  “You like it?” he asked.

  “It’s great,” I said.

  “It’s too long,” he said. “I need to whittle it down quite a bit. Keep all the meaning and cut out the wordiness.”

  “Don’t you dare cut out that part about virtue,” I told him. “That was absolutely quotable. Let’s hear it again.”

  He scanned through the document until he found the line I meant.

  “If Goldwater were commenting on the policies of this Oval Office, he might remark that virtue taken to its extreme is as dangerous to our liberty as any vice.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow?”

  “Yes, wow, and that’s my final word on the subject,” I told him.

  He chuckled. “I’d better get back to work,” he said. “I want to try and get this finished today. The more timely it is, the better chance it has for getting in the paper.”

  “For the local paper?”

  He nodded. “Well, yeah. That’s where I’ve printed all of my stuff before.”

  “I don’t think you should send it to them,” I told him.

  “You don’t?”

  “Why start locally?” I said. “It’s a national issue, send it out nationally. What are the top newspapers in the country, the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times? Send it there first.”

  “Why would the New York Times print a letter from me?”

  “Scott, it’s a global village, right?” I told him. “The world is their readership. And it’s exactly what you say here. If they are good leaders, then they’ll want to fill their newspaper with independent thinkers.”

  He went back to his laptop as soon as we finished eating and I continued combing through rhinestones and paste. I had a couple of interesting afternoon customers, and made a few good sales.

  About three-thirty I found a brilliantly colored Morpho brooch. These pretty pieces from the 1920s used South American butterfly wings as part of the decoration, but they did not necessarily sell at high prices. But I felt the value of them could only go up. After admiring it thoroughly, I placed it in the padded case I’d marked as Not for Retail and returned to my labors.

  It was after six when Scott came back to find me.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Found a few pieces with genuine gems,” I told him, indicating the little box I’d set aside.

  “Valuable?”

  “Moderately,” I told him. “And even a lot of the inexpensively produced items are unique enough to command some good prices.”

  “I’m glad you’re going through those boxes,” he said. “I always knew it was a bad idea to have that much stuff just packed away.”

  “You know, Scott, we might think about setting up a special jewelry section here in the store.”

  “You think we could sell anything here?” he asked. “We haven’t had many people interested in it in the past.”

  “Because the people who would buy this kind of thing never made it to our door,” I said, “we probably need to heighten our profile.”

  “You have an idea for doing that?”

  “I’m thinking we could put some of the stock on consignment with jewelers around town,” I told him. “I could make sure Yesteryear Emporium was listed as the origin of the pieces. That would get our name in front of those people who might be our potential customers.”

  When I glanced up at him, he was smiling at me.

  “What?”

  “Janey, you are undoubtedly the best thing that has happened to this store in a very long time.”

  I laughed. “The feeling is mutual,” I told him.

  He leaned against a support pillar, arms folded across his chest.

  “You may be the best thing that has happened to me, as well,” he said.

  That statement was considerably more serious.

  “That feeling is also mutual.”

  We just looked at each other. Our relationship was so new, we were both still too surprised by it to make the effort to link it to definition.

  He stepped forward and bent down to touch my lips with his own.

  “Thanks for being here, Janey Domschke,” he said.

  “I can assure you,” I teased politely, “that it’s my pleasure.
”

  Scott tweaked my nose in retaliation.

  “Have you got time to proofread my final version?” he asked.

  “I will make time.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Make time?” he said. “Didn’t we do that yesterday.”

  I groaned with complaint. We made our way hand in hand to our little semiprivate hideaway behind the counter.

  His finished letter was, in my humble and perhaps moderately biased opinion, a masterpiece.

  I helped him find the appropriate Web sites on the Internet and showed him how to paste them into e-mail addresses.

  “And in just a few keystrokes,” I said, doing a fair imitation of a newsreel narrator, “we send the words of Scott Robbins hurtling headlong into the digital universe of twenty-first-century technology.”

  “It’s so easy,” he said. “I should have been doing this years ago.”

  “You certainly should have,” I agreed. “But when the good comes, it’s never too late.”

  “That’s a pretty quotable line you’ve got yourself,” he said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not mine,” I admitted. “Better cc a copy of that to the White House. Wouldn’t want them to say they didn’t get a chance to look at it before it went to print.”

  We closed the doors at 8:00 p.m. and went upstairs intending to make dinner. We made love instead and lay together afterward, so satisfied.

  “I just can’t quite believe you’re here with me, Janey,” Scott whispered. “I want to say…to say something special, but it seems too early.”

  “It is too early,” I agreed.

  “But I feel it,” he told me. “I feel it intensely.”

  It felt so wonderful being there in his arms. I wasn’t sure that I really deserved it.

  “Scott, I’m not really the person you think I am,” I told him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You think I’m a good person,” I said. “But I’m not. Before the accident, I didn’t even try to be.”

  He opened his mouth, probably to contradict me, but I didn’t give him the chance.

  “I wasn’t evil,” I assured him. “I did the right things. I went to church, gave to charity, didn’t make judgments based on race, creed, color or national origin. But I never really gave a damn about other people or their problems.”