Alfred rotated his bobbing hands and examined their dorsal sides.
“I’d never seen such an enormous bathroom.”
“Enid, you have no tact,” Alfred said.
It might have occurred to Chip that this, too, was a tactless remark, since it implied that his father concurred in his mother’s criticism of the apartment and objected only to her airing of it. But Chip was unable to focus on anything but the hair dryer protruding from Julia’s DreamWorks tote bag. It was the hair dryer that she kept in his bathroom. She seemed, actually, to be heading out the door.
“Dean and Trish have a whirlpool and a shower stall and a tub, all separate,” Enid went on. “The sinks are his ’n’ hers.”
“Chip, I’m sorry,” Julia said.
He raised a hand to put her on hold. “We’re going to have lunch here as soon as Denise comes,” he announced to his parents. “It’s a very simple lunch. Just make yourselves at home.”
“It was nice to meet you both,” Julia called to Enid and Alfred. To Chip in a lower voice she said, “Denise will be here. You’ll be fine.”
She opened the door.
“Mom, Dad,” Chip said, “just one second.”
He followed Julia out of the apartment and let the door fall shut behind him.
“This is really unfortunate timing,” he said. “Just really, really unfortunate.”
Julia shook her hair back off her temples. “I’m feeling good about the fact that it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever acted self-interestedly in a relationship.”
“That’s nice. That’s a big step.” Chip made an effort to smile. “But what about the script? Is Eden reading it?”
“I think maybe this weekend sometime.”
“What about you?”
“I read, um,” Julia looked away, “most of it.”
“My idea,” Chip said, “was to have this ‘hump’ that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something off-putting at the beginning, it’s a classic modernist strategy. There’s a lot of rich suspense toward the end.”
Julia turned toward the elevator and didn’t reply.
“Did you get to the end yet?” Chip asked.
“Oh, Chip,” she burst out miserably, “your script starts off with a six-page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama!”
He was aware of this. Indeed, for weeks now, he’d been awakening most nights before dawn, his stomach churning and his teeth clenched, and had wrestled with the nightmarish certainty that a long academic monologue on Tudor drama had no place in Act I of a commercial script. Often it took him hours—took getting out of bed, pacing around, drinking vodka—to regain his conviction that a theory-driven opening monologue was not only not a mistake but the script’s most powerful selling point; and now, with a single glance at Julia, he could see that he was wrong.
Nodding in heartfelt agreement with her criticism, he opened the door of his apartment and called to his parents, “One second, Mom, Dad. Just one second.” As he shut the door again, however, the old arguments came back to him. “You see, though,” he said, “the entire story is prefigured in that monologue. Every single theme is there in capsule form—gender, power, identity, authenticity—and the thing is . . . wait. Wait. Julia?”
Bowing her head sheepishly, as though she’d somehow hoped he wouldn’t notice she was leaving, Julia turned away from the elevator and back toward him.
“The thing is,” he said, “the girl is sitting in the front row of the classroom listening to the lecture. The fact that he is controlling the discourse—”
“And it’s a little creepy, though,” Julia said, “the way you keep talking about her breasts.”
This, too, was true. That it was true, however, seemed unfair and cruel to Chip, who would never have had the heart to write the script at all without the lure of imagining the breasts of his young female lead. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Although some of the physicality there is intentional. Because that’s the irony, see, that she’s attracted to his mind while he’s attracted to her—”
“But for a woman reading it,” Julia said obstinately, “it’s sort of like the poultry department. Breast, breast, breast, thigh, leg.”
“I can remove some of those references,” Chip said in a low voice. “I can also shorten the opening lecture. The thing is, though, I want there to be a ‘hump’—”
“Right, for the moviegoer to get over. That’s a neat idea.”
“Please come and have lunch. Please. Julia?”
The elevator door had opened at her touch.
“I’m saying it’s a tiny bit insulting to a person somehow.”
“But that’s not you. It’s not even based on you.”
“Oh, great. It’s somebody else’s breasts.”
“Jesus. Please. One second.” Chip turned back to his apartment door and opened it, and this time he was startled to find himself face to face with his father. Alfred’s big hands were shaking violently.
“Dad, hi, just another minute here.”
“Chip,” Alfred said, “ask her to stay! Tell her we want her to stay!”
Chip nodded and closed the door in the old man’s face; but in the few seconds that his back had been turned the elevator swallowed Julia. He punched the call button, to no avail, and then opened the fire door and ran down the spiral of the service stairwell. After a series of effulgent lectures celebrating the unfettered pursuit of pleasure as a strategy of subverting the bureaucracy of rationalism, BILL QUAINTENCE, an attractive young professor of Renaissance Studies and Critical Theory, is seduced by his beautiful and adoring student MONA. Their wildly erotic affair has hardly begun, however, when they are discovered by Bill’s estranged wife, HILLAIRE. In a tense confrontation representing the clash of Therapeutic and Transgressive worldviews, BILL and HILLAIRE struggle for the soul of young MONA, who lies naked between them on tangled sheets. HILLAIRE succeeds in seducing MONA with her crypto-repressive rhetoric, and MONA publicly denounces BILL. BILL loses his job but soon discovers e-mail records proving that HILLAIRE has given MONA money to ruin his career. As BILL is driving to see his lawyer with a diskette containing the incriminating evidence, his car is run off the road into the raging C—— River, and the diskette floats free of the sunken car and is borne by ceaseless, indomitable currents into the raging, erotic/chaotic open sea, and the crash is ruled vehicular suicide, and in the film’s final scenes HILLAIRE is hired to replace BILL on the faculty and is seen lecturing on the evils of unfettered pleasure to a classroom in which is seated her diabolical lesbian lover, MONA. This was the one-page précis that Chip had assembled with the aid of store-bought screenwriting manuals and had faxed, one winter morning, to a Manhattan-based film producer named Eden Procuro. Five minutes later he’d answered his phone to the cool, blank voice of a young woman saying, “Please hold for Eden Procuro,” followed by Eden Procuro herself crying, “I love it, love it, love it, love it, love it!” But now a year and a half had passed. Now the one-page précis had become a hundred-and-twenty-four-page script called “The Academy Purple,” and now Julia Vrais, the chocolate-haired owner of that cool, blank personal assistant’s voice, was running away from him, and as he raced downstairs to intercept her, planting his feet sidewise to take the steps three and four at a time, grabbing the newel at each landing and reversing his trajectory with a jerk, all he could see or think of was a damning entry in his nearly photographic mental concordance of those hundred and twenty-four pages:
3: bee-stung lips, high round breasts, narrow hips and
3: over the cashmere sweater that snugly hugs her breasts
4: forward raptly, her perfect adolescent breasts eagerly
8: (eying her breasts)
9: (eying her breasts)
9: (his eyes drawn helplessly to her perfect breasts)
11: (eying her breasts)
12: (mentally fondling her perfect breasts)
15: (eying and eying her perfect adolescent breasts)
> 23: (clinch, her perfect breasts surging against his)
24: the repressive bra to unfetter her subversive breasts.)
28: to pinkly tongue one sweat-sheened breast.)
29: phallically jutting nipple of her sweat-drenched breast
29: I like your breasts.
30: absolutely adore your honeyed, heavy breasts.
33: (HILLAIRE’S breasts, like twin Gestapo bullets, can be)
36: barbed glare as if to puncture and deflate her breasts
44: Arcadian breasts with stern puritanical terry cloth and
45: cowering, ashamed, the towel clutched to her breasts.)
76: her guileless breasts shrouded now in militaristic
83: I miss your mouth, I miss your perfect breasts, I
117: drowned headlights fading like two milk-white breasts.
And there were probably even more! More than he could remember! And the only two readers who mattered now were women! It seemed to Chip that Julia was leaving him because “The Academy Purple” had too many breast references and a draggy opening, and that if he could correct these few obvious problems, both on Julia’s copy of the script and, more important, on the copy he’d specially laser-printed on twenty-four-pound ivory bond paper for Eden Procuro, there might be hope not only for his finances but also for his chances of ever again unfettering and fondling Julia’s own guileless, milk-white breasts. Which by this point in the day, as by late morning of almost every day in recent months, was one of the last activities on earth in which he could still reasonably expect to take solace for his failures.
Exiting the stairwell into the lobby, he found the elevator waiting to torment its next rider. Through the open street door he saw a taxi extinguish its roof light and pull away. Zoroaster was mopping up inblown water from the lobby’s checkerboard marble. “Goodbye, Mister Chip!” he quipped, by no means for the first time, as Chip ran outside.
Through the bead curtain of water coming off the marquee, he saw Julia’s cab brake for a yellow light. Directly across the street, another cab had stopped to discharge a passenger, and it occurred to Chip that he could take this other cab and ask the driver to follow Julia. The idea was tempting; but there were difficulties.
One difficulty was that by chasing Julia he would arguably be committing the worst of the offenses for which the general counsel of C—— College, in a shrill, moralistic lawyer’s letter, had once upon a time threatened to countersue him or have him prosecuted. The alleged offenses had included fraud, breach of contract, kidnap, Title IX sexual harassment, serving liquor to a student under the legal drinking age, and possession and sale of a controlled substance; but it was the accusation of stalking—of making “obscene” and “threatening” and “abusive” telephone calls and trespassing with intent to violate a young woman’s privacy—that had really scared Chip and scared him still.
A more immediate difficulty was that he had four dollars in his wallet, less than ten dollars in his checking account, no credit to speak of on any of his major credit cards, and no prospect of further proofreading work until Monday afternoon. Considering that the last time he’d seen Julia, six days ago, she’d specifically complained that he “always” wanted to stay home and eat pasta and “always” be kissing her and having sex (she’d said that sometimes she almost felt like he used sex as a kind of medication, and that maybe the reason he didn’t just go ahead and self-medicate with crack or heroin instead was that sex was free and he was turning into such a cheapskate; she’d said that now that she was taking an actual prescription medication herself she sometimes felt like she was taking it for both of them and that this seemed doubly unfair, because she was the one who paid for the medication and because the medication made her slightly less interested in sex than she used to be; she’d said that if it were up to Chip, like, they probably wouldn’t even go to movies anymore but would spend the whole weekend wallowing in bed with the shades down and then reheating pasta), he suspected that the minimum price of further conversation with her would be an overpriced lunch of mesquite-grilled autumn vegetables and a bottle of Sancerre for which he had no conceivable way of paying.
And so he stood and did nothing as the corner traffic light turned green and Julia’s cab drove out of sight. Rain was lashing the pavement in white, infected-looking drops. Across the street, a long-legged woman in tight jeans and excellent black boots had climbed out of the other cab.
That this woman was Chip’s little sister, Denise—i. e., was the only attractive young woman on the planet whom he was neither permitted nor inclined to feast his eyes on and imagine having sex with—seemed to him just the latest unfairness in a long morning of unfairnesses.
Denise picked her way through the pools and rapids on the pavement and joined Chip beneath the marquee.
“Listen,” Chip said with a nervous smile, not looking at her, “I need to ask you a big favor. I need you to hold the fort for me here while I find Eden and get my script back. There’s a major, quick set of corrections I have to make.”
As if he were a caddie or a servant, Denise handed him her umbrella and brushed water and grit from the ankles of her jeans. Denise was the one who’d instructed him to invite his parents to stop and have lunch in New York today. She’d sounded like the World Bank dictating terms to a Latin debtor state, because unfortunately Chip owed her some money. He owed her whatever ten thousand and fifty-five hundred and four thousand and a thousand dollars added up to.
“See,” he explained, “Eden wants to read the script this afternoon sometime, and financially, obviously, it’s critical that we—”
“You can’t leave now,” Denise said.
“It’ll take me an hour,” Chip said. “An hour and a half at most.”
“Is Julia here?”
“No, she left. She said hello and left.”
“You broke up?”
“I don’t know. She’s gotten herself medicated and I don’t even trust—”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you wanting to go to Eden’s, or chasing Julia?”
Chip touched the rivet in his left ear. “Ninety per cent going to Eden’s.”
“Oh, Chip.”
“No, but listen,” he said, “she’s using the word ‘health’ like it has some kind of absolute timeless meaning.”
“This is Julia?”
“She takes pills for three months, the pills make her unbelievably obtuse, and the obtuseness then defines itself as mental health! It’s like blindness defining itself as vision. ‘Now that I’m blind, I can see there’s nothing to see.’”
Denise sighed and let her shoulders droop. “What are you saying? You want to follow her and take away her medicine?”
“I’m saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed,” Chip said. “I’m saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as ‘diseased.’ A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease which requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that’s free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental ‘health’ is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you’re buying into buying. And I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant.”
Denise closed one eye and opened the other very wide. “If I grant that these are interesting issues,” she said, “will you stop talking about them and come upstairs with me?”
Chip shook his head. “There’s a poached salmon in the fridge. A crème fraiche with sorrel.”
“Has it occurred to you that Dad is sick?”
“An hour is all it’s going to take. Hour and a half at most.”
“I said has it occurred to you that Dad is sick?”
Chip had a vision of his father trembling and pleading in the doorway, and to block it out he t
ried to summon up an image of sex with Julia, with the azure-haired stranger, with Ruthie, with anyone, but all he could picture was a vengeful, Fury-like horde of disembodied breasts.
“The faster I find Eden and make those corrections,” he said, “the sooner I’ll be back. If you really want to help me.”
An available cab was coming down the street. He made the mistake of looking at it, and Denise misunderstood him.
“I can’t give you any more money,” she said.
He recoiled as if she’d spat on him. “Jesus, Denise—”
“I’d like to but I can’t.”
“I wasn’t asking you for money!”
“Because where does it end?”
He turned on his heel and walked into the downpour and marched toward University Place, smiling with rage. He was ankle deep in a boiling gray sidewalk-shaped lake. He was clutching Denise’s umbrella in his fist without opening it, and still it seemed unfair to him, it seemed not his fault, that he was getting drenched.
[1999]
SALLY BENSON
APARTMENT HOTEL
MR. AND MRS. MORRISON LIVED in an apartment hotel in the East Thirties. They had moved there from an apartment hotel in the East Twenties that had been torn down to make an office building.
Although the dining-room opened at seven and closed at nine, they made it a rule to breakfast at eight. Their table was in a corner by the window and was distinguished from the other tables by a fern in an etched silver bowl. It was Mrs. Morrison’s fern and Mrs. Morrison’s bowl.
Sometimes she brought down a few fresh flowers and took the fern up to their sitting-room. She said she wanted to give it a breath of fresh air.
The sitting-room was full of personal touches. Even if Mrs. Morrison did live in a hotel she believed in trying to make it homelike.
The hotel management had provided the dark blue carpet and the dark blue draperies with tan fringe, but Mrs. Morrison had done wonders with them. The room was filled with useless little ornaments left over from the days when they had kept house.
Mrs. Morrison couldn’t remember exactly when they had decided not to keep house. After the baby had died, the house in Twenty-second Street in Chelsea had seemed too big for them, and Mr. Morrison had suggested that they live in a hotel for the winter. He thought it might brighten her up a bit.
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 22