Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Good thing my face was already moist and red from the queasy spell. It couldn’t flush any darker, and I couldn’t look any more sickly or strange.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “The dinner in two weeks. Of course.”

  I should have been mortified by my misunderstanding, but I was less embarrassed than determined. Those nickels and quarters I’d been saving by skipping lunch and walking block after sooty block? I spent them downstairs at the newsstand, buying five magazines to study as soon as I got home: every ad, every picture, every slogan. The next time I met Helen, I’d have more to say. I’d press John for more details about JWT’s campaigns, what they’d pioneered and what they were still trying to figure out. I’d fill my change purse again and keep saving what I could, in the hopes that I might buy the right kind of dress for the upcoming celebration dinner: something fashionable but not too feminine, striking just the right balance for Helen’s taste.

  That night in bed, John put an arm over me and pulled me close, forearm against my ribcage, palm against my spine. “You are getting a little bonier these days, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?” I said, pulling away.

  He tugged me closer again, so that my breasts crushed up against his own soft, warm chest.

  “Don’t worry. You’ve still got plenty where it counts. I don’t care for those new flat-chested fashions.”

  “Careful,” I said, feeling tender in his strong arms. “That’s a little tight.”

  He loosened up an inch and smiled, looking down at me. “I just can’t get enough, is all.”

  “Even with all those beautiful women surrounding you at your office?”

  “Oh, Rar,” he said, chastising and forgiving me in the same moment, mistaking my comment for the first pangs of marital jealousy. But I was not—or not yet—the jealous sort. What I really wanted to know was why he hadn’t told me that one of his bosses was a woman. That this was a more egalitarian field than I’d realized. That there might be opportunities for me to work at JWT as well.

  He started to nibble my earlobe.

  “Tell me about Helen Resor,” I said.

  “Later,” he mumbled, face buried in my neck.

  “You’re hiding her from me, and that means you think I’ll dislike her, or the opposite, and you don’t want me fawning.”

  “That’s right, darling. And fawning is prohibited at JWT. We’re too sophisticated for that.”

  “You think I’ll have a girl crush.” His tongue darted into my ear. “That tickles. In the wrong way.”

  “I know they encouraged that sort of thing at Vassar,” he said breathily.

  “Tickling?”

  “Girl crushes.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t you like to think so.” His discomfort with homosexuality extended to both genders, but at the same time, he was intrigued by the idea of women “being” with other women.

  “I’ll tell you about her later,” he said, pushing off the covers that were getting in our way. “I’ll tell you about all the gray-haired JWT spinsters later.”

  “She’s not a spinster. She’s married, and she must be no more than thirty . . .”

  “There, you know all about her already. For now, news trailer finished. Feature entertainment to follow.”

  As a man in his forties, he was at his prime, and at times, it seemed, insatiable. I didn’t mind his pushing. And when it came to work news, I didn’t worry terribly that he was withholding. It was a dance, both ways. We all had things we wanted, precious treasures we needlessly hid, appetites that rose and fell and sometimes needed a little doing-without to stimulate. I still remembered John warning me away from the Benny Fertigs of the world, who did not want enough. Marriage, physical satisfaction, professional ambition: there was room enough, and time, for both of us to have everything we desired.

  “Promise,” I said, letting him unfasten me, refusing to help as he fumbled with the ribbon lacings that cinched the top of my negligee. Dear man, with his thick fingers and thumping heart.

  “I promise.”

  “All right. But I won’t let you forget.”

  Chapter 20

  For the next two weeks, I pressed John for more details about Helen, which he parceled out in teasingly small bites. She was a legend already in the company, which controlled three quarters of all the advertising accounts in New York and Boston. She had increased the sale of Woodbury soap 1,000 percent. The common man outside the company didn’t know much about her, and didn’t need to. People inside the company seemed to take her genius and authority for granted.

  But how had she found her way into such a position? That was the question I put to John. Was she the daughter of a famous businessman? I teasingly hinted that perhaps it simply ran in her family’s blood. If you wanted to bait John Watson, you had only to emphasize ancestral predilections.

  Refusing to give inherited traits any unearned credit, John told me what he knew about her up-by-the-bootstraps career, explaining that Helen had started working various ad-company jobs—bill auditing, writing retail ads—directly out of high school. When Stanley and his brother opened a small branch of JWT in Cincinnati, he brought her on to work for him as the sole copywriter, and she followed them when they transferred to the New York headquarters three years later. Five years ago, Stanley had bought out the company for a half-million dollars, and a year after that, they married and continued to run the company as a team. In her position at JWT now, Helen had been known for hiring women, including suffragettes and women with science backgrounds.

  “Surely, that’s all you need to know,” he said the night he coughed up most of her background. He’d come home after 9 p.m., skipping dinner in favor of a long evening of liquid nutrition. “I admire your interest, Rar. But you know, I go with the men for a drink after work, and the shop talk never ends. By the time I come home, I’m about done.”

  “Then let me come for a drink. Especially if you’re not going to make it home in time for dinner.”

  I’d let him think I’d eaten alone, when in fact I’d made only a half portion, nibbled a few bites, and then set aside the rest for him, in the icebox. He’d told me he was going out that night with the other Research Department fellows to a “teahouse”—one of the many speakeasies doing a lively business now—and I’d known that meant I wouldn’t be seeing him for hours.

  Half of the time lately, I felt ravenously hungry, and the other half of the time I felt nauseated. I didn’t tell John. He’d only tease me for finally living like normal people—no longer pampered by maids and cooks, forced occasionally to deal with an empty icebox or my own inferior cooking abilities. But it wasn’t my bad cooking that was making me queasy. I chalked it up to anxiety and my own feelings of rootlessness. I refused to believe it could be anything else. I had the records to prove that John and I scheduled our intimacy with some care.

  Loosening his tie, John said, “Never mind about Helen—you’d like these boys in Research. You really would.”

  I didn’t need to be convinced. Working in the Hopkins lab, I’d occasionally socialized with other scientists who, at lunchtime or day’s end, didn’t want to talk about science anymore. But these ad men were more like John: equally obsessed, wanting to tinker and test. John was convinced they were the practical scientists of our day. People throughout America were their subjects and the experimental design was elegant. Will a certain photograph interest women in a new kind of lotion? Run the ad, offer free samples of the new product, and count how many requests are made. In the lab, it had been hard work to get hundreds of babies for testing and sometimes, to make sense of the results. It wasn’t hard at all to get twenty thousand women to respond to an advertisement in a ladies’ magazine, requesting free samples of a new beauty product, proving that the stimulus had worked.

  “If an ad man is right,” John liked to say, “the consumer behaviors prove it.” I would always nod when he made
those statements, showing my interest, while my brain lingered a step behind, noticing he’d said “ad man,” never “ad woman.” I knew it was just a turn of phrase, but as advertisers know, a turn of phrase changes everything.

  John had always enjoyed the argumentative side of our science work, but not me—I’d enjoyed the sense of urgency and collaboration, the way the hours and the days flew, the stalking down of some new idea, the nailing down of an answer to some question. “Let me come out with you, John,” I said.

  “Listen,” he tried to reassure me. “It’s just a little different than the lab. I was at Hopkins years before you came along. I could make a case for any assistant. But now it’s different. I have to make a name for myself first. I can’t sneak a wife into my briefcase.”

  He was right. But I’d never imagined that word, wife, would sound quite so unappealing.

  “Rar, you know me. I don’t like to wait for anything. It won’t take me very long. I could be running the place in a few years’ time.”

  “Not if Helen and Stanley Resor have anything to say about it.”

  “Running it with them, I mean. One of the VPs at the very least.”

  He never erred on the side of modesty. It was possible. Anything was possible.

  But I didn’t like to wait, either.

  •••

  We didn’t have a telephone line in the apartment, which made it easier not to talk with my mother and to ignore the fact that she might not wish to talk with me. Letters were easier: one-sided, brief.

  When my mother sent a note asking about our plans for Passover–Passover again already, the last one still a bad taste in all of our mouths—I made excuses. John’s too busy. He can’t miss a day of work.

  John wanted me to patch things up. He’d even hinted that it wouldn’t be terrible if my parents provided us with a belated wedding gift—cash would do—that might ease us through this period until John was past probation and more generously compensated at JWT. But I couldn’t ask. I wasn’t even sure I’d accept if help were offered. I wanted proof that the world recognized that John and I had been a good match from the beginning, that we were right, and that I, as John’s new wife, could make a household run just fine, even with scant resources.

  Mother wrote again, suggesting it was just as well that John was busy. It was better, in fact, that I come alone. But that’s where I had to draw the line. If he wasn’t truly welcome, I couldn’t go. I didn’t want to become one of those daughters who ran home whenever things were difficult, to be comforted by a family whose objection to a marriage was clear. That was not a strong foundation for our future. They had been ready and eager for me to exile myself in Europe. A briefer exile in New York would have to be just as acceptable, at least until John had proven himself and they were ready to admit that our lives were not an unmitigated disaster.

  The restaurant chosen for John’s postprobation dinner was below street level: windowless, dark paneled, and clubby. The smell of frying fat hit us as we came down the steps. With one hand, I gripped the banister as we descended into the warm, loud, overly fragrant dark. With the other, I rested a hand over my unsettled stomach. The maître d’, who immediately recognized Stanley, put us in a special room at the back.

  Stanley liked to deny that he was recognizable or any kind of Manhattan bigwig, and Helen reinforced their shared modesty. She quipped, “If we were a better looking group, they’d keep us in full view.”

  “You’ll hurt Mildred’s feelings, saying that,” Stanley joked back. Mildred was in Personnel. “She tries to get us handsome people. She signed off on Dr. Watson, didn’t she?”

  I liked hearing my husband’s good looks praised. I liked even better knowing that at least two women had needed to approve his hiring. How could one wish to be living in any other place, at any other time in history? I had every reason to be optimistic. Lab science, even with its Margaret Washburns and Mary Covers, had been a closed, masculine world compared to this.

  I felt his hand at the small of my back now, escorting me toward the table and guiding me away from unproductive contemplation. Why on earth should I be thinking about the past? It was only my fatigue and anxiety talking. This was a time for celebration.

  At the table, John’s co-workers jockeyed for their positions. Helen was at one end of the long table, and Stanley at the other, and John, the man of honor, stood between them, waiting to be tugged in either direction, while the other men—researchers and copywriters—made quick dashes for middle-of-the-table seats, like children playing duck, duck, goose.

  “Here, Rosalie, you’ll be next to me,” Helen said, indicating a seat at her right. “John, you sit next to your lovely wife.” I felt honored, and grateful to collapse into the chair, scooting into place, all our legs tucked in tight to avoid kicking one another. The food here was good, not great, John had told me beforehand. But there were cocktails, and supposedly a back wall connected to chutes where the liquor bottles would drop at the flip of a switch, if the police came in. The police who weren’t already here drinking, that is.

  Seated, my dress felt even tighter around the middle. It was the first major purchase I’d ever had to save for carefully, a quarter here and a dollar there, sacrificing along the way, and it was nearly perfect: panels of dark navy and white, sleeveless, slim-cut. I kept the matching blue jacket on, even thought it was too warm at the table, because the ensemble looked more elegant than the dress alone, and plus, I could feel sweat rings already darkening the cloth under my arms. In a moment of daring, using kitchen shears, I’d cut my hair even shorter, and now I wore a close-fitting hairband, with a cloth rosette on one side, over the right ear. Hearing about Helen’s love of art, I’d trekked all the way to Brooklyn for a free museum showing of Art Nouveau works, and I hoped the subject would come up, that I’d be able to find a subtle way to mention it to her.

  She turned to me, “Now that’s a smart suit. Rosalie, you could give me some good advice on my own fashion regimen. I’m afraid I don’t take the time to keep up.”

  “Oh, but you do. Your clothes are gorgeous.”

  “No, no,” she laughed, looking away—and I made a note, no unnecessary flattery, no bending the truth, not with Helen. I thought I’d lost her attention already, but she was only flagging down a waiter. She turned back to me and said, “I’m frugal. It’s neglect, on my part. Really it is. How can you understand consumers if you don’t understand women? And how can you understand women if you don’t understand what they like to wear?”

  “Oh. I agree.”

  “That reminds me,” she continued, tapping her water glass with a butter knife until everyone stopped fussing with their chairs and their napkins and looked up. “Some of you may have heard, and some of you may only have hoped, but the research is in . . .”

  “Tell us already, Helen,” some male voice had the gall to interrupt. I looked around. It hadn’t been John, thank goodness. But everyone was smiling; Helen, too. I had to get used to this: everyone interrupted, everyone bantered, everyone joked. No wonder John fit in so well here.

  “I am telling you. It’s official. Ladies are discarding their corsets.”

  A male copywriter at the end of the table wisecracked, “Goodbye, lingerie departments.”

  “Not at all,” Helen corrected him. “The undergarments are shrinking, but their place in women’s hearts is only growing. What portion do you think women are spending now on flimsy pieces of silk and satin that do nothing to define a woman’s waist?”

  When no one volunteered, she answered. “Half. Fully half of women’s clothing budgets are now spent on undergarments.”

  “It proves women are irrational,” Stanley suggested, smiling.

  Mildred spoke more loudly, “It suggests women are perfectly rational.”

  A man whose name I hadn’t caught interrupted her. “What’s rational about spending so much on garments that aren’
t seen once the lights go off?”

  “Don’t blame us,” Mildred interrupted back. “Who says women want the lights off? I’ve got nothing to hide, with or without lingerie.”

  A young busboy had just approached the table with a pitcher of water. He paused, face reddening, and turned on his heel. Stanley waved him back to finish the job, and raised his cocktail glass. “A toast to Thomas Edison.”

  A flurry of competing toasts filled the room with a roar.

  “To light.”

  “To lovely, unashamed women.”

  The man opposite me said good-naturedly, “To—what’s your name again? To Rosie.”

  I took a sip and wished I hadn’t. It was water I needed. Plain water. The busboy had barely finished filling my glass when I lifted it to drink, desperately.

  More toasts: “To John—isn’t he the reason we’re here drinking this terrible stuff?”

  “To Stanley for hiring John.”

  “To Helen—the brains of the operation—for marrying Stanley.”

  “Enough of that,” Helen said, laughing. “I only meant to toast the end of corsets.”

  I was wishing for a corset now, something to hold my own tummy in place. I was bloated, my cycle delayed. Maybe I was coming down with something, or maybe it was the way we were all crowded around this table, with our elbows pinned in close to our sides and our ankles crossed and our feet tucked underneath our chairs. And the heat, especially in this windowless back room. And that smell again: thick steaks frying, breaded fish sizzling in pans. When the menus were passed around, the dense curling script danced in front of my eyes, and I had no desire for anything and no idea what to order.

  “John, choose for me,” I said. “Whatever you get, I’ll have the same.”

  At the table, a more earnest debate started on the topic of how consumers made decisions, on whether they used logic. Either way, no one present believed that advertisers should lie to consumers. That was one of the Resors’ strongest positions. Outright deception had gone the way of old patent medicine ads. The new game was about mass education and finding a fit between products and people—a people who wouldn’t stay put, who no longer lived in the same towns and shopped in the same few stores as their parents had. The new game, someone at the table said, was storytelling: the skillful use of story and imagery and the perfect phrase and testimonials that made clear that a product had real value and appeal.