by Melissa Bank
He said, “I bought it myself in Santa Fe.”
I nodded. It was good that the ring had not been given to him by one of the ex-girlfriends he maintained contact with. But, like Josh, I had principles, and one of mine was that, except for a watch and a plain gold wedding band, a man ought not to wear jewelry. A ring, even this small and un-diamond, put him in a country that a man in a fur coat ruled.
“You don’t like it?” he said.
“No,” I said. “I like turquoise.”
. . . . .
I spent all day reading the manuscript I would have to report on. It was a novel called The Wives of Armonk, about women with a lot of money and how they liked to spend it plus have affairs with young men who had big penises. The main character, Jacqueline, fell in love with the pool man. He was skimming the pool for leaves, and she dived in naked. Then they were in the pool house, and she was saying, “Yes . . . yes . . . oh, Lord . . . yes.”
At dinner, my grandmother said, “So,” and I could tell she was about to bring up Josh.
“You know what I was just thinking?” I said. “I don’t know too much about your childhood.”
“I was a little girl,” she said, and I realized I’d asked her this question before. She sometimes said she grew up in Austria, other times Germany, and once Poland, and she’d left when she was twelve, fourteen, and sixteen. Her family was always very poor, but sometimes her father was a shoemaker and other times a farmer.
“What was your father like?” I asked.
“Sick,” she said.
“What was wrong with him?”
Tapping her chest, she said, “Weak lungs.”
Finally I asked why she didn’t like talking to me about her past. “Is it painful?”
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t remember.”
. . . . .
I was a slow reader, and I didn’t start writing my report until midnight on Sunday. I stayed up all night and at sunrise saw the Harlem River turn unscenically from black to brown.
I proofread my report twice and was especially proud of the last line: “This is dreck.”
I didn’t have time to take a shower, change my clothes, or put in my contact lenses. I took the express bus down to Manhattan and got to Steinhardt Publishers just before five.
The receptionist asked for my name, and I told her.
As she picked up the phone, I said, “I’m just supposed to drop this off.”
She said, “I’ll tell Honey you’re here,” and a moment later, out came Honey.
“Come on back,” she said, taking the manuscript and my reader’s report from me.
Incoherent with sleeplessness, I tried to apologize for wearing jeans.
She shook her head like I was a little crazy.
I sat in her office while she read my report. She tipped herself back in her chair and her eyes widened as she read. Then she laughed.
I hadn’t made any jokes in my report.
She laughed and laughed, and when she could speak, she told me Steinhardt was publishing The Wives of Armonk.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
She said, “No.” Then she asked me when I could start.
. . . . .
When I gave my grandmother the news, she said, “How much are they paying you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
The salary was very low, and I didn’t want to say the number out loud. Instead, I told her what my father had told me: I was an apprentice, learning a craft.
She turned her head to one side.
I was too tired and too happy to let this bother me. I said, “Maybe I’ll cook you dinner one night before I go.”
She said, “That’s nice,” but I could see she didn’t care for the idea.
She sat down with me on the sofa, where I was splayed out in my exhausted bliss.
She said, “I bet you’ll be happy to leave your old grandma.”
“No,” I said. “No.” Yes, yes, I thought in the cadence of an Armonk wife, oh, Lord . . . yes.
When she began to ask me about Josh, I said, “Listen, Mamie.” I looked at her, old lady to old lady, and said, “I don’t want to talk about my romantic life.” It occurred to me that romantic life was the phrase you’d use if you didn’t have one; for a moment, I went back to the night when I’d faked a date with Josh and wandered around midtown in the rain.
“Why,” she said, “if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It makes me feel bad.”
She took one of my cigarettes and lit it. She puffed but didn’t inhale. It reminded me of a picture she had of herself with my grandfather in a nightclub. They were sitting at a big round table, and she was wearing a shiny dress and lipstick.
“I’m trying to tell you how life is,” she said.
I said, “Things have changed, though.” I tried to make my voice sound certain. “Things are different.”
“How?” she said.
I thought of the professor who taught Introduction to Women’s Studies at Rogers and tried to think of some sure, smart thing she would say. Instead, I remembered that she’d broken her foot and even once the cast came off she walked with a cane. For some reason, this seemed to weaken my case. “Women have careers now,” I said. “We don’t care as much about, you know, men.”
“Is that so?”
I wanted to give her a specific example of my new modern relationship with Josh, but all I could think of was that we split the check. It was his idea, an offshoot of the principle that everything should be equal between us. When the check came, Josh divided it, calculating how much more my soda and coffee were. He himself drank only water.
“Anyway,” I said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
She got up from the sofa and went to the kitchen. In a few minutes my dinner was set out.
I said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
For the first time, she didn’t sit down with me or hover nearby. She turned on the television and pretended to watch it.
The chicken was undercooked; it was pink inside. I considered putting it back in the oven, but I didn’t. I got up from the table and hid the chicken underneath other garbage in the pail. I cleared my dishes and washed them, without any protest from her.
“I’m going to take a walk,” I said.
She said, “Have a good time.”
I went across the street to the pizza place and ordered a slice. I sat there eating it under fluorescent lights. The only other diners were an old man and a young couple with a child who whined. They didn’t seem unhappy or happy. It was impossible to learn anything from looking at them.
Sitting there, I thought of my grandmother saying, I only want what’s best for you, and I knew that if I could get myself to believe this I’d feel better about her and myself. But like everything else I was supposed to think, it didn’t feel true.
. . . . .
Robert called to congratulate me on my job and asked if I’d have dinner with him and Naomi. Jack was coming, too. “Bring Josh if you want to,” Robert said.
When I mentioned the invitation to Josh, he said that he was at a critical stage with a poem, but if the dinner was important to me he’d go.
He seemed to be stating a principle of his, though I wasn’t sure exactly what it was and didn’t ask. Lately, his principles had begun to feel like bars on a cage I was supposed to fit inside.
I said, “It’s not important.”
. . . . .
At Robert’s, Naomi gave me a hug, and I thought, Is all forgiven? In the kitchen, I saw that Robert’s MEAT and MILK labels were still on the drawers and cabinets.
There were only four places set at the table, so I knew Cynthia wasn’t coming, and Jack himself came late. He walked in tired and full of jokes about what he called “the shoot.”
I asked him what the movie was about, and he said that the shoot was for a commercial.
“I thought you made movies,” I said.
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He said that commercials were the company’s bread and butter.
Robert and Naomi had cooked a big dinner, a lamb stew and some mushy starch that was supposedly Middle Eastern and made me think the two of them and my grandmother could benefit from a cooking lesson from Cynthia.
Robert kept smiling at me in what felt like the private way of our pre-Naomi past. I thought maybe he was proud of me for finally getting a job.
I mentioned that my new boss was an old girlfriend of Jack’s.
Jack said, “How did you know that?”
I said, “She wouldn’t stop talking about you.”
Robert sounded like a little boy when he said, “Were you nice to her?”
Jack said, “I satisfied her needs”—I think to mortify Naomi.
But Naomi stood up to him; she said, “How do you mean, Jack?”
At dessert, Robert came out with a bottle of champagne.
I thought it was sweet of him to celebrate my job, and I was about to say so when he held up his glass and announced his engagement to Naomi.
I made my mouth smile, say, “Wow,” and kiss them both.
It was hard not to feel happy for Robert, though, since he seemed so happy for himself. It reminded me of the way he’d looked in the mirror when I’d helped him get ready for his prom.
Seeing himself in his tuxedo, he’d said, “Good, right?”
. . . . .
Jack and I walked out together and down Broadway.
I had keys to Josh’s apartment; I was supposed to meet him there after dinner. I knew he was probably already home from the library, but when Jack asked if I needed to rush off to Ovid I said that I didn’t.
We went to a bar on Broadway, and Jack ordered scotch for both of us. I pulled out a cigarette, and Jack took my matches and struck one for me. We sat there with our drinks and didn’t talk at first, which felt nice.
“Well,” he said, “there goes our little boy.”
I remembered Jack saying, What happens between me and Cynthia is between me and Cynthia, so I hesitated before saying, “What’s wrong with Cynthia?”
He said, “There’s not a thing wrong with that woman.”
“I mean, why didn’t she come?”
He thought for a moment. Then he told me that he’d suspected Robert’s announcement. “I think Cynthia wants to get married.”
“Oh,” I said. “Do you want to marry her?”
He said, “I am giving it some very serious thought,” but the way he said it made me think he wasn’t.
I remembered my father’s speech about what Jack was capable of and wasn’t; he’d said, It has nothing to do with how much Jack loves you. I thought about all the girls he’d stopped loving; it was like he had a timer, and at a certain point it just buzzed.
I said, “Does she say she wants to get married?”
“She’s from Alabama,” he said. “She doesn’t talk like that.”
“So, how do you know?”
“She’s thirty-two,” he said.
“That sounds like something Grandma would say.”
“Which one?” he said.
I knew he was just dodging the topic, but I answered anyway. “Mamie. Obviously.”
We’d finished our scotches and he raised his hand to the bartender; I thought he was going to signal for the check, but he pointed to our glasses: Another round.
Then he laughed, and his mood got about a hundred pounds lighter. “I can’t believe you’re going to work for Honey Zipkin.”
I said, “What happened with you two?”
“Not what she wanted to happen.”
“Meaning?”
He said, “I didn’t fall in love with her.”
. . . . .
I let myself into Josh’s apartment. I was a little drunk. I stood in the hall waiting for the bathroom for a long time before I figured out that the door was just closed and no one was inside.
When I got into bed beside Josh, I put my arms through his and kissed the back of his neck.
“You smell like a bar,” he said.
I thought, You smell like a library. But I wanted to have sex right then, so I said, “You smell like a poem.”
. . . . .
“I’m trying to think of Naomi as Robert’s first wife,” I said to Josh. We were having breakfast at La Rosita.
He looked at me with something like disapproval, and I was surprised to feel disapproval right back at him.
“That was a joke,” I said.
“But you don’t like her.”
“I don’t like her yet,” I said. “But maybe I will.”
“I think you should at least pretend to like her,” he said. “She’s going to be a member of your family.”
I was getting that caged feeling again. But right then I saw my key. When the check came, I said, “This is on me.”
. . . . .
Jack told me about the apartment, a walk-up above a cigar store on Thirty-third Street. Maura Edwards had made documentaries all over the world; now she was going to New Jersey to have a baby and needed to sublet her apartment.
When I met her at the apartment, she was eight months’ pregnant, and her skin was waxy and pale. She said, “You’re on time,” but her intonation said, You’re late.
She said the apartment was her refuge and spoke of it with more affection than she did either the boyfriend she was moving in with or the baby she was about to have. Her voice was almost loving when she said that the apartment had no bugs. A gecko she’d brought back from Brazil ate them. He lived in the walls.
Even by New York standards the apartment was tiny, and the few pieces of furniture were child-sized, which made the apartment feel like a dollhouse—or doll cell—though the intention was obviously to make the apartment seem bigger. What made the apartment seem smaller was that everywhere, on every surface, were vases and sculptures, tchotchkes galore.
She seemed deflated when I agreed to the terms of the sublet: It might last a month or a year, she said; she might want to use the apartment herself sometimes, and if she did she’d give me twenty-four hours’ notice and a rent reduction.
Since it was an illegal sublet, I was to make myself as invisible as possible. If anyone asked, I was her sister. I couldn’t receive mail here, and I would have to forward hers.
I said, “No problem,” and explained that I could easily send it from my office, which was just a few blocks away.
She wasn’t listening. She was resigned now, showing me how to work the answering machine, though a moment later she asked me never to touch it. She played the outgoing message she’d recorded, which was in English first and Spanish second and gave her phone number in New Jersey. She seemed to be concentrating as she listened to her own voice, as though it might have something important to tell her.
She was more sure of herself than anyone I’d ever met, except maybe my father. You could tell that she’d gotten camera crews on overbooked flights all over the world and knew when to stand up to a customs official and when to offer a bribe. Her voice was full of certainty, even when she said, after good-bye, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
. . . . .
I put my typewriter way in the back of my grandmother’s closet. It took up a lot of room, but she didn’t have many shoes. I promised that I’d come back for it soon. “I’ll borrow Jack’s car,” I said, even though he’d never lent it to me and I doubted that he would.
I was putting my bags by the door when my grandmother said, “You’re a modern girl in every way.”
I wasn’t too sure about that, but I thanked her. “Well, roomie,” I said.
She looked upset, and I thought that maybe she’d heard my “roomie” as roomy, as in big and fat, so I said, “Roomie as in roommate.”
Her face didn’t change.
I was happy, and maybe it made her see how unhappy I’d been living with her. Or, knowing that her life lectures hadn’t stuck, maybe she was envisioning my impending spinsterhood.
&nbs
p; She double-sighed, and in a voice that sounded as sad as she looked, she said, “The world is your oyster.”
I’d heard the expression, of course, and I knew it was supposed to refer to pearls to come. But it made me think of an actual oyster, and picturing the hard gray shell and the slimy animal inside, I thought, My world was like an oyster, but not anymore.
4.
AT 375 MADISON AVENUE, Steinhardt Publishers occupied three floors of a building that had once been grand. Like a faded beauty trying to conceal her age, the lobby was lit dimly; your eyes acknowledged the gold-domed ceiling and marble walls without really seeing them. The red exit sign glowed like a night-light.
I worked on the floor the elevators called 14, though it came right after 12. My desk was one of five in a makeshift secretarial pool we called the Cave, short for Bat Cave. Floor-to-ceiling file cabinets blocked all sunlight; the shredding carpet was variegated with the splash patterns of spilled coffee.
I shared the Cave with three girls and one Boy Wonder, Adam, whom I adored. He was the kind of man who might’ve fished Zelda Fitzgerald out of the fountain at the Plaza, draped his cashmere coat around her shoulders, never asked for it back, and never told anyone the story. He was slight, with a hairline well into recession even at twenty-two, but his character was so impeccable, his manner so graceful, that even then, when I saw him every day, I thought of him as tall and strikingly handsome.
With endless patience, he answered all my questions, even those I was too embarrassed to ask. This was lucky, as I was scared of Bettina, who’d already acquired a novel; once a week or so she’d shush us and announce, “I’m calling my author.” Sue, a broad-backed workhorse from Minnesota, was perpetually on the phone with her boyfriend, a sophomore at what she called “the U.” When they argued, as they often did, she didn’t talk at all; she was a silent fumer. The phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, she typed letters and logged manuscripts, waiting for her boyfriend to grow up.
I sat across from Francine Lawlor—our desks touched—but whole days went by without our eyes even meeting. She was pale and thin, with pale, thin hair and pale, thin lips she pursed. A dozen years earlier, she’d arrived at Steinhardt to learn that the editor she’d been hired to assist had been fired. During what should have been a brief bossless interim, a position had been created for her. Now she was thirty-three, and Floating Assistant was still her title.