Authors: Kate Christensen
“I can’t concentrate,” said William. “It’s getting worse.”
A double helix of joy and despair twisted through me.
“I know what you mean,” I said, laughing. “I have the same problem.”
“No, you don’t,” he shot back.
“Yes I do.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t work with Devorah.” He almost groaned the name.
“Devorah,” I said.
He took this as a sign of interest and elaborated: Devorah was a paperback bodice-ripper heroine brought to life, given a paralegal degree and recently hired by his firm. For the first time since I’d known him, I heard William say the words “olive-skinned” and “bewitching.”
“Bewitching,” I repeated hopelessly.
She was also twenty-two. I had lately begun to notice the new crop of young girls on the sidewalks and in the bars, making me feel supplanted and strange. Biology was cruel; I knew that as well as anyone, and I didn’t need any reminders, especially not from him.
“What do you think,” he said with a short chuckle, clearly under the illusion that I was his pal, his confidant, his sidekick in matters amatory, “should I call her into my office and bend her over a filing cabinet?”
“No,” I said.
He laughed. For years we’d always discussed, frankly and in exhaustive detail, the people we were attracted to or sleeping with or trying to extricate from our lives; for several months last spring I’d been involved with William’s old friend John Threadgill, and William spared me no detail of his unresolved
feelings for Margot Spencer, and the string of young, impeccably groomed, unforgivably humorless women he dated, obsessed over and eventually dumped.
It pained me to hear about all this, because I’d been in love with William myself for the past year or so. Of course I hadn’t told him; I didn’t want to ruin our friendship or chase him away. Anyway, I hadn’t chosen to feel this way, it had been visited on me like a fever, and as with a fever, I would ride it out. All I could do in the meantime was send peacekeeping troops from reason to hormones and wait for deliverance.
“You want to meet at George’s tonight?” he said. “Gus wants to join us. I just talked to him a couple of minutes ago.”
“Gus?” I said, but I knew better than to complain. For reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at, William loved Gus, and William was almost pathologically loyal to anyone he loved. I would have bet that Gus bit his tongue about me for the same reason. “All right, see you at George’s,” I said equably.
“Gotta go, I have someone on hold. Around nine or so?”
“Keep your mitts off the jailbait,” I said, but he was already gone.
I opened the casement window as far as it would go and leaned out over the courtyard. The air smelled of dry leaves, an underlying tang of diesel exhaust. The wind rushed upward with a light chuckling, ivy leaves turning on their stems. The sky was darkening already. The bleakness of the waning afternoon held the promise of some alluring after-dark adventure, if I could just hold on until then.
Then Jackie’s squawk issued from her bedroom, talking to her secretary, and that secretary was me. I reeled myself back in and followed the sound of her voice to see what she wanted now. What bound me to her, to coming here every day and going home to my little room every night, to the nocturnal escapes I devised for myself, was a centrifugal force so established
that all my bodily systems had adjusted themselves to it. If it were removed suddenly, I imagined that I would stagger and collapse.
Nine years ago I had come to New York, fresh out of college, buoyed along by the idea that I wanted to be a journalist. But after a brief stint in the dun-carpeted offices of a midtown gazette, typing things for burned-out maniacs who stood over me frothing at the mouth, my starry-eyed notion of Claudia Steiner, Reporter on the Beat, had vanished into the ozone. I couldn’t muster the requisite hard-bitten, white-hot urgency, the chain-smoking and yelling and cutthroat story-mongering.
After I quit, I carried around a hole in my chest where a driving ambition should have been. As if sensing this vacuity, the professional world presented a smooth cheek, offering no purchase as I slid from job to job—receptionist, dog walker, phone-sex scriptwriter, temporary secretary, waitress, house-cleaner, temp again. Each time I left a job I looked dazedly around, gulping in mouthfuls of fresh air before plunging bleakly on to the next one. What sustained me through each dull, grinding interlude was my knowledge of the ephemeral ease with which I would vanish from their consciousnesses and they from mine six months later when I moved on again.
I had never intended to make such a mess of things. It had happened incrementally and gradually; every day, I’d felt the gap widen between me and that parallel universe that contained the life I’d meant to create for myself, that exciting, interesting whirl of travel and fabulous dinner parties and satisfying work. Over the years, I’d begun to take a perverse pleasure in seeing just how bad my life could get before the whole thing blew and, as an interesting corollary, just how severely I could punish myself for having been so arrogant as to think that my untapped potential and vague desire to succeed were of interest to anyone but me. Since I had run
out of other options, this experiment served as a sort of substitute for ambition.
Three years ago, I’d come to work for Genevieve del Castellano, socialite and best-selling author. I was still there. I had my reasons, but they were all I had.
I found Jackie trying on a black cocktail dress in front of her wall of mirrors. She presented her back to me. The zipper stuck halfway up, and her flesh lapped over the material. “It’ll go on,” she said calmly, folding the wings of her shoulder blades together. The zipper cut into my fingers and wouldn’t budge. She scooped her breasts higher in the bodice, repositioned her shoulders, and said, “Now try it.” It slid up easily. She did a tripping little waltz, humming, swishing the full skirt; she was as small and fine-boned as a girl, and her husky tone-deaf voice was so guileless I had to laugh. She always looked a little taken aback when I laughed at her, but flattered, as if people rarely found her funny. She laughed along with me although she didn’t seem to know why. “Does it make me look fat?”
“Not at all,” I said sincerely.
“It’s ancient,” she said, pleased. We smiled at each other. “I had it made in Paris twenty years ago. Those new designer dresses disintegrate if you wear them twice.”
The second dress went on easily, a sequined number she’d just had made by one of her designer friends. It had a stiff, crenellated skirt and a complicated bodice that stood away from her chest like a shell. She took one look at her reflection and said, “It’s absolutely hideous.”
I said with emphatic earnestness, “No, it’s beautiful,” but I knew what was coming.
“Don’t patronize me, Claudia; a
child
could see how impossible this dress is. I’d like to send it back right this minute.”
“Should I call them?” A slow hot bubble welled in my head and burst against the top of my skull.
But to my intense relief, she said, “Juanita might be able to cut off the sequins, or take it in, or … we’ll see.” As I helped her out of it, she added, “By the way, that new waiter we hired for my dinner last night turned out to be a
black!
In he walked, black as you ever saw! Well! My
jaw
dropped. He sounded fine over the phone, didn’t he? Probably because he’s a homosexual and they all sound alike. I couldn’t very well tell him to leave, I had guests arriving. I had to spend the whole evening in the pantry. I wasn’t going to leave him alone with the silver. And I had to serve most of the courses myself; I didn’t want him to touch anything with those hands, no telling
where
they’d been, and they’ve all got that AIDS now. Can you
imagine
?”
And the thing was, here in the buffered, hermetic vault of her apartment, I
could
imagine. “How awful,” I heard myself saying soothingly.
She bustled back into the bathroom, unaware that our little colloquy had sent a jolt of self-loathing through my gutless viscera. I had sympathized with her. I had bolstered her view of the world and herself. Technically this complicity didn’t hurt anyone, but its macrocosmic and historical implications were not lost on me. I should have told her how insanely self-centered she was. I should have defended the poor waiter.
I trudged back to my desk. Several minutes later I heard her slippers flopping along the foyer. I rattled the computer keys busily, although one second before I’d been picking my split ends and darkly considering my own spinelessness.
“I have a project for us,” she announced.
For the rest of the afternoon, we worked on compiling the photographic section for
Detective in Décolletage
. The idea was
that these photographs would bolster the veracity of the story, but Jackie allowed into her books only those pictures in which she looked her absolute best, no matter how everyone else looked or whether or not it had anything to do with the plot and characters at hand. As a result, the photographic sections of her books were an oddly assorted mishmash of unrelated characters, unintelligible scenes, blurred faces identifiable only with the aid of the caption below. Their collective authority served to reassure the reader that the author was the same woman as the narrator of the story. She reigned over the squinting, the decapitated, the compromised, the out-of-focus, her features crisp and radiant, her hair perfect.
With my help (which consisted mainly of saying either “Beautiful” or “Not your best”), she chose for her latest book a stack of snapshots and newspaper photos of herself standing alongside several of the book’s more famous characters. The people in the photographs were engaged in activities which jibed well enough with those of the characters in the book: lunching, golfing, hunting, yachting, and smiling in self-satisfied little groups at charity balls and parties. She extracted from its gilt frame on the guest bedroom table the crown jewel in this particular collection: a photograph of Jackie and Giancarlo del Castellano with their close friends Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, taken in 1977 in Manila.
“The trip to the Philippines comes in Chapter Seven,” Jackie informed me, as if I hadn’t put it there. “Giancarlo and President Marcos got on splendidly together. Ferdinand wasn’t nearly as bad as the liberal press made him out to be. And I don’t believe for a minute that Imelda had any idea what he was up to. Wives of our generation never paid attention to those things, that’s what no one seems to understand.”
The foursome stood with the sun full in their faces. I suspected that Jackie had masterminded the photograph by commanding
the photographer to shoot before anyone else was ready: the President and First Lady had clearly been caught off-guard, but Signor del Castellano, whatever else he may have been, was the sort of man his wife could trust always to meet with perfect equanimity any shutter that went off in his direction. The Marcoses looked squat and unprepossessing next to their glamorous guests. The del Castellanos had both had the foresight to wear sunglasses and stylish white hats, so their shaded faces looked attractively smooth, while their hosts were caught squinting, baring their teeth in almost canine aggression. Standing on a slight rise, Jackie looked triumphant in a white flared-leg pantsuit. Although I knew that the two women were about the same height, she looked nearly a head taller and far slimmer than Mrs. Marcos, who appeared to have been edged into an adjacent flower bed.
“Take especially good care of this one,” said Jackie, putting the Marcos photo into a large brown envelope, separate from the others. “I have no negative and this is my only print.”
“I’ll guard it with my life,” I promised impatiently. What did she take me for?
“Well, I certainly hope you won’t have to do that,” she said.
I checked my watch: it was time to start packing up for the day, but there was still her incoming mail to open and sort. This consisted today of several invitations, a fan letter, something from the IRS, a bank statement, a bill or two, the latest bulletin from Media Watchdog and the usual assortment of junk mail. I always separated junk mail into its own pile. I had once, early on, mistakenly thrown out a notice for a sale at one of her neighborhood stores, and the next day she’d gone out and bought a new answering machine somewhere else for eight dollars more than the sale price; in the elevator, her next-door neighbor had seen her opening the package it came in and had
asked her whether she had gone to the store in question, they were having such a marvelous sale. Jackie had said no, were they really? and then the whole thing came out, and I caught hell, and as a result she now insisted on seeing everything.
I left the mail on the kitchen table in two piles, one junk, one everything else, then put away the folding table and computer trolley in the pantry. I stored the two envelopes containing her precious photographs on the shelf where I always kept my current work. And then I was free to leave for the day. As I crossed Central Park, I hummed to myself, the same breathy, tuneless notes Jackie had waltzed to. The darkening early spring dusk smelled fresh and empty; headlights came on one by one until the traffic was a blur of streaming light. Lit interiors stacked high above the edges of the park glowed through the bare treetops. I came out of the park onto Central Park West and headed up and over to my building.
I lived on the fourth floor of a former residential hotel that had been constructed cheaply and hastily after one war or another to house a sudden influx of immigrants willing to live anywhere. The stairwell was a trembling shell of flaking plaster, a fragile husk my mounting or descending tread always threatened to implode and send sliding into a pile of rubble in the basement. The stairs sagged in the middle, eroded like bars of soap. The plaster curlicues in the upper corners of each landing had been reduced by attrition to sad grayish ridges, more fungal growths than embellishments. There was an elevator, but it was a scary, creaky old box, splitting at the seams and frayed at the cables, whose upward speed was slower than climbing on foot.