But this time I was supposed to work with a writer, a well-known writer, well he wrote some famous books, and he is the darling of critics who like manly, virile prose. He comes from Chicago and he is supposed to write well about cities and underworld people, to be tough, like Hemingway; he’s praised for his realism. I’ve never read him, but I was very excited, here I was going to work with Orson Sonders and it was only my second assignment!
I was to meet him at eleven at the Oyster Bar in Penn Station. I knew I’d be walking miles and clambering over barriers and climbing up on things, all the while lugging my fifty pounds of equipment, so I wore pants and a sweater and a heavy jacket and a wool cap to keep my ears warm—we are having a cold February—and wool socks and lined boots against the snow that is still piled up along the curbs and buildings.
So I walk into the Oyster Bar at eleven A.M., clutching my camera case and my mental picture of this man. The place was empty except for one guy standing at the long polished mahogany bar, everything shiny and clean on it and behind it, except this guy who looks as if he has been standing there all night. He is medium high and medium fat, with a flabby unused body and rumpled clothes. You can see he was good-looking once except his face is as rumpled as his clothes and he hasn’t shaved in a while. I just stand there: this couldn’t be Orson Sonders. He looks at me with a surly expression, but he doesn’t say anything. He leans back against a barstool; his thick hand is around a glass of beer.
It feels strange to me to be in a place like this at all, but especially when it is empty and I am alone. I don’t know what to do, I know I have to wait for Sonders, but I don’t want a drink at this hour of the morning and I’m too embarrassed to order coffee. So I sort of sidle toward the bar, and get up on a stool and sit on it facing the door. This is an unsuccessful ploy: the bartender immediately approaches me and asks what I want. I stutter, I blush, I can feel the hot pulse of blood in my cheeks, I explain I am waiting for someone and don’t want anything at the moment, thank you.
A gravelly voice blasts me: “Who you waiting for?”
I turn with hauteur. What the hell business is it of his? “Someone I have an appointment with,” I say coldly. Is he going to try to pick me up, this bum? How dare he! (Damn it! Why am I frightened?)
“What’s all that stuff you’re carrying,” he continues, unperturbed by my haughtiness.
“My camera equipment.” Cold as an ice cube in the hand, proud as an empress.
“Your camera equipment,” he echoes in a mincing little-girl voice. (I don’t sound like that!) “Your camera equipment! Don’t tell me you’re a photographer!”
I turn and give him my worst glare, a look that says I am preparing to do murder, a look that has reduced shopkeepers, waiters, Brad, and men who whistle at me or make propositions on the streets to paralysis followed by expostulation—“Okay, lady, okay! I’m sorry, okay?”
He lays his flabby face in his thick paws, resting his elbows on the bar. He cries out “Don’t tell me you work for World! Don’t, please don’t! A girl photographer! A baby girl dyke yet, they send me! No. No!” The sobbing is loud and it takes me a few seconds to realize it is fake. Now he is pounding the bar, sobbing, “No, no, no, no, no!”
The bartender has a shit-eating grin on his face as he watches the man; he glances over at me to see how I am taking this. I do not know how I am taking it. I am filled with dread, horror, hatred, and embarrassment, and I do not know what to do. I can’t help staring at the sobbing drinker, who pounds the bar rhythmically now and the bartender swiftly goes into action, pouring a double of bourbon into a pony, and replacing the empty glass with a fresh beer. The sobber raises his head and tosses the shot down his throat, then grabs the beer and drinks deeply, getting foam on his upper lip. He does not look at me at all. He puts his head back down in his hands.
“Oh, the little girls, how I hate the little girls!” He raises his head a little, like a bull about to charge, and looks at me. “Always running home to Mommy, always crying, ‘I’ve been raped! I’ve been raped!’ If you have to have women, give me a whore any day!”
He sobs, pours half the glass of beer down his throat, then glares at me furiously. “But worst of all are the dykes, my god, girl, didn’t your mother teach you how to dress, or was it your father, did daddy give his ittoo dirw his fly to play with, or are you trying to convince the idiots at World that you’re a man, is that why they hired you? they must be blinder than even I thought, you don’t even have on lipstick, for Jesus’ sake!” This outrage reduces him to tears again and he knocks on the bar for another drink, which is promptly supplied.
Deep in my stomach there is a sharp throb of dread. This guy is crazed with woman hatred. What am I going to do? I have to work with him, I can’t blow this, I know that. World is the kind of place that hates trouble and gets rid of troublemakers, and if things go wrong with Sonders, I will automatically be considered the one at fault. He’s famous, I’m not. Russ reveres him, I heard the tone of his voice when he told me of my great good fortune in working with him. But I can’t stand this, I can’t stand his insults….
“Are you Orson Sonders?” I ask coolly.
He doesn’t answer. He’s busy mimicking me, making me sound like a prissy little girl. I can’t, I can’t put up with this, I can’t, there’s no way I can just accept this abuse calmly like a slave, a person with no rights, no dignity. I can’t.
But what am I going to do?
I open my mouth. “I’m Stacey Stevens, the photographer assigned to work with you, Mr. Sonders.” I feel my voice about to tremble, and stop. I know instinctively that it will be fatal to show this man any vulnerability. I try to focus my mind on his outrageousness, instead of my hurt, and collect enough anger to keep my voice steady. “I’m sorry my sex and my appearance offend you. But I’m a professional, and I know you are, and I suggest we get to work. One thing I can assure you of: you won’t hate working with me any more than I hate working with you, so we’re even.”
He raises his head and looks at me with glassy cold eyes. “Oh, you’re a professional, are you, I’ll bet you are, but you don’t cut it, girlie, the women I know who are professionals look like women!” He cackles.
He pounds the bar and mutters to the bartender, and lays some bills on the bar. He pulls himself upright carefully, holding to the bar with one hand, watching his feet. He stands up. He lets go of the bar. He takes a step. He looks at me triumphantly. “Well, are you coming or not?”
I don’t answer. He walks toward me unsteadily. “I needa eat something,” he growls.
We walk out to the station, and find a hot-dog bar and he gulps—disgustingly—two cups of coffee with three teaspoons of sugar apiece, and eats a hot dog with mustard. “All right,” he says as he chews, “the underside of New York. You going to be able to stand it, missy? Drunks and dope addicts and whores? Streets so filthy the dust comes right up between your legs and dirties your nice clean panties that your mother told you to wear every day in case you’re in an accident so the ambulance driver won’t see shit stains. Guys with shivs and guns, whores with VD. You ready for this?”
“That isn’t what we’re doing,” I say coldly. I pull out my list.
“The hell it isn’t!”
“That isn’t what they want. They want charming, or interesting, or especially lively corners, places most people don’t see. Look!” I point to my authority, the list. He doesn’t bother to glance at it.
“Oh! Charming, interesting, lively corners!” he mimics, sounding like a priggish British spinster. “How sweet!” He swings his head around as if he were going to charge and butt me with it. “They hired me to write it, right? That means they want what I do, and Hell’s Kitchen is what I do.” Truculent, dug in. I know there is no point in quarreling. I pick up my bags and start out of the dump.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going!”
“To call Russ Farrell,” I say, and leave before he can say anything more.
I kn
ow I may be endangering my job. But I will not, will not be bullied by this man. As I run for the phone, I think I can present the situation in such a way that Farrell will see it as a legitimate question rather than a challenge. I hurry because it’s almost noon and although I don’t know what time Farrell goes out for lunch, I do know that once he’s gone, he’s gone for hours. I reach Farrell’s office: he’s at a meeting, I’m told. I find myself shouting at the poor woman on the other end, crying Urgent, and Important, and she says she’ll try to interrupt it and call me back. By this time, Sonders has sidled up to the phone booth, fiddling around inside his mouth with a toothpick.
We stand there waiting. I feel like crying, I want to go home and get in bed and I have to breathe the foul air of the place and feel it on my skin, and there’s nothing to look at except Sonders examining the stuff he manages to extract from his teeth, and the crowd of harried miserable-looking people who rush by. At that moment I hate my life, I hate my job, I hate the world.
The phone rings: it’s Russ. I explain that Sonders and I have different notions of precisely what the assignment is, and need some clarification. All the while I’m talking to Farrell, Sonders is yammering at me, “Tell him I’m insulted to have to work with a dyke cunt,” and muttering about my general idiocy and the way I’m dressed, and his own misery in having to work with such a creature. I keep my hand over the speaking end of the phone except when I talk, and then I put my mouth right up against it. I know it will be fatal for Russ to hear Sonders.
Russ hems and haws, typically. He speaks abstractedly, in a low voice I can barely hear over the noise of the crowd and the ceiling fans and the loudspeaker announcements. In the end, there is a compromise. Russ did want the kind of piece I described, but clearly he wants even more that Sonders write what strikes his fancy.
At a quarter of one, we stagger up the stairs and into the New York air, which is not a whole lot better than the air in the station. I am hungry but will be damned if I’ll admit it. Sonders is grinning, pleased with himself: he’s won, he’s had a victory over me. We stand on the sidewalk while people stream around us.
“Okay, where first?”
“We have to sit down someplace and work it out. We have to decide where to go when, what light I’ll need, and try to get some order in our itinerary so we’re not crisscrossing the city for the next three days. We have to choose eight or nine sites from this list.”
“Okay, okay, you go sit down someplace, girlie, and figure it out with your little brain. Just don’t forget the nights belong to me. I’ll meet you here in half an hour.”
I know he is going to catch another drink. I look around. Now’s the time for me to get something to eat, but there isn’t a decent-looking place in sight.
“No. You’ll go with me to find a coffee shop. I’ll go into the coffee shop and you can go booze yourself up some more—not that you need it—and come back to the coffee shop for me in half an hour.” I talk to him like a mother to a naughty child. He shrugs.
I walk on and he follows. We walk five blocks before I find a coffee shop I am willing to enter. And there is a bar just two doors away.
“Okay,” I bark at him like a sergeant. “Half an hour. If you’re not here then, I’ll go without you and you’ll have to go to the sites on your own, another day.”
He raises his eyebrows. He looks at me appraisingly. He turns and shuffles off.
I look at my watch. It is one o’clock of the first day, and we have not even started. I go into the coffee shop and order a sandwich and coffee. I am still trembling and I need to cry. But I can’t do it here. What I have to do is all by myself pick out what look like the most interesting places, decide the time of day when they would be at their most characteristic, and the kind of light they’ll look best in. Knowing that he should be helping me with this, knowing that instead, whatever I decide, he will mock and attack, make fun of me for choosing it. That I can’t win.
I feel horribly abused. I look at the waitress: I would like to blubber to her as if she were a momma, that it wasn’t fair of him to expect me to wear spike heels and hose and a beehive hairdo when I was going to have to be walking and climbing and bending and carrying, but I see she is wearing hose and a beehive blonded hairdo despite her hard job, and she might not sympathize. She isn’t wearing spike heels though. I suppose I should have worn makeup, but you need your entire concentration when you photograph, you can’t worry about eye makeup smearing and dripping and reapplying lipstick whenever it gets worn off and it’s not fair, it just isn’t fair….
I move from defense to attack. Look at what he looks like! No one says boo to him! He could wear anything and no one would say anything. But immediately back to defense: It isn’t fair! How dare he, anyway, talk to me that way, a complete stranger, and innocent, I’m not a bad person, I never meant him any harm, I was even excited about meeting him….
But at the same time all this is going on in my head/heart, another part of me is looking on with a kind of appalled shock. Why do you care! it exclaims. Why do you feel you have to defend yourself against this man’s attacks! Why do you feel that what he says about the way you look matters at all! Why does anything he says or does hurt you, he is a drunk, a bully, an infantile tyrant!
But I can’t just dismiss him as a drunk and a bully.
He is a man. And automatically, because he is a man, he has a kind of authority. Over women. Over me.
WHY! shouts the other part of my heart/head.
I feel the way I used to feel as a child when my mother treated me with disinterest or contempt. I want to die. I feel everything is too much for me. I want to quit this job, go back to Lynbrook and get some office job that pays a little better than what I was getting at the paper, and just live for small pleasures. I want to move to the country, to some quiet rural spot where you can see the sunrise and the sunset, and live quietly with the kids, raising a garden, taking pictures of the landscape. Forget this business of career, success, the big world.
I can’t manage this world. I’m not strong enough. I hate myself, I feel weak and teary and victimized and I don’t want to feel those things, I want to be able to deal with whatever I have to deal with. But I know that most women, maybe all, would feel what I was feeling. I have to recognize that despite all my resolutions, I am just like other women.
My lunch arrives and I take tiny bites and chew them a long time. Even worse is swallowing. I drink three glasses of water; the waitress is looking at me strangely. I wipe my mouth finally, I can’t finish this food, and I pull out my list and a pad. I work intensely, and in a half hour I am able to plan out the first day. It looks as if it will take more than the three days allotted to us. I figure I’ll do the rest of the schedule that night in my hotel room. There is a sharp pain in the muscles of my shoulders and it hurts to turn my head.
I pay for my barely eaten sandwich and two cups of coffee and leave an extra tip for all that water. I go outside, my stomach tightening, expecting the worst. But he is there and together we walk to the IRT and set out for Queens.
I didn’t come to like Orson Sonders in the time I spent with him, but I learned how to manage him. I spoke to him coolly and only in the imperative mode. What I resented most, apart from my problems with myself, was that the relation between Sonders and me was stipulated only by him, that I could not change it or even affect it very much. I could choose to be bullied by him and fall apart; or to be bullied by him and bully him back, something I didn’t like to do, something that didn’t fit into my image of myself. But there was no other choice.
He forces me to be someone I don’t like no matter which role I take—just by being who he is—because he sees relations between men and women, or maybe between all people, to be power struggles and nothing else, ever. I feel exhausted by this thought, it reminds me of my marriage, of what happened to Brad and me, and that crushes me.
But I went on. I don’t know why. I didn’t make a decision to go on, I just did it, plodding, in
the same way my mother went on and on, plodding to the supermarkets and lugging back the heavy bags, doing the laundry, the way I too went through my days doing the work that had to be done, not-feeling, not-thinking, no matter how demeaning or boring the work was. Maybe I went on because I had no one to run to, no one who would hold me and sympathize and pat my head and tell me I was good and Sonders was bad and it was all right. Or maybe I went on because it was my nature and training to do so, and someplace inside me I recognized that if I could get over this problem of mine—having respect for the male for no reason—the job was no worse than any other I could do.
On Monday, I quit shooting around four because the light was gone, and we went together back to the Pennsylvania Hotel, where World was putting us up because it was convenient to subways and the Long Island Railroad. Sonders of course headed immediately for the bar. I went up to my room. We agreed to meet at the bar at ten, “There’s no action in this burg until then.” I ordered a large pot of coffee and spread out my lists and a pad. I knew, from what I’d been able to accomplish that afternoon, that the assignment would require at least three more days. I roughed out an agenda, then began to plan tomorrow’s shooting in detail.
I ordered a whiskey and a sandwich from room service, and after three hours, I stopped working, having done as much as I could do in advance. You simply can’t plan these things completely—a chance view, the weather, a badly placed garbage truck—things like that can delay and divert you. Then I showered and took a nap, having called the desk for a wake-up call at nine-thirty. I wondered what shape Sonders would be in by then.