“Good-bye, Geneva Rose. I’ll see myself out.”
And he does.
7
I BELIEVE I’VE had just about all I can take from this particular Monday, as I stand there listening to the echo of Carl Green’s boots going down the boardinghouse stairs, but I suspect Monday isn’t done with me yet. Not when there’s a man still stuck under my bed.
“You can come out now,” I say. Still staring at the door.
There’s some scraping and shuffling as Oliver Anson extricates himself from his predicament. I guess I ought to laugh, but all I can manage just now is a smile, and that smile only just turning up the far corner of the right-hand side of my mouth. I fold my arms and tell Anson he can just forget what he heard down there, every word.
He nods to the brown envelope half-hidden in my arms. “Is that what he gave you?”
“That’s personal. None of your business.”
“It is my business when you’re as shaken as that.”
“I ain’t—I’m not shaken.”
He doesn’t bother to contradict me. I press my fingernails into my arms, hard as I can through the ivory crepe de Chine of my respectable Sterling Bates blouse, just to prove that I’m not trembling all over, not shaken in every bone.
“Has anyone ever told you,” he says, not moving an eyelash, “that you possess an extraordinary ability to alter your voice and your language and your manner almost beyond recognition, depending on your audience?”
“Do I?”
“You’re not doing it on purpose?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Anson moves at last, but only to brush the dust from the sleeves of his jacket. “All right, then. If you don’t want to speak about it.”
“Oh, now, that’s rich, coming from a fellow like you. You’ve got no right to judge how I keep my secrets. How I keep my private thoughts to myself.”
“I’ve already told you, Miss Kelly. It’s not my business to make any sort of judgment on your personal affairs.”
“But you do anyway. I can tell that you do.”
“You’re wrong.”
“No, sir. I am never wrong, least about the inner speculations of the male sex. You might say I’m an expert. And do you want to know what I figure? I figure you’re a clean, straight arrow, sharp and true in his course through the air, and I’m only a sly, crooked thing, and if there’s one thing you can’t stand, a straight arrow like you, it’s a girl who drinks and breaks laws and shows every man a different face.”
There is another one of those curious pauses, in which Anson examines me with his dark, steady eyes, and I just stand there and take it as best I can, like we’re a pair of gunslingers out west somewhere, sizing up each other’s parts. And then he breaks the standoff. Not, at first, by speaking, but by raising his right hand and cupping his palm about the line of my jaw, such that his fingertips straddle my ear.
“That’s not quite true,” he says. “You may have several masks, Miss Kelly, for reasons of your own, which you apply and discard at will, and I regard each of them with a deep professional admiration. But you have but one face, and I believe I admire that most of all.”
You can’t reply to a speech like that. You can but stand there and take those words, as best you can. Your own eyes open and unblinking to the stare of his. Your pulse drumming under his hand. Your two hands clutching a brown envelope full of something your mama gave unto your keeping. Your fingers tangling in the string.
“Your eyes are so dry,” Anson says. “You need to weep a little, sometimes.”
“I’m not one for weeping. No more than you are.”
“We’re not talking about me, are we?”
“No,” I say, “I guess we’re not,” and I don’t know whether it’s me falling forward or him reaching out to catch me, but then the means aren’t so important at a time like this, are they? Just the ends. The V of his gray tweed waistcoat, into which I shed about a pint of honest salt tears.
8
WHEN I am done weeping, he gives me his handkerchief and pours me a tumbler of water from the faucet in the third-floor bathroom. Somehow I end up in bed, though I can’t remember just how I got there: whether he helped me or whether I made my own way. I figure I never will ask him for certain. The gin has taken hold, though I believe I only drank but two glasses altogether. During that hour or so of my weakness, I never once looked at his face. Just the whites of his arms—he shed his jacket for my sake when I began to shiver, the way you do sometimes set to shaking after a long weep—and the gray comfort of his waistcoat. My armchair, in which he settled us, wedged between the bed’s end and the wall’s beginning. I believe I held my eyes closed, anyway, most of that time. Did not want to catch the horror of my reflection in some mirror or other.
In the morning, the sleet is gone and the sun does shine from a painful blue sky. My head’s full of gin rocks, sharp and heavy, and while Mama’s brown envelope lies on the bureau, strings still attached, the gray jacket and the enamel box and the half-dozen buttons are gone through the window, together with the man who bore them out.
9
NOW, I keep a certain appointment on the first Saturday of every month: one I missed in February, on account of my mama’s passing. But don’t you worry, he’s an understanding fellow, and when I apply my knuckles to his door at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon, the first of March, he opens right up and offers me an understanding embrace.
“How are you, Gin?” he says, once he’s ushered me inside and handed me a drink, which he’s already mixed in anticipation of my arrival. The little dear.
“Same as ever. Did you miss me terribly?”
“Terribly. None of the other girls are half so good as you, Ginger.”
“Of course they aren’t. I have a kind of je ne sais quoi, don’t you know.”
“Don’t I ever.” He sits intimately next to me on the sofa and places a hand on my thigh. “You’ve lost weight.”
“A little.”
“As long as you haven’t lost anything in that glorious forecastle of yours.”
“It’s the fashion, you know.”
“We gentlemen do not care much about the fashion, ma chère amie. We want the same things we have always wanted.”
“And I suppose I have them?”
“In spades.” He clinks my glass and drinks at last. His eyes fall on my bosom. “I don’t suppose we—”
“Not on your life. It’s just business between you and me, Anatole.”
“That’s not true. We have a beautiful friendship.”
“If you say so. I call it business.”
His hand retreats to the sash of his dressing gown. “You wound me.”
“Oh, Anatole. If only I had the power to wound you.”
He rises from the sofa and heads for the table next to his easel, where his cigarette case rests next to his paints and brushes and odds and ends. He offers me one, which I decline—he raises his eyebrows at that—and lights himself up with the kind of relish you ordinarily reserve for a juicy beefsteak in the comfort of a high-class restaurant. “You know,” he observes, after a thoughtful drag or two, “I sometimes wish I had not made you what you are. There was something so deliciously wholesome about you in those days, with your round cheeks and that awful pink coat.”
“Unspoiled, you mean?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“So you figured you absolutely had to spoil me—”
“Before someone else did, mon amour! Some far more unscrupulous character than I.”
He smiles with such satisfaction, I don’t have the heart to explain to him that I was already spoiled, round cheeks and pink coat notwithstanding: that the rot in my middle had already taken hold, and he, Anatole himself, was the man I chose to obliterate it, or at least to replace the rot with something I could live with. We met on the Christopher Street IRT platform, on the evening of my second day in the typing pool, and he gave me a ticket to an art gallery of some kind, where
he was shortly opening an exhibition of his latest work. I remember experiencing a real thrill at the curl of this ticket in my palm—an artist, a New York City artist, one skilled enough to have his own exhibition—but the gallery turned out to be some meager shop on Bedford Street, and the opening-night crowd consisted of me, Anatole, the gallery owner, and maybe a dozen or so of Anatole’s discarded lovers, eyes dark with kohl and bright with hope. A futile hope, I’m afraid, for by then Anatole had come to some sort of decision about me, some kind of fury, and when Anatole grabs the bit in his teeth like that, there’s nothing you can do but hold on and ride him to the end, so to speak. And I was eager for the ride—that was why I had come to New York, after all, why I had fled River Junction and made my way to the wicked city—so I climbed aboard, I let him sweep me upstairs to his studio so he could paint me, he said, paint me in all my glory! And the funny thing is, that’s exactly what he did. Anatole’s not a monster. He is not, as he said himself, altogether unscrupulous. Why, his paintings of me became the basis for an entirely new exhibition three months later, one that actually received a certain degree of critical attention, and it was only while celebrating this modest triumph that we became lovers. At the time, I was relieved and kind of naïvely puzzled to learn that I was—at least as a matter of strict physical status—a virgin, and I expect that’s why I can never be sorry about Anatole, I cannot ever really renounce him. He returned to me some miniature piece of my soul that I thought I had lost.
Still, I don’t have any wish to return to those days of early enthrallment, and anyway—well, there’s the question of Julie Schuyler, isn’t there?
10
I EXPECT YOU’VE heard of Julie. She’s that exact selfsame Julie Schuyler you’ve read about in the gossip pages, under those breathless headlines containing all the exclamation points and the simple, electric words: JULIE DRIVES FORD UP LIBRARY STEPS! JULIE STRIPS, DIVES INTO PLAZA FOUNTAIN! That kind of thing. You know whom I mean.
“Speaking of unscrupulous characters,” I say, inspecting my glass against the light, “where’s our Julie?”
Anatole makes this disappointed sigh and extracts his watch from the pocket of his dressing gown. (Anatole always wears dressing gowns indoors, and furthermore, he would rather die than own a modern wristwatch. He’s that kind of fellow. You know what I mean.)
“Late,” he says.
But she arrives a minute later, blue of blood and blond of hair, smelling of cigarettes and face powder and independence. She tosses her cloche hat on the sofa and says she’s dying for a drink, would somebody please mix her a gin and tomato juice, and Anatole sort of starts.
“What the devil kind of drink is this?”
“It’s all the rage in Paris right now—a thing I suppose you’d already know, if you were really French, instead of just pretending. Hemingway drinks them to chase away his hangovers.” She notices me and frowns. “You’ve still got your clothes on.”
“Only just arrived.”
“Well, I guess we’re all fashionably late today. The winter blues.” She comes forward and takes my hands and kisses each cheek, very French—Julie spent the autumn in Paris, visiting friends, and it still hasn’t worn off—and she asks me how I’m getting along.
“Fit as a fiddle.”
“You’ve lost weight.”
“Not where it counts.”
“All right, then. Let’s get down to business, shall we? Haven’t got all afternoon, and my head’s something vicious.”
I step behind the screen and unbutton my blouse. “Bad night?”
“The worst.”
She doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t encourage her. You see, a couple of years ago, Julie replaced me on Anatole’s chaise longue (I’ll tell you that story another time), an unexpected discovery that still inhibits the full flowering of our friendship, if you know what I mean. Not that we haven’t tried. These are modern times, and Julie and I are terribly sophisticated women. The party, for instance, where I met Billy Marshall. That was at Julie’s apartment, remember, or rather at her parents’ apartment, given over to Julie’s high jinks. She invited me carelessly that particular Saturday afternoon for a Saturday evening party, just as I was buttoning up my jacket, and I couldn’t resist calling a bluff like that. The Schuylers, after all, are one of New York’s oldest and best families, as I’m sure you’re aware. I found myself disappointed by the apartment, however. I was expecting something grand, something kind of palatial, but the place owned but two parlors, and the library was closed to guests. No matter. We danced to jazz on the phonograph and the vintage champagne flowed all night. Julie introduced me to Billy, and you know the rest. So I suppose I owe her for that, among other things.
Now, Julie and Anatole are no longer lovers—come to think of it, I do wonder who Anatole’s sleeping with these days—but I guess she does still regard him with a proprietary air. When I belt the silken dressing gown around my waist and step from the screen, I’m not surprised to find them tangled together in an almost erotic confederation, arranging the photography equipment and the chaise longue upon which I’m required to pose myself this afternoon. Above the chaise, affixed to the wall that serves as our backdrop, someone’s hung one of the portraits Anatole painted of me three years ago, in which I’m arranged fruitfully atop that same piece of furniture, breasts catching a beam of light from the dirty skylight above, hair spilling down my shoulders in strange, abstract, carroty pieces. It’s called Redhead Under Skylight, and it’s the only painting Anatole didn’t sell on that first night of the Ginger exhibition. Not because he didn’t receive any offers—among the gentlemen, at least, it was his most popular work—but because he was so terribly in love with me then, and what better way to seduce a naïve girl from the far sliver of Maryland than with such a declaration of devotion? He used to prop that damn picture against the wall while he had me in bed, and I swear he preferred to watch his own representation of me than the genuine article laid out before him.
I turn around and plant my hands at my hips. “Whose idea was this?”
“Mine,” says Julie. “It’s Anatole’s most famous work, and it’s only been exhibited once. This card’s going to be a sensation.”
“What if somebody recognizes me?”
“Nobody’s going to recognize you, pet. They never do. We always take the greatest care, don’t we, Anatole?”
“Besides, my hair’s bobbed now. Won’t have the same effect.”
“That’s all right. We’ve got a wig for you.”
“I’m not wearing a wig!”
“You’ve worn them before. And the better to disguise you, after all. You’re so terribly worried about somebody recognizing you.”
I turn to Anatole, who’s fussing with the camera aperture in a naked attempt (you’ll pardon the pun) to keep himself pure of the grime of commercial negotiation. “I thought you weren’t ever going to make a dime from that painting. That’s what you promised me. It was sacred, you said.”
He straightens. Offers me a kind of ashamed smile. “My dear girl. Is this really so bad? It is only the scenery. Why, no one will even notice the painting behind you! It is only your lovely figure they see in these cards.”
“I’m not an idiot, Anatole.”
“We’ll pay you double,” Julie says. “A hundred dollars.”
“Two hundred.”
“One fifty.”
“One eighty.”
She smiles and holds out her manicured hand. “Done.”
11
THE CARDS were Julie’s idea. Shortly after I applied a pair of scissors to Anatole’s collection of silk dressing gowns and departed the premises, vowing never to return, Julie happened upon one of Anatole’s portraits from the Ginger exhibition—Redhead Eating Cherries, I believe—on the wall of somebody’s dining room. Apparently the painting was attracting a great deal of furtive admiration from the gentlemen present. Can’t imagine why.
Anyway, the story goes, she stormed on down to Anatole’s stu
dio and asked why he had never painted her like that—after all, she’s indisputably the more beautiful of the two of us—and he told her that as soon as she grew a pair of tits like mine, he would create an entire exhibition devoted to her, as well. Julie took this in the proper spirit. She found me at the Christopher Club that evening and made me the kind of indecent proposition you can’t possibly refuse. She and Anatole would pay me to model for photographs—absent the customary drapery, but in perfect taste, she assured me—from which the two of them would produce, tinted and artfully printed, a series of cards, much like those made of professional baseball players. Why, I’d be the Babe Ruth of indecency!
Now, I had my own reasons for agreeing to this proposal, but I did impose one condition on my employers. In none of these images was my face to be identifiable as my own, and in order to ensure their compliance with this condition, I should have approval of each card before printing.
Done, Julie said right back, much as she said just now.
Though it was a shame, Anatole said at the time. Her tits are magnificent, to be sure, but her face is something more. (Something more what? demanded Julie, and Anatole said, Something more interesting, and apparently that mollified the dear old thing. Beautiful always trumps interesting.)
Naturally, the cards have proved a smashing success, print runs in the tens of thousands, each new release snapped up in every tobacco shop and newspaper stand in New York City, and I guess Anatole is one hundred percent correct when it comes to the male gaze: no one ever bothers to examine my face in those photographs, because I’ve never been stopped on the subway train or called into Miss Atkins’s office or leered at in the Sterling Bates canteen—well, no more than usual—in short, never once recognized as the Redhead, even though her identity is a matter of intense public speculation. It’s the funniest damned thing. I guess people see what they want to see. And I confess, I do wear a brassiere with a flattening effect, in order to achieve the fashionable profile.