Howard came home two nights after the night she stopped expecting him, and she knew the moment she saw him, if not from the very sound of his key in the lock, that it was all over.
‘… I would’ve called you,’ he explained, ‘but I didn’t see any point in waking you up just to say I’d be a little late. How’ve you been?’
‘All right. How was your trip?’
‘Oh, it was – quite a trip. Let me get us both a drink, and then we’ll talk.’ From the kitchen, over the sounds of ice cubes and glassware, he called ‘Actually, Emily, there’s quite a lot to talk about,’ and he came back to her with two clicking highballs. He looked guilty. ‘First of all,’ he began after the heavy sigh that followed his first few sips, ‘I don’t suppose it’s really news to you that I’ve seen Linda occasionally on some of these trips over the past – however long it’s been.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not really news.’
‘Sometimes I’d finish work a day or two ahead of time,’ he went on, sounding encouraged, ‘and I’d fly up to San Francisco and we’d have dinner together. Nothing more than that. She’d tell me about how she was doing – and actually she’s doing very well: she and another girl have their own business, designing clothes – and I’d just sit there acting sort of like her father. Once or twice I’d ask her if she’d met any nice guys, and then when she’d tell me about men she’d been “seeing” or “dating” I’d feel my heart start to pound like some crazy – I don’t know. I’d feel the blood racing all the way down to my fingertips. I’d feel—’
‘Get to the point, Howard.’
‘All right.’ He drank off nearly all of his bourbon-and-water and then he sighed again, as if in relief that the hard part was over. ‘The point is there wasn’t really any National Carbon business on this trip,’ he said. ‘I did lie to you on that score, Emily, and I’m sorry. I hate lying. I spent the whole time with Linda. She’s almost thirty-five now – nobody can call her an impressionable kid any more – and she’s decided she wants to come back to me.’
For weeks and months afterwards, Emily thought of many passionate, well-worded rejoinders she might have made to that statement; at the time, though, all she could muster was the weak, meek little phrase she had hated herself for using since childhood: ‘I see.’
It took only a couple of days for Howard to move his belongings out of the apartment. He was very apologetic about everything. Only once, when he flicked the heavy silken rope of his neckties out of the closet, was there any kind of a scene, and that turned into such a dreadful, squalid scene – it ended with her falling on her knees to embrace his legs and begging him, begging him to stay – that Emily did the best she could to put it out of her mind.
There were worse things in the world than being alone. She told herself that every day as she went efficiently about the business of getting ready for work, of enduring her eight hours in Baldwin Advertising and of conquering the evenings until she could sleep.
There was no longer any listing for Michael Hogan in the Manhattan Telephone Directory, or any listing for his public relations firm. He had always talked of moving to Texas, which was his home; probably he’d made the move.
Ted Banks was still listed, at his old address, but when she called him he explained with what seemed an excessive amount of embarrassment that he was married to a wonderful person.
She tried others – it had always seemed that her life was filled with men – but none came through.
There was no Flanders, John; and when she tried Flanders, J., on West End Avenue, it turned out to be a woman.
For a year she found an exquisite pain – almost pleasure – in facing the world as if she didn’t care. Look at me, she would say to herself in the middle of a trying day. Look at me: I’m surviving; I’m coping; I’m in control of all this.
But some days were worse than others; and one afternoon, a few days before her forty-eighth birthday, turned out to be especially bad. She had carried a batch of finished copy and layouts uptown for a client’s approval, and on coming back she was all the way into Hannah Baldwin’s office before discovering that she’d left it all on the seat of the taxicab.
‘Oh, my God!’ Hannah cried, reeling back on the casters of her desk chair as if she’d been shot through the heart. Then she came forward again, placed both elbows on the desk and held her head with all ten fingers, messing up her careful hair. ‘You’ve gotta be kidding,’ she said. ‘That was finished copy. That was approved copy. It had the client’s signature on it…’
And Emily stood watching her, realizing at last how much she had always disliked her, knowing this was probably the last time she would ever face this humiliation.
‘… Total, utter carelessness,’ Hannah was saying. ‘Any child could’ve been trusted with a thing like this, and it’s so typical of you, Emily. And it isn’t as if you hadn’t been warned; I’ve given you every chance. I’ve been carrying you – I’ve been carrying you for years – and I simply can’t afford it any longer.’
‘I have several things to tell you, Hannah,’ Emily said, proud that she was shaking only a little and that her voice came out almost steady, ‘and the first is that I’ve worked here too long to be “fired.” I want to resign as of today.’
Hannah took her hands away from her disheveled hair and looked up into Emily’s eyes for the first time. ‘Oh, Emily, you are a child. Don’t you see I’m trying to do you a favor? If you resign you’ll have nothing. If you let me fire you, you can draw Unemployment. Don’t you even know that? Were you born yesterday?’
Chapter 3
ON THE DOLE – A WOMAN’S STORY
If you’re fired from a job in New York, you can receive unemployment compensation checks for fifty-two weeks. After that, if you still haven’t found work, your only recourse is to go on Welfare. There are more than one and a half million people on Welfare in the metropolitan area.
I am white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and a college graduate. I have always earned my living in ‘professional’ fields – as a librarian, as a journalist, and finally as an advertising copywriter. I am now in my ninth month of unemployment status, with nothing but Welfare in sight. My employment counsellors, public and private, have done their best; they tell me there simply aren’t any jobs.
Perhaps no one can fully explain this predicament, but at the risk of displaying an easy and all too fashionable self-pity, I will hazard a guess: I am a woman, and I am no longer young.
That was as far as Emily’s article went. It had been rolled into her typewriter for weeks; now the paper was curled and sun-bleached and gathering dust.
She was in the eleventh month of her unemployment status when she began to fear that she might be losing her mind. She had given up the old apartment and moved into a smaller, cheaper place in the West Twenties, not far from where Jack Flanders had once lived. Watching the early morning light filter down among the loft buildings across the street, she often thought of Jack Flanders fondling her elbow inside his bathrobe and saying ‘Sometimes, if you play your cards right, you get to meet a nice girl.’ But that was part of the trouble: she lived in memories all the time. No sight or sound or smell in the whole of New York was free of old associations; wherever she walked, and she sometimes walked for hours, she found only the past.
Hard liquor frightened her, but she drank enough beer to help her sleep in the afternoons – it was a good way to kill time – and it was on waking from one of these naps, sitting on the bed and staring at four empty beer cans on the floor, that she had her first intimations of madness. If anyone had asked her what day or month or year it was she would have had to say ‘Wait – let me think,’ and she didn’t know whether the gray beyond her windows was dawn or dusk. Worse still, her dreams had been filled with clamorous voices from the past, and now the voices were still talking. She ran for the door to make sure it was locked – Good; nobody could get in; she was alone and safe in her own private place – and after standing there for a long t
ime with her fist in her mouth she got the telephone book and fumbled through the ‘New York – City of’ listings until she found ‘Mental Health Information Service.’ But when she tried to call that number it rang eleven times with no answer. Then she remembered it was Sunday; she would have to wait.
‘You ought to get out and meet people, Emily,’ Grace Talbot often told her. Grace Talbot had worked at Baldwin Advertising too, until she found a better job with a bigger agency, and lately had become Emily’s only friend. She was wry and hawk-faced and not very likable, but once a week, when they met for a restaurant dinner together, she seemed better than nothing.
And she was certainly better than nothing now. Emily was halfway through the dialing of her number before she realized she didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t say ‘Grace, I think I’m going crazy’ without sounding like a fool.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Grace, it’s Emily. I just called for – you know – no very good reason, except to talk.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s – nice. How’ve you been?’
‘Oh, okay, I guess, except that Sundays in New York can be pretty awful.’
‘Really? God, I love Sundays. I luxuriate in bed for hours with the Times, and with cinnamon toast and cups upon cups of tea, and then in the afternoon I take a walk in the park, or sometimes friends drop over, or sometimes I go to a film. It’s the only day of the week when I really feel like myself.’
There was a pause during which Emily regretted having called at all. Then she said ‘What’d you do this afternoon?’
‘Oh, I had a drink with some friends, George and Myra Fox. I’ve told you about them: he writes blurb copy for paperback books; she’s a commercial artist. They’re delightful people.’
‘Oh. Well, I just thought I’d check in with you and – you know – see what you were up to.’ Everything she said made her hate herself more and more. ‘I’m sorry if I bothered you in the middle of something, or anything like that.’
And there was another pause. ‘Emily?’ Grace Talbot said at last. ‘You know something? I wish you’d quit kidding me, and quit kidding yourself. I know how lonely you are; it’s a crime for anyone to be that lonely. Listen: George and Myra are having a few people over next Friday evening. How about coming along with me…?’
A party. It would be the first party in longer than she wanted to remember, and Friday was only five days away.
All week she could think of nothing else; then Friday was upon her, and all that mattered in the world was getting her clothes and her hair right. She settled on a simple black dress (she couldn’t help remembering how Howard Dunninger had said, of Linda, ‘She was wearing a simple, short black dress…’) and a hair style that left one lock attractively low over the eye. She looked good. There might easily be a man there, a graying, pleasant-looking man of her own age or older, who would say ‘Tell me about yourself, Emily…’
But it wasn’t really a party at all. The eight or ten people in the Foxes’ living room never left their seats to get up and move around; they all seemed to know each other, and they sat in attitudes of exhaustion, with sardonic faces, sipping at tiny glasses of cheap red wine. There were no unattached men. Emily and Grace, sitting well apart from the main group, were wholly excluded from the talk until Myra Fox bustled over to their rescue, bringing the expectant listening looks of several other guests in her wake.
‘Have I told you about Trudy?’ she demanded of Grace. ‘Our neighbor on this floor? She said she might drop in later, so you may meet her, but you really ought to know about her first. She’s really something. She’s—’
And here George Fox, standing with a wine bottle poised for pouring, interrupted his wife in a voice loud enough to address the group. ‘Trudy runs a women’s masturbation clinic,’ he said.
‘Oh, George, it’s not a “clinic.” It’s a studio.’
‘A studio, right,’ George Fox said. ‘She gets women of all ages – mostly sort of middle-aged, I gather – and she charges quite a hefty fee. The classes meet in her studio and go through a warm-up of modern dance routines – in the nude, of course – and then they get down to the – well, they get down to the business at hand, you might say. Because Trudy doesn’t believe in masturbation as a poor substitute for the real thing, you see; she believes in masturbation as a way of life. Sort of the ultimate in radical feminism. Who needs men?’
‘I don’t believe it,’ somebody said.
‘You don’t believe it? Stick around. You’ll meet her. Ask her yourself. And she likes nothing better than to show visitors through the studio.’
Trudy did drop in later – or rather, she made an entrance. The most startling thing about her was that her head was shaved – she looked like a handsome, totally bald man of forty or so – and then you noticed her clothes: a man’s purple undershirt through which the nipples of her small breasts jutted, and a pair of well-bleached blue jeans whose crotch had been appliquéd in the pattern of a big yellow butterfly. She mingled with the company for a while, drawing deeply on a cigarette in a way that emphasized her hollow cheeks and prominent cheekbones; then, when some of the guests were beginning to leave, she said ‘Would anyone care to see my studio?’
First came an entrance hall with many coat hooks on its walls and a sign above its archway reading PLEASE REMOVE YOUR CLOTHES. ‘You can ignore that,’ Trudy said, ‘but please do take off your shoes,’ and she led her stockinged visitors into the big, deeply carpeted main room.
On one wall was a huge, anatomically perfect drawing of a woman reclining naked with her legs apart, fondling one breast with one hand and applying an electric vibrator to her crotch with the other. On another wall, bathed in a spotlight from the ceiling, was what looked like a sculptured sunburst of many podlike aluminum shapes. Close up, the pods proved to be precise life-sized renderings of open vaginas – some considerably larger than others, all with intricately different kinds of outer and inner labia. Emily was inspecting the display when Trudy came up to stand at her shoulder.
‘These are some of my students,’she explained. ‘A sculptor friend of mine modeled them in wax, then they were cast into aluminum.’
‘I see,’ Emily said. ‘Well, that’s very – interesting.’ The glass of wine was warm and sticky in her fingers, and her spine ached with tiredness. She had a presentiment that if she didn’t get out of here at once, Trudy would invite her to enroll in her classes.
Trying not to hurry, she excused herself and went back to the entrance hall where her shoes lay, and then back to the Foxes’ apartment where several people were agreeing with each other that Trudy’s studio was the God damnedest thing they had ever seen.
‘I told you,’ George Fox kept saying. ‘You wouldn’t believe me, but I told you…’
Then the party was over and she was out on the sidewalk saying goodnight to Grace Talbot, who insisted several times that the evening had been ‘fun,’ and then she was on her way home.
There were no more parties, and she got out of the habit of taking walks. She left her apartment only to buy food (‘TV dinners’ and other cheap, processed food, easy to prepare and quick to eat), and there were many days when she didn’t even do that. Once, having willed herself out on the street and into a corner delicatessen, she had selected her purchases from the shelves and the freezer and placed them near the cash register when she looked up and found the proprietor smiling into her eyes. He was a soft, stout man in his sixties, with coffee stains on his apron, and in none of the times she’d dealt with him before had he ever smiled like that, or even spoken to her.
‘You know something?’ he said, as shyly as if he were about to make a declaration of love. ‘If all my customers were like you, my life would be a great deal happier.’
‘Mm?’ she said. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because you help yourself,’ he said. ‘You pick everything out for yourself and you bring it up here. That’s wonderful. Most people – especially the women – come in here and say “Box o
f Wheaties.” I go all the way back to where the cereal’s kept, bring it all the way back up, and they say “Oh, I forgot – a box of Rice Krispies, too.” So for thirty-nine cents I’m getting a heart attack. Not you. Not you, ever. You’re a pleasure to do business with.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ And her fingers trembled as she counted out the dollar bills. It was the first time in nearly a week that she’d heard the sound of her own voice, and it had been much, much longer than that since anyone — anyone – had said something nice to her.
Several times she started to dial the number for Mental Health Information Service, but couldn’t make herself complete the call. Then once she did complete it and was referred to another number, at which a woman with a heavy Spanish accent, speaking carefully, explained the procedure: Emily could go to Bellevue Hospital any weekday morning before ten, go down to the basement level and look for a sign reading WALK-IN CLINIC.There she would be interviewed by a social worker, and an appointment with a psychiatrist would be arranged for her at a later date.
‘Thank you very much,’ Emily said, but she never went. The prospect of going down into the bowels of Bellevue in search of the Walk-in Clinic seemed almost as bereft of hope as that of walking into Trudy’s studio.
One afternoon she was returning from a long walk to the Village that she’d forced herself to take – a visit seething with memories of the dead – when she came to a stop on the sidewalk and felt her blood quicken with the beginnings of a new idea. She hurried home then, and once she was alone behind her locked door she dragged a heavy, dusty cardboard box out of its storage place and into the middle of the floor. It was a box of old letters – she had never been able to throw a letter away – and she went through many thick handfuls of shifting, sliding envelopes, all of them hopelessly out of chronological order, before she found one of the two she was looking for: