Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Page 11

  “I know what I’m saying.” She took another sip and smeared a lurid lipstick glyph down her chin. “You think you’re so precious, living here in the city. Scoffing at love.”

  “Love, Olive, is not what I scoff at,” I said. “What I scoff at is rank sentimentalism: the silly, simplistic idea of love that advertisers—including us—use to sell everything from soup to soap to subjugation. As for the city, Olive, I live here because I like it.”

  “You like it because it’s fashionable.”

  “No, Olive,” I said. “I like it for the same reason that it’s fashionable. Namely, that it’s pretty swell.”

  I was exasperated at having to explain myself to her, but unable to stop. I suppose in a sense I was happy to be fighting with her, freed from the need to hide my dislike and glad at the chance to voice thoughts I’d long harbored but never had the call to speak—because no one ever challenged me. Everything Olive was saying, I knew, was something that my mother also believed but had long since lost the temerity to say. But Olive—poor Olive. She was like one of those miserable dogs that it takes more effort not to kick than to kick.

  “This may be hard for you to understand,” I went on, “but I’d rather live here in the city, in a microscopic apartment—like, for instance, this one, my home, where, as you might wish to recall, you are a guest—than ride a train to and from the suburbs. If you enjoy living with your parents out in Westchester County, then what do I care? And why should I do the same?”

  “You’ll end up there one day, I’ll bet,” she said. “You’ll have a house in the country and a husband and a baby bouncing on the lawn, and you won’t remember a word you said to me tonight.”

  “Olive, do you know the meaning of the term idée fixe? Because you, right now, are practically illustrating the textbook definition.”

  “Stop being so witty,” she said.

  “All right. I’ll be direct: Live in the suburbs if it makes you happy. But you’re not happy, Olive. All of us can see that. And might that be due at least in part to the fact that the suburbs put young ladies at a cruel disadvantage where fun with the local boys is concerned? Here’s some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you’ve made before you look askance at somebody else’s.”

  I had it on good authority that Cornelius, one of the male copywriters at R.H. Macy’s, had asked Olive to a movie recently, and she had refused. She had used the suburbs as an excuse, when really she was merely waiting on a juicier plum to fall her way. In addition to an excess of parental chaperonage, Olive suffered from the condition of being a snob.

  “I like it there!” she said, raising her voice even as I’d been keeping mine level. “Any boy with proper intentions will respect me enough to come see me there.”

  Boy? I thought. Olive, you must be every minute of thirty years old.

  But I didn’t say it. By that point, of course, everyone else in the kitchen had fallen silent to listen, including Bennie, who was now at my side. I could feel him tensed, ready to join the argument on my behalf—Now see here …—and I didn’t want that. “Let’s just wrap this up, Olive,” I said. “You love your bucolic daffodils and buttercups. I prefer my flowers in proximity to cement. Agree to disagree, yes?”

  I offered a hand, but she refused it.

  “You can’t even for one instant stop being cute, can you?” she said, slamming her empty glass on the counter, its forlorn lime wedge leaping from the rim to the floor. “It’s disgusting!”

  With that, she flounced from the room in a cloud of crumpled periwinkle satin, leaving a wake of mouths agape behind her.

  “Oh my stars,” said Helen. The room felt flabbergasted, but sympathetic to my side. “What an outrageous outburst. She’d been bottling that up for quite some time.”

  “Are you all right?” asked Dwight.

  “Quite,” I said, to him, to the room. “Chalk it up to a free show. Stick around now that it’s over. Don’t feel that you have to go home, especially as it just got a bit more roomy in here.”

  “Let’s get you some air,” said Bennie, taking my elbow.

  I didn’t feel embarrassed, but I felt a little strange, so I let him guide me to the roof and its relative privacy. He put his arm around my shoulder, and we looked out at the sparkling city.

  “So,” he said, changing the subject with delicacy, “when you did that interview for the Times, you may recall that I and my camera came in at the end. Therefore I missed the most interesting parts. Your career achievements. Your biographical particulars.”

  “Well,” I said, “you could just read all that in the paper.”

  He grinned. “Given the state of journalism I thought it better just to ask you. What kind of advertising do you do, exactly, for Macy’s?”

  I didn’t feel too keen on talking about work, as it reminded me of Olive, but I did appreciate his taking an interest, so I explained.

  “Institutional advertising,” I said. “That means ads dealing generally with store policy and service and amenities, et cetera. Timely ads arising from hurricanes, Labor Day, spring, July Fourth, et cetera. Promotional ads dealing with assortments of merchandise for various departments, and also all magazine ads, et cetera. I’m the voice of the store. But the store’s voice is not my voice. I help everyone under me to also sound unlike themselves, but rather like R.H. Macy’s, and then to step back and disappear so the store stands alone at center stage.”

  Most men were not impressed with my career but rather saw it as a diversion—a novelty that I would cease to find novel once they were done wooing me. They’d seek to give me the gift of not having to work anymore, not realizing I’d abhor few gifts more than that.

  But Bennie, looking out at the lit windows of the newly sprung skyscrapers, said, “Ah—the way a crane creates and then erases itself from the skyline.”

  And I knew then that I’d be going to bed with him that night, after the guests had left us in quiet.

  * * *

  The following Monday, on my walk to the office, when it was already so sticky that it felt like being underwater, I was not hungover, exactly. For one thing, I didn’t get that way. For another, the party, obviously, had been on Saturday. But even my shoes felt glum and protesting. When I thought of arriving at R.H. Macy’s and having to see Olive, I felt tired and flat down to the arches of my feet.

  To my surprise, the thirteenth floor of R.H. Macy’s that day ended up sounding like a symphony from which the conductor had struck one discordant and out-of-time instrument dumb. The fight seemed to have marked the merciful end of Olive’s and my laborious attempts at friendship. From that point on, she left me alone—watching me from afar, but not bothering me, aside from whatever minimal communication was required to get our jobs done.

  “What neighborhood cat has absconded with Olive’s tongue?” asked Chester, an astute boss of the kind who would notice such changes.

  “If I knew that,” I said, “I would have brought a tin of salmon for it.”

  * * *

  Olive and I didn’t have another run-in until just under a year later, June of 1934, when Bennie was but a distant, albeit pleasant, memory.

  It had been a wiltingly busy spring at R.H. Macy’s, and I felt in need of a present to perk myself up. I settled on a new perfume for summer. As soon as I could, as soon as it came out on this side of the Atlantic, I bought myself a bottle of Fleurs de Rocaille, a well-blended explosion of blooms with a solid wooden base—cedar and sandalwood and musk at the core. A composition that at the time was not unlike my own: feminine, but hard.

  The day after I got a bottle on my lunch break and came back to the office wearing it, my grinning enemy Olive—though she could ill afford it—did the same: purchased a bottle on her lunch break and came back to the thirteenth floor of R.H. Macy’s having practically bathed in it. I recognized it in an instant—though it smelled, on her, sour, like the sour grapes she feasted on daily.

  She saw me smelling it. Her reaction, flushed and
flustered, was that of a plain girl caught in flagrante delicto with the beau of the homecoming queen. A circumstance any civilized person would regard as an occasion for shame was, for her, a tiny triumph—what my profession, years after I left it, would come to call a “peak experience.”

  “I couldn’t resist,” she said, breaking the silence she’d held for a steady ten months. “I didn’t get it because of you. I read about it weeks ago. That it was coming here, to America. And I knew I had to have it. Just for the name. Fleurs de Rocaille.”

  Eyes closed, dreamy sigh heaved.

  “Just for the name?” I said. “No other reason?”

  “Lillian, really,” she said, eyes rolling skyward. “That was just an expression. I don’t need to defend myself, but if you must know, first it was for the name. Next it was for how lovely it smells on me. Third is because the bottle is so pretty. And fourth is just because I felt like it.”

  “The rule of threes, Olive,” I said, “does not just apply to writing copy. Always limit your reasons to three, the number of greatest credibility. Cite more and people will assume that you’re fabricating. Often correctly.”

  “Hey, Lily,” said Chester, coming up behind me. “Where’s the damn copy?”

  “Right here, you sweet-talker,” I said, grateful that his good-natured question had interrupted our conversation, giving me the last word and an occasion to return to my work.

  As Chester and I walked away from Olive’s desk, I could feel her eyes on the back of my suit, like a child with a magnifying glass trying to set ants on fire. I ignored her and felt the fire grow hotter. I breathed in: floral, woody, aldehydic—a smell I would always associate from that point on with rosy serenity in the face of irrational hate.

  As I sat in Chester’s office and listened to his revisions of the work I’d done that morning on our new campaign, I thought about how Olive, even after years, still did not understand the most basic principles of what we did. Good advertising had to be genuine, joyful, unforced. To write informal copy, we had to be informal—to forget motives and mechanisms for a moment and simply speak to the public in the voice we might use to greet an acquaintance encountered on the sidewalk. The instant Olive took pen in hand, she stiffened up. She wrote drafts that left her humiliated because she permitted herself to be humiliated, revealed as fundamentally phony. As Chester tore through my first drafts with abundant blue-pencil edits, I felt no humiliation. That was the process. Nobody’s first cracks were perfect. Olive thought mine were, but she didn’t see how hard I worked. How I loved this job, but how it wasn’t easy for me.

  Especially—though I hated to admit it to myself—lately. My mind was on other things, like my upcoming move to the Village. I was excited about that, truly. But increasingly I’d come to wonder if this was it. Though my achievements—professional, literary—were sweet, it was hard not to be conscious of the gaps between these successes and what I’d imagined of them, and hard, too, to see what route to take now that I had won almost everything I had wanted. From the peak, of course, all paths lead down.

  I was still at the top of my advertising game. Still making plenty of money. And it was a glorious summer, so far, in the city, with liquor once again flowing freely.

  But recently, even on the hottest nights, I couldn’t fall asleep without being covered up, couldn’t quite rest without at least the lightest sheet settled lightly over me. In my mind, I’d come to see it as the physical remedy for a vulnerability I’d begun to feel—a material attempt to ward off my own light sheet of anxiety, ever-present, ever-covering.

  12

  A Fireman’s Axe and a Dracula Cape

  In certain instances, walking alone in Manhattan is actually safer at night.

  Passing by the Strand, for example, at Twelfth and Broadway. I usually walk past that bookstore with intense ambivalence: delight because I have been frequenting it since the 1930s, when it was over on Fourth Avenue, just one among nearly fifty similar shops; dread because on more than one occasion in the past two decades I have found my own poetry collections derelict on the sidewalk carts, on sale for mere cents, and with no one watching over them because if they get stolen, well, who cares? At night, at least, the carts have been rolled away and there’s no chance I’ll be confronted with evidence of my grim literary fate.

  The Strand is something like two miles behind me now. I am making good time, nearing Lower Manhattan. Feeling the simple satisfaction of a well-executed plan, as I am close to Delmonico’s and beginning to feel peckish.

  Broadway takes me west of Little Italy, but among my fellow pedestrians I find many hints of its closeness: dapper hats and open collars, boxes of pastry wrapped tightly in twine, a brash and urgent music in voices—both Italian and Chinese, who increasingly are the actual inhabitants of the neighborhood. I think of how many times I came here with Max to meet his parents—when we were first involved, and also when they’d visit the city on weekends to see Johnny, their only grandchild. Back when I met Max, I was surprised and disappointed that his parents didn’t reside in Little Italy, but, rather, in New Jersey—Rutherford, where they’d been for years, Max living with them. Little Italy, I learned, was really Little Naples, and Max’s parents were northerners, Milanese. They also had the deeply held, received idea—received from friends and neighbors, and the parents of friends and neighbors, who remembered a time when Mulberry Street was the worst of Manhattan’s slums—and also, to be sure, received from advertising—that success meant to pass through the city quickly and settle in the suburbs.

  Within a couple of blocks, the foot traffic has thinned almost to nothing. This part of the walk—approaching the financial district, emptied for the holiday—feels like passing through a ghost town or the backlot of a movie studio. I am the only moving figure in sight.

  Passing the grand French Renaissance exterior of city hall, I am reminded of good manners. Max and I got married there. He was a Catholic, I an Episcopalian, and it was easier just to do it that way, civilly and with a nondenominational party for both of our families after, rather than trying to unify the two faiths. Plus we were able to save the money that a more stately wedding would have cost and use it to take a boat to Italy.

  The funny part, the manners part, is that I was working on an etiquette book at the time: a guide that I had been invited by the publisher—thanks to the success of my verses, and to my prominence as a writer for R.H. Macy’s—to compose. Helen was illustrating. We called it Little Better than Beasts: A Guide to Rudeness and How to Avoid It, and all of her drawings were of anthropomorphic animals. In the chapter on weddings, I advised blushing brides such as myself to work hard to reconcile the families but also to recognize—as I had—when such a reconciliation would not be possible, and to navigate the differences with grace.

  For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity—one’s own and others’—but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.

  I suppose I came to hold this belief for the same reason I came to work so hard: Civility and work gave me, respectively, a rationale and an opportunity for evading my family, my mother in particular. Work always provided an excuse not to see them when I didn’t want to, and work always kept me from being indebted to them.

  My mother understood the world to be a place where one’s behavior was determined by rules, and rules determined by beholdenness. That understanding is not mine. If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant. Solutions of style have a greater moral force than those of obligation.

  You could, of course, read all about this in my preface to Little Better than Beasts, were that book not long ou
t of print. If fortune smiles, perhaps one day you’ll come across a cheap copy on the sidewalk outside the Strand—one mute tirade among many.

  About six blocks from Delmonico’s I pause at Cortlandt Street, because Cortlandt Street always gives me pause. It used to be small and dense—full of trade—until they shut it down to build the World Trade Center.

  It went by the name of Radio Row before the Port Authority—that practically paramilitary factotum of the odious Robert Moses—demolished it all in 1966, citing eminent domain. Social priorities are always changing, but these changes sadden me even when they don’t affect me directly. Good-bye, Radio Row. Good-bye days when men—mostly men—came down to Cortlandt Street to comb the wholesalers in search of replacements for broken components that might Lazarus their radios, resurrect the dead machines. Max used to bring Johnny down here. But people don’t repair very much these days.

  By now I have come to appreciate the Twin Towers, even though I thought them ugly at first, boxy and rectangular and needlessly huge. While they were being constructed, somebody, I can’t remember who, called them soulless and inhospitable to human use: a pair of glass and metal filing cabinets on a colossal scale. In spite of myself, I have always found their gigantism majestic, and now I esteem them, too. If some latter-day Moses ever displaces them—their current tenants’ arcane shifting of cash and commodities someday rendered as quaint as the radio scrappers’ labor, supplanted by robots, satellites, who knows what—then I suppose I would feel their absence much as I do that of other already absented parts of my city. Dully but not quite fully gone. A pair of phantom limbs.

  I am standing there, north of Liberty Park Plaza, looking up at the Towers, when someone barks at me.

  “Excuse me, ma’am” he says, in a bass-drum boom. “Excuse me. Hey, lady!”

  The voice is close, but I don’t see anyone on the street, and for a beat I’m confused—a feeling I hate for its resemblance to senility. Then I see he’s yelling from the rolled-down window of a long limousine.