Portrait of a Married Woman

by Sally Mandel

  Hilary leaned forward earnestly. “You’re friends. You respect each other. It shows in the way you relate.”

  Maggie was beginning to feel the familiar panic again. It suddenly reminded her of being stuck between stations in the subway. It was always dark and hot and there was a dangerous smell. Perspiration slid down her sides.

  “You’re absolutely the best married people I know,” Hilary declared.

  “What about Robin and Jackson?”

  “That’s strictly father-daughter. Who needs it? Besides, I’m too tall to be anybody’s little girl. Come on.” Hilary unfolded her legs. “Let me show you around your new office.” Maggie got up and began tidying the coffee table, but Hilary took her arm. “Leave it, you’re not at home now.”

  Maggie followed her down a carpeted corridor to the design department. There was a large well-lighted room with windows reaching practically to the ceiling. Two men and a woman looked up from their drawing boards to nod at Hilary. The men wore beards. One of them was completing a mock-up for the new Sylvia Goodwin picture. His composition was off, Maggie noticed. She longed to fix it.

  Hilary half-dragged her out the door and down the hall. “One of the guys is gay, one’s happily married, and the girl’s an ambitious little thing. Reminds me of me. Ah, he’s in.” They stood in the doorway of an office only slightly larger than Hilary’s. “Jim, this is the lady I told you about. Maggie Hollander, James Perry, our illustrious leader.”

  Perry came around from behind his desk. He, too, was bearded. Perhaps it was a requirement for men working here, Maggie thought. The women had to be beautiful, the men hairy. Perhaps she ought to try growing a beard.

  Perry had a kind young-old face—childlike expression and yet plenty of wrinkles in the forehead and around the eyes. He had probably suffered, but he was not embittered. His handclasp was warm and firm.

  “I hear good things about you,” he said. “I hope you’ll be joining us.”

  Maggie hoped her smile wasn’t idiotic. Hilary walked her to the elevator.

  “That’s too much,” Maggie whispered.

  “You didn’t have to bother him.”

  “We want you.”

  “You don’t even know what I can do.”

  “Don’t tell me. I’m paid to know what people can and can’t do. You’re the one who doesn’t know. Call me tomorrow.” It was a command. She gave Maggie a little shove into the elevator.

  On the way down, Maggie speculated as to why Hilary wasn’t a more assertive bridge player. Perhaps if they tried playing in Hilary’s elegant office where she felt most at home, there would be a marked improvement. When Hilary had first showed up as a copy editor at Woman’s Companion, Maggie had sensed the vine-covered walls and manicured lawns in her background. It turned out that the two women had been educated at neighboring boarding schools and had almost certainly met at each other’s lacrosse fields. They traded stories about the agony of tea dances, the joy of tiffin, the mysterious forbidden attraction of “townies.” One day when Maggie’s parents arrived at the office to take her to lunch, Hilary pulled Maggie aside, nearly exploding with suppressed laughter, to inform Maggie that their mothers owned the exact same navy Lily Pulitzer wraparound with the yellow daisy print. Before long, Maggie and Hilary called their parents identical pairs of BYW’s—Boring Yankee Wasps.

  If these two had been watered in the same garden, how then, Maggie wondered, had their futures diverged so dramatically? Here was Hilary, a glittering success in her career, interviewed in Time, photographed for fashion magazines, with nothing but emptiness and discontent lurking one step outside her glamorous office. And as for Maggie, there was the doling out of meals and comfort while her dreams of artistic productivity had shriveled into a tiny painful knot in some obscure corner of her consciousness.

  Back in her own kitchen massaging herbs into the leg of lamb, Maggie thought about how it would be if she actually took the job. The idea seemed so radical, and yet women went back to work all the time. But the children still needed her. And Matthew, too. He was hopelessly disorganized outside of his office. Of course, she could hire someone to do the errands. Still, nobody else could do them properly. Who else could have chosen the appropriate present for Fred’s friend? Who else could select the exact color of Matthew’s shoelaces? What about groceries and menu planning? It was so complicated, with Susan’s allergies. By the time she finished explaining everything to a housekeeper, it would be easier to do it herself. And who wanted a stranger around the house? It was such an intrusion. No, she wouldn’t take the job. Later, when the children were in college.

  Besides, wasn’t she supposed to be an artist, the kind who sits in a room by herself and creates things that do more than persuade people to buy things they can’t afford? She always meant to make art, not sales. On the other hand, she had never been convinced of the value of her vision. And CinemInc was so attractive. It had been a long time since she’d participated in the companionable activity of a busy office. And she was needed. Hilary made that very clear. Oh, hell, maybe she’d just do it.

  She changed her mind a dozen times before dinner. Finally she resolved to let the ultimate decision rest with the reaction of her family. She would assess their response and act accordingly.

  It was peculiar for Maggie to be the bearer of news. Normally she listened while the others related the day’s triumphs and defeats. Tonight would be different. She would wait and tell them at dinner when they were all sitting down together. She was eager to share it, and yet holding back for a little while was delicious, the way she had hoarded the confirmation of her pregnancy with Fred, lying on her bed and smiling at the ceiling for an hour before calling Matthew.

  Finally, when everyone was seated, she handed the platter of roast lamb across the table to Matthew. Fred watched her.

  “What’s with you, Mom?” he asked.

  Maggie reached out and touched her son’s arm in appreciation. “I’ve been offered a job.” There was so much music in the statement that it sounded like a chord played by a full orchestra, strings, woodwinds, brass, and all. Everyone heard it differently.

  “You don’t sound very happy about it,” Susan said.

  “She does, too,” Fred objected.

  “What kind of job?” Matthew asked. “Pass the butter, please, Frederick.”

  “Assistant art director at CinemInc. I’d be doing the promotion posters.”

  “Jeez, CinemInc,” Fred breathed. “Maybe I could meet Harrison Ford.”

  “Hilary get you into it?” Matthew asked.

  Maggie nodded. “She really put on the pressure. Even introduced me to James Perry. He’s very nice.”

  Matthew smiled indulgently. “Jim Perry’s a lot of things, but nice isn’t one of them.”

  “How would you feel if I took it?” Maggie asked.

  “How you feel is more to the point.”

  “What if your shirts aren’t done on time? What about dinner? What about …”

  He interrupted her. “Get a gofer. Hire somebody. It’s just scut work around here. I assume they’ll pay you decently.”

  Scut work, Maggie said to herself. So that’s what I’ve been doing all these years.

  She remembered when Matthew used to introduce her to clients as “My wife, Maggie, the gifted artist.” But after a while it just became, “My wife, Maggie,” and when he found her sliding paint boxes and empty canvases under the bed for storage, he had said, “Seems a shame,” without further comment.

  “How much, Mom?” Susan persisted.

  “Four hundred a week.”

  “Take it,” Matthew said. “It’ll be good for you to do something useful.”

  “Mom’s useful,” Fred said. He was beginning to look anxious.

  “Just like that, just take it,” Maggie said.

  “Yup,” Matthew affirmed.

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard. It’s nice of
Hilary.”

  “I don’t know if she’s being nice …” Maggie began. “She seems to think I can do it.”

  “Of course you can do it, but you don’t have a track record in the field. She could choose anybody at all for an operation like CinemInc.”

  Maggie sat in silence.

  “Will you be home when we get out of school?” Fred wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. I guess not,” Maggie replied.

  “I wouldn’t like that. I’d live with it for the sake of art, though, I guess.”

  “Art!” Susan sniffed. “It’s a big sellout if you ask me. Mom’s work should be hanging in the Metropolitan, not the subway station. Boy, when I’m a writer, you won’t catch me writing junk. If it’s not good stuff, I won’t write at all.”

  “I thought you were going to be an actress,” Fred said. “You’re always blabbing away in that goony accent.”

  “I’m just trying to stay in character,” she protested. As the lead in the school production of Our Town, Susan had adopted a decidedly New England inflection.

  “You’ll wind up writing TV scripts for Dallas,” Fred taunted.

  “I’d die first.”

  “Cool it,” Matthew said. “I’ll have another slice of that lamb. The decision is up to your mother. Let her struggle with it in peace.”

  “It isn’t only up to her, Daddy. We’re her family,” Susan complained.

  “Why do you talk about me as if I’m not here? I’m not ‘her,’ I’m ‘you.’ ”

  Susan looked confused.

  “Never mind,” Maggie said.

  But Susan turned to address her directly. “Okay, I’m saying that as my mother, you have a responsibility to be a role model and I don’t think you’re being a very good one.”

  “Oh, listen to her …” Fred began in disgust, but Susan cut him off.

  “No, really, she’s this homebody type all the time and we all know what that means …”

  Maggie wondered what it meant.

  “… and now she’s going to take this sucky job that just exploits her talent as a true artist, so then she’ll be a failure as a woman and an artist. What kind of example is that for her children, especially me, since I’m the creative one?”

  “That’s the most ridiculous junk I ever heard,” Fred maintained.

  Maggie sat looking at her plate. She was trying to hide the fact that she was crying, but it was difficult because large drops kept splashing onto her vegetables.

  The others watched in horror as tiny thuds of tears hit her baked potato. Maggie never cried in front of the children.

  “I think you’d better apologize to your mother, Susan,” Matthew said.

  By this time, Susan was crying too. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

  But Maggie shoved her chair back and murmured, “I think I’d better be excused.” She fled to the bedroom and shut the door.

  Later, as she and Matthew lay side by side in the dark, Maggie said, “I think I might like to try skydiving someday.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I don’t know if I am.”

  “Well, take it from me, it’s not your style.” He rolled over and soon she could hear him breathing with the slow rhythm of sleep.

  Chapter 5

  The buzzer sounded next to Matthew Hollander’s elbow. He pushed a button. “Send him in, Barbara.” Hollis Reardon’s papers were ready, and Matthew was pleased. He had pried a reasonable deal out of International Films, a particularly gratifying outcome since Reardon had been screwed at least a dozen times over the years. It was pitiful how helpless creative people could be. In fact, their vulnerability was the reason Matthew had opted for entertainment law in the first place. Writers, performers, painters, it was all the same. Somebody had to protect their interests or they’d never survive.

  The one exception was Maggie. She was the only artist Matthew had ever met with common sense. Joanne had the creative temperament in that family. Of course, Joanne was compelled to paint, and with Maggie, art was strictly part-time, though in his opinion, Maggie was more talented.

  Hollis Reardon stepped into the office. Matthew rose to shake his hand. “Glad to meet you in person after all those marathon phone calls,” Matthew said. Reardon was short, round, and red-faced, not at all what Matthew had expected from the deep booming drawl.

  “Some beautiful view,” Reardon said.

  Matthew glanced out the window. His office was twenty stories up over New York harbor. The building, constructed in 1898, had long ago achieved landmark status. Matthew’s mahogany-paneled office had been occupied by lawyers since the turn of the century. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve looked out that window in three weeks. Have a seat.”

  “I want to thank you for what you’ve done,” Reardon said. “I really got my ass wiped with the last screenplay.”

  Matthew smiled. Vulgarity seemed incongruous coming from the rosebud mouth of this small man. Still, Reardon’s writing was powerful, often even brutal. Matthew thought of Maggie’s paintings. They shimmered with vitality, and yet she was a restrained person, rather formal, not the least bit flamboyant.

  “We’ve built in some percentage points in case the picture does well,” Matthew said, “but I think we’ve got the maximum up front. Once these guys get out of production and into the accountant’s office, you end up with zero.”

  Reardon nodded. “I’ve been up that rat hole.”

  They spent an hour poring over the papers for Reardon’s contract. Then Matthew leaned back in his chair. A few years ago, he would have made sure his client was out the door the moment they finished, but Matthew had put in plenty of pressure-cooker years. Now he was entitled to savor his triumphs. He snapped the stereo on to WQXR and was rewarded with Rubinstein’s Chopin Preludes.

  “You know what this contract means, besides paying off the Mercedes?” Reardon asked. “After I finish the film, I’m taking six months off to write poetry.”

  “My mother was a poet for a while,” Matthew said. “She even published a book. A small one.”

  “That was in the days when people read poems, I guess,” Reardon said.

  “She was damn good. It was a great disappointment to her that I didn’t inherit any of her literary genes. Christ, she used to sit with me hour after hour doing ‘descriptions,’ she called them. I was supposed to describe things I saw or thought about or dreamed of. But I was one of her least successful projects. I couldn’t even write a decent letter home from camp.”

  Reardon’s cherubic face looked so crestfallen that Matthew smiled. “That’s probably why I got into this business. I may not possess the sparks myself, but I can be the guardian of the flame.” Matthew looked at his watch. The gesture was not lost on Reardon. He rose and held out his hand.

  Afterward, Matthew sat and stared out the window. He decided the Statue of Liberty looked like a Staten Island housewife who had fallen into the water with her nightgown on. She rose out of the harbor with her hair in rollers. Helicopters flew past her head like gnats and she had raised a weary hand to swipe at them. Rubinstein switched to Brahms. The sound was complex, passionate and disturbing. Matthew felt eyes on him and turned to see Maggie’s face regarding him from her portrait. It was his favorite picture of her, taken when they were first married. Her hair had been longer then, long enough to wear in stubby braids. She was sitting on the gunwale of a sailboat wearing white shorts, one of Matthew’s T-shirts, and a wide grin. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen that grin in a long time.

  Maybe he ought to take her on a vacation this summer when the kids went to camp. Up until now, there had been so many demands from the firm. Matthew had seen his opportunity to become indispensable. He had achieved that now, as much as anybody could realistically become indispensable. But he deserved a break, and the two of them hadn’t been away alone together in several years. Maggie sometimes talked wistfully about London and Paris, but
he failed to see the charm in clomping around a city when they lived in one. Maybe an adult tennis camp. Maggie enjoyed being active as much as he did. He’d check it out.

  Funny how he couldn’t seem to get into his work today. Ordinarily he enjoyed the office. He was eager to plunge in every morning and reluctant to extract himself in the evening. Matthew performed countless juggling acts every day, keeping clients, adversaries, and other attorneys spinning in the air above his desk. For the most part, they returned to earth at Matthew’s bidding, to land on the appropriate spot. It had happened that way with Reardon, but there were two other challenging matters that required his immediate attention. However, rather than delve into the files, he swung around in his chair again to avoid Maggie’s stare. Home was intruding into his bastion today. Perhaps it was this morning’s conference with Susan’s teacher, where he was due in less than an hour.

  This would be Matthew’s first parent-teacher conference since Susan’s nursery-school years. During her first weeks, Matthew had walked her to the sunny brick building every morning on his way to work. She was so tiny that he could cup her chin with his hand as they strolled side by side along Seventy-ninth Street. She had clung to him and cried when it was time for him to leave her. Matthew had expected this, but he was unprepared for his own pain.

  Then in October, there had been a crisis at the firm. Maggie took over walking Susan, and Matthew had never really participated in her education again. But he still remembered that when he kissed her good-bye outside her nursery schoolroom, she had smelled of bread and butter.

  Matthew quickly became comfortable with Maggie’s sovereignty in that area of their lives. He trusted her judgment with the children more than his own. What was more, he had come to dislike any trespass from home into the cerebral citadel of his profession. Today, however, Susan’s teacher had particularly asked if both parents would be attending the conference. Maggie interpreted this to mean that Matthew’s presence was expected. Susan had walked into the kitchen just as the topic arose. She had fixed her eyes on his face, and Matthew found there was no way to refuse.