AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

‘Oh, no, she’s much more than that,’ said Mick soberly. ‘She began her association with Julian designing the interior of that exquisite store of his. And then moved into the company. She’s creative director of the whole thing, not just Juliana, and advertising director. She may not be quite an advertising person, but I’d hate to pitch against her on that account.’

  ‘But doesn’t she work for him because – well, she and he have this weird relationship?’

  ‘No, not really. It really, believe it or not, has very little to do with that. She’s brilliantly clever, powerful in that company in her own right and more than capable of telling Julian to fuck off every now and again. It’s a very volatile relationship, I tell you, baby. Anyway, we have to keep her sweet. Now what did you think of those new lip colours?’

  Most of the time of course she didn’t work on the ads herself, but wrote endless pack and counter display copy; but she could feel her confidence and her skills growing almost physically. And her pleasure, her excitement in what she did never faltered.

  ‘I don’t often say this, darling,’ said Mick, ‘but you seem to have a slight flair for this.’

  ‘How about something else you don’t often say?’ said Fleur. ‘Like take a raise?’

  Mick laughed and said too right, he didn’t often say it and wasn’t about to now; two weeks later he gave her a raise, and she was able to start looking for her own apartment. She was tired of living with Kate; she wanted independence.

  She found it six weeks later, after tramping up what seemed like a hundred flights of stairs, jumping up and down on a thousand creaking, dodgy floorboards, haggling with dozens of hatchet-faced, wall-eyed landlords and ladies. It was a tiny top floor of a brownstone on the Upper West Side, running between Amsterdam and Columbus and within walking distance of Zabars Deli. It was really not an apartment at all, just a large room, with a tiny bathroom off one side of it, and a tinier kitchen off the other; it had no heating or air-conditioning, and the hot water system was primitive to put it mildly and either came out so hot it scalded, or so cool it was hardly worth the bother. But the ceiling was not covered with polystyrene tiles, and the walls were not coated in embossed paper, and the sash window was tall and had a wooden curtain rail and looked over the yard which actually had a tree in it, albeit slightly dusty, and there was a small, pretty iron grate which, though clearly no use at all for containing a fire, was a charming accessory to the room. The apartment was extremely cold when she looked at it, and she could see it would be extremely hot a few months later. The neighbourhood was colourful, noisy, ethnic, full of crying babies, fighting kids, loud, late music, a fair amount of crime – and friendly faces. Her landlady was the distracted mother of five children under seven, whose husband was a professional saxophonist working on average two days out of every month. Their name was Steinberg, and they took a great fancy to Fleur, making her welcome at their Friday night family feasts, apologizing endlessly for the crying babies and the saxophone noise. Fleur could not have cared less about any of it, it was her home, her own small castle, and she had never been so happy.

  She spent the first weekend sanding the floor, and then varnishing it, with the help of Edna’s husband, and Kate, who was genuinely sad to lose her, got out Kathleen’s old sewing machine and made her some fine muslin curtains for the summer, and some heavy woollen weave ones for the winter. She went to the flea markets down in the Village and bought rag rugs for her floor, a small pine chest, an oval mirror on a stand and a Victorian china jug and washbowl. She acquired a clothes rail from a bankrupt fashion house for her clothes, and hung the walls with discarded agency roughs, fished from the waste-bins or snatched from desks en route to the wastebins (with Poppy’s blessing). Her only concession to extravagance was her bed, which she bought new from Macy’s; Fleur was a bad sleeper, and her only hope of a reasonable amount of oblivion lay in thick, firm mattresses. She found a tattered patchwork quilt in one of the markets, and asked Maureen, who was clever with her needle, to show her how to repair it. She had set herself a target of a patch a week, but it was slow, painstaking work, and she grew impatient with it, and three months after moving in, she had still only replaced two.

  It didn’t seem to matter; it still looked wonderful. The whole place looked wonderful; she was immensely proud of it.

  ‘Can I bring my brother to your little gathering on Saturday?’ asked Poppy. ‘He’s dying of a broken heart and I’m sure you could cheer him up.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fleur. ‘It will mean the walls will entirely give way under the pressure, and the floor as well I dare say, but he’s extremely welcome. I didn’t know you had a brother, Poppy. What’s his name?’

  ‘His name is Reuben, I’m afraid,’ said Poppy. ‘Our parents had most colourful ideas about names. We would both much rather have been called Mary and Mike or some such but I suppose it makes us memorable.’

  ‘Well anyway, bring him,’ said Fleur, smiling pleasedly. She was looking forward to her party, which was by way of a housewarming.

  ‘He’s not very talkative,’ said Poppy. ‘I warn you.’

  ‘I like quiet people,’ said Fleur and there was a sudden wistfulness in her voice. Joe was quiet.

  She had asked far too many people; twenty-two jammed into her hot, overcrowded room. The floorboards did creak ominously, and everyone kept spilling drinks over everyone because it was so difficult to move. But it was still fun, and Saul Steinberg came up and played his saxophone for a while, outside the door so they wouldn’t be quite deafened – ‘Live music, my dear, how smart,’ said Poppy – and then Saul said why didn’t they come down and sit in the kitchen and have some coffee, Mary had just made a huge jug. They went down and Fleur found herself sitting on the kitchen floor next to Reuben Blake, whom she had not yet managed to say more than five words to. He was devastatingly attractive; she had taken one look at him and decided that the solution to one of her lesser, if pressing problems, one of acute sexual frustration, could lie most agreeably in his hands. Literally, she thought to herself, with a grin.

  He was very tall, and almost too thin; he had very long, gangly arms and legs, with huge bony hands. His hair was dark sandy blond, and his eyes were what she could only describe as mud-coloured; he had freckles all over his face, and when he smiled, which was seldom, his teeth were rather crooked.

  ‘What do you do?’ she said to him, passing him a tin mug of steaming coffee, and he sighed and said he worked at Bloomingdale’s, as a display designer; he added after a very long time that it was horrible. Why was it so horrible? Fleur said, and he said he didn’t really know. After that he lapsed back into a gloomy silence, which he did not again break; he left with Poppy soon after twelve with a mournful smile, shook Fleur’s hand and thanked her and said it had been an interesting evening.

  ‘I’m afraid your brother didn’t like me,’ she said to Poppy on Monday morning, and Poppy said not at all, he had said he’d found her very nice to talk to.

  ‘But he didn’t talk to me,’ said Fleur, slightly irritably. ‘He said, let me see, about two dozen words at the most, the whole evening.’

  ‘Fleur,’ said Poppy, ‘two dozen is an enormous number for Reuben.’

  ‘Even when he’s not broken-hearted?’

  ‘Even when he’s not broken-hearted. He’s even worse today. The girl finally absolutely finished things off, he spent the whole of yesterday just lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He’s very emotional.’

  ‘Good,’ said Fleur. Emotional in her very limited experience meant good in bed.

  ‘Is that Fleur?’

  ‘Yes, this is she.’

  ‘Ah.’

  A long silence followed. Fleur waited, coughed, said, ‘Yes?’

  She was just about to ring off when the voice said, ‘This is Reuben Blake.’

  There was another very long silence; Fleur smiled into the
telephone. ‘Yes, Reuben?’ she said finally.

  ‘I have tickets for an art exhibition in the Village,’ he said.

  ‘How nice,’ said Fleur. She was determined not to make this easy for him.

  After another very long pause he said, ‘Would you like to go?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Fleur, smiling even more radiantly into the phone, ‘yes, Reuben, I would.’

  He met her in the Village Square; he was ten minutes late and he came shambling along, his disjointed-looking limbs somehow all out of step, his dark gold hair ruffled and untidy. Fleur realized with a pang of pain why she had so instantly liked him: he reminded her of Joe.

  Not that he was in the least like Joe to be with; Joe talked, joked, listened, empathized. Reuben simply was there. He didn’t even greet her properly; merely nodded, smiled and said, ‘Sorry’ (short for ‘sorry I’m late’ she supposed), and indicated towards a small gallery just along on 7th. Fleur, amused and determined not to talk until he did, walked beside him, and followed him into the gallery. It was an exhibition of early twentieth-century primitives; Fleur was enchanted by them. She moved slowly around them, Reuben half forgotten, spellbound by their charm, their innocence; she lingered for a particularly long time by a prairie scene, all yellows and blues with a tiny red house set in the middle distance, walking backwards and forwards, enjoying it. Reuben, who had long completed the circuit and was slightly desultorily doing it again, suddenly appeared beside her. ‘Like it?’

  ‘I love it,’ said Fleur. ‘It’s – well, it’s so happy somehow.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Reuben and disappeared again; when she had finished looking at the pictures she saw him outside, standing in the evening sunshine. She followed him out and looked up at him smiling, slightly challenging; after at least sixty seconds her resolve weakened and she said, ‘What now?’

  ‘I expect you’re hungry,’ said Reuben and yes, she said, yes she was. ‘Like pizza?’ he said, and yes, she said again, yes very much, and so they went to Ray’s Pizza and bought two huge Americans and stood there eating them, and Fleur kept thinking, any moment now he will say something, surely, and still he was silent.

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ he said, when finally they had finished, and she said no, no, she would be fine, but he insisted, and they took the F train right uptown, and he sat next to her, smiling at her every so often, rather vaguely. When they got out at 79th and turned into her street, it was full of people in spite of the cold, and Saul’s saxophone was throbbing somewhere in the air, and he smiled suddenly and said, ‘Hey, this is a really nice place,’ and then he said, ‘Well, goodnight,’ and ambled off before she could even thank him.

  She went to sleep upset, sure that the whole thing had been a disaster; and in the morning not even Poppy’s reassurances – that he was always like that, always quiet, hopelessly shy – could comfort her and she sat staring at the paper in her typewriter trying to write something amusing and interesting about liquid eyeliner, quite convinced that she was doomed for the rest of her life not to have anything more to do with men. And then her phone rang. It was the gallery they had been at the night before, ‘Just checking, Miss FitzPatrick, that we do have the right picture here for you.’ She said there must be some mistake, she hadn’t reserved or paid for any pictures and they said yes, yes, there was one here, Prairie it was called, paid for in her name, and the agency number as the contact, and was that correct, because there was another one called Prayer, and they would hate to get it wrong.

  Fleur said they hadn’t got it wrong and walked very slowly over to Poppy’s desk and told her what Reuben had done, and Poppy said this had clearly been quite an evening; and then Fleur’s phone rang again, and it was Reuben, who said he had so enjoyed talking to her the night before, and it was so rare that he met a girl he could talk to, that he would like to see her again, and was she busy that evening?

  Fleur said she wasn’t.

  Love, she supposed: of a sort. Certainly sex, and sexual desire; in the long silences of those evenings, she would sit and look at him, and he would sit and look at her, and the hunger between them was almost tangible. He kissed her for the first time after their third date; they had been to the cinema, to see Dr Zhivago (the third time, for Fleur, but she still managed to express pleasure and delight), and then out to supper in a restaurant in Little Italy, and as they sat there, he suddenly said, ‘She’s beautiful, Julie Christie,’ and yes, said Fleur, adding with some asperity that so was Omar Sharif, and he smiled at her and said, ‘You’re beautiful too, I think,’ and went back into his plate of tagliatelli al forno. Fleur was so stunned she was unable to eat anything more. As usual he escorted her home in almost total silence, and on the steps of number 33, he turned her face up to his and said, ‘I meant it, you’re beautiful,’ and bent down and kissed her. It was a kiss such as she had not experienced before: it reached into every corner, every area of her; she felt it in her throat and her breasts, and her back and, dear God, she felt it in her pelvis, and she felt it in her legs and she felt it in her head and she felt it in her heart. And when it was over, she pulled back and looked up at him and said, ‘Thank you so much, so very much for the picture, I didn’t know whether to thank you before,’ and he said damn, the gallery wasn’t meant to tell her, just deliver it to the agency when the show was over, and she was so overwhelmed by this long speech that she smiled and kissed him again.

  Well,’ he said, ‘I must get back,’ and he was gone, ambling down the street without a look back, leaving her throbbing, longing for more of him, and her heart alight with pleasure and triumph.

  She had been entrusted with all the pack copy for Juliana. Not earth-shattering, not the stuff awards were made of, but still important. She had asked Julian if she could work for a couple of days behind one of the Juliana counters, so she could get a clearer idea of what women were interested in when they bought cosmetics; he had been pleased and fixed for her to work at Bergdorf’s. Standing there, confronted by rich, demanding, vain women, to whom she had to be not just polite but deferential, she learnt that above all they wanted to be flattered, to be told that the cosmetics they were buying were merely adornments, improvements on an already pleasing image. She worked that into every piece of copy: ‘Second Look foundation flatters and enhances the fine skin you were born with’; ‘Skimon eye shadow takes on the smooth texture of your own lids’.

  Julian was very pleased with it; it was such a simple idea, he said, but it contained a great truth, and he asked Mick to look at working it up into a full campaign.

  ‘Sure,’ said Mick. ‘Bella, darling, what do you think about that?’

  Bella Buchanan was the art director on the account; she was a baby-blue-eyed blonde, with a face like an angel, ferociously hostile to Fleur. Fleur couldn’t make out why.

  ‘Well, obviously I think it would be great,’ said Bella, smiling her perfect smile at Julian. ‘I mean, it was a concept I actually put to Fleur when she was telling me about her days at the Juliana counter. I’m just pleased you like it.’

  ‘You –’ said Fleur and then stopped again, biting her lip, ‘you did, didn’t you.’

  Later that night, Mick came down to see her. ‘That was very nice copy,’ he said. ‘Did Bella really think of that line?’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Fleur.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said and went back up into his eyrie. Five minutes later, some Stravinsky filled the office; he was evidently in the very painful early throes of some campaign or other.

  ‘Do you know why Bella hates me so much?’ Fleur asked Poppy that night. They were sorting transparencies after the presentation.

  ‘Jealousy, I suppose,’ said Poppy. ‘And not just professional either.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Fleur, she was Nigel’s little friend. Before you. And consequently very jealous of you.’

  ‘I �
�� don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Yes, you do, Fleur.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fleur. ‘Oh, I see. Er – does everyone else know?’

  ‘No, not everyone. I guess the woman who cleans the toilets might not.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Fleur.

  ‘I’m kidding you,’ said Poppy. ‘Hardly anyone knows. I do because I know everything. I kind of think Mick does. But not many people. Nigel is very discreet. Listen, it doesn’t matter. It was tough and you handled it well. But anyway, Bella was the one before you. She lasted a long time. I thought and Mick thought that it might even be serious, be coming to something, you know? But – well, Serena knows her stuff. They still have – what should I say – well, a certain closeness.’

  ‘Are there really that many?’

  ‘There are that many. Although since you there hasn’t been anyone. You should enjoy that. Nearly a year, and Nigel still celibate.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Fleur bitterly.

  ‘Well, if you were married to Serena wouldn’t you be celibate?’

  Fleur laughed. ‘Maybe. I wish I’d known you knew. I could have talked, got over it quicker.’

  ‘You did better your way. Better not to talk. Anyway, that’s why Bella hates you. Plus you’re young and pretty and even a bit talented.’

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ said Fleur and giggled.

  She was beginning to yearn for Reuben. ‘Is he always so slow off the mark?’ she said to Poppy.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Poppy noncommittally. There were times when she could say as little as Reuben.

  It was another silent man, Buster Keaton to be precise, who was indirectly the catalyst in the situation, who brought them together. They had been sitting on the subway, she and Reuben, travelling uptown to her apartment, and she had seen in someone’s paper that Keaton had died.