The hours shrunk, closing in on the time when her alarm would ring for work, and she screwed her eyes shut, fading in and out of sleep. She would tell the ladies at the Starlite that she hadn’t gone to work. Tommy was unaccounted for.
You’re not married to him. That’s what Madeline would say, if she told her the full truth. You can leave. You can stay in the Starlite until you get on your feet.
Madeline would make such a generous offer; she would even welcome her company, though Elaine didn’t need the help. Elaine wouldn’t take it, anyway.
She could do this job. She’d set herself to do this job.
But she got very little sleep.
* * *
When the alarm clock rang, Tommy was still out.
It was her big day.
Elaine wrenched herself out of bed; she looked nothing like somebody ready for their first day at the Chronicle, with purple circles beneath her sagging lids.
She gave herself generous dabs of makeup to cover the exhaustion. It didn’t conceal all traces, but it was an improvement.
She couldn’t eat breakfast; she didn’t even try. She packed up a little lunch, took a few sips of tea, and headed out the door.
The morning chill bit her exposed nose sharply—but here she was, on the sidewalk like everyone else, walking to the bus stop as her heels clicked on the concrete. She was heading somewhere important.
But once she was seated on the bus, she took furtive glances at every bar or pub on the route. In the distance, a tall man with dark hair stood outside one of them, smoking, but he wore the apron of a bartender.
Her bus neared the outskirts of Brooklyn and picked up speed. All around her, the other passengers flipped through their copies of the morning paper.
She was almost at the Chronicle, her dream job. This newspaper carried significant import for the States, for Great Britain—her motherland—and for nations around the globe.
She was doing something big with her life.
As the bus zipped over the bridge to Manhattan, Elaine allowed herself to stop looking for him; instead, she focused her gaze on her own destination.
PART THREE
Indiscretions
20
Lisa
March 1962
The plane’s engines roared to life. Lisa usually froze during this moment to linger in the anticipation of lift-off. The passengers were always subdued as they waited to ascend.
But someone next to Lisa buckled a seat belt, and the metallic clink echoed with the vibrations of the shattering window at the Starlite. She had been searching the Starlite for Elaine when its window exploded. Someone had screamed about an attack. Her legs were frozen into place as others ran toward the back of the store. A thin shard of glass cut into her knee as she knelt down to help Harriet, who was bent over in shock.
The storefront glass had detonated on impact; any one of them could have been killed.
Now, Lisa’s plane began its ascent. The ground below seemed to shift as the wing started to turn. A deep shudder jerked her back, but she had to commence her usual services; the passengers would need her attention momentarily. Taking a brief opportunity to pause as they flew higher and higher, Lisa gazed out over the bay, and something caught her eye: a dark wisp of something above the marsh, like a plume of smoke. But their jet tilted in the other direction, so she couldn’t see.
“Did you see that?” Lisa nudged Betsy, who was otherwise occupied. Then she dismissed it, and turned her attention instead to the first round of drink service.
On the whole, the flight was uneventful, other than the disturbance of a screaming baby, whose wails sent the passengers in her section into a foul mood. Lisa dug for the supply of earplugs in a back cabinet and handed them out to everyone, then searched for some plastic cups to give the baby as a toy. “Here you go!” she cooed to the baby, handing her one of the yellow cups.
The baby smiled and grabbed for it, and her young mother seemed relieved. They were seated in the same row where Billy’s father had sat with his mistress, and the seat was now covered in spit-up, an appropriate liquid to mask the scent of Billy’s father’s cologne, which hadn’t yet faded off the fabric of the headrest.
They landed in London in the early evening. A buffet supper awaited the flight crew in the dining room of their hotel.
When it was time to eat, the group sat down for their meal together, as they always did, but the head pilot sat at the head of the table. This wasn’t a man of particular pretention; he usually reserved his position of command for his seat in the cockpit.
He wore a grim expression today.
After the crew had gotten their food, he tapped his glass with a fork, making some loud ting-tings, and everyone sat at attention.
“I have something to tell you all.” His usual grin was nowhere to be seen, and his eyes were blank. “There’s been a crash. A plane went down in the swamp at Idlewild. An American Airlines flight.”
Lisa had seen the plume of smoke.
A crash.
Her skin erupted in dozens of prickles.
“I don’t have any further details. Control didn’t want to create additional fear.”
She had been oblivious for the entire flight. Not knowing what she had just seen in the bay, her ears had still been ringing with the scene at the Starlite, pieces of glass shattering into the club.
She had hovered over the baby in the seat of Billy’s cheating father and inhaled the musk scent of a blouse covered in a sheen of spit-up.
There was a plane crash. That could have been her, going down in the swamp, in a plume of smoke. She had applied to work at American Airlines some time ago.
“Oh my God.”
Betsy was the first to start sobbing. The copilot drummed his fingers on the table. Even Jane was incredibly pale.
“What happened to the people?” Lisa asked, in a small voice.
“We don’t know yet.”
The pilot put his head down on the table and held it between his hands. He started to choke—an unidentifiable sound. It was the second time in her life that Lisa had heard a grown man weep.
None of them could eat.
Lisa trembled, and her fork fell to her plate in a spasm. Soon she withdrew to her hotel room.
A small envelope was attached to her door—a telegram from her mother, asking if she was okay.
Her mother must be in a frenzy; telegrams weren’t cheap.
There was nothing from Billy.
She turned on the television and switched the dial to the BBC.
A catastrophic crash. No survivors.
“I don’t want to,” she said out loud to herself. Then she picked up the phone and had the operator put her through to her mother.
“Lisa?” her mother hyperventilated. “I’m just so happy that you’re okay. I don’t know how I could have gone on.” She cried, in chokes that rushed through the static of the phone line. “Those poor people. Those poor people.”
It could have been me. “I’m sorry, Ma.”
She was in a dangerous line of work, far away from home, every other week.
Her mother didn’t respond to this, gulping, catching her breath. “This phone call is expensive, I know. Let’s hang up now. I love you, Lisa.”
They hung up.
The BBC switched to another topic, something about Parliament. Things didn’t seem to matter much to people unless they lived right near where it happened.
She had seen that plume of smoke.
The fire of the dying.
There was still no word from Billy. She got out of bed, gazing out the window over London, at lights that sparkled all around. Life still went on somehow—people here across the Atlantic, with all the other things that they were doing.
Elaine was from London. She could have grown up in one of those buildings. Lisa had seen Elaine briefly at the Starlite last night, before the window exploded. She had talked a bit more about her fancy new job at the Chronicle, speaking in a strangely distracte
d way as she twisted the huge rock on her finger.
Elaine’s man had given her such a beautiful ring. He definitely would have checked to see if Elaine was okay.
21
Elaine
The Chronicle lobby was packed. People milled everywhere, and Elaine moved through the crowd to board the elevator.
Nobody talked, as everyone seemed to be in a strange, quiet rush. They stared at the ceiling, the elevator buttons, and their watches. They exited the elevator in a hurry to their respective floors.
She got off at the fifth floor. Nobody was in plain sight.
The corridor was empty and smelled like a cleaning chemical.
Elaine peeled her ears to search for signs of activity. The sound of a few voices filtered through a doorway. She meandered down a hallway and stumbled upon rows of women crammed in one room.
They sat with long pads of paper, scrawling notes in shorthand as a tall, blonde woman announced names and subjects from a roster. There had been a horrific plane crash at Idlewild, and most of the articles would be about that. Everybody raised their arms as the woman announced the specific topics of each article and made the final assignations.
They were all fact-checkers, getting their work for the day.
“You must be the new girl.” The blonde woman shook Elaine’s hand with brisk efficiency. “Mr. Stephens told me you were starting today. You arrived in the midst of our article assignation. Whoever doesn’t claim an article gets stuck with whatever’s left over.”
“I’ll gladly take the leftovers!” Elaine’s voice was too high-pitched; the other women glared, and her neck grew hot.
The blonde woman spoke curtly. “After these ladies have picked, you’ll have yours.”
Elaine took a step back. The Chronicle was not a friendly social club; she would need to tame her outward eagerness. She was now employed at a significant newspaper, reporting on important topics.
The others got their articles and scurried to their duties, leaving Elaine and the head fact-checker alone. “I’m Mrs. Ainsley,” she announced. “I’ll be showing you the ropes for the first half of the day. You should be ready to go at it on your own after lunch break—you seem like a bright enough girl.”
She led Elaine out of the room, to a desk near the back of the main space. It had a phone, a lamp, and a typewriter—catty-corner to another desk, where a woman held a receiver to her ear and fluently chatted in another language.
“You speak French, correct?” Mrs. Ainsley tossed a look over her shoulder to Elaine, who nodded with a thin-lipped smile. “Next to you will be Nia—she speaks Greek. We have a multilingual staff so we can field calls with non-English speakers.” Elaine hadn’t used much French since she graduated from college eight years prior, aside from the poetry she sometimes read with Tommy. “I’m going to walk you through your day: you’ll get your article, as you saw happening this morning; then you’ll return to your desk and ring the reporter of the article, whose extension should appear on the slip of paper. If the reporter doesn’t answer the phone, you’ll locate him in the building. If a reporter is occupied when you approach him, you must not interrupt; instead, flash him a hello sign and return in ten minutes. Reporters do not like fact-checkers who lurk around their desks.”
“Yes, madam,” Elaine replied.
“Once you’ve ascertained your sources, you’re under strict deadline. You know we have our early and late editions, and everything needs to be checked and approved well before printing.”
They went off on the tour of the building, which had ten floors. Elaine’s head spun at the convoluted alleyways of desks, chairs, hallways, and offices.
Afterward, she attempted to work on her article, but soon she got lost, and her eyes darted through the unfamiliar building in a hopeless state, as though she would never find her way through the mazes of halls and desks. It took nearly thirty minutes to track down the reporter. Finally, she completed the assignment and began to fact-check another article about the governor’s race in New Jersey. She called the campaign offices multiple times before reaching a person who could answer her questions.
She ate lunch at her desk and absentmindedly scrawled words on a scrap of paper.
Lost.
Empty.
All at once, her phone started to ring off the hook. She typed notes with studied taps of her fingers and yanked the papers with quick pulls from the typewriter. She scanned to check the accuracy of figures, budgetary estimates, and percentage points. The familiarity of detailed work flooded back to her senses—this was something comfortable, at least.
When it was all done, she gave a quick exhalation of accomplishment. She ran down the stairs to the sixth floor and speed-walked to the desk of the news editor.
He bellowed out, “Cutting it close to deadline!” The portly man had a cigar between his teeth, and he seemed to be laughing and shouting at the same time.
Elaine blushed. “Sorry, I’m new.”
“Of course, dear! I remember you from that interview—lost your shoe in the Rockaways.” He took the cigar from his mouth. “Don’t mind me. I get all the girls confused sometimes.”
She nodded, as if she understood perfectly; then she handed over her work with a clammy hand and rushed back to her desk.
The Greek woman at the next desk was off the phone. “Looks like you had a busy day!”
“I did!”
“Well, that’s usually every day around here!” The woman gave a friendly laugh. “I’m Nia. Pleased to make your acquaintance! Hey, do you want to head down to the pizza parlor when we clock out? I have a hankering for a slice.”
Elaine fingered the scrap of paper on her desk, the one with the words lost and empty. “I’m really sorry; I can’t.”
She would go back to the brownstone—see if Tommy had returned.
“All right then. Maybe another time! We’re so busy around here, we usually don’t have time for socializing during the day. We try to get together after work if we can.”
Elaine had rejected her first social invitation at the job, but none of the other fact-checkers could possibly have a man like Tommy at home.
Then she looked down at herself, taking in her own professional ensemble, her neat skirt and polished heels. Nobody could surmise anything based on her appearance, so it might be impossible to make guesses about any of them.
* * *
When she arrived back to the brownstone, Tommy was in bed, sleeping. He didn’t budge in response to her footsteps.
She stood over him, searching for bruises, any telltale signs of what he’d been doing or where he’d been. Her only evidence took the shape of scents: cigarette smoke and booze.
He woke, hours later, when at last she laid herself down to sleep. He shot up from bed as though startled by her gentle presence. He coughed and sputtered.
Elaine’s own voice was slurred with exhaustion. “Oh God. Where were you last night?”
It took him a moment to respond.
Then he laughed. “What’s there for me to do if you’re not around, Elaine?”
“How about you get a job? That’ll be something to do.”
“You actually think I could hold down a job?” He laughed again, briefly.
The other Chronicle women had seemed so content. Smiles nestled into the corners of their lips as they made phone calls with professional ease, and their fingers danced gracefully as they typed up their notes with tall-postured efficiency. They couldn’t possibly be well postured if they had to deal with something like this.
But she had looked efficient too, even as she scrawled her chaotic feelings onto pieces of scrap paper, prepared to read it all later—in literary code at the Starlite.
It was dark and late. If she told Tommy she was leaving to make her own life, he would promise to change. He might even apply to jobs, just to placate her. Then it would be the same thing all over again. No job could be enough for him. He thought he was beyond any work that would be offered to him.
&nbs
p; Or, if she just stayed put, she might become so disgusted that she would forget to want him.
If she could learn not to want him.
She struggled to speak as exhaustion gripped her with steely fingers.
“What are we doing, Tommy?”
He was wide awake, intent on putting his shoes on in the dark. He laughed. “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but I’m going out now.”
She gulped. “Drinking some more, I assume?”
“As a matter of fact, you’re right. I’m going to drown my sorrows.” He pulled his long coat over his arms, with jumpy movements and taps of his feet. His voice was unsteady, and his hands shook as he tried to button his coat. “I’m really not sure why you’re still living with me, Elaine. I guess you just want to sleep here after your hard day at work and have a place for your sister to stay. I guess I’m almost like your landlord now. Maybe I should start charging rent.”
“So, you want me to quit my job and drink with you all day?”
“Maybe you just need to consider things, Elaine.”
He slammed the bedroom door behind him as he left.
As he stumbled down the stairs, she rolled over to the warm spot in bed where he had slept—where she now trembled.
Downstairs, she heard the slam of the front door. The vibrations of his exit came to a quick stop—to a heavy silence, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock.
She put a pillow over her ears, to muffle the sound of the steady rhythm.
Then—with a sudden move, she got up.
She lifted herself with a force that was barely her own.
She turned on the light.
She was packing her bags; she was shoving in dresses and nightclothes, everything in lumpy knots.
When she finally filled the luggage, it was midnight, and she trembled, in uncontrollable shudders. There was an emptiness on her shoulders, no reassuring arms. Catherine wasn’t downstairs—she was out somewhere.
Glimmer As You Can Page 13
