Zany Mina was a certified kook, nine feet tall and gorgeous like a model but the biggest spaz in the universe. She specialized in dancing in people’s faces. I’d knock on the door of the suite and hear the dim strains of Ignition playing in the background, and Mina would rip the door open, stick her big gorgeous face in mine, and hold it very steady while punching out her arms and kicking out her feet in every direction. It was a lot like Snoopy’s happy dance. Then Z.M. would grab me around the neck and dance me down the hallway.
“I’ve discovered the source of Mina’s crazy exhausting energy,” Trina announced one morning as we sat in our nine o’clock Apuleius class clutching coffees, big black circles under our eyes.
“Crystal meth?”
“She sleeps for sixteen hours at a stretch. And then she’s up for eight. Bed for sixteen, up for eight. She’s got the cat-sleep ratio absolutely down. Next thing you know she’ll be prowling around the bookshelves about to knock a trophy on your head.”
The other thing that happened with us all was that Fang met a guy.
Of course, it was really not fair to be so utterly in one another’s business as we all were, especially when it came to a person’s choice of love interest, but we hated this guy. He was a sort of minor jerk-off celebrity on the Columbia campus. He kept his hair in a carefully tousled, cascading fashion, and was never seen on campus without his tweed blazer, sunglasses, and copy of Of Grammatology glued under his arm, his tender lip curled in disgust over anyone not lucky enough to be him. Worst of all, he was one of the biggest ass men around. I remember sitting on the Low Library steps smoking a cig with a woman named Karina, who was out of the L.A. scene, which seemed to be the exact opposite of the D.C. scene to my mind in that people out west actually did and had things like drugs and sex, when Decon Head happened to pass by on College Walk. I watched as Karina followed him coolly with her kohl-lidded eyes. Something made him turn our way, and Karina looked to the side and flicked her cigarette butt down the steps.
“See that guy?” she said, once his tweed back was in sight.
“Decon Head?”
“I did the deed with him last night,” she said.
It would be hard to convey the just-come-in-on-the-turnip-truck alarm that the casualness of her words gave me.
“And you…um, don’t say hi to each other?”
“It’s not like that,” she said, a world of West Coast cool about her.
I took it at face value, this attitude of hers, not really understanding in those days how people could pretend when it came to things like their hearts. I was not made that way. I knew myself to be completely transparent. There was too much at stake, there were too many ways to be hurt. Girls I’d grown up with back in Barfonia were mothers at fifteen, had to drop out of high school—and as far as I could tell, that was it with their lives. You would see them at the mall, pushing strollers and looking at frilly prom dresses in the window of Merry Go Round. Then there were other girls I knew, more sophisticated ones, who’d had two and three abortions by the time they were nineteen. They said it was no big deal, but they trailed this sadness after them. I hated that women could be hurt in this way while men could walk away. I was confused by the idea of random hookups, confused by the concept of a “flirtatious” blow job, by phrases like “walk of shame,” and by all the trivializing. I knew if I met someone and fell in love I would give myself completely, my heart and my body…and maybe because of this I was forever guarding my heart, holding it close. I just didn’t understand an attraction to a person who was known to be a player.
Anyway, Fang revealed the big news to Trina and me late one night as we sat in Tom’s over our cheeseburger-special plates, which, if I had any insight at all into the ways of a bulimic, I would have realized ninety-pound Fang would only be throwing up an hour later. Had I clued in to this, I also might have understood the appeal of her choice of men.
“Decon Head?” I said. “You’re going out with Decon Head?”
“Please don’t call him that,” Fang said, suddenly demure.
“Decon Head?” I was incredulous, and of course drunk.
“It might be time for you to turn that shit down,” Trina said to me.
“I just can’t believe it,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s such an asshole poseur.”
“It’s definitely time for you to turn that shit down,” Trina said to me.
Fang did the thing she always did when she was on the defensive, which was to twine herself up into a human Twizzler.
“You don’t know him at all,” she said.
“Do I need to?” I said.
“Once you actually meet him, you’ll see he’s really great,” she said.
“For a talking monkey,” I said. And then took a big bite of my cheeseburger.
Trina had stopped eating and was fixing me with a look.
“Chess, what is that repetitive jackass disorder you have again?” she said.
True, I was always tactless, always blurting, hurting people’s feelings; and then I would retreat and be nearly immobilized with shyness. It was like I had to dare myself forward, and any reflection on this made me think better of it, pull back, and shut down.
At any rate, as graduation approached we were all bursting at the seams. We just needed to be on the other side—needed to have “real life” begin. We all shared a certain kind of young elegiac tendency that was almost crippling. Everything was so new that lived life felt incredibly full: you accrued experience with such intensity, examined it so lavishly, felt feelings so deeply that it made for a twenty-one-year-old self nearly immobilized with world-weariness. The only way over this was through it—and what we needed was to burst out and start a new phase.
Of course, I had a real dearth of any actual plans. There were probably all sorts of job fairs and career seminars and things like this, but they had nothing to do with me. I preferred not to. I was an old pro at temping, so I figured I’d just do that for a bit until I (a) finished my monograph about Simone Martini’s Blessed Agostino Novello altarpiece and its influence on alternative comics, (b) was randomly discovered by some nice person who would pay me just for being smart, or (c) wrote the Great American Novel. Twenty years’ wisdom tells me a positive outcome would have been much more likely if I had pinned a dartboard to my chest and stood in the middle of Times Square.
Trina was always a lot more clued in than I, and she was the one who got us going to Career Services, where they had fat three-ring binders full of job listings, their pages sent in via exotic fax machine from publishers, entertainment conglomerates, and sundry other concerns all over Manhattan. Those pages had the air of possibility about them. I’d read them for their dollar value and think, for example, Twenty-five bucks an hour for Romanian translation? Sure, I can figure out how to do that. Trina was far more together, and it was she who showed me the page, one afternoon just before graduation, that told the Barnard community that Clarice Marr was looking for an assistant.
“Isn’t this Kendra’s scary mom?” is what she said.
I leaned over and looked at the page. It wasn’t on fax paper but instead on something I would become all too familiar with, Clarice’s stationery, which had her name, in fancy interlocking cursive, at the top of it. We stared at the page together.
“Doesn’t that look like the Cosmetics Plus logo?” Trina said.
“I think I’m going to call her,” I said.
“But you said she’s awful.”
“She is.” I was staring at the phone number, which I realized was still engraved in my mind.
“You want to work for a freak like that?”
“I think I just want to ask her about Kendra,” I said.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted, actually.
Rumors had flown around campus. Kendra had gone off to London to work in Vivienne Westwood’s shop. Or she had gone off to art school. Or off to bale hay at a Catholic Worker farm in Wisconsin, or was it California? Whatever it was, she had left New York City b
ehind.
That evening I held the Clarice job notice in my hands and stared at it for a long time. I was the only person still there in the suite, and maybe because of this I was feeling beset by that left-at-school, Ghost of Christmas Past kind of thing. I remember sitting on the hall floor, which was covered in black-and-white vinyl tile, and staring down the length of it, through the open kitchen door and out the window, which looked out on the streetlights of Broadway.
I finally picked up the phone and called down to Eleventh Street. Amazingly, Clarice answered.
“Ms. Marr?” I said, involuntarily standing up. “Hello, this is Francesca Varani. Chess. A friend of Kendra’s.”
There was a pause—a pause so long that I thought I maybe should just quietly put the phone down again and slink away. Then I heard smoke slowly being exhaled. I thought of the Clarice Marr of the old glamour photograph, the insane-makingly long ash at the end of her cigarette. Here was a woman who liked to keep people waiting.
“I remember you,” she said finally.
“I saw your job posting,” I said, “and it made me think of Kendra. How is she?”
“When can you come in for an interview?” she said.
“I’m actually just calling to ask about Kendra.”
“You’re not interested in the job?”
“Um, well—how’s Kendra?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said.
“I heard she went to a Catholic Worker house—?”
She laughed a rich, theatrical laugh much like Kendra’s.
“You girls have some comediennes up there. What a thing to be known for. What a false scent. Well, she was there. That lasted maybe a week—a long time ago. I could have filled you in at some point perhaps last year, but she’s a big girl now, twenty-two, and frankly, I’ve lost interest. The last I heard she was in Morocco.”
“Morocco?” I said.
“In Tangiers, visiting Paul Bowles.”
“Paul Bowles!” I said.
“Do you like his writing?” she asked me. It seemed strange that she might want my opinion about anything.
“Not so much,” I said. “Too solitary. Too…chilly. Jane’s more my cup of tea.”
I could hear her exhaling again.
“Jane Bowles is your cup of tea, eh?”
“Genuinely strange,” I said, “sui generis.”
There was another long pause.
“Why don’t you come in for a talk, Francesca?” she said.
I turned to the full-length mirror. My posture was already much straighter.
“I suppose I could,” I said.
“It’s been terrible,” she said. “Bertrand was my secretary for years. But the poor boy just got tired—he went off to live in London and work as a florist. Do I blame him? Yes, I blame him. I’ve had no luck since then. Terrible, terrible girls. Lazy, unreliable girls. And the ridiculous part is that this is a great job for the right person—the right conscientious type of girl. You’d live here, in his room. Or in her room, frankly.”
Or in her room.
In her room, frankly.
“Come down here,” she said when I didn’t reply.
“When?” I said.
“How’s tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s graduation.”
“Oh my dear, you’ll want to go to that,” she said. “A lifetime of memories.” She said this with no irony whatsoever.
At that moment I knew I was going to ditch graduation. No one in my family was coming anyway. And my thought was also this: how redoubtable could this woman be if she said something like “a lifetime of memories”? My own mother, her mind reprogrammed with one million Catholic banalities, would nonetheless never say anything so insipid.
“Actually, tomorrow’s fine,” I said.
After we set the time, I put down the phone feeling expectant—and flushed with a kind of greed.
*
The next afternoon I sat in the parlor on Eleventh Street maintaining eye contact with Ms. Marr. Clarice, she insisted.
I’d gone to only a few job interviews at that point in my life. One had been with a writer who was blind and who regularly advertised at Barnard for an assistant. He sort of shot to hell the (okay, foolish) idea of blind people being nonjudgmental. I had no decent work-type shoes at the time, so I’d borrowed a pair from Trina—she was a full size smaller than me, but she’d managed to find ones with long, witchy points that I could cram my feet into if I taped up my small toes with Band-Aids. Trina of course thought it hilarious that I was borrowing a pair of shoes to go have an interview with a blind man. Anyway, the interview itself was no great shakes—the man lived in a big, bland-fancy apartment with a much younger wife who at some point came into the room with a hush-before-the-great-man sort of attitude and gently deposited a baby on his shoulder. The guy wasn’t much of an interviewer, and I wasn’t much of an interviewee, so I seized on this opportunity to look at the baby and announce, “What a little doll.” He raised his eyebrows and said, very slowly, “No—she is a little baby.” Then he leaned back with satisfaction, glad to have set the record straight. I remember thinking, This bore is a writer? Not long after, he excused me and I went back up to Barnard wondering what I did wrong. Later I told this story to my brother Sandy.
“Wow, Chess,” he said, incredulous, “I guess you don’t read Spy magazine.” They’d done an exposé on this very writer about how he endlessly advertised for assistants so that he could have young women to size up, sniff, and insult. Of one of them he famously asked, Are you menstruating?
It was heartening to realize that I must not have been sufficiently smelly.
At any rate, as soon as Clarice opened the door of the house on Eleventh Street and looked at me that morning, I knew something. How to explain this? I knew the job was mine. And that if I took it I’d have to jump through hoops to prove myself to her.
She showed me into the parlor. Unlike on the weekends, the curtains were open and the room was flooded with afternoon light. I realized I had to put myself in the false position of pretending I’d barely been there before, and managed some “surprised” comments on the beauty of the room. Clarice, I knew, would be one of those people who liked to hear her taste complimented.
The house on Eleventh Street, I’d come to realize, was an entirely different place during the week than on the weekend. During the week the stress fell on the front of the house, the public face that overlooked the street. The back, which looked out on the garden, had been Kendra’s domain, the realm of dreaming. But now it was all business, and we were in Clarice lockdown. She was dressed extremely formally, in a Chanel suit—a real one, as far as I could tell—of taupe bouclé trimmed in black. She had on high heels and her hair was in a complicated upsweep.
“Do you like ‘Francesca’ or ‘Chess’?” she asked me once we’d sat down. She had indicated the low, notoriously-uncomfortable-unless-you-were-sprawling daybed for me to sit on, while she took the most generous and comfortable chair in the room. Later I would learn that this particular kind of chair was known as a bergère à la reine. Clarice was the queen.
“Chess,” I said.
“I think I’ll call you Francesca,” she said.
“If you must,” I said.
“Francesca, what languages do you speak?” she asked.
“I can translate Latin. And Italian. Sort of slowly.”
I could tell she thought this was a ridiculous answer.
“Can you at least read French?” she said.
“Not so much…but…enough to babble through the scene when Hans Castorp talks to the girl with the Kirghiz eyes.”
She sat staring very weirdly into my own eyes.
“Well, what a very literary response,” she said.
“I like to read,” I said, wretched with obviousness.
“What was your major?”
“Art history.”
“Preposterous,” she said.
“I like—”
“You like to
look at art, eh?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
She pushed a pack of cigarettes out of the nearly flat pocket of her jacket and lit up.
“How’s your grammar?” she said, blowing smoke at me and then turning away.
“It’s pretty well, I guess.”
She turned back to me, horrified.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m nervous.”
I stood up.
“It was nice to have a chat,” I said.
“What are you doing?” she asked me.
I shrugged.
“Clearly I’m not your gal,” I said.
“Not the case at all, not at all,” she said. Then she reached out, grabbed me by the forearm with the grip of a man, and pulled me back down.
I stared at her. Her face, I realized, was different from what I’d remembered. It occurred to me that she must have had some “work” done. Oh, she was a vain woman. Something about her was not really human, suggesting that she made no concessions to anyone who might be. I felt foolish, unsophisticated, beside her. She was like a movie actress, playing herself in her life. It was alien—but it was glamorous, and I realized that some of the charge I’d got from Kendra came from this very quality. But Clarice was a cold fish. I wanted to study her but not be studied by her.
And yet I couldn’t leave. It was as if there was something we knew about each other, some understanding we could just about smell in each other—some familiar embarrassment. She was fronting, just as I always was.
“The job pays three hundred dollars a week,” she said, “and you’ll live here. No friends will stay over, of course. You’ll be on call as I need you during the week, at any hour. The time on the weekend is your own, unless something particular comes up. Lunch together, unless I have a date, and dinner occasionally. Breakfast is your own, unless something comes up. If things work out, I’ll put you on the family insurance after three months.”
She stood up then, so I did too. I opened my mouth to speak, and a gust of silence blew out.
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