Suzanne Davis gets a life

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  After it was over, Pauline came up to me. “I have to congratulate you,” she said. “I should have done it. I really shirked my duty there. But Daniel threw sand in Rose’s face last week, and I felt I couldn’t afford to antagonize Karen, given what she went through. But you were right, of course. We lose sight of the larger picture, spending all our time around our own children. You were fabulous with that stuff about moral responsibility and being a model for world peace. I mean, that was high-level negotiation rhetoric. I’m telling you, you have a gift.”

  Pauline paused at this juncture to consider her own words. During her years as a mover and shaker in the workplace, she had been particularly adept in the area of human resources, and the prospect of putting me to use seemed to strike her forcibly. “They could certainly use you in the mayor’s office, with the sanitation workers,” she noted. “They’re always threatening to strike; it’s a real problem. But bad as they are, they’re not half as hard to manage as Karen. You could be a definite asset to the city if you used your skills with them. I’ll speak to Roger about it, if you’re interested.”

  THE PROSPECT OF a new job as a sanitation-worker negotiator, seductive though it might be, flew out of my mind when I meandered into the I-ACE headquarters the next morning.

  I may have mentioned that I was not obliged to report regularly to my site of employment. No one at I-ACE cared where I did my work so long as a certain number of press releases and conference abstracts were put on file so that the organization could say that it was engaged in “public outreach,” written into its charter as one of its myriad of useless functions. The fact is, my employers didn’t really expect people outside their own group of specialized nerds to care about air conditioning, and so they didn’t really expect my efforts to amount to much. This made my job very easy, low expectations being the friend of the lackadaisical worker.

  That said, the guys in the office were always happy to see me when I chose to make an appearance. As I may also have noted, I-ACE members are not a prepossessing bunch in general, and those employed by the organization are, if possible, even less so.

  The in-house workers in question consisted of three individuals with jobs so technical that, given my non-technical background in technical writing, I couldn’t make head or tail of them. I think they were involved with something to do with establishing, testing, and revising standards for the industry, but what those standards consisted of, I couldn’t say, and what it was they did all day, since they, unlike me, were, for reasons of necessity or lack of imagination, actually there in the office, I couldn’t say either.

  Two of the three, Walt and Dave, were in their fifties and looked as if they had spent their lives in a cave, which, in a manner of speaking, they had—I-ACE headquarters being a cramped space which, ironically enough, is poorly ventilated. The guys were always complaining about this fact but never managing to rectify it (a bad sign, as I saw it, from a public relations standpoint, but, since I was rarely at the office, not an issue I was inclined to make a fuss over).

  Walt, the senior of the two, was extremely obese and wore pants that held his massive girth in an uneven sling. He had a large droopy face and wore small dirty eyeglasses that he was always wiping with a dirty handkerchief plucked from some mysterious part of his lumpy anatomy. It was hard to look at Walt straight on, which meant that I tended to focus more on the other two. Dave was not fat, I’m happy to say, but he also had an unhealthy demeanor: a sallow complexion and thin, graying hair that he combed across his head like strips of undercooked bacon. Dave was a smoker and was always nervously touching his breast pocket, where he kept his cigarettes, as though promising himself that if he only held on and did a little more of whatever he was doing, he would allow himself to go outside and stand in the garbage-strewn alley behind the I-ACE headquarters and suck on a cigarette.

  The third employee, Roy, was, comparatively speaking, the most attractive and couth of the three. This, however, was not saying much. Roy was about forty years old and not overweight or pasty, since he did not overeat or smoke. On the contrary, his habits were extremely careful and prescribed. He usually brought a whole-grain sandwich to work and would leave the office for an hour or so during the day to take a long walk. These commendable habits were overshadowed, however, by the fact that he seemed set on some sort of timer and did everything by rote. Roy, as it turned out, lived with his mother in Queens and continued to be as obedient at forty as he had been at four. Both Walter and Dave were vaguely married—the idea that women were attached to these men strained the imagination but was nonetheless true, given the fact that they both had wedding bands embedded in the flesh of their left ring fingers. Roy had clearly never gone on a date, much less contemplated matrimony. He had fresh pink cheeks that had never seen a razor and large rheumy eyes that always looked as if they were gazing out at life for the first time and not making much sense of what they saw.

  At my most desperate moments, I would sometimes consider Roy as a romantic prospect. I would imagine him blossoming, under my tutelage, into a fascinating consort, capable of surprising sexual antics. This scenario was one that I periodically entertained at 2 or 3 A.M., after being seduced and then rejected by one of those charming, predatory types who are the opposite of Roy. But whenever I visited I-ACE headquarters and saw Roy in the flesh, the scenario would evaporate. There was just no way that Roy’s emphatically neutered person could be jump-started for my purposes. To make Roy into a viable partner would be the equivalent of making a rubber duck into a living creature with feathers.

  Visiting I-ACE was therefore not something I particularly relished, but when I did do it I have to say I made an effort. I felt I was doing a good deed—like one of those starlets visiting the troops: they don’t want to get too close, but for the moment on the stage, with all that whistling and applause, there’s bound to be a rush. Thus it was that when I would traipse into I-ACE headquarters, all work would come to a halt and the three guys would turn their unprepossessing faces in my direction expectantly. Walt would turn down his radio—he listened to Golden Oldies—and the others would look up from their treatises and proceedings and allow me to regale them with tales from the outside world.

  I felt I could really say almost anything to these guys; they took it as my style, and they followed the saga of my life the way people follow a soap opera. They knew about my annoying mother, and my series of hopeless relationships, including my misunderstanding with Wordsworth and Philip. Usually, I came in with a story prepared for them, but sometimes I took requests, which keyed me in to their particular interests. Walt and Dave liked to hear about my miserable love life, Roy about my abusive mother—which I suppose says something about their particular repressions.

  Occasionally, when I entered the squalid headquarters office, some of the members of the organization, air-conditioning engineers from “out in the field,” so to speak, would be there to discuss some piece of air-conditioning arcana or confer over a paper they planned to deliver at the I-ACE convention held annually in Parsippany, New Jersey (due to the prohibitive cost of hotels in Manhattan). These visitors, usually members from Delaware or New Jersey with a little vacation time on their hands, were all variations of Walt, Dave, or Roy. Evidently air-conditioning engineers came in these three varieties, like standard flavors of ice cream: large and soiled, thin and stained, or plain asexual—three brands that, as far as I could see, left very little room to maneuver for someone with her biological clock ticking.

  But on this particular visit, I was in for a surprise. A different sort of person was lounging near the cluttered desk behind which Walt’s massive girth was spread, and I could see at a glance that he did not fit into the three kinds of men that generally make up the I-ACE selection.

  This man was a wiry specimen, slim and well dressed in what I immediately perceived to be a European style. One can tell a European man by the way his clothes fit—they hug his body rather than draping loosely in the American manner. European me
n also wear shoes molded to the foot like a modified ballet slipper, not the sort of clodhoppers that reflect the bull-in-a-china-shop style of the American man in almost any situation. The European weaves and insinuates, the American clomps and pushes—there you have it in a nutshell. This man was European, and I soon learned his name was Yves Guiset, a genuine Frenchman, come all the way from France to confer about a new air-conditioning technology that he wanted to receive the I-ACE seal of approval.

  Yves’s innovation, as I soon learned over aperitifs at the Carlyle, where he whisked me off almost as soon as he saw me, was a new system calibrated to prevent the sort of frigid air conditioning that had become the norm in American office buildings.

  “With my system,” said Yves, leaning toward me seductively, “you will no longer have to wear a sweater to work in the summertime. You will be able to wear your pretty little summer dresses and your pretty, very small blouses, without fear of freezing.”

  I have to say that I was taken by Yves’s innovation quite as much as I was taken with Yves. I am one of those women who, during the summer months, suffer from excessive air conditioning the way others suffer from hay fever. I carry large handbags exclusively for the purpose of lugging sweaters and scarves to protect myself against air conditioning. I have had dates in fancy restaurants ruined by being seated under the air-conditioning vent; a desire to escape the frigid blast has obscured the poor man’s possibly sterling qualities. Older women have told me that in time air conditioning will be my friend, but currently—and I suppose until my biological clock clicks to its appointed end—I consider air conditioning my enemy. This is all the more paradoxical since my work is with those responsible for it. Now here was a Frenchman, dressed in a body-hugging suit and supple loafers, with a small pointed face and piercing dark eyes, offering to solve my air-conditioning problem while plying me with aperitifs at the Carlyle Hotel. How could I not go to bed with him?

  But I am getting ahead of myself. Yves had prepared a paper to be delivered at the I-ACE annual convention in March. His hope, and the reason for his advance trip to New York, was to get his innovation approved by various U.S. regulatory groups and to build, as he put it in his delightfully broken English, “a swelling ground” of support for it among the general populace. His notion seemed to be that a great deal of enthusiasm was likely to accrue to the idea of a non-frigid air-conditioning system if only he could get the word out in the proper places. My job, he seemed to feel, was crucial in this respect. He was keen to have me edit his paper so that it would read more smoothly for industry dissemination, and also, more importantly, to have me distill its message into a press release for the various news outlets that he was sure were clamoring for it. Given that he was adorable, plying me with drinks and making goo-goo eyes at me all over the city, I wasn’t about to disabuse him of his inflated idea of my usefulness in effecting these ends.

  For the next five days, therefore, I showed Yves the sights of New York, stopping for aperitifs and repasts of various sorts, talking air conditioning (as far as I was capable), and slowly moving toward the inevitable culmination of it all, i.e., a tumultuous night of love. How I managed to put this event off for almost a week is beyond me. I think, despite his protestations, that Yves was helpful in this regard. He was scheduled to return to France in ten days, and we all know that the French are experts at foreplay.

  I wrote a draft or two of a press release on the subject of his “non-frigid air-conditioning system” (as he liked to refer to it) that we pored over, our bodies touching and giving me a frisson of anticipation, as I crossed out and added to the fact sheet on how the new system would work.

  By the fifth day, when we appeared to be getting along swimmingly, my fantasies about life in France—Yves was from the south not far from the Côte d’Azur—had taken on a lush and vibrant hue. It seemed that he came from a family of some wealth. His parents lived in a château—a small one, he protested, and a bit run down, but very sympa (which, I learned, means “nice” in French slang). “You will like it,” he said enticingly. When a Frenchman says that you will like his château, how can you not let your fantasies a little bit loose? I began to imagine what it would be like to move to the South of France, live in a château, albeit a small one, and learn to prepare dishes like coq au vin and sole meuniere for Yves and his friends.

  Still, I’m not a complete idiot; I did ask him some questions. I said, “Yves—have you been married?”

  He waved his hand. “Married, bien sûr. But that was a long time ago. French women are very disdainful, very cold— unlike American women.”

  What, pray tell, would you have made of that? That he was divorced from a cold and disdainful French woman and looking for a warm and spontaneous American woman to take her place in the château? Precisely what I made of it. And like me, you would have been wrong.

  By the fifth day, as I said, my resistance was so low that even a vague hint that I might perhaps want to accompany him back to his hotel was met with unabashed enthusiasm. I think, retrospectively, that Yves would have preferred to have me hold out until the last day of his visit, but by now I had become what he considered a typical American woman: lacking in all calculation and very, very hot to roll around in the sack with him.

  It turned out that he was staying in a boutique hotel frequented by French people. There are many such ethnically niched hotels in New York, and the French are particularly keen to stay in hotels run and frequented by their own nationality. In a hotel of this sort they can continue to lord it over Americans, even in America. Because all the employees in Yves’s hotel were French, he spoke to them in his native language, making me feel, when I accompanied him to the front desk, like a foreigner and a bit of a tramp. The young woman with well-applied makeup behind the desk eyed me contemptuously, gave Yves his key, and, I could swear, winked at him as we went upstairs.

  I will admit that Yves was an attentive and excellent lover. This, too, could have been predicted. Frenchmen, unlike Americans, take their time, and Yves’s delectation of my body was something akin to the way I eat a very good pastry— slowly, savoring it, and when it’s done, vaguely regretting having eaten it.

  The regret part was not evident to me right away. Indeed, I am so used to having American men fall into a profound slumber after making love that Yves’s relative alertness struck me as a tribute to my charms. Also impressive was the fact that he had ordered a post-coital meal. The young woman with the well-applied makeup knocked and, not waiting for a reply, entered (giving me barely time to pull the covers up over my recently ravished nakedness). She thumped the tray down on the night table and began chattering to Yves in rapid French, her eyes darting at me with contemptuous amusement as she did so.

  “What did she say?” I asked after she’d gone.

  “Oh nothing,” said Yves. “She just wanted to know what I wanted for breakfast tomorrow.”

  This seemed to me precisely what she had not said, but I let it go.

  We continued to loll in bed, sipping on the cheap champagne that the girl at the desk had brought up. I noted that Yves had his eye on the clock.

  I asked him what it was he was waiting for.

  “A phone call from France,” he said. “There it is.” The phone indeed was ringing, and Yves picked it up and began speaking in animated French. The conversation, lively and full of laughter, went on for about fifteen minutes—which I have to say I found a bit rude, since there I was buck naked in bed, having finally succumbed to this man’s seductive entreaty after five days of intensive courtship.

  Toward the end of the phone call, Yves spoke rapidly in a low and ardent voice of the sort that I recalled he had used on me only that afternoon. He ended by making kissing sounds into the phone.

  Needless to say, I was curious and alarmed. I had imagined that our lovemaking was the prelude to something serious, but here he was smacking his lips and whispering seductively to someone else, even as I lay naked beside him.

  “Who was that?
” I asked after he hung up.

  “Oh,” said Yves, “that was my wife.”

  “Your wife? You said you were divorced.”

  “I never said that,” he protested. “I have been married to Marie-Thérèse for ten years. We have two children, Gilles and Lorraine.”

  “I see,” I said. “I thought the woman you married was disdainful and cold.”

  “She is,” shrugged Yves. “I like that about her.”

  This was a wake-up call. A cultural rift seemed to open up as we spoke. Perhaps the French liked disdainful and cold; if so, that placed my spontaneity and warmth in an entirely different light.

  Yves must have seen the expression on my face because he looked eager to assuage me. “But I very much like you,” he said. “You are very American. I hope to see you when I come back for the annual meeting. We will work on a new press release and have many nice evenings together.”

  By now I had begun to hurriedly get dressed. The sooner I got myself out of Yves’s hotel room the better, I thought, for my fragile psyche.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. He seemed genuinely confused by my behavior.

  “You didn’t tell me about Gilles and Lorraine,” I said.

  “Why should I tell you? It’s boring to hear about other people’s children.”

  “Or that you liked the fact that your wife was disdainful and cold.”

  “But I also like spontaneous and warm,” said Yves. To his credit, I think he probably liked both. It was like having a taste for a hamburger and a hot dog; they’re not mutually exclusive.

  By the time I was dressed and ready to leave, I had calmed down a bit and could acknowledge that Yves, though vaguely duplicitous, was not actually malevolent. He had assumed that I, like him, had my own agenda. He liked women and he liked aperitifs. Sex, too, though that wasn’t at the very top of his list. That place was reserved for air-conditioning systems, which were really his first and best love. How could he possibly have imagined that I was fantasizing about living in a château, cooking coq au vin, and having little Gilles and Lorraines of my own? I mean, that would have been too pathetic.