by Jon Cleary
Gus Green was an ex-newspaperman, short, fat and in his late sixties, a ball of energy kept going by the momentum he had built up over the years. He had an office that looked out on to Times Square and a reputation that stood up to any looking into. He was not the biggest agent in New York but he was one of the best.
“I’m on the wrong side of town for all the publishers, but this is where I like to be, even with all the pimps and pushers and hookers who’ve taken over Times Square. So you want to conquer New York, eh?” She hadn’t said so, but she guessed he said that to all his new clients. “So did I, so did I. I came here from Chicago fifty years ago. It was summer, I wore a ten-dollar seersucker suit, a Sears Roebuck panama hat, I was eighteen years old and I was going to conquer the World. The World was the paper everyone wanted to work for in those days. They started me at twenty bucks a week and I couldn’t believe I was being paid to work in New York. I was a newspaperman right up till the end of the war, WW Two. Then I decided I wanted to meet a classier lot of people, the wife was always complaining she never met anyone but newspaper bums. So, Christ forgive me, I chose book publishers and magazine editors, better dressed bums, that’s all, says the wife. I make more money, but I work twice as hard and I still miss everything that goes on in the city room just before the paper goes to press. A big book generates excitement, but it’s nothing to what I used to get out of a big story breaking. Don’t you miss what you used to have on the Examiner?”
“I didn’t mention anything about working for the London Examiner,” she said cautiously.
“Miss Spearfield, I know you. How many dames in the world are called Cleo Spearfield? I been going to London twice a year for Christ knows how long—I used to read your column. I don’t want to know why you’re here working for peanuts for the Australian government, but don’t expect me not to recognize you. If I’m going to handle you, if you’ll forgive the expression, I’m going to sell you as Cleo Spearfield, not as Jane Doe or whatever other name you had in mind.”
“I hadn’t thought of using any name but my own.”
“Good, then I got something to sell. Who sent you to me, by the way? Tom Border?”
She stiffened, retreated into herself. “I didn’t know Mr. Border knew you.”
“I represent him, didn’t you know that?” He pushed a book across his book-littered desk. “Have you read it?”
The book, The Guns of Chance, had been out several months, but she had resisted the urge to buy it and read it, afraid, for no reason she could name, that she might find herself in it, even though it was fiction. The book was in every bookstore window in the city; Brentano’s and Scribners and Doubleday had featured blown-up photographs of Tom. She had decided that when, if, she fell in love again it would be better to fall for someone anonymous, a man whose face would never be made public. A CIA agent or a tax collector or a socialist Presidential candidate from Arizona.
“No. It was an experience I don’t want to relive.” Meaning taking too long to make up her mind about Tom. She had cried herself to sleep the night after he had told her he was married, realizing there in the darkness of the night and her own bitter disappointment how much she had loved him.
“Yeah, I can understand that,” said Gus Green, meaning something else but wondering if Miss Spearfield had any ideas about libel. He would have to re-read the book and see what Tom had said about his heroine.
“Perhaps if you represent Mr. Border it would be better if I went to another agent . . .”
Gus Green waved her back into her chair, though she hadn’t risen from it. “Look—can I call you Cleo?—I don’t know what’s with you and Tom. It’s none of my business. And his business, I mean business business, isn’t yours and yours isn’t his. I make myself clear? You’ll be my client and no other client on my list need ever meet you or you meet them. It’ll just be you, me, editors and publishers. Now what do you want to write and who for?”
She was at the bottom again. She could not afford to spurn a helping hand, not even one that charged her ten per cent commission for saving her from poverty. “I have a couple of ideas that might interest International.”
“Good choice.”
International was a magazine, so it advertised, for intelligent women one step ahead of trends. It featured articles on sex, clothes, sexy clothes, where to go for sex and what clothes to wear, travel, how to enjoy sex while travelling, beauty, how sex improved beauty, how to prepare for sex in (God, dare we mention it?) old age. There were no articles on cookery, unless it was the odd piece on how to concoct an aphrodisiac, and the only articles on housekeeping featured advice on how to furnish a bedroom that would turn a man on. It published editions in six other countries besides the United States and its circulation suggested that the world was in danger of being over-run by intelligent women hell-bent on sex. The women’s liberation movement was applying to the courts to have it banned as obscene, pornographic and seditious,
“Tongue-in-cheek stuff about sex.”
“We’d have to see how they react to that,” said Gus Green doubtfully. “They think sex is holier than motherhood. I don’t think they’d buy heresy. Anyhow, let’s try ‘em.”
Next day he called her at the bureau. “International would like to see you—they know your work. You want me to come with you?”
“They’re an all-women staff, aren’t they? I think you might be embarrassed, Mr. Green, especially when we start to talk about sex.”
“I’d only be embarrassed because I’m too old to do much about it. Okay, see ‘em on your own. But don’t talk money, let me do that.”
Cleo went in to see Stewart Norway. “Stew, I’d like a couple of hours off this afternoon. I have an appointment over at International.”
He was a generous man. “Cleo, it embarrasses me, being your boss. You do work that’s worth so much more than we can pay you. So long as you get done whatever has to be done, take all the time you like.”
“Stew, I could fall in love with you if you weren’t so plain and middle-aged and married.”
“Geez, I got close, didn’t I?”
She went out, revising her idea that all Australian men, including her father and her brothers, were male chauvinists. Stew Norway was not the sort of man who would ever be written about in the pages of International, but a lot of intelligent women, tired of trying to stay one step ahead of trends, would have found him a comfort.
The offices of International were in Rockefeller Center; Cleo had only to cross from one building to another. The address of the bureau and the magazine might be the same, but they were countries apart. The office of the bureau was strictly functional, designed to discourage loitering, as if afraid that too much information about Australia might leak out. The magazine’s offices were strictly sensual, designed to lure, a bordello (but not a brothel) of publishing.
Francine Tobin, the executive editor, fitted her magazine’s format. She was in her thirties, intelligent, beautiful (if manufactured) and discreetly suggested that she was interested in sex. She wore a hat in her office, a wide-brimmed felt with the brim turned up in front, as if she were facing a gale that had struck no one else. Cleo had once read about the Queen Bees of American business, women executives above a certain level, who always wore hats in their offices, like bishops’ mitres. But that, Cleo thought, had been back in the Fifties.
“What did you have in mind, Cleo?”
There were two other women in the office, younger than Francine, both hatless, and everyone was on first name terms as soon as Cleo came in the door. Just like back home, Cleo thought, amongst the boys in the pub. Delia and P.J., the latter of which Cleo took to stand for two first names, were in their late twenties and looked like ex-models who had read the wrinkles in their untouched photos and wisely gone into another career.
“I’d like to do a piece about the gigolos, the studs, along the French Riviera. Tongue in cheek.”
Francine looked at Delia and P.J. “Can we take a little tongue in cheek?
”
“Why not?” said P.J., stroking a long finger down a still flawless cheek. But she had laughter wrinkles round her eyes and Cleo liked her. “We keep telling our readers they’re intelligent.”
“Do you know the Riviera?” said Delia, who, Cleo guessed, would some day wear a hat in this office.
“Intimately. But not the studs—I only know them from observation.”
“Could you work in something about the older men? I understand there are lots of older men available there, ones with more money than the young guys.” Francine’s beautifully made-up face was beautifully blank.
Cleo could feel Delia and P.J. freeze, just as they had once done before the cameras. Somehow all three of them knew about Jack. They were waiting for her to let her hair down, give them the dirt on what turned on an English lord.
“The Greeks and South Americans, you mean? Yes, I can work something in.”
“Good,” said Francine, disappointed but not showing a trace of it. “Well, let’s discuss some angles . . .”
Next day Gus Green rang Cleo. “Okay, go to work. I’ve got you two thousand dollars. They pay more, but you’ll have to work up to it. Who knows, some day you may write a book and I’ll make you a fortune, like I did for Tom Border.”
II
Cleo wrote her piece, quickly as she always did, and International loved it and the promptness with which it was delivered. They took out an article that had been scheduled and substituted hers. It is now history that in the autumn of 1973 hordes of intelligent, one-step-ahead-of-the-trend women converged on the French Riviera to study the gigolos and bucks they had been warned against. The gigolos and bucks, tongues in cheeks, wrote Cleo thank-you notes.
P.J., whose full name was Pia Jane Lagerlof, called her up a week after the article was accepted and invited her to lunch.
“We want you to do two more pieces for us, Cleo. You have a fresh approach. You take people down a peg or two, but you’re not offensive. That’s fresh for us, anyway. Between you and me, we tend to cut the balls off of anyone we’re ragging. Well, anyway. We’d like something in the same vein, as the gold-digger said to the sugar daddy.”
Cleo laughed and shook her head. “Your similes aren’t much better than your syntax.”
P J. grinned. “I was hired for my looks originally. When I gave up modelling, they signed me on as assistant to the beauty editor. They were bowled over when they found out I had a B.A. in Eng Lit, from Barnard.”
“What about Francine and Delia?” She was interested in the opportunities for women in this city, how they got them and what use they made of them. Soon, she hoped, she would be taking her first step out onto the same battlefield.
“Francine has been in magazines or advertising ever since she got out of some tacky little college in the Dakotas somewhere. There are no flies on Francine, as you probably noticed. There is blood on her spike heels, but we never mention that . . . Delia is an ex-model like me. She wouldn’t know a parenthetical clause from a bull’s ass, but she knows where she’s going—right into Francine’s chair, some day. She also knows what our readers like, so she leaves the syntax and the parenthetical clauses to me. On top of all that she knows that in this town nice people, especially nice women, come last. Why am I telling you all this? What do you do for men?”
“What’s Delia like on non-sequiturs? You’re not bad. What do I do for men? At present, nothing.”
“See anything here you like?”
They were in a restaurant in Rockefeller Center, one of those whose prices were more digestible if one was on an expense account. Cleo was still becoming accustomed to the glossier and wider spread of affluence here in New York compared to London or Sydney. There was more visible money here. The diners in this crowded restaurant might be up to their necks in debt in private, but they were ordering from the menu with no public sign of pain. There were restaurants like this in London and Sydney, but they were smaller and would not have been as crowded. There certainly would not have been as many women present, not at lunch.
“There are guys from NBC and Time, a few from advertising, some bankers—”
“What about the women?”
P.J. cocked an eyebrow. “You’re not a dyke?”
Cleo laughed. “No, I’m straight. But I can’t get over the number of women in this city who look as if they’ve got it made. In business, I mean. This really is the world capital for career women.”
“You might do a piece on that for us. But enough about business. I get the feeling you could be getting more out of this town than you are. I mean after office hours.”
“I don’t rush into things.”
A man stopped by their table to say hello to P.J. He was tall and heavily built, with the thick rubbery skin that Cleo had come to notice on some healthy American men, as if the flesh were applied freshly each morning over their bones. He was dressed in a dark flannel suit and wore a button-down shirt with a silk tie. He looked as if he wore it as a uniform each day, but was at ease in it. He said a few words to P.J., gave Cleo a charming smile and a quick appraising look and passed on.
“He’s with Socony, in finance or something. He’s just going through his second divorce, he’s marvellous in bed, so I’m told, and I wouldn’t get into the hay with him, or the sand, if I was alone with him on a desert isle. He’s the worst sort, he talks. A girl goes to bed with him, every guy in the Yale Club knows about it the next day. You have to watch out, Cleo. American men say that we women have cut their balls off, but they’ve only got themselves to blame. I don’t think women are natural castrators, do you?”
It was surgery she had never contemplated, at least not knowingly. “Do you have a man?”
P.J. nodded and looked sad, an expression that lay oddly on her vivacious, beautiful face. “He’s married, unfortunately. I see him from Monday to Friday, then he goes home to his wife in Philadelphia and I feel as guilty as hell all weekend. I go to church on Sunday and pray for forgiveness for breaking up a happy home, then on Monday he comes back and I welcome him with open arms and open legs. I’m disgusting, really.”
Cleo made no comment, but wondered if she would open her arms (and her legs) to Tom if he wanted to see her Monday to Friday. But knew that she wouldn’t, not while he was happily married to—Simone? She had only dimly taken in the name of his wife when he had mentioned it.
“I’m a very moral girl, actually,” said P.J. “My father is an Episcopalian minister up in New Hampshire and I respect everything he believes in. I think the Ten Commandments make much better reading than anything we ever print in International. Unfortunately, I have a body that’s not moral at all and I’m in love with a married man.”
“P.J., why are you telling me all this? I’m a perfect—well, an imperfect stranger—”
“I honestly don’t know, Cleo. Yes, I do.” She blinked and Cleo was shocked to see the shine of tears in the beautiful blue eyes. “I just saw my man across the room there—he’s gone now. He was having lunch with his wife.”
Oh God, Cleo thought, don’t let Tom come back to New York. Let him settle forever in California with his wife, let him take her to lunch there, let me never see them together.
Cleo accepted the commission to write two more articles and Gus Green, delighted with his new client, had her price raised. She was no longer on the breadline, albeit it had been fancy bread, and she felt a re-awakening of her ambitions. She took an excursion trip round Manhattan Island and looked at what she might some day conquer. She felt a certain trepidation: there were battlements to be scaled, certain of the taller buildings stood like castle keeps. Had she the talent to batter down the gates? How many other would-be knights and Joans of Arc had arrived here and failed, they and their descendants still trapped in the moats of the Lower East Side or up in Spanish Harlem? She knew the geography of the city, though she had seen very little of it. All she had to learn and conquer was the climate.
She worked diligently at the bureau, writing pieces about Aust
ralia, telling Americans more than they really wanted to know about Down Under. She did articles, short and long, on the Barrier Reef, the revival of the arts under the Labour government, the terrors of funnel-web spiders, the gastronomic delights of the pavlova, the lamington and the iced vo-vo (that one done tongue in cheek but taken seriously by American readers, who were so ignorant of Australia they believed anything they read) and the honoured place of racehorses in the Australian pantheon. But while she dispensed information about her own country she began to learn all that she could about the country she had, she had now decided, come to conquer.
She learned a few things about American men. She went out occasionally with P.J. on a double date and soon caught on that P.J.’s married lover was quite happy with the arrangement as it stood and had no intention of making an honest woman of P.J. Cleo never raised the matter with P.J. because she also caught on that the latter was so in love she was ready to settle for any arrangement her married man suggested. For her own part Cleo enjoyed herself with a couple of the dates P.J. brought along but none of them interested her enough for any regular dating. One night, feeling in need of sex, she went to bed with her date for that night, an editor from one of the larger publishers. He treated her as if she were a tyro writer, editing everything she attempted in their love-making and imposing his own format on the exercise. When he rang her the next morning she sent him a rejection slip.
Time and the seasons slipped by. She went up to New Hampshire with P.J. for Christmas, but felt an intruder in the Lagerlof family. The night before she left Manhattan she called her father and her brothers and sisters-in-law and felt worse for hearing their voices. She felt homesick, something she had told herself she would never feel.
“How are things, sweetheart?”
“Fine, Dad.” She had a sizeable income now from her magazine pieces. But she hadn’t come to America just to make money. “How are things with you?”
