by Kate Walbert
* * *
In the years since Beatrice Wells worked for Jonathan Fontaine, she has often pictured bumping into him, though never literally. For a while, she would most often imagine sitting across from him in court, Jonathan Fontaine dressed for the role, gray suit, spiffy tie, shiny loafers if one were to strip the witness stand and see. The judge listens to the charge with a look on her face. This is nothing she hasn’t heard before, or experienced firsthand herself. She’s already bored with how predictable it all is—didn’t she sign on for more exciting complaints? Who cares? This is news?
In the fantasy Beatrice Wells’s lawyer is trim. A professional who runs marathons on weekends, her hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail, her stockings stretched taut over her muscular calves. If you looked in her refrigerator you’d find only blueberries and Greek yogurt, several bottles of white wine. She stands before Jonathan Fontaine and raises a shaky fist. Unlike the judge, she is paid to care, so now the jury, eleven women and one old man who usually snores so loudly the court stenographer has to stop the proceedings, listens rapt with attention.
“Would you say, Mr. Fontaine, that you intimidated Ms. Wells?” the lawyer asks.
“She’s a big girl,” Jonathan Fontaine says. In the overheated courtroom he wears a cashmere V-neck under his suit jacket. If he crossed his legs in a certain way, you’d see his silk socks slipped down, his hairless legs, white as veal.
“And you noticed?”
“Of course I noticed! Who wouldn’t?” he says. “So she’s female, case closed. There are certain considerations when working with the Y chromosome, certain considerations that should be addressed head-on, no pun intended. I don’t go in for subtleties.”
“So you’re saying you admit you saw her first as a woman,” the lawyer says.
“First. Second. Third.”
“And you took note?”
“With pleasure,” Jonathan Fontaine says, winking at the lawyer, leaning in. “Are you male-identified, Ms.…?”
“Esquire,” the lawyer says.
“So you hear me.”
“I’m comfortable with both sexes,” the lawyer says.
“So you’re bi-identified.”
“Let’s just say I assume the proper position for either situation.”
“Missionary?” Jonathan Fontaine says.
“Objection!” This protest, surprisingly, from Beatrice Wells, who rarely spoke in her own fantasies but rather watched as other, more powerful women spoke for her. “I requested someone sympathetic! I requested someone who would get it!”
“Oh, I get it,” the lawyer says, turning toward Beatrice, who sees, for the first time, that the lawyer is herself.
* * *
“Beatrice?” Jonathan Fontaine is saying; he’s apparently been speaking.
“Oh,” Beatrice says. “Right. Freelance, mostly. Teaching from time to time. Hunter. City College. You can usually land something.”
“And you never went back?”
“Hah. Well. Until a few years ago, it was all I could do to wear a shirt right side out,” Beatrice says.
“They’re beautiful boys,” Jonathan Fontaine says.
“Yes, they are,” Beatrice says, watching them smack a Ping-Pong ball back and forth, the attendant hovering as if convinced they will break something, and they will; they always do. In her fantasy of this meeting, her sons would have sat down at a chess table, easily beating the old chess masters who normally milked tourists, smacking their hands on the timers before the tourists had a chance to think. The boys would have won; the old chess masters would have eaten their hats.
“You?” she says, turning back to him. They both know it’s a rhetorical question.
“The usual insanity,” Jonathan Fontaine says. “Davos. TED. I’ll be in Beijing tomorrow, the summit on the Future of Our World. You know. Invitational. I’m here for a hostess gift.” He looks out toward the jumble of kiosks. “She’s into cats, apparently.”
Jonathan Fontaine’s breath is a cloud, his eyes a watery blue, blank. He turns back to her. “Any ideas?” he says, then looks off into the mid-distance, as if trying to conjure a more interesting audience, or at the very least, a more populous one. She wouldn’t say he’d aged so much as hardened, or rather, settled into himself, like a sedimentary rock; in a cross slice she could find the evolution of Jonathan Fontaine—precious youth, adored son, educated at one of those ancient institutions where the boys put on Shakespeare and adopt all the parts, their fairest Desdemona waving his handkerchief from the top of the wooden staircase, its railing polished by the sweaty, masturbatory hands of his thousands of predecessors, the fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers of same; from there somewhere better, the highlight of which a coveted invitation to join his master at high table, his master instructing him in all things male—the donning of the black cloak and hat, the patience to wait for the gong announcing their procession and ascension to the stage. (Now ten men here to every woman, though in the master’s day none were permitted, he’d explain, recounting again the infamous story of the Girton girl who dressed up as a boy and was caught—they were always caught. She’s been asked to leave the college—true story—and now she’s married to the great Hudgins in Philosophy but still she won’t show up. You’d think she’d get over it.) From there New York, where he’d begun as an editorial assistant and ascended to publisher by the time Beatrice Wells came into his life, an illustrator, an artist, the front-runner to head the graphics department.
And what of the evolution of Beatrice Wells? Precocious youth, adored daughter, educated at one of those ancient institutions where the girls performed Shakespeare and took on all the roles, Macduff shouting down from the top of the wooden staircase, the wooden banister polished by the powdered palms of their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, three of whom had founded the school on the second floor of a brownstone, their names inscribed in the keystone of the recently opened state-of-the-art building that housed the music rooms and the media rooms and the language rooms and the science labs and the art studios. Here the girls were taught by a faculty culled from the best schools east of the Mississippi—nothing they didn’t know. Ask us! they would say at assembly. Seek us out! Question us! Demand of us!
Every Friday morning their leader, Dr. Frances Pearlman, in black polyester pants and sturdy shoes, limped to the podium and cleared her throat to read a poem by some forgotten poetess, or a quote from a woman no one has ever heard of—Hannah Whitall Smith or Mary Winsor—insisting they commit it all to memory, or at the very least, write it down in their assembly books. Photographs of girls in white blouses and pleated skirts, shoulder to shoulder, arranged by height, positioned to be seen—class of 1918, class of 1937, class of 1951, class of 1972—kept sentinel as the girls listened to Dr. Pearlman drone on and on, as the girls spooned dry cereal into their mouths, stirred more brown sugar into their oatmeal, knowing they could copy whatever it was they were supposed to be remembering from Winifred Titlebaum, who groveled, per usual, at Dr. Pearlman’s feet. Afterward, during her morning free period, Beatrice sketched in the glorious art studio, its floor-to-ceiling windows donated by an alumna, Mary Beth Howard, so that more girls, she had said, her voice quivery with emotion at the groundbreaking, her tight gray curls capped by an ill-becoming hard hat, could be “brought into the light.” Beatrice’s drawings were beautiful amalgams of the life studies model, her imagination, and a vague understanding of the artistic temperament—gleaned from the fifth-form requirement the Fall of the Romantics, with particular attention to Shelley’s Frankenstein and the life of Mary Wollstonecraft—drawings that paved her way to art school, where she smoked and drank with the best of them. From there she moved to New York, renting a one-bedroom on Grove Street with a wisteria snaking up the building’s brick facade, painting in the mornings and waiting tables in the evenings, before landing a job in the graphics department. Throughout it all there were times when she caught herself holding her breath for the thi
ng that had been promised her to finally happen. It would, she knew, it would.
But this is all off subject.
The subject is Beatrice Wells and Jonathan Fontaine, an abrupt meeting on a windy, warmish, late December afternoon in New York, between Fifth and Sixth off Forty-second Street, Bryant Park. Picture them bumping into one another as strangers often do in New York, especially in December, especially in midtown, where at this time of year a surge of bepackaged tourists converges with the usual businessmen and businesswomen, bike messengers, street hawkers, commuters, pickpockets, actors, beggars, shoe shiners, and now ice skaters, given that the pond has magically appeared, the city’s troubadours revived. (This, the first time she’s been in the neighborhood for ages, she had said. She had to twist the boys’ arms, to practically drag them!) The two had jostled for a moment before recognizing one another, before realizing that they were familiar, somehow, though it had been many years since Beatrice Wells had screwed her courage to the sticking place and knocked on the door, ajar, of Jonathan Fontaine’s large office, his collection of antique typewriters lining the one uncluttered shelf against the back wall, the view out his double-hung window of a quaint, lost New York: dirty, honky-tonk, flashy, like something now on HBO.
She had entered with ease, her oversize portfolio, somewhat a formality, tucked under her arm; she felt confident, happy, completely qualified or even, over: at this point she could have performed the job eyes closed, she could have sat in Jonathan Fontaine’s place, even, her feet on his desk. She had just that morning performed a ritual, of sorts, rereading the accumulated wisdom of generations in her Assembly book, the snippets and bon mots relayed by Dr. Pearlman on those dreary Friday mornings, the girls gathered in their Lanz nightgowns and furry slippers, dried egg whites on their faces from makeovers the night before; she had even shared a few with her husband, a public relations man, an old flame from art school, another story. “Wish me luck,” she’d said to him.
“Attagirl,” he’d answered—he’d been raised by missionaries in Minnesota so she was used to this—“hear me roar,” he’d said, smiling at her in the mirror, half his face white with shaving foam.
Now she listens as Jonathan Fontaine explains how the typewriters were purchased at a recently defunct store in New Haven, a city where he’d spend a year or two perfecting his drinking skills at Mory’s. This one, he says, pointing to a dark black machine with small round keys, the gold-leafed letters looking as if they’d been individually painted with a single-haired brush, belonged to S. R. Hutchison. On this baby he wrote his Universal Survey of Art, volumes one through six, and here, he says, moving on to a heavier looking one, its keys raised so high you might imagine the user needed to stand, A. H. Heider composed On the Migrations of Seven Continents, or rather his wife, the long-suffering Melanie, typed its fourteen drafts.
“The accumulated wisdom of generations,” Jonathan Fontaine says, his hand in a sweep. “I’ve been at it since my undergraduate days,” he says. “You?”
“Me?” Beatrice says.
“Are you a collector?”
“Not particularly,” Beatrice says, thinking she should have come up with something: silver spoons, first editions, a Curran purchased for pennies from a gallery in the East Village.
“Please,” Jonathan Fontaine says, pushing a heavy book off a small chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat.”
“Thank you,” Beatrice says. She can feel her heart pounding, the color rising, why? She’s a thirty-two-year-old woman, a professional, and besides, it’s only Jonathan Fontaine, twenty years, give or take, her senior: she’s been here long enough, he knows her worth. And still, and still, he sits across from her, the big boss, his blue eyes steady, his thicket of hair fluffed as if by a blast of air. If she could crawl into its hiding place and put her ear to his skull, what would she hear? No doubt the thinking of Jonathan Fontaine’s elaborately coddled brain, the revolutions of his well-oiled wheel of judgment, his consideration as he stares at Beatrice Wells, bright by all accounts and more than qualified, her bow tie perky, a nice touch.
Jonathan Fontaine smiles. “Everyone’s impressed with what you’ve done around here.”
“Thank you,” Beatrice says. “That’s nice,” she says.
“And now the senior position? How so?” he asks, leaning back, crossing his legs, his hands on his knee, and though she’s momentarily stuck by the awkward construction of the question, Beatrice soon regains her bearings and launches forth—gaining, as she goes, a building momentum, an ease. She spins farther and farther from the question, flying, flung, explaining to Jonathan Fontaine how as a child she had filled countless sketchbooks, read the journals of René Robert Bouché and the great George Barbier, studied the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the construction of the Eiffel Tower and Berlin in the Roaring Twenties, the works of Marie Laurencin, Grandma Moses, et cetera, et cetera, how she’d briefly—he’d seen in her résumé, which he now held loosely, reviewing—worked toward a graduate degree at NYU but soon found hers was not a spirit suited for academia, its backbiting, its ennui, hers a spirit suited for this, for here, for exactly what he offered, what she wanted, what she’d worked toward, what she’d dreamed of: truly. Breathless, or rather, spent, Beatrice abruptly sits on her hands as Jonathan Fontaine seems to, for the second or third time, drift off.
“Delighted,” he says, to no one in particular. “First rate,” he says. “Now,” he says. “A few questions.” He leans forward again, the keys from T. R. Peterson’s ancient Smith-Corona visible just over his left shoulder, poised as if anticipating Peterson’s brilliant ghost. “You’re married, right? Recently?”
“Four months,” Beatrice says. “June third,” she says, wondering how they got here and where they are going.
Jonathan Fontaine nods then stretches and takes off his suit jacket; she notices the neatly folded handkerchief in his pocket: a nice touch.
“Congratulations,” he says.
“Oh, well. We’ve been living together for ages,” Beatrice says. Outside, music flares from the opened sash of the double-hung window—the break-dancing decade long passed, though in neighborhoods like this one “Thriller” won’t die.
“Now, I could get sued for this,” Jonathan Fontaine says, pausing, smiling again. She sees a bit of spit on a tooth, the sparkle of it, and notices the delicacy of his features, his eyebrows so fair as to be almost disappeared. “But you’re not planning on getting pregnant anytime soon,” he says. “Are you?”
Beatrice sits back in her small chair. “What?” she says. She’s stalling, of course; she’s heard every word.
“Pregnant,” Jonathan Fontaine says. He stands and shuts the window, the noise ineffectively gagged. “We need someone to hit the ground running,” he says, sitting back down, picking up a paper clip. “You understand the issue with mothers,” he says, bending the paper clip. “Birthday parties. Trips to the dentist. That sort of thing.”
“Oh, God, yes,” Beatrice says. “I mean, no. I mean, I understand, but God, no.” They had been trying since their trip to city hall, calling it their Paris years: sex in the afternoon—in the shower, sometimes, on the moldy living room couch; sex in the evening; sex in the morning, the wisteria budding, fading, drying, its smell so faint, just a whiff from time to time, on the pillows. No interruption for le petit chapeau, just straight start to finish, glorious; she might, at this moment, be hosting a burrowing sperm, or thousands of them; at this precise moment one of her tiny eggs, still springy, might be rent in two. Now she leans forward, conspiratorial.
“No,” she says. “Never.”
* * *
When Beatrice Wells called her husband from the street corner to tell him what her boss, the asshole Jonathan Fontaine, had said to her, her husband would not believe her. “He didn’t mean that,” he said. “He must have meant something else,” he said.
“What?” she said. “What else could he have possibly meant?”
“Not that,” her husband sa
id.
“See, that’s the problem. Right there,” she said. “Nobody ever wants to believe us. Nobody. Not even women,” she said. “Not even women want to believe women. Look at Anita Hill and Phyllis Schlafly.”
“You’re overreacting,” he said.
“I could sue him,” Beatrice said.
“You could,” her husband said.
“I would lose,” Beatrice said.
“You would,” her husband said.
“I mean, it’s none of his business, none of his goddamn business,” Beatrice said.
“It’s not,” her husband said.
“Our bodies, ourselves,” Beatrice said, somewhat inexplicably.
“Ditto,” her husband said, equally so.
* * *
Jonathan Fontaine doesn’t want to spend more than thirty dollars but he needs something presentable, he says. Unique. He is hopeless at these things, as she might imagine, all thumbs, and he remembers she had a good eye, an excellent eye. He pulls his coat tighter, the wound, or rather, scratch exposed on his hand. Beyond them the boys are in the grips of a Ping-Pong tournament with what appear to be two hustlers; some holiday shoppers warm their hands on hot cocoa or cider and watch; the sun slips behind Times Square and the day gets predictably dark and colder. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald seem oblivious to it all. “I guess she really doesn’t want to dance,” Beatrice says—the song on what seems like an endless loop.
“Sorry?” Jonathan Fontaine says.
“Okay,” Beatrice says. “I’d be happy to,” she says.
* * *
In the court of law in which Beatrice Wells repeatedly sues Jonathan Fontaine there are, from time to time, celebrity guests. Anita Hill has been known to show up, wearing her signature yellow suit and ancient, bookish hairstyle. Sometimes Strom Thurmond bursts in. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” the senator shouts, to no one in particular, his sad pate resting crookedly. He might take a seat beside Anne Boleyn, cradling her own head in her lap, or Gloria Steinem in a flowing white wedding dress, signature blue glasses. They will abruptly stand and march out, as if this means something, but Beatrice is not sure what. She keeps her eyes steady on Jonathan Fontaine, looking for a twitch of regret.
