THE PHONE RANG AND I ANSWERED AS IF I WERE SISSY. “MS. BOXWELL’S OFFICE.”
“Sissy?” It was Monica’s deep-pitched voice.
“She’s out.”
“Who’s this?”
“She.”
“Oh.” The voice sank lower. “Can you take a message?”
I had had a rotten day. In exchange for a short span of joy I sat at my desk in terror of a madwoman accosting me. I had sold my soul once more to my spying secretary. I had cleaned unnecessarily my apartment, emptied unnecessarily my refrigerator, tormented my soul and my head and my body and convinced myself that I was ready to fall in love with someone I knew nothing about. It was a romance à la Kafka. Monica dictated the laundry list to me while I carefully transcribed all their intimacies, the colors of their sheets, the pairs of underwear worn each week, the towels, by design and manufacturer, the very fabric of their strange life together. I didn’t like it. They shared the most detailed information about each other and I loved a man . . . whoops . . . and I was thinking of loving a man, an elusive grinning man who was barely evident, who said he loved me and twice called me on the phone and touched me on the arm and once blew on my neck and once bought me lunch, who created despair in my stomach and whose last name I didn’t even know. By his elusiveness, he had created this chaos, but it was the same chaos Il Duce created by his violence. Maybe I really didn’t like men. Monica at least called Sissy. Monica suffered. She’d feel something. Did men feel anything? Did Richard, except that I was the right girl, an intellectual decision, a vote-getter?
The only real emotion I’d ever seen in a man was anger. And lust. If that’s an emotion. Maybe they feigned emotion in order to satisfy lust. And maybe we feigned lust in order to satisfy emotion. Maybe they’ve just run out of emotion, the way the world runs out of fossil fuels. Fighting might have done it to them. When I considered Miriam’s Il Duce, I thought men really did begin with tails and although they had lost them or perhaps turned them into testicles, they still harbored truly bestial characteristics. Not intellectually, not physically, but emotionally; they were still lumbering destructive swamp creatures, unresponsive, autistic. As a Christian, trained and dogmatic, I think they must at one time have had the same given emotional package we women have. As a woman, I think they never had it or never will. But why did I want one so much? I wondered if I really hated men.
If I could only have related to them. There’s a story about a muleskinner teaching recruits to train mules. “First you have to get their attention,” he told the recruits as he beat the mule over the head with a plank. Is that the answer? Hit them over the head and then relate to them? I could relate to history. I could relate to space and design. Except for Sissy and myself, I could relate to women—well, perhaps I couldn’t relate to whoever Richard’s bucktooth buddy was. But I couldn’t relate to men. But then I didn’t even know what relate meant. I meant that I couldn’t understand one and I wanted one and I didn’t know how to get one . . . the right one.
I decided that some wonderful Black Annie witch goddess cursed the Cornwall men with tails as a memory and reminder not of their wickedness but of their lowly origins. I saved the square 1/32 of the Lanivet Cross with the tracing of the heart on it and slipped it into my wallet behind my Social Security card. Whatever it was with men, I would put the Lanivet Number One in the center of my exhibit. Someone would understand. I heard the elevator begin its climb upward. My blood stopped in response. Sissy stepped from the elevator.
“Seven minutes,” she shrugged, showing empty hands.
“God, am I glad it’s you, Sissy.”
“You are?”
“Instead of her.”
Discreetly, I swept my thirty-one shreds into my drawer to hide them. I didn’t need her to know about my tearing things. She knew enough about me already and I had always let her think that it was she who lost my papers. Sissy went to sit at her desk and wait, I knew, for Monica’s phone call.
I called her away from her desk. “Are you sure, Sissy?”
“Honest, there’s no one. There’s a German tourist group, a lot of school kids, a couple of old ladies.”
“Are you sure?”
“I looked all over. There was a really batty old lady stealing crocus plants and I told the guard and he wrestled her for the plants and she kept screaming: ‘Goy, you’ll be sorry come Easter!’ And then she told me, very rationally, ‘You have the crocuses for a little; I have them for a little. What’s so bad?’ ”
“Did you go into the lower areas?”
“Every place.” She was waiting for my thank you. I didn’t feel it necessary. “Did Monica call?”
Although I might torment her a bit with the timing as she had done with Mrs. Slentz’s phone call, in matters like these we could trust each other. We were aware that we would protect each other when it really counted. I handed her the laundry list. Sissy turned the note over. “Wasn’t there any message? Nothing else?”
I shook my head.
“I’m very upset about Monica, Stephanie. It seems to be so important who takes care of the laundry. It’s just like a man/woman sexist thing.” She sat on my desk. “Oh, God, I’m super upset.”
“Sissy,” I held my hand to my forehead, “don’t tell me.”
“Do you have any aspirin?”
I had a vast collection of pills left from the time Miriam had prescribed megadoses of vitamins for me. I dumped a handful of them into Sissy’s palm. Miriam and I were off chemicals. Sissy put the pills into her pocket and left, closing the door so carefully I understood it as a message of hatred. When she hates me I’m happier because she leaves me alone.
For the last hour of our day, she worked hard, typing nonstop. It might have been my mail. It might have been a long suicide note. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to know who Mrs. Slentz was. I wanted to know if she was lurking someplace in the shadows, behind a column, dagger unsheathed. At five, Sissy popped her head in, composed again in that false obedient efficiency which says I’ve hurt her deeply but she respects my position as She: “I ordered a case of Scotch tape for you. You’re going to need it.” And then she left for the night. Sissy’s good at last tag.
I would have fired her but if she were ever to defend herself to Personnel, I’d have lost my job also.
All because of Richard No-Name, the Governor, not only had the day been totally lousy, but I couldn’t leave on time. I read the personal ads in the Voice underlining professional men over thirty who want no emotional involvement and like to sail, until I was certain all visitors, buses and cars had left, all daggers were sheathed, all shadows accounted for. Outside, early dusk slid around the columns and clothed the stones for the night. I paused before the Virgin to pray that if I were going to be in love, it wouldn’t hurt. Leaves were closing on the trees and the last rush of orange covered the face of the Palisades. I so wanted to meet him here in the moonlight in a medieval garden and make love with the monks chanting the Psalms of David in the background and the jasmine spoor flooding the air. It was spring and I wanted to be loved a little. That, as Miriam would assure me, wasn’t such a crime. That, as the crazy lady with the crocuses said, wasn’t so bad. So I have him for a little; so the bucktoothed wonder has him for a little. What’s so bad?