I KNEW one person who had studied love in its every incarnation, from the time of immense, waddling fertility goddesses to the advent of leather and chains. One person who could have been curator in the museum of love.
“Philippa?”
“Ye-es?” (This spoken with her characteristic wary irritation.)
“It’s Beatrice,” I said, trying to sound as if I thought this would please her.
“Beatrice.” Her wariness ticked upward: she thought she’d gotten rid of me.
“I wanted…” I said, but my voice caught in my throat. I wanted to show Philippa I was in love with someone else, so she’d know I didn’t need her, wouldn’t fear me and run away.
“Now, Beatrice, I thought we’d settled this.”
“I wanted to ask your advice about something,” I crashed in, but I was so hurt at her assuming I was calling to pester her, when I’d been so good, put my tail between my legs and fled the minute she told me to go, hadn’t called her all summer even though I was lost and she was my guiding star, that my accursed voice broke and I felt a wave of tears rising.
“Beatrice, Beatrice Wolfe,” she said. “Stop this at once!”
“You’ve already rejected me, Philippa,” I said—drily, because I had a glimpse of some absurdity here that I’d never quite recognized before. “You don’t have to repeat yourself. I’m calling for romantic advice—there’s a woman here that I—well, Philippa, I’ve met someone wonderful.”
“You’ve … you have? In Hartford?”
It did sound unlikely. “Yes,” I said, smugly. Philippa might need Rome; let me show her what I could make out of the insurance city. “I wish you could meet her, Philippa, she’s wonderful. So self-contained, so authoritative.”
“Hmm, authoritative,” she said. “That does sound piquant.”
“But Philippa, she’s in love with someone else,” I moaned.
“Not insurmountable,” she mused. I heard ice cubes—she was pouring herself a drink. Settling into her chair, ready for the next chapter. Now my eyes really did fill with tears. “She only just met you, you can hardly expect her to drop everything right away. In fact, you wouldn’t want it—you need that tension.”
“I do?”
“Yes,” Philippa said, with sharp pleasure. She was an encyclopedia, she only wanted to be opened to the right page. “Of course! You want her to yearn, you want her to suffer the distance between you, so she’ll feel the relief when you cross it! If she doesn’t suffer, she won’t know the strength of her own feeling.”
“How can she have any feeling for me? She just met me last night!”
“You just met her last night, too!”
“But that’s different.”
“What’s her name, what does she do?”
“Lee Schuyler, she works for the Aetna.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know. What does anyone who works for an insurance company do? They go there, thousands of them, every morning, and they don’t come home until night. They must be doing something.”
“It is mysterious,” she conceded. “Where does she live?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” she sputtered. “Do you have a phone book? Look her up, for God’s sake.”
“Willbrook,” I read. “That’s way south of here.”
“You’ve got to go down and take a look at it,” Philippa said. “Research is always the first step. Then you’ll know how to proceed.”
“I’ll go down tomorrow, if I can find the right bus.”
“And keep me informed!” she said. “Okay. ’Bye.”
Keep me informed. I was just repeating these words to myself, in triumph, when she called me back.
“Where was she born?” she asked. “What sign is she? What does her father do?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” I said happily. I had Philippa back, what did anything else matter? I had Philippa back and I was going to make a good story out of Lee Schuyler for her.
* * *
AND THE next day, feeling for the first time in months as if I was doing something for a good reason, I left the hospital after my shift and walked straight past my usual bus stop to catch the number twenty-one for Willbrook. Dietary aides did not live in the suburbs; I waited with a couple of nurses, half expecting them to recognize my motive and turn me in to some authority. This fear—that I would overstep one of the boundaries that everyone else held sacred, and be discovered as an impostor, ridiculed and cast aside—would ordinarily have paralyzed me, but now I didn’t care. My duty was clear; I had to keep Philippa informed.
Here it was! QUAIL RUN TOWNHOMES, A PLANNED COMMUNITY. A bank of steel mailboxes (Schuyler, 32B), a winding road with yellow speedbumps, parking spaces with stenciled numbers. I was at her door (dove gray, with no nameplate, no wreath of dried flowers, just a door). She was on the first floor, though, so I could look in through the slider, heart in throat, to see: white drapes, with a sensible thermal backing, an aspidistra, a round table on which stood a conch shell whose glossy inner surface scrolled open invitingly, and a photograph in a Plexiglas frame.
We’d had an aspidistra once, a gift from my father’s sister. They’re not very attractive plants, they never flower, but nor do they wither—to own one is to be certain that one thing in your living room is really alive. Ma saw hers as a bourgeois menace that would attract other conventional objects to itself until our world filled up with them and we became like everyone else. She’d tried to drown it but it only bloated, so she tried to parch it, but the water it had absorbed in the drowning attempt held it for months. Finally, she put it in the basement, and a year later it was, miraculously, dead, dry, and brown.
“I was not going to let that plant emerge victorious,” she’d said, but I of course had been rooting for it. And here it was, sitting calmly beside a shell picked up on a beach vacation and a picture of someone Lee loved.
She loved someone; she might, possibly, come to love me. Waist-deep in the shrubbery outside her kitchen window, reminding myself to note for Philippa the feminine qualities of the conch, I felt determined that I would come to live with Lee and her aspidistra here at Quail Run. Live with her, live like her, my pulse slow, my thoughts calm.
I ran back up the long driveway to the bus stop, skipping over the speed bumps the way I used to skip down the school hallways when I was little. What a relief to be back on the old familiar treadmill, working toward love! The pounding pulse, the desperate inner pleading with a nameless god whose silence would leave me to learn the ways of another heart—the essential subject, the only one important enough to keep my attention. I took the bus back all the way to the Aetna Insurance Company, where Lee must be leaning in a doorway now, having a quiet conversation. Would she walk down the street for lunch? Was there a chance I’d cross her path? The idea of catching her in an act of normality, seeing her buy a pack of cigarettes or admire a dress in a shop window, made my heart jump.
* * *
THE SHOP I found myself standing in front of, called LaLouche, was a glass temple to the goddess of chic, and I imagined Lee going in there, choosing a few exquisite pieces and buying them without my million hesitations (were they too expensive, too pretentious, did they make me look fat, or silly, or like I had no idea at all what I was doing, etc.?). The faceless mannequins in the window leaned back against the air with their endless arms outstretched. One was carrying a stack of cashmere sweaters in muted, nameless colors, another was standing behind a card that read SALES OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE.
I imagined that if I went in to apply, the owner might become hysterical and try to chase me out with a broom, as a guest of ours had when a flying squirrel fell down the chimney one time. But whoever got that job would have a view of this intersection—she could watch all day for Lee. I didn’t even dream of winning her, just of seeing her go quietly, competently by. Starvation hadn’t done it, sweating in the bowels of St. Gerasimus hadn’t done it—but now, for the first time since I’d arrived in Hartford, I really, really wanted a job.
So I pulled open the high wide door and strode toward the counter, where a languid and infinitely supercilious man in a green silk shirt leaned against the wall and regarded me skeptically.
“You’re looking for a job,” he said, as if he were a soothsayer.
“How did you know?”
He laughed very slightly, tore an application form off a pad, and handed it across to me with a black and gold fountain pen ten times the weight of the St. Gerasimus ballpoint in my purse. It had a good effect on my handwriting, so that the application looked interesting. By the time I’d filled it in, I heard the proprietor’s voice behind me, asking me if I could start that afternoon. He’d used the time to walk around and examine me from every angle, and he’d decided I would do.
He himself looked like a maharaja, or maybe more of a goatherd—someone from an exotic storybook. His silk shirt flowed over broad shoulders, and his jeans were pressed, his boots had brass at the toes. He had stubble instead of hair, like he’d shaved his head and then thought better.
“But,” I said, “how can you tell I’d be good?”
“Instinct,” he said, with amazing arrogance, and reading my name off the top line: “Instinct, Beatrice Wolfe.” That was how he’d gotten so far in this business, he said, that was how he could know that, in spite of my apparent mousiness (he paused to let this remark sink in), I had potential.
“Stetson Tortola,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s my name,” he said drily, stepping back, his eyes ticking over me as if he was registering my various capacities on some internal seismograph, then giving a quick nod. Yes, he was sure of it: he could do something with me. “Does it surprise you?”
“No, no—why would it surprise me?” I was always careful not to seem surprised—otherwise someone might guess I didn’t know anything.
“Ever considered dreadlocks?” he asked.
I had not.
“Well, you ought to,” he said, holding up a picture of Bob Marley that he apparently kept behind the counter for this purpose. “Dreadlocks would be just the thing. Sometimes a change of image is necessary.”
I peered into the mirror, disappointed.
“I don’t know.” I wondered if he’d ever considered wearing deerskin, or an old T-shirt, because his face didn’t go with his clothing—it was a wary, curious face, not the mask of narcissism I knew from Sweetriver and would have expected from a man in silk.
His eyes flicked over me and then around the store, looking for imperfections. He saw a sweater out of place and stepped around me to get to it as if I were a boulder in the road.
“What weekly salary would you need?” he asked.
Salary, my God. The word was barely in my vocabulary. Ma had made a salary, in her teaching days, but she took it in cash; she liked peeling off twenties to dazzle the pharmacist or the veterinarian with her insouciance, show how little she cared for it all. Money was the antithesis of love; so we didn’t associate with the kind of people who made salaries.
But then of course, we didn’t associate with anyone. “I’m not really sure,” I said. Then I remembered what my father had said. “Would a hundred a week be okay?”
He darted a glance at me and I wondered if I’d asked too much.
“Would ninety be better?”
“No, no,” he said, “I’m sure I can manage a hundred.
“This a gift from Mom?” he asked then, plucking at my blouse. “Quite a look. Get something off the rack over there,” he said. “I mean, assuming you can stay today.”
Something in his voice mocked the idea that I might have anywhere else to go. He’d seen through me, knew more about me than I’d told him somehow. For him, fashion was art, and retail sales its attendant philosophy—and by this standard, I was an imbecile. LaLouche clothes did not stoop to flattery—no, they demanded that their wearers live up to their rigorous, if mercurial, standards. If you couldn’t manage to look smug in a hacked-off sheath and furry leggings, pigment-dyed in two complementary shades of mustard, then you weren’t the LaLouche type and would have to creep across town and get yourself something polyester at Sears.
And indeed, he shook his head sadly as soon as my hand closed on a hanger—“No flowers,” he said, with a contempt almost as tender as affection. “Try the olive. It’ll tone down the pinks.” He pressed a finger to my cheek as if it was a muffin he was testing, and my heart leapt. I’d fooled him. I really did look as gentle and flowery as a woman. “You want to play against type, in this case.
“That’s a little closer,” he said, when I came out of the dressing room in something colored like a bruise, and stood in front of the mirror gawking—the dietary aide, the little squirrel, had disappeared. This person looked nearly like a predator, and seeing her I felt different than I’d felt in some months. Stetson had changed me into someone who might be attractive to Lee.
“I don’t even know how this got in here—it looks like a tablecloth,” Stetson said, carrying the dress I’d picked first, with its depictions of morning glories twining, into the back room. My first task was to pack it up to send it back to its maker, and I went about it with brisk efficiency, imagining Lee would walk by and see me, and be enthralled.
* * *
AT HOME, I called the hospital and told them I was quitting. I was shaking—I’d never dared quit anything before, for fear I’d get addicted to quitting and end up back home looking for a pencil for the rest of my life.
“You will never, ever work at St. Gerasimus Hospital again!” the supervisor said, sounding not unlike my mother. I felt responsible to seem undone, to weep and apologize and beg her to reconsider.
“Do you promise?” I asked. It was the first bridge I’d ever burned.
* * *
“LOVE IS a transforming thing!” Philippa crowed. “I must say, you’ve pushed the envelope in the stalking department, actually getting a job on her street. And fashion is an excellent field for you. We need bold vision, there’s no appreciation these days of the way appearance can shape reality.”
“There isn’t?” The phrase “bold vision” described Philippa, but she always saw her best qualities reflected in me. I’d be startled and disbelieving, then I’d catch a glimpse of the corner of something, and there it would be—bold vision, or whatever. “Seems like people think appearance can replace reality.”
“Which makes for absurdity. But it can enhance reality,” she said. We were hitting on our basic argument—something about the role of glamour in life. Philippa’s childhood had been gritty and glamourless and alleviated only by celluloid; mine was all show so that every time I got a clod of earth in my hand I was grateful.
I was going to flout her, and her damned precepts, from now until eternity. She could hardly expect me to live out her notions after she’d left me. I refused even to try to be lurid anymore, I was going with Lee and her aspidistra.
“And happily ever after too,” I added, just to turn the knife.
“But,” Philippa said. “The aspidistra motif—I’m not sure I fully understand. I mean, there was the time I followed Tallulah Bankhead into Saks and watched her try on hats, but I didn’t actually buy a hat myself.”
“That’s where we differ. I have a great sympathy for aspidistras.” I told her how my mother had tried to extinguish ours, and she began to laugh like a mad gambler who’d put a quarter in the slot machine and gotten more than she could have dreamed. “I do believe, Beatrice, that this is history’s first example of a really heroic plant. I see it riding into battle astride its noble mount. It is going to emerge victorious!
“So, how are we to accomplish this?” she asked.
We agreed that I had to get Lee talking, draw her out of herself and into my web. Reenie was the potluck hostess next week, which complicated matters, but Philippa delighted in thinking through complications. What if I became Lee’s confidante, so that, as she poured her fears and longings into my ear, her affections were to change course, by degrees, and begin creeping in my direction? Would that be possible?
“I don’t know,” I said. “The thing is, Reenie keeps flirting with me.”
“Now there’s a twist!” Philippa cried. “This could be fabulous.”
“How? It’s just making Lee hate me!”
“It is making Lee rivalrous, and that alone is a fascination!” she said. “She’s going to wonder what Reenie sees in you! Who knows where that could lead?”
“So she might fall in love with me to avenge herself on Reenie?” I asked, full of hope. I did not ask myself whether a love excited by spite was really the kind of love I was looking for; I was in no position for such a proud question.