Self-Help (eBook)

Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow. All the stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.

He emerges from nowhere, looks like Robert Culp, the fog rolling, then parting, then sort of closing up again behind him. He asks you for a light and you jump a bit, startled, but you give him your “Lucky’s Lounge—Where Leisure Is a Suit” matches. He has a nice chuckle, nice fingernails. He lights the cigarette, cupping his hands around the end, and drags deeply, like a starving man. He smiles as he exhales, returns you the matches, looks at your face, says: “Thanks.”

He then stands not far from you, waiting. Perhaps for the same bus. The two of you glance furtively at each other, shifting feet. Pretend to contemplate the chemical snow. You are two spies glancing quickly at watches, necks disappearing in the hunch of your shoulders, collars upturned and slowly razoring the cab and store-lit fog like sharkfins. You begin to circle, gaug­ing each other in primordial sniffs, eyeing, sidling, keen as Basil Rathbone.

A bus arrives. It is crowded, everyone looking laughlessly into one another’s underarms. A blonde woman in barrettes steps off, holding her shoes in one hand.

You climb on together, grab adjacent chrome posts, and when the bus hisses and rumbles forward, you take out a book. A minute goes by and he asks what you’re reading. It is Madame Bovary in a Doris Day biography jacket. Try to explain about binding warpage. He smiles, interested.

Return to your book. Emma is opening her window, think­ing of Rouen.

“What weather,” you hear him sigh, faintly British or up-percrust Delaware.

Glance up. Say: “It is fit for neither beast nor vegetable.”

It sounds dumb. It makes no sense.

But it is how you meet.

At the movies he is tender, caressing your hand beneath the seat.

At concerts he is sweet and attentive, buying cocktails, lo­cating the ladies’ lounge when you can’t find it.

At museums he is wise and loving, leading you slowly through the Etruscan cinerary urns with affectionate gestures and an art history minor from Columbia. He is kind; he laughs at your jokes.

After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half mu­seums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music. He tells you his wife’s name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm. When he says, “How do you feel about that?” don’t say “Ridiculous” or “Get the hell out of my apartment.” Prop your head up with one hand and say: “It depends. What is intellectual property law?”

He grins. “Oh, you know. Where leisure is a suit.”

Give him a tight, wiry little smile.

“I just don’t want you to feel uncomfortable about this,” he says.

Say: “Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough.” Show him your bicep.

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

You walk differently. In store windows you don’t recognize yourself; you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins. In public restrooms you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration, murmuring into your bluing thighs: “Hello, I’m Charlene. I’m a mistress.”

It is like having a book out from the library.

It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

You meet frequently for dinner, after work, split whole liters of the house red, then wamble the two blocks east, twenty blocks south to your apartment and lie sprawled on the living room floor with your expensive beige raincoats still on.

He is a systems analyst—you have already exhausted this joke—but what he really wants to be, he reveals to you, is an actor.

“Well, how did you become a systems analyst?” you ask, funny you.

“The same way anyone becomes anything,” he muses. “I took courses and sent out resumes.” Pause. “Patricia helped me work up a great resume. Too great.”

“Oh.” Wonder about mistress courses, certification, resumes. Perhaps you are not really qualified.

“But I’m not good at systems work,” he says, staring through and beyond, way beyond, the cracked ceiling. “Figuring out the cost-effectiveness of two hundred people shuffling five hundred pages back and forth across a new four-and-a-half-by-three-foot desk. I’m not an organized person, like Patricia, for instance. She’s just incredibly organized. She makes lists for everything. It’s pretty impressive.”

Say flatly, dully: “What?”

“That she makes lists.”

“That she makes lists? You like that?”

“Well, yes. You know, what she’s going to do, what she has to buy, names of clients she has to see, et cetera.”

“Lists?” you murmur hopelessly, listlessly, your expensive beige raincoat still on. There is a long, tired silence. Lists? You stand up, brush off your coat, ask him what he would like to drink, then stump off to the kitchen without waiting for the answer.

At one-thirty, he gets up noiselessly except for the soft rus­tle of his dressing. He leaves before you have even quite fallen asleep, but before he does, he bends over you in his expensive beige raincoat and kisses the ends of your hair. Ah, he kisses your hair.

Technically, you are still a secretary for Karma-Kola, but you wear your Phi Beta Kappa key around your neck on a cheap gold chain, hoping someone will spot you for a promotion. Unfortunately, you have lost the respect of all but one of your co-workers and many of your superiors as well, who are work­ing in order to send their daughters to universities so they won’t have to be secretaries, and who, therefore, hold you in contempt for having a degree and being a failure anyway. It is like having a degree in failure. Hilda, however, likes you. You are young and remind her of her sister, the professional skater.

“But I hate to skate,” you say.

And Hilda smiles, nodding. “Yup, that’s exactly what my sister says sometimes and in that same way.”

“What way?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Hilda. “Your bangs parted on the side or something.”

Ask Hilda if she will go to lunch with you. Over Reuben sandwiches ask her if she’s ever had an affair with a married man. As she attempts, mid-bite, to complete the choreography of her chomp, Russian dressing spurts out onto her hands.

“Once,” she says. “That was the last lover I had. That was over two years ago.”

Say: “Oh my god,” as if it were horrible and tragic, then try to mitigate that rudeness by clearing your throat and say­ing, “Well, actually, I guess that’s not so bad.”

“No,” she sighs good-naturedly. “His wife had Hodgkin’s disease, or so everyone thought. When they came up with the correct diagnosis, something that wasn’t nearly so awful, he went back to her. Does that make sense to you?”

“I suppose,” say doubtfully.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Hilda is still cleaning Reuben off the backs of her hands with a napkin. “At any rate, who are you involved with?”

“Someone who has a wife that makes lists. She has List-maker’s disease.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” says Hilda. “That’s typical.”