Girls In 3-B, The (8 page)

"A crazy business." Phyllis pushed up her horn-rimmed glasses, which were always sliding off her short but pretty nose, and pulled down her skirt. She was a pretty girl and had a remarkably good figure, but Pat had never seen her in anything but a skirt and blouse, with her nose shiny and her long blue-black hair in need of combing. Oddly enough this untidiness gave her a sexy look
--
she had the aura of a woman who knows herself attractive to men and therefore needs no artifices of dress or grooming.

Ordinarily Phyllis's casual ways would have encouraged Pat to throw on her own clothes and think no more about it, but since her first look into Mr. Thomson's eyes she had taken to spending a great deal of time and money on her appearance. She felt it necessary to be chic and well-groomed and, in a word, worthy of love. Her salary, which was seventy dollars a week before deductions and about fifty-six when it reached her, didn't go as far as she had expected it to, but knowing Barby was a help. Barby did all of Pat's and Annice's shopping on her lunch hour, using her employee's discount. The discount was supposed to be for personal use only, but as Annice said, what could be more personal than a roommate?

She said, "It's interesting." It was noon; everyone else was gone, and she was waiting for Miss Miller to relieve her at the switchboard. Some of her best bedtime fantasies were timed at noon, when everyone else was out of the office, although she and Blake usually went on to a honeymoon hotel or a woodland carpeted with spring flowers. So far, in actual fact, nobody but Phyllis had shared her twelve-to-one watch. Phyllis sat quietly smoking and waiting for the telephone to ring; she switched her calls to Mr. Thomson's office, which had a door that shut tight, and talked inaudibly for a long time. The office grapevine had it that she was mixed up with a married man of wealth and social standing.

"Sure it's interesting. Why do you think I stay here, doing two people's work for the pittance I get? I could go to work as private secretary to the manager of a big department store
--
would, too, if I had the sense I was born with." The telephone jingled. Phyllis grabbed it. "The Fort Dearborn Press." She listened, head tilted. "I am sorry, you have a wrong number. Goddamn."

"Why do you stay
?
"

"God only knows." She shoved her glasses up. "I guess it's a special form of insanity. It sort of gets you after a while. Looking at the manuscripts when they come in
--
I started as a reader, what a rat-race that is
--
and then when you hit a good one it's sort of exciting. Not that it happens very much."

Pat nodded. She had already learned not to be indignant on behalf of the authors whose cherished stories bounced back after a hasty reading. "I could write a better book myself," she said.

"For God's sake don't. The world's full of fools who think they can write books."

"Some of them can, too. Look at Sam Fry."

"Sure. I was here the first time Sam Fry ever walked into this office. He had holes in his shoes. All I'm saying is, not one in a hundred."

"What's really exciting is when the galleys come in."

"Sure, because it starts to feel like a real book. Page is even better. I don't worry much about typos in galley, but I really sweat when the page proofs come in. Then the promotion office gets busy, they start getting in touch with the big mags and the movies and all that jazz. I don't know, it makes every other line of business look dull." Phyllis lit another cigarette.

"And the artists. Like that girl with the long cigarette holder the other day, that you said was going to do the illustrations for the Fairchild."

"Sure, sure, everybody gets into the act then, the ad agency people
--
you ever go out with an adman? Don't." She sat down, propping her flats on the edge of Pat's desk. "Then all of a sudden
--
makes no difference how long it's been scheduled, you might have the date up on your bulletin board for three months, but it always seems sudden anyhow
--
then the advance copies come in. That's the book."

She paused for breath while Pat answered the phone and took an order. "You know," she said dreamily, "you never think about it as five or ten or twenty thousand separate books rolling off the presses. Maybe the warehouse people do; I don't know, I never worked in a warehouse." She considered, shutting her eyes. "Yeah, I suppose it's different when they start rolling 'em in on skids. In the editorial office though, it's
a
book, a living breathing book. It's something like having a baby."

"I never had a baby," Pat said idly.

"Me neither, but you can imagine how it feels." The phone rang; they both reached, but Phyllis got there first. Pat said quietly, "Watch the board, I'm going to the John," and tiptoed out to give her a little privacy.

She thought it over, sitting in the white-tiled cubicle that was so silent now compared to the nine and five o'clock clatter. Phyllis was right, it was an exciting business. She couldn't tell how much of the excitement was due to her new awareness of herself as a woman and how much was implicit in publishing itself. Even the letters she typed were unlike the letters ordinary businessmen dictated, with a vocabulary and range of subject matter all their own. She had worked summers since she was thirteen, for various uncles and cousins in the dry-goods, coal, and paper-box businesses, and the work had bored her stiff. But this was fascinating. Holding her hands under the hot-air dryer, she counted over the things she had learned in her short eventful weeks with The Fort Dearborn Press.

She had supposed, until this fall, that writers were a special breed of people
--
more cultured, less interested in money and material things. That wasn't so. She had seen a lady novelist go into hysterics because Blake Thomson wouldn't give her fifteen per cent royalty instead of the usual ten, and she had opened and answered letters from dignified college professors who screamed like wounded tigers because the accounting department had shorted them sixty-two cents on royalties. A famous poet had asked her out to dinner, and, although she had refused to go, she wasn't sure whether it was because she was awed by his international reputation or because he was sixty and practically bald.
Maybe Phyllis is right,
she thought, swinging the washroom door open;
maybe it's a form of insanity that makes us stay. It sure as hell isn't the money.

Phyllis had retreated to her own cubbyhole and was hunched over an endless stack of page proofs, looking withdrawn and pale. She squinted over her slipped down spectacles.
Wonder how much a copy editor makes?
Pat thought, remembering Phyllis's boast that she had done every phase of putting a book together short of actually setting type. She dropped into her posture chair, which was uncomfortable, and tried to pull her attention back to her correspondence.

In a few minutes Blake Thomson came in, holding the door open for a woman Pat had never seen before. She would have remembered that tall erect form, that finely modelled face if they had ever passed in the street or stood side by side in a department store, because this female looked the way she had always wanted to look. The way she
did
look in her daydreams. The woman was fine-drawn, as though her bones were made of better stuff than other people's. Her taffy-colored hair was pulled back straight from a beautiful thin face and worn in a chignon, no strand out of place. Under arched eyebrows her eyes were not the blue or gray you might expect, but a deep lively brown. She had on a plain black dress that made Pat's own basic black look like what it was
--
marked down from the moderate-price fine for the October sales.

A job applicant
?
Author
?
Clubwoman
?
she ran through the possibilities and discarded them in a flicker of time. The expression on Blake Thomson's face wasn't that of a businessman looking at a client. It was the look she had dreamed of at night, picturing it accurately before she ever saw it
--
a look of infinite tenderness, male protectiveness, naked masculine hunger. It was
her
look, directed at somebody with whom she could never hope to compete.

They ignored her as well-bred people ignore a porter or waiter, not rudely, but as though she didn't exist apart from serving them. As they proceeded down the corridor she saw Blake's hand touch the woman's, a caress so slight that it might have been mistaken for an accidental contact if both faces had not registered an intense awareness of it.

Phyllis sauntered in, lighting a new cigarette. "See what just went into the sanctum?"

"Yeah." She turned her betraying face away. "He makes me furious! That man has laid half the women in this building," Phyllis said, her color high. "They fall for him before he so much as puts a finger on them, and now that he's ready to get married and settle down what does he do but pick something like this. Money, looks
and
social standing. He's no fool; he knows a good thing when he sees it."

"Maybe he loves her."

"He hasn't got it in him to love anyone but himself. He's been in love with himself ever since he was old enough to look in the mirror. Sure, he has technique. Makes you feel like you're going right up through the ceiling and coming down in another world. That's all it is, goddam it, don't mean a thing."

"Well
--
"

"He keeps a room at the Midwest Hotel all the time, the son of a bitch. I bet he uses it at least once or twice a week, too. I bet he has some other female on the string before they've been married six weeks."

It was true what the love magazines said. The heart really did ache. She could feel it hurting in her chest, a steady, heavy pain that grew and lessened with every beat. She put her hand to the place, feeling as though it should be tangible
--
heat, maybe, burning through the front of her dress. Phyllis looked at her sharply. "Don't tell me you've fallen for him. He's pure dynamite for a nice girl."

"Oh," Pat said, "don't talk about it."

"Don't say I didn't tell you."

Sap,
she accused herself, trying not to cry.
A man like that, you might know he wouldn't be free.
She put her hand to her mouth, trying not to sob out loud, afraid that the others would come in from lunch and hear her making like a hurt baby.

The telephone rang. Phyllis caught it. "It's for you," she said, grinding out her cigarette in Pat's ashtray and sauntering back to her own desk.
Needn't bother,
Pat thought bitterly.
Nobody's going to be calling me about anything private.

"Pat? Annice. Look, darling, will you do something for me? I told Jack last night I'd go to Penny Williams' party tonight, in fact I had a hell of a time to make him say he'd go. I don't want to get him mad at me, Pat, but there's going to be somebody else there I want to see about something important."

"Sure, sure, and you want me to take old Jack off your hands."

"Not exactly. After all, I told him I'd go with him," Annice said smugly. "I sort of thought maybe we could all come home together, sort of
--
"

"And drop old Jack off first."
She thought, I'd be crazy to go, all I want to do is just quietly lie down and die. Let Annice work out her own problems
.
She said,
"I don't think I will."

"Oh, come on. I'll do something for you some time."

"Well
--
" She considered. Noise, smoke, and talk till hell wouldn't have it. Might as well be smoked and talked to death as sit home alone, feeling bad. "Okay, I'll go. But I don't want to stay out all night
--
you remember it."

"You're a doll."

"Sure."

When she came back from lunch Blake Thomson's office was empty. She worked half-heartedly all afternoon, jumping every time the door opened, but he didn't come back. She was dully thankful.

All schools smell alike. Kindergartens, grade schools, high schools, even these temporary college buildings thrown together to take care of the influx of students. Chalk and sandwiches and the girl's perfume, and
--
of all things
--
old overshoes. Annice shut her eyes and sniffed, standing in the main hall with the home-coming crowd milling around. Definitely overshoes. She must remember to tell Jack, the next time they were out together.

Not Alan. You didn't share ideas and observations with Alan; he wasn't interested in anyone but himself, and if the conversation turned into someone else's channel he quickly turned it back again or lapsed into glowering silence. Last night, on the way home from the ballet theater, she had tried to tell him how excited she was at seeing Swan Lake the first time, the way the dances and costumes looked exactly as she thought they would from hearing the music on records. Unfortunately Alan had been reading up on Mies van der Rohe and was full of theories on modern architecture. "You're a conceited fool," she told him finally, giving up. "You don't think other people ever have any ideas worth listening to.”

"They don't."

"I hate you."

"No, you don't. You wouldn't go out with me if you hated me. I fascinate you."

He did too, damn him. She opened her eyes quickly before the current of traffic could wash her downstairs and out of the building. There was something about Alan that made everybody else seem dull and colorless. She couldn't stop thinking about him and wanting to see him; when she sat beside him on the front seat of his ratty little car she couldn't help wanting to touch him. Being with him made her feel more alive than she had ever felt before.
If
I'm not careful I'll end up doing whatever he wants me to,
she thought, scared and thrilled at the same time.
No matter what it does to me.

She had decided, after the first date, that she would Go All the Way if he asked her to. After all, she had come to Chicago in search of love more than fame or independence
--
she was dedicated to love. She went to a party with him, shaking with mingled pleasure and terror, and he didn't make a single pass. He had been polite to her
--
for Alan
--
and he had escorted her home at one a.m. and deposited her on the doorstep as if she had been somebody's maiden aunt, without so much as a good-night kiss. It was maddening. "What's the matter, don't you like me or something?"