In the Beauty of the Lilies (34 page)

All around them, as they talked, she trying to match his gentle voice with one equally soft and diffident, the apartment spread its wealth and silence and amplitude of unseen rooms. There were many antique family things and some modern boxy furniture such as Aunt Esther and Peter had but bigger and more expensive, and over all a romantic tinge of neglect, a sense of absent owners, who had brought the decor to a certain high pitch and then wandered away, bored, leaving the windows dusty and the fabrics fading. Yes, her cousin said, he would like to go with her when she had her interview with Mr. Wexler. There were other agencies, better agencies, but since Wexler had already expressed interest, had seen her portfolio, let’s begin with him. A bird in hand, et cetera. He would make the call for her, he knew a chap, actually, who had worked for Wexler. No trouble, honestly. He’d like to do it, he was between terms and bored fairly silly. He talked rapidly, in his murmuring voice, as if seeking to hypnotize her. No, in answer to an earnest question of Essie’s, he had no doubts, having seen her now in the flesh. She was a gem, wanting only—with some embarrassment, Patrick made vague and agitated gestures in the air—polishing. Voice and acting lessons, perhaps, once she was established here in the city. To Method, or not to Method, that was the question. An in joke, he explained. Of course there was a limit to what could be taught, they can’t make a silk purse, et cetera, but these coaches have techniques, there are little tricks, ways of connecting with yourself, your inner self.… Everything would happen, he was confident. For years he had been hearing about her from dear Aunt Esther. In fact, his mother was always talking about driving down to Delaware for a visit,
but … No matter, the mountain at last had come to Mohammed. Now, she
must
let him take her out for a little lunch, and then he could point her in the direction of a museum—she
must
go to the Modern, his mother was one of its founding spirits—or over to Broadway, the overrated Great White Way, rather dreary in daylight, actually, for all of its gigantic signs and pathetically palatial movie houses. Some people came to New York and then went and sat in a dark movie house, could you believe it?

But Essie had visions of a movie right here, in this lovely quiet set. He thought she knew nothing, a rube, but she did know some things. “Before any of that,” she said, “I wonder if I could take a b-bath? I w-worked up a terrible sweat, walking all the way, I was so excited. This city is absolute heaven.”

“No,” said Patrick, with a primness she was not sure was a joke. “Heaven is quite elsewhere.” She wondered how much he had been raised a Catholic. They took everything so literally, straight from the priests. Essie was grateful that her God was a Protestant one, Who gave you credit for some brains and let you work things out for yourself, at least until you died.

In her bath, she kept waiting for him to come in and see her naked, the tops of her breasts gleaming up from the bubbles. She had found some of his mother’s fragrant soap in a cabinet but the tub had been so long unused there were dead spiders in it, and one living, and the water thumped out with a burst of rusty brown. Still, an abundance of mirrors gave her back in angled slices her pink-and-white perfection. Waiting to share her pleasure in herself, she thrust one taut ankle and rosy-toed foot out of the soapy water, and then the other, admiring the fine straight tendons that jumped up, and the wandering veins like rivers of delicate aquamarine. She
leaned back so her nape got wet and soapy and moved her eyes from one corner of the bathroom ceiling to the other, and then oppositely, making an X. All her nerves were tensed against the click of the door opening, as it would have in any movie—amusingly in a comedy, scarily in an intrigue mystery—but eventually the bubbles all had popped and the water clammily cooled. Draped in a beige towel with a scratchy monogram, she went in search of Patrick. The little maid came down the hall, looking startled to see her, but Essie smiled vaguely through her, knowing that servants were just love’s furniture. She walked on, barefoot across the textures of parquet and Oriental carpet and polar-bear rug, into the study, masculine with books and maroon leather, where Patrick was pretending to read a magazine. It was called
The New Yorker
—she had never heard of it, it wasn’t on the rack at Addison’s Drug Store—and the cover had a chalky drawing of white-faced shoppers walking at night along where she had just been, past a store window holding a Christmas tree and a hollow-eyed, sinister Santa Claus.

Perhaps he was truly reading it; he didn’t seem to hear her and looked up only as she let the towel drop. Patrick winced, and his moody blue-black eyebrows scowled. He jumped up to retrieve the damp towel off the polar bear’s massive square head, where she had dropped it, and to push it back at her, hiding her tender, radiant front. His breathing was heavy and entwined with her awareness of her own; he gave her a light cool kiss on the cheek and said in his rapid voice, as if trying to restore her hypnotized mood, “You’re absolutely lovely, you know, but shouldn’t you be saving yourself?”

“Who for?” she asked, correcting this to, “For whom? You’ll do fine.”

“Well, that’s it, darling. I won’t. I won’t do fine. I know that
much about myself at this point.
Sorry
. Oh, my. You must let me explain during lunch. Do get your clothes on—you’ll scandalize poor Marie.”

She had things to learn in life, Essie knew that. But her sense of herself was that she would be looked after, now, and not allowed to fail. There were too many eyes on her, ghostly and real. This particular embarrassment she deflected by picturing, as she walked away, back to the bathroom and her clothes, her naked back receding in the rectangular frame of his vision, the towel clasped casually to her chest where he had thrust it, the lithe white lengths of her legs and the unrepentant seesaw of her buttocks spelling out to him what he had with such curious gallantry renounced. Maybe, she thought, he had a fiancée. But no, he explained at lunch, the problem was that from about the age of fourteen he had found himself in the unfortunate position of being attracted only to boys. His mother had no idea; old Trap, who was somewhat queer himself, guessed, but said nothing. Boarding school—Choate, in Wallingford, Connecticut—had made it all beautifully, horrifyingly clear. Well, it was his problem. He patted her knee, there at the little round table of the restaurant, where the menu was all in French. They had an affinity: two Wilmots with a touch of outlaw. Maybe all Wilmots had a touch of outlaw.

As though nothing awkward had happened, he took her to the museum, on the far side of an Episcopal church. Such gaudy colors, such toylike shapes! And all being looked at so seriously, by men in fitted suits with double-breasted coats and women in the latest long bell-shaped skirts and wasp-waisted suits decreed by Dior. Then, as the short day drew in, making her cheeks sting with its cold, Patrick walked her down Broadway to the Times Square subway station, and
told his country cousin how, in that vast underground of cement and steel and hurrying bodies, to find the IND Eighth Avenue line to Penn Station. On the train back to Wilmington she had time to reflect that sex was at the heart of show business, but was not worn, actually, on its sleeve.

She couldn’t believe Patrick was really homosexual. She felt she could bring him around, if he’d just let her. The only homosexual in Basingstoke was an old man who lived in one of the rooms above Krauthammer’s; the high-school boys used to play awful pranks on him, but he never got mad or went to the police, as if he had no rights. He just snuck around like a beaten dog, bent with weird longing, hoping to get lucky. Here in New York it wasn’t quite so bad; there were enough of them to make a society, and not such a secret society at that. The arts, especially minor arts like window-dressing, were dominated by them. She felt it a kind of comforting accreditation, actually, at the model agency, to have a poof bring her in.

The glamour trade was run by types who didn’t exist in Basingstoke. Wexler was a busy bald short man who snarled, “Show us the legs, dear,” and said of the sheaf of photos Doug Germaine had sent him, “Some of these I like. Girl next door, with a little devil in her. Take off five pounds and do something about your hair; it’s out of control. Also it’s a little dead. Lighten it, darken it, something. O.K., young lady. You want to come try your luck in town, we’ll put you in our files. No promises, no guarantees. Client satisfaction’s a slippery thing. Some girls come in here you think, ‘Jeez, what a knockout!’ but in black-and-white, nothing happens. Something about the nose, usually. What you ask of a nose, basically, is that it stays out of the way. The eyes, the mouth—there’s the action. Your nose, well, it could be tuned up but it’s not a big problem
right now. I hope you thank God every night for those teeth. Your mom and dad must have spent a fortune.”

“Not a penny,” Essie said. “Ama—my grandmother—said brush after every meal, especially when you had dessert. I’ve had four cavities in my whole life. She said it was all the iodine in the local spinach. My brother, Danny, has terrible teeth, but then he’s a complainer about everything.” She liked Wexler. She felt he liked her, in his rude Jewish way. These were her people, show people—like Jack Oakie and Jack Haley in the movie where one of them was shivering and put the stutter into the song about “K-K-K-Katie.” She had been cast up on the shore of the Delaware and adopted by nice natives but in her heart knew she belonged to another race and spoke another language; the movies and radio had brought her news of her real people and now she was crossing the border to them.

“Seven fifty an hour is where our girls start; some get up to twenty-five. Minus our ten percent. Sounds like a fortune, but it’s only working time. Conventions, a lot of the old bucks will ask you for a date. Handle it with dignity. Any girl takes bed money we hear of it, she’s out. Runway shows, less of a problem. Right, Pat? You said you’re cousins?”

Patrick nodded. “First. Non-kissing.”

“You taking a cut?”

“Not a penny, to re-coin a phrase.”

“Maybe she could use an agent—somebody to push her. You, Pat, you seem like a nice well-mannered guy, but I don’t get much feeling of
push
. Hustle—there’s no substitute. With a girl’s looks, you don’t have all day. Sorry, Essie, if I sound like a cynical shit.”

“No, no. I know. Do you think I should leave high school and come to New York now?”

“No, Jesus. Get your diploma. You’ll probably be needing it, to get an honest job. You’re not even legal yet, are you?”

“Not until Valentine’s Day.” This was January, the Middle Atlantic region having been hit two days before by a great snowstorm. What had been a picture postcard in Basingstoke, where the hemlock boughs were bent low over the sidewalks and the chickadees hopped in the tracery of grapevines and Locust Street chimed from end to end with the scraping of snow shovels, was in New York an icy ashy slush the traffic churned with broken chains and angry claxons. Yet there was for Essie also something secretive and radiant about the storm’s aftermath here, like light and cool morning air sneaking in across the windowsill. Spots of pure snow were still tucked in basement doorways and windowboxes and in fine straight lines on fire escapes. Dirty plowed snow was mountainously heaped along the curbs, burying the trash cans, and people had worn a narrow wobbling path like a forest trail, carrying their expensive parcels and wearing their expensive clothes. She loved it when it snowed in the movies—so richly, barrels of Lux flakes—and it was like that here. West Nineteenth Street seemed a brownstone village street, everybody’s breath visible and lemon-yellow dog pee scribbled in the snow among the cigarette butts. She even liked the scratchy coldy feeling she had in her throat from rising so early this morning and getting snow in her galoshes and thinking,
Dear God, don’t let me have such a bad cold I fall apart, let me be a grown-up who just rides a cold through
, as she rode the train north through the transformed New Jersey landscape, restored by the blizzard to a gently rolling land of villages with smoking chimneys.

“Almost there,” Wexler said. “You have a nice birthday, young lady. Take care of that face. Don’t go playing hardball with any wild pitchers.”

But in fact he didn’t wait; a couple of possibilities came in—demonstrating a floor-waxing machine at a housewares show at the Sixty-eighth Street Armory, and a Bloomingdale’s ad showing a group of girls modelling the daring new Bikinistyle bathing suit—for which Wexler thought Essie would be right, and by May she had become a veteran of riding the train, of getting off at Penn Station, of moving through the subway with its girder-rattling expresses and gum machines and newspaper stands and subterranean vaults, grimy expanses warmed by thousands of daily bodies. Her senior year—its basketball games where she and other cheerleaders ran out onto the floor to do the choo-choo, its weekly exams and quarterly report cards, its rasping of buzzers and slamming of metal locker doors, its herd aroma of girls’ drugstore perfume and boys’ Vitalis and sweat, its furtive cigarettes and furious hissed gossip of she-said and he-said and who-said, its juggling of boys and promises, its parked cars heated by a running engine and lit by a feeble dashboard glow, its class play in April (
A Change of Heart
, in which she played the mother, long-suffering Mrs. Dunlap), its May Court (she was not elected queen or even maid of honor but one of the five so-called ladies-in-waiting), its prom (she went with Jamie Ingraham, though they had broken up in April, and he kept saying how much he wanted to marry her if his parents would agree until in the back of the car she leaned back and lifted up all those scratchy petticoats and let him fuck her, which shut him up), its feeling of a sheltering world shredding and wearing thin, of her girlhood ending—all this seemed a lesser reality, like Rodney Street when she came out of the Roxie.

She moved to New York in June. Patrick had done some asking around and decided that the best place for her would be at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, at Sixty-third Street
and Lexington. The rooms were pink and green and the bathrooms were at the far end of the halls. Big butch elevator operators kept the men and boys that thronged the lobby from getting into the upper floors, but there was no system for keeping the girls from spending the night out of their rooms. Essie in the next year and a half had a number of boyfriends—some her age, some older and married, and one rich besotted Iranian playboy attached to the United Nations—but it was the female friendships at the Barbizon that she thought of when she looked back on this transitional period. In Basingstoke she had missed having female friends, once Loretta Whaley and she had drifted apart in their junior year, Essie tugged one way by her lessons and ambitions and Loretta tugged another, down into virtual marriage to Eddie Bacheller, her steady since tenth grade. From the way the couple acted they had already joined their parents’ generation, with its bowling alleys and Saturday-night blowouts and its way at parties of the men clustering on one side of the kitchen and the women on the other. Loretta talked of just the kind of house and car they would have, and how many children, and where they would go on vacations. She even turned dowdy, her hair all in split ends and her nails ragged, and tough, making a chewing motion with her jaw even when she didn’t have gum in her mouth: a lazy coarseness of manner spread to her skin. Essie knew that, however tough she must make herself inside, the Wilmot fineness was her ticket out of Basingstoke—that, and a greenhouse freshness. Another reason that she hadn’t had a lot of close high-school friends was the number of hours after school and on the weekends that she had spent in the greenhouse, moving through its sultry white light, inhaling its moist, oxygen-rich air, greeting and assisting customers, carrying trays of seedlings and sprouting cuttings
from one table to another in the constant rotation the miniature climate demanded, from warmer to cooler areas, from northern to southern exposures. At the Barbizon she found another hothouse, of young women in bloom; humid confidences and gushed news about men and clothes, waitressing jobs, and
must
movies were shared from mouth to ear to mouth until it seemed the building had a single, female nervous system, vibrating each morning through the stacked floors to the same smell of coffee and the clanking of depleted shower pipes, flooding the halls with evening perfume as the girls swirled out on stiletto heels to their dates,
jeunes filles en fleur
menstruating on a single merged cycle and turning over in unison in the dead of the night as they rose through the gauze of their dreams and sank back again. It seemed to Essie that for this interval the terrible responsibility she carried, of being herself, was shared—diluted in giggles and laughter and childish pranks performed in pajamas and flimsy underwear.