Rubyfruit Jungle (19 page)

A bad case of the hots was only one of Rhea’s faults. She was notoriously lazy and connived to get other luckless lowlies to do her job for her, thereby giving her time to file her fingernails and change the color of the polish daily. Mr. Cohen turned a blind eye to her eternal manicure by saying we should be kind to her, after all her mother did kill herself when Rhea was eleven. The situation grew daily more intolerable, and so the mixture of loneliness since Holly left and the irritation at work gave birth to a scheme I was sure would do old Rhea Ratface in. Sunday night I went out with a plastic garbage bag and collected every agreeable specimen of dogshit I could find. I got half a bagful and I carefully twisted the candy-striped red wire and put it next to my briefcase for tomorrow’s labor.

Seven in the morning I was dragging that damn bag through the subway station, up the stairs, and into the square office building streaked with grime, pigeon patties, and car exhaust. By
eight I had feverishly crammed the presents into Rhea’s desk drawers. Then I evacuated by the back stairway and didn’t come back until 9:10.

Rhea was at her desk, Revlon’s Mocha Mist by her right hand, the telephone in her left, chattering away as usual. Mr. Cohen came in with Stella trailing after him at 9:20. Rhea was still on the phone. James and I were working on a book about medieval art when Rhea paraded through the open door, “Really, James, I don’t see why you and Miss Bolt have to sit so close together when you work. Photographs of Flemish churches can’t be that interesting.”

“Rhea, don’t you have some work to do?” James muttered.

“Yes, I was taking a little break. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

She oozed away, thoroughly happy that she had needled her love. Through the open door I could see her plopped at her desk behind the glass partition on the phone again. She hadn’t cracked a desk drawer. The entire morning crept along and she never opened even one drawer.

James and I were having lunch in the office, because we had an enormous amount of copy to cover before the author came in at 3:00. As if sensing we were in a hurry, Stella sashayed into the office and noticed James eating a Hershey almond bar.

“I thought you were on a diet. What’s the matter, are you tired of eggs and tuna fish? You know eggs cause special acids and mucus in your system.”

“No, I didn’t know that but—”

Stella cut him off, “Dave has a little yellow pill that clears it right up. No mucus problems for him. I made him go to the doctor, Dr. Bronstein, the one who says I’m the spitting image of Ruby Keeler. Bronstein says there’s not a thing wrong with Dave but he should take the pill for his drip. You should see the doctor about a diet. I had a friend who went to a special clinic for her weight. All she ate was grapes and watermelon. After three days she felt much lighter. Grapes and watermelon.”

James rallied a smile, after all you can’t tell the boss’s wife to fuck off. “I loathe watermelon, although I like them pickled.”

“Yes, I like pickled watermelons, too, Did you ever have mushmelons? I like those a lot. I bought a mushmelon before Dave left for Chicago. When did he go there? September? Well, I bought a mushmelon in September, but it wasn’t ripe so I put it in my refrigerator and as soon as it got ripe I ate it. I ate a little bit of it each day. It was wonderful not to have to cook for Dave and just pick at mushmelon. He’s so fussy that it’s a relief when he goes on these little trips. Our refrigerator is full of oranges. He won’t drink anything but freshly-squeezed orange juice. Today I was naughty and reveled in not washing out the squeezer.” James looked up wearily from a colored photograph of Henry the II’s heaven cloak and started again to try to indicate she should leave but Stella shifted into second gear and ran him down: “Mr. Cohen has to have his orange juice fresh and everything just so. He won’t sit down to the table if I put luncheon napkins next to his plate when he has breakfast. I
have to keep three sizes of napkins around the house to please him. We bought new cereal bowls and he complained that I gave him too much cereal, so I had to pour the cereal in the old bowl then pour it in the new bowl in front of him before he was satisfied. But coffee brings out the worst in him. He is pickier about his coffee than he is about these manuscripts.”

“That’s impossible,” James asserted.

“Ha. If you think he’s hard as a boss, you should live with him.” Stella, realizing what she had said, took a step back and peeped around the door to make certain no one had heard such blasphemy. “James, I have to grind the beans myself for him. First, I have to run after him with orange juice. Then he sits at the table and inspects the napkins and demands to see the cereal measured. Then he demands his coffee and each morning there’s something wrong with it. After all this activity it’s 9:10 and he says to me, ‘Hurry up, we’ll be late,’ and I haven’t even had a cup of coffee or orange juice myself.” As she inhaled for a refueling we were saved by an earsplitting shriek from behind the glass partition.

“Shit! Shit! My desk is full of shit. Every drawer has turds and crap and yuk in it.”

From down at the end of the longest corridor in the office’s dull grid structure you could hear running feet. People swarmed out of their cubicles which had pictures of Chiquita banana on the wall. In the press by Rhea’s desk, her photograph of Rhett Butler was rubbed off the wall.

Stella blustered to the front of the mob. “Rhea, what terrible language, what’s the …” Before
she could finish she was rendered speechless for the first time in her long life by the sight of all that carefully arranged dogshit. The ruckus drew Mr. Cohen out of a conference and he slammed the door behind him for full effect. The crowd parted for their patriarch like the Red Sea.

“What the hell is going on out here? Rhea, what’s the matter with you?”

Rhea, her face bloated with rage, spat out, “My desk is full of dogshit.”

David Cohen with impeccable logic answered in a calm, fatherly voice, “But that’s impossible. There are no dogs in this office.”

Stella nudged her husband’s shoulder. “Look in her desk, Dave.”

He briefly glanced toward the drawers, turned his head and bent over for a second look then he said to his wife in a little voice, “But that’s impossible.”

Stella held her ground, “Impossible or not, her desk is filled with dog … uh, droppings.”

“This must be someone’s idea of a joke,” Dave concluded. “Whoever did this should apologize to Rhea immediately and clean up this mess.” Silence. Utter silence. “Maybe it’s one of the Puerto Ricans in the shipping room. It’s absurd to think anyone in the front office would do such a thing.” Armed with his new conclusion, fortified with the knowledge that men who don’t wear coats and ties are capable of any crime, he turned on his heel and started for shipping. From the shipping room we could hear excited voices in Spanish. David Cohen came back looking confused and angry.

“All right. Back to work, people. This is a publishing house not a circus. The janitor will clean up this mess.”

Rhea by the time of the boss’s return had worked up a good cry. Melted by the sight of this unfortunate in tears, Mr. Cohen gave her the rest of the day off. James and I had settled back over the manuscript when Rhea came in.

“It was you, Molly. I know it was you. Only a lesbian would stoop to such a thing. Did you know that, James? Your girlfriend is a dyke. She told me so herself. But you’re even lower than a lesbian, Molly Bolt. You’re a lesbian who steals men!” As she was ranting and waving her arms her pocketbook, which was half open, opened all the way when she had it on the upswing and her bag of wares rained on the floor. For a lazy girl she moved fast but not fast enough. James had picked up her birth control pills.

“Give me those.”

“Delighted to, dear Rhea, but don’t take them on my account.”

Hell hath no fury like a woman who has been told she doesn’t need her daily dosage of uterine cancer by the man she loves. Rhea took a swing at James with her full-loaded and prudently-closed purse. He ducked and she gave up with another earsplitting shriek and ran out the door directly into Polina Bellantoni, author of
The Creative Spirit of the Middle Ages
, who was right on time for her afternoon appointment. James and I broke for the door where we each took an arm and raised the woman to her feet.

Polina Bellantoni was firm of flesh, at least her arm was in good shape. She was forty-one years
old, had been married twenty years, had mothered a child who was sixteen and had managed to raise the daughter while completing her Ph.D. in Babylonian underpants for Columbia University. Currently, she was teaching at Columbia having left ancient fashions for medieval studies. Polina’s hair was blue-black with strands of perfect, electric gray and her eyes were a soft brown. Wrinkles played around those eyes and made her look both knowing and beautiful. I realized in a flash that men were total fools to put middle-aged women out to pasture for a smooth and boring strawberry face. I don’t know about love at first sight, but I decided right then and there to bridge the generation gap. Somehow, someway, someday I was going to love this married lady with the sixteen-year-old daughter and camelback trucks filled with remnants of archaic undies.

Every two weeks Polina showed up at the office. She was the nervous type and double-checked everything that James and I did. This drove James right up the wall, so I volunteered to take care of matters. Every other Thursday Polina and I went over manuscript changes, photographs and captions. She was impressed that I was so careful with her work and amazed that I was going to school while working full-time. On her fourth visit she asked me if I’d like to have dinner with her family.

On the night of the dinner I showed up in the best clothes I could piece together. She lived in a spacious apartment overlooking Morningside Heights. After meeting me at the door she deposited me in the living room with her husband, while she went back to the kitchen. Mr. Bellantoni
treated me like a student, giving me those fatherly smiles and calculated pauses in his delivery. You’re supposed to smile during those pauses. He had earned his Ph.D. in art history. His original thesis was cataloging cows in nineteenth century French paintings and he had expanded this original interest to a thorough knowledge of cows in Western art. This very summer he had been invited to deliver the definitive paper on this subject to a group of his esteemed colleagues at Cambridge, England. Soon, he confided, leaning over to draw me into his words, he would begin his greatest project: cows in Indian art—a long smoldering passion.

He was forty-nine, paunchy, with sagging red cheeks already betraying age spots. I forgot his name. But Alice, the daughter of the cow man and the underpants woman was unforgettable. Her complexion radiated sweetness and her almond eyes were a pure, piercing green. Alice’s hair hung down to her ass and changed from brown to honey to ash at the tips. Her large breasts stood straight out without benefit of a bra. Alice was a Renaissance princess come back to life.

Polina was delighted that her daughter and I could talk. Mostly we talked about Janis Joplin, the Moody Blues and Aretha Franklin—things Polina never heard about other than to yell at Alice to turn her stereo down. Polina rarely left Babylon except to vacation in the tenth century. But on those sparse moments when she peeked into the present, she seemed to enjoy me.

Polina asked her husband questions throughout our meal to try to get him to act alive but mouth to mouth couldn’t have revived him. After
dinner he wandered back into his den, the obligatory pipe dangling out of his mouth.

The three of us sat around a brass coffee table. Polina told me about Hrosvitha, a tenth-century German nun who wrote plays in crystal clear Latin. She played with Alice’s hair and continued her tale of the nun. Her Latin was as good as Terence’s, the Roman playwright. And that was so pure that no one would believe a woman could write such perfect verse. It was a raging controversy in the medieval scholars’ world, equal to the controversy over black intelligence in the psychology world. There was something pathetic about all that intelligence of hers squandered in the murky past and defined by the dusty priorities of academic life. But she was intelligent, and I had lived long enough to know that’s cause for celebration.

My triumph of the evening was in picking up a copy of Hrosvitha’s “Dulcitius” and reading it right off the page, in cadence.

“That’s lovely. Your Latin is lovely.”

“Thank you. I studied it all through high school and I’m still at it in college. I’m reading Livy and Tacitus these days with a little Attic Greek thrown in for good measure.”

Polina clapped her hands and gave me a bear hug. “No wonder you’ve been so helpful to me! You’re a classics scholar. We’re a rare breed these days, you know. Ever since they took Latin off the compulsory study list in high schools, we’ve been slipping. But I find that only the brightest kids keep on with Latin. That’s good, I guess.”

“Well, I’m not really a classics scholar. I’m
in film studies. I take Latin and Greek for the language credit, but I love them.”

“I hope so. Greek is too difficult to take for laughs. If you’re in film studies, why Latin and Greek?”

“Uh—this may sound funny to you, but Latin especially has helped my ability to discipline myself more than anything I’ve ever studied. It wouldn’t matter what I would do, Latin would help me because it taught me how to think. And Greek, that adds a soaring quality, something that pushed my mind fast. I—well, this must sound stupid to you.”

“No, no, not at all. I think that’s exactly right about Latin teaching you the process of logic, to think, I mean. Too bad a few more of our politicians haven’t studied it.”

Alice was sitting wide-eyed through all this. “Molly, is that true about the Latin or are you buttering the old lady up?” She ribbed her mother and Polina grabbed her hand and held it.

“No. I know it sounds weird but it was the best thing I ever studied. I take that back. Not the best thing, but the most useful.”

Alice moved forward on her seat, “Mom has been at me to take Latin so I did this year. I hate it. But maybe that’s because my teacher is a fossil.”