The Receptionist (11 page)

Meanwhile, the slide of Evan’s career at the magazine continued. I could see how completely it was in eclipse by the look of amused disgust with which Ivy told of his having “practically ordered” her to have drinks with him—
“
twice!” Her tales of nightmarish scenes of too many martinis, weavings into and out of cabs, and narrow escapes from his clutches, at the Algonquin and afterward, made it only too apparent.

Finally, when the strain Evan put on his drawing account burst even
Th
e
New Yorker
’s generous bounds, he was asked to vacate the premises. For several tipsy days he continued, defiantly, to come in, but under a court order, he ceased doing even that. A moving company packed his belongings and shipped them to him. Painters came in with fresh white paint, and within a week, it was as if Evan Simm had never been. His career at the magazine over, a large part of his life must have ended with it. He labored on, one doesn’t know how, until 2004, when Cornell announced his name on its annual list of alumni deaths.

I now see that my conviction, during my affair with Evan, that I was in a preengagement phase of a relationship that was leading inevitably to marriage, children, and a station wagon in Connecticut was an illusion. Nor am I so deluded as to imagine I ever truly loved Evan. What caused searing pains to shoot from my chest through my head and made me come home nights and fall, scotch bottle in hand, into a butterfly chair dyed a revolting shade of bright terra-cotta was the sense that I had become part of a dumb blond cliché. Phrases like
fallen woman, seduced and abandoned, damaged goods, no respect in the morning,
all the tired claptrap of the worst scenarios of the cheapest novels and grade-B Hollywood pictures, tormented me. Had I been privy to just a little more perspective, I would have recognized it as the stuff of much better literature and music as well: of
Les liaisons dangereuses, Tess of the Durbervilles,
fully half of the best blues songs ever written, many a grand opera, and many a fine play (including a couple by William Shakespeare, though he usually fixed his up with a wedding in act 5). Even so, if I had realized sooner that what was injured in me by Evan’s treachery was not my heart but a totally immature girl’s vanity, it might have stung a good deal less, and I would have been much less likely to spin myself into the spiral of promiscuity that followed.

P
ARTY
G
IRL

B
EGINNING WITH MY DISCOVERY
of Evan’s betrayal in November 1959 and lasting well beyond Easter into May 1960, my love life became a disaster area.
Th
is only exacerbated my self-hatred, which reached new heights—no, depths—after Evan. What does the disintegrating self look like? In my case, it looked a lot like fun. If only the self-condemnation could have been severed from the deed.

A degrading pattern emerged: a round of partying, always ending in the same way, a drink too far, a one-night stand.
Th
en, dismaying me further, a growing list of my onetime sex partners came back for more, going so far as to precede mattress acrobatics with dinner and a show. In other words, they liked me better than I thought they should.

No longer able to consider myself a credible ingenue (is that polite stagespeak for
virgin
?), or at any rate an inexperienced naïf, I began acting out the role of the party girl/woman of the world. One of the props I added was the short amber cigarette holder I acquired in Europe, using it as a filter between me and the unfiltered Pall Malls I favored—the very prop Professor Morgan Blum accused me of
writing
with when he read my first attempt at a novel. I kept the Pall Malls in an Italian leather case and lit them with a silver propane lighter acquired in Europe, too, courtesy of my sophisticator in chief, Frank Cucci.

I met Frank before my discovery of Evan’s treachery, even before I moved up to the art department, but in my new world-weary guise, I was able to draw on much that I learned under his tutelage. A more finely featured version of Frankie Avalon, with a brand-new Harvard degree in comparative lit, Frank was whiling away the time as he waited for his mandatory two years in the service to begin—he’d asked for an army posting to either Germany or the Far East. So he took a menial job in the mail room at
Th
e New Yorker,
an amusing item, he figured, on the jacket copy of his first novel. Presently he was dancing circles around the aged Mr. O’Leary and Gus from Queens, the doddering and highly inefficient pair who made up the core of the mail room “force.” Finishing his chores betimes, Frank spent quarter hour after quarter hour AWOL from the mail room and in the back reaches of the eighteenth floor.

Th
ere, I hung out at the world’s least busy reception desk, across the way from Betty Guyer, the fashion department assistant, who also had long lag times between the big shows, spring and fall, and the Christmas shopping column. We played games of B for Botticelli that went on for days. It finally took some devious twists of the truth for Frank to fox me on the composer of “
Th
e Star-Spangled Banner.” He insisted it was Puccini and brought me a score from
Madama Butterfly
to prove it. Outfoxed!

Frank was fun and I was crazy about him, but puzzled over his clear signaling that ours was to be a brother-sister relationship. I decided he was self-conscious about his height, though he seemed fine with our going out together, me rising ever so slightly over him in my heels. Frank was determined on “wising me up” to the delights of the Big Apple. He said he got a kick out of showing the Iowa girl the bright lights of the city. Our blowout the night before he left for Germany was a doozy. His posting had come through, for West Berlin, over which he was ecstatic. An opera fan, he knew he’d be going to a town crawling with concert halls and three opera companies, not to mention Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble.

Th
at evening began with straight-up martinis at the bar of the Charles French Café in the Village, followed by veal piccata at Marta’s.
Th
en a taxi up to the old Met and a pair of aisle seats to Maria Callas’s second-ever Met
Tosca,
from row B of the orchestra. We wound up the evening—the early morning, actually—with Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer at the Blue Note.

What an evening! What a hangover!

But Frank did not stop at educating me into culture in New York only. He corresponded faithfully from his new spot in Berlin, heard all about my romance with Evan, insisted on booking my hotel in the Berlin portion of my grand tour and handling all the tickets for our three operas and one recital during my four days there. (
Th
e Brecht theater, alas, would be dark on the dates I would be there.)

I last saw Frank Cucci walking on the Brooklyn Promenade one windy day in the March following our Berlin escapade. Catching the merest flick of a glance, which could have been Frank seeing me out of the corner of his eye, I flashed on how I would smile in delight, how he would introduce me to his companion, how the elegant man would bend slightly toward me as if he were going to raise my hand to kiss it or simply brush it lightly with his lips. Frank would ask me to lunch with him the following week . . .

But none of it happened.
Th
ey were abreast of me for a moment, only yards away, but they walked on, never slowing by a hairbreadth.

Th
e scene persisted in my mind long after it had faded from my vision. Something about the way they had walked together, seeming to share a secret, made me realize the truth. Frank, I saw now, played for the other team, as we put it back then. I lost so many simpatico beaux that way. Made me, on occasion, feel and behave like a sore loser.

After the Promenade incident I was not surprised never to hear from him again.

I’d had a letter of stinging rebuke Frank sent when he heard I’d swallowed my pride and gone back to dating Evan again, even after his deception was exposed. I’d also hinted at the turn I was taking as slut of the year in the wake of it. Is this what all his careful mentoring had come to? he wrote. He was furious, he was let down. He was through.

But most broken relationships have codas, and ours was no exception. In 1983 I nearly jumped out of my chair as I watched the credits of a much-hyped made-for-tv movie called
Svengali.
It was adapted from the du Maurier novel
Trilby
and written, I discovered, by Frank Cucci. Peter O’Toole played Svengali, and his young protégée was played by a plump Jodie Foster, just out of Yale and still recovering from the trauma of John Hinckley Jr. Neither actor was up to form, and the whole enterprise seemed weighted down by a ponderous and pretentious script.

I felt bad for Frank then, and again when I looked him up on the Web recently and learned that he had two or three other screen and television credits, each effort dominated by big-name stars doing flop turns. His date of death was given as July 1989. He would have been fifty-four years old. Just barely.

Meanwhile, back in 1959, Gotham’s newest party girl put lemon in the rinse to lighten the blond in her hair, added a touch of shadow to the lids of vaguely Egyptian-looking mascara-outlined eyes. My long ponytail was looped winsomely over one shoulder, and my earlobes were adorned with gold or silver hoops or chunky clasp earrings of the kind favored by Eve Arden and Joan Crawford in
Mildred Pierce.
My partying mates (whose names have been changed) were a high-caliber assortment—they made, I thought, for a nice variety.
Th
ere was Maury, the Village Democratic activist, a well-brought-up, ambitious Jewish boy, an Ed Koch with testosterone, who was so proud of his erection that he lit a candle to it and posed it above his upright organ as he marched into my bedroom for more.
Th
ere was Bob M., an up-and-coming editor at Random House, very popular with other guys and with women, too—he was small and wiry, sort of a Steve McQueen without the cool. We never made it in bed, however, his amorous intent undone by his heavy drinking.
Th
e others drank also, but not to the point of incapacitation—which may have been Bob’s unconscious design.

Th
ere was the friend of my friend Gloria, another Jewish lad—these boys were notably more aggressive lovers than their Gentile counterparts, and good at it, too—whom I shall call Saul, who liked to go out for cream cheese and lox after intercourse.
Th
ere was the best-looking Ivy Leaguer in my stable, a Jack Kennedy look-alike from the architecture school at Yale who took me to a party in Princeton. All momentum, either for our tryst or for the party, was spoiled by an endless train ride. In a hot railcar that spent a great deal of time on a siding, my date began to assess all the ways in which my costume, haircut, makeup, and midwestern manners fell short of the Ivy League hottie he would have liked to be bringing to the party. It was, once we got there, not a success. Nor, when we got back to my apartment late that night, was it the long-lasting romp usual to the men of my acquaintance or—why deny it—to me?

In late February I went to a party in the staff lounge at one of the large hospitals in the city, given to celebrate the engagement of a male intern to a female resident.
Th
ere I met an Anglo-Italian doctor. Marco, handsome and otherwise extremely fit, had lost one leg below the knee. He had been a paratrooper, and his plane was shot down on the eastern front as he prepared to make a routine jump, the final one of hundreds he’d made in World War II. I got drunk, and we wound up in bed in one of the private patient suites. Marco was not connected any longer to the New York hospital whose hospitality we were enjoying, his career having taken him, some months before, to a position as staff surgeon at a hospital in another Middle Atlantic state.

He came up to New York for our dates on a weekly basis. In a sublime act of insouciance he would unstrap his prosthesis and hop into bed, where the loss of his lower limb impeded his lovemaking not a whit. Marco was frank about his hedonism, as about everything else. Uncircumcised, and proud of it—he thought the intact foreskin intensified his pleasure—he never used a condom, said it was like making love through a sock. He convinced me that it was not necessary to practice contraception, since as a physician he was well enough versed in the physical signs of ovulation not to impregnate me.

We dined out a good deal and, after the first two weekends or so, took to choosing ever larger and noisier restaurants as it became convenient to let other people hold the conversation for us. Our own conversation had disappointed each of us in different ways. I complained that he told me too many times how he had interned in Paris and fixed up Errol Flynn so he could go on swashbuckling his way through Europe and Hollywood without incurring further paternity suits. He said I told him too many times how much I liked reading Henry James. We got on together not at all well. One cold night in March, after a weekend in a hotel, spent chiefly quarreling over why we were there, he discovered I had missed a period, examined me briefly, and determined that I was indeed pregnant. Not to worry. He was a physician, wasn’t he?

After that, he went away for a spell and wrote me a long letter confessing that he could not make “an honest woman” of me because he was already married. His letter explained that in fact his knocked-up wife’s posse of brothers had all but waved shotguns in his face to ensure that he made one of
her.
I did not doubt it had been her advanced stage of pregnancy that had quickened his interest in our rendezvousing in New York. Now that this avenue of release was becoming complicated, he refused to become either contrite or falsely seductive. He wrote that he was prepared to administer a perfectly safe medication that would induce a miscarriage and that he intended to do so the next time he could get a weekend off.

Several more weeks went by. A letter from Marco announced that his wife had delivered a healthy baby, a daughter. Late in the first week of the next month, a “medical emergency” presented him the opportunity for a trip to New York, and on May 6 he arrived and the medication was administered. Upon his advising me to seek diversion while it “worked,” we went to see
Th
e Man with the Green Carnation,
the Oscar Wilde movie with Peter Finch, then playing at the Plaza. I got home just in time to hemorrhage. Marco offered to come back up if there were complications, but there were none.

Soon, there was Barry, the (to me) really attractive type of older man, gray at the temples, in well-cut tweeds. Barry got more of an ego boost than he should have from his famous dad. His father, a Broadway lyricist, had once written a hit song with Yip Harburg. Barry took me to the theater and dinner at El Morocco, which was handy because his rather elegantly furnished bachelor pad with the mirror over the fireplace was just upstairs. He had shared it until earlier that year with his now ex-wife, a TV anchorwoman. A man in mourning really, Barry was sterile, though far from impotent. His unreachable sadness over this was a revelation to me: it turned out that men, as well as most women, yearned for offspring. Myself, that spring, not so much.

Th
at was about it for lovers between Evan’s two-timing me and my next long-term beau Fritz’s coming along. Oh, no, I am forgetting my
New Yorker
pal “Seth,” who took me to a New Year’s Eve party given by A. J. Liebling and Jean Stafford. Afterward, Seth fed me enough coffee at his place to make it OK in his gentlemanly opinion for us to go to bed. My headache the next morning was monumental. I got home just in time in the late afternoon to be reminded by the doorbell of a date with Barry, who came in for some hair of the dog and of course some time in the sack.

It was this disheartening period of my life and these
characters that I depicted—though without a trace of
understanding or compassion for anyone involved—in that discarded novel. Professor Blum had it right: why would I ask any reader to waste time with them?

Th
e good thing about this period of acting out, this
radical excursion outside my own comfort zone, was that it precipitated a crisis of faith. I had fallen away from the Sunday-school brand of Lutheranism that I had practiced when living at home and on weekend visits back there. I skipped religious observances while at the university, where, frankly, it was very unhip to attend church or, John Berryman’s classes excepted, to take seriously the presence in the universe of a Creator or of the individual moral conscience. I arrived in New York completely rudderless.
Th
at moment to which Saint John of the Cross was referring when he spoke of “the dark night of the soul” never comes to most of us, not because we experience no comparable state, but because we find it hard to justify the grandeur of the phrase. Philosophers, men of genius, and kings may despair; the rest of us usually just give up hope. For me that moment came one
Th
ursday night or, rather, early one Friday morning in the late spring of my twenty-second year. It came to the crude accompaniment of a scratchy show tune on the phonograph, the crude and automatic motions of a man called Johnny moving mechanically above me. I could not recall how Johnny had come to be there.
Th
is frightened and appalled me. Frank Cucci’s attempts at sophisticating me notwithstanding, I found out, in my long-deferred examination of conscience, that I was not cool and never would be, at least not in the sense of blasé.