Re: Blank Sheet Music For English Horn Lon Vinger
Rocki Stenger
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake,country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnightevaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-grey atthe bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered inthe sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, tinderydust blew into my eyes and down my throat.
I knew something was wrong with me that summer, becauseall I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'dbeen to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanginglimp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'dtotted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside theslick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.
Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girllives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poorshe can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship tocollege and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends upsteering New York like her own private car.
Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I justbumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from partiesto my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus. I guess Ishould have been excited the way most of the other girls were,but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and veryempty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dullyalong in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
We had all won a fashion magazine contest, by writingessays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs, and as prizesthey gave us jobs in New York for a month, expenses paid, andpiles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passesto fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensivesalon and chances to meet successful people in the field of ourdesire and advice about what to do with our particularcomplexions.
I still have the make-up kit they gave me, fitted out for aperson with brown eyes and brown hair: an oblong of brownmascara with a tiny brush, and a round basin of blueeye-shadow just big enough to dab the tip of your finger in, andthree lipsticks ranging from red to pink, all cased in the samelittle gilt box with a mirror on one side. I also have a whiteplastic sun-glasses case with coloured shells and sequins and agreen plastic starfish sewed on to it.
I realized we kept piling up these presents because it was asgood as free advertising for the firms involved, but I couldn't becynical. I got such a kick out of all those free gifts showering onto us. For a long time afterwards I hid them away, but later,when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still havethem around the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, andlast week I cut the plastic starfish off the sun-glasses case for thebaby to play with.
These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on thesun-roof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keepup their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talkedwith one of them, and she was bored with yachts and boredwith flying around in aeroplanes and bored with skiing inSwitzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil.
Girls like that make me sick. I'm so jealous I can't speak.Nineteen years, and I hadn't been out of New England exceptfor this trip to New York. It was my first big chance, but here Iwas, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like somuch water.
I'd never known a girl like Doreen before. Doreen camefrom a society girls' college down South and had bright whitehair standing out in a cotton candy fluff round her head andblue eyes like transparent agate marbles, hard and polished andjust about indestructible, and a mouth set in a sort of perpetualsneer. I don't mean a nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterioussneer, as if all the people around her were pretty silly and shecould tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to.
Doreen singled me out right away. She made me feel I wasthat much sharper than the others, and she really was wonderfullyfunny. She used to sit next to me at the conference table,and when the visiting celebrities were talking she'd whisperwitty sarcastic remarks to me under her breath.
Her college was so fashion-conscious, she said, that all thegirls had pocket-book covers made out of the same material astheir dresses, so each time they changed their clothes they had amatching pocket-book. This kind of detail impressed me. Itsuggested a whole life of marvellous, elaborate decadence thatattracted me like a magnet.
'What are you sweating over that for?' Doreen lounged onmy bed in a peach silk dressing-gown, filing her long, nicotine-yellownails with an emery board, while I typed up the draft ofan interview with a best-selling novelist.
'You know old Jay Cee won't give a damn if that story's intomorrow or Monday.' Doreen lit a cigarette and let the smokeflare slowly from her nostrils so her eyes were veiled. 'Jay Cee'sugly as sin,' Doreen went on coolly. 'I bet that old husband ofhers turns out all the lights before he gets near her or he'd pukeotherwise.'
Jay Cee was my boss, and I liked her a lot, in spite of whatDoreen said. She wasn't one of the fashion magazine gusherswith fake eyelashes and giddy jewellery. Jay Cee had brains, soher plug-ugly looks didn't seem to matter. She read a couple oflanguages and knew all the quality writers in the business.
I tried to imagine Jay Cee out of her strict office suit andluncheon-duty hat and in bed with her fat husband, but I justcouldn't do it. I always had a terribly hard time trying toimagine people in bed together.
Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies Iever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenlydidn't think they had anything to teach me. I fitted the lid onmy typewriter and clicked it shut.
They imported Betsy straight from Kansas with her bouncingblonde pony-tail and Sweetheart-of-Sigma-Chi smile. Iremember once the two of us were called over to the office ofsome blue-chinned TV producer in a pin-stripe suit to see if wehad any angles he could build up for a programme, and Betsystarted to tell about the male and female corn in Kansas. She gotso excited about that damn corn even the producer had tears inhis eyes, only he couldn't use any of it, unfortunately, he said.
'We'll just go till we get sick of it,' Doreen told me, stubbingout her cigarette in the base of my bedside reading-lamp, 'thenwe'll go out on the town. Those parties they stage here remindme of the old dances in the school gym. Why do they alwaysround up Yalies? They're so stoo-pit!'
Buddy Willard went to Yale, but now I thought of it, whatwas wrong with him was that he was stupid. Oh, he'd managedto get good marks all right, and to have an affair with someawful waitress on the Cape by the name of Gladys, but hedidn't have one speck of intuition. Doreen had intuition. Everythingshe said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of myown bones.
Doreen looked terrific. She was wearing a strapless whitelace dress zipped up over a snug corset affair that curved her inat the middle and bulged her out again spectacularly above andbelow, and her skin had a bronzy polish under the paledusting-powder. She smelled strong as a whole perfume store.
I wore a black shantung sheath that cost me forty dollars. Itwas part of a buying spree I had with some of my scholarshipmoney when I heard I was one of the lucky ones going to NewYork. This dress was cut so queerly I couldn't wear any sort of abra under it, but that didn't matter much as I was skinny as aboy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on thehot summer nights.
The city had faded my tan, though. I looked yellow as aChinaman. Ordinarily, I would have been nervous about mydress and my odd colour, but being with Doreen made meforget my worries. I felt wise and cynical as all hell.
When the man in the blue lumber shirt and black chinos andtooled leather cowboy boots started to stroll over to us fromunder the striped awning of the bar where he'd been eyeing ourcab, I didn't have any illusions. I knew perfectly well he'd comefor Doreen. He threaded his way out between the stopped carsand leaned engagingly on the sill of our open window.
The laughter should have warned me. It was a kind of low,know-it-all snicker, but the traffic showed signs of movingagain, and I knew that if I sat tight, in two seconds I'd bewishing I'd taken this gift of a chance to see something of New Yorkbesides what the people on the magazine had planned out for usso carefully.
'How about it, Doreen?' the man said, smiling his big smile.To this day I can't remember what he looked like when hewasn't smiling. I think he must have been smiling the wholetime. It must have been natural for him, smiling like that.
The man laughed and left us on the kerb and went back andhanded a bill to the driver in the middle of a great honking andsome yelling, and then we saw the girls from the magazinemoving off in a row, one cab after another, like a wedding partywith nothing but bridesmaids.
He was the type of fellow I can't stand. I'm five feet ten in mystocking feet, and when I am with little men I stoop over a bitand slouch my hips, one up and one down, so I'll look shorter,and I feel gawky and morbid as somebody in a side-show.
For a minute I had a wild hope we might pair off accordingto size, which would line me up with the man who had spokento us in the first place, and he cleared a good six feet, but he wentahead with Doreen and didn't give me a second look. I tried topretend I didn't see Frankie dogging along at my elbow and satclose by Doreen at the table.
It was so dark in the bar I could hardly make out anythingexcept Doreen. With her white hair and white dress she was sowhite she looked silver. I think she must have reflected theneons over the bar. I felt myself melting into the shadows likethe negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.
Ordering drinks always floored me. I didn't know whiskyfrom gin and never managed to get anything I really liked thetaste of. Buddy Willard and the other college boys I knew wereusually too poor to buy hard liquor or they scorned drinkingaltogether. It's amazing how many college boys don't drink orsmoke. I seemed to know them all. The farthest BuddyWillard ever went was buying us a bottle of Dubonnet, whichhe only did because he was trying to prove he could besthetic in spite of being a medical student.
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