Living Room (9 page)

It was the evening that Arthur’s wife, Jane, had invited her to dine with them in Connecticut. They had several local friends in. After dinner, the women clustered together, talking about their
children’s adolescent vicissitudes, the difficulties
of getting good
domestic help, the gossip of suburbia. Shirley longed to join the men at the other side of the room. They had to be talking about
something
that would keep her awake.

Finally, she just excused herself from the domesticities and took her brandy over to the men. To Jane, Arthur’s welcome to Shirley was a bit too effusive. She could see the men laughing in response to something Shirley had said. Jane felt, with some justice, that Shirley’s conversation interested Arthur a great deal more than her own news of Westport charities and social events, and since Shirley was so much younger, and attractive, and was seen by Arthur every working day, Jane could not see why Arthur, from his position of power as head of the firm, did not have an affair with her. She assumed he did, which was incorrect.

When the women finally joined the men, Shirley still held center stage. It was that evening, when the guests had gone, that Jane dubbed Shirley “Ms. George Bernard Pshaw.”

“I think she’s clever,” said Arthur, taking his tie off. He was watching Jane’s expression in the hall mirror.

“Very clever,” said Jane.

Arthur decided it ought to be a long time before Shirley was invited back.

*

Al Chunin had a dream in which the Shirley Hartman he had seen on TV was sitting on a chair in a large room that otherwise had nothing in it. Coming through the door, Al bumped his head on the lintel. He felt too tall, so he stooped as he walked toward her. She raised a hand as if in warning, stopping him dead. Smiling, she then motioned him to take one step forward. Why the hell should he obey her? He took one step, hating himself, he must master her by talk, overwhelm her with a flail of words, wit, facts, flashing insights to put her in her place, but he could not speak. He tried shouting, but no sound came.

He woke from the dream, determined to cancel his Friday
dinner date at Jack and Mary’s, where he was to meet this Shirley Hartman person face to face. He forgot to call until evening of the next day. When he did, the Woods were both out. Their baby sitter answered the telephone.

“Any message?” asked the baby sitter.

“No,” said Al Chunin. He hung up, wondering about the flash of cowardice. It was only a dream. She was only another woman.

*

Shirley was intrigued by the nature of power in office life. The executives of Armon, Caiden, Crouch were always summoned to Arthur’s office. If he ventured into someone else’s office, it had to be a casual drop-in lest it be interpreted as a dimunition of his status. To Shirley, rank seemed ridiculous; hierarchies were for totem poles.

She knew that some women achieved a special status in business through an after-hours connection with someone of rank. Even if she would ever be genuinely passionate about one of the higher ups in the agency—a fantasy beyond belief—she would abstain; any accretion of Shirley Hartman’s power would derive from her skill. But the idea of sex as a means of control continued to prickle through her sometimes mischievous mind.

In the office Shirley now wore short red or orange or yellow dresses that made her look younger than her twenty-eight years. Once, when she caught Arthur staring, she said, “I know Arthur, you’d rather have me wear blue-gray and below the knees, something with a mature look, right? Wrong.”

“Shirley, for all I care you could come to the office naked.”

That remark set Shirley’s mind whirring. She had an idea. An unused idea was a waste. She would not waste this one. She would get Arthur to pay attention.

Later that morning, nervous but determined, she buzzed Arthur on the intercom. “I could come to your office,” she said, “but it
might be preferable if you could come down
here.”

When he knocked and walked in, Shirley was seated behind her desk wearing her glasses and nothing else.

Impeccable Arthur’s clean-shaven WASP face flushed. He didn’t think he should be looking at her breasts, which seemed startlingly perfect, and tried to focus on her face—how could she be so relaxed?—as Shirley removed her glasses and said, “You didn’t mean it, did you?”

“Suppose someone walked in?”

“You just did.”

“I mean someone else.”

“No one walks in here without knocking.”

“You know my policy.”

Ah, Arthur,
she thought,
your policy.
In her first months over drinks, as she and Arthur waited for a client who was late for lunch, Arthur had said, as if he were announcing a slogan, “I never put my penis in my pocketbook,” meaning if he had affairs, which Shirley doubted, they would never be carried on with someone in the office.

“Are you trying to make me, Shirley?”

“I’m trying to make you a good boss.”

“Put your clothes on, please.”

She stood, her pubic hair showing now just above the level of the desk, saluted, and proceeded to dress in front of him, and Arthur, who wanted to look away, couldn’t help the quick glimpse at her buttocks and thinking how unfair God was to give a girl so bright such an attractive body as well.

Finally, slipping her shoes back on, knowing she had him at his weakest moment, she said, “Arthur, I’ve taken a crack at the Ford campaign. I want you to look at it now, before the Plans Board meeting.”

Arthur nodded with a touch of sadness. The inevitable was going to happen. The Ford account couldn’t be saved. And Marvin Goodkin, whose macho was the car account, would use Shirley’s
involvement in that failure to hound her out of the agency. Arthur
wished the game plan weren’t so damn clear.

Shirley had dropped the gauntlet. Arthur went around to her side of the desk, keeping as many inches as he could between his fully clothed body and hers because the memory of her nakedness did not fade with her dressing, and over her shoulder looked at what she had come up with.

CHAPTER NINE

SHIRLEY HARTMAN’S BEST FRIEND was not a
person but a couple. Jack and Mary Wood had fallen in love under Shirley’s auspices while Mary was in her last months at Barnard. He was then a surgical resident, perpetually exhausted from assisting at too many operations, and from the countless indigents at the city hospital who adopted Jack as the young doctor between them and a community that wished them dead and out of the way.

Shirley and Mary took turns putting together meals on short notice or picking up the check for the threesome at some inexpensive joint. More than once Shirley had provided them with a shelter for their lovemaking at her own considerable inconvenience. She was the only witness to their wedding in City Hall four months before Clarence was born, a child with three parents. Shirley accepted the title of godmother with reluctance. Once Jack and Mary settled down, they devoted some small part of each month to trying to make their relationship to Shirley symmetrical by introducing her to a man they thought she would like. Over the years they must have introduced Shirley to more than half a dozen men, always luckless occasions, the last a fiasco named Warner Calley, a surgeon friend of Jack’s who turned out, they learned
from Shirley in dismay, to have a hopeless sexual incompetence.
Thus now a whole year had gone by without introductions and Shirley’s suspicions were quiescent when Mary phoned her at the office and invited her over for dinner Friday evening, a quiet supper “just like in the old days.”

But when Friday came, the exhaustions of the week seemed to have bunched together in Shirley’s shoulders. Home, she wanted only to stretch out and sleep, glad that Dora, the cleaning woman, had left everything in perfect shape.

The bathroom mirror caught her attention. In it, the week’s erosion showed in her face, too, a delta at the outer corner of each eye, a splay of minute lines that rubbed, would not go away. She should wet cotton balls, let the cotton rest on her eyes, lie down, rest, sleep.

She dialed. Jack answered the phone. “Shirley, what the hell are you doing there instead of here?”

“Listen, love, it’s been a tough week. I’m tired and apologizing for finking out. I just can’t make dinner.”

“Let me put Mary on.”

Shirley heard them whispering in the background.

“Please,” Shirley said, her voice straining. “I love you both, but you’ll have to forgive me. This week has been too much.”

“But dinner’s been—”

“Enjoy it.”

“Shirley, it’s nor the dinner. Al will think you ducked on purpose.”

“Who’s Al?”

“Oh God, you weren’t supposed to know till you got here.”

“I thought this was just a family dinner! Who’s Al?”

“An old friend who lives in the exurbs. It takes months of work to lure him to the city. He’s as eccentric as you are.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Come and see.”

“Mary, I thought you two gave up pimping for me as a lost cause.”

“He’s a nice man. I really should have briefed you about him. Al is—”

“Save it, Mary. I’ll find out for myself if I ever meet him. Hon, I have to reconstitute myself as a human being after an impossible week, I can’t possibly—”

In the background, a buzzer grated.

“Your timer’s gone off, Mary.”

“It’s the damn doorbell. Jack is getting it. It’s probably Al.”

“My God, is it that late?”

“I asked you for seven, it’s seven-ten.”

Is it true, Shirley reflected, that more than half of the engagements one made in a lifetime were accommodations to the wishes of people other than oneself, that one bartered so many dates and evenings and visits and weekends for the sake of appeasing people who were supposed to be one’s friends?

“Are you still there?” said Mary.

“Uh huh.”

“If you’re that tired…”

“I’ll come, Mary, but I’ve got to have a half-hour cat nap. Get Al what’s-his-name sloshed in the meantime. Please?”

Shirley sat on the edge of her bed, cursing her capitulation. She had a vision of Shirley Hartman being let out of her cell in the Women’s House of Detention to work, then shut in, being let out to entertain the warden with bright chatter, then shut in again, being let out to straighten out a problem between the black and white inmates, then being shut in, she wouldn’t like jail, she couldn’t take even the shortest term, why then did she give in to these usurpations by the wardens of her life, her friends?

Shirley swung her legs up on the bed. She put the wet cotton balls from the dish beside her bed on her eyes, holding them in place as she lowered herself to horizontal. She felt the ache of her legs and arms and shoulders; was it physical, or boredom and anger? With her eyes closed, she concentrated on the peach-colored blur
of
her own lids.
Mary and Jack with their
unwanted
evening, hatching their plot to casually rustle up, once again, an eligible male. Who needed or wanted life in foursomes? Most people never developed the high pleasure of being happily alone.

*

In the first split second of waking, she was certain the sudden, jarring, insistent ring was her classroom bell, the math hour she detested about to start, but the bell kept ringing and ringing, and terror seized her, it was a fire drill and she had to get out of the building fast and not be crushed beneath the stampeding kids scurrying before the onrushing flames. Awake now, the cotton balls dropped away from her eyes, Shirley saw the great interrupter of adult life, the telephone, jangling away on the night table. She wanted to smother, choke it to silence, but the only way it would stop would be to lift the damn receiver off the cradle, which she did. In the earpiece there was a familiar voice trying to say something.

“I didn’t hear you.”

It was Mary. “You all right?”

Shirley glanced at the clock. Christ, it was after eight o’clock. “I fell asleep. I spoiled your evening.”

“You spoiled nothing, honey. I let it ring seven times. If you’re that tired, you needed the rest. We’re still on our first drink. He’s not much of a drinker. If you don’t like him, Shirley, I’ll take him. You can run
off
with Jack.”

“After all these years with an experienced woman like you, what would Jack do with me?”

“Thanks,” said Mary. “Can you hurry?”

“Sure, hon. I’ll just wash my face, slip a dress on, and grab a cab.”

As she hung up, she could hear Mary’s sigh of relief.

*

She kissed Mary’s cheek, Jack’s cheek, said, “Sorry, sorry,
sorry,” as Jack and Mary parted so that Shirley could see the gangly guest rise from the couch, mostly arms and legs, a praying mantis bringing a thin body up from too deep in the sofa.

He was very tall. “Al Chunin,” he said, holding out his hand from too far away. Mary took his outstretched hand in her left hand and Shirley’s in her right, a bridge between them.