Men and Angels (32 page)

Ben said he would meet her at the bus terminal. It was unnecessary, but his courtliness pleased both of them; she wouldn’t dream of throwing on it the cold water of democracy or common sense. It was March, and the melting snow ran brilliantly down the long streets. People looked over their shoulders as if they would throw their winter coats into a litter basket if no one was looking.

“Let me tell you about Harriet Brevard,” said Ben. “A woman of parts, as we used to say. Frightfully attractive, very sexy, though not pretty. Not at all like you. I’ve known her, of course, since she was three. We were all together in Paris. Her father made a fortune buying Klees and Legers for five dollars apiece; he filled his attic with them. Very solid, very jolly. Now, my darling, you must be at your singularly most impressive for this lunch. Harriet’s extraordinarily pleased with what you’ve done. She’s thinking of taking you on on a permanent basis. Her father used to do all the research for the exhibits, but he’s a bit past it now. So you mustn’t get girlish and modest when someone says you’ve done good work.”

“It would have been better if you hadn’t told me. Now I’ll be afraid of everything I say.”

“Nonsense, you’ll know that everyone thinks you’re extraordinary. It’ll buck you up no end.”

She couldn’t begin to make Ben understand; if someone told him he was extraordinary, he accepted it as a compliment that was his due, it was, to him, no more than recognition. But to her, it was a treasure she must be suspicious of. It could so easily be spurious, it could so easily be lost.

They passed a famous shoe store on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. A sign was in the window:
2/3 OFF
. Anne stopped and looked. Her eye fell on a pair of green leather boots, soft and low-heeled like riding boots, except that the tops could fold down. Two-thirds off. It was like being at the beach on a fine day; it might never happen again. But probably they wouldn’t have them in her size. Still, they were two-thirds off, and Harriet Brevard might want to hire her.

“Ben, can we stop here a moment?”

“Of course, my darling, we have piles of time.”

He opened the door for her. There were no men like Ben in the world now; if there were, she would have to dislike them.

The shop was as big as a ballroom. Fashionable women walked around as if it were their kitchen. They tried on shoes they couldn’t possibly walk comfortably in, but then, Anne thought, they probably never had to walk very far. The salespeople were blessedly ordinary, shabby even. They looked tired, grumbly, overworked. A woman of about sixty, her hair the color of face powder, walked over to Anne.

“You want something?” she asked in a Middle European accent. Her expression was so pained, it was clear she was hoping Anne didn’t want anything, had wandered in by mistake. It occurred to Anne that the woman looked as if her feet hurt all the time. Surely that was bad for business.

Anne pointed to the boots in the window and told the woman her size. The woman disappeared into the back room with a shake of her head that conveyed that she thought the project was doomed from the start. A few minutes later she returned, carrying a box.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “Not many people wear size eleven.”

The boots slid onto her feet, her legs, like a silk sleeve. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was so pleased with what she saw that she began to blush.

“They do suit you wonderfully,” said Ben.

“How much are they?” she asked the woman.

“Now a hundred twenty-five. At the beginning of the season they were three seventy-five.”

Nearly four hundred dollars. She didn’t spend that much on clothing in two years. Now they were a hundred twenty-five. Still, they were a great extravagance, boots you wouldn’t feel right wearing in the snow. She looked down at her feet. Her heart lifted. What would Michael say? He would want her to have them, but she would see his eyes go worried about the money and she would back down. But it was different now: she had more money. And if Harriet Brevard hired her, she would have even more. What a nice thing money was. It said, you can have this, and this, and this, this you can put against your skin, that in your mouth, and on your feet boots that make you swoon with pleasure. This book is yours, it said, that record. You have all the time in the world, it whispered. Don’t rush, don’t be worried. She hated to say it, she hadn’t believed it, ever in her life, but at this moment she knew it to be true: money made a difference.

“I’ll take them,” she said to the woman whose name, she saw pinned on her jacket, was Solange.

What exalted past had she dropped down from, to be kneeling here, her hair the color of face powder, writing a bill out on her lap?

Harriet Brevard answered the gallery door when they rang the buzzer. She was a tall woman of fifty with short black Japanese hair. Her hands were distractingly large, and as if knowing that and deciding to acknowledge it by drawing more attention to them, she wore a large square emerald the size of a pat of butter.

She shook Anne’s hand and looked her frankly up and down. Anne was glad she was wearing her new boots; she felt they gave her something more to offer.

“You’ve done a remarkable job,” she said. “You’re to be profoundly congratulated. I’ve done a lot of exhibitions, hired a lot of people, and you’ve done the best job I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you, I’ve enjoyed it,” Anne said, forcing herself not to look at the floor.

“Jane said we’re to meet her at the restaurant,” said Harriet. “You’ve got a good press agent there, you know.”

“Jane’s very kind.”

“She’s as tough as a sailor and nobody’s fool. She terrified me for twenty years.”

Anne laughed. “What happened after twenty years?”

“I had a baby. Jane Watson is absolutely dotty about children. Spends a fortune on little sweaters. Well, I couldn’t quite be terrified after that.”

“My son’s in love with her. It’s the first grand passion of his life.”

“How old is he?”

“Nine.”

“My dear, wait till he’s twenty. My son is living with one of his high school teachers. Earth science, whatever that is. I’m chilled to imagine.”

Anne laughed again. “How many children do you have?”

“Two boys. Older than they have any right to be. One’s sailing down the Amazon, finding himself. It drives me mad. What drives me maddest is that they’re out of the house. I miss them dreadfully.”

“You’ve gone on liking them for twenty years?”

“Of course. They’re wonderful people. Who takes care of yours while you work?”

Anne groaned. “It’s a long and dreadful story.”

“You must tell me all about it at lunch. I’m sure I can top it. Cressida,” she called over her shoulder.

One of the young women Anne had lunched with appeared at the door of the back office. She seemed to have shrunk in Harriet’s presence, she was almost shy.

“We’ll be back at two-thirty. Take messages. Dreadful girl,” Harriet said. “They’re all dreadful. Anorexic and ungrammatical. That’s why I want you to come work for me. I always know if I’m going to work well with someone within twenty seconds of meeting them. Don’t you?”

“No,” said Anne. “I’ve come to believe I’m a very bad judge of character.”

“She’s too kind by half,” said Ben.

“Ben, you must stop saying that. You’ve no idea what goes on in my mind.”

“It’s like the way you go on about her being pretty,” said Harriet. “No one wants to be told they’re kind and pretty anymore.”

“Whyever not?” asked Ben.

“Because it makes them seem powerless. As if they ought to be dozing by the fire, wearing a pink ribbon around their necks. People want to be more tigerish nowadays.”

“Harriet’s absolutely right,” said Anne.

“Of course this is all guesswork,” said Harriet. “No one’s ever accused me of being kind. Or pretty. My words are ‘striking,’ and ‘dynamic.’ I think I must come across like a stevedore.”

“Women are never satisfied with their looks,” said Ben.

“Jane is,” said Harriet. “She knows she’s beautiful. But that’s because she’s had Ben for forty years, and he’s told her so often.”

“That’s not why,” said Ben proudly. “It’s because her beauty is so undeniable. She’s the finest woman of her time.”

Jane was waiting outside the restaurant.

“How are you, Harriet?” she said. “Have you told Anne you’re going to hire her?”

“Not yet, but I’m about to.”

“And, of course, Anne, you’ll say yes.”

“I’ll have to hear first, Jane.”

“Nonsense, it’s perfect for you.”

She was right, Anne learned, when Harriet made her offer. She would work in the office three days a week: she would research the exhibits and do the catalogues. Her first job would be to do a complete inventory of the gallery’s holdings. The pay would be small. Ten thousand dollars a year. But she would be free to do more work freelance if she desired.

“So you’ll take it, of course,” said Jane, reading the menu in a slow bored way.

“Of course,” said Anne.

“Bravo,” Ben said. “Let’s order wine.”

They toasted Anne and Harriet. It was luck, Anne thought, once more good luck had brushed her with its tender and enlivening wing. She knew that she had done good work, but many others did and were not so conveniently rewarded.

“I must tell you about my worst
au pair
and then I want to hear your story,” said Harriet. “She was a sculptress from Bennington, in love with a young Algerian man who had come here for a year. She ran up phone bills of hundreds of dollars, which I could never get her to pay. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t feel I could withhold her salary. She just kept saying ‘I can’t pay for that, I don’t have the money.’ But she kept on making the calls. She said she couldn’t help it, whatever that meant. The children hated her. Every time I walked in the door, everyone was screaming and crying. But there was nothing I could do. I had to finish a show. I sat them down at the kitchen table and told them they would simply have to cope for six more weeks and there was nothing else to say.”

“And did they?” asked Anne.

“Of course. They always do.”

“My situation’s so much less bad than that,” Anne said. She told them about Laura’s lurking presence, her eavesdropping, her fanatical cleanliness. To her astonishment, as she told the stories everyone laughed. When she described Laura’s refolding all the paper bags into precisely identical shapes, the three people at the table thought it was hilarious. Anne felt as if she had just been told she could put down the sack of stones she carried around her neck. If she could see Laura’s behavior as ludicrous, perhaps she could be free of her. It was only another two months; if she could just laugh at Laura. She felt as if her friends had introduced her to a new invention, the typewriter or the vacuum cleaner. It was wonderful what they had done for her.

Her mood was high. She decided to phone Ianthe and arrange to go with her to the place where Ianthe got facials and pedicures and where she had her legs waxed. “Just do it once, darling. Just for once cut the brown rice and sleeping-bag motif and indulge yourself. My treat,” Ianthe had said at Christmas.

“What a heavenly idea,” she said when Anne phoned her. “I’ll meet you in an hour. But don’t expect anything glamorous. These people are all business. Very medical, really. I’m sure they did abortions in Budapest in the thirties, in whatever little back rooms they had then. Anyway, darling, it’s all very brutal, but you end up feeling divine.”

To Anne’s astonishment, Ianthe burst into tears when she told her about the job Harriet had offered her. “I don’t think you know what working with you is like,” she said. “Oh, I know, I’m a selfish slut and no doubt I take advantage of you, but, you see, you’re the most perfectly splendid companion. You keep everyone at bay, including my demons, and all the while sailing above things like some beautiful ship, no, like some Van der Goes angel—you know how one sometimes mistakes the look for stupidity, but really it’s this terrific vision. And underneath it all, my dear, dear friend, is a first-rate mind. It’s a terrible loss for me. And then you’ll end up liking Harriet better than me, I know it. I’ve always been madly jealous of her—that emerald, for one thing. Now, promise me upon your children’s lives that you’ll never like her better than me.”

“I promise.”

“Well, you don’t mean it, you’re just humoring me. But it’s all right. By the way, did I tell you I’m fucking Adrian again?”

“After you burned all his clothes?”

“You see, that was my opening gambit. I invited him to Balmain and bought him a whole new wardrobe.”

“You two are so lucky. You just go to bed when you want, and burn each other’s clothes up when you want, and the universe goes on.”

“Now, what is that wistful tone I detect? And why are you suddenly at Gilda’s? If I didn’t know better, I’d say the natives were getting restless.”

“Oh, Ianthe, don’t be ridiculous,” Anne said. “Who would I possibly get involved with?”

“Well, when I’m in the mood, darling, I just pick whoever’s nearest.”

She rang the buzzer of a door, marked
GILDA COSMETOLOGIST
, that looked like any of the other offices on the corridor of what was, after all, an office building. A downtrodden-looking girl wearing a blue kerchief around her head and a nurse’s uniform answered the door silently, her eyes on the floor. She gestured Ianthe to a room off the main one. It was dark and the size of a large walk-in closet. Silently she turned on the light and indicated that Anne and Ianthe should pick up a sheet.

“You strip here, love, and wrap yourself up in this. Just like the gynecologist.”

Inside the main room, fluorescent lights buzzed cruelly and only half lit the area. In the back, a window was opened, and sunlamps shone on the faces of supine women, who looked as though they might be dead. No one spoke. Fortunately, Ianthe knew what to do. She lay down on what looked like a doctor’s examining table, and told Anne to do the same. It was covered with white paper. On the paper were clots of wax the size of half-dollars. “First the legs,” Ianthe said to a woman in her fifties who mysteriously appeared. Her eyebrows were heavily penciled, her eye shadow was electric blue. Through a series of grunts, she indicated that Anne should turn over on her back. Several times the room went utterly silent, then suddenly another woman would appear, massage the face of one of the corpses, and speak to her fellow worker in some Middle European tongue.