Rubyfruit Jungle (18 page)

“You’re fired, now get outa here. I’m sorry, Sir, this is most unfortunate.” Larry then looked at me and, remembering that Holly and I were friends, added as a postscript, “You can stay, I’m not mad at you.”

Holly whirled around and jacked her foot squarely in Larry’s huge gut. He sailed down the stairs, airborne without a sound until he bombed on the bottom step. She locked my wrist in an iron clasp and announced at the top of her lungs, “If I’m fired, I’m taking my wife with me!”

The uproar was louder than a home run at the World Series. Holly yanked me down the steps and out into the street. She didn’t let go until we had walked to the Lexington Avenue subway. I was a mixture of amazement and laughter.

“You shook the shit out of all of them, but Holly, you told a lie, we’re not married. Now all those nice people will think I’m taken. This is the ruin of my single life.”

She was still too wrought up to be amused. “Shut up and come home with me.”

“I can’t. I have to get up early tomorrow and go to the library to do some research on D. W. Griffith. Come down to my place.”

“Go to that dump?”

“Well, I’m in it so close your eyes to the rest.”

“All right, but don’t wake me up when you go to the library.”

We rode down to the apartment in silence. The crosstown at Union Square took forever so we walked down Fourteenth Street all the way to the river and up to the apartment. Holly wasn’t cooled by the walk, it only irritated her more. As I opened the door and heard the police lock click into place, I turned on the light accompanied by Holly’s “How can you live in this rathole? You’re a fool not to let Chryssa keep you.”

“Let’s not get into that. I’ve got enough on my mind. Glad as I was to see both that little shriveled-up turd get it and Larry too, now I’ve got to look for another job.”

“Look, you stubborn shit, if you’d just bend a little you wouldn’t have to kill yourself like this—and you’d have some clothes, a decent apartment, a few little lovelies that make life easier.”

“Holly, lay off.”

“Lay off what? You think you’re too good to be kept? I’m kept, so what am I, a whore or something? Or maybe it’s symptomatic of my race’s refusal to be responsible. That what you think?”

“No. We’re different people and it has nothing to do with whoring or color or any of that shit. I can’t do it, that’s that.”

“Don’t hand me that shit. You can’t do it because you’re a fucking prude and you think it’s immoral. Well, I think you’re a goddamn ass, that’s what I think. You spent your whole life in poverty and now you have a chance to have something. Take it.”

“You don’t understand, Holly, I don’t want to live here. I don’t want raggedy clothes. I don’t
want to be running on nerves for the next ten years, but I have to do it my way. My way, understand. It has nothing to do with morality, it has to do with me.”

“Oh, come off it, Horatio Alger.”

“I don’t want a fight. Can’t we forget it for tonight?”

“No, I’m not going to forget it because I know you’re making a value judgment on me.”

“I am
not
. Now stop trying to guilt trip me.”

“You think I’m weak and lazy, don’t you? You think I’m a soft rich kid who’s taking money from her lover instead of from doctor daddy. Why don’t you say it? You don’t love me.”

“I never said I did.”

Holly blinked and then her eyes narrowed. “Why, you can’t fall in love with a decadent, middle-class, black brat?”

“Just stop, will you? This is ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous, I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous. You sitting here in this, working yourself to the bone and for what—to be a film director. Listen to me, baby: big dreams, big dreams. You can graduate at the top of your class. You probably will, but you’re not going to get any work. You’re another piece of ass who can sit in a secretary’s chair with your Phi Beta Kappa key wrapped around your neck. You’re doing all this for nothing. You know what, you’re a lot like my father. I never realized that until now. He worked his ass off too and he got rich but he wanted to go all the way to the top and he’s not getting there for the obvious reason. You two would make a fine pair, bullheaded, can’t see what’s coming down in front of you. Gonna fight the whole world
and get nothing but kicked in the ass. At least, my old man got money out of the deal. You aren’t even going to get that. You’d better grab on to Chryssa Hart because she’s the best you’ll get, honey.”

“Goddammit! No matter what happens to me I’ll still have the knowledge inside my head and nobody can take that away from me. And someday, even if you can’t see it coming, I’m going to make use of that knowledge and make my movies. My movies, you hear me, Holly—not soppy romances about hapless heterosexuals, not family dramas about sparkling white America, not Westerns that run red from first reel to last or science fiction thrillers where renegade white corpuscles fill the screen—my movies, real movies about real people and about the way the shit comes down. Now if I don’t get the money to do that until I’m fifty, then that’s the way it is. I’m doing this so help me God and it’s not for nothing.”

“You know, you’re incredible. I don’t know if you’re crazy or if you’re the stuff that towers over the masses of the mediocre, but I’m not going to stick around to find out. I’m not willing to have to watch you go through the ugliness you’re going through now and I don’t think I could face what’s going to happen after this—when all those doors shut in your face and they tell you whatever lie it is they’re telling to Blacks and Puerto Ricans and women that day. You’re strong enough to take it, but I’m not strong enough to watch it. After watching Daddy, I haven’t got the heart to see it all over again.” She stopped, took a breath and lowered her eyes to the linoleum floor, “I feel shitty. I just feel shitty. Maybe some of it is that
I don’t have real work of my own. I go around being beautiful and having fun, yeah, but I don’t have anything for me, really mine, and you do, and it fucking kills me.”

“So what the hell am I supposed to do? Give it up to make you happy? Be a failure, so you can feel good about yourself?”

“No, no. Oh, Molly, deep inside I do want you to bust right out of here, to break the whole scene wide open. I know what it means to you, and maybe I’m even perceptive enough to know what it will mean to a lot of other people if you do. It’s the everyday wear and tear that brings out the green in me. I begin to hate you, hate you and I love you, that’s a fucked mess—but I start to resent you for all the things that make you strong, that enable you to stand up under that daily erosion. I begin to hate myself because I’m not like you. I don’t know, maybe it was because my parents gave me everything, spoiled me, maybe that’s why I’ve got no drive.”

“There were plenty of people who had things given to them, who were middle-class, who had drive.”

“So what. I don’t care what they did. I care about what I’m going to do. What the hell am I going to do with my life? Tell me what to do?”

“I can’t. It wouldn’t mean anything if I told you. You got to tell you.”

“It’s so hard.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s always hard no matter who you are, where you came from, what color your skin happens to be or what sex you got stuck with. It’s the hardest decision every individual has to make in their life, probably.”

“Yeah, I know. I know it’s hard where you’re at right now and I’m not doing you any good with my emphasis on the pleasure principle.”

“And I know it’s hard where you’re at, too. I’m sorry.”

“Me too, I’m sorry I yelled at you and I’m sorry I lost you the job. I’m such a dumb shit. I have to go off and get my head together. Maybe I’ll ask Kim for the money to go to Paris for a couple of months or maybe I’ll go to Ethiopia—I have a friend there from college. It might be easier to make up my mind if I’m out of this insane city.”

“You can make up your mind anywhere, even in jail. Going to Paris sounds like a ritzy cop-out.”

“Fuck you. You have to throw in my face that you don’t have that option, don’t you. People like you make me sick, wearing your poverty like a badge of purity.”

“I didn’t mean it to sound that way. Maybe I did sound self-righteous. Well, hell, I’d like to go to Paris myself or wherever. But all I’m trying to say is, don’t make a ritual out of getting your head together, that’s all.”

“Yeah, okay. I can’t tell anymore if you’re putting me down or being level. I get pissed off at you a lot these days. I guess we’re out of phase, you know. Maybe one of the ways I’ll get myself together is not to see you for awhile.”

“If that’s the way you feel about it, then that’s the way it has to be.”

“You don’t seem very upset.”

“Goddammit, woman, I’m doing the best I can to help you do whatever it is you have to do. No, I’m not crushed. Do you want me to be crushed and fizzle in a puddle at your feet like the Witch
of the West? And yes, I will miss you. I’ll miss making love with you and going to the Thalia and you’re probably the only woman I’ll ever know who kicked a fat pig down the stairs when she’s in total drag. Okay?”

“Oh shit, I do love you. I do.” She picked up her cape, slid open the police lock, and closed the door behind her. I listened to her footsteps until she opened and closed the front door. She strode to the corner and hailed a cab. I watched until she tucked her feet in and closed the door.

I set out among the subways, the red-and-white Coke machines and ads for Dr. Scholl’s foot powder to find another job. Night work ran in two categories: telephone operating or various forms of entertainment. Since Hal Prince did not rush out on the street to sign me up I found myself dancing nightly in a bar in the West Fifties. That lasted two weeks—until I provided a dentist with a patient needing a new set of uppers. There was nothing to do but change my schedule, cut down on classes, and work during the day.

I got a job as a secretary at Silver Publishing Company. Every morning at nine a.m. I roared into the office in complete female rig—skirt, stockings, slip. I couldn’t cross my legs because some of the more obvious sperm producers would try to look up my leg, couldn’t put my feet on the desk because that wasn’t ladylike, and if I didn’t
wear make-up everyone, including the boss, would ask me if I was “under the weather” that day.

My immediate superior was Stella by Starlight. Stella had married the president of the company, David Cohen, so she worked “just for fun.” Stella looked exactly like Ruby Keeler and someone must have told her this back in 1933 because she had been trying ever since to be a carbon copy of the original. At the merest suggestion of Ruby she’d go into the routine from
Footlight Parade
. Then, her husband, aroused by the sound of tapping feet, would have to come out of his office to remind her there were galleys to be read and would she save the dance until after five.

We lowlies were herded into the bullpen where we cheerlessly typed up anything from a bill to the latest manuscript as well as churning out back-copy, front-copy, and captions for bent photographs. In a short time Stella managed to notice that I could both read and spell, two points in my favor, joined by a remarkable third: I could dash off copy on command. Stella rescued me from the bullpen and threw me in with one of the prized editors, James Adler.

Rhea Rhadin, another groundling who had fought her way up to being head receptionist, unfortunately had a full blown heterosexual crush on James. She’d practically slide into the office on her own lubrication and croon at him, “James, may I fetch you some coffee—anything at all this morning?” James abhored her and gave her a curt “no” on these persistent occasions. Rhea exhibited the peculiar twists so often found in the
brains of straight women: she became convinced that James treated her brusquely because he and I were having a hot fling. She decided to make life miserable for me. Any work she got from my hands she deliberately botched and then blamed it on me. Once a week she would slip into Mr. Cohen’s office with another horrendous mistake she had saved the printer from committing because of my laxity and poor work habits. James in an heroic effort to save me reported his perceptions of the situation to Mr. Cohen, who couldn’t believe anyone, even Rhea, could be such an ass.