Stages (13 page)

Lauren walked almost four miles. She was right by Harrod’s when she saw the car glaring in the fog. She couldn’t believe it, but there it was, a bright red Mustang shouldered up to the drab Daimlers and Rolls-Royces.

She saw a young man getting out of the Mustang. At the same time, he saw her.

24

Paula sat in her mother’s all-white living room, listening to the Beatles’ white album, a half-finished glass of lowfat milk in her hand. Over a year of living at home had proven to be almost a resumption of high school, except that she got out of bed at seven in the morning in order to go to work in a hat shop.

Why the hat shop even existed, with just about nobody wearing hats anymore, Paula regarded as one of life’s mysteries. Her mother had been patronizing it for a couple of years now to buy the variations on the theme of a nurse’s cap that she had been wearing ever since the house got its grand whitewash. She’d heard about the place from an old lady in the temple who wore hats and white gloves into Manhattan in order to germ-proof her femininity. When word of an opening at the shop came to Paula’s mother’s ears, her advice to her daughter had been, “All that shlepping back and forth to the city, for those auditions that make such a nervous wreck of you. You should have some little job for in between, so you have some distraction, something to occupy your mind.”

How much, at that moment, Paula had needed something to take up the slack in her head, she would never be able to bring herself to admit to her mother. She’d made the trip into the city a dozen times by then, and each time she’d stood
outside a forbidding steel door, usually in an alley with webs of fire escapes hanging overhead, unable to go inside.

Each time she’d fled. To Saks, to Bloomingdale’s. To the Donnell branch of the public library, where she’d researched a paper on Kemal Attaturk her sophomore year in high school. After killing a couple of hours, she’d go home to her parents and tell them, “I didn’t get the job.” That was true but, like so many of the truths told in and around New York, a lie in its specific details.

Once she’d run into Melanie on Forty-fourth Street. Melanie had just gotten her Equity card. She’d asked Paula what she’d been doing.

“Not having much luck so far,” Paula had replied.

They’d parted as abruptly as they’d met, because Melanie was going to an open call, and because Paula had nothing more to say, although she wanted to burst into tears.
Melanie, I’m slowly going out of my mind reading
National Geographic
in the library.

Going to work in the hat shop would at least be a release from these pathetic charades.

The owner’s name was Aaron Feldman. His hat shop, called, jauntily, Toppers, had flourished briefly in the fifties and then had its modest prosperity whipped away by the winds of change in the sixties.

Her first day on the job Paula met the only other person on Mr. Feldman’s sales staff. She was Mrs. Singer, a very thin widow who, Paula quickly learned, was addicted to caffeine.

“Oh, I sure do love those Cokes,” Mrs. Singer said of herself. Every couple of hours she would go out to get one from the machine in the gas station on the corner. She would finish the cola, and two minutes later she’d be up making a fresh pot of coffee.

For the first two weeks Mrs. Singer hinted to Paula that she had a secret she dared not reveal. Finally, on a Friday afternoon, she took Paula into her confidence. She had for years hidden from all of Long Island the fact that she couldn’t get going in the morning without having coffee soup, which she made, Mrs. Singer admitted, as she sat shrinking in her fear of condemnation, by crumbling pieces of bread into her cup.

“Then I eat it with a spoon,” she whispered.

Clasping the woman’s filament of a hand, Paula replied, “Mrs. Singer, it’s
okay.
As long as you enjoy it.”

“Do you think so?” Mrs. Singer said tentatively. “I don’t know. The Germans do it, you see.”

One thing that the Germans did not do, as far as Paula knew, but which Mr. Feldman did, was eat the same dessert every day. A taciturn man, he wouldn’t have been thought eccentric by anyone until lunchtime rolled around. Precisely at noon, every day, he would unwrap a kosher meal packed that morning by his wife, Ruth, whose other occupation, Paula was given to understand, was writing with her sister Golda a column for a suburban newspaper entitled “Opportunities in Widowhood.”

After finishing his corned beef or chopped liver sandwich, Mr. Feldman would go to the little portable refrigerator behind the counter, take out a stick of unsalted butter, cut himself a thick pat, and pop it into his mouth. Every day.

Paula was aware that people could get foolish, especially about food, as they got older. She had an uncle who put peanut butter on chocolate chip cookies. But although she tried to make allowances, Paula soon found herself thinking of Mr. Feldman with his glass of tea and buttered toast (hold the bread) and Mrs. Singer with her nervous little twitches as the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse.

Still, she got along well with them.

She got along with the shop’s customers too, even Mrs. Melish, whose reputation preceded her like the front bumper of her 1959 Cadillac, which she often drove up onto the sidewalk, her eyesight being poor. Paula was told that Mrs. Melish lived in Great Neck and in her garage she kept trash barrels filled with silver dollars. Even judges were intimidated by her wealth and her overbearing manner. Supposedly one had dismissed a traffic charge against her that might have led to her losing her license when she said to the judge, “I’ve
got
to drive places, I can’t see to walk.”

Almost every week Mrs. Melish would visit Toppers. Finding a hat she liked, she would look at the price tag, turn pale, and begin a bitter lament.

“Can’t you come down on this hat?” she’d say to Mrs. Singer or Paula (never picking Mr. Feldman, whose heart, like all men’s hearts, was hard). “I’m a widow and I can’t afford prices like these for hats anymore.” Sometimes she’d simply put on a new hat and sit there with it at a crazy angle on her head while tears rolled down her cheeks.

Paula quickly became the mediator in these situations, giving Mrs. Melish the hat for five or ten dollars off, not including a box.

It was a comfortable existence; she was as sheltered and secure as she would have been in a convent.

Then one afternoon, Paula volunteered to run over to the gas station and get Mrs. Singer a coke.

In the driveway of the station was a car with its hood up. The paint had been sanded off it in places, leaving a dark matte copper finish, and the rear tires of the car were enormous. They made Paula think of the haunches of some big, mean rabbit. Three young men were hovering around the front of the car. It was warm outside, and two of them had taken off their shirts.

One had a tattoo of a lightning bolt on his biceps.

Aware that their eyes were on her, Paula fumbled with her change.

“Hey, hey, he-y-y,” she heard.

Out of the corner of her eye, Paula looked. They were staring at her brazenly, and they were smirking.

The Coke clattered out of the machine.

“Howya doin’, hon?” the guy with the tattoo asked. The other two were watching intently, as alert to the possibility of action as a couple of dogs in a kitchen.

A cockroach darted under the Coke machine; Paula wanted to crawl under there too.

“Whatsa matter, baby, cat got your tongue?”

Paula almost ran. Then she turned around slowly, cocked her head, smiled, pushed her tongue out a little, and gave her upper lip a lollipop lick.

And in a Marilyn Monroe voice she said, “Gee, I dunno, fellas, the cat might have my tongue, but it feels like it’s still there.”

Before her little audience could recover its bravado, she had turned on her heel and was sashaying down the sidewalk.

“Wait, you gotta gimme your phone number,” the tattooed one was yelling. But he didn’t quite have the nerve to pursue her. The other two were hooting and whistling and thumping the sides of the car.

Paula’s heart was pounding as she walked into the shop, and she didn’t even hear Mrs. Singer saying “Thank you” when she handed her the Coke because a loud voice inside her kept saying,
What did you just do, what did you do?

Later that afternoon, when she’d calmed down, Paula sat for several minutes looking around the shop’s four mirrored walls. She saw her reflection from every possible angle, and where the images intersected, sometimes a whole choir of herself. Idly she picked up a blue velvet hat with a veil and put it on. She moistened her lips, and the veil clung to them briefly. Paula opened her mouth a little, trying to duplicate in the mirror the look she had always associated with not very bright people who were between thoughts. She searched her own eyes, and saw that they knew something, or at least looked as though they did. No, this was not Marilyn Monroe she was seeing.

But it wasn’t Paula Rubin either.

25

“A carpet beetle?” Melanie said incredulously. “That’s what you’re telling me I’m supposed to be?”

On the other end of the line, Abe, her agent, was trying to be encouraging.

“Bugs are cute,” he said. “Look at Mickey Mouse. People don’t think of Mickey Mouse as a rodent that carries disease, do they?”

“This isn’t Disney,” Melanie replied. “This is a commercial. And one they’re going to show during ‘I Love Lucy,’ reruns, yet. I bet there are plenty of home movies of somebody’s relatives playing horseshoes that’ll look better produced than this thirty seconds will.”

“It’s not the look, it’s the money,” Abe reminded her. “You want a job or don’t you?”

“I’m thinking about that last job you got for me,” Melanie said. “Doing voiceovers for a French porno movie. I only felt convincing when I was moaning. I just don’t know, Abe. I gotta think how desperate I am.” She quickly surveyed her railroad apartment with her eyes, taking stock. She halted abruptly at the box of day-old donuts on the table. “Okay, Abe,” she said. “I
am
really desperate. So I’ll do it.”

“Listen kid, it’s a credit,” Abe told her. “Versatility. Flexibility. They look for those things.”

“Where?” Melanie asked. “In the sex ads in
Screw
?”

“No, people who take out sex ads are usually very specific about what they want,” Abe said. “Casting people can fool you.”

“Well, a job is a job, I guess,” Melanie said. “And I am a needy person. How many years you been an agent, Abe?”

“Too many.”

“I’m serious. I really want to know.”

“Twenty-three years this October. Why?”

“Don’t you know yet that it’s cruel to ask actors if they want a job?”

“Of course I know. You think I enjoy having to remind you guys of the way things are all the time? But if you’re an agent long enough, you know you hafta deal with your client’s ego like a dentist doing root canal.”

“That’s about graphic enough,” Melanie replied. “I don’t want to think about taking anything in my mouth from an agent in my present circumstances. I’ll take the job, and I’ll make the best of it.”

“Good idea,” Abe agreed. “Make the best of it. You’ll get along fine that way. Be sure you get there at ten o’clock sharp, now.”

“I’ll be there,” Melanie said. “What the hell. It’ll be a new experience—being rolled up in a nine-by-twelve rug. Who knows? Next thing you know, I could be a
Daily News
being carried across the living room in a German shepherd’s mouth.”

“Yeah,” said Abe, “
you’ll be snug as a bug in a rug.
What can I tell you? I admit it isn’t the most inspired ad campaign in the world. Why not just go along with the deal and try to have a little fun? Look, kid, I got to go now,” Abe said. “I got a meeting with a producer across town at eleven.”

“Which one?” Melanie asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“Nobody,” Abe replied. “He’s an independent. They’re fired, they’re suddenly independent. Look, it’s a lousy fuckin’ business, but there’s always a chance, ya know what I’m sayin’? There’s always a reason to get out of bed in the morning. You chose this life, kiddo, I shouldn’t have to remind you of these things.”

“It’s nice when you do, Abe,” Melanie said. “It helps. It really does.”

“So I’m ten percent humanitarian,” Abe said. “I really gotta go. Be there at ten. Bye.”

“Bye,” said Melanie. “And…thanks.”

26

In 1968 a lot of people were getting married for political reasons. Kathy was still single, but completely committed. Most of her friends were political too, like Jean, who was working with her at the Democratic convention in Chicago.

Kathy had tried to imagine what her friend Jean must have looked like as a little girl. What she’d pictured was a pair of black patent leather Mary Janes, white ankle socks that were folded over and fit loosely, and a nautical-looking navy-blue suit topped by a straw hat with a black velvet ribbon around it. In such an outfit, Jean would have looked very much herself, and the picture would have been perfect, Kathy had decided, if it had been taken at the time by a fussy maiden aunt with a Brownie camera.

Jean still looked the part of an innocent abroad, with her blond pageboy and wide blue eyes set in an ivory cameo of a face. However, her sophomore year in college she had fallen in love with Voltaire, and her involvement with him had led her from skepticism about sorority life at Northwestern to her present full-time commitment to the Eugene McCarthy campaign, where Kathy had met her. Now the two young women were sharing a hotel room, and their desks at McCarthy’s Chicago headquarters were side by side. On her desk Jean kept a tiny herb garden that was thriving under an ultraviolet light. Often she would refer to it, glancing at the basil and saying, “Yes,
we must all go and work in the garden,
” an echo of
Candide,
which was her bible. She brought a philosophical detachment to a place that had often seemed to Kathy like a kennel with everyone barking at once.