The Other Typist (14 page)

“Oh!” I stammered. “Oh!” I looked again at Mr. Vitalli and saw that his frightened expression was now developing into something else. It was genuine, it was familiar, and with a shock I realized it was the slow smile of a person recognizing an old friend he hasn’t seen in a long while. I ran from the room, straight down the hall, and plunged through the hinged door of the ladies’ room.

I did not see him leave. Even now, I do not know if Mr. Vitalli showed himself to the precinct exit, or whether he ever told the Sergeant about the little incident that transpired between us. Once in the ladies’ room I remained there, trembling, for some time. I opened the faucet tap and let it run, plunging my hands under the bone-achingly icy water, driven by a half-mad hope that the pain of the cold water would wash away something more than those drops of Mr. Vitalli’s blood. At some point I became cognizant that someone had entered the ladies’ room and was standing behind me. Like a startled animal, my eyes flashed at the dark presence in the mirror, ready to do full battle with Mr. Vitalli if need be. But to my relief it was only Odalie. Her elegantly penciled brow was furrowed, and suddenly I felt a wave of shame. I shut off the tap and let my throbbing, frozen, blue-veined hands drip in the sink. My joints hurt, my skin stung. I reached for the dirty rag of a towel that hung on the towel bar and blotted them dry. When that was done, I stood there, fiddling, not sure what to do. I felt Odalie’s eyes running over me.

Very slowly and meticulously—as if she were cautiously stepping around a murky puddle—Odalie approached and took the towel from my hands. I felt my grip loosen and the rough texture of the flour sack towel slip through my fingers as she pulled it away. She paused, and I summoned the courage to look up and meet her gaze. Then she took a corner of the towel and rubbed something from my cheek. I glanced in the mirror as she rubbed my face with the cloth and suddenly understood there had been a splotch of blood drying on the apple of my right cheekbone. I must’ve touched my face sometime after hurting Mr. Vitalli but before washing my hands in the sink, and had not been aware of doing so. Odalie wiped it clean and handed the towel back to me. She took a lingering look at me and smiled. Then she turned and exited the ladies’ room without having ever uttered a word.

I
n looking over my notes, I see now where I got the idea that ultimately led to my undoing, and how Odalie herself planted the rather subtle and innocuous first seed. In many ways, the trouble truly began with those typos I’ve already mentioned. She was always making them, and now I see how it was a clever way for her to test me, to determine whether or not I was paying close attention and to find out if I would report her mistakes, correct them myself, or simply let them stand. And of course, the greater intimates we became, the more I became inclined to do the latter.

It escalated slowly at first. Over time, simple typos evolved into entire rewordings—the sort of thing that might still be chalked up to carelessness, yet not attributable to something as unconscious and mechanical as a broken typewriter with a couple of stuck keys. She was developing a very curious habit of, well . . . I suppose I might phrase it as
translating things
. And I could not know her motivations. When she transcribed reports, the Lieutenant Detective’s handwriting focused on one set of details and Odalie’s typing appeared to prefer another. Also, I supervised her a few times in the interrogation room and had observed the disparity between the suspect’s words as they were spoken aloud and the words Odalie tapped out on the stenotype.

I did not know what to make of this new development at the time, but being that Odalie and I were getting along so well (not to mention that by moving in with her I had in some respects cast my lot in with hers), I was slow to make much of a fuss over the odd embellishments that increasingly appeared in her reports. Because they were usually about minor details and did not change the overall accuracy of the confessions, I often let them stand. Did it really matter, I asked myself, as long as the right people went to prison in the end? It didn’t seem immediately apparent to me that anyone might be injured by this practice. My doctor here scoffs when I claim to have once been so naive, but it’s true to say I was. (
Come now, you are hardly the naive type,
he says to me.) Of course, this was before I saw how bending the truth leads to breaking it, how Odalie would eventually twist the truth one way, and I another.

But all that came later.

In the meantime, the darkest day of winter came and went and yet somehow we barely took notice. Odalie and I spent our evenings insulated by the bright cheery interior of that white wedding cake of a hotel. We lay on the plush emerald lawn of the wall-to-wall carpet in the sitting room, sprawled out over the latest fashion magazines (Odalie even received all the Paris magazines; of course, between the two of us she was the only one who could read French, but I nonetheless enjoyed the illustrations). Sometimes when she was feeling particularly friendly, Odalie practiced a minor form of hypnotism on me, buffing my nails or brushing my long hair as we sat by the fireplace (she claimed to miss her own long hair, though her insistence on regular trims at the beauty parlor to keep her bob fashionably short and sleek would suggest otherwise). I can still hear how the smoldering logs in the fireplace popped and crackled arrhythmically, like bones cracking. Thinking about it now, I see I let myself get far too comfortable; we were spoiled, wasteful girls. We opened the valves on the radiator pipes to their fullest and walked around in nothing but our slips. We ate pretty little French pastries so pristinely decorated with ganache and gold leafing, the disarray inflicted by a single bite almost broke the heart. (At the time, I remember thinking of Helen and her sad penny candy, and for a moment I almost wished she could share in our bounty.) Above all else that winter, I came to learn that with enough money and modern steam heating, a balmy summer day could be created in just about any season. Together Odalie and I made summer year-round.

Two or three times a week, we visited a speakeasy or a private party of an equally lively nature. We tramped delicately over packed snow, wrapped in fur coats with the collars turned up, our hair wiry and untamable with the cold electric air of winter. Odalie clipped earrings to the fatty lobes of our ears—pendulous diamonds, as it was “our duty to out-sparkle the snow,” she declared in her seductive, charming way—and these icy baubles swung jauntily just above our coat collars, grazing the fuzzy edge of the upturned fur. Once inside, it was always the same: Odalie pushed me around the room, introducing me to people with an air of gleeful whimsy—much like a young girl dancing with a broom—although I’m happy to report I never again consumed as much alcohol as I did on that first night.

And yet the feeling of astonishment I’d experienced upon my first speakeasy visit never completely left me. Each time Odalie led me into an otherwise lackluster shop front or a dubious-looking lunch counter and a cellar door or obscure passageway opened up to reveal yet another lush, boisterous party concealed within, I found myself just as overcome with surprise and curiosity as I had been on that first day. Absurd though it may sound, I could not determine whether it was always the same speakeasy or several different ones. What I did know was that the same set of people were frequently in attendance—more or less—despite the fact the location sometimes changed. And of course Gib was always somewhere to be found, standing square-jawed and stoic in the center of it all. In those days, I guessed he was the host of these parties. Or a front man of some sort. Slowly but surely, Gib and I began to develop a surly sort of rapport with each other. Or at least as much of a rapport as a person can have with someone who views you as a constant competitor.

I’m not sure what the right idea would’ve been, but it certainly seemed like Gib had gotten the wrong idea about me and Odalie—much the way Dotty had gotten the wrong idea about my feelings for my friend Adele. Which is to say Gib had the wrong idea about
me
. I will admit, a certain loneliness existed in my life and it’s true enough to say these women helped alleviate that. Those trendy followers of Freud might say this neediness on my part has something to do with my mother, with how she abandoned me for no better reason than hateful spite. They might even imply there was something rather unnatural in my eagerness to be close to first Adele and later Odalie. But I don’t give a fig for these dirty-minded diagnoses. I enjoyed watching Odalie from afar more than anything else. I suppose I didn’t mind when she brushed my hair or traced light little circles on the palms of my hands. I didn’t mind the way she wet her lips and leaned in toward me whenever I spoke (as if I were about to say something absolutely riveting, only I didn’t know it). And I’ll admit I wanted to be within eyeshot of Odalie at all times. But who didn’t? It was simply a side effect of her beauty. Or perhaps
beauty
is too crude a word for it; rather, it was a side effect of the way Odalie’s beauty was uniquely animated, which was a phenomenon unto itself. It’s not as if I hadn’t caught Gib watching her out of the corner of his eye, keeping track of who she spoke to at the speakeasy, a voyeuristic hawk in his own right. I’m sure you’ve heard it said a hundred times: The most objectionable people are often the ones with whom you have the most in common.

Gib was all wrong for Odalie—I’m sure this much was plain to everyone who saw them together. They made an absurd pairing: Odalie was regal where Gib could only be described as sly-looking at best. Other than the speakeasy—the inner workings of which at the time I assumed were Gib’s affair and Odalie only attended for amusement—I could not see they had very much in common. I could hardly imagine Gib attending one of Odalie’s little bohemian gatherings, much less chatting at length about art or poetry. Neither could I imagine where they must’ve met. They were an odd couple to say the least, and I assumed it was only a matter of time before I saw the last of Gib. But in the weeks after moving in with Odalie, I began to see Gib had been a regular in her life for quite some time already, and planned to go on as such.

In any case, Gib and I were building up a slow tolerance for each other, the way some people slowly build a tolerance for a specific kind of poison. By the end of my first month at the apartment, we had learned to make the kind of civil conversation two people might make while waiting at the same streetcar stop. By the end of two months, I had learned to accept my somewhat subordinate position as a newer addition to Odalie’s apartment as a fact. After all, Gib did not need to be told which closet kept the spare linens for his shower and was no stranger to the bell-boys at our hotel, who greeted him by his first name (as opposed to the polite but generic
miss
they eternally lobbed in my direction). Accepting these things likewise meant accepting the fact there would be evenings when I’d listen for the sound of him letting himself out the front door but never hear it, and mornings when I’d wake up to see him grumpily slurping hot coffee from one of Odalie’s little white china mugs at our breakfast table. As with all things that are unstomachable, I tried my best not to think about what objectionable things might have passed in the night and always maintained a civil front.

It was on one such morning Gib began to leak out information about Odalie’s past. Or at least a certain
version
of Odalie’s past. There was a pair of French doors that led from the dining room onto a fairly generous-size terrace that hugged the corner of the hotel apartment. That morning Gib stared out the window and sipped his coffee, observing the large, lumpy mounds of snow as they melted and made a soggy mess out of the terrace. He frowned. “We ought to glass that in,” he said. “It’s a waste in the wintertime, and with a little glass it’d make a damned fine solarium.”

“Would Odalie’s father approve of that?” I asked, holding a piece of toast over the sink and scraping away the blackened char.
Honeymoon toast,
the nuns used to call it whenever I burned the toast in the orphanage kitchen. An ironic choice of phrase, I had always thought, for a group of women utterly uninitiated in the ways of matrimonial life.

Gib’s spine straightened. He looked up in surprise.

“Odalie’s father?”

“Sure,” I said, setting the plate of toast on the table and slipping into a chair. Despite my thorough scraping, the bread slices were still peppered with tiny black speckles. “Doesn’t her father pay the rent for this place? I just assumed we would need his approval.”

Gib cocked his head to the side, examining me closely with one eye as though he were a parrot taking in the sight of a new stranger. Suddenly an incredulous, somewhat sarcastic expression spread over his features.

“Oh. Is she calling him her father now?” Gib asked. “How interesting. I’d gotten so used to her referring to him as her
uncle
.” He turned in a matter-of-fact way to the newspaper lying in his lap and snapped it open.

I blinked. “What do you mean?” I stammered into the thin newsprint wall hovering between us. “Do you mean to say Odalie’s father is . . . is not . . .” I struggled to find the proper words, but there were none for this curious turn of events. “. . . not her father?”

Gib dropped the paper a few inches and studied my face. I cannot imagine what he found there, but after some minutes evidently he was able to plumb the depths of my ignorance enough to see greater explanation on his part was required. He gave a sigh and picked up a piece of toast, frowned at it as he turned it over for further inspection, then returned it to the serving plate. “If by
father
you mean the word in strictly the genealogical sense, then—no. The man who pays for this apartment is not Odalie’s
father
.” Gib paused and gave me an assessing once-over, as though deciding something. “Of course,” he finally proceeded, “a case could be made that you might refer to him as her
daddy
.” Upon pronouncing the word
daddy
he gave a disdainful, self-amused snort. A cool bar of early spring sunshine leaned in from the glass of the French doors and fell across his cheek, revealing the many pockmarks in his roughly shaven skin. Strangely, this defect rather enhanced Gib’s features, much the way the scar over the Lieutenant Detective’s eyebrow enhanced his. Gib looked at me again and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I didn’t realize . . . ,” he began, but trailed off. The newspaper floating before him sagged further, and finally with a sigh and a couple flicks of his wrist he folded it back up into a tidy rectangle.

“Hmm. I can see you’re confused,” he said. “I suppose it doesn’t do to keep you completely in the dark.” And then he cleared his throat and began, in his stiff-jawed way, to tell me the story of Odalie’s “uncle.” As soon as Gib began speaking, the image of Odalie I had diligently conjured in my mind up to that point melted away faster than the rain-pecked lumps of snow on the balcony, and yet another new one formed to take its place.

I shall paraphrase here, because I’m not at all sure I can tell it quite as Gib told it. In the months since I’ve been seeing my doctor, I’ve retold this story so many times it feels as though somehow the tale has always belonged to me, that I have always been the one who told it.

According to Gib, the French-speaking, fashionably coiffed woman I knew as Odalie Lazare was born Odalie Mae Buford to some people who owned a drugstore just outside of Chicago. The store was a small family-run affair, and from a young age Odalie proved herself useful behind the till, able as she was to make sums in her head while at the same time shooting the customers looks of sly curiosity from under those preternaturally long, dark lashes. But the family fell on hard times when Odalie’s father suffered a sudden stroke and died, and Odalie’s mother—a wiry, thin-lipped woman named Cora-Sue—consequently fell down the long neck of a bottomless bottle. Odalie, barely ten at the time, tried her valiant but youthful hand at keeping the books, but every trace of profit was drunk away very efficiently and speedily by Cora-Sue, who was sinking deeper and deeper into what my doctor here at the institution might call a state of melancholia. Odalie and her mother were eventually prompted to forfeit the drugstore to the bank. Deepening poverty forced them from the outskirts of Chicago and into the city proper, where Cora-Sue found she had limited professional skills at her disposal and promptly became a professional of a different kind.